Nightfall Part 5

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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+fts.

"'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 cla.s.s, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 f.a.gged. 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 ba.n.a.l grat.i.tude 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, the trees were set apart with an airy and graceful effect, so that one could trace the course of their branches; and between them were visible hayfields from which the hay had recently been carried, and the headlands of the Plain--fair sunny distances, the lowlands bloomed over with summer mist, the uplands delicately clear like those blue landscapes that in early Italian pictures lie behind the wheel of Saint Catherine or the turrets of Saint Barbara.

"A sweet pretty place you have here. I was in China nine weeks ago. Everlasting mud huts and millet fields. I must say there's nothing to beat an English June."

"Or a French June?" suggested Laura, her accent faintly sly.

"Lucian said he met you at Auteuil."

"Dear old Lucian! He seemed very fit, but rather worried about you, Laura--may I call you Laura? We're cousins by marriage, which const.i.tutes a sort of tie. Besides, you let me at Farringay."

"Farringay. . . . What a long while ago it seems! I can't keep up any pretence of juvenility with you, can I? We were the same age then so we're both thirty-six now. Isn't it strange to think that half one's life is over? Mine doesn't seem ever to have begun. But you wouldn't feel that: a man's life is so much fuller than a woman's. You've been half over the world while Berns and I have been patiently cultivating our cabbage patch.

I envy you: it would be jolly to have one's mind stored full of queer foreign adventures and foreign landscapes to think about in odd moments, even if it were only millet fields."

"I've no ties, you see, nothing to keep me in England. Come to think of it, Bernard is my nearest male relative, since my father died five years ago."

"I heard of that and wanted to write to you, but I wasn't sure of your address"

"I was in Peru. They cabled to me to come home when he was taken ill, but I was up country and missed it. The first news I had was a second cable announcing his death. It was unlucky."

"For both of you," said Laura gently, "if it meant that he was alone when he died." Sincere herself, Mrs. Clowes exacted from her friends either sincerity or silence, and her sweet half-melancholy smile pierced through Hyde's conventional regrets. He was silent, a little confused.

They were near the river now, and in the pale shadow of the lime tree Laura sat down on a bench, while Hyde threw himself on a patch of sunlit turf at her feet. Most men of his age would have looked clumsy in such an unb.u.t.toned att.i.tude, but Hyde was an athlete still, and Laura, who was fond of sketching, admired his vigorous grace. She felt intimate with him already: she was not shy nor was Lawrence, but this was an intimacy of sympathy that went deeper than the mere trained ease of social intercourse: she could be herself with him: she could say whatever she liked.

And, looking back on the old days which she had half forgotten, Laura remembered that she had always felt the same freedom from constraint in Hyde's company: she had found it pleasant fourteen years ago, when she was young and had no reserves except a natural delicacy of mind, and it was pleasant still, but strange, after the isolating adventure of her marriage. Perhaps she would not now have felt it so strongly, if he had not been her husband's cousin as well as her friend.

She sat with folded hands watching Lawrence with a vague, observant smile. Drilled to a stately ease and worn down to a lean hardihood by his life of war and wandering, he was, like his cousin, a big, handsome man, but distinguished by the singular combination of black eyes and fair hair. Was there a corresponding anomaly in his temperament? He looked as though he had lived through many experiences and had come out of them fortified with philosophy--that easy negative philosophy of a man of the world, for which death is only the last incident in life and not the most important. Of Bernard's hot pa.s.sions there was not a sign. Amiable? Laura fancied that so far as she was concerned she could count on a personal amiability: he liked her, she was sure of that, his eyes softened when he spoke to her. But the ruck of people? She doubted whether Lawrence would have lost his appet.i.te for lunch if they had all been drowned.

The pleasant, selfish man of the world is a common type, but she could not confine Lawrence to his type. He basked in the sun: with every nerve of his thinly-clad body he relinquished himself to the contact of the warm gra.s.s: deliberately and consciously he was savouring the honied air, the babble of running water, the caress of the tiny green blades fresh against his cheek and hand, the swell of earth that supported his broad, powerful limbs.

This sensuous acceptance of the physical joy of life pleased Laura, born a Selincourt, bred in France, and temperamentally out of touch with middle-cla.s.s England.

Whether one could rely on him for any serviceable friends.h.i.+p Laura was uncertain. As a youth he had inclined to idealize women, but she was suspicious of his later record. Good or bad it had left no mark on him. Probably he had not much principle where women were concerned. Few of the men Laura had known in early life had had any principles of any sort except a common spirit of kindliness and fair play. Her brother was always drifting in and out of amatory entanglements--the hunter or the hunted--and he was not much the worse for it so far as Laura could see. Perhaps Hyde was of the game stamp, in which case there might well be no lines round his mouth, since lines are drawn by conflict: or perhaps a wandering life had kept him out of harm's way. It made no great odds to Laura--she had not the shrinking abhorrence which most women feel for that special form of evil: it was on the same footing in her mind as other errors to which male human nature is more p.r.o.ne than female, a little worse than drunkenness but not so bad as cruelty. From her own life of serene married maidenhood such sins of the flesh seemed as remote as murder.

The strong southern light broke in splinters on the dancing water, and was mirrored in reflected ripplings, silver-pale, tremulous, over the shadowy understems of gra.s.s and loosestrife on the opposite bank. "And I never gave you anything to drink after all!" said Laura after a long, companionable silence. "Why didn't you remind me?"

"Because I didn't want it. Don't you worry: I'll look after myself. I always do. I'm a charming guest, no trouble to any one."

"At least have a cigarette while you're waiting for lunch! I'm sorry to have none to offer you."

"Don't you smoke now? You did at Farringay."

"No, I've given it up. I never much cared for it, and Bernard does so hate to see a woman smoking. He is very old-fas.h.i.+oned in some ways."

"And do you always do as Bernard likes?" Lawrence asked with an impertinence so airy that it left Laura no time to be offended.

"--It was a great shock to me to find him so helpless. Is he always like that?"

"He can never get about, if that's what you mean." It was not all Hyde meant, but Laura had not the heart to repress him; she felt that thrill of guilty joy which we all feel when some one says for us what we are too magnanimous to say for ourselves. "He lies indoors all day smoking and reading quant.i.ties of novels."

"Fearfully sad. Very galling to the temper. But there are a lot of modern mechanical appliances, aren't there, that ought to make him fairly independent?"

"He won't touch any of them."

"Sick men have their whims. But can't you drag him out into the sun? He ought not to lie in that mausoleum of a hall."

"He has never been in the garden in all our years at Wanhope."

Lawrence took off his straw hat to fan himself with. It was not only the heat of the day that oppressed him. "Poor, wretched Bernard! But I dare say I should be equally mulish if I were in his shoes. By the by, was he really in pain just now?"

"Really in pain?" Laura echoed. "Why--why should you say that?"