It was not till he reached the street that he took in all she meant--as
in particular by those last words. Without sense or sight, on leaving
the house, he turned mechanically to the left and went blankly before
him. This was not his way home, but he had no thought for ways. He moved
simply because if he didn't there was nothing for him but to sit down on
the first other doorstep. He felt mainly a great weakness--felt almost
nothing else; yet it was a weakness that, oddly, sustained him for a
long stretch, carried him up to the Park, determined his passing in, and
then made him proceed unheedingly from the nearer to the further end. It
was only on reaching the distant limit that he so much as noted a bench.
The one he noted, however, he quickly sank upon; and little by little,
thereafter, he gained a second consciousness. This was a perception of
the beauty of the day, the mildest mood of March. The windless air,
charged with spring, was like a brimming cup held still. The weather was
divine, but the person supposed by him an hour before as dear to him as
life had since then turned him out into the world. Well, the world was
there to take him. Yes, he increasingly felt, he was there and his
bench, placed near the top of the spread of a great alley, seemed to
give him a general view of it. The object indeed after a while most
distinct in this view was Ralph Pendrel himself, who rose there
conspicuous and held our young friend's eyes. What marked him most was
that he was a man humiliated. Arrange it as he would--or as _she_
would--he had not been good enough. What it really came to--she might
say what she liked--was that he was not of the type. Who _was_ then?--he
could but put himself the question. He even presently reflected that it
might serve her right to find after a while there was nobody. Thus it
was that Ralph Pendrel, with the world taking him, was yet thrown back
on that gentleman. If he was not good enough for _her_ he would be so
for this alternative friend; and he gathered about him in thought for an
hour all the merits he could muster. One of them precisely was that he
had another and quite a different passion. He kept repeating to himself
that just this, for his hard mistress, was his defect. He had wondered
much before he got up whether he had it with such intensity as to
constitute a vice--an inhuman side, that is, which she might pardonably
distrust. The only thing for him doubtless now therefore would be to
attest the intensity. He at last quitted the place with the step of a
man proposing to test it on the spot. All this while, however, the
anxiety truly deepest in him was about another affair. What in the world
had happened to her in Europe?
It was when he reached the quiet scene which the recent lapse of his
mother's soft pervasion had made so inconsequently, though now the abode
of a more single state, not wider but narrower, that the next great
thing befel him. He found on his table a letter from a firm of London
solicitors, a communication on the face of it most harmoniously timed.
It appeared that under the will of his late kinsman, Mr. Philip Augustus
Pendrel, he inherited property--a fact enriched by the further mention,
on the part of his informants, that should he find it convenient to come
to England without undue delay his being on the spot would contribute to
their action in his interest. It may immediately be said that the light
wind of this stroke had even at the moment a happy effect on the heat of
his wound. The event would certainly appeal with no great directness to
the author of that injury, but its connection with the object of his
other passion, as we have termed this source of inspiration, became at
once of the liveliest. He made as rapidly as possible his arrangements
for a journey to London, but he had time, before winding up the
situation in New York, to hear from his cousin's representatives of
matters still further concerning him and to receive from them in
especial a letter addressed in that gentleman's hand and not at first
found among his effects. It contained the only words that had, so far as
he knew, come to any member of the American kinship, for two
generations, from any member of the English. The English, he was
perfectly aware, had been held by the American to be offish and haughty,
and the American had stiffened itself to show that, since the question
was of turning an unconscious back, the game was playable wherever backs
were broad enough to show--which they made bold to feel themselves in
the new country too. It was familiar to Ralph Pendrel that his father
and his grandfather had fairly studied, and had practised with
consistency, the art of the cold shoulder. They had each been more than
once to England, but had "looked up" nobody and nothing--had clearly not
acquainted themselves either by inquiry or closer visitation with those
thin possibilities of something some day to their advantage, or to that
of their posterity, that might have been dreamed of at the best. The
property mainly accruing to Ralph loomed large now as a house--it was
described as commodious--in a fine quarter of the town; this remained at
first the limit of his charmed apprehension. No light, of the dimmest,
had previously reached him as to the English view of what he had always
heard called at home "the American attitude." He had in growing older
not much believed there could be an English view; but it would seem
after all that over this ground his fancy had too shyly hovered.
Mr. Pendrel's letter practically expressed the unsupposed quantity, and
nothing surely could have been of more flattering effect. Written to be
delivered after his death, it explained and enhanced, the delightful
document--shaking the tree, as it were, for the golden fruit to fall.
What it came to was that he had read as an old man his young relative's
remarkable volume, "An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History," and,
wishing somehow to testify to the admiration he felt for it, had come to
consider that no symbol would be so solid as the old English house
forming the sole item, in a long list of heavily hampered possessions,
that he was free thus to dispose of. It was a mere town tenement, and
none of the newest, but it was the best repayment of his debt he could
make. He had nowhere seen the love of old things, of the scrutable,
palpable past, nowhere felt an ear for stilled voices, as precious as
they are faint, as seizable, truly, as they are fine, affirm a more
remarkable power than in the pages that had moved him to gratitude.
Unpretending though the title, the spare volume, but in which every word
reached the mark, was a contribution to causes he had always had much at
heart, a plea with which he rejoiced that the name of their family
should have been associated. There were old things galore in Mansfield
Square; the past, he considered, held its state there for those with the
wit to make it out; and, should his young kinsman accept his bequest, he
would find himself master of a scene in which a chapter of
history--obscure, though not so remote as might perhaps have been
wished--would perhaps by his intervention step more into the light. The
generations at least had passed through it, clinging indeed as long as
they might, and couldn't have failed to leave something of their mark,
which it would doubtless interest Mr. Ralph to puzzle out. It was the
testator's wish that he should do so at his ease. The letter in fine
was, as Ralph said, a deucedly beautiful gentlemanly one, and the turn
of the wheel of fortune. The material advantage might be uncertain; but
it was blessedly not for the economic question, it was for the historic,
the aesthetic, fairly in fact for the cryptic, that he cared. A big
London house sounded in truth on the face of the matter less like an aid
to research than like an exposure to rates and taxes, a legacy of the
order vulgarly known as thumping. But verily too even London, for our
rare young man, was within the pale of romance. His "other" passion in
short had soon begun freshly to glow.
Within a month it had shaken him still harder, and all the more that,
this time, his impatience had fallen and two or three of his illusions
with it: his curiosity had sat down to its feast. He had encountered in
London more business than he expected, but had not encountered what he
most feared, the display of a swarm of litigants. This greatly eased his
mind, since if injustice had been done it would have taken much from the
savour of the feast. There was no nearer relative, it surprisingly
seemed, no counter-claimant, no hint in the air of a satisfaction
disputed. No unfortunate and expropriated person came, in a word, to
light, and there was therefore neither a cause to defend nor a sacrifice
to consider. The only thing really to consider in such a stroke of luck
was its violation of the common law of prose. Life was at best good
prose--when it wasn't bad; and Mr. Pendrel's succession was--all "town
tenement" as it might be--poetry undefiled. It was none the less poetry
that the value of the property was so easily ascertained to be high.
Ralph reflected not even for a moment after he had been to see it that a
fine country estate would have been more to his purpose. He _had_ no
purpose, he freely recognised, but to begin at once to cultivate
whatever relation should seem most fruitful to his so suddenly acquired
"stake" in an alien order. The circumstance of its being exactly what it
was--of no greater extent, yet of no less dignity--ministered beyond
anything else for the new master to a sense of close communication with
the old. It was extraordinary how on this ground the young man felt
himself understood; and he reflected endlessly as well as amazedly on
the fact that it had all been done for him by his slim composition of
five years before, so timid, so futile in the light of his subsequent
growth. The affair would have been less of a fairytale--and had indeed
thereby less of a charm--if Mr. Pendrel's impulse had been determined by
such a book as he might now write. What a book, what books, moreover,
should properly proceed, he said to himself, from a longer and nearer
view of the silent secrets of the place! _These_ were what had been
bequeathed him, these were what the hand of death had placed before him,
on the table, as in a locked brass-bound box the key of which he was to
find. It would not be by any weakness of his, please God, that a single
one of them should fail of its message.
He liked to think, as he took possession, that his kinsman was watching,
and therewith waiting, beyond the grave; though the way he had abstained
from restrictive conditions--from all, that is, save a single one
hereafter to be mentioned--was perhaps the deepest note in his good
taste. The part played in the whole business by that happy principle was
in truth at moments almost such as to make poor Ralph uneasy. There was
a roundness in his fortune that might seem too much to beguile. Were
blessings so unexpected ever, beyond a certain point, anything but
traps? Should he begin to make his way into the secrets, as they hovered
and hung there, wearing a sort of sensible consistency, who could say
where he might come out, into what dark deeps of knowledge he might be
drawn, or how he should "like," given what must perhaps at the best
stick to him of insuperable modern prejudice, the face of some of his
discoveries? He encountered however on this ground of a possible menace
to his peace a reassurance that sprang, and with all eagerness, from the
very nature of his mind. He lived, so far as a wit sharpened by friction
with the real permitted him, in his imagination; but if life was for
this faculty but a chain of open doors through which endless connections
danced there was yet no knowledge in the world on which one should wish
a door closed. There was none at any rate that in the glow of his first
impression of his property he didn't desire much more to face than to
shirk. If he was even in this early stage a little disconcerted it came
only from the too narrow limits in which Mr. Pendrel's personal image,
meeting his mind's eye at odd moments on the spot and constantly invoked
by his gratitude, appeared to have arranged to reveal itself. He would
have been particularly grateful for a portrait; but though there were in
the house other framed physiognomies these were things--and not
unluckily either!--of a different order of reference, an order in which
the friendly photograph for instance, whether of the late tenant of the
place or of any other subject, played no part. The friendly photograph
had been with us for half a century, but there was nothing there to
Ralph's vision so new as that. Number Nine Mansfield Square affected
that vision, in short, to a degree presently to be explained, as with an
inimitable reserve in respect to the modern world. It had crossed the
threshold of the century, the nineteenth, it had even measured a few
steps of the portentous prospect, but where it had stopped, pulled up
very short and as with its head in the air--it had stopped, one might
have surmised, with a kind of disgust. It had determined clearly, on the
apprehension then interchanged, to have as little to say to the future
as an animated home, of whatever period, might get off with. "And yet I
am the future," Ralph Pendrel mused, "and I dream of making it speak."
Face to face with it then, when he felt that already and quite
distinctly it was speaking--which happened the first time that ever, key
in hand, he was able to enter it unaccompanied--there was an
inconsequence to note, and one from which he drew a fine pleasure. He
was thus moved more shrewdly to reflect that if he was so trusted there
must have been something in him to inspire it. Was he to such a tune the
future? Had not his taste for "research," which was more personally his
passion for the past, worked rather, and despite his comparative youth,
to transmute him? On the day he disembarked in England he felt himself
as never before ranged in that interest, counted on that side of the
line. It was to this he had been brought by his desire to remount the
stream of time, really to bathe in its upper and more natural waters, to
risk even, as he might say, drinking of them. No man, he well believed,
could ever so much have wanted to look behind and still behind--to scale
the high wall into which the successive years, each a squared block,
pile themselves in our rear and look over as nearly as possible with the
eye of sense into, unless it should rather be called out of, the vast
prison yard. He was by the turn of his spirit oddly indifferent to the
actual and the possible; his interest was all in the spent and the
displaced, in what had been determined and composed roundabout him, what
had been presented as a subject and a picture, by ceasing--so far as
things ever cease--to bustle or even to be. It was when life was framed
in death that the picture was really hung up. If his idea in fine was to
recover the lost moment, to feel the stopped pulse, it was to do so as
experience, in order to be again consciously the creature that had been,
to breathe as he had breathed and feel the pressure that he had felt.
The truth most involved for him, so intent, in the insistent ardour of
the artist, was that art was capable of an energy to this end never yet
to all appearance fully required of it. With an address less awkward, a
wooing less shy, an embrace less weak, it would draw the foregone much
closer to its breast. What he wanted himself was the very smell of that
simpler mixture of things that had so long served; he wanted the very
tick of the old stopped clocks. He wanted the hour of the day at which
this and that had happened, and the temperature and the weather and the
sound, and yet more the stillness, from the street, and the exact
look-out, with the corresponding look-in, through the window and the
slant on the walls of the light of afternoons that had been. He wanted
the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the
common lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose,
was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there
had never been documents enough, or for which documents mainly, however
multiplied, would never _be_ enough. That was indeed in any case the
artist's method--to try for an ell in order to get an inch. The
difficult, as at best it is, becomes under such conditions so dire that
to face it with any prospect one had to propose the impossible.
Recovering the lost was at all events on this scale much like entering
the enemy's lines to get back one's dead for burial; and to that extent
was he not, by his deepening penetration, contemporaneous and present?
"Present" was a word used by him in a sense of his own and meaning as
regards most things about him markedly absent. It was for the old ghosts
to take him for one of themselves.
The spirit of gossip governed but little, he had promptly seen, the
commerce of his friends the London solicitors with their clients; they
were persons of a hard professional and facial surface and of settled
dull complexion, giving back, on a rap of the knuckle, the special sharp
answer, but not thereby corrupted to any human resonance. They betrayed
to him in consequence few of Mr. Pendrel's secrets, and he shrank on his
side from giving the measure of his ignorance of the source of so large
a bounty. This was perhaps the weakness of a slightly lame pride; he had
not been too proud to accept, but he felt that in asking many questions
he should show himself indebted to a stranger. He accordingly made out
little more than that his kinsman had read books, possibly even pursued
studies and entertained ideals, had had another habitation, the estate
of Driffle, in the country, much more frequented, and had never, since
forming, on the occasion of an inheritance in the maternal line, the
connection with Mansfield Square, been disposed to pass in London--it
was even a little odd--more than two or three weeks together. Odder
still, though to our young man's but half informed view, was it that his
visits to town appeared to have been almost always of the autumn and the
winter, had indeed often taken place at Christmas and at Easter, the
periods, by the rigid London law, of gregarious intermission. He had
been a person, it was clear, of few commonplace conformities, a person
with a fine sense for his own taste and his own freedom, one in whose
life the accents, as who should say, were not placed where people in
general place them. There were moreover in the history points of
indistinctness which would doubtless clear up under pressure; as the
fact for instance that though he had entered into possession in middle
life he had yet affirmed this possession so thoroughly that confusion
and a grey vagueness had already settled on the memory of whatever
predecessors, who seemed to lurk indistinguishable behind him. At the
same time that he had loved and guarded the place, he had none the less,
as might have been remarked and as was somehow to be divined, not
admitted it to the last familiarity. This went so far as to suggest that
in keeping it clear and inviolate he had had in view betimes the
convenience of some other considerable person.
That beneficiary, in the form of his American cousin, so rejoiced in
such an inference that, during the first few days, he hung about under
cover of night, and with mingled diffidence and pride, before the
inexpressive front. The pride was for all he was already aware of
within, while the diffidence was for the caretaker and her husband, a
mature and obese but irreproachably formal policeman--persons of high
respectability both, placed in charge by Mr. Pendrel's executors, to
whom he feared to show as frivolous in knocking yet again. Was he _not_
for that matter frivolous actually and sufficiently, he more than once
asked himself, carried off his intellectual feet to such a point by an
accident that would have had for most people a mere relation to their
income? He was conscious enough that what had thus caught him up to
flights of fancy was an object of a class more definable than almost any
other as of the reverse of extraordinary, a London house of the elder,
larger, finer type, of an age long anterior to the age of
jerry-building, but still after all a mere grey square section of a
street, passed and repassed by cabs and costermongers, called at by the
milkman, numbered by the vestryman, and marked by the solicitude of this
last functionary to the extent exactly of an unimpressive street-lamp
placed straight, or rather in fact placed considerably crooked, before
the door. The street-lamp was a disfavour to the dark backward into
which Ralph loved to look, and yet he was perhaps a little glad of its
presence on the two or three occasions just mentioned--occasions of his
patrolling the opposite side in covert contemplation. The dusky front at
these times showed its eyes--admirable many-paned windows, at once
markedly numerous and markedly interspaced--in a manner more responsive
to his own. He had moments of stopping when the coast was clear for a
longer stare and then of going on in pronounced detachment at the
approach of observation. There was still a want of ease in his ecstasy,
if it were not rather that the very essence of the ecstasy was a certain
depth of apprehension.
If as he paced he sought to avoid suspicion, of what was it at bottom
that he was to have been suspected? He would have confessed, had the
question been put to him, that it was only of his thoughts, which he was
himself moreover the only person to know anything about. If he desired
so extremely to hide them was it then that his conscience was bad about
them? An examination of the state of his conscience would perhaps in
truth have shown him as entertaining a hope scarce seriously to be
confessed. If he had an underhand dream that his house might prove
"haunted"--the result of an inordinate conception, in his previous time,
of old and doubtless foolish tales--the thing might after all have been
forgiven to his so belated freedom. Experience had lagged with him
behind interpretation, and the worst that could have been said was that
his gift for the latter might do well to pause awhile till an increase
of the former could catch up. By the time it did catch up he might
perhaps have come to make out for himself that, as is perfectly known to
biases millions, despair seldom fails to settle on any surmise that the
common forces of solicitation in respectable neighbourhoods may be in a
given case much transcended. He was sufficiently a man of the world,
further, not to care to face the smile that would greet his having had
that lesson to learn. He had disembarked with an immense provision of
prepared sensibility, but had packed into its interstices various fine
precautions against his passing for a fool. He was slightly ashamed, if
the truth be told, of the bounds he had honestly to set to his reach of
reminiscence, and he understood that he should most please himself by
making his pretensions few. It would be simple enough, he seemed to see,
to betray on occasion his ignorance, but he might find it in general
awkward to betray some sides of his knowledge. He knew too much for a
man who had seen so little, and nothing could be more fatuous than to go
about apologising. Of course he exaggerated the danger of the perception
of either excess in so preoccupied a world. He was at any rate careful
to keep to himself his real reason for disgustedly flushing in hours of
privacy at the thought of the figure his acquisition would make at the
hands, or at least under the pen, of auctioneers and agents eager to
invite him to regard it as a source of income. The reason was simply
that the language of advertisement, the inimitable catchpenny flourish,
depressed him by the perfection of its missing of the whole point. The
whole point, that of the exceptional eligibility they panted to express
in their terms, was the ineffable genius itself of the place, which
while he kept indirectly raking it, grew upon him day by day. He
couldn't go so far as to tell anyone that he had never seen anything so
old--so old at once and so elaborate--as a structure dating only from
the earlier years of the previous century. He couldn't decently cry it
on the housetops that he had never yet so wetted his lips at the founts
of romance. It was indeed without doubt, as he reflected, in favour of
one's not finding people laugh in one's face that he happened to be in
general little addicted to crying from the housetops.
Just these high considerations were in all probability the influence
most active in his attitude toward the only approach to an adverse
interest with which he was to perceive himself confronted. It had been
at their first interview made known to him by his kinsman's main
representative that the house stood, for the time, subject to a short
lease--a lease for the "season" given by its late proprietor, apparently
in one of his rare fits of response to the economic motive, the previous
year; which arrangement constituted in fact but the renewal of an
understanding arrived at, on more than one other occasion, in the same
conditions. The tenant bequeathed by Mr. Pendrel to his successor had in
other words already three times enjoyed the tenancy, and though it was
not impossible the agreement might be amicably rescinded it was for this
successor to judge whether he preferred to sacrifice so substantial a
gain. The gain, Ralph understood, was of a round weekly sum, as to the
weight of which in the scale he reserved his decision. He had a general
wish not to begin by a failure to oblige, as well, positively quite at
first, as an imperfect, almost a deprecatory, sense of possession. It
pulled him up a little on the other hand, after he had seen the place,
to think of prior possession, so far as he was concerned, insisted on
and enjoyed by a parcel of people whose very name was new to him. Mrs.
Midmore of Drydown in Hampshire embodied the claim with which he had to
reckon, but he knew little of Mrs. Midmore, save that she had, with her
address, as his firm of friends called it, rather an old-time imaging
sound. It was judiciously remarked by the firm that she was of a family
with which Mr. Pendrel's relations appeared, so far as they were
traceable, to have been close; and moreover that some such tradition was
needed to account for his departure from a custom of indifference to the
pecuniary argument so patent in other connections. Except in these
instances the house had practically never been let--within, as might be
said, the modern era. It might be even now, as was hinted to Ralph,
offered at a much higher figure than the rental subscribed to by Mrs.
Midmore. This last little fact it really was that had in its perverse
operation most weight with our young man. Full of scruples and
refinements and of the clash of cross-lights in which he saw things, he
knew the arrangement would have troubled him more had a handsomer
bargain been made for him. If he accepted at all the necessity of
trafficking in his treasure it was a salve to discomfort that the
traffic was poor.
By the time he solemnly entered it had been further mentioned to him
that the lady's appreciation of the place--unless its appeal were more
especially to her son, or to one or other, if not both, of her two
daughters--had been noted as almost extravagant. Signs in short had not
been wanting of the length to which such an attachment could go. Poor
Ralph at the end of an hour indeed would have understood any length; but
it was under this impression precisely that he fell into a train of
delays. The immediate effect of his first visit had been the wish to
"move in" that afternoon; the next had been a gathering doubt as to
whether he had better do so at all. The inner scene spoke to him with a
hundred voices, yet not one of these phrased to him quite happily the
terms of the single life there. The strangest part of this moreover was
that his hesitation--which fairly partook of the nature of a sort of
sacred terror--rested not in the least on any vision of what was
wanting, but wholly on the consciousness, almost as strong as a shock,
of what was impressively, what was tremendously, involved. He tried to
put it to himself simply, yet was not sure he put it sincerely, in
pronouncing it impossible he should fill out so many rooms. He
apprehended at bottom what might be going to happen--his making up his
mind on some uncandid basis that temporary lodgings elsewhere were his
indicated course. The want of candour would lie in the plea of
absurdity--the absurdity of his organising, with so much else to do,
such an establishment as would consort with such a setting. It would be
swagger, it would be vulgar precipitate eagerness, he on the one side
reasoned, to waste time in the pretence of really "running" such a
place; and there would be on the other a distinct offence in attempting
to inhabit it meanly. He should have time enough to ask himself what
would have been his benefactor's idea. The idea would come to him in
some way of its own: evidently it had been thrown out in the offered
facts themselves; they held it there in reserve and in subtle solution.
On its appearing he should know it, and he mustn't before that make a
mistake.
This was meanwhile in the interest of all the things for which in his
queer position he wanted a free hand. His queer position was that, as he
privately panted, everything had dropped on him at once. He saw the face
of Aurora Coyne whenever he winced with one of those livelier throbs of
the sense of "Europe" which had begun to consume him even before his
ship sighted land. He had sniffed the elder world from afar very much as
Columbus had caught on his immortal approach the spices of the Western
Isles. His consciousness was deep and confused, but "Europe" was for the
time and for convenience the sign easiest to know it by. It hovered
before him, this sign, in places as to which signs were mainly of
another sort; on his dusty Liverpool dock, in his rattling train to
Euston, when he called, betimes, on the Clifford Street tailor
recommended to him, when he helped himself at his "private hotel" from
the inveterate muffin-plate that protected at breakfast the tepidity of
his slop-bowl, and when he swayed, aloft, with the movement of the bus
that brought him back through historic ways from his prime pilgrimage to
the City. It scarce took even the bus to make him sway; he was at the
mercy, wherever he found himself and to whatever he clung, of such
incalculable gusts. This was what he meant by his almost scared
consciousness of the simultaneous and the many. He had first of all his
base arrears to make up, after which he could settle with his special
relation. He gasped on reminding himself as his tenth day dawned that
the glimpse accompanied for him with so much ado was yet but a small
millionth of the whole. The whole waited, for didn't there hang behind
this troublous foreground the vast vagueness which the English
themselves spoke of as "abroad"? Ah he was in all conscience already
abroad enough!
It was on the morning of this tenth day that he definitely promised his
friends in the City the expression on the morrow of his final view of
Mrs. Midmore. He had hung the night before, again postponing
re-entrance, in front of the habitation contingently reserved for her,
and he had now returned westward with a certain gathered and penitent
sharpness on the subject of action. Action would be to drive straight to
Mansfield Square, indulge himself with another impression, let this
impression settle the case and then wire to the City the result of it.
It so befell none the less that he repaired again--and as if
mechanically and in the beguiling intensity of this conclusion--to his
lodgings, where, instead of taking, after a glance at some letters that
had come in, a prompt fresh start, he dropped into a chair and drew it
a foot or two nearer the fire that a particularly English April seemed
huskily to have prescribed. The day was dark and damp, and it had
suddenly occurred to him that not once yet, since the hour, at home, of
his sombre station in the Park, had he so much as stopped to think. He
had in very fact, as we make out, not stopped thinking, for what had it
been but thought that drove him on and kept him going?--the thought of
all the use he should have for the abounding fruits of a larger
perception, the thought of the really wonderful book, as it would be
this time, that he foresaw himself writing. That was as far as he had
got with the book, of which the plan still remained sketchy; he
prefigured it mainly as a volume that should "count"--which meant for
him to be noticed by the half-dozen persons who themselves counted and
who would more or less understand. He had already, and even repeatedly,
asked himself when he should be able so to detach himself as to think at
all straight about his book; detachment and selection, prime aids of the
artist, were the sacred sparenesses menaced by a rank growth of
material. It was perhaps the better to think that he now put back his
head and closed his eyes; he at any rate considered to such purpose that
he never moved for two hours. The first conception his mind had
registered was that he was brutally tired. When he woke the day was
darker, and on shaking himself for a look from his window he was met by
a state of rain. Wet, muddy, ugly, the spring afternoon offered nothing
of its own and seemed to mark a general break of the spells it had
hitherto helped to work. Number Nine, from beyond its interposing spread
of splashy crossings, faced him for the first time without its high
authority. But this note of the hour soon determined him only the more:
if he had in fact let too fresh a fancy run away with him it positively
concerned his self-respect that the extravagance should cease. There was
a question in a word to clear up--a question sufficiently identical,
moreover, with the other and immediate one, the one he must no longer
leave open. He signed from where he stood to a passing hansom, and in a
few minutes was rolling, with the glass down, toward Mansfield Square.
It was an occasion at last on which he could lift with assurance the
knocker he hadn't once even yet taken a proprietor's full liberty
with--an engine huge, heavy, ancient, brazen, polished, essentially
defiant of any trifling, but now resoundingly applied.
It was the merit of the good couple in charge that they at least let him
alone, and he had at present more than ever a sense, not unembroidered
by fond prejudice, of the figure he made for them, of which it
harmlessly amused him to think. It agreed with he knew not what interior
ancientry and was truly but part of the deep picture that had already
drawn him into a bottomless abyss of "tone" whenever the high door
closed behind him and he stood with his sharp special thrill in the wide
white hall, which he had from the first noted with rapture as paved in
alternate squares of white marble and black, each so old that the white
was worn nearly to yellow and the black nearly to blue. He had never for
an instant doubted of the virtue, the value he would have called it in
his esoteric sense, of this particular spot; which had originally given
him, on the instant, under his first flush, the measure of a possible
experience. He had said to himself crudely and artlessly "It's
Jacobean"--which it wasn't, even though he had thought but of the later
James. The intensity of the inference and the charm of the mistake had
marked withal his good faith; the memory of which was to remind him
later on of how everything still to come was then latent in that plot of
space, and of how everything that _had_, was accorded and attested by
it. The door to-day had but once more to close with the slight heaviness
that inevitably defeated discretion and the overpaid and dismissed
hansom to be heard for a minute get again into empty motion on the other
side of it, for Ralph to feel at ease about the lapsed influence he had
come to start up. The influence was on this occasion not only all
there--it was really there as it had been on no other. His friends in
charge, effacing themselves and leaving him to roam, appeared literally
to have provided the particular hush into which it would best step
forth, and he liked to figure them as types of ancient servitude, quaint
and knowing their place, properly awestruck by the outland gentleman who
had suddenly become the providence of their compact round world. It was
a world clearly that they desired to remain shut up in, and a happy
instinct had admonished them that they best appeased fortune by holding
their breath. They could scarce have done better had they known of
spells and superstitions and been possessed with a recipe for causing
them to flourish. They even stayed downstairs too consistently to give
their new patron his chance of expressing to them how honestly he judged
them to keep his house.
That was what struck him afresh after he had mounted the large old stair
and begun to pass from room to room: there was something in his
impression so indefinably prepared by other hands that acknowledgment
surely ought somehow and somewhere to be made. It all came back of
course soon enough to thanking Mr. Pendrel, and this in truth Ralph
sufficiently did by his mere attitude from point to point. That was the
question on the whole as to which he was easiest; wherever he paused to
draw a long breath and again look round he felt his gratitude carry and
his appreciation in a singular degree picked up and noted. Not yet for
that matter had it so affected him this evening as returning richly upon
himself. The cold rain was on his window-pane, and it damped the great
London hum. These squares of old glass were small and many and the
frames that enclosed them thick; the appropriate recess, of which no
window failed, was deep, and Ralph could as he looked out rest a knee on
the flat cushion, all flowered and faded, that covered the solid bench.
He looked out only to look in again under the charm of isolation and
enclosure, of being separated from the splashed Square and its blurred
and distant life much more by time than by space; under the charm above
all of the queer incomparable London light--unless one frankly loved it
rather as London shade--which he had repeatedly noted as so strange as
to be at its finest sinister, and which just now scattered as never
before its air over what surrounded him. However else this air might
have been described it was signally not the light of freshness and
suggested as little as possible the element in which the first children
of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages, generations,
inventions, corruptions had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it
rested, to have filtered through the bed of history. It made the objects
about show for the time as in something "turned on"--something highly
successful that he might have seen at the theatre. What was one to call
the confounding impression but that of some stamp, some deposit again
laid bare, of a conscious past, recognising no less than recognised?
This was a character to which every item involved in Mr. Pendrel's
bequest quite naturally and directly contributed. They were all items of
duration and evidence, all smoothed with service and charged with
accumulated messages. The house was of about 1710, and nothing of that
age had ever spoken of it to Ralph in such a tone of having dropped
nothing by the way to reach him. Large, simple and straight, effective
from a happy relation of line to line and space to space, from a dignity
that seemed somehow a product of rightnesses even as an effect in
arithmetic is a concord of numbers, it was exemplary in its kind, and
its kind was for its new master the kind with which he could least
imagine ever having a quarrel. The type carried him back and back till
he remembered that such offices were solemn for honours after all not
rare; yet at the same time that he tasted the sweet staleness almost to
intoxication he rejoiced in the fact that the animating presences, all
the other figures involved, could still be fitted together. They were of
an age so remote and yet of an imagery so near. None of the steps were
missing and the backward journey took no turns. It wasn't for Ralph as
if he had lost himself, as he might have done in a deeper abyss, but
much rather as if in respect to what he most cared for he had never
found himself till now. As the house was his house, so the time, as it
sank into him, was his time. It sank into him as he sat in the handsome
chairs, specimens surely of price, as he figured the fineness of inlaid
tables, rejoicing in the form of panels and pilasters and pronouncing
the whole scene inimitably "quiet." It had never been either overloaded
or despoiled; everything was in place and answered and acted; the large
clear rooms almost furnished themselves, moreover, thanks to pleasant
proportion and surface, without the aid of redundancy. He gave himself
with relief, with gratitude for their luck, to all they had escaped
knowing, all that, in the vulgarest of ages, they had succeeded in not
inheriting. There wasn't a chimney-piece, an arched recess, a glazed and
columned cupboard, that hadn't for our young man the note of structural
style, not a cornice nor a moulding that his eye didn't softly brush,
not a sunk glass, above a shelf, unevenly bevelled and however
tarnished, in which shadows didn't condense themselves into shapes, not
an old hinge nor an old brass lock that he couldn't work with love of
the act, not an echo on the great stairs--he had from the first classed
the staircase as "great"--that he didn't each time pause to catch again.
He drew himself along the banister like a schoolboy yearning for a
slide; all the more that the banister of hammered iron, admirably
flourished and scalloped and with a handrail of polished oak, vaguely
commended itself to him as French and matchable in an old Paris
_hôtel._ A museum the place on this occasion more than ever became, but
a museum of held reverberations still more than of kept specimens. It
contained more of these latter than his fondest dream had originally
pleaded for, but he felt at moments that even had they all been absent
the sense of the whole would have been scarce less saved or the
composition less happy. The walls and windows and floors sufficiently
produced the effect--the perfect "state" of everything sufficiently
sounded the note.
There were questions--more even than he could meet--that came up for him
in the act of absence; but these questions either practically answered
themselves by contact, or, so far as they didn't, merged themselves in
others to which the answers might wait. Had the array of appurtenances,
such as it was, been there from of old, or were they objects got
together with the modern motive and precisely for the sake of their
suggestion? Did they in their elegant sparseness render the house
technically "furnished," and could it in point of fact be lived in
without additions and excrescences that would make it wrong? Were the
things honest rarities such as collectors would jump at, or only a
fortuitous handful that roughly and loosely harmonised? How came it that
if they were really "good" they were not on everyone's tongue, and how
above all that if they were poor they so convinced and beguiled? These
would have been matters to clear up by putting them to the test, and
Ralph knew of more ways than one in which, should he ask for an hour
from an obliging expert, his eyes would probably open. But experts and
tests were, as it happened, and as I have already signified, quite what
he was as yet least moved to cultivate; his instinct, with so much more
on his consciousness, from the first concussion, than he could fairly
handle, having been all to postpone the social complication, the
presentation of letters, the looking up of friends. It had struck him
that, marked out by his odd fate for an hospitality so rare and so
special, he might temporarily neglect any minor appeal. There was
already before him, goodness knew, matter enough for response.
This evening at any rate, while the day darkened and the weather
shrouded his vigil, he invoked convenient illusions with a tremour he
had not yet felt; he arrived, between his fondness and his fear, at the
easiest compromise with concentration. Unmistakeably, as the afternoon
waned, he held off as much as he hovered. It was a natural effect of his
restlessness that he didn't for the present see himself settled. It was
positively as if, with the cup so held to his lips, the taste of 1710
might prove too stiff a dose. He would judge, as it were, when he came
back--back, as who should say also, from everywhere else. He would go of
course everywhere else; intellectually now he could so well afford to.
This would make all the general initiation that, as a preliminary, was
indispensable--the series of scattered dashes and superficial dips.
Strange his divination, or whatever one might call it, that from such a
plunge at Number Nine as would thoroughly penetrate he might possibly
not emerge undamaged--or even, it was actually to be figured, not emerge
at all. He might remain there below, remain in the quintessential depth
that stood so ready for a real resident. He pulled up his patrol as it
again came to him that for this privilege of real residence he had a
candidate in hand. He loitered anew, looked and listened, strolled and
stopped, paused at moments, with hands in pockets, to gaze all too
gravely at a mere panel in a wainscot, a mere seam in a curtain, and
repeat over vaguely the name of Mrs. Midmore of Drydown. She had
gradually become for him less abstract, and he reflected with interest
that she was the one historic figure he was as yet in position to
introduce into the view. There were in fact moments of desultory thought
when he felt as if she were already in it by her own act--so close a
relation to it seemed asserted by her proved resolution. This proved
resolution was, so far as his wondering mind could now place her before
him, what was most the mark of her aspect, and there were literally for
him flights of fancy through which, as she stood there, she looked out
at him with a hard old face. Yes, she would be old, Mrs. Midmore of
Drydown--in the sense at least that she wouldn't be new: she wouldn't
without that have what he could only phrase as the connection; and she
would not less assuredly be hard: she wouldn't without that have what he
could only think of as the nerve. He dressed her, with unwitting
confusion, in the old manner of the house--the manner of the two or
three portraits of women (these, alas, plainly enough, not from
illustrious or even from known hands) inserted in the woodwork of the
reception rooms, he heard for an instant, hallucinated, the scrape of
her stiff petticoat on the floor, and the tap of her shoes, if it
weren't rather the click of her small crutch, on the stone stair. She
wore a little black hood fastened under her chin by an ornament--_that_
old-time trinket would be priceless of a truth; and her pronunciation of
certain words made her, as she talked, difficult to understand. Could
she, he wistfully wondered, live in the house as it stood?--it being, as
might have been made out, a puzzle to him to see her there so poorly
convenienced, and yet not less a pain to equip her with a background of
cosy corners or photographs framed in leather, of tailor-made ladies
doing tricks with little dogs and gentlemen in tweed mixtures tilting
back "good" chairs.
The few portraits of men in the house were not sensibly superior to the
three or four women's, besides being, in a couple of cases, of a date
observably later; but they had alike that prime and sufficient property
of the old portrait--they had, as Ralph put it to himself, their more or
less attaching "look" to give out. They had in short those painted eyes
for the particular purpose of following their friend as he moved; and
one of the things he actually found himself most doing was to circulate
in their presence just to see for his amusement how far they would in
this fashion go. They all had somehow the art of going further than he
had ever perceived such a company--on the walls of a museum for
instance--to coincide in going. His amusements, it will be noted, were
for a rainy hour simple enough, and a protected observer of some of his
proceedings would doubtless have pronounced them pointless to the verge
of puerility. This, however, would result partly from the difficulty of
his making a lucid plea for what all the while took place within him. It
was a ferment deep enough--even while he might superficially have
appeared but to be asking the flat framed images what _they_ thought of
the question of his admitting Mrs. Midmore. He read into them as he
lingered before them the knowledge of her being of their company; they
had had on occasion, it would seem, to live with her, they had witnessed
her ways and could give him the answer he watched and waited for.
Nothing could have been more amusing, if, always, he was amused--than
his impression at once that they really gave it and that he yet quite as
really couldn't make it out. Portraits of the dead are at best ironic
things, but, unknown and unnamed as were these victims of fate, none had
ever so affected him as after all reacting upon it. This general
innuendo, as he felt himself take it from them, was quite out of scale
with their general obscurity. It represented none the less for his
question neither a yea nor a nay; though it might have made one or the
other if he could only have told which. It was thus their character,
excepting only one, that they defied interpretation, and the character
of the exception scarce bettered the case.
In presence of the single picture in which anything to call art had been
appreciably active Ralph was luckily able--from the point of view of
diversion--to treat himself to the sense of something like a prodigy.
Let into the upper wainscot of the innermost and smallest of the three
drawing-rooms, a charming panelled parlour lighted from the large walled
court behind the house, which made a decent distance for other roofs,
chimneys and windows, this work, prominent in its place over the mantel,
depicted a personage who simply appeared to have sought to ignore our
friend's appeal by turning away his face. This it was that constituted
the prodigy, for Ralph had truly never seen a gentleman painted, and
painted beautifully, in so thankless a posture. It gave the figure a
conscious air which might have made for ridicule had it not so
positively made for life; whereby to laugh at it would verily have been,
in spite of its averted look, too much like laughing in a gentleman's
face. The gentleman in question here had turned his back, and for all
the world as if he had turned it within the picture. This of course was
far from the first time Ralph had admired and studied him, but it was
the first time of his finding his attention throb with the idea that the
actual attitude might change--that it had even probably, that it had in
fact repeatedly, done so. Extravagant enough such an imagination, but
now settling on our young man in force--the prodigy that when one wasn't
there the figure looked as figures in portraits inveterately look,
somewhere into the room, and that this miraculous shift, the concealment
of feature and identity, took place only when one's step drew near. Who
in the world had ever "sat"--though in point of fact the model in this
case stood--in a position that so trifled with the question of
resemblance? The only explanation conceivable was some motive on the
sitter's part--since it surely wouldn't have been on the artist's--for
wishing resemblance minimised; a situation in which a refusal to sit at
all would have been a much easier course. From the first occasion of his
pausing there Ralph Pendrel had spun his fine thread, matching the
wilful position with this and that hypothesis; only not till now had his
view of the possible taken this monstrous jump. He had read into the
picture the notion of a wager, a joke, or even of some particular vanity
as to poise of head, form of ear, shape of shoulder, or even fit of
coat, some whim of old-time elegance, some conceit of the age of the
bucks--among whom, not indistinguishably, the original of the portrait
might have figured. Had he otherwise, failing these possibilities, a
face to be so deprecated, a face so inferior to the rest of his person
as to constitute a deformity prohibitive or represent an identity in
some way compromised? There was nothing Ralph had in fine been able to
think of that was not more or less met by the objection that an easier
choice is usually open to the afflicted and the dishonoured.
The honours were exactly what this representation in a high degree
enjoyed; for if it had not been placed in the largest and best room it
had claimed, still better, a room all to itself. The little innermost
parlour was moreover for its new proprietor the most consecrated corner
of the house. It was there that, as he had repeatedly said to himself,
the spell worked best; it was there, for instance, that, as he was
perfectly sure, Mrs. Midmore of Drydown would like best to sit; but
didn't it by the same token precisely happen that the absence of another
portrait was what would permit the fullest license within the frame to
the subject of this one? He might turn about as he liked when he didn't
turn before other eyes. When once this conceit of his turning had lodged
itself in Pendrel's brain the way our friend played with it would have
exposed him perhaps more than anything else--had there been observation
of him too--to that charge of apparent levity which we have rejoiced for
him that there was no one to bring. He came and went, passed into the
next room and then returned quickly, presented his own back to the
chimney-piece and wheeled round on a sudden--all as if he might have
caught his mystificator bringing off the trick. No other trick however
was probably played on him but that, little by little and as dusk began
to gather, he found himself interested almost to impatience, perplexed
almost to pain. His companion on the wall indescribably _lived_, and yet
lived only to cheat him. When he had at last in meditation fixed the
ground of his complaint he found in it the quite defensible position
that, painted as people are always painted, the subject would have had
something to say to him. That was a contention valid enough, and one
with which he was at last able to associate his grievance. He had
somehow lost a friend by the perversity of the posture--he was so sure
of the friend he should have gained had the face been presented.
The more he looked at everything else the less it was credible there
should have been anything to hide. The subject had been young, gallant,
generous; these things, even on the scant showing, were his mysteries
and marks. Ralph ended in fact by asking himself what other mere male
back would so have produced the effect of sharpening curiosity. It was
enough to say for this gentleman's close compact dark curls, for his
long straight neck, which emerged from a high stock and rolled collar,
for the fall of his shoulder and the cut of his dark-green sleeve, from
the way his handsome left hand, folding easily over a pair of grey
gloves, rested its knuckles on his hip and conveyed the impression of a
beaver, of the earliest years of the century, held out of view in the
right--it was enough to say for these few indications that they provoked
to irritation the desire for others. He was a son of his time, and his
time was the dawn of the modern era--which, bringing him to that extent
within range, made it more of an offence to curiosity so to have missed
him. He was a young English gentleman of a happy "position" and of a
time in which his youth, given that position, could only be dedicated to
the god of all the battles of which Waterloo was to be the greatest and
the last. Who could say what had become of him or on what far-off field
of Spain or of Flanders he mightn't have left his life? These were rare
questions and quick flights, though Ralph had in truth on his first
visit begun to presume and combine and construct. With opportunities
renewed he had arrived under the effect of the last occasion previous at
a complete and consistent scheme of vision. These present hours
disconcerted him therefore the more that they poured again the elements
into the crucible. The violet fumes went up afresh, but were thick and
confounding. It was not that he didn't, the figure in the frame, remain
extraordinarily persuasive, but that he on the contrary quite harassed
credulity. It was not that there was less of him than one wanted, but
rather that there was too inordinately much and that there would be more
and more of the measure to come. Ralph repeatedly felt, as he let
himself go, that it would come in force. He was like the worshipper in a
Spanish church who watches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop
from the wound of some wonder-working effigy of Mother or of Son. When
he moved away a little it was to let these things start at their ease,
and when he next turned upon them it was to assist at the prodigy before
it should stop.
It must at the same time be mentioned that he knew at moments the chill
of intermissions, that he had more than once to shake himself in the
lapse of faith. He saw during these revulsions but what he had seen
before, the sharpest mere suggestion, no doubt, in the whole range of
the effective art of suggestion. The young man looked away, but not from
any embarrassment that he could produce. It wasn't what he hid that he
thought of, but what he saw for himself. The practical snub to poor
Ralph was thus that he looked away into a world of his own--off into the
dark backward that at once so challenged and so escaped his successor.
Just so his own was in his tremendous "pull" and reach, the fact of his
positively living enjoyment of some relation or other, not to say some
cluster of relations, that during those very minutes determined his
considering air, and even, of a sudden, invested him with something of
that effect which poor Ralph, wondering about great Italian church
pictures and ruefully conscious of knowing them but by hearsay, imputed
to the beauty and sincerity of the portrayed, the attentive donatorio in
the corner of the Venetian or other masterpiece. What was the presence
of the pious magnifico, say, but our very Ralph Pendrel's presence, not
a little mixed, as he supposed that of the old-time devotee represented
in the act to be, with the immemorial smoke of altar candles?--yet
leaving the upper spaces, those where the sacred or the saintly image
itself reigned, clear and sublime. The clearness, or call it even the
sublimity, was here for all the world the same sort of thing: didn't it
place round the handsome uplifted head, as by the patina of the years,
the soft rub of the finger of time, that ring of mystic light? In the
Titian, the Tintoret or the Veronese such a melting of the tone, such a
magic as grew and grew for Ralph as soon as he once had caught the fancy
of it, would have expressed the supernatural even as the circling nimbus
expresses.
He had at intervals an eye to his watch, but what kept him on and on was
precisely the force of the stillness in which nothing happened. There
had come to him at the end of an hour or two a special and peculiar
sense of being alone in the house. If his good friends in charge were
below--he had had with them this evening no contact--never were good
friends so respectful of what he was quite ready to call for their sake
his absurdity. He was fully aware of how absurd it might appear in a
quiet gentleman of unannounced intentions to perambulate an ordered
house after the fashion of some carpet-man or plumber deprived by a
catastrophe of foot-rule or pocket-book. He listened at the mouth of the
lower regions and found them soundless; he remounted to the chambers
above, and then he again descended to apply that test. Practically, in
any case, he was beyond all observation and if self-effaced agents but
worked to make him feel so, that only assured the freedom. Perhaps they
had in fact gone out, finding him in murmured counsel more uncanny than
they liked; it came to him whimsically while he paused anew at one of
the windows as if on purpose to feel cut off by the gathering night and
the patter of cold rain, it came to him agreeably that they might have
been scared of a person whose range was so restless, who, declining at
the outset a fire, seemed to like the gruesome chill, and who now let
the shadows multiply without so much as ringing for a light.
The windy lanterns flickered in the square and were reflected in the
wet, and as he turned about for another prowl--his last decidedly this
one--he assured himself that he had in his pocket matches for tobacco
and that, should he require them, the numerous brave stiff candle-sticks
of silver and brass (oh what people he knew, even Aurora herself, would
have given for them!) were furnished with tall tapers. On his reaching
again for his final round the first drawing-room, which occupied with
its fine windows the width of the house and into which, as the curtains
were still undrawn, the street-lamp before the outer door played up with
a gusty rise and fall that made objects, chairs, cabinets, sofas,
pictures, look the least bit equivocal and like some vague human company
that blinked or grimaced at him--on his thus finding himself once more
where he seemed most to hold the key of the place he resumed the
pointless pacing that had occupied so much of his visit. He walked from
end to end as with a problem to think out; listened to his tread on the
carpetless floor, for the perfect polish of which (no material note in
the whole scale being more to his taste) he had made from the first a
point of commending the housekeeper; he stayed on without knowing why,
only clinging to this particular room just because he could measure its
length, and even a little because of the very ambiguity, half sociable
and half sinister, that made its different features, as he might have
said, take action. He trifled at moments with the idea of spending the
night--which he was indeed spending to the extent that he so hung on.
Nights spent in peculiar houses were a favourite theme of the magazines,
and he remembered tales about them that had been thought clever--only
regretting now that he had not heard on the retreat of his
fellow-occupants (for was not that always the indispensable stroke?) the
terrified bang of the door. The real deterrent to sitting up at Number
Nine would just be, he lucidly reasoned, its coincidence with the
magazines. Nothing would induce him, he could at least fondly convince
himself, to make the place the subject of one of the vulgar experiments
that pass into current chatter. He would presently go with his mind made
up; but meanwhile he walked.
He walked and walked--walked till he received a check in the form of a
bump from a piece of furniture. This brought him back to the fact of the
complete fall of night and to more darkness in the room than his
enlarged vision had for the time needed to reckon with. He looked about
him and felt as cold as if he had really passed a vigil; without his
certainty that he had been on his legs he might fairly believe he had
slept. He wondered what time had elapsed, but, taking out his watch to
see, found its face indistinct even at the window. He then felt in his
waistcoat for matches, but immediately after, in the act of striking
one, had a happy change of thought. It was as if he had already proof
positive of being there alone. It was vivid to him at this instant, in
the flame of his match, that for reasons he didn't stop to question--the
fact itself made so for intenser moments--he had been peculiarly
disconnected and _left_, left to himself and to whatever else might be;
with which consciousness he instead of consulting his watch, though he
took another look about, made for the first candlestick that just showed
its upright silver gleam. His match went out before he reached it, but
he struck another, and it was in the act of lighting the candle that his
hand told him how he trembled. This was the shake, he felt, however, of
excitement--not of a baser state of nerves; an excitement that marked
simply his at last knowing himself, as not yet, in possession of what he
had come in for. His doubt was settled: he had asked himself if he were
prepared, if he should "elect," to be; but here he was, in fine, without
more question or more ado. The only ado was, with his candle lighted, to
face the consequence of that particular preparation.
This act employed him, thanks to the bunchy wick, a minute or two; but
no sooner was the little flame assured and he had raised aloft the
glimmering torch than he was filled with the sense of a quite new
relation to the house. It was but a trifle, yet he had not hitherto so
much used the place even as to light a candle. This triviality made all
the difference of raising him from the condition, comparatively poor, of
a visitor who betrayed timidity. It registered in a single brief
insistence the fact that he was master, and when he now almost waved in
the air his light, of which the wax hadn't time to melt, it was in
sign--tremble though his hand still might--of a confidence sharply
gained. The impression was strong with him of having traversed a
crisis--served, and all in half an hour, one of those concentrated terms
of pious self-dedication or whatever by which the aspirants of the ages
of faith used to earn their knighthood. What was it he had emerged from
after this fashion of the accepted probationer? He had had his idea of
testing the house, and lo it was the house that by a turn of the tables
had tested him. He had at all events grasped his candle as if it had
been sword or cross, and his attitude may pass for us as sufficiently
his answer or his vow. It had already occurred to him that, so
completely consecrated, he must make one more round. He moved to the end
of the room and then moved back; it had begun to give him extraordinary
pleasure thus to march with his light. He marched out to the lobby and
the staircase and then down, slow and solemn, to the hall he had
supposed Jacobean and in which, illumined, he could once more, by the
mere play of his arm, make due amends for his mistake. He came up again
to the landing by the great room and, after a slight hesitation,
continued his ascent. He revolved through the chambers above and amused
himself, at successive windows, with the thought of the observation
possibly incurred, out in the square, by such a wandering twinkle from
floor to floor and in the small hours on the part of some soaked and
sleepy policeman not already, in respect to the old house, without a
working hypothesis. On his return to the level of the drawing rooms he
had another of his pauses; he stood with his candle aloft and his eyes
attached a minute to the door that, open at the end of the passage,
would have admitted him straight to the panelled parlour.
The effect of this consideration was that he went roundabout, turning
directly again to the front and the row of dark windows lashed afresh by
a great gust of the rain. It was as if the wind had of a sudden grown
wild in order to emphasise with its violence all the elements of his
case. It was somehow too by this time--with such a stride--two o'clock
in the morning and terrible weather. The forward exposure most met the
assault, the small square black panes rattled in their tall white
sashes, the objects around him creaked, and his candle came as near
going out as if a window had blown through. The commotion was in fact so
great, shaking all the place, that under the sense of the draught he
wasn't for the moment sure something hadn't somewhere been forced open.
He instinctively moved, half for inquiry, half for shelter, to the inner
room, the second; which brought him, still with his clutched and raised
light, to view of the other door of the panelled parlour, the access
independent of the hall. He had after this an instant of confusion, an
instant during which he struck himself as catching at a distance the
chance reflection of his candle-flame on some polished surface. If the
flame was there, however, where was the surface?--the duplication of his
light showing, he quickly perceived, in the doorway itself. He received
in those instants an amazing impression--knew himself convinced that in
his absence the thing he had thought of and put away had taken place.
Somebody was in the room more prodigiously still than he had dreamed--on
his level, on the floor itself and but ten yards off, and now, all
intelligence and response, vividly aware of him, fixed him across the
space with eyes of life. It was like the miracle prayed for in the
church--the figure in the picture had turned; but from the moment it had
done so this tremendous action, this descent, this advance, an advance,
and as for recognition, upon his solitary self, had almost the effect at
first of crushing recognition, in other words of crushing presumption,
by their immeasurable weight. The huge strangeness, that of a gentleman
there, a gentleman from head to foot, to meet him and share his
disconnection, stopped everything; yet it was in nothing stranger than
in the association that they already, they unmistakeably felt they had
enjoyed. With this last apprehension at any rate the full prodigy was
there, for what he most sharply knew while he turned colder still was
that what he had taken for a reflection of his light was only another
candle. He knew, though out of his eye's range any assurance, that the
second of the pair on the shelf below the portrait was now not in its
place. He raised his own still higher to be sure, and the young man in
the doorway made a movement that answered; but so, while almost as with
brandished weapons they faced each other, he saw what was indeed beyond
sense. He was staring at the answer to the riddle that had been his
obsession, but this answer was a wonder of wonders. The young man above
the mantel, the young man brown-haired, pale, erect, with the
high-collared dark blue coat, the young man revealed, responsible,
conscious, quite shining out of the darkness, presented him the face he
had prayed to reward his vigil; but the face--miracle of miracles,
yes--confounded him as his own.