Nightfall, Anthony Pryde [easy novels to read .TXT] 📗

I say, Laura, I like the way you handed over that letter! Thought it would do me good, didn't you? Look here, I can't have my character taken away behind my back! You tell him to come and judge for himself."

"You'll get very tired of him, Berns," said Laura doubtfully. "You always say you get sick of people in twenty-four hours: and I can't take him entirely off your hands—you'll have to do your share of entertaining him. He's your cousin, not mine, and it'll be you he comes to see."

"I shan't see any more of him than I want to, my dear, on that you may depend," said Bernard with easy emphasis. "If he invites himself he'll have to put with what he can get. But I can stand a good deal of him. Regimental shop is always amusing, and Lawrence will know heaps of fellows I used to know, and tell me what's become of them all. Besides, I'm sick to death of the local gang and Lawrence will be a change. He's got more brains than Jack Bendish, and from the style of his letter he can't be so much like a curate as Val is." Val Stafford was agent for the Wanhope property. "Oh, by George!"

"What's the matter?"

Bernard threw back his head and grinned broadly with half shut eyes. "Ha, ha! by Gad, that's funny—that's very funny. Why, Val knows him!"

"Knows Lawrence? I never heard Val mention his name."

"No, my love, but one can't get Val to open his lips on that subject. Lawrence and I were in the same battalion. He was there when Val got his ribbon."

"Really? That will be nice for Val, meeting him again."

"Oh rather!" said Bernard Clowes. "On my word it's a shame and I've half a mind . . .. No, let him come: let him come and be damned to the pair of them! Straighten me out, will you?" He was liable like most paralytics to mechanical jerks and convulsions which drove him mad with impatience. Laura drew down the helplessly twitching knee, and ran one firm hand over him from thigh to ankle. Her touch had a mesmeric effect on his nerves when he could endure it, but nine times out of ten he struck it away. He did so now. "Go to the devil! How often have I told you not to paw me about? I wish you'd do as you're told. What do you call him Lawrence for?"

"I always did. But I'll call him Captain Hyde if you like—"

"'Mr.,' you mean: he's probably dropped the 'Captain.' He was only a 'temporary.'"

"For all that, he has stuck to his prefix," said Laura smiling. "Lucian chaffed him about it. But Lawrence was always rather a baby in some ways: clocked socks to match his ties, and astonishing adventures in jewellery, and so on. Oh yes, I knew him very well indeed when I was a girl. Mr. and Mrs. Hyde were among the last of the old set who kept up with us after father was turned out of his clubs. I've stayed at Farringay."

"You never told me that!"

"I never thought of telling you. Lawrence hasn't been near us since we came to Wanhope and I don't recollect your ever mentioning his name. You see I tell you now."

"How old were you when you stayed at Farringay?"

"Twenty-two. Lawrence and I are the same age."

"And you knew him well, did you?"

"We were great friends," said Mrs. Clowes, tossing a lump of sugar out of the window to a lame jackdaw. She had many such pensioners, alike in a community of misfortune. "And, yes, Berns, you're right, we flirted a little—only a little: wasn't it natural? It was only for fun, because we were both young and it was such heavenly weather—it was the Easter before war broke out. No, he didn't ask me to marry him! Nothing was farther from his mind."

"Did he kiss you?"

Laura slowly and smilingly shook her head. "Am I, Yvonne?"

"But you liked the fellow?"

"Oh yes, he was charming. A little too much one of a class, perhaps: there's a strong family likeness, isn't there, between Cambridge undergraduates? But he was more cultivated than a good many of his class. We used to go up the river together and read —what did one read in the spring of 1914? Masefield, I suppose, or was it Maeterlinck? Rupert Brooks came with the war. Imagine reading 'Pelleas et Melisande' in a Canadian canoe! It makes one want to be twenty-two again, so young and so delightfully serious." It was hard to run on while the glow faded out of Bernard's face and a cold gloom again came over it, but sad experience had taught Laura that at all costs, under whatever temptation, it was wiser to be frank. It would have been easier for the moment to paint the boy and girl friendship in neutral tints, but if its details came out later, trivial and innocent as they were, the economy of today would cost her dear tomorrow, Her own impression was that Clowes had never been jealous of her in his life. But the pretence of jealousy was one of his few diversions.

"I dare say you do wish you were twenty-two again," he said, delicately setting down his tea cup on the tray—all his movements, so far as he could control them, were delicate and fastidious. "I dare say you would like a chance to play your cards differently. Can't be done, my, girl, but what a good fellow I am to ask Lawrence to Wanhope, ain't I? No one can say I'm not an obliging husband. Lawrence isn't a jumping doll. He's six and thirty and as strong as a horse. You'll have no end of a good time knitting up your severed friendship .. 'Pon my word, I've a good mind to put him off. . I shouldn't care to fall foul of the King's Proctor."

"Will you have another cup of tea before I ring"

"No, thanks . . . Do I lead you the deuce of a life, Lally?"

"You do now and then," said his wife, smiling with pale lips.

"It isn't that I'm sensitive for myself, because I know you don't mean a word of it, but I rather hate it for your own sake. It isn't worthy of you, old boy. It's so—so ungentlemanly."

"So it is. But I do it because I'm bored. I am bored, you know. Desperately!" He stretched out his hand to her with such haggard, hunted eyes that Laura, reckless, threw herself down by him and kissed the heavy eyelids. Clowes put his arm round her neck, fondling her hair, and for a little while peace, the peace of perfect mutual tenderness, fell on this hard-driven pair. But soon, a great sigh bursting from his breast, Clowes pushed her away, his features settling back into their old harsh lines of savage pain and scorn.

"Get away! get up! do you want Parker to see you through the window? If there's a thing on earth I hate it's a dishevelled crying woman. Write to Lawrence. Say I shall be delighted to see him and that I hope he'll give us at least a week. Stop. Warn him that I shan't be able to see much of him because of my invalid habits, and that I shall depute you to entertain him. That ought to fetch him if he remembers you when you were twenty-two."

Laura was neither dishevelled nor in tears: perhaps such scenes were no novelty to her. She leant against the frame of the open window, looking out over the sunlit garden full of flowers, over the wide expanse of turf that sloped down to a wide, shallow river all sparkling in western light, and over airy fields on the other side of it to the roofs of the distant village strung out under a break of woody hill.

"Are you sure you want him? He used to have a hot temper when he was a young man, and you know, Berns, it would be tiresome if there were any open scandal."

"Scandal be hanged," said Bernard Clowes. "You do as you're told." His wife gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders as if to disclaim further responsibility. She was breathing rather hurriedly as if she had been running, and her neck was so white that the shadow of her sunlit wistaria threw a faint lilac stain on the warm, fine grain of her skin. And the haggard look returned to Bernard's eyes as he watched her, and with it a wistfulness, a weariness of desire, "hungry, and barren, and sharp as the sea." Laura never saw that hunger in his eyes. If he spared her nothing else he spared her that.

"You do as I tell you, old girl," his harsh voice had softened again. "There won't be any row. Honestly I'd like to have old Lawrence here for a bit, I'm not rotting now. He had almost four years of it—almost as long as I had. I'll guarantee it put a mark on him. It scarred us all. It'll amuse me to dine him and Val together, and make them talk shop, our own old shop, and see what the war's done for each of us: three retired veterans, that's what we shall be, putting our legs under the same mahogany: three old comrades in arms." He gave his strange, jarring laugh. "Wonder which of us is scarred deepest?"

CHAPTER II

WANHOPE and Castle Wharton—or, to give them their due order, Wharton and Wanhope, for Major Clowes' place would have gone inside the Castle three times over—were the only country houses in the Reverend James Stafford's parish. The village of Chilmark—a stone bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman tower and frondlike Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line of school, shops, and cottages strung out between the stream and chalky beech-crested hillside occupied one of those long, winding, sheltered crannies that mark the beds of watercourses along the folds of Salisbury Plain. Uplands rose steeply all along it except on the south, where it widened away into the flats of Dorsetshire. Wharton overlooked this expanse of hunting country: a formidable Norman keep, round which, by gradual accretion, a dwelling-place had grown up, a history of English architecture and English gardening written in stone and brick and grass and flowers. One sunny square there was, enclosed between arched hedges set upon pillars of carpenters' work, which still kept the design of old Verulam: and Yvonne of the Castle loved its little turrets and cages of singing birds, and its alleys paved with burnet, wild thyme, and watermints, which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed.

Wanhope also, though modest by comparison, had a good deal of land attached to it, but the Clowes property lay north up the Plain, where they sowed the headlands with red wheat still as in the days of Justice Shallow. The shining Mere, a tributary of the Avon, came dancing down out of these hills: strange pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with fine sward, and worked by the hands of prehistoric man into bastions and ramparts that imitated in verdure the bold sweep of masonry.

Mr. Stafford was a man of sixty, white-haired and of sensitive, intelligent features. He was a High Churchman, but wore a felt wideawake in winter because when he bought it wideawakes were the fashion for High Churchmen. In the summer he usually roved about his parish without any hat at all, his white curls flying in the wind. He was of gentle birth, which tended to ease his intercourse with the Castle. He had a hundred a year of his own, and the living of Chilmark was worth 175 pounds net. So it may have been partly from necessity that he went about in clothes at which any respectable tramp would have turned his nose up: but idiosyncrasy alone can have inspired him to get the village tailor to line his short blue pilot jacket with pink flannelette. "It's very warm and comfortable, my dear," he said apologetically to his wife, who sat and gazed at him aghast, "so much more cosy than Italian cloth."

On that