Lawford opened his mouth; “Temporarily tepid,” he at last all but coughed out.
“Oh yes, of course,” said Herbert intelligently. “Only temporarily. It’s this beastly gregariousness that’s the devil. The very thought of it undoes me—with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals, bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of—of infinity. And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one thinks too much of one’s clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too deep for their poor reasons. I don’t mean that your wanting to go home is anything gregarious, but I do think their insisting on your coming back at once might be. And I know you won’t visit this stuff on me as anything more than just my ‘scum,’ as Grisel calls the fine flower of my maiden meditations. All that I really want to say is that we should both be more than delighted if you’d stay just as long as it will not be a bore for you to stay. Stay till you’re heartily tired of us. Go back now, if you must; tell them how much better you are. Bolt off to a nerve specialist. He’ll say complete rest—change of scene, and all that. They all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not take your rest here? We are such miserably dull company to one another it would be a greater pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I mean it from the very bottom of my heart. Do!”
Lawford listened. “I wish—,” he began, and stopped dead again. “Anyhow, I’ll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I’ve been playing truant. It was all very well while—To tell you the truth I can’t think quite straight yet. But it won’t last forever. Besides—well, anyhow, I’ll go back.”
“Right you are,” said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. “You can’t expect, you really can’t, everything to come right straight away. Just have patience. And now, let’s go out and sit in the sun. They’ve mixed September up with May.”
And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair.
Grisel had taken her brother’s place, with a little pile of needlework beside her on the grass, when Lawford again opened his eyes under the rosy shade of a parasol. He watched her for a while, without speaking.
“How long have I been asleep?” he said at last.
She started and looked up from her needle.
“That depends on how long you have been awake,” she said, smiling. “My brother tells me,” she went on, beginning to stitch, “that you have made up your mind to leave us today. Perhaps we are only flattering ourselves it has been a rest. But if it has—is that, do you think, quite wise?”
He leant forward and hid his face in his hands. “It’s because—it’s because it’s the only ‘must’ I can see.”
“But even ‘musts’—well, we have to be sure even of ‘musts,’ haven’t we? Are you?” She glanced up and for an instant their eyes met, and the falling water seemed to be sounding out of a distance so remote it might be but the echo of a dream. She stooped once more over her work.
“Supposing,” he said very slowly, and almost as if speaking to himself, “supposing Sabathier—and you know he’s merely like a friend now one mustn’t be seen talking to—supposing he came back; what then?”
“Oh, but Sabathier’s gone: he never really came. It was only a fancy—a mood. It was only you—another you.”
“Who was that yesterday, then?”
She glanced at him swiftly and knew the question was but a venture.
“Yesterday?”
“Oh, very well,” he said fretfully, “you too! But if he did, if he did, come really back: ‘prey’ and all?”
“What is the riddle?” she said, taking a deep breath and facing him brightly.
“Would my ‘must’ still be his?” The face he raised to her, as he leaned forward under the direct light of the sun, was so colourless, cadaverous and haggard, the thought crossed her mind that it did indeed seem little more than a shadowy mask that but one hour of darkness might dispel.
“You said, you know, we did win through. Why then should we be even thinking of defeat now?”
“ ‘We’!”
“Oh no, you!” she cried triumphantly.
“You do not answer my question.”
“Nor you mine! It was a glorious victory. Is there the ghost of a reason why you should cast your mind back? Is there, now?”
“Only,” said Lawford, looking patiently up into her face, “only because I love you”: and listened in the silence to the words as one may watch a bird that has escaped forever and irrevocably out of its cage, steadily flying on and on till lost to sight.
For an instant the grey eyes faltered. “But that, surely,” she began in a low voice, still steadily sewing, “that was our compact last night—that you should let me help, that you should trust me just as you trusted the mother years ago who came in the little cart with the shaggy dusty pony to the homesick boy watching at the window. Perhaps,” she added, her fingers trembling, “in this odd shuffle of souls and faces, I am that mother, and most frightfully
