When Ada came back the next evening and said he was out, I came the
following morning—by myself—and knocked. No one answered, and I let
myself in. His bed had not been slept in. There were candles and
matches all over the house—one even burnt nearly to the stick on the
floor in the corner of the drawing-room. I suppose it was foolish, but
I was alone, and just that, somehow, horrified me. It seemed to point
to such a peculiar state of mind. I hesitated; what was the use of
looking further? Yet something seemed to say to me—and it was surely
providential—“Go downstairs!” And there in the breakfast-room the first
thing I saw on the table was this book—a dingy, ragged, bleared,
patched-up, oh, a horrible, a loathsome little book (and I have read
bits too here and there); and beside it was my own little school
dictionary, my own child’s——’ She looked up sharply. ‘What was that? Did anybody call?’

‘Nobody _I_ heard,’ said Danton, staring stonily round. ‘It may have been the passing of the wind,’ suggested Mr Craik, after a
pause. ‘Peep between the blinds, Mr Craik; it may be poor Mr Bethany
confronting Pneumonia in the porch.’

‘There’s no one there, Mrs Lovat,’ said the curate, returning softly
from his errand. ‘Please continue your—your narrative, Mrs Lawford.’

‘We are panting for the “devil,” my dear.’

‘Well, I sat down and, very much against my inclination, turned over
the pages. It was full of the most revolting confessions and trials, so
far as I could see. In fact, I think the book was merely an amateur
collection of—of horrors. And the faces, the portraits! Well, then, can
you imagine my feelings when towards the end of the book about thirty
pages from the end, I came upon this—gloating up at me from the table
in my house before my very eyes?’

She cast a rapid glance over her shoulder, and gathering up her silk
skirt, drew out, from the pocket beneath, the few crumpled pages, and
passed them without a word to Danton. Lawford kept him plainly in view,
as, lowering his great face, he slowly stooped, and holding the loose
leaves with both fat hands between his knees, stared into the portrait. Then he truculently lifted his cropped head. ‘What did I say?’ he said. ‘What did I _say?_ What did I tell old
Bethany in this very room? What d’ye think of that, Mrs Lovat, for a
portrait of Arthur Lawford? What d’ye make of that, Craik—eh? Devil—eh?’

Mrs Lovat glanced with arched eyebrows, and with her finger-tips handed
the sheets on to her neighbour, who gazed with a settled and mournful
frown and returned them to Sheila. She took the pages, folded them and replaced them carefully in her
pocket. She swept her hands over her skirts, and turned to Danton. ‘You agree,’ she inquired softly, ‘it’s like?’

‘Like! It’s the livin’ livid image. The livin’ image,’ he repeated,
stretching out his arm, ‘as he stood there that very night.’

‘What will you say, then,’ said Sheila, quietly, ‘What will you say if
I tell you that that man, Nicholas de Sabathier, has been in his grave
for over a hundred years?’

Danton’s little eyes seemed, if anything, to draw back even further
into his head. ‘I’d say, Mrs Lawford, if you’ll excuse the word, that
it might be a damn horrible coincidence—I’d go farther, an almost
incredible coincidence. But if you want the sober truth, I’d say it was
nothing more than a crafty, clever, abominable piece of trickery. That’s what I’d say. Oh, you don’t know, Mrs Lovat. When a scamp’s a
scamp, he’ll stop at nothing. _I_ could tell you some tales.’

‘Ah, but that’s not all,’ said Sheila, eyeing them steadfastly one by
one. ‘We all of us know that my husband’s story was that he had gone
down to Widderstone—into the churchyard, for his convalescent ramble;
that story’s true. We all know that he said he had had a fit, a heart
attack, and that a kind of—of stupor had come over him. I believe on my
honour that’s true too. But no one knows but he himself and Mr Bethany
and I, that it was a wretched broken grave, quite at the bottom of the
hill, that he chose for his resting place, nor—and I can’t get the
scene out of my head—nor that the name on that one solitary tombstone
down there was—was...this!’

Danton rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t begin to follow,’ he said stubbornly. ‘You don’t mean,’ said Mr Craik, who had not removed his gaze from
Sheila’s face, ‘I am not to take it that you mean, Mrs Lawford, the—the
other?’

‘Yes,’ said Sheila, ‘_his_’—she patted her skirts—‘Sabathier’s.’

‘You mean,’ said Mrs Lovat crisply, ‘that the man in the grave is the
man in the book, and that the man in the book is—is poor Arthur’s
changed face?’

Sheila nodded. Danton rose cumbrously from his chair, looking beadily down on his
three friends. ‘Oh, but you know, it isn’t—it isn’t right,’ he began. ‘Lord! I can see
him now. Glassy—yes, that’s the very word I said—glassy. It won’t do,
Mrs Lawford; on my solemn honour, it won’t do. I don’t deny it, call it
what you like; yes, devils, if you like. But what I say as a practical
man is that it’s just rank—that’s what it is! Bethany’s had too much
rope. The time’s gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy’s
all very well, but after all it’s justice that clinches the bargain. There’s only one way: we must catch him; we must lay the poor wretch by
the heels before it’s too late. No publicity, God bless me, no. We’d
have all the rags in London on us. They’d pillory us nine days on end. We’d never live it down. No, we must just hush it up—a home or
something; an asylum. For my part,’ he turned like a huge toad, his
chin low in his collar—‘and I’d say the same if it was my own brother,
and, after all, he is your husband, Mrs Lawford—I’d sooner he was in
his grave. It takes two to play at that game, that’s what I say. To lay
himself open! I can’t stand it—honestly, I can’t stand it. And yet,’ he
jerked his chin over the peak of his collar towards the ladies, ‘and
yet you say he’s being fetched; comes creeping home, and is fetched at
dark by a—a lady in a pony-carriage. God bless me! It’s rank. What,’ he
broke out violently again, ‘what was he doing there in a cemetery after
dark? Do you think that beastly Frenchman would have played such a
trick on Craik here? Would he have tried his little game on me? Deviltry be it, if you prefer the word, and all deference to you, Mrs
Lawford. But I know this—a couple of hundred years ago they would have
burnt a man at the stake for less than a tenth of this. Ask Craik here. I don’t know how, and I don’t know when: his mother, I’ve always heard
say, was a little eccentric; but the truth is he’s managed by some
unholy legerdemain to get the thing at his finger’s ends; that’s what
it is. Think of that unspeakable book. Left open on the table! Look at
his Ferguson game. It’s our solemn duty to keep him for good and all
out of mischief. It reflects all round. There’s no getting out of it;
we’re all in it. And tar sticks.