CHAPTER XLV
LABELLED AND CORDED
‘No argument can help us, Geff. A woman without a tithe of my poor wife’s noble qualities but possessing even a faint sense of the ridiculous, might be reached: Dinah, never! Oh, it is the absurdity of the thing which humiliates one! A French song sung after a dinner-party ... the winning of a pair of gloves!’ said Gaston Arbuthnot bitterly. ‘And to think, out of such materials, that the jealousy of the most impracticable woman living could evolve serious tragedy!’
‘Tragedy,’ returned Geff, ‘of which the fifth act is, as yet, unconditioned.’
Dinner was over; a meal at which Dinah had not appeared. The Arbuthnot cousins, side by side, were pacing a remote walk of the hotel garden. And Geoffrey, little by little, had made out the truth in respect of Dinah’s crowning misery. With his heart sore as a brave man’s heart could be over keen personal disappointment, Geoffrey knew that he must arbitrate between the two people who stood nearest to him on earth, and with whose lives his own, by some fantastic stroke of destiny, seemed, for good and for evil, to be interwoven.
‘I don’t believe in rash judgments, formed when the blood is hot,’ went on Gaston Arbuthnot. ‘When Dinah burst upon me with this new proposal I felt as if ten years of my youth had been taken from me. My anger was at white heat, and if I had spoken as I felt.... Well, I did not so speak. I accepted my fate with a decent show of self-command. Reviewing the position—yes, and remembering every word you have been saying, Geff—I believe it may be best for my poor Dinah to leave me, on probation. Let her stay for a couple of months with her people in Devonshire, see how things go on, and——’
‘They will go on vilely! They will go from bad to worse.’ Geoffrey was in no humour for putting ornamental polish on his words. ‘When does good come from a tentative separation between man and wife?’
‘Exactly what I said to Dinah. These little imitation divorces, I told her, are risky experiments. Impossible to make her hear me.’
‘Your eloquence must have been at fault. You have had perfect happiness, Gaston—there is the truth! You have had such a lot as does not fall to one man in a million, and you have grown careless of it.’
Geoffrey’s voice was set in a lower key than usual. Glancing round at him, Gaston surprised an expression on the strong features, a glow in the dark eyes that he remembered. Not wholly unlike this did Geff look on the late June evening when he came, four years ago, to his rooms in Jesus, and congratulated him, Gaston, on his engagement to Dinah Thurston.
‘You have always been Dinah’s friend. I thank God she will have you for her friend in the future. Towards myself, perhaps, you are a little less than kind. Some French proverb explains to us, does it not, how a man’s friendship can never be perfectly equal for a husband and for his wife?’
‘The French proverb is at fault, as far as I am concerned,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I am your friend. I am Dinah’s. At this present hour I reprobate the conduct of both with strict impartiality.’
‘My conduct is negative. I find myself placed by an outburst of the eternal feminine injustice in a ridiculous position. I must, as men have done before me, live a ridiculous position out. Whatever my wife desires in the way of money arrangements shall be hers. On the day when she is tired of Tavistock Moor I shall be at her feet.’
‘All this might be aptly said if you were in a stage-box, a critic looking on at the histrionic break-up of other people’s lives, with a view to the morning papers.’
‘I have tried, since I was a boy, to regard everything concerning myself from an indifferent person’s point of view. The habit has become second nature, and——’
‘Shake yourself free of it to-night. You are not an indifferent person. You are not criticising a scene in a mixed drama. You have to decide whether you, Gaston Arbuthnot, intend, at thirty, to be a failure or a success.’
‘A failure!’ repeated Gaston, his pride galled instantly. ‘In your office of peacemaker, Geff, don’t allow your good will to run away with you. We have a score of big examples—Byron, if you choose, at their head—to show how men of shipwrecked lives can give the world the best of their genius.’
‘When you come to genius,’ said Geff, grimly truthful, ‘we are off our lines. We are talking of common men, not of giants. For a man of your calibre, Gaston, to forfeit his domestic happiness is to forfeit all. In losing Dinah, whatever her folly in proposing the Quixotic scheme, you would lose your right hand. Up to this time, even with a good and beautiful and long-suffering woman at your side, your backslidings have been many. Do you think you are going to work onward and upward without an influence such as Dinah’s has been to hold you straight?’
‘You speak hotly, Geff.’
‘I feel hotly,’ answered Geoffrey, without an effort at a fence. ‘My own life has been spoilt—I—I would say,’ he corrected himself, ‘the happiness which men like you, Gaston, can throw away or keep as they choose, is not likely to come near me. Mine must be sought for in such commonplace daily work as I have strength to do. This gives me a selfish interest in the welfare of the people I love. Your fireside and Dinah’s,’ he attempted a lighter tone, ‘is the only one to which I can look forward in my old age.’
Again Gaston watched his face curiously. Perhaps in the moment’s keen illumination he read aright the larger nature than his own, apprehended with his balanced mixture of worldly depth and moral airiness, a page whose intricacies should never, in this life, be wholly deciphered by poor Geff himself.
‘You were right as to genius, Geoffrey. There is an ingredient wanting in me! If I had had your heart I should not at thirty be a manufacturer of third-rate prettinesses for the dealers.’
Engrossed in talk, the cousins paced to and fro among the falling shadows of the garden for another hour. It was an hour, a talk, which neither of the Arbuthnots would be likely to refer to, which neither certainly would forget this side the grave. By and by, when night had come in earnest, when the roses and jasmines that clung round the hotel verandahs smelt dewy sweet, Gaston returned to the house alone. He entered through the little court that had been fitted up as his studio. Here a flicker of starlight overhead showed him his tools, his unfinished models, his working blouse, all the implements of his craft, neatly set in order as Dinah’s hand left them. Passing on into the parlour he found himself in darkness, silence. For a moment a nameless fear—the possibility that she was gone—contracted Gaston Arbuthnot’s heart. Then, with soft, eager step he made his way to his wife’s bedroom, laid his hand on the lock, and opened the door by an inch.
A solitary light burned there.
‘May I come in, Dinah? Can I be of use to you in your packing?’
To this she answered not, or answered in so low a voice that Gaston’s ear could not catch the sound. He pushed back the door wide and entered, making fast the lock behind him. Dinah’s packing, to the smallest detail, was complete. Her boxes, labelled and corded, stood in a row; her wraps were put up; her travelling bag was strapped. Dinah herself sat in a low chair beside the curtained half-open window. The light from a hand lamp on the mantelshelf just enabled Gaston to discern the dead whiteness of her tired face.
‘Your packing done?’ he asked her. ‘And have you moved these heavy boxes by yourself?’
‘The Frenchwoman helped me. I had no need of her—my arms are strong—but when she insisted, I thought it would look strange to refuse longer. I tried to speak to her lightly—just saying that I had to go away, of a sudden, to stay with friends in England.’
‘That was wise. It were a pity that idle tongues should begin to talk of us already.’
No answer came to this. Gaston saw that her hands trembled as they lay tightly clasped together on her knee.
‘And about money, Dinah?’
Crossing the room, Mr. Arbuthnot shut down the window, then placed himself at the distance of two or three feet from his wife. He looked at her long and tenderly, looked as though on that white, strained face he saw some beauty which the dulness of his senses, the selfishness of his heart, had never during the past four years let him discover.
‘Geoffrey and I have just had a long talk. I believe, as far as Southampton, you had better let Geff be purse-holder. Then we must think of the future. We must plan as to a permanent settlement. I am a poor man, you know, Dinah, or rich only by fits and starts. If I can secure to you two hundred pounds a year, could you make it enough?’
Dinah raised her clasped hands deprecatingly. Her speech failed her. Now, in the moment when she needed strength, self-control most, they proved traitors. She could only sit, faint, cold, sick, only hear the details of her own passionate wish put into calm, reasonable—ay, and generous detail by Gaston.
‘For the first year,’ he repeated, ‘until I become a steadier worker, could you make an allowance of two hundred pounds suffice?’
‘I want nothing but a few pounds at first,’ said Dinah, with a desperate effort. ‘After that I will work—plain sewing, out-door work, anything they can find for me to do.’
‘You might get plain sewing and out-door work, too, without going as far as Tavistock Moor.’
‘But I am known there. I am not the sort of woman—I mean as yet—to make my way alone among strangers.’
‘You shall neither go to Tavistock Moor nor among strangers. You shall remain with me.’ Gaston said this with slow emphasis. ‘The law is on my side.’
Poor Dinah started up. The world seemed to float away from before her. A piteous look in which—yes, amidst all its anguish—there was a tremble of hope, went across her blanched face.
‘My sins have been grievous enough, the sins of carelessness and selfishness—they have not gone deeper. Let the future make up for them. Forgive me, Dinah!’ Arbuthnot’s arms were opened wide. ‘I could not work, I could not live without you. I love you better than my life.’
With a cry as of a child taken back, unexpectedly, to the lost shelter of home, Dinah fell upon his breast.