Chapter 10

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_ CHAPTER TEN

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 metier. 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.' _

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