The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau—they were familiar but not very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. “I wonder what they’ll do?” had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few hours as had “What am I to do?” in the first bout of his “visitation.”
But the “they” was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn, and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr. Sutherland, and the verger, Mr. Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one’s place in the world’s economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his place was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness at least a respite.
Solitude!—he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again, past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow sweetness of Alice’s, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long and dreamless sleep.
By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten he got up from Sheila’s fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to answer Mrs. Gull’s summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous “Good morning,” and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a blueprinted circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across from line to line of the obscure French print.
Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself, breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as Mr. Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and foreboding ennui stole over Lawford’s solitude once more. He shut his books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table, lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.
At a mean little barber’s with a pole above his lettered door he went in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the crumb-littered counter of a little baker’s shop to have some tea. It pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty, consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker’s wife. Whatever his face might now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never have hobnobbed so affably with his social “inferiors.”
For no reason in the world, unless to spend a moment or two longer in the friendly baker’s shop, he bought sixpenny-worth of cakes. He watched them as they were deposited one by one in the bag, and even asked for one sort to be exchanged for another, flushing a little at the pretty compliment he had ventured on.
He climbed out of the shop, and paused on the wooden doorstep. “Do you happen to know Mr. Herbert Herbert’s?” he said.
The baker’s wife glanced up at him with clear, reflective eyes. “Mr. Herbert’s?—that must be some little way off, sir. I don’t know any such name, and I know most, just round about like.”
“Well, yes, it is,” said Lawford, rather foolishly; “I hardly know why I asked. It’s past the churchyard at Widderstone.”
“Oh yes, sir,” she encouraged him.
“A big, wooden-looking house.”
“Really, sir. Wooden?”
Lawford looked into her face, but could find nothing more to say, so he smiled again rather absently, and ascended into the street.
He sat down outside the churchyard gate on the very bank where he had in the sourness of the nettles first opened Sabathier’s Memoirs. The world lay still beneath the pale sky. Presently the little fat rector walked up the hill, his wrists still showing beneath his sleeves. Lawford meditatively watched him pass by. A small boy with a switch, a tiny nose, and a swinging gallipot, his cheeks lit with the sunset, followed soon after. Lawford beckoned him with his finger
