The last light of sunset lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud
was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country
graveyard again by its dark weather-worn lych-gate. The old stone
church with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window
faintly aglow with crimson and purple. He could hear a steady, rather
nasal voice through its open lattices. But the stooping stones and the
cypresses were out of sight of its porch. He would not be seen down
there. He paused a moment, however; his hat was drawn down over his
eyes; he was shivering. Far over the harvest fields showed a growing
pallor in the sky. He would have the moon to go home by.
‘Home!’—these trees, this tongueless companionship, this heavy winelike
air, this soundless turf—these in some obscure desolate fashion seemed
far rather really home. His eyes wandered towards the fading crimson.
And with that on his right hand he began softly, almost on tiptoe,
descending the hill. It seemed to him that the steady eyes of the dead
were watching him in his slow progress. The air was echoing with little
faint, clear calls. He turned and snapped his fingers at a robin that
was stalking him with its stony twittering from bush to bush.
But when after some little time he actually came out of the narrow
avenue and looked down, his heart misgave him, for some one was already
sitting there on his low and solitary seat beneath the cypresses. He
stood hesitating, gazing steadily and yet half vacantly at the
motionless figure, and in a while a face was lifted in his direction,
and undisconcerted eyes calmly surveyed him.
‘I am afraid,’ called Lawford rather nervously—‘I hope I am not
intruding?’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the stranger. ‘I have no privileges
here; at least as yet.’
Lawford again hesitated, then slowly advanced. ‘It’s astonishingly
quiet and beautiful,’ he said.
The stranger turned his head to glance over the fields. ‘Yes, it is,
very,’ he replied. There was the faintest accent, a little drawl of
unfriendliness in the remark.
‘You often sit here?’ Lawford persisted.
The stranger raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh yes, often.’ He smiled. ‘It is my
own modest fashion of attending divine service. The congregation is
rapt.’
‘_My_ visits,’ said Lawford, ‘have been very few—in fact, so far as I
know, I have only once been here before.’
‘I envy you the novelty.’ There was again the same faint unmistakable
antagonism in voice and attitude; and yet so deep was the relief in
talking to a fellow creature who hadn’t the least suspicion of anything
unusual in his appearance that Lawford was extremely disinclined to
turn back. He made another effort—for conversation with strangers had
always been a difficulty to him—and advanced towards the seat. ‘You
mustn’t please let me intrude upon you,’ he said, ‘but really I am very
interested in this queer old place. Perhaps you would tell me something
of its history?’ He sat down. His companion moved slowly to the other
side of the broken gravestone.
‘To tell you the truth,’ he replied, picking his way as it were from
word to word, ‘it’s “history,” as people call it, does not interest me
in the least. After all, it’s not _when_ a thing is, but _what_ it is,
that much matters. What this is’—he glanced, with head bent, across the
shadowy stones, ‘is pretty evident. Of course, age has its charms.’
‘And is this very old?’
‘Oh yes, it’s old right enough, as things go; but even age, perhaps, is
mainly an affair of the imagination. There’s a tombstone near that
little old hawthorn, and there are two others side by side under the
wall, still even legibly late seventeenth century. That’s pretty good
weathering.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Of course, the church itself is
centuries older, drenched with age. But she’s still sleep-walking while
these old tombstones dream. Glow-worms and crickets are not such bad
bedfellows.’
‘What interested me most, I think,’ said Lawford haltingly, ‘was this.’
He pointed with his stick to the grave at his feet.
‘Ah, yes, Sabathier’s,’ said the stranger; ‘I know his peculiar history
almost by heart.’
Lawford found himself staring with unusual concentration into the
rather long and pale face. ‘Not, I suppose,’ he resumed faintly—‘not, I
suppose, beyond what’s there.’
His companion leant his hand on the old stooping tombstone. ‘Well, you
know, there’s a good deal there’—he stooped over—‘if you read between
the lines. Even if you don’t.’
‘A suicide,’ said Lawford, under his breath.
‘Yes, a suicide; that’s why our Christian countrymen have buried him
outside of the fold. Dead or alive, they try to keep the wolf out.’
‘Is this, then, unconsecrated ground?’ said Lawford.
‘Haven’t you noticed,’ drawled the other, ‘how green the grass grows
down here, and how very sharp are poor old Sabathier’s thorns? Besides,
he was a stranger, and they—kept him out.’
‘But, surely,’ said Lawford, ‘was it so entirely a matter of choice—the
laws of the Church? If he did kill himself, he did.’
The stranger turned with a little shrug. ‘I don’t suppose it’s a matter
of much consequence to _him_. I fancied I was his only friend. May I
venture to ask why you are interested in the poor old thing?’
Lawford’s mind was as calm and shallow as a millpond. ‘Oh, a rather
unusual thing happened to me here,’ he said. ‘You say you often come?’
‘Often,’ said the stranger rather curtly.
‘Has anything—ever—occurred?’
‘“Occurred?”’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I wish it had. I come here
simply, as I have said, because it’s quiet; because I prefer the
company of those who never answer me back, and who do not so much as
condescend to pay me the least attention.’ He smiled and turned his
face towards the quiet fields.
Lawford, after a long pause, lifted his eyes. ‘Do you think,’ he said
softly, ‘it is possible one ever could?’
‘“One ever could?”’
‘Answer back?’
There was a low rotting wall of stone encompassing Sabathier’s grave;
on this the stranger sat down. He glanced up rather curiously at his
companion. ‘Seldom the time and the place and the _revenant_
altogether. The thought has occurred to others,’ he ventured to add.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Lawford eagerly. ‘But it is an absolutely
new one to me. I don’t mean that I have never had such an idea, just in
one’s own superficial way; but’—he paused and glanced swiftly into the
fast-thickening twilight—‘I wonder: are they, do you think, really, all
quite dead?’
‘Call and see!’ taunted the stranger softly.
‘Ah, yes, I know,’ said Lawford. ‘But I believe in the resurrection of
the body; that is what we say; and supposing, when a man dies—supposing
it was most frightfully against one’s will; that one hated the awful
inaction that death brings, shutting a poor devil up like a child
kicking against the door in a dark cupboard; one might surely one
might—just quietly, you know, try to get out? wouldn’t you?’ he added.
‘And, surely,’ he found himself beginning gently to argue again,
‘surely, what about, say, him?’ He nodded towards the old and broken
grave that lay between them.
‘What, Sabathier?’ the other echoed, laying his hand upon the stone.
And a sheer enormous abyss of silence seemed to follow the unanswerable
question.
‘He was a stranger; it says so. Good God!’ said Lawford, ‘how he must
have wanted to get home! He killed himself, poor wretch, think of the
fret and fever he must have been in—just before. Imagine it.’
‘But it might, you know,’ suggested the other with a smile—‘might have
been sheer indifference.’
‘“Nicholas Sabathier, Stranger to this parish”—no, no,’ said Lawford,
his heart beating as if it would choke him, ‘I don’t fancy it was
indifference.’
It was almost too dark now to distinguish the stranger’s features but
there seemed a faint suggestion of irony in his voice. ‘And how do you
suppose your angry naughty child would set about it? It’s narrow
quarters; how would he begin?’
Lawford sat quite still. ‘You say—I hope I am not detaining you—you say
you have come here, sat here often, on this very seat; have you ever
had—have you ever fallen asleep here?’
‘Why do you ask?’ inquired the other curiously.
‘I was only wondering,’ said Lawford. He was cold and shivering. He
felt instinctively it was madness to sit on here in the thin gliding
mist that had gathered in swathes above the grass, milk-pale in the
rising moon. The stranger turned away from him.
‘“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause,”’
he said slowly, with a little satirical catch on the last word. ‘What
did _you_ dream?’
Lawford glanced helplessly about him. The moon cast lean grey beams of
light between the cypresses. But to his wide and wandering eyes it
seemed that a radiance other than hers haunted these mounds and leaning
stones. ‘Have you ever noticed it?’ he said, putting out his hand
towards his unknown companion; ‘this stone is cracked from head to
foot?... But there’—he rose stiff and chilled—‘I am afraid I have bored
you with my company. You came here for solitude, and I have been trying
to convince you that we are surrounded with witnesses. You will forgive
my intrusion?’ There was a kind of old-fashioned courtesy in his manner
that he himself was dimly aware of. He held out his hand.
‘I hope you will think nothing of the kind,’ said the other earnestly;
‘how could it be in any sense an intrusion? It’s the old story of
Bluebeard. And I confess I too should very much like a peep into his
cupboard. Who wouldn’t? But there, it’s merely a matter of time, I
suppose.’ He paused, and together they slowly ascended the path already
glimmering with a heavy dew. At the porch they paused once more. And
now it was the stranger that held out his hand.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you will give me the pleasure of some day
continuing our talk. As for our friend below, it so happens that I
_have_ managed to pick up a little more of his history than the sexton
seems to have heard of—if you would care some time or other to share
it. I live only at the foot of the hill, not half a mile distant.
Perhaps you could spare the time now?’
Lawford took out his watch, ‘You are really very kind,’ he said. ‘But,
perhaps—well, whatever that history may be, I think you would agree
that mine is even—but, there, I’ve talked too much about myself
already. Perhaps to-morrow?’
‘Why, to-morrow, then,’ said his companion. ‘It’s a flat wooden house,
on the left-hand side. Come at any time of the evening’; he paused
again and smiled—‘the third house after the Rectory, which is marked up
on the gate. My name is Herbert—Herbert Herbert to be precise.’
Lawford took out his pocket-book and a card. ‘Mine,’ he said, handing
it gravely to his companion. ‘is Lawford—at least...’ It was really the
first time that either had seen the other’s face at close quarters and
clear-lit; and on Lawford’s a moon almost at the full shone dazzlingly.
He saw an expression—dismay, incredulity, overwhelming
astonishment—start suddenly into the dark, rather indifferent eyes.
‘What is it?’ he cried, hastily stooping close.
‘Why,’ said the other, laughing and turning away, ‘I think the moon
must have bewitched me too.’