“Yes, yes,” came the rather dissatisfied reply. “I do agree; perfectly. But then, you see—I told you I was going to talk of nothing but myself—what did at first happen to me was something much worse, and, I suppose, something quite different from that.”
“And yet, didn’t you tell us, that of all your friends not one really denied in their hearts your—what they would call, I suppose—your identity; except that poor little offended old lady. And even she, if my intuition is worth a penny piece, even she when you go soon and talk to her will own that she did know you, and that it was not because you were a stranger that she was offended, but because you so ungenerously pretended to be one. That was a little mad, now, if you like!”
“Oh yes,” said Lawford, “I am going to ask her forgiveness. I don’t know what I didn’t vow to take her for a peace-offering if the chance should ever come—and the courage—to make my peace with her. But now that the chance has come, and I think the courage, it is the desire that’s gone. I don’t seem to care either way. I feel as if I had got past making my peace with anyone.”
But this time no answer helped him out.
“After all,” he went plodding on, “there is more than just the mere day to day to consider. And one doesn’t realise that one’s face actually is one’s fortune without a shock. And that that gone, one is, as your brother said, just like a bee come back to the wrong hive. It undermines,” he smiled rather bitterly, “one’s views rather. And it certainly shifts one’s friends. If it hadn’t been just for my old”—he stopped dead, and again pushed slowly on—“if it hadn’t been for our old friend, Mr. Bethany, I doubt if we should now have had a soul on our side. I once read somewhere that wolves always chase the old and weak and maimed out of the pack. And after all, what do we do? Where do we keep the homeless and the insane? And yet, you know,” he added ruminatingly, “it is not as if mine was ever a particularly lovely or lovable face! While as for the poor wretch behind it, well, I really cannot see what meaning, or life even, he had before—”
“Before?”
Lawford met bravely the clear whimsical eyes. “Before, I was Sabathiered.”
Grisel laughed outright.
“You think,” he retorted almost bitterly, “you think I am talking like a child.”
“Yes,” she sighed cheerfully, “I was quite envying you.”
“Well, there I am,” said Lawford inconsequently. “And now; well, now, I suppose, the whole thing’s to begin again. I can’t help beginning to wonder what the meaning of it all is; why one’s duty should always seem so very stupid a thing. And then, too, what can there be on earth that even a buried Sabathier could desire?” He glanced up in a really animated perplexity at the still, dark face turned in the evening light towards the darkening valley. And perplexity deepened into a disquieted frown—like that of a child who is roused suddenly from a daydream by the half-forgotten question of a stranger. He turned his eyes almost furtively away as if afraid of disturbing her; and for awhile they sat in silence … At last he turned again almost shyly. “I hope some day you will let me bring my daughter to see you.”
“Yes, yes,” said Grisel eagerly; “we should both love it, of course. Isn’t it curious?—I simply knew you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!”
“I say ‘some day,’ ” said Lawford; “I know, though, that that some day will never come.”
“Wait; just wait,” replied the quiet confident voice, “that will come too. One thing at a time, Mr. Lawford. You’ve won your old self back again; you’ll win your old love of life back again in a little while; never fear. Oh, don’t I know that awful Land’s End after illness; and that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So, it’s a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.” She busied herself over the tea things. “And, of course,” she added, as if it were an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green sunlight as she knelt, “you simply won’t think of going back tonight. … Solitude, I really do think, solitude just now would be absolute madness. You’ll write today and go, perhaps, tomorrow!”
Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. “I think, do you know, I ought to go today.”
“Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all’s well. And come back here to sleep. If you’d really promise that I’d drive you in. I’d love it. There’s the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes hire for our picnics. May I? You’ve no idea how much easier in our minds my brother and I would be if you would. And then tomorrow, or at any rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your right mind. There, that’s a bargain too. Now we must hurry.”
XIX
Herbert himself went down to order the governess cart, and packed them in with a rug. And in the dusk Grisel set Lawford down at the corner of his road and drove on to an old bookseller’s with a commission from her brother, promising to return for him in an hour. Dust and a few straws lay at rest as if in some abstruse arrangement on the stones of the
