Part 38 (2/2)

”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 m.u.f.f. ”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 blus.h.!.+” 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 pa.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstances 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, s.p.a.cious 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 pa.s.sively. 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 pa.s.sion: ”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 s.e.x: 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 coa.r.s.e.”

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