Nightfall Part 14

Lawrence took the length of serge she gave him and with characteristic indifference to danger stooped over the dog, whose spirit he admired, and tried to swathe his head in its heavy folds. But, torn, blinded, baffled, the Dane was undefeated. He wrenched his jaws out of their m.u.f.flings and rolled his head from side to side, snapping right and left. "Oh Billy," cried Isabel, "you know me, lie down, dear old man!" A pure-bred dog when sight and hearing are gone will recognize a familiar scent. In an agony of pity Isabel flung her arm over the heaving shoulders--

"Don't!" Lawrence dragged her off, but too late: the Dane's teeth had snapped on her wrist. The next moment he was lying on his side with his brains beaten out. Lawrence was willing to spare his own enemy but not Isabel's.

"Oh," said Isabel, s.h.i.+vering and moaning, "oh, my poor old Billy!"

"d.a.m.n your poor old Billy," said Lawrence: "let me look at your arm."

He carried her indoors, leaving Janaway and his wife and the Dane lying scattered on the sunlit turf. He did not care one straw whether they lived or died. In the little front parlour, neat and fresh with its window full of white muslin and red geraniums, he laid Isabel on a sofa and rolled up her sleeve: the flesh was not much torn but the Dane's fangs had sunk in deep and clean.

"How far are we from a doctor?"

"Four miles. Why? Billy wasn't mad. I shall be all right directly. May I have some water to drink?"

"Curse these country hamlets," said Lawrence. He could not carry her four miles, nor was she fit to walk so far: but to fetch help would mean an hour or so's delay. He went into the kitchen to filla tumbler from the pump, and found an iron wash-bowl in Clara Janaway's neat sink, and a kettle boiling on the hob beside a saucepan of potatoes that she had been cooking for dinner.

Isabel sat up and took the gla.s.s from his hand.

"I'm so sorry," she murmured, raising her beautiful dark eyes in a diffident apology. "It was all my own fault." Lawrence slipped a cus.h.i.+on under her head and drew her gently down. "Oh, thank you! But please don't trouble about me. I do feel rather queer."

Lawrence thought it probable. He had been bitten by a dog himself and knew how horribly such a wound smarts. "It was all so--so very dreadful. But I shall be all right directly.. Do go back to the others: I'm afraid poor Clara--oh! oh, Captain Hyde! What are you doing?"

"Set your teeth and shut your eyes," said Lawrence "it won't take long. Your beloved Billy wasn't a nice animal to be bitten by.

No, he wasn't mad, but his teeth weren't very clean, and we don't want blood poisoning to set up. Steady now." He pressed his lips to her arm.

Isabel's hand lay lax in his grasp while he methodically sucked the wound and rinsed his mouth from her tumbler. He hurt her, but she had been bred to accept pain philosophically. "Is it done?" she asked meekly when he released her. "Not any more?"

"No, that's enough. Now for a drop of warm water." He bathed the wound thoroughly and in default of a better dressing bound it up with his own handkerchief. "I wish I had some brandy to give you, but there isn't a drop in the place. Your estimable friend appears to have been a teetotaller. I don't doubt he was a pattern of all the virtues.-- But for that matter I couldn't give the child publichouse stuff.-- Now, my little friend, if you'll lie quiet for five minutes, I'll see what's going on outside."

"Please may I have my skirt?"

"Your what?"

"My serge skirt."

It had not struck Lawrence till then that she was dressed in a white muslin blouse and a pink and blue striped petticoat. "Do you mean to say that was your skirt you gave me to tie up the dog's head in?"

"I hadn't anything else," said Isabel still more apologetically, and blus.h.i.+ng--she was feeling very guilty, very much ashamed of the trouble she had given: "and you don't know how fond Ben was of Billy!"

"Oh, d.a.m.n Billy!" said Lawrence for the second time.

He went out into the summer suns.h.i.+ne. The dog, the fallen man, the fallen woman, not one of them had stirred a hair. All was peaceful and clear in every note of black and white and scarlet on the turf plat where they lay as if on a stage, in their green setting of dimpled hillside and beech grove and marsh. There was a sickly smell in the hot bright air which carried Lawrence back to the trenches.

He went to examine the human wreckage. No need to examine Billy --his record for good or ill was manifestly closed: and Lawrence had a sickening suspicion that Mrs. Janaway too had finished with a world which perhaps had not offered her much inducement to remain in it. He lifted her up and laid her down again in a decent posture, straightening her limbs and sweeping back her clotted grey hair: no, no need to feel for the pulse in that faded breast from which her husband had partly torn away the neatly darned stuff bodice, so modest with its white tucker and silver Mizpah brooch. Lawrence composed its disorder with a reverent hand, spreading his own coat over her face.

He went on to Ben, and was frankly disappointed to find that Ben was not dead--far from it: he gave a deep groan when Lawrence rolled him over: but it was a case of broken arm and collarbone, if not of spinal injury as well. Lawrence found a length of line in the yard--Clara's clothes-line, in fact--and knotted it into a triple cord, for, though no sane man could have got far in such a state, it was on the cards that Janaway in his madness might scramble up and wander away on the downs. So Lawrence lashed him hand and foot, and Ben blinked and grinned at the sun and slavered over his beard.

It was while thus employed that Lawrence began to wonder what would have happened if Isabel had come to Wancote alone. She might have run away. But would she, while Ben was engaged in carpet-beating? Not she! Lawrence was not a fanciful man: but the red and grey remains of Clara Janaway would have set the visualizing faculty to work in the mind of a ploughboy. After tying the last of a dozen knots, reef knots and none too loose, he went to the back of the cottage where Isabel could not see him and was swiftly and violently sick.

After that he felt better. There was a pump in the yard, and he rinsed his head and hands under it, and washed off as best he could the stains of the fight, and re-knotted his scarf and shook himself down into his disordered clothes before going back to Isabel. And then it was that Isabel received of him a fresh impression as though she had never known him before, one of those vivid second impressions that efface earlier memories.

Val had always held paternal rank, Captain Hyde had been introduced as Val's late superior officer, and so Isabel had accepted him as Val's contemporary, of the generation before her own. But framed in the sunlit doorway, a very tall handsome man in undress, his coat thrown off, his trousers belted on his lean flanks, his wet s.h.i.+rt modelling itself over his powerful throat and shoulders and sticking to his ribs, Hyde might have been only six or seven and twenty: and certainly his manner was not middle-aged! Val's language was refined enough for a curate, and even Rowsley in his young sister's presence never went beyond a sarcenet oath; but Hyde's frank fury was piquant to Isabel's not very decorous taste. When he came in, her pain and faintness began to diminish as if a stream of warm fresh life were flowing into her veins.

"Are you better, Miss Isabel?"

"Ever so much better, thank you. Is--is Clara--?"

Cool, grave, and tranquil, Lawrence took her hand. "Clara is dead." He felt her trembling, and found a form of consolation which would have been slow to occur to his unprompted fancy.

"Better so, isn't it? She wouldn't have been very happy after her husband's trying to kill her."

"No, she wouldn't want them to put him in an asylum," Isabel agreed, but in a subdued voice. "Did you forget my skirt?"

"No, but it was rather in a mess with the unfortunate Billy, and I'm afraid you'll have to do without it. I'm going to take you home now. You can walk, can't you, with my help? I'd like to carry you a few steps, till we're out of sight of the cottage.

Put your arm round my neck." Isabel hesitated. She had been frightened out of her life and still felt cruelly shaken, but her quick sense of the ridiculous protested against this deference paid to her when she wasn't really hurt and it was all her own fault. What would Val have said? But apparently Captain Hyde was less exacting than Val. "Ah! let me: it is an ugly little scene outside and I don't want you to be haunted by it."

She resigned herself. She had not yet begun to feel shy of Lawrence, she was a child still, a child with the instincts of a woman, but those instincts all asleep. They quickened in her when she felt the glow of his life so near her own, but there was a touch of Miranda in Isabel, and no cautionary withdrawal followed.

And Lawrence? The trustfulness of a n.o.ble nature begets what it a.s.sumes. One need not ask what would have become of Miranda if she had given her troth to an unworthy Ferdinand, because the Mirandas of this world are rarely deceived. Hyde was but a battered Ferdinand. He was a man of strong and rather coa.r.s.e fibre who had indifferently indulged tastes that he saw no reason to restrain. But he was changing: when he carried Isabel across the sunlit gra.s.s plot, her beautiful grave childish head lying warm on his shoulder, he had travelled far from the Hyde of the summer house at Bingley.

"My word!" said Yvonne Bendish, startled out of her drawl. "Is it you, Isabel?" She reined in and sat gazing with all her eyes at the couple coming down the field path to Chilmark Bridge.

"Have you had an accident? What's happened?"

"Excuse my hat," said Lawrence with rather more than his habitual calm. "How lucky to have met you. There has been a shocking business up at Wancote. Perhaps you would take Miss Stafford home? She should be got to bed, I think."

Mrs. Jack Bendish was not soon ruffled, nor for long. "Lift her in," she said. "Sorry I can't make room for you too, Captain Hyde, you are as white as a ghost. Very upsetting, isn't it? but don't worry, girls of her age turn faint rather easily. Her arm hurt? . . ." She pointed down the road with her whip. "Dr.

Verney lives at The Laburnus, on the right, beyond the publichouse.

If you would be so kind as to send him up to the vicarage?"

She whipped up her black ponies and was gone. Lawrence was grateful to her for asking no questions, but he would rather have taken Isabel direct to Val. Romance in bud requires a delicate hand. Now Mrs. Jack Bendish had all the bourgeois virtues except modesty and discretion.

CHAPTER X

The Wancote affair made a nine days' wonder in the Plain. Indeed it even got into the London papers, under such t.i.tles as "A Domestic Tragedy" or "Duel with a Dog": and, while the Morning Post added a thumbnail sketch of Captain Hyde's distinguished career, the Spectator took Ben as the text of a "middle" on "The Abuse of Asylum Administration in Rural Districts."

Lawrence himself, when he had despatched Hubert Verney to the vicarage, would have liked to cut his responsibility. But it could not be done: first there was the village policeman to run to earth and information to be laid before him, and then, since Brown's first fl.u.s.tered impulse was to arrest all concerned from Lawrence to Clara Janaway, Lawrence had to walk down with him to Wharton to interview Jack Bendish, as both the nearest magistrate and the nearest sensible man. But after pouring his tale into Jack's sympathetic ear he felt ent.i.tled to wash his hands of the affair. Instead of going back to Wanhope with the relief party he got Bendish to drop him at the field path to Wanhope: and he slipped up to his room by a garden door, bathed, changed, and came down to lunch without trace of discomposure. Gaston, curtly ordered to take his master's clothes away and burn them, was eaten by curiosity, but in vain.

Even before his cousin, Lawrence did not own to his adventure till the servants had left the room. If it could have been kept dark he would not have owned to it at all. He did so only because it must soon be common property and he did not care to be taxed with affectation.

When, bit by bits his story came out across the liqueur gla.s.ses and the early strawberries, Major Clowes laid his head back and roared with laughter. Lawrence was annoyed: he had not found it amusing and he felt that his cousin had a macabre and uncomfortable sense of humour. But Bernard, wiping the tears from his eyes, developed unabashed his idea of a good joke. "Hark to him! Now isn't that Lawrence all over? What! can't you run down for twenty-four hours to a hamlet the size of Chilmark but you must bring your faics divers in your pocket?"

"It isn't my fault if you have dangerous lunatics at large," said Lawrence, helping himself daintily to cream. "If this is a specimen of the way things go on in country districts, thank you, give me a London slum. The brute was as mad as a hatter. He ought to have been locked up years ago. I can't conceive what Stafford was about to keep him on the estate."

"All very fine," Bernard chuckled, "but I'd lay any odds Ben didn't go for Mrs. Ben till he saw you coming."

"Adventures are to the adventurous," Laura mildly translated the bitter jest. Her mission in life was to smooth down Bernard's rough edges. "But that is too ugly, Berns. You oughtn't to say such a thing even in fun. It was no fun for Lawrence."

"I don't object to an occasional sc.r.a.p," said Lawrence. "But this one was overdone." He s.h.i.+vered suddenly from head to foot.

"Hallo, old man, I didn't know you had a nerve in your body!"