'What on earth, my good man, are you fumbling after now?' came the almost fretful question from under the echoing porch.

'Coming, coming,' said Lawford, and slammed the door behind them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The first faint streaks of dawn were silvering across the stars when Lawford again let himself into his deserted house. He stumbled down to the pantry and cut himself a crust of bread and cheese, and ate it, sitting on the table, watching the leafy eastern sky through the painted bars of the area window. He munched on, hungry and tired. His night walk had cooled head and heart. Having obstinately refused Mr Bethany's invitation to sleep at the Vicarage, he had sat down on an old low wall, and watched until his light had shone out at his bedroom window. Then he had simply wandered on, past rustling glimmering gardens, under the great timbers of yellowing elms, hardly thinking, hardly aware of himself except as in a far-away vision of a sluggish insignificant creature struggling across the tossed-up crust of an old, incomprehensible world.

The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau--they were familiar but not very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. 'I wonder what they'll do?'

had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few hours as had 'What am I to do?' in the first bout of his 'visitation.'

But the 'they' was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn, and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the verger, Mr Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one's place in the world's economy as a firm-set pin the camph.o.r.ed moth. What his place was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness at least a respite.

Solitude!--he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again, past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow sweetness of Alice's, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long and dreamless sleep.

By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten he got up from Sheila's fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to answer Mrs Gull's summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous 'Good morning,' and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across from line to line of the obscure French print.

Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself, breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and foreboding ennui stole over Lawford's solitude once more. He shut his books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table, lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.

At a mean little barber's with a pole above his lettered door he went in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the crumb-littered counter of a little baker's shop to have some tea. It pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty, consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker's wife. Whatever his face might now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never have hob-n.o.bbed so affably with his social 'inferiors.'

For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer in the friendly baker's shop, he bought six-penny-worth of cakes. He watched them as they were deposited one by one in the bag, and even asked for one sort to be exchanged for another, flushing a little at the pretty compliment he had ventured on.

He climbed out of the shop, and paused on the wooden doorstep. 'Do you happen to know Mr Herbert Herbert's?' he said.

The baker's wife glanced up at him with clear, reflective eyes. 'Mr Herbert's?--that must be some little way off, sir. I don't know any such name, and I know most, just round about like.'

'Well, yes, it is,' said Lawford, rather foolishly; 'I hardly know why I asked. It's past the churchyard at Widderstone.'

'Oh yes, sir,' she encouraged him.

'A big, wooden-looking house.'

'Really, sir. Wooden?'

Lawford looked into her face, but could find nothing more to say, so he smiled again rather absently, and ascended into the street.

He sat down outside the churchyard gate on the very bank where he had in the sourness of the nettles first opened Sabathier's Memoirs. The world lay still beneath the pale sky. Presently the little fat rector walked up the hill, his wrists still showing beneath his sleeves. Lawford meditatively watched him pa.s.s by. A small boy with a switch, a tiny nose, and a swinging gallipot, his cheeks lit with the sunset, followed soon after. Lawford beckoned him with his finger and held out the bag of tarts. He watched him, half incredulous of his prize, and with many a cautious look over his shoulder, pa.s.s out of sight. For a long while he sat alone, only the evening birds singing out of the greenness and silence of the churchyard. What a haunting inescapable riddle life was.

Colour suddenly faded out of the light streaming between the branches.

And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom, began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so devilish empty--this raft of the world floating under evening's shadow.

How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen asleep, ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy deep had stolen oar and sail and compa.s.s, leaving him adrift amid the riding of the waves.

'Are they worth, do you think, quite a penny?' suddenly inquired a quiet voice in the silence. He looked up into the almost colourless face, into the grey eyes beneath their clear narrow brows.

'I was thinking,' he said, 'what a curious thing life is, and wondering--'

'The first half is well worth the penny--its originality! I can't afford twopence. So you must GIVE me what you were wondering.'

Lawford gazed rather blankly across the twilight fields. 'I was wondering,' he said with an oddly naive candour, 'how long it took one to sink.'

'They say, you know,' Grisel replied solemnly, 'drowned sailors float midway, suffering their sea change; purgatory. But what a splendid pennyworth. All pure philosophy!'

'"Philosophy!"' said Lawford; 'I am a perfect fool. Has your brother told you about me?'

She glanced at him quickly. 'We had a talk.'

'Then you do know--?' He stopped dead, and turned to her. 'You really realise it, looking at me now?'

'I realise,' she said gravely, 'that you look even a little more pale and haggard than when I saw you first the other night. We both, my brother and I, you know, thought for certain you'd come yesterday.

In fact, I went into the Widderstone in the evening to look for you, knowing your nocturnal habits....' She glanced again at him with a kind of shy anxiety.

'Why--why is your brother so--why does he let me bore him so horribly?'

'Does he? He's tremendously interested; but then, he's pretty easily interested when he's interested at all. If he can possibly twist anything into the slightest show of a mystery, he will. But, of course, you won't, you can't, take all he says seriously. The tiniest pinch of salt, you know. He's an absolute fanatic at talking in the air. Besides, it doesn't really matter much.'

'In the air?'

'I mean if once a theory gets into his head--the more far-fetched, so long as it's original, the better--it flowers out into a positive miracle of incredibilities. And of course you can rout out evidence for anything under the sun from his dingy old folios. Why did he lend you that PARTICULAR book?'

'Didn't he tell you that, then?'

'He said it was Sabathier.' She seemed to think intensely for the merest fraction of a moment, and turned. 'Honestly, though, I think he immensely exaggerated the likeness. As for...'

He touched her arm, and they stopped again, face to face. 'Tell me what difference exactly you see,' he said. 'I am quite myself again now, honestly; please tell me just the very worst you think.'

'I think, to begin with,' she began, with exaggerated candour, 'his is rather a detestable face.'

'And mine?' he said gravely.

'Why--very troubled; oh yes--but his was like some bird of prey.

Yours--what mad stuff to talk like this!--not the least symptom, that I can see, of--why, the "prey," you know.'

They had come to the wicket in the dark th.o.r.n.y hedge. 'Would it be very dreadful to walk on a little--just to finish?'

'Very,' she said, turning as gravely at his side.

'What I wanted to say was--' began Lawford, and forgetting altogether the thread by which he hoped to lead up to what he really wanted to say, broke off lamely; 'I should have thought you would have absolutely despised a coward.'

'It would be rather absurd to despise what one so horribly well understands. Besides, we weren't cowards--we weren't cowards a bit. My childhood was one long, reiterated terror--nights and nights of it. But I never had the pluck to tell any one. No one so much as dreamt of the company I had. Ah, and you didn't see either that my heart was absolutely in my mouth, that I was shrivelled up with fear, even at sight of the fear on your face in the dark. There's absolutely nothing so catching. So, you see, I do know a little what nerves are; and dream too sometimes, though I don't choose charnelhouses if I can get a comfortable bed. A coward! May I really say that to ask my help was one of the bravest things in a man I ever heard of. Bullets--that kind of courage--no real woman cares twopence for bullets. An old aunt of mine stared a man right out of the house with the thing in her face. Anyhow, whether I may or not, I do say it. So now we are quits.'

'Will you--' began Lawford, and stopped. 'What I wanted to say was,'

he jerked on, 'it is sheer horrible hypocrisy to be talking to you like this--though you will never have the faintest idea of what it has meant and done for me. I mean... And yet, and yet, I do feel when just for the least moment I forget what I am, and that isn't very often, when I forget what I have become and what I must go back to--I feel that I haven't any business to be talking with you at all. "Quits!" And here I am, an outcast from decent society. Ah, you don't know--'

She bent her head and laughed under her breath. 'You do really stumble on such delicious compliments. And yet, do you know, I think my brother would be immensely pleased to think you were an outcast from decent society if only he could be thought one too. He has been trying half his life to wither decent society with neglect and disdain--but it doesn't take the least notice. The deaf adder, you know. Besides, besides; what is all this meek talk? I detest meek talk--G.o.ds or men. Surely in the first and last resort all we are is ourselves. Something has happened; you are jangled, shaken. But to us, believe me, you are simply one of fewer friends-and I think, after struggling up Widderstone Lane hand in hand with you in the dark, I have a right to say "friends" than I could count on one hand. What are we all if we only realized it? We talk of dignity and propriety, and we are like so many children playing with knucklebones in a giant's scullery. Come along, he will, some suppertime, for us, each in turn--and how many even will so much as look up from their play to wave us good-bye? that's what I mean--the plot of silence we are all in. If only I had my brother's lucidity, how much better I would have said all this. It is only, believe me, that I want ever so much to help you, if I may--even at risk, too,' she added, rather shakily, 'of having that help--well--I know it's little good.'