Some few moments afterwards Mr Craik shook
himself free of the basement, hastened at a spirited trot to rejoin his
companions, and in his absence of mind omitted to shut the front door. 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.