But the coolness and deliberation of his scrutiny, had to a certain
extent calmed Lawford’s mind and given him confidence. Hitherto he had
met the little difficulties of life only to vanquish them with ease and
applause. Now he was standing face to face with the unknown. He burst
out laughing, into a long, low, helpless laughter. Then he arose and
began to walk softly, swiftly, to and fro across the room—from wall to
wall seven paces, and at the fourth, that awful, unseen, brightly-lit
profile passed as swiftly over the tranquil surface of the
looking-glass. The power of concentration was gone again. He simply
paced on mechanically, listening to a Babel of questions, a conflicting
medley of answers. But above all the confusion and turmoil of his
brain, as a boatswain’s whistle rises above a storm, so sounded that
same infinitesimal voice, incessantly repeating another question now,
‘What are you going to do? What are you going to do?’
And in the midst of this confusion, out of the infinite, as it were,
came another sharp tap at the door, and all within sank to utter
stillness again.
‘It’s nearly half-past eight, Arthur; I can’t wait any longer.’
Lawford cast a last fleeting look into the glass, turned, and
confronted the closed door. ‘Very well, Sheila, you shall _not_ wait
any longer.’ He crossed over to the door, and suddenly a swift crafty
idea flashed into his mind.
He tapped on the panel. ‘Sheila,’ he said softly, ‘I want you first,
before you come in, to get me something out of my old writing-desk in
the smoking-room. Here is the key.’ He pushed a tiny key—from off the
ring he carried—beneath the door. ‘In the third little drawer from the
top, on the left side, is a letter; please don’t say anything now. It
is the letter you wrote me, you will remember, after I had asked you to
marry me. You scribbled in the corner under your signature the initials
“Y.S.O.A.”—do you remember? They meant, You Silly Old Arthur!—do you
remember? Will you please get that letter at once?’
‘Arthur,’ answered the voice from without, empty of all expression,
‘what does all this mean, this mystery, this hopeless nonsense about a
silly letter? What has happened? Is this a miserable form of
persecution? Are you mad?—I refuse to get the letter.’
Lawford stooped, black and angular, against the door. ‘I am not mad.
Oh, I am in the deadliest earnest, Sheila. You _must_ get the letter,
if only for your own peace of mind.’ He heard his wife hesitate as she
turned. He heard a sob. And once more he waited.
‘I have brought the letter,’ came the low toneless voice again.
‘Have you opened it?’
There was a rustle of paper. ‘Are the letters there underlined three
times—“Y.S.O.A.”?’
‘The letters are there.’
‘And the date of the month is underneath, “April 3rd.” No one else in
the whole world, living or dead, could know of this but ourselves,
Sheila?’
‘Will you please open the door?’
‘No one?’
‘I suppose not—no one.’
‘Then come in.’ He unlocked the door and opened it. A dark, rather
handsome woman, with sleek hair, in a silk dress of a dark rich colour
entered. Lawford closed the door. But his face was in shadow. He had
still a moment’s respite.
‘I need not ask you to be patient,’ he began quickly; ‘if I could
possibly have spared you—if there had been anybody in the world to go
to... I am in horrible, horrible trouble, Sheila. It is inconceivable.
I said I was sane: so I am, but the fact is—I went out for a walk; it
was rather stupid, perhaps, so soon: and I think I was taken ill, or
something—my heart. A kind of fit, a nervous fit. Possibly I am a
little unstrung, and it’s all, it’s mainly fancy: but I think, I can’t
help thinking it has a little distorted—changed my face; everything,
Sheila; except, of course, myself. Would you mind looking?’ He walked
slowly and with face averted towards the dressing-table.
‘Simply a nervous—to make such a fuss, to scare!...’ began his wife,
following him.
Without a word he took up the two old china candlesticks, and held
them, one in each lank-fingered hand, before his face, and turned.
Lawford could see his wife—every tint and curve and line as distinctly
as she could see him. Her cheeks never had much colour; now her whole
face visibly darkened, from pallor to a dusky leaden grey, as she
gazed. It was not an illusion then; not a miserable hallucination. The
unbelievable, the inconceivable, had happened. He replaced the candles
with trembling fingers and sat down.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it really; what is it really, Sheila? What on
earth are we to do?’
‘Is the door locked?’ she whispered. He nodded. With eyes fixed
stirlessly on his face, Sheila unsteadily seated herself, a little out
of the candlelight, in the shadow. Lawford rose and put the key of the
door on his wife’s little rose-wood prayer-desk at her elbow, and
deliberately sat down again.
‘You said “a fit”—where?’
‘I suppose—is—is it very different—hopeless? You will understand my
being... O Sheila, what am I to do?’ His wife sat perfectly still,
watching him with unflinching attention.
‘You gave me to understand—“a nervous fit”; where?’
Lawford took a deep breath, and quietly faced her again. ‘In the old
churchyard, Widderstone; I was looking at—at the gravestones.’
‘A fit; in the old churchyard, Widderstone—you were “looking at the
gravestones”?’
Lawford shut his mouth. ‘I suppose so—a fit,’ he said presently. ‘My
heart went a little queer, and I sat down and fell into a kind of
doze—a stupor, I suppose. I don’t remember anything more. And then I
woke; like this.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know what?’
‘“Like that”?’
He turned slowly towards the looking-glass. ‘Why, here I am!’
She gazed at him steadily; and a hard, incredulous, almost cunning
glint came into her wide blue eyes. She took up the key carelessly,
glanced at it; glanced at him. ‘It has made me—I mean the first shock,
you know—it has made me a little faint.’ She walked slowly,
deliberately to the door, and unlocked it. ‘I’ll get a little sal
volatile.’ She softly drew out the key, and without once removing her
eyes from his face, opened the door and pushed the key noiselessly in
on the other side. ‘Please stay there; I won’t be a minute.’
Lawford’s face smiled—a rather desperate, yet for all that a patient,
resolute smile. ‘Oh yes, of course,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘I had
not foreseen—at least—you must do precisely what you please, Sheila.
You were going to lock me in. You will, however, before taking any
final step, please think over what it will entail. I did not think you
would, after such proof, in this awful trouble—I did not think you
would simply disbelieve me, Sheila. Who else is there to help me? You
have the letter in your hand. Isn’t that sufficient proof? It was
overwhelming proof to me. And even I doubted too; doubted myself. But
never mind; why I should have dreamed you would believe me; or taken
this awful thing differently, I don’t know. It’s rather awful to have
to go on alone. But there, think it over. I shall not stir until I hear
the voices. And then: honestly, Sheila, I couldn’t face quite that. I’d
sooner give up altogether. Any proof you can think of—I will... O God,
I cannot bear it!’ He covered his face with his hands; but in a moment
looked up, unmoved once more. ‘Why, for that matter,’ he added slowly,
and, as it were, with infinite pains, a faint thin smile again stealing
into his face, ‘I think,’ he turned wearily to the glass, ‘I think,
it’s almost an improvement!’
Something deep in those dark clear pupils, out of that lean adventurous
face, gleamed back at him, the distant flash of a heliograph, as it
were, height to height, flashing ‘Courage!’ He shuddered, and shut his
eyes. ‘But I would really rather,’ he added in a quiet childlike way,
‘I would really rather, Sheila, you left me alone now.’
His wife stood irresolute. ‘I understand you to explain,’ she said,
‘that you went out of this house, just your usual self, this afternoon,
for a walk; that for some reason you went to Widderstone—“to read the
tombstones,” that you had a heart attack, or, as you said at first, a
fit, that you fell into a stupor, and came home like—like this. Am I
likely to believe all that? Am I likely to believe such a story as
that? Whoever you are, whoever you may be, is it likely? I am not in
the least afraid. I thought at first it was some silly practical joke.
I thought that at first.’ She paused, but no answer came. ‘Well, I
suppose in a civilised country there is a remedy even for a joke as
wicked as that.’
Lawford listened patiently. ‘She is pretending; she is trying me; she
is feeling her way,’ he kept repeating to himself. ‘She knows I _am_ I,
but hasn’t the courage... Let her talk!’
‘I shall leave the door open,’ Sheila continued. ‘I am not, as you no
doubt very naturally assumed—I am not going to do anything either
senseless or heedless. I am merely going to ask your brother Cecil to
come in, if he is at home, and if not, no doubt our old friend Mr.
Montgomery would—would help us.’ Her scrutiny was still and
concentrated, like that of a cat above a mouse’s hole.
Lawford sat crouched together in the candle-light. ‘By all means,
Sheila,’ he said slowly choosing his words, ‘if you think poor old
Cecil, who next January will have been three years in his grave, will
be of any use in our difficulty. Who Mr. Montgomery is...’ His voice
dropped in utter weariness. ‘You did it very well, my dear,’ he added
softly.
Sheila gently closed the door and sat down on the bed. He heard her
softly crying, he heard the bed shaken with her sobs. But a slow glance
towards the steady candle-flames restrained him. He let her cry on
alone. When she had become a little more composed he stood up. ‘You
have had no dinner,’ he managed to blurt out at last, ‘you will be
faint. It’s useless to talk, even to think, any more to-night. Leave me
to myself for a while. Don’t look at me any more. Perhaps I can sleep:
perhaps if I sleep it will come right again. When the servants are gone
up, I will come down. Just let me have some—some medical book, or
other; and some more candles. Don’t think, Sheila; don’t even think!’
Sheila paid him no attention for a while. ‘You tell me not to think,’
she began, in a low, almost listless voice; ‘why—I wonder I am in my
right mind. And “eat”! How can you have the heartlessness to suggest
it? You don’t seem in the least to _realize_ what you say. You seem to
have lost all—all consciousness. I quite agree, it is useless for me to
burden you with my company while you are in your present condition of
mind. But you will at least promise me that you won’t take any further
steps in this awful business.’ She could not, try as she would, bring
herself again to look at him. She rose softly, paused a moment with
sidelong eyes, then turned deliberately towards the door, ‘What, what
have I done to deserve all this?’
From behind her that voice, so extraordinarily like—and yet in some
vague fashion more arresting, more resonant than her husband’s, broke
incredibly out once more. ‘You will please leave the key, Sheila. I am
ill, but I am not yet in the padded room. And please understand, I take
no further steps in “this awful business” until I hear a strange voice
in the house.’ Sheila paused, but the quiet voice rang in her ear,
desperately yet convincingly. She took the key out of the lock, placed
it on the bed, and with a sigh, that was not quite without a hint of
relief in its misery, she furtively extinguished the gas-light on the
landing and rustled downstairs.
She speedily returned. ‘I have brought the book.’ she said hastily. ‘I
could only find the one volume. I have said you have taken a fresh
chill. No one will disturb you.’
Lawford took the book without a word. And once more, with eyes stonily
averted, his wife left him to his own company and that of the face in
the glass.
When completely deserted, Lawford with fumbling fingers opened Quain’s
‘Dictionary of Medicine.’ He had never had much curiosity, and had
always hated what he disbelieved, but none the less he had heard
occasionally of absurd and questionable experiments. He remembered even
to have glanced over reports of cases in the newspapers concerning
disappearances, loss of memory, dual personality. Cranks... Oh yes, he
thought now, with a sense of cold humiliating relief, there _had_ been
such cases as his before. They were no doubt curable. They must be
comparatively common in America—that land of jangled nerves. Possibly
bromide, rest, a battery. But Quain, it seemed, shared his prejudices,
at least in this edition, or had hidden away all such apocryphal matter
beneath technical terms, where no sensible man could find it,
‘Besides,’ he muttered angrily, ‘what’s the good of your one volume?’
He flung it down and strode to the bed, and rang the bell. Then
suddenly recollecting himself, he paused and listened. There came a tap
on the door. ‘Is that you, Sheila?’ he called, doubtfully.
‘No, sir, it’s me,’ came the answer.
‘Oh, don’t trouble; I only wanted to speak to your mistress. It’s all
right.’
‘Mrs. Lawford has gone out, sir,’ replied the voice.
‘Gone out?’
‘Yes, sir; she told me not to mention it; but I suppose as you asked—’
‘Oh, that’s all right; never mind; I didn’t ring.’ He stood with face
uplifted, thinking.
‘Can I do anything, sir?’ came the faint, nervous question after a long
pause.
‘One moment, Ada,’ he called in a loud voice. He took out his
pocket-book, sat down, and scribbled a little note. He hardly noticed
how changed his handwriting was—the clear round letters crabbed and
irregular.
‘Are you there, Ada?’ he called. ‘I am slipping a note beneath the
door; just draw back the mat; that’s it. Take it at once, please, to
Mr. Critchett’s, and be sure to wait for an answer. Then come back
direct to me, up here. I don’t think, Ada, your mistress believes much
in Critchett; but I have fully explained what I want. He has made me up
many prescriptions. Explain that to his assistant if he is not there.
Go at once, and you will be back before she is. I should be so very
much obliged, tell him. “Mr Arthur Lawford.”’
The minutes slowly drifted by. He sat quite still in the clear
untroubled light, waiting in the silence of the empty house. And for
the first time he was confronted with the cold incredible horror of his
ordeal. Who would believe, who could believe, that behind this strange
and awful, yet how simple mask, lay himself? What test; what heaped-up
evidence of identity would break it down? It was all a loathsome
ignominy. It was utterly absurd. It was—
Suddenly, with a kind of ape-like cunning, he deliberately raised a
long lean forefinger and pointed it at the shadowy crystal of the
looking-glass. Perhaps he was dead, was really and indeed changed in
body, was fated really and indeed to change in soul, into That. ‘It’s
that beastly voice again,’ Lawford cried out loud, looking vacantly at
his upstretched finger. And then, hand and arm, not too willingly, as
it were, obeyed; relaxed and fell to his side. ‘You must keep a tight
hold, old man,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Once, once you lose
yourself—the least symptom of that—the least symptom, and it’s all up!’
And the fools, the heartless, preposterous fools had brought him one
volume!
When on earth was Ada coming back? She was lagging on purpose. She was
in the conspiracy too. Oh, it should be a lesson to Sheila! Oh, if only
daylight would come! ‘What are you going to do—to do—to DO?’ He rose
once more and paced his silent cage. To and fro, thinking no more; just
using his eyes, compelling them to wander from picture to picture,
bedpost to bedpost; now counting aloud his footsteps; now humming;
only, only to keep himself from thinking. At last he took out a drawer
and actually began arranging its medley of contents; ties, letters,
studs, concert and theatre programmes—all higgledy-piggledy. And in the
midst of this childish strategem he heard a faint sound, as of heavy
water trickling from a height. He turned. A thief was in one of the
candles. It was guttering out. He would be left in darkness. He turned
hastily without a moment’s heed, to call for light, flung the door open
and full in the flare of a lamp, illuminating her pale forehead and
astonished face beneath her black straw hat, stood face to face with
Ada.
With one swift dexterous movement he drew the door to after him,
looking straight into her almost colourless steady eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said
instantly, in a high faint voice, ‘the powder, thank you; yes, Mr
Lawford’s powder; thank you, thank you. He must be kept absolutely
quiet—absolutely. Mrs Lawford is following. Please tell her that I am
here, when she returns. Mr Critchett was in, then? Thank you. Extreme,
extreme silence, please.’ Again that knotted, melodramatic finger
raised itself on high; and within that lean, cadaverous body the soul
of its lodger quailed at this spectral boldness. But it was triumphant.
The maid at once left him and went downstairs. He heard faint voices in
muffled consultation. And in a moment Sheila’s silks rustled once more
on the staircase. Lawford put down the lamp, and watched her
deliberately close the door.
‘What does this mean?’ she began swiftly, ‘I understand that—Ada tells
me a stranger is here; giving orders, directions. Who is he? where is
he? You bound yourself on your solemn promise not to stir till I
returned. You... How can I, how can we get decently through this
horrible business if you are so wretchedly indiscreet? You sent Ada to
the chemist’s. What for? What for? I say.’
Lawford watched his wife with an almost extraneous interest. She was
certainly extremely interesting from that point of view, that very
novel point of view. ‘It’s quite useless,’ he said, ‘to get in the
least nervous or hysterical. I don’t care for the darkness just now.
That was all. Tell the girl I am a strange doctor—Dr Simon’s new
partner. You are clever at conventionalities, Sheila. Invent! I said
our patient must be kept quiet—I really think he must. That is all, so
far as Ada is concerned.... What on earth else _are_ we to say?’ he
broke out. ‘That, for the present to _everybody_, is our only possible
story. It will give us what we must have—time. And next—where is the
second volume of Quain? I want that. And next—why have you broken faith
with me?’ Mrs Lawford sat down. This sudden and baffling outburst had
stupefied her.
‘I can’t, I can’t make head or tail of what you say. And as for having
broken faith, as you call it, would any wife, would any sane woman face
what you have brought on us, a situation like this, without seeking
advice and help? Mr Bethany will be perfectly discreet—if he thinks
discretion desirable. He is the only available friend we have close
enough to ask at once. And things of this kind are, I suppose, if
anybody’s concern, his. It’s certain to leak out. Everybody will hear
of it. Don’t flatter yourself you are going to hush up a thing like
this for long. You can’t keep _living_ skeletons in a cupboard. You
think only of yourself, only of your own misfortune. But who’s to know,
pray, that you really are my husband—if you are? The sooner I get the
vicar on my side the better for us both. Who in the whole of the
parish—I ask you—and you must have the sense left to see that—who will
believe that a respectable man, a gentleman, a Churchman, would
deliberately go out to seek an afternoon’s amusement in a poky little
country churchyard? Why, apart from everything else, _that_ was
absolutely mad to start with. Can you really wonder at the result?’
Probably because she still steadfastly refused to look at him, her
memory kept losing its hold on the appalling fact facing them. She
realised fully only that she was in a great, unwarrantable, and
insurmountable difficulty, but until she actually lifted her eyes for a
moment she had not fully realised what that difficulty was. She got up
with a sudden and horrible nausea. ‘One moment,’ she said, ‘I will see
if the servants have gone to bed.’
That long saturnine face, behind which Lawford lay in a dull and
desperate ambush, smiled. Something partaking of its clay, some reflex
ghost of its rather remarkable features, was even a little amused at
Sheila.
She returned in a moment, and stood in profile in the doorway. ‘Will
you come down?’ she remarked distantly.
‘One moment, Sheila,’ Lawford began miserably. ‘Before we take this
irrevocable step, a step I implore you to postpone awhile—for what
comes, I suppose, may go—what precisely have you told the vicar? I must
in fairness know that.’
‘In fairness,’ she began ironically, and suddenly broke off. Her
husband had turned the flame of the lamp low down in the vacant room
behind them; the corridor was lit obscurely by the chandelier far down
in the hall below. A faint, inexplicable dread fell softly and coldly
on her heart. ‘Have you no trust in me?’ she murmured a little
bitterly. ‘I have simply told him the truth.’
They softly descended the stairs; she first, the dark figure following
close behind her.