Gaston Arbuthnot changed colour.
‘What, on Lilith?’ he asked, shifting away, and bending over his unfinished sketch. ‘It is to be good, like all my things, some day. A new block in the pavement of the road to Hades! At present this left arm, above the elbow, is, as you see, a libel on anatomy.’
Geff followed him. He rested his hand on his cousin’s shoulder with such emphasis that Gaston Arbuthnot had no choice but to look up.
‘I congratulate you,’ he repeated very low, but with a concentrated energy that infused meaning into each syllable ‘I congratulate you upon your engagement to Dinah Thurston.’
So these visions of the past stood out; not merely with rigid correctness of form, but with colour, with fragrance, with the stir of human passion, the ring of human voices, to give them vitality. By the time the last one had vanished—the rose-shaded lamps, the actress in her frame, the clay-sketched Lilith, the yellow-backed novels dissolving into the actual grays and greens of this Guernsey moorland—Geoffrey found himself ringing, with a somewhat quickened pulse, despite his indifference to every form of feminine caprice, at the front bell of Tintajeux Manoir.
CHAPTER V MARJORIE
The door was opened by a French serving-man, who bestowed on Geoffrey a bow such as valets used to copy from their masters in days when the first country in Europe possessed a manner. Had not Sylvestre made the Grand Tour with the Reverend Andros Bartrand more than half a century before the present time! He was clad in a faded livery of puce and silver, wore long white locks that in this uncertain light gave Geoffrey the notion of a pigtail and hair powder, and had a wrinkled astute face, in which official decorum and a certain thin twinkle of humour, if not of malice, contended together agreeably for precedence.
‘Monsieur demands these ladies?’—from her earliest years Marjorie Bartrand had received a kind of spurious chaperonage through this plural phrase of Sylvestre’s. ‘Will Monsieur give himself then the trouble to enter?’