“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, “its ‘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 sleepwalking while these old tombstones dream. Glowworms 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
