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"One locked door after all?" "I was fond of him," said Lawrence with difficult passion. "He told me once that I broke his life, it was no one's doing but mine that he had to go through the crucifixion of that last hour at Wanhope, and he was killed for me." He left her and went to the window, flung it up and stood looking out into the night. "I'd have given my life to save him.
I can't say what Melford knew of me, but the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare." Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an "Ah!" Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word "Nightmare?" "Nightmare," the stranger continued, firmly.
A man in love cannot soberly analyse his own psychological state, and Lawrence did not know that he had fallen in love with Isabel at first sight or that the germ of matrimonial intentions had lain all along in his mind. Here and now he believed that he first thought of marrying her. Then he would have to stay on at Wanhope. And court Isabel under the eyes of all Chilmark?
"How about the poets?" asked Minver, less with the notion, perhaps, of refuting the psychologist than of bringing the literary member of our little group under the disgrace that had fallen upon him as an artist. "The poets," said I, "are as extinct as the personifications." "That's very handsome of you, Acton," said the artist. "But go on, Wanhope." "Yes, get down to business," said Rulledge.
Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. "It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists."
"Perhaps he hadn't," Minver suggested. Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. "You mean that she " "I don't see why you say that, Minver," Rulledge interposed, chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich. "I didn't say it," Minver contradicted. "You implied it; and I don't think it's fair.
But she can't be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence." "Oh, I'm not sure about that, professor," Minver put in. "Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you." "It's all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life," Wanhope resumed. "I don't believe I could make out the case, as I feel it to be." "Braybridge's part of the case is rather plain, isn't it?"
They were crossing the Wanhope lawn as he spoke, on their way to the open French windows of the parlour, gold-lit with many candles against an amethyst evening sky. Laura, in a plain black dress, was at the piano, the cool drenched foliage of Claude Debussy's rainwet gardens rustling under her magic fingers. Bernard was talking to Mrs.
Time slips away fast in a country village, and Lawrence remained a welcome guest at Wanhope, where Chilmark said though with a covert smile that Captain Hyde had done his cousin a great deal of good.
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.
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