He loved her, there and then. It was an old, a sacred story now, and Geoffrey questioned no syllable of the text as he scanned it quickly through. He took her picture back with him to his dark, book-strewn scholar’s attic in John’s, and that night he dreamed of her. Next morning he walked forth to Lesser Cheriton at the same hour, passed the rectory, the seven public-houses, and again caught glimpses of Dinah’s head as she sat, with a very fat old lady, alas! of a very humble class, in a close little parlour sewing, the lamp lighted, the windows fast shut, all the glories of the outside June night ignored.
The same kind of mute worship went on the next evening and the next. Towards the end of the week the old lady of a very humble class accosted him. Geff could remember the thrill of that moment yet. Away through the garden gloom did he not descry the flutter of a russet dress, the outline of a girlish head downbent over a bush of opening roses? The young gentleman would pardon her for taking such a liberty, but as he seemed fond of the country he might care sometimes for a bunch of cut flowers. She was a lone widow and lived too far off to send in her garden stuff to the Cambridge market except in wall-fruit time. If she could dispose, friendly like, of a few cut flowers it would be a little profit to her. Some of the University gentlemen, she had heard, dressed up their rooms, like a show, with flowers, and the roses and carnations this term were coming on wonderful. If the young gentleman would please to walk round the garden and see?
The young gentleman walked round the garden. He bought as many flowers as his arms could carry away. He learned that the girl’s name was Dinah Thurston, that she was ‘apprenticed to the dressmaking,’ and had come up all the way out of Devonshire to spend a month’s holiday with the old lady, her father’s sister. The Devonshire burr in Dinah’s speech disenchanted him no more than did an occasional lapse or two in Dinah’s grammar. When is a stripling of his age disenchanted by anything save frowns or rivals? Geoffrey held original ideas on more than one burning social subject, had made up his mind—on the first evening he saw Dinah Thurston—that it was a duty for him and for every man to marry young.
And he cared not one straw either for want of money, or for plebeian birth.
Good, because healthy blood flowed in this girl’s veins, thought Geff—the incipient physiologist. Sweet temper was on her lips. A stainless woman’s soul looked forth from those fair eyes. She was above, only too much above him in every excellence, inward or external. What chance had he with his plain face, his shy student’s manner, of winning such a jewel as Dinah Thurston’s love? What hope was there that she would wait until the day, necessarily distant, when he would be able to work for a wife’s support?
He became a daily caller at the cottage, and it is hard to suppose that both Dinah and Dinah’s protector were quite blind to the truth. Garden stuff was ever Geff’s ostensible object. He wanted cut flowers for himself, for an acquaintance who could not walk as far as Lesser Cheriton. He wanted radishes, cresses,—so different, he declared, to the stringy salad of College butteries! He wanted to know when the strawberries were likely to ripen.
He wanted some daily excuse for gazing on Dinah Thurston’s face.
Hard, I repeat, to think that the feminine instinct, however unsophisticated, would make no guess, as time went on, at the state of the poor young undergraduate’s heart. But this is just the kind of point at which good women, in every class, are prone to innocent casuistry. At all events, Dinah Thurston and her aunt gave no outward sign of intelligence. The old lady took her daily shillings and sixpences with commercial gravity. Dinah cut the flowers or tied up little hunches of cress and radishes in a convenient form for Geff to carry.
So, as in a new garden of Eden without a threat of the serpent’s coming, matters progressed for yet another fortnight.
Lesser Cheriton lies at a junction of rough Cambridgeshire lanes; a village girt round by blossoming orchards in May, by sheets of black water or blacker ice in December. In addition to its rectory and seven public-houses, it contains a score or two of the thatched, high-shouldered cottages common to this part of England. Being untraversed by any of the Maid’s Causeways, Lesser Cheriton lies somewhat out of the ordinary undergraduate track. Geoffrey had no intimate friend in the University save Gaston Arbuthnot, whose time was quite otherwise occupied than in watching the comings and goings of his simple scholar cousin. He was known to be a hard-working man who took his daily walk from duty and without companionship. But for an after-dinner stupidity—a turning missed—the little love drama would probably have unfolded itself with commonplace speed, and Geoffrey have gained a wife, for I cannot think Dinah’s unoccupied fancy would, at the age of eighteen, have been hard to win. The turning, however, was missed—thus.