The Return Part 13

'No,' said Sheila; 'but--it was at least unfortunate. We can't, I suppose, rely on Dr Bethany alone.'

Lawford crouched over his food. 'Will he blab?'

'Blab! Mr Danton is a gentleman, Arthur.'

Lawford rolled his eyes as if in temporary vertigo. 'Yes,' he said. And Sheila once more prepared to make a reposeful exit.

'I don't think I can see Simon this morning.'

'Oh. Who, then?'

'I mean I would prefer to be left alone.'

'Believe me, I had no intention to intrude.' And this time the door really closed.

'He is in a quiet, soothing sleep,' said Sheila a few minutes later.

'Nothing could be better,' said Dr Simon; and Lawford, to his inexpressible relief, heard the fevered throbbing of the doctor's car reverse, and turned over and shut his eyes, dulled and exhausted in the still unfriendliness of the vacant room. His spirits had sunk, he thought, to their lowest ebb. He scarcely heeded the fragments of dreams--clear, green landscapes, amazing gleams of peace, the sudden broken voices, the rustling and calling shadowiness of subconsciousness--in this quiet sunlight of reality. The clouds had broken, or had been withdrawn like a veil from the October skies. One thought alone was his refuge; one face alone haunted him with its peace; one remembrance soothed him--Alice. Through all his scattered and purposeless arguments he strove to remember her voice, the loving-kindness of her eyes, her untroubled confidence.

In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring himself to stand before the gla.s.s and deliberately shave. He even smiled at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He dressed by the fireplace.

'I couldn't rest,' he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one of her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; 'and one tires of reading even Quain in bed.'

'Have you found anything?' she inquired politely.

'Oh yes,' said Lawford wearily; 'I have discovered that infinitely worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there's nothing quite so picturesque.'

'Tell me,' said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. 'How does it feel? does it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?'

He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for inspiration. 'Practically, not at all,' he said hollowly. 'Of course, one's nerves--that fellow Danton--when one's overtired. You have'--his voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered--'YOU haven't noticed anything? My mind?'

'Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that, Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me unsympathetic--but don't you think we must sooner or later be thinking of what's to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn't. You WILL help me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!'

'What about Alice?'

'She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter of that, even if he was, at death's door.'

'At death's door,' murmured Lawford under his breath; 'who was it was saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one's thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel carved into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony--in that cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond--O G.o.d, beyond!'

Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. 'And was all that in Quain?'

she inquired rather flutteringly.

Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.

She shook herself, with a slight shiver. 'Very well, then,' she said and paused in the silence.

Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last sunshine seemed the smile that pa.s.sed for an instant across the reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. 'What has he been saying now?' he inquired like a fretful child.

Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare, wild, timid creature by the least stir. 'Who?' she merely breathed.

Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. 'It's just the last rags of that beastly influenza,' he said, and began vigorously combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.

But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts that pa.s.sed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance--the magic of the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him.

He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of a falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There was a faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the landing and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been Alice's nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that showed beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the garden--the trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a flower-bed, late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and--yes, three wicker chairs, a footstool, a work-basket, a little table on the smooth gra.s.s in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there in the autumnal sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair, her head bent, evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an inch or two forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the gra.s.s--Alice's big garden hat--and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears sagging. He had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would he bark at the strange, distasteful scent of a--Dr Ferguson? The coast was clear, then.

He turned even softlier yet, to confront, rapt, still, and hovering betwixt astonishment and dread, the blue calm eyes of his daughter, looking in at the door. It seemed to Lawford as if they had both been suddenly swept by some unseen power into a still, unearthly silence.

'We thought,' he began at last, 'we thought just to beckon Mrs Lawford from the window. He--he is asleep.'

Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed and left her pale. 'I will go down and tell mother you want to see her.

It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first...I suppose, thinking of my father--' The words faltered, and the eyes were lifted to his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford turned away heartsick and trembling.

'Certainly, certainly, by no means,' he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course--two heads, we know, are so much better than one when there's the least--the least difficulty. The great thing is quiet, rest, isolation, no possibility of a shock, else--' His voice fell away, his eloquence failed.

For Alice stood gazing stirlessly on and on into this infinitely strange, infinitely familiar shadowy, phantasmal face. 'Oh yes,' she replied, 'I quite understand, of course; but if I might just peep even, it would--I should be so much, much happier. Do let me just see him, Dr Ferguson, if only his head on the pillow! I wouldn't even breathe.

Couldn't it possibly help--even a faith-cure?' She leant forward impulsively, her voice trembling, a.n.a.l her eyes still shining beneath their faint, melancholy smile.

'I fear, my dear...it cannot be. He longs to see you. But with his mind, you know, in this state, it might--?'

'But mother never told me,' broke in the girl desperately, 'there was anything wrong with his MIND. Oh, but that was quite unfair. You don't mean, you don't mean--that--?'

Lawford scanned swiftly the little square beloved and memoried room that fate had suddenly converted for him into a cage of unspeakable pain and longing. 'Oh no; believe me, no! Not his brain, not that, not even wandering; really: but always thinking, always longing on and on for you, dear, only. Quite, quite master of himself, but--'

'You talk,' she broke in again angrily, 'only in pretence! You are treating me like a child; and so does mother, and so it has been ever since I came home. Why, if mother can, and you can, why may not I? Why, if he can walk and talk in the night....'

'But who--who "can walk and talk in the night?"' inquired a low stealthy voice out of the quietness behind her.

Alice turned swiftly. Her mother was standing at a little distance, with all the calm and moveless concentration of a waxwork figure, looking up at her from the staircase.

'I was--I was talking to Dr Ferguson, mother.'

'But as I came up the stairs I understood you to be inquiring something of Dr Ferguson, "if," you were saying, "he can walk and talk in the night": you surely were not referring to your father, child? That could not possibly be, in his state. Dr Ferguson, I know, will bear me out in that at least. And besides, I really must insist on following out medical directions to the letter. Dr Ferguson I know, will fully concur.

Do, pray, Dr Ferguson,' continued Sheila, raising her voice even now scarcely above a rapid murmur--'do pray a.s.sure my daughter that she must have patience; that however much even he himself may desire it, it is impossible that she should see her father yet. And now, my dear child, come down, I want to have a moment's talk with Dr Ferguson. I feared from his beckoning at the window that something was amiss.'

Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility, at the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old play-room. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell suddenly on the pin in his scarf--the claw and the pearl she had known all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild demented thing's, over face, hair, hands, clothes, att.i.tude, expression, and her heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague still figure whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell fainting in the doorway. Lawford stood motionless, vacantly watching Sheila, who knelt, chafing the cold hands. 'She has fainted?' he said; 'oh, Sheila, tell me--only fainted?'

Sheila made no answer; did not even raise her eyes.

'Some day, Sheila' he began in a dull voice, and broke off, and without another word, without even another glance at the still face and blue, twitching lids, he pa.s.sed her rapidly by, and in another instant Sheila heard the house-door shut. She got up quickly, and after a glance into the vacant bedroom turned the key; then she hastened upstairs for sal volatile and eau de cologne....

It was yet clear daylight when Lawford appeared beneath the portico of his house. With a glance of circ.u.mspection that almost seemed to suggest a fear of pursuit, he descended the steps, only to be made aware in so doing that Ada was with a kind of furtive eagerness pointing out the mysterious Dr Ferguson to a steadily gazing cook. One or two well-known and many a well-remembered face he encountered in the thin stream of City men treading blackly along the pavement. It was a still, high evening, and something very like a forlorn compa.s.sion rose in his mind at sight of their grave, rather pretentious, rather dull, respectable faces.

He found himself walking with an affectation of effrontery, and smiling with a faint contempt on all alike, as if to keep himself from slinking, and the wolf out of his eyes. He felt restless, and watchful, and suspicious, as if he had suddenly come down in the world. His, then, was a disguise as effectual as a shabby coat and a glazing eye. His heart sickened. Was it even worth while living on a crust of social respectability so thin and so exquisitely treacherous? He challenged no one. One or two actual acquaintances raised and lowered a faintly inquiring eyebrow in his direction. One even recalled in his confusion a smile of recognition just a moment too late. There was, it seemed, a peculiar aura in Lawford's presence, a shadow of a something in his demeanour that proved him alien.

None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should come to the worst, why--there is pasture in the solitary by-ways for the beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets, and soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with dying colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows filled the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him here. He looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops were left behind, the last milestone pa.s.sed, and in a little while he was descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had wandered down into the churchyard.

At the foot of the hill he pa.s.sed by the green and white Rectory, and there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding from his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying up a rambling rose-shoot on his trim cedared lawn. The next house barely showed its old red chimney-tops, above its bowers; the next was empty, with windows vacantly gazing, its paths peopled with great bearded weeds that stood mutely watching and guarding the seldom-opened gate. Then came more lofty grandmotherly elms, a dense hedge of every leaf that p.r.i.c.ks, and then Lawford found himself standing at the small canopied gate of the queer old wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in part described.