Chapter 15

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_ CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Raying and gleaming in the sunlight the hired landau drove up to the gate. Lawford, peeping between the blinds, looked down on the coachman, with reins hanging loosely from his red squat-thumbed hand, seated in his tight livery and indescribable hat on the faded cushions. One thing only was in his mind; and it was almost with an audible cry that he turned towards the figure that edged, white and trembling, into the chill room, to fling herself into his arms. 'Don't look at me,' he begged her, 'only remember, dearest, I would rather have died down there and been never seen again than have given you pain. Run--run, your mother's calling. Write to me, think of me; good-bye!'

He threw himself on the bed and lay there till evening--till the door had shut gently behind the last rat to leave the sinking ship. All the clearness, the calmness were gone again. Round and round in dizzy sickening flare and clatter his thoughts whirled. Contempt, fear, loathing, blasphemy, laughter, longing: there was no end. Death was no end. There was no meaning, no refuge, no hope, no possible peace. To give up was to go to perdition: to go forward was to go mad. And even madness--he sat up with trembling lips in the twilight--madness itself was only a state, only a state. You might be bereaved, and the pain and hopelessness of that would pass. You might be cast out, betrayed, deserted, and still be you, still find solitude lovely and in a brave face a friend. But madness!--it surged in on him with all the clearness and emptiness of a dream. And he sat quite still, his hand clutching the bedclothes, his head askew, waiting for the sound of footsteps, for the presences and the voices that have their thin-walled dwelling beneath the shallow crust of consciousness.

Inky blackness drifted up in wisps, in smoke before his eyes; he was powerless to move, to cry out. There was no room to turn; no air to breathe. And yet there was a low, continuous, never-varying stir as of an enormous wheel whirling in the gloom. Countless infinitesimal faces arched like glimmering pebbles the huge dim-coloured vault above his head. He heard a voice above the monstrous rustling of the wheel, clamouring, calling him back. He was hastening headlong, muttering to himself his own flat meaningless name, like a child repeating as he runs his errand. And then as if in a charmed cold pool he awoke and opened his eyes again on the gathering darkness of the great bedroom, and heard a quick, importunate, long-continued knocking on the door below, as of some one who had already knocked in vain.

Cramped and heavy-limbed, he felt his way across the room and lit a candle. He stood listening awhile: his eyes fixed on the door that hung a little open. All in the room seemed acutely fantastically still. The flame burned dim, misled in the sluggish air. He stole slowly to the door, looked out, and again listened. Again the knocking broke out, more impetuously and yet with a certain restraint and caution. Shielding the flame of his candle in the shell of his left hand, Lawford moved slowly, with chin uplifted, to the stairs. He bent forward a little, and stood motionless and drawn up, the pupils of his eyes slowly contracting and expanding as he gazed down into the carpeted vacant gloom; past the dim louring presence that had fallen back before him.

His mouth opened. 'Who's there?' at last he called.

'Thank God, thank God!' he heard Mr Bethany mutter. 'I mustn't call, Lawford,' came a hurried whisper as if the old gentleman were pressing his lips to speak through the letter-box. 'Come down and open the door; there's a good fellow! I've been knocking no end of a time.'

'Yes, I am coming,' said Lawford. He shut his mouth and held his breath, and stair by stair he descended, driving steadily before him the crouching, gloating menacing shape, darkly lifted up before him against the darkness, contending the way with him.

'Are you ill? Are you hurt? Has anything happened, Lawford?' came the anxious old voice again, striving in vain to be restrained.

'No, no,' muttered Lawford. 'I am coming; coming slowly.' He paused to breathe, his hands trembling, his hair lank with sweat, and still with eyes wide open he descended against the phantom lurking in the darkness--an adversary that, if he should but for one moment close his lids, he felt would master sanity and imagination with its evil. 'So long as you don't get in,' he heard himself muttering, 'so long as you don't get in, my friend!'

'What's that you're saying?' came up the muffled, querulous voice; 'I can't for the life of me hear, my boy.'

'Nothing, nothing,' came softly the answer from the foot of the stairs. 'I was only speaking to myself.'

Deliberately, with candle held rigidly on a level with his eyes, Lawford pushed forward a pace or two into the airless, empty drawing-room, and grasped the handle of the door. He gazed in awhile, a black oblique shadow flung across his face, his eyes fixed like an animal's, then drew the door steadily towards him. And suddenly some power that had held him tense seemed to fail. He thrust out his head, and, his face quivering with fear and loathing, spat defiance as if in a passion of triumph into the gloom.

Still muttering, he shut the door and turned the key. In another moment his light was gleaming out on the grey perturbed face and black narrow shoulders of his visitor.

'You gave me quite a fright,' said the old man almost angrily; 'have you hurt your foot, or something?'

'It was very dark,' said Lawford, 'down the stairs.'

'What!' said Mr Bethany still more angrily, blinking out of his unspectacled eyes; 'has she cut off the gas, then?'

'You got the note?' said Lawford, unmoved.

'Yes, yes; I got the note.... Gone?'

'Oh, yes; all gone. It was my choice. I preferred it so.'

Mr Bethany sat down on one of the hard old wooden chairs that stood on either side of the lofty hall, and breathing rather thickly, rested his hands on his knees. 'What's happened?' he inquired, looking up into the candle. 'I forgot my glasses, old fool that I am, and can't, my dear fellow, see you very plainly. But your voice--'

'I think,' said Lawford, 'I think it's beginning to come back.'

'What, the whole thing! Oh no, my dear, dear man; be frank with me; not the whole thing?'

'Yes,' said Lawford, 'the whole thing--very, very gradually, imperceptibly. I think even Sheila noticed. But I rather feel it than see it; that is all.... I'm cornering him.'

'Him?'

Lawford jerked his candle as if towards some definite goal. 'In time,' he said.

The two faces with the candle between them seemed as it were to gain light each from the other.

'Well, well,' said Mr Bethany, 'every man for himself, Lawford; it's the only way. But what's going to be done? We must be cautious; must think of--of the others?'

'Oh, that,' said Lawford; 'she's going to squeeze me out.'

'You've--squabbled? Oh, but my dear, honest old, HONEST old idiot, there are scores of families here in this parish, within a stone's throw, that squabble, wrangle, all but politely tear each other's eyes out, every day of their earthly lives. It's perfectly natural. Where should we poor old busybodies be else. Peace on earth we bring, and it's mainly between husband and wife.'

'Yes,' said Lawford, 'but you see, this was not our earthly life. It was between US.'

'Listen, listen to the dear mystic!' exclaimed the old creature scoffingly. 'What depths we're touching. Here's the first serious break of his lifetime, and he's gone stark staring transcendental. Ah well.' He paused and glanced quickly about him, with his curious bird-like poise of head. 'But you're not alone here?' he inquired suddenly; 'not absolutely alone?'

'Yes,' said Lawford. 'But there's plenty to think about--and read. I haven't thought or read for years.'

'No, nor I; after thirty, my dear boy, one merely annotates, and the book's called Life. Bless me, his solemn old voice is grinding epigrams out of even this poor old parochial barrel-organ. You don't suppose, you cannot be supposing you are the only serious person in the world? What's more, it's only skin deep.'

Lawford smiled. 'Skin deep. But think quietly over it; you'll see I'm done.'

'Come here,' said Mr Bethany. 'Where's the whiskey, where's the cigars? You shall smoke and drink, and I'll watch. If it weren't for a pitiful old stomach, I'd join you. Come on!' He led the way into the dining-room.

He looked sparer, more wizened and sinewy than ever as he stooped to open the sideboard. 'Where on earth do they keep everything?' he was muttering to himself.

Lawford put the candlestick down on the table. 'There's only one thing,' he said, watching his visitor's rummaging; 'what precisely do you think they will do with me?'

'Look here, Lawford,' snapped Mr Bethany; 'I've come round here, hooting through your letter-box, to tally sense, not sentiment. Why has your wife deserted you? Without a servant, without a single--It's perfectly monstrous.'

'On my word of honour, I prefer it so. I couldn't have gone on. Alone I all but forget this--this lupus. Every turn of her little finger reminded me of it. We are all of us alone, whether we know it or not; you said so yourself. And it's better to realize it stark and unconfused. Besides, you have no idea what--what odd things.... There may be; there IS something on the other side. I'll win through to that.'

Mr Bethany had been listening attentively. He scrambled up from his knees with a half-empty syphon of sodawater. 'See here, Lawford,' he said; 'if you really want to know what's your most insidious and most dangerous symptom just now, it is spiritual pride. You've won what you think a domestic victory; and you can scarcely bear the splendour. Oh, you may shrug! Pray, what IS this "other side" which the superior double-faced creature's going to win through to now?' He rapped it out almost bitterly, almost contemptuously.

Lawford hardly heard the question. Before his eyes had suddenly arisen the peace, the friendly unquestioning stillness, the thunderous lullaby old as the grave. 'It's only a fancy. It seemed I could begin again.'

'Well, look here,' said Mr Bethany, his whole face suddenly lined and grey with age. 'You can't. It's the one solitary thing I've got to say, as I've said it to myself morn, noon, and night these scores of years. You can't begin again; it's all a delusion and a snare. You say we're alone. So we are. The world's a dream, a stage, a mirage, a rack, call it what you will--but YOU don't change, YOU'RE no illusion. There's no crying off for YOU no ravelling out, no clean leaves. You've got this--this trouble, this affliction--my dear, dear fellow what shall I say to tell you how I grieve and groan for you oh yes, and actually laughed, I confess it, a vile hysterical laughter, to think of it. You've got this almost intolerable burden to bear; it's come like a thief in the night; but bear it you must, and ALONE! They say death's a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life's a long undressing. We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade. Well then, and not another word of sense shall you worm out of my worn-out old brains after today--all I say is, don't give in! Why, if you stood here now, freed from this devilish disguise, the old, fat, sluggish fellow that sat and yawned his head off under my eyes in his pew the Sunday before last, if I know anything about human nature I'd say it to your face, and a fig for your vanity and resignation--your last state would be worse than the first. There!'

He bunched up a big white handkerchief and mopped it over his head. 'That's done,' he said, 'and we won't go back. What I want to know now is what are you going to do? Where are you sleeping? What are you going to think about? I'll stay--yes, yes, that's what it must be: I must stay. And I detest strange beds. I'll stay, you SHAN'T be alone. Do you hear me, Lawford?--you SHAN'T be alone!'

Lawford gazed gravely. 'There is just one little thing I want to ask you before you go. I've wormed out an extraordinary old French book; and--just as you say--to pass the time, I've been having a shot at translating it. But I'm frightfully rusty; it's old French; would you mind having a look?'

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 unobserved 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. 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. _

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