Doctor Thorne was one of the most thorough believers extant in this questioning, sceptical nineteenth-century world. He believed in his own drugs, practising, on a small but murderous scale, here in Guernsey, and holding the same pharmacopœial opinions that obtained half a century earlier in Calcutta. He believed in the great political names he had admired when he was a schoolboy; in the balance of power; in the infallibility of Church, State, and the British Empire generally. He believed in the extraordinary convenience of his house, in the fitness of his furniture, in the talents of his Linda. Doctor Thorne, I should add, had a mind—curiously small, thoroughly limited, but still a mind—not badly stored with facts, of a dry and statistical order, which he loved to impart to others.
Fastening at once on Dinah—for Linda, moving a few paces distant, began to lionise the adjacent islands for Gaston’s benefit, and Geff contrived to vanish from the scene—fastening on poor Dinah for his victim, Doctor Thorne at once opened a conversation with the airy didactic grace in which old gentlemen would seem to have shone when the story-books of our infancy were written.
‘Your first visit to the island, Mrs. Arbuthnot I Then I trust you and your worthy husband will accept my services as your cicerone. There is much here, I can assure you, to stimulate the interest and foster habits of observation. In the first place, you see, we have the people themselves, whose habits of frugality contrast in a marked and favourable manner with those of larger countries. You are not perhaps acquainted with the statistics of savings-banks generally?’
‘I have never had anything to save in my life, sir.’
‘Well, then, I can give you a few important facts. Sit down, pray. Let us protect our heads under the shadow of this delightful ash, or lime, which is it? I can give you a few details, with the amount actually saved by each person in this island over the age of fifteen. Studies of this kind captivate the softer faculty of benevolence, while they strengthen and enlarge the understanding.’
Dinah was well dowered by Nature with means of self-defence. She could put down an impertinence—I am afraid could resent an injury, as well as any fine London lady of them all. But in Dinah’s moral arsenal was no weapon for demolishing a mild little prosy gentleman of sixty-seven, with snow-white moustache, yellow shoes, and a tired smile. Some intuition she could not have analysed made her almost feel a species of pity for Linda’s husband.
We do not easily experience two distinct kinds of pain at one moment. It may be that Dinah’s heart was too sorely troubled for her to be sensible of boredom, even at the hands of such a master in the art of boring as the Doctor.
‘That morsel of table-land in the south is Sark,’ observed Linda, pointing to an outline of haze faintly towering above the dense blue of the Channel. ‘And the streak nearer at hand—please don’t look at me, but at the islands—the streak nearer at hand, with the sun shining on its yellow patches, is Jetho; and nearer still, where the pale green spaces mark the shallows, is Herm. I hope you are following my stage directions, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
Mr. Arbuthnot was scrutinising her face; curiously, as one scrutinises any waif or stray from the past suddenly brought back to one; but tenderly, too. When does a man of Gaston’s character feel aught but kindness towards the woman whose life has been a little embittered by his own fascination?