Lawrence's reflections when he went to bed that night were more
insurgent and disorderly than usual. In his negative philosophy,
when he shut the door of his room, it was his custom to shut the
door on memory too--to empty his mind of all its contents except
the physical disposition to sleep. He cultivated an Indian's
self-involved and deliberate vacancy. On this his second night
at Wanhope however--Wanhope which was to bring him a good many
white nights before he was done with it--he lay long awake,
watching the stars that winked and glittered in the field of his
open window, the same stars that were perhaps shining on Isabel's
pillow. . . .
Isabel: it was on her that his thoughts ran with a tiring
persistency against which his common sense rebelled. A kiss!
what was it after all? A Christmas forfeit, a prank of which
even Val Stafford could have said no worse than that it was
beneath the dignity of his six and thirty years: only too
flattering for such a little country girl, sunburnt, simple, and
occasionally tongue-tied. The lady of the ivory frame (whom
Lawrence had fished out of her seclusion and set up on his
dressing table, to the disgust of Caroline: who was a Baptist,
and didn't care to dust a person who wore so few clothes), the
lady of the ivory frame was far handsomer than Isabel, or at
least handsome in a far more finished style.
Lawrence had the curiosity to get out of bed and carry Mrs. Cleve
to the window. Yes, she certainly was an expensive luxury, this
smiling lady, her eyes large and liquid, her waved hair rippling
under its diamond aigrette, her rather wide, eighteenth century
shoulders dimpling down under a collar of diamonds to the half
bare swell of her breast: and for an amateur of her type she was
charming, with her tired, sophisticated glance and her fresh
mouth, like a rouged child: but it was borne in on Lawrence that
she was not for him. He had kissed her two or three times, as
occasion served and she seemed to desire it, but he had never
lain awake afterwards, nor had his heart beaten any faster, no,
not even in the summerhouse at Bingley when she was fairly in his
arms. He pitched the photograph into a drawer. Frederick Cleve
was safe, for him.
Strolling out on the balcony, Lawrence folded his arms on the
balustrade. The night was hot: perhaps that was why he could not
sleep. By his watch it was ten minutes past two. The moon was
near her setting. She lay on her back with tumbled clouds all
round her: mother & pearl clouds, quilted, and tinged with a
sheen of opal. He wondered whether Bernard was asleep: poor
Bernard, lying alone through the dreary hours. Perhaps it was
because Lawrence was not at all like a curate that Bernard had
already made his cousin free of certain dark corners which Val
had never been allowed to explore. "My wife? She's not my
wife," Clowes had said, staring up at Lawrence with his wide
black eyes. "She's my nurse." And he went on defining the
situation with the large coarse frankness which he permitted
himself since his accident, and which did not repel Lawrence, as
it would have repelled Val or Jack Bendish, because Lawrence
habitually used the same frankness in his own mind. There was
some family likeness between the cousins, and it came out in
their common contempt for modern delicacy, which Bernard called
squeamishness and Lawrence damned in more literary language as
the Victorian manner.
The moon dipped lower over the trees while Lawrence took one of
his sharp turns of self-analysis. Most men live in a haze, but
Lawrence was naturally a clear thinker, and he had neither a warm
heart nor a sentimental temperament to blind him. Cleve was
safe: but with his Rabelaisian candour and cultivated want of
scruple Lawrence reflected that Cleve had been anything but safe
at Bingley. Whence the change? From Isabel Stafford! Lawrence
shrugged his shoulders: he was accustomed to examine himself in a
dry light of curiosity, and no vice or weakness shocked him, but
here was pure folly.
What was he doing at Wanhope? "I'm contracting attachments," he
reflected, unbuttoning his silk jacket to feel the night air cool
on his chest, a characteristic action: wind, sunshine, a
wandering scent, the freshness of dew, all the small sensuous
pleasures that most men neglect, Lawrence would go out of his way
to procure. "I'm breaking my rule." Long ago he had resolved
never to let himself get fond of any one again, because in this
world of chance and change, at the mercy of a blindly striking
power, the game is not worth the candle: one suffers too much.
As for Miss Stafford, one need not be a professed stole to draw
the line at a little country girl, pious to insipidity and simple
to the brink of silliness. Here Lawrence, not being one of those
who deny facts when they are unwelcome, caught himself up: she
was not insipid and her power over him was undeniable. Twice
within forty-eight hours she had defeated his will, and what was
stranger was that each time he had surrendered eagerly, feeling
for the moment as though it didn't matter what he said or did
before Isabel.--It was at this point of his analysis that Lawrence
began to take fright. "You rascal," he said to himself, "so that's
why you're off Mrs. Cleve, is it? What is it you want--to marry the
child? You would be sick to death of her in six weeks--and haven't
you had enough of giving hostages to Fortune?"
Hostages to fortune: that pregnant phrase frightens men who fear
nothing else in heaven or earth. But not one of Hyde's friends
knew that he had ever given fortune a hostage. He was not
reserved as a rule: indeed he was always willing to argue creed
and code with a frankness rare in the self-conscious English
race: he was never shy and there was little in him that was
distinctively English. But he was too subtle and inconsistent
for the average homogeneous Englishman, and not even the comrades
of trench and tent knew much about his private life. Lawrence
was one of those products of a high civilization which have in
them pretty strong affinities with barbarism,--but always with a
difference. The noble savage tortures his enemy out of hate or
revenge: Lawrence, more sophisticated in brutality, was capable
of doing it by way of a psychological experiment. The savage
takes a short cut from desire to possession: Lawrence though his
blood ran hot curbed it from caution, because in modern life
women are a burden and a drag.
This was the trained and tempered Lawrence Hyde, a personage of
great good humour and numitigable egoism. This was the companion
of easy morals with whom Lawrence was on familiar terms. But on
that first white night at Wanhope Lawrence grew dimly aware of
the upheaval of deeper forces, as if his youth were stirring in
its grave. When Laura Clowes smiled at him with her gallant
bearing: when Bernard gripped his hand in wishing him good night:
when Val in the middle of the psychological experiment pierced
him with his grave tired eyes, all sorts of feelings long dormant
and believed to be dead came to life in Lawrence: pity, and
affection, and remorse and shame. "Hang the fellow!" Lawrence
reflected. "He's too like his sister. And Isabel? She is a
child." Whose voice was it that answered, "This is the woman I
have been waiting for all my life?"
And then, turning at bay, he came to a sufficiently cynical
conclusion. "No nonsense!" he said to himself. "Your trouble is
that she's twenty and you're six and thirty, which is a dangerous
age. But you don't want to marry her, and there's no middle
course. Fruit defendu, mon ami: hands off! If you can't be
sensible you'll have to shift out of Wanhope and compromise on
Mrs. Cleve."
The rain held off, and after breakfast--a cheery meal at which
Bernard for the first time for many months appeared dressed and
in a good temper--Lawrence fulfilled the main duty of a guest by
going for a walk.
He came by footbridge and field path into the High Street, where
he was immediately buttonholed by the vicar. Lawrence had a
fixed idea that all priests were hypocrites: they must be, since
as educated men they could not well believe the fables they were
paid to teach! But it was hard to associate hypocrisy with Mr.
Stafford, whose fond ambition it was to nail Lawrence Hyde to
lecture on his Chinese travels before the Bible Class. "Oh, nothing
religious," he explained, holding his victim firmly by the coat as
Lawrence edged away. "Only half an hour's story-telling to put a few
new ideas into their heads--as if you were talking to a young brother
of your own. I'm always trying to get them to emigrate, but they
need a great deal of shoving." Lawrence said they could not emigrate
to China, and, further, that he didn't regard them as brothers. "How
narrow you are, some of you University men!" sighed Mr. Stafford.
"What a concept of society! But," brightening, "you're not so bad as
you're painted. Come, come! a fifth-of-August recruit can't very
well deny that we're all brothers in arms?" Before Lawrence escaped
he was not sure that he hadn't pledged himself to an address on
"Fringes of the Empire," with special reference to the C.U.M.C.A.
It was too sunny to fish, but the trout lured him, and from the
cross-roads by the stone bridge he struck into a footpath that
led upstream into the hills, behind whose green spurs Chilmark
before long was out of sight. Here it was lonely country.
Sometimes on a headland the sun flashed white over a knot of
labourers, scything the hay where no machine could go: sometimes
a shepherd's cote gleamed far off above the pale wattlings of a
fold: but as he wound on--and on into the Plain there was no
sign of man in all the hot landscape, and no motion but the
bicker of the stream over its stony bed, and the hum of insect
life busy on its millions of dark and tiny vibrant wings. Not a
breath of wind stirred among these grassy valleys, and Lawrence,
feeling warm, had sat down by a pool under a sapling birchtree,
when he heard a step on the path. It was Isabel Stafford.
He had hardly seen her again overnight, for Val had carried his
young sister away before ten o'clock. He waited for her in the
rare shadow of the birchtree, a tall powerful figure in a white
drill suit of the tropics, his fair skin and black eyes shaded by
a wide Panama hat. Isabel as she drew near was vexed to find
herself blushing. She was a little shy of Captain Hyde, a little
averse to meet his sparkling eyes.
"Isn't it hot?" she said, frankly wiping her face with a large
handkerchief. "This is a favourite pool of mine, I often sit
here when I come this way. I never saw such beautiful dragonflies,
did you? They must be nearly as big as hummingbirds."
Over the brown mirror of the pool a troop of great dragonflies
were ceaselessly darting to and fro, their metallic wings making
a faint whirr as they looped in blinding mazes through the air
that glowed blue with their splendour. "Very beautiful," said
Lawrence.
"Are you out for a walk? I'm on my way to Wancote." Here panic
fell on Isabel, the panic that lies in wait for young girls: if
he were to think she thought he ought to offer to escort her!
"I'm late, I must go on now. Good-bye!"
Lawrence stood looking down at her, impassive, almost sombre, but
for the hot glow in his eyes. His caution had gone overboard.
"Mayn't I come too?"
"Oh. . . ."
"Do let me."
"If you--if you like."
The valley narrowed as it receded, the upland air began to
sparkle with a myriad prismatic needles that glittered from the
wings of flies and beetles, and from dewdrops on patches of turf
still as grey as hoarfrost in the shadow on the edge of a wood,
and from wayside hollies whose leaf-points were all starred in
silver. The blue bow overhead was stainless, not a cloud in it
nor a mist: azure, azure, and unfathomable, like the heart of
man, or the justice of God.--Isabel was not shy now but alert
and radiant, as if she had caught a sparkle from the air: and
expansive, as women are when they are sure of pleasing. "'For
the jaded man of the world at her side, the young girl's rustic
freshness was her chief charm. She was so different from the
beautiful but heartless mondaines he had known in Town. No
diamonds glittered round her slender throat, and her hands,
though small and well-shaped, were tanned by the summer sun. But
for the jaded-man-of-the-world, weary of sparkling epigram or
caustic repartee, her simple chatter held a fascination of its
own.' I don't believe," reflected Isabel, coming down mentally to
plain prose, "he'd mind if I talked to him about the dinner or
last week's washing bill."
She did not in fact enter on any such intimate topic, but
conversed sedately about parish politics and the beauties of the
Plain. "This is a very lonely part," she said, "there are
scarcely any houses. I'm taking the magazine to one of Major
Clowes' shepherds. It's rather interesting going there. He's
mad."
"Mad!"
"As a March hare. He's perfectly harmless of course, and an
excellent shepherd. In lambing time he looks after the ewes like
a mother, Val says his flock hardly ever lose a lamb. But he's a
thrilling person to district-visit. Last time I went he had the
Prince of Wales staying with him."
"Why on earth don't they put him in an asylum?"
"Do you know much about country villages?" Isabel enquired. "I
thought not. They never put any one in an asylum till after he's
got into trouble, and not always then if he doesn't want to go:
just as they never build a bridge over a level crossing till one
or two people have been killed. We had a woman in Chilmark that
was much madder than poor dear Ben is. She took a knife out of
her drawer once when I was there and told me she was going to cut
her throat with it. She made me feel the edge to see how sharp
it was. At last she cut the children's throats instead of her
own, and then they put her away, but none of them died and she's
out again now. She's supposed to be cured. You see a County
asylum doesn't keep people longer than it must because the money
comes out of the rates."
"Do you mean to say," Lawrence fastened on the point that struck
him most forcibly, "that your father lets you go to such places
by yourself?"
"Oh yes: why not? He would think it showed want of faith to
prevent me. He's very sensible about things like that," said
Isabel without affectation. "There are always typhoid and
diphtheria about in the autumn, but Jimmy never fusses. It
wouldn't be much use if he did, with him and Val always in and
out of infected houses."
"Pure fatalism--" said Lawrence, hitting with his stick at the
flowers by their path. "Your brother ought to put his foot
down--" Isabel seized his arm.
"Take care!-- There was a bee in it. You really are most
careless Captain Hyde! I shan't take you for any more walks if
you do that. I dare say it was one of my own bees, and he had
the very narrowest escape! And Val wouldn't dream of interfering.
Ben and I are the best of friends. Besides, it's Mrs. Janaway I
really go to see, poor dear, she don't ever hear a bit o' news from
week's end to week's end. Wouldn't you be glad to see me," her eyes
were destitute of challenge but not of humour, "if you lived three
miles deep in the Plain, alone with your husband and the Prince of
Wales?"
"I should be delighted to see you at any time."
Isabel, not knowing what to do with this speech, let it alone.
"And the dog: I mustn't forget the dog. They have a thoroughbred
Great Dane. Mr. Bendish gave Ben the puppy because it was the
worst of the litter and they thought it would die: but it didn't
die--no animal does that Ben gets hold of--and he's too fond of
it now to part with it, though a dog fancier from Amesbury has
offered him practically his own price for it."
"I should like to see the Dane."
"Well, you will, if you come with me. There's the cottage."
They had turned a bend and the head of the dale lay before them,
a mere dimpling depression between breasts of chalky grass. Set
close by the way on a cross-track, which forded the brook by
stepping stones and went on over the downs to Amesbury, stood a
small, square, tumbledown cottage, its door opening on primeval
turf, though behind it a plot of garden enclosed in a quickset
hedge provided Mrs. Janaway with cabbages and gooseberries and
sour apples and room to hang out the clothes.
"Ben won't be in, but Billy will be looking after Clara. Billy
is no good with the sheep, but he's death on tramps. In fact if
I weren't here it wouldn't be too safe for you to go to the door.
A Dane can pull any man down: I've heard even Jack Bendish say he
wouldn't care to tackle him--"
Even Jack Bendish! Lawrence smiled. He felt the prick of
Isabel's blade, it amused him, automatically he reacted to it,
she made him want to fight the Dane first and Jack Bendish
afterwards--but he retained just too much of the ascendancy of
his six and thirty years to gratify her by self-betrayal.
"You're a very brave young lady," he said cheerfully, "but if I
were Val--"
He stopped short. From the cottage window, now not twenty yards
off, there had come a burst of the most appalling screams he had
ever heard in his life, the mechanical screaming of mortal agony.
Isabel went as white as chalk and even Hyde felt the blood turn
cold at his heart. Next moment the door was torn open and out of
it came a big red-bearded man, dressed in a brown tweed jacket
and velveteen trousers tied at the knees, and prancing high in a
solemn jig. In one hand he held up an iron stake and in the
other a rag of red and black carpet . . . the body of a woman in
a black dress, her arms and legs hanging down, her face a scarlet
mask that had ceased to scream.
"Keep back, Isabel," said Lawrence: then, running across the
turf, "Drop that, Janaway! drop her!" in the hard authoritative
voice of the barrack square. With the fitful docility of the
mad, Janaway obeyed, and directly he did so Lawrence checked and
stood on the defensive, taking a moment to collect his wits--he
had need of them: he had to make his head guard his hands. He
was a tall powerful man, but so was the shepherd: to offset
Hyde's science, Janaway was mad and would be stopped by no
punishment short of a knock-out blow: and Lawrence carried only
an ordinary walking-stick, while Janaway had hold of an upright
from a bit of iron railing, five feet long and barbed like a
spear.
"If he whacks me over the head with that or jabs it into my
stomach, I'm done," Lawrence thought, and pat to the moment
Janaway, his mouth open and his teeth bare, rushed on him and
struck at his eyes. Lawrence parried and sprang aside: but his
arm was jarred to the elbow. "That was a close call. Ha! my
chance now . . ." Like a flash, as Janaway turned, Lawrence
ran in to meet him body to body, seized him by the lapels of his
coat, pinned down his arms, set one foot against his thigh, and
with no great exertion of strength, by the Samurai's trick of
falling with one's enemy, heaved him up and shot him clean over
his own shoulder: then, as they dropped together, struck with his
wrist a paralysing blow at the base of the spine. Janaway's yell
of fury was choked into a rattling groan.
Lawrence was up in a twinkling, but the shepherd lay where he had
fallen, and Lawrence let him lie: he knew that, so handled, the
victim could be counted out of action, perhaps for good and all.
He stood erect, breathing deep. Ben could wait, but what of Mrs.
Ben? He was shocked to find Isabel already at her side on the
reddened turf.
Mechanically Lawrence picked up his stick before he went to join
her. Clara was huddled up over a pool of blood, her head between
her knees: not a pleasant sight for a young girl. But Isabel,
though white and trembling, was collected. "I can't feel her
heart, I--I'm afraid--"
She broke off. Her glance had travelled beyond Lawrence and her
features were stiffening into a mask of fear. "Oh, the dog, the
dog!" she pointed past him. "Billy, Billy, down, sir!"
From some eyrie on the hillside the Dane had watched without
emotion the legitimate spectacle of his master beating his
mistress: in the war of the sexes, a dog is ever on the man's
side. But when the tables were turned Billy went to the rescue.
He was coming round the corner of the cottage when Isabel caught
sight of him, travelling in great bounds at the pace of a wolf,
but silent. Lawrence had but just time to swing Isabel behind
him before the Dane leapt for his throat. Lawrence struck him
over the head, but the blow glanced: so sudden, so thundering
came the impact that Lawrence all but went down under it: and
once down. . . .
The great jaws snapped one inch from his cheek, and before the
Dane could recover Lawrence had seized him by the throat and
fought him off. Then Lawrence set his back against the cottage
wall and felt safer. A second blow got home, and spoilt Billy's
beauty for ever: it laid open his left eye and the left side of
his jaw. Undaunted, the Dane gave himself an angry shake, which
spattered Lawrence with blood, and gathered his haunches for a
second spring. But by now Lawrence had clubbed his stick and was
beating him about the head with its heavy knobbed handle. Swift
as the dog was, the man was swifter: they fought eye to eye, the
man forestalling every motion of the dog's whipcord frame:
Lawrence's blood was up, he would have liked to fight it out
bare-handed. They would not have been ill-matched, for when the
Dane reared Lawrence overtopped him only by an inch or so, and
the weight of the steelclad paws on his breast tore open his
clothes and pinned him to the wall. But Lawrence thrashed him
off his feet whenever he tried to rise, till at length the lean
muzzle sank with a low baffled moan.
Even then there was such fell strength in him that Lawrence dared
not spare him, and blow rained on blow.--"Don't kill him," said
Isabel. "Put this over his head."
Lawrence took the length of serge she gave him and with
characteristic indifference to danger stooped over the dog, whose
spirit he admired, and tried to swathe his head in its heavy
folds. But, torn, blinded, baffled, the Dane was undefeated. He
wrenched his jaws out of their mufflings and rolled his head from
side to side, snapping right and left. "Oh Billy," cried Isabel,
"you know me, lie down, dear old man!" A pure-bred dog when sight
and hearing are gone will recognize a familiar scent. In an
agony of pity Isabel flung her arm over the heaving shoulders--
"Don't!" Lawrence dragged her off, but too late: the Dane's teeth
had snapped on her wrist. The next moment he was lying on his
side with his brains beaten out. Lawrence was willing to spare
his own enemy but not Isabel's.
"Oh," said Isabel, shivering and moaning, "oh, my poor old
Billy!"
"Damn your poor old Billy," said Lawrence: "let me look at your
arm."
He carried her indoors, leaving Janaway and his wife and the Dane
lying scattered on the sunlit turf. He did not care one straw
whether they lived or died. In the little front parlour, neat
and fresh with its window full of white muslin and red geraniums,
he laid Isabel on a sofa and rolled up her sleeve: the flesh was
not much torn but the Dane's fangs had sunk in deep and clean.
"How far are we from a doctor?"
"Four miles. Why? Billy wasn't mad. I shall be all right
directly. May I have some water to drink?"
"Curse these country hamlets," said Lawrence. He could not carry
her four miles, nor was she fit to walk so far: but to fetch help
would mean an hour or so's delay. He went into the kitchen to
filla tumbler from the pump, and found an iron wash-bowl in Clara
Janaway's neat sink, and a kettle boiling on the hob beside a
saucepan of potatoes that she had been cooking for dinner.
Isabel sat up and took the glass from his hand.
"I'm so sorry," she murmured, raising her beautiful dark eyes in
a diffident apology. "It was all my own fault." Lawrence slipped
a cushion under her head and drew her gently down. "Oh, thank
you! But please don't trouble about me. I do feel rather queer."
Lawrence thought it probable. He had been bitten by a dog
himself and knew how horribly such a wound smarts. "It was all
so--so very dreadful. But I shall be all right directly.. Do go
back to the others: I'm afraid poor Clara--oh! oh, Captain
Hyde! What are you doing?"
"Set your teeth and shut your eyes," said Lawrence "it won't take
long. Your beloved Billy wasn't a nice animal to be bitten by.
No, he wasn't mad, but his teeth weren't very clean, and we don't
want blood poisoning to set up. Steady now." He pressed his lips
to her arm.
Isabel's hand lay lax in his grasp while he methodically sucked
the wound and rinsed his mouth from her tumbler. He hurt her,
but she had been bred to accept pain philosophically. "Is it
done?" she asked meekly when he released her. "Not any more?"
"No, that's enough. Now for a drop of warm water." He bathed the
wound thoroughly and in default of a better dressing bound it up
with his own handkerchief. "I wish I had some brandy to give
you, but there isn't a drop in the place. Your estimable friend
appears to have been a teetotaller. I don't doubt he was a
pattern of all the virtues.-- But for that matter I couldn't give
the child publichouse stuff.-- Now, my little friend, if you'll
lie quiet for five minutes, I'll see what's going on outside."
"Please may I have my skirt?"
"Your what?"
"My serge skirt."
It had not struck Lawrence till then that she was dressed in a
white muslin blouse and a pink and blue striped petticoat. "Do
you mean to say that was your skirt you gave me to tie up the
dog's head in?"
"I hadn't anything else," said Isabel still more apologetically,
and blushing--she was feeling very guilty, very much ashamed of
the trouble she had given: "and you don't know how fond Ben was
of Billy!"
"Oh, damn Billy!" said Lawrence for the second time.
He went out into the summer sunshine. The dog, the fallen man,
the fallen woman, not one of them had stirred a hair. All was
peaceful and clear in every note of black and white and scarlet
on the turf plat where they lay as if on a stage, in their green
setting of dimpled hillside and beech grove and marsh. There was
a sickly smell in the hot bright air which carried Lawrence back
to the trenches.
He went to examine the human wreckage. No need to examine Billy
--his record for good or ill was manifestly closed: and Lawrence
had a sickening suspicion that Mrs. Janaway too had finished with
a world which perhaps had not offered her much inducement to
remain in it. He lifted her up and laid her down again in a
decent posture, straightening her limbs and sweeping back her
clotted grey hair: no, no need to feel for the pulse in that
faded breast from which her husband had partly torn away the
neatly darned stuff bodice, so modest with its white tucker and
silver Mizpah brooch. Lawrence composed its disorder with a
reverent hand, spreading his own coat over her face.
He went on to Ben, and was frankly disappointed to find that Ben
was not dead--far from it: he gave a deep groan when Lawrence
rolled him over: but it was a case of broken arm and collarbone,
if not of spinal injury as well. Lawrence found a length of line
in the yard--Clara's clothes-line, in fact--and knotted it into
a triple cord, for, though no sane man could have got far in such
a state, it was on the cards that Janaway in his madness might
scramble up and wander away on the downs. So Lawrence lashed him
hand and foot, and Ben blinked and grinned at the sun and
slavered over his beard.
It was while thus employed that Lawrence began to wonder what
would have happened if Isabel had come to Wancote alone. She
might have run away. But would she, while Ben was engaged in
carpet-beating? Not she! Lawrence was not a fanciful man: but
the red and grey remains of Clara Janaway would have set the
visualizing faculty to work in the mind of a ploughboy. After
tying the last of a dozen knots, reef knots and none too loose,
he went to the back of the cottage where Isabel could not see him
and was swiftly and violently sick.
After that he felt better. There was a pump in the yard, and he
rinsed his head and hands under it, and washed off as best he
could the stains of the fight, and re-knotted his scarf and shook
himself down into his disordered clothes before going back to
Isabel. And then it was that Isabel received of him a fresh
impression as though she had never known him before, one of those
vivid second impressions that efface earlier memories.
Val had always held paternal rank, Captain Hyde had been
introduced as Val's late superior officer, and so Isabel had
accepted him as Val's contemporary, of the generation before her
own. But framed in the sunlit doorway, a very tall handsome man
in undress, his coat thrown off, his trousers belted on his lean
flanks, his wet shirt modelling itself over his powerful throat
and shoulders and sticking to his ribs, Hyde might have been
only six or seven and twenty: and certainly his manner was not
middle-aged! Val's language was refined enough for a curate, and
even Rowsley in his young sister's presence never went beyond a
sarcenet oath; but Hyde's frank fury was piquant to Isabel's not
very decorous taste. When he came in, her pain and faintness
began to diminish as if a stream of warm fresh life were flowing
into her veins.
"Are you better, Miss Isabel?"
"Ever so much better, thank you. Is--is Clara--?"
Cool, grave, and tranquil, Lawrence took her hand. "Clara is
dead." He felt her trembling, and found a form of consolation
which would have been slow to occur to his unprompted fancy.
"Better so, isn't it? She wouldn't have been very happy after her
husband's trying to kill her."
"No, she wouldn't want them to put him in an asylum," Isabel
agreed, but in a subdued voice. "Did you forget my skirt?"
"No, but it was rather in a mess with the unfortunate Billy, and
I'm afraid you'll have to do without it. I'm going to take you
home now. You can walk, can't you, with my help? I'd like to
carry you a few steps, till we're out of sight of the cottage.
Put your arm round my neck." Isabel hesitated. She had been
frightened out of her life and still felt cruelly shaken, but her
quick sense of the ridiculous protested against this deference
paid to her when she wasn't really hurt and it was all her own
fault. What would Val have said? But apparently Captain Hyde
was less exacting than Val. "Ah! let me: it is an ugly little
scene outside and I don't want you to be haunted by it."
She resigned herself. She had not yet begun to feel shy of
Lawrence, she was a child still, a child with the instincts of a
woman, but those instincts all asleep. They quickened in her
when she felt the glow of his life so near her own, but there was
a touch of Miranda in Isabel, and no cautionary withdrawal
followed.
And Lawrence? The trustfulness of a noble nature begets what it
assumes. One need not ask what would have become of Miranda if
she had given her troth to an unworthy Ferdinand, because the
Mirandas of this world are rarely deceived. Hyde was but a
battered Ferdinand. He was a man of strong and rather coarse
fibre who had indifferently indulged tastes that he saw no reason
to restrain. But he was changing: when he carried Isabel across
the sunlit grass plot, her beautiful grave childish head lying
warm on his shoulder, he had travelled far from the Hyde of the
summer house at Bingley.
"My word!" said Yvonne Bendish, startled out of her drawl. "Is
it you, Isabel?" She reined in and sat gazing with all her eyes
at the couple coming down the field path to Chilmark Bridge.
"Have you had an accident? What's happened?"
"Excuse my hat," said Lawrence with rather more than his habitual
calm. "How lucky to have met you. There has been a shocking
business up at Wancote. Perhaps you would take Miss Stafford
home? She should be got to bed, I think."
Mrs. Jack Bendish was not soon ruffled, nor for long. "Lift her
in," she said. "Sorry I can't make room for you too, Captain
Hyde, you are as white as a ghost. Very upsetting, isn't it? but
don't worry, girls of her age turn faint rather easily. Her arm
hurt? . . ." She pointed down the road with her whip. "Dr.
Verney lives at The Laburnus, on the right, beyond the publichouse.
If you would be so kind as to send him up to the vicarage?"
She whipped up her black ponies and was gone. Lawrence was
grateful to her for asking no questions, but he would rather have
taken Isabel direct to Val. Romance in bud requires a delicate
hand. Now Mrs. Jack Bendish had all the bourgeois virtues except
modesty and discretion.