



[Illustration]




The Return

By Walter de la Mare




    “Look not for roses in Attalus his garden, or wholesome flowers in
    a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce any one bad, but
    some others are the worse for him; tempt not contagion by proximity
    and hazard not thyself in the shadow of corruption.”—SIR THOMAS
    BROWNE. CONTENTS

 CHAPTER ONE
 CHAPTER TWO
 CHAPTER THREE
 CHAPTER FOUR
 CHAPTER FIVE
 CHAPTER SIX
 CHAPTER SEVEN
 CHAPTER EIGHT
 CHAPTER NINE
 CHAPTER TEN
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
 CHAPTER TWELVE
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 CHAPTER NINETEEN
 CHAPTER TWENTY
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE




CHAPTER ONE


The churchyard in which Arthur Lawford found himself wandering that
mild and golden September afternoon was old, green, and refreshingly
still. The silence in which it lay seemed as keen and mellow as the
light—the pale, almost heatless, sunlight that filled the air. Here and
there robins sang across the stones, elvishly shrill in the quiet of
harvest. The only other living creature there seemed to Lawford to be
his own rather fair, not insubstantial, rather languid self, who at the
noise of the birds had raised his head and glanced as if between
content and incredulity across his still and solitary surroundings. An
increasing inclination for such lonely ramblings, together with the
feeling that his continued ill-health had grown a little irksome to his
wife, and that now that he was really better she would be relieved at
his absence, had induced him to wander on from home without much
considering where the quiet lanes were leading him. And in spite of a
peculiar melancholy that had welled up into his mind during these last
few days, he had certainly smiled with a faint sense of the irony of
things on lifting his eyes in an unusually depressed moodiness to find
himself looking down on the shadows and peace of Widderstone. With that anxious irresolution which illness so often brings in its
train he had hesitated for a few minutes before actually entering the
graveyard. But once safely within he had begun to feel extremely loth
to think of turning back again, and this not the less at remembering
with a real foreboding that it was now drawing towards evening, that
another day was nearly done. He trailed his umbrella behind him over
the grass-grown paths; staying here and there to read some time-worn
inscription; stooping a little broodingly over the dark green graves. Not for the first time during the long laborious convalescence that had
followed apparently so slight an indisposition, a fleeting sense almost
as if of an unintelligible remorse had overtaken him, a vague thought
that behind all these past years, hidden as it were from his daily
life, lay something not yet quite reckoned with. How often as a boy had
he been rapped into a galvanic activity out of the deep reveries he
used to fall into—those fits of a kind of fishlike day-dream. How
often, and even far beyond boyhood, had he found himself bent on some
distant thought or fleeting vision that the sudden clash of
self-possession had made to seem quite illusory, and yet had left so
strangely haunting. And now the old habit had stirred out of its long
sleep, and, through the gate that Influenza in departing had left ajar,
had returned upon him. ‘But I suppose we are all pretty much the same, if we only knew it,’ he
had consoled himself. ‘We keep our crazy side to ourselves; that’s all. We just go on for years and years doing and saying whatever happens to
come up—and really keen about it too’—he had glanced up with a kind of
challenge in his face at the squat little belfry—‘and then, without the
slightest reason or warning, down you go, and it all begins to wear
thin, and you get wondering what on earth it all means.’ Memory slipped
back for an instant to the life that in so unusual a fashion seemed to
have floated a little aloof. Fortunately he had not discussed these
inward symptoms with his wife. How surprised Sheila would be to see him
loafing in this old, crooked churchyard. How she would lift her dark
eyebrows, with that handsome, indifferent tolerance. He smiled, but a
little confusedly; yet the thought gave even a spice of adventure to
the evening’s ramble. He loitered on, scarcely thinking at all now, stooping here and there. These faint listless ideas made no more stir than the sunlight gilding
the fading leaves, the crisp turf underfoot. With a slight effort he
stooped even once again;—

‘Stranger, a moment pause, and stay;
In this dim chamber hidden away
Lies one who once found life as dear
As now he finds his slumbers here:
Pray, then, the Judgement but increase
His deep, everlasting peace!’


‘But then, do you _know_ you lie at peace?’ Lawford audibly questioned,
gazing at the doggerel. And yet, as his eyes wandered over the blunt
green stone and the rambling crimson-berried brier that had almost
encircled it with its thorns, the echo of that whisper rather jarred. He was, he supposed, rather a dull creature—at least people seemed to
think so—and he seldom felt at ease even with his own small
facetiousness. Besides, just that kind of question was getting very
common. Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were
clever—even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a
bore: all head and no body. He turned languidly to the small
cross-shaped stone on the other side:

‘Here lies the body of Ann Hard, who died in child-bed. Also of James, her infant son.’


He muttered the words over with a kind of mournful bitterness. ‘That’s
just it—just it; that’s just how it goes!’... He yawned softly; the
pathway had come to an end. Beyond him lay ranker grass, one and
another obscurer mounds, an old scarred oak seat, shadowed by a few
everlastingly green cypresses and coral-fruited yew-trees. And above
and beyond all hung a pale blue arch of sky with a few voyaging clouds
like silvered wool, and the calm wide curves of stubble field and
pasture land. He stood with vacant eyes, not in the least aware how
queer a figure he made with his gloves and his umbrella and his hat
among the stained and tottering gravestones. Then, just to linger out
his hour, and half sunken in reverie, he walked slowly over to the few
solitary graves beneath the cypresses. One only was commemorated with a tombstone, a rather unusual
oval-headed stone, carved at each corner into what might be the heads
of angels, or of pagan dryads, blindly facing each other with worn-out,
sightless faces. A low curved granite canopy arched over the grave,
with a crevice so wide between its stones that Lawford actually bent
down and slid in his gloved fingers between them. He straightened
himself with a sigh, and followed with extreme difficulty the
well-nigh, illegible inscription:

‘Here lie ye Bones of one,
Nicholas Sabathier, a Stranger to this Parish,
who fell by his own Hand on ye
Eve of Ste.