In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring himself to stand before the glass and deliberately shave. He even smiled at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He dressed by the fireplace.
“I couldn’t rest,” he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one of her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; “and one tires of reading even Quain in bed.”
“Have you found anything?” she inquired politely.
“Oh yes,” said Lawford wearily; “I have discovered that infinitely worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there’s nothing quite so picturesque.”
“Tell me,” said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. “How does it feel? does it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?”
He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for inspiration. “Practically, not at all,” he said hollowly. “Of course, one’s nerves—that fellow Danton—when one’s overtired. You have”—his voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered—“you haven’t noticed anything? My mind?”
“Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that, Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me unsympathetic—but don’t you think we must sooner or later be thinking of what’s to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr. Bethany as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn’t. You will help me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!”
“What about Alice?”
“She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter of that, even if he was, at death’s door.”
“At death’s door,” murmured Lawford under his breath; “who was it was saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one’s thoughts go sometimes, seen that door? … its ruinous stone lintel carved into lichenous stone heads … stonily silent in the last thin sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony—in that cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary. … But beyond—O God, beyond!”
Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. “And was all that in Quain?” she inquired rather flutteringly.
Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.
She shook herself, with a slight shiver. “Very well, then,” she said and paused in the silence.
Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. “What has he been saying now?” he inquired like a fretful child.
Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare, wild, timid creature by the least stir. “Who?” she merely breathed.
Lawford paused on the hearthrug with his comb in his hand. “It’s just the last rags of that beastly influenza,” he said, and began vigorously combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.
But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the “change” quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously, had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him.
He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of a falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There was a faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the landing and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been Alice’s nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that showed beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the garden—the trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a flowerbed, late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and—yes, three wicker chairs, a footstool, a workbasket, a little table on the smooth grass in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there in the autumnal sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair, her head bent, evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an inch or two forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the grass—Alice’s big garden hat—and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears sagging. He had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would he bark at the strange,
