Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

not recommend a cab. Countisford was a small village, smaller even than Chilmark, and owed the distinction of the railway solely to its being in the flat country under the Plain. "But you don't mean to say," said Lawrence incredulous, "that I shall have to walk?"

But it seemed there was no help for it, unless he preferred to sit in the station while a small boy on a bicycle was despatched to Chilmark for the fly from the Prince of Wales's Feathers; and in the end Lawrence went afoot, though his expression when faced with four miles of dusty road would have moved pity in any heart but that of his little valet. Hyde was one of those men who change their habits when they change their clothes. He did not care what happened to him when he was out of England, following the Alaskan trail in eighty degrees of frost, or thrashing round the Horn in a tramp steamer, but when he shaved off his beard, and put on silk underclothing and the tweeds of Sackville Street, he grew as lazy as any flaneur of the pavement. Gaston however was not sympathetic. He was always glad when anything unpleasant happened to his master.

Leaving Gaston to sit on the luggage, Lawrence swung off with his long even stride, flicking with his stick at the bachelor's buttons in the hedge. He could not miss his way, said the station master: straight down the main road for a couple of miles, then the first turning on the left and the first on the left again. Some half a mile out of Countisford however Lawrence came on a signpost and with the traveller's instinct stopped to read it:

WINCANTON 8 M. CASTLE WHARTON 3 1/2 M. CHILMARK 3 M.

So ran the clear lettering on the southern arm. Eastwards a much more weatherbeaten arm, pointing crookedly up a stony cart track, said in dim brown characters: "CHILMARK 2 M." Plainly a short cut over the moor! Better stones underfoot than padded dust: and Lawrence struck uphill swiftly, glad to escape from the traffic of the London road. But he knew too much about short cuts to be surprised when, after climbing five hundred feet in twice as many yards—for the gradients off the Plain are steep—he found himself adrift on the open moor, his track going five ways at once in the light dry grass.

He halted, leaning on his stick. He was on the edge of the Plain: below him stretched away a great half-ring of cultivated country, its saliencies the square tower of a church jutting over a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange—the tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years. On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an alien. It touched him, but to revolt. More than a child of the soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also as an oppression, a limitation: an ordered littleness from which world-interests were excluded. He was a lover of art and a cosmopolitan, and though the lowland landscape was itself a piece of art, and perfect in its way, Hyde's mind found no home in it. Yet, he reflected with his tolerant smile, he had fought for it, and was ready any day to fight for it again—for stability and tradition, the Game Laws, the Established Church, and the rotation of crops. He was the son of an English mother and had received the training of an Englishman. A rather cynical smile, now and then, at the random and diffident ways of England was the only freedom he allowed to the foreign strain within him.

And when he looked the other way even this faint feeling of irritation passed off, blown away by the wind that always blows across a moor, thin and sweet now, and sunlit as the light curled clouds that it carried overhead through the profound June blue. Acres upon acres of pale sward, sown all over with the blue of scabious and the lemon-yellow of hawkweed, stretched away in rolling undulations like the plain of the sea; dense woods hung massed on the far horizon, beech-woods, sapphire blue beyond the pale silver and amber, of the middle distance, and under them a puff of white smoke from a passing train, or was it the white scar of a quarry? He could not be sure across so many miles of sunlit air, but it must have been smoke, for it dissolved slowly away till there was no gleam left under the brown hillside. Here too was stability, permanence: the wind ruffling the grass as it had done when the Normans crossed their not far distant Channel, or rattling over hilltops through leather-coated oak groves which had kept their symmetry since their progenitors were planted by the Druids. Here was nothing to cramp the mind: here was the England that has absorbed Celt, Saxon, Fleming, Norman, generation after generation, each with its passing form of political faith: the England of traditional eld, the beloved country.

In the meanwhile Lawrence had to find Chilmark. He had neither map nor compass and was unfamiliar with the lie of the land, but, mindful of the station master's directions to go south and turn twice to the left, he shaped a course south-east and looked for a shepherd to ask his way of. At present there were no shepherds to be seen and no houses; here and there a trail of smoke marked some hidden hamlet, sunk deep in cup or cranny, but which was Chilmark he could not tell. Down went the track, plunging towards a stream that brawled in a wild bottom: up over a rough hillside ruby-red with willowherb: then down again to a pool shaded by two willows and a silver birch, and lying so cool and solitary in its own cloven nook, bounded in every direction by half a furlong of chalky hillside, that Lawrence was seized with a desire to strip and bathe, and sun himself dry on the brilliant mossy lawn at its brink. But out of regard for the Wanhope lunch hour he walked on, following a trickle of water between reeds and knotgrafis, till in the next winding of the glen he came on a house: only a labourer's cot, two rooms below and one above, but inhabited, for smoke was coming out of the chimney. Lawrence turned up a worn thread of path and knocked with his stick at the open door.

It was answered by a tall young girl with a dirty face, wearing a serge skirt pinned up under a dirty apron. The house was dirty too: the smell of an unwashed, unswept interior came out of it, together with the wailing of a fretful baby. "I've missed my way on the moor," said Lawrence, inobtrusively holding his handkerchief to his nose. "Can you direct me to Chilmark?"

"Do you mean Chilmark or Castle Wharton? Oh Dorrie, don't cry!" She lifted the babe on her arm and stood gazing at Lawrence in a leisured and friendly manner, as if she wondered who he were. "It isn't far, but it's a long rambling village and there are any number of paths down. And if you want the Bendishes—" Evidently she thought he must want the Bendishes, and perhaps Lawrence's judgment was a little bribed by her artless compliment, for at this point he began to think her pretty in an undeveloped way: certainly she had lovely eyes, dark blue under black lashes, which reminded him of other eyes that he had seen long ago—but when? He could not remember those wistful eyes in any other woman's face.

"I'm making for Wanhope—Major Clowe's house."

"Oh, but then you must be Captain Hyde," exclaimed Miss
Stafford: "aren't you? that Mrs. Clowes was expecting."

"My name is Hyde. No one met me at the station" in spite of himself Lawrence could not keep his grievance out of his voice "so, as there are no cabs at Countisford, I had to walk."

"Oh! dear, how sad: and on such a hot day too! You'll be so tired." Was this satire? Pert little thing! Lawrence was faintly amused—not irritated, because she was certainly very pretty: what a swan's throat she had under her holland blouse, and what a smooth slope of neck! But for all that she ought to have sirred him.

"So you know Mrs. Clowes, do you?" He said with as much politeness as a little girl deserves who has lovely eyes and a dirty face. It had crossed his mind that she might be one of the servants at Wanhope: he knew next to nothing of the English labouring classes, but was not without experience of lady's maids.

"Yes, I know her," said Isabel. She hung on the brink of introducing herself—was not Captain Hyde coming to tea with her that afternoon?—but was deterred by a very unusual feeling of constraint. She was not accustomed to be watched as Hyde was watching her, and she felt shy and restless, though she knew not why. It never entered her head that he had taken her for Dorrie Drury's sister. She was dressed like a servant, but what of that? In Chilmark she would have remained "Miss Isabel" if she had gone about in rags, and it would have wounded her bitterly to learn that she owed the deference of the parish rather to her rank as the vicar's daughter, who visited at Wanhope and Wharton, than to any dignity of her own. In all her young life no one had ever taken a liberty with Isabel. And, for that matter, why should any one take a liberty with Dorrie Drury's sister? Isabel's father would not have done so, nor her brothers, nor indeed Jack Bendish, and she was too ignorant of other men to know what it was that made her so hot under Hyde's eyes. "But you'll be late for lunch. Wait half a minute and I'll run up with you to the top of the glen."

Lawrence watched her wrap her charge carefully in a shawl, and fetch milk from the dresser, and coax till Dorrie turned her small head, heavy with the cares of neglected babyhood, sideways on the old plaid maud and began to suck. Apparently he had interrupted the scrubbing of the kitchen floor, for the tiles were wet three quarters of the way over, and on a dry oasis stood a pail, a scrubbing brush, and a morsel of soap. Among less honourable odours he was glad to distinguish a good strong whiff of carbolic.

Isabel meanwhile had recovered from her little fit of shyness. She pulled off her apron and pulled down her skirt (it had been kilted to the knee), rinsed her hands under a tap, wiped her face with a wet handkerchief, and came out into the June sunshine bareheaded, her long pigtail swinging between drilled and slender shoulders. "Yours are London boots," she remarked as she buttoned her cuff. "Do you mind going over the marsh?"

"Not at all."

"Not if you get your feet wet?" Lawrence laughed outright. "But it's a real marsh!" said Isabel offended: "and you're not used to mud, are you? You don't look as if you were." She pointed down the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of cotton grass. "There's no danger in summertime, the shepherds often cross it and so do I. Still if you're afraid—"

"I assure you I'm not afraid," said Lawrence, looking at her so oddly that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused. Nor was Lawrence. She had struck out of his male vanity a resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even shocked? He was not readily shocked. A pure cynic, he let into his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that