The Return Part 20

Mr Bethany blinked and listened. He tried for the twentieth time to judge his friend's eyes, to gain as best he could some sustained and un.o.bserved glance at this baffling face. 'Where is your precious French book?' he said irritably.

'It's upstairs.'

'Fire away, then!' Lawford rose and glanced about the room. 'What, no light there either?' snapped Mr Bethany. 'Take this; I don't mind the dark. There'll be plenty of that for me soon.'

Lawford hesitated at the door, looking rather strangely back. 'No,'

he said, 'there are matches upstairs.' He shut the door after him. The darkness seemed cold and still as water. He went slowly up, with eyes fixed wide on the floating luminous gloom, and out of memory seemed to gather, as faintly as in the darkness which they had exorcised for him, the strange pitiful eyes of the night before. And as he mounted a chill, terrible, physical peace seemed to steal over him.

Mr Bethany was sitting as he had left him, looking steadily on the floor, when Lawford returned. He flattened out the book on the table with a sniff of impatience. And dragging the candle nearer, and stooping his nose close to the fusty print, he began to read.

'Was this in the house?' he inquired presently.

'No,' said Lawford; 'it was lent to me by a friend--Herbert.'

'H'm! don't know him. Anyhow, precious poor stuff this is.

This Sabathier, whoever he is, seems to be a kind of clap-trap eighteenth-century adventurer who thought the world would be better off, apparently, for a long account of all his sentimental amours. Rousseau, with a touch of Don Quixote in his composition, and an echo of that prince of bogies, Poe! What, in the name of wonder, induced you to fix on this for your holiday reading?'

'Sabathier's alive, isn't he?'

'I never said he wasn't. He's a good deal too much alive for my old wits, with his Mam'selle This and Madame the Other; interesting enough, perhaps, for the professional literary nose with a taste for patchouli.'

'Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?' Mr Bethany peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. 'I should say decidedly that the fellow was a very rare character, so long as by rare you don't mean good. It's one of the dullest stupidities of the present day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he's different from the rest of us. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels. From what I can gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old troubled hermit like yourself at the present moment.'

'There's a portrait of him a few pages back.'

Mr Bethany, with some little impatience, turned back to the engraving.

'"Nicholas de Sabathier,"'s he muttered. '"De," 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 roue 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. G.o.d 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 gra.s.s-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 k.n.o.bbed 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.