He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as happened, an emotion
not unconnected with that range of feeling. Walking home at the close of
a busy day he was arrested in the London street by the particular effect
of a shop-front that lighted the dull brown air with its mercenary grin
and before which several persons were gathered. It was the window of a
jeweller whose diamonds and sapphires seemed to laugh, in flashes like
high notes of sound, with the mere joy of knowing how much more they were
“worth” than most of the dingy pedestrians staring at them from the other
side of the pane. Stransom lingered long enough to suspend, in a vision,
a string of pearls about the white neck of Mary Antrim, and then was kept
an instant longer by the sound of a voice he knew. Next him was a
mumbling old woman, and beyond the old woman a gentleman with a lady on
his arm. It was from him, from Paul Creston, the voice had proceeded: he
was talking with the lady of some precious object in the window.
Stransom had no sooner recognised him than the old woman turned away; but
just with this growth of opportunity came a felt strangeness that stayed
him in the very act of laying his hand on his friend’s arm. It lasted
but the instant, only that space sufficed for the flash of a wild
question. Was _not_ Mrs. Creston dead?—the ambiguity met him there in
the short drop of her husband’s voice, the drop conjugal, if it ever was,
and in the way the two figures leaned to each other. Creston, making a
step to look at something else, came nearer, glanced at him, started and
exclaimed—behaviour the effect of which was at first only to leave
Stransom staring, staring back across the months at the different face,
the wholly other face, the poor man had shown him last, the blurred
ravaged mask bent over the open grave by which they had stood together.
That son of affliction wasn’t in mourning now; he detached his arm from
his companion’s to grasp the hand of the older friend. He coloured as
well as smiled in the strong light of the shop when Stransom raised a
tentative hat to the lady. Stransom had just time to see she was pretty
before he found himself gaping at a fact more portentous. “My dear
fellow, let me make you acquainted with my wife.”
Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half a minute, at the
rate we live in polite society, it had practically become, for our
friend, the mere memory of a shock. They stood there and laughed and
talked; Stransom had instantly whisked the shock out of the way, to keep
it for private consumption. He felt himself grimace, he heard himself
exaggerate the proper, but was conscious of turning not a little faint.
That new woman, that hired performer, Mrs. Creston? Mrs. Creston had
been more living for him than any woman but one. This lady had a face
that shone as publicly as the jeweller’s window, and in the happy candour
with which she wore her monstrous character was an effect of gross
immodesty. The character of Paul Creston’s wife thus attributed to her
was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to know
perfectly that he knew. The happy pair had just arrived from America,
and Stransom hadn’t needed to be told this to guess the nationality of
the lady. Somehow it deepened the foolish air that her husband’s
confused cordiality was unable to conceal. Stransom recalled that he had
heard of poor Creston’s having, while his bereavement was still fresh,
crossed the sea for what people in such predicaments call a little
change. He had found the little change indeed, he had brought the little
change back; it was the little change that stood there and that, do what
he would, he couldn’t, while he showed those high front teeth of his,
look other than a conscious ass about. They were going into the shop,
Mrs. Creston said, and she begged Mr. Stransom to come with them and help
to decide. He thanked her, opening his watch and pleading an engagement
for which he was already late, and they parted while she shrieked into
the fog, “Mind now you come to see me right away!” Creston had had the
delicacy not to suggest that, and Stransom hoped it hurt him somewhere to
hear her scream it to all the echoes.
He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in his life to go near
her. She was perhaps a human being, but Creston oughtn’t to have shown
her without precautions, oughtn’t indeed to have shown her at all. His
precautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer, and the
people at home would never have mentioned extradition. This was a wife
for foreign service or purely external use; a decent consideration would
have spared her the injury of comparisons. Such was the first flush of
George Stransom’s reaction; but as he sat alone that night—there were
particular hours he always passed alone—the harshness dropped from it and
left only the pity. _He_ could spend an evening with Kate Creston, if
the man to whom she had given everything couldn’t. He had known her
twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he might perhaps have
been unfaithful. She was all cleverness and sympathy and charm; her
house had been the very easiest in all the world and her friendship the
very firmest. Without accidents he had loved her, without accidents
every one had loved her: she had made the passions about her as regular
as the moon makes the tides. She had been also of course far too good
for her husband, but he never suspected it, and in nothing had she been
more admirable than in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep
every one else (keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out.
Here was a man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had
given it up—dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and she had
had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on her
grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had replaced.
The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom’s eyes fill; and he had
that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a world without delicacy,
had a right to hold up his head. While he smoked, after dinner, he had a
book in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his eyes, in the
swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston’s, and it was
into their sad silences he looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had
turned, knowing it to be of her he would think. He thought for a long
time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live—how they could
open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their
last. They had looks that survived—had them as great poets had quoted
lines.
The newspaper lay by his chair—the thing that came in the afternoon and
the servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it he had
mechanically unfolded and then dropped it. Before he went to bed he took
it up, and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by five
words that made him start. He stood staring, before the fire, at the
“Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.,” the man who ten years earlier had
been the nearest of his friends and whose deposition from this eminence
had practically left it without an occupant. He had seen him after their
rupture, but hadn’t now seen him for years. Standing there before the
fire he turned cold as he read what had befallen him. Promoted a short
time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton Hague
had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness consequent on
the bite of a poisonous snake. His career was compressed by the
newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of which excited on George
Stransom’s part no warmer feeling than one of relief at the absence of
any mention of their quarrel, an incident accidentally tainted at the
time, thanks to their joint immersion in large affairs, with a horrible
publicity. Public indeed was the wrong Stransom had, to his own sense,
suffered, the insult he had blankly taken from the only man with whom he
had ever been intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University
years, the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public that he
had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he had
completely overlooked it. It had made the difference for him that
friendship too was all over, but it had only made just that one. The
shock of interests had been private, intensely so; but the action taken
by Hague had been in the face of men. To-day it all seemed to have
occurred merely to the end that George Stransom should think of him as
“Hague” and measure exactly how much he himself could resemble a stone.
He went cold, suddenly and horribly cold, to bed.