I am bound to add that Dinah pronounced the monosyllable as ‘knee.’ And a red spot showed on Gaston Arbuthnot’s cheek.
From his precocious boyhood up, it had been a belief of Gaston’s that lady-killing was an open accomplishment; the established means of defence as much an art to be learnt as the means of attack. And still, at the sight of those poor pencil-marks, at the thought of the youthful evenings when Linda Constantia used to hand him cups of weak tea, flavoured atrociously with cinnamon, in the salon of a remembered Paris entresol, the conscience of the man was touched.
As Dinah’s voice asked the meaning of the word ‘knee,’ he changed colour.
‘Linda Constantia Smythe. What an absurdly small world we inhabit! You and I, my love, and Geoffrey, coming across poor Linda Constantia! Faites entrer cette dame,’ he added, turning to the waitress. ‘An absolutely forgotten acquaintance of a hundred years ago, Dinah—an acquaintance of times before I had heard your name. Linda married—no, did not marry; went out to India a spinster, and returned, poor soul! the wife of a Doctor Thorne. They say, in these Channel Islands, a man will run across every mortal he has known, or is fated to know, from his cradle to his grave.’
‘You never told me of your acquaintance with any Linda Constantia Smythe. I wonder you recollected her name so instantly, Gaston.’
‘Easier, perhaps, to recollect the name than the lady. Can it be possible that this is she?’ A cream-coloured parasol, a great many yards of cream-coloured cambric, were advancing with agitated flutter across the lawn. ‘By Jupiter! how these meagre women age when they once cross the line. Can this be the walk one has admired, I know not how oft? Are those the shoulders?... My dear Mrs. Thorne,’—Gaston Arbuthnot rose to meet his visitor, thoroughly warm, thoroughly natural of manner; and Dinah, with a sensation of insignificance only too familiar to her, sank into the background—‘this is too kind! Doctor Thorne well, I hope? And your little daughter? You see I have watched the first column of the Times. About your own health I need not ask. And so you have really given up India—have made a settlement in Guernsey! Dinah, my love, let me introduce you to one of my very early Parisian friends. My wife—Mrs. Thorne.’
Dinah bowed with the staid gravity that in her case, as in that of some other lowly-born people one has known, came so near to the self-possession of breeding. Mrs. Thorne was effusive.
Gaston felt an honest artistic satisfaction in watching the contrast the two young women presented to each other.
Linda Thorne’s figure was lithe, straight, thin; the sort of figure that ever lends itself kindly to the setting forth of such anatomical deformities as shall have received the last approving seal of Parisian fashion. Her eight-buttoned long hands were pleasingly posed. She wore a great deal of frizzled darkish hair on a forehead that, but for this Cupid’s ambuscade, might have been overhigh. Traces of rice-powder, at noon of a June day, were not absent from Mrs. Thorne’s India-bleached cheeks. Her eyes were big, black-lashed, green. Her nose was flat, giving somewhat the Egyptian Sphinx type to a personality which, with all its demerits, was by no means void either of allurement or distinction.
If Linda had spoken perfect grammar, in a London tone, and with a taught manner, you would have set her down, perhaps, as an actress from one of our good theatres. Speaking, as she did, at utter grammatical random, with the slightest little bit of Irish accent, and no manner at all, imagination might suggest to you that Dr. Thorne’s wife belonged to some lost tribe of nomad Lords or Honourables. And the suggestion would be correct. Linda’s grandfather was an Irish earl; a hare-brained gentleman not unknown to the newspaper editors of his day, but with whose deeds, good or evil, with whose forfeited acres, domestic relations, or political principles, our story has no concern.