During nearly four years, a portentously large slice of life under five-and-twenty, it had been one long case of give-and-take between Geoffrey and Dinah—the ‘take’ invariably on Dinah’s side. She took his heart from him to start with. She took the happiness out of his youth. Silently, unrecognised, Geoffrey constituted himself her knight-errant in the hour of his own sharpest pain. (Till her death Dinah could never know the part played by Geoffrey at the time of her engagement and marriage.) In a hundred ways he had since steadied her husband in the path of right. By a hundred unselfish actions he had smoothed nascent domestic discontents, any one of which might have worked mortal havoc with Dinah’s peace.
She had received all his devotion—a prevalent weakness, it is to be feared, among gentle, unimaginative women of her type—as the simplest thing in the world!
If Dinah, as once there was promise, had had children, doubt not that her moral nature must have widened. But this was not to be. A tiny, dying creature held between weak arms for half a day; some yellowing, never-used baby-clothes, jealously hidden out of Gaston’s sight; a kiss stolen, when her husband was not by to see, from any fair cottage babe she might chance to come across in her walk—this much, and no more, was Dinah to know of motherhood.
And the love blindly centred on Gaston had in it an element which, although the word is hard, must in justice be called selfishness.
‘Nothing Gaston likes so well as the smell of flowers on his breakfast table.’ And Dinah still carelessly held out her hand in a receptive attitude. ‘He says his brain must be like the brains of dogs or deer—smell colours all his thoughts. You will see, Geff! Those heliotropes and roses will just set him kneading some new idea into clay to-morrow morning.’
But the heliotropes and the roses did not quit Geoffrey’s hand.
In this moment, ay, while Dinah was speaking, a current of new, keen, healthful life had swept through him. He felt more thoroughly master of himself than he had done since that May evening when he first blindly surrendered his will, with his heart, to a blonde girl watering flowers through a casement window at Lesser Cheriton. Marjorie’s roses, fresh from her pure touch, a friendly gift from the world-scorning child who, somehow, looked upon her tutor as out of the scope of scorn, were his. If Gaston needed inspiration from flower-scents, Doctor Thorne’s garden, any other garden than that of the Seigneur of Tintajeux, must supply the inspiration.
He made a dexterous exit, rushed away, boy-fashion, light of spirit, three steps at a time, to his own room. And before half a minute was over Dinah Arbuthnot had forgotten him. Poor old faithful Geff, his lesson-giving, his heiress, his bouquet—what were these, nay, what were the alien concerns of the universe to a pathetically tender soul, quick smarting under its own immediate and narrow pain!
Had Linda Thorne the power of holding an artist’s restless fancy captive, the genius of making time pass swiftly, the talent of clever talk, of giving genial little dinners, of dressing perfectly? Above all, was she a woman to expect nothing whatever in return for her devotion? A woman strong enough to be philosophical, even, towards a rival who should vanquish her, in her own world, with her own weapons? If she were thus gifted—Dinah moved to the window and looked out across the hotel garden to a point between an opening in the trees where the sea showed blue and foamless—if Linda Thorne were thus gifted, then might to-night be taken as a foretaste of what the next six weeks, the bloom and glory of a mid-Channel summer, had in store for herself.