Chapter 9

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_ CHAPTER NINE

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 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.' _

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