Chapter 23

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_ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Lawford sat on in the darkness, and now one sentence and now another of their talk would repeat itself in his memory, in much the same way as one listlessly turns over an antiquated diary, to read here and there a flattened and almost meaningless sentiment. Sometimes a footstep passed echoing along the path under the trees, then his thoughts would leave him, and he would listen and listen till it had died quite out. It was all so very far away. And they too--these talkers--so very far away; as remote and yet as clear as the characters in a play when they have made their final bow, and have left the curtained stage, and one is standing uncompanioned and nearly the last of the spectators, and the lights that have summoned back reality again are being extinguished. It was only by painful effort of mind that he kept recalling himself to himself--why he was here; what it all meant; that this was indeed actuality.

Yet, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark. He glanced around him in the clear, black, stirless air. Here and there, it seemed, a humped or spindled form held against all comers its passive place. Here and there a tiny faintness of light played. Night after night these chairs and tables kept their blank vigil. Why, he thought, pleased as an overtired child with the fancy, in a sense they were always alone, shut up in a kind of senselessness--just like us all. But what--what, he had suddenly risen from his chair to ask himself--what on earth are they alone with? No precise answer had been forthcoming to that question. But as in turning in the doorway, he looked out into the night, flashing here and there in dark spaces of the sky above the withering apple leaves--the long dark wall and quiet untrodden road--with the tumultuous beating of the stars--one thing at least he was conscious of having learned in these last few days: he knew what kind of a place he was alone IN.

It seemed to weave a spell over him, to call up a nostalgia he had lost all remembrance of since childhood. And that queer homesickness, at any rate, was all Sabathier's doing, he thought, smiling in his rather careworn fashion. Sabathier! It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were only really appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

Just with one's lantern lit, on the edge of the whispering unknown, and a reiterated going back out of the solitude into the light and warmth, to the voices and glancing of eyes, to say good-bye:--that after all was this life on earth for those who watched as well as acted. What if one's earthly home were empty?--still the restless fretted traveller must tarry; 'for the horrible worst of it is, my friend,' he said, as if to some silent companion listening behind him, 'the worst of it is, YOUR way was just simply, solely suicide.' What was it Herbert had called it? Yes, a cul-de-sac--black, lofty, immensely still and old and picturesque, but none the less merely a contemptible cul-de-sac; no abiding place, scarcely even sufficing with its flagstones for a groan from the fugitive and deluded refugee. There was no peace for the wicked. The question of course then came in--Was there any peace anywhere, for anybody?

He smiled at a sudden odd remembrance of a quiet, sardonic old aunt whom he used to stay with as a child. 'Children should be seen and not heard,' she would say, peering at him over his favourite pudding.

His eyes rested vacantly on the darkling street. He fell again into reverie, gigantically brooded over by shapes only imagination dimly conceived of: the remote alleys of his mind astir with a shadowy and ceaseless traffic which it wasn't at least THIS life's business to hearken after, or regard. And as he stood there in a mysteriously thronging peaceful solitude such as he had never known before, faintly out of the silence broke the sound of approaching hoofs. His heart seemed to gather itself close; a momentary blindness veiled his eyes, so wildly had his blood surged up into cheek and brain. He remained, caught up, with head slightly inclined, listening, as, with an interminable tardiness, measureless anguished hope died down into nothing in his mind.

Cold and heavy, his heart began to beat again, as if to catch up those laggard moments. He turned with an infinite revulsion of feeling to look out on the lamps of the old fly that had drawn up at his gate.

He watched incuriously a little old lady rather arduously alight, pause, and look up at his darkened windows, and after a momentary hesitation, and a word over her shoulder to the cabman, stoop and fumble at the iron latch. He watched her with a kind of wondering aversion, still scarcely tinged with curiosity. She had succeeded in lifting the latch and in pushing her way through, and was even now steadily advancing towards him along the tiled path. And a minute after he recognised with the strangest reactions the quiet old figure that had shared a sunset with him ages and ages ago--his mother's old schoolfellow, Miss Sinnet.

He was already ransacking the still faintly-perfumed dining-room for matches, and had just succeeded in relighting the still-warm lamp, when he heard her quiet step in the porch, even felt her peering in, in the gloom, with all her years' trickling customariness behind her, a little dubious of knocking on a wide-open door.

But the lamp lit Lawford went out again and welcomed his visitor. 'I am alone,' he was explaining gravely, 'my wife's away and the whole house topsy-turvy. How very, very kind of you!'

The old lady was breathing a little heavily after her ascent of the steep steps, and seemed not to have noticed his outstretched hand. None the less she followed him in, and when she was well advanced into the lighted room, she sighed deeply, raised her veil over the front of her bonnet, and leisurely took out her spectacles.

'I suppose,' she was explaining in a little quiet voice, 'you ARE Mr Arthur Lawford, but as I did not catch sight of a light in any of the windows I began to fear that the cabman might have set me down at the wrong house.'

She raised her head, and first through, and then over her spectacles she deliberately and steadfastly regarded him.

'Yes,' she said to herself, and turned, not as it seemed entirely with satisfaction, to look for a chair. He wheeled the most comfortable up to the table.

'I have been visiting my old friend Miss Tucker--Rev W. Tucker's daughter--she, I knew, could give me your address; and sure enough she did. Your road, d'ye see, was on my way home. And I determined, in spite of the hour, just to inquire. You must understand, Mr Lawford, there was something that I rather particularly wanted to say to you. But there!--you're looking sadly, sadly ill; and,' she glanced round a little inquisitively, 'I think my story had better wait for a more convenient occasion.'

'Not at all, Miss Sinnet; please not,' Lawford assured her, 'really. I have been ill, but I'm now practically quite myself again. My wife and daughter have gone away for a few days; and I follow to-morrow, so if you'll forgive such a very poor welcome, it may be my--my only chance. Do please let me hear.'

The old lady leant back in her chair, placed her hands on its arms and softly panted, while out of the rather broad serenity of her face she sat blinking up at her companion as if after a long talk, instead of at the beginning of one. 'No,' she repeated reflectively, 'I don't like your looks at all; yet here we are, enjoying beautiful autumn weather, Mr Lawford, why not make use of it?'

'Oh yes,' said Lawford, 'I do. I have been making tremendous use of it.'

Her eyelid flickered at his candid glance. 'And does your business permit of much walking?'

'Well, I've been malingering these last few days idling at home; but I am usually more or less my own man, Miss Sinnet. I walk a little.'

'H'm, but not much in my direction, Mr Lawford?' she quizzed him.

'All horrible indolence, Miss Sinnet. But I often--often think of you; and especially just lately.'

'Well, now,' she wriggled round her head to get a better view of him rather stiffly seated on his chair, 'that's very peculiar; because I too have been thinking lately a great deal of you. And yet--I fancy I shall succeed in mystifying you presently--not precisely of you, but of somebody else!'

'You do mystify me--"somebody else"!' he replied gallantly. 'And that is the story, I suppose?'

'That's the story,' repeated Miss Sinnet with some little triumph. 'Now, let me see; it was on Saturday last--yes, Saturday evening; a wonderful sunset; Bewley Heath.'

'Oh yes; my daughter's favourite walk.'

'And your daughter's age now?'

'She's nearly sixteen; Alice, you know.'

'Ah, yes, Alice; to be sure. It is a beautiful walk, and if fine, I generally take mine there too. It's near; there's shade; it's very little frequented; and I can wander and muse undisturbed. And that I think is pretty well all that an old woman like me is fit for, Mr Lawford. "Nearly sixteen!" Is it possible? Dear, dear me? But let me get on. On my way home from the Heath, you may be aware, before one reaches the road again, there's a somewhat steep ascent. I haven't the strength I had, and whether I'm fatigued or not, I have always made it a rule to rest awhile on a most convenient little seat at the summit, admire the view--what I can see of it--and then make my way quietly, quietly home. On Saturday, however, and it most rarely occurs--once, I remember, when a very civil nursemaid was sitting with two charmingly behaved little children in the sunshine, and I heard they were my old friend Major Loder's son's children--on Saturday, as I was saying, my own particular little haunt was already occupied.' She glanced back at him from out of her thoughts, as it were. 'By a gentleman. I say, gentleman; though I must confess that his conduct--perhaps, too, a little something even in his appearance, somewhat belied the term. Anyhow, gentleman let us call him.'

Lawford, all attention, nodded, and encouragingly smiled.

'I'm not one of those tiresome, suspicious people, Mr Lawford, who distrust strangers. I have never been molested, and I have enjoyed many and many a most interesting, and sometimes instructive, talk with an individual whom I've never seen in my life before, and this side of the grave perhaps, am never likely to see again.' She lifted her head with pursed lips, and gravely yet still flickeringly regarded him once more. 'Well, I made some trifling remark--the weather, the view, what-not,' she explained with a little jerk of her shoulder--'and to my extreme astonishment he turned and addressed me by name--Miss Sinnet. Unmistakably--Sinnet. Now, perhaps, and very rightly, you won't considered THAT a very peculiar thing to do? But you will recollect, Mr Lawford, that I had been sitting there a considerable time. Surely, now, if you had recognised my face you would have addressed me at once?'

'Was he, do you think, Miss Sinnet, a little uncertain, perhaps?'

'Never mind, never mind; let me get on with my story first. The next thing my gentleman does is more mysterious still. His whole manner was a little peculiar, perhaps--a certain restlessness, what, in fact, one might be almost tempted to call a certain furtiveness of behaviour. Never mind. What he does next is to ask me a riddle! Perhaps you won't think that was peculiar either?'

'What was the riddle?' smiled Lawford.

'Why, to be sure, to guess his name! Simply guided, so I surmised, by some very faint resemblance in his face to his MOTHER, who was, he assured me, an old schoolfellow of mine at BRIGHTON. I thought and thought. I confess the adventure was beginning to be a little perplexing. But of course, very, very few of my old schoolfellows remain distinctly in my memory now; and I fear that grows more treacherous the longer I live. Their faces as girls are clear enough. But later in life most of them drifted out of sight--many, alas, are dead; and, well, at last I narrowed my man down to one. And who now, do you suppose that was?'

Lawford sustained an expression of abysmal mystification. 'Do tell me--who?'

'Your own poor dear mother, Mr Lawford.'

'HE said so?'

'No, no,' said the old lady, with some vexation, closing her eyes. 'I said so. He asked me to guess. And I guessed Mary Lawford; now do you see?'

'Yes, yes. But WAS he like her, Miss Sinnet? That was really very, very extraordinary. Did you see any likeness in his face?'

Miss Sinnet very deliberately took her spectacles out of their case again. 'Now, see here, sir; this is being practical, isn't it? I'm just going to take a leisurely glance at yours. But you mustn't let me forget the time. You must look after the time for me.'

'It's about a quarter to ten,' said Lawford, having glanced first at the stopped clock on the chimney-piece and then at his watch. He then sat quite still and endeavoured to sit at ease, while the old lady lifted her bonneted head and ever so gravely and benignly surveyed him.

'H'm,' she said at last. 'There's no mistaking YOU. It's Mary's chin, and Mary's brow--with just a little something, perhaps, of her dreamy eye. But you haven't all her looks, Mr Lawford, by any manner of means. She was a very beautiful girl, and so vivacious, so fanciful--it was, I suppose the foreign strain showing itself. Even marriage did not quite succeed in spoiling her.'

'The foreign strain?' Lawford glanced with a kind of fleeting fixity at the quiet old figure. 'The foreign strain?'

Your mother's maiden name, my dear Mr Lawford, surely memory does not deceive me in that, was van der Gucht. THAT, I believe, is a foreign name.'

'Ah, yes,' said Lawford, his rising thoughts sinking quietly to rest again. 'Van der Gucht, of course. I--how stupid of me!'

'As a matter of fact, your mother was very proud of her Dutch blood. But there,' she flung out little fin-like sleeves, 'if you don't let me keep to my story I shall go back as uneasy as I came. And you didn't,' she added even more fretfully, 'you didn't tell me the time.'

Lawford stared at his watch again for some few moments without replying. 'It's a few minutes to ten,' he said at last.

'Dear me! And I'm keeping the cabman! I mast hurry on. Well, now, I put it to you; you shall be my father confessor--though I detest the idea in real life--was I wrong? Was I justified in professing to the poor fellow that I detected a likeness when there was extremely little likeness there?'

'What! None at all!' cried Lawford; 'not the faintest trace?'

'My dear good Mr Lawford,' she expostulated, patting her lap, 'there's very little more than a trace of my dear beautiful Mary in YOU, her own son. How could there be--how could you expect it in him, a complete stranger? No, it was nothing but my own foolish kindliness. It might have been Mary's son for all that I could recollect. I haven't for years, please remember, had the pleasure of receiving a visit from YOU. I am firmly of opinionthat I was justified. My motive was entirely benevolent. And then--to my positive amazement--well, I won't say hard things of the absent; but he suddenly turns round on me with a "Thank you, Miss Bennett." Bennett, hark ye! Perhaps you won't agree that I had any justification in being vexed and--and affronted at THAT.'

'I think, Miss Sinnet,' said Lawford solemnly, 'that you were perfectly justified. Oh, perfectly. I wonder even you had the patience to give the real Arthur Lawford a chance to ask your forgiveness for--or the stranger.'

'Well, candidly,' said Miss Sinnett severely. 'I was very much scandalised; and I shouldn't be here now telling you my story if it hadn't been for your mother.'

'My mother!'

The old lady rather grimly enjoyed his confusion. 'Yes, Mr Lawford, your mother. I don't know why--something in his manner, something in his face--so dejected, so unhappy, so--if it is not uncharitablnesse to say it--so wild: it has haunted me: I haven't been able to put the matter out of my mind. I have lain awake in my bed thinking of him. Why did he speak to me, I keep asking myself. Why did he play me so very aimless a trick? How had he learned my name? Why was he sitting there so solitary and so dejected? And worse even than that, what has become of him? A little more patience, a little more charity, perhaps--what might I not have done for him? The whole thing has harassed and distressed me more than I can say. Would you believe it, I have actually twice, and on one occasion, three times in a day made my way to the seat--hoping to see him there. And I am not so young as I was. And then, as I say, to crown all, I had a most remarkable dream about your mother. But that's my own affair. Elderly people like me are used--well, perhaps I won't say used--we're not surprised or disturbed by visits from those who have gone before. We live, in a sense, among the tombs; though I would not have you fancy it's in any way a morbid or unhappy life to lead. We don't talk about it--certainly not to young people. Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the Tree yet, Mr Lawford.'

She leant forward and whispered it with a big, simple smile:--'We don't even discuss it much among ourselves. But as one gets nearer and nearer to the wicket-gate there's other company around one than you'll find in--in the directory. And that is why I have just come on here tonight. Very probably my errand may seem to have no meaning for you. You look ill, but you don't appear to be in any great trouble or adversity, as I feared in my--well, there--as I feared you might be. I must say, though, it seems a terribly empty house. And no lights, too!'

She slowly, with a little trembling nodding of her bonnet, turned her head and glanced quietly, fixedly, and unflinchingly, out of the half-open door. 'But that's not my affair.' And again she looked at him for a little while.

Then she stooped forward and touched him kindly and trustingly on the knee. 'Trouble or no trouble,' she said, 'it's never too late to remind a man of his mother. And I'm sure, Mr Lawford, I'm very glad to hear you are struggling up out of your illness again. We must keep a brave heart, forty or seventy, whichever we may be: "While the evil days come not nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them," though they have not come to me even yet; and I trust from the bottom of my heart, not to YOU.'

She looked at him without a trace of emotion or constraint in her large, quiet face, and their eyes met for a moment in that brief, fixed, baffling fashion that seems to prove that mankind is after all but a dumb masked creature saddled with the vain illusion of speech.

'And now that I've eased my conscience,' said the old lady, pulling down her veil, 'I must beg pardon for intruding at such an hour of the evening. And may I have your arm down those dreadful steps? Really, Mr Lawford, judging from the houses they erect for us, the builders must have a very peculiar notion of mankind. Is the fly still there? I expressly told the man to wait, and what I am going to do if--!'

'He's there,' Lawford reassured her, craning his neck in their slow progress to catch a peep into the quiet road. And like a flock of birds scared by a chance comer at their feeding in some deserted field, a whirring cloud of memories swept softly up in his mind--memories whose import he made no effort to discover. None the less, the leisurely descent became in their company something of a real experience even in such a brimming week.

'I hope, some day, you will really tell me your dream?' he said, pushing the old lady's silk skirts in after her as she slowly climbed into the carriage.

'Ah, my dear Lawford, when you are my age,' she called back to him, groping her way into the rather musty gloom, 'you'll dream such dreams for yourself. Life's not what's just the fashion. And there are queerer things to be seen and heard just quietly in one's solitude than this busy life gives us time to discover. But as for my mystifying Bewley acquaintance--I confess I cannot make head or tail of him.'

'Was he,' said Lawford rather vaguely, looking up into the dim white face that with its plumes filled nearly the whole carriage window, 'was his face very unpleasing?'

She raised a gloved hand. 'It has haunted me, haunted me, Mr Lawford; its--its conflict! Poor fellow; I hope, I do hope, he faced his trouble out. But I shall never see him again.'

He squeezed the trembling, kindly old hand. 'I bet, Miss Sinnet,' he said earnestly, 'even your having thought kindly of the poor beggar eased his mind--whoever he may have been. I assure you, assure you of that.'

'Ay, but I did more than THINK,' replied the old lady with a chuckle that might have seemed even a little derisive if it had not been so profoundly magnanimous.

He watched the old black fly roll slowly off, and still smiling at Miss Sinnet's inscrutable finesse went back into the house. 'And now, my friend,' he said, addressing peacefully the thronging darkness, 'the time's nearly up for me to go too.'

He had made up his mind. Or, rather, it seemed as if in the unregarded silences of this last long talk his mind had made up itself. Only among impossibilities had he the shadow of a choice. In this old haunted house, amid this shallow turmoil no practicable clue could show itself of a way out. He would go away for a while.

He left the door ajar behind him for the moments still left, and stood for a while thinking. Then, lamp in hand, he descended into the breakfast-room for pen, ink, and paper. He sat for some time in that underground calm, nibbling his pen like a harassed and self-conscious schoolboy. At last he began:

'MY DEAR SHEILA,--I must tell you, to begin with, that the CHANGE has now all passed away. I am--as near as man can be--completely myself again. And next: that I overheard all that was said to-night in the dining-room.

'I'm sorry for listening; but it's no good going over all that now. Here I am, and, as you said, for Alice's sake we must make the best of it. I am going away for a while, to get, if I can, a chance to quiet down. I suppose every one comes sooner or later to a time in life when there is nothing else to be done but just shut one's eyes and blunder on. And that's all I can do now--blunder on....'

He paused, and suddenly, at the echo of the words in his mind, a revulsion of feeling--shame and hatred of himself surged up, and he tore his letter into tiny pieces. Once more he began, 'my dear Sheila,' dropped his pen, sat on for a long time, cold and inert, harbouring almost unendurably a pitiful, hopeless longing.... He would write to Grisel another day.

He leant back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his eyelids. And clearer than those which myriad-hued reality can ever present, pictures of the imagination swam up before his eyes. It seemed, indeed, that even now some ghost, some revenant of himself was sitting there, in the old green churchyard, roofed only with a thousand thousand stars. The breath of darkness stirred softly on his cheek. Some little scampering shape slipped by. A bird on high cried weirdly, solemnly, over the globe. He shuddered faintly, and looked out again into the small lamplit room.

Here, too, was quite as inexplicable a coming and going. A fly was walking on the table beneath his eyes, with the uneasy gait of one that has outlived his hour and most of his companions. Mice were scampering and shrieking in the empty kitchen. And all about him, in the viewless air, the phantoms of another life passed by, unmindful of his motionless body. He fell into a lethargy of the senses, and only gradually became aware after a while of the strange long-drawn sigh of rain at the window. He rose and opened it. The night air flowed in, chilled with its waters and faintly fragrant of the dust. It soothed away all thought for a while. He turned back to his chair. He would wait until the rain had lulled before starting....

A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care, pushed open, and Mr Bethany's old face, with an intense and sharpened scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on the least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the sidelong face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on the arms of his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to detect in his heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his breast.

He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What WAS this monstrous web of Craik's? What HAD the creature been nodding and ducketing about?--those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end, when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles, then sat blinking--and softly slowly deciphered the solitary 'My dear Sheila' on Lawford's note-paper. 'H'm,' he muttered, and looked up again at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of sleep might yet be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them some hint of his presence. 'I wish to goodness, you wonderful old creature,' he muttered, wagging his head, 'I wish to goodness you'd wake up.'

For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the fading leaves. 'They don't come to me,' he said softly again; with a tiny smile on his old face. 'It's that old medieval Craik: with a face like a last year's rookery!' And again he sat, with head a little sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without, now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on Lawford.

At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him. A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at his phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of multitudinous rain-drops, like the roar of Time's winged chariot hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend's denuded battlefield.

[THE END]
Walter De la Mare's Novel: The Return

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