She laid her hand lightly on his arm. “Whether he did or not,” she said with an earnestness that was almost an entreaty, “of course, you must agree that we every one of us have some such experience—that kind of visitor, once at least, in a lifetime.” “Ah, but,” began Lawford, turning forlornly away, “you didn’t see, you can’t have realized—the change.”
She pulled the bell almost as if in some inward triumph. “But don’t you think,” she suggested, “that that, like the other, might be, as it were, partly imagination too? If now you thought back …”
But a little old woman had opened the door, and the sentence, for the moment, was left unfinished.
XVII
There was no one in the room, and no light, when they entered. For a moment Grisel stood by the open window, looking out. Then she turned impulsively. “My brother, of course, will ask you too,” she said; “we had made up our minds to do so if you came again; but I want you to promise me now that you won’t dream of going back tonight. That surely would be tempting—well, not Providence. I couldn’t rest if I thought you might be alone; like that again.” Her voice died away into the calling of the waters. A light moved across the dingy old rows of books and as his sister turned to go out Herbert appeared in the doorway, carrying a green-shaded lamp, with an old leather quarto under his arm.
“Ah, here you are,” he said. “I guessed you had probably met.” He drew up, burdened, before his visitor. But his clear black glance, instead of wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was almost with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his book on to a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the floor. He put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next words came up muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him. “You don’t feel worse, I hope?” He got up and faced his visitor for the answer. And for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.
“No,” he said almost gaily; “I feel enormously better.” But Herbert’s long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still fixed on his face. “I am afraid, my dear fellow,” he said, with something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, “the struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.”
“The question is,” answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical melancholy in his voice, “though I am not sure that the answer very much matters—what’s going to put me together again? It’s the old story of Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in a quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?”
“What was that?” said Herbert with unfeigned curiosity.
“Why, you said even though Sabathier had failed, though I was still my own old stodgy self, that you thought the face—the face, you know, might work in. Somehow, sometimes I think it has. It does really rather haunt me. In that case—well, what then?” Lawford had himself listened to this involved explanation much as one watches the accomplishment of a difficult trick, marvelling more at its completion at all than at the difficulty involved in the doing of it.
“ ‘Work in,’ ” repeated Herbert, like a rather blasé child confronted with a new mechanical toy; “did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn’t bad; it’s what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot’s over the threshold, it’s nine points of the law! But I don’t remember saying it.” He shamefacedly and naively confessed it: “I say such an awful lot of things. And I’m always changing my mind. It’s a standing joke against me with my sister. She says the recording angel will have two sides to my account: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—diametrically opposite convictions, and both kinds wrong. On Sundays I am all things to all men. As for Sabathier, by the way, I do want particularly to have another go at him. I’ve been thinking him over, and I’m afraid in some ways he won’t quite wash. And that reminds me, did you read the poor chap?”
“I just grubbed through a page or two; but most of my French was left at school. What I did do, though, was to show the book to an old friend of ours—my wife’s and mine—just to skim—a Mr. Bethany. He’s an old clergyman—our vicar, in fact.”
Herbert had sat down, and with eyes slightly narrowed was listening with peculiar attention. He smiled a little magnanimously. “His verdict, I should think, must have been a perfect joy.”
“He said,” said Lawford, in his rather low, monotonous voice, “he said it was precious poor stuff, that it reminded him of patchouli; and that Sabathier—the print I mean—looked like a foxy old roué. They were, I think, his exact words. We were alone together, last night.”
“You don’t mean that he simply didn’t see the faintest resemblance?”
Lawford nodded. “But then,” he added simply, “whenever he comes to see me now he leaves his spectacles at home.”
And at that, as if at some preconcerted signal, they both went off into a simple shout of laughter, unanimous and sustained.
But this first wild bout of laughter over, the first real bursting of the dam, perhaps, for years, Lawford found himself at a lower ebb than ever.
“You see,” he said presently, and while still his companion’s face was smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone, “Bethany has been absolutely my sheet-anchor right through. And I was—it was—you can’t possibly realise what a ghastly change it really was. I don’t think anyone ever will.”
Herbert opened his hand and
