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 _sha’n’t_ be alone. Do
you hear me, Lawford?—you _sha’n’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 roué 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.