I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire
that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit
recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’s _Westminster
Gazette_ still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At
lunch to-day the club was busy with his death. We talked of nothing
else.
They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation
near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been
made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is
protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high
road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of
some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left
unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through
it he made his way....
My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.
It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has
frequently walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure
his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up,
intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat
the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened
door awaken some memory?
Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are
times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the
coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination
and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You
may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I
am more than half convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift,
and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and
door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape
into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you
will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you
touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the
imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the
pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness,
danger, and death.
But did he see like that?