The Wancote affair made a nine days' wonder in the Plain. Indeed
it even got into the London papers, under such titles as "A
Domestic Tragedy" or "Duel with a Dog": and, while the Morning
Post added a thumbnail sketch of Captain Hyde's distinguished
career, the Spectator took Ben as the text of a "middle" on "The
Abuse of Asylum Administration in Rural Districts."
Lawrence himself, when he had despatched Hubert Verney to the
vicarage, would have liked to cut his responsibility. But it
could not be done: first there was the village policeman to run
to earth and information to be laid before him, and then, since
Brown's first flustered impulse was to arrest all concerned from
Lawrence to Clara Janaway, Lawrence had to walk down with him to
Wharton to interview Jack Bendish, as both the nearest magistrate
and the nearest sensible man. But after pouring his tale into
Jack's sympathetic ear he felt entitled to wash his hands of the
affair. Instead of going back to Wanhope with the relief party
he got Bendish to drop him at the field path to Wanhope: and he
slipped up to his room by a garden door, bathed, changed, and
came down to lunch without trace of discomposure. Gaston,
curtly ordered to take his master's clothes away and burn them,
was eaten by curiosity, but in vain.
Even before his cousin, Lawrence did not own to his adventure
till the servants had left the room. If it could have been kept
dark he would not have owned to it at all. He did so only
because it must soon be common property and he did not care to be
taxed with affectation.
When, bit by bits his story came out across the liqueur glasses
and the early strawberries, Major Clowes laid his head back and
roared with laughter. Lawrence was annoyed: he had not found it
amusing and he felt that his cousin had a macabre and uncomfortable
sense of humour. But Bernard, wiping the tears from his eyes,
developed unabashed his idea of a good joke. "Hark to him! Now
isn't that Lawrence all over? What! can't you run down for
twenty-four hours to a hamlet the size of Chilmark but you must
bring your faics divers in your pocket?"
"It isn't my fault if you have dangerous lunatics at large," said
Lawrence, helping himself daintily to cream. "If this is a
specimen of the way things go on in country districts, thank you,
give me a London slum. The brute was as mad as a hatter. He
ought to have been locked up years ago. I can't conceive what
Stafford was about to keep him on the estate."
"All very fine," Bernard chuckled, "but I'd lay any odds Ben
didn't go for Mrs. Ben till he saw you coming."
"Adventures are to the adventurous," Laura mildly translated the
bitter jest. Her mission in life was to smooth down Bernard's
rough edges. "But that is too ugly, Berns. You oughtn't to say
such a thing even in fun. It was no fun for Lawrence."
"I don't object to an occasional scrap," said Lawrence. "But
this one was overdone." He shivered suddenly from head to foot.
"Hallo, old man, I didn't know you had a nerve in your body!"
said Bernard staring at him.
Lawrence went on with his strawberries in an ungenial silence.
He was irritated by his momentary self betrayal. If he had cared
to explain it he would have had to confess that though personally
indifferent to adventures he disliked to have women mixed up in
them. He was glad when Laura with her intuitive tact changed the
conversation, not too abruptly.
"All modern men have nerves. I should think Lawrence had as few
as any, but it must have been a frightful scene. I must run up
after lunch and see Isabel. Poor child! But she's wonderfully
brave. All the Staffords were brought up to be stoical: if they
knocked themselves about as children they were never allowed to
cry. Mr. Stafford is a fanatic on the point of personal courage.
Val told me once that the only sins for which his father ever
cuffed him were telling fibs and running away."
"Did he get cuffed often?" Lawrence enquired.
"Shouldn't wonder," said Bernard. "Val's one of your nervy men."
"Not after he was ten years old," said Laura smiling. "But as a
little boy he was always in trouble. Not the wisest treatment,
was it? for a delicate, sensitive child."
"Miss Isabel is not nervous," said Lawrence. "She is as cool a
young lady as I have ever seen. I believe she still owes me a
grudge for hitting Billy so hard." He dipped his fingers
delicately into his finger bowl. "No, no more, thanks. Did I
tell you that the brute of a Dane bit her?"
"Bit Isabel!"
"Made his teeth pretty nearly meet in her forearm. She was
trying to soothe the dear dog. Mr. Stafford's theories may be
ethically beautiful, but I object to their being carried to
extremes. Frankly, I should describe your young friend as
idiotically rash," said Lawrence with a wintry smile. "I
couldn't prevent her doing it because I hadn't the remotest
notion she was going to do it. The Dane was practically mad with
rage. I could have cuffed her myself with pleasure. It was a
wild thing to do and not at all agreeable for me."
"But, my dear Lawrence, that is one way of looking at it!" Laura
protested, amused by his cool egoism, though she took it with the
necessary grain of salt. "Bitten by that horrible dog? My poor
Isabel! she loves dogs--I don't suppose she stopped to consider
her own feelings or yours."
"She ought to have had more sense."
"Hear, hear!" said Bernard. "Half the trouble in the world comes
from women shoving in where they're not wanted. It's a pleasure
to talk to you, Lawrence, after lying here to be slobbered over
by a pack of old women. I always exclude you, my dear," he
nodded to Laura, "but the parson twaddles on till he makes me
sick, and Val's not much better. What's a woman want with
courage? Teach her to buy decent clothes and put 'em on
properly, and she's learning something useful. I'll guarantee
Isabel only got in the way. But you, Lawrence," he measured his
cousin with an admiring eye, much as a Roman connoisseur might
have run over the points of a favourite gladiator, "I should have
liked to see you tackle the Dane. You're a big chap--deeper in
the chest than I ever was, and longer in the reach. What's your
chest measurement?-- Yes, you look it. And nothing in your hand
but a stick? By Jove, it must have been worth watching! Hey,
Laura?"
"Bernard, you are embarrassing! You will make even Lawrence shy.
But, yes," Laura laid her hand on Hyde's arm: "I should have
liked to watch you fight the Dane."
How long was it since any one had spoken to Lawrence in that warm
tone of affection? Not since his father died. From time to time
Mrs. Cleve or other ladies had flattered his senses or his
vanity, but none of them had ever looked at him with Laura's kind
admiring eyes. Perhaps after all there was something to be said
for family life! Tragic wreck as Clowes was, he would have been
far more to be pitied but for his wife: their marriage, crippled
and sterilized, was yet--as Lawrence saw it--a beautiful
relation. Suppose he stood in that relation to Isabel? Sitting
at table in the cool panelled diningroom, his careless pose
stiffening under Laura's touch, Lawrence for the first time began
to wonder whether he would not gain more in happiness than he
would lose in freedom if he were to make the child his wife.
"To make the child his wife." He was not really more of an egoist
than the average man, but he did assume that if he wanted her he
could win her. His mistress was very young: it was her rose of
youth and her unquelled spirit that charmed him even more than
her beauty: and she had not sixpence to her name, while he was a
rich man. He did not, as Bernard would have done, go on to plume
himself on his magnanimity, or infer that Isabel's gratitude
would give him a claim on her fealty over and beyond the Pauline
duty of wives. In the immediate personal relation Lawrence was
visited by a saving humility. But on the main issue he took, or
thought he took, a practical view. A man in love cannot soberly
analyse his own psychological state, and Lawrence did not know
that he had fallen in love with Isabel at first sight or that the
germ of matrimonial intentions had lain all along in his mind.
Here and now he believed that he first thought of marrying her.
Then he would have to stay on at Wanhope. And court Isabel
under the eyes of all Chilmark? Under Bernard's eyes at all
events; they were already watching him. Lawrence was irritated:
whatever happened, he was not going to be watched by his cousin
and chaffed and argued over and betted on. In most points
indifferently frank, Lawrence was silent as the grave where sex
came into play.
"Thank you." He touched with his lips the hand that Laura had
innocently laid on his wrist. "It can't really be fourteen
years, Laura, since you were staying at Farringay."
"Flatterer!" said Laura, smiling but startled, and rising from
her chair. "This to an old married woman!"
"Ah! when I remember that I knew you before this fellow did--!"
"Here, I say," came Bernard's voice across the table, riotously
amused, "none o' that! none o' that!"
"Penalty for having a charming wife," laughed Lawrence, in his
preoccupation blind and deaf to danger signals. He rose to open
the door for Laura. "By the by, if you go to the vicarage this
afternoon, I'll stroll up with you, if I may. I suppose I owe
the young lady that much civility!"
"I can't: I'm busy," said Laura hastily. "That is, I don't know
what time I shall get away. Go by yourself, don't wait for me."
"Rubbish," said Bernard. "Much pleasanter for both of you to
have the walk together. Lawrence doesn't want to go alone, do
you?" ("Rather not," said Lawrence heartily.) "And I don't want
you here, my love, if that's the trouble, I can't have you tied
to the leg of my sofa."
Later, when Lawrence had gone out on the lawn to smoke, Bernard
recalled Laura. She came to him. He took hold of her wrist and lay
smiling up at her. "Nice relationship, isn't it, cousins-in-law?
So free and easy. You--. I watched you pawing him about. So
affectionate. He felt it too. Did you see the start he gave? He
twigged fast enough. Think you can play that game under my nose, do
you? So you can. I don't care what you do. Take yourself off now
and take him with you."
"Don't pinch my wrist below the cuff, Bernard," said his wife. "I
can't wear gloves at tea."
"You can stop out all night for all I care," said Clowes. "I'm
sick of the sight of you."
Then Laura knew that the Golden Age was over.
Isabel had refused to go to bed. She had no nerves: she saw life
in its proper colours without refraction. The dreadful scene at
Wancote had made its full impression on her, but she was not
beset like Hyde by visions of what might have been. Still she
was tired and subdued, and when Verney had dressed her arm she
announced her intention of spending the afternoon in the garden
out of the way of kind enquiries: and she settled herself on an
Indian chair behind a thicket of lilac and syringa, while Val and
Rowsley and Yvonne brought books and cushions and chocolate and
eau de cologne to comfort beauty in distress.
But she had reckoned without the wicket gate in the garden wall,
which Lawrence let himself in by. He caught sight of her as he
crossed the lawn and came up to her bare-headed. "How are you?"
he asked without preface. "Better now?"
His informality went against the grain of Isabel's taste: he had
no right to presume on a forced situation: with what fastidious
modesty Val would have drawn back! She was tired, and she did
not want to be reminded of what had happened in the morning. She
shut up her book, but kept a finger in the place. "Thank you.
I'm sorry the others are all out."
"Mrs. Clowes sent me on ahead."
For the second time she had made Lawrence redden like a girl, and
his easy manner deserted him. Isabel unconsciously let the book
slip from her hand. The lives of the Forsythe family were less
absorbing than her own life when this fiery dramatic glow was
shed over it. A singular smile flitted over her lips: "Well, you
may as well sit down now you are here," she observed. Lawrence
sat down in a deck chair and Isabel's smile broadened: she was
laughing at him and teasing him with her eyes, though what she
said remained conventional to the point of primness. "Is Laura
coming to see me? How sweet of her! But what a pity she
couldn't come with you! Why couldn't she?"
"I believe she stayed to look after my cousin."
"How is Major Clowes? Did he have a good night and was he in a--
was he cheerful today?"
"So-so: he's not a great talker, is he?"
Isabel's speaking face expressed dissent. "Perhaps not when
he's in a good temper. Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm always forgetting
he's your cousin."
"I'm prone to forget it myself. I've seen so little of him."
"('Though the blase-man-of-the-world had seen thousands of
superbly beautiful women in elegant creations by Paquin or Worth,
his gaze was riveted as by a mesmeric attraction on the innocent
young girl in her simple little white muslin frock, with her
lissome ankles and slim, sunburnt hands.') Laura said you had
been a great traveller. Shall you settle down in England?"
"Not unless I marry."
Isabel declined this topic, on which Mrs. Jack Bendish would have
expatiated. "Laura says you have a lovely old house in
Somersetshire. It must be jolly to have an ancestral house."
"Mine is not ancestral," said Lawrence amused. "My father bought
it forty years ago at the time of the agricultural depression.
It belonged to some county people--Sir Frank Fleet--who
couldn't afford to keep it up. It is a lovely place, Farringay,
but it's full of Fleet ghosts and the neighbourhood doesn't let
me forget that I'm an alien."
"But how absurd! how narrow-minded!" exclaimed Isabel. "Houses
must change hands now and then, and I dare say your father was a
better landlord than the Fleets were. Besides, see how much worse it
might have been! There's Wilmerdings, here in Chilmark, that the
Morleys have taken: his name isn't Morley at all, Yvonne says it's
Moss in the City: but they foreclosed on the Orr-Matthews' mortgage
and turned them out, and that darling old place is delivered over to
a horrid little Jew!"
"Poor Morley!" said Lawrence laughing. "I am a Jew myself."
Isabel was stricken dumb. "I thought I had better tell you than
let you hear it from some one else. No, don't apologize! these
things will happen, and I'm not deeply hurt, for I refuse to call
sibb with a Moss-Morley. I should never foreclose on any one's
mortgage. My mother was an Englishwoman and my father was a
Levantine--half Jew, half Greek. Have you never heard of Andrew
Hyde the big curio dealer in New Bond Street? He was commonly
known as old Hyde-and-seek. The Hyde galleries are famous. As I
remember him he was a common-looking little old man with a
passion for art."
"Well, I'm sorry I said such a stupid thing," said Isabel, still
very red, "not because of hurting your feelings, for it isn't
likely that anything I said would do that--but because it was
stupid in itself, and narrow-minded, and snobbish. It'll be a
lesson to me. All the same, it's interesting." She had
forgotten by now that she was an innocent-young-girl and Lawrence
a blase-man-of-the-world, and had slipped into a vein of intimacy
which was fast charming Lawrence out of all his caution. "I
suppose you take after your father, and that's why you're so
unlike Major Clowes. He is a Clowes, but you're a Hyde."
"What does that mean?"
Isabel waited a moment to think it out. "You're more of a
cosmopolitan; I expect you have a passion for art too, like your
father. Major Clowes hasn't. He doesn't care two pins for the
beauty of his old swords and daggers, he cares only for getting
all the different sorts. You, perhaps, might care almost too
much." Lawrence dropped his eyes. "And you vary more, you're
not always the same, you have more facets: one can see you've
done all sorts of things and mixed with all sorts of people. I
suppose that's why you're so easily bored--I don't mean to be
rude!"
"At the present moment I am deeply interested. Go on: it charms
me to be dissected to my face, and by such an able hand."
"No: it's absurd and I never meant to begin it. Of course I
don't know a bit what you're like."
"God forbid!" Lawrence murmured:--"Guess away and I'll tell you
if you're right."
"You won't play fair. You won't own up and you'll get cross if I
do."
"Not I, I have the most amiable temper in the world."
"Now I wonder if that's true?" said Isabel, scrutinizing him
closely. "Perhaps you wouldn't often take the trouble to get in
a wax. Oh well," surrendering at indiscretion, "then I guess
that you care for very few people and for those few very much."
"Missed both barrels. I like any number of people and I
shouldn't care if I never saw one of them again."
Isabel laughed. "I said you wouldn't play fair."
"Don't you believe me?"
"No, of course not. You wouldn't say it if it were true."
Lawrence drew a deep breath and looked away. Their nook of turf was
out of sight of the house, sheltered from it behind a great thicket
of lilac and syringa, which walled off the lawn from the kitchen
garden full of sweet-smelling currant bushes and apple-trees laden
with green fruit. The sleepy air was alive with gilded wasps, and
between the stiffly-drooping apple-branches, with their coarse
foliage, and the pencilled frieze of stonecrop and valerian waving
along the low stone boundarywall, there was a dim honey-coloured
expanse that stretched away like an inland sea, where, the afternoon
sunshine lay in a yellow haze over brown and yellow and blue tracts
of the Plain. Nothing was to be heard but the drone of wings near at
hand and the whirr of a haycutter far down in the valley. No one was
near and summer lay heavy on the land.
"I did care once. . I had a bad smash in my life when I was
little more than a boy." He dragged a heavy gold band from his
finger. "That was my wedding ring."
"Oh ... I'm sorry!" faltered Isabel. She was stunned by the
extraordinary confidence.
"I married out of my class. It was when I was at Cambridge. She
was a beautiful girl but she was not a lady. Her father was a
tobacconist in the Cury, and Lizzie liked to serve in the shop.
As she didn't want to lose her character nor I my degree, we
compromised on secret nuptials. I took a house for her in Newham
where I could go and visit her. I ought not to tell you the rest
of the story."
"Oh yes, you can," said Isabel simply. "I hear all sorts of
stories in the village."
So childish in some ways, so mature in others, she saw that
Lawrence was longing to unbosom himself, and her instinct was to
listen quietly, for, after all, this, though the strangest, was
not the first such confidence that had been poured into her ear.
She and her brother Val were alike in occasionally hearing
secrets that had never been told to any one else. Why? Probably
because they never gave advice, never moralized, never thought of
themselves at all but only of the friend in distress. Isabel took
Hyde's hand and held it closely, palm to palm. "Tell me all
about it."
"There was another fellow at Trinity who had been in the Sixth at
Eton with me, a year older than I was, a very brilliant man and
as hard as nails: Rendell, his name was: an athlete, a tophole
centre-forward, with a fascinating Irish manner and blazing blue
eyes. To him I told my tale, because we were Damon and Pythias,
and I couldn't have kept a secret from him to save my life. I
was an ingenuous youngster in those days: never was such a pal as
my pal! He saw me through my marriage and afterwards I took him
with me once or twice to Myrtle Villa: it may illuminate the
situation if I say that it made me all the prouder of Lizzie when
I saw Rendell admired her: never was such an idyll as my manage a
trois! Unluckily, one evening when I turned up unexpectedly I
found them together."
"Oh! . . . What did you do?"
"Nothing. There was nothing to be done. I wasn't going to ruin
myself by divorcing her. Luckily the war broke out and Rendell
and I both enlisted the next day. He was killed fighting by my
side at Neuve Chapelle, and I had the job of breaking the news to
Lizzie. She was royally angry, poor Lizzle: told me I had no
right to be alive when a better man than myself was dead. I
agreed: Rendell was--the better man, though he didn't behave
well to me. He died better than he lived. Out there it didn't
seem to matter much. He died in my arms."
"Did you forgive your wife?"
"I never lived with her again, if that's what you mean. If I had
been willing, which I wasn't, she never would have consented.
She had the rather irrational prejudices of her type and class,
and persisted in regarding me, or professing to regard me, as
answerable for Rendell's death. It wasn't true," said Lawrence,
turning his eyes on Isabel without any attempt to veil their
agony. "If I'd meant to shoot him I should have shot him to his
face. But I'd have saved him if I could. How on earth could any
one do anything in such a hell as Neuve Chapelle? That week
every officer in my company was either killed or wounded. But
Lizzie had no imagination. She couldn't get beyond the fact that
I was alive and he was dead."
"What became of her?"
"I'm sorry to say she went to the bad. She had money from both
of us, but she spent it in public houses--didn't seem to care
what happened to her after losing Arthur: a wretched life: it
ended last January with her death from pneumonia after measles.
That was what brought me back to England; I couldn't stand coming
home before."
"Was it a relief when she died?"
"No, I was sorry," said Hyde. His wide black eyes, devil-driven
beyond reticence, were riveted on Isabel's: apparently she no
longer existed for him except as the Chorus before whom he could
strip himself of the last rag of his reserve. "It brought it all
back. I was besotted when I married her, and I remembered all
that when I saw her dead. I forgot the other men. It was just as
it was when Arthur died. I couldn't do anything for him, and he
was in agony: he was shot through the stomach: it didn't seem to
matter then that he had robbed me of Lizzie. I couldn't even get
him a drop of water to drink. He died hard, did Rendell. It
wasn't true, what Lizzie said. I'd have given my life for him.
But I couldn't even make it easy for him to go."
"Poor Rendell," said Isabel softly, "and poor you! Oh, I'm so
sorry--I'm so sorry!"
She was not afraid of Hyde now nor shy of him, she felt only an
immense pity for him--this man who for no conceivable reason and
without the slightest warning had flung the weight of his
terrible past on her young shoulders. She longed to comfort him.
But he was inaccessibly far away, isolated, his voice rapid and
hard and clear, his manner normal: every nerve stripped bare but
still rigid. Inexperienced as she was, Isabel had a shrewd idea
of his immediate need. She took up the ring that Lawrence had
wrenched off and slipped it on his finger again.
"Don't do that," said Lawrence starting: "why do you do that?"
"But I shall love to see you wear it," said Isabel. "It's the
sign that you've forgiven them both."
"Have I?"
"Of course you have. You loved them too much not to forgive."
"It is true. But I hate myself for it," said Lawrence. "I hate
your etiolated Christian ethics. I don't believe in the
forgiveness of sins. The complaisant husband, O God! If I'd had
the spirit of a man, I should have shot Arthur the night--that
night--. . . .
"But you loved him," said Isabel, "and your wife too. You felt
revenge and hate and passion, but love was stronger: and love is
nobler than hate. They betrayed you, but you never betrayed
them. It wasn't unmanly of you, it was defeat and dishonour for
them, not for you, when Rendell, after that great wrong he had
done you, when you tried to make it easy for him to go."
"May I--?" said Lawrence.
He leaned his face down on her open palms, and she felt the tears
that she could not see. He could not control them, and indeed
after the first racking agony, when he felt as though his will
were being torn out of him by the roots, he made no effort to
control them, releasing Isabel and dropping at full length upon
the turf. Nothing else, no torment of his own thoughts, not
Rendell's last pangs nor his wife's beauty young again in death
had ever made Hyde weep: if Rendell had died hard, Lawrence had
lived equally hard, locking up his frightful trouble in his own
breast, escaping from it when he could, cursing it and fighting
against it when it threatened to overpower him. But now he
surrendered to it and acknowledged to himself that it had broken
his life. And he felt no shame, not one iota, nothing but a
profound soulagement: the proud reticent man, too vain to shed
tears in his own room alone, wept voluntarily before Isabel,
uncovering for her pity the wounds not only of grief but of rage
and humiliation.
Such an outbreak would have been impossible in a man of pure
English blood, and in a pure Oriental it would have manifested
itself differently, but Isabel had truly said of Hyde that his
temperament was not homogeneous: the mixed strain in him betrayed
him into strange incongruities of strength and weakness. Isabel
shut her eyes to incongruity. She gave him without stint the
pitying gentleness he thirsted for. She refused now to contrast
him with her brother. Certainly Val's judgment would have been
cutting and curt. But just? Hardly. By instinct Isabel felt
that her brother's clear, sane, English mind had not all the
factors necessary for judging this collapse.
Her imagination was at work in the shadow: "'the night--that
night. . . ." How do men live through such hours? She saw Lizzie
as a chocolate-box beauty, but redeemed from hebetude by her
robust youth: able to attract Hyde by his love of luxury and to
hold him by main force: uneducated, coarse, and cruel, but not
weak. What a disastrous marriage! doomed from the outset, even
if no Rendell had come on the scene. Isabel dismissed Rendell
rather scornfully: in that night at Myrtle Villa she felt pretty
sure that the duel had been fought out between husband and wife:
the very staging of it, picturesque for Lizzie Hyde and tragic
for her husband, must for the entrapped lover have taken a frame
of ignominious farce. A gleam shot through Isabel's eyes-as she
imagined Rendell trying to face Hyde, and Hyde sparing him and
sending him away untouched. No, no! as between the two men, the
honours lay with Hyde.
But as between him and Lizzie? There the reckoning was not so
easy. His wife had set scars on him that would never wear out.
Dimly Isabel guessed that since coming out of her destructive
hands Hyde himself could be both coarse and cruel: the seed of
brutality must have been in him all along, but Myrtle Villa had
fertilized it. If he married again, what would be required of
Lizzie's successor? A strange deep smile gave to Isabel's young
lips the wisdom of the women of all the ages. Love that gives
without stint asking for no recompense: love that understands yet
will not criticize nor listen to criticism: love that dares to
deny its lover for his own sake.
After collapse came quiescence, and, after a long quiescence,
revival. Hyde raised himself on his arm and felt for his
handkerchief--indifferent to Isabel's observation, or soothed by
it: his features were ravaged. Isabel drenched her own
handkerchief in Mrs. Bendish's eau-de cologne and gave it him,
dripping wet. "Take this, it will do you good."
"Thank you" said Lawrence, exhausted and subdued.
Becoming gradually rather more composed, he raised his eyes
again. "What must you think of me? It is beyond apology. Will
you ever forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive: I'm not hurt."
"You're rather young to hear such a history as mine."
She blushed. "Val says it doesn't matter what one knows so long
as one doesn't think about it in the wrong way." With her sweet
friendly smile, she touched with her fingertip the lapel of his
coat: an airy gesture, but there was a fire as well as sweetness
in Isabel, and for his life Lawrence could not repress a start.
"You mustn't mind me, Captain Hyde. You needn't mind, because
you couldn't help it. One can keep a secret for twenty years but
not for ever, and for confessor I suppose any woman will do
better than a man, won't she? It's not as though I should ever
tell any one else: I never will, I promise you that. You'll go
away and never see me again, and it'll be as though no one knew
or as though I were dead."
Touching innocence! Did she indeed imagine that after such a
scene . . .?
"But I do not care two straws," said Lawrence, "so spare your
consolations! On the contrary, it has been a great relief to me.
It's as if you had unlocked a door. The prisoner you have set
free thanks you. I was only afraid it might have been too much
for you, but you're made of strong stuff. Yet I don't suppose
you ever saw a man weep before: well, you've seen it now: mon
Dieu, mon Dieu, but I am tired! But you've let yourself in for a
considerable responsibility."
"For what?"
"For me. Do you think it can ever again be the same between us?"
On one knee by Isabel's chair, Hyde laughed down at her with his
brilliant eyes, irreticent and unsparing of timidity in others.
"Do you think I could have leaned my head on any hands but
yours?"
He came too near, he touched her. Isabel had gone through a
great deal that day, but, with the cruel and sordid history of
Hyde's married life fresh in her mind, none of the material
horrors at Wancote had produced in her such a shuddering recoil
as now. His wife had not been dead six months! "Captain Hyde,
how dare you?"
"I beg your pardon."
Lawrence drew himself up, a good-humoured smile on his lips: but
they were pale. "I--I didn't mean to hurt you," faltered
Isabel, as the tension of his silence reached her. What right
had she, a young girl, to impose her own code of delicacy on a
man of Hyde's age and standing?--Lawrence looked at her
searchingly and his eyes changed, the sad irony died out of them,
and rapidly, imperceptibly, he returned to his normal manner.
"Nor I to frighten you. Why, what a child it is, after all!
Yes, your hands are strong, but they aren't practised yet. Never
mind, you shall forget or remember anything you like, except this
one thing which it pleases me and may please you to remember that
I'm very glad you know the worst and weakest of me--"
"Isabel, are you there?"
Thus daily life revenges itself on those who forget its
existence.
"That is Val's voice," said Lawrence. He stood up, no longer
pale. "Heavens, I can't face him!"
"Oh dear!" said Isabel in dismay. She was no more anxious for
them to meet than Lawrence was, but Val's footstep on the turf
was dangerously near. But he was making for the middle of the
lilac-hedge, for the red rose archway and the asphalt walk
between reddening apple trees: and Isabel was sitting near the
end, close to the garden wall. She flew out of her chair, held
up a branch while Lawrence squeezed between the wall and the
lilacs, and flew back and curled up again. The lilac leaves had
not finished twinkling and rustling when Val appeared.
"How are you, invalid? I came home early on purpose to look
after you." He was in well-worn grey riding clothes, booted and
spurred, his whip in one hand and his gloves in the other: a
slight, cool, well-knit figure of low tones and half-lights.
"Have you had a quiet afternoon?"
"So-so," said Isabel, crimson.
"You look flushed, my darling," said Val tenderly. He sat down
at the foot of Isabel's Indian chair and laid a finger on her
wrist. "You don't feel feverish, do you?" The light click of the
wicket gate, which meant that Lawrence was safely off the
premises, enabled Isabel to say no with a sigh of relief. "It
must be the hot weather. Hallo! what have we here?"
He held up the gold cigarette case which had dropped from Hyde's
coat when he was lying on the grass.
"Some of Mrs. Bendish's property by the look of it," remarked
Val. "Diamonds, begad! I should have thought Yvonne had better
taste. But it must be hers, though the cipher doesn't seem to
have a B in it. I'll guarantee it isn't Rosy's." He slipped it
into his pocket. "I'll give it to Jack, I shall see him tonight
at the vestry-meeting."
"It belongs to Captain Hyde."
"How do you know?"
"He's been here this afternoon."
"How long did he stay?"
"What time is it?-- An hour and twenty minutes."
"What brought him?" said Val, bewildered.
Isabel was mute. . . "I don't know what you're talking about,
Isabel. Has he been with you all that time? Very stupid of him
when I particularly wanted you to have a quiet afternoon. When
did he go?"
"He has only just gone."
"Just gone? I never saw him."
"He went by the wicket gate."
"But I came in by the wicket gate myself!" said Val. His kind
serene eyes rested on his sister without a shadow of any thought
behind surprise.
"I left the mare with Rowsley in the village."
Isabel sat up suddenly and wound her arms round Val's neck. "I
sent him away when I heard you coming. He dodged you behind the
lilacs. I didn't want to tell you he'd been here. I never should
have told you if you hadn't found that case."
"You got rid of him-- This minute? Because I came--? Isabel!"
Stafford held her off. "It is not possible--! Listen to me: I
will have an answer. I know Hyde. Has he said anything to
offend you?"
"No! no! oh Val, don't be so angry!"
"Lucky for him," said Val, drawing a long breath and sitting down
again, his whip across his knee. "My dear little sister, you
mustn't make mysteries out of nothing at all! I'm sorry I
startled you, but you startled me: I didn't know what to make of
it. Hyde has not a very good name. . . . In fact I'd rather you
didn't see too much of him unless Rose or I were there: it was
cheek of him to come up this afternoon when I was out, considering
that he scarcely knows you: but I suppose he thinks the Wancote show
gives him right of entry. That is the sort of thing a chap like Hyde
does think. Now begin again and tell me what it's all about."
"Oh, nothing, Val, nothing!" said Isabel, laughing, though the
tears were not far from her eyes. "I didn't know you could get
in such a wax if you tried! It's as you say, a little mystery of
nothing at all. I'd tell you like a shot if I could, but I can't
because it would be breaking a promise."
"Hyde had no earthly right to make you promise."
"It was of my own accord."
"It is all wrong," said Val. "Promises and silly secrets between
a child like you and a fellow like Hyde!" He was more grave and
vexed than Isabel had ever seen him. "There must be no more of
it."
"There won't if I can help it!" said Isabel. "I like Captain
Hyde--yes, I do: I know you don't, and I can quite see that he's
what Rose would call a bit of an outsider, but I'm sorry for him
and there's a great deal I like in him. But I don't want to see
him again for years and years." She gave a little shiver of
distaste: if anything had been wanting to heighten the reaction
of her youth against Hyde's stained middle age, the evasions in
which he had involved her would have done it. "Now don't scold
me any more! I'm innocent, and I feel rather sad. The world
looks unhomely this afternoon. All except you! You stay there
where I can watch you: you're so comfortably English, so nice and
cool and quiet! There's no one like you, no one: the more I see
of other people the more I like you! I'm so glad you don't wear
linen clothes and a Panama hat and rings. I'd give you away if
you did with half a pound of tea. No, it's no use asking me any
more questions because I shan't answer them: a promise is all the
more binding if one would rather not keep it. No, and it's no
use fishing either, I can keep a secret as well as you can--"
She broke off before the white alteration in Val's face.
"Has--.
"No," said Isabel slowly: "no, he never mentioned your name."