Lady Sophia had said to Malling that if he went to the two services at
St. Joseph's on the Sunday she would invite him to see her again. She
was as good as her word. In the middle of the week he received a note
from her, saying she would be at home at four on Thursday, if he was
able to come. He went, and found her alone. But as soon as he entered
the drawing-room and had taken her hand, she said:
"I am expecting Mr. Chichester almost immediately. He's coming to tea."
"I shall be glad to meet him," said Malling, concealing his surprise,
which was great.
Yet he did not know why it should be. For what more natural than that
Chichester should be coming?
"I heard of you at St. Joseph's," Lady Sophia continued. "A friend of
mine, Lily Armitage, saw you there. I didn't. I was sitting at the back.
I have taken to sitting quite at the back of the church. What did you
think of it?"
"Do you wish me to be frank, and do you mean the two sermons?"
She hesitated for an instant. Then she said:
"I do mean the sermons, and I do wish you to be frank."
"I thought Mr. Chichester's sermon very remarkable indeed."
"And my husband's sermon?"
Her lips twisted almost as if with contempt when she said the words, "my
husband's."
"Why doesn't Mr. Harding take a long rest?" said Malling, speaking
conventionally, a thing that he seldom did.
"You think he needs one?"
"He has a tiresome malady, I understand."
"What malady?"
"Doesn't he suffer very much from nervous dyspepsia?"
She looked at him with irony, which changed almost instantly into serious
reflection. But the irony returned.
"Now and then he has a touch of it," she said. "Very few of us don't have
something. But we have to go on, and we do go on, nevertheless."
"I think a wise doctor would probably order your husband away," said
Malling, though Mr. Harding's departure was the last thing he desired
just then.
"Even if he were ordered away, I don't know that he would go."
"Why not?"
"I don't think he would. I don't feel as if he could get away," she said,
with what seemed to Malling a sort of odd obstinacy. "In fact, I know
he's not going," she abruptly added. "I have an instinct."
Malling felt sure that she had considered, perhaps long before he had
suggested it, this very project of Mr. Harding's departure for a while
for rest, and that she had rejected it. Her words recalled to his mind
some other words of her husband, spoken in Mr. Harding's study: "Surely
one ought to get out of such an atmosphere, to get out of it, and to keep
out of it. But how extraordinary it is the difficulty men have in getting
away from things!"
Perhaps Lady Sophia was right. Perhaps the rector could not get away from
the atmosphere which seemed to be destroying him.
"I dare say he is afraid to trust everything to his curates," observed
Malling, prosaically.
"He needn't be--now," she replied.
In that "now," as she said it, there lay surely a whole history. Malling
understood that Lady Sophia, suddenly perhaps, had given her husband up.
Since Malling had first encountered her she had cried, _"Le roi est
mort!"_ in her heart. The way she had just uttered the word "now" made
Malling wonder whether she was not about to utter the supplementary cry,
_"Vive le roi!"_
As he looked at her, with this wonder in his mind, Henry Chichester came
into the room.
There was an expression of profound sadness on his face, which seemed to
dignify it, to make it more powerful, more manly, than it had been. The
choir-boy look was gone. Malling of course knew how very much expression
can change a human being; nevertheless, he was startled by the alteration
in the curate's outward man. It seemed, to use the rector's phrase, that
he had "shed his character." And now, perhaps, the new character,
mysteriously using matter as the vehicle of its manifestation, was
beginning to appear to the eyes of men. He showed no surprise at the
sight of Malling, but rather a faint, though definite, pleasure. The
way in which Lady Sophia greeted him was a revelation to Malling, and
a curious exhibition of feminine psychology.
She looked up at him from the low chair in which she was sitting, gave
him her left hand, and said, "Are you very tired?" That was all. Yet
it would have been impossible to express more clearly a woman's mental,
not affectional, subjugation by a man, her instinctive yielding to power,
her respect for authority, her recognition that the master of her master
had come into the room.
Her "_Vive le roi!_" was said.
Chichester accepted Lady Sophia's subtle homage with an air of
unconsciousness. His interior melancholy seemed to lift him above the
small things that flatter small men. He acknowledged that he was tired,
and would be glad of tea. He had been down in the East End. The rector
had asked him to talk over something with Mr. Carlile of the Church Army.
"You mean that you suggested to the rector that it would be wise to see
Mr. Carlile," said Lady Sophia.
"Is the rector coming in to tea?" asked Chichester.
"Possibly he may," she replied. "He knew Mr. Malling was to be here. Did
you tell him you were coming?"
"No. I was not certain I should get away in time."
"I think he will probably turn up."
A footman brought in tea at this moment, and Malling told the curate he
had heard him preach in the evening of last Sunday.
"It was a deeply interesting sermon," he said.
"Thank you," said Chichester, very impersonally.
The footman went away, and Lady Sophia began to make tea.
"When I went home," Malling continued, "I sat up till late thinking
it over. Part of it suggested to my mind one or two rather curious
speculations."
"Which part?" asked Lady Sophia, dipping a spoon into a silver tea-caddy.
"The part about the man and his double."
She shivered, and some of the tea with which she had just filled the
spoon was shaken out of it.
"That was terrible," she said.
"What were your speculations?" said Chichester, showing a sudden and
definite waking up of keen interest.
"One of them was this--"
Before he could continue, the door opened again, and the tall and
powerful form of the rector appeared. And as the outer man of Chichester
seemed to Malling to have begun subtly to change, in obedience surely
to the change of his inner man, so seemed Mr. Harding a little altered
physically, as he now slowly came forward to greet his wife's two
visitors. The power of his physique seemed to be struck at by something
within, and to be slightly marred. One saw that largeness can become
but a wide surface for the tragic exhibition of weakness. As the rector
perceived the presence of Chichester, an expression of startled pain fled
over his face and was gone in an instant. He greeted the two men and sat
down.
"Have you just begun tea?" he asked, looking now at his wife.
"We are just going to begin it," she replied. "We are talking about the
sermon of last Sunday."
"Oh," rejoined the rector.
He turned to Malling.
"Did you come to hear me preach again?"
There was a note as of slight reassurance in his voice.
"Mr. Chichester's sermon," said Lady Sophia.
"Oh, I see," said the rector. He glanced hastily from one to the other of
the three people in the room, like a man searching for sympathy or help.
"What were you saying about our friend Chichester's sermon?" he asked,
with a forced air of interest.
Lady Sophia distributed cups for tea.
"I was speaking of that part of it which dealt with the man who followed
his double," said Malling.
"Ah?" said the rector.
He was holding his tea-cup. His hand trembled slightly at this moment,
and the china rattled. He set the cup down on the small table before
him.
"You said," observed Chichester--toward whom Lady Sophia immediately
turned, with an almost rapt air--"that it suggested some curious
speculations to your mind. I should very much like to know what they
were."
"One was this. Suppose the man in the garden, who looked in upon his
double, had not fled away. Suppose he had had the courage to remain,
and, in hiding--for the sake of argument we may assume the situation to
be possible--"
"Ah, indeed! And why not?" interrupted Chichester.
His voice, profoundly melancholy, fell like a weight upon those who heard
him. And again Malling thought of him almost as some one set apart from
his fellows by some mysterious knowledge, some heavy burthen of truth.
"--and in hiding had watched the life of his double. I sat up speculating
what effect such an observation, terrible no doubt and grotesque, would
be likely to have on the soul of the watching man. But there was another
speculation with which I entertained my mind that night."
"Let us have it," said Chichester, leaning forward, and, with the gesture
characteristic of him, dropping his hands down between his knees. "Let us
have it."
"Suppose the man to remain and, in hiding, to watch the life of his
double, what effect would such an observation be likely to have upon the
double?"
Malling paused. The rector, with an almost violent movement of his big
hand and arm, took his cup from the table and drank his tea.
"It didn't occur to you, I suppose, when composing your sermon to follow
that train of thought?" said Malling to Chichester.
"No," replied the curate, slowly, and like one thinking profoundly. "I
was too engrossed with the feelings of the man. But, then, you thought
of the double as a living man, with all the sensations of a man?"
"That was your fault," said Malling.
"His fault!" said Lady Sophia, with a sort of latent sharpness, and
laying an emphasis on the second word.
"Certainly; for making the narrative so vital and human."
He addressed himself again to the curate.
"Did you not give to the double the attributes of a man? Did you not
make his wife come to bid him good night, bend down to kiss him, waft
him a characteristic farewell?"
"It is true. I did," said Chichester, still speaking like a man in deep
thought.
"That was the most terrible part of all," said Lady Sophia. In her voice
there was an accent almost of horror. "It sickened me to the soul,"
she continued--"the idea of a woman bidding a tender good night to an
apparition."
"I took it as a man," said Malling.
They had all three, strangely, left the rector out of this discussion,
and he seemed willing that it should be so. He now sat back in his chair
listening to all that was being said, somewhat as he had listened to the
sermon of Chichester, in a sort of ghastly silence.
"How could a man's double be a man?" said Lady Sophia.
"We are in the region of assumption and of speculation," returned
Malling, quietly, "a not uninteresting region either, I think. The other
night for a whole hour, having assumed the double man, I speculated on
his existence, spied upon by his other self. And you never did that?"
He looked at Chichester.
"When I was making my sermon I was engrossed by the thought of the
watching man."
Malling's idea had evidently laid a grip upon Chichester's mind.
"Tell me what the double's existence would be, according to you," he
said. "Tell me."
"You imagined the lesson learnt by the man so terrible that he fled away
into the night."
"Yes."
"Had he been strong enough to stay--"
"Strong enough!" interposed Chichester. "Better say, had he been obliged
to stay."
"Very well. Given that compulsion, in my imagination the double must have
learnt a lesson, too. If we can learn by contemplation, can we not, must
we not, learn by being contemplated? Life is permeated by reciprocity. I
can imagine another sermon growing out of yours of last Sunday."
"Yes, you are right--you are right," said Chichester.
"The double, then, in my imagination, would gradually become uneasy
under this secret observation. You described him as, his wife gone,
sitting down comfortably to write some account of the hidden doings
of his life, as, the writing finished, the diary committed to the
drawer and safely locked away, rising up to go to rest with a smile of
self-satisfaction. It seemed to me that, given my circumstance of the
persistent observation, a few nights later matters would have been very
different within that room. The hypocrite is happy, if he is happy at
all, when he is convinced that his hypocrisy is successful. Take away
that certainty, and he would be invaded by anxiety. Set any one to watch
him closely, he would certainly suffer, if he knew it."
"If he knew it! That is the point," said Chichester. "You put the man
watching the double in hiding."
"There are influences not yet fully understood which can traverse space,
which can touch not as a hand touches, but as unmistakably. I imagined
the soul of the double touched in this way, the waters troubled."
"Troubled! Troubled!"
It was Mr. Harding who had spoken, almost lamentably. His powerfully
shaped head now drooped forward on his breast.
"I imagined," continued Malling, "a sort of gradual disintegration
beginning, and proceeding, in the double--a disintegration of the soul,
if such a thing can be conceived of."
His piercing eyes went from Chichester to Harding.
"Or, no," he corrected himself. "Perhaps that is an incorrect description
of my--very imaginative--flight through speculation the other night.
Possibly I should say a gradual transference, instead of disintegration
of soul. For it seemed to me as if the man who watched might gradually,
as it were, absorb into himself the soul of the double, but purified. For
the watcher has the tremendous advantage of seeing the hypocrite living
the hypocrite's life, while the hypocrite is only seen. Might not the
former, therefore, conceivably draw in strength, while the other faded
into weakness? Ignorance is the terrible thing in life, I think. Now the
man who watched would receive knowledge, fearful knowledge, but the man
who was watched, while perhaps suffering first uneasiness, then possibly
even terror, would not, in my conception, ever clearly understand. He
would not any longer dare at night to sit down alone to fill up that
dreadful diary. He would not any longer perhaps--I only say perhaps--dare
to commit the deeds the record of which in the past the diary held. But
his lesson would be one of fear, making for weakness, finally almost for
nothingness. And the other night I conceived of him at last fading away
in the gloom of his room with the darkened window."
"That was your end!" said Mr. Harding, in a low voice.
"Yes, that was my end."
"Then," said Chichester, "you think the lesson men learn from being
contemplated tends only to destroy them?"
But Malling, now with a smiling change to greater lightness and ease,
hastened to traverse this statement.
"No, no," he replied. "For the contemplation of a man by his fellow-men
must always be an utterly different thing from his own contemplation by
himself. For our fellow-men always remain in a very delightful ignorance
of us. Don't they, Lady Sophia? And so they can never destroy us, luckily
for us."
He had done what he wished to do, and he was now ready for other
activities. But he found it was not easy to switch his companions off
onto another trail. Lady Sophia, now that he looked at her closely, he
saw to be under the influence of fear, provoked doubtless by the subject
they had been discussing. Chichester, also, had a look as of fear in his
eyes. As to the rector, he sat gazing at his curate, and there had come
upon his countenance an expression of almost unnatural resolution, such
as a coward's might wear if terror forced him into defiance.
In reply to Malling's half-laughing question, Lady Sophia said:
"You've studied all these things, haven't you?"
"Do you mean what are sometimes called occult questions?"
"Yes."
"I have."
"And do you believe in them?"
"I'm afraid I must ask you to be a little more definite."
"Do you believe that there are such things as doubles?"
"I have no reason to believe that there are, unless you include wrongly
in the term the merely physical replica. It appears to be established
that now and then two human beings are born who, throughout their
respective lives remain physically so much alike that it is difficult,
if not impossible, to distinguish between them."
"I didn't mean only that," she said quickly.
"You meant the double in mind and soul as well as in body," said
Chichester.
"Yes."
"How can one see if a soul is the double of another soul?" said Malling.
"Then you think such a story as Mr. Chichester related in his sermon all
nonsense?" said Lady Sophia, almost hotly, and yet, it seemed to Malling,
with a slight lifting of the countenance, as if relief perhaps were
stealing through her.
"I thought it a legitimate and powerful invention introduced to point a
moral."
"Nothing more than that?" said Lady Sophia.
Malling did not reply; for suddenly a strange question had risen up in
him. Did he really think it nothing more than that? He glanced at
Chichester, and the curate's eyes seemed asking him to say.
The rector's heavy and powerful frame shifted in his chair, and his voice
was heard saying:
"My dear Sophy, I think you had better leave such things alone. You do
not know where they might lead you."
There was in his voice a sound of forced authority, as if he had been
obliged to "screw himself up" to speak as he had just spoken. Lady Sophia
was about to make a quick rejoinder when, still with a forced air of
resolution, Mr. Harding addressed himself to Chichester.
"Since I saw you this morning," he said, "I find that I shall not be here
next Sunday."
He looked about the circle at his wife and Malling.
"The doctor has ordered me away for a week, and I've decided to go."
His introduction of the subject had been abrupt. As if almost in despite
of themselves, Lady Sophia and Malling exchanged glances. Chichester
said nothing.
"You can get on without me quite well, of course," continued the rector.
"Are you going to be away long?" said Chichester.
"No; I think only for a week or so. The doctor says I absolutely need a
breath of fresh air."
Malling got up to go.
"I hope you'll enjoy your little holiday," he said. "Are you going far?"
"Oh, dear, no. My doctor recommends Tankerton on the Kentish coast. It
seems the air there is extraordinary. When the tide is down it comes off
the mud flats. A kind parishioner of mine--" he turned slightly toward
his wife: "Mrs. Amherst, Sophy--has a cottage there and has often offered
me the use of it. I hope to accept her offer now."
Lady Sophia expressed no surprise at the project, and did not inquire
whether her husband wished her to accompany him.
But when she shook hands with Malling, her dark eyes seemed to say to
him, "I was wrong."
And he thought she looked humbled.