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

After that he felt better. There was a pump in the yard, and he rinsed his head and hands under it, and washed off as best he could the stains of the fight, and re-knotted his scarf and shook himself down into his disordered clothes before going back to Isabel. And then it was that Isabel received of him a fresh impression as though she had never known him before, one of those vivid second impressions that efface earlier memories.

Val had always held paternal rank, Captain Hyde had been introduced as Val's late superior officer, and so Isabel had accepted him as Val's contemporary, of the generation before her own. But framed in the sunlit doorway, a very tall handsome man in undress, his coat thrown off, his trousers belted on his lean flanks, his wet shirt modelling itself over his powerful throat and shoulders and sticking to his ribs, Hyde might have been only six or seven and twenty: and certainly his manner was not middle-aged! Val's language was refined enough for a curate, and even Rowsley in his young sister's presence never went beyond a sarcenet oath; but Hyde's frank fury was piquant to Isabel's not very decorous taste. When he came in, her pain and faintness began to diminish as if a stream of warm fresh life were flowing into her veins.

"Are you better, Miss Isabel?"

"Ever so much better, thank you. Is—is Clara—?"

Cool, grave, and tranquil, Lawrence took her hand. "Clara is dead." He felt her trembling, and found a form of consolation which would have been slow to occur to his unprompted fancy. "Better so, isn't it? She wouldn't have been very happy after her husband's trying to kill her."

"No, she wouldn't want them to put him in an asylum," Isabel agreed, but in a subdued voice. "Did you forget my skirt?"

"No, but it was rather in a mess with the unfortunate Billy, and I'm afraid you'll have to do without it. I'm going to take you home now. You can walk, can't you, with my help? I'd like to carry you a few steps, till we're out of sight of the cottage. Put your arm round my neck." Isabel hesitated. She had been frightened out of her life and still felt cruelly shaken, but her quick sense of the ridiculous protested against this deference paid to her when she wasn't really hurt and it was all her own fault. What would Val have said? But apparently Captain Hyde was less exacting than Val. "Ah! let me: it is an ugly little scene outside and I don't want you to be haunted by it."

She resigned herself. She had not yet begun to feel shy of Lawrence, she was a child still, a child with the instincts of a woman, but those instincts all asleep. They quickened in her when she felt the glow of his life so near her own, but there was a touch of Miranda in Isabel, and no cautionary withdrawal followed.

And Lawrence? The trustfulness of a noble nature begets what it assumes. One need not ask what would have become of Miranda if she had given her troth to an unworthy Ferdinand, because the Mirandas of this world are rarely deceived. Hyde was but a battered Ferdinand. He was a man of strong and rather coarse fibre who had indifferently indulged tastes that he saw no reason to restrain. But he was changing: when he carried Isabel across the sunlit grass plot, her beautiful grave childish head lying warm on his shoulder, he had travelled far from the Hyde of the summer house at Bingley.

"My word!" said Yvonne Bendish, startled out of her drawl. "Is it you, Isabel?" She reined in and sat gazing with all her eyes at the couple coming down the field path to Chilmark Bridge. "Have you had an accident? What's happened?"

"Excuse my hat," said Lawrence with rather more than his habitual calm. "How lucky to have met you. There has been a shocking business up at Wancote. Perhaps you would take Miss Stafford home? She should be got to bed, I think."

Mrs. Jack Bendish was not soon ruffled, nor for long. "Lift her in," she said. "Sorry I can't make room for you too, Captain Hyde, you are as white as a ghost. Very upsetting, isn't it? but don't worry, girls of her age turn faint rather easily. Her arm hurt? . . ." She pointed down the road with her whip. "Dr. Verney lives at The Laburnus, on the right, beyond the publichouse. If you would be so kind as to send him up to the vicarage?"

She whipped up her black ponies and was gone. Lawrence was grateful to her for asking no questions, but he would rather have taken Isabel direct to Val. Romance in bud requires a delicate hand. Now Mrs. Jack Bendish had all the bourgeois virtues except modesty and discretion.

The Wancote affair made a nine days' wonder in the Plain. Indeed it even got into the London papers, under such titles as "A Domestic Tragedy" or "Duel with a Dog": and, while the Morning Post added a thumbnail sketch of Captain Hyde's distinguished career, the Spectator took Ben as the text of a "middle" on "The Abuse of Asylum Administration in Rural Districts."

Lawrence himself, when he had despatched Hubert Verney to the vicarage, would have liked to cut his responsibility. But it could not be done: first there was the village policeman to run to earth and information to be laid before him, and then, since Brown's first flustered impulse was to arrest all concerned from Lawrence to Clara Janaway, Lawrence had to walk down with him to Wharton to interview Jack Bendish, as both the nearest magistrate and the nearest sensible man. But after pouring his tale into Jack's sympathetic ear he felt entitled to wash his hands of the affair. Instead of going back to Wanhope with the relief party he got Bendish to drop him at the field path to Wanhope: and he slipped up to his room by a garden door, bathed, changed, and came down to lunch without trace of discomposure. Gaston, curtly ordered to take his master's clothes away and burn them, was eaten by curiosity, but in vain.

Even before his cousin, Lawrence did not own to his adventure till the servants had left the room. If it could have been kept dark he would not have owned to it at all. He did so only because it must soon be common property and he did not care to be taxed with affectation.

When, bit by bits his story came out across the liqueur glasses and the early strawberries, Major Clowes laid his head back and roared with laughter. Lawrence was annoyed: he had not found it amusing and he felt that his cousin had a macabre and uncomfortable sense of humour. But Bernard, wiping the tears from his eyes, developed unabashed his idea of a good joke. "Hark to him! Now isn't that Lawrence all over? What! can't you run down for twenty-four hours to a hamlet the size of Chilmark but you must bring your faics divers in your pocket?"

"It isn't my fault if you have dangerous lunatics at large," said Lawrence, helping himself daintily to cream. "If this is a specimen of the way things go on in country districts, thank you, give me a London slum. The brute was as mad as a hatter. He ought to have been locked up years ago. I can't conceive what Stafford was about to keep him on the estate."

"All very fine," Bernard chuckled, "but I'd lay any odds Ben didn't go for Mrs. Ben till he saw you coming."

"Adventures are to the adventurous," Laura mildly translated the bitter jest. Her mission in life was to smooth down Bernard's rough edges. "But that is too ugly, Berns. You oughtn't to say such a thing even in fun. It was no fun for Lawrence."

"I don't object to an occasional scrap," said Lawrence. "But this one was overdone." He shivered suddenly from head to foot.

"Hallo, old man, I didn't know you had a nerve in your body!" said Bernard staring at him.

Lawrence went on with his strawberries in an ungenial silence. He was irritated by his momentary self betrayal. If he had cared to explain it he would have had to confess that though personally indifferent to adventures he disliked to have women mixed up in them. He was glad when Laura with her intuitive tact changed the conversation, not too abruptly.

"All modern men have nerves. I should think Lawrence had as few as any, but it must have been a frightful scene. I must run up after lunch and see Isabel. Poor child! But she's wonderfully brave. All the Staffords were brought up to be stoical: if they knocked themselves about as children they were never allowed to cry. Mr. Stafford is a fanatic on the point of personal courage. Val told me once that the only sins for which his father ever cuffed him were telling fibs and running away."

"Did he get cuffed often?" Lawrence enquired.

"Shouldn't wonder," said Bernard. "Val's one of your nervy men."

"Not after he was ten years old," said Laura smiling. "But as a little boy he was always in trouble. Not the wisest treatment, was it? for a delicate, sensitive child."

"Miss Isabel is not nervous," said Lawrence. "She is as cool a young lady as I have ever seen. I believe she still owes me a grudge for hitting Billy so hard." He dipped his fingers delicately into his finger bowl. "No, no more, thanks. Did I tell you that the brute of a Dane bit her?"

"Bit Isabel!"

"Made his teeth pretty nearly meet in her forearm. She was trying to soothe the dear dog. Mr. Stafford's theories may be ethically beautiful, but I object to their being carried to extremes. Frankly, I should describe your young friend as idiotically rash," said Lawrence with a wintry smile. "I couldn't prevent her doing it because I hadn't the remotest notion she was going to do it. The Dane was practically mad with rage. I could have cuffed her myself with pleasure. It was a wild thing to do and not at all agreeable for me."

"But, my dear Lawrence, that is one way of looking at it!" Laura protested, amused by his cool egoism, though she took it with the necessary grain of salt. "Bitten by that horrible dog? My poor Isabel! she loves dogs—I don't suppose she stopped to consider her own feelings or yours."

"She ought to have had more sense."

"Hear, hear!" said Bernard. "Half the trouble in the world comes from women shoving in where they're not wanted. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Lawrence, after lying here to be slobbered over by a pack of old women. I always exclude you, my dear," he nodded to Laura, "but the parson twaddles on till he makes me sick, and Val's not much better. What's a woman want with courage? Teach her to buy decent clothes and put 'em on properly, and she's learning something useful. I'll guarantee Isabel only got in the way. But you, Lawrence," he measured his cousin with an admiring eye, much as a Roman connoisseur might have run over the points of a favourite gladiator, "I should have liked to see you tackle the Dane. You're a big chap—deeper in the chest than I ever was, and longer in the reach. What's your chest measurement?— Yes, you look it. And nothing in your hand but a stick? By Jove, it must have been worth watching! Hey, Laura?"

"Bernard, you are embarrassing! You will make even Lawrence shy. But, yes," Laura laid her hand on Hyde's arm: "I should have liked to watch you fight the Dane."

How long was it since any one had spoken to Lawrence in that warm tone of affection? Not since his father died. From time to time Mrs. Cleve or other ladies had flattered his senses or his vanity, but none of them had ever looked at him with Laura's kind admiring