It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a
cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular
form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and
more believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was
living for--since he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon had
retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to
cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and,
as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in
the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering
dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and
again, he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him,
most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine
attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great
vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have
prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later--rarely much before
midnight, but then for a considerable vigil--he watched with his
glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far,
rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of
communication between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or
show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to
invite. It was a practice he found he could perfectly "work" without
exciting remark; 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 calm
proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue
"officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty,
he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at
two. He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at
the evening's end; it was as easy to do this after 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 ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left
his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly
to go to his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and
promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience something
that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of
consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly,
old relations--met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and
seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such
different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as
ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to
edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim
secondary social success--and all with people who had truly not an idea
of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome,
this popping of their corks--just as his gestures of response were the
extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some
game of _ombres chinoises_. He projected himself all day, in thought,
straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the
other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard
behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly
corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music
follows the tap of the conductor's wand.
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the
old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he
remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in
him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This
effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who
should say where?--in the depths of the house, of the past, of that
mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for
weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same
thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner--feeling the place
once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave
crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its
edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world,
and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the
scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled
forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his
hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as
they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but
they weren't really sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto
felt them--before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them
take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting
on tiptoe, the points of his 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 and posted. He
knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a
cheque presented in demand for cash. His _alter ego_ "walked"--that was
the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own
odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed,
slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself did--Mrs. Muldoon had been
right, absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence
he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious
and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quite
sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to
night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had
been comparable. It had been the theory of many superficially-judging
persons, 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, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the
patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at
bay perhaps more formidable, than any beast of the forest. The terms,
the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again
into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional
experience as a sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of
moor and mountain and desert, revived for him--and to the increase of his
keenness--by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at
moments--once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf or in
some recess--stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself behind
a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock
and tree; he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of
the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone.
He wasn't afraid (though putting himself the question as he believed
gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters with the great bear
of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this
indeed--since here at least he might be frank!--because of the
impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself produced as yet a
dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest he was likely to
feel. They fell for him into categories, they fairly became familiar,
the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm his presence and his
vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on
his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a
consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and
last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so
turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an
incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite dared
to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that side of his
privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary
degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of
corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of
uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere
shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective;
putting down his dim luminary he could still wander on without it, pass
into other rooms and, only knowing it was there behind him in case of
need, see his way about, visually project for his purpose a comparative
clearness. It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous
stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with
large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't verily be, for the poor
hard-pressed _alter ego_, 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 she
shouldn't notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the
upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through
the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below,
the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out.
This was human actual social; this was of the world he 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 his detachment it seemed
to give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide
front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central
shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds,
was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the
house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The place was there
more subdivided; a large "extension" in particular, where small rooms for
servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets
and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase
over which he leaned, many a time, to look far down--not deterred from
his gravity even while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured
some solemn simpleton playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact he might
himself make that ironic _rapprochement_; but within the walls, and in
spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against the cynical
light of New York.
It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his
victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to
himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate" his
whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation--which
indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was
bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of
which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions,
attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him
at once. This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last
quite frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition--absolutely
unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his
resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence
of three nights--of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distance
carefully 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
conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his book. He was kept
in sight while remaining himself--as regards the essence of his
position--sightless, and his only recourse then was in abrupt turns,
rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if
he might so 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 manoeuvres recalled to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce,
buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left
intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re-
exposed to them, so that 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 baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and the result of
the third was to confirm the after-effect of the second.
On his return that night--the night succeeding his last intermission--he
stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more
intimate 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--which is 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 lowest stair; in which position he felt
as never before the air chilled by his logic. He himself turned cold in
it, for he seemed of a sudden to 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 like and can't
bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now
balances with his dread. I've hunted him till he has 'turned'; that, up
there, is what has happened--he's the fanged or the antlered animal
brought at last to bay." There came to him, as I say--but determined by
an influence beyond my notation!--the acuteness of this certainty; under
which however the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as
little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared
immediately to act upon it for enterprise. It marked none the less a
prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but
also represented, 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 up to anger,
he'll fight!"--this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it
were, of terror and applause. But what was 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 ineffable identity was thus in the
last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there--somewhere near at
hand, however unseen still--as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm
of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted
probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself
consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just
skulking, should to the end not 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 shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure
by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing
that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and
simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it.
The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and
the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or
really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of
certain instants of concentrated conscious _combat_, the sense of a need
to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slipping and
slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to
act, to charge, somehow and upon something--to show himself, in a word,
that he wasn't afraid. The state of "holding on" was thus the state to
which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the
great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having
clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the nearest
chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate--of this he _was_
aware--into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of
the place; he had closed his eyes, held them tight, for a long minute, as
with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened
them the room, the other contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed
lighter--so light, almost, that at first he took the change for day. He
stood firm, however that might be, just where he had paused; his
resistance had helped him--it was as if there were something he had tided
over. He knew after a little what this was--it had been in the imminent
danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without this
he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with
his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would have known how,
straight and swiftly, to the bottom.
Well, as he had held out, here he was--still at the top, among the 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 time to go. He
would go at his time--only at his time: didn't he go every night very
much at the same hour? He took out his watch--there was light for that:
it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon.
He reached his lodgings for 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
till then; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting
while he held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which
he recognised, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to
make. It would prove his courage--unless indeed the latter might most be
proved by his budging at last from his place. What he mainly felt now
was that, since he hadn't originally scuttled, he had his dignities--which
had never in his life seemed so many--all to preserve and to carry aloft.
This was before him in truth as a physical image, an image almost worthy
of an age of greater romance. That remark indeed glimmered for him only
to glow the next instant with a finer light; since what age of romance,
after all, could have matched either the state of his mind or,
"objectively," as they said, the wonder of his situation? The only
difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his head
as in a parchment scroll, he might then--that is in the heroic time--have
proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.
At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next
room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the course of a
minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of.
The door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door
opened to a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a
common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without
issue save through the preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step
again, was appreciably a help; though even in recognising this he
lingered once more a little by the chimney-piece on which his light had
rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found
himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and
comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that
often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of having
ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the door in which
the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the
nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it. Placed at some
distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the
last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it
not, to his intimate conviction, been closed _since_ his former
visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He
stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where
he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely
it had been _subsequently_ closed--that is it had been on his previous
passage indubitably open!
He took it full in the face that something had happened between--that he
couldn't have noticed before (by which he meant on his original tour of
all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally
presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation
so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view; and
he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into
the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the
door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never
did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence
of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was
well aware, quite on the brain: the strange apparition, 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, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty. He
had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards
dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself. "There!" under some fond
brief hallucination. The house, as the case stood, admirably lent
itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the
particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of
doors--the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete
proscription of them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this
obsession of the presence encountered telescopically, as he might say,
focused and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the
elbow.
It was with these considerations that his present attention was
charged--they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous. He
_couldn't_, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn't,
if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been
another agent? Another agent?--he had been catching, as he felt, a
moment back, the very breath of him; but when had he been so close as in
this simple, this logical, this completely personal act? It was so
logical, that is, that one might have _taken_ it for personal; yet for
what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt
his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah this time at last they _were_,
the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as
much as one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not
before, the question of courage--for what he knew the blank face of the
door to say to him was "Show us how much you have!" It stared, it glared
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 consciousness was to
_think_--and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the
lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted--that was the
misery and the pang--was even still not to act; was in fact _all_ to feel
the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause
and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it;
for his vibration had already changed--as just by the effect of its
intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the
thing palpably proveably _done_, thus giving notice like some stark
signboard--under that accession of accent the situation itself had
turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had
turned to.
It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme hint,
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 ten steps and
applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if
necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need might have been
met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged--it was amazing, but
it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should have, at a touch,
quite dropped from him. Discretion--he jumped at that; and yet not,
verily, at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but
because, much more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he
"jumped" at it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that--at
the end indeed of I know not how long--he did move again, he crossed
straight to the door. He wouldn't touch it--it seemed now that he 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; but with 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't then--good: I spare you and I give
up. You affect me as by the appeal positively for pity: you convince me
that for reasons rigid and 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,
on my 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-nigh
to the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he would, the
distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself
at the other side of the house. He did here what he had not yet done at
these hours--he opened half a casement, one of those in the front, and
let in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time
previous for a sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now, and
it didn't matter--broken by his concession and his surrender, which made
it idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street--its
other life so marked even by great lamp-lit vacancy--was within call,
within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again, high above it though
he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some
vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird
however base. He would have blessed that sign of life; he would have
welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom
he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol
had come into sight he 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 so occupied
with the thought of recording his Discretion--as an effect of the vow he
had just uttered to his intimate adversary--that the importance of this
loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of
proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the
house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters
and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed
somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and
arm that mode of descent. If there had been 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 present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment, as the
question stood, a little in vain, and even--at the end of he scarce knew,
once more, how long--found it, as by the action on his mind of the
failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It
seemed 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, the blankness
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? Great builded voids, great
crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small
hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective
negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the 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 of life,
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--at least
by his present measure--extraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps
to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last
pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his
own. This required an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his
reason, which over-mastered for the moment everything else. 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 closed were at present open? He
could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an
act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground
and never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked;
but what it meant for him depended 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--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as
when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to
him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread,
he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too
great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific
form.
He knew--yes, as he had never known anything--that, _should_ he 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 the deep abjection--was
once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in
the face was the act that this would determine for him. It would send
him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be
long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself
uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street. The hideous
chance of this he at least could avert; 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; only he now knew that uncertainty alone could
start him. He stole back from where he had checked himself--merely to do
so was suddenly like safety--and, making blindly for the greater
staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind. Here was the
top of the stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious
landings to mark off. His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet
were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple of
minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. He couldn't
have spoken, the tone of his voice would have scared him, and the common
conceit or resource of "whistling in the dark" (whether literally or
figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to
hear himself go, and when he had reached his first landing--taking it all
with no rush, but quite steadily--that stage 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 their
shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that
formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he
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 this nobleness took
the form too of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice
it. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers--they might
come as soon as they would. At the end of two flights he had dropped to
another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more left,
he recognised the influence of the lower windows, of half-drawn blinds,
of the occasional gleam of street-lamps, of the glazed spaces of the
vestibule. This was the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination
of its own and which he even saw paved--when at a given moment he drew up
to sink a long look over the banisters--with the marble squares of his
childhood. By that time indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a
commoner cause, better; it had allowed him to stop and draw breath, and
the case increased with the sight of the old black-and-white slabs. But
what he most felt was that now surely, with the element of impunity
pulling him as by hard firm hands, the case was settled for what he might
have seen above had he dared that last look. The closed door, blessedly
remote now, was still closed--and he had only in short to reach that of
the house.
He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to the
last flight and if here again he stopped an instant it was almost for the
sharpness of the thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his
eyes--which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the
stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive; inasmuch
as the side-lights and the high fantracery of the entrance were
glimmering straight into the hall; an appearance produced, he the next
instant saw, by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged
halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of that again the
_question_ sprang at him, making his eyes, as he felt, half-start from
his head, as they had done, at the top of the house, before the sign of
the other door. If he had left that one open, hadn't he left this one
closed, and wasn't he now in _most_ immediate presence of some
inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a knife
in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in
the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise
over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery
nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked--to shift and expand and
contract.
It was as if there had been something within it, protected by
indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface
behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which
the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he
stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude, so
that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the
sense that here _was_ at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to
know--something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was
the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The
penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood
in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored
sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was to
recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest
of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central
vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward
which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It
gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a
personal presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and
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 covered it and
in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried, as for
dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of
him now, in the higher light, hard and acute--his planted stillness, his
vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer
actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming
silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and
polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented
him with more intensity, thrust him out 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 inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he
gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this
other anguish, gape as a proof that _he_, standing there for the
achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his
triumph. Wasn't the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and
completely spread?--so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a
special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these
hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if
accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.
"Saved," though, _would_ it be?--Brydon breathed his wonder till the very
impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as
he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent,
while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The
hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a
flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror,
with the sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound
he couldn't utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as _his_, and
his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, _that_ face, Spencer
Brydon's?--he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and
denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown,
inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility!--He had been
"sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence
before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste
of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an
irony. Such an identity fitted his at _no_ point, made its alternative
monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the
face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as
one of those expanding 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 falling
back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than
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.