Something deep in those dark clear pupils, out of that lean adventurous face, gleamed back at him, the distant flash of a heliograph, as it were, height to height, flashing “Courage!” He shuddered, and shut his eyes. “But I would really rather,” he added in a quiet childlike way, “I would really rather, Sheila, you left me alone now.”
His wife stood irresolute. “I understand you to explain,” she said, “that you went out of this house, just your usual self, this afternoon, for a walk; that for some reason you went to Widderstone—‘to read the tombstones,’ that you had a heart attack, or, as you said at first, a fit, that you fell into a stupor, and came home like—like this. Am I likely to believe all that? Am I likely to believe such a story as that? Whoever you are, whoever you may be, is it likely? I am not in the least afraid. I thought at first it was some silly practical joke. I thought that at first.” She paused, but no answer came. “Well, I suppose in a civilised country there is a remedy even for a joke as wicked as that.”
Lawford listened patiently. “She is pretending; she is trying me; she is feeling her way,” he kept repeating to himself. “She knows I am I, but hasn’t the courage … Let her talk!”
“I shall leave the door open,” Sheila continued. “I am not, as you no doubt very naturally assumed—I am not going to do anything either senseless or heedless. I am merely going to ask your brother Cecil to come in, if he is at home, and if not, no doubt our old friend Mr. Montgomery would—would help us.” Her scrutiny was still and concentrated, like that of a cat above a mouse’s hole.
Lawford sat crouched together in the candlelight. “By all means, Sheila,” he said slowly choosing his words, “if you think poor old Cecil, who next January will have been three years in his grave, will be of any use in our difficulty. Who Mr. Montgomery is …” His voice dropped in utter weariness. “You did it very well, my dear,” he added softly.
Sheila gently closed the door and sat down on the bed. He heard her softly crying, he heard the bed shaken with her sobs. But a slow glance towards the steady candle-flames restrained him. He let her cry on alone. When she had become a little more composed he stood up. “You have had no dinner,” he managed to blurt out at last, “you will be faint. It’s useless to talk, even to think, any more tonight. Leave me to myself for a while. Don’t look at me any more. Perhaps I can sleep: perhaps if I sleep it will come right again. When the servants are gone up, I will come down. Just let me have some—some medical book, or other; and some more candles. Don’t think, Sheila; don’t even think!”
Sheila paid him no attention for a while. “You tell me not to think,” she began, in a low, almost listless voice; “why—I wonder I am in my right mind. And ‘eat’! How can you have the heartlessness to suggest it? You don’t seem in the least to realize what you say. You seem to have lost all—all consciousness. I quite agree, it is useless for me to burden you with my company while you are in your present condition of mind. But you will at least promise me that you won’t take any further steps in this awful business.” She could not, try as she would, bring herself again to look at him. She rose softly, paused a moment with sidelong eyes, then turned deliberately towards the door, “What, what have I done to deserve all this?”
From behind her that voice, so extraordinarily like—and yet in some vague fashion more arresting, more resonant than her husband’s, broke incredibly out once more. “You will please leave the key, Sheila. I am ill, but I am not yet in the padded room. And please understand, I take no further steps in ‘this awful business’ until I hear a strange voice in the house.” Sheila paused, but the quiet voice rang in her ear, desperately yet convincingly. She took the key out of the lock, placed it on the bed, and with a sigh, that was not quite without a hint of relief in its misery, she furtively extinguished the gaslight on the landing and rustled downstairs.
She speedily returned. “I have brought the book,” she said hastily. “I could only find the one volume. I have said you have taken a fresh chill. No one will disturb you.”
Lawford took the book without a word. And once more, with eyes stonily averted, his wife left him to his own company and that of the face in the glass.
When completely deserted, Lawford with fumbling fingers opened Quain’s “Dictionary of Medicine.” He had never had much curiosity, and had always hated what he disbelieved, but none the less he had heard occasionally of absurd and questionable experiments. He remembered even to have glanced over reports of cases in the newspapers concerning disappearances, loss of memory, dual personality. Cranks … Oh yes, he thought now, with a sense of cold humiliating relief, there had been such cases as his before. They were no doubt curable.
