Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

hand to Mrs. Clowes. The morning air was fresh, fog was still hanging over the river, and the sun had not yet thrown off an autumn quilting of cloud. Touched by the chill of dawn, some leaves had fallen and lay in the dust, their ribs beaded with dark dew: others, yellow and shrivelling, where shaken down by the wind of the car and fluttered slowly in the eddying air. Laura drew her sable scarf close over her bare neck.

"What I should like best, Lawrence, would be for you to go home with Isabel and make our excuses to Mr. Stafford. Would you mind? Or is it too much to ask before you get out of your evening dress?"

"I should be delighted," said Lawrence, feeling and indeed looking entirely the reverse. "But Miss Isabel has her brother to take care of her, she doesn't want me." Isabel gave that indefinable start which is the prelude of candour, but remained dumb. "I don't like to leave you to walk up to Wanhope alone." This, was as near as in civilized life he could go to saying "to face Clowes alone."

"The length of the drive?" said Laura smiling. "I should prefer it. You know what Berns is." This was what Lawrence had never known. "If he's put out I'd rather you weren't there."

"Why, you can't imagine I should care what Bernard said?"

Laura struck her hands together.-"There! There!" she turned to
Val, "can you wonder Bernard feels it?"

"I beg your pardon," said Lawrence from his heart.

"No, the contrast is poignant,'' said Val coldly.

"Dear Val, you always agree with me," said Laura. "Take Captain
Hyde home and give him some breakfast. I'd rather go alone,
Lawrence: it will be easier that way, believe me."

It was impossible to argue with her. But while Val wheeled and turned in the wide cross, before they took their upward bend under the climbing beechwood, Lawrence glanced over his shoulder and saw Mrs. Clowes still standing by the gate of Wanhope, solitary, a wan gleam of sunlight striking down over her gold embroideries and ivory coat, a russet leaf or two whirling slowly round her drooping head: like a butterfly in winter, delicate, fantastic, and astray.

Breakfast at the vicarage was not a genial meal. Val was anxious and preoccupied, Isabel in eclipse, even Mr. Stafford out of humour—vexed with Lawrence, and with Val for bringing Lawrence in under the immunities of a guest. Lawrence himself was in a frozen mood. As soon as they had finished he rose: "If you'll excuse my rushing off I'll go down to Wanhope now."

"By all means," said Mr. Stafford drily.

"Good-bye," said Isabel, casting about for a form of consolation, and evolving one which, in the circumstances, was possibly unique: "You'll feel better when you've had a bath."

"I'll walk down with you to Wanhope" said Val.

"You? Oh! no, don't bother," said Lawrence very curtly. "I can manage my cousin, thanks."

But Val's only reply was to open the door for him and stroll with him across the lawn. At the wicket gate Hyde turned: "Excuse my saying so, but I prefer to go alone."

"I'm not coming in at Wanhope. But I've ten words to say to you before you go there."

"Oh?" said Lawrence. He swung through leaving Val to follow or not as he liked.

"Stop, Hyde, you must listen. You're going into a house full of the materials for an explosion. You don't know your own danger."

"I dislike hints. What are you driving at?"

"Laura."

"Mrs. Clowes?"

"Naturally," said Val with a faint smile. "You know as well as I do how pointless that correction is. You imply by it that as I'm not her brother I've no right to meddle. But I told you in June that I should interfere if it became necessary to protect others."

"And since when, my dear Val, has it become necessary? Last night?"

"Well, not that only: all Chilmark has been talking for weeks and weeks."

"Chilmark—"

"Oh," Val interrupted, flinging out his delicate hands, "what's the good of that? Who would ever suggest that you care what Chilmark says? But she has to live in it."

The scene had to be faced, and a secret vein of cruelty in Lawrence was not averse from facing it. This storm had been brewing all summer.—They were alone, for the beechen way was used only as a short cut to the vicarage. Above them the garden wall lifted its feathery fringe of grass into great golden boughs that drooped over it: all round them the beech forest ran down into the valley, the eye losing itself among clear glades at the end of which perhaps a thicket of hollies twinkled darkly or a marbled gleam of blue shone in from overhead; the steep dark path was illumined by the golden lamplight of millions on millions of pointed leaves, hanging motionless in the sunny autumnal morning air which smelt of dry moss and wood smoke.

"And what's the rumour? That I'm going to prevail or that I've prevailed already?"

"The worst of it is," Val kept his point and his temper, "that it's not only Chilmark. One could afford to ignore village gossip, but this has reached Wharton, my father—Mrs. Clowes herself. You wouldn't willingly do anything to make her unhappy: indeed it's because of your consistent and delicate kindness both to her and to Bernard that I've refrained from giving you a hint before. You've done Bernard an immense amount of good. But the good doesn't any longer counterbalance the involuntary mischief: hasn't for some time past: can't you see it for yourself? One has only to watch the change coming over her, to look into her eyes—"

"Really, if you'll excuse my saying so, you seem to have looked into them a little too often yourself."

Val waited to take out his case and light a cigarette. He offered one to Hyde—"Won't you?"

"No, thanks: if you've done I'll be moving on."

"Why I haven't really begun yet. You make me nervous—it's a rotten thing to say to any man, and doubly difficult from me to you—and I express myself badly, But I must chance being called impertinent. The trouble is with your cousin. If you had heard him last night. . . . He's madly jealous."

"Of me? Last night?" Lawrence gave a short laugh: this time he really was amused.

"Dangerously jealous."

"There's not room for a shadow of suspicion. Go and interview
Selincourt's servant if you like, or nose around the Continental."

"Well," said Val, coaxing a lucifer between his cupped palms,
"I dare say it'll come to that. I've done a good deal of
Bernard's dirty work. Some one has to do it for the sake of a
quiet life. His suspicions aren't rational, you know."

"I should think you put them into his head."

"I?" the serene eyes widened slightly, irritating Lawrence by their effect of a delicacy too fastidious for contempt. For this courtesy, of finer grain than his own sarcasm, made him itch to violate and soil it, as mobs will destroy what they never can possess. "Need we drag in personalities? He was jealous of you before you came to Wanhope. He fancies or pretends to fancy that you were in love with Mrs. Clowes when you were boy and girl. We're not dealing with a sane or normal nature: he was practically mad last night—he frightened me. May I give you, word for word, what he said? That he let you stay on because he meant to give his wife rope enough to hang herself."

"What do you want me to do?" said Lawrence after a pause.

"To leave Wanhope."

More at his ease than Val, in spite of the disadvantage of his evening dress, Lawrence stood looking down at him with brilliant inexpressive eyes. "Is it your own idea that I stayed on at Wanhope to make love to Laura?"

"If I answer that, you'll tell me that I'm meddling with what is none of my business, and this time you'll be right."

"No: after going so far, you owe me a reply."

"Well then, I've never been able to see any other reason."

"Oh? Bernard's my cousin."

"Since you will have it, Hyde, I can't see you burying yourself in a country village out of cousinly affection. You said you'd stay as long as you were comfortable. Well, it won't be comfortable now! I'm not presuming to judge you. I've no idea what your ethical or social standards are. Quite likely you would consider yourself justified in taking away your cousin's wife. Some modern professors and people who write about social questions would say, wouldn't they, that she ought to be able to divorce him: that a marriage which can't be fruitful ought not to be a binding tie? I've never got up the subject because for me it's settled out of hand on religious grounds, but they may not influence you, nor perhaps would the other possible deterrent, pity for the weak—if one can call Bernard weak. It would be an impertinence for me to judge you by my code, when perhaps your own is pure social expediency—which would certainly be better served if Mrs. Clowes went to you."

"Assuming that you've correctly defined my standard—why should
I go?"

Val shrugged his shoulders. "You know well enough. Because Mrs. Clowes is old-fashioned; her duty to Bernard is the ruling force in her life, and you could never make her give him up. Or if you did she wouldn't live long enough for you to grow tired of her— it would break her heart."

"Really?" said Lawrence. "Before I grew tired of her?"

He had never been so angry in his life. To be brought to book at all was bad enough, but what rankled worst was the nature of the charge. Sometimes it takes a false accusation to make a man realize the esteem in which he is held, the opinions which others attribute to him and which perhaps, without examining them too closely, he has allowed to pass for his own. Lawrence had indulged in plenty of loose talk about Nietzschean ethics and the danger of altruism and the social inexpediency of sacrificing the strong for the weak, but when it came to his own honour not Val himself could have held a more conservative view. He, take advantage of a cripple? He commit a breach of hospitality? He sneak into Wanhope as his cousin's friend to corrupt his cousin's wife? What has been called the pickpocket form of adultery had never been to his taste. Had Bernard been on his feet, a strong man armed, Lawrence might, if he had fallen in love with Laura, have gloried in carrying her off openly; but of the baseness of which Val accused him he knew himself to be incapable.

"Really?" he said, looking down at Val out of his wide black eyes, so like Bernard's except that they concealed all that Bernard revealed. "So now we understand each other. I know why you want me to go and you know why I want to stay."

"If I've done you an injustice I'm sorry for it."

"Oh, don't apologize," said Lawrence laughing. His manner bewildered Val, who could make nothing of it except that it was incompatible with any sense of guilt.

"But, then," the question broke from Val involuntarily, "why did you stay?"

"Why do you?"

"I?"

"Yes, you. Did it never strike you that I might retort with a tu quoque?"

"How on earth—?"

"You were perhaps a little preoccupied," said Lawrence with his deadly smile. "I suggest, Val, that whether Clowes was jealous or not—you were."

"I?"

"Yes, my dear fellow:" the Jew laughed: it gave him precisely the same satisfaction to violate Val's reticence, as it might have given one of his ancestors to cut Christian flesh to ribbons in the markets of the East: "and who's to blame you? Thrown so much into the society of a very pretty and very unhappy woman, what more natural than for you to—how shall I put it?—constitute yourself her protector? Set your mind at rest. You have only one rival, Val—her husband."

He enjoyed his triumph for a few moments, during which