A TRINITY BALL
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.