Lawford listened awhile before opening his door. He heard voices in the
dining-room. A light shone faintly between the blinds of his bedroom.
He very gently let himself in, and unheard, unseen, mounted the stairs.
He sat down in front of the fire, tired out and bitterly cold in spite
of his long walk home. But his mind was wearier even than his body. He
tried in vain to catch up the thread of his thoughts. He only knew for
certain that so far as his first hope and motives had gone his errand
had proved entirely futile. ‘How could I possibly fall asleep with that
fellow talking there?’ he had said to himself angrily; yet knew in his
heart that their talk had driven every other idea out of his mind. He
had not yet even glanced into the glass. His every thought was vainly
wandering round and round the one curious hint that had drifted in, but
which he had not yet been able to put into words.
Supposing, though, that he had really fallen into a deep sleep, with
none to watch or spy—what then? However ridiculous that idea, it was
not more ridiculous, more incredible than the actual fact. If he had
remained there, he might, it was just possible that he would by now,
have actually awakened just his own familiar every-day self again. And
the thought of that—though he hardly realised its full import—actually
did send him on tip-toe for a glance that more or less effectually set
the question at rest. And there looked out at him, it seemed, the same
dark sallow face that had so much appalled him only two nights
ago—expressionless, cadaverous, with shadowy hollows beneath the
glittering eyes. And even as he watched it, its lips, of their own
volition, drew together and questioned him—‘Whose?’
He was not to be given much leisure, however, for fantastic reveries
like this. As he leaned his head on his hands, gladly conscious that he
could not possibly bear this incessant strain for long, Sheila opened
the door. He started up.
‘I wish you would knock,’ he said angrily; ‘you talk of quiet; you tell
me to rest, and think; and here you come creeping and spying on me as
if I was a child in a nursery. I refuse to be watched and guarded and
peeped on like this.’ He knew that his hands were trembling, that he
could not keep his eyes fixed, that his voice was nearly inarticulate.
Sheila drew in her lips. ‘I have merely come to tell you, Arthur, that
Mr Bethany has brought Mr Danton in to supper. He agrees with me it
really would be advisable to take such a very old and prudent and
practical friend into our confidence. You do nothing I ask of you. I
simply cannot bear the burden of this incessant anxiety. Look, now,
what your night walk has done for you! You look positively at death’s
door.’
‘What—what an instinct you have for the right word,’ said Lawford
softly. ‘And Danton, of all people in the world! It was surely rather a
curious, a thoughtless choice. Has he had supper?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He won’t believe: too—bloated.’
‘I think,’ said Sheila indignantly, ‘it is hardly fair to speak of a
very old and a very true friend of mine in such—well, vulgar terms as
that. Besides, Arthur, as for believing—without in the least desiring
to hurt your feelings—I must candidly warn you, some people won’t.’
‘Come along,’ said Lawford, with a faint gust of laughter; ‘let’s see.’
They went quickly downstairs, Sheila with less dignity, perhaps, than
she had been surprised into since she had left a slimmer girlhood
behind. She swept into the gaze of the two gentlemen standing together
on the hearthrug; and so was caught, as it were, between a rain of
conflicting glances, for her husband had followed instantly, and stood
now behind her, stooping a little, and with something between contempt
and defiance confronting an old fat friend, whom that one brief
challenging instant had congealed into a condition of passive and
immovable hostility.
Mr Danton composed his chin in his collar, and deliberately turned
himself towards his companion. His small eyes wandered, and
instantaneously met and rested on those of Mrs Lawford.
‘Arthur thought he would prefer to come down and see you himself.’
‘You take such formidable risks, Lawford,’ said Mr Bethany in a dry,
difficult voice.
‘Am I really to believe,’ Danton began huskily. ‘I am sure, Bethany,
you will—My dear Mrs Lawford!’ said he, stirring vaguely, glancing
restlessly.
‘It was not my wish, Vicar, to come at all,’ said a voice from the
doorway. ‘To tell you the truth, I am too tired to care a jot either
way. And’—he lifted a long arm—‘I must positively refuse to produce the
least, the remotest proof that I am not, so far as I am personally
aware, even the Man in the Moon. Danton at heart was always an
incorrigible sceptic. Aren’t you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn
on it in secret?’
‘I really—’ began Danton in a rich still voice.
‘Oh, but you know you are,’ drawled on the slightly hesitating
long-drawn syllables; ‘it’s your parochial métier_. Firm, unctuous,
subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born
fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately
thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You’ll perish of surfeit some day,
of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting’s
there!’
Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke. He turned swiftly on Mrs
Lawford. ‘Why, why, could you not have seen?’ he cried.
‘It’s no good, Vicar. She’s all sheer Laodicean. Blow hot, blow cold.
North, south, east, west—to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry
the wind. There’s nothing to be got from poor Sheila but...’
‘Lawford!’ the little man’s voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip;
‘I forbid it. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Some self-command; my dear
good fellow, remember, remember it’s only the will, the will that keeps
us breathing.’
Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and
flickered with shadows before his eyes. ‘What’s he mean, then,’ he
muttered huskily, ‘coming here with his black, still carcase—peeping,
peeping—what’s he mean, I say?’ There was a moment’s silence. Then with
lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses
left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy
pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.
‘I suppose,’ began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle
himself from the humiliation of the moment, ‘I suppose he
was—wandering?’
‘Bless me, yes,’ said Mr Bethany cordially—‘fever. We all know what
that means.’
‘Yes,’ said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford’s white and intent
gaze.
‘Just think, think, Danton—the awful, incessant strain of such an
ordeal. Think for an instant what such a thing _means_!’
Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin. ‘Oh yes.
But—eh?—needlessly abusive? I never _said_ I disbelieved him.’
‘Do you?’ said Mrs Lawford’s voice.
He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his
legs. ‘Eh?’ he said.
Mr Bethany sat down at the table. ‘I rather feared some such temporary
breakdown as this, Danton. I think I foresaw it. And now, just while we
are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn’t it be
as well, don’t you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties?
I know—we all know, that that poor half-demented creature _is_ Arthur
Lawford. This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now. An
awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him—this change. I own frankly
at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it
has staggered you. But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face,
heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and
awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep. I had no more
doubt in my own mind and heart that he was he than I have in my mind
that I—am I. We do in some mysterious way, you’ll own at once, grow so
accustomed, so inured, if you like, to each other’s faces (masks though
they be) that we hardly realise we see them when we are speaking
together. And yet the slightest, the most infinitesimal change is
instantly apparent.’
‘Oh yes, Vicar; but you see—’
Mr Bethany raised a small lean hand: ‘One moment, please. I have heard
Lawford’s own account. Conscious or unconscious, he has been through
some terrific strain, some such awful conflict with the unseen powers
that we—thank God!—have only read about, and never perhaps, until death
is upon us, shall witness for ourselves. What more likely, more
inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its
masking shadow?—call it what you will. A smile can turn a face we dread
into a face we’d die for. Some experience, which would be nothing but a
hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps,
which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has
put him temporarily at the world’s mercy. They made him a nine days’
wonder, a byword. And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in.
We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a
buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this
deadly, craving, sheepish world—for the time being; oh yes, just for
the time being. Other and keener and more knowledgeable minds than mine
or yours will some day bring him back to us again. We don’t attempt to
explain; we can’t. We simply believe.’
But Danton merely continued to stare, as if into the quiet of an
aquarium.
‘My dear good Danton,’ persisted Mr Bethany with cherubic patience,
‘how old are you?’
‘I don’t see quite...’ smiled Danton with recovered ease, and rapidly
mobilising forces. ‘Excuse the confidence, Mrs Lawford, I’m
forty-three.’
‘Good,’ said Mr Bethany; ‘and I’m seventy-one, and this child here’—he
pointed an accusing finger at Sheila—is youth perpetual. So,’ he
briskly brightened, ‘say, between us we’re six score all told. Are
we—can _we_, deliberately, with this mere pinch of years at our command
out of the wheeling millions that have gone—can we say, “This is
impossible,” to any single phenomenon? _Can_ we?’
‘No, we can’t, of course,’ said Danton formidably. ‘Not finally. That’s
all very well, but’—he paused, and nodded, nodding his round head
upward as if towards the inaudible overhead, ‘I suppose he can’t
_hear?_’
Mr Bethany rose cheerfully. ‘All right, Danton; I am afraid you are
exactly what the poor fellow in his delirium solemnly asseverated. And,
jesting apart, it is in delirium that we tell our sheer, plain,
unadulterated truth: you’re a nicely covered sceptic. Personally, I
refuse to discuss the matter. Mere dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry,
if you like. I will only remark just this—that Mrs Lawford and I, in
our inmost hearts, _know_. You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom,
merely incredulously grope. Faith versus Reason—that prehistoric
Armageddon. Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will
come back to us. This—this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by
some inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put
up. He’ll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage. But now,
because I ask it, and this poor child here entreats it, you will say
nothing to a living soul about the matter, say, till Friday? What
step-by-step creatures we are, to be sure! I say Friday because it will
be exactly a week then. And what’s a week?—to Nature scarcely the
unfolding of a rose. But still, Friday be it. Then, if nothing has
occurred, we will, we shall _have_ to call a friendly gathering, we
shall be compelled to have a friendly consultation.’
‘I’m not, I hope, a brute, Bethany,’ said Danton apologetically; ‘but,
honestly, speaking for myself, simply as a man of the world, it’s a big
risk to be taking on—what shall we call it?—on mere intuition.
Personally, and even in a court of law—though Heaven forbid it ever
reaches that stage—personally, I could swear that the fellow that stood
abusing me there, in that revolting fashion, was not Lawford. It would
be easier even to believe in him, if there were not that—that glaze,
that shocking simulation of the man himself, the very man. But then, I
am a sceptic; I own it. And ‘pon my word, Mrs Lawford, there’s plenty
of room for sceptics in a world like this.’
‘Very well,’ said Mr Bethany crisply, ‘that’s settled, then. With your
permission, my dear,’ he added, turning untarnishably clear childlike
eyes on Sheila, ‘I will take all risks—even to the foot of the gibbet:
accessory, Danton, _after_ the fact.’ And so direct and cloudless was
his gaze that Sheila tried in vain to evade it and to catch a glimpse
of Danton’s small agate-like eyes, now completely under mastery, and
awaiting confidently the meeting with her own.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I am entirely in your hands, dear Mr Bethany.’