CHAPTER XXXIX
THAT LITTLE DIVINITY
The project roused her, at least, into physical brightness. As she walked at Geoffrey’s side towards the hospital, the basket of strawberries hanging from her arm, her hands filled with roses, a stranger, meeting them, would have taken Dinah Arbuthnot for some April cheeked girl, ignorant of passion as of disappointment; a girl needing no apologist! She wore, on this fateful afternoon, a dove-coloured Quaker gown, a Gainsborough hat tied beneath her chin by black velvet strings; item, a large plain cambric tippet, with cambric half sleeves reaching to the elbows. It was the latest costume invented by her husband in an idle moment. And Geoffrey had lost exactly half an hour while she put it on.
But what man would grudge a lost half-hour after one glance at that for which he had waited!
The road from Miller’s Hotel to the hospital led through Petersport High Street, and close to the north entrance of Colonel de Gourmet’s garden. At the moment when Dinah and Geff walked along, it chanced that the Colonel, himself, reclined under the shaded verandah of his drawing-room,—the Colonel, smoking his third cheroot, and offering unsentimental criticisms on the dress and looks of such feminine passers-by as came within range of a pair of languidly held opera-glasses.
Of an afternoon Colonel de Gourmet’s drawing-room was generally full. Lacking many, let us say lacking all the more solid human qualities, the old East Indian sybarite had one virtue—he was universally hospitable. Nothing pleased him better than that a man he had invited to breakfast should loiter on till dinner. Nothing pleased him better than that other men whom he had not invited should drop in, at any hour they chose, make free with his rare cigars, rarer wines, and entertain each other with ideas, or with that best discovered substitute for the trivial masculine mind—cards.
In a garrison town, sea on three sides, and barely available space on the other for a polo match or a herring run, it may be believed that old Colonel de Gourmet was in no lack of callers.
Six or eight men, young enough, most of them, to be their host’s grandsons, were lounging, this July afternoon, in various attitudes of idleness about his pleasant bachelor drawing-room. The air was lightly impregnated with tobacco smoke, so good of its kind that, mingled with the wafted garden sweets, it scarcely seemed grosser than some finely distilled odour of musk flower or of tea-rose. Gaston Arbuthnot was on the point of finishing a match at écarté with little Oscar Jones—two or three of Oscar’s brother officers forming a silent and discriminative gallery.
Cards, simply as cards, Gaston Arbuthnot disliked, although he had an inborn knack of playing most things successfully. The childish intricacies of a game like Nap., beloved of all the Maltshire subalterns, were to him a weariness of spirit.
‘We can use your English Nap. as a means,’ he would tell them, frankly, ‘just as we can use blind hookey or, simpler than either, chicken hazard, if we want to transfer money from one man’s pocket to another. As a matter of amusement, I would sooner play euchre or poker for counters: in poker especially, all our natural human instincts—bluster, bluffing, intent to deceive, etc.—come agreeably to the fore.’
Whist, Gaston confessed, he played well. At écarté he was moderately good. This moderate goodness his antagonist was about to test practically.
‘Four, all!’ cried little Oscar, eager over a just-dealt, brilliant hand of trumps.
‘The king,’ said Gaston, quietly laying down his cards. ‘Some one tell de Gourmet it is his turn to cut in.’
The Colonel had now risen to his feet. He was watching an object, evidently of paramount interest, through his opera-glasses.
‘A throat—an ankle—shoulders! Tell you what it is, sir,—she is the prettiest woman in the island—not one of our society beauties can hold a candle to her! And she’s not a woman one meets at any of the parties.—By and by, Arbuthnot, by and by.’ For Gaston with a presentiment of the truth, sat, restlessly, shuffling and re-shuffling the cards. ‘To view the Queen of Hearts in flesh and blood is better, surely, than handling her in pasteboard. Now where did one see that little divinity before? At Saturday’s rose-show, of course. Asked Linda Thorne about her. Mrs. Linda—true type of her sex—affected not to know her name. Luckily, such a paragon does not need a name. An Archdeaconess, if I mistake not, threw her little pebble. “The young person with the yellow hair was—nobody one knew.”’
Every man in the room, with the exception of Arbuthnot, had by this time crowded to the window. One of the youngsters hazarded a bold whisper in the host’s ear. It was old de Gourmet’s deafer ear. He caught the note of warning imperfectly. He resumed his parable with warmth:
‘French woman, do you say? Cannot believe it, sir. No French woman had ever such a complexion, such hair. But the dress, with its complex simplicity, comes from Paris, doubtless. Dove coloured mousseline de laine.’ The Colonel made these things as much a study as his Brillat Savarin. ‘A tippet, designedly plain, such as Perfection, only, dare put on. A little black velvet knot beneath the dainty chin.... (Directly, Arbuthnot, directly—calm your impatience.) And look at her teeth, now she smiles, and her dimples! The young fellow with her seems disposed to make the best of his opportunities—small blame to him!’
Throughout the listeners there ran a flash of hideous silence. At last some one passed a slip of paper, on which a name had been hastily scribbled, into Colonel de Gourmet’s gouty fingers, and then arose general conversation, mainly as to the weather prospects. After this fog that had been hanging about the Channel for days, and with the glass running down fast, what were the chances we should not have a thunderstorm in the course of the next twenty-four hours?
Gaston Arbuthnot arranged the cards in two neat packs on the table and waited silently for his host. He felt morally certain that the little divinity was his wife, also that Lord Rex Basire was her companion. And a wholesomely bitter contrition filled his soul, a feeling widely differing from the vague disrelish with which he had watched her teaching Basire cross-stitch five days before. Probably he never knew how dear Dinah’s white name was to him, never realised how culpably he had left her in the shade, until this moment’s humiliation.
And still Gaston’s countenance betrayed him not. An instant later, he was rallying the Colonel on his boyish enthusiasm, confessing that, for his own part, he was too staid a Benedict to exert himself, at the present state of the thermometer, merely because a nice-looking woman happened to pass along the street.
‘And what are our stakes—the usual fiver?’ asked de Gourmet, looking immensely tickled as he hobbled across the room to the card-table. ‘I am afraid of you though, Arbuthnot! You are just the man to be in luck.’
‘I don’t believe in luck. Conduct is fate.’ Gaston lifted his handsome face. He fixed his clear steely glance on the somewhat Silenus features over against him. ‘Champagne?—I thank you, Colonel. No brain-enemy, just at present. Don’t you know that we Yankees keep our heads cool——’
‘On purpose to rook the Britishers,’ interrupted de Gourmet, still with a suppressed chuckle in his voice.
‘On purpose to rook the Britishers. Now, let us attend to business, sir,’ said Gaston cheerfully. ‘The best of three games for a five-pound note—good!’
The little divinity and her companion had by this time reached the hospital gates.
‘I hope I shall use the proper words, Geff,’ whispered Dinah, looking flushed and nervous. ‘The kind of exhortation, you know, that clergymen’s wives would give to sick people.’
‘Impossible!’ Geoffrey disencouraged her promptly. ‘Orthodoxy cannot be learnt at a moment’s notice. You must be content to be—yourself! And that is much,’ he added, watching her beautiful, earnest face. ‘Your sermon may well be a silent one. Look, just as you are looking at this moment, and leave the rest to the patient’s human nature. Jack may be a miserable sinner, needing homilies. That is a fact you and I have no certitude about. We know that he is a poor lad, far from his people, laid low in pain and weakness. Depend upon it, the sound of a tender voice, the sight of Dinah Arbuthnot’s face, must prove good medicine, both for his soul and body.’
The tears started to Dinah’s eyes. She was just at that tension point of suppressed emotion when a kindly accent, a word or two of praise, are as hands extended to a drowning man. If Gaston only esteemed her poor personal gifts as Geoffrey did—for, of whatever she thought, to-day, Gaston still was beneath the current of her thinking! Nay (this followed by a descending, yet inevitable sequence of ideas), if Gaston could only hold the opinion of her held—Dinah, remembering events, had a little thrill of shame—by a man like Lord Rex Basire!
Perhaps the sum-total of yoked infelicity might be lessened if careless husbands would reckon with themselves, sometimes, concerning the number of their deserved rivals—such husbands, I mean, as possess wives of Dinah Arbuthnot’s mould. For must not the answer be trumpet-tongued: ‘The whole seeing world!’ Does not every man, save the purblind, range himself by intuition on the side of a young and beautiful and neglected woman? But careless husbands may not have imagination enough for such a stretch, or there may be sympathisers ... outside feminine judges ... mature sirens ... a clever whisper, even, now and then. And so the wife’s heart continues to ache to the last—or gives up aching of a sudden: deeper tragedy, by far.
Dinah’s colour went and came as she traversed the corridors of the hospital beside Geoffrey. The moment they entered Ward A., the men’s accident room, she forgot her want of knowledge, of orthodoxy. ‘Explanation’ was not needed here. She saw only the rows of beds, each bed with its pallid inmate. She felt only that she was Dinah Thurston—among the poor, the simple, the suffering,—among her equals.
The patients in the ward were mostly working-men in the springtime of their strength, the majority of them victims of the late quarry accident. A few, like poor Jack, had been struck down by mishap at sea or in the harbour. Beside nearly every bed was a visitor. Here might be seen a country girl talking in whispers to her sweetheart. Here a pale wife clasped her husband’s hand, or a mother in silent anguish watched her lad’s changed face. On every pillow was a little posy of sweet-smelling cottage flowers, reminding the gaunt sufferers who lay there, patient and uncomplaining, of blue summer sky, of the freshness of fields and gardens, of home.
Number 28 had neither visitor nor posy. Poor Jack came from a remote hamlet among the Devonshire moors. His mates on board the Princess were afloat again. The lad had no friends, save the surgeons and nurses of the Guernsey hospital—and Geff Arbuthnot.
‘Speak to him about his own country,’ Geoffrey whispered, as his companion drew back a little; ‘Jack will dispense with any formal introduction.’
And on this, Dinah, her face overflowing with sweetest womanly compassion, stooped over the low pallet and spoke—a commonplace word or two, unworthy of raising to the dignity of print—a word or two whose homely Devonshire lilt called the blood up to Jack’s temples as though some voice from the old familiar home addressed him.
Since her marriage, Dinah had learnt to speak English, ‘with a foreign pronunciation,’ Gaston would tell her, ‘yet scarcely strong enough to be disagreeable.’ Although a tell-tale cadence was traceable, ever and again, in her speech, she had tardily succeeded in putting away the Devonshire burr that was strong on her tongue when Geoffrey met her first. Here, at Jack’s bedside, no Gaston near to be put to shame, she fell back, instinctively, upon the West Country accent, the soft, half-strange, half-familiar o’s and u’s of her childhood.
‘It’s so bad to be sick, for a young fellow like you, and away from home. We just thought you might like a talk with some one Devonshire born and bred. I wonder, now, do you and I come from the same part?’
‘I was born at Torrhill, a village out away beyond Chagford. A poor place, ma’am, on the borders of the moor—quite a poor place,’ repeated Jack apologetically.
‘Why, that is near to my own town, Tavistock!’ said Dinah. ‘We used to pass Torrhill going along the Vale of Widdicombe every autumn when we went out whortleberrying. “Torrhill, in the cold country.” I mind we children used to say, when we got snowstorms in winter, “the Widdicombe folk were picking their geese.”’
Well, and as he listened to her simple talk, to the soft West Country accent, it came to pass that Geff Arbuthnot’s heart knew a thrill of its old infatuation. No man can possibly hold two women dear at the same time. And Geoffrey was in love—the warm flesh and blood love of four-and-twenty—with an actuality, not a remembrance. But his heart thrilled at Dinah’s voice. Something in his temperament forbade him to outlive the past, wholly. It was a book that could not be clasped. A word, an accent, and the enchantment cast upon him in the long dead summer days at Lesser Cheriton would be revitalised. This was his weakness (a conscious one) always; and now he was in the dangerous state of wounded feeling when a man’s tenderness is easily arrested at rebound....
Those Devonshire o’s and u’s brought back before him in its fiery ardour the fortnight when he worshipped Dinah Thurston’s footsteps, the fortnight ending on that evening when Gaston and his friends drove past in the twilight on their return from Ely. Standing here, in the Guernsey hospital ward, Geoffrey’s senses recalled the rush of wheels down the village street, the lingering daylight in the low fields of Cambridgeshire sky. He remembered how Dinah’s head and throat stood out in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge of the cottage garden.
And he decided, there and then,—yes, while she was chatting, low-voiced, smiling, to the lad about the moors, and the ‘cold country,’ and the autumn huckle-berrying—to return to England forthwith.
A French steamer was to touch at Petersport on Sunday morning. That would give him to-morrow for winding up his small affairs, for taking leave of his patients, for visiting Tintajeux. He would kiss, in coldest fancy, the hair, the lips that should have made up to him for the unattainable heaven of his youth’s desire. He would look once again in Marjorie’s eyes, and go. It was possible—here, at least, might be a gleam of comfort—that Gaston and Dinah would steer clearer through their difficulties if left absolutely alone than they were doing now.
He told her of his intention when they were on their way back to the hotel.
‘And, remember, you know your way to the hospital,’ he added quickly, as Dinah was about to speak. ‘I hope when I am gone you will pay Jack many a kind little visit, your hands as full of fruits and flowers as they were to-day.’
‘When you are gone!’ echoed Dinah, blankly. The fear smote her that with Geoffrey’s going, such slack hold as she still had upon Gaston must be loosened. ‘I hoped you would remain here ... as long, at least, as I must. Think of all the sick people who will miss you, Geff. Think of Miss Bartrand.’
‘I shall find sick people everywhere. In the matter of doctors, Guernsey is full of better men than I.’
‘And Marjorie Bartrand?’
‘Ah! that is a different side of the question. I am conceited enough to think Miss Bartrand’s mathemathics will suffer.’
‘And you don’t care—you are not one bit sorry at giving her up? Do you know, Geoffrey, I had begun to hope——’
‘Miss Bartrand will be a Girton girl before long,’ interrupted Geoffrey. ‘Happily,’—he paused—‘she is not without self-reliance, has more than a woman’s share, perhaps, of ambition. When we see each other next it will be as fellow-students in Cambridge.’
Dinah knew the tone of his voice. It was not a tone that invited discussion.
‘Your leaving is an ill stroke of luck for me, Geff. Day by day Gaston’s engagements seem to grow upon him. My time will be emptier than ever when you are gone.’
‘You may fill it, full as time can hold. I thought as I watched you charming poor Jack out of knowledge of his pain that you had missed your vocation. You should be a nurse. Yours are the ideal face and voice and tread that we want in the hospitals. If you ever harbour thoughts of emancipation, or of a mission,’ said Geoffrey, ‘remember my hint.’
‘When Gaston has used the last line that can be modelled from my face, for instance?’
The smile was flickering with which Dinah hazarded the surmise.
‘When Gaston has got his last inspiration from your face! Unluckily for the hospitals, that day will not come quite yet. A woman with a mission should have no such vexatious encumbrance as a husband or a lover.’
For once, Geoffrey’s tone was cynical. He recalled his parting with Marjorie Bartrand over-night.