The Return | Page 4

content and
incredulity across his still and solitary surroundings. An increasing
inclination for such lonely ramblings, together with the feeling that his
continued ill-health had grown a little irksome to his wife, and that now
that he was really better she would be relieved at his absence, had
induced him to wander on from home without much considering where
the quiet lanes were leading him. And in spite of a peculiar melancholy
that had welled up into his mind during these last few days, he had
certainly smiled with a faint sense of the irony of things on lifting his
eyes in an unusually depressed moodiness to find himself looking down
on the shadows and peace of Widderstone.
With that anxious irresolution which illness so often brings in its train
he had hesitated for a few minutes before actually entering the
graveyard. But once safely within he had begun to feel extremely loth
to think of turning back again, and this not the less at remembering
with a real foreboding that it was now drawing towards evening, that
another day was nearly done. He trailed his umbrella behind him over

the grass-grown paths; staying here and there to read some time-worn
inscription; stooping a little broodingly over the dark green graves. Not
for the first time during the long laborious convalescence that had
followed apparently so slight an indisposition, a fleeting sense almost
as if of an unintelligible remorse had overtaken him, a vague thought
that behind all these past years, hidden as it were from his daily life, lay
something not yet quite reckoned with. How often as a boy had he been
rapped into a galvanic activity out of the deep reveries he used to fall
into--those fits of a kind of fishlike day-dream. How often, and even far
beyond boyhood, had he found himself bent on some distant thought or
fleeting vision that the sudden clash of self-possession had made to
seem quite illusory, and yet had left so strangely haunting. And now the
old habit had stirred out of its long sleep, and, through the gate that
Influenza in departing had left ajar, had returned upon him.
'But I suppose we are all pretty much the same, if we only knew it,' he
had consoled himself. 'We keep our crazy side to ourselves; that's all.
We just go on for years and years doing and saying whatever happens
to come up--and really keen about it too'--he had glanced up with a
kind of challenge in his face at the squat little belfry--'and then, without
the slightest reason or warning, down you go, and it all begins to wear
thin, and you get wondering what on earth it all means.' Memory
slipped back for an instant to the life that in so unusual a fashion
seemed to have floated a little aloof. Fortunately he had not discussed
these inward symptoms with his wife. How surprised Sheila would be
to see him loafing in this old, crooked churchyard. How she would lift
her dark eyebrows, with that handsome, indifferent tolerance. He
smiled, but a little confusedly; yet the thought gave even a spice of
adventure to the evening's ramble.
He loitered on, scarcely thinking at all now, stooping here and there.
These faint listless ideas made no more stir than the sunlight gilding the
fading leaves, the crisp turf underfoot. With a slight effort he stooped
even once again;--
'Stranger, a moment pause, and stay; In this dim chamber hidden away
Lies one who once found life as dear As now he finds his slumbers here:

Pray, then, the Judgement but increase His deep, everlasting peace!'
'But then, do you know you lie at peace?' Lawford audibly questioned,
gazing at the doggerel. And yet, as his eyes wandered over the blunt
green stone and the rambling crimson-berried brier that had almost
encircled it with its thorns, the echo of that whisper rather jarred. He
was, he supposed, rather a dull creature--at least people seemed to think
so--and he seldom felt at ease even with his own small facetiousness.
Besides, just that kind of question was getting very common. Now that
cleverness was the fashion most people were clever--even perfect fools;
and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body. He
turned languidly to the small cross-shaped stone on the other side:
'Here lies the body of Ann Hard, who died in child-bed. Also of James,
her infant son.'
He muttered the words over with a kind of mournful bitterness. 'That's
just it--just it; that's just how it goes!'... He yawned softly; the pathway
had come to an end. Beyond him lay ranker grass, one and another
obscurer mounds, an old scarred oak seat, shadowed by a few
everlastingly green cypresses and coral-fruited yew-trees. And above