Isn't it silly?"

If so it was a form of silliness with which Mrs. Clowes was in full sympathy. In her world, to be young and pretty gave a woman a claim on Fate to provide her with pretty dresses and the admiration of men. As for Yvonne, till she married Jack Bendish she had never been out of debt in her life. "No, it's the most natural thing on earth," said Laura. "How I wish--!"

"No, no," said Isabel hastily. "It's very, very sweet of you, but even Jimmy wouldn't like it: and as for Val I don't know what he'd say! Poor old Val, he wants some new evening clothes himself, and it's worse for him than for me because men do so hate to look shabby and out at elbows. He's worn that suit for ten years. My one consolation is that Captain Hyde couldn't wear a suit he wore ten years ago. It would burst."

"Isabel! really! you ridiculous child, why have you such a spite against poor Lawrence? Any one would think he was a perfect Daniel Lambert! Do you know he's a pukka sportsman and has shot all over the world? Lions and tigers, and rhinoceros, and grizzly bears, and all sorts of ferocious animals! He's promised me a black panther skin for my parlour and he's persuaded Bernard to call in Dr. Verney for his neuritis, so I won't hear another word against him!"

"Has he? H'm. . . . No, I haven't any prejudice against him: in fact I like him," said Isabel, smiling to herself. "But he reminds me of Tom Wallis at the Prince of Wales's Feathers. Do you remember Tom? 'Poor Tom,' Mrs. Wallis always says, 'he went from bad to worse. First it was a drop too much of an evening: and then he began getting drunk mornings: and then he 'listed for a soldier!' Not that Captain Hyde would get drunk, but he has the same excitable temperament. . . . Laura!"

"What is it?" said Mrs. Clowes, framing the young face between her hands as Isabel rose up kneeling before her. In the quivering apple-tree shadow Isabel's eyes were very dark, and penetrating and reflective too, as if she had just undergone one of those transitions from childhood to womanhood which are the mark and the charm of her variable age. Laura was puzzled by her judgment of Lawrence Hyde, so keen, yet so wide of the truth as Laura saw it: "excitable" was the last thing that Laura would have called him, and she couldn't see any likeness to Tom Wallis.

But one can't argue over a man's character with a child. "Why so serious?"

"This evening, at dinner, weren't there some queer undercurrents?"

"Undercurrents!" Laura drew her hands away. She looked startled and nervous. "What sort of undercurrents?"

"When they were chaffing Val about his ribbon. Oh, I don't know,"

said Isabel vaguely. Laura drew a breath of relief. "I was sorry you made him wear it. But he'd cut his hand off to please you, darling. You don't really realize the way you can make Val do anything you like."

"Nonsense," said Laura, but with an indulgent smile, which was her way of saying that it was true but did not signify. She was no coquette, but she preferred to create an agreeable impression.

Always in France, where women are the focus of social interest, there had been men who did as Laura Selincourt pleased, and the incense which Val alone continued to burn was not ungrateful to her altar. "As if Val would mind about a little thing like that."

Isabel shook her head. "Perhaps you weren't attending. Major Clowes was very down on him for wearing it--chaffing him, of course, but chaffing half in earnest: a s...o...b..ll with a stone in it. Naturally Val wasn't going to say you made him--"

"No, but Lawrence did: or I should have cut in myself."

"Yes, after a minute, he interfered, and then Major Clowes shut up, but it was all rather--rather queer, and I'm sure Val hated it. You won't make him do it again, will you? Val's so odd.

Laura--don't tell any one--I sometimes think Val's very unhappy."

"Val, unhappy? You fanciful child, this is worse than Tom Wallis! What should make Val unhappy? He might be dull," said Laura ruefully. "Life at Wanhope isn't exciting! But he's keen on his work and very fond of the country. Val is one of the most contented people I know."

A shadow fell over Isabel's face, the veil that one draws down when one has offered a confidence to hands that are not ready to receive it. "Then it must be all my imagination." She abandoned the subject as rapidly as she had introduced it. "O! dear, I am sleepy." She stretched herself and yawned, opening her mouth wide and shutting it with a little snap like a kitten. "I was up at six to give Val his breakfast, and I've been running about all day, what with the school treat next week, and Jimmy's new night-s.h.i.+rts that I had to get the stuff for and cut them out, and choir practice, and f.a.n.n.y taking it into her head to make rhubarb jam. How can London people stay up till twelve or one o'clock every night? But of course they don't get up at six."

"Have a snooze in my hammock," suggested Laura. "I see Barry coming, which means that Bernard is going off and I shall have to run away and leave you, and probably the men won't come out for some time. Take forty winks, you poor child, it will freshen you up."

"I never, never go to sleep in the daytime," said Isabel firmly.

"It's a demoralizing habit. But I shouldn't mind tumbling into your hammock, thank you very much." And, while Mrs. Clowes went away with Barry, she slipped across to Laura's large comfortable cot, swung waist-high between two alders that knelt on the river brink.

Isabel sprawled luxuriously at full length, one arm under her head and the other dropped over the netting: her young frame was tired, little flying aches of fatigue were darting pins and needles through her knees and shoulders and the base of her spine. The evening was very warm and the stars winked at her, they were green diamonds that sparkled through c.h.i.n.ks in the alder leaf.a.ge overhead: round dark leaves like coins, and scattered in cl.u.s.ters, like branches of black bloom. Near at hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice, where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the mill. And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing, now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, now rich turns and grace-notes, and now again a reiterated metallic c.h.i.n.k which melted into liquid fluting:

Vogek im Tannenwald Pfeifet so h.e.l.l: Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schatze sein?

Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so h.e.l.l.

Isabel was still so young that she felt the beauty more deeply when she could link it with some poetic a.s.sociation, and as she listened to the nightingale she murmured to herself "'In some melodious plot of beechen green with shadows numberless'--but it isn't a beech, it's a fir-tree," and then wandering off into another literary channel, "'How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Eternal pa.s.sion--eternal pain' . . . but I don't believe he feels any pain at all. It is we who feel pain.

He's not been long married, and it's lovely weather, and there's plenty for them to eat, and they're in love . . . what a heavenly night it is! I wish some one were in love with me. I wonder if any one ever will be.

"How thrilling it would be to refuse him! Of course I couldn't possibly accept him--not the first: it would be too slow, because then one couldn't have any more. One would be like Laura. Poor Laura! Now if she were in that tree"--Isabel's ideas were becoming slightly confused--"it would be natural for her to be melancholy--only if she were a bird she wouldn't care, she would fly off with some one else and leave Major Clowes, and all the other birds would come and peck him to death. They manage these things better in bird land." Isabel's eyes shut but she hurriedly opened them again. "I'm not going to go to sleep.

It's perfectly absurd. It can't be much after nine o'clock. I dare say Captain Hyde will come out before so very long . . . I should like to talk to him again by myself. He isn't so interesting when other people are there. I wonder why I told Laura he was getting fat? He isn't: he couldn't be, to travel all over the world and shoot black panthers. And if he did take two helps of vol-au-vent, you must remember, Isabel, he's a big man--well over six feet--and requires good support. He certainly is not greedy or he would have tried to pick out the oysters: all men love oysters.

"He was nice about Val's ribbon, too . . . wish I understood about that ribbon. Val was grateful: he said 'Thanks, Hyde'

while Major Clowes was speaking to Barry. Laura isn't stupid, but she never understands Val. 'Contented?' My dearest darling Val! If he were being roasted over a slow fire he would be 'contented' if Laura was looking on. That's the worst of being perfectly unselfish: people never realize that you're unselfish at all. Wives don't seem to hear what their husbands say. Often and often Major Clowes is absolutely insulting to Val, before Laura and before me. But Laura always looks on Val as a boy.

Perhaps if Captain Hyde hears it going on he'll interfere and shut Major Clowes up as he did tonight. He can manage Major Clowes . . . which is clever of him! 'A strong, silent man'--as a matter of fact he talks a good deal. . . . But I loved him for sitting on Major Clowes. I'd rather he were nice to Val than to me.

"But he might be nice to me too. . . .

"He was, yesterday afternoon. How he coloured up! He was absolutely natural for the minute. That can't often happen.

People who don't like giving themselves away are thrilling when they do."

Another yawn came upon her.

"O! dear, I really mustn't go to sleep. What a lulling noise you make, you old river! I don't think I can get up at six tomorrow.

This hammock is as comfortable as a bed. 'The young girl reclined in a graceful att.i.tude, her head pillowed on her slender hand, her long dark lashes entangled and resting on her ivory cheek.' Well, they couldn't rest anywhere else: unless they were long enough to rest on her nose. 'Her--her breathing was soft and regular . . .'" It became so. Isabel slept.

Val would rather have owed no grat.i.tude to a man he disliked so much as Hyde. When Bernard was wheeled away, an interchange of perfunctory civilities was followed by a constrained silence, which Val broke by rising. "Hyde, if you'll excuse me, I'll say five words to Bernard before Barry begins getting him to bed.

There's a right of way dispute going on that he liked me to keep him posted up in."

"Do," said Lawrence vaguely. He brushed past Val and escaped into the garden.

Lawrence was enjoying his stay at Wanhope, but tonight he felt defrauded, though he knew not why. He had had an agreeable day.

In the morning Jack Bendish had appeared on horseback and Lawrence had ridden over with him to lunch at Wharton, a sufficiently amusing experience, what with the crabbed high-spirited whims of Jack's grandfather and the old-fas.h.i.+oned courtesy of Lord Grantchester, and Yvonne's romantic toilette: later Laura had joined them and they had played bowls on the famous green: in the cool of the evening he had strolled home with Laura through the fields. Dinner too had been amusing in its way, the wines were excellent, the parlour maid waited at table like a deft ghost, and he recognized in Mrs. Fryar an artist who was thrown away alike on Bernard's devotion to roast beef and Val's inability to remember what he ate. Yet Lawrence was left vaguely discontented.

Bernard's manner to Val had set his teeth on edge. Bernard could have meant no harm: no one had ever known the truth except Lawrence and Val, and possibly Dale with such torn shreds of consciousness as H. E. and barbed wire had left him: but in all innocence Bernard had set the rack to work as deftly as Lawrence could have done it himself. Lawrence pitied--no, that was a slip of the mind: he was not so weak as to pity Stafford, but their intercourse was difficult, genant.

And Isabel Stafford too: Clowes had left her out of the conversation as though she were a child, and though Lawrence tried to bring her in she remained, so to say, in the nursery most of the time, speaking when she was spoken to but without any of her characteristic freshness and boldness. She was the schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be. Her very dress irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting. He had not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had played him a trick. Disappointing! and now there was no chance of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with Laura--who should have known better than to leave Captain Hyde to his own devices. But probably Miss Stafford had refused to face the men alone: it was what a little shy country girl would do.

Isabel's arm hanging over the edge of the hammock, and pearly white in the dark, was his first warning of her presence. He crossed the wood with his hunter's step and found her lapped in dreams, the starlight that filtered between the alder branches chequering her with a faint diaper of light and shade. Only the very young can afford to be, seen asleep, when the face sinks back into its original repose, and lines and wrinkles reappear in the loss of all that smiling charm of expression which may efface them by day. Laura, asleep, looked old and haggard. But Isabel presented a blank page, a face virginally pure, and candid, and lineless: from the att.i.tude of her young body one would have thought she was constructed without bones, and from her serenity it might have been a child who slept there in the June night, so placidly entrusting herself to its mild embrace. Vividly aware that he had no right to watch her, Lawrence stood watching her, though afraid at every breath that she would wake up: it was hard to believe that even in her sleep she could remain insensible of his eyes. Here was the authentic Isabel, the girl who had enchanted him on the moor: the incarnation of that cla.s.sic beauty by which alone his spirit was capable of being touched to fine issues. The alder branches quivered, their cl.u.s.ters of black shadow fell like an embroidered veil over the imperfections of her dress, but what light there was shone clear on her head and throat, and the pearly moulding of her shoulder, based where her sleeve was dragged down a little by the tension of her weight upon it. All the mystery of womanhood and all its promise of life in bud and life not yet sown lay on this young girl asleep in the stars.h.i.+ne. Lights flashed up in the house, figures were moving between the curtains: Laura had left Bernard, soon she would come out into the garden and call to Isabel, and Isabel would wake and his chance be lost. His chance? Isabel had rashly incurred a forfeit and would have to pay. The frolic was old, there was plenty of precedent for it, and not for one moment did Lawrence dream of letting her off. A moth, a dead leaf might have settled on her sleeping lips and she would have been none the wiser, and just such a moth's touch he promised himself, the contact of a moment, but enough to intoxicate him with its sweetness, and the first--yes, he believed it would be the first: not from any special faith in Isabel's obduracy, but because no one in Chilmark was enough of a connoisseur to appreciate her. Yes, the first, the bloom on the fruit, the unfolding of the bud, he promised himself that: and warily he stooped over Isabel, who slept as tranquil as though she were in her own room under the vicarage eaves. Lawrence held his breath.

If she were to wake? Then?--Oh, then the middleaged friend of the family claiming his gloves and his jest! But Lawrence was not feeling middle-aged.

"O! dear," said Isabel, "I've been asleep!"

She sat up rubbing her eyes. "Laura, are you there?" But no one was there. Yet, though she was alone, in the solitude of the alder shade Isabel blushed scarlet. "What a ridiculous dream!

worse than ridiculous, What would Val say if he knew? Really, Isabel, you ought to be whipped!" She slipped to her feet and peered suspiciously this way and that into the shadowy corners of the wood. Not a step: not the rustle of a leaf: no one.

Yet Isabel's cheeks continued to burn, till with a little frightened laugh she buried them in her hands. "O! it was-- it was a dream--?"

CHAPTER IX

Lawrence's reflections when he went to bed that night were more insurgent and disorderly than usual. In his negative philosophy, when he shut the door of his room, it was his custom to shut the door on memory too--to empty his mind of all its contents except the physical disposition to sleep. He cultivated an Indian's self-involved and deliberate vacancy. On this his second night at Wanhope however--Wanhope which was to bring him a good many white nights before he was done with it--he lay long awake, watching the stars that winked and glittered in the field of his open window, the same stars that were perhaps s.h.i.+ning on Isabel's pillow. . . .

Isabel: it was on her that his thoughts ran with a tiring persistency against which his common sense rebelled. A kiss!

what was it after all? A Christmas forfeit, a prank of which even Val Stafford could have said no worse than that it was beneath the dignity of his six and thirty years: only too flattering for such a little country girl, sunburnt, simple, and occasionally tongue-tied. The lady of the ivory frame (whom Lawrence had fished out of her seclusion and set up on his dressing table, to the disgust of Caroline: who was a Baptist, and didn't care to dust a person who wore so few clothes), the lady of the ivory frame was far handsomer than Isabel, or at least handsome in a far more finished style.

Lawrence had the curiosity to get out of bed and carry Mrs. Cleve to the window. Yes, she certainly was an expensive luxury, this smiling lady, her eyes large and liquid, her waved hair rippling under its diamond aigrette, her rather wide, eighteenth century shoulders dimpling down under a collar of diamonds to the half bare swell of her breast: and for an amateur of her type she was charming, with her tired, sophisticated glance and her fresh mouth, like a rouged child: but it was borne in on Lawrence that she was not for him. He had kissed her two or three times, as occasion served and she seemed to desire it, but he had never lain awake afterwards, nor had his heart beaten any faster, no, not even in the summerhouse at Bingley when she was fairly in his arms. He pitched the photograph into a drawer. Frederick Cleve was safe, for him.

Strolling out on the balcony, Lawrence folded his arms on the bal.u.s.trade. The night was hot: perhaps that was why he could not sleep. By his watch it was ten minutes past two. The moon was near her setting. She lay on her back with tumbled clouds all round her: mother & pearl clouds, quilted, and tinged with a sheen of opal. He wondered whether Bernard was asleep: poor Bernard, lying alone through the dreary hours. Perhaps it was because Lawrence was not at all like a curate that Bernard had already made his cousin free of certain dark corners which Val had never been allowed to explore. "My wife? She's not my wife," Clowes had said, staring up at Lawrence with his wide black eyes. "She's my nurse." And he went on defining the situation with the large coa.r.s.e frankness which he permitted himself since his accident, and which did not repel Lawrence, as it would have repelled Val or Jack Bendish, because Lawrence habitually used the same frankness in his own mind. There was some family likeness between the cousins, and it came out in their common contempt for modern delicacy, which Bernard called squeamishness and Lawrence d.a.m.ned in more literary language as the Victorian manner.