“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 métier. 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
