Ere Geoffrey had had time to retaliate, a factor of no common importance was destined to enter the difficult problem of Dinah Arbuthnot’s happiness. Holding the corner of her apron before her lips, the jaunty French waitress tripped up a pathway leading from the hotel to the lime-shaded lawn, and placed a lady’s card between Gaston’s hands.
‘Une dame ... Mais, une petite dame qui demande Monsieur!’
And the serving-woman’s eyes took in the whole space of blue mid-heaven at a glance. Obviously this Norman waitress, with acumen derived from an older civilisation than ours, was mistress of the situation.
In a second of time Dinah had glanced over her husband’s shoulder.
‘Mrs. Thorne. Who is Mrs. Thorne? What is that written in pencil? “Née Linda Constantia Smythe.” Gaston, what is the meaning of “Née?”’
I am bound to add that Dinah pronounced the monosyllable as ‘knee.’ And a red spot showed on Gaston Arbuthnot’s cheek.
From his precocious boyhood up, it had been a belief of Gaston’s that lady-killing was an open accomplishment; the established means of defence as much an art to be learnt as the means of attack. And still, at the sight of those poor pencil-marks, at the thought of the youthful evenings when Linda Constantia used to hand him cups of weak tea, flavoured atrociously with cinnamon, in the salon of a remembered Paris entresol, the conscience of the man was touched.
As Dinah’s voice asked the meaning of the word ‘knee,’ he changed colour.
‘Linda Constantia Smythe. What an absurdly small world we inhabit! You and I, my love, and Geoffrey, coming across poor Linda Constantia! Faites entrer cette dame,’ he added, turning to the waitress. ‘An absolutely forgotten acquaintance of a hundred years ago, Dinah—an acquaintance of times before I had heard your name. Linda married—no, did not marry; went out to India a spinster, and returned, poor soul! the wife of a Doctor Thorne. They say, in these Channel Islands, a man will run across every mortal he has known, or is fated to know, from his cradle to his grave.’
‘You never told me of your acquaintance with any Linda Constantia Smythe. I wonder you recollected her name so instantly, Gaston.’
‘Easier, perhaps, to recollect the name than the lady. Can it be possible that this is she?’ A cream-coloured parasol, a great many yards of cream-coloured cambric, were advancing with agitated flutter across the lawn. ‘By Jupiter! how these meagre women age when they once cross the line. Can this be the walk one has admired, I know not how oft? Are those the shoulders?... My dear Mrs. Thorne,’—Gaston Arbuthnot rose to meet his visitor, thoroughly warm, thoroughly natural of manner; and Dinah, with a sensation of insignificance only too familiar to her, sank into the background—‘this is too kind! Doctor Thorne well, I hope? And your little daughter? You see I have watched the first column of the Times. About your own health I need not ask. And so you have really given up India—have made a settlement in Guernsey! Dinah, my love, let me introduce you to one of my very early Parisian friends. My wife—Mrs. Thorne.’
Dinah bowed with the staid gravity that in her case, as in that of some other lowly-born people one has known, came so near to the self-possession of breeding. Mrs. Thorne was effusive.
Gaston felt an honest artistic satisfaction in watching the contrast the two young women presented to each other.
Linda Thorne’s figure was lithe, straight, thin; the sort of figure that ever lends itself kindly to the setting forth of such anatomical deformities as shall have received the last approving seal of Parisian fashion. Her eight-buttoned long hands were pleasingly posed. She wore a great deal of frizzled darkish hair on a forehead that, but for this Cupid’s ambuscade, might have been overhigh. Traces of rice-powder, at noon of a June day, were not absent from Mrs. Thorne’s India-bleached cheeks. Her eyes were big, black-lashed, green. Her nose was flat, giving somewhat the Egyptian Sphinx type to a personality which, with all its demerits, was by no means void either of allurement or distinction.
If Linda had spoken perfect grammar, in a London tone, and with a taught manner, you would have set her down, perhaps, as an actress from one of our good theatres. Speaking, as she did, at utter grammatical random, with the slightest little bit of Irish accent, and no manner at all, imagination might suggest to you that Dr. Thorne’s wife belonged to some lost tribe of nomad Lords or Honourables. And the suggestion would be correct. Linda’s grandfather was an Irish earl; a hare-brained gentleman not unknown to the newspaper editors of his day, but with whose deeds, good or evil, with whose forfeited acres, domestic relations, or political principles, our story has no concern.
Linda grasped Mrs. Arbuthnot’s hands; drawing her towards herself with such warmth that Dinah’s unsmiling face rose higher in the air. She had an instinctive, a horrible dread that this old Parisian friend of Gaston’s, this lady of the green eyes, rice-powdered cheeks, and effusive manner, might be going to embrace her.
‘A pleasure, and an immense surprise to meet like this!’ Mrs. Thorne took in with one long look the blooming fairness of the girl Gaston Arbuthnot had married, then dropping Dinah’s hands, she turned coolly away. ‘I heard of your arrival here, Mr. Arbuthnot, from Colonel de Gourmet.’
‘Colonel de Gourmet is——’
‘Our island authority in all matters of taste, from the dressing of a salad to the delivery of a sermon. He said you looked like a man who would understand the meaning of the word “dinner.” That is the highest praise Colonel de Gourmet can give.’
‘I appreciate the compliment immensely.’
‘You must appreciate the Colonel by meeting him at our house. Somehow, I fancied you were alone. I thought stupidly, you had come to Guernsey for art reasons, and as a bachelor.’
So her visit was deliberately not intended for the wife; after such a declaration, could not involve the necessity of the wife’s future acquaintance! The keen blood quickened on Dinah’s cheek. Dinah’s husband was unmoved. Should it be counted as strength or as weakness, as fault or as virtue, that no small feminine by-thrust at his lowly-born wife ever shook the outward composure of Gaston Arbuthnot?
‘No, Dinah is with me. We are just starting on somewhat lengthy travels. We mean to spend the early summer here, Mrs. Thorne. In autumn we shall ramble leisurely on towards the South of France, and in winter make a settlement of some kind in Florence. In Florence, greatly to my wife’s satisfaction, I am pledged to do serious work.’
‘Yes! And is it true, then, that you are a sculptor by profession, that you have become an artist to the exclusion of other aims! Of course there is a way of looking at things which makes such a life seem the most charming possible.’ Mrs. Thorne clasped her thin clever hands as though entering some mysterious general protest against art and its followers. ‘And still, one has regrets. I was foolishly ambitious about you, if you remember, Mr. Arbuthnot. In our romantic boy-and-girl Paris days, I quite thought you were to get into Parliament. To be the people’s friend. A kind of second Mirabeau. To make a tremendous name.’
Gaston Arbuthnot’s face for a second betrayed sincere perplexity. When was Linda Constantia ambitious in her hopes about his intellectual future! At what period of that shallow flirtation, a decade of years ago, could dreams of a seat in the House of Commons, and of Parliamentary victories, have been possible to her?
‘I am open to flattery, Mrs. Thorne. When does a mediocre man not glory in the fine things which, according to his friends, he might have done? Yet it seems to me I never held a political opinion in my life.’
‘You once held very strong ones. Why, in a letter you wrote me after—after we had said good-bye in Paris, you were so nobly warm, I remember, about the English lower classes! Our sisters and brothers in the alleys, whose claims that dear, immortal Mrs. Browning so beautifully reveals to us.’
Gaston Arbuthnot, at this mention of a letter, felt the ground grow solid beneath his feet.
‘I must have written to you from Cambridge; for the moment, perhaps, had taken up some of Geff’s fads. Let me introduce my cousin, by the bye. Geoffrey Arbuthnot—Mrs. Thorne.’
Mrs. Thorne, who knew that in Geoffrey Arbuthnot she would never have a friend, smiled ambrosially. Geff rose. He gave the lady the lowest, at the same time the coldest bow in the world. It was a true case of elective dislike at first sight.
‘Yes,’ went on Gaston, ‘I remember.’ He drew forward a garden-chair, into which Mrs. Thorne—no unpleasing picture in her broad Leghorn hat, her cambric morning gown, her eight-buttoned gloves, her cream-coloured sunshade—sank gracefully. ‘I had taken up one of Geff’s fads. The British Workman was an epidemic among all classes of Cambridge undergraduates that term. Get hold of your poorer brother in his hour of sobriety—that is to say, on a Friday afternoon. Present him with a bookshelf of your own carving. Explain to him the newest thing out in draining-pipes. Show him how to make a window-box of rough cork, and present him with half a dozen slips of scarlet geranium. Humanise him—always, of course, with the capital H. Humanise him!’
‘You call work so utterly noble as this “a fad”? I assure you, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, I am wild myself about the working classes. At this very moment I ought to be visiting among my district people.’
Mrs. Thorne’s eyes offered Geoffrey a glance of tentative sympathy.
‘Different men come to the same end by different roads,’ said Gaston. ‘Your greatest English authority on culture declares that any man with a dash of genius is the born elevator of others. I believe myself to have a dash—a thin streak, rather—of genius. I believe myself to be a born elevator, but it must be in my own way.’
‘And that is?’ asked Geoffrey.
‘Well, remembering the atmosphere of Barnwell and Chesterton, the scene of our early labours, one feels sure that the geraniums must have choked for want of air. Remembering the clay soil, the neighbourhood of that oozy river, the thick air, the black ugliness,’ Gaston shivered unaffectedly, ‘one is sceptical even as to draining-pipes. My opinion is—that the English must be regenerated by art, by sculpture notably, owing to the low price of plaster casts. Sculpture can be best studied in Italy, and I am on my road thither. But Geff and I may still be fellow-labourers in the same cause.’
Gaston rattled forth this specimen of ‘poker talk’ lightly, his sombrero pulled low on his forehead, his shrewd, thought-reading eyes making observation the while of Linda—Linda whom, in long-dead Paris days, he just liked too well to be ever, for one moment, in love with. And the result of his study was that, in her Leghorn hat and cambric gown and slim, eight-buttoned gloves, Linda Constantia Thorne looked undeniably picturesque.
Each attitude that she took had, he saw, been diligently learnt by heart. It was Mrs. Thorne’s habit when in town to spend her nights at the Lyceum, studying gracefulness, from the stalls, at so much an hour. Her expression savoured rather of earth than heaven. Her figure spoke of the Parisian deformity artist, not of nature. But these faults were just les défauts de ses qualités. Gaston could never think idiomatically save in French. A well-paying section of the art of 188- required models of Linda Thorne’s type. And what artist, with pockets poorly lined, can resist the prospect of a good unpaid model?
If pure-faced Madonnas commanded the worship yielded to them of old, no need to go farther than the exquisite brow and throat of his own Dinah. But pure-faced Madonnas in the nineteenth century are for the first-class sculptor. Gaston belonged to the dilettante third-rate men who execute pretty conventionalities with readiness, get money for them from the dealers, and are stirred neither by great expectation of success nor by great disappointment in failure.
In any case, so decided the quick brain under the sombrero, Linda Thorne, during half a summer here in Guernsey, must be a resource, personally, against stagnation. She had ripened into a kind of sub-acid cleverness that pleased Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s taste. Her acquaintance opened out a not unprofitable means of spending one’s hours between work and dinner. On principle, he was in favour always of the brain woman, as opposed to the sentiment woman. He chose the white rose rather than the red—his only condition being that the white rose must wear Jouvin’s gloves, get her dresses from Paris, abjure patchouli, and be peremptorily certain that every inch of his, Gaston’s, heart belonged to the somewhat neglected girl, with Juno face and Devonshire accent, who waited for him at home.
Before sixty seconds were over he had resolved upon soliciting Linda Thorne to be his model.
‘And while Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot chisels marble for the English pauper in some delicious Florentine palace, you are thinking of Guernsey as an abiding-place?’
Mrs. Thorne asked the question softly of Geoffrey.
‘I? Certainly not, madam. After a few weeks’ holiday I am going back to my medical work in Cambridge.’
‘Geoffrey won his academic honours long ago,’ said Gaston. ‘In my cousin Geff you behold that melancholy specimen, Mrs. Thorne, a man of genius resolutely bent on not getting on in the world. After passing eighth in the Classical Tripos of his year——’
‘And finding that a Classical Tripos does not mean bread and cheese,’ put in Geff with sturdy independence.
‘My cousin went back to school, set up a skeleton, and began smelling evil smells out of bottles, like a good little boy of sixteen. In another year and a half he hopes to get some unpaid work in the East End of London. The worse,’ added Gaston, with the hearty appreciation of Geoffrey, which was the finest thing in his own character—‘the worse for all the wretched men and women in Cambridge whose lives are bettered by my cousin Geff’s labours among them.’
‘Re—ally? Dear, dear, it is all too noble! A veritable life-poem in prose! My husband is a man of science, too. Only in his days, you know, doctors believed in their own horrible medicines. Doctor Thorne will be charmed to make Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s acquaintance. You are not working quite too dreadfully hard here in Guernsey, I hope?’
Geoffrey detested italics, even though he might tolerate a woman who habitually employed them. Judge how he was affected by the italicised enthusiasm, applied to himself, of Linda Thorne!
‘My work in Guernsey will take the shape of pupils, if I am lucky enough to get any. My terms are five shillings an hour, madam. My tuition comprises Greek, Latin, arithmetic, a moderate quantity of algebra, and, if required,’ said Geff, without the ghost of a smile, ‘the use of the globes. Perhaps you could recommend me?’
‘Oh, to be sure; I quite understand.’ Linda’s highly-wrought tones went through a diminuendo of interest, well bred but rapid, at this announcement of poverty. ‘Classics; the use of the globes; algebra; pupils.’
‘Of whom we hope we have caught one,’ cried Gaston, watching her face, gauging the extent of her sympathy for life-poems in prose. ‘You think, do you not, Geff, that you have secured Miss Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux?’
‘I have already offered myself in writing, and shall walk out to Tintajeux, on approval, this evening. If Miss Bartrand thinks me capable of teaching her arithmetic, also the rudiments of Greek and Latin, at five shillings an hour, the bargain will be struck.’
‘Capable!’
The exclamation came from Dinah, who until now had maintained a staid but not ungracious silence while the others talked. A certain light in Dinah’s eyes betrayed the profound conviction of Geoffrey’s intellect which was felt by her.
Mrs. Thorne looked, without showing she looked, at the three Arbuthnots in turn.
‘You think Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot more than capable of guiding the whole combined feminine intellect of our poor little Guernsey. Do you not, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Linda asked this with the North Pole voice that puts the social position of a feminine questioner at so vast a distance from the social position of her questioned.
‘I know nothing about intellect, except what I hear from Geoffrey and my husband. I am quite uneducated myself.’
Dinah’s reply was accompanied by a large level glance from those fearless, truthful Devonshire eyes of hers. And Mrs. Thorne’s eyes fell.
Gaston Arbuthnot felt the heart within him rejoice. He would honestly have liked to accord a ‘Brava!’ to his wife.
‘A good many interpretations may be put upon the word “uneducated,”’ observed Geoffrey.
Mrs. Thorne had long known herself to be a clever woman. She felt that she was a cleverer woman than usual at this moment. Yet not a suspicion had she of the situation’s actual point, not an inkling of the delicate friendship which bound Geoffrey to Dinah, and, at a somewhat lengthened distance, to Gaston.
‘Ah! When you have stayed longer in our Robinson Crusoe little island—— And it is charming, is it not?’
‘Quite too deliciously charming,’ answered Gaston, paraphrasing Linda’s own style of speech. ‘And cheaper than any decently liveable place this side Italy. For the daily consideration of two five-franc pieces one gets such sunshine as cannot be bought in Great Britain, three excellently cooked meals, and the advantage of living under the same roof with members of the English aristocracy. You hear the domestic gossip, Dinah. Does not a dowager countess, with a German lady’s maid, a second husband, two pug dogs, and a wig, reside in some upper apartment of Miller’s Hotel?’
‘But you will find that we are a little behindhand. Doctor Thorne and myself are sensible that there is always the insular note. Our friends are most kind, most hospitable, and of course there are the military people to fall back upon. Still, remembering other days, the intimacies of the soul, the freedom, the expansion of Indian society, Robbie and I feel we are in exile. There is a constant danger of fatty degeneration—I see Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot laughing at me—fatty degeneration of the mind.’
‘Want of appreciation is the saddest thing in human life,’ murmured Gaston, with a serious face. ‘I am taking my wife to Florence on the outside chance that we may be recognised by the Florentines as persons of distinction. In London we are nowhere.’
‘Yes. There is the insular note. Now, these Bartrands of Tintajeux. Delightful people! Noble French family who emigrated a hundred years ago to Guernsey—such of them, I mean, as were not guillotined—dropped the “de” from before their name, and settled here. Well, it is very wicked to awaken prejudice, but——’
‘Put aside all moral obligations,’ exclaimed Gaston Arbuthnot. ‘At a pass like this, dear Mrs. Thorne, it is a matter of life or death to some of us to have facts. Is Marjorie Bartrand pretty?’
With her long, gloved fingers Linda Thorne stroked down imaginary creases in her dress.
‘Marjorie ought to be pretty. I am a frank adorer of beauty, you must know. I hate to see a girl with possibilities make the least of herself. So I always contrive to give Marjorie a friendly lecture. If she would only arrange her hair differently, as I tell her, and dress like other people, and take a little reasonable care of her complexion, she might be distinctly nice-looking. All to no purpose. Marjorie is Marjorie still. Some people call her an original. I,’ said Linda playfully, ‘go farther. I call her an aboriginal.’
‘I see her with my mind’s eye. Geoffrey, accept my condolences. All these classico-mathematical girls,’ observed Gaston, ‘are the same. Much nose, little hair, freckles, ankles. Let the conversation be changed.’
‘Marjorie has too little rather than too much nose, and is certainly too dark for freckles. It seems, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, that you have grown cynical in these latter days. If I were a girl again I should be wild to become a pupil of Mr. Geoffrey’s—if he would have me. I should adore classics and mathematics, a touch of science even! Positively, I think one ought to have a smattering of biology, just as one ought to attend the ambulance classes. But we may cultivate the Graces also. Now, Marjorie carries everything to extremes. Perhaps that is only another way of saying Marjorie is a Bartrand.’
‘And the Bartrands, you hinted, are, as a race, handsome?’
Never was man surer of carrying his point, by oblique if not by direct means, than Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘Handsome, stiff-necked, unrelenting. I am not talking scandal against Queen Elizabeth, mind. If I said this in their presence, both Marjorie and her terrible grandfather would feel flattered. Something softer the child may perhaps have inherited from her Spanish mother.’
(‘A Spanish mother!’ interpolated Gaston, in speculative parenthesis. ‘Southern eyes flashing at you from the handsome Bartrand face!’)
‘But Marjorie has the true family temper. She knows too much. She ascribes the worst motives to every one. She cannot forgive. About a twelvemonth ago, when the girl really ought to have been in the schoolroom, there was an unhappy little love story afloat in Guernsey.’
‘A lover who was unworthy of her, of course?’
‘That sort of thing happens to many of us,’ said Linda, examining the stitching of her kerchief, ‘and yet we women manage to forget our own wrongs and to tolerate humanity for the remainder of our lives. Marjorie, reckoning pounds, shillings, and pence by our modest insular standard, is an heiress. Well, she despises the very name of man now, because a certain rather mercenary Major Tredennis sought to marry her for her money.’
‘And intends to be revenged upon us from the awful heights of Plato and conic sections! Geff, my boy, I don’t envy you as much as I did a quarter of an hour ago.’
‘Oh, Mr. Geoffrey will be frightfully snubbed. It is only right to prepare him beforehand.’
Mrs. Thorne raised her eyes—very fine and sparkling eyes they looked just then—to Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s face.
‘I shall like the sensation,’ remarked Geff. ‘To the usual forms of feminine caprice one should be indifferent. Snubbing means sincerity.’
‘If you tell her she has worked out a proposition in Euclid right she will resent it, think you are offering her an affront under the veil of compliment.’
‘Then I will speak of the propositions only in which she fails.’
‘If you admire the flower she holds in her hand she will throw it away. If you say the sky is fair, she will remark that, for her part, she thinks it looks like rain. Once or twice,’ said Linda, ‘I have met Marjorie Bartrand at some village treat or flower-show. The girl is not out, or likely to come out. She possesses one dress, I believe, the orthodox length of other people’s! And each time I have pitied the unfortunate young men who tried to make themselves agreeable to her.’
‘I am not an agreeable young man, Mrs. Thorne, either in fact or intention. Your warnings are kind, but I think even a Bartrand and an heiress will find it waste of time to snub me long.’
As Geoffrey spoke a side gate of the hotel garden opened. The figure of a spare, wooden-structured old gentleman dressed in white nankeen, and with a white umbrella, outspread, walked in.
‘Why, there is Robbie! My dear good husband!’ exclaimed Mrs. Thorne, impulsively. ‘What in the world——’
‘Allait-il faire dans cette galère?’
The quotation was put in by Gaston in an innocent voice.
Now Dinah’s French studies had in her youth been conducted, for five terms, in a small and remote Devonshire boarding-school. Consequently she did not understand one word of the language as pronounced by Gaston. Her heart sank as she watched an amused smile play round Linda’s mouth. Already ideas were exchanged between these two people—dear friends once—from which she must, perforce, remain shut out.
‘Doctor Tho—orne! Doctor Tho—orne!’
And with playful undulatory movements of her parasol Mrs. Linda strove to arrest her husband’s attention.
‘Linda! Bless my heart, my love, I thought you were district visiting hours ago. Quite an unexpected pleasure.’
And, hat in hand, Doctor Thorne advanced up the path, dutifully obedient to his Linda’s call, to be introduced to Linda’s friends.
He was an ultra Indian-looking, ultra curry-coloured old Company’s servant, considerably more than thirty years his wife’s senior, with a snow-white military moustache, projecting white eyebrows, mild, tired eyes, a very thick gold chain, a puggaree, and buff shoes. You could never look at Doctor Thorne without a certain surprise that he did not live in Cheltenham; so well was his appearance in tune with your recollections of the Cheltenham promenade winter garden, Montpellier lawn-tennis courts, and club windows blossoming over with generals, admirals, and old Indians.
But in Cheltenham Linda might have hunted! Quite early after their return to Europe Doctor Thorne made the discovery that he and his wife had two passions—Linda’s for horses, his own for living within his pension. This decided him on choosing an island for his residence.
‘Bless my heart, Linda! A positively unexpected pleasure,’ repeated the Doctor, with urbane little bows discreetly given to no person in particular.
‘You dear, delicious Robbie, to turn up just when you are so wanted!’ cried Linda. ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot, let me introduce my husband.’ With a careless wave of the hand that said, plainly enough, this part of the ceremony might be cut as short as possible. ‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot. Have I not often told you, Robbie, of my old friendship for Gast—, I mean, for Mr. Arbuthnot, in Paris? Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, a medical student from Cambridge.’
Doctor Thorne was one of the most thorough believers extant in this questioning, sceptical nineteenth-century world. He believed in his own drugs, practising, on a small but murderous scale, here in Guernsey, and holding the same pharmacopœial opinions that obtained half a century earlier in Calcutta. He believed in the great political names he had admired when he was a schoolboy; in the balance of power; in the infallibility of Church, State, and the British Empire generally. He believed in the extraordinary convenience of his house, in the fitness of his furniture, in the talents of his Linda. Doctor Thorne, I should add, had a mind—curiously small, thoroughly limited, but still a mind—not badly stored with facts, of a dry and statistical order, which he loved to impart to others.
Fastening at once on Dinah—for Linda, moving a few paces distant, began to lionise the adjacent islands for Gaston’s benefit, and Geff contrived to vanish from the scene—fastening on poor Dinah for his victim, Doctor Thorne at once opened a conversation with the airy didactic grace in which old gentlemen would seem to have shone when the story-books of our infancy were written.
‘Your first visit to the island, Mrs. Arbuthnot I Then I trust you and your worthy husband will accept my services as your cicerone. There is much here, I can assure you, to stimulate the interest and foster habits of observation. In the first place, you see, we have the people themselves, whose habits of frugality contrast in a marked and favourable manner with those of larger countries. You are not perhaps acquainted with the statistics of savings-banks generally?’
‘I have never had anything to save in my life, sir.’
‘Well, then, I can give you a few important facts. Sit down, pray. Let us protect our heads under the shadow of this delightful ash, or lime, which is it? I can give you a few details, with the amount actually saved by each person in this island over the age of fifteen. Studies of this kind captivate the softer faculty of benevolence, while they strengthen and enlarge the understanding.’
Dinah was well dowered by Nature with means of self-defence. She could put down an impertinence—I am afraid could resent an injury, as well as any fine London lady of them all. But in Dinah’s moral arsenal was no weapon for demolishing a mild little prosy gentleman of sixty-seven, with snow-white moustache, yellow shoes, and a tired smile. Some intuition she could not have analysed made her almost feel a species of pity for Linda’s husband.
We do not easily experience two distinct kinds of pain at one moment. It may be that Dinah’s heart was too sorely troubled for her to be sensible of boredom, even at the hands of such a master in the art of boring as the Doctor.
‘That morsel of table-land in the south is Sark,’ observed Linda, pointing to an outline of haze faintly towering above the dense blue of the Channel. ‘And the streak nearer at hand—please don’t look at me, but at the islands—the streak nearer at hand, with the sun shining on its yellow patches, is Jetho; and nearer still, where the pale green spaces mark the shallows, is Herm. I hope you are following my stage directions, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
Mr. Arbuthnot was scrutinising her face; curiously, as one scrutinises any waif or stray from the past suddenly brought back to one; but tenderly, too. When does a man of Gaston’s character feel aught but kindness towards the woman whose life has been a little embittered by his own fascination?
The kindness made itself felt in his voice and look when he answered her:
‘Almost the last time you and I saw each other we followed stage directions side by side. Have you forgotten those New Year charades of Madame Benjamin’s?’
‘I have forgotten nothing,’ exclaimed Mrs. Thorne, with a sharpish accent. ‘I have remembered you, Mr. Arbuthnot; I have thought of you, hoped for your happiness all these years. Now, at length, I am called upon to witness it.’
She gave a glance at Dinah, patiently enduring the Doctor’s statistics, then went on with a sort of effort:
‘You must let me congratulate you. I am blunt, matter-of-fact—just as I used to be.’ Certainly Linda Thorne was at no pains to modulate her voice. ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot is simply beautiful. Those matchless lines of profile! Those soft waves of gold above her brow!’
‘You like that way she has with her curls? I am answerable for it. It took exactly fifteen months to convince Dinah that a woman may wear short hair upon her forehead, yet save her soul alive.’
‘And the lips, the chin! I believe Mrs. Arbuthnot’s face is the first I have ever seen without a flaw.’
Linda spoke as one might speak of a shell cameo, of a china vase, of a lily modelled in wax.
Gaston Arbuthnot mentally translated the chill distinct tone, with edification to himself.
‘Dinah’s is a nature laid on large lines. She is the best possible wife for such a light-ballasted man as I.’ He made this confession of faith with genuine earnestness, feeling, rather than acknowledging he felt, that the speech set his conscience satisfactorily at rest ‘Goodness matters a great deal more, does it not, Mrs. Thorne, than a beautiful face?’
‘Possibly. I am ready to accept what you say. Tell me only you are not offended by my outspoken admiration,’ she went on. ‘Surely I may presume sufficiently on old—old acquaintance, to congratulate you on your marriage, on the domestic sunshine of your life?’
‘It is delightful to feel that your heart is warm as ever! As a matter of priority, congratulations, Mrs. Thorne, were due to you first. Dinah and I have been married three years and three quarters, while you——’
‘Oh, it makes me too old a woman to be precise about dates,’ said Linda, looking away from him. ‘My daughter, although she retains her ayah and her spoilt Indian ways, is a big girl, almost four years old. I hope you will visit The Bungalow soon for Rahnee’s sake.’
‘The Bungalow being——’
‘The straggling, white, one-storied place which you see low down under the hill to the right. That is my home, built entirely from Doctor Thorne’s own plans. The ugliest house, every honest person who sees it admits, in Guernsey.’
‘Not in its interior. I am certain a house inhabited by you could not be ugly.’
‘Prettily said. Why, pray, in the present æsthetic age, cut off’ as we are from the poetic upholstery of London, should a house inhabited by me not be a great deal uglier than other people’s?’
‘I decline, at this hour of the morning, to be logical. One has an instinct in such things.’
‘Rahnee, at least, is not ugly. I am not afraid of your judgment on our little Rahnee. Now, what is to-day?’
Gaston Arbuthnot believed it to be the fourteenth day of June, in the year of grace 188—.
‘Well, then’—Mrs. Thorne’s voice sank so as to be only half a tone higher than a whisper—‘will you dine with us this evening, at half-past seven? I believe,’ added Linda vaguely, ‘that one or two of the artillery officers may be coming to us. We do not entertain. I make a point of telling everybody that. Doctor Thorne and I do not entertain. But if our friends care to drop in unexpectedly, to eat our roast mutton with us, and smoke a cigarette with Robbie afterwards, there we are.’
It was to be a bachelor party, then. Dinah might possibly have been invited to eat roast mutton at Mrs. Thorne’s table. She could, under no circumstances, be asked to smoke a cigarette with Robbie afterwards. But Gaston accepted with frank cordiality. During the years of his married life it had so grown to be a matter of course that Dinah, dear good girl! should never go into the world, that even the form of hesitation at leaving her had been dropped on the part of Dinah’s husband.
‘No dress coat, no white tie, please. In these long June evenings one likes to stroll away as far from bricks and mortar as possible. There will not be a moon to-night. Still, even in the darkness, it will be enjoyable to breathe pure air and watch the light upon the Caskets from the jetty yonder.’
‘And what do you think of my old friend?’ Gaston Arbuthnot asked his wife when the Thornes had departed on their different roads—the Doctor to visit a patient in Miller’s Hotel; Linda, her dress, a caviller might say, scarce fitted to the work, to her poor dear brothers and sisters in the alleys. ‘I have listened to Linda Thorne’s verdict on you. Now for the reverse of the medal. What do you think of Linda Thorne?’
‘I think her vulgar.’
It was the first time Gaston had heard judgment so harsh from Dinah’s lips. Hers was the least condemnatory of human souls. She shrank with a rare modesty from giving opinions on the people with whom Gaston associated, was openly unashamed always of her own lowly origin, and of her inability to discern the finer shades of a society to which she was not born.
A slight tinge of red kindled on Arbuthnot’s cheek. ‘Vulgar is a strong word. Women are not always generous in their strictures upon each other. Yet it happened that Mrs. Thorne was singularly generous in her criticism of you. Linda thinks you beautiful, my dear. She said yours was the first face she has ever seen without a flaw.’
‘Standing close beside me as you did, Mrs. Thorne would have shown delicacy by not talking of me at all. Although I tried not to listen, I heard too well what she said. It was those flatteries of Mrs. Thorne’s, for of course I am no judge of manner, which made me think her vulgar. A lady at heart would have known how you must wince on hearing me so coarsely praised.’
For one moment Gaston Arbuthnot’s looks were threatening, then the cloud passed.
‘I believe you are half right, my dear girl,’ he observed, in his sunniest voice, and picking up his wife’s hat from the spot where it had fallen at her feet. ‘But people of the world are not as transparently truthful as you, my Dinah. You shoot at the bull’s eye when you do discharge an arrow, and seldom miss the mark. Now, let me tie your hat strings! Lift your chin—so! Let us wander off to the sea and forget all the insincerities, all the Linda Thornes in existence.’
The speech must have been uttered with some of the airy mental reservation that Gaston Arbuthnot’s habit of ‘poker talk’ made easy to him. He did not for one instant forget that he was engaged to dine that evening at The Bungalow; engaged, although there was no moon, to enjoy pure air and watch the light upon the Caskets from the jetty yonder.