Riding back from Liddiard St. Agnes in the low September
sunshine, Val became aware of something pleasantly pictorial in
the landscape. It was a day when the hills looked higher than
usual, the tilt of the Plain sharper, the shadows a darker umber,
the light clearer under a softly-quilted autumn sky. When he
crossed a reaped cornfield, the pale golden stalks of stubble to
westward were tipped each with a spark of light, so that all the
upland flashed away from him toward the declining sun.
In his own mind there was a lull which corresponded with this
clear quietness of Nature: a pleasant vacancy and a suspension of
personal interest, so that even his anxiety about Laura was put
at a little distance, and he could see her and Bernard, and
Lawrence himself, like figures in a picture, hazed over by a kind
of moral sunlight--the Grace of God, say, which from Val's point
of view shapes all our ends:
I do not ask to see
The distant scene: one step enough for me,
this courage came to Val now without effort, and not for himself
only, which would have been easy at any time, but for Laura in
her difficult married life, and for those other beloved heads on
which he was fated to bring disgrace--his father, Rowsley,
Isabel: come what might, sorrow could not harm them, nor fear
annoy. How quiet it was! the quieter for the wrangling of rooks
in the border elms, and for the low autumn wind that rustled in
the hedgerows: and how full of light the sky, in spite of the
soft bloomy clouds that had hung about all day, imbrowning the
sunshine! far off in the valley doves were grieving, and over the
reaped and glittering cornstalks curlews were flying and calling
with their melancholy--shrill wail, an echo from the sea, while
small birds in flocks flew away twittering as he rode up, and
settled again further on, and rose and settled again, always with
a clatter of tiny wings. Evening coming on: and winter coming
on: and light, light everywhere, and calm, over the harvest
fields and the darkened copses, and the far blue headlands that
seemed to lift themselves up into immeasurable serenities of sky.
It was lucky for Val that he was able to enjoy this quiet hour,
for it was soon over. When he crossed the turf to the diningroom
window, the fire had burnt down into red embers and not much
light came in from out of doors under that low ceiling, but there
was enough to show him Isabel in Lawrence's arms. Fatality! He
had not foreseen it, not for a moment: and yet directly he saw it
he seemed to have known it all along. After a momentary
suspension of his faculties, during which his ideas shifted much
as they do when an unfamiliar turns into a familiar road, Val
tapped on the glass and strolled in, giving his young sister one
of his light teasing smiles. "Am I to bestow my consent,
Isabel?"
"Oh Val!-- Don't be angry, or not with Lawrence anyhow, it wasn't
his fault."
Isabel disengaged herself but without confusion. Her brother
watched her in increasing surprise. Rosy and sparkling, she
seemed to have grown from child to woman in an hour, as after a
late spring the first hot day brings a million buds into leaf.
"Are you startled?" she asked, holding up her cheek for a kiss.
"Not so much so as I should have been twenty-four hours ago. No,
I didn't guess--not a bit; I suppose brothers never expect
people to want to marry their sisters. We know too much about
you."
"Better run off to the nursery, Isabel," said Lawrence. Isabel
made him a little smiling curtsey eloquent of her disdain--it
was so like Captain Hyde to be saucy before Val!--and slipped
away. When Lawrence returned after holding open the door for her,
he found a certain difficulty in meeting Val's eyes.
"And this then is the mysterious attraction that has kept you at
Wanhope all the summer? Wonderful! What will Mrs. Jack say?
But I suppose nineteen, for forty, has a charm of its own."
Lawrence was not forty. But he refused to be drawn. "She is
very beautiful."
"Oh, very," Val was nothing if not cordial. "But her face is her
fortune. I needn't ask if you can keep her in the state to which
she's accustomed," his eye wandered over the dilapidated vicarage
furniture, "or whether your attentions are disinterested.
Evidently you're one of those men who like their wives to be
dependent on them-- Dear me!"
"Damn the money!" said Lawrence at white heat. "Jew I may be,
but it's you and Isabel that harp on it, not I."
"Come, come!" Val arched his eyebrows. "So sorry to ruffle you,
but these questions are in all the etiquette books and some one
has to ask them. If you could look on me as Isabel's father--?"
It was too much. Angry as he was, Lawrence began to laugh. "No,
I won't look on you as Isabel's father," he had regained the
advantage of age and position, neutralized till now by Val's
cooler self-restraint. "I won't look on you as anything but a
brother-in-law; a younger brother of my own, Val, if you can
support the relation. Won't you start fresh with me? I've not
given you much cause to think well of me up to now, but I love
Isabel, and I'll do my best to make her happy. I might find
forgiveness difficult if I were you, but then," for his life he
could not have said whether he was in earnest or chaffing Val,
"I'm a Jew of Shylock's breed and you're a Christian."
"But, my dear fellow, what is there to forgive? We're only too
delighted and grateful for the honour done us: it's a brilliant
match, of course, far better than she could expect to make." A
duller man than Lawrence could not have missed the secret silken
mischief. "And to me, to all of us, you're more than kind; it's
nice to feel that instead of losing a sister I shall gain a
brother."
"You are an infernal prig, Val!"
"Oh," said Val, this time without irony, "It's easy for you to
come with an apology in one hand and a cheque in the other."
He turned away and stood looking out into the garden. In the
lilac bushes over the lawn Isabel's robin was still singing his
winter carol, and the atmosphere was saturated with the smell of
wet, dead leaves, the poignant, fatal smell of autumn. "There's
winter in the air tonight," said Val half aloud.
"What?" said Lawrence startled.
"I say that life's too short for quarrelling." He held out his
hand. "But be gentle with her, she is very young.-- Yes, what is
it, Fanny?"
"Major Clowes's compliments, sir, and he would be glad to see
Captain Hyde as soon as convenient."
At Wanhope half an hour later the sun had gone down behind a bank
of purple fog, and cloud after cloud had put off its vermilion
glow and faded into a vague dimness of twilight: house and garden
were quiet, except for the silver rippling of the river which
went on and on, ceaselessly fleeting over shallows or washing
along through faded sedge. These river murmurs haunted Wanhope
all day and night, and so did the low river-mists: in autumn by
six o'clock the grass was already ankle deep and white as a field
of lilies.
The tall doors were wide open now: no lamps were lit, but a big
log fire blazed on the hearth, and through the empurpled evening
air the house streamed with flame-light, flinging a ruddy glow
over leafless acacia and misty turf. Stretched on his couch in a
warm and dark angle by the staircase, Clowes was busy with his
collection, examining and sorting a number of small objects which
were laid out on his tray: sparks of light winked between his
fingers as iron or gold or steel turned up a reflecting edge. His
face as white as his hands, the wide eyes blackened by the
expansion of their pupils, he looked like a ghost, but a ghost of
normal habits, washed and shaved and dressed in ordinary tweeds.
"Hullo, Bernard."
"Good evening, Lawrence. Oh, you've brought Val and--
Selincourt, is it? What years since we've met, Selincourt! Very
good of you to come down, and I'm delighted to see you, one can't
have too many witnesses. Mild evening, isn't it? Leave the
doors open, Val, Barry has made up an immense fire, big enough
for January. Now sit down all of you, will you? I shan't keep
you long."
Propped high on cushions, he lay like a statue, his huge
shoulders squared against them as boldly as if he were in the
saddle. Lawrence, so like him in frame and colouring, stood with
his back to the hearth: Selincourt with his tired eyes and grey
hair sat near the door, one hand slipped between his crossed
knees: Val preferred to stay in the background, a spectator,
interested and deeply sympathetic, but a trifle shadowy. They
were three to one, but the dominant personality was that of the
cripple.
"It's with you, Lawrence, that I have to do business. You passed
last night with my wife."
The heavy voice was deadened out of all heat except grossness.
How had Clowes spent the last twelve hours? In reliving over and
over again his wife's fall: defiling her image and poisoning his
own soul with emanations of a diseased mind, from which
Selincourt, a straightforward sinner, would have turned in
disgust. Men of strong passions like Bernard need greater
control than Bernard possessed to curb what they cannot indulge:
and a mind full of gross imagery was nature's revenge on him for
a love that had been to him "hungry, and barren, and sharp as the
sea." But for the friend, the brother, and the lover it was
difficult to grant him such allowances as would have been made by
a physician.
"That'll do," said Lawrence, raising his hand. "Your wife is
innocent. Send any one you like to the hotel--private detective
if you like--and find out what rooms Miss Stafford and Laura
had, or whether Selincourt and I stayed five minutes in the place
after the ladies went upstairs."
"So Laura said this morning."
"There's no loophole for suspicion. I went back with Selincourt
to his rooms and we sat up the rest of the night smoking and
playing auction piquet. He won about five pounds off me. Ask
him: he'll confirm it."
"That's what he came for, isn't it?" Bernard smiled. "My good
chap, think I don't know that if you gave him a five pound note
to do it Selincourt would hold the door for you?"
Selincourt's pale face was scarlet. "I say she shall not return
to him!" he broke out loudly. "If this is a specimen of what
he'll say to us, what does he say to her?"
"No offence, no offence,'' Bernard bore him down, insolent and
jovial. "'The Lord commended the unjust steward.' I foresaw that
Lawrence would lie through thick and thin, and if I'd given it a
thought either way I should have known you'd be brought down to
back him up. And quite right too to stand by your sister--the
more so that all you Selincourts are as poor as Church rats and
naturally don't want your damaged goods back on your hands. But
don't get huffy, keep calm like me. You deny everything,
Lawrence. Quite right: a man's not worth his salt if he won't lie
to protect a woman. Laura also denies everything. Quite right
again: a woman's bound to lie to save her reputation. But the
husband also has his natural function, which is to exercise a
decent incredulity. Perhaps it's a bit difficult for you to
enter into my feelings. You're none of you married men and you
don't know how it stings a man up when his wife makes him a--
Hallo!"
"What?"
"What's the matter with you?"
"Go on," said Lawrence, flinging himself into a chair: "if you
have a point, come to it. I'm pretty well sick of this."
"So it seems," said Bernard staring at him. "Is it the good
old-fashioned English word that you can't stomach? All right, after
tonight I shan't offend again. That's my point and I'm coming to
it as fast as I can. I won't have any one of the lot of you near
me again except Val: I acquit him of complicity: he probably
believes Laura innocent. Don't you, Val?"
"There's no evidence whatever against her, outside your
imagination, old man."
"You're in love with her yourself," Bernard retorted brutally.
Val started, it was the second time in twelve hours. "Oh! think
I haven't seen that? There's not much I don't see, that goes on
around me. Cheer up, I'm not really jealous of you. Laura never
cared that for you. She was my wife for ten days, after all: it
takes a man to master her."
"What he wants is a medical man," said Lawrence to Selincourt in
a low voice. He dared not look at Val.
"After tonight neither Selincourt nor you, Lawrence nor your lady
friend will darken my doors again. Try it on and I'll have you
warned off by the police."
"Bernard, you over-rate the attractions of your society."
"Pass to my second point. I don't propose to divorce Laura."
"You couldn't get a divorce, you ass: you've no case."
"But equally I don't propose to take her back. If she lives alone
and conducts herself decently I'll make her an allowance--say
four or five hundred a year. If she lives with a lover or tries
to force her way in here I won't give her a stiver. Now,
Selincourt, you had better use your influence or you'll have her
planted on you directly Lawrence gets sick of her. If she goes
from me to Lawrence she can go from Lawrence on the streets for
all I--shut that door, Val!--Keep her out!"
"Laura! go away!" cried Selincourt. The scene was rising into a
nightmare and his nerves shivered under it. But he was too late.
The wide doorway had filled with people: Laura with her satin
hair, her flying veil, her ineffaceable French grace of air and
dress: Isabel bare-headed, very pale and reluctant: and Mr.
Stafford, who had come down to exercise a moderating influence in
the direction of compromise. Isabel edged round towards
Lawrence, while Mr. Stafford stood glancing from one to another
with keen authoritative eyes, waiting a chance to strike in. But
Laura after her long sleep had recovered her fighting temper and
was no longer content to remain a cipher in her own house. She
smiled and shook her head at Lucian, reddening under her dark
skin.
"Bernard, have they told you the truth yet? No, I thought not,
Lawrence was too shy." High spirited, for all her sensitiveness,
she laid her slight hand on her husband's wrist. "Did you think
if Lawrence stayed on at Wanhope it must be because he admired
me? You forget that there are younger and prettier women in
Chilmark than I am. Lawrence is going to marry Isabel. It's a
romantic tale," was there a touch of pique in Laura's charming
voice? "and I'm afraid they both of them took some pains to throw
dust in our eyes. I've only this moment learnt it from Isabel."
Yes, undeniably a trace of pique. Women like Laura, used to the
admiration of men however innocent, cannot forego it without a
sigh. She did not grudge Isabel her happiness or even envy it,
and she had never believed Lawrence to be in love with herself,
and yet this courtship that had gone on under her blind eyes
produced in her a faint sense of irritation, of male defection
that had made her look a little silly. She was aware of it
herself and faintly amused and faintly ashamed. "My time for
romantic adventure has gone by. Oh my poor Berns, you forget
that I'm thirty-six!"
Here was the authentic accent of truth. Clowes heard it, but he
had got beyond the point where a man is capable of saying "I was
wrong, forgive me." At that moment he no longer desired Laura to
be innocent, he would have preferred to justify himself by
proving her guilty. "Take your damned face out of this," he
said, enveloping her in an intensity of hate before which Laura's
delicate personality seemed to shrivel like a scorched leaf.
"Take it away before I kill you." He struck her hand from his
wrist and dashed himself down on the pillow, his great arms and
shoulders writhing above the marble waist like some fierce animal
trapped by the loins. "Oh, I can't stand it, I can't stand
it . . ."
"Oh dear, this is awful," said Selincourt weakly. He got up and
stood in the doorway. Despair is a terrible thing to watch. Not
even Lawrence dared go near Bernard. It was the priest, inured
to scenes of grief and rebellion, who came forward with the cold
strong common sense of the Christian stoic. "But you will have
to stand it," said Mr. Stafford sternly, "it is the Will of God
and rebellion only makes it worse. After all, thousands of men
of all ranks have had to bear the same trial and with much less
alleviation. You know now that your wife is innocent and is
prepared to forgive you." It did not strike Mr. Stafford that men
like Bernard Clowes do not care to be forgiven by their wives.
There was no confessional box in Chilmark church. "You have
plenty of interests left and plenty of friends: so long as you
don't alienate them by behaving in such an unmanly way. Lift
him, Val.-- Come, Major Clowes, you're torturing your wife. This
is cowardice--"
"Like Val's, eh?"
"Like--?"
"Like your precious Val behaved ten years ago." Clowes raised
himself on his elbows. "Aha! how's that for a smack in the eye?"
"Val, my darling lad," said Mr. Stafford, stumbling a little in
his speech, "what--what is this?"
"Poor chap!" Clowes gave his curt "Ha ha!" as he reached out a
long arm to turn on all the lights. "Who was that chap, Hercules
was it, that pulled the temple on his own head? By God, if my
life's gone to pieces, I'll take some of you with me. You, Val,
I was always fond of you: tell your daddy, or shall I, what you
did in the Great War?"
"Bernard. . . ."
"Can't stand it, eh? But, like me, you'll have to stand it.
Come, come, Val, this is cowardice--"
"Lawrence, don't touch him: let it come."
But no one dared touch Clowes. "Before his sister!" Selincourt
muttered. He had no idea what was coming but Val's grey pallor
frightened him. "And the old man!" Lawrence added with clenched
hands. Clowes ignored them both. He held the entire group in
subjection by sheer savage force of personality.
"Simple little anecdote of war. Dale, you remember, was a
brother officer of mine. He was shot in a raid and left hanging
on the German wire. In the night when he was dying another chap
in our regiment, that had been lying up all day between the lines
with a bullet in his ribs, crawled across for him. The Boches
opened fire but he got Dale off and started back. Three quarters
of the way over they found a third casualty, a subaltern in the
Dorchesters. This chap wasn't hurt but he was weeping with fear.
He had gone to ground in a shellhole during the advance and
stayed there too frightened to move. The Winchester man was by
now done to the world. He kicked the Dorchester to his feet and
ordered him to carry on with Dale. The Dorchester pointed out
that if he turned up without a scratch on him, he would probably
be shot by court martial, so the other fellow by way of pretext
put a shot through his arm. 'Now you can tell 'em it was you who
fetched Dale.' 'Oh I can't, I'm frightened,' says the Dorchester
boy. 'By God you shall,' says the other, 'or I'll put a second
bullet through your brains.' Now, Val, you finish telling us how
you did the return trip in tears with Dale on your shoulders and
Lawrence at your heels chivying you with a revolver."
"You unutterable devil," said Lawrence under his breath, "who
told you that?"
Bernard grinned at him almost amicably. He had got one blow home
at last and felt better. "Why, I've always known it. Dale told
me himself. He lived twenty minutes after you got him in."
"Val," said Mr. Stafford, "this isn't true?"
"Perfectly true, sir."
Undefended, unreserved, stripped even of pride, Val stood up
before them all as if before a firing party, for the others had
involuntarily fallen back leaving him alone. . . . To Lawrence
the silence seemed endless, it went on and on, while through the
open doorway grey shadows crept in, the leafy smell of night and
the liquid river-murmur so much louder than it could have been
heard by day. Suddenly, as if he could not stand the strain any
longer, Val covered his eyes with his hands. The movement, full
of shame galvanized Lawrence into activity. But he had not the
courage to approach Val. He had but one desire which was to get
out of the house.
"Bernard, if you weren't a cripple I'd put the fear of God into
you with a stick" He stood near the door eyeing his cousin with
a cold dislike more cutting than anger. "You're as safe as a
woman. But I'm through with you. I'll never forgive you this,
never. I'm going: and I shall take your wife with me." He
turned. "Come, Laura--"
"Take care, Lawrence!" cried Isabel.
She spoke too late. Bernard's hand was already raised and a
glint of steel shone between his fingers. No one was near enough
to disarm him. Unable to move without exposing Laura, Lawrence
mechanically threw up his wrist on guard, but the trick of
Bernard's left-handed throw was difficult to counter, and
Lawrence was bracing himself for a shock when Val stepped into
the line of fire. Selincourt uttered an exclamation of horror,
and Val reeled heavily. "For me!" said Lawrence under his
breath. He was by Val in a moment, bending over him, tender and
protecting, an arm round his shoulders. "Are you hurt, Val?
What is it, old man?"
Stafford had one hand pressed to his side. "He meant it for
you," he said, grimacing over the words as if he had not perfect
control of his facial muscles. "Take care. Ah! that's better."
Selincourt with a sweep of his arm had sent the remaining
contents of the swing-tray flying across the floor. There was no
need of such violence, however, for the devil had gone out of
Bernard Clowes now. Deathly pale, his eyes blank with startled
fear, his great frame seemed to break and collapse and he turned
like a lost child to his wife: Laura--Laura . . ."
"I'm here, my darling." In panic, as if the police were already
at the door, Laura fell on her knees by the low couch. Come what
might he was still her husband, still the man she loved, to be
defended against the consequences of his own acts irrespective of
his deserts. There was much of the wife but more of the mother
in the way she covered him with her arms and breast. "No one
shall touch you, no one. It was only an accident, you never
meant it, and besides Val's only a little hurt--"
Val, still with that wrenched grimace of pain, turned round and
leant against Lawrence. "Get me out of this," he said weakly.
"Invent some story. Anything, but spare her. Get me out, I'm
going to faint."
Between them, Lawrence and Selincourt carried him out and laid
him on the steps. No one else paid any attention. Laura was
taken up with Bernard. Mr. Stafford had shuffled over to the
fire and was stooping down to warm his fingers while Isabel tried
brokenly to soothe the anguish from which old and tired hearts
rarely recover. She was more frightened for him than for Val,
and the grief she felt for him was a grief outside herself, which
could be pitied and comforted, whereas the blow that had fallen
on Val seemed to have fallen on her own life also, withering
where it struck. She suffered for her father but with Val, and
this intensity of communion hardened her into steel, for it
seemed as weak and vain to pity him as it would have been to pity
herself if she like him had fallen under the stress of war. The
weak must first be served--later, later there would be time to
pity the strong.
She did not realize that for Val, whom instinctively she still
classed among the strong, time and opportunity were over. He
fainted before they got him out into the air, and his hand fell
away from his side, and then they saw what was wrong. He had
been stabbed: stabbed with the Persian dagger that Lawrence
himself had given Bernard. Val had taken it under his left
breast, and it was buried to its delicate hilt. When Lawrence
opened his coat and shirt there was scarcely any blood flowing:
scarcely any sign of mischief except his leaden pallor and the
all-but-cessation of his pulse. "Internal haemorrhage," said
Lawrence. He drew out the weapon, which came forth with a slow
sidelong wrench of its curved blade: a gush of blood followed,
running down over Val's shirt, over his shabby coat, over the
steps of Wanhope and the dry autumn turf. Lawrence held the lips
of the wound together with his hand. "Go and find Verney, will
you? Mind, it was an accident. Don't be drawn into giving any
details. We must all stick to the same story."
"But--but" Selincourt could not frame a coherent question with
his pale frightened lips: "you don't--you can't think--"
"That he's dying? He won't see another sun rise."
"But do they--do they--in there--understand?"
"Oh for them," said Lawrence with his bitter ironical smile, "he
died five minutes ago."
This then was the end. Waiting in the autumn twilight with Val's
head on his arm Lawrence tried to retrace the steps by which it
had been reached. Bernard's revenge had struck blind and wild as
revenge is apt to strike, but it had helped to bring the wheel
full circle. Val's expiation was complete. In his heart
Lawrence knew that his own was complete also. In breaking Val's
life he had permanently scarred his own.
And the night when it had all begun came back to him, a March
night, quiet and dark but for the periodical fanbeam of an enemy
searchlight from the slope of an opposite hill: a mild rain had
been falling, falling, ceaselessly, plashingly, over muddy
ploughland or sere grass, over the intricacy of trenchwork behind
the firing lines and the dreary expanse of no man's land between
them: falling over wire entanglements from which dangled rags of
uniform and rags of flesh: falling on faces of the unburied dead
that it was helping to dissolve into, their primal pulp of clay.
War! always war! and no theatre of scarlet and gold and cavalry
charges, but a rat's war of mud and cold and fleas and unutterable,
nerve-dissolving fatigue. Not far off occasionally the rustle of
clothes or the tinkle of an entrenching tool, as a sleeper turned
over or the group sentry shifted arms on the parapet; and always in a
lulling undertone the plash of rain on grass or wire, and the heavy
breathing of tired men. For four years these nocturnal sounds of war
had been familiar in the ears of Lawrence Hyde. He could hear them
now, the river-murmur repeated them. And then as now he had taken
young Stafford's head on his arm, the boy lying as he had lain for
eighteen hours, immovable, the rain running down over his face and
through his short fair hair.
He had failed . . . Lawrence recalled his own first near glimpse
of death, a fellow subaltern hideously killed at his side: he had
turned faint as the nightmare shape fell and rose and fell again,
spouting blood over his clothes: contact with elder men had
steadied him. By night and alone? Well: even by night and alone
Lawrence knew that he would have recovered himself and gone on.
It was no more than they all had to fight through, thousands of
officers, millions of men. Val had failed. . . . Yet how vast
the disproportion between the crime and the punishment! Endurance
is at a low ebb at nineteen when one's eyelids are dropping and one's
head nodding with fatigue. Oh to sleep--sleep for twelve hours on a
bed between clean sheets, and wake with a mind wiped clear of bloody
memories! . . . memories above all . . . incommunicable things that
even years later, even to men who have shared them, cannot be
recalled except by a half-averted glance and a low "Do you
remember--?" like frightened children holding hands in the dark of
the world. . . . Had any one of them kept sane that night--those
many nights? . . . But how should a civilian understand?
He felt Val's heart. It was beating slower and slower. If one
could only have one's life over again! but the gods themselves
cannot recall their gifts.