“We thought,” he began at last, “we thought just to beckon Mrs. Lawford from the window. He—he is asleep.”
Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed and left her pale. “I will go down and tell mother you want to see her. It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first … I suppose, thinking of my father—” The words faltered, and the eyes were lifted to his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford turned away heartsick and trembling.
“Certainly, certainly, by no means,” he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. “Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr. Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads, we know, are so much better than one when there’s the least—the least difficulty. The great thing is quiet, rest, isolation, no possibility of a shock, else—” His voice fell away, his eloquence failed.
For Alice stood gazing stirlessly on and on into this infinitely strange, infinitely familiar shadowy, phantasmal face. “Oh yes,” she replied, “I quite understand, of course; but if I might just peep even, it would—I should be so much, much happier. Do let me just see him, Dr. Ferguson, if only his head on the pillow! I wouldn’t even breathe. Couldn’t it possibly help—even a faith-cure?” She leant forward impulsively, her voice trembling, and her eyes still shining beneath their faint, melancholy smile.
“I fear, my dear … it cannot be. He longs to see you. But with his mind, you know, in this state, it might—?”
“But mother never told me,” broke in the girl desperately, “there was anything wrong with his mind. Oh, but that was quite unfair. You don’t mean, you don’t mean—that—?”
Lawford scanned swiftly the little square beloved and memoried room that fate had suddenly converted for him into a cage of unspeakable pain and longing. “Oh no; believe me, no! Not his brain, not that, not even wandering; really: but always thinking, always longing on and on for you, dear, only. Quite, quite master of himself, but—”
“You talk,” she broke in again angrily, “only in pretence! You are treating me like a child; and so does mother, and so it has been ever since I came home. Why, if mother can, and you can, why may not I? Why, if he can walk and talk in the night. …”
“But who—who ‘can walk and talk in the night?’ ” inquired a low stealthy voice out of the quietness behind her.
Alice turned swiftly. Her mother was standing at a little distance, with all the calm and moveless concentration of a waxwork figure, looking up at her from the staircase.
“I was—I was talking to Dr. Ferguson, mother.”
“But as I came up the stairs I understood you to be inquiring something of Dr. Ferguson, ‘if,’ you were saying, ‘he can walk and talk in the night’: you surely were not referring to your father, child? That could not possibly be, in his state. Dr. Ferguson, I know, will bear me out in that at least. And besides, I really must insist on following out medical directions to the letter. Dr. Ferguson I know, will fully concur. Do, pray, Dr. Ferguson,” continued Sheila, raising her voice even now scarcely above a rapid murmur—“do pray assure my daughter that she must have patience; that however much even he himself may desire it, it is impossible that she should see her father yet. And now, my dear child, come down, I want to have a moment’s talk with Dr. Ferguson. I feared from his beckoning at the window that something was amiss.”
Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility, at the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old playroom. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell suddenly on the pin in his scarf—the claw and the pearl she had known all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild demented thing’s, over face, hair, hands, clothes, attitude, expression, and her heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague still figure whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell fainting in the doorway. Lawford stood motionless, vacantly watching Sheila, who knelt, chafing the cold hands. “She has fainted?” he said; “oh, Sheila, tell me—only fainted?”
Sheila made no answer; did not even raise her eyes.
“Some day, Sheila—” he began in a dull voice, and broke off, and without another word, without even another glance at the still face and blue, twitching lids, he passed her rapidly by, and in another instant Sheila heard the house-door shut. She got up quickly, and after a glance into the vacant bedroom turned the key; then she hastened upstairs for sal volatile and eau de cologne. …
It was yet clear daylight when Lawford appeared beneath the portico of his house. With a glance of circumspection that almost seemed to suggest a fear of pursuit, he descended the steps, only to be made aware in so doing that Ada was with a kind of furtive eagerness pointing out the mysterious Dr. Ferguson to a steadily gazing cook. One or two well-known and many a well-remembered face he encountered in the thin stream of City men treading blackly along the pavement. It was a still, high evening, and something very like a forlorn compassion rose in his mind at sight of their grave, rather pretentious, rather dull, respectable faces.
He found himself
