CROSS-STITCH
Dinah was still busied over her embroidery frame when Geoffrey’s
entrance brought the coolness of the night, the wholesome odour of
heliotropes and roses, into the chronically dinner-oppressed atmosphere
of Miller’s Hotel.
Her blonde youthful face looked weary. The lightless, far-away
expression, which you may always observe as a result of unshed tears,
was in the glance she lifted to Geff.
‘What, you are up still! Do you know that it is past eleven, Mrs.
Arbuthnot?’
Four years ago, when Geoffrey first saw Gaston and Dinah in the bloom
of wedded happiness not two months old, it was decreed by Gaston, least
jealous of men, that his wife and cousin should call each other by
their Christian names.
Upon Dinah’s joyous lips Geoffrey, without an effort, became at once a
familiar household word--dear good old Geff, through whom, obliquely,
her introduction to the husband she passionately loved had come about!
But Geoffrey, after a few stammering, painful efforts, abandoned the
calling of Dinah by her Christian name for ever.
He could and did call her so to Gaston only. He intended to stand by
her heroically, absent, or in her presence; intended, God helping him,
to be the good brotherly influence of her life and of her husband’s.
Looking upon the eyes that met his with such cruel self-possession,
upon the lips which he had once madly coveted to press, Geoffrey
Arbuthnot realised that he could never feel towards Dinah as a brother
feels. He resolved that his speech, knowingly, should not play traitor
to his heart. Gaston’s wife must, for him, be coldly, stiffly,
conventionally, ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ until his life’s end.
‘Yes, I am up still, Geff. There’s no chance of seeing Gaston till long
past midnight. A lady like Mrs. Thorne, accustomed to India and Indian
military society,’ said Dinah, ‘would be sure to keep late hours. So
I thought I would shade my poppies straight through. I must wait for
daylight to put in the pinks and scarlets.’
Crossing to the table where Dinah was laboriously stitching, Geoffrey
seated himself at her side. He looked attentively down at her work with
those acute, deep-browed gray eyes of his.
‘Your embroidery is very----’ he was about to say ‘beautiful,’ but
checked himself. The star-strewn night, the hay-scents along the
cliffs, the roses of Tintajeux were in his soul, lifting it above
sympathy with poor Dinah’s wool-work. ‘Your embroidery is very delicate
and smooth,’ he went on truthfully. ‘And how quick you are about it!
You only began the top yellow rose when I stayed with you and Gaston, I
recollect, last Easter.’
Dinah’s pieces of work were on a scale that carried one back to
the female industry of the Middle Ages, yet was their ultimate use
nebulous. Vast ottomans, vast cushions, yards of curtain border, imply
a mansion. And the Arbuthnot’s mansion at present existed not. But on
what else should a childless woman, cut off from household duties, not
over fond of books, forlornly destitute of acquaintance, and with an
ever-absent husband, employ herself?
Once, long ago, the poor girl made Gaston a set of shirts, as a
birthday surprise. These shirts were lovingly, exquisitely stitched, as
Dinah Thurston had been taught to stitch in her childhood. They were
also a consummate failure. As a monument of patience, he observed, they
were beyond praise. As a fit--‘Well,’ said Gaston, kissing her cheek in
careless gratitude, ‘it is not a case of Eureka.’
He never wore them, never knew on what day, in what manner, his wife,
fired by sharp disappointment, got them out of existence. Simply, the
shirts did not adjust themselves well round his, Gaston Arbuthnot’s,
shapely throat. It was not a case of Eureka. The subject interested him
no farther.
Plain sewing for grown men and women, Dinah promptly decided, was
fruitless labour. Of dressmaking proper Gaston would never (excusably,
perhaps) suffer a trace in his rooms. And so, the sweet fashioning of
tiny children’s clothes not belonging to her lot, Dinah Arbuthnot it
would seem had no choice, no refuge on the planet she inhabited, but
cross-stitch.
At moments of more than common loneliness she would feel that her life
was being recorded--mournfully, for a life of two-and-twenty--in these
large and not artistic embroideries. It seemed as though she stitched
with a double thread, as though a dull strand of autobiography for ever
intertwined itself among the flaunting roses, the impossible auriculas
and poppies that grew beneath her hands.
The piece at which she now worked was begun in London, at a time when
Gaston used to dine out regularly every night of his life, and when
his days, from various art callings, were, perforce, spent apart from
her. As Geoffrey spoke, she could see her St. John’s Wood lodging, her
afternoon walks in the Regent’s Park, worked gloomily in with every
shade of those topmost yellow roses. After London came a short stay at
Weymouth. Here Gaston had a ‘convict study’ to make, on order, and with
his usual good luck discovered he knew several capital fellows in the
regiment quartered at Portland. The capital fellows naturally delighted
in having the versatile artist at mess, and Dinah passed almost as many
lonely evenings as she had done in London. It was in Weymouth, she
remembered, that her auriculas, her impossible auriculas, began to take
colour and shape. And now, in Guernsey....
The heavy drops gathered in Dinah Arbuthnot’s eyes; pushing her work
frame away, she turned to Geoffrey. The lamp shone on her full. The
delicate outlines of her cheek and throat stood out before him in
startling whiteness.
‘And so you have come back from your coaching, Geff.’ Her tone was
quiet. Long practice had taught Dinah to repress that sound detested by
Gaston--as by all husbands--tears in the voice. ‘How do you like the
sensation of being snubbed by an heiress?’
‘Pretty well, I thank you,’ said Geff. ‘Snubbing, as you know, Mrs.
Arbuthnot, is a sensation I got used to in my youth.’
‘Was the heiress very bad? Did she make you feel miserably
uncomfortable?’
‘No, I cannot go so far as that. I cannot say that I felt miserably
uncomfortable.’
‘But you don’t care for her? If you keep the work on, it will not be
for pleasure?’
Dinah’s heart was fuller than it could hold with love for her husband.
Geoffrey was nothing to her, except the best friend that she and Gaston
possessed. Yet she asked this question quickly, with interest. In her
secret consciousness it was an accepted fear, perhaps, though Dinah
knew it not, that Geoffrey would never care, as men care who mean to
marry, for any girl.
‘Work that is to be decently done must always be done for pleasure.’
It was Geff Arbuthnot who uttered the aphorism.
‘And your evening, snubbing and all, has been passed pleasantly?’
‘I have breathed ampler air,’ Geoffrey made evasive apology, man-like.
‘I have seen more blue sea and sky than ever in my life before. Miss
Bartrand’s snubbing was--not beyond my strength. The Seigneur of
Tintajeux is a specimen of the old scholarly, high-and-dry parson,
worth walking any number of Guernsey miles to see. Some day, Mrs.
Arbuthnot, I shall take you with me to Tintajeux.’
‘To come in for my share of snubbing too?’
Dinah asked the question, faintly colouring.
‘Marjorie is a frank, generous-hearted child. You cannot think of her
in the light of a grown-up woman. She is a Bartrand, with the faults
and virtues of her inheritance, the faults--pride and temper--visibly
on the surface. I am very sure,’ added Geff, bending his head, as
though to examine the intricate shading of Dinah’s poppies, ‘that you
and Marjorie Bartrand might be fast friends, if you chose.’
‘I have no friends,’ said Dinah, ‘except my own people, down home,’ of
whom, in truth, Gaston allowed her to see little enough,’and--and you,
Geff.’
The voice was unfaltering, the full good mouth was steady. Dinah
made the admission, not as a matter of complaint, but of fact, and
Geoffrey’s heart fired.
‘That “friendlessness” is the one huge mistake of your life,’ he
exclaimed. ‘Gaston is not selfish, would not be selfish, unless your
unselfishness forced him into being so. You should never have allowed
this morbid love of solitude to grow on you. You ought to assert
yourself, to go into the world at Gaston’s side, whether you like it or
not.’
‘I should not like it now. When I was a girl, when we first married,
my heart was light, against what it is now. It was the end of the
London season, you remember. No, I don’t suppose you do?’
Did he not, though--that late July time when, after seeing the marriage
ceremony over, he went back to his scholar’s attic in John’s; that Long
Vacation when the skies were brazen to him, when day and night alike
were one feverish pain!
‘It was the end of the London season, and when Gaston took me to the
Opera and twice down to dinner at Richmond I did feel,’ confessed Dinah
with humility, ‘that I had it in me to be fond of junketing,--oh,
Geff, there’s one of my country words! luckily Gaston can’t hear
it--of pleasure, I mean, and society. But the taste has died.’ Of what
lingering, cruel death, who should know better than Geoffrey? ‘Ladies
of my husband’s class have not called upon me. I have neither rank,
talent, nor a million. Without these, Gaston says, no woman can make
her way in the English world.’
Hot words were ready to rush from Geoffrey’s lips, but he kept them
back. To remain on equal terms with husband and wife in this strange
triangular friendship did sorely tax his powers of self-repression at
times.
‘Gaston would rejoice in knowing that your life was cheerfuller, no
matter how the cheerfulness was brought about. He has told me so,
often. Now, here, in Guernsey, eight sea-going hours removed,’ said
Geff lightly, ‘from English Philistinism, what should hinder you from
joining in any little bit of “junketing” that may offer itself?’
‘The hindrance of having no introduction to the Guernsey ladies.’
‘Mrs. Thorne has called on you.’
‘On Gaston. He is dining with them now. He will dine with them four
evenings a week. Yes,’ Dinah’s voice fell, ‘I know, at a glance, the
kind of clever person who will amuse my husband. Mrs. Thorne is one of
them. She is magnetic.’
‘With the magnetism that repels rather than attracts,’ remarked Geff.
‘That is your feeling about her. You and Gaston would be safe not to
admire the same woman.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot was mute. Although his face was too sunburnt to
admit of visible deepening in hue, it may be that just then Geoffrey
Arbuthnot blushed.
‘You have no change in your character. You could be content (a happy
thing for your wife, whenever Mrs. Geoffrey appears on the scene) with
one mood, one voice, one face, day after day, before you for forty
years. Is not that true?’
‘I am not an artist,’ said Geff, after a pause. ‘For a humdrum
man, prosaically occupied, the one face, Mrs. Arbuthnot, the one
voice,’--ah, fool that he was! his own voice trembled--‘might
constitute as much happiness as we are likely to taste, any of us, this
side death.’
‘And Gaston is an artist in every fibre.’ Poor Dinah’s estimate of Mr.
Gaston Arbuthnot was invariably Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s, except that she
believed in him a vast deal more than he believed in himself. ‘I ought
to know that my dull days, my silent evenings, are matters of course.
It is not Gaston’s fault that he can only get inspiration through
change. Some day, when the world is bowing down before a really great
work of his, my hour of triumph will come. Who knows, Geff, if Gaston
had married in his own class, if he and his wife had led just the usual
life of people in society--it may be his genius would not have fared so
well!’
Dinah never looked more perilously lovely than when, with flushed
cheeks and kindling eyes, she spoke aloud of her ambitions for her
husband. The poor girl’s whole life lay in her one, passionate,
oft-bruised affection. More than common beauty, a look of divine,
all-hoping, all-forgiving love, shone on her face at this instant.
Geff Arbuthnot recollected it wanted only ten seconds to midnight,
and that he must fly. Had not long habit trained him to recognise the
moment when flight was his surest, his only wisdom!
‘You and Gaston understand each other, as no third person can hope to
do, Mrs. Arbuthnot. I consider you the two happiest mortals alive,
though perhaps you do not know the extent of your own happiness.’
‘And you are off to your pillow, to dream of the heiress who has not
snubbed you,’ said Dinah, as he moved from her side. ‘Why, Geff!’ For
the first time she caught sight of the bouquet, somewhat cunningly held
in shadow hitherto. ‘What roses, what jasmines, what heliotropes? I
have been wondering all this time what made the room so sweet.’
And speaking thus, she stretched forth her hand for Marjorie Bartrand’s
flowers.
During nearly four years, a portentously large slice of life under
five-and-twenty, it had been one long case of give-and-take between
Geoffrey and Dinah--the ‘take’ invariably on Dinah’s side. She took his
heart from him to start with. She took the happiness out of his youth.
Silently, unrecognised, Geoffrey constituted himself her knight-errant
in the hour of his own sharpest pain. (Till her death Dinah could never
know the part played by Geoffrey at the time of her engagement and
marriage.) In a hundred ways he had since steadied her husband in the
path of right. By a hundred unselfish actions he had smoothed nascent
domestic discontents, any one of which might have worked mortal havoc
with Dinah’s peace.
She had received all his devotion--a prevalent weakness, it is to be
feared, among gentle, unimaginative women of her type--as the simplest
thing in the world!
If Dinah, as once there was promise, had had children, doubt not that
her moral nature must have widened. But this was not to be. A tiny,
dying creature held between weak arms for half a day; some yellowing,
never-used baby-clothes, jealously hidden out of Gaston’s sight; a kiss
stolen, when her husband was not by to see, from any fair cottage babe
she might chance to come across in her walk--this much, and no more,
was Dinah to know of motherhood.
And the love blindly centred on Gaston had in it an element which,
although the word is hard, must in justice be called selfishness.
‘Nothing Gaston likes so well as the smell of flowers on his breakfast
table.’ And Dinah still carelessly held out her hand in a receptive
attitude. ‘He says his brain must be like the brains of dogs or
deer--smell colours all his thoughts. You will see, Geff! Those
heliotropes and roses will just set him kneading some new idea into
clay to-morrow morning.’
But the heliotropes and the roses did not quit Geoffrey’s hand.
In this moment, ay, while Dinah was speaking, a current of new, keen,
healthful life had swept through him. He felt more thoroughly master of
himself than he had done since that May evening when he first blindly
surrendered his will, with his heart, to a blonde girl watering flowers
through a casement window at Lesser Cheriton. Marjorie’s roses, fresh
from her pure touch, a friendly gift from the world-scorning child
who, somehow, looked upon her tutor as out of the scope of scorn, were
his. If Gaston needed inspiration from flower-scents, Doctor Thorne’s
garden, any other garden than that of the Seigneur of Tintajeux, must
supply the inspiration.
He made a dexterous exit, rushed away, boy-fashion, light of spirit,
three steps at a time, to his own room. And before half a minute was
over Dinah Arbuthnot had forgotten him. Poor old faithful Geff, his
lesson-giving, his heiress, his bouquet--what were these, nay, what
were the alien concerns of the universe to a pathetically tender soul,
quick smarting under its own immediate and narrow pain!
Had Linda Thorne the power of holding an artist’s restless fancy
captive, the genius of making time pass swiftly, the talent of clever
talk, of giving genial little dinners, of dressing perfectly? Above
all, was she a woman to expect nothing whatever in return for her
devotion? A woman strong enough to be philosophical, even, towards a
rival who should vanquish her, in her own world, with her own weapons?
If she were thus gifted--Dinah moved to the window and looked out
across the hotel garden to a point between an opening in the trees
where the sea showed blue and foamless--if Linda Thorne were thus
gifted, then might to-night be taken as a foretaste of what the next
six weeks, the bloom and glory of a mid-Channel summer, had in store
for herself.