"That is a question I have occasionally asked myself," Val answered with his faint indecipherable smile. "My dear child, I only saw him once or twice. He was a senior captain and commanded his company. I was a very junior lieutenant."
"Still he was there at the time," reflected Isabel. "O Rose! if he"s anything like nice, which is almost past praying for in Major Clowes" cousin, let"s beguile him into the gooseberry bushes and make him tell us all about it! Val is very dear to his family, but no one, however tenderly attached to him, could call him a brilliant raconteur. Now Mr. Hyde won"t have any modest scruples. Val, if there is a slug in that lettuce I wish you would say so. It would hurt my feelings less than for you to sit looking at it in a stony silence. Was he good-looking?"
"Possibly he might be," said Val, "when he sc.r.a.ped the dirt off."
After a moment he added, "He was very decent to me."
"Was he? Then he was nice?"
"Gnat," said Rowsley from the middle of his third egg. Isabel rounded him indignantly.
"I"m not gnatting! I"m not asking Val anything about himself, am I? Val can"t possibly mind telling me about another man in another regiment. You eat your eggs, there"s a good boy, before they get cold.-- Laura says the Dorchesters dined the Winchesters once when they were in billets. Was that when you and Mr. Hyde were there?"
"Captain Hyde," Val corrected his young sister. "Yes, we both graced the festive board. It was too festive for me. We had Buszard"s soup and curried chicken and real cream, and more champagne than was good for us. But it was not on that occasion that Hyde was so decent to me. The day I--the day Dale went down--" Rowsley nodded to him as he raised his gla.s.s of beer to his lips--"thank you, Rose.-- As I was saying, that evening I ran across Hyde between the lines. The Dorsets and Wintons had gone over the top together, and he had been left behind with a bullet in his chest. I was done to the world, but he had some brandy left and shared it with me. If it had not been for Hyde I should never have brought Dale in."
"Well, I"ve never heard that before," said Rowsley to his fourth egg.
Isabel was silent, and her eyes in the shadow of a momentary gravity were the eyes of a woman and not of a child. She raised them to look out at the evening sky, indigo blue against the lamplit interior, or faintly primrose in the west, and wondered for the thousandth time why it was still such an effort to Val to refer to his brief military experience. Soft country noises came in, peaceful and soothing: the short shrill shriek of a bat, the rustle of a branch of rose-leaves moving like a hand over the window panes, a faint breathing of wind from the moor. Surely the scar of war ought to be healed by now! Isabel kept these thoughts to herself: young as she was, her solitary life--for a woman alone among men is always to some extent solitary--had trained her to a clear perception of what had better not be said.
"When is Hyde coming?" asked Val, going on with his salad.
"Tomorrow, didn"t you hear me say Laura is going to bring him here to tea? He"s staying at his own place, Farringay--I think from the way Laura spoke it is what one calls a place--and they expect him by the morning train. Laura"s to meet him in the car."
"Did you ask her to bring him in to tea," said Rowsley, frowning over the marmalade jar, "when Val is safe to be out and you didn"t know I should be here?"
"Yes: oughtn"t I to have?"
"No."
"Is there anything else you would like to speak to me about?"
said Isabel after a pregnant silence. "Dear Rowsley, you seem determined to look after my manners and morals! I asked him to please Laura. She"s nervous of Major Clowes. Jack and Yvonne are coming too."
"Oh I don"t see that it signifies," said Val. Mrs. Clowes wouldn"t have accepted if it weren"t all right. I don"t see that you or I need worry if she doesn"t. Isabel is old enough to pour out tea for herself. In any case, as it happens, you"ll be here if I"m not, and I dare say Jimmy will look in for ten minutes."
"You are sweet, Val," said Isabel gratefully.
"Oh I don"t say Rowsley"s not right! Prigs generally are: and besides now I come to think of it, Laura did look faintly amused when I asked her. But these stupid things never occur to me till afterwards! After all, what am I to do? I can"t manufacture a chaperon, and it would be very bad for the parish if the vicar never entertained. And it"s not as if Captain Hyde were a young man; he"s thirty-six if he"s a day."
CHAPTER III
When the sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war.
When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester Regiment, a keen polo player and first cla.s.s batsman who rarely opened a book. He was sent out with the First Division and carried himself with his usual phlegmatic good humour through almost four years of fighting from Mons to Cambrai.
In the March break-through he had his wrist broken by a rifle-bullet and was invalided home, where he took advantage of his leave to get married, partly because most of the men he knew were already married, and partly to please his sister. There were no other brothers, and Mrs. Morrison, a practical lady, but always a little regretful of her own marriage with Morrison"s Boot and Shoe Company, recommended him with the family bluntness to arrange for an olive branch before the Huns got him.
Laura, a penniless woman two years his senior and handicapped by her disreputable belongings, was not the wife Gertrude Morrison would have chosen for him: still it might have been worse, for Laura was well-born and personally irreproachable, while Clowes, hot-blooded and casual, was as likely as not to have married a chorus-girl. If any disappointment lingered, Gertrude soothed it by trying over in her own mind the irritation that she would be able to produce in Morrison circles: "Where he met her?
Oh, when she was staying with her married sister at Castle Wharton . . . .Yvonne, the elder Selincourt girl, married into the Bendish family."
Bernard did not care a straw either for the paternal handicap or for the glories of the Wharton connection. He took his love-affair as simply as his cricket and with the same bold confidence. Laura was what he wanted; she would fit into her surroundings at Wanhope as delicately as an old picture fits into an old frame, and one could leave her about--so he put it to himself--without fear of her getting damaged. When Tom Morrison, shrewd business man, dropped a hint about the rashness of marrying the daughter of a scamp like Ferdinand Selincourt, Bernard merely stared at him and let the indiscretion go in silence. He can scarcely be said to have loved his bride, for up to the time of the wedding his nature was not much more developed than that of a prize bull, but he considered her a very pretty woman, and his faith in her was a religion.
So they were married, and went to Eastbourne for their honeymoon: an average match, not marked by pa.s.sion on either side, but destined apparently to an average amount of comfort and good will. They had ten gay days before Laura was left on a victoria platform, gallantly smiling with pale lips and waving her handkerchief after the train that carried Bernard back to the front.
Five months later on the eve of the Armistice he was flung out of the service, a broken man, paralysed below the waist, cursing every one who came near him and chiefly the surgeons for not letting him die. No one ever desired life more pa.s.sionately than Bernard desired death. For some time he clung to the hope that his mind would wear his body out. But his body was too young, too strong, too tenacious of earth to be betrayed by the renegade mind.
There came a day when Clowes felt his youth welling up in him like sap in a fallen tree: new energy throbbed in his veins, his heart beat strong and even, it was hard to believe that he could not get off his bed if he liked and go down to the playing fields or throw his leg over a horse. This mood fastened on him without warning in a Surbiton hospital after a calm night without a sleeping draught, when through his open window he could see green branches waving in sunlight, and hear the cries of men playing cricket and the smack of the driven ball: and it was torture.
Tears forced their way suddenly into Bernard"s eyes. His nurse, who had watched not a few reluctant recoveries, went out of the room. Then his great chest heaved, and he sobbed aloud, lying on his back with face unhidden, his wide black eyes blinking at the sweet pale June sky. No chance of death for him: he was good for ten, twenty, fifty years more: he could not bear it, but it had to be borne. He tried to pull himself up: if he could only have reached the window! But the arms that felt so strong were as weak as an infant"s, while the dead weight of his helpless legs dragged on him like lead. The only result of his struggle was a dreadful access of pain. Reaction followed, for he had learnt in his A B C days not to whimper when he was hurt, and by the time the nurse returned Clowes had scourged himself back to his usual savage tranquillity. "Can I have that window shut, please?" he asked, cynically frank. "I used to play cricket myself."
Laura Clowes in this period went through an experience almost equally formative. Two years older than Bernard, she was also more mature for her years and had developed more evenly, and from the outset her engagement and marriage had meant more to her then to Bernard, because her girlhood had been unhappy and they provided a way of escape. Her sister Yvonne had met Jack Bendish at a race-meeting and he had fallen madly in love with her and married her in a month in the teeth of opposition. That was luck--heaven-sent luck, for Yvonne on the night before her marriage had broken down utterly and confessed that if Jack had not saved her she would have gone off with the first man who asked her on any terms, because she was twenty-nine and sick to death of wandering with her father on the outskirts of society. Subsequently Yvonne had after a hard fight won a footing at Wharton for herself and her sister, and there Laura had met Clowes, not such a social prize as Jack, but rich and able to give his wife an a.s.sured position. She was shrewd and realized that in himself he had little to offer beyond a handsome and highly trained physique and a mind that worked lucidly within the limits of a narrow imagination but she was beyond all words grateful to him, and he fascinated her more than she realized.
The ten days at Eastbourne opened her eyes. Bernard enjoyed every minute of them and was exceedingly pleased with himself and proud of his wife, but for Laura they were a time of heavy strain. Innocent and shy, she had feared her husband, only to discover that she loved him better than he was capable of loving her. Laura was not blind. She understood Bernard and all his limitations, the dangerous grip that his pa.s.sions had of him, his boyish impatience, his wild-bull courage, and his inability to distinguish between a wife and a mistress: she was happiest when he slept, always holding her in his arms, exacting even in sleep, but so naively youthful in the bloom of his four and twenty summers, and, for the moment, all her own. She loved him "because I am I--because you are you," and her tenderness was edged with the profound pity that women felt in those days for the men who came to them under the shadow of death. It was her hope that the strong half-developed nature would grow to meet her need. It grew swiftly enough: in the forcing-house of pain he soon learned to think and to feel: but the change did not lead him to his wife"s heart.
Laura had married a man of a cla.s.s and apparently normal to a fault: she found herself united now to incarnate storm and tempest. The first time she saw him at Surbiton, he drove her out in five minutes with curses and insult. Why? Laura, wandering about half-stunned in the visitors" room, had no idea why. She stumbled against the furniture: she looked at the photographs of Windermere and King"s College Chapel and the Nursing Staff on the walls: she took up Punch and began to read it. Laura was no dreamer, she had never doubted that her husband would rather have the use of his legs again than all the feminine devotion in the world, but she had hoped to soothe him, perhaps for a little while to make him forget: it had not crossed her mind that her anguish of love and service would be rejected.
Enlightenment was like folding a sword to her breast.
By and by his nurse came down to her, a young hard-looking woman with tired eyes. She had little comfort to give, but what she gave Laura never forgot, because it was the truth without any conventional or sentimental gloss. "You"re having a bad time with him, aren"t you?" she said, coldly sympathetic. "It won"t last. Nothing lasts. You mustn"t think he"s left off caring for you. I expect he was very fond of you, wasn"t he? That"s the trouble. Some men take invalid life nicely and let their wives fuss over them to their hearts" content, but Major Clowes is one of those tremendously strong masculine men that always want to be top dog. Besides, you"re young and pretty, if you don"t mind my saying so, and you remind him of what he"s done out of . . .
Twenty-four, isn"t he? Don"t give way, Mrs. Clowes, you"ve a long road before you; these paralysis cases are a frightful worry, almost as bad for the friends as they are for the patient; but if you play up it"ll get better instead of worse. He"ll get used to it and so will you. One gets used to anything."
Even so: time goes on and storms subside. Bernard Clowes came out of the hospital and he and his wife settled down on friendly terms after all. "It"s not what you bargained for when you married me," said the cripple with his hard smile. "However, it"s no good crying over spilt milk, and you must console yourself with the fact that there"s still plenty of money going. But I wish we"d had a little more time together first." He pierced her with his black eyes, restless and fiery. "I dare say you would have liked a boy. So should I. Nevermind, my girl, you shan"t miss much else."
Wanhope, the family property, was buried deep in Wilts.h.i.+re, three or four miles from a station. Laura liked the country: Wanhope let it be, then: and Wanhope it was, with the additional advantage that Yvonne was at Castle Wharton within a stroll.
Laura liked a wide house and airy rooms, a wide garden, plenty of land, privacy from her neighbours: all this Wanhope gave her, no slight relief to a girl who had been brought up between Brighton and Monte Carlo. The place was too big to be run without an agent? No drawback, the agent: on the contrary, Clowes looked out for a fellow who would be useful to Laura, a gentleman, an unmarried man, who would be available to ride with her or make a fourth at bridge--and there by good luck was Val Stafford ready to hand. Born and reared in the country, though young and untrained, Val brought to his job a wide casual knowledge of local conditions and a natural head for business, and was only too glad to squire Laura in the hunting field. For Laura must hunt: as Laura Selincourt she had hunted whenever she was offered a mount, and she was to go on doing as she had always done.
Laura would rather not have hunted, for the freshness of her youth was gone and the strain of her life left her permanently tired, and she pleaded first expense, then propriety. "Don"t be a d.a.m.ned fool," replied Bernard Clowes. So Laura went riding with Val Stafford.
"Come in," said Major Clowes in a rasping snarl, and Laura came into her husband"s room and stumbled over a chair. The windows were shuttered and the room was still dark at eleven o"clock of a fine June morning. Laura, irrepressibly annoyed, groped her way through a disorder of furniture, which seemed, as furniture always does in the dark, to be out of place and malevolently full of corners, and without asking leave flung down a shutter and flung up a window. In a field across the river they were cutting hay, and the dry summer smell of it breathed in, and with it the long rolling whirr of a haymaking machine and its periodical clash, most familiar of summer noises. And the June daylight lit up the gaunt body of Bernard Clowes stretched out on a water mattress, his silk jacket unb.u.t.toned over his strong, haggard throat. "Really, Berns," said Laura, flinging down a second shutter, "I don"t wonder you sleep badly. The room is positively stuffy! I should have a racking headache if I slept in it."
"Well, you don"t, you see," Bernard replied politely. "Stop pulling those blinds about. Come over here." Laura came to him.
"Kiss me," said Clowes, and she laid her cool lips on his cheek.
Clowes received her kiss pa.s.sively: even Laura, though she understood him pretty well, never was sure whether he made her kiss him because he liked it or because he thought she did not like it.
"Where are you off to now?" asked Clowes, pus.h.i.+ng her away: "you look very smart. I like that cotton dress. It is cotton, isn"t it?" he rubbed the fabric gingerly between his finger and thumb.
"Did Catherine make it? That girl is a jewel. I like that gipsy hat too, it"s a pretty shape and it shades your eyes. I call that sensible, which can"t often be said for a woman"s clothes.
You have good eyes, Laura, well worth shading, though your figure is your trump card. I like these fitting bodices that give a woman a chance to show what shape she is. All you Selincourt women score in evening gowns. Yvonne has a topping figure, though she"s an ugly little devil. She has an American complexion and her eyes aren"t as good as yours. Where did you say you were going?"
"To the station to meet Lawrence. I promised to fetch him in the car."
"Lawrence? So he"s due today, is he? I"d forgotten all about him. And you"re meeting him? Oh yes, that explains the dress and hat, I thought you wouldn"t have put them on for my benefit."
"Dear, it"s only one of the cotton frocks I wear every day, and I couldn"t go driving without a hat, could I?"
"Can"t conceive why you want to go at all." Laura was silent.
"If Lawrence must be met, why can"t Miller go alone?" Miller was the chauffeur. "Undignified, I call it, the way you women run after a man nowadays. You think men like it but they don"t."
Laura wondered if she dared tell him not to be silly. He might take it with a grin, in which case he would probably relent and let her go: or--? The field of alternative conjecture was wide.
In the end Laura, whose knee was still aching from her adventure with the chair, decided to chance it. But--perhaps because they were suffused with irritation--the words had no sooner left her lips than she regretted them.