Within a week of Geoffrey’s departure Dinah and her husband, bride and bridegroom once more, started joyously on their way to Italy. There was a little wonder among the few people who had known them, a little hypothetic gossip, an unjust suspicion, perhaps, that Linda Thorne could clear up more secrets than one, ‘as she listed.’ And then Guernsey knew the name of Arbuthnot no more. Marjorie Bartrand must take up life at its old point before love, before disappointment made acquaintance with her—must stand, chill and alone, in the same Arcadia where she stood beside Geoffrey on the morning of their one day’s engagement; must work under a new teacher in the schoolroom where every book, every window-pane, spoke to her of the past, and of the sharp irrevocableness of her loss.
Autumn faded, monotonously, into the season of soft weather which in the Channel archipelago does duty for winter. March came again with its outside show of hope; all Tintajeux busy at farm work—the Seigneur, alert of step, taking part in his potato-planting and his vraic harvest, like a man of five-and-twenty. Later on, the cuckoo flower blushed anew, the rooks vociferated from the tree-tops. And then, a little later, the roses reddened. Marjorie Bartrand, conning over the entries in her last year’s pocket-book, began to know the meaning of the sombre word anniversary.
‘To-day,’ after this fashion the record ran, ‘commenced my reading with Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘Many faults in my Latin exercise. Geoffrey Arbuthnot stern and inhuman.’
‘Have resolved to lecture a certain person on his neglect of his wife. And on frivolity.’
‘This day received my first letter from Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
And so through the brief drama, until a final entry on Sunday, July the 3d—‘To-day Geoffrey Arbuthnot left Guernsey for ever.’ After which all was blank—in the pocket-book, as elsewhere.
There were sombre anniversaries, I say, for Marjorie Bartrand. For two or three of the young women who have flitted across the background of this story, summer brought the sound of jocund bells, brought a day which to each must henceforth be the one crowning anniversary, dark or sunny, of life. Rosie Verschoyle took to herself a mate, happily for Rosie, a worthier man than Rex Basire. Ada de Carteret became the wife of little Oscar Jones. Marjorie enacted bridesmaid until the sight and smell of orange blossoms were a weariness to her. She felt glad when weddings and summer were alike over, when the scents of blown syringa and heliotrope belonged definitely to the past, glad when the equinox had stript the woods, and November, grave and pale, approached, like a friend who knew her trouble, and had solace in store for her.
For Marjorie’s character had opened out rather than altered. She was a Bartrand—high-handed as ever; during the past fifteen months had worked with a courage betokening of what tough fibre her spirit was made. In November a decisive step towards the Alma Mater was to be taken. Mademoiselle Pouchée, the earliest on the Tintajeux list of governesses, had long besought Marjorie to stay with her in Cambridge, and the Seigneur, with exceeding bad grace, had tardily consented to the visit. For Cambridge meant Girton! Marjorie, of late, had been coaching with a Girton graduate who held high office in the Guernsey college, and was promised credentials to the highest feminine magnates of the University. ‘Women who, in achieving renown, had lost the fairest ornament of their sex.’ Thus spoke old Andros, stirred by the irreconcilable antipathies of his youth, antipathies which sixty subsequent years amidst a world in full progress had failed to modify.
‘The best person you could come across would be that tutor of yours—Arbuthnot.’ The Seigneur brought the blood into Marjorie’s cheeks by telling her this, one day. ‘We must conclude that I shall die some time. It is given to few men to draw breath in three centuries. When I am gone you will need a husband more than the Higher Education. I liked Arbuthnot. He was a shallowish classic and over-full of this modern “know-all, know-nothing” spirit. But he was a man—so many honest English stone, moral and physical, in him! A good make-weight for a bit of wandering thistle-down like you.’