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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A  Passionate Pilgrim, 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: A  Passionate Pilgrim
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8080]
+Posting Date: July 24, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A  PASSIONATE PILGRIM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+
+A PASSIONATE PILGRIM
+
+
+By Henry James
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I determined to
+spend the interval of six weeks in England, to which country my mind's
+eye only had as yet been introduced. I had formed in Italy and France a
+resolute preference for old inns, considering that what they sometimes
+cost the ungratified body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival
+in London, therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much
+to the east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably
+figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay, I
+descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of the genius
+of "attendance" in the person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had
+I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt I had cut a
+golden-ripe crop of English "impressions." The coffee-room of the Red
+Lion, like so many other places and things I was destined to see in the
+motherland, seemed to have been waiting for long years, with just that
+sturdy sufferance of time written on its visage, for me to come and
+extract the romantic essence of it.
+
+The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most
+characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile failed
+to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so deeply buried
+in the soil of our early culture that, without some great upheaval
+of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when and where and how it
+begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of England an emotion more
+searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of
+the Red Lion years ago, at home--at Saragossa Illinois--in books, in
+visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small
+and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular
+screens of mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished
+on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient
+Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a narrow table--a
+table expected under stress to accommodate no less than four pairs of
+active British elbows. High pressure indeed had passed away from the
+Red Lion for ever. It now knew only that of memories and ghosts and
+atmosphere. Round the room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent
+panelling of mahogany, so dark with time and so polished with unremitted
+friction that by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out
+the dim reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just
+arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated by
+the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a
+dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age--the Derby favourite of
+the year 1807, the Bank of England, her Majesty the Queen. On the floor
+was a Turkey carpet--as old as the mahogany almost, as the Bank
+of England, as the Queen--into which the waiter had in his lonely
+revolutions trodden so many massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing
+beer that the glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have
+recognised it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type
+would be altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having
+dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in
+penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against
+the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the mahogany
+partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that must have
+expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy screen refused even
+to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency.
+
+While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a person
+whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be a fellow
+lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like myself, to have
+submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on the other side of my
+partition had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to the fire,
+exposed his back to it and, after consulting his watch, looked directly
+out of the window and indirectly at me. He was a man of something less
+than middle age and more than middle stature, though indeed you would
+have called him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for
+his emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his head,
+was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey, unsuited,
+perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not altogether out
+of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion. His nose was aquiline
+and delicate; beneath it his moustache languished much rather than
+bristled. His mouth and chin were negative, or at the most provisional;
+not vulgar, doubtless, but ineffectually refined. A cold fatal
+gentlemanly weakness was expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His
+eye was restless and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of
+shifting his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head,
+told of exhausted intentions, of a will relaxed. His dress was neat and
+"toned down"--he might have been in mourning. I made up my mind on three
+points: he was a bachelor, he was out of health, he was not indigenous
+to the soil. The waiter approached him, and they conversed in accents
+barely audible. I heard the words "claret," "sherry" with a tentative
+inflexion, and finally "beer" with its last letter changed to "ah."
+Perhaps he was a Russian in reduced circumstances; he reminded me
+slightly of certain sceptical cosmopolite Russians whom I had met on the
+Continent. While in my extravagant way I followed this train--for
+you see I was interested--there appeared a short brisk man with
+reddish-brown hair, with a vulgar nose, a sharp blue eye and a red
+beard confined to his lower jaw and chin. My putative Russian, still in
+possession of the rug, let his mild gaze stray over the dingy ornaments
+of the room. The other drew near, and his umbrella dealt a playful
+poke at the concave melancholy waistcoat. "A penny ha'penny for your
+thoughts!"
+
+My friend, as I call him, uttered an exclamation, stared, then laid
+his two hands on the other's shoulders. The latter looked round at me
+keenly, compassing me in a momentary glance. I read in its own vague
+light that this was a transatlantic eyebeam; and with such confidence
+that I hardly needed to see its owner, as he prepared, with his
+companion, to seat himself at the table adjoining my own, take from his
+overcoat-pocket three New York newspapers and lay them beside his
+plate. As my neighbours proceeded to dine I felt the crumbs of their
+conversation scattered pretty freely abroad. I could hear almost all
+they said, without straining to catch it, over the top of the partition
+that divided us. Occasionally their voices dropped to recovery of
+discretion, but the mystery pieced itself together as if on purpose to
+entertain me. Their speech was pitched in the key that may in English
+air be called alien in spite of a few coincidences. The voices were
+American, however, with a difference; and I had no hesitation in
+assigning the softer and clearer sound to the pale thin gentleman, whom
+I decidedly preferred to his comrade. The latter began to question him
+about his voyage.
+
+"Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the hour we left New York."
+
+"Well, you do look considerably reduced," said the second-comer.
+
+"Reduced! I've been on the verge of the grave. I haven't slept six hours
+for three weeks." This was said with great gravity.
+
+"Well, I've made the voyage for the last time."
+
+"The plague you have! You mean to locate here permanently?"
+
+"Oh it won't be so very permanent!"
+
+There was a pause; after which: "You're the same merry old boy, Searle.
+Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?"
+
+"I almost wish I were."
+
+"You're not so sweet on England then? I've heard people say at home that
+you dress and talk and act like an Englishman. But I know these people
+here and I know you. You're not one of this crowd, Clement Searle, not
+you. You'll go under here, sir; you'll go under as sure as my name's
+Simmons."
+
+Following this I heard a sudden clatter as of the drop of a knife and
+fork. "Well, you're a delicate sort of creature, if it IS your ugly
+name! I've been wandering about all day in this accursed city, ready
+to cry with homesickness and heartsickness and every possible sort of
+sickness, and thinking, in the absence of anything better, of meeting
+you here this evening and of your uttering some sound of cheer and
+comfort and giving me some glimmer of hope. Go under? Ain't I under now?
+I can't do more than get under the ground!"
+
+Mr. Simmons's superior brightness appeared to flicker a moment in this
+gust of despair, but the next it was burning steady again. "DON'T 'cry,'
+Searle," I heard him say. "Remember the waiter. I've grown Englishman
+enough for that. For heaven's sake don't let's have any nerves. Nerves
+won't do anything for you here. It's best to come to the point. Tell me
+in three words what you expect of me."
+
+I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had collapsed in his
+chair. "Upon my word, sir, you're quite inconceivable. You never got my
+letter?"
+
+"Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to get anything in my
+life."
+
+At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath, which it was well
+perhaps that I but partially heard. "Abijah Simmons," he then cried,
+"what demon of perversity possesses you? Are you going to betray me here
+in a foreign land, to turn out a false friend, a heartless rogue?"
+
+"Go on, sir," said sturdy Simmons. "Pour it all out. I'll wait till
+you've done. Your beer's lovely," he observed independently to the
+waiter. "I'll have some more."
+
+"For God's sake explain yourself!" his companion appealed.
+
+There was a pause, at the end of which I heard Mr. Simmons set down his
+empty tankard with emphasis. "You poor morbid mooning man," he resumed,
+"I don't want to say anything to make you feel sore. I regularly pity
+you. But you must allow that you've acted more like a confirmed crank
+than a member of our best society--in which every one's so sensible."
+
+Mr. Searle seemed to have made an effort to compose himself. "Be so good
+as to tell me then what was the meaning of your letter."
+
+"Well, you had got on MY nerves, if you want to know, when I wrote it.
+It came of my always wishing so to please folks. I had much better have
+let you alone. To tell you the plain truth I never was so horrified in
+my life as when I found that on the strength of my few kind words you
+had come out here to seek your fortune."
+
+"What then did you expect me to do?"
+
+"I expected you to wait patiently till I had made further enquiries and
+had written you again."
+
+"And you've made further enquiries now?"
+
+"Enquiries! I've committed assaults."
+
+"And you find I've no claim?"
+
+"No claim that one of THESE big bugs will look at. It struck me at first
+that you had rather a neat little case. I confess the look of it took
+hold of me--"
+
+"Thanks to your liking so to please folks!" Mr. Simmons appeared for
+a moment at odds with something; it proved to be with his liquor. "I
+rather think your beer's too good to be true," he said to the waiter. "I
+guess I'll take water. Come, old man," he resumed, "don't challenge me
+to the arts of debate, or you'll have me right down on you, and then you
+WILL feel me. My native sweetness, as I say, was part of it. The idea
+that if I put the thing through it would be a very pretty feather in
+my cap and a very pretty penny in my purse was part of it. And the
+satisfaction of seeing a horrid low American walk right into an old
+English estate was a good deal of it. Upon my word, Searle, when I think
+of it I wish with all my heart that, extravagant vain man as you are, I
+COULD, for the charm of it, put you through! I should hardly care what
+you did with the blamed place when you got it. I could leave you alone
+to turn it into Yankee notions--into ducks and drakes as they call 'em
+here. I should like to see you tearing round over it and kicking up its
+sacred dust in their very faces!"
+
+"You don't know me one little bit," said Mr. Searle, rather shirking,
+I thought, the burden of this tribute and for all response to the
+ambiguity of the compliment.
+
+"I should be very glad to think I didn't, sir. I've been to no small
+amount of personal inconvenience for you. I've pushed my way right up
+to the headspring. I've got the best opinion that's to be had. The best
+opinion that's to be had just gives you one leer over its spectacles. I
+guess that look will fix you if you ever get it straight. I've been
+able to tap, indirectly," Mr. Simmons went on, "the solicitor of your
+usurping cousin, and he evidently knows something to be in the wind. It
+seems your elder brother twenty years ago put out a feeler. So you're
+not to have the glory of even making them sit up."
+
+"I never made any one sit up," I heard Mr. Searle plead. "I shouldn't
+begin at this time of day. I should approach the subject like a
+gentleman."
+
+"Well, if you want very much to do something like a gentleman you've got
+a capital chance. Take your disappointment like a gentleman."
+
+I had finished my dinner and had become keenly interested in poor Mr.
+Searle's unencouraging--or unencouraged--claim; so interested that I
+at last hated to hear his trouble reflected in his voice without being
+able--all respectfully!--to follow it in his face. I left my place, went
+over to the fire, took up the evening paper and established a post of
+observation behind it.
+
+His cold counsellor was in the act of choosing a soft chop from the
+dish--an act accompanied by a great deal of prying and poking with that
+gentleman's own fork. My disillusioned compatriot had pushed away his
+plate; he sat with his elbows on the table, gloomily nursing his head
+with his hands. His companion watched him and then seemed to wonder--to
+do Mr. Simmons justice--how he could least ungracefully give him up.
+"I say, Searle,"--and for my benefit, I think, taking me for a native
+ingenuous enough to be dazzled by his wit, he lifted his voice a little
+and gave it an ironical ring--"in this country it's the inestimable
+privilege of a loyal citizen, under whatsoever stress of pleasure or of
+pain, to make a point of eating his dinner."
+
+Mr. Searle gave his plate another push. "Anything may happen now. I
+don't care a straw."
+
+"You ought to care. Have another chop and you WILL care. Have some
+better tipple. Take my advice!" Mr. Simmons went on.
+
+My friend--I adopt that name for him--gazed from between his two hands
+coldly before him. "I've had enough of your advice."
+
+"A little more," said Simmons mildly; "I shan't trouble you again. What
+do you mean to do?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Oh come!"
+
+"Nothing, nothing, nothing!"
+
+"Nothing but starve. How about meeting expenses?"
+
+"Why do you ask?" said my friend. "You don't care."
+
+"My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer you twenty pounds you set
+most clumsily about it. You said just now I don't know you," Mr. Simmons
+went on. "Possibly. Come back with me then," he said kindly enough, "and
+let's improve our acquaintance."
+
+"I won't go back. I shall never go back."
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never."
+
+Mr. Simmons thought it shrewdly over. "Well, you ARE sick!" he exclaimed
+presently. "All I can say is that if you're working out a plan for cold
+poison, or for any other act of desperation, you had better give it
+right up. You can't get a dose of the commonest kind of cold poison
+for nothing, you know. Look here, Searle"--and the worthy man made what
+struck me as a very decent appeal. "If you'll consent to return home
+with me by the steamer of the twenty-third I'll pay your passage down.
+More than that, I'll pay for your beer."
+
+My poor gentleman met it. "I believe I never made up my mind to anything
+before, but I think it's made up now. I shall stay here till I take my
+departure for a newer world than any patched-up newness of ours. It's an
+odd feeling--I rather like it! What should I do at home?"
+
+"You said just now you were homesick."
+
+"I meant I was sick for a home. Don't I belong here? Haven't I longed to
+get here all my life? Haven't I counted the months and the years till I
+should be able to 'go' as we say? And now that I've 'gone,' that is that
+I've come, must I just back out? No, no, I'll move on. I'm much obliged
+to you for your offer. I've enough money for the present. I've about my
+person some forty pounds' worth of British gold, and the same amount,
+say, of the toughness of the heaven-sent idiot. They'll see me through
+together! After they're gone I shall lay my head in some English
+churchyard, beside some ivied tower, beneath an old gnarled black yew."
+
+I had so far distinctly followed the dialogue; but at this point the
+landlord entered and, begging my pardon, would suggest that number 12,
+a most superior apartment, having now been vacated, it would give him
+pleasure if I would look in. I declined to look in, but agreed for
+number 12 at a venture and gave myself again, with dissimulation, to
+my friends. They had got up; Simmons had put on his overcoat; he stood
+polishing his rusty black hat with his napkin. "Do you mean to go down
+to the place?" he asked.
+
+"Possibly. I've thought of it so often that I should like to see it."
+
+"Shall you call on Mr. Searle?"
+
+"Heaven forbid!"
+
+"Something has just occurred to me," Simmons pursued with a grin that
+made his upper lip look more than ever denuded by the razor and jerked
+the ugly ornament of his chin into the air. "There's a certain Miss
+Searle, the old man's sister."
+
+"Well?" my gentleman quavered.
+
+"Well, sir!--you talk of moving on. You might move on the damsel."
+
+Mr. Searle frowned in silence and his companion gave him a tap on the
+stomach. "Line those ribs a bit first!" He blushed crimson; his eyes
+filled with tears. "You ARE a coarse brute," he said. The scene
+quite harrowed me, but I was prevented from seeing it through by the
+reappearance of the landlord on behalf of number 12. He represented to
+me that I ought in justice to him to come and see how tidy they HAD
+made it. Half an hour afterwards I was rattling along in a hansom toward
+Covent Garden, where I heard Madame Bosio in The Barber of Seville. On
+my return from the opera I went into the coffee-room; it had occurred
+to me I might catch there another glimpse of Mr. Searle. I was not
+disappointed. I found him seated before the fire with his head sunk on
+his breast: he slept, dreaming perhaps of Abijah Simmons. I watched him
+for some moments. His closed eyes, in the dim lamplight, looked even
+more helpless and resigned, and I seemed to see the fine grain of his
+nature in his unconscious mask. They say fortune comes while we sleep,
+and, standing there, I felt really tender enough--though otherwise most
+unqualified--to be poor Mr. Searle's fortune. As I walked away I noted
+in one of the little prandial pews I have described the melancholy
+waiter, whose whiskered chin also reposed on the bulge of his
+shirt-front. I lingered a moment beside the old inn-yard in which, upon
+a time, the coaches and post-chaises found space to turn and disgorge.
+Above the dusky shaft of the enclosing galleries, where lounging lodgers
+and crumpled chambermaids and all the picturesque domesticity of a
+rattling tavern must have leaned on their elbows for many a year, I made
+out the far-off lurid twinkle of the London constellations. At the foot
+of the stairs, enshrined in the glittering niche of her well-appointed
+bar, the landlady sat napping like some solemn idol amid votive brass
+and plate.
+
+The next morning, not finding the subject of my benevolent curiosity in
+the coffee-room, I learned from the waiter that he had ordered breakfast
+in bed. Into this asylum I was not yet prepared to pursue him. I spent
+the morning in the streets, partly under pressure of business, but
+catching all kinds of romantic impressions by the way. To the searching
+American eye there is no tint of association with which the great grimy
+face of London doesn't flush. As the afternoon approached, however,
+I began to yearn for some site more gracefully classic than what
+surrounded me, and, thinking over the excursions recommended to the
+ingenuous stranger, decided to take the train to Hampton Court. The day
+was the more propitious that it yielded just that dim subaqueous light
+which sleeps so fondly upon the English landscape.
+
+At the end of an hour I found myself wandering through the apartments of
+the great palace. They follow each other in infinite succession, with no
+great variety of interest or aspect, but with persistent pomp and a fine
+specific effect. They are exactly of their various times. You pass from
+painted and panelled bedchambers and closets, anterooms, drawing-rooms,
+council-rooms, through king's suite, queen's suite, prince's suite,
+until you feel yourself move through the appointed hours and stages
+of some rigid monarchical day. On one side are the old monumental
+upholsteries, the big cold tarnished beds and canopies, with the
+circumference of disapparelled royalty symbolised by a gilded
+balustrade, and the great carved and yawning chimney-places where
+dukes-in-waiting may have warmed their weary heels; on the other,
+in deep recesses, rise the immense windows, the framed and draped
+embrasures where the sovereign whispered and favourites smiled, looking
+out on terraced gardens and misty park. The brown walls are dimly
+illumined by innumerable portraits of courtiers and captains, more
+especially with various members of the Batavian entourage of William
+of Orange, the restorer of the palace; with good store too of the
+lily-bosomed models of Lely and Kneller. The whole tone of this
+processional interior is singularly stale and sad. The tints of all
+things have both faded and darkened--you taste the chill of the place
+as you walk from room to room. It was still early in the day and in
+the season, and I flattered myself that I was the only visitor. This
+complacency, however, dropped at sight of a person standing motionless
+before a simpering countess of Sir Peter Lely's creation. On hearing
+my footstep this victim of an evaporated spell turned his head and I
+recognised my fellow lodger of the Red Lion. I was apparently recognised
+as well; he looked as if he could scarce wait for me to be kind to him,
+and in fact didn't wait. Seeing I had a catalogue he asked the name of
+the portrait. On my satisfying him he appealed, rather timidly, as to my
+opinion of the lady.
+
+"Well," said I, not quite timidly enough perhaps, "I confess she strikes
+me as no great matter."
+
+He remained silent and was evidently a little abashed. As we strolled
+away he stole a sidelong glance of farewell at his leering shepherdess.
+To speak with him face to face was to feel keenly that he was no less
+interesting than infirm. We talked of our inn, of London, of the palace;
+he uttered his mind freely, but seemed to struggle with a weight of
+depression. It was an honest mind enough, with no great cultivation but
+with a certain natural love of excellent things. I foresaw that I
+should find him quite to the manner born--to ours; full of glimpses and
+responses, of deserts and desolations. His perceptions would be fine and
+his opinions pathetic; I should moreover take refuge from his sense of
+proportion in his sense of humour, and then refuge from THAT, ah me!--in
+what? On my telling him that I was a fellow citizen he stopped short,
+deeply touched, and, silently passing his arm into my own, suffered me
+to lead him through the other apartments and down into the gardens. A
+large gravelled platform stretches itself before the basement of the
+palace, taking the afternoon sun. Parts of the great structure are
+reserved for private use and habitation, occupied by state-pensioners,
+reduced gentlewomen in receipt of the Queen's bounty and other deserving
+persons. Many of the apartments have their dependent gardens, and here
+and there, between the verdure-coated walls, you catch a glimpse of
+these somewhat stuffy bowers. My companion and I measured more than once
+this long expanse, looking down on the floral figures of the rest of the
+affair and on the stoutly-woven tapestry of creeping plants that muffle
+the foundations of the huge red pile. I thought of the various images of
+old-world gentility which, early and late, must have strolled in front
+of it and felt the protection and security of the place. We peeped
+through an antique grating into one of the mossy cages and saw an old
+lady with a black mantilla on her head, a decanter of water in one hand
+and a crutch in the other, come forth, followed by three little dogs and
+a cat, to sprinkle a plant. She would probably have had an opinion on
+the virtue of Queen Caroline. Feeling these things together made us
+quickly, made us extraordinarily, intimate. My companion seemed to ache
+with his impression; he scowled, all gently, as if it gave him pain. I
+proposed at last that we should dine somewhere on the spot and take
+a late train to town. We made our way out of the gardens into the
+adjoining village, where we entered an inn which I pronounced, very
+sincerely, exactly what we wanted. Mr. Searle had approached our board
+as shyly as if it had been a cold bath; but, gradually warming to his
+work, he declared at the end of half an hour that for the first time in
+a month he enjoyed his victuals.
+
+"I'm afraid you're rather out of health," I risked.
+
+"Yes, sir--I'm an incurable."
+
+The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered about the entrance
+of Bushey Park, and after we had dined we lounged along into the
+celebrated avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare emotion, familiar
+to every intelligent traveller, in which the mind seems to swallow the
+sum total of its impressions at a gulp. You take in the whole place,
+whatever it be. You feel England, you feel Italy, and the sensation
+involves for the moment a kind of thrill. I had known it from time to
+time in Italy and had opened my soul to it as to the spirit of the
+Lord. Since my landing in England I had been waiting for it to arrive. A
+bottle of tolerable Burgundy, at dinner, had perhaps unlocked to it the
+gates of sense; it arrived now with irresistible force. Just the scene
+around me was the England of one's early reveries. Over against us, amid
+the ripeness of its gardens, the dark red residence, with its formal
+facings and its vacant windows, seemed to make the past definite and
+massive; the little village, nestling between park and palace, around
+a patch of turfy common, with its taverns of figurative names, its
+ivy-towered church, its mossy roofs, looked like the property of a
+feudal lord. It was in this dark composite light that I had read the
+British classics; it was this mild moist air that had blown from the
+pages of the poets; while I seemed to feel the buried generations in the
+dense and elastic sod. And that I must have testified in some form or
+other to what I have called my thrill I gather, remembering it, from a
+remark of my companion's.
+
+"You've the advantage over me in coming to all this with an educated
+eye. You already know what old things can be. I've never known it but by
+report. I've always fancied I should like it. In a small way at home, of
+course, I did try to stand by my idea of it. I must be a conservative by
+nature. People at home used to call me a cockney and a fribble. But it
+wasn't true," he went on; "if it had been I should have made my way over
+here long ago: before--before--" He paused, and his head dropped sadly
+on his breast.
+
+The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue; I had but to choose my
+time for learning his story. Something told me that I had gained his
+confidence and that, so far as attention and attitude might go, I was
+"in" for responsibilities. But somehow I didn't dread them. "Before you
+lost your health," I suggested.
+
+"Before I lost my health," he answered. "And my property--the little I
+had. And my ambition. And any power to take myself seriously."
+
+"Come!" I cried. "You shall recover everything. This tonic English
+climate will wind you up in a month. And THEN see how you'll take
+yourself--and how I shall take you!"
+
+"Oh," he gratefully smiled, "I may turn to dust in your hands! I should
+like," he presently pursued, "to be an old genteel pensioner, lodged
+over there in the palace and spending my days in maundering about these
+vistas. I should go every morning, at the hour when it gets the sun,
+into that long gallery where all those pretty women of Lely's are
+hung--I know you despise them!--and stroll up and down and say something
+kind to them. Poor precious forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted
+in their day, so neglected now! Offering up their shoulders and ringlets
+and smiles to that musty deadly silence!"
+
+I laid my hand on my friend's shoulder. "Oh sir, you're all right!"
+
+Just at this moment there came cantering down the shallow glade of the
+avenue a young girl on a fine black horse--one of those little budding
+gentlewomen, perfectly mounted and equipped, who form to alien eyes one
+of the prettiest incidents of English scenery. She had distanced her
+servant and, as she came abreast of us, turned slightly in her saddle
+and glanced back at him. In the movement she dropped the hunting-crop
+with which she was armed; whereupon she reined up and looked shyly at
+us and at the implement. "This is something better than a Lely," I
+said. Searle hastened forward, picked up the crop and, with a particular
+courtesy that became him, handed it back to the rider. Fluttered and
+blushing she reached forward, took it with a quick sweet sound, and the
+next moment was bounding over the quiet turf. Searle stood watching her;
+the servant, as he passed us, touched his hat. When my friend turned
+toward me again I saw that he too was blushing. "Oh sir, you're all
+right," I repeated.
+
+At a short distance from where we had stopped was an old stone bench. We
+went and sat down on it and, as the sun began to sink, watched the light
+mist powder itself with gold. "We ought to be thinking of the train back
+to London, I suppose," I at last said.
+
+"Oh hang the train!" sighed my companion.
+
+"Willingly. There could be no better spot than this to feel the English
+evening stand still." So we lingered, and the twilight hung about us,
+strangely clear in spite of the thickness of the air. As we sat there
+came into view an apparition unmistakeable from afar as an immemorial
+vagrant--the disowned, in his own rich way, of all the English ages. As
+he approached us he slackened pace and finally halted, touching his cap.
+He was a man of middle age, clad in a greasy bonnet with false-looking
+ear-locks depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red
+scarf, tucked into his waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote
+affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a stick; on
+his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of withered
+vegetables at the bottom. His face was pale haggard and degraded beyond
+description--as base as a counterfeit coin, yet as modelled somehow as
+a tragic mask. He too, like everything else, had a history. From what
+height had he fallen, from what depth had he risen? He was the perfect
+symbol of generated constituted baseness; and I felt before him in
+presence of a great artist or actor.
+
+"For God's sake, gentlemen," he said in the raucous tone of
+weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat exacerbated
+by perpetual gin, "for God's sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor
+fern-collector!"--turning up his stale daisies. "Food hasn't passed my
+lips, gentlemen, for the last three days." We gaped at him and at each
+other, and to our imagination his appeal had almost the force of a
+command. "I wonder if half-a-crown would help?" I privately wailed. And
+our fasting botanist went limping away through the park with the grace
+of controlled stupefaction still further enriching his outline.
+
+"I feel as if I had seen my Doppelganger," said Searle. "He reminds me
+of myself. What am I but a mere figure in the landscape, a wandering
+minstrel or picker of daisies?"
+
+"What are you 'anyway,' my friend?" I thereupon took occasion to ask.
+"Who are you? kindly tell me."
+
+The colour rose again to his pale face and I feared I had offended
+him. He poked a moment at the sod with the point of his umbrella before
+answering. "Who am I?" he said at last. "My name is Clement Searle. I
+was born in New York, and that's the beginning and the end of me."
+
+"Ah not the end!" I made bold to plead.
+
+"Then it's because I HAVE no end--any more than an ill-written book. I
+just stop anywhere; which means I'm a failure," the poor man all lucidly
+and unreservedly pursued: "a failure, as hopeless and helpless, sir, as
+any that ever swallowed up the slender investments of the widow and
+the orphan. I don't pay five cents on the dollar. What I might have
+been--once!--there's nothing left to show. I was rotten before I was
+ripe. To begin with, certainly, I wasn't a fountain of wisdom. All the
+more reason for a definite channel--for having a little character and
+purpose. But I hadn't even a little. I had nothing but nice tastes, as
+they call them, and fine sympathies and sentiments. Take a turn through
+New York to-day and you'll find the tattered remnants of these things
+dangling on every bush and fluttering in every breeze; the men to whom
+I lent money, the women to whom I made love, the friends I trusted, the
+follies I invented, the poisonous fumes of pleasure amid which nothing
+was worth a thought but the manhood they stifled! It was my fault that I
+believed in pleasure here below. I believe in it still, but as I believe
+in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal, certainly--if
+you've got one; but most people haven't. Pleasure would be right if it
+were pleasure straight through; but it never is. My taste was to be the
+best in the world; well, perhaps it was. I had a little money; it went
+the way of my little wit. Here in my pocket I have the scant dregs
+of it. I should tell you I was the biggest kind of ass. Just now that
+description would flatter me; it would assume there's something left of
+me. But the ghost of a donkey--what's that? I think," he went on with
+a charming turn and as if striking off his real explanation, "I should
+have been all right in a world arranged on different lines. Before
+heaven, sir--whoever you are--I'm in practice so absurdly tender-hearted
+that I can afford to say it: I entered upon life a perfect gentleman.
+I had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found them
+nowhere--found a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without shade,
+without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery
+of colour. To furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own
+soul. I went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very
+pretty chiaroscuro you'll find in my track! Sitting here in this old
+park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of
+what might have been! I should have been born here and not there; here
+my makeshift distinctions would have found things they'd have been true
+of. How it was I never got free is more than I can say. It might have
+cut the knot, but the knot was too tight. I was always out of health or
+in debt or somehow desperately dangling. Besides, I had a horror of the
+great black sickening sea. A year ago I was reminded of the existence of
+an old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes of
+my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I confess it's a
+bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means sure that to this hour
+I've got the hang of it. You look as if you had a clear head: some other
+time, if you consent, we'll have a go at it, such as it is, together.
+Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and tried to commit the
+'points' of our case to memory, as I used to get nine-times-nine by
+heart as a boy. I dreamed of it for six months, half-expecting to wake
+up some fine morning and hear through a latticed casement the cawing of
+an English rookery. A couple of months ago there came out to England on
+business of his own a man who once got me out of a dreadful mess (not
+that I had hurt anyone but myself), a legal practitioner in our courts,
+a very rough diamond, but with a great deal of FLAIR, as they say in New
+York. It was with him yesterday you saw me dining. He undertook, as
+he called it, to 'nose round' and see if anything could be made of our
+questionable but possible show. The matter had never seriously been
+taken up. A month later I got a letter from Simmons assuring me that it
+seemed a very good show indeed and that he should be greatly surprised
+if I were unable to do something. This was the greatest push I had ever
+got in my life; I took a deliberate step, for the first time; I sailed
+for England. I've been here three days: they've seemed three months.
+After keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours my legal adviser makes his
+appearance last night and states to me, with his mouth full of mutton,
+that I haven't a leg to stand on, that my claim is moonshine, and that
+I must do penance and take a ticket for six more days of purgatory
+with his presence thrown in. My friend, my friend--shall I say I was
+disappointed? I'm already resigned. I didn't really believe I had
+any case. I felt in my deeper consciousness that it was the crowning
+illusion of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor legal
+adviser!--I forgive him with all my heart. But for him I shouldn't be
+sitting in this place, in this air, under these impressions. This is a
+world I could have got on with beautifully. There's an immense charm in
+its having been kept for the last. After it nothing else would have been
+tolerable. I shall now have a month of it, I hope, which won't be long
+enough for it to "go back on me. There's one thing!"--and here, pausing,
+he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before him--"I wish it were
+possible you should be with me to the end."
+
+"I promise you to leave you only when you kick me downstairs." But I
+suggested my terms. "It must be on condition of your omitting from your
+conversation this intolerable flavour of mortality. I know nothing of
+'ends.' I'm all for beginnings."
+
+He kept on me his sad weak eyes. Then with a faint smile: "Don't cut
+down a man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it. I'm bankrupt."
+
+"Oh health's money!" I said. "Get well, and the rest will take care of
+itself. I'm interested in your questionable claim--it's the question
+that's the charm; and pretenders, to anything big enough, have always
+been, for me, an attractive class. Only their first duty's to be
+gallant."
+
+"Their first duty's to understand their own points and to know their own
+mind," he returned with hopeless lucidity. "Don't ask me to climb our
+family tree now," he added; "I fear I haven't the head for it. I'll try
+some day--if it will bear my weight; or yours added to mine. There's
+no doubt, however, that we, as they say, go back. But I know nothing of
+business. If I were to take the matter in hand I should break in two the
+poor little silken thread from which everything hangs. In a better world
+than this I think I should be listened to. But the wind doesn't set to
+ideal justice. There's no doubt that a hundred years ago we suffered
+a palpable wrong. Yet we made no appeal at the time, and the dust of a
+century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!"
+
+"What then," I asked, "is the estimated value of your interest?"
+
+"We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise. Compared with
+the whole property our ideas have been small. We were once advised in
+the sense of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Why a hundred and
+thirty I'm sure I don't know. Don't beguile me into figures."
+
+"Allow me one more question," I said. "Who's actually in possession?"
+
+"A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing about him."
+
+"He's in some way related to you?"
+
+"Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make us?"
+
+"Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin live?"
+
+"At a place called Lackley--in Middleshire."
+
+I thought it over. "Well, suppose we look up Lackley in Middleshire!"
+
+He got straight up. "Go and see it?"
+
+"Go and see it."
+
+"Well," he said, "with you I'll go anywhere."
+
+On our return to town we determined to spend three days there together
+and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one as the other of
+that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those superstitious pilgrims
+who feel it the mother-city of their race, the distributing heart of
+their traditional life. Certain characteristics of the dusky Babylon,
+certain aspects, phases, features, "say" more to the American spiritual
+ear than anything else in Europe. The influence of these things on
+Searle it charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as
+I pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
+appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from long
+inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and his talk.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+We looked out the topography of Middleshire in a county-guide, which
+spoke highly, as the phrase is, of Lackley Park, and took up our abode,
+our journey ended, at a wayside inn where, in the days of leisure, the
+coach must have stopped for luncheon and burnished pewters of rustic
+ale been handed up as straight as possible to outsiders athirst with
+the sense of speed. We stopped here for mere gaping joy of its
+steep-thatched roof, its latticed windows, its hospitable porch, and
+allowed a couple of days to elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet
+sentimental observance of the land before approaching the particular
+business that had drawn us on. The region I allude to is a compendium
+of the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
+scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely knew whether
+we were looking at it for the first or the last time, made it arrest us
+at every step. The countryside, in the full warm rains of the last
+of April, had burst into sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the
+hedgerows had turned into blooming screens, the sodden verdure of lawn
+and meadow been washed over with a lighter brush. We went forth without
+loss of time for a long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested
+central billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which
+you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties,
+within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations.
+Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered
+slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of
+the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish
+blur of habitation, taking the mild English light.
+
+We gave an irrepressible attention to this same solar reserve, and found
+in it only a refinement of art. The sky never was empty and never idle;
+the clouds were continually at play for our benefit. Over against
+us, from our station on the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved,
+condensed and shifted, blotting the blue with sullen rain-spots,
+stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of grey, bursting into
+an explosion of light or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our
+way along the rounded ridge of the downs and reached, by a descent,
+through slanting angular fields, green to cottage-doors, a russet
+village that beckoned us from the heart of the maze in which the hedges
+wrapped it up. Close beside it, I admit, the roaring train bounces out
+of a hole in the hills; yet there broods upon this charming hamlet an
+old-time quietude that makes a violation of confidence of naming it so
+far away. We struck through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its
+barriers of hawthorn; it led us to a superb old farmhouse, now rather
+rudely jostled by the multiplied roads and by-ways that have reduced its
+ancient appanage. It stands there in stubborn picturesqueness, doggedly
+submitting to be pointed out and sketched. It is a wonderful image of
+the domiciliary conditions of the past--cruelly complete; with bended
+beams and joists, beneath the burden of gables, that seem to ache and
+groan with memories and regrets. The short low windows, where lead and
+glass combine equally to create an inward gloom, retain their opacity as
+a part of the primitive idea of defence. Such an old house provokes on
+the part of an American a luxury of respect. So propped and patched, so
+tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central
+English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanised with ages
+of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed to offer to our
+grateful eyes a small rude symbol of the great English social order.
+Passing out upon the highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch,
+the "village-green" of the tales of our youth. Nothing was absent: the
+shaggy mouse-coloured donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge
+proboscis, the geese, the old woman--THE old woman, in person, with
+her red cloak and her black bonnet, frilled about the face and
+double-frilled beside her decent placid cheeks--the towering ploughman
+with his white smock-frock puckered on chest and back, his short
+corduroys, his mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these
+things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and
+mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the
+handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle
+whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy
+but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a
+meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a
+surface of fine plush. We followed it from field to field and from
+stile to stile; it was all adorably the way to church. At the church we
+finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the
+workday world by the broad stillness of pastures--a grey, grey tower, a
+huge black yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and
+protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to ache with
+consecration that my sensitive companion gave way to the force of it.
+
+"You must bury me here, you know"--he caught at my arm. "It's the first
+place of worship I've seen in my life. How it makes a Sunday where it
+stands!"
+
+It took the Church, we agreed, to make churches, but we had the sense
+the next day of seeing still better why. We walked over some seven
+miles, to the nearer of the two neighbouring seats of that lesson; and
+all through such a mist of local colour that we felt ourselves a pair
+of Smollett's pedestrian heroes faring tavernward for a night of
+adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass of
+the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue; and
+as we got closer stopped on a bridge and looked down at the reflexion of
+the solid minster in a yellow stream. Going further yet we entered
+the russet town--where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots
+and curricles, must often have come a-shopping for their sandals and
+mittens; we lounged in the grassed and gravelled precinct and gazed
+insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning wasting
+afternoon light, the visible ether that feels the voices of the chimes
+cling far aloft to the quiet sides of the cathedral-tower; saw it linger
+and nestle and abide, as it loves to do on all perpendicular spaces,
+converting them irresistibly into registers and dials; tasted too, as
+deeply, of the peculiar stillness of this place of priests; saw a rosy
+English lad come forth and lock the door of the old foundation-school
+that dovetailed with cloister and choir, and carry his big responsible
+key into one of the quiet canonical houses: and then stood musing
+together on the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood gone and
+come through cathedral-shades as a King's scholar, and yet kept ruddy
+with much cricket in misty river meadows. On the third morning we betook
+ourselves to Lackley, having learned that parts of the "grounds" were
+open to visitors, and that indeed on application the house was sometimes
+shown.
+
+Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of the
+hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound and circled
+from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
+glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at
+everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and untended
+as I had found a few of the large loose villas of old Italy, and I was
+still never to see the angular fact of English landlordism muffle itself
+in so many concessions. The weather had just become perfect; it was one
+of the dozen exquisite days of the English year--days stamped with a
+purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap. It was as if the
+mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which starred the
+dark waysides like petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been
+meted out to us by the cubic foot--distilled from an alchemist's
+crucible. From this pastoral abundance we moved upon the more composed
+scene, the park proper--passed through a second lodge-gate, with
+weather-worn gilding on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where the
+great trees stood singly and the tame deer browsed along the bed of
+a woodland stream. Here before us rose the gabled grey front of the
+Tudor-time, developed and terraced and gardened to some later loss, as
+we were afterwards to know, of type.
+
+"Here you can wander all day," I said to Searle, "like an exiled
+prince who has come back on tiptoe and hovers about the dominion of the
+usurper."
+
+"To think of 'others' having hugged this all these years!" he answered.
+"I know what I am, but what might I have been? What do such places make
+of a man?"
+
+"I dare say he gets stupidly used to them," I said. "But I dare say too,
+even then, that when you scratch the mere owner you find the perfect
+lover."
+
+"What a perfect scene and background it forms!" my friend, however,
+had meanwhile gone on. "What legends, what histories it knows! My heart
+really breaks with all I seem to guess. There's Tennyson's Talking Oak!
+What summer days one could spend here! How I could lounge the rest of my
+life away on this turf of the middle ages! Haven't I some maiden-cousin
+in that old hall, or grange, or court--what in the name of enchantment
+do you call the thing?--who would give me kind leave?" And then he
+turned almost fiercely upon me. "Why did you bring me here? Why did you
+drag me into this distraction of vain regrets?"
+
+At this moment there passed within call a decent lad who had emerged
+from the gardens and who might have been an underling in the stables. I
+hailed him and put the question of our possible admittance to the house.
+He answered that the master was away from home, but that he thought it
+probable the housekeeper would consent to do the honours. I passed my
+arm into Searle's. "Come," I said; "drain the cup, bitter-sweet though
+it be. We must go in." We hastened slowly and approached the fine front.
+The house was one of the happiest fruits of its freshly-feeling era,
+a multitudinous cluster of fair gables and intricate chimneys, brave
+projections and quiet recesses, brown old surfaces weathered to silver
+and mottled roofs that testified not to seasons but to centuries. Two
+broad terraces commanded the wooded horizon. Our appeal was answered by
+a butler who condescended to our weakness. He renewed the assertion that
+Mr. Searle was away from home, but he would himself lay our case before
+the housekeeper. We would be so good, however, as to give him our cards.
+This request, following so directly on the assertion that Mr. Searle
+was absent, was rather resented by my companion. "Surely not for the
+housekeeper."
+
+The butler gave a diplomatic cough. "Miss Searle is at home, sir."
+
+"Yours alone will have to serve," said my friend. I took out a card and
+pencil and wrote beneath my name NEW YORK. As I stood with the pencil
+poised a temptation entered into it. Without in the least considering
+proprieties or results I let my implement yield--I added above my name
+that of Mr. Clement Searle. What would come of it?
+
+Before many minutes the housekeeper waited upon us--a fresh rosy little
+old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown; a quaint
+careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our pleasure, to say
+nothing of any other. She had the accent of the country, but the manners
+of the house. Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments,
+duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour,
+with a hundred ornaments and treasures. The pictures were especially
+valuable. The two Vandykes, the trio of rosy Rubenses, the sole and
+sombre Rembrandt, glowed with conscious authenticity. A Claude, a
+Murillo, a Greuze, a couple of Gainsboroughs, hung there with high
+complacency. Searle strolled about, scarcely speaking, pale and grave,
+with bloodshot eyes and lips compressed. He uttered no comment on what
+we saw--he asked but a question or two. Missing him at last from my side
+I retraced my steps and found him in a room we had just left, on a faded
+old ottoman and with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in
+his hands. Before him, ranged on a great credence, was a magnificent
+collection of old Italian majolica; plates of every shape, with their
+glaze of happy colour, jugs and vases nobly bellied and embossed. There
+seemed to rise before me, as I looked, a sudden vision of the young
+English gentleman who, eighty years ago, had travelled by slow stages to
+Italy and been waited on at his inn by persuasive toymen. "What is it,
+my dear man?" I asked. "Are you unwell?"
+
+He uncovered his haggard face and showed me the flush of a consciousness
+sharper, I think, to myself than to him. "A memory of the past!
+There comes back to me a china vase that used to stand on the parlour
+mantel-shelf when I was a boy, with a portrait of General Jackson
+painted on one side and a bunch of flowers on the other. How long do you
+suppose that majolica has been in the family?"
+
+"A long time probably. It was brought hither in the last century, into
+old, old England, out of old, old Italy, by some contemporary dandy with
+a taste for foreign gimcracks. Here it has stood for a hundred years,
+keeping its clear firm hues in this quiet light that has never sought to
+advertise it."
+
+Searle sprang to his feet. "I say, for mercy's sake, take me away! I
+can't stand this sort of thing. Before I know it I shall do something
+scandalous. I shall steal some of their infernal crockery. I shall
+proclaim my identity and assert my rights. I shall go blubbering to Miss
+Searle and ask her in pity's name to 'put me up.'"
+
+If he could ever have been said to threaten complications he rather
+visibly did so now. I began to regret my officious presentation of
+his name and prepared without delay to lead him out of the house. We
+overtook the housekeeper in the last room of the series, a small unused
+boudoir over whose chimney-piece hung a portrait of a young man in a
+powdered wig and a brocaded waistcoat. I was struck with his resemblance
+to my companion while our guide introduced him. "This is Mr. Clement
+Searle, Mr. Searle's great-uncle, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He died young,
+poor gentleman; he perished at sea, going to America."
+
+"He was the young buck who brought the majolica out of Italy," I
+supplemented.
+
+"Indeed, sir, I believe he did," said the housekeeper without wonder.
+
+"He's the image of you, my dear Searle," I further observed.
+
+"He's remarkably like the gentleman, saving his presence," said the
+housekeeper.
+
+My friend stood staring. "Clement Searle--at sea--going to America--?"
+he broke out. Then with some sharpness to our old woman: "Why the devil
+did he go to America?"
+
+"Why indeed, sir? You may well ask. I believe he had kinsfolk there. It
+was for them to come to him."
+
+Searle broke into a laugh. "It was for them to come to him! Well, well,"
+he said, fixing his eyes on our guide, "they've come to him at last!"
+
+She blushed like a wrinkled rose-leaf. "Indeed, sir, I verily believe
+you're one of US!"
+
+"My name's the name of that beautiful youth," Searle went on. "Dear
+kinsman I'm happy to meet you! And what do you think of this?" he
+pursued as he grasped me by the arm. "I have an idea. He perished at
+sea. His spirit came ashore and wandered about in misery till it got
+another incarnation--in this poor trunk!" And he tapped his hollow
+chest. "Here it has rattled about these forty years, beating its wings
+against its rickety cage, begging to be taken home again. And I never
+knew what was the matter with me! Now at last the bruised spirit can
+escape!"
+
+Our old lady gaped at a breadth of appreciation--if not at the
+disclosure of a connexion--beyond her. The scene was really
+embarrassing, and my confusion increased as we became aware of another
+presence. A lady had appeared in the doorway and the housekeeper dropped
+just audibly: "Miss Searle!" My first impression of Miss Searle was that
+she was neither young nor beautiful. She stood without confidence on the
+threshold, pale, trying to smile and twirling my card in her fingers.
+I immediately bowed. Searle stared at her as if one of the pictures had
+stepped out of its frame.
+
+"If I'm not mistaken one of you gentlemen is Mr. Clement Searle," the
+lady adventured.
+
+"My friend's Mr. Clement Searle," I took upon myself to reply. "Allow me
+to add that I alone am responsible for your having received his name."
+
+"I should have been sorry not to--not to see him," said Miss Searle,
+beginning to blush. "Your being from America has led me--perhaps to
+intrude!"
+
+"The intrusion, madam, has been on our part. And with just that
+excuse--that we come from so far away."
+
+Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he stood
+silent beneath Sir Joshua's portrait. The housekeeper, agitated and
+mystified, fairly let herself go. "Heaven preserve us, Miss! It's your
+great-uncle's picture come to life."
+
+"I'm not mistaken then," said Miss Searle--"we must be distantly
+related." She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was almost
+anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her with gentle
+wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his thoughts. This
+then was his maiden-cousin, prospective mistress of these hereditary
+treasures. She was of some thirty-five years of age, taller than was
+then common and perhaps stouter than is now enjoined. She had small
+kind grey eyes, a considerable quantity of very light-brown hair and a
+smiling well-formed mouth. She was dressed in a lustreless black
+satin gown with a short train. Disposed about her neck was a blue
+handkerchief, and over this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string
+of amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was large yet somehow
+vague, mature yet undeveloped. Her manner of addressing us spoke of all
+sorts of deep diffidences. Searle, I think, had prefigured to himself
+some proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved at finding
+the lady timid and not obtrusively fair. He at once had an excellent
+tone.
+
+"We're distant cousins, I believe. I'm happy to claim a relationship
+which you're so good as to remember. I hadn't counted on your knowing
+anything about me."
+
+"Perhaps I've done wrong." And Miss Searle blushed and smiled anew. "But
+I've always known of there being people of our blood in America, and
+have often wondered and asked about them--without ever learning much.
+To-day, when this card was brought me and I understood a Clement Searle
+to be under our roof as a stranger, I felt I ought to do something. But,
+you know, I hardly knew what. My brother's in London. I've done what I
+think he would have done. Welcome as a cousin." And with a resolution
+that ceased to be awkward she put out her hand.
+
+"I'm welcome indeed if he would have done it half so graciously!" Again
+Searle, taking her hand, acquitted himself beautifully.
+
+"You've seen what there is, I think," Miss Searle went on. "Perhaps now
+you'll have luncheon." We followed her into a small breakfast-room where
+a deep bay window opened on the mossy flags of a terrace. Here, for some
+moments, she remained dumb and abashed, as if resting from a measurable
+effort. Searle too had ceased to overflow, so that I had to relieve the
+silence. It was of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and
+mansion, and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no
+impulses nor graces--scarce even any manners; she was queerly, almost
+frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an antique sweetness,
+a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so simple, among those
+complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so fresh, so modest and yet
+so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in which Searle and I had
+imagined human life to be steeped in such places as that. This figure
+was to the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood what a fact is to a fairy-tale,
+an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were to our hostess
+subjects of a curiosity not cunningly veiled.
+
+"I should like so to go abroad!" she exclaimed suddenly, as if she meant
+us to take the speech for an expression of interest in ourselves.
+
+"Have you never been?" one of us asked.
+
+"Only once. Three years ago my brother took me to Switzerland. We
+thought it extremely beautiful. Except for that journey I've always
+lived here. I was born in this house. It's a dear old place indeed, and
+I know it well. Sometimes one wants a change." And on my asking her
+how she spent her time and what society she saw, "Of course it's very
+quiet," she went on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in
+the manner of a person called upon for the first time to analyse to that
+extent her situation. "We see very few people. I don't think there are
+many nice ones hereabouts. At least we don't know them. Our own family's
+very small. My brother cares for nothing but riding and books. He had
+a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and his only son, a dear
+little boy, who of course would have had everything. Do you know that
+that makes me the heir, as they've done something--I don't quite
+know what--to the entail? Poor old me! Since his loss my brother has
+preferred to be quite alone. I'm sorry he's away. But you must wait till
+he comes back. I expect him in a day or two." She talked more and more,
+as if our very strangeness led her on, about her circumstances, her
+solitude, her bad eyes, so that she couldn't read, her flowers, her
+ferns, her dogs, and the vicar, recently presented to the living by
+her brother and warranted quite safe, who had lately begun to light his
+altar candles; pausing every now and then to gasp in self-surprise, yet,
+in the quaintest way in the world, keeping up her story as if it were
+a slow rather awkward old-time dance, a difficult pas seul in which
+she would have been better with more practice, but of which she must
+complete the figure. Of all the old things I had seen in England this
+exhibited mind of Miss Searle's seemed to me the oldest, the most handed
+down and taken for granted; fenced and protected as it was by convention
+and precedent and usage, thoroughly acquainted with its subordinate
+place. I felt as if I were talking with the heroine of a last-century
+novel. As she talked she rested her dull eyes on her kinsman with
+wondering kindness. At last she put it to him: "Did you mean to go away
+without asking for us?"
+
+"I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined not to trouble
+you. You've shown me how unfriendly I should have been."
+
+"But you knew of the place being ours, and of our relationship?"
+
+"Just so. It was because of these things that I came down here--because
+of them almost that I came to England. I've always liked to think of
+them," said my companion.
+
+"You merely wished to look then? We don't pretend to be much to look
+at."
+
+He waited; her words were too strange. "You don't know what you are,
+Miss Searle."
+
+"You like the old place then?"
+
+Searle looked at her again in silence. "If I could only tell you!" he
+said at last.
+
+"Do tell me. You must come and stay with us."
+
+It moved him to an oddity of mirth. "Take care, take care--I should
+surprise you! I'm afraid I should bore you. I should never leave you."
+
+"Oh you'd get homesick--for your real home!"
+
+At this he was still more amused. "By the way, tell Miss Searle about
+our real home," he said to me. And he stepped, through the window, out
+upon the terrace, followed by two beautiful dogs, a setter and a young
+stag-hound who from the moment we came in had established the fondest
+relation with him. Miss Searle looked at him, while he went, as if she
+vaguely yearned over him; it began to be plain that she was interested
+in her exotic cousin. I suddenly recalled the last words I had heard
+spoken by my friend's adviser in London and which, in a very crude form,
+had reference to his making a match with this lady. If only Miss Searle
+could be induced to think of that, and if one had but the tact to put it
+in a light to her! Something assured me that her heart was virgin-soil,
+that the flower of romantic affection had never bloomed there. If I
+might just sow the seed! There seemed to shape itself within her the
+perfect image of one of the patient wives of old.
+
+"He has lost his heart to England," I said. "He ought to have been born
+here."
+
+"And yet he doesn't look in the least an Englishman," she still rather
+guardedly prosed.
+
+"Oh it isn't his looks, poor fellow."
+
+"Of course looks aren't everything. I never talked with a foreigner
+before; but he talks as I have fancied foreigners."
+
+"Yes, he's foreign enough."
+
+"Is he married?"
+
+"His wife's dead and he's all alone in the world."
+
+"Has he much property?"
+
+"None to speak of."
+
+"But he has means to travel."
+
+I meditated. "He has not expected to travel far," I said at last. "You
+know, he's in very poor health."
+
+"Poor gentleman! So I supposed."
+
+"But there's more of him to go on with than he thinks. He came here
+because he wanted to see your place before he dies."
+
+"Dear me--kind man!" And I imagined in the quiet eyes the hint of a
+possible tear. "And he was going away without my seeing him?"
+
+"He's very modest, you see."
+
+"He's very much the gentleman."
+
+I couldn't but smile. "He's ALL--"
+
+At this moment we heard on the terrace a loud harsh cry. "It's the great
+peacock!" said Miss Searle, stepping to the window and passing out while
+I followed her. Below us, leaning on the parapet, stood our appreciative
+friend with his arm round the neck of the setter. Before him on
+the grand walk strutted the familiar fowl of gardens--a splendid
+specimen--with ruffled neck and expanded tail. The other dog had
+apparently indulged in a momentary attempt to abash the gorgeous biped,
+but at Searle's summons had bounded back to the terrace and leaped upon
+the ledge, where he now stood licking his new friend's face. The scene
+had a beautiful old-time air: the peacock flaunting in the foreground
+like the genius of stately places; the broad terrace, which flattered
+an innate taste of mine for all deserted walks where people may have sat
+after heavy dinners to drink coffee in old Sevres and where the stiff
+brocade of women's dresses may have rustled over grass or gravel; and
+far around us, with one leafy circle melting into another, the timbered
+acres of the park. "The very beasts have made him welcome," I noted as
+we rejoined our companion.
+
+"The peacock has done for you, Mr. Searle," said his cousin, "what he
+does only for very great people. A year ago there came here a great
+person--a grand old lady--to see my brother. I don't think that since
+then he has spread his tail as wide for any one else--not by a dozen
+feathers."
+
+"It's not alone the peacock," said Searle. "Just now there came slipping
+across my path a little green lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard
+of literature! And if you've a ghost, broad daylight though it be,
+I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of your house, Miss
+Searle?"
+
+"Oh dear, no! You must ask my brother for all those things."
+
+"You ought to have a collection of legends and traditions. You ought to
+have loves and murders and mysteries by the roomful. I shall be ashamed
+of you if you haven't."
+
+"Oh Mr. Searle! We've always been a very well-behaved family," she quite
+seriously pleaded. "Nothing out of the way has ever happened, I think."
+
+"Nothing out of the way? Oh that won't do! We've managed better than
+that in America. Why I myself!"--and he looked at her ruefully enough,
+but enjoying too his idea that he might embody the social scandal or
+point to the darkest drama of the Searles. "Suppose I should turn out
+a better Searle than you--better than you nursed here in romance and
+extravagance? Come, don't disappoint me. You've some history among you
+all, you've some poetry, you've some accumulation of legend. I've been
+famished all my days for these things. Don't you understand? Ah you
+can't understand! Tell me," he rambled on, "something tremendous. When
+I think of what must have happened here; of the lovers who must have
+strolled on this terrace and wandered under the beeches, of all the
+figures and passions and purposes that must have haunted these walls!
+When I think of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings, the
+young hopes and the old regrets, the rich experience of life--!" He
+faltered a moment with the increase of his agitation. His humour of
+dismay at a threat of the commonplace in the history he felt about him
+had turned to a deeper reaction. I began to fear however that he was
+really losing his head. He went on with a wilder play. "To see it all
+called up there before me, if the Devil alone could do it I'd make a
+bargain with the Devil! Ah Miss Searle," he cried, "I'm a most unhappy
+man!"
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear!" she almost wailed while I turned half away.
+
+"Look at that window, that dear little window!" I turned back to see him
+point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved against the purple
+brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and curtained with ivy.
+
+"It's my little room," she said.
+
+"Of course it's a woman's room. Think of all the dear faces--all of them
+so mild and yet so proud--that have looked out of that lattice, and of
+all the old-time women's lives whose principal view of the world has
+been this quiet park! Every one of them was a cousin of mine. And you,
+dear lady, you're one of them yet." With which he marched toward her and
+took her large white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her eyes
+and pressing her other hand to her breast. "You're a woman of the past.
+You're nobly simple. It has been a romance to see you. It doesn't matter
+what I say to you. You didn't know me yesterday, you'll not know me
+to-morrow. Let me to-day do a mad sweet thing. Let me imagine in you the
+spirit of all the dead women who have trod the terrace-flags that lie
+here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement of a church. Let me say I
+delight in you!"--he raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it
+and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her eyes the next instant I
+saw the tears had come. The Sleeping Beauty was awake.
+
+There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue was suddenly presented by
+the appearance of the butler bearing a letter. "A telegram, Miss," he
+announced.
+
+"Oh what shall I do?" cried Miss Searle. "I can't open a telegram.
+Cousin, help me."
+
+Searle took the missive, opened it and read aloud: "I shall be home to
+dinner. Keep the American."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+"KEEP the American!" Miss Searle, in compliance with the injunction
+conveyed in her brother's telegram (with something certainly of
+telegraphic curtness), lost no time in expressing the pleasure it would
+give her that our friend should remain. "Really you must," she said;
+and forthwith repaired to the house-keeper to give orders for the
+preparation of a room.
+
+"But how in the world did he know of my being here?" my companion put to
+me.
+
+I answered that he had probably heard from his solicitor of the other's
+visit. "Mr. Simmons and that gentleman must have had another interview
+since your arrival in England. Simmons, for reasons of his own, has
+made known to him your journey to this neighbourhood, and Mr. Searle,
+learning this, has immediately taken for granted that you've formally
+presented yourself to his sister. He's hospitably inclined and wishes
+her to do the proper thing by you. There may even," I went on, "be more
+in it than that. I've my little theory that he's the very phoenix of
+usurpers, that he has been very much struck with what the experts have
+had to say for you, and that he wishes to have the originality of making
+over to you your share--so limited after all--of the estate."
+
+"I give it up!" my friend mused. "Come what come will!"
+
+"You, of course," said Miss Searle, reappearing and turning to me, "are
+included in my brother's invitation. I've told them to see about a room
+for you. Your luggage shall immediately be sent for."
+
+It was arranged that I in person should be driven over to our little inn
+and that I should return with our effects in time to meet Mr. Searle at
+dinner. On my arrival several hours later I was immediately conducted
+to my room. The servant pointed out to me that it communicated by a
+door and a private passage with that of my fellow visitor. I made my way
+along this passage--a low narrow corridor with a broad latticed casement
+through which there streamed upon a series of grotesquely sculptured
+oaken closets and cupboards the vivid animating glow of the western
+sun--knocked at his door and, getting no answer, opened it. In an
+armchair by the open window sat my friend asleep, his arms and legs
+relaxed and head dropped on his breast. It was a great relief to see him
+rest thus from his rhapsodies, and I watched him for some moments before
+waking him. There was a faint glow of colour in his cheek and a light
+expressive parting of his lips, something nearer to ease and peace than
+I had yet seen in him. It was almost happiness, it was almost health. I
+laid my hand on his arm and gently shook it. He opened his eyes, gazed
+at me a moment, vaguely recognised me, then closed them again. "Let me
+dream, let me dream!"
+
+"What are you dreaming about?"
+
+A moment passed before his answer came. "About a tall woman in a quaint
+black dress, with yellow hair and a sweet, sweet smile, and a soft low
+delicious voice! I'm in love with her."
+
+"It's better to see her than to dream about her," I said. "Get up and
+dress; then we'll go down to dinner and meet her."
+
+"Dinner--dinner--?" And he gradually opened his eyes again. "Yes, upon
+my word I shall dine!"
+
+"Oh you're all right!" I declared for the twentieth time as he rose to
+his feet. "You'll live to bury Mr. Simmons." He told me he had spent the
+hours of my absence with Miss Searle--they had strolled together half
+over the place. "You must be very intimate," I smiled.
+
+"She's intimate with ME. Goodness knows what rigmarole I've treated her
+to!" They had parted an hour ago; since when, he believed, her brother
+had arrived.
+
+The slow-fading twilight was still in the great drawing-room when we
+came down. The housekeeper had told us this apartment was rarely used,
+there being others, smaller and more convenient, for the same needs.
+It seemed now, however, to be occupied in my comrade's honour. At the
+furthest end, rising to the roof like a royal tomb in a cathedral, was
+a great chimney-piece of chiselled white marble, yellowed by time, in
+which a light fire was crackling. Before the fire stood a small short
+man, with his hands behind him; near him was Miss Searle, so transformed
+by her dress that at first I scarcely knew her. There was in our
+entrance and reception something remarkably chilling and solemn. We
+moved in silence up the long room; Mr. Searle advanced slowly, a dozen
+steps, to meet us; his sister stood motionless. I was conscious of her
+masking her visage with a large white tinselled fan, and that her eyes,
+grave and enlarged, watched us intently over the top of it. The master
+of Lackley grasped in silence the proffered hand of his kinsman and eyed
+him from head to foot, suppressing, I noted, a start of surprise at his
+resemblance to Sir Joshua's portrait. "This is a happy day." And then
+turning to me with an odd little sharp stare: "My cousin's friend is my
+friend." Miss Searle lowered her fan.
+
+The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle's appearance was his very
+limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of his sister.
+The second was the preternatural redness of his hair and beard. They
+intermingled over his ears and surrounded his head like a huge lurid
+nimbus. His face was pale and attenuated, the face of a scholar, a
+dilettante, a comparer of points and texts, a man who lives in a library
+bending over books and prints and medals. At a distance it might have
+passed for smooth and rather blankly composed; but on a nearer view
+it revealed a number of wrinkles, sharply etched and scratched, of a
+singularly aged and refined effect. It was the complexion of a man of
+sixty. His nose was arched and delicate, identical almost with the nose
+of my friend. His eyes, large and deep-set, had a kind of auburn glow,
+the suggestion of a keen metal red-hot--or, more plainly, were full
+of temper and spirit. Imagine this physiognomy--grave and solemn,
+grotesquely solemn, in spite of the bushy brightness which made a sort
+of frame for it--set in motion by a queer, quick, defiant, perfunctory,
+preoccupied smile, and you will have an imperfect notion of the
+remarkable presence of our host; something better worth seeing and
+knowing, I perceived as I quite breathlessly took him in, than anything
+we had yet encountered. How thoroughly I had entered into sympathy
+with my poor picked-up friend, and how effectually I had associated my
+sensibilities with his own, I had not suspected till, within the short
+five minutes before the signal for dinner, I became aware, without his
+giving me the least hint, of his placing himself on the defensive. To
+neither of us was Mr. Searle sympathetic. I might have guessed from her
+attitude that his sister entered into our thoughts. A marked change had
+been wrought in her since the morning; during the hour, indeed--as
+I read in the light of the wondering glance he cast at her--that had
+elapsed since her parting with her cousin. She had not yet recovered
+from some great agitation. Her face was pale and she had clearly
+been crying. These notes of trouble gave her a new and quite perverse
+dignity, which was further enhanced by something complimentary and
+commemorative in her dress.
+
+Whether it was taste or whether it was accident I know not; but the
+amiable creature, as she stood there half in the cool twilight, half in
+the arrested glow of the fire as it spent itself in the vastness of its
+marble cave, was a figure for a painter. She was habited in some faded
+splendour of sea-green crape and silk, a piece of millinery which,
+though it must have witnessed a number of dull dinners, preserved still
+a festive air. Over her white shoulders she wore an ancient web of the
+most precious and venerable lace and about her rounded throat a single
+series of large pearls. I went in with her to dinner, and Mr. Searle,
+following with my friend, took his arm, as the latter afterwards told
+me, and pretended jocosely to conduct him. As dinner proceeded the
+feeling grew within me that a drama had begun to be played in which the
+three persons before me were actors--each of a really arduous part. The
+character allotted to my friend, however, was certainly the least easy
+to represent with effect, though I overflowed with the desire that he
+should acquit himself to his honour. I seemed to see him urge his faded
+faculties to take their cue and perform. The poor fellow tried to do
+himself credit more seriously than ever in his old best days. With Miss
+Searle, credulous passive and pitying, he had finally flung aside all
+vanity and propriety and shown the bottom of his fantastic heart.
+But with our host there might be no talking of nonsense nor taking
+of liberties; there and then, if ever, sat a consummate conservative,
+breathing the fumes of hereditary privilege and security. For an hour,
+accordingly, I saw my poor protege attempt, all in pain, to meet a new
+decorum. He set himself the task of appearing very American, in order
+that his appreciation of everything Mr. Searle represented might seem
+purely disinterested. What his kinsman had expected him to be I know
+not; but I made Mr. Searle out as annoyed, in spite of his exaggerated
+urbanity, at finding him so harmless. Our host was not the man to
+show his hand, but I think his best card had been a certain implicit
+confidence that so provincial a parasite would hardly have good manners.
+
+He led the conversation to the country we had left; rather as if a leash
+had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half-domesticated
+animal the tendency of whose movements had to be recognised. He spoke of
+it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien to the British orbit, lately
+proclaimed to have the admixture of atmospheric gases required
+to support animal life, but not, save under cover of a liberal
+afterthought, to be admitted into one's regular conception of things. I,
+for my part, felt nothing but regret that the spheric smoothness of
+his universe should be disfigured by the extrusion even of such
+inconsiderable particles as ourselves.
+
+"I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over there," Mr.
+Searle mentioned; "but had scarcely followed it more than you pretend to
+pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree may drop, on the other side
+of your wall, in your neighbour's garden. There was a man I knew at
+Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a decent fellow too; he and I were rather
+cronies; I think he afterwards went to the Middle States. They'll be,
+I suppose, about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that
+great-uncle of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he
+never got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make
+one fancy he DID get there and that you've kept him alive by one of
+those beastly processes--I think you have 'em over there: what do you
+call it, 'putting up' things? If you're he you've not done a wise thing
+to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There's a ghost
+who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one
+to whom he did a wrong."
+
+"Oh mercy ON us!" cried Miss Searle in simple horror.
+
+"Of course YOU know nothing of such things," he rather dryly allowed.
+"You're too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts."
+
+"I'm sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost," said
+my friend, the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes.
+"Why does it sob? I feel as if that were what we've come above all to
+learn."
+
+Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment gaugingly; he held the balance as
+to measure his resources. He wished to do justice to his theme. With
+the long finger-nails of his left hand nervously playing against the
+tinkling crystal of his wineglass and his conscious eyes betraying that,
+small and strange as he sat there, he knew himself, to his pleasure and
+advantage, remarkably impressive, he dropped into our untutored minds
+the sombre legend of his house. "Mr. Clement Searle, from all I gather,
+was a young man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was
+left a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the elder and
+the more promising. She educated him with the greatest affection and
+care. Of course when he came to manhood she wished him to marry well.
+His means were quite sufficient to enable him to overlook the want of
+money in his wife; and Mrs. Searle selected a young lady who possessed,
+as she conceived, every good gift save a fortune--a fine proud handsome
+girl, the daughter of an old friend, an old lover I suspect, of her own.
+Clement, however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was
+as yet unprepared to choose. The young lady opened upon him in vain the
+battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her cause. Clement
+remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle had a character which
+appears to have gone out of fashion in my family nowadays; she was a
+great manager, a maitresse-femme. A proud passionate imperious woman,
+she had had immense cares and ever so many law-suits; they had sharpened
+her temper and her will. She suspected that her son's affections had
+another object, and this object she began to hate. Irritated by his
+stubborn defiance of her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more
+she watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he
+loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the place
+all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the rashness of an
+angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady of her choice--who,
+by the way, seems to have been no shrinking blossom--to stay in the
+house. A stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if she did
+so he would leave the country and sail for America. She probably
+disbelieved him; she knew him to be weak, but she overrated his
+weakness. At all events the rejected one arrived and Clement Searle
+departed. On a dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two
+women, desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this big house,
+mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on Christmas
+Eve, in the midst of a great snowstorm long famous in the country,
+something happened that quickened their bitterness. A young woman,
+battered and chilled by the storm, gained entrance to the house and,
+making her way into the presence of the mistress and her guest, poured
+out her tale. She was a poor curate's daughter out of some little hole
+in Gloucestershire. Clement Searle had loved her--loved her all too
+well! She had been turned out in wrath from her father's house; his
+mother at least might pity her--if not for herself then for the child
+she was soon to bring forth. Hut the poor girl had been a second time
+too trustful. The women, in scorn, in horror, with blows possibly, drove
+her forth again into the storm. In the storm she wandered and in the
+deep snow she died. Her lover, as you know, perished in that hard winter
+weather at sea; the news came to his mother late, but soon enough. We're
+haunted by the curate's daughter!"
+
+Mr. Searle retailed this anecdote with infinite taste and point, the
+happiest art; when he ceased there was a pause of some moments. "Ah well
+we may be!" Miss Searle then mournfully murmured.
+
+Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. "Of course, you know"--with which he
+began to blush violently--"I should be sorry to claim any identity
+with the poor devil my faithless namesake. But I should be immensely
+gratified if the young lady's spirit, deceived by my resemblance, were
+to mistake me for her cruel lover. She's welcome to the comfort of it.
+What one can do in the case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost haunt
+a ghost? I AM a ghost!"
+
+Mr. Searle stared a moment and then had a subtle sneer. "I could almost
+believe you are!"
+
+"Oh brother--and cousin!" cried Miss Searle with the gentlest yet most
+appealing dignity. "How can you talk so horribly?" The horrible talk,
+however, evidently possessed a potent magic for my friend; and his
+imagination, checked a while by the influence of his kinsman, began
+again to lead him a dance. From this moment he ceased to steer his frail
+bark, to care what he said or how he said it, so long as he expressed
+his passionate appreciation of the scene around him. As he kept up this
+strain I ceased even secretly to wish he wouldn't. I have wondered since
+that I shouldn't have been annoyed by the way he reverted constantly to
+himself. But a great frankness, for the time, makes its own law and
+a great passion its own channel. There was moreover an irresponsible
+indescribable effect of beauty in everything his lips uttered. Free
+alike from adulation and from envy, the essence of his discourse was a
+divine apprehension, a romantic vision free as the flight of Ariel, of
+the poetry of his companions' situation and their contrasted general
+irresponsiveness.
+
+"How does the look of age come?" he suddenly broke out at dessert. "Does
+it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded, unmeasured? Or do you woo it
+and set baits and traps for it, and watch it like the dawning brownness
+of a meerschaum pipe, and make it fast, when it appears, just where it
+peeps out, and light a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to it
+daily? Or do you forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it
+settling and deepening about you as irresistible as fate?"
+
+"What the deuce is the man talking about?" said the smile of our host.
+
+"I found a little grey hair this morning," Miss Searle incoherently
+prosed.
+
+"Well then I hope you paid it every respect!" cried her visitor.
+
+"I looked at it for a long time in my hand-glass," she answered with
+more presence of mind.
+
+"Miss Searle can for many years to come afford to be amused at grey
+hairs," I interposed in the hope of some greater ease. It had its
+effect. "Ten years from last Thursday I shall be forty-four," she almost
+comfortably smiled.
+
+"Well, that's just what I am," said Searle. "If I had only come here ten
+years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the feast, but I should
+have had less appetite. I needed first to get famished."
+
+"Oh why did you wait for that?" his entertainer asked. "To think of
+these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!" At the vision of
+which waste and loss Mr. Searle had a fine shrill laugh.
+
+"Well," my friend explained, "I always had a notion--a stupid vulgar
+notion if there ever was one--that to come abroad properly one had to
+have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At last I came with my
+empty pot!"
+
+Mr. Searle had a wait for delicacy, but he proceeded. "You're reduced,
+you're--a--straitened?"
+
+Our companion's very breath blew away the veil. "Reduced to nothing.
+Straitened to the clothes on my back!"
+
+"You don't say so!" said Mr. Searle with a large vague gasp.
+"Well--well--well!" he added in a voice which might have meant
+everything or nothing; and then, in his whimsical way, went on to finish
+a glass of wine. His searching eye, as he drank, met mine, and for a
+moment we each rather deeply sounded the other, to the effect no doubt
+of a slight embarrassment. "And you," he said by way of carrying this
+off--"how about YOUR wardrobe?"
+
+"Oh his!" cried my friend; "his wardrobe's immense. He could dress up a
+regiment!" He had drunk more champagne--I admit that the champagne
+was good--than was from any point of view to have been desired. He was
+rapidly drifting beyond any tacit dissuasion of mine. He was feverish
+and rash, and all attempt to direct would now simply irritate him. As
+we rose from the table he caught my troubled look. Passing his arm for
+a moment into mine, "This is the great night!" he strangely and softly
+said; "the night and the crisis that will settle me."
+
+Mr. Searle had caused the whole lower portion of the house to be thrown
+open and a multitude of lights to be placed in convenient and effective
+positions. Such a marshalled wealth of ancient candlesticks and
+flambeaux I had never beheld. Niched against the dusky wainscots,
+casting great luminous circles upon the pendent stiffness of sombre
+tapestries, enhancing and completing with admirable effect the variety
+and mystery of the great ancient house, they seemed to people the wide
+rooms, as our little group passed slowly from one to another, with a
+dim expectant presence. We had thus, in spite of everything, a wonderful
+hour of it. Mr. Searle at once assumed the part of cicerone, and--I had
+not hitherto done him justice--Mr. Searle became almost agreeable. While
+I lingered behind with his sister he walked in advance with his kinsman.
+It was as if he had said: "Well, if you want the old place you shall
+have it--so far as the impression goes!" He spared us no thrill--I
+had almost said no pang--of that experience. Carrying a tall silver
+candlestick in his left hand, he raised it and lowered it and cast the
+light hither and thither, upon pictures and hangings and carvings and
+cornices. He knew his house to perfection. He touched upon a hundred
+traditions and memories, he threw off a cloud of rich reference to
+its earlier occupants. He threw off again, in his easy elegant way, a
+dozen--happily lighter--anecdotes. His relative attended with a brooding
+deference. Miss Searle and I meanwhile were not wholly silent.
+
+"I suppose that by this time you and your cousin are almost old
+friends," I remarked.
+
+She trifled a moment with her fan and then raised her kind small
+eyes. "Old friends--yet at the same time strangely new! My cousin, my
+cousin"--and her voice lingered on the word--"it seems so strange to
+call him my cousin after thinking these many years that I've no one in
+the world but my brother. But he's really so very odd!"
+
+"It's not so much he as--well, as his situation, that deserves that
+name," I tried to reason.
+
+"I'm so sorry for his situation. I wish I could help it in some way. He
+interests me so much." She gave a sweet-sounding sigh. "I wish I could
+have known him sooner--and better. He tells me he's but the shadow of
+what he used to be."
+
+I wondered if he had been consciously practising on the sensibilities of
+this gentle creature. If he had I believed he had gained his point. But
+his position had in fact become to my sense so precarious that I hardly
+ventured to be glad. "His better self just now seems again to be taking
+shape," I said. "It will have been a good deed on your part if you help
+to restore him to all he ought to be."
+
+She met my idea blankly. "Dear me, what can I do?"
+
+"Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him love you. I dare say you
+see in him now much to pity and to wonder at. But let him simply enjoy
+a while the grateful sense of your nearness and dearness. He'll be
+a better and stronger man for it, and then you can love him, you can
+esteem him, without restriction."
+
+She fairly frowned for helplessness. "It's a hard part for poor stupid
+me to play!"
+
+Her almost infantine innocence left me no choice but to be absolutely
+frank. "Did you ever play any part at all?"
+
+She blushed as if I had been reproaching her with her insignificance.
+"Never! I think I've hardly lived."
+
+"You've begun to live now perhaps. You've begun to care for something
+else than your old-fashioned habits. Pardon me if I seem rather
+meddlesome; you know we Americans are very rough and ready. It's a great
+moment. I wish you joy!"
+
+"I could almost believe you're laughing at me. I feel more trouble than
+joy."
+
+"Why do you feel trouble?"
+
+She paused with her eyes fixed on our companions. "My cousin's arrival's
+a great disturbance," she said at last.
+
+"You mean you did wrong in coming to meet him? In that case the fault's
+mine. He had no intention of giving you the opportunity."
+
+"I certainly took too much on myself. But I can't find it in my heart to
+regret it. I never shall regret it! I did the only thing I COULD, heaven
+forgive me!"
+
+"Heaven bless you, Miss Searle! Is any harm to come of it? I did the
+evil; let me bear the brunt!"
+
+She shook her head gravely. "You don't know my brother!"
+
+"The sooner I master the subject the better then," I said. I couldn't
+help relieving myself--at least by the tone of my voice--of the
+antipathy with which, decidedly, this gentleman had inspired me. "Not
+perhaps that we should get on so well together!" After which, as she
+turned away, "Are you VERY much afraid of him?" I added.
+
+She gave me a shuddering sidelong glance. "He's looking at me!"
+
+He was placed with his back to us, holding a large Venetian hand-mirror,
+framed in chiselled silver, which he had taken from a shelf of
+antiquities, just at such an angle that he caught the reflexion of his
+sister's person. It was evident that I too was under his attention, and
+was resolved I wouldn't be suspected for nothing. "Miss Searle," I said
+with urgency, "promise me something."
+
+She turned upon me with a start and a look that seemed to beg me to
+spare her. "Oh don't ask me--please don't!" It was as if she were
+standing on the edge of a place where the ground had suddenly fallen
+away, and had been called upon to make a leap. I felt retreat was
+impossible, however, and that it was the greater kindness to assist her
+to jump.
+
+"Promise me," I repeated.
+
+Still with her eyes she protested. "Oh what a dreadful day!" she cried
+at last.
+
+"Promise me to let him speak to you alone if he should ask you--any wish
+you may suspect on your brother's part notwithstanding." She coloured
+deeply. "You mean he has something so particular to say?"
+
+"Something so particular!"
+
+"Poor cousin!"
+
+"Well, poor cousin! But promise me."
+
+"I promise," she said, and moved away across the long room and out of
+the door.
+
+"You're in time to hear the most delightful story," Searle began to me
+as I rejoined him and his host. They were standing before an old sombre
+portrait of a lady in the dress of Queen Anne's time, whose ill-painted
+flesh-tints showed livid, in the candle-light, against her dark drapery
+and background. "This is Mrs. Margaret Searle--a sort of Beatrix
+Esmond--qui se passait ses fantaisies. She married a paltry Frenchman,
+a penniless fiddler, in the teeth of her whole family. Pretty Mrs.
+Margaret, you must have been a woman of courage! Upon my word, she looks
+like Miss Searle! But pray go on. What came of it all?"
+
+Our companion watched him with an air of distaste for his boisterous
+homage and of pity for his crude imagination. But he took up the tale
+with an effective dryness: "I found a year ago, in a box of very old
+papers, a letter from the lady in question to a certain Cynthia Searle,
+her elder sister. It was dated from Paris and dreadfully ill-spelled.
+It contained a most passionate appeal for pecuniary assistance. She
+had just had a baby, she was starving and dreadfully neglected by her
+husband--she cursed the day she had left England. It was a most dismal
+production. I never heard she found means to return."
+
+"So much for marrying a Frenchman!" I said sententiously.
+
+Our host had one of his waits. "This is the only lady of the family who
+ever was taken in by an adventurer."
+
+"Does Miss Searle know her history?" asked my friend with a stare at the
+rounded whiteness of the heroine's cheek.
+
+"Miss Searle knows nothing!" said our host with expression.
+
+"She shall know at least the tale of Mrs. Margaret," their guest
+returned; and he walked rapidly away in search of her.
+
+Mr. Searle and I pursued our march through the lighted rooms. "You've
+found a cousin with a vengeance," I doubtless awkwardly enough laughed.
+
+"Ah a vengeance?" my entertainer stiffly repeated.
+
+"I mean that he takes as keen an interest in your annals and possessions
+as yourself."
+
+"Oh exactly so! He tells me he's a bad invalid," he added in a moment.
+"I should never have supposed it."
+
+"Within the past few hours he's a changed man. Your beautiful house,
+your extreme kindness, have refreshed him immensely." Mr. Searle uttered
+the vague ejaculation with which self-conscious Britons so often betray
+the concussion of any especial courtesy of speech. But he followed this
+by a sudden odd glare and the sharp declaration: "I'm an honest man!" I
+was quite prepared to assent; but he went on with a fury of frankness,
+as if it were the first time in his life he had opened himself to any
+one, as if the process were highly disagreeable and he were hurrying
+through it as a task. "An honest man, mind you! I know nothing about Mr.
+Clement Searle! I never expected to see him. He has been to me a--a--!"
+And here he paused to select a word which should vividly enough express
+what, for good or for ill, his kinsman represented. "He has been to me
+an Amazement! I've no doubt he's a most amiable man. You'll not deny,
+however, that he's a very extraordinary sort of person. I'm sorry he's
+ill. I'm sorry he's poor. He's my fiftieth cousin. Well and good. I'm
+an honest man. He shall not have it to say that he wasn't received at my
+house."
+
+"He too, thank heaven, is an honest man!" I smiled.
+
+"Why the devil then," cried Mr. Searle, turning almost fiercely on me,
+"has he put forward this underhand claim to my property?"
+
+The question, quite ringing out, flashed backward a gleam of light upon
+the demeanour of our host and the suppressed agitation of his sister. In
+an instant the jealous gentleman revealed itself. For a moment I was so
+surprised and scandalised at the directness of his attack that I lacked
+words to reply. As soon as he had spoken indeed Mr. Searle appeared to
+feel he had been wanting in form. "Pardon me," he began afresh, "if I
+speak of this matter with heat. But I've been more disgusted than I
+can say to hear, as I heard this morning from my solicitor, of the
+extraordinary proceedings of Mr. Clement Searle. Gracious goodness,
+sir, for what does the man take me? He pretends to the Lord knows what
+fantastic admiration for my place. Let him then show his respect for it
+by not taking too many liberties! Let him, with his high-flown parade
+of loyalty, imagine a tithe of what _I_ feel! I love my estate; it's my
+passion, my conscience, my life! Am I to divide it up at this time of
+day with a beggarly foreigner--a man without means, without appearance,
+without proof, a pretender, an adventurer, a chattering mountebank? I
+thought America boasted having lands for all men! Upon my soul, sir,
+I've never been so shocked in my life."
+
+I paused for some moments before speaking, to allow his passion fully to
+expend itself and to flicker up again if it chose; for so far as I was
+concerned in the whole awkward matter I but wanted to deal with him
+discreetly. "Your apprehensions, sir," I said at last, "your not
+unnatural surprise, perhaps, at the candour of our interest, have acted
+too much on your nerves. You're attacking a man of straw, a creature
+of unworthy illusion; though I'm sadly afraid you've wounded a man
+of spirit and conscience. Either my friend has no valid claim on your
+estate, in which case your agitation is superfluous; or he HAS a valid
+claim--"
+
+Mr. Searle seized my arm and glared at me; his pale face paler still
+with the horror of my suggestion, his great eyes of alarm glowing and
+his strange red hair erect and quivering. "A valid claim!" he shouted.
+"Let him try it--let him bring it into court!"
+
+We had emerged into the great hall and stood facing the main doorway.
+The door was open into the portico, through the stone archway of which
+I saw the garden glitter in the blue light of a full moon. As the master
+of the house uttered the words I have just repeated my companion came
+slowly up into the porch from without, bareheaded, bright in the outer
+moonlight, dark in the shadow of the archway, and bright again in the
+lamplight at the entrance of the hall. As he crossed the threshold the
+butler made an appearance at the head of the staircase on our left,
+faltering visibly a moment at sight of Mr. Searle; after which, noting
+my friend, he gravely descended. He bore in his hand a small silver
+tray. On the tray, gleaming in the light of the suspended lamp, lay a
+folded note. Clement Searle came forward, staring a little and startled,
+I think, by some quick nervous prevision of a catastrophe. The butler
+applied the match to the train. He advanced to my fellow visitor, all
+solemnly, with the offer of his missive. Mr. Searle made a movement as
+if to spring forward, but controlled himself. "Tottenham!" he called in
+a strident voice.
+
+"Yes, sir!" said Tottenham, halting.
+
+"Stand where you are. For whom is that note?"
+
+"For Mr. Clement Searle," said the butler, staring straight before him
+and dissociating himself from everything.
+
+"Who gave it to you?"
+
+"Mrs. Horridge, sir." This personage, I afterwards learned, was our
+friend the housekeeper.
+
+"Who gave it Mrs. Horridge?"
+
+There was on Tottenham's part just an infinitesimal pause before
+replying.
+
+"My dear sir," broke in Searle, his equilibrium, his ancient ease,
+completely restored by the crisis, "isn't that rather my business?"
+
+"What happens in my house is my business, and detestable things seem to
+be happening." Our host, it was clear, now so furiously detested them
+that I was afraid he would snatch the bone of contention without more
+ceremony. "Bring me that thing!" he cried; on which Tottenham stiffly
+moved to obey.
+
+"Really this is too much!" broke out my companion, affronted and
+helpless.
+
+So indeed it struck me, and before Mr. Searle had time to take the note
+I possessed myself of it. "If you've no consideration for your sister
+let a stranger at least act for her." And I tore the disputed object
+into a dozen pieces.
+
+"In the name of decency, what does this horrid business mean?" my
+companion quavered.
+
+Mr. Searle was about to open fire on him, but at that moment our hostess
+appeared on the staircase, summoned evidently by our high-pitched
+contentious voices. She had exchanged her dinner-dress for a dark
+wrapper, removed her ornaments and begun to disarrange her hair, a
+thick tress of which escaped from the comb. She hurried down with a
+pale questioning face. Feeling distinctly that, for ourselves, immediate
+departure was in the air, and divining Mr. Tottenham to be a person of
+a few deep-seated instincts and of much latent energy, I seized the
+opportunity to request him, sotto voce, to send a carriage to the door
+without delay. "And put up our things," I added.
+
+Our host rushed at his sister and grabbed the white wrist that escaped
+from the loose sleeve of her dress. "What was in that note?" he quite
+hissed at her.
+
+Miss Searle looked first at its scattered fragments and then at her
+cousin. "Did you read it?"
+
+"No, but I thank you for it!" said Searle.
+
+Her eyes, for an instant, communicated with his own as I think they had
+never, never communicated with any other source of meaning; then she
+transferred them to her brother's face, where the sense went out of
+them, only to leave a dull sad patience. But there was something even
+in this flat humility that seemed to him to mock him, so that he flushed
+crimson with rage and spite and flung her away. "You always were an
+idiot! Go to bed."
+
+In poor Searle's face as well the gathered serenity had been by this
+time all blighted and distorted and the reflected brightness of his
+happy day turned to blank confusion. "Have I been dealing these three
+hours with a madman?" he woefully cried.
+
+"A madman, yes, if you will! A man mad with the love of his home and the
+sense of its stability. I've held my tongue till now, but you've been
+too much for me. Who the devil are you, and what and why and whence?"
+the terrible little man continued. "From what paradise of fools do you
+come that you fancy I shall make over to you, for the asking, a part
+of my property and my life? I'm forsooth, you ridiculous person, to go
+shares with you? Prove your preposterous claim! There isn't THAT in it!"
+And he kicked one of the bits of paper on the floor.
+
+Searle received this broadside gaping. Then turning away he went and
+seated himself on a bench against the wall and rubbed his forehead
+amazedly. I looked at my watch and listened for the wheels of our
+carriage.
+
+But his kinsman was too launched to pull himself up. "Wasn't it enough
+that you should have plotted against my rights? Need you have come into
+my very house to intrigue with my sister?"
+
+My friend put his two hands to his face. "Oh, oh, oh!" he groaned while
+Miss Searle crossed rapidly and dropped on her knees at his side.
+
+"Go to bed, you fool!" shrieked her brother.
+
+"Dear cousin," she said, "it's cruel you're to have so to think of us!"
+
+"Oh I shall think of YOU as you'd like!" He laid a hand on her head.
+
+"I believe you've done nothing wrong," she brought bravely out.
+
+"I've done what I could," Mr. Searle went on--"but it's arrant folly to
+pretend to friendship when this abomination lies between us. You were
+welcome to my meat and my wine, but I wonder you could swallow them. The
+sight spoiled MY appetite!" cried the master of Lackley with a laugh.
+"Proceed with your trumpery case! My people in London are instructed and
+prepared."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if your case had improved a good deal since you gave
+it up," I was moved to observe to Searle.
+
+"Oho! you don't feign ignorance then?" and our insane entertainer shook
+his shining head at me. "It's very kind of you to give it up! Perhaps
+you'll also give up my sister!"
+
+Searle sat staring in distress at his adversary. "Ah miserable man--I
+thought we had become such beautiful friends."
+
+"Boh, you hypocrite!" screamed our host.
+
+Searle seemed not to hear him. "Am I seriously expected," he slowly and
+painfully pursued, "to defend myself against the accusation of any real
+indelicacy--to prove I've done nothing underhand or impudent? Think what
+you please!" And he rose, with an effort, to his feet. "I know what YOU
+think!" he added to Miss Searle.
+
+The wheels of the carriage resounded on the gravel, and at the same
+moment a footman descended with our two portmanteaux. Mr. Tottenham
+followed him with our hats and coats.
+
+"Good God," our host broke out again, "you're not going away?"--an
+ejaculation that, after all that had happened, had the grandest
+comicality. "Bless my soul," he then remarked as artlessly, "of course
+you're going!"
+
+"It's perhaps well," said Miss Searle with a great effort, inexpressibly
+touching in one for whom great efforts were visibly new and strange,
+"that I should tell you what my poor little note contained."
+
+"That matter of your note, madam," her brother interrupted, "you and I
+will settle together!"
+
+"Let me imagine all sorts of kind things!" Searle beautifully pleaded.
+
+"Ah too much has been imagined!" she answered simply. "It was only a
+word of warning. It was to tell you to go. I knew something painful was
+coming."
+
+He took his hat. "The pains and the pleasures of this day," he said to
+his kinsman, "I shall equally never forget. Knowing you," and he offered
+his hand to Miss Searle, "has been the pleasure of pleasures. I hoped
+something more might have come of it."
+
+"A monstrous deal too much has come of it!" Mr. Searle irrepressibly
+declared.
+
+His departing guest looked at him mildly, almost benignantly, from head
+to foot, and then with closed eyes and some collapse of strength, "I'm
+afraid so, I can't stand more," he went on. I gave him my arm and we
+crossed the threshold. As we passed out I heard Miss Searle break into
+loud weeping.
+
+"We shall hear from each other yet, I take it!" her brother pursued,
+harassing our retreat.
+
+My friend stopped, turning round on him fiercely. "You very impossible
+man!" he cried in his face.
+
+"Do you mean to say you'll not prosecute?" Mr. Searle kept it up. "I
+shall force you to prosecute! I shall drag you into court, and you shall
+be beaten--beaten--beaten!" Which grim reiteration followed us on our
+course.
+
+We drove of course to the little wayside inn from which we had departed
+in the morning so unencumbered, in all broad England, either with
+enemies or friends. My companion, as the carriage rolled along, seemed
+overwhelmed and exhausted. "What a beautiful horrible dream!" he
+confusedly wailed. "What a strange awakening! What a long long day! What
+a hideous scene! Poor me! Poor woman!" When we had resumed possession of
+our two little neighbouring rooms I asked him whether Miss Searle's
+note had been the result of anything that had passed between them on
+his going to rejoin her. "I found her on the terrace," he said, "walking
+restlessly up and down in the moonlight. I was greatly excited--I
+hardly know what I said. I asked her, I think, if she knew the story of
+Margaret Searle. She seemed frightened and troubled, and she used
+just the words her brother had used--'I know nothing.' For the moment,
+somehow, I felt as a man drunk. I stood before her and told her, with
+great emphasis, how poor Margaret had married a beggarly foreigner--all
+in obedience to her heart and in defiance to her family. As I talked the
+sheeted moonlight seemed to close about us, so that we stood there in
+a dream, in a world quite detached. She grew younger, prettier, more
+attractive--I found myself talking all kinds of nonsense. Before I knew
+it I had gone very far. I was taking her hand and calling her 'Margaret,
+dear Margaret!' She had said it was impossible, that she could do
+nothing, that she was a fool, a child, a slave. Then with a sudden
+sense--it was odd how it came over me there--of the reality of my
+connexion with the place, I spoke of my claim against the estate. 'It
+exists,' I declared, 'but I've given it up. Be generous! Pay me for my
+sacrifice.' For an instant her face was radiant. 'If I marry you,'
+she asked, 'will it make everything right?' Of that I at once assured
+her--in our marriage the whole difficulty would melt away like a
+rain-drop in the great sea. 'Our marriage!' she repeated in wonder; and
+the deep ring of her voice seemed to wake us up and show us our folly.
+'I love you, but I shall never see you again,' she cried; and she
+hurried away with her face in her hands. I walked up and down the
+terrace for some moments, and then came in and met you. That's the only
+witchcraft I've used!"
+
+The poor man was at once so roused and so shaken by the day's events
+that I believed he would get little sleep. Conscious on my own part that
+I shouldn't close my eyes, I but partly undressed, stirred my fire
+and sat down to do some writing. I heard the great clock in the little
+parlour below strike twelve, one, half-past one. Just as the vibration
+of this last stroke was dying on the air the door of communication with
+Searle's room was flung open and my companion stood on the threshold,
+pale as a corpse, in his nightshirt, shining like a phantom against the
+darkness behind him. "Look well at me!" he intensely gasped; "touch me,
+embrace me, revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost!"
+
+"Gracious goodness, what do you mean?"
+
+"Write it down!" he went on. "There, take your pen. Put it into dreadful
+words. How do I look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red? Am I speaking
+English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?"
+
+I confess there came upon me by contact a kind of supernatural shock. I
+shall always feel by the whole communication of it that I too have seen
+a ghost. My first movement--I can smile at it now--was to spring to the
+door, close it quickly and turn the key upon the gaping blackness from
+which Searle had emerged. I seized his two hands; they were wet with
+perspiration. I pushed my chair to the fire and forced him to sit down
+in it; then I got on my knees and held his hands as firmly as possible.
+They trembled and quivered; his eyes were fixed save that the pupil
+dilated and contracted with extraordinary force. I asked no questions,
+but waited there, very curious for what he would say. At last he spoke.
+"I'm not frightened, but I'm--oh excited! This is life! This is living!
+My nerves--my heart--my brain! They're throbbing--don't you feel it? Do
+you tingle? Are you hot? Are you cold? Hold me tight--tight--tight! I
+shall tremble away into waves--into surges--and know all the secrets of
+things and all the reasons and all the mysteries!" He paused a moment
+and then went on: "A woman--as clear as that candle: no, far clearer! In
+a blue dress, with a black mantle on her head and a little black muff.
+Young and wonderfully pretty, pale and ill; with the sadness of all
+the women who ever loved and suffered pleading and accusing in her
+wet-looking eyes. God knows I never did any such thing! But she took me
+for my elder, for the other Clement. She came to me here as she would
+have come to me there. She wrung her hands and she spoke to me 'marry
+me!' she moaned; 'marry me and put an end to my shame!' I sat up in bed,
+just as I sit here, looked at her, heard her--heard her voice melt away,
+watched her figure fade away. Bless us and save us! Here I be!"
+
+I made no attempt either to explain or to criticise this extraordinary
+passage. It's enough that I yielded for the hour to the strange force
+of my friend's emotion. On the whole I think my own vision was the
+more interesting of the two. He beheld but the transient irresponsible
+spectre--I beheld the human subject hot from the spectral presence. Yet
+I soon recovered my judgement sufficiently to be moved again to try to
+guard him against the results of excitement and exposure. It was easily
+agreed that he was not for the night to return to his room, and I made
+him fairly comfortable in his place by my fire. Wishing above all to
+preserve him from a chill I removed my bedding and wrapped him in the
+blankets and counterpane. I had no nerves either for writing or for
+sleep; so I put out my lights, renewed the fuel and sat down on the
+opposite side of the hearth. I found it a great and high solemnity just
+to watch my companion. Silent, swathed and muffled to his chin, he sat
+rigid and erect with the dignity of his adventure. For the most part
+his eyes were closed; though from time to time he would open them with
+a steady expansion and stare, never blinking, into the flame, as if he
+again beheld without terror the image of the little woman with the muff.
+His cadaverous emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles intensified by the
+upward glow from the hearth, his distorted moustache, his extraordinary
+gravity and a certain fantastical air as the red light flickered over
+him, all re-enforced his fine likeness to the vision-haunted knight of
+La Mancha when laid up after some grand exploit. The night passed wholly
+without speech. Toward its close I slept for half an hour. When I awoke
+the awakened birds had begun to twitter and Searle, unperturbed, sat
+staring at me. We exchanged a long look, and I felt with a pang that his
+glittering eyes had tasted their last of natural sleep. "How is it? Are
+you comfortable?" I nevertheless asked.
+
+He fixed me for a long time without replying and then spoke with a
+weak extravagance and with such pauses between his words as might have
+represented the slow prompting of an inner voice. "You asked me when
+you first knew me what I was. 'Nothing,' I said, 'nothing of any
+consequence.' Nothing I've always supposed myself to be. But I've
+wronged myself--I'm a great exception. I'm a haunted man!"
+
+If sleep had passed out of his eyes I felt with even a deeper pang that
+sanity had abandoned his spirit. From this moment I was prepared for
+the worst. There were in my friend, however, such confirmed habits of
+mildness that I found myself not in the least fearing he would prove
+unmanageable. As morning began fully to dawn upon us I brought our
+curious vigil to a close. Searle was so enfeebled that I gave him
+my hands to help him out of his chair, and he retained them for some
+moments after rising to his feet, unable as he seemed to keep his
+balance. "Well," he said, "I've been once favoured, but don't think I
+shall be favoured again. I shall soon be myself as fit to 'appear' as
+any of them. I shall haunt the master of Lackley! It can only mean
+one thing--that they're getting ready for me on the other side of the
+grave."
+
+When I touched the question of breakfast he replied that he had his
+breakfast in his pocket; and he drew from his travelling-bag a phial of
+morphine. He took a strong dose and went to bed. At noon I found him
+on foot again, dressed, shaved, much refreshed. "Poor fellow," he said,
+"you've got more than you bargained for--not only a man with a grievance
+but a man with a ghost. Well, it won't be for long!" It had of course
+promptly become a question whither we should now direct our steps. "As
+I've so little time," he argued for this, "I should like to see the
+best, the best alone." I answered that either for time or eternity I had
+always supposed Oxford to represent the English maximum, and for Oxford
+in the course of an hour we accordingly departed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Of that extraordinary place I shall not attempt to speak with any order
+or indeed with any coherence. It must ever remain one of the supreme
+gratifications of travel for any American aware of the ancient pieties
+of race. The impression it produces, the emotions it kindles in the
+mind of such a visitor, are too rich and various to be expressed in the
+halting rhythm of prose. Passing through the small oblique streets in
+which the long grey battered public face of the colleges seems to watch
+jealously for sounds that may break upon the stillness of study, you
+feel it the most dignified and most educated of cities. Over and through
+it all the great corporate fact of the University slowly throbs after
+the fashion of some steady bass in a concerted piece or that of the
+mediaeval mystical presence of the Empire in the old States of Germany.
+The plain perpendicular of the so mildly conventual fronts, masking
+blest seraglios of culture and leisure, irritates the imagination
+scarce less than the harem-walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching
+portals, however, you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and
+the dark verdure soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green
+quadrangles stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of
+the humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a marshalled
+host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our arrival my friend and
+I wandered forth in the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge
+that under-spans the walls of Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower,
+delicately fluted and embossed, rise in temperate beauty--the perfect
+prose of Gothic--wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained
+of day. We entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little
+court that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows niche more
+lovingly in the tangled ivy than elsewhere in Oxford, and passed into
+the quiet cloister and studied the small sculptured monsters on the
+entablature of the arcade. I rejoiced in every one of my unhappy
+friend's responsive vibrations, even while feeling that they might as
+direfully multiply as those that had preceded them. I may say that from
+this time forward I found it difficult to distinguish in his company
+between the riot of fancy and the labour of thought, or to fix the
+balance between what he saw and what he imagined. He had already begun
+playfully to exchange his identity for that of the earlier Clement
+Searle, and he now delivered himself almost wholly in the character of
+his old-time kinsman.
+
+"THIS was my college, you know," he would almost anywhere break out,
+applying the words wherever we stood--"the sweetest and noblest in
+the whole place. How often have I strolled in this cloister with my
+intimates of the other world! They are all dead and buried, but many a
+young fellow as we meet him, dark or fair, tall or short, reminds me of
+the past age and the early attachment. Even as we stand here, they say,
+the whole thing feels about its massive base the murmurs of the tide of
+time; some of the foundation-stones are loosened, some of the breaches
+will have to be repaired. Mine was the old unregenerate Oxford, the home
+of rank abuses, of distinctions and privileges the most delicious and
+invidious. What cared I, who was a perfect gentleman and with my pockets
+full of money? I had an allowance of a thousand a year."
+
+It was at once plain to me that he had lost the little that remained of
+his direct grasp on life and was unequal to any effort of seeing things
+in their order. He read my apprehension in my eyes and took pains to
+assure me I was right. "I'm going straight down hill. Thank heaven it's
+an easy slope, coated with English turf and with an English churchyard
+at the foot." The hysterical emotion produced by our late dire
+misadventure had given place to an unruffled calm in which the scene
+about us was reflected as in an old-fashioned mirror. We took an
+afternoon walk through Christ-Church meadow and at the river-bank
+procured a boat which I pulled down the stream to Iffley and to the
+slanting woods of Nuneham--the sweetest flattest reediest stream-side
+landscape that could be desired. Here of course we encountered the
+scattered phalanx of the young, the happy generation, clad in white
+flannel and blue, muscular fair-haired magnificent fresh, whether
+floated down the current by idle punts and lounging in friendly couples
+when not in a singleness that nursed ambitions, or straining together
+in rhythmic crews and hoarsely exhorted from the near bank. When to the
+exhibition of so much of the clearest joy of wind and limb we added the
+great sense of perfumed protection shed by all the enclosed lawns and
+groves and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic shades
+must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion found himself
+less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a series of gardens
+and spent long hours sitting in their greenest places. They struck us as
+the fairest things in England and the ripest and sweetest fruit of the
+English system. Locked in their antique verdure, guarded, as in the case
+of New College, by gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the
+matted leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and
+memories, a sort of chorus of tradition; with vaguely-generous youths
+sprawling bookishly on the turf as if to spare it the injury of
+their boot-heels, and with the great conservative college countenance
+appealing gravely from the restless outer world, they seem places to
+lie down on the grass in for ever, in the happy faith that life is all
+a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon. This
+charmed seclusion was especially grateful to my friend, and his sense of
+it reached its climax, I remember, on one of the last of such occasions
+and while we sat in fascinated flanerie over against the sturdy back of
+Saint John's. The wide discreetly-windowed wall here perhaps broods upon
+the lawn with a more effective air of property than elsewhere. Searle
+dropped into fitful talk and spun his humour into golden figures. Any
+passing undergraduate was a peg to hang a fable, every feature of the
+place a pretext for more embroidery.
+
+"Isn't it all a delightful lie?" he wanted to know. "Mightn't one fancy
+this the very central point of the world's heart, where all the echoes
+of the general life arrive but to falter and die? Doesn't one feel the
+air just thick with arrested voices? It's well there should be such
+places, shaped in the interest of factitious needs, invented to minister
+to the book-begotten longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked
+and believe unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all's well in
+a world where so much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth and
+fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful unachieved
+especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world's made--work's over.
+Now for leisure! England's safe--now for Theocritus and Horace, for
+lawn and sky! What a sense it all gives one of the composite life of
+the country and of the essential furniture of its luckier minds! Thank
+heaven they had the wit to send me here in the other time. I'm not much
+visibly the braver perhaps, but think how I'm the happier! The misty
+spires and towers, seen far off on the level, have been all these years
+one of the constant things of memory. Seriously, what do the spires and
+towers do for these people? Are they wiser, gentler, finer, cleverer?
+My diminished dignity reverts in any case at moments to the naked
+background of our own education, the deadly dry air in which we gasp for
+impressions and comparisons. I assent to it all with a sort of desperate
+calmness; I accept it with a dogged pride. We're nursed at the opposite
+pole. Naked come we into a naked world. There's a certain grandeur
+in the lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young
+imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which has to
+invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-air, with
+a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we dwell. Noblesse
+oblige--Oxford must damnably do so. What a horrible thing not to rise
+to such examples! If you pay the pious debt to the last farthing of
+interest you may go through life with her blessing; but if you let it
+stand unhonoured you're a worse barbarian than we! But for the better or
+worse, in a myriad private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the
+youthful sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of
+the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls. Think of
+the centuries' tale of dead lads--dead alike with the end of the young
+days to which these haunts were a present world, and the close of
+the larger lives which the general mother-scene has dropped into less
+bottomless traps. What are those two young fellows kicking their heels
+over on the grass there? One of them has the Saturday Review; the
+other--upon my soul--the other has Artemus Ward! Where do they live,
+how do they live, to what end do they live? Miserable boys! How can they
+read Artemus Ward under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think
+loveliest in all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that
+one yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice
+and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a hundred
+years ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken cornice. Don't
+pretend it's not a common thing to have one's bosom friend at another
+college. Pray was I committed to common things? He was a charming
+fellow. By the way, he was a good deal like you. Of course his cocked
+hat, his long hair in a black ribbon, his cinnamon velvet suit and his
+flowered waistcoat made a difference. We gentlemen used to wear swords."
+
+There was really the touch of grace in my poor friend's divagations--the
+disheartened dandy had so positively turned rhapsodist and seer. I
+was particularly struck with his having laid aside the diffidence and
+self-consciousness of the first days of our acquaintance. He had become
+by this time a disembodied observer and critic; the shell of sense,
+growing daily thinner and more transparent, transmitted the tremor of
+his quickened spirit. He seemed to pick up acquaintances, in the course
+of our contemplations, merely by putting out his hand. If I left him for
+ten minutes I was sure to find him on my return in earnest conversation
+with some affable wandering scholar. Several young men with whom he had
+thus established relations invited him to their rooms and entertained
+him, as I gathered, with rather rash hospitality. For myself, I chose
+not to be present at these symposia; I shrank partly from being held
+in any degree responsible for his extravagance, partly from the pang of
+seeing him yield to champagne and an admiring circle. He reported such
+adventures with less keen a complacency than I had supposed he might
+use, but a certain method in his madness, a certain dignity in his
+desire to fraternise, appeared to save him from mischance. If they
+didn't think him a harmless lunatic they certainly thought him a
+celebrity of the Occident. Two things, however, grew evident--that he
+drank deeper than was good for him and that the flagrant freshness of
+his young patrons rather interfered with his predetermined sense of the
+element of finer romance. At the same time it completed his knowledge
+of the place. Making the acquaintance of several tutors and fellows,
+he dined in hall in half a dozen colleges, alluding afterwards to these
+banquets with religious unction. One evening after a participation
+indiscreetly prolonged he came back to the hotel in a cab, accompanied
+by a friendly undergraduate and a physician and looking deadly pale. He
+had swooned away on leaving table and remained so rigidly unconscious
+as much to agitate his banqueters. The following twenty-four hours he of
+course spent in bed, but on the third day declared himself strong enough
+to begin afresh. On his reaching the street his strength once more
+forsook him, so that I insisted on his returning to his room. He
+besought me with tears in his eyes not to shut him up. "It's my last
+chance--I want to go back for an hour to that garden of Saint John's.
+Let me eat and drink--to-morrow I die." It seemed to me possible that
+with a Bath-chair the expedition might be accomplished. The hotel, it
+appeared, possessed such a convenience, which was immediately produced.
+It became necessary hereupon that we should have a person to propel the
+chair. As there was no one on the spot at liberty I was about to perform
+the office; but just as my patient had got seated and wrapped--he now
+had a perpetual chill--an elderly man emerged from a lurking-place near
+the door and, with a formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman.
+We assented, and he proceeded solemnly to trundle the chair before him.
+I recognised him as a vague personage whom I had observed to lounge
+shyly about the doors of the hotels, at intervals during our stay, with
+a depressed air of wanting employment and a poor semblance of finding
+it. He had once indeed in a half-hearted way proposed himself as an
+amateur cicerone for a tour through the colleges; and I now, as I
+looked at him, remembered with a pang that I had too curtly declined his
+ministrations. Since then his shyness, apparently, had grown less or
+his misery greater, for it was with a strange grim avidity that he
+now attached himself to our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby
+gentility and the dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would
+have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard
+unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable
+disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden of his days and
+tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly
+compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled
+under a month's neglect of the razor. In all this rusty forlornness
+lurked a visible assurance of our friend's having known better days.
+Obviously he was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the market
+value of pure gentility. There had been something terribly affecting in
+the way he substituted for the attempt to touch the greasy rim of his
+antiquated hat some such bow as one man of the world might make another.
+Exchanging a few words with him as we went I was struck with the
+decorum of his accent. His fine whole voice should have been congruously
+cracked.
+
+"Take me by some long roundabout way," said Searle, "so that I may see
+as many college-walls as possible."
+
+"You know," I asked of our attendant, "all these wonderful ins and
+outs?"
+
+"I ought to, sir," he said, after a moment, with pregnant gravity. And
+as we were passing one of the colleges, "That used to be my place," he
+added.
+
+At these words Searle desired him to stop and come round within sight.
+"You say that's YOUR college?"
+
+"The place might deny me, sir; but heaven forbid I should seem to take
+it ill of her. If you'll allow me to wheel you into the quad I'll show
+you my windows of thirty years ago."
+
+Searle sat staring, his huge pale eyes, which now left nothing else
+worth mentioning in his wasted face, filled with wonder and pity. "If
+you'll be so kind," he said with great deference. But just as this
+perverted product of a liberal education was about to propel him across
+the threshold of the court he turned about, disengaged the mercenary
+hands, with one of his own, from the back of the chair, drew their owner
+alongside and turned to me. "While we're here, my dear fellow," he said,
+"be so good as to perform this service. You understand?" I gave our
+companion a glance of intelligence and we resumed our way. The latter
+showed us his window of the better time, where a rosy youth in a scarlet
+smoking-fez now puffed a cigarette at the open casement. Thence we
+proceeded into the small garden, the smallest, I believe, and certainly
+the sweetest, of all the planted places of Oxford. I pushed the chair
+along to a bench on the lawn, turned it round, toward the front of
+the college and sat down by it on the grass. Our attendant shifted
+mournfully from one foot to the other, his patron eyeing him
+open-mouthed. At length Searle broke out: "God bless my soul, sir, you
+don't suppose I expect you to stand! There's an empty bench."
+
+"Thank you," said our friend, who bent his joints to sit.
+
+"You English are really fabulous! I don't know whether I most admire or
+most abominate you! Now tell me: who are you? what are you? what brought
+you to this?"
+
+The poor fellow blushed up to his eyes, took off his hat and wiped his
+forehead with an indescribable fabric drawn from his pocket. "My name's
+Rawson, sir. Beyond that it's a long story."
+
+"I ask out of sympathy," said Searle. "I've a fellow-feeling. If you're
+a poor devil I'm a poor devil as well."
+
+"I'm the poorer devil of the two," said the stranger with an assurance
+for once presumptuous.
+
+"Possibly. I suppose an English poor devil's the poorest of all
+poor devils. And then you've fallen from a height. From a gentleman
+commoner--is that what they called you?--to a propeller of Bath-chairs.
+Good heavens, man, the fall's enough to kill you!"
+
+"I didn't take it all at once, sir. I dropped a bit one time and a bit
+another."
+
+"That's me, that's me!" cried Searle with all his seriousness.
+
+"And now," said our friend, "I believe I can't drop any further."
+
+"My dear fellow"--and Searle clasped his hand and shook it--"I too am at
+the very bottom of the hole."
+
+Mr. Rawson lifted his eyebrows. "Well, sir, there's a difference between
+sitting in such a pleasant convenience and just trudging behind it!"
+
+"Yes--there's a shade. But I'm at my last gasp, Mr. Rawson."
+
+"I'm at my last penny, sir."
+
+"Literally, Mr. Rawson?"
+
+Mr. Rawson shook his head with large loose bitterness. "I've almost come
+to the point of drinking my beer and buttoning my coat figuratively; but
+I don't talk in figures."
+
+Fearing the conversation might appear to achieve something like gaiety
+at the expense of Mr. Rawson's troubles, I took the liberty of asking
+him, with all consideration, how he made a living.
+
+"I don't make a living," he answered with tearful eyes; "I can't make
+a living. I've a wife and three children--and all starving, sir. You
+wouldn't believe what I've come to. I sent my wife to her mother's, who
+can ill afford to keep her, and came to Oxford a week ago, thinking I
+might pick up a few half-crowns by showing people about the colleges.
+But it's no use. I haven't the assurance. I don't look decent. They
+want a nice little old man with black gloves and a clean shirt and a
+silver-headed stick. What do I look as if I knew about Oxford, sir?"
+
+"Mercy on us," cried Searle, "why didn't you speak to us before?"
+
+"I wanted to; half a dozen times I've been on the point of it. I knew
+you were Americans."
+
+"And Americans are rich!" cried Searle, laughing. "My dear Mr. Rawson,
+American as I am I'm living on charity."
+
+"And I'm exactly not, sir! There it is. I'm dying for the lack of that
+same. You say you're a pauper, but it takes an American pauper to go
+bowling about in a Bath-chair. America's an easy country."
+
+"Ah me!" groaned Searle. "Have I come to the most delicious corner of
+the ancient world to hear the praise of Yankeeland?"
+
+"Delicious corners are very well, and so is the ancient world," said Mr.
+Rawson; "but one may sit here hungry and shabby, so long as one isn't
+too shabby, as well as elsewhere. You'll not persuade me that it's not
+an easier thing to keep afloat yonder than here. I wish _I_ were in
+Yankeeland, that's all!" he added with feeble force. Then brooding for
+a moment on his wrongs: "Have you a bloated brother? or you, sir? It
+matters little to you. But it has mattered to me with a vengeance!
+Shabby as I sit here I can boast that advantage--as he his five thousand
+a year. Being but a twelvemonth my elder he swaggers while I go thus.
+There's old England for you! A very pretty place for HIM!"
+
+"Poor old England!" said Searle softly.
+
+"Has your brother never helped you?" I asked.
+
+"A five-pound note now and then! Oh I don't say there haven't been times
+when I haven't inspired an irresistible sympathy. I've not been what I
+should. I married dreadfully out of the way. But the devil of it is that
+he started fair and I started foul; with the tastes, the desires, the
+needs, the sensibilities of a gentleman--and not another blessed 'tip.'
+I can't afford to live in England."
+
+"THIS poor gentleman fancied a couple of months ago that he couldn't
+afford to live in America," I fondly explained.
+
+"I'd 'swap'--do you call it?--chances with him!" And Mr. Rawson looked
+quaintly rueful over his freedom of speech.
+
+Searle sat supported there with his eyes closed and his face twitching
+for violent emotion, and then of a sudden had a glare of gravity. "My
+friend, you're a dead failure! Be judged! Don't talk about 'swapping.'
+Don't talk about chances. Don't talk about fair starts and false starts.
+I'm at that point myself that I've a right to speak. It lies neither
+in one's chance nor one's start to make one a success; nor in anything
+one's brother--however bloated--can do or can undo. It lies in one's
+character. You and I, sir, have HAD no character--that's very plain.
+We've been weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we are for it--sitting
+staring in each other's faces and reading our weakness in each other's
+eyes. We're of no importance whatever, Mr. Rawson!"
+
+Mr. Rawson received this sally with a countenance in which abject
+submission to the particular affirmed truth struggled with the
+comparative propriety of his general rebellion against fate. In the
+course of a minute a due self-respect yielded to the warm comfortable
+sense of his being relieved of the cares of an attitude. "Go on, sir, go
+on," he said. "It's wholesome doctrine." And he wiped his eyes with what
+seemed his sole remnant of linen.
+
+"Dear, dear," sighed Searle, "I've made you cry! Well, we speak as from
+man to man. I should be glad to think you had felt for a moment the
+side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit which precedes--which
+precedes the grand illumination of death."
+
+Mr. Rawson sat silent a little, his eyes fixed on the ground and his
+well-cut nose but the more deeply dyed by his agitation. Then at last
+looking up: "You're a very good-natured man, sir, and you'll never
+persuade me you don't come of a kindly race. Say what you please about a
+chance; when a man's fifty--degraded, penniless, a husband and father--a
+chance to get on his legs again is not to be despised. Something tells
+me that my luck may be in your country--which has brought luck to so
+many. I can come on the parish here of course, but I don't want to come
+on the parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty
+years of life before me yet. If only by God's help I could have a real
+change of air! It's a fixed idea of mine. I've had it for the last ten
+years. It's not that I'm a low radical. Oh I've no vulgar opinions. Old
+England's good enough for me, but I'm not good enough for old England.
+I'm a shabby man that wants to get out of a room full of staring
+gentlefolk. I'm for ever put to the blush. It's a perfect agony of
+spirit; everything reminds me of my younger and better self. The thing
+for me would be a cooling cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the
+unknown! I lie awake thinking of it."
+
+Searle closed his eyes, shivering with a long-drawn tremor which I
+hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of mental
+pain. In a moment I saw it was neither. "Oh my country, my country,
+my country!" he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat for some time
+abstracted and lost. I signalled our companion that it was time we
+should bring our small session to a close, and he, without hesitating,
+possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-chair and pushed it before
+him. We had got halfway home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly
+in the High Street, as we passed a chop-house from whose open doors we
+caught a waft of old-fashioned cookery and other restorative elements,
+he motioned us to halt. "This is my last five pounds"--and he drew a
+note from his pocket-book. "Do me the favour, Mr. Rawson, to accept
+it. Go in there and order the best dinner they can give you. Call for a
+bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my eternal rest!"
+
+Mr. Rawson stiffened himself up and received the gift with fingers
+momentarily irresponsive. But Mr. Rawson had the nerves of a gentleman.
+I measured the spasm with which his poor dispossessed hand closed upon
+the crisp paper, I observed his empurpled nostril convulsive under the
+other solicitation. He crushed the crackling note in his palm with a
+passionate pressure and jerked a spasmodic bow. "I shall not do you the
+wrong, sir, of anything but the best!" The next moment the door swung
+behind him.
+
+Searle sank again into his apathy, and on reaching the hotel I helped
+him to get to bed. For the rest of the day he lay without motion or
+sound and beyond reach of any appeal. The doctor, whom I had constantly
+in attendance, was sure his end was near. He expressed great surprise
+that he should have lasted so long; he must have been living for a
+month on the very dregs of his strength. Toward evening, as I sat by his
+bedside in the deepening dusk, he roused himself with a purpose I had
+vaguely felt gathering beneath his stupor. "My cousin, my cousin," he
+said confusedly. "Is she here?" It was the first time he had spoken of
+Miss Searle since our retreat from her brother's house, and he continued
+to ramble. "I was to have married her. What a dream! That day was like
+a string of verses--rhymed hours. But the last verse is bad measure.
+What's the rhyme to 'love'? ABOVE! Was she a simple woman, a kind sweet
+woman? Or have I only dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her touch
+would have cured my madness. I want you to do something. Write three
+lines, three words: 'Good-bye; remember me; be happy.'" And then after
+a long pause: "It's strange a person in my state should have a wish. Why
+should one eat one's breakfast the day one's hanged? What a creature
+is man! What a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a mere throbbing
+fever-point; I breathe and nothing more, and yet I DESIRE! My desire
+lives. If I could see her! Help me out with it and let me die."
+
+Half an hour later, at a venture, I dispatched by post a note to Miss
+Searle: "Your cousin is rapidly sinking. He asks to see you." I was
+conscious of a certain want of consideration in this act, since it would
+bring her great trouble and yet no power to face the trouble; but out
+of her distress I fondly hoped a sufficient force might be born. On the
+following day my friend's exhaustion had become so great that I began
+to fear his intelligence altogether broken up. But toward evening he
+briefly rallied, to maunder about many things, confounding in a sinister
+jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years. "By the
+way," he said suddenly, "I've made no will. I haven't much to bequeath.
+Yet I have something." He had been playing listlessly with a large
+signet-ring on his left hand, which he now tried to draw off. "I leave
+you this"--working it round and round vainly--"if you can get it off.
+What enormous knuckles! There must be such knuckles in the mummies of
+the Pharaohs. Well, when I'm gone--! No, I leave you something more
+precious than gold--the sense of a great kindness. But I've a little
+gold left. Bring me those trinkets." I placed on the bed before him
+several articles of jewellery, relics of early foppery: his watch
+and chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some odds and ends
+of goldsmith's work. He trifled with them feebly for some moments,
+murmuring various names and dates associated with them. At last, looking
+up with clearer interest, "What has become," he asked, "of Mr. Rawson?"
+
+"You want to see him?"
+
+"How much are these things worth?" he went on without heeding me. "How
+much would they bring?" And he weighed them in his weak hands. "They're
+pretty heavy. Some hundred or so? Oh I'm richer than I thought!
+Rawson--Rawson--you want to get out of this awful England?"
+
+I stepped to the door and requested the servant whom I kept in constant
+attendance in our adjacent sitting-room to send and ascertain if Mr.
+Rawson were on the premises. He returned in a few moments, introducing
+our dismal friend. Mr. Rawson was pale even to his nose and derived from
+his unaffectedly concerned state an air of some distinction. I led him
+up to the bed. In Searle's eyes, as they fell on him, there shone for a
+moment the light of a human message.
+
+"Lord have mercy!" gasped Mr. Rawson.
+
+"My friend," said Searle, "there's to be one American the less--so let
+there be at the same time one the more. At the worst you'll be as good a
+one as I. Foolish me! Take these battered relics; you can sell them; let
+them help you on your way. They're gifts and mementoes, but this is a
+better use. Heaven speed you! May America be kind to you. Be kind, at
+the last, to your own country!"
+
+"Really this is too much; I can't," the poor man protested, almost
+scared and with tears in his eyes. "Do come round and get well and I'll
+stop here. I'll stay with you and wait on you."
+
+"No, I'm booked for my journey, you for yours. I hope you don't mind the
+voyage."
+
+Mr. Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude, appealing piteously
+from so strange a windfall. "It's like the angel of the Lord who bids
+people in the Bible to rise and flee!"
+
+Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, quite used up; I led Mr. Rawson
+back into the sitting-room, where in three words I proposed to him
+a rough valuation of our friend's trinkets. He assented with perfect
+good-breeding; they passed into my possession and a second bank-note
+into his.
+
+From the collapse into which this wondrous exercise of his imagination
+had plunged him my charge then gave few signs of being likely to emerge.
+He breathed, as he had said, and nothing more. The twilight deepened; I
+lighted the night-lamp. The doctor sat silent and official at the foot
+of the bed; I resumed my constant place near the head. Suddenly our
+patient opened his eyes wide. "She'll not come," he murmured. "Amen!
+she's an English sister." Five minutes passed; he started forward.
+"She's come, she's here!" he confidently quavered. His words conveyed to
+my mind so absolute an assurance that I lightly rose and passed into the
+sitting-room. At the same moment, through the opposite door, the
+servant introduced a lady. A lady, I say; for an instant she was simply
+such--tall pale dressed in deep mourning. The next instant I had uttered
+her name--"Miss Searle!" She looked ten years older.
+
+She met me with both hands extended and an immense question in her
+face. "He has just announced you," I said. And then with a fuller
+consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance: "What has
+happened?"
+
+"Oh death, death!" she wailed. "You and I are left."
+
+There came to me with her words a sickening shock, the sense of poetic
+justice somehow cheated, defeated. "Your brother?" I panted.
+
+She laid her hand on my arm and I felt its pressure deepen as she spoke.
+"He was thrown from his horse in the park. He died on the spot. Six days
+have passed. Six months!"
+
+She accepted my support and a moment later we had entered the room and
+approached the bedside, from which the doctor withdrew. Searle opened
+his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to make
+out her mourning. "Already!" he cried audibly and with a smile, as I
+felt, of pleasure.
+
+She dropped on her knees and took his hand. "Not for you, cousin," she
+whispered. "For my poor brother."
+
+He started, in all his deathly longitude, as with a galvanic shock.
+"Dead! HE dead! Life itself!" And then after a moment and with a slight
+rising inflexion: "You're free?"
+
+"Free, cousin. Too sadly free. And now--NOW--with what use for freedom?"
+
+He looked steadily into her eyes, dark in the heavy shadow of her musty
+mourning-veil. "For me wear colours!"
+
+In a moment more death had come, the doctor had silently attested it,
+and she had burst into sobs.
+
+We buried him in the little churchyard in which he had expressed the
+wish to lie; beneath one of the blackest and widest of English yews and
+the little tower than which none in all England has a softer and hoarier
+grey. A year has passed; Miss Searle, I believe, has begun to wear
+colours.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A  Passionate Pilgrim, by Henry James
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A  Passionate Pilgrim, by Henry James
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+Title: A  Passionate Pilgrim
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8080]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 12, 2003]
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A  PASSIONATE PILGRIM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol
+
+
+
+
+A PASSIONATE PILGRIM
+
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+
+
+I
+
+Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I
+determined to spend the interval of six weeks in England, to
+which country my mind's eye only had as yet been introduced. I
+had formed in Italy and France a resolute preference for old
+inns, considering that what they sometimes cost the ungratified
+body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London,
+therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much to the
+east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably
+figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay,
+I descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of
+the genius of "attendance" in the person of the solitary waiter.
+No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt
+I had cut a golden-ripe crop of English "impressions." The
+coffee-room of the Red Lion, like so many other places and things
+I was destined to see in the motherland, seemed to have been
+waiting for long years, with just that sturdy sufferance of time
+written on its visage, for me to come and extract the romantic
+essence of it.
+
+The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most
+characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile
+failed to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so
+deeply buried in the soil of our early culture that, without some
+great upheaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when
+and where and how it begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of
+England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I
+had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home--at
+Saragossa Illinois--in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens,
+in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six
+narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of
+mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished on
+either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in
+ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a
+narrow table--a table expected under stress to accommodate no
+less than four pairs of active British elbows. High pressure
+indeed had passed away from the Red Lion for ever. It now knew
+only that of memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the room
+there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling of mahogany,
+so dark with time and so polished with unremitted friction that
+by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out the dim
+reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just
+arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated
+by the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch
+whiskey, were a dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age--
+the Derby favourite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her
+Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpet--as old as
+the mahogany almost, as the Bank of England, as the Queen--into
+which the waiter had in his lonely revolutions trodden so many
+massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing beer that the
+glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognised it.
+To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type would be
+altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having
+dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in
+penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet
+against the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the
+mahogany partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that
+must have expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy
+screen refused even to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up
+the deficiency.
+
+While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a
+person whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be
+a fellow lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like
+myself, to have submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on
+the other side of my partition had been prepared to receive him.
+He walked up to the fire, exposed his back to it and, after
+consulting his watch, looked directly out of the window and
+indirectly at me. He was a man of something less than middle age
+and more than middle stature, though indeed you would have called
+him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for his
+emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his
+head, was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey,
+unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not
+altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion.
+His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache
+languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were
+negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but
+ineffectually refined. A cold fatal gentlemanly weakness was
+expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His eye was restless
+and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting
+his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head,
+told of exhausted intentions, of a will relaxed. His dress was
+neat and "toned down"--he might have been in mourning. I made up
+my mind on three points: he was a bachelor, he was out of health,
+he was not indigenous to the soil. The waiter approached him, and
+they conversed in accents barely audible. I heard the words
+"claret," "sherry" with a tentative inflexion, and finally "beer"
+with its last letter changed to "ah." Perhaps he was a Russian in
+reduced circumstances; he reminded me slightly of certain
+sceptical cosmopolite Russians whom I had met on the Continent.
+While in my extravagant way I followed this train--for you see I
+was interested--there appeared a short brisk man with reddish-
+brown hair, with a vulgar nose, a sharp blue eye and a red beard
+confined to his lower jaw and chin. My putative Russian, still in
+possession of the rug, let his mild gaze stray over the dingy
+ornaments of the room. The other drew near, and his umbrella
+dealt a playful poke at the concave melancholy waistcoat. "A
+penny ha'penny for your thoughts!"
+
+My friend, as I call him, uttered an exclamation, stared, then
+laid his two hands on the other's shoulders. The latter looked
+round at me keenly, compassing me in a momentary glance. I read
+in its own vague light that this was a transatlantic eyebeam; and
+with such confidence that I hardly needed to see its owner, as he
+prepared, with his companion, to seat himself at the table
+adjoining my own, take from his overcoat-pocket three New York
+newspapers and lay them beside his plate. As my neighbours
+proceeded to dine I felt the crumbs of their conversation
+scattered pretty freely abroad. I could hear almost all they
+said, without straining to catch it, over the top of the
+partition that divided us. Occasionally their voices dropped to
+recovery of discretion, but the mystery pieced itself together as
+if on purpose to entertain me. Their speech was pitched in the
+key that may in English air be called alien in spite of a few
+coincidences. The voices were American, however, with a
+difference; and I had no hesitation in assigning the softer and
+clearer sound to the pale thin gentleman, whom I decidedly
+preferred to his comrade. The latter began to question him about
+his voyage.
+
+"Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the hour we left New
+York."
+
+"Well, you do look considerably reduced," said the second-comer.
+
+"Reduced! I've been on the verge of the grave. I haven't slept
+six hours for three weeks." This was said with great gravity.
+
+"Well, I've made the voyage for the last time."
+
+"The plague you have! You mean to locate here permanently?"
+
+"Oh it won't be so very permanent!"
+
+There was a pause; after which: "You're the same merry old boy,
+Searle. Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?"
+
+"I almost wish I were."
+
+"You're not so sweet on England then? I've heard people say at
+home that you dress and talk and act like an Englishman. But I
+know these people here and I know you. You're not one of this
+crowd, Clement Searle, not you. You'll go under here, sir; you'll
+go under as sure as my name's Simmons."
+
+Following this I heard a sudden clatter as of the drop of a knife
+and fork. "Well, you're a delicate sort of creature, if it IS
+your ugly name! I've been wandering about all day in this
+accursed city, ready to cry with homesickness and heartsickness
+and every possible sort of sickness, and thinking, in the absence
+of anything better, of meeting you here this evening and of your
+uttering some sound of cheer and comfort and giving me some
+glimmer of hope. Go under? Ain't I under now? I can't do more
+than get under the ground!"
+
+Mr. Simmons's superior brightness appeared to flicker a moment in
+this gust of despair, but the next it was burning steady again.
+"DON'T 'cry,' Searle," I heard him say. "Remember the waiter.
+I've grown Englishman enough for that. For heaven's sake don't
+let's have any nerves. Nerves won't do anything for you here.
+It's best to come to the point. Tell me in three words what you
+expect of me."
+
+I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had collapsed in his
+chair. "Upon my word, sir, you're quite inconceivable. You never
+got my letter?"
+
+"Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to get anything in
+my life."
+
+At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath, which it was
+well perhaps that I but partially heard. "Abijah Simmons," he
+then cried, "what demon of perversity possesses you? Are you
+going to betray me here in a foreign land, to turn out a false
+friend, a heartless rogue?"
+
+"Go on, sir," said sturdy Simmons. "Pour it all out. I'll wait
+till you've done. Your beer's lovely," he observed independently
+to the waiter. "I'll have some more."
+
+"For God's sake explain yourself!" his companion appealed.
+
+There was a pause, at the end of which I heard Mr. Simmons set
+down his empty tankard with emphasis. "You poor morbid mooning
+man," he resumed, "I don't want to say anything to make you feel
+sore. I regularly pity you. But you must allow that you've acted
+more like a confirmed crank than a member of our best society--
+in which every one's so sensible."
+
+Mr. Searle seemed to have made an effort to compose himself. "Be
+so good as to tell me then what was the meaning of your letter."
+
+"Well, you had got on MY nerves, if you want to know, when I
+wrote it. It came of my always wishing so to please folks. I had
+much better have let you alone. To tell you the plain truth I
+never was so horrified in my life as when I found that on the
+strength of my few kind words you had come out here to seek your
+fortune."
+
+"What then did you expect me to do?"
+
+"I expected you to wait patiently till I had made further
+enquiries and had written you again."
+
+"And you've made further enquiries now?"
+
+"Enquiries! I've committed assaults."
+
+"And you find I've no claim?"
+
+"No claim that one of THESE big bugs will look at. It struck me
+at first that you had rather a neat little case. I confess the
+look of it took hold of me--"
+
+"Thanks to your liking so to please folks!" Mr. Simmons appeared
+for a moment at odds with something; it proved to be with his
+liquor. "I rather think your beer's too good to be true," he said
+to the waiter. "I guess I'll take water. Come, old man," he
+resumed, "don't challenge me to the arts of debate, or you'll
+have me right down on you, and then you WILL feel me. My native
+sweetness, as I say, was part of it. The idea that if I put the
+thing through it would be a very pretty feather in my cap and a
+very pretty penny in my purse was part of it. And the
+satisfaction of seeing a horrid low American walk right into an
+old English estate was a good deal of it. Upon my word, Searle,
+when I think of it I wish with all my heart that, extravagant
+vain man as you are, I COULD, for the charm of it, put you
+through! I should hardly care what you did with the blamed place
+when you got it. I could leave you alone to turn it into Yankee
+notions--into ducks and drakes as they call 'em here. I should
+like to see you tearing round over it and kicking up its sacred
+dust in their very faces!"
+
+"You don't know me one little bit," said Mr. Searle, rather
+shirking, I thought, the burden of this tribute and for all
+response to the ambiguity of the compliment.
+
+"I should be very glad to think I didn't, sir. I've been to no
+small amount of personal inconvenience for you. I've pushed my
+way right up to the headspring. I've got the best opinion that's
+to be had. The best opinion that's to be had just gives you one
+leer over its spectacles. I guess that look will fix you if you
+ever get it straight. I've been able to tap, indirectly," Mr.
+Simmons went on, "the solicitor of your usurping cousin, and he
+evidently knows something to be in the wind. It seems your elder
+brother twenty years ago put out a feeler. So you're not to have
+the glory of even making them sit up."
+
+"I never made any one sit up," I heard Mr. Searle plead. "I
+shouldn't begin at this time of day. I should approach the
+subject like a gentleman."
+
+"Well, if you want very much to do something like a gentleman
+you've got a capital chance. Take your disappointment like a
+gentleman."
+
+I had finished my dinner and had become keenly interested in poor
+Mr. Searle's unencouraging--or unencouraged--claim; so interested
+that I at last hated to hear his trouble reflected in his voice
+without being able--all respectfully!--to follow it in his face.
+I left my place, went over to the fire, took up the evening paper
+and established a post of observation behind it.
+
+His cold counsellor was in the act of choosing a soft chop from
+the dish--an act accompanied by a great deal of prying and poking
+with that gentleman's own fork. My disillusioned compatriot had
+pushed away his plate; he sat with his elbows on the table,
+gloomily nursing his head with his hands. His companion watched
+him and then seemed to wonder--to do Mr. Simmons justice--how he
+could least ungracefully give him up. "I say, Searle,"--and for
+my benefit, I think, taking me for a native ingenuous enough to
+be dazzled by his wit, he lifted his voice a little and gave it
+an ironical ring--"in this country it's the inestimable privilege
+of a loyal citizen, under whatsoever stress of pleasure or of
+pain, to make a point of eating his dinner."
+
+Mr. Searle gave his plate another push. "Anything may happen now.
+I don't care a straw."
+
+"You ought to care. Have another chop and you WILL care. Have
+some better tipple. Take my advice!" Mr. Simmons went on.
+
+My friend--I adopt that name for him--gazed from between his two
+hands coldly before him. "I've had enough of your advice."
+
+"A little more," said Simmons mildly; "I shan't trouble you
+again. What do you mean to do?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Oh come!"
+
+"Nothing, nothing, nothing!"
+
+"Nothing but starve. How about meeting expenses?"
+
+"Why do you ask?" said my friend. "You don't care."
+
+"My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer you twenty pounds
+you set most clumsily about it. You said just now I don't know
+you," Mr. Simmons went on. "Possibly. Come back with me then," he
+said kindly enough, "and let's improve our acquaintance."
+
+"I won't go back. I shall never go back."
+
+"Never?"
+
+"Never."
+
+Mr. Simmons thought it shrewdly over. "Well, you ARE sick!" he
+exclaimed presently. "All I can say is that if you're working out
+a plan for cold poison, or for any other act of desperation, you
+had better give it right up. You can't get a dose of the
+commonest kind of cold poison for nothing, you know. Look here,
+Searle"--and the worthy man made what struck me as a very decent
+appeal. "If you'll consent to return home with me by the steamer
+of the twenty-third I'll pay your passage down. More than that,
+I'll pay for your beer."
+
+My poor gentleman met it. "I believe I never made up my mind to
+anything before, but I think it's made up now. I shall stay here
+till I take my departure for a newer world than any patched-up
+newness of ours. It's an odd feeling--I rather like it! What
+should I do at home?"
+
+"You said just now you were homesick."
+
+"I meant I was sick for a home. Don't I belong here? Haven't I
+longed to get here all my life? Haven't I counted the months and
+the years till I should be able to 'go' as we say? And now that
+I've 'gone,' that is that I've come, must I just back out? No,
+no, I'll move on. I'm much obliged to you for your offer. I've
+enough money for the present. I've about my person some forty
+pounds' worth of British gold, and the same amount, say, of the
+toughness of the heaven-sent idiot. They'll see me through
+together! After they're gone I shall lay my head in some English
+churchyard, beside some ivied tower, beneath an old gnarled black
+yew."
+
+I had so far distinctly followed the dialogue; but at this point
+the landlord entered and, begging my pardon, would suggest that
+number 12, a most superior apartment, having now been vacated, it
+would give him pleasure if I would look in. I declined to look
+in, but agreed for number 12 at a venture and gave myself again,
+with dissimulation, to my friends. They had got up; Simmons had
+put on his overcoat; he stood polishing his rusty black hat with
+his napkin. "Do you mean to go down to the place?" he asked.
+
+"Possibly. I've thought of it so often that I should like to see
+it."
+
+"Shall you call on Mr. Searle?"
+
+"Heaven forbid!"
+
+"Something has just occurred to me," Simmons pursued with a grin
+that made his upper lip look more than ever denuded by the razor
+and jerked the ugly ornament of his chin into the air. "There's a
+certain Miss Searle, the old man's sister."
+
+"Well?" my gentleman quavered.
+
+"Well, sir!--you talk of moving on. You might move on the
+damsel."
+
+Mr. Searle frowned in silence and his companion gave him a tap on
+the stomach. "Line those ribs a bit first!" He blushed crimson;
+his eyes filled with tears. "You ARE a coarse brute," he said.
+The scene quite harrowed me, but I was prevented from seeing it
+through by the reappearance of the landlord on behalf of number
+12. He represented to me that I ought in justice to him to come
+and see how tidy they HAD made it. Half an hour afterwards I was
+rattling along in a hansom toward Covent Garden, where I heard
+Madame Bosio in The Barber of Seville. On my return from the
+opera I went into the coffee-room; it had occurred to me I might
+catch there another glimpse of Mr. Searle. I was not
+disappointed. I found him seated before the fire with his head
+sunk on his breast: he slept, dreaming perhaps of Abijah Simmons.
+I watched him for some moments. His closed eyes, in the dim
+lamplight, looked even more helpless and resigned, and I seemed
+to see the fine grain of his nature in his unconscious mask. They
+say fortune comes while we sleep, and, standing there, I felt
+really tender enough--though otherwise most unqualified--to be
+poor Mr. Searle's fortune. As I walked away I noted in one of the
+little prandial pews I have described the melancholy waiter,
+whose whiskered chin also reposed on the bulge of his shirt-
+front. I lingered a moment beside the old inn-yard in which, upon
+a time, the coaches and post-chaises found space to turn and
+disgorge. Above the dusky shaft of the enclosing galleries, where
+lounging lodgers and crumpled chambermaids and all the
+picturesque domesticity of a rattling tavern must have leaned on
+their elbows for many a year, I made out the far-off lurid
+twinkle of the London constellations. At the foot of the stairs,
+enshrined in the glittering niche of her well-appointed bar, the
+landlady sat napping like some solemn idol amid votive brass and
+plate.
+
+The next morning, not finding the subject of my benevolent
+curiosity in the coffee-room, I learned from the waiter that he
+had ordered breakfast in bed. Into this asylum I was not yet
+prepared to pursue him. I spent the morning in the streets,
+partly under pressure of business, but catching all kinds of
+romantic impressions by the way. To the searching American eye
+there is no tint of association with which the great grimy face
+of London doesn't flush. As the afternoon approached, however, I
+began to yearn for some site more gracefully classic than what
+surrounded me, and, thinking over the excursions recommended to
+the ingenuous stranger, decided to take the train to Hampton
+Court. The day was the more propitious that it yielded just that
+dim subaqueous light which sleeps so fondly upon the English
+landscape.
+
+At the end of an hour I found myself wandering through the
+apartments of the great palace. They follow each other in
+infinite succession, with no great variety of interest or aspect,
+but with persistent pomp and a fine specific effect. They are
+exactly of their various times. You pass from painted and
+panelled bedchambers and closets, anterooms, drawing-rooms,
+council-rooms, through king's suite, queen's suite, prince's
+suite, until you feel yourself move through the appointed hours
+and stages of some rigid monarchical day. On one side are the old
+monumental upholsteries, the big cold tarnished beds and
+canopies, with the circumference of disapparelled royalty
+symbolised by a gilded balustrade, and the great carved and
+yawning chimney-places where dukes-in-waiting may have warmed
+their weary heels; on the other, in deep recesses, rise the
+immense windows, the framed and draped embrasures where the
+sovereign whispered and favourites smiled, looking out on
+terraced gardens and misty park. The brown walls are dimly
+illumined by innumerable portraits of courtiers and captains,
+more especially with various members of the Batavian entourage of
+William of Orange, the restorer of the palace; with good store
+too of the lily-bosomed models of Lely and Kneller. The whole
+tone of this processional interior is singularly stale and sad.
+The tints of all things have both faded and darkened--you taste
+the chill of the place as you walk from room to room. It was
+still early in the day and in the season, and I flattered myself
+that I was the only visitor. This complacency, however, dropped
+at sight of a person standing motionless before a simpering
+countess of Sir Peter Lely's creation. On hearing my footstep
+this victim of an evaporated spell turned his head and I
+recognised my fellow lodger of the Red Lion. I was apparently
+recognised as well; he looked as if he could scarce wait for me
+to be kind to him, and in fact didn't wait. Seeing I had a
+catalogue he asked the name of the portrait. On my satisfying him
+he appealed, rather timidly, as to my opinion of the lady.
+
+"Well," said I, not quite timidly enough perhaps, "I confess she
+strikes me as no great matter."
+
+He remained silent and was evidently a little abashed. As we
+strolled away he stole a sidelong glance of farewell at his
+leering shepherdess. To speak with him face to face was to feel
+keenly that he was no less interesting than infirm. We talked of
+our inn, of London, of the palace; he uttered his mind freely,
+but seemed to struggle with a weight of depression. It was an
+honest mind enough, with no great cultivation but with a certain
+natural love of excellent things. I foresaw that I should find
+him quite to the manner born--to ours; full of glimpses and
+responses, of deserts and desolations. His perceptions would be
+fine and his opinions pathetic; I should moreover take refuge
+from his sense of proportion in his sense of humour, and then
+refuge from THAT, ah me!--in what? On my telling him that I was a
+fellow citizen he stopped short, deeply touched, and, silently
+passing his arm into my own, suffered me to lead him through the
+other apartments and down into the gardens. A large gravelled
+platform stretches itself before the basement of the palace,
+taking the afternoon sun. Parts of the great structure are
+reserved for private use and habitation, occupied by state-
+pensioners, reduced gentlewomen in receipt of the Queen's bounty
+and other deserving persons. Many of the apartments have their
+dependent gardens, and here and there, between the verdure-coated
+walls, you catch a glimpse of these somewhat stuffy bowers. My
+companion and I measured more than once this long expanse,
+looking down on the floral figures of the rest of the affair and
+on the stoutly-woven tapestry of creeping plants that muffle the
+foundations of the huge red pile. I thought of the various images
+of old-world gentility which, early and late, must have strolled
+in front of it and felt the protection and security of the place.
+We peeped through an antique grating into one of the mossy cages
+and saw an old lady with a black mantilla on her head, a decanter
+of water in one hand and a crutch in the other, come forth,
+followed by three little dogs and a cat, to sprinkle a plant. She
+would probably have had an opinion on the virtue of Queen
+Caroline. Feeling these things together made us quickly, made us
+extraordinarily, intimate. My companion seemed to ache with his
+impression; he scowled, all gently, as if it gave him pain. I
+proposed at last that we should dine somewhere on the spot and
+take a late train to town. We made our way out of the gardens
+into the adjoining village, where we entered an inn which I
+pronounced, very sincerely, exactly what we wanted. Mr. Searle
+had approached our board as shyly as if it had been a cold bath;
+but, gradually warming to his work, he declared at the end of
+half an hour that for the first time in a month he enjoyed his
+victuals.
+
+"I'm afraid you're rather out of health," I risked.
+
+"Yes, sir--I'm an incurable."
+
+The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered about the
+entrance of Bushey Park, and after we had dined we lounged along
+into the celebrated avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare
+emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveller, in which the
+mind seems to swallow the sum total of its impressions at a gulp.
+You take in the whole place, whatever it be. You feel England,
+you feel Italy, and the sensation involves for the moment a kind
+of thrill. I had known it from time to time in Italy and had
+opened my soul to it as to the spirit of the Lord. Since my
+landing in England I had been waiting for it to arrive. A bottle
+of tolerable Burgundy, at dinner, had perhaps unlocked to it the
+gates of sense; it arrived now with irresistible force. Just the
+scene around me was the England of one's early reveries. Over
+against us, amid the ripeness of its gardens, the dark red
+residence, with its formal facings and its vacant windows, seemed
+to make the past definite and massive; the little village,
+nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common,
+with its taverns of figurative names, its ivy-towered church, its
+mossy roofs, looked like the property of a feudal lord. It was in
+this dark composite light that I had read the British classics;
+it was this mild moist air that had blown from the pages of the
+poets; while I seemed to feel the buried generations in the dense
+and elastic sod. And that I must have testified in some form or
+other to what I have called my thrill I gather, remembering it,
+from a remark of my companion's.
+
+"You've the advantage over me in coming to all this with an
+educated eye. You already know what old things can be. I've never
+known it but by report. I've always fancied I should like it. In
+a small way at home, of course, I did try to stand by my idea of
+it. I must be a conservative by nature. People at home used to
+call me a cockney and a fribble. But it wasn't true," he went on;
+"if it had been I should have made my way over here long ago:
+before--before--" He paused, and his head dropped sadly on his
+breast.
+
+The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue; I had but to
+choose my time for learning his story. Something told me that I
+had gained his confidence and that, so far as attention and
+attitude might go, I was "in" for responsibilities. But somehow I
+didn't dread them. "Before you lost your health," I suggested.
+
+"Before I lost my health," he answered. "And my property--the
+little I had. And my ambition. And any power to take myself
+seriously."
+
+"Come!" I cried. "You shall recover everything. This tonic
+English climate will wind you up in a month. And THEN see how
+you'll take yourself--and how I shall take you!"
+
+"Oh," he gratefully smiled, "I may turn to dust in your hands! I
+should like," he presently pursued, "to be an old genteel
+pensioner, lodged over there in the palace and spending my days
+in maundering about these vistas. I should go every morning, at
+the hour when it gets the sun, into that long gallery where all
+those pretty women of Lely's are hung--I know you despise them!--
+and stroll up and down and say something kind to them. Poor
+precious forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted in their
+day, so neglected now! Offering up their shoulders and ringlets
+and smiles to that musty deadly silence!"
+
+I laid my hand on my friend's shoulder. "Oh sir, you're all
+right!"
+
+Just at this moment there came cantering down the shallow glade
+of the avenue a young girl on a fine black horse--one of those
+little budding gentlewomen, perfectly mounted and equipped, who
+form to alien eyes one of the prettiest incidents of English
+scenery. She had distanced her servant and, as she came abreast
+of us, turned slightly in her saddle and glanced back at him. In
+the movement she dropped the hunting-crop with which she was
+armed; whereupon she reined up and looked shyly at us and at the
+implement. "This is something better than a Lely," I said. Searle
+hastened forward, picked up the crop and, with a particular
+courtesy that became him, handed it back to the rider. Fluttered
+and blushing she reached forward, took it with a quick sweet
+sound, and the next moment was bounding over the quiet turf.
+Searle stood watching her; the servant, as he passed us, touched
+his hat. When my friend turned toward me again I saw that he too
+was blushing. "Oh sir, you're all right," I repeated.
+
+At a short distance from where we had stopped was an old stone
+bench. We went and sat down on it and, as the sun began to sink,
+watched the light mist powder itself with gold. "We ought to be
+thinking of the train back to London, I suppose," I at last said.
+
+"Oh hang the train!" sighed my companion.
+
+"Willingly. There could be no better spot than this to feel the
+English evening stand still." So we lingered, and the twilight
+hung about us, strangely clear in spite of the thickness of the
+air. As we sat there came into view an apparition unmistakeable
+from afar as an immemorial vagrant--the disowned, in his own rich
+way, of all the English ages. As he approached us he slackened
+pace and finally halted, touching his cap. He was a man of middle
+age, clad in a greasy bonnet with false-looking ear-locks
+depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red scarf,
+tucked into his waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote
+affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a
+stick; on his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of
+withered vegetables at the bottom. His face was pale haggard and
+degraded beyond description--as base as a counterfeit coin, yet
+as modelled somehow as a tragic mask. He too, like everything
+else, had a history. From what height had he fallen, from what
+depth had he risen? He was the perfect symbol of generated
+constituted baseness; and I felt before him in presence of a
+great artist or actor.
+
+"For God's sake, gentlemen," he said in the raucous tone of
+weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat
+exacerbated by perpetual gin, "for God's sake, gentlemen, have
+pity on a poor fern-collector!"--turning up his stale daisies.
+"Food hasn't passed my lips, gentlemen, for the last three days."
+We gaped at him and at each other, and to our imagination his
+appeal had almost the force of a command. "I wonder if half-a-
+crown would help?" I privately wailed. And our fasting botanist
+went limping away through the park with the grace of controlled
+stupefaction still further enriching his outline.
+
+"I feel as if I had seen my Doppelganger" said Searle. "He
+reminds me of myself. What am I but a mere figure in the
+landscape, a wandering minstrel or picker of daisies?"
+
+"What are you 'anyway,' my friend?" I thereupon took occasion to
+ask. "Who are you? kindly tell me."
+
+The colour rose again to his pale face and I feared I had
+offended him. He poked a moment at the sod with the point of his
+umbrella before answering. "Who am I?" he said at last. "My name
+is Clement Searle. I was born in New York, and that's the
+beginning and the end of me."
+
+"Ah not the end!" I made bold to plead.
+
+"Then it's because I HAVE no end--any more than an ill-written
+book. I just stop anywhere; which means I'm a failure," the poor
+man all lucidly and unreservedly pursued: "a failure, as hopeless
+and helpless, sir, as any that ever swallowed up the slender
+investments of the widow and the orphan. I don't pay five cents
+on the dollar. What I might have been--once!--there's nothing
+left to show. I was rotten before I was ripe. To begin with,
+certainly, I wasn't a fountain of wisdom. All the more reason for
+a definite channel--for having a little character and purpose.
+But I hadn't even a little. I had nothing but nice tastes, as
+they call them, and fine sympathies and sentiments. Take a turn
+through New York to-day and you'll find the tattered remnants of
+these things dangling on every bush and fluttering in every
+breeze; the men to whom I lent money, the women to whom I made
+love, the friends I trusted, the follies I invented, the
+poisonous fumes of pleasure amid which nothing was worth a
+thought but the manhood they stifled! It was my fault that I
+believed in pleasure here below. I believe in it still, but as I
+believe in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal,
+certainly--if you've got one; but most people haven't. Pleasure
+would be right if it were pleasure straight through; but it never
+is. My taste was to be the best in the world; well, perhaps it
+was. I had a little money; it went the way of my little wit. Here
+in my pocket I have the scant dregs of it. I should tell you I
+was the biggest kind of ass. Just now that description would
+flatter me; it would assume there's something left of me. But the
+ghost of a donkey--what's that? I think," he went on with a
+charming turn and as if striking off his real explanation, "I
+should have been all right in a world arranged on different
+lines. Before heaven, sir--whoever you are--I'm in practice so
+absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to say it: I entered
+upon life a perfect gentleman. I had the love of old forms and
+pleasant rites, and I found them nowhere--found a world all hard
+lines and harsh lights, without shade, without composition, as
+they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour. To
+furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own soul. I
+went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very
+pretty chiaroscuro you'll find in my track! Sitting here in this
+old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty
+verge of what might have been! I should have been born here and
+not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things
+they'd have been true of. How it was I never got free is more
+than I can say. It might have cut the knot, but the knot was too
+tight. I was always out of health or in debt or somehow
+desperately dangling. Besides, I had a horror of the great black
+sickening sea. A year ago I was reminded of the existence of an
+old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes
+of my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I
+confess it's a bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means
+sure that to this hour I've got the hang of it. You look as if
+you had a clear head: some other time, if you consent, we'll have
+a go at it, such as it is, together. Poverty was staring me in
+the face; I sat down and tried to commit the 'points' of our case
+to memory, as I used to get nine-times-nine by heart as a boy. I
+dreamed of it for six months, half-expecting to wake up some fine
+morning and hear through a latticed casement the cawing of an
+English rookery. A couple of months ago there came out to England
+on business of his own a man who once got me out of a dreadful
+mess (not that I had hurt anyone but myself), a legal
+practitioner in our courts, a very rough diamond, but with a
+great deal of FLAIR, as they say in New York. It was with him
+yesterday you saw me dining. He undertook, as he called it, to
+'nose round' and see if anything could be made of our
+questionable but possible show. The matter had never seriously
+been taken up. A month later I got a letter from Simmons assuring
+me that it seemed a very good show indeed and that he should be
+greatly surprised if I were unable to do something. This was the
+greatest push I had ever got in my life; I took a deliberate
+step, for the first time; I sailed for England. I've been here
+three days: they've seemed three months. After keeping me waiting
+for thirty-six hours my legal adviser makes his appearance last
+night and states to me, with his mouth full of mutton, that I
+haven't a leg to stand on, that my claim is moonshine, and that I
+must do penance and take a ticket for six more days of purgatory
+with his presence thrown in. My friend, my friend--shall I say I
+was disappointed? I'm already resigned. I didn't really believe I
+had any case. I felt in my deeper consciousness that it was the
+crowning illusion of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty
+one. Poor legal adviser!--I forgive him with all my heart. But
+for him I shouldn't be sitting in this place, in this air, under
+these impressions. This is a world I could have got on with
+beautifully. There's an immense charm in its having been kept for
+the last. After it nothing else would have been tolerable. I
+shall now have a month of it, I hope, which won't be long enough
+for it to "go back on me. There's one thing!"--and here,
+pausing, he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before him--
+"I wish it were possible you should be with me to the end."
+
+"I promise you to leave you only when you kick me downstairs."
+But I suggested my terms. "It must be on condition of your
+omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavour of
+mortality. I know nothing of 'ends.' I'm all for beginnings."
+
+He kept on me his sad weak eyes. Then with a faint smile: "Don't
+cut down a man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it. I'm
+bankrupt."
+
+"Oh health's money!" I said. "Get well, and the rest will take
+care of itself. I'm interested in your questionable claim--it's
+the question that's the charm; and pretenders, to anything big
+enough, have always been, for me, an attractive class. Only their
+first duty's to be gallant."
+
+"Their first duty's to understand their own points and to know
+their own mind," he returned with hopeless lucidity. "Don't ask
+me to climb our family tree now," he added; "I fear I haven't the
+head for it. I'll try some day--if it will bear my weight; or
+yours added to mine. There's no doubt, however, that we, as they
+say, go back. But I know nothing of business. If I were to take
+the matter in hand I should break in two the poor little silken
+thread from which everything hangs. In a better world than this I
+think I should be listened to. But the wind doesn't set to ideal
+justice. There's no doubt that a hundred years ago we suffered a
+palpable wrong. Yet we made no appeal at the time, and the dust
+of a century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!"
+
+"What then," I asked, "is the estimated value of your interest?"
+
+"We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise.
+Compared with the whole property our ideas have been small. We
+were once advised in the sense of a hundred and thirty thousand
+dollars. Why a hundred and thirty I'm sure I don't know. Don't
+beguile me into figures."
+
+"Allow me one more question," I said. "Who's actually in
+possession?"
+
+"A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing about him."
+
+"He's in some way related to you?"
+
+"Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make
+us?"
+
+"Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin
+live?"
+
+"At a place called Lackley--in Middleshire."
+
+I thought it over. "Well, suppose we look up Lackley in
+Middleshire!"
+
+He got straight up. "Go and see it?"
+
+"Go and see it."
+
+"Well," he said, "with you I'll go anywhere."
+
+On our return to town we determined to spend three days there
+together and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one
+as the other of that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those
+superstitious pilgrims who feel it the mother-city of their race,
+the distributing heart of their traditional life. Certain
+characteristics of the dusky Babylon, certain aspects, phases,
+features, "say" more to the American spiritual ear than anything
+else in Europe. The influence of these things on Searle it
+charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as I
+pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
+appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from
+long inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and
+his talk.
+
+
+
+II
+
+We looked out the topography of Middleshire in a county-guide,
+which spoke highly, as the phrase is, of Lackley Park, and took
+up our abode, our journey ended, at a wayside inn where, in the
+days of leisure, the coach must have stopped for luncheon and
+burnished pewters of rustic ale been handed up as straight as
+possible to outsiders athirst with the sense of speed. We stopped
+here for mere gaping joy of its steep-thatched roof, its latticed
+windows, its hospitable porch, and allowed a couple of days to
+elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet sentimental
+observance of the land before approaching the particular business
+that had drawn us on. The region I allude to is a compendium of
+the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
+scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely knew
+whether we were looking at it for the first or the last time,
+made it arrest us at every step. The countryside, in the full
+warm rains of the last of April, had burst into sudden perfect
+spring. The dark walls of the hedgerows had turned into blooming
+screens, the sodden verdure of lawn and meadow been washed over
+with a lighter brush. We went forth without loss of time for a
+long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested central
+billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which you
+find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties,
+within the scope of your vision, commingle their green
+exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and
+the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At
+widely opposite points of the expanse two great towers of
+cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish blur of habitation,
+taking the mild English light.
+
+We gave an irrepressible attention to this same solar reserve,
+and found in it only a refinement of art. The sky never was empty
+and never idle; the clouds were continually at play for our
+benefit. Over against us, from our station on the hills, we saw
+them piled and dissolved, condensed and shifted, blotting the
+blue with sullen rain-spots, stretching, breeze-fretted, into
+dappled fields of grey, bursting into an explosion of light or
+melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our way along the
+rounded ridge of the downs and reached, by a descent, through
+slanting angular fields, green to cottage-doors, a russet village
+that beckoned us from the heart of the maze in which the hedges
+wrapped it up. Close beside it, I admit, the roaring train
+bounces out of a hole in the hills; yet there broods upon this
+charming hamlet an old-time quietude that makes a violation of
+confidence of naming it so far away. We struck through a narrow
+lane, a green lane, dim with its barriers of hawthorn; it led us
+to a superb old farmhouse, now rather rudely jostled by the
+multiplied roads and by-ways that have reduced its ancient
+appanage. It stands there in stubborn picturesqueness, doggedly
+submitting to be pointed out and sketched. It is a wonderful
+image of the domiciliary conditions of the past--cruelly
+complete; with bended beams and joists, beneath the burden of
+gables, that seem to ache and groan with memories and regrets.
+The short low windows, where lead and glass combine equally to
+create an inward gloom, retain their opacity as a part of the
+primitive idea of defence. Such an old house provokes on the part
+of an American a luxury of respect. So propped and patched, so
+tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its
+central English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanised
+with ages of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed
+to offer to our grateful eyes a small rude symbol of the great
+English social order. Passing out upon the highroad, we came to
+the common browsing-patch, the "village-green" of the tales of
+our youth. Nothing was absent: the shaggy mouse-coloured donkey,
+nosing the turf with his mild and huge proboscis, the geese, the
+old woman--THE old woman, in person, with her red cloak and her
+black bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside
+her decent placid cheeks--the towering ploughman with his white
+smock-frock puckered on chest and back, his short corduroys, his
+mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these things as
+children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and mourned
+and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the
+handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy
+straddle whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not
+only a ploughboy but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the
+level velvet of a meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn
+by a finger over a surface of fine plush. We followed it from
+field to field and from stile to stile; it was all adorably the
+way to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in its
+rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the workday world by the
+broad stillness of pastures--a grey, grey tower, a huge black
+yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and
+protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to
+ache with consecration that my sensitive companion gave way to
+the force of it.
+
+"You must bury me here, you know"--he caught at my arm. "It's the
+first place of worship I've seen in my life. How it makes a
+Sunday where it stands!"
+
+It took the Church, we agreed, to make churches, but we had the
+sense the next day of seeing still better why. We walked over
+some seven miles, to the nearer of the two neighbouring seats of
+that lesson; and all through such a mist of local colour that we
+felt ourselves a pair of Smollett's pedestrian heroes faring
+tavernward for a night of adventures. As we neared the provincial
+city we saw the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high,
+rise far into the cloud-freckled blue; and as we got closer
+stopped on a bridge and looked down at the reflexion of the solid
+minster in a yellow stream. Going further yet we entered the
+russet town--where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots and
+curricles, must often have come a-shopping for their sandals and
+mittens; we lounged in the grassed and gravelled precinct and
+gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning
+wasting afternoon light, the visible ether that feels the voices
+of the chimes cling far aloft to the quiet sides of the
+cathedral-tower; saw it linger and nestle and abide, as it loves
+to do on all perpendicular spaces, converting them irresistibly
+into registers and dials; tasted too, as deeply, of the peculiar
+stillness of this place of priests; saw a rosy English lad come
+forth and lock the door of the old foundation-school that
+dovetailed with cloister and choir, and carry his big responsible
+key into one of the quiet canonical houses: and then stood musing
+together on the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood
+gone and come through cathedral-shades as a King's scholar, and
+yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty river meadows. On the
+third morning we betook ourselves to Lackley, having learned that
+parts of the "grounds" were open to visitors, and that indeed on
+application the house was sometimes shown.
+
+Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of
+the hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound
+and circled from the outermost gate through an untrimmed
+woodland, whence you glanced at further slopes and glades and
+copses and bosky recesses--at everything except the limits of the
+place. It was as free and untended as I had found a few of the
+large loose villas of old Italy, and I was still never to see the
+angular fact of English landlordism muffle itself in so many
+concessions. The weather had just become perfect; it was one of
+the dozen exquisite days of the English year--days stamped with a
+purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap. It was as
+if the mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses
+which starred the dark waysides like petals wind-scattered
+over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by the cubic foot--
+distilled from an alchemist's crucible. From this pastoral
+abundance we moved upon the more composed scene, the park proper
+--passed through a second lodge-gate, with weather-worn gilding
+on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where the great trees
+stood singly and the tame deer browsed along the bed of a
+woodland stream. Here before us rose the gabled grey front of the
+Tudor-time, developed and terraced and gardened to some later
+loss, as we were afterwards to know, of type.
+
+"Here you can wander all day," I said to Searle, "like an exiled
+prince who has come back on tiptoe and hovers about the dominion
+of the usurper."
+
+"To think of 'others' having hugged this all these years!" he
+answered. "I know what I am, but what might I have been? What do
+such places make of a man?"
+
+"I dare say he gets stupidly used to them," I said. "But I dare
+say too, even then, that when you scratch the mere owner you find
+the perfect lover."
+
+"What a perfect scene and background it forms!" my friend,
+however, had meanwhile gone on. "What legends, what histories it
+knows! My heart really breaks with all I seem to guess. There's
+Tennyson's Talking Oak! What summer days one could spend here!
+How I could lounge the rest of my life away on this turf of the
+middle ages! Haven't I some maiden-cousin in that old hall, or
+grange, or court--what in the name of enchantment do you call the
+thing?--who would give me kind leave?" And then he turned almost
+fiercely upon me. "Why did you bring me here? Why did you drag me
+into this distraction of vain regrets?"
+
+At this moment there passed within call a decent lad who had
+emerged from the gardens and who might have been an underling in
+the stables. I hailed him and put the question of our possible
+admittance to the house. He answered that the master was away
+from home, but that he thought it probable the housekeeper would
+consent to do the honours. I passed my arm into Searle's. "Come,"
+I said; "drain the cup, bitter-sweet though it be. We must go
+in." We hastened slowly and approached the fine front. The house
+was one of the happiest fruits of its freshly-feeling era, a
+multitudinous cluster of fair gables and intricate chimneys,
+brave projections and quiet recesses, brown old surfaces
+weathered to silver and mottled roofs that testified not to
+seasons but to centuries. Two broad terraces commanded the wooded
+horizon. Our appeal was answered by a butler who condescended to
+our weakness. He renewed the assertion that Mr. Searle was away
+from home, but he would himself lay our case before the
+housekeeper. We would be so good, however, as to give him our
+cards. This request, following so directly on the assertion that
+Mr. Searle was absent, was rather resented by my companion.
+"Surely not for the housekeeper."
+
+The butler gave a diplomatic cough. "Miss Searle is at home,
+sir."
+
+"Yours alone will have to serve," said my friend. I took out a
+card and pencil and wrote beneath my name NEW YORK. As I stood
+with the pencil poised a temptation entered into it. Without in
+the least considering proprieties or results I let my implement
+yield--I added above my name that of Mr. Clement Searle. What
+would come of it?
+
+Before many minutes the housekeeper waited upon us--a fresh rosy
+little old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown;
+a quaint careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our
+pleasure, to say nothing of any other. She had the accent of the
+country, but the manners of the house. Under her guidance we
+passed through a dozen apartments, duly stocked with old
+pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour, with a hundred
+ornaments and treasures. The pictures were especially valuable.
+The two Vandykes, the trio of rosy Rubenses, the sole and sombre
+Rembrandt, glowed with conscious authenticity. A Claude, a
+Murillo, a Greuze, a couple of Gainsboroughs, hung there with
+high complacency. Searle strolled about, scarcely speaking, pale
+and grave, with bloodshot eyes and lips compressed. He uttered no
+comment on what we saw--he asked but a question or two. Missing
+him at last from my side I retraced my steps and found him in a
+room we had just left, on a faded old ottoman and with his elbows
+on his knees and his face buried in his hands. Before him, ranged
+on a great credence, was a magnificent collection of old Italian
+majolica; plates of every shape, with their glaze of happy
+colour, jugs and vases nobly bellied and embossed. There seemed
+to rise before me, as I looked, a sudden vision of the young
+English gentleman who, eighty years ago, had travelled by slow
+stages to Italy and been waited on at his inn by persuasive
+toymen. "What is it, my dear man?" I asked. "Are you unwell?"
+
+He uncovered his haggard face and showed me the flush of a
+consciousness sharper, I think, to myself than to him. "A memory
+of the past! There comes back to me a china vase that used to
+stand on the parlour mantel-shelf when I was a boy, with a
+portrait of General Jackson painted on one side and a bunch of
+flowers on the other. How long do you suppose that majolica has
+been in the family?"
+
+"A long time probably. It was brought hither in the last century,
+into old, old England, out of old, old Italy, by some
+contemporary dandy with a taste for foreign gimcracks. Here it
+has stood for a hundred years, keeping its clear firm hues in
+this quiet light that has never sought to advertise it."
+
+Searle sprang to his feet. "I say, for mercy's sake, take me
+away! I can't stand this sort of thing. Before I know it I shall
+do something scandalous. I shall steal some of their infernal
+crockery. I shall proclaim my identity and assert my rights. I
+shall go blubbering to Miss Searle and ask her in pity's name to
+'put me up.'"
+
+If he could ever have been said to threaten complications he
+rather visibly did so now. I began to regret my officious
+presentation of his name and prepared without delay to lead him
+out of the house. We overtook the housekeeper in the last room of
+the series, a small unused boudoir over whose chimney-piece hung
+a portrait of a young man in a powdered wig and a brocaded
+waistcoat. I was struck with his resemblance to my companion
+while our guide introduced him. "This is Mr. Clement Searle, Mr.
+Searle's great-uncle, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He died young, poor
+gentleman; he perished at sea, going to America."
+
+"He was the young buck who brought the majolica out of Italy," I
+supplemented.
+
+"Indeed, sir, I believe he did," said the housekeeper without
+wonder.
+
+"He's the image of you, my dear Searle," I further observed.
+
+"He's remarkably like the gentleman, saving his presence," said
+the housekeeper.
+
+My friend stood staring. "Clement Searle--at sea--going to
+America--?" he broke out. Then with some sharpness to our old
+woman: "Why the devil did he go to America?"
+
+"Why indeed, sir? You may well ask. I believe he had kinsfolk
+there. It was for them to come to him."
+
+Searle broke into a laugh. "It was for them to come to him! Well,
+well," he said, fixing his eyes on our guide, "they've come to
+him at last!"
+
+She blushed like a wrinkled rose-leaf. "Indeed, sir, I verily
+believe you're one of US!"
+
+"My name's the name of that beautiful youth," Searle went on.
+"Dear kinsman I'm happy to meet you! And what do you think of
+this?" he pursued as he grasped me by the arm. "I have an idea.
+He perished at sea. His spirit came ashore and wandered about in
+misery till it got another incarnation--in this poor trunk!" And
+he tapped his hollow chest. "Here it has rattled about these
+forty years, beating its wings against its rickety cage, begging
+to be taken home again. And I never knew what was the matter with
+me! Now at last the bruised spirit can escape!"
+
+Our old lady gaped at a breadth of appreciation--if not at the
+disclosure of a connexion--beyond her. The scene was really
+embarrassing, and my confusion increased as we became aware of
+another presence. A lady had appeared in the doorway and the
+housekeeper dropped just audibly: "Miss Searle!" My first
+impression of Miss Searle was that she was neither young nor
+beautiful. She stood without confidence on the threshold, pale,
+trying to smile and twirling my card in her fingers. I
+immediately bowed. Searle stared at her as if one of the pictures
+had stepped out of its frame.
+
+"If I'm not mistaken one of you gentlemen is Mr. Clement Searle,"
+the lady adventured.
+
+"My friend's Mr. Clement Searle," I took upon myself to reply.
+"Allow me to add that I alone am responsible for your having
+received his name."
+
+"I should have been sorry not to--not to see him," said Miss
+Searle, beginning to blush. "Your being from America has led me--
+perhaps to intrude!"
+
+"The intrusion, madam, has been on our part. And with just that
+excuse--that we come from so far away."
+
+Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he
+stood silent beneath Sir Joshua's portrait. The housekeeper,
+agitated and mystified, fairly let herself go. "Heaven preserve
+us, Miss! It's your great-uncle's picture come to life."
+
+"I'm not mistaken then," said Miss Searle--"we must be distantly
+related." She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was
+almost anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her
+with gentle wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his
+thoughts. This then was his maiden-cousin, prospective mistress
+of these hereditary treasures. She was of some thirty-five years
+of age, taller than was then common and perhaps stouter than is
+now enjoined. She had small kind grey eyes, a considerable
+quantity of very light-brown hair and a smiling well-formed
+mouth. She was dressed in a lustreless black satin gown with a
+short train. Disposed about her neck was a blue handkerchief, and
+over this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string of amber
+beads. Her appearance was singular; she was large yet somehow
+vague, mature yet undeveloped. Her manner of addressing us spoke
+of all sorts of deep diffidences. Searle, I think, had prefigured
+to himself some proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was
+relieved at finding the lady timid and not obtrusively fair. He
+at once had an excellent tone.
+
+"We're distant cousins, I believe. I'm happy to claim a
+relationship which you're so good as to remember. I hadn't
+counted on your knowing anything about me."
+
+"Perhaps I've done wrong." And Miss Searle blushed and smiled
+anew. "But I've always known of there being people of our blood
+in America, and have often wondered and asked about them--without
+ever learning much. To-day, when this card was brought me and I
+understood a Clement Searle to be under our roof as a stranger, I
+felt I ought to do something. But, you know, I hardly knew what.
+My brother's in London. I've done what I think he would have
+done. Welcome as a cousin." And with a resolution that ceased to
+be awkward she put out her hand.
+
+"I'm welcome indeed if he would have done it half so graciously!"
+Again Searle, taking her hand, acquitted himself beautifully.
+
+"You've seen what there is, I think," Miss Searle went on.
+"Perhaps now you'll have luncheon." We followed her into a small
+breakfast-room where a deep bay window opened on the mossy flags
+of a terrace. Here, for some moments, she remained dumb and
+abashed, as if resting from a measurable effort. Searle too had
+ceased to overflow, so that I had to relieve the silence. It was
+of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and mansion,
+and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no
+impulses nor graces--scarce even any manners; she was queerly,
+almost frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an
+antique sweetness, a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so
+simple, among those complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so
+fresh, so modest and yet so placid, told of just the spacious
+leisure in which Searle and I had imagined human life to be
+steeped in such places as that. This figure was to the Sleeping
+Beauty in the Wood what a fact is to a fairy-tale, an
+interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were to our hostess
+subjects of a curiosity not cunningly veiled.
+
+"I should like so to go abroad!" she exclaimed suddenly, as if
+she meant us to take the speech for an expression of interest in
+ourselves.
+
+"Have you never been?" one of us asked.
+
+"Only once. Three years ago my brother took me to Switzerland. We
+thought it extremely beautiful. Except for that journey I've
+always lived here. I was born in this house. It's a dear old
+place indeed, and I know it well. Sometimes one wants a change."
+And on my asking her how she spent her time and what society she
+saw, "Of course it's very quiet," she went on, proceeding by
+short steps and simple statements, in the manner of a person
+called upon for the first time to analyse to that extent her
+situation. "We see very few people. I don't think there are many
+nice ones hereabouts. At least we don't know them. Our own
+family's very small. My brother cares for nothing but riding and
+books. He had a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and
+his only son, a dear little boy, who of course would have had
+everything. Do you know that that makes me the heir, as they've
+done something--I don't quite know what--to the entail? Poor old
+me! Since his loss my brother has preferred to be quite alone.
+I'm sorry he's away. But you must wait till he comes back. I
+expect him in a day or two." She talked more and more, as if our
+very strangeness led her on, about her circumstances, her
+solitude, her bad eyes, so that she couldn't read, her flowers,
+her ferns, her dogs, and the vicar, recently presented to the
+living by her brother and warranted quite safe, who had lately
+begun to light his altar candles; pausing every now and then to
+gasp in self-surprise, yet, in the quaintest way in the world,
+keeping up her story as if it were a slow rather awkward old-time
+dance, a difficult pas seul in which she would have been better
+with more practice, but of which she must complete the figure. Of
+all the old things I had seen in England this exhibited mind of
+Miss Searle's seemed to me the oldest, the most handed down and
+taken for granted; fenced and protected as it was by convention
+and precedent and usage, thoroughly acquainted with its
+subordinate place. I felt as if I were talking with the heroine
+of a last-century novel. As she talked she rested her dull eyes
+on her kinsman with wondering kindness. At last she put it to
+him: "Did you mean to go away without asking for us?"
+
+"I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined not to
+trouble you. You've shown me how unfriendly I should have been."
+
+"But you knew of the place being ours, and of our relationship?"
+
+"Just so. It was because of these things that I came down here--
+because of them almost that I came to England. I've always liked
+to think of them," said my companion.
+
+"You merely wished to look then? We don't pretend to be much to
+look at."
+
+He waited; her words were too strange. "You don't know what you
+are, Miss Searle."
+
+"You like the old place then?"
+
+Searle looked at her again in silence. "If I could only tell
+you!" he said at last.
+
+"Do tell me. You must come and stay with us."
+
+It moved him to an oddity of mirth. "Take care, take care--I
+should surprise you! I'm afraid I should bore you. I should never
+leave you."
+
+"Oh you'd get homesick--for your real home!"
+
+At this he was still more amused. "By the way, tell Miss Searle
+about our real home," he said to me. And he stepped, through the
+window, out upon the terrace, followed by two beautiful dogs, a
+setter and a young stag-hound who from the moment we came in had
+established the fondest relation with him. Miss Searle looked at
+him, while he went, as if she vaguely yearned over him; it began
+to be plain that she was interested in her exotic cousin. I
+suddenly recalled the last words I had heard spoken by my
+friend's adviser in London and which, in a very crude form, had
+reference to his making a match with this lady. If only Miss
+Searle could be induced to think of that, and if one had but the
+tact to put it in a light to her! Something assured me that her
+heart was virgin-soil, that the flower of romantic affection had
+never bloomed there. If I might just sow the seed! There seemed
+to shape itself within her the perfect image of one of the
+patient wives of old.
+
+"He has lost his heart to England," I said. "He ought to have
+been born here."
+
+"And yet he doesn't look in the least an Englishman," she still
+rather guardedly prosed.
+
+"Oh it isn't his looks, poor fellow."
+
+"Of course looks aren't everything. I never talked with a
+foreigner before; but he talks as I have fancied foreigners."
+
+"Yes, he's foreign enough."
+
+"Is he married?"
+
+"His wife's dead and he's all alone in the world."
+
+"Has he much property?"
+
+"None to speak of."
+
+"But he has means to travel."
+
+I meditated. "He has not expected to travel far," I said at last.
+"You know, he's in very poor health."
+
+"Poor gentleman! So I supposed."
+
+"But there's more of him to go on with than he thinks. He came
+here because he wanted to see your place before he dies."
+
+"Dear me--kind man!" And I imagined in the quiet eyes the hint of
+a possible tear. "And he was going away without my seeing him?"
+
+"He's very modest, you see."
+
+"He's very much the gentleman."
+
+I couldn't but smile. "He's ALL--"
+
+At this moment we heard on the terrace a loud harsh cry. "It's
+the great peacock!" said Miss Searle, stepping to the window and
+passing out while I followed her. Below us, leaning on the
+parapet, stood our appreciative friend with his arm round the
+neck of the setter. Before him on the grand walk strutted the
+familiar fowl of gardens--a splendid specimen--with ruffled neck
+and expanded tail. The other dog had apparently indulged in a
+momentary attempt to abash the gorgeous biped, but at Searle's
+summons had bounded back to the terrace and leaped upon the
+ledge, where he now stood licking his new friend's face. The
+scene had a beautiful old-time air: the peacock flaunting in the
+foreground like the genius of stately places; the broad terrace,
+which flattered an innate taste of mine for all deserted walks
+where people may have sat after heavy dinners to drink coffee in
+old Sevres and where the stiff brocade of women's dresses may
+have rustled over grass or gravel; and far around us, with one
+leafy circle melting into another, the timbered acres of the
+park. "The very beasts have made him welcome," I noted as we
+rejoined our companion.
+
+"The peacock has done for you, Mr. Searle," said his cousin,
+"what he does only for very great people. A year ago there came
+here a great person--a grand old lady--to see my brother. I don't
+think that since then he has spread his tail as wide for any one
+else--not by a dozen feathers."
+
+"It's not alone the peacock," said Searle. "Just now there came
+slipping across my path a little green lizard, the first I ever
+saw, the lizard of literature! And if you've a ghost, broad
+daylight though it be, I expect to see him here. Do you know the
+annals of your house, Miss Searle?"
+
+"Oh dear, no! You must ask my brother for all those things."
+
+"You ought to have a collection of legends and traditions. You
+ought to have loves and murders and mysteries by the roomful. I
+shall be ashamed of you if you haven't."
+
+"Oh Mr. Searle! We've always been a very well-behaved family,"
+she quite seriously pleaded. "Nothing out of the way has ever
+happened, I think."
+
+"Nothing out of the way? Oh that won't do! We've managed better
+than that in America. Why I myself!"--and he looked at her
+ruefully enough, but enjoying too his idea that he might embody
+the social scandal or point to the darkest drama of the Searles.
+"Suppose I should turn out a better Searle than you--better than
+you nursed here in romance and extravagance? Come, don't
+disappoint me. You've some history among you all, you've some
+poetry, you've some accumulation of legend. I've been famished
+all my days for these things. Don't you understand? Ah you can't
+understand! Tell me," he rambled on, "something tremendous. When
+I think of what must have happened here; of the lovers who must
+have strolled on this terrace and wandered under the beeches, of
+all the figures and passions and purposes that must have haunted
+these walls! When I think of the births and deaths, the joys and
+sufferings, the young hopes and the old regrets, the rich
+experience of life--!" He faltered a moment with the increase of
+his agitation. His humour of dismay at a threat of the
+commonplace in the history he felt about him had turned to a
+deeper reaction. I began to fear however that he was really
+losing his head. He went on with a wilder play. "To see it all
+called up there before me, if the Devil alone could do it I'd
+make a bargain with the Devil! Ah Miss Searle," he cried, "I'm a
+most unhappy man!"
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear!" she almost wailed while I turned half away.
+
+"Look at that window, that dear little window!" I turned back to
+see him point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved
+against the purple brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and
+curtained with ivy.
+
+"It's my little room," she said.
+
+"Of course it's a woman's room. Think of all the dear faces--all
+of them so mild and yet so proud--that have looked out of that
+lattice, and of all the old-time women's lives whose principal
+view of the world has been this quiet park! Every one of them was
+a cousin of mine. And you, dear lady, you're one of them yet."
+With which he marched toward her and took her large white hand.
+She surrendered it, blushing to her eyes and pressing her other
+hand to her breast. "You're a woman of the past. You're nobly
+simple. It has been a romance to see you. It doesn't matter what
+I say to you. You didn't know me yesterday, you'll not know me
+to-morrow. Let me to-day do a mad sweet thing. Let me imagine in
+you the spirit of all the dead women who have trod the terrace-
+flags that lie here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement of a
+church. Let me say I delight in you!"--he raised her hand to his
+lips. She gently withdrew it and for a moment averted her face.
+Meeting her eyes the next instant I saw the tears had come. The
+Sleeping Beauty was awake.
+
+There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue was suddenly
+presented by the appearance of the butler bearing a letter. "A
+telegram, Miss," he announced.
+
+"Oh what shall I do?" cried Miss Searle. "I can't open a
+telegram. Cousin, help me."
+
+Searle took the missive, opened it and read aloud: "I shall be
+home to dinner. Keep the American."
+
+
+
+III
+
+"KEEP the American!" Miss Searle, in compliance with the
+injunction conveyed in her brother's telegram (with something
+certainly of telegraphic curtness), lost no time in expressing
+the pleasure it would give her that our friend should remain.
+"Really you must," she said; and forthwith repaired to the house-
+keeper to give orders for the preparation of a room.
+
+"But how in the world did he know of my being here?" my companion
+put to me.
+
+I answered that he had probably heard from his solicitor of the
+other's visit. "Mr. Simmons and that gentleman must have had
+another interview since your arrival in England. Simmons, for
+reasons of his own, has made known to him your journey to this
+neighbourhood, and Mr. Searle, learning this, has immediately
+taken for granted that you've formally presented yourself to his
+sister. He's hospitably inclined and wishes her to do the proper
+thing by you. There may even," I went on, "be more in it than
+that. I've my little theory that he's the very phoenix of
+usurpers, that he has been very much struck with what the experts
+have had to say for you, and that he wishes to have the
+originality of making over to you your share--so limited after
+all--of the estate."
+
+"I give it up!" my friend mused. "Come what come will!"
+
+"You, of course," said Miss Searle, reappearing and turning to
+me, "are included in my brother's invitation. I've told them to
+see about a room for you. Your luggage shall immediately be sent
+for."
+
+It was arranged that I in person should be driven over to our
+little inn and that I should return with our effects in time to
+meet Mr. Searle at dinner. On my arrival several hours later I
+was immediately conducted to my room. The servant pointed out to
+me that it communicated by a door and a private passage with that
+of my fellow visitor. I made my way along this passage--a low
+narrow corridor with a broad latticed casement through which
+there streamed upon a series of grotesquely sculptured oaken
+closets and cupboards the vivid animating glow of the western sun
+--knocked at his door and, getting no answer, opened it. In an
+armchair by the open window sat my friend asleep, his arms and
+legs relaxed and head dropped on his breast. It was a great
+relief to see him rest thus from his rhapsodies, and I watched
+him for some moments before waking him. There was a faint glow of
+colour in his cheek and a light expressive parting of his lips,
+something nearer to ease and peace than I had yet seen in him. It
+was almost happiness, it was almost health. I laid my hand on his
+arm and gently shook it. He opened his eyes, gazed at me a
+moment, vaguely recognised me, then closed them again. "Let me
+dream, let me dream!"
+
+"What are you dreaming about?"
+
+A moment passed before his answer came. "About a tall woman in a
+quaint black dress, with yellow hair and a sweet, sweet smile,
+and a soft low delicious voice! I'm in love with her."
+
+"It's better to see her than to dream about her," I said. "Get up
+and dress; then we'll go down to dinner and meet her."
+
+"Dinner--dinner--?" And he gradually opened his eyes again. "Yes,
+upon my word I shall dine!"
+
+"Oh you're all right!" I declared for the twentieth time as he
+rose to his feet. "You'll live to bury Mr. Simmons." He told me
+he had spent the hours of my absence with Miss Searle--they had
+strolled together half over the place. "You must be very
+intimate," I smiled.
+
+"She's intimate with ME. Goodness knows what rigmarole I've
+treated her to!" They had parted an hour ago; since when, he
+believed, her brother had arrived.
+
+The slow-fading twilight was still in the great drawing-room when
+we came down. The housekeeper had told us this apartment was
+rarely used, there being others, smaller and more convenient, for
+the same needs. It seemed now, however, to be occupied in my
+comrade's honour. At the furthest end, rising to the roof like a
+royal tomb in a cathedral, was a great chimney-piece of chiselled
+white marble, yellowed by time, in which a light fire was
+crackling. Before the fire stood a small short man, with his
+hands behind him; near him was Miss Searle, so transformed by her
+dress that at first I scarcely knew her. There was in our
+entrance and reception something remarkably chilling and solemn.
+We moved in silence up the long room; Mr. Searle advanced slowly,
+a dozen steps, to meet us; his sister stood motionless. I was
+conscious of her masking her visage with a large white tinselled
+fan, and that her eyes, grave and enlarged, watched us intently
+over the top of it. The master of Lackley grasped in silence the
+proffered hand of his kinsman and eyed him from head to foot,
+suppressing, I noted, a start of surprise at his resemblance to
+Sir Joshua's portrait. "This is a happy day." And then turning to
+me with an odd little sharp stare: "My cousin's friend is my
+friend." Miss Searle lowered her fan.
+
+The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle's appearance was his
+very limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of
+his sister. The second was the preternatural redness of his hair
+and beard. They intermingled over his ears and surrounded his
+head like a huge lurid nimbus. His face was pale and attenuated,
+the face of a scholar, a dilettante, a comparer of points and
+texts, a man who lives in a library bending over books and prints
+and medals. At a distance it might have passed for smooth and
+rather blankly composed; but on a nearer view it revealed a
+number of wrinkles, sharply etched and scratched, of a singularly
+aged and refined effect. It was the complexion of a man of sixty.
+His nose was arched and delicate, identical almost with the nose
+of my friend. His eyes, large and deep-set, had a kind of auburn
+glow, the suggestion of a keen metal red-hot--or, more plainly,
+were full of temper and spirit. Imagine this physiognomy--grave
+and solemn, grotesquely solemn, in spite of the bushy brightness
+which made a sort of frame for it--set in motion by a queer,
+quick, defiant, perfunctory, preoccupied smile, and you will have
+an imperfect notion of the remarkable presence of our host;
+something better worth seeing and knowing, I perceived as I quite
+breathlessly took him in, than anything we had yet encountered.
+How thoroughly I had entered into sympathy with my poor picked-up
+friend, and how effectually I had associated my sensibilities
+with his own, I had not suspected till, within the short five
+minutes before the signal for dinner, I became aware, without his
+giving me the least hint, of his placing himself on the
+defensive. To neither of us was Mr. Searle sympathetic. I might
+have guessed from her attitude that his sister entered into our
+thoughts. A marked change had been wrought in her since the
+morning; during the hour, indeed--as I read in the light of the
+wondering glance he cast at her--that had elapsed since her
+parting with her cousin. She had not yet recovered from some
+great agitation. Her face was pale and she had clearly been
+crying. These notes of trouble gave her a new and quite perverse
+dignity, which was further enhanced by something complimentary
+and commemorative in her dress.
+
+Whether it was taste or whether it was accident I know not; but
+the amiable creature, as she stood there half in the cool
+twilight, half in the arrested glow of the fire as it spent
+itself in the vastness of its marble cave, was a figure for a
+painter. She was habited in some faded splendour of sea-green
+crape and silk, a piece of millinery which, though it must have
+witnessed a number of dull dinners, preserved still a festive
+air. Over her white shoulders she wore an ancient web of the most
+precious and venerable lace and about her rounded throat a single
+series of large pearls. I went in with her to dinner, and Mr.
+Searle, following with my friend, took his arm, as the latter
+afterwards told me, and pretended jocosely to conduct him. As
+dinner proceeded the feeling grew within me that a drama had
+begun to be played in which the three persons before me were
+actors--each of a really arduous part. The character allotted to
+my friend, however, was certainly the least easy to represent
+with effect, though I overflowed with the desire that he should
+acquit himself to his honour. I seemed to see him urge his faded
+faculties to take their cue and perform. The poor fellow tried to
+do himself credit more seriously than ever in his old best days.
+With Miss Searle, credulous passive and pitying, he had finally
+flung aside all vanity and propriety and shown the bottom of his
+fantastic heart. But with our host there might be no talking of
+nonsense nor taking of liberties; there and then, if ever, sat a
+consummate conservative, breathing the fumes of hereditary
+privilege and security. For an hour, accordingly, I saw my poor
+protege attempt, all in pain, to meet a new decorum. He set
+himself the task of appearing very American, in order that his
+appreciation of everything Mr. Searle represented might seem
+purely disinterested. What his kinsman had expected him to be I
+know not; but I made Mr. Searle out as annoyed, in spite of his
+exaggerated urbanity, at finding him so harmless. Our host was
+not the man to show his hand, but I think his best card had been
+a certain implicit confidence that so provincial a parasite would
+hardly have good manners.
+
+He led the conversation to the country we had left; rather as if
+a leash had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half-
+domesticated animal the tendency of whose movements had to be
+recognised. He spoke of it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien
+to the British orbit, lately proclaimed to have the admixture of
+atmospheric gases required to support animal life, but not, save
+under cover of a liberal afterthought, to be admitted into one's
+regular conception of things. I, for my part, felt nothing but
+regret that the spheric smoothness of his universe should be
+disfigured by the extrusion even of such inconsiderable particles
+as ourselves.
+
+"I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over
+there," Mr. Searle mentioned; "but had scarcely followed it more
+than you pretend to pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree
+may drop, on the other side of your wall, in your neighbour's
+garden. There was a man I knew at Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a
+decent fellow too; he and I were rather cronies; I think he
+afterwards went to the Middle States. They'll be, I suppose,
+about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that great-uncle
+of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he never
+got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make
+one fancy he DID get there and that you've kept him alive by one
+of those beastly processes--I think you have 'em over there: what
+do you call it, 'putting up' things? If you're he you've not done
+a wise thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind
+him. There's a ghost who comes sobbing about the house every
+now and then, the ghost of one to whom he did a wrong."
+
+"Oh mercy ON us!" cried Miss Searle in simple horror.
+
+"Of course YOU know nothing of such things," he rather dryly
+allowed. "You're too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of
+ghosts."
+
+"I'm sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a
+ghost," said my friend, the light of his previous eagerness
+playing up into his eyes. "Why does it sob? I feel as if that
+were what we've come above all to learn."
+
+Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment gaugingly; he held the
+balance as to measure his resources. He wished to do justice to
+his theme. With the long finger-nails of his left hand nervously
+playing against the tinkling crystal of his wineglass and his
+conscious eyes betraying that, small and strange as he sat there,
+he knew himself, to his pleasure and advantage, remarkably
+impressive, he dropped into our untutored minds the sombre legend
+of his house. "Mr. Clement Searle, from all I gather, was a young
+man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was left
+a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the elder
+and the more promising. She educated him with the greatest
+affection and care. Of course when he came to manhood she wished
+him to marry well. His means were quite sufficient to enable him
+to overlook the want of money in his wife; and Mrs. Searle
+selected a young lady who possessed, as she conceived, every good
+gift save a fortune--a fine proud handsome girl, the daughter of
+an old friend, an old lover I suspect, of her own. Clement,
+however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was as
+yet unprepared to choose. The young lady opened upon him in vain
+the battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her
+cause. Clement remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle
+had a character which appears to have gone out of fashion in my
+family nowadays; she was a great manager, a maitresse-femme. A
+proud passionate imperious woman, she had had immense cares and
+ever so many law-suits; they had sharpened her temper and her
+will. She suspected that her son's affections had another object,
+and this object she began to hate. Irritated by his stubborn
+defiance of her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more she
+watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he
+loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the
+place all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the
+rashness of an angry woman, she threatened to bring the young
+lady of her choice--who, by the way, seems to have been no
+shrinking blossom--to stay in the house. A stormy scene was the
+result. He threatened that if she did so he would leave the
+country and sail for America. She probably disbelieved him; she
+knew him to be weak, but she overrated his weakness. At all
+events the rejected one arrived and Clement Searle departed. On a
+dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two women,
+desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this big house,
+mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on
+Christmas Eve, in the midst of a great snowstorm long famous in
+the country, something happened that quickened their bitterness.
+A young woman, battered and chilled by the storm, gained entrance
+to the house and, making her way into the presence of the
+mistress and her guest, poured out her tale. She was a poor
+curate's daughter out of some little hole in Gloucestershire.
+Clement Searle had loved her--loved her all too well! She had
+been turned out in wrath from her father's house; his mother at
+least might pity her--if not for herself then for the child she
+was soon to bring forth. Hut the poor girl had been a second time
+too trustful. The women, in scorn, in horror, with blows
+possibly, drove her forth again into the storm. In the storm she
+wandered and in the deep snow she died. Her lover, as you know,
+perished in that hard winter weather at sea; the news came to his
+mother late, but soon enough. We're haunted by the curate's
+daughter!"
+
+Mr. Searle retailed this anecdote with infinite taste and point,
+the happiest art; when he ceased there was a pause of some
+moments. "Ah well we may be!" Miss Searle then mournfully
+murmured.
+
+Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. "Of course, you know"--with
+which he began to blush violently--"I should be sorry to claim
+any identity with the poor devil my faithless namesake. But I
+should be immensely gratified if the young lady's spirit,
+deceived by my resemblance, were to mistake me for her cruel
+lover. She's welcome to the comfort of it. What one can do in the
+case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost haunt a ghost? I AM a
+ghost!"
+
+Mr. Searle stared a moment and then had a subtle sneer. "I could
+almost believe you are!"
+
+"Oh brother--and cousin!" cried Miss Searle with the gentlest yet
+most appealing dignity. "How can you talk so horribly?"
+The horrible talk, however, evidently possessed a potent magic
+for my friend; and his imagination, checked a while by the
+influence of his kinsman, began again to lead him a dance. From
+this moment he ceased to steer his frail bark, to care what he
+said or how he said it, so long as he expressed his passionate
+appreciation of the scene around him. As he kept up this strain I
+ceased even secretly to wish he wouldn't. I have wondered since
+that I shouldn't have been annoyed by the way he reverted
+constantly to himself. But a great frankness, for the time, makes
+its own law and a great passion its own channel. There was
+moreover an irresponsible indescribable effect of beauty in
+everything his lips uttered. Free alike from adulation and from
+envy, the essence of his discourse was a divine apprehension, a
+romantic vision free as the flight of Ariel, of the poetry of his
+companions' situation and their contrasted general
+irresponsiveness.
+
+"How does the look of age come?" he suddenly broke out at
+dessert. "Does it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded,
+unmeasured? Or do you woo it and set baits and traps for it, and
+watch it like the dawning brownness of a meerschaum pipe, and
+make it fast, when it appears, just where it peeps out, and light
+a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to it daily? Or do you
+forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it settling
+and deepening about you as irresistible as fate?"
+
+"What the deuce is the man talking about?" said the smile of our
+host.
+
+"I found a little grey hair this morning," Miss Searle
+incoherently prosed.
+
+"Well then I hope you paid it every respect!" cried her visitor.
+
+"I looked at it for a long time in my hand-glass," she answered
+with more presence of mind.
+
+"Miss Searle can for many years to come afford to be amused at
+grey hairs," I interposed in the hope of some greater ease.
+It had its effect. "Ten years from last Thursday I shall be
+forty-four," she almost comfortably smiled.
+
+"Well, that's just what I am," said Searle. "If I had only come
+here ten years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the
+feast, but I should have had less appetite. I needed first to get
+famished."
+
+"Oh why did you wait for that?" his entertainer asked. "To think
+of these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!" At the
+vision of which waste and loss Mr. Searle had a fine shrill
+laugh.
+
+"Well," my friend explained, "I always had a notion--a stupid
+vulgar notion if there ever was one--that to come abroad properly
+one had to have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At
+last I came with my empty pot!"
+
+Mr. Searle had a wait for delicacy, but he proceeded. "You're
+reduced, you're--a--straitened?"
+
+Our companion's very breath blew away the veil. "Reduced to
+nothing. Straitened to the clothes on my back!"
+
+"You don't say so!" said Mr. Searle with a large vague gasp.
+"Well--well--well!" he added in a voice which might have meant
+everything or nothing; and then, in his whimsical way, went on to
+finish a glass of wine. His searching eye, as he drank, met mine,
+and for a moment we each rather deeply sounded the other, to the
+effect no doubt of a slight embarrassment. "And you," he said by
+way of carrying this off--"how about YOUR wardrobe?"
+
+"Oh his!" cried my friend; "his wardrobe's immense. He could
+dress up a regiment!" He had drunk more champagne--I admit that
+the champagne was good--than was from any point of view to have
+been desired. He was rapidly drifting beyond any tacit dissuasion
+of mine. He was feverish and rash, and all attempt to direct
+would now simply irritate him. As we rose from the table he
+caught my troubled look. Passing his arm for a moment into mine,
+"This is the great night!" he strangely and softly said; "the
+night and the crisis that will settle me."
+
+Mr. Searle had caused the whole lower portion of the house to be
+thrown open and a multitude of lights to be placed in convenient
+and effective positions. Such a marshalled wealth of ancient
+candlesticks and flambeaux I had never beheld. Niched against the
+dusky wainscots, casting great luminous circles upon the pendent
+stiffness of sombre tapestries, enhancing and completing with
+admirable effect the variety and mystery of the great ancient
+house, they seemed to people the wide rooms, as our little group
+passed slowly from one to another, with a dim expectant presence.
+We had thus, in spite of everything, a wonderful hour of it. Mr.
+Searle at once assumed the part of cicerone, and--I had not
+hitherto done him justice--Mr. Searle became almost agreeable.
+While I lingered behind with his sister he walked in advance with
+his kinsman. It was as if he had said: "Well, if you want the old
+place you shall have it--so far as the impression goes!" He
+spared us no thrill--I had almost said no pang--of that
+experience. Carrying a tall silver candlestick in his left hand,
+he raised it and lowered it and cast the light hither and
+thither, upon pictures and hangings and carvings and cornices. He
+knew his house to perfection. He touched upon a hundred
+traditions and memories, he threw off a cloud of rich reference
+to its earlier occupants. He threw off again, in his easy elegant
+way, a dozen--happily lighter--anecdotes. His relative attended
+with a brooding deference. Miss Searle and I meanwhile were not
+wholly silent.
+
+"I suppose that by this time you and your cousin are almost old
+friends," I remarked.
+
+She trifled a moment with her fan and then raised her kind small
+eyes. "Old friends--yet at the same time strangely new! My
+cousin, my cousin"--and her voice lingered on the word--"it seems
+so strange to call him my cousin after thinking these many years
+that I've no one in the world but my brother. But he's really so
+very odd!"
+
+"It's not so much he as--well, as his situation, that deserves
+that name," I tried to reason.
+
+"I'm so sorry for his situation. I wish I could help it in some
+way. He interests me so much." She gave a sweet-sounding sigh. "I
+wish I could have known him sooner--and better. He tells me he's
+but the shadow of what he used to be."
+
+I wondered if he had been consciously practising on the
+sensibilities of this gentle creature. If he had I believed he
+had gained his point. But his position had in fact become to my
+sense so precarious that I hardly ventured to be glad. "His
+better self just now seems again to be taking shape," I said.
+"It will have been a good deed on your part if you help to
+restore him to all he ought to be."
+
+She met my idea blankly. "Dear me, what can I do?"
+
+"Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him love you. I dare
+say you see in him now much to pity and to wonder at. But let him
+simply enjoy a while the grateful sense of your nearness and
+dearness. He'll be a better and stronger man for it, and then you
+can love him, you can esteem him, without restriction."
+
+She fairly frowned for helplessness. "It's a hard part for poor
+stupid me to play!"
+
+Her almost infantine innocence left me no choice but to be
+absolutely frank. "Did you ever play any part at all?"
+
+She blushed as if I had been reproaching her with her
+insignificance. "Never! I think I've hardly lived."
+
+"You've begun to live now perhaps. You've begun to care for
+something else than your old-fashioned habits. Pardon me if I
+seem rather meddlesome; you know we Americans are very rough and
+ready. It's a great moment. I wish you joy!"
+
+"I could almost believe you're laughing at me. I feel more
+trouble than joy."
+
+"Why do you feel trouble?"
+
+She paused with her eyes fixed on our companions. "My cousin's
+arrival's a great disturbance," she said at last.
+
+"You mean you did wrong in coming to meet him? In that case the
+fault's mine. He had no intention of giving you the opportunity."
+
+"I certainly took too much on myself. But I can't find it in my
+heart to regret it. I never shall regret it! I did the only thing
+I COULD, heaven forgive me!"
+
+"Heaven bless you, Miss Searle! Is any harm to come of it? I did
+the evil; let me bear the brunt!"
+
+She shook her head gravely. "You don't know my brother!"
+
+"The sooner I master the subject the better then," I said. I
+couldn't help relieving myself--at least by the tone of my voice
+--of the antipathy with which, decidedly, this gentleman had
+inspired me. "Not perhaps that we should get on so well
+together!" After which, as she turned away, "Are you VERY much
+afraid of him?" I added.
+
+She gave me a shuddering sidelong glance. "He's looking at me!"
+
+He was placed with his back to us, holding a large Venetian hand-
+mirror, framed in chiselled silver, which he had taken from a
+shelf of antiquities, just at such an angle that he caught the
+reflexion of his sister's person. It was evident that I too was
+under his attention, and  was resolved I wouldn't be suspected
+for nothing. "Miss Searle," I said with urgency, "promise me
+something."
+
+She turned upon me with a start and a look that seemed to beg me
+to spare her. "Oh don't ask me--please don't!" It was as if she
+were standing on the edge of a place where the ground had
+suddenly fallen away, and had been called upon to make a leap. I
+felt retreat was impossible, however, and that it was the greater
+kindness to assist her to jump.
+
+"Promise me," I repeated.
+
+Still with her eyes she protested. "Oh what a dreadful day!" she
+cried at last.
+
+"Promise me to let him speak to you alone if he should ask you--
+any wish you may suspect on your brother's part notwithstanding."
+She coloured deeply. "You mean he has something so particular to
+say?"
+
+"Something so particular!"
+
+"Poor cousin!"
+
+"Well, poor cousin! But promise me."
+
+"I promise," she said, and moved away across the long room and
+out of the door.
+
+"You're in time to hear the most delightful story," Searle began
+to me as I rejoined him and his host. They were standing before
+an old sombre portrait of a lady in the dress of Queen Anne's
+time, whose ill-painted flesh-tints showed livid, in the candle-
+light, against her dark drapery and background. "This is Mrs.
+Margaret Searle--a sort of Beatrix Esmond--qui se passait ses
+fantaisies. She married a paltry Frenchman, a penniless fiddler,
+in the teeth of her whole family. Pretty Mrs. Margaret, you must
+have been a woman of courage! Upon my word, she looks like Miss
+Searle! But pray go on. What came of it all?"
+
+Our companion watched him with an air of distaste for his
+boisterous homage and of pity for his crude imagination. But he
+took up the tale with an effective dryness: "I found a year ago,
+in a box of very old papers, a letter from the lady in question
+to a certain Cynthia Searle, her elder sister. It was dated from
+Paris and dreadfully ill-spelled. It contained a most passionate
+appeal for pecuniary assistance. She had just had a baby, she was
+starving and dreadfully neglected by her husband--she cursed the
+day she had left England. It was a most dismal production. I
+never heard she found means to return."
+
+"So much for marrying a Frenchman!" I said sententiously.
+
+Our host had one of his waits. "This is the only lady of the
+family who ever was taken in by an adventurer."
+
+"Does Miss Searle know her history?" asked my friend with a stare
+at the rounded whiteness of the heroine's cheek.
+
+"Miss Searle knows nothing!" said our host with expression.
+
+"She shall know at least the tale of Mrs. Margaret," their guest
+returned; and he walked rapidly away in search of her.
+
+Mr. Searle and I pursued our march through the lighted rooms.
+"You've found a cousin with a vengeance," I doubtless awkwardly
+enough laughed.
+
+"Ah a vengeance?" my entertainer stiffly repeated.
+
+"I mean that he takes as keen an interest in your annals and
+possessions as yourself."
+
+"Oh exactly so! He tells me he's a bad invalid," he added in a
+moment. "I should never have supposed it."
+
+"Within the past few hours he's a changed man. Your beautiful
+house, your extreme kindness, have refreshed him immensely."
+Mr. Searle uttered the vague ejaculation with which self-
+conscious Britons so often betray the concussion of any especial
+courtesy of speech. But he followed this by a sudden odd glare
+and the sharp declaration: "I'm an honest man!" I was quite
+prepared to assent; but he went on with a fury of frankness, as
+if it were the first time in his life he had opened himself to
+any one, as if the process were highly disagreeable and he were
+hurrying through it as a task. "An honest man, mind you! I know
+nothing about Mr. Clement Searle! I never expected to see him. He
+has been to me a--a--!" And here he paused to select a word which
+should vividly enough express what, for good or for ill, his
+kinsman represented. "He has been to me an Amazement! I've no
+doubt he's a most amiable man. You'll not deny, however, that
+he's a very extraordinary sort of person. I'm sorry he's ill. I'm
+sorry he's poor. He's my fiftieth cousin. Well and good. I'm an
+honest man. He shall not have it to say that he wasn't received
+at my house."
+
+"He too, thank heaven, is an honest man!" I smiled.
+
+"Why the devil then," cried Mr. Searle, turning almost fiercely
+on me, "has he put forward this underhand claim to my property?"
+
+The question, quite ringing out, flashed backward a gleam of
+light upon the demeanour of our host and the suppressed agitation
+of his sister. In an instant the jealous gentleman revealed
+itself. For a moment I was so surprised and scandalised at the
+directness of his attack that I lacked words to reply. As soon as
+he had spoken indeed Mr. Searle appeared to feel he had been
+wanting in form. "Pardon me," he began afresh, "if I speak of
+this matter with heat. But I've been more disgusted than I can
+say to hear, as I heard this morning from my solicitor, of the
+extraordinary proceedings of Mr. Clement Searle. Gracious
+goodness, sir, for what does the man take me? He pretends to the
+Lord knows what fantastic admiration for my place. Let him then
+show his respect for it by not taking too many liberties! Let
+him, with his high-flown parade of loyalty, imagine a tithe of
+what _I_ feel! I love my estate; it's my passion, my conscience,
+my life! Am I to divide it up at this time of day with a beggarly
+foreigner--a man without means, without appearance, without
+proof, a pretender, an adventurer, a chattering mountebank? I
+thought America boasted having lands for all men! Upon my soul,
+sir, I've never been so shocked in my life."
+
+I paused for some moments before speaking, to allow his passion
+fully to expend itself and to flicker up again if it chose; for
+so far as I was concerned in the whole awkward matter I but
+wanted to deal with him discreetly. "Your apprehensions, sir," I
+said at last, "your not unnatural surprise, perhaps, at the
+candour of our interest, have acted too much on your nerves.
+You're attacking a man of straw, a creature of unworthy illusion;
+though I'm sadly afraid you've wounded a man of spirit and
+conscience. Either my friend has no valid claim on your estate,
+in which case your agitation is superfluous; or he HAS a valid
+claim--"
+
+Mr. Searle seized my arm and glared at me; his pale face paler
+still with the horror of my suggestion, his great eyes of alarm
+glowing and his strange red hair erect and quivering. "A valid
+claim!" he shouted. "Let him try it--let him bring it into
+court!"
+
+We had emerged into the great hall and stood facing the main
+doorway. The door was open into the portico, through the stone
+archway of which I saw the garden glitter in the blue light of a
+full moon. As the master of the house uttered the words I have
+just repeated my companion came slowly up into the porch from
+without, bareheaded, bright in the outer moonlight, dark in the
+shadow of the archway, and bright again in the lamplight at the
+entrance of the hall. As he crossed the threshold the butler made
+an appearance at the head of the staircase on our left, faltering
+visibly a moment at sight of Mr. Searle; after which, noting my
+friend, he gravely descended. He bore in his hand a small silver
+tray. On the tray, gleaming in the light of the suspended lamp,
+lay a folded note. Clement Searle came forward, staring a little
+and startled, I think, by some quick nervous prevision of a
+catastrophe. The butler applied the match to the train. He
+advanced to my fellow visitor, all solemnly, with the offer of
+his missive. Mr. Searle made a movement as if to spring forward,
+but controlled himself. "Tottenham!" he called in a strident
+voice.
+
+"Yes, sir!" said Tottenham, halting.
+
+"Stand where you are. For whom is that note?"
+
+"For Mr. Clement Searle," said the butler, staring straight
+before him and dissociating himself from everything.
+
+"Who gave it to you?"
+
+"Mrs. Horridge, sir." This personage, I afterwards learned, was
+our friend the housekeeper.
+
+"Who gave it Mrs. Horridge?"
+
+There was on Tottenham's part just an infinitesimal pause before
+replying.
+
+"My dear sir," broke in Searle, his equilibrium, his ancient
+ease, completely restored by the crisis, "isn't that rather my
+business?"
+
+"What happens in my house is my business, and detestable things
+seem to be happening." Our host, it was clear, now so furiously
+detested them that I was afraid he would snatch the bone of
+contention without more ceremony. "Bring me that thing!" he
+cried; on which Tottenham stiffly moved to obey.
+
+"Really this is too much!" broke out my companion, affronted and
+helpless.
+
+So indeed it struck me, and before Mr. Searle had time to take
+the note I possessed myself of it. "If you've no consideration
+for your sister let a stranger at least act for her." And I tore
+the disputed object into a dozen pieces.
+
+"In the name of decency, what does this horrid business mean?" my
+companion quavered.
+
+Mr. Searle was about to open fire on him, but at that moment our
+hostess appeared on the staircase, summoned evidently by our
+high-pitched contentious voices. She had exchanged her dinner-
+dress for a dark wrapper, removed her ornaments and begun to
+disarrange her hair, a thick tress of which escaped from the
+comb. She hurried down with a pale questioning face. Feeling
+distinctly that, for ourselves, immediate departure was in the
+air, and divining Mr. Tottenham to be a person of a few deep-
+seated instincts and of much latent energy, I seized the
+opportunity to request him, sotto voce, to send a carriage to the
+door without delay. "And put up our things," I added.
+
+Our host rushed at his sister and grabbed the white wrist that
+escaped from the loose sleeve of her dress. "What was in that
+note?" he quite hissed at her.
+
+Miss Searle looked first at its scattered fragments and then at
+her cousin. "Did you read it?"
+
+"No, but I thank you for it!" said Searle.
+
+Her eyes, for an instant, communicated with his own as I think
+they had never, never communicated with any other source of
+meaning; then she transferred them to her brother's face, where
+the sense went out of them, only to leave a dull sad patience.
+But there was something even in this flat humility that seemed to
+him to mock him, so that he flushed crimson with rage and spite
+and flung her away. "You always were an idiot! Go to bed."
+
+In poor Searle's face as well the gathered serenity had been by
+this time all blighted and distorted and the reflected brightness
+of his happy day turned to blank confusion. "Have I been dealing
+these three hours with a madman?" he woefully cried.
+
+"A madman, yes, if you will! A man mad with the love of his home
+and the sense of its stability. I've held my tongue till now, but
+you've been too much for me. Who the devil are you, and what and
+why and whence?" the terrible little man continued. "From what
+paradise of fools do you come that you fancy I shall make over to
+you, for the asking, a part of my property and my life? I'm
+forsooth, you ridiculous person, to go shares with you? Prove
+your preposterous claim! There isn't THAT in it!" And he kicked
+one of the bits of paper on the floor.
+
+Searle received this broadside gaping. Then turning away he went
+and seated himself on a bench against the wall and rubbed his
+forehead amazedly. I looked at my watch and listened for the
+wheels of our carriage.
+
+But his kinsman was too launched to pull himself up. "Wasn't it
+enough that you should have plotted against my rights? Need you
+have come into my very house to intrigue with my sister?"
+
+My friend put his two hands to his face. "Oh, oh, oh!" he groaned
+while Miss Searle crossed rapidly and dropped on her knees at his
+side.
+
+"Go to bed, you fool!" shrieked her brother.
+
+"Dear cousin," she said, "it's cruel you're to have so to think
+of us!"
+
+"Oh I shall think of YOU as you'd like!" He laid a hand on her
+head.
+
+"I believe you've done nothing wrong," she brought bravely out.
+
+"I've done what I could," Mr. Searle went on--"but it's arrant
+folly to pretend to friendship when this abomination lies between
+us. You were welcome to my meat and my wine, but I wonder you
+could swallow them. The sight spoiled MY appetite!" cried the
+master of Lackley with a laugh. "Proceed with your trumpery case!
+My people in London are instructed and prepared."
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if your case had improved a good deal since
+you gave it up," I was moved to observe to Searle.
+
+"Oho! you don't feign ignorance then?" and our insane entertainer
+shook his shining head at me. "It's very kind of you to give it
+up! Perhaps you'll also give up my sister!"
+
+Searle sat staring in distress at his adversary. "Ah miserable
+man--I thought we had become such beautiful friends."
+
+"Boh, you hypocrite!" screamed our host.
+
+Searle seemed not to hear him. "Am I seriously expected," he
+slowly and painfully pursued, "to defend myself against the
+accusation of any real indelicacy--to prove I've done nothing
+underhand or impudent? Think what you please!" And he rose, with
+an effort, to his feet. "I know what YOU think!" he added to Miss
+Searle.
+
+The wheels of the carriage resounded on the gravel, and at the
+same moment a footman descended with our two portmanteaux. Mr.
+Tottenham followed him with our hats and coats.
+
+"Good God," our host broke out again, "you're not going away?"--
+an ejaculation that, after all that had happened, had the
+grandest comicality. "Bless my soul," he then remarked as
+artlessly, "of course you're going!"
+
+"It's perhaps well," said Miss Searle with a great effort,
+inexpressibly touching in one for whom great efforts were visibly
+new and strange, "that I should tell you what my poor little note
+contained."
+
+"That matter of your note, madam," her brother interrupted, "you
+and I will settle together!"
+
+"Let me imagine all sorts of kind things!" Searle beautifully
+pleaded.
+
+"Ah too much has been imagined!" she answered simply. "It was
+only a word of warning. It was to tell you to go. I knew
+something painful was coming."
+
+He took his hat. "The pains and the pleasures of this day," he
+said to his kinsman, "I shall equally never forget. Knowing you,"
+and he offered his hand to Miss Searle, "has been the pleasure of
+pleasures. I hoped something more might have come of it."
+
+"A monstrous deal too much has come of it!" Mr. Searle
+irrepressibly declared.
+
+His departing guest looked at him mildly, almost benignantly,
+from head to foot, and then with closed eyes and some collapse of
+strength, "I'm afraid so, I can't stand more," he went on. I gave
+him my arm and we crossed the threshold. As we passed out I heard
+Miss Searle break into loud weeping.
+
+"We shall hear from each other yet, I take it!" her brother
+pursued, harassing our retreat.
+
+My friend stopped, turning round on him fiercely. "You very
+impossible man!" he cried in his face.
+
+"Do you mean to say you'll not prosecute?" Mr. Searle kept it up.
+"I shall force you to prosecute! I shall drag you into court, and
+you shall be beaten--beaten--beaten!" Which grim reiteration
+followed us on our course.
+
+We drove of course to the little wayside inn from which we had
+departed in the morning so unencumbered, in all broad England,
+either with enemies or friends. My companion, as the carriage
+rolled along, seemed overwhelmed and exhausted. "What a beautiful
+horrible dream!" he confusedly wailed. "What a strange awakening!
+What a long long day! What a hideous scene! Poor me! Poor woman!"
+When we had resumed possession of our two little neighbouring
+rooms I asked him whether Miss Searle's note had been the result
+of anything that had passed between them on his going to rejoin
+her. "I found her on the terrace," he said, "walking restlessly
+up and down in the moonlight. I was greatly excited--I hardly
+know what I said. I asked her, I think, if she knew the story of
+Margaret Searle. She seemed frightened and troubled, and she used
+just the words her brother had used--'I know nothing.' For the
+moment, somehow, I felt as a man drunk. I stood before her and
+told her, with great emphasis, how poor Margaret had married a
+beggarly foreigner--all in obedience to her heart and in defiance
+to her family. As I talked the sheeted moonlight seemed to close
+about us, so that we stood there in a dream, in a world quite
+detached. She grew younger, prettier, more attractive--I found
+myself talking all kinds of nonsense. Before I knew it I had gone
+very far. I was taking her hand and calling her 'Margaret, dear
+Margaret!' She had said it was impossible, that she could do
+nothing, that she was a fool, a child, a slave. Then with a
+sudden sense--it was odd how it came over me there--of the
+reality of my connexion with the place, I spoke of my claim
+against the estate. 'It exists,' I declared, 'but I've given it
+up. Be generous! Pay me for my sacrifice.' For an instant her
+face was radiant. 'If I marry you,' she asked, 'will it make
+everything right?' Of that I at once assured her--in our marriage
+the whole difficulty would melt away like a rain-drop in the
+great sea. 'Our marriage!' she repeated in wonder; and the deep
+ring of her voice seemed to wake us up and show us our folly. 'I
+love you, but I shall never see you again,' she cried; and she
+hurried away with her face in her hands. I walked up and down the
+terrace for some moments, and then came in and met you. That's
+the only witchcraft I've used!"
+
+The poor man was at once so roused and so shaken by the day's
+events that I believed he would get little sleep. Conscious on my
+own part that I shouldn't close my eyes, I but partly undressed,
+stirred my fire and sat down to do some writing. I heard the
+great clock in the little parlour below strike twelve, one, half-
+past one. Just as the vibration of this last stroke was dying on
+the air the door of communication with Searle's room was flung
+open and my companion stood on the threshold, pale as a corpse,
+in his nightshirt, shining like a phantom against the darkness
+behind him. "Look well at me!" he intensely gasped; "touch me,
+embrace me, revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost!"
+
+"Gracious goodness, what do you mean?"
+
+"Write it down!" he went on. "There, take your pen. Put it into
+dreadful words. How do I look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red?
+Am I speaking English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?"
+
+I confess there came upon me by contact a kind of supernatural
+shock. I shall always feel by the whole communication of it that
+I too have seen a ghost. My first movement--I can smile at it now
+--was to spring to the door, close it quickly and turn the key
+upon the gaping blackness from which Searle had emerged. I seized
+his two hands; they were wet with perspiration. I pushed my chair
+to the fire and forced him to sit down in it; then I got on my
+knees and held his hands as firmly as possible. They trembled and
+quivered; his eyes were fixed save that the pupil dilated and
+contracted with extraordinary force. I asked no questions, but
+waited there, very curious for what he would say. At last he
+spoke. "I'm not frightened, but I'm--oh excited! This is life!
+This is living! My nerves--my heart--my brain! They're throbbing
+--don't you feel it? Do you tingle? Are you hot? Are you cold?
+Hold me tight--tight--tight! I shall tremble away into waves--
+into surges--and know all the secrets of things and all the
+reasons and all the mysteries!" He paused a moment and then went
+on: "A woman--as clear as that candle: no, far clearer! In a blue
+dress, with a black mantle on her head and a little black muff.
+Young and wonderfully pretty, pale and ill; with the sadness of
+all the women who ever loved and suffered pleading and accusing
+in her wet-looking eyes. God knows I never did any such thing!
+But she took me for my elder, for the other Clement. She came to
+me here as she would have come to me there. She wrung her hands
+and she spoke to me 'marry me!' she moaned; 'marry me and put an
+end to my shame!' I sat up in bed, just as I sit here, looked at
+her, heard her--heard her voice melt away, watched her figure
+fade away. Bless us and save us! Here I be!"
+
+I made no attempt either to explain or to criticise this
+extraordinary passage. It's enough that I yielded for the hour to
+the strange force of my friend's emotion. On the whole I think my
+own vision was the more interesting of the two. He beheld but the
+transient irresponsible spectre--I beheld the human subject hot
+from the spectral presence. Yet I soon recovered my judgement
+sufficiently to be moved again to try to guard him against the
+results of excitement and exposure. It was easily agreed that he
+was not for the night to return to his room, and I made him
+fairly comfortable in his place by my fire. Wishing above all to
+preserve him from a chill I removed my bedding and wrapped him in
+the blankets and counterpane. I had no nerves either for writing
+or for sleep; so I put out my lights, renewed the fuel and sat
+down on the opposite side of the hearth. I found it a great and
+high solemnity just to watch my companion. Silent, swathed and
+muffled to his chin, he sat rigid and erect with the dignity of
+his adventure. For the most part his eyes were closed; though
+from time to time he would open them with a steady expansion and
+stare, never blinking, into the flame, as if he again beheld
+without terror the image of the little woman with the muff. His
+cadaverous emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles intensified by the
+upward glow from the hearth, his distorted moustache, his
+extraordinary gravity and a certain fantastical air as the red
+light flickered over him, all re-enforced his fine likeness to
+the vision-haunted knight of La Mancha when laid up after some
+grand exploit. The night passed wholly without speech. Toward its
+close I slept for half an hour. When I awoke the awakened birds
+had begun to twitter and Searle, unperturbed, sat staring at me.
+We exchanged a long look, and I felt with a pang that his
+glittering eyes had tasted their last of natural sleep. "How is
+it? Are you comfortable?" I nevertheless asked.
+
+He fixed me for a long time without replying and then spoke with
+a weak extravagance and with such pauses between his words as
+might have represented the slow prompting of an inner voice. "You
+asked me when you first knew me what I was. 'Nothing,' I said,
+'nothing of any consequence.' Nothing I've always supposed myself
+to be. But I've wronged myself--I'm a great exception. I'm a
+haunted man!"
+
+If sleep had passed out of his eyes I felt with even a deeper
+pang that sanity had abandoned his spirit. From this moment I was
+prepared for the worst. There were in my friend, however, such
+confirmed habits of mildness that I found myself not in the least
+fearing he would prove unmanageable. As morning began fully to
+dawn upon us I brought our curious vigil to a close. Searle was
+so enfeebled that I gave him my hands to help him out of his
+chair, and he retained them for some moments after rising to his
+feet, unable as he seemed to keep his balance. "Well," he said,"
+I've been once favoured, but don't think I shall be favoured
+again. I shall soon be myself as fit to 'appear' as any of them.
+I shall haunt the master of Lackley! It can only mean one thing--
+that they're getting ready for me on the other side of the
+grave."
+
+When I touched the question of breakfast he replied that he had
+his breakfast in his pocket; and he drew from his travelling-bag
+a phial of morphine. He took a strong dose and went to bed. At
+noon I found him on foot again, dressed, shaved, much refreshed.
+"Poor fellow," he said, "you've got more than you bargained for--
+not only a man with a grievance but a man with a ghost. Well, it
+won't be for long!" It had of course promptly become a question
+whither we should now direct our steps. "As I've so little time,"
+he argued for this, "I should like to see the best, the best
+alone." I answered that either for time or eternity I had always
+supposed Oxford to represent the English maximum, and for Oxford
+in the course of an hour we accordingly departed.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Of that extraordinary place I shall not attempt to speak with any
+order or indeed with any coherence. It must ever remain one of
+the supreme gratifications of travel for any American aware of
+the ancient pieties of race. The impression it produces, the
+emotions it kindles in the mind of such a visitor, are too rich
+and various to be expressed in the halting rhythm of prose.
+Passing through the small oblique streets in which the long grey
+battered public face of the colleges seems to watch jealously for
+sounds that may break upon the stillness of study, you feel it
+the most dignified and most educated of cities. Over and through
+it all the great corporate fact of the University slowly throbs
+after the fashion of some steady bass in a concerted piece or
+that of the mediaeval mystical presence of the Empire in the old
+States of Germany. The plain perpendicular of the so mildly
+conventual fronts, masking blest seraglios of culture and
+leisure, irritates the imagination scarce less than the harem-
+walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching portals, however,
+you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and the dark verdure
+soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green quadrangles
+stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of the
+humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a
+marshalled host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our
+arrival my friend and I wandered forth in the luminous early
+dusk. We reached the bridge that under-spans the walls of
+Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower, delicately fluted and
+embossed, rise in temperate beauty--the perfect prose of Gothic--
+wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained of day. We
+entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little court
+that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows niche more
+lovingly in the tangled ivy than elsewhere in Oxford, and passed
+into the quiet cloister and studied the small sculptured monsters
+on the entablature of the arcade. I rejoiced in every one of my
+unhappy friend's responsive vibrations, even while feeling that
+they might as direfully multiply as those that had preceded them.
+I may say that from this time forward I found it difficult to
+distinguish in his company between the riot of fancy and the
+labour of thought, or to fix the balance between what he saw and
+what he imagined. He had already begun playfully to exchange his
+identity for that of the earlier Clement Searle, and he now
+delivered himself almost wholly in the character of his old-time
+kinsman.
+
+"THIS was my college, you know," he would almost anywhere break
+out, applying the words wherever we stood--"the sweetest and
+noblest in the whole place. How often have I strolled in this
+cloister with my intimates of the other world! They are all dead
+and buried, but many a young fellow as we meet him, dark or fair,
+tall or short, reminds me of the past age and the early
+attachment. Even as we stand here, they say, the whole thing
+feels about its massive base the murmurs of the tide of time;
+some of the foundation-stones are loosened, some of the breaches
+will have to be repaired. Mine was the old unregenerate Oxford,
+the home of rank abuses, of distinctions and privileges the most
+delicious and invidious. What cared I, who was a perfect
+gentleman and with my pockets full of money? I had an allowance
+of a thousand a year."
+
+It was at once plain to me that he had lost the little that
+remained of his direct grasp on life and was unequal to any
+effort of seeing things in their order. He read my apprehension
+in my eyes and took pains to assure me I was right. "I'm going
+straight down hill. Thank heaven it's an easy slope, coated with
+English turf and with an English churchyard at the foot." The
+hysterical emotion produced by our late dire misadventure had
+given place to an unruffled calm in which the scene about us was
+reflected as in an old-fashioned mirror. We took an afternoon
+walk through Christ-Church meadow and at the river-bank procured
+a boat which I pulled down the stream to Iffley and to the
+slanting woods of Nuneham--the sweetest flattest reediest stream-
+side landscape that could be desired. Here of course we
+encountered the scattered phalanx of the young, the happy
+generation, clad in white flannel and blue, muscular fair-haired
+magnificent fresh, whether floated down the current by idle punts
+and lounging in friendly couples when not in a singleness that
+nursed ambitions, or straining together in rhythmic crews and
+hoarsely exhorted from the near bank. When to the exhibition of
+so much of the clearest joy of wind and limb we added the great
+sense of perfumed protection shed by all the enclosed lawns and
+groves and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic
+shades must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion
+found himself less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a
+series of gardens and spent long hours sitting in their greenest
+places. They struck us as the fairest things in England and the
+ripest and sweetest fruit of the English system. Locked in their
+antique verdure, guarded, as in the case of New College, by
+gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the matted
+leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and
+memories, a sort of chorus of tradition; with vaguely-generous
+youths sprawling bookishly on the turf as if to spare it the
+injury of their boot-heels, and with the great conservative
+college countenance appealing gravely from the restless outer
+world, they seem places to lie down on the grass in for ever, in
+the happy faith that life is all a green old English garden and
+time an endless summer afternoon. This charmed seclusion was
+especially grateful to my friend, and his sense of it reached its
+climax, I remember, on one of the last of such occasions and
+while we sat in fascinated flanerie over against the sturdy back
+of Saint John's. The wide discreetly-windowed wall here perhaps
+broods upon the lawn with a more effective air of property than
+elsewhere. Searle dropped into fitful talk and spun his humour
+into golden figures. Any passing undergraduate was a peg to hang
+a fable, every feature of the place a pretext for more
+embroidery.
+
+"Isn't it all a delightful lie?" he wanted to know. "Mightn't one
+fancy this the very central point of the world's heart, where all
+the echoes of the general life arrive but to falter and die?
+Doesn't one feel the air just thick with arrested voices? It's
+well there should be such places, shaped in the interest of
+factitious needs, invented to minister to the book-begotten
+longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked and believe
+unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all's well in a
+world where so much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth
+and fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful
+unachieved especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world's
+made--work's over. Now for leisure! England's safe--now for
+Theocritus and Horace, for lawn and sky! What a sense it all
+gives one of the composite life of the country and of the
+essential furniture of its luckier minds! Thank heaven they had
+the wit to send me here in the other time. I'm not much visibly
+the braver perhaps, but think how I'm the happier! The misty
+spires and towers, seen far off on the level, have been all these
+years one of the constant things of memory. Seriously, what do
+the spires and towers do for these people? Are they wiser,
+gentler, finer, cleverer? My diminished dignity reverts in any
+case at moments to the naked background of our own education, the
+deadly dry air in which we gasp for impressions and comparisons.
+I assent to it all with a sort of desperate calmness; I accept it
+with a dogged pride. We're nursed at the opposite pole. Naked
+come we into a naked world. There's a certain grandeur in the
+lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young
+imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which
+has to invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-
+air, with a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we
+dwell. Noblesse oblige--Oxford must damnably do so. What a
+horrible thing not to rise to such examples! If you pay the pious
+debt to the last farthing of interest you may go through life
+with her blessing; but if you let it stand unhonoured you're a
+worse barbarian than we! But for the better or worse, in a myriad
+private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the youthful
+sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of
+the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls.
+Think of the centuries' tale of dead lads--dead alike with the
+end of the young days to which these haunts were a present world,
+and the close of the larger lives which the general mother-scene
+has dropped into less bottomless traps. What are those two young
+fellows kicking their heels over on the grass there? One of them
+has the Saturday Review; the other--upon my soul--the other has
+Artemus Ward! Where do they live, how do they live, to what end
+do they live? Miserable boys! How can they read Artemus Ward
+under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think loveliest in
+all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that one
+yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice
+and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a
+hundred years ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken
+cornice. Don't pretend it's not a common thing to have one's
+bosom friend at another college. Pray was I committed to common
+things? He was a charming fellow. By the way, he was a good deal
+like you. Of course his cocked hat, his long hair in a black
+ribbon, his cinnamon velvet suit and his flowered waistcoat made
+a difference. We gentlemen used to wear swords."
+
+There was really the touch of grace in my poor friend's
+divagations--the disheartened dandy had so positively turned
+rhapsodist and seer. I was particularly struck with his having
+laid aside the diffidence and self-consciousness of the first
+days of our acquaintance. He had become by this time a
+disembodied observer and critic; the shell of sense, growing
+daily thinner and more transparent, transmitted the tremor of his
+quickened spirit. He seemed to pick up acquaintances, in the
+course of our contemplations, merely by putting out his hand. If
+I left him for ten minutes I was sure to find him on my return in
+earnest conversation with some affable wandering scholar. Several
+young men with whom he had thus established relations invited him
+to their rooms and entertained him, as I gathered, with rather
+rash hospitality. For myself, I chose not to be present at these
+symposia; I shrank partly from being held in any degree
+responsible for his extravagance, partly from the pang of seeing
+him yield to champagne and an admiring circle. He reported such
+adventures with less keen a complacency than I had supposed he
+might use, but a certain method in his madness, a certain dignity
+in his desire to fraternise, appeared to save him from mischance.
+If they didn't think him a harmless lunatic they certainly
+thought him a celebrity of the Occident. Two things, however,
+grew evident--that he drank deeper than was good for him and that
+the flagrant freshness of his young patrons rather interfered
+with his predetermined sense of the element of finer romance. At
+the same time it completed his knowledge of the place. Making the
+acquaintance of several tutors and fellows, he dined in hall in
+half a dozen colleges, alluding afterwards to these banquets with
+religious unction. One evening after a participation indiscreetly
+prolonged he came back to the hotel in a cab, accompanied by a
+friendly undergraduate and a physician and looking deadly pale.
+He had swooned away on leaving table and remained so rigidly
+unconscious as much to agitate his banqueters. The following
+twenty-four hours he of course spent in bed, but on the third day
+declared himself strong enough to begin afresh. On his reaching
+the street his strength once more forsook him, so that I insisted
+on his returning to his room. He besought me with tears in his
+eyes not to shut him up. "It's my last chance--I want to go back
+for an hour to that garden of Saint John's. Let me eat and drink
+--to-morrow I die." It seemed to me possible that with a Bath-
+chair the expedition might be accomplished. The hotel, it
+appeared, possessed such a convenience, which was immediately
+produced. It became necessary hereupon that we should have a
+person to propel the chair. As there was no one on the spot at
+liberty I was about to perform the office; but just as my patient
+had got seated and wrapped--he now had a perpetual chill--an
+elderly man emerged from a lurking-place near the door and, with
+a formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman. We assented,
+and he proceeded solemnly to trundle the chair before him. I
+recognised him as a vague personage whom I had observed to lounge
+shyly about the doors of the hotels, at intervals during our
+stay, with a depressed air of wanting employment and a poor
+semblance of finding it. He had once indeed in a half-hearted way
+proposed himself as an amateur cicerone for a tour through the
+colleges; and I now, as I looked at him, remembered with a pang
+that I had too curtly declined his ministrations. Since then his
+shyness, apparently, had grown less or his misery greater, for it
+was with a strange grim avidity that he now attached himself to
+our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby gentility and the
+dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would have been, I
+suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard
+unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the
+irremediable disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden
+of his days and tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot,
+his bold nose was sadly compromised, and his reddish beard,
+largely streaked with grey, bristled under a month's neglect of
+the razor. In all this rusty forlornness lurked a visible
+assurance of our friend's having known better days. Obviously he
+was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the market value of
+pure gentility. There had been something terribly affecting in
+the way he substituted for the attempt to touch the greasy rim of
+his antiquated hat some such bow as one man of the world might
+make another. Exchanging a few words with him as we went I was
+struck with the decorum of his accent. His fine whole voice
+should have been congruously cracked.
+
+"Take me by some long roundabout way," said Searle, "so that I
+may see as many college-walls as possible."
+
+"You know," I asked of our attendant, "all these wonderful ins
+and outs?"
+
+"I ought to, sir," he said, after a moment, with pregnant
+gravity. And as we were passing one of the colleges, "That used
+to be my place," he added.
+
+At these words Searle desired him to stop and come round within
+sight. "You say that's YOUR college?"
+
+"The place might deny me, sir; but heaven forbid I should seem to
+take it ill of her. If you'll allow me to wheel you into the quad
+I'll show you my windows of thirty years ago."
+
+Searle sat staring, his huge pale eyes, which now left nothing
+else worth mentioning in his wasted face, filled with wonder and
+pity. "If you'll be so kind," he said with great deference. But
+just as this perverted product of a liberal education was about
+to propel him across the threshold of the court he turned about,
+disengaged the mercenary hands, with one of his own, from the
+back of the chair, drew their owner alongside and turned to me.
+"While we're here, my dear fellow," he said, "be so good as to
+perform this service. You understand?" I gave our companion a
+glance of intelligence and we resumed our way. The latter showed
+us his window of the better time, where a rosy youth in a scarlet
+smoking-fez now puffed a cigarette at the open casement. Thence
+we proceeded into the small garden, the smallest, I believe, and
+certainly the sweetest, of all the planted places of Oxford. I
+pushed the chair along to a bench on the lawn, turned it round,
+toward the front of the college and sat down by it on the grass.
+Our attendant shifted mournfully from one foot to the other, his
+patron eyeing him open-mouthed. At length Searle broke out: "God
+bless my soul, sir, you don't suppose I expect you to stand!
+There's an empty bench."
+
+"Thank you," said our friend, who bent his joints to sit.
+
+"You English are really fabulous! I don't know whether I most
+admire or most abominate you! Now tell me: who are you? what are
+you? what brought you to this?"
+
+The poor fellow blushed up to his eyes, took off his hat and
+wiped his forehead with an indescribable fabric drawn from his
+pocket. "My name's Rawson, sir. Beyond that it's a long story."
+
+"I ask out of sympathy," said Searle. "I've a fellow-feeling. If
+you're a poor devil I'm a poor devil as well."
+
+"I'm the poorer devil of the two," said the stranger with an
+assurance for once presumptuous.
+
+"Possibly. I suppose an English poor devil's the poorest of all
+poor devils. And then you've fallen from a height. From a
+gentleman commoner--is that what they called you?--to a propeller
+of Bath-chairs. Good heavens, man, the fall's enough to kill
+you!"
+
+"I didn't take it all at once, sir. I dropped a bit one time and
+a bit another."
+
+"That's me, that's me!" cried Searle with all his seriousness.
+
+"And now," said our friend, "I believe I can't drop any further."
+
+"My dear fellow"--and Searle clasped his hand and shook it--"I
+too am at the very bottom of the hole."
+
+Mr. Rawson lifted his eyebrows. "Well, sir, there's a difference
+between sitting in such a pleasant convenience and just trudging
+behind it!"
+
+"Yes--there's a shade. But I'm at my last gasp, Mr. Rawson."
+
+"I'm at my last penny, sir."
+
+"Literally, Mr. Rawson?"
+
+Mr. Rawson shook his head with large loose bitterness. "I've
+almost come to the point of drinking my beer and buttoning my
+coat figuratively; but I don't talk in figures."
+
+Fearing the conversation might appear to achieve something like
+gaiety at the expense of Mr. Rawson's troubles, I took the
+liberty of asking him, with all consideration, how he made a
+living.
+
+"I don't make a living," he answered with tearful eyes; "I can't
+make a living. I've a wife and three children--and all starving,
+sir. You wouldn't believe what I've come to. I sent my wife to
+her mother's, who can ill afford to keep her, and came to Oxford
+a week ago, thinking I might pick up a few half-crowns by showing
+people about the colleges. But it's no use. I haven't the
+assurance. I don't look decent. They want a nice little old man
+with black gloves and a clean shirt and a silver-headed stick.
+What do I look as if I knew about Oxford, sir?"
+
+"Mercy on us," cried Searle, "why didn't you speak to us before?"
+
+"I wanted to; half a dozen times I've been on the point of it. I
+knew you were Americans."
+
+"And Americans are rich!" cried Searle, laughing. "My dear Mr.
+Rawson, American as I am I'm living on charity."
+
+"And I'm exactly not, sir! There it is. I'm dying for the lack of
+that same. You say you're a pauper, but it takes an American
+pauper to go bowling about in a Bath-chair. America's an easy
+country."
+
+"Ah me!" groaned Searle. "Have I come to the most delicious
+corner of the ancient world to hear the praise of Yankeeland?"
+
+"Delicious corners are very well, and so is the ancient world,"
+said Mr. Rawson; "but one may sit here hungry and shabby, so long
+as one isn't too shabby, as well as elsewhere. You'll not
+persuade me that it's not an easier thing to keep afloat yonder
+than here. I wish _I_ were in Yankeeland, that's all!" he added
+with feeble force. Then brooding for a moment on his wrongs:
+"Have you a bloated brother? or you, sir? It matters little to
+you. But it has mattered to me with a vengeance! Shabby as I sit
+here I can boast that advantage--as he his five thousand a year.
+Being but a twelvemonth my elder he swaggers while I go thus.
+There's old England for you! A very pretty place for HIM!"
+
+"Poor old England!" said Searle softly.
+
+"Has your brother never helped you?" I asked.
+
+"A five-pound note now and then! Oh I don't say there haven't
+been times when I haven't inspired an irresistible sympathy. I've
+not been what I should. I married dreadfully out of the way. But
+the devil of it is that he started fair and I started foul; with
+the tastes, the desires, the needs, the sensibilities of a
+gentleman--and not another blessed 'tip.' I can't afford to live
+in England."
+
+"THIS poor gentleman fancied a couple of months ago that he
+couldn't afford to live in America," I fondly explained.
+
+"I'd 'swap'--do you call it?--chances with him!" And Mr. Rawson
+looked quaintly rueful over his freedom of speech.
+
+Searle sat supported there with his eyes closed and his face
+twitching for violent emotion, and then of a sudden had a glare
+of gravity. "My friend, you're a dead failure! Be judged! Don't
+talk about 'swapping.' Don't talk about chances. Don't talk about
+fair starts and false starts. I'm at that point myself that I've
+a right to speak. It lies neither in one's chance nor one's start
+to make one a success; nor in anything one's brother--however
+bloated--can do or can undo. It lies in one's character. You and
+I, sir, have HAD no character--that's very plain. We've been
+weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we are for it--sitting staring
+in each other's faces and reading our weakness in each other's
+eyes. We're of no importance whatever, Mr. Rawson!"
+
+Mr. Rawson received this sally with a countenance in which abject
+submission to the particular affirmed truth struggled with the
+comparative propriety of his general rebellion against fate. In
+the course of a minute a due self-respect yielded to the warm
+comfortable sense of his being relieved of the cares of an
+attitude. "Go on, sir, go on," he said. "It's wholesome
+doctrine." And he wiped his eyes with what seemed his sole
+remnant of linen.
+
+"Dear, dear," sighed Searle, "I've made you cry! Well, we speak
+as from man to man. I should be glad to think you had felt for a
+moment the side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit
+which precedes--which precedes the grand illumination of death."
+
+Mr. Rawson sat silent a little, his eyes fixed on the ground and
+his well-cut nose but the more deeply dyed by his agitation. Then
+at last looking up: "You're a very good-natured man, sir, and
+you'll never persuade me you don't come of a kindly race. Say
+what you please about a chance; when a man's fifty--degraded,
+penniless, a husband and father--a chance to get on his legs
+again is not to be despised. Something tells me that my luck may
+be in your country--which has brought luck to so many. I can come
+on the parish here of course, but I don't want to come on the
+parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty
+years of life before me yet. If only by God's help I could have a
+real change of air! It's a fixed idea of mine. I've had it for
+the last ten years. It's not that I'm a low radical. Oh I've no
+vulgar opinions. Old England's good enough for me, but I'm not
+good enough for old England. I'm a shabby man that wants to get
+out of a room full of staring gentlefolk. I'm for ever put to the
+blush. It's a perfect agony of spirit; everything reminds me of
+my younger and better self. The thing for me would be a cooling
+cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the unknown! I lie awake
+thinking of it."
+
+Searle closed his eyes, shivering with a long-drawn tremor which
+I hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of
+mental pain. In a moment I saw it was neither. "Oh my country, my
+country, my country!" he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat
+for some time abstracted and lost. I signalled our companion that
+it was time we should bring our small session to a close, and he,
+without hesitating, possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-
+chair and pushed it before him. We had got halfway home before
+Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly in the High Street, as we passed
+a chop-house from whose open doors we caught a waft of old-
+fashioned cookery and other restorative elements, he motioned us
+to halt. "This is my last five pounds"--and he drew a note from
+his pocket-book. "Do me the favour, Mr. Rawson, to accept it. Go
+in there and order the best dinner they can give you. Call for a
+bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my eternal rest!"
+
+Mr. Rawson stiffened himself up and received the gift with
+fingers momentarily irresponsive. But Mr. Rawson had the nerves
+of a gentleman. I measured the spasm with which his poor
+dispossessed hand closed upon the crisp paper, I observed his
+empurpled nostril convulsive under the other solicitation. He
+crushed the crackling note in his palm with a passionate pressure
+and jerked a spasmodic bow. "I shall not do you the wrong, sir,
+of anything but the best!" The next moment the door swung behind
+him.
+
+Searle sank again into his apathy, and on reaching the hotel I
+helped him to get to bed. For the rest of the day he lay without
+motion or sound and beyond reach of any appeal. The doctor, whom
+I had constantly in attendance, was sure his end was near. He
+expressed great surprise that he should have lasted so long; he
+must have been living for a month on the very dregs of his
+strength. Toward evening, as I sat by his bedside in the
+deepening dusk, he roused himself with a purpose I had vaguely
+felt gathering beneath his stupor. "My cousin, my cousin," he
+said confusedly. "Is she here?" It was the first time he had
+spoken of Miss Searle since our retreat from her brother's house,
+and he continued to ramble. "I was to have married her. What a
+dream! That day was like a string of verses--rhymed hours. But
+the last verse is bad measure. What's the rhyme to 'love'? ABOVE!
+Was she a simple woman, a kind sweet woman? Or have I only
+dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her touch would have cured
+my madness. I want you to do something. Write three lines, three
+words: 'Good-bye; remember me; be happy.'" And then after a long
+pause: "It's strange a person in my state should have a wish. Why
+should one eat one's breakfast the day one's hanged? What a
+creature is man! What a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a
+mere throbbing fever-point; I breathe and nothing more, and yet I
+DESIRE! My desire lives. If I could see her! Help me out with it
+and let me die."
+
+Half an hour later, at a venture, I dispatched by post a note to
+Miss Searle: "Your cousin is rapidly sinking. He asks to see
+you." I was conscious of a certain want of consideration in this
+act, since it would bring her great trouble and yet no power to
+face the trouble; but out of her distress I fondly hoped a
+sufficient force might be born. On the following day my friend's
+exhaustion had become so great that I began to fear his
+intelligence altogether broken up. But toward evening he briefly
+rallied, to maunder about many things, confounding in a sinister
+jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years.
+"By the way," he said suddenly, "I've made no will. I haven't
+much to bequeath. Yet I have something." He had been playing
+listlessly with a large signet-ring on his left hand, which he
+now tried to draw off. "I leave you this"--working it round and
+round vainly--"if you can get it off. What enormous knuckles!
+There must be such knuckles in the mummies of the Pharaohs. Well,
+when I'm gone--! No, I leave you something more precious than
+gold--the sense of a great kindness. But I've a little gold left.
+Bring me those trinkets." I placed on the bed before him several
+articles of jewellery, relics of early foppery: his watch and
+chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some odds and ends of
+goldsmith's work. He trifled with them feebly for some moments,
+murmuring various names and dates associated with them. At last,
+looking up with clearer interest, "What has become," he asked,
+"of Mr. Rawson?"
+
+"You want to see him?"
+
+"How much are these things worth?" he went on without heeding me.
+"How much would they bring?" And he weighed them in his weak
+hands. "They're pretty heavy. Some hundred or so? Oh I'm richer
+than I thought! Rawson--Rawson--you want to get out of this awful
+England?"
+
+I stepped to the door and requested the servant whom I kept in
+constant attendance in our adjacent sitting-room to send and
+ascertain if Mr. Rawson were on the premises. He returned in a
+few moments, introducing our dismal friend. Mr. Rawson was pale
+even to his nose and derived from his unaffectedly concerned
+state an air of some distinction. I led him up to the bed. In
+Searle's eyes, as they fell on him, there shone for a moment the
+light of a human message.
+
+"Lord have mercy!" gasped Mr. Rawson.
+
+"My friend," said Searle, "there's to be one American the less--
+so let there be at the same time one the more. At the worst
+you'll be as good a one as I. Foolish me! Take these battered
+relics; you can sell them; let them help you on your way. They're
+gifts and mementoes, but this is a better use. Heaven speed you!
+May America be kind to you. Be kind, at the last, to your own
+country!"
+
+"Really this is too much; I can't," the poor man protested,
+almost scared and with tears in his eyes. "Do come round and get
+well and I'll stop here. I'll stay with you and wait on you."
+
+"No, I'm booked for my journey, you for yours. I hope you don't
+mind the voyage."
+
+Mr. Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude, appealing
+piteously from so strange a windfall. "It's like the angel of the
+Lord who bids people in the Bible to rise and flee!"
+
+Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, quite used up; I led Mr.
+Rawson back into the sitting-room, where in three words I
+proposed to him a rough valuation of our friend's trinkets. He
+assented with perfect good-breeding; they passed into my
+possession and a second bank-note into his.
+
+From the collapse into which this wondrous exercise of his
+imagination had plunged him my charge then gave few signs of
+being likely to emerge. He breathed, as he had said, and nothing
+more. The twilight deepened; I lighted the night-lamp. The doctor
+sat silent and official at the foot of the bed; I resumed my
+constant place near the head. Suddenly our patient opened his
+eyes wide. "She'll not come," he murmured. "Amen! she's an
+English sister." Five minutes passed; he started forward. "She's
+come, she's here!" he confidently quavered. His words conveyed to
+my mind so absolute an assurance that I lightly rose and passed
+into the sitting-room. At the same moment, through the opposite
+door, the servant introduced a lady. A lady, I say; for an
+instant she was simply such--tall pale dressed in deep mourning.
+The next instant I had uttered her name--"Miss Searle!" She
+looked ten years older.
+
+She met me with both hands extended and an immense question in
+her face. "He has just announced you," I said. And then with a
+fuller consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance:
+"What has happened?"
+
+"Oh death, death!" she wailed. "You and I are left."
+
+There came to me with her words a sickening shock, the sense of
+poetic justice somehow cheated, defeated. "Your brother?" I
+panted.
+
+She laid her hand on my arm and I felt its pressure deepen as she
+spoke. "He was thrown from his horse in the park. He died on the
+spot. Six days have passed. Six months!"
+
+She accepted my support and a moment later we had entered the
+room and approached the bedside, from which the doctor withdrew.
+Searle opened his eyes and looked at her from head to foot.
+Suddenly he seemed to make out her mourning. "Already!" he cried
+audibly and with a smile, as I felt, of pleasure.
+
+She dropped on her knees and took his hand. "Not for you,
+cousin," she whispered. "For my poor brother."
+
+He started, in all his deathly longitude, as with a galvanic
+shock. "Dead! HE dead! Life itself!" And then after a moment and
+with a slight rising inflexion: "You're free?"
+
+"Free, cousin. Too sadly free. And now--NOW--with what use for
+freedom?"
+
+He looked steadily into her eyes, dark in the heavy shadow of her
+musty mourning-veil. "For me wear colours!"
+
+In a moment more death had come, the doctor had silently attested
+it, and she had burst into sobs.
+
+We buried him in the little churchyard in which he had expressed
+the wish to lie; beneath one of the blackest and widest of
+English yews and the little tower than which none in all England
+has a softer and hoarier grey. A year has passed; Miss Searle, I
+believe, has begun to wear colours.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A  Passionate Pilgrim, by Henry James
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