Part 24 (1/2)
”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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 gra.s.ses 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 p.r.i.c.ked her, but she was m.u.f.fled 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 ”h.e.l.lenics,” ”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 rubbis.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s carriage.