Geoffrey Arbuthnot was a man of whom none could say that Fortune had been to him a too fond mistress.
As a four-foot high boy, with shrewd observant Scottish eyes, with a Scottish mind already beginning to hold its own ideas as to the universe, he was sent, through the reluctant generosity of an uncle, to a London public school. In those days sanitary and social reforms for overtaxed city schoolboys were still inchoate. Each boy must look after himself, make personal acquaintance with facts, with the cut and thrust of human circumstance, take his recreation on the London pavements, sink or swim as he listed.
Geoffrey Arbuthnot, before he was ten had made acquaintance with a great many facts, all hard ones. He had no pocket-money, no tips. His holidays had to be paid for out of the same reluctant uncle’s purse—father and mother sleeping in a Perthshire kirkyard ere Geff could well remember aught—and were enjoyed under the roof of such persons as endure homeless schoolboys, on systems of rigid economy, as a business.
Hard-working to excess, perhaps because in work he found a friend, pushed into dead-language grooves because the masters sought to keep up the dead-language reputation of the school, Geoffrey Arbuthnot awoke one morning at the age of eighteen a fine classic. He was sent up to compete for a Cambridge scholarship, won it, and, true to tradition, began reading, his heart warmed by the unwonted feeling of success, for his Classical Tripos.
Considering that every aptitude he possessed lay in an opposite direction to classical study, one can scarcely look on the nine Cambridge terms that followed as fortunate. The square man did his best to fill the round hole faithfully, his own squareness decreased not. And then, in the midst of this Greek and Latin epoch, came his love affairs—I retract the plural: his one overwhelming passion, ardent, pure as was ever love felt by man for woman; a passion which paled, ere he could well grasp it, into shadow, and which still—yes, in the Guernsey sunshine of this June day—rendered his happiness paradoxical, just at the age when happiness should be fullest, most complete.
Geoffrey Arbuthnot had not been smiled on by Fortune. Nevertheless, he possessed gifts which for the simple hourly manufacture of human contentment are better worth than the bigger favours of the gods. Life interested him. If he had had few artificial pleasures, he had exhausted no pleasures at all. In regard of nature, his sensations were vivid as a child’s. Walking forth to Tintajeux Manoir at an hour when the crisp blue and gold of afternoon had reached declension, Geoffrey felt youth run in his veins like wine. The hay and clover smells from the newly-cut fields; the ‘kiss sweet! kiss sweet!’ of the thrushes; the verdured hedges touched still by Spring’s immaturity, though the flower of the May was past; the peeps at every turn of purple salt water; the road-side ferns through which, knee-deep, he waded; the yellowing honeysuckle sprays which brushed his face; the streamlets slipping seaward away, through channels thick with cresses and forget-me-nots; ay, even the whiffs of wood-smoke from the farmhouse chimneys, the incomprehensible Froissart French in which he heard the haymakers chattering to each other over their bread and cider,—all the low, melodious notes of this homely landscape affected him with a physical and keen delight.
His life, since remotest baby-days, when he walked holding his mother’s hand in blithe, fair Scotland, had been passed among streets and among the human creatures who inhabit them. The pleasure of the Bethnal Green arab who, at six years old, first handles a living daisy, differs, in degree only, from Geoffrey’s as he trudged along through the Guernsey lanes, his mind vaguely fixed on Tintajeux Manoir and on the chill reception from his future pupil which there awaited him.
Would Miss Bartrand’s thunder glances be discharged from black eyes or blue ones? Geoffrey had reached a stretch of undulating rushy common at the extreme western point of the island when this question presented itself. Ahead was a vista of mouldering banks, gay in their shroud of blue-flowered, ivy-leaved campanula, and with here and there a jutting tip of granite, crimson, by reason of its glittering mica, in the sunset. Above hovered a falcon, almost lost to view against the largely-vaulted, bountifully-coloured evening sky.
Interpreting Froissart French by such lights as he possessed, Geoffrey learned from an ancient goat-tending peasant dame that a neighbouring block of stone building, partially visible on the left through oak and larch plantations, was Tintajeux Manoir. Would the girl who awaited his visit there be blonde or dark? Something Mrs. Thorne had hinted about a Spanish mother. According to all mournful human probabilities, the heiress would be swarthy; a black-eyed, atrociously clever-looking young person, he thought, with shining hair drawn tightly from her forehead, with stiff linen collar and wristbands, with a dignified manner and inkstained fingers. Also, despite her seventeen summers, with a leaning towards stoutness.
Geoffrey disrelished the picture projected before his mental sight about as much as in his present buoyant physical state he could disrelish anything. Consulting his watch, he found with relief that he had reached the outskirts of Tintajeux five-and-twenty minutes too early. There would be time, amidst this delicious wealth of atmosphere and hue that flooded him around, for a quiet smoke before encountering the terrible presence of Miss Marjorie Bartrand!
A suspicion that the heiress’s peppery temper might be roused if one’s jacket smelt of tobacco rather heightened the alacrity with which Geff Arbuthnot threw himself down on the fragrant sward and produced his pipe and pouch. The pipe was a black, ferociously Bohemian-looking ‘bulldog,’ the pouch a delicate mass of silk embroidery and velvet. As he drew forth—alas! that I should have to say it, his strong-flavoured cavendish, Geoffrey thought, as it was his custom to think four or five times each day, of the tender friendly woman’s hand that worked this pouch for him—Dinah’s!
Poor Dinah! When he saw her last, an hour before, her hands were clasped together with the half-apathetic gesture of a person to whom moral suffering has become a habit. A basket of coloured wools stood before her on the table, ready for her evening’s cross stitching. Round the corners of her lips was the look of silent endurance which had become so painfully familiar to Geoffrey’s sight. And all this for what? There was no great sin, surely, in Gaston’s putting himself at once under Mrs. Thorne’s easy guidance. The happiest households one hears of, thought Geoffrey, striking a vesuvian, are those in which the broadest law of liberty obtains. Does not an artist, more than other men, want change, professionally? Dinah should know that a creator, of the cheap popularity order, as Gaston with his pleasant self-depreciation would say, must have a constant supply of straw for his brickmaking; must have material, ‘stuff,’ must see brisk lights, sharp shadows that the calm twilight of domestic happiness does not yield. And yet....
It was that constant, unspoken ‘and yet’ in Geoffrey’s mind which, up to the present point, had rendered the close friendship of the three Arbuthnots a paradox.
Leaning back against a little thyme-grown knoll, his hands clasped behind his head, Geff looked, with eyes that had learned the secret of most common things in Nature, at the moorland weeds around him. Here were graceful quake grasses in plenty, and waving sedges, and the poet’s wood-spurge, three cups in one. Close at his right hand grew a stalk of rush crowned by four or five brownish insignificant flowers, the least lovely outwardly of all the brilliant Guernsey flora. Well, and it came to pass that the neighbourhood of these degenerate, colourless petals altered Geff’s mood. He thought of the inherited mysteries and dooms of human life. He called to mind the sordid prose of the Cambridge outskirts, and the wretched men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who lived in them. He called to mind his own often despairing work, the struggles, hard and single-handed, of his manhood, his youth. His youth—ah! and with that the moorland scene faded. The years since he first saw Dinah spread themselves out scrollwise, suddenly illuminated, before Geff Arbuthnot’s mind.
How well he remembered himself a lad of twenty! How well he remembered the hawthorn-scented evening of their first meeting! He was walking alone through the one street of Lesser Cheriton, had passed its rectory, its seven public-houses, was honestly thinking of his approaching ‘Mays’ and of nothing in the world beyond, when a cottage casement window opened just above his head, and looking up he saw her—unornamented, in russet gown and apron blue, a jug of water in her white hand ready for the thirsty row of mignonette and geranium slips in the window-box.
He loved her, there and then. It was an old, a sacred story now, and Geoffrey questioned no syllable of the text as he scanned it quickly through. He took her picture back with him to his dark, book-strewn scholar’s attic in John’s, and that night he dreamed of her. Next morning he walked forth to Lesser Cheriton at the same hour, passed the rectory, the seven public-houses, and again caught glimpses of Dinah’s head as she sat, with a very fat old lady, alas! of a very humble class, in a close little parlour sewing, the lamp lighted, the windows fast shut, all the glories of the outside June night ignored.
The same kind of mute worship went on the next evening and the next. Towards the end of the week the old lady of a very humble class accosted him. Geff could remember the thrill of that moment yet. Away through the garden gloom did he not descry the flutter of a russet dress, the outline of a girlish head downbent over a bush of opening roses? The young gentleman would pardon her for taking such a liberty, but as he seemed fond of the country he might care sometimes for a bunch of cut flowers. She was a lone widow and lived too far off to send in her garden stuff to the Cambridge market except in wall-fruit time. If she could dispose, friendly like, of a few cut flowers it would be a little profit to her. Some of the University gentlemen, she had heard, dressed up their rooms, like a show, with flowers, and the roses and carnations this term were coming on wonderful. If the young gentleman would please to walk round the garden and see?
The young gentleman walked round the garden. He bought as many flowers as his arms could carry away. He learned that the girl’s name was Dinah Thurston, that she was ‘apprenticed to the dressmaking,’ and had come up all the way out of Devonshire to spend a month’s holiday with the old lady, her father’s sister. The Devonshire burr in Dinah’s speech disenchanted him no more than did an occasional lapse or two in Dinah’s grammar. When is a stripling of his age disenchanted by anything save frowns or rivals? Geoffrey held original ideas on more than one burning social subject, had made up his mind—on the first evening he saw Dinah Thurston—that it was a duty for him and for every man to marry young.
And he cared not one straw either for want of money, or for plebeian birth.
Good, because healthy blood flowed in this girl’s veins, thought Geff—the incipient physiologist. Sweet temper was on her lips. A stainless woman’s soul looked forth from those fair eyes. She was above, only too much above him in every excellence, inward or external. What chance had he with his plain face, his shy student’s manner, of winning such a jewel as Dinah Thurston’s love? What hope was there that she would wait until the day, necessarily distant, when he would be able to work for a wife’s support?
He became a daily caller at the cottage, and it is hard to suppose that both Dinah and Dinah’s protector were quite blind to the truth. Garden stuff was ever Geff’s ostensible object. He wanted cut flowers for himself, for an acquaintance who could not walk as far as Lesser Cheriton. He wanted radishes, cresses,—so different, he declared, to the stringy salad of College butteries! He wanted to know when the strawberries were likely to ripen.
He wanted some daily excuse for gazing on Dinah Thurston’s face.
Hard, I repeat, to think that the feminine instinct, however unsophisticated, would make no guess, as time went on, at the state of the poor young undergraduate’s heart. But this is just the kind of point at which good women, in every class, are prone to innocent casuistry. At all events, Dinah Thurston and her aunt gave no outward sign of intelligence. The old lady took her daily shillings and sixpences with commercial gravity. Dinah cut the flowers or tied up little hunches of cress and radishes in a convenient form for Geff to carry.
So, as in a new garden of Eden without a threat of the serpent’s coming, matters progressed for yet another fortnight.
Lesser Cheriton lies at a junction of rough Cambridgeshire lanes; a village girt round by blossoming orchards in May, by sheets of black water or blacker ice in December. In addition to its rectory and seven public-houses, it contains a score or two of the thatched, high-shouldered cottages common to this part of England. Being untraversed by any of the Maid’s Causeways, Lesser Cheriton lies somewhat out of the ordinary undergraduate track. Geoffrey had no intimate friend in the University save Gaston Arbuthnot, whose time was quite otherwise occupied than in watching the comings and goings of his simple scholar cousin. He was known to be a hard-working man who took his daily walk from duty and without companionship. But for an after-dinner stupidity—a turning missed—the little love drama would probably have unfolded itself with commonplace speed, and Geoffrey have gained a wife, for I cannot think Dinah’s unoccupied fancy would, at the age of eighteen, have been hard to win. The turning, however, was missed—thus.
Just as Geff, his hands filled with flowers, was parting from the girl, one hushed and radiant evening, there came a rush of wheels—he could hear it now, dreaming over the past on this Guernsey moorland, and the blood rose to Geff’s face at the remembrance—a rush of wheels down the slumbering street of Lesser Cheriton. For a few seconds the sound was muffled by the ivied churchyard wall where the road wound abruptly. Then, at a slapping pace, trotted past a high-stepping bay, of which Gaston Arbuthnot was for the moment the possessor, also Gaston Arbuthnot, in his well-appointed cart, returning to Alma Mater, with a brace of rich Jesus friends, after spending the afternoon at Ely.
Lesser Cheriton does not lie on the road between Ely and Cambridge. Lesser Cheriton, we may boldly say, lies on the road nowhere. But these young gentlemen were in the adventure-seeking, after-dinner mood, when a devious turning of any kind is taken with pleasant ease. And here, on their wrong road, and in Lesser Cheriton’s one street, they found themselves.
There was daylight lingering still in the low fields of Cambridgeshire sky. There was a young May moon, too, whose yellowish silver caused the outlines of Dinah Thurston’s head and throat to stand out in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge that divided the cottage garden and the road.
Gaston Arbuthnot turned sharply round for an instant and saw her. Shouting a cheery ‘Hullo!’ to his cousin, he drove on, giving a little valedictory wave of his whip ere he disappeared. And Geff, the glory shorn suddenly, unaccountably from his Eden, bade Dinah good-night, and started on his four-mile trudge back to Cambridge.
It was ten days before he again smelt the mignonette and roses of the cottage, or slaked his soul’s thirst by gazing on Dinah’s face. By early post next morning came a letter saying that the uncle to whose reluctantly generous hand he owed the hard All of his life lay at the point of death. The old man was sound of mind still, and desired his nephew’s presence. A lawyer wrote the letter, and it was added that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot would well consult his worldly interests by obeying the wishes of the dying man without delay.
It was one of those crises when all our present and future good seems to resolve itself into a desolate ‘perhaps.’ Geoffrey’s debts were few. Still, he had debts. The possibility of remaining up his nine terms at Cambridge might depend upon the will of this stern-hearted uncle who, dying, craved his presence. And yet, in obeying the summons, might he not be risking dearer things than worldly success—jeopardising hopes which already threw a trembling light over his loveless life?
He had spoken no syllable of his passion to Dinah, was too self-distrustful to tell his secret by means so matter-of-fact as a sheet of paper and the post. And so, like many another timid suitor, Geoffrey Arbuthnot elected to play a losing game. With immense fidelity in his breast, but without a word of explanation, he set off by noon of that day to London—not ignorant that Gaston’s eyes and those of Dinah Thurston had already met.
A girl’s vanity, if not her heart, might well have been wounded by such conduct. In after times Geoffrey Arbuthnot, musing over his lost happiness, would apply such medicine to his sore spirit as the limited pharmacopœia of disappointment can offer. If he had had a man’s metal, if, instead of flying like a schoolboy, he had said to her, on that evening when Gaston drove past them at the gate, ‘Take me or reject me, but choose!’—had he thus spoken, Geoffrey used to think, he might have won her.
To-night, on the Guernsey waste-land, with heaven so broad above, with earth so friendly, the past seemed to return to him without effort of his own and without sting. The fortnight he passed in London, the unknown relatives who beset the sick man’s bed, the scene amidst a London churchyard’s gloom, wherein he, Geff, in hired crape, was chief mourner, the reading of the will, the return to Cambridge—all this, at first, floated before his vision in grey monotone, as scenes will do in which one has played a spectator’s rather than an actor’s part. Then in a moment (Geoffrey’s half-closed eyes scanning the moor’s horizon, the soft airs blowing on his face) there came upon him a flash of light. It was so intolerably clear that every leaf and flower and pebble of a cottage garden in far-off Cambridgeshire stood out before him with a vividness that was poignant, a vividness that had in it the stab of sudden bodily pain.
Springing to his feet, Geoffrey resolved to brood over the irrevocable no longer. He emptied the ashes from his pipe, then replaced it, with Dinah’s delicate morsel of handiwork, in his pocket. He took out his watch. It was more than time for him to be off; and after a farewell glance at the campanula-shrouded knolls, Geff started briskly in the direction of Tintajeux Manoir. But the ghosts would not be laid. There were yet two pictures, a garden scene, an interior, upon which, whether he walked or remained still, Geoffrey Arbuthnot felt himself forced, in the spirit, to look.
The garden scene, first: time, seven of a June evening, sky and atmosphere rosy as these that surrounded him now. Thirsting to see Dinah’s face, Geoffrey walked straight away from Cambridge station, he remembered, on his arrival from London. He was dusty and wearied when he drew near the village. The rectory, the seven public-houses of Lesser Cheriton, looked more blankly uninhabited than usual. Some barn-door fowls, a few shining-necked pigeons, strutted up and down the High Street, its only occupants. When he reached the cottage no one answered his ring. The aunt was evidently absent. Dinah, thought Geoffrey, would be busy among her flowers, or might have taken her sewing to the orchard that lay at the bottom of the garden. He had been told, on some former visit, to go round, if the bell was unanswered, to a side entrance, lift the kitchen-latch, and if the door was unbolted, enter. He did so now; passed through the kitchen, burnished and neat as though it came out of a Dutch picture—through the tiny, cool-smelling dairy, and out into the large shadows of the garden beyond.
Silence met him everywhere.
The roses, only budding a fortnight ago, had now yearned into June’s deep crimson. The fruit-tree leaves had grown long and grayish, forming an impenetrable screen which shut out familiar perspectives, and gave Geoffrey a sense of strangeness that he liked not. Under the south wall, where the apricots already looked like yellowing, was a turf path leading you fieldward, through the entire length of the garden.
Along this path, with unintentionally muffled footsteps, Geoffrey Arbuthnot trod. When he reached the hedge that formed the final boundary between garden and orchard a man’s voice fell on his ear. He stopped, transfixed, as one might do to whom the surgeon’s verdict of ‘No hope’ has been delivered with cruel unexpectedness.
The voice was his cousin Gaston’s.
Geoffrey had no need to advance farther. In his black clothes, among the trees’ thick leafage, he was himself invisible, could see by the slightest bending of his neck as much as the world in the way of personal misery had on that summer evening to display to him.
For there, at the entrance to the orchard, stood Dinah Thurston, the glow that lingers after sunset throwing up the fresh beauty of her head and figure, and there stood Gaston. They were face to face, hands holding hands, eyes looking into eyes. And even as Geoffrey watched them his cousin bent forward and kissed Dinah Thurston’s unresisting lips.
Youth, the possibility of every youthful joy, died out in that moment’s anguish from Geff Arbuthnot’s heart. But the stuff the man was made of showed itself. More potent than all juice of grape is pain for evoking the best and the worst from human souls. Desolate, bemocked of fate, he turned away, the door of his earthly Paradise shutting on him, walked back to the scholar’s attic in John’s, whose full loneliness he had never realised till now, and during two hours’ space gave way to such abandonment as even the bravest men know under the wrench of sudden and total loss.
During two hours’ space! Then the lad gathered up his strength and faced the position. As regarded himself, the path lay plain. He must work up to the collar, hot and hard, leaving himself no time to feel the parts that were galled and wrung. But the others? At the point which all had reached, what was his, Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s, duty in respect of them? It was his duty, he thought—after a somewhat blind and confused fashion, doubtless—to stand like a brother by this woman who did not love him. Stifling every baser feeling towards Gaston, it was his duty to further, if he could, the happiness of them both. The sun should not go down on his despair. He would see his rival, would visit Dinah Thurston’s lover to-night.
Gaston Arbuthnot, a man of means, which he considerably lived beyond, occupied charmingly-furnished rooms in the first court of Jesus. Peacock’s feathers and sunflowers had not, happily for saner England, been then invented. A human creature could profess artistic leanings, yet run no risk of being expected by his fellows to live up to a dado! Gaston’s surroundings seemed rather the haphazard outcome of personal taste than the orthodox result of a full purse and adherence to the upholstery prophets. They had the negative merit of sincerity.
Walking with quick steps towards Tintajeux, how distinctly those rose-lit Jesus rooms, the last in the series of pictures, came back upon Geoffrey’s sense! He remembered an unfinished sketch in clay upon the mantelpiece; a Lilith, with languid eyes and limbs, with faultless passionless mouth, with coils of loosened hair; charms how unlike those of the demure Madonna in the cottage at Lesser Cheriton! He remembered the smell of hothouse flowers, the like of which at all seasons of the year was wont to hang about Gaston Arbuthnot’s rooms; remembered a pile of yellow-backed French books on a writing-table, also a framed photograph of the prettiest actress of the day exactly fronting the easy-chair in which his cousin Gaston was pleased to affirm that he ‘read.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot had to wait some minutes alone, his cousin’s level, self-contained voice informing him from an inner room that he, Gaston, was dressing for the last ball of the term, given by Trinity. Would Geff not have come to that Trinity ball, by the bye? Ah, no. Mourning, weepers. Decent respect—cette chère Madame Grundy. And so the uncle had cut up decently! Nothing for him, of course. Kind of wretch whom uncles always would regard as belonging to the criminal classes. Had a mind to dispute the will, ruin Geoffrey as well as himself by throwing the whole thing into Chancery!
Then Gaston’s airy step crossed the room to a waltz tune that he whistled. A curtain was drawn back. The two men whose future relations were to be one long paradox stood opposite each other.
Gaston Arbuthnot was in evening dress; his white cravat tied to perfection, a tiny moss rose in his button-hole; a pair of unfolded lavender gloves were in his hand. His handsome ‘Bourbon’ face looked its handsomest. No traces of perturbed conscience marred his gracious and débonnaire mien. A man may surely find himself deep in a flirtation with some soft-eyed village Phillis, and at the same time like to dance with as many pretty girls in his own class of life as choose to smile on him!
He advanced with outstretched hand.
‘I congratulate you, Geff.’
The uncle had left Geoffrey a sum that for the forwarding of the frugal student’s worldly ambition was more than adequate—one thousand pounds.
‘And I,’ said Geff, his ice-cold fingers returning his cousin’s grasp firmly, ‘congratulate you!’
There must have been some modulation in his voice, some look on his haggard face, that supplemented these four words, strongly.
Gaston Arbuthnot changed colour.
‘What, on Lilith?’ he asked, shifting away, and bending over his unfinished sketch. ‘It is to be good, like all my things, some day. A new block in the pavement of the road to Hades! At present this left arm, above the elbow, is, as you see, a libel on anatomy.’
Geff followed him. He rested his hand on his cousin’s shoulder with such emphasis that Gaston Arbuthnot had no choice but to look up.
‘I congratulate you,’ he repeated very low, but with a concentrated energy that infused meaning into each syllable ‘I congratulate you upon your engagement to Dinah Thurston.’
So these visions of the past stood out; not merely with rigid correctness of form, but with colour, with fragrance, with the stir of human passion, the ring of human voices, to give them vitality. By the time the last one had vanished—the rose-shaded lamps, the actress in her frame, the clay-sketched Lilith, the yellow-backed novels dissolving into the actual grays and greens of this Guernsey moorland—Geoffrey found himself ringing, with a somewhat quickened pulse, despite his indifference to every form of feminine caprice, at the front bell of Tintajeux Manoir.