‘I appreciate your delicacy, my dear sir. But my black fellow and I thoroughly understand each other. Those mullet,’ said the Colonel, with a quiver of the lips, ‘are now reposing, each in its paper shroud, buttered, flavoured to a nicety. They will not approach the fire until Kutscheel sees me turn yonder corner beneath the Arsenal gates. I will wait for you here—putting the last finishing touch, alas! to a poorish appetite—as I limp up and down in the shade. But don’t exceed thirty-five minutes. We owe it to our cook, a human being with passions and weaknesses like unto our own, to have a conscience in these matters.’
A minute or two later, Gaston’s alert step had brought him to the outer gate of Miller’s Hotel. He loitered for a few seconds in the garden, enjoying its double sensation of warmth and flower scents. Then, with hesitation for which he would have found it hard to account, Gaston Arbuthnot entered the house. He traversed a passage, and opened the door of Dinah’s sitting-room.
It was empty. Her work-frame was shrouded in silver paper. A bouquet of hot-house flowers lay, with petals browned and faded, on the table, a card of Lord Rex Basire’s beside them. Gaston felt that the room had not been lived in since they left it last on Wednesday morning.
‘Madame had gone out,’ volunteered the black-eyed French waitress, peeping in at him through the half-open door—the black-eyed waitress building up dramatic likelihoods on the spot, possibly from the recollection of Madame’s tears of yesterday, possibly from Milor’s neglected bouquet on the table, possibly from a certain blank look on Arbuthnot’s face. ‘Madame had gone out—there was a good hour at least. Madame had left no message for Monsieur.’
For the first time since their marriage, thought Gaston Arbuthnot, not without a pang, as he walked off in silence to his dressing-room!
Well, there must be a first time, he supposed, in all one’s disillusionments. From to-day forth, he need never more expect a passionate greeting, perhaps never dread a passionate reproach from Dinah. And it was best so. Gaston had seen Clesinger’s rival statues of Rachel; one, the ‘Phèdre,’ the other, ‘Lesbia with her Sparrow.’ He infinitely preferred the Lesbia, sparrow, silliness, and all. Still, mused Mr. Arbuthnot, whose emotions had a trick of mounting quickly from the heart to the head, it might be a little stroke of wise and kindly diplomacy for him to exhibit discerning mortification, make Dinah feel that she had been forgetful of him. Forgetful! For the first time, surely, since that morning in the rustic Cambridgeshire church when she walked down the aisle, in her white straw bonnet, her simple cambric gown—his wife.
Accordingly, when he re-entered their sitting-room presently—Dinah absent still—Mr. Arbuthnot pencilled the following note, curtly amative, as was ever one of Captain Steele’s to his Prue!
‘My dearest Girl—My existence, I perceive, has slipped your memory. But I do exist. I am, at this moment, going out to breakfast—not in high spirits.
‘Your devoted
‘G. A.’
Gaston Arbuthnot pencilled this note. Then, with affections, it must be confessed, undividedly centred on red mullet, he started off, lightsome of mien, elastic of step, in the direction of Colonel de Gourmet’s house. At the first turning of the road a girl with golden hair, with a face fair, despite its pallor, as the summer morning, stood opposite to him—Dinah. A basket of strawberries hung on Mrs. Arbuthnot’s arm, a bunch of white moss-roses, her husband’s favourite flower, was between her hands.
‘Dinah, my love, this is fortunate. I have been hunting everywhere for you,’ said Gaston, hitting without effort upon one of those airy little nothings which float men of his weight, like corks, over half the whirlpools of life.