Since her marriage, Dinah had learnt to speak English, ‘with a foreign pronunciation,’ Gaston would tell her, ‘yet scarcely strong enough to be disagreeable.’ Although a tell-tale cadence was traceable, ever and again, in her speech, she had tardily succeeded in putting away the Devonshire burr that was strong on her tongue when Geoffrey met her first. Here, at Jack’s bedside, no Gaston near to be put to shame, she fell back, instinctively, upon the West Country accent, the soft, half-strange, half-familiar o’s and u’s of her childhood.
‘It’s so bad to be sick, for a young fellow like you, and away from home. We just thought you might like a talk with some one Devonshire born and bred. I wonder, now, do you and I come from the same part?’
‘I was born at Torrhill, a village out away beyond Chagford. A poor place, ma’am, on the borders of the moor—quite a poor place,’ repeated Jack apologetically.
‘Why, that is near to my own town, Tavistock!’ said Dinah. ‘We used to pass Torrhill going along the Vale of Widdicombe every autumn when we went out whortleberrying. “Torrhill, in the cold country.” I mind we children used to say, when we got snowstorms in winter, “the Widdicombe folk were picking their geese.”’
Well, and as he listened to her simple talk, to the soft West Country accent, it came to pass that Geff Arbuthnot’s heart knew a thrill of its old infatuation. No man can possibly hold two women dear at the same time. And Geoffrey was in love—the warm flesh and blood love of four-and-twenty—with an actuality, not a remembrance. But his heart thrilled at Dinah’s voice. Something in his temperament forbade him to outlive the past, wholly. It was a book that could not be clasped. A word, an accent, and the enchantment cast upon him in the long dead summer days at Lesser Cheriton would be revitalised. This was his weakness (a conscious one) always; and now he was in the dangerous state of wounded feeling when a man’s tenderness is easily arrested at rebound....
Those Devonshire o’s and u’s brought back before him in its fiery ardour the fortnight when he worshipped Dinah Thurston’s footsteps, the fortnight ending on that evening when Gaston and his friends drove past in the twilight on their return from Ely. Standing here, in the Guernsey hospital ward, Geoffrey’s senses recalled the rush of wheels down the village street, the lingering daylight in the low fields of Cambridgeshire sky. He remembered how Dinah’s head and throat stood out in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge of the cottage garden.
And he decided, there and then,—yes, while she was chatting, low-voiced, smiling, to the lad about the moors, and the ‘cold country,’ and the autumn huckle-berrying—to return to England forthwith.
A French steamer was to touch at Petersport on Sunday morning. That would give him to-morrow for winding up his small affairs, for taking leave of his patients, for visiting Tintajeux. He would kiss, in coldest fancy, the hair, the lips that should have made up to him for the unattainable heaven of his youth’s desire. He would look once again in Marjorie’s eyes, and go. It was possible—here, at least, might be a gleam of comfort—that Gaston and Dinah would steer clearer through their difficulties if left absolutely alone than they were doing now.
He told her of his intention when they were on their way back to the hotel.