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

to pull down her sleeve, but checked herself, and turning a little away, so that she could pretend not to know that he was looking at her, raised her arm to smooth her hair, lifting it and pushing a loosened hairpin into place. After all . . . This was Isabel's first venture into coquetry. But it was half unconscious.

"Why can't you? oh, I suppose people would be silly. Major
Clowes himself is silly enough for anything. Oh, I'm so sorry,
I always forget he's your cousin! Is that why you want me to
go?"

"No."

She laughed. "Never mind, you'll soon find some one else. What play is it?"

"'She Promised to Marry.'"

"Oh ah, yes: that's by Moore, who wrote 'The Milkmaid' and 'Sheddon, M.P.' I've read some of his things. I liked them so, I made Rowsley give me them for my last birthday. They're quite cheap in brown paper. O! dear, I should love to see one of them on the stage!" Isabel gave a great sigh. "A London stage too! I've never been to a theatre except in Salisbury. And Hadow's is the one to go to, isn't it? Where they play the clever plays that aren't tiresome. Who's acting tonight?"

"Madeleine Wild and Peter Sennet."

"Have you ever seen them?"

Lawrence laughed outright. "I was at their wedding. Madeleine is half French: I knew her first when she was singing in a cafe chantant on the Champs Elysees. She is dark and pretty and Peter is fair and pretty, and Peter is the deadliest poker player that ever scored off an American train crook."

"Oh," said Isabel with a second sigh that nearly blew her away, "how I should love to know actors and actresses and people who play poker! It must make Life so intensely interesting!"

Behind her badinage was she half in earnest? Lawrence's eye ranged over the old pale walls of the vicarage, on which the climbing roses were already beginning to redden their leaves: over the lavender borders: over the dry pale turf underfoot and the silver and brown of the Plain, burnt by a hot summer. The fruit that had been green in June was ripe now, and down the Painted-Lady apple-trees fell such a cascade of ruby and coral-coloured apples, from high sprig to heavy bole, that they looked like trees in a Kate Greenaway drawing. But there was no other change. Life at Chilmark flowed on uneventful from day to day. He did not admonish Isabel to be content with it. "Should you like to live in Chelsea?"

Isabel shut her eyes. "I should like fifteen thousand a year and a yacht. Don't tell Jimmy, it would break his heart. He says money is a curse. But he's not much of a judge, dear angel, because he's never had any. What's your opinion—you're rich, aren't you? Has it done you any harm?"

"Oh, I am a fairly decent sort of fellow as men go."

"But would you be a nobler character if you were poor?" Isabel asked, pillowing her round chin on her palm and examining Lawrence apparently in a spirit of scientific enquiry. "Because that is Jimmy's theory, and merely to say that you're noble now doesn't meet the case. Do you do good with your money?"

"No fear! I encourage trade. I've never touched second rate stuff in my life."

"Oh, you are different!" Isabel exclaimed. They had been using words for counters, to mean at once less and more than they said, but under his irony she penetrated to a hard material egoism, as swiftly as he had detected in her the eternal unrest of youth. "Val was right."

"What saith the Gospel according to St. Val?"

"That you were only a bird of passage."

Lawrence waited a moment before replying. "Birds of passage have their mating seasons." Once more Isabel, not knowing what to make of this remark, let it alone. "But I should like to possess Val's good opinion. What have I done to offend him? Can't you give me any tips?"

"It isn't so much what you do as what you are. Val's very, very
English."

"But what am I?"

"Foreign," said Isabel simply.

"A Jew? Yes, I knew I should have that prejudice to live down.
But I'm not a hall-marked Israelite, am I? After all I'm half
English by birth and wholly so by breeding." Isabel was betrayed
into an involuntary and fleeting smile. "Hallo! what's this?"

"Oh, Captain Hyde—"

"Go on."

"No: it's the tiniest trifle, and besides I've no right."

"Ask me anything you like, I give you the right."

Isabel blushed. "You must be descended from Jephthah!— O! dear,
I didn't mean that!"

"Never mind," said Lawrence, unable to help laughing. "My feelings are not sensitive. But do finish—you fill me with curiosity. What shibboleth do I fail in?"

Faithful are the wounds of a friend. "Englishmen don't wear jewellery," murmured Isabel apologetic.

"Sac a papier!" said Lawrence. "My rings?"

He stretched out his hand, a characteristic hand, strong and flexible, but soft from idleness and white from Gaston's daily attentions: a diamond richly set in a cluster of diamonds and emeralds sparkled on the second finger, and a royal turquoise from Iran, an immense stone the colour of the Mediterranean in April, on the third. "Does Val object to them? Certainly Val is very English. My pocket editions of beauty! That diamond was presented by one of the Rothschilds in gratitude for the help old Hyde-and-seek gave him in getting together his collection of early English watercolours: as for the other, it never ought to have left the Persian treasury, and there'd have been trouble in the royal house if my father had worn it at the Court. Have you ever seen such a blue? On a dull railway journey I can sit and watch those stones by the hour together. But Val would rather read the Daily Mail"

"Every one laughs at them: Jack and Lord Grantchester, and even
Jimmy."

"And you?" said Lawrence, taking off the rings:—not visibly nettled, but a trifle regretful.

Isabel knit her brows. "Can a thing be very beautiful and historic, and yet not in good taste?— It can if it's out of harmony: that's what the Greeks never forgot. Men ought not to look effeminate— Oh! O Captain Hyde, don't!"

Lawrence, standing up, had with one powerful smooth drive of the arm sent both rings skimming over the borders, under the apple trees, over the garden wall, to scatter and drop on the open moor. "And here comes Mrs. Clowes, so now I shall learn my fate. I thought Val would not leave us long together.— Well, Val, what is it to be? May the young lady come?"

Isabel also sprang up, changing from woman to child as Lawrence changed from deference to patronage. Their manner to each other when alone was always different from their manner before an audience. But this change, deliberate in Lawrence, had hitherto been instinctive and almost unconscious in Isabel. It was not so now, she fled to Val and to her younger self for refuge. What a fanfaronade! Why couldn't Captain Hyde have put the rings in his pocket? But no, it must all be done with an air—and what an air! Rings worth thousands—historic mementoes—stripped off and tossed away to please—! And at that Isabel, enchanted and terrified, bundled the entire dialogue into the cellars of her mind and locked the doors on it. Later,—later,—when one was alone! "Oh, Val, say I may go!" she cried, clasping her hands on Val's arm, so cool and firm amid a spinning world.

[Footnote]

What actually happened later that afternoon was that Isabel, who had a practical mind, spent three-quarters of an hour on the moor hunting for the rings. The turquoise she found, conspicuous on a patch of smooth turf: the other was never recovered.

[End of Footnote]

"You may," said Val laughing. He disliked the scheme, but was incapable of refusing Laura Clowes: he gave her Isabel as he would have given her the last drops of his blood, if she had asked for them in that low voice of hers, and with those sweet eyes that never seemed to anticipate refusal. There are women—not necessarily the most beautiful of their sex—to whom men find it hard to refuse anything. And, consenting, it was not in Val to consent with an ill grace. "Certainly you may, if Captain Hyde is kind enough to take you!" Stafford's lips, finely cut and sensitive, betrayed the sarcastic sense of humour which he ruled out of his voice: perhaps the less said about kindness the better! "But do look over her wardrobe first, Laura: I'm never sure whether Isabel is grown up or not, but she could hardly figure at Hadow's in her present easy-going kit—"

He stopped, because Isabel was trying to waltz him round the lawn. In her reaction from a deeper excitement, she was as excited as a child. She released Val soon and hugged Laura Clowes instead, while Lawrence, looking on with his wintry smile, wondered whether she would have extended the same civility to him if she had known how much he desired it. . . . There were moments when he hated Isabel. Was she never going to grow up?

Not at present, apparently. "What must I wear, Laura? Do people wear evening dress? Where shall we sit? What time shall we get back? How are you going? What time must I be ready? Will you have dinner before you go or take sandwiches with you?"—how long the patter of questions would have run on it is hard to say, if the extreme naivete of the last one had not drowned them in universal laughter, and Isabel in crimson.

Mrs. Jack Bendish rode up while they were talking, slipped from her saddle, and threw the reins to Val without apology, though she knew there was no one but Val to take the mare to the stable. Yvonne was the only member of the Castle household who presumed on Val's subordinate position. She treated him like a superior servant. When she heard what was in the wind her eyes were as green as a cat's. "How kind of Captain Hyde!" she drawled, as Lawrence, irritated by her manner, went to help Val, while Isabel was called indoors by Fanny to listen to a tale of distress, unravel a grievance, and prescribe for anemia. "Some one ought to warn the child."

"Warn her of what?"

"Has it never struck you that Isabel is a pretty girl and
Lawrence a good looking man?"

"But Isabel is too intelligent to have her head turned by the first handsome man she meets!" Yvonne looked as though she found her sister rather hopeless. "Dear, you really must be sensible!" Laura pleaded. "It's not as if poor Lawrence had tried to flirt with her. He never even thought of asking her for tonight till I suggested it!" This was the impression left on Laura's memory. "She isn't the sort of woman to attract him."

"What sort of woman would attract him, I wonder?" said Mrs. Jack, blowing rings of smoke delicately down her thin nostrils.

"Oh, when he marries it will be some one older than Isabel, more sophisticated, more a woman of the world. I like Lawrence immensely, but there is just that in him: he's one of the men who expect their wives to do them credit."

"Some one more like me," suggested Yvonne. "Or you." Her face was a study in untroubled innocence. Laura eyed her rather sharply. "But Lawrence isn't a marrying man. He won't marry till some woman raises the price on him."

"You speak as if between men and women life were always a duel."

"So It is." Laura made a small inarticulate sound of dissent. "Sex is a duel. Don't you know"—an infinitesimal hesitation marked the conscious forcing of a barrier: cynically frank as she was on most points, Mrs. Bendish had always left her sister's married life alone:—"that—that's what's wrong with Bernard? Oh! Laura! Simpleton that you are. . . I'm often frightfully sorry for Bernard. It has thrown him clean off the rails. One can't wonder that