Part 3 (1/2)

”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.