WANHOPE and Castle Wharton--or, to give them their due order,
Wharton and Wanhope, for Major Clowes' place would have gone
inside the Castle three times over--were the only country
houses in the Reverend James Stafford's parish. The village
of Chilmark--a stone bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman
tower and frondlike Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line
of school, shops, and cottages strung out between the stream and
chalky beech-crested hillside occupied one of those long, winding,
sheltered crannies that mark the beds of watercourses along the
folds of Salisbury Plain. Uplands rose steeply all along it
except on the south, where it widened away into the flats of
Dorsetshire. Wharton overlooked this expanse of hunting country:
a formidable Norman keep, round which, by gradual accretion, a
dwelling-place had grown up, a history of English architecture
and English gardening written in stone and brick and grass and
flowers. One sunny square there was, enclosed between arched
hedges set upon pillars of carpenters' work, which still kept the
design of old Verulam: and Yvonne of the Castle loved its little
turrets and cages of singing birds, and its alleys paved with
burnet, wild thyme, and watermints, which perfume the air most
delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon
and crushed.
Wanhope also, though modest by comparison, had a good deal of
land attached to it, but the Clowes property lay north up the
Plain, where they sowed the headlands with red wheat still as
in the days of Justice Shallow. The shining Mere, a tributary
of the Avon, came dancing down out of these hills: strange
pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with fine sward, and worked by
the hands of prehistoric man into bastions and ramparts that
imitated in verdure the bold sweep of masonry.
Mr. Stafford was a man of sixty, white-haired and of sensitive,
intelligent features. He was a High Churchman, but wore a felt
wideawake in winter because when he bought it wideawakes were
the fashion for High Churchmen. In the summer he usually roved
about his parish without any hat at all, his white curls flying
in the wind. He was of gentle birth, which tended to ease his
intercourse with the Castle. He had a hundred a year of his own,
and the living of Chilmark was worth 175 pounds net. So it may
have been partly from necessity that he went about in clothes at
which any respectable tramp would have turned his nose up: but
idiosyncrasy alone can have inspired him to get the village tailor
to line his short blue pilot jacket with pink flannelette. "It's
very warm and comfortable, my dear," he said apologetically to his
wife, who sat and gazed at him aghast, "so much more cosy than
Italian cloth."
On that occasion Mrs. Stafford was too late to interfere, but as
a rule she exercised a restraining influence, and while she lived
the vicar was not allowed to go about with holes in his trousers.
After her death Mr. Stafford mourned her sincerely and cherished
her memory, but all the same he was glad to be able to wear his
old boots. However, he had a cold bath every morning and kept
his hands irreproachable, not from vanity but from an inbred
instinct of personal care. Yvonne of the Castle, who spoke her
mind as Yvonne's of the Castle commonly do, said that the fewer
clothes Mr. Stafford wore the better she liked him, because he
was always clean and they were not.
Mr. Stafford had three children; Val, late of the Dorchester
Regiment, Rowsley an Artillery lieutenant two years younger,
and Isabel the curate, a tall slip of a girl of nineteen. They
were all beloved, but Val was the prop of the family and the
pride of his father's heart. Invalided out of the Army after
six weeks' fighting, with an honourable distinction and an
irremediably shattered arm, he had been given the agency of the
Wanhope property, and lived at home, where the greater part of
his three hundred a year went to pay the family bills. Most of
these were for what Mr. Stafford gave away, for the vicar had no
idea of the value of money, and was equally generous with Val's
income and his own.
Altogether Mr. Stafford was a contented and happy man, and his
only worry was the thought, which crossed his mind now and then,
that Chilmark for a young man of Val's age was dull, and that the
Wanhope agency led nowhere. If Val had been an ambitious man!
But Val was not ambitious, and Mr Stafford thanked heaven that
this pattern son of his had never been infected by the vulgar
modern craze for money making. His salary would not have kept him
in luxury in a cottage of his own, but it was enough to make the
vicarage a comfortable home for him; and, so long as he remained
unmarried, what could he want more, after all, than the society
of his own family and his kind country neighbours?
Rowsley, cheerfully making both ends meet in the Artillery on an
allowance from his godmother, was off his father's hands.
Isabel? Mr. Stafford did not trouble much about Isabel, who was
only a little girl. She was a happy, healthy young thing, and
Mr. Stafford was giving her a thoroughly good education. She
would be able to earn her own living when he died, if she were
not married, as every woman ought to be. (There was no one for
Isabel to marry, but Mr. Stafford's principles rose superior to
facts.) Meantime it was not as if she were running wild: that
sweet woman Laura Clowes and the charming minx at the Castle
between them could safely be left to form her manners and see
after her clothes.
One summer afternoon Isabel was coming back from an afternoon's
tennis at Wharton. Mrs. Clowes brought her in the Wanhope car as
far as the Wanhope footpath, and would have sent her home, but
Isabel declined, ostensibly because she wanted to stretch her
legs, actually because she couldn't afford to tip the Wanhope
chauffeur. So she tumbled out of the car and walked away at a
great rate, waving Laura farewell with her tennis racquet.
Isabel was a tall girl of nineteen, but she still plaited her
hair in a pigtail which swung, thick and dark and glossy, well
below her waist. She wore a holland blouse and skirt, a sailor
hat trimmed with a band of Rowsley's ribbon, brown cotton
stockings, and brown sandshoes bought for 5/11-3/4 of Chapman,
the leading draper in Chilmark High Street. Isabel made her own
clothes and made them badly. Her skirt was short in front and
narrow below the waist, and her sailor blouse was comfortably but
inelegantly loose round the armholes. Laura Clowes, who had a
French instinct of dress, and would have clad Isabel as Guinevere
clad Enid, if Isabel had not been prouder than Enid, looked after
her with a smile and a sigh: it was a grief to her to see her
young friend so shabby, but, bless the child! how little she
cared--and how little it signified after all! Isabel's poverty
sat as light on her spirits as the sailor hat, never straight,
sat on her upflung head.
Isabel knew every one in Chilmark parish. Pausing before a knot
of boys playing marbles: "Herbert," she said sternly, "why
weren't you at school on Sunday?" Old Hewett, propped like a
wheezy mummy against the oak tree that shaded the Prince of
Wales's Feathers, brought up his stiff arm slowly in a salute to
the vicar's daughter. "'Evening," said Isabel cheerfully, "what a
night for rheumatics isn't it?" Hewitt chuckled mightily at this
subtle joke. "'Evening, Isabel," called out Dr. Verney, putting
up one finger to his cap: he considered one finger enough for a
young lady whom he had brought into the world. Isabel knew every
one in Chilmark and every one knew her. Such a range of
intensive acquaintance is not so narrow as people who have never
lived in a country village are apt to suppose.
Past the schoolhouse, past the wide stone bridge where Isabel
loved to hang over the parapet watching for trout--but not
tonight, for it was late, and Isabel after a "company tea" wanted
her supper: by a footpath through the churchyard, closely mown
and planted with rosebushes: and so into the church, where, after
dropping a hurried professional curtsey to the altar, she set
about her evening duties. Isabel called herself the curate, but
she did a good deal which is not expected of a curate, such as
shutting windows and changing lesson-markers, propping up the
trebles when they went astray in the pointing of the Psalms,
altering the numbers on the hymn-board, writing out choir papers,
putting flowers in the vases and candles in the benediction
lights, playing the organ as required and occasionally blowing
it. . . . Before leaving the church she fell on her knees, in
deference to Mr. Stafford and the text by the door, and said a
prayer. What did she pray? "O Lord bless this church and all
who worship in it and make father preach a good sermon next
Sunday. I wish I'd been playing with Val instead of Jack, we
should have won that last set if Jack hadn't muffed his
services. . . . Well, this curate was only nineteen."
And then, coming out into the fading light, she locked the north
door behind her and went off whistling like a blackbird, if a
blackbird could whistle the alto of Calkin's Magnificat in B
flat. . . . Five minutes climbing of the steep brown floor of
the beechwood, and she was out on uplands in the dying fires of
day. It had been twilight in the valley, but here the wide plain
was sunlit and the air was fresh and dry: in the valley even the
river-aspens were almost quiet, but here there was still a sough
of wind coming and going, through the dry grass thick set with
lemon thyme and lady's slipper, or along the low garden wall
where red valerian sprouted out of yellow stonecrop.
A wishing gate led into the garden, and Isabel made for an open
window, but halfway over the sill she paused, gazing with all her
soul in her eyes across the vicarage gooseberry bushes. That
grey suit was Val's of course, but who was inside the belted coat
and riding breeches? "Rows-lee!" sang out Isabel, tumbling back
into the garden with a generous display of leg. The raiders rose
up each holding a handful of large red strawberries melting ripe,
and Isabel, pitching in her racquet on a sofa, ran across the
grass and enfolded her brother in her arms. Rowsley, dark and
slight and shrewd, returned her hug with one arm, while carefully
guarding his strawberries with the other--"You pig, you perfect
pig!" wailed Isabel. "I was saving them for tea tomorrow,
Laura's coming and I can't afford a cake. Oh joy, you can buy me
one! How long can you stay?"
"Over the week end: but I didn't come to buy you cakes, Baby. I
haven't any money either. I came because I wanted you to buy me
cakes."
"O well never mind, I'll make one," Isabel joyously slipped her
hand through Rowsley's arm. "Then I can get the flour from the
baker and it won't cost anything at all--it'll go down in the
bill. Well give me one anyhow, now they're picked it would be a
pity to waste them." She helped herself liberally out of Val's
hand. "Now stop both of you, you can't have any more."
She linked her other arm in Val's and dragged her brothers out of
the dangerous proximity of the strawberry beds. Val sat down on
a deck chair, one leg thrown over the other, Rowsley dropped at
full length on the turf, and Isabel doubled herself up between
them, her arms clasped round her knees. "How's the Old Man?" she
asked in friendly reference to Rowsley's commanding officer.
"Oh Rose, I knew there was something I wanted to ask you. Will
Spillsby be able to play on the Fourth?" Spillsby, a brother
subaltern and a famous bat, had twisted his ankle at the nets,
and Rowsley in his last letter had been uncertain whether he
would be well enough to play the Sappers at the annual fixture.
Happily Rowsley was able to reassure his young sister: the ankle
was much better and Spillsby was already allowed to walk on it.
Isabel then turned her large velvet eyes--gazelle eyes with a
world of pathos in their velvet gloom on her elder brother.
"Coruscate, Val," she commanded. "You haven't said anything at
all yet. We should all try to be bright in the home circle. We
cannot all be witty, but-Ow! Rowsley, if you pull my hair I
shall hit you in the--in the place where the Gauls fined their
soldiers if they stuck out on parade. Oh, Val, that really isn't
vulgar, I found it in Matthew Arnold! Their stomachs, you know.
They wouldn't have fined you anyhow. You look fagged, darling--
are you?"
"Not so much fagged as hungry," said Val in his soft voice. "It's
getting on for nine o'clock and I was done out of my tea. I went
in to Wanhope, but Laura was out, and Clowes was drinking whisky
and soda. I cannot stand whisky at four in the afternoon, and
Irish whisky at that. There'll be some supper going before long,
won't there?"
"Not until half past nine because Jimmy has his Bible class
tonight." Jimmy was Mr. Stafford: and perhaps a purist might
have objected that Mrs. Clowes and Yvonne Bendish had not done
all they might have done to form Isabel's manners. "I'm so sorry,
darling," she continued, preparing to leap to her feet. "Shall I
get you a biscuit? There are oatmeals in the sideboard, the kind
you like, I won't be a minute--"
"Thanks very much, I'd rather wait. Did you see Mrs. Clowes
today? Clowes said she was at the Castle."
"So she was, sitting with Mrs. Morley in an angelic striped
cotton. Mrs. Morley was in mauve ninon and a Gainsborough hat.
Yvonne says Mr. Morley is a Jew and made his money in I. D. B.'s,
which I suppose are some sort of stocks?" Neither of her brothers
offered to enlighten her, Rowsley because he was feeling
indolent, Val because he never said an unkind word to any one.
Isabel, who was enamoured of her own voice flowed on with little
delay: "If he really is a Jew, I can't think how she could marry
him; I wouldn't. Mrs. Morley can't be very happy or Laura
wouldn't go and talk to her. Laura is so sweet, she always sits
with people that other people run away from. Oh Val, did Major
Clowes tell you their news?" Isabel might refer to her father as
Jimmy and to Rowsley's commander as the Old Man, but she rarely
failed to give Bernard Clowes his correct prefix.
"No--is there any?"
"Only that they have some one coming to stay with them. Won't he
have a deadly time?" Isabel glanced from Val to Rowsley in the
certainty of a common response. "Imagine staying at Wanhope!
However, he invited himself, so it's at his own risk. Perhaps
he's embarrassed like you, Rose, and wants Laura to feed him.
It's rather fun for Laura, though--that is, it will be, if Major
Clowes isn't too hopeless."
Strange freemasonry of the generations! Mr. Stafford's children
loved him dearly and he was wont to say that there were no
secrets at the vicarage, yet they lived in a conspiracy of
silence, and even Val, who was mentally nearer to his father's
age, would have been loth to let Mr. Stafford know as much as
Isabel knew about Wanhope. It was assumed that Val's job was the
very job Val wanted. Mr. Stafford had indeed a suspicion that it
was not all plain sailing: Bernard Clowes retained just so much
of the decently bred man as to be courteous to his wife before a
mere acquaintance, but the vicar came and went at odd hours, and
he observed now and then vague intimations--undertones from
Bernard himself, an uncontrollable shrinking on Laura's part, an
occasional hesitation or reluctance in Val--which hinted at
flying storms. But Val, the father supposed, could make
allowance for a cripple: Bernard was so much to be pitied that no
man would resent an occasional burst of temper! And there his
children left him. The younger generation can trust one another
not to interfere, but when the seniors strike in, with their cut
and dry precedents and rule of thumb moralities, who knows what
mischief may follow? Elder people are so indiscreet!
"It's a cousin of Major Clowes," Isabel continued, "but they
haven't met for years and years--not since the war. Laura knows
him too, she met him before she was married and liked him very
much indeed. She's looking forward to it--that is, she would be
if she had spirit enough to look forward to anything."
"Clowes never said a word to me about it," remarked Val.
"Didn't he?" Isabel unfolded herself and stood up. "That means he
is going to be tiresome. I must run now, it's five past nine.
Which will you both have, cold beef or eggs?"
"Oh, anything that's going," said Val.
"Eggs," said Rowsley, "not less than four. Without prejudice to
the cold beef if it's underdone. Hallo!"
"What?"
"What's the matter with your skirt?"
"Nothing," said Isabel shortly. She screwed her head over her
shoulder in a vain endeavour to see her own back. "It's
perfectly all right."
"It would be, on a scarecrow." Isabel stuck her chin up. "Have
you been over to the Castle in that kit, Baby? Well, if Yvonne
won't give you some of her old clothes, you might ask the
kitchenmaid."
"The kitchenmaid has more money than I have," said Isabel
cheerfully. "Is it so very bad? It's clean anyway, I washed and
ironed it myself."
"It looks very nice and so do you," said Val. Isabel eyed him
with a softened glance: one could rely on Val to salve one's
wounded vanity, but, alas! Val did not know home-made from
tailor-made. Reluctantly she owned to herself that she had more
faith in Rowsley's judgment. "It seems rather short though," Val
added. "I suppose you will have to go into long frocks pretty
soon, won't you, and put your hair up?"
"Oh bother my hair and my dresses!" said Isabel with a great
sigh. "I will pin my hair up when I get some new clothes, but
how can I when I haven't any money and Jim hasn't any money and
neither of you have any money? Don't you see, idiot," this was
exclusively to Rowsley, "when I pin my hair up I shall turn into
a grown up lady? And then I shall have to wear proper clothes.
At present I'm only a little girl and it doesn't signify what I
wear. If any one will give me five pounds I'll pin my hair up
like a shot. Oh dear, I wonder what Yvonne would say if Jack
expected her to outfit herself for five pounds? I do wish some
one would leave me 10,000 pounds a year. Get up now, you lazy
beggar, come and help me lay the supper. It's Fanny's evening
out."
She pulled Rowsley to his feet and they went off together leaving
Val alone on the lawn: good comrades those two, and apparently
more of an age, in spite of the long gap between them, than
Rowsley and Val, who was the eldest by only eighteen months. And
Val sat on alone, while stains of coral and amber faded out of
the lavender sky, and a rack of sea clouds, which half an hour
ago had shone like fiery ripples, dwindled away into smoke--mist
--a mere shadow on the breast of the night. Stars began to
sparkle, moths and humming cockchafers sailed by him, a chase of
bats overhead endlessly fell down airy precipices and rose in
long loops of darkling flight: honeysuckle and night-scented
stock tinged with their sweet garden perfume the cool airs from
the moor.
Val lit a cigarette, a rare indulgence. If cigarettes grew on
gooseberry bushes Val would have been an inveterate smoker, but
good Egyptians were a luxury which he could not often afford
The Wanhope agency was ample for his needs, though underpaid as
agencies go: but there was Rowsley, always hard up, uncomplaining,
but sensitive, as a young fellow in his position is sure to be, and
secretly fretting because he could not do as other men did: and there
was Isabel, for whom Val felt the anxiety Mr. Stafford ought to have
felt, and was trying to make the provision Mr. Stafford ought to have
made: and then there was the vicar himself, who laid out a great deal
of money in those investments for which we are promised cent per cent
interest, but upon a system of deferred payment.
Tonight however Val lit a cigarette, and then a second, to the
surprise of Isabel, who saw the red spark on the lawn. She
thought her brother must be tired, and perhaps it really was the
long day without food that made him so restless in mind and so
uneasy. Bernard Clowes had been more than usually cranky that
afternoon. Even the patient Val had had thoughts of throwing up
his job when the cripple made him go through his week's accounts,
scrutinizing every entry and cross-examining him on every
transaction in such a tone as the head of a firm might employ to
a junior clerk suspected of dishonesty. It was Bernard's way:
it meant nothing: but it was irksome to Val, especially when he
could not soothe himself by dropping into Laura's quiet parlour
for a cup of tea. Yet his irritation would not have lingered
through a cigarette if Isabel's news had not revived it. This
cousin of Bernard's! Val had not much faith in any cousin of
Bernard Clowes: nor in the kindness of life.
Val was a slight, fair, pleasant-looking man of eight or nine and
twenty, quiet of movement, friendly-mannered and as inconspicuous
as his own rather worn grey tweeds: one of a class, till he
raised his eyes: and then? There was something strange in Val's eyes
when they were fully raised, an indrawn arresting brilliance
difficult to analyse: imaginative and sympathetic, as if he were at
home in dark places: the quality of acceptance of pain.
Adepts in old days knew by his eyes a man who had been on the
rack. Stafford had been racked: and by the pain that is half
shame, the keenest, the most lacerating and destructive of
wounds. He had suffered till he could suffer no more, and
tonight in the starlit garden he, suffered still, without hope,
or rebellion, or defence.
Indoors Rowsley and Isabel, with the rapidity of long use, laid
the cloth, and Isabel fetched cold beef from the larder and
butter and eggs from the dairy, while Rowsley went down the
cellar with a jug and a candle and drew from the cask a generous
allowance of beer. "Come along in, old Val," said Isabel,
reappearing at the open window, "You and Rose are both famishing
and I'm not," this was a pious fiction, "so you can begin and
I'll wait for Jimmy. I dare say he's gone wandering off
somewhere and won't be in till ten."
Val came across the dark, cool lawn and climbed over the window
sill. A shabby room, large and low: a faded paper, grey toning
to blue: a carpet of faded roses on a grey ground: the shaded
Dresden lamp and roselit supper table shining like an island in
a pool of shadow, and those two beloved heads, both so dark and
smooth and young, tam cara capita! Neither of them suspected
that Val was unhappy. His feeling for them was more fatherly
than fraternal, and Rowsley, strange to say, fell in with Val's
attitude, coming to his brother for money as naturally as most
young men go to their parents. Val sat at the head of the table
because Mr. Stafford could not carve. "There!" said Isabel,
giving him his plate. "Mustard? I've just made it so you
needn't look to see if it's fresh. Watercress: I picked it
myself. Lettuce. Cream and vinegar and sugar. Beer. Now do
you feel happy? Lord love you, dear, I like to see you eat."
She sat on the arm of Mr. Stafford's mahogany chair. "What time
do you want breakfast? Seven o'clock? Major Clowes wouldn't come
down at seven if he were your agent. Can you get back to tea
tomorrow? Laura may bring the cousin up to tea with her and she
wants him to meet you."
"Very good of her. Why?"
"Oh, because he was in the Army too and all through the war. He
went out with the first hundred thousand. He's much older than
you are--the same age as Laura. Oh, wait a minute!" exclaimed
Isabel in the tone in which a Frenchwoman says Tenez. I forgot.
She thinks you must have met him, Val."
"Possibly," said Val.
"Was he in the Dorchesters?" asked Rowsley--much more
interested than his brother, no doubt because he was not so
hungry as Val, who was giving all his attention to his supper.
"No, in the Winchesters," said Isabel. "Do I mean the
Winchesters, Val? What was Major Clowes' old regiment?"
"Clowes was in the Wintons."
Isabel nodded. "Then so was the cousin. And Laura says he was
out there when the Wintons were in the next bit of trench north
of the Dorchesters. He was there when--when you were wounded."
Such was Val Stafford's modesty that in the family circle it was
not in etiquette to refer in other terms to that famous occasion.
"I don't remember any fellow named Clowes and I never knew
Bernard Clowes had a cousin out there," said Val, mixing himself
a salad.
"Oh, his name isn't Clowes. It's Ryde or Pride or something like
that. I'm sorry to be so vague, but Jack Bendish and Yvonne and
Mrs. Morley were all talking at once. Lawrence Pied--Fried--"
"Lawrence Hyde?"
"Yes, that's it! Then you really do remember him?"
"Er--yes. Is that lamp smoking, Rowsley? You might turn it
down a trifle, I can't reach."
"Let me, let me?-- What was he like?"
"Who--Hyde? Oh," said Val vaguely, "he was like the rest of us
--very tired."
"Tired?" echoed Isabel with a blank face, "but, Val darling, he
couldn't have been only tired! What should you think he was like
when he wasn't tired?"
"That is a question I have occasionally asked myself," Val
answered with his faint indecipherable smile. "My dear child,
I only saw him once or twice. He was a senior captain and
commanded his company. I was a very junior lieutenant."
"Still he was there at the time," reflected Isabel. "O Rose! if
he's anything like nice, which is almost past praying for in
Major Clowes' cousin, let's beguile him into the gooseberry
bushes and make him tell us all about it! Val is very dear to
his family, but no one, however tenderly attached to him, could
call him a brilliant raconteur. Now Mr. Hyde won't have any
modest scruples. Val, if there is a slug in that lettuce I wish
you would say so. It would hurt my feelings less than for you to
sit looking at it in a stony silence. Was he good-looking?"
"Possibly he might be," said Val, "when he scraped the dirt off."
After a moment he added, "He was very decent to me."
"Was he? Then he was nice?"
"Gnat," said Rowsley from the middle of his third egg. Isabel
rounded him indignantly.
"I'm not gnatting! I'm not asking Val anything about himself, am
I? Val can't possibly mind telling me about another man in
another regiment. You eat your eggs, there's a good boy, before
they get cold.-- Laura says the Dorchesters dined the Winchesters
once when they were in billets. Was that when you and Mr. Hyde
were there?"
"Captain Hyde," Val corrected his young sister. "Yes, we both
graced the festive board. It was too festive for me. We had
Buszard's soup and curried chicken and real cream, and more
champagne than was good for us. But it was not on that occasion
that Hyde was so decent to me. The day I--the day Dale went
down--" Rowsley nodded to him as he raised his glass of beer to
his lips--"thank you, Rose.-- As I was saying, that evening I
ran across Hyde between the lines. The Dorsets and Wintons had
gone over the top together, and he had been left behind with a
bullet in his chest. I was done to the world, but he had some
brandy left and shared it with me. If it had not been for Hyde I
should never have brought Dale in."
"Well, I've never heard that before," said Rowsley to his fourth
egg.
Isabel was silent, and her eyes in the shadow of a momentary
gravity were the eyes of a woman and not of a child. She raised
them to look out at the evening sky, indigo blue against the
lamplit interior, or faintly primrose in the west, and wondered
for the thousandth time why it was still such an effort to Val to
refer to his brief military experience. Soft country noises came
in, peaceful and soothing: the short shrill shriek of a bat, the
rustle of a branch of rose-leaves moving like a hand over the
window panes, a faint breathing of wind from the moor. Surely
the scar of war ought to be healed by now! Isabel kept these
thoughts to herself: young as she was, her solitary life--for
a woman alone among men is always to some extent solitary--had
trained her to a clear perception of what had better not be said.
"When is Hyde coming?" asked Val, going on with his salad.
"Tomorrow, didn't you hear me say Laura is going to bring him
here to tea? He's staying at his own place, Farringay--I think
from the way Laura spoke it is what one calls a place--and they
expect him by the morning train. Laura's to meet him in the
car."
"Did you ask her to bring him in to tea," said Rowsley, frowning
over the marmalade jar, "when Val is safe to be out and you
didn't know I should be here?"
"Yes: oughtn't I to have?"
"No."
"Is there anything else you would like to speak to me about?"
said Isabel after a pregnant silence. "Dear Rowsley, you seem
determined to look after my manners and morals! I asked him to
please Laura. She's nervous of Major Clowes. Jack and Yvonne
are coming too."
"Oh I don't see that it signifies," said Val. Mrs. Clowes
wouldn't have accepted if it weren't all right. I don't see that
you or I need worry if she doesn't. Isabel is old enough to pour
out tea for herself. In any case, as it happens, you'll be here
if I'm not, and I dare say Jimmy will look in for ten minutes."
"You are sweet, Val," said Isabel gratefully.
"Oh I don't say Rowsley's not right! Prigs generally are: and
besides now I come to think of it, Laura did look faintly amused
when I asked her. But these stupid things never occur to me till
afterwards! After all, what am I to do? I can't manufacture a
chaperon, and it would be very bad for the parish if the vicar
never entertained. And it's not as if Captain Hyde were a young
man; he's thirty-six if he's a day."