"I understand that," I said; "perhaps it would be even well if I returned to London for the present."
She looked at me, saying: "don't say that; he needs you now, and wishes you to stay."
"And you?" I asked.
"Not what I will," she answered softly in Greek, "but what he."
We accordingly returned to Swandale from Goodford on the Thursday morning. But something of the old Sabbath was soon known now to have departed from our habit of life in the cottage, for the roar of the age reached even into our cloister, hampering the mood of that old world which we wished to inhabit. The very servants had new looks of unrest. Langler smiled doggedly, but was as one who ruminates bitterish herbage. He was much alone, questioning the oracles in the dells or in his study; and Miss Emily and I were much with each other.
She at least knew little quietness in those days, I think: I would spy her hanging about the door behind which her brother paced, and her fever about his state of mind became chronic. "The visits of this man must be terrible to him," she said of some sort of police-official from London who called about the happenings at Hallam Castle on the Sunday night of the miracle; Robinson had left no trace behind: so poor Langler was plied with questions, without having the least faith probably that the man with the note-book would see light where he himself saw none. And "it is so distressing," Miss Emily said to me during the third of the visits; "he keeps Aubrey closeted an hour, and he is not pretty, his boots creak. I only wish that Aubrey could be coaxed into some change of scene; you ought to be able to get him to Paris, if you try. Have you noticed that for four days he has burned no incense at all in his rooms?"
"I wonder why?" I said.
"Perhaps he thinks it unbecoming now—I don't know; and he hasn't once played the usual chants since we have been back from Goodford. The old attitude to everything has to be all changed, twisted, readjusted, now. Deus meus! in what foreign world have we suddenly waked up?"
"Patience!" I said: "in time the new way will be seen to be the best."
"But the old pleases Cato all the same," she muttered, with a nod of stubbornness which belonged to her; "it is to be desired at least that the new way was not complicated by officers of the law."