Embarrassments

“To put yourself into your slippers,” I rejoined, “and fall asleep in your chair. You slept till morning—you saw her in a dream!” He looked at me in silence and with sombre eyes—eyes that showed me he had some irritation to repress. Presently I went on: “You had a visit, at an extraordinary hour, from a lady—soit: nothing in the world is more probable. But there are ladies and ladies. How in the name of goodness, if she was unannounced and dumb and you had into the bargain never seen the least portrait of her—how could you identify the person we’re talking of?”

“Haven’t I to absolute satiety heard her described? I’ll describe her for you in every particular.”

“Don’t!” I exclaimed with a promptness that made him laugh once more. I coloured at this, but I continued: “Did your servant introduce her?”

“He wasn’t here—he’s always away when he’s wanted. One of the features of this big house is that from the street-door the different floors are accessible practically without challenge. My servant makes love to a young person employed in the rooms above these, and he had a long bout of it last evening. When he’s out on that job he leaves my outer door, on the staircase, so much ajar as to enable him to slip back without a sound. The door then only requires a push. She pushed it—that simply took a little courage.”

“A little? It took tons! And it took all sorts of impossible calculations.”

“Well, she had them—she made them. Mind you, I don’t deny for a moment,” he added, “that it was very, very wonderful!”

Something in his tone prevented me for a while from trusting myself to speak. At last I said: “How did she come to know where you live?”

“By remembering the address on the little label the shop-people happily left sticking to the frame I had had made for my photograph.”

“And how was she dressed?”

“In mourning, my own dear. No great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan. She has near the left eye,” he continued, “a tiny vertical scar—”

I stopped him short. “The mark of a caress from her husband.” Then I added: “How close you must have been to her!” He made no answer to this, and I thought he blushed, observing which I broke straight off. “Well, goodbye.”

“You won’t stay a little?” He came to me again tenderly, and this time I suffered him. “Her visit had its beauty,” he murmured as he held me, “but yours has a greater one.”

I let him kiss me, but I remembered, as I had remembered the day before, that the last kiss she had given, as I supposed, in this world had been for the lips he touched.

“I’m life, you see,” I answered. “What you saw last night was death.”

“It was life—it was life!”

He spoke with a kind of soft stubbornness, and I disengaged myself. We stood looking at each other hard.

“You describe the scene—so far as you describe it at all—in terms that are incomprehensible. She was in the room before you knew it?”

“I looked up from my letter-writing—at that table under the lamp, I had been wholly absorbed in it—and she stood before me.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I sprang up with an ejaculation, and she, with a smile, laid her finger, ever so warningly, yet with a sort of delicate dignity, to her lips. I knew it meant silence, but the strange thing was that it seemed immediately to explain and to justify her. We, at any rate, stood for a time that, as I’ve told you, I can’t calculate, face to face. It was just as you and I stand now.”

“Simply staring?”

He impatiently protested. “Ah! we’re not staring!”

“Yes, but we’re talking.”

“Well, we were—after a fashion.” He lost himself in the memory of it. “It was as friendly as this.” I had it on my tongue’s end to ask if that were saying much for it, but I remarked instead that what they had evidently done was to gaze in mutual admiration. Then I inquired whether his recognition of her had been immediate. “Not quite,” he replied, “for, of course, I didn’t expect her; but it came to me long before she went who she was—who she could only be.”

I thought a little. “And how did she at last go?”

“Just as she arrived. The door was open behind her, and she passed out.”

“Was she rapid—slow?”

“Rather quick. But looking behind her,” he added, with a smile. “I let her go, for I perfectly understood that I was to take it as she wished.”

I was conscious of exhaling a long, vague sigh. “Well, you must take it now as I wish—you must let me go.”

At this he drew near me again, detaining and persuading me, declaring with all due gallantry that I was a very different matter. I would have given anything to have been able to ask him if he had touched her, but the words refused to form themselves: I knew well enough how horrid and vulgar they would sound. I said something else—I forget exactly what; it was feebly tortuous, and intended to make him tell me without my putting the question. But he didn’t tell me; he only repeated, as if from a glimpse of the propriety of soothing and consoling me, the sense of his declaration of some minutes before—the assurance that she was indeed exquisite, as I had always insisted, but that I was his “real” friend and his very own for ever. This led me to reassert, in the spirit of my previous rejoinder, that I had at least the merit of being alive; which in turn drew from him again the flash of contradiction I dreaded. “Oh, she was alive! she was, she was!”

“She was dead! she was dead!” I asseverated with an energy, a determination that it should be so, which comes back to me now almost as grotesque. But the sound of the word, as it rang out, filled me suddenly with horror, and all the natural emotion the meaning of it might have evoked in other conditions gathered and broke in a flood. It rolled over me that here was a great affection quenched, and how much I had loved and trusted her. I had a vision at the same time of the lonely beauty of her end. “She’s gone—she’s lost to us for ever!” I burst into sobs.

“That’s exactly what I feel,” he exclaimed, speaking with extreme kindness and pressing me to him for comfort. “She’s gone; she’s lost to us for ever: so what does it matter now?” He bent over me, and when his face had touched mine I scarcely knew if it were wet with my tears or with his own.

VII

It was my theory, my conviction, it became, as I may say, my attitude, that they had still never “met;” and it was just on this ground that I said to myself it would be generous to ask him to stand with me beside her grave. He did so, very modestly and tenderly, and I assumed, though he himself clearly cared nothing for the danger, that the solemnity of the occasion, largely made up of persons who had known them both and had a sense of the long joke, would sufficiently deprive his presence of all light association. On the question of what had happened the evening of her death little more passed between us; I had been overtaken by a horror of the element of evidence. It seemed gross and prying on either hypothesis. He, on his side, had none to produce, none at least but a statement of his house-porter—on his own admission a most casual and intermittent personage—that between the hours of ten o’clock and midnight no less than three ladies in deep black had flitted in and out of the place. This proved far too much; we had neither of us any use for three. He knew that I considered I had accounted for every fragment of her time, and we dropped the matter as settled; we abstained from further discussion. What I knew however was that he abstained to please me rather than because he yielded to my reasons. He didn’t yield—he was only indulgent; he clung to his interpretation because he liked it better. He liked it better, I held, because it had more to say to his vanity. That, in a similar position, would not have been its effect on me, though I had doubtless quite as much; but these are things of individual humour, as to which no person can judge for another. I should have supposed it more gratifying to be the subject of one of those inexplicable occurrences that are chronicled in thrilling books and disputed about at learned meetings; I could conceive, on the part of a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august than such an impulse of reparation, of admonition or even of curiosity. That was beautiful, if one would, and I should in his place have thought more of myself for being so distinguished. It was public that he had already, that he had long been distinguished, and what was this in itself but almost a proof? Each of the strange visitations contributed to establish the other. He had a different feeling; but he had also, I hasten to add, an unmistakable desire not to make a stand or, as they say, a fuss about it. I might believe what I liked—the more so that the whole thing was in a manner a mystery of my producing. It was an event of my history, a puzzle of my consciousness, not of his; therefore he would take about it any tone that struck me as convenient. We had both at all events other business on hand; we were pressed with preparations for our marriage.

Mine were assuredly urgent, but I found as the days went on that to believe what I “liked” was to believe what I was more and more intimately convinced of. I found also that I didn’t like it so much as that came to, or that the pleasure at all events was far from being the cause of my conviction. My obsession, as I may really call it and as I began to perceive, refused to be elbowed away, as I had hoped, by my sense of paramount duties. If I had a great deal to do I had still more to think about, and the moment came when my occupations were gravely menaced by my thoughts. I see it all now, I feel it, I live it over. It’s terribly void of joy, it’s full indeed to overflowing of bitterness; and yet I must do myself justice—I couldn’t possibly be other than I was. The same strange impressions, had I to meet them again, would produce the same deep anguish, the same sharp doubts, the same still sharper certainties. Oh, it’s all easier to remember than to write, but even if I could retrace the business hour by hour, could find terms for the inexpressible, the ugliness and the pain would quickly stay my hand. Let me then note very simply and briefly that a week before our wedding-day, three weeks after her death, I became fully aware that I had something very serious to look in the face, and that if I was to make this effort I must make it on the spot and before another hour should elapse. My unextinguished jealousy—that was the Medusa-mask. It hadn’t died with her death, it had lividly survived, and it was fed by suspicions unspeakable. They would be unspeakable to-day, that is, if I hadn’t felt the sharp need of uttering them at the time.

This need took possession of me—to save me, as it appeared, from my fate. When once it had done so I saw—in the urgency of the case, the diminishing hours and shrinking interval—only one issue, that of absolute promptness and frankness. I could at least not do him the wrong of delaying another day, I could at least treat my difficulty as too fine for a subterfuge. Therefore very quietly, but none the less abruptly and hideously, I put it before him on a certain evening that we must reconsider our situation and recognise that it had completely altered.

He stared bravely. “How has it altered?” “Another person has come between us.” He hesitated a moment. “I won’t pretend not to know whom you mean.” He smiled in pity for my aberration, but he meant to be kind. “A woman dead and buried!”

“She’s buried, but she’s not dead. She’s dead for the world—she’s dead for me. But she’s not dead for you.”

“You hark back to the different construction we put on her appearance that evening?”

“No,” I answered, “I hark back to nothing. I’ve no need of it. I’ve more than enough with what’s before me.”

“And pray, darling, what is that?”

“You’re completely changed.”

“By that absurdity?” he laughed.

“Not so much by that one as by other absurdities that have followed it.”

“And what may they have been?”

We had faced each other fairly, with eyes that didn’t flinch; but his had a dim, strange light, and my certitude triumphed in his perceptible paleness. “Do you really pretend,” I asked, “not to know what they are?”

“My dear child,” he replied, “you describe them too sketchily!”

I considered a moment. “One may well be embarrassed to finish the picture! But from that point of view—and from the beginning—what was ever more embarrassing than your idiosyncrasy?”

He was extremely vague. “My idiosyncrasy?”

“Your notorious, your peculiar power.”