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

"I married out of my class. It was when I was at Cambridge. She was a beautiful girl but she was not a lady. Her father was a tobacconist in the Cury, and Lizzie liked to serve in the shop. As she didn't want to lose her character nor I my degree, we compromised on secret nuptials. I took a house for her in Newham where I could go and visit her. I ought not to tell you the rest of the story."

"Oh yes, you can," said Isabel simply. "I hear all sorts of stories in the village."

So childish in some ways, so mature in others, she saw that Lawrence was longing to unbosom himself, and her instinct was to listen quietly, for, after all, this, though the strangest, was not the first such confidence that had been poured into her ear. She and her brother Val were alike in occasionally hearing secrets that had never been told to any one else. Why? Probably because they never gave advice, never moralized, never thought of themselves at all but only of the friend in distress. Isabel took Hyde's hand and held it closely, palm to palm. "Tell me all about it."

"There was another fellow at Trinity who had been in the Sixth at Eton with me, a year older than I was, a very brilliant man and as hard as nails: Rendell, his name was: an athlete, a tophole centre-forward, with a fascinating Irish manner and blazing blue eyes. To him I told my tale, because we were Damon and Pythias, and I couldn't have kept a secret from him to save my life. I was an ingenuous youngster in those days: never was such a pal as my pal! He saw me through my marriage and afterwards I took him with me once or twice to Myrtle Villa: it may illuminate the situation if I say that it made me all the prouder of Lizzie when I saw Rendell admired her: never was such an idyll as my manage a trois! Unluckily, one evening when I turned up unexpectedly I found them together."

"Oh! . . . What did you do?"

"Nothing. There was nothing to be done. I wasn't going to ruin myself by divorcing her. Luckily the war broke out and Rendell and I both enlisted the next day. He was killed fighting by my side at Neuve Chapelle, and I had the job of breaking the news to Lizzie. She was royally angry, poor Lizzle: told me I had no right to be alive when a better man than myself was dead. I agreed: Rendell was—the better man, though he didn't behave well to me. He died better than he lived. Out there it didn't seem to matter much. He died in my arms."

"Did you forgive your wife?"

"I never lived with her again, if that's what you mean. If I had been willing, which I wasn't, she never would have consented. She had the rather irrational prejudices of her type and class, and persisted in regarding me, or professing to regard me, as answerable for Rendell's death. It wasn't true," said Lawrence, turning his eyes on Isabel without any attempt to veil their agony. "If I'd meant to shoot him I should have shot him to his face. But I'd have saved him if I could. How on earth could any one do anything in such a hell as Neuve Chapelle? That week every officer in my company was either killed or wounded. But Lizzie had no imagination. She couldn't get beyond the fact that I was alive and he was dead."

"What became of her?"

"I'm sorry to say she went to the bad. She had money from both of us, but she spent it in public houses—didn't seem to care what happened to her after losing Arthur: a wretched life: it ended last January with her death from pneumonia after measles. That was what brought me back to England; I couldn't stand coming home before."

"Was it a relief when she died?"

"No, I was sorry," said Hyde. His wide black eyes, devil-driven beyond reticence, were riveted on Isabel's: apparently she no longer existed for him except as the Chorus before whom he could strip himself of the last rag of his reserve. "It brought it all back. I was besotted when I married her, and I remembered all that when I saw her dead. I forgot the other men. It was just as it was when Arthur died. I couldn't do anything for him, and he was in agony: he was shot through the stomach: it didn't seem to matter then that he had robbed me of Lizzie. I couldn't even get him a drop of water to drink. He died hard, did Rendell. It wasn't true, what Lizzie said. I'd have given my life for him. But I couldn't even make it easy for him to go."

"Poor Rendell," said Isabel softly, "and poor you! Oh, I'm so sorry—I'm so sorry!"

She was not afraid of Hyde now nor shy of him, she felt only an immense pity for him—this man who for no conceivable reason and without the slightest warning had flung the weight of his terrible past on her young shoulders. She longed to comfort him. But he was inaccessibly far away, isolated, his voice rapid and hard and clear, his manner normal: every nerve stripped bare but still rigid. Inexperienced as she was, Isabel had a shrewd idea of his immediate need. She took up the ring that Lawrence had wrenched off and slipped it on his finger again.

"Don't do that," said Lawrence starting: "why do you do that?"

"But I shall love to see you wear it," said Isabel. "It's the sign that you've forgiven them both."

"Have I?"

"Of course you have. You loved them too much not to forgive."

"It is true. But I hate myself for it," said Lawrence. "I hate your etiolated Christian ethics. I don't believe in the forgiveness of sins. The complaisant husband, O God! If I'd had the spirit of a man, I should have shot Arthur the night—that night—. . . .

"But you loved him," said Isabel, "and your wife too. You felt revenge and hate and passion, but love was stronger: and love is nobler than hate. They betrayed you, but you never betrayed them. It wasn't unmanly of you, it was defeat and dishonour for them, not for you, when Rendell, after that great wrong he had done you, when you tried to make it easy for him to go."

"May I—?" said Lawrence.

He leaned his face down on her open palms, and she felt the tears that she could not see. He could not control them, and indeed after the first racking agony, when he felt as though his will were being torn out of him by the roots, he made no effort to control them, releasing Isabel and dropping at full length upon the turf. Nothing else, no torment of his own thoughts, not Rendell's last pangs nor his wife's beauty young again in death had ever made Hyde weep: if Rendell had died hard, Lawrence had lived equally hard, locking up his frightful trouble in his own breast, escaping from it when he could, cursing it and fighting against it when it threatened to overpower him. But now he surrendered to it and acknowledged to himself that it had broken his life. And he felt no shame, not one iota, nothing but a profound soulagement: the proud reticent man, too vain to shed tears in his own room alone, wept voluntarily before Isabel, uncovering for her pity the wounds not only of grief but of rage and humiliation.

Such an outbreak would have been impossible in a man of pure English blood, and in a pure Oriental it would have manifested itself differently, but Isabel had truly said of Hyde that his temperament was not homogeneous: the mixed strain in him betrayed him into strange incongruities of strength and weakness. Isabel shut her eyes to incongruity. She gave him without stint the pitying gentleness he thirsted for. She refused now to contrast him with her brother. Certainly Val's judgment would have been cutting and curt. But just? Hardly. By instinct Isabel felt that her brother's clear, sane, English mind had not all the factors necessary for judging this collapse.

Her imagination was at work in the shadow: "'the night—that night. . . ." How do men live through such hours? She saw Lizzie as a chocolate-box beauty, but redeemed from hebetude by her robust youth: able to attract Hyde by his love of luxury and to hold him by main force: uneducated, coarse, and cruel, but not weak. What a disastrous marriage! doomed from the outset, even if no Rendell had come on the scene. Isabel dismissed Rendell rather scornfully: in that night at Myrtle Villa she felt pretty sure that the duel had been fought out between husband and wife: the very staging of it, picturesque for Lizzie Hyde and tragic for her husband, must for the entrapped lover have taken a frame of ignominious farce. A gleam shot through Isabel's eyes-as she imagined Rendell trying to face Hyde, and Hyde sparing him and sending him away untouched. No, no! as between the two men, the honours lay with Hyde.

But as between him and Lizzie? There the reckoning was not so easy. His wife had set scars on him that would never wear out. Dimly Isabel guessed that since coming out of her destructive hands Hyde himself could be both coarse and cruel: the seed of brutality must have been in him all along, but Myrtle Villa had fertilized it. If he married again, what would be required of Lizzie's successor? A strange deep smile gave to Isabel's young lips the wisdom of the women of all the ages. Love that gives without stint asking for no recompense: love that understands yet will not criticize nor listen to criticism: love that dares to deny its lover for his own sake.

After collapse came quiescence, and, after a long quiescence, revival. Hyde raised himself on his arm and felt for his handkerchief—indifferent to Isabel's observation, or soothed by it: his features were ravaged. Isabel drenched her own handkerchief in Mrs. Bendish's eau-de cologne and gave it him, dripping wet. "Take this, it will do you good."

"Thank you" said Lawrence, exhausted and subdued.

Becoming gradually rather more composed, he raised his eyes again. "What must you think of me? It is beyond apology. Will you ever forgive me?"

"There's nothing to forgive: I'm not hurt."

"You're rather young to hear such a history as mine."

She blushed. "Val says it doesn't matter what one knows so long as one doesn't think about it in the wrong way." With her sweet friendly smile, she touched with her fingertip the lapel of his coat: an airy gesture, but there was a fire as well as sweetness in Isabel, and for his life Lawrence could not repress a start. "You mustn't mind me, Captain Hyde. You needn't mind, because you couldn't help it. One can keep a secret for twenty years but not for ever, and for confessor I suppose any woman will do better than a man, won't she? It's not as though I should ever tell any one else: I never will, I promise you that. You'll go away and never see me again, and it'll be as though no one knew or as though I were dead."

Touching innocence! Did she indeed imagine that after such a scene . . .?

"But I do not care two straws," said Lawrence, "so spare your consolations! On the contrary, it has been a great relief to me. It's as if you had unlocked a door. The prisoner you have set free thanks you. I was only afraid it might have been too much for you, but you're made of strong stuff. Yet I don't suppose you ever saw a man weep before: well, you've seen it now: mon Dieu, mon Dieu, but I am tired! But you've let yourself in for a considerable responsibility."

"For what?"

"For me. Do you think it can ever again be the same between us?" On one knee by Isabel's chair, Hyde laughed down at her