The French waitress met Dinah as she entered the hotel.
Madame Thorne had called—there was scarce five minutes since. The visitor insisted ... but insisted on entering. A thousand amiabilities were to be transmitted by the tongue of Louise, and something—the Frenchwoman shrugged her shoulders vaguely—had been left in Madame’s salon for Monsieur.
‘I know all about it,’ cried Dinah, with readiness. ‘Mrs. Thorne and I have just been talking together. It is quite right, Louise.’
She assumed the lightest, most cheerful tone of which she was mistress, feeling, with inward smart, that the French shrug was over-vague, that a glimmer of suspicious knowledge showed on the serving-woman’s face. Then she walked, her step mock-elastic, a poorly counterfeited smile upon her lips, to her sitting-room. Shutting the door, with the automatic care human beings bestow on trivial actions in times when their hearts are fullest, Dinah walked straight to the fireplace. The ‘something’ left for Monsieur was evidently before her. A letter, almost amounting to a packet, stood on the mantelpiece. It was addressed in large decisive handwriting to ‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel, Guernsey.’
(Cette chère Smeet! Elle sait si bien s’effacer! A pair of iron-gray men’s gloves, lying, modestly, on the farther corner of the shelf did not arrest Dinah Arbuthnot’s sight.)
‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel, Guernsey.’
Well, reader, if Dinah had possessed only a few grains more of worldly experience it must have been clear to her that this letter never issued from The Bungalow. In the first place, by reason of the handwriting—when did a woman of Linda’s culture affect the Greek e’s, the up and down characters of an undergraduate? In the second, by the ignorance of common English etiquette which the use of the title ‘Mr.’ betrayed.
But Dinah had no worldly experience at all, neither had she the imaginativeness which renders some equally untaught people nimble at guessing. In her mind was one engrossing thought—Gaston. In her ears rang the text of Mrs. Thorne’s message. ‘I deposited the stakes on a corner of your mantleshelf. Tell your husband from me that he has won, that I am bankrupt.’
There was no room, in her tempest of heart and brain, for doubts that could have been favourable to her own peace.
‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel.’ She took the letter—at first with unwillingness—in her hands. She turned it over and over. The envelope was too small for all that the sender had forced it to contain; it adhered on one side, only. A touch, Dinah thought, shrinking from her thought, and the edges must come asunder. Her hands trembled so violently that she let the letter fall, with some force, on the ground. As she picked it up she saw that the narrow edge of adhering envelope had become narrower. An instant more of dalliance—and the temptation, strong and imperious, to open it altogether, had taken hold of her.
‘Be true to yourself,’ whispered a still small voice, the voice of Dinah’s better nature, ‘loyal, upright, as you have striven to be from the day you married Gaston Arbuthnot. Go away from him to-night, to-morrow, if you have not wifely courage to live your life out at his side. But go, with head erect, looking neither to the right hand nor the left, till the last.’
Then rose another voice, bolder of tone, of strain less heroic.
‘Poor, foolish, hot-hearted woman! Is it not possible that you are brewing a thunderstorm in a tea-cup? Why these turns and twistings of conscience? Linda Thorne, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, thinking no evil, make one of the silly wagers common among idle people who inhabit an idle world. The lady is the loser, calls at her friend’s hotel to discharge her debt, and meeting the friend’s wife, confesses, playfully, that she is bankrupt! Open that quarter-inch of yawning envelope, as Linda Thorne, no doubt, intended you to do. In Gaston’s absence, you have often opened letters addressed to him, by his own desire. Where is the fancied line between former right and present wrong. How could it matter to Gaston if you did see the contents of a packet in which there is probably not a syllable of writing?’
And Dinah’s heart was vanquished by the meanness of opportunity. She opened it.
A length of folded ribbon met her sight; a tiny bouquet, odorous still with yesterday’s sweetness, of briar and of heliotrope; a sheet of notepaper upon which one word was written. Bare hints—outlines of some unknown story, which jealous passion might easily colour, fill up with vivid detail, endow with pulsating life! After the first moment’s shock, Dinah stood like a woman petrified. Her eyes were fixed on the one word—never meant for their perusal! Her face was bloodless. She felt cold, stupefied with anger. It seemed to her that she could not drag herself from the spot where this hateful, sure light had dispelled her darkness for ever. She waited—as though waiting could avail her! At last the striking of a clock caused her to start. She had got to dress, she remembered, to face men and women, to dine—for Gaston’s sake. With an effort that almost cost her bodily pain, Dinah made her way into her bedroom. She locked, double locked the door. Then holding the envelope and its contents between her shivering hands, she tried to force herself into calmness, to resolve on conduct, if that were possible, which should be just to herself and to her husband.
He was guilty of no actual wrong-doing. This thought presented itself, in clear pure light, amidst all the dusky half-shades of her mind. Gaston was fickle, neglectful of herself, too easily led captive along the road of pleasure. Worse things than these she could never think of him. To the moment of her death he must remain her best beloved and her lord; the one man, could the hour of choosing come again, whom she would choose out of ten thousand. She did not accuse Gaston of wrong. She sought not to blacken Linda. For aught she knew, these delicately sentimental friendships, these intimacies which permitted tender expression—the yielding of a ribbon or a flower!—might, in the world above her head, be held innocent.
What she did know was that she, Dinah, belonged not to that world, desired no further education in its usages. A comedy ... an amusing drawing-room charade, perhaps ... was in course of rehearsal between a tired Indian lady, needing sensation, and her husband. She would not passively, ignobly stand by, a spectator. She would drag out her life of paltry distrust no longer. Gaston’s formal leave must be asked for, before she started; money also—enough to take her from Guernsey to the Devonshire moors. This would be all. Briefly, if Heaven would help her, honestly, she would tell Gaston what wish lay next her heart. And Gaston was not likely to thwart her! By Monday—oh, that it could be earlier—she would go back to her own people, to a life shone on by no sun, watered by no shower, a life shut out from keen pleasure as from keen humiliation for evermore.
Dinah sank into a chair and fell to examining the hue and texture of the ribbon, curiosity, for the moment, out-balancing cold repugnance. It was of foreign make, she saw; a relic, doubtless, of those days when two people, who might have suited each other, used to meet, to exchange furtive whispers in a Paris salon; a memento sufficiently precious to have survived through a decade of divided years, and to become the object of a keenly contested wager between them now.
‘Tell your husband,’ with fresh purport Linda’s message returned to her, ‘that he has won, and I am bankrupt.’
She put back the enclosures in their cover, not suffering herself to smell the flowers’ languid odour, or look again on the one word whose import her jealousy divined and magnified. Then, just as she had hidden the letter away in a secret drawer of her dressing-case, the first dinner-bell was set ringing, and Dinah bethought her that, if she would carry out Gaston’s parting request, she must go into the dining-room, alone.
No further shirking of that ‘alone’ was practicable. On former occasions she had quietly contrived to absent herself from the public table when Gaston dined abroad, pleading headaches for heartaches, preferring tea to food, ringing the changes by which neglected wives, when they have common sense, keep their own sad counsel apart from the world. The time was past for deceits now, either towards herself, or others. Dinner, to-day, like all her future dinners, for twenty or thirty years, say, must, perforce, be eaten without Gaston.
To drift—here, in truth, seemed that which lay before her! To drift! At the present moment to speculate on possible effects—to vacillate over a tucker, a locket, the colour of one’s dinner dress. A despairing human soul, perplexed over the rival merits of pink, white, or blue; a soul which, when love shone on it, had less than its feminine share of toilet vanity! As poor Dinah hesitated, her thoughts travelled back, by no road she knew, to Saturday’s rose-show, her first meeting with Rex Basire, her earliest distinct doubt of Gaston’s truthfulness. She decided to put on the black dress she wore that day, to pin a white rose, Gaston’s flower by predilection, in her hair, to wear a silver bracelet, Gaston’s first present after their marriage, on her wrist.
How fair, how marvellously fair she was! The fact struck Dinah with a sense of newness as she stood, waiting for the last dinner-bell, before her glass. Surely her looks, joined to such lavish love as she had given, might have contented the heart, the pride of the most exacting husband. If she had only had more mind. There was the flaw, the fatal deficiency to a man with whom mind was all in all, like Gaston Arbuthnot.
She scrutinised the moulding of her temples, the lines of her perfectly cut head. In outward proportion she thought there was not much amiss. It must be the quality of the brain that was poor. There must be an inherited peasant slowness, a bluntness of perception or wit, something which disabled her from holding her own against the taught graces, the pliant, inexhaustible lightness of such an one as Linda Thorne. She might, if lowlier duties had fallen to her, have been clever enough to manage a house, to look after her husband’s interests, to bring up children. Amongst ladies and gentlemen—oh, the bitterness with which she uttered the titles of gentility half aloud—amongst ladies and gentlemen she had no place, no chance.
And in her nature, not thoroughly sounded as yet, but of whose depths the last few days had vaguely informed her—in her innermost nature were evil things that a constant pressure of temptation might bring to the surface. She was not like Geoffrey. No ministering to others could fill her life, at any rate not while she was young, while the cry for love had the double keenness of a physical and of a moral want. If she continued a hanger-on of the world that Gaston loved,—‘some one who must be asked, don’t you know, occasionally, on sufferance,’—she would, one day, meet with homage, differently offered, and from a different man to Rex Basire. Was she sure that gratitude would not be awakened in her, then vanity? Was she sure she might not decline, step by step, to the condition of that most pitiable among women—a wife, true to the cold letter of her fealty, who has at once outlived her husband’s affection and the stings of her own self-contempt?
Dinah started, guiltily, as the sharp clang of the dinner-bell roused her into final action. It took a good many minutes before she could recover sufficiently to face the ordeal that lay before her. At last, arming herself by the reflection that henceforth all life’s common actions must be gone through alone, and under a certain cloud of suspicion, she made her way to the dining-room. After a moment’s trembling heartsickness, she pushed back one of the double doors—entered.
A hush, an involuntary suspension of knife and fork greeted her. The light through a western window fell full upon her golden head. The whiteness of her throat and hands was thrown into brilliant relief by the sombre dress she wore.
‘A saint of Holman Hunt’s—Early manner,’ thought a high-church curate, away on his four weeks’ holiday, and who never would know more of Dinah than the large sad eyes, the lips’ carnation, the nimbus of sunlight-coloured hair.
‘Can the complexion be absolutely real?’ floated through the brain of more than one duly aged and authorised feminine critic.
Miller, with his professional little run and smile, came forward. He ushered Dinah Arbuthnot to her place.
‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot not expected, I believe?’ asked the host, as Dinah prepared to take her seat.
‘No, Mr. Arbuthnot is dining at the Fort.’
‘And Mr. Geoffrey will not return till late. Then I may be allowed to fill this vacant chair? Thank you, madam. I should not have ventured to place a stranger next Mrs. Arbuthnot without permission.’
A minute later Dinah discovered—no stranger, but her husband’s friend, Lord Rex Basire, at her side.