The Return Part 32

'Dear me! And I'm keeping the cabman! I mast hurry on. Well, now, I put it to you; you shall be my father confessor--though I detest the idea in real life--was I wrong? Was I justified in professing to the poor fellow that I detected a likeness when there was extremely little likeness there?'

'What! None at all!' cried Lawford; 'not the faintest trace?'

'My dear good Mr Lawford,' she expostulated, patting her lap, 'there's very little more than a trace of my dear beautiful Mary in YOU, her own son. How could there be--how could you expect it in him, a complete stranger? No, it was nothing but my own foolish kindliness. It might have been Mary's son for all that I could recollect. I haven't for years, please remember, had the pleasure of receiving a visit from YOU. I am firmly of opinionthat I was justified. My motive was entirely benevolent. And then--to my positive amazement--well, I won't say hard things of the absent; but he suddenly turns round on me with a "Thank you, Miss Bennett." Bennett, hark ye! Perhaps you won't agree that I had any justification in being vexed and--and affronted at THAT.'

'I think, Miss Sinnet,' said Lawford solemnly, 'that you were perfectly justified. Oh, perfectly. I wonder even you had the patience to give the real Arthur Lawford a chance to ask your forgiveness for--or the stranger.'

'Well, candidly,' said Miss Sinnett severely. 'I was very much scandalised; and I shouldn't be here now telling you my story if it hadn't been for your mother.'

'My mother!'

The old lady rather grimly enjoyed his confusion. 'Yes, Mr Lawford, your mother. I don't know why--something in his manner, something in his face--so dejected, so unhappy, so--if it is not uncharitablnesse to say it--so wild: it has haunted me: I haven't been able to put the matter out of my mind. I have lain awake in my bed thinking of him. Why did he speak to me, I keep asking myself. Why did he play me so very aimless a trick? How had he learned my name? Why was he sitting there so solitary and so dejected? And worse even than that, what has become of him? A little more patience, a little more charity, perhaps--what might I not have done for him? The whole thing has hara.s.sed and distressed me more than I can say. Would you believe it, I have actually twice, and on one occasion, three times in a day made my way to the seat--hoping to see him there. And I am not so young as I was. And then, as I say, to crown all, I had a most remarkable dream about your mother. But that's my own affair. Elderly people like me are used--well, perhaps I won't say used--we're not surprised or disturbed by visits from those who have gone before. We live, in a sense, among the tombs; though I would not have you fancy it's in any way a morbid or unhappy life to lead. We don't talk about it--certainly not to young people. Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the Tree yet, Mr Lawford.'

She leant forward and whispered it with a big, simple smile:--'We don't even discuss it much among ourselves. But as one gets nearer and nearer to the wicket-gate there's other company around one than you'll find in--in the directory. And that is why I have just come on here tonight.

Very probably my errand may seem to have no meaning for you. You look ill, but you don't appear to be in any great trouble or adversity, as I feared in my--well, there--as I feared you might be. I must say, though, it seems a terribly empty house. And no lights, too!'

She slowly, with a little trembling nodding of her bonnet, turned her head and glanced quietly, fixedly, and unflinchingly, out of the half-open door. 'But that's not my affair.' And again she looked at him for a little while.

Then she stooped forward and touched him kindly and trustingly on the knee. 'Trouble or no trouble,' she said, 'it's never too late to remind a man of his mother. And I'm sure, Mr Lawford, I'm very glad to hear you are struggling up out of your illness again. We must keep a brave heart, forty or seventy, whichever we may be: "While the evil days come not nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them,"

though they have not come to me even yet; and I trust from the bottom of my heart, not to YOU.'

She looked at him without a trace of emotion or constraint in her large, quiet face, and their eyes met for a moment in that brief, fixed, baffling fas.h.i.+on that seems to prove that mankind is after all but a dumb masked creature saddled with the vain illusion of speech.

'And now that I've eased my conscience,' said the old lady, pulling down her veil, 'I must beg pardon for intruding at such an hour of the evening. And may I have your arm down those dreadful steps? Really, Mr Lawford, judging from the houses they erect for us, the builders must have a very peculiar notion of mankind. Is the fly still there? I expressly told the man to wait, and what I am going to do if--!'

'He's there,' Lawford rea.s.sured her, craning his neck in their slow progress to catch a peep into the quiet road. And like a flock of birds scared by a chance comer at their feeding in some deserted field, a whirring cloud of memories swept softly up in his mind--memories whose import he made no effort to discover. None the less, the leisurely descent became in their company something of a real experience even in such a br.i.m.m.i.n.g week.

'I hope, some day, you will really tell me your dream?' he said, pus.h.i.+ng the old lady's silk skirts in after her as she slowly climbed into the carriage.

'Ah, my dear Lawford, when you are my age,' she called back to him, groping her way into the rather musty gloom, 'you'll dream such dreams for yourself. Life's not what's just the fas.h.i.+on. And there are queerer things to be seen and heard just quietly in one's solitude than this busy life gives us time to discover. But as for my mystifying Bewley acquaintance--I confess I cannot make head or tail of him.'

'Was he,' said Lawford rather vaguely, looking up into the dim white face that with its plumes filled nearly the whole carriage window, 'was his face very unpleasing?'

She raised a gloved hand. 'It has haunted me, haunted me, Mr Lawford; its--its conflict! Poor fellow; I hope, I do hope, he faced his trouble out. But I shall never see him again.'

He squeezed the trembling, kindly old hand. 'I bet, Miss Sinnet,' he said earnestly, 'even your having thought kindly of the poor beggar eased his mind--whoever he may have been. I a.s.sure you, a.s.sure you of that.'

'Ay, but I did more than THINK,' replied the old lady with a chuckle that might have seemed even a little derisive if it had not been so profoundly magnanimous.

He watched the old black fly roll slowly off, and still smiling at Miss Sinnet's inscrutable finesse went back into the house. 'And now, my friend,' he said, addressing peacefully the thronging darkness, 'the time's nearly up for me to go too.'

He had made up his mind. Or, rather, it seemed as if in the unregarded silences of this last long talk his mind had made up itself. Only among impossibilities had he the shadow of a choice. In this old haunted house, amid this shallow turmoil no practicable clue could show itself of a way out. He would go away for a while.

He left the door ajar behind him for the moments still left, and stood for a while thinking. Then, lamp in hand, he descended into the breakfast-room for pen, ink, and paper. He sat for some time in that underground calm, nibbling his pen like a hara.s.sed and self-conscious schoolboy. At last he began:

'MY DEAR SHEILA,--I must tell you, to begin with, that the CHANGE has now all pa.s.sed away. I am--as near as man can be--completely myself again. And next: that I overheard all that was said to-night in the dining-room.

'I'm sorry for listening; but it's no good going over all that now. Here I am, and, as you said, for Alice's sake we must make the best of it. I am going away for a while, to get, if I can, a chance to quiet down. I suppose every one comes sooner or later to a time in life when there is nothing else to be done but just shut one's eyes and blunder on. And that's all I can do now--blunder on....'

He paused, and suddenly, at the echo of the words in his mind, a revulsion of feeling--shame and hatred of himself surged up, and he tore his letter into tiny pieces. Once more he began, 'my dear Sheila,'

dropped his pen, sat on for a long time, cold and inert, harbouring almost unendurably a pitiful, hopeless longing.... He would write to Grisel another day.

He leant back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his eyelids. And clearer than those which myriad-hued reality can ever present, pictures of the imagination swam up before his eyes. It seemed, indeed, that even now some ghost, some revenant of himself was sitting there, in the old green churchyard, roofed only with a thousand thousand stars. The breath of darkness stirred softly on his cheek. Some little scampering shape slipped by. A bird on high cried weirdly, solemnly, over the globe. He shuddered faintly, and looked out again into the small lamplit room.

Here, too, was quite as inexplicable a coming and going. A fly was walking on the table beneath his eyes, with the uneasy gait of one that has outlived his hour and most of his companions. Mice were scampering and shrieking in the empty kitchen. And all about him, in the viewless air, the phantoms of another life pa.s.sed by, unmindful of his motionless body. He fell into a lethargy of the senses, and only gradually became aware after a while of the strange long-drawn sigh of rain at the window. He rose and opened it. The night air flowed in, chilled with its waters and faintly fragrant of the dust. It soothed away all thought for a while. He turned back to his chair. He would wait until the rain had lulled before starting....

A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care, pushed open, and Mr Bethany's old face, with an intense and sharpened scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on the least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the sidelong face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on the arms of his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to detect in his heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his breast.

He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What WAS this monstrous web of Craik's? What HAD the creature been nodding and ducketing about?--those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end, when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles, then sat blinking--and softly slowly deciphered the solitary 'My dear Sheila' on Lawford's note-paper. 'H'm,' he muttered, and looked up again at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of sleep might yet be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them some hint of his presence. 'I wish to goodness, you wonderful old creature,' he muttered, wagging his head, 'I wish to goodness you'd wake up.'

For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the fading leaves. 'They don't come to me,' he said softly again; with a tiny smile on his old face. 'It's that old medieval Craik: with a face like a last year's rookery!' And again he sat, with head a little sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without, now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on Lawford.

At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him.

A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at his phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of mult.i.tudinous rain-drops, like the roar of Time's winged chariot hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend's denuded battlefield.