"I wish we were out of England now."

"So do I. Oh Lawrence, I'd sell my soul to go to Egypt!"

"Red-hot days and blue sands in the moonlight. Shall I take you there for our honeymoon?"

"Or Spain: or Sicily: or what about Majorea?— Let's slip off alone in a nom de plume and an aeroplane to some place where no one ever goes, all roses and lemon thyme and honey-coloured cliffs and a bay of blue sea—"

"Should you like to be alone with me?"

"Yes ... why not?"

"Good!" said Hyde laughing. "I see no reason if you don't." He put his hand before his eyes, which were throbbing as though he had looked too long at a bright light. But Isabel pulled down his wrist. "Don't do that. I like to watch your eyes. I allow no reserves, Lawrence. And isn't it rather too late to lock the door? I've seen you—"

"Isabel!" He freed himself and stood up. "I beg your pardon, but you must not— I can't stand—" His face was burning. Isabel had not realized—it is difficult for a young girl to realize, convinced of her own insignificance—how deeply his pride had been cut overnight, but she was under no delusion now. He was hot with shame and anger, and had to wait to fight them down before he could go on. "Nineteen are you—or nine? I can't play with you today. Make allowance for me, dearest! I'm in a most difficult position. I've done incalculable mischief, and, to tell you the truth, I shouldn't have chosen to raise this subject again till I'm clear of it. Your people may very fairly object. My cousin is threatening a divorce action. He's mad: and no decent lawyer would take his case into court: but the fact remains that poor Laura has been turned out of doors, and for that I am, in myself-centred carelessness, to blame. You won't misunderstand me, will you, if I say that while this abominable business is hanging over me we can't be formally engaged? Val must be told—nothing would induce me to keep him in the dark for an hour. But for all that I shan't know how to face him. What! ask him for you, and in the same breath tell him that Laura has been turned adrift because I've compromised her? If I were Val there'd be the devil and all to pay. In the meantime I must—I must be sure of you. But you change like the wind: last night you refused me, and to-day . . ." He walked over to the window and stood looking out into the garden, fighting down one of those tremendous storms of memory which swept over him from time to time and made the present seem absolutely one with the past.

"What's the matter?"

He turned, but his voice was thick. "Last time I trusted a woman she betrayed me."

"You're thinking of your wife."

"I often think of her," Hyde said savagely, "and wonder if all women are tarred with the same brush."

"Oh, that is brutal," said Isabel, paling: "but you're tired out."

It was true, he was too tired to rest: heartsick and ashamed, painfully aware of the immense harm he had done and uncertain how to mend it. This sense of guilt was the more harassing because he was not in the habit of regretting his actions, good or bad: but now he could no longer fling off responsibility: it was riveted on him by all the other emotions which Wanhope had evoked, pity for Bernard, and affection for Laura, and humility before Val.

Among the lilacs a robin was singing his delicate and bold welcome to autumn, and over the window a branch of red roses nodded persistently and rhythmically in a draught of wind. Lawrence stood looking out into the garden of which he saw nothing, and Isabel, watching him, felt tears coming into her own eyes, the tears of that unnerving pity which a woman feels for the man she loves, when she has never before seen him in defeat or depression. No wonder he thought her fickle! How could he read what was dark to her?

Isabel had not deliberately altered her mind in the night. She had lain down free and risen up bond, waking from sound sleep, the sleep of a child, to find that the silent inner Court of Appeal had reversed her verdict while she slept. Her first thought had been, "I'm going to marry Lawrence!" For he needed her: that was what she had forgotten last night: by his parade of wealth he had defeated his own ends, but, her first anger over, she had realized that one should no more refuse a man for being rich, than accept him. Far other were the grounds on which that decision had to be made. It had been pity that carried Isabel away. Perhaps in any case she could not have held out for long.

Did she expect to be happy? Scarcely, for she did not trust him enough to be frank with him. Sophisticated men soon tire of candid women: it was in this faith that Isabel had clouded herself in such an iridescence of mystery and coquetry, laughing when she felt more inclined to cry, eluding Lawrence when she would rather have rested in his arms. Roses and steel: innocence in a saffron scarf: ascendancy won and held only by surrender: such was to be the life of the woman who married Lawrence Hyde, as she had seen it long ago on a June evening, and as, with some necessary failings for human weakness, she carried it out to the end. If any moralities at all were to be fulfilled in their union, it was for her to impose them, for Hyde had none. Within the limits of his code of honour he would simply do as he liked. And with nine-tenths of her nature Isabel would have liked nothing better than to shut her eyes and yield to him as all her life she had yielded to Val, for she too loved red roses and sunshine and the pleasure of the senses: but her innermost self, the warder of her will, would rather have died than yield, she the child of an ascetic and trained in Val's simple code of duty.

But there should be compromise: one must not—one need not—cheat him of the pride of his manhood. Isabel's heart ached for her lover. She could not defend herself against him any longer, and in her yielding the warder of her will whispered, "You may yield now. Not to be frank with him now would be unfair as well as unkind."

She came softly to him in the window, and instantly by some change of tension Lawrence discovered to his delight that Circe had vanished. His mistress was his own now, a girl of nineteen who had promised to be his wife, and he was carried beyond doubt or anger by the rush of tenderness which went over him when he began to taste the sweetness of his victory. "Have I won you?" he whispered, his voice as unsteady as a boy's in his first passion. "You won't fail me?"

"Oh never! never!"

"You have the most beautiful eyes in the world. I believe one reason why I always secretly liked Val was that his eyes reminded me of yours. I can't stand it when he looks at me under your eyelashes. I always want to say 'Here take it Val.'"

"Take what?"

"Anything he wants. I'm going to extend a protecting wing over my young brother-in-law. He shall not, no, I swear he shall not come to grief. I can't stand it, he's too like you. When did you first fall in love with me?"

"When did you?"

"The night you went to sleep in the garden at Wanhope."

"Oh! when you kissed me?"

"When I—?"

Isabel was speechless.

"How do you know I kissed you, Isabel? I thought you were asleep."

"So I was," said Isabel, blushing deeply. "Oh! Captain Hyde, I wasn't pretending! But I woke up directly after, and heard a rustling in the wood, and I—I knew, don't ask me: I could feel -"

"This?"

"Yes," Isabel murmured, resigning herself.

"How strange!" said Lawrence under his breath. "You were asleep and you felt me kiss you?"

She looked up at him through her eyelashes. "Is that so strange?"

"Rather: because I never did kiss you."

"Not?"

"No: I bent over you to do it, but you were so defenceless and so young, I didn't dare.— Isabel! my darling! what have I done?"

The first days of love are supposed to be blind days, but too often they are days of overstrained criticism, when from very fear each sees slips and imperfections even where they do not exist. The discovery that she had misjudged Hyde was an exquisite joy to Isabel. This trivial, crucial scruple, of morality or taste, whichever one liked to call it, was the sign of a chastity of mind which could coexist, it seemed, with the coarse and careless sins that he had never denied. After all no marriage on earth is perfect, and husbands as well as wives have to make allowances; but as years go on, and affection does its daily work, the rubs are less and less felt, till the time comes when deeper wisdom can look back smiling on the fears of youth. Isabel at nineteen did not possess this wisdom but she had youth itself.

The flames crackled low on the hearth: the wind, a small autumn wind, piped weakly round white wall and high chimneypot: outside in the garden late roses were shedding their petals loosened by a touch of frost in the night. "Tears because you mistrusted me?" said Hyde in his soft voice. "But why should the Gentile maiden trust a Jew?"



CHAPTER XIX

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.



CHAPTER XX

It was one March evening six mouths later, one of those warm, still, sunshot-and-grey March evenings when elm-root are blue with violets and the air is full of the faint indeterminate scent of tree flowers, that Lawrence brought his bride home to Farringay. March weather is uncertain, and he preferred to go where he could be sure of comfort, while Isabel, having once consented to be married, left all arrangements to him. It was eight o'clock before they reached the house, and Isabel never forgot the impression which it made on her when she came in out of the bloomy twilight; warm and dim and smelling of violets that were set about in bowls on bookcase and cabinet, while the flames of an immense wood fire on an open hearth flickered over the blue and rose of porcelain or the oakleaf and gold of morocco. She stood in the middle of an ocean of polished floor and looked round her as if she had lost her way in it, till Lawrence came to her and kissed her hands. "Isabel, do you like the look of your new home?"

"Very much. Thank you."

"May I take off your furs for you?" Getting no answer he took them off. Framed in the sable cap and scarf that Yvonne had given her Isabel still parted her hair on one side, a fashion which Lawrence had grown to admire immensely, but her young throat and the fine straight masque of her features were thin and she had lost much of her colour since the autumn. Lawrence held her by the wrists and stood looking down at her, compelling her to raise her eyes, though they soon fell again with a flutter of the sensitive eyelids. "Are you tired, sweetheart?"

"Oh no, thank you."

"Cold?"

"Not now."

"Frightened?"

"A little."

"You wouldn't rather I left you for a little while?"

Isabel almost imperceptibly shook her head, but with a shade of mockery in her smile which prevented Lawrence from taking her in his arms. "Am I an unsatisfactory wife? Will you soon be tired of me? No, not yet," she said, moving away from him to put down her gloves and muff. "I've hardly had time to thank you for my presents yet. Oh Lawrence, how you spoil me!" She held up her watch to admire the lettering on its Roman enamel. "'I.H.' Does that stand for me—am I really Isabel Hyde? And are those sapphires mine, and can I drink my tea out of this roseleaf Dresden cup? It does seem strange that saying a few words and writing one's name in a book should make so much difference."

"Regretful?"

"A little oppressed, that's all. I shall soon get used to it. If you were not you I should hate it. But there's something essentially generous and careless in you, Lawrence, that makes it easy to take from you. Come here." He came to her. "Oh, I've made you blush!" said Isabel, naively surprised. Under her rare and unexpected praise he had coloured against his will. "Oh foolish one!" She kissed him sweetly. "Lawrence, are you sorry Val died?" Lawrence freed himself and turned away. It was six months since Val's death, but he still could not bear to think of it and he had scarcely spoken of it to Isabel.

There had been no protracted farewell for Val. He had died in Lawrence's arms on the steps of Wanhope without recovering consciousness, while Verney stood by helpless, and Isabel, by a stroke of irony, tried to convince poor agonized Laura Clowes that the law should not touch her husband. It had not done so. He had been saved mainly by the unscrupulous concerted perjury of Lawrence and Selincourt, who swore that Val had stumbled and fallen by accident with the dagger in his hand, while Verney confined himself to drily agreeing that the wound might have been self-inflicted. In the absence of any contrary evidence the lie was allowed to pass, but perhaps it would hardly have done so if it had not been universally taken for a half-truth. The day before the inquest there appeared in the Gazette a laconic notice that Second Lieutenant Valentine Ormsby Stafford, late of the Dorchester Regiment, had been deprived of his distinction on account of circumstances recently brought to light. After that, no need to ask why Val should have had a dagger in his hand! A jury who had known Val and his father before him were not anxious to press the case; and perhaps even the coroner was secretly grateful for evidence which spared him the pain of calling Mr. Stafford.

Except in Chilmark, the scandal scarcely ran its nine days, but there of course it raged like a fire, and no one was much surprised when the vicar resigned his living and crept away to a bed-sittingroom in Museum Street, a broken old man, to spend the brief remainder of his life among black letter texts and incunabula. He could have borne any sin in the Decalogue less hardly than a breach of the military oath. He stopped Isabel, Rowsley, Lawrence himself when they tried to plead for Val. "I am not angry," he said feebly. "If my son were alive I wouldn't shut my door on him. But it's better as it is." He even tried to persuade Isabel to break with Lawrence. "Captain Hyde is an honourable man and no doubt considers himself bound to you, so you mustn't wait for him to release himself. It is very sad for you, my dear, but you belong to a disgraced family now and you must suffer with the rest of us." Isabel agreed, and returned her engagement ring. Followed a rather fiery scene, in which Lawrence lost his temper, and Isabel wept: and finally Mr. Stafford, finding Lawrence obdurate, broke down and owned that his one last wish was to see his daughter happily married. He refused to take her to Bloomsbury. She stayed with Rowsley or at the Castle till Lawrence brought her to Farringay.

So there were changes at Chilmark, for the parish went to a hot-tempered Welshman with a wife and six children, and Wanhope was let to an American steel magnate, and Mrs. Jack Bendish, always mischievous when she was unhappy, embroiled them with each other first and then quarrelled with both. Yes, Wanhope was let: a fortnight after Val's death Major Clowes went by car to Cornwall with his wife for a change of air after the shock. He was reported to have stood the journey very well, but Laura's letters were not expansive.

Nor was Isabel: nor any other of those who had been eyewitnesses of the tragedy at Wanhope. The memory of it cast a shadow and a silence. Lawrence had never discussed it with Isabel; nor with Selincourt, except in a hurried whispered interchange of notes to avoid discrepancy in their evidence; nor with Bernard . . . the murderer. Since the night when he carried Val dead over the vicarage threshold Lawrence had not seen his cousin. He had seen Laura and tried to comfort her, but what could one say? It was murder. Had it not been for Laura he would have left Clowes to stand his trial. Even for her sake he would not have kept the secret if Rowsley, to whom alone it was revealed, had not given his leave, in the dim blinded room where revenge and anger seemed small things, and Val's last words, almost unremarked at the time, took on the solemn force of a dying injunction. The grey placidity of Val's closed eyelids and crossed hands was the last memory that Lawrence would have chosen to evoke on his wedding night.

"Come and get warm," said Isabel. She saw that she had startled and distressed her husband, and she drew him down into an immense armchair by the fire, a man's chair, spacious and soft. "Is there room for me too?" She slipped into it beside him and threw her arms round his neck. Lawrence held her lightly and passively. Not once during their engagement had she so surrendered herself to him for more than a moment, and he dared not take advantage of his opportunities for fear of losing her again. But Isabel smiled at him with shut eyes. "All my heart," she murmured; "don't be afraid, I'm not going to slip through your fingers now . . . I love you too, too much . . . Val would say it was wrong to care so much for any one."

Val again! Lawrence lifted her eyelashes with his finger. "Isabel, why are you haunted by Val now? I don't want you to think of any one but me."

"Are you jealous of the dead?"

"Not I!" his voice rang out harsh with passion: "with you in my arms why should I be jealous of any one in heaven or earth?"

"Val would say that was wrong too. . . . Lawrence, do you remember your first wedding night?"

"Well enough."

"Was Lizzie beautiful?"

"I thought so then. She was a tall, well-made piece: black hair, blue eyes, buxom and plenty of colour. I was shy of her because— it's a curious fact—she was my first experience of your sex: but she was not shy with me, though I believe she too was— technically—innocent. Even at the time I was conscious of something wanting—some grace, some reserve, some economy of effect. She was of a coming-on disposition, very amorous and towardly."

"Val would call that coarse."

"Probably. Do you object? You asked for it."

"Not a bit. I don't mind your telling me any thing that's a fact. Bad thoughts are different, but facts, good or bad, coarse or refined, are the stuff the world's made of, and why should we shut our eyes to them? I like to take life as it comes without expurgation. Lawrence, Lizzie never had any children, did she?"

"By me?"

"Yes."

"No, our married life didn't last long. I should have warned you, my dear, if I had had any responsibilities of that description."

"So you would—I forgot that." Isabel lay silent a moment, nestling her closed eyelids against his throat. "Lawrence, my darling, I don't want to hurt you; but tell me, did she have any children after she left you?"

"Yes—one, a boy: Rendell's."

"What became of him after Rendell died?"

"When it became impossible to leave him with Lizzie I sent him to school. He spends his holidays with my agent here at Farringay. He's quite a nice little chap, and good looking, like Arther, and by the gossip of the neighbourhood I'm supposed to be his father. Do you mind leaving it at that? It's no worse for him and less ignominious for me."

"Nothing in what I've heard of your married life is ignominious for you. So you brought up Rendell's child? Essentially generous . . . . Kiss me." Isabel's pale beauty glowed like a flame. A Christian malagre lui and very much ashamed of it, Lawrence gave her the lightest of butterfly kisses, one on either eyelid. "Oh, I suppose you'll say I am—what was it?—towardly too," murmured Isabel. "Don't you want to kiss me?" He shook his head. Isabel, a trifle startled, opened her eyes, but was apparently satisfied, for she shut them again hurriedly and let her arm fall across them. "We'll go and see Rendell's boy tomorrow. You shall take me. I can say what I like to you now, can't I? . . . Shall you like to have one of our own?"

"Isabel, Isabel!"

"But it's perfectly proper now we're married! Oh Lawrence, it'll so soon come to seem commonplace— I want to taste the strangeness of it while I'm still near enough to Isabel Stafford to realize what a miracle it'll be. Our own! it seems so strange to say 'ours.'"

"I don't want any brats to come between you and me."

"Aren't you always in your secret soul afraid of life?"

"Afraid of life—I?"

"You have no faith . . . Everything we possess—your happiness, our love, the children you'll give me—don't you hold it all at the sword's point? You're afraid of death or change?"

"Yes."

"How frank you are!" Isabel smiled fleetingly. "Aren't there any locked doors?—no?—I may go wherever I like ?—Lawrence, are you sorry Val's dead?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, not Val again!"

"One locked door after all?"

"I was fond of him," said Lawrence with difficult passion. "He told me once that I broke his life, it was no one's doing but mine that he had to go through the crucifixion of that last hour at Wanhope, and he was killed for me." He left her and went to the window, flung it up and stood looking out into the night. "I'd have given my life to save him. I'd give it now—now."

"I heard from Laura this morning."

"I wonder she dared write to you."

"Major Clowes is wonderfully better. He drives out with her every day and mixes with other people in the sanatorium and makes friends with them. He's been sleeping better than he has ever done since his accident."

"Good God!"

"He has been having a new massage treatment, and there's just a faint hope that some day he may be able to get about on crutches."

Lawrence had an inclination to laugh. "That's enough," he said, shuddering. "I don't want to hear any more."

"She sent a message to you."

"Well, give it to me, then."

"'Don't let Lawrence suppose that Bernard has gone unpunished.'"

"He should have stood his trial," said Lawrence thickly. "It was murder."

He understood all that Laura's laconic message implied. Bernard reformed was Bernard broken by remorse: if he had shot himself— which was what Lawrence had anticipated—he would have deserved less pity. Yet Lawrence would have liked some swifter and less subtle form of punishment.

Out of doors in the garden an owl was hooting and the night air breathed on him its perfume of lilac and violets. How quiet it was and how fragrant and dim! one could scarcely distinguish between the dewy glimmer of turf and the dark island-like thickets of guelder-rose and other flowering shrubs. It was one of those late spring nights that are full of the promise of summer; but for Val there were no summers to come. His death had been as quiet as his life and without any struggle; his head on Lawrence's arm, he had stretched himself out with a little sigh, and was gone. Lawrence with his keen physical memory could still feel that light burden leaning on him. Isabel too had memories she was afraid of, the watch ticking on the dead man's wrist was one of them. Many tears had been shed for Val, some very bitter ones by Yvonne Bendish, but none by Lawrence or by Isabel. It was murder: a flash of devil's lightning, that withered where it struck.

Isabel turned in her chair to watch her husband. He had brought her straight into the drawingroom without staying to remove his leathern driving coat, which set off his big frame and the drilled flatness of his shoulders; everything he wore or used was expensive and fashionable. There came on her suddenly the impression of being shut up alone with a stranger, a man of whom she knew nothing except that in upbringing and outlook he was entirely different from her and her family. The room seemed immense and Hyde was at the other end of it. Suddenly he turned and came striding back to Isabel. Her instinct was to defend herself. She checked it and kept still, her arms and hands thrown out motionless along the arms of the chair in which her slight figure was lying in perfect repose. Lawrence tenderly took her head between his finger-tips and kissed her mouth. "Why did you raise a ghost you can't lay?" he said. "My cousin killed your brother." Isabel smiled at him without moving. Her eyes were mysteriously full of light. Lawrence knelt down and threw his arms round her waist and let his head fall against her bosom. What strength there was in this immature personality neither yielded nor withdrawn! Lawrence was entirely disarmed and subdued. He uttered a deep sigh and gave up to Isabel with the simplicity of a child the secret of his tormented restlessness. "I am unhappy, Isabel."

"I know you are, my darling, and that's why I raised the ghost. What is it troubles you?"

"My own guilt. I never knew what remorse meant before, but your Christian ethics have mastered me this time. I had no right to extract that promise from Val."

"No. Why did you? It seems so motiveless."

"Because it amused me to get a man into my power." Isabel felt him shuddering. "Is this what you call the sense of sin? I used to hear it described as a theological fiction. But it tears one's heart out. Bernard killed him: but who put the weapon into Bernard's hand?"

"Val did."

"I don't understand you."

"The original fault was Val's, and you and Major Clowes were entangled in the consequences of it. Let us two face the truth once and for all! Val can stand it—can't you, Val? . . . He broke his military oath. He deserved a sharp stinging punishment, and if you had reported him he would have had it; perhaps a worse one than you exacted, except for that last awful hour at Wanhope, and for that Major Clowes, not you, was responsible. Oh, I won't say he deserved precisely what he got! because judgment ought to be dispassionate, and in yours there was an element of cruelty for cruelty's sake; wasn't there? You half enjoyed it and half shivered under it . . ."

"More than half enjoyed it," said Hyde under his breath.

"But I do not believe that was your only motive. I think you were sorry for Val. Haven't I seen you watching him at Wanhope? with such a strange half-unwilling pity, as if you hated yourself for it. Oh Lawrence, it's for that I love you!" Lawrence shook his head. He had never been able to analyse the complex of feelings that had determined his attitude to Val. "Well, in any case it was not your fault only. A coward is an irresistible temptation to a bully."

"Do you call Val a coward? Nervous collapses were not so uncommon as you may have gathered from the Daily Mail."

"Did Major Clowes describe the scene truthfully?"

"Yes."

"Did you ever break down like Val?"

"I was older."

"There were plenty of boys of nineteen, officers and men. Did you ever know such another case so complete, so prolonged?"

"I've commanded a firing party."

"For cowardice?"

"For cowardice."

"A worse exhibition than Val's?"

"Isabel, you are pitiless!"

"Because Val deserves justice not mercy. It's his due: he died to earn it."

Hyde was silent, not thoroughly understanding her.

"He wasn't a coward when he died," said Isabel with her sweet half melancholy smile. "He fought under a heavy handicap, and won: he paid his debt, paid it to the last farthing; and now do you grudge him his sleep? 'He hates him, that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer. . . .'" Her beautiful voice dropped to a murmur which was almost lost in the rustling of flames on the hearth and the stir of wind among budded branches in the garden.

The clock struck ten and Lawrence raised his head. "It's growing late, Isabel. Aren't you tired?"

"A little. I got up at five to say good-bye to all the animals."

"All the—?"

"My cocks and hens and Val's mare and Dodor and Zou-zou and Rowsley's old rabbits. They're at the Castle, don't you remember? Jack Bendish offered to take charge of them when we turned out of the vicarage."

"I hope you put your pinafore on," said her husband.

He took her by the hands and raised her to her feet, and Isabel with irreproachable docility began to collect her scattered belongings, her sable scarf and mull and veil. Lawrence forestalled her. "Mayn't I even carry my own gloves?" Isabel pleaded. "No, you're so slow," said Lawrence laughing down at her. Isabel's cheeks flew their scarlet flag before the invading enemy. "Isabel," Lawrence murmured, "are you shy of me?"

"A little. I'm only twenty," Isabel excused herself.

"And I'm not gentle. I shall brush the bloom off. . . . Yet I love the bloom."

He went to close the window. A breath of night wind shook through the bushes on the lawn and blew off a snow of petals through the soft air. He was not a believer in the immortality of the soul, but tonight he would have given much to know that Val was near him, a spirit of smiling tenderness. But no: the night was empty of everything except moonlight and petals and the sighing of wind over diapered turf. Youth passes, and beauty, and bloom: it is of the essence of their sweetness that they cannot last. Yet, while they last, how sweet they are!

THE END