‘The battle is to the strong, Marjorie Bartrand; the race to the swift. Women have been fatally handicapped since the world began. And Nature understands her own intentions, depend upon it, better than we do.’
‘Does Nature intend one half of the human race to be ciphers?’
‘Nature intends men to have wives. There is no escaping that fact. When I was a girl we got quite as much education as society required of us.’
‘Society!’
‘We learned modern languages, French and Italian, for of course German was not in vogue, and I must say I think Italian much the more feminine accomplishment.’
‘That is paying an exceedingly high compliment to German, ma’am!’
‘And we studied English literature, solidly, not out of little green-backed handbooks. Never a day passed that I did not read Addison, or some other fine Queen Anne writer, aloud to my father. And we knew how to write a letter. And we coloured from Nature, for the love of the thing, exceedingly well, some of us, though there was no South Kensington, and we never called ourselves art students, and, and—Marjorie Bartrand, how did this conversation begin?’
‘Apropos of Spain, did it not?’
‘To be sure. Apropos of your Girton scheme, your wish to see classics and mathematics pushed into a country where women are still content to be women, and very womanly ones. University teaching for girls is a freak that will die out of itself, like coal-scuttle bonnets, bishops’ sleeves, crinoline, or any other mode that is at once cumbersome and unbeautiful.’
Afternoon sunshine was flooding the weather-beaten lichened walls of Tintajeux Manoir. The Atlantic glittered, one vast field of diamonds, until it melted into pallid sky along the southern horizon line. The keen, cool ocean saltness mingled with and almost overbalanced the fragrance of the pinks, heliotropes, and roses in the Reverend Andros Bartrand’s old-fashioned borders. On a garden bench, at some short distance from the house, were seated two ladies, fresh of face, both; countrified of dress; fast friends, although more than forty years stood between their ages. A cedar of Lebanon spread wide its layers of odorous darkness above their heads. A grass plot, emerald green, close shorn, was their carpet.
‘If your wits were your fortune, child, such ambitions might be pardonable.’ So, after a space, the enemy of progress resumed her parable. ‘In families where the olive branches are in excess of the exchequer, the governess, Heaven help her, is expected to “ground” the boys, as they call it, in Latin grammar and Euclid. But with your grandfather’s position, your own inheritance, putting the idea of your marriage aside——’
‘As you know I have put it, for ever and ever!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand, her whole face seeming abruptly transformed into a pair of passionate eyes. ‘Did we not decide long ago, Miss Tighe, that the word mar——, the word I detest so heartily, should never be spoken between us. Allow that I may not be forced, for money, to ground small boys in Latin grammar. Allow that my visions of raising Spanish girls above the level of dolls are as laughable as you all seem to find them. May I not want to bring myself, Marjorie Bartrand, up to the highest improvable point as a human being? Great in mathematics I shall never be.’
‘I am thankful, indeed, to hear you say so,’ remarked Miss Tighe, with an air of relief.
‘But even the Seigneur is forced to confess I might become—a fourth-rate classic! I know French and Spanish, Dogberry wise, by nature. That must help me a long way on the road to Latin. And I have learnt seventeen irregular Greek verbs—I’m not sure about the aorists—and Mademoiselle le Patourel and I went straight through the Apology of Plato, with Bohn’s crib.’
‘Poor Sophie le Patourel! You have outgrown her, at last, as you outgrew all your previous dozen or more governesses.’
‘I don’t know about “outgrown.” Grandpapa ridiculed our attempting Greek, from the first. You know the cruel way we Bartrands have of ridiculing under cover of a compliment! Well, one day last week, Mademoiselle le Patourel was reading the text of Plato aloud, not very flowingly, poor good soul——’
‘Sophie le Patourel had better have kept to the millinery! Her mother made up a cap like no woman in this island.’
‘And looking round she saw the Seigneur, outside the window, with a wicked smile about that handsome old mouth of his as he listened. Grandpapa made her the prettiest speech in the world about her quantities, her fine classic tastes, and her pupil. And Mademoiselle le Patourel never gave me another lesson.’
‘So now your scheme is to prepare for Girton by yourself. Ambitious, on my word!’
‘My scheme,’ said Marjorie, lowering her voice and glancing over her shoulder to make sure her terrible grandfather, Andros Bartrand, was not within earshot—‘my scheme is to have a real University coach of my own. A Cambridge B.A. at the present time residing in Guernsey.’
Cassandra Tighe started up from her seat.
She was a spare, tall, conspicuous spinster, with a face all features, a figure all angles, a manner all energy. Her hair was bleached, as much by exposure to weather as by actual age. Her complexion was that of a frosted apple. Her dress cost her fifteen pounds a year!
Living alone with one woman-servant in a small Guernsey cottage, it may be affirmed that Miss Tighe made as much of her life as any gentlewoman of modest income, and more than sixty summers, in the British dominions. Her intellectual resources were many. She was a thorough, an inborn naturalist. She played the harp, and with no dilettante touch, but as ladies early in the Victorian reign were wont to play that instrument. She drew. On stormy evenings, when she knew her voice could not penetrate the cottage window shutters, Cassandra confessed that she sang—such songs as ‘I see them on their winding way,’ ‘The Captive Knight,’ or ‘Zuleika.’
Her popularity and her influence were widespread. The figure of Miss Tighe in her red fishing-cloak, with nets, hooks, jars, boxes, bottles, overflowing from her village cart, was familiar throughout every nook and corner of the island. If she had not had the sunniest of human hearts you might have been tempted to dub her a gossip. That good old English word, however, is associated in these days with a more than doubtful spice of malice. And men and women who had known Cassandra Tighe for thirty years averred that they had never heard an unkindly judgment from her lips. She was simply a raconteuse—we lack the English equivalent—a sympathiser in all the vivid varying doings that constitute the lives of young and wholesomely happy people; a chronicler of news; a delighter in love affairs.
Simply this. And yet, not unfrequently, Cassandra Tighe made mischief. Truthful, as far as conscious veracity went, to a fault, this excellent lady’s memory was in a chronic state of jumble; so stored, it may be, with polysyllabic names of plants, grubs, and fishes, that subsidiary human details had to be packed in pell-mell, and take their chance of coming out again untwisted. And, depend upon it, these tangled well-meaners, not your deliberate villains, are the cause of half the loves marred, the heartburnings, the jealousies, that make up the actual dramas, the unwritten three-volume novels of this work-a-day world!
‘You are going to study with a tutor, Marjorie Bartrand! With a Cambridge B.A.! With a MAN! What does your grandfather say?’
‘I have not told him the news, Miss Tighe. I grudge giving the Seigneur such intense pleasure. “If you insist on learning Latin and Greek,” grandpapa has always said, “learn them decently. Send these trashy governesses to the winds. Be taught by a competent master.” Yes,’ cried Marjorie, bringing down a very small hand with very great energy on her knee, ‘I grudge grandpapa his triumph, but the truth must be told. Now that I have caught him, I shall begin coaching with my B.A., my Cantab, forthwith.’
Cassandra shook her head, mournfully incredulous. She was of an age and of a disposition to which revolutionary ideas do not come with ease. There was really no place in her mental fabric for the picture of Marjorie Bartrand, here, inside the sacred walls of Tintajeux, reading classics and mathematics with a University coach.
‘I think it more than likely the plan will fall through. We have no Cambridge tutors in the island, unless, indeed, you mean good old Mr. Winkworth from the High Street Academy?’
‘I mean no one belonging to Guernsey. I mean a person who—ah, Miss Tighe,’ the girl broke off, ‘I see that I must make full confession. No knowing, as grandpapa says, when you once begin to speak the truth, where the truth may land you. My B.A. is coming to arrange about terms and hours this evening.’
‘And how did he—how did any stranger man hear of you?’
‘I put an advertisement in the Chronique Guernésiaise, three days ago.’
‘Without consulting the Seigneur! Child—you did this thing? You gave your name, unknown to your grandfather, in the public newspaper?’
‘I gave my name in the public newspaper, ma’am, and this afternoon I got an answer to my advertisement. Wait one second and you shall hear it.’
Marjorie drew a note from the breast of her frock, and with an air half of mystery, half of triumph, began to read aloud:—
‘“Miller’s Hotel, Tuesday, June 14th.
‘“Geoffrey Arbuthnot, B.A., Cantab., is willing to read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand. Terms, five shillings an hour. Geoffrey Arbuthnot will call at Tintajeux Manoir, on approval, between the hours of seven and eight this evening.”’
‘Arbuthnot? Why, this is fatality.’ Cassandra discerned a special providence, an inchoate stroke of destiny in most things. ‘I was looking in at Miller’s Hotel last night. That reasonless creature, Mrs. Miller, has one of her throats again, and I did so want her to take some of my globules, but in vain. The ignorance of uneducated people——’
‘And you saw my coach of the future,’ interrupted Marjorie, knowing that when Miss Tighe got into such engrossing interests as throats and globules, she must be brought back to her subject with a run.
‘Yes, I saw Mr. Arbuthnot. A rough diamond, my dear, to speak truth.’
‘That is so much in his favour,’ said Marjorie, peeling, shred from shred, the petals of a carnation that she held between her fingers. ‘I want to do my work for Girton steadily, unvexed by the sight or thought of that most irritating of God’s creatures—a beauty-man.’
Cassandra looked hard at the girl, remembering days, perhaps, when a beauty-man, in the fullest sense of the contemptuous epithet, had scathed rather than softened Marjorie Bartrand’s heart.
‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, on the score of ugliness, will meet your wishes, my dear. A rough-hewn Scotchman of the Carlyle stamp. A man who looks as though he ought to do big things in the world. A man with a scar—got, I am told, in a Quixotic pavement fight—traversing his forehead.’
‘I like the sketch. Proceed.’
‘As regards Geoffrey Arbuthnot himself I have done. Walking at his side, the evening light falling on her uncovered head and fair face, was the loveliest sight these old eyes have beheld for many a year—Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s wife.’
‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot—has he a wife?’ cried Marjorie in an altered voice. ‘My Cambridge B.A.—married! I hope you are sure of your facts, Miss Tighe. You know that sometimes—rarely, of course—mistakes occur in our little bits of Sarnian intelligence. You are perfectly certain that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot is a married man?’
‘I have seen his wife. How can you ask me if I am certain? “A daughter of the gods,”’ Cassandra quoted, “divinely tall,” fair-skinned, large-eyed, with a look of repressed sadness about her mouth that makes her bloom and youth the more noticeable. I was sitting in poor Mrs. Miller’s parlour, endeavouring to argue the woman out of taking Doctor Thorne’s drugs. As a human creature, a father, a husband, I have not one word to say against Doctor Thorne——’
‘I have!’ exclaimed Marjorie Bartrand imperatively. ‘As a human creature, a father, a husband—most especially as a husband—I have everything imaginable to say against Doctor Thorne.’
‘As a physician I consider him a man-slaughterer. Yes,’ repeated Cassandra, with pious warmth, ‘a man-slaughterer. Indeed, if I had sat at the inquest on more than one of Doctor Thorne’s departed patients, Heaven knows what verdict I should not have returned against him.’
‘But your story, Miss Tighe? The man like Carlyle; the beautiful wife. Return, please, to the Arbuthnots.’
‘Well, just as I was trying to put reason into Mrs. Miller’s weak mind, I was startled by the sight I told you of. This lovely young woman went past the window, not two yards from where I sat.’
‘With her husband. Was she leaning on Mr. Arbuthnot’s arm?’ asked Marjorie. ‘Did they look as if they had ever had a quarrel? Was she in white—bridal looking? Did you hear them murmur to each other? Miss Tighe, be dramatic! At Tintajeux we have not the joy, remember, of eventful living.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot was dressed in black. Her hair lay in short blonde waves on her forehead. She wore not a flower, not an ornament about her person. As they passed the window her husband remarked that he considered the roast duck and peas of which they had partaken for dinner were excellent.’
‘So much,’ said Marjorie, affecting cynicism, ‘for a chapter of married romance.’
‘Ah, that has been. The key of our common life is C major—roast duck and green peas—whatever accidental sharps and flats we may deviate into occasionally. The romance has been. I was overcome by the young woman’s singular beauty,’ went on Cassandra. ‘I asked her name, and was rewarded by hearing such an account of them as warmed my heart. The girl belonged to the humblest class of life—a gardener’s daughter, or something of the kind; and Arbuthnot, while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, married her.’
‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
Marjorie repeated the name softly; a question in her tone rather than in her words.
‘Geoffrey, I presume; that is to say, most decidedly and beyond question, Geoffrey,’ answered Cassandra, with the fatal certitude of inaccuracy. ‘I am the more positive because I felt a kind of love at first sight for the two young people, and made Mrs. Miller give me details. A party of Cambridge men were staying in the hotel when first the Arbuthnots arrived; and some of these men knew the husband by sight. He is looked upon as rather eccentric among his fellows. I am afraid, Marjorie, whenever a man leads a nobler life than other people the tendency of the day is to call him eccentric. And Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s life must be very noble.’
‘Because he had the courage of his opinions in choosing a wife?’
‘Not that only. Arbuthnot is a student still at the Cambridge medical school, and gives such time as he has over from study to the most miserable people in the Cambridge streets. Not proselytising, not preaching—for my part I don’t believe much in a preaching young man,’ said old Cassandra, whose opinions tended towards the broad; ‘simply binding up their wounds as men and women. Doing the Master’s work, not talking about it.’
‘And his beautiful wife helps him!’ exclaimed Marjorie, her sensitive Southern face aglow. ‘Ah, Miss Tighe, thank you again and again for your visit and for telling me this news. In my foolish, trivial, wasted existence, what a splendid bit of good fortune that I should have the chance of knowing two such people!’
Cassandra Tighe looked a little uncomfortable. She prided herself on her freedom from the prejudices of her sex; within limits, really did startle her friends, sometimes, by the free exercise of private judgment. But the liberality of a white-haired lady, whose sixty years of life have run in the safest, narrowest, conventional trammels, may differ widely from the liberality of a hot head, an eager, self-forgetting young heart like Marjorie Bartrand’s.
‘It will be a fine thing for your Girton prospects, capital for your Greek and Latin, to read with Mr. Arbuthnot. But I gathered—you must take this as I mean it, Marjorie Bartrand; you have no mother to tell you things—I gathered from different small hints that Mrs. Arbuthnot is not exactly in society. That she is good and sweet and honest,’ said Cassandra, ‘you have only to look in her face to know; still if I were in Marjorie Bartrand’s place, I should wait to see what the island ladies did in the matter of calling.’
Marjorie paled round the lips—sign infallible, throughout the Bartrand race, of rising tempest. Cassandra, knowing the family storm-signals, prepared to take a hasty departure.
‘I forget time always under the Tintajeux cedars. And there is plenty for me to do at home. To-morrow Annette and I are off to Sark for five days’ shore-work. Our talk about your new tutor has been an interesting one.’
‘Especially the clause that prohibits my calling on the new tutor’s wife!’
‘There is no prohibition at all. The Seigneur might safely leave his card on Mr. Arbuthnot. It would be a very pretty piece of condescension, and of course a gentleman calling upon a gentleman can lead to nothing,’ added Cassandra, rather ignobly temporising.
‘Exactly. Thank you very much, Miss Tighe, for your advice. As you say, I have no mother to enlighten me as to the dark mysteries of calling or not calling. And as I consider the island ladies too frisky for pioneers——’
‘Marjorie! Our archdeaconess, our irreproachable Guernsey matrons, frisky?’
‘I shall just have to act for myself. As Mrs. Arbuthnot, you tell me, has all good qualities written on her face, and knowing the fine things we do know of her husband’s life, it must be a credit to any woman—above all to an archdeaconess—to make their acquaintance.’
‘Still, if she is unused——’
‘Oh, I shall not put myself forward. If their merit is unrecognised, if narrow-minded, irreproachable people hold back from calling on them, I can understand that there may be shyness on my tutor’s part in mentioning his wife. I shall simply bide his time. I shall be silent until he chooses, himself, to speak to me of Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
‘That will be wise. Treat him, honest gentleman, as though one had not heard of his marriage. Meantime we can find out if our leading ladies, Madame Corbie especially, intend to notice her——’
‘But in my own self, I honour Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ interrupted Marjorie, her face colouring like a rose at sunset. ‘I admire, honour, love him! I wish the world were full of such men. I hold out both hands in fellowship to him at this moment.’
Cassandra, for once, showed prescience worthy of her name. Cassandra argued no more.