Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

In the stillness that followed Yvonne occupied herself with her cigarette. Mrs. Clowes was formidable even to her sister in her delicately inaccessible dignity.

"Had you any special motive in saying this to me now, Yvonne?"

"This theatre business."

"I don't contemplate running away with Lawrence, if that is what you mean."

"Wish you would!" confessed Mrs. Bendish frankly. "Then Bernard could divorce you and you could start fair again. I'm fed up with Bernard. I'm sorry for him, poor devil, but he never was much of a joy as a husband, and he's going from bad to worse. Think I'm blind? Of course he's jealous. High dresses and lace cuffs aren't the fashion now, Lal."

Her sister slowly turned back the frill from her wrist and examined the scarlet stain of Bernard's finger-print. "Does it show so plainly? I hope other people haven't noticed. Bernard doesn't remember how strong his hands still are."

"Doesn't care, you mean."

"Do you want me quite naked?" said Laura. "Well, doesn't care, then."

Yvonne was not accustomed to the smart of pity. She winced under it, and her tongue, an edge-tool of intelligence or passion, but not naturally prone to express tenderness, became more than ever articulate. "Sorry!" she said with difficulty, and then, "Didn't want to rake all this up. But I'm fond of you. We've always been pals, you and I, Lulu."

"Say whatever you like."

"Then—" she sat up, throwing away her cigarette-"I'm going to warn you. All Chilmark believes Lawrence is your lover."

"And do you?"

"No. I know you wouldn't run an intrigue."

"Thank you."

"But Jack and I both think, if you don't want to cut and run with him, you ought to pack him off. Mind, if you do want to, you can count me in, and Jack too. I'm not religious: Jack is, but he's not narrow. As for the social bother of it—marriage is a useful institution and all that, but it's perfectly obvious that one can get—over the rails and back again if one has money. There aren't twenty houses (worth going to) in London that would cut you if you turned up properly remarried to a rich man."

"Are you . . . recommending this course?"

"I'd like you to be happy."

"And what about Bernard?"

"Put in a couple of good trained nurses who wouldn't give him his head as you do, and he'd be a different man by the spring."

"He certainly would," said Laura drily. "He would be dead."

"Not he. He's far too strong to die of being made uncomfortable. As a matter of fact it would do him all the good in the world," pursued Yvonne calmly. "He cries out to be bullied. What's so irritating in the present situation is that though you let him rack you to pieces you never give him what he wants! You don't shine as a wife, my dear."

"It will end in my sending Lawrence away," said Laura with a subdued sigh. "I didn't want to because in many ways he has done Bernard so much good; no one else has ever had the same influence over him; besides, I liked having him at Wanhope for my own sake—he freshened us up and gave us different things to talk about, outside interests, new ideas. And after all, so far as Bernard himself is concerned, one is as good as another. He always has been jealous and always will be. But if all Chilmark credits us with the rather ignominious feat of betraying him, Lawrence will have to go."

"Lawrence may have something to say to that."

"He's not in love with me." Yvonne's eyes widened in genuine scepticism.—"Oh dear, as if I shouldn't know!" Laura broke out petulantly. Might not Yvonne have remembered that, in the days when they were living together in a French appartement, Laura's experience had been pretty nearly as wide as her own? "He is not, I tell you! nor I with him. But, if we were, I shouldn't desert Bernard. I do not believe in your two highly trained nurses. I don't think you much believe in them yourself. They might break him in, because nurses are drilled to deal with tiresome and unmanageable patients, but it would be worse for him, not better. He rebels fiercely enough now, but if I weren't there he would rebel still more fiercely, and all the rage and humiliation would have no outlet. You want me to be happy? We Selincourts are so quick to seize happiness! Father did it . . . and Lucian does it: dear Lulu! We both love him, but it's difficult to be proud of him. Yet he has good qualities, good abilities. He's far cleverer than I am, and so are you," Laura's tone was diffident, "but oh, you are wrong in thinking so much of mere happiness. There is an immense amount of pain in the world, and if one doesn't bear one's own share it falls on some one else. My life with Bernard isn't—always easy," she found a momentary difficulty in controlling her voice, "but he's my husband and I shall stick to him. The more so for being deeply conscious that a different woman might manage him better. No I don't mind your saying it. Oh, how often I've felt the truth of it! But, such as I am, I'm all he has."

"You're a thousand times too good for him. Why are you so good?"

"I'm not good and no more is Lulu." Mrs. Bendish sighed, impressed perhaps by Laura's alien moralities, certainly by her determination. "However, if you won't you won't, and in a way I'm glad, selfishly that is, because of Jack's people. But in that case, dear girl, do get rid of Lawrence! The situation strikes me as fraught with danger. One of those situations where every one says something's sure to happen, and then they're all flabbergasted when it does."

"Bernard is not a formidable enemy," said Mrs. Clowes drily.
"But, yes, Lawrence must go. I'll speak to him tomorrow."

"Why not today?"

"It would spoil our evening."

"Give it up."

"And disappoint Isabel?"

"I don't like it."

"Nor I. But I was forced into it, and I can't break my word to Lawrence and the child. After all, there's no great odds between today and tomorrow. What can happen in twenty-four hours?"

In after life, when Isabel was destined to look back on that day as the last day of her youth, she recalled no part of it more clearly than wandering up to her own room after an early tea to dress, and flinging herself down on her bed instead of dressing. She slept next to Val. But while Val's room, sailor-like in its neatness, was bare as any garret and got no sun at all, Isabel's was comfortable in a shabby way and faced south and west over the garden: an autumn garden now, bathed in westering sunshine, fortified from the valley by a carved gold height of beech trees, open on every other side over sunburnt moorland pale and rough as a stubble-field in its autumn feathering of light brown grasses and seedling flowers aflicker in a west wind. Tonight however Isabel saw nothing of it, she lay as if asleep, her face hidden in her pillow: she, the most active person in the house, who was never tired like Val nor lazy like Rowsley! Conscience pricked her, but she was muffled so thick in happiness that she scarcely felt it: the fancies that floated into her mind frightened her, and yet they were too sweet to banish: and then after all were they wrong?

Always on clear evenings the sun flung a great ray across her wall, turning the faded pale green paper into a liquid gold-green like sunlit water, evoking a dusty gleam from her mirror, and deepening the shadows in an old mezzo tint of Botticelli's Spring which was pinned up where she could gaze at it while she brushed her hair. The room thus illumined was that of a young girl with little time to spare and less money, and an ungrown individual taste not yet critical enough to throw off early loyalties. There were no other pictures, except an engraving of "The Light of the World," given her by Val, who admired it. There was a tall bookcase, the top shelves devoted to Sweet's "Anglo-Saxon Reader," Lanson's "Histoire de la litterature Francaise," and other textbooks that she was reading for her examination in October, the lower a ragged regiment of novels and verse—"The Three Musketeers," "Typhoon," "Many Inventions," Landor's "Hellenics," "with fondest love from Laura," "Une Vie" and "Fort comme la Mort" in yellow and initialled "Y.B." There were also a big table strewn with papers and books, and a chintz covered box-ottoman into which Isabel bundled all those rubbishing treasures that people who love their past can never make up their weak minds to throw away. She examined them all in the stream of gold sunlight as if she had never seen them before. It was time to get up and arrange her hair and change into her lace petticoats. If she did not get up at once she would be late and they would lose their train. And it seemed to her that she would die if they lost their train, that she never could survive such a disappointment: and yet she could not bring herself to get up and give over dreaming.

And what dreams they were, oh! what would Val say to them?—And yet again after all were they so wicked?—They were incredibly naif and innocent, and so dim that within twenty-four hours Isabel was to look back on them as a woman looks back on her childhood. She was not ignorant of the mysteries of birth and death. She had lived all her life among the poor, and knew many things which are not included in school curricula, such as the gentle art of keeping children's hair clean, how to divide a four-roomed cottage between a man and wife and six children and a lodger, and what to say when shown "a beautiful corpse": but she had never had a lover of her own. There were no marriageable men in Chilmark—there never are in an English village—and she was too young for Rowsley's brother officers, or they were too young for her. She had dreamed of fairy princes (blases-men-of-the-world, mostly in the Guards or the diplomatic service), but it was never precisely Isabel Stafford whom they clasped to their hearts—no, it was LaSignora Isabella, the star of Covent Garden, or the Lady Isabel de Stafford, a Duke's daughter in disguise. And Lawrence came to her in the mantle of these patrician ghosts.

But—and at this point Isabel hid her face on her arm—he was no ghost: he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it: and it was a far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large, fair, overmanicured hands. A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish: from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental blood. When people were engaged they often kissed each other . . . but when it came to imagining oneself . . . one's head against that thick tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do but dangerous to dream of doing. Oh, never, never!—But she had been trained in sincerity: and was this cry sincere? Her mind was chaos.

And yet after all why dangerous? Even Laura, Val's adored Laura, had been engaged twice before she married Major Clowes: as for Yvonne, Isabel felt sure she had been kissed many times, and not by Jack Bendish only. Such things happen, then! in real life, not only in books. As for the cigars and the valet . . . and Val's warnings . . . one can't have all one wants in this world! It contains no ideal heroes: what was it Yvonne had once said? "Every marriage is either a delusion or a compromise." And Isabel had shortcomings enough of her own: she was irritable, lazy, selfish: read novels when she ought to have been at her lessons: left household jobs undone