The Altar of the Dead by Henry James.
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The Altar of the Dead




CHAPTER I.



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

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

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

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



CHAPTER II.



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

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

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

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



CHAPTER III.



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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV.



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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER V.



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

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

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

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

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

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

"I mean, dear lady, my own."

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

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



CHAPTER VI.



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

"Yes, I shall have another.  She was very kind to me.  It's that 
that's the difference."

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

She matched his great wonder.  "Did you know him?"

"He was the friend of all my youth - of my early manhood.  And YOU 
knew him?"

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

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



CHAPTER VII.



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

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

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

"Mayn't I put you that question as well?  Hadn't your life also 
been full of him?"

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

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

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

"Women aren't like men.  They can love even where they've 
suffered."

"Women are wonderful," said Stransom.  "But I assure you I've 
forgiven him too."

"If I had known of anything so strange I wouldn't have brought you 
here."

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

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

At this he could smile back at her.  "You'll see - when it comes."

She thought of that.  "This is better perhaps; but as we were - it 
was good."

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

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

"How, if I hadn't, could I linger here?"

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

"There's never a light for Acton Hague!"

She stared with a dreadful fall, "But if he's one of your Dead?"

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

"HE was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased to be.  
If you forgave him you went back to him.  Those whom we've once 
loved - "

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

"Ah it's not true - you've NOT forgiven him!" she wailed with a 
passion that startled him.

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

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

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

"Not as we've met - not THERE!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's because you're generous - you can imagine and think.  But 
the spell is broken."

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

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

"Come once again," he pleaded.

"Will you give him his candle?" she asked.

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

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

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

"Oh yes, come if you like.  But I don't think it will do."

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

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

"And what would have been the objection to that?"

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

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

"She didn't know what I went for."

"Of me then she never even heard?"

"You'll think I was deceitful.  But I didn't need to be!"

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

"It would have come out - SHE would have told you.  That fear at my 
heart - that was my reason!"  And she closed the door, shutting him 
out.



CHAPTER VIII.



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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IX.



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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then you COULD come?  God sent you!" he murmured with a happy 
smile.

"You're very ill - you shouldn't be here," she urged in anxious 
reply.

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah no more - no more!" she wailed, as with a quick new horror of 
it, under her breath.

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