Nightfall Part 26

"Must you distress yourself like this? Wouldn't it do if I promised to lay my record before Val, and let him be judge?"

"Would you do that?"

"If you wish it."

"Wouldn't you hate it?"

Lawrence smiled.

"And I should hate it for you,", said Isabel. "No: no one can judge you for me and no one shall try. I know you better than Val ever would. No, if you're to be humiliated it shall be before me and me only." She brought the colour into his face. "There have been others, Lawrence?"

"My dear, I've lived the life of other men."

"Do all men live so?"

"Pretty well all."

"Does Val?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "His facilities are limited!"

"He did once--might again?"

"Couldn't we confine the issue to ourselves?"

"Are you afraid of my misjudging Val? I never should: my dearest darling Val is a fixed standard for me, and nothing could alter the way I think of him."

"Don't challenge luck," Lawrence muttered.

"I'm not, it's true. I'm surer of Val than I am of myself, or you, or the sun's rising tomorrow. All I want is to cheek you by him."

"Val is genuinely religious and a bit of an ascetic. I have no doubt that his life is now and will continue to be spotless. But that it was always so is most unlikely. Army subalterns during the war were given no end of a good time. And quite right too, it was the least that could be done for us: and the most, in nine cases out of ten: personally I had no use for munition workers in mud-coloured overalls, but I still remember with grat.i.tude the nymphs who decorated my week end leaves."

Isabel s.h.i.+vered: the hand that he was holding had grown icy cold.

"There, you see!" said Hyde with his saddened cynicism. "You will have it all out but you can't stand it when it comes. You had better have left it to Val: not but what I'd rather talk to you, but I hate to distress you, and you're not old enough yet, my darling, to see these trivial things--yes, trivial to nine-tenths of the world: it's only the clergy, and unmarried women, and a small number of hyper-sensitives like Val, who attach an importance to them that they don't deserve. But you're too young to see them in perspective. Try to do it for my sake. Try to see me as I am."

"Well, show me then."

But what he showed her was not himself but the aspect of himself that he wished her to see--a very different matter. "I'm too old for you. I'm the son of a Jew, and a Houndsditch Jew at that. But I'm rich--what's called rich in my set--and when I marry I shan't keep my wife dependent on me. Ah! don't misunderstand me--yours is a rich manysided nature, and you're too intelligent to underrate the value of money. It means a wide life and lots of interests, books, pictures, music, travel, mixing with the men and women best worth knowing. You're ambitious, my dear, and as my wife you can build yourself up any social position you like. Farringay's not as big as Wharton, but on my soul it's more perfect in its way. I've never seen such panelling in my life, and the gardens are admittedly the most beautiful in Dorsets.h.i.+re. There are Sevres services more precious than gold plate, and if you come to that there's gold plate into the bargain. Can't I see you there as chatelaine, entertaining the county! You'll wear the sapphires my mother wore; the old man couldn't have been more happily inspired, they're the very colour of your eyes. And there'll be no price to pay, for since I'm a Jew and a cosmopolitan, and not a country squire, you'll keep your personal freedom inviolate. You'll give what you will, when you will, as you will. Any other terms are to my mind unthinkable--a brutalizing of what ought to be the most delicate of things. Heavens, how I hate a middlecla.s.s English marriage! Ah! but I'm not so accommodating as I sound, for you won't be a grudging giver; you're not an ascetic like Val, there's pa.s.sion in you though you've been trained to repress it, you'll soon learn what love means as we understand it in the sunny countries. . . . Isabel, my Isabel, when we get away from these grey English skies you won't refuse to let me kiss you. . ."

Isabel had ceased to listen. Without her own will a scene had sprung up before her eyes: an imaginary scene, like one of those romantic adventures that she had invented a thousand times before--but this was not romantic nor was she precisely the heroine. A foreign hotel with long corridors and many rooms: a door thoughtlessly left ajar: and through it a glimpse of Lawrence--her husband--holding another woman in his arms. It was lifelike, she could have counted the buds embroidered on the girl's blouse, their rose-pink reflected in the hot flush on Hyde's cheek and the glow in his eyes as he stooped over her. And then the imaginary Isabel with a pain at her heart like the stab of a knife, and a smile of inexpressible self-contempt on her lips, noiselessly closed the door so that no one else might see what she had seen, and left him. . . . It would all happen one day, if not that way, some other way; and he would come to her by and by without explanation--she was convinced that he would not lie to her--smiling, the hot glow still on his face, a subdued air of well-being diffused over him from head to foot--and then? The vision faded; her clairvoyance, which had already carried her far beyond her experience, broke down in sheer anguish. But reason took it up and told her that she would speak to him, and that he would apologize and she would forgive him--and that it would all happen again the next time temptation met him in a weak hour.

Faithful? it was not in him to be faithful: with so much that was generous and gallant, there was this vice of taste in him which had offended her that first morning on the moor and again at night in Laura's garden, and which now led him to make love to her when she was under his protection and while the scent of Mrs.

Cleve's flowers still clung to his coat. And what love! if he had simply spoken to her out of his need of her, one would not have known how to resist, but it was he who was to be the giver, and what he offered was the measure of what he desired--a lesson in pa.s.sion and a liberal allowance. . . .

"O no, no, no, I can't!" Isabel cried out, turning from him.

"Yes, I love you, but I don't trust you, and I won't marry you.

I'm too much afraid."

"Afraid of me?"

"Afraid of the pain."

"What pain?"

"And the--wickedness of it." Lawrence, frozen with astonishment--he had foreseen resistance, but not of this quality--let fall her hand.

"Yes, we'll part now. We can part now. I love you, but not too much to get over it in a year or so; and you? you'll forget sooner, because I'm not worth remembering."

"Forget you?"

"Oh! yes, it's not as if you really cared for me; you wouldn't talk to me of money if you did. But I suppose you've known so many. . . . Val warned me long ago that you had not a good name with women."

"Val said that? Val!"

"And now you're angry with Val; I repeat what I oughtn't to repeat, and make mischief. Lawrence, this isn't Val's doing; it isn't even Mrs. Cleve's: it's my own cowardice. I daren't marry you."

"But why not?"

"You're not trying to be good."

"The language of the nursery defeats me, Isabel."

She flushed. "That means I've hurt you."

"Naturally."

"I can't help it." That was truer than he realized, for she could hardly help crying. She could not soften her refusal, because she was so shaken and exhausted by the strain of it that she dared not venture on more than one sentence at a time.

"I'm very sorry."

"But as my wife you could be as 'good' as you liked?"

"You would not leave me strength for it."

"I should corrupt you?"

"Yes, I think you would deliberately tempt me. . . . I think you have tonight."

"Do you care for no one but yourself?" he flung at her in his vertigo of humiliation and anger.

"No: I care for G.o.d."

"For G.o.d!" Lawrence repeated stupidly: "what has that to do with your marrying me?"

He heard his own betise as it left his lips, and felt the immeasurable depth of it, but he had not time to retract before every personal consideration was wiped from his mind by a cry from Isabel in a very different accent--"Lawrence! oh! look at the time!"

She pointed to the dial of an illuminated clock, hanging high in the soft September night. It was eight minutes to twelve. "What time did you say our train went?"