When the sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all
sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human
wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war.
When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester
Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely
opened a book. He was sent out with the First Division and
carried himself with his usual phlegmatic good humour through
almost four years of fighting from Mons to Cambrai.
In the March break-through he had his wrist broken by a rifle-bullet
and was invalided home, where he took advantage of his leave to get
married, partly because most of the men he knew were already married,
and partly to please his sister. There were no other brothers, and
Mrs. Morrison, a practical lady, but always a little regretful of her
own marriage with Morrison's Boot and Shoe Company, recommended him
with the family bluntness to arrange for an olive branch before the
Huns got him.
Laura, a penniless woman two years his senior and handicapped by
her disreputable belongings, was not the wife Gertrude Morrison
would have chosen for him: still it might have been worse, for
Laura was well-born and personally irreproachable, while Clowes,
hot-blooded and casual, was as likely as not to have married a
chorus-girl. If any disappointment lingered, Gertrude soothed
it by trying over in her own mind the irritation that she would
be able to produce in Morrison circles: "Where he met her?
Oh, when she was staying with her married sister at Castle
Wharton . . . .Yvonne, the elder Selincourt girl, married into
the Bendish family."
Bernard did not care a straw either for the paternal handicap or
for the glories of the Wharton connection. He took his
love-affair as simply as his cricket and with the same bold
confidence. Laura was what he wanted; she would fit into her
surroundings at Wanhope as delicately as an old picture fits
into an old frame, and one could leave her about--so he put
it to himself--without fear of her getting damaged. When Tom
Morrison, shrewd business man, dropped a hint about the rashness
of marrying the daughter of a scamp like Ferdinand Selincourt,
Bernard merely stared at him and let the indiscretion go in
silence. He can scarcely be said to have loved his bride, for
up to the time of the wedding his nature was not much more
developed than that of a prize bull, but he considered her a
very pretty woman, and his faith in her was a religion.
So they were married, and went to Eastbourne for their honeymoon:
an average match, not marked by passion on either side, but
destined apparently to an average amount of comfort and good
will. They had ten gay days before Laura was left on a victoria
platform, gallantly smiling with pale lips and waving her
handkerchief after the train that carried Bernard back to the
front.
Five months later on the eve of the Armistice he was flung out
of the service, a broken man, paralysed below the waist, cursing
every one who came near him and chiefly the surgeons for not
letting him die. No one ever desired life more passionately than
Bernard desired death. For some time he clung to the hope that
his mind would wear his body out. But his body was too young,
too strong, too tenacious of earth to be betrayed by the renegade
mind.
There came a day when Clowes felt his youth welling up in him
like sap in a fallen tree: new energy throbbed in his veins, his
heart beat strong and even, it was hard to believe that he could
not get off his bed if he liked and go down to the playing fields
or throw his leg over a horse. This mood fastened on him without
warning in a Surbiton hospital after a calm night without a
sleeping draught, when through his open window he could see green
branches waving in sunlight, and hear the cries of men playing
cricket and the smack of the driven ball: and it was torture.
Tears forced their way suddenly into Bernard's eyes. His nurse,
who had watched not a few reluctant recoveries, went out of the
room. Then his great chest heaved, and he sobbed aloud, lying
on his back with face unhidden, his wide black eyes blinking at
the sweet pale June sky. No chance of death for him: he was good
for ten, twenty, fifty years more: he could not bear it, but it
had to be borne. He tried to pull himself up: if he could only
have reached the window! But the arms that felt so strong were
as weak as an infant's, while the dead weight of his helpless
legs dragged on him like lead. The only result of his struggle
was a dreadful access of pain. Reaction followed, for he had
learnt in his A B C days not to whimper when he was hurt, and by
the time the nurse returned Clowes had scourged himself back to
his usual savage tranquillity. "Can I have that window shut,
please?" he asked, cynically frank. "I used to play cricket
myself."
Laura Clowes in this period went through an experience almost
equally formative. Two years older than Bernard, she was also
more mature for her years and had developed more evenly, and from
the outset her engagement and marriage had meant more to her then
to Bernard, because her girlhood had been unhappy and they provided
a way of escape. Her sister Yvonne had met Jack Bendish at a
race-meeting and he had fallen madly in love with her and married
her in a month in the teeth of opposition. That was luck--heaven-sent
luck, for Yvonne on the night before her marriage had broken down
utterly and confessed that if Jack had not saved her she would have
gone off with the first man who asked her on any terms, because she
was twenty-nine and sick to death of wandering with her father on the
outskirts of society. Subsequently Yvonne had after a hard fight won
a footing at Wharton for herself and her sister, and there Laura had
met Clowes, not such a social prize as Jack, but rich and able to
give his wife an assured position. She was shrewd and realized that
in himself he had little to offer beyond a handsome and highly
trained physique and a mind that worked lucidly within the limits of
a narrow imagination but she was beyond all words grateful to him,
and he fascinated her more than she realized.
The ten days at Eastbourne opened her eyes. Bernard enjoyed
every minute of them and was exceedingly pleased with himself
and proud of his wife, but for Laura they were a time of heavy
strain. Innocent and shy, she had feared her husband, only to
discover that she loved him better than he was capable of loving
her. Laura was not blind. She understood Bernard and all his
limitations, the dangerous grip that his passions had of him,
his boyish impatience, his wild-bull courage, and his inability
to distinguish between a wife and a mistress: she was happiest
when he slept, always holding her in his arms, exacting even in
sleep, but so naively youthful in the bloom of his four and
twenty summers, and, for the moment, all her own. She loved him
"because I am I--because you are you," and her tenderness was
edged with the profound pity that women felt in those days for
the men who came to them under the shadow of death. It was her
hope that the strong half-developed nature would grow to meet her
need. It grew swiftly enough: in the forcing-house of pain he
soon learned to think and to feel: but the change did not lead
him to his wife's heart.
Laura had married a man of a class and apparently normal to a
fault: she found herself united now to incarnate storm and
tempest. The first time she saw him at Surbiton, he drove her
out in five minutes with curses and insult. Why? Laura,
wandering about half-stunned in the visitors' room, had no idea
why. She stumbled against the furniture: she looked at the
photographs of Windermere and King's College Chapel and the
Nursing Staff on the walls: she took up Punch and began to read
it. Laura was no dreamer, she had never doubted that her husband
would rather have the use of his legs again than all the feminine
devotion in the world, but she had hoped to soothe him, perhaps
for a little while to make him forget: it had not crossed her
mind that her anguish of love and service would be rejected.
Enlightenment was like folding a sword to her breast.
By and by his nurse came down to her, a young hard-looking woman
with tired eyes. She had little comfort to give, but what she
gave Laura never forgot, because it was the truth without any
conventional or sentimental gloss. "You're having a bad time
with him, aren't you?" she said, coldly sympathetic. "It won't
last. Nothing lasts. You mustn't think he's left off caring for
you. I expect he was very fond of you, wasn't he? That's the
trouble. Some men take invalid life nicely and let their wives
fuss over them to their hearts' content, but Major Clowes is one
of those tremendously strong masculine men that always want to be
top dog. Besides, you're young and pretty, if you don't mind my
saying so, and you remind him of what he's done out of . . .
Twenty-four, isn't he? Don't give way, Mrs. Clowes, you've a
long road before you; these paralysis cases are a frightful
worry, almost as bad for the friends as they are for the patient;
but if you play up it'll get better instead of worse. He'll get
used to it and so will you. One gets used to anything."
Even so: time goes on and storms subside. Bernard Clowes came
out of the hospital and he and his wife settled down on friendly
terms after all. "It's not what you bargained for when you
married me," said the cripple with his hard smile. "However, it's
no good crying over spilt milk, and you must console yourself
with the fact that there's still plenty of money going. But I
wish we'd had a little more time together first." He pierced her
with his black eyes, restless and fiery. "I dare say you would
have liked a boy. So should I. Nevermind, my girl, you shan't
miss much else."
Wanhope, the family property, was buried deep in Wiltshire, three
or four miles from a station. Laura liked the country: Wanhope
let it be, then: and Wanhope it was, with the additional
advantage that Yvonne was at Castle Wharton within a stroll.
Laura liked a wide house and airy rooms, a wide garden, plenty of
land, privacy from her neighbours: all this Wanhope gave her, no
slight relief to a girl who had been brought up between Brighton
and Monte Carlo. The place was too big to be run without an
agent? No drawback, the agent: on the contrary, Clowes looked
out for a fellow who would be useful to Laura, a gentleman, an
unmarried man, who would be available to ride with her or make a
fourth at bridge--and there by good luck was Val Stafford ready
to hand. Born and reared in the country, though young and
untrained, Val brought to his job a wide casual knowledge of
local conditions and a natural head for business, and was only
too glad to squire Laura in the hunting field. For Laura must
hunt: as Laura Selincourt she had hunted whenever she was offered
a mount, and she was to go on doing as she had always done.
Laura would rather not have hunted, for the freshness of her
youth was gone and the strain of her life left her permanently
tired, and she pleaded first expense, then propriety. "Don't be
a damned fool," replied Bernard Clowes. So Laura went riding
with Val Stafford.
"Come in," said Major Clowes in a rasping snarl, and Laura came
into her husband's room and stumbled over a chair. The windows
were shuttered and the room was still dark at eleven o'clock of a
fine June morning. Laura, irrepressibly annoyed, groped her way
through a disorder of furniture, which seemed, as furniture
always does in the dark, to be out of place and malevolently full
of corners, and without asking leave flung down a shutter and
flung up a window. In a field across the river they were cutting
hay, and the dry summer smell of it breathed in, and with it the
long rolling whirr of a haymaking machine and its periodical
clash, most familiar of summer noises. And the June daylight lit
up the gaunt body of Bernard Clowes stretched out on a water
mattress, his silk jacket unbuttoned over his strong, haggard
throat. "Really, Berns," said Laura, flinging down a second
shutter, "I don't wonder you sleep badly. The room is positively
stuffy! I should have a racking headache if I slept in it."
"Well, you don't, you see," Bernard replied politely. "Stop
pulling those blinds about. Come over here." Laura came to him.
"Kiss me," said Clowes, and she laid her cool lips on his cheek.
Clowes received her kiss passively: even Laura, though she
understood him pretty well, never was sure whether he made her
kiss him because he liked it or because he thought she did not
like it.
"Where are you off to now?" asked Clowes, pushing her away: "you
look very smart. I like that cotton dress. It is cotton, isn't
it?" he rubbed the fabric gingerly between his finger and thumb.
"Did Catherine make it? That girl is a jewel. I like that gipsy
hat too, it's a pretty shape and it shades your eyes. I call
that sensible, which can't often be said for a woman's clothes.
You have good eyes, Laura, well worth shading, though your figure
is your trump card. I like these fitting bodices that give a
woman a chance to show what shape she is. All you Selincourt
women score in evening gowns. Yvonne has a topping figure,
though she's an ugly little devil. She has an American
complexion and her eyes aren't as good as yours. Where did you
say you were going?"
"To the station to meet Lawrence. I promised to fetch him in the
car."
"Lawrence? So he's due today, is he? I'd forgotten all about
him. And you're meeting him? Oh yes, that explains the dress
and hat, I thought you wouldn't have put them on for my
benefit."
"Dear, it's only one of the cotton frocks I wear every day, and I
couldn't go driving without a hat, could I?"
"Can't conceive why you want to go at all." Laura was silent.
"If Lawrence must be met, why can't Miller go alone?" Miller was
the chauffeur. "Undignified, I call it, the way you women run
after a man nowadays. You think men like it but they don't."
Laura wondered if she dared tell him not to be silly. He might
take it with a grin, in which case he would probably relent and
let her go: or--? The field of alternative conjecture was wide.
In the end Laura, whose knee was still aching from her adventure
with the chair, decided to chance it. But--perhaps because they
were suffused with irritation--the words had no sooner left her
lips than she regretted them.
"I won't have it." Bernard's heavy jaw was clenched like a
bloodhound's. "It's not decent running after Hyde while I'm tied
here by the leg. I won't have you set all the village talking.
There's the Times on my table. Stop. Where are you going?"
"To ring the bell. It's time Miller started. You don't want your
cousin to find no one there to meet him--not even a cart for his
luggage."
"He can walk. Do him good: and Miller can fetch the luggage
afterwards. You do as I tell you. Take the Times. Sit down in
that chair with your face to the light and read me the leading
articles and the rest of the news on Page 7. Don't gabble: read
distinctly if you can--you're supposed to be an educated woman,
aren't you?"
Poor Laura had been looking forward to her drive. She had taken
some innocent pleasure in choosing the prettiest of her morning
dresses, a gingham that fell into soft folds the colour of a
periwinkle, and in rearranging the liberty scarf on her drooping
gipsy straw, and in putting on her long fringed gauntlets and
little country shoes. Her husband's compliments made her wince,
Jack Bendish had eyes only for his wife, Val Stafford's
admiration was sweet but indiscriminate: but she remembered
Lawrence as a connoisseur. And worse than the sting of her own
small disappointment were the breaking of her promise to
Lawrence, the failure in hospitality, in common courtesy.
And for the thousandth time Laura wondered whether it would not
have been better for Bernard, in the long run, to defy his
senseless tyranny. He was at her mercy: it would have been easy
to defy him. Easy, but how cruel! A trained nurse would have
made short work of Bernard's whims, he would have been washed and
brushed and fed and exercised and disregarded--till he died
under it? Perhaps. It was safer at all events to let him go
his own way. He could never hope to command his regiment now:
let him get what satisfaction he could out of commanding his
wife! She would have preferred a form of sacrifice which looked
less like fear, but there was little sentiment in Bernard, and
love must not pick and choose. For it was love still, the old
inexplicable fascination: in the middle of one of his tirades,
when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the
contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on
his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as
if that summed up for her the essence of his personality, and
were more truly Bernard Clowes then his intemperate insignificance
of speech. . . . Even when others suffered for it she yielded to
Bernard, because she loved him and because he suffered so infinitely
worse than they.
For denial maddened him. He raised himself on his arm, crimson
with anger, his chest heaving under the thin silken jacket which
defined his gaunt ribs--"Sit down, will you, damn you?" Because
Laura believed that she and she only stood between her husband
and despair, she yielded and began to read out the Times leader
in a voice that was perfectly gentle and placid.
Bernard sank back and watched her like a cat after a mouse. He
was under no delusion: he knew she was not cowed or nervous, but
that the spring of her devotion was pity--pity ever fed anew by
his dreadful helplessness: and it was this knowledge that drove
him into brutality. The instincts of possession and domination
were strong in him, and but for the accident that wrenched his
mind awry he would probably have made himself a king to Laura,
for, once her master, he would have grown more gentle and more
tender as the years went by, while Laura was one of those women
who find happiness in love and duty: not a weak woman, not a
coward, but a humble-minded woman with no great opinion of her
own judgment, who would have liked to look up to father, brother,
sister, husband, as better and wiser than herself. But in his
present avatar he could not master her: and Clowes, feeling as
she felt, seeing himself as she saw him, came sometimes as near
madness as any man out of an asylum. He was not far off it now,
though he lay quiet enough, with not one grain of expression in
his cold black eyes.
The 11:39 pulled up at Countisford station, and Lawrence Hyde got
out of a first class smoking carriage and stood at ease, waiting
for his servant to come and look after him. "There'll be a car
waiting from Wanhope, Gaston--"
"Zere no car 'ere, M'sieu--ze man say."
"What, no one to meet me?" Evidently no one: there were not half
a dozen people on the flower-bordered platform, and those few
were country folk with bundles and bags. Lawrence strolled out
into the yard, hoping that his servant's incorrigibly lame
English might have led to a misunderstanding. But there was no
vehicle of any kind, and the station master could not recommend a
cab. Countisford was a small village, smaller even than
Chilmark, and owed the distinction of the railway solely to its
being in the flat country under the Plain. "But you don't mean
to say," said Lawrence incredulous, "that I shall have to walk?"
But it seemed there was no help for it, unless he preferred to
sit in the station while a small boy on a bicycle was despatched
to Chilmark for the fly from the Prince of Wales's Feathers; and
in the end Lawrence went afoot, though his expression when faced
with four miles of dusty road would have moved pity in any heart
but that of his little valet. Hyde was one of those men who
change their habits when they change their clothes. He did not
care what happened to him when he was out of England, following
the Alaskan trail in eighty degrees of frost, or thrashing round
the Horn in a tramp steamer, but when he shaved off his beard,
and put on silk underclothing and the tweeds of Sackville Street,
he grew as lazy as any flaneur of the pavement. Gaston however
was not sympathetic. He was always glad when anything unpleasant
happened to his master.
Leaving Gaston to sit on the luggage, Lawrence swung off with his
long even stride, flicking with his stick at the bachelor's
buttons in the hedge. He could not miss his way, said the
station master: straight down the main road for a couple of
miles, then the first turning on the left and the first on the
left again. Some half a mile out of Countisford however Lawrence
came on a signpost and with the traveller's instinct stopped to
read it:
WINCANTON 8 M.
CASTLE WHARTON 3 1/2 M.
CHILMARK 3 M.
So ran the clear lettering on the southern arm. Eastwards a much
more weatherbeaten arm, pointing crookedly up a stony cart track,
said in dim brown characters: "CHILMARK 2 M." Plainly a short cut
over the moor! Better stones underfoot than padded dust: and
Lawrence struck uphill swiftly, glad to escape from the traffic
of the London road. But he knew too much about short cuts to be
surprised when, after climbing five hundred feet in twice as many
yards--for the gradients off the Plain are steep--he found
himself adrift on the open moor, his track going five ways at
once in the light dry grass.
He halted, leaning on his stick. He was on the edge of the
Plain: below him stretched away a great half-ring of cultivated
country, its saliencies the square tower of a church jutting over
a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale
haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange--the
tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years.
On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an
alien. It touched him, but to revolt. More than a child of the
soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also
as an oppression, a limitation: an ordered littleness from which
world-interests were excluded. He was a lover of art and a
cosmopolitan, and though the lowland landscape was itself a piece
of art, and perfect in its way, Hyde's mind found no home in it.
Yet, he reflected with his tolerant smile, he had fought for it,
and was ready any day to fight for it again--for stability and
tradition, the Game Laws, the Established Church, and the
rotation of crops. He was the son of an English mother and had
received the training of an Englishman. A rather cynical smile,
now and then, at the random and diffident ways of England was the
only freedom he allowed to the foreign strain within him.
And when he looked the other way even this faint feeling of
irritation passed off, blown away by the wind that always blows
across a moor, thin and sweet now, and sunlit as the light curled
clouds that it carried overhead through the profound June blue.
Acres upon acres of pale sward, sown all over with the blue of
scabious and the lemon-yellow of hawkweed, stretched away in
rolling undulations like the plain of the sea; dense woods hung
massed on the far horizon, beech-woods, sapphire blue beyond the
pale silver and amber, of the middle distance, and under them a
puff of white smoke from a passing train, or was it the white
scar of a quarry? He could not be sure across so many miles of
sunlit air, but it must have been smoke, for it dissolved slowly
away till there was no gleam left under the brown hillside. Here
too was stability, permanence: the wind ruffling the grass as it
had done when the Normans crossed their not far distant Channel,
or rattling over hilltops through leather-coated oak groves which
had kept their symmetry since their progenitors were planted by
the Druids. Here was nothing to cramp the mind: here was the
England that has absorbed Celt, Saxon, Fleming, Norman,
generation after generation, each with its passing form of
political faith: the England of traditional eld, the beloved
country.
In the meanwhile Lawrence had to find Chilmark. He had neither
map nor compass and was unfamiliar with the lie of the land, but,
mindful of the station master's directions to go south and turn
twice to the left, he shaped a course south-east and looked for a
shepherd to ask his way of. At present there were no shepherds
to be seen and no houses; here and there a trail of smoke marked
some hidden hamlet, sunk deep in cup or cranny, but which was
Chilmark he could not tell. Down went the track, plunging
towards a stream that brawled in a wild bottom: up over a rough
hillside ruby-red with willowherb: then down again to a pool
shaded by two willows and a silver birch, and lying so cool and
solitary in its own cloven nook, bounded in every direction by
half a furlong of chalky hillside, that Lawrence was seized with
a desire to strip and bathe, and sun himself dry on the brilliant
mossy lawn at its brink. But out of regard for the Wanhope lunch
hour he walked on, following a trickle of water between reeds and
knotgrafis, till in the next winding of the glen he came on a
house: only a labourer's cot, two rooms below and one above, but
inhabited, for smoke was coming out of the chimney. Lawrence
turned up a worn thread of path and knocked with his stick at the
open door.
It was answered by a tall young girl with a dirty face, wearing a
serge skirt pinned up under a dirty apron. The house was dirty
too: the smell of an unwashed, unswept interior came out of it,
together with the wailing of a fretful baby. "I've missed my
way on the moor," said Lawrence, inobtrusively holding his
handkerchief to his nose. "Can you direct me to Chilmark?"
"Do you mean Chilmark or Castle Wharton? Oh Dorrie, don't cry!"
She lifted the babe on her arm and stood gazing at Lawrence in a
leisured and friendly manner, as if she wondered who he were. "It
isn't far, but it's a long rambling village and there are any
number of paths down. And if you want the Bendishes--" Evidently
she thought he must want the Bendishes, and perhaps Lawrence's
judgment was a little bribed by her artless compliment, for at
this point he began to think her pretty in an undeveloped way:
certainly she had lovely eyes, dark blue under black lashes,
which reminded him of other eyes that he had seen long ago--but
when? He could not remember those wistful eyes in any other
woman's face.
"I'm making for Wanhope--Major Clowe's house."
"Oh, but then you must be Captain Hyde," exclaimed Miss
Stafford: "aren't you? that Mrs. Clowes was expecting."
"My name is Hyde. No one met me at the station" in spite of
himself Lawrence could not keep his grievance out of his voice
"so, as there are no cabs at Countisford, I had to walk."
"Oh! dear, how sad: and on such a hot day too! You'll be so
tired." Was this satire? Pert little thing! Lawrence was
faintly amused--not irritated, because she was certainly very
pretty: what a swan's throat she had under her holland blouse,
and what a smooth slope of neck! But for all that she ought to
have sirred him.
"So you know Mrs. Clowes, do you?" He said with as much
politeness as a little girl deserves who has lovely eyes and a
dirty face. It had crossed his mind that she might be one of the
servants at Wanhope: he knew next to nothing of the English
labouring classes, but was not without experience of lady's
maids.
"Yes, I know her," said Isabel. She hung on the brink of
introducing herself--was not Captain Hyde coming to tea with her
that afternoon?--but was deterred by a very unusual feeling of
constraint. She was not accustomed to be watched as Hyde was
watching her, and she felt shy and restless, though she knew not
why. It never entered her head that he had taken her for Dorrie
Drury's sister. She was dressed like a servant, but what of
that? In Chilmark she would have remained "Miss Isabel" if she
had gone about in rags, and it would have wounded her bitterly to
learn that she owed the deference of the parish rather to her
rank as the vicar's daughter, who visited at Wanhope and Wharton,
than to any dignity of her own. In all her young life no one had
ever taken a liberty with Isabel. And, for that matter, why
should any one take a liberty with Dorrie Drury's sister?
Isabel's father would not have done so, nor her brothers, nor
indeed Jack Bendish, and she was too ignorant of other men to
know what it was that made her so hot under Hyde's eyes. "But
you'll be late for lunch. Wait half a minute and I'll run up with
you to the top of the glen."
Lawrence watched her wrap her charge carefully in a shawl, and
fetch milk from the dresser, and coax till Dorrie turned her
small head, heavy with the cares of neglected babyhood, sideways
on the old plaid maud and began to suck. Apparently he had
interrupted the scrubbing of the kitchen floor, for the tiles
were wet three quarters of the way over, and on a dry oasis stood
a pail, a scrubbing brush, and a morsel of soap. Among less
honourable odours he was glad to distinguish a good strong whiff
of carbolic.
Isabel meanwhile had recovered from her little fit of shyness.
She pulled off her apron and pulled down her skirt (it had been
kilted to the knee), rinsed her hands under a tap, wiped her face
with a wet handkerchief, and came out into the June sunshine
bareheaded, her long pigtail swinging between drilled and slender
shoulders. "Yours are London boots," she remarked as she
buttoned her cuff. "Do you mind going over the marsh?"
"Not at all."
"Not if you get your feet wet?" Lawrence laughed outright. "But
it's a real marsh!" said Isabel offended: "and you're not used to
mud, are you? You don't look as if you were." She pointed down
the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its
exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a
sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of
cotton grass. "There's no danger in summertime, the shepherds
often cross it and so do I. Still if you're afraid--"
"I assure you I'm not afraid," said Lawrence, looking at her so
oddly that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused.
Nor was Lawrence. She had struck out of his male vanity a
resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even
shocked? He was not readily shocked. A pure cynic, he let into
his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that 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.