And yet this was no solution, especially after he had talked again to his
friend of all it had been his plan she should finally do for him. He had
talked in the other days, and she had responded with a frankness
qualified only by a courteous reluctance, a reluctance that touched him,
to linger on the question of his death. She had then practically
accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could depend upon her to be
the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it was in the name of what had
so passed between them that he appealed to her not to forsake him in his
age. She listened at present with shining coldness and all her habitual
forbearance to insist on her terms; her deprecation was even still
tenderer, for it expressed the compassion of her own sense that he was
abandoned. Her terms, however, remained the same, and scarcely the less
audible for not being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more
than he she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have
provided her. They both missed the rich future, but she missed it most,
because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it was her
acceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of her preference
for the thought of Acton Hague over any other thought whatever. He had
humour enough to laugh rather grimly when he said to himself: “Why the
deuce does she like him so much more than she likes me?”—the reasons
being really so conceivable. But even his faculty of analysis left the
irritation standing, and this irritation proved perhaps the greatest
misfortune that had ever overtaken him. There had been nothing yet that
made him so much want to give up. He had of course by this time well
reached the age of renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to
him that it was time to give up everything.
Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced the friendship
once so charming and comforting. His privation had two faces, and the
face it had turned to him on the occasion of his last attempt to
cultivate that friendship was the one he could look at least. This was
the privation he inflicted; the other was the privation he bore. The
conditions she never phrased he used to murmur to himself in solitude:
“One more, one more—only just one.” Certainly he was going down; he
often felt it when he caught himself, over his work, staring at vacancy
and giving voice to that inanity. There was proof enough besides in his
being so weak and so ill. His irritation took the form of melancholy,
and his melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite
failed. His altar moreover had ceased to exist; his chapel, in his
dreams, was a great dark cavern. All the lights had gone out—all his
Dead had died again. He couldn’t exactly see at first how it had been in
the power of his late companion to extinguish them, since it was neither
for her nor by her that they had been called into being. Then he
understood that it was essentially in his own soul the revival had taken
place, and that in the air of this soul they were now unable to breathe.
The candles might mechanically burn, but each of them had lost its
lustre. The church had become a void; it was his presence, her presence,
their common presence, that had made the indispensable medium. If
anything was wrong everything was—her silence spoiled the tune.
Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that he went back;
reflecting that as they had been his best society for years his Dead
perhaps wouldn’t let him forsake them without doing something more for
him. They stood there, as he had left them, in their tall radiance, the
bright cluster that had already made him, on occasions when he was
willing to compare small things with great, liken them to a group of
sea-lights on the edge of the ocean of life. It was a relief to him,
after a while, as he sat there, to feel they had still a virtue. He was
more and more easily tired, and he always drove now; the action of his
heart was weak and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the
action of his fancy. None the less he returned yet again, returned
several times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a
renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience. In winter the church
was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the glow of his
shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask. He sat and
wondered to what he had reduced his absent associate and what she now did
with the hours of her absence. There were other churches, there were
other altars, there were other candles; in one way or another her piety
would still operate; he couldn’t absolutely have deprived her of her
rites. So he argued, but without contentment; for he well enough knew
there was no other such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had
once mentioned to him as the satisfaction of her need. As this semblance
again gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he
found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her darkness; for
never so much as in these weeks had his rites been real, never had his
gathered company seemed so to respond and even to invite. He lost
himself in the large lustre, which was more and more what he had from the
first wished it to be—as dazzling as the vision of heaven in the mind of
a child. He wandered in the fields of light; he passed, among the tall
tapers, from tier to tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the
white intensity of one clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another. It
was in the quiet sense of having saved his souls that his deep strange
instinct rejoiced. This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a
contingent world; they were saved better than faith or works could save
them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk_ _from dying to, for
actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of human remembrance.
By this time he had survived all his friends; the last straight flame was
three years old, there was no one to add to the list. Over and over he
called his roll, and it appeared to him compact and complete. Where
should he put in another, where, if there were no other objection, would
it stand in its place in the rank? He reflected, with a want of
sincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would be difficult to
determine that place. More and more, besides, face to face with his
little legion, over endless histories, handling the empty shells and
playing with the silence—more and more he could see that he had never
introduced an alien. He had had his great companions, his
indulgences—there were cases in which they had been immense; but what had
his devotion after all been if it hadn’t been at bottom a respect? He
was, however, himself surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the
winter the responsibility of it was what was uppermost in his thoughts.
The refrain had grown old to them, that plea for just one more. There
came a day when, for simple exhaustion, if symmetry should demand just
one he was ready so far to meet symmetry. Symmetry was harmony, and the
idea of harmony began to haunt him; he said to himself that harmony was
of course everything. He took, in fancy, his composition to pieces,
redistributing it into other lines, making other juxtapositions and
contrasts. He shifted this and that candle, he made the spaces
different, he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap. There were
subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross-reference, and moments in
which he seemed to catch a glimpse of the void so sensible to the woman
who wandered in exile or sat where he had seen her with the portrait of
Acton Hague. Finally, in this way, he arrived at a conception of the
total, the ideal, which left a clear opportunity for just another figure.
“Just one more—to round it off; just one more, just one,” continued to
hum in his head. There was a strange confusion in the thought, for he
felt the day to be near when he too should be one of the Others. What in
this event would the Others matter to him, since they only mattered to
the living? Even as one of the Dead what would his altar matter to him,
since his particular dream of keeping it up had melted away? What had
harmony to do with the case if his lights were all to be quenched? What
he had hoped for was an instituted thing. He might perpetuate it on some
other pretext, but his special meaning would have dropped. This meaning
was to have lasted with the life of the one other person who understood
it.
In March he had an illness during which he spent a fortnight in bed, and
when he revived a little he was told of two things that had happened.
One was that a lady whose name was not known to the servants (she left
none) had been three times to ask about him; the other was that in his
sleep and on an occasion when his mind evidently wandered he was heard to
murmur again and again: “Just one more—just one.” As soon as he found
himself able to go out, and before the doctor in attendance had
pronounced him so, he drove to see the lady who had come to ask about
him. She was not at home; but this gave him the opportunity, before his
strength should fall again, to take his way to the church. He entered it
alone; he had declined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to
decline effectively, the company of his servant or of a nurse. He knew
now perfectly what these good people thought; they had discovered his
clandestine connexion, the magnet that had drawn him for so many years,
and doubtless attached a significance of their own to the odd words they
had repeated to him. The nameless lady was the clandestine connexion—a
fact nothing could have made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin
her. He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on
his hands. His weakness, his life’s weariness overtook him. It seemed
to him he had come for the great surrender. At first he asked himself
how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the
very desire to move gradually left him. He had come, as he always came,
to lose himself; the fields of light were still there to stray in; only
this time, in straying, he would never come back. He had given himself
to his Dead, and it was good: this time his Dead would keep him. He
couldn’t rise from his knees; he believed he should never rise again; all
he could do was to lift his face and fix his eyes on his lights. They
looked unusually, strangely splendid, but the one that always drew him
most had an unprecedented lustre. It was the central voice of the choir,
the glowing heart of the brightness, and on this occasion it seemed to
expand, to spread great wings of flame. The whole altar flared—dazzling
and blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned clearer than the
rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was human beauty and human
charity, was the far-off face of Mary Antrim. She smiled at him from the
glory of heaven—she brought the glory down with her to take him. He
bowed his head in submission and at the same moment another wave rolled
over him. Was it the quickening of joy to pain? In the midst of his joy
at any rate he felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated
knowledge that had the force of a reproach. It suddenly made him
contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to another.
This breath of the passion immortal was all that other had asked; the
descent of Mary Antrim opened his spirit with a great compunctious throb
for the descent of Acton Hague. It was as if Stransom had read what her
eyes said to him.
After a moment he looked round in a despair that made him feel as if the
source of life were ebbing. The church had been empty—he was alone; but
he wanted to have something done, to make a last appeal. This idea gave
him strength for an effort; he rose to his feet with a movement that made
him turn, supporting himself by the back of a bench. Behind him was a
prostrate figure, a figure he had seen before; a woman in deep mourning,
bowed in grief or in prayer. He had seen her in other days—the first
time of his entrance there, and he now slightly wavered, looking at her
again till she seemed aware he had noticed her. She raised her head and
met his eyes: the partner of his long worship had come back. She looked
across at him an instant with a face wondering and scared; he saw he had
made her afraid. Then quickly rising she came straight to him with both
hands out.
“Then you _could_ come? God sent you!” he murmured with a happy smile.
“You’re very ill—you shouldn’t be here,” she urged in anxious reply.
“God sent me too, I think. I was ill when I came, but the sight of you
does wonders.” He held her hands, which steadied and quickened him.
“I’ve something to tell you.”
“Don’t tell me!” she tenderly pleaded; “let me tell you. This afternoon,
by a miracle, the sweetest of miracles, the sense of our difference left
me. I was out—I was near, thinking, wandering alone, when, on the spot,
something changed in my heart. It’s my confession—there it is. To come
back, to come back on the instant—the idea gave me wings. It was as if I
suddenly saw something—as if it all became possible. I could come for
what you yourself came for: that was enough. So here I am. It’s not for
my own—that’s over. But I’m here for _them_.” And breathless,
infinitely relieved by her low precipitate explanation, she looked with
eyes that reflected all its splendour at the magnificence of their altar.
“They’re here for you,” Stransom said, “they’re present to-night as
they’ve never been. They speak for you—don’t you see?—in a passion of
light; they sing out like a choir of angels. Don’t you hear what they
say?—they offer the very thing you asked of me.”
“Don’t talk of it—don’t think of it; forget it!” She spoke in hushed
supplication, and while the alarm deepened in her eyes she disengaged one
of her hands and passed an arm round him to support him better, to help
him to sink into a seat.
He let himself go, resting on her; he dropped upon the bench and she fell
on her knees beside him, his own arm round her shoulder. So he remained
an instant, staring up at his shrine. “They say there’s a gap in the
array—they say it’s not full, complete. Just one more,” he went on,
softly—“isn’t that what you wanted? Yes, one more, one more.”
“Ah no more—no more!” she wailed, as with a quick new horror of it, under
her breath.
“Yes, one more,” he repeated, simply; “just one!” And with this his head
dropped on her shoulder; she felt that in his weakness he had fainted.
But alone with him in the dusky church a great dread was on her of what
might still happen, for his face had the whiteness of death.