In after life, when Isabel was destined to look back on that day
as the last day of her youth, she recalled no part of it more
clearly than wandering up to her own room after an early tea to
dress, and flinging herself down on her bed instead of dressing.
She slept next to Val. But while Val's room, sailor-like in
its neatness, was bare as any garret and got no sun at all,
Isabel's was comfortable in a shabby way and faced south and west
over the garden: an autumn garden now, bathed in westering
sunshine, fortified from the valley by a carved gold height of
beech trees, open on every other side over sunburnt moorland pale
and rough as a stubble-field in its autumn feathering of light
brown grasses and seedling flowers aflicker in a west wind.
Tonight however Isabel saw nothing of it, she lay as if asleep,
her face hidden in her pillow: she, the most active person in the
house, who was never tired like Val nor lazy like Rowsley!
Conscience pricked her, but she was muffled so thick in happiness
that she scarcely felt it: the fancies that floated into her mind
frightened her, and yet they were too sweet to banish: and then
after all were they wrong?
Always on clear evenings the sun flung a great ray across her
wall, turning the faded pale green paper into a liquid gold-green
like sunlit water, evoking a dusty gleam from her mirror, and
deepening the shadows in an old mezzo tint of Botticelli's Spring
which was pinned up where she could gaze at it while she brushed
her hair. The room thus illumined was that of a young girl with
little time to spare and less money, and an ungrown individual
taste not yet critical enough to throw off early loyalties.
There were no other pictures, except an engraving of "The Light
of the World," given her by Val, who admired it. There was a
tall bookcase, the top shelves devoted to Sweet's "Anglo-Saxon
Reader," Lanson's "Histoire de la litterature Francaise," and
other textbooks that she was reading for her examination in
October, the lower a ragged regiment of novels and verse--"The
Three Musketeers," "Typhoon," "Many Inventions," Landor's
"Hellenics," "with fondest love from Laura," "Une Vie" and "Fort
comme la Mort" in yellow and initialled "Y.B." There were also a big
table strewn with papers and books, and a chintz covered box-ottoman
into which Isabel bundled all those rubbishing treasures that people
who love their past can never make up their weak minds to throw away.
She examined them all in the stream of gold sunlight as if she had
never seen them before. It was time to get up and arrange her hair
and change into her lace petticoats. If she did not get up at once
she would be late and they would lose their train. And it seemed to
her that she would die if they lost their train, that she never could
survive such a disappointment: and yet she could not bring herself to
get up and give over dreaming.
And what dreams they were, oh! what would Val say to them?--And
yet again after all were they so wicked?--They were incredibly
naif and innocent, and so dim that within twenty-four hours
Isabel was to look back on them as a woman looks back on her
childhood. She was not ignorant of the mysteries of birth and
death. She had lived all her life among the poor, and knew many
things which are not included in school curricula, such as the
gentle art of keeping children's hair clean, how to divide a
four-roomed cottage between a man and wife and six children and a
lodger, and what to say when shown "a beautiful corpse": but she
had never had a lover of her own. There were no marriageable men
in Chilmark--there never are in an English village--and she was
too young for Rowsley's brother officers, or they were too young
for her. She had dreamed of fairy princes (blases-men-of-the-world,
mostly in the Guards or the diplomatic service), but it was never
precisely Isabel Stafford whom they clasped to their hearts--no, it
was LaSignora Isabella, the star of Covent Garden, or the Lady Isabel
de Stafford, a Duke's daughter in disguise. And Lawrence came to her
in the mantle of these patrician ghosts.
But--and at this point Isabel hid her face on her arm--he was no
ghost: he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it: and it was a
far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a
Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large,
fair, overmanicured hands. A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish:
from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental blood. When
people were engaged they often kissed each other . . . but when it
came to imagining oneself . . . one's head against that thick
tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do
but dangerous to dream of doing. Oh, never, never!--But she had been
trained in sincerity: and was this cry sincere? Her mind was chaos.
And yet after all why dangerous? Even Laura, Val's adored Laura,
had been engaged twice before she married Major Clowes: as for
Yvonne, Isabel felt sure she had been kissed many times, and not
by Jack Bendish only. Such things happen, then! in real life,
not only in books. As for the cigars and the valet . . . and
Val's warnings . . . one can't have all one wants in this world!
It contains no ideal heroes: what was it Yvonne had once said?
"Every marriage is either a delusion or a compromise." And Isabel
had shortcomings enough of her own: she was irritable, lazy,
selfish: read novels when she ought to have been at her lessons:
left household jobs undone in the certainty that Val, however
tired he was, would do them for her: small sins, but then her
temptations were small! Take it by and large, she was probably
no better than Captain Hyde except for want of opportunity. And
how he would laugh if he heard her say so!
She liked him for laughing. She had been brought up in an
atmosphere of scruple. Her father overworked his conscience,
treating a question of taste as a moral issue, and drawing no
line between great and small--like the man who gave a penny to a
beggar and implored him not to spend it on debauchery. Charity
and a sense of fun saved Val, but if more lenient to others he
was ruthlessly stern to himself. Lawrence blew on Isabel like a
breath of sea air. In her reaction she liked his external
characteristics, his manner to servants, his expensive clothes
and boots, all the signs of money spent freely on himself.
She even liked his politics. Isabel had been brought up all her
life to talk politics. Mr. Stafford was a Christian Socialist, a
creed which in her private opinion was nicely calculated to
produce the maximum of human discomfort: and from a conversation
between Hyde and Jack Bendish she had learnt that Hyde was all of
her own view. There was no nonsense about him--none of that
sweet blind altruism which, as Isabel saw it, only made the
altruist and his family so bitterly uncomfortable without doing
any good to the poor. The poor? She knew intuitively that
servants and porters and waiters would far rather serve Hyde than
her father. Mr. Stafford longed to uplift the working classes,
but Isabel had never got herself thoroughly convinced that they
stood in need of uplifting. Her practical common sense rose in
arms against Movements that tried to get them to go to picture
galleries instead of picture palaces. Why shouldn't they do as
they liked? Does one reform one's friends? Captain Hyde would
live and let live.
And he was rich. Few girls as cramped as Isabel could have
remained blind to that wide horizon, and she made no pretence of
doing so: she was honest with herself and owned that she had
always longed to be rich. No one could call her discontented!
her happy sunny temper took life as it came and enjoyed every
minute of it, but her tastes were not really simple, though Val
thought they were. She had long felt a clear though perfectly
good-humoured and philosophic impatience of her narrow scope.
Hyde could give her all and more than all she had ever desired--
foreign countries and fine clothes, books and paintings, and
power apparently and the admiration of men . . . Isabel Hyde
. . . Mrs. Lawrence Hyde . . . .smiling she tried his name under
her breath . . .and suddenly she found herself standing before
the mirror, examining her face in its dusky shallows and asking
of it the question that has perplexed many a young girl as
beautiful as she--"Am I pretty?" She pulled the pins out of her
hair and ran a comb through it till it fell this way and that
like an Indian veil, darkly burnished and sunset-shot with
threads of bronze. "Lawrence has never seen it loose," she
reflected: "surely I am rather pretty?" and then "Oh, oh, I shall
be late!" and Isabel's dreams were drenched and scattered under
the shock of cold water.
Dreamlike the run through the warm September landscape: dreamlike
the slip of country platform, where, while Lawrence took their
tickets, she and Laura walked up and down and fingered the tall
hollyhocks flowering upward in quilled rosettes of lemon-yellow
and coral red, like paper lanterns lit by a fairy lamplighter on
a spiral stair: and most dreamlike of all the discovery that the
Exeter express had been flagged for them and that she was
expected to precede Laura into a reserved first class carriage.
It was not more than once or twice in a year that Isabel went by
train, and she had never travelled but third class in her life.
How smoothly life runs for those who have great possessions! How
polite the railway staff were! The station master himself held
open the door for the Wanhope party. Now she knew Mr. Chivers
very well, but in all previous intercourse one finger to his cap
had been enough for young Miss Isabel. Certainly it was
agreeable, this hothouse atmosphere. "Shall you feel cold?"
Lawrence asked, and Isabel, murmuring "No, thank you," blushed in
response to the touch of formality in his manner. She felt what
women often feel in the early stages of a love affair, that he
had been nearer to her when he was not there, than now when they
were together in the presence of a third person. She had grown
shy and strange before this careless composed man lounging
opposite her with his light overcoat thrown open and his crush
hat on his knees, conventionally polite, his long legs stretched
out sideways to give her and Laura plenty of room.
And Lawrence on the journey neither spoke to her nor watched her,
though Isabel shone in borrowed plumes. There had been no time
to buy clothes, and so Val, though grudgingly, had allowed Laura
and Yvonne to ransack their shelves and presses for Cinderella's
adornment. But one glance had painted her portrait for him, tall
and slender in a long sealskin coat of Yvonne's which was rulled
and collared and flounced with fur, her glossy hair parted on one
side and drawn back into what she called a soup-plate of plaits.
Once only he directly addressed her, when Laura loosened her own
sables. "Do undo your coat, won't you? It's hot tonight for
September."
"I'm not hot, thank you," said Isabel stiffly: but slowly, as if
against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it
back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown.
The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt: it
was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it
had survived so long. She had seized on it with her unerring tact:
this was right for Isabel, this dim transparency of rosepoint
modelling itself over the immature slenderness of nineteen: and she
and her maid Catherine and Mrs. Bendish had spent patient hours
trying it on and modifying it to suit the fashion of the day. Laura
had refused to impose upon Isabel either her own modish elegance or
Yvonne's effect of the arresting and bizarre. "Isn't she almost too
slight for it?" Yvonne had asked, and Laura for all answer had
hummed a little French song--
'Mignonne allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil
A point perdu ceste vespree
I as plis de sa robe pourpree
Et son teint au votre pareil . . .'
She discerned in Isabel that quality of beauty, noble, spirited,
and yet wistful, which requires a most expensive setting of
simplicity. And that was why Isabel opened her coat. If Captain
Hyde had admired her in her Chilmark muslin, what would he think
of flounce and fold of rose-point of Alencon under Yvonne's
perfumed furs? And then she blushed again because the yearning
in his eyes made her wonder if he cared after all whether she
wore lace or cotton. Everything was so strange!
Strangest of all it was, to the brink of unreality, that Laura
evidently remained blind. But Laura was always blind. "Why, she
never even sees Val!" reflected Isabel scornfully. And yet--
suppose Isabel were deceiving herself? What if Captain Hyde were
not in earnest? But her older self comforted her child's self:
careless was he, and composed? "You were not always so composed,
Lawrence," in her own mind the elder Isabel mocked him with her
sparkling eyes.
Waterloo, lamplit and resonant: the pulsing of many lamps, the
hurry of many steps, the flitting by of many faces under an arch
of gloom: dark quiet and the scent of violets in a waiting car.
"What a jolly taxi!" Isabel exclaimed. "I never was in a taxi
like this before. Is it a more expensive kind?"
"My dear Lawrence, you certainly have the art of making your life
run on wheels!" said Laura smiling. "How many telegrams have you
sent today?"
"If you do a thing at all you may as well do it in decent
comfort," Lawrence replied sententiously. "Half past seven;
that'll give us easy time! I booked a table at Malvani's, I
thought you would prefer it to one of the big crowded shows."
"Are we going to have supper--dinner I mean--at a restaurant?"
asked Isabel awestruck.
Laurance smiled at her with irrepressible tenderness. "Did you
think you weren't going to get anything to eat at all?" He
forbore to remind her of her unfortunate allusion to sandwiches--
for which Isabel was grateful to him. "Aren't you hungry?"
"Oh yes: but then I often am. Is Malvani's a very quiet place?"
Lawrence looked at Laura with a comical expression. "What an ass
I was! Wouldn't the Ritz have been more to the point?"
"Never mind, sweetheart," said Laura. "Malvani's isn't dowdily
quiet. It's the smartest of the smart, and there are always a
lot of distinguished people in it. Dear me, how long it is since
I've dined in town! Really it's great fun, I feel as if I had
come out of a tomb--" she checked herself: but she might have
been as indiscreet as she liked, for her companions were not
listening. Laura was faintly, very faintly startled by their
attitude--Hyde leaning forward in the half-light of the brougham
to button Isabel's glove--but she was soon smiling at her own
fancy. "Poor Isabel, poor simple Isabel!" She was only a child
after all.
A child, but a very gay and winning child, when she came into
Malvani's with her long swaying step, direct glance, and joyous
mouth. A spirit of excitement sparkled in Isabel tonight, and
every movement was a separate and conscious pleasure to her: the
physical sensation of walking delicately, the ripple of her skirt
over her ankles, the poise of her shoulders under their
transparent veil. . . . Laura saw a dozen men turn to look after
the Wanhope party, and took no credit for it, though not long ago
she had been accustomed to be watched when she moved through a
public room. But now she was better pleased to see Isabel
admired than to be admired herself.
As they neared their reserved table a man who had been sitting at
it rose with an amused smile. "Have you forgotten who I am,
Laura?"
"One might as well be even numbers," Lawrence explained. "So, as
I knew Selincourt was in town, I wired to him to join us."
A worn, fatigued-looking, but not ungentle rake of forty,
Selincourt had stayed once at Wanhope, but the visit had not been
a success: indeed Laura had been thankful when it ended before
host and guest threw the decanters at each other's heads. That
she was pleased to see him now there could be no doubt: she had
taken him by both hands and was smiling at him as if she would
have liked to fling decorum to the winds and kiss him. Lawrence
also smiled but with a touch of finesse. His plan was working.
Laura was going to enjoy herself: bon! he was truly fond of Laura
and delighted to give her pleasure. But by it he would be left
free to devote himself to Isabel.
It was to this end that he had planned the entire expedition. At
Chilmark they met continually in the same setting, and he had no
means of printing a fresh image of himself on her mind, but here
he was free of country customs, a rich man among his equals, an
expert in the art of "doing oneself well"--one of those who rule
over modern civilization by divine right of a chequebook and a
trained manner. Isabel had been brought up by High Churchmen,
had she? Let them test what hold they had of her! Every aspect
of their journey and of the supper-table at Malvani's, with its
heady music and smell of rich food and wines, had been calculated
to produce a certain effect--an intoxication of excitement and
pleasure. And he set himself to stamp his own impression on
Isabel, naming to her, in his soft, isolating undertones, the
notable men and women in the room, describing their careers,
their finances, even their scandals--it amused him to watch her
repress a start. It amused him still more to stand up and shake
hands when the immense body and Hebraic nose of an international
financier went by with two great ladies and a cabinet minister in
tow. "One of my countrymen," Hyde turned to Isabel with a
mocking smile. "I am a citizen of no mean city. Those--" with an
imperceptible jerk of the head--"would lick the dust off his
boots to find out what line the Jew bankers mean to take in the
Syrian question. They might as well lick mine."
"Why, do you know?" breathed Isabel.
"Verily, O Gentile maiden." Lawrence grinned at her over his
champagne. "I lunched Raphael last time I was in town and he
told me all about it. But I shouldn't tell them. It isn't good
for Gentiles to know too much about Weltpotitik. That's our
show." He leant back in his chair and his hot eyes challenged her
to call him a dirty Jew.
Selincourt caught his last remark and looked him up and down with
a twinkling glance. He no longer wondered why Lawrence had spent
his summer in the tents of Kedar--so differently do brothers
look on their own and other men's sisters. But he knew men and
things pretty well, and at a moment when Laura was speaking to
Isabel he looked straight at Lawrence and touched his glass with
a murmured, "Go slow, old man." The elder man had seen instantly
what neither Mrs. Clowes nor Isabel had any notion of, that under
his easy manner Hyde's nerves were all on edge. Lawrence started
and stared at him, half offended: but after a moment his good
sense extorted a grudging "Thanks." It warned him to be grateful
for the hint, and he took it: a second glass of champagne that
night would infallibly have gone to his head.
A darkened theatre, fantastically decorated in scarlet and
silver: a French orchestra already playing a delicate prelude: a
lively audience--a typical "Moor" audience--agreeably ready to
be piqued and scandalized as well as amused.
All the plays Isabel had ever seen were Salisbury matinees of
"As You Like It" and "Julius Caesar." It was not by chance that
Hyde introduced her tonight to this filigree comedy, so cynical
under its glittering dialogue. He could find no swifter way to
present to her le monde ou l'on s'amuse in all its refined and
defiant charm. He liked to watch her laugh, he laughed himself
and gave a languid clap or two when Madeleine Wild made one of
her famous entries, but his main interest was in his plan of
campaign.
Yet chance can never he counted out. When the lights went up
after the first act Lawrence found himself looking directly
across the rather small and narrow proscenium at a lady in the
opposite box. Who the devil was it?--The devil, with a
vengeance! It was Mrs. Cleve.