Nightfall | Page 6

fashion for High Churchmen. In the summer he usually roved about his
parish without any hat at all, his white curls flying in the wind. He was
of gentle birth, which tended to ease his intercourse with the Castle. He

had a hundred a year of his own, and the living of Chilmark was worth
175 pounds net. So it may have been partly from necessity that he went
about in clothes at which any respectable tramp would have turned his
nose up: 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