She had turned and they were steadily ascending as if pushing their way, battling on through some obstacle of the mind rather than of the senses beneath the star-powdered callous vault of night. And it seemed to Lawford as if, as they pressed on together, some obscure detestable presence as slowly, as doggedly had drawn worsted aside. He could see again the peaceful outspread branches of the trees, the lychgate standing in clear-cut silhouette against the liquid dusk of the sky. A strange calm stole over his mind. The very meaning and memory of his fear faded out and vanished, as the passed-away clouds of a storm that leave a purer, serener sky.
They stopped and stood together on the brow of the little hill, and Lawford, still trembling from head to foot, looked back across the hushed and lightless countryside. “It’s all gone now,” he said wearily, “and now there’s nothing left. You see, I cannot even ask your forgiveness—and a stranger!”
“Please don’t say that—unless—unless—a ‘pilgrim’ too. I think, surely, you must own we did have the best of it that time. Yes—and I don’t care who may be listening—but we did win through.”
“What can I say? How shall I explain? How shall I make you understand?”
The clear grey eyes showed not the faintest perturbation. “But I do; I do indeed, in part; I do understand, ever so faintly.”
“And now I will come back with you.”
They paused in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky, arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness of their triumph.
She turned unquestioningly. And laughing softly almost as children do, the stalking shadows of a twilight wood behind them—they trod in silence back to the house. They said goodbye at the gate, and Lawford started once more for home. He walked slowly, conscious of an almost intolerable weariness, as if his strength had suddenly been wrested away from him. And at some distance beyond the top of the hill he sat down on the bank beside a nettled ditch, and with his book pressed down upon the wayside grass struck a match, and holding it low in the scented, windless air turned slowly the cockled leaf.
Few of them were alike except for the dinginess of the print and the sinister smudge of the portraits. All were sewn roughly together into a mould-stained, marbled cover. He lit a second match, and as he did so glanced as if inquiringly over his shoulder. And a score or so of pages before the end he came at last upon the name he was seeking, and turned the page.
It was a likeness even more striking in its crudeness of ink and line and paper than the most finished of portraits could have been. It repelled, and yet it fascinated him. He had not for a moment doubted Herbert’s calm conviction. And yet as he stooped in the grass, closely scrutinising the blurred obscure features, he felt the faintest surprise not so much at the significant resemblance but at his own composure, his own steady, unflinching confrontation with this sinister and intangible adversary. The match burned down to his fingers. It hissed faintly in the grass.
He stuffed the book into his pocket, and stared into the pale dial of his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. Midnight, then, would just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer exhaustion. Then, hesitating, he turned his head and looked back towards the hollow. But a vague foreboding held him back. A sour and vacuous incredulity swept over him. What was the use of all this struggling and vexation. What gain in living on? Once dead his sluggish spirit at least would find its rest. Dust to dust it would indeed be for him. What else, in sober earnest, had he been all his daily stolid life but half dead, scarce conscious, without a living thought, or desire, in head or heart?
And while he was still gloomily debating within himself he had turned towards home, and soon was walking in a kind of reverie, even his extreme tiredness in part forgotten, and only a faraway dogged recollection in his mind that in spite of shame, in spite of all his miserable weakness, the words had been uttered once for all, and in all sincerity, “We did win through.”
Yet a desolate and odd air of strangeness seemed to drape his unlighted house as he stood looking up in a kind of furtive communion with its windows. It affected him with that discomforting air of extreme and meaningless novelty that things very familiar sometimes take upon themselves. In this leaden tiredness no impression could be trustworthy. His lids shut of themselves as he softly mounted the steps. It seemed a needlessly wide door that soundlessly admitted him. But however hard he pressed the key his bedroom door remained stubbornly shut until he found that it was already unlocked and he had only to turn the handle. A night-light burned in a little basin on the washstand. The room was hung, as it were, with the stillness of night. And half lying on the bed in her dressing-gown, her head leaning on the rail at the foot, was Alice, just as sleep had overtaken her.
Lawford returned to the door and listened. It seemed he heard a voice talking downstairs, and yet not talking, for it ran on and on in an incessant slightly argumentative monotony that had neither break nor interruption. He closed the door, and stooping laid his hand softly on Alice’s narrow, still childish hand that lay half-folded on her knee. Her eyes opened instantly and gazed widely into his face. A slow vacant smile of
