The door opened. Lawford rose, and into the further rays of the
candlelight entered a rather slim figure in a light summer gown.
‘Just home?’ said Herbert.
‘We’ve been for a walk—’
‘My sister always forgets everything,’ said Herbert, turning to
Lawford; ‘even tea-time. This is Mr Lawford, Grisel. We’ve been arguing
no end. And we want you to give a decision. It’s just this: Supposing
if by some impossible trick you had come in now, not the charming
familiar sister you are, but shorter, fatter, fair and round-faced,
quite different, physically, you know—what would you do?’
‘What nonsense you talk, Herbert!’
‘Yes, but supposing: a complete transmogrification—by some unimaginable
ingression or enchantment, by nibbling a bunch of roses, or whatever
you like to call it?’
‘_Only_ physically?’
‘Well, yes, actually; but potentially, why—that’s another matter.’
The dark eyes passed slowly from her brother’s face and rested gravely
on their visitor’s.
‘Is he making fun of me?’
Lawford almost imperceptibly shook his head.
‘But what a question! And I’ve had no tea.’ She drew her gloves slowly
through her hand. ‘The thing, of course, isn’t possible, I know. But
shouldn’t I go mad, don’t you think?’
Lawford gazed quietly back into the clear, grave, deliberate eyes.
‘Suppose, suppose, just for the sake of argument—_not_,’ he suggested.
She turned her head and reflected, glancing from one to the other of
the pure, steady candle-flames.
‘And what was _your_ answer?’ she said, looking over her shoulder at
her brother.
‘My dear child, you know what _my_ answers are like!’
‘And yours?’
Lawford took a deep breath, gazing mutely, forlornly, into the lovely
untroubled peace of her eyes, and without the least warning tears swept
up into his own. With an immense effort he turned, and choking back
every sound, beating back every thought, groped his way towards the
square black darkness of the open door.
‘I must think, I must think,’ he managed to whisper, lifting his hand
and steadying himself. He caught over his shoulder the glimpse of a
curiously distorted vision, a lifted candle, and a still face gazing
after him with infinitely grieved eyes, then found himself groping and
stumbling down the steep, uneven staircase into the darkness of the
queer old wooden and hushed and lonely house. The night air cold on his
face calmed his mind. He turned and held out his hand.
‘You’ll come again?’ Herbert was saying, with a hint of anxiety, even
of apology in his voice.
Lawford nodded, with eyes fixed blankly on the candle, and turning once
more, made his way slowly down the narrow green-bordered path upon
which the stars rained a scattered light so feeble it seemed but as a
haze that blurred the darkness. He pushed open the little white wicket
and turned his face towards the soundless, leaf-crowned hill. He had
advanced hardly a score of steps in the thick dust when almost as if
its very silence had struck upon his ear he remembered the black broken
grave with its sightless heads that lay beyond the leaves. And fear,
vast and menacing, fear such as only children know, broke like a sea of
darkness on his heart. He stopped dead—cold, helpless, trembling. And,
in the silence he heard a faint cry behind him and light footsteps
pursuing him. He turned again. In the thick close gloom beneath the
enormous elm-boughs the grey eyes shone clearly visible in the face
upturned to him. ‘My brother,’ she began breathlessly—‘the little
French book. It was I who—who mislaid it.’
The set, stricken face listened unmoved.
‘You are ill. Come back! I am afraid you are very ill.’
‘It’s not that, not that,’ Lawford muttered; ‘don’t leave me; I am
alone. Don’t question me,’ he said strangely, looking down into her
face, clutching her hand; ‘only understand that I can’t, I can’t go
on.’ He swept a lean arm towards the unseen churchyard. ‘I am afraid.’
The cold hand clasped his closer. ‘Hush, don’t speak! Come back; come
back. I am with you, a friend, you see; come back.’
Lawford clutched her hand as a blind man in sudden peril might clutch
the hand of a child. He saw nothing clearly; spoke almost without
understanding his words.
‘Oh, but it’s _must_,’ he said; ‘I _must_ go on. You see—why,
everything depends on struggling through: the future! But if you only
knew—There!’ Again his arm swept out, and the lean terrified face
turned shuddering from the dark.
‘I do know; believe me, believe me! I can guess. See, I am coming with
you; we will go together. As if, as if I did not know what it is to be
afraid. Oh, believe me; no one is near; we go on; and see! it
gradually, gradually lightens. How thankful I am I came.’
She had turned and they were steadily ascending as if pushing their
way, battling on through some obstacle of the mind rather than of the
senses beneath the star-powdered callous vault of night. And it seemed
to Lawford as if, as they pressed on together, some obscure detestable
presence as slowly, as doggedly had drawn worsted aside. He could see
again the peaceful outspread branches of the trees, the lych-gate
standing in clear-cut silhouette against the liquid dusk of the sky. A
strange calm stole over his mind. The very meaning and memory of his
fear faded out and vanished, as the passed-away clouds of a storm that
leave a purer, serener sky.
They stopped and stood together on the brow of the little hill, and
Lawford, still trembling from head to foot, looked back across the
hushed and lightless countryside. ‘It’s all gone now,’ he said wearily,
‘and now there’s nothing left. You see, I cannot even ask your
forgiveness—and a stranger!’
‘Please don’t say that—unless—unless—a “pilgrim” too. I think, surely,
you must own we did have the best of it that time. Yes—and I don’t care
_who_ may be listening—but we _did_ win through.’
‘What can I say? How shall I explain? How shall I make you understand?’
The clear grey eyes showed not the faintest perturbation. ‘But I do; I
do indeed, in part; I do understand, ever so faintly.’
‘And now I will come back with _you_.’
They paused in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky,
arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness of their
triumph.
She turned unquestioningly. And laughing softly almost as children do,
the stalking shadows of a twilight wood behind them—they trod in
silence back to the house. They said good-bye at the gate, and Lawford
started once more for home. He walked slowly, conscious of an almost
intolerable weariness, as if his strength had suddenly been wrested
away from him. And at some distance beyond the top of the hill he sat
down on the bank beside a nettled ditch, and with his book pressed down
upon the wayside grass struck a match, and holding it low in the
scented, windless air turned slowly the cockled leaf.
Few of them were alike except for the dinginess of the print and the
sinister smudge of the portraits. All were sewn roughly together into a
mould-stained, marbled cover. He lit a second match, and as he did so
glanced as if inquiringly over his shoulder. And a score or so of pages
before the end he came at last upon the name he was seeking, and turned
the page.
It was a likeness even more striking in its crudeness of ink and line
and paper than the most finished of portraits could have been. It
repelled, and yet it fascinated him. He had not for a moment doubted
Herbert’s calm conviction. And yet as he stooped in the grass, closely
scrutinising the blurred obscure features, he felt the faintest
surprise not so much at the significant resemblance but at his own
composure, his own steady, unflinching confrontation with this sinister
and intangible adversary. The match burned down to his fingers. It
hissed faintly in the grass.
He stuffed the book into his pocket, and stared into the pale dial of
his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. Midnight, then, would
just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer exhaustion. Then,
hesitating, he turned his head and looked back towards the hollow. But
a vague foreboding held him back. A sour and vacuous incredulity swept
over him. What was the use of all this struggling and vexation. What
gain in living on? Once dead _his_ sluggish spirit at least would find
its rest. Dust to dust it would indeed be for him. What else, in sober
earnest, had he been all his daily stolid life but half dead, scarce
conscious, without a living thought, or desire, in head or heart?
And while he was still gloomily debating within himself he had turned
towards home, and soon was walking in a kind of reverie, even his
extreme tiredness in part forgotten, and only a far-away dogged
recollection in his mind that in spite of shame, in spite of all his
miserable weakness, the words had been uttered once for all, and in all
sincerity, ‘We _did_ win through.’
Yet a desolate and odd air of strangeness seemed to drape his unlighted
house as he stood looking up in a kind of furtive communion with its
windows. It affected him with that discomforting air of extreme and
meaningless novelty that things very familiar sometimes take upon
themselves. In this leaden tiredness no impression could be
trustworthy. His lids shut of themselves as he softly mounted the
steps. It seemed a needlessly wide door that soundlessly admitted him.
But however hard he pressed the key his bedroom door remained
stubbornly shut until he found that it was already unlocked and he had
only to turn the handle. A night-light burned in a little basin on the
washstand. The room was hung, as it were, with the stillness of night.
And half lying on the bed in her dressing-gown, her head leaning on the
rail at the foot, was Alice, just as sleep had overtaken her.
Lawford returned to the door and listened. It seemed he heard a voice
talking downstairs, and yet not talking, for it ran on and on in an
incessant slightly argumentative monotony that had neither break nor
interruption. He closed the door, and stooping laid his hand softly on
Alice’s narrow, still childish hand that lay half-folded on her knee.
Her eyes opened instantly and gazed widely into his face. A slow vacant
smile of sleep came and went and her fingers tightened gently over his
as again her lids drooped down over the drowsy blue eyes.
‘At last, at last, dear,’ she said; ‘I have been waiting such a time.
But we mustn’t talk much. Mother is waiting up, reading.’
Faintly through the close-shut door came the sound of that distant
expressionless voice monotonously rising and falling.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, dear?’ Alice still sleepily whispered. ‘Would
I have asked a single question? How could I? Oh, if you had only
trusted me!’
‘But the change—the change, Alice! You must have seen that. You spoke
to me, you did think I was only a stranger; and even when you knew, it
was only fear on your face, dearest, and aversion; and you turned to
your mother first. Don’t think, Alice, that I am...God only knows—I’m
not complaining. But truth is best whatever it is. I do feel that. You
mustn’t be afraid of hurting me, my dear.’
Her very hands seemed to quicken in his as now, with sleep quite gone,
the fret of memory returned, and she must reassure both herself and
him. ‘But you see, dear, mother had told me that you—besides, I did
know you at once, really; quite inside, you know, deep down. I know I
was perplexed; I didn’t understand; but that was all. Why, even when
you came up in the dark, and we talked—if you only knew how miserable I
had been—though I knew even then there was something different, still I
was not a bit afraid. Was I? And shouldn’t I have been afraid, horribly
afraid, if _you_ had not been _you?_’ She repressed a little shudder,
and clasped his hand more closely. ‘Don’t let us say anything more
about it, she implored him; ‘we are just together again, you and I;
that is all that matters.’ But her words were like brave soldiers who
have fought their way through an ambuscade but have left all confidence
behind them.
Lawford listened; and that was enough just now—that she still, in spite
of doubt, believed in him, and thought and cared for him. He was too
tired to have refused the least kindness. He made no answer, but leant
his head on the cool, slender fingers in gratitude and peace. And, just
as he was, he almost instantly fell asleep. He woke in the darkness to
find himself alone. He groped his way heavily to the door and turned
the handle. But now it was really locked. Energy failed him. ‘I
suppose—Sheila...’ he muttered.