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The Return

by Walter De la Mare · English · Gutenberg #3075 · 469,847 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Return

Author: Walter De la Mare


        
Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3075]
                Most recently updated: November 19, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3075

Credits: Eve Sobol and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN ***




[Illustration]




The Return

By Walter de la Mare




    “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.




CONTENTS

 CHAPTER ONE
 CHAPTER TWO
 CHAPTER THREE
 CHAPTER FOUR
 CHAPTER FIVE
 CHAPTER SIX
 CHAPTER SEVEN
 CHAPTER EIGHT
 CHAPTER NINE
 CHAPTER TEN
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
 CHAPTER TWELVE
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 CHAPTER NINETEEN
 CHAPTER TWENTY
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE




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 added 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, ‘Yes,’ 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 sky. He would have the moon to go home by.

‘Home!’—these trees, this tongueless companionship, this heavy winelike
air, this soundless turf—these in some obscure desolate fashion seemed
far rather really home. His eyes wandered towards the fading crimson.
And with that on his right hand he began softly, almost on tiptoe,
descending the hill. It seemed to him that the steady eyes of the dead
were watching him in his slow progress. The air was echoing with little
faint, clear calls. He turned and snapped his fingers at a robin that
was stalking him with its stony twittering from bush to bush.

But when after some little time he actually came out of the narrow
avenue and looked down, his heart misgave him, for some one was already
sitting there on his low and 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 métier_. 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, and 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

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