The Return Part 27

'Oh yes, of course,' said Herbert intelligently. 'Only temporarily. It's this beastly gregariousness that's the devil. The very thought of it undoes me--with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals, bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of--of infinity.

And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one thinks too much of one's clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too deep for their poor reasons. I don't mean that YOUR wanting to go home is anything gregarious, but I do think THEIR insisting on your coming back at once might be. And I know you won't visit this stuff on me as anything more than just my "sc.u.m," as Grisel calls the fine flower of my maiden meditations. All that I really want to say is that we should both be more than delighted if you'd stay just as long as it will not be a bore for you to stay. Stay till you're heartily tired of us. Go back now, if you MUST; tell them how much better you are. Bolt off to a nerve specialist. He'll say complete rest--change of scene, and all that. They all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not take your rest here? We are such miserably dull company to one another it would be a greater pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I mean it from the very bottom of my heart. Do!'

Lawford listened. 'I wish--,' he began, and stopped dead again. 'Anyhow, I'll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I've been playing truant. It was all very well while--To tell you the truth I can't think QUITE straight yet.

But it won't last for ever. Besides--well, anyhow, I'll go back.'

'Right you are,' said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. 'You can't expect, you really can't, everything to come right straight away. Just have patience. And now, let's go out and sit in the sun. They've mixed September up with May.'

And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair.

Grisel had taken her brother's place, with a little pile of needlework beside her on the gra.s.s, when Lawford again opened his eyes under the rosy shade of a parasol. He watched her for a while, without speaking.

'How long have I been asleep?' he said at last.

She started and looked up from her needle.

'That depends on how long you have been awake,' she said, smiling. 'My brother tells me,' she went on, beginning to st.i.tch, 'that you have made up your mind to leave us to-day. Perhaps we are only flattering ourselves it has been a rest. But if it has--is that, do you think, quite wise?'

He leant forward and hid his face in his hands. 'It's because--it's because it's the only "must" I can see.'

'But even "musts"--well, we have to be sure even of "musts," haven't we? Are YOU?' She glanced up and for an instant their eyes met, and the falling water seemed to be sounding out of a distance so remote it might be but the echo of a dream. She stooped once more over her work.

'Supposing,' he said very slowly, and almost as if speaking to himself, 'supposing Sabathier--and you know he's merely like a friend now one mustn't be seen talking to--supposing he came back; what then?'

'Oh, but Sabathier's gone: he never really came. It was only a fancy--a mood. It was only you--another you.'

'Who was that yesterday, then?'

She glanced at him swiftly and knew the question was but a venture.

'Yesterday?'

'Oh, very well,' he said fretfully, 'you too! But if he did, if he did, come really back: "prey" and all?'

'What is the riddle?' she said, taking a deep breath and facing him brightly.

'Would MY "must" still be HIS?' The face he raised to her, as he leaned forward under the direct light of the sun, was so colourless, cadaverous and haggard, the thought crossed her mind that it did indeed seem little more than a shadowy mask that but one hour of darkness might dispel.

'You said, you know, we did win through. Why then should we be even thinking of defeat now?'

'"We"!'

'Oh no, you!' she cried triumphantly.

'You do not answer my question.'

'Nor you mine! It WAS a glorious victory. Is there the ghost of a reason why you should cast your mind back? Is there, now?'

'Only,' said Lawford, looking patiently up into her face, 'only because I love you': and listened in the silence to the words as one may watch a bird that has escaped for ever and irrevocably out of its cage, steadily flying on and on till lost to sight.

For an instant the grey eyes faltered. 'But that, surely,' she began in a low voice, still steadily sewing, 'that was our compact last night--that you should let me help, that you should trust me just as you trusted the mother years ago who came in the little cart with the s.h.a.ggy dusty pony to the homesick boy watching at the window. Perhaps,' she added, her fingers trembling, 'in this odd shuffle of souls and faces, I AM that mother, and most frightfully anxious you should not give in.

Why, even because of the tiredness, even because the cause seems vain, you must still fight on--wouldn't she have said it? Surely there are prizes, a daughter, a career, no end! And even they gone--still the self undimmed, undaunted, that took its drubbing like a man.'

'I know you know I'm all but crazed; you see this wretched mind all littered and broken down; look at me like that, then. Forget even you have befriended me and pretended--Why must I blunder on and on like this? Oh, Grisel, my friend, my friend, if only you loved me!'

Tears clouded her eyes. She turned vaguely as if for a hiding-place.

'We can't talk here. How mad the day is. Listen, listen! I do--I do love you--mother and woman and friend--from the very moment you came. It's all so clear, so clear: that, and your miserable "must," my friend.

Come, we will go away by ourselves a little, and talk. That way. I'll meet you by the gate.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She came out into the sunlight, and they went through the little gate together. She walked quickly, without speaking, over the bridge, past a little cottage whose hollyhocks leaned fading above its low flint wall.

Skirting a field of stubble, she struck into a wood by a path that ran steeply up the hillside. And by and by they came to a glen where the woodmen of a score of years ago had felled the trees, leaving a green hollow of saplings in the midst of their towering neighbours.

'There,' she said, holding out her hand to him, 'now we are alone. Just six hours or so--and then the sun will be there,' she pointed to the tree-tops to the west, 'and then you will have to go; for good, for good--you your way, and I mine. What a tangle--a tangle is this life of ours. Could I have dreamt we should ever be talking like this, you and I? Friends of an hour. What will you think of me? Does it matter? Don't speak. Say nothing--poor face, poor hands. If only there were something to look to--to pray to!' She bent over his hand and pressed it to her breast. 'What worlds we've seen together, you and I. And then--another parting.'

They wandered on a little way, and came back and listened to the first few birds that flew up into the higher branches, noonday being past, to sing.

They talked, and were silent, and talked again with out question, or sadness, or regret, or reproach; she mocking even at themselves, mocking at this 'change'--'Why, and yet without it, would you ever even have dreamed once a poor fool of a Frenchman went to his restless grave for me--for me? Need we understand? Were we told to pry? Who made us human must be human too. Why must we take such care, and make such a fret--this soul? I know it, I know it; it is all we have--"to save,"

they say, poor creatures. No, never to SPEND, and so they daren't for a solitary instant lift it on the finger from its cage. Well, we have; and now, soon, back it must go, back it must go, and try its best to whistle the day out. And yet, do you know, perhaps the very freedom does a little shake its--its monotony. It's true, you see, they have lived a long time; these Worldly Wisefolk they were wise before they were swaddled....

'There, and you are hungry?' she asked him, laughing in his eyes. 'Of course, of course you are--scarcely a mouthful since that first still wonderful supper. And you haven't slept a wink, except like a tired-out child after its first party, on that old garden chair. I sat and watched, and yes, almost hoped you'd never wake in case--in case. Come along, see, down there. I can't go home just yet. There's a little old inn--we'll go and sit down there--as if we were really trying to be romantic! I know the woman quite well; we can talk there--just the day out.'

They sat at a little table in the garden of 'The Cherry Trees,' its thick green apple branches burdened with ripened fruit. And Grisel tried to persuade him to eat and drink, 'for to-morrow we die,' she said, her hands trembling, her face as it were veiled with a faint mysterious light.

'There are dozens and dozens of old stories, you know,' she said, leaning on her elbows, 'dozens and dozens, meaning only us. You must, you must eat; look, just an apple. We've got to say good-bye. And faintness will double the difficulty.' She lightly touched his hand as if to compel him to smile with her. 'There, I'll peel it; and this is Eden; and soon it will be the cool of the evening. And then, oh yes, the voice will come. What nonsense I am talking. Never mind.'

They sat on in the quiet sunshine, and a spider slid softly through the air and with busy claws set to its nets; and those small ghosts the robins went whistling restlessly among the heavy boughs.

A child presently came out of the porch of the inn into the garden, and stood with its battered doll in its arms, softly watching them awhile.

But when Grisel smiled and tried to coax her over, she burst out laughing and ran in again.

Lawford stooped forward on his chair with a groan. 'You see,' he said, 'the whole world mocks me. You say "this evening"; need it be, must it be this evening? If you only knew how far they have driven me. If you only knew what we should only detest each other for saying and for listening to. The whole thing's dulled and staled. Who wants a changeling? Who wants a painted bird? Who does not loathe the converted?--and I'm converted to Sabathier's G.o.d. Should we be sitting here talking like this if it were not so? I can't, I can't go back.'

She rose and stood with her hand pressed over her mouth, watching him.

'Won't you understand?' he continued. 'I am an outcast--a felon caught red-handed, come in the flesh to a hideous and righteous judgment. I hear myself saying all these things; and yet, Grisel, I do, I do love you with all the dull best I ever had. Not now, then; I don't ask new even. I can, I would begin again. G.o.d knows my face has changed enough even as it is. Think of me as that poor wandering ghost of yours; how easily I could hide away--in your memory; and just wait, wait for you.

In time even this wild futile madness too would fade away. Then I could come back. May I try?'

'I can't answer you. I can't reason. Only, still, I do know, talk, put off, forget as I may, must is must. Right and wrong, who knows what THEY mean, except that one's to be done and one's to be forsworn; or--forgive, my friend, the truest thing I ever said--or else we lose the savour of both. Oh, then, and I know, too, you'd weary of me. I know you, Monsieur Nicholas, better than you can ever know yourself, though you have risen from your grave. You follow a dream, no voice or face or flesh and blood; and not to do what the one old raven within you cries you must, would be in time to hate the very sound of my footsteps. You shall go back, poor turncoat, and face the clearness, the utterly more difficult, bald, and heartless clearness, as together we faced the dark.

Life is a little while. And though I have no words to tell what always are and must be foolish reasons because they are not reasons at all but ghosts of memory, I know in my heart that to face the worst is your only hope of peace. Should I have staked so much on your finding that, and now throw up the game? Don't let us talk any more. I'll walk half the way, perhaps. Perhaps I will walk all the way. I think my brother guesses--at least MY madness. I've talked and talked him nearly past his patience. And then, when you are quite safely, oh yes, quite safely and soundly gone, then I shall go away for a little, so that we can't even hear each other speak, except in dreams. Life!--well, I always thought it was much too plain a tale to have as dull an ending. And with us the powers beyond have played a newer trick, that's all. Another hour, and we will go. Till then there's just the solitary walk home and only the dull old haunted house that h.o.a.rds as many ghosts as we ourselves to watch our coming.'

Evening began to shine between the trees; they seemed to stand aflame, with a melancholy rapture in their uplifted boughs above their fading coats. The fields of the garnered harvest shone with a golden stillness, awhir with shimmering flocks of starlings. And the old birds that had sung in the spring sang now amid the same leaves, grown older too to give them harbourage.

Herbert was sitting in his room when they returned, nursing his teacup on his knee while he pretended to be reading, with elbow propped on the table.

'Here's Nicholas Sabathier, my dear, come to say goodbye awhile,'

said Grisel. She stood for a moment in her white gown, her face turned towards the clear green twilight of the open window. 'I have promised to walk part of the way with him. But I think first we must have some tea.