CHAPTER XLIII
GEOFFREY CALLS TO BE PAID
It was a custom, dating farther back than Andros Bartrand’s childhood, that the Seigneurs of Tintajeux should hold a stiff and formal levée on the first Saturday of every alternate month.
The ceremony, shorn of its former old-world stiffness, lingered on, and to the feminine mind was one of the most popular Sarnian entertainments. For Andros Bartrand, with his fine manner, his handsome face, his learning, his temper, was scarcely less a favourite with the sex at fourscore than he had been in the flower of his age, half a century earlier.
‘Will this generation of progress, will the coming democracy ever produce men of eighty like our Seigneur?’ the Guernsey ladies, Conservative to a woman, would ask.
And he who had argued that there may be higher ideals of an octogenarian than are comprised by culture, originality, vigorous health, an arrogant profile, and a courtly bow, would have stood poor chance of escaping without scar from their hands.
‘The Seigneur grows robuster every year,’ remarked Mrs. Verschoyle to Cassandra Tighe, on the afternoon of July 2. The ‘Tintajeux levée’ had opened. The elder ladies were ranged along the row of white and gold arm-chairs that surrounded the drawing-room. ‘Time stands still with Andros Bartrand. Look at him talking—flirting, I call it—with Rosie. The child declares, if the Seigneur would only ask her, she is quite prepared to answer “Yes.”’
‘What would Lord Rex Basire say to that?’ whispered Cassandra, warming up at the faintest suggestion of a love affair.
Mrs. Verschoyle looked mournfully perplexed, the chronic state of her good, maternal, overburdened soul.
‘Lord Rex Basire? One certainly seems,’ said poor Mrs. Verschoyle inappositely, ‘to have seen less of him since the picnic. But then we have no gentleman to leave a card at the Fort! That is the worst of an unmarried colonel in a regiment. One really can not do the polite thing. Does any one know, I wonder,’ a faint pink blush suffused the whiteness of Mrs. Verschoyle’s cheek as some misty sequence of ideas ran through her brain—‘does any one know if there is truth in this rumour of the Arbuthnot family leaving the island?’
‘I can give reliable information about one member of the Arbuthnot family,’ cried the prettiest, least wise, of the de Carterets. This young lady, in the absence of better amusement, had been listening to the exchange of confidences between her elders. ‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot leaves Guernsey to-morrow. I am sure of my facts, because papa went to inquire at Miller’s after a room for Fred. You know, Mrs. Verschoyle, that we have had a telegram from Lloyd’s? Fred will be home on Monday.’
‘I hope your poor mother will get no shock when she sees him,’ Mrs. Verschoyle answered sadly. ‘Not one young man in fifty brings back a constitution from India.’
‘And Miller said the younger Mr. Arbuthnot’s room would be vacant to-morrow. I appreciated Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot highly at the subalterns’ picnic, and should like to have seen more of him, only Marjorie Bartrand would not let me! Yes, Miss Bartrand,’ ran on Ada de Carteret guilelessly, but putting additional meaning in her tone as Marjorie came within earshot, ‘and—although this is not meant for you to hear—I can tell by your face that you are listening, that your conscience pricks you.’
Listening! Ay, that was Marjorie Bartrand, in truth, outwardly listening, with strained sense, to the even hum of small-talk that filled the rooms, inwardly awaiting, with the keen expectancy that hardly needs the help of bodily hearing, for the step, the voice whose absence already made the world blank to her.
‘I shall certainly not leave Guernsey without calling on the Seigneur—to be paid.’
To the cruel words, to such remote and slender hope of reconciliation as they might hold forth, Marjorie’s heart clung tenaciously. She was softer of manner to-day than was her wont, played her part of hostess with studied dutifulness towards her grandfather’s visitors. The annual Sunday School treat would come on next week, said the rectoress of some remote country parish. Of course one might count on Marjorie Bartrand to lead the games? Had the great St. Laurens scandal reached Tintajeux, asked another? Maître Giroflée and his wife, the best church people in the parish, gone over to Salem because the rector had cut down their pew—good solid oak, it must be confessed, worth so much a foot—in making his chancel restorations!
Oh, with what weary patience the poor child listened to it all, making occasional random answer, when answer was needed. How utterly had her vivid child’s life lost its interest! How flat, how dissonant was every sound on this planet to Marjorie Bartrand, so long as the footstep for whose approach she yearned was silent!
‘Why—witch! Your cheeks are as white as your gown,’ remarked the Reverend Andros, happening, presently, to come across her. ‘We must get our Cambridge Esculapius to prescribe for you. What is Arbuthnot doing with himself?’ added the Seigneur, with a hard look at his granddaughter. ‘We are short of the inferior sex to-day. Why is Arbuthnot not here to make himself useful among the tea-cups?’
‘Afternoon parties are not much in my tutor’s way. But I believe—yes,’ faltered Marjorie, with one of her dark blushes, ‘I believe—at this moment—I see a figure like Mr. Arbuthnot’s crossing the moor. We will put a tea-cup in each of his hands, sir, as soon as we feel certain of having caught him.’
She fled into the recess of a window in the smaller drawing-room. Standing there, shrouded by the lace draperies, she wondered if more than a dozen pair of eyes had noticed her change of colour! She clenched her hands until the nails impressed her soft palms painfully. She essayed, with will, to keep her rebel cheeks from flaming, her lips from weakness. She marvelled by what art she could render her manner passive—Marjorie Bartrand, who during her seventeen years of life had, at every pass, gone aggressively to the fore, for good or for evil—on her tutor’s entrance.
His ring came at the front-door bell. ‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ was ceremoniously announced by Sylvestre. The French windows stood open. With the occult sixth sense which, in lovers, supplements the ordinary ones of sight and hearing, Marjorie divined that Geoffrey walked at once to the lawn in search of the Seigneur. After a time she could hear his voice—excellent spirits Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot seemed to be in—as he made his way through the crowded outer room. She caught the laughter of Ada de Carteret, the thin gay tones of Rosie Verschoyle. A sharp cross fire of raillery was being levelled against Geoffrey on the subject of his abrupt departure. Marjorie could detect and misconstrue the coolness with which he turned this raillery aside. By and by came a new excitement. The Maltshire dandies were arriving in force, and in the general flutter which ensued upon this important crisis no single voice was longer distinguishable. Marjorie’s pulse went quicker. She knew that her time had come. Three or four seconds passed breathlessly, then a hand drew back the curtain behind which she was half concealed. Geoffrey Arbuthnot stood beside her.
‘I have kept my word. I am here to wish you and the Seigneur good-bye.’ His composed speech stirred every fibre of Marjorie’s repentant, passionate heart. ‘It is a surprise,’ Geff added, ‘to find half the Guernsey world at Tintajeux Manoir. But I hope, Miss Bartrand, you can spare me five minutes’ quiet talk?’
Marjorie, on this, had no choice but to look up at him. Tears, despite pride, despite principle, were in her eyes.
‘To say good-bye!’ she repeated, holding out her hand, then, with cheeks going from rosy-red to white, shrinking back ere he could grasp it. ‘I—I never thought you could be so cruel.’
So the girl cared something for him, after all, thought Geoffrey. She would brush a tear away to-morrow, perhaps, when those who travel by land or water were courteously alluded to by old Andros in the Litany, would regret him a little, as long as this summer’s roses lasted. She would remember him until her heart, if heart she possessed, should be touched in earnest. No more than this. It was not her time to love, poor Marjorie! And he ... must part from her as a strong man ought; must say ‘this is,’ not ‘this might have been.’ There should be neither recrimination nor bitterness. A touch of the sunburnt chiselled hand, a look into the eyes which had wounded him, as children wound, from ignorance, and then a brave and loyal farewell, this time a final one.
A table on which lay books and photographs stood at hand. Geoffrey took up a photograph of the Gouliots, Sark—some glistening boulders, a fishing-net stretched on the shingle, a break of wave. How indelibly the bit of sun-etching transferred itself to his brain’s tablets! How often, in dull future hours, would those boulders, that break of wave, stand out in crisp relief before Geff’s memory?
‘Yes.’ He spoke in a key that only Marjorie could hear. ‘For just five minutes I should like to claim you. When I was at Tintajeux the day before yesterday, I was atrociously churlish to you, Miss Bartrand. I have been brought to see it since. Will you accept my apology?’
Geoffrey had ‘been brought to see’ his churlishness! Then he held at nought her offer of truce—the word it had cost her pride so dear to write! He offered her this cutting rejoinder, an apology!
‘You are hard upon me, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ There was a piteous deprecation in her voice. ‘When you were my master, I used to think you severe; but that was the worst. I believed you to be human.’
‘I am afraid I am very human.’ Geoffrey took up a fresh photograph; he examined it at a curiously shortsighted focus. ‘So human,’ he added, softening, ‘that I have not altogether given up the hope of your some day writing to me.’
‘A formal, set letter, do you mean?’
‘A letter,’ said Geff, very low, ‘in which no thought of the Tintajeux acres has place.’
For a moment her face showed one of its old bright flashes. In the world of story books it had ever been Marjorie’s pleasure to scoff at the frail impediments, arising from the necessity of a third volume, which keep true lovers apart. Should paltry reserve—the thought came upon her abruptly—should schoolgirl cowardice divide her, as though three hundred pages of ‘copy’ depended upon the quarrel, from Geoffrey?
‘I don’t know what you would have me say. I can’t see why you should be off so quick! I tried—I hoped——’
But while the monosyllables came haltingly from Marjorie’s tongue, a stir had arisen in the larger drawing-room. It was plain that a group of people, young men and maidens taking counsel together in a corner, were bent on some kind of action. Their project matured quickly. Rosie Verschoyle shot a beseeching glance at old Andros as she went through a meaning pantomime of the waltz step. Little Oscar Jones, with the air of a man upon whom rests an onerous embassy, made his way across both rooms to Marjorie.
‘Ten thousand pardons, Miss Bartrand! Would not intrude for the world on a tête-à-tête. Fact is, you see, some of them want to get up a dance on the lawn.’
‘A dance! Absurdity!’ cried Marjorie, bestowing on him an ultra-Bartrand look. Then, recollecting their position as hostess and guest, ‘I mean, would not tennis amuse you just as well?’ she observed, with show of interest. ‘Or ask Gertrude de Carteret to sing, or——’
‘But, dear Miss Bartrand, we all of us want to dance,’ persisted the handsome little lieutenant, with a smile that he had grounds for believing irresistible. ‘Miss Tighe volunteers to play for us beside an open window. Powerful backstairs interest is at this moment bearing down on the Seigneur. We only want an encouraging word from you.’
‘I never say encouraging words. It is too foolish,’ cried Marjorie, detecting, in her misery, that Geoffrey showed signs of flight. ‘To begin with, we have so few gentlemen.’
‘Few; why, there are five at least of Ours. There is Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.... Ah! going already? Then we must reckon without Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot. And it seems some of the clergy dance, a mild square dance, and——’
‘Yes, yes, Marjorie!’ exclaimed a bevy of young girls, coming up and surrounding her like the chorus in an opera. ‘It is useless for you to be wise. Rosie has won the Seigneur to say Yes. Miss Tighe is ready. The piano is on its journey to the window.’
‘Will you be my partner for the first waltz, Miss Bartrand?’ pleaded Oscar Jones.
Now, at any prior moment of her life, Marjorie Bartrand, deficient neither in temper nor in courage, would, thus attacked, have held her ground stoutly. But the girl saw, or fancied she saw, that Geoffrey was eager to get away. Her spirit was charged to overflowing. The eyes of half the people in the room were fixed upon her expectantly. Easier, she thought, before Geoffrey, before them all, to give a coldly assenting bow than trust her voice to speak; so she gave it.
Oscar Jones looked radiant. ‘Thank you, awfully, Miss Bartrand. This is a victory worth scoring. I will just go and start the corps de ballet, ask the orchestra to strike up some gay old waltz tune, and return to you.’
The corps de ballet was already setting towards the lawn. Cassandra Tighe had taken her place at the piano beside an open window. Geoffrey Arbuthnot and Marjorie, with youth, with love, with the heaviness of parting at their hearts, were alone. But their good chance was gone. The thread had snapped which bound together poor Marjorie’s monosyllables. Two minutes later she would be treading a waltz measure, the arm of Mr. Oscar Jones round her waist. And Geff (the conqueror, to whom all, in whitest, girlish faith, had been conceded) felt his blood rebel. He took the reprisals of his nobler sex, offered prompt, italicised repetition of the crushing word, apology.
‘You have accepted mine, have you not, Miss Bartrand?’ He held his hand out, steadily, for a last good-bye.
‘I accept the blame you choose to force on me,’ said Marjorie, turning aside her face.
Cold, fettered, was the speech of both. Still, in this interval there was an encounter of pulses. Their hands had met; the farewell pressure was a lingering one. Propinquity—unspiritual god of youthful lovers—might, even at this supreme moment, have set things straight, had not old Andros Bartrand passed by, looked at them, smiled.
Marjorie moved away with a start. She felt as much divided from her sweetheart as though the Channel already rolled between them.
‘What is this I hear about your leaving us, Arbuthnot? The little witch has been plaguing you, I suspect, with her false quantities. My dear sir, not one in a thousand of the sex has an ear. Music is an art in which they have had more opportunities than we, and there has never been even a third-rate female composer. You are going to England next week? To-morrow! Nay, if it is to be to-morrow we must have business talk together. Come with me, Arbuthnot, to the library.’
The situation was a crucial one for Marjorie Bartrand. Scarcely had Geoffrey gone away with the Seigneur—her heart told her, ‘to be paid’—before a dapper figure tripped, alertly, across the rooms. The well satisfied voice of little Oscar Jones reminded her that the first waltz was beginning, that they were engaged to dance it together. Her cheeks tingled with the sense of her humiliation and of her helplessness.
Oscar was in high spirits. ‘Coach gone, I suppose? Dancing not much in Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s line. Confess now, Miss Bartrand’—by this time they had reached the dancers on the lawn, Mr. Jones’s arm encircled the girl’s lithe slip of a waist—‘confess, in your heart, that you rate enjoyment higher than you do Euclid and Plato?’
‘I do not understand your question. I cannot deal in generalities.’
Marjorie Bartrand held herself as stiffly at bay from her partner as was possible.
‘Well, you’ll enjoy our dance, for instance, better than being shut up in a schoolroom over musty books and figures with Arbuthnot?’
‘I shall not enjoy it at all.’ Without a second’s hesitation came the answer. ‘Hostesses do not dance. See, there is Ada de Carteret standing out. Give me my freedom, pray, and ask her.’
‘Your freedom—to go indoors, to “work a last problem, write one Latin line,” with Arbuthnot? No, no, Miss Bartrand, you are the best dancer in Guernsey, and I don’t often get the chance of a waltz with you.’
For Oscar Jones, like bigger men, had his vanities. The thought of cutting out Geoffrey Arbuthnot was tasteful to him. It may be added that, although Marjorie’s tongue had not lost its sharpness, she was at this moment the sweetest-looking girl among the little crowd of dancers. The fire of strong emotion glittered in her large eyes. Her cheeks glowed damask. Her slim, white-clad figure showed up, in exceedingly agreeable relief, against the dense background of cedar-shaded lawn.
That there was a certain dramatic interest connected with Geoffrey’s going seemed divined by all. The divination rose to a whisper among the non-dancers, elderly men and women who, gathering on the drawing-room steps, enjoyed the pleasant sensations which bright sunshine, a garden of flowers, blue sky, and the sight of young people moving to dance-music, can scarce fail of producing.
‘The child has a hectic flush that I do not like,’ observed the plaintive voice of Mrs. Verschoyle. ‘I wish any one dared ask the Seigneur if the mother died of heart-complaint. All that class of disease is hereditary, and poor Marjorie is so little cared for! Not a creature to see whether she wears a thick sole or a thin one.’
The Archdeaconess was standing close at hand, looking on at the sunshine, the flowers, the lightly moving figures, through her accustomed smoke-coloured medium. Madame Corbie turned round with slow severity on Mrs. Verschoyle.
‘Marjorie Bartrand is not a girl to die of heart disease!’ The assertion was made with such suggestive profundity that mild little Mrs. Verschoyle recoiled a step. ‘Marjorie Bartrand wants the refined observance, the scrupulous exactness, the dignified correctness of manner which can only be obtained at school. None of your Girtons. None of your Newnhams. A strictly disciplined school, such as prevailed in my young days, for the formation of character and the affections. I do not consider,’ said Madame Corbie, ‘that Marjorie’s study of Greek and mathematics has been to her advantage.’
‘And yet Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot appears so charming, so thoroughly reliable.’
Seeing her Rosie joyously dancing in the distance, Mrs. Verschoyle’s motherly heart was disposed towards optimism on most points.
‘Has a word been uttered against the reliability of any member of the Arbuthnot family?’
The question was an innocent one. And still did something in its tone, something in the added blankness of Mrs. Corbie’s smoke-coloured gaze, seem to reduce the character of each of the Arbuthnot trio to a ghostly possibility.
Marjorie and her partner floated past the window at this juncture.
‘Give us one more round, Miss Tighe,’ cried Oscar, in breathless staccato. ‘Never danced to such a splendid tune in my life!’ Cassandra was labouring, hot with her exertions, through ‘Strauss’s First Set,’ ‘Les Hirondelles,’ or some other long buried favourite of her youth. ‘Capital turf, capital music, a first-rate partner! If a dance like this,’ he proceeded, ‘could only last for ever, Miss Bartrand!’
‘Thank Heaven it draws to an end,’ said Marjorie, in a voice of steel.
A hundred yards distant, across velvet lawns and beds of flower bloom, she could discern the figure of Geoffrey Arbuthnot. He walked away, firm of tread, erect of head, from the acres of Tintajeux and from her. And her partner’s arm clasped her waist, her steps twirled lightly. She was hostess of the party, must go through other dances, must entertain the Seigneur’s guests to the end.
From this time forth Marjorie knew that she could never more feel as a girl feels, never enjoy with a girl’s enjoyment. She would be a woman, with the bitter taste of grown-up life in her mouth, from this hour onward till she died.