Colour suddenly faded out of the light streaming between the branches. And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom, began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so devilish empty—this raft of the world floating under evening’s shadow. How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen asleep, ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy deep had stolen oar and sail and compass, leaving him adrift amid the riding of the waves.
“Are they worth, do you think, quite a penny?” suddenly inquired a quiet voice in the silence. He looked up into the almost colourless face, into the grey eyes beneath their clear narrow brows.
“I was thinking,” he said, “what a curious thing life is, and wondering—”
“The first half is well worth the penny—its originality! I can’t afford twopence. So you must give me what you were wondering.”
Lawford gazed rather blankly across the twilight fields. “I was wondering,” he said with an oddly naive candour, “how long it took one to sink.”
“They say, you know,” Grisel replied solemnly, “drowned sailors float midway, suffering their sea change; purgatory. But what a splendid pennyworth. All pure philosophy!”
“ ‘Philosophy!’ ” said Lawford; “I am a perfect fool. Has your brother told you about me?”
She glanced at him quickly. “We had a talk.”
“Then you do know—?” He stopped dead, and turned to her. “You really realise it, looking at me now?”
“I realise,” she said gravely, “that you look even a little more pale and haggard than when I saw you first the other night. We both, my brother and I, you know, thought for certain you’d come yesterday. In fact, I went into the Widderstone in the evening to look for you, knowing your nocturnal habits. …” She glanced again at him with a kind of shy anxiety.
“Why—why is your brother so—why does he let me bore him so horribly?”
“Does he? He’s tremendously interested; but then, he’s pretty easily interested when he’s interested at all. If he can possibly twist anything into the slightest show of a mystery, he will. But, of course, you won’t, you can’t, take all he says seriously. The tiniest pinch of salt, you know. He’s an absolute fanatic at talking in the air. Besides, it doesn’t really matter much.”
“In the air?”
“I mean if once a theory gets into his head—the more farfetched, so long as it’s original, the better—it flowers out into a positive miracle of incredibilities. And of course you can rout out evidence for anything under the sun from his dingy old folios. Why did he lend you that particular book?”
“Didn’t he tell you that, then?”
“He said it was Sabathier.” She seemed to think intensely for the merest fraction of a moment, and turned. “Honestly, though, I think he immensely exaggerated the likeness. As for …”
He touched her arm, and they stopped again, face to face. “Tell me what difference exactly you see,” he said. “I am quite myself again now, honestly; please tell me just the very worst you think.”
“I think, to begin with,” she began, with exaggerated candour, “his is rather a detestable face.”
“And mine?” he said gravely.
“Why—very troubled; oh yes—but his was like some bird of prey. Yours—what mad stuff to talk like this!—not the least symptom, that I can see, of—why, the ‘prey,’ you know.”
They had come to the wicket in the dark thorny hedge. “Would it be very dreadful to walk on a little—just to finish?”
“Very,” she said, turning as gravely at his side.
“What I wanted to say was—” began Lawford, and forgetting altogether the thread by which he hoped to lead up to what he really wanted to say, broke off lamely; “I should have thought you would have absolutely despised a coward.”
“It would be rather absurd to despise what one so horribly well understands. Besides, we weren’t cowards—we weren’t cowards a bit. My childhood was one long, reiterated terror—nights and nights of it. But I never had the pluck to tell anyone. No one so much as dreamt of the company I had. Ah, and you didn’t see either that my heart was absolutely in my mouth, that I was shrivelled up with fear, even at sight of the fear on your face in the dark. There’s absolutely nothing so catching. So, you see, I do know a little what nerves are; and dream too sometimes, though I don’t choose charnelhouses if I can get a comfortable bed. A coward! May I really say that to ask my help was one of the bravest things in a man I ever heard of. Bullets—that kind of courage—no real woman cares twopence for bullets. An old aunt of mine stared a man right out of the house with the thing in her face. Anyhow, whether I may or not, I do say it. So now we are quits.”
“Will you—” began Lawford, and stopped. “What I wanted to say was,” he jerked on, “it is sheer horrible hypocrisy to be talking to you like this—though you will never have the faintest idea of what it has meant and done for me. I mean … And yet, and yet, I do feel when just for the least moment I forget what I am, and that isn’t very often, when I forget what I have become and what I must go back to—I feel that I haven’t any business to be talking with you at all. ‘Quits!’ And here I am, an outcast from decent society. Ah, you don’t know—”
She bent her head and laughed under her breath. “You do really stumble on such delicious
