“As to that, Mr. Lawford,” came the still voice out of the darkness; “the very fact of your being able to say so seems to me all but proof positive that you’re not. Insanity is on another plane, isn’t it? in which one can’t compare one’s states. As for what you say being credible, take our precious noodle of a spook here! Ninety-nine hundredths of this amiable world of ours would have guffawed the poor creature into imperceptibility ages ago. To such poor credulous creatures as my sister and I he is no more and no less a fact, a personality, an amusing reality than—well, this teacup. Here we are, amazing mysteries both of us in any case; and all round us are scores of books, dealing just with life, pure, candid, and unexpurgated; and there’s not a single one among them but reads like a taradiddle. Yet grope between the lines of any autobiography, it’s pretty clear what one has got—a feeble, timid, creeping attempt to describe the indescribable. As for what you say your case is, the bizarre—that kind very seldom gets into print at all. In all our make-believe, all our pretence, how, honestly, could it? But there, this is immaterial. The real question is, may I, can I help? What I gather is this: You just trundled down into Widderstone all among the dead men, and—but one moment, I’ll light up.”
A light flickered up in the dark. Shading it in his hand from the night air straying through the open window, Herbert lit the two candles that stood upon the little chimneypiece behind Lawford’s head. Then sauntering over to the window again, almost as if with an affectation of nonchalance, he drew one of the shutters, and sat down. “Nothing much struck me,” he went on, leaning back on his hands, “I mean on Sunday evening, until you said goodbye. It was then that I caught in the moon a distinct glimpse of your face.”
“This,” said Lawford, with a sudden horrible sinking of the heart.
Herbert nodded. “The fact is, I have a print of it,” he said.
“A print of it?”
“A miserable little dingy engraving.”
“Of this?” Herbert nodded, with eyes fixed. “Where?”
“That’s the nuisance. I searched high and low for it the instant I got home. For the moment it has been mislaid; but it must be somewhere in the house and it will turn up all in good time. It’s the frontispiece of one of a queer old hotchpotch of pamphlets, sewn up together by some amateur enthusiast in a marbled paper cover—confessions, travels, trials and so on. All eighteenth century, and all in French.”
“And mine?” said Lawford, gazing stonily across the candlelight.
Herbert, from a head slightly stooping, gazed back in an almost birdlike fashion across the room at his visitor.
“Sabathier’s,” he said.
“Sabathier’s!”
“A really curious resemblance. Of course, I am speaking only from memory; and perhaps it’s not quite so vivid in this light; but still astonishingly clear.”
Lawford sat drawn up, staring at his companion’s face in an intense and helpless silence. His mouth opened but no words came.
“Of course,” began Herbert again, “I don’t say there’s anything in it—except the—the mere coincidence,” he paused and glanced out of the open casement beside him. “But there’s just one obvious question. Do you happen to know of any strain of French blood in your family?”
Lawford shut his eyes, even memory seemed to be forsaking him at last. “No,” he said, after a long pause, “there’s a little Dutch, I think, on my mother’s side, but no French.”
“No Sabathier, then?” said Herbert, smiling. “And then there’s another question—this change; is it really as complete as you suppose? Has it—please just warn me off if I am in the least intruding—has it been noticed?”
Lawford hesitated. “Oh, yes,” he said slowly, “it has been noticed—my wife, a few friends.”
“Do you mind this infernal clatter?” said Herbert, laying his fingers on the open casement.
“No, no. And you think?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t think anything. It’s all the craziest conjecture. Stranger things even than this have happened. There are dozens here—in print. What are we human beings after all? Clay in the hands of the potter. Our bodies are merely an inheritance, packed tight and corded up. We have practically no control over their main functions. We can’t even replace a little fingernail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one’s body might change. … It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions today, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, consider man’s abysmal impudence.” He smoked on in silence for a moment. “You say you fell asleep down there?”
Lawford nodded. Herbert tapped his cigarette on the sill. “Just following up our ludicrous conjecture, you know,” he remarked musingly, “it wasn’t such a bad opportunity for the poor chap.”
“But surely,” said Lawford, speaking as it were out of a dream of candlelight and reverberating sound and clearest darkness, towards this strange deliberate phantom with the unruffled clear-cut features—“surely then, in that case, he is here now? And yet, on my word of honour, though every friend I ever had in the world should deny it, I am the same. Memory stretches back clear and sound to my childhood. I can see myself with extraordinary lucidity, how I think, my motives and all that; and in spite of these voices that I seem to hear, and this peculiar kind
