Geoffrey Arbuthnot had not been smiled on by Fortune. Nevertheless, he possessed gifts which for the simple hourly manufacture of human contentment are better worth than the bigger favours of the gods. Life interested him. If he had had few artificial pleasures, he had exhausted no pleasures at all. In regard of nature, his sensations were vivid as a child’s. Walking forth to Tintajeux Manoir at an hour when the crisp blue and gold of afternoon had reached declension, Geoffrey felt youth run in his veins like wine. The hay and clover smells from the newly-cut fields; the ‘kiss sweet! kiss sweet!’ of the thrushes; the verdured hedges touched still by Spring’s immaturity, though the flower of the May was past; the peeps at every turn of purple salt water; the road-side ferns through which, knee-deep, he waded; the yellowing honeysuckle sprays which brushed his face; the streamlets slipping seaward away, through channels thick with cresses and forget-me-nots; ay, even the whiffs of wood-smoke from the farmhouse chimneys, the incomprehensible Froissart French in which he heard the haymakers chattering to each other over their bread and cider,—all the low, melodious notes of this homely landscape affected him with a physical and keen delight.
His life, since remotest baby-days, when he walked holding his mother’s hand in blithe, fair Scotland, had been passed among streets and among the human creatures who inhabit them. The pleasure of the Bethnal Green arab who, at six years old, first handles a living daisy, differs, in degree only, from Geoffrey’s as he trudged along through the Guernsey lanes, his mind vaguely fixed on Tintajeux Manoir and on the chill reception from his future pupil which there awaited him.
Would Miss Bartrand’s thunder glances be discharged from black eyes or blue ones? Geoffrey had reached a stretch of undulating rushy common at the extreme western point of the island when this question presented itself. Ahead was a vista of mouldering banks, gay in their shroud of blue-flowered, ivy-leaved campanula, and with here and there a jutting tip of granite, crimson, by reason of its glittering mica, in the sunset. Above hovered a falcon, almost lost to view against the largely-vaulted, bountifully-coloured evening sky.
Interpreting Froissart French by such lights as he possessed, Geoffrey learned from an ancient goat-tending peasant dame that a neighbouring block of stone building, partially visible on the left through oak and larch plantations, was Tintajeux Manoir. Would the girl who awaited his visit there be blonde or dark? Something Mrs. Thorne had hinted about a Spanish mother. According to all mournful human probabilities, the heiress would be swarthy; a black-eyed, atrociously clever-looking young person, he thought, with shining hair drawn tightly from her forehead, with stiff linen collar and wristbands, with a dignified manner and inkstained fingers. Also, despite her seventeen summers, with a leaning towards stoutness.
Geoffrey disrelished the picture projected before his mental sight about as much as in his present buoyant physical state he could disrelish anything. Consulting his watch, he found with relief that he had reached the outskirts of Tintajeux five-and-twenty minutes too early. There would be time, amidst this delicious wealth of atmosphere and hue that flooded him around, for a quiet smoke before encountering the terrible presence of Miss Marjorie Bartrand!
A suspicion that the heiress’s peppery temper might be roused if one’s jacket smelt of tobacco rather heightened the alacrity with which Geff Arbuthnot threw himself down on the fragrant sward and produced his pipe and pouch. The pipe was a black, ferociously Bohemian-looking ‘bulldog,’ the pouch a delicate mass of silk embroidery and velvet. As he drew forth—alas! that I should have to say it, his strong-flavoured cavendish, Geoffrey thought, as it was his custom to think four or five times each day, of the tender friendly woman’s hand that worked this pouch for him—Dinah’s!
Poor Dinah! When he saw her last, an hour before, her hands were clasped together with the half-apathetic gesture of a person to whom moral suffering has become a habit. A basket of coloured wools stood before her on the table, ready for her evening’s cross stitching. Round the corners of her lips was the look of silent endurance which had become so painfully familiar to Geoffrey’s sight. And all this for what? There was no great sin, surely, in Gaston’s putting himself at once under Mrs. Thorne’s easy guidance. The happiest households one hears of, thought Geoffrey, striking a vesuvian, are those in which the broadest law of liberty obtains. Does not an artist, more than other men, want change, professionally? Dinah should know that a creator, of the cheap popularity order, as Gaston with his pleasant self-depreciation would say, must have a constant supply of straw for his brickmaking; must have material, ‘stuff,’ must see brisk lights, sharp shadows that the calm twilight of domestic happiness does not yield. And yet....
It was that constant, unspoken ‘and yet’ in Geoffrey’s mind which, up to the present point, had rendered the close friendship of the three Arbuthnots a paradox.
Leaning back against a little thyme-grown knoll, his hands clasped behind his head, Geff looked, with eyes that had learned the secret of most common things in Nature, at the moorland weeds around him. Here were graceful quake grasses in plenty, and waving sedges, and the poet’s wood-spurge, three cups in one. Close at his right hand grew a stalk of rush crowned by four or five brownish insignificant flowers, the least lovely outwardly of all the brilliant Guernsey flora. Well, and it came to pass that the neighbourhood of these degenerate, colourless petals altered Geff’s mood. He thought of the inherited mysteries and dooms of human life. He called to mind the sordid prose of the Cambridge outskirts, and the wretched men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who lived in them. He called to mind his own often despairing work, the struggles, hard and single-handed, of his manhood, his youth. His youth—ah! and with that the moorland scene faded. The years since he first saw Dinah spread themselves out scrollwise, suddenly illuminated, before Geff Arbuthnot’s mind.
How well he remembered himself a lad of twenty! How well he remembered the hawthorn-scented evening of their first meeting! He was walking alone through the one street of Lesser Cheriton, had passed its rectory, its seven public-houses, was honestly thinking of his approaching ‘Mays’ and of nothing in the world beyond, when a cottage casement window opened just above his head, and looking up he saw her—unornamented, in russet gown and apron blue, a jug of water in her white hand ready for the thirsty row of mignonette and geranium slips in the window-box.