— that makes me feel better,” he said hoarsely, and there were murmurs of respectful approval. He knew now quite clearly. He made to speak again, and again he could not.
He pressed his throat and tried a third time. “How long?” he asked in a level voice. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Some considerable time,” said the flaxen-bearded man, glancing quickly at the others.
“How long?”
“A very long time.”
“Yes — yes,” said Graham, suddenly testy. “But I want — Is it — it is — some years? Many years? There was something — I forget what. I feel — confused. But you — ” He sobbed. “You need not fence with me. How long —?”
He stopped, breathing irregularly. He squeezed his eyes with his knuckles and sat waiting for an answer.
They spoke in undertones.
“Five or six?” he asked faintly. “More?”
“Very much more than that.”
“More!”
“More.”
He looked at them and it seemed as though imps were twitching the muscles of his face. He looked his question.
“Many years,” said the man with the red beard.
Graham struggled into a sitting position. He wiped a rheumy tear from his face with a lean hand. “Many years!” he repeated. He shut his eyes tight, opened them, and sat looking about him from one unfamiliar thing to another.
“How many years?” he asked.
“You must be prepared to be surprised.”
“Well?”
“More than a gross of years.”
He was irritated at the strange word. “More than a what?”
Two of them spoke together. Some quick remarks that were made about “decimal” he did not catch.
“How long did you say?” asked Graham. “How long? Don’t look like that. Tell me.”
Among the remarks in an undertone, his ear caught six words: “More than a couple of centuries.”
“What?” he cried, turning on the youth who he thought had spoken. “Who says —? What was that? A couple of centuries!”
“Yes,” said the man with the red beard. “Two hundred years.”
Graham repeated the words. He had been prepared to hear of a vast repose, and yet these concrete centuries defeated him.
“Two hundred years,” he said again, with the figure of a great gulf opening very slowly in his mind; and then, “Oh, but —!”
They said nothing.
“You — did you say —?”
“Two hundred years. Two centuries of years,” said the man with the red beard.
There was a pause. Graham looked at their faces and saw that what he had heard was indeed true.
“But it can’t be,” he said querulously. “I am dreaming. Trances — trances don’t last. That is not right — this is a joke you have played upon me! Tell me — some days ago, perhaps, I was walking along the coast of Cornwall —?”
His voice failed him.
The man with the flaxen beard hesitated. “I’m not very strong in history, sir,” he said weakly, and glanced at the others.
“That was it, sir,” said the youngster. “Boscastle, in the old Duchy of Cornwall — it’s in the southwest country beyond the dairy meadows. There is a house there still. I have been there.”
“Boscastle!” Graham turned his eyes to the youngster. “That was it — Boscastle. Little Boscastle. I fell asleep — somewhere there. I don’t exactly remember. I don’t exactly remember.”
He pressed his brows and whispered, “More than two hundred years!”
He began to speak quickly with a twitching face, but his heart was cold within him. “But if it is two hundred years, every soul I know, every human being that ever I saw or spoke to before I went to sleep, must be dead.”
They did not answer him.
“The Queen and the Royal Family, her Ministers, Church and State. High and low, rich and poor, one with another … Is there England still?”
“That’s a comfort! Is there London?”
“This is London, eh? And you are my assistant-custodian; assistant-custodian. And these —? Eh? Assistant-custodians too!”
He sat with a gaunt stare on his face. “But why am I here? No! Don’t talk. Be quiet. Let me — “
He sat silent, rubbed his eyes, and, uncovering them, found another little glass of pinkish fluid held towards him. He took the dose. Directly he had taken it he began to weep naturally and refreshingly.
Presently he looked at their faces, suddenly laughed through his tears, a little foolishly. “But — two — hun — dred — years!” he said. He grimaced hysterically and covered his face again.
After a space he grew calm. He sat up, his hands hanging over his knees in almost precisely the same attitude in which Isbister had found him on the cliff at Pentargen. His attention was attracted by a thick domineering voice, the footsteps of an advancing personage. “What are you doing? Why was I not warned? Surely you could tell? Someone will suffer for this. The man must be kept quiet. Are the doorways closed? All the doorways? He must be kept perfectly quiet. He must not be told. Has he been told anything?”
The man with the fair beard made some inaudible remark, and Graham looking over his shoulder saw approaching a short, fat, and thickset beardless man, with aquiline nose and heavy neck and chin. Very thick black and slightly sloping eyebrows that almost met over his nose and overhung deep grey eyes, gave his face an oddly formidable expression. He scowled momentarily at Graham and then his regard returned to the man with the flaxen beard. “These others,” he said in a voice of extreme irritation. “You had better go.”
“Go?” said the red-bearded man.
“Certainly — go now. But see the doorways are closed as you go.”
The two men addressed turned obediently, after one reluctant glance at Graham, and instead of going through the archway as he expected, walked straight to the dead wall of the apartment opposite the archway. A long strip of this apparently solid wall rolled up with a snap, hung over the two retreating men and fell again, and immediately Graham was alone with the newcomer and the purple-robed man with the flaxen beard.
For a space the thickset man took not the slightest notice of Graham, but proceeded to interrogate the other — obviously his subordinate — -upon the treatment of their charge.
