Nightfall Part 20

"I don't want to offend you," Val continued with his direct simplicity of manner, "but perhaps you hardly realize how young my sister is."

"Some one said she was nineteen, but why?"

"I don't know what you said to her, probably nothing of the slightest consequence, but she's only a child, and you managed to upset her. To be frank, I didn't want her to see any one this afternoon. Oh, she's all right, but her arm has run her up a bit of a temperature, and Verney wants her to keep quiet for a few days. It'll give her an excuse to keep clear of the inquest too.

This sounds ungrateful as well as ungracious, when we owe you so much, but there's no ingrat.i.tude in it, only common sense."

"Oh, d.a.m.n your common sense!" exclaimed Lawrence.

It was as laconic a warning-off as civility allowed: and it irritated Lawrence beyond bearing to be rebuked by young Stafford, whose social life stood in his danger, whom he could at pleasure strip to universal crucifying shame. But there was neither defiance nor fear in Val: tranquil and unpretentious, in his force of character he reminded Lawrence of Laura Clowes. She too had been attacked once or twice that evening by her husband, and Lawrence had admired the way in which she either foiled or evaded the rapier point, or took it to her bosom without flinching. This same silken courage, it seemed, Val also possessed. Both would stand up to a blow with the same grave dignity and--perhaps--secret scorn.

Minutes pa.s.sed. Val waited because he chose not to be the first to break silence, Lawrence because he was absorbing fresh impressions with that intensity which wipes out time and place.

He was in the mood to receive them: tired, softened, and quickened, from the tears of the afternoon. After all Val was Isabel's brother and possessed Isabel's eyes! This drew Lawrence to him by a double cord: practically, because it is inconvenient to be on bad terms with one's brother-in-law, and mystically, because in his profound romantic pa.s.sion he loved whatever was a.s.sociated with her, down to the very sprig of honeysuckle that she had pinned into his coat. But for this cord his relations with Stafford would have begun and ended in a casual regret for the casual indulgence of a cruel impulse. But Isabel's brother had ex officio a right of entry into Hyde's private life, and, the doors once opened, he was dazed by the light that Val let in.

It was after ten o'clock and dews were falling, falling from a clear night. "One faint eternal eventide of gems," beading the dark turf underfoot and the pale faces of roses that had bloomed all day in suns.h.i.+ne: now prodigal of scent only they hung their heads like ghosts of flowers among dark glossy leaves. Stars hung sparkling on the dark field of heaven, stars threw down their spears on the dark river fleeting to the star-roofed distant Channel. Stream and gra.s.s and leaf-buds were ephemeral and eternal, ever pa.s.sing and ever renewed, old as the stars, or the waste ether in which they range: the green, sappy stem, the dew-bead that hung on it, the shape of a ripple were the same now as when Nineveh was a queen of civilization and men's flesh was reddening alive in osier cages over altar fires on Wilts.h.i.+re downs. And all the sweetness, all the romance of an English midsummer night seized the heart of Lawrence, a nomad, a returned exile, and a man in love--as if he had never known England before.

Or her inhabitants either! Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred cla.s.s. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and Jack Bendish. What were these forces? Lawrence thought in flashes, by imagery, scene after scene flitting before him out of the last forty-eight hours. Homespun virtues: unselfishness, indifference to money values, the constant sense of filial, fraternal, social responsibility . . . the glow in Jack's eyes when they rested on his wife: Verney's war on cesspools: Leverton Morley as scoutmaster: the Chinese lecture: rosebushes in the churchyard, by the great stone cross with its list of names beginning "George Potts, Wilts.h.i.+re Rifles, aged 49," and ending "Robert Denis Bendish, Grenadier Guards, aged 19: Into Thy Hands, O Lord": old, old feudal England, closeknit, no pastoral of easy virtues, yet holding together in a fellows.h.i.+p which underlies cla.s.s disunion: whose sons, from days long before the Conquest, have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt showers, because they could not bear to be landless and lordless men. . . .

[Footnote]

"Swylce geac mona geomran reorde, singe sumeres weard, sorge beade bittre in breosthord; pset se beorn ne wat, secg esteadig, hwset pa sume dreoga, pe pa wrseclastas widost lecga! . . . . pince him on mode pset he his monndryhten clyppe and cysse andon cneo lecge honda and heafod; ponne onwsecne, gesihp him beforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas."

"Even so the cuckoo warns him with its sad voice, Summer's warden sings foreboding sorrow, bitter grief of heart. Little knows the prosperous fellow what others are doing who follow far and wide the tracks of exile . . . Then dreams the seafarer that he clasps his lord and kisses him, and on his knee lays hand and head; but he awakes and sees before him the fallow waterways and the sea-fowls bathing."

[End of Footnote]

Lawrence flung off the impression with a jerk of his shoulders, as if it were a physical weight. It was too heavy to be endured.

Not even to marry Isabel was he going to impose on his own unbroken egoism the restricting code of a country village.

"You are a dreamer, Val! Why don't you throw over Bernard and take the Etchingham agency? Yes, I heard every word you said to Laura: you made a gallant effort, but the facts speak for themselves, and your terminological inexact.i.tudes wouldn't deceive a babe at the breast. Bernard pays you 300 pounds a year and orders you about like a groom, Grautchester would give you six and behave like a gentleman. But no, you must needs stick to Bernard, though you never get any thanks for it! You're an unpractical dreamer."

"I don't know what on earth you're talking about."

"And you're all in it together, d.a.m.n you!" Lawrence broke out with an angry laugh. "It's all equally picturesque--feudal's the word! I never knew anything like it in my life and I wouldn't have believed it could continue to exist. What do you do with gipsies? evict 'em, I suppose." He flung a second question at Val which made the son of a vicarage knit his brows.

"As a matter of fact there's a house in Brook Lane about which Bendish and I are a good deal exercised in our minds at the present moment . . . and the percentage of children born too soon after marriage is disastrous. You're all out, Hyde. Nothing could be more commonplace than Chilmark, believe me: life is like this all over rural England, and it's only from a distance that one takes it for Arcadia."

"Folly," said Lawrence. "Good G.o.d, why should you exercise your simple minds over the house in Brook Lane? Ah! because the men who go to it are your own men, and the parsonage and the Castle are answerable for their souls." Val, irritated, suggested that if Hyde's forebears had lived in Chilmark since the time when every freeman had to swear fealty, laying his hands between the knees of his lord, Hyde might have shared this feeling. "But they didn't," said Lawrence, drily. "My grandfather was a p.a.w.nbroker in the New Cut."

"Then perhaps you're hardly in a position to judge."

"Judge? I don't judge, my good fellow--I'm lost in admiration!

In an age of materialism it's refres.h.i.+ng to come across these simple, homespun virtues. I didn't know there was a man left in England that would exist, for choice, on three hundred a year.

Are you always content with your rustic ideals, Val? Haven't you any ambition?"

"I?" said Val.

"'Carry me out of the fight,'" quoted Lawrence under his breath.

"I swear I forgot."

Silence fell again, the silence on Lawrence's part of continual conflict and adjustment, and on Val's mainly of irritation.

Lawrence talked too much and too loosely, and was over-given to d.a.m.ning what he disliked--a trick that went with his rings and his diamond monogram. Val was not interested in a townsman's amateur satire; in so far as Lawrence was not satirical, he had probably drunk one gla.s.s more of Bernard's' champagne than was good for him! In the upshot, Val was less disinclined to credit Rowsley than half an hour ago.

Lawrence roused himself. "About your sister: I was sorry afterwards to have stayed so long. She seemed none the worse for it at the time, but no doubt she ought to keep quiet for a bit.

Will you make my excuses to her?"

"I will with pleasure."

"And will you allow me to tackle Bernard about the agency?"

"To--?"

"If you won't resent my interfering? I can generally knock some sense into Bernard's head. It's an iniquitous thing that he should take advantage of your generosity, Val."

Stafford was completely taken by surprise. "I'd rather--it's most awfully kind of you," he stammered, "but I couldn't trespa.s.s on your kindness--"

"Kindness, nonsense! Bernard's my cousin: if your services are worth more in the open market than he pays you, it's up to me to see he doesn't fleece you. Otherwise you might ultimately chuck up your job, and where should we be then? In the soup: for he'd never get another man of your cla.s.s--a gentleman--to put up with the rough side of his tongue. No: he must be brought to book: if you'll allow me?"

Val's disposition was to refuse; it was odious to him to accept a favour from Hyde. But pride is one of the luxuries that poor men cannot afford. "I should be most grateful. Thank you very much."

"And now go to bed: you're tired and so am I. I've had the devil of a hard day." He stretched himself, raising his wrists to the level of his shoulders, luxuriously tense under the closefitting coat. "I shall hope to see your sister again after the inquest."

"Yes," said Val, hesitating: "are you staying on, then?"

"As you advised."

"You'll be very bored."

"No, I've fallen in love." Val gave a perceptible start. "With the country," Lawrence explained with a merry laugh. "Rustic ideals. Don't misjudge me, I beg: I have no designs on Mrs.

Bendish."

"Hyde . . .

"Well, my dear Val?"

"Give me back my parole."

"Not I."

"You're unjust and ungenerous," said Val with repressed pa.s.sion.

"But I warn you that I shall interfere none the less to protect others if necessary. Good-night."

Lawrence watched him across the lawn with a bewildered expression. But he forgot him in a minute--or remembered him only in the a.s.sociation with Isabel which brought Val into the radius of his good will.

CHAPTER XII