To the man who pays heed to that voice within him which warns him that
twilight and danger are settling over his soul, terror is apt to appear
an absolute thing, against which his heart must be safeguarded in a twink
unless there is to take place an alteration in the whole range and scale
of his nature. Mercifully, he has never far to look for safeguards. Of
the immediate and small and common and momentary things of life, of
usages and observances and modes and conventions, he builds up
fortifications against the powers of darkness. He is even content that,
not terror only, but joy also, should for working purposes be placed in
the category of the absolute things; and the last treason he will commit
will be that breaking down of terms and limits that strikes, not at one
man, but at the welfare of the souls of all.
In his own person, Oleron began to commit this treason. He began to
commit it by admitting the inexplicable and horrible to an increasing
familiarity. He did it insensibly, unconsciously, by a neglect of the
things that he now regarded it as an impertinence in Elsie Bengough to
have prescribed. Two months before, the words "a haunted house," applied
to his lovely bemusing dwelling, would have chilled his marrow; now,
his scale of sensation becoming depressed, he could ask "Haunted by
what?" and remain unconscious that horror, when it can be proved to be
relative, by so much loses its proper quality. He was setting aside the
landmarks. Mists and confusion had begun to enwrap him.
And he was conscious of nothing so much as of a voracious
inquisitiveness. He wanted _to know_. He was resolved to know. Nothing
but the knowledge would satisfy him; and craftily he cast about for means
whereby he might attain it.
He might have spared his craft. The matter was the easiest imaginable. As
in time past he had known, in his writing, moments when his thoughts
had seemed to rise of themselves and to embody themselves in words not to
be altered afterwards, so now the questions he put himself seemed to be
answered even in the moment of their asking. There was exhilaration in
the swift, easy processes. He had known no so such joy in his own power
since the days when his writing had been a daily freshness and a delight
to him. It was almost as if the course he must pursue was being dictated
to him.
And the first thing he must do, of course, was to define the problem. He
defined it in terms of mathematics. Granted that he had not the place to
himself; granted that the old house had inexpressibly caught and engaged
his spirit; granted that, by virtue of the common denominator of the
place, this unknown co-tenant stood in some relation to himself: what
next? Clearly, the nature of the other numerator must be ascertained.
And how? Ordinarily this would not have seemed simple, but to Oleron it
was now pellucidly clear. The key, _of course_, lay in his half-written
novel--or rather, in both _Romillys_, the old and the proposed new one.
A little while before Oleron would have thought himself mad to have
embraced such an opinion; now he accepted the dizzying hypothesis without
a quiver.
He began to examine the first and second _Romillys_.
From the moment of his doing so the thing advanced by leaps and bounds.
Swiftly he reviewed the history of the _Romilly_ of the fifteen chapters.
He remembered clearly now that he had found her insufficient on the very
first morning on which he had sat down to work in his new place. Other
instances of his aversion leaped up to confirm his obscure investigation.
There had come the night when he had hardly forborne to throw the whole
thing into the fire; and the next morning he had begun the planning of
the new _Romilly_. It had been on that morning that Mrs. Barrett,
overhearing him humming a brief phrase that the dripping of a tap the
night before had suggested, had informed him that he was singing some air
he had never in his life heard before, called "The Beckoning Fair
One."...
The Beckoning Fair One!...
With scarcely a pause in thought he continued:
The first _Romilly_ having been definitely thrown over, the second had
instantly fastened herself upon him, clamouring for birth in his brain.
He even fancied now, looking back, that there had been something like
passion, hate almost, in the supplanting, and that more than once a stray
thought given to his discarded creation had--(it was astonishing how
credible Oleron found the almost unthinkable idea)--had offended the
supplanter.
Yet that a malignancy almost homicidal should be extended to his
fiction's poor mortal prototype....
In spite of his inuring to a scale in which the horrible was now a thing
to be fingered and turned this way and that, a "Good God!" broke from
Oleron.
This intrusion of the first _Romilly's_ prototype into his thought
again was a factor that for the moment brought his inquiry into the
nature of his problem to a termination; the mere thought of Elsie was
fatal to anything abstract. For another thing, he could not yet think of
that letter of Barrett's, nor of a little scene that had followed it,
without a mounting of colour and a quick contraction of the brow. For,
wisely or not, he had had that argument out at once. Striding across the
square on the following morning, he had bearded Barrett on his own
doorstep. Coming back again a few minutes later, he had been strongly of
opinion that he had only made matters worse. The man had been vagueness
itself. He had not been to be either challenged or browbeaten into
anything more definite than a muttered farrago in which the words
"Certain things ... Mrs. Barrett ... respectable house ... if the cap
fits ... proceedings that shall be nameless," had been constantly
repeated.
"Not that I make any charge--" he had concluded.
"Charge!" Oleron had cried.
"I 'ave my idears of things, as I don't doubt you 'ave yours--"
"Ideas--mine!" Oleron had cried wrathfully, immediately dropping his
voice as heads had appeared at windows of the square. "Look you here, my
man; you've an unwholesome mind, which probably you can't help, but a
tongue which you can help, and shall! If there is a breath of this
repeated ..."
"I'll not be talked to on my own doorstep like this by anybody,..."
Barrett had blustered....
"You shall, and I'm doing it ..."
"Don't you forget there's a Gawd above all, Who 'as said..."
"You're a low scandalmonger!..."
And so forth, continuing badly what was already badly begun. Oleron had
returned wrathfully to his own house, and thenceforward, looking out
of his windows, had seen Barrett's face at odd times, lifting blinds or
peering round curtains, as if he sought to put himself in possession of
Heaven knew what evidence, in case it should be required of him.
The unfortunate occurrence made certain minor differences in Oleron's
domestic arrangements. Barrett's tongue, he gathered, had already been
busy; he was looked at askance by the dwellers of the square; and he
judged it better, until he should be able to obtain other help, to make
his purchases of provisions a little farther afield rather than at the
small shops of the immediate neighbourhood. For the rest, housekeeping
was no new thing to him, and he would resume his old bachelor habits....
Besides, he was deep in certain rather abstruse investigations, in which
it was better that he should not be disturbed.
He was looking out of his window one midday rather tired, not very well,
and glad that it was not very likely he would have to stir out of doors,
when he saw Elsie Bengough crossing the square towards his house. The
weather had broken; it was a raw and gusty day; and she had to force
her way against the wind that set her ample skirts bellying about her
opulent figure and her veil spinning and streaming behind her.
Oleron acted swiftly and instinctively. Seizing his hat, he sprang to the
door and descended the stairs at a run. A sort of panic had seized him.
She must be prevented from setting foot in the place. As he ran along the
alley he was conscious that his eyes went up to the eaves as if something
drew them. He did not know that a slate might not accidentally fall....
He met her at the gate, and spoke with curious volubleness.
"This is really too bad, Elsie! Just as I'm urgently called away! I'm
afraid it can't be helped though, and that you'll have to think me an
inhospitable beast." He poured it out just as it came into his head.
She asked if he was going to town.
"Yes, yes--to town," he replied. "I've got to call on--on Chambers. You
know Chambers, don't you? No, I remember you don't; a big man you once
saw me with.... I ought to have gone yesterday, and--" this he felt to be
a brilliant effort--"and he's going out of town this afternoon. To
Brighton. I had a letter from him this morning."
He took her arm and led her up the square. She had to remind him that his
way to town lay in the other direction.
"Of course--how stupid of me!" he said, with a little loud laugh. "I'm so
used to going the other way with you--of course; it's the other way to
the bus. Will you come along with me? I am so awfully sorry it's happened
like this...."
They took the street to the bus terminus.
This time Elsie bore no signs of having gone through interior struggles.
If she detected anything unusual in his manner she made no comment, and
he, seeing her calm, began to talk less recklessly through silences. By
the time they reached the bus terminus, nobody, seeing the pallid-faced
man without an overcoat and the large ample-skirted girl at his side,
would have supposed that one of them was ready to sink on his knees for
thankfulness that he had, as he believed, saved the other from a wildly
unthinkable danger.
They mounted to the top of the bus, Oleron protesting that he should not
miss his overcoat, and that he found the day, if anything, rather
oppressively hot. They sat down on a front seat.
Now that this meeting was forced upon him, he had something else to say
that would make demands upon his tact. It had been on his mind for some
time, and was, indeed, peculiarly difficult to put. He revolved it for
some minutes, and then, remembering the success of his story of a sudden
call to town, cut the knot of his difficulty with another lie.
"I'm thinking of going away for a little while, Elsie," he said.