‘there’s a portrait of him a few pages back.”
Mr Bethany, with some little impatience, turned back to the engraving. ‘“Nicholas de Sabathier,’“ she muttered. “’He,’ indeed!” He poked in at the foxy print with narrowed eyes. “I don’t deny it’s a striking, even perhaps, a rather taking face. I don’t deny it.” He gazed on with an even more acute concentration, and looked up sharply. “Look here, Lawford, what in the name of wonder—what trick are you playing on me now?”
“Trick?” said Lawford; and the world fell with the tiniest plash in the silence, like a vivid little float upon the surface of a shadowy pool.
The old face flushed. “What conceivable bearing, I say, has this dead and gone old rouge on us now?”
“You don’t think, then, you see any resemblance—ANY resemblance at all?”
“Resemblance?” repeated Mr Bethany in a flat voice, and without raising his face again to meet Lawford’s direct scrutiny. “Resemblance to whom?”
“To me? To me, as I am?”
“But even, my dear fellow (forgive my dull old brains!), even if there was just the faintest superficial suggestion of—of that; what then?”
“Why,” said Lawford, “he’s buried in Widderstone.”
“Buried in Widderstone?” The keen childlike blue eyes looked almost stealthily up across the book; the old man sat without speaking, so still that it might even be supposed he himself was listening for a quiet distant footfall.
“He is buried in the grave beside which I fell asleep,” said Lawford; “all green and still and broken,” he added faintly. “You remember,” he went on in a repressed voice—”you remember you asked me if there was anybody else in sight, any eavesdropper? You don’t think—him?”
Mr. Bethany pushed the book a few inches away from him. “Who, did you say—who was it you said put the thing into your head? A queer friend surely?” he paused helplessly. “And how, pray, do you know,” he began again more firmly, “even if there is a Sabathier buried at Widderstone, how do you know it is this Sabathier? It’s not, I think,” he added boldly, “a very uncommon name; with two b’s at any rate. Whereabouts is the grave?”
“Quite down at the bottom, under the trees. And the little seat I told you of is there, too, where I fell asleep. You see,” he explained, ‘the grave’s almost isolated; I suppose because he killed himself.”
Mr Bethany clasped his knuckled fingers on the tablecloth. “It’s no good,” he concluded after a long pause; ‘the fellow’s got up into my head. I can’t think him out. We must thrash it out quietly in the morning with the blessed sun at the window; not this farthing dip. To me the whole idea is as revolting as it is incredible. Why, above a century—no, no! And on the other hand, how easily one’s fancy builds! A few straws and there’s a nest and squawking fledglings, all complete. Is that why—is that why that good, practical wife of yours and all your faithful household have absconded? Does it”—he threw up his head as if towards the house above them—”does it REEK with him?”
Lawford shook his head. “She hasn’t seen him: not—not apart. I haven’t told her.”
Mr Bethany tossed the hugger-mugger of pamphlets across the table. “Then, for simple sanity’s sake, don’t. Hide it; burn it; put the thing completely out of your mind. A friend! Who, where is this wonderful friend?”
“Not very far from Widderstone. He lives—practically alone.”
“And all that stumbling and muttering on the stairs?” he leant forward almost threateningly. “There isn’t anybody here, Lawford?”
“Oh, no,” said Lawford. “We are practically alone with this, you know,” he pointed to the book, and smiled frankly, however faintly.
Again Mr Bethany sank into a fixed yet uneasy reverie, and again shook himself and raised his eyes.
“Well then,” he said, in a voice all but morose in its fretfullness, “what I suggest is that first you keep quiet here; and next, that you write and get your wife back. You say you are better. I think you said she herself noticed a slight improvement. Isn’t it just exactly as I foresaw? And yet she’s gone! But that’s not our business. Get her back. And don’t for a single instant waste a thought on the other; not for a single instant, I implore you, Lawford. And in a week the whole thing will be no more than a dreary, preposterous dream.... You don’t answer me!” he cried impulsively.
“But can one so easily forget a dream like this?”
“You don’t speak out, Lawford; you mean SHE won’t.”
“It must at least seem to have been in part of my own seeking, or contriving; or at any rate—she said it—of my own hereditary or unconscious deserving.”
“She said that!” Mr Bethany sat back. “I see, I see,” he said. “I’m nothing but a fumbling old meddler. And there was I, not ten minutes ago, preaching for all I was worth on a text I knew nothing about. God bless me, Lawford, how long we take a-learning. I’ll say no more. But what an illusion. To think this—this—he laid a long lean hand at arm’s length flat upon the table towards his friend—’to think this is our old jog-trot Arthur Lawford! From henceforth I throw you over, you old wolf in sheep’s wool. I wash my hands of you. And now where am I going to sleep?”
He covered up his age and weariness for an instant with a small crooked hand.
Lawford took a deep breath. “You’re going, old friend, to sleep at home. And I—I’m going to give you my arm to the Vicarage gate. Here I am, immeasurably relieved, fitter than I’ve been since I was a dolt of a schoolboy. On my word of honour: I can’t say why, but I am. I don’t care THAT, vicar, honestly—puffed up with spiritual pride. If a man can’t sleep with pride for a bed-fellow, well, he’d better try elsewhere. It’s no good; I’m as stubborn as a mule; that’s at least a relic of the old Adam. I care no more,” he raised his voice firmly and gravely—”I don’t care a jot for solitude, not a jot for all the ghosts of all the catacombs!”
Mr. Bethany listened, grimly pursed up his lips. “Not a jot for all the ghosts of all the catechisms!” he muttered. `Nor the devil himself, I suppose?” He turned once more to glance sharply in the direction of the face he could so dimly—and of set purpose—discern; and without a word trotted off into the hall. Lawford followed with the candle.
‘“Pon my word, you haven’t had a mouthful of supper. Let me forage; just a quarter of an hour, eh?”
“Not me,” said Mr Bethany; “if you won’t have me, home I go. I refuse to encourage this miserable grass-widowering. What WOULD they say? What would the busybodies say? Ghouls and graves and shocking mysteries—Selina! Sister Anne! Come on.”
He shuffled on his hat and caught firm hold of his knobbed umbrella. “Better not leave a candle,” he said.
Lawford blew out the candle.
“What? What?” called the old man suddenly. But no voice had spoken.
A thin trickle of light from the lamp in the street stuck up through the fanlight as, with a smile that could be described neither as mischievous, saturnine, nor vindictive, and was yet faintly suggestive of all three, Lawford quietly opened the drawing-room door and put down the candlestick on the floor within.
“What on earth, my good man, are you fumbling after now?” came the almost fretful question from under the echoing porch.
“Coming, coming,” said Lawford, and slammed the door behind them.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The first faint streaks of dawn were silvering across the stars when Lawford again let himself into his deserted house. He stumbled down to the pantry and cut himself a crust of bread and cheese, and ate it, sitting on the table, watching the leafy eastern sky through the painted bars of the area window. He munched on, hungry and tired. His night walk had cooled head and heart. Having obstinately refused Mr Bethany’s invitation to sleep at the Vicarage, he had sat down on an old low wall, and watched until his light had shone out at his bedroom window. Then he had simply wandered on, past rustling glimmering gardens, under the great timbers of yellowing elms, hardly thinki
ng, hardly aware of himself except as in a far-away vision of a sluggish insignificant creature struggling across the tossed-up crust of an old, incomprehensible world.
The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau—they were familiar but not very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. “I wonder what they’ll do?” had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few hours as had “What am I to do?” in the first bout of his “visitation.”
But the “they” was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn, and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the verger, Mr Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one’s place in the world’s economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his place was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness at least a respite.
Solitude!—he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again, past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow sweetness of Alice’s, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long and dreamless sleep.
By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten he got up from Sheila’s fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to answer Mrs Gull’s summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous “Good morning,” and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across from line to line of the obscure French print.
Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself, breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and foreboding ennui stole over Lawford’s solitude once more. He shut his books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table, lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.
At a mean little barber’s with a pole above his lettered door he went in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the crumb-littered counter of a little baker’s shop to have some tea. It pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty, consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker’s wife. Whatever his face might now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never have hob-nobbed so affably with his social “inferiors.”
For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer in the friendly baker’s shop, he bought six-penny-worth of cakes. He watched them as they were deposited one by one in the bag, and even asked for one sort to be exchanged for another, flushing a little at the pretty compliment he had ventured on.
He climbed out of the shop, and paused on the wooden doorstep. “Do you happen to know Mr Herbert Herbert’s?” he said.
The baker’s wife glanced up at him with clear, reflective eyes. “Mr Herbert’s?—that must be some little way off, sir. I don’t know any such name, and I know most, just round about like.”
“Well, yes, it is,” said Lawford, rather foolishly; “I hardly know why I asked. It’s past the churchyard at Widderstone.”
“Oh yes, sir,” she encouraged him.
“A big, wooden-looking house.”
“Really, sir. Wooden?”
Lawford looked into her face, but could find nothing more to say, so he smiled again rather absently, and ascended into the street.
He sat down outside the churchyard gate on the very bank where he had in the sourness of the nettles first opened Sabathier’s Memoirs. The world lay still beneath the pale sky. Presently the little fat rector walked up the hill, his wrists still showing beneath his sleeves. Lawford meditatively watched him pass by. A small boy with a switch, a tiny nose, and a swinging gallipot, his cheeks lit with the sunset, followed soon after. Lawford beckoned him with his finger and held out the bag of tarts. He watched him, half incredulous of his prize, and with many a cautious look over his shoulder, pass out of sight. For a long while he sat alone, only the evening birds singing out of the greenness and silence of the churchyard. What a haunting inescapable riddle life was.
Colour suddenly faded out of the light streaming between the branches. And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom, began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so devilish empty—this raft of the world floating under evening’s shadow. How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen asleep, ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy deep had stolen oar and sail and compass, leaving him adrift amid the riding of the waves.
“Are they worth, do you think, quite a penny?” suddenly inquired a quiet voice in the silence. He looked up into the almost colourless face, into the grey eyes beneath their clear narrow brows.
“I was thinking,” he said, “what a curious thing life is, and wondering—”
“The first half is well worth the penny—its originality! I can’t afford twopence. So you must GIVE me what you were wondering.”
Lawford gazed rather blankly across the twilight fields. “I was wondering,” he said with an oddly naive candour, “how long it took one to sink.”
“They say, you know,” Grisel replied solemnly, “drowned sailors float midway, suffering their sea change; purgatory. But what a splendid pennyworth. All pure philosophy!”
‘“Philosophy!’“ said Lawford; “I am a perfect fool. Has your brother told you about me?”
She glanced at him quickly. “We had a talk.”
“Then you do know—?” He stopped dead, and turned to her. “You really realise it, looking at me now?”
“I realise,” she said gravely, ‘that you look even a little more pale and haggard than when I saw you first the other night. We both, my brother and I, you know, thought for certain you’d come yesterday. In fact, I went into the Widderstone in the evening to look for you, knowing your nocturnal habits....” She glanced again at him with a kind of shy anxiety.
“Why—why is your brother so—why does he let me bore him so horribly?”
“Does he? He’s tremendously interested; but then, he’s pretty easily interested when he’s interested at all. If he can possibly twist anything into the slightest show of a mystery, he will. But, of course, you won’t, you can’t, take all he says seriously. The tiniest pinch of salt, you know. He’s an absolute fanatic at talking in the air. Besides, it doesn’t really matter much
.”
“In the air?”
“I mean if once a theory gets into his head—the more far-fetched, so long as it’s original, the better—it flowers out into a positive miracle of incredibilities. And of course you can rout out evidence for anything under the sun from his dingy old folios. Why did he lend you that PARTICULAR book?”
“Didn’t he tell you that, then?”
“He said it was Sabathier.” She seemed to think intensely for the merest fraction of a moment, and turned. “Honestly, though, I think he immensely exaggerated the likeness. As for...”
He touched her arm, and they stopped again, face to face. “Tell me what difference exactly you see,” he said. “I am quite myself again now, honestly; please tell me just the very worst you think.”
“I think, to begin with,” she began, with exaggerated candour, “his is rather a detestable face.”
“And mine?” he said gravely.
“Why—very troubled; oh yes—but his was like some bird of prey. Yours—what mad stuff to talk like this!—not the least symptom, that I can see, of—why, the ‘prey,’ you know.”
They had come to the wicket in the dark thorny hedge. “Would it be very dreadful to walk on a little—just to finish?”
“Very,” she said, turning as gravely at his side.
“What I wanted to say was—” began Lawford, and forgetting altogether the thread by which he hoped to lead up to what he really wanted to say, broke off lamely; “I should have thought you would have absolutely despised a coward.”
The Altar of the Dead And Other Morbid Tales Page 29