The lane had narrowed. They had climbed the arch of a narrow stone bridge that spanned the smooth dark Widder. A few late starlings were winging far above them. Darkness was coming on apace. They stood for awhile looking down into the black flowing water, with here and there the mild silver of a star dim leagues below. “I am afraid,” said Grisel, looking quietly up, “you have led me into talking most pitiless nonsense. How many hours, I wonder, did I lie awake in the dark last night, thinking of you? Honestly, I shall never, never forget that walk. It haunted me, on and on.”
“Thinking of me? Do you really mean that? Then it was not all imagination; it wasn’t just the drowning man clutching at a straw?”
The grey eyes questioned him. “You see,” he explained in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard, “it—it came back again, and—I don’t mind a bit how much you laugh at me! I had been asleep, and had had a most awful dream, one of those dreams that seem to hint that some day that will be our real world, that some day we may awake where dreaming then will be of this; and I woke—came back—and there was a tremendous knocking going on downstairs. I knew there was no one else in the house—”
“No one else in the house? And you like this?”
“Yes,” said Lawford, stolidly, “they were all out as it happened. And, of course,” he went on quickly, “there was nothing for me to do but simply to go down and open the door. And yet, do you know, at first I simply couldn’t move. I lit a candle, and then—then somehow I got to know that waiting for me was just—but there,” he broke off half-ashamed, “I mustn’t bother you with all this morbid stuff. Will your brother be in now, do you think?”
“My brother will be in, and, of course, expecting you. But as for ‘bother,’ believe me—well, did I quite deserve it?” She stooped towards him. “You lit a candle—and then?”
They turned and retraced their way slowly up the hill.
“It came again.”
“It?”
“That—that presence, that shadow. I don’t mean, of course, it’s a real shadow. It comes, doesn’t it, from—from within? As if from out of some unheard-of hiding place, where it has been lurking for ages and ages before one’s childhood; at least, so it seems to me now. And yet although it does come from within, there it is, too, in front of you, before your eyes, feeding even on your fear, just watching, waiting for—What nonsense all this must seem to you!”
“Yes, yes; and then?”
“Then, and you must remember the poor old boy had been knocking all this time—my old friend—Mr. Bethany, I mean—knocking and calling through the letter-box, thinking I was in extremis, or something; then—how shall I describe it?—well you came, your eyes, your face, as clear as when, you know, the night before last, we went up the hill together. And then …”
“And then?”
“And then, we—you and I, you know—simply drove him downstairs, and I could hear myself grunting as if it was really a physical effort; we drove him, step by step, downstairs. And—” He laughed outright, and boyishly continued his adventure. “What do you think I did then, without the ghost of a smile, too, at the idiocy of the thing? I locked the poor beggar in the drawing-room. I saw him there, as plainly as I ever saw anything in my life, and the furniture glimmering, though it was pitch dark: I can’t describe it. It all seemed so desperately real, absolutely vital then. It all seems so meaningless and impossible now. And yet, although I am utterly played out and done for, and however absurd it may sound, I wouldn’t have lost it; I wouldn’t go back for any bribe there is. I feel just as if a great bundle had been rolled off my back. Of course, the queerest, the most detestable part of the whole business is that it—the thing on the stairs—was this”—he lifted a grave and haggard face towards her again—“or rather that,” he pointed with his stick towards the starry churchyard. “Sabathier,” he said.
Again they had paused together before the white gate, and this time Lawford pushed it open, and followed his companion up the narrow path.
She stayed a moment, her hand on the bell. “Was it my brother who actually put that horrible idea into your mind?—about Sabathier?”
“Oh no, not really put it into my
