Part 36 (2/2)
CHAPTER XIX
Riding back from Liddiard St. Agnes in the low September suns.h.i.+ne, Val became aware of something pleasantly pictorial in the landscape. It was a day when the hills looked higher than usual, the tilt of the Plain sharper, the shadows a darker umber, the light clearer under a softly-quilted autumn sky. When he crossed a reaped cornfield, the pale golden stalks of stubble to westward were tipped each with a spark of light, so that all the upland flashed away from him toward the declining sun.
In his own mind there was a lull which corresponded with this clear quietness of Nature: a pleasant vacancy and a suspension of personal interest, so that even his anxiety about Laura was put at a little distance, and he could see her and Bernard, and Lawrence himself, like figures in a picture, hazed over by a kind of moral sunlight--the Grace of G.o.d, say, which from Val's point of view shapes all our ends:
I do not ask to see The distant scene: one step enough for me,
this courage came to Val now without effort, and not for himself only, which would have been easy at any time, but for Laura in her difficult married life, and for those other beloved heads on which he was fated to bring disgrace--his father, Rowsley, Isabel: come what might, sorrow could not harm them, nor fear annoy. How quiet it was! the quieter for the wrangling of rooks in the border elms, and for the low autumn wind that rustled in the hedgerows: and how full of light the sky, in spite of the soft bloomy clouds that had hung about all day, imbrowning the suns.h.i.+ne! far off in the valley doves were grieving, and over the reaped and glittering cornstalks curlews were flying and calling with their melancholy--shrill wail, an echo from the sea, while small birds in flocks flew away twittering as he rode up, and settled again further on, and rose and settled again, always with a clatter of tiny wings. Evening coming on: and winter coming on: and light, light everywhere, and calm, over the harvest fields and the darkened copses, and the far blue headlands that seemed to lift themselves up into immeasurable serenities of sky.
It was lucky for Val that he was able to enjoy this quiet hour, for it was soon over. When he crossed the turf to the diningroom window, the fire had burnt down into red embers and not much light came in from out of doors under that low ceiling, but there was enough to show him Isabel in Lawrence's arms. Fatality! He had not foreseen it, not for a moment: and yet directly he saw it he seemed to have known it all along. After a momentary suspension of his faculties, during which his ideas s.h.i.+fted much as they do when an unfamiliar turns into a familiar road, Val tapped on the gla.s.s and strolled in, giving his young sister one of his light teasing smiles. ”Am I to bestow my consent, Isabel?”
”Oh Val!-- Don't be angry, or not with Lawrence anyhow, it wasn't his fault.”
Isabel disengaged herself but without confusion. Her brother watched her in increasing surprise. Rosy and sparkling, she seemed to have grown from child to woman in an hour, as after a late spring the first hot day brings a million buds into leaf.
”Are you startled?” she asked, holding up her cheek for a kiss.
”Not so much so as I should have been twenty-four hours ago. No, I didn't guess--not a bit; I suppose brothers never expect people to want to marry their sisters. We know too much about you.”
”Better run off to the nursery, Isabel,” said Lawrence. Isabel made him a little smiling curtsey eloquent of her disdain--it was so like Captain Hyde to be saucy before Val!--and slipped away. When Lawrence returned after holding open the door for her, he found a certain difficulty in meeting Val's eyes.
”And this then is the mysterious attraction that has kept you at Wanhope all the summer? Wonderful! What will Mrs. Jack say?
But I suppose nineteen, for forty, has a charm of its own.”
Lawrence was not forty. But he refused to be drawn. ”She is very beautiful.”
”Oh, very,” Val was nothing if not cordial. ”But her face is her fortune. I needn't ask if you can keep her in the state to which she's accustomed,” his eye wandered over the dilapidated vicarage furniture, ”or whether your attentions are disinterested.
Evidently you're one of those men who like their wives to be dependent on them-- Dear me!”
”d.a.m.n the money!” said Lawrence at white heat. ”Jew I may be, but it's you and Isabel that harp on it, not I.”
”Come, come!” Val arched his eyebrows. ”So sorry to ruffle you, but these questions are in all the etiquette books and some one has to ask them. If you could look on me as Isabel's father--?”
It was too much. Angry as he was, Lawrence began to laugh. ”No, I won't look on you as Isabel's father,” he had regained the advantage of age and position, neutralized till now by Val's cooler self-restraint. ”I won't look on you as anything but a brother-in-law; a younger brother of my own, Val, if you can support the relation. Won't you start fresh with me? I've not given you much cause to think well of me up to now, but I love Isabel, and I'll do my best to make her happy. I might find forgiveness difficult if I were you, but then,” for his life he could not have said whether he was in earnest or chaffing Val, ”I'm a Jew of Shylock's breed and you're a Christian.”
”But, my dear fellow, what is there to forgive? We're only too delighted and grateful for the honour done us: it's a brilliant match, of course, far better than she could expect to make.” A duller man than Lawrence could not have missed the secret silken mischief. ”And to me, to all of us, you're more than kind; it's nice to feel that instead of losing a sister I shall gain a brother.”
”You are an infernal prig, Val!”
”Oh,” said Val, this time without irony, ”It's easy for you to come with an apology in one hand and a cheque in the other.”
He turned away and stood looking out into the garden. In the lilac bushes over the lawn Isabel's robin was still singing his winter carol, and the atmosphere was saturated with the smell of wet, dead leaves, the poignant, fatal smell of autumn. ”There's winter in the air tonight,” said Val half aloud.
”What?” said Lawrence startled.
<script>