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"EVERY ONE asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon; "and I make answer as I can--begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself." He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years--thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that license. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York--he was fifty-six today: unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger" things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come--putting the thing pompously--to look at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it--the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his over-schooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so "good"--the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live in "Europe," as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.
These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before, to overtures for this conversion--in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism--where it might be said of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn weather--the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place--he loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least "minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations and really "go into" figures.
It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn't however going to be better off for it, as he was--and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better off than she found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures--if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood off, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to "spirit," the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference; with her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge, "their" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all over laid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.
She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building-firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite "standing-up" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly urged his case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold-mine. He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations. It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which in the eastward direction formed one of the corners, the "jolly" one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.
They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn't name them: all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes--all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's, some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell him, if he "plased," that he must ask it of somebody else.
The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy woman against what one might see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "scraping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms--so many of them as there were tool--with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace--for the moment; the question of the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by his own hand three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard that occupied, as a "fixture," the deep recess in the dining-room. Just now he laughed at his companions--quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that, in the first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination, if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.
There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken out, after a yearning look round: "But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull this to pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with his re-awakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were "at" him for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to decent feelings. He had found the place, just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short--! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. "In short you're to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination--not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of "society," bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demur, "Well yes: so precisely, you may put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.
He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead; the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here." It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words. "You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?"
"Well, with such a home--!" But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an i, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could any one--of any wit--insist on any one else's "wanting" to live in New York?
"Oh," he said, "I might have lived here (since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then everything would have been different enough--and, I dare say, 'funny' enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of it--I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal'--is just in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it would have to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here but of dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever--not the ghost of one.
"They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. "Are you very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't, much rather, serve--?
"He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a grin: "Oh ghosts--of course the place must swarm with them I should be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in."
Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering. Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the "set" commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished and lived in--!"
She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it is lived in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for her to sigh "Ah yes--!" all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls, ineffaceable life.
It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity--among the people he met--about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his "thinking" (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and "turned out," if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculation--which but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking--he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal. "What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made something of me as well. Only I can't make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated it--I've never known what was in the letter. You may of course say it's a trifle--!"
"I don't say it's a trifle," Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.
She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. "I shouldn't care if you did!" he laughed, however; "and it's only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. Not to have followed my perverse young course--and almost in the teeth of my father's curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,' from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference: some variation from that, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my 'form.' I should have stuck here--if it had been possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, pour deux sous, whether it were possible. If I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I admire them so much--the question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions for them, has nothing to do with the matter: it's only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn't have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever."
"And you wonder about the flower," Miss Staverton said. "So do I, if you want to know; and so I've been wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower," she continued, "I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous."
"Monstrous above all!" her visitor echoed; "and I imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive."
"You don't believe that," she returned; "if you did you wouldn't wonder. You'd know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel--and what I feel for you--is that you'd have had power."
"You'd have liked me that way?" he asked.
She barely hung fire. "How should I not have liked you?"
"I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!"
"How should I not have liked you?" she simply again asked.
He stood before her still--her question kept him motionless. He took it in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise meeting it testified to that. "I know at least what I am," he simply went on; "the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me."
She just waited, smiling at him. "You see what it has made of me."
"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you've the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without my exile, I shouldn't have been waiting till now--?" But he pulled up for the strange pang.
"The great thing to see," she presently said, "seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking--" She also however faltered.
He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. "Do you believe then--too dreadfully!--that I am as good as I might ever have been?"
"Oh no! Far from it!" With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him. "But I don't care," she smiled.
"You mean I'm good enough?"
She considered a little. "Will you believe it if I say so? I mean will you let that settle your question for you?" And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: "Oh you don't care either--but very differently: you don't care for anything but yourself."
Spencer Brydon recognised it--it was in fact what he had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified. "He isn't myself. He's the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him," he added. "And I can. And I shall."
Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breathable air. What she said however was unexpected. "Well, I've seen him."
"You--?"
"I've seen him in a dream."
"Oh a 'dream'--!" It let him down.
"But twice over," she continued. "I saw him as I see you now."
"You've dreamed the same dream--?"
"Twice over," she repeated. "The very same."
This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. "You dream about me at that rate?"
"Ah about him!" she smiled.
His eyes again sounded her. "Then you know all about him." And as she said nothing more: "What's the wretch like?"
She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that, resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. "I'll tell you some other time!"
It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was living for-- since he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe of in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later--rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil--he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was practice he found he could perfectly "work" without exciting remark; no one was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine.
He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue "officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at two. He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evening's end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations--met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success--and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks--just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of ombres chinoises. He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.
He always caught the first effect of the
steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall
pavement, large black-and That was the essence of his vision--which was
all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house
and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last
verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He knew
what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the
figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash. His
alter ego "walked" --that was the note of
his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own
odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He
roamed, slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself
did--Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her
figure of their "craping"; and the presence he
watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as
cautious and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in
fact its already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of
pursuit grew for him from night to night, laying on him
finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had been
comparable. It had been the theory of many
superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting
that life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of
no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been
introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience
and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle,
yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any beast of the
forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of
the chase positively came again into play; there were even
moments when passages of his occasional experience as a
sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor
and mountain and desert, revived for him--and to the
increase of his keenness--by the tremendous force of
analogy. He found himself at moments--once he had placed his
single light on some mantel-shelf or in some
recess--stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing
himself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought
of old the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself
holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the
supreme suspense created by big game alone.
He wasn't afraid (though putting himself the
question as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or
in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had
been known to confess to having put it); and this
indeed--since here at least he might be frank!--because of
the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself
produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond
the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into
categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his
own perception, of the alarm his presence and his vigilance
created; though leaving him always to remark, portentously,
on his probably having formed a relation, his probably
enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man.
People enough, first and last, had been in terror of
apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables
and become himself, in the apparitional world, an
incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he
quite dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist,
truly, on that side of his privilege. With habit and
repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to
penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners,
to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of
uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom
by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting
effects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he
could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and,
only knowing it was there behind him in case of need, see
his way about, visually project for his purpose a
comparative clearness. It made him feel, this acquired
faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he
would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow
eyes, and what it mightn't verily be, for the poor
hard-pressed alter ego, to be confronted with such a
type.
He liked however the open shutters; he opened
everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as
carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he
liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the upper
rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars
through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the
street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would
have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual
social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was
more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly
general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of
his detachment it seemed to give him. He had support of
course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the
prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central
shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on
his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less
often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle
of his prey. The place was there more subdivided; a large
"extension" in particular, where small rooms for
servants had been multiplied abounded in nooks and corners,
in closets and passages, in the ramifications especially of
an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a time,
to look far down--not deterred from his gravity even while
aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some
solemn simpleton playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact
he might himself make that ironic rapprochement; but
within the walls, and in spite of the clear windows, his
consistency was proof against the cynical light of New York.
It had belonged to that idea of the
exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real
test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the
first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate"
his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to
cultivation--which indeed was but another name for his
manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing
it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it
had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions,
attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have
broken upon him at once. This was the case more specifically
with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the
upper rooms, the recognition-- On his return, that night--the night
succeeding his last intermission--he stood in the hall and
looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than
any he had yet known. "He's there, at the top,
and waiting--not, as in general, falling back for
disappearance. He's holding his ground, and it's the first
time--which is a proof, isn't it? that something has
happened for him." So Brydon argued with his hand on
the banister and his foot on the lowest stair; in which
position he felt as never before the air chilled by his
logic. He himself turned cold in it, for he seemed of a
sudden to know what now was involved. "Harder
pressed?--yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to
him that I've come, as they say, 'to stay.' He finally
doesn't like and can't bear it, in the sense, I mean, that
his wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his
dread. I've hunted him till he has 'turned': that, up there,
is what has happened--he's the fanged or the antlered animal
brought at last to bay." There came to him, as I
say--but determined by an influence beyond my notation!--the
acuteness of this certainty; under which however the next
moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as little
have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared
immediately to act upon it for enterprise. it marked none
the less a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented
sudden dismay, no doubt, but also represented, and with the
selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the
next minute almost the proudest, duplication of
consciousness.
"He has been dodging, retreating,
hiding, but now, worked up to anger, he'll
fight!"--this intense impression made a single
mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was
wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so
eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to
earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort
not unworthy of him. It bristled there--somewhere near at
hand, however unseen still--as the hunted thing, even as the
trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and
Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more
complex than had ever before found itself consistent with
sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly
succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the
open, so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a
great lift of the whole situation. Yet with another rare
shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure
by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear;
so rejoicing that he could, in another form, actively
inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form
in which he might passively know it.
The apprehension of knowing it must after a
little have grown in him, and the strangest moment of his
adventure perhaps, the most memorable or really most
interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of
certain instants of concentrated conscious combat,
the sense of a need to hold on to something. even after the
manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline;
the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge,
somehow and upon something--to show himself, in a word, that
he wasn't afraid. The state of "holding-on" was
thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced; if there
had been anything, in the great vacancy, to seize, he would
presently have been aware of having clutched it as he might
under a shock at home have clutched the nearest chair-back.
He had been surprised at any rate--of this he was
aware--into something unprecedented since his original
appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held
them tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of
dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened them the
room, the other contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed
lighter--so light, almost, that at first he took the change
for day. He stood firm, however that might be, just where he
had paused; his resistance had helped him--it was as if
there were something he had tided over. He knew after a
little what this was--it had been in the imminent danger of
flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without
this he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him
that, still with his eyes closed, he would have descended
them, would have known how, straight and swiftly, to the
bottom.
Well, as he had held out, here he was--still
at the top, among the more intricate upper rooms and with
the gauntlet of the others, of all the rest of the house,
still to run when it should be his time to go. He would go
at his time--only at his time: didn't he go every night very
much at the same hour? He took out his watch--there was
light for that: it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he
had never withdrawn so soon. He reached his lodgings for the
most part at two--with his walk of a quarter of an hour. He
would wait for the last quarter--he wouldn't stir till then;
and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting
while he held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an
effort, which he recognised, would serve perfectly for the
attestation he desired to make. It would prove his
courage-- At present, really, the light he had set down
on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his
sword; which utensil, in the course of a minute, he had
taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of.
The door between the rooms was open, and from the second
another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he
remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well,
but there was a fourth, beyond them, without issue save
through the preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step
again, was appreciably a help; though even in recognising
this he lingered once more a little by the chimney-piece on
which his light had rested. When he next moved, just
hesitating where to turn, he found himself considering a
circumstance that, after his first and comparatively vague
apprehension of it, produced in him the start that often
attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of
having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of
the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and
which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not
directly facing it. Placed at some distance to the left of
this point, it would have admitted him to the last room of
the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it
not, to his intimate conviction, been closed since his
former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an
hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the wonder of
the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding
his breath while he sounded its sense. Surely it had been
subsequently closed--that is it had been on his
previous passage indubitably open!
He took it full in the face that something
had happened between--that he couldn't not have noticed
before (by which he meant on his original tour of all the
rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally
presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone
an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for
him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself that
he might perhaps then have gone into the room and,
inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the
door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was
what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he
might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas
clear. He had them from the first, as he was well aware
quite on the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end
of one of them, of his baffled "prey" (which had
become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to
apply!) was the form of success his imagination had most
cherished, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty.
He had known fifty times the start of perception that had
afterwards dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself
"There!" under some fond brief hallucination. The
house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself; he might
wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the
particular time, which could rejoice so in the
multiplication of doors--the opposite extreme to the modern,
the actual almost complete proscription of them; but it had
fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence
encountered telescopically, as he might say, focussed and
studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the
elbow.
It was with these considerations that his
present attention was charged--they perfectly availed to
make what he saw portentous. He couldn't, by any
lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn't, if it
was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had
been another agent? Another agent?--he had been catching, as
he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when had
he been so close as in this simple, this logical, this
completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that
one might have taken it for personal; yet for what
did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting,
he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah this time at
last they were, the two, the opposed projections of
him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the
question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not before, the
question of courage--for what he knew the blank face of the
door to say to him was "Show us how much you
have!" It stared, it glared back at him with that
challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he
just push it open or not? Oh to have this consciousness was
to think--and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood
there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not
to have acted--that was the misery and the pang--was even
still not to act; was in fact all to feel the thing
in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause
and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to
measure it; for his vibration had already changed--as just
by the effect of its intensity. Shut up there, at bay,
defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably
proveably done, thus giving notice like some stark
signboard--under that accession of accent the situation
itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his
mind on what it had turned to.
It had turned altogether to a different
admonition; to a supreme hint, for him, of the value of
Discretion! This slowly dawned, no doubt--for it could take
its time; so perfectly, on his threshold, had he been
stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or
retreated. It was the strangest-of all things that now when,
by his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or
even his shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel,
all the hunger of his prime need might have been met, his
high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged--it was amazing,
but it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should
have, at a touch, quite dropped from him. Discretion--he
jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such a pitch,
because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much
more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he
"jumped" at it I feel the consonance of this term
with the fact that--at the end indeed of I know not how
long--he did move again, he crossed straight to the door. He
wouldn't touch it--it seemed now that he might if
he would: he would only just wait there a little, to show,
to prove, that he wouldn't. He had thus another station,
close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied
him; but with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere
intensity of stillness. He listened as if there had been
something to hear, but this attitude, while it lasted, was
his own communication. "If you won't then--good: I
spare you and I give up. You affect me as by the appeal
positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigid
and sublime-- what do I know?--we both of us should have
suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and
privileged as I believe, it has never been given to man, I
retire, I renounce--never, on my honour, to try again. So
rest for ever--and let me!"
That, for Brydon was the deep sense of this
last demonstration--solemn, measured, directed, as he felt
it to be He brought it to a close, he turned away; and now
verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He retraced
his steps taking up his candle, burnt, he observed,
well-nigh to the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he
would, the distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a
moment, he knew himself at the other side of the house. He
did here what he had not yet done at these hours--he opened
half a casement, one of those in the front, and let in the
air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time
previous for a sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was
broken now and it didn't matter--broken by his concession
and his surrender, which made it idle henceforth that he
should ever come back. The empty street--its other life so
marked even by the great lamplit vacancy--was within call,
within touch he stayed there as to be in it again, high
above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some
comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage
of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base. He
would have blessed that sign of life; he would have welcomed
positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman,
whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure
that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn't have felt
the impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it, on
some pretext, from his fourth floor.
The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly
or too compromising, the explanation that would have saved
his dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the
papers was not definite to him: he was so occupied with the
thought of recording his Discretion--as an effect of the vow
he had just uttered to his intimate adversary--that the
importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken
all ironically his sense of proportion. If there had been a
ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the
vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers
and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed
somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by
outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent. If there had
been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at
hotels, a workable fire-escape in the form of notched cable
or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a
proof--well, of his present delicacy. He nursed that
sentiment, as the question stood, a little in vain, and
even--at the end of he scarce knew, once more, how
long--found it, as by the action on his mind of the failure
of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague
anguish. It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir
of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself
under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole
prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and
the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the
hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim
dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his
spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put
on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a
sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective
negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the
more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at
hand, proving to him what night he had made of it.
He looked again at his watch, saw what had
become of his time-values (he had taken hours for
minutes--not, as in other tense situations, minutes for
hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak,
the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still
locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window had
been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at
last as for a worse despair. Yet while so deeply demoralised
he was capable again of an impulse denoting--at least by his
present measure--extraordinary resolution; of retracing his
steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the
extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to there being in
the place another presence than his own. This required an
effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his reason,
which over-mastered for the moment everything else. There
was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how
should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen
closed were at present open? He could hold to the idea that
the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a
chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground
and never again profane it. This conception held together,
it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on
the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his
recent inaction, had engendered. The image of the
"presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him
to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his
nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which
certainty would have come to him. For, with all his
resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop
short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too
great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an
awful specific form.
He knew--yes, as he had never known
anything--that, should he see the door open, it
would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean that
the agent of his shame --for his shame was the deep
abjection--was once more at large and in general possession;
and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this
would determine for him. It would send him straight about to
the window he had left open, and by that window, be long
ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw
himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the
street. The hideous chance of this he at least could avert;
but he could only avert it by recoiling in time from
assurance. He had the whole house to deal with, this fact
was still there; only he now knew that uncertainty alone
could start him. He stole back from where he had checked
himself--merely to do so was suddenly like safety--and,
making blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms
and sounding passages behind. Here was the top of the
stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious
landings to mark off. His instinct was all for mildness, but
his feet were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he
had in a couple of minutes become aware of this, it counted
somehow for help. He couldn't have spoken, the tone of his
voice would have scared him, and the common conceit or
resource of "whistling in the dark" (whether
literally or figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet
he liked none the less to hear himself go, and when he had
reached his first landing-- taking it all with no rush, but
quite steadily--that stage of success drew from him a gasp
of relief.
The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space
again inordinate; the open rooms to no one of which his eyes
deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of
caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown of the
deep well created for him a medium in which he could
advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour,
some watery under-world. He tried to think of something
noble, as that his property was really grand, a splendid
possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the
clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it.
They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers-- they
might come as soon as they would. At the end of two flights
he had dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the
third, with only one more left, he recognised the influence
of the lower windows, of half-drawn blinds, of the
occasional gleam of street-lamps, of the glazed spaces of
the vestibule. This was the bottom of the sea, which showed
an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved--when
at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the
banisters--with the marble squares of his childhood. By that
time indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a
commoner cause, better; it had allowed him to stop and draw
breath, and the ease increased with the sight of the old
black-and-white slabs. But what he most felt was that now
surely, with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard
firm hands, the case was settled for what he might have seen
above had he dared that last look. The closed door,
blessedly remote now, was still closed--and he had only in
short to reach that of the house.
He came down further, he crossed the passage
forming the access to the last flight; and if here again he
stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the
thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his eyes--which
opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the
stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity almost
excessive; inasmuch as the side-lights and the high
fan-tracery of the entrance were glimmering straight into
the hall; an appearance produced, he the next instant saw,
by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged
halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of
that again the question sprang at him, making his eyes, as
he felt, half start from his head, as they had done, at the
top of the house, before the sign of the other door. If he
had left that one open, hadn't he left this one closed, and
wasn't he now in most immediate presence of some
inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the
question, as a knife in his side, but the answer hung fire
still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to
which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the
whole outer door made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery
nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked--to shift
and expand and contract.
It was as if there had been something within
it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent
with the opaque surface behind, the painted panels of the
last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in his
pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared,
affected him as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude,
so that after faltering an instant on his step he let
himself go with the sense that here was at last
something to meet, to touch, to take, to know--something all
unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the
condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat.
The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a
figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a
niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure.
Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out,
the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his
descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the
central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the
very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his
curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was
something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal
presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a
man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure
himself with his power to dismay. This only could it
be--this only till he recognised, with his advance, that
what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that
covered it and in which, so far from being offered in
defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Brydon,
before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the
higher light, hard and acute--his planted stillness, his
vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands,
his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double
eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl
button and gold watchguard and polished shoe. No portrait by
a great modern master could have presented him with more
intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if
there had been "treatment," of the consummate
sort, in his every shade and salience. The revulsion, for
our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense--this
drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his
adversary's inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least,
while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his
other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he,
standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant
life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the proof in
the splendid covering hands, strong and completely
spread?--so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a
special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one
of these hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to
stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was
effectually guarded and saved.
"Saved," though, would it
be?--Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of
his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced,
as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a
deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal
of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move,
to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the
face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the
sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat, gasping there in a
sound he couldn't utter; for the bared identity was too
hideous as his, and his glare was the passion of
his protest. The face, that face, Spencer
Brydon's?--he searched it still, but looking away from it in
dismay and denial, falling straight from his height and
sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful,
disconnected from any possibility--! He had been
"sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as
this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror
within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been
only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony.
Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its
alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon
him nearer now--the face was the face of a stranger. It came
upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding
fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of
childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil,
odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and
he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick
with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the
hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his
own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed,
he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet
give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.
What had next brought him back,
clearly--though after how long?--was Mrs. Muldoon's voice,
coming to him from quite near, from so near that he seemed
presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him
while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the
ground, but half-raised and upheld--conscious, yes, of
tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head
pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing
fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at
his service- then another face intervened, bending more
directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton
had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and
that she had to this end seated herself on the lowest degree
of the staircase, the rest of his long person remaining
stretched on his old black- It had brought him to knowledge, to
knowledge--yes, this was the beauty of his state; which came
to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to
sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after
dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to
it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only
to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his
patience-- "It must have been that I
was." He made it out as she held him.
"Yes--I can only have died. You brought me literally to
life. Only," he wondered, his eyes rising to her,
"only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?"
It took her but an instant to bend her face
and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the
way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the
cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this
beatitude somehow answered everything. "And now I keep
you," she said.
"Oh keep me, keep me" he pleaded
while her face still hung over him: in response to which it
dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the
seal of their situation--of which he tasted the impress for
a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back.
"Yet how did you know--?"
"I was uneasy. You were to have come,
you remember-- and you had sent no word."
"Yes, I remember--I was to have gone to
you at one today." It caught on to their
"old" life and relation--which were so near and so
far. "I was still out there in my strange
darkness--where was it, what was it? I must have stayed
there so long." He could but wonder at the death and
the duration of his swoon.
"Since last night?" she asked with
a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.
"Since this morning--it must have been:
the cold dim dawn of today. Where have I been," he
vaguely wailed, "where have I been?" He felt her
hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make
in all security his mild moan. "What a long dark
day!"
All in her tenderness she had waited a
moment. "In the cold dim dawn?" she quavered.
But he had already gone on piecing together
the parts of the whole prodigy. "As I didn't turn up
you came straight--?
"She barely cast about. "I went
first to your hotel-- where they told me of your absence.
You had dined out last evening and hadn't been back since.
But they appeared to know you had been at your club."
"So you had the idea of
this--?"
"Of what?" she asked in a moment.
"Well--of what has happened."
"I believed at least you'd have been
here. I've known, all along," she said, "that
you've been coming."
"'Known' it--?"
"Well, I've believed it. I said nothing
to you after that talk we had a month ago--but I felt sure.
I knew you would," she declared.
"That I'd persist, you mean?"
"That you'd see him."
"Ah but I didn't" cried Brydon with
his long wail. "There's somebody--an awful beast; whom
I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it's not me."
At this she bent over him again, and her eyes
were in his eyes. "No--it's not you." And it was
as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it,
hadn't it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a
smile. "No, thank heaven," she
repeated--"it's not you! Of course it wasn't to have
been."
"Ah but it was," he gently
insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been
staring for so many weeks. "I was to have known
myself."
"You couldn't!" she returned
consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account
further for what she had herself done, "But it wasn't
only that, that you hadn't been at home," she
went on. "I waited till the hour at which we had found
Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived,
as I've told you, while, failing to bring any one to the
door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little,
if she hadn't come, by such a mercy, I should have found
means to hunt her up. But it wasn't," said Alice
Staverton, as if once more with her fine intention--
"it wasn't only that."
His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her.
"What more then?"
She met it, the wonder she had stirred.
"In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim
dawn of this morning I too saw you."
"Saw me--?"
"Saw him," said Alice
Staverton. "It must have been at the same moment."
He lay an instant taking it in--as if he
wished to be quite reasonable. "At the same
moment?"
"Yes--in my dream again, the same one
I've named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a
sign. He had come to you."
At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see
her better. She helped him when she understood his movement,
and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the
window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left.
"He didn't come to me."
"You came to yourself," she
beautifully smiled.
"Ah I've come to myself now--thanks to
you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face--this
brute's a black stranger. He's none of me, even as
I might have been," Brydon sturdily declared.
But she kept the clearness that was like the
breath of infallibility. "Isn't the whole point that
you'd have been different?"
He almost scowled for it. "As different
as that--?"
Her look again was more beautiful to him than
the things of this world. "Haven't you exactly wanted
to know how different? So this morning," she
said, "you appeared to me."
"Like him?"
"A black stranger!"
"Then how did you know it was I?"
"Because, as I told you weeks ago, my
mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might,
what you mightn't have been--to show you, you see, how I've
thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me--that my
wonder might be answered. So I knew," she went on;
"and believed that, since the question held you too so
fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for
yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would
be because you had--and also then, from the first moment,
because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me
of that. So why," she strangely smiled, "shouldn't
I like him?"
It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet.
"You 'like' that horror--?"
"I could have liked him. And to
me," she said, "he was no horror. I had accepted
him."
"'Accepted'--?" Brydon oddly
sounded.
"Before, for the interest of his
difference--yes. And as I didn't disown him, as
I knew him--which you at last, confronted with him
in his difference, so cruelly didn't, my dear--well, he
must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may
have pleased him that I pitied him.
"She was beside him on her feet, but
still holding his hand--still with her arm supporting him.
But though it all brought for him thus a dim light,
"You 'pitied' him?" he grudgingly, resentfully
asked.
"He has been unhappy; he has been
ravaged," she said.
"And haven't I been unhappy? Am not
I--you've only to look at me!--ravaged?"
"Ah I don't say I like him
better," she granted after a thought.
"But he's grim, he's worn--and things have happened to
him. He doesn't make shift, for sight, with your charming
monocle."
"No"--it struck Brydon: "I
couldn't have sported mine 'downtown.' They'd have guyed me
there."
"His great convex pince-nez--I saw it, I
recognised the kind--is for his poor ruined sight. And his
poor right hand--!"
"Ah!" Brydon winced--whether for
his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, "He
has a million a year," he lucidly added. "But he
hasn't you."
"And he isn't--no, he
isn't--you!" she murmured as he drew her to
his breast.
END. Prepared by James Hake.
III