The Altar of the Dead

He had ruthlessly abandoned her—that of course was what he had done.  Stransom made it all out in solitude, at leisure, fitting the unmatched pieces gradually together and dealing one by one with a hundred obscure points.  She had known Hague only after her present friend’s relations with him had wholly terminated; obviously indeed a good while after; and it was natural enough that of his previous life she should have ascertained only what he had judged good to communicate.  There were passages it was quite conceivable that even in moments of the tenderest expansion he should have withheld.  Of many facts in the career of a man so in the eye of the world there was of course a common knowledge; but this lady lived apart from public affairs, and the only time perfectly clear to her would have been the time following the dawn of her own drama.  A man in her place would have “looked up” the past—would even have consulted old newspapers.  It remained remarkable indeed that in her long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply been that security had prevailed.  She had taken what Hague had given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions was only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to produce.

This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught his breath again and again as it came over him that the woman with whom he had had for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom Acton Hague, of all men in the world, had more or less fashioned.  Such as she sat there to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him.  Beneficent, blameless as Stransom held her, he couldn’t rid himself of the sense that he had been, as who should say, swindled.  She had imposed upon him hugely, though she had known it as little as he.  All this later past came back to him as a time grotesquely misspent.  Such at least were his first reflexions; after a while he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it, more troubled.  He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which was to make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate.  He felt her spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own to the very degree in which she might have been, in which she certainly had been, more wronged.  A women, when wronged, was always more wronged than a man, and there were conditions when the least she could have got off with was more than the most he could have to bear.  He was sure this rare creature wouldn’t have got off with the least.  He was awestruck at the thought of such a surrender—such a prostration.  Moulded indeed she had been by powerful hands, to have converted her injury into an exaltation so sublime.  The fellow had only had to die for everything that was ugly in him to be washed out in a torrent.  It was vain to try to guess what had taken place, but nothing could be clearer than that she had ended by accusing herself.  She absolved him at every point, she adored her very wounds.  The passion by which he had profited had rushed back after its ebb, and now the tide of tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too deep even to fathom.  Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven him; but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved!  His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.  The light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his silence with a blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for her too great a hush.

She had been right about the difference—she had spoken the truth about the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely but sharply jealous.  His tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had “forgiven” Acton Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken spring.  The very fact of her appeal for a material sign, a sign that should make her dead lover equal there with the others, presented the concession to her friend as too handsome for the case.  He had never thought of himself as hard, but an exorbitant article might easily render him so.  He moved round and round this one, but only in widening circles—the more he looked at it the less acceptable it seemed.  At the same time he had no illusion about the effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how it would make for a rupture.  He left her alone a week, but when at last he again called this conviction was cruelly confirmed.  In the interval he had kept away from the church, and he needed no fresh assurance from her to know she hadn’t entered it.  The change was complete enough: it had broken up her life.  Indeed it had broken up his, for all the fires of his shrine seemed to him suddenly to have been quenched.  A great indifference fell upon him, the weight of which was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his devotion had been for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped watch.  Neither did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on the final service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in this abandonment the whole future gave way.

These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable; all the more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even resentful.  It was not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard reality, to the stern logic of life.  This came home to him when he sat with her again in the room in which her late aunt’s conversation lingered like the tone of a cracked piano.  She tried to make him forget how much they were estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up it was impossible not to be sorry for her.  He had taken from her so much more than she had taken from him.  He argued with her again, told her she could now have the altar to herself; but she only shook her head with pleading sadness, begging him not to waste his breath on the impossible, the extinct.  Couldn’t he see that in relation to her private need the rites he had established were practically an elaborate exclusion?  She regretted nothing that had happened; it had all been right so long as she didn’t know, and it was only that now she knew too much and that from the moment their eyes were open they would simply have to conform.  It had doubtless been happiness enough for them to go on together so long.  She was gentle, grateful, resigned; but this was only the form of a deep immoveability.  He saw he should never more cross the threshold of the second room, and he felt how much this alone would make a stranger of him and give a conscious stiffness to his visits.  He would have hated to plunge again into that well of reminders, but he enjoyed quite as little the vacant alternative.

After he had been with her three or four times it struck him that to have come at last into her house had had the horrid effect of diminishing their intimacy.  He had known her better, had liked her in greater freedom, when they merely walked together or kneeled together.  Now they only pretended; before they had been nobly sincere.  They began to try their walks again, but it proved a lame imitation, for these things, from the first, beginning or ending, had been connected with their visits to the church.  They had either strolled away as they came out or gone in to rest on the return.  Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn’t walk as of old.  The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation of their lives.  Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no mystery of his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament.  Her response, whatever it was, always came to the same thing—an implied invitation to him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she had in hers.  For him indeed was no comfort even in complaint, since every allusion to what had befallen them but made the author of their trouble more present.  Acton Hague was between them—that was the essence of the matter, and never so much between them as when they were face to face.  Then Stransom, while still wanting to banish him, had the strangest sense of striving for an ease that would involve having accepted him.  Deeply disconcerted by what he knew, he was still worse tormented by really not knowing.  Perfectly aware that it would have been horribly vulgar to abuse his old friend or to tell his companion the story of their quarrel, it yet vexed him that her depth of reserve should give him no opening and should have the effect of a magnanimity greater even than his own.

He challenged himself, denounced himself, asked himself if he were in love with her that he should care so much what adventures she had had.  He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with her; therefore nothing could have surprised him more than to discover he was jealous.  What but jealousy could give a man that sore contentious wish for the detail of what would make him suffer?  Well enough he knew indeed that he should never have it from the only person who to-day could give it to him.  She let him press her with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him with an exquisite mercy and breathing equally little the word that would expose her secret and the word that would appear to deny his literal right to bitterness.  She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted everything but the possibility of her return to the old symbols.  Stransom divined that for her too they had been vividly individual, had stood for particular hours or particular attributes—particular links in her chain.  He made it clear to himself, as he believed, that his difficulty lay in the fact that the very nature of the plea for his faithless friend constituted a prohibition; that it happened to have come from her was precisely the vice that attached to it.  To the voice of impersonal generosity he felt sure he would have listened; he would have deferred to an advocate who, speaking from abstract justice, knowing of his denial without having known Hague, should have had the imagination to say: “Ah, remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for him.”  To provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of his turpitudes was not to pity but to glorify him.  The more Stransom thought the more he made out that whatever this relation of Hague’s it could only have been a deception more or less finely practised.  Where had it come into the life that all men saw?  Why had one never heard of it if it had had the frankness of honourable things?  Stransom knew enough of his other ties, of his obligations and appearances, not to say enough of his general character, to be sure there had been some infamy.  In one way or another this creature had been coldly sacrificed.  That was why at the last as well as the first he must still leave him out and out.

CHAPTER IX

And yet this was no solution, especially after he had talked again to his friend of all it had been his plan she should finally do for him.  He had talked in the other days, and she had responded with a frankness qualified only by a courteous reluctance, a reluctance that touched him, to linger on the question of his death.  She had then practically accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could depend upon her to be the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it was in the name of what had so passed between them that he appealed to her not to forsake him in his age.  She listened at present with shining coldness and all her habitual forbearance to insist on her terms; her deprecation was even still tenderer, for it expressed the compassion of her own sense that he was abandoned.  Her terms, however, remained the same, and scarcely the less audible for not being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more than he she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have provided her.  They both missed the rich future, but she missed it most, because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it was her acceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of her preference for the thought of Acton Hague over any other thought whatever.  He had humour enough to laugh rather grimly when he said to himself: “Why the deuce does she like him so much more than she likes me?”—the reasons being really so conceivable.  But even his faculty of analysis left the irritation standing, and this irritation proved perhaps the greatest misfortune that had ever overtaken him.  There had been nothing yet that made him so much want to give up.  He had of course by this time well reached the age of renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to him that it was time to give up everything.

Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced the friendship once so charming and comforting.  His privation had two faces, and the face it had turned to him on the occasion of his last attempt to cultivate that friendship was the one he could look at least.  This was the privation he inflicted; the other was the privation he bore.  The conditions she never phrased he used to murmur to himself in solitude: “One more, one more—only just one.”  Certainly he was going down; he often felt it when he caught himself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice to that inanity.  There was proof enough besides in his being so weak and so ill.  His irritation took the form of melancholy, and his melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite failed.  His altar moreover had ceased to exist; his chapel, in his dreams, was a great dark cavern.  All the lights had gone out—all his Dead had died again.  He couldn’t exactly see at first how it had been in the power of his late companion to extinguish them, since it was neither for her nor by her that they had been called into being.  Then he understood that it was essentially in his own soul the revival had taken place, and that in the air of this soul they were now unable to breathe.  The candles might mechanically burn, but each of them had lost its lustre.  The church had become a void; it was his presence, her presence, their common presence, that had made the indispensable medium.  If anything was wrong everything was—her silence spoiled the tune.

Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that he went back; reflecting that as they had been his best society for years his Dead perhaps wouldn’t let him forsake them without doing something more for him.  They stood there, as he had left them, in their tall radiance, the bright cluster that had already made him, on occasions when he was willing to compare small things with great, liken them to a group of sea-lights on the edge of the ocean of life.  It was a relief to him, after a while, as he sat there, to feel they had still a virtue.  He was more and more easily tired, and he always drove now; the action of his heart was weak and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the action of his fancy.  None the less he returned yet again, returned several times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience.  In winter the church was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the glow of his shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask.  He sat and wondered to what he had reduced his absent associate and what she now did with the hours of her absence.  There were other churches, there were other altars, there were other candles; in one way or another her piety would still operate; he couldn’t absolutely have deprived her of her rites.  So he argued, but without contentment; for he well enough knew there was no other such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had once mentioned to him as the satisfaction of her need.  As this semblance again gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her darkness; for never so much as in these weeks had his rites been real, never had his gathered company seemed so to respond and even to invite.  He lost himself in the large lustre, which was more and more what he had from the first wished it to be—as dazzling as the vision of heaven in the mind of a child.  He wandered in the fields of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from tier to tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the white intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another.  It was in the quiet sense of having saved his souls that his deep strange instinct rejoiced.  This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a contingent world; they were saved better than faith or works could save them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk from dying to, for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of human remembrance.

By this time he had survived all his friends; the last straight flame was three years old, there was no one to add to the list.  Over and over he called his roll, and it appeared to him compact and complete.  Where should he put in another, where, if there were no other objection, would it stand in its place in the rank?  He reflected, with a want of sincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would be difficult to determine that place.  More and more, besides, face to face with his little legion, over endless histories, handling the empty shells and playing with the silence—more and more he could see that he had never introduced an alien.  He had had his great companions, his indulgences—there were cases in which they had been immense; but what had his devotion after all been if it hadn’t been at bottom a respect?  He was, however, himself surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the winter the responsibility of it was what was uppermost in his thoughts.  The refrain had grown old to them, that plea for just one more.  There came a day when, for simple exhaustion, if symmetry should demand just one he was ready so far to meet symmetry.  Symmetry was harmony, and the idea of harmony began to haunt him; he said to himself that harmony was of course everything.  He took, in fancy, his composition to pieces, redistributing it into other lines, making other juxtapositions and contrasts.  He shifted this and that candle, he made the spaces different, he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap.  There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross-reference, and moments in which he seemed to catch a glimpse of the void so sensible to the woman who wandered in exile or sat where he had seen her with the portrait of Acton Hague.  Finally, in this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal, which left a clear opportunity for just another figure.  “Just one more—to round it off; just one more, just one,” continued to hum in his head.  There was a strange confusion in the thought, for he felt the day to be near when he too should be one of the Others.  What in this event would the Others matter to him, since they only mattered to the living?  Even as one of the Dead what would his altar matter to him, since his particular dream of keeping it up had melted away?  What had harmony to do with the case if his lights were all to be quenched?  What he had hoped for was an instituted thing.  He might perpetuate it on some other pretext, but his special meaning would have dropped.  This meaning was to have lasted with the life of the one other person who understood it.

In March he had an illness during which he spent a fortnight in bed, and when he revived a little he was told of two things that had happened.  One was that a lady whose name was not known to the servants (she left none) had been three times to ask about him; the other was that in his sleep and on an occasion when his mind evidently wandered he was heard to murmur again and again: “Just one more—just one.”  As soon as he found himself able to go out, and before the doctor in attendance had pronounced him so, he drove to see the lady who had come to ask about him.  She was not at home; but this gave him the opportunity, before his strength should fall again, to take his way to the church.  He entered it alone; he had declined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to decline effectively, the company of his servant or of a nurse.  He knew now perfectly what these good people thought; they had discovered his clandestine connexion, the magnet that had drawn him for so many years, and doubtless attached a significance of their own to the odd words they had repeated to him.  The nameless lady was the clandestine connexion—a fact nothing could have made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin her.  He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on his hands.  His weakness, his life’s weariness overtook him.  It seemed to him he had come for the great surrender.  At first he asked himself how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the very desire to move gradually left him.  He had come, as he always came, to lose himself; the fields of light were still there to stray in; only this time, in straying, he would never come back.  He had given himself to his Dead, and it was good: this time his Dead would keep him.  He couldn’t rise from his knees; he believed he should never rise again; all he could do was to lift his face and fix his eyes on his lights.  They looked unusually, strangely splendid, but the one that always drew him most had an unprecedented lustre.  It was the central voice of the choir, the glowing heart of the brightness, and on this occasion it seemed to expand, to spread great wings of flame.  The whole altar flared—dazzling and blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearer than the rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was human beauty and human charity, was the far-off face of Mary Antrim.  She smiled at him from the glory of heaven—she brought the glory down with her to take him.  He bowed his head in submission and at the same moment another wave rolled over him.  Was it the quickening of joy to pain?  In the midst of his joy at any rate he felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated knowledge that had the force of a reproach.  It suddenly made him contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to another.  This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; the descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb for the descent of Acton Hague.  It was as if Stransom had read what her eyes said to him.

After a moment he looked round in a despair that made him feel as if the source of life were ebbing.  The church had been empty—he was alone; but he wanted to have something done, to make a last appeal.  This idea gave him strength for an effort; he rose to his feet with a movement that made him turn, supporting himself by the back of a bench.  Behind him was a prostrate figure, a figure he had seen before; a woman in deep mourning, bowed in grief or in prayer.  He had seen her in other days—the first time of his entrance there, and he now slightly wavered, looking at her again till she seemed aware he had noticed her.  She raised her head and met his eyes: the partner of his long worship had come back.  She looked across at him an instant with a face wondering and scared; he saw he had made her afraid.  Then quickly rising she came straight to him with both hands out.

“Then you could come?  God sent you!” he murmured with a happy smile.

“You’re very ill—you shouldn’t be here,” she urged in anxious reply.

“God sent me too, I think.  I was ill when I came, but the sight of you does wonders.”  He held her hands, which steadied and quickened him.  “I’ve something to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me!” she tenderly pleaded; “let me tell you.  This afternoon, by a miracle, the sweetest of miracles, the sense of our difference left me.  I was out—I was near, thinking, wandering alone, when, on the spot, something changed in my heart.  It’s my confession—there it is.  To come back, to come back on the instant—the idea gave me wings.  It was as if I suddenly saw something—as if it all became possible.  I could come for what you yourself came for: that was enough.  So here I am.  It’s not for my own—that’s over.  But I’m here for them.”  And breathless, infinitely relieved by her low precipitate explanation, she looked with eyes that reflected all its splendour at the magnificence of their altar.

“They’re here for you,” Stransom said, “they’re present to-night as they’ve never been.  They speak for you—don’t you see?—in a passion of light; they sing out like a choir of angels.  Don’t you hear what they say?—they offer the very thing you asked of me.”

“Don’t talk of it—don’t think of it; forget it!”  She spoke in hushed supplication, and while the alarm deepened in her eyes she disengaged one of her hands and passed an arm round him to support him better, to help him to sink into a seat.

He let himself go, resting on her; he dropped upon the bench and she fell on her knees beside him, his own arm round her shoulder.  So he remained an instant, staring up at his shrine.  “They say there’s a gap in the array—they say it’s not full, complete.  Just one more,” he went on, softly—“isn’t that what you wanted?  Yes, one more, one more.”

“Ah no more—no more!” she wailed, as with a quick new horror of it, under her breath.

“Yes, one more,” he repeated, simply; “just one!”  And with this his head dropped on her shoulder; she felt that in his weakness he had fainted.  But alone with him in the dusky church a great dread was on her of what might still happen, for his face had the whiteness of death.