“Well,” said Herbert with a faint smile, ‘that depends on your definition of the word. He wasn’t a flunkey, a fool, or a prig, if that’s what you mean. He wasn’t perhaps on Mrs Grundy’s visiting list. He wasn’t exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To the stodgy, suety world of course it’s little else than sheer moonshine, midsummer madness. Naturally, in its own charming and stodgy way the world kept flickering cold water in his direction. Naturally it hissed.... I shall find the book. You shall have the book; oh yes.”
“There’s only one more question,” said Lawford in a dull, slow voice, stooping and covering his face with his hands. “I know it’s impossible for you to realise—but to me time seems like that water there, to be heaping up about me. I wait, just as one waits when the conductor of an orchestra lifts his hand and in a moment the whole surge of brass and wood, cymbal and drum will crash out—and sweep me under. I can’t tell you Herbert, how it all is, with just these groping stirrings of that mole in my mind’s dark. You say it may be this face, working in! God knows. I find it easy to speak to you—this cold, clear sense, you know. The others feel too much, or are afraid, or—let me think—yes, I was going to ask you a question. But no one can answer it.” He peered darkly, with white face suddenly revealed between his hands. “What remains now? Where do I come in? What is there left for ME to do?”
And at that moment there sounded, even above the monotonous roar of the water beyond the window—there fell the sound of a light footfall approaching along the corridor.
“Listen,” said Herbert; “here’s my sister coming; we’ll ask her.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The door opened. Lawford rose, and into the further rays of the candlelight entered a rather slim figure in a light summer gown.
“Just home?” said Herbert.
“We’ve been for a walk—”
“My sister always forgets everything,” said Herbert, turning to Lawford; “even tea-time. This is Mr Lawford, Grisel. We’ve been arguing no end. And we want you to give a decision. It’s just this: Supposing if by some impossible trick you had come in now, not the charming familiar sister you are, but shorter, fatter, fair and round-faced, quite different, physically, you know—what would you do?”
“What nonsense you talk, Herbert!”
“Yes, but supposing: a complete transmogrification—by some unimaginable ingression or enchantment, by nibbling a bunch of roses, or whatever you like to call it?”
“Only physically?”
“Well, yes, actually; but potentially, why—that’s another matter.”
The dark eyes passed slowly from her brother’s face and rested gravely on their visitor’s.
“Is he making fun of me?”
Lawford almost imperceptibly shook his head.
“But what a question! And I’ve had no tea.” She drew her gloves slowly through her hand. “The thing, of course, isn’t possible, I know. But shouldn’t I go mad, don’t you think?”
Lawford gazed quietly back into the clear, grave, deliberate eyes. ‘suppose, suppose, just for the sake of argument—NOT,” he suggested.
She turned her head and reflected, glancing from one to the other of the pure, steady candle-flames.
“And what was your answer?” she said, looking over her shoulder at her brother.
“My dear child, you know what my answers are like!”
“And yours?”
Lawford took a deep breath, gazing mutely, forlornly, into the lovely untroubled peace of her eyes, and without the least warning tears swept up into his own. With an immense effort he turned, and choking back every sound, beating hack every thought, groped his way towards the square black darkness of the open door.
“I must think, I must think,” he managed to whisper, lifting his hand and steadying himself. He caught over his shoulder the glimpse of a curiously distorted vision, a lifted candle, and a still face gazing after him with infinitely grieved eyes, then found himself groping and stumbling down the steep, uneven staircase into the darkness of the queer old wooden and hushed and lonely house. The night air cold on his face calmed his mind. He turned and held out his hand.
“You’ll come again?” Herbert was saying, with a hint of anxiety, even of apology in his voice.
Lawford nodded, with eyes fixed blankly on the candle, and turning once more, made his way slowly down the narrow green-bordered path upon which the stars rained a scattered light so feeble it seemed but as a haze that blurred the darkness. He pushed open the little white wicket and turned his face towards the soundless, leaf-crowned hill. He had advanced hardly a score of steps in the thick dust when almost as if its very silence had struck upon his ear he remembered the black broken grave with its sightless heads that lay beyond the leaves. And fear, vast and menacing, fear such as only children know, broke like a sea of darkness on his heart. He stopped dead—cold, helpless, trembling. And, in the silence he heard a faint cry behind him and light footsteps pursuing him. He turned again. In the thick close gloom beneath the enormous elm-boughs the grey eyes shone clearly visible in the face upturned to him. “My brother,” she began breathlessly—’the little French book. It was I who—who mislaid it.”
The set, stricken face listened unmoved.
“You are ill. Come back! I am afraid you are very ill.”
“It’s not that, not that,” Lawford muttered; “don’t leave me; I am alone. Don’t question me,” he said strangely, looking down into her face, clutching her hand; “only understand that I can’t, I can’t go on.” He swept a lean arm towards the unseen churchyard. “I am afraid.”
The cold hand clasped his closer. “Hush, don’t speak! Come back; come back. I am with you, a friend, you see; come back.”
Lawford clutched her hand as a blind man in sudden peril might clutch the hand of a child. He saw nothing clearly; spoke almost without understanding his words.
“Oh, but it’s MUST,” he said; “I MUST go on. You see—why, everything depends on struggling through: the future! But if you only knew—There!” Again his arm swept out, and the lean terrified face turned shuddering from the dark.
“I do know; believe me, believe me! I can guess. See, I am coming with you; we will go together. As if, as if I did not know what it is to be afraid. Oh, believe me; no one is near; we go on; and see! It gradually, gradually lightens. How thankful I am I came.”
She had turned and they were steadily ascending as if pushing their way, battling on through some obstacle of the mind rather than of the senses beneath the star-powdered callous vault of night. And it seemed to Lawford as if, as they pressed on together, some obscure detestable presence as slowly, as doggedly had drawn worsted aside. He could see again the peaceful outspread branches of the trees, the lych-gate standing in clear-cut silhouette against the liquid dusk of the sky. A strange calm stole over his mind. The very meaning and memory of his fear faded out and vanished, as the passed-away clouds of a storm that leave a purer, serener sky.
They stopped and stood together on the brow of the little hill, and Lawford, still trembling from head to foot, looked back across the hushed and lightless countryside. “It’s all gone now,” he said wearily, “and now there’s nothing left. You see, I cannot even ask your forgiveness—and a stranger!”
“Please don’t say that—unless—unless—a "pilgrim" too. I think, surely, you must own we did have the best of it that time. Yes—and I don’t care WHO may be listening—but we DID win through.”
“What can I say? How shall I explain? How shall I make you understand?”
The clear grey eyes showed not the faintest perturbation. “But I do; I do indeed, in part; I do understand, ever so faintly.”
“And now I will come back with you.”
They paused in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky, arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness of their triumph.
She turned unquestioningly. And
laughing softly almost as children do, the stalking shadows of a twilight wood behind them—they trod in silence back to the house. They said goodbye at the gate, and Lawford started once more for home. He walked slowly, conscious of an almost intolerable weariness, as if his strength had suddenly been wrested away from him. And at some distance beyond the top of the hill he sat down on the bank beside a nettled ditch, and with his book pressed down upon the wayside grass struck a match, and holding it low in the scented, windless air turned slowly the cockled leaf.
Few of them were alike except for the dinginess of the print and the sinister smudge of the portraits. All were sewn roughly together into a mould-stained, marbled cover. He lit a second match, and as he did so glanced as if inquiringly over his shoulder. And a score or so of pages before the end he came at last upon the name he was seeking, and turned the page.
It was a likeness even more striking in its crudeness of ink and line and paper than the most finished of portraits could have been. It repelled, and yet it fascinated him. He had not for a moment doubted Herbert’s calm conviction. And yet as he stooped in the grass, closely scrutinising the blurred obscure features, he felt the faintest surprise not so much at the significant resemblance but at his own composure, his own steady, unflinching confrontation with this sinister and intangible adversary. The match burned down to his fingers. It hissed faintly in the grass.
He stuffed the book into his pocket, and stared into the pale dial of his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. Midnight, then, would just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer exhaustion. Then, hesitating, he turned his head and looked back towards the hollow. But a vague foreboding held him back. A sour and vacuous incredulity swept over him. What was the use of all this struggling and vexation. What gain in living on? Once dead his sluggish spirit at least would find its rest. Dust to dust it would indeed be for him. What else, in sober earnest, had he been all his daily stolid life but half dead, scarce conscious, without a living thought, or desire, in head or heart?
And while he was still gloomily debating within himself he had turned towards home, and soon was walking in a kind of reverie, even his extreme tiredness in part forgotten, and only a far-away dogged recollection in his mind that in spite of shame, in spite of all his miserable weakness, the words had been uttered once for all, and in all sincerity, “We DID win through.”
Yet a desolate and odd air of strangeness seemed to drape his unlighted house as he stood looking up in a kind of furtive communion with its windows. It affected him with that discomforting air of extreme and meaningless novelty that things very familiar sometimes take upon themselves. In this leaden tiredness no impression could be trustworthy. His lids shut of themselves as he softly mounted the steps. It seemed a needlessly wide door that soundlessly admitted him. But however hard he pressed the key his bedroom door remained stubbornly shut until he found that it was already unlocked and he had only to turn the handle. A night-light burned in a little basin on the washstand. The room was hung, as it were, with the stillness of night. And half lying on the bed in her dressing-gown, her head leaning on the rail at the foot, was Alice, just as sleep had overtaken her.
Lawford returned to the door and listened. It seemed he heard a voice talking downstairs, and yet not talking, for it ran on and on in an incessant slightly argumentative monotony that had neither break nor interruption. He closed the door, and stooping laid his hand softly on Alice’s narrow, still childish hand that lay half-folded on her knee. Her eyes opened instantly and gazed widely into his face. A slow vacant smile of sleep came and went and her fingers tightened gently over his as again her lids drooped down over the drowsy blue eyes.
“At last, at last, dear,” she said; “I have been waiting such a time. But we mustn’t talk much. Mother is waiting up, reading.”
Faintly through the close-shut door came the sound of that distant expressionless voice monotonously rising and falling.
“Why didn’t you tell me, dear?” Alice still sleepily whispered. “Would I have asked a single question? How could I? Oh, if you had only trusted me!”
“But the change—the change, Alice! You must have seen that. You spoke to me, you did think I was only a stranger; and even when you knew, it was only fear on your face, dearest, and aversion; and you turned to your mother first. Don’t think, Alice, that I am...God only knows—I’m not complaining. But truth is best whatever it is. I do feel that. You mustn’t be afraid of hurting me, my dear.”
Her very hands seemed to quicken in his as now, with sleep quite gone, the fret of memory returned, and she must reassure both herself and him. “But you see, dear, mother had told me that you—besides, I did know you at once, really; quite inside, you know, deep down. I know I was perplexed; I didn’t understand; but that was all. Why, even when you came up in the dark, and we talked—if you only knew how miserable I had been—though I knew even then there was something different, still I was not a bit afraid. Was I? And shouldn’t I have been afraid, horribly afraid, if YOU had not been YOU?” She repressed a little shudder, and clasped his hand more closely. “Don’t let us say anything more about it, she implored him; “we are just together again, you and I; that is all that matters.” But her words were like brave soldiers who have fought their way through an ambuscade but have left all confidence behind them.
Lawford listened; and that was enough just now—that she still, in spite of doubt, believed in him, and thought and cared for him. He was too tired to have refused the least kindness. He made no answer, but leant his head on the cool, slender fingers in gratitude and peace. And, just as he was, he almost instantly fell asleep. He woke in the darkness to find himself alone. He groped his way heavily to the door and turned the handle. But now it was really locked. Energy failed him. “I suppose—Sheila...” he muttered.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sheila, calm, alert, reserved, was sitting at the open window when he awoke again. His breakfast tray stood on a little table beside the bed. He raised himself on his elbow and looked at his wife. The morning light shone full on her features as she turned quickly at sound of his stirring.
“You have slept late,” she said, in a low, mellow voice.
“Have I, Sheila? I suppose I was tired out. It is very kind of you to have got everything ready like this.”
“I am afraid, Arthur, I was thinking rather of the maids. I like to inconvenience them as little as possible; in their usual routine, I mean. How are you feeling, do you think, this morning?”
“I—I haven’t seen the glass, Sheila.”
She paused to place a little pencil tick at the foot of the page of her butcher’s book. “And did you—did you try?”
“Did I try? Try what?”
“I understood,” she said, turning slowly in her chair, “you gave me to understand that you went out with the specific intention of trying to regain.... But there, forgive me, Arthur; I think I must be getting a little bit hardened to the position, so far at least as any hope is in my mind of rather amateurish experiments being of much help. I may seem unsympathetic in saying frankly what I feel. But amateurish or no, you are curiously erratic. Why, if you really were the Dr Ferguson whose part you play so admirably you could scarcely spend a more active life.”
“All you mean, Sheila, I suppose, is that I have failed.”
‘“Failed" did not enter my mind. I thought, looking at you just now in your clothes on the bed, one might for the moment be deceived into thinking there was a slight—quite the slightest improvement. There was not quite that”—she hovered for the right word—’that tenseness. Whether or not, whether you desired any such change or didn’t, I should have supposed in any case it would have been better to act as far as possible like any ordinary person. You were certainly in an extraordinarily sound sleep. I was almost alarmed; until I remembered that it was a little after two when I looked up from reading aloud to keep myself awake and discovered that you had only just come home. I had no fire. You know how easily late h
ours bring on my headaches; a little thought might possibly have suggested that I should be anxious to hear. But no; it seems I cannot profit by experience, Arthur. And even now you have not answered surely a very natural question. You do not recollect, perhaps, exactly what did happen last night? Did you go in the direction even of Widderstone?”
“Yes, Sheila, I went to Widderstone.”
“It was of course absurd to suppose that sitting on a seat beside the broken-down grave of a suicide would have the slightest effect on one’s—one’s physical condition; though possibly it might affect one’s brain. It would mine; I am at least certain of that. It was your own prescription, however; and it merely occurred to me to inquire whether the actual experience has not brought you round to my own opinion.”
“Yes, I think it has,” Lawford answered calmly. “But I don’t quite see what suicide has got to do with it; unless—You know Widderstone, then, Sheila?”
“I drove there last Saturday afternoon.”
“For prayer or praise?” Although Lawford had not actually raised his head, he became conscious rather of the wonderfully adjusted mass of hair than of the pained dignity in the face that was now closely regarding him.
“I went,” came the rigidly controlled retort, ‘simply to test an inconceivable story.”
“And returned?”
“Convinced, Arthur, of its inconceivability. But if you would kindly inform me what precise formula you followed at Widderstone last night, I would tell you why I think the explanation, or rather your first account of the matter, is not an explanation of the facts.”
Lawford shot a rather doglike glance over his toast. “Danton?” he said.
“Candidly, Arthur, Mr Danton doubts the whole story. Your very conduct—well, it would serve no useful purpose to go into that. Candidly, on the other hand, Mr. Danton did make some extremely helpful suggestions—basing them, of course, on the TRUTH of your account. He has seen a good deal of life; and certainly very mysterious things do occur to quite innocent and well-meaning people without the faintest shadow of warning, and as Mr. Bethany himself said, evil birds do come home to roost, and often out of a clear sky, as it were. But there, every fresh solution that occurs to me only makes the thing more preposterous, more, I was going to say, disreputable—I mean, of course, to the outside world. And we have our duties to perform to them too, I suppose. Why, what can we say? What plausible account of ourselves have we? We shall never be able to look anybody in the face again. I can only—I am compelled to believe that God has been pleased to make this precise visitation upon us—an eye for an eye, I suppose, SOMEWHERE. And to that conviction I shall hold until actual circumstances convince me that it’s false. What, however, and this is all that I have to say now, what I cannot understand are your amazing indiscretions.”
The Altar of the Dead And Other Morbid Tales Page 26