‘Keep true to your own transparent self, child. Be what you have been always, and I, for one, shall be contented.’
CHAPTER XX ‘JAMES LEE’S WIFE’
The speech was really the best chosen, prettiest thing that a somewhat errant husband could have found to say. In every moral encounter that befel Gaston Arbuthnot, and whether his antagonist floundered in the mud or no, Gaston seemed invariably to find himself, at the last, in a graceful attitude. But Dinah’s heart was no more warmed by honeyed little phrases than by the reconciliatory kiss her husband bestowed on her ere he started to his dinner-party. She was reaching—nay, had reached—the miserable stage when honeyed phrases and reconciliatory kisses are in themselves matters of distrust? How, her lonely dinner over, would she get through the evening hours—long counted-on hours—when she was to have walked, her hand within Gaston’s arm, to distant Roscoff Common for her briar roses.
For a space Dinah looked listlessly forth at the garden. It was full of people who knew each other, who talked together in friendly voices—the boarders of the hotel, with whom Gaston mixed, with whom Gaston was popular. Then she seated herself before her embroidery frame. But recollections of Lord Rex Basire, of the effaced stitches, of Gaston’s commentaries on her ‘patience,’ made the thought of work repugnant to her. If she could only read, she thought! Not after her dull, country pattern, repeating each word to herself as a child cons his task ere he can take in its meaning. If she could read for pleasure, as she had watched Geoffrey read—quickly, easily, with hearty human interest, like one bent on receiving counsel from some well-beloved friend!
A book of Geff’s lay on the mantelshelf. Dinah rose, crossed the room with languid steps, and took it in her hand. Then, as readers invariably do, to whom the shell of a book matters more than the kernel, she fell to a careful examination of the text, binding, title-page.
‘The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Vol. VI. Dramatis Personæ.’
Well, four years ago, during the brief fortnight of Geoffrey’s madness, it chanced one evening that he walked out to Lesser Cheriton with this very book in his pocket. (Did some ineffaceable rose odour of that dead June cling to the pages still, rendering Vol. VI. dearer in Geff’s imagination than its fellows?) He read ‘James Lee’s Wife’ aloud to Dinah Thurston—a poem totally outside the girl’s comprehension—and during the recital of which her decently suppressed yawns must have rebuffed any man less blindly in love than was Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
At ‘James Lee’s Wife’ the book opened now.