In the afternoon he got up and dressed himself. He could not bring himself to stand before the glass and deliberately shave. He even smiled at the thought of playing the barber to that lean chin. He dressed by the fireplace.
‘I couldn’t rest,’ he told Sheila, when she presently came in on one of her quiet, cautious, heedful visits; ‘and one tires of reading even Quain in bed.’
‘Have you found anything?’ she inquired politely.
‘Oh yes,’ said Lawford wearily; ‘I have discovered that infinitely worse things are infinitely commoner. But that there’s nothing quite so picturesque.’
‘Tell me,’ said Sheila, with refreshing naivete. ‘How does it feel? does it even in the slightest degree affect your mind?’
He turned his back and looked up at his broad gilt portrait for inspiration. ‘Practically, not at all,’ he said hollowly. ‘Of course, one’s nerves—that fellow Danton—when one’s overtired. You have’—his voice, in spite of every effort, faintly quavered—‘you haven’t noticed anything? My mind?’
‘Me? Oh dear, no! I never was the least bit observant; you know that, Arthur. But apart from that, and I hope you will not think me unsympathetic—but don’t you think we must sooner or later be thinking of what’s to be done? At present, though I fully agree with Mr Bethany as to the wisdom of hushing this unhappy business up as long as possible, at least from the gossiping outside world, still we are only standing still. And your malady, dear, I suppose, isn’t. You will help me, Arthur? You will try and think? Poor Alice!’
‘What about Alice?’
‘She mopes, dear, rather. She cannot, of course, quite understand why she must not see her father, and yet his not being, or, for the matter of that, even if he was, at death’s door.’
‘At death’s door,’ murmured Lawford under his breath; ‘who was it was saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one’s thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel carved into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony—in that cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond—O God, beyond!’