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Title: The Altar of the Dead


Author: Henry James



Release Date: November 9, 2010  [eBook #642]
[This file was first posted on September 10, 1996]

Language: English

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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD***


Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                               THE ALTAR OF
                                 THE DEAD


                              BY HENRY JAMES

[Picture: Graphic]

                                * * * * *

                          LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
                     NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

                                * * * * *

                    This edition first published 1916

                       The text follows that of the
                            Definitive Edition




CHAPTER I.


He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved
them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.  Celebrations and
suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found
a place in his life.  He had kept each year in his own fashion the date
of Mary Antrim’s death.  It would be more to the point perhaps to say
that this occasion kept _him_: it kept him at least effectually from
doing anything else.  It took hold of him again and again with a hand of
which time had softened but never loosened the touch.  He waked to his
feast of memory as consciously as he would have waked to his
marriage-morn.  Marriage had had of old but too little to say to the
matter: for the girl who was to have been his bride there had been no
bridal embrace.  She had died of a malignant fever after the wedding-day
had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection
that promised to fill his life to the brim.

Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to say this life
could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a pale ghost, still
ordered by a sovereign presence.  He had not been a man of numerous
passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown stronger with
him than the sense of being bereft.  He had needed no priest and no altar
to make him for ever widowed.  He had done many things in the world—he
had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten.  He had tried
to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had
failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally
absent.  She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that
his tenacity set apart.  He had no arranged observance of it, but his
nerves made it all their own.  They drove him forth without mercy, and
the goal of his pilgrimage was far.  She had been buried in a London
suburb, a part then of Nature’s breast, but which he had seen lose one
after another every feature of freshness.  It was in truth during the
moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least.  They looked
at another image, they opened to another light.  Was it a credible
future?  Was it an incredible past?  Whatever the answer it was an
immense escape from the actual.

It’s true that if there weren’t other dates than this there were other
memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such memories
had greatly multiplied.  There were other ghosts in his life than the
ghost of Mary Antrim.  He had perhaps not had more losses than most men,
but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen death more closely,
but had in a manner felt it more deeply.  He had formed little by little
the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that
there was something one had to do for them.  They were there in their
simplified intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive
patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb.
When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if
their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that
they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the
hard usage of life.  They had no organised service, no reserved place, no
honour, no shelter, no safety.  Even ungenerous people provided for the
living, but even those who were called most generous did nothing for the
others.  So on George Stransom’s part had grown up with the years a
resolve that he at least would do something, do it, that is, for his
own—would perform the great charity without reproach.  Every man _had_
his own, and every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of
the soul.

It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; as
the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion with
these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called in his
thoughts the Others.  He spared them the moments, he organised the
charity.  Quite how it had risen he probably never could have told you,
but what came to pass was that an altar, such as was after all within
everybody’s compass, lighted with perpetual candles and dedicated to
these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritual spaces.  He had
wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a religion; being
very sure, and not a little content, that he hadn’t at all events the
religion some of the people he had known wanted him to have.  Gradually
this question was straightened out for him: it became clear to him that
the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been simply the
religion of the Dead.  It suited his inclination, it satisfied his
spirit, it gave employment to his piety.  It answered his love of great
offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no shrine could be more
bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than those to which his worship
was attached.  He had no imagination about these things but that they
were accessible to any one who should feel the need of them.  The poorest
could build such temples of the spirit—could make them blaze with candles
and smoke with incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers.  The
cost, in the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on the
generous heart.




CHAPTER II.


He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as happened, an emotion
not unconnected with that range of feeling.  Walking home at the close of
a busy day he was arrested in the London street by the particular effect
of a shop-front that lighted the dull brown air with its mercenary grin
and before which several persons were gathered.  It was the window of a
jeweller whose diamonds and sapphires seemed to laugh, in flashes like
high notes of sound, with the mere joy of knowing how much more they were
“worth” than most of the dingy pedestrians staring at them from the other
side of the pane.  Stransom lingered long enough to suspend, in a vision,
a string of pearls about the white neck of Mary Antrim, and then was kept
an instant longer by the sound of a voice he knew.  Next him was a
mumbling old woman, and beyond the old woman a gentleman with a lady on
his arm.  It was from him, from Paul Creston, the voice had proceeded: he
was talking with the lady of some precious object in the window.
Stransom had no sooner recognised him than the old woman turned away; but
just with this growth of opportunity came a felt strangeness that stayed
him in the very act of laying his hand on his friend’s arm.  It lasted
but the instant, only that space sufficed for the flash of a wild
question.  Was _not_ Mrs. Creston dead?—the ambiguity met him there in
the short drop of her husband’s voice, the drop conjugal, if it ever was,
and in the way the two figures leaned to each other.  Creston, making a
step to look at something else, came nearer, glanced at him, started and
exclaimed—behaviour the effect of which was at first only to leave
Stransom staring, staring back across the months at the different face,
the wholly other face, the poor man had shown him last, the blurred
ravaged mask bent over the open grave by which they had stood together.
That son of affliction wasn’t in mourning now; he detached his arm from
his companion’s to grasp the hand of the older friend.  He coloured as
well as smiled in the strong light of the shop when Stransom raised a
tentative hat to the lady.  Stransom had just time to see she was pretty
before he found himself gaping at a fact more portentous.  “My dear
fellow, let me make you acquainted with my wife.”

Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half a minute, at the
rate we live in polite society, it had practically become, for our
friend, the mere memory of a shock.  They stood there and laughed and
talked; Stransom had instantly whisked the shock out of the way, to keep
it for private consumption.  He felt himself grimace, he heard himself
exaggerate the proper, but was conscious of turning not a little faint.
That new woman, that hired performer, Mrs. Creston?  Mrs. Creston had
been more living for him than any woman but one.  This lady had a face
that shone as publicly as the jeweller’s window, and in the happy candour
with which she wore her monstrous character was an effect of gross
immodesty.  The character of Paul Creston’s wife thus attributed to her
was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to know
perfectly that he knew.  The happy pair had just arrived from America,
and Stransom hadn’t needed to be told this to guess the nationality of
the lady.  Somehow it deepened the foolish air that her husband’s
confused cordiality was unable to conceal.  Stransom recalled that he had
heard of poor Creston’s having, while his bereavement was still fresh,
crossed the sea for what people in such predicaments call a little
change.  He had found the little change indeed, he had brought the little
change back; it was the little change that stood there and that, do what
he would, he couldn’t, while he showed those high front teeth of his,
look other than a conscious ass about.  They were going into the shop,
Mrs. Creston said, and she begged Mr. Stransom to come with them and help
to decide.  He thanked her, opening his watch and pleading an engagement
for which he was already late, and they parted while she shrieked into
the fog, “Mind now you come to see me right away!”  Creston had had the
delicacy not to suggest that, and Stransom hoped it hurt him somewhere to
hear her scream it to all the echoes.

He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in his life to go near
her.  She was perhaps a human being, but Creston oughtn’t to have shown
her without precautions, oughtn’t indeed to have shown her at all.  His
precautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer, and the
people at home would never have mentioned extradition.  This was a wife
for foreign service or purely external use; a decent consideration would
have spared her the injury of comparisons.  Such was the first flush of
George Stransom’s reaction; but as he sat alone that night—there were
particular hours he always passed alone—the harshness dropped from it and
left only the pity.  _He_ could spend an evening with Kate Creston, if
the man to whom she had given everything couldn’t.  He had known her
twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he might perhaps have
been unfaithful.  She was all cleverness and sympathy and charm; her
house had been the very easiest in all the world and her friendship the
very firmest.  Without accidents he had loved her, without accidents
every one had loved her: she had made the passions about her as regular
as the moon makes the tides.  She had been also of course far too good
for her husband, but he never suspected it, and in nothing had she been
more admirable than in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep
every one else (keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out.
Here was a man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had
given it up—dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and she had
had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on her
grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had replaced.
The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom’s eyes fill; and he had
that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a world without delicacy,
had a right to hold up his head.  While he smoked, after dinner, he had a
book in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his eyes, in the
swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston’s, and it was
into their sad silences he looked.  It was to him her sentient spirit had
turned, knowing it to be of her he would think.  He thought for a long
time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live—how they could
open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their
last.  They had looks that survived—had them as great poets had quoted
lines.

The newspaper lay by his chair—the thing that came in the afternoon and
the servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it he had
mechanically unfolded and then dropped it.  Before he went to bed he took
it up, and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by five
words that made him start.  He stood staring, before the fire, at the
“Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.,” the man who ten years earlier had
been the nearest of his friends and whose deposition from this eminence
had practically left it without an occupant.  He had seen him after their
rupture, but hadn’t now seen him for years.  Standing there before the
fire he turned cold as he read what had befallen him.  Promoted a short
time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton Hague
had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness consequent on
the bite of a poisonous snake.  His career was compressed by the
newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of which excited on George
Stransom’s part no warmer feeling than one of relief at the absence of
any mention of their quarrel, an incident accidentally tainted at the
time, thanks to their joint immersion in large affairs, with a horrible
publicity.  Public indeed was the wrong Stransom had, to his own sense,
suffered, the insult he had blankly taken from the only man with whom he
had ever been intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University
years, the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public that he
had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he had
completely overlooked it.  It had made the difference for him that
friendship too was all over, but it had only made just that one.  The
shock of interests had been private, intensely so; but the action taken
by Hague had been in the face of men.  To-day it all seemed to have
occurred merely to the end that George Stransom should think of him as
“Hague” and measure exactly how much he himself could resemble a stone.
He went cold, suddenly and horribly cold, to bed.




CHAPTER III.


The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb, he knew his
long walk had tired him.  In the dreadful cemetery alone he had been on
his feet an hour.  Instinctively, coming back, they had taken him a
devious course, and it was a desert in which no circling cabman hovered
over possible prey.  He paused on a corner and measured the dreariness;
then he made out through the gathered dusk that he was in one of those
tracts of London which are less gloomy by night than by day, because, in
the former case of the civil gift of light.  By day there was nothing,
but by night there were lamps, and George Stransom was in a mood that
made lamps good in themselves.  It wasn’t that they could show him
anything, it was only that they could burn clear.  To his surprise,
however, after a while, they did show him something: the arch of a high
doorway approached by a low terrace of steps, in the depth of which—it
formed a dim vestibule—the raising of a curtain at the moment he passed
gave him a glimpse of an avenue of gloom with a glow of tapers at the
end.  He stopped and looked up, recognising the place as a church.  The
thought quickly came to him that since he was tired he might rest there;
so that after a moment he had in turn pushed up the leathern curtain and
gone in.  It was a temple of the old persuasion, and there had evidently
been a function—perhaps a service for the dead; the high altar was still
a blaze of candles.  This was an exhibition he always liked, and he
dropped into a seat with relief.  More than it had ever yet come home to
him it struck him as good there should be churches.

This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; a verger
shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed to Stransom there was
hospitality in the thick sweet air.  Was it only the savour of the
incense or was it something of larger intention?  He had at any rate
quitted the great grey suburb and come nearer to the warm centre.  He
presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at last even a sense of
community with the only worshipper in his neighbourhood, the sombre
presence of a woman, in mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he could
see of her and who had sunk deep into prayer at no great distance from
him.  He wished he could sink, like her, to the very bottom, be as
motionless, as rapt in prostration.  After a few moments he shifted his
seat; it was almost indelicate to be so aware of her.  But Stransom
subsequently quite lost himself, floating away on the sea of light.  If
occasions like this had been more frequent in his life he would have had
more present the great original type, set up in a myriad temples, of the
unapproachable shrine he had erected in his mind.  That shrine had begun
in vague likeness to church pomps, but the echo had ended by growing more
distinct than the sound.  The sound now rang out, the type blazed at him
with all its fires and with a mystery of radiance in which endless
meanings could glow.  The thing became as he sat there his appropriate
altar and each starry candle an appropriate vow.  He numbered them, named
them, grouped them—it was the silent roll-call of his Dead.  They made
together a brightness vast and intense, a brightness in which the mere
chapel of his thoughts grew so dim that as it faded away he asked himself
if he shouldn’t find his real comfort in some material act, some outward
worship.

This idea took possession of him while, at a distance, the black-robed
lady continued prostrate; he was quietly thrilled with his conception,
which at last brought him to his feet in the sudden excitement of a plan.
He wandered softly through the aisles, pausing in the different chapels,
all save one applied to a special devotion.  It was in this clear recess,
lampless and unapplied, that he stood longest—the length of time it took
him fully to grasp the conception of gilding it with his bounty.  He
should snatch it from no other rites and associate it with nothing
profane; he would simply take it as it should be given up to him and make
it a masterpiece of splendour and a mountain of fire.  Tended sacredly
all the year, with the sanctifying church round it, it would always be
ready for his offices.  There would be difficulties, but from the first
they presented themselves only as difficulties surmounted.  Even for a
person so little affiliated the thing would be a matter of arrangement.
He saw it all in advance, and how bright in especial the place would
become to him in the intermissions of toil and the dusk of afternoons;
how rich in assurance at all times, but especially in the indifferent
world.  Before withdrawing he drew nearer again to the spot where he had
first sat down, and in the movement he met the lady whom he had seen
praying and who was now on her way to the door.  She passed him quickly,
and he had only a glimpse of her pale face and her unconscious, almost
sightless eyes.  For that instant she looked faded and handsome.

This was the origin of the rites more public, yet certainly esoteric,
that he at last found himself able to establish.  It took a long time, it
took a year, and both the process and the result would have been—for any
who knew—a vivid picture of his good faith.  No one did know, in fact—no
one but the bland ecclesiastics whose acquaintance he had promptly
sought, whose objections he had softly overridden, whose curiosity and
sympathy he had artfully charmed, whose assent to his eccentric
munificence he had eventually won, and who had asked for concessions in
exchange for indulgences.  Stransom had of course at an early stage of
his enquiry been referred to the Bishop, and the Bishop had been
delightfully human, the Bishop had been almost amused.  Success was
within sight, at any rate from the moment the attitude of those whom it
concerned became liberal in response to liberality.  The altar and the
sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and
customary worship, were to be splendidly maintained; all that Stransom
reserved to himself was the number of his lights and the free enjoyment
of his intention.  When the intention had taken complete effect the
enjoyment became even greater than he had ventured to hope.  He liked to
think of this effect when far from it, liked to convince himself of it
yet again when near.  He was not often indeed so near as that a visit to
it hadn’t perforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but the
time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him more a contribution to
his other interests than a betrayal of them.  Even a loaded life might be
easier when one had added a new necessity to it.

How much easier was probably never guessed by those who simply knew there
were hours when he disappeared and for many of whom there was a vulgar
reading of what they used to call his plunges.  These plunges were into
depths quieter than the deep sea-caves, and the habit had at the end of a
year or two become the one it would have cost him most to relinquish.
Now they had really, his Dead, something that was indefensibly theirs;
and he liked to think that they might in cases be the Dead of others, as
well as that the Dead of others might be invoked there under the
protection of what he had done.  Whoever bent a knee on the carpet he had
laid down appeared to him to act in the spirit of his intention.  Each of
his lights had a name for him, and from time to time a new light was
kindled.  This was what he had fundamentally agreed for, that there
should always be room for them all.  What those who passed or lingered
saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars called suddenly into
vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for whom it evidently had a
fascination, often seated there in a maze or a doze; but half the
satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and fitful worshipper was
that he found the years of his life there, and the ties, the affections,
the struggles, the submissions, the conquests, if there had been such, a
record of that adventurous journey in which the beginnings and the
endings of human relations are the lettered mile-stones.  He had in
general little taste for the past as a part of his own history; at other
times and in other places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and
impossible to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with
something of that positive gladness with which one adjusts one’s self to
an ache that begins to succumb to treatment.  To the treatment of time
the malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him.  The day
was written for him there on which he had first become acquainted with
death, and the successive phases of the acquaintance were marked each
with a flame.

The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom had entered that
dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one dies every day.  It
was only yesterday that Kate Creston had flashed out her white fire; yet
already there were younger stars ablaze on the tips of the tapers.
Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense drew closer to
him by entering this company.  He went over it, head by head, till he
felt like the shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd’s vision
of differences imperceptible.  He knew his candles apart, up to the
colour of the flame, and would still have known them had their positions
all been changed.  To other imaginations they might stand for other
things—that they should stand for something to be hushed before was all
he desired; but he was intensely conscious of the personal note of each
and of the distinguishable way it contributed to the concert.  There were
hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his
friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a
connexion more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy
with them in life.  In regard to those from whom one was separated by the
long curves of the globe such a connexion could only be an improvement:
it brought them instantly within reach.  Of course there were gaps in the
constellation, for Stransom knew he could only pretend to act for his
own, and it wasn’t every figure passing before his eyes into the great
obscure that was entitled to a memorial.  There was a strange
sanctification in death, but some characters were more sanctified by
being forgotten than by being remembered.  The greatest blank in the
shining page was the memory of Acton Hague, of which he inveterately
tried to rid himself.  For Acton Hague no flame could ever rise on any
altar of his.




CHAPTER IV.


Every year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he went to
church as he had done the day his idea was born.  It was on this
occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he began to
observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least as frequent as
himself.  Others of the faithful, and in the rest of the church, came and
went, appealing sometimes, when they disappeared, to a vague or to a
particular recognition; but this unfailing presence was always to be
observed when he arrived and still in possession when he departed.  He
was surprised, the first time, at the promptitude with which it assumed
an identity for him—the identity of the lady whom two years before, on
his anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic face
he had had so flitting a vision.  Given the time that had passed, his
recollection of her was fresh enough to make him wonder.  Of himself she
had of course no impression, or rather had had none at first: the time
came when her manner of transacting her business suggested her having
gradually guessed his call to be of the same order.  She used his altar
for her own purpose—he could only hope that sad and solitary as she
always struck him, she used it for her own Dead.  There were
interruptions, infidelities, all on his part, calls to other associations
and duties; but as the months went on he found her whenever he returned,
and he ended by taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her
almost the contentment he had given himself.  They worshipped side by
side so often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure, so
straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in their
rites.  She was younger than he, but she looked as if her Dead were at
least as numerous as his candles.  She had no colour, no sound, no fault,
and another of the things about which he had made up his mind was that
she had no fortune.  Always black-robed, she must have had a succession
of sorrows.  People weren’t poor, after all, whom so many losses could
overtake; they were positively rich when they had had so much to give up.
But the air of this devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in
any attitude, a beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom
that she had known more kinds of trouble than one.

He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but
occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons,
it used to come back to him that there were glories.  There were moreover
friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found
himself sitting out concerts.  On one of these winter afternoons, in St.
James’s Hall, he became aware after he had seated himself that the lady
he had so often seen at church was in the place next him and was
evidently alone, as he also this time happened to be.  She was at first
too absorbed in the consideration of the programme to heed him, but when
she at last glanced at him he took advantage of the movement to speak to
her, greeting her with the remark that he felt as if he already knew her.
She smiled as she said “Oh yes, I recognise you”; yet in spite of this
admission of long acquaintance it was the first he had seen of her smile.
The effect of it was suddenly to contribute more to that acquaintance
than all the previous meetings had done.  He hadn’t “taken in,” he said
to himself, that she was so pretty.  Later, that evening—it was while he
rolled along in a hansom on his way to dine out—he added that he hadn’t
taken in that she was so interesting.  The next morning in the midst of
his work he quite suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression
of her, beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last
reached the sea.

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of what
had now passed between them.  It wasn’t much, but it had just made the
difference.  They had listened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they
had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to which they
moved together, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter of
getting away.  She had thanked him and put up her umbrella, slipping into
the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him
to remember at leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual
scene of that coincidence.  This omission struck him now as natural and
then again as perverse.  She mightn’t in the least have allowed his
warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn’t he would have judged
her an underbred woman.  It was odd that when nothing had really ever
brought them together he should have been able successfully to assume
they were in a manner old friends—that this negative quantity was somehow
more than they could express.  His success, it was true, had been
qualified by her quick escape, so that there grew up in him an absurd
desire to put it to some better test.  Save in so far as some other poor
chance might help him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at
church.  Left to himself he would have gone to church the very next
afternoon, just for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there.
But he wasn’t left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last,
after he had virtually made up his mind to go.  The influence that kept
him away really revealed to him how little to himself his Dead _ever_
left him.  He went only for _them_—for nothing else in the world.

The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hated to connect
the place with anything but his offices or to give a glimpse of the
curiosity that had been on the point of moving him.  It was absurd to
weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that
might with ease have been daily or hourly; yet the tangle got itself
woven.  He was sorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy
spell had been broken and he had lost a familiar security.  At the last,
however, he asked himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear
of this muddle about motives.  After an interval neither longer nor
shorter than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that
he should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the
concert.  This indifference didn’t prevent his at once noting that for
the only time since he had first seen her she wasn’t on the spot.  He had
now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but she didn’t arrive,
and when he went away still missing her he was profanely and consentingly
sorry.  If her absence made the tangle more intricate, that was all her
own doing.  By the end of another year it was very intricate indeed; but
by that time he didn’t in the least care, and it was only his cultivated
consciousness that had given him scruples.  Three times in three months
he had gone to church without finding her, and he felt he hadn’t needed
these occasions to show him his suspense had dropped.  Yet it was,
incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacy that had
kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of course immediately have
recognised his description of her, whether she had been seen at other
hours.  His delicacy had kept him from asking any question about her at
any time, and it was exactly the same virtue that had left him so free to
be decently civil to her at the concert.

This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him when she finally
met his eyes—it was after a fourth trial—to predetermine quite fixedly
his awaiting her retreat.  He joined her in the street as soon as she had
moved, asking her if he might accompany her a certain distance.  With her
placid permission he went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which
she had business: she let him know it was not where she lived.  She
lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in
connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and
regular occupations.  She wasn’t, the mourning niece, in her first youth,
and her vanished freshness had left something behind that, for Stransom,
represented the proof it had been tragically sacrificed.  Whatever she
gave him the assurance of she gave without references.  She might have
been a divorced duchess—she might have been an old maid who taught the
harp.




CHAPTER V.


They fell at last into the way of walking together almost every time they
met, though for a long time still they never met but at church.  He
couldn’t ask her to come and see him, and as if she hadn’t a proper place
to receive him she never invited her friend.  As much as himself she knew
the world of London, but from an undiscussed instinct of privacy they
haunted the region not mapped on the social chart.  On the return she
always made him leave her at the same corner.  She looked with him, as a
pretext for a pause, at the depressed things in suburban shop-fronts; and
there was never a word he had said to her that she hadn’t beautifully
understood.  For long ages he never knew her name, any more than she had
ever pronounced his own; but it was not their names that mattered, it was
only their perfect practice and their common need.

These things made their whole relation so impersonal that they hadn’t the
rules or reasons people found in ordinary friendships.  They didn’t care
for the things it was supposed necessary to care for in the intercourse
of the world.  They ended one day—they never knew which of them expressed
it first—by throwing out the idea that they didn’t care for each other.
Over this idea they grew quite intimate; they rallied to it in a way that
marked a fresh start in their confidence.  If to feel deeply together
about certain things wholly distinct from themselves didn’t constitute a
safety, where was safety to be looked for?  Not lightly nor often, not
without occasion nor without emotion, any more than in any other
reference by serious people to a mystery of their faith; but when
something had happened to warm, as it were, the air for it, they came as
near as they could come to calling their Dead by name.  They felt it was
coming very near to utter their thought at all.  The word “they”
expressed enough; it limited the mention, it had a dignity of its own,
and if, in their talk, you had heard our friends use it, you might have
taken them for a pair of pagans of old alluding decently to the
domesticated gods.  They never knew—at least Stransom never knew—how they
had learned to be sure about each other.  If it had been with each a
question of what the other was there for, the certitude had come in some
fine way of its own.  Any faith, after all, has the instinct of
propagation, and it was as natural as it was beautiful that they should
have taken pleasure on the spot in the imagination of a following.  If
the following was for each but a following of one it had proved in the
event sufficient.  Her debt, however, of course was much greater than
his, because while she had only given him a worshipper he had given her a
splendid temple.  Once she said she pitied him for the length of his
list—she had counted his candles almost as often as himself—and this made
him wonder what could have been the length of hers.  He had wondered
before at the coincidence of their losses, especially as from time to
time a new candle was set up.  On some occasion some accident led him to
express this curiosity, and she answered as if in surprise that he hadn’t
already understood.  “Oh for me, you know, the more there are the
better—there could never be too many.  I should like hundreds and
hundreds—I should like thousands; I should like a great mountain of
light.”

Then of course in a flash he understood.  “Your Dead are only One?”

She hung back at this as never yet.  “Only One,” she answered, colouring
as if now he knew her guarded secret.  It really made him feel he knew
less than before, so difficult was it for him to reconstitute a life in
which a single experience had so belittled all others.  His own life,
round its central hollow, had been packed close enough.  After this she
appeared to have regretted her confession, though at the moment she spoke
there had been pride in her very embarrassment.  She declared to him that
his own was the larger, the dearer possession—the portion one would have
chosen if one had been able to choose; she assured him she could
perfectly imagine some of the echoes with which his silences were
peopled.  He knew she couldn’t: one’s relation to what one had loved and
hated had been a relation too distinct from the relations of others.  But
this didn’t affect the fact that they were growing old together in their
piety.  She was a feature of that piety, but even at the ripe stage of
acquaintance in which they occasionally arranged to meet at a concert or
to go together to an exhibition she was not a feature of anything else.
The most that happened was that his worship became paramount.  Friend by
friend dropped away till at last there were more emblems on his altar
than houses left him to enter.  She was more than any other the friend
who remained, but she was unknown to all the rest.  Once when she had
discovered, as they called it, a new star, she used the expression that
the chapel at last was full.

“Oh no,” Stransom replied, “there is a great thing wanting for that!  The
chapel will never be full till a candle is set up before which all the
others will pale.  It will be the tallest candle of all.”

Her mild wonder rested on him.  “What candle do you mean?”

“I mean, dear lady, my own.”

He had learned after a long time that she earned money by her pen,
writing under a pseudonym she never disclosed in magazines he never saw.
She knew too well what he couldn’t read and what she couldn’t write, and
she taught him to cultivate indifference with a success that did much for
their good relations.  Her invisible industry was a convenience to him;
it helped his contented thought of her, the thought that rested in the
dignity of her proud obscure life, her little remunerated art and her
little impenetrable home.  Lost, with her decayed relative, in her dim
suburban world, she came to the surface for him in distant places.  She
was really the priestess of his altar, and whenever he quitted England he
committed it to her keeping.  She proved to him afresh that women have
more of the spirit of religion than men; he felt his fidelity pale and
faint in comparison with hers.  He often said to her that since he had so
little time to live he rejoiced in her having so much; so glad was he to
think she would guard the temple when he should have been called.  He had
a great plan for that, which of course he told her too, a bequest of
money to keep it up in undiminished state.  Of the administration of this
fund he would appoint her superintendent, and if the spirit should move
her she might kindle a taper even for him.

“And who will kindle one even for me?” she then seriously asked.




CHAPTER VI.


She was always in mourning, yet the day he came back from the longest
absence he had yet made her appearance immediately told him she had
lately had a bereavement.  They met on this occasion as she was leaving
the church, so that postponing his own entrance he instantly offered to
turn round and walk away with her.  She considered, then she said: “Go in
now, but come and see me in an hour.”  He knew the small vista of her
street, closed at the end and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the
pairs of shabby little houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united,
were like married couples on bad terms.  Often, however, as he had gone
to the beginning he had never gone beyond.  Her aunt was dead—that he
immediately guessed, as well as that it made a difference; but when she
had for the first time mentioned her number he found himself, on her
leaving him, not a little agitated by this sudden liberality.  She wasn’t
a person with whom, after all, one got on so very fast: it had taken him
months and months to learn her name, years and years to learn her
address.  If she had looked, on this reunion, so much older to him, how
in the world did he look to her?  She had reached the period of life he
had long since reached, when, after separations, the marked clock-face of
the friend we meet announces the hour we have tried to forget.  He
couldn’t have said what he expected as, at the end of his waiting, he
turned the corner where for years he had always paused; simply not to
pause was a efficient cause for emotion.  It was an event, somehow; and
in all their long acquaintance there had never been an event.  This one
grew larger when, five minutes later, in the faint elegance of her little
drawing-room, she quavered out a greeting that showed the measure she
took of it.  He had a strange sense of having come for something in
particular; strange because literally there was nothing particular
between them, nothing save that they were at one on their great point,
which had long ago become a magnificent matter of course.  It was true
that after she had said “You can always come now, you know,” the thing he
was there for seemed already to have happened.  He asked her if it was
the death of her aunt that made the difference; to which she replied:
“She never knew I knew you.  I wished her not to.”  The beautiful
clearness of her candour—her faded beauty was like a summer
twilight—disconnected the words from any image of deceit.  They might
have struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had always
given him a sense of noble reasons.  The vanished aunt was present, as he
looked about him, in the small complacencies of the room, the beaded
velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we know, he had the worship
of the Dead, he found himself not definitely regretting this lady.  If
she wasn’t in his long list, however, she was in her niece’s short one,
and Stransom presently observed to the latter that now at least, in the
place they haunted together, she would have another object of devotion.

“Yes, I shall have another.  She was very kind to me.  It’s that that’s
the difference.”

He judged, wondering a good deal before he made any motion to leave her,
that the difference would somehow be very great and would consist of
still other things than her having let him come in.  It rather chilled
him, for they had been happy together as they were.  He extracted from
her at any rate an intimation that she should now have means less
limited, that her aunt’s tiny fortune had come to her, so that there was
henceforth only one to consume what had formerly been made to suffice for
two.  This was a joy to Stransom, because it had hitherto been equally
impossible for him either to offer her presents or contentedly to stay
his hand.  It was too ugly to be at her side that way, abounding himself
and yet not able to overflow—a demonstration that would have been
signally a false note.  Even her better situation too seemed only to draw
out in a sense the loneliness of her future.  It would merely help her to
live more and more for their small ceremonial, and this at a time when he
himself had begun wearily to feel that, having set it in motion, he might
depart.  When they had sat a while in the pale parlour she got up—“This
isn’t my room: let us go into mine.”  They had only to cross the narrow
hall, as he found, to pass quite into another air.  When she had closed
the door of the second room, as she called it, he felt at last in real
possession of her.  The place had the flush of life—it was expressive;
its dark red walls were articulate with memories and relics.  These were
simple things—photographs and water-colours, scraps of writing framed and
ghosts of flowers embalmed; but a moment sufficed to show him they had a
common meaning.  It was here she had lived and worked, and she had
already told him she would make no change of scene.  He read the
reference in the objects about her—the general one to places and times;
but after a minute he distinguished among them a small portrait of a
gentleman.  At a distance and without their glasses his eyes were only so
caught by it as to feel a vague curiosity.  Presently this impulse
carried him nearer, and in another moment he was staring at the picture
in stupefaction and with the sense that some sound had broken from him.
He was further conscious that he showed his companion a white face when
he turned round on her gasping: “Acton Hague!”

She matched his great wonder.  “Did you know him?”

“He was the friend of all my youth—of my early manhood.  And _you_ knew
him?”

She coloured at this and for a moment her answer failed; her eyes
embraced everything in the place, and a strange irony reached her lips as
she echoed: “Knew him?”

Then Stransom understood, while the room heaved like the cabin of a ship,
that its whole contents cried out with him, that it was a museum in his
honour, that all her later years had been addressed to him and that the
shrine he himself had reared had been passionately converted to this use.
It was all for Acton Hague that she had kneeled every day at his altar.
What need had there been for a consecrated candle when he was present in
the whole array? The revelation so smote our friend in the face that he
dropped into a seat and sat silent.  He had quickly felt her shaken by
the force of his shock, but as she sank on the sofa beside him and laid
her hand on his arm he knew almost as soon that she mightn’t resent it as
much as she’d have liked.




CHAPTER VII.


He learned in that instant two things: one being that even in so long a
time she had gathered no knowledge of his great intimacy and his great
quarrel; the other that in spite of this ignorance, strangely enough, she
supplied on the spot a reason for his stupor.  “How extraordinary,” he
presently exclaimed, “that we should never have known!”

She gave a wan smile which seemed to Stransom stranger even than the fact
itself.  “I never, never spoke of him.”

He looked again about the room.  “Why then, if your life had been so full
of him?”

“Mayn’t I put you that question as well?  Hadn’t your life also been full
of him?”

“Any one’s, every one’s life who had the wonderful experience of knowing
him.  _I_ never spoke of him,” Stransom added in a moment, “because he
did me—years ago—an unforgettable wrong.”  She was silent, and with the
full effect of his presence all about them it almost startled her guest
to hear no protest escape her.  She accepted his words, he turned his
eyes to her again to see in what manner she accepted them.  It was with
rising tears and a rare sweetness in the movement of putting out her hand
to take his own.  Nothing more wonderful had ever appeared to him than,
in that little chamber of remembrance and homage, to see her convey with
such exquisite mildness that as from Acton Hague any injury was credible.
The clock ticked in the stillness—Hague had probably given it to her—and
while he let her hold his hand with a tenderness that was almost an
assumption of responsibility for his old pain as well as his new,
Stransom after a minute broke out: “Good God, how he must have used
_you_!”

She dropped his hand at this, got up and, moving across the room, made
straight a small picture to which, on examining it, he had given a slight
push.  Then turning round on him with her pale gaiety recovered, “I’ve
forgiven him!” she declared.

“I know what you’ve done,” said Stransom “I know what you’ve done for
years.”  For a moment they looked at each other through it all with their
long community of service in their eyes.  This short passage made, to his
sense, for the woman before him, an immense, an absolutely naked
confession; which was presently, suddenly blushing red and changing her
place again, what she appeared to learn he perceived in it.  He got up
and “How you must have loved him!” he cried.

“Women aren’t like men.  They can love even where they’ve suffered.”

“Women are wonderful,” said Stransom.  “But I assure you I’ve forgiven
him too.”

“If I had known of anything so strange I wouldn’t have brought you here.”

“So that we might have gone on in our ignorance to the last?”

“What do you call the last?” she asked, smiling still.

At this he could smile back at her.  “You’ll see—when it comes.”

She thought of that.  “This is better perhaps; but as we were—it was
good.”

He put her the question.  “Did it never happen that he spoke of me?”

Considering more intently she made no answer, and he then knew he should
have been adequately answered by her asking how often he himself had
spoken of their terrible friend.  Suddenly a brighter light broke in her
face and an excited idea sprang to her lips in the appeal: “You _have_
forgiven him?”

“How, if I hadn’t, could I linger here?”

She visibly winced at the deep but unintended irony of this; but even
while she did so she panted quickly: “Then in the lights on your altar—?”

“There’s never a light for Acton Hague!”

She stared with a dreadful fall, “But if he’s one of your Dead?”

“He’s one of the world’s, if you like—he’s one of yours.  But he’s not
one of mine.  Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me.  They’re
mine in death because they were mine in life.”

“_He _was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased to be.  If
you forgave him you went back to him.  Those whom we’ve once loved—”

“Are those who can hurt us most,” Stransom broke in.

“Ah it’s not true—you’ve _not_ forgiven him!” she wailed with a passion
that startled him.

He looked at her as never yet.  “What was it he did to you?”

“Everything!”  Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell.
“Good-bye.”

He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man’s death.
“You mean that we meet no more?”

“Not as we’ve met—not _there_!”

He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement
that rang out in the word she so expressively sounded.  “But what’s
changed—for you?”

She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the first time
since he had known her made her splendidly stern.  “How can you
understand now when you didn’t understand before?”

“I didn’t understand before only because I didn’t know.  Now that I know,
I see what I’ve been living with for years,” Stransom went on very
gently.

She looked at him with a larger allowance, doing this gentleness justice.
“How can I then, on this new knowledge of my own, ask you to continue to
live with it?”

“I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings,” Stransom began; but
she quietly interrupted him.

“You set up your altar, and when I wanted one most I found it
magnificently ready.  I used it with the gratitude I’ve always shown you,
for I knew it from of old to be dedicated to Death.  I told you long ago
that my Dead weren’t many.  Yours were, but all you had done for them was
none too much for _my_ worship!  You had placed a great light for Each—I
gathered them together for One!”

“We had simply different intentions,” he returned.  “That, as you say, I
perfectly knew, and I don’t see why your intention shouldn’t still
sustain you.”

“That’s because you’re generous—you can imagine and think.  But the spell
is broken.”

It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance, that it really
was, and the prospect stretched grey and void before him.  All he could
say, however, was: “I hope you’ll try before you give up.”

“If I had known you had ever known him I should have taken for granted he
had his candle,” she presently answered.  “What’s changed, as you say, is
that on making the discovery I find he never has had it.  That makes _my_
attitude”—she paused as thinking how to express it, then said simply—“all
wrong.”

“Come once again,” he pleaded.

“Will you give him his candle?” she asked.

He waited, but only because it would sound ungracious; not because of a
doubt of his feeling.  “I can’t do that!” he declared at last.

“Then good-bye.”  And she gave him her hand again.

He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation of everything
that had opened out to him, he felt the need to recover himself as he
could only do in solitude.  Yet he lingered—lingered to see if she had no
compromise to express, no attenuation to propose.  But he only met her
great lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was as sorry for
him as for any one else.  This made him say: “At least, in any case, I
may see you here.”

“Oh yes, come if you like.  But I don’t think it will do.”

He looked round the room once more, knowing how little he was sure it
would do.  He felt also stricken and more and more cold, and his chill
was like an ague in which he had to make an effort not to shake.  Then he
made doleful reply: “I must try on my side—if you can’t try on yours.”
She came out with him to the hall and into the doorway, and here he put
her the question he held he could least answer from his own wit.  “Why
have you never let me come before?”

“Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should have had to tell her
how I came to know you.”

“And what would have been the objection to that?”

“It would have entailed other explanations; there would at any rate have
been that danger.”

“Surely she knew you went every day to church,” Stransom objected.

“She didn’t know what I went for.”

“Of me then she never even heard?”

“You’ll think I was deceitful.  But I didn’t need to be!”

He was now on the lower door-step, and his hostess held the door
half-closed behind him.  Through what remained of the opening he saw her
framed face.  He made a supreme appeal.  “What _did_ he do to you?”

“It would have come out—_she _would have told you.  That fear at my
heart—that was my reason!”  And she closed the door, shutting him out.




CHAPTER VIII.


He had ruthlessly abandoned her—that of course was what he had done.
Stransom made it all out in solitude, at leisure, fitting the unmatched
pieces gradually together and dealing one by one with a hundred obscure
points.  She had known Hague only after her present friend’s relations
with him had wholly terminated; obviously indeed a good while after; and
it was natural enough that of his previous life she should have
ascertained only what he had judged good to communicate.  There were
passages it was quite conceivable that even in moments of the tenderest
expansion he should have withheld.  Of many facts in the career of a man
so in the eye of the world there was of course a common knowledge; but
this lady lived apart from public affairs, and the only time perfectly
clear to her would have been the time following the dawn of her own
drama.  A man in her place would have “looked up” the past—would even
have consulted old newspapers.  It remained remarkable indeed that in her
long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a
train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact
come: it had simply been that security had prevailed.  She had taken what
Hague had given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions
was only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme
reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to produce.

This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught his breath
again and again as it came over him that the woman with whom he had had
for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom Acton Hague, of all
men in the world, had more or less fashioned.  Such as she sat there
to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him.  Beneficent, blameless as
Stransom held her, he couldn’t rid himself of the sense that he had been,
as who should say, swindled.  She had imposed upon him hugely, though she
had known it as little as he.  All this later past came back to him as a
time grotesquely misspent.  Such at least were his first reflexions;
after a while he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it,
more troubled.  He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for
himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which was to
make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate.  He felt her
spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own to the very
degree in which she might have been, in which she certainly had been,
more wronged.  A women, when wronged, was always more wronged than a man,
and there were conditions when the least she could have got off with was
more than the most he could have to bear.  He was sure this rare creature
wouldn’t have got off with the least.  He was awestruck at the thought of
such a surrender—such a prostration.  Moulded indeed she had been by
powerful hands, to have converted her injury into an exaltation so
sublime.  The fellow had only had to die for everything that was ugly in
him to be washed out in a torrent.  It was vain to try to guess what had
taken place, but nothing could be clearer than that she had ended by
accusing herself.  She absolved him at every point, she adored her very
wounds.  The passion by which he had profited had rushed back after its
ebb, and now the tide of tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too
deep even to fathom.  Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven
him; but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved!
His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.  The
light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his silence with a
blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for her too great a
hush.

She had been right about the difference—she had spoken the truth about
the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely but sharply
jealous.  _His_ tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had “forgiven” Acton
Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken spring.  The very fact
of her appeal for a material sign, a sign that should make her dead lover
equal there with the others, presented the concession to her friend as
too handsome for the case.  He had never thought of himself as hard, but
an exorbitant article might easily render him so.  He moved round and
round this one, but only in widening circles—the more he looked at it the
less acceptable it seemed.  At the same time he had no illusion about the
effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how it would make for a rupture.
He left her alone a week, but when at last he again called this
conviction was cruelly confirmed.  In the interval he had kept away from
the church, and he needed no fresh assurance from her to know she hadn’t
entered it.  The change was complete enough: it had broken up her life.
Indeed it had broken up his, for all the fires of his shrine seemed to
him suddenly to have been quenched.  A great indifference fell upon him,
the weight of which was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his
devotion had been for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped
watch.  Neither did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on
the final service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in
this abandonment the whole future gave way.

These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable; all the
more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even resentful.  It was
not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard
reality, to the stern logic of life.  This came home to him when he sat
with her again in the room in which her late aunt’s conversation lingered
like the tone of a cracked piano.  She tried to make him forget how much
they were estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up
it was impossible not to be sorry for her.  He had taken from her so much
more than she had taken from him.  He argued with her again, told her she
could now have the altar to herself; but she only shook her head with
pleading sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on the impossible,
the extinct.  Couldn’t he see that in relation to her private need the
rites he had established were practically an elaborate exclusion?  She
regretted nothing that had happened; it had all been right so long as she
didn’t know, and it was only that now she knew too much and that from the
moment their eyes were open they would simply have to conform.  It had
doubtless been happiness enough for them to go on together so long.  She
was gentle, grateful, resigned; but this was only the form of a deep
immoveability.  He saw he should never more cross the threshold of the
second room, and he felt how much this alone would make a stranger of him
and give a conscious stiffness to his visits.  He would have hated to
plunge again into that well of reminders, but he enjoyed quite as little
the vacant alternative.

After he had been with her three or four times it struck him that to have
come at last into her house had had the horrid effect of diminishing
their intimacy.  He had known her better, had liked her in greater
freedom, when they merely walked together or kneeled together.  Now they
only pretended; before they had been nobly sincere.  They began to try
their walks again, but it proved a lame imitation, for these things, from
the first, beginning or ending, had been connected with their visits to
the church.  They had either strolled away as they came out or gone in to
rest on the return.  Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn’t walk as
of old.  The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation of
their lives.  Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no mystery of
his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament.  Her response,
whatever it was, always came to the same thing—an implied invitation to
him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she had in
hers.  For him indeed was no comfort even in complaint, since every
allusion to what had befallen them but made the author of their trouble
more present.  Acton Hague was between them—that was the essence of the
matter, and never so much between them as when they were face to face.
Then Stransom, while still wanting to banish him, had the strangest sense
of striving for an ease that would involve having accepted him.  Deeply
disconcerted by what he knew, he was still worse tormented by really not
knowing.  Perfectly aware that it would have been horribly vulgar to
abuse his old friend or to tell his companion the story of their quarrel,
it yet vexed him that her depth of reserve should give him no opening and
should have the effect of a magnanimity greater even than his own.

He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were in
love with her that he should care so much what adventures she had had.
He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with her; therefore
nothing could have surprised him more than to discover he was jealous.
What but jealousy could give a man that sore contentious wish for the
detail of what would make him suffer?  Well enough he knew indeed that he
should never have it from the only person who to-day could give it to
him.  She let him press her with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him
with an exquisite mercy and breathing equally little the word that would
expose her secret and the word that would appear to deny his literal
right to bitterness.  She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted
everything but the possibility of her return to the old symbols.
Stransom divined that for her too they had been vividly individual, had
stood for particular hours or particular attributes—particular links in
her chain.  He made it clear to himself, as he believed, that his
difficulty lay in the fact that the very nature of the plea for his
faithless friend constituted a prohibition; that it happened to have come
from _her_ was precisely the vice that attached to it.  To the voice of
impersonal generosity he felt sure he would have listened; he would have
deferred to an advocate who, speaking from abstract justice, knowing of
his denial without having known Hague, should have had the imagination to
say: “Ah, remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for him.”  To
provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of his
turpitudes was not to pity but to glorify him.  The more Stransom thought
the more he made out that whatever this relation of Hague’s it could only
have been a deception more or less finely practised.  Where had it come
into the life that all men saw?  Why had one never heard of it if it had
had the frankness of honourable things?  Stransom knew enough of his
other ties, of his obligations and appearances, not to say enough of his
general character, to be sure there had been some infamy.  In one way or
another this creature had been coldly sacrificed.  That was why at the
last as well as the first he must still leave him out and out.




CHAPTER IX.


And yet this was no solution, especially after he had talked again to his
friend of all it had been his plan she should finally do for him.  He had
talked in the other days, and she had responded with a frankness
qualified only by a courteous reluctance, a reluctance that touched him,
to linger on the question of his death.  She had then practically
accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could depend upon her to be
the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it was in the name of what had
so passed between them that he appealed to her not to forsake him in his
age.  She listened at present with shining coldness and all her habitual
forbearance to insist on her terms; her deprecation was even still
tenderer, for it expressed the compassion of her own sense that he was
abandoned.  Her terms, however, remained the same, and scarcely the less
audible for not being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more
than he she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have
provided her.  They both missed the rich future, but she missed it most,
because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it was her
acceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of her preference
for the thought of Acton Hague over any other thought whatever.  He had
humour enough to laugh rather grimly when he said to himself: “Why the
deuce does she like him so much more than she likes me?”—the reasons
being really so conceivable.  But even his faculty of analysis left the
irritation standing, and this irritation proved perhaps the greatest
misfortune that had ever overtaken him.  There had been nothing yet that
made him so much want to give up.  He had of course by this time well
reached the age of renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to
him that it was time to give up everything.

Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced the friendship
once so charming and comforting.  His privation had two faces, and the
face it had turned to him on the occasion of his last attempt to
cultivate that friendship was the one he could look at least.  This was
the privation he inflicted; the other was the privation he bore.  The
conditions she never phrased he used to murmur to himself in solitude:
“One more, one more—only just one.”  Certainly he was going down; he
often felt it when he caught himself, over his work, staring at vacancy
and giving voice to that inanity.  There was proof enough besides in his
being so weak and so ill.  His irritation took the form of melancholy,
and his melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite
failed.  His altar moreover had ceased to exist; his chapel, in his
dreams, was a great dark cavern.  All the lights had gone out—all his
Dead had died again.  He couldn’t exactly see at first how it had been in
the power of his late companion to extinguish them, since it was neither
for her nor by her that they had been called into being.  Then he
understood that it was essentially in his own soul the revival had taken
place, and that in the air of this soul they were now unable to breathe.
The candles might mechanically burn, but each of them had lost its
lustre.  The church had become a void; it was his presence, her presence,
their common presence, that had made the indispensable medium.  If
anything was wrong everything was—her silence spoiled the tune.

Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that he went back;
reflecting that as they had been his best society for years his Dead
perhaps wouldn’t let him forsake them without doing something more for
him.  They stood there, as he had left them, in their tall radiance, the
bright cluster that had already made him, on occasions when he was
willing to compare small things with great, liken them to a group of
sea-lights on the edge of the ocean of life.  It was a relief to him,
after a while, as he sat there, to feel they had still a virtue.  He was
more and more easily tired, and he always drove now; the action of his
heart was weak and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the
action of his fancy.  None the less he returned yet again, returned
several times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a
renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience.  In winter the church
was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the glow of his
shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask.  He sat and
wondered to what he had reduced his absent associate and what she now did
with the hours of her absence.  There were other churches, there were
other altars, there were other candles; in one way or another her piety
would still operate; he couldn’t absolutely have deprived her of her
rites.  So he argued, but without contentment; for he well enough knew
there was no other such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had
once mentioned to him as the satisfaction of her need.  As this semblance
again gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he
found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her darkness; for
never so much as in these weeks had his rites been real, never had his
gathered company seemed so to respond and even to invite.  He lost
himself in the large lustre, which was more and more what he had from the
first wished it to be—as dazzling as the vision of heaven in the mind of
a child.  He wandered in the fields of light; he passed, among the tall
tapers, from tier to tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the
white intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another.  It
was in the quiet sense of having saved his souls that his deep strange
instinct rejoiced.  This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a
contingent world; they were saved better than faith or works could save
them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk_ _from dying to, for
actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of human remembrance.

By this time he had survived all his friends; the last straight flame was
three years old, there was no one to add to the list.  Over and over he
called his roll, and it appeared to him compact and complete.  Where
should he put in another, where, if there were no other objection, would
it stand in its place in the rank?  He reflected, with a want of
sincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would be difficult to
determine that place.  More and more, besides, face to face with his
little legion, over endless histories, handling the empty shells and
playing with the silence—more and more he could see that he had never
introduced an alien.  He had had his great companions, his
indulgences—there were cases in which they had been immense; but what had
his devotion after all been if it hadn’t been at bottom a respect?  He
was, however, himself surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the
winter the responsibility of it was what was uppermost in his thoughts.
The refrain had grown old to them, that plea for just one more.  There
came a day when, for simple exhaustion, if symmetry should demand just
one he was ready so far to meet symmetry.  Symmetry was harmony, and the
idea of harmony began to haunt him; he said to himself that harmony was
of course everything.  He took, in fancy, his composition to pieces,
redistributing it into other lines, making other juxtapositions and
contrasts.  He shifted this and that candle, he made the spaces
different, he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap.  There were
subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross-reference, and moments in
which he seemed to catch a glimpse of the void so sensible to the woman
who wandered in exile or sat where he had seen her with the portrait of
Acton Hague.  Finally, in this way, he arrived at a conception of the
total, the ideal, which left a clear opportunity for just another figure.
“Just one more—to round it off; just one more, just one,” continued to
hum in his head.  There was a strange confusion in the thought, for he
felt the day to be near when he too should be one of the Others.  What in
this event would the Others matter to him, since they only mattered to
the living?  Even as one of the Dead what would his altar matter to him,
since his particular dream of keeping it up had melted away?  What had
harmony to do with the case if his lights were all to be quenched?  What
he had hoped for was an instituted thing.  He might perpetuate it on some
other pretext, but his special meaning would have dropped.  This meaning
was to have lasted with the life of the one other person who understood
it.

In March he had an illness during which he spent a fortnight in bed, and
when he revived a little he was told of two things that had happened.
One was that a lady whose name was not known to the servants (she left
none) had been three times to ask about him; the other was that in his
sleep and on an occasion when his mind evidently wandered he was heard to
murmur again and again: “Just one more—just one.”  As soon as he found
himself able to go out, and before the doctor in attendance had
pronounced him so, he drove to see the lady who had come to ask about
him.  She was not at home; but this gave him the opportunity, before his
strength should fall again, to take his way to the church.  He entered it
alone; he had declined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to
decline effectively, the company of his servant or of a nurse.  He knew
now perfectly what these good people thought; they had discovered his
clandestine connexion, the magnet that had drawn him for so many years,
and doubtless attached a significance of their own to the odd words they
had repeated to him.  The nameless lady was the clandestine connexion—a
fact nothing could have made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin
her.  He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on
his hands.  His weakness, his life’s weariness overtook him.  It seemed
to him he had come for the great surrender.  At first he asked himself
how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the
very desire to move gradually left him.  He had come, as he always came,
to lose himself; the fields of light were still there to stray in; only
this time, in straying, he would never come back.  He had given himself
to his Dead, and it was good: this time his Dead would keep him.  He
couldn’t rise from his knees; he believed he should never rise again; all
he could do was to lift his face and fix his eyes on his lights.  They
looked unusually, strangely splendid, but the one that always drew him
most had an unprecedented lustre.  It was the central voice of the choir,
the glowing heart of the brightness, and on this occasion it seemed to
expand, to spread great wings of flame.  The whole altar flared—dazzling
and blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearer than the
rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was human beauty and human
charity, was the far-off face of Mary Antrim.  She smiled at him from the
glory of heaven—she brought the glory down with her to take him.  He
bowed his head in submission and at the same moment another wave rolled
over him.  Was it the quickening of joy to pain?  In the midst of his joy
at any rate he felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated
knowledge that had the force of a reproach.  It suddenly made him
contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to another.
This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; the
descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb
for the descent of Acton Hague.  It was as if Stransom had read what her
eyes said to him.

After a moment he looked round in a despair that made him feel as if the
source of life were ebbing.  The church had been empty—he was alone; but
he wanted to have something done, to make a last appeal.  This idea gave
him strength for an effort; he rose to his feet with a movement that made
him turn, supporting himself by the back of a bench.  Behind him was a
prostrate figure, a figure he had seen before; a woman in deep mourning,
bowed in grief or in prayer.  He had seen her in other days—the first
time of his entrance there, and he now slightly wavered, looking at her
again till she seemed aware he had noticed her.  She raised her head and
met his eyes: the partner of his long worship had come back.  She looked
across at him an instant with a face wondering and scared; he saw he had
made her afraid.  Then quickly rising she came straight to him with both
hands out.

“Then you _could_ come?  God sent you!” he murmured with a happy smile.

“You’re very ill—you shouldn’t be here,” she urged in anxious reply.

“God sent me too, I think.  I was ill when I came, but the sight of you
does wonders.”  He held her hands, which steadied and quickened him.
“I’ve something to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me!” she tenderly pleaded; “let me tell you.  This afternoon,
by a miracle, the sweetest of miracles, the sense of our difference left
me.  I was out—I was near, thinking, wandering alone, when, on the spot,
something changed in my heart.  It’s my confession—there it is.  To come
back, to come back on the instant—the idea gave me wings.  It was as if I
suddenly saw something—as if it all became possible.  I could come for
what you yourself came for: that was enough.  So here I am.  It’s not for
my own—that’s over.  But I’m here for _them_.”  And breathless,
infinitely relieved by her low precipitate explanation, she looked with
eyes that reflected all its splendour at the magnificence of their altar.

“They’re here for you,” Stransom said, “they’re present to-night as
they’ve never been.  They speak for you—don’t you see?—in a passion of
light; they sing out like a choir of angels.  Don’t you hear what they
say?—they offer the very thing you asked of me.”

“Don’t talk of it—don’t think of it; forget it!”  She spoke in hushed
supplication, and while the alarm deepened in her eyes she disengaged one
of her hands and passed an arm round him to support him better, to help
him to sink into a seat.

He let himself go, resting on her; he dropped upon the bench and she fell
on her knees beside him, his own arm round her shoulder.  So he remained
an instant, staring up at his shrine.  “They say there’s a gap in the
array—they say it’s not full, complete.  Just one more,” he went on,
softly—“isn’t that what you wanted?  Yes, one more, one more.”

“Ah no more—no more!” she wailed, as with a quick new horror of it, under
her breath.

“Yes, one more,” he repeated, simply; “just one!”  And with this his head
dropped on her shoulder; she felt that in his weakness he had fainted.
But alone with him in the dusky church a great dread was on her of what
might still happen, for his face had the whiteness of death.




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