If only, Lawford thought, this insufferable weariness would lift awhile
he could enjoy the quiet, absurd, heedless talk, and this very friendly
topsy-turvy effort to ease his mind and soothe his nerves. He might
even take an interest again in his ‘case.’

‘You see,’ he said, turning to Grisel, ‘I don’t think it really very
much matters how it all came about. I never could believe it would
last. It may perhaps—some of it at least may be fancy. But then, what
isn’t? What _is_ trustworthy? And now your brother tells me my hair’s
turning grey. I suppose I have been living too slowly, too sluggishly,
and they thought it was high time to stir me up.’

He saw with extraordinary vividness the low panelled room; the still
listening face; the white muslin shoulders and dark hair; and the eyes
that seemed to recall some far-off desolate longing for home and
childhood. It was all a dream. That was the end of the matter. Even
now, perhaps, his tired old stupid body was lying hunched up, drenched
with dew upon the little old seat under the mist-wreathed branches. Soon it would bestir itself and wake up and go off home—home to Sheila,
to the old deadly round that once had seemed so natural and inevitable,
to the old dull Lawford—eyes and brain and heart. They returned up the dark shallow staircase to Herbert’s book-room, and
he talked on to very quiet and passive listeners in his own fantastic
endless fashion. And ever and again Lawford would find himself
intercepting fleeting and anxious glances at his face, glances almost
of remorse and pity; and thought he detected beneath this irresponsible
contradictory babble an unceasing effort to clear the sky, to lure away
too pressing memories, to put his doubts and fears completely to rest. Herbert even went so far as to plead guilty, when Grisel gave him the
cue, of having a little heightened and overcoloured his story of the
restless phantasmal old creature that haunted their queer wooden
hauntable old house. And when they rose, laughing and yawning to take
up their candles, it was, after all, after a rather animated
discussion, with many a hair-raising ghost story brought in for proof
between brother and sister, as to exactly how many times that
snuff-coloured spectre had made his appearance; and, with less
unanimity still, as to the precise manner in which he was in the habit
of making his precipitant exit. ‘You do at any rate acknowledge, Grisel, that the old creature does
appear, and that you saw him yourself step out into space when you were
sitting down there under the willow shelling peas. I’ve seen him twice
for certain, once rather hazily; Sallie saw him so plainly she asked
his business: that’s five. I resign.’

‘Acknowledge!’ said Grisel; ‘of course I do. I’d acknowledge anything
in the world to save argument. Why, I don’t know what I should do
without him. If only, now Mr Lawford would give him a fair chance to
show himself reading quietly here about ten minutes to one, or shelling
peas even, if he prefers it. If only he’d stay long enough for _that_. Wouldn’t it be the very thing for them both!’

‘Of course,’ said Herbert cordially, ‘the very thing.’

Lawford looked up at neither of them. He shook his head. But he needed little persuasion to stay at least one night. The
prospect of that long solitary walk, of that tired stupid stooping
figure dragging itself along the interminable country roads seemed a
sheer impossibility. ‘It is not—it isn’t, I swear it—the other that
keeps me back,’ he had solemnly assured the friend that half smiled her
relief at his acceptance, ‘but—if you only knew how empty it’s all got
now; all reason gone even to go on at all.’

‘But doesn’t it follow? Of course it’s empty. And now life is going to
begin again. I assure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have
courage—just the will to win on.’

He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room,
ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung
with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across
at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All
speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again. He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table
without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What
did it matter what a man looked like—a now familiar but enfeebled and
deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even
Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this
world was concerned. At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in
unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed
indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet
languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some
faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of
the dark Adventurer, but that—how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and
faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished
across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he come
hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But—was he
disappointed! He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying
almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey,
hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose
pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed
to detect the least hint of any iris. ‘It must have been something
pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,’ they
seemed to be trying to say to him, ‘to drag us down to this.’

He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came. Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused
a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to
pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present
he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if, while
kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such
tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but
rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice who
looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old
charwoman, Mrs Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed
painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a
friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr
Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure
dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now
he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and
circumspectly together in the room beneath. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


A quiet knocking aroused him in the long, tranquil bedroom; and
Herbert’s head was poked into the room.