The Altar of the Dead, by Henry James

Published：2026-08-02 10:48:15 Source: miniature figures Author: Hotel Retail

Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by DavidPrice,gift superhero figures for 13 year olds email [email protected]

THE ALTAR OF
THE DEAD

BY HENRY JAMES

LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
number five john street adelphi

This edition first published1916

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 afigure.  Celebrations and suppressions were equally painfulto him, and but one of the former found a place in hislife.  He had kept each year in his own fashion the date ofMary Antrim’s death.  It would be more to the pointperhaps to say that this occasion kept him: it kept him atleast effectually from doing anything else.  It took hold ofhim again and again with a hand of which time had softened butnever loosened the touch.  He waked to his feast of memoryas consciously as he would have waked to his marriage-morn. Marriage had had of old but too little to say to the matter: forthe girl who was to have been his bride there had been no bridalembrace.  She had died of a malignant fever after thewedding-day had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly tastingit an affection that promised to fill his life to the brim.

Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to saythis life could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a paleghost, still ordered by a sovereign presence.  He had notbeen a man of numerous passions, and even in all these years nosense had grown stronger with him than the sense of beingbereft.  He had needed no priest and no altar to make himfor ever widowed.  He had done many things in theworld—he had done almost all but one: he had never, neverforgotten.  He had tried to put into his existence whateverelse might take up room in it, but had failed to make it morethan a house of which the mistress was eternally absent. She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that histenacity set apart.  He had no arranged observance of it,but his nerves made it all their own.  They drove him forthwithout mercy, and the goal of his pilgrimage was far.  Shehad been buried in a London suburb, a part then of Nature’sbreast, but which he had seen lose one after another everyfeature of freshness.  It was in truth during the moments hestood there that his eyes beheld the place least.  Theylooked at another image, they opened to another light.  Wasit 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 thanthis there were other memories; and by the time George Stransomwas fifty-five such memories had greatly multiplied.  Therewere other ghosts in his life than the ghost of MaryAntrim.  He had perhaps not had more losses than most men,but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen deathmore closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply.  Hehad formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: ithad come to him early in life that there was something one had todo for them.  They were there in their simplifiedintensified essence, their conscious absence and expressivepatience, as personally there as if they had only been strickendumb.  When all sense of them failed, all sound of themceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth:they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, anddied again, died every day, of the hard usage of life.  Theyhad no organised service, no reserved place, no honour, noshelter, no safety.  Even ungenerous people provided for theliving, but even those who were called most generous did nothingfor the others.  So on George Stransom’s part hadgrown up with the years a resolve that he at least would dosomething, do it, that is, for his own—would perform thegreat charity without reproach.  Every man hadhisown, and every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resourcesof the soul.

It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for thembest; as the years at any rate went by he found himself inregular communion with these postponed pensioners, those whomindeed he always called in his thoughts the Others.  Hespared them the moments, he organised the charity.  Quitehow it had risen he probably never could have told you, but whatcame to pass was that an altar, such as was after all withineverybody’s compass, lighted with perpetual candles anddedicated to these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritualspaces.  He had wondered of old, in some embarrassment,whether he had a religion; being very sure, and not a littlecontent, that he hadn’t at all events the religion some ofthe people he had known wanted him to have.  Gradually thisquestion was straightened out for him: it became clear to himthat the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness hadbeen simply the religion of the Dead.  It suited hisinclination, it satisfied his spirit, it gave employment to hispiety.  It answered his love of great offices, of a solemnand splendid ritual; for no shrine could be more bedecked and noceremonial more stately than those to which his worship wasattached.  He had no imagination about these things but thatthey were accessible to any one who should feel the need ofthem.  The poorest could build such temples of thespirit—could make them blaze with candles and smoke withincense, make them flush with pictures and flowers.  Thecost, in the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on thegenerous 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 theLondon street by the particular effect of a shop-front thatlighted the dull brown air with its mercenary grin and beforewhich several persons were gathered.  It was the window of ajeweller whose diamonds and sapphires seemed to laugh, in flasheslike high notes of sound, with the mere joy of knowing how muchmore they were “worth” than most of the dingypedestrians staring at them from the other side of thepane.  Stransom lingered long enough to suspend, in avision, a string of pearls about the white neck of Mary Antrim,and then was kept an instant longer by the sound of a voice heknew.  Next him was a mumbling old woman, and beyond the oldwoman a gentleman with a lady on his arm.  It was from him,from Paul Creston, the voice had proceeded: he was talking withthe lady of some precious object in the window.  Stransomhad no sooner recognised him than the old woman turned away; butjust with this growth of opportunity came a felt strangeness thatstayed him in the very act of laying his hand on hisfriend’s arm.  It lasted but the instant, only thatspace sufficed for the flash of a wild question.  WasnotMrs. Creston dead?—the ambiguity met him therein the short drop of her husband’s voice, the dropconjugal, if it ever was, and in the way the two figures leanedto each other.  Creston, making a step to look at somethingelse, came nearer, glanced at him, started andexclaimed—behaviour the effect of which was at first onlyto leave Stransom staring, staring back across the months at thedifferent face, the wholly other face, the poor man had shown himlast, the blurred ravaged mask bent over the open grave by whichthey had stood together.  That son of afflictionwasn’t in mourning now; he detached his arm from hiscompanion’s to grasp the hand of the older friend.  Hecoloured as well as smiled in the strong light of the shop whenStransom raised a tentative hat to the lady.  Stransom hadjust time to see she was pretty before he found himself gaping ata fact more portentous.  “My dear fellow, let me makeyou acquainted with my wife.”

Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half aminute, at the rate we live in polite society, it had practicallybecome, for our friend, the mere memory of a shock.  Theystood there and laughed and talked; Stransom had instantlywhisked the shock out of the way, to keep it for privateconsumption.  He felt himself grimace, he heard himselfexaggerate the proper, but was conscious of turning not a littlefaint.  That new woman, that hired performer, Mrs.Creston?  Mrs. Creston had been more living for him than anywoman but one.  This lady had a face that shone as publiclyas the jeweller’s window, and in the happy candour withwhich she wore her monstrous character was an effect of grossimmodesty.  The character of Paul Creston’s wife thusattributed to her was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judgehis friend to know perfectly that he knew.  The happy pairhad just arrived from America, and Stransom hadn’t neededto be told this to guess the nationality of the lady. Somehow it deepened the foolish air that her husband’sconfused cordiality was unable to conceal.  Stransomrecalled that he had heard of poor Creston’s having, whilehis bereavement was still fresh, crossed the sea for what peoplein such predicaments call a little change.  He had found thelittle change indeed, he had brought the little change back; itwas the little change that stood there and that, do what hewould, he couldn’t, while he showed those high front teethof his, look other than a conscious ass about.  They weregoing into the shop, Mrs. Creston said, and she begged Mr.Stransom to come with them and help to decide.  He thankedher, opening his watch and pleading an engagement for which hewas already late, and they parted while she shrieked into thefog, “Mind now you come to see me right away!” Creston had had the delicacy not to suggest that, and Stransomhoped it hurt him somewhere to hear her scream it to all theechoes.

He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in his lifeto go near her.  She was perhaps a human being, but Crestonoughtn’t to have shown her without precautions,oughtn’t indeed to have shown her at all.  Hisprecautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer, andthe people at home would never have mentioned extradition. This was a wife for foreign service or purely external use; adecent consideration would have spared her the injury ofcomparisons.  Such was the first flush of GeorgeStransom’s reaction; but as he sat alone thatnight—there were particular hours he always passedalone—the harshness dropped from it and left only thepity.  Hecould 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 forwhom he might perhaps have been unfaithful.  She was allcleverness and sympathy and charm; her house had been the veryeasiest in all the world and her friendship the veryfirmest.  Without accidents he had loved her, withoutaccidents every one had loved her: she had made the passionsabout her as regular as the moon makes the tides.  She hadbeen also of course far too good for her husband, but he neversuspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than inthe exquisite art with which she tried to keep every one else(keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out.  Herewas a man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she hadgiven it up—dying to bring into the world a child of hisbed; and she had had only to submit to her fate to have, ere thegrass was green on her grave, no more existence for him than adomestic servant he had replaced.  The frivolity, theindecency of it made Stransom’s eyes fill; and he had thatevening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a world withoutdelicacy, 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 forhis page: his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed tohave caught Kate Creston’s, and it was into their sadsilences he looked.  It was to him her sentient spirit hadturned, knowing it to be of her he would think.  He thoughtfor a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could stilllive—how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room,long after they had looked their last.  They had looks thatsurvived—had them as great poets had quoted lines.

The newspaper lay by his chair—the thing that came inthe afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; without sensefor what was in it he had mechanically unfolded and then droppedit.  Before he went to bed he took it up, and this time, atthe top of a paragraph, he was caught by five words that made himstart.  He stood staring, before the fire, at the“Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.,” the man who tenyears earlier had been the nearest of his friends and whosedeposition from this eminence had practically left it without anoccupant.  He had seen him after their rupture, buthadn’t now seen him for years.  Standing there beforethe fire he turned cold as he read what had befallen him. Promoted a short time previous to the governorship of theWestward Islands, Acton Hague had died, in the bleak honour ofthis exile, of an illness consequent on the bite of a poisonoussnake.  His career was compressed by the newspaper into adozen lines, the perusal of which excited on GeorgeStransom’s part no warmer feeling than one of relief at theabsence of any mention of their quarrel, an incident accidentallytainted at the time, thanks to their joint immersion in largeaffairs, with a horrible publicity.  Public indeed was thewrong Stransom had, to his own sense, suffered, the insult he hadblankly taken from the only man with whom he had ever beenintimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University years, thesubject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public that he hadnever spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he hadcompletely overlooked it.  It had made the difference forhim that friendship too was all over, but it had only made justthat one.  The shock of interests had been private,intensely so; but the action taken by Hague had been in the faceof men.  To-day it all seemed to have occurred merely to theend that George Stransom should think of him as“Hague” and measure exactly how much he himself couldresemble a stone.  He went cold, suddenly and horribly cold,to bed.

CHAPTER III.

The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb, heknew his long walk had tired him.  In the dreadful cemeteryalone he had been on his feet an hour.  Instinctively,coming back, they had taken him a devious course, and it was adesert in which no circling cabman hovered over possibleprey.  He paused on a corner and measured the dreariness;then he made out through the gathered dusk that he was in one ofthose tracts of London which are less gloomy by night than byday, because, in the former case of the civil gift oflight.  By day there was nothing, but by night there werelamps, and George Stransom was in a mood that made lamps good inthemselves.  It wasn’t that they could show himanything, it was only that they could burn clear.  To hissurprise, 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—theraising of a curtain at the moment he passed gave him a glimpseof an avenue of gloom with a glow of tapers at the end.  Hestopped and looked up, recognising the place as a church. The thought quickly came to him that since he was tired he mightrest there; so that after a moment he had in turn pushed up theleathern curtain and gone in.  It was a temple of the oldpersuasion, and there had evidently been a function—perhapsa service for the dead; the high altar was still a blaze ofcandles.  This was an exhibition he always liked, and hedropped into a seat with relief.  More than it had ever yetcome home to him it struck him as good there should bechurches.

This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; averger shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed toStransom there was hospitality in the thick sweet air.  Wasit only the savour of the incense or was it something of largerintention?  He had at any rate quitted the great grey suburband come nearer to the warm centre.  He presently ceased tofeel intrusive, gaining at last even a sense of community withthe only worshipper in his neighbourhood, the sombre presence ofa woman, in mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he could seeof her and who had sunk deep into prayer at no great distancefrom him.  He wished he could sink, like her, to the verybottom, be as motionless, as rapt in prostration.  After afew moments he shifted his seat; it was almost indelicate to beso aware of her.  But Stransom subsequently quite losthimself, floating away on the sea of light.  If occasionslike this had been more frequent in his life he would have hadmore 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 theecho had ended by growing more distinct than the sound.  Thesound now rang out, the type blazed at him with all its fires andwith a mystery of radiance in which endless meanings couldglow.  The thing became as he sat there his appropriatealtar and each starry candle an appropriate vow.  Henumbered them, named them, grouped them—it was the silentroll-call of his Dead.  They made together a brightness vastand intense, a brightness in which the mere chapel of histhoughts grew so dim that as it faded away he asked himself if heshouldn’t find his real comfort in some material act, someoutward worship.

This idea took possession of him while, at a distance, theblack-robed lady continued prostrate; he was quietly thrilledwith his conception, which at last brought him to his feet in thesudden excitement of a plan.  He wandered softly through theaisles, pausing in the different chapels, all save one applied toa special devotion.  It was in this clear recess, lamplessand unapplied, that he stood longest—the length of time ittook him fully to grasp the conception of gilding it with hisbounty.  He should snatch it from no other rites andassociate it with nothing profane; he would simply take it as itshould be given up to him and make it a masterpiece of splendourand a mountain of fire.  Tended sacredly all the year, withthe sanctifying church round it, it would always be ready for hisoffices.  There would be difficulties, but from the firstthey presented themselves only as difficulties surmounted. Even for a person so little affiliated the thing would be amatter of arrangement.  He saw it all in advance, and howbright in especial the place would become to him in theintermissions of toil and the dusk of afternoons; how rich inassurance at all times, but especially in the indifferentworld.  Before withdrawing he drew nearer again to the spotwhere he had first sat down, and in the movement he met the ladywhom he had seen praying and who was now on her way to thedoor.  She passed him quickly, and he had only a glimpse ofher 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 certainlyesoteric, that he at last found himself able to establish. It took a long time, it took a year, and both the process and theresult would have been—for any who knew—a vividpicture of his good faith.  No one did know, infact—no one but the bland ecclesiastics whose acquaintancehe had promptly sought, whose objections he had softlyoverridden, 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 forindulgences.  Stransom had of course at an early stage ofhis enquiry been referred to the Bishop, and the Bishop had beendelightfully human, the Bishop had been almost amused. Success was within sight, at any rate from the moment theattitude of those whom it concerned became liberal in response toliberality.  The altar and the sacred shell that halfencircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and customary worship,were to be splendidly maintained; all that Stransom reserved tohimself was the number of his lights and the free enjoyment ofhis intention.  When the intention had taken complete effectthe enjoyment became even greater than he had ventured tohope.  He liked to think of this effect when far from it,liked to convince himself of it yet again when near.  He wasnot often indeed so near as that a visit to it hadn’tperforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but the timehe gave to his devotion came to seem to him more a contributionto his other interests than a betrayal of them.  Even aloaded life might be easier when one had added a new necessity toit.

How much easier was probably never guessed by those who simplyknew there were hours when he disappeared and for many of whomthere was a vulgar reading of what they used to call hisplunges.  These plunges were into depths quieter than thedeep sea-caves, and the habit had at the end of a year or twobecome the one it would have cost him most to relinquish. Now they had really, his Dead, something that was indefensiblytheirs; and he liked to think that they might in cases be theDead of others, as well as that the Dead of others might beinvoked there under the protection of what he had done. Whoever bent a knee on the carpet he had laid down appeared tohim to act in the spirit of his intention.  Each of hislights had a name for him, and from time to time a new light waskindled.  This was what he had fundamentally agreed for,that there should always be room for them all.  What thosewho passed or lingered saw was simply the most resplendent of thealtars called suddenly into vivid usefulness, with a quietelderly man, for whom it evidently had a fascination, oftenseated there in a maze or a doze; but half the satisfaction ofthe spot for this mysterious and fitful worshipper was that hefound the years of his life there, and the ties, the affections,the struggles, the submissions, the conquests, if there had beensuch, a record of that adventurous journey in which thebeginnings and the endings of human relations are the letteredmile-stones.  He had in general little taste for the past asa part of his own history; at other times and in other places itmostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible torepair; but on these occasions he accepted it with something ofthat positive gladness with which one adjusts one’s self toan ache that begins to succumb to treatment.  To thetreatment of time the malady of life begins at a given moment tosuccumb; and these were doubtless the hours at which that truthmost came home to him.  The day was written for him there onwhich he had first become acquainted with death, and thesuccessive phases of the acquaintance were marked each with aflame.

The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom hadentered that dark defile of our earthly descent in which some onedies every day.  It was only yesterday that Kate Creston hadflashed out her white fire; yet already there were younger starsablaze on the tips of the tapers.  Various persons in whomhis interest had not been intense drew closer to him by enteringthis company.  He went over it, head by head, till he feltlike the shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd’svision of differences imperceptible.  He knew his candlesapart, up to the colour of the flame, and would still have knownthem had their positions all been changed.  To otherimaginations they might stand for other things—that theyshould stand for something to be hushed before was all hedesired; but he was intensely conscious of the personal note ofeach and of the distinguishable way it contributed to theconcert.  There were hours at which he almost caught himselfwishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he mightestablish with them in this manner a connexion more charmingthan, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them inlife.  In regard to those from whom one was separated by thelong curves of the globe such a connexion could only be animprovement: it brought them instantly within reach.  Ofcourse there were gaps in the constellation, for Stransom knew hecould only pretend to act for his own, and it wasn’t everyfigure passing before his eyes into the great obscure that wasentitled to a memorial.  There was a strange sanctificationin death, but some characters were more sanctified by beingforgotten than by being remembered.  The greatest blank inthe shining page was the memory of Acton Hague, of which heinveterately tried to rid himself.  For Acton Hague no flamecould 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 worshipperat least as frequent as himself.  Others of the faithful,and in the rest of the church, came and went, appealingsometimes, when they disappeared, to a vague or to a particularrecognition; but this unfailing presence was always to beobserved when he arrived and still in possession when hedeparted.  He was surprised, the first time, at thepromptitude with which it assumed an identity for him—theidentity of the lady whom two years before, on his anniversary,he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic face he hadhad so flitting a vision.  Given the time that had passed,his recollection of her was fresh enough to make himwonder.  Of himself she had of course no impression, orrather had had none at first: the time came when her manner oftransacting her business suggested her having gradually guessedhis call to be of the same order.  She used his altar forher own purpose—he could only hope that sad and solitary asshe always struck him, she used it for her own Dead.  Therewere interruptions, infidelities, all on his part, calls to otherassociations and duties; but as the months went on he found herwhenever he returned, and he ended by taking pleasure in thethought that he had given her almost the contentment he had givenhimself.  They worshipped side by side so often that therewere moments when he wished he might be sure, so straight didtheir prospect stretch away of growing old together in theirrites.  She was younger than he, but she looked as if herDead were at least as numerous as his candles.  She had nocolour, no sound, no fault, and another of the things about whichhe had made up his mind was that she had no fortune.  Alwaysblack-robed, she must have had a succession of sorrows. People weren’t poor, after all, whom so many losses couldovertake; they were positively rich when they had had so much togive 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 oftrouble than one.

He had a great love of music and little time for the joy ofit; but occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled bySaturday afternoons, it used to come back to him that there wereglories.  There were moreover friends who reminded him ofthis and side by side with whom he found himself sitting outconcerts.  On one of these winter afternoons, in St.James’s Hall, he became aware after he had seated himselfthat the lady he had so often seen at church was in the placenext him and was evidently alone, as he also this time happenedto be.  She was at first too absorbed in the considerationof the programme to heed him, but when she at last glanced at himhe took advantage of the movement to speak to her, greeting herwith the remark that he felt as if he already knew her.  Shesmiled as she said “Oh yes, I recognise you”; yet inspite of this admission of long acquaintance it was the first hehad seen of her smile.  The effect of it was suddenly tocontribute more to that acquaintance than all the previousmeetings had done.  He hadn’t “taken in,”he said to himself, that she was so pretty.  Later, thatevening—it was while he rolled along in a hansom on his wayto dine out—he added that he hadn’t taken in that shewas so interesting.  The next morning in the midst of hiswork he quite suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that hisimpression of her, beginning so far back, was like a windingriver that had at last reached the sea.

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by thesense of what had now passed between them.  It wasn’tmuch, but it had just made the difference.  They hadlistened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they had talked inthe pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to which they movedtogether, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter ofgetting away.  She had thanked him and put up her umbrella,slipping into the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yetagain and leaving him to remember at leisure that not a word hadbeen exchanged about the usual scene of that coincidence. This omission struck him now as natural and then again asperverse.  She mightn’t in the least have allowed hiswarrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn’t he wouldhave judged her an underbred woman.  It was odd that whennothing had really ever brought them together he should have beenable successfully to assume they were in a manner oldfriends—that this negative quantity was somehow more thanthey could express.  His success, it was true, had beenqualified by her quick escape, so that there grew up in him anabsurd desire to put it to some better test.  Save in so faras some other poor chance might help him, such a test could beonly to meet her afresh at church.  Left to himself he wouldhave gone to church the very next afternoon, just for thecuriosity of seeing if he should find her there.  But hewasn’t left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at thelast, after he had virtually made up his mind to go.  Theinfluence that kept him away really revealed to him how little tohimself his Dead everleft him.  He went only forthem—for nothing else in the world.

The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hatedto connect the place with anything but his offices or to give aglimpse of the curiosity that had been on the point of movinghim.  It was absurd to weave a tangle about a matter sosimple as a custom of devotion that might with ease have beendaily or hourly; yet the tangle got itself woven.  He wassorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy spell hadbeen broken and he had lost a familiar security.  At thelast, however, he asked himself if he was to stay away for everfrom the fear of this muddle about motives.  After aninterval neither longer nor shorter than usual he re-entered thechurch with a clear conviction that he should scarcely heed thepresence or the absence of the lady of the concert.  Thisindifference didn’t prevent his at once noting that for theonly time since he had first seen her she wasn’t on thespot.  He had now no scruple about giving her time toarrive, but she didn’t arrive, and when he went away stillmissing her he was profanely and consentingly sorry.  If herabsence made the tangle more intricate, that was all her owndoing.  By the end of another year it was very intricateindeed; but by that time he didn’t in the least care, andit was only his cultivated consciousness that had given himscruples.  Three times in three months he had gone to churchwithout finding her, and he felt he hadn’t needed theseoccasions to show him his suspense had dropped.  Yet it was,incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacythat had kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of courseimmediately have recognised his description of her, whether shehad been seen at other hours.  His delicacy had kept himfrom asking any question about her at any time, and it wasexactly the same virtue that had left him so free to be decentlycivil to her at the concert.

This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him whenshe finally met his eyes—it was after a fourthtrial—to predetermine quite fixedly his awaiting herretreat.  He joined her in the street as soon as she hadmoved, asking her if he might accompany her a certaindistance.  With her placid permission he went as far as ahouse in the neighbourhood at which she had business: she let himknow it was not where she lived.  She lived, as she said, ina mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in connexion with whomshe spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and regularoccupations.  She wasn’t, the mourning niece, in herfirst youth, and her vanished freshness had left something behindthat, for Stransom, represented the proof it had been tragicallysacrificed.  Whatever she gave him the assurance of she gavewithout references.  She might have been a divorcedduchess—she might have been an old maid who taught theharp.

CHAPTER V.

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

These things made their whole relation so impersonal that theyhadn’t the rules or reasons people found in ordinaryfriendships.  They didn’t care for the things it wassupposed necessary to care for in the intercourse of theworld.  They ended one day—they never knew which ofthem expressed it first—by throwing out the idea that theydidn’t care for each other.  Over this idea they grewquite intimate; they rallied to it in a way that marked a freshstart in their confidence.  If to feel deeply together aboutcertain things wholly distinct from themselves didn’tconstitute a safety, where was safety to be looked for?  Notlightly nor often, not without occasion nor without emotion, anymore than in any other reference by serious people to a mysteryof their faith; but when something had happened to warm, as itwere, the air for it, they came as near as they could come tocalling their Dead by name.  They felt it was coming verynear to utter their thought at all.  The word“they” expressed enough; it limited the mention, ithad a dignity of its own, and if, in their talk, you had heardour friends use it, you might have taken them for a pair ofpagans of old alluding decently to the domesticated gods. They never knew—at least Stransom never knew—how theyhad learned to be sure about each other.  If it had beenwith each a question of what the other was there for, thecertitude had come in some fine way of its own.  Any faith,after all, has the instinct of propagation, and it was as naturalas it was beautiful that they should have taken pleasure on thespot in the imagination of a following.  If the followingwas for each but a following of one it had proved in the eventsufficient.  Her debt, however, of course was much greaterthan his, because while she had only given him a worshipper hehad given her a splendid temple.  Once she said she pitiedhim for the length of his list—she had counted his candlesalmost as often as himself—and this made him wonder whatcould have been the length of hers.  He had wondered beforeat the coincidence of their losses, especially as from time totime a new candle was set up.  On some occasion someaccident led him to express this curiosity, and she answered asif in surprise that he hadn’t already understood. “Oh for me, you know, the more there are thebetter—there could never be too many.  I should likehundreds and hundreds—I should like thousands; I shouldlike a great mountain of light.”

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

She hung back at this as never yet.  “OnlyOne,” she answered, colouring as if now he knew her guardedsecret.  It really made him feel he knew less than before,so difficult was it for him to reconstitute a life in which asingle experience had so belittled all others.  His ownlife, round its central hollow, had been packed closeenough.  After this she appeared to have regretted herconfession, though at the moment she spoke there had been pridein her very embarrassment.  She declared to him that his ownwas the larger, the dearer possession—the portion one wouldhave chosen if one had been able to choose; she assured him shecould perfectly imagine some of the echoes with which hissilences were peopled.  He knew she couldn’t:one’s relation to what one had loved and hated had been arelation too distinct from the relations of others.  Butthis didn’t affect the fact that they were growing oldtogether in their piety.  She was a feature of that piety,but even at the ripe stage of acquaintance in which theyoccasionally arranged to meet at a concert or to go together toan exhibition she was not a feature of anything else.  Themost that happened was that his worship became paramount. Friend by friend dropped away till at last there were moreemblems on his altar than houses left him to enter.  She wasmore than any other the friend who remained, but she was unknownto all the rest.  Once when she had discovered, as theycalled it, a new star, she used the expression that the chapel atlast was full.

“Oh no,” Stransom replied, “there is a greatthing wanting for that!  The chapel will never be full tilla 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 youmean?”

“I mean, dear lady, my own.”

He had learned after a long time that she earned money by herpen, writing under a pseudonym she never disclosed in magazineshe never saw.  She knew too well what he couldn’t readand what she couldn’t write, and she taught him tocultivate indifference with a success that did much for theirgood relations.  Her invisible industry was a convenience tohim; it helped his contented thought of her, the thought thatrested in the dignity of her proud obscure life, her littleremunerated art and her little impenetrable home.  Lost,with her decayed relative, in her dim suburban world, she came tothe surface for him in distant places.  She was really thepriestess of his altar, and whenever he quitted England hecommitted it to her keeping.  She proved to him afresh thatwomen have more of the spirit of religion than men; he felt hisfidelity pale and faint in comparison with hers.  He oftensaid to her that since he had so little time to live he rejoicedin her having so much; so glad was he to think she would guardthe temple when he should have been called.  He had a greatplan for that, which of course he told her too, a bequest ofmoney to keep it up in undiminished state.  Of theadministration of this fund he would appoint her superintendent,and if the spirit should move her she might kindle a taper evenfor him.

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

CHAPTER VI.

She was always in mourning, yet the day he came back from thelongest absence he had yet made her appearance immediately toldhim she had lately had a bereavement.  They met on thisoccasion as she was leaving the church, so that postponing hisown entrance he instantly offered to turn round and walk awaywith her.  She considered, then she said: “Go in now,but come and see me in an hour.”  He knew the smallvista of her street, closed at the end and as dreary as an emptypocket, where the pairs of shabby little houses, semi-detachedbut indissolubly united, were like married couples on badterms.  Often, however, as he had gone to the beginning hehad never gone beyond.  Her aunt was dead—that heimmediately guessed, as well as that it made a difference; butwhen she had for the first time mentioned her number he foundhimself, on her leaving him, not a little agitated by this suddenliberality.  She wasn’t a person with whom, after all,one got on so very fast: it had taken him months and months tolearn her name, years and years to learn her address.  Ifshe had looked, on this reunion, so much older to him, how in theworld did he look to her?  She had reached the period oflife he had long since reached, when, after separations, themarked clock-face of the friend we meet announces the hour wehave tried to forget.  He couldn’t have said what heexpected as, at the end of his waiting, he turned the cornerwhere for years he had always paused; simply not to pause was aefficient cause for emotion.  It was an event, somehow; andin all their long acquaintance there had never been anevent.  This one grew larger when, five minutes later, inthe faint elegance of her little drawing-room, she quavered out agreeting that showed the measure she took of it.  He had astrange sense of having come for something in particular; strangebecause literally there was nothing particular between them,nothing save that they were at one on their great point, whichhad long ago become a magnificent matter of course.  It wastrue that after she had said “You can always come now, youknow,” the thing he was there for seemed already to havehappened.  He asked her if it was the death of her aunt thatmade the difference; to which she replied: “She never knewI knew you.  I wished her not to.”  The beautifulclearness of her candour—her faded beauty was like a summertwilight—disconnected the words from any image ofdeceit.  They might have struck him as the record of a deepdissimulation; but she had always given him a sense of noblereasons.  The vanished aunt was present, as he looked abouthim, in the small complacencies of the room, the beaded velvetand the fluted moreen; and though, as we know, he had the worshipof the Dead, he found himself not definitely regretting thislady.  If she wasn’t in his long list, however, shewas in her niece’s short one, and Stransom presentlyobserved to the latter that now at least, in the place theyhaunted together, she would have another object of devotion.

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

He judged, wondering a good deal before he made any motion toleave her, that the difference would somehow be very great andwould consist of still other things than her having let him comein.  It rather chilled him, for they had been happy togetheras they were.  He extracted from her at any rate anintimation that she should now have means less limited, that heraunt’s tiny fortune had come to her, so that there washenceforth only one to consume what had formerly been made tosuffice for two.  This was a joy to Stransom, because it hadhitherto been equally impossible for him either to offer herpresents or contentedly to stay his hand.  It was too uglyto be at her side that way, abounding himself and yet not able tooverflow—a demonstration that would have been signally afalse note.  Even her better situation too seemed only todraw out in a sense the loneliness of her future.  It wouldmerely help her to live more and more for their small ceremonial,and this at a time when he himself had begun wearily to feelthat, having set it in motion, he might depart.  When theyhad sat a while in the pale parlour she got up—“Thisisn’t my room: let us go into mine.”  They hadonly to cross the narrow hall, as he found, to pass quite intoanother air.  When she had closed the door of the secondroom, as she called it, he felt at last in real possession ofher.  The place had the flush of life—it wasexpressive; its dark red walls were articulate with memories andrelics.  These were simple things—photographs andwater-colours, scraps of writing framed and ghosts of flowersembalmed; but a moment sufficed to show him they had a commonmeaning.  It was here she had lived and worked, and she hadalready told him she would make no change of scene.  He readthe reference in the objects about her—the general one toplaces and times; but after a minute he distinguished among thema small portrait of a gentleman.  At a distance and withouttheir glasses his eyes were only so caught by it as to feel avague curiosity.  Presently this impulse carried him nearer,and in another moment he was staring at the picture instupefaction and with the sense that some sound had broken fromhim.  He was further conscious that he showed his companiona white face when he turned round on her gasping: “ActonHague!”

She matched his great wonder.  “Did you knowhim?”

“He was the friend of all my youth—of my earlymanhood.  And youknew him?”

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

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

CHAPTER VII.

He learned in that instant two things: one being that even inso long a time she had gathered no knowledge of his greatintimacy and his great quarrel; the other that in spite of thisignorance, strangely enough, she supplied on the spot a reasonfor his stupor.  “How extraordinary,” hepresently exclaimed, “that we should never haveknown!”

She gave a wan smile which seemed to Stransom stranger eventhan the fact itself.  “I never, never spoke ofhim.”

He looked again about the room.  “Why then, if yourlife 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 thewonderful experience of knowing him.  Inever spokeof him,” Stransom added in a moment, “because he didme—years ago—an unforgettable wrong.”  Shewas silent, and with the full effect of his presence all aboutthem it almost startled her guest to hear no protest escapeher.  She accepted his words, he turned his eyes to heragain to see in what manner she accepted them.  It was withrising tears and a rare sweetness in the movement of putting outher hand to take his own.  Nothing more wonderful had everappeared to him than, in that little chamber of remembrance andhomage, to see her convey with such exquisite mildness that asfrom Acton Hague any injury was credible.  The clock tickedin the stillness—Hague had probably given it toher—and while he let her hold his hand with a tendernessthat was almost an assumption of responsibility for his old painas 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 theroom, made straight a small picture to which, on examining it, hehad given a slight push.  Then turning round on him with herpale gaiety recovered, “I’ve forgiven him!” shedeclared.

“I know what you’ve done,” said Stransom“I know what you’ve done for years.”  Fora moment they looked at each other through it all with their longcommunity of service in their eyes.  This short passagemade, to his sense, for the woman before him, an immense, anabsolutely naked confession; which was presently, suddenlyblushing red and changing her place again, what she appeared tolearn he perceived in it.  He got up and “How you musthave loved him!” he cried.

“Women aren’t like men.  They can love evenwhere 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’thave brought you here.”

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

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

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

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

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

Considering more intently she made no answer, and he then knewhe should have been adequately answered by her asking how oftenhe himself had spoken of their terrible friend.  Suddenly abrighter light broke in her face and an excited idea sprang toher lips in the appeal: “You haveforgivenhim?”

“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 thelights on your altar—?”

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

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

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

“He was yours in life then, even if for a whilehe ceased to be.  If you forgave him you went back tohim.  Those whom we’ve once loved—”

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

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

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

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

He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read theman’s death.  “You mean that we meet nomore?”

“Not as we’ve met—notthere!”

He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at therenouncement that rang out in the word she so expressivelysounded.  “But what’s changed—foryou?”

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

“I didn’t understand before only because Ididn’t know.  Now that I know, I see what I’vebeen living with for years,” Stransom went on verygently.

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

“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 Ifound it magnificently ready.  I used it with the gratitudeI’ve always shown you, for I knew it from of old to bededicated to Death.  I told you long ago that my Deadweren’t many.  Yours were, but all you had done forthem was none too much for myworship!  You hadplaced a great light for Each—I gathered them together forOne!”

“We had simply different intentions,” hereturned.  “That, as you say, I perfectly knew, and Idon’t see why your intention shouldn’t still sustainyou.”

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

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

“If I had known you had ever known him I should havetaken for granted he had his candle,” she presentlyanswered.  “What’s changed, as you say, is thaton making the discovery I find he never has had it.  Thatmakes myattitude”—she paused as thinking howto express it, then said simply—“allwrong.”

“Come once again,” he pleaded.

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

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

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

He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation ofeverything that had opened out to him, he felt the need torecover himself as he could only do in solitude.  Yet helingered—lingered to see if she had no compromise toexpress, no attenuation to propose.  But he only met hergreat lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was assorry 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 thinkit will do.”

He looked round the room once more, knowing how little he wassure it would do.  He felt also stricken and more and morecold, and his chill was like an ague in which he had to make aneffort not to shake.  Then he made doleful reply: “Imust try on my side—if you can’t try onyours.”  She came out with him to the hall and intothe doorway, and here he put her the question he held he couldleast answer from his own wit.  “Why have you neverlet me come before?”

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

“And what would have been the objection tothat?”

“It would have entailed other explanations; there wouldat 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 Ididn’t need to be!”

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

“It would have come out—she would have toldyou.  That fear at my heart—that was myreason!”  And she closed the door, shutting himout.

CHAPTER VIII.

He had ruthlessly abandoned her—that of course was whathe had done.  Stransom made it all out in solitude, atleisure, fitting the unmatched pieces gradually together anddealing one by one with a hundred obscure points.  She hadknown Hague only after her present friend’s relations withhim had wholly terminated; obviously indeed a good while after;and it was natural enough that of his previous life she shouldhave ascertained only what he had judged good tocommunicate.  There were passages it was quite conceivablethat even in moments of the tenderest expansion he should havewithheld.  Of many facts in the career of a man so in theeye of the world there was of course a common knowledge; but thislady lived apart from public affairs, and the only time perfectlyclear to her would have been the time following the dawn of herown drama.  A man in her place would have “lookedup” the past—would even have consulted oldnewspapers.  It remained remarkable indeed that in her longcontact with the partner of her retrospect no accident hadlighted a train; but there was no arguing about that; theaccident had in fact come: it had simply been that security hadprevailed.  She had taken what Hague had given her, and herblankness in respect of his other connexions was only a touch inthe picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme reason toknow so great a master could have been trusted to produce.

This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught hisbreath again and again as it came over him that the woman withwhom he had had for years so fine a point of contact was a womanwhom Acton Hague, of all men in the world, had more or lessfashioned.  Such as she sat there to-day she wasineffaceably stamped with him.  Beneficent, blameless asStransom held her, he couldn’t rid himself of the sensethat he had been, as who should say, swindled.  She hadimposed upon him hugely, though she had known it as little ashe.  All this later past came back to him as a timegrotesquely misspent.  Such at least were his firstreflexions; 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 refusedto give him; the effect of which was to make her seem to him onlymore saturated with her fate.  He felt her spirit, throughthe whole strangeness, finer than his own to the very degree inwhich she might have been, in which she certainly had been, morewronged.  A women, when wronged, was always more wrongedthan a man, and there were conditions when the least she couldhave got off with was more than the most he could have tobear.  He was sure this rare creature wouldn’t havegot off with the least.  He was awestruck at the thought ofsuch a surrender—such a prostration.  Moulded indeedshe had been by powerful hands, to have converted her injury intoan exaltation so sublime.  The fellow had only had to diefor everything that was ugly in him to be washed out in atorrent.  It was vain to try to guess what had taken place,but nothing could be clearer than that she had ended by accusingherself.  She absolved him at every point, she adored hervery wounds.  The passion by which he had profited hadrushed 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 howlittle he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved! His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unutteredsound.  The light she had demanded for his altar would havebroken his silence with a blare; whereas all the lights in thechurch were for her too great a hush.

She had been right about the difference—she had spokenthe truth about the change: Stransom was soon to know himself asperversely but sharply jealous.  Histide had ebbed,not flowed; if he had “forgiven” Acton Hague, thatforgiveness was a motive with a broken spring.  The veryfact of her appeal for a material sign, a sign that should makeher dead lover equal there with the others, presented theconcession to her friend as too handsome for the case.  Hehad never thought of himself as hard, but an exorbitant articlemight easily render him so.  He moved round and round thisone, but only in widening circles—the more he looked at itthe less acceptable it seemed.  At the same time he had noillusion about the effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how itwould make for a rupture.  He left her alone a week, butwhen at last he again called this conviction was cruellyconfirmed.  In the interval he had kept away from thechurch, and he needed no fresh assurance from her to know shehadn’t entered it.  The change was complete enough: ithad broken up her life.  Indeed it had broken up his, forall the fires of his shrine seemed to him suddenly to have beenquenched.  A great indifference fell upon him, the weight ofwhich was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his devotionhad been for him till in that shock it ceased like a droppedwatch.  Neither did he know with how large a confidence hehad counted on the final service that had now failed: the mortaldeception was that in this abandonment the whole future gaveway.

These days of her absence proved to him of what she wascapable; all the more that he never dreamed she was vindictive oreven resentful.  It was not in anger she had forsaken him;it was in simple submission to hard reality, to the stern logicof life.  This came home to him when he sat with her againin the room in which her late aunt’s conversation lingeredlike the tone of a cracked piano.  She tried to make himforget how much they were estranged, but in the very presence ofwhat they had given up it was impossible not to be sorry forher.  He had taken from her so much more than she had takenfrom him.  He argued with her again, told her she could nowhave the altar to herself; but she only shook her head withpleading sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on theimpossible, the extinct.  Couldn’t he see that inrelation to her private need the rites he had established werepractically an elaborate exclusion?  She regretted nothingthat had happened; it had all been right so long as shedidn’t know, and it was only that now she knew too much andthat from the moment their eyes were open they would simply haveto conform.  It had doubtless been happiness enough for themto go on together so long.  She was gentle, grateful,resigned; but this was only the form of a deepimmoveability.  He saw he should never more cross thethreshold of the second room, and he felt how much this alonewould make a stranger of him and give a conscious stiffness tohis visits.  He would have hated to plunge again into thatwell of reminders, but he enjoyed quite as little the vacantalternative.

After he had been with her three or four times it struck himthat to have come at last into her house had had the horrideffect of diminishing their intimacy.  He had known herbetter, had liked her in greater freedom, when they merely walkedtogether or kneeled together.  Now they only pretended;before they had been nobly sincere.  They began to try theirwalks again, but it proved a lame imitation, for these things,from the first, beginning or ending, had been connected withtheir visits to the church.  They had either strolled awayas they came out or gone in to rest on the return. Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn’t walk as ofold.  The omission made everything false; it was a diremutilation of their lives.  Our friend was frank andmonotonous, making no mystery of his remonstrance and no secretof his predicament.  Her response, whatever it was, alwayscame to the same thing—an implied invitation to him tojudge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she hadin hers.  For him indeed was no comfort even in complaint,since every allusion to what had befallen them but made theauthor of their trouble more present.  Acton Hague wasbetween them—that was the essence of the matter, and neverso much between them as when they were face to face.  ThenStransom, while still wanting to banish him, had the strangestsense of striving for an ease that would involve having acceptedhim.  Deeply disconcerted by what he knew, he was stillworse tormented by really not knowing.  Perfectly aware thatit would have been horribly vulgar to abuse his old friend or totell his companion the story of their quarrel, it yet vexed himthat her depth of reserve should give him no opening and shouldhave the effect of a magnanimity greater even than his own.

He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if hewere in love with her that he should care so much what adventuresshe had had.  He had never for a moment allowed he was inlove with her; therefore nothing could have surprised him morethan to discover he was jealous.  What but jealousy couldgive a man that sore contentious wish for the detail of whatwould make him suffer?  Well enough he knew indeed that heshould never have it from the only person who to-day could giveit to him.  She let him press her with his sombre eyes, onlysmiling at him with an exquisite mercy and breathing equallylittle the word that would expose her secret and the word thatwould appear to deny his literal right to bitterness.  Shetold nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted everything but thepossibility of her return to the old symbols.  Stransomdivined that for her too they had been vividly individual, hadstood for particular hours or particularattributes—particular links in her chain.  He made itclear to himself, as he believed, that his difficulty lay in thefact that the very nature of the plea for his faithless friendconstituted a prohibition; that it happened to have come fromherwas precisely the vice that attached to it.  Tothe voice of impersonal generosity he felt sure he would havelistened; he would have deferred to an advocate who, speakingfrom abstract justice, knowing of his denial without having knownHague, should have had the imagination to say: “Ah,remember only the best of him; pity him; provide forhim.”  To provide for him on the very ground of havingdiscovered another of his turpitudes was not to pity but toglorify him.  The more Stransom thought the more he made outthat whatever this relation of Hague’s it could only havebeen a deception more or less finely practised.  Where hadit come into the life that all men saw?  Why had one neverheard of it if it had had the frankness of honourablethings?  Stransom knew enough of his other ties, of hisobligations and appearances, not to say enough of his generalcharacter, to be sure there had been some infamy.  In oneway or another this creature had been coldly sacrificed. That was why at the last as well as the first he must still leavehim out and out.

CHAPTER IX.

And yet this was no solution, especially after he had talkedagain to his friend of all it had been his plan she shouldfinally do for him.  He had talked in the other days, andshe had responded with a frankness qualified only by a courteousreluctance, a reluctance that touched him, to linger on thequestion of his death.  She had then practically acceptedthe charge, suffered him to feel he could depend upon her to bethe eventual guardian of his shrine; and it was in the name ofwhat had so passed between them that he appealed to her not toforsake him in his age.  She listened at present withshining coldness and all her habitual forbearance to insist onher terms; her deprecation was even still tenderer, for itexpressed the compassion of her own sense that he wasabandoned.  Her terms, however, remained the same, andscarcely the less audible for not being uttered; though he wassure that secretly even more than he she felt bereft of thesatisfaction his solemn trust was to have provided her. They both missed the rich future, but she missed it most, becauseafter all it was to have been entirely hers; and it was heracceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of herpreference for the thought of Acton Hague over any other thoughtwhatever.  He had humour enough to laugh rather grimly whenhe said to himself: “Why the deuce does she like him somuch more than she likes me?”—the reasons beingreally so conceivable.  But even his faculty of analysisleft the irritation standing, and this irritation proved perhapsthe greatest misfortune that had ever overtaken him.  Therehad been nothing yet that made him so much want to give up. He had of course by this time well reached the age ofrenouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to him that itwas time to give up everything.

Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced thefriendship once so charming and comforting.  His privationhad two faces, and the face it had turned to him on the occasionof his last attempt to cultivate that friendship was the one hecould look at least.  This was the privation he inflicted;the other was the privation he bore.  The conditions shenever 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 caughthimself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice tothat inanity.  There was proof enough besides in his beingso weak and so ill.  His irritation took the form ofmelancholy, and his melancholy that of the conviction that hishealth had quite failed.  His altar moreover had ceased toexist; his chapel, in his dreams, was a great dark cavern. All the lights had gone out—all his Dead had diedagain.  He couldn’t exactly see at first how it hadbeen in the power of his late companion to extinguish them, sinceit was neither for her nor by her that they had been called intobeing.  Then he understood that it was essentially in hisown soul the revival had taken place, and that in the air of thissoul they were now unable to breathe.  The candles mightmechanically 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 indispensablemedium.  If anything was wrong everything was—hersilence spoiled the tune.

Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that hewent back; reflecting that as they had been his best society foryears his Dead perhaps wouldn’t let him forsake themwithout doing something more for him.  They stood there, ashe had left them, in their tall radiance, the bright cluster thathad already made him, on occasions when he was willing to comparesmall things with great, liken them to a group of sea-lights onthe edge of the ocean of life.  It was a relief to him,after a while, as he sat there, to feel they had still avirtue.  He was more and more easily tired, and he alwaysdrove now; the action of his heart was weak and gave him none ofthe reassurance conferred by the action of his fancy.  Nonethe less he returned yet again, returned several times, andfinally, during six months, haunted the place with a renewal offrequency and a strain of impatience.  In winter the churchwas unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the glow ofhis shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask. He sat and wondered to what he had reduced his absent associateand what she now did with the hours of her absence.  Therewere other churches, there were other altars, there were othercandles; in one way or another her piety would still operate; hecouldn’t absolutely have deprived her of her rites. So he argued, but without contentment; for he well enough knewthere was no other such rare semblance of the mountain of lightshe had once mentioned to him as the satisfaction of herneed.  As this semblance again gradually grew great to himand his pious practice more regular, he found a sharper andsharper pang in the imagination of her darkness; for never somuch as in these weeks had his rites been real, never had hisgathered company seemed so to respond and even to invite. He lost himself in the large lustre, which was more and more whathe had from the first wished it to be—as dazzling as thevision of heaven in the mind of a child.  He wandered in thefields of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from tier totier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the whiteintensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, toanother.  It was in the quiet sense of having saved hissouls that his deep strange instinct rejoiced.  This was nodim theological rescue, no boon of a contingent world; they weresaved better than faith or works could save them, saved for thewarm world they had shrunkfrom dying to, for actuality,for continuity, for the certainty of human remembrance.

By this time he had survived all his friends; the laststraight flame was three years old, there was no one to add tothe list.  Over and over he called his roll, and it appearedto him compact and complete.  Where should he put inanother, where, if there were no other objection, would it standin its place in the rank?  He reflected, with a want ofsincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would bedifficult 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—moreand more he could see that he had never introduced analien.  He had had his great companions, hisindulgences—there were cases in which they had beenimmense; but what had his devotion after all been if ithadn’t been at bottom a respect?  He was, however,himself surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the winter theresponsibility of it was what was uppermost in histhoughts.  The refrain had grown old to them, that plea forjust one more.  There came a day when, for simpleexhaustion, if symmetry should demand just one he was ready sofar to meet symmetry.  Symmetry was harmony, and the idea ofharmony began to haunt him; he said to himself that harmony wasof course everything.  He took, in fancy, his composition topieces, redistributing it into other lines, making otherjuxtapositions and contrasts.  He shifted this and thatcandle, he made the spaces different, he effaced thedisfigurement of a possible gap.  There were subtle andcomplex relations, a scheme of cross-reference, and moments inwhich he seemed to catch a glimpse of the void so sensible to thewoman who wandered in exile or sat where he had seen her with theportrait of Acton Hague.  Finally, in this way, he arrivedat a conception of the total, the ideal, which left a clearopportunity for just another figure.  “Just onemore—to round it off; just one more, just one,”continued to hum in his head.  There was a strange confusionin the thought, for he felt the day to be near when he too shouldbe one of the Others.  What in this event would the Othersmatter to him, since they only mattered to the living?  Evenas one of the Dead what would his altar matter to him, since hisparticular dream of keeping it up had melted away?  What hadharmony to do with the case if his lights were all to bequenched?  What he had hoped for was an institutedthing.  He might perpetuate it on some other pretext, buthis special meaning would have dropped.  This meaning was tohave lasted with the life of the one other person who understoodit.

In March he had an illness during which he spent a fortnightin bed, and when he revived a little he was told of two thingsthat had happened.  One was that a lady whose name was notknown to the servants (she left none) had been three times to askabout him; the other was that in his sleep and on an occasionwhen his mind evidently wandered he was heard to murmur again andagain: “Just one more—just one.”  As soonas he found himself able to go out, and before the doctor inattendance had pronounced him so, he drove to see the lady whohad come to ask about him.  She was not at home; but thisgave him the opportunity, before his strength should fall again,to take his way to the church.  He entered it alone; he haddeclined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to declineeffectively, the company of his servant or of a nurse.  Heknew now perfectly what these good people thought; they haddiscovered his clandestine connexion, the magnet that had drawnhim for so many years, and doubtless attached a significance oftheir own to the odd words they had repeated to him.  Thenameless lady was the clandestine connexion—a fact nothingcould have made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoinher.  He sank on his knees before his altar while his headfell over on his hands.  His weakness, his life’sweariness overtook him.  It seemed to him he had come forthe great surrender.  At first he asked himself how heshould get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, thevery desire to move gradually left him.  He had come, as healways came, to lose himself; the fields of light were stillthere to stray in; only this time, in straying, he would nevercome back.  He had given himself to his Dead, and it wasgood: this time his Dead would keep him.  He couldn’trise from his knees; he believed he should never rise again; allhe could do was to lift his face and fix his eyes on hislights.  They looked unusually, strangely splendid, but theone that always drew him most had an unprecedented lustre. It was the central voice of the choir, the glowing heart of thebrightness, and on this occasion it seemed to expand, to spreadgreat wings of flame.  The whole altar flared—dazzlingand blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearerthan the rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was humanbeauty and human charity, was the far-off face of MaryAntrim.  She smiled at him from the glory ofheaven—she brought the glory down with her to takehim.  He bowed his head in submission and at the same momentanother wave rolled over him.  Was it the quickening of joyto pain?  In the midst of his joy at any rate he felt hisburied face grow hot as with some communicated knowledge that hadthe force of a reproach.  It suddenly made him contrast thatvery rapture with the bliss he had refused to another.  Thisbreath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; thedescent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a greatcompunctious throb for the descent of Acton Hague.  It wasas if Stransom had read what her eyes said to him.

After a moment he looked round in a despair that made him feelas if the source of life were ebbing.  The church had beenempty—he was alone; but he wanted to have something done,to make a last appeal.  This idea gave him strength for aneffort; he rose to his feet with a movement that made him turn,supporting himself by the back of a bench.  Behind him was aprostrate figure, a figure he had seen before; a woman in deepmourning, bowed in grief or in prayer.  He had seen her inother days—the first time of his entrance there, and he nowslightly wavered, looking at her again till she seemed aware hehad noticed her.  She raised her head and met his eyes: thepartner of his long worship had come back.  She lookedacross at him an instant with a face wondering and scared; he sawhe had made her afraid.  Then quickly rising she camestraight to him with both hands out.

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

“You’re very ill—you shouldn’t behere,” 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 herhands, which steadied and quickened him.  “I’vesomething to tell you.”

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

“They’re here for you,” Stransom said,“they’re present to-night as they’ve neverbeen.  They speak for you—don’t yousee?—in a passion of light; they sing out like a choir ofangels.  Don’t you hear what they say?—theyoffer the very thing you asked of me.”

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

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

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

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

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