‘For my part,’ said Mrs Lovat, breathing the faint wind that was rising out of the west, ‘I’d sigh; I’d rub my eyes; I’d thank God for such an exciting dream; and I’d turn comfortably over and go to sleep again. I’m all for Arthur—absolutely—back against the wall.’
‘For my part,’ said Danton, looming in the dusk, ‘friend or no friend, I’d cut the—I’d cut him dead. But don’t fret, Mrs Lawford, devil or no devil, he’s gone for good.’
‘And for my part—’ began Mr Craik; but the door at that moment slammed.
Voices, however, broke out almost immediately in the porch. And after a hurried consultation, Lawford in his stagnant retreat heard the door softly reopen, and the striking of a match. And Mr Craik, followed closely by Danton’s great body, stole circumspectly across his dim chink, and the first adventurer went stumbling down the kitchen staircase.
‘I suppose,’ muttered Lawford, turning his head in the darkness, ‘they have come back to put out the kitchen gas.’
Danton began a busy tuneless whistle between his teeth.
‘Coming, Craik?’ he called thickly, after a long pause.
Apparently no answer had been returned to his inquiry: he waited a little longer, with legs apart, and eyeballs enveloped in brooding darkness. ‘I’ll just go and tell the ladies you’re coming,’ he suddenly bawled down the hollow. ‘Do you hear, Craik? They’re alone, you know.’ And with that he resolutely wheeled and rapidly made his way down the steps into the garden. Some few moments afterwards Mr Craik shook himself free of the basement, hastened at a spirited trot to rejoin his companions, and in his absence of mind omitted to shut the front door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lawford sat on in the darkness, and now one sentence and now another of their talk would repeat itself in his memory, in much the same way as one listlessly turns over an antiquated diary, to read here and there a flattened and almost meaningless sentiment. Sometimes a footstep passed echoing along the path under the trees, then his thoughts would leave him, and he would listen and listen till it had died quite out. It was all so very far away. And they too—these talkers—so very far away; as remote and yet as clear as the characters in a play when they have made their final bow, and have left the curtained stage, and one is standing uncompanioned and nearly the last of the spectators, and the lights that have summoned back reality again are being extinguished. It was only by painful effort of mind that he kept recalling himself to himself—why he was here; what it all meant; that this was indeed actuality.