Lawford slept far into the cloudy Monday morning, to wake steeped in
sleep, lethargic, and fretfully haunted by inconclusive remembrances of
the night before. When Sheila, with obvious and capacious composure,
brought him his breakfast tray, he watched her face for some time
without speaking.
‘Sheila,’ he began, as she was about to leave the room again.
She paused, smiling.
‘Did anything happen last night? Would you mind telling me, Sheila? Who
was it was here?’
Her lids the least bit narrowed. ‘Certainly, Arthur; Mr Danton was
here.’
‘Then it was not a dream?’
‘Oh no,’ said Sheila.
‘What did I say? What did _he_ say? It was hopeless, anyhow.’
‘I don’t quite understand what you mean by “hopeless,” Arthur. And must
I answer the other questions?’
Lawford drew his hand over his face, like a tired child. ‘He
didn’t—believe?’
‘No, dear,’ said Sheila softly.
‘And you, Sheila?’ came the subdued voice.
Sheila crossed slowly to the window. ‘Well, quite honestly, Arthur, I
was not very much surprised. Whatever we are agreed about on the whole,
you were scarcely yourself last night.’
Lawford shut his eyes, and re-opened them full on his wife’s calm
scrutiny, who had in that moment turned in the light of the one drawn
blind to face him again.
‘Who is? Always?’
‘No,’ said Sheila; ‘but—it was at least unfortunate. We can’t, I
suppose, rely on Dr Bethany alone.’
Lawford crouched over his food. ‘Will he blab?’
‘Blab! Mr Danton is a gentleman, Arthur.’
Lawford rolled his eyes as if in temporary vertigo. ‘Yes,’ he said. And
Sheila once more prepared to make a reposeful exit.
‘I don’t think I can see Simon this morning.’
‘Oh. Who, then?’
‘I mean I would prefer to be left alone.’
‘Believe me, I had no intention to intrude.’ And this time the door
really closed.
‘He is in a quiet, soothing sleep,’ said Sheila a few minutes later.
‘Nothing could be better,’ said Dr Simon; and Lawford, to his
inexpressible relief, heard the fevered throbbing of the doctor’s car
reverse, and turned over and shut his eyes, dulled and exhausted in the
still unfriendliness of the vacant room. His spirits had sunk, he
thought, to their lowest ebb. He scarcely heeded the fragments of
dreams—clear, green landscapes, amazing gleams of peace, the sudden
broken voices, the rustling and calling shadowiness of
subconsciousness—in this quiet sunlight of reality. The clouds had
broken, or had been withdrawn like a veil from the October skies. One
thought alone was his refuge; one face alone haunted him with its
peace; one remembrance soothed him—Alice. Through all his scattered and
purposeless arguments he strove to remember her voice, the
loving-kindness of her eyes, her untroubled confidence.
In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring
himself to stand before the glass and deliberately shave. He even
smiled at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He
dressed by the fireplace.
‘I couldn’t rest,’ he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one of
her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; ‘and one tires of reading even
Quain in bed.’
‘Have you found anything?’ she inquired politely.
‘Oh yes,’ said Lawford wearily; ‘I have discovered that infinitely
worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there’s nothing quite so
picturesque.’
‘Tell me,’ said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. ‘How does it feel?
does it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?’
He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for
inspiration. ‘Practically, not at all,’ he said hollowly. ‘Of course,
one’s nerves—that fellow Danton—when one’s overtired. You have’—his
voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered—‘_you_ haven’t
noticed anything? My mind?’
‘Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that,
Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me
unsympathetic—but don’t you think we must sooner or later be thinking
of what’s to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany
as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as
possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only
standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn’t. You _will_
help me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!’
‘What about Alice?’
‘She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why
she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter
of that, even if he was, at death’s door.’
‘At death’s door,’ murmured Lawford under his breath; ‘who was it was
saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one’s
thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel
carved into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin
sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony—in that
cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond—O
God, beyond!’
Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. ‘And was all that in Quain?’
she inquired rather flutteringly.
Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.
She shook herself, with a slight shiver. ‘Very well, then,’ she said
and paused in the silence.
Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin
last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the
reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes.
‘What has he been saying now?’ he inquired like a fretful child.
Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare,
wild, timid creature by the least stir. ‘Who?’ she merely breathed.
Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. ‘It’s just
the last rags of that beastly influenza,’ he said, and began vigorously
combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it
moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences
of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her
hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid
revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.
But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of
heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts
that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond
measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed
existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of
the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the
shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the
stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the
broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the ‘change’ quite so monstrous, so
meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed
to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had
been freely opened to him.
He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came
a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of
a falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There
was a faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the
landing and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been
Alice’s nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that
showed beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the
garden—the trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a
flower-bed, late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and—yes,
three wicker chairs, a footstool, a work-basket, a little table on the
smooth grass in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there
in the autumnal sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair,
her head bent, evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an
inch or two forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the grass—Alice’s
big garden hat—and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears
sagging. He had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would
he bark at the strange, distasteful scent of a—Dr Ferguson? The coast
was clear, then. He turned even softlier yet, to confront, rapt, still,
and hovering betwixt astonishment and dread, the blue calm eyes of his
daughter, looking in at the door. It seemed to Lawford as if they had
both been suddenly swept by some unseen power into a still, unearthly
silence.
‘We thought,’ he began at last, ‘we thought just to beckon Mrs Lawford
from the window. He—he is asleep.’
Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed
and left her pale. ‘I will go down and tell mother you want to see her.
It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first...I
suppose, thinking of my father—’ The words faltered, and the eyes were
lifted to his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford
turned away heartsick and trembling.
‘Certainly, certainly, by no means,’ he began, listening vaguely to the
glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. ‘Your father, my
dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to
recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads,
we know, are so much better than one when there’s the least—the least
difficulty. The great thing is quiet, rest, isolation, no possibility
of a shock, else—’ His voice fell away, his eloquence failed.
For Alice stood gazing stirlessly on and on into this infinitely
strange, infinitely familiar shadowy, phantasmal face. ‘Oh yes,’ she
replied, ‘I quite understand, of course; but if I might just peep even,
it would—I should be so much, much happier. Do let me just see him, Dr
Ferguson, if only his head on the pillow! I wouldn’t even breathe.
Couldn’t it possibly help—even a faith-cure?’ She leant forward
impulsively, her voice trembling, and her eyes still shining beneath
their faint, melancholy smile.
‘I fear, my dear...it cannot be. He longs to see you. But with his
mind, you know, in this state, it might—?’
‘But mother never told me,’ broke in the girl desperately, ‘there was
anything wrong with his _mind_. Oh, but that was quite unfair. You
don’t mean, you don’t mean—that—?’
Lawford scanned swiftly the little square beloved and memoried room
that fate had suddenly converted for him into a cage of unspeakable
pain and longing. ‘Oh no; believe me, no! Not his brain, not that, not
even wandering; really: but always thinking, always longing on and on
for you, dear, only. Quite, quite master of himself, but—’
‘You talk,’ she broke in again angrily, ‘only in pretence! You are
treating me like a child; and so does mother, and so it has been ever
since I came home. Why, if mother can, and you can, why may not I? Why,
if he can walk and talk in the night....’
‘But who—who “can walk and talk in the night?”’ inquired a low stealthy
voice out of the quietness behind her.
Alice turned swiftly. Her mother was standing at a little distance,
with all the calm and moveless concentration of a waxwork figure,
looking up at her from the staircase.
‘I was—I was talking to Dr Ferguson, mother.’
‘But as I came up the stairs I understood you to be inquiring something
of Dr Ferguson, “if,” you were saying, “he can walk and talk in the
night”: you surely were not referring to your father, child? That could
not possibly be, in his state. Dr Ferguson, I know, will bear me out in
that at least. And besides, I really must insist on following out
medical directions to the letter. Dr Ferguson I know, will fully
concur. Do, pray, Dr Ferguson,’ continued Sheila, raising her voice
even now scarcely above a rapid murmur—‘do pray assure my daughter that
she must have patience; that however much even he himself may desire
it, it is impossible that she should see her father yet. And now, my
dear child, come down, I want to have a moment’s talk with Dr Ferguson.
I feared from his beckoning at the window that something was amiss.’
Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility, at
the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old
play-room. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell
suddenly on the pin in his scarf—the claw and the pearl she had known
all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild demented
thing’s, over face, hair, hands, clothes, attitude, expression, and her
heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She
turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned
once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague still figure
whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell
fainting in the doorway. Lawford stood motionless, vacantly watching
Sheila, who knelt, chafing the cold hands. ‘She has fainted?’ he said;
‘oh, Sheila, tell me—only fainted?’
Sheila made no answer; did not even raise her eyes.
‘Some day, Sheila’ he began in a dull voice, and broke off, and without
another word, without even another glance at the still face and blue,
twitching lids, he passed her rapidly by, and in another instant Sheila
heard the house-door shut. She got up quickly, and after a glance into
the vacant bedroom turned the key; then she hastened upstairs for sal
volatile and eau de cologne....
It was yet clear daylight when Lawford appeared beneath the portico of
his house. With a glance of circumspection that almost seemed to
suggest a fear of pursuit, he descended the steps, only to be made
aware in so doing that Ada was with a kind of furtive eagerness
pointing out the mysterious Dr Ferguson to a steadily gazing cook. One
or two well-known and many a well-remembered face he encountered in the
thin stream of City men treading blackly along the pavement. It was a
still, high evening, and something very like a forlorn compassion rose
in his mind at sight of their grave, rather pretentious, rather dull,
respectable faces.
He found himself walking with an affectation of effrontery, and smiling
with a faint contempt on all alike, as if to keep himself from
slinking, and the wolf out of his eyes. He felt restless, and watchful,
and suspicious, as if he had suddenly come down in the world. His,
then, was a disguise as effectual as a shabby coat and a glazing eye.
His heart sickened. Was it even worth while living on a crust of social
respectability so thin and so exquisitely treacherous? He challenged no
one. One or two actual acquaintances raised and lowered a faintly
inquiring eyebrow in his direction. One even recalled in his confusion
a smile of recognition just a moment too late. There was, it seemed, a
peculiar aura in Lawford’s presence, a shadow of a something in his
demeanour that proved him alien.
None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the
imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should
come to the worst, why—there is pasture in the solitary by-ways for the
beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets, and
soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of
shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the
hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with
dying colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows
filled the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him
here. He looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops
were left behind, the last milestone passed, and in a little while he
was descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had
stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had
wandered down into the churchyard.
At the foot of the hill he passed by the green and white Rectory, and
there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding
from his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying up a rambling
rose-shoot on his trim cedared lawn. The next house barely showed its
old red chimney-tops, above its bowers; the next was empty, with
windows vacantly gazing, its paths peopled with great bearded weeds
that stood mutely watching and guarding the seldom-opened gate. Then
came more lofty grandmotherly elms, a dense hedge of every leaf that
pricks, and then Lawford found himself standing at the small canopied
gate of the queer old wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in
part described.
It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of verdure.
Roses here and there sprang from the grass, and a narrow box-edged path
led to a small door in a low green-mantled wing, with its one square
window above the porch. And while, with vacant mind, Lawford stood
waiting, as one stands forebodingly upon the eve of a new experience he
heard as if at a distance the sound of falling water. He still paused
on the country roadside, scrutinising this strange, still, wooden
presence; but at last with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed
the winding path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came
presently a quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led
into a little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old prints and
obscure portraits in dark frames.
‘Ah, yes, come in, Mr Lawford,’ he drawled; ‘I was beginning to be
afraid you were not coming.’
Lawford laid hat and walking-stick on an oak bench, and followed his
churchyard companion up a slightly inclined corridor and a staircase
into a high room, covered far up the yellowish walls with old books on
shelves and in cases, between which hung in little black frames, mezzo
tints, etchings, and antiquated maps. A large table stood a few paces
from the deep alcove of the window, which was surrounded by a low,
faded, green seat, and was screened from the sunshine by wooden
shutters. And here the tranquil surge of falling water shook
incessantly on the air, for the three lower casements stood open to the
fading sunset. On a smaller table were spread cups, old earthenware
dishes of fruit, and a big bowl of damask roses.
‘Please sit down; I shan’t be a moment; I am not sure that my sister is
in; but if so, I will tell her we are ready for tea.’ Left to himself
in this quiet, strange old room, Lawford forgot for a while everything
else, he was for the moment so taken up with his surroundings.
What seized on his fancy and strangely affected his mind was this
incessant changing roar of falling water. It must be the Widder, he
said to himself, flowing close to the walls. But not until he had had
the boldness to lean head and shoulders out of the nearest window did
he fully realize how close indeed the Widder was. It came sweeping dark
and deep and begreened and full with the early autumnal rains, actually
against the lower walls of the house itself, and in the middle suddenly
swerved in a black, smooth arch, and tumbled headlong into a great
pool, nodding with tall slender water-weeds, and charged in its bubbled
blackness here and there with the last crimson of the setting sun. To
the left of the house, where the waters floated free again, stood vast,
still trees above the clustering rushes; and in glimpses between their
spreading boughs lay the far-stretching countryside, now dimmed with
the first mists of approaching evening. So absorbed he became as he
stood leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye
and ear became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint
atmosphere of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old
house and these prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking
dream.
When at last he did draw back into the room it was perceptibly darker,
and a thin keen shaft of recollection struck across his mind—the
recollection of what he was, and of how he came to be there, his
reasons for coming and of that dark indefinable presence which like a
raven had begun to build its dwelling in his mind. He sat on, his eyes
restlessly wandering, his face leaning on his hands; and in a while the
door opened and Herbert returned, carrying an old crimson and green
teapot and a dish of hot cakes.
‘They’re all out,’ he said; ‘sister, Sallie, and boy; but these were in
the oven, so we won’t wait. I hope you haven’t been very much bored.’
Lawford dropped his hands from his face and smiled. ‘I have been
looking at the water,’ he said.
‘My sister’s favorite occupation; she sits for hours and hours, with
not even a book for an apology, staring down into the black old roaring
pot. It has a sort of hypnotic effect after a time. And you’d be
surprised how quickly one gets used to the noise. To me it’s even less
distracting than sheer silence. You don’t know, after all, what on
earth sheer silence means—even at Widderstone. But one can just realize
a water-nymph. They chatter; but, thank Heaven, it’s not articulate.’
He handed Lawford a cup with a certain niceness and self-consciousness,
lifting his eyebrows slightly as he turned.
Lawford found himself listening out of a peculiar stillness of mind to
the voice of this suave and rather inscrutable acquaintance. ‘The
curious thing is, do you know,’ he began rather nervously, ‘that though
I must have passed your gate at least twice in the last few months, I
have never noticed it before, never even caught the sound of the
water.’
‘No, that’s the best of it; nobody ever does. We are just buried alive.
We have lived here for years, and scarcely know a soul—not even our
own, perhaps. Why on earth should one? Acquaintances, after all, are
little else than a bad habit.’
‘But then, what about me?’ said Lawford.
‘But that’s just it,’ said Herbert. ‘I said _acquaintances_; that’s
just exactly what I’m going to prove—what very old friends we are.
You’ve no idea! It really is rather queer.’ He took up his cup and
sauntered over to the window.
Lawford eyed him vacantly for a moment, and, following rather his own
curious thoughts than seeking any light on this somewhat vague
explanation, again broke the silence. ‘It’s odd, I suppose, but this
house affects me much in the same way as Widderstone does. I’m not
particularly fanciful—at least, I used not to be. But sitting here I
seem, I hope it isn’t a very frantic remark, it seems as though, if
only my ears would let me, I should hear—well, voices. It’s just what
you said about the silence. I suppose it’s the age of the place; it
_is_ very old?’
‘Pretty old, I suppose; it’s worm-eaten and rat-eaten and tindery
enough in all conscience; and the damp doesn’t exactly foster it. It’s
a queer old shanty. There are two or three accounts of it in some old
local stuff I have. And of course there’s a ghost.’
‘A ghost?’ echoed Lawford, looking up.