Riding back from Liddiard St. Agnes in the low September sunshine, Val became aware of something pleasantly pictorial in the landscape. It was a day when the hills looked higher than usual, the tilt of the Plain sharper, the shadows a darker umber, the light clearer under a softly-quilted autumn sky. When he crossed a reaped cornfield, the pale golden stalks of stubble to westward were tipped each with a spark of light, so that all the upland flashed away from him toward the declining sun.

In his own mind there was a lull which corresponded with this clear quietness of Nature: a pleasant vacancy and a suspension of personal interest, so that even his anxiety about Laura was put at a little distance, and he could see her and Bernard, and Lawrence himself, like figures in a picture, hazed over by a kind of moral sunlight the Grace of God, say, which from Val’s point of view shapes all our ends:

I do not ask to see
The distant scene: one step enough for me,

this courage came to Val now without effort, and not for himself only, which would have been easy at any time, but for Laura in her difficult married life, and for those other beloved heads on which he was fated to bring disgrace his father, Rowsley, Isabel: come what might, sorrow could not harm them, nor fear annoy. How quiet it was! the quieter for the wrangling of rooks in the border elms, and for the low autumn wind that rustled in the hedgerows: and how full of light the sky, in spite of the soft bloomy clouds that had hung about all day, imbrowning the sunshine! far off in the valley doves were grieving, and over the reaped and glittering cornstalks curlews were flying and calling with their melancholy shrill wail, an echo from the sea, while small birds in flocks flew away twittering as he rode up, and settled again further on, and rose and settled again, always with a clatter of tiny wings. Evening coming on: and winter coming on: and light, light everywhere, and calm, over the harvest fields and the darkened copses, and the far blue headlands that seemed to lift themselves up into immeasurable serenities of sky.

It was lucky for Val that he was able to enjoy this quiet hour, for it was soon over. When he crossed the turf to the diningroom window, the fire had burnt down into red embers and not much light came in from out of doors under that low ceiling, but there was enough to show him Isabel in Lawrence’s arms. Fatality! He had not foreseen it, not for a moment: and yet directly he saw it he seemed to have known it all along. After a momentary suspension of his faculties, during which his ideas shifted much as they do when an unfamiliar turns into a familiar road, Val tapped on the glass and strolled in, giving his young sister one of his light teasing smiles. “Am I to bestow my consent, Isabel?”

“Oh Val! Don’t be angry, or not with Lawrence anyhow, it wasn’t his fault.”

Isabel disengaged herself but without confusion. Her brother watched her in increasing surprise. Rosy and sparkling, she seemed to have grown from child to woman in an hour, as after a late spring the first hot day brings a million buds into leaf.

“Are you startled?” she asked, holding up her cheek for a kiss.

“Not so much so as I should have been twenty-four hours ago. No, I didn’t guess not a bit; I suppose brothers never expect people to want to marry their sisters. We know too much about you.”

“Better run off to the nursery, Isabel,” said Lawrence. Isabel made him a little smiling curtsey eloquent of her disdain it was so like Captain Hyde to be saucy before Val! and slipped away. When Lawrence returned after holding open the door for her, he found a certain difficulty in meeting Val’s eyes.

“And this then is the mysterious attraction that has kept you at Wanhope all the summer? Wonderful! What will Mrs. Jack say? But I suppose nineteen, for forty, has a charm of its own.”

Lawrence was not forty. But he refused to be drawn. “She is very beautiful.”

“Oh, very,” Val was nothing if not cordial. “But her face is her fortune. I needn’t ask if you can keep her in the state to which she’s accustomed,” his eye wandered over the dilapidated vicarage furniture, “or whether your attentions are disinterested. Evidently you’re one of those men who like their wives to be dependent on them Dear me!”

“Damn the money!” said Lawrence at white heat. “Jew I may be, but it’s you and Isabel that harp on it, not I.”

“Come, come!” Val arched his eyebrows. “So sorry to ruffle you, but these questions are in all the etiquette books and some one has to ask them. If you could look on me as Isabel’s father ?”

It was too much. Angry as he was, Lawrence began to laugh. “No, I won’t look on you as Isabel’s father,” he had regained the advantage of age and position, neutralized till now by Val’s cooler self-restraint. “I won’t look on you as anything but a brother-in-law; a younger brother of my own, Val, if you can support the relation. Won’t you start fresh with me? I’ve not given you much cause to think well of me up to now, but I love Isabel, and I’ll do my best to make her happy. I might find forgiveness difficult if I were you, but then,” for his life he could not have said whether he was in earnest or chaffing Val, “I’m a Jew of Shylock’s breed and you’re a Christian.”

“But, my dear fellow, what is there to forgive? We’re only too delighted and grateful for the honour done us: it’s a brilliant match, of course, far better than she could expect to make.” A duller man than Lawrence could not have missed the secret silken mischief. “And to me, to all of us, you’re more than kind; it’s nice to feel that instead of losing a sister I shall gain a brother.”

“You are an infernal prig, Val!”

“Oh,” said Val, this time without irony, “It’s easy for you to come with an apology in one hand and a cheque in the other.”

He turned away and stood looking out into the garden. In the lilac bushes over the lawn Isabel’s robin was still singing his winter carol, and the atmosphere was saturated with the smell of wet, dead leaves, the poignant, fatal smell of autumn. “There’s winter in the air tonight,” said Val half aloud.

“What?” said Lawrence startled.

“I say that life’s too short for quarrelling.” He held out his hand. “But be gentle with her, she is very young. Yes, what is it, Fanny?”

“Major Clowes’s compliments, sir, and he would be glad to see Captain Hyde as soon as convenient.”

At Wanhope half an hour later the sun had gone down behind a bank of purple fog, and cloud after cloud had put off its vermilion glow and faded into a vague dimness of twilight: house and garden were quiet, except for the silver rippling of the river which went on and on, ceaselessly fleeting over shallows or washing along through faded sedge. These river murmurs haunted Wanhope all day and night, and so did the low river-mists: in autumn by six o’clock the grass was already ankle deep and white as a field of lilies.

The tall doors were wide open now: no lamps were lit, but a big log fire blazed on the hearth, and through the empurpled evening air the house streamed with flame-light, flinging a ruddy glow over leafless acacia and misty turf. Stretched on his couch in a warm and dark angle by the staircase, Clowes was busy with his collection, examining and sorting a number of small objects which were laid out on his tray: sparks of light winked between his fingers as iron or gold or steel turned up a reflecting edge. His face as white as his hands, the wide eyes blackened by the expansion of their pupils, he looked like a ghost, but a ghost of normal habits, washed and shaved and dressed in ordinary tweeds.

“Hullo, Bernard.”

“Good evening, Lawrence. Oh, you’ve brought Val and Selincourt, is it? What years since we’ve met, Selincourt! Very good of you to come down, and I’m delighted to see you, one can’t have too many witnesses. Mild evening, isn’t it? Leave the doors open, Val, Barry has made up an immense fire, big enough for January. Now sit down all of you, will you? I shan’t keep you long.”

Propped high on cushions, he lay like a statue, his huge shoulders squared against them as boldly as if he were in the saddle. Lawrence, so like him in frame and colouring, stood with his back to the hearth: Selincourt with his tired eyes and grey hair sat near the door, one hand slipped between his crossed knees: Val preferred to stay in the background, a spectator, interested and deeply sympathetic, but a trifle shadowy. They were three to one, but the dominant personality was that of the cripple.

“It’s with you, Lawrence, that I have to do business. You passed last night with my wife.”

The heavy voice was deadened out of all heat except grossness. How had Clowes spent the last twelve hours? In reliving over and over again his wife’s fall: defiling her image and poisoning his own soul with emanations of a diseased mind, from which Selincourt, a straightforward sinner, would have turned in disgust. Men of strong passions like Bernard need greater control than Bernard possessed to curb what they cannot indulge: and a mind full of gross imagery was nature’s revenge on him for a love that had been to him “hungry, and barren, and sharp as the sea.” But for the friend, the brother, and the lover it was difficult to grant him such allowances as would have been made by a physician.

“That’ll do,” said Lawrence, raising his hand. “Your wife is innocent. Send any one you like to the hotel private detective if you like and find out what rooms Miss Stafford and Laura had, or whether Selincourt and I stayed five minutes in the place after the ladies went upstairs.”

“So Laura said this morning.”

“There’s no loophole for suspicion. I went back with Selincourt to his rooms and we sat up the rest of the night smoking and playing auction piquet. He won about five pounds off me. Ask him: he’ll confirm it.”

“That’s what he came for, isn’t it?” Bernard smiled. “My good chap, think I don’t know that if you gave him a five pound note to do it Selincourt would hold the door for you?”

Selincourt’s pale face was scarlet. “I say she shall not return to him!” he broke out loudly. “If this is a specimen of what he’ll say to us, what does he say to her?”

“No offence, no offence,’’ Bernard bore him down, insolent and jovial. “‘The Lord commended the unjust steward.’ I foresaw that Lawrence would lie through thick and thin, and if I’d given it a thought either way I should have known you’d be brought down to back him up. And quite right too to stand by your sister the more so that all you Selincourts are as poor as Church rats and naturally don’t want your damaged goods back on your hands. But don’t get huffy, keep calm like me. You deny everything, Lawrence. Quite right: a man’s not worth his salt if he won’t lie to protect a woman. Laura also denies everything. Quite right again: a woman’s bound to lie to save her reputation. But the husband also has his natural function, which is to exercise a decent incredulity. Perhaps it’s a bit difficult for you to enter into my feelings. You’re none of you married men and you don’t know how it stings a man up when his wife makes him a Hallo!”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Go on,” said Lawrence, flinging himself into a chair: “if you have a point, come to it. I’m pretty well sick of this.”

“So it seems,” said Bernard staring at him. “Is it the good old-fashioned English word that you can’t stomach? All right, after tonight I shan’t offend again. That’s my point and I’m coming to it as fast as I can. I won’t have any one of the lot of you near me again except Val: I acquit him of complicity: he probably believes Laura innocent. Don’t you, Val?”

“There’s no evidence whatever against her, outside your imagination, old man.”

“You’re in love with her yourself,” Bernard retorted brutally. Val started, it was the second time in twelve hours. “Oh! think I haven’t seen that? There’s not much I don’t see, that goes on around me. Cheer up, I’m not really jealous of you. Laura never cared that for you. She was my wife for ten days, after all: it takes a man to master her.”

“What he wants is a medical man,” said Lawrence to Selincourt in a low voice. He dared not look at Val.

“After tonight neither Selincourt nor you, Lawrence nor your lady friend will darken my doors again. Try it on and I’ll have you warned off by the police.”

“Bernard, you over-rate the attractions of your society.”

“Pass to my second point. I don’t propose to divorce Laura.”

“You couldn’t get a divorce, you ass: you’ve no case.”

“But equally I don’t propose to take her back. If she lives alone and conducts herself decently I’ll make her an allowance say four or five hundred a year. If she lives with a lover or tries to force her way in here I won’t give her a stiver. Now, Selincourt, you had better use your influence or you’ll have her planted on you directly Lawrence gets sick of her. If she goes from me to Lawrence she can go from Lawrence on the streets for all I shut that door, Val! Keep her out!”

“Laura! go away!” cried Selincourt. The scene was rising into a nightmare and his nerves shivered under it. But he was too late. The wide doorway had filled with people: Laura with her satin hair, her flying veil, her ineffaceable French grace of air and dress: Isabel bare-headed, very pale and reluctant: and Mr. Stafford, who had come down to exercise a moderating influence in the direction of compromise. Isabel edged round towards Lawrence, while Mr. Stafford stood glancing from one to another with keen authoritative eyes, waiting a chance to strike in. But Laura after her long sleep had recovered her fighting temper and was no longer content to remain a cipher in her own house. She smiled and shook her head at Lucian, reddening under her dark skin.

“Bernard, have they told you the truth yet? No, I thought not, Lawrence was too shy.” High spirited, for all her sensitiveness, she laid her slight hand on her husband’s wrist. “Did you think if Lawrence stayed on at Wanhope it must be because he admired me? You forget that there are younger and prettier women in Chilmark than I am. Lawrence is going to marry Isabel. It’s a romantic tale,” was there a touch of pique in Laura’s charming voice? “and I’m afraid they both of them took some pains to throw dust in our eyes. I’ve only this moment learnt it from Isabel.” Yes, undeniably a trace of pique. Women like Laura, used to the admiration of men however innocent, cannot forego it without a sigh. She did not grudge Isabel her happiness or even envy it, and she had never believed Lawrence to be in love with herself, and yet this courtship that had gone on under her blind eyes produced in her a faint sense of irritation, of male defection that had made her look a little silly. She was aware of it herself and faintly amused and faintly ashamed. “My time for romantic adventure has gone by. Oh my poor Berns, you forget that I’m thirty-six!”

Here was the authentic accent of truth. Clowes heard it, but he had got beyond the point where a man is capable of saying “I was wrong, forgive me.” At that moment he no longer desired Laura to be innocent, he would have preferred to justify himself by proving her guilty. “Take your damned face out of this,” he said, enveloping her in an intensity of hate before which Laura’s delicate personality seemed to shrivel like a scorched leaf. “Take it away before I kill you.” He struck her hand from his wrist and dashed himself down on the pillow, his great arms and shoulders writhing above the marble waist like some fierce animal trapped by the loins. “Oh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it . . .”

“Oh dear, this is awful,” said Selincourt weakly. He got up and stood in the doorway. Despair is a terrible thing to watch. Not even Lawrence dared go near Bernard. It was the priest, inured to scenes of grief and rebellion, who came forward with the cold strong common sense of the Christian stoic. “But you will have to stand it,” said Mr. Stafford sternly, “it is the Will of God and rebellion only makes it worse. After all, thousands of men of all ranks have had to bear the same trial and with much less alleviation. You know now that your wife is innocent and is prepared to forgive you.” It did not strike Mr. Stafford that men like Bernard Clowes do not care to be forgiven by their wives. There was no confessional box in Chilmark church. “You have plenty of interests left and plenty of friends: so long as you don’t alienate them by behaving in such an unmanly way. Lift him, Val. Come, Major Clowes, you’re torturing your wife. This is cowardice

“Like Val’s, eh?”

“Like ?”

“Like your precious Val behaved ten years ago.” Clowes raised himself on his elbows. “Aha! how’s that for a smack in the eye?”

“Val, my darling lad,” said Mr. Stafford, stumbling a little in his speech, “what what is this?”

“Poor chap!” Clowes gave his curt “Ha ha!” as he reached out a long arm to turn on all the lights. “Who was that chap, Hercules was it, that pulled the temple on his own head? By God, if my life’s gone to pieces, I’ll take some of you with me. You, Val, I was always fond of you: tell your daddy, or shall I, what you did in the Great War?”

“Bernard. . . .”

“Can’t stand it, eh? But, like me, you’ll have to stand it. Come, come, Val, this is cowardice

“Lawrence, don’t touch him: let it come.”

But no one dared touch Clowes. “Before his sister!” Selincourt muttered. He had no idea what was coming but Val’s grey pallor frightened him. “And the old man!” Lawrence added with clenched hands. Clowes ignored them both. He held the entire group in subjection by sheer savage force of personality.

“Simple little anecdote of war. Dale, you remember, was a brother officer of mine. He was shot in a raid and left hanging on the German wire. In the night when he was dying another chap in our regiment, that had been lying up all day between the lines with a bullet in his ribs, crawled across for him. The Boches opened fire but he got Dale off and started back. Three quarters of the way over they found a third casualty, a subaltern in the Dorchesters. This chap wasn’t hurt but he was weeping with fear. He had gone to ground in a shellhole during the advance and stayed there too frightened to move. The Winchester man was by now done to the world. He kicked the Dorchester to his feet and ordered him to carry on with Dale. The Dorchester pointed out that if he turned up without a scratch on him, he would probably be shot by court martial, so the other fellow by way of pretext put a shot through his arm. ’Now you can tell ’em it was you who fetched Dale.’ ‘Oh I can’t, I’m frightened,’ says the Dorchester boy. ‘By God you shall,’ says the other, ’or I’ll put a second bullet through your brains.’ Now, Val, you finish telling us how you did the return trip in tears with Dale on your shoulders and Lawrence at your heels chivying you with a revolver.”

“You unutterable devil,” said Lawrence under his breath, “who told you that?”

Bernard grinned at him almost amicably. He had got one blow home at last and felt better. “Why, I’ve always known it. Dale told me himself. He lived twenty minutes after you got him in.”

“Val,” said Mr. Stafford, “this isn’t true?”

“Perfectly true, sir.”

Undefended, unreserved, stripped even of pride, Val stood up before them all as if before a firing party, for the others had involuntarily fallen back leaving him alone. . . . To Lawrence the silence seemed endless, it went on and on, while through the open doorway grey shadows crept in, the leafy smell of night and the liquid river-murmur so much louder than it could have been heard by day. Suddenly, as if he could not stand the strain any longer, Val covered his eyes with his hands. The movement, full of shame galvanized Lawrence into activity. But he had not the courage to approach Val. He had but one desire which was to get out of the house.

“Bernard, if you weren’t a cripple I’d put the fear of God into you with a stick” He stood near the door eyeing his cousin with a cold dislike more cutting than anger. “You’re as safe as a woman. But I’m through with you. I’ll never forgive you this, never. I’m going: and I shall take your wife with me.” He turned. “Come, Laura

“Take care, Lawrence!” cried Isabel.

She spoke too late. Bernard’s hand was already raised and a glint of steel shone between his fingers. No one was near enough to disarm him. Unable to move without exposing Laura, Lawrence mechanically threw up his wrist on guard, but the trick of Bernard’s left-handed throw was difficult to counter, and Lawrence was bracing himself for a shock when Val stepped into the line of fire. Selincourt uttered an exclamation of horror, and Val reeled heavily. “For me!” said Lawrence under his breath. He was by Val in a moment, bending over him, tender and protecting, an arm round his shoulders. “Are you hurt, Val? What is it, old man?”

Stafford had one hand pressed to his side. “He meant it for you,” he said, grimacing over the words as if he had not perfect control of his facial muscles. “Take care. Ah! that’s better.” Selincourt with a sweep of his arm had sent the remaining contents of the swing-tray flying across the floor. There was no need of such violence, however, for the devil had gone out of Bernard Clowes now. Deathly pale, his eyes blank with startled fear, his great frame seemed to break and collapse and he turned like a lost child to his wife: Laura Laura . . .”

“I’m here, my darling.” In panic, as if the police were already at the door, Laura fell on her knees by the low couch. Come what might he was still her husband, still the man she loved, to be defended against the consequences of his own acts irrespective of his deserts. There was much of the wife but more of the mother in the way she covered him with her arms and breast. “No one shall touch you, no one. It was only an accident, you never meant it, and besides Val’s only a little hurt

Val, still with that wrenched grimace of pain, turned round and leant against Lawrence. “Get me out of this,” he said weakly. “Invent some story. Anything, but spare her. Get me out, I’m going to faint.”

Between them, Lawrence and Selincourt carried him out and laid him on the steps. No one else paid any attention. Laura was taken up with Bernard. Mr. Stafford had shuffled over to the fire and was stooping down to warm his fingers while Isabel tried brokenly to soothe the anguish from which old and tired hearts rarely recover. She was more frightened for him than for Val, and the grief she felt for him was a grief outside herself, which could be pitied and comforted, whereas the blow that had fallen on Val seemed to have fallen on her own life also, withering where it struck. She suffered for her father but with Val, and this intensity of communion hardened her into steel, for it seemed as weak and vain to pity him as it would have been to pity herself if she like him had fallen under the stress of war. The weak must first be served later, later there would be time to pity the strong.

She did not realize that for Val, whom instinctively she still classed among the strong, time and opportunity were over. He fainted before they got him out into the air, and his hand fell away from his side, and then they saw what was wrong. He had been stabbed: stabbed with the Persian dagger that Lawrence himself had given Bernard. Val had taken it under his left breast, and it was buried to its delicate hilt. When Lawrence opened his coat and shirt there was scarcely any blood flowing: scarcely any sign of mischief except his leaden pallor and the all-but-cessation of his pulse. “Internal haemorrhage,” said Lawrence. He drew out the weapon, which came forth with a slow sidelong wrench of its curved blade: a gush of blood followed, running down over Val’s shirt, over his shabby coat, over the steps of Wanhope and the dry autumn turf. Lawrence held the lips of the wound together with his hand. “Go and find Verney, will you? Mind, it was an accident. Don’t be drawn into giving any details. We must all stick to the same story.”

“But but” Selincourt could not frame a coherent question with his pale frightened lips: “you don’t you can’t think

“That he’s dying? He won’t see another sun rise.”

“But do they do they in there understand?”

“Oh for them,” said Lawrence with his bitter ironical smile, “he died five minutes ago.”

This then was the end. Waiting in the autumn twilight with Val’s head on his arm Lawrence tried to retrace the steps by which it had been reached. Bernard’s revenge had struck blind and wild as revenge is apt to strike, but it had helped to bring the wheel full circle. Val’s expiation was complete. In his heart Lawrence knew that his own was complete also. In breaking Val’s life he had permanently scarred his own.

And the night when it had all begun came back to him, a March night, quiet and dark but for the periodical fanbeam of an enemy searchlight from the slope of an opposite hill: a mild rain had been falling, falling, ceaselessly, plashingly, over muddy ploughland or sere grass, over the intricacy of trenchwork behind the firing lines and the dreary expanse of no man’s land between them: falling over wire entanglements from which dangled rags of uniform and rags of flesh: falling on faces of the unburied dead that it was helping to dissolve into, their primal pulp of clay. War! always war! and no theatre of scarlet and gold and cavalry charges, but a rat’s war of mud and cold and fleas and unutterable, nerve-dissolving fatigue. Not far off occasionally the rustle of clothes or the tinkle of an entrenching tool, as a sleeper turned over or the group sentry shifted arms on the parapet; and always in a lulling undertone the plash of rain on grass or wire, and the heavy breathing of tired men. For four years these nocturnal sounds of war had been familiar in the ears of Lawrence Hyde. He could hear them now, the river-murmur repeated them. And then as now he had taken young Stafford’s head on his arm, the boy lying as he had lain for eighteen hours, immovable, the rain running down over his face and through his short fair hair.

He had failed . . . Lawrence recalled his own first near glimpse of death, a fellow subaltern hideously killed at his side: he had turned faint as the nightmare shape fell and rose and fell again, spouting blood over his clothes: contact with elder men had steadied him. By night and alone? Well: even by night and alone Lawrence knew that he would have recovered himself and gone on. It was no more than they all had to fight through, thousands of officers, millions of men. Val had failed. . . . Yet how vast the disproportion between the crime and the punishment! Endurance is at a low ebb at nineteen when one’s eyelids are dropping and one’s head nodding with fatigue. Oh to sleep sleep for twelve hours on a bed between clean sheets, and wake with a mind wiped clear of bloody memories! . . . memories above all . . . incommunicable things that even years later, even to men who have shared them, cannot be recalled except by a half-averted glance and a low “Do you remember ?” like frightened children holding hands in the dark of the world. . . . Had any one of them kept sane that night those many nights? . . . But how should a civilian understand?

He felt Val’s heart. It was beating slower and slower. If one could only have one’s life over again! but the gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.