The Return by Walter de la Mare (page 4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘”Nothing more?” What?’

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

‘More, sweetheart, more!’

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

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

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

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

‘I see no “ought,”‘ she said. ‘No one is there?’

‘Only a miserable broken voice out of a broken cage–called Conscience.’

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

‘Why do I distress you?–my face, my story you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWENTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My dear fellow–‘ began Herbert reassuringly.

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

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

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

Herbert turned for a moment to the open window.

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

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

Herbert smiled faintly, but made no answer.

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

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

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

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

‘What is that–there?’ he said almost menacingly, standing with bloodshot eyes looking down upon Herbert.

‘”That!”–what?’ said Herbert, glancing up startled from his book. ‘Why, what’s wrong, Lawford?’

‘That,’ said Lawford sullenly, yet with a faintly mournful cadence in his voice; ‘those fields and that old empty farm–that village over there? Why did you bring me here?’

Grisel had not stirred. ‘The village…’

‘Ssh!’ she said, catching her brother’s sleeve; ‘that’s Detcham, yes, Detcham.’

Lawford turned wide vacant eyes on her. He shook his head and shuddered. ‘No, no; not Detcham. I know it; I know it; but it has gone out of my mind. Not Detcham; I’ve been there before; don’t look at me. Horrible, horrible. It takes me back–I can’t think. I stood there, trying, trying; it’s all in a blur. Don’t ask me– a dream.’

Grisel leaned forward and touched his hand. ‘Don’t think; don’t even try. Why should you? We can’t; we MUSTN’T go back.’

Lawford, still gazing fixedly, turned again a darkened face towards the steep of the hill. ‘I think, you know,’ he said, stooping and whispering, ‘HE would know–the window and the sun and the singing. And oh, of course it was too late. You understand–too late. And once… you can’t go back; oh no. You won’t leave me? You see, if you go, it would only be all. I could not be quite so alone. But Detcham–Detcham? perhaps you will not trust me–tell me? That was not the name.’ He shuddered violently and turned dog-like beseeching eyes. ‘To-morrow–yes, to-morrow,’ he said, ‘I will promise anything if you will not leave me now. Once–‘ But again the thread running so faintly through that inextricable maze of memory eluded him. ‘So long as you won’t leave me now!’ he implored her.

She was vainly trying to win back her composure, and could not answer him at once….

In the evening after supper Grisel sat her guest down in front of a big wood fire in the old book-room, where, staring into the playing flames, he could fall at peace into the almost motionless reverie which he seemed merely to harass and weary himself by trying to disperse. She opened the little piano at the far end of the room and played on and on as fancy led–Chopin and Beethoven, a fugue from Bach, and lovely forlorn old English airs, till the music seemed not only a voice persuading, pondering, and lamenting, but gathered about itself the hollow surge of the water and the darkness; wistful and clear, as the thoughts of a solitary child. Ever and again a log burnt through its strength, and falling amid sparks, stirred, like a restless animal, the stillness; or Herbert in his corner lifted his head to glance towards his visitor, and to turn another page. At last the music, too, fell silent, and Lawford stood up with his candle in his hand and eyed with a strange fixity brother and sister. His glance wandered slowly round the quiet flame-lit room.

‘You won’t,’ he said, stooping towards them as if in extreme confidence, ‘you won’t much notice? They come and go. I try not to–to speak. It’s the only way through. It is not that I don’t know they’re only dreams. But if once the–the others thought there had been any tampering’–he tapped his forehead meaningly– ‘here: if once they thought that, it would, you know, be quite over then. How could I prove…?’ He turned cautiously towards the door, and with laborious significance nodded his head at them.

Herbert bent down and held out his long hands to the fire. ‘Tampering, my dear chap: That’s what the lump said to the leaven.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Lawford, putting out his hand, ‘but you know what I mean, Herbert. Anything I tried to do then would be quite, quite hopeless. That would be poisoning the wells.’

They watched him out of the room, and listened till quite distinctly in the still night-shaded house they heard his door gently close. Then, as if by consent, they turned and looked long and questioningly into each other’s faces.

‘Then you are not afraid?’ Herbert said quietly.

Grisel gazed steadily on, and almost imperceptibly shook her head.

‘You mean?’ he questioned her; but still he had again to read her answer in her eyes.

‘Oh, very well, Grisel,’ he said quietly, ‘you know best,’ and returned once more to his writing.

For an hour or two Lawford slept heavily, so heavily that when a little after midnight he awoke, with his face towards the uncurtained window, though for many minutes he lay brightly confronting all Orion, that from blazing helm to flaming dog at heel filled high the glimmering square, he could not lift or stir his cold and leaden limbs. He rose at last and threw off the burden of his bedclothes, and rested awhile, as if freed from the heaviness of an unrememberable nightmare. But so clear was his mind and so extraordinarily refreshed he seemed in body that sleep for many hours would not return again. And he spent almost all the remainder of the lagging darkness pacing softly to and fro; one face only before his eyes, the one sure thing, the one thing unattainable in a world of phantoms.

Herbert waited on in vain for his guest next morning, and after wandering up and down the mossy lawn at the back of the house, went off cheerfully at last alone for his dip. When he returned Lawford was in his place at the breakfast-table. He sat on, moody and constrained, until even Herbert’s haphazard talk trickled low.

‘I fancy my sister is nursing a headache,’ he said at last, ‘but she’ll be down soon. And I’m afraid from the looks of you, Lawford, your night was not particularly restful.’ He felt his way very heedfully. ‘Perhaps we walked you a little too far yesterday. We are so used to tramping that–‘ Lawford kept thoughtful eyes fixed on the deprecating face.

‘I see what it is, Herbert–you are humouring me again. I have been wracking my brains in vain to remember what exactly DID happen yesterday. I feel as if it was all sunk oceans deep in sleep. I get so far–and then I’m done. It won’t give up a hint. But you really mustn’t think I’m an invalid, or–or in my second childhood. The truth is,’ he added, ‘it’s only my FIRST, come back again. But now that I’ve got so far, now that I’m really better, I–‘ He broke off rather vacantly, as if afraid of his own confidence. ‘I must be getting on,’ he summed up with an effort, ‘and that’s the solemn fact. I keep on forgetting I’m– I’m a ratepayer!’

Herbert sat round in his chair. ‘You see, Lawford, the very term is little else than Double-Dutch to me. As a matter of fact Grisel sends all my hush-money to the horrible people that do the cleaning up, as it were. I can’t catch their drift. Government to me is merely the spectacle of the clever, or the specious, managing the dull. It deals merely with the physical, and just the fringe of consciousness. I am not joking. I think I follow you. All I mean is that the obligations–mainly tepid, I take it– that are luring you back to the fold would be the very ones that would scare me quickest off. The imagination, the appeal faded: we’re dead.’

Lawford opened his mouth; ‘TEMPORARILY tepid,’ he at last all but coughed out.

‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Herbert intelligently. ‘Only temporarily. It’s this beastly gregariousness that’s the devil. The very thought of it undoes me–with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals, bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of–of infinity. And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one thinks too much of one’s clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too deep for their poor reasons. I don’t mean that YOUR wanting to go home is anything gregarious, but I do think THEIR insisting on your coming back at once might be. And I know you won’t visit this stuff on me as anything more than just my “scum,” as Grisel calls the fine flower of my maiden meditations. All that I really want to say is that we should both be more than delighted if you’d stay just as long as it will not be a bore for you to stay. Stay till you’re heartily tired of us. Go back now, if you MUST; tell them how much better you are. Bolt off to a nerve specialist. He’ll say complete rest–change of scene, and all that. They all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not take your rest here? We are such miserably dull company to one another it would be a greater pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I mean it from the very bottom of my heart. Do!’

Lawford listened. ‘I wish–,’ he began, and stopped dead again. ‘Anyhow, I’ll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I’ve been playing truant. It was all very well while– To tell you the truth I can’t think QUITE straight yet. But it won’t last for ever. Besides–well, anyhow, I’ll go back.’

‘Right you are,’ said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. ‘You can’t expect, you really can’t, everything to come right straight away. Just have patience. And now, let’s go out and sit in the sun. They’ve mixed September up with May.’

And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair.

Grisel had taken her brother’s place, with a little pile of needlework beside her on the grass, when Lawford again opened his eyes under the rosy shade of a parasol. He watched her for a while, without speaking.

‘How long have I been asleep?’ he said at last.

She started and looked up from her needle.

‘That depends on how long you have been awake,’ she said, smiling. ‘My brother tells me,’ she went on, beginning to stitch, ‘that you have made up your mind to leave us to-day. Perhaps we are only flattering ourselves it has been a rest. But if it has– is that, do you think, quite wise?’

He leant forward and hid his face in his hands. ‘It’s because– it’s because it’s the only “must” I can see.’

‘But even “musts”–well, we have to be sure even of “musts,” haven’t we? Are YOU?’ She glanced up and for an instant their eyes met, and the falling water seemed to be sounding out of a distance so remote it might be but the echo of a dream. She stooped once more over her work.

‘Supposing,’ he said very slowly, and almost as if speaking to himself, ‘supposing Sabathier–and you know he’s merely like a friend now one mustn’t be seen talking to–supposing he came back; what then?’

‘Oh, but Sabathier’s gone: he never really came. It was only a fancy–a mood. It was only you–another you.’

‘Who was that yesterday, then?’

She glanced at him swiftly and knew the question was but a venture.

‘Yesterday?’

‘Oh, very well,’ he said fretfully, ‘you too! But if he did, if he did, come really back: “prey” and all?’

‘What is the riddle?’ she said, taking a deep breath and facing him brightly.

‘Would MY “must” still be HIS?’ The face he raised to her, as he leaned forward under the direct light of the sun, was so colourless, cadaverous and haggard, the thought crossed her mind that it did indeed seem little more than a shadowy mask that but one hour of darkness might dispel.

‘You said, you know, we did win through. Why then should we be even thinking of defeat now?’

‘”We”!’

‘Oh no, you!’ she cried triumphantly.

‘You do not answer my question.’

‘Nor you mine! It WAS a glorious victory. Is there the ghost of a reason why you should cast your mind back? Is there, now?’

‘Only,’ said Lawford, looking patiently up into her face, ‘only because I love you’: and listened in the silence to the words as one may watch a bird that has escaped for ever and irrevocably out of its cage, steadily flying on and on till lost to sight.

For an instant the grey eyes faltered. ‘But that, surely,’ she began in a low voice, still steadily sewing, ‘that was our compact last night–that you should let me help, that you should trust me just as you trusted the mother years ago who came in the little cart with the shaggy dusty pony to the homesick boy watching at the window. Perhaps,’ she added, her fingers trembling, ‘in this odd shuffle of souls and faces, I AM that mother, and most frightfully anxious you should not give in. Why, even because of the tiredness, even because the cause seems vain, you must still fight on–wouldn’t she have said it? Surely there are prizes, a daughter, a career, no end! And even they gone– still the self undimmed, undaunted, that took its drubbing like a man.’

‘I know you know I’m all but crazed; you see this wretched mind all littered and broken down; look at me like that, then. Forget even you have befriended me and pretended– Why must I blunder on and on like this? Oh, Grisel, my friend, my friend, if only you loved me!’

Tears clouded her eyes. She turned vaguely as if for a hiding-place. ‘We can’t talk here. How mad the day is. Listen, listen! I do–I do love you–mother and woman and friend–from the very moment you came. It’s all so clear, so clear: that, and your miserable “must,” my friend. Come, we will go away by ourselves a little, and talk. That way. I’ll meet you by the gate.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She came out into the sunlight, and they went through the little gate together. She walked quickly, without speaking, over the bridge, past a little cottage whose hollyhocks leaned fading above its low flint wall. Skirting a field of stubble, she struck into a wood by a path that ran steeply up the hillside. And by and by they came to a glen where the woodmen of a score of years ago had felled the trees, leaving a green hollow of saplings in the midst of their towering neighbours.

‘There,’ she said, holding out her hand to him, ‘now we are alone. Just six hours or so–and then the sun will be there,’ she pointed to the tree-tops to the west, ‘and then you will have to go; for good, for good–you your way, and I mine. What a tangle– a tangle is this life of ours. Could I have dreamt we should ever be talking like this, you and I? Friends of an hour. What will you think of me? Does it matter? Don’t speak. Say nothing–poor face, poor hands. If only there were something to look to–to pray to!’ She bent over his hand and pressed it to her breast. ‘What worlds we’ve seen together, you and I. And then–another parting.’

They wandered on a little way, and came back and listened to the first few birds that flew up into the higher branches, noonday being past, to sing.

They talked, and were silent, and talked again with out question, or sadness, or regret, or reproach; she mocking even at themselves, mocking at this ‘change’–‘Why, and yet without it, would you ever even have dreamed once a poor fool of a Frenchman went to his restless grave for me–for me? Need we understand? Were we told to pry? Who made us human must be human too. Why must we take such care, and make such a fret–this soul? I know it, I know it; it is all we have–“to save,” they say, poor creatures. No, never to SPEND, and so they daren’t for a solitary instant lift it on the finger from its cage. Well, we have; and now, soon, back it must go, back it must go, and try its best to whistle the day out. And yet, do you know, perhaps the very freedom does a little shake its–its monotony. It’s true, you see, they have lived a long time; these Worldly Wisefolk they were wise before they were swaddled….

‘There, and you are hungry?’ she asked him, laughing in his eyes. `Of course, of course you are–scarcely a mouthful since that first still wonderful supper. And you haven’t slept a wink, except like a tired-out child after its first party, on that old garden chair. I sat and watched, and yes, almost hoped you’d never wake in case–in case. Come along, see, down there. I can’t go home just yet. There’s a little old inn–we’ll go and sit down there–as if we were really trying to be romantic! I know the woman quite well; we can talk there–just the day out.’

They sat at a little table in the garden of ‘The Cherry Trees,’ its thick green apple branches burdened with ripened fruit. And Grisel tried to persuade him to eat and drink, ‘for to-morrow we die,’ she said, her hands trembling, her face as it were veiled with a faint mysterious light.

‘There are dozens and dozens of old stories, you know,’ she said, leaning on her elbows, ‘dozens and dozens, meaning only us. You must, you must eat; look, just an apple. We’ve got to say good-bye. And faintness will double the difficulty.’ She lightly touched his hand as if to compel him to smile with her. ‘There, I’ll peel it; and this is Eden; and soon it will be the cool of the evening. And then, oh yes, the voice will come. What nonsense I am talking. Never mind.’

They sat on in the quiet sunshine, and a spider slid softly through the air and with busy claws set to its nets; and those small ghosts the robins went whistling restlessly among the heavy boughs.

A child presently came out of the porch of the inn into the garden, and stood with its battered doll in its arms, softly watching them awhile. But when Grisel smiled and tried to coax her over, she burst out laughing and ran in again.

Lawford stooped forward on his chair with a groan. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘the whole world mocks me. You say “this evening”; need it be, must it be this evening? If you only knew how far they have driven me. If you only knew what we should only detest each other for saying and for listening to. The whole thing’s dulled and staled. Who wants a changeling? Who wants a painted bird? Who does not loathe the converted?–and I’m converted to Sabathier’s God. Should we be sitting here talking like this if it were not so? I can’t, I can’t go back.’

She rose and stood with her hand pressed over her mouth, watching him.

‘Won’t you understand?’ he continued. ‘I am an outcast–a felon caught red-handed, come in the flesh to a hideous and righteous judgment. I hear myself saying all these things; and yet, Grisel, I do, I do love you with all the dull best I ever had. Not now, then; I don’t ask new even. I can, I would begin again. God knows my face has changed enough even as it is. Think of me as that poor wandering ghost of yours; how easily I could hide away–in your memory; and just wait, wait for you. In time even this wild futile madness too would fade away. Then I could come back. May I try?’

‘I can’t answer you. I can’t reason. Only, still, I do know, talk, put off, forget as I may, must is must. Right and wrong, who knows what THEY mean, except that one’s to be done and one’s to be forsworn; or–forgive, my friend, the truest thing I ever said–or else we lose the savour of both. Oh, then, and I know, too, you’d weary of me. I know you, Monsieur Nicholas, better than you can ever know yourself, though you have risen from your grave. You follow a dream, no voice or face or flesh and blood; and not to do what the one old raven within you cries you must, would be in time to hate the very sound of my footsteps. You shall go back, poor turncoat, and face the clearness, the utterly more difficult, bald, and heartless clearness, as together we faced the dark. Life is a little while. And though I have no words to tell what always are and must be foolish reasons because they are not reasons at all but ghosts of memory, I know in my heart that to face the worst is your only hope of peace. Should I have staked so much on your finding that, and now throw up the game? Don’t let us talk any more. I’ll walk half the way, perhaps. Perhaps I will walk all the way. I think my brother guesses–at least MY madness. I’ve talked and talked him nearly past his patience. And then, when you are quite safely, oh yes, quite safely and soundly gone, then I shall go away for a little, so that we can’t even hear each other speak, except in dreams. Life!–well, I always thought it was much too plain a tale to have as dull an ending. And with us the powers beyond have played a newer trick, that’s all. Another hour, and we will go. Till then there’s just the solitary walk home and only the dull old haunted house that hoards as many ghosts as we ourselves to watch our coming.’

Evening began to shine between the trees; they seemed to stand aflame, with a melancholy rapture in their uplifted boughs above their fading coats. The fields of the garnered harvest shone with a golden stillness, awhir with shimmering flocks of starlings. And the old birds that had sung in the spring sang now amid the same leaves, grown older too to give them harbourage.

Herbert was sitting in his room when they returned, nursing his teacup on his knee while he pretended to be reading, with elbow propped on the table.

‘Here’s Nicholas Sabathier, my dear, come to say goodbye awhile,’ said Grisel. She stood for a moment in her white gown, her face turned towards the clear green twilight of the open window. ‘I have promised to walk part of the way with him. But I think first we must have some tea. No; he flatly refuses to be driven. We are going to walk.’

The two friends were left alone, face to face with a rather difficult silence, only the least degree of nervousness apparent, so far as Herbert was concerned, in that odd aloof sustained air of impersonality that had so baffled his companion in their first queer talk together.

‘Your sister said just now, Herbert,’ blurted Lawford at last. ‘”Here’s Nicholas Sabathier come to say good-bye” well, I–what I want you to understand is that it is Sabathier, the worst he ever was; but also that it is “good-bye.”‘

Herbert slowly turned. ‘I don’t quite see why “goodbye,” Lawford. And–frankly, there is nothing to explain. We have chosen to live such a very out-of-the-way life,’ he went on, as if following up a train of thought…. ‘The truth is if one wants to live at all–one’s own life, I mean–there’s no time for many friends. And just steadfastly regarding your neighbour’s tail as you follow it down into the Nowhere–it’s that that seems to me the deadliest form of hypnotism. One must simply go one’s own way, doing one’s best to free one’s mind of cant–and I dare say clearing some excellent stuff out with the rubbish. One consequence is that I don’t think, however foolhardy it may be to say so, I don’t think I care a groat for any opinion as human as my own, good or bad. My sister’s a million times a better woman than I am a man. What possibly could there be, then, for me to say?’ He turned with a nervous smile. ‘Why should it be good-bye?’

Lawford glanced involuntarily towards the door that stood in shadow duskily ajar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have talked, and we think it must be that, until, at least,’ he smiled faintly, ‘I can come as quietly as your old ghost you told me of; and in that case it may not be so very long to wait.’

Their eyes met fleetingly across the still, listening room. ‘The more I think of it,’ Lawford pushed slowly on, ‘the less I understand the frantic purposelessness of all that has happened to me. Until I went down, as you said, “a godsend of a little Miss Muffet,” and the inconceivable farce came off, I was fairly happy, fairly contented to dance my little wooden dance and wait till the showman should put me down into his box again. And now– well, here I am. The whole thing has gone by and scarcely left a trace of its visit. Here I am for all my friends to swear to; and yet, Herbert, if you’ll forgive me troubling you with this stuff about myself, not a single belief, or thought, or desire remains unchanged. You will remember all that, I hope. It’s not, of course, the ghost of an apology, only the mere facts.’

Herbert rose and paced slowly across to the window. ‘The longer I live, Lawford, the more I curse this futile gift of speech. Here am I, wanting to tell you, to say out frankly what, if mind could appeal direct to mind, would be merely as the wind passing through the leaves of a tree with just one–one multitudinous rustle, but which, if I tried to put into words–well, daybreak would find us still groping on….’ He turned; a peculiar wry smile on his face. ‘It’s a dumb world: but there we are. And some day you’ll come again.’

‘Well,’ said Lawford, as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn thought into such primitive speech, ‘that’s where we stand, then.’ He got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger, ‘Where is your sister?’ he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in actual answer to his entreaty, they heard the clinking of the cups on the little, old, green lacquer tray she was at that moment carrying into the room. She sat down on the window seat and put the tray down beside her. ‘It will be before dark even now,’ she said, glancing out at the faintly burning skies.

They had trudged on together with almost as deep a sense of physical exhaustion as peasants have who have been labouring in the fields since daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. ‘This–is as far as I can go,’ she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. ‘Even now it’s wet with dew.’ She rose again and looked strangely into his face. ‘Yes, yes, here it is,’ she said, ‘oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We’re both at least past that.’

‘Grisel,’ he said, ‘forgive me, but I can’t–I can’t go on.’

‘Don’t think, don’t think,’ she said, taking his hands, and lifting them to her bosom. ‘It’s only how the day goes; and it has all, my one dear, happened scores and scores of times before –mother and child and friend–and lovers that are all these too, like us. We mustn’t cry out. Perhaps it was all before even we could speak–this sorrow came. Take all the hope and all the future: and then may come our chance.’