‘To a naturally industrious man these islands would be the mischief.’ The characteristic remark came from Gaston, who was entering his wife’s sitting-room just about the hour when Geoffrey quitted Tintajeux. ‘Yes, Mrs. Arbuthnot, these bachelor breakfasts, these picnics, these summer nights given up to card-playing, might well despatch many an excellent fellow along the road to ruin. Happily,’ said Gaston, ‘I have the capacity for large waste of time. I am in no sense of the word an excellent fellow.’
His tone was blithe; the fact of his calling Dinah ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot’ showed a willingness to meet contingent domestic trouble with good temper. Stooping down, Gaston Arbuthnot snatched a kiss from his wife’s pale lips; he pressed her drooping golden head between his hands. Dinah wavered not in her resolves. His caresses were sweet to her as ever. But was not the dearness of this man’s presence her danger; that which should nerve her in righteous sternness towards herself—and him?
‘No kiss for me, my darling! And pale cheeks again—swollen eyes! Dinah, you are ill. Something in the place really disagrees with you. We will leave it. You cannot stand the climate. I half believe I want a change of air myself.’
Sinking down in an American rocking-chair, the easiest location the room possessed, Gaston Arbuthnot propelled himself to and fro until he reached a point at which his heels were on a level with his breast. He rested the tips of his boots on the corner of an adjacent couch, he folded his arms in an attitude of leisurely repose upon his breast. Then, the primary point of comfort exhaustively seen to, he looked, with closer heed than he had yet bestowed upon her, at his wife.
Dinah was dressed in a dark travelling serge. Her hair was brushed back tightly from her temples. Her face was bloodless, the outline of her delicate features blurred by a night of tears. It was impossible for her to be unlovely, even with pink eyelids and swollen lips. (If Gaston Arbuthnot’s chisel could have compassed the tragic, how exquisite a Niobe had lain here to his hand!) It was impossible, I say, for Dinah to be unlovely. She seemed transformed, rather—a woman of harder, colder texture than her old self. When at length she raised her head slowly, the eyes that looked her husband through and through were fraught with an expression that his soul knew not.
‘I want change, you tell me, Gaston, and that’s true. We want change, both of us.’
‘Oh, I was not in earnest about myself,’ said Gaston, a little uneasily. ‘As far as health goes, the place suits me well enough. Only one positively cannot work here! Now, look how this week has gone!’ He took a note-book from his breast pocket, he turned over page after page with a marked abandonment of his first sprightly manner. ‘This week, too, when I was to have got on with your bust, to have begun I don’t know how much besides. Where are you, by the bye, Dinah—I mean, where is your model? There is a tidy look one doesn’t like about the room.’
‘The model is on the top shelf in your working place. Although you don’t like tidiness, I have been putting everything as straight as I could get it to-day.’
‘Like the good forgiving girl that you are! My dear child, I confess I have idled through this week disgracefully. Not to speak of yesterday’s dinner, of the old Colonel’s breakfast, of the best hours wasted—those wretched cards again—to-day, there was the initial mistake of being left behind in Alderney.’
‘You were left behind there, I think, for your own pleasure?’
‘I am not so sure of that. The scheme, any way, did not turn out a success. Max Grimsby is the best fellow living—but one-ideaed. You cannot get him to move, save in a circle. He is tethered to Max Grimsby’s pictures. If the sun had shone he would have taken me round, among rocks and places, to ‘verify’ his sketches, as he says, by nature. There was a most disgusting fog. I could be taken nowhere. I bored myself to extinction in Alderney. I——’
‘Gaston,’ exclaimed Dinah, fierily, ‘don’t say things of this kind, if you please. The time is past for them. I know about the wager you had with Mrs. Thorne before you left the steamer.’
‘Then you know about a very foolish matter.’ Gaston spoke with prompt self-control, although he reddened. ‘You have certainly been tidying with a vengeance, my love,’ he went on, looking round him. ‘I miss a dozen landmarks. What has become of my own priceless portraits?’ Wherever they lived poor Dinah loved to hang Gaston’s three or four latest photographs upon the walls of her sitting-room. ‘I do not see your embroidery frame, or——’
‘Yes,’ she again interrupted. ‘I know about Mrs. Thorne’s wager, about everything. It is a relief to speak plain at last. I have known, for a good long time past, that you deceived me.’
Down came Gaston Arbuthnot’s feet to their normal level. Away flew all his assumption of serenity. A couple of quick strides brought him across the room.
‘If you are bent on having one of our wretched scenes, Dinah, look, pray, to your language, as far as I am concerned. Say what you choose about Mrs. Thorne, if it gives you pleasure. Say what you like, of course, about yourself. Don’t use disagreeable expressions when you speak of me! I’m the kind of conceited fellow whose love really won’t stand rough usage. My love for you is the best possession I have. I don’t want to risk my best possession. You understand?’
No, she did not, that was the worst of it. She could not see that her strong direct nature, craving and athirst for affection, imposed a strain beyond endurance upon a temperament at once ease-loving and volatile like Gaston’s.
‘I have never deceived you, as far as I can remember, Dinah. I have not sufficient energy of character, I should imagine, to be deceitful.’
‘No? We may have different notions of deceit, perhaps.’
‘One may deviate, now and then, from veracity,’ said Gaston, recovering his good humour. ‘Suppressions of fact, in minor matters, are forced upon us all. The man would be a wretch, not fit for civilised society, who should for ever blurt out what he considered truth, regardless of the feelings he hurt, the toes he trod upon.’
‘For instance—to speak of something I understand—if you had gone to Mrs. Thorne’s house after a mess dinner it would be forced on you not to tell me of it next morning?’
‘To Mrs. Thorne’s house ... after a mess dinner! Such an unimportant thing may have happened once—twice, perhaps, during the weeks we have been here. But did I not mention it? Well, then, I do so now, and ask forgiveness,’ resting his hand upon her shoulder, ‘for the heinousness of my crime.’
‘And your wager—was that, too, unimportant? Your wager, made at a time when my heart was breaking! And the feelings with which Linda Thorne regards your winning it——’ Dinah’s voice choked.
Gaston Arbuthnot was, habitually, a man of mild speech. His most familiar men friends had never heard an English expletive escape him. When he was strongly moved his tongue went back, instinctively, to the language of his youth. And he was moved to sudden and keen anger at this moment. Three or four French expressions, fortunately not understanded of his wife, rolled from his lips.
‘You make me detest the sound of Linda Thorne’s name. But take care—take care, in this matter of hating, that you do not force me farther than you intend.’
‘I would rather you hated than tolerated me,’ cried Dinah, her tear-worn eyes looking bravely up into Arbuthnot’s face.
Some new note in her voice startled him. It was a note, Gaston Arbuthnot felt, that might well prove the prelude to dangerous self-assertion. Was a tu quoque possible?
‘You do not wish me to be tolerant. The husband of any excessively pretty woman must be so, whether he will or not. Now yesterday—suppose the medal reversed, Dinah, that I begin to cross-question you—how did you spend your afternoon, yesterday? You forget. Let me refresh your memory. With whom were you walking down the High Street, towards four o’clock, in the dove-coloured dress I invented for you, the Gainsborough hat, the cambric collar?’
‘I am not jesting, though you are.’ Dinah started to her feet, her eyes were level with her husband’s. ‘Geoffrey came in after you had gone away; I was idle and dull as usual, and Geff asked me to carry some fruit and flowers to the hospital. The walk did me good. We visited a Devonshire sailor-lad—like one of my own people, he seemed to me—and I was able to talk with him, the old country talk I love so well. And afterwards, coming back—perhaps with my heart a little lightened—I met ... your friend.’
‘Poor, ill-fated Linda Thorne?’
‘And everything went dark again. It was then I heard about your bet, how you had won, how Mrs. Thorne was bankrupt! Mrs. Thorne had made her way into the parlour while I was out. Your winnings were left for you by her own hand. Gaston, I found them!’
‘The situation, my dear girl, grows poignant. You found them!’
Gaston Arbuthnot checked himself. The dimensions of this domestic tragedy—this storm of wifely passion over a pair of iron-gray gloves—overcame him with a fatal sense of the ridiculous.
Dinah saw that he repressed a smile. Her righteous anger waxed hotter.
‘And I intend to keep them until I die. If ... I mean when you see Mrs. Thorne, you can tell her so.’
‘I will do nothing of the sort,’ said Arbuthnot, thoroughly incensed at last. ‘This constant Inquisition business grows unbearable! There will be no living with you, Dinah, if you go on nursing these puerile, these childish jealousies. I would no more offer an impertinence to Mrs. Thorne than to any other lady of my acquaintance. You must learn to be reasonable.’
‘Must I? I have tried to learn much the last few days, without success. It is because I can’t learn, because I am ignorant’—her voice had grown hoarse, her eyes dilated—‘that I shall go away.’
‘We can go as soon as you like; I have told you so already,’ said Gaston, coldly. ‘We can go the beginning of next week, if you choose. You would not object very much to my leaving cards on the few people who have been civil to me?’
‘I would like to go to-morrow, if—if you will give me money enough for the journey. Geff will be crossing. He can see me as far as Southampton. After that, I can easily make my way on to Tavistock Moor——’
‘You—alone?’
‘Why not? In the old days, before I married, I needed no looking after.’
‘And I am to follow with the luggage,’ suggested Mr. Arbuthnot. ‘You are quite sure there is room on Tavistock Moor for such luggage as ours?’
But his tone was doubtful. Less and less could he understand the look, yearning yet steadfast, that encountered him from his wife’s eyes.
‘I will take my luggage with me. As near as might be, I have tried to divide things. I have put all belonging to you in order, Gaston, as you will find.’
‘You want to visit your people without me? Say it out!’ Gaston Arbuthnot’s colour heightened. ‘This is rough—harder punishment than I deserve, and a risky experiment! Think it over twice. I’ve been in the world thirty years, Dinah, and have seen somewhat of most things. I have never seen any good come of man and wife trying their hand at these little imitation divorces.’
‘I cannot live up to your life,’ answered Dinah, unshrinkingly. ‘I cannot understand you, or your friends, or the feelings you have for each other. If I stayed, I might grow myself to be—well, something I don’t care to think of. I was meant for the ways of common working people. It suits me to be told things plain and straightforward, to keep to my duty, to find my happiness there.’
‘My poor Dinah! Have you not always kept to duty?’ For once in his life, Gaston Arbuthnot spoke from impulse.
‘Up to this time, because my heart has been full. I have loved you so much ... there has been no room for any feeling but love! This could not last for ever, and you always away, and others—ladies born and educated—not ashamed to take you from me. I might grow hard. I might grow vain—worse! Yes, Gaston, down in my heart I feel all this is possible. And so, if you please——’
‘Don’t hesitate. Let everything he absolutely clear between us.’
‘I will go home. My father’s sisters, I know, would be willing to take me in while they live, and I can work at my trade as I used, of course, if you will give me leave.’
Gaston Arbuthnot stood for a few seconds motionless. Then, without a word, he walked to the farthest end of the room. He stood, gazing upon some local oil-painting of an impossible First Napoleon, mounted on a still more impossible charger, as intently as though he gazed upon one of Raphael’s masterpieces. Let anger, wounded pride—ah, more dreaded than either, let easy acquiescence be on her husband’s face, Dinah could see it not!
She waited for him to speak, with the tension of nerves that is a bodily pain; hoping nothing—the time for hope was past—fearing only lest, under the sting of her proposal, he should tell her that he no longer loved her. The truth, itself, had, in that moment, seemed small beside the possibility of his confessing it.
But Gaston Arbuthnot was not a man of coarse or cruel words.
‘I never looked for such a scene—I am not good at these high passions! Your vehemence forces me into the sort of position I detest. I have told you often, Dinah, that in everything,’—he leaned sideways, as though seeking a point whence the impossible Napoleon might be more advantageously viewed—‘in everything I am a light weight. No use asking from me the feats of an athlete. In life, I walk quietly. In art, I can produce nothing bigger or intenser than I experience in life. I am, what you would call, poor all round.’
‘Poor—in feeling, most of all,’ said Dinah with irrepressible bitterness.
‘In the constant exhibition of feeling, you mean, in reiterations of “I love you.”’ Gaston turned, having got thus far; he walked back to her with marked deliberation. ‘In the art of quarrelling about nothing—in showy expenditure of emotion on trifles ... emotion of which, I take it, only a limited quantity is dealt to each of us, and which we should store up for large occasions—in capacity of this kind I am, doubtless, poor. If I were a moral nonentity, Dinah, no human heart in my breast at all, it would seem strange, after four years’ companionship, close as ours, that you should love me still!’
There was an inflection in Gaston Arbuthnot’s voice that overstepped the line of tenderness. His face, though it was calm, wore an unwonted flush. To Dinah, burning with passionate sense of injury, the very reasonableness of his speech was an offence. To Dinah his quiet pleading seemed fine words—altogether beside the present grave issue of their lives.
‘Love! Ah, I love you, well as ever, to my misfortune! I shall love you till my death. Do we measure love out by the meagre quantity of it we get in return?’
‘And loving me, after this strong fashion, you desire that we should spend our lives apart? You tempt me to say a cutting thing,’ broke forth Gaston with warmth, ‘yet I believe it to be a true one. A man had better be loved less, Dinah, and that his wife should remain contentedly at his side.’
‘No doubt of it. If you had married an educated woman you might have been happy with her—according to your notions of happiness. But there’s no going back on that now. I exist, you see.’
‘Yes, Dinah, you exist.’
‘And I am two-and-twenty. And since we came to this place, I scarce know why, I have awakened. I see my ignorance. I know that I want more than I used to want in life. Gaston—I cannot fall asleep again. If you let me return among my own people I shall take to their plain country ways—in time, perhaps, shall find a little peace. At least I shall have work, real work, such as I was brought up to. I could never plod, patiently, at cross-stitch flowers for days and days together as I have done. And I can never rise to being a lady, as a week ago I thought I might.’
‘Then the only outlook would seem to be Tavistock Moor. It is not a brilliant one for either of us—for myself, in particular.’ Turning away from her, Gaston took up his hat, he moved aimlessly, and with a dull step towards the door. ‘If I do not cry “Kismet” with a better grace,’ he added, ‘you must remember this sentence of widowerhood has come upon one suddenly—as I think, without justice. But I shall not seek to stay you. I wish you to take back your freedom, unconditionally.’
And so speaking, and while the coldness of death seized Dinah’s tortured heart, he left her.