‘Well, there I am,’ said Lawford inconsequently. ‘And now; well, now, I suppose, the whole thing’s to begin again. I can’t help beginning to wonder what the meaning of it all is; why one’s duty should always seem so very stupid a thing. And then, too, what can there be on earth that even a buried Sabathier could desire?’ He glanced up in a really animated perplexity at the still, dark face turned in the evening light towards the darkening valley. And perplexity deepened into a disquieted frown—like that of a child who is roused suddenly from a daydream by the half-forgotten question of a stranger. He turned his eyes almost furtively away as if afraid of disturbing her; and for awhile they sat in silence... At last he turned again almost shyly. ‘I hope some day you will let me bring my daughter to see you.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Grisel eagerly; ‘we should both love it, of course. Isn’t it curious?—I simply knew you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!’
‘I say “some day,”’ said Lawford; ‘I know, though, that that some day will never come.’
‘Wait; just wait,’ replied the quiet confident voice, ‘that will come too. One thing at a time, Mr Lawford. You’ve won your old self back again; you’ll win your old love of life back again in a little while; never fear. Oh, don’t I know that awful Land’s End after illness; and that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So, it’s a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.’ She busied herself over the tea things. ‘And, of course,’ she added, as if it were an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green sunlight as she knelt, ‘you simply won’t think of going back to-night.... Solitude, I really do think, solitude just now would be absolute madness. You’ll write to-day and go, perhaps, to-morrow!’
Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. ‘I think, do you know, I ought to go to-day.’
‘Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all’s well. And come back here to sleep. If you’d really promise that I’d drive you in. I’d love it. There’s the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes hire for our picnics. May I? You’ve no idea how much easier in our minds my brother and I would be if you would. And then to-morrow, or at any rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your right mind. There, that’s a bargain too. Now we must hurry.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Herbert himself went down to order the governess cart, and packed them in with a rug. And in the dusk Grisel set Lawford down at the corner of his road and drove on to an old bookseller’s with a commission from her brother, promising to return for him in an hour. Dust and a few straws lay at rest as if in some abstruse arrangement on the stones of the porch just as the last faint whirling gust of sunset had left them. Shut lids of sightless indifference seemed to greet the wanderer from the curtained windows.
He opened the door and went in. For a moment he stood in the vacant hall; then he peeped first into the blind-drawn dining-room, faintly, dingily sweet, like an empty wine-bottle. He went softly on a few paces and just opening the door looked in on the faintly glittering twilight of the drawing-room. But the congealed stump of candle that he had set in the corner as a final rancorous challenge to the beaten Shade was gone. He slowly and deliberately ascended the stairs, conscious of a peculiar sense of ownership of what in even so brief an absence had taken on so queer a look of strangeness. It was almost as if he might be some lone heir come in the rather mournful dusk to view what melancholy fate had unexpectedly bestowed on him.
‘Work in’—what on earth else could this chill sense of strangeness mean? Would he ever free his memory from that one haphazard, haunting hint? And as he stood in the doorway of the big, calm room, which seemed even now to be stirring with the restless shadow of these last few far-away days; now pacing sullenly to and fro; now sitting hunched-up to think; and now lying impotent in a vain, hopeless endeavour only for the breath of a moment to forget—he awoke out of reverie to find himself smiling at the thought that a changed face was practically at the mercy of an incredulous world, whereas a changed heart was no one’s deadly dull affair but its owner’s. The merest breath of pity even stole over him for the Sabathier who after all had dared and had needed, perhaps, nothing like so arrogant and merciless a coup de grâce to realise that he had so ignominiously failed.