Dinah Arbuthnot did not want to perish. She could be content, she thought, although delight was gone out of her days, if use survived; ready to spin the wool and bake the bread; to return to the plain, sweet wholesomeness of workaday existence from which the hapless good fortune of marrying a gentleman had divorced her.
To part from Gaston, in short!
For an instant she had a physical longing to breathe the air of the Devonshire moorlands. A wild hope crossed her that she might go back to her father’s people, live their village lives, earn her own bread—be Dinah Thurston again. Then her heart smote her with violence. The volume fell to the floor. Could parting from Gaston be a beginning of better things, a turning towards the straight path of duty—that path along which so many a wife has to walk, uncomplaining, through the after years of a marriage to which happiness has not been granted? Her existence at his side was more, now, than a long, slow disappointment. It was a growing anguish, a combat in which ignorant, plain-speaking love on one side had no chance against a succession of sympathetic rivals all uttering perfect little flatteries, all giving perfect little dinners, on the other. And she, Dinah, was not two-and-twenty, and her young heart craved, insistently, for sunshine. And such a slender change, it seemed, in the eternal foreordering of events, a child at her knee, a husband loving the quiet of his own fireside, would have made up the sum of her prosaic ambition!
Yet she must go on enduring. She must not part from Gaston until the dark final curtain shut his face for ever from her sight. What taste could she have for the Devonshire moorlands, the country joys which contented her when she was a girl? No human soul can serve two masters. After knowing passionate love, passionate jealousy, how could she go back to a life of no emotion at all, how share the village interests of people like her father’s folk; simple souls with whom it was a vital point whether the next cake should be made with carraways or with raisins, who could speculate through half a winter as to who would be ‘asked,’ and who wear new bonnets on Easter Sunday, and in whose minds a visit to Exeter, or the yearly house-cleaning, ranked among the larger events of mortal destiny!
The poor girl was reluctantly coming to the conclusion—a hard one to realise at her age—that she would not be extraordinarily welcome anywhere, when Geff Arbuthnot, unannounced, as was his habit, entered the parlour.
He took in the position of affairs promptly. Dinah’s colourless face, her unoccupied hands, the book lying, as it had fallen, on the floor, told him, with gist passing that of words, that she was in some fresh misery of which Gaston was the cause.
Geoffrey’s own heart was sore, his spirit troubled, to-day. A thought distantly akin to that which had newly traversed Dinah’s mind for a moment overcame him. What a little change in the foreordering of things might have re-written the story of both lives! If Dinah Thurston had chanced to love him before his cousin Gaston crossed her path....
‘Alone—and indoors, Dinah?’ Her Christian name for once slipped from his lips. ‘It is a day,’ quoted Geff, ‘“when it were a sullenness against Nature not to go abroad and see her riches.” Has Gaston returned?’
‘Gaston and the Thornes have returned. The Cherbourg boat came in long ago. And I have been out—I went down to market before breakfast. I enjoyed the morning wonderfully.’
There was the kind of discrepancy between voice and statement that you might detect in the speech of a man who should declare he had ‘wonderfully enjoyed’ a funeral.