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A GIRTON GIRL
BY
ANNIE EDWARDES
AUTHOR OF ‘ARCHIE LOVELL,’ ‘OUGHT WE TO VISIT HER?’ ETC.
O Women, Women! O our frail frail sex!
No wonder tragedies are made from us.
Always the same: nothing but loves and cradles’
_The Revolt of the Women_ (ARISTOPHANES)
[Illustration: Logo]
A NEW EDITION
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1886
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. TRIANGULAR FRIENDSHIP 1
II. POKER TALK 11
III. HAS HE A WIFE? 32
IV. A TRINITY BALL 43
V. MARJORIE 58
VI. TWO IN ARCADIA 71
VII. ON THE BRINK OF A FLIRTATION 82
VIII. CROSS-STITCH 89
IX. HALF WAY TOWARDS LITTLE GO 99
X. ‘THEY SAY----’ 108
XI. ‘DODO’S DESPAIR’ 115
XII. YELLOW-BACKED NOVELS 123
XIII. THROUGH SMOKE-COLOURED SPECTACLES 135
XIV. BROUGHT UP BY THE JESUITS 143
XV. A LOVE-LETTER 158
XVI. A RASH RESOLVE 166
XVII. THE FIRST CRUMPLED ROSE-LEAF 172
XVIII. HOW DINAH SAID ‘YES’ 178
XIX. GASTON ARBUTHNOT’S PHILOSOPHY 194
XX. ‘JAMES LEE’S WIFE’ 204
XXI. ‘IS MY VIRGIL PASSABLE?’ 212
XXII. LINDA AS AN ART CRITIC 218
XXIII. A SWAGGER AND A SWORD 227
XXIV. REX BASIRE’S HUMOUR 238
XXV. YOU--AND I! 244
XXVI. CUT AND THRUST 252
XXVII. GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY 261
XXVIII. FOR AULD LANG SYNE 275
XXIX. MISSING 282
XXX. LINDA WARMS TO HER PART 290
XXXI. WIFE AND HUSBAND 300
XXXII. ROSE-WATER SOCIALISM 312
XXXIII. CLOSE TO PORT 320
XXXIV. DEAD ROSE PETALS 325
XXXV. A TRAITRESS 334
XXXVI. THE LAST OF ARCADIA 341
XXXVII. A STONE FOR BREAD 347
XXXVIII. TEMPTATION 362
XXXIX. THAT LITTLE DIVINITY 379
XL. AT THE BUNGALOW 389
XLI. ONE WORD 399
XLII. EMANCIPATION 407
XLIII. GEOFFREY CALLS TO BE PAID 416
XLIV. KISMET 428
XLV. LABELLED AND CORDED 438
XLVI. A BYE-TERM MAN 444
XLVII. BESIDE THE CRADLE 454
XLVIII. HAPPINESS 464
XLIX. FROM DINAH’S HAND 475
A GIRTON GIRL
CHAPTER I
TRIANGULAR FRIENDSHIP
‘The foundations of Newnham and of Girton may be deep,’ observed
Gaston Arbuthnot, in his pleasant, level, semi-American voice. ‘The
foundations of the Gogmagog Hills are deeper! Girl wranglers may come,
girl optimists may go. The heart of woman remains unchanged. And the
heart of woman----’
But a plate piled with luscious Guernsey strawberries happening to
be placed, by a jaunty Norman waitress, under Gaston’s nose, the
generalisation, for the moment, ended abruptly.
Guernsey. Imagine that dot of granite washed round by such blue as our
western Channel shows in June; imagine carnation-smelling sunshine,
a friendly trio of young persons breakfasting, with appetite, on the
lime-shaded lawn of Miller’s Sarnian Hotel; imagine the flutter of a
muslin dress, the presence of a beautiful girl of two-and-twenty, and
the opening scene of this little drama lies before you.
I may add that the friendship of the three persons was a paradox, as
the reader of the succeeding pages shall be brought to see.
‘The heart of woman tends towards marriage. Well, a picturesque
revival of Lady-Jane-Greyism,’ went on Gaston Arbuthnot, as his plate
of strawberries subsided, ‘may be safe enough--to the Lady Jane Greys!
Especially in an age when women, young or old, are by no means given
to losing their heads. But let the Roger Aschams who bear them company
look to it! This young person whom you, Geoffrey, propose to coach is
probably neither worse nor better than her sisters. The man-hating
story I flatly disbelieve. Marjorie Bartrand may or may not go to
Girton. She is sure to prove herself a very woman in the end.’
‘Unfortunately, you flatly disbelieve so many things.’ As she spoke
Gaston’s wife transferred a monster strawberry from her own plate to
her husband’s. ‘You told me, only yesterday----’
‘Dinah, my love,’ interrupted Gaston, with good humour, ‘never remind a
man who has well dined or well breakfasted of what he said yesterday.
In what state were one’s nerves twenty-four hours ago? Was the wind
in the east? Had our perennial duns arrived from England? Had our
cousin Geoffrey been reading pauper statistics at us? Each or all of
these accidents may have engendered scepticism which at this moment is
replaced by the childlike faith born of idleness and a fine digestion.’
And Dinah’s strawberry, encrusted by sugar, delicately dipped in
Guernsey cream, was placed between Gaston’s white teeth, savoured and
swallowed.
It was not part of Mr. Arbuthnot’s philosophy to refuse any little
choice morsel that the world, artistic, intellectual, or physical,
thought fit to offer him.
He was a handsome man verging on his thirtieth year: tawny-bearded,
fair, with hands that Titian or Velasquez might have loved to paint,
and a profile of the type commonly known as Bourbon. (Although he may
not play the first part in this or any other drama, one has a feeling
that Gaston should advance to the footlights, make his bow, a good
minute before his fellow-actors leave the slips.) His eyes were shrewd
and near together, their colour and their expression alike prone to
shift if a stranger sought, too persistently, to investigate them.
With a first look you felt sure that Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot bore a brain.
You felt equally sure, with a second, that the opinion was shared, even
to exaggeration, by Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot himself.
In dress it was his pleasure to affect Bohemianism. On this particular
June morning Gaston wore a brown velveteen coat, a spun silk shirt,
a white sombrero hat--the well-tailored man becoming only more
conspicuous under the disguise. What smaller things shall be said of
him? That he had been brought up as a child in Paris, the only son of
a valetudinarian American widow, and spoke French to this hour with a
better accent than English, rolling his ‘r’s’ and clipping his vowels
like a born denizen of the boulevards. Item: that he had a fair English
girl for his wife; item: a loyal, rough-hewn Scottish cousin for his
friend--the Dinah and Geoffrey who, breakfasting with appetite although
their discourse was of sentiment, made up the paradoxical little group
under the lime trees at which we have glanced.
Let us turn to Geoffrey next, leaving Dinah, as I see they leave the
first actress in the theatrical advertisements, for the bottom of the
list.
The cousinship of the Arbuthnots might be divined at a glance,
although, reviewed feature by feature, the two men were notably unlike
in their likeness. Both were tall, both were wiry of build, both held
their heads high, going along life’s road as though the world, taken
from whichever point of view you liked, were decidedly a place worth
living in. Here the likeness ended. Gaston, indeed, would declare
that by virtue of his mother’s Yankee blood, and his own Parisian
instincts, they were less related, physically, than any ordinary
cousin-germans.
One overwhelming difference between them was patent. Geoffrey was no
beauty-man! When he was the freshest of freshmen, five or six years
before the morning of this Guernsey breakfast, Geff went in, one
November night, for a little bit of guerilla fighting in the Cambridge
streets, which, without quenching the guerilla spirit, effectually left
a beauty-spoiling brand upon himself for the remainder of his life.
It happened thus. Geoffrey, raw from school, had newly carried off one
of the scholarships best worth winning in the University. Although
brave, manly, impetuous, the lad’s hours were early, his habits sober.
He belonged, indeed, to a class which young gentlemen, fond of their
pleasure, and of modest mental gifts, are apt to label during their
first two terms of residence under the generic name of smug. Well,
with an old schoolmate, less versed in Greek than himself, Geff had
been drinking coffee and conning over such portions of Plato as would
be wanted by his friend for the coming Little Go. He was midway on his
way back to his scholar’s attic in John’s when, turning sharply round
a corner of Petty Cury, he found himself in the thick of a small but
classic ‘town and gown.’ A brace of undergraduates, raw as himself,
held a mob of roughs at bay; stones, oaths, and brickbats flew about
with Homeric profusion. A fine Cambridge drizzle gave atmosphere to the
scene. Police, bull-dogs, proctors, were beneath the horizon.
With no other weapons than his fists and his Plato, Geff rushed to the
fore. In those early days he had neither the weight nor the staying
power which on many a well-contested football field have since made his
name a terror to the foe and a tower of strength to All England. He
had, however, the force born of will, of brain, of generous impulse.
Ere twenty seconds had sped Plato, with all the Platonic philosophy,
went to the winds, and the biggest, brawniest of the roughs, stoutly
gripped about the neck-cloth region, gave tokens of surrender.
Unfortunately for Geff’s beauty, his antagonist’s left hand held a
broken stone bottle. As the ruffian felt himself reel to earth he swung
the missile, with dastard might, into the Scotch lad’s face, cutting
his nose and forehead very literally to the bone. There came a cry of
‘Proctor!’ There was the shuffle of departing feet. Then Geoffrey,
blinded, stunned, fell into a bull-dog’s arms and heard the usual
proctorial question as to name and college, addressed with the usual
calm proctorial courtesy to himself.
It was a week before the Little Go exams.; and Geoffrey Arbuthnot, as
soon as the surgeons could strap his face into a grim resemblance of
humanity, went down.
The incident in nowise lessened his Cambridge reputation. Although he
eventually came out eighth in the Classical Tripos, it is not known
that the most foolish tongue called Arbuthnot of John’s a smug again;
tacitly, he was recognised, even by pleasure-loving young gentlemen,
as one of that queer ‘good-all-round sort’ in whom the defects of
bookishness and staid living are condoned by certain sterling natural
virtues--glorious muscle, unconquerable pluck. ‘Virtues that a man
can’t help, don’t you know, if they are born in him!’ And which,
confusing to the pleasure-loving intelligence though such facts may be,
do certainly, in the long run, bring public credit to the Alma Mater.
But the blow from his street antagonist had marred Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s
looks for life.
Strength, loyalty, gentleness, were written large upon his face. His
dark, somewhat sunken eyes had in them the glow of an intellect high
above the level of his handsome cousin! His smile, though Geff did not
resemble the family of Bourbon, was finer, because sweeter, more wholly
human than Gaston’s. But his looks were marred. That rugged cicatrice
across nose and forehead could never wear out, and Geoffrey possessed
not the thousand little drawing-room graces that, in some women’s
sight, might go far towards rendering such a blemish ‘interesting.’ His
hands, however firm, lithe, adequate for a surgeon’s work, did neither
suggest Titian nor Velasquez to your mental eye. His dress bespoke the
student. His French was grotesque. Although a second Bayard in his
reverence for abstract Woman, he had no small attentions for concrete
idle ladies.
Garden parties Geoffrey Arbuthnot evaded; dancing parties he abhorred.
In regard to matrimony he would shake his head, not holding it a state
meet for all men.
Concerning this latest clause, however, the reader shall learn more
when we come to ask why the triangular friendship of the persons
breakfasting together under the shadow of Mr. Miller’s limes was
paradoxical.
‘Yes,’ resumed Gaston Arbuthnot, tilting himself to the outside limit
of equilibrium on his garden-chair, and clasping his arms, with a
gesture admirably suggestive of habitual laziness, above his head,
‘look the position in the face for one moment, and you reduce it to an
absurdity. No girl of seventeen has ever yet been a man-hater; has she,
Dinah?’
‘I was not,’ admitted Mrs. Arbuthnot frankly, although she blushed.
‘But Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux, young though she is, has gone through
disappointment. Mrs. Miller told me so when I showed her the paper with
the advertisement. Miss Bartrand, more than a year ago, was engaged to
the major of some English regiment stationed in Guernsey.’
‘Is that a disappointment, my love?’
‘The major of the regiment proved a sorry character,’ said Dinah
gravely. ‘Miss Bartrand found out that he had broken the heart of some
poor girl at a former garrison town.’
‘And, from that hour forth, swore to look on all men as in the
conspiracy,’ interrupted Gaston. ‘What breadth of discrimination, what
knowledge of the world, these simple-seeming schoolgirls occasionally
show!’
‘When I was eighteen, that spring I went to stay with Aunt Susan at
Lesser Cheriton, I knew no more of the world’s ways than a baby, did I,
Geff?’
‘The philosophers are divided as to how much a baby does know,’
answered Geoffrey, fixing his dark eyes with discrimination upon Mrs.
Gaston Arbuthnot’s face.
‘There is an unexpected parry for you, my dear girl.’ Shifting his
chair away from the table, Dinah’s lord began to fold himself a loose,
or Spanish-modelled cigarette. Pipes and cigars of ordinary goodness
Gaston would no more smoke than he would swallow any of the popular
fluids known among Britons as wine. He had the virtue of facile
temperance, wore the blue ribbon of a fastidious taste. Unless his
small luxuries were of the choicest, he could at any time fill the
anchorite’s _rôle_ without effort. ‘You had better apply to your own
lawful husband, Dinah, than to Geff, when you want a compliment.’
‘I apply to Geoffrey when I want truth.’
Dinah made this answer unconscious of the slight irony her speech
conveyed.
‘The truth! When a pretty woman talks of truth,’ cried Gaston, ‘she
means, “Give me the biggest, most sugared lump of praise that my moral
gullet will enable me to swallow.”’
Mrs. Arbuthnot had been married close upon four years. Yet was she so
much in love with Gaston still as to colour rosy red at the doubtful
flattery of this remark.
She was a blonde, amply framed Devonshire girl, in the fresh summer
of her youth. ‘Not a lady,’ according to the traditions of small
social courts, the judgments of smaller feminine tribunals. Dinah’s
lips could scarcely unclose before ineradicable accents of the west
country working folk informed you that Gaston Arbuthnot, like so many
artists--poor dear impressionable fellows!--had married beneath him.
Not a lady, as far as the enunciation of certain vowels, the absence
of certain petty artificialities of female manner were concerned, but
with the purity of April dawn on her cheeks, the wholesome work-a-day
qualities of a long line of yeoman progenitors in her heart.
About most women’s charms men are prone to hold contradictory opinions.
What world-renowned beauty but has at times felt the cold breath
of adverse criticism? A smile from Dinah’s pensive mouth, a gleam
from Dinah’s serious eyes, appealed to all beholders. Tottering old
gentlemen would turn, with spectacles hastily adjusted, to wonder; fine
ladies cast looks of despair after her from their carriages; young men
of every sort and condition would lose their peace, if Dinah did but
demurely walk along London pavement or provincial street. She was an
altogether unique specimen of our mixed and over-featured race: white
and rose of complexion; chiselled of profile, with English-coloured
hair (and this hair is neither gold nor flaxen nor chestnut, but a
subdued blending of the three); eyebrows and eyelashes that matched;
a nobly cut throat; and the slow, calm movements that belong in all
countries to the fair large Madonna-like women of her type.
Madonna. The word in connection with poor Dinah must awaken instant
visions of sock-knitting and of pinafore-mending! Gaston’s wife was, in
truth, a very ideal of sweet and gracious motherhood. Gladly you would
have imagined her, girt round by a swarm of toddlers, with eyes and
cheeks like her own, to be bequeathed, a priceless heirloom, to future
generations. But Dinah had no living child. And round Dinah’s mouth
might be discerned lines that should certainly not have found their way
thither at two-and-twenty. And in Dinah’s low country voice there was
a lilt at times of unexpected sadness. Round some corner of her path
Dull Care, you felt, must lurk, stealthily watchful. At some point in
the outward and visible sunshine of her married life there must be a
blot of shadow. A woman like Dinah could be hit through her affections
only. Her affections were centred painfully--I had almost written
morbidly--on one subject. And that subject was Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot,
her husband.
‘If Miss Bartrand be a hater of men, a scorner of marriage, so much the
easier prospect for me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘At the present time I look
upon myself as an educational machine to be hired out at so much an
hour. I have no more mind to put on company manners for Miss Marjorie
Bartrand than for any thick-headed fresher I was vainly endeavouring to
get through Little Go.’
‘You? It depends, rather, on what Miss Marjorie Bartrand has a mind
for,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, with the certainty born of larger
experience.
‘Happily, the wording of the advertisement shows that Miss Bartrand
means work. We have it here.’
Geoffrey looked down the columns of a small, blue, badly-printed local
newspaper, half French, half English, that lay open on the breakfast
table.
“Tutor wanted. I, Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux, need a coach
to prepare me for Girton. Classics and mathematics. Six hours a
week.--Apply, personally, at Tintajeux Manoir, after six P.M. An Oxford
or Cambridge man preferred.”’
‘Does any one know if Marjorie Bartrand is handsome?’ exclaimed Gaston,
with sudden animation. ‘Dinah, I adjure you to find out the truth in
this matter. The women of the hotel would at least repeat the popular
island beliefs. “An Oxford or Cambridge man preferred.” The crystalline
artfulness of the clause touches one, from a girl who makes pretence at
misanthropy.’
‘But surely, Gaston, you would not----’
‘I would do most things. My classics were unfairly judged of by my
college tutor. My mathematics,’ Gaston confessed, with his air of
unreliable fatuity, ‘never existed. Still, I kept all my terms, except,
of course, the hunting terms. And I succeeded--as far as I went! If I
passed no exams., I was at least never spun. I am as much a Cambridge
man as Geoffrey is. I feel more than disposed to apply to Miss Marjorie
Bartrand myself.’
The muscles about Dinah Arbuthnot’s delicately-carved mouth trembled.
‘You would tire before the first lesson was over,’ said Geff, watching
Dinah, while he addressed Dinah’s husband. ‘You want my incentive,
Gaston, filthy lucre. My terms as a coach in Guernsey are five
shillings an hour. Five sixes are thirty. Yes, reading classics and
mathematics with Miss Bartrand will just pay half my weekly hotel bill,
supposing I am not lucky enough to get other work.’
‘And you don’t care a straw whether Marjorie Bartrand is pretty or
plain? My dear Geff, if ever fortune brings you to the stage, take the
part of Joseph Surface, for my sake. It would suit you to admiration.’