Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

eyes. Perhaps after all there was something to be said for family life! Tragic wreck as Clowes was, he would have been far more to be pitied but for his wife: their marriage, crippled and sterilized, was yet—as Lawrence saw it—a beautiful relation. Suppose he stood in that relation to Isabel? Sitting at table in the cool panelled diningroom, his careless pose stiffening under Laura's touch, Lawrence for the first time began to wonder whether he would not gain more in happiness than he would lose in freedom if he were to make the child his wife.

"To make the child his wife." He was not really more of an egoist than the average man, but he did assume that if he wanted her he could win her. His mistress was very young: it was her rose of youth and her unquelled spirit that charmed him even more than her beauty: and she had not sixpence to her name, while he was a rich man. He did not, as Bernard would have done, go on to plume himself on his magnanimity, or infer that Isabel's gratitude would give him a claim on her fealty over and beyond the Pauline duty of wives. In the immediate personal relation Lawrence was visited by a saving humility. But on the main issue he took, or thought he took, a practical view. A man in love cannot soberly analyse his own psychological state, and Lawrence did not know that he had fallen in love with Isabel at first sight or that the germ of matrimonial intentions had lain all along in his mind. Here and now he believed that he first thought of marrying her.

Then he would have to stay on at Wanhope. And court Isabel under the eyes of all Chilmark? Under Bernard's eyes at all events; they were already watching him. Lawrence was irritated: whatever happened, he was not going to be watched by his cousin and chaffed and argued over and betted on. In most points indifferently frank, Lawrence was silent as the grave where sex came into play.

"Thank you." He touched with his lips the hand that Laura had innocently laid on his wrist. "It can't really be fourteen years, Laura, since you were staying at Farringay."

"Flatterer!" said Laura, smiling but startled, and rising from her chair. "This to an old married woman!"

"Ah! when I remember that I knew you before this fellow did—!"

"Here, I say," came Bernard's voice across the table, riotously amused, "none o' that! none o' that!"

"Penalty for having a charming wife," laughed Lawrence, in his preoccupation blind and deaf to danger signals. He rose to open the door for Laura. "By the by, if you go to the vicarage this afternoon, I'll stroll up with you, if I may. I suppose I owe the young lady that much civility!"

"I can't: I'm busy," said Laura hastily. "That is, I don't know what time I shall get away. Go by yourself, don't wait for me."

"Rubbish," said Bernard. "Much pleasanter for both of you to have the walk together. Lawrence doesn't want to go alone, do you?" ("Rather not," said Lawrence heartily.) "And I don't want you here, my love, if that's the trouble, I can't have you tied to the leg of my sofa."

Later, when Lawrence had gone out on the lawn to smoke, Bernard recalled Laura. She came to him. He took hold of her wrist and lay smiling up at her. "Nice relationship, isn't it, cousins-in-law? So free and easy. You—. I watched you pawing him about. So affectionate. He felt it too. Did you see the start he gave? He twigged fast enough. Think you can play that game under my nose, do you? So you can. I don't care what you do. Take yourself off now and take him with you."

"Don't pinch my wrist below the cuff, Bernard," said his wife. "I can't wear gloves at tea."

"You can stop out all night for all I care," said Clowes. "I'm sick of the sight of you."

Then Laura knew that the Golden Age was over.

Isabel had refused to go to bed. She had no nerves: she saw life in its proper colours without refraction. The dreadful scene at Wancote had made its full impression on her, but she was not beset like Hyde by visions of what might have been. Still she was tired and subdued, and when Verney had dressed her arm she announced her intention of spending the afternoon in the garden out of the way of kind enquiries: and she settled herself on an Indian chair behind a thicket of lilac and syringa, while Val and Rowsley and Yvonne brought books and cushions and chocolate and eau de cologne to comfort beauty in distress.

But she had reckoned without the wicket gate in the garden wall, which Lawrence let himself in by. He caught sight of her as he crossed the lawn and came up to her bare-headed. "How are you?" he asked without preface. "Better now?"

His informality went against the grain of Isabel's taste: he had no right to presume on a forced situation: with what fastidious modesty Val would have drawn back! She was tired, and she did not want to be reminded of what had happened in the morning. She shut up her book, but kept a finger in the place. "Thank you. I'm sorry the others are all out."

"Mrs. Clowes sent me on ahead."

For the second time she had made Lawrence redden like a girl, and his easy manner deserted him. Isabel unconsciously let the book slip from her hand. The lives of the Forsythe family were less absorbing than her own life when this fiery dramatic glow was shed over it. A singular smile flitted over her lips: "Well, you may as well sit down now you are here," she observed. Lawrence sat down in a deck chair and Isabel's smile broadened: she was laughing at him and teasing him with her eyes, though what she said remained conventional to the point of primness. "Is Laura coming to see me? How sweet of her! But what a pity she couldn't come with you! Why couldn't she?"

"I believe she stayed to look after my cousin."

"How is Major Clowes? Did he have a good night and was he in a— was he cheerful today?"

"So-so: he's not a great talker, is he?"

Isabel's speaking face expressed dissent. "Perhaps not when he's in a good temper. Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm always forgetting he's your cousin."

"I'm prone to forget it myself. I've seen so little of him."

"('Though the blase-man-of-the-world had seen thousands of superbly beautiful women in elegant creations by Paquin or Worth, his gaze was riveted as by a mesmeric attraction on the innocent young girl in her simple little white muslin frock, with her lissome ankles and slim, sunburnt hands.') Laura said you had been a great traveller. Shall you settle down in England?"

"Not unless I marry."

Isabel declined this topic, on which Mrs. Jack Bendish would have expatiated. "Laura says you have a lovely old house in Somersetshire. It must be jolly to have an ancestral house."

"Mine is not ancestral," said Lawrence amused. "My father bought it forty years ago at the time of the agricultural depression. It belonged to some county people—Sir Frank Fleet—who couldn't afford to keep it up. It is a lovely place, Farringay, but it's full of Fleet ghosts and the neighbourhood doesn't let me forget that I'm an alien."

"But how absurd! how narrow-minded!" exclaimed Isabel. "Houses must change hands now and then, and I dare say your father was a better landlord than the Fleets were. Besides, see how much worse it might have been! There's Wilmerdings, here in Chilmark, that the Morleys have taken: his name isn't Morley at all, Yvonne says it's Moss in the City: but they foreclosed on the Orr-Matthews' mortgage and turned them out, and that darling old place is delivered over to a horrid little Jew!"

"Poor Morley!" said Lawrence laughing. "I am a Jew myself." Isabel was stricken dumb. "I thought I had better tell you than let you hear it from some one else. No, don't apologize! these things will happen, and I'm not deeply hurt, for I refuse to call sibb with a Moss-Morley. I should never foreclose on any one's mortgage. My mother was an Englishwoman and my father was a Levantine—half Jew, half Greek. Have you never heard of Andrew Hyde the big curio dealer in New Bond Street? He was commonly known as old Hyde-and-seek. The Hyde galleries are famous. As I remember him he was a common-looking little old man with a passion for art."

"Well, I'm sorry I said such a stupid thing," said Isabel, still very red, "not because of hurting your feelings, for it isn't likely that anything I said would do that—but because it was stupid in itself, and narrow-minded, and snobbish. It'll be a lesson to me. All the same, it's interesting." She had forgotten by now that she was an innocent-young-girl and Lawrence a blase-man-of-the-world, and had slipped into a vein of intimacy which was fast charming Lawrence out of all his caution. "I suppose you take after your father, and that's why you're so unlike Major Clowes. He is a Clowes, but you're a Hyde."

"What does that mean?"

Isabel waited a moment to think it out. "You're more of a cosmopolitan; I expect you have a passion for art too, like your father. Major Clowes hasn't. He doesn't care two pins for the beauty of his old swords and daggers, he cares only for getting all the different sorts. You, perhaps, might care almost too much." Lawrence dropped his eyes. "And you vary more, you're not always the same, you have more facets: one can see you've done all sorts of things and mixed with all sorts of people. I suppose that's why you're so easily bored—I don't mean to be rude!"

"At the present moment I am deeply interested. Go on: it charms me to be dissected to my face, and by such an able hand."

"No: it's absurd and I never meant to begin it. Of course I don't know a bit what you're like."

"God forbid!" Lawrence murmured:—"Guess away and I'll tell you if you're right."

"You won't play fair. You won't own up and you'll get cross if I do."

"Not I, I have the most amiable temper in the world."

"Now I wonder if that's true?" said Isabel, scrutinizing him closely. "Perhaps you wouldn't often take the trouble to get in a wax. Oh well," surrendering at indiscretion, "then I guess that you care for very few people and for those few very much."

"Missed both barrels. I like any number of people and I shouldn't care if I never saw one of them again."

Isabel laughed. "I said you wouldn't play fair."

"Don't you believe me?"

"No, of course not. You wouldn't say it if it were true."

Lawrence drew a deep breath and looked away. Their nook of turf was out of sight of the house, sheltered from it behind a great thicket of lilac and syringa, which walled off the lawn from the kitchen garden full of sweet-smelling currant bushes and apple-trees laden with green fruit. The sleepy air was alive with gilded wasps, and between the stiffly-drooping apple-branches, with their coarse foliage, and the pencilled frieze of stonecrop and valerian waving along the low stone boundarywall, there was a dim honey-coloured expanse that stretched away like an inland sea, where, the afternoon sunshine lay in a yellow haze over brown and yellow and blue tracts of the Plain. Nothing was to be heard but the drone of wings near at hand and the whirr of a haycutter far down in the valley. No one was near and summer lay heavy on the land.

"I did care once. . I had a bad smash in my life when I was little more than a boy." He dragged a heavy gold band from his finger. "That was my wedding ring."

"Oh … I'm sorry!" faltered Isabel. She was stunned by the extraordinary