Nightfall | Page 6

but idiosyncrasy alone can have inspired him to get the village tailor to line his short blue pilot jacket with pink flannelette. "It's very warm and comfortable, my dear," he said apologetically to his wife, who sat and gazed at him aghast, "so much more cosy than Italian cloth."
On that occasion Mrs. Stafford was too late to interfere, but as a rule she exercised a restraining influence, and while she lived the vicar was not allowed to go about with holes in his trousers. After her death Mr. Stafford mourned her sincerely and cherished her memory, but all the same he was glad to be able to wear his old boots. However, he had a cold bath every morning and kept his hands irreproachable, not from vanity but from an inbred instinct of personal care. Yvonne of the Castle, who spoke her mind as Yvonne's of the Castle commonly do, said that the fewer clothes Mr. Stafford wore the better she liked him, because he was always clean and they were not.
Mr. Stafford had three children; Val, late of the Dorchester Regiment, Rowsley an Artillery lieutenant two years younger, and Isabel the curate, a tall slip of a girl of nineteen. They were all beloved, but Val was the prop of the family and the pride of his father's heart. Invalided out of the Army after six weeks' fighting, with an honourable distinction and an irremediably shattered arm, he had been given the agency of the Wanhope property, and lived at home, where the greater part of his three hundred a year went to pay the family bills. Most of these were for what Mr. Stafford gave away, for the vicar had no idea of the value of money, and was equally generous with Val's income and his own.
Altogether Mr. Stafford was a contented and happy man, and his only worry was the thought, which crossed his mind now and then, that Chilmark for a young man of Val's age was dull, and that the Wanhope agency led nowhere. If Val had been an ambitious man! But Val was not ambitious, and Mr Stafford thanked heaven that this pattern son of his had never been infected by the vulgar modern craze for money making. His salary would not have kept him in luxury in a cottage of his own, but it was enough to make the vicarage a comfortable home for him; and, so long as he remained unmarried, what could he want more, after all, than the society of his own family and his kind country neighbours?
Rowsley, cheerfully making both ends meet in the Artillery on an allowance from his godmother, was off his father's hands. Isabel? Mr. Stafford did not trouble much about Isabel, who was only a little girl. She was a happy, healthy young thing, and Mr. Stafford was giving her a thoroughly good education. She would be able to earn her own living when he died, if she were not married, as every woman ought to be. (There was no one for Isabel to marry, but Mr. Stafford's principles rose superior to facts.) Meantime it was not as if she were running wild: that sweet woman Laura Clowes and the charming minx at the Castle between them could safely be left to form her manners and see after her clothes.
One summer afternoon Isabel was coming back from an afternoon's tennis at Wharton. Mrs. Clowes brought her in the Wanhope car as far as the Wanhope footpath, and would have sent her home, but Isabel declined, ostensibly because she wanted to stretch her legs, actually because she couldn't afford to tip the Wanhope chauffeur. So she tumbled out of the car and walked away at a great rate, waving Laura farewell with her tennis racquet. Isabel was a tall girl of nineteen, but she still plaited her hair in a pigtail which swung, thick and dark and glossy, well below her waist. She wore a holland blouse and skirt, a sailor hat trimmed with a band of Rowsley's ribbon, brown cotton stockings, and brown sandshoes bought for 5/11-3/4 of Chapman, the leading draper in Chilmark High Street. Isabel made her own clothes and made them badly. Her skirt was short in front and narrow below the waist, and her sailor blouse was comfortably but inelegantly loose round the armholes. Laura Clowes, who had a French instinct of dress, and would have clad Isabel as Guinevere clad Enid, if Isabel had not been prouder than Enid, looked after her with a smile and a sigh: it was a grief to her to see her young friend so shabby, but, bless the child! how little she cared--and how little it signified after all! Isabel's poverty sat as light on her spirits as the sailor hat, never straight, sat