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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar of the Dead, by Henry James
+(#10 in our series by Henry James)
+
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+Title: The Altar of the Dead
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: September, 1996  [EBook #642]
+[This file was first posted on September 10, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 2, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
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