‘Oh, but you know you are,’ drawled on the slightly hesitating long-drawn syllables; ‘it’s your parochial métier. Firm, unctuous, subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You’ll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting’s there!’
Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke. He turned swiftly on Mrs Lawford. ‘Why, why, could you not have seen?’ he cried.
‘It’s no good, Vicar. She’s all sheer Laodicean. Blow hot, blow cold. North, south, east, west—to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry the wind. There’s nothing to be got from poor Sheila but...’
‘Lawford!’ the little man’s voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip; ‘I forbid it. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Some self-command; my dear good fellow, remember, remember it’s only the will, the will that keeps us breathing.’
Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and flickered with shadows before his eyes. ‘What’s he mean, then,’ he muttered huskily, ‘coming here with his black, still carcase—peeping, peeping—what’s he mean, I say?’ There was a moment’s silence. Then with lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.
‘I suppose,’ began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself from the humiliation of the moment, ‘I suppose he was—wandering?’
‘Bless me, yes,’ said Mr Bethany cordially—‘fever. We all know what that means.’
‘Yes,’ said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford’s white and intent gaze.
‘Just think, think, Danton—the awful, incessant strain of such an ordeal. Think for an instant what such a thing means!’
Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin. ‘Oh yes. But—eh?—needlessly abusive? I never said I disbelieved him.’