Nightfall Part 24

"You're a thousand times too good for him. Why are you so good?"

"I'm not good and no more is Lulu." Mrs. Bendish sighed, impressed perhaps by Laura's alien moralities, certainly by her determination. "However, if you won't you won't, and in a way I'm glad, selfishly that is, because of Jack's people. But in that case, dear girl, do get rid of Lawrence! The situation strikes me as fraught with danger. One of those situations where every one says something's sure to happen, and then they're all flabbergasted when it does."

"Bernard is not a formidable enemy," said Mrs. Clowes drily.

"But, yes, Lawrence must go. I'll speak to him tomorrow."

"Why not today?"

"It would spoil our evening."

"Give it up."

"And disappoint Isabel?"

"I don't like it."

"Nor I. But I was forced into it, and I can't break my word to Lawrence and the child. After all, there's no great odds between today and tomorrow. What can happen in twenty-four hours?"

CHAPTER XIII

In after life, when Isabel was destined to look back on that day as the last day of her youth, she recalled no part of it more clearly than wandering up to her own room after an early tea to dress, and flinging herself down on her bed instead of dressing.

She slept next to Val. But while Val's room, sailor-like in its neatness, was bare as any garret and got no sun at all, Isabel's was comfortable in a shabby way and faced south and west over the garden: an autumn garden now, bathed in westering sunshine, fortified from the valley by a carved gold height of beech trees, open on every other side over sunburnt moorland pale and rough as a stubble-field in its autumn feathering of light brown grasses and seedling flowers aflicker in a west wind.

Tonight however Isabel saw nothing of it, she lay as if asleep, her face hidden in her pillow: she, the most active person in the house, who was never tired like Val nor lazy like Rowsley!

Conscience pricked her, but she was muffled so thick in happiness that she scarcely felt it: the fancies that floated into her mind frightened her, and yet they were too sweet to banish: and then after all were they wrong?

Always on clear evenings the sun flung a great ray across her wall, turning the faded pale green paper into a liquid gold-green like sunlit water, evoking a dusty gleam from her mirror, and deepening the shadows in an old mezzo tint of Botticelli's Spring which was pinned up where she could gaze at it while she brushed her hair. The room thus illumined was that of a young girl with little time to spare and less money, and an ungrown individual taste not yet critical enough to throw off early loyalties.

There were no other pictures, except an engraving of "The Light of the World," given her by Val, who admired it. There was a tall bookcase, the top shelves devoted to Sweet's "Anglo-Saxon Reader," Lanson's "Histoire de la litterature Francaise," and other textbooks that she was reading for her examination in October, the lower a ragged regiment of novels and verse--"The Three Musketeers," "Typhoon," "Many Inventions," Landor's "Hellenics," "with fondest love from Laura," "Une Vie" and "Fort comme la Mort" in yellow and initialled "Y.B." There were also a big table strewn with papers and books, and a chintz covered box-ottoman into which Isabel bundled all those rubbishing treasures that people who love their past can never make up their weak minds to throw away.

She examined them all in the stream of gold sunlight as if she had never seen them before. It was time to get up and arrange her hair and change into her lace petticoats. If she did not get up at once she would be late and they would lose their train. And it seemed to her that she would die if they lost their train, that she never could survive such a disappointment: and yet she could not bring herself to get up and give over dreaming.

And what dreams they were, oh! what would Val say to them?--And yet again after all were they so wicked?--They were incredibly naif and innocent, and so dim that within twenty-four hours Isabel was to look back on them as a woman looks back on her childhood. She was not ignorant of the mysteries of birth and death. She had lived all her life among the poor, and knew many things which are not included in school curricula, such as the gentle art of keeping children's hair clean, how to divide a four-roomed cottage between a man and wife and six children and a lodger, and what to say when shown "a beautiful corpse": but she had never had a lover of her own. There were no marriageable men in Chilmark--there never are in an English village--and she was too young for Rowsley's brother officers, or they were too young for her. She had dreamed of fairy princes (blases-men-of-the-world, mostly in the Guards or the diplomatic service), but it was never precisely Isabel Stafford whom they clasped to their hearts--no, it was LaSignora Isabella, the star of Covent Garden, or the Lady Isabel de Stafford, a Duke's daughter in disguise. And Lawrence came to her in the mantle of these patrician ghosts.

But--and at this point Isabel hid her face on her arm--he was no ghost: he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it: and it was a far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large, fair, overmanicured hands. A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish: from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental blood. When people were engaged they often kissed each other . . . but when it came to imagining oneself . . . one's head against that thick tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do but dangerous to dream of doing. Oh, never, never!--But she had been trained in sincerity: and was this cry sincere? Her mind was chaos.

And yet after all why dangerous? Even Laura, Val's adored Laura, had been engaged twice before she married Major Clowes: as for Yvonne, Isabel felt sure she had been kissed many times, and not by Jack Bendish only. Such things happen, then! in real life, not only in books. As for the cigars and the valet . . . and Val's warnings . . . one can't have all one wants in this world!

It contains no ideal heroes: what was it Yvonne had once said?

"Every marriage is either a delusion or a compromise." And Isabel had shortcomings enough of her own: she was irritable, lazy, selfish: read novels when she ought to have been at her lessons: left household jobs undone in the certainty that Val, however tired he was, would do them for her: small sins, but then her temptations were small! Take it by and large, she was probably no better than Captain Hyde except for want of opportunity. And how he would laugh if he heard her say so!

She liked him for laughing. She had been brought up in an atmosphere of scruple. Her father overworked his conscience, treating a question of taste as a moral issue, and drawing no line between great and small--like the man who gave a penny to a beggar and implored him not to spend it on debauchery. Charity and a sense of fun saved Val, but if more lenient to others he was ruthlessly stern to himself. Lawrence blew on Isabel like a breath of sea air. In her reaction she liked his external characteristics, his manner to servants, his expensive clothes and boots, all the signs of money spent freely on himself.

She even liked his politics. Isabel had been brought up all her life to talk politics. Mr. Stafford was a Christian Socialist, a creed which in her private opinion was nicely calculated to produce the maximum of human discomfort: and from a conversation between Hyde and Jack Bendish she had learnt that Hyde was all of her own view. There was no nonsense about him--none of that sweet blind altruism which, as Isabel saw it, only made the altruist and his family so bitterly uncomfortable without doing any good to the poor. The poor? She knew intuitively that servants and porters and waiters would far rather serve Hyde than her father. Mr. Stafford longed to uplift the working classes, but Isabel had never got herself thoroughly convinced that they stood in need of uplifting. Her practical common sense rose in arms against Movements that tried to get them to go to picture galleries instead of picture palaces. Why shouldn't they do as they liked? Does one reform one's friends? Captain Hyde would live and let live.

And he was rich. Few girls as cramped as Isabel could have remained blind to that wide horizon, and she made no pretence of doing so: she was honest with herself and owned that she had always longed to be rich. No one could call her discontented!

her happy sunny temper took life as it came and enjoyed every minute of it, but her tastes were not really simple, though Val thought they were. She had long felt a clear though perfectly good-humoured and philosophic impatience of her narrow scope.

Hyde could give her all and more than all she had ever desired-- foreign countries and fine clothes, books and paintings, and power apparently and the admiration of men . . . Isabel Hyde . . . Mrs. Lawrence Hyde . . . .smiling she tried his name under her breath . . .and suddenly she found herself standing before the mirror, examining her face in its dusky shallows and asking of it the question that has perplexed many a young girl as beautiful as she--"Am I pretty?" She pulled the pins out of her hair and ran a comb through it till it fell this way and that like an Indian veil, darkly burnished and sunset-shot with threads of bronze. "Lawrence has never seen it loose," she reflected: "surely I am rather pretty?" and then "Oh, oh, I shall be late!" and Isabel's dreams were drenched and scattered under the shock of cold water.

Dreamlike the run through the warm September landscape: dreamlike the slip of country platform, where, while Lawrence took their tickets, she and Laura walked up and down and fingered the tall hollyhocks flowering upward in quilled rosettes of lemon-yellow and coral red, like paper lanterns lit by a fairy lamplighter on a spiral stair: and most dreamlike of all the discovery that the Exeter express had been flagged for them and that she was expected to precede Laura into a reserved first class carriage.

It was not more than once or twice in a year that Isabel went by train, and she had never travelled but third class in her life.

How smoothly life runs for those who have great possessions! How polite the railway staff were! The station master himself held open the door for the Wanhope party. Now she knew Mr. Chivers very well, but in all previous intercourse one finger to his cap had been enough for young Miss Isabel. Certainly it was agreeable, this hothouse atmosphere. "Shall you feel cold?"

Lawrence asked, and Isabel, murmuring "No, thank you," blushed in response to the touch of formality in his manner. She felt what women often feel in the early stages of a love affair, that he had been nearer to her when he was not there, than now when they were together in the presence of a third person. She had grown shy and strange before this careless composed man lounging opposite her with his light overcoat thrown open and his crush hat on his knees, conventionally polite, his long legs stretched out sideways to give her and Laura plenty of room.

And Lawrence on the journey neither spoke to her nor watched her, though Isabel shone in borrowed plumes. There had been no time to buy clothes, and so Val, though grudgingly, had allowed Laura and Yvonne to ransack their shelves and presses for Cinderella's adornment. But one glance had painted her portrait for him, tall and slender in a long sealskin coat of Yvonne's which was rulled and collared and flounced with fur, her glossy hair parted on one side and drawn back into what she called a soup-plate of plaits.

Once only he directly addressed her, when Laura loosened her own sables. "Do undo your coat, won't you? It's hot tonight for September."

"I'm not hot, thank you," said Isabel stiffly: but slowly, as if against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown.

The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt: it was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it had survived so long. She had seized on it with her unerring tact: this was right for Isabel, this dim transparency of rosepoint modelling itself over the immature slenderness of nineteen: and she and her maid Catherine and Mrs. Bendish had spent patient hours trying it on and modifying it to suit the fashion of the day. Laura had refused to impose upon Isabel either her own modish elegance or Yvonne's effect of the arresting and bizarre. "Isn't she almost too slight for it?" Yvonne had asked, and Laura for all answer had hummed a little French song--

'Mignonne allons voir si la rose Qui ce matin avoit desclose Sa robe de pourpre au soleil A point perdu ceste vespree I as plis de sa robe pourpree Et son teint au votre pareil . . .'

She discerned in Isabel that quality of beauty, noble, spirited, and yet wistful, which requires a most expensive setting of simplicity. And that was why Isabel opened her coat. If Captain Hyde had admired her in her Chilmark muslin, what would he think of flounce and fold of rose-point of Alencon under Yvonne's perfumed furs? And then she blushed again because the yearning in his eyes made her wonder if he cared after all whether she wore lace or cotton. Everything was so strange!

Strangest of all it was, to the brink of unreality, that Laura evidently remained blind. But Laura was always blind. "Why, she never even sees Val!" reflected Isabel scornfully. And yet-- suppose Isabel were deceiving herself? What if Captain Hyde were not in earnest? But her older self comforted her child's self: careless was he, and composed? "You were not always so composed, Lawrence," in her own mind the elder Isabel mocked him with her sparkling eyes.

Waterloo, lamplit and resonant: the pulsing of many lamps, the hurry of many steps, the flitting by of many faces under an arch of gloom: dark quiet and the scent of violets in a waiting car.

"What a jolly taxi!" Isabel exclaimed. "I never was in a taxi like this before. Is it a more expensive kind?"

"My dear Lawrence, you certainly have the art of making your life run on wheels!" said Laura smiling. "How many telegrams have you sent today?"

"If you do a thing at all you may as well do it in decent comfort," Lawrence replied sententiously. "Half past seven; that'll give us easy time! I booked a table at Malvani's, I thought you would prefer it to one of the big crowded shows."

"Are we going to have supper--dinner I mean--at a restaurant?"

asked Isabel awestruck.

Laurance smiled at her with irrepressible tenderness. "Did you think you weren't going to get anything to eat at all?" He forbore to remind her of her unfortunate allusion to sandwiches-- for which Isabel was grateful to him. "Aren't you hungry?"

"Oh yes: but then I often am. Is Malvani's a very quiet place?"

Lawrence looked at Laura with a comical expression. "What an ass I was! Wouldn't the Ritz have been more to the point?"

"Never mind, sweetheart," said Laura. "Malvani's isn't dowdily quiet. It's the smartest of the smart, and there are always a lot of distinguished people in it. Dear me, how long it is since I've dined in town! Really it's great fun, I feel as if I had come out of a tomb--" she checked herself: but she might have been as indiscreet as she liked, for her companions were not listening. Laura was faintly, very faintly startled by their attitude--Hyde leaning forward in the half-light of the brougham to button Isabel's glove--but she was soon smiling at her own fancy. "Poor Isabel, poor simple Isabel!" She was only a child after all.

A child, but a very gay and winning child, when she came into Malvani's with her long swaying step, direct glance, and joyous mouth. A spirit of excitement sparkled in Isabel tonight, and every movement was a separate and conscious pleasure to her: the physical sensation of walking delicately, the ripple of her skirt over her ankles, the poise of her shoulders under their transparent veil. . . . Laura saw a dozen men turn to look after the Wanhope party, and took no credit for it, though not long ago she had been accustomed to be watched when she moved through a public room. But now she was better pleased to see Isabel admired than to be admired herself.

As they neared their reserved table a man who had been sitting at it rose with an amused smile. "Have you forgotten who I am, Laura?"

"One might as well be even numbers," Lawrence explained. "So, as I knew Selincourt was in town, I wired to him to join us."

A worn, fatigued-looking, but not ungentle rake of forty, Selincourt had stayed once at Wanhope, but the visit had not been a success: indeed Laura had been thankful when it ended before host and guest threw the decanters at each other's heads. That she was pleased to see him now there could be no doubt: she had taken him by both hands and was smiling at him as if she would have liked to fling decorum to the winds and kiss him. Lawrence also smiled but with a touch of finesse. His plan was working.

Laura was going to enjoy herself: bon! he was truly fond of Laura and delighted to give her pleasure. But by it he would be left free to devote himself to Isabel.

It was to this end that he had planned the entire expedition. At Chilmark they met continually in the same setting, and he had no means of printing a fresh image of himself on her mind, but here he was free of country customs, a rich man among his equals, an expert in the art of "doing oneself well"--one of those who rule over modern civilization by divine right of a chequebook and a trained manner. Isabel had been brought up by High Churchmen, had she? Let them test what hold they had of her! Every aspect of their journey and of the supper-table at Malvani's, with its heady music and smell of rich food and wines, had been calculated to produce a certain effect--an intoxication of excitement and pleasure. And he set himself to stamp his own impression on Isabel, naming to her, in his soft, isolating undertones, the notable men and women in the room, describing their careers, their finances, even their scandals--it amused him to watch her repress a start. It amused him still more to stand up and shake hands when the immense body and Hebraic nose of an international financier went by with two great ladies and a cabinet minister in tow. "One of my countrymen," Hyde turned to Isabel with a mocking smile. "I am a citizen of no mean city. Those--" with an imperceptible jerk of the head--"would lick the dust off his boots to find out what line the Jew bankers mean to take in the Syrian question. They might as well lick mine."

"Why, do you know?" breathed Isabel.

Chapter end