The Jolly Corner

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Transcribed from the 1918 Martin Secker edition by David Price,gift fort building kits for 14 year olds [email protected]

THE JOLLY CORNER
by Henry James

CHAPTER I

“Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,”said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—beggingor dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense.  Itwouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for,even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so sillya demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would stillbe almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months nowhe had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this dispositionand this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in factpresented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in theconsiderable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his sostrangely belated return to America.  Everything was somehow asurprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistentlyneglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin forplay.  He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three,to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performancequite on the scale of that licence.  He had been twenty-three onleaving New York—he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he wereto reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himselffeeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allottedto man.  It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself,and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absenceand a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty,to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above allthe bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaultedhis vision wherever he looked.

The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability;since he hadsupposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing,and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he wouldhave been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected,the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly wakedup to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather,as it happened, under the charm; whereas the “swagger” things,the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly,like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see,were exactly his sources of dismay.  They were as so many set trapsfor displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless treadwas constantly pressing the spring.  It was interesting, doubtless,the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’ta certain finer truth saved the situation.  He had distinctly not,in this steadier light, come over allfor the monstrosities;he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face ofthe act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do.  Hehad come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his “property,”which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousandmiles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humourof seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quitefondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light,in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in whichthe holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the fewsocial flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienatedthen for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of histwo brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly intohis hands.  He was the owner of another, not quite so “good”—thejolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended andconsecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital,with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respectiverents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) hadnever been depressingly low.  He could live in “Europe,”as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishingNew York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure,the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallenin, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself sincehis arrival distinguishing more than ever between them.  The housewithin the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in courseof reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some timebefore, to overtures for this conversion—in which, now that itwas going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments tofind himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounceof such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almostwith a certain authority.  He had lived his life with his backso turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so differentan order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in acompartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for businessand a sense for construction.  These virtues, so common all roundhim now, had been dormant in his own organism—where it might besaid of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn weather—the autumn at leastwas a pure boon in the terrible place—he loafed about his “work”undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least “minding”that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, andready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and lookwise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanationsand really “go into” figures.

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke,it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming herperceptibly less.  She wasn’t, however, going to be better-offfor it, as hewas—and so astonishingly much: nothing wasnow likely, he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself,in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenantof the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed tocling through her almost unbroken New York career.  If he knewthe way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadfulmultiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole placeto some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossedlines and figures—if he had formed, for his consolation, thathabit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his havingencountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale,breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force andsuccess, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things,kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, andwhere economy hung about like the scent of a garden.  His old friendlived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lampsand polished her silver; she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, whenshe could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge wasreally to “spirit,” the spirit she after all confessed to,proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of theircommon, their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things thatpeople scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats;she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussionsand ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance,which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked olderthrough trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young throughsuccessful indifference with her precious reference, above all, to memoriesand histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for himas some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing othersweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort.  They hadcommunities of knowledge, “their” knowledge (this discriminatingpossessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presencesall overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedomof a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of lifethat were strange and dim to her, just by “Europe” in short,but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that piousvisitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.

She had come with him one day to see how his “apartment-house”was rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans,and while they were there had happened to have, before her, a briefbut lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative ofthe building firm that had undertaken his work.  He had found himselfquite “standing up” to this personage over a failure onthe latter’s part to observe some detail of one of their notedconditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever soprettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she hadafterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of irony)that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventorof the sky-scraper.  If he had but stayed at home he would havediscovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awfularchitectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold mine. He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the smallsilver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his ownlately most disguised and most muffled vibrations.

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it hadbroken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment:it met him there—and this was the image under which he himselfjudged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed withit—very much as he might have been met by some strange figure,some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of anempty house.  The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained withhim, when he didn’t indeed rather improve it by a still intenserform: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sureof finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet socoming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confrontingpresence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing himthrough the dusk.  After that visit to the house in constructionhe walked with his companion to see the other and always so much thebetter one, which in the eastward direction formed one of the corners,—the“jolly” one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonouredand disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservativeAvenue.  The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said,to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown,and here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely,like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feelthe impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration toshelter.

They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with hiskey, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons,to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good womanliving in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windowsand dust and sweep.  Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growinglyaware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, thoughhe didn’t name them all to his companion, any more than he toldher as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the greatblank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom,there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon’s broomstick, in a corner,to tempt the burglar.  Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, andshe loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room toroom and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes—all to showthem, as she remarked, how little there was to see.  There waslittle indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositionsand the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of amplerallowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message,affecting him as some good old servant’s, some lifelong retainer’sappeal for a character, or even for a retiring-pension; yet it was alsoa remark of Mrs. Muldoon’s that, glad as she was to oblige himby her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he wouldnever make of her.  If he should wish her for any reason to comein after dark she would just tell him, if he “plased,” thathe must ask it of somebody else.

The fact that there was nothing to see didn’t militate forthe worthy woman against what one mightsee, and she put it franklyto Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she?“craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours.” The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evokeda gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms—somany of them as there were too!—with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the professionthat she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace—for the moment; the questionof the “evil” hours in his old home had already become toograve for him.  He had begun some time since to “crape,”and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit hadbeen stowed by his own hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawerof the fine old sideboard that occupied, as a “fixture,”the deep recess in the dining-room.  Just now he laughed at hiscompanions—quickly however changing the subject; for the reasonthat, in the first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment asstarting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knewhow to qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent backto his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined AliceStaverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination,if he ever so prowled.  There were divinations he was unpreparedfor, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoonhad left them, passing on to other parts.

There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that couldbe said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations wasprecipitated by his friend’s having herself broken out, aftera yearning look round: “But I hope you don’t mean they wantyou to pull thisto pieces!”  His answer came, promptly,with his re-awakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted,and what they were “at” him for, daily, with the iterationof people who couldn’t for their life understand a man’sliability to decent feelings.  He had found the place, just asit stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short,in short—!  But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. “In short you’re to make so good a thing of your sky-scraperthat, living in luxury on thoseill-gotten gains, you can affordfor a while to be sentimental here!”  Her smile had for him,with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half hertalk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, fromher having so much imagination—not, like the cheap sarcasms withwhich one heard most people, about the world of “society,”bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody’s really havingany.  It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure thatwhen he had answered, after a brief demur, “Well, yes; so, precisely,you may put it!” her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from theother house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further,while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction hewas already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sightof the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, merefeel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahoganydoors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventyyears of the past in fine that these things represented, the annalsof nearly three generations, counting his grandfather’s, the onethat had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth,afloat in the very air like microscopic motes.  She listened toeverything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterlydidn’t chatter.  She scattered abroad therefore no cloudof words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage,without doing that.  Only at the last she went a little furtherthan he had done himself.  “And then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here.”  It ratherindeed pulled him up, for it wasn’t what he had been thinking,at least in her sense of the words, “You mean I may decide tostay on for the sake of it?”

“Well, withsuch a home—!”  But, quitebeautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an i,and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn’t rattle. How could any one—of any wit—insist on any one else’s“wanting” to live in New York?

“Oh,” he said, “I mighthave lived here(since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in hereall these years.  Then everything would have been different enough—and,I dare say, ‘funny’ enough.  But that’s anothermatter.  And then the beauty of it—I mean of my perversity,of my refusal to agree to a ‘deal’—is just in thetotal absence of a reason.  Don’t you see that if I had areason about the matter at all it would haveto be the otherway, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars?  There areno reasons here butof dollars.  Let us therefore have nonewhatever—not the ghost of one.”

They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where theystood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great squaremain saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces betweenwindows.  Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own amoment.  “Are you very sure the ‘ghost’ of onedoesn’t, much rather, serve—?”

He had a positive sense of turning pale.  But it was as nearas they were then to come.  For he made answer, he believed, betweena glare and a grin: “Oh ghosts—of course the place mustswarm with them!  I should be ashamed of it if it didn’t. Poor Mrs. Muldoon’s right, and it’s why I haven’tasked her to do more than look in.”

Miss Staverton’s gaze again lost itself, and things she didn’tutter, it was clear, came and went in her mind.  She might evenfor the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some elementdimly gathering.  Simplified like the death-mask of a handsomeface, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stirof an expression in the “set” commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vagueplatitude.  “Well, if it were only furnished and lived in—!”

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished hemight have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her wordsbehind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and wasstanding with her on the steps.  He closed the door and, whilehe re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparativelyharsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault ofthe outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptiantomb.  But he risked before they stepped into the street his gatheredanswer to her speech.  “For me it islived in. For me it is furnished.”  At which it was easy for her tosigh “Ah yes!” all vaguely and discreetly; since his parentsand his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, hadrun their course and met their end there.  That represented, withinthe walls, ineffaceable life.

It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with heragain, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity—amongthe people he met—about his appreciation of New York.  Hehad arrived at none at all that was socially producible, and as forthat matter of his “thinking” (thinking the better or theworse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one subject ofthought.  It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover, if sheliked, a morbid obsession.  He found all things come back to thequestion of what he personally might have been, how he might have ledhis life and “turned out,” if he had not so, at the outset,given it up.  And confessing for the first time to the intensitywithin him of this absurd speculation—which but proved also, nodoubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking—he affirmed the impotencethere of any other source of interest, any other native appeal. “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positivelyaches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have madesomething of me as well.  Only I can’t make out what, andthe worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied,brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judgingbest, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened.  I’vebeen sorry, I’ve hated it—I’ve never known what wasin the letter.  You may, of course, say it’s a trifle—!”

“I don’t say it’s a trifle,” Miss Stavertongravely interrupted.

She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless,he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitfuland unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear littleold objects on her chimney-piece.  Her interruption made him foran instant look at her harder.  “I shouldn’t care ifyou did!” he laughed, however; “and it’s only a figure,at any rate, for the way I now feel.  Notto have followedmy perverse young course—and almost in the teeth of my father’scurse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, ‘over there,’from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, tohave liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with suchan abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from that,I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and formy ‘form.’  I should have stuck here—if it hadbeen possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, pourdeux sous, whether it werepossible.  If I had waitedI might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here,something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hardand made so keen by their conditions.  It isn’t that I admirethem so much—the question of any charm in them, or of any charm,beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions forthem, has nothing to do with the matter: it’s only a questionof what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own natureI mayn’t have missed.  It comes over me that I had then astrange alter egodeep down somewhere within me, as the full-blownflower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, Ijust transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once andfor ever.”

“And you wonder about the flower,” Miss Staverton said. “So do I, if you want to know; and so I’ve been wonderingthese several weeks.  I believe in the flower,” she continued,“I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous.”

“Monstrous above all!” her visitor echoed; “andI imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive.”

“You don’t believe that,” she returned; “ifyou did you wouldn’t wonder.  You’d know, and thatwould be enough for you.  What you feel—and what I feel foryou—is that you’d have had power.”

“You’d have liked me that way?” he asked.

She barely hung fire.  “How should I not have liked you?”

“I see.  You’d have liked me, have preferred me,a billionaire!”

“How should I not have liked you?” she simply again asked.

He stood before her still—her question kept him motionless. He took it in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwisemeeting it testified to that.  “I know at least what I am,”he simply went on; “the other side of the medal’s clearenough.  I’ve not been edifying—I believe I’mthought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent.  I’vefollowed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have cometo you again and again—in fact you’ve admitted to me asmuch—that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfishfrivolous scandalous life.  And you see what it has made of me.”

She just waited, smiling at him.  “You see what it hasmade of me.”

“Oh you’re a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you’ve theperfection nothing else could have blighted.  And don’t yousee how, without my exile, I shouldn’t have been waiting tillnow—?”  But he pulled up for the strange pang.

“The great thing to see,” she presently said, “seemsto me to be that it has spoiled nothing.  It hasn’t spoiledyour being here at last.  It hasn’t spoiled this.  Ithasn’t spoiled your speaking—”  She also howeverfaltered.

He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. “Do you believe then—too dreadfully!—that I amas good as I might ever have been?”

“Oh no!  Far from it!”  With which she gotup from her chair and was nearer to him.  “But I don’tcare,” she smiled.

“You mean I’m good enough?”

She considered a little.  “Will you believe it if I sayso?  I mean will you let that settle your question for you?” And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, thathe had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn’t yet bargainaway: “Oh you don’t care either—but very differently:you don’t care for anything but yourself.”

Spencer Brydon recognised it—it was in fact what he had absolutelyprofessed.  Yet he importantly qualified.  “Heisn’t myself.  He’s the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him,” he added.  “And I can. And I shall.”

Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hersthat she divined his strange sense.  But neither of them otherwiseexpressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock,no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constitutingfor his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breatheableair.  What she said however was unexpected.  “Well,I’veseen him.”

“You—?”

“I’ve seen him in a dream.”

“Oh a ‘dream’—!”  It let him down.

“But twice over,” she continued.  “I saw himas I see you now.”

“You’ve dreamed the same dream—?”

“Twice over,” she repeated.  “The very same.”

This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. “You dream about me at that rate?”

“Ah about him!” she smiled.

His eyes again sounded her.  “Then you know all abouthim.”  And as she said nothing more: “What’sthe wretch like?”

She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that,resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away.  “I’lltell you some other time!”

CHAPTER II

It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most ofa cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particularform of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more andmore believed to be his privilege.  It was what in these weekshe was living for—since he really felt life to begin but afterMrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample housefrom attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safepossession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go.  Hesometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the moments he likedbest were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; thiswas the time of which, again and again, he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, lingerand listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine,on the pulse of the great vague place: he preferred the lampless hourand only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscularspell.  Later—rarely much before midnight, but then for aconsiderable vigil—he watched with his glimmering light; movingslowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as muchas he might, in open vistas, reaches of communication between roomsand by passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would havecalled it, for the revelation he pretended to invite.  It was apractice he found he could perfectly “work” without excitingremark; no one was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton,who was moreover a well of discretion, didn’t quite fully imagine.

He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calmproprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue“officer” had happened on occasion to see him entering ateleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticedas emerging at two.  He walked there on the crisp November nights,arrived regularly at the evening’s end; it was as easy to do thisafter dining out as to take his way to a club or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn’t been dining out, it was ostensiblyto go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a partof the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club.  Everythingwas easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted: there was trulyeven in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, somethingthat salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness.  Hecirculated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations—metindeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make outon the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts,which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, forthose who might have watched it, to edification, he was positively ratherliked than not.  He was a dim secondary social success—andall with people who had truly not an idea of him.  It was all meresurface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks—justas his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic inproportion as they meant little, of some game of ombres chinoises. He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristlingline of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waitinglife; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click ofhis great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilinglyas the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’swand.

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stickon the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squaresthat he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had thenmade in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception ofstyle.  This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of somefar-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house,of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourishedfor him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it.  On this impressionhe did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—feelingthe place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all preciousconcave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist fingerround its edge.  The concave crystal held, as it were, this mysticalother world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sighthere, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of allthe old baffled forsworn possibilities.  What he did thereforeby this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measureof ghostly life as they might still enjoy.  They were shy, allbut unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at leastthey weren’t as he had hitherto felt them—before they hadtaken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at momentssaw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points ofhis evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.

That was the essence of his vision—which was all rank folly,if one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied,but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed andposted.  He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clearas the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash.  His alterego“walked”—that was the note of his image ofhim, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desireto waylay him and meet him.  He roamed, slowly, warily, but allrestlessly, he himself did—Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely,with her figure of their “craping”; and the presence hewatched for would roam restlessly too.  But it would be as cautiousand as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quitesensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night tonight, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life hadbeen comparable.  It had been the theory of many superficially-judgingpersons, he knew, that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations,but he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, hadbeen introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience and thenerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay perhapsmore formidable, than any beast of the forest.  The terms, thecomparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again intoplay; there were even moments when passages of his occasional experienceas a sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor andmountain and desert, revived for him—and to the increase of hiskeenness—by the tremendous force of analogy.  He found himselfat moments—once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelfor in some recess—stepping back into shelter or shade, effacinghimself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old thevantage of rock and tree; he found himself holding his breath and livingin the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big gamealone.

He wasn’t afraid (though putting himself the question as hebelieved gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters withthe great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having putit); and this indeed—since here at least he might be frank!—becauseof the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself producedas yet a dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest hewas likely to feel.  They fell for him into categories, they fairlybecame familiar, the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm hispresence and his vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark,portentously, on his probably having formed a relation, his probablyenjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man.  Peopleenough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who hadever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitionalworld, an incalculable terror?  He might have found this sublimehad he quite dared to think of it; but he didn’t too much insist,truly, on that side of his privilege.  With habit and repetitionhe gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the duskof distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into theirinnocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking formstaken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shiftingeffects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he could stillwander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing it wasthere behind him in case of need, see his way about, visually projectfor his purpose a comparative clearness.  It made him feel, thisacquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if hewould have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, andwhat it mightn’t verily be, for the poor hard-pressed alterego, to be confronted with such a type.

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs.Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that sheshouldn’t notice: he liked—oh this he did like, and aboveall in the upper rooms!—the sense of the hard silver of the autumnstars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lampsbelow, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtainsto keep out.  This was human actual social; this was of the worldhe had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance,coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of hisdetachment it seemed to give him.  He had support of course mostlyin the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed himconsiderably in the central shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, sonone the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungleof his prey.  The place was there more subdivided; a large “extension”in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, aboundedin nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramificationsespecially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a time,to look far down—not deterred from his gravity even while awarethat he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton playingat hide-and-seek.  Outside in fact he might himself make that ironicrapprochement; but within the walls, and in spite of the clearwindows, his consistency was proof against the cynical light of NewYork.

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness ofhis victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put itto himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could “cultivate”his whole perception.  He had felt it as above all open to cultivation—whichindeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequenceof which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions,attestations of his general postulate, that couldn’t have brokenupon him at once.  This was the case more specifically with a phenomenonat last quite frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition—absolutelyunmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his resumptionof his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of threenights—of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distancecarefully taken and to the express end that he should the less confidently,less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to pursue.  It worried,it finally quite broke him up, for it proved, of all the conceivableimpressions, the one least suited to his book.  He was kept insight while remaining himself—as regards the essence of his position—sightless,and his only recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries ofground.  He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he mightso catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvresrecalled to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and trickedfrom behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influenceof the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, sothat in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant,would on a certain side have but ministered to his intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the premises the baselesssense of a reprieve, his three absences; and the result of the thirdwas to confirm the after-effect of the second.

On his return that night—the night succeeding his last intermission—hestood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty moreintimate than any he had yet known.  “He’s there,at the top, and waiting—not, as in general, falling back for disappearance. He’s holding his ground, and it’s the first time—whichis a proof, isn’t it? that something has happened for him.” So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his foot on the loweststair; in which position he felt as never before the air chilled byhis logic.  He himself turned cold in it, for he seemed of a suddento know what now was involved.  “Harder pressed?—yes,he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I’ve come,as they say, ‘to stay.’  He finally doesn’t likeand can’t bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menacedinterest, now balances with his dread.  I’ve hunted him tillhe has ‘turned’; that, up there, is what has happened—he’sthe fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay.” There came to him, as I say—but determined by an influence beyondmy notation!—the acuteness of this certainty; under which howeverthe next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as little haveconsented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately toact upon it for enterprise.  It marked none the less a prodigiousthrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but alsorepresented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous,possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication of consciousness.

“He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked upto anger, he’ll fight!”—this intense impression madea single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause.  But whatwas wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager,since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffableidentity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him.  It bristledthere—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as thehunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle;and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complexthan had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.  It wasas if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with hisown should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the endnot risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot,a great lift of the whole situation.  Yet with another rare shiftof the same subtlety he was already trying to measure by how much morehe himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could,in another form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quakingfor the form in which he might passively know it.

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown inhim, and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorableor really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapseof certain instants of concentrated conscious combat, the senseof a need to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slippingand slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, tomove, to act, to charge, somehow and upon something—to show himself,in a word, that he wasn’t afraid.  The state of “holdingon” was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced; ifthere had been anything, in the great vacancy, to seize, he would presentlyhave been aware of having clutched it as he might under a shock at homehave clutched the nearest chair-back.  He had been surprised atany rate—of this he wasaware—into something unprecedentedsince his original appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes,held them tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismayand that terror of vision.  When he opened them the room, the othercontiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed lighter—so light, almost,that at first he took the change for day.  He stood firm, howeverthat might be, just where he had paused; his resistance had helped him—itwas as if there were something he had tided over.  He knew aftera little what this was—it had been in the imminent danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without this he would havemade for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with his eyesclosed, he would have descended them, would have known how, straightand swiftly, to the bottom.

Well, as he had held out, here he was—still at the top, amongthe more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others,of all the rest of the house, still to run when it should be his timeto go.  He would go at his time—only at his time: didn’the go every night very much at the same hour?  He took out hiswatch—there was light for that: it was scarcely a quarter pastone, and he had never withdrawn so soon.  He reached his lodgingsfor the most part at two—with his walk of a quarter of an hour. He would wait for the last quarter—he wouldn’t stir tillthen; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting whilehe held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which herecognised, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired tomake.  It would prove his courage—unless indeed the lattermight most be proved by his budging at last from his place.  Whathe mainly felt now was that, since he hadn’t originally scuttled,he had his dignities—which had never in his life seemed so many—allto preserve and to carry aloft.  This was before him in truth asa physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance. That remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant witha finer light; since what age of romance, after all, could have matchedeither the state of his mind or, “objectively,” as theysaid, the wonder of his situation?  The only difference would havebeen that, brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchmentscroll, he might then—that is in the heroic time—have proceededdownstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.

At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of thenext room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the courseof a minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himselfof.  The door between the rooms was open, and from the second anotherdoor opened to a third.  These rooms, as he remembered, gave allthree upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyondthem, without issue save through the preceding.  To have moved,to have heard his step again, was appreciably a help; though even inrecognising this he lingered once more a little by the chimney-pieceon which his light had rested.  When he next moved, just hesitatingwhere to turn, he found himself considering a circumstance that, afterhis first and comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in himthe start that often attends some pang of recollection, the violentshock of having ceased happily to forget.  He had come into sightof the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and whichhe now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facingit.  Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it wouldhave admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without otherapproach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction, been closedsincehis former visitation, the matter probably of a quarterof an hour before.  He stared with all his eyes at the wonder ofthe fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breathwhile he sounded his sense.  Surely it had been subsequentlyclosed—that is it had been on his previous passage indubitablyopen!

He took it full in the face that something had happened between—thathe couldn’t have noticed before (by which he meant on his originaltour of all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionallypresented itself.  He had indeed since that moment undergone anagitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlierview; and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then havegone into the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out,have drawn the door after him.  The difficulty was that this exactlywas what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he mighthave said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear.  He hadthem from the first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain: the strangeapparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled “prey”(which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to apply!)was the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projectinginto it always a refinement of beauty.  He had known fifty timesthe start of perception that had afterwards dropped; had fifty timesgasped to himself.  “There!” under some fond briefhallucination.  The house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself;he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the particulartime, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors—theopposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete proscriptionof them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession ofthe presence encountered telescopically, as he might say, focused andstudied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the elbow.

It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged—theyperfectly availed to make what he saw portentous.  He couldn’t,by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn’t, ifit was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had beenanother agent?  Another agent?—he had been catching, as hefelt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when had he been soclose as in this simple, this logical, this completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that one might have takenit forpersonal; yet for what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while,softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets.  Ahthis time at last they were, the two, the opposed projectionsof him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the questionof danger loomed.  With it rose, as not before, the question ofcourage—for what he knew the blank face of the door to say tohim was “Show us how much you have!”  It stared, itglared back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives:should he just push it open or not?  Oh to have this consciousnesswas to think—and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there,was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted!  Not to haveacted—that was the misery and the pang—was even still notto act; was in fact allto feel the thing in another, in a newand terrible way.  How long did he pause and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had alreadychanged—as just by the effect of its intensity.  Shut upthere, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveablydone, thus giving notice like some stark signboard—underthat accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydonat last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.

It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supremehint, for him, of the value of Discretion!  This slowly dawned,no doubt—for it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold,had he been stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated. It was the strangest of all things that now when, by his taking tensteps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and hisknee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need mighthave been met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged—itwas amazing, but it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence shouldhave, at a touch, quite dropped from him.  Discretion—hejumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such a pitch, because it savedhis nerves or his skin, but because, much more valuably, it saved thesituation.  When I say he “jumped” at it I feel theconsonance of this term with the fact that—at the end indeed ofI know not how long—he did move again, he crossed straight tothe door.  He wouldn’t touch it—it seemed now thathe might if he would: he would only just wait there a little, to show,to prove, that he wouldn’t.  He had thus another station,close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him; butwith his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness. He listened as if there had been something to hear, but this attitude,while it lasted, was his own communication.  “If you won’tthen—good: I spare you and I give up.  You affect me as bythe appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigidand sublime—what do I know?—we both of us should have suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as, I believe,it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce—never, onmy honour, to try again.  So rest for ever—and let me!”

That, for Brydon, was the deep sense of this last demonstration—solemn,measured, directed, as he felt it to be.  He brought it to a close,he turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt, he observed, well-nighto the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he would, the distinctnessof his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself at the otherside of the house.  He did here what he had not yet done at thesehours—he opened half a casement, one of those in the front, andlet in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any timeprevious for a sharp rupture of his spell.  His spell was brokennow, and it didn’t matter—broken by his concession and hissurrender, which made it idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street—its other life so marked even by great lamp-litvacancy—was within call, within touch; he stayed there as to bein it again, high above it though he was still perched; he watched asfor some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passageof a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base.  He wouldhave blessed that sign of life; he would have welcomed positively theslow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had hitherto onlysought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sighthe mightn’t have felt the impulse to get into relation with it,to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.

The pretext that wouldn’t have been too silly or too compromising,the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name,in such a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him: he was sooccupied with the thought of recording his Discretion—as an effectof the vow he had just uttered to his intimate adversary—thatthe importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken allironically his sense of proportion.  If there had been a ladderapplied to the front of the house, even one of the vertiginous perpendicularsemployed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight,he would have managed somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compassby outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent.  If there hadbeen some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels,a workable fire-escape in the form of notched cable or a canvas shoot,he would have availed himself of it as a proof—well, of his presentdelicacy.  He nursed that sentiment, as the question stood, a littlein vain, and even—at the end of he scarce knew, once more, howlong—found it, as by the action on his mind of the failure ofresponse of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish.  Itseemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush;the life of the town was itself under a spell—so unnaturally,up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, theblankness and the silence lasted.  Had they ever, he asked himself,the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn,had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit?  Greatbuilded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heartof cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it wasof this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious—allthe more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand,proving to him what a night he had made of it.

He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time-values(he had taken hours for minutes—not, as in other tense situations,minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak,the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note oflife, and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair. Yet while so deeply demoralised he was capable again of an impulse denoting—atleast by his present measure—extraordinary resolution; of retracinghis steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction ofhis last pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presencethan his own.  This required an effort strong enough to sickenhim; but he had his reason, which over-mastered for the moment everythingelse.  There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse,and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closedwere at present open?  He could hold to the idea that the closinghad practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him todescend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for himdepended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action,or rather his recent inaction, had engendered.  The image of the“presence” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go—thisimage had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stoppedshort of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, hedid stop short—he hung back from really seeing.  The riskwas too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awfulspecific form.

He knew—yes, as he had never known anything—that, shouldhe see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean that the agent of his shame—for his shame was thedeep abjection—was once more at large and in general possession;and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would determinefor him.  It would send him straight about to the window he hadleft open, and by that window, be long ladder and dangling rope as absentas they would, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take hisway to the street.  The hideous chance of this he at least couldavert; but he could only avert it by recoiling in time from assurance. He had the whole house to deal with, this fact was still there; onlyhe now knew that uncertainty alone could start him.  He stole backfrom where he had checked himself—merely to do so was suddenlylike safety—and, making blindly for the greater staircase, leftgaping rooms and sounding passages behind.  Here was the top ofthe stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious landingsto mark off.  His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet wereharsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple of minutesbecome aware of this, it counted somehow for help.  He couldn’thave spoken, the tone of his voice would have scared him, and the commonconceit or resource of “whistling in the dark” (whetherliterally or figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he likednone the less to hear himself go, and when he had reached his firstlanding—taking it all with no rush, but quite steadily—thatstage of success drew from him a gasp of relief.

The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate;the open rooms, to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in theirshuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight thatformed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in whichhe could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour,some watery under-world.  He tried to think of something noble,as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession; but thisnobleness took the form too of the clear delight with which he was finallyto sacrifice it.  They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers—theymight come as soon as they would.  At the end of two flights hehad dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the third, withonly one more left, he recognised the influence of the lower windows,of half-drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of street-lamps, of theglazed spaces of the vestibule.  This was the bottom of the sea,which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved—whenat a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisters—withthe marble squares of his childhood.  By that time indubitablyhe felt, as he might have said in a commoner cause, better; it had allowedhim to stop and draw breath, and the case increased with the sight ofthe old black-and-white slabs.  But what he most felt was thatnow surely, with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firmhands, the case was settled for what he might have seen above had hedared that last look.  The closed door, blessedly remote now, wasstill closed—and he had only in short to reach that of the house.

He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access tothe last flight and if here again he stopped an instant it was almostfor the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape.  It made himshut his eyes—which opened again to the straight slope of theremainder of the stairs.  Here was impunity still, but impunityalmost excessive; inasmuch as the side-lights and the high fantraceryof the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall; an appearanceproduced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that the vestibule gapedwide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of that again the questionsprang at him, making his eyes,as he felt, half-start from his head, as they had done, at the top ofthe house, before the sign of the other door.  If he had left thatone open, hadn’t he left this one closed, and wasn’t henow in mostimmediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a knife in his side, but the answerhung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to whichthe thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door,made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to playa little as he looked—to shift and expand and contract.

It was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctnessand corresponding in extent with the opaque surface behind, the paintedpanels of the last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in hispocket.  The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affectedhim as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after falteringan instant on his step he let himself go with the sense that here wasat last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know—somethingall unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the conditionfor him either of liberation or of supreme defeat.  The penumbra,dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in itas still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinelguarding a treasure.  Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recalland make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest ofhis descent.  He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, thecentral vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very formtoward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigyof a personal presence.

Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substanceand stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be—this only till he recognised, with his advance,that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that coveredit and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried,as for dark deprecation.  So Brydon, before him, took him in; withevery fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute—hisplanted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and whitemasking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling doubleeye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl buttonand gold watch-guard and polished shoe.  No portrait by a greatmodern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust himout of his frame with more art, as if there had been “treatment,”of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience.  The revulsion,for our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense—this drop,in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary’s inscrutablemanoeuvre.  That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him;for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gapeas a proof that he, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed,the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph.  Wasn’tthe proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread?—sospread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassedevery other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers,which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the facewas effectually guarded and saved.

“Saved,” though, wouldit be?—Brydon breathedhis wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistenceof his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the nextinstant as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayalof a braver purpose.  The hands, as he looked, began to move, toopen; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and leftit uncovered and presented.  Horror, with the sight, had leapedinto Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’tutter; for the bared identity was too hideous as his, and hisglare was the passion of his protest.  The face, thatface,Spencer Brydon’s?—he searched it still, but looking awayfrom it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility!—Hehad been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such gameas this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within hima horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and thesuccess of his adventure an irony.  Such an identity fitted hisat nopoint, made its alternative monstrous.  A thousandtimes yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the face was the face ofa stranger.  It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of thoseexpanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood;for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar,had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and fallingback as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life largerthan his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed,he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.

CHAPTER III

What had next brought him back, clearly—though after how long?—wasMrs. Muldoon’s voice, coming to him from quite near, from so nearthat he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground beforehim while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground,but half-raised and upheld—conscious, yes, of tenderness of supportand, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softnessand faintly refreshing fragrance.  He considered, he wondered,his wit but half at his service; then another face intervened, bendingmore directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton hadmade her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had tothis end seated herself on the lowest degree of the staircase, the restof his long person remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were cold, these marble squares of his youth; but hesomehowwas not, in this rich return of consciousness—the most wonderfulhour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did,so gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligencewaiting all round him for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he might callit, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a lateautumn afternoon.  He had come back, yes—come back from furtheraway than any man but himself had ever travelled; but it was strangehow with this sense what he had come back toseemed really thegreat thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sakeof it.  Slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision ofhis state thus completing itself; he had been miraculously carriedback—lifted and carefully borne as from where he had been pickedup, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage.  Even withthis he was suffered to rest, and what had now brought him to knowledgewas the break in the long mild motion.

It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge—yes, this wasthe beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that ofa man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, andthen, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strangeto it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lieand watch it grow.  This was the drift of his patience—thathe had only to let it shine on him.  He must moreover, with intermissions,still have been lifted and borne; since why and how else should he haveknown himself, later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longerat the foot of his stairs—situated as these now seemed at thatdark other end of his tunnel—but on a deep window-bench of hishigh saloon, over which had been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle ofsoft stuff lined with grey fur that was familiar to his eyes and thatone of his hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon’s face had gone, but the other, the second he hadrecognised, hung over him in a way that showed how he was still proppedand pillowed.  He took it all in, and the more he took it the moreit seemed to suffice: he was as much at peace as if he had had foodand drink.  It was the two women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon’shaving plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key—and on her havingabove all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered near the house. She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle—hercalculation having been of the hour of the good woman’s visit;but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there, andthey had entered together.  He had then lain, beyond the vestibule,very much as he was lying now—quite, that is, as he appeared tohave fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in adepth of stupor.  What he most took in, however, at present, withthe steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakablemoment not doubted he was dead.

“It must have been that I was.”  He madeit out as she held him.  “Yes—I can only have died. You brought me literally to life.  Only,” he wondered, hiseyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions,how?”

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and somethingin the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked hishead while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, somethingin all this beatitude somehow answered everything.

“And now I keep you,” she said.

“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face stillhung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close,clingingly close.  It was the seal of their situation—ofwhich he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back.  “Yet how did you know—?”

“I was uneasy.  You were to have come, you remember—andyou had sent no word.”

“Yes, I remember—I was to have gone to you at one to-day.” It caught on to their “old” life and relation—whichwere so near and so far.  “I was still out there in my strangedarkness—where was it, what was it?  I must have stayed thereso long.”  He could but wonder at the depth and the durationof his swoon.

“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear forher possible indiscretion.

“Since this morning—it must have been: the cold dim dawnof to-day.  Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “wherehave I been?”  He felt her hold him close, and it was asif this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. “What a long dark day!”

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment.  “In thecold dim dawn?” she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the wholeprodigy.  “As I didn’t turn up you came straight—?”

She barely cast about.  “I went first to your hotel—wherethey told me of your absence.  You had dined out last evening andhadn’t been back since.  But they appeared to know you hadbeen at your club.”

“So you had the idea of this—?”

“Of what?” she asked in a moment.

“Well—of what has happened.”

“I believed at least you’d have been here.  I’veknown, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”

“‘Known’ it—?”

“Well, I’ve believed it.  I said nothing to youafter that talk we had a month ago—but I felt sure.  I knewyou would,” she declared.

“That I’d persist, you mean?”

“That you’d see him.”

“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail. “There’s somebody—an awful beast; whom I brought,too horribly, to bay.  But it’s not me.”

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. “No—it’s not you.”  And it was as if, whileher face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it beenso near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile.  “No,thank heaven,” she repeated, “it’s not you! Of course it wasn’t to have been.”

“Ah but it was,” he gently insisted.  Andhe stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. “I was to have known myself.”

“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herselfdone, “But it wasn’t only that, that you hadn’tbeen at home,” she went on.  “I waited till the hourat which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; andshe arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any oneto the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps.  After a little,if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found meansto hunt her up.  But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton,as if once more with her fine intentions—“it wasn’tonly that.”

His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her.  “What more then?”

She met it, the wonder she had stirred.  “In the colddim dawn, you say?  Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morningI too saw you.”

“Saw me—?”

“Saw him,” said Alice Staverton.  “Itmust have been at the same moment.”

He lay an instant taking it in—as if he wished to be quitereasonable.  “At the same moment?”

“Yes—in my dream again, the same one I’ve namedto you.  He came back to me.  Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you.”

At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better.  Shehelped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadyinghimself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right handgrasping her left.  “Hedidn’t come to me.”

“You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled.

“Ah I’ve come to myself now—thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face—this brute’s a blackstranger.  He’s none of me, even as I mighthave been,” Brydon sturdily declared.

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”

He almost scowled for it.  “As different as that—?”

Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of thisworld.  “Haven’t you exactly wanted to know howdifferent?  So this morning,” she said, “you appearedto me.”

“Like him?”

“A black stranger!”

“Then how did you know it was I?”

“Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination,has worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been—toshow you, you see, how I’ve thought of you.  In the midstof that you came to me—that my wonder might be answered. So I knew,” she went on; “and believed that, since the questionheld you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see foryourself.  And when this morning I again saw I knew it would bebecause you had—and also then, from the first moment, becauseyou somehow wanted me.  Heseemed to tell me of that. So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?”

It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet.  “You ‘like’that horror—?”

“I couldhave liked him.  And to me,” shesaid, “he was no horror.  I had accepted him.”

“‘Accepted’—?” Brydon oddly sounded.

“Before, for the interest of his difference—yes. And as Ididn’t disown him, as Iknew him—whichyou at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t,my dear,—well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.”

She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand—stillwith her arm supporting him.  But though it all brought for himthus a dim light, “You ‘pitied’ him?” he grudgingly,resentfully asked.

“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,” she said.

“And haven’t I been unhappy?  Am not I—you’veonly to look at me!—ravaged?”

“Ah I don’t say I like him better,” shegranted after a thought.  “But he’s grim, he’sworn—and things have happened to him.  He doesn’t makeshift, for sight, with your charming monocle.”

“No”—it struck Brydon; “I couldn’thave sported mine ‘down-town.’  They’d have guyedme there.”

“His great convex pince-nez—I saw it, I recognised thekind—is for his poor ruined sight.  And his poor right hand—!”

“Ah!” Brydon winced—whether for his proved identityor for his lost fingers.  Then, “He has a million a year,”he lucidly added.  “But he hasn’t you.”

“And he isn’t—no, he isn’t—you!”she murmured, as he drew her to his breast.

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