“It’s nearly half-past eight, Arthur; I can’t wait any longer.”
Lawford cast a last fleeting look into the glass, turned, and confronted the closed door. “Very well, Sheila, you shall not wait any longer.” He crossed over to the door, and suddenly a swift crafty idea flashed into his mind.
He tapped on the panel. “Sheila,” he said softly, “I want you first, before you come in, to get me something out of my old writing-desk in the smoking-room. Here is the key.” He pushed a tiny key—from off the ring he carried—beneath the door. “In the third little drawer from the top, on the left side, is a letter; please don’t say anything now. It is the letter you wrote me, you will remember, after I had asked you to marry me. You scribbled in the corner under your signature the initials ‘Y.S.O.A.’—do you remember? They meant, You Silly Old Arthur!—do you remember? Will you please get that letter at once?”
“Arthur,” answered the voice from without, empty of all expression, “what does all this mean, this mystery, this hopeless nonsense about a silly letter? What has happened? Is this a miserable form of persecution? Are you mad?—I refuse to get the letter.”
Lawford stooped, black and angular, against the door. “I am not mad. Oh, I am in the deadliest earnest, Sheila. You must get the letter, if only for your own peace of mind.” He heard his wife hesitate as she turned. He heard a sob. And once more he waited.
“I have brought the letter,” came the low toneless voice again.
“Have you opened it?”
There was a rustle of paper. “Are the letters there underlined three times—‘Y.S.O.A.’?”
“The letters are there.”
“And the date of the month is underneath, ‘April 3rd.’ No one else in the whole world, living or dead, could know of this but ourselves, Sheila?”
“Will you please open the door?”
“No one?”
“I suppose not—no one.”
“Then come in.” He unlocked the door and opened it. A dark, rather handsome woman, with sleek hair, in a silk dress of a dark rich colour entered. Lawford closed the door. But his face was in shadow. He had still a moment’s respite.
“I need not ask you to be patient,” he began quickly; “if I could possibly have spared you—if there had been anybody in the world to go to … I am in horrible, horrible trouble, Sheila. It is inconceivable. I said I was sane: so I am, but the fact is—I went out for a walk; it was rather stupid, perhaps, so soon: and I think I was taken ill, or something—my heart. A kind of fit, a nervous fit. Possibly I am a little unstrung, and it’s all, it’s mainly fancy: but I think, I can’t help thinking it has a little distorted—changed my face; everything, Sheila; except, of course, myself. Would you mind looking?” He walked slowly and with face averted towards the dressing-table.
“Simply a nervous—to make such a fuss, to scare! …” began his wife, following him.
Without a word he took up the two old china candlesticks, and held them, one in each lank-fingered hand, before his face, and turned.
Lawford could see his wife—every tint and curve and line as distinctly as she could see him. Her cheeks never had much colour; now her whole face visibly darkened, from pallor to a dusky leaden grey, as she gazed. It was not an illusion then; not a miserable hallucination. The unbelievable, the inconceivable, had happened. He replaced the candles with trembling fingers and sat down.
“Well,” he said, “what is it really; what is it really, Sheila? What on earth are we to do?”
“Is the door locked?” she whispered. He nodded. With eyes fixed stirlessly on his face, Sheila unsteadily seated herself, a little out of the candlelight, in the shadow. Lawford rose and put the key of the door on his wife’s little rosewood prayer-desk at her elbow, and deliberately sat down again.
“You said ‘a fit’—where?”
“I suppose—is—is it very different—hopeless? You will understand my being … O Sheila, what am I to do?” His wife sat perfectly still, watching him with unflinching attention.
“You gave me to understand—‘a nervous fit’; where?”
Lawford took a deep breath, and quietly faced her again. “In the old churchyard, Widderstone; I was looking at—at the gravestones.”
“A fit; in the old churchyard, Widderstone—you were ‘looking at the gravestones’?”
Lawford shut his mouth. “I suppose so—a fit,” he said presently. “My heart went a little queer, and I sat down and fell into a kind of doze—a stupor, I suppose. I don’t remember anything more. And then I woke; like this.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know what?”
“ ‘Like that’?”
He turned slowly towards the looking-glass. “Why, here I am!”
She gazed at him steadily; and a hard, incredulous, almost cunning glint came into her wide blue eyes. She took up the key carelessly, glanced at it; glanced at him. “It has made me—I mean the first shock, you know—it has made me a little faint.” She walked slowly, deliberately to the door, and unlocked it. “I’ll get a little sal volatile.” She softly drew out the key, and without once removing her eyes from his face, opened the door and pushed the key noiselessly in on the other side. “Please stay there; I won’t be a minute.”
Lawford’s face smiled—a rather desperate, yet for all that a patient, resolute smile. “Oh yes, of course,” he said, almost to himself, “I had not foreseen—at least—you must do precisely what you please, Sheila. You were going to lock me in. You will, however, before taking any final step, please think over what it will entail. I did not think you would, after such proof, in this awful trouble—I did not think you would simply disbelieve me, Sheila. Who else is there to help me? You have the letter in your hand. Isn’t that sufficient proof? It was overwhelming proof to me. And even I doubted too; doubted myself. But never mind; why I should have dreamed you would
