The Return Part 24

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.sured 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 IDENt.i.tY; 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 s.h.i.+fts 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 rea.s.sure 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 owners.h.i.+p 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-gla.s.s, 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-n.o.b 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 pa.s.sing 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-gla.s.s. The empty drawer flew open. There were finger-marks still in the dust.

Yet, strangely enough, beneath all the clas.h.i.+ng 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.