Nightfall Part 22

"To tell Lawrence not to get the tickets. I shan't go with him."

"You will go with him," said Bernard Clowes, his fingers tightening on her wrist. "Stop here: come closer." He locked his arm round her waist. "Is he your lover yet, Lally? Tell me: I swear I won't kill you if you do. Are you on the borderland of virtue still, or over it?"

"Let me go," said Laura, panting for breath under his clenched grip. "I will not answer such questions. You know you don't mean one word of them. Take care, you're tearing my blouse. Oh, that frightful war! what has it done to you, to turn you from the man I married into what you are?"

"What am I?"

"A madman, or not far off it. End this horrible life: send him away. It's killing me, and as for you, if you were sane enough to understand what you're doing, you would blow your brains out."

"Likely enough," said Bernard Clowes.

He let her go. "Come back to me now, Laura." His wife leant over him, unfaltering, though she had known for some time that she was dealing with the abnormal. "Kiss me." Laura touched his lips. "That's better, old girl. I am a cross-grained devil and I make your life a h.e.l.l to you, don't I? But don't--don't leave me. Don't chuck me over. Let me have your love to cling to. I don't believe in G.o.d, I don't believe in any other man, often enough I don't believe in myself, I feel, I feel unreal . . . ."

He stopped, shut his eyes, moved his head on the pillow, and felt about over his rug with the blind groping hands of a delirious, almost of a dying man. Laura gathered them up and held them to her heart. "That's better," said Bernard, his voice gaining strength as he opened his eyes on the beautiful still face bent over him. "Just now and again, in my lucid moments, I do--I do believe in you, old girl. You are just the one thing I have left. You won't forsake me, will you, ever? not whatever I do to you."

"Never, my darling."

"Seems a bit one-sided, that bargain," said Bernard.

He lay perfectly still for a little while, his great hands softly pressed against his wife's firm breast.

"And now get your hat and trot up to the village with Lawrence.

Yes, I should like you to go tonight. It'll do you good. Give you a breath of fresh air after your extra dose of sulphur. Yes, you shall take Isabel. Then you'll be safe: I can't insult you if you and Lawrence weren't alone. Now run along, I've had enough emotions. But don't forget. Laura," he spoke thickly and with effort, turning his head away as he pushed her from him "yes, get out, I've had enough of you for the present--but don't forget all the same that you're the one thing on earth that ever is real to me."

Isabel was up a ladder in the orchard picking plums. Waving her hand to Laura and Lawrence Hyde, she called out to them to look the other way while she came down. It must be owned that neither Laura nor Lawrence obeyed her, and they were rewarded, while she felt about for the top rung, with an unimpeded view of two very pretty legs. Lawrence really thought she was going to fall out of the tree, but eventually she came safe to earth, and approached holding out a basket full of glowing fruit. "Though you don't deserve them," she said reproachfully, "because I could feel you looking at me. I did think I should be safe at this hour in the morning!"

"Do I see Val?" said Laura, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her eyes to peer in through the slats of the green jalousies. "I'll go and talk him round, while you break the news to Miss Stafford. Such do's, Isabel! You don't know what dissipations are in store for you, if only Val will say yes." She like every one else elevated Val to the parental dignity vice Mr. Stafford deposed.

"He's come in for some lunch. He'll love to have you watch him eat," said Isabel. "What's it to be, Captain Hyde? A picnic?"

Isabel's imagination had never soared beyond a picnic. When Lawrence unfolded the London scheme her eyes grew round with astonishment and an awed silence fell on her. "Oh, it won't happen," she said, when she had recovered sufficiently to reply at all. "Nothing so angelically wonderful ever would happen to me. I'm perfectly certain Val will say no. Now we've settled that, you can tell me all about it, because of course you and Laura will go in any case."

"But that's precisely what we can't do." Gently and imperceptibly Lawrence impelled her through the rose archway into the kitchen garden, where they were partly sheltered behind the walls of lilacs, a little thinner than they had been in June but still an effective screen. He had not found himself alone with Isabel for ten days. Since Val was with Laura, Lawrence drew the rather cynical conclusion that he could count on a breathing s.p.a.ce, and he wondered if Isabel too were glad of it. She was in a brown cotton dress, her right sleeve still tucked up high on her bare arm: a rounded slender arm not much tanned even at the wrist, for her skin was almost impervious to sunburn. Above the elbow it was milk-white with a faint bloom on it, in texture not like ivory, which is a dead, cold, and polished material, but like a flower petal, one of those flowers that have a downy sheen on them, white hyacinths or tall lilies. Lawrence fixed his eyes on it unconsciously but so steadily that Isabel became aware of his admiration. She blushed and was going to pull down her sleeve, but checked herself, and turning a little away, so that she could pretend not to know that he was looking at her, raised her arm to smooth her hair, lifting it and pus.h.i.+ng a loosened hairpin into place. After all . . . This was Isabel's first venture into coquetry. But it was half unconscious.

"Why can't you? oh, I suppose people would be silly. Major Clowes himself is silly enough for anything. Oh, I'm so sorry, I always forget he's your cousin! Is that why you want me to go?"

"No."

She laughed. "Never mind, you'll soon find some one else. What play is it?"

"'She Promised to Marry.'"

"Oh ah, yes: that's by Moore, who wrote 'The Milkmaid' and 'Sheddon, M.P.' I've read some of his things. I liked them so, I made Rowsley give me them for my last birthday. They're quite cheap in brown paper. O! dear, I should love to see one of them on the stage!" Isabel gave a great sigh. "A London stage too!

I've never been to a theatre except in Salisbury. And Hadow's is the one to go to, isn't it? Where they play the clever plays that aren't tiresome. Who's acting tonight?"

"Madeleine Wild and Peter Sennet."

"Have you ever seen them?"

Lawrence laughed outright. "I was at their wedding. Madeleine is half French: I knew her first when she was singing in a cafe chantant on the Champs Elysees. She is dark and pretty and Peter is fair and pretty, and Peter is the deadliest poker player that ever scored off an American train crook."

"Oh," said Isabel with a second sigh that nearly blew her away, "how I should love to know actors and actresses and people who play poker! It must make Life so intensely interesting!"

Behind her badinage was she half in earnest? Lawrence's eye ranged over the old pale walls of the vicarage, on which the climbing roses were already beginning to redden their leaves: over the lavender borders: over the dry pale turf underfoot and the silver and brown of the Plain, burnt by a hot summer. The fruit that had been green in June was ripe now, and down the Painted-Lady apple-trees fell such a cascade of ruby and coral-coloured apples, from high sprig to heavy bole, that they looked like trees in a Kate Greenaway drawing. But there was no other change. Life at Chilmark flowed on uneventful from day to day. He did not admonish Isabel to be content with it. "Should you like to live in Chelsea?"

Isabel shut her eyes. "I should like fifteen thousand a year and a yacht. Don't tell Jimmy, it would break his heart. He says money is a curse. But he's not much of a judge, dear angel, because he's never had any. What's your opinion--you're rich, aren't you? Has it done you any harm?"

"Oh, I am a fairly decent sort of fellow as men go."

"But would you be a n.o.bler character if you were poor?" Isabel asked, pillowing her round chin on her palm and examining Lawrence apparently in a spirit of scientific enquiry. "Because that is Jimmy's theory, and merely to say that you're n.o.ble now doesn't meet the case. Do you do good with your money?"

"No fear! I encourage trade. I've never touched second rate stuff in my life."

"Oh, you are different!" Isabel exclaimed. They had been using words for counters, to mean at once less and more than they said, but under his irony she penetrated to a hard material egoism, as swiftly as he had detected in her the eternal unrest of youth.

"Val was right."

"What saith the Gospel according to St. Val?"

"That you were only a bird of pa.s.sage."

Lawrence waited a moment before replying. "Birds of pa.s.sage have their mating seasons." Once more Isabel, not knowing what to make of this remark, let it alone. "But I should like to possess Val's good opinion. What have I done to offend him?

Can't you give me any tips?"

"It isn't so much what you do as what you are. Val's very, very English."

"But what am I?"

"Foreign," said Isabel simply.

"A Jew? Yes, I knew I should have that prejudice to live down.

But I'm not a hall-marked Israelite, am I? After all I'm half English by birth and wholly so by breeding." Isabel was betrayed into an involuntary and fleeting smile. "Hallo! what's this?"

"Oh, Captain Hyde--"

"Go on."

"No: it's the tiniest trifle, and besides I've no right."

"Ask me anything you like, I give you the right."

Isabel blushed. "You must be descended from Jephthah!-- O! dear, I didn't mean that!"

"Never mind," said Lawrence, unable to help laughing. "My feelings are not sensitive. But do finish--you fill me with curiosity. What s.h.i.+bboleth do I fail in?"

Faithful are the wounds of a friend. "Englishmen don't wear jewellery," murmured Isabel apologetic.

"Sac a papier!" said Lawrence. "My rings?"

He stretched out his hand, a characteristic hand, strong and flexible, but soft from idleness and white from Gaston's daily attentions: a diamond richly set in a cl.u.s.ter of diamonds and emeralds sparkled on the second finger, and a royal turquoise from Iran, an immense stone the colour of the Mediterranean in April, on the third. "Does Val object to them? Certainly Val is very English. My pocket editions of beauty! That diamond was presented by one of the Rothschilds in grat.i.tude for the help old Hyde-and-seek gave him in getting together his collection of early English watercolours: as for the other, it never ought to have left the Persian treasury, and there'd have been trouble in the royal house if my father had worn it at the Court. Have you ever seen such a blue? On a dull railway journey I can sit and watch those stones by the hour together. But Val would rather read the Daily Mail"