CHAPTER XLVII
BESIDE THE CRADLE
‘I just feel we are too happy. It makes me tremble, Gaston. I would rather see the speck of cloud no bigger than a man’s hand than for ever live in dread of it.’
‘You would rather have anything than the actual, my dear. That is a little weakness of the sex. Surely your daughter ought to fill every crevice of your dissatisfied heart!’
‘She fills it, fuller than my heart can hold—my own sweet baby. She is a wonderfully forward child, is she not? So strong of her age,—so intelligent—so beautiful!’
‘Not beautiful, Dinah. I am no amateur of infants, although I can tolerate their presence after the age of two years. As regards the particular infant sleeping in the cradle, yonder, even my knowledge of the subject enables me to say she is unornamental—as unornamental a child as could be found in Florence.’
‘She is your living portrait,’ returned the mother, unconscious of irony. ‘Yes, even to her shrewd looks, to the firm way she clasps her fingers. And already—in that,’ murmured Dinah, penitently, ‘it may be she favours me—already, Baby has a temper.’
These exceedingly domestic confidences were interchanged in a vast old Florentine room, fitted up by Gaston Arbuthnot as a studio, and on a November night, some forty-eight hours later than the gray evening when Marjorie paid her farewell visit to Cassandra Tighe.
But November in Florence is a different season to November in the English Channel. The dry nipping touch of Italian winter had already made itself felt beside the banks of the Arno, and the blaze from an up-piled heap of olive-faggots cast a ruddy glow upon the room and its occupants. Gaston Arbuthnot, his day’s work done, reclined, outstretched, in one of his favourite American chairs beside the hearth. On the other side the fire was a cradle, wickered, capacious, of the genuine Italian build that you may remember in many a sixteenth-century picture. And beside this cradle stood Dinah, serious of mien, gazing with rapt, Madonna-like devotion at the little English child who slept there.
At Gaston’s last remark she stooped and drew a muslin curtain tenderly over her daughter’s face. Then she came across to her husband, she sank on her knees beside him. Stealing a soft arm round Mr. Arbuthnot’s neck, Dinah brought his cheek within reach of her lips.
‘Honestly and without jesting, you can say you think the child ugly?’
‘I think she will never be as handsome as her mother—the better for herself, perhaps. Beauty is a snare. Who should know that better than Dinah Arbuthnot?’
‘If I had been—well, plainer than I am, would you have sought me out, I wonder, in Aunt Sarah’s little cottage that summer?’
‘Difficult to speculate backwards! I had thought some plainish women charming before I heard the name of Lesser Cheriton.’
‘That is a matter of course. You had been the friend of Linda Thorne.’
‘Linda Smythe, as she was at that time. I don’t know that “cette chère Smeet” could ever be called charming. She was lively, apt, a thorough mistress of situation and inexhaustively talkative—to a boy fresh from school that gift of talkativeness goes for much! She lacked charm. I have heard her mourn over the deficiency, in her plaintive little way, poor soul, with tears.’
How calmly they spoke of Linda’s qualities—this Darby and Joan of nearly six years’ standing, to whom romance, in its earliest, sweetest bloom, would seem to have returned! From what a different standpoint Dinah could review the sentimental dilemmas of Gaston’s youth! How the renewal of their love had bettered them, man and woman alike!
‘Sometimes when I look back upon our Guernsey days, the days, I mean, which followed on that Langrune picnic, I feel a great remorse. Things ended happily ... because you would not let my jealous temper ruin both our lives.’
Possibly, thought Gaston Arbuthnot, because of Geff. He remembered their talk when the summer eve was sinking into darkness, the eve upon whose morrow Dinah would fain have quitted him for ever.
‘But I deserved the heaviest punishment that could have fallen upon me. Jealousy, such as mine was then, means selfishness, not love.’
‘Spoken from a fine moral height! All the same, Dinah, I think you did love me, slightly.’
‘I was unjust to Linda Thorne about your wager. When I opened the packet she left for you I was dishonourable. The whole thing may have been a jest—may have belonged to a time before you knew me at all. I recollect telling you I would keep that packet always. Well, Gaston—I wish now I had never seen it. There is a drawer in my dressing-case I have not once since had courage to open.’
Gaston Arbuthnot turned his head. Studying his wife’s face closely, some suspicion of possible mistake began to dawn upon him.
‘Are you certain as to your facts, Dinah? A drawer, you say, in your dressing-case which you never have found courage to open? And why not? I confess to being out of my depth. Linda’s gloves, honestly lost by her, honestly paid, lay on the parlour mantelshelf. Of this I am positive. From the mantelshelf I naturally transferred them to my pocket.’
‘Gloves!’
‘What else? You do not suppose poor Linda and I made bets of twenty pound notes?’
‘But the word she wrote for you—the flower, the ribbon.... Ah, Gaston,’ cried Dinah, hurriedly, ‘let us never have another misunderstanding. I was wrong—criminal, if you choose—in opening a cover that was not directed to myself. But I suffered for my wrong-doing—you should know that—and you may be frank with me now. I am not so weak that you need hide a syllable of the truth.’
‘I put the gloves in my pocket,’ Gaston Arbuthnot reasserted, ‘and to the best of my remembrance wore them out in about a fortnight. They were iron-gray. A pair of iron-gray gloves would last one ten days or a fortnight, would they not?’
On this Dinah Arbuthnot started to her feet. She remembered Gaston’s talent, of old, for calm mystification, and her heart fired.
‘I have not re-opened the subject for amusement, Gaston. To show you that I would make amends in earnest, I will fetch the packet this moment. I shall feel easier when it is in your keeping, to destroy or keep, as you choose.’
Taking up a hand-lamp, Dinah passed into a neighbouring chamber. When she returned, in three or four minutes’ time, there was a pallor about her lips, a threatening of tears (the like of which during the past fifteen months had been happily absent) in her voice.
‘Baby has moved—has she not! I thought I heard her from my room.’
‘The infant sneezed,’ answered Gaston Arbuthnot with gravity. ‘Much to my terror. Sneezing might suggest waking. And to be alone with a waking baby recalls Dr. Johnson and the tower. Bring your wonderful packet here’—she had paused for a moment beside the child’s cradle—‘and let us have the scene out.’
‘We will never have a scene again while we live.’ Poor Dinah sank into her former kneeling position; she rested her cheek against her husband’s coat-sleeve. ‘Indeed, I think it might be fairer to you, more generous to Linda Thorne, to close the matter—thus.’
She held the packet in the direction of the flames.
With a quick movement Gaston Arbuthnot’s hand stayed her. He drew the contents forth from the envelope. He read Marjorie Bartrand’s ‘one word.’ Then he glanced at the blackened flower-stalks, at the bit of tarnished Spanish ribbon.
‘And could you believe—in the full possession of your reason, wife—that this was meant for me?’
Dinah’s head drooped lower. She coloured violently.
‘Could you believe that Linda Thorne, a woman who has travelled over half the habitable globe alone, picking up experience everywhere—Linda, a woman of tact, a woman of the world—would commit herself to sentiment of doubtful application, set down in black and white?’
‘I never stopped to reason—the heart within me was too sore. I knew Linda Thorne had called. I saw that the envelope was directed to you.’
‘Or to Geoffrey—which? It is, as you see, addressed simply “Mr. G. Arbuthnot.”’
‘But Mrs. Thorne and Geff disliked each other. Do you think, even in jest, she would——’
‘My best Dinah—let a molehill which, during fifteen months, has been assuming gigantic size, return, forthwith, to molehill proportions? This handwriting may be Marjorie Bartrand’s. One can imagine a classico-mathematical girl making that kind of “e.” It is certainly not Linda’s.’
‘And the meaning of the solitary word “REPENTANCE!”’
‘Ah! you must read your own riddles,’ answered Gaston, with suavity. ‘Poor Linda and myself made an innocent wager of gloves, which I won. I know no more.’
Dinah rose hastily. She turned her face away from the fire’s light. Amidst the full happiness of the last year, in her wifely rejoicing over Gaston’s progress in his art, in the flood of charity towards all men which had come upon her with the new delights of motherhood, she had always dreaded the cloud ‘no bigger than a man’s hand,’ had always remembered the secret which a jealously locked drawer of her dressing-case hid out of sight. Her moral attitude towards Gaston had perforce been a stooping one, an attitude of dumb forgiveness. Believing in the present, hoping all things for the future, it had not been possible for her wholly to forget the past. In this moment’s sharp enlightenment, this unlooked-for vindication of Gaston’s loyalty, her first sensation was one of relief. Succeeding it—so swiftly that Dinah distinguished not where relief ended and pain began—there swept across her the keenest shame which in her fair untarnished life her soul had ever known.
‘You believe that the letter came from Marjorie Bartrand?’
The question fell from her lips almost unconsciously.
‘One suspects the Greek “e’s,” and see—here, in this corner is the Bartrand crest, an eagle with a bad-tempered beak and upheld claw. Take back your own, wife, your cherished vendetta. I will have none of it.’
‘And you think she cared, really, for poor Geff?’
‘Marjorie was seventeen years old. The season of the year was June. They bent their heads together over the same schoolroom table. Even I—I, who have been so long out of the running, saw whither things tended as early as the rose-show. Geff, no doubt, after a Platonic mode, admired the budding Girton girl—a girl,’ said Gaston, narrow-mindedly, ‘far too pretty for her calling! There came a breeze between them,—Geoffrey hinted as much to me the night before he left Guernsey,—a threatening of storm which, if a certain letter had not been kidnapped, might have cost him his life, I mean his liberty, there and then.’
By this time the blood had gone from Dinah’s cheeks. ‘And all this was brought about through me, through my small, self-engrossed jealousy. Oh, Gaston, how sinful I was, how guilty I am still! But for me, Geoffrey might long ago have come to happiness. He was our best friend always, and I betrayed him. I am the veriest wretch on earth.’
Tears of repentance rushed to Dinah’s eyes.
‘You do not mention a slight reparation you owe to Linda Thorne,’ observed Gaston, with his shrewd smile. ‘You forget that something may be due also to me, even me, a husband.’
‘I was ill, body and mind, that miserable day. I had scarce had an hour’s sleep since I came back from Langrune without you. A flimsy excuse,’ poor Dinah faltered, ‘and yet the only one I have to offer.’
‘It is the excuse in vogue. The big social scientists put just the same plea forward for the criminal classes. Crime is an illness. A man may run a knife into another simply because his digestion, reacting on the nerve centres, happened to be out of order. Probably, like you, my dear, the poor fellow had been suffering from insomnia! Such excuses,’ added Gaston, ‘are comforting enough for the man with the knife, but scarcely so consolatory to him stabbed.’
Dinah touched the flower stalks wistfully. She folded the ribbon with care before returning it to the envelope. Her hands trembled in her excitement.
‘You talk about reparation.... I shall not let an hour be lost. I shall write to Miss Bartrand at once, send back her own letter, and confess—oh, Gaston, the hard word is yours—that ’twas I kidnapped it.’
‘You mean to perform this act of contrition for Geoffrey’s sake?’
‘I do.’
‘Poor Geff! After getting decently out of danger once (and his letters don’t savour of a broken heart), it seems a trifle rough on him to have the thing revived.’
‘Poor Geff!’ echoed Dinah, her eyes glistening through their tears. ‘You call a man poor who has a chance of winning Marjorie Bartrand’s love? Does our happiness make you such an egotist,’—the reader will note that Dinah’s vocabulary was enlarging,—‘such an egotist you do not care for other people to marry?’
‘Or are you like the fox in the fable, my dear child—which?’
Dinah rested her clasped hands upon her husband’s shoulder, and cogitated softly.
‘Yes, I shall write to Tintajeux to-night. If it is not too late, if the hearts of both are free, Miss Bartrand will find some way of letting Geoffrey know the truth.’
‘Of that you may be assured. If two women are to conspire together in league against him, I say “poor Geff” with still more marked emphasis.’
And rising, Gaston moved in the direction of the door. In these later days, in the confidence of established love, Dinah had thought it no grievance that her husband should join the Florentine Artists’ Club, or spend a portion of every evening in other society than hers.
‘Like all true women you are a remorseless match-maker,’ he told her. ‘Unless the flame between these two victims is clean burnt out, you will contrive by your letter to re-kindle it.’
‘I wish I were a better scribe—that I could put my heart between the lines! Oh, I must begin at once. Baby shall be left—for the first time—with old Giacintha, and I will run round to the Piazza, and post the letter myself.’
‘Five years hence, I hope Geoffrey will bless you for having written it. There was a flash of temper not to be forgotten in Marjorie Bartrand’s handsome eyes.’
‘And if there was! If a woman has a temper, even a jealous one, is it impossible for her husband’s life to be happy?’
Dinah had followed Gaston to the door. She held up her face—the loveliest face in Florence, said the artists who worked therein—for his kiss.
‘All men are not philosophers,’ Gaston Arbuthnot made reply. ‘I have learnt—tolerably dear the lesson cost me—not only to exist in a stormy atmosphere, but to flourish there.’
And this is what Dinah wrote, not troubling herself over possible faults of Syntax, not making a fair copy in the slanting pointed handwriting to which, after much labour, she had tediously attained. This is what Dinah wrote, straight out from her heart—
‘Florence, November 15.
‘MY DEAR MISS BARTRAND,
‘I have just found, with shame and remorse, that I did you grievous wrong, last July twelvemonth. You were the kindest friend, save Geff, that ever I met, and I repaid you, little meaning it, with treachery. Perhaps when you see the enclosed you will guess what bitter confession I have got to make.
‘Dear Miss Bartrand—I found your envelope on the mantelpiece of our parlour at Miller’s Hotel, and I committed the meanest action of my life. I broke it open—and because I was blind with selfish trouble, and thought of my own suffering before all things, I kept the letter. I have had it in my possession till this hour.
‘It would be poor excuse to say I mistook the person it was meant for, as well as the hand that wrote it. It would be cowardice to say my heart was too hot, too miserable to reason. I sinned, and if my sin has stood between my best friends and happiness, my punishment will last me my life.
‘Unless I make too bold, may I hope, some future time, you will let Geoffrey read what I now write? Ask him to think of July the 1st, the day I went with him to Guernsey hospital. It was on that day, a quarter of an hour after Geoffrey left me, at the sight of some one he will remember, that I found your letter.
‘Dear Miss Bartrand, I am the penitent and humble well-wisher of your happiness,
‘DINAH.’
The letter was directed to Tintajeux Manoir, Guernsey, and posted by the writer’s hand on the night of November 15. A sharp Italian night, with the swollen Arno swirling, the moonlight lying in ebon and ivory patterns along the Florentine streets, with only one person—so it seemed to Dinah’s beating heart—abroad in the sleeping city.
At the same hour Marjorie’s eager eyes looked forth, through rain and fog, through the blurred obscurity of a Great Eastern carriage window, upon the lamps of Cambridge.