At any rate Quain was found, with all the ills of life, from A to I; and Lawford turned back to his bondage with the book under his arm.
VIII
The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming bells, had passed languidly away. Dr. Simon had come and gone, optimistic and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to lurk. Even Mrs. Lawford had appeared to share her husband’s reticence. But Dr. Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.
The voices and footsteps, even the frou-frou of worshippers going to church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church, had floated up to the patient’s open window. Sunlight had drawn across his room in one pale beam, and vanished. A few callers had called. Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of sympathy. Even Dr. Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made inquiries on his way home from chapel.
Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft slippers. The very monotony had eased his mind. Now and again he had lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling. He had dozed and had awakened, cold and torpid with dream. He had hardly been aware of the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards clarifying his point of view. A consciousness had begun to stir in him that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his distracted nerves. He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him. It would, of course, wear him down in time. There could be only one end to such a struggle—the end.
All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls. This heedful silken coming and going, these Sunday voices, this reiterant yelp of a single peevish bell—would they never cease? And above all, betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for night. He sat down with elbows on knees and head on his hands, thinking of night, its secrecy, its immeasurable solitude.
His eyelids twitched; the fire before him had for an instant gone black out. He seemed to see slow-gesturing branches, grass stooping beneath a grey and windswept sky. He started up; and the remembrance of the morning returned to him—the glassy light, the changing rays, the beaming gilt upon the useless books. Now, at last, at the windows; afternoon had begun to wane. And when Sheila brought up his tea, as if Chance had heard his cry, she entered in hat and stole. She put down the tray, and paused at the glass, looking across it out of the window.
“Alice says you are to eat every one of those delicious sandwiches, and especially the tiny omelette. You have scarcely touched anything today, Arthur. I am a poor one to preach, I am afraid; but you know what that will mean—a worse breakdown still. You really must try to think of—of us all.”
“Are you going to church?” he asked in a low voice.
“Not, of course, if you would prefer not. But Dr. Simon advised me most particularly to go out at least once a day. We must remember, this is not the beginning of your illness. Long-continued anxiety, I suppose, does tell on one in time. Anyhow, he said that I looked worried and rundown. I am worried. Let us both try for each other’s sakes, or even if only for Alice’s, to—to do all we can. I must not harass you; but is there any—do you see the slightest change of any kind?”
“You always look pretty, Sheila; tonight you look prettier: that is the only change, I think.”
Mrs. Lawford’s attitude intensified in its stillness. “Now, speaking quite frankly, what is it in you suggests these remarks at such a time? That’s what baffles me. It seems so childish, so needlessly blind.”
“I am very sorry, Sheila, to be so childish. But I’m not, say what you like, blind. You are pretty: I’d repeat it if I was burning at the stake.”
Sheila lowered her eyes softly on to the rich-toned picture in the glass. “Supposing,” she said, watching her lips move, “supposing—of course, I know you are getting better and all that—but supposing you don’t change back as Mr. Bethany thinks, what will you do? Honestly, Arthur, when I think over it calmly, the whole tragedy comes back on me with such a force it sweeps me off my feet; I am for the moment scarcely my own mistress. What would you do?”
“I think, Sheila,” replied a low, infinitely weary voice, “I think I should marry again.” It was the same wavering, faintly ironical voice that had slightly discomposed Dr. Simon that same morning.
“ ‘Marry again’!” exclaimed incredulously the full lips in the looking-glass. “Who?”
“You, dear!”
Sheila turned softly round, conscious in a
