Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. ‘And was all that in Quain?’ she inquired rather flutteringly.
Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife.
She shook herself, with a slight shiver. ‘Very well, then,’ she said and paused in the silence.
Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. ‘What has he been saying now?’ he inquired like a fretful child.
Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare, wild, timid creature by the least stir. ‘Who?’ she merely breathed.
Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. ‘It’s just the last rags of that beastly influenza,’ he said, and began vigorously combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced.
But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the ‘change’ quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him.
He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen. From far away came a rich, long-continued chuckle of laughter, followed by the clatter of a falling plate, and then, still more uncontrollable laughter. There was a faint smell of toast on the air. Lawford ventured out on to the landing and into a little room that had once, in years gone by, been Alice’s nursery. He stood far back from the strip of open window that showed beneath the green blind, craning forward to see into the garden—the trees, their knotted trunks, and then, as he stole nearer, a flower-bed, late roses, geraniums, calceolarias, the lawn and—yes, three wicker chairs, a footstool, a work-basket, a little table on the smooth grass in the honey-coloured sunshine; and Sheila sitting there in the autumnal sunlight, her hands resting on the arms of her chair, her head bent, evidently deeply engrossed in her thoughts. He crept an inch or two forward, and stooped. There was a hat on the grass—Alice’s big garden hat—and beside it lay Flitters, nose on paws, long ears sagging. He had forgotten Flitters. Had Flitters forgotten him? Would he bark at the strange, distasteful scent of a—Dr Ferguson? The coast was clear, then. He turned even softlier yet, to confront, rapt, still, and hovering betwixt astonishment and dread, the blue calm eyes of his daughter, looking in at the door. It seemed to Lawford as if they had both been suddenly swept by some unseen power into a still, unearthly silence.
‘We thought,’ he began at last, ‘we thought just to beckon Mrs Lawford from the window. He—he is asleep.’
Alice nodded. Her whole face was in a moment flooded with red. It ebbed and left her pale. ‘I will go down and tell mother you want to see her. It was very silly of me. I did not quite recognise at first...I suppose, thinking of my father—’ The words faltered, and the eyes were lifted to his face again with a desolate, incredulous appeal. Lawford turned away heartsick and trembling.