Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

and flung himself into a chair to wait. He dreaded inaction: inaction meant thought: and thought meant such bitter realities as he knew not how to stand up against: but what he liked or disliked was no longer to the point.

In that easy-going household, where comfort was obtained at the expense of appearances, there was always a diningroom fire in cold weather, and on this September morning the glow of the flames had a lulling effect. Dead tired, he dropped asleep, to be roused by the feeling that there was some one in the room. There was, it was Isabel; and in the drugged heaviness that follows daylight slumber Hyde simply held out his arms to her in oblivion of last night. "Oh, oh!" said Isabel smiling at him and touching his palms with the tips of her fingers, "were you dreaming of me?" Hyde drew back, a deep flush covering his face. What had changed Isabel? she was pure fascination. "I've been watching you a long time while you were asleep. I thought you would never wake. You're so, so tired! Here's a cup of coffee for you."

"Thank you," said Lawrence, entirely subdued.

He still felt half dazed: confused and shy, emotions the harder to disguise because they were so unfamiliar: and restless under Isabel's merry eyes. How near she was to him, the leaping flames flinging a dance of light and shadow over her silk shirt, and the bloom on her cheek, and the dark hair parted on one side (a boyish fashion which he had always disliked) and waved over her head! So near that without rising he could have pressed his lips to that white throat of hers. . . . Last night it had been beauty clouded, beauty averse, but this morning it was beauty in the most delicate and derisive and fleeting sunlight of pleasure; and the temperament of his race delivered Lawrence hand and foot into its power. The deep waters went over him and he ceased to struggle—"Isabel," he heard himself saying in a level voice but without his own volition, "should you mind if I were to kiss you?"

What a banality to ask of a woman, his second self scoffed at him: a woman who should be kissed or left alone, but never asked for a kiss!

"Not very much," said Isabel, presenting her smooth cheek. "Not if it would do you any good."

Oh irony, oh disenchantment! "Thank you." He curbed his passion and sat still. "I am not Val."

"Shut your eyes then."

He held his breath: the thick beating of his heart was like a muffled hammer.

"This isn't the way I kiss Val."

"Isabel!" exclaimed Lawrence. He held out his arms again but they closed on the empty firelight: she had gone dancing off, the most fugitive, the most insubstantial of mistresses, nothing left of her to him but the memory of that moth's wing touch.

"Isabel, come here!" He, sprang to his feet. From the other end of the room Isabel turned round, wistful, her head bent, glancing up at him under her eyelashes.

"Oh must you have me?—all of me? Oh Lawrence!—well then—"

She advanced step by step, slowly. Lawrence waited, convinced that if he tried to seize her she would be gone, such a vague thistledown grace there was in her slender immaturity. He waited and Isabel came to him, drifted into his arms, was lying for a moment on his breast, and then, "Let me go: dearest, don't hold me!"

He kept her long enough to ask "But are you mine?"

"Yes," said Isabel, sighing.

"This is a grudging gift, Isabel."

"Oh no," she whispered, "not grudging. All my heart: all of me.
Only don't hold me, I'm still afraid."

"Of me?"

"Yes: now are you triumphant?" She escaped.

"Will you sit down in a chair, you sprite, and let me kneel at your ladyship's feet?"

"No—yes—No, you too sit down." Then as Lawrence, enchained, relapsed into the deep easy chair by the fire, she came behind and leant over him, wreathing her arms over his shoulders. "There: now lie still: so: is that cosy for you? Now will you go to sleep?"

"Circe . . ."

"You don't feel as though you were going to sleep."

"Mon Dieu!" Lawrence murmured under his breath.

"Don't say that," her voice was so soft that it was like the voice of his own heart speaking to him, "it isn't a proper reply to make when a lady says she loves you."

"Oh! provided that you do love me—!"

She took his temples between her fingertips and again her enchanting caress brushed his lips. Lawrence lay helpless. It was like receiving the caresses of a fairy: a delight and a torment, a serenity and a flame. "I love you. I will marry you. I shall be a most exacting wife, 'December when I wed.' Very soon you'll wish you had never set eyes on me. You'll have to marry Val too and all the family." Her long lashes were fluttering against his cheek. "As you're thirty-six and I'm only nineteen, you'll have to be very docile or I shall tell you you're ungenerous."

"Presuming on my income, as you said—was it last night?"

"When you were free. Does it seem so long ago?" She gave a little laugh, airy and sweet. "Oh poor Benedict! Would you like to cry off? Let me see: you may scratch any time before I tell Val, which will be when he comes in at five o'clock. Now then?"

This mention of Val was like a dash of cold water, and Lawrence tried to rouse himself. "Will you be serious for half a second, you incarnation of mischief?"

"No—yes—no, I don't want to be serious," she turned in his arms and the Isabel of last night pierced him with her dark, humid, brilliant eyes. "I want to forget. Make me forget!"

"Forget what?"

"Other women."

"There are no other women, Isabel."

"There have been.—Lawrence!" the scent of the honeysuckle pinned into her blouse seemed to narcotize all his senses with its irresistible sweetness, "you will be true to me, won't you? You won't love other women now? Say you never wanted to kiss any of them so much as— Oh!" Drunk with her Circean cup, Hyde was more than willing to convince her, but in a fashion of his own. Isabel gave a little sigh and faded out of his clasp: he tried to seize her but she was gone, leaving only the scent of bruised petals and the memory of a silken contact. "You're so—so stormy," the gossamer voice mocked him with its magic of youth and gaiety. "Val says—"

"Isabel, I'm sick of that formula. You're going to marry me, not
Val."

"—You're not one-third English."

"I've lived in countries where they knew how to manage women,"
Lawrence muttered.

"With a whip?"

"No."

"What a pity!"

"No, the other method is more effective."

"You terrify me," her eyes were sparkling now like a diamond. "Don't fling any more of those dark threats at me or I shall never marry you at all. Some day you'll be madly jealous of me like Major Clowes—you are like him: you could be just as brutal: and I'm not like Laura—and you'll lure me out of England and wreak a mysterious vengeance."

"I wish we were out of England now."

"So do I. Oh Lawrence, I'd sell my soul to go to Egypt!"

"Red-hot days and blue sands in the moonlight. Shall I take you there for our honeymoon?"

"Or Spain: or Sicily: or what about Majorea?— Let's slip off alone in a nom de plume and an aeroplane to some place where no one ever goes, all roses and lemon thyme and honey-coloured cliffs and a bay of blue sea—"

"Should you like to be alone with me?"

"Yes … why not?"

"Good!" said Hyde laughing. "I see no reason if you don't." He put his hand before his eyes, which were throbbing as though he had looked too long at a bright light. But Isabel pulled down his wrist. "Don't do that. I like to watch your eyes. I allow no reserves, Lawrence. And isn't it rather too late to lock the door? I've seen you—"

"Isabel!" He freed himself and stood up. "I beg your pardon, but you must not— I can't stand—" His face was burning. Isabel had not realized—it is difficult for a young girl to realize, convinced of her own insignificance—how deeply his pride had been cut overnight, but she was under no delusion now. He was hot with shame and anger, and had to wait to fight them down before he could go on. "Nineteen are you—or nine? I can't play with you today. Make allowance for me, dearest! I'm in a most difficult position. I've done incalculable mischief, and, to tell you the truth, I shouldn't have chosen to raise this subject again till I'm clear of it. Your people may very fairly object. My cousin is threatening a divorce action. He's mad: and no decent lawyer would take his case into court: but the fact remains that poor Laura has been turned out of doors, and for that I am, in myself-centred carelessness, to blame. You won't misunderstand me, will you, if I say that while this abominable business is hanging over me we can't be formally engaged? Val must be told—nothing would induce me to keep him in the dark for an hour. But for all that I shan't know how to face him. What! ask him for you, and in the same breath tell him that Laura has been turned adrift because I've compromised her? If I were Val there'd be the devil and all to pay. In the meantime I must—I must be sure of you. But you change like the wind: last night you refused me, and to-day . . ." He walked over to the window and stood looking out into the garden, fighting down one of those tremendous storms of memory which swept over him from time to time and made the present seem absolutely one with the past.

"What's the matter?"

He turned, but his voice was thick. "Last time I trusted a woman she betrayed me."

"You're thinking of your wife."

"I often think of her," Hyde said savagely, "and wonder if all women are tarred with the same brush."

"Oh, that is brutal," said Isabel, paling: "but you're tired out."

It was true, he was too tired to rest: heartsick and ashamed, painfully aware of the immense harm he had done and uncertain how to mend it. This sense of guilt was the more harassing because he was not in the habit of regretting his actions, good or bad: but now he could no longer fling off responsibility: it was riveted on him by all the other emotions which Wanhope had evoked, pity for Bernard, and affection for Laura, and humility before Val.

Among the lilacs a robin was singing his delicate and bold welcome to autumn, and over the window a branch of red roses nodded persistently and rhythmically in a draught of wind. Lawrence stood looking out into the garden of which he saw nothing, and Isabel, watching him, felt tears coming into her own eyes, the tears of that unnerving pity which a woman feels for the man she loves, when she has never before seen him in defeat or depression. No wonder he thought her fickle! How could he read what was dark to her?

Isabel had not deliberately altered her mind in the night. She had lain down free and risen up bond, waking from sound sleep, the sleep of a child, to find that the silent inner Court of Appeal had reversed her verdict while she slept. Her first thought had been, "I'm going to marry Lawrence!" For he needed her: that was what she had forgotten last night: by his parade of wealth he had defeated his own ends, but, her first anger over, she had realized that one should no more refuse a man for being rich, than accept him. Far other were the grounds on which that decision had to be made. It had been pity that carried Isabel away. Perhaps in any case she could not have held out for long.

Did she expect to be happy?