He bunched up a big white handkerchief and mopped it over his head. “That’s done,” he said, “and we won’t go back. What I want to know now is what are you going to do? Where are you sleeping? What are you going to think about? I’ll stay—yes, yes, that’s what it must be: I must stay. And I detest strange beds. I’ll stay, you shan’t be alone. Do you hear me, Lawford?—you shan’t be alone!”
Lawford gazed gravely. “There is just one little thing I want to ask you before you go. I’ve wormed out an extraordinary old French book; and—just as you say—to pass the time, I’ve been having a shot at translating it. But I’m frightfully rusty; it’s old French; would you mind having a look?”
Mr. Bethany blinked and listened. He tried for the twentieth time to judge his friend’s eyes, to gain as best he could some sustained and unobserved glance at this baffling face. “Where is your precious French book?” he said irritably.
“It’s upstairs.”
“Fire away, then!” Lawford rose and glanced about the room. “What, no light there either?” snapped Mr. Bethany. “Take this; I don’t mind the dark. There’ll be plenty of that for me soon.”
Lawford hesitated at the door, looking rather strangely back. “No,” he said, “there are matches upstairs.” He shut the door after him. The darkness seemed cold and still as water. He went slowly up, with eyes fixed wide on the floating luminous gloom, and out of memory seemed to gather, as faintly as in the darkness which they had exorcised for him, the strange pitiful eyes of the night before. And as he mounted a chill, terrible, physical peace seemed to steal over him.
Mr. Bethany was sitting as he had left him, looking steadily on the floor, when Lawford returned. He flattened out the book on the table with a sniff of impatience. And dragging the candle nearer, and stooping his nose close to the fusty print, he began to read.
“Was this in the house?” he inquired presently.
“No,” said Lawford; “it was lent to me by a friend—Herbert.”
“H’m! don’t know him. Anyhow, precious poor stuff this is. This Sabathier, whoever he is, seems to be a kind of claptrap eighteenth-century adventurer who thought the world would be better off, apparently, for a long account of all his sentimental amours. Rousseau, with a touch of Don Quixote in his composition, and an echo of that prince of bogies, Poe! What, in the name of wonder, induced you to fix on this for your holiday reading?”
“Sabathier’s alive, isn’t he?”
“I never said he wasn’t. He’s a good deal too much alive for my old wits, with his Mam’selle This and Madame the Other; interesting enough, perhaps, for the professional literary nose with a taste for patchouli.”
“Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?” Mr. Bethany peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. “I should say decidedly that the fellow was a very rare character, so long as by rare you don’t mean good. It’s one of the dullest stupidities of the present day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he’s different from the rest of us. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he’s more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels. From what I can gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old troubled hermit like yourself at the present moment.”
“There’s a portrait of him a few pages back.”
Mr. Bethany, with some little impatience, turned back to the engraving. “ ‘Nicholas de Sabathier,’ he muttered. “ ‘De,’ indeed!” He poked in at the foxy print with narrowed eyes. “I don’t deny it’s a striking, even perhaps, a rather taking face. I don’t deny it.” He gazed on with an even more acute concentration, and looked up sharply. “Look here, Lawford, what in the name of wonder—what trick are you playing on me now?”
“Trick?” said Lawford; and the world fell with the tiniest plash in the silence, like a vivid little float upon the surface of a shadowy pool.
The old face flushed. “What conceivable bearing, I say, has this dead and gone old roué on us now?”
“You don’t think, then, you see any resemblance—any resemblance at all?”
“Resemblance?” repeated Mr. Bethany in a flat voice, and without raising his face again to meet Lawford’s direct scrutiny. “Resemblance to whom?”
“To me? To me, as I am?”
“But even, my dear fellow (forgive my dull old brains!), even if there was just the faintest superficial suggestion of—of that; what then?”
“Why,” said Lawford, “he’s buried in Widderstone.”
“Buried in Widderstone?” The keen childlike blue eyes looked almost stealthily up across the book; the old man sat without speaking, so still that it might even be supposed he himself was listening for a quiet distant footfall.
“He is buried in the grave beside which I fell asleep,” said Lawford; “all green and still and broken,” he added faintly. “You remember,” he went on in a repressed voice—“you remember you asked me if there was anybody else in sight, any eavesdropper? You don’t think—him?”
Mr. Bethany pushed the book a few inches away from him. “Who, did you say—who was it you said put the thing into your head? A queer friend surely?” he paused helplessly. “And how, pray, do you know,” he began again more firmly, “even if there is a Sabathier buried at Widderstone, how do you know it is this Sabathier? It’s not, I think,” he added boldly, “a very uncommon name; with two b’s at any rate. Whereabouts is the grave?”
“Quite down at the bottom, under the trees. And the little seat
