Val resumed after a moment: "my father may live another thirty years, and by that time I should be too old to stand in a white sheet. Or perhaps I shall only tell one or two people--"

"Mrs. Clowes?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You would like to tell my cousin and his wife?"

"I should like to feel myself a free agent, which I'm not now, because I'm under parole to you."

"And so you will remain," said Lawrence coldly.

"You mean that?"

"Thoroughly. I've no wish to distress you, Val, but I'm no more convinced now than I was ten years ago that you can be trusted to judge for yourself. You were an impulsive boy then with remarkably little self-control: you're--forgive my saying so--an impulsive man now, capable of doing things that in five minutes you would be uncommonly sorry for. How long would Bernard keep your secret? If I'm not much mistaken you would lose your billet and the whole county would hear why. The whole thing's utter rubbish. You make too much of your ribbon: you--I--it would never have been given if Dale's father hadn't been a bra.s.s hat."

Stafford was ashy pale. "I know you think you're just."

"No, I don't. I'm not just, my good chap: I'm weakly, idiotically generous. In your heart of hearts you're grateful to me. Now let's drop all this. Nothing you can say will have the slightest effect, so you may as well not say it." He stood by Val's chair, laughing down at him and gently gripping him by the shoulder.

"Be a man, Val! you're not nineteen now. You've got a comfortable job and the esteem of all who know you--take it and be thankful: it's more than you deserve. If you must indulge in a hair s.h.i.+rt, wear it under your clothes. It isn't necessary to embarra.s.s other people by undressing in public."

Thought is free: one may be at a man's mercy and in his debt and keep one's own opinion of him, impersonal and cold. With a faint smile on his lips Val got up and strolled over to the piano.

"Hullo, what's all this music lying about?" he said in his ordinary manner. "Has Laura been playing? Good, I'm so glad: Bernard can hardly ever stand it. See the first fruits of your bracing influence! Oh, the Polonaises . . ." And then he in his turn began to play, but not the melancholy fiery lyrics that had soothed Laura's unsatisfied heart. Val, a thorough musician, went for sympathy to the cla.s.sics. Impulsive? There was not much impulse left in this quiet, reticent man, who with his old trouble fresh on him could sit down and play a chorale of Bach or a prelude of Mozart, subordinating his own imperious anguish to the grave universal daylight of the elder masters. Long since Val had resolved that no shadow from him should fall across any other life. He had foresworn "that impure pa.s.sion of remorse,"

and so keen an observer as Rowsley had grown up in his intimacy without suspecting anything wrong. Unfortunately for Val, however, he still suffered, though he was now denied all expression, all relief: the wounded mind bled inwardly. It was no wonder Val's hair was turning grey.

Lawrence, no mean judge of music, understood much--not all--of the significance of Val's playing. He was an imaginative man-- far more so than Val, who would have lived an ordinary life and travelled on ordinary lines of thought but for the war, which wrenched so many men out of their natural development. But it was again unfortunate for Val that the sporting instinct ran strong in Captain Hyde. He was irritated by Val's grave superior dignity, and deep and unacknowledged there was working in him the instinct of the bully, the love of cruelty, overlaid by layer on layer of civilization, of chivalry, of decency, yet native to the human heart and quick to rea.s.sert itself at any age: in the boy who thrashes a smaller boy, in the young man who takes advantage of a woman, in the fighter who hounds down surrendered men.

He settled himself in a chair close to the piano. "Val, I'm very glad to have met you. Having taken so much upon me," he was smiling into Val's eyes, "I've often wondered what had become of you. This," he lightly touched Val's arm, "was a cruel handicap.

I had to disable you, but it need not have been permanent."

"Do you mind moving? you're in my light."

He s.h.i.+fted his chair by an inch or so. "After all, what's a single failure of nerve? Physical causes--wet, cold, indigestion, tight puttees--account for nine out of ten of these queer breakdowns.

At all events you've paid, Val, paid twice over: when I read your name in the Honours List I laughed, but I was sorry for you. The sword-and-epaulets business would have been mild compared to that."

"Cat and mouse, is it?" said Val, resting his hands on the keys.

"What?"

"I'm not going to stand this sort of thing, Hyde, not for a minute."

"I don't know what you mean," said Lawrence, reddening slowly to his forehead. But it was a lie: he was not one of those who can overstep limits with impunity. The streak of vulgarity again!

and worse than vulgarity: Andrew Hyde's sardonic old voice was ringing in his ears, "Lawrence, you'll never be a gentleman."

"All right, we'll leave it at that. Only don't do it again."

Lawrence was dumb. "Here's Mrs. Clowes."

Val rose as Laura came in, released at length from attendance on her husband. "I heard you playing," she said, giving him her hand with her sweet, friendly smile. "So you've introduced yourself to Captain Hyde? I hope you were nice to him, for my grat.i.tude to him is boundless. I haven't seen Bernard looking so fit or so bright for months and months! Now sit down, both of you, and we'll have cigarettes and coffee. Ring, Val, will you--? it's barely half past ten.

"I can only stay for one cigarette, Laura: I must get home to bed."

"But, my dear boy, how tired you look!" exclaimed Laura. "You do too much--I'm sure you do too much. He wears himself out, Lawrence--oh! my scarf!" She was wearing a silver scarf over her black dress, and as she moved it fluttered up and caught on the chain round her throat. "Unfasten me, please, Val," she said, bending her fair neck, and Val was obliged laboriously to disentangle the silken cobweb from the spurs of her clear-set diamonds, a process which fascinated Lawrence, whose mind was more French than English in its permanent interest in women.

Certainly Val's office of friend of the family was not less delicate because Laura, secure in her few years seniority, treated him like a younger brother! Watching, not Val, but Val's reflection in a mirror, Lawrence overlooked no shade of constraint, no effort that Val made to avoid touching with his finger-tips the satin allure of Laura's exquisite skin. "Poor miserable Val!" Suspicion was crystallizing into certainty. "Or is it poor Bernard? No, I swear she doesn't know. Does he know himself?"

A servant had brought in coffee, and Lawrence in his quality of cousin poured out two cups and carried them over to Laura and to Val. "Well, I'm d.a.m.ned!" murmured Lawrence as Val refastened the clasp of the chain. "Picturesque, all this.-- Here, Val, here's your coffee."

"But do you know each other so well as that?" exclaimed Laura, arching her wren's-feather eyebrows.

"I was an infant subaltern when Hyde knew me," said Val laughing, "and he was a howling swell of a captain. Do you remember that night you all dined with us, sir, when we were in billets? We stood you champagne--"

"Purchased locally. I remember the champagne."

"Dine with us tomorrow night," said Laura. "Do! and bring Isabel." Lawrence gave an imperceptible start: for the last hour he had forgotten Isabel's existence except when her eyes had looked at him out of her brother's face. "The child will enjoy it, I never knew any one so easily pleased; and you and Lawrence and Bernard can rag one another to your heart's content. Yes, you will, I know you will, Army men always do when they get together; and you're all boys, even Bernard, even you with your grey hair, my dear Val; as for Lawrence, he's only giving himself airs."

"Yes, do bring your sister," said Lawrence. "She is the most charming young girl I've met for years, if a man of my mature age may say so. She is so natural, a rare thing nowadays: the modern jeune fille is a sophisticated product."

"Bravo, Lawrence!" cried Mrs. Clowes, clapping her hands. "Now, Val, didn't I tell you Isabel was going to be very, very pretty?

That's settled, then, you'll both come: and, to please me," she looked not much older than Isabel as she took hold of the lapel of Val's coat, "will you wear your ribbon? I know you hate wearing it in civilian kit! But I do so love to see you in it: and it's not as if there would be any one here but ourselves."

Lawrence swung round on his heel and walked away. One may enjoy the pleasures of the chase and yet draw the line at watching an application of the rack, and it sickened him to remember that his own hand had given a turn to the screw. It had needed that brief colloquy to let him see what Stafford's life was like at Wanhope, and in what slow nerve-by-nerve laceration amends were being made. He admired the gallantry of Stafford's reply.

"My dear Laura, I would tie myself up in ribbon from head to foot if it would give you pleasure. I'll wear it if you like, though my superior officer will certainly rag me if I do."

"No, I shan't," said Lawrence shortly.

CHAPTER VIII

"And now tell me," murmured Mrs. Clowes in the mischievously caressing tone that she kept for Isabel, "did mamma's little girl enjoy her party?"

"Rather!" said Isabel--with a great sigh, the satisfied sigh of a dog curling up after a meal. "They were lovely strawberries.

And what do you call that French thing? Oh, that's what a vol-au-vent is, is it? I wish I knew how to make it, but probably it's one of those recipes that begin 'Take twelve eggs and a quart of cream.' I wish nice things to eat weren't so dear, Jimmy would love it. Captain Hyde took two helps--did you see?--big ones! If he always eats as much as he did tonight he'll be fat before he's fifty, which will be a pity. He ate three times what Val did."

"Is that what you were thinking of all the time? I noticed you didn't say very much."

"Well, I was between Captain Hyde and Major Clowes, and they neither of them think I'm grown up," explained Isabel. "They talked to each other over the top of me. Oh no, not rudely, Major Clowes was as nice as he could be" (Isabel salved her conscience by reflecting that this was verbally true since Major Clowes could never he nice), "and Captain Hyde asked me if I was fond of dolls--"

"My dear Isabel!"

"Or words to that effect. Oh! it's perfectly fair, I'm not grown up, or only by fits and starts. Some of me is a weary forty-five but the rest is still in pigtails. It's curious, isn't it?

considering that I'm nearly twenty. Let's go through the wood, my stockings are coming down." Out of sight of the house in a clearing of the loosely planted alder-coppice by the bridge, she pulled them up, slowly and candidly: white cotton stockings supported by garters of black elastic. "After all," she continued, "I'm housekeeper, and in common politeness we shall have to dine you back, so I really did want to see what sort of things Captain Hyde likes. But it's no use, he won't like anything we give him. Not though we strain our resources to the uttermost. Laura! would Mrs. Fryar give me the receipt for that vol-au-vent? I don't suppose we could run to it, but I should love to try."

"Mrs. Fryar would be flattered," said Laura, finding a chair in the forked stem of a wild apple-tree, while Isabel sat plump down on the net of moss-fronds and fine ivy and grey wood-violets at her feet. "But, my darling, you're not to worry your small head over vol-au-vents! Lawrence will like one of your own roast chickens just as well, or any simple thing--"

"Oh no, Lawrence won't!" Isabel gave a little laugh. "Excuse my contradicting you, but Lawrence isn't a bit fond of simple things. That's why he doesn't like me, because I'm simple, simple as a daisy. I don't mind--much," she added truthfully.

"I can survive his most extended want of interest. After all what can you expect if you go out to dinner in the same nun's veiling frock you wore when you were confirmed, with the tucks let down and the collar taken out? O! Laura, I wish someone would give me twenty pounds on condition that I spent it all on dress! I'd buy--I'd buy--oh,--silk stockings, and long gloves, and French cambric underclothes, and chiffon nightgowns like those Yvonne wears (but they aren't decent: still that doesn't matter so long as you're not married, and they are so pretty)! And a homespun tailor-made suit with a seam down the back and open tails: and--and--one of those real Panamas that you can pull through a wedding ring: and--oh! dear, I am greedy!

It must be because I never have any clothes at all that I'm always wanting some. I ache all over when I look at catalogues.