Through the open windows of the drawingroom, where candlesticks
of twisted silver glimmered among Laura's old, silvery brocades,
and dim mirrors, and branches of pink and white rosebuds blooming
deliciously in rose-coloured Dubarry jars, the two men came in
together, Lawrence keenly on the watch. But observation was
wasted on Stafford who had nothing to conceal, who was merely
what he appeared to be, a faded and tired-looking man of middle
height, with blue eyes and brown hair turning grey, and wellworn
evening clothes a trifle rubbed at the cuffs. It was difficult to
connect this gentle and unassuming person with the fiery memory
of the war, and Lawrence without apology took hold of Stafford's
arm like a surgeon and tried to flex the rigid elbow-muscles, and
to distinguish with his fingers used to handling wounds the hard
seams and hollows below its shrunken joint. The action, which
was overbearing was by no means redeemed by the intention, which
was brutal.
"Surely after all these years you don't propose to confess, Val?"
"I should like to make some sort of amends."
"Too late: these things can never be undone."
"No, of course not. Undone? no, nothing once done can be undone.
"But one needn't follow a wrong path to the bitter end. You made
me give you that promise for the sake of discipline and morale.
But of the men who were in the trenches with us that night how
many are left? Your battalion were pretty badly cut up at
Cambrai, weren't they? And the survivors are all back in civil
life like ourselves. If it were to come out now there aren't
twenty men who would remember anything about it: except of course
here in Chilmark, where they know my people so well."
"But you surely don't contemplate writing to the War Office?
I've no idea what course they would take, but they'd be safe to
make themselves unpleasant. I might even come in for a reprimand
myself! That's a fate I could support with equanimity, but what
about you? If I were you I shouldn't care to be hauled up for an
interview!"
"Really, if you'll forgive my saying so, I don't want to enter
into contingencies at all. Give me my promise back, Hyde,
there's a good fellow, it's worth nothing now to anyone but the
owner."
"What about your own people?" said Lawrence, his hands in his
pockets, and falling unawares into the tone of the orderly room.
"You'll do nothing while your father's alive: I'm glad you've
sense enough for that: but what about your brother and sister?
You're suffering under some unpractical attack of remorse, Val,
and like most penitent souls you think of nothing but yourself."
"On the contrary, I shrink very much from bringing distress on
other people. I'm well aware," said Val slowly, "that a man who
does what I've done forfeits his right to take an easy way out."
"An easy way?"
"Believe me, I haven't found the way you imposed on me an easy
one."
"Poor wretch!" said Lawrence under his breath. Stafford heard,
perhaps he was meant to hear: and he glanced out over the dark
turf on which the windows traced a golden oblong, over the trees,
dark and mysterious except where the same light caught and
bronzed the tips of their branches. In its glow every leaf stood
out separate and defined, clearer than by day through the
contrast of the immense surrounding darkness: and so it had been
in that bit of French forest years ago, when the wild bright
searchlights lit up its plague-spotted glades. Civilians talk
glibly of courage and cowardice who have never smelt the odour
of corruption. . . .
"What's your motive? Some misbegotten sense of duty?"
"Partly," said Val, turning from the window. How like his eyes
were to his young sister's! The impression was unwelcome, and
Lawrence flung it off. "I ought never to have given way to you.
I ought to have faced Wynn-West and let him deal with me as he
thought fit. After all, I was of no standing in the regiment.
A boy of nineteen--what on earth would it have signified? I
was so very young."
Nineteen! yes, one called a lad young at nineteen even in those
pitiless days. Under normal conditions he would have had two or
three years' more training before he was required to shoulder the
responsibilities and develop the braced muscles of manhood.
"Anyhow it's all over now--"
"No, you forget." A wave of colour swept over Val's face but his
voice was steady. "Through me the regiment holds a distinction
it hasn't earned, and the distinction is in hands that don't
deserve to hold it. That isn't consonant with the traditions of
the service."
"Oh, when it comes to the honour of the Army--!" Lawrence jeered
at him. "There speaks the soldier born and bred. But I was only
a 'temporary.' Give me a personal reason."
"Well, I can do that too! I hate sailing under false colours.
The good folk of Chilmark; my own people; Bernard, Laura . . . ."
Lawrence's eyes began to sparkle: when a man's voice deepens over
a woman's name--! "Oh, I dare say nothing will ever come of it,"
Val resumed after a moment: "my father may live another thirty
years, and by that time I should be too old to stand in a white
sheet. Or perhaps I shall only tell one or two people--"
"Mrs. Clowes?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You would like to tell my cousin and his wife?"
"I should like to feel myself a free agent, which I'm not now,
because I'm under parole to you."
"And so you will remain," said Lawrence coldly.
"You mean that?"
"Thoroughly. I've no wish to distress you, Val, but I'm no more
convinced now than I was ten years ago that you can be trusted to
judge for yourself. You were an impulsive boy then with remarkably
little self-control: you're--forgive my saying so--an impulsive man
now, capable of doing things that in five minutes you would be
uncommonly sorry for. How long would Bernard keep your secret? If
I'm not much mistaken you would lose your billet and the whole county
would hear why. The whole thing's utter rubbish. You make too much
of your ribbon: you--I--it would never have been given if Dale's
father hadn't been a brass hat."
Stafford was ashy pale. "I know you think you're just."
"No, I don't. I'm not just, my good chap: I'm weakly, idiotically
generous. In your heart of hearts you're grateful to me. Now
let's drop all this. Nothing you can say will have the slightest
effect, so you may as well not say it." He stood by Val's chair,
laughing down at him and gently gripping him by the shoulder.
"Be a man, Val! you're not nineteen now. You've got a comfortable
job and the esteem of all who know you--take it and be thankful:
it's more than you deserve. If you must indulge in a hair shirt,
wear it under your clothes. It isn't necessary to embarrass other
people by undressing in public."
Thought is free: one may be at a man's mercy and in his debt and
keep one's own opinion of him, impersonal and cold. With a faint
smile on his lips Val got up and strolled over to the piano.
"Hullo, what's all this music lying about?" he said in his
ordinary manner. "Has Laura been playing? Good, I'm so glad:
Bernard can hardly ever stand it. See the first fruits of your
bracing influence! Oh, the Polonaises . . ." And then he in
his turn began to play, but not the melancholy fiery lyrics that
had soothed Laura's unsatisfied heart. Val, a thorough musician,
went for sympathy to the classics. Impulsive? There was not
much impulse left in this quiet, reticent man, who with his old
trouble fresh on him could sit down and play a chorale of Bach or
a prelude of Mozart, subordinating his own imperious anguish to
the grave universal daylight of the elder masters. Long since
Val had resolved that no shadow from him should fall across any
other life. He had foresworn "that impure passion of remorse,"
and so keen an observer as Rowsley had grown up in his intimacy
without suspecting anything wrong. Unfortunately for Val,
however, he still suffered, though he was now denied all
expression, all relief: the wounded mind bled inwardly. It was
no wonder Val's hair was turning grey.
Lawrence, no mean judge of music, understood much--not all--of
the significance of Val's playing. He was an imaginative man--
far more so than Val, who would have lived an ordinary life and
travelled on ordinary lines of thought but for the war, which
wrenched so many men out of their natural development. But it
was again unfortunate for Val that the sporting instinct ran
strong in Captain Hyde. He was irritated by Val's grave superior
dignity, and deep and unacknowledged there was working in him the
instinct of the bully, the love of cruelty, overlaid by layer on
layer of civilization, of chivalry, of decency, yet native to the
human heart and quick to reassert itself at any age: in the boy
who thrashes a smaller boy, in the young man who takes advantage
of a woman, in the fighter who hounds down surrendered men.
He settled himself in a chair close to the piano. "Val, I'm very
glad to have met you. Having taken so much upon me," he was
smiling into Val's eyes, "I've often wondered what had become of
you. This," he lightly touched Val's arm, "was a cruel handicap.
I had to disable you, but it need not have been permanent."
"Do you mind moving? you're in my light."
He shifted his chair by an inch or so. "After all, what's a single
failure of nerve? Physical causes--wet, cold, indigestion, tight
puttees--account for nine out of ten of these queer breakdowns.
At all events you've paid, Val, paid twice over: when I read your
name in the Honours List I laughed, but I was sorry for you. The
sword-and-epaulets business would have been mild compared to that."
"Cat and mouse, is it?" said Val, resting his hands on the keys.
"What?"
"I'm not going to stand this sort of thing, Hyde, not for a
minute."
"I don't know what you mean," said Lawrence, reddening slowly to
his forehead. But it was a lie: he was not one of those who can
overstep limits with impunity. The streak of vulgarity again!
and worse than vulgarity: Andrew Hyde's sardonic old voice was
ringing in his ears, "Lawrence, you'll never be a gentleman."
"All right, we'll leave it at that. Only don't do it again."
Lawrence was dumb. "Here's Mrs. Clowes."
Val rose as Laura came in, released at length from attendance on
her husband. "I heard you playing," she said, giving him her hand
with her sweet, friendly smile. "So you've introduced yourself to
Captain Hyde? I hope you were nice to him, for my gratitude to
him is boundless. I haven't seen Bernard looking so fit or so
bright for months and months! Now sit down, both of you, and
we'll have cigarettes and coffee. Ring, Val, will you--? it's
barely half past ten.
"I can only stay for one cigarette, Laura: I must get home to
bed."
"But, my dear boy, how tired you look!" exclaimed Laura. "You do
too much--I'm sure you do too much. He wears himself out,
Lawrence--oh! my scarf!" She was wearing a silver scarf over her
black dress, and as she moved it fluttered up and caught on the
chain round her throat. "Unfasten me, please, Val," she said,
bending her fair neck, and Val was obliged laboriously to
disentangle the silken cobweb from the spurs of her clear-set
diamonds, a process which fascinated Lawrence, whose mind was
more French than English in its permanent interest in women.
Certainly Val's office of friend of the family was not less
delicate because Laura, secure in her few years seniority,
treated him like a younger brother! Watching, not Val, but Val's
reflection in a mirror, Lawrence overlooked no shade of
constraint, no effort that Val made to avoid touching with his
finger-tips the satin allure of Laura's exquisite skin. "Poor
miserable Val!" Suspicion was crystallizing into certainty. "Or
is it poor Bernard? No, I swear she doesn't know. Does he know
himself?"
A servant had brought in coffee, and Lawrence in his quality of
cousin poured out two cups and carried them over to Laura and to
Val. "Well, I'm damned!" murmured Lawrence as Val refastened the
clasp of the chain. "Picturesque, all this.-- Here, Val, here's
your coffee."
"But do you know each other so well as that?" exclaimed Laura,
arching her wren's-feather eyebrows.
"I was an infant subaltern when Hyde knew me," said Val laughing,
"and he was a howling swell of a captain. Do you remember that
night you all dined with us, sir, when we were in billets? We
stood you champagne--"
"Purchased locally. I remember the champagne."
"Dine with us tomorrow night," said Laura. "Do! and bring
Isabel." Lawrence gave an imperceptible start: for the last hour
he had forgotten Isabel's existence except when her eyes had
looked at him out of her brother's face. "The child will enjoy
it, I never knew any one so easily pleased; and you and Lawrence
and Bernard can rag one another to your heart's content. Yes,
you will, I know you will, Army men always do when they get
together; and you're all boys, even Bernard, even you with your
grey hair, my dear Val; as for Lawrence, he's only giving himself
airs."
"Yes, do bring your sister," said Lawrence. "She is the most
charming young girl I've met for years, if a man of my mature age
may say so. She is so natural, a rare thing nowadays: the modern
jeune fille is a sophisticated product."
"Bravo, Lawrence!" cried Mrs. Clowes, clapping her hands. "Now,
Val, didn't I tell you Isabel was going to be very, very pretty?
That's settled, then, you'll both come: and, to please me," she
looked not much older than Isabel as she took hold of the lapel
of Val's coat, "will you wear your ribbon? I know you hate
wearing it in civilian kit! But I do so love to see you in it:
and it's not as if there would be any one here but ourselves."
Lawrence swung round on his heel and walked away. One may enjoy
the pleasures of the chase and yet draw the line at watching an
application of the rack, and it sickened him to remember that his
own hand had given a turn to the screw. It had needed that brief
colloquy to let him see what Stafford's life was like at Wanhope,
and in what slow nerve-by-nerve laceration amends were being
made. He admired the gallantry of Stafford's reply.
"My dear Laura, I would tie myself up in ribbon from head to foot
if it would give you pleasure. I'll wear it if you like, though
my superior officer will certainly rag me if I do."
"No, I shan't," said Lawrence shortly.