If, in that flood of unintelligible thoughts, anything clearly recurred at all, it was the memory of Sheila. He saw her face, lit, transfigured, distorted, stricken, appealing, horrified. His lids narrowed; a vague terror and horror mastered him. He hid his eyes in his hands and cried without sound, without tears, without hope, like a desolate child. He ceased crying; and sat without stirring. And it seemed after an age of vacancy and meaninglessness he heard a door shut downstairs, a distant voice, and then the rustle of someone slowly ascending the stairs. Someone turned the handle; in vain; tapped. “Is that you, Arthur?”
For an instant Lawford paused, then like a child listening for an echo, answered, “Yes, Sheila.” And a sigh broke from him; his voice, except for a little huskiness, was singularly unchanged.
“May I come in?” Lawford stood softly up and glanced once more into the glass. His lips set tight, and a slight frown settled between the long, narrow, intensely dark eyes.
“Just one moment, Sheila,” he answered slowly, “just one moment.”
“How long will you be?”
He stood erect and raised his voice, gazing the while impassively into the glass.
“It’s no use,” he began, as if repeating a lesson, “it’s no use your asking me, Sheila. Please give me a moment, a … I am not quite myself, dear,” he added quite gravely.
The faintest hint of vexation was in the answer.
“What is the matter? Can’t I help? It’s so very absurd—”
“What is absurd?” he asked dully.
“Why, standing like this outside my own bedroom door. Are you ill? I will send for Dr. Simon.”
“Please, Sheila, do nothing of the kind. I am not ill. I merely want a little time to think in.” There was again a brief pause, and then a slight rattling at the handle.
“Arthur, I insist on knowing at once what’s wrong; this does not sound a bit like yourself. It is not even quite like your own voice.”
“It is myself,” he replied stubbornly, staring fixedly into the glass. “You must give me a few moments, Sheila. Something has happened. My face. Come back in an hour.”
“Don’t be absurd; it’s simply wicked to talk like that. How do I know what you are doing? As if I can leave you for an hour in uncertainty! Your face! If you don’t open at once I shall believe there’s something seriously wrong: I shall send Ada for assistance.”
“If you do that, Sheila, it will be disastrous. I cannot answer for the con—. Go quietly downstairs. Say I am unwell; don’t wait dinner for me; come back in an hour; oh, half an hour!”
The answer broke out angrily. “You must be mad, beside yourself, to ask such a thing. I shall wait in the next room until you call.”
“Wait where you please,” Lawford replied, “but tell them downstairs.”
“Then if I tell them to wait until half-past eight, you will come down? You say you are not ill: the dinner will be ruined. It’s absurd.”
Lawford made no answer. He listened a while, then he deliberately sat down once more to try to think. Like a squirrel in a cage his mind seemed to be aimlessly, unceasingly astir. “What is it really? What is it really?—really?” He sat there and it seemed to him his body was transparent as glass. It seemed he had no body at all—only the memory of an hallucinatory reflection in the glass, and this inward voice crying, arguing, questioning, threatening out of the silence—“What is it really—really—really?” And at last, cold, wearied out, he rose once more and leaned between the two long candle-flames, and stared on—on—on, into the glass.
He gave that long, dark face that had been foisted on him tricks to do—lift an eyebrow, frown. There was scarcely any perceptible pause between the wish and its performance. He found to his discomfiture that the face answered instantaneously to the slightest emotion, even to his fainter secondary thoughts; as if these unfamiliar features were not entirely within control. He could not, in fact, without the glass before him, tell precisely what that face was expressing. He was still, it seemed, keenly sane. That he would discover for certain when Sheila returned. Terror, rage, horror had fallen back. If only he felt ill, or was in pain: he would have rejoiced at it. He was simply caught in some unheard-of snare—caught, how? when? where? by whom?
II
But the coolness and deliberation of his scrutiny, had to a certain extent calmed Lawford’s mind and given him confidence. Hitherto he had met the little difficulties of life only to vanquish them with ease and applause. Now he was standing face to face with the unknown. He burst out laughing, into a long, low, helpless laughter. Then he arose and began to walk softly, swiftly, to and fro across the room—from wall to wall seven paces, and at the fourth, that awful, unseen, brightly-lit profile passed as swiftly over the tranquil surface of the looking-glass. The power of concentration was gone again. He simply paced on mechanically, listening to a Babel of questions, a conflicting medley of answers. But above all the confusion and turmoil of his brain, as a boatswain’s whistle rises above a storm, so sounded that same infinitesimal voice, incessantly repeating another question now, “What are you going to do? What are you going to do?”
And in the midst of this confusion, out of the infinite, as it were, came another sharp tap
