“So long as it is your best, Sheila.”
Sheila pondered. “You think, you mean, they’ll all say I ought to have stayed. Candidly, I can’t see it in that light. Surely every experience of life proves that in intimate domestic matters, and especially in those between husband and wife, only the parties concerned have any means of judging what is best for them? It has been our experience at any rate: though I must in fairness confess that, outwardly at least, I haven’t had much of that kind of thing to complain of.” Sheila paused again for a reply.
“What kind of thing?”
“Domestic experience, dear.”
The house was quiet. There was not a sound stirring in the still sunny road of orchards and discreet and drowsy villas. A long silence followed, immensely active and alert on the one side, almost morbidly lethargic so far as the stooping figure in front of the looking-glass was concerned. At last the last haunting question came in a kind of croak, as if only by a supreme effort could it be compelled to produce itself for consideration.
“And Alice, Sheila?”
“Alice, dear, of course goes with me.”
“You realise,” he stirred uneasily, “you realise it may be final.”
“My dear Arthur,” cried Sheila, “it is surely, apart from mere delicacy, a parental obligation to screen the poor child from the shock. Could she be at such a time in any better keeping than her mother’s? At present she only vaguely guesses. To know definitely that her father, infinitely worse than death, had—had—Oh, is it possible to realise anything in this awful cloud? It would kill her outright.”
Lawford made no stir. The quietest of raps came at the door. “The money from the Bank, ma’am,” said a faint voice.
Sheila carefully opened the door a few inches. She laid the blue envelope on the dressing-table at her husband’s elbow. “You had better perhaps count it,” she said in a low voice—“forty in notes, the rest in gold,” and narrowed her eyes beneath her veil upon her husband’s very peculiar method of forgetting his responsibilities.
“French?” she said with a nod. “How very quaint.”
Lawford’s eyes fell and rested gravely on the dingy page of Herbert’s mean-looking bundle of print. A queer feeling of cold crept over him. “Yes,” he said vaguely, “French,” and hopelessly failed to fill in the silence that seemed like some rather sleek nocturnal creature quietly waiting to be fed.
Sheila swept softly towards the door. “Well, Arthur, I think that is all. The servants will have gone by this evening. I have ordered a carriage for half-past twelve. Perhaps you would first write down anything that occurs to you to be necessary? Perhaps, too, it would be better if Dr. Simon were told that we shall not need him any more, that you are thinking of a complete change of scene, a voyage. He is obviously useless. Besides, Mr. Bethany, I think, is going to discuss a specialist with you. I have written him a little note, just briefly explaining. Shall I write to Dr. Simon too?”
“You remember everything,” said Lawford, and it seemed to him it was a remark he had heard ages and ages ago. “It’s only this money, Sheila; will you please take that away?”
“Take it away?”
“I think, Sheila, if I do take a voyage I should almost prefer to work my passage. As for a mere ‘change of scene,’ that’s quite uncostly.”
“It is only your face, Arthur,” said Sheila solemnly, “that suggest these wicked stabs. Some day you will perhaps repent of every one.”
“It is possible, Sheila; we none of us stand still, you know. One rips open a lid sometimes and the wax face rots before one’s eyes. Take back your blue envelope; and thank you for thinking of me. It’s always the woman of the house that has the head.”
“I wish,” said Sheila almost pathetically, and yet with a faint quaver of resignation, “I wish it could be said that the man of the house sometimes has the heart. Think it over, Arthur!”
Sheila, with her husband’s luncheon tray, brought also her farewells. Lawford surveyed, not without a faint, shy stirring of incredulity, the superbly restrained presence. He stood before her dry-lipped, inarticulate, a schoolboy caught red-handed in the shabbiest of offences.
“It is your wish then that I go, Arthur?” she said pleadingly.
He handed her her money without a word.
“Very well, Arthur; if you won’t take it,” she said. “I should scarcely have thought this the occasion for mere pride.”
“The tenth,” she continued, as she squeezed the envelope into her purse, with only the least hardening of voice, “although I daresay you have not troubled to remember it—the tenth will be the eighteenth anniversary of our wedding-day. It makes parting, however advisable, and though only for the few days we should think nothing of in happier circumstances, a little harder to bear. But there, all will come right. You will see things in a different light, perhaps. Words may wound, but time will heal.” But even as she now looked closely into his colourless sunken face some distant memory seemed to well up irresistibly—the memory of eyes just as ingenuous, and as unassuming that even in claiming her love had expressed only their stolid unworthiness.
“Did you know it? have you seen it?” she said, stooping forward a little. “I believe in spite of all. …” He gazed on solemnly, almost owlishly, out of his fading mask.
“Wait till Mr. Bethany tells you; you will believe it perhaps from him.” He saw the grey-gloved hand a little reluctantly lifted towards him.
“Goodbye, Sheila,” he said, and turned mechanically back to the window.
She hesitated, listening to a small faraway voice that kept urging her with an almost frog-like pertinacity to do,
