Nightfall Part 38

"Bernard, if you weren't a cripple I'd put the fear of God into you with a stick" He stood near the door eyeing his cousin with a cold dislike more cutting than anger. "You're as safe as a woman. But I'm through with you. I'll never forgive you this, never. I'm going: and I shall take your wife with me." He turned. "Come, Laura--"

"Take care, Lawrence!" cried Isabel.

She spoke too late. Bernard's hand was already raised and a glint of steel shone between his fingers. No one was near enough to disarm him. Unable to move without exposing Laura, Lawrence mechanically threw up his wrist on guard, but the trick of Bernard's left-handed throw was difficult to counter, and Lawrence was bracing himself for a shock when Val stepped into the line of fire. Selincourt uttered an exclamation of horror, and Val reeled heavily. "For me!" said Lawrence under his breath. He was by Val in a moment, bending over him, tender and protecting, an arm round his shoulders. "Are you hurt, Val?

What is it, old man?"

Stafford had one hand pressed to his side. "He meant it for you," he said, grimacing over the words as if he had not perfect control of his facial muscles. "Take care. Ah! that's better."

Selincourt with a sweep of his arm had sent the remaining contents of the swing-tray flying across the floor. There was no need of such violence, however, for the devil had gone out of Bernard Clowes now. Deathly pale, his eyes blank with startled fear, his great frame seemed to break and collapse and he turned like a lost child to his wife: Laura--Laura . . ."

"I'm here, my darling." In panic, as if the police were already at the door, Laura fell on her knees by the low couch. Come what might he was still her husband, still the man she loved, to be defended against the consequences of his own acts irrespective of his deserts. There was much of the wife but more of the mother in the way she covered him with her arms and breast. "No one shall touch you, no one. It was only an accident, you never meant it, and besides Val's only a little hurt--"

Val, still with that wrenched grimace of pain, turned round and leant against Lawrence. "Get me out of this," he said weakly.

"Invent some story. Anything, but spare her. Get me out, I'm going to faint."

Between them, Lawrence and Selincourt carried him out and laid him on the steps. No one else paid any attention. Laura was taken up with Bernard. Mr. Stafford had shuffled over to the fire and was stooping down to warm his fingers while Isabel tried brokenly to soothe the anguish from which old and tired hearts rarely recover. She was more frightened for him than for Val, and the grief she felt for him was a grief outside herself, which could be pitied and comforted, whereas the blow that had fallen on Val seemed to have fallen on her own life also, withering where it struck. She suffered for her father but with Val, and this intensity of communion hardened her into steel, for it seemed as weak and vain to pity him as it would have been to pity herself if she like him had fallen under the stress of war. The weak must first be served--later, later there would be time to pity the strong.

She did not realize that for Val, whom instinctively she still classed among the strong, time and opportunity were over. He fainted before they got him out into the air, and his hand fell away from his side, and then they saw what was wrong. He had been stabbed: stabbed with the Persian dagger that Lawrence himself had given Bernard. Val had taken it under his left breast, and it was buried to its delicate hilt. When Lawrence opened his coat and shirt there was scarcely any blood flowing: scarcely any sign of mischief except his leaden pallor and the all-but-cessation of his pulse. "Internal haemorrhage," said Lawrence. He drew out the weapon, which came forth with a slow sidelong wrench of its curved blade: a gush of blood followed, running down over Val's shirt, over his shabby coat, over the steps of Wanhope and the dry autumn turf. Lawrence held the lips of the wound together with his hand. "Go and find Verney, will you? Mind, it was an accident. Don't be drawn into giving any details. We must all stick to the same story."

"But--but" Selincourt could not frame a coherent question with his pale frightened lips: "you don't--you can't think--"

"That he's dying? He won't see another sun rise."

"But do they--do they--in there--understand?"

"Oh for them," said Lawrence with his bitter ironical smile, "he died five minutes ago."

This then was the end. Waiting in the autumn twilight with Val's head on his arm Lawrence tried to retrace the steps by which it had been reached. Bernard's revenge had struck blind and wild as revenge is apt to strike, but it had helped to bring the wheel full circle. Val's expiation was complete. In his heart Lawrence knew that his own was complete also. In breaking Val's life he had permanently scarred his own.

And the night when it had all begun came back to him, a March night, quiet and dark but for the periodical fanbeam of an enemy searchlight from the slope of an opposite hill: a mild rain had been falling, falling, ceaselessly, plashingly, over muddy ploughland or sere grass, over the intricacy of trenchwork behind the firing lines and the dreary expanse of no man's land between them: falling over wire entanglements from which dangled rags of uniform and rags of flesh: falling on faces of the unburied dead that it was helping to dissolve into, their primal pulp of clay.

War! always war! and no theatre of scarlet and gold and cavalry charges, but a rat's war of mud and cold and fleas and unutterable, nerve-dissolving fatigue. Not far off occasionally the rustle of clothes or the tinkle of an entrenching tool, as a sleeper turned over or the group sentry shifted arms on the parapet; and always in a lulling undertone the plash of rain on grass or wire, and the heavy breathing of tired men. For four years these nocturnal sounds of war had been familiar in the ears of Lawrence Hyde. He could hear them now, the river-murmur repeated them. And then as now he had taken young Stafford's head on his arm, the boy lying as he had lain for eighteen hours, immovable, the rain running down over his face and through his short fair hair.

He had failed . . . Lawrence recalled his own first near glimpse of death, a fellow subaltern hideously killed at his side: he had turned faint as the nightmare shape fell and rose and fell again, spouting blood over his clothes: contact with elder men had steadied him. By night and alone? Well: even by night and alone Lawrence knew that he would have recovered himself and gone on.

It was no more than they all had to fight through, thousands of officers, millions of men. Val had failed. . . . Yet how vast the disproportion between the crime and the punishment! Endurance is at a low ebb at nineteen when one's eyelids are dropping and one's head nodding with fatigue. Oh to sleep--sleep for twelve hours on a bed between clean sheets, and wake with a mind wiped clear of bloody memories! . . . memories above all . . . incommunicable things that even years later, even to men who have shared them, cannot be recalled except by a half-averted glance and a low "Do you remember--?" like frightened children holding hands in the dark of the world. . . . Had any one of them kept sane that night--those many nights? . . . But how should a civilian understand?

He felt Val's heart. It was beating slower and slower. If one could only have one's life over again! but the gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.

CHAPTER XX

It was one March evening six mouths later, one of those warm, still, sunshot-and-grey March evenings when elm-root are blue with violets and the air is full of the faint indeterminate scent of tree flowers, that Lawrence brought his bride home to Farringay. March weather is uncertain, and he preferred to go where he could be sure of comfort, while Isabel, having once consented to be married, left all arrangements to him. It was eight o'clock before they reached the house, and Isabel never forgot the impression which it made on her when she came in out of the bloomy twilight; warm and dim and smelling of violets that were set about in bowls on bookcase and cabinet, while the flames of an immense wood fire on an open hearth flickered over the blue and rose of porcelain or the oakleaf and gold of morocco. She stood in the middle of an ocean of polished floor and looked round her as if she had lost her way in it, till Lawrence came to her and kissed her hands. "Isabel, do you like the look of your new home?"

"Very much. Thank you."

"May I take off your furs for you?" Getting no answer he took them off. Framed in the sable cap and scarf that Yvonne had given her Isabel still parted her hair on one side, a fashion which Lawrence had grown to admire immensely, but her young throat and the fine straight masque of her features were thin and she had lost much of her colour since the autumn. Lawrence held her by the wrists and stood looking down at her, compelling her to raise her eyes, though they soon fell again with a flutter of the sensitive eyelids. "Are you tired, sweetheart?"

"Oh no, thank you."

"Cold?"

"Not now."

"Frightened?"

"A little."

"You wouldn't rather I left you for a little while?"

Isabel almost imperceptibly shook her head, but with a shade of mockery in her smile which prevented Lawrence from taking her in his arms. "Am I an unsatisfactory wife? Will you soon be tired of me? No, not yet," she said, moving away from him to put down her gloves and muff. "I've hardly had time to thank you for my presents yet. Oh Lawrence, how you spoil me!" She held up her watch to admire the lettering on its Roman enamel. "'I.H.' Does that stand for me--am I really Isabel Hyde? And are those sapphires mine, and can I drink my tea out of this roseleaf Dresden cup? It does seem strange that saying a few words and writing one's name in a book should make so much difference."

"Regretful?"

"A little oppressed, that's all. I shall soon get used to it.

If you were not you I should hate it. But there's something essentially generous and careless in you, Lawrence, that makes it easy to take from you. Come here." He came to her. "Oh, I've made you blush!" said Isabel, naively surprised. Under her rare and unexpected praise he had coloured against his will. "Oh foolish one!" She kissed him sweetly. "Lawrence, are you sorry Val died?" Lawrence freed himself and turned away. It was six months since Val's death, but he still could not bear to think of it and he had scarcely spoken of it to Isabel.

There had been no protracted farewell for Val. He had died in Lawrence's arms on the steps of Wanhope without recovering consciousness, while Verney stood by helpless, and Isabel, by a stroke of irony, tried to convince poor agonized Laura Clowes that the law should not touch her husband. It had not done so.

He had been saved mainly by the unscrupulous concerted perjury of Lawrence and Selincourt, who swore that Val had stumbled and fallen by accident with the dagger in his hand, while Verney confined himself to drily agreeing that the wound might have been self-inflicted. In the absence of any contrary evidence the lie was allowed to pass, but perhaps it would hardly have done so if it had not been universally taken for a half-truth. The day before the inquest there appeared in the Gazette a laconic notice that Second Lieutenant Valentine Ormsby Stafford, late of the Dorchester Regiment, had been deprived of his distinction on account of circumstances recently brought to light. After that, no need to ask why Val should have had a dagger in his hand! A jury who had known Val and his father before him were not anxious to press the case; and perhaps even the coroner was secretly grateful for evidence which spared him the pain of calling Mr.

Stafford.

Except in Chilmark, the scandal scarcely ran its nine days, but there of course it raged like a fire, and no one was much surprised when the vicar resigned his living and crept away to a bed-sittingroom in Museum Street, a broken old man, to spend the brief remainder of his life among black letter texts and incunabula. He could have borne any sin in the Decalogue less hardly than a breach of the military oath. He stopped Isabel, Rowsley, Lawrence himself when they tried to plead for Val. "I am not angry," he said feebly. "If my son were alive I wouldn't shut my door on him. But it's better as it is." He even tried to persuade Isabel to break with Lawrence. "Captain Hyde is an honourable man and no doubt considers himself bound to you, so you mustn't wait for him to release himself. It is very sad for you, my dear, but you belong to a disgraced family now and you must suffer with the rest of us." Isabel agreed, and returned her engagement ring. Followed a rather fiery scene, in which Lawrence lost his temper, and Isabel wept: and finally Mr.

Stafford, finding Lawrence obdurate, broke down and owned that his one last wish was to see his daughter happily married. He refused to take her to Bloomsbury. She stayed with Rowsley or at the Castle till Lawrence brought her to Farringay.

So there were changes at Chilmark, for the parish went to a hot-tempered Welshman with a wife and six children, and Wanhope was let to an American steel magnate, and Mrs. Jack Bendish, always mischievous when she was unhappy, embroiled them with each other first and then quarrelled with both. Yes, Wanhope was let: a fortnight after Val's death Major Clowes went by car to Cornwall with his wife for a change of air after the shock. He was reported to have stood the journey very well, but Laura's letters were not expansive.

Nor was Isabel: nor any other of those who had been eyewitnesses of the tragedy at Wanhope. The memory of it cast a shadow and a silence. Lawrence had never discussed it with Isabel; nor with Selincourt, except in a hurried whispered interchange of notes to avoid discrepancy in their evidence; nor with Bernard . . . the murderer. Since the night when he carried Val dead over the vicarage threshold Lawrence had not seen his cousin. He had seen Laura and tried to comfort her, but what could one say? It was murder. Had it not been for Laura he would have left Clowes to stand his trial. Even for her sake he would not have kept the secret if Rowsley, to whom alone it was revealed, had not given his leave, in the dim blinded room where revenge and anger seemed small things, and Val's last words, almost unremarked at the time, took on the solemn force of a dying injunction. The grey placidity of Val's closed eyelids and crossed hands was the last memory that Lawrence would have chosen to evoke on his wedding night.

"Come and get warm," said Isabel. She saw that she had startled and distressed her husband, and she drew him down into an immense armchair by the fire, a man's chair, spacious and soft. "Is there room for me too?" She slipped into it beside him and threw her arms round his neck. Lawrence held her lightly and passively. Not once during their engagement had she so surrendered herself to him for more than a moment, and he dared not take advantage of his opportunities for fear of losing her again. But Isabel smiled at him with shut eyes. "All my heart,"

she murmured; "don't be afraid, I'm not going to slip through your fingers now . . . I love you too, too much . . . Val would say it was wrong to care so much for any one."

Val again! Lawrence lifted her eyelashes with his finger.

"Isabel, why are you haunted by Val now? I don't want you to think of any one but me."

"Are you jealous of the dead?"

"Not I!" his voice rang out harsh with passion: "with you in my arms why should I be jealous of any one in heaven or earth?"

"Val would say that was wrong too. . . . Lawrence, do you remember your first wedding night?"

"Well enough."

"Was Lizzie beautiful?"

"I thought so then. She was a tall, well-made piece: black hair, blue eyes, buxom and plenty of colour. I was shy of her because-- it's a curious fact--she was my first experience of your sex: but she was not shy with me, though I believe she too was-- technically--innocent. Even at the time I was conscious of something wanting--some grace, some reserve, some economy of effect. She was of a coming-on disposition, very amorous and towardly."

"Val would call that coarse."

Chapter end