The Return Part 2

But there, think it over. I shall not stir until I hear the voices. And then: honestly, Sheila, I couldn't face quite that. I'd sooner give up altogether. Any proof you can think of--I will... O G.o.d, I cannot bear it!' He covered his face with his hands; but in a moment looked up, unmoved once more. 'Why, for that matter,' he added slowly, and, as it were, with infinite pains, a faint thin smile again stealing into his face, 'I think,' he turned wearily to the gla.s.s, 'I think, it's almost an improvement!'

Something deep in those dark clear pupils, out of that lean adventurous face, gleamed back at him, the distant flash of a heliograph, as it were, height to height, flas.h.i.+ng 'Courage!' He shuddered, and shut his eyes. 'But I would really rather,' he aided in a quiet childlike way, 'I would really rather, Sheila, you left me alone now.'

His wife stood irresolute. 'I understand you to explain,' she said, 'that you went out of this house, just your usual self, this afternoon, for a walk; that for some reason you went to Widderstone--"to read the tombstones," that you had a heart attack, or, as you said at first, a fit, that you fell into a stupor, and came home like--like this. Am I likely to believe all that? Am I likely to believe such a story as that?

Whoever you are, whoever you may be, is it likely? I am not in the least afraid. I thought at first it was some silly practical joke. I thought that at first.' She paused, but no answer came. 'Well, I suppose in a civilised country there is a remedy even for a joke as wicked as that.'

Lawford listened patiently. 'She is pretending; she is trying me; she is feeling her way,' he kept repeating to himself. 'She knows I AM I, but hasn't the courage... Let her talk!'

'I shall leave the door open,' Sheila continued. 'I am not, as you no doubt very naturally a.s.sumed--I am not going to do anything either senseless or heedless. I am merely going to ask your brother Cecil to come in, if he is at home, and if not, no doubt our old friend Mr. Montgomery would--would help us.' Her scrutiny was still and concentrated, like that of a cat above a mouse's hole.

Lawford sat crouched together in the candle-light. 'By all means, Sheila,' he said slowly choosing his words, 'if you think poor old Cecil, who next January will have been three years in his grave, will be of any use in our difficulty. Who Mr. Montgomery is...' His voice dropped in utter weariness. 'You did it very well, my dear,' he added softly.

Sheila gently closed the door and sat down on the bed. He heard her softly crying, he heard the bed shaken with her sobs. But a slow glance towards the steady candle-flames restrained him. He let her cry on alone. When she had become a little more composed he stood up. 'You have had no dinner,' he managed to blurt out at last, 'you will be faint.

It's useless to talk, even to think, any more to-night. Leave me to myself for a while. Don't look at me any more. Perhaps I can sleep: perhaps if I sleep it will come right again. When the servants are gone up, I will come down. Just let me have some--some medical book, or other; and some more candles. Don't think, Sheila; don't even think!'

Sheila paid him no attention for a while. 'You tell me not to think,'

she began, in a low, almost listless voice; 'why--I wonder I am in my right mind. And "eat"! How can you have the heartlessness to suggest it?

You don't seem in the least to realize what you say. You seem to have lost all--all consciousness. I quite agree, it is useless for me to burden you with my company while you are in your present condition of mind. But you will at least promise me that you won't take any further steps in this awful business.' She could not, try as she would, bring herself again to look at him. She rose softly, paused a moment with sidelong eyes, then turned deliberately towards the door, 'What, what have I done to deserve all this?'

From behind her that voice, so extraordinarily like--and yet in some vague fas.h.i.+on more arresting, more resonant than her husband's, broke incredibly out once more. 'You will please leave the key, Sheila. I am ill, but I am not yet in the padded room. And please understand, I take no further steps in "this awful business" until I hear a strange voice in the house.' Sheila paused, but the quiet voice rang in her ear, desperately yet convincingly. She took the key out of the lock, placed it on the bed, and with a sigh, that was not quite without a hint of relief in its misery, she furtively extinguished the gas-light on the landing and rustled downstairs.

She speedily returned. 'I have brought the book.' she said hastily.

'I could only find the one volume. I have said you have taken a fresh chill. No one will disturb you.'

Lawford took the book without a word. And once more, with eyes stonily averted, his wife left him to his own company and that of the face in the gla.s.s.

When completely deserted, Lawford with fumbling fingers opened Quain's 'Dictionary of Medicine.' He had never had much curiosity, and had always hated what he disbelieved, but none the less he had heard occasionally of absurd and questionable experiments. He remembered even to have glanced over reports of cases in the newspapers concerning disappearances, loss of memory, dual personality. Cranks... Oh yes, he thought now, with a sense of cold humiliating relief, there had been such cases as his before. They were no doubt curable. They must be comparatively common in America--that land of jangled nerves. Possibly bromide, rest, a battery. But Quain, it seemed, shared his prejudices, at least in this edition, or had hidden away all such apocryphal matter beneath technical terms, where no sensible man could find it, 'Besides,'

he muttered angrily, 'what's the good of your one volume?' He flung it down and strode to the bed, and rang the bell. Then suddenly recollecting himself, he paused and listened. There came a tap on the door. 'Is that you, Sheila?' he called, doubtfully.

'No, sir, it's me,' came the answer.

'Oh, don't trouble; I only wanted to speak to your mistress. It's all right.'

'Mrs. Lawford has gone out, sir,' replied the voice.

'Gone out?'

'Yes, sir; she told me not to mention it; but I suppose as you asked--'

'Oh, that's all right; never mind; I didn't ring.' He stood with face uplifted, thinking.

'Can I do anything, sir?' came the faint, nervous question after a long pause.

'One moment, Ada,' he called in a loud voice. He took out his pocket-book, sat down, and scribbled a little note. He hardly noticed how changed his handwriting was--the clear round letters crabbed and irregular.

'Are you there, Ada?' he called. 'I am slipping a note beneath the door; just draw back the mat; that's it. Take it at once, please, to Mr.

Critchett's, and be sure to wait for an answer. Then come back direct to me, up here. I don't think, Ada, your mistress believes much in Critchett; but I have fully explained what I want. He has made me up many prescriptions. Explain that to his a.s.sistant if he is not there.

Go at once, and you will be back before she is. I should be so very much obliged, tell him. "Mr Arthur Lawford."'

The minutes slowly drifted by. He sat quite still in the clear untroubled light, waiting in the silence of the empty house. And for the first time he was confronted with the cold incredible horror of his ordeal. Who would believe, who could believe, that behind this strange and awful, yet how simple mask, lay himself? What test; what heaped-up evidence of ident.i.ty would break it down? It was all a loathsome ignominy. It was utterly absurd. It was--

Suddenly, with a kind of ape-like cunning, he deliberately raised a long lean forefinger and pointed it at the shadowy crystal of the looking-gla.s.s. Perhaps he was dead, was really and indeed changed in body, was fated really and indeed to change in soul, into That. 'It's that beastly voice again,' Lawford cried out loud, looking vacantly at his upstretched finger. And then, hand and arm, not too willingly, as it were, obeyed; relaxed and fell to his side. 'You must keep a tight hold, old man,' he muttered to himself. 'Once, once you lose yourself--the least symptom of that--the least symptom, and it's all up!' And the fools, the heartless, preposterous fools had brought him one volume!

When on earth was Ada coming back? She was lagging on purpose. She was in the conspiracy too. Oh, it should be a lesson to Sheila! Oh, if only daylight would come! 'What are you going to do--to do--to DO?' He rose once more and paced his silent cage. To and fro, thinking no more; just using his eyes, compelling them to wander from picture to picture, bedpost to bedpost; now counting aloud his footsteps; now humming; only, only to keep himself from thinking. At last he took out a drawer and actually began arranging its medley of contents; ties, letters, studs, concert and theatre programmes--all higgledy-piggledy. And in the midst of this childish strategem he heard a faint sound, as of heavy water trickling from a height. He turned. A thief was in one of the candles.

It was guttering out. He would be left in darkness. He turned hastily without a moment's heed, to call for light, flung the door open and full in the flare of a lamp, illuminating her pale forehead and astonished face beneath her black straw hat, stood face to face with Ada.

With one swift dexterous movement he drew the door to after him, looking straight into her almost colourless steady eyes. 'Ah,' he said instantly, in a high faint voice, 'the powder, thank you; yes, Mr Lawford's powder; thank you, thank you. He must be kept absolutely quiet--absolutely. Mrs Lawford is following. Please tell her that I am here, when she returns. Mr Critchett was in, then? Thank you. Extreme, extreme silence, please.' Again that knotted, melodramatic finger raised itself on high; and within that lean, cadaverous body the soul of its lodger quailed at this spectral boldness. But it was triumphant. The maid at once left him and went downstairs. He heard faint voices in m.u.f.fled consultation. And in a moment Sheila's silks rustled once more on the staircase. Lawford put down the lamp, and watched her deliberately close the door.

'What does this mean?' she began swiftly, 'I understand that--Ada tells me a stranger is here; giving orders, directions. Who is he? where is he? You bound yourself on your solemn promise not to stir till I returned. You... How can I, how can we get decently through this horrible business if you are so wretchedly indiscreet? You sent Ada to the chemist's. What for? What for? I say.'

Lawford watched his wife with an almost extraneous interest. She was certainly extremely interesting from that point of view, that very novel point of view. 'It's quite useless,' he said, 'to get in the least nervous or hysterical. I don't care for the darkness just now. That was all. Tell the girl I am a strange doctor--Dr Simon's new partner. You are clever at conventionalities, Sheila. Invent! I said our patient must be kept quiet--I really think he must. That is all, so far as Ada is concerned.... What on earth else ARE we to say?' he broke out. 'That, for the present to EVERYBODY, is our only possible story. It will give us what we must have--time. And next--where is the second volume of Quain? I want that. And next--why have you broken faith with me?' Mrs Lawford sat down. This sudden and baffling outburst had stupefied her.

'I can't, I can't make head or tail of what you say. And as for having broken faith, as you call it, would any wife, would any sane woman face what you have brought on us, a situation like this, without seeking advice and help? Mr Bethany will be perfectly discreet--if he thinks discretion desirable. He is the only available friend we have close enough to ask at once. And things of this kind are, I suppose, if anybody's concern, his. It's certain to leak out. Everybody will hear of it. Don't flatter yourself you are going to hush up a thing like this for long. You can't keep living skeletons in a cupboard. You think only of yourself, only of your own misfortune. But who's to know, pray, that you really are my husband--if you are? The sooner I get the vicar on my side the better for us both. Who in the whole of the parish--I ask you--and you must have the sense left to see that--who will believe that a respectable man, a gentleman, a Churchman, would deliberately go out to seek an afternoon's amus.e.m.e.nt in a poky little country churchyard?

Why, apart from everything else, THAT was absolutely mad to start with.

Can you really wonder at the result?'

Probably because she still steadfastly refused to look at him, her memory kept losing its hold on the appalling fact facing them. She realised fully only that she was in a great, unwarrantable, and insurmountable difficulty, but until she actually lifted her eyes for a moment she had not fully realised what that difficulty was. She got up with a sudden and horrible nausea. 'One moment,' she said, 'I will see if the servants have gone to bed.'

That long saturnine face, behind which Lawford lay in a dull and desperate ambush, smiled. Something partaking of its clay, some reflex ghost of its rather remarkable features, was even a little amused at Sheila.

She returned in a moment, and stood in profile in the doorway. 'Will you come down?' she remarked distantly.

'One moment, Sheila,' Lawford began miserably. 'Before we take this irrevocable step, a step I implore you to postpone awhile--for what comes, I suppose, may go--what precisely have you told the vicar? I must in fairness know that.'

'In fairness,' she began ironically, and suddenly broke off. Her husband had turned the flame of the lamp low down in the vacant room behind them; the corridor was lit obscurely by the chandelier far down in the hall below. A faint, inexplicable dread fell softly and coldly on her heart. 'Have you no trust in me?' she murmured a little bitterly. 'I have simply told him the truth.'

They softly descended the stairs; she first, the dark figure following close behind her.

CHAPTER THREE

Mr Bethany sat awaiting them in the dining-room, a large, heavily-furnished room with a great benign looking-gla.s.s on the mantelpiece, a marble clock, and with rich old damask curtains. Fleecy silver hair was all that was visible of their visitor when they entered.

But Mr Bethany rose out of his chair when he heard them, and with a little jerk, turned sharply round. Thus it was that the gold-spectacled vicar and Lawford first confronted each other, the one brightly illuminated, the other framed in the gloom of the doorway. Mr Bethany's first scrutiny was timid and courteous, but beneath it he tried to be keen, and himself hastened round the table almost at a trot, to obtain, as delicately as possible, a closer view. But Lawford, having shut the door behind him, had gone straight to the fire and seated himself, leaning his face in his hands. Mr Bethany smiled faintly, waved his hand almost as if in blessing, but certainly in peace, and tapped Mrs Lawford into the chair upon the other side. But he himself remained standing.

'Mrs Lawford has, I declare, been telling family secrets,' he began, and paused, peering. But there, you will forgive an old friend's intrusion--this little confidence about a change, my dear fellow--about a ramble and a change?' He sat down, put up his kind little puckered face and peered again at Lawford, and then very hastily at his wife.

But all her attention was centred on the bowed figure opposite to her.

Lawford responded to this cautious advance without raising his head.

'You do not wish me to repeat all that my wife tells me she has told you?'

'Dear me, no,' said Mr Bethany cheerfully, 'I wish nothing, nothing, old friend. You must not burden yourself with me. If I may be of any help, here I am.... Oh, no, no....' he paused, with blinking eyes, but wits still shrewd and alert. Why doesn't the man raise his head? he thought.

A mere domestic dispute!

'I thought,' he went on ruminatingly, 'I thought on Tuesday, yes, on Tuesday, that you weren't looking quite the thing. Indeed, I remarked on it. But now, I understand from Mrs Lawford that the malady has taken a graver turn--eh, Lawford, an heretical turn? I hear you have been wandering from the true fold.' Mr Bethany leaned forward with what might be described as a very large smile in a very small compa.s.s. 'And that, of course, entailed instant retribution.' He broke off solemnly. 'I know Widderstone churchyard well; a most verdant and beautiful spot. The late rector, a Mr Strickland, was a very old friend of mine. And his wife, dear good Alicia, used to set out her babies, in the morning, to sleep and to play there, twenty, dear me, perhaps twenty-five years ago. But I did not know, my dear Lawford, that you--' and suddenly, without an instant's warning, something seemed to shout at him, 'Look, look! He is looking at you!' He stopped, faltered, and a slight warmth came into his face. 'And and you were taken ill there?' His voice had fallen flat and faint.

'I fell asleep--or something of that sort,' came the stubborn reply.

'Yes,' said Mr Bethany, brightly, 'so your wife was saying. "Fell asleep," so have I too--scores of times'; he beamed, with beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. 'And then? I'm not, I'm not persisting?'