What is the difference? Does it shock
you? Does it make the whole world seem a trick, a sham? Does it simply
sour your life to think such a thing possible? Oh, the hours I’ve spent
gloating on Widderstone’s miserable mask of skin and bone, as I was
saying to your brother only last night, and never knew until they
shuffled me that the old self too was nothing better than a stifling
suffocating mask.’

‘But don’t you see,’ she argued softly, turning her face away a little,
‘you were a stranger then (though I certainly didn’t _mean_ to frown). And then a little while after we were, well, just human beings,
shoulder to shoulder, and if friendship does not mean that, I don’t
know what it does mean. And now, you are—well, just you: the you, you
know, of three centuries ago! And if you mean to ask me whether at any
precise moment I have been conscious that this you I am now speaking to
was not the you of last night, or of that dark climb up the hill, why,
it is simply frantic to think it could ever be necessary to say over
and over again, No. But if you mean, Have you changed else? All I could
answer is, Don’t we all change as we grow to know one another? What
were just features, what just dingily represented one, as it were, is
forgotten, or rather gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is
the landscape under lightning as it were. But afterwards isn’t it
surely like the alphabet to a child; what was first a queer angular
scrawl becomes A, and is always ever after A, undistinguished,
half-forgotten, yet standing at last for goodness knows what real
wonderful things—or for just the dry bones of soulless words? Is that
it?’ She stole a sidelong glance into his brooding face, leaning her
head on her hand. ‘Yes, yes,’ came the rather dissatisfied reply. ‘I do agree; perfectly. But then, you see—I told you I was going to talk of nothing but
myself—what did at first happen to me was something much worse, and, I
suppose, something quite different from that.’

‘And yet, didn’t you tell us, that of all your friends not one really
denied in their hearts your—what they would call, I suppose—your
_identity_; except that poor little offended old lady. And even she, if
my intuition is worth a penny piece, even she when you go soon and talk
to her will own that she did know you, and that it was not because you
were a stranger that she was offended, but because you so ungenerously
pretended to be one. That was a little mad, now, if you like!’

‘Oh yes,’ said Lawford, ‘I am going to ask her forgiveness. I don’t
know what I didn’t vow to take her for a peace-offering if the chance
should ever come—and the courage—to make my peace with her. But now
that the chance has come, and I think the courage, it is the desire
that’s gone. I don’t seem to care either way. I feel as if I had got
past making my peace with any one.’

But this time no answer helped him out. ‘After all,’ he went plodding on, ‘there is more than just the mere day
to day to consider. And one doesn’t realise that one’s face actually
_is_ one’s fortune without a shock. And that _that_ gone, one is, as
your brother said, just like a bee come back to the wrong hive. It
undermines,’ he smiled rather bitterly, ‘one’s views rather. And it
certainly shifts one’s friends. If it hadn’t been just for my old’—he
stopped dead, and again pushed slowly on—‘if it hadn’t been for our old
friend, Mr Bethany, I doubt if we should now have had a soul on our
side. I once read somewhere that wolves always chase the old and weak
and maimed out of the pack. And after all, what do _we_ do? Where do we
keep the homeless and the insane? And yet, you know,’ he added
ruminatingly, ‘it is not as if mine was ever a particularly lovely or
lovable face! While as for the poor wretch behind it, well, I really
cannot see what meaning, or life even, he had before—’

‘Before?’

Lawford met bravely the clear whimsical eyes. ‘Before, I was
Sabathiered.’

Grisel laughed outright. ‘You think,’ he retorted almost bitterly, ‘you think I am talking like
a child.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed cheerfully, ‘I was quite envying you.’

‘Well, there I am,’ said Lawford inconsequently. ‘And now; well, now, I
suppose, the whole thing’s to begin again. I can’t help beginning to
wonder what the meaning of it all is; why one’s duty should always seem
so very stupid a thing. And then, too, what _can_ there be on earth
that even a buried Sabathier could desire?’ He glanced up in a really
animated perplexity at the still, dark face turned in the evening light
towards the darkening valley. And perplexity deepened into a disquieted
frown—like that of a child who is roused suddenly from a daydream by
the half-forgotten question of a stranger. He turned his eyes almost
furtively away as if afraid of disturbing her; and for awhile they sat
in silence... At last he turned again almost shyly. ‘I hope some day
you will let me bring my daughter to see you.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Grisel eagerly; ‘we should both _love_ it, of course. Isn’t it curious?—I simply _knew_ you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!’

‘I say “some day,”’ said Lawford; ‘I know, though, that that some day
will never come.’

‘Wait; just wait,’ replied the quiet confident voice, ‘that will come
too. One thing at a time, Mr Lawford. You’ve won your old self back
again; you’ll win your old love of life back again in a little while;
never fear. Oh, don’t I know that awful Land’s End after illness; and
that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So,
it’s a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.’ She
busied herself over the tea things. ‘And, of course,’ she added, as if
it were an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green
sunlight as she knelt, ‘you simply won’t think of going back
to-night.... Solitude, I really do think, solitude just now would be
absolute madness. You’ll write to-day and go, perhaps, to-morrow!’

Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house,
full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. ‘I
think, do you know, I ought to go to-day.’

‘Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all’s well. And
come back here to sleep. If you’d really promise that I’d drive you in. I’d love it. There’s the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes
hire for our picnics. May I? You’ve no idea how much easier in our
minds my brother and I would be if you would. And then to-morrow, or at
any rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your
right mind. There, that’s a bargain too. Now we must hurry.’




CHAPTER NINETEEN


Herbert himself went down to order the governess cart, and packed them
in with a rug. And in the dusk Grisel set Lawford down at the corner of
his road and drove on to an old bookseller’s with a commission from her
brother, promising to return for him in an hour. Dust and a few straws
lay at rest as if in some abstruse arrangement on the stones of the
porch just as the last faint whirling gust of sunset had left them.