‘H’m,’ said Herbert solemnly: ‘I wish I had as sensitive a conscience. But as your old friend didn’t recognise you, who’s the worse? As for her not doing so, just think of the difference a few years makes to a man, and any severe shock. Life wears so infernally badly. Who, for that matter, does not change, even in character and yet who professes to see it? Mind, I don’t say in essence! But then how many of the human ghosts one meets does one know in essence? One doesn’t want to. It would be positively cataclysmic. And that’s what brings me around to feel, Lawford, if I may venture to say so, that you may have brooded a little too keenly on—on your own case. Tell any one you feel ill; he will commiserate with you to positive nausea. Tell any priest your soul is in danger; will he wait for proof? It’s misereres and penances world without end. Tell any woman you love her; will she, can she, should she, gainsay you? There you are. The cat’s out of the bag, you see. My sister and I sat up half the night talking the thing over. I said I’d take the plunge. I said I’d risk appearing the crassest, contradictoriest wretch that ever drew breath. I don’t deny that what I hinted at the other night must seem in part directly contrary to what I’m going to say now.’
He wheeled his black eyes as if for inspiration, and helped himself to salad. ‘It’s this,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it possible, isn’t it even probable that being ill, and overstrung, moping a little over things more or less out of the common ruck, and sitting there in a kind of trance—isn’t it possible that you may have very largely imagined the change? Hypnotised yourself into believing it much worse—more profound, radical, acute—and simply absolutely hypnotizing others into thinking so, too. Christendom is just beginning to rediscover that there is such a thing as faith, that it is just possible that, say, megrims or melancholia may be removed at least as easily as mountains. The converse, of course, is obvious on the face of it. A man fails because he thinks himself a failure. It’s the men that run away that lose the battle. Suppose then, Lawford’—he leaned forward, keen and suave—‘suppose you have been and “Sabathiered” yourself!’
Lawford had grown accustomed during the last few days to finding himself gazing out like a child into reality, as if from the windows of a dream. He had in a sense followed this long, loosely stitched, preliminary argument; he had at least in part realised that he sat there between two clear friendly minds acting in the friendliest and most obvious collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely on any single fragment of Herbert’s apology, or of rousing himself into being much more than a dispassionate and not very interested spectator of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it had so laboriously led up to: ‘But surely, I don’t quite see...’
Herbert lifted his glass as if to his visitor’s acumen and set it down again without tasting it. ‘Why, my dear fellow,’ he said triumphantly, ‘even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old suicide. Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In spite of all that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night, dead men don’t tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a ghost is where his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think what irrefutable masses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips if every tombstone hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with his creepy epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly fertilizing. It catches one’s fancy in its own crude way, as pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of, germinate, and sprout in one’s imagination in another way. We are all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you think, Grisel?’
‘I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call it—“darkening counsel”? It’s “the hair of the dog,” Mr Lawford.’
‘Well, then, you see,’ said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning again to his victim—‘then you see, when you were just in the pink of condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with the least impetus, can one not see by moonlight? The howl of a dog turns the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at you like a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies. I’d, mind you, sipped of the deadly old Huguenot too. I’d listened to your innocent prattle about the child kicking his toes out on death’s cupboard door; what more likely thing in the world, then, than that with that moon, in that packed air, I should have swallowed the bait whole, and seen Sabathier in every crevice of your skin? I don’t say there wasn’t any resemblance; it was for the moment extraordinary; it was even when you were here the other night distinctly arresting. But now (poor old Grisel, I’m nearly done) all I want to say is this: that if we had the “foxy old roué” here now, and Grisel played Paris between the three of us, she’d hand over the apple not to you but to me.’
‘I don’t quite see where poor Paris comes in,’ suggested Grisel meekly.
‘No, nor do I,’ said Herbert. ‘All that I mean, sagacious child, is, that Mr Lawford no more resembles the poor wretch now than I resemble the Apollo Belvedere. If you had only heard my sister scolding me, railing at me for putting such ideas into your jangled head! They don’t affect me one iota. I have, I suppose, what is usually called imagination; which merely means that I can sup with the devil, spoon for spoon, and could sleep in Bluebeard’s linen-closet without turning a hair. You, if I am not very much mistaken, are not much troubled with that very unprofitable quality, and so, I suppose, when a crooked and bizarre fancy does edge into your mind it roots there.’
And that said, not without some little confusion, and covert glance of inquiry at his sister, Herbert made all the haste he could to catch up the course that his companions had already finished.
If only, Lawford thought, this insufferable weariness would lift awhile he could enjoy the quiet, absurd, heedless talk, and this very friendly topsy-turvy effort to ease his mind and soothe his nerves. He might even take an interest again in his ‘case.’