‘So be it,’ said he crisply. ‘Get to bed, Lawford; it’s better so. And I’ll look in on my way back from Witchett. I came, my dear fellow, in gloomy disturbance of mind. It was getting up too early; it fogs old brains. Good-bye, good-bye.’
He squeezed Lawford’s hand. Then, with umbrella under his arm, his hat on his head, his spectacles readjusted, he hurried out of the room. Mrs Lawford followed him. For a few minutes Lawford sat motionless, with head bent a little, and eyes restlessly scanning the door. Then he rose abruptly, and in a quarter of an hour was in bed, alone with his slow thoughts: while a basin of cornflour stood untasted on a little table at his bedside, and a cheerful fire burned in the best visitors’ room’s tiny grate.
At half-past eleven Dr Simon entered this soundless seclusion. He sat down beside Lawford, and took temperature and pulse. Then he half closed his lids, and scanned his patient out of an unusually dark, un-English face, with straight black hair, and listened attentively to his rather incoherent story. It was a story very much modified and rounded off. Nor did Lawford draw Dr Simon’s attention to the portrait now smiling conventionally above their heads from the wall over the fireplace.
‘It was rather bleak—the wind; and, I think, perhaps, I had had a touch of influenza. It was a silly thing to do. But still, Dr Simon, one doesn’t expect—well, there, I don’t feel the same man—physically. I really cannot explain how great a change has taken place. And yet I feel perfectly fit in myself. And if it were not for—for being laughed at, go back to town, to-day. Why my wife scarcely recognised me.’
Dr Simon continued his scrutiny. Try as he would, Lawford could not raise his downcast eyes to meet direct the doctor’s polite attention.
‘And what,’ said Dr Simon, ‘what precisely is the nature of the change? Have you any pain?’
‘No, not the least pain,’ said Lawford; ‘I think, perhaps, or rather my face is a little shrunken—and yet lengthened; at least it feels so; and a faint twinge of rheumatism. But my hair—well, I don’t know; it’s difficult to say one’s self.’ He could get on so very much better, he thought, if only his mind would be at peace and these preposterous promptings and voices were still.
Dr Simon faced the window, and drew his hand softly over his head. ‘We never can be too cautious at a certain age, and especially after influenza,’ he said. ‘It undermines the whole system, and in particular the nervous system; leaving the mind the prey of the most melancholy fancies. I should astound you, Mr Lawford, with the devil influenza plays.... A slight nervous shock and a chill; quite slight, I hope. A few days’ rest and plenty of nourishment. There’s nothing; temperature inconsiderable. All perfectly intelligible. Most certainly reassure yourself! And as for the change you speak of’—he looked steadily at the dark face on the pillow and smiled amiably—‘I don’t think we need worry much about that. It certainly was a bleak wind yesterday—and a cemetery, my dear sir! It was indiscreet—yes, very.’ He held out his hand. ‘You must not be alarmed,’ he said, very distinctly with the merest trace of an accent; ‘air, sunshine, quiet, nourishment; sleep—that is all. The little window might be a few inches open, and—and any light reading.’
He opened the door and joined Mrs Lawford on the staircase. He talked to her quietly over his shoulder all the way downstairs. ‘It was, it was sporting with Providence—a wind, believe me, nearly due east, in spite of the warm sunshine.’
‘But the change—the change!’ Mrs Lawford managed to murmur tragically, as he strode to the door. Dr Simon smiled, and gracefully tapped his forehead with a red-gloved forefinger.