But he had still one more mission to perform before he could go home to break the bad news to Rowsley: a trying mission under which Val fretted in repressed distaste. He came up to Lawrence holding out the gold cigarette case. "You dropped this at our place when you were talking to my sister this afternoon."
"Did I?" Lawrence slipped it into his pocket. His manner was perfectly calm. "Thanks so much.—I hadn't missed it." He had no fear of having been betrayed, in essentials, by Isabel.
"I don't want to offend you," Val continued with his direct simplicity of manner, "but perhaps you hardly realize how young my sister is."
"Some one said she was nineteen, but why?"
"I don't know what you said to her, probably nothing of the slightest consequence, but she's only a child, and you managed to upset her. To be frank, I didn't want her to see any one this afternoon. Oh, she's all right, but her arm has run her up a bit of a temperature, and Verney wants her to keep quiet for a few days. It'll give her an excuse to keep clear of the inquest too. This sounds ungrateful as well as ungracious, when we owe you so much, but there's no ingratitude in it, only common sense."
"Oh, damn your common sense!" exclaimed Lawrence.
It was as laconic a warning-off as civility allowed: and it irritated Lawrence beyond bearing to be rebuked by young Stafford, whose social life stood in his danger, whom he could at pleasure strip to universal crucifying shame. But there was neither defiance nor fear in Val: tranquil and unpretentious, in his force of character he reminded Lawrence of Laura Clowes. She too had been attacked once or twice that evening by her husband, and Lawrence had admired the way in which she either foiled or evaded the rapier point, or took it to her bosom without flinching. This same silken courage, it seemed, Val also possessed. Both would stand up to a blow with the same grave dignity and—perhaps—secret scorn.
Minutes passed. Val waited because he chose not to be the first to break silence, Lawrence because he was absorbing fresh impressions with that intensity which wipes out time and place. He was in the mood to receive them: tired, softened, and quickened, from the tears of the afternoon. After all Val was Isabel's brother and possessed Isabel's eyes! This drew Lawrence to him by a double cord: practically, because it is inconvenient to be on bad terms with one's brother-in-law, and mystically, because in his profound romantic passion he loved whatever was associated with her, down to the very sprig of honeysuckle that she had pinned into his coat. But for this cord his relations with Stafford would have begun and ended in a casual regret for the casual indulgence of a cruel impulse. But Isabel's brother had ex officio a right of entry into Hyde's private life, and, the doors once opened, he was dazed by the light that Val let in.
It was after ten o'clock and dews were falling, falling from a clear night. "One faint eternal eventide of gems," beading the dark turf underfoot and the pale faces of roses that had bloomed all day in sunshine: now prodigal of scent only they hung their heads like ghosts of flowers among dark glossy leaves. Stars hung sparkling on the dark field of heaven, stars threw down their spears on the dark river fleeting to the star-roofed distant Channel. Stream and grass and leaf-buds were ephemeral and eternal, ever passing and ever renewed, old as the stars, or the waste ether in which they range: the green, sappy stem, the dew-bead that hung on it, the shape of a ripple were the same now as when Nineveh was a queen of civilization and men's flesh was reddening alive in osier cages over altar fires on Wiltshire downs. And all the sweetness, all the romance of an English midsummer night seized the heart of Lawrence, a nomad, a returned exile, and a man in love—as if he had never known England before.
Or her inhabitants either! Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred class. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and Jack Bendish. What were these forces? Lawrence thought in flashes, by imagery, scene after scene flitting before him out of the last forty-eight hours. Homespun virtues: unselfishness, indifference to money values, the constant sense of filial, fraternal, social responsibility . . . the glow in Jack's eyes when they rested on his wife: Verney's war on cesspools: Leverton Morley as scoutmaster: the Chinese lecture: rosebushes in the churchyard, by the great stone cross with its list of names beginning "George Potts, Wiltshire Rifles, aged 49," and ending "Robert Denis Bendish, Grenadier Guards, aged 19: Into Thy Hands, O Lord": old, old feudal England, closeknit, no pastoral of easy virtues, yet holding together in a fellowship which underlies class disunion: whose sons, from days long before the Conquest, have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt showers, because they could not bear to be landless and lordless men. . . .