"I won"t have it." Bernard"s heavy jaw was clenched like a bloodhound"s. "It"s not decent running after Hyde while I"m tied here by the leg. I won"t have you set all the village talking.
There"s the Times on my table. Stop. Where are you going?"
"To ring the bell. It"s time Miller started. You don"t want your cousin to find no one there to meet him--not even a cart for his luggage."
"He can walk. Do him good: and Miller can fetch the luggage afterwards. You do as I tell you. Take the Times. Sit down in that chair with your face to the light and read me the leading articles and the rest of the news on Page 7. Don"t gabble: read distinctly if you can--you"re supposed to be an educated woman, aren"t you?"
Poor Laura had been looking forward to her drive. She had taken some innocent pleasure in choosing the prettiest of her morning dresses, a gingham that fell into soft folds the colour of a periwinkle, and in rearranging the liberty scarf on her drooping gipsy straw, and in putting on her long fringed gauntlets and little country shoes. Her husband"s compliments made her wince, Jack Bendish had eyes only for his wife, Val Stafford"s admiration was sweet but indiscriminate: but she remembered Lawrence as a connoisseur. And worse than the sting of her own small disappointment were the breaking of her promise to Lawrence, the failure in hospitality, in common courtesy.
And for the thousandth time Laura wondered whether it would not have been better for Bernard, in the long run, to defy his senseless tyranny. He was at her mercy: it would have been easy to defy him. Easy, but how cruel! A trained nurse would have made short work of Bernard"s whims, he would have been washed and brushed and fed and exercised and disregarded--till he died under it? Perhaps. It was safer at all events to let him go his own way. He could never hope to command his regiment now: let him get what satisfaction he could out of commanding his wife! She would have preferred a form of sacrifice which looked less like fear, but there was little sentiment in Bernard, and love must not pick and choose. For it was love still, the old inexplicable fascination: in the middle of one of his tirades, when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as if that summed up for her the essence of his personality, and were more truly Bernard Clowes then his intemperate insignificance of speech. . . . Even when others suffered for it she yielded to Bernard, because she loved him and because he suffered so infinitely worse than they.
For denial maddened him. He raised himself on his arm, crimson with anger, his chest heaving under the thin silken jacket which defined his gaunt ribs--"Sit down, will you, d.a.m.n you?" Because Laura believed that she and she only stood between her husband and despair, she yielded and began to read out the Times leader in a voice that was perfectly gentle and placid.
Bernard sank back and watched her like a cat after a mouse. He was under no delusion: he knew she was not cowed or nervous, but that the spring of her devotion was pity--pity ever fed anew by his dreadful helplessness: and it was this knowledge that drove him into brutality. The instincts of possession and domination were strong in him, and but for the accident that wrenched his mind awry he would probably have made himself a king to Laura, for, once her master, he would have grown more gentle and more tender as the years went by, while Laura was one of those women who find happiness in love and duty: not a weak woman, not a coward, but a humble-minded woman with no great opinion of her own judgment, who would have liked to look up to father, brother, sister, husband, as better and wiser than herself. But in his present avatar he could not master her: and Clowes, feeling as she felt, seeing himself as she saw him, came sometimes as near madness as any man out of an asylum. He was not far off it now, though he lay quiet enough, with not one grain of expression in his cold black eyes.
The 11:39 pulled up at Countisford station, and Lawrence Hyde got out of a first cla.s.s smoking carriage and stood at ease, waiting for his servant to come and look after him. "There"ll be a car waiting from Wanhope, Gaston--"
"Zere no car "ere, M"sieu--ze man say."
"What, no one to meet me?" Evidently no one: there were not half a dozen people on the flower-bordered platform, and those few were country folk with bundles and bags. Lawrence strolled out into the yard, hoping that his servant"s incorrigibly lame English might have led to a misunderstanding. But there was no vehicle of any kind, and the station master could not recommend a cab. Countisford was a small village, smaller even than Chilmark, and owed the distinction of the railway solely to its being in the flat country under the Plain. "But you don"t mean to say," said Lawrence incredulous, "that I shall have to walk?"
But it seemed there was no help for it, unless he preferred to sit in the station while a small boy on a bicycle was despatched to Chilmark for the fly from the Prince of Wales"s Feathers; and in the end Lawrence went afoot, though his expression when faced with four miles of dusty road would have moved pity in any heart but that of his little valet. Hyde was one of those men who change their habits when they change their clothes. He did not care what happened to him when he was out of England, following the Alaskan trail in eighty degrees of frost, or thras.h.i.+ng round the Horn in a tramp steamer, but when he shaved off his beard, and put on silk underclothing and the tweeds of Sackville Street, he grew as lazy as any flaneur of the pavement. Gaston however was not sympathetic. He was always glad when anything unpleasant happened to his master.
Leaving Gaston to sit on the luggage, Lawrence swung off with his long even stride, flicking with his stick at the bachelor"s b.u.t.tons in the hedge. He could not miss his way, said the station master: straight down the main road for a couple of miles, then the first turning on the left and the first on the left again. Some half a mile out of Countisford however Lawrence came on a signpost and with the traveller"s instinct stopped to read it:
WINCANTON 8 M.
CASTLE WHARTON 3 1/2 M.
CHILMARK 3 M.
So ran the clear lettering on the southern arm. Eastwards a much more weatherbeaten arm, pointing crookedly up a stony cart track, said in dim brown characters: "CHILMARK 2 M." Plainly a short cut over the moor! Better stones underfoot than padded dust: and Lawrence struck uphill swiftly, glad to escape from the traffic of the London road. But he knew too much about short cuts to be surprised when, after climbing five hundred feet in twice as many yards--for the gradients off the Plain are steep--he found himself adrift on the open moor, his track going five ways at once in the light dry gra.s.s.
He halted, leaning on his stick. He was on the edge of the Plain: below him stretched away a great half-ring of cultivated country, its saliencies the square tower of a church jutting over a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange--the tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years.
On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an alien. It touched him, but to revolt. More than a child of the soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also as an oppression, a limitation: an ordered littleness from which world-interests were excluded. He was a lover of art and a cosmopolitan, and though the lowland landscape was itself a piece of art, and perfect in its way, Hyde"s mind found no home in it.
Yet, he reflected with his tolerant smile, he had fought for it, and was ready any day to fight for it again--for stability and tradition, the Game Laws, the Established Church, and the rotation of crops. He was the son of an English mother and had received the training of an Englishman. A rather cynical smile, now and then, at the random and diffident ways of England was the only freedom he allowed to the foreign strain within him.
And when he looked the other way even this faint feeling of irritation pa.s.sed off, blown away by the wind that always blows across a moor, thin and sweet now, and sunlit as the light curled clouds that it carried overhead through the profound June blue.
Acres upon acres of pale sward, sown all over with the blue of scabious and the lemon-yellow of hawkweed, stretched away in rolling undulations like the plain of the sea; dense woods hung ma.s.sed on the far horizon, beech-woods, sapphire blue beyond the pale silver and amber, of the middle distance, and under them a puff of white smoke from a pa.s.sing train, or was it the white scar of a quarry? He could not be sure across so many miles of sunlit air, but it must have been smoke, for it dissolved slowly away till there was no gleam left under the brown hillside. Here too was stability, permanence: the wind ruffling the gra.s.s as it had done when the Normans crossed their not far distant Channel, or rattling over hilltops through leather-coated oak groves which had kept their symmetry since their progenitors were planted by the Druids. Here was nothing to cramp the mind: here was the England that has absorbed Celt, Saxon, Fleming, Norman, generation after generation, each with its pa.s.sing form of political faith: the England of traditional eld, the beloved country.
In the meanwhile Lawrence had to find Chilmark. He had neither map nor compa.s.s and was unfamiliar with the lie of the land, but, mindful of the station master"s directions to go south and turn twice to the left, he shaped a course south-east and looked for a shepherd to ask his way of. At present there were no shepherds to be seen and no houses; here and there a trail of smoke marked some hidden hamlet, sunk deep in cup or cranny, but which was Chilmark he could not tell. Down went the track, plunging towards a stream that brawled in a wild bottom: up over a rough hillside ruby-red with willowherb: then down again to a pool shaded by two willows and a silver birch, and lying so cool and solitary in its own cloven nook, bounded in every direction by half a furlong of chalky hillside, that Lawrence was seized with a desire to strip and bathe, and sun himself dry on the brilliant mossy lawn at its brink. But out of regard for the Wanhope lunch hour he walked on, following a trickle of water between reeds and knotgrafis, till in the next winding of the glen he came on a house: only a labourer"s cot, two rooms below and one above, but inhabited, for smoke was coming out of the chimney. Lawrence turned up a worn thread of path and knocked with his stick at the open door.
It was answered by a tall young girl with a dirty face, wearing a serge skirt pinned up under a dirty ap.r.o.n. The house was dirty too: the smell of an unwashed, unswept interior came out of it, together with the wailing of a fretful baby. "I"ve missed my way on the moor," said Lawrence, in.o.btrusively holding his handkerchief to his nose. "Can you direct me to Chilmark?"
"Do you mean Chilmark or Castle Wharton? Oh Dorrie, don"t cry!"
She lifted the babe on her arm and stood gazing at Lawrence in a leisured and friendly manner, as if she wondered who he were. "It isn"t far, but it"s a long rambling village and there are any number of paths down. And if you want the Bendishes--" Evidently she thought he must want the Bendishes, and perhaps Lawrence"s judgment was a little bribed by her artless compliment, for at this point he began to think her pretty in an undeveloped way: certainly she had lovely eyes, dark blue under black lashes, which reminded him of other eyes that he had seen long ago--but when? He could not remember those wistful eyes in any other woman"s face.
"I"m making for Wanhope--Major Clowe"s house."
"Oh, but then you must be Captain Hyde," exclaimed Miss Stafford: "aren"t you? that Mrs. Clowes was expecting."
"My name is Hyde. No one met me at the station" in spite of himself Lawrence could not keep his grievance out of his voice "so, as there are no cabs at Countisford, I had to walk."
"Oh! dear, how sad: and on such a hot day too! You"ll be so tired." Was this satire? Pert little thing! Lawrence was faintly amused--not irritated, because she was certainly very pretty: what a swan"s throat she had under her holland blouse, and what a smooth slope of neck! But for all that she ought to have sirred him.
"So you know Mrs. Clowes, do you?" He said with as much politeness as a little girl deserves who has lovely eyes and a dirty face. It had crossed his mind that she might be one of the servants at Wanhope: he knew next to nothing of the English labouring cla.s.ses, but was not without experience of lady"s maids.
"Yes, I know her," said Isabel. She hung on the brink of introducing herself--was not Captain Hyde coming to tea with her that afternoon?--but was deterred by a very unusual feeling of constraint. She was not accustomed to be watched as Hyde was watching her, and she felt shy and restless, though she knew not why. It never entered her head that he had taken her for Dorrie Drury"s sister. She was dressed like a servant, but what of that? In Chilmark she would have remained "Miss Isabel" if she had gone about in rags, and it would have wounded her bitterly to learn that she owed the deference of the parish rather to her rank as the vicar"s daughter, who visited at Wanhope and Wharton, than to any dignity of her own. In all her young life no one had ever taken a liberty with Isabel. And, for that matter, why should any one take a liberty with Dorrie Drury"s sister?
Isabel"s father would not have done so, nor her brothers, nor indeed Jack Bendish, and she was too ignorant of other men to know what it was that made her so hot under Hyde"s eyes. "But you"ll be late for lunch. Wait half a minute and I"ll run up with you to the top of the glen."
Lawrence watched her wrap her charge carefully in a shawl, and fetch milk from the dresser, and coax till Dorrie turned her small head, heavy with the cares of neglected babyhood, sideways on the old plaid maud and began to suck. Apparently he had interrupted the scrubbing of the kitchen floor, for the tiles were wet three quarters of the way over, and on a dry oasis stood a pail, a scrubbing brush, and a morsel of soap. Among less honourable odours he was glad to distinguish a good strong whiff of carbolic.
Isabel meanwhile had recovered from her little fit of shyness.
She pulled off her ap.r.o.n and pulled down her skirt (it had been kilted to the knee), rinsed her hands under a tap, wiped her face with a wet handkerchief, and came out into the June suns.h.i.+ne bareheaded, her long pigtail swinging between drilled and slender shoulders. "Yours are London boots," she remarked as she b.u.t.toned her cuff. "Do you mind going over the marsh?"
"Not at all."
"Not if you get your feet wet?" Lawrence laughed outright. "But it"s a real mars.h.!.+" said Isabel offended: "and you"re not used to mud, are you? You don"t look as if you were." She pointed down the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of cotton gra.s.s. "There"s no danger in summertime, the shepherds often cross it and so do I. Still if you"re afraid--"
"I a.s.sure you I"m not afraid," said Lawrence, looking at her so oddly that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused.
Nor was Lawrence. She had struck out of his male vanity a resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even shocked? He was not readily shocked. A pure cynic, he let into his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that the average man admits only behind a screen. Yet when these libertine fancies played over Isabel"s innocent head they were distasteful to him: as he remembered once, in a Barbizon studio, to have knocked a man down for a Gallic jest on the Queen of Heaven although Luke"s Evangel meant no more to him than the legend of Eros and Psyche. But one can"t knock oneself down--more"s the pity!
"Oh, all right," said Isabel impatiently. He was watching her again! "But do look where you"re going, this isn"t Piccadilly.
You had better hold my hand."
Lawrence was six and thirty. At eighteen he would have s.n.a.t.c.hed her up and carried her over: at thirty-six he said: "Thanks very much," touched the tips of her fingers, let them fall. . . .
Unfortunately however he weighed more than Isabel or the shepherds, and, half way across, the green floor quietly gave way under him: first one foot immersed itself with a gentle splash and then the other--"Oh dear" said Isabel, seized with a great disposition to laugh. Lawrence was not amused. His boots were full of mud and water and he had an aching sense of injured dignity. The bog was not even dangerous: and ankle-deep, calf-deep, knee-deep he waded through it and got out on the opposite bank, bringing up a cloud of little marsh-bubbles on his heels. Isabel would have given all the money she had in the world--about five s.h.i.+llings to go away and laugh, but she had been well brought up and she remained grave, though she grew very red.
"I am so sorry!" she faltered, looking up at Lawrence with her beautiful sympathetic eyes (one must never say I told you so).
"I never thought you really would go in. You must be very heavy!
Oh! dear, I"m afraid you"ve spoilt your trousers, and it was all my fault. Oh! dear, I hope you won"t catch cold. Do you catch cold easily?"
"Oh no, thanks. Do you mind showing me the way to Wanhope?"
Isabel without another word took the steep hillside at a run. In her decalogue of manners to refuse an apology was an unpardonable sin. How differently Val would have behaved! Val never lost his temper over trifles, and if anything happened to make him look ridiculous he was the first to laugh at himself. At this time in her life Isabel compared Val with all the other men she met and much to his advantage. She forgot that Lawrence was not her brother and that no man cares to be made ridiculous before a woman, or rather she never thought of herself as a woman at all.
She pointed east by south across the Plain. "Do you see that hawk hovering? Carry your eye down to the patch of smoke right under him, in the trees: those are the Wanhope chimneys. If you go straight over there till you strike the road, it will bring you into Chilmark High Street. Go on past Chapman the draper"s shop, turn sharp down a footpath opposite the Prince of Wales"s Feathers, cross the stream by a footbridge, and you"ll be in the grounds of Wanhope."
"Thank you," said Lawrence, "your directions are most precise."
He had one hand in his pocket feeling among his loose silver: tips are more easily given than thanks, especially when one is not feeling grateful, and he was accustomed to pay his way through the world with the facile profusion of a rich man. Still he hesitated: if he had not the refined intuition that would have made such a blunder impossible to Val Stafford, he had at all events enough intelligence to hesitate. There is a coinage that is safer than silver, and Lawrence thought it might well pa.s.s current (now that she had washed her face) with this fair schoolgirl of sixteen, ruffled by sun and wind and unaware of her beauty. He would not confess to himself that the prospect of Isabel"s confusion pleased him.
He bent his head, smiling into Isabel"s eyes. "You"re a very kind little girl. May I--?"
"No," said Isabel.
The blood sprang to her cheek, but she did not budge, not by a hair"s breadth. "I beg your pardon," said Lawrence, standing erect. He had measured in that moment the extent of his error, and he cursed, not for the first time, his want of perception, which his ever-candid father had once called a streak of vulgarity. Defrauded of the pleasure he had promised himself from the contact of Isabel"s smooth cheek, he grew suddenly very tired of her. Young girls with their trick of attaching importance to trifles are a nuisance!
He forced a smile. "I beg your pardon, I had no idea-- I see you"re ever so much older than I thought you were. Some day I shall find my way up here again and you must let me make my peace with a box of chocolates." He raised his hat--he had not done so when she opened the door--and swung off across the moor, leaving the vicar"s daughter to go back and scrub Mrs. Drury"s floor as it had never been scrubbed before in its life. The honours of the day lay with Isabel, but she was not proud of them, and her face flamed for the rest of the morning. "You"re worse than Major Clowes!" she said violently to the kitchen tap.