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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Altar of the Dead, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Altar of the Dead
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 9, 2010  [eBook #642]
+[This file was first posted on September 10, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                               THE ALTAR OF
+                                 THE DEAD
+
+
+                              BY HENRY JAMES
+
+[Picture: Graphic]
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                          LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
+                     NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                    This edition first published 1916
+
+                       The text follows that of the
+                            Definitive Edition
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved
+them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.  Celebrations and
+suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found
+a place in his life.  He had kept each year in his own fashion the date
+of Mary Antrim's death.  It would be more to the point perhaps to say
+that this occasion kept _him_: it kept him at least effectually from
+doing anything else.  It took hold of him again and again with a hand of
+which time had softened but never loosened the touch.  He waked to his
+feast of memory as consciously as he would have waked to his
+marriage-morn.  Marriage had had of old but too little to say to the
+matter: for the girl who was to have been his bride there had been no
+bridal embrace.  She had died of a malignant fever after the wedding-day
+had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection
+that promised to fill his life to the brim.
+
+Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to say this life
+could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a pale ghost, still
+ordered by a sovereign presence.  He had not been a man of numerous
+passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown stronger with
+him than the sense of being bereft.  He had needed no priest and no altar
+to make him for ever widowed.  He had done many things in the world--he
+had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten.  He had tried
+to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had
+failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally
+absent.  She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that
+his tenacity set apart.  He had no arranged observance of it, but his
+nerves made it all their own.  They drove him forth without mercy, and
+the goal of his pilgrimage was far.  She had been buried in a London
+suburb, a part then of Nature's breast, but which he had seen lose one
+after another every feature of freshness.  It was in truth during the
+moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least.  They looked
+at another image, they opened to another light.  Was it a credible
+future?  Was it an incredible past?  Whatever the answer it was an
+immense escape from the actual.
+
+It's true that if there weren't other dates than this there were other
+memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such memories
+had greatly multiplied.  There were other ghosts in his life than the
+ghost of Mary Antrim.  He had perhaps not had more losses than most men,
+but he had counted his losses more; he hadn't seen death more closely,
+but had in a manner felt it more deeply.  He had formed little by little
+the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that
+there was something one had to do for them.  They were there in their
+simplified intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive
+patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb.
+When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if
+their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that
+they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the
+hard usage of life.  They had no organised service, no reserved place, no
+honour, no shelter, no safety.  Even ungenerous people provided for the
+living, but even those who were called most generous did nothing for the
+others.  So on George Stransom's part had grown up with the years a
+resolve that he at least would do something, do it, that is, for his
+own--would perform the great charity without reproach.  Every man _had_
+his own, and every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of
+the soul.
+
+It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; as
+the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion with
+these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called in his
+thoughts the Others.  He spared them the moments, he organised the
+charity.  Quite how it had risen he probably never could have told you,
+but what came to pass was that an altar, such as was after all within
+everybody's compass, lighted with perpetual candles and dedicated to
+these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritual spaces.  He had
+wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a religion; being
+very sure, and not a little content, that he hadn't at all events the
+religion some of the people he had known wanted him to have.  Gradually
+this question was straightened out for him: it became clear to him that
+the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been simply the
+religion of the Dead.  It suited his inclination, it satisfied his
+spirit, it gave employment to his piety.  It answered his love of great
+offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no shrine could be more
+bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than those to which his worship
+was attached.  He had no imagination about these things but that they
+were accessible to any one who should feel the need of them.  The poorest
+could build such temples of the spirit--could make them blaze with
+candles and smoke with incense, make them flush with pictures and
+flowers.  The cost, in the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly
+on the generous heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as happened, an emotion
+not unconnected with that range of feeling.  Walking home at the close of
+a busy day he was arrested in the London street by the particular effect
+of a shop-front that lighted the dull brown air with its mercenary grin
+and before which several persons were gathered.  It was the window of a
+jeweller whose diamonds and sapphires seemed to laugh, in flashes like
+high notes of sound, with the mere joy of knowing how much more they were
+"worth" than most of the dingy pedestrians staring at them from the other
+side of the pane.  Stransom lingered long enough to suspend, in a vision,
+a string of pearls about the white neck of Mary Antrim, and then was kept
+an instant longer by the sound of a voice he knew.  Next him was a
+mumbling old woman, and beyond the old woman a gentleman with a lady on
+his arm.  It was from him, from Paul Creston, the voice had proceeded: he
+was talking with the lady of some precious object in the window.
+Stransom had no sooner recognised him than the old woman turned away; but
+just with this growth of opportunity came a felt strangeness that stayed
+him in the very act of laying his hand on his friend's arm.  It lasted
+but the instant, only that space sufficed for the flash of a wild
+question.  Was _not_ Mrs. Creston dead?--the ambiguity met him there in
+the short drop of her husband's voice, the drop conjugal, if it ever was,
+and in the way the two figures leaned to each other.  Creston, making a
+step to look at something else, came nearer, glanced at him, started and
+exclaimed--behaviour the effect of which was at first only to leave
+Stransom staring, staring back across the months at the different face,
+the wholly other face, the poor man had shown him last, the blurred
+ravaged mask bent over the open grave by which they had stood together.
+That son of affliction wasn't in mourning now; he detached his arm from
+his companion's to grasp the hand of the older friend.  He coloured as
+well as smiled in the strong light of the shop when Stransom raised a
+tentative hat to the lady.  Stransom had just time to see she was pretty
+before he found himself gaping at a fact more portentous.  "My dear
+fellow, let me make you acquainted with my wife."
+
+Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half a minute, at the
+rate we live in polite society, it had practically become, for our
+friend, the mere memory of a shock.  They stood there and laughed and
+talked; Stransom had instantly whisked the shock out of the way, to keep
+it for private consumption.  He felt himself grimace, he heard himself
+exaggerate the proper, but was conscious of turning not a little faint.
+That new woman, that hired performer, Mrs. Creston?  Mrs. Creston had
+been more living for him than any woman but one.  This lady had a face
+that shone as publicly as the jeweller's window, and in the happy candour
+with which she wore her monstrous character was an effect of gross
+immodesty.  The character of Paul Creston's wife thus attributed to her
+was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to know
+perfectly that he knew.  The happy pair had just arrived from America,
+and Stransom hadn't needed to be told this to guess the nationality of
+the lady.  Somehow it deepened the foolish air that her husband's
+confused cordiality was unable to conceal.  Stransom recalled that he had
+heard of poor Creston's having, while his bereavement was still fresh,
+crossed the sea for what people in such predicaments call a little
+change.  He had found the little change indeed, he had brought the little
+change back; it was the little change that stood there and that, do what
+he would, he couldn't, while he showed those high front teeth of his,
+look other than a conscious ass about.  They were going into the shop,
+Mrs. Creston said, and she begged Mr. Stransom to come with them and help
+to decide.  He thanked her, opening his watch and pleading an engagement
+for which he was already late, and they parted while she shrieked into
+the fog, "Mind now you come to see me right away!"  Creston had had the
+delicacy not to suggest that, and Stransom hoped it hurt him somewhere to
+hear her scream it to all the echoes.
+
+He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in his life to go near
+her.  She was perhaps a human being, but Creston oughtn't to have shown
+her without precautions, oughtn't indeed to have shown her at all.  His
+precautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer, and the
+people at home would never have mentioned extradition.  This was a wife
+for foreign service or purely external use; a decent consideration would
+have spared her the injury of comparisons.  Such was the first flush of
+George Stransom's reaction; but as he sat alone that night--there were
+particular hours he always passed alone--the harshness dropped from it
+and left only the pity.  _He_ could spend an evening with Kate Creston,
+if the man to whom she had given everything couldn't.  He had known her
+twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he might perhaps have
+been unfaithful.  She was all cleverness and sympathy and charm; her
+house had been the very easiest in all the world and her friendship the
+very firmest.  Without accidents he had loved her, without accidents
+every one had loved her: she had made the passions about her as regular
+as the moon makes the tides.  She had been also of course far too good
+for her husband, but he never suspected it, and in nothing had she been
+more admirable than in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep
+every one else (keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out.
+Here was a man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had
+given it up--dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and she
+had had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on
+her grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had
+replaced.  The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes fill;
+and he had that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a world without
+delicacy, had a right to hold up his head.  While he smoked, after
+dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his
+eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate
+Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he looked.  It was to him
+her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it to be of her he would think.
+He thought for a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could
+still live--how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long
+after they had looked their last.  They had looks that survived--had them
+as great poets had quoted lines.
+
+The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the afternoon and
+the servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it he had
+mechanically unfolded and then dropped it.  Before he went to bed he took
+it up, and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by five
+words that made him start.  He stood staring, before the fire, at the
+"Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.," the man who ten years earlier had
+been the nearest of his friends and whose deposition from this eminence
+had practically left it without an occupant.  He had seen him after their
+rupture, but hadn't now seen him for years.  Standing there before the
+fire he turned cold as he read what had befallen him.  Promoted a short
+time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton Hague
+had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness consequent on
+the bite of a poisonous snake.  His career was compressed by the
+newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of which excited on George
+Stransom's part no warmer feeling than one of relief at the absence of
+any mention of their quarrel, an incident accidentally tainted at the
+time, thanks to their joint immersion in large affairs, with a horrible
+publicity.  Public indeed was the wrong Stransom had, to his own sense,
+suffered, the insult he had blankly taken from the only man with whom he
+had ever been intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University
+years, the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public that he
+had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he had
+completely overlooked it.  It had made the difference for him that
+friendship too was all over, but it had only made just that one.  The
+shock of interests had been private, intensely so; but the action taken
+by Hague had been in the face of men.  To-day it all seemed to have
+occurred merely to the end that George Stransom should think of him as
+"Hague" and measure exactly how much he himself could resemble a stone.
+He went cold, suddenly and horribly cold, to bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb, he knew his
+long walk had tired him.  In the dreadful cemetery alone he had been on
+his feet an hour.  Instinctively, coming back, they had taken him a
+devious course, and it was a desert in which no circling cabman hovered
+over possible prey.  He paused on a corner and measured the dreariness;
+then he made out through the gathered dusk that he was in one of those
+tracts of London which are less gloomy by night than by day, because, in
+the former case of the civil gift of light.  By day there was nothing,
+but by night there were lamps, and George Stransom was in a mood that
+made lamps good in themselves.  It wasn't that they could show him
+anything, it was only that they could burn clear.  To his surprise,
+however, after a while, they did show him something: the arch of a high
+doorway approached by a low terrace of steps, in the depth of which--it
+formed a dim vestibule--the raising of a curtain at the moment he passed
+gave him a glimpse of an avenue of gloom with a glow of tapers at the
+end.  He stopped and looked up, recognising the place as a church.  The
+thought quickly came to him that since he was tired he might rest there;
+so that after a moment he had in turn pushed up the leathern curtain and
+gone in.  It was a temple of the old persuasion, and there had evidently
+been a function--perhaps a service for the dead; the high altar was still
+a blaze of candles.  This was an exhibition he always liked, and he
+dropped into a seat with relief.  More than it had ever yet come home to
+him it struck him as good there should be churches.
+
+This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; a verger
+shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed to Stransom there was
+hospitality in the thick sweet air.  Was it only the savour of the
+incense or was it something of larger intention?  He had at any rate
+quitted the great grey suburb and come nearer to the warm centre.  He
+presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at last even a sense of
+community with the only worshipper in his neighbourhood, the sombre
+presence of a woman, in mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he could
+see of her and who had sunk deep into prayer at no great distance from
+him.  He wished he could sink, like her, to the very bottom, be as
+motionless, as rapt in prostration.  After a few moments he shifted his
+seat; it was almost indelicate to be so aware of her.  But Stransom
+subsequently quite lost himself, floating away on the sea of light.  If
+occasions like this had been more frequent in his life he would have had
+more present the great original type, set up in a myriad temples, of the
+unapproachable shrine he had erected in his mind.  That shrine had begun
+in vague likeness to church pomps, but the echo had ended by growing more
+distinct than the sound.  The sound now rang out, the type blazed at him
+with all its fires and with a mystery of radiance in which endless
+meanings could glow.  The thing became as he sat there his appropriate
+altar and each starry candle an appropriate vow.  He numbered them, named
+them, grouped them--it was the silent roll-call of his Dead.  They made
+together a brightness vast and intense, a brightness in which the mere
+chapel of his thoughts grew so dim that as it faded away he asked himself
+if he shouldn't find his real comfort in some material act, some outward
+worship.
+
+This idea took possession of him while, at a distance, the black-robed
+lady continued prostrate; he was quietly thrilled with his conception,
+which at last brought him to his feet in the sudden excitement of a plan.
+He wandered softly through the aisles, pausing in the different chapels,
+all save one applied to a special devotion.  It was in this clear recess,
+lampless and unapplied, that he stood longest--the length of time it took
+him fully to grasp the conception of gilding it with his bounty.  He
+should snatch it from no other rites and associate it with nothing
+profane; he would simply take it as it should be given up to him and make
+it a masterpiece of splendour and a mountain of fire.  Tended sacredly
+all the year, with the sanctifying church round it, it would always be
+ready for his offices.  There would be difficulties, but from the first
+they presented themselves only as difficulties surmounted.  Even for a
+person so little affiliated the thing would be a matter of arrangement.
+He saw it all in advance, and how bright in especial the place would
+become to him in the intermissions of toil and the dusk of afternoons;
+how rich in assurance at all times, but especially in the indifferent
+world.  Before withdrawing he drew nearer again to the spot where he had
+first sat down, and in the movement he met the lady whom he had seen
+praying and who was now on her way to the door.  She passed him quickly,
+and he had only a glimpse of her pale face and her unconscious, almost
+sightless eyes.  For that instant she looked faded and handsome.
+
+This was the origin of the rites more public, yet certainly esoteric,
+that he at last found himself able to establish.  It took a long time, it
+took a year, and both the process and the result would have been--for any
+who knew--a vivid picture of his good faith.  No one did know, in
+fact--no one but the bland ecclesiastics whose acquaintance he had
+promptly sought, whose objections he had softly overridden, whose
+curiosity and sympathy he had artfully charmed, whose assent to his
+eccentric munificence he had eventually won, and who had asked for
+concessions in exchange for indulgences.  Stransom had of course at an
+early stage of his enquiry been referred to the Bishop, and the Bishop
+had been delightfully human, the Bishop had been almost amused.  Success
+was within sight, at any rate from the moment the attitude of those whom
+it concerned became liberal in response to liberality.  The altar and the
+sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and
+customary worship, were to be splendidly maintained; all that Stransom
+reserved to himself was the number of his lights and the free enjoyment
+of his intention.  When the intention had taken complete effect the
+enjoyment became even greater than he had ventured to hope.  He liked to
+think of this effect when far from it, liked to convince himself of it
+yet again when near.  He was not often indeed so near as that a visit to
+it hadn't perforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but the
+time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him more a contribution to
+his other interests than a betrayal of them.  Even a loaded life might be
+easier when one had added a new necessity to it.
+
+How much easier was probably never guessed by those who simply knew there
+were hours when he disappeared and for many of whom there was a vulgar
+reading of what they used to call his plunges.  These plunges were into
+depths quieter than the deep sea-caves, and the habit had at the end of a
+year or two become the one it would have cost him most to relinquish.
+Now they had really, his Dead, something that was indefensibly theirs;
+and he liked to think that they might in cases be the Dead of others, as
+well as that the Dead of others might be invoked there under the
+protection of what he had done.  Whoever bent a knee on the carpet he had
+laid down appeared to him to act in the spirit of his intention.  Each of
+his lights had a name for him, and from time to time a new light was
+kindled.  This was what he had fundamentally agreed for, that there
+should always be room for them all.  What those who passed or lingered
+saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars called suddenly into
+vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for whom it evidently had a
+fascination, often seated there in a maze or a doze; but half the
+satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and fitful worshipper was
+that he found the years of his life there, and the ties, the affections,
+the struggles, the submissions, the conquests, if there had been such, a
+record of that adventurous journey in which the beginnings and the
+endings of human relations are the lettered mile-stones.  He had in
+general little taste for the past as a part of his own history; at other
+times and in other places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and
+impossible to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with
+something of that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self to
+an ache that begins to succumb to treatment.  To the treatment of time
+the malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
+doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him.  The day
+was written for him there on which he had first become acquainted with
+death, and the successive phases of the acquaintance were marked each
+with a flame.
+
+The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom had entered that
+dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one dies every day.  It
+was only yesterday that Kate Creston had flashed out her white fire; yet
+already there were younger stars ablaze on the tips of the tapers.
+Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense drew closer to
+him by entering this company.  He went over it, head by head, till he
+felt like the shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd's vision
+of differences imperceptible.  He knew his candles apart, up to the
+colour of the flame, and would still have known them had their positions
+all been changed.  To other imaginations they might stand for other
+things--that they should stand for something to be hushed before was all
+he desired; but he was intensely conscious of the personal note of each
+and of the distinguishable way it contributed to the concert.  There were
+hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his
+friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a
+connexion more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy
+with them in life.  In regard to those from whom one was separated by the
+long curves of the globe such a connexion could only be an improvement:
+it brought them instantly within reach.  Of course there were gaps in the
+constellation, for Stransom knew he could only pretend to act for his
+own, and it wasn't every figure passing before his eyes into the great
+obscure that was entitled to a memorial.  There was a strange
+sanctification in death, but some characters were more sanctified by
+being forgotten than by being remembered.  The greatest blank in the
+shining page was the memory of Acton Hague, of which he inveterately
+tried to rid himself.  For Acton Hague no flame could ever rise on any
+altar of his.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Every year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he went to
+church as he had done the day his idea was born.  It was on this
+occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he began to
+observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least as frequent as
+himself.  Others of the faithful, and in the rest of the church, came and
+went, appealing sometimes, when they disappeared, to a vague or to a
+particular recognition; but this unfailing presence was always to be
+observed when he arrived and still in possession when he departed.  He
+was surprised, the first time, at the promptitude with which it assumed
+an identity for him--the identity of the lady whom two years before, on
+his anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic face
+he had had so flitting a vision.  Given the time that had passed, his
+recollection of her was fresh enough to make him wonder.  Of himself she
+had of course no impression, or rather had had none at first: the time
+came when her manner of transacting her business suggested her having
+gradually guessed his call to be of the same order.  She used his altar
+for her own purpose--he could only hope that sad and solitary as she
+always struck him, she used it for her own Dead.  There were
+interruptions, infidelities, all on his part, calls to other associations
+and duties; but as the months went on he found her whenever he returned,
+and he ended by taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her
+almost the contentment he had given himself.  They worshipped side by
+side so often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure, so
+straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in their
+rites.  She was younger than he, but she looked as if her Dead were at
+least as numerous as his candles.  She had no colour, no sound, no fault,
+and another of the things about which he had made up his mind was that
+she had no fortune.  Always black-robed, she must have had a succession
+of sorrows.  People weren't poor, after all, whom so many losses could
+overtake; they were positively rich when they had had so much to give up.
+But the air of this devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in
+any attitude, a beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom
+that she had known more kinds of trouble than one.
+
+He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but
+occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons,
+it used to come back to him that there were glories.  There were moreover
+friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found
+himself sitting out concerts.  On one of these winter afternoons, in St.
+James's Hall, he became aware after he had seated himself that the lady
+he had so often seen at church was in the place next him and was
+evidently alone, as he also this time happened to be.  She was at first
+too absorbed in the consideration of the programme to heed him, but when
+she at last glanced at him he took advantage of the movement to speak to
+her, greeting her with the remark that he felt as if he already knew her.
+She smiled as she said "Oh yes, I recognise you"; yet in spite of this
+admission of long acquaintance it was the first he had seen of her smile.
+The effect of it was suddenly to contribute more to that acquaintance
+than all the previous meetings had done.  He hadn't "taken in," he said
+to himself, that she was so pretty.  Later, that evening--it was while he
+rolled along in a hansom on his way to dine out--he added that he hadn't
+taken in that she was so interesting.  The next morning in the midst of
+his work he quite suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression
+of her, beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last
+reached the sea.
+
+His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of what
+had now passed between them.  It wasn't much, but it had just made the
+difference.  They had listened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they
+had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to which they
+moved together, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter of
+getting away.  She had thanked him and put up her umbrella, slipping into
+the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him
+to remember at leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual
+scene of that coincidence.  This omission struck him now as natural and
+then again as perverse.  She mightn't in the least have allowed his
+warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he would have judged
+her an underbred woman.  It was odd that when nothing had really ever
+brought them together he should have been able successfully to assume
+they were in a manner old friends--that this negative quantity was
+somehow more than they could express.  His success, it was true, had been
+qualified by her quick escape, so that there grew up in him an absurd
+desire to put it to some better test.  Save in so far as some other poor
+chance might help him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at
+church.  Left to himself he would have gone to church the very next
+afternoon, just for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there.
+But he wasn't left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last,
+after he had virtually made up his mind to go.  The influence that kept
+him away really revealed to him how little to himself his Dead _ever_
+left him.  He went only for _them_--for nothing else in the world.
+
+The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hated to connect
+the place with anything but his offices or to give a glimpse of the
+curiosity that had been on the point of moving him.  It was absurd to
+weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that
+might with ease have been daily or hourly; yet the tangle got itself
+woven.  He was sorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy
+spell had been broken and he had lost a familiar security.  At the last,
+however, he asked himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear
+of this muddle about motives.  After an interval neither longer nor
+shorter than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that
+he should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the
+concert.  This indifference didn't prevent his at once noting that for
+the only time since he had first seen her she wasn't on the spot.  He had
+now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but she didn't arrive,
+and when he went away still missing her he was profanely and consentingly
+sorry.  If her absence made the tangle more intricate, that was all her
+own doing.  By the end of another year it was very intricate indeed; but
+by that time he didn't in the least care, and it was only his cultivated
+consciousness that had given him scruples.  Three times in three months
+he had gone to church without finding her, and he felt he hadn't needed
+these occasions to show him his suspense had dropped.  Yet it was,
+incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacy that had
+kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of course immediately have
+recognised his description of her, whether she had been seen at other
+hours.  His delicacy had kept him from asking any question about her at
+any time, and it was exactly the same virtue that had left him so free to
+be decently civil to her at the concert.
+
+This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him when she finally
+met his eyes--it was after a fourth trial--to predetermine quite fixedly
+his awaiting her retreat.  He joined her in the street as soon as she had
+moved, asking her if he might accompany her a certain distance.  With her
+placid permission he went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which
+she had business: she let him know it was not where she lived.  She
+lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in
+connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and
+regular occupations.  She wasn't, the mourning niece, in her first youth,
+and her vanished freshness had left something behind that, for Stransom,
+represented the proof it had been tragically sacrificed.  Whatever she
+gave him the assurance of she gave without references.  She might have
+been a divorced duchess--she might have been an old maid who taught the
+harp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+They fell at last into the way of walking together almost every time they
+met, though for a long time still they never met but at church.  He
+couldn't ask her to come and see him, and as if she hadn't a proper place
+to receive him she never invited her friend.  As much as himself she knew
+the world of London, but from an undiscussed instinct of privacy they
+haunted the region not mapped on the social chart.  On the return she
+always made him leave her at the same corner.  She looked with him, as a
+pretext for a pause, at the depressed things in suburban shop-fronts; and
+there was never a word he had said to her that she hadn't beautifully
+understood.  For long ages he never knew her name, any more than she had
+ever pronounced his own; but it was not their names that mattered, it was
+only their perfect practice and their common need.
+
+These things made their whole relation so impersonal that they hadn't the
+rules or reasons people found in ordinary friendships.  They didn't care
+for the things it was supposed necessary to care for in the intercourse
+of the world.  They ended one day--they never knew which of them
+expressed it first--by throwing out the idea that they didn't care for
+each other.  Over this idea they grew quite intimate; they rallied to it
+in a way that marked a fresh start in their confidence.  If to feel
+deeply together about certain things wholly distinct from themselves
+didn't constitute a safety, where was safety to be looked for?  Not
+lightly nor often, not without occasion nor without emotion, any more
+than in any other reference by serious people to a mystery of their
+faith; but when something had happened to warm, as it were, the air for
+it, they came as near as they could come to calling their Dead by name.
+They felt it was coming very near to utter their thought at all.  The
+word "they" expressed enough; it limited the mention, it had a dignity of
+its own, and if, in their talk, you had heard our friends use it, you
+might have taken them for a pair of pagans of old alluding decently to
+the domesticated gods.  They never knew--at least Stransom never
+knew--how they had learned to be sure about each other.  If it had been
+with each a question of what the other was there for, the certitude had
+come in some fine way of its own.  Any faith, after all, has the instinct
+of propagation, and it was as natural as it was beautiful that they
+should have taken pleasure on the spot in the imagination of a following.
+If the following was for each but a following of one it had proved in the
+event sufficient.  Her debt, however, of course was much greater than
+his, because while she had only given him a worshipper he had given her a
+splendid temple.  Once she said she pitied him for the length of his
+list--she had counted his candles almost as often as himself--and this
+made him wonder what could have been the length of hers.  He had wondered
+before at the coincidence of their losses, especially as from time to
+time a new candle was set up.  On some occasion some accident led him to
+express this curiosity, and she answered as if in surprise that he hadn't
+already understood.  "Oh for me, you know, the more there are the
+better--there could never be too many.  I should like hundreds and
+hundreds--I should like thousands; I should like a great mountain of
+light."
+
+Then of course in a flash he understood.  "Your Dead are only One?"
+
+She hung back at this as never yet.  "Only One," she answered, colouring
+as if now he knew her guarded secret.  It really made him feel he knew
+less than before, so difficult was it for him to reconstitute a life in
+which a single experience had so belittled all others.  His own life,
+round its central hollow, had been packed close enough.  After this she
+appeared to have regretted her confession, though at the moment she spoke
+there had been pride in her very embarrassment.  She declared to him that
+his own was the larger, the dearer possession--the portion one would have
+chosen if one had been able to choose; she assured him she could
+perfectly imagine some of the echoes with which his silences were
+peopled.  He knew she couldn't: one's relation to what one had loved and
+hated had been a relation too distinct from the relations of others.  But
+this didn't affect the fact that they were growing old together in their
+piety.  She was a feature of that piety, but even at the ripe stage of
+acquaintance in which they occasionally arranged to meet at a concert or
+to go together to an exhibition she was not a feature of anything else.
+The most that happened was that his worship became paramount.  Friend by
+friend dropped away till at last there were more emblems on his altar
+than houses left him to enter.  She was more than any other the friend
+who remained, but she was unknown to all the rest.  Once when she had
+discovered, as they called it, a new star, she used the expression that
+the chapel at last was full.
+
+"Oh no," Stransom replied, "there is a great thing wanting for that!  The
+chapel will never be full till a candle is set up before which all the
+others will pale.  It will be the tallest candle of all."
+
+Her mild wonder rested on him.  "What candle do you mean?"
+
+"I mean, dear lady, my own."
+
+He had learned after a long time that she earned money by her pen,
+writing under a pseudonym she never disclosed in magazines he never saw.
+She knew too well what he couldn't read and what she couldn't write, and
+she taught him to cultivate indifference with a success that did much for
+their good relations.  Her invisible industry was a convenience to him;
+it helped his contented thought of her, the thought that rested in the
+dignity of her proud obscure life, her little remunerated art and her
+little impenetrable home.  Lost, with her decayed relative, in her dim
+suburban world, she came to the surface for him in distant places.  She
+was really the priestess of his altar, and whenever he quitted England he
+committed it to her keeping.  She proved to him afresh that women have
+more of the spirit of religion than men; he felt his fidelity pale and
+faint in comparison with hers.  He often said to her that since he had so
+little time to live he rejoiced in her having so much; so glad was he to
+think she would guard the temple when he should have been called.  He had
+a great plan for that, which of course he told her too, a bequest of
+money to keep it up in undiminished state.  Of the administration of this
+fund he would appoint her superintendent, and if the spirit should move
+her she might kindle a taper even for him.
+
+"And who will kindle one even for me?" she then seriously asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+She was always in mourning, yet the day he came back from the longest
+absence he had yet made her appearance immediately told him she had
+lately had a bereavement.  They met on this occasion as she was leaving
+the church, so that postponing his own entrance he instantly offered to
+turn round and walk away with her.  She considered, then she said: "Go in
+now, but come and see me in an hour."  He knew the small vista of her
+street, closed at the end and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the
+pairs of shabby little houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united,
+were like married couples on bad terms.  Often, however, as he had gone
+to the beginning he had never gone beyond.  Her aunt was dead--that he
+immediately guessed, as well as that it made a difference; but when she
+had for the first time mentioned her number he found himself, on her
+leaving him, not a little agitated by this sudden liberality.  She wasn't
+a person with whom, after all, one got on so very fast: it had taken him
+months and months to learn her name, years and years to learn her
+address.  If she had looked, on this reunion, so much older to him, how
+in the world did he look to her?  She had reached the period of life he
+had long since reached, when, after separations, the marked clock-face of
+the friend we meet announces the hour we have tried to forget.  He
+couldn't have said what he expected as, at the end of his waiting, he
+turned the corner where for years he had always paused; simply not to
+pause was a efficient cause for emotion.  It was an event, somehow; and
+in all their long acquaintance there had never been an event.  This one
+grew larger when, five minutes later, in the faint elegance of her little
+drawing-room, she quavered out a greeting that showed the measure she
+took of it.  He had a strange sense of having come for something in
+particular; strange because literally there was nothing particular
+between them, nothing save that they were at one on their great point,
+which had long ago become a magnificent matter of course.  It was true
+that after she had said "You can always come now, you know," the thing he
+was there for seemed already to have happened.  He asked her if it was
+the death of her aunt that made the difference; to which she replied:
+"She never knew I knew you.  I wished her not to."  The beautiful
+clearness of her candour--her faded beauty was like a summer
+twilight--disconnected the words from any image of deceit.  They might
+have struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had always
+given him a sense of noble reasons.  The vanished aunt was present, as he
+looked about him, in the small complacencies of the room, the beaded
+velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we know, he had the worship
+of the Dead, he found himself not definitely regretting this lady.  If
+she wasn't in his long list, however, she was in her niece's short one,
+and Stransom presently observed to the latter that now at least, in the
+place they haunted together, she would have another object of devotion.
+
+"Yes, I shall have another.  She was very kind to me.  It's that that's
+the difference."
+
+He judged, wondering a good deal before he made any motion to leave her,
+that the difference would somehow be very great and would consist of
+still other things than her having let him come in.  It rather chilled
+him, for they had been happy together as they were.  He extracted from
+her at any rate an intimation that she should now have means less
+limited, that her aunt's tiny fortune had come to her, so that there was
+henceforth only one to consume what had formerly been made to suffice for
+two.  This was a joy to Stransom, because it had hitherto been equally
+impossible for him either to offer her presents or contentedly to stay
+his hand.  It was too ugly to be at her side that way, abounding himself
+and yet not able to overflow--a demonstration that would have been
+signally a false note.  Even her better situation too seemed only to draw
+out in a sense the loneliness of her future.  It would merely help her to
+live more and more for their small ceremonial, and this at a time when he
+himself had begun wearily to feel that, having set it in motion, he might
+depart.  When they had sat a while in the pale parlour she got up--"This
+isn't my room: let us go into mine."  They had only to cross the narrow
+hall, as he found, to pass quite into another air.  When she had closed
+the door of the second room, as she called it, he felt at last in real
+possession of her.  The place had the flush of life--it was expressive;
+its dark red walls were articulate with memories and relics.  These were
+simple things--photographs and water-colours, scraps of writing framed
+and ghosts of flowers embalmed; but a moment sufficed to show him they
+had a common meaning.  It was here she had lived and worked, and she had
+already told him she would make no change of scene.  He read the
+reference in the objects about her--the general one to places and times;
+but after a minute he distinguished among them a small portrait of a
+gentleman.  At a distance and without their glasses his eyes were only so
+caught by it as to feel a vague curiosity.  Presently this impulse
+carried him nearer, and in another moment he was staring at the picture
+in stupefaction and with the sense that some sound had broken from him.
+He was further conscious that he showed his companion a white face when
+he turned round on her gasping: "Acton Hague!"
+
+She matched his great wonder.  "Did you know him?"
+
+"He was the friend of all my youth--of my early manhood.  And _you_ knew
+him?"
+
+She coloured at this and for a moment her answer failed; her eyes
+embraced everything in the place, and a strange irony reached her lips as
+she echoed: "Knew him?"
+
+Then Stransom understood, while the room heaved like the cabin of a ship,
+that its whole contents cried out with him, that it was a museum in his
+honour, that all her later years had been addressed to him and that the
+shrine he himself had reared had been passionately converted to this use.
+It was all for Acton Hague that she had kneeled every day at his altar.
+What need had there been for a consecrated candle when he was present in
+the whole array? The revelation so smote our friend in the face that he
+dropped into a seat and sat silent.  He had quickly felt her shaken by
+the force of his shock, but as she sank on the sofa beside him and laid
+her hand on his arm he knew almost as soon that she mightn't resent it as
+much as she'd have liked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+He learned in that instant two things: one being that even in so long a
+time she had gathered no knowledge of his great intimacy and his great
+quarrel; the other that in spite of this ignorance, strangely enough, she
+supplied on the spot a reason for his stupor.  "How extraordinary," he
+presently exclaimed, "that we should never have known!"
+
+She gave a wan smile which seemed to Stransom stranger even than the fact
+itself.  "I never, never spoke of him."
+
+He looked again about the room.  "Why then, if your life had been so full
+of him?"
+
+"Mayn't I put you that question as well?  Hadn't your life also been full
+of him?"
+
+"Any one's, every one's life who had the wonderful experience of knowing
+him.  _I_ never spoke of him," Stransom added in a moment, "because he
+did me--years ago--an unforgettable wrong."  She was silent, and with the
+full effect of his presence all about them it almost startled her guest
+to hear no protest escape her.  She accepted his words, he turned his
+eyes to her again to see in what manner she accepted them.  It was with
+rising tears and a rare sweetness in the movement of putting out her hand
+to take his own.  Nothing more wonderful had ever appeared to him than,
+in that little chamber of remembrance and homage, to see her convey with
+such exquisite mildness that as from Acton Hague any injury was credible.
+The clock ticked in the stillness--Hague had probably given it to
+her--and while he let her hold his hand with a tenderness that was almost
+an assumption of responsibility for his old pain as well as his new,
+Stransom after a minute broke out: "Good God, how he must have used
+_you_!"
+
+She dropped his hand at this, got up and, moving across the room, made
+straight a small picture to which, on examining it, he had given a slight
+push.  Then turning round on him with her pale gaiety recovered, "I've
+forgiven him!" she declared.
+
+"I know what you've done," said Stransom "I know what you've done for
+years."  For a moment they looked at each other through it all with their
+long community of service in their eyes.  This short passage made, to his
+sense, for the woman before him, an immense, an absolutely naked
+confession; which was presently, suddenly blushing red and changing her
+place again, what she appeared to learn he perceived in it.  He got up
+and "How you must have loved him!" he cried.
+
+"Women aren't like men.  They can love even where they've suffered."
+
+"Women are wonderful," said Stransom.  "But I assure you I've forgiven
+him too."
+
+"If I had known of anything so strange I wouldn't have brought you here."
+
+"So that we might have gone on in our ignorance to the last?"
+
+"What do you call the last?" she asked, smiling still.
+
+At this he could smile back at her.  "You'll see--when it comes."
+
+She thought of that.  "This is better perhaps; but as we were--it was
+good."
+
+He put her the question.  "Did it never happen that he spoke of me?"
+
+Considering more intently she made no answer, and he then knew he should
+have been adequately answered by her asking how often he himself had
+spoken of their terrible friend.  Suddenly a brighter light broke in her
+face and an excited idea sprang to her lips in the appeal: "You _have_
+forgiven him?"
+
+"How, if I hadn't, could I linger here?"
+
+She visibly winced at the deep but unintended irony of this; but even
+while she did so she panted quickly: "Then in the lights on your
+altar--?"
+
+"There's never a light for Acton Hague!"
+
+She stared with a dreadful fall, "But if he's one of your Dead?"
+
+"He's one of the world's, if you like--he's one of yours.  But he's not
+one of mine.  Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me.  They're
+mine in death because they were mine in life."
+
+"_He _was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased to be.  If
+you forgave him you went back to him.  Those whom we've once loved--"
+
+"Are those who can hurt us most," Stransom broke in.
+
+"Ah it's not true--you've _not_ forgiven him!" she wailed with a passion
+that startled him.
+
+He looked at her as never yet.  "What was it he did to you?"
+
+"Everything!"  Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell.
+"Good-bye."
+
+He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man's death.
+"You mean that we meet no more?"
+
+"Not as we've met--not _there_!"
+
+He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement
+that rang out in the word she so expressively sounded.  "But what's
+changed--for you?"
+
+She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the first time
+since he had known her made her splendidly stern.  "How can you
+understand now when you didn't understand before?"
+
+"I didn't understand before only because I didn't know.  Now that I know,
+I see what I've been living with for years," Stransom went on very
+gently.
+
+She looked at him with a larger allowance, doing this gentleness justice.
+"How can I then, on this new knowledge of my own, ask you to continue to
+live with it?"
+
+"I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings," Stransom began; but
+she quietly interrupted him.
+
+"You set up your altar, and when I wanted one most I found it
+magnificently ready.  I used it with the gratitude I've always shown you,
+for I knew it from of old to be dedicated to Death.  I told you long ago
+that my Dead weren't many.  Yours were, but all you had done for them was
+none too much for _my_ worship!  You had placed a great light for Each--I
+gathered them together for One!"
+
+"We had simply different intentions," he returned.  "That, as you say, I
+perfectly knew, and I don't see why your intention shouldn't still
+sustain you."
+
+"That's because you're generous--you can imagine and think.  But the
+spell is broken."
+
+It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance, that it really
+was, and the prospect stretched grey and void before him.  All he could
+say, however, was: "I hope you'll try before you give up."
+
+"If I had known you had ever known him I should have taken for granted he
+had his candle," she presently answered.  "What's changed, as you say, is
+that on making the discovery I find he never has had it.  That makes _my_
+attitude"--she paused as thinking how to express it, then said
+simply--"all wrong."
+
+"Come once again," he pleaded.
+
+"Will you give him his candle?" she asked.
+
+He waited, but only because it would sound ungracious; not because of a
+doubt of his feeling.  "I can't do that!" he declared at last.
+
+"Then good-bye."  And she gave him her hand again.
+
+He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation of everything
+that had opened out to him, he felt the need to recover himself as he
+could only do in solitude.  Yet he lingered--lingered to see if she had
+no compromise to express, no attenuation to propose.  But he only met her
+great lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was as sorry for
+him as for any one else.  This made him say: "At least, in any case, I
+may see you here."
+
+"Oh yes, come if you like.  But I don't think it will do."
+
+He looked round the room once more, knowing how little he was sure it
+would do.  He felt also stricken and more and more cold, and his chill
+was like an ague in which he had to make an effort not to shake.  Then he
+made doleful reply: "I must try on my side--if you can't try on yours."
+She came out with him to the hall and into the doorway, and here he put
+her the question he held he could least answer from his own wit.  "Why
+have you never let me come before?"
+
+"Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should have had to tell her
+how I came to know you."
+
+"And what would have been the objection to that?"
+
+"It would have entailed other explanations; there would at any rate have
+been that danger."
+
+"Surely she knew you went every day to church," Stransom objected.
+
+"She didn't know what I went for."
+
+"Of me then she never even heard?"
+
+"You'll think I was deceitful.  But I didn't need to be!"
+
+He was now on the lower door-step, and his hostess held the door
+half-closed behind him.  Through what remained of the opening he saw her
+framed face.  He made a supreme appeal.  "What _did_ he do to you?"
+
+"It would have come out--_she _would have told you.  That fear at my
+heart--that was my reason!"  And she closed the door, shutting him out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+He had ruthlessly abandoned her--that of course was what he had done.
+Stransom made it all out in solitude, at leisure, fitting the unmatched
+pieces gradually together and dealing one by one with a hundred obscure
+points.  She had known Hague only after her present friend's relations
+with him had wholly terminated; obviously indeed a good while after; and
+it was natural enough that of his previous life she should have
+ascertained only what he had judged good to communicate.  There were
+passages it was quite conceivable that even in moments of the tenderest
+expansion he should have withheld.  Of many facts in the career of a man
+so in the eye of the world there was of course a common knowledge; but
+this lady lived apart from public affairs, and the only time perfectly
+clear to her would have been the time following the dawn of her own
+drama.  A man in her place would have "looked up" the past--would even
+have consulted old newspapers.  It remained remarkable indeed that in her
+long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a
+train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact
+come: it had simply been that security had prevailed.  She had taken what
+Hague had given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions
+was only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme
+reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to produce.
+
+This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught his breath
+again and again as it came over him that the woman with whom he had had
+for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom Acton Hague, of all
+men in the world, had more or less fashioned.  Such as she sat there
+to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him.  Beneficent, blameless as
+Stransom held her, he couldn't rid himself of the sense that he had been,
+as who should say, swindled.  She had imposed upon him hugely, though she
+had known it as little as he.  All this later past came back to him as a
+time grotesquely misspent.  Such at least were his first reflexions;
+after a while he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it,
+more troubled.  He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for
+himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which was to
+make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate.  He felt her
+spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own to the very
+degree in which she might have been, in which she certainly had been,
+more wronged.  A women, when wronged, was always more wronged than a man,
+and there were conditions when the least she could have got off with was
+more than the most he could have to bear.  He was sure this rare creature
+wouldn't have got off with the least.  He was awestruck at the thought of
+such a surrender--such a prostration.  Moulded indeed she had been by
+powerful hands, to have converted her injury into an exaltation so
+sublime.  The fellow had only had to die for everything that was ugly in
+him to be washed out in a torrent.  It was vain to try to guess what had
+taken place, but nothing could be clearer than that she had ended by
+accusing herself.  She absolved him at every point, she adored her very
+wounds.  The passion by which he had profited had rushed back after its
+ebb, and now the tide of tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too
+deep even to fathom.  Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven
+him; but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved!
+His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.  The
+light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his silence with a
+blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for her too great a
+hush.
+
+She had been right about the difference--she had spoken the truth about
+the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely but sharply
+jealous.  _His_ tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had "forgiven" Acton
+Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken spring.  The very fact
+of her appeal for a material sign, a sign that should make her dead lover
+equal there with the others, presented the concession to her friend as
+too handsome for the case.  He had never thought of himself as hard, but
+an exorbitant article might easily render him so.  He moved round and
+round this one, but only in widening circles--the more he looked at it
+the less acceptable it seemed.  At the same time he had no illusion about
+the effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how it would make for a
+rupture.  He left her alone a week, but when at last he again called this
+conviction was cruelly confirmed.  In the interval he had kept away from
+the church, and he needed no fresh assurance from her to know she hadn't
+entered it.  The change was complete enough: it had broken up her life.
+Indeed it had broken up his, for all the fires of his shrine seemed to
+him suddenly to have been quenched.  A great indifference fell upon him,
+the weight of which was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his
+devotion had been for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped
+watch.  Neither did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on
+the final service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in
+this abandonment the whole future gave way.
+
+These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable; all the
+more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even resentful.  It was
+not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard
+reality, to the stern logic of life.  This came home to him when he sat
+with her again in the room in which her late aunt's conversation lingered
+like the tone of a cracked piano.  She tried to make him forget how much
+they were estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up
+it was impossible not to be sorry for her.  He had taken from her so much
+more than she had taken from him.  He argued with her again, told her she
+could now have the altar to herself; but she only shook her head with
+pleading sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on the impossible,
+the extinct.  Couldn't he see that in relation to her private need the
+rites he had established were practically an elaborate exclusion?  She
+regretted nothing that had happened; it had all been right so long as she
+didn't know, and it was only that now she knew too much and that from the
+moment their eyes were open they would simply have to conform.  It had
+doubtless been happiness enough for them to go on together so long.  She
+was gentle, grateful, resigned; but this was only the form of a deep
+immoveability.  He saw he should never more cross the threshold of the
+second room, and he felt how much this alone would make a stranger of him
+and give a conscious stiffness to his visits.  He would have hated to
+plunge again into that well of reminders, but he enjoyed quite as little
+the vacant alternative.
+
+After he had been with her three or four times it struck him that to have
+come at last into her house had had the horrid effect of diminishing
+their intimacy.  He had known her better, had liked her in greater
+freedom, when they merely walked together or kneeled together.  Now they
+only pretended; before they had been nobly sincere.  They began to try
+their walks again, but it proved a lame imitation, for these things, from
+the first, beginning or ending, had been connected with their visits to
+the church.  They had either strolled away as they came out or gone in to
+rest on the return.  Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn't walk as
+of old.  The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation of
+their lives.  Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no mystery of
+his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament.  Her response,
+whatever it was, always came to the same thing--an implied invitation to
+him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she had in
+hers.  For him indeed was no comfort even in complaint, since every
+allusion to what had befallen them but made the author of their trouble
+more present.  Acton Hague was between them--that was the essence of the
+matter, and never so much between them as when they were face to face.
+Then Stransom, while still wanting to banish him, had the strangest sense
+of striving for an ease that would involve having accepted him.  Deeply
+disconcerted by what he knew, he was still worse tormented by really not
+knowing.  Perfectly aware that it would have been horribly vulgar to
+abuse his old friend or to tell his companion the story of their quarrel,
+it yet vexed him that her depth of reserve should give him no opening and
+should have the effect of a magnanimity greater even than his own.
+
+He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were in
+love with her that he should care so much what adventures she had had.
+He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with her; therefore
+nothing could have surprised him more than to discover he was jealous.
+What but jealousy could give a man that sore contentious wish for the
+detail of what would make him suffer?  Well enough he knew indeed that he
+should never have it from the only person who to-day could give it to
+him.  She let him press her with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him
+with an exquisite mercy and breathing equally little the word that would
+expose her secret and the word that would appear to deny his literal
+right to bitterness.  She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted
+everything but the possibility of her return to the old symbols.
+Stransom divined that for her too they had been vividly individual, had
+stood for particular hours or particular attributes--particular links in
+her chain.  He made it clear to himself, as he believed, that his
+difficulty lay in the fact that the very nature of the plea for his
+faithless friend constituted a prohibition; that it happened to have come
+from _her_ was precisely the vice that attached to it.  To the voice of
+impersonal generosity he felt sure he would have listened; he would have
+deferred to an advocate who, speaking from abstract justice, knowing of
+his denial without having known Hague, should have had the imagination to
+say: "Ah, remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for him."  To
+provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of his
+turpitudes was not to pity but to glorify him.  The more Stransom thought
+the more he made out that whatever this relation of Hague's it could only
+have been a deception more or less finely practised.  Where had it come
+into the life that all men saw?  Why had one never heard of it if it had
+had the frankness of honourable things?  Stransom knew enough of his
+other ties, of his obligations and appearances, not to say enough of his
+general character, to be sure there had been some infamy.  In one way or
+another this creature had been coldly sacrificed.  That was why at the
+last as well as the first he must still leave him out and out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+And yet this was no solution, especially after he had talked again to his
+friend of all it had been his plan she should finally do for him.  He had
+talked in the other days, and she had responded with a frankness
+qualified only by a courteous reluctance, a reluctance that touched him,
+to linger on the question of his death.  She had then practically
+accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could depend upon her to be
+the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it was in the name of what had
+so passed between them that he appealed to her not to forsake him in his
+age.  She listened at present with shining coldness and all her habitual
+forbearance to insist on her terms; her deprecation was even still
+tenderer, for it expressed the compassion of her own sense that he was
+abandoned.  Her terms, however, remained the same, and scarcely the less
+audible for not being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more
+than he she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have
+provided her.  They both missed the rich future, but she missed it most,
+because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it was her
+acceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of her preference
+for the thought of Acton Hague over any other thought whatever.  He had
+humour enough to laugh rather grimly when he said to himself: "Why the
+deuce does she like him so much more than she likes me?"--the reasons
+being really so conceivable.  But even his faculty of analysis left the
+irritation standing, and this irritation proved perhaps the greatest
+misfortune that had ever overtaken him.  There had been nothing yet that
+made him so much want to give up.  He had of course by this time well
+reached the age of renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to
+him that it was time to give up everything.
+
+Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced the friendship
+once so charming and comforting.  His privation had two faces, and the
+face it had turned to him on the occasion of his last attempt to
+cultivate that friendship was the one he could look at least.  This was
+the privation he inflicted; the other was the privation he bore.  The
+conditions she never phrased he used to murmur to himself in solitude:
+"One more, one more--only just one."  Certainly he was going down; he
+often felt it when he caught himself, over his work, staring at vacancy
+and giving voice to that inanity.  There was proof enough besides in his
+being so weak and so ill.  His irritation took the form of melancholy,
+and his melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite
+failed.  His altar moreover had ceased to exist; his chapel, in his
+dreams, was a great dark cavern.  All the lights had gone out--all his
+Dead had died again.  He couldn't exactly see at first how it had been in
+the power of his late companion to extinguish them, since it was neither
+for her nor by her that they had been called into being.  Then he
+understood that it was essentially in his own soul the revival had taken
+place, and that in the air of this soul they were now unable to breathe.
+The candles might mechanically burn, but each of them had lost its
+lustre.  The church had become a void; it was his presence, her presence,
+their common presence, that had made the indispensable medium.  If
+anything was wrong everything was--her silence spoiled the tune.
+
+Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that he went back;
+reflecting that as they had been his best society for years his Dead
+perhaps wouldn't let him forsake them without doing something more for
+him.  They stood there, as he had left them, in their tall radiance, the
+bright cluster that had already made him, on occasions when he was
+willing to compare small things with great, liken them to a group of
+sea-lights on the edge of the ocean of life.  It was a relief to him,
+after a while, as he sat there, to feel they had still a virtue.  He was
+more and more easily tired, and he always drove now; the action of his
+heart was weak and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the
+action of his fancy.  None the less he returned yet again, returned
+several times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a
+renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience.  In winter the church
+was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the glow of his
+shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask.  He sat and
+wondered to what he had reduced his absent associate and what she now did
+with the hours of her absence.  There were other churches, there were
+other altars, there were other candles; in one way or another her piety
+would still operate; he couldn't absolutely have deprived her of her
+rites.  So he argued, but without contentment; for he well enough knew
+there was no other such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had
+once mentioned to him as the satisfaction of her need.  As this semblance
+again gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he
+found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her darkness; for
+never so much as in these weeks had his rites been real, never had his
+gathered company seemed so to respond and even to invite.  He lost
+himself in the large lustre, which was more and more what he had from the
+first wished it to be--as dazzling as the vision of heaven in the mind of
+a child.  He wandered in the fields of light; he passed, among the tall
+tapers, from tier to tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the
+white intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another.  It
+was in the quiet sense of having saved his souls that his deep strange
+instinct rejoiced.  This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a
+contingent world; they were saved better than faith or works could save
+them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk_ _from dying to, for
+actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of human remembrance.
+
+By this time he had survived all his friends; the last straight flame was
+three years old, there was no one to add to the list.  Over and over he
+called his roll, and it appeared to him compact and complete.  Where
+should he put in another, where, if there were no other objection, would
+it stand in its place in the rank?  He reflected, with a want of
+sincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would be difficult to
+determine that place.  More and more, besides, face to face with his
+little legion, over endless histories, handling the empty shells and
+playing with the silence--more and more he could see that he had never
+introduced an alien.  He had had his great companions, his
+indulgences--there were cases in which they had been immense; but what
+had his devotion after all been if it hadn't been at bottom a respect?
+He was, however, himself surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the
+winter the responsibility of it was what was uppermost in his thoughts.
+The refrain had grown old to them, that plea for just one more.  There
+came a day when, for simple exhaustion, if symmetry should demand just
+one he was ready so far to meet symmetry.  Symmetry was harmony, and the
+idea of harmony began to haunt him; he said to himself that harmony was
+of course everything.  He took, in fancy, his composition to pieces,
+redistributing it into other lines, making other juxtapositions and
+contrasts.  He shifted this and that candle, he made the spaces
+different, he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap.  There were
+subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross-reference, and moments in
+which he seemed to catch a glimpse of the void so sensible to the woman
+who wandered in exile or sat where he had seen her with the portrait of
+Acton Hague.  Finally, in this way, he arrived at a conception of the
+total, the ideal, which left a clear opportunity for just another figure.
+"Just one more--to round it off; just one more, just one," continued to
+hum in his head.  There was a strange confusion in the thought, for he
+felt the day to be near when he too should be one of the Others.  What in
+this event would the Others matter to him, since they only mattered to
+the living?  Even as one of the Dead what would his altar matter to him,
+since his particular dream of keeping it up had melted away?  What had
+harmony to do with the case if his lights were all to be quenched?  What
+he had hoped for was an instituted thing.  He might perpetuate it on some
+other pretext, but his special meaning would have dropped.  This meaning
+was to have lasted with the life of the one other person who understood
+it.
+
+In March he had an illness during which he spent a fortnight in bed, and
+when he revived a little he was told of two things that had happened.
+One was that a lady whose name was not known to the servants (she left
+none) had been three times to ask about him; the other was that in his
+sleep and on an occasion when his mind evidently wandered he was heard to
+murmur again and again: "Just one more--just one."  As soon as he found
+himself able to go out, and before the doctor in attendance had
+pronounced him so, he drove to see the lady who had come to ask about
+him.  She was not at home; but this gave him the opportunity, before his
+strength should fall again, to take his way to the church.  He entered it
+alone; he had declined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to
+decline effectively, the company of his servant or of a nurse.  He knew
+now perfectly what these good people thought; they had discovered his
+clandestine connexion, the magnet that had drawn him for so many years,
+and doubtless attached a significance of their own to the odd words they
+had repeated to him.  The nameless lady was the clandestine connexion--a
+fact nothing could have made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin
+her.  He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on
+his hands.  His weakness, his life's weariness overtook him.  It seemed
+to him he had come for the great surrender.  At first he asked himself
+how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the
+very desire to move gradually left him.  He had come, as he always came,
+to lose himself; the fields of light were still there to stray in; only
+this time, in straying, he would never come back.  He had given himself
+to his Dead, and it was good: this time his Dead would keep him.  He
+couldn't rise from his knees; he believed he should never rise again; all
+he could do was to lift his face and fix his eyes on his lights.  They
+looked unusually, strangely splendid, but the one that always drew him
+most had an unprecedented lustre.  It was the central voice of the choir,
+the glowing heart of the brightness, and on this occasion it seemed to
+expand, to spread great wings of flame.  The whole altar flared--dazzling
+and blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearer than the
+rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was human beauty and human
+charity, was the far-off face of Mary Antrim.  She smiled at him from the
+glory of heaven--she brought the glory down with her to take him.  He
+bowed his head in submission and at the same moment another wave rolled
+over him.  Was it the quickening of joy to pain?  In the midst of his joy
+at any rate he felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated
+knowledge that had the force of a reproach.  It suddenly made him
+contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to another.
+This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; the
+descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb
+for the descent of Acton Hague.  It was as if Stransom had read what her
+eyes said to him.
+
+After a moment he looked round in a despair that made him feel as if the
+source of life were ebbing.  The church had been empty--he was alone; but
+he wanted to have something done, to make a last appeal.  This idea gave
+him strength for an effort; he rose to his feet with a movement that made
+him turn, supporting himself by the back of a bench.  Behind him was a
+prostrate figure, a figure he had seen before; a woman in deep mourning,
+bowed in grief or in prayer.  He had seen her in other days--the first
+time of his entrance there, and he now slightly wavered, looking at her
+again till she seemed aware he had noticed her.  She raised her head and
+met his eyes: the partner of his long worship had come back.  She looked
+across at him an instant with a face wondering and scared; he saw he had
+made her afraid.  Then quickly rising she came straight to him with both
+hands out.
+
+"Then you _could_ come?  God sent you!" he murmured with a happy smile.
+
+"You're very ill--you shouldn't be here," she urged in anxious reply.
+
+"God sent me too, I think.  I was ill when I came, but the sight of you
+does wonders."  He held her hands, which steadied and quickened him.
+"I've something to tell you."
+
+"Don't tell me!" she tenderly pleaded; "let me tell you.  This afternoon,
+by a miracle, the sweetest of miracles, the sense of our difference left
+me.  I was out--I was near, thinking, wandering alone, when, on the spot,
+something changed in my heart.  It's my confession--there it is.  To come
+back, to come back on the instant--the idea gave me wings.  It was as if
+I suddenly saw something--as if it all became possible.  I could come for
+what you yourself came for: that was enough.  So here I am.  It's not for
+my own--that's over.  But I'm here for _them_."  And breathless,
+infinitely relieved by her low precipitate explanation, she looked with
+eyes that reflected all its splendour at the magnificence of their altar.
+
+"They're here for you," Stransom said, "they're present to-night as
+they've never been.  They speak for you--don't you see?--in a passion of
+light; they sing out like a choir of angels.  Don't you hear what they
+say?--they offer the very thing you asked of me."
+
+"Don't talk of it--don't think of it; forget it!"  She spoke in hushed
+supplication, and while the alarm deepened in her eyes she disengaged one
+of her hands and passed an arm round him to support him better, to help
+him to sink into a seat.
+
+He let himself go, resting on her; he dropped upon the bench and she fell
+on her knees beside him, his own arm round her shoulder.  So he remained
+an instant, staring up at his shrine.  "They say there's a gap in the
+array--they say it's not full, complete.  Just one more," he went on,
+softly--"isn't that what you wanted?  Yes, one more, one more."
+
+"Ah no more--no more!" she wailed, as with a quick new horror of it,
+under her breath.
+
+"Yes, one more," he repeated, simply; "just one!"  And with this his head
+dropped on her shoulder; she felt that in his weakness he had fainted.
+But alone with him in the dusky church a great dread was on her of what
+might still happen, for his face had the whiteness of death.
+
+
+
+
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