‘Sober elders’—so Dinah realised, with a contracting heart—was a sufficiently elastic term to embrace Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot. Before landing from the boats, Gaston, with keen artistic vision, had descried some marvellously pretty fisher-girl among the crowd of French people on the rocks. Not a real red-handed, rough-haired fisher-girl, but the latest Worth idea of a duly got-up pêcheuse, the very subject, Gaston declared, for his own meretricious pencil. He must make a stealthy study of her forthwith. And indeed, at this present moment, not many paces distant from Mrs. Verschoyle and her devoted friend, Gaston Arbuthnot, sketch-book in hand, was already at work.
Dinah lingered aimlessly. The desire of her heart was to stay beside her husband. Her pleasure would have been to watch his quick, clever pencil, to hear him discourse, in his light strain, about these foreigners, whose theatrical manners and dress, overwhelming to her in her ignorance, must to him be familiar. She felt that the brightness of her day would be clouded if she left Gaston! And yet, mused Dinah, troubled of spirit, do wives, in society, hang jealously at their husband’s elbow, or watch their pencil, or listen to their talk with delight? Would she expose herself—far worse, would she expose Gaston to ridicule, by shirking the walking party?
An expressive glance, shot from Mr. Arbuthnot’s eyes, set these questionings only too sharply at rest.
‘Look carefully in through the cottage windows, Dinah.’ He bestowed on her a little valedictory wave of two fingers. ‘Capital bits of ware are still to be unearthed in these parts of the world. If you see a likely cup or saucer, get Geoffrey to talk French for you.’ Gaston Arbuthnot was a dabbler in most branches of bric-à-brac, and up to the present date had never lost money by his dealings. ‘Mrs. Thorne, when we have got rid of these young people, I want you to criticise me. My beautiful fishing-girl grows too much like a figure from the mode-books.’
Linda Thorne, promptly obedient, took up her position at the artist’s side.
CHAPTER XXIII A SWAGGER AND A SWORD
It was the hottest, most deserted hour of the day when the walking party reached Langrune plage, an hour when such of the young Parisians as do not follow la pêche drive donkey-carts—those wonderful, springless, seatless, Langrune carts—along the country roads, or start, by rail, to distant Trouville for toilettes and distraction. Here and there were elderly ladies at work before the doors of their canvas bathing-sheds. In the road two portly fathers of families were solemnly sending up ‘messengers’ to a very small Japanese kite some fifty or sixty feet above their heads. Two other middle-aged gentlemen played at battledore and shuttlecock. A few irrepressible boulevard lovers sat over their cards or dominoes outside the restaurant windows of the principal hotel. The shrill sounds from a fish auction, held on the monster slab of rough granite which constitutes the Langrune market-place, alone broke the stillness.
Before one had thought it possible that dress or speech could have betrayed the nationality of the new-comers, up ran a brown-legged, tattered sand-imp, holding out a bunch of shore-flowers. He announced his name, with some pride of birth, as Jean Jacques la Ferté of these parts, offering his services as cicerone to the English strangers.