Nightfall - Anthony Pryde (classic novels .txt) 📗

the average man admits only behind a screen. Yet when these libertine fancies played over Isabel's innocent head they were distasteful to him: as he remembered once, in a Barbizon studio, to have knocked a man down for a Gallic jest on the Queen of Heaven although Luke's Evangel meant no more to him than the legend of Eros and Psyche. But one can't knock oneself down—more's the pity!

"Oh, all right," said Isabel impatiently. He was watching her again! "But do look where you're going, this isn't Piccadilly. You had better hold my hand."

Lawrence was six and thirty. At eighteen he would have snatched her up and carried her over: at thirty-six he said: "Thanks very much," touched the tips of her fingers, let them fall. . . . Unfortunately however he weighed more than Isabel or the shepherds, and, half way across, the green floor quietly gave way under him: first one foot immersed itself with a gentle splash and then the other—"Oh dear" said Isabel, seized with a great disposition to laugh. Lawrence was not amused. His boots were full of mud and water and he had an aching sense of injured dignity. The bog was not even dangerous: and ankle-deep, calf-deep, knee-deep he waded through it and got out on the opposite bank, bringing up a cloud of little marsh-bubbles on his heels. Isabel would have given all the money she had in the world—about five shillings to go away and laugh, but she had been well brought up and she remained grave, though she grew very red.

"I am so sorry!" she faltered, looking up at Lawrence with her beautiful sympathetic eyes (one must never say I told you so). "I never thought you really would go in. You must be very heavy! Oh! dear, I'm afraid you've spoilt your trousers, and it was all my fault. Oh! dear, I hope you won't catch cold. Do you catch cold easily?"

"Oh no, thanks. Do you mind showing me the way to Wanhope?"

Isabel without another word took the steep hillside at a run. In her decalogue of manners to refuse an apology was an unpardonable sin. How differently Val would have behaved! Val never lost his temper over trifles, and if anything happened to make him look ridiculous he was the first to laugh at himself. At this time in her life Isabel compared Val with all the other men she met and much to his advantage. She forgot that Lawrence was not her brother and that no man cares to be made ridiculous before a woman, or rather she never thought of herself as a woman at all.

She pointed east by south across the Plain. "Do you see that hawk hovering? Carry your eye down to the patch of smoke right under him, in the trees: those are the Wanhope chimneys. If you go straight over there till you strike the road, it will bring you into Chilmark High Street. Go on past Chapman the draper's shop, turn sharp down a footpath opposite the Prince of Wales's Feathers, cross the stream by a footbridge, and you'll be in the grounds of Wanhope."

"Thank you," said Lawrence, "your directions are most precise." He had one hand in his pocket feeling among his loose silver: tips are more easily given than thanks, especially when one is not feeling grateful, and he was accustomed to pay his way through the world with the facile profusion of a rich man. Still he hesitated: if he had not the refined intuition that would have made such a blunder impossible to Val Stafford, he had at all events enough intelligence to hesitate. There is a coinage that is safer than silver, and Lawrence thought it might well pass current (now that she had washed her face) with this fair schoolgirl of sixteen, ruffled by sun and wind and unaware of her beauty. He would not confess to himself that the prospect of Isabel's confusion pleased him.

He bent his head, smiling into Isabel's eyes. "You're a very kind little girl. May I—?"

"No," said Isabel.

The blood sprang to her cheek, but she did not budge, not by a hair's breadth. "I beg your pardon," said Lawrence, standing erect. He had measured in that moment the extent of his error, and he cursed, not for the first time, his want of perception, which his ever-candid father had once called a streak of vulgarity. Defrauded of the pleasure he had promised himself from the contact of Isabel's smooth cheek, he grew suddenly very tired of her. Young girls with their trick of attaching importance to trifles are a nuisance!

He forced a smile. "I beg your pardon, I had no idea— I see you're ever so much older than I thought you were. Some day I shall find my way up here again and you must let me make my peace with a box of chocolates." He raised his hat—he had not done so when she opened the door—and swung off across the moor, leaving the vicar's daughter to go back and scrub Mrs. Drury's floor as it had never been scrubbed before in its life. The honours of the day lay with Isabel, but she was not proud of them, and her face flamed for the rest of the morning. "You're worse than Major Clowes!" she said violently to the kitchen tap.

CHAPTER IV

"How do?" Bernard Clowes was saying an hour later. "So good of you to look us up."

Lawrence, coming down from his own room after brushing his muddy clothes, met his cousin with a good humoured smile which covered dismay. Heavens, what a wreck of manhood! And how chill it struck indoors, and how dark, after the June sunshine on the moor! Delicately he took the hand that Clowes held out to him— but seized in a grip that made him wince. Clowes gave his curt "Ha ha!"

"I can still use my arms, Lawrence. Don't be so timid, I shan't break to pieces if I'm touched. It's only these legs of mine that won't work. Awkward, isn't it? But never mind that now, it's an old story. You had a mishap on the moor, the servants tell me? Ah! while I think of it, let me apologize for leaving you to walk from the station. Laura, my wife, you know, forgot to send the car. By the by, you know her, don't you? She says she met you once or twice before she married me."

Like most men who surrender to their temperaments, Lawrence was as a rule well served by his intuitions. Now and again they failed him as with Isabel, but when his mind was alert it was a sensitive medium. He dropped with crossed knees into his chair and glanced reflectively at Bernard Clowes, heu quantum mutatus. . . . When the body was wrecked, was there not nine times out of ten some corresponding mental warp? Bernard's fluent geniality struck him as too good to be true—it was not in Bernard's line: and why translate a close friendship into "meeting once or twice"? Was Bernard misled or mistaken, or was he laying a trap?—Not misled: the Laura Selincourt of Hyde's recollection was not one to stoop to petty shifts.

"'Once or twice?'" Lawrence echoed: "Oh, much oftener than that! Mrs. Clowes and I are old friends, at least I hoped we were. She can't be so ungracious as to have forgotten me?"

"She seems to have, doesn't she?" Bernard with his inscrutable smile let the question drop. "Just touch that bell, will you, there's a good fellow? So sorry to make you dance attendance— Hallo, here she is!"

Laura had been waiting in the parlour, under orders not to enter till the bell rang. She had heard all, and wondered whether it was innocence or subtlety that had walked in and out of Bernard's trap. She remembered Hyde was much like other fourth-year University men except that he was not egotistical and not shy: he had altered away from his class, but in what direction it was difficult to tell: there was no deciphering the pleasant blankness of his features or the conventional smile in his black eyes.

"I haven't seen you for fourteen years," she said, giving him her hand. "Oh Lawrence, how old you make me feel!"

"Shall I swear you haven't changed? It would be a poor compliment."

"And one I couldn't return. I shouldn't have known you, unless it were by your likeness to Bernard."

"Am I like Bernard?" said Lawrence, startled.

"That's a good joke, isn't it?" said Clowes. "But my wife is right. If I were not paralysed, we should be a good bit alike."

Under the casual manner, it was in that moment that Hyde saw his cousin for what he was: a rebel in agony. There was a tragedy at Wanhope then, Lucian Selincourt had not exaggerated. Though Lawrence was not naturally sympathetic, he felt an unpleasant twinge of pity, much the same as when his dog was run over in the street: a pain in the region of the heart, as well defined as rheumatism. In Sally's case, after convincing himself that she would never get on her legs again, he had eased it by carrying her to the nearest chemist's: the loving little thing had licked his hand with her last breath, but when the brightness faded out of her brown eyes, in his quality of Epicurean, Lawrence had not let himself grieve over her. Unluckily one could not pay a chemist to put Bernard Clowes out of his pain! "This is going to be deuced uncomfortable," was the reflection that crossed his mind in its naked selfishness. "I wish I had never come near the place. I'll get away as soon as I can."

Then he saw that Bernard was struggling to turn over on his side, flapping about with his slow uncouth gestures like a bird with a broken wing. "Let me—!" Laura's "No, Lawrence!" came too late. Hyde had taken the cripple in his arms, lifting him like a child: "You're light for your height," he said softly. He was as strong as Barry and as gentle as Val Stafford. Laura had turned perfectly white. She fully expected Clowes to strike his cousin. She could hardly believe her eyes when with a great gasp of relief he flung his arm round Hyde's neck and lay back on Hyde's shoulder. "Thanks, that's damned comfortable—first easy moment I've had since last night," he murmured: then, to Laura, "we must persuade this fellow to stop on a bit. You're not in a hurry to get off, are you, Lawrence?"

"Not I. I'll stay as long as you and Laura care to keep me."

"I and Laura, hey?"

Bernard's flush faded: he slipped from Hyde's arm.

"H'm, yes, you're old friends, aren't you? Met at Farringay? I'd forgotten that." He shut his eyes. "And Laura's dying to renew the intimacy. It's dull for her down here. Take him into the garden, Lally. You'll excuse me now, Lawrence, I can't talk long without getting fagged. Wretched state of things, isn't it? I'm a vile bad host but I can't help it. At the present moment for example I'm undergoing grinding torments and it doesn't amuse me to make conversation, so you two can cut along and disport yourselves in any way you like. Give Lawrence a drink, will you, my love? . . . . Oh no, thanks, you've done a lot but you can't do any more, no one can, I just have to grin and bear it. Laura, would you mind ringing for Barry? I'm not sure I shall show up again before dinner-time. It's no end good of you, old chap, to come to such a beastly house. . ."

He pursued them with banal gratitude till they were out of earshot, when Lawrence drew a deep breath as if to throw off some physical oppression. Under the weathered archway, down the flagged steps and over the lawn. . . . How still it was, and how sweet! The milk-blooms in the spire of the acacia were beginning to turn faintly brown, but its perfume still hung in the valley air, mixed with the honey-heavy breath of a great white double lime tree on the edge of the stream. There were no dense woods at Wanhope,