THE FIRST CRUMPLED ROSE-LEAF
Rex Basire showed no disposition to let his newly-made acquaintance
with Dinah Arbuthnot cool. Long before the hour for visitors on Monday
afternoon, Louise, the French waitress, entered the Arbuthnots’
parlour. She placed before Dinah a card, also a bouquet made up
entirely of white and costly hothouse flowers. Just like the bouquet
Gaston gave her on her wedding morning! thought Dinah, with a rush of
bitter-sweet recollection.
‘The Monsieur who was here yesterday, le petit Milor au moustache
blond, demanded news of Madame. Was Madame visible? Should she, Louise,
pray Milor to enter?’
Dinah glanced with indifference at card and flowers alike, then she
rose from her work-table. Gaston Arbuthnot, it happened, was at home,
putting the finishing touches to ‘Dodo’s Despair’ in his improvised
studio. Walking quickly to the open window, Dinah, in a whisper,
appealed to her husband.
‘Gaston, how shall I get rid of Lord Rex Basire? He has sent in his
card and some flowers, as if flowers from a stranger could give one
pleasure! He demands news of me, the French girl says, but that is too
senseless. Tell me the civil way to--to----’
‘Shut the door in his face,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, looking up
from his model as Dinah hesitated. ‘Why shut the door at all? The poor
boy will be better off talking to you than he would be making useless
purchases for young ladies in the Petersport shops.’
‘But I am at work. I am counting off stitches for the forget-me-nots
round Aunt Susan’s ottoman, and then I shall come outside. I want no
company but yours.’
‘Basire will help you to count forget-me-nots. The very employment he
would delight in!’
And, raising his voice, Gaston Arbuthnot called cheerily to the servant
that Madame was visible. There was no time for Dinah to escape. In
another minute Lord Rex had followed his hothouse bouquet, his card,
and the French waitress into her presence.
She suffered him to possess her hand for one chill, unwilling instant.
Determined, after a somewhat confused and halting fashion, to amend the
error of her ways, to instruct herself, as in a book, in the usages
of Gaston’s world, poor Dinah shrank like a child from the initiatory
chapter of her lesson. She had endured Lord Rex, yesterday, in the
spirit of martyrdom. But to-day, to-morrow! Over what space between the
present time and September was her endurance to last?
‘I was afraid if I waited till the afternoon you would be out, Mrs.
Arbuthnot. And I have a weighty matter to put into your hands;
I--I--mean an awfully great favour to ask of you.’
Rex Basire, as garrison society knew him, was a youth weighted by no
undue modesty, no obsolete chivalrous deference in his manner towards
Woman. He really shone, little though Dinah might appreciate such
shining, as he stood, hesitating--for a moment half abashed--before the
calm coldness of her face.
‘You will forgive me for calling at this unholy hour?’ he proceeded as
she remained silent.
Dinah Arbuthnot glanced towards the flood of sunshine that rested on
the flower-bright borders of Mr. Miller’s garden.
‘Why is the hour unholy?’ she inquired, with slow gravity.
‘I mean an hour when you were certain to be busy,’ said Lord Rex,
approaching her work-table. ‘Now I can see I am interrupting you, Mrs.
Arbuthnot, am I not?’
He drew forward a chair for Dinah; then, after standing for some
appreciable time, and finding that she neither spoke to him nor looked
at him, he seated himself, uninvited.
‘Awful shame, isn’t it, to interrupt you like this?’
‘It does not matter much, my lord. My time was occupied in nothing more
important than counting stitches for a border--that dreariest form of
feminine arithmetic,’ Dinah’s lips relaxed, ‘as my husband calls it.’
‘Does your husband say so really? Just what one might expect. All
husbands are alike.’
Modelling his clay outside, Mr. Arbuthnot smiled good-humouredly to
himself at the remark.
‘Now, to me--you mustn’t mind my saying so--lovely woman is never so
lovely as when she is absolutely a woman! Dead against the higher
education business--girl graduates--platform females--you know the
style of thing I mean. Only one out of my tribe of sisters, Vic, the
eldest, works at her needle--my favourite sister from my cradle.’
Rex Basire felt that he threw a shade of discriminative, yet
unmistakable flattery into this avowal of family preference. Dinah held
her peace, having in her possession none of those useful colloquial
counters which less uninformed persons have agreed to accept as coin.
Rex Basire’s generalisation about husbands lingered in her mind with
unpleasant, with personal significance. Was it possible that Gaston’s
coolness towards her had become matter of comment in the idle little
world to which Linda Thorne and Lord Rex Basire both belonged?
‘I work at my needle,’ she remarked presently, ‘because I am not gifted
enough to do better things. If I had talent, a tenth part of talent
like Gaston’s, I should not spend my time counting threads of canvas.’
So the discriminative flattery had fallen through. Lord Rex tapped
his exceedingly white teeth with the top of his cane. He searched
diligently throughout the length and breadth of his brain for
subject-matter, and found the land naked. His want of inspiration must,
he began to think, be Mrs. Arbuthnot’s fault. These constant allusions
to the absent husband were crushingly unsuggestive; tended, indeed,
towards irksomeness. Arbuthnot was a well-looking man enough, of the
usual American type, clever, possibly, in his way,--could knead up
clay into droll little figures, and sing French songs without accent!
It was distinctly not to listen to Gaston Arbuthnot’s praises that
Lord Rex had toiled under a hot sun, and at this ‘unholy hour,’ from
Fort-William Barracks up to Miller’s Sarnian Hotel.
He asked himself if Dinah were really as beautiful as during the past
two days and nights she had appeared before him in his dreams? With a
world full of charming women, most of them disposed, thought Lord Rex,
to value one adequately, were this particular woman’s good graces high
enough stakes to be worth playing for?
Was she really, if one watched her dispassionately, so beautiful?
Dinah set up her frame, and, leaning over it, began, or went through
the semblance of beginning, to count her stitches. In doing so the line
of down-bent golden head, the sweep of lash on the pink cheek, the
outline of throat and shoulder, were given with full unconscious effect
to Lord Rex. And the young man’s heresy left him. Whatever his other
scepticisms, he felt, while he lived he could never doubt more on one
subject, the flawlessness of Dinah Arbuthnot’s beauty.
‘Please let me help you in your dreary arithmetic, Mrs. Arbuthnot.
Lend me a needle, at least, and give me a trial. I have only one hand
to use, but I have been shown, often, how worsted-work stitches are
counted.’ And, indeed, Rex Basire had had a pretty wide training in
most unprofitable pursuits. ‘Each little painted square of the pattern
goes for two threads, does it not?’
‘I am sure I did not know gentlemen understood about cross-stitch!’
And Dinah reluctantly surrendered her canvas to his outstretched hand.
‘Your lordship,’ she added, ‘will never make out the different shades
of blue. This forget-me-not border is the most heart-breaking pattern I
have worked.’
Your lordship--your lordship! Gaston’s face assumed an unwonted
liveliness of colour as his wife’s voice reached him. Would Dinah never
leave off talking as the young ladies talk behind the counters in glove
shops, he asked himself? Would she never learn the common everyday
titles by which men and women address each other in the world?
The clay was no longer plastic under Mr. Arbuthnot’s touch. He moved
without sound to the window. He took a discerning glance at the two
people seated beside the table--Lord Rex with masculine awkward fingers
solemnly parcelling out canvas forget-me-nots, as though his commission
depended on his accuracy; Dinah, a look of shy amusement on her face,
demurely watching him.
Gaston Arbuthnot took one glance. Then he put aside his tools, wrapped
a wet cloth hastily around ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ and with a manner not
devoid of a certain impatience, prepared to quit his studio. Could it
be--the question presented itself unbidden--that a shadow of coming
distrust had fallen on him? The thought was absurd. He, Gaston
Arbuthnot, distrustful of the gentle, home-staying girl, whose devotion
to himself had at times--poor Dinah--amounted to something worse than a
fault, an inconvenience! That to-morrow’s sun should rise in the east
was not a surer fact than that his wife’s Griselda-like fidelity should
endure to the end.
And still, in the inmost conscience of him, Gaston Arbuthnot was
uncomfortable.
He had spent nearly four years of absolute trust--four golden years of
youth, of love, with the sweetest companion that ever blest the lot
of erring man. In this moment he realised the sensation of the first
crumpled rose-leaf. Commonly jealous he could not be. His temperament,
the circumstances of his lot, forbade ignoble feeling. He knew that for
a man like Rex Basire toleration must be the kindliest sentiment that
Dinah, with difficulty, could bring herself to entertain.
It was not jealousy, not distrust; it was simply the reversal of all
past experience that disconcerted Gaston’s mind. It was the whole
abnormal picture--the diverted look on Dinah’s face, her embroidery
needle and canvas--_hers_--between Rex Basire’s fingers, that was so
blankly unwelcome in his sight.
If Gaston Arbuthnot ever in his life was an actor in a similar bit of
drawing-room comedy, you may be sure the _rôle_ chosen by him had been
the one now played by Lord Rex. Some other fellow-mortal in a blouse,
and with clay-stained hands, may have watched from the slips. It was
Gaston who counted the stitches!
He was not cut out by Nature to take subordinate parts; and this his
first little taste of abdicated power had a singularly insipid flavour
to his palate.