The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau—they were familiar but not very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. 'I wonder what they'll do?' had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few hours as had 'What am I to do?' in the first bout of his 'visitation.'

But the 'they' was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn, and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the verger, Mr Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one's place in the world's economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his place was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness at least a respite.

Solitude!—he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again, past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow sweetness of Alice's, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long and dreamless sleep.

By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten he got up from Sheila's fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to answer Mrs Gull's summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous 'Good morning,' and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across from line to line of the obscure French print.

Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself, breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and foreboding ennui stole over Lawford's solitude once more. He shut his books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table, lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.

At a mean little barber's with a pole above his lettered door he went in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the crumb-littered counter of a little baker's shop to have some tea. It pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty, consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker's wife. Whatever his face might now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never have hob-nobbed so affably with his social 'inferiors.'

For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer in the friendly baker's shop, he bought six-penny-worth of cakes. He watched them as they were deposited one by one in the bag, and even asked for one sort to be exchanged for another, flushing a little at the pretty compliment he had ventured on.

He climbed out of the shop, and paused on the wooden doorstep. 'Do you happen to know Mr Herbert Herbert's?' he said.

The baker's wife glanced up at him with clear, reflective eyes. 'Mr Herbert's?—that must be some little way off, sir. I don't know any such name, and I know most, just round about like.'

'Well, yes, it is,' said Lawford, rather foolishly; 'I hardly know why I asked. It's past the churchyard at Widderstone.'

'Oh yes, sir,' she encouraged him.

'A big, wooden-looking house.'

'Really, sir. Wooden?'

Lawford looked into her face, but could find nothing more to say, so he smiled again rather absently, and ascended into the street.

He sat down outside the churchyard gate on the very bank where he had in the sourness of the nettles first opened Sabathier's Memoirs. The world lay still beneath the pale sky. Presently the little fat rector walked up the hill, his wrists still showing beneath his sleeves. Lawford meditatively watched him pass by. A small boy with a switch, a tiny nose, and a swinging gallipot, his cheeks lit with the sunset, followed soon after. Lawford beckoned him with his finger and held out the bag of tarts. He watched him, half incredulous of his prize, and with many a cautious look over his shoulder, pass out of sight. For a long while he sat alone, only the evening birds singing out of the greenness and silence of the churchyard. What a haunting inescapable riddle life was.

Colour suddenly faded out of the light streaming between the branches. And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom, began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so devilish empty—this raft of the world floating under evening's shadow. How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen asleep, ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy deep had stolen oar and sail and compass, leaving him adrift amid the riding of the waves.

'Are they worth, do you think, quite a penny?' suddenly inquired a quiet voice in the silence. He looked up into the almost colourless face, into the grey eyes beneath their clear narrow brows.

'I was thinking,' he said, 'what a curious thing life is, and wondering—'

'The first half is well worth the penny—its originality! I can't afford twopence. So you must GIVE me what you were wondering.'

Lawford gazed rather blankly across the twilight fields. 'I was wondering,' he said with an oddly naive candour, 'how long it took one to sink.'

'They say, you know,' Grisel replied solemnly, 'drowned sailors float midway, suffering their sea change; purgatory. But what a splendid pennyworth. All pure philosophy!'

'"Philosophy!"' said Lawford; 'I am a perfect fool. Has your brother told you about me?'

She glanced at him quickly. 'We had a talk.'

'Then you do know—?' He stopped dead, and turned to her. 'You really realise it, looking at me now?'

'I realise,' she said gravely, 'that you look even a little more pale and haggard than when I saw you first the other night. We both, my brother and I, you know, thought for certain you'd come yesterday. In fact, I went into the Widderstone in the evening to look for you, knowing your nocturnal habits....' She glanced again at him with a kind of shy anxiety.

'Why—why is your brother so—why does he let me bore him so horribly?'

'Does he? He's tremendously interested; but then, he's pretty easily interested when he's interested at all. If he can possibly twist anything into the slightest show of a mystery, he will. But, of course, you won't, you can't, take all he says seriously. The tiniest pinch of salt, you know. He's an absolute fanatic at talking in the air. Besides, it doesn't really matter much.'

'In the air?'

'I mean if once a theory gets into his head—the more far-fetched, so long as it's original, the better—it flowers out into a positive miracle of incredibilities. And of course you can rout out evidence for anything under the sun from his dingy old folios. Why did he lend you that PARTICULAR book?'

'Didn't he tell you that, then?'

'He said it was Sabathier.' She seemed to think intensely for the merest fraction of a moment, and turned. 'Honestly, though, I think he immensely exaggerated the likeness. As for...'

He touched her arm, and they stopped again, face to face. 'Tell me what difference exactly you see,' he said. 'I am quite myself again now, honestly; please tell me just the very worst you think.'

'I think, to begin with,' she began, with exaggerated candour, 'his is rather a detestable face.'

'And mine?' he said gravely.

'Why—very troubled; oh yes—but his was like some bird of prey. Yours—what mad stuff to talk like this!—not the least symptom, that I can see, of—why, the "prey," you know.'

They had come to the wicket in the dark thorny hedge. 'Would it be very dreadful to walk on a little—just to finish?'

'Very,' she said, turning as gravely at his side.

'What I wanted to say was—' began Lawford, and forgetting altogether the thread by which he hoped to lead up to what he really wanted to say, broke off lamely; 'I should have thought you would have absolutely despised a coward.'

'It would be rather absurd to despise what one so horribly well understands. Besides, we weren't cowards—we weren't cowards a bit. My childhood was one long, reiterated terror—nights and nights of it. But I never had the pluck to tell any one. No one so much as dreamt of the company I had. Ah, and you didn't see either that my heart was absolutely in my mouth, that I was shrivelled up with fear, even at sight of the fear on your face in the dark. There's absolutely nothing so catching. So, you see, I do know a little what nerves are; and dream too sometimes, though I don't choose charnelhouses if I can get a comfortable bed. A coward! May I really say that to ask my help was one of the bravest things in a man I ever heard of. Bullets—that kind of courage—no real woman cares twopence for bullets. An old aunt of mine stared a man right out of the house with the thing in her face. Anyhow, whether I may or not, I do say it. So now we are quits.'

'Will you—' began Lawford, and stopped. 'What I wanted to say was,' he jerked on, 'it is sheer horrible hypocrisy to be talking to you like this—though you will never have the faintest idea of what it has meant and done for me. I mean... And yet, and yet, I do feel when just for the least moment I forget what I am, and that isn't very often, when I forget what I have become and what I must go back to—I feel that I haven't any business to be talking with you at all. "Quits!" And here I am, an outcast from decent society. Ah, you don't know—'

She bent her head and laughed under her breath. 'You do really stumble on such delicious compliments. And yet, do you know, I think my brother would be immensely pleased to think you were an outcast from decent society if only he could be thought one too. He has been trying half his life to wither decent society with neglect and disdain—but it doesn't take the least notice. The deaf adder, you know. Besides, besides; what is all this meek talk? I detest meek talk—gods or men. Surely in the first and last resort all we are is ourselves. Something has happened; you are jangled, shaken. But to us, believe me, you are simply one of fewer friends-and I think, after struggling up Widderstone Lane hand in hand with you in the dark, I have a right to say "friends" than I could count on one hand. What are we all if we only realized it? We talk of dignity and propriety, and we are like so many children playing with knucklebones in a giant's scullery. Come along, he will, some suppertime, for us, each in turn—and how many even will so much as look up from their play to wave us good-bye? that's what I mean—the plot of silence we are all in. If only I had my brother's lucidity, how much better I would have said all this. It is only, believe me, that I want ever so much to help you, if I may—even at risk, too,' she added, rather shakily, 'of having that help—well—I know it's little good.'

The lane had narrowed. They had climbed the arch of a narrow stone bridge that spanned the smooth dark Widder. A few late starlings were winging far above them. Darkness was coming on apace. They stood for awhile looking down into the black flowing water, with here and there the mild silver of a star dim leagues below. 'I am afraid,' said Grisel, looking quietly up, 'you have led me into talking most pitiless nonsense. How many hours, I wonder, did I lie awake in the dark last night, thinking of you? Honestly, I shall never, NEVER forget that walk. It haunted me, on and on.'

'Thinking of me? Do you really mean that? Then it was not all imagination; it wasn't just the drowning man clutching at a straw?'

The grey eyes questioned him. 'You see,' he explained in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard, 'it—it came back again, and—I don't mind a bit how much you laugh at me! I had been asleep, and had had a most awful dream, one of those dreams that seem to hint that some day THAT will be our real world, that some day we may awake where dreaming then will be of this; and I woke—came back—and there was a tremendous knocking going on downstairs. I knew there was no one else in the house—'

'No one else in the house? And you like this?'

'Yes,' said Lawford, stolidly, 'they were all out as it happened. And, of course,' he went on quickly, 'there was nothing for me to do but simply to go down and open the door. And yet, do you know, at first I simply couldn't move. I lit a candle, and then—then somehow I got to know that waiting for me was just—but there,' he broke off half-ashamed, 'I mustn't bother you with all this morbid stuff. Will your brother be in now, do you think?'

'My brother will be in, and, of course, expecting you. But as for "bother," believe me—well, did I quite deserve it?' She stooped towards him. 'You lit a candle—and then?'

They turned and retraced their way slowly up the hill.

'It came again.'

'It?'

'That—that presence, that shadow. I don't mean, of course, it's a real shadow. It comes, doesn't it, from—from within? As if from out of some unheard-of hiding place, where it has been lurking for ages and ages before one's childhood; at least, so it seems to me now. And yet although it does come from within, there it is, too, in front of you, before your eyes, feeding even on your fear, just watching, waiting for—What nonsense all this must seem to you!'

'Yes, yes; and then?'

'Then, and you must remember the poor old boy had been knocking all this time—my old friend—Mr Bethany, I mean—knocking and calling through the letter-box, thinking I was in extremis, or something; then—how shall I describe it?—well YOU came, your eyes, your face, as clear as when, you know, the night before last, we went up the hill together. And then...'

'And then?'

'And then, we—you and I, you know—simply drove him downstairs, and I could hear myself grunting as if it was really a physical effort; we drove him, step by step, downstairs. And—' He laughed outright, and boyishly continued his adventure. 'What do you think I did then, without the ghost of a smile, too, at the idiocy of the thing? I locked the poor beggar in the drawing-room. I saw him there, as plainly as I ever saw anything in my life, and the furniture glimmering, though it was pitch dark: I can't describe it. It all seemed so desperately real, absolutely vital then. It all seems so meaningless and impossible now. And yet, although I am utterly played out and done for, and however absurd it may sound, I wouldn't have lost it; I wouldn't go back for any bribe there is. I feel just as if a great bundle had been rolled off my back. Of course, the queerest, the most detestable part of the whole business is that it—the thing on the stairs—was this'—he lifted a grave and haggard face towards her again—'or rather that,' he pointed with his stick towards the starry churchyard. 'Sabathier,' he said.

Again they had paused together before the white gate, and this time Lawford pushed it open, and followed his companion up the narrow path.

She stayed a moment, her hand on the bell. 'Was it my brother who actually put that horrible idea into your mind?—about Sabathier?'

'Oh no, not really put it into my head,' said Lawford hollowly. 'He only found it there; lit it up.'

She laid her hand lightly on his arm. 'Whether he did or not,' she said with an earnestness that was almost an entreaty, 'of course, you MUST agree that we every one of us have some such experience—that kind of visitor, once at least, in a lifetime.' 'Ah, but,' began Lawford, turning forlornly away, 'you didn't see, you can't have realized—the change.'

She pulled the bell almost as if in some inward triumph. 'But don't you think,' she suggested, 'that that, like the other, might be, as it were, partly imagination too? If now you thought back.'

But a little old woman had opened the door, and the sentence, for the moment, was left unfinished.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

There was no one in the room, and no light, when they entered. For a moment Grisel stood by the open window, looking out. Then she turned impulsively. 'My brother, of course, will ask you too,' she said; 'we had made up our minds to do so if you came again; but I want you to promise me now that you won't dream of going back to-night. That surely would be tempting—well, not Providence. I couldn't rest if I thought you might be alone; like that again.' Her voice died away into the calling of the waters. A light moved across the dingy old rows of books and as his sister turned to go out Herbert appeared in the doorway, carrying a green-shaded lamp, with an old leather quarto under his arm.

'Ah, here you are,' he said. 'I guessed you had probably met.' He drew up, burdened, before his visitor. But his clear black glance, instead of wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was almost with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his book on to a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the floor. He put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next words came up muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him. 'You don't feel worse, I hope?' He got up and faced his visitor for the answer. And for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.

'No,' he said almost gaily; 'I feel enormously better.' But Herbert's long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still fixed on his face. 'I am afraid, my dear fellow,' he said, with something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, 'the struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.'

'The question is,' answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical melancholy in his voice, 'though I am not sure that the answer very much matters—what's going to put me together again? It's the old story of Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in a quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?'

'What was that?' said Herbert with unfeigned curiosity.

'Why, you said even though Sabathier had failed, though I was still my own old stodgy self, that you thought the face—the face, you know, might work in. Somehow, sometimes I think it has. It does really rather haunt me. In that case—well, what then?' Lawford had himself listened to this involved explanation much as one watches the accomplishment of a difficult trick, marvelling more at its completion at all than at the difficulty involved in the doing of it.

'"Work in,"' repeated Herbert, like a rather blase child confronted with a new mechanical toy; 'did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn't bad; it's what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot's over the threshold, it's nine points of the law! But I don't remember saying it.' He shamefacedly and naively confessed it: 'I say such an awful lot of things. And I'm always changing my mind. It's a standing joke against me with my sister. She says the recording angel will have two sides to my account: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—diametrically opposite convictions, and both kinds wrong. On Sundays I am all things to all men. As for Sabathier, by the way, I do want particularly to have another go at him. I've been thinking him over, and I'm afraid in some ways he won't quite wash. And that reminds me, did you read the poor chap?'

'I just grubbed through a page or two; but most of my French was left at school. What I did do, though, was to show the book to an old friend of ours—my wife's and mine—just to skim—a Mr Bethany. He's an old clergyman—our vicar, in fact.'

Herbert had sat down, and with eyes slightly narrowed was listening with peculiar attention. He smiled a little magnanimously. 'His verdict, I should think, must have been a perfect joy.'

'He said,' said Lawford, in his rather low, monotonous voice, 'he said it was precious poor stuff, that it reminded him of patchouli; and that Sabathier—the print I mean—looked like a foxy old roue. They were, I think, his exact words. We were alone together, last night.'

'You don't mean that he simply didn't see the faintest resemblance?'

Lawford nodded. 'But then,' he added simply, 'whenever he comes to see me now he leaves his spectacles at home.'

And at that, as if at some preconcerted signal, they both went off into a simple shout of laughter, unanimous and sustained.

But this first wild bout of laughter over, the first real bursting of the dam, perhaps, for years, Lawford found himself at a lower ebb than ever.

'You see,' he said presently, and while still his companion's face was smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone, 'Bethany has been absolutely my sheet-anchor right through. And I was—it was—you can't possibly realise what a ghastly change it really was. I don't think any one ever will.'

Herbert opened his hand and looked reflectively into its palm before allowing himself to reply. 'I wonder, you know; I have been wondering a good deal; simply taking the other point of view for a moment; WAS it? I don't mean "ghastly" exactly (like, say, smallpox, G.P.I, elephantiasis), but was it quite so complete, so radical, as in the first sheer gust of astonishment you fancied?'

Lawford thought on a little further. 'You know how one sees oneself in a passion—why, how a child looks—the whole face darkened and drawn and possessed? That was the change. That's how it seems to come back to me. And something, somebody, dodging behind the eyes. Yes; more that than even any excessive change of feature, except, of course, that I also seemed—Shall I ever forget that first cold, stifling stare into the looking-glass! I certainly was much darker, even my hair. But I've told you all this before,' he added wearily, 'and the scores and scores of times I've thought it. I used to sit up there in the big spare bedroom my wife put me up in, simply gloating. My flesh seemed nothing more than an hallucination: there I was, haunting my body, an old grinning tenement, and all that I thought I wanted, and couldn't do without, all I valued and prided myself on—stacked up in the drizzling street below. Why, Herbert, our bodies are only glass or cloud. They melt, don't they, like wax in the sun once we're out. But those first few days don't make very pleasant thinking. Friday night was the first, when I sat there like a twitching waxwork, soberly debating between Bedlam here and Bedlam hereafter. I even sometimes wonder whether its very repetition has not dulled the memory or distorted it. My wife,' he added ingenuously, 'seems to think there are signs of a slight improvement—a going back, I mean. But I'm not sure whether she meant it.'

Herbert surveyed his visitor critically. 'You say "dark," he said; 'but surely, Lawford, your hair now is nearly grey; well-flecked at least.'

Although the remark carried nothing comparatively of a shock with it, yet it seemed to Lawford as if an electric current had passed over his scalp, coldly stirring every hair upon his head. But somehow or other it was easier to sit quietly on, to express no surprise, to let them do or say what they liked. 'Well' he retorted with an odd, crooked smile, 'you must remember I am a good deal older than I was last Saturday. I grew grey in the grave, Herbert.'

'But it's like this, you know,' said Herbert, rising excitedly, and at the next moment, on reflection, composedly reseating himself. 'How many of your people actually saw it? How many owned to its being as bad, as complete, as you made out? I don't want for a moment to cut right across what you said last night—our talk—but there are two million sides to every question, and as often as not the less conspicuous have sounder—well—roots. That's all.'

'I think really, do you know, I would rather not go over the detestable thing again. Not many; my wife, though, and a man I know called Danton, who—who's prejudiced. After all, I have myself to think about too. And right through, right through—there wasn't the least doubt of that—they all in their hearts knew it was me. They knew I was behind. I could feel that absolutely always; it's not just eyes and ears we use, there's us ourselves to consider, though God alone knows what that means. But the password was there, as you might say; and they all knew I knew it, all—except'—he looked up as if in bewilderment—'except just one, a poor old lady, a very old friend of my mother's, whom I—I Sabathiered!'

'Whom—you—Sabathiered!' repeated Herbert carefully, with infinite relish, looking sidelong at his visitor. 'And it is just precisely that....'

But at that moment his sister appeared in the doorway to say that supper was ready. And it was not until Herbert was actually engaged in carving a cold chicken that he followed up his advantage. 'Mr. Lawford, Grisel,' he said, 'has just enriched our jaded language with a new verb—to Sabathier. And if I may venture to define it in the presence of the distinguished neologist himself, it means, "To deal with histrionically"; or, rather, that's what it will mean a couple of hundred years hence. For the moment it means, "To act under the influence of subliminalization; To perplex, or bemuse, or estrange with OTHERNESS." Do tell us, Lawford, more about the little old lady.' He passed with her plate a little meaningful glance at his sister, and repeated, 'Do!'

'But I've been plaguing your sister enough already. You'll wish...' Lawford began, and turned his tired-out eyes towards those others awaiting them so frankly they seemed in their perfect friendliness a rest from all his troubles. 'You see,' he went on, 'what I kept on thinking and thinking of was to get a quite unbiased and unprejudiced view. She had known me for years, though we had not actually met more than once or twice since my mother's death. And there she was sitting with me at the other end of just such another little seat as'—he turned—to Herbert 'as ours, at Widderstone. It was on Bewley Common: I can see it all now; it was sunset. And I simply turned and asked her in a kind of a whining affected manner if she remembered me; and when after a long time she came round to owning that to all intents and purposes she did not—I professed to have made a mistake in recognising her. I think,' he added, glancing up from one to the other of his two strange friends, 'I think it was the meanest trick I can remember.'

'H'm,' said Herbert solemnly: 'I wish I had as sensitive a conscience. But as your old friend didn't recognise you, who's the worse? As for her not doing so, just think of the difference a few years makes to a man, and any severe shock. Life wears so infernally badly. Who, for that matter, does not change, even in character and yet who professes to see it? Mind, I don't say in essence! But then how many of the human ghosts one meets does one know in essence? One doesn't want to. It would be positively cataclysmic. And that's what brings me around to feel, Lawford, if I may venture to say so, that you may have brooded a little too keenly on—on your own case. Tell any one you feel ill; he will commiserate with you to positive nausea. Tell any priest your soul is in danger; will he wait for proof? It's misereres and penances world without end. Tell any woman you love her; will she, can she, should she, gainsay you? There you are. The cat's out of the bag, you see. My sister and I sat up half the night talking the thing over. I said I'd take the plunge. I said I'd risk appearing the crassest, contradictoriest wretch that ever drew breath. I don't deny that what I hinted at the other night must seem in part directly contrary to what I'm going to say now.'

He wheeled his black eyes as if for inspiration, and helped himself to salad. 'It's this,' he said. 'Isn't it possible, isn't it even probable that being ill, and overstrung, moping a little over things more or less out of the common ruck, and sitting there in a kind of trance—isn't it possible that you may have very largely IMAGINED the change? Hypnotised yourself into believing it much worse—more profound, radical, acute—and simply absolutely hypnotizing others into thinking so, too. Christendom is just beginning to rediscover that there is such a thing as faith, that it is just possible that, say, megrims or melancholia may be removed at least as easily as mountains. The converse, of course, is obvious on the face of it. A man fails because he thinks himself a failure. It's the men that run away that lose the battle. Suppose then, Lawford'—he leaned forward, keen and suave—'suppose you have been and "Sabathiered" yourself!'

Lawford had grown accustomed during the last few days to finding himself gazing out like a child into reality, as if from the windows of a dream. He had in a sense followed this long, loosely stitched, preliminary argument; he had at least in part realised that he sat there between two clear friendly minds acting in the friendliest and most obvious collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely on any single fragment of Herbert's apology, or of rousing himself into being much more than a dispassionate and not very interested spectator of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it had so laboriously led up to: 'But surely, I don't quite see...'

Herbert lifted his glass as if to his visitor's acumen and set it down again without tasting it. 'Why, my dear fellow,' he said triumphantly, 'even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old suicide. Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In spite of all that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night, dead men DON'T tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a ghost is where his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think what irrefutable masses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips if every tombstone hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with his creepy epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly fertilizing. It catches one's fancy in its own crude way, as pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of, germinate, and sprout in one's imagination in another way. We are all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you think, Grisel?'

'I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call it—"darkening counsel"? It's "the hair of the dog," Mr Lawford.'

'Well, then, you see,' said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning again to his victim—'then you see, when you were just in the pink of condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with the least impetus, can one NOT see by moonlight? The howl of a dog turns the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at you like a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies. I'd, mind you, sipped of the deadly old Huguenot too. I'd listened to your innocent prattle about the child kicking his toes out on death's cupboard door; what more likely thing in the world, then, than that with that moon, in that packed air, I should have swallowed the bait whole, and seen Sabathier in every crevice of your skin? I don't say there wasn't any resemblance; it was for the moment extraordinary; it was even when you were here the other night distinctly arresting. But now (poor old Grisel, I'm nearly done) all I want to say is this: that if we had the "foxy old roue" here now, and Grisel played Paris between the three of us, she'd hand over the apple not to you but to me.'

'I don't quite see where poor Paris comes in,' suggested Grisel meekly.

'No, nor do I,' said Herbert. 'All that I mean, sagacious child, is, that Mr Lawford no more resembles the poor wretch now than I resemble the Apollo Belvedere. If you had only heard my sister scolding me, railing at me for putting such ideas into your jangled head! They don't affect ME one iota. I have, I suppose, what is usually called imagination; which merely means that I can sup with the devil, spoon for spoon, and could sleep in Bluebeard's linen-closet without turning a hair. You, if I am not very much mistaken, are not much troubled with that very unprofitable quality, and so, I suppose, when a crooked and bizarre fancy does edge into your mind it roots there.'

And that said, not without some little confusion, and covert glance of inquiry at his sister, Herbert made all the haste he could to catch up the course that his companions had already finished.

If only, Lawford thought, this insufferable weariness would lift awhile he could enjoy the quiet, absurd, heedless talk, and this very friendly topsy-turvy effort to ease his mind and soothe his nerves. He might even take an interest again in his 'case.'

'You see,' he said, turning to Grisel, 'I don't think it really very much matters how it all came about. I never could believe it would last. It may perhaps—some of it at least may be fancy. But then, what isn't? What is trustworthy? And now your brother tells me my hair's turning grey. I suppose I have been living too slowly, too sluggishly, and they thought it was high time to stir me up.'

He saw with extraordinary vividness the low panelled room; the still listening face; the white muslin shoulders and dark hair; and the eyes that seemed to recall some far-off desolate longing for home and childhood. It was all a dream. That was the end of the matter. Even now, perhaps, his tired old stupid body was lying hunched up, drenched with dew upon the little old seat under the mist-wreathed branches. Soon it would bestir itself and wake up and go off home—home to Sheila, to the old deadly round that once had seemed so natural and inevitable, to the old dull Lawford—eyes and brain and heart.

They returned up the dark shallow staircase to Herbert's book-room, and he talked on to very quiet and passive listeners in his own fantastic endless fashion. And ever and again Lawford would find himself intercepting fleeting and anxious glances at his face, glances almost of remorse and pity; and thought he detected beneath this irresponsible contradictory babble an unceasing effort to clear the sky, to lure away too pressing memories, to put his doubts and fears completely to rest.

Herbert even went so far as to plead guilty, when Grisel gave him the cue, of having a little heightened and overcoloured his story of the restless phantasmal old creature that haunted their queer wooden hauntable old house. And when they rose, laughing and yawning to take up their candles, it was, after all, after a rather animated discussion, with many a hair-raising ghost story brought in for proof between brother and sister, as to exactly how many times that snuff-coloured spectre had made his appearance; and, with less unanimity still, as to the precise manner in which he was in the habit of making his precipitant exit.

'You do at any rate acknowledge, Grisel, that the old creature does appear, and that you saw him yourself step out into space when you were sitting down there under the willow shelling peas. I've seen him twice for certain, once rather hazily; Sallie saw him so plainly she asked his business: that's five. I resign.'

'Acknowledge!' said Grisel; 'of course I do. I'd acknowledge anything in the world to save argument. Why, I don't know what I should do without him. If only, now Mr Lawford would give him a fair chance to show himself reading quietly here about ten minutes to one, or shelling peas even, if he prefers it. If only he'd stay long enough for THAT. Wouldn't it be the very thing for them both!'

'Of course,' said Herbert cordially, 'the very thing.'

Lawford looked up at neither of them. He shook his head.

But he needed little persuasion to stay at least one night. The prospect of that long solitary walk, of that tired stupid stooping figure dragging itself along the interminable country roads seemed a sheer impossibility. 'It is not—it isn't, I swear it—the other that beeps me back,' he had solemnly assured the friend that half smiled her relief at his acceptance, 'but—if you only knew how empty it's all got now; all reason gone even to go on at all.'

'But doesn't it follow? Of course it's empty. And now life is going to begin again. I assure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have courage—just the will to win on.'

He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room, ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again. He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What did it matter what a man looked like—a now familiar but enfeebled and deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this world was concerned.

At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the dark Adventurer, but that—how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he come hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But—was he disappointed!

He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey, hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed to detect the least hint of any iris. 'It must have been something pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,' they seemed to be trying to say to him, 'to drag us down to this.'

He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came. Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if, while kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice who looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old charwoman, Mrs Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circumspectly together in the room beneath.



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A quiet knocking aroused him in the long, tranquil bedroom; and Herbert's head was poked into the room. 'There's a bath behind that door over there,' he whispered, 'or if you like I'm off for a bathe in the Widder. It's a luscious day. Shall I wait? All right,' and the head was withdrawn. 'Don't put much on,' came the voice at the panel; 'we'll be home again in twenty minutes.'

The green and brightness of the morning must have been prepared for overnight by spiders and the dew. Everywhere the gleaming nets were hung, and everywhere there rose a tiny splendour from the waterdrops, so clear and pure and changeable it seemed with their fire and colour they shook a tiny crystal music in the air. Herbert led the way along a clayey downward path beneath hazels tossing softly together their twigs of nuts, until they came out into a rounded hollow that, mounded with thyme, sloped gently down to the green banks of the Widder. The water poured like clearest glass beneath a rain of misty sunbeams.

'My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his mind's eye when he wrote the "Decameron." There really is something almost classic in those pines. And I'd sometimes swear with my eyes just out of the water I've seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between those beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns have made, and missed!'

The water was violently cold. It seemed to Lawford, as it swept up over his body, and as he plunged his night-distorted eyes beneath its blazing surface, that it was charged with some strange, powerful enchantment to wash away in its icy clearness even the memory of the dull and tarnished days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that stained bundle of inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into a cupboard remoter even than Bluebeard's, and lock the door, and drop the quickly-rusting key into these living waters!

He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But, like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate burst of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back to that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone from which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a more ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which confronted him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken chaps, that angular chin.

And even now, beneath the lantern of broad daylight, just as within that other face had lurked the undeniable ghost and presence of himself, so beneath the sunken features seemed to float, tenuous as smoke, scarcely less elusive than a dream, between eye and object, the sinister darkness of the face that in those two bouts with fear he had by some strange miracle managed to repel.

'Work in,' the chance phrase came back. It had worked in in sober earnest; and so far as the living of the next few weeks went, surely it might prove an ally without which he simply could not conceive himself as struggling on at all.

But as dexterous minds as even restless Sabathier's had him just now in safe and kindly keeping. All the quiet October morning Herbert kept him talking and stooping over his extraordinary collection of books.

'The point is,' he explained to Lawford, standing amid a positive archipelago of precious 'finds,' with his foot hoisted onto a chair and a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, 'I honestly detest the mere give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don't deny Life's there,' he swept his hand towards the open window—'in that frantic Tophet we call London; but there's no focus, no point of vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the world's nectar is merely honeydew.' He smiled pleasantly into the fixed vacancy of his visitor's face. 'That's why I've just gone on,' he continued amiably, 'collecting this particular kind of stuff—what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it—just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.'

'But surely,' said Lawford, trying for the twentieth time to pretend to himself that these endless books carried the faintest savour of the delight to him which they must, he rather forlornly supposed, shower upon Herbert, 'surely genius is a very rare thing!'

'Rare! the world simply swarms with it. But before you can bottle it up in a book it's got to be articulate. Just for a single instant imagine yourself Falstaff, and if there weren't hundreds of Falstaffs in every generation, to be examples of his ungodly life, he'd be as dead as a doornail to-morrow—imagine yourself Falstaff, and being so, sitting down to write "Henry IV," or "The Merry Wives." It's simply preposterous. You wouldn't be such a fool as to waste the time. A mere Elizabethan scribbler comes along with a gift of expression and an observant eye, lifts the bloated old tippler clean out of life, and swims down the ages as the greatest genius the world has ever seen. Whereas, surely, though you mustn't let me bore you with all this piffle, it's Falstaff is the genius, and W. S. merely a talented reporter.

'Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio—they live on their own, as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever WATCHED tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. What the devil are you, my dear chap, but genius itself, with all the world brand new upon your shoulders? And who'd have thought it of you ten days ago?

'It's simply and solely because we're all, poor wretches, dumb—dumb as butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am, trickling out this—this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper does Sappho. But that's what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts and vagabonds—and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print, I can tell you. We're all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged with the second-hand, and barnacled with respectability until—until the touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there's no mistaking it; oh no!'

'But what,' said Lawford uneasily, 'what on earth do you mean by the touch?'

'I mean when you cease to be a puppet only and sit up in the gallery too. When you squeeze through to the other side. When you suffer a kind of conversion of the mind; become aware of your senses. When you get a living inkling. When you become articulate to yourself. When you SEE.'

'I am awfully stupid,' Lawford murmured, 'but even now I don't really follow you a bit. But when, as you say, you do become articulate to yourself, what happens then?'

'Why, then,' said Herbert with a shrug almost of despair, 'then begins the weary tramp back. One by one drop off the truisms, and the Grundyisms, and the pedantries, and all the stillborn claptrap of the marketplace sloughs off. Then one can seriously begin to think about saving one's soul.'

'Saving one's soul,' groaned Lawford; 'why, I am not even sure of my own body yet.' He walked slowly over to the window and with every thought in his head as quiet as doves on a sunny wall, stared out into the garden of green things growing, leaves fading and falling water. 'I tell you what,' he said, turning irresolutely, 'I wonder if you could possibly find time to write me out a translation of Sabathier. My French is much too hazy to let me really get at the chap. He's gone now; but I really should like to know what kind of stuff exactly he has left behind.'

'Oh, Sabathier!' said Herbert, laughing. 'What do you think of that, Grisel?' he asked, turning to his sister, who at that moment had looked in at the door. 'Here's Mr Lawford asking me to make a translation of Sabathier. Lunch, Lawford.'

Lawford sighed. And not until he had slowly descended half the narrow uneven stairs that led down to the dining-room did he fully realise the guile of a sister that could induce a hopeless bookworm to waste a whole morning over the stupidest of companions, simply to keep his tired-out mind from rankling, and give his Sabathier a chance to go to roost.

'I think, do you know,' he managed to blurt out at last 'I think I ought to be getting home again. The house is empty—and—'

'You shall go this evening,' said Herbert, 'if you really must insist on it. But honestly, Lawford, we both think that after what the last few days must have been, it is merely common sense to take a rest. How can you possibly rest with a dozen empty rooms echoing every thought you think? There's nothing more to worry about; you agree to that. Send your people a note saying that you are here, safe and sound. Give them a chance of lighting a fire, and driving in the fatted calf. Stay on with us just the week out.'

Lawford turned from one to the other of the two friendly faces. But what was dimly in his mind refused to express itself. 'I think, you know, I—' he began falteringly.

'But it's just this thinking that's the deuce—this preposterous habit of having continually to make up one's mind. Off with his head, Grisel! My sister's going to take you for a picnic; we go every other fine afternoon; and you can argue it out with her.'

Once alone again with Grisel, however, Lawford found talking unnecessary. Silences seemed to fall between them as quietly and restfully as evening flows into night. They walked on slowly through the fading woods, and when they had reached the top of the hill that sloped down to the dark and foamless Widder they sat down in the honey-scented sunshine on a knoll of heather and bracken, and Grisel lighted the little spirit-kettle she had brought with her, and busied herself very methodically over making tea.

That done, she clasped her hands round her knees, and sat now gossiping, now silent, in the pale autumnal beauty. There was a bird wistfully twittering in the branches overhead, and ever and again a withered leaf would slip circling down from the motionless beech boughs arched in their stillness above their heads beneath the thin blue sky.

'Men, you know,' she began again suddenly, starting out of reverie, 'really are absurdly blind; and just a little bit absurdly kindly stupid. How many times have I been at the point of laughing out at my brother's delicious naive subtleties. But you do, you will, understand, Mr Lawford, that he was, that we are both "doing our best"—to make amends?'

'I understand—I do indeed—a tenth part of all your kindness.'

'Yes, but that's just it—that horrible word "kindness"! If ever there were two utterly self-absorbed people, without a trace, with an absolute horror of kindness, it is just my brother and I. It's most of it false and most of it useless. We all surely must take what comes in this topsy-turvy world. I believe in saying out:—that the more one thinks about life the worse it becomes. There are only two kinds of happiness in this world—a wooden post's and Prometheus's. And who ever heard of any one having the impudence to be kind to Prometheus? As for a miserable "medium" like me, not quite a post and leagues and leagues from even envying a Prometheus, she's better for the powder without the jam. But that's all nothing. What I can't help thinking—and it's not a bit giving my brother away, because we both think it—that it was partly our thoughtlessness that added at least something to—to the rest. It was perfectly absurd. He saw you were ill; he saw—he must have seen even in that first Sunday talk—that your nerves were all askew. And who doesn't know what "nerves" means nowadays? And yet he deliberately chattered. He loves it—just at large, you know, like me. I told him before I came out that I intended, if I could, to say all this. And now it's said you'll please forgive me for going back to it.'

'Please don't talk about forgiveness. But when you say he chattered, you mean about Sabathier, of course. And that, you know, I don't care a fig for now. We can settle all that between ourselves—him and me, I mean. And now tell me candidly again—Is there any "prey" in my face now?'

She looked up fleetingly into his eyes, leant back her head and laughed. '"Prey," there never was a glimpse.'

'And "change"?' Their eyes met again in an infinitely brief, infinitely bewildering argument.

'Really, really, scarcely perceptible,' she assured him, 'except, of course, how horribly, horribly ill you look. And that only seems to prove to me you must be hiding something else. No illusion on earth could—could have done that to your face.'

'You think, I know,' he persisted, 'that I must be persuaded and cosseted and humoured. Yes, you do; it's my poor old sanity that's really in both your minds. Perhaps I am—not absolutely sound. Anyhow. I've been watching it in your looks at each other all the time. And I can never, never say, never tell you what you have done for me. But you see, after all, we did win through; I keep on telling myself that. So that now it's purely from the most selfish and practical motives that I want you to be perfectly frank with me. I have to go back, you know; and some of them, one or two of my friends I mean, are not all on my side. Think of me as I was when you came into the room, three centuries ago, and you turned and looked, frowning at me in the candle-light; remember that and look at me now. What is the difference? Does it shock you? Does it make the whole world seem a trick, a sham? Does it simply sour your life to think such a thing possible? Oh, the hours I've spent gloating on Widderstone's miserable mask of skin and bone, as I was saying to your brother only last night, and never knew until they shuffled me that the old self too was nothing better than a stifling suffocating mask.'

'But don't you see,' she argued softly, turning her face away a little, 'you were a stranger then (though I certainly didn't mean to frown). And then a little while after we were, well, just human beings, shoulder to shoulder, and if friendship does not mean that, I don't know what it does mean. And now, you are—well, just you: the you, you know, of three centuries ago! And if you mean to ask me whether at any precise moment I have been conscious that this you I am now speaking to was not the you of last night, or of that dark climb up the hill, why, it is simply frantic to think it could ever be necessary to say over and over again, No. But if you mean, Have you changed else? All I could answer is, Don't we all change as we grow to know one another? What were just features, what just dingily represented one, as it were, is forgotten, or rather gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is the landscape under lightning as it were. But afterwards isn't it surely like the alphabet to a child; what was first a queer angular scrawl becomes A, and is always ever after A, undistinguished, half-forgotten, yet standing at last for goodness knows what real wonderful things—or for just the dry bones of soulless words? Is that it?' She stole a sidelong glance into his brooding face, leaning her head on her hand.

'Yes, yes,' came the rather dissatisfied reply. 'I do agree; perfectly. But then, you see—I told you I was going to talk of nothing but myself—what did at first happen to me was something much worse, and, I suppose, something quite different from that.'

'And yet, didn't you tell us, that of all your friends not one really denied in their hearts your—what they would call, I suppose—your IDENTITY; except that poor little offended old lady. And even she, if my intuition is worth a penny piece, even she when you go soon and talk to her will own that she did know you, and that it was not because you were a stranger that she was offended, but because you so ungenerously pretended to be one. That was a little mad, now, if you like!'

'Oh yes,' said Lawford, 'I am going to ask her forgiveness. I don't know what I didn't vow to take her for a peace-offering if the chance should ever come—and the courage—to make my peace with her. But now that the chance has come, and I think the courage, it is the desire that's gone. I don't seem to care either way. I feel as if I had got past making my peace with any one.'

But this time no answer helped him out.

'After all,' he went plodding on, 'there is more than just the mere day to day to consider. And one doesn't realise that one's face actually IS one's fortune without a shock. And that THAT gone, one is, as your brother said, just like a bee come back to the wrong hive. It undermines,' he smiled rather bitterly, 'one's views rather. And it certainly shifts one's friends. If it hadn't been just for my old'—he stopped dead, and again pushed slowly on—'if it hadn't been for our old friend, Mr Bethany, I doubt if we should now have had a soul on our side. I once read somewhere that wolves always chase the old and weak and maimed out of the pack. And after all, what do we do? Where do we keep the homeless and the insane? And yet, you know,' he added ruminatingly, 'it is not as if mine was ever a particularly lovely or lovable face! While as for the poor wretch behind it, well, I really cannot see what meaning, or life even, he had before—'

'Before?'

Lawford met bravely the clear whimsical eyes. 'Before, I was Sabathiered.'

Grisel laughed outright.

'You think,' he retorted almost bitterly, 'you think I am talking like a child.'

'Yes,' she sighed cheerfully, 'I was quite envying you.'

'Well, there I am,' said Lawford inconsequently. 'And now; well, now, I suppose, the whole thing's to begin again. I can't help beginning to wonder what the meaning of it all is; why one's duty should always seem so very stupid a thing. And then, too, what can there be on earth that even a buried Sabathier could desire?' He glanced up in a really animated perplexity at the still, dark face turned in the evening light towards the darkening valley. And perplexity deepened into a disquieted frown—like that of a child who is roused suddenly from a daydream by the half-forgotten question of a stranger. He turned his eyes almost furtively away as if afraid of disturbing her; and for awhile they sat in silence... At last he turned again almost shyly. 'I hope some day you will let me bring my daughter to see you.'

'Yes, yes,' said Grisel eagerly; 'we should both LOVE it, of course. Isn't it curious?—I simply KNEW you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!'

'I say "some day,"' said Lawford; 'I know, though, that that some day will never come.'

'Wait; just wait,' replied the quiet confident voice, 'that will come too. One thing at a time, Mr Lawford. You've won your old self back again; you'll win your old love of life back again in a little while; never fear. Oh, don't I know that awful Land's End after illness; and that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So, it's a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.' She busied herself over the tea things. 'And, of course,' she added, as if it were an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green sunlight as she knelt, 'you simply won't think of going back to-night.... Solitude, I really do think, solitude just now would be absolute madness. You'll write to-day and go, perhaps, to-morrow!'

Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I think, do you know, I ought to go to-day.'

'Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all's well. And come back here to sleep. If you'd really promise that I'd drive you in. I'd love it. There's the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes hire for our picnics. Way I? You've no idea how much easier in our minds my brother and I would be if you would. And then to-morrow, or at any rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your right mind. There, that's a bargain too. Now we must hurry.'



CHAPTER NINETEEN

Herbert himself went down to order the governess cart, and packed them in with a rug. And in the dusk Grisel set Lawford down at the corner of his road and drove on to an old bookseller's with a commission from her brother, promising to return for him in an hour. Dust and a few straws lay at rest as if in some abstruse arrangement on the stones of the porch just as the last faint whirling gust of sunset had left them. Shut lids of sightless indifference seemed to greet the wanderer from the curtained windows.

He opened the door and went in. For a moment he stood in the vacant hall; then he peeped first into the blind-drawn dining-room, faintly, dingily sweet, like an empty wine-bottle. He went softly on a few paces and just opening the door looked in on the faintly glittering twilight of the drawing-room. But the congealed stump of candle that he had set in the corner as a final rancorous challenge to the beaten Shade was gone. He slowly and deliberately ascended the stairs, conscious of a peculiar sense of ownership of what in even so brief an absence had taken on so queer a look of strangeness. It was almost as if he might be some lone heir come in the rather mournful dusk to view what melancholy fate had unexpectedly bestowed on him.

'Work in'—what on earth else could this chill sense of strangeness mean? Would he ever free his memory from that one haphazard, haunting hint? And as he stood in the doorway of the big, calm room, which seemed even now to be stirring with the restless shadow of these last few far-away days; now pacing sullenly to and fro; now sitting hunched-up to think; and now lying impotent in a vain, hopeless endeavour only for the breath of a moment to forget—he awoke out of reverie to find himself smiling at the thought that a changed face was practically at the mercy of an incredulous world, whereas a changed heart was no one's deadly dull affair but its owner's. The merest breath of pity even stole over him for the Sabathier who after all had dared and had needed, perhaps, nothing like so arrogant and merciless a coup de grace to realise that he had so ignominiously failed.

'But there, that's done!' he exclaimed out loud, not without a tinge of regret that theories, however brilliant and bizarre, could never now be anything else—that now indeed that the symptoms had gone, the 'malady,' for all who had not been actually admitted into the shocked circle, was become nothing more than an inanely 'tall' story; stuffing not even savoury enough for a goose. How wide exactly, he wondered, would Sheila's discreet, shocked circle prove? He stood once more before the looking-glass, hearing again Grisel's words in the still green shadow of the beech-tree, 'Except of course, horribly, horribly ill.' 'What a fool, what a coward she thinks I am!'

There was still nearly an hour to be spent in this great barn of faded interests. He lit a candle and descended into the kitchen. A mouse went scampering to its hole as he pushed open the door. The memory of that ravenous morning meal nauseated him. It was sour and very still here; he stood erect; the air smelt faint of earth. In the breakfast-room the bookcase still swung open. Late evening mantled the garden; and in sheer ennui again he sat down to the table, and turned for a last not unfriendly hob-a-nob with his poor old friend Sabathier. He would take the thing back. Herbert, of course, was going to translate it for him. Now if the patient old Frenchman had stormed Herbert instead—that surely would have been something like a coup! Those frenzied books. The absurd talk of the man. Herbert was perfectly right—he could have entertained fifty old Huguenots without turning a hair. 'I'm such an awful stodge.'

He turned the woolly leaves over very slowly. He frowned impatiently, and from the end backwards turned them over again. Then he laid the book softly down on the table and sat back. He stared with narrowed lids into the flame of his quiet friendly candle. Every trace, every shred of portrait and memoir were gone. Once more, deliberately, punctiliously, he examined page by page the blurred and unfamiliar French—the sooty heads, the long, lean noses, the baggy eyes passing like figures in a peepshow one by one under his hand—to the last fragmentary and dexterously mended leaf. Yes, Sabathier was gone. Quite the old slow Lawford smile crept over his face at the discovery. It was a smile a little sheepish too, as he thought of Sheila's quiet vigilance.

And the next instant he had looked up sharply, with a sudden peculiar shrug, and a kind of cry, like the first thin cry of an awakened child, in his mind. Without a moment's hesitation he climbed swiftly upstairs again to the big sepulchral bedroom. He pressed with his fingernail the tiny spring in the looking-glass. The empty drawer flew open. There were finger-marks still in the dust.

Yet, strangely enough, beneath all the clashing thoughts that came flocking into his mind as he stood with the empty drawer in his hand, was a wounding yet still a little amused pity for his old friend Mr Bethany. So far as he himself was concerned the discovery—well, he would have plenty of time to consider everything that could possibly now concern himself. Anyhow, it could only simplify matters.

He remembered waking to that old wave of sickening horror on the first unhappy morning; he remembered the keen yet owlish old face blinking its deathless friendliness at him, and the steady pressure of the cold, skinny hand. As for Sheila, she had never done anything by halves; certainly not when it came to throwing over a friend no longer necessary to one's social satisfaction. But she would edge out cleverly, magnanimously, triumphantly enough, no doubt, when the day of reckoning should come, the day when, her nets wide spread, her bait prepared, he must stand up before her outraged circle and positively prove himself her lawful husband, perhaps even to the very imprint of his thumb.

'Poor old thing!' he said again; and this time his pity was shared almost equally between both witnesses to Mr Bethany's ingenuous little document, the loss of which had fallen so softly and pathetically that he felt only ashamed of having discovered it so soon.

He shut back the tell-tale drawer, and after trying to collect his thoughts in case anything should have been forgotten, he turned with a deep trembling sigh to descend the stairs. But on the landing he drew back at the sound of voices, and then a footstep. Soon came the sound of a key in the lock. He blew out his candle and leant listening over the balusters.

'Who's there?' he called quietly.

'Me, sir,' came the feeble reply out of the darkness.

'What is it, Ada? What have you come for?'

'Only, sir, to see that all was safe, and you were in, sir.'

'Yes,' he said. 'All's safe; and I am in. What if I had been out?' It was like dropping tiny pebbles into a deep well—so long after came the answering feeble splash.

'Then I was to go back, sir.' And a moment after the discreet voice floated up with the faintest tinge of effrontery out of the hush. 'Is that Dr Ferguson, too sir?'

'No, Ada; and please tell your mistress from me that Dr Ferguson is unlikely to call again.' A keen but rather forlorn smile passed over his face. 'He's dining with friends no doubt at Holloway. But of course if she should want to see him he will see her to-morrow at any hour at Mrs Lovat's. And—Ada!'

'Yes, sir?'

'Say that I'm a little better; your mistress will be relieved to hear that I'm a little better; still not quite myself say, but, I think, a little better.'

'Yes, sir; and I'm sure I'm very glad to hear it,' came fainter still.

'What voice was that I heard just now?'

'Miss Alice's, sir; but she came quite against my wishes, and I hope you won't repeat it, sir. She promised if she came that mistress shouldn't know. I was only afraid she might disturb you, or—or Dr Ferguson. And did you say, sir, that I was to tell mistress that he MIGHT be coming back?'

'Ah, that I don't know; so perhaps it would be as well not to mention him at all. Is Miss Alice there?'

'I said I would tell her if you were alone. But I hope you'll understand that it was only because she begged so. Mistress has gone to St Peter's bazaar; and that's how it was.'

'I quite understand. Beckon to her.'

There came a hasty step in the hall and a hurried murmur of explanation. Lawford heard her call as she ran up the stairs; and the next moment he had Alice's hand in his and they were groping together through the gloaming back into the solitude of the empty room again.

'Don't be alarmed, dear,' he heard himself imploring. Just hold tight to that clear common sense, and above all you won't tell? It must be our secret; a dead, dead secret from every one, even your mother, for just a little while; just a mere two days or so—in case. I'm—I'm better, dear.'

He fumbled with the little box of matches, dropped one, broke another; but at last the candle-flame dipped, brightened, and with the door shut and the last pale blueness of dusk at the window Lawford turned and looked at his daughter. She stood with eyes wide open, like the eyes of a child walking in its sleep; then twisted her fingers more tightly within his. 'Oh, dearest, how ill, how ill you look,' she whispered. 'But there, never mind—never mind. It was all a miserable dream, then; it won't, it can't come back? I don't think I could bear its coming back. And mother told me such curious things; as if I were a child and understood nothing. And even after I knew that you were you—I mean before I sat up here in the dark to see you—she said that you were gone and would never come back; that a terrible thing had happened—a disgrace which we must never speak of; and that all the other was only a pretence to keep people from talking. But I did not believe then, and how could I believe afterwards?'

'There, never mind now, dear, what she said. It was all meant for the best, perhaps. But here I am; and not nearly so ill as I look, Alice; and there's nothing more to trouble ourselves about; not even if it should be necessary for me to go away for a time. And this is our secret, mind; ours only; just a dead secret between you and me.'

They sat for awhile without speaking or stirring. And faintly along the hushed road Lawford heard in the silence a leisurely indolent beat of little hoofs approaching, and the sound of wheels. A sudden wave of feeling swept over him. He took Alice's quiet loving face in his hands and kissed her passionately. 'Do not so much as think of me yet, or doubt, or question: only love me, dearest. And soon—and soon—'

'We'll just begin again, just begin again, won't we? all three of us together, just as we used to be. I didn't mean to have said all those horrid things about mother. She was only dreadfully anxious and meant everything for the best. You'll let me tell her soon?'

The haggard face turned slowly, listening. 'I hear, I understand, but I can't think very clearly now, Alice; I can't, dear; my miserable old tangled nerves. I just stumble along as best I can. You'll understand better when you get to be a poor old thing like me. We must do the best we can. And of course you'll see, Dillie, how awfully important it is not to raise false hopes. You understand? I mustn't risk the least thing in the world, must I? And now goodbye; only for a few hours now. And not a word, not a word to a single living soul.'

He extinguished the candle again, and led the way to the top of the stairs. 'Are you there, Ada?'

'Yes, sir,' answered the quiet imperturbable voice from under the black straw brim. Alice went slowly down, but at the foot of the stairs, looking out into the cold, blue, lamplit street she paused as if at a sudden recollection, and ran hastily up again.

'There was nothing more, dear?' She said, leaning back to peer up.

'"Nothing more?" What?'

She stood panting a little in the darkness, listening to some cautious yet uneasy thought that seemed to haunt her mind. 'I thought—it seemed there was something we had not said, something I could not understand. But there, it is nothing! You know what a fanciful old silly I am. You do love me? Quite as much as ever?'

'More, sweetheart, more!'

'Good-night again, then; and God bless you, dear.'

The outer door closed softly, the footsteps died away. Lawford still hesitated. He took hold of the stairs above his head as he stood on the landing and leaned his head upon his hands, striving calmly to disentangle the perplexity of his thoughts. His pulses were beating in his ear with a low muffled roar. He looked down between the blinds to where against the blue of the road beneath the straggling yellow beams of the lamp stood the little cart and drooping, shaggy pony, and Grisel sitting quietly there awaiting him. He shut his eyes as if in hope by some convulsive effort of mind to break through this subtle glasslike atmosphere of dream that had stolen over consciousness, and blotted out the significance, almost the meaning of the past. He turned abruptly. Empty as the empty rooms around him, unanswering were mind and heart. Life was a tale told by an idiot—signifying nothing.

He paused at the head of the staircase. And even then the doubt confronted him: Would he ever come back? Who knows? he thought; and again stood pondering, arguing, denying. At last he seemed to have come to a decision. He made his way downstairs, opened and left ajar a long narrow window in a passage to the garden beyond the kitchen. He turned on his heel as he reached the gate and waved his hand as if in a kind of forlorn mockery towards the darkly glittering windows. The drowsy pony awoke at touch of the whip.

Grisel lifted the rug and squeezed a little closer into the corner. She had drawn a veil over her face, so that to Lawford her eyes seemed to be dreaming in a little darkness of their own as he laid his hand on the side of the cart. 'It's a most curious thing,' he said, 'but peeping down at you just now when the sound of the wheels came, a memory came clearly back to me of years and years ago—of my mother. She used to come to fetch me at school in a little cart like this, and a little pony just like this, with a thick dusty coat. And once I remember I was simply sick of everything, a failure, and fagged out, and all that, and was looking out in the twilight; I fancy even it was autumn too. It was a little side staircase window; I was horribly homesick. And she came quite unexpectedly. I shall never forget it—the misery, and then, her coming.' He lifted his eyes, cowed with the incessant struggle, and watched her face for some time in silence. 'Ought I to stay?'

'I see no "ought,"' she said. 'No one is there?'

'Only a miserable broken voice out of a broken cage—called Conscience.'

'Don't you think, perhaps, that even that has a good many disguises—convention, cowardice, weakness, ennui; they all take their turn at hooting in its feathers? You must, you really must have rest. You don't know; you don't see; I do. Just a little snap, some one last exquisite thread gives way, and then it is all over. You see I have even to try to frighten you, for I can't tell you how you distress me.'

'Why do I distress you?—my face, my story you mean?'

'No; I mean you: your trouble, that horrible empty house, and—oh, dear me, yes, your courage too.'

'Listen,' said Lawford, stooping forward. He could scarcely see the pale, veiled face through this mist that had risen up over his eyes. 'I have no courage apart from you; no courage and no hope. Ask me to come!—a stranger with no history, no mockery, no miserable rant of a grave and darkness and fear behind me. Are we not all haunted—every one? That forgotten, and the fool I was, and the vacillating, and the pretence—oh, how it all sweeps clear before me; without a will, without a hope or glimpse or whisper of courage. Be just the memory of my mother, the face, the friend I've never seen; the voice that every dream leaves echoing. Ask me to come.'

She sat unstirring; and then as if by some uncontrollable impulse stooped a little closer to him and laid her gloved hand on his.

'I hear, you know; I hear too,' she whispered. 'But we mustn't listen. Come now. It's growing late.'

The little village echoed back from its stone walls the clatter of the pony's hoofs. Night had darkened to its deepest when their lamp shone white on the wicket in the hedge. They had scarcely spoken. Lawford had simply watched pass by, almost without a thought, the arching trees, the darkening fields; had watched rise up in a mist of primrose light the harvest moon to shine in saffron on the faces and shoulders of the few wayfarers they met, or who passed them by. The still grave face beneath the shadow of its veil had never turned, though the moon poured all her flood of brilliance upon the dark profile. And once when as if in sudden alarm he had lifted his head and looked at her, a sudden doubt had assailed him so instantly that he had half put out his hand to touch her, and had as quickly withdrawn it, lest her beauty and stillness should be, even as the moment's fancy had suggested, only a far-gone memory returned in dream.

Herbert hailed them from the darkness of an open window. He came down, and they talked a little in the cold air of the garden. He lit a cigarette, and climbed languidly into the cart, and drove the drowsy little pony off into the moonlight.



CHAPTER TWENTY

It was a quiet supper the three friends sat down to. Herbert sat narrowing his eyes over his thoughts, which, when the fancy took him, he scattered out upon the others' silence. Lawford apparently had not yet shaken himself free from the sorcery of the moonlight. His eyes shone dark and full like those of a child who has trespassed beyond its hour for bed, and sits marvelling at reality in a waking dream.

Long after they had bidden each other good-night, long after Herbert had trodden on tiptoe with his candle past his closed door, Lawford sat leaning on his arms at the open window, staring out across the motionless moonlit trees that seemed to stand like draped and dreaming pilgrims, come to the peace of their Nirvana at last beside the crashing music of the waters. And he himself, the self that never sleeps beneath the tides and waves of consciousness, was listening, too, almost as unmovedly and unheedingly to the thoughts that clashed in conflict through his brain.

Why, in a strange transitory life was one the slave of these small cares? What if even in that dark pit beneath, which seemed to whisper Lethe to the tumultuous, swirling waters—what if there, too, were merely a beginning again, and to seek a slumbering refuge there merely a blind and reiterated plunge into the heat and tumult of another day? Who was that poor, dark, homeless ghoul, Sabathier? Who was this Helen of an impossible dream? Her face with its strange smile, her eyes with their still pity and rapt courage had taken hope away. 'Here's not your rest,' cried one insistent voice; 'she is the mystery that haunts day and night, past all the changing of the restless hours. Chance has given you back eyes to see, a heart that can be broken. Chance and the stirrings of a long-gone life have torn down the veil age spins so thick and fast. Pride and ambition; what dull fools men are! Effort and duty, what dull fools men are!' He listened on and on to these phantom pleadings and to the rather coarse old Lawford conscience grunting them mercilessly down, too weary even to try to rest.

Rooks at dawn came sweeping beneath the turquoise of the sky. He saw their sharp-beaked heads turn this way, that way, as they floated on outspread wings across the misty world. Except for the hoarse roar of the water under the huge thin-leafed trees, not a sound was stirring. 'One thing,' he seemed to hear himself mutter as he turned with a shiver from the morning air, 'it won't be for long. You can, at least, poor devil, wait the last act out.' If in this foolish hustling mob of the world, hired anywhere and anywhen for the one poor dubious wage of a penny—if it was only his own small dull part to carry a mock spear, and shout huzza with the rest—there was nothing for it, he grunted obstinately to himself, shout he would with the loudest.

He threw himself on to the bed with eyes so wearied with want of sleep it seemed they had lost their livelong skill in finding it. Not the echo of triumph nor even a sigh of relief stirred the torpor of his mind. He knew vaguely that what had been the misery and madness of the last few days was gone. But the thought had no power to move him now. Sheila's good sense, and Mr Bethany's stubborn loyalty were alike old stories that had lost their savour and meaning. Gone, too, was the need for that portentous family gathering that had sat so often in his fancy during these last few days around his dining-room table, discussing with futile decorum the problem of how to hush him up, to muffle him down. Half dreaming, half awake, he saw the familiar door slowly open and, like the timely hero in a melodrama, his own figure appear before the stricken and astonished company. His eyes opened half-fearfully, and glanced up in the morning twilight. Their perplexity gave place to a quiet, almost vacant smile; the lids slowly closed again, and at last the lean hands twitched awhile in sleep.

Next morning he spent rummaging among the old books, dipping listlessly here and there as the tasteless fancy took him, while Herbert sat writing with serene face and lifted eyebrows at his open window. But the unfamiliar long S's, the close type, and the spelling of the musty old books wearied eye and mind. What he read, too, however far-fetched, or lively, or sententious, or gross, seemed either to be of the same texture as what had become his everyday experience, and so baffled him with its nearness, or else was only the meaningless ramblings of an idle pen. And this, he thought to himself, looking covertly up at the spruce clear-cut profile at the window, this is what Herbert had called Life.

'Am I interrupting you, Herbert; are you very busy?' he asked at last, taking refuge on a chair in a far corner of the room.

'Bless me, no; not a bit—not a bit,' said Herbert amiably, laying down his pen. 'I'm afraid the old leatherjackets have been boring you. It's a habit this beastly reading; this gorge and glint and fever all at second-hand—purely a bad habit, like morphia, like laudanum. But once in, you know there's no recovery Anyhow, I'm neck-deep, and to struggle would be simply to drown.'

'I was only going to say how sorry I am for having left Sabathier at home.'

'My dear fellow—' began Herbert reassuringly.

'It was only because I wanted so very much to have your translation. I get muddled up with other things groping through the dictionary.'

Herbert surveyed him critically. 'What exactly is your interest now, Lawford? You don't mean that my old "theory" has left any sting now?'

'No sting; oh no. I was only curious. But you yourself still think it really, don't you?'

Herbert turned for a moment to the open window.

'I was simply trying then to find something to fit the facts as you experienced them. But now that the facts have gone—and they have, haven't they?—exit, of course, my theory!'

'I see,' was the cryptic answer. 'And yet, Herbert,' Lawford solemnly began again, 'it has changed me; even in my way of thinking. When I shut my eyes now—I only discovered it by chance—I see immediately faces quite strange to me; or places, sometimes thronged with people; and once an old well with some one sitting in the shadow. I can't tell you how clearly, and yet it is all altogether different from a dream. Even when I sit with my eyes open, I am conscious, as it were, of a kind of faint, colourless mirage. In the old days—I mean before Widderstone, what I saw was only what I'd seen already. Nothing came uncalled for, unexplained. This makes the old life seem so blank; I did not know what extraordinarily real things I was doing without. And whether for that reason or another, I can't quite make out what in fact I did want then, and was always fretting and striving for. I can see no wisdom or purpose in anything now but to get to one's journey's end as quickly and bravely as one can. And even then, even if we do call life a journey, and death the inn we shall reach at last in the evening when it's over; that, too, I feel will be only as brief a stopping-place as any other inn would be. Our experience here is so scanty and shallow—nothing more than the moment of the continual present. Surely that must go on, even if one does call it eternity. And so we shall all have to begin again. Probably Sabathier himself.... But there, what on earth are we, Herbert, when all is said? Who is it has—has done all this for us—what kind of self? And to what possible end? Is it that the clockwork has been wound up and must still jolt on a while with jarring wheels? Will it never run down, do you think?'

Herbert smiled faintly, but made no answer.

'You see,' continued Lawford, in the same quiet, dispassionate undertone, 'I wouldn't mind if it was only myself. But there are so many of us, so many selves, I mean; and they all seem to have a voice in the matter. What is the reality to this infernal dream?'

'The reality is, Lawford, that you are fretting your life out over this rotten illusion. Be guided by me just this once. We'll go, all three of us, a good ten-mile walk to-day, and thoroughly tire you out. And to-night you shall sleep here—a really sound, refreshing sleep. Then to-morrow, whole and hale, back you shall go; honestly. It's only professional strong men should ask questions. Babes like you and me must keep to slops.'

So, though Lawford made no answer, it was agreed. Before noon the three of them had set out on their walk across the fields. And after rambling on just as caprice took them, past reddening blackberry bushes and copses of hazel, and flaming beech, they sat down to spread out their meal on the slope of a hill, overlooking quiet ploughed fields and grazing cattle. Herbert stretched himself with his back to the earth, and his placid face to the pale vacant sky, while Lawford, even more dispirited after his walk, wandered up to the crest of the hill.

At the foot of the hill, upon the other side, lay a farm and its out-buildings, and a pool of water beneath a group of elms. It was vacant in the sunlight, and the water vividly green with a scum of weed. And about half a mile beyond stood a cluster of cottages and an old towered church. He gazed idly down, listening vaguely to the wailing of a curlew flitting anxiously to and fro above the broken solitude of its green hill. And it seemed as if a thin and dark cloud began to be quietly withdrawn from over his eyes. Hill and wailing cry and barn and water faded out. And he was staring as if in an endless stillness at an open window against which the sun was beating in a bristling torrent of gold, while out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of another world. The light gathered to a radiance almost intolerable, driving back with its raining beams some memory, forlorn, remorseless, remote. His body stood dark and senseless, rocking in the air on the hillside as if bereft of its spirit. Then his hands were drawn over his eyes. He turned unsteadily and made his way, as if through a thick, drizzling haze, slowly back.

'What is that—there?' he said almost menacingly, standing with bloodshot eyes looking down upon Herbert.