Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

Scarcely, for she did not trust him enough to be frank with him. Sophisticated men soon tire of candid women: it was in this faith that Isabel had clouded herself in such an iridescence of mystery and coquetry, laughing when she felt more inclined to cry, eluding Lawrence when she would rather have rested in his arms. Roses and steel: innocence in a saffron scarf: ascendancy won and held only by surrender: such was to be the life of the woman who married Lawrence Hyde, as she had seen it long ago on a June evening, and as, with some necessary failings for human weakness, she carried it out to the end. If any moralities at all were to be fulfilled in their union, it was for her to impose them, for Hyde had none. Within the limits of his code of honour he would simply do as he liked. And with nine-tenths of her nature Isabel would have liked nothing better than to shut her eyes and yield to him as all her life she had yielded to Val, for she too loved red roses and sunshine and the pleasure of the senses: but her innermost self, the warder of her will, would rather have died than yield, she the child of an ascetic and trained in Val's simple code of duty.

But there should be compromise: one must not—one need not—cheat him of the pride of his manhood. Isabel's heart ached for her lover. She could not defend herself against him any longer, and in her yielding the warder of her will whispered, "You may yield now. Not to be frank with him now would be unfair as well as unkind."

She came softly to him in the window, and instantly by some change of tension Lawrence discovered to his delight that Circe had vanished. His mistress was his own now, a girl of nineteen who had promised to be his wife, and he was carried beyond doubt or anger by the rush of tenderness which went over him when he began to taste the sweetness of his victory. "Have I won you?" he whispered, his voice as unsteady as a boy's in his first passion. "You won't fail me?"

"Oh never! never!"

"You have the most beautiful eyes in the world. I believe one reason why I always secretly liked Val was that his eyes reminded me of yours. I can't stand it when he looks at me under your eyelashes. I always want to say 'Here take it Val.'"

"Take what?"

"Anything he wants. I'm going to extend a protecting wing over my young brother-in-law. He shall not, no, I swear he shall not come to grief. I can't stand it, he's too like you. When did you first fall in love with me?"

"When did you?"

"The night you went to sleep in the garden at Wanhope."

"Oh! when you kissed me?"

"When I—?"

Isabel was speechless.

"How do you know I kissed you, Isabel? I thought you were asleep."

"So I was," said Isabel, blushing deeply. "Oh! Captain Hyde, I wasn't pretending! But I woke up directly after, and heard a rustling in the wood, and I—I knew, don't ask me: I could feel -"

"This?"

"Yes," Isabel murmured, resigning herself.

"How strange!" said Lawrence under his breath. "You were asleep and you felt me kiss you?"

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. "Is that so strange?"

"Rather: because I never did kiss you."

"Not?"

"No: I bent over you to do it, but you were so defenceless and so young, I didn't dare.— Isabel! my darling! what have I done?"

The first days of love are supposed to be blind days, but too often they are days of overstrained criticism, when from very fear each sees slips and imperfections even where they do not exist. The discovery that she had misjudged Hyde was an exquisite joy to Isabel. This trivial, crucial scruple, of morality or taste, whichever one liked to call it, was the sign of a chastity of mind which could coexist, it seemed, with the coarse and careless sins that he had never denied. After all no marriage on earth is perfect, and husbands as well as wives have to make allowances; but as years go on, and affection does its daily work, the rubs are less and less felt, till the time comes when deeper wisdom can look back smiling on the fears of youth. Isabel at nineteen did not possess this wisdom but she had youth itself.

The flames crackled low on the hearth: the wind, a small autumn wind, piped weakly round white wall and high chimneypot: outside in the garden late roses were shedding their petals loosened by a touch of frost in the night. "Tears because you mistrusted me?" said Hyde in his soft voice. "But why should the Gentile maiden trust a Jew?"

CHAPTER XIX

Riding back from Liddiard St. Agnes in the low September sunshine, Val became aware of something pleasantly pictorial in the landscape. It was a day when the hills looked higher than usual, the tilt of the Plain sharper, the shadows a darker umber, the light clearer under a softly-quilted autumn sky. When he crossed a reaped cornfield, the pale golden stalks of stubble to westward were tipped each with a spark of light, so that all the upland flashed away from him toward the declining sun.

In his own mind there was a lull which corresponded with this clear quietness of Nature: a pleasant vacancy and a suspension of personal interest, so that even his anxiety about Laura was put at a little distance, and he could see her and Bernard, and Lawrence himself, like figures in a picture, hazed over by a kind of moral sunlight—the Grace of God, say, which from Val's point of view shapes all our ends:

          I do not ask to see
          The distant scene: one step enough for me,

this courage came to Val now without effort, and not for himself only, which would have been easy at any time, but for Laura in her difficult married life, and for those other beloved heads on which he was fated to bring disgrace—his father, Rowsley, Isabel: come what might, sorrow could not harm them, nor fear annoy. How quiet it was! the quieter for the wrangling of rooks in the border elms, and for the low autumn wind that rustled in the hedgerows: and how full of light the sky, in spite of the soft bloomy clouds that had hung about all day, imbrowning the sunshine! far off in the valley doves were grieving, and over the reaped and glittering cornstalks curlews were flying and calling with their melancholy—shrill wail, an echo from the sea, while small birds in flocks flew away twittering as he rode up, and settled again further on, and rose and settled again, always with a clatter of tiny wings. Evening coming on: and winter coming on: and light, light everywhere, and calm, over the harvest fields and the darkened copses, and the far blue headlands that seemed to lift themselves up into immeasurable serenities of sky.

It was lucky for Val that he was able to enjoy this quiet hour, for it was soon over. When he crossed the turf to the diningroom window, the fire had burnt down into red embers and not much light came in from out of doors under that low ceiling, but there was enough to show him Isabel in Lawrence's arms. Fatality! He had not foreseen it, not for a moment: and yet directly he saw it he seemed to have known it all along. After a momentary suspension of his faculties, during which his ideas shifted much as they do when an unfamiliar turns into a familiar road, Val tapped on the glass and strolled in, giving his young sister one of his light teasing smiles. "Am I to bestow my consent, Isabel?"

"Oh Val!— Don't be angry, or not with Lawrence anyhow, it wasn't his fault."

Isabel disengaged herself but without confusion. Her brother watched her in increasing surprise. Rosy and sparkling, she seemed to have grown from child to woman in an hour, as after a late spring the first hot day brings a million buds into leaf.

"Are you startled?" she asked, holding up her cheek for a kiss.

"Not so much so as I should have been twenty-four hours ago. No, I didn't guess—not a bit; I suppose brothers never expect people to want to marry their sisters. We know too much about you."

"Better run off to the nursery, Isabel," said Lawrence. Isabel made him a little smiling curtsey eloquent of her disdain—it was so like Captain Hyde to be saucy before Val!—and slipped away. When Lawrence returned after holding open the door for her, he found a certain difficulty in meeting Val's eyes.

"And this then is the mysterious attraction that has kept you at
Wanhope all the summer? Wonderful! What will Mrs. Jack say?
But I suppose nineteen, for forty, has a charm of its own."

Lawrence was not forty. But he refused to be drawn. "She is very beautiful."

"Oh, very," Val was nothing if not cordial. "But her face is her fortune. I needn't ask if you can keep her in the state to which she's accustomed," his eye wandered over the dilapidated vicarage furniture, "or whether your attentions are disinterested. Evidently you're one of those men who like their wives to be dependent on them— Dear me!"

"Damn the money!" said Lawrence at white heat. "Jew I may be, but it's you and Isabel that harp on it, not I."

"Come, come!" Val arched his eyebrows. "So sorry to ruffle you, but these questions are in all the etiquette books and some one has to ask them. If you could look on me as Isabel's father—?"

It was too much. Angry as he was, Lawrence began to laugh. "No, I won't look on you as Isabel's father," he had regained the advantage of age and position, neutralized till now by Val's cooler self-restraint. "I won't look on you as anything but a brother-in-law; a younger brother of my own, Val, if you can support the relation. Won't you start fresh with me? I've not given you much cause to think well of me up to now, but I love Isabel, and I'll do my best to make her happy. I might find forgiveness difficult if I were you, but then," for his life he could not have said whether he was in earnest or chaffing Val, "I'm a Jew of Shylock's breed and you're a Christian."

"But, my dear fellow, what is there to forgive? We're only too delighted and grateful for the honour done us: it's a brilliant match, of course, far better than she could expect to make." A duller man than Lawrence could not have missed the secret silken mischief. "And to me, to all of us, you're more than kind; it's nice to feel that instead of losing a sister I shall gain a brother."

"You are an infernal prig, Val!"

"Oh," said Val, this time without irony, "It's easy for you to come with an apology in one hand and a cheque in the other."

He turned away and stood looking out into the garden. In the lilac bushes over the lawn Isabel's robin was still singing his winter carol, and the atmosphere was saturated with the smell of wet, dead leaves, the poignant, fatal smell of autumn. "There's winter in the air tonight," said Val half aloud.

"What?" said Lawrence startled.

"I say that life's too short for quarrelling." He held out his hand. "But be gentle with her, she is very young.— Yes, what is it, Fanny?"

"Major Clowes's compliments, sir, and he would be glad to see
Captain Hyde as soon as convenient."

At Wanhope half an hour later the sun had gone down behind a bank of purple fog, and cloud after cloud had put off its vermilion glow and faded into a vague dimness of twilight: house and garden were quiet, except for the silver rippling of the river which went on and on, ceaselessly fleeting over shallows or washing along through faded sedge. These river murmurs haunted Wanhope all day and night, and so did the low river-mists: in autumn by six o'clock the grass was already ankle deep and white as a field of lilies.

The tall doors were wide open now: no lamps were