THAT LITTLE DIVINITY
The project roused her, at least, into physical brightness. As
she walked at Geoffrey’s side towards the hospital, the basket of
strawberries hanging from her arm, her hands filled with roses, a
stranger, meeting them, would have taken Dinah Arbuthnot for some April
cheeked girl, ignorant of passion as of disappointment; a girl needing
no apologist! She wore, on this fateful afternoon, a dove-coloured
Quaker gown, a Gainsborough hat tied beneath her chin by black velvet
strings; _item_, a large plain cambric tippet, with cambric half
sleeves reaching to the elbows. It was the latest costume invented by
her husband in an idle moment. And Geoffrey had lost exactly half an
hour while she put it on.
But what man would grudge a lost half-hour after one glance at that for
which he had waited!
The road from Miller’s Hotel to the hospital led through Petersport
High Street, and close to the north entrance of Colonel de Gourmet’s
garden. At the moment when Dinah and Geff walked along, it chanced
that the Colonel, himself, reclined under the shaded verandah of
his drawing-room,--the Colonel, smoking his third cheroot, and
offering unsentimental criticisms on the dress and looks of such
feminine passers-by as came within range of a pair of languidly held
opera-glasses.
Of an afternoon Colonel de Gourmet’s drawing-room was generally full.
Lacking many, let us say lacking all the more solid human qualities,
the old East Indian sybarite had one virtue--he was universally
hospitable. Nothing pleased him better than that a man he had invited
to breakfast should loiter on till dinner. Nothing pleased him better
than that other men whom he had not invited should drop in, at any hour
they chose, make free with his rare cigars, rarer wines, and entertain
each other with ideas, or with that best discovered substitute for the
trivial masculine mind--cards.
In a garrison town, sea on three sides, and barely available space on
the other for a polo match or a herring run, it may be believed that
old Colonel de Gourmet was in no lack of callers.
Six or eight men, young enough, most of them, to be their host’s
grandsons, were lounging, this July afternoon, in various attitudes of
idleness about his pleasant bachelor drawing-room. The air was lightly
impregnated with tobacco smoke, so good of its kind that, mingled
with the wafted garden sweets, it scarcely seemed grosser than some
finely distilled odour of musk flower or of tea-rose. Gaston Arbuthnot
was on the point of finishing a match at écarté with little Oscar
Jones--two or three of Oscar’s brother officers forming a silent and
discriminative gallery.
Cards, simply as cards, Gaston Arbuthnot disliked, although he had
an inborn knack of playing most things successfully. The childish
intricacies of a game like Nap., beloved of all the Maltshire
subalterns, were to him a weariness of spirit.
‘We can use your English Nap. as a means,’ he would tell them,
frankly, ‘just as we can use blind hookey or, simpler than either,
chicken hazard, if we want to transfer money from one man’s pocket
to another. As a matter of amusement, I would sooner play euchre
or poker for counters: in poker especially, all our natural human
instincts--bluster, bluffing, intent to deceive, etc.--come agreeably
to the fore.’
Whist, Gaston confessed, he played well. At écarté he was moderately
good. This moderate goodness his antagonist was about to test
practically.
‘Four, all!’ cried little Oscar, eager over a just-dealt, brilliant
hand of trumps.
‘The king,’ said Gaston, quietly laying down his cards. ‘Some one tell
de Gourmet it is his turn to cut in.’
The Colonel had now risen to his feet. He was watching an object,
evidently of paramount interest, through his opera-glasses.
‘A throat--an ankle--shoulders! Tell you what it is, sir,--she is
the prettiest woman in the island--not one of our society beauties
can hold a candle to her! And she’s not a woman one meets at any of
the parties.--By and by, Arbuthnot, by and by.’ For Gaston with a
presentiment of the truth, sat, restlessly, shuffling and re-shuffling
the cards. ‘To view the Queen of Hearts in flesh and blood is better,
surely, than handling her in pasteboard. Now where did one see that
little divinity before? At Saturday’s rose-show, of course. Asked
Linda Thorne about her. Mrs. Linda--true type of her sex--affected not
to know her name. Luckily, such a paragon does not need a name. An
Archdeaconess, if I mistake not, threw her little pebble. “The young
person with the yellow hair was--nobody one knew.”’
Every man in the room, with the exception of Arbuthnot, had by this
time crowded to the window. One of the youngsters hazarded a bold
whisper in the host’s ear. It was old de Gourmet’s deafer ear. He
caught the note of warning imperfectly. He resumed his parable with
warmth:
‘French woman, do you say? Cannot believe it, sir. No French woman had
ever such a complexion, such hair. But the dress, with its complex
simplicity, comes from Paris, doubtless. Dove coloured _mousseline
de laine_.’ The Colonel made these things as much a study as his
Brillat Savarin. ‘A tippet, designedly plain, such as Perfection, only,
dare put on. A little black velvet knot beneath the dainty chin....
(Directly, Arbuthnot, directly--calm your impatience.) And look at her
teeth, now she smiles, and her dimples! The young fellow with her seems
disposed to make the best of his opportunities--small blame to him!’
Throughout the listeners there ran a flash of hideous silence. At last
some one passed a slip of paper, on which a name had been hastily
scribbled, into Colonel de Gourmet’s gouty fingers, and then arose
general conversation, mainly as to the weather prospects. After this
fog that had been hanging about the Channel for days, and with the
glass running down fast, what were the chances we should not have a
thunderstorm in the course of the next twenty-four hours?
Gaston Arbuthnot arranged the cards in two neat packs on the table and
waited silently for his host. He felt morally certain that the little
divinity was his wife, also that Lord Rex Basire was her companion.
And a wholesomely bitter contrition filled his soul, a feeling widely
differing from the vague disrelish with which he had watched her
teaching Basire cross-stitch five days before. Probably he never knew
how dear Dinah’s white name was to him, never realised how culpably he
had left her in the shade, until this moment’s humiliation.
And still Gaston’s countenance betrayed him not. An instant later, he
was rallying the Colonel on his boyish enthusiasm, confessing that,
for his own part, he was too staid a Benedict to exert himself, at the
present state of the thermometer, merely because a nice-looking woman
happened to pass along the street.
‘And what are our stakes--the usual fiver?’ asked de Gourmet, looking
immensely tickled as he hobbled across the room to the card-table. ‘I
am afraid of you though, Arbuthnot! You are just the man to be in luck.’
‘I don’t believe in luck. Conduct is fate.’ Gaston lifted his handsome
face. He fixed his clear steely glance on the somewhat Silenus features
over against him. ‘Champagne?--I thank you, Colonel. No brain-enemy,
just at present. Don’t you know that we Yankees keep our heads cool----’
‘On purpose to rook the Britishers,’ interrupted de Gourmet, still with
a suppressed chuckle in his voice.
‘On purpose to rook the Britishers. Now, let us attend to business,
sir,’ said Gaston cheerfully. ‘The best of three games for a five-pound
note--good!’
The little divinity and her companion had by this time reached the
hospital gates.
‘I hope I shall use the proper words, Geff,’ whispered Dinah, looking
flushed and nervous. ‘The kind of _exhortation_, you know, that
clergymen’s wives would give to sick people.’
‘Impossible!’ Geoffrey disencouraged her promptly. ‘Orthodoxy cannot be
learnt at a moment’s notice. You must be content to be--yourself! And
that is much,’ he added, watching her beautiful, earnest face. ‘Your
sermon may well be a silent one. Look, just as you are looking at this
moment, and leave the rest to the patient’s human nature. Jack may be
a miserable sinner, needing homilies. That is a fact you and I have no
certitude about. We know that he is a poor lad, far from his people,
laid low in pain and weakness. Depend upon it, the sound of a tender
voice, the sight of Dinah Arbuthnot’s face, must prove good medicine,
both for his soul and body.’
The tears started to Dinah’s eyes. She was just at that tension point
of suppressed emotion when a kindly accent, a word or two of praise,
are as hands extended to a drowning man. If Gaston only esteemed her
poor personal gifts as Geoffrey did--for, of whatever she thought,
to-day, Gaston still was beneath the current of her thinking! Nay (this
followed by a descending, yet inevitable sequence of ideas), if Gaston
could only hold the opinion of her held--Dinah, remembering events, had
a little thrill of shame--by a man like Lord Rex Basire!
Perhaps the sum-total of yoked infelicity might be lessened if careless
husbands would reckon with themselves, sometimes, concerning the number
of their deserved rivals--such husbands, I mean, as possess wives of
Dinah Arbuthnot’s mould. For must not the answer be trumpet-tongued:
‘The whole seeing world!’ Does not every man, save the purblind, range
himself by intuition on the side of a young and beautiful and neglected
woman? But careless husbands may not have imagination enough for such
a stretch, or there may be sympathisers ... outside feminine judges
... mature sirens ... a clever whisper, even, now and then. And so the
wife’s heart continues to ache to the last--or gives up aching of a
sudden: deeper tragedy, by far.
Dinah’s colour went and came as she traversed the corridors of the
hospital beside Geoffrey. The moment they entered Ward A., the men’s
accident room, she forgot her want of knowledge, of orthodoxy.
‘Explanation’ was not needed here. She saw only the rows of beds,
each bed with its pallid inmate. She felt only that she was Dinah
Thurston--among the poor, the simple, the suffering,--among her equals.
The patients in the ward were mostly working-men in the springtime
of their strength, the majority of them victims of the late quarry
accident. A few, like poor Jack, had been struck down by mishap at sea
or in the harbour. Beside nearly every bed was a visitor. Here might
be seen a country girl talking in whispers to her sweetheart. Here a
pale wife clasped her husband’s hand, or a mother in silent anguish
watched her lad’s changed face. On every pillow was a little posy of
sweet-smelling cottage flowers, reminding the gaunt sufferers who lay
there, patient and uncomplaining, of blue summer sky, of the freshness
of fields and gardens, of home.
Number 28 had neither visitor nor posy. Poor Jack came from a remote
hamlet among the Devonshire moors. His mates on board the _Princess_
were afloat again. The lad had no friends, save the surgeons and nurses
of the Guernsey hospital--and Geff Arbuthnot.
‘Speak to him about his own country,’ Geoffrey whispered, as his
companion drew back a little; ‘Jack will dispense with any formal
introduction.’
And on this, Dinah, her face overflowing with sweetest womanly
compassion, stooped over the low pallet and spoke--a commonplace word
or two, unworthy of raising to the dignity of print--a word or two
whose homely Devonshire lilt called the blood up to Jack’s temples as
though some voice from the old familiar home addressed him.
Since her marriage, Dinah had learnt to speak English, ‘with a foreign
pronunciation,’ Gaston would tell her, ‘yet scarcely strong enough to
be disagreeable.’ Although a tell-tale cadence was traceable, ever and
again, in her speech, she had tardily succeeded in putting away the
Devonshire burr that was strong on her tongue when Geoffrey met her
first. Here, at Jack’s bedside, no Gaston near to be put to shame,
she fell back, instinctively, upon the West Country accent, the soft,
half-strange, half-familiar o’s and u’s of her childhood.
‘It’s so bad to be sick, for a young fellow like you, and away from
home. We just thought you might like a talk with some one Devonshire
born and bred. I wonder, now, do you and I come from the same part?’
‘I was born at Torrhill, a village out away beyond Chagford. A poor
place, ma’am, on the borders of the moor--quite a poor place,’ repeated
Jack apologetically.
‘Why, that is near to my own town, Tavistock!’ said Dinah. ‘We used to
pass Torrhill going along the Vale of Widdicombe every autumn when we
went out whortleberrying. “Torrhill, in the cold country.” I mind we
children used to say, when we got snowstorms in winter, “the Widdicombe
folk were picking their geese.”’
Well, and as he listened to her simple talk, to the soft West Country
accent, it came to pass that Geff Arbuthnot’s heart knew a thrill of
its old infatuation. No man can possibly hold two women dear at the
same time. And Geoffrey was in love--the warm flesh and blood love of
four-and-twenty--with an actuality, not a remembrance. But his heart
thrilled at Dinah’s voice. Something in his temperament forbade him
to outlive the past, wholly. It was a book that could not be clasped.
A word, an accent, and the enchantment cast upon him in the long dead
summer days at Lesser Cheriton would be revitalised. This was his
weakness (a conscious one) always; and now he was in the dangerous
state of wounded feeling when a man’s tenderness is easily arrested at
rebound....
Those Devonshire o’s and u’s brought back before him in its fiery
ardour the fortnight when he worshipped Dinah Thurston’s footsteps,
the fortnight ending on that evening when Gaston and his friends drove
past in the twilight on their return from Ely. Standing here, in the
Guernsey hospital ward, Geoffrey’s senses recalled the rush of wheels
down the village street, the lingering daylight in the low fields of
Cambridgeshire sky. He remembered how Dinah’s head and throat stood out
in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge of the cottage garden.
And he decided, there and then,--yes, while she was chatting,
low-voiced, smiling, to the lad about the moors, and the ‘cold
country,’ and the autumn huckle-berrying--to return to England
forthwith.
A French steamer was to touch at Petersport on Sunday morning. That
would give him to-morrow for winding up his small affairs, for taking
leave of his patients, for visiting Tintajeux. He would kiss, in
coldest fancy, the hair, the lips that should have made up to him for
the unattainable heaven of his youth’s desire. He would look once again
in Marjorie’s eyes, and go. It was possible--here, at least, might be
a gleam of comfort--that Gaston and Dinah would steer clearer through
their difficulties if left absolutely alone than they were doing now.
He told her of his intention when they were on their way back to the
hotel.
‘And, remember, you know your way to the hospital,’ he added quickly,
as Dinah was about to speak. ‘I hope when I am gone you will pay Jack
many a kind little visit, your hands as full of fruits and flowers as
they were to-day.’
‘When you are gone!’ echoed Dinah, blankly. The fear smote her that
with Geoffrey’s going, such slack hold as she still had upon Gaston
must be loosened. ‘I hoped you would remain here ... as long, at least,
as I must. Think of all the sick people who will miss you, Geff. Think
of Miss Bartrand.’
‘I shall find sick people everywhere. In the matter of doctors,
Guernsey is full of better men than I.’
‘And Marjorie Bartrand?’
‘Ah! that is a different side of the question. I am conceited enough to
think Miss Bartrand’s mathemathics will suffer.’
‘And you don’t care--you are not one bit sorry at giving her up? Do you
know, Geoffrey, I had begun to hope----’
‘Miss Bartrand will be a Girton girl before long,’ interrupted
Geoffrey. ‘Happily,’--he paused--‘she is not without self-reliance, has
more than a woman’s share, perhaps, of ambition. When we see each other
next it will be as fellow-students in Cambridge.’
Dinah knew the tone of his voice. It was not a tone that invited
discussion.
‘Your leaving is an ill stroke of luck for me, Geff. Day by day
Gaston’s engagements seem to grow upon him. My time will be emptier
than ever when you are gone.’
‘You may fill it, full as time can hold. I thought as I watched you
charming poor Jack out of knowledge of his pain that you had missed
your vocation. You should be a nurse. Yours are the ideal face and
voice and tread that we want in the hospitals. If you ever harbour
thoughts of emancipation, or of a mission,’ said Geoffrey, ‘remember my
hint.’
‘When Gaston has used the last line that can be modelled from my face,
for instance?’
The smile was flickering with which Dinah hazarded the surmise.
‘When Gaston has got his last inspiration from your face! Unluckily for
the hospitals, that day will not come quite yet. A woman with a mission
should have no such vexatious encumbrance as a husband or a lover.’
For once, Geoffrey’s tone was cynical. He recalled his parting with
Marjorie Bartrand over-night.