For several months I continued to advance in intimacy with my picture.
It grew more familiar, more suggestive; the truth and beauty of it
came home to me constantly. Yet there was something in it not quite
apprehended; a sense of strangeness; a reserve which I had not yet
penetrated.
One night in August I found myself practically alone, so far as human
intercourse was concerned, in the populous, weary city. A couple of
hours of writing had produced nothing that would bear the test of
sunlight, so I anticipated judgment by tearing up the spoiled sheets of
paper, and threw myself upon the couch before the empty fireplace. It
was a dense, sultry night, with electricity thickening the air, and a
trouble of distant thunder rolling far away on the rim of the cloudy
sky--one of those nights of restless dulness, when you wait and long for
something to happen, and yet feel despondently that nothing ever will
happen again. I passed through a region of aimless thoughts into one
of migratory and unfinished dreams, and dropped from that into an empty
gulf of sleep.
How late it was when I drifted back toward the shore of consciousness,
I cannot tell. But the student-lamp on the table had burned out, and
the light of the gibbous moon was creeping in through the open windows.
Slowly the pale illumination crept up the eastern wall, like a tide
rising as the moon declined. Now it reached the mantel-shelf and
overflowed the bronze heads of Homer and the Indian Bacchus and the
Egyptian image of Isis with the infant Horus. Now it touched the frame
of the picture and lapped over the edge. Now it rose to the shadowy
house and the dim garden, in the midst of which I saw the white blot
more distinctly than ever before.
It seemed now to have taken a new shape, like the slender form of a
woman, robed in flowing white. And as I watched it through half-closed
eyes, the figure appeared to move and tremble and wave to and fro, as if
it were a ghost.
A haunted picture! Why should it not be so? A haunted ruin, a haunted
forest, a haunted ship,--all these have been seen, or imagined, and
reported, and there are learned societies for investigating such things.
Why should not a picture have a ghost in it?
My mind, in that curiously vivid state which lies between waking and
sleeping, went through the form of careful reasoning over the question.
If there may be some subtle connection between a house and the spirits
of the people who have once lived in it,--and wise men have believed
this,--why should there be any impassable gulf between a picture and
the vanished lives out of which it has grown? All the human thought
and feeling which have passed into it through the patient toil of art,
remain forever embodied there. A picture is the most living and personal
thing that a man can leave behind him. When we look at it we see what he
saw, hour after hour, day after day, and we see it through his mood
and impression, coloured by his emotion, tinged with his personality.
Surely, if the spirits of the dead are not extinguished, but only veiled
and hidden, and if it were possible by any means that their presence
could flash for a moment through the veil, it would be most natural that
they should come back again to hover around the work into which their
experience and passion had been woven. Here, if anywhere, they would
“Revisit the pale glimpses of the moon.” Here, if anywhere, we might
catch fleeting sight, as in a glass darkly, of the visions that passed
before them while they worked.
This much of my train of reasoning along the edge of the dark, I
remember sharply. But after this, all was confused and misty. The shore
of consciousness receded. I floated out again on the ocean of forgotten
dreams. When I woke, it was with a quick start, as if my ship had been
made fast, silently and suddenly, at the wharf of reality, and the bell
rang for me to step ashore.
But the vision of the white blot remained clear and distinct. And the
question that it had brought to me, the chain of thoughts that had
linked themselves to it, lingered through the morning, and made me feel
sure that there was an untold secret in Falconer's life and that the
clew to it must be sought in the history of his last picture.
But how to trace the connection? Every one who had known Falconer,
however slightly, was out of town. There was no clew to follow. Even the
name “Larmone” gave me no help; for I could not find it on any map
of Long Island. It was probably the fanciful title of some old
country-place, familiar only to the people who had lived there.
But the very remoteness of the problem, its lack of contact with the
practical world, fascinated me. It was like something that had drifted
away in the fog, on a sea of unknown and fluctuating currents. The only
possible way to find it was to commit yourself to the same wandering
tides and drift after it, trusting to a propitious fortune that you
might be carried in the same direction; and after a long, blind,
unhurrying chase, one day you might feel a faint touch, a jar, a thrill
along the side of your boat, and, peering through the fog, lay your hand
at last, without surprise, upon the very object of your quest.