He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room, ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again. He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What did it matter what a man looked like—a now familiar but enfeebled and deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this world was concerned.
At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the dark Adventurer, but that—how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he come hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But—was he disappointed!
He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey, hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed to detect the least hint of any iris. ‘It must have been something pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,’ they seemed to be trying to say to him, ‘to drag us down to this.’
He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came. Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if, while kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice who looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old charwoman, Mrs Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circumspectly together in the room beneath.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A quiet knocking aroused him in the long, tranquil bedroom; and Herbert’s head was poked into the room. ‘There’s a bath behind that door over there,’ he whispered, ‘or if you like I’m off for a bathe in the Widder. It’s a luscious day. Shall I wait? All right,’ and the head was withdrawn. ‘Don’t put much on,’ came the voice at the panel; ‘we’ll be home again in twenty minutes.’
The green and brightness of the morning must have been prepared for overnight by spiders and the dew. Everywhere the gleaming nets were hung, and everywhere there rose a tiny splendour from the waterdrops, so clear and pure and changeable it seemed with their fire and colour they shook a tiny crystal music in the air. Herbert led the way along a clayey downward path beneath hazels tossing softly together their twigs of nuts, until they came out into a rounded hollow that, mounded with thyme, sloped gently down to the green banks of the Widder. The water poured like clearest glass beneath a rain of misty sunbeams.
‘My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his mind’s eye when he wrote the “Decameron.” There really is something almost classic in those pines. And I’d sometimes swear with my eyes just out of the water I’ve seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between those beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns have made, and missed!’
The water was violently cold. It seemed to Lawford, as it swept up over his body, and as he plunged his night-distorted eyes beneath its blazing surface, that it was charged with some strange, powerful enchantment to wash away in its icy clearness even the memory of the dull and tarnished days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that stained bundle of inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into a cupboard remoter even than Bluebeard’s, and lock the door, and drop the quickly-rusting key into these living waters!
He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But, like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate burst of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back to that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone from which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a more ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which confronted him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken chaps, that angular chin.