A TRAITRESS
But their speech betrayed them not. Roseate stage of the passion when
unacknowledged lovers are conscious each of the other’s secret, yet
talk upon commonplace subjects, look celibacy, stoutly, in the face,
still. If that hour only lasted! If the clover would not lose its first
honeyed sweetness, if the gold would stop on the wheat-fields, if the
thrushes would sing love-ditties till September, instead of becoming
respectable heads of families in June!
‘You put forth to sea as a martyr, so I will not ask if you have
enjoyed yourself, Mr. Arbuthnot. I have. Without giving up a prejudice
against military folk in general,’ said Marjorie Bartrand, ‘I pronounce
the subalterns’ picnic to have been a success.’
‘Success--looked at from whose focus, Miss Bartrand? Poor Jack, with
his twisted ankle, scarcely appreciated the cleverness with which we
managed to kill a day and night of our existence, depend upon it.’
‘Nor did Mrs. Verschoyle. “If we had only been drinking tea,” so I
heard her make moan through the fog--“drinking tea as we used on
L’Ancresse Common, when the Colonel was in command!”’
‘Miss Tighe, at least, enjoyed herself. Other conquests may have been
made,’ observed Geoffrey, a little inappositely. ‘Miss Tighe captured a
new butterfly! A human being with a hobby possesses a joy that all the
sorrows and passions of our common nature cannot rob him of.’
But neither Mrs. Verschoyle nor Cassandra served to open out wider
interests. The conversation flagged sensibly, and Marjorie’s pace
quickened. For the first time since she began to read with Geff,
Marjorie felt that she was at a loss for subjects in talking to her
tutor.
‘I am afraid your cousin, Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot, did not take much
pleasure out of the day.’
She made the remark after some deliberation, and without looking round
at Geoffrey’s face.
‘It was a mistake for Dinah to go,’ Geoffrey answered, keeping his gaze
very straight before him. ‘Dinah’s life is a dull one. The kind of
Bohemian wandering existence which suits Gaston as an artist robs his
wife of the household tasks in which she could take honest heart. If I
were not so mortally afraid of you, Miss Bartrand----’
‘_Of me?_’
‘I should use a French phrase.’
‘Please do! I delight in your command of modern languages.’
‘I should call Dinah desœuvrée.’ Geff, you may be sure, pronounced the
word atrociously. ‘But she will never find compensation by frequenting
Gaston’s world. At this moment poor Dinah, I know, feels heavier in
spirit than if she had stayed quietly at home with her book and her
cross-stitch.
‘She is beautiful beyond praise. In these regions one gets tired of
mere pink and white prettiness. It is a thing of the climate. Every
girl in the Channel Islands has her day of good looks. Mrs. Arbuthnot’s
is a face of which you could never grow tired.’
‘I believe I am no judge of beauty. Gaston tells me frequently to
admire people who to my taste are horrible monsters--“type Rubens,”
I think he calls them. It requires an education to admire the “type
Rubens.” One does not like a face, or one does like it--too much,
perhaps, for one’s own peace.’
Geff spoke in a tone that brought the blood into Marjorie’s cheeks. The
girl had blushed with other feelings could she have guessed--she, who
would accept second love from no man--that at this moment his thoughts
had wandered to a remote Cambridgeshire village, and to the peace of
mind he lost there!
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot seems to me so thrown away--you must let me
speak, although I know it is a subject on which you can bear no
contradiction--so cruelly thrown away upon a man like your cousin
Gaston.’
‘No other woman would suit my cousin Gaston half as well.’
‘That is the true man’s way of putting things. “Suit Gaston.” Would
not a less Frenchified, less universally popular husband, suit Dinah
better?’
‘I am quite sure Dinah, who should be a competent judge, would answer
“No.” Miss Bartrand,’ broke off Geoffrey, with notable directness and
point, ‘I wonder why you and I are discussing other people’s happiness
just at an hour when we ought to be thinking about our own?’
The remark was made with Geff’s usual seriousness. But Marjorie,
reading between the lines, discerned some obvious joke therein. She
laughed until the high-banked road along which they walked re-echoed to
her fresh voice. Then starting at a brisk run, she took flight along
a foot-track which, diverging from the chaussée, led through a couple
of breast-high cornfields, across a corner of the common land, to
Tintajeux.
Untaught daughter of nature though she was, Marjorie knew that every
moment brought the supreme one nearer in which Geoffrey Arbuthnot
must speak to her of love. Although the conclusion was foregone,
although her whole girlish fancy was won, she strove, with such might
as she possessed, to stave that moment off. For she knew that she was
a traitress to her cause, an apostate from the man-despising creed in
which, recollecting the sins of Major Tredennis, she had gloried.
Fast as her limbs would bear her the girl sped on, Geff Arbuthnot, with
swinging, slow run, nicely adjusted to her pace, following half a dozen
yards behind. ‘Renegade!’ every bush along the familiar path cried
aloud to her. ‘Renegade,’ whispered the stream trickling down between
rushy banks, through beds of thick forget-me-nots, to the shore. The
cornfields were soon passed. They reached the breezy bit of moor above
the Hüets. The ravine where the water-lanes met lay in purple shadow:
all around was warm and joyous sunshine. A scent of fern and wild thyme
filled the air. Far away the tide curled round the dark base of the
Gros Nez range. The choughs and daws were flying across the face of the
cliffs. The gulls poised and swooped, flashes of intense white against
the background of green sea.
For very want of breath Marjorie presently stopped short. Geff was at
her side in a couple of seconds. The young man caught her in his arms.
‘Mr. Arbuthnot.... Sir!’
‘I thought it my duty to steady you.’ He liberated her, partially, and
with reluctance. ‘Your pace, Miss Bartrand, is killing. Do the Guernsey
Sixties ever play hare and hounds? You would make a really respectable
hare, I can tell you.’
‘I hope not.’ With a little air of ill-maintained stiffness Marjorie
contrived to put a few more inches between Geoffrey and herself. ‘Who
would wish to be anything really respectable, until one gets to the age
of the Seigneur, at least?’
‘We shall both of us be too stiff for hare and hounds by that time.’
Perhaps this was the first hour of his life when Geoffrey Arbuthnot
talked nonsense with a child’s sense of enjoyment, a child’s immunity
from care. Hard facts, hard work, had made up the sum of his existence
hitherto. His staunchest friends complained that he was just a little
too grimly lord of himself. In his undergraduate days the men of his
year, despite their recognition of his muscular and sterling qualities,
had a suspicion that there lurked a skeleton in some hidden closet
of Arbuthnot of John’s, a memory, or a dread which rendered the easy
philosophy of youth impossible to him.
Dinah, who knew him well, Gaston, who knew him better, never saw the
look on Geff Arbuthnot’s strong face which lit it in the red freshness
of this Guernsey morning.
‘How shamefully we lose the best hours of the day!’ Marjorie’s hand
rested, as she spoke, on a wicket-gate, overgrown by sweetbriar, which
led into the Manoir gardens. ‘Did you ever smell cherry-pie so sweet
before?’ Heliotrope was a passion with old Andros Bartrand. Rows of the
odorous purple bloom, profusely flourishing in this generous climate,
garnished the borders, even, of his kitchen garden. ‘I, for one, mean
to mend my ways. I shall get up with the sun from this day forth.’
‘Alter my hours, then. We could read together, out of doors, at
sunrise, just as well as in the schoolroom at eleven.’
‘Do you think we should do much serious work, Mr. Arbuthnot?’
Marjorie asked the question with assurance, then coloured up to the
roots of her hair.
‘Not unless breakfast were part of the programme,’ said Geoffrey, with
discernment. ‘At this moment,’ he added, ‘I am reminded of my schoolboy
days in the City. I recall, forcibly, the starvation pangs that used
to unman us on dreary winter mornings over the pages of our Latin
Grammar and Greek Delectus.’
It was not a sentimental speech. Even when treading the primrose path,
nineteenth century young people are rarely indifferent, like the heroic
lovers of an older school, to their meals. And these young people had
really eaten nothing since yesterday’s dinner in Langrune. Confessing
that she too was famished, Marjorie proposed an instant sack of the
Tintajeux dairy and larder. There was a broken pane in one of the
dairy casements through which, luck befriending them, a bolt might be
drawn. From the dairy it would be only a step to the larder, and then,
having secured their booty, they could go forth and eat their breakfast
together in Arcadia.
‘It is a bigger adventure, I can tell you, Mr. Arbuthnot, than any
which befel us on board the _Princess_. Grandpapa and Sylvestre keep
loaded carbines, and are quite careless as to time and place in the
matter of firing their weapons off.’
‘I am not fond of carbines--still, hunger overcomes my natural
cowardice,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I would brave Sylvestre--I would brave the
Seigneur himself for a bowl of milk.’
The dairy, almost hidden from view by thickly-planted alders, lay at
the northern end of the Manoir, immediately under a window of the old
Seigneur’s study.
‘You hold your life in your hand,’ whispered Marjorie, as they stepped
noiselessly along. ‘Grandpapa is always astir by this hour. If he were
to look through his window, you see, he might fire first and recognise
you afterwards.’
‘Although you are my accomplice?’
‘He would be in the right, any way, according to old Norman law. What
is a Seigneur worth if he may not use firearms at discretion? We should
lodge the accident officially, au greffe, plead self-defence, if the
case ever came to be heard, and pay an amende of a few hundred francs
to the island poor.’
She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, which expressed that the
subject was disposed of satisfactorily.
The broken pane, shrouded in green leaves, was conveniently near the
casement bolt. Sufficient space existed for Marjorie’s slim hand to
pass through the opening. There came a click as she slipped the bolt
back in its setting, a slight groaning sound as Geoffrey Arbuthnot
lifted the sash guardedly. Then the heiress of Tintajeux made good a
somewhat undignified entrance into her own house, her tutor keeping
watch for possible intruders outside.
Oh! the ice-cool sweetness of this Guernsey dairy, the air entering
in free currents through gratings in either wall, the big pans filled
with golden cream, the butter of yesterday’s churning standing, in
tempting pats, upon the fair white shelves! Marjorie plunged a jug
boldly into a pan of milk only set last night. It seemed--as she
remembered Suzette, the fiery-tempered dairymaid--like a first plunge
into crime. Conscience, however, as occurs in weightier matters than
pillaging cream, hardened rapidly. To glide on tiptoe, from the dairy
to the larder, to cut some solid trenches from a new-baked raisin loaf
intended for the Seigneur’s lunch-table, was a minute’s work.
Then Miss Bartrand handed out her spoils to Geoffrey Arbuthnot. She
cleared the window at a jump. The sash was stealthily closed, the
boughs were pulled back into place, and away the pair walked, across
the cedar-shadowed lawn, through the cool and dewy maze, to Arcadia.