One solitary and tall candle burned on the great dressing-table. Faint,
solitary pictures broke the blankness of each wall. The carpet was
rich, the bed impressive, and the basins on the washstand as uninviting
as the bed. Lawford sat down on the edge of it in complete isolation.
He sat without stirring, listening to his watch ticking in his pocket.
The china clock on the chimney piece pointed cheerfully to the hour of
dawn. It was exactly, he computed carefully, five hours and seven
minutes fast. Not the slightest sound broke the stillness, until he
heard, very, very softly and gradually, the key of his door turn in the
oiled wards, and realized that he was a prisoner.
Women were strange creatures. How often he had heard that said, he
thought lamely. He felt no anger, no surprise or resentment, at the
trick. It was only to be expected. He could sit on till morning; easily
till morning. He had never noticed before how empty a well-furnished
room could seem. It was his own room too; his best visitors’ room. His
father-in-law had slept here, with his whiskers on that pillow. His
wife’s most formidable aunt had been all night here, alone with these
pictures. She certainly was... ‘But what are _you_ doing here?’ cried a
voice suddenly out of his reverie.
He started up and stretched himself, and taking out the neat little
packet that the maid had brought from the chemist’s, he drew up a
chair, and sat down once more in front of the glass. He sighed
vacantly, rose and lifted down from the wall above the fireplace a
tinted photograph of himself that Sheila had had enlarged about twelve
years ago. It was a brighter, younger, hairier, but unmistakably the
same dull indolent Lawford who had ventured into Widderstone churchyard
that afternoon. The cheek was a little plumper, the eyes not quite so
full-lidded, the hair a little more precisely parted, the upper lip
graced with a small blonde moustache. He tilted the portrait into the
candlelight, and compared it with this reflection in the glass of what
had come out of Widderstone, feature with feature, with perfect
composure and extreme care. Then he laid down the massive frame on the
table, and gazed quietly at the tiny packet.
It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized
with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this
small punctilious packet lay a Sesame—a power of transformation beside
which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday
into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from
house to house—a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so
very normal. Which should it be, that, or—his face lifted itself once
more to the ice-like gloom of the looking-glass—that, or this?
It simply gazed back with a kind of quizzical pity on its lean features
under the scrutiny of eyes so deep, so meaningful, so desolate, and yet
so indomitably courageous. In the brain behind them a slow and stolid
argument was in progress; the one baffling reply on the one side to
every appeal on the other being still simply. ‘What dreams may come?’
Those eyes surely knew something of dreams, else, why this violent and
stubborn endeavour to keep awake.
Lawford did indeed once actually frame the question, ‘But who the devil
are you?’ And it really seemed the eyes perceptibly widened or
brightened. The mere vexation of his unparalleled position. Sheila’s
pathetic incredulity, his old vicar’s laborious kindness, the tiresome
network of experience into which he would be dragged struggling on the
morrow, and on the morrow after that, and after that—the thought of all
these things faded for the moment from his mind, lost if not their
significance, at least their instancy.
He simply sat face to face with the sheer difficulty of living on at
all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had
occurred, no ‘change,’ he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet
Lawford, in his best visitor’s room, deciding between inscrutable life
and just—death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn’t even
the energy to complete themselves. None cared but himself and this—this
Silence.
‘But what does it all mean?’ the insistent voice he was getting to know
so well began tediously inquiring again. And every time he raised his
eyes, or, rather, as in many cases it seemed, his eyes raised
themselves, they saw this haunting face there—a face he no longer
bitterly rebelled at, nor dimmed with scrutiny, but a face that was
becoming a kind of hold on life, even a kind of refuge, an ally. It was
a face that might have come out of a rather flashy book; or such as is
revered on the stage. ‘A rotten bad face,’ he whispered at it in his
own familiar slang, after some such abrupt encounter; a fearless,
packed, daring, fascinating face, with even—what?—a spice of genius in
it. Whose the devil’s face was it? What on earth was the matter?...
‘Brazen it out,’ a jubilant thought cried suddenly; ‘follow it up; play
the game! give me just one opening. Think—think what I’ve risked!’
And all these voices thought Lawford, in deadly lassitude, meant only
one thing—insanity. A blazing, impotent indignation seized him. He
leaned near, peering as it were out of a red dusky mist. He snatched up
the china candlestick, and poised it above the sardonic reflection, as
if to throw. Then slowly, with infinite pains, he drew back from the
glass and replaced the candlestick on the table; stuffed his paper
packet into his pocket, took off his boots and threw himself on to the
bed. In a little while, in the faint, still light, he opened drowsily
wondering eyes. ‘Poor old thing!’ his voice murmured, ‘Poor old
Sheila!’