‘Oh, but you know, it isn’t—it isn’t right,’ he began. ‘Lord! I can see him now. Glassy—yes, that’s the very word I said—glassy. It won’t do, Mrs Lawford; on my solemn honour, it won’t do. I don’t deny it, call it what you like; yes, devils, if you like. But what I say as a practical man is that it’s just rank—that’s what it is! Bethany’s had too much rope. The time’s gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy’s all very well, but after all it’s justice that clinches the bargain. There’s only one way: we must catch him; we must lay the poor wretch by the heels before it’s too late. No publicity, God bless me, no. We’d have all the rags in London on us. They’d pillory us nine days on end. We’d never live it down. No, we must just hush it up—a home or something; an asylum. For my part,’ he turned like a huge toad, his chin low in his collar—‘and I’d say the same if it was my own brother, and, after all, he is your husband, Mrs Lawford—I’d sooner he was in his grave. It takes two to play at that game, that’s what I say. To lay himself open! I can’t stand it—honestly, I can’t stand it. And yet,’ he jerked his chin over the peak of his collar towards the ladies, ‘and yet you say he’s being fetched; comes creeping home, and is fetched at dark by a—a lady in a pony-carriage. God bless me! It’s rank. What,’ he broke out violently again, ‘what was he doing there in a cemetery after dark? Do you think that beastly Frenchman would have played such a trick on Craik here? Would he have tried his little game on me? Deviltry be it, if you prefer the word, and all deference to you, Mrs Lawford. But I know this—a couple of hundred years ago they would have burnt a man at the stake for less than a tenth of this. Ask Craik here. I don’t know how, and I don’t know when: his mother, I’ve always heard say, was a little eccentric; but the truth is he’s managed by some unholy legerdemain to get the thing at his finger’s ends; that’s what it is. Think of that unspeakable book. Left open on the table! Look at his Ferguson game. It’s our solemn duty to keep him for good and all out of mischief. It reflects all round. There’s no getting out of it; we’re all in it. And tar sticks. And then there’s poor little Alice to consider, and—and you yourself, Mrs. Lawford: I wouldn’t give the fellow—friend though he was, in a way—it isn’t safe to give him five minutes’ freedom. We’ve simply got to save you from yourself, Mrs Lawford; that’s what it is—and from old-fashioned sentiment. And I only wish Bethany was here now to dispute it!’
He stirred himself down, as it were, into his clothes, and stood in the middle of the hearthrug, gently oscillating, with his hands behind his back. But at some faint rumour out of the silent house his posture suddenly stiffened, and he lifted a little, with heavy, steady lids, his head.
‘What is the matter, Danton?’ said Mr Craik in a small voice; ‘why are you listening?’
‘I wasn’t listening,’ said Danton stoutly, ‘I was thinking.’
At the same moment, at the creak of a footstep on the kitchen stairs, Lawford also had drawn soundlessly back into the darkness of the empty drawing-room.
‘While Mr Danton is “thinking,” Sheila,’ Mrs Lovat was softly interposing, ‘do please listen a moment to me. Do you mean really that that Frenchman—the one you’ve pocketed—is the poor creature in the grave?’
‘Yes, Mrs Lawford,’ said Mr Craik, putting out his face a little, ‘are we to take it that you mean that?’
‘It’s the same date, dear, the same name even to the spelling; what possibly else can I think?’
‘And that the poor creature in the grave actually climbed up out of the darkness and—well, what?’
‘I know no more than you do now, Bettie. But the two faces—you must remember you haven’t seen my husband since.’ You must remember you haven’t heard the peculiar—the most peculiar things he—Arthur himself—has said to me. Things such as a wife... And not in jest, Bettie; I assure you....’