He learned in that instant two things: one being that even in so long a
time she had gathered no knowledge of his great intimacy and his great
quarrel; the other that in spite of this ignorance, strangely enough, she
supplied on the spot a reason for his stupor. “How extraordinary,” he
presently exclaimed, “that we should never have known!”
She gave a wan smile which seemed to Stransom stranger even than the fact
itself. “I never, never spoke of him.”
He looked again about the room. “Why then, if your life had been so full
of him?”
“Mayn’t I put you that question as well? Hadn’t your life also been full
of him?”
“Any one’s, every one’s life who had the wonderful experience of knowing
him. _I_ never spoke of him,” Stransom added in a moment, “because he
did me—years ago—an unforgettable wrong.” She was silent, and with the
full effect of his presence all about them it almost startled her guest
to hear no protest escape her. She accepted his words, he turned his
eyes to her again to see in what manner she accepted them. It was with
rising tears and a rare sweetness in the movement of putting out her hand
to take his own. Nothing more wonderful had ever appeared to him than,
in that little chamber of remembrance and homage, to see her convey with
such exquisite mildness that as from Acton Hague any injury was credible.
The clock ticked in the stillness—Hague had probably given it to her—and
while he let her hold his hand with a tenderness that was almost an
assumption of responsibility for his old pain as well as his new,
Stransom after a minute broke out: “Good God, how he must have used
_you_!”
She dropped his hand at this, got up and, moving across the room, made
straight a small picture to which, on examining it, he had given a slight
push. Then turning round on him with her pale gaiety recovered, “I’ve
forgiven him!” she declared.
“I know what you’ve done,” said Stransom “I know what you’ve done for
years.” For a moment they looked at each other through it all with their
long community of service in their eyes. This short passage made, to his
sense, for the woman before him, an immense, an absolutely naked
confession; which was presently, suddenly blushing red and changing her
place again, what she appeared to learn he perceived in it. He got up
and “How you must have loved him!” he cried.
“Women aren’t like men. They can love even where they’ve suffered.”
“Women are wonderful,” said Stransom. “But I assure you I’ve forgiven
him too.”
“If I had known of anything so strange I wouldn’t have brought you here.”
“So that we might have gone on in our ignorance to the last?”
“What do you call the last?” she asked, smiling still.
At this he could smile back at her. “You’ll see—when it comes.”
She thought of that. “This is better perhaps; but as we were—it was
good.”
He put her the question. “Did it never happen that he spoke of me?”
Considering more intently she made no answer, and he then knew he should
have been adequately answered by her asking how often he himself had
spoken of their terrible friend. Suddenly a brighter light broke in her
face and an excited idea sprang to her lips in the appeal: “You _have_
forgiven him?”
“How, if I hadn’t, could I linger here?”
She visibly winced at the deep but unintended irony of this; but even
while she did so she panted quickly: “Then in the lights on your altar—?”
“There’s never a light for Acton Hague!”
She stared with a dreadful fall, “But if he’s one of your Dead?”
“He’s one of the world’s, if you like—he’s one of yours. But he’s not
one of mine. Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me. They’re
mine in death because they were mine in life.”
“_He _was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased to be. If
you forgave him you went back to him. Those whom we’ve once loved—”
“Are those who can hurt us most,” Stransom broke in.
“Ah it’s not true—you’ve _not_ forgiven him!” she wailed with a passion
that startled him.
He looked at her as never yet. “What was it he did to you?”
“Everything!” Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell.
“Good-bye.”
He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man’s death.
“You mean that we meet no more?”
“Not as we’ve met—not _there_!”
He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement
that rang out in the word she so expressively sounded. “But what’s
changed—for you?”
She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the first time
since he had known her made her splendidly stern. “How can you
understand now when you didn’t understand before?”
“I didn’t understand before only because I didn’t know. Now that I know,
I see what I’ve been living with for years,” Stransom went on very
gently.
She looked at him with a larger allowance, doing this gentleness justice.
“How can I then, on this new knowledge of my own, ask you to continue to
live with it?”
“I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings,” Stransom began; but
she quietly interrupted him.
“You set up your altar, and when I wanted one most I found it
magnificently ready. I used it with the gratitude I’ve always shown you,
for I knew it from of old to be dedicated to Death. I told you long ago
that my Dead weren’t many. Yours were, but all you had done for them was
none too much for _my_ worship! You had placed a great light for Each—I
gathered them together for One!”
“We had simply different intentions,” he returned. “That, as you say, I
perfectly knew, and I don’t see why your intention shouldn’t still
sustain you.”
“That’s because you’re generous—you can imagine and think. But the spell
is broken.”
It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance, that it really
was, and the prospect stretched grey and void before him. All he could
say, however, was: “I hope you’ll try before you give up.”
“If I had known you had ever known him I should have taken for granted he
had his candle,” she presently answered. “What’s changed, as you say, is
that on making the discovery I find he never has had it. That makes _my_
attitude”—she paused as thinking how to express it, then said simply—“all
wrong.”
“Come once again,” he pleaded.
“Will you give him his candle?” she asked.
He waited, but only because it would sound ungracious; not because of a
doubt of his feeling. “I can’t do that!” he declared at last.
“Then good-bye.” And she gave him her hand again.
He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation of everything
that had opened out to him, he felt the need to recover himself as he
could only do in solitude. Yet he lingered—lingered to see if she had no
compromise to express, no attenuation to propose. But he only met her
great lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was as sorry for
him as for any one else. This made him say: “At least, in any case, I
may see you here.”
“Oh yes, come if you like. But I don’t think it will do.”
He looked round the room once more, knowing how little he was sure it
would do. He felt also stricken and more and more cold, and his chill
was like an ague in which he had to make an effort not to shake. Then he
made doleful reply: “I must try on my side—if you can’t try on yours.”
She came out with him to the hall and into the doorway, and here he put
her the question he held he could least answer from his own wit. “Why
have you never let me come before?”
“Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should have had to tell her
how I came to know you.”
“And what would have been the objection to that?”
“It would have entailed other explanations; there would at any rate have
been that danger.”
“Surely she knew you went every day to church,” Stransom objected.
“She didn’t know what I went for.”
“Of me then she never even heard?”
“You’ll think I was deceitful. But I didn’t need to be!”
He was now on the lower door-step, and his hostess held the door
half-closed behind him. Through what remained of the opening he saw her
framed face. He made a supreme appeal. “What _did_ he do to you?”
“It would have come out—_she _would have told you. That fear at my
heart—that was my reason!” And she closed the door, shutting him out.