He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came. Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if, while kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice who looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old charwoman, Mrs. Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr. Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and fantasy and yet … He listened intently and fancied even now he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circumspectly together in the room beneath.
XVIII
A quiet knocking aroused him in the long, tranquil bedroom; and Herbert’s head was poked into the room. “There’s a bath behind that door over there,” he whispered, “or if you like I’m off for a bathe in the Widder. It’s a luscious day. Shall I wait? All right,” and the head was withdrawn. “Don’t put much on,” came the voice at the panel; “we’ll be home again in twenty minutes.”
The green and brightness of the morning must have been prepared for overnight by spiders and the dew. Everywhere the gleaming nets were hung, and everywhere there rose a tiny splendour from the waterdrops, so clear and pure and changeable it seemed with their fire and colour they shook a tiny crystal music in the air. Herbert led the way along a clayey downward path beneath hazels tossing softly together their twigs of nuts, until they came out into a rounded hollow that, mounded with thyme, sloped gently down to the green banks of the Widder. The water poured like clearest glass beneath a rain of misty sunbeams.
“My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his mind’s eye when he wrote the Decameron. There really is something almost classic in those pines. And I’d sometimes swear with my eyes just out of the water I’ve seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between those beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns have made, and missed!”
The water was violently cold. It seemed to Lawford, as it swept up over his body, and as he plunged his night-distorted eyes beneath its blazing surface, that it was charged with some strange, powerful enchantment to wash away in its icy clearness even the memory of the dull and tarnished days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that stained bundle of inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into a cupboard remoter even than Bluebeard’s, and lock the door, and drop the quickly-rusting key into these living waters!
He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But, like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate burst of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back to that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone from which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a more ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which confronted him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken chaps, that angular chin.
And even now, beneath the lantern of broad daylight, just as within that other face had lurked the undeniable ghost and presence of himself, so beneath the sunken features seemed to float, tenuous as smoke, scarcely less elusive than a dream, between eye and object, the sinister darkness of the face that in those two bouts with fear he had by some strange miracle managed to repel.
“Work in,” the chance phrase came back. It had worked in in sober earnest; and so far as the living of the next few weeks went, surely it might prove an ally without which he simply could not conceive himself as struggling on at all.
But as dexterous minds as even restless Sabathier’s had him just now in safe and kindly keeping. All the quiet October morning Herbert kept him talking and stooping over his extraordinary collection of books.
“The point is,” he explained to Lawford, standing amid a positive archipelago of precious “finds,” with his foot hoisted onto a chair and a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, “I honestly detest the mere give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don’t deny Life’s there,” he swept his hand towards the open window—“in that frantic Tophet we call London; but there’s no focus, no point of vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the world’s nectar is merely honeydew.” He smiled pleasantly into the fixed vacancy of his visitor’s face. “That’s why I’ve just gone on,” he continued amiably, “collecting this particular kind of stuff—what you might call riffraff. There’s not a book here, Lawford,
