‘Useless to ask you to breakfast with us,’ murmured that lady, from beneath her treble gauze mask, as she and Gaston were passing across the gangway. ‘Dear Mrs. Arbuthnot, I am sure, will be in a fever of anxiety about your return.’
‘Scarcely. Every one in Guernsey must have known that fog detained us. If you will be at home this afternoon,’ Gaston added, when their hands met at parting, ‘I will give you the latest bulletin as to Dinah’s condition.’
‘Oh, I make no promises,’ cried Linda, carelessly. ‘“He who will not when he may”—you know the rest of the proverb. Long before five o’clock to-day some tragic event may have changed us’—in after times this prophecy, made in jest, might possibly return to Linda Thorne’s memory—‘changed us for ever into enemies. Robbie, love, accept my arm. As you are quite determined that two shillings’ worth of cab would bring us to bankruptcy, we will return to our home and infant on foot.’
Doctor and Mrs. Thorne turned, on leaving the quay, into a narrow street leading towards the Old Town and The Bungalow. Gaston Arbuthnot, with the lightheartedness born of recovered freedom, ran quickly up the hundred-and-eighty steps that formed the shortest cut from the pier road to Miller’s Hotel. At the summit of these steps a new temptation assailed him in the person of old Colonel de Gourmet, the bachelor proprietor of the most luxurious little house, the best cellar, and the best cook in the Channel Archipelago.
‘Why, Arbuthnot! Some one told me you were at the bottom of the sea. You and Linda Thorne. Locksley Hall sort of thing! So goes the story of the moment. You are the very man I could have wished to meet, sir. Come back to breakfast with me. I have two of the finest mullet ever caught in this Channel, and Kutscheel, my black fellow, could dress a mullet with Brillat Savarin himself. Now, I’ll hear of no refusal.’
‘I have a wife, Colonel. The argument, naturally, does not carry weight with you. Still, it is an argument. I have a wife, and she expects me.’
‘Send up a line from my house telling Mrs. Arbuthnot where you are. I positively wouldn’t waste such fish on a man of less cultivated taste.’ In the Colonel’s lack-lustre eye there came a momentary glow of feeling. ‘In my time we used to look upon a palate—a palate, sir, as one of the essentials of a gentleman. The young men nowadays don’t know a mullet from a stickleback.’
Well, reader, a dual breakfast with old de Gourmet was a temptation, after its sort, that Gaston Arbuthnot ranked high. The Colonel’s admirably arranged house was screened by just sufficient leafy shadow from the eastern sun, refreshed by just sufficient air on the side where it opened to the sea. The Colonel’s black fellow was a finished artist; his cellar the long result of half a lifetime. To Gaston—true Parisian in all the more important business of existence—a noontide breakfast was the crowning meal of the day. Man dines, he would contend, as dogs or horses feed, because his body needs replenishment. Breakfast, with its delicate light dishes, fine wine, fruits and coffee,—breakfast succeeded by a prime cigar, morning sunshine, and morning talk—is, essentially, a refined, a human repast. The nine o’clock tea and toast, the marmalade, bloaters, or bacon, sacred to the British householder, were scarcely less horrible to him than the buckwheat cakes and maple syrup, the porridge, the pie, the ‘shad’ of American breakfast-tables.
‘If you can give me half an hour’s law, Colonel de Gourmet, time to have a bath, to get a change of apparel, and hear my wife’s version of the Locksley Hall episode, I will come to you. Otherwise, I know the nature of mullet, and——’