Lawford rose very slowly from his knees. He could feel in the dark his brows drawn down; there came a low, sullen beating on his ear; he saw his face as it were in dim outline against the dark. Rage and rebellion surged up in him; even his love could be turned to bitterness. Well, two could play at any game! Alice sprang up in bed and caught his sleeve. ‘Dearest, dearest, you must not be angry with me now!’
He flung himself down beside the bed. Anger, resentment died away. ‘You are all I have left,’ he said.
He stole back, as he had come, in the clear dawn to his bedroom.
It was not five yet. He put a few more coals on his fire and blew out the night-light, and lay down. But it was impossible to rest, to remain inactive. He would go down and search for that first volume of Quain. Hallucination, Influenza, Insanity—why, Sheila must have purposely mislaid it. A rather formidable figure he looked, descending the stairs in the grey dusk of daybreak. The breakfast-room was at the back of the house. He tilted the blind, and a faint light flowed in from the changing colours of the sky. He opened the glass door of the little bookcase to the right of the window, and ran eye and finger over the few rows of books. But as he stood there with his back to the room, just as the shadow of a bird’s wing floats across the moonlight of a pool, he became suddenly conscious that something, somebody had passed across the doorway, and in passing had looked in on him.
He stood motionless, listening; but no sound broke the morning slumbrousness, except the faraway warbling of a thrush in the first light. So sudden and transitory had been the experience that it seemed now to be illusory; yet it had so caught him up, it had with so furtive and sinister a quietness broken in on his solitude, that for a moment he dared not move. A cold, indefinite sensation stole over him that he was being watched; that some dim, evil presence was behind him biding its time, patient and stealthy, with eyes fixed unmovingly on him where he stood. But, watch and wait as silently as he might, only the day broadened at the window, and at last a narrow ray of sunlight stole trembling up into the dusky bowl of the sky.
At any rate Quain was found, with all the ills of life, from A to I; and Lawford turned back to his bondage with the book under his arm.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming bells, had passed languidly away. Dr Simon had come and gone, optimistic and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to lurk. Even Mrs Lawford had appeared to share her husband’s reticence. But Dr Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.
The voices and footsteps, even the frou-frou of worshippers going to church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church, had floated up to the patient’s open window. Sunlight had drawn across his room in one pale beam, and vanished. A few callers had called. Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of sympathy. Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made inquiries on his way home from chapel.
Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft slippers. The very monotony had eased his mind. Now and again he had lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling. He had dozed and had awakened, cold and torpid with dream. He had hardly been aware of the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards clarifying his point of view. A consciousness had begun to stir in him that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his distracted nerves. He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him. It would, of course, wear him down in time. There could be only one end to such a struggle—the end.