Nightfall | Page 5

little while peace, the peace of perfect mutual tenderness, fell
on this hard-driven pair. But soon, a great sigh bursting from his breast,
Clowes pushed her away, his features settling back into their old harsh
lines of savage pain and scorn.
"Get away! get up! do you want Parker to see you through the window?
If there's a thing on earth I hate it's a dishevelled crying woman. Write
to Lawrence. Say I shall be delighted to see him and that I hope he'll

give us at least a week. Stop. Warn him that I shan't be able to see
much of him because of my invalid habits, and that I shall depute you
to entertain him. That ought to fetch him if he remembers you when
you were twenty-two."
Laura was neither dishevelled nor in tears: perhaps such scenes were no
novelty to her. She leant against the frame of the open window, looking
out over the sunlit garden full of flowers, over the wide expanse of turf
that sloped down to a wide, shallow river all sparkling in western light,
and over airy fields on the other side of it to the roofs of the distant
village strung out under a break of woody hill.
"Are you sure you want him? He used to have a hot temper when he
was a young man, and you know, Berns, it would be tiresome if there
were any open scandal."
"Scandal be hanged," said Bernard Clowes. "You do as you're told."
His wife gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders as if to
disclaim further responsibility. She was breathing rather hurriedly as if
she had been running, and her neck was so white that the shadow of her
sunlit wistaria threw a faint lilac stain on the warm, fine grain of her
skin. And the haggard look returned to Bernard's eyes as he watched
her, and with it a wistfulness, a weariness of desire, "hungry, and
barren, and sharp as the sea." Laura never saw that hunger in his eyes.
If he spared her nothing else he spared her that.
"You do as I tell you, old girl," his harsh voice had softened again.
"There won't be any row. Honestly I'd like to have old Lawrence here
for a bit, I'm not rotting now. He had almost four years of it--almost as
long as I had. I'll guarantee it put a mark on him. It scarred us all. It'll
amuse me to dine him and Val together, and make them talk shop, our
own old shop, and see what the war's done for each of us: three retired
veterans, that's what we shall be, putting our legs under the same
mahogany: three old comrades in arms." He gave his strange, jarring
laugh. "Wonder which of us is scarred deepest?"

CHAPTER II
WANHOPE and Castle Wharton--or, to give them their due order,
Wharton and Wanhope, for Major Clowes' place would have gone
inside the Castle three times over--were the only country houses in the
Reverend James Stafford's parish. The village of Chilmark--a stone
bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman tower and frondlike
Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line of school, shops, and cottages
strung out between the stream and chalky beech-crested hillside
occupied one of those long, winding, sheltered crannies that mark the
beds of watercourses along the folds of Salisbury Plain. Uplands rose
steeply all along it except on the south, where it widened away into the
flats of Dorsetshire. Wharton overlooked this expanse of hunting
country: a formidable Norman keep, round which, by gradual accretion,
a dwelling-place had grown up, a history of English architecture and
English gardening written in stone and brick and grass and flowers.
One sunny square there was, enclosed between arched hedges set upon
pillars of carpenters' work, which still kept the design of old Verulam:
and Yvonne of the Castle loved its little turrets and cages of singing
birds, and its alleys paved with burnet, wild thyme, and watermints,
which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but
being trodden upon and crushed.
Wanhope also, though modest by comparison, had a good deal of land
attached to it, but the Clowes property lay north up the Plain, where
they sowed the headlands with red wheat still as in the days of Justice
Shallow. The shining Mere, a tributary of the Avon, came dancing
down out of these hills: strange pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with
fine sward, and worked by the hands of prehistoric man into bastions
and ramparts that imitated in verdure the bold sweep of masonry.
Mr. Stafford was a man of sixty, white-haired and of sensitive,
intelligent features. He was a High Churchman, but wore a felt
wideawake in winter because when he bought it wideawakes were the