Just as Geff, his hands filled with flowers, was parting from the girl, one hushed and radiant evening, there came a rush of wheels—he could hear it now, dreaming over the past on this Guernsey moorland, and the blood rose to Geff’s face at the remembrance—a rush of wheels down the slumbering street of Lesser Cheriton. For a few seconds the sound was muffled by the ivied churchyard wall where the road wound abruptly. Then, at a slapping pace, trotted past a high-stepping bay, of which Gaston Arbuthnot was for the moment the possessor, also Gaston Arbuthnot, in his well-appointed cart, returning to Alma Mater, with a brace of rich Jesus friends, after spending the afternoon at Ely.
Lesser Cheriton does not lie on the road between Ely and Cambridge. Lesser Cheriton, we may boldly say, lies on the road nowhere. But these young gentlemen were in the adventure-seeking, after-dinner mood, when a devious turning of any kind is taken with pleasant ease. And here, on their wrong road, and in Lesser Cheriton’s one street, they found themselves.
There was daylight lingering still in the low fields of Cambridgeshire sky. There was a young May moon, too, whose yellowish silver caused the outlines of Dinah Thurston’s head and throat to stand out in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge that divided the cottage garden and the road.
Gaston Arbuthnot turned sharply round for an instant and saw her. Shouting a cheery ‘Hullo!’ to his cousin, he drove on, giving a little valedictory wave of his whip ere he disappeared. And Geff, the glory shorn suddenly, unaccountably from his Eden, bade Dinah good-night, and started on his four-mile trudge back to Cambridge.
It was ten days before he again smelt the mignonette and roses of the cottage, or slaked his soul’s thirst by gazing on Dinah’s face. By early post next morning came a letter saying that the uncle to whose reluctantly generous hand he owed the hard All of his life lay at the point of death. The old man was sound of mind still, and desired his nephew’s presence. A lawyer wrote the letter, and it was added that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot would well consult his worldly interests by obeying the wishes of the dying man without delay.
It was one of those crises when all our present and future good seems to resolve itself into a desolate ‘perhaps.’ Geoffrey’s debts were few. Still, he had debts. The possibility of remaining up his nine terms at Cambridge might depend upon the will of this stern-hearted uncle who, dying, craved his presence. And yet, in obeying the summons, might he not be risking dearer things than worldly success—jeopardising hopes which already threw a trembling light over his loveless life?
He had spoken no syllable of his passion to Dinah, was too self-distrustful to tell his secret by means so matter-of-fact as a sheet of paper and the post. And so, like many another timid suitor, Geoffrey Arbuthnot elected to play a losing game. With immense fidelity in his breast, but without a word of explanation, he set off by noon of that day to London—not ignorant that Gaston’s eyes and those of Dinah Thurston had already met.
A girl’s vanity, if not her heart, might well have been wounded by such conduct. In after times Geoffrey Arbuthnot, musing over his lost happiness, would apply such medicine to his sore spirit as the limited pharmacopœia of disappointment can offer. If he had had a man’s metal, if, instead of flying like a schoolboy, he had said to her, on that evening when Gaston drove past them at the gate, ‘Take me or reject me, but choose!’—had he thus spoken, Geoffrey used to think, he might have won her.
To-night, on the Guernsey waste-land, with heaven so broad above, with earth so friendly, the past seemed to return to him without effort of his own and without sting. The fortnight he passed in London, the unknown relatives who beset the sick man’s bed, the scene amidst a London churchyard’s gloom, wherein he, Geff, in hired crape, was chief mourner, the reading of the will, the return to Cambridge—all this, at first, floated before his vision in grey monotone, as scenes will do in which one has played a spectator’s rather than an actor’s part. Then in a moment (Geoffrey’s half-closed eyes scanning the moor’s horizon, the soft airs blowing on his face) there came upon him a flash of light. It was so intolerably clear that every leaf and flower and pebble of a cottage garden in far-off Cambridgeshire stood out before him with a vividness that was poignant, a vividness that had in it the stab of sudden bodily pain.
Springing to his feet, Geoffrey resolved to brood over the irrevocable no longer. He emptied the ashes from his pipe, then replaced it, with Dinah’s delicate morsel of handiwork, in his pocket. He took out his watch. It was more than time for him to be off; and after a farewell glance at the campanula-shrouded knolls, Geff started briskly in the direction of Tintajeux Manoir. But the ghosts would not be laid. There were yet two pictures, a garden scene, an interior, upon which, whether he walked or remained still, Geoffrey Arbuthnot felt himself forced, in the spirit, to look.