She rose and stood with her hand pressed over her mouth, watching him.
“Won’t you understand?” he continued. “I am an outcast—a felon caught red-handed, come in the flesh to a hideous and righteous judgment. I hear myself saying all these things; and yet, Grisel, I do, I do love you with all the dull best I ever had. Not now, then; I don’t ask new even. I can, I would begin again. God knows my face has changed enough even as it is. Think of me as that poor wandering ghost of yours; how easily I could hide away—in your memory; and just wait, wait for you. In time even this wild futile madness too would fade away. Then I could come back. May I try?”
“I can’t answer you. I can’t reason. Only, still, I do know, talk, put off, forget as I may, must is must. Right and wrong, who knows what they mean, except that one’s to be done and one’s to be forsworn; or—forgive, my friend, the truest thing I ever said—or else we lose the savour of both. Oh, then, and I know, too, you’d weary of me. I know you, Monsieur Nicholas, better than you can ever know yourself, though you have risen from your grave. You follow a dream, no voice or face or flesh and blood; and not to do what the one old raven within you cries you must, would be in time to hate the very sound of my footsteps. You shall go back, poor turncoat, and face the clearness, the utterly more difficult, bald, and heartless clearness, as together we faced the dark. Life is a little while. And though I have no words to tell what always are and must be foolish reasons because they are not reasons at all but ghosts of memory, I know in my heart that to face the worst is your only hope of peace. Should I have staked so much on your finding that, and now throw up the game? Don’t let us talk any more. I’ll walk half the way, perhaps. Perhaps I will walk all the way. I think my brother guesses—at least my madness. I’ve talked and talked him nearly past his patience. And then, when you are quite safely, oh yes, quite safely and soundly gone, then I shall go away for a little, so that we can’t even hear each other speak, except in dreams. Life!—well, I always thought it was much too plain a tale to have as dull an ending. And with us the powers beyond have played a newer trick, that’s all. Another hour, and we will go. Till then there’s just the solitary walk home and only the dull old haunted house that hoards as many ghosts as we ourselves to watch our coming.”
Evening began to shine between the trees; they seemed to stand aflame, with a melancholy rapture in their uplifted boughs above their fading coats. The fields of the garnered harvest shone with a golden stillness, awhir with shimmering flocks of starlings. And the old birds that had sung in the spring sang now amid the same leaves, grown older too to give them harbourage.
Herbert was sitting in his room when they returned, nursing his teacup on his knee while he pretended to be reading, with elbow propped on the table.
“Here’s Nicholas Sabathier, my dear, come to say goodbye awhile,” said Grisel. She stood for a moment in her white gown, her face turned towards the clear green twilight of the open window. “I have promised to walk part of the way with him. But I think first we must have some tea. No; he flatly refuses to be driven. We are going to walk.”
The two friends were left alone, face to face with a rather difficult silence, only the least degree of nervousness apparent, so far as Herbert was concerned, in that odd aloof sustained air of impersonality that had so baffled his companion in their first queer talk together.
“Your sister said just now, Herbert,” blurted Lawford at last. “ ‘Here’s Nicholas Sabathier come to say goodbye’: well, I—what I want you to understand is that it is Sabathier, the worst he ever was; but also that it is ‘goodbye.’ ”
Herbert slowly turned. “I don’t quite see why ‘goodbye,’ Lawford. And—frankly, there is nothing to explain. We have chosen to live such a very out-of-the-way life,” he went on, as if following up a train of thought. … “The truth is if one wants to live at all—one’s own life, I mean—there’s no time for many friends. And just steadfastly regarding your neighbour’s tail as you follow it down into the Nowhere—it’s that that seems to me the deadliest form of hypnotism. One must simply go one’s own way, doing one’s best to free one’s mind of cant—and I dare say clearing some excellent stuff out with the rubbish. One runs that risk. And the consequence is that I don’t think, however foolhardy it may be to say so, I don’t think I care a groat for any opinion as human as my own, good or bad. My sister’s a million times a better woman than I am a man. What possibly could there be, then, for me to say?” He turned with a nervous smile. “Why should it be goodbye?”
Lawford glanced involuntarily towards the door that stood in shadow duskily ajar. “Well,” he said, “we have talked, and we think it must be that, until, at least,” he smiled faintly, “I can come as quietly as your old ghost you told me of; and in that case it may not be so very long to wait.”
Their eyes met fleetingly across the still, listening room. “The more I think of it,” Lawford pushed slowly on, “the less I understand the frantic purposelessness of all that has happened to me. Until I went down, as you said, ‘a godsend of a little Miss Muffet,’ and the inconceivable farce came off, I was
