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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Return, by Walter de la Mare
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Return
+
+Author: Walter de la Mare
+
+Posting Date: February 22, 2009 [EBook #3075]
+Release Date: February, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RETURN
+
+Walter de la Mare
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  This edition has single quotation marks for direct quotes,
+  and double for indirect quotes.
+
+  There are no periods in the original text after
+  Mr
+  Mrs
+  Dr
+
+
+     "Look not for roses in Attalus his garden, or wholesome
+     flowers in a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce
+     any one bad, but some others are the worse for him; tempt
+     not contagion by proximity and hazard not thyself in the
+     shadow of corruption."
+
+           SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+The churchyard in which Arthur Lawford found himself wandering that mild
+and golden September afternoon was old, green, and refreshingly still.
+The silence in which it lay seemed as keen and mellow as the light--the
+pale, almost heatless, sunlight that filled the air. Here and there
+robins sang across the stones, elvishly shrill in the quiet of harvest.
+The only other living creature there seemed to Lawford to be his own
+rather fair, not insubstantial, rather languid self, who at the noise
+of the birds had raised his head and glanced as if between content and
+incredulity across his still and solitary surroundings. An increasing
+inclination for such lonely ramblings, together with the feeling that
+his continued ill-health had grown a little irksome to his wife, and
+that now that he was really better she would be relieved at his absence,
+had induced him to wander on from home without much considering where
+the quiet lanes were leading him. And in spite of a peculiar melancholy
+that had welled up into his mind during these last few days, he had
+certainly smiled with a faint sense of the irony of things on lifting
+his eyes in an unusually depressed moodiness to find himself looking
+down on the shadows and peace of Widderstone.
+
+With that anxious irresolution which illness so often brings in its
+train he had hesitated for a few minutes before actually entering the
+graveyard. But once safely within he had begun to feel extremely loth to
+think of turning back again, and this not the less at remembering with
+a real foreboding that it was now drawing towards evening, that another
+day was nearly done. He trailed his umbrella behind him over the
+grass-grown paths; staying here and there to read some time-worn
+inscription; stooping a little broodingly over the dark green graves.
+Not for the first time during the long laborious convalescence that had
+followed apparently so slight an indisposition, a fleeting sense almost
+as if of an unintelligible remorse had overtaken him, a vague thought
+that behind all these past years, hidden as it were from his daily life,
+lay something not yet quite reckoned with. How often as a boy had he
+been rapped into a galvanic activity out of the deep reveries he used
+to fall into--those fits of a kind of fishlike day-dream. How often,
+and even far beyond boyhood, had he found himself bent on some distant
+thought or fleeting vision that the sudden clash of self-possession had
+made to seem quite illusory, and yet had left so strangely haunting. And
+now the old habit had stirred out of its long sleep, and, through the
+gate that Influenza in departing had left ajar, had returned upon him.
+
+'But I suppose we are all pretty much the same, if we only knew it,' he
+had consoled himself. 'We keep our crazy side to ourselves; that's all.
+We just go on for years and years doing and saying whatever happens to
+come up--and really keen about it too'--he had glanced up with a kind of
+challenge in his face at the squat little belfry--'and then, without
+the slightest reason or warning, down you go, and it all begins to wear
+thin, and you get wondering what on earth it all means.' Memory slipped
+back for an instant to the life that in so unusual a fashion seemed
+to have floated a little aloof. Fortunately he had not discussed these
+inward symptoms with his wife. How surprised Sheila would be to see him
+loafing in this old, crooked churchyard. How she would lift her dark
+eyebrows, with that handsome, indifferent tolerance. He smiled, but a
+little confusedly; yet the thought gave even a spice of adventure to the
+evening's ramble.
+
+He loitered on, scarcely thinking at all now, stooping here and there.
+These faint listless ideas made no more stir than the sunlight gilding
+the fading leaves, the crisp turf underfoot. With a slight effort he
+stooped even once again;--
+
+     'Stranger, a moment pause, and stay;
+     In this dim chamber hidden away
+     Lies one who once found life as dear
+     As now he finds his slumbers here:
+     Pray, then, the Judgement but increase
+     His deep, everlasting peace!'
+
+'But then, do you know you lie at peace?' Lawford audibly questioned,
+gazing at the doggerel. And yet, as his eyes wandered over the blunt
+green stone and the rambling crimson-berried brier that had almost
+encircled it with its thorns, the echo of that whisper rather jarred.
+He was, he supposed, rather a dull creature--at least people seemed
+to think so--and he seldom felt at ease even with his own small
+facetiousness. Besides, just that kind of question was getting
+very common. Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were
+clever--even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only
+a bore: all head and no body. He turned languidly to the small
+cross-shaped stone on the other side:
+
+     'Here lies the body of Ann Hard, who died in child-bed.
+                 Also of James, her infant son.'
+
+He muttered the words over with a kind of mournful bitterness. 'That's
+just it--just it; that's just how it goes!'... He yawned softly; the
+pathway had come to an end. Beyond him lay ranker grass, one and
+another obscurer mounds, an old scarred oak seat, shadowed by a few
+everlastingly green cypresses and coral-fruited yew-trees. And above and
+beyond all hung a pale blue arch of sky with a few voyaging clouds like
+silvered wool, and the calm wide curves of stubble field and pasture
+land. He stood with vacant eyes, not in the least aware how queer a
+figure he made with his gloves and his umbrella and his hat among the
+stained and tottering gravestones. Then, just to linger out his hour,
+and half sunken in reverie, he walked slowly over to the few solitary
+graves beneath the cypresses.
+
+One only was commemorated with a tombstone, a rather unusual oval-headed
+stone, carved at each corner into what might be the heads of angels,
+or of pagan dryads, blindly facing each other with worn-out, sightless
+faces. A low curved granite canopy arched over the grave, with a crevice
+so wide between its stones that Lawford actually bent down and slid in
+his gloved fingers between them. He straightened himself with a
+sigh, and followed with extreme difficulty the well-nigh, illegible
+inscription:
+
+     'Here lie ye Bones of one,
+     Nicholas Sabathier, a Stranger to this Parish,
+     who fell by his own Hand on ye
+     Eve of Ste. Michael and All Angels.
+     MDCCXXXIX
+
+Of the date he was a little uncertain. The 'Hand' had lost its 'n' and
+'d'; and all the 'Angels' rain had erased. He was not quite sure even
+of the 'Stranger.' There was a great rich 'S,' and the twisted tail of
+a 'g'; and, whether or not, Lawford smilingly thought, he is no Stranger
+now. But how rare and how memorable a name! French evidently; probably
+Huguenot. And the Huguenots, he remembered vaguely, were a rather
+remarkable 'crowd.' He had, he thought, even played at 'Huguenots'
+once. What was the man's name? Coligny; yes, of course, Coligny. 'And I
+suppose,' Lawford continued, muttering to himself, 'I suppose this poor
+beggar was put here out of the way. They might, you know,' he added
+confidentially, raising the ferrule of his umbrella, 'they might have
+stuck a stake through you, and buried you at the crossroads.' And
+again, a feeling of ennui, a faint disgust at his poor little witticism,
+clouded over his mind. It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest
+way, like water in old ditches.
+
+'"Here lie ye bones of one, Nicholas Sabathier,"' he began murmuring
+again--'merely bones, mind you; brains and heart are quite another
+story. And it's pretty certain the fellow had some kind of brains.
+Besides, poor devil! he killed himself. That seems to hint at brains...
+Oh, for goodness' sake!' he cried out; so loud that the sound of his
+voice alarmed even a robin that had perched on a twig almost within
+touch, with glittering eye intent above its dim red breast on this other
+and even rarer stranger.
+
+'I wonder if it is XXXIX.; it might be LXXIX.' Lawford cast a cautious
+glance over his round grey shoulder, then laboriously knelt down beside
+the stone, and peeped into the gaping cranny. There he encountered
+merely the tiny, pale-green, faintly conspicuous eyes of a large spider,
+confronting his own. It was for the moment an alarming, and yet a
+faintly fascinating experience. The little almost colourless fires
+remained so changeless. But still, even when at last they had actually
+vanished into the recesses of that quiet habitation, Lawford did not
+rise from his knees. An utterly unreasonable feeling of dismay, a sudden
+weakness and weariness had come over him.
+
+'What is the good of it all?' he asked himself inconsequently--this
+monotonous, restless, stupid life to which he was soon to be returning,
+and for good. He began to realize how ludicrous a spectacle he must be,
+kneeling here amid the weeds and grass beneath the solemn cypresses.
+'Well, you can't have everything,' seemed loosely to express his
+disquiet.
+
+He stared vacantly at the green and fretted gravestone, dimly aware that
+his heart was beating with an unusual effort. He felt ill and weak. He
+leant his hand on the stone and lifted himself on to the low wooden
+seat nearby. He drew off his glove and thrust his bare hand under his
+waistcoat, with his mouth a little ajar, and his eyes fixed on the dark
+square turret, its bell sharply defined against the evening sky.
+
+'Dead!' a bitter inward voice seemed to break into speech; 'Dead!'
+The viewless air seemed to be flocking with hidden listeners. The very
+clearness and the crystal silence were their ambush. He alone seemed to
+be the target of cold and hostile scrutiny. There was not a breath to
+breathe in this crisp, pale sunshine. It was all too rare, too thin. The
+shadows lay like wings everlastingly folded. The robin that had been
+his only living witness lifted its throat, and broke, as if from the
+uttermost outskirts of reality, into its shrill, passionless song.
+Lawford moved heavy eyes from one object to another--bird--sun-gilded
+stone--those two small earth-worn faces--his hands--a stirring in the
+grass as of some creature labouring to climb up. It was useless to sit
+here any longer. He must go back now. Fancies were all very well for
+a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to
+reality. He leaned his hand on the dark grey wood, and closed his eyes.
+The lids presently unsealed a little, momentarily revealing astonished,
+aggrieved pupils, and softly, slowly they again descended....
+
+The flaming rose that had swiftly surged from the west into the zenith,
+dyeing all the churchyard grass a wild and vivid green, and the stooping
+stones above it a pure faint purple, waned softly back like a falling
+fountain into its basin. In a few minutes, only a faint orange burned in
+the west, dimly illuminating with its band of light the huddled figure
+on his low wood seat, his right hand still pressed against a faintly
+beating heart. Dusk gathered; the first white stars appeared; out of the
+shadowy fields a nightjar purred. But there was only the silence of the
+falling dew among the graves. Down here, under the ink-black cypresses,
+the blades of the grass were stooping with cold drops; and darkness lay
+like the hem of an enormous cloak, whose jewels above the breast of
+its wearer might be in the unfathomable clearness the glittering
+constellations....
+
+In his small cage of darkness Lawford shuddered and raised a furtive
+head. He stood up and peered eagerly and strangely from side to side. He
+stayed quite still, listening as raptly as some wandering night-beast to
+the indiscriminate stir and echoings of the darkness. He cocked his head
+above his shoulder and listened again, then turned upon the soundless
+grass towards the hill. He felt not the faintest astonishment or
+strangeness in his solitude here; only a little chilled, and physically
+uneasy; and yet in this vast darkness a faint spiritual exaltation
+seemed to hover.
+
+He hastened up the narrow path, walking with knees a little bent, like
+an old labourer who has lived a life of stooping, and came out into the
+dry and dusty lane. One moment his instinct hesitated as to which turn
+to take--only a moment; he was soon walking swiftly, almost trotting,
+downhill with this vivid exaltation in the huge dark night in his
+heart, and Sheila merely a little angry Titianesque cloud on a scarcely
+perceptible horizon. He had no notion of the time; the golden hands of
+his watch were indiscernible in the gloom. But presently, as he passed
+by, he pressed his face close to the cold glass of a little shop-window,
+and pierced that out by an old Swiss cuckoo-clock. He would if he
+hurried just be home before dinner.
+
+He broke into a slow, steady trot, gaining speed as he ran on, vaguely
+elated to find how well his breath was serving him. An odd smile
+darkened his face at remembrance of the thoughts he had been thinking.
+There could be little amiss with the heart of a man who could shamble
+along like this, taking even pleasure, an increasing pleasure in this
+long, wolf-like stride. He turned round occasionally to look into the
+face of some fellow-wayfarer whom he had overtaken, for he felt not only
+this unusual animation, this peculiar zest, but that, like a boy on some
+secret errand, he had slightly disguised his very presence, was going
+masked, as it were. Even his clothes seemed to have connived at this
+queer illusion. No tailor had for these ten years allowed him so
+much latitude. He cautiously at last opened his garden gate and with
+soundless agility mounted the six stone steps, his latch-key ready in
+his gloveless hand, and softly let himself into the house.
+
+Sheila was out, it seemed, for the maid had forgotten to light the
+lamp. Without pausing to take off his greatcoat, he hung up his hat, ran
+nimbly upstairs, and knocked with a light knuckle on his bedroom door.
+It was closed, but no answer came. He opened it, shut it, locked it, and
+sat down on the bedside for a moment, in the darkness, so that he could
+scarcely hear any other sound, as he sat erect and still, like some
+night animal, wary of danger, attentively alert. Then he rose from the
+bed, threw off his coat, which was clammy with dew, and lit a candle on
+the dressing-table.
+
+Its narrow flame lengthened, drooped, brightened, gleamed clearly. He
+glanced around him, unusually contented--at the ruddiness of the low
+fire, the brass bedstead, the warm red curtains, the soft silveriness
+here and there. It seemed as if a heavy and dull dream had withdrawn out
+of his mind. He would go again some day, and sit on the little hard seat
+beside the crooked tombstone of the friendless old Huguenot. He opened
+a drawer, took out his razors, and, faintly whistling, returned to the
+table and lit a second candle. And still with this strange heightened
+sense of life stirring in his mind, he drew his hand gently over his
+chin and looked unto the glass.
+
+For an instant he stood head to foot icily still, without the least
+feeling, or thought, or stir--staring into the looking-glass. Then an
+inconceivable drumming beat on his ear. A warm surge, like the onset of
+a wave, broke in him, flooding neck, face, forehead, even his hands with
+colour. He caught himself up and wheeled deliberately and completely
+round, his eyes darting to and fro, suddenly to fix themselves in
+a prolonged stare, while he took a deep breath, caught back his
+self-possession and paused. Then he turned and once more confronted the
+changed strange face in the glass.
+
+Without a sound he drew up a chair and sat down, just as he was, frigid
+and appalled, at the foot of the bed. To sit like this, with a kind of
+incredibly swift torrent of consciousness, bearing echoes and images
+like straws and bubbles on its surface, could not be called thinking.
+Some stealthy hand had thrust open the sluice of memory. And words,
+voices, faces of mockery streamed through without connection, tendency,
+or sense. His hands hung between his knees, a deep and settled frown
+darkened the features stooping out of the direct rays of the light, and
+his eyes wandered like busy and inquisitive, but stupid, animals over
+the floor.
+
+If, in that flood of unintelligible thoughts, anything clearly recurred
+at all, it was the memory of Sheila. He saw her face, lit, transfigured,
+distorted, stricken, appealing, horrified. His lids narrowed; a vague
+terror and horror mastered him. He hid his eyes in his hands and cried
+without sound, without tears, without hope, like a desolate child. He
+ceased crying; and sat without stirring. And it seemed after an age of
+vacancy and meaninglessness he heard a door shut downstairs, a distant
+voice, and then the rustle of some one slowly ascending the stairs. Some
+one turned the handle; in vain; tapped. 'Is that you, Arthur?'
+
+For an instant Lawford paused, then like a child listening for an echo,
+answered, 'Yes, Sheila.' And a sigh broke from him; his voice, except
+for a little huskiness, was singularly unchanged.
+
+'May I come in?' Lawford stood softly up and glanced once more into the
+glass. His lips set tight, and a slight frown settled between the long,
+narrow, intensely dark eyes.
+
+'Just one moment, Sheila,' he answered slowly, 'just one moment.'
+
+'How long will you be?'
+
+He stood erect and raised his voice, gazing the while impassively into
+the glass.
+
+'It's no use,' he began, as if repeating a lesson, 'it's no use your
+asking me, Sheila. Please give me a moment, a...I am not quite myself,
+dear,' he added quite gravely.
+
+The faintest hint of vexation was in the answer.
+
+'What is the matter? Can't I help? It's so very absurd--'
+
+'What is absurd?' he asked dully.
+
+'Why, standing like this outside my own bedroom door. Are you ill? I
+will send for Dr. Simon.'
+
+'Please, Sheila, do nothing of the kind. I am not ill. I merely want
+a little time to think in.' There was again a brief pause, and then a
+slight rattling at the handle.
+
+'Arthur, I insist on knowing at once what's wrong; this does not sound a
+bit like yourself. It is not even quite like your own voice.'
+
+'It is myself,' he replied stubbornly, staring fixedly into the glass.
+You must give me a few moments, Sheila. Something has happened. My face.
+Come back in an hour.'
+
+'Don't be absurd; it's simply wicked to talk like that. How do I know
+what you are doing? As if I can leave you for an hour in uncertainty!
+Your face! If you don't open at once I shall believe there's something
+seriously wrong: I shall send Ada for assistance.'
+
+'If you do that, Sheila, it will be disastrous. I cannot answer for the
+con--. Go quietly downstairs. Say I am unwell; don't wait dinner for me;
+come back in an hour; oh, half an hour!'
+
+The answer broke out angrily. 'You must be mad, beside yourself, to ask
+such a thing. I shall wait in the next room until you call.'
+
+'Wait where you please,' Lawford replied, 'but tell them downstairs.'
+
+'Then if I tell them to wait until half-past eight, you will come down?
+You say you are not ill: the dinner will be ruined. It's absurd.'
+
+Lawford made no answer. He listened a while, then he deliberately sat
+down once more to try to think. Like a squirrel in a cage his mind
+seemed to be aimlessly, unceasingly astir. 'What is it really? What
+is it really?--really?' He sat there and it seemed to him his body was
+transparent as glass. It seemed he had no body at all--only the memory
+of an hallucinatory reflection in the glass, and this inward voice
+crying, arguing, questioning, threatening out of the silence--'What is
+it really--really--REALLY?' And at last, cold, wearied out, he rose
+once more and leaned between the two long candle-flames, and stared
+on--on--on, into the glass.
+
+He gave that long, dark face that had been foisted on him tricks to
+do--lift an eyebrow, frown. There was scarcely any perceptible pause
+between the wish and its performance. He found to his discomfiture that
+the face answered instantaneously to the slightest emotion, even to his
+fainter secondary thoughts; as if these unfamiliar features were not
+entirely within control. He could not, in fact, without the glass before
+him, tell precisely what that face WAS expressing. He was still, it
+seemed, keenly sane. That he would discover for certain when Sheila
+returned. Terror, rage, horror had fallen back. If only he felt ill, or
+was in pain: he would have rejoiced at it. He was simply caught in some
+unheard-of snare--caught, how? when? where? by whom?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+But the coolness and deliberation of his scrutiny, had to a certain
+extent calmed Lawford's mind and given him confidence. Hitherto he had
+met the little difficulties of life only to vanquish them with ease and
+applause. Now he was standing face to face with the unknown. He burst
+out laughing, into a long, low, helpless laughter. Then he arose and
+began to walk softly, swiftly, to and fro across the room--from wall to
+wall seven paces, and at the fourth, that awful, unseen, brightly-lit
+profile passed as swiftly over the tranquil surface of the
+looking-glass. The power of concentration was gone again. He simply
+paced on mechanically, listening to a Babel of questions, a conflicting
+medley of answers. But above all the confusion and turmoil of his brain,
+as a boatswain's whistle rises above a storm, so sounded that same
+infinitesimal voice, incessantly repeating another question now, 'What
+are you going to do? What are you going to do?'
+
+And in the midst of this confusion, out of the infinite, as it were,
+came another sharp tap at the door, and all within sank to utter
+stillness again.
+
+'It's nearly half-past eight, Arthur; I can't wait any longer.'
+
+Lawford cast a last fleeting look into the glass, turned, and confronted
+the closed door. 'Very well, Sheila, you shall not wait any longer.' He
+crossed over to the door, and suddenly a swift crafty idea flashed into
+his mind.
+
+He tapped on the panel. 'Sheila,' he said softly, 'I want you first,
+before you come in, to get me something out of my old writing-desk in
+the smoking-room. Here is the key.' He pushed a tiny key--from off the
+ring he carried--beneath the door. 'In the third little drawer from the
+top, on the left side, is a letter; please don't say anything now. It
+is the letter you wrote me, you will remember, after I had asked you to
+marry me. You scribbled in the corner under your signature the initials
+"Y.S.O.A."--do you remember? They meant, You Silly Old Arthur!--do you
+remember? Will you please get that letter at once?'
+
+'Arthur,' answered the voice from without, empty of all expression,
+'what does all this mean, this mystery, this hopeless nonsense about
+a silly letter? What has happened? Is this a miserable form of
+persecution? Are you mad?--I refuse to get the letter.'
+
+Lawford stooped, black and angular, against the door. 'I am not mad. Oh,
+I am in the deadliest earnest, Sheila. You must get the letter, if only
+for your own peace of mind.' He heard his wife hesitate as she turned.
+He heard a sob. And once more he waited.
+
+'I have brought the letter,' came the low toneless voice again.
+
+'Have you opened it?'
+
+There was a rustle of paper. 'Are the letters there underlined three
+times--"Y.S.O.A."?'
+
+'The letters are there.'
+
+'And the date of the month is underneath, "April 3rd." No one else
+in the whole world, living or dead, could know of this but ourselves,
+Sheila?'
+
+'Will you please open the door?'
+
+'No one?'
+
+'I suppose not--no one.'
+
+'Then come in.' He unlocked the door and opened it. A dark, rather
+handsome woman, with sleek hair, in a silk dress of a dark rich colour
+entered. Lawford closed the door. But his face was in shadow. He had
+still a moment's respite.
+
+'I need not ask you to be patient,' he began quickly; 'if I could
+possibly have spared you--if there had been anybody in the world to go
+to... I am in horrible, horrible trouble, Sheila. It is inconceivable. I
+said I was sane: so I am, but the fact is--I went out for a walk; it
+was rather stupid, perhaps, so soon: and I think I was taken ill, or
+something--my heart. A kind of fit, a nervous fit. Possibly I am a
+little unstrung, and it's all, it's mainly fancy: but I think, I can't
+help thinking it has a little distorted--changed my face; everything,
+Sheila; except, of course, myself. Would you mind looking?' He walked
+slowly and with face averted towards the dressing-table.
+
+'Simply a nervous--to make such a fuss, to scare!...' began his wife,
+following him.
+
+Without a word he took up the two old china candlesticks, and held them,
+one in each lank-fingered hand, before his face, and turned.
+
+Lawford could see his wife--every tint and curve and line as distinctly
+as she could see him. Her cheeks never had much colour; now her whole
+face visibly darkened, from pallor to a dusky leaden grey, as she
+gazed. It was not an illusion then; not a miserable hallucination. The
+unbelievable, the inconceivable, had happened. He replaced the candles
+with trembling fingers and sat down.
+
+'Well,' he said, 'what is it really; what is it really, Sheila? What on
+earth are we to do?'
+
+'Is the door locked?' she whispered. He nodded. With eyes fixed
+stirlessly on his face, Sheila unsteadily seated herself, a little out
+of the candlelight, in the shadow. Lawford rose and put the key of
+the door on his wife's little rose-wood prayer-desk at her elbow, and
+deliberately sat down again.
+
+'You said "a fit"--where?'
+
+'I suppose--is--is it very different--hopeless? You will understand
+my being... O Sheila, what am I to do?' His wife sat perfectly still,
+watching him with unflinching attention.
+
+'You gave me to understand--"a nervous fit"; where?'
+
+Lawford took a deep breath, and quietly faced her again. 'In the old
+churchyard, Widderstone; I was looking at--at the gravestones.'
+
+'A fit; in the old churchyard, Widderstone--you were "looking at the
+gravestones"?'
+
+Lawford shut his mouth. 'I suppose so--a fit,' he said presently.
+'My heart went a little queer, and I sat down and fell into a kind of
+doze--a stupor, I suppose. I don't remember anything more. And then I
+woke; like this.'
+
+'How do you know?'
+
+'How do I know what?'
+
+'"Like that"?'
+
+He turned slowly towards the looking-glass. 'Why, here I am!'
+
+She gazed at him steadily; and a hard, incredulous, almost cunning glint
+came into her wide blue eyes. She took up the key carelessly, glanced
+at it; glanced at him. 'It has made me--I mean the first shock, you
+know--it has made me a little faint.' She walked slowly, deliberately to
+the door, and unlocked it. 'I'll get a little sal volatile.' She softly
+drew out the key, and without once removing her eyes from his face,
+opened the door and pushed the key noiselessly in on the other side.
+'Please stay there; I won't be a minute.'
+
+Lawford's face smiled--a rather desperate, yet for all that a patient,
+resolute smile. 'Oh yes, of course,' he said, almost to himself, 'I had
+not foreseen--at least--you must do precisely what you please, Sheila.
+You were going to lock me in. You will, however, before taking any final
+step, please think over what it will entail. I did not think you would,
+after such proof, in this awful trouble--I did not think you would
+simply disbelieve me, Sheila. Who else is there to help me? You have the
+letter in your hand. Isn't that sufficient proof? It was overwhelming
+proof to me. And even I doubted too; doubted myself. But never mind; why
+I should have dreamed you would believe me; or taken this awful thing
+differently, I don't know. It's rather awful to have to go on alone.
+But there, think it over. I shall not stir until I hear the voices. And
+then: honestly, Sheila, I couldn't face quite that. I'd sooner give up
+altogether. Any proof you can think of--I will... O God, I cannot bear
+it!' He covered his face with his hands; but in a moment looked up,
+unmoved once more. 'Why, for that matter,' he added slowly, and, as it
+were, with infinite pains, a faint thin smile again stealing into his
+face, 'I think,' he turned wearily to the glass, 'I think, it's almost
+an improvement!'
+
+Something deep in those dark clear pupils, out of that lean adventurous
+face, gleamed back at him, the distant flash of a heliograph, as it
+were, height to height, flashing 'Courage!' He shuddered, and shut his
+eyes. 'But I would really rather,' he aided in a quiet childlike way, 'I
+would really rather, Sheila, you left me alone now.'
+
+His wife stood irresolute. 'I understand you to explain,' she said,
+'that you went out of this house, just your usual self, this afternoon,
+for a walk; that for some reason you went to Widderstone--"to read the
+tombstones," that you had a heart attack, or, as you said at first, a
+fit, that you fell into a stupor, and came home like--like this. Am I
+likely to believe all that? Am I likely to believe such a story as that?
+Whoever you are, whoever you may be, is it likely? I am not in the least
+afraid. I thought at first it was some silly practical joke. I thought
+that at first.' She paused, but no answer came. 'Well, I suppose in a
+civilised country there is a remedy even for a joke as wicked as that.'
+
+Lawford listened patiently. 'She is pretending; she is trying me; she is
+feeling her way,' he kept repeating to himself. 'She knows I AM I, but
+hasn't the courage... Let her talk!'
+
+'I shall leave the door open,' Sheila continued. 'I am not, as you
+no doubt very naturally assumed--I am not going to do anything either
+senseless or heedless. I am merely going to ask your brother Cecil
+to come in, if he is at home, and if not, no doubt our old friend
+Mr. Montgomery would--would help us.' Her scrutiny was still and
+concentrated, like that of a cat above a mouse's hole.
+
+Lawford sat crouched together in the candle-light. 'By all means,
+Sheila,' he said slowly choosing his words, 'if you think poor old
+Cecil, who next January will have been three years in his grave, will
+be of any use in our difficulty. Who Mr. Montgomery is...' His voice
+dropped in utter weariness. 'You did it very well, my dear,' he added
+softly.
+
+Sheila gently closed the door and sat down on the bed. He heard her
+softly crying, he heard the bed shaken with her sobs. But a slow glance
+towards the steady candle-flames restrained him. He let her cry on
+alone. When she had become a little more composed he stood up. 'You have
+had no dinner,' he managed to blurt out at last, 'you will be faint.
+It's useless to talk, even to think, any more to-night. Leave me to
+myself for a while. Don't look at me any more. Perhaps I can sleep:
+perhaps if I sleep it will come right again. When the servants are
+gone up, I will come down. Just let me have some--some medical book, or
+other; and some more candles. Don't think, Sheila; don't even think!'
+
+Sheila paid him no attention for a while. 'You tell me not to think,'
+she began, in a low, almost listless voice; 'why--I wonder I am in my
+right mind. And "eat"! How can you have the heartlessness to suggest it?
+You don't seem in the least to realize what you say. You seem to have
+lost all--all consciousness. I quite agree, it is useless for me to
+burden you with my company while you are in your present condition of
+mind. But you will at least promise me that you won't take any further
+steps in this awful business.' She could not, try as she would, bring
+herself again to look at him. She rose softly, paused a moment with
+sidelong eyes, then turned deliberately towards the door, 'What, what
+have I done to deserve all this?'
+
+From behind her that voice, so extraordinarily like--and yet in some
+vague fashion more arresting, more resonant than her husband's, broke
+incredibly out once more. 'You will please leave the key, Sheila. I am
+ill, but I am not yet in the padded room. And please understand, I take
+no further steps in "this awful business" until I hear a strange voice
+in the house.' Sheila paused, but the quiet voice rang in her ear,
+desperately yet convincingly. She took the key out of the lock, placed
+it on the bed, and with a sigh, that was not quite without a hint of
+relief in its misery, she furtively extinguished the gas-light on the
+landing and rustled downstairs.
+
+She speedily returned. 'I have brought the book.' she said hastily.
+'I could only find the one volume. I have said you have taken a fresh
+chill. No one will disturb you.'
+
+Lawford took the book without a word. And once more, with eyes stonily
+averted, his wife left him to his own company and that of the face in
+the glass.
+
+When completely deserted, Lawford with fumbling fingers opened Quain's
+'Dictionary of Medicine.' He had never had much curiosity, and had
+always hated what he disbelieved, but none the less he had heard
+occasionally of absurd and questionable experiments. He remembered
+even to have glanced over reports of cases in the newspapers concerning
+disappearances, loss of memory, dual personality. Cranks... Oh yes, he
+thought now, with a sense of cold humiliating relief, there had been
+such cases as his before. They were no doubt curable. They must be
+comparatively common in America--that land of jangled nerves. Possibly
+bromide, rest, a battery. But Quain, it seemed, shared his prejudices,
+at least in this edition, or had hidden away all such apocryphal matter
+beneath technical terms, where no sensible man could find it, 'Besides,'
+he muttered angrily, 'what's the good of your one volume?' He flung
+it down and strode to the bed, and rang the bell. Then suddenly
+recollecting himself, he paused and listened. There came a tap on the
+door. 'Is that you, Sheila?' he called, doubtfully.
+
+'No, sir, it's me,' came the answer.
+
+'Oh, don't trouble; I only wanted to speak to your mistress. It's all
+right.'
+
+'Mrs. Lawford has gone out, sir,' replied the voice.
+
+'Gone out?'
+
+'Yes, sir; she told me not to mention it; but I suppose as you asked--'
+
+'Oh, that's all right; never mind; I didn't ring.' He stood with face
+uplifted, thinking.
+
+'Can I do anything, sir?' came the faint, nervous question after a long
+pause.
+
+'One moment, Ada,' he called in a loud voice. He took out his
+pocket-book, sat down, and scribbled a little note. He hardly noticed
+how changed his handwriting was--the clear round letters crabbed and
+irregular.
+
+'Are you there, Ada?' he called. 'I am slipping a note beneath the
+door; just draw back the mat; that's it. Take it at once, please, to Mr.
+Critchett's, and be sure to wait for an answer. Then come back direct
+to me, up here. I don't think, Ada, your mistress believes much in
+Critchett; but I have fully explained what I want. He has made me up
+many prescriptions. Explain that to his assistant if he is not there.
+Go at once, and you will be back before she is. I should be so very much
+obliged, tell him. "Mr Arthur Lawford."'
+
+The minutes slowly drifted by. He sat quite still in the clear
+untroubled light, waiting in the silence of the empty house. And for
+the first time he was confronted with the cold incredible horror of his
+ordeal. Who would believe, who could believe, that behind this strange
+and awful, yet how simple mask, lay himself? What test; what heaped-up
+evidence of identity would break it down? It was all a loathsome
+ignominy. It was utterly absurd. It was--
+
+Suddenly, with a kind of ape-like cunning, he deliberately raised a
+long lean forefinger and pointed it at the shadowy crystal of the
+looking-glass. Perhaps he was dead, was really and indeed changed in
+body, was fated really and indeed to change in soul, into That. 'It's
+that beastly voice again,' Lawford cried out loud, looking vacantly at
+his upstretched finger. And then, hand and arm, not too willingly, as it
+were, obeyed; relaxed and fell to his side. 'You must keep a tight hold,
+old man,' he muttered to himself. 'Once, once you lose yourself--the
+least symptom of that--the least symptom, and it's all up!' And the
+fools, the heartless, preposterous fools had brought him one volume!
+
+When on earth was Ada coming back? She was lagging on purpose. She was
+in the conspiracy too. Oh, it should be a lesson to Sheila! Oh, if only
+daylight would come! 'What are you going to do--to do--to DO?' He rose
+once more and paced his silent cage. To and fro, thinking no more;
+just using his eyes, compelling them to wander from picture to picture,
+bedpost to bedpost; now counting aloud his footsteps; now humming; only,
+only to keep himself from thinking. At last he took out a drawer and
+actually began arranging its medley of contents; ties, letters, studs,
+concert and theatre programmes--all higgledy-piggledy. And in the midst
+of this childish strategem he heard a faint sound, as of heavy water
+trickling from a height. He turned. A thief was in one of the candles.
+It was guttering out. He would be left in darkness. He turned hastily
+without a moment's heed, to call for light, flung the door open and full
+in the flare of a lamp, illuminating her pale forehead and astonished
+face beneath her black straw hat, stood face to face with Ada.
+
+With one swift dexterous movement he drew the door to after him,
+looking straight into her almost colourless steady eyes. 'Ah,' he
+said instantly, in a high faint voice, 'the powder, thank you; yes,
+Mr Lawford's powder; thank you, thank you. He must be kept absolutely
+quiet--absolutely. Mrs Lawford is following. Please tell her that I am
+here, when she returns. Mr Critchett was in, then? Thank you. Extreme,
+extreme silence, please.' Again that knotted, melodramatic finger raised
+itself on high; and within that lean, cadaverous body the soul of its
+lodger quailed at this spectral boldness. But it was triumphant. The
+maid at once left him and went downstairs. He heard faint voices in
+muffled consultation. And in a moment Sheila's silks rustled once
+more on the staircase. Lawford put down the lamp, and watched her
+deliberately close the door.
+
+'What does this mean?' she began swiftly, 'I understand that--Ada tells
+me a stranger is here; giving orders, directions. Who is he? where
+is he? You bound yourself on your solemn promise not to stir till
+I returned. You... How can I, how can we get decently through this
+horrible business if you are so wretchedly indiscreet? You sent Ada to
+the chemist's. What for? What for? I say.'
+
+Lawford watched his wife with an almost extraneous interest. She was
+certainly extremely interesting from that point of view, that very
+novel point of view. 'It's quite useless,' he said, 'to get in the least
+nervous or hysterical. I don't care for the darkness just now. That was
+all. Tell the girl I am a strange doctor--Dr Simon's new partner. You
+are clever at conventionalities, Sheila. Invent! I said our patient must
+be kept quiet--I really think he must. That is all, so far as Ada is
+concerned.... What on earth else ARE we to say?' he broke out. 'That,
+for the present to EVERYBODY, is our only possible story. It will give
+us what we must have--time. And next--where is the second volume of
+Quain? I want that. And next--why have you broken faith with me?' Mrs
+Lawford sat down. This sudden and baffling outburst had stupefied her.
+
+'I can't, I can't make head or tail of what you say. And as for having
+broken faith, as you call it, would any wife, would any sane woman face
+what you have brought on us, a situation like this, without seeking
+advice and help? Mr Bethany will be perfectly discreet--if he thinks
+discretion desirable. He is the only available friend we have close
+enough to ask at once. And things of this kind are, I suppose, if
+anybody's concern, his. It's certain to leak out. Everybody will hear
+of it. Don't flatter yourself you are going to hush up a thing like this
+for long. You can't keep living skeletons in a cupboard. You think only
+of yourself, only of your own misfortune. But who's to know, pray, that
+you really are my husband--if you are? The sooner I get the vicar on
+my side the better for us both. Who in the whole of the parish--I ask
+you--and you must have the sense left to see that--who will believe that
+a respectable man, a gentleman, a Churchman, would deliberately go out
+to seek an afternoon's amusement in a poky little country churchyard?
+Why, apart from everything else, THAT was absolutely mad to start with.
+Can you really wonder at the result?'
+
+Probably because she still steadfastly refused to look at him, her
+memory kept losing its hold on the appalling fact facing them. She
+realised fully only that she was in a great, unwarrantable, and
+insurmountable difficulty, but until she actually lifted her eyes for a
+moment she had not fully realised what that difficulty was. She got up
+with a sudden and horrible nausea. 'One moment,' she said, 'I will see
+if the servants have gone to bed.'
+
+That long saturnine face, behind which Lawford lay in a dull and
+desperate ambush, smiled. Something partaking of its clay, some reflex
+ghost of its rather remarkable features, was even a little amused at
+Sheila.
+
+She returned in a moment, and stood in profile in the doorway. 'Will you
+come down?' she remarked distantly.
+
+'One moment, Sheila,' Lawford began miserably. 'Before we take this
+irrevocable step, a step I implore you to postpone awhile--for what
+comes, I suppose, may go--what precisely have you told the vicar? I must
+in fairness know that.'
+
+'In fairness,' she began ironically, and suddenly broke off. Her husband
+had turned the flame of the lamp low down in the vacant room behind
+them; the corridor was lit obscurely by the chandelier far down in the
+hall below. A faint, inexplicable dread fell softly and coldly on her
+heart. 'Have you no trust in me?' she murmured a little bitterly. 'I
+have simply told him the truth.'
+
+They softly descended the stairs; she first, the dark figure following
+close behind her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+Mr Bethany sat awaiting them in the dining-room, a large,
+heavily-furnished room with a great benign looking-glass on the
+mantelpiece, a marble clock, and with rich old damask curtains. Fleecy
+silver hair was all that was visible of their visitor when they entered.
+But Mr Bethany rose out of his chair when he heard them, and with a
+little jerk, turned sharply round. Thus it was that the gold-spectacled
+vicar and Lawford first confronted each other, the one brightly
+illuminated, the other framed in the gloom of the doorway. Mr Bethany's
+first scrutiny was timid and courteous, but beneath it he tried to be
+keen, and himself hastened round the table almost at a trot, to obtain,
+as delicately as possible, a closer view. But Lawford, having shut
+the door behind him, had gone straight to the fire and seated himself,
+leaning his face in his hands. Mr Bethany smiled faintly, waved his hand
+almost as if in blessing, but certainly in peace, and tapped Mrs Lawford
+into the chair upon the other side. But he himself remained standing.
+
+'Mrs Lawford has, I declare, been telling family secrets,' he began,
+and paused, peering. But there, you will forgive an old friend's
+intrusion--this little confidence about a change, my dear fellow--about
+a ramble and a change?' He sat down, put up his kind little puckered
+face and peered again at Lawford, and then very hastily at his wife.
+But all her attention was centred on the bowed figure opposite to her.
+Lawford responded to this cautious advance without raising his head.
+
+'You do not wish me to repeat all that my wife tells me she has told
+you?'
+
+'Dear me, no,' said Mr Bethany cheerfully, 'I wish nothing, nothing, old
+friend. You must not burden yourself with me. If I may be of any help,
+here I am.... Oh, no, no....' he paused, with blinking eyes, but wits
+still shrewd and alert. Why doesn't the man raise his head? he thought.
+A mere domestic dispute!
+
+'I thought,' he went on ruminatingly, 'I thought on Tuesday, yes, on
+Tuesday, that you weren't looking quite the thing. Indeed, I remarked on
+it. But now, I understand from Mrs Lawford that the malady has taken
+a graver turn--eh, Lawford, an heretical turn? I hear you have been
+wandering from the true fold.' Mr Bethany leaned forward with what might
+be described as a very large smile in a very small compass. 'And that,
+of course, entailed instant retribution.' He broke off solemnly. 'I know
+Widderstone churchyard well; a most verdant and beautiful spot. The late
+rector, a Mr Strickland, was a very old friend of mine. And his wife,
+dear good Alicia, used to set out her babies, in the morning, to sleep
+and to play there, twenty, dear me, perhaps twenty-five years ago. But
+I did not know, my dear Lawford, that you--' and suddenly, without an
+instant's warning, something seemed to shout at him, 'Look, look! He is
+looking at you!' He stopped, faltered, and a slight warmth came into his
+face. 'And and you were taken ill there?' His voice had fallen flat and
+faint.
+
+'I fell asleep--or something of that sort,' came the stubborn reply.
+
+'Yes,' said Mr Bethany, brightly, 'so your wife was saying. "Fell
+asleep," so have I too--scores of times'; he beamed, with beads of sweat
+glistening on his forehead. 'And then? I'm not, I'm not persisting?'
+
+'Then I woke; refreshed, I think, as it seemed--I felt much better and
+came home.'
+
+'Ah, yes,' said his visitor. And after that there was a long, brightly
+lit, intense pause; at the end of which Lawford raised his face and
+again looked firmly at his friend.
+
+Mr Bethany was now a shrunken old man; he sat perfectly still, his head
+craned a little forward, and his veined hands clutching his bent, spare
+knees.
+
+There wasn't the least sign of devilry, or out-facingness, or insolence
+in that lean shadowy steady head; and yet he himself was compelled to
+sidle his glance away, so much the face shook him. He closed his eyes,
+too, as a cat does after exchanging too direct a scrutiny with human
+eyes. He put out towards, and withdrew, a groping hand from Mrs Lawford.
+
+'Is it,' came a voice from somewhere, 'is it a great change, sir? I
+thought perhaps I may have exaggerated--candle-light, you know.'
+
+Mr Bethany remained still and silent, striving to entertain one thought
+at a time. His lips moved as if he were talking to himself. And again
+it was Lawford's faltering voice that broke the silence. 'You see,'
+he said, 'I have never... no fit, or anything of that kind before. I
+remember on Tuesday... oh yes, quite well. I did feel seedy, very. And
+we talked, didn't we?--Harvest Festival, Mrs Wine's flowers, the new
+offertory-bags, and all that. For God's sake, Vicar, it is not as bad
+as--as they make out?'
+
+Mr Bethany woke with a start. He leaned forward, and stretched out a
+long black wrinkled sleeve, just managing to reach far enough to tap
+Lawford's knee. 'Don't worry, don't worry,' he said soothingly. 'We
+believe, we believe.'
+
+It was, none the less, a sheer act of faith. He took off his spectacles
+and took out his handkerchief. 'What we must do, eh, my dear,' he half
+turned to Mrs Lawford, 'what we must do is to consult, yes, consult
+together. And later--we must have advice--medical advice; unless, as
+I very much suspect, it is merely a little quite temporary physical
+aberration. Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting,
+groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of
+before--without being burned alive for it. What's in a name? Nerves,
+especially, Lawford.'
+
+Mrs Lawford sat perfectly still, absorbedly listening, turning her face
+first this way, then that, to each speaker in turn. 'That is what
+I thought,' she said, and cast one fleeting glance across at the
+fireplace, 'but--'
+
+The little old gentleman turned sharply with half-blind eyes, and lips
+tight shut. 'I think,' he said, with a hind of austere humour, 'I think,
+do you know, I see no "but."' He paused as if to catch the echo and
+added, 'It's our only course.' He continued to polish round and round
+his glasses. Mrs Lawford rather magnificently rose.
+
+'Perhaps if I were to leave you together awhile? I shall not be far
+off. It is,' she explained, as if into a huge vacuum, 'it is a terrible
+visitation.' She moved gravely round the table and very softly and
+firmly closed the door after her.
+
+Lawford took a deep breath. 'Of course.' he said, 'you realise my
+wife does not believe me. She thinks,' he explained naively, as if to
+himself, 'she thinks I am an imposter. Goodness knows what she does
+think. I can't think much myself--for long!'
+
+The vicar rubbed busily on. 'I have found, Lawford,' he said smoothly,
+'that in all real difficulties the only feasible plan is--is to face the
+main issue. The others right themselves. Now, to take a plunge into your
+generosity. You have let me in far enough to make it impossible for me
+to get out--may I hear then exactly the whole story? All that I know
+now, so far as I could gather from your wife, poor soul, is of course
+inconceivable: that you went out one man and came home another. You will
+understand, my dear man, I am speaking, as it were, by rote. God has
+mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the
+blow, hours afterwards the bruise. Oh, dear me, that man Hume--"on
+miracles"--positively amazing! So that too, please, you will be quite
+clear about. Credo--not quia impossible est, but because you, Lawford,
+have told me. Now then, if it won't be too wearisome to you, the whole
+story.' He sat, lean and erect in his big chair, a hand resting
+loosely on each knee, in one spectacles, in the other a dangling pocket
+handkerchief. And the dark, sallow, aquiline, formidable figure, with
+its oddly changing voice, re-told the whole story from the beginning.
+
+'You were aware then of nothing different, I understand, until you
+actually looked into the glass?'
+
+'Only vaguely. I mean that after waking I felt much better, more alert.
+And my thoughts--'
+
+'Ah, yes, your thoughts?'
+
+'I hardly know--oh, clear as if I had had a real long rest. It was just
+like being a boy again. Influenza dispirits one so.'
+
+Mr Bethany gazed without stirring. 'And yet, you know,' he said, 'I can
+hardly believe, I mean conceive, how--You have been taking no drugs, no
+quackery, Lawford?'
+
+'I never dose myself,' said Lawford, with sombre pride.
+
+'God bless me, that's Lawford to the echo,' thought his visitor. 'And
+before--?' he went on gently; 'I really cannot conceive, you see, how
+a mere fit could... Before you sat down you were quite alone?' He stuck
+out his head. 'There was nobody with you?'
+
+'With me? Oh no,' came the soft answer.
+
+'What had you been thinking of? In these days of faith-cures, and
+hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities--why, the simple old world
+grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel. You were thinking,
+you say; do you remember, perhaps, just the drift?'
+
+'Well,' began Lawford ruminatingly, 'there was something curious even
+then, perhaps. I remember, for instance, I knelt down to read an old
+tombstone. There was a little seat--no back. And an epitaph. The sun was
+just setting; some French name. And there was a long jagged crack in
+the stone, like the black line you know one sees after lightning, I mean
+it's as clear as that even now, in memory. Oh yes, I remember. And then,
+I suppose, came the sleep--stupid, sluggish: and then; well, here I am.'
+
+'You are absolutely certain, then,' persisted Mr Bethany almost
+querulously, 'there was no living creature near you? Bless me, Lawford,
+I see no unkindness in believing what the Bible itself relates. There
+are powers supernatural. Saul, and so on. We are all convinced of that.
+No one?'
+
+'I remember distinctly,' replied Lawford, in a calm, stubborn voice, 'I
+looked up all around me, while I was kneeling there, and there wasn't a
+soul to be seen. Because, you see, it even then occurred to me that it
+would have looked rather queer--my wandering about like that, I mean.
+Facing me there were some cypress-trees, and beyond, a low sunken
+fence, and then, just open country. Up above there were the gravestones
+toppling down the hill, where I had just strolled down, and sunshine!'
+He suddenly threw up his hand. 'Oh, marvellous! streaming in
+gold--flaming, like God's own ante-chamber.'
+
+There was a very pregnant pause. Mr Bethany shrunk back a little into
+his chair. His lips moved; he folded his spectacles.
+
+'Yes, yes,' he said. And then very quietly he stole one mole-like look
+into his sidesman's face.
+
+'What is Dr Simon's number?' he said. Lawford was gazing gloomily
+into the fire. 'Oh, Annandale,' he replied absently. 'I don't know the
+number.'
+
+'Do you believe in him? Your wife mentioned him. Is he clever?'
+
+'Oh, he's new,' said Lawford; 'old James was our doctor. He--he killed
+my father.' He laughed out shamefacedly.
+
+'A sound, lovable man,' said Mr Bethany, 'one of the kindest men I ever
+knew; and a very old friend of mine.'
+
+And suddenly the dark face turned with a shudder from the fire, and
+spoke in a low trembling voice. 'Only one thing--only one thing--my
+sanity, my sanity. If once I forget, who will believe me?' He thrust his
+long lean fingers beneath his coat. 'And mad,' he added; 'I would sooner
+die.'
+
+Mr Bethany deliberately adjusted his spectacles. 'May I, may I
+experiment?' he said boldly. There came a tap on the door.
+
+'Bless me,' said the vicar, taking out his watch, 'it is a quarter to
+twelve. 'Yes, yes, Mrs Lawford,' he trotted round to the door. 'We are
+beginning to see light--a ray!'
+
+'But I--I can see in the dark,' whispered Lawford, as if at a cue,
+turning with an inscrutable smile to the fire.
+
+The vicar came again, wrapped up in a little tight grey great-coat, and
+a white silk muffler. He looked up unflinching into Lawford's face,
+and tears stood in his eyes. 'Patience, patience, my dear fellow,'
+he repeated gravely, squeezing his hand. 'And rest, complete rest, is
+imperative. Just till the first thing to-morrow. And till then,' he
+turned to Mrs Lawford, where she stood looking in at the doorway, 'oh
+yes, complete quiet; and caution!'
+
+Mrs Lawford let him out. He shook his head once or twice, holding her
+fingers. 'Oh yes,' he whispered, 'it is your husband, not the smallest
+doubt. I tried: for MYSELF. But something--something has happened. Don't
+fret him now. Have patience. Oh yes, it is incredible... the change! But
+there, the very first thing to-morrow.' She closed the door gently
+after him, and stepping softly back to the dining-room, peered in. Her
+husband's back was turned, but he could see her in the looking-glass,
+stooping a little, with set face watching him, in the silvery stillness.
+
+'Well,' he said, 'is the old--' he doggedly met the fixed eyes facing
+him there, 'is our old friend gone?'
+
+'Yes,' said Sheila, 'he's gone.' Lawford sighed and turned round. 'It's
+useless talking now, Sheila. No more questions. I cannot tell you how
+tired I am. And my head--'
+
+'What is wrong with your head?' inquired his wife discreetly.
+
+The haggard face turned gravely and patiently. 'Only one of my old
+headaches.' he smiled, 'my old bilious headaches--the hereditary Lawford
+variety.' But his voice fell low again. 'We must get to bed.'
+
+With a rather pretty and childish movement, Sheila gently drew her hands
+across her silk skirts. 'Yes, dear,' she said, 'I have made up a bed for
+you in the large spare room. It is thoroughly aired.' She came softly
+in, hastened over to a closed work-table that stood under the curtains,
+and opened it.
+
+Lawford watched her, utterly expressionless, utterly motionless. He
+opened his mouth and shut it again, still watching his wife as she
+stooped with ridiculously too busy fingers, searching through her
+coloured silks.
+
+Again he opened his mouth. 'Yes,' he said, and stalked slowly towards
+the door. But there he paused. 'God knows,' he said, strangely and
+meekly, 'I am sorry, sorry for all this. You will forgive me, Sheila?'
+
+She looked up swiftly. 'It's very tiresome, I can't find anywhere,' she
+murmured, 'I can't find anywhere the--the little red box key.'
+
+Lawford's cheek turned more sallow than ever. 'You are only pretending
+to look for it,' he said, 'to try me. We both know perfectly well the
+lock is broken. Ada broke it.'
+
+Sheila let fall the lid; and yet for a while her eyes roved over it as
+if in violent search for something. Then she turned: 'I am so very glad
+the vicar was at home,' she said brightly. 'And mind, mind you rest,
+Arthur. There's nothing so bad but it might be worse.... Oh, I can't, I
+can't bear it!' She sat down in the chair and huddled her face between
+her hands, sobbing on and on, without a tear.
+
+Lawford listened and stared solemnly. 'Whatever it may be, Sheila, I
+will be loyal,' he said.
+
+Her sobs hushed, and again cold horror crept over her. Nobody in
+the whole world could have said that 'I will be loyal' quite like
+that--nobody but Arthur. She stood up, patting her hair. 'I don't think
+my brain would bear much more. It's useless to talk. If you will go up;
+I will put out the lamp.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+One solitary and tall candle burned on the great dressing-table. Faint,
+solitary pictures broke the blankness of each wall. The carpet was rich,
+the bed impressive, and the basins on the washstand as uninviting as the
+bed. Lawford sat down on the edge of it in complete isolation. He sat
+without stirring, listening to his watch ticking in his pocket. The
+china clock on the chimney piece pointed cheerfully to the hour of dawn.
+It was exactly, he computed carefully, five hours and seven minutes
+fast. Not the slightest sound broke the stillness, until he heard, very,
+very softly and gradually, the key of his door turn in the oiled wards,
+and realized that he was a prisoner.
+
+Women were strange creatures. How often he had heard that said, he
+thought lamely. He felt no anger, no surprise or resentment, at the
+trick. It was only to be expected. He could sit on till morning; easily
+till morning. He had never noticed before how empty a well-furnished
+room could seem. It was his own room too; his best visitors' room. His
+father-in-law had slept here, with his whiskers on that pillow. His
+wife's most formidable aunt had been all night here, alone with these
+pictures. She certainly was... 'But what are you doing here?' cried a
+voice suddenly out of his reverie.
+
+He started up and stretched himself, and taking out the neat little
+packet that the maid had brought from the chemist's, he drew up a chair,
+and sat down once more in front of the glass. He sighed vacantly, rose
+and lifted down from the wall above the fireplace a tinted photograph
+of himself that Sheila had had enlarged about twelve years ago. It was
+a brighter, younger, hairier, but unmistakably the same dull indolent
+Lawford who had ventured into Widderstone churchyard that afternoon. The
+cheek was a little plumper, the eyes not quite so full-lidded, the hair
+a little more precisely parted, the upper lip graced with a small blonde
+moustache. He tilted the portrait into the candlelight, and compared it
+with this reflection in the glass of what had come out of Widderstone,
+feature with feature, with perfect composure and extreme care, Then he
+laid down the massive frame on the table, and gazed quietly at the tiny
+packet.
+
+It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized
+with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this
+small punctilious packet lay a Sesame--a power of transformation beside
+which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into
+this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house
+to house--a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so very
+normal. Which should it be, that, or--his face lifted itself once more
+to the ice-like gloom of the looking-glass-that, or this?
+
+It simply gazed back with a kind of quizzical pity on its lean features
+under the scrutiny of eyes so deep, so meaningful, so desolate, and yet
+so indomitably courageous. In the brain behind them a slow and stolid
+argument was in progress; the one baffling reply on the one side to
+every appeal on the other being still simply. 'What dreams may come?'
+
+Those eyes surely knew something of dreams, else, why this violent and
+stubborn endeavour to keep awake.
+
+Lawford did indeed once actually frame the question, 'But who the
+devil are you?' And it really seemed the eyes perceptibly widened or
+brightened. The mere vexation of his unparalleled position. Sheila's
+pathetic incredulity, his old vicar's laborious kindness, the tiresome
+network of experience into which he would be dragged struggling on the
+morrow, and on the morrow after that, and after that--the thought of
+all these things faded for the moment from his mind, lost if not their
+significance, at least their instancy.
+
+He simply sat face to face with the sheer difficulty of living on
+at all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had
+occurred, no 'change,' he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet
+Lawford, in his best visitor's room, deciding between inscrutable life
+and just--death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn't even
+the energy to complete themselves. None cared but himself and this--this
+Silence.
+
+'But what does it all mean?' the insistent voice he was getting to know
+so well began tediously inquiring again. And every time he raised
+his eyes, or, rather, as in many cases it seemed, his eyes raised
+themselves, they saw this haunting face there--a face he no longer
+bitterly rebelled at, nor dimmed with scrutiny, but a face that was
+becoming a kind of hold on life, even a kind of refuge, an ally. It was
+a face that might have come out of a rather flashy book; or such as is
+revered on the stage. 'A rotten bad face,' he whispered at it in his own
+familiar slang, after some such abrupt encounter; a fearless, packed,
+daring, fascinating face, with even--what?--a spice of genius in it.
+Whose the devil's face was it? What on earth was the matter?... 'Brazen
+it out,' a jubilant thought cried suddenly; 'follow it up; play the
+game! give me just one opening. Think--think what I've risked!'
+
+And all these voices thought Lawford, in deadly lassitude, meant only
+one thing--insanity. A blazing, impotent indignation seized him. He
+leaned near, peering as it were out of a red dusky mist. He snatched up
+the china candlestick, and poised it above the sardonic reflection, as
+if to throw. Then slowly, with infinite pains, he drew back from the
+glass and replaced the candlestick on the table; stuffed his paper
+packet into his pocket, took off his boots and threw himself on to the
+bed. In a little while, in the faint, still light, he opened drowsily
+wondering eyes. `Poor old thing!' his voice murmured, 'Poor old Sheila!'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+It was but little after daybreak when Mrs Lawford, after listening at
+his door a while, turned the key and looked in on her husband. Blue-grey
+light from between the venetian blinds just dusked the room. She stood
+in a bluish dressing-gown, her hand on her bosom, looking down on the
+lean impassive face. For the briefest instant her heart had leapt with
+an indescribable surmise; to fall dull as lead once more. Breathing
+equably and quietly, the strange figure lay stretched upon the bed. 'How
+can he sleep? How can he sleep?' she whispered with a black and hopeless
+indignation. What a night she had had! And he!
+
+She turned noiselessly away. The candle had guttered to extinction. The
+big glass reflected her, voluminous and wan, her dark-ringed eyes, full
+lips, rich, glossy hair, and rounded chin. 'Yes, yes,' it seemed to
+murmur mournfully. She turned away, and drawing stealthily near stooped
+once more quite low, and examined the face on the pillow with lynx-like
+concentration. And though every nerve revolted at the thought, she was
+finally convinced, unwillingly, but assuredly, that her husband was
+here. Indeed, if it were not so, how could she for a single moment have
+accepted the possibility that he was a stranger? He seemed to haunt,
+like a ghostly emanation, this strange, detestable face--as memory
+supplies the features concealed beneath a mask. The face was still
+and stony, like one dead or imaged in wax, yet beneath it dreams were
+passing--silly, ordinary Lawford dreams. She was almost alarmed at the
+terribly rancorous hatred she felt for the face... 'It was just like
+Arthur to be so taken in!'
+
+Then she too remembered Quain, and remembered also in the slowly paling
+dusk that the house would soon be stirring. She went out and noiselessly
+locked the door again. But it was useless to begin looking for
+Quain now--her husband had a good many dull books, most of them his
+'eccentric' father's. What must the servants be thinking? and what was
+all that talk about a mysterious visitor? She would have to question
+Ada--diplomatically. She returned to her room and sat down in an
+arm-chair, and waited. In sheer weariness she fell into a doze, and woke
+at the sound of dustpan and broom. She rang the bell, and asked for hot
+water, tea, and a basin of cornflour.
+
+'And please, Ada, be as quiet as possible over your work; your master is
+in a nice sleep, and must not be disturbed on any account. In the front
+bedroom.' She looked up suddenly. 'By the way, who let Dr Ferguson in
+last night?' It was dangerous, but successful.
+
+'Dr Ferguson, ma'am? Oh, you mean... He WAS in.'
+
+Sheila smiled resignedly. 'Was in? What do you mean, "was in"? And where
+were you, then?'
+
+'I had been sent out to Critchett's, the chemist's.'
+
+'Of course, of course. So cook let Dr Ferguson in, then? Why didn't you
+say so before, Ada? And did you bring the medicine with you?'
+
+'It was a packet in an envelope, ma'am. But Cook is sure she heard
+no knock--not while I was out. So Dr Ferguson must have come in quite
+unbeknown.'
+
+'Well, really,' said Sheila, 'it seems very difficult to get at the
+truth sometimes. And when illness is in the house I cannot understand
+why there should be no one available to answer the door. You must
+have left it ajar, unsecured, when you went out. And pray, what if Dr
+Ferguson had been some common tramp? That would have been a nice thing.'
+
+'I am quite certain,' said Ada a little flatly, 'that I did shut the
+door. And cook says she never so much as stirred from the kitchen till
+I came down the area steps with the packet. And that's all I know about
+it, ma'am; except that he was here when I came back. I did not know even
+there was a Dr Ferguson; and my mother has lived here nineteen years.'
+
+'We must be thankful your mother enjoys such good health,' replied
+Mrs Lawford suavely. 'Please tell cook to be very careful with the
+cornflour--to be sure it's well mixed and thoroughly done.'
+
+Mrs Lawford's eyes followed with a certain discomfort those narrow print
+shoulders descending the stairs. And this abominable ruse was--Arthur's!
+She ran up lightly and listened with her ear to the panel of his door.
+And just as she was about to turn away again, there came a little light
+knock at the front door.
+
+Mrs Lawford paused at the loop of the staircase; and not altogether
+with gratitude or relief she heard the voice of Mr Bethany, inquiring in
+cautious but quite audible tones after her husband.
+
+She dressed quickly and went down. The little white old man looked very
+solitary in the long, fireless, drawing-room.
+
+'I could not sleep,' he said; 'I don't think I grasped in the least, I
+don't indeed, until I was nearly home, the complexity of our problem.
+I came, in fact, to a lamppost. It was casting a peculiar shadow.
+And then--you know how such thoughts seize us, my dear--like a sudden
+inspiration, I realised how tenuous, how appallingly tenuous a hold we
+every one of us have on our mere personality. But that,' he continued
+rapidly, 'that's only for ourselves--and after the event. Ours, just
+now, is to act. And first--?'
+
+'You really do, then--you really are convinced--' began Mrs Lawford.
+
+But Mr Bethany was too quick. 'We must be most circumspect. My dear
+friend, we must be most circumspect, for all our sakes. And this, you'll
+say,' he added, smiling, stretching out his arms, his soft hat in one
+hand, his umbrella in the other--'this is being circumspect--a seven
+o'clock in the morning call! But you see, my dear, I have come, as I
+took the precaution of explaining to the maid, because it's now or
+never to-day. It does so happen that I have to take a wedding for an old
+friend's niece at Witchett; so when in need, you see, Providence enables
+us to tell even the conventional truth. Now really, how is he? has he
+slept? has he recalled himself at all? is there any change?--and, dear
+me, how are YOU?'
+
+Mrs Lawford sighed. 'A broken night is really very little to a mother,'
+she said. 'He is still asleep. He hasn't, I think, stirred all night.'
+
+'Not stirred!' Mr Bethany repeated. 'You baffle me. And you have
+watched?'
+
+'Oh no,' was the cheerful answer; 'I felt that quiet, solitude; space,
+was everything; he preferred it so. He--he changed alone, I suppose.
+Don't you think it almost stands to reason that he will be alone...when
+he comes back? Was I right? But there, it's useless, it's worse than
+useless, to talk like this. My husband is gone. Some terrible thing has
+happened. Whatever the mystery may be, he will never come back alive. My
+only fear is that I am dragging you into a matter that should from the
+beginning have been entrusted to--Oh, it's monstrous!' It appeared for a
+moment as if she were blinking to keep back her tears, yet her scrutiny
+seemed merely to harden.
+
+Only the merest flicker of the folded eyelids over the greenish eyes of
+her visitor answered the challenge. He stood small and black, peeping
+fixedly out of the window at the sunflecked laurels.
+
+'Last night,' he said slowly, 'when I said good-bye to your husband, on
+the tip of my tongue were the words I have used, in season and out of
+season, for nearly forty-five years--"God knows best." Well, my dear
+lady, a sense of humour, a sense of reverence, or perhaps even a taint
+of scepticism--call it what you will--just intercepted them. Oh no,
+not any of these, my child; just pity, overwhelming pity. God does know
+best; but in a matter like this it is not even my place to say so. It
+would be good for none of us to endanger our souls even with verbal
+cant. Now, if, do you think, I had just five minutes' talk--five
+minutes; would it disquiet him?'
+
+Only by an almost undignified haste, for the vicar was remarkably
+agile, Sheila managed to unlock the bedroom door without apparently his
+perceiving it, and with a warning finger she preceded him into the great
+bedroom. 'Oh, yes, yes,' he was whispering to himself; 'alone--well,
+well!' He hung his hat on his umbrella and leaned it in a corner, and
+then he turned.
+
+'I don't think, you know, an old friend does him any wrong; but last
+night I had no real oppor--' He firmly adjusted his spectacles, and
+looked long into the dark, dispassioned face.
+
+'H'm!' he said, and fidgeted, and peered again. Mrs Lawford watched him
+keenly.
+
+'Do you still--' she began.
+
+But at the same moment he too broke silence, suddenly stepping back with
+the innocent remark, 'Has he--has he asked for anything?'
+
+'Only for Quain.'
+
+'"Quain"?'
+
+'The medical Dictionary.'
+
+'Oh, yes; bless me; of course.... A calm, complete sleep of utter
+prostration--utter nervous prostration. And can one wonder? Poor fellow,
+poor fellow!' He walked to the window and peered between the blinds.
+'Sparrows, sunshine--yes, and here's the postman,' he said, as if to
+himself. Then he turned sharply round, with mind made up.
+
+'Now, do you leave me here,' he said. 'Take half an hour's quiet rest.
+He will be glad of a dull old fellow like me when he wakes. And as for
+my pretty bride, if I miss the train, she must wait till the next.
+Good discipline, my dear. Oh, dear me! I don't change. What a precious
+experience now this would have been for a tottery, talkative, owlish
+old parochial creature like me. But there, there. Light words make heavy
+hearts, I see. I shall be quite comfortable. No, no, I breakfasted at
+home. There's hat and umbrella; at 9.3 I can fly.'
+
+Mrs Lawford thanked him mutely. He smilingly but firmly bowed her out
+and closed the door.
+
+But eyes and brain had been very busy. He had looked at the gutted
+candle; at the tinted bland portrait on the dressing-table; at the chair
+drawn-up; at the boots; and now again he turned almost with a groan
+towards the sleeper. Then he took out an envelope, on which he had
+jotted various memoranda, and waited awhile. Minutes passed and at last
+the sleeper faintly stirred, muttering.
+
+Mr Bethany stooped quickly. 'What is it, what is it?' he whispered.
+
+Lawford sighed. 'I was only dreaming, Sheila,' he said, and softly,
+peacefully opened his eyes. 'I dreamed I was in the--, His lids
+narrowed, his dark eyes fixed themselves on the anxious spectacled face
+bending over him. 'Mr Bethany! Where? What's wrong?'
+
+His friend put out his hand. 'There, there,' he said soothingly, 'do not
+be disturbed; do not disquiet yourself.'
+
+Lawford struggled up. Slowly, painfully consciousness returned to him.
+He glanced furtively round the room, at his clothes, slinkingly at
+the vicar; licked his lips; flushed with extraordinary rapidity; and
+suddenly burst into tears.
+
+Mr Bethany sat without movement, waiting till he should have spent
+himself. 'Now, Lawford,' he said gently, compose yourself, old friend.
+We must face the music--like men.' He went to the window, drew up the
+blind, peeped out, and took off his spectacles.
+
+'The first thing to be done,' he said, returning briskly to his chair,
+'is to send for Simon. Now, does Simon know you WELL?' Lawford shook his
+head. 'Would he recognise you?... I mean...'
+
+'I have only met him once--in the evening.'
+
+'Good; let him come immediately, then. Tell him just the facts. If I am
+not mistaken, he will pooh-pooh the whole thing; tell you to keep quiet,
+not to worry, and so on. My dear fellow, if we realised, say, typhoid,
+who'd dare to face it? That will give us time; to wait a while, to
+recover our breath, to see what happens next. And if--as I don't
+believe for a moment--Why, in that case I heard the other day of a most
+excellent man--Grosser, of Wimpole Street; nerves. He would be absorbed.
+He'll bottle you in spirit, Lawford. We'll have him down quietly. You
+see? But there won't be any necessity. Oh no. By then light will have
+come. We shall remember. What I mean is this.' He crossed his legs
+and pushed out his lips. 'We are on quaky ground; and it's absolutely
+essential that you keep cool, and trust. I am yours, heart and soul--you
+know that. I own frankly, at first I was shaken. And I have, I confess,
+been very cunning. But first, faith, then evidence to bolster it up. The
+faith was absolute'--he placed one firm hand on Lawford's knee--'why,
+I cannot explain; but it was. The evidence is convincing. But there are
+others to think of. The shock, the incredibleness, the consequences; we
+must not scan too closely. Think WITH; never against: and bang go all
+the arguments. Your wife, poor dear, believes; but of course, of course,
+she is horribly--' he broke off; 'of course she is SHAKEN, you old
+simpleton! Time will heal all that. Time will wear out the mask. Time
+will tire out this detestable physical witchcraft. The mind, the self's
+the thing. Old fogey though I may seem for saying it--that must be kept
+unsmirched. We won't go wearily over the painful subject again. You
+told me last night, dear old friend, that you were absolutely alone at
+Widderstone. That is enough. But here we have visible facts, tangible
+effects, and there must have been a definite reason and a cause for
+them. I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford,
+as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless--in the long run.
+They--what shall we say?--have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can
+just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the
+other side too. A loathsome process too. But there--we are not speaking
+of any such monstrosities, and even if we were, you and I with God's
+help would just tire them out. And that ally gone, our poor dear old Mrs
+Grundy will at once capitulate. Eh? Eh?'
+
+Through all this long and arduous harangue, consciousness, like the
+gradual light of dawn, had been flooding that other brain. And the face
+that now confronted Mr Bethany, though with his feeble unaided sight he
+could only very obscurely discern it, was vigilant and keen, in every
+sharp-cut hungry feature.
+
+A rather prolonged silence followed, the visitor peering mutely. The
+black eyes nearly closed, the face turned slowly towards the window, saw
+burnt-out candle, comprehensive glass.
+
+'Yes, yes.' he said; 'I'll send for Simon at once.'
+
+'Good,' said Mr Bethany, and more doubtfully repeated 'good.' 'Now
+there's only one thing left,' he went on cheerfully. 'I have jotted down
+a few test questions here; they are questions no one on this earth could
+answer but you, Lawford. They are merely for external proofs. You won't,
+you can't, mistake my motive. We cannot foretell or foresee what need
+may arise for just such jog-trot primitive evidence. I propose that you
+now answer them here, in writing.'
+
+Lawford stood up and walked to the looking-glass, and paused. He put his
+hand to his head, 'es,' he said, 'of course; it's a rattling good move.
+I'm not quite awake; myself, I mean. I'll do it now.' He took out a
+pencil case and tore another leaf from his pocket-book. 'What are they?'
+
+Mr Bethany rang the bell. Sheila herself answered it. She stood on the
+threshold and looked across through a shaft of autumnal sunshine at
+her husband, and her husband with a quiet strange smile looked across
+through the sunshine at his wife. Mr Bethany waited in vain.
+
+'I am just going to put the arch-impostor through his credentials,' he
+said tartly. 'Now then, Lawford!' He read out the questions, one by one,
+from his crafty little list, pursing his lips between each; and one
+by one, Lawford, seated at the dressing-table, fluently scribbled
+his answers. Then question and answer were rigorously compared by Mr
+Bethany, with small white head bent close and spectacles poised upon the
+powerful nose, and signed and dated, and passed to Mrs Lawford without a
+word.
+
+Mrs Lawford read question and answer where she stood, in complete
+silence. She looked up. 'Many of these questions I don't know the
+answers to myself,' she said.
+
+'It is immaterial,' said Mr Bethany.
+
+'One answer is--is inaccurate. 'Yes, yes, quite so: due to a mistake in
+a letter from myself.'
+
+Mrs Lawford read quietly on, folded the papers, and held them out
+between finger and thumb. 'The--handwriting...' she remarked very
+softly.
+
+'Wonderful, isn't it?' said Mr Bethany warmly; 'all the general look and
+run of the thing different, but every real essential feature unchanged.
+Now into the envelope. And now a little wax?'
+
+Mrs Lawford stood waiting. 'There's a green piece of sealing-wax,'
+almost drawled the quiet voice, 'in the top right drawer of the nest
+in the study, which old James gave me the Christmas before last.' He
+glanced with lowered eyelids at his wife's flushed cheek. Their eyes
+met.
+
+'Thank you,' she said.
+
+When she returned the vicar was sitting in a chair, leaning his chin on
+the knobbed handle of his umbrella. He rose and lit a taper for her
+with a match from a little green pot on the table. And Mrs Lawford, with
+trembling fingers, sealed the letter, as he directed, with his own seal.
+
+'There!' he said triumphantly, 'how many more such brilliant lawyers, I
+wonder, lie dormant in the Church? And who shall keep this?... Why, all
+three, of course.' He went on without pausing. 'Some little drawer now,
+secret and undetectable, with a lock.' Just such a little drawer that
+locked itself with a spring lay by chance in the looking-glass. There
+the letter was hidden. And Mr Bethany looked at his watch. 'Nineteen
+minutes,' he said. 'The next thing, my dear child--we're getting on
+swimmingly--and it's astonishing how things are simplified by mere
+use--the next thing is to send for Simon.'
+
+Sheila took a deep breath, but did not look up. 'I am entirely in your
+hands,' she replied.
+
+'So be it,' said he crisply. 'Get to bed, Lawford; it's better so. And
+I'll look in on my way back from Witchett. I came, my dear fellow, in
+gloomy disturbance of mind. It was getting up too early; it fogs old
+brains. Good-bye, good-bye.'
+
+He squeezed Lawford's hand. Then, with umbrella under his arm, his hat
+on his head, his spectacles readjusted, he hurried out of the room. Mrs
+Lawford followed him. For a few minutes Lawford sat motionless, with
+head bent a little, and eyes restlessly scanning the door. Then he rose
+abruptly, and in a quarter of an hour was in bed, alone with his slow
+thoughts: while a basin of cornflour stood untasted on a little table
+at his bedside, and a cheerful fire burned in the best visitors' room's
+tiny grate.
+
+At half-past eleven Dr Simon entered this soundless seclusion. He sat
+down beside Lawford, and took temperature and pulse. Then he half closed
+his lids, and scanned his patient out of an unusually dark, un-English
+face, with straight black hair, and listened attentively to his rather
+incoherent story. It was a story very much modified and rounded off.
+Nor did Lawford draw Dr Simon's attention to the portrait now smiling
+conventionally above their heads from the wall over the fireplace.
+
+'It was rather bleak--the wind; and, I think, perhaps, I had had a
+touch of influenza. It was a silly thing to do. But still, Dr Simon, one
+doesn't expect--well, there, I don't feel the same man--physically. I
+really cannot explain how great a change has taken place. And yet I feel
+perfectly fit in myself. And if it were not for--for being laughed at,
+go back to town, to-day. Why my wife scarcely recognised me.'
+
+Dr Simon continued his scrutiny. Try as he would, Lawford could not
+raise his downcast eyes to meet direct the doctor's polite attention.
+
+'And what,' said Dr Simon, 'what precisely is the nature of the change?
+Have you any pain?'
+
+'No, not the least pain,' said Lawford; 'I think, perhaps, or rather my
+face is a little shrunken--and yet lengthened; at least it feels so;
+and a faint twinge of rheumatism. But my hair--well, I don't know; it's
+difficult to say one's self.' He could get on so very much better,
+he thought, if only his mind would be at peace and these preposterous
+promptings and voices were still.
+
+Dr Simon faced the window, and drew his hand softly over his head.
+'We never can be too cautious at a certain age, and especially after
+influenza,' he said. 'It undermines the whole system, and in particular
+the nervous system; leaving the mind the prey of the most melancholy
+fancies. I should astound you, Mr Lawford, with the devil influenza
+plays.... A slight nervous shock and a chill; quite slight, I hope. A
+few days' rest and plenty of nourishment. There's nothing; temperature
+inconsiderable. All perfectly intelligible. Most certainly reassure
+yourself! And as for the change you speak of'--he looked steadily at the
+dark face on the pillow and smiled amiably--'I don't think we need
+worry much about that. It certainly was a bleak wind yesterday--and a
+cemetery, my dear sir! It was indiscreet--yes, very.' He held out his
+hand. 'You must not be alarmed,' he said, very distinctly with
+the merest trace of an accent; 'air, sunshine, quiet, nourishment;
+sleep--that is all. The little window might be a few inches open,
+and--and any light reading.'
+
+He opened the door and joined Mrs Lawford on the staircase. He talked
+to her quietly over his shoulder all the way downstairs. 'It was, it was
+sporting with Providence--a wind, believe me, nearly due east, in spite
+of the warm sunshine.'
+
+'But the change--the change!' Mrs Lawford managed to murmur tragically,
+as he strode to the door. Dr Simon smiled, and gracefully tapped his
+forehead with a red-gloved forefinger.
+
+'Humour him, humour him,' he repeated indulgently. 'Rest and quiet
+will soon put that little trouble out of his head. Oh yes, I did notice
+it--the set drawn look, and the droop: quite so. Good morning.'
+
+Mrs Lawford gently closed the door after him. A glimpse of Ada, crossing
+from room to room, suggested a precaution. She called out in her
+clearest notes. 'If Dr Ferguson should call while I am out, Ada, will
+you please tell him that Dr Simon regretted that he was unable to wait?
+Thank you.' She paused with hand on the balusters, then slowly ascended
+the stairs. Her husband's face was turned to the ceiling, his hands
+clasped above his head. She took up her stand by the fireplace, resting
+one silk-slippered foot on the fender. 'Dr Simon is reassuring,' she
+said, 'but I do hope, Arthur, you will follow his advice. He looks a
+fairly clever man.... But with a big practice.... Do you think, dear, he
+quite realised the extent of the--the change?'
+
+'I told him what happened,' said her husband's voice out of the
+bed-clothes.
+
+'Yes, yes, I know,' said Sheila soothingly; 'but we must remember he is
+comparatively a stranger. He would not detect--'
+
+'What did he tell you?' asked the voice.
+
+Mrs Lawford deliberately considered. If only he would always thus keep
+his face concealed, how much easier it would be to discuss matters
+rationally. 'You see, dear,' she said softly, 'I know, of course,
+nothing about the nerves; but personally, I think his suggestion absurd.
+No mere fancy, surely, can make a lasting alteration in one's face. And
+your hair--I don't want to say anything that may seem unkind--but isn't
+it really quite a distinct shade darker, Arthur?'
+
+'Any great strain will change the colour of a man's hair,' said Lawford
+stolidly; 'at any rate, to white. Why, I read once of a fellow in India,
+a Hindoo, or something, who--'
+
+'But have you HAD any intense strain, or anxiety?' broke in Sheila. 'You
+might, at least, have confided in me; that is, unless--But there, don't
+you think really, Arthur, it would be much more satisfactory in every
+way if we had further advice at once? Alice will be home next week.
+To-morrow is the Harvest Festival, and next week, of course, the
+Dedication; and, in any case, the Bazaar is out of the question. They
+will have to find another stall-holder. We must do our utmost to avoid
+comment or scandal. Every minute must help to--to fix a thing like that.
+I own even now I cannot realise what this awful calamity means. It's
+useless to brood on it. We must, as the poor dear old vicar said only
+last night, keep our heads clear. But I am sure Dr Simon was under a
+misapprehension. If, now, it was explained to him, a little more fully,
+Arthur--a photograph. Oh, anything on earth but this dreadful wearing
+uncertainty and suspense! Besides ...is Simon quite an English name?'
+
+Lawford drew further into his pillow. 'Do as you think best, Sheila,'
+he said. 'For my own part, I believe it may be as he suggests--partly an
+illusion, a touch of nervous breakdown. It simply can't be as bad as I
+think it is. If it were, you would not be here talking like this; and
+Bethany wouldn't have believed a word I said. Whatever it is, it's no
+good crying it on the housetops. Give me time, just time. Besides, how
+do we know what he really thought? Doctors don't tell their patients
+everything. Give the poor chap a chance, and more so if he is a
+foreigner. He's'--his voice sank almost to a whisper--'he's no darker
+than this. And do, please, Sheila, take this infernal stuff away, and
+let me have something solid. I'm not ill--in that way. All I want is
+peace and quiet, time to think. Let me fight it out alone. It's been
+sprung on me. The worst's not over. But I'll win through; wait! And
+if not--well, you shall not suffer, Sheila. Don't be afraid. There are
+other ways out.'
+
+Sheila broke down. 'Any one would think to hear you talk, that I was
+perfectly heartless. I told Ada to be most careful about the cornflour.
+And as for other ways out, it's a positively wicked thing to say to me
+when I'm nearly distracted with trouble and anxiety. What motive could
+you have had for loitering in an old cemetery? And in an east wind! It's
+useless for me to remain here, Arthur, to be accused of every horrible
+thing that comes into a morbid imagination. I will leave you, as you
+suggest, in peace.'
+
+'One moment, Sheila,' answered the muffled voice. 'I have accused you
+of nothing. If you knew all; if you could read my thoughts, you would
+be surprised, perhaps, at my--But never mind that. On the other hand, I
+really do think it would be better for the present to discuss the thing
+no more. To-day is Friday. Give this miserable face a week. Talk it over
+with Bethany if you like. But I forbid'--he struggled up in bed,
+sallow and sinister--'I flatly forbid, please understand, any other
+interference till then. Afterwards you must do exactly as you please.
+Send round the Town Crier! But till then, silence!'
+
+Sheila with raised head confronted him. 'This, then, is your gratitude.
+So be it. Silence, no doubt! Until it's too late to take action. Until
+you have wormed your way in, and think you are safe. To have believed!
+Where is my husband? that is what I am asking you now. When and how you
+have learned his secrets God only knows, and your conscience! But he
+always was a simpleton at heart. I warn you, then. Until next Thursday
+I consent to say nothing provided you remain quiet; make no disturbance,
+no scandal here. The servants and all who inquire shall simply be told
+that my husband is confined to his room with--with a nervous breakdown,
+as you have yourself so glibly suggested. I am at your mercy, I own it.
+The vicar believes your preposterous story--with his spectacles off.
+You would convince anybody with the wicked cunning with which you have
+cajoled and wheedled him, with which you have deceived and fooled a
+foreign doctor. But you will not convince me. You will not convince
+Alice. I have friends in the world, though you may not be aware of it,
+who will not be quite so apt to believe any cock-and-bull story you may
+see fit to invent. That is all I have to say. To-night I tell the vicar
+all that I have just told you. And from this moment, please, we are
+strangers. I shall come into the room no more than necessity dictates.
+On Friday we resume our real parts. My husband--Arthur--to--to connive
+at... Phh!'
+
+Rage had transfigured her. She scarcely heard her own words. They poured
+out senselessly, monotonously, one calling up another, as if from the
+lips of a Cassandra. Lawford sank back into bed, clutching the sheets
+with both lean hands. He took a deep breath and shut his mouth.
+
+'It reminds me, Sheila,' he began arduously, 'of our first quarrel
+before we were married, the evening after your aunt Rose died at
+Llandudno--do you remember? You threw open the window, and I think--I
+saved your life.' A pause followed. Then a queer, almost inarticulate
+voice added, 'At least, I am afraid so.'
+
+A cold and awful quietness fell on Sheila's heart. She stared fixedly
+at the tuft of dark hair, the only visible sign of her husband, on the
+pillow. Then, taking up the basin of cold cornflour, she left the room.
+In a quarter of an hour she reappeared carrying a tray, with ham and
+eggs and coffee and honey invitingly displayed. She laid it down.
+
+'There is only one other question,' she said, with perfect
+composure--'that of money. Your signature as it appears on the--the
+document drawn up this morning, would, of course, be quite useless on
+a cheque. I have taken all the money I could find; it is in safety.
+You may, however, conceivably be in need of some yourself; here is five
+pounds. I have my own cheque-book, and shall therefore have no need
+to consider the question again for--for the present. So far as you are
+concerned, I shall be guided solely by Mr Bethany. He will, I do not
+doubt, take full responsibility.'
+
+'And may the Lord have mercy on my soul!' uttered a stifled, unfamiliar
+voice from the bed. Mrs Lawford stooped. 'Arthur!' she cried faintly,
+'Arthur!'
+
+Lawford raised himself on his elbow with a sigh that was very near to
+being a sob. 'Oh, Sheila, if you'd only be your real self! What is the
+use of all this pretence? Just consider MY position a little. The fear
+and horror are not all on your side. You called me Arthur even then. I'd
+willingly do anything you wish to save you pain; you know that. Can't we
+be friends even in this--this ghastly--Won't you, Sheila?'
+
+Mrs Lawford drew back, struggling with a doubtful heart.
+
+'I think,' she said, `it would be better not to discuss that now.'
+
+The rest of the morning Lawford remained in solitude.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+There were three books in the room--Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and
+Dying,' a volume of the Quiver, and a little gilded book on wildflowers.
+He read in vain. He lay and listened to the uproar of his thoughts on
+which an occasional sound--the droning of a fly, the cry of a milkman,
+the noise of a passing van--obtruded from the workaday world. The pale
+gold sunlight edged softly over the bed. He ate up everything on his
+tray. He even, on the shoals of nightmare, dreamed awhile. But by and
+by as the hours wheeled slowly on he grew less calm, less strenuously
+resolved on lying there inactive. Every sparrow that twittered cried
+reveille through his brain. He longed with an ardour strange to his
+temperament to be up and doing.
+
+What if his misfortune was, as he had in the excitement of the moment
+suggested to Sheila, only a morbid delusion of mind; shared too in part
+by sheer force of his absurd confession? Even if he was going mad, who
+knows how peaceful a release that might not be? Could his shrewd old
+vicar have implicitly believed in him if the change were as complete
+as he supposed it? He flung off the bedclothes and locked the door.
+He dressed himself, noticing, he fancied, with a deadly revulsion
+of feeling, that his coat was a little too short in the sleeves, his
+waistcoat too loose. In the midst of his dressing came Sheila bringing
+his luncheon. 'I'm sorry,' he called out, stooping quickly beside the
+bed, 'I can't talk now. Please put the tray down.'
+
+About half an hour afterwards he heard the outer door close, and peeping
+from behind the curtains saw his wife go out. All was drowsily quiet in
+the house. He devoured his lunch like a schoolboy. That finished to the
+last crumb, without a moment's delay he covered his face with a towel,
+locked the door behind him, put the key in his pocket, and ran lightly
+downstairs. He stuffed the towel into an ulster pocket, put on a soft,
+wide-brimmed hat, and noiselessly let himself out. Then he turned
+with an almost hysterical delight and ran--ran like the wind, without
+pausing, without thinking, straight on, up one turning, down another,
+until he reached a broad open common, thickly wooded, sprinkled with
+gorse and hazel and may, and faintly purple with fading heather. There
+he flung himself down in the beautiful sunlight, among the yellowing
+bracken, to recover his breath.
+
+He lay there for many minutes, thinking almost with composure. Flight,
+it seemed, had for the moment quietened the demands of that other feebly
+struggling personality which was beginning to insinuate itself into his
+consciousness, which had so miraculously broken in and taken possession
+of his body. He would not think now. All he needed was a little quiet
+and patience before he threw off for good and all his right to be free,
+to be his own master, to call himself sane.
+
+He scrambled up and turned his face towards the westering sun. What was
+there in the stillness of its beautiful splendour that seemed to sharpen
+his horror and difficulty, and yet to stir him to such a daring and
+devilry as he had never known since he was a boy? There was little sound
+of life; somewhere an unknown bird was singing, and a few late bees were
+droning in the bracken. All these years he had, like an old blind horse,
+stolidly plodded round and round in a dull self-set routine. And now,
+just when the spirit had come for rebellion, the mood for a harmless
+truancy, there had fallen with them too this hideous enigma. He sat
+there with the dusky silhouette of the face that was now drenched with
+sunlight in his mind's eye. He set off again up the stony incline.
+
+Why not walk on and on? In time real wholesome weariness would come; he
+could sleep at ease in some pleasant wayside inn, without once meeting
+the eyes that stood as it were like a window between himself and a
+shrewd incredulous scoffing world that would turn him into a monstrosity
+and his story into a fable. And in a little while, perhaps in three
+days, he would awaken out of this engrossing nightmare, and know he
+was free, this black dog gone from his back, and (as the old saying
+expressed it without any one dreaming what it really meant) his own
+man again. How astonished Sheila would be; how warmly she would welcome
+him!... Oh yes, of course she would.
+
+He came again to a standstill. No voice answered him out of that
+illimitable gold and blue. Nothing seemed aware of him. But as he stood
+there, doubtful as Cain on the outskirts of the unknown, he caught the
+sound of a footfall on the lonely and stone-strewn path.
+
+The ground sloped steeply away to the left, and slowly mounting the
+hillside came mildly on an old lady he knew, a Miss Sinnet, an old
+friend of his mother's. There was just such a little seat as that
+other he knew so well, on the brow of the hill. He made his way to it,
+intending to sit quietly there until the little old lady had passed by.
+Up and up she came. Her large bonnet appeared, and then her mild white
+face, inclined a little towards him as she ascended. Evidently this very
+seat was her goal; and evasion was impossible. Evasion!... Memory rushed
+back and set his pulses beating. He turned boldly to the sun, and the
+old lady, with a brief glance into his face, composed herself at the
+other end of the little seat. She gazed out of a gentle reverie into the
+golden valley. And so they sat a while. And almost as if she had
+felt the bond of acquaintance between them, she presently sighed, and
+addressed him: 'A very, very, beautiful view, sir.'
+
+Lawford paused, then turned a gloomy, earnest face, gilded with
+sunshine. 'Beautiful, indeed,' he said, 'but not for me. No, Miss
+Sinnet, not for me.'
+
+The old lady gravely turned and examined the aquiline profile. 'Well, I
+confess,' she remarked urbanely, 'you have the advantage of me.'
+
+Lawford smiled uneasily. 'Believe me, it is little advantage.'
+
+'My sight,' said Miss Sinnet precisely, 'is not so good as I might wish;
+though better perhaps than I might have hoped; I fear I am not much
+wiser; your face is still unfamiliar to me.'
+
+'It is not unfamiliar to me,' said Lawford. Whose trickery was this? he
+thought, putting such affected stuff into his mouth.
+
+A faint lightening of pity came into the silvery and scrupulous
+countenance. 'Ah, dear me, yes,' she said courteously.
+
+Lawford rested a lean hand on the seat. 'And have you,' he asked, 'not
+the least recollection in the world of my face?'
+
+'Now really,' she said, smiling blandly, 'is that quite fair? Think of
+all the scores and scores of faces in seventy long years; and how very
+treacherous memory is. You shall do me the service of REMINDING me of
+one whose name has for the moment escaped me.'
+
+'I am the son of a very old friend of yours, Miss Sinnet,' said Lawford
+quietly 'a friend that was once your schoolfellow at Brighton.'
+
+'Well, now,' said the old lady, grasping her umbrella, 'that is
+undoubtedly a clue; but then, you see, all but one of the friends of my
+girlhood are dead; and if I have never had the pleasure of meeting her
+son, unless there is a decided resemblance, how am I to recollect HER by
+looking at HIM?'
+
+'There is, I believe, a likeness,' said Lawford.
+
+She nodded her great bonnet at him with gentle amusement. 'You are
+insistent in your fancy. Well, let me think again. The last to leave
+me was Fanny Urquhart, that was--let me see--last October. Now you are
+certainly not Fanny Urquhart's son,' she stooped austerely, 'for she
+never had one. Last year, too, I heard that my dear, dear Mrs Jameson
+was dead. HER I hadn't met for many, many years. But, if I may venture
+to say so, yours is not a Scottish face; and she not only married a
+Scottish husband, but was herself a Dunbar. No, I am still at a loss.'
+
+A miserable strife was in her chance companion's mind, a strife of anger
+and recrimination. He turned his eyes wearily to the fast declining sun.
+'You will forgive my persistency, but I assure you it is a matter of
+life or death to me. Is there no one my face recalls? My voice?'
+
+Miss Sinnet drew her long lips together, her eyebrows lifted with the
+faintest perturbation. 'But he certainly knows my name,' she said to
+herself. She turned once more, and in the still autumnal beauty, beneath
+that pale blue arch of evening, these two human beings confronted
+one another again. She eyed him blandly, yet with a certain grave
+directness.
+
+'I don't really think,' she said, 'you can be Mary Lawford's son. I
+could scarcely have mistaken HIM.'
+
+Lawford gulped and turned away. He hardly knew what this surge of
+feeling meant. Was it hope, despair, resentment; had he caught even the
+echo of an unholy joy? His mind for a moment became confused as if
+in the tumult of a struggle. He heard himself expostulate, 'Ah, Miss
+Bennett, I fear I set you too difficult a task.'
+
+The old lady drew abruptly in, like a trustful and gentle snail into its
+shocked house. 'Bennett, sir; but my name is not Bennett.'
+
+And again Lawford accepted the miserable prompting. 'Not Bennett!... How
+can I ever then apologise for so frantic a mistake?'
+
+The little old lady took firm hold of her umbrella. She did not answer
+him. 'The likeness, the likeness!' he began unctuously, and stopped,
+for the glance that dwelt fleetingly on him was cold with the formidable
+dignity and displeasure of age. He raised his hat and turned miserably
+home. He strode on out of the last gold into the blue twilight. What
+fantastic foolery of mind was mastering him? He cast a hurried look
+over his shoulder at the kindly and offended old figure sitting there,
+solitary, on the little seat, in her great bonnet, with back turned
+resolutely upon him--the friend of his dead mother who might have proved
+in his need a friend indeed to him. And he had by this insane caprice
+hopelessly estranged her.
+
+She would remember this face well enough now, he thought bitterly,
+and would take her place among his quiet enemies, if ever the day of
+reckoning should come. It was scandalous, it was banal to have abused
+her trust and courtesy. Oh, it was hopeless to struggle any more! The
+fates were against him. They had played him a trick. He was to be their
+transitory sport, as many a better man he could himself recollect had
+been before him. He would go home and give in; let Sheila do with him
+what she pleased. No one but a lunatic could have acted as he had, with
+just that frantic hint of method so remarkable in the insane.
+
+He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin
+evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that fateful
+afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And
+even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go
+to the old green time-worn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly
+alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the
+yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his only
+possible chance of recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila had
+not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in
+repeating so successful a stratagem.
+
+Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned
+to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He
+would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again.
+She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely
+comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers, some
+old keepsake of his mother's. What would he not do when the old moods
+and brains of the stupid Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so
+little and so superficially, came back to him.
+
+He ran up the steps and stopped dead, his hand in his pocket, chilled
+and aghast. Sheila had taken his keys. He stood there, dazed and still,
+beneath the dim yellow of his own fanlight; and once again that inward
+spring flew back. 'Brazen it out; brazen it out! Knock and ring!'
+
+He knocked flamboyantly, and rang.
+
+There came a quiet step and the door opened. 'Dr Simon, of course, has
+called?' he inquired suavely.
+
+'Yes, sir.'
+
+'Ah, and gone'--as I feared. And Mrs Lawford?'
+
+'I think Mrs Lawford is in, sir.'
+
+Lawford put out a detaining hand. 'We will not disturb her; we will not
+disturb her. I can find my way up; oh yes, thank you!'
+
+But Ada still palely barred the way. 'I think, sir,' she said, 'Mrs
+Lawford would prefer to see you herself; she told me most particularly
+"all callers." And Mr Lawford was not to be disturbed on any account.'
+
+'Disturbed? God forbid!' said Lawford, but his dark eyes failed to
+move these lightest hazel. 'Well,' he continued nonchalantly,
+'perhaps--perhaps it--WOULD be as well if Mrs Lawford should know that
+I am here. No, thank you, I won't come in. Please go and tell--'
+But even as the maid turned to obey, Sheila herself appeared at the
+dining-room door in hat and veil.
+
+Lawford hesitated an immeasurable moment. In one swift glance
+he perceived the lamplit mystery of evening, beckoning, calling,
+pleading--Fly, fly! Home's here for you. Begin again, begin again. And
+there before him in quiet and hostile decorum stood maid and mistress.
+He took off his hat and stepped quickly in.
+
+'So late, so very late, I fear,' he began glibly. 'A sudden call, a
+perfectly impossible distance. Shall we disturb him, do you think?'
+
+'Wouldn't it,' began Sheila softly, 'be rather a pity perhaps? Dr Simon
+seemed to think.... But, of course, you must decide that.'
+
+Ada turned quiet small eyes.
+
+'No, no, by no means,' he almost mumbled.
+
+And a hard, slow smile passed over Sheila's face. 'Excuse me one
+moment,' she said; 'I will see if he is awake.' She swept swiftly
+forward, superb and triumphant, beneath the gaze of those dark, restless
+eyes. But so still was home and street that quite distinctly a clear
+and youthful laughter was heard, and light footsteps approaching. Sheila
+paused. Ada, in the act of closing the door, peered out. 'Miss Alice,
+ma'am,' she said.
+
+And in this infinitesimal advantage of time Dr Ferguson had seized his
+vanishing opportunity, and was already swiftly mounting the stairs. Mrs
+Lawford stood with veil half raised and coldly smiling lips and, as if
+it were by pre-arrangement, her daughter's laughing greeting from the
+garden, and from the landing above her, a faint 'Ah, and how are we
+now?' broke out simultaneously. And Ada, silent and discreet, had thrown
+open the door again to the twilight and to the young people ascending
+the steps.
+
+Lawford was still sitting on his bed before a cold and ashy hearth when
+Sheila knocked at the door.
+
+'Yes?' he said; 'who's there?' No answer followed. He rose with a
+shuddering sigh and turned the key. His wife entered.
+
+'That little exhibition of finesse was part of our agreement, I
+suppose?'
+
+'I say--' began Lawford.
+
+'To creep out in my absence like a thief, and to return like a
+mountebank; that was part of our compact?'
+
+'I say,' he stubbornly began again, 'did you wire for Alice?'
+
+'Will you please answer my question? Am I to be a mere catspaw in your
+intrigues, in this miserable masquerade before the servants? To set the
+whole place ringing with the name of a doctor that doesn't exist, and
+a bedridden patient that slips out of the house with his bedroom key in
+his pocket! Are you aware that Ada has been hammering at your door
+every half-hour of your absence? Are you aware of that? How much,'
+she continued in a low, bitter voice, 'how much should I offer for her
+discretion?'
+
+'Who was that with Alice?' inquired the same toneless voice.
+
+'I refuse to be ignored. I refuse to be made a child of. Will you please
+answer me?'
+
+Lawford turned. 'Look here, Sheila,' he began heavily, 'what about
+Alice? If you wired: well, it's useless to say anything more. But if you
+didn't, I ask you just this one thing. Don't tell her!'
+
+'Oh, I perfectly appreciate a father's natural anxiety.'
+
+Her husband drew up his shoulders as if to receive a blow. 'Yes, yes,'
+he said, 'but you won't?'
+
+The sound of a young laughing voice came faintly up from below. 'How did
+Jimmie Fortescue know she was coming home to-day?'
+
+'Will you not inquire of Jimmie Fortescue for yourself?'
+
+'Oh, what is the use of sneering?' began the dull voice again. 'I am
+horribly tired, Sheila. And try how you will, you can't convince me that
+you believe for a moment that I am not myself, that you are as hard
+as you pretend. An acquaintance, even a friend might be deceived; but
+husband and wife--oh no! It isn't only a man's face that's himself--or
+even his hands.' He looked at them, straightened them slowly out, and
+buried them in his pockets. 'All I care about now is Alice. Is she, or
+is she not going to be told? I am simply asking you to give her just a
+chance.'
+
+'"Simply asking me to give Alice a chance"; now isn't that really just a
+little...?'
+
+Lawford slowly shook his head. 'You know in your heart it isn't, Sheila;
+you understand me quite well, although you persistently pretend not to.
+I can't argue now. I can't speak up for myself. I am just about as far
+down as I can go. It's only Alice.'
+
+'I see; a lucid interval?' suggested his wife in a low, trembling voice.
+
+'Yes, yes, if you like,' said her husband patiently, '"a lucid
+interval." Don't please look at my face like that, Sheila. Think--think
+that it's just lupus, just some horrible disfigurement.'
+
+Not much light was in the large room, and there was something so
+extraordinarily characteristic of her husband in those stooping
+shoulders, in the head hung a little forward, and in the preternaturally
+solemn voice, that Sheila had to bend a little over the bed to catch a
+glimpse of the sallow and keener face again. She sighed; and even on her
+own strained ear her sigh sounded almost like one of relief.
+
+'It's useless, I know, to ask you anything while you are in this mood,'
+continued Lawford dully; 'I know that of old.'
+
+The white, ringed hands clenched, '"Of old!"'
+
+'I didn't mean anything. Don't listen to what I say. It's only--it's
+just Alice knowing, that was all; I mean at once.'
+
+'Don't for a moment suppose I am not perfectly aware that it is only
+Alice you think of. You were particularly anxious about my feelings,
+weren't you? You broke the news to me with the tenderest solicitude. I
+am glad our--our daughter shares my husband's love.'
+
+'Look here,' said Lawford densely, 'you know that I love you as much as
+ever; but with this--as I am; what would be the good of my saying so?'
+Mrs Lawford took a deep breath.
+
+And a voice called softly at the door, 'Mother, are you there? Is father
+awake? May I come in?'
+
+In a flash the memory returned to her; twenty-four hours ago she was
+asking that very question of this unspeakable figure that sat hunched-up
+before her.
+
+'One moment, dear,' she called. And added in a very low voice, 'Come
+here!'
+
+Lawford looked up. 'What?' he said.
+
+'Perhaps, perhaps,' she whispered, 'it isn't quite so bad.'
+
+'For mercy's sake, Sheila,' he said, 'don't torture me; tell the poor
+child to go away.'
+
+She paused. 'Are you there, Alice? Would you mind, father says, waiting
+a little? He is so very tired.'
+
+'Too tired to.... Oh, very well, mother.'
+
+Mrs Lawford opened the door, and called after her, 'Is Jimmie gone?'
+
+'Oh, yes, hours.'
+
+'Where did you meet?'
+
+'I couldn't get a carriage at the station. He carried my dressing-bag;
+I begged him not to. The other's coming on. You know what Jimmie is.
+How very, very lucky I did come home. I don't know what made me; just an
+impulse; they did laugh at me so. Father dear--do speak to me; how are
+you now?'
+
+Lawford opened his mouth, gulped, and shook his head.
+
+'Ssh, dear!' whispered Sheila, 'I think he has fallen asleep. I will
+be down in a minute.' Mrs Lawford was about to close the door when Ada
+appeared.
+
+'If you please, ma'am,' she said, 'I have been waiting, as you told me,
+to let Dr Ferguson out, but it's nearly seven now; and the table's not
+laid yet.'
+
+'I really should have thought, Ada,' Sheila began, then caught back the
+angry words, and turned and looked over her shoulder into the room.
+'Do you think you will need anything more, Dr Ferguson?' she asked in a
+sepulchral voice.
+
+Again Lawford's lips moved; again he shook his head.
+
+'One moment, Ada,' she said closing the door. 'Some more medicine--what
+medicine? Quick! She mustn't suspect.'
+
+'"What medicine?"' repeated Lawford stolidly.
+
+'Oh, vexing, vexing; don't you see we must send her out? Don't you see?
+What was it you sent to Critchett's for last night? Tell him that's
+gone: we want more of that.'
+
+Lawford stared heavily. Oh, yes, yes,' he said thickly, 'more of
+that....'
+
+Sheila, with a shrug of extreme distaste and vexation, hastily opened
+the door. 'Dr Ferguson wants a further supply of the drug which Mr
+Critchett made up for Mr Lawford yesterday evening. You had better go at
+once, Ada, and please make as much haste as you possibly can.'
+
+'I say, I say,' began Lawford; but it was too late, the door was shut.
+
+'How I detest this wretched falsehood and subterfuge. What could have
+induced you....?'
+
+'Yes,' said her husband, 'what! I think I'll be getting to bed again,
+Sheila; I forgot I had been ill. And now I do really feel very tired.
+But I should like to feel--in spite of this hideous--I should like to
+feel we are friends, Sheila.'
+
+Sheila almost imperceptibly shuddered, crossed the room, and faced
+the still, almost lifeless mask. 'I spoke,' she said, in a low, cold,
+difficult voice--'I spoke in a temper this morning. You must try to
+understand what a shock it has been to me. Now, I own it frankly, I
+know you are--Arthur. But God only knows how it frightens me,
+and--and--horrifies me.' She shut her eyes beneath her veil. They waited
+on in silence a while.
+
+'Poor boy!' she said at last, lightly touching the loose sleeve; 'be
+brave; it will all come right, soon. Meanwhile, for Alice's sake, if
+not for mine, don't give way to--to caprices, and all that. Keep quietly
+here, Arthur. And--and forgive my impatience.'
+
+He put out his hand as if to touch her. 'Forgive you!' he said humbly,
+pushing it stubbornly back into his pocket again. 'Oh, Sheila, the
+forgiveness is all on your side. You know I have nothing to forgive.' A
+long silence fell between them.
+
+'Then, to-night,' at last began Sheila wearily, drawing back, 'we
+say nothing to Alice, except that you are too tired--just nervous
+prostration--to see her. What we should do without this influenza, I
+cannot conceive. Mr Bethany will probably look in on his way home; and
+then we can talk it over--we can talk it over again. So long as you
+are like this, yourself, in mind, why I--What is it now?' she broke off
+querulously.
+
+'If you please, ma'am, Mr Critchett says he doesn't know Dr Ferguson,
+his name's not in the Directory, and there must be something wrong with
+the message, and he's sorry, but he must have it in writing because
+there was more even in the first packet than he ought by rights to send.
+What shall I do, if you please?'
+
+Still looking at her husband. Sheila listened quietly to the end, and
+then, as if in inarticulate disdain, she deliberately shrugged her
+shoulders, and went out to play her part unaided.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+Her husband turned wearily once more, and drawing up a chair sat down in
+front of the cold grate. He realised that Sheila thought him as much
+of a fool now as she had for the moment thought him an impostor, or
+something worse, the night before. That was at least something gained.
+He realised, too, in a vague way that the exuberance of mind that had
+practically invented Dr Ferguson, and outraged Miss Sinnet, had quite
+suddenly flickered out. It was astonishing, he thought, with gaze
+fixed innocently on the black coals, that he should ever have done such
+things. He detested that kind of 'rot'; that jaunty theatrical pose so
+many men prided their jackdaw brains on.
+
+And he sat quite still, like a cat at a cranny, listening, as it
+were, for the faintest remotest stir that might hint at any return of
+this--activity. It was the first really sane moment he had had since
+the 'change.' Whatever it was that had happened at Widderstone was now
+distinctly weakening in effect. Why, now, perhaps? He stole a thievish
+look over his shoulder at the glass, and cautiously drew finger and
+thumb down that beaked nose. Then he really quietly smiled, a smile he
+felt this abominable facial caricature was quite unused to, the superior
+Lawford smile of guileless contempt for the fanatical, the fantastic,
+and the bizarre: He wouldn't have sat with his feet on the fender before
+a burnt-out fire.
+
+And the animosity of that 'he,' uttered only just under his breath,
+surprised even himself. It actually did seem as if there were a chance;
+if only he kept cool and collected. If the whole mind of a man was bent
+on being one thing, surely no power on earth, certainly not on earth,
+could for long compel him to look another, any more (followed the
+resplendent thought) than vice versa.
+
+That, in fact, was the trick that had been in fitful fashion played him
+since yesterday. Obviously, and apart altogether from his promise to
+Sheila, the best possible thing he could do would be to walk quietly
+over to Widderstone to-morrow and like a child that has lost a penny,
+just make the attempt to reverse the process: look at the graves, read
+the inscriptions on the weather-beaten stones, compose himself once more
+to sleep on the little seat.
+
+Magic, witchcraft, possession, and all that--well, Mr Bethany might
+prefer to take it on the authority of the Bible if it was his duty. But
+it was at least mainly Old Testament stuff, like polygamy, Joshua, and
+the 'unclean beasts.' The 'unclean beasts.' It was simply, as Simon had
+said, mainly an affair of the nerves, like Indian jugglery. He had heard
+of dozens of such cases, or similar cases. And it was hardly likely
+that cases even remotely like his own would be much bragged about, or
+advertised. All those mysterious 'disappearances,' too, which one
+reads about so repeatedly? What of them? Even now, he felt (and glanced
+swiftly behind him at the fancy), it would be better to think as softly
+as possible, not to hope too openly, certainly not to triumph in the
+least degree, just in case of--well--listeners.
+
+He would wrap up too. And he wouldn't tell Sheila of the project till
+he had come safely back. What an excellent joke it would be to confess
+meekly to his escapade, and to be scolded, and then suddenly to reveal
+himself. He sat back and gazed with an almost malignant animosity at the
+face in the portrait, comely and plump.
+
+An inarticulate, unfathomable depression rolled back on him, like a
+mist out of the sea. He hastily undressed, put watch and door-key and
+Critchett's powder under his pillow, paused, vacantly ruminated, and
+then replaced the powder in his waistcoat pocket, said his prayers, and
+got shivering to bed. He did not feel hurt at Sheila's leaving him like
+this. So long as she really believed in him. And now--Alice was home. He
+listened, trying not to shiver, for her voice; and sometimes heard, he
+fancied, the clear note. It was this beastly influenza that made him
+feel so cold and lifeless. But all would soon come right--that is, if
+only that face, luminous against the floating darkness within, would not
+appear the instant he closed his eyes.
+
+But legions of dreams are Influenza's allies. He fell into a chill doze,
+heard voices innumerable, and one above the rest, shouting them down,
+until there fell a lull. And another, as it were, from afar said quite
+clearly and distinctly, 'But surely, my dear, you have heard the story
+of the poor old charwoman who talked Greek in her delirium? A little
+school French need not alarm us.' And Lawford opened his eyes again on
+Mr Bethany standing at his bed.
+
+'Tt, tt! There, I've been and waked him. And yet they say men make such
+excellent nurses in time of war. But you see, Lawford, what did I tell
+you? Wasn't I now an infallible prophet? Your wife has been giving me a
+most glowing account. Quite your old self, she tells me, except for just
+this--this touch of facial paralysis. And I think, do you know' (the
+kind old creature stooped over the bed, but still, Lawford noticed
+bitterly, still without his spectacles)--'yes, I really think there is
+a decided improvement. Not quite so--drawn. We must make haste slowly.
+Wedderburn, you know, believes profoundly in Simon; he pulled his
+wife through a dangerous confinement. And here's pills and tonics and
+liniments--a whole chemist's shop. Oh, we are getting on swimmingly.'
+
+Flamelight was flickering in the candled dusk. Lawford turned his head
+and saw Sheila's coiled, beautiful hair in the firelight.
+
+'You haven't told Alice?' he asked.
+
+'My dear good man,' said Mr Bethany, 'of course we haven't. You shall
+tell her yourself on Monday. What an incredible tradition it will be!
+But you mustn't worry; you mustn't even think. And no more of these
+jaunts, eh? That Ferguson business--that was too bad. What are we going
+to do with the fellow now we have created him? He will come home to
+roost--mark my words. And as likely as not down the Vicarage chimney.
+I wouldn't have believed it of you, my dear fellow.' He beamed, but
+looked, none the less, very lean and fagged and depressed.
+
+'How did the wedding go off?' Lawford managed to think of inquiring.
+
+'Oh, A1,' said Mr Bethany. 'I've just been describing it to Alice--the
+bride, her bridegroom, mother, aunts, cake, presents, finery, blushes,
+tears, and everything that was hers. We've been in fits, haven't we, Mrs
+Lawford? And Alice says I'm a Worth in a clerical collar--didn't she?
+And that it's only Art that has kept me out of an apron. Now look here;
+quiet, quiet, quiet; no excitement, no pranks. What is there to worry
+about, pray? And now Little Dorrit's down with influenza too. And Craik
+and I will have double work to do. Well, well; good-bye, my dear. God
+bless you, Lawford. I can't tell you how relieved, how unspeakably
+relieved I am to find you so much--so much better. Feed him up, my other
+dear; body and mind and soul and spirit. And there goes the bell. I must
+have a biscuit. I've swallowed nothing but a Cupid in plaster of Paris
+since breakfast. Goodnight; we shall miss you both--both.'
+
+But when Sheila returned, her husband was sunk again into a quiet sleep,
+from which not even the many questions she fretted to put to him seemed
+weighty enough to warrant his disturbance.
+
+So when Lawford again opened his eyes he found himself lying wide awake,
+clear and refreshed, and eager to get up. But upon the air lay the still
+hush of early morning. He tried in vain to catch back sleep again.
+A distant shred of dream still floated in his mind, like a cloud
+at evening. He rarely dreamed, but certainly something immensely
+interesting had but a moment ago eluded him. He sat up and looked at
+the clear red cinders and their maze of grottoes. He got out of bed and
+peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and
+an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquillity hung the
+morning star, and rose, rifling into the dusk of night, the first grey
+of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed,
+deserted.
+
+Hardly since childhood had Lawford seen the dawn unless over his winter
+breakfast-table. Very much like a child now he stood gazing out of his
+bow-window--the child whom Time's busy robins had long ago covered over
+with the leaves of numberless hours. A vague exultation fumed up into
+his brain. Still on the borders of sleep, he unlocked the great wardrobe
+and took out an old faded purple and crimson dressing-gown that had
+belonged to his grandfather, the chief glory of every Christmas charade.
+He pulled the cowl-like hood over his head and strode majestically over
+to the looking-glass.
+
+He looked in there a moment on the strange face, like a child dismayed
+at its own excitement, and a fit of sobbing that was half uncontrollable
+laughter swept over him. He threw off the hood and turned once more to
+the window. Consciousness had flooded back indeed. What would Sheila
+have said to see him there? The unearthly beauty and stillness, and
+man's small labours, garden and wall and roof-tree idle and smokeless in
+the light of daybreak--there seemed to be some half-told secret between
+them. What had life done with him to leave a reality so clouded? He
+put on his slippers, and, gently opening the door, crept with extreme
+caution up the stairs. At a long, narrow landing window he confronted
+a panorama of starry night-gardens, sloping orchards; and beyond them
+fields, hills, Orion, the Dogs, in the clear and cloudless darkness.
+
+'My God, how beautiful!' a voice whispered. And a cock crowed mistily
+afar. He stood staring like a child into the wintry brightness of a
+pastry-cook's. Then once more he crept stealthily on. He stooped and
+listened at a closed door, until he fancied that above the beating of
+his own heart he could hear the breathing of the sleeper within. Then,
+taking firm hold of the handle with both hands, he slowly noiselessly
+turned it, and peeped in on Alice.
+
+The moon was long past her faint shining here. The blind was down. And
+yet it was not pitch dark. He stood with eyes fixed, waiting. Then he
+edged softly forward and knelt down beside the bed. He could hear her
+breathing now: long, low, quiet, unhastening--the miracle of life. He
+could just dimly discern the darkness of her hair against the pillow.
+Some long-sealed spring of tenderness seemed to rise in his heart with a
+grief and an ache he had never known before. Here at least he could find
+a little peace, a brief pause, however futile and stupid all his hopes
+of the night had been. He leant his head on his hands on the counterpane
+and refused to think. He felt a quick tremor, a startled movement, and
+knew that eyes wide open with fear were striving to pierce the gloom
+between them.
+
+'There, there, dearest,' he said in a low whisper, 'it's only me, only
+me.' He stroked the narrow hand and gazed into the shadowiness. Her
+fingers lay quiet and passive in his, with that strange sense of
+immateriality that sleep brings to the body.
+
+'You, you!' she answered with a deep sigh. 'Oh, dearest, how you
+frightened me. What is wrong? why have you come? Are you worse, dearest,
+dearest?'
+
+He kissed her hand. 'No, Alice, not worse. I couldn't sleep, that was
+all.'
+
+'Oh, and I came so utterly miserable to bed because you would not see
+me. And Mother would tell me only so very little. I didn't even know
+you had been ill.' She pressed his hand between her own. 'But this, you
+know, is very, very naughty--you will catch cold, you bad thing. What
+would Mother say?'
+
+'I think we mustn't tell her, dear. I couldn't help it; I felt much I
+wanted to see you. I have been rather miserable.'
+
+'Why?' she said, stroking his hand from wrist to fingertips with one
+soft finger. 'You mustn't be miserable. You and me have never done such
+a thing before; have we? Was it that wretched old Flu?'
+
+It was too dark in the little fragrant room even to see her face so
+close to his own. And yet he feared. 'Dr Simon,' she went on softly,
+'said it was. But isn't your voice a little hoarse, and it sounds so
+melancholy in the dark. And oh'--she squeezed his wrist--'you have grown
+so thin! You do frighten me. Whatever should I do if you were really
+ill? And it was so odd, dear. When first I woke I seemed to be still
+straining my eyes in a dream, at such a curious, haunting face--not very
+nice. I am glad, I am glad you were here.'
+
+'What was the dream-face like?' came the muttered question.
+
+'Dark and sharp, and rather dwelling eyes; you know those long faces one
+sees in dreams: like a hawk, like a conjuror's.'
+
+Like a conjuror's!--it was the first unguarded and ungarbled criticism.
+'Perhaps, dear, if you find my voice different, and my hand shrunk up,
+you will find my face changed, too--like a conjuror's.... What then?'
+
+She laughed gaily and tenderly. 'You silly silly; I should love you more
+than ever. Your hands are icy cold. I can't warm them nohow.'
+
+Lawford held tight his daughter's hand. 'You do love me, Alice? You
+would not turn against me, whatever happened? Ah, you shall see, you
+shall see.' A sudden burning hope sprang up in him. Surely when all was
+well again, these last few hours would not have been spent in vain.
+Like the shadow of death they had been, against whose darkness the green
+familiar earth seems beautiful as the plains of paradise. Had he but
+realized before how much he loved her--what years of life had been
+wasted in leaving it all unsaid! He came back from his reverie to find
+his hand wet with her tears. He stroked her hair, and touched gently her
+eyelids without speaking.
+
+'You will let me come in to-morrow?' she pleaded; 'you won't keep me
+out?'
+
+'Ah, but, dear, you must remember your mother. She gets so anxious, and
+every word the doctor says is law. How would you like me to come again
+like this, perhaps?--like Santa Claus?'
+
+'You know how I love having you,' she said, and stopped. 'But--but...'
+He leaned closer. 'Yes, yes, come,' she said, clutching his hand and
+hiding her eyes; 'it is only my dream--that horrible, dwelling face in
+the dream; it frightened me so.'
+
+Lawford rose very slowly from his knees. He could feel in the dark his
+brows drawn down; there came a low, sullen beating on his ear; he saw
+his face as it were in dim outline against the dark. Rage and rebellion
+surged up in him; even his love could be turned to bitterness. Well, two
+could play at any game! Alice sprang up in bed and caught his sleeve.
+'Dearest, dearest, you must not be angry with me now!'
+
+He flung himself down beside the bed. Anger, resentment died away. 'You
+are all I have left,' he said.
+
+He stole back, as he had come, in the clear dawn to his bedroom.
+
+It was not five yet. He put a few more coals on his fire and blew out
+the night-light, and lay down. But it was impossible to rest, to remain
+inactive. He would go down and search for that first volume of Quain.
+Hallucination, Influenza, Insanity--why, Sheila must have purposely
+mislaid it. A rather formidable figure he looked, descending the stairs
+in the grey dusk of daybreak. The breakfast-room was at the back of
+the house. He tilted the blind, and a faint light flowed in from the
+changing colours of the sky. He opened the glass door of the little
+bookcase to the right of the window, and ran eye and finger over the few
+rows of books. But as he stood there with his back to the room, just as
+the shadow of a bird's wing floats across the moonlight of a pool, he
+became suddenly conscious that something, somebody had passed across the
+doorway, and in passing had looked in on him.
+
+He stood motionless, listening; but no sound broke the morning
+slumbrousness, except the faraway warbling of a thrush in the first
+light. So sudden and transitory had been the experience that it seemed
+now to be illusory; yet it had so caught him up, it had with so furtive
+and sinister a quietness broken in on his solitude, that for a moment he
+dared not move. A cold, indefinite sensation stole over him that he was
+being watched; that some dim, evil presence was behind him biding its
+time, patient and stealthy, with eyes fixed unmovingly on him where
+he stood. But, watch and wait as silently as he might, only the day
+broadened at the window, and at last a narrow ray of sunlight stole
+trembling up into the dusky bowl of the sky.
+
+At any rate Quain was found, with all the ills of life, from A to I; and
+Lawford turned back to his bondage with the book under his arm.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming
+bells, had passed languidly away. Dr Simon had come and gone, optimistic
+and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient
+behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to
+lurk. Even Mrs Lawford had appeared to share her husband's reticence.
+But Dr Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact
+was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.
+
+The voices and footsteps, even the frou-frou of worshippers going to
+church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church,
+had floated up to the patient's open window. Sunlight had drawn across
+his room in one pale beam, and vanished. A few callers had called.
+Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of
+sympathy. Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made
+inquiries on his way home from chapel.
+
+Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft
+slippers. The very monotony had eased his mind. Now and again he had
+lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling. He had dozed and had
+awakened, cold and torpid with dream. He had hardly been aware of
+the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards
+clarifying his point of view. A consciousness had begun to stir in him
+that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been
+fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that
+haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his
+distracted nerves. He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them
+both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there
+really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him. It would, of
+course, wear him down in time. There could be only one end to such a
+struggle--THE end.
+
+All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open
+sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls. This
+heedful silken coming and going, these Sunday voices, this reiterant
+yelp of a single peevish bell--would they never cease? And above all,
+betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for night. He
+sat down with elbows on knees and head on his hands, thinking of night,
+its secrecy, its immeasurable solitude.
+
+His eyelids twitched; the fire before him had for an instant gone black
+out. He seemed to see slow-gesturing branches, grass stooping beneath
+a grey and wind-swept sky. He started up; and the remembrance of the
+morning returned to him--the glassy light, the changing rays, the
+beaming gilt upon the useless books. Now, at last, at the windows;
+afternoon had begun to wane. And when Sheila brought up his tea, as if
+Chance had heard his cry, she entered in hat and stole. She put down the
+tray, and paused at the glass, looking across it out of the window.
+
+'Alice says you are to eat every one of those delicious sandwiches, and
+especially the tiny omelette. You have scarcely touched anything to-day,
+Arthur. I am a poor one to preach, I am afraid; but you know what that
+will mean--a worse breakdown still. You really must try to think of--of
+us all.'
+
+'Are you going to church?' he asked in a low voice.
+
+'Not, of course, if you would prefer not. But Dr Simon advised me most
+particularly to go out at least once a day. We must remember, this is
+not the beginning of your illness. Long-continued anxiety, I suppose,
+does tell on one in time. Anyhow, he said that I looked worried and
+run-down. I AM worried. Let us both try for each other's sakes, or even
+if only for Alice's, to--to do all we can. I must not harass you; but is
+there any--do you see the slightest change of any kind?'
+
+'You always look pretty, Sheila; to-night you look prettier: THAT is the
+only change, I think.'
+
+Mrs Lawford's attitude intensified in its stillness. 'Now, speaking
+quite frankly, what is it in you suggests these remarks at such a time?
+That's what baffles me. It seems so childish, so needlessly blind.'
+
+'I am very sorry, Sheila, to be so childish. But I'm not, say what
+you like, blind. You ARE pretty: I'd repeat it if I was burning at the
+stake.'
+
+Sheila lowered her eyes softly on to the rich-toned picture in the
+glass. 'Supposing,' she said, watching her lips move, 'supposing--of
+course, I know you are getting better and all that--but supposing you
+don't change back as Mr Bethany thinks, what will you do? Honestly,
+Arthur, when I think over it calmly, the whole tragedy comes back on me
+with such a force it sweeps me off my feet; I am for the moment scarcely
+my own mistress. What would you do?'
+
+'I think, Sheila,' replied a low, infinitely weary voice, 'I think I
+should marry again.' It was the same wavering, faintly ironical voice
+that had slightly discomposed Dr Simon that same morning.
+
+'"Marry again"!' exclaimed incredulously the full lips in the
+looking-glass. 'Who?'
+
+'YOU, dear!'
+
+Sheila turned softly round, conscious in a most humiliating manner that
+she had ever so little flushed.
+
+Her husband was pouring out his tea, unaware, apparently, of her change
+of position. She watched him curiously. In spite of all her reason, of
+her absolute certainty, she wondered even again for a moment if this
+really could be Arthur. And for the first time she realised the power
+and mastery of that eager and far too hungry face. Her mind seemed to
+pause, fluttering in air, like a bird in the wind. She hastened rather
+unsteadily to the door.
+
+'Will you want anything more, do you think, for an hour?' she asked.
+
+Her husband looked up over his little table. 'Is Alice going with you?'
+
+'Oh yes; poor child, she looks so pale and miserable. We are going to
+Mrs Sherwin's, and then on to Church. You will lock your door?'
+
+'Yes, I will lock my door.'
+
+'And I do hope Arthur--nothing rash!'
+
+A change, that seemed almost the effect of actual shadow, came over his
+face. 'I wish you could stay with me,' he said slowly. 'I don't think
+you have any idea what--what I go through.'
+
+It was as if a child had asked on the verge of terror for a candle in
+the dark. But an hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.
+Sheila sighed.
+
+'I think,' she said, 'I too might say that. But there; giving way will
+do nothing for either of us. I shall be gone only for an hour, or two
+at the most. And I told Mr Bethany I should have to come out before the
+sermon: it's only Mr Craik.'
+
+'But why Mrs Sherwin? She'd worm a secret out of one's grave.'
+
+'It's useless to discuss that, Arthur; you have always consistently
+disliked my friends. It's scarcely likely that you would find any
+improvement in them now.'
+
+'Oh, well--' he began. But the door was already closed.
+
+'Sheila!' he called in a burst of anger.
+
+'Well, Arthur?'
+
+'You have taken my latchkey.'
+
+Sheila came hastily in again. 'Your latchkey?'
+
+'I am going out.'
+
+'"Going out!"--you will not be so mad, so criminal; and after your
+promise!'
+
+He stood up. 'It is useless to argue. If I do not go out, I shall
+certainly go mad. As for criminal--why, that's a woman's word. Who on
+earth is to know me?'
+
+'It is of no consequence, then, that the servants are already gossiping
+about this impossible Dr Ferguson; that you are certain to be seen
+either going or returning; that Alice is bound to discover that you are
+well enough to go out, and yet not even enough to say good-night to your
+own daughter--oh, it's monstrous, it's a frantic, a heartless thing to
+do!' Her voice vaguely suggested tears.
+
+Lawford eyed her coldly and stubbornly--thinking of the empty room
+he would leave awaiting his return, its lamp burning, its fire-flames
+shining. It was almost a physical discomfort, this longing unspeakable
+for the twilight, the green secrecy and the silence of the graves. 'Keep
+them out of the way,' he said in a low voice; 'it will be dark when I
+come in.' His hardened face lit up. 'It's useless to attempt to dissuade
+me.'
+
+'Why must you always be hurting me? why do you seem to delight in trying
+to estrange me?' Husband and wife faced each other across the clear-lit
+room. He did not answer.
+
+'For the last time,' she said in a quiet, hard voice, 'I ask you not to
+go.'
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. 'Ask me not to come back,' he said; 'that's
+nearer your hope.' He turned his face to the fire. Without moving
+he heard her go out, return, pause, and go out again. And when he
+deliberately wheeled round in his chair the little key lay conspicuous
+there on the counterpane.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+The last light of sunset lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud
+was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country
+graveyard again by its dark weather-worn lych-gate. The old stone church
+with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window faintly aglow
+with crimson and purple. He could hear a steady, rather nasal voice
+through its open lattices. But the stooping stones and the cypresses
+were out of sight of its porch. He would not be seen down there. He
+paused a moment, however; his hat was drawn down over his eyes; he was
+shivering. Far over the harvest fields showed a growing pallor in
+the solitary seat beneath the cypresses. He stood hesitating, gazing
+steadily and yet half vacantly at the motionless figure, and in a while
+a face was lifted in his direction, and undisconcerted eyes calmly
+surveyed him.
+
+'I am afraid,' called Lawford rather nervously--'I hope I am not
+intruding?'
+
+'Not at all, not at all,' said the stranger. 'I have no privileges here;
+at least as yet.'
+
+Lawford again hesitated, then slowly advanced. 'It's astonishingly quiet
+and beautiful,' he said.
+
+The stranger turned his head to glance over the fields. 'Yes, it is,
+very,' he replied. There was the faintest accent, a little drawl of
+unfriendliness in the remark.
+
+'You often sit here?' Lawford persisted.
+
+The stranger raised his eyebrows. 'Oh yes, often.' He smiled. 'It is
+my own modest fashion of attending divine service. The congregation is
+rapt.'
+
+'My visits,' said Lawford, 'have been very few--in fact, so far as I
+know, I have only once been here before.'
+
+'I envy you the novelty.' There was again the same faint unmistakable
+antagonism in voice and attitude; and yet so deep was the relief in
+talking to a fellow creature who hadn't the least suspicion of anything
+unusual in his appearance that Lawford was extremely disinclined to turn
+back. He made another effort--for conversation with strangers had always
+been a difficulty to him--and advanced towards the seat. 'You mustn't
+please let me intrude upon you,' he said, 'but really I am very
+interested in this queer old place. Perhaps you would tell me something
+of its history?' He sat down. His companion moved slowly to the other
+side of the broken gravestone.
+
+'To tell you the truth,' he replied, picking his way as it were from
+word to word, 'it's "history," as people call it, does not interest me
+in the least. After all, it's not when a thing is, but what it is, that
+much matters. What this is'--he glanced, with head bent, across the
+shadowy stones, 'is pretty evident. Of course, age has its charms.'
+
+'And is this very old?'
+
+'Oh yes, it's old right enough, as things go; but even age, perhaps,
+is mainly an affair of the imagination. There's a tombstone near that
+little old hawthorn, and there are two others side by side under the
+wall, still even legibly late seventeenth century. That's pretty
+good weathering.' He smiled faintly. 'Of course, the church itself is
+centuries older, drenched with age. But she's still sleep-walking while
+these old tombstones dream. Glow-worms and crickets are not such bad
+bedfellows.'
+
+'What interested me most, I think,' said Lawford haltingly, 'was this.'
+He pointed with his stick to the grave at his feet.
+
+'Ah, yes, Sabathier's,' said the stranger; 'I know his peculiar history
+almost by heart.'
+
+Lawford found himself staring with unusual concentration into the
+rather long and pale face. 'Not, I suppose,' he resumed faintly--'not, I
+suppose, beyond what's there.'
+
+His companion leant his hand on the old stooping tombstone. 'Well, you
+know, there's a good deal there'--he stooped over--'if you read between
+the lines. Even if you don't.'
+
+'A suicide,' said Lawford, under his breath.
+
+'Yes, a suicide; that's why our Christian countrymen have buried him
+outside of the fold. Dead or alive, they try to keep the wolf out.'
+
+'Is this, then, unconsecrated ground?' said Lawford.
+
+'Haven't you noticed,' drawled the other, 'how green the grass grows
+down here, and how very sharp are poor old Sabathier's thorns? Besides,
+he was a stranger, and they--kept him out.'
+
+'But, surely,' said Lawford, 'was it so entirely a matter of choice--the
+laws of the Church? If he did kill himself, he did.'
+
+The stranger turned with a little shrug. 'I don't suppose it's a matter
+of much consequence to HIM. I fancied I was his only friend. May I
+venture to ask why you are interested in the poor old thing?'
+
+Lawford's mind was as calm and shallow as a millpond. 'Oh, a rather
+unusual thing happened to me here,' he said. 'You say you often come?'
+
+'Often,' said the stranger rather curtly.
+
+'Has anything--ever--occurred?'
+
+'"Occurred?"' He raised his eyebrows. 'I wish it had. I come here
+simply, as I have said, because it's quiet; because I prefer the company
+of those who never answer me back, and who do not so much as condescend
+to pay me the least attention.' He smiled and turned his face towards
+the quiet fields.
+
+Lawford, after a long pause, lifted his eyes. 'Do you think,' he said
+softly, 'it is possible one ever could?'
+
+'"One ever could?"'
+
+'Answer back?'
+
+There was a low rotting wall of stone encompassing Sabathier's grave;
+on this the stranger sat down. He glanced up rather curiously at his
+companion. 'Seldom the time and the place and the revenant altogether.
+The thought has occurred to others,' he ventured to add.
+
+'Of course, of course,' said Lawford eagerly. 'But it is an absolutely
+new one to me. I don't mean that I have never had such an idea, just in
+one's own superficial way; but'--he paused and glanced swiftly into the
+fast-thickening twilight--'I wonder: are they, do you think, really, all
+quite dead?'
+
+'Call and see!' taunted the stranger softly.
+
+'Ah, yes, I know,' said Lawford. 'But I believe in the resurrection of
+the body; that is what we say; and supposing, when a man dies--supposing
+it was most frightfully against one's will; that one hated the awful
+inaction that death brings, shutting a poor devil up like a child
+kicking against the door in a dark cupboard; one might surely one
+might--just quietly, you know, try to get out? wouldn't you?' he added.
+
+'And, surely,' he found himself beginning gently to argue again,
+'surely, what about, say, him?' He nodded towards the old and broken
+grave that lay between them.
+
+'What, Sabathier?' the other echoed, laying his hand upon the stone.
+
+And a sheer enormous abyss of silence seemed to follow the unanswerable
+question.
+
+'He was a stranger; it says so. Good God!' said Lawford, 'how he must
+have wanted to get home! He killed himself, poor wretch, think of the
+fret and fever he must have been in--just before. Imagine it.'
+
+'But it might, you know,' suggested the other with a smile--'might have
+been sheer indifference.'
+
+'"Nicholas Sabathier, Stranger to this parish"--no, no,' said Lawford,
+his heart beating as if it would choke him, 'I don't fancy it was
+indifference.'
+
+It was almost too dark now to distinguish the stranger's features but
+there seemed a faint suggestion of irony in his voice. 'And how do
+you suppose your angry naughty child would set about it? It's narrow
+quarters; how would he begin?'
+
+Lawford sat quite still. 'You say--I hope I am not detaining you--you
+say you have come here, sat here often, on this very seat; have you ever
+had--have you ever fallen asleep here?'
+
+'Why do you ask?' inquired the other curiously.
+
+'I was only wondering,' said Lawford. He was cold and shivering. He felt
+instinctively it was madness to sit on here in the thin gliding mist
+that had gathered in swathes above the grass, milk-pale in the rising
+moon. The stranger turned away from him.
+
+'"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause,"'
+he said slowly, with a little satirical catch on the last word. 'What
+did you dream?'
+
+Lawford glanced helplessly about him. The moon cast lean grey beams
+of light between the cypresses. But to his wide and wandering eyes it
+seemed that a radiance other than hers haunted these mounds and leaning
+stones. 'Have you ever noticed it?' he said, putting out his hand
+towards his unknown companion; 'this stone is cracked from head to
+foot?... But there'--he rose stiff and chilled--'I am afraid I have
+bored you with my company. You came here for solitude, and I have been
+trying to convince you that we are surrounded with witnesses. You will
+forgive my intrusion?' There was a kind of old-fashioned courtesy in his
+manner that he himself was dimly aware of. He held out his hand.
+
+'I hope you will think nothing of the kind,' said the other earnestly;
+'how could it be in any sense an intrusion? It's the old story of
+Bluebeard. And I confess I too should very much like a peep into his
+cupboard. Who wouldn't? But there, it's merely a matter of time, I
+suppose.' He paused, and together they slowly ascended the path already
+glimmering with a heavy dew. At the porch they paused once more. And now
+it was the stranger that held out his hand.
+
+'Perhaps,' he said, 'you will give me the pleasure of some day
+continuing our talk. As for our friend below, it so happens that I have
+managed to pick up a little more of his history than the sexton seems to
+have heard of--if you would care some time or other to share it. I live
+only at the foot of the hill, not half a mile distant. Perhaps you could
+spare the time now?'
+
+Lawford took out his watch, 'You are really very kind,' he said. 'But,
+perhaps--well, whatever that history may be, I think you would agree
+that mine is even--but, there, I've talked too much about myself
+already. Perhaps to-morrow?'
+
+'Why, to-morrow, then,' said his companion. 'It's a flat wooden house,
+on the left-hand side. Come at any time of the evening'; he paused again
+and smiled--'the third house after the Rectory, which is marked up on
+the gate. My name is Herbert--Herbert Herbert to be precise.'
+
+Lawford took out his pocket-book and a card. 'Mine,' he said, handing
+it gravely to his companion. 'is Lawford--at least...' It was really the
+first time that either had seen the other's face at close quarters and
+clear-lit; and on Lawford's a moon almost at the full shone
+dazzlingly. He saw an expression--dismay, incredulity, overwhelming
+astonishment--start suddenly into the dark, rather indifferent eyes.
+
+'What is it?' he cried, hastily stooping close.
+
+'Why,' said the other, laughing and turning away, 'I think the moon must
+have bewitched me too.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+Lawford listened awhile before opening his door. He heard voices in the
+dining-room. A light shone faintly between the blinds of his bedroom. He
+very gently let himself in, and unheard, unseen, mounted the stairs. He
+sat down in front of the fire, tired out and bitterly cold in spite
+of his long walk home. But his mind was wearier even than his body. He
+tried in vain to catch up the thread of his thoughts. He only knew for
+certain that so far as his first hope and motives had gone his errand
+had proved entirely futile. 'How could I possibly fall asleep with that
+fellow talking there?' he had said to himself angrily; yet knew in his
+heart that their talk had driven every other idea out of his mind. He
+had not yet even glanced into the glass. His every thought was vainly
+wandering round and round the one curious hint that had drifted in, but
+which he had not yet been able to put into words.
+
+Supposing, though, that he had really fallen into a deep sleep, with
+none to watch or spy--what then? However ridiculous that idea, it was
+not more ridiculous, more incredible than the actual fact. If he had
+remained there, he might, it was just possible that he would by now,
+have actually awakened just his own familiar every-day self again. And
+the thought of that--though he hardly realised its full import--actually
+did send him on tip-toe for a glance that more or less effectually set
+the question at rest. And there looked out at him, it seemed, the
+same dark sallow face that had so much appalled him only two nights
+ago--expressionless, cadaverous, with shadowy hollows beneath the
+glittering eyes. And even as he watched it, its lips, of their own
+volition, drew together and questioned him--'Whose?'
+
+He was not to be given much leisure, however, for fantastic reveries
+like this. As he leaned his head on his hands, gladly conscious that he
+could not possibly bear this incessant strain for long, Sheila opened
+the door. He started up.
+
+'I wish you would knock,' he said angrily; 'you talk of quiet; you tell
+me to rest, and think; and here you come creeping and spying on me as
+if I was a child in a nursery. I refuse to be watched and guarded and
+peeped on like this.' He knew that his hands were trembling, that he
+could not keep his eyes fixed, that his voice was nearly inarticulate.
+
+Sheila drew in her lips. 'I have merely come to tell you, Arthur, that
+Mr Bethany has brought Mr Danton in to supper. He agrees with me it
+really would be advisable to take such a very old and prudent and
+practical friend into our confidence. You do nothing I ask of you. I
+simply cannot bear the burden of this incessant anxiety. Look, now, what
+your night walk has done for you! You look positively at death's door.'
+
+'What--what an instinct you have for the right word,' said Lawford
+softly. 'And Danton, of all people in the world! It was surely rather a
+curious, a thoughtless choice. Has he had supper?'
+
+'Why do you ask?'
+
+'He won't believe: too--bloated.'
+
+'I think,' said Sheila indignantly, 'it is hardly fair to speak of a
+very old and a very true friend of mine in such--well, vulgar terms as
+that. Besides, Arthur, as for believing--without in the least desiring
+to hurt your feelings--I must candidly warn you, some people won't.'
+
+'Come along,' said Lawford, with a faint gust of laughter; 'let's see.'
+
+They went quickly downstairs, Sheila with less dignity, perhaps, than
+she had been surprised into since she had left a slimmer girlhood
+behind. She swept into the gaze of the two gentlemen standing together
+on the hearthrug; and so was caught, as it were, between a rain of
+conflicting glances, for her husband had followed instantly, and stood
+now behind her, stooping a little, and with something between contempt
+and defiance confronting an old fat friend, whom that one brief
+challenging instant had congealed into a condition of passive and
+immovable hostility.
+
+Mr Danton composed his chin in his collar, and deliberately
+turned himself towards his companion. His small eyes wandered, and
+instantaneously met and rested on those of Mrs Lawford.
+
+'Arthur thought he would prefer to come down and see you himself.'
+
+'You take such formidable risks, Lawford,' said Mr Bethany in a dry,
+difficult voice.
+
+'Am I really to believe,' Danton began huskily. 'I am sure, Bethany,
+you will--My dear Mrs Lawford!' said he, stirring vaguely, glancing
+restlessly.
+
+'It was not my wish, Vicar, to come at all,' said a voice from the
+doorway. 'To tell you the truth, I am too tired to care a jot either
+way. And'--he lifted a long arm--'I must positively refuse to produce
+the least, the remotest proof that I am not, so far as I am personally
+aware, even the Man in the Moon. Danton at heart was always an
+incorrigible sceptic. Aren't you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn
+on it in secret?'
+
+'I really--' began Danton in a rich still voice.
+
+'Oh, but you know you are,' drawled on the slightly hesitating
+long-drawn syllables; 'it's your parochial metier. Firm, unctuous,
+subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born
+fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately
+thrust on you--in layers! Lampreys! You'll perish of surfeit some day,
+of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting's
+there!'
+
+Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke. He turned swiftly on Mrs
+Lawford. 'Why, why, could you not have seen?' he cried.
+
+'It's no good, Vicar. She's all sheer Laodicean. Blow hot, blow cold.
+North, south, east, west--to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry
+the wind. There's nothing to be got from poor Sheila but....
+
+'Lawford!' the little man's voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip;
+'I forbid it. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Some self-command; my dear
+good fellow, remember, remember it's only the will, the will that keeps
+us breathing.'
+
+Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and
+flickered with shadows before his eyes. 'What's he mean, then,' he
+muttered huskily, 'coming here with his black, still carcase--peeping,
+peeping--what's he mean, I say?' There was a moment's silence. Then with
+lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses
+left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy
+pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.
+
+'I suppose,' began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself
+from the humiliation of the moment, 'I suppose he was--wandering?'
+
+'Bless me, yes,' said Mr Bethany cordially--'fever. We all know what
+that MEANS.'
+
+'Yes,' said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford's white and intent
+gaze.
+
+'Just think, think, Danton--the awful, incessant strain of such an
+ordeal. Think for an instant what such a thing means!'
+
+Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin. 'Oh yes.
+But--eh?--needlessly abusive? I never SAID I disbelieved him.'
+
+'Do you?' said Mrs Lawford's voice.
+
+He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his
+legs. 'Eh?' he said.
+
+Mr Bethany sat down at the table. 'I rather feared some such temporary
+breakdown as this, Danton. I think I foresaw it. And now, just while we
+are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn't it be
+as well, don't you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties?
+I know--we all know, that that poor half-demented creature IS Arthur
+Lawford. This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now. An
+awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him--this change. I own frankly
+at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it
+has staggered you. But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face,
+heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and
+awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep. I had no more
+doubt in my own mind and heart that he was he than I have in my mind
+that I--am I. We do in some mysterious way, you'll own at once, grow so
+accustomed, so inured, if you like, to each other's faces (masks
+though they be) that we hardly realise we see them when we are speaking
+together. And yet the slightest, the most infinitesimal change is
+instantly apparent.'
+
+'Oh yes, Vicar; but you see--'
+
+Mr Bethany raised a small lean hand: 'One moment, please. I have heard
+Lawford's own account. Conscious or unconscious, he has been through
+some terrific strain, some such awful conflict with the unseen powers
+that we--thank God!--have only read about, and never perhaps, until
+death is upon us, shall witness for ourselves. What more likely, more
+inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its
+masking shadow?--call it what you will. A smile can turn a face we dread
+into a face we'd die for. Some experience, which would be nothing but
+a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about--one, perhaps,
+which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of--has
+put him temporarily at the world's mercy. They made him a nine days'
+wonder, a byword. And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in.
+We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a
+buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this
+deadly, craving, sheepish world--for the time being; oh yes, just for
+the time being. Other and keener and more knowledgeable minds than mine
+or yours will some day bring him back to us again. We don't attempt to
+explain; we can't. We simply believe.'
+
+But Danton merely continued to stare, as if into the quiet of an
+aquarium.
+
+'My dear good Danton,' persisted Mr Bethany with cherubic patience, 'how
+old are you?'
+
+'I don't see quite...' smiled Danton with recovered ease, and
+rapidly mobilising forces. 'Excuse the confidence, Mrs Lawford, I'm
+forty-three.'
+
+'Good,' said Mr Bethany; 'and I'm seventy-one, and this child here'--he
+pointed an accusing finger at Sheila--is youth perpetual. So,' he
+briskly brightened, 'say, between us we're six score all told. Are
+we--can we, deliberately, with this mere pinch of years at our command
+out of the wheeling millions that have gone--can we say, "This is
+impossible," to any single phenomenon? CAN we?'
+
+'No, we can't, of course,' said Danton formidably. 'Not finally. That's
+all very well, but'--he paused, and nodded, nodding his round head
+upward as if towards the inaudible overhead, 'I suppose he can't HEAR?'
+
+Mr Bethany rose cheerfully. 'All right, Danton; I am afraid you are
+exactly what the poor fellow in his delirium solemnly asseverated.
+And, jesting apart, it is in delirium that we tell our sheer, plain,
+unadulterated truth: you're a nicely covered sceptic. Personally, I
+refuse to discuss the matter. Mere dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry, if
+you like. I will only remark just this--that Mrs Lawford and I, in our
+inmost hearts, know. You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom, merely
+incredulously grope. Faith versus Reason--that prehistoric Armageddon.
+Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will come back
+to us. This--this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by some
+inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put
+up. He'll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage. But now,
+because I ask it, and this poor child here entreats it, you will say
+nothing to a living soul about the matter, say, till Friday? What
+step-by-step creatures we are, to be sure! I say Friday because it
+will be exactly a week then. And what's a week?--to Nature scarcely
+the unfolding of a rose. But still, Friday be it. Then, if nothing has
+occurred, we will, we shall HAVE to call a friendly gathering, we shall
+be compelled to have a friendly consultation.'
+
+'I'm not, I hope, a brute, Bethany,' said Danton apologetically; 'but,
+honestly, speaking for myself, simply as a man of the world, it's a
+big risk to be taking on--what shall we call it?--on mere intuition.
+Personally, and even in a court of law--though Heaven forbid it ever
+reaches that stage--personally, I could swear that the fellow that stood
+abusing me there, in that revolting fashion, was not Lawford. It would
+be easier even to believe in him, if there were not that--that glaze,
+that shocking simulation of the man himself, the very man. But then, I
+am a sceptic; I own it. And 'pon my word, Mrs Lawford, there's plenty of
+room for sceptics in a world like this.'
+
+'Very well,' said Mr Bethany crisply, 'that's settled, then. With your
+permission, my dear,' he added, turning untarnishably clear childlike
+eyes on Sheila, 'I will take all risks--even to the foot of the gibbet:
+accessory, Danton, AFTER the fact.' And so direct and cloudless was his
+gaze that Sheila tried in vain to evade it and to catch a glimpse
+of Danton's small agate-like eyes, now completely under mastery, and
+awaiting confidently the meeting with her own.
+
+'Of course,' she said, 'I am entirely in your hands, dear Mr Bethany.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+Lawford slept far into the cloudy Monday morning, to wake steeped in
+sleep, lethargic, and fretfully haunted by inconclusive remembrances
+of the night before. When Sheila, with obvious and capacious composure,
+brought him his breakfast tray, he watched her face for some time
+without speaking.
+
+'Sheila,' he began, as she was about to leave the room again.
+
+She paused, smiling.
+
+'Did anything happen last night? Would you mind telling me, Sheila? Who
+was it was here?'
+
+Her lids the least bit narrowed. 'Certainly, Arthur; Mr Danton was
+here.'
+
+'Then it was not a dream?'
+
+'Oh no,' said Sheila.
+
+'What did I say? What did HE say? It was hopeless, anyhow.'
+
+'I don't quite understand what you mean by "hopeless," Arthur. And must
+I answer the other questions?'
+
+Lawford drew his hand over his face, like a tired child. 'He
+didn't--believe?'
+
+'No, dear,' said Sheila softly.
+
+'And you, Sheila?' came the subdued voice.
+
+Sheila crossed slowly to the window. 'Well, quite honestly, Arthur, I
+was not very much surprised. Whatever we are agreed about on the whole,
+you were scarcely yourself last night.'
+
+Lawford shut his eyes, and re-opened them full on his wife's calm
+scrutiny, who had in that moment turned in the light of the one drawn
+blind to face him again.
+
+'Who is? Always?'
+
+'No,' said Sheila; 'but--it was at least unfortunate. We can't, I
+suppose, rely on Dr Bethany alone.'
+
+Lawford crouched over his food. 'Will he blab?'
+
+'Blab! Mr Danton is a gentleman, Arthur.'
+
+Lawford rolled his eyes as if in temporary vertigo. 'Yes,' he said. And
+Sheila once more prepared to make a reposeful exit.
+
+'I don't think I can see Simon this morning.'
+
+'Oh. Who, then?'
+
+'I mean I would prefer to be left alone.'
+
+'Believe me, I had no intention to intrude.' And this time the door
+really closed.
+
+'He is in a quiet, soothing sleep,' said Sheila a few minutes later.
+
+'Nothing could be better,' said Dr Simon; and Lawford, to his
+inexpressible relief, heard the fevered throbbing of the doctor's car
+reverse, and turned over and shut his eyes, dulled and exhausted in
+the still unfriendliness of the vacant room. His spirits had sunk,
+he thought, to their lowest ebb. He scarcely heeded the fragments of
+dreams--clear, green landscapes, amazing gleams of peace, the
+sudden broken voices, the rustling and calling shadowiness of
+subconsciousness--in this quiet sunlight of reality. The clouds had
+broken, or had been withdrawn like a veil from the October skies. One
+thought alone was his refuge; one face alone haunted him with its
+peace; one remembrance soothed him--Alice. Through all his scattered
+and purposeless arguments he strove to remember her voice, the
+loving-kindness of her eyes, her untroubled confidence.
+
+In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring
+himself to stand before the glass and deliberately shave. He even smiled
+at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He dressed by
+the fireplace.
+
+'I couldn't rest,' he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one
+of her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; 'and one tires of reading even
+Quain in bed.'
+
+'Have you found anything?' she inquired politely.
+
+'Oh yes,' said Lawford wearily; 'I have discovered that infinitely
+worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there's nothing quite so
+picturesque.'
+
+'Tell me,' said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. 'How does it feel? does
+it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?'
+
+He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for
+inspiration. 'Practically, not at all,' he said hollowly. 'Of course,
+one's nerves--that fellow Danton--when one's overtired. You have'--his
+voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered--'YOU haven't noticed
+anything? My mind?'
+
+'Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know
+that, Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me
+unsympathetic--but don't you think we must sooner or later be thinking
+of what's to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany
+as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as
+possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only
+standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn't. You WILL help
+me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!'
+
+'What about Alice?'
+
+'She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why
+she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter
+of that, even if he was, at death's door.'
+
+'At death's door,' murmured Lawford under his breath; 'who was it
+was saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one's
+thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel carved
+into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin sunlight,
+hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony--in that cold,
+green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond--O God,
+beyond!'
+
+Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. 'And was all that in Quain?'
+she inquired rather flutteringly.
+
+Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.
+
+She shook herself, with a slight shiver. 'Very well, then,' she said and
+paused in the silence.
+
+Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last
+sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie
+of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. 'What has he
+been saying now?' he inquired like a fretful child.
+
+Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare,
+wild, timid creature by the least stir. 'Who?' she merely breathed.
+
+Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. 'It's just
+the last rags of that beastly influenza,' he said, and began vigorously
+combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it
+moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences
+of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of
+her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid
+revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.
+
+But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of
+heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts
+that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond
+measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed
+outside the covers of some old impossible romance--the magic of the
+darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock
+of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the
+stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the
+broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so
+meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to
+be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been
+freely opened to him.
+
+He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came
+a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of a
+falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There was a
+faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the landing
+and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been Alice's
+nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that showed
+beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the garden--the
+trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a flower-bed,
+late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and--yes, three wicker
+chairs, a footstool, a work-basket, a little table on the smooth grass
+in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there in the autumnal
+sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair, her head bent,
+evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an inch or two
+forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the grass--Alice's big garden
+hat--and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears sagging. He
+had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would he bark at the
+strange, distasteful scent of a--Dr Ferguson? The coast was clear, then.
+He turned even softlier yet, to confront, rapt, still, and hovering
+betwixt astonishment and dread, the blue calm eyes of his daughter,
+looking in at the door. It seemed to Lawford as if they had both been
+suddenly swept by some unseen power into a still, unearthly silence.
+
+'We thought,' he began at last, 'we thought just to beckon Mrs Lawford
+from the window. He--he is asleep.'
+
+Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed
+and left her pale. 'I will go down and tell mother you want to see her.
+It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first...I suppose,
+thinking of my father--' The words faltered, and the eyes were lifted to
+his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford turned away
+heartsick and trembling.
+
+'Certainly, certainly, by no means,' he began, listening vaguely to the
+glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father,
+my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to
+recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course--two heads,
+we know, are so much better than one when there's the least--the least
+difficulty. The great thing is quiet, rest, isolation, no possibility of
+a shock, else--' His voice fell away, his eloquence failed.
+
+For Alice stood gazing stirlessly on and on into this infinitely
+strange, infinitely familiar shadowy, phantasmal face. 'Oh yes,' she
+replied, 'I quite understand, of course; but if I might just peep even,
+it would--I should be so much, much happier. Do let me just see him,
+Dr Ferguson, if only his head on the pillow! I wouldn't even breathe.
+Couldn't it possibly help--even a faith-cure?' She leant forward
+impulsively, her voice trembling, anal her eyes still shining beneath
+their faint, melancholy smile.
+
+'I fear, my dear...it cannot be. He longs to see you. But with his mind,
+you know, in this state, it might--?'
+
+'But mother never told me,' broke in the girl desperately, 'there was
+anything wrong with his MIND. Oh, but that was quite unfair. You don't
+mean, you don't mean--that--?'
+
+Lawford scanned swiftly the little square beloved and memoried room that
+fate had suddenly converted for him into a cage of unspeakable pain
+and longing. 'Oh no; believe me, no! Not his brain, not that, not even
+wandering; really: but always thinking, always longing on and on for
+you, dear, only. Quite, quite master of himself, but--'
+
+'You talk,' she broke in again angrily, 'only in pretence! You are
+treating me like a child; and so does mother, and so it has been ever
+since I came home. Why, if mother can, and you can, why may not I? Why,
+if he can walk and talk in the night....'
+
+'But who--who "can walk and talk in the night?"' inquired a low stealthy
+voice out of the quietness behind her.
+
+Alice turned swiftly. Her mother was standing at a little distance, with
+all the calm and moveless concentration of a waxwork figure, looking up
+at her from the staircase.
+
+'I was--I was talking to Dr Ferguson, mother.'
+
+'But as I came up the stairs I understood you to be inquiring something
+of Dr Ferguson, "if," you were saying, "he can walk and talk in the
+night": you surely were not referring to your father, child? That could
+not possibly be, in his state. Dr Ferguson, I know, will bear me out
+in that at least. And besides, I really must insist on following out
+medical directions to the letter. Dr Ferguson I know, will fully concur.
+Do, pray, Dr Ferguson,' continued Sheila, raising her voice even now
+scarcely above a rapid murmur--'do pray assure my daughter that she must
+have patience; that however much even he himself may desire it, it is
+impossible that she should see her father yet. And now, my dear child,
+come down, I want to have a moment's talk with Dr Ferguson. I feared
+from his beckoning at the window that something was amiss.'
+
+Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility,
+at the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old
+play-room. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell
+suddenly on the pin in his scarf--the claw and the pearl she had known
+all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild demented
+thing's, over face, hair, hands, clothes, attitude, expression, and her
+heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She
+turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned
+once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague still figure
+whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell
+fainting in the doorway. Lawford stood motionless, vacantly watching
+Sheila, who knelt, chafing the cold hands. 'She has fainted?' he said;
+'oh, Sheila, tell me--only fainted?'
+
+Sheila made no answer; did not even raise her eyes.
+
+'Some day, Sheila' he began in a dull voice, and broke off, and without
+another word, without even another glance at the still face and blue,
+twitching lids, he passed her rapidly by, and in another instant Sheila
+heard the house-door shut. She got up quickly, and after a glance into
+the vacant bedroom turned the key; then she hastened upstairs for sal
+volatile and eau de cologne....
+
+It was yet clear daylight when Lawford appeared beneath the portico of
+his house. With a glance of circumspection that almost seemed to suggest
+a fear of pursuit, he descended the steps, only to be made aware in so
+doing that Ada was with a kind of furtive eagerness pointing out the
+mysterious Dr Ferguson to a steadily gazing cook. One or two well-known
+and many a well-remembered face he encountered in the thin stream of
+City men treading blackly along the pavement. It was a still, high
+evening, and something very like a forlorn compassion rose in his mind
+at sight of their grave, rather pretentious, rather dull, respectable
+faces.
+
+He found himself walking with an affectation of effrontery, and smiling
+with a faint contempt on all alike, as if to keep himself from slinking,
+and the wolf out of his eyes. He felt restless, and watchful, and
+suspicious, as if he had suddenly come down in the world. His, then, was
+a disguise as effectual as a shabby coat and a glazing eye. His
+heart sickened. Was it even worth while living on a crust of social
+respectability so thin and so exquisitely treacherous? He challenged
+no one. One or two actual acquaintances raised and lowered a faintly
+inquiring eyebrow in his direction. One even recalled in his confusion
+a smile of recognition just a moment too late. There was, it seemed,
+a peculiar aura in Lawford's presence, a shadow of a something in his
+demeanour that proved him alien.
+
+None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the
+imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should
+come to the worst, why--there is pasture in the solitary by-ways for
+the beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets,
+and soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of
+shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the
+hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with dying
+colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows filled
+the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him here. He
+looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops were
+left behind, the last milestone passed, and in a little while he was
+descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had
+stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had wandered
+down into the churchyard.
+
+At the foot of the hill he passed by the green and white Rectory, and
+there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding from
+his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying up a rambling rose-shoot
+on his trim cedared lawn. The next house barely showed its old red
+chimney-tops, above its bowers; the next was empty, with windows
+vacantly gazing, its paths peopled with great bearded weeds that stood
+mutely watching and guarding the seldom-opened gate. Then came more
+lofty grandmotherly elms, a dense hedge of every leaf that pricks, and
+then Lawford found himself standing at the small canopied gate of
+the queer old wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in part
+described.
+
+It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of verdure.
+Roses here and there sprang from the grass, and a narrow box-edged path
+led to a small door in a low green-mantled wing, with its one square
+window above the porch. And while, with vacant mind, Lawford stood
+waiting, as one stands forebodingly upon the eve of a new experience he
+heard as if at a distance the sound of falling water. He still paused on
+the country roadside, scrutinising this strange, still, wooden presence;
+but at last with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed the winding
+path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came presently a
+quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led into a
+little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old prints and obscure
+portraits in dark frames.
+
+'Ah, yes, come in, Mr Lawford,' he drawled; 'I was beginning to be
+afraid you were not coming.'
+
+Lawford laid hat and walking-stick on an oak bench, and followed his
+churchyard companion up a slightly inclined corridor and a staircase
+into a high room, covered far up the yellowish walls with old books on
+shelves and in cases, between which hung in little black frames, mezzo
+tints, etchings, and antiquated maps. A large table stood a few paces
+from the deep alcove of the window, which was surrounded by a low,
+faded, green seat, and was screened from the sunshine by wooden
+shutters. And here the tranquil surge of falling water shook incessantly
+on the air, for the three lower casements stood open to the fading
+sunset. On a smaller table were spread cups, old earthenware dishes of
+fruit, and a big bowl of damask roses.
+
+'Please sit down; I shan't be a moment; I am not sure that my sister is
+in; but if so, I will tell her we are ready for tea.' Left to himself
+in this quiet, strange old room, Lawford forgot for a while everything
+else, he was for the moment so taken up with his surroundings.
+
+What seized on his fancy and strangely affected his mind was this
+incessant changing roar of falling water. It must be the Widder, he said
+to himself, flowing close to the walls. But not until he had had the
+boldness to lean head and shoulders out of the nearest window did he
+fully realize how close indeed the Widder was. It came sweeping dark
+and deep and begreened and full with the early autumnal rains, actually
+against the lower walls of the house itself, and in the middle suddenly
+swerved in a black, smooth arch, and tumbled headlong into a great
+pool, nodding with tall slender water-weeds, and charged in its bubbled
+blackness here and there with the last crimson of the setting sun. To
+the left of the house, where the waters floated free again, stood vast,
+still trees above the clustering rushes; and in glimpses between their
+spreading boughs lay the far-stretching countryside, now dimmed with the
+first mists of approaching evening. So absorbed he became as he stood
+leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye and ear
+became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint atmosphere
+of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old house and these
+prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking dream.
+
+When at last he did draw back into the room it was perceptibly darker,
+and a thin keen shaft of recollection struck across his mind--the
+recollection of what he was, and of how he came to be there, his reasons
+for coming and of that dark indefinable presence which like a raven had
+begun to build its dwelling in his mind. He sat on, his eyes restlessly
+wandering, his face leaning on his hands; and in a while the door opened
+and Herbert returned, carrying an old crimson and green teapot and a
+dish of hot cakes.
+
+'They're all out,' he said; 'sister, Sallie, and boy; but these were in
+the oven, so we won't wait. I hope you haven't been very much bored.'
+
+Lawford dropped his hands from his face and smiled. 'I have been looking
+at the water,' he said.
+
+'My sister's favorite occupation; she sits for hours and hours, with not
+even a book for an apology, staring down into the black old roaring pot.
+It has a sort of hypnotic effect after a time. And you'd be surprised
+how quickly one gets used to the noise. To me it's even less distracting
+than sheer silence. You don't know, after all, what on earth sheer
+silence means--even at Widderstone. But one can just realize a
+water-nymph. They chatter; but, thank Heaven, it's not articulate.' He
+handed Lawford a cup with a certain niceness and self-consciousness,
+lifting his eyebrows slightly as he turned.
+
+Lawford found himself listening out of a peculiar stillness of mind
+to the voice of this suave and rather inscrutable acquaintance. 'The
+curious thing is, do you know,' he began rather nervously, 'that though
+I must have passed your gate at least twice in the last few months, I
+have never noticed it before, never even caught the sound of the water.'
+
+'No, that's the best of it; nobody ever does. We are just buried alive.
+We have lived here for years, and scarcely know a soul--not even our
+own, perhaps. Why on earth should one? Acquaintances, after all, are
+little else than a bad habit.'
+
+'But then, what about me?' said Lawford.
+
+'But that's just it,' said Herbert. 'I said ACQUAINTANCES; that's just
+exactly what I'm going to prove--what very old friends we are. You've no
+idea! It really is rather queer.' He took up his cup and sauntered over
+to the window.
+
+Lawford eyed him vacantly for a moment, and, following rather his
+own curious thoughts than seeking any light on this somewhat vague
+explanation, again broke the silence. 'It's odd, I suppose, but this
+house affects me much in the same way as Widderstone does. I'm not
+particularly fanciful--at least, I used not to be. But sitting here I
+seem, I hope it isn't a very frantic remark, it seems as though, if only
+my ears would let me, I should hear--well, voices. It's just what you
+said about the silence. I suppose it's the age of the place; it IS very
+old?'
+
+'Pretty old, I suppose; it's worm-eaten and rat-eaten and tindery enough
+in all conscience; and the damp doesn't exactly foster it. It's a queer
+old shanty. There are two or three accounts of it in some old local
+stuff I have. And of course there's a ghost.'
+
+'A ghost?' echoed Lawford, looking up.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+What's in a name?' laughed Herbert. 'But it really is a queer show-up of
+human oddity. A fellow comes in here, searching; that's all.' His back
+was turned, as he stood staring absently out, sipping his tea between
+his sentences. 'He comes in--oh, it's a positive fact, for I've seen him
+myself, just sitting back in my chair here, you know, watching him as
+one would a tramp in one's orchard.' He cast a candid glance over his
+shoulder. 'First he looks round, like a prying servant. Then he comes
+cautiously on--a kind of grizzled, fawn-coloured face, middle-size, with
+big hands; and then just like some quiet, groping, nocturnal creature,
+he begins his precious search--shelves, drawers that are not here,
+cupboards gone years ago, questing and nosing no end, and quite
+methodically too, until he reaches the window. Then he stops, looks
+back, narrows his foxy lids, listens--quite perceptibly, you know, a
+kind of gingerish blur; then he seems to open this corner bookcase here,
+as if it were a door and goes out along what I suppose might at some
+time have been an outside gallery or balcony, unless, as I rather fancy,
+the house extended once beyond these windows. Anyhow, out he goes quite
+deliberately, treading the air as lightly as Botticelli's angels,
+until, however far you lean out of the window, you can't follow him any
+further. And then--and this is the bit that takes one's fancy--when you
+have contentedly noddled down again to whatever you may have been doing
+when the wretch appeared, or are sitting in a cold sweat, with bolting
+eyes awaiting developments, just according to your school of thought,
+or of nerves, the creature comes back--comes back; and with what looks
+uncommonly like a lighted candle in his hand. That really is a thrill, I
+assure you.'
+
+'But you've seen this--you've really seen this yourself?'
+
+'Oh yes, twice,' replied Herbert cheerfully. 'And my sister, quite
+by haphazard, once saw him from the garden. She was shelling peas one
+evening for Sallie, and she distinctly saw him shamble out of the window
+here, and go shuffling along, mid-air, across the roaring washpot down
+below, turn sharp round the high corner of the house, sheer against
+the stars, in a kind of frightened hurry. And then, after five minutes'
+concentrated watching over the shucks, she saw him come shuffling back
+again--the same distraction, the same nebulous snuff colour, and a
+candle trailing its smoke behind him as he whisked in home.'
+
+'And then?'
+
+'Ah, then,' said Herbert, lagging along the bookshelves, and scanning
+the book-backs with eyes partially closed: he turned with lifted teapot,
+and refilled his visitor's cup; 'then, wherever you are--I mean,' he
+added, cutting up a little cake into six neat slices, 'wherever the
+chance inmate of the room happens to be, he comes straight for you, at
+a quite alarming velocity, and fades, vanishes, melts, or, as it were,
+silts inside.'
+
+Lawford listened in a curious hush that had suddenly fallen over his
+mind. '"Fades inside? silts?"--I'm awfully stupid, but what on earth
+do you mean?' The room had slowly emptied itself of daylight; its own
+darkness, it seemed, had met that of the narrowing night, and Herbert
+deliberately lit a cigarette before replying. His clear pale face, with
+its smooth outline and thin mouth and rather long dark eyes, turned with
+a kind of serene good-humour towards his questioner.
+
+'Why,' he said, 'I mean frankly just that. Besides, it's Grisel's own
+phrase; and an old nurse we used to have said much the same. He comes,
+or IT comes towards you, first just walking, then with a kind of
+gradually accelerated slide or glide, and sweeps straight into you,' he
+tapped his chest, 'me, whoever it may be is here. In a kind of panic, I
+suppose, to hide, or perhaps simply to get back again.'
+
+'Get back where?'
+
+'Be resumed, as it were, via you. You see, I suppose he is compelled to
+regain his circle, or Purgatory, or Styx, whatever you like to call it,
+via consciousness. No one present, then no revenant or spook, or
+astral body, or hallucination: what's in a name? And of course even an
+hallucination is mind-stuff, and on its own, as it were. What I mean is
+that the poor devil must have some kind of human personality to get back
+through in order to make his exit from our sphere of consciousness
+into his. And naturally, of course to make his entrance too. If like
+a tenuous smoke he can get in, the probability is that he gets out
+in precisely the same fashion. For really, if you weren't consciously
+expecting the customary impact (you actually jerk forward in the act of
+resistance unresisted), you would not notice his going. I am afraid I
+must be horribly boring you with all these tangled theories. All I mean
+is, that if you were really absorbed in what you happened to be doing at
+the time, the thing might come and go, with your mind for entrance and
+exit, as it were, without your being conscious of it at all.' There was
+a longish pause, in which Herbert slowly inhaled and softly breathed out
+his smoke.
+
+'And what--what is the poor wretch searching FOR? And what--why, what
+becomes of him when he does go?'
+
+'Ah, there you have me! One merely surmises just as one's temperament or
+convictions lean. Grisel says it's some poor derelict soul in search of
+peace--that the poor beggar wants finally to die, in fact, and can't.
+Sallie smells crime. After all, what is every man?' he talked on; 'a
+horde of ghosts--like a Chinese nest of boxes--oaks that were acorns
+that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front--in our ancestors,
+back and back, until--'
+
+'"Until?"' Lawford managed to remark.
+
+'Ah, that settles me again. Don't they call it an amoeba? But really I
+am abjectly ignorant of all that kind of stuff. We are ALL we are, and
+all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything
+outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is
+after all just what the old boy said--it's only the impossible that's
+credible; whatever credible may mean....'
+
+It seemed to Lawford as if the last remark had wafted him bodily into
+the presence of his kind, blinking, intensely anxious old friend, Mr
+Bethany. And what leagues asunder the two men were who had happened on
+much the same words to express their convictions.
+
+He drew his hand gropingly over his face, half rose, and again seated
+himself. 'Whatever it may be,' he said, 'the whole thing reminds me, you
+know--it is in a way so curiously like my own--my own case.'
+
+Herbert sat on, a little drawn up in his chair, quietly smoking. The
+crash of the falling water, after seeming to increase in volume with
+the fading of evening, had again died down in the darkness to a low
+multitudinous tumult as of countless inarticulate, echoing voices.
+
+'"Bizarre," you said; God knows I am.' But Herbert still remained
+obdurately silent. 'You remember, perhaps,' Lawford faintly began again,
+'our talk the other night?'
+
+'Oh, rather,' replied the cordial voice out of the dusk.
+
+'I suppose you thought I was insane?'
+
+'Insane!' There was a genuinely amused astonishment in the echo. 'You
+were lucidity itself. Besides--well, honestly, if I may venture, I don't
+put very much truck in what one calls one's sanity: except, of course,
+as a bond of respectability and a means of livelihood.'
+
+'But did you realise in the least from what I said how I really
+stand? That I went down into that old shadowy hollow one man, and came
+back--well--this?'
+
+'I gathered vaguely something like that. I thought at first it was
+merely an affectation--that what you said was an affectation, I
+mean--until--well, to be frank, it was the "this" that so immensely
+interested me. Especially,' he added almost with a touch of gaiety,
+'especially the last glimpse. But if it's really not a forbidden
+question, what precisely was the other? What precise manner of man, I
+mean, came down into Widderstone?'
+
+'It is my face that is changed, Mr Herbert. If you'll try to understand
+me--my FACE. What you see now is not what I really am, not what I was.
+Oh, it is all quite different. I know perfectly well how absurd it must
+sound. And you won't press me further. But that's the truth: that's what
+they have done for me.'
+
+It seemed to Lawford as if a remote tiny shout of laughter had been
+suddenly caught back in the silence that had followed this confession.
+He peered in vain in the direction of his companion. Even his cigarette
+revealed no sign of him. 'I know, I know,' he went gropingly on; 'I felt
+it would sound to you like nothing but frantic incredible nonsense. YOU
+can't see it. YOU can't feel it. YOU can't hear these hooting voices.
+It's no use at all blinking the fact; I am simply on the verge, if not
+over it, of insanity.'
+
+'As to that, Mr Lawford,' came the still voice out of the darkness;
+'the very fact of your being able to say so seems to me all but proof
+positive that you're not. Insanity is on another plane, isn't it?
+in which one can't compare one's states. As for what you say being
+credible, take our precious noodle of a spook here! Ninety-nine
+hundredths of this amiable world of ours would have guffawed the
+poor creature into imperceptibility ages ago. To such poor credulous
+creatures as my sister and I he is no more and no less a fact, a
+personality, an amusing reality than--well, this teacup. Here we are,
+amazing mysteries both of us in any case; and all round us are scores
+of books, dealing just with life, pure, candid, and unexpurgated; and
+there's not a single one among them but reads like a taradiddle. Yet
+grope between the lines of any autobiography, it's pretty clear what
+one has got--a feeble, timid, creeping attempt to describe the
+indescribable. As for what you say your case is, the bizarre--that kind
+very seldom gets into print at all. In all our make-believe, all our
+pretence, how, honestly, could it? But there, this is immaterial. The
+real question is, may I, can I help? What I gather is this: You just
+trundled down into Widderstone all among the dead men, and--but one
+moment, I'll light up.'
+
+A light flickered up in the dark. Shading it in his hand from the night
+air straying through the open window, Herbert lit the two candles
+that stood upon the little chimneypiece behind Lawford's head. Then
+sauntering over to the window again, almost as if with an affectation
+of nonchalance, he drew one of the shutters, and sat down. 'Nothing much
+struck me,' he went on, leaning back on his hands, 'I mean on Sunday
+evening, until you said good-bye. It was then that I caught in the moon
+a distinct glimpse of your face.'
+
+'This,' said Lawford, with a sudden horrible sinking of the heart.
+
+Herbert nodded. 'The fact is, I have a print of it,' he said.
+
+'A print of it?'
+
+'A miserable little dingy engraving.'
+
+'Of this?' Herbert nodded, with eyes fixed. 'Where?'
+
+'That's the nuisance. I searched high and low for it the instant I got
+home. For the moment it has been mislaid; but it must be somewhere in
+the house and it will turn up all in good time. It's the frontispiece
+of one of a queer old hotchpotch of pamphlets, sewn up together by
+some amateur enthusiast in a marbled paper cover--confessions, travels,
+trials and so on. All eighteenth century, and all in French.'
+
+'And mine?' said Lawford, gazing stonily across the candlelight.
+
+Herbert, from a head slightly stooping, gazed back in an almost birdlike
+fashion across the room at his visitor.
+
+'Sabathier's,' he said.
+
+'Sabathier's!'
+
+'A really curious resemblance. Of course, I am speaking only from
+memory; and perhaps it's not quite so vivid in this light; but still
+astonishingly clear.'
+
+Lawford sat drawn up, staring at his companion's face in an intense and
+helpless silence. His mouth opened but no words came.
+
+'Of course,' began Herbert again, 'I don't say there's anything in
+it--except the--the mere coincidence,' he paused and glanced out of the
+open casement beside him. 'But there's just one obvious question. Do you
+happen to know of any strain of French blood in your family?'
+
+Lawford shut his eyes, even memory seemed to be forsaking him at last.
+'No,' he said, after a long pause, 'there's a little Dutch, I think, on
+my mother's side, but no French.'
+
+'No Sabathier, then?' said Herbert, smiling. 'And then there's another
+question--this change; is it really as complete as you suppose? Has
+it--please just warn me off if I am in the least intruding--has it been
+noticed?'
+
+Lawford hesitated. 'Oh, yes,' he said slowly, 'it has been noticed--my
+wife, a few friends.'
+
+'Do you mind this infernal clatter?' said Herbert, laying his fingers on
+the open casement.
+
+'No, no. And you think?'
+
+'My dear fellow, I don't think anything. It's all the craziest
+conjecture. Stranger things even than this have happened. There are
+dozens here--in print. What are we human beings after all? Clay in the
+hands of the potter. Our bodies are merely an inheritance, packed tight
+and corded up. We have practically no control over their main functions.
+We can't even replace a little finger-nail. And look at the faces of
+us--what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But
+we know our bodies change--age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It
+proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not
+in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort
+from outside one's body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness
+to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of
+Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be nothing better
+than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, consider man's abysmal
+impudence.' He smoked on in silence for a moment. 'You say you fell
+asleep down there?'
+
+Lawford nodded. Herbert tapped his cigarette on the sill. 'Just
+following up our ludicrous conjecture, you know,' he remarked musingly,
+'it wasn't such a bad opportunity for the poor chap.'
+
+'But surely,' said Lawford, speaking as it were out of a dream of
+candle-light and reverberating sound and clearest darkness, towards
+this strange deliberate phantom with the unruffled clear-cut
+features--'surely then, in that case, he is here now? And yet, on my
+word of honour, though every friend I ever had in the world should
+deny it, I am the same. Memory stretches back clear and sound to my
+childhood. I can see myself with extraordinary lucidity, how I think, my
+motives and all that; and in spite of these voices that I seem to hear,
+and this peculiar kind of longing to break away, as it were, just
+to press on--it is I,--I myself, that am speaking to you now out of
+this--this mask.'
+
+Herbert glanced reflectively at his companion. 'You mustn't let me tire
+you,' he said; 'but even on our theory it would not necessarily
+follow that you yourself would be much affected. It's true this fellow
+Sabathier really was something of a personality. He had a rather
+unusual itch for life, for trying on and on to squeeze something out
+of experience that isn't there; and he seemed never to weary of a
+magnificent attempt to find in his fellow-creatures, especially in the
+women he met, what even--if they have it--they cannot give. The little
+book I wanted to show you is partly autobiographical and really does
+manage to set the fellow on his feet. Even there he does absolutely take
+one's imagination. I shall never forget the thrill of picking him up in
+the Charing Cross Road. You see, I had known the queer old tombstone for
+years. He's enormously vivid--quite beyond my feebleness to describe,
+with a kind of French verve and rapture. Unluckily we can't get nearer
+than two years to his death. I shouldn't mind guessing some last
+devastating dream swept over him, held him the breath of an instant too
+long beneath the wave, and he caved in. We know he killed himself; and
+perhaps lived to regret it ever after.
+
+'After all, what is this precious dying we talk so much about?' Herbert
+continued after a while, his eyes restlessly wandering from shelf to
+shelf. 'You remember our talk in the churchyard? We all know that the
+body fades quick enough when its occupant is gone. Supposing even in the
+sleep of the living it lies very feebly guarded. And supposing in that
+state some infernally potent thing outside it, wandering disembodied,
+just happens on it--like some hungry sexton beetle on the carcase of
+a mouse. Supposing--I know it's the most outrageous theorising--but
+supposing all these years of sun and dark, Sabathier's emanation,
+or whatever you like to call it, horribly restless, by some fatality
+longing on and on just for life, or even for the face, the voice, of
+some "impossible she" whom he couldn't get in this muddled world, simply
+loathing all else; supposing he has been lingering in ambush down beside
+those poor old dusty bones that had poured out for him such marrowy
+hospitality--oh, I know it; the dead do. And then, by a chance, one
+quiet autumn evening, a veritable godsend of a little Miss Muffet comes
+wandering down under the shade of his immortal cypresses, half asleep,
+fagged out, depressed in mind and body, perhaps: imagine yourself in his
+place, and he in yours!' Herbert stood up in his eagerness, his sleek
+hair shining. 'The one clinching chance of a century! Wouldn't you
+have made a fight for it? Wouldn't you have risked the raid? I can just
+conceive it--the amazing struggle in that darkness within a darkness;
+like some dazed alien bee bursting through the sentinels of a hive;
+one mad impetuous clutch at victory; then the appalling stirring on the
+other side; the groping back to a house dismantled, rearranged, not,
+mind you, disorganised or disintegrated....' He broke off with a smile,
+as if of apology for his long, fantastic harangue.
+
+Lawford sat listening, his eyes fixed on Herbert's colourless face.
+There was not a sound else, it seemed, than that slightly drawling
+scrupulous voice poking its way amid a maze of enticing, baffling
+thoughts. Herbert turned away with a shrug. 'It's tempting stuff,' he
+said, choosing another cigarette. 'But anyhow, the poor beggar failed.'
+
+'Failed?'
+
+'Why, surely; if he had succeeded I should not now be talking to a mere
+imperfect simulacrum, to the outward illusion of a passing likeness
+to the man, but to Sabathier himself!' His eyes moved slowly round and
+dwelt for a moment with a dark, quiet scrutiny on his visitor.
+
+'You say a passing likeness; do you MEAN that?'
+
+Herbert smiled indulgently. 'If one CAN mean what is purely a
+speculation. I am only trying to look at the thing dispassionately, you
+see. We are so much the slaves of mere repetition. Here is life--yours
+and mine--a kind of plenum in vacuo. It is only when we begin to play
+the eavesdropper; when something goes askew; when one of the sentries on
+the frontier of the unexpected shouts a hoarse "Qui vive?"--it is only
+then we begin to question; to prick our aldermen and pinch the calves
+of our kings. Why, who is there can answer to anybody's but his own
+satisfaction just that one fundamental question--Are we the prisoners,
+the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures, or the creators of our
+bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust? As for identity or likeness
+or personality, we have only our neighbours' nod for them, and just a
+fading memory. No, the old fairy tales knew better; and witchcraft's
+witchcraft to the end of the chapter. Honestly, and just of course on
+that one theory, Lawford, I can't help thinking that Sabathier's raid
+only just so far succeeded as to leave his impression in the wax.
+It doesn't, of course, follow that it will necessarily end there. It
+might--it may be even now just gradually fading away. It may, you know,
+need driving out--with whips and scorpions. It might, perhaps, work in.'
+
+Lawford sat cold and still. 'It's no good, no good,' he said, 'I don't
+understand; I can't follow you. I was always stupid, always bigoted and
+cocksure. These things have never seemed anything but old women's tales
+to me. And now I must pay for it. And this Nicholas Sabathier; you say
+he was a blackguard?'
+
+'Well,' said Herbert with a faint smile, 'that depends on your
+definition of the word. He wasn't a flunkey, a fool, or a prig, if
+that's what you mean. He wasn't perhaps on Mrs Grundy's visiting
+list. He wasn't exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of
+temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To
+the stodgy, suety world of course it's little else than sheer moonshine,
+midsummer madness. Naturally, in its own charming and stodgy way
+the world kept flickering cold water in his direction. Naturally it
+hissed.... I shall find the book. You shall have the book; oh yes.'
+
+'There's only one more question,' said Lawford in a dull, slow voice,
+stooping and covering his face with his hands. 'I know it's impossible
+for you to realise--but to me time seems like that water there, to be
+heaping up about me. I wait, just as one waits when the conductor of an
+orchestra lifts his hand and in a moment the whole surge of brass and
+wood, cymbal and drum will crash out--and sweep me under. I can't tell
+you Herbert, how it all is, with just these groping stirrings of that
+mole in my mind's dark. You say it may be this face, working in! God
+knows. I find it easy to speak to you--this cold, clear sense, you know.
+The others feel too much, or are afraid, or--Let me think--yes, I
+was going to ask you a question. But no one can answer it.' He peered
+darkly, with white face suddenly revealed between his hands. 'What
+remains now? Where do I come in? What is there left for ME to do?'
+
+And at that moment there sounded, even above the monotonous roar of
+the water beyond the window--there fell the sound of a light footfall
+approaching along the corridor.
+
+'Listen,' said Herbert; 'here's my sister coming; we'll ask her.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+The door opened. Lawford rose, and into the further rays of the
+candlelight entered a rather slim figure in a light summer gown.
+
+'Just home?' said Herbert.
+
+'We've been for a walk--'
+
+'My sister always forgets everything,' said Herbert, turning to Lawford;
+'even tea-time. This is Mr Lawford, Grisel. We've been arguing no end.
+And we want you to give a decision. It's just this: Supposing if by some
+impossible trick you had come in now, not the charming familiar sister
+you are, but shorter, fatter, fair and round-faced, quite different,
+physically, you know--what would you do?'
+
+'What nonsense you talk, Herbert!'
+
+'Yes, but supposing: a complete transmogrification--by some unimaginable
+ingression or enchantment, by nibbling a bunch of roses, or whatever you
+like to call it?'
+
+'Only physically?'
+
+'Well, yes, actually; but potentially, why--that's another matter.'
+
+The dark eyes passed slowly from her brother's face and rested gravely
+on their visitor's.
+
+'Is he making fun of me?'
+
+Lawford almost imperceptibly shook his head.
+
+'But what a question! And I've had no tea.' She drew her gloves slowly
+through her hand. 'The thing, of course, isn't possible, I know. But
+shouldn't I go mad, don't you think?'
+
+Lawford gazed quietly back into the clear, grave, deliberate eyes.
+'Suppose, suppose, just for the sake of argument--NOT,' he suggested.
+
+She turned her head and reflected, glancing from one to the other of the
+pure, steady candle-flames.
+
+'And what was your answer?' she said, looking over her shoulder at her
+brother.
+
+'My dear child, you know what my answers are like!'
+
+'And yours?'
+
+Lawford took a deep breath, gazing mutely, forlornly, into the lovely
+untroubled peace of her eyes, and without the least warning tears swept
+up into his own. With an immense effort he turned, and choking back
+every sound, beating hack every thought, groped his way towards the
+square black darkness of the open door.
+
+'I must think, I must think,' he managed to whisper, lifting his hand
+and steadying himself. He caught over his shoulder the glimpse of a
+curiously distorted vision, a lifted candle, and a still face gazing
+after him with infinitely grieved eyes, then found himself groping and
+stumbling down the steep, uneven staircase into the darkness of the
+queer old wooden and hushed and lonely house. The night air cold on his
+face calmed his mind. He turned and held out his hand.
+
+'You'll come again?' Herbert was saying, with a hint of anxiety, even of
+apology in his voice.
+
+Lawford nodded, with eyes fixed blankly on the candle, and turning once
+more, made his way slowly down the narrow green-bordered path upon which
+the stars rained a scattered light so feeble it seemed but as a haze
+that blurred the darkness. He pushed open the little white wicket
+and turned his face towards the soundless, leaf-crowned hill. He had
+advanced hardly a score of steps in the thick dust when almost as if
+its very silence had struck upon his ear he remembered the black broken
+grave with its sightless heads that lay beyond the leaves. And fear,
+vast and menacing, fear such as only children know, broke like a sea of
+darkness on his heart. He stopped dead--cold, helpless, trembling.
+And, in the silence he heard a faint cry behind him and light footsteps
+pursuing him. He turned again. In the thick close gloom beneath the
+enormous elm-boughs the grey eyes shone clearly visible in the face
+upturned to him. 'My brother,' she began breathlessly--'the little
+French book. It was I who--who mislaid it.'
+
+The set, stricken face listened unmoved.
+
+'You are ill. Come back! I am afraid you are very ill.'
+
+'It's not that, not that,' Lawford muttered; 'don't leave me; I am
+alone. Don't question me,' he said strangely, looking down into her
+face, clutching her hand; 'only understand that I can't, I can't go on.'
+He swept a lean arm towards the unseen churchyard. 'I am afraid.'
+
+The cold hand clasped his closer. 'Hush, don't speak! Come back; come
+back. I am with you, a friend, you see; come back.'
+
+Lawford clutched her hand as a blind man in sudden peril might clutch
+the hand of a child. He saw nothing clearly; spoke almost without
+understanding his words.
+
+'Oh, but it's MUST,' he said; 'I MUST go on. You see--why, everything
+depends on struggling through: the future! But if you only knew--There!'
+Again his arm swept out, and the lean terrified face turned shuddering
+from the dark.
+
+'I do know; believe me, believe me! I can guess. See, I am coming with
+you; we will go together. As if, as if I did not know what it is to be
+afraid. Oh, believe me; no one is near; we go on; and see! it gradually,
+gradually lightens. How thankful I am I came.'
+
+She had turned and they were steadily ascending as if pushing their way,
+battling on through some obstacle of the mind rather than of the senses
+beneath the star-powdered callous vault of night. And it seemed to
+Lawford as if, as they pressed on together, some obscure detestable
+presence as slowly, as doggedly had drawn worsted aside. He could
+see again the peaceful outspread branches of the trees, the lych-gate
+standing in clear-cut silhouette against the liquid dusk of the sky.
+A strange calm stole over his mind. The very meaning and memory of his
+fear faded out and vanished, as the passed-away clouds of a storm that
+leave a purer, serener sky.
+
+They stopped and stood together on the brow of the little hill, and
+Lawford, still trembling from head to foot, looked back across the
+hushed and lightless countryside. 'It's all gone now,' he said
+wearily, 'and now there's nothing left. You see, I cannot even ask your
+forgiveness--and a stranger!'
+
+'Please don't say that--unless--unless--a "pilgrim" too. I think,
+surely, you must own we did have the best of it that time. Yes--and I
+don't care WHO may be listening--but we DID win through.'
+
+'What can I say? How shall I explain? How shall I make you understand?'
+
+The clear grey eyes showed not the faintest perturbation. 'But I do; I
+do indeed, in part; I do understand, ever so faintly.'
+
+'And now I will come back with you.'
+
+They paused in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky,
+arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness of their
+triumph.
+
+She turned unquestioningly. And laughing softly almost as children
+do, the stalking shadows of a twilight wood behind them--they trod in
+silence back to the house. They said good-bye at the gate, and Lawford
+started once more for home. He walked slowly, conscious of an almost
+intolerable weariness, as if his strength had suddenly been wrested away
+from him. And at some distance beyond the top of the hill he sat down on
+the bank beside a nettled ditch, and with his book pressed down upon
+the wayside grass struck a match, and holding it low in the scented,
+windless air turned slowly the cockled leaf.
+
+Few of them were alike except for the dinginess of the print and the
+sinister smudge of the portraits. All were sewn roughly together into
+a mould-stained, marbled cover. He lit a second match, and as he did so
+glanced as if inquiringly over his shoulder. And a score or so of pages
+before the end he came at last upon the name he was seeking, and turned
+the page.
+
+It was a likeness even more striking in its crudeness of ink and line
+and paper than the most finished of portraits could have been. It
+repelled, and yet it fascinated him. He had not for a moment doubted
+Herbert's calm conviction. And yet as he stooped in the grass, closely
+scrutinising the blurred obscure features, he felt the faintest surprise
+not so much at the significant resemblance but at his own composure, his
+own steady, unflinching confrontation with this sinister and intangible
+adversary. The match burned down to his fingers. It hissed faintly in
+the grass.
+
+He stuffed the book into his pocket, and stared into the pale dial of
+his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. Midnight, then, would
+just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer exhaustion. Then,
+hesitating, he turned his head and looked back towards the hollow. But
+a vague foreboding held him back. A sour and vacuous incredulity swept
+over him. What was the use of all this struggling and vexation. What
+gain in living on? Once dead his sluggish spirit at least would find
+its rest. Dust to dust it would indeed be for him. What else, in sober
+earnest, had he been all his daily stolid life but half dead, scarce
+conscious, without a living thought, or desire, in head or heart?
+
+And while he was still gloomily debating within himself he had turned
+towards home, and soon was walking in a kind of reverie, even his
+extreme tiredness in part forgotten, and only a far-away dogged
+recollection in his mind that in spite of shame, in spite of all his
+miserable weakness, the words had been uttered once for all, and in all
+sincerity, 'We DID win through.'
+
+Yet a desolate and odd air of strangeness seemed to drape his unlighted
+house as he stood looking up in a kind of furtive communion with its
+windows. It affected him with that discomforting air of extreme and
+meaningless novelty that things very familiar sometimes take upon
+themselves. In this leaden tiredness no impression could be trustworthy.
+His lids shut of themselves as he softly mounted the steps. It seemed a
+needlessly wide door that soundlessly admitted him. But however hard he
+pressed the key his bedroom door remained stubbornly shut until he
+found that it was already unlocked and he had only to turn the handle.
+A night-light burned in a little basin on the washstand. The room was
+hung, as it were, with the stillness of night. And half lying on the
+bed in her dressing-gown, her head leaning on the rail at the foot, was
+Alice, just as sleep had overtaken her.
+
+Lawford returned to the door and listened. It seemed he heard a voice
+talking downstairs, and yet not talking, for it ran on and on in an
+incessant slightly argumentative monotony that had neither break nor
+interruption. He closed the door, and stooping laid his hand softly on
+Alice's narrow, still childish hand that lay half-folded on her knee.
+Her eyes opened instantly and gazed widely into his face. A slow vacant
+smile of sleep came and went and her fingers tightened gently over his
+as again her lids drooped down over the drowsy blue eyes.
+
+'At last, at last, dear,' she said; 'I have been waiting such a time.
+But we mustn't talk much. Mother is waiting up, reading.'
+
+Faintly through the close-shut door came the sound of that distant
+expressionless voice monotonously rising and falling.
+
+'Why didn't you tell me, dear?' Alice still sleepily whispered. 'Would
+I have asked a single question? How could I? Oh, if you had only trusted
+me!'
+
+'But the change--the change, Alice! You must have seen that. You spoke
+to me, you did think I was only a stranger; and even when you knew, it
+was only fear on your face, dearest, and aversion; and you turned to
+your mother first. Don't think, Alice, that I am...God only knows--I'm
+not complaining. But truth is best whatever it is. I do feel that. You
+mustn't be afraid of hurting me, my dear.'
+
+Her very hands seemed to quicken in his as now, with sleep quite gone,
+the fret of memory returned, and she must reassure both herself and him.
+'But you see, dear, mother had told me that you--besides, I did know
+you at once, really; quite inside, you know, deep down. I know I was
+perplexed; I didn't understand; but that was all. Why, even when you
+came up in the dark, and we talked--if you only knew how miserable I had
+been--though I knew even then there was something different, still I
+was not a bit afraid. Was I? And shouldn't I have been afraid, horribly
+afraid, if YOU had not been YOU?' She repressed a little shudder, and
+clasped his hand more closely. 'Don't let us say anything more about it,
+she implored him; 'we are just together again, you and I; that is all
+that matters.' But her words were like brave soldiers who have fought
+their way through an ambuscade but have left all confidence behind them.
+
+Lawford listened; and that was enough just now--that she still, in spite
+of doubt, believed in him, and thought and cared for him. He was too
+tired to have refused the least kindness. He made no answer, but leant
+his head on the cool, slender fingers in gratitude and peace. And, just
+as he was, he almost instantly fell asleep. He woke in the darkness to
+find himself alone. He groped his way heavily to the door and turned
+the handle. But now it was really locked. Energy failed him. 'I
+suppose--Sheila...' he muttered.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+Sheila, calm, alert, reserved, was sitting at the open window when he
+awoke again. His breakfast tray stood on a little table beside the bed.
+He raised himself on his elbow and looked at his wife. The morning
+light shone full on her features as she turned quickly at sound of his
+stirring.
+
+'You have slept late,' she said, in a low, mellow voice.
+
+'Have I, Sheila? I suppose I was tired out. It is very kind of you to
+have got everything ready like this.'
+
+'I am afraid, Arthur, I was thinking rather of the maids. I like to
+inconvenience them as little as possible; in their usual routine, I
+mean. How are you feeling, do you think, this morning?'
+
+'I--I haven't seen the glass, Sheila.'
+
+She paused to place a little pencil tick at the foot of the page of her
+butcher's book. 'And did you--did you try?'
+
+'Did I try? Try what?'
+
+'I understood,' she said, turning slowly in her chair, 'you gave me to
+understand that you went out with the specific intention of trying to
+regain.... But there, forgive me, Arthur; I think I must be getting a
+little bit hardened to the position, so far at least as any hope is in
+my mind of rather amateurish experiments being of much help. I may seem
+unsympathetic in saying frankly what I feel. But amateurish or no, you
+are curiously erratic. Why, if you really were the Dr Ferguson whose
+part you play so admirably you could scarcely spend a more active life.'
+
+'All you mean, Sheila, I suppose, is that I have failed.'
+
+'"Failed" did not enter my mind. I thought, looking at you just now
+in your clothes on the bed, one might for the moment be deceived into
+thinking there was a slight--quite the slightest improvement. There
+was not quite that'--she hovered for the right word--'that tenseness.
+Whether or not, whether you desired any such change or didn't, I should
+have supposed in any case it would have been better to act as far
+as possible like any ordinary person. You were certainly in an
+extraordinarily sound sleep. I was almost alarmed; until I remembered
+that it was a little after two when I looked up from reading aloud to
+keep myself awake and discovered that you had only just come home. I had
+no fire. You know how easily late hours bring on my headaches; a little
+thought might possibly have suggested that I should be anxious to hear.
+But no; it seems I cannot profit by experience, Arthur. And even now you
+have not answered surely a very natural question. You do not recollect,
+perhaps, exactly what did happen last night? Did you go in the direction
+even of Widderstone?'
+
+'Yes, Sheila, I went to Widderstone.'
+
+'It was of course absurd to suppose that sitting on a seat beside
+the broken-down grave of a suicide would have the slightest effect on
+one's--one's physical condition; though possibly it might affect one's
+brain. It would mine; I am at least certain of that. It was your own
+prescription, however; and it merely occurred to me to inquire whether
+the actual experience has not brought you round to my own opinion.'
+
+'Yes, I think it has,' Lawford answered calmly. 'But I don't quite see
+what suicide has got to do with it; unless--You know Widderstone, then,
+Sheila?'
+
+'I drove there last Saturday afternoon.'
+
+'For prayer or praise?' Although Lawford had not actually raised his
+head, he became conscious rather of the wonderfully adjusted mass
+of hair than of the pained dignity in the face that was now closely
+regarding him.
+
+'I went,' came the rigidly controlled retort, 'simply to test an
+inconceivable story.'
+
+'And returned?'
+
+'Convinced, Arthur, of its inconceivability. But if you would kindly
+inform me what precise formula you followed at Widderstone last night, I
+would tell you why I think the explanation, or rather your first account
+of the matter, is not an explanation of the facts.'
+
+Lawford shot a rather doglike glance over his toast. 'Danton?' he said.
+
+'Candidly, Arthur, Mr Danton doubts the whole story. Your very
+conduct--well, it would serve no useful purpose to go into that.
+Candidly, on the other hand, Mr. Danton did make some extremely helpful
+suggestions--basing them, of course, on the TRUTH of your account. He
+has seen a good deal of life; and certainly very mysterious things do
+occur to quite innocent and well-meaning people without the faintest
+shadow of warning, and as Mr. Bethany himself said, evil birds do come
+home to roost, and often out of a clear sky, as it were. But there,
+every fresh solution that occurs to me only makes the thing more
+preposterous, more, I was going to say, disreputable--I mean, of course,
+to the outside world. And we have our duties to perform to them too, I
+suppose. Why, what can we say? What plausible account of ourselves have
+we? We shall never be able to look anybody in the face again. I can
+only--I am compelled to believe that God has been pleased to make this
+precise visitation upon us--an eye for an eye, I suppose, SOMEWHERE. And
+to that conviction I shall hold until actual circumstances convince me
+that it's false. What, however, and this is all that I have to say now,
+what I cannot understand are your amazing indiscretions.'
+
+'Do you understand your own, Sheila?'
+
+'My indiscretions, Arthur?'
+
+'Well,' said Lawford, 'wasn't it indiscreet, don't you think, to risk
+divine retribution by marrying me? Shouldn't you have inquired? Wasn't
+it indiscreet to allow me to remain here in--in my "visitation?" Wasn't
+it indiscreet to risk the moral stigma this unhappy face of mine must
+cast on its surroundings? I am not sure whether such a change as this
+constitutes cruelty.... Oh, what is the use of fretting and babbling on
+like this?'
+
+'Am I to understand, then, that you refuse positively to discuss this
+horrible business any more? You are doing your best to drive me away,
+Arthur; you must see that. Will you be very disappointed if I refuse to
+go?'
+
+Lawford rose from the bed. 'Listen just this once,' he said, seating
+himself on the corner of the dressing-table. 'Imagine all this--whatever
+you like to call it--obliterated. Take this,' he nodded towards the
+glass, 'entirely for itself, on its own merits, as it were. Let the dead
+past bury its dead. Which, now, precisely, REALLY do you prefer--him,'
+he jerked his head in the direction of the dispassionate youthful
+picture on the wall, 'him or me?'
+
+He was so close to her now that he could see the faintest tremor on the
+face that had suddenly become grey and still in the thin clear sunshine.
+
+'I own it, I own it,' he went on, slowly; 'the change is more than
+skin-deep now. One can't go through what I have gone through these last
+few terrifying days, Sheila, unchanged. They have played the devil with
+my body; now begins the tampering with my mind. Not even Danton knows
+how it will end. But shall I tell you why you won't, why you can't
+answer me that one question--him or me? Shall I tell you?'
+
+Sheila slowly raised her eyes.
+
+'It is because, my dear, you don't care the ghost of a straw for either.
+That one--he was worn out long ago, and we never knew it. I know it now.
+Time and the sheer going-on of day by day, without either of us guessing
+at it, wore that down till it had no more meaning for you or me than any
+other faded remembrance in this interminable footling with truth that we
+call life. And this one--the whole abject meaning of it lies simply in
+the fact that it has pierced down and shown us up. I had no courage.
+I couldn't see how feeble a hold I had on life--just one's friends'
+opinions. It was all at second hand. What I want to know now is--leave
+me out; don't think, or care, or regard my living-on one shadow of an
+iota--all I ask is, What am I to do for you?' He turned away and stood
+staring down at the cinders in the fireless grate.
+
+'I answer that mad wicked outburst with one plain question,' said a low,
+trembling voice; 'did you or did you not go to Widderstone yesterday?'
+
+'I did go.'
+
+'You sat there, just as you said you sat before; and with all your heart
+and soul strove to regain--yourself?'
+
+Lawford lifted a still, colourless face into the sunlight. 'No,' he
+said; 'I spent the evening at the house of a friend.'
+
+'Then I say it is infamous. You cast all this on me. You have brought
+me into contempt and poisoned Alice's whole life. You dream and idle
+on just as you used to do, without the least care or thought or
+consideration for others; and go out in this condition--go out
+absolutely unashamed--to spend the evening at a friend's. Peculiar
+friends they must be. Why, really, Arthur, you must be mad!'
+
+Lawford paused. Like a flock of sheep streaming helter-skelter before
+the onset of a wolf were the thoughts that a moment before had seemed so
+orderly and sober.
+
+'Not mad--possessed,' he said softly.
+
+'And I add this,' cried Sheila, as it were out of a tragic mask,
+'somewhere in the past, whether of your own life, or of the lives of
+those who brought you into the world--the world which you pretend so
+conveniently to despise--somewhere is hidden some miserable secret. God
+visits all sins. On you has fallen at last the payment. THAT I believe.
+You can't run away, any more than a child can run away from the cupboard
+it has been locked into for a punishment. Who's going to hear you now?
+You have deliberately refused to make a friend of me. Fight it out
+alone, then!'
+
+Lawford heard the door close, and the dying away of the sound that had
+been the unceasing accompaniment of all these later years--the rustling
+of his wife's skirts, her crisp, authoritative footstep. And he turned
+towards the flooding sunlight that streamed in on the upturned surface
+of the looking-glass. No clear decisive thought came into his mind, only
+a vague recognition that so far as Sheila was concerned this was the
+end. No regret, no remorse visited him. He was just alone again, that
+was all--alone, as in reality he had always been alone, without having
+the sense or power to see or to acknowledge it. All he had said had been
+the mere flotsam of the moment, and now it stood stark and irrevocable
+between himself and the past.
+
+He sat down dazed and stupid. Again and again a struggling recollection
+tried to obtrude itself; again and again he beat it back. And rather
+for something to distract his attention than for any real interest
+or enlightenment he might find in its pages, he took out the grimy
+dog's-eared book that Herbert had given him, and turned slowly over the
+leaves till he came to Sabathier once more. Snatches of remembrance of
+their long talk returned to him, but just as that dark, water-haunted
+house had seemed to banish remembrance and the reality of the room in
+which he now sat, and of the old familiar life; so now the house, the
+faces of yesterday seemed in their turn unreal, almost spectral, and
+the thick print on the smudgy page no more significant than a story one
+reads and throws away.
+
+But a moment's comparison in the glass of the two faces side by
+side suddenly sharpened his attention--the resemblance was so oddly
+arresting, and yet, and yet, so curiously inconclusive. There was then
+something of the stolid old Saxon left, he thought. Or had it been
+regained? Which was it? Not merely the complexity of the question, but
+a half-conscious distaste of attempting to face it, set him reading very
+slowly and laboriously, for his French was little more than fragmentary
+recollection, the first few pages of the life of this buried Sabathier.
+But with a disinclination almost amounting to aversion he made very slow
+progress. Many of the words were meaningless to him, and every other
+moment he found himself listening with intense concentration for the
+least hint of what Sheila was doing, of what was going on in the house
+beneath him. He had not very long to wait. He was sitting with his head
+leaning on his hand, the book unheeded beneath the other on the table,
+when the door opened again behind him, and Sheila entered. She stood for
+a moment, calm and dignified, looking down on him through her veil.
+
+'Please understand, Arthur, that I am not taking this step in pique,
+or even in anger. It would serve no purpose to go on like this--this
+incessant heedlessness and recrimination. There have been mistakes,
+misconceptions, perhaps, on both sides. To me naturally yours are most
+conspicuous. That need not, however, blind me to my own.'
+
+She paused in vain for an answer.
+
+'Think the whole thing over candidly and quietly,' she began again in a
+quiet rapid voice. 'Have you really shown the slightest regard, I won't
+say for me, or even for Alice, but for just the obvious difficulties
+and--and proprieties of our position? I have given up as far as I
+can brooding on and on over the same horrible impossible thoughts. I
+withdraw unreservedly what I said just now about punishment. Whatever
+the evidence, it is not even a wife's place to judge like that. You will
+forgive me that?'
+
+Lawford did not turn his head. 'Of course,' he said, looking rather
+vacantly out of the window, 'it was only in the heat of the moment,
+Sheila; though, who knows? it may be true.'
+
+'Well,' she took hold of the great brass knob at the foot of the bed
+with one gloved hand--'well, I feel it is my duty to withdraw it. Apart
+from it, I see only too clearly that even though all that has happened
+in these last few days was in reality nothing but a horrible nightmare,
+I see that even then what you have said about our married life together
+can never be recalled. You have told me quite deliberately that for
+years past your life has been nothing but a pretence--a sham. You
+implied that mine had been too. Honestly, I was not aware of it, Arthur.
+But supposing all that has happened to you had been merely what might
+happen at any moment to anybody, some actual defacement (you will
+forgive me suggesting such a horrible thing)--why, if what you say is
+true, even in that case my sympathy would have been only a continual
+fret and annoyance to you. And this--this change, I own, is infinitely
+harder to bear. It would be an outrage on common sense and on all that
+we hold seemly and--and sacred in life, even in some trumpery story. You
+do, you must see all that, Arthur?'
+
+'Oh yes,' said Lawford, narrowing his eyes to pierce through the
+sunlight, 'I see all that.'
+
+'Then we need not go over it all again. Whatever others may say,
+or think, I shall still, at least so long as nothing occurs to the
+contrary, keep firmly to my present convictions. Mr Bethany has assured
+me repeatedly that he has no--no misgivings; that he understands. And
+even if I still doubted, which I don't, Arthur, though it would be
+rather trying to have to accept one's husband at second-hand, as it
+were, I should have to be satisfied. I dare say even such an unheard-of
+thing as what we are discussing now, or something equally ghastly, does
+occur occasionally. In foreign countries, perhaps. I have not studied
+such things enough to say. We were all very much restricted in our
+reading as children, and I honestly think, not unwisely. It is enough
+for the present to repeat that I do believe, and that whatever may
+happen--and I know absolutely nothing about the procedure in such
+cases--but whatever may happen, I shall still be loyal; I shall always
+have your interests at heart.' Her words faltered and she turned her
+head away. 'You did love me once, Arthur, I can't forget that.' The
+contralto voice trembled ever so little, and the gloved hand smoothed
+gently the brass knob beneath.
+
+'If,' said Lawford, resting his face on his hands, and curiously
+watching the while his moving reflection in the looking-glass before
+him--'if I said I still loved you, what then?
+
+'But you have already denied it, Arthur.'
+
+'Yes; but if I said that that too was said only in haste, that brooding
+over the trouble this--this metamorphosis was bringing on us all had
+driven me almost beyond endurance: supposing that I withdrew all that,
+and instead said now that I do still love you, just as I--' he turned a
+little, and turned back again, 'like this?'
+
+Sheila paused. 'Could ANY woman answer such a question?' she almost
+sighed at last.
+
+'Yes, but,' Lawford pressed on, in a voice almost naive and stubborn as
+a child's, 'If I tried to--to make you? I did once, Sheila.'
+
+'I can't, I can't conceive such a position. Surely that alone is almost
+as frantic as it is heartless! Is it, is it even right?'
+
+'Well, I have not actually asked it. I own,' he added moodily, almost
+under his breath, 'it would be--dangerous.... But there, Sheila, this
+poor old mask of mine is wearing out. I am somehow convinced of that.
+What will be left, God only knows. You were saying--' He rose abruptly.
+'Please, please sit down,' he said; 'I did not notice you were
+standing.'
+
+'I shall not keep you a moment,' she answered hurriedly; 'I will sit
+here. The truth is, Arthur,' she began again almost solemnly, 'apart
+from all sentiment and--and good intentions, my presence here only
+harasses you and keeps you back. I am not so bound up in myself that I
+cannot realise THAT. The consequence is that after calmly--and I
+hope considerately--thinking the whole thing over, I have come to the
+conclusion that it would arouse very little comment, the least possible
+perhaps in the circumstances, if I just went away for a few days. You
+are not in any sense ill. In fact, I have never known you so--so robust,
+so energetic. You will be alone: Mr Bethany, perhaps.... You could go
+out and come in just as you pleased. Possibly,' Sheila smiled frankly
+beneath her veil, 'even this Dr Ferguson you have invented will be a
+help. It's only the servants that remain to be considered.'
+
+'I should prefer to be quite alone.'
+
+'Then do not worry about THEM. I can easily explain. And if you would
+not mind letting her in, Mrs Gull can come in every other day or so just
+to keep things in order. She's entirely trustworthy and discreet. Or
+perhaps, if you would prefer--'
+
+'Mrs Gull will do nicely, Sheila. It's very good of you to have given me
+so much thought.' A long and rather arduous pause followed.
+
+'Oh, one other thing, Arthur. You sent out to Mr Critchett--do you
+remember?--the night you first came home. I think, too, after the first
+awful shock, when we were sitting in our bedroom, you actually referred
+to--to violent measures. You will promise me, I may perhaps at least ask
+that, you will promise me on your word of honour, for Alice's sake, if
+not for mine, to do nothing rash.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said Lawford, sinking lower even than he had supposed
+possible into the thin and lightless chill of ennui--'nothing rash.'
+
+Sheila rose with a sigh only in part suppressed. 'I have not seen Mr
+Bethany again. I think, however, it would be better to let Harry know; I
+mean, dear, of your derangement. After all, he is one of the family--at
+least, of mine. He will not interfere. He would, perhaps quite
+naturally, be hurt if we did not take him into our confidence. Otherwise
+there is no pressing cause for haste, at least for another week or so.
+After that, I suppose, something will have to be done. Then there's Mr
+Wedderburn; wouldn't it be as well to let him know that at least for the
+present you are quite unable to think of returning to town? That,
+too, in time will have to be arranged, I suppose, if nothing happens
+meanwhile; I mean if things don't come right. And I do hope, Arthur, you
+will not set your mind too closely on what may only prove false hopes.
+This is all intensely painful to me; of course, to us both.'
+
+Again Lawford, even though he did not turn to confront it, became
+conscious of the black veil turned towards him tentatively,
+speculatively, impenetrably.
+
+'Yes,' he said, 'I'll write to Wedderburn; he's had his ups and downs
+too.'
+
+'I always rather fancied so,' said Sheila reflectively, 'he looks rather
+a--a restless man. Oh, and then again,' she broke off quickly, 'there's
+the question of money. I suppose--it is only a conjecture--I suppose it
+would be better to do nothing in that direction just for the present.
+Ada has now gone to the Bank. Fifty pounds, Arthur; it is out of my own
+private account--do you think that will be enough, just, of course, for
+your PRESENT needs?'
+
+'As a bribe, hush-money, or a thank-offering, Sheila?' murmured her
+husband wearily.
+
+'I don't follow you,' replied the discreet voice from beneath the veil.
+
+He did actually turn this time and glance steadily over his shoulder.
+'How long are you going for? and where?'
+
+'I proposed to go to my cousin's, Bettie Lovat's; that is, of course, if
+you have no objection. It's near; it will be a long-deferred visit; and
+she need know very little. And, of course, if for the least thing in the
+world you should want me, there I am within call, as it were. And you
+will write? We ARE acting for the best, Arthur?'
+
+'So long as it is your best, Sheila.'
+
+Sheila pondered. 'You think, you mean, they'll all say I ought to have
+stayed. Candidly, I can't see it in that light. Surely every experience
+of life proves that in intimate domestic matters, and especially in
+those between husband and wife, only the parties concerned have any
+means of judging what is best for them? It has been our experience at
+any rate: though I must in fairness confess that, outwardly at least,
+I haven't had much of that kind of thing to complain of.' Sheila paused
+again for a reply.
+
+'What kind of thing?'
+
+'Domestic experience, dear.'
+
+The house was quiet. There was not a sound stirring in the still
+sunny road of orchards and discreet and drowsy villas. A long silence
+followed, immensely active and alert on the one side, almost morbidly
+lethargic so far as the stooping figure in front of the looking-glass
+was concerned. At last the last haunting question came in a kind of
+croak, as if only by a supreme effort could it be compelled to produce
+itself for consideration.
+
+'And Alice, Sheila?'
+
+'Alice, dear, of course goes with ME.'
+
+'You realise,' he stirred uneasily, `you realise it may be final.'
+
+'My dear Arthur,' cried Sheila, 'it is surely, apart from mere delicacy,
+a parental obligation to screen the poor child from the shock. Could she
+be at such a time in any better keeping than her mother's? At present
+she only vaguely guesses. To know definitely that her father, infinitely
+worse than death, had--had--Oh, is it possible to realise anything in
+this awful cloud? It would kill her outright.'
+
+Lawford made no stir. The quietest of raps came at the door. 'The money
+from the Bank, ma'am,' said a faint voice.
+
+Sheila carefully opened the door a few inches. She laid the blue
+envelope on the dressing-table at her husband's elbow. 'You had better
+perhaps count it,' she said in a low voice--'forty in notes, the rest
+in gold,' and narrowed her eyes beneath her veil upon her husband's very
+peculiar method of forgetting his responsibilities.
+
+'French?' she said with a nod. 'How very quaint.'
+
+Lawford's eyes fell and rested gravely on the dingy page of Herbert's
+mean-looking bundle of print. A queer feeling of cold crept over him.
+'Yes,' he said vaguely, 'French,' and hopelessly failed to fill in the
+silence that seemed like some rather sleek nocturnal creature quietly
+waiting to be fed.
+
+Sheila swept softly towards the door. 'Well, Arthur, I think that is
+all. The servants will have gone by this evening. I have ordered a
+carriage for half-past twelve. Perhaps you would first write down
+anything that occurs to you to be necessary? Perhaps, too, it would be
+better if Dr Simon were told that we shall not need him any more,
+that you are thinking of a complete change of scene, a voyage. He is
+obviously useless. Besides, Mr Bethany, I think, is going to discuss
+a specialist with you. I have written him a little note, just briefly
+explaining. Shall I write to Dr Simon too?'
+
+'You remember everything,' said Lawford, and it seemed to him it was a
+remark he had heard ages and ages ago. 'It's only this money, Sheila;
+will you please take that away?'
+
+'Take it away?'
+
+'I think, Sheila, if I do take a voyage I should almost prefer to work
+my passage. As for a mere "change of scene," that's quite uncostly.'
+
+'It is only your face, Arthur,' said Sheila solemnly, 'that suggest
+these wicked stabs. Some day you will perhaps repent of every one.'
+
+'It is possible, Sheila; we none of us stand still, you know. One rips
+open a lid sometimes and the wax face rots before one's eyes. Take back
+your blue envelope; and thank you for thinking of me. It's always the
+woman of the house that has the head.'
+
+'I wish,' said Sheila almost pathetically, and yet with a faint quaver
+of resignation, 'I wish it could be said that the man of the house
+sometimes has the heart. Think it over, Arthur!'
+
+Sheila, with her husband's luncheon tray, brought also her farewells.
+Lawford surveyed, not without a faint, shy stirring of incredulity,
+the superbly restrained presence. He stood before her dry-lipped,
+inarticulate, a schoolboy caught redhanded in the shabbiest of offences.
+
+'It is your wish then that I go, Arthur?' she said pleadingly.
+
+He handed her her money without a word.
+
+'Very well, Arthur; if you won't take it,' she said. 'I should scarcely
+have thought this the occasion for mere pride.'
+
+'The tenth,' she continued, as she squeezed the envelope into her purse,
+with only the least hardening of voice, 'although I daresay you have not
+troubled to remember it--the tenth will be the eighteenth anniversary
+of our wedding-day. It makes parting, however advisable, and though only
+for the few days we should think nothing of in happier circumstances,
+a little harder to bear. But there, all will come right. You will see
+things in a different light, perhaps. Words may wound, but time will
+heal.' But even as she now looked closely into his colourless sunken
+face some distant memory seemed to well up irresistibly--the memory of
+eyes just as ingenuous, and as unassuming that even in claiming her love
+had expressed only their stolid unworthiness.
+
+'Did you know it? have you seen it?' she said, stooping forward a
+little. 'I believe in spite of all....' He gazed on solemnly, almost
+owlishly, out of his fading mask.
+
+'Wait till Mr Bethany tells you; you will believe it perhaps from him.'
+He saw the grey-gloved hand a little reluctantly lifted towards him.
+
+'Good-bye, Sheila,' he said, and turned mechanically back to the window.
+
+She hesitated, listening to a small far-away voice that kept urging her
+with an almost frog-like pertinacity to do, to say something, and yet as
+stubbornly would not say what; and she was gone.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIFTEEN
+
+Raying and gleaming in the sunlight the hired landau drove up to the
+gate. Lawford, peeping between the blinds, looked down on the coachman,
+with reins hanging loosely from his red squat-thumbed hand, seated in
+his tight livery and indescribable hat on the faded cushions. One thing
+only was in his mind; and it was almost with an audible cry that he
+turned towards the figure that edged, white and trembling, into the
+chill room, to fling herself into his arms. 'Don't look at me,' he
+begged her, 'only remember, dearest, I would rather have died down
+there and been never seen again than have given you pain. Run--run, your
+mother's calling. Write to me, think of me; good-bye!'
+
+He threw himself on the bed and lay there till evening--till the door
+had shut gently behind the last rat to leave the sinking ship. All
+the clearness, the calmness were gone again. Round and round in dizzy
+sickening flare and clatter his thoughts whirled. Contempt, fear,
+loathing, blasphemy, laughter, longing: there was no end. Death was no
+end. There was no meaning, no refuge, no hope, no possible peace. To
+give up was to go to perdition: to go forward was to go mad. And even
+madness--he sat up with trembling lips in the twilight--madness itself
+was only a state, only a state. You might be bereaved, and the pain
+and hopelessness of that would pass. You might be cast out, betrayed,
+deserted, and still be you, still find solitude lovely and in a brave
+face a friend. But madness!--it surged in on him with all the clearness
+and emptiness of a dream. And he sat quite still, his hand clutching the
+bedclothes, his head askew, waiting for the sound of footsteps, for the
+presences and the voices that have their thin-walled dwelling beneath
+the shallow crust of consciousness.
+
+Inky blackness drifted up in wisps, in smoke before his eyes; he was
+powerless to move, to cry out. There was no room to turn; no air to
+breathe. And yet there was a low, continuous, never-varying stir as of
+an enormous wheel whirling in the gloom. Countless infinitesimal faces
+arched like glimmering pebbles the huge dim-coloured vault above his
+head. He heard a voice above the monstrous rustling of the wheel,
+clamouring, calling him back. He was hastening headlong, muttering to
+himself his own flat meaningless name, like a child repeating as he runs
+his errand. And then as if in a charmed cold pool he awoke and opened
+his eyes again on the gathering darkness of the great bedroom, and heard
+a quick, importunate, long-continued knocking on the door below, as of
+some one who had already knocked in vain.
+
+Cramped and heavy-limbed, he felt his way across the room and lit a
+candle. He stood listening awhile: his eyes fixed on the door that hung
+a little open. All in the room seemed acutely fantastically still. The
+flame burned dim, misled in the sluggish air. He stole slowly to the
+door, looked out, and again listened. Again the knocking broke out, more
+impetuously and yet with a certain restraint and caution. Shielding the
+flame of his candle in the shell of his left hand, Lawford moved slowly,
+with chin uplifted, to the stairs. He bent forward a little, and stood
+motionless and drawn up, the pupils of his eyes slowly contracting and
+expanding as he gazed down into the carpeted vacant gloom; past the dim
+louring presence that had fallen back before him.
+
+His mouth opened. 'Who's there?' at last he called.
+
+'Thank God, thank God!' he heard Mr Bethany mutter. 'I mustn't call,
+Lawford,' came a hurried whisper as if the old gentleman were pressing
+his lips to speak through the letter-box. 'Come down and open the door;
+there's a good fellow! I've been knocking no end of a time.'
+
+'Yes, I am coming,' said Lawford. He shut his mouth and held his
+breath, and stair by stair he descended, driving steadily before him the
+crouching, gloating menacing shape, darkly lifted up before him against
+the darkness, contending the way with him.
+
+'Are you ill? Are you hurt? Has anything happened, Lawford?' came the
+anxious old voice again, striving in vain to be restrained.
+
+'No, no,' muttered Lawford. 'I am coming; coming slowly.' He paused to
+breathe, his hands trembling, his hair lank with sweat, and still
+with eyes wide open he descended against the phantom lurking in the
+darkness--an adversary that, if he should but for one moment close his
+lids, he felt would master sanity and imagination with its evil. 'So
+long as you don't get in,' he heard himself muttering, 'so long as you
+don't get in, my friend!'
+
+'What's that you're saying?' came up the muffled, querulous voice; 'I
+can't for the life of me hear, my boy.'
+
+'Nothing, nothing,' came softly the answer from the foot of the stairs.
+'I was only speaking to myself.'
+
+Deliberately, with candle held rigidly on a level with his eyes, Lawford
+pushed forward a pace or two into the airless, empty drawing-room, and
+grasped the handle of the door. He gazed in awhile, a black oblique
+shadow flung across his face, his eyes fixed like an animal's, then drew
+the door steadily towards him. And suddenly some power that had held him
+tense seemed to fail. He thrust out his head, and, his face quivering
+with fear and loathing, spat defiance as if in a passion of triumph into
+the gloom.
+
+Still muttering, he shut the door and turned the key. In another moment
+his light was gleaming out on the grey perturbed face and black narrow
+shoulders of his visitor.
+
+'You gave me quite a fright,' said the old man almost angrily; 'have you
+hurt your foot, or something?'
+
+'It was very dark,' said Lawford, 'down the stairs.'
+
+'What!' said Mr Bethany still more angrily, blinking out of his
+unspectacled eyes; 'has she cut off the gas, then?'
+
+'You got the note?' said Lawford, unmoved.
+
+'Yes, yes; I got the note.... Gone?'
+
+'Oh, yes; all gone. It was my choice. I preferred it so.'
+
+Mr Bethany sat down on one of the hard old wooden chairs that stood on
+either side of the lofty hall, and breathing rather thickly, rested his
+hands on his knees. 'What's happened?' he inquired, looking up into the
+candle. 'I forgot my glasses, old fool that I am, and can't, my dear
+fellow, see you very plainly. But your voice--'
+
+'I think,' said Lawford, 'I think it's beginning to come back.'
+
+'What, the whole thing! Oh no, my dear, dear man; be frank with me; not
+the whole thing?'
+
+'Yes,' said Lawford, 'the whole thing--very, very gradually,
+imperceptibly. I think even Sheila noticed. But I rather feel it than
+see it; that is all.... I'm cornering him.'
+
+'Him?'
+
+Lawford jerked his candle as if towards some definite goal. 'In time,'
+he said.
+
+The two faces with the candle between them seemed as it were to gain
+light each from the other.
+
+'Well, well,' said Mr Bethany, 'every man for himself, Lawford; it's the
+only way. But what's going to be done? We must be cautious; must think
+of--of the others?'
+
+'Oh, that,' said Lawford; 'she's going to squeeze me out.'
+
+'You've--squabbled? Oh, but my dear, honest old, HONEST old idiot, there
+are scores of families here in this parish, within a stone's throw, that
+squabble, wrangle, all but politely tear each other's eyes out, every
+day of their earthly lives. It's perfectly natural. Where should we poor
+old busybodies be else. Peace on earth we bring, and it's mainly between
+husband and wife.'
+
+'Yes,' said Lawford, 'but you see, this was not our earthly life. It was
+between US.'
+
+'Listen, listen to the dear mystic!' exclaimed the old creature
+scoffingly. 'What depths we're touching. Here's the first serious break
+of his lifetime, and he's gone stark staring transcendental. Ah well.'
+He paused and glanced quickly about him, with his curious bird-like
+poise of head. 'But you're not alone here?' he inquired suddenly; 'not
+absolutely alone?'
+
+'Yes,' said Lawford. 'But there's plenty to think about--and read. I
+haven't thought or read for years.'
+
+'No, nor I; after thirty, my dear boy, one merely annotates, and the
+book's called Life. Bless me, his solemn old voice is grinding epigrams
+out of even this poor old parochial barrel-organ. You don't suppose, you
+cannot be supposing you are the only serious person in the world? What's
+more, it's only skin deep.'
+
+Lawford smiled. 'Skin deep. But think quietly over it; you'll see I'm
+done.'
+
+'Come here,' said Mr Bethany. 'Where's the whiskey, where's the cigars?
+You shall smoke and drink, and I'll watch. If it weren't for a
+pitiful old stomach, I'd join you. Come on!' He led the way into the
+dining-room.
+
+He looked sparer, more wizened and sinewy than ever as he stooped to
+open the sideboard. 'Where on earth do they keep everything?' he was
+muttering to himself.
+
+Lawford put the candlestick down on the table. 'There's only one thing,'
+he said, watching his visitor's rummaging; 'what precisely do you think
+they will do with me?'
+
+'Look here, Lawford,' snapped Mr Bethany; 'I've come round here, hooting
+through your letter-box, to tally sense, not sentiment. Why has your
+wife deserted you? Without a servant, without a single--It's perfectly
+monstrous.'
+
+'On my word of honour, I prefer it so. I couldn't have gone on. Alone
+I all but forget this--this lupus. Every turn of her little finger
+reminded me of it. We are all of us alone, whether we know it or
+not; you said so yourself. And it's better to realize it stark and
+unconfused. Besides, you have no idea what--what odd things.... There
+may be; there IS something on the other side. I'll win through to that.'
+
+Mr Bethany had been listening attentively. He scrambled up from his
+knees with a half-empty syphon of sodawater. 'See here, Lawford,' he
+said; 'if you really want to know what's your most insidious and most
+dangerous symptom just now, it is spiritual pride. You've won what you
+think a domestic victory; and you can scarcely bear the splendour.
+Oh, you may shrug! Pray, what IS this "other side" which the superior
+double-faced creature's going to win through to now?' He rapped it out
+almost bitterly, almost contemptuously.
+
+Lawford hardly heard the question. Before his eyes had suddenly arisen
+the peace, the friendly unquestioning stillness, the thunderous lullaby
+old as the grave. 'It's only a fancy. It seemed I could begin again.'
+
+'Well, look here,' said Mr Bethany, his whole face suddenly lined and
+grey with age. 'You can't. It's the one solitary thing I've got to say,
+as I've said it to myself morn, noon, and night these scores of years.
+You can't begin again; it's all a delusion and a snare. You say we're
+alone. So we are. The world's a dream, a stage, a mirage, a rack, call
+it what you will--but YOU don't change, YOU'RE no illusion. There's
+no crying off for YOU no ravelling out, no clean leaves. You've got
+this--this trouble, this affliction--my dear, dear fellow what shall
+I say to tell you how I grieve and groan for you oh yes, and actually
+laughed, I confess it, a vile hysterical laughter, to think of it.
+You've got this almost intolerable burden to bear; it's come like a
+thief in the night; but bear it you must, and ALONE! They say death's a
+going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life's a long undressing. We came
+in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out
+again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and
+watch the world fade. Well then, and not another word of sense shall you
+worm out of my worn-out old brains after today--all I say is, don't give
+in! Why, if you stood here now, freed from this devilish disguise, the
+old, fat, sluggish fellow that sat and yawned his head off under my eyes
+in his pew the Sunday before last, if I know anything about human nature
+I'd say it to your face, and a fig for your vanity and resignation--your
+last state would be worse than the first. There!'
+
+He bunched up a big white handkerchief and mopped it over his head.
+'That's done,' he said, 'and we won't go back. What I want to know now
+is what are you going to do? Where are you sleeping? What are you going
+to think about? I'll stay--yes, yes, that's what it must be: I must
+stay. And I detest strange beds. I'll stay, you SHAN'T be alone. Do you
+hear me, Lawford?--you SHAN'T be alone!'
+
+Lawford gazed gravely. 'There is just one little thing I want to ask
+you before you go. I've wormed out an extraordinary old French book;
+and--just as you say--to pass the time, I've been having a shot at
+translating it. But I'm frightfully rusty; it's old French; would you
+mind having a look?'
+
+Mr Bethany blinked and listened. He tried for the twentieth time to
+judge his friend's eyes, to gain as best he could some sustained and
+unobserved glance at this baffling face. 'Where is your precious French
+book?' he said irritably.
+
+'It's upstairs.'
+
+'Fire away, then!' Lawford rose and glanced about the room. 'What, no
+light there either?' snapped Mr Bethany. 'Take this; I don't mind the
+dark. There'll be plenty of that for me soon.'
+
+Lawford hesitated at the door, looking rather strangely back. 'No,'
+he said, 'there are matches upstairs.' He shut the door after him. The
+darkness seemed cold and still as water. He went slowly up, with eyes
+fixed wide on the floating luminous gloom, and out of memory seemed to
+gather, as faintly as in the darkness which they had exorcised for him,
+the strange pitiful eyes of the night before. And as he mounted a chill,
+terrible, physical peace seemed to steal over him.
+
+Mr Bethany was sitting as he had left him, looking steadily on the
+floor, when Lawford returned. He flattened out the book on the table
+with a sniff of impatience. And dragging the candle nearer, and stooping
+his nose close to the fusty print, he began to read.
+
+'Was this in the house?' he inquired presently.
+
+'No,' said Lawford; 'it was lent to me by a friend--Herbert.'
+
+'H'm! don't know him. Anyhow, precious poor stuff this is.
+This Sabathier, whoever he is, seems to be a kind of clap-trap
+eighteenth-century adventurer who thought the world would be better off,
+apparently, for a long account of all his sentimental amours. Rousseau,
+with a touch of Don Quixote in his composition, and an echo of that
+prince of bogies, Poe! What, in the name of wonder, induced you to fix
+on this for your holiday reading?'
+
+'Sabathier's alive, isn't he?'
+
+'I never said he wasn't. He's a good deal too much alive for my old
+wits, with his Mam'selle This and Madame the Other; interesting enough,
+perhaps, for the professional literary nose with a taste for patchouli.'
+
+'Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?' Mr Bethany
+peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. 'I should say
+decidedly that the fellow was a very rare character, so long as by rare
+you don't mean good. It's one of the dullest stupidities of the present
+day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he's different
+from the rest of us. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's
+more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels. From what I can
+gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been
+an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as
+easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I
+should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old
+troubled hermit like yourself at the present moment.'
+
+'There's a portrait of him a few pages back.'
+
+Mr Bethany, with some little impatience, turned back to the engraving.
+'"Nicholas de Sabathier,"'s he muttered. '"De," indeed!' He poked in at
+the foxy print with narrowed eyes. 'I don't deny it's a striking, even
+perhaps, a rather taking face. I don't deny it.' He gazed on with
+an even more acute concentration, and looked up sharply. 'Look here,
+Lawford, what in the name of wonder--what trick are you playing on me
+now?'
+
+'Trick?' said Lawford; and the world fell with the tiniest plash in the
+silence, like a vivid little float upon the surface of a shadowy pool.
+
+The old face flushed. 'What conceivable bearing, I say, has this dead
+and gone old roue on us now?'
+
+'You don't think, then, you see any resemblance--ANY resemblance at
+all?'
+
+'Resemblance?' repeated Mr Bethany in a flat voice, and without raising
+his face again to meet Lawford's direct scrutiny. 'Resemblance to whom?'
+
+'To me? To me, as I am?'
+
+'But even, my dear fellow (forgive my dull old brains!), even if there
+was just the faintest superficial suggestion of--of that; what then?'
+
+'Why,' said Lawford, 'he's buried in Widderstone.'
+
+'Buried in Widderstone?' The keen childlike blue eyes looked almost
+stealthily up across the book; the old man sat without speaking, so
+still that it might even be supposed he himself was listening for a
+quiet distant footfall.
+
+'He is buried in the grave beside which I fell asleep,' said Lawford;
+'all green and still and broken,' he added faintly. 'You remember,' he
+went on in a repressed voice--'you remember you asked me if there was
+anybody else in sight, any eavesdropper? You don't think--him?'
+
+Mr. Bethany pushed the book a few inches away from him. 'Who, did you
+say--who was it you said put the thing into your head? A queer friend
+surely?' he paused helplessly. 'And how, pray, do you know,' he began
+again more firmly, 'even if there is a Sabathier buried at Widderstone,
+how do you know it is this Sabathier? It's not, I think,' he added
+boldly, 'a very uncommon name; with two b's at any rate. Whereabouts is
+the grave?'
+
+'Quite down at the bottom, under the trees. And the little seat I told
+you of is there, too, where I fell asleep. You see,' he explained, 'the
+grave's almost isolated; I suppose because he killed himself.'
+
+Mr Bethany clasped his knuckled fingers on the tablecloth. 'It's no
+good,' he concluded after a long pause; 'the fellow's got up into
+my head. I can't think him out. We must thrash it out quietly in the
+morning with the blessed sun at the window; not this farthing dip. To
+me the whole idea is as revolting as it is incredible. Why, above a
+century--no, no! And on the other hand, how easily one's fancy builds! A
+few straws and there's a nest and squawking fledglings, all complete.
+Is that why--is that why that good, practical wife of yours and all your
+faithful household have absconded? Does it'--he threw up his head as if
+towards the house above them--'does it REEK with him?'
+
+Lawford shook his head. 'She hasn't seen him: not--not apart. I haven't
+told her.'
+
+Mr Bethany tossed the hugger-mugger of pamphlets across the table.
+'Then, for simple sanity's sake, don't. Hide it; burn it; put the thing
+completely out of your mind. A friend! Who, where is this wonderful
+friend?'
+
+'Not very far from Widderstone. He lives--practically alone.'
+
+'And all that stumbling and muttering on the stairs?' he leant forward
+almost threateningly. 'There isn't anybody here, Lawford?'
+
+'Oh, no,' said Lawford. 'We are practically alone with this, you know,'
+he pointed to the book, and smiled frankly, however faintly.
+
+Again Mr Bethany sank into a fixed yet uneasy reverie, and again shook
+himself and raised his eyes.
+
+'Well then,' he said, in a voice all but morose in its fretfullness,
+'what I suggest is that first you keep quiet here; and next, that you
+write and get your wife back. You say you are better. I think you said
+she herself noticed a slight improvement. Isn't it just exactly as I
+foresaw? And yet she's gone! But that's not our business. Get her back.
+And don't for a single instant waste a thought on the other; not for a
+single instant, I implore you, Lawford. And in a week the whole thing
+will be no more than a dreary, preposterous dream.... You don't answer
+me!' he cried impulsively.
+
+'But can one so easily forget a dream like this?'
+
+'You don't speak out, Lawford; you mean SHE won't.'
+
+'It must at least seem to have been in part of my own seeking, or
+contriving; or at any rate--she said it--of my own hereditary or
+unconscious deserving.'
+
+'She said that!' Mr Bethany sat back. 'I see, I see,' he said. 'I'm
+nothing but a fumbling old meddler. And there was I, not ten minutes
+ago, preaching for all I was worth on a text I knew nothing about. God
+bless me, Lawford, how long we take a-learning. I'll say no more. But
+what an illusion. To think this--this--he laid a long lean hand at arm's
+length flat upon the table towards his friend--'to think this is our old
+jog-trot Arthur Lawford! From henceforth I throw you over, you old wolf
+in sheep's wool. I wash my hands of you. And now where am I going to
+sleep?'
+
+He covered up his age and weariness for an instant with a small crooked
+hand.
+
+Lawford took a deep breath. 'You're going, old friend, to sleep at home.
+And I--I'm going to give you my arm to the Vicarage gate. Here I am,
+immeasurably relieved, fitter than I've been since I was a dolt of a
+schoolboy. On my word of honour: I can't say why, but I am. I don't care
+THAT, vicar, honestly--puffed up with spiritual pride. If a man can't
+sleep with pride for a bed-fellow, well, he'd better try elsewhere. It's
+no good; I'm as stubborn as a mule; that's at least a relic of the old
+Adam. I care no more,' he raised his voice firmly and gravely--'I
+don't care a jot for solitude, not a jot for all the ghosts of all the
+catacombs!'
+
+Mr. Bethany listened, grimly pursed up his lips. 'Not a jot for all the
+ghosts of all the catechisms!' he muttered. `Nor the devil himself, I
+suppose?' He turned once more to glance sharply in the direction of the
+face he could so dimly--and of set purpose--discern; and without a word
+trotted off into the hall. Lawford followed with the candle.
+
+''Pon my word, you haven't had a mouthful of supper. Let me forage; just
+a quarter of an hour, eh?'
+
+'Not me,' said Mr Bethany; 'if you won't have me, home I go. I refuse
+to encourage this miserable grass-widowering. What WOULD they say?
+What would the busybodies say? Ghouls and graves and shocking
+mysteries--Selina! Sister Anne! Come on.'
+
+He shuffled on his hat and caught firm hold of his knobbed umbrella.
+'Better not leave a candle,' he said.
+
+Lawford blew out the candle.
+
+'What? What?' called the old man suddenly. But no voice had spoken.
+
+A thin trickle of light from the lamp in the street stuck up through
+the fanlight as, with a smile that could be described neither as
+mischievous, saturnine, nor vindictive, and was yet faintly suggestive
+of all three, Lawford quietly opened the drawing-room door and put down
+the candlestick on the floor within.
+
+'What on earth, my good man, are you fumbling after now?' came the
+almost fretful question from under the echoing porch.
+
+'Coming, coming,' said Lawford, and slammed the door behind them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIXTEEN
+
+The first faint streaks of dawn were silvering across the stars when
+Lawford again let himself into his deserted house. He stumbled down
+to the pantry and cut himself a crust of bread and cheese, and ate it,
+sitting on the table, watching the leafy eastern sky through the painted
+bars of the area window. He munched on, hungry and tired. His night
+walk had cooled head and heart. Having obstinately refused Mr Bethany's
+invitation to sleep at the Vicarage, he had sat down on an old low wall,
+and watched until his light had shone out at his bedroom window. Then
+he had simply wandered on, past rustling glimmering gardens, under
+the great timbers of yellowing elms, hardly thinking, hardly aware
+of himself except as in a far-away vision of a sluggish insignificant
+creature struggling across the tossed-up crust of an old,
+incomprehensible world.
+
+The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been
+that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the
+direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his
+breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his
+eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing
+he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white
+drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau--they were familiar but not
+very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment
+in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him
+wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such
+a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila
+with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. 'I wonder what they'll do?'
+had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few
+hours as had 'What am I to do?' in the first bout of his 'visitation.'
+
+But the 'they' was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and
+Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn,
+and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the
+verger, Mr Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the
+whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one's place in
+the world's economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his place
+was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness
+at least a respite.
+
+Solitude!--he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in
+it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest
+reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last
+crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again,
+past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow
+sweetness of Alice's, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long
+and dreamless sleep.
+
+By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten
+he got up from Sheila's fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to
+answer Mrs Gull's summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with
+arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained
+melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous 'Good
+morning,' and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by
+in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three
+she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag
+hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of
+sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a
+blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a
+little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open
+to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across
+from line to line of the obscure French print.
+
+Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible
+literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself,
+breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few
+half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as
+Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the
+declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and
+foreboding ennui stole over Lawford's solitude once more. He shut his
+books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table,
+lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.
+
+At a mean little barber's with a pole above his lettered door he went
+in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the
+crumb-littered counter of a little baker's shop to have some tea. It
+pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen
+and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty,
+consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker's wife. Whatever his face might
+now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never have
+hob-nobbed so affably with his social 'inferiors.'
+
+For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer
+in the friendly baker's shop, he bought six-penny-worth of cakes. He
+watched them as they were deposited one by one in the bag, and even
+asked for one sort to be exchanged for another, flushing a little at the
+pretty compliment he had ventured on.
+
+He climbed out of the shop, and paused on the wooden doorstep. 'Do you
+happen to know Mr Herbert Herbert's?' he said.
+
+The baker's wife glanced up at him with clear, reflective eyes. 'Mr
+Herbert's?--that must be some little way off, sir. I don't know any such
+name, and I know most, just round about like.'
+
+'Well, yes, it is,' said Lawford, rather foolishly; 'I hardly know why I
+asked. It's past the churchyard at Widderstone.'
+
+'Oh yes, sir,' she encouraged him.
+
+'A big, wooden-looking house.'
+
+'Really, sir. Wooden?'
+
+Lawford looked into her face, but could find nothing more to say, so he
+smiled again rather absently, and ascended into the street.
+
+He sat down outside the churchyard gate on the very bank where he had in
+the sourness of the nettles first opened Sabathier's Memoirs. The world
+lay still beneath the pale sky. Presently the little fat rector walked
+up the hill, his wrists still showing beneath his sleeves. Lawford
+meditatively watched him pass by. A small boy with a switch, a tiny
+nose, and a swinging gallipot, his cheeks lit with the sunset, followed
+soon after. Lawford beckoned him with his finger and held out the bag
+of tarts. He watched him, half incredulous of his prize, and with many a
+cautious look over his shoulder, pass out of sight. For a long while
+he sat alone, only the evening birds singing out of the greenness and
+silence of the churchyard. What a haunting inescapable riddle life was.
+
+Colour suddenly faded out of the light streaming between the branches.
+And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom,
+began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so
+devilish empty--this raft of the world floating under evening's shadow.
+How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the
+ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen asleep,
+ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy deep had
+stolen oar and sail and compass, leaving him adrift amid the riding of
+the waves.
+
+'Are they worth, do you think, quite a penny?' suddenly inquired a quiet
+voice in the silence. He looked up into the almost colourless face, into
+the grey eyes beneath their clear narrow brows.
+
+'I was thinking,' he said, 'what a curious thing life is, and
+wondering--'
+
+'The first half is well worth the penny--its originality! I can't afford
+twopence. So you must GIVE me what you were wondering.'
+
+Lawford gazed rather blankly across the twilight fields. 'I was
+wondering,' he said with an oddly naive candour, 'how long it took one
+to sink.'
+
+'They say, you know,' Grisel replied solemnly, 'drowned sailors float
+midway, suffering their sea change; purgatory. But what a splendid
+pennyworth. All pure philosophy!'
+
+'"Philosophy!"' said Lawford; 'I am a perfect fool. Has your brother
+told you about me?'
+
+She glanced at him quickly. 'We had a talk.'
+
+'Then you do know--?' He stopped dead, and turned to her. 'You really
+realise it, looking at me now?'
+
+'I realise,' she said gravely, 'that you look even a little more pale
+and haggard than when I saw you first the other night. We both, my
+brother and I, you know, thought for certain you'd come yesterday.
+In fact, I went into the Widderstone in the evening to look for you,
+knowing your nocturnal habits....' She glanced again at him with a kind
+of shy anxiety.
+
+'Why--why is your brother so--why does he let me bore him so horribly?'
+
+'Does he? He's tremendously interested; but then, he's pretty easily
+interested when he's interested at all. If he can possibly twist
+anything into the slightest show of a mystery, he will. But, of course,
+you won't, you can't, take all he says seriously. The tiniest pinch of
+salt, you know. He's an absolute fanatic at talking in the air. Besides,
+it doesn't really matter much.'
+
+'In the air?'
+
+'I mean if once a theory gets into his head--the more far-fetched,
+so long as it's original, the better--it flowers out into a positive
+miracle of incredibilities. And of course you can rout out evidence for
+anything under the sun from his dingy old folios. Why did he lend you
+that PARTICULAR book?'
+
+'Didn't he tell you that, then?'
+
+'He said it was Sabathier.' She seemed to think intensely for the
+merest fraction of a moment, and turned. 'Honestly, though, I think he
+immensely exaggerated the likeness. As for...'
+
+He touched her arm, and they stopped again, face to face. 'Tell me what
+difference exactly you see,' he said. 'I am quite myself again now,
+honestly; please tell me just the very worst you think.'
+
+'I think, to begin with,' she began, with exaggerated candour, 'his is
+rather a detestable face.'
+
+'And mine?' he said gravely.
+
+'Why--very troubled; oh yes--but his was like some bird of prey.
+Yours--what mad stuff to talk like this!--not the least symptom, that I
+can see, of--why, the "prey," you know.'
+
+They had come to the wicket in the dark thorny hedge. 'Would it be very
+dreadful to walk on a little--just to finish?'
+
+'Very,' she said, turning as gravely at his side.
+
+'What I wanted to say was--' began Lawford, and forgetting altogether
+the thread by which he hoped to lead up to what he really wanted to
+say, broke off lamely; 'I should have thought you would have absolutely
+despised a coward.'
+
+'It would be rather absurd to despise what one so horribly well
+understands. Besides, we weren't cowards--we weren't cowards a bit. My
+childhood was one long, reiterated terror--nights and nights of it. But
+I never had the pluck to tell any one. No one so much as dreamt of
+the company I had. Ah, and you didn't see either that my heart was
+absolutely in my mouth, that I was shrivelled up with fear, even at
+sight of the fear on your face in the dark. There's absolutely nothing
+so catching. So, you see, I do know a little what nerves are; and
+dream too sometimes, though I don't choose charnelhouses if I can get a
+comfortable bed. A coward! May I really say that to ask my help was one
+of the bravest things in a man I ever heard of. Bullets--that kind of
+courage--no real woman cares twopence for bullets. An old aunt of mine
+stared a man right out of the house with the thing in her face. Anyhow,
+whether I may or not, I do say it. So now we are quits.'
+
+'Will you--' began Lawford, and stopped. 'What I wanted to say was,'
+he jerked on, 'it is sheer horrible hypocrisy to be talking to you like
+this--though you will never have the faintest idea of what it has meant
+and done for me. I mean... And yet, and yet, I do feel when just for
+the least moment I forget what I am, and that isn't very often, when
+I forget what I have become and what I must go back to--I feel that I
+haven't any business to be talking with you at all. "Quits!" And here I
+am, an outcast from decent society. Ah, you don't know--'
+
+She bent her head and laughed under her breath. 'You do really stumble
+on such delicious compliments. And yet, do you know, I think my brother
+would be immensely pleased to think you were an outcast from decent
+society if only he could be thought one too. He has been trying half his
+life to wither decent society with neglect and disdain--but it doesn't
+take the least notice. The deaf adder, you know. Besides, besides; what
+is all this meek talk? I detest meek talk--gods or men. Surely in the
+first and last resort all we are is ourselves. Something has happened;
+you are jangled, shaken. But to us, believe me, you are simply one of
+fewer friends-and I think, after struggling up Widderstone Lane hand in
+hand with you in the dark, I have a right to say "friends" than I could
+count on one hand. What are we all if we only realized it? We talk of
+dignity and propriety, and we are like so many children playing
+with knucklebones in a giant's scullery. Come along, he will, some
+suppertime, for us, each in turn--and how many even will so much as look
+up from their play to wave us good-bye? that's what I mean--the plot
+of silence we are all in. If only I had my brother's lucidity, how much
+better I would have said all this. It is only, believe me, that I want
+ever so much to help you, if I may--even at risk, too,' she added,
+rather shakily, 'of having that help--well--I know it's little good.'
+
+The lane had narrowed. They had climbed the arch of a narrow stone
+bridge that spanned the smooth dark Widder. A few late starlings were
+winging far above them. Darkness was coming on apace. They stood for
+awhile looking down into the black flowing water, with here and there
+the mild silver of a star dim leagues below. 'I am afraid,' said
+Grisel, looking quietly up, 'you have led me into talking most pitiless
+nonsense. How many hours, I wonder, did I lie awake in the dark last
+night, thinking of you? Honestly, I shall never, NEVER forget that walk.
+It haunted me, on and on.'
+
+'Thinking of me? Do you really mean that? Then it was not all
+imagination; it wasn't just the drowning man clutching at a straw?'
+
+The grey eyes questioned him. 'You see,' he explained in a whisper, as
+if afraid of being overheard, 'it--it came back again, and--I don't mind
+a bit how much you laugh at me! I had been asleep, and had had a most
+awful dream, one of those dreams that seem to hint that some day THAT
+will be our real world, that some day we may awake where dreaming then
+will be of this; and I woke--came back--and there was a tremendous
+knocking going on downstairs. I knew there was no one else in the
+house--'
+
+'No one else in the house? And you like this?'
+
+'Yes,' said Lawford, stolidly, 'they were all out as it happened. And,
+of course,' he went on quickly, 'there was nothing for me to do but
+simply to go down and open the door. And yet, do you know, at first I
+simply couldn't move. I lit a candle, and then--then somehow I got
+to know that waiting for me was just--but there,' he broke off
+half-ashamed, 'I mustn't bother you with all this morbid stuff. Will
+your brother be in now, do you think?'
+
+'My brother will be in, and, of course, expecting you. But as for
+"bother," believe me--well, did I quite deserve it?' She stooped towards
+him. 'You lit a candle--and then?'
+
+They turned and retraced their way slowly up the hill.
+
+'It came again.'
+
+'It?'
+
+'That--that presence, that shadow. I don't mean, of course, it's a real
+shadow. It comes, doesn't it, from--from within? As if from out of some
+unheard-of hiding place, where it has been lurking for ages and ages
+before one's childhood; at least, so it seems to me now. And yet
+although it does come from within, there it is, too, in front of you,
+before your eyes, feeding even on your fear, just watching, waiting
+for--What nonsense all this must seem to you!'
+
+'Yes, yes; and then?'
+
+'Then, and you must remember the poor old boy had been knocking all this
+time--my old friend--Mr Bethany, I mean--knocking and calling through
+the letter-box, thinking I was in extremis, or something; then--how
+shall I describe it?--well YOU came, your eyes, your face, as clear as
+when, you know, the night before last, we went up the hill together. And
+then...'
+
+'And then?'
+
+'And then, we--you and I, you know--simply drove him downstairs, and
+I could hear myself grunting as if it was really a physical effort; we
+drove him, step by step, downstairs. And--' He laughed outright, and
+boyishly continued his adventure. 'What do you think I did then, without
+the ghost of a smile, too, at the idiocy of the thing? I locked the poor
+beggar in the drawing-room. I saw him there, as plainly as I ever saw
+anything in my life, and the furniture glimmering, though it was pitch
+dark: I can't describe it. It all seemed so desperately real, absolutely
+vital then. It all seems so meaningless and impossible now. And yet,
+although I am utterly played out and done for, and however absurd it may
+sound, I wouldn't have lost it; I wouldn't go back for any bribe there
+is. I feel just as if a great bundle had been rolled off my back. Of
+course, the queerest, the most detestable part of the whole business
+is that it--the thing on the stairs--was this'--he lifted a grave and
+haggard face towards her again--'or rather that,' he pointed with his
+stick towards the starry churchyard. 'Sabathier,' he said.
+
+Again they had paused together before the white gate, and this time
+Lawford pushed it open, and followed his companion up the narrow path.
+
+She stayed a moment, her hand on the bell. 'Was it my brother who
+actually put that horrible idea into your mind?--about Sabathier?'
+
+'Oh no, not really put it into my head,' said Lawford hollowly. 'He only
+found it there; lit it up.'
+
+She laid her hand lightly on his arm. 'Whether he did or not,' she said
+with an earnestness that was almost an entreaty, 'of course, you MUST
+agree that we every one of us have some such experience--that kind
+of visitor, once at least, in a lifetime.' 'Ah, but,' began Lawford,
+turning forlornly away, 'you didn't see, you can't have realized--the
+change.'
+
+She pulled the bell almost as if in some inward triumph. 'But don't you
+think,' she suggested, 'that that, like the other, might be, as it were,
+partly imagination too? If now you thought back.'
+
+But a little old woman had opened the door, and the sentence, for the
+moment, was left unfinished.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
+
+There was no one in the room, and no light, when they entered. For a
+moment Grisel stood by the open window, looking out. Then she turned
+impulsively. 'My brother, of course, will ask you too,' she said; 'we
+had made up our minds to do so if you came again; but I want you to
+promise me now that you won't dream of going back to-night. That surely
+would be tempting--well, not Providence. I couldn't rest if I thought
+you might be alone; like that again.' Her voice died away into the
+calling of the waters. A light moved across the dingy old rows of books
+and as his sister turned to go out Herbert appeared in the doorway,
+carrying a green-shaded lamp, with an old leather quarto under his arm.
+
+'Ah, here you are,' he said. 'I guessed you had probably met.' He drew
+up, burdened, before his visitor. But his clear black glance, instead of
+wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was almost
+with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his book on to
+a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the floor. He
+put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next words came up
+muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him. 'You don't
+feel worse, I hope?' He got up and faced his visitor for the answer. And
+for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.
+
+'No,' he said almost gaily; 'I feel enormously better.' But Herbert's
+long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still
+fixed on his face. 'I am afraid, my dear fellow,' he said, with
+something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, 'the
+struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.'
+
+'The question is,' answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical
+melancholy in his voice, 'though I am not sure that the answer very much
+matters--what's going to put me together again? It's the old story of
+Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in a
+quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?'
+
+'What was that?' said Herbert with unfeigned curiosity.
+
+'Why, you said even though Sabathier had failed, though I was still
+my own old stodgy self, that you thought the face--the face, you know,
+might work in. Somehow, sometimes I think it has. It does really rather
+haunt me. In that case--well, what then?' Lawford had himself listened
+to this involved explanation much as one watches the accomplishment of
+a difficult trick, marvelling more at its completion at all than at the
+difficulty involved in the doing of it.
+
+'"Work in,"' repeated Herbert, like a rather blase child confronted with
+a new mechanical toy; 'did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn't
+bad; it's what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are
+only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot's over the
+threshold, it's nine points of the law! But I don't remember saying it.'
+He shamefacedly and naively confessed it: 'I say such an awful lot of
+things. And I'm always changing my mind. It's a standing joke against me
+with my sister. She says the recording angel will have two sides to my
+account: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
+Saturdays--diametrically opposite convictions, and both kinds wrong. On
+Sundays I am all things to all men. As for Sabathier, by the way, I
+do want particularly to have another go at him. I've been thinking him
+over, and I'm afraid in some ways he won't quite wash. And that reminds
+me, did you read the poor chap?'
+
+'I just grubbed through a page or two; but most of my French was left at
+school. What I did do, though, was to show the book to an old friend
+of ours--my wife's and mine--just to skim--a Mr Bethany. He's an old
+clergyman--our vicar, in fact.'
+
+Herbert had sat down, and with eyes slightly narrowed was listening with
+peculiar attention. He smiled a little magnanimously. 'His verdict, I
+should think, must have been a perfect joy.'
+
+'He said,' said Lawford, in his rather low, monotonous voice, 'he said
+it was precious poor stuff, that it reminded him of patchouli; and that
+Sabathier--the print I mean--looked like a foxy old roue. They were, I
+think, his exact words. We were alone together, last night.'
+
+'You don't mean that he simply didn't see the faintest resemblance?'
+
+Lawford nodded. 'But then,' he added simply, 'whenever he comes to see
+me now he leaves his spectacles at home.'
+
+And at that, as if at some preconcerted signal, they both went off into
+a simple shout of laughter, unanimous and sustained.
+
+But this first wild bout of laughter over, the first real bursting of
+the dam, perhaps, for years, Lawford found himself at a lower ebb than
+ever.
+
+'You see,' he said presently, and while still his companion's face was
+smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the
+splash of a stone, 'Bethany has been absolutely my sheet-anchor right
+through. And I was--it was--you can't possibly realise what a ghastly
+change it really was. I don't think any one ever will.'
+
+Herbert opened his hand and looked reflectively into its palm before
+allowing himself to reply. 'I wonder, you know; I have been wondering a
+good deal; simply taking the other point of view for a moment; WAS it?
+I don't mean "ghastly" exactly (like, say, smallpox, G.P.I,
+elephantiasis), but was it quite so complete, so radical, as in the
+first sheer gust of astonishment you fancied?'
+
+Lawford thought on a little further. 'You know how one sees oneself in
+a passion--why, how a child looks--the whole face darkened and drawn and
+possessed? That was the change. That's how it seems to come back to me.
+And something, somebody, dodging behind the eyes. Yes; more that than
+even any excessive change of feature, except, of course, that I also
+seemed--Shall I ever forget that first cold, stifling stare into the
+looking-glass! I certainly was much darker, even my hair. But I've told
+you all this before,' he added wearily, 'and the scores and scores of
+times I've thought it. I used to sit up there in the big spare bedroom
+my wife put me up in, simply gloating. My flesh seemed nothing more
+than an hallucination: there I was, haunting my body, an old grinning
+tenement, and all that I thought I wanted, and couldn't do without, all
+I valued and prided myself on--stacked up in the drizzling street below.
+Why, Herbert, our bodies are only glass or cloud. They melt, don't they,
+like wax in the sun once we're out. But those first few days don't make
+very pleasant thinking. Friday night was the first, when I sat there
+like a twitching waxwork, soberly debating between Bedlam here and
+Bedlam hereafter. I even sometimes wonder whether its very repetition
+has not dulled the memory or distorted it. My wife,' he added
+ingenuously, 'seems to think there are signs of a slight improvement--a
+going back, I mean. But I'm not sure whether she meant it.'
+
+Herbert surveyed his visitor critically. 'You say "dark," he said; 'but
+surely, Lawford, your hair now is nearly grey; well-flecked at least.'
+
+Although the remark carried nothing comparatively of a shock with it,
+yet it seemed to Lawford as if an electric current had passed over his
+scalp, coldly stirring every hair upon his head. But somehow or other it
+was easier to sit quietly on, to express no surprise, to let them do or
+say what they liked. 'Well' he retorted with an odd, crooked smile, 'you
+must remember I am a good deal older than I was last Saturday. I grew
+grey in the grave, Herbert.'
+
+'But it's like this, you know,' said Herbert, rising excitedly, and at
+the next moment, on reflection, composedly reseating himself. 'How many
+of your people actually saw it? How many owned to its being as bad, as
+complete, as you made out? I don't want for a moment to cut right across
+what you said last night--our talk--but there are two million sides
+to every question, and as often as not the less conspicuous have
+sounder--well--roots. That's all.'
+
+'I think really, do you know, I would rather not go over the detestable
+thing again. Not many; my wife, though, and a man I know called Danton,
+who--who's prejudiced. After all, I have myself to think about too. And
+right through, right through--there wasn't the least doubt of that--they
+all in their hearts knew it was me. They knew I was behind. I could feel
+that absolutely always; it's not just eyes and ears we use, there's us
+ourselves to consider, though God alone knows what that means. But
+the password was there, as you might say; and they all knew I knew it,
+all--except'--he looked up as if in bewilderment--'except just one, a
+poor old lady, a very old friend of my mother's, whom I--I Sabathiered!'
+
+'Whom--you--Sabathiered!' repeated Herbert carefully, with infinite
+relish, looking sidelong at his visitor. 'And it is just precisely
+that....'
+
+But at that moment his sister appeared in the doorway to say that supper
+was ready. And it was not until Herbert was actually engaged in carving
+a cold chicken that he followed up his advantage. 'Mr. Lawford, Grisel,'
+he said, 'has just enriched our jaded language with a new verb--to
+Sabathier. And if I may venture to define it in the presence of
+the distinguished neologist himself, it means, "To deal with
+histrionically"; or, rather, that's what it will mean a couple of
+hundred years hence. For the moment it means, "To act under the
+influence of subliminalization; To perplex, or bemuse, or estrange
+with OTHERNESS." Do tell us, Lawford, more about the little old lady.'
+He passed with her plate a little meaningful glance at his sister, and
+repeated, 'Do!'
+
+'But I've been plaguing your sister enough already. You'll wish...'
+Lawford began, and turned his tired-out eyes towards those others
+awaiting them so frankly they seemed in their perfect friendliness
+a rest from all his troubles. 'You see,' he went on, 'what I kept on
+thinking and thinking of was to get a quite unbiased and unprejudiced
+view. She had known me for years, though we had not actually met more
+than once or twice since my mother's death. And there she was sitting
+with me at the other end of just such another little seat as'--he
+turned--to Herbert 'as ours, at Widderstone. It was on Bewley Common: I
+can see it all now; it was sunset. And I simply turned and asked her in
+a kind of a whining affected manner if she remembered me; and when after
+a long time she came round to owning that to all intents and purposes
+she did not--I professed to have made a mistake in recognising her. I
+think,' he added, glancing up from one to the other of his two strange
+friends, 'I think it was the meanest trick I can remember.'
+
+'H'm,' said Herbert solemnly: 'I wish I had as sensitive a conscience.
+But as your old friend didn't recognise you, who's the worse? As for her
+not doing so, just think of the difference a few years makes to a man,
+and any severe shock. Life wears so infernally badly. Who, for that
+matter, does not change, even in character and yet who professes to see
+it? Mind, I don't say in essence! But then how many of the human ghosts
+one meets does one know in essence? One doesn't want to. It would
+be positively cataclysmic. And that's what brings me around to feel,
+Lawford, if I may venture to say so, that you may have brooded a little
+too keenly on--on your own case. Tell any one you feel ill; he will
+commiserate with you to positive nausea. Tell any priest your soul is
+in danger; will he wait for proof? It's misereres and penances world
+without end. Tell any woman you love her; will she, can she, should she,
+gainsay you? There you are. The cat's out of the bag, you see. My sister
+and I sat up half the night talking the thing over. I said I'd take the
+plunge. I said I'd risk appearing the crassest, contradictoriest wretch
+that ever drew breath. I don't deny that what I hinted at the other
+night must seem in part directly contrary to what I'm going to say now.'
+
+He wheeled his black eyes as if for inspiration, and helped himself to
+salad. 'It's this,' he said. 'Isn't it possible, isn't it even probable
+that being ill, and overstrung, moping a little over things more or less
+out of the common ruck, and sitting there in a kind of trance--isn't it
+possible that you may have very largely IMAGINED the change? Hypnotised
+yourself into believing it much worse--more profound, radical,
+acute--and simply absolutely hypnotizing others into thinking so, too.
+Christendom is just beginning to rediscover that there is such a thing
+as faith, that it is just possible that, say, megrims or melancholia may
+be removed at least as easily as mountains. The converse, of course,
+is obvious on the face of it. A man fails because he thinks himself a
+failure. It's the men that run away that lose the battle. Suppose then,
+Lawford'--he leaned forward, keen and suave--'suppose you have been and
+"Sabathiered" yourself!'
+
+Lawford had grown accustomed during the last few days to finding himself
+gazing out like a child into reality, as if from the windows of a dream.
+He had in a sense followed this long, loosely stitched, preliminary
+argument; he had at least in part realised that he sat there between
+two clear friendly minds acting in the friendliest and most obvious
+collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely
+on any single fragment of Herbert's apology, or of rousing himself into
+being much more than a dispassionate and not very interested spectator
+of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment
+decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a
+smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it
+had so laboriously led up to: 'But surely, I don't quite see...'
+
+Herbert lifted his glass as if to his visitor's acumen and set it down
+again without tasting it. 'Why, my dear fellow,' he said triumphantly,
+'even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old suicide.
+Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In spite of all
+that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night, dead men DON'T
+tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a ghost is where
+his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think what irrefutable
+masses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips if every tombstone
+hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with his creepy
+epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly
+fertilizing. It catches one's fancy in its own crude way, as pages
+and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of,
+germinate, and sprout in one's imagination in another way. We are all
+psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I
+wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and
+guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you think, Grisel?'
+
+'I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call
+it--"darkening counsel"? It's "the hair of the dog," Mr Lawford.'
+
+'Well, then, you see,' said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning
+again to his victim--'then you see, when you were just in the pink of
+condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with
+the least impetus, can one NOT see by moonlight? The howl of a dog turns
+the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at you like
+a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies. I'd, mind you, sipped of the deadly
+old Huguenot too. I'd listened to your innocent prattle about the child
+kicking his toes out on death's cupboard door; what more likely thing in
+the world, then, than that with that moon, in that packed air, I should
+have swallowed the bait whole, and seen Sabathier in every crevice of
+your skin? I don't say there wasn't any resemblance; it was for the
+moment extraordinary; it was even when you were here the other night
+distinctly arresting. But now (poor old Grisel, I'm nearly done) all I
+want to say is this: that if we had the "foxy old roue" here now, and
+Grisel played Paris between the three of us, she'd hand over the apple
+not to you but to me.'
+
+'I don't quite see where poor Paris comes in,' suggested Grisel meekly.
+
+'No, nor do I,' said Herbert. 'All that I mean, sagacious child, is,
+that Mr Lawford no more resembles the poor wretch now than I resemble
+the Apollo Belvedere. If you had only heard my sister scolding me,
+railing at me for putting such ideas into your jangled head! They
+don't affect ME one iota. I have, I suppose, what is usually called
+imagination; which merely means that I can sup with the devil, spoon
+for spoon, and could sleep in Bluebeard's linen-closet without turning
+a hair. You, if I am not very much mistaken, are not much troubled with
+that very unprofitable quality, and so, I suppose, when a crooked and
+bizarre fancy does edge into your mind it roots there.'
+
+And that said, not without some little confusion, and covert glance of
+inquiry at his sister, Herbert made all the haste he could to catch up
+the course that his companions had already finished.
+
+If only, Lawford thought, this insufferable weariness would lift awhile
+he could enjoy the quiet, absurd, heedless talk, and this very friendly
+topsy-turvy effort to ease his mind and soothe his nerves. He might even
+take an interest again in his 'case.'
+
+'You see,' he said, turning to Grisel, 'I don't think it really very
+much matters how it all came about. I never could believe it would last.
+It may perhaps--some of it at least may be fancy. But then, what isn't?
+What is trustworthy? And now your brother tells me my hair's turning
+grey. I suppose I have been living too slowly, too sluggishly, and they
+thought it was high time to stir me up.'
+
+He saw with extraordinary vividness the low panelled room; the still
+listening face; the white muslin shoulders and dark hair; and the
+eyes that seemed to recall some far-off desolate longing for home and
+childhood. It was all a dream. That was the end of the matter. Even now,
+perhaps, his tired old stupid body was lying hunched up, drenched with
+dew upon the little old seat under the mist-wreathed branches. Soon it
+would bestir itself and wake up and go off home--home to Sheila, to the
+old deadly round that once had seemed so natural and inevitable, to the
+old dull Lawford--eyes and brain and heart.
+
+They returned up the dark shallow staircase to Herbert's book-room, and
+he talked on to very quiet and passive listeners in his own fantastic
+endless fashion. And ever and again Lawford would find himself
+intercepting fleeting and anxious glances at his face, glances almost
+of remorse and pity; and thought he detected beneath this irresponsible
+contradictory babble an unceasing effort to clear the sky, to lure away
+too pressing memories, to put his doubts and fears completely to rest.
+
+Herbert even went so far as to plead guilty, when Grisel gave him the
+cue, of having a little heightened and overcoloured his story of
+the restless phantasmal old creature that haunted their queer wooden
+hauntable old house. And when they rose, laughing and yawning to take
+up their candles, it was, after all, after a rather animated discussion,
+with many a hair-raising ghost story brought in for proof between
+brother and sister, as to exactly how many times that snuff-coloured
+spectre had made his appearance; and, with less unanimity still, as
+to the precise manner in which he was in the habit of making his
+precipitant exit.
+
+'You do at any rate acknowledge, Grisel, that the old creature does
+appear, and that you saw him yourself step out into space when you were
+sitting down there under the willow shelling peas. I've seen him twice
+for certain, once rather hazily; Sallie saw him so plainly she asked his
+business: that's five. I resign.'
+
+'Acknowledge!' said Grisel; 'of course I do. I'd acknowledge anything in
+the world to save argument. Why, I don't know what I should do without
+him. If only, now Mr Lawford would give him a fair chance to show
+himself reading quietly here about ten minutes to one, or shelling peas
+even, if he prefers it. If only he'd stay long enough for THAT. Wouldn't
+it be the very thing for them both!'
+
+'Of course,' said Herbert cordially, 'the very thing.'
+
+Lawford looked up at neither of them. He shook his head.
+
+But he needed little persuasion to stay at least one night. The prospect
+of that long solitary walk, of that tired stupid stooping figure
+dragging itself along the interminable country roads seemed a sheer
+impossibility. 'It is not--it isn't, I swear it--the other that beeps me
+back,' he had solemnly assured the friend that half smiled her relief at
+his acceptance, 'but--if you only knew how empty it's all got now; all
+reason gone even to go on at all.'
+
+'But doesn't it follow? Of course it's empty. And now life is going
+to begin again. I assure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have
+courage--just the will to win on.'
+
+He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room,
+ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung
+with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across
+at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All
+speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again.
+He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table
+without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What
+did it matter what a man looked like--a now familiar but enfeebled and
+deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even
+Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What
+now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this world was
+concerned.
+
+At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in
+unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed
+almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid
+Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint
+trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the
+dark Adventurer, but that--how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and
+faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished
+across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he
+come hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But--was he
+disappointed!
+
+He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying
+almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey,
+hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose
+pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed
+to detect the least hint of any iris. 'It must have been something
+pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,' they
+seemed to be trying to say to him, 'to drag us down to this.'
+
+He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came.
+Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused
+a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to
+pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present
+he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if,
+while kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such
+tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but
+rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice
+who looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old
+charwoman, Mrs Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed painfully
+up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend,
+nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him--Mr Bethany;
+and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and
+fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now he could
+hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circumspectly
+together in the room beneath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
+
+A quiet knocking aroused him in the long, tranquil bedroom; and
+Herbert's head was poked into the room. 'There's a bath behind that door
+over there,' he whispered, `or if you like I'm off for a bathe in the
+Widder. It's a luscious day. Shall I wait? All right,' and the head was
+withdrawn. 'Don't put much on,' came the voice at the panel; 'we'll be
+home again in twenty minutes.'
+
+The green and brightness of the morning must have been prepared for
+overnight by spiders and the dew. Everywhere the gleaming nets were
+hung, and everywhere there rose a tiny splendour from the waterdrops, so
+clear and pure and changeable it seemed with their fire and colour
+they shook a tiny crystal music in the air. Herbert led the way along a
+clayey downward path beneath hazels tossing softly together their twigs
+of nuts, until they came out into a rounded hollow that, mounded with
+thyme, sloped gently down to the green banks of the Widder. The water
+poured like clearest glass beneath a rain of misty sunbeams.
+
+'My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his
+mind's eye when he wrote the "Decameron." There really is something
+almost classic in those pines. And I'd sometimes swear with my eyes just
+out of the water I've seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between those
+beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns have made,
+and missed!'
+
+The water was violently cold. It seemed to Lawford, as it swept up over
+his body, and as he plunged his night-distorted eyes beneath its blazing
+surface, that it was charged with some strange, powerful enchantment to
+wash away in its icy clearness even the memory of the dull and tarnished
+days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that stained bundle of
+inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into a cupboard remoter
+even than Bluebeard's, and lock the door, and drop the quickly-rusting
+key into these living waters!
+
+He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and
+thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But,
+like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate burst
+of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back to
+that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone from
+which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a more
+ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which confronted
+him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken chaps, that
+angular chin.
+
+And even now, beneath the lantern of broad daylight, just as within that
+other face had lurked the undeniable ghost and presence of himself, so
+beneath the sunken features seemed to float, tenuous as smoke, scarcely
+less elusive than a dream, between eye and object, the sinister darkness
+of the face that in those two bouts with fear he had by some strange
+miracle managed to repel.
+
+'Work in,' the chance phrase came back. It had worked in in sober
+earnest; and so far as the living of the next few weeks went, surely it
+might prove an ally without which he simply could not conceive himself
+as struggling on at all.
+
+But as dexterous minds as even restless Sabathier's had him just now in
+safe and kindly keeping. All the quiet October morning Herbert kept him
+talking and stooping over his extraordinary collection of books.
+
+'The point is,' he explained to Lawford, standing amid a positive
+archipelago of precious 'finds,' with his foot hoisted onto a chair and
+a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, 'I honestly detest the mere
+give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don't deny
+Life's there,' he swept his hand towards the open window--'in that
+frantic Tophet we call London; but there's no focus, no point of
+vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled
+medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our
+tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the
+world's nectar is merely honeydew.' He smiled pleasantly into the
+fixed vacancy of his visitor's face. 'That's why I've just gone on,' he
+continued amiably, 'collecting this particular kind of stuff--what you
+might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't
+at least a glimmer of the real thing in it--just Life, seen through
+a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that
+gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint
+of genius in his making.'
+
+'But surely,' said Lawford, trying for the twentieth time to pretend
+to himself that these endless books carried the faintest savour of the
+delight to him which they must, he rather forlornly supposed, shower
+upon Herbert, 'surely genius is a very rare thing!'
+
+'Rare! the world simply swarms with it. But before you can bottle it up
+in a book it's got to be articulate. Just for a single instant imagine
+yourself Falstaff, and if there weren't hundreds of Falstaffs in every
+generation, to be examples of his ungodly life, he'd be as dead as a
+doornail to-morrow--imagine yourself Falstaff, and being so,
+sitting down to write "Henry IV," or "The Merry Wives." It's simply
+preposterous. You wouldn't be such a fool as to waste the time. A mere
+Elizabethan scribbler comes along with a gift of expression and an
+observant eye, lifts the bloated old tippler clean out of life, and
+swims down the ages as the greatest genius the world has ever seen.
+Whereas, surely, though you mustn't let me bore you with all this
+piffle, it's Falstaff is the genius, and W. S. merely a talented
+reporter.
+
+'Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio--they live on their own, as it were. The
+newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it.
+Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever WATCHED tradesmen
+behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You
+jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class
+railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools.
+What the devil are you, my dear chap, but genius itself, with all the
+world brand new upon your shoulders? And who'd have thought it of you
+ten days ago?
+
+'It's simply and solely because we're all, poor wretches, dumb--dumb as
+butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am,
+trickling out this--this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper
+does Sappho. But that's what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich
+everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind
+these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no
+mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts
+and vagabonds--and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print,
+I can tell you. We're all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged
+with the second-hand, and barnacled with respectability until--until the
+touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there's no mistaking it; oh
+no!'
+
+'But what,' said Lawford uneasily, 'what on earth do you mean by the
+touch?'
+
+'I mean when you cease to be a puppet only and sit up in the gallery
+too. When you squeeze through to the other side. When you suffer a kind
+of conversion of the mind; become aware of your senses. When you get a
+living inkling. When you become articulate to yourself. When you SEE.'
+
+'I am awfully stupid,' Lawford murmured, 'but even now I don't really
+follow you a bit. But when, as you say, you do become articulate to
+yourself, what happens then?'
+
+'Why, then,' said Herbert with a shrug almost of despair, 'then
+begins the weary tramp back. One by one drop off the truisms, and the
+Grundyisms, and the pedantries, and all the stillborn claptrap of the
+marketplace sloughs off. Then one can seriously begin to think about
+saving one's soul.'
+
+'Saving one's soul,' groaned Lawford; 'why, I am not even sure of my own
+body yet.' He walked slowly over to the window and with every thought in
+his head as quiet as doves on a sunny wall, stared out into the garden
+of green things growing, leaves fading and falling water. 'I tell you
+what,' he said, turning irresolutely, 'I wonder if you could possibly
+find time to write me out a translation of Sabathier. My French is much
+too hazy to let me really get at the chap. He's gone now; but I really
+should like to know what kind of stuff exactly he has left behind.'
+
+'Oh, Sabathier!' said Herbert, laughing. 'What do you think of that,
+Grisel?' he asked, turning to his sister, who at that moment had looked
+in at the door. 'Here's Mr Lawford asking me to make a translation of
+Sabathier. Lunch, Lawford.'
+
+Lawford sighed. And not until he had slowly descended half the narrow
+uneven stairs that led down to the dining-room did he fully realise the
+guile of a sister that could induce a hopeless bookworm to waste a whole
+morning over the stupidest of companions, simply to keep his tired-out
+mind from rankling, and give his Sabathier a chance to go to roost.
+
+'I think, do you know,' he managed to blurt out at last 'I think I ought
+to be getting home again. The house is empty--and--'
+
+'You shall go this evening,' said Herbert, 'if you really must insist
+on it. But honestly, Lawford, we both think that after what the last few
+days must have been, it is merely common sense to take a rest. How can
+you possibly rest with a dozen empty rooms echoing every thought you
+think? There's nothing more to worry about; you agree to that. Send
+your people a note saying that you are here, safe and sound. Give them a
+chance of lighting a fire, and driving in the fatted calf. Stay on with
+us just the week out.'
+
+Lawford turned from one to the other of the two friendly faces. But what
+was dimly in his mind refused to express itself. 'I think, you know,
+I--' he began falteringly.
+
+'But it's just this thinking that's the deuce--this preposterous habit
+of having continually to make up one's mind. Off with his head, Grisel!
+My sister's going to take you for a picnic; we go every other fine
+afternoon; and you can argue it out with her.'
+
+Once alone again with Grisel, however, Lawford found talking
+unnecessary. Silences seemed to fall between them as quietly and
+restfully as evening flows into night. They walked on slowly through the
+fading woods, and when they had reached the top of the hill that sloped
+down to the dark and foamless Widder they sat down in the honey-scented
+sunshine on a knoll of heather and bracken, and Grisel lighted the
+little spirit-kettle she had brought with her, and busied herself very
+methodically over making tea.
+
+That done, she clasped her hands round her knees, and sat now gossiping,
+now silent, in the pale autumnal beauty. There was a bird wistfully
+twittering in the branches overhead, and ever and again a withered leaf
+would slip circling down from the motionless beech boughs arched in
+their stillness above their heads beneath the thin blue sky.
+
+'Men, you know,' she began again suddenly, starting out of reverie,
+'really are absurdly blind; and just a little bit absurdly kindly
+stupid. How many times have I been at the point of laughing out at my
+brother's delicious naive subtleties. But you do, you will, understand,
+Mr Lawford, that he was, that we are both "doing our best"--to make
+amends?'
+
+
+'I understand--I do indeed--a tenth part of all your kindness.'
+
+'Yes, but that's just it--that horrible word "kindness"! If ever there
+were two utterly self-absorbed people, without a trace, with an absolute
+horror of kindness, it is just my brother and I. It's most of it false
+and most of it useless. We all surely must take what comes in this
+topsy-turvy world. I believe in saying out:--that the more one thinks
+about life the worse it becomes. There are only two kinds of happiness
+in this world--a wooden post's and Prometheus's. And who ever heard
+of any one having the impudence to be kind to Prometheus? As for a
+miserable "medium" like me, not quite a post and leagues and leagues
+from even envying a Prometheus, she's better for the powder without the
+jam. But that's all nothing. What I can't help thinking--and it's not a
+bit giving my brother away, because we both think it--that it was partly
+our thoughtlessness that added at least something to--to the rest. It
+was perfectly absurd. He saw you were ill; he saw--he must have seen
+even in that first Sunday talk--that your nerves were all askew. And
+who doesn't know what "nerves" means nowadays? And yet he deliberately
+chattered. He loves it--just at large, you know, like me. I told him
+before I came out that I intended, if I could, to say all this. And now
+it's said you'll please forgive me for going back to it.'
+
+'Please don't talk about forgiveness. But when you say he chattered, you
+mean about Sabathier, of course. And that, you know, I don't care a fig
+for now. We can settle all that between ourselves--him and me, I mean.
+And now tell me candidly again--Is there any "prey" in my face now?'
+
+She looked up fleetingly into his eyes, leant back her head and laughed.
+'"Prey," there never was a glimpse.'
+
+'And "change"?' Their eyes met again in an infinitely brief, infinitely
+bewildering argument.
+
+'Really, really, scarcely perceptible,' she assured him, 'except, of
+course, how horribly, horribly ill you look. And that only seems to
+prove to me you must be hiding something else. No illusion on earth
+could--could have done that to your face.'
+
+'You think, I know,' he persisted, 'that I must be persuaded and
+cosseted and humoured. Yes, you do; it's my poor old sanity that's
+really in both your minds. Perhaps I am--not absolutely sound. Anyhow.
+I've been watching it in your looks at each other all the time. And I
+can never, never say, never tell you what you have done for me. But you
+see, after all, we did win through; I keep on telling myself that. So
+that now it's purely from the most selfish and practical motives that I
+want you to be perfectly frank with me. I have to go back, you know; and
+some of them, one or two of my friends I mean, are not all on my side.
+Think of me as I was when you came into the room, three centuries ago,
+and you turned and looked, frowning at me in the candle-light; remember
+that and look at me now. What is the difference? Does it shock you? Does
+it make the whole world seem a trick, a sham? Does it simply sour your
+life to think such a thing possible? Oh, the hours I've spent gloating
+on Widderstone's miserable mask of skin and bone, as I was saying to
+your brother only last night, and never knew until they shuffled me that
+the old self too was nothing better than a stifling suffocating mask.'
+
+'But don't you see,' she argued softly, turning her face away a little,
+'you were a stranger then (though I certainly didn't mean to frown). And
+then a little while after we were, well, just human beings, shoulder
+to shoulder, and if friendship does not mean that, I don't know what it
+does mean. And now, you are--well, just you: the you, you know, of three
+centuries ago! And if you mean to ask me whether at any precise moment
+I have been conscious that this you I am now speaking to was not the
+you of last night, or of that dark climb up the hill, why, it is simply
+frantic to think it could ever be necessary to say over and over again,
+No. But if you mean, Have you changed else? All I could answer is, Don't
+we all change as we grow to know one another? What were just features,
+what just dingily represented one, as it were, is forgotten, or rather
+gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is the landscape under
+lightning as it were. But afterwards isn't it surely like the alphabet
+to a child; what was first a queer angular scrawl becomes A, and is
+always ever after A, undistinguished, half-forgotten, yet standing at
+last for goodness knows what real wonderful things--or for just the dry
+bones of soulless words? Is that it?' She stole a sidelong glance into
+his brooding face, leaning her head on her hand.
+
+'Yes, yes,' came the rather dissatisfied reply. 'I do agree; perfectly.
+But then, you see--I told you I was going to talk of nothing but
+myself--what did at first happen to me was something much worse, and, I
+suppose, something quite different from that.'
+
+'And yet, didn't you tell us, that of all your friends not one really
+denied in their hearts your--what they would call, I suppose--your
+IDENTITY; except that poor little offended old lady. And even she, if my
+intuition is worth a penny piece, even she when you go soon and talk to
+her will own that she did know you, and that it was not because you
+were a stranger that she was offended, but because you so ungenerously
+pretended to be one. That was a little mad, now, if you like!'
+
+'Oh yes,' said Lawford, 'I am going to ask her forgiveness. I don't know
+what I didn't vow to take her for a peace-offering if the chance should
+ever come--and the courage--to make my peace with her. But now that the
+chance has come, and I think the courage, it is the desire that's gone.
+I don't seem to care either way. I feel as if I had got past making my
+peace with any one.'
+
+But this time no answer helped him out.
+
+'After all,' he went plodding on, 'there is more than just the mere day
+to day to consider. And one doesn't realise that one's face actually
+IS one's fortune without a shock. And that THAT gone, one is, as
+your brother said, just like a bee come back to the wrong hive. It
+undermines,' he smiled rather bitterly, 'one's views rather. And it
+certainly shifts one's friends. If it hadn't been just for my old'--he
+stopped dead, and again pushed slowly on--'if it hadn't been for our
+old friend, Mr Bethany, I doubt if we should now have had a soul on our
+side. I once read somewhere that wolves always chase the old and weak
+and maimed out of the pack. And after all, what do we do? Where do
+we keep the homeless and the insane? And yet, you know,' he added
+ruminatingly, 'it is not as if mine was ever a particularly lovely or
+lovable face! While as for the poor wretch behind it, well, I really
+cannot see what meaning, or life even, he had before--'
+
+'Before?'
+
+Lawford met bravely the clear whimsical eyes. 'Before, I was
+Sabathiered.'
+
+Grisel laughed outright.
+
+'You think,' he retorted almost bitterly, 'you think I am talking like a
+child.'
+
+'Yes,' she sighed cheerfully, 'I was quite envying you.'
+
+'Well, there I am,' said Lawford inconsequently. 'And now; well, now,
+I suppose, the whole thing's to begin again. I can't help beginning to
+wonder what the meaning of it all is; why one's duty should always seem
+so very stupid a thing. And then, too, what can there be on earth
+that even a buried Sabathier could desire?' He glanced up in a really
+animated perplexity at the still, dark face turned in the evening light
+towards the darkening valley. And perplexity deepened into a disquieted
+frown--like that of a child who is roused suddenly from a daydream by
+the half-forgotten question of a stranger. He turned his eyes almost
+furtively away as if afraid of disturbing her; and for awhile they sat
+in silence... At last he turned again almost shyly. 'I hope some day you
+will let me bring my daughter to see you.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said Grisel eagerly; 'we should both LOVE it, of course.
+Isn't it curious?--I simply KNEW you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!'
+
+'I say "some day,"' said Lawford; 'I know, though, that that some day
+will never come.'
+
+'Wait; just wait,' replied the quiet confident voice, 'that will come
+too. One thing at a time, Mr Lawford. You've won your old self back
+again; you'll win your old love of life back again in a little while;
+never fear. Oh, don't I know that awful Land's End after illness; and
+that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So,
+it's a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.' She busied
+herself over the tea things. 'And, of course,' she added, as if it were
+an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green sunlight as she
+knelt, 'you simply won't think of going back to-night.... Solitude, I
+really do think, solitude just now would be absolute madness. You'll
+write to-day and go, perhaps, to-morrow!'
+
+Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house,
+full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I
+think, do you know, I ought to go to-day.'
+
+'Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all's well. And
+come back here to sleep. If you'd really promise that I'd drive you in.
+I'd love it. There's the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes
+hire for our picnics. Way I? You've no idea how much easier in our minds
+my brother and I would be if you would. And then to-morrow, or at any
+rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your right
+mind. There, that's a bargain too. Now we must hurry.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINETEEN
+
+Herbert himself went down to order the governess cart, and packed them
+in with a rug. And in the dusk Grisel set Lawford down at the corner of
+his road and drove on to an old bookseller's with a commission from her
+brother, promising to return for him in an hour. Dust and a few straws
+lay at rest as if in some abstruse arrangement on the stones of the
+porch just as the last faint whirling gust of sunset had left them. Shut
+lids of sightless indifference seemed to greet the wanderer from the
+curtained windows.
+
+He opened the door and went in. For a moment he stood in the vacant
+hall; then he peeped first into the blind-drawn dining-room, faintly,
+dingily sweet, like an empty wine-bottle. He went softly on a few paces
+and just opening the door looked in on the faintly glittering twilight
+of the drawing-room. But the congealed stump of candle that he had set
+in the corner as a final rancorous challenge to the beaten Shade was
+gone. He slowly and deliberately ascended the stairs, conscious of a
+peculiar sense of ownership of what in even so brief an absence had
+taken on so queer a look of strangeness. It was almost as if he might be
+some lone heir come in the rather mournful dusk to view what melancholy
+fate had unexpectedly bestowed on him.
+
+'Work in'--what on earth else could this chill sense of strangeness
+mean? Would he ever free his memory from that one haphazard, haunting
+hint? And as he stood in the doorway of the big, calm room, which seemed
+even now to be stirring with the restless shadow of these last few
+far-away days; now pacing sullenly to and fro; now sitting hunched-up to
+think; and now lying impotent in a vain, hopeless endeavour only for the
+breath of a moment to forget--he awoke out of reverie to find himself
+smiling at the thought that a changed face was practically at the mercy
+of an incredulous world, whereas a changed heart was no one's deadly
+dull affair but its owner's. The merest breath of pity even stole over
+him for the Sabathier who after all had dared and had needed, perhaps,
+nothing like so arrogant and merciless a coup de grace to realise that
+he had so ignominiously failed.
+
+'But there, that's done!' he exclaimed out loud, not without a tinge of
+regret that theories, however brilliant and bizarre, could never now be
+anything else--that now indeed that the symptoms had gone, the 'malady,'
+for all who had not been actually admitted into the shocked circle,
+was become nothing more than an inanely 'tall' story; stuffing not
+even savoury enough for a goose. How wide exactly, he wondered, would
+Sheila's discreet, shocked circle prove? He stood once more before the
+looking-glass, hearing again Grisel's words in the still green shadow
+of the beech-tree, 'Except of course, horribly, horribly ill.' 'What a
+fool, what a coward she thinks I am!'
+
+There was still nearly an hour to be spent in this great barn of faded
+interests. He lit a candle and descended into the kitchen. A mouse went
+scampering to its hole as he pushed open the door. The memory of that
+ravenous morning meal nauseated him. It was sour and very still here;
+he stood erect; the air smelt faint of earth. In the breakfast-room the
+bookcase still swung open. Late evening mantled the garden; and in
+sheer ennui again he sat down to the table, and turned for a last not
+unfriendly hob-a-nob with his poor old friend Sabathier. He would take
+the thing back. Herbert, of course, was going to translate it for him.
+Now if the patient old Frenchman had stormed Herbert instead--that
+surely would have been something like a coup! Those frenzied books.
+The absurd talk of the man. Herbert was perfectly right--he could have
+entertained fifty old Huguenots without turning a hair. 'I'm such an
+awful stodge.'
+
+He turned the woolly leaves over very slowly. He frowned impatiently,
+and from the end backwards turned them over again. Then he laid the book
+softly down on the table and sat back. He stared with narrowed lids
+into the flame of his quiet friendly candle. Every trace, every shred of
+portrait and memoir were gone. Once more, deliberately, punctiliously,
+he examined page by page the blurred and unfamiliar French--the sooty
+heads, the long, lean noses, the baggy eyes passing like figures in
+a peepshow one by one under his hand--to the last fragmentary and
+dexterously mended leaf. Yes, Sabathier was gone. Quite the old slow
+Lawford smile crept over his face at the discovery. It was a smile a
+little sheepish too, as he thought of Sheila's quiet vigilance.
+
+And the next instant he had looked up sharply, with a sudden peculiar
+shrug, and a kind of cry, like the first thin cry of an awakened child,
+in his mind. Without a moment's hesitation he climbed swiftly upstairs
+again to the big sepulchral bedroom. He pressed with his fingernail the
+tiny spring in the looking-glass. The empty drawer flew open. There were
+finger-marks still in the dust.
+
+Yet, strangely enough, beneath all the clashing thoughts that came
+flocking into his mind as he stood with the empty drawer in his hand,
+was a wounding yet still a little amused pity for his old friend Mr
+Bethany. So far as he himself was concerned the discovery--well, he
+would have plenty of time to consider everything that could possibly now
+concern himself. Anyhow, it could only simplify matters.
+
+He remembered waking to that old wave of sickening horror on the first
+unhappy morning; he remembered the keen yet owlish old face blinking
+its deathless friendliness at him, and the steady pressure of the cold,
+skinny hand. As for Sheila, she had never done anything by halves;
+certainly not when it came to throwing over a friend no longer
+necessary to one's social satisfaction. But she would edge out cleverly,
+magnanimously, triumphantly enough, no doubt, when the day of reckoning
+should come, the day when, her nets wide spread, her bait prepared, he
+must stand up before her outraged circle and positively prove himself
+her lawful husband, perhaps even to the very imprint of his thumb.
+
+'Poor old thing!' he said again; and this time his pity was shared
+almost equally between both witnesses to Mr Bethany's ingenuous little
+document, the loss of which had fallen so softly and pathetically that
+he felt only ashamed of having discovered it so soon.
+
+He shut back the tell-tale drawer, and after trying to collect his
+thoughts in case anything should have been forgotten, he turned with a
+deep trembling sigh to descend the stairs. But on the landing he drew
+back at the sound of voices, and then a footstep. Soon came the sound of
+a key in the lock. He blew out his candle and leant listening over the
+balusters.
+
+'Who's there?' he called quietly.
+
+'Me, sir,' came the feeble reply out of the darkness.
+
+'What is it, Ada? What have you come for?'
+
+'Only, sir, to see that all was safe, and you were in, sir.'
+
+'Yes,' he said. 'All's safe; and I am in. What if I had been out?' It
+was like dropping tiny pebbles into a deep well--so long after came the
+answering feeble splash.
+
+'Then I was to go back, sir.' And a moment after the discreet voice
+floated up with the faintest tinge of effrontery out of the hush. 'Is
+that Dr Ferguson, too sir?'
+
+'No, Ada; and please tell your mistress from me that Dr Ferguson is
+unlikely to call again.' A keen but rather forlorn smile passed over his
+face. 'He's dining with friends no doubt at Holloway. But of course if
+she should want to see him he will see her to-morrow at any hour at Mrs
+Lovat's. And--Ada!'
+
+'Yes, sir?'
+
+'Say that I'm a little better; your mistress will be relieved to hear
+that I'm a little better; still not quite myself say, but, I think, a
+little better.'
+
+'Yes, sir; and I'm sure I'm very glad to hear it,' came fainter still.
+
+'What voice was that I heard just now?'
+
+'Miss Alice's, sir; but she came quite against my wishes, and I hope you
+won't repeat it, sir. She promised if she came that mistress shouldn't
+know. I was only afraid she might disturb you, or--or Dr Ferguson. And
+did you say, sir, that I was to tell mistress that he MIGHT be coming
+back?'
+
+'Ah, that I don't know; so perhaps it would be as well not to mention
+him at all. Is Miss Alice there?'
+
+'I said I would tell her if you were alone. But I hope you'll understand
+that it was only because she begged so. Mistress has gone to St Peter's
+bazaar; and that's how it was.'
+
+'I quite understand. Beckon to her.'
+
+There came a hasty step in the hall and a hurried murmur of explanation.
+Lawford heard her call as she ran up the stairs; and the next moment
+he had Alice's hand in his and they were groping together through the
+gloaming back into the solitude of the empty room again.
+
+'Don't be alarmed, dear,' he heard himself imploring. Just hold tight
+to that clear common sense, and above all you won't tell? It must be our
+secret; a dead, dead secret from every one, even your mother, for just
+a little while; just a mere two days or so--in case. I'm--I'm better,
+dear.'
+
+He fumbled with the little box of matches, dropped one, broke another;
+but at last the candle-flame dipped, brightened, and with the door shut
+and the last pale blueness of dusk at the window Lawford turned and
+looked at his daughter. She stood with eyes wide open, like the eyes
+of a child walking in its sleep; then twisted her fingers more tightly
+within his. 'Oh, dearest, how ill, how ill you look,' she whispered.
+'But there, never mind--never mind. It was all a miserable dream, then;
+it won't, it can't come back? I don't think I could bear its coming
+back. And mother told me such curious things; as if I were a child and
+understood nothing. And even after I knew that you were you--I mean
+before I sat up here in the dark to see you--she said that you were
+gone and would never come back; that a terrible thing had happened--a
+disgrace which we must never speak of; and that all the other was only
+a pretence to keep people from talking. But I did not believe then, and
+how could I believe afterwards?'
+
+'There, never mind now, dear, what she said. It was all meant for the
+best, perhaps. But here I am; and not nearly so ill as I look, Alice;
+and there's nothing more to trouble ourselves about; not even if it
+should be necessary for me to go away for a time. And this is our
+secret, mind; ours only; just a dead secret between you and me.'
+
+They sat for awhile without speaking or stirring. And faintly along the
+hushed road Lawford heard in the silence a leisurely indolent beat of
+little hoofs approaching, and the sound of wheels. A sudden wave of
+feeling swept over him. He took Alice's quiet loving face in his hands
+and kissed her passionately. 'Do not so much as think of me yet, or
+doubt, or question: only love me, dearest. And soon--and soon--'
+
+'We'll just begin again, just begin again, won't we? all three of us
+together, just as we used to be. I didn't mean to have said all those
+horrid things about mother. She was only dreadfully anxious and meant
+everything for the best. You'll let me tell her soon?'
+
+The haggard face turned slowly, listening. 'I hear, I understand, but
+I can't think very clearly now, Alice; I can't, dear; my miserable old
+tangled nerves. I just stumble along as best I can. You'll understand
+better when you get to be a poor old thing like me. We must do the best
+we can. And of course you'll see, Dillie, how awfully important it is
+not to raise false hopes. You understand? I mustn't risk the least thing
+in the world, must I? And now goodbye; only for a few hours now. And not
+a word, not a word to a single living soul.'
+
+He extinguished the candle again, and led the way to the top of the
+stairs. 'Are you there, Ada?'
+
+'Yes, sir,' answered the quiet imperturbable voice from under the black
+straw brim. Alice went slowly down, but at the foot of the stairs,
+looking out into the cold, blue, lamplit street she paused as if at a
+sudden recollection, and ran hastily up again.
+
+'There was nothing more, dear?' She said, leaning back to peer up.
+
+'"Nothing more?" What?'
+
+She stood panting a little in the darkness, listening to some cautious
+yet uneasy thought that seemed to haunt her mind. 'I thought--it seemed
+there was something we had not said, something I could not understand.
+But there, it is nothing! You know what a fanciful old silly I am. You
+do love me? Quite as much as ever?'
+
+'More, sweetheart, more!'
+
+'Good-night again, then; and God bless you, dear.'
+
+The outer door closed softly, the footsteps died away. Lawford still
+hesitated. He took hold of the stairs above his head as he stood on
+the landing and leaned his head upon his hands, striving calmly to
+disentangle the perplexity of his thoughts. His pulses were beating in
+his ear with a low muffled roar. He looked down between the blinds to
+where against the blue of the road beneath the straggling yellow beams
+of the lamp stood the little cart and drooping, shaggy pony, and Grisel
+sitting quietly there awaiting him. He shut his eyes as if in hope by
+some convulsive effort of mind to break through this subtle glasslike
+atmosphere of dream that had stolen over consciousness, and blotted out
+the significance, almost the meaning of the past. He turned abruptly.
+Empty as the empty rooms around him, unanswering were mind and heart.
+Life was a tale told by an idiot--signifying nothing.
+
+He paused at the head of the staircase. And even then the doubt
+confronted him: Would he ever come back? Who knows? he thought; and
+again stood pondering, arguing, denying. At last he seemed to have come
+to a decision. He made his way downstairs, opened and left ajar a long
+narrow window in a passage to the garden beyond the kitchen. He turned
+on his heel as he reached the gate and waved his hand as if in a kind of
+forlorn mockery towards the darkly glittering windows. The drowsy pony
+awoke at touch of the whip.
+
+Grisel lifted the rug and squeezed a little closer into the corner. She
+had drawn a veil over her face, so that to Lawford her eyes seemed to
+be dreaming in a little darkness of their own as he laid his hand on
+the side of the cart. 'It's a most curious thing,' he said, 'but peeping
+down at you just now when the sound of the wheels came, a memory came
+clearly back to me of years and years ago--of my mother. She used to
+come to fetch me at school in a little cart like this, and a little
+pony just like this, with a thick dusty coat. And once I remember I was
+simply sick of everything, a failure, and fagged out, and all that, and
+was looking out in the twilight; I fancy even it was autumn too. It was
+a little side staircase window; I was horribly homesick. And she came
+quite unexpectedly. I shall never forget it--the misery, and then, her
+coming.' He lifted his eyes, cowed with the incessant struggle, and
+watched her face for some time in silence. 'Ought I to stay?'
+
+'I see no "ought,"' she said. 'No one is there?'
+
+'Only a miserable broken voice out of a broken cage--called Conscience.'
+
+'Don't you think, perhaps, that even that has a good many
+disguises--convention, cowardice, weakness, ennui; they all take their
+turn at hooting in its feathers? You must, you really must have rest.
+You don't know; you don't see; I do. Just a little snap, some one last
+exquisite thread gives way, and then it is all over. You see I have even
+to try to frighten you, for I can't tell you how you distress me.'
+
+'Why do I distress you?--my face, my story you mean?'
+
+'No; I mean you: your trouble, that horrible empty house, and--oh, dear
+me, yes, your courage too.'
+
+'Listen,' said Lawford, stooping forward. He could scarcely see the
+pale, veiled face through this mist that had risen up over his eyes.
+'I have no courage apart from you; no courage and no hope. Ask me to
+come!--a stranger with no history, no mockery, no miserable rant of a
+grave and darkness and fear behind me. Are we not all haunted--every
+one? That forgotten, and the fool I was, and the vacillating, and the
+pretence--oh, how it all sweeps clear before me; without a will, without
+a hope or glimpse or whisper of courage. Be just the memory of my
+mother, the face, the friend I've never seen; the voice that every dream
+leaves echoing. Ask me to come.'
+
+She sat unstirring; and then as if by some uncontrollable impulse
+stooped a little closer to him and laid her gloved hand on his.
+
+'I hear, you know; I hear too,' she whispered. 'But we mustn't listen.
+Come now. It's growing late.'
+
+The little village echoed back from its stone walls the clatter of the
+pony's hoofs. Night had darkened to its deepest when their lamp shone
+white on the wicket in the hedge. They had scarcely spoken. Lawford had
+simply watched pass by, almost without a thought, the arching trees, the
+darkening fields; had watched rise up in a mist of primrose light the
+harvest moon to shine in saffron on the faces and shoulders of the few
+wayfarers they met, or who passed them by. The still grave face beneath
+the shadow of its veil had never turned, though the moon poured all her
+flood of brilliance upon the dark profile. And once when as if in sudden
+alarm he had lifted his head and looked at her, a sudden doubt had
+assailed him so instantly that he had half put out his hand to touch
+her, and had as quickly withdrawn it, lest her beauty and stillness
+should be, even as the moment's fancy had suggested, only a far-gone
+memory returned in dream.
+
+Herbert hailed them from the darkness of an open window. He came
+down, and they talked a little in the cold air of the garden. He lit
+a cigarette, and climbed languidly into the cart, and drove the drowsy
+little pony off into the moonlight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY
+
+It was a quiet supper the three friends sat down to. Herbert sat
+narrowing his eyes over his thoughts, which, when the fancy took him, he
+scattered out upon the others' silence. Lawford apparently had not yet
+shaken himself free from the sorcery of the moonlight. His eyes shone
+dark and full like those of a child who has trespassed beyond its hour
+for bed, and sits marvelling at reality in a waking dream.
+
+Long after they had bidden each other good-night, long after Herbert
+had trodden on tiptoe with his candle past his closed door, Lawford
+sat leaning on his arms at the open window, staring out across the
+motionless moonlit trees that seemed to stand like draped and dreaming
+pilgrims, come to the peace of their Nirvana at last beside the crashing
+music of the waters. And he himself, the self that never sleeps beneath
+the tides and waves of consciousness, was listening, too, almost as
+unmovedly and unheedingly to the thoughts that clashed in conflict
+through his brain.
+
+Why, in a strange transitory life was one the slave of these small
+cares? What if even in that dark pit beneath, which seemed to whisper
+Lethe to the tumultuous, swirling waters--what if there, too, were
+merely a beginning again, and to seek a slumbering refuge there merely a
+blind and reiterated plunge into the heat and tumult of another day? Who
+was that poor, dark, homeless ghoul, Sabathier? Who was this Helen of an
+impossible dream? Her face with its strange smile, her eyes with their
+still pity and rapt courage had taken hope away. 'Here's not your rest,'
+cried one insistent voice; 'she is the mystery that haunts day and
+night, past all the changing of the restless hours. Chance has given you
+back eyes to see, a heart that can be broken. Chance and the stirrings
+of a long-gone life have torn down the veil age spins so thick and fast.
+Pride and ambition; what dull fools men are! Effort and duty, what dull
+fools men are!' He listened on and on to these phantom pleadings and to
+the rather coarse old Lawford conscience grunting them mercilessly down,
+too weary even to try to rest.
+
+Rooks at dawn came sweeping beneath the turquoise of the sky. He saw
+their sharp-beaked heads turn this way, that way, as they floated on
+outspread wings across the misty world. Except for the hoarse roar of
+the water under the huge thin-leafed trees, not a sound was stirring.
+'One thing,' he seemed to hear himself mutter as he turned with a shiver
+from the morning air, 'it won't be for long. You can, at least, poor
+devil, wait the last act out.' If in this foolish hustling mob of the
+world, hired anywhere and anywhen for the one poor dubious wage of a
+penny--if it was only his own small dull part to carry a mock spear,
+and shout huzza with the rest--there was nothing for it, he grunted
+obstinately to himself, shout he would with the loudest.
+
+He threw himself on to the bed with eyes so wearied with want of sleep
+it seemed they had lost their livelong skill in finding it. Not the echo
+of triumph nor even a sigh of relief stirred the torpor of his mind. He
+knew vaguely that what had been the misery and madness of the last few
+days was gone. But the thought had no power to move him now. Sheila's
+good sense, and Mr Bethany's stubborn loyalty were alike old stories
+that had lost their savour and meaning. Gone, too, was the need for that
+portentous family gathering that had sat so often in his fancy during
+these last few days around his dining-room table, discussing with futile
+decorum the problem of how to hush him up, to muffle him down. Half
+dreaming, half awake, he saw the familiar door slowly open and, like the
+timely hero in a melodrama, his own figure appear before the stricken
+and astonished company. His eyes opened half-fearfully, and glanced up
+in the morning twilight. Their perplexity gave place to a quiet, almost
+vacant smile; the lids slowly closed again, and at last the lean hands
+twitched awhile in sleep.
+
+Next morning he spent rummaging among the old books, dipping listlessly
+here and there as the tasteless fancy took him, while Herbert sat
+writing with serene face and lifted eyebrows at his open window. But the
+unfamiliar long S's, the close type, and the spelling of the musty old
+books wearied eye and mind. What he read, too, however far-fetched,
+or lively, or sententious, or gross, seemed either to be of the same
+texture as what had become his everyday experience, and so baffled him
+with its nearness, or else was only the meaningless ramblings of an idle
+pen. And this, he thought to himself, looking covertly up at the spruce
+clear-cut profile at the window, this is what Herbert had called Life.
+
+'Am I interrupting you, Herbert; are you very busy?' he asked at last,
+taking refuge on a chair in a far corner of the room.
+
+'Bless me, no; not a bit--not a bit,' said Herbert amiably, laying down
+his pen. 'I'm afraid the old leatherjackets have been boring you. It's
+a habit this beastly reading; this gorge and glint and fever all at
+second-hand--purely a bad habit, like morphia, like laudanum. But once
+in, you know there's no recovery Anyhow, I'm neck-deep, and to struggle
+would be simply to drown.'
+
+'I was only going to say how sorry I am for having left Sabathier at
+home.'
+
+'My dear fellow--' began Herbert reassuringly.
+
+'It was only because I wanted so very much to have your translation. I
+get muddled up with other things groping through the dictionary.'
+
+Herbert surveyed him critically. 'What exactly is your interest now,
+Lawford? You don't mean that my old "theory" has left any sting now?'
+
+'No sting; oh no. I was only curious. But you yourself still think it
+really, don't you?'
+
+Herbert turned for a moment to the open window.
+
+'I was simply trying then to find something to fit the facts as you
+experienced them. But now that the facts have gone--and they have,
+haven't they?--exit, of course, my theory!'
+
+'I see,' was the cryptic answer. 'And yet, Herbert,' Lawford solemnly
+began again, 'it has changed me; even in my way of thinking. When I shut
+my eyes now--I only discovered it by chance--I see immediately faces
+quite strange to me; or places, sometimes thronged with people; and once
+an old well with some one sitting in the shadow. I can't tell you how
+clearly, and yet it is all altogether different from a dream. Even when
+I sit with my eyes open, I am conscious, as it were, of a kind of faint,
+colourless mirage. In the old days--I mean before Widderstone, what
+I saw was only what I'd seen already. Nothing came uncalled for,
+unexplained. This makes the old life seem so blank; I did not know what
+extraordinarily real things I was doing without. And whether for that
+reason or another, I can't quite make out what in fact I did want then,
+and was always fretting and striving for. I can see no wisdom or purpose
+in anything now but to get to one's journey's end as quickly and bravely
+as one can. And even then, even if we do call life a journey, and death
+the inn we shall reach at last in the evening when it's over; that, too,
+I feel will be only as brief a stopping-place as any other inn would
+be. Our experience here is so scanty and shallow--nothing more than the
+moment of the continual present. Surely that must go on, even if one
+does call it eternity. And so we shall all have to begin again. Probably
+Sabathier himself.... But there, what on earth are we, Herbert, when all
+is said? Who is it has--has done all this for us--what kind of self?
+And to what possible end? Is it that the clockwork has been wound up and
+must still jolt on a while with jarring wheels? Will it never run down,
+do you think?'
+
+Herbert smiled faintly, but made no answer.
+
+'You see,' continued Lawford, in the same quiet, dispassionate
+undertone, 'I wouldn't mind if it was only myself. But there are so many
+of us, so many selves, I mean; and they all seem to have a voice in the
+matter. What is the reality to this infernal dream?'
+
+'The reality is, Lawford, that you are fretting your life out over this
+rotten illusion. Be guided by me just this once. We'll go, all three
+of us, a good ten-mile walk to-day, and thoroughly tire you out. And
+to-night you shall sleep here--a really sound, refreshing sleep. Then
+to-morrow, whole and hale, back you shall go; honestly. It's only
+professional strong men should ask questions. Babes like you and me must
+keep to slops.'
+
+So, though Lawford made no answer, it was agreed. Before noon the three
+of them had set out on their walk across the fields. And after rambling
+on just as caprice took them, past reddening blackberry bushes and
+copses of hazel, and flaming beech, they sat down to spread out their
+meal on the slope of a hill, overlooking quiet ploughed fields and
+grazing cattle. Herbert stretched himself with his back to the earth,
+and his placid face to the pale vacant sky, while Lawford, even more
+dispirited after his walk, wandered up to the crest of the hill.
+
+At the foot of the hill, upon the other side, lay a farm and its
+out-buildings, and a pool of water beneath a group of elms. It was
+vacant in the sunlight, and the water vividly green with a scum of weed.
+And about half a mile beyond stood a cluster of cottages and an old
+towered church. He gazed idly down, listening vaguely to the wailing of
+a curlew flitting anxiously to and fro above the broken solitude of
+its green hill. And it seemed as if a thin and dark cloud began to be
+quietly withdrawn from over his eyes. Hill and wailing cry and barn and
+water faded out. And he was staring as if in an endless stillness at an
+open window against which the sun was beating in a bristling torrent of
+gold, while out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird
+singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must
+be perched upon the confines of another world. The light gathered to a
+radiance almost intolerable, driving back with its raining beams some
+memory, forlorn, remorseless, remote. His body stood dark and senseless,
+rocking in the air on the hillside as if bereft of its spirit. Then his
+hands were drawn over his eyes. He turned unsteadily and made his way,
+as if through a thick, drizzling haze, slowly back.
+
+'What is that--there?' he said almost menacingly, standing with
+bloodshot eyes looking down upon Herbert.
+
+'"That!"--what?' said Herbert, glancing up startled from his book. 'Why,
+what's wrong, Lawford?'
+
+'That,' said Lawford sullenly, yet with a faintly mournful cadence in
+his voice; 'those fields and that old empty farm--that village over
+there? Why did you bring me here?'
+
+Grisel had not stirred. 'The village...'
+
+'Ssh!' she said, catching her brother's sleeve; 'that's Detcham, yes,
+Detcham.'
+
+Lawford turned wide vacant eyes on her. He shook his head and shuddered.
+'No, no; not Detcham. I know it; I know it; but it has gone out of my
+mind. Not Detcham; I've been there before; don't look at me. Horrible,
+horrible. It takes me back--I can't think. I stood there, trying,
+trying; it's all in a blur. Don't ask me--a dream.'
+
+Grisel leaned forward and touched his hand. 'Don't think; don't even
+try. Why should you? We can't; we MUSTN'T go back.'
+
+Lawford, still gazing fixedly, turned again a darkened face towards
+the steep of the hill. 'I think, you know,' he said, stooping and
+whispering, 'HE would know--the window and the sun and the singing. And
+oh, of course it was too late. You understand--too late. And once... you
+can't go back; oh no. You won't leave me? You see, if you go, it would
+only be all. I could not be quite so alone. But Detcham--Detcham?
+perhaps you will not trust me--tell me? That was not the name.'
+He shuddered violently and turned dog-like beseeching eyes.
+'To-morrow--yes, to-morrow,' he said, 'I will promise anything if you
+will not leave me now. Once--' But again the thread running so faintly
+through that inextricable maze of memory eluded him. 'So long as you
+won't leave me now!' he implored her.
+
+She was vainly trying to win back her composure, and could not answer
+him at once....
+
+In the evening after supper Grisel sat her guest down in front of a big
+wood fire in the old book-room, where, staring into the playing flames,
+he could fall at peace into the almost motionless reverie which he
+seemed merely to harass and weary himself by trying to disperse. She
+opened the little piano at the far end of the room and played on and
+on as fancy led--Chopin and Beethoven, a fugue from Bach, and lovely
+forlorn old English airs, till the music seemed not only a voice
+persuading, pondering, and lamenting, but gathered about itself the
+hollow surge of the water and the darkness; wistful and clear, as the
+thoughts of a solitary child. Ever and again a log burnt through its
+strength, and falling amid sparks, stirred, like a restless animal, the
+stillness; or Herbert in his corner lifted his head to glance towards
+his visitor, and to turn another page. At last the music, too, fell
+silent, and Lawford stood up with his candle in his hand and eyed with a
+strange fixity brother and sister. His glance wandered slowly round the
+quiet flame-lit room.
+
+'You won't,' he said, stooping towards them as if in extreme confidence,
+'you won't much notice? They come and go. I try not to--to speak. It's
+the only way through. It is not that I don't know they're only dreams.
+But if once the--the others thought there had been any tampering'--he
+tapped his forehead meaningly--'here: if once they thought that, it
+would, you know, be quite over then. How could I prove...?' He turned
+cautiously towards the door, and with laborious significance nodded his
+head at them.
+
+Herbert bent down and held out his long hands to the fire. 'Tampering,
+my dear chap: That's what the lump said to the leaven.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said Lawford, putting out his hand, 'but you know what
+I mean, Herbert. Anything I tried to do then would be quite, quite
+hopeless. That would be poisoning the wells.'
+
+They watched him out of the room, and listened till quite distinctly in
+the still night-shaded house they heard his door gently close. Then, as
+if by consent, they turned and looked long and questioningly into each
+other's faces.
+
+'Then you are not afraid?' Herbert said quietly.
+
+Grisel gazed steadily on, and almost imperceptibly shook her head.
+
+'You mean?' he questioned her; but still he had again to read her answer
+in her eyes.
+
+'Oh, very well, Grisel,' he said quietly, 'you know best,' and returned
+once more to his writing.
+
+For an hour or two Lawford slept heavily, so heavily that when a little
+after midnight he awoke, with his face towards the uncurtained window,
+though for many minutes he lay brightly confronting all Orion, that from
+blazing helm to flaming dog at heel filled high the glimmering square,
+he could not lift or stir his cold and leaden limbs. He rose at last and
+threw off the burden of his bedclothes, and rested awhile, as if freed
+from the heaviness of an unrememberable nightmare. But so clear was his
+mind and so extraordinarily refreshed he seemed in body that sleep for
+many hours would not return again. And he spent almost all the remainder
+of the lagging darkness pacing softly to and fro; one face only before
+his eyes, the one sure thing, the one thing unattainable in a world of
+phantoms.
+
+Herbert waited on in vain for his guest next morning, and after
+wandering up and down the mossy lawn at the back of the house, went off
+cheerfully at last alone for his dip. When he returned Lawford was in
+his place at the breakfast-table. He sat on, moody and constrained,
+until even Herbert's haphazard talk trickled low.
+
+'I fancy my sister is nursing a headache,' he said at last, 'but she'll
+be down soon. And I'm afraid from the looks of you, Lawford, your night
+was not particularly restful.' He felt his way very heedfully. 'Perhaps
+we walked you a little too far yesterday. We are so used to tramping
+that--' Lawford kept thoughtful eyes fixed on the deprecating face.
+
+'I see what it is, Herbert--you are humouring me again. I have
+been wracking my brains in vain to remember what exactly DID happen
+yesterday. I feel as if it was all sunk oceans deep in sleep. I get so
+far--and then I'm done. It won't give up a hint. But you really mustn't
+think I'm an invalid, or--or in my second childhood. The truth is,' he
+added, 'it's only my FIRST, come back again. But now that I've got so
+far, now that I'm really better, I--' He broke off rather vacantly, as
+if afraid of his own confidence. 'I must be getting on,' he summed
+up with an effort, 'and that's the solemn fact. I keep on forgetting
+I'm--I'm a ratepayer!'
+
+Herbert sat round in his chair. 'You see, Lawford, the very term is
+little else than Double-Dutch to me. As a matter of fact Grisel sends
+all my hush-money to the horrible people that do the cleaning up, as
+it were. I can't catch their drift. Government to me is merely the
+spectacle of the clever, or the specious, managing the dull. It deals
+merely with the physical, and just the fringe of consciousness. I am not
+joking. I think I follow you. All I mean is that the obligations--mainly
+tepid, I take it--that are luring you back to the fold would be the
+very ones that would scare me quickest off. The imagination, the appeal
+faded: we're dead.'
+
+Lawford opened his mouth; 'TEMPORARILY tepid,' he at last all but
+coughed out.
+
+'Oh yes, of course,' said Herbert intelligently. 'Only temporarily. It's
+this beastly gregariousness that's the devil. The very thought of it
+undoes me--with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise
+my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals,
+bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of--of infinity.
+And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one
+thinks too much of one's clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out
+of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these
+fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than
+very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too
+deep for their poor reasons. I don't mean that YOUR wanting to go home
+is anything gregarious, but I do think THEIR insisting on your coming
+back at once might be. And I know you won't visit this stuff on me as
+anything more than just my "scum," as Grisel calls the fine flower of my
+maiden meditations. All that I really want to say is that we should both
+be more than delighted if you'd stay just as long as it will not be a
+bore for you to stay. Stay till you're heartily tired of us. Go back
+now, if you MUST; tell them how much better you are. Bolt off to a nerve
+specialist. He'll say complete rest--change of scene, and all that. They
+all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not take your rest here? We
+are such miserably dull company to one another it would be a greater
+pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I mean it from the very
+bottom of my heart. Do!'
+
+Lawford listened. 'I wish--,' he began, and stopped dead again. 'Anyhow,
+I'll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I've been playing truant. It was all
+very well while--To tell you the truth I can't think QUITE straight yet.
+But it won't last for ever. Besides--well, anyhow, I'll go back.'
+
+'Right you are,' said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. 'You can't
+expect, you really can't, everything to come right straight away. Just
+have patience. And now, let's go out and sit in the sun. They've mixed
+September up with May.'
+
+And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find
+his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair.
+
+Grisel had taken her brother's place, with a little pile of needlework
+beside her on the grass, when Lawford again opened his eyes under the
+rosy shade of a parasol. He watched her for a while, without speaking.
+
+'How long have I been asleep?' he said at last.
+
+She started and looked up from her needle.
+
+'That depends on how long you have been awake,' she said, smiling. 'My
+brother tells me,' she went on, beginning to stitch, 'that you have
+made up your mind to leave us to-day. Perhaps we are only flattering
+ourselves it has been a rest. But if it has--is that, do you think,
+quite wise?'
+
+He leant forward and hid his face in his hands. 'It's because--it's
+because it's the only "must" I can see.'
+
+'But even "musts"--well, we have to be sure even of "musts," haven't
+we? Are YOU?' She glanced up and for an instant their eyes met, and the
+falling water seemed to be sounding out of a distance so remote it might
+be but the echo of a dream. She stooped once more over her work.
+
+'Supposing,' he said very slowly, and almost as if speaking to himself,
+'supposing Sabathier--and you know he's merely like a friend now one
+mustn't be seen talking to--supposing he came back; what then?'
+
+'Oh, but Sabathier's gone: he never really came. It was only a fancy--a
+mood. It was only you--another you.'
+
+'Who was that yesterday, then?'
+
+She glanced at him swiftly and knew the question was but a venture.
+
+'Yesterday?'
+
+'Oh, very well,' he said fretfully, 'you too! But if he did, if he did,
+come really back: "prey" and all?'
+
+'What is the riddle?' she said, taking a deep breath and facing him
+brightly.
+
+'Would MY "must" still be HIS?' The face he raised to her, as he leaned
+forward under the direct light of the sun, was so colourless, cadaverous
+and haggard, the thought crossed her mind that it did indeed seem little
+more than a shadowy mask that but one hour of darkness might dispel.
+
+'You said, you know, we did win through. Why then should we be even
+thinking of defeat now?'
+
+'"We"!'
+
+'Oh no, you!' she cried triumphantly.
+
+'You do not answer my question.'
+
+'Nor you mine! It WAS a glorious victory. Is there the ghost of a reason
+why you should cast your mind back? Is there, now?'
+
+'Only,' said Lawford, looking patiently up into her face, 'only because
+I love you': and listened in the silence to the words as one may watch a
+bird that has escaped for ever and irrevocably out of its cage, steadily
+flying on and on till lost to sight.
+
+For an instant the grey eyes faltered. 'But that, surely,' she began
+in a low voice, still steadily sewing, 'that was our compact last
+night--that you should let me help, that you should trust me just as you
+trusted the mother years ago who came in the little cart with the shaggy
+dusty pony to the homesick boy watching at the window. Perhaps,' she
+added, her fingers trembling, 'in this odd shuffle of souls and faces,
+I AM that mother, and most frightfully anxious you should not give in.
+Why, even because of the tiredness, even because the cause seems vain,
+you must still fight on--wouldn't she have said it? Surely there are
+prizes, a daughter, a career, no end! And even they gone--still the self
+undimmed, undaunted, that took its drubbing like a man.'
+
+'I know you know I'm all but crazed; you see this wretched mind all
+littered and broken down; look at me like that, then. Forget even you
+have befriended me and pretended--Why must I blunder on and on like
+this? Oh, Grisel, my friend, my friend, if only you loved me!'
+
+Tears clouded her eyes. She turned vaguely as if for a hiding-place.
+'We can't talk here. How mad the day is. Listen, listen! I do--I do love
+you--mother and woman and friend--from the very moment you came. It's
+all so clear, so clear: that, and your miserable "must," my friend.
+Come, we will go away by ourselves a little, and talk. That way. I'll
+meet you by the gate.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
+
+She came out into the sunlight, and they went through the little gate
+together. She walked quickly, without speaking, over the bridge, past a
+little cottage whose hollyhocks leaned fading above its low flint wall.
+Skirting a field of stubble, she struck into a wood by a path that ran
+steeply up the hillside. And by and by they came to a glen where the
+woodmen of a score of years ago had felled the trees, leaving a green
+hollow of saplings in the midst of their towering neighbours.
+
+'There,' she said, holding out her hand to him, 'now we are alone. Just
+six hours or so--and then the sun will be there,' she pointed to the
+tree-tops to the west, 'and then you will have to go; for good, for
+good--you your way, and I mine. What a tangle--a tangle is this life of
+ours. Could I have dreamt we should ever be talking like this, you and
+I? Friends of an hour. What will you think of me? Does it matter? Don't
+speak. Say nothing--poor face, poor hands. If only there were something
+to look to--to pray to!' She bent over his hand and pressed it to her
+breast. 'What worlds we've seen together, you and I. And then--another
+parting.'
+
+They wandered on a little way, and came back and listened to the first
+few birds that flew up into the higher branches, noonday being past, to
+sing.
+
+They talked, and were silent, and talked again with out question, or
+sadness, or regret, or reproach; she mocking even at themselves, mocking
+at this 'change'--'Why, and yet without it, would you ever even have
+dreamed once a poor fool of a Frenchman went to his restless grave for
+me--for me? Need we understand? Were we told to pry? Who made us
+human must be human too. Why must we take such care, and make such a
+fret--this soul? I know it, I know it; it is all we have--"to save,"
+they say, poor creatures. No, never to SPEND, and so they daren't for a
+solitary instant lift it on the finger from its cage. Well, we have; and
+now, soon, back it must go, back it must go, and try its best to whistle
+the day out. And yet, do you know, perhaps the very freedom does a
+little shake its--its monotony. It's true, you see, they have lived
+a long time; these Worldly Wisefolk they were wise before they were
+swaddled....
+
+'There, and you are hungry?' she asked him, laughing in his eyes. `Of
+course, of course you are--scarcely a mouthful since that first still
+wonderful supper. And you haven't slept a wink, except like a tired-out
+child after its first party, on that old garden chair. I sat and
+watched, and yes, almost hoped you'd never wake in case--in case. Come
+along, see, down there. I can't go home just yet. There's a little old
+inn--we'll go and sit down there--as if we were really trying to be
+romantic! I know the woman quite well; we can talk there--just the day
+out.'
+
+They sat at a little table in the garden of 'The Cherry Trees,' its
+thick green apple branches burdened with ripened fruit. And Grisel tried
+to persuade him to eat and drink, 'for to-morrow we die,' she said,
+her hands trembling, her face as it were veiled with a faint mysterious
+light.
+
+'There are dozens and dozens of old stories, you know,' she said,
+leaning on her elbows, 'dozens and dozens, meaning only us. You must,
+you must eat; look, just an apple. We've got to say good-bye. And
+faintness will double the difficulty.' She lightly touched his hand as
+if to compel him to smile with her. 'There, I'll peel it; and this is
+Eden; and soon it will be the cool of the evening. And then, oh yes, the
+voice will come. What nonsense I am talking. Never mind.'
+
+They sat on in the quiet sunshine, and a spider slid softly through
+the air and with busy claws set to its nets; and those small ghosts the
+robins went whistling restlessly among the heavy boughs.
+
+A child presently came out of the porch of the inn into the garden, and
+stood with its battered doll in its arms, softly watching them awhile.
+But when Grisel smiled and tried to coax her over, she burst out
+laughing and ran in again.
+
+Lawford stooped forward on his chair with a groan. 'You see,' he said,
+'the whole world mocks me. You say "this evening"; need it be, must it
+be this evening? If you only knew how far they have driven me. If you
+only knew what we should only detest each other for saying and
+for listening to. The whole thing's dulled and staled. Who wants
+a changeling? Who wants a painted bird? Who does not loathe the
+converted?--and I'm converted to Sabathier's God. Should we be sitting
+here talking like this if it were not so? I can't, I can't go back.'
+
+She rose and stood with her hand pressed over her mouth, watching him.
+
+'Won't you understand?' he continued. 'I am an outcast--a felon caught
+red-handed, come in the flesh to a hideous and righteous judgment. I
+hear myself saying all these things; and yet, Grisel, I do, I do love
+you with all the dull best I ever had. Not now, then; I don't ask new
+even. I can, I would begin again. God knows my face has changed enough
+even as it is. Think of me as that poor wandering ghost of yours; how
+easily I could hide away--in your memory; and just wait, wait for you.
+In time even this wild futile madness too would fade away. Then I could
+come back. May I try?'
+
+'I can't answer you. I can't reason. Only, still, I do know, talk, put
+off, forget as I may, must is must. Right and wrong, who knows what
+THEY mean, except that one's to be done and one's to be forsworn;
+or--forgive, my friend, the truest thing I ever said--or else we lose
+the savour of both. Oh, then, and I know, too, you'd weary of me. I know
+you, Monsieur Nicholas, better than you can ever know yourself, though
+you have risen from your grave. You follow a dream, no voice or face or
+flesh and blood; and not to do what the one old raven within you cries
+you must, would be in time to hate the very sound of my footsteps. You
+shall go back, poor turncoat, and face the clearness, the utterly more
+difficult, bald, and heartless clearness, as together we faced the dark.
+Life is a little while. And though I have no words to tell what always
+are and must be foolish reasons because they are not reasons at all but
+ghosts of memory, I know in my heart that to face the worst is your only
+hope of peace. Should I have staked so much on your finding that, and
+now throw up the game? Don't let us talk any more. I'll walk half
+the way, perhaps. Perhaps I will walk all the way. I think my brother
+guesses--at least MY madness. I've talked and talked him nearly past his
+patience. And then, when you are quite safely, oh yes, quite safely and
+soundly gone, then I shall go away for a little, so that we can't even
+hear each other speak, except in dreams. Life!--well, I always thought
+it was much too plain a tale to have as dull an ending. And with us the
+powers beyond have played a newer trick, that's all. Another hour, and
+we will go. Till then there's just the solitary walk home and only the
+dull old haunted house that hoards as many ghosts as we ourselves to
+watch our coming.'
+
+Evening began to shine between the trees; they seemed to stand aflame,
+with a melancholy rapture in their uplifted boughs above their fading
+coats. The fields of the garnered harvest shone with a golden stillness,
+awhir with shimmering flocks of starlings. And the old birds that had
+sung in the spring sang now amid the same leaves, grown older too to
+give them harbourage.
+
+Herbert was sitting in his room when they returned, nursing his teacup
+on his knee while he pretended to be reading, with elbow propped on the
+table.
+
+'Here's Nicholas Sabathier, my dear, come to say goodbye awhile,'
+said Grisel. She stood for a moment in her white gown, her face turned
+towards the clear green twilight of the open window. 'I have promised to
+walk part of the way with him. But I think first we must have some tea.
+No; he flatly refuses to be driven. We are going to walk.'
+
+The two friends were left alone, face to face with a rather difficult
+silence, only the least degree of nervousness apparent, so far as
+Herbert was concerned, in that odd aloof sustained air of impersonality
+that had so baffled his companion in their first queer talk together.
+
+'Your sister said just now, Herbert,' blurted Lawford at last. '"Here's
+Nicholas Sabathier come to say good-bye" well, I--what I want you to
+understand is that it is Sabathier, the worst he ever was; but also that
+it is "good-bye."'
+
+Herbert slowly turned. 'I don't quite see why "goodbye," Lawford.
+And--frankly, there is nothing to explain. We have chosen to live such
+a very out-of-the-way life,' he went on, as if following up a train of
+thought.... 'The truth is if one wants to live at all--one's own life,
+I mean--there's no time for many friends. And just steadfastly regarding
+your neighbour's tail as you follow it down into the Nowhere--it's that
+that seems to me the deadliest form of hypnotism. One must simply go
+one's own way, doing one's best to free one's mind of cant--and I dare
+say clearing some excellent stuff out with the rubbish. One consequence
+is that I don't think, however foolhardy it may be to say so, I don't
+think I care a groat for any opinion as human as my own, good or bad. My
+sister's a million times a better woman than I am a man. What possibly
+could there be, then, for me to say?' He turned with a nervous smile.
+'Why should it be good-bye?'
+
+Lawford glanced involuntarily towards the door that stood in shadow
+duskily ajar. 'Well,' he said, 'we have talked, and we think it must
+be that, until, at least,' he smiled faintly, 'I can come as quietly as
+your old ghost you told me of; and in that case it may not be so very
+long to wait.'
+
+Their eyes met fleetingly across the still, listening room. 'The more
+I think of it,' Lawford pushed slowly on, 'the less I understand the
+frantic purposelessness of all that has happened to me. Until I
+went down, as you said, "a godsend of a little Miss Muffet," and the
+inconceivable farce came off, I was fairly happy, fairly contented to
+dance my little wooden dance and wait till the showman should put me
+down into his box again. And now--well, here I am. The whole thing has
+gone by and scarcely left a trace of its visit. Here I am for all my
+friends to swear to; and yet, Herbert, if you'll forgive me troubling
+you with this stuff about myself, not a single belief, or thought, or
+desire remains unchanged. You will remember all that, I hope. It's not,
+of course, the ghost of an apology, only the mere facts.'
+
+Herbert rose and paced slowly across to the window. 'The longer I live,
+Lawford, the more I curse this futile gift of speech. Here am I, wanting
+to tell you, to say out frankly what, if mind could appeal direct to
+mind, would be merely as the wind passing through the leaves of a tree
+with just one--one multitudinous rustle, but which, if I tried to
+put into words--well, daybreak would find us still groping on....' He
+turned; a peculiar wry smile on his face. 'It's a dumb world: but there
+we are. And some day you'll come again.'
+
+'Well,' said Lawford, as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn
+thought into such primitive speech, 'that's where we stand, then.' He
+got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger,
+'Where is your sister?' he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in
+actual answer to his entreaty, they heard the clinking of the cups on
+the little, old, green lacquer tray she was at that moment carrying into
+the room. She sat down on the window seat and put the tray down beside
+her. 'It will be before dark even now,' she said, glancing out at the
+faintly burning skies.
+
+They had trudged on together with almost as deep a sense of physical
+exhaustion as peasants have who have been labouring in the fields since
+daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road
+began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she
+stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside.
+'This--is as far as I can go,' she said. She stooped, and laid her hand
+on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. 'Even now it's wet with
+dew.' She rose again and looked strangely into his face. 'Yes, yes, here
+it is,' she said, 'oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now
+can trouble you again of that. We're both at least past that.'
+
+'Grisel,' he said, 'forgive me, but I can't--I can't go on.'
+
+'Don't think, don't think,' she said, taking his hands, and lifting them
+to her bosom. 'It's only how the day goes; and it has all, my one
+dear, happened scores and scores of times before--mother and child and
+friend--and lovers that are all these too, like us. We mustn't cry out.
+Perhaps it was all before even we could speak--this sorrow came. Take
+all the hope and all the future: and then may come our chance.'
+
+'What's life to me now. You said the desire would come back; that I
+should shake myself free. I could if you would help me. I don't know
+what you are or what your meaning is, only that I love you; care for
+nothing, wish for nothing but to see you and think of you. A flat, dull
+voice keeps saying that I have no right to be telling you all this.
+You will know best. I know I am nothing. I ask nothing. If we love one
+another, what is there else to say?'
+
+'Nothing, nothing to say, except only good-bye. What could you tell
+me that I have not told myself over and over again? Reason's gone.
+Thinking's gone. Now I am only sure.' She smiled shadowily. 'What peace
+did HE find who couldn't, perhaps, like you, face the last good-bye?'
+
+They stood in utter solitude awhile in the evening gloom. The air was
+as still and cold as some grey unfathomable untraversed sea. Above them
+uncountable clouds drifted slowly across space.
+
+'Why do they all keep whispering together?' he said in a low voice, with
+cowering face. 'Oh if you knew, Grisel, how they have hemmed me in; how
+they have come pressing in through the narrow gate I left ajar. Only to
+mock and mislead. It's all dark and unintelligible.'
+
+He touched her hand, peering out of the shadows that seemed to him to be
+gathering between their faces. He drew her closer and touched her lips
+with his fingers. Her beauty seemed to his distorted senses to fill
+earth and sky. This, then, was the presence, the grave and lovely
+overshadowing dream whose surrender made life a torment, and death the
+near fold of an immortal, starry veil. She broke from him with a faint
+cry. And he found himself running and running, just as he had run that
+other night, with death instead of life for inspiration, towards his
+earthly home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
+
+He was utterly wearied, but he walked on for a long while with a dogged
+unglancing pertinacity and without looking behind him. Then he rested
+under the dew-sodden hedgeside and buried his face in his hands. Once,
+indeed, he did turn and grind his way back with hard uplifted face for
+many minutes, but at the meeting with an old woman who in the late dusk
+passed him unheeded on the road, he stopped again, and after standing
+awhile looking down upon the dust, trying to gather up the tangled
+threads of his thoughts, he once more set off homewards.
+
+It was clear, starry, and quite dark when he reached the house. The lamp
+at the roadside obscurely lit its breadth and height. Lamp-light within,
+too, was showing yellow between the Venetian blinds; a cold gas-jet
+gleamed out of the basement window. He seemed bereft now of all desire
+or emotion, simply the passive witness of things external in a calm
+which, though he scarcely realised its cause, was an exquisite solace
+and relief. His senses were intensely sharpened with sleeplessness. The
+faintest sound belled clear and keen on his ear. The thinnest beam of
+light besprinkled his eyes with curious brilliance.
+
+As quietly as some nocturnal creature he ascended the steps to the
+porch, and leaning between stone pilaster and wall, listened intently
+for any rumour of those within.
+
+He heard a clear, rather languid and delicate voice quietly speak on
+until it broke into a little peal of laughter, followed, when it fell
+silent by Sheila's--rapid, rich, and low. The first speaker seemed to be
+standing. Probably, then, his evening visitors had only just come in, or
+were preparing to depart. He inserted his latchkey and gently pushed at
+the cumbersome door. It was locked against him. With not the faintest
+thought of resentment or surprise, he turned back, stooped over the
+balustrade and looked down into the kitchen. Nothing there was visible
+but a narrow strip of the white table, on which lay a black cotton
+glove, and beyond, the glint of a copper pan. What made all these mute
+and inanimate things so coldly hostile?
+
+An extreme, almost nauseous distaste filled him at the thought of
+knocking for admission, of confronting Ada, possibly even Sheila, in the
+cold echoing gloom of the detestable porch; of meeting the first wild,
+almost metallic, flash of recognition. He swept softly down again, and
+paused at the open gate. Once before the voices of the night had called
+him: they would not summon him forever in vain. He raised his eyes again
+towards the window. Who were these visitors met together to drum the
+alien out? He narrowed his lids and smiled up at the vacuous unfriendly
+house. Then wheeling, on a sudden impulse he groped his way down the
+gravel path that led into the garden. As he had left it, the long white
+window was ajar.
+
+With extreme caution he pushed it noiselessly up, and climbed in, and
+stood listening again in the black passage on the other side. When
+he had fully recovered his breath, and the knocking of his heart was
+stilled, he trod on softly, till turning the corner he came in sight
+of the kitchen door. It was now narrowly open, just enough, perhaps, to
+admit a cat; and as he softly approached, looking steadily in, he
+could see Ada sitting at the empty table, beneath the single whistling
+chandelier, in her black dress and black straw hat. She was reading
+apparently; but her back was turned to him and he could not distinguish
+her arm beyond the elbow. Then almost in an instant he discovered, as,
+drawn up and unstirring he gazed on, that she was not reading, but had
+covertly and instantaneously raised her eyes from the print on the table
+beneath, and was transfixedly listening too. He turned his eyes away and
+waited. When again he peered in she had apparently bent once more over
+her magazine, and he stole on.
+
+One by one, with a thin remote exultation in his progress, he mounted
+the kitchen stairs, and with each deliberate and groping step the voices
+above him became more clearly audible. At last, in the darkness of the
+hall, but faintly stirred by the gleam of lamplight from the chink of
+the dining-room door, he stood on the threshold of the drawing-room door
+and could hear with varying distinctness what those friendly voices
+were so absorbedly discussing. His ear seemed as exquisite as some
+contrivance of science, registering passively the least sound, the
+faintest syllable, and like it, in no sense meddling with the thought
+that speech conveyed. He simply stood listening, fixed and motionless,
+like some uncouth statue in the leafy hollow of a garden, stony,
+unspeculating.
+
+'Oh, but you either refuse to believe, Bettie, or you won't understand
+that it's far worse than that.' Sheila seemed to be upbraiding, or at
+least reasoning with, the last speaker. 'Ask Mr Danton--he actually SAW
+him.'
+
+'"Saw him,"' repeated a thick, still voice. 'He stood there, in that
+very doorway, Mrs Lovat, and positively railed at me. He stood there
+and streamed out all the names he could lay his tongue to. I
+wasn't--unfriendly to the poor beggar. When Bethany let me into it
+I thought it was simply--I did indeed, Mrs Lawford--a monstrous
+exaggeration. Flatly, I didn't believe it; shall I say that? But when I
+stood face to face with him, I could have taken my oath that that was no
+more poor old Arthur Lawford than--well, I won't repeat what particular
+word occurred to me. But there,' the corpulent shrug was almost audible,
+'we all know what old Bethany is. A sterling old chap, mind you, so far
+as mere character is concerned; the right man in the right place; but as
+gullible and as soft-hearted as a tom-tit. I've said all this before, I
+know, Mrs Lawford, and been properly snubbed for my pains. But if I
+had been Bethany I'd have sifted the whole story at the beginning,
+the moment he put his foot into the house. Look at that Tichborne
+fellow--went for months and months, just picking up one day what he
+floored old Hawkins--wasn't it?--with the next. But of course,' he added
+gloomily, 'now that's all too late. He's moaned himself into a tolerably
+tight corner. I'd just like to see, though, a British jury comparing
+this claimant with his photograph, 'pon my word I would. Where would he
+be then, do you think?'
+
+'But my dear Mr Danton,' went on the clear, languid voice Lawford had
+heard break so light-heartedly into laughter, 'you don't mean to tell me
+that a woman doesn't know her own husband when she sees him--or, for the
+matter of that, when she doesn't see him? If Tom came home from a ramble
+as handsome as Apollo to-morrow, I'd recognise him at the very first
+blush--literally! He'd go nuzzling off to get his slippers, or complain
+that the lamps had been smoking, or hunt the house down for last week's
+paper. Oh, besides, Tom's Tom--and there's an end of it.'
+
+'That's precisely what I think, Mrs Lovat; one is saturated with one's
+personality, as it were.'
+
+'You see, that's just it! That's just exactly every woman's husband all
+over; he is saturated with his personality. Bravo, Mr Craik!'
+
+'Good Lord,' said Danton softly. 'I don't deny it!'
+
+'But that,' broke in Sheila crisply--'that's just precisely what I asked
+you all to come in for. It's because I know now, apart altogether from
+the mere evidence, that--that he is Arthur. Mind, I don't say I ever
+really doubted. I was only so utterly shocked, I suppose. I positively
+put posers to him; but his memory was perfect in spite of the shock
+which would have killed a--a more sensitive nature.' She had risen, it
+seemed, and was moving with all her splendid impressiveness of silk and
+presence across the general line of vision. But the hall was dark and
+still; her eyes were dimmed with light. Lawford could survey her there
+unmoved.
+
+'Are you there, Ada?' she called discreetly.
+
+'Yes, ma'am,' answered the faint voice from below.
+
+'You have not heard anything--no knock?'
+
+'No, ma'am, no knock.'
+
+'The door is open if you should call.'
+
+'Yes, ma'am.'
+
+'The girl's scared out of her wits,' said Sheila returning to her
+audience. 'I've told you all that miserable Ferguson story--a piece of
+calm, callous presence of mind I should never have dreamed my husband
+capable of. And the curious thing is--at least, it is no longer curious
+in the light of the ghastly facts I am only waiting for Mr Bethany
+to tell you--from the very first she instinctively detested the very
+mention of his name.'
+
+'I believe, you know,' said Mr Craik with some decision, 'that servants
+must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children; they are
+natural, intuitive judges of character.'
+
+'Yes,' said Sheila gravely, 'and it's only through that that I got to
+hear of the--the mysterious friend in the little pony-carriage. Ada's
+magnificently loyal--I will say that.'
+
+'I don't want to suggest anything, Mrs Lawford,' began Mr Craik rather
+hurriedly, 'but wouldn't it perhaps be wiser not to wait for Mr Bethany?
+It is not at all unusual for him to be kept a considerable time in the
+vestry after service, and to-day is the Feast of St Michael's and all
+Angels, you know. Mightn't your husband be--er--coming back, don't you
+think?'
+
+'Craik's right, Mrs Lawford; it's not a bit of good waiting. Bethany
+would stick there till midnight if any old woman's spiritual state could
+keep her going so long. Here we all are, and at any moment we may be
+interrupted. Mind you, I promise nothing--only that there shall be
+no scene. But here I am, and if he does come knocking and ringing and
+lunging out in the disgusting manner he--well, all I ask is permission
+to speak for YOU. 'Pon my soul, to think what you must have gone
+through! It isn't the place for ladies just now--honestly it ain't.'
+
+'Besides, supposing the romantic lady of the pony-carriage has friends?
+Are YOU a pugilist, Mr Craik?'
+
+'I hope I could give some little account of myself, Mrs Lovat; but you
+need have no anxiety about that.'
+
+'There, Mr Danton. So as there is not the least cause for anxiety even
+if poor Arthur SHOULD return to his earthly home, may we share your
+dreadful story at once, Sheila; and then, perhaps, hear Mr Bethany's
+exposition of it when he DOES arrive? We are amply guarded.'
+
+'Honestly, you know, you are a bit of a sceptic, Mrs Lovat,' pleaded
+Danton playfully. 'I've SEEN him.'
+
+'And seeing is disbelieving, I suppose. Now then, Sheila.'
+
+'I don't think there's the least chance of Arthur returning to-night,'
+said Sheila solemnly. 'I am perfectly well aware it's best to be as
+cheerful as one can--and as resolved; but I think, Bettie, when even
+you know the whole horrible secret, you won't think Mr Danton was--was
+horrified for nothing. The ghastly, the awful truth is that my
+husband--there is no other word for it--is--possessed!'
+
+'"Possessed," Sheila! What in the name of all the creeps is that?'
+
+'Well, I dare say Mr Craik will explain it much better than I can. By
+a devil, dear.' The voice was perfectly poised and restrained, and Mr
+Craik did not see fit for the moment to embellish the definition.
+
+Lawford, with an almost wooden immobility, listened on.
+
+'But THE devil, or A devil? Isn't there a distinction?' inquired Mrs
+Lovat.
+
+'It's in the Bible, Bettie, over and over again. It was quite a common
+thing in the Middle Ages; I think I'm right in saying that, am I not,
+Mr Craik?' Mr Craik must have solemnly nodded or abundantly looked
+his unwilling affirmation. 'And what HAS been,' continued Sheila
+temperately, 'I suppose may be again.'
+
+'When the fellow began raving at me the other night,' began Danton
+huskily, as if out of an unfathomable pit of reflection, 'among other
+things he said that I haven't any wish to remember was that I was a
+sceptic. And Bethany said DITTO to it. I don't mind being called a
+sceptic: why, I said myself Mrs Lovat was a sceptic just now! But when
+it comes to "devils," Mrs Lawford--I may be convinced about the other,
+but "devils"! Well, I've been in the City nearly twenty-five years, and
+it's my impression human nature can raise all the devils WE shall
+ever need. And another thing,' he added, as if inspired, and with an
+immensely intelligent blink, 'is it just precisely that word in the
+Revised Version--eh, Craik?'
+
+'I'll certainly look it up, Danton. But I take it that Mrs Lawford is
+not so much insisting on the word, as on the--the manifestation. And
+I'm bound to confess that the Society for Psychical Research, which
+has among its members quite eminent and entirely trustworthy men of
+science--I am bound to admit they have some very curious stories to
+tell. The old idea was, you know, that there are seventy-two princely
+devils, and as many as seven million--er--commoners. It may very well
+sound quaint to our ears, Mrs Lovat; but there it is. But whether
+that has any bearing on--on what you were saying, Danton, I can't say.
+Perhaps Mrs Lawford will throw a little more light on the subject
+when she tells us on what precise facts her--her distressing theory is
+based.'
+
+Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stooping
+forward a little he could, each in turn, scrutinise the little intent
+company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the
+table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing
+for wonders on the brink of the unknown.
+
+'Yes,' Mrs Lovat was saying, 'I quite agree, Mr Craik. Seventy-two
+princes, and no princesses. Oh, these masculine prejudices! But do throw
+a little more modern light on the subject, Sheila.'
+
+'I mean this,' said Sheila firmly. 'When I went in for the last time to
+say good-bye--and of course it was at his own wish that I did leave him;
+and precisely WHY he wished it is now unhappily only too apparent--I had
+brought him some money from the bank--fifty pounds, I think; yes, fifty
+pounds. And quite by the merest chance I glanced down, in passing, at a
+book he had apparently been reading, a book which he seemed very anxious
+to conceal with his hand. Arthur is not a great reader, though I believe
+he studied a little before we were married, and--well, I detest anything
+like subterfuge, and I said it out without thinking, "Why, you're
+reading French, Arthur!" He turned deathly white but made no answer.'
+
+'And can't you even confide to us the title, Sheila?' sighed Mrs Lovat
+reproachfully.
+
+'Wait a minute,' said Sheila; 'you shall make as much fun of the thing
+as you like, Bettie, when I've finished. I don't know why, but that
+peculiar, stealthy look haunted me. "Why French?" I kept asking myself.
+"Why French?" Arthur hasn't opened a French book for years. He doesn't
+even approve of the entente. His argument was that we ought to be
+friends with the Germans because they are more hostile. Never mind. When
+Ada came back the next evening and said he was out, I came the following
+morning--by myself--and knocked. No one answered, and I let myself in.
+His bed had not been slept in. There were candles and matches all over
+the house--one even burnt nearly to the stick on the floor in the corner
+of the drawing-room. I suppose it was foolish, but I was alone, and just
+that, somehow, horrified me. It seemed to point to such a peculiar state
+of mind. I hesitated; what was the use of looking further? Yet something
+seemed to say to me--and it was surely providential--"Go downstairs!"
+And there in the breakfast-room the first thing I saw on the table
+was this book--a dingy, ragged, bleared, patched-up, oh, a horrible,
+a loathsome little book (and I have read bits too here and there);
+and beside it was my own little school dictionary, my own child's 'She
+looked up sharply. 'What was that? Did anybody call?'
+
+'Nobody I heard,' said Danton, staring stonily round.
+
+'It may have been the passing of the wind,' suggested Mr Craik, after a
+pause.
+
+'Peep between the blinds, Mr Craik; it may be poor Mr Bethany
+confronting Pneumonia in the porch.'
+
+'There's no one there, Mrs Lovat,' said the curate, returning softly
+from his errand. 'Please continue your--your narrative, Mrs Lawford.'
+
+'We are panting for the "devil," my dear.'
+
+'Well, I sat down and, very much against my inclination, turned over the
+pages. It was full of the most revolting confessions and trials, so
+far as I could see. In fact, I think the book was merely an amateur
+collection of--of horrors. And the faces, the portraits! Well, then, can
+you imagine my feelings when towards the end of the book about thirty
+pages from the end, I came upon this--gloating up at me from the table
+in my house before my very eyes?'
+
+She cast a rapid glance over her shoulder, and gathering up her silk
+skirt, drew out, from the pocket beneath, the few crumpled pages, and
+passed them without a word to Danton. Lawford kept him plainly in view,
+as, lowering his great face, he slowly stooped, and holding the loose
+leaves with both fat hands between his knees, stared into the portrait.
+Then he truculently lifted his cropped head.
+
+'What did I say?' he said. 'What did I SAY? What did I tell old Bethany
+in this very room? What d'ye think of that, Mrs Lovat, for a portrait of
+Arthur Lawford? What d'ye make of that, Craik--eh? Devil--eh?'
+
+Mrs Lovat glanced with arched eyebrows, and with her finger-tips handed
+the sheets on to her neighbour, who gazed with a settled and mournful
+frown and returned them to Sheila.
+
+She took the pages, folded them and replaced them carefully in her
+pocket. She swept her hands over her skirts, and turned to Danton.
+
+'You agree,' she inquired softly, 'it's like?'
+
+'Like! It's the livin' livid image. The livin' image,' he repeated,
+stretching out his arm, 'as he stood there that very night.'
+
+'What will you say, then,' said Sheila, quietly, 'What will you say if I
+tell you that that man, Nicholas de Sabathier, has been in his grave for
+over a hundred years?'
+
+Danton's little eyes seemed, if anything, to draw back even further
+into his head. 'I'd say, Mrs Lawford, if you'll excuse the word, that
+it might be a damn horrible coincidence--I'd go farther, an almost
+incredible coincidence. But if you want the sober truth, I'd say it was
+nothing more than a crafty, clever, abominable piece of trickery. That's
+what I'd say. Oh, you don't know, Mrs Lovat. When a scamp's a scamp,
+he'll stop at nothing. I could tell you some tales.'
+
+'Ah, but that's not all,' said Sheila, eyeing them steadfastly one by
+one. 'We all of us know that my husband's story was that he had gone
+down to Widderstone--into the churchyard, for his convalescent ramble;
+that story's true. We all know that he said he had had a fit, a heart
+attack, and that a kind of--of stupor had come over him. I believe on my
+honour that's true too. But no one knows but he himself and Mr Bethany
+and I, that it was a wretched broken grave, quite at the bottom of the
+hill, that he chose for his resting place, nor--and I can't get the
+scene out of my head--nor that the name on that one solitary tombstone
+down there was--was...this!'
+
+Danton rolled his eyes. 'I don't begin to follow,' he said stubbornly.
+
+'You don't mean,' said Mr Craik, who had not removed his gaze from
+Sheila's face, 'I am not to take it that you mean, Mrs Lawford, the--the
+other?'
+
+'Yes,' said Sheila, 'HIS'--she patted her skirts--'Sabathier's.'
+
+'You mean,' said Mrs Lovat crisply, 'that the man in the grave is the
+man in the book, and that the man in the book is--is poor Arthur's
+changed face?'
+
+Sheila nodded.
+
+Danton rose cumbrously from his chair, looking beadily down on his three
+friends.
+
+'Oh, but you know, it isn't--it isn't right,' he began. 'Lord! I can see
+him now. Glassy--yes, that's the very word I said--glassy. It won't do,
+Mrs Lawford; on my solemn honour, it won't do. I don't deny it, call it
+what you like; yes, devils, if you like. But what I say as a practical
+man is that it's just rank--that's what it is! Bethany's had too much
+rope. The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all
+very well, but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain. There's
+only one way: we must catch him; we must lay the poor wretch by the
+heels before it's too late. No publicity, God bless me, no. We'd have
+all the rags in London on us. They'd pillory us nine days on end. We'd
+never live it down. No, we must just hush it up--a home or something;
+an asylum. For my part,' he turned like a huge toad, his chin low in his
+collar--'and I'd say the same if it was my own brother, and, after all,
+he is your husband, Mrs Lawford--I'd sooner he was in his grave. It
+takes two to play at that game, that's what I say. To lay himself open!
+I can't stand it--honestly, I can't stand it. And yet,' he jerked his
+chin over the peak of his collar towards the ladies, 'and yet you say
+he's being fetched; comes creeping home, and is fetched at dark by a--a
+lady in a pony-carriage. God bless me! It's rank. What,' he broke out
+violently again, 'what was he doing there in a cemetery after dark? Do
+you think that beastly Frenchman would have played such a trick on Craik
+here? Would he have tried his little game on me? Deviltry be it, if
+you prefer the word, and all deference to you, Mrs Lawford. But I know
+this--a couple of hundred years ago they would have burnt a man at the
+stake for less than a tenth of this. Ask Craik here. I don't know how,
+and I don't know when: his mother, I've always heard say, was a little
+eccentric; but the truth is he's managed by some unholy legerdemain to
+get the thing at his finger's ends; that's what it is. Think of that
+unspeakable book. Left open on the table! Look at his Ferguson game.
+It's our solemn duty to keep him for good and all out of mischief. It
+reflects all round. There's no getting out of it; we're all in it. And
+tar sticks. And then there's poor little Alice to consider, and--and
+you yourself, Mrs. Lawford: I wouldn't give the fellow--friend though
+he was, in a way--it isn't safe to give him five minutes' freedom.
+We've simply got to save you from yourself, Mrs Lawford; that's what it
+is--and from old-fashioned sentiment. And I only wish Bethany was here
+now to dispute it!'
+
+He stirred himself down, as it were, into his clothes, and stood in the
+middle of the hearthrug, gently oscillating, with his hands behind
+his back. But at some faint rumour out of the silent house his posture
+suddenly stiffened, and he lifted a little, with heavy, steady lids, his
+head.
+
+'What is the matter, Danton?' said Mr Craik in a small voice; 'why are
+you listening?'
+
+'I wasn't listening,' said Danton stoutly, 'I was thinking.'
+
+At the same moment, at the creak of a footstep on the kitchen stairs,
+Lawford also had drawn soundlessly back into the darkness of the empty
+drawing-room.
+
+'While Mr Danton is "thinking," Sheila,' Mrs Lovat was softly
+interposing, 'do please listen a moment to me. Do you mean really that
+that Frenchman--the one you've pocketed--is the poor creature in the
+grave?'
+
+'Yes, Mrs Lawford,' said Mr Craik, putting out his face a little, 'are
+we to take it that you mean that?'
+
+'It's the same date, dear, the same name even to the spelling; what
+possibly else can I think?'
+
+'And that the poor creature in the grave actually climbed up out of the
+darkness and--well, what?'
+
+'I know no more than you do NOW, Bettie. But the two faces--you must
+remember you haven't seen my husband SINCE.' You must remember you
+haven't heard the peculiar--the most peculiar things he--Arthur
+himself--has said to me. Things such as a wife... And not in jest,
+Bettie; I assure you....'
+
+'And Mr Bethany?' interpolated Mr Craik modestly, feeling his way.
+
+'Pah, Bethany, Craik! He'd back Old Nick himself if he came with a good
+tale. We've got to act; we've got to settle his hash before he does any
+mischief.'
+
+'Well,' began Mrs Lovat, smiling a little remorsefully beneath the arch
+of her raised eyebrows, 'I sincerely hope you'll all forgive me; but I
+really am, heart and soul, with Old Nick, as Mr Danton seems on intimate
+terms enough to call him. Dead, he is really immensely alluring; and
+alive, I think, awfully--just awfully pitiful and--and pathetic. But if
+I know anything of Arthur he won't be beaten by a Frenchman. As for
+just the portrait, I think, do you know, I almost prefer dark men'--she
+glanced up at the face immediately in front of the clock--'at least,'
+she added softly, 'when they are not looking very vindictive. I suppose
+people are fairly often possessed, Mr Craik? HOW many "deadly sins" are
+there?'
+
+'As a matter of fact, Mrs Lovat, there are seven. But I think in this
+case Mrs Lawford intends to suggest not so much that--that her husband
+is in that condition; habitual sin, you know--grave enough, of course,
+I own--but that he is actually being compelled, even to the extent of a
+more or less complete change of physiognomy, to follow the biddings of
+some atrocious spiritual influence. It is no breach of confidence to
+say that I have myself been present at a death-bed where the struggle
+against what I may call the end was perfectly awful to witness. I
+don't profess to follow all the ramifications of the affair, but though
+possibly Mr Danton may seem a little harsh, such harshness, if I may
+venture to intercede, is not necessarily "vindictive." And--and personal
+security is a consideration.'
+
+'If you only knew the awful fear, the awful uncertainty I have been
+in, Bettie! Oh, it is worse, infinitely worse, than you can possibly
+imagine. I have myself heard the Voice speak out of him--a high, hard,
+nasal voice. I've seen what Mr Danton calls the "glassiness" come into
+his face, and an expression so wild and so appallingly depraved, as
+it were, that I have had to hurry downstairs to hide myself from the
+thought. I'm willing to sacrifice everything for my own husband and for
+Alice; but can it be expected of me to go on harbouring....' Lawford
+listened on in vain for a moment; poor Sheila, it seemed, had all but
+broken down.
+
+'Look here, Mrs Lawford,' began Danton huskily, 'you really mustn't give
+way; you really mustn't. It's awful, unspeakably awful, I admit. But
+here we are; friends, in the midst of friends. And there's absolutely
+nothing--What's that? Eh? Who is it?... Oh, the maid!'
+
+Ada stood in the doorway looking in. 'All I've come to ask, ma'am,' she
+said in a low voice, 'is, am I to stay downstairs any longer? And are
+you aware there's somebody in the house?'
+
+'What's that? What's that you're saying?' broke out the husky voice
+again. 'Control yourself! Speak gently! What's that?'
+
+'Begging your pardon, sir, I'm perfectly under control. And all I say is
+that I can't stay any longer alone downstairs there. There's somebody in
+the house.'
+
+A concentrated hush seemed to have fallen on the little assembly.
+
+'"Somebody"--but who?' said Sheila out of the silence. 'You come up
+here, Ada, with these idle fancies. Who's in the house? There has been
+no knock--no footstep.'
+
+'No knock, no footstep, ma'am, that I've heard. It's Dr Ferguson, ma'am.
+He was here that first night; and he's been here ever since. He was here
+when I came on Tuesday; and he was here last night. And he's here now.
+I can't be deceived by my own feelings. It's not right, it's not
+out-spoken to keep me in the dark like this. And if you have no
+objection, I would like to go home.'
+
+Lawford in his utter weariness had nearly closed the door and now sat
+bent up on a chair, wondering vaguely when this poor play was coming to
+an end, longing with an intensity almost beyond endurance for the keen
+night air, the open sky. But still his ears drank in every tiniest sound
+or stir. He heard Danton's lowered voice muttering his arguments. He
+heard Ada quietly sniffing in the darkness of the hall. And this was his
+world! This was his life's panorama, creaking on at every jolt. This was
+the 'must' Grisel had sent him back to--these poor fools packed
+together in a panic at an old stale tale! Well, they would all come out
+presently, and cluster; and the crested, cackling fellow would lead them
+safely away out of the haunted farmyard.
+
+He started out of his reverie at Danton's voice close at hand.
+
+'Look here, my good girl, we haven't the least intention of keeping you
+in the dark. If you want to leave your mistress like this in the midst
+of her anxieties she says you can go and welcome. But it's not a bit of
+good in the world coming up with these cock-and-bull stories. The truth
+is your master's mad, that's the sober truth of it--hopelessly insane,
+you understand; and we've got to find him. But nothing's to be said,
+d'ye see? It's got to be done without fuss or scandal. But if there's
+any witness wanted, or anything of that kind, why, here you are; and,'
+he dropped his voice to an almost inaudible hoot, 'and well worth your
+while! You did see him, eh? Step into the trap, and all that?'
+
+Ada stood silent a moment. 'I don't know, sir,' she began quietly, 'by
+what right you speak to me about what you call my cock-and-bull stories.
+If the master is mad, all I can say to anybody is I'm very sorry to hear
+it. I came to my mistress, sir, if you please; and I prefer to take my
+orders from one who has a right to give them. Did I understand you to
+say, ma'am, that you wouldn't want me any more this evening?'
+
+Sheila had swept solemnly to the door. 'Mr Danton meant all that he said
+quite kindly, Ada. I can perfectly understand your feelings--perfectly.
+And I'm very much obliged to you for all your kindness to me in very
+trying circumstances. We are all agreed--we are forced to the terrible
+conclusion which--which Mr Danton has just--expressed. And I know I
+can rely on your discretion. Don't stay on a moment if you really are
+afraid. But when you say "some one" Ada, do you mean--some one like you
+or me; or do you mean--the other?'
+
+'I've been sitting in the kitchen, ma'am, unable to move. I'm watched
+everywhere. The other evening I went into the drawing-room--I was alone
+in the house--and... I can't describe it. It wasn't dark; and yet it was
+all still and black, like the ruins after a fire. I don't mean I saw it,
+only that it was like a scene. And then the watching--I am quite aware
+to some it may sound all fancy. But I'm not superstitious, never was.
+I only mean--that I can't sit alone here. I daren't. Else, I'm quite
+myself. So if so be you don't want me any more; if I can't be of any
+further use to you or to--to Mr. Lawford, I'd prefer to go home.'
+
+'Very well, Ada; thank you. You can go out this way.'
+
+The door was unchained and unbolted, and 'Good-night' said. And Sheila
+swept back in sombre pomp to her absorbed friends.
+
+'She's quite a good creature at heart,' she explained frankly, as if to
+disclaim any finesse, 'and almost quixotically loyal. But what really
+did she mean, do you think? She is so obstinate. That maddening "some
+one"! How they do repeat themselves. It can't be my husband; not Dr
+Ferguson, I mean. You don't suppose--oh surely, not "some one" else!'
+Again the dark silence of the house seemed to drift in on the little
+company.
+
+Mr Craik cleared his throat. 'I failed to catch quite all that the maid
+said,' he murmured apologetically; 'but I certainly did gather it was to
+some kind of--of emanation she was referring. And the "ruin," you know.
+I'm not a mystic; and yet do you know, that somehow seemed to me almost
+offensively suggestive of--of demonic influence. You don't suppose,
+Mrs Lawford--and of course I wouldn't for a moment venture on such a
+conjecture unsupported-but even if this restless spirit (let us call
+it) did succeed in making a footing, it might possibly be rather in
+the nature of a lodging than a permanent residence. Moreover we are, I
+think, bound to remember that probably in all spheres of existence like
+attracts like; even the Gadarene episode seems to suggest a possible
+MULTIPLICATION!' he peered largely. 'You don't suppose, Mrs Lawford...?'
+
+'I think Mr Craik doesn't quite relish having to break the news, Sheila
+dear,' explained Mrs Lovat soothingly, 'that perhaps Sabathier's out.
+Which really is quite a heavenly suggestion, for in that case your
+husband would be in, wouldn't he? Just our old stolid Arthur again, you
+know. And next Mr Craik is suggesting, and it certainly does seem rather
+fascinating, that poor Ada's got mixed up with the Frenchman's friends,
+or perhaps, even, with one of the seventy-two Princes Royal. I know
+women can't, or mustn't reason, Mr Danton, but you do, I hope, just
+catch the drift?'
+
+Danton started. 'I wasn't really listening to the girl,' he explained
+nonchalantly, shrugging his black shoulders and pursing up his eyes.
+'Personally, Mrs Lovat, I'd pack the baggage off to-night, box and all.
+But it's not my business.'
+
+'You mustn't be depressed--must he, Mr Craik? After all, my dear man,
+the business, as you call it, is not exactly entailed. But really,
+Sheila, I think it must be getting very late. Mr Bethany won't come now.
+And the dear old thing ought certainly to have his say before we go any
+further; OUGHTN'T he, Mr Danton? So what's the use of worriting poor
+Ada's ghost any longer. And as for poor Arthur--I haven't the faintest
+desire in the world to hear the little cart drive up, simply in case it
+should be to leave your unfortunate husband behind it, Sheila. What
+it must be to be alone all night in this house with a dead and buried
+Frenchman's face--well, I shudder, dear!'
+
+'And yet, Mrs Lovat,' said Mr Craik, with some little show of returning
+bravado, 'as we make our bed, you know.'
+
+'But in this case, you see,' she replied reflectively, 'if all accounts
+are true, Mr Craik, it's manifestly the wicked Frenchman who has made
+the bed, and Sheila who refu---- But look; Mr Danton is fretting to get
+home.'
+
+'If you'll all go to the door,' said Danton, seizing a fleeting
+opportunity to raise his eyebrows more expressively even than if he had
+again shrugged his shoulders at Sheila, 'I'll put out the light.'
+
+The night air flowed into the dark house as Danton hastily groped his
+way out of the dining-room.
+
+'There's only one thing,' said Sheila slowly. 'When I last saw my
+husband, you know, he was, I think, the least bit better. He was always
+stubbornly convinced it would all come right in time. That's why,
+I think, he's been spending his--his evenings away from home. But
+supposing it did?'
+
+'For my part,' said Mrs Lovat, breathing the faint wind that was rising
+out of the west, 'I'd sigh; I'd rub my eyes; I'd thank God for such an
+exciting dream; and I'd turn comfortably over and go to sleep again. I'm
+all for Arthur--absolutely--back against the wall.'
+
+'For my part,' said Danton, looming in the dusk, 'friend or no friend,
+I'd cut the--I'd cut him dead. But don't fret, Mrs Lawford, devil or no
+devil, he's gone for good.'
+
+'And for my part--' began Mr Craik; but the door at that moment slammed.
+
+Voices, however, broke out almost immediately in the porch. And after
+a hurried consultation, Lawford in his stagnant retreat heard the door
+softly reopen, and the striking of a match. And Mr Craik, followed
+closely by Danton's great body, stole circumspectly across his dim
+chink, and the first adventurer went stumbling down the kitchen
+staircase.
+
+'I suppose,' muttered Lawford, turning his head in the darkness, 'they
+have come back to put out the kitchen gas.'
+
+Danton began a busy tuneless whistle between his teeth.
+
+'Coming, Craik?' he called thickly, after a long pause.
+
+Apparently no answer had been returned to his inquiry: he waited a
+little longer, with legs apart, and eyeballs enveloped in brooding
+darkness. 'I'll just go and tell the ladies you're coming,' he suddenly
+bawled down the hollow. 'Do you hear, Craik? They're alone, you know.'
+And with that he resolutely wheeled and rapidly made his way down
+the steps into the garden. Some few moments afterwards Mr Craik shook
+himself free of the basement, hastened at a spirited trot to rejoin his
+companions, and in his absence of mind omitted to shut the front door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
+
+Lawford sat on in the darkness, and now one sentence and now another of
+their talk would repeat itself in his memory, in much the same way as
+one listlessly turns over an antiquated diary, to read here and there a
+flattened and almost meaningless sentiment. Sometimes a footstep passed
+echoing along the path under the trees, then his thoughts would leave
+him, and he would listen and listen till it had died quite out. It was
+all so very far away. And they too--these talkers--so very far away; as
+remote and yet as clear as the characters in a play when they have made
+their final bow, and have left the curtained stage, and one is standing
+uncompanioned and nearly the last of the spectators, and the lights that
+have summoned back reality again are being extinguished. It was only by
+painful effort of mind that he kept recalling himself to himself--why he
+was here; what it all meant; that this was indeed actuality.
+
+Yet, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was
+little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.
+He glanced around him in the clear, black, stirless air. Here and there,
+it seemed, a humped or spindled form held against all comers its passive
+place. Here and there a tiny faintness of light played. Night after
+night these chairs and tables kept their blank vigil. Why, he thought,
+pleased as an overtired child with the fancy, in a sense they were
+always alone, shut up in a kind of senselessness--just like us all. But
+what--what, he had suddenly risen from his chair to ask himself--what
+on earth are they alone with? No precise answer had been forthcoming to
+that question. But as in turning in the doorway, he looked out into
+the night, flashing here and there in dark spaces of the sky above
+the withering apple leaves--the long dark wall and quiet untrodden
+road--with the tumultuous beating of the stars--one thing at least he
+was conscious of having learned in these last few days: he knew what
+kind of a place he was alone IN.
+
+It seemed to weave a spell over him, to call up a nostalgia he had lost
+all remembrance of since childhood. And that queer homesickness, at
+any rate, was all Sabathier's doing, he thought, smiling in his rather
+careworn fashion. Sabathier! It was this mystery, bereft now of all
+fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and
+yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were
+only really appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over
+into the grave.
+
+Just with one's lantern lit, on the edge of the whispering unknown, and
+a reiterated going back out of the solitude into the light and warmth,
+to the voices and glancing of eyes, to say good-bye:--that after all was
+this life on earth for those who watched as well as acted. What if one's
+earthly home were empty?--still the restless fretted traveller must
+tarry; 'for the horrible worst of it is, my friend,' he said, as if to
+some silent companion listening behind him, 'the worst of it is, YOUR
+way was just simply, solely suicide.' What was it Herbert had called
+it? Yes, a cul-de-sac--black, lofty, immensely still and old and
+picturesque, but none the less merely a contemptible cul-de-sac; no
+abiding place, scarcely even sufficing with its flagstones for a groan
+from the fugitive and deluded refugee. There was no peace for the
+wicked. The question of course then came in--Was there any peace
+anywhere, for anybody?
+
+He smiled at a sudden odd remembrance of a quiet, sardonic old aunt
+whom he used to stay with as a child. 'Children should be seen and not
+heard,' she would say, peering at him over his favourite pudding.
+
+His eyes rested vacantly on the darkling street. He fell again into
+reverie, gigantically brooded over by shapes only imagination dimly
+conceived of: the remote alleys of his mind astir with a shadowy and
+ceaseless traffic which it wasn't at least THIS life's business to
+hearken after, or regard. And as he stood there in a mysteriously
+thronging peaceful solitude such as he had never known before, faintly
+out of the silence broke the sound of approaching hoofs. His heart
+seemed to gather itself close; a momentary blindness veiled his eyes, so
+wildly had his blood surged up into cheek and brain. He remained, caught
+up, with head slightly inclined, listening, as, with an interminable
+tardiness, measureless anguished hope died down into nothing in his
+mind.
+
+Cold and heavy, his heart began to beat again, as if to catch up those
+laggard moments. He turned with an infinite revulsion of feeling to look
+out on the lamps of the old fly that had drawn up at his gate.
+
+He watched incuriously a little old lady rather arduously alight, pause,
+and look up at his darkened windows, and after a momentary hesitation,
+and a word over her shoulder to the cabman, stoop and fumble at the iron
+latch. He watched her with a kind of wondering aversion, still scarcely
+tinged with curiosity. She had succeeded in lifting the latch and in
+pushing her way through, and was even now steadily advancing towards
+him along the tiled path. And a minute after he recognised with the
+strangest reactions the quiet old figure that had shared a sunset with
+him ages and ages ago--his mother's old schoolfellow, Miss Sinnet.
+
+He was already ransacking the still faintly-perfumed dining-room for
+matches, and had just succeeded in relighting the still-warm lamp, when
+he heard her quiet step in the porch, even felt her peering in, in the
+gloom, with all her years' trickling customariness behind her, a little
+dubious of knocking on a wide-open door.
+
+But the lamp lit Lawford went out again and welcomed his visitor. 'I am
+alone,' he was explaining gravely, 'my wife's away and the whole house
+topsy-turvy. How very, very kind of you!'
+
+The old lady was breathing a little heavily after her ascent of the
+steep steps, and seemed not to have noticed his outstretched hand. None
+the less she followed him in, and when she was well advanced into the
+lighted room, she sighed deeply, raised her veil over the front of her
+bonnet, and leisurely took out her spectacles.
+
+'I suppose,' she was explaining in a little quiet voice, 'you ARE Mr
+Arthur Lawford, but as I did not catch sight of a light in any of the
+windows I began to fear that the cabman might have set me down at the
+wrong house.'
+
+She raised her head, and first through, and then over her spectacles she
+deliberately and steadfastly regarded him.
+
+'Yes,' she said to herself, and turned, not as it seemed entirely with
+satisfaction, to look for a chair. He wheeled the most comfortable up to
+the table.
+
+'I have been visiting my old friend Miss Tucker--Rev W. Tucker's
+daughter--she, I knew, could give me your address; and sure enough she
+did. Your road, d'ye see, was on my way home. And I determined, in spite
+of the hour, just to inquire. You must understand, Mr Lawford, there
+was something that I rather particularly wanted to say to you. But
+there!--you're looking sadly, sadly ill; and,' she glanced round a
+little inquisitively, 'I think my story had better wait for a more
+convenient occasion.'
+
+'Not at all, Miss Sinnet; please not,' Lawford assured her, 'really. I
+have been ill, but I'm now practically quite myself again. My wife and
+daughter have gone away for a few days; and I follow to-morrow, so if
+you'll forgive such a very poor welcome, it may be my--my only chance.
+Do please let me hear.'
+
+The old lady leant back in her chair, placed her hands on its arms and
+softly panted, while out of the rather broad serenity of her face she
+sat blinking up at her companion as if after a long talk, instead of
+at the beginning of one. 'No,' she repeated reflectively, 'I don't like
+your looks at all; yet here we are, enjoying beautiful autumn weather,
+Mr Lawford, why not make use of it?'
+
+'Oh yes,' said Lawford, 'I do. I have been making tremendous use of it.'
+
+Her eyelid flickered at his candid glance. 'And does your business
+permit of much walking?'
+
+'Well, I've been malingering these last few days idling at home; but I
+am usually more or less my own man, Miss Sinnet. I walk a little.'
+
+'H'm, but not much in my direction, Mr Lawford?' she quizzed him.
+
+'All horrible indolence, Miss Sinnet. But I often--often think of you;
+and especially just lately.'
+
+'Well, now,' she wriggled round her head to get a better view of him
+rather stiffly seated on his chair, 'that's very peculiar; because I too
+have been thinking lately a great deal of you. And yet--I fancy I
+shall succeed in mystifying you presently--not precisely of you, but of
+somebody else!'
+
+'You do mystify me--"somebody else"!' he replied gallantly. 'And that is
+the story, I suppose?'
+
+'That's the story,' repeated Miss Sinnet with some little triumph. 'Now,
+let me see; it was on Saturday last--yes, Saturday evening; a wonderful
+sunset; Bewley Heath.'
+
+'Oh yes; my daughter's favourite walk.'
+
+'And your daughter's age now?'
+
+'She's nearly sixteen; Alice, you know.'
+
+'Ah, yes, Alice; to be sure. It is a beautiful walk, and if fine, I
+generally take mine there too. It's near; there's shade; it's very
+little frequented; and I can wander and muse undisturbed. And that
+I think is pretty well all that an old woman like me is fit for, Mr
+Lawford. "Nearly sixteen!" Is it possible? Dear, dear me? But let me get
+on. On my way home from the Heath, you may be aware, before one reaches
+the road again, there's a somewhat steep ascent. I haven't the strength
+I had, and whether I'm fatigued or not, I have always made it a rule to
+rest awhile on a most convenient little seat at the summit, admire the
+view--what I can see of it--and then make my way quietly, quietly home.
+On Saturday, however, and it most rarely occurs--once, I remember, when
+a very civil nursemaid was sitting with two charmingly behaved little
+children in the sunshine, and I heard they were my old friend Major
+Loder's son's children--on Saturday, as I was saying, my own particular
+little haunt was already occupied.' She glanced back at him from out of
+her thoughts, as it were. 'By a gentleman. I say, gentleman; though I
+must confess that his conduct--perhaps, too, a little something even in
+his appearance, somewhat belied the term. Anyhow, gentleman let us call
+him.'
+
+Lawford, all attention, nodded, and encouragingly smiled.
+
+'I'm not one of those tiresome, suspicious people, Mr Lawford, who
+distrust strangers. I have never been molested, and I have enjoyed many
+and many a most interesting, and sometimes instructive, talk with an
+individual whom I've never seen in my life before, and this side of the
+grave perhaps, am never likely to see again.' She lifted her head with
+pursed lips, and gravely yet still flickeringly regarded him once more.
+'Well, I made some trifling remark--the weather, the view, what-not,'
+she explained with a little jerk of her shoulder--'and to my extreme
+astonishment he turned and addressed me by name--Miss Sinnet.
+Unmistakably--Sinnet. Now, perhaps, and very rightly, you won't
+considered THAT a very peculiar thing to do? But you will recollect, Mr
+Lawford, that I had been sitting there a considerable time. Surely, now,
+if you had recognised my face you would have addressed me at once?'
+
+'Was he, do you think, Miss Sinnet, a little uncertain, perhaps?'
+
+'Never mind, never mind; let me get on with my story first. The next
+thing my gentleman does is more mysterious still. His whole manner was
+a little peculiar, perhaps--a certain restlessness, what, in fact, one
+might be almost tempted to call a certain furtiveness of behaviour.
+Never mind. What he does next is to ask me a riddle! Perhaps you won't
+think that was peculiar either?'
+
+'What was the riddle?' smiled Lawford.
+
+'Why, to be sure, to guess his name! Simply guided, so I surmised,
+by some very faint resemblance in his face to his MOTHER, who was,
+he assured me, an old schoolfellow of mine at BRIGHTON. I thought
+and thought. I confess the adventure was beginning to be a little
+perplexing. But of course, very, very few of my old schoolfellows remain
+distinctly in my memory now; and I fear that grows more treacherous the
+longer I live. Their faces as girls are clear enough. But later in life
+most of them drifted out of sight--many, alas, are dead; and, well, at
+last I narrowed my man down to one. And who now, do you suppose that
+was?'
+
+Lawford sustained an expression of abysmal mystification. 'Do tell
+me--who?'
+
+'Your own poor dear mother, Mr Lawford.'
+
+'HE said so?'
+
+'No, no,' said the old lady, with some vexation, closing her eyes. 'I
+said so. He asked me to guess. And I guessed Mary Lawford; now do you
+see?'
+
+`Yes, yes. But WAS he like her, Miss Sinnet? That was really very, very
+extraordinary. Did you see any likeness in his face?'
+
+Miss Sinnet very deliberately took her spectacles out of their case
+again. 'Now, see here, sir; this is being practical, isn't it? I'm just
+going to take a leisurely glance at yours. But you mustn't let me forget
+the time. You must look after the time for me.'
+
+'It's about a quarter to ten,' said Lawford, having glanced first at the
+stopped clock on the chimney-piece and then at his watch. He then sat
+quite still and endeavoured to sit at ease, while the old lady lifted
+her bonneted head and ever so gravely and benignly surveyed him.
+
+'H'm,' she said at last. 'There's no mistaking YOU. It's Mary's chin,
+and Mary's brow--with just a little something, perhaps, of her dreamy
+eye. But you haven't all her looks, Mr Lawford, by any manner of means.
+She was a very beautiful girl, and so vivacious, so fanciful--it was, I
+suppose the foreign strain showing itself. Even marriage did not quite
+succeed in spoiling her.'
+
+'The foreign strain?' Lawford glanced with a kind of fleeting fixity at
+the quiet old figure. 'The foreign strain?'
+
+Your mother's maiden name, my dear Mr Lawford, surely memory does not
+deceive me in that, was van der Gucht. THAT, I believe, is a foreign
+name.'
+
+'Ah, yes,' said Lawford, his rising thoughts sinking quietly to rest
+again. 'Van der Gucht, of course. I--how stupid of me!'
+
+'As a matter of fact, your mother was very proud of her Dutch blood. But
+there,' she flung out little fin-like sleeves, 'if you don't let me keep
+to my story I shall go back as uneasy as I came. And you didn't,' she
+added even more fretfully, 'you didn't tell me the time.'
+
+Lawford stared at his watch again for some few moments without replying.
+'It's a few minutes to ten,' he said at last.
+
+'Dear me! And I'm keeping the cabman! I mast hurry on. Well, now, I put
+it to you; you shall be my father confessor--though I detest the idea in
+real life--was I wrong? Was I justified in professing to the poor fellow
+that I detected a likeness when there was extremely little likeness
+there?'
+
+'What! None at all!' cried Lawford; 'not the faintest trace?'
+
+'My dear good Mr Lawford,' she expostulated, patting her lap, 'there's
+very little more than a trace of my dear beautiful Mary in YOU, her
+own son. How could there be--how could you expect it in him, a complete
+stranger? No, it was nothing but my own foolish kindliness. It might
+have been Mary's son for all that I could recollect. I haven't for
+years, please remember, had the pleasure of receiving a visit from
+YOU. I am firmly of opinionthat I was justified. My motive was entirely
+benevolent. And then--to my positive amazement--well, I won't say hard
+things of the absent; but he suddenly turns round on me with a "Thank
+you, Miss Bennett." Bennett, hark ye! Perhaps you won't agree that I had
+any justification in being vexed and--and affronted at THAT.'
+
+'I think, Miss Sinnet,' said Lawford solemnly, 'that you were perfectly
+justified. Oh, perfectly. I wonder even you had the patience to give
+the real Arthur Lawford a chance to ask your forgiveness for--or the
+stranger.'
+
+'Well, candidly,' said Miss Sinnett severely. 'I was very much
+scandalised; and I shouldn't be here now telling you my story if it
+hadn't been for your mother.'
+
+'My mother!'
+
+The old lady rather grimly enjoyed his confusion. 'Yes, Mr Lawford,
+your mother. I don't know why--something in his manner, something in
+his face--so dejected, so unhappy, so--if it is not uncharitablnesse to
+say it--so wild: it has haunted me: I haven't been able to put the
+matter out of my mind. I have lain awake in my bed thinking of him. Why
+did he speak to me, I keep asking myself. Why did he play me so very
+aimless a trick? How had he learned my name? Why was he sitting there so
+solitary and so dejected? And worse even than that, what has become of
+him? A little more patience, a little more charity, perhaps--what might
+I not have done for him? The whole thing has harassed and distressed me
+more than I can say. Would you believe it, I have actually twice, and on
+one occasion, three times in a day made my way to the seat--hoping to
+see him there. And I am not so young as I was. And then, as I say, to
+crown all, I had a most remarkable dream about your mother. But that's
+my own affair. Elderly people like me are used--well, perhaps I won't
+say used--we're not surprised or disturbed by visits from those who have
+gone before. We live, in a sense, among the tombs; though I would not
+have you fancy it's in any way a morbid or unhappy life to lead. We
+don't talk about it--certainly not to young people. Let them enjoy their
+Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the
+Tree yet, Mr Lawford.'
+
+She leant forward and whispered it with a big, simple smile:--'We don't
+even discuss it much among ourselves. But as one gets nearer and nearer
+to the wicket-gate there's other company around one than you'll find
+in--in the directory. And that is why I have just come on here tonight.
+Very probably my errand may seem to have no meaning for you. You look
+ill, but you don't appear to be in any great trouble or adversity, as I
+feared in my--well, there--as I feared you might be. I must say, though,
+it seems a terribly empty house. And no lights, too!'
+
+She slowly, with a little trembling nodding of her bonnet, turned
+her head and glanced quietly, fixedly, and unflinchingly, out of the
+half-open door. 'But that's not my affair.' And again she looked at him
+for a little while.
+
+Then she stooped forward and touched him kindly and trustingly on the
+knee. 'Trouble or no trouble,' she said, 'it's never too late to remind
+a man of his mother. And I'm sure, Mr Lawford, I'm very glad to hear you
+are struggling up out of your illness again. We must keep a brave heart,
+forty or seventy, whichever we may be: "While the evil days come not nor
+the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them,"
+though they have not come to me even yet; and I trust from the bottom of
+my heart, not to YOU.'
+
+She looked at him without a trace of emotion or constraint in her
+large, quiet face, and their eyes met for a moment in that brief, fixed,
+baffling fashion that seems to prove that mankind is after all but a
+dumb masked creature saddled with the vain illusion of speech.
+
+'And now that I've eased my conscience,' said the old lady, pulling
+down her veil, 'I must beg pardon for intruding at such an hour of the
+evening. And may I have your arm down those dreadful steps? Really, Mr
+Lawford, judging from the houses they erect for us, the builders must
+have a very peculiar notion of mankind. Is the fly still there? I
+expressly told the man to wait, and what I am going to do if--!'
+
+'He's there,' Lawford reassured her, craning his neck in their slow
+progress to catch a peep into the quiet road. And like a flock of birds
+scared by a chance comer at their feeding in some deserted field, a
+whirring cloud of memories swept softly up in his mind--memories whose
+import he made no effort to discover. None the less, the leisurely
+descent became in their company something of a real experience even in
+such a brimming week.
+
+'I hope, some day, you will really tell me your dream?' he said, pushing
+the old lady's silk skirts in after her as she slowly climbed into the
+carriage.
+
+'Ah, my dear Lawford, when you are my age,' she called back to him,
+groping her way into the rather musty gloom, 'you'll dream such dreams
+for yourself. Life's not what's just the fashion. And there are queerer
+things to be seen and heard just quietly in one's solitude than this
+busy life gives us time to discover. But as for my mystifying Bewley
+acquaintance--I confess I cannot make head or tail of him.'
+
+'Was he,' said Lawford rather vaguely, looking up into the dim white
+face that with its plumes filled nearly the whole carriage window, 'was
+his face very unpleasing?'
+
+She raised a gloved hand. 'It has haunted me, haunted me, Mr Lawford;
+its--its conflict! Poor fellow; I hope, I do hope, he faced his trouble
+out. But I shall never see him again.'
+
+He squeezed the trembling, kindly old hand. 'I bet, Miss Sinnet,' he
+said earnestly, 'even your having thought kindly of the poor beggar
+eased his mind--whoever he may have been. I assure you, assure you of
+that.'
+
+'Ay, but I did more than THINK,' replied the old lady with a chuckle
+that might have seemed even a little derisive if it had not been so
+profoundly magnanimous.
+
+He watched the old black fly roll slowly off, and still smiling at Miss
+Sinnet's inscrutable finesse went back into the house. 'And now, my
+friend,' he said, addressing peacefully the thronging darkness, 'the
+time's nearly up for me to go too.'
+
+He had made up his mind. Or, rather, it seemed as if in the unregarded
+silences of this last long talk his mind had made up itself. Only among
+impossibilities had he the shadow of a choice. In this old haunted
+house, amid this shallow turmoil no practicable clue could show itself
+of a way out. He would go away for a while.
+
+He left the door ajar behind him for the moments still left, and
+stood for a while thinking. Then, lamp in hand, he descended into the
+breakfast-room for pen, ink, and paper. He sat for some time in that
+underground calm, nibbling his pen like a harassed and self-conscious
+schoolboy. At last he began:
+
+'MY DEAR SHEILA,--I must tell you, to begin with, that the CHANGE has
+now all passed away. I am--as near as man can be--completely myself
+again. And next: that I overheard all that was said to-night in the
+dining-room.
+
+'I'm sorry for listening; but it's no good going over all that now. Here
+I am, and, as you said, for Alice's sake we must make the best of it. I
+am going away for a while, to get, if I can, a chance to quiet down. I
+suppose every one comes sooner or later to a time in life when there
+is nothing else to be done but just shut one's eyes and blunder on. And
+that's all I can do now--blunder on....'
+
+He paused, and suddenly, at the echo of the words in his mind, a
+revulsion of feeling--shame and hatred of himself surged up, and he
+tore his letter into tiny pieces. Once more he began, 'my dear Sheila,'
+dropped his pen, sat on for a long time, cold and inert, harbouring
+almost unendurably a pitiful, hopeless longing.... He would write to
+Grisel another day.
+
+He leant back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his eyelids. And
+clearer than those which myriad-hued reality can ever present, pictures
+of the imagination swam up before his eyes. It seemed, indeed, that even
+now some ghost, some revenant of himself was sitting there, in the old
+green churchyard, roofed only with a thousand thousand stars. The breath
+of darkness stirred softly on his cheek. Some little scampering shape
+slipped by. A bird on high cried weirdly, solemnly, over the globe. He
+shuddered faintly, and looked out again into the small lamplit room.
+
+Here, too, was quite as inexplicable a coming and going. A fly was
+walking on the table beneath his eyes, with the uneasy gait of one that
+has outlived his hour and most of his companions. Mice were scampering
+and shrieking in the empty kitchen. And all about him, in the viewless
+air, the phantoms of another life passed by, unmindful of his motionless
+body. He fell into a lethargy of the senses, and only gradually became
+aware after a while of the strange long-drawn sigh of rain at the
+window. He rose and opened it. The night air flowed in, chilled with its
+waters and faintly fragrant of the dust. It soothed away all thought for
+a while. He turned back to his chair. He would wait until the rain had
+lulled before starting....
+
+A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care,
+pushed open, and Mr Bethany's old face, with an intense and sharpened
+scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on
+the least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and
+stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the sidelong
+face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on the arms of
+his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to detect in his
+heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his breast.
+
+He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable
+relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What WAS
+this monstrous web of Craik's? What HAD the creature been nodding and
+ducketing about?--those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end,
+when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be
+of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands
+over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles,
+then sat blinking--and softly slowly deciphered the solitary 'My dear
+Sheila' on Lawford's note-paper. 'H'm,' he muttered, and looked up again
+at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of sleep might yet
+be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them some hint of his
+presence. 'I wish to goodness, you wonderful old creature,' he muttered,
+wagging his head, 'I wish to goodness you'd wake up.'
+
+For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the
+fading leaves. 'They don't come to me,' he said softly again; with a
+tiny smile on his old face. 'It's that old medieval Craik: with a
+face like a last year's rookery!' And again he sat, with head a little
+sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without,
+now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on
+Lawford.
+
+At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him.
+A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the
+birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness
+at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at
+his phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of
+multitudinous rain-drops, like the roar of Time's winged chariot
+hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his
+chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend's denuded
+battlefield.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Return, by Walter de la Mare
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