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

the trees were set apart with an airy and graceful effect, so that one could trace the course of their branches; and between them were visible hayfields from which the hay had recently been carried, and the headlands of the Plain—fair sunny distances, the lowlands bloomed over with summer mist, the uplands delicately clear like those blue landscapes that in early Italian pictures lie behind the wheel of Saint Catherine or the turrets of Saint Barbara.

"A sweet pretty place you have here. I was in China nine weeks ago. Everlasting mud huts and millet fields. I must say there's nothing to beat an English June."

"Or a French June?" suggested Laura, her accent faintly sly.
"Lucian said he met you at Auteuil."

"Dear old Lucian! He seemed very fit, but rather worried about you, Laura—may I call you Laura? We're cousins by marriage, which constitutes a sort of tie. Besides, you let me at Farringay."

"Farringay. . . . What a long while ago it seems! I can't keep up any pretence of juvenility with you, can I? We were the same age then so we're both thirty-six now. Isn't it strange to think that half one's life is over? Mine doesn't seem ever to have begun. But you wouldn't feel that: a man's life is so much fuller than a woman's. You've been half over the world while Berns and I have been patiently cultivating our cabbage patch. I envy you: it would be jolly to have one's mind stored full of queer foreign adventures and foreign landscapes to think about in odd moments, even if it were only millet fields."

"I've no ties, you see, nothing to keep me in England. Come to think of it, Bernard is my nearest male relative, since my father died five years ago."

"I heard of that and wanted to write to you, but I wasn't sure of your address"

"I was in Peru. They cabled to me to come home when he was taken ill, but I was up country and missed it. The first news I had was a second cable announcing his death. It was unlucky."

"For both of you," said Laura gently, "if it meant that he was alone when he died." Sincere herself, Mrs. Clowes exacted from her friends either sincerity or silence, and her sweet half-melancholy smile pierced through Hyde's conventional regrets. He was silent, a little confused.

They were near the river now, and in the pale shadow of the lime tree Laura sat down on a bench, while Hyde threw himself on a patch of sunlit turf at her feet. Most men of his age would have looked clumsy in such an unbuttoned attitude, but Hyde was an athlete still, and Laura, who was fond of sketching, admired his vigorous grace. She felt intimate with him already: she was not shy nor was Lawrence, but this was an intimacy of sympathy that went deeper than the mere trained ease of social intercourse: she could be herself with him: she could say whatever she liked. And, looking back on the old days which she had half forgotten, Laura remembered that she had always felt the same freedom from constraint in Hyde's company: she had found it pleasant fourteen years ago, when she was young and had no reserves except a natural delicacy of mind, and it was pleasant still, but strange, after the isolating adventure of her marriage. Perhaps she would not now have felt it so strongly, if he had not been her husband's cousin as well as her friend.

She sat with folded hands watching Lawrence with a vague, observant smile. Drilled to a stately ease and worn down to a lean hardihood by his life of war and wandering, he was, like his cousin, a big, handsome man, but distinguished by the singular combination of black eyes and fair hair. Was there a corresponding anomaly in his temperament? He looked as though he had lived through many experiences and had come out of them fortified with philosophy—that easy negative philosophy of a man of the world, for which death is only the last incident in life and not the most important. Of Bernard's hot passions there was not a sign. Amiable? Laura fancied that so far as she was concerned she could count on a personal amiability: he liked her, she was sure of that, his eyes softened when he spoke to her. But the ruck of people? She doubted whether Lawrence would have lost his appetite for lunch if they had all been drowned.

The pleasant, selfish man of the world is a common type, but she could not confine Lawrence to his type. He basked in the sun: with every nerve of his thinly-clad body he relinquished himself to the contact of the warm grass: deliberately and consciously he was savouring the honied air, the babble of running water, the caress of the tiny green blades fresh against his cheek and hand, the swell of earth that supported his broad, powerful limbs. This sensuous acceptance of the physical joy of life pleased Laura, born a Selincourt, bred in France, and temperamentally out of touch with middle-class England.

Whether one could rely on him for any serviceable friendship Laura was uncertain. As a youth he had inclined to idealize women, but she was suspicious of his later record. Good or bad it had left no mark on him. Probably he had not much principle where women were concerned. Few of the men Laura had known in early life had had any principles of any sort except a common spirit of kindliness and fair play. Her brother was always drifting in and out of amatory entanglements—the hunter or the hunted—and he was not much the worse for it so far as Laura could see. Perhaps Hyde was of the game stamp, in which case there might well be no lines round his mouth, since lines are drawn by conflict: or perhaps a wandering life had kept him out of harm's way. It made no great odds to Laura—she had not the shrinking abhorrence which most women feel for that special form of evil: it was on the same footing in her mind as other errors to which male human nature is more prone than female, a little worse than drunkenness but not so bad as cruelty. From her own life of serene married maidenhood such sins of the flesh seemed as remote as murder.

The strong southern light broke in splinters on the dancing water, and was mirrored in reflected ripplings, silver-pale, tremulous, over the shadowy understems of grass and loosestrife on the opposite bank. "And I never gave you anything to drink after all!" said Laura after a long, companionable silence. "Why didn't you remind me?"

"Because I didn't want it. Don't you worry: I'll look after myself. I always do. I'm a charming guest, no trouble to any one."

"At least have a cigarette while you're waiting for lunch! I'm sorry to have none to offer you."

"Don't you smoke now? You did at Farringay."

"No, I've given it up. I never much cared for it, and Bernard does so hate to see a woman smoking. He is very old-fashioned in some ways."

"And do you always do as Bernard likes?" Lawrence asked with an impertinence so airy that it left Laura no time to be offended. "—It was a great shock to me to find him so helpless. Is he always like that?"

"He can never get about, if that's what you mean." It was not all Hyde meant, but Laura had not the heart to repress him; she felt that thrill of guilty joy which we all feel when some one says for us what we are too magnanimous to say for ourselves. "He lies indoors all day smoking and reading quantities of novels."

"Fearfully sad. Very galling to the temper. But there are a lot of modern mechanical appliances, aren't there, that ought to make him fairly independent?"

"He won't touch any of them."

"Sick men have their whims. But can't you drag him out into the sun? He ought not to lie in that mausoleum of a hall."

"He has never been in the garden in all our years at Wanhope."

Lawrence took off his straw hat to fan himself with. It was not only the heat of the day that oppressed him. "Poor, wretched Bernard! But I dare say I should be equally mulish if I were in his shoes. By the by, was he really in pain just now?"

"Really in pain?" Laura echoed. "Why—why should you say that?" She no longer doubted Lawrence Hyde's subtlety. "'He's constantly in pain and he scarcely ever complains."

"Oh? I didn't know one suffered, with paralysis."

"He has racking neuritis in his shoulders and back."

"That's bad. I'm afraid he can't be much up to entertaining visitors. Does he hate having me here?"

"No! oh no! I know he sometimes seems a little odd," said poor Laura, wishing her guest were less clear-sighted: and yet before he came she had been hoping that Lawrence would divine the less obvious aspects of the situation, and perhaps, since a man can do more with a man like Bernard than any woman can, succeed in easing it. "But can you wonder? Struck down like this at five and twenty! and he never was keen on indoor interests—sport and his profession were all he cared about. Please, Lawrence, make allowances for him—he had been looking forward so much to your coming here! A man's society always does him good, and you know how few men there are in this country: we have only the vicar, and the doctor, and Jack Bendish and people who stay at the Castle. And if you only realized how different he was with you from what he is with most people, you would be flattered! He won't let any one touch him as a rule, except Barry, whom he treats like a machine. But he was quite grateful to you—he seemed to lean on you."

"Did he?"

She had made Lawrence feel uncomfortable again in the region of the heart, but he was deliberately stifling pity, as five years ago, in a Peruvian fonda, he had subdued his filial tenderness and grief. He was not callous: if he had had the earlier cable he would have sailed for home without delay. But since Andrew Hyde was dead and would never know whether his son wept for him or not, Lawrence set himself to repress not only tears but the fount of human feeling that fed them. He had dabbled enough in psychology to know that natural emotions, if not indulged, may only be driven down under the surface, there to work havoc among the roots of nerve life. Lawrence however had no nerves and no fear of Nemesis, and no inclination to sacrifice himself for Bernard, and he determined, if Wanhope continued to inspire these oppressive sensations to send himself a telegram calling him away.

He changed the subject. "It's a long while since I've heard stockdoves cooing. And, yes, that's a nightingale. Oh, you jolly little beggar!" His face fell into boyish creases when he smiled. "Do you remember the nightingales at Farringay? Laura— may I say it?—while rusticating in Arden you haven't forgotten certain talents you used to possess. The dress is delightful, but where the masterhand appears is in the way it's worn. That carries me back to Auteull."

"Nonsense!" said Laura, changing her attitude, but not visibly displeased.

"Oh I shan't say don't move" Lawrence murmured. "The slippers also. . . . Are there many trout in this river, I wonder? Hallo! there's a big fellow rubbing along by that black stone! Must weigh a cool pound and a half. I suppose the angling rights go with the property?"

"You can fish all day long if you like: the water is ours, both sides of it, as far south as the mill above Wharton and a good half-mile upstream. The banks are kept clear on principle, though none of us ever touch a line. The Castle people come over now and then: Jack Bendish is keen, and he says our sport is better than theirs because they fish theirs down too much. Val put some stock in this spring."

"Val?"

"You seem to fit in so naturally," Laura smiled, "that I forget you've