Lawrence himself, when he had despatched Hubert Verney to the vicarage, would have liked to cut his responsibility. But it could not be done: first there was the village policeman to run to earth and information to be laid before him, and then, since Brown's first flustered impulse was to arrest all concerned from Lawrence to Clara Janaway, Lawrence had to walk down with him to Wharton to interview Jack Bendish, as both the nearest magistrate and the nearest sensible man. But after pouring his tale into Jack's sympathetic ear he felt entitled to wash his hands of the affair. Instead of going back to Wanhope with the relief party he got Bendish to drop him at the field path to Wanhope: and he slipped up to his room by a garden door, bathed, changed, and came down to lunch without trace of discomposure. Gaston, curtly ordered to take his master's clothes away and burn them, was eaten by curiosity, but in vain.
Even before his cousin, Lawrence did not own to his adventure till the servants had left the room. If it could have been kept dark he would not have owned to it at all. He did so only because it must soon be common property and he did not care to be taxed with affectation.
When, bit by bits his story came out across the liqueur glasses and the early strawberries, Major Clowes laid his head back and roared with laughter. Lawrence was annoyed: he had not found it amusing and he felt that his cousin had a macabre and uncomfortable sense of humour. But Bernard, wiping the tears from his eyes, developed unabashed his idea of a good joke. "Hark to him! Now isn't that Lawrence all over? What! can't you run down for twenty-four hours to a hamlet the size of Chilmark but you must bring your faics divers in your pocket?"
"It isn't my fault if you have dangerous lunatics at large," said Lawrence, helping himself daintily to cream. "If this is a specimen of the way things go on in country districts, thank you, give me a London slum. The brute was as mad as a hatter. He ought to have been locked up years ago. I can't conceive what Stafford was about to keep him on the estate."
"All very fine," Bernard chuckled, "but I'd lay any odds Ben didn't go for Mrs. Ben till he saw you coming."
"Adventures are to the adventurous," Laura mildly translated the bitter jest. Her mission in life was to smooth down Bernard's rough edges. "But that is too ugly, Berns. You oughtn't to say such a thing even in fun. It was no fun for Lawrence."
"I don't object to an occasional scrap," said Lawrence. "But this one was overdone." He shivered suddenly from head to foot.
"Hallo, old man, I didn't know you had a nerve in your body!" said Bernard staring at him.
Lawrence went on with his strawberries in an ungenial silence. He was irritated by his momentary self betrayal. If he had cared to explain it he would have had to confess that though personally indifferent to adventures he disliked to have women mixed up in them. He was glad when Laura with her intuitive tact changed the conversation, not too abruptly.
"All modern men have nerves. I should think Lawrence had as few as any, but it must have been a frightful scene. I must run up after lunch and see Isabel. Poor child! But she's wonderfully brave. All the Staffords were brought up to be stoical: if they knocked themselves about as children they were never allowed to cry. Mr. Stafford is a fanatic on the point of personal courage. Val told me once that the only sins for which his father ever cuffed him were telling fibs and running away."