Every year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he went to
church as he had done the day his idea was born. It was on this
occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he began to
observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least as frequent as
himself. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of the church, came and
went, appealing sometimes, when they disappeared, to a vague or to a
particular recognition; but this unfailing presence was always to be
observed when he arrived and still in possession when he departed. He
was surprised, the first time, at the promptitude with which it assumed
an identity for him—the identity of the lady whom two years before, on
his anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic face
he had had so flitting a vision. Given the time that had passed, his
recollection of her was fresh enough to make him wonder. Of himself she
had of course no impression, or rather had had none at first: the time
came when her manner of transacting her business suggested her having
gradually guessed his call to be of the same order. She used his altar
for her own purpose—he could only hope that sad and solitary as she
always struck him, she used it for her own Dead. There were
interruptions, infidelities, all on his part, calls to other associations
and duties; but as the months went on he found her whenever he returned,
and he ended by taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her
almost the contentment he had given himself. They worshipped side by
side so often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure, so
straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in their
rites. She was younger than he, but she looked as if her Dead were at
least as numerous as his candles. She had no colour, no sound, no fault,
and another of the things about which he had made up his mind was that
she had no fortune. Always black-robed, she must have had a succession
of sorrows. People weren’t poor, after all, whom so many losses could
overtake; they were positively rich when they had had so much to give up.
But the air of this devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in
any attitude, a beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom
that she had known more kinds of trouble than one.
He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but
occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons,
it used to come back to him that there were glories. There were moreover
friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found
himself sitting out concerts. On one of these winter afternoons, in St.
James’s Hall, he became aware after he had seated himself that the lady
he had so often seen at church was in the place next him and was
evidently alone, as he also this time happened to be. She was at first
too absorbed in the consideration of the programme to heed him, but when
she at last glanced at him he took advantage of the movement to speak to
her, greeting her with the remark that he felt as if he already knew her.
She smiled as she said “Oh yes, I recognise you”; yet in spite of this
admission of long acquaintance it was the first he had seen of her smile.
The effect of it was suddenly to contribute more to that acquaintance
than all the previous meetings had done. He hadn’t “taken in,” he said
to himself, that she was so pretty. Later, that evening—it was while he
rolled along in a hansom on his way to dine out—he added that he hadn’t
taken in that she was so interesting. The next morning in the midst of
his work he quite suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression
of her, beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last
reached the sea.
His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of what
had now passed between them. It wasn’t much, but it had just made the
difference. They had listened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they
had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to which they
moved together, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter of
getting away. She had thanked him and put up her umbrella, slipping into
the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him
to remember at leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual
scene of that coincidence. This omission struck him now as natural and
then again as perverse. She mightn’t in the least have allowed his
warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn’t he would have judged
her an underbred woman. It was odd that when nothing had really ever
brought them together he should have been able successfully to assume
they were in a manner old friends—that this negative quantity was somehow
more than they could express. His success, it was true, had been
qualified by her quick escape, so that there grew up in him an absurd
desire to put it to some better test. Save in so far as some other poor
chance might help him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at
church. Left to himself he would have gone to church the very next
afternoon, just for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there.
But he wasn’t left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last,
after he had virtually made up his mind to go. The influence that kept
him away really revealed to him how little to himself his Dead _ever_
left him. He went only for _them_—for nothing else in the world.
The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hated to connect
the place with anything but his offices or to give a glimpse of the
curiosity that had been on the point of moving him. It was absurd to
weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that
might with ease have been daily or hourly; yet the tangle got itself
woven. He was sorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy
spell had been broken and he had lost a familiar security. At the last,
however, he asked himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear
of this muddle about motives. After an interval neither longer nor
shorter than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that
he should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the
concert. This indifference didn’t prevent his at once noting that for
the only time since he had first seen her she wasn’t on the spot. He had
now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but she didn’t arrive,
and when he went away still missing her he was profanely and consentingly
sorry. If her absence made the tangle more intricate, that was all her
own doing. By the end of another year it was very intricate indeed; but
by that time he didn’t in the least care, and it was only his cultivated
consciousness that had given him scruples. Three times in three months
he had gone to church without finding her, and he felt he hadn’t needed
these occasions to show him his suspense had dropped. Yet it was,
incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacy that had
kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of course immediately have
recognised his description of her, whether she had been seen at other
hours. His delicacy had kept him from asking any question about her at
any time, and it was exactly the same virtue that had left him so free to
be decently civil to her at the concert.
This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him when she finally
met his eyes—it was after a fourth trial—to predetermine quite fixedly
his awaiting her retreat. He joined her in the street as soon as she had
moved, asking her if he might accompany her a certain distance. With her
placid permission he went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which
she had business: she let him know it was not where she lived. She
lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in
connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and
regular occupations. She wasn’t, the mourning niece, in her first youth,
and her vanished freshness had left something behind that, for Stransom,
represented the proof it had been tragically sacrificed. Whatever she
gave him the assurance of she gave without references. She might have
been a divorced duchess—she might have been an old maid who taught the
harp.