The Beast in the Jungle

Published：2026-07-31 04:59:52 Source: educational musical shakers for 8 year olds Author: Partners

Transcribed from the 1915 Martin Secker edition by David Price,best farm playsets for 8 year olds [email protected]

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE

CHAPTER I

What determined the speech that startled him in the course of theirencounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken byhimself quite without intention—spoken as they lingered and slowlymoved together after their renewal of acquaintance.  He had beenconveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which shewas staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he wasone, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lostin the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon.  There had beenafter luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive,a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic features,pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the placealmost famous; and the great rooms were so numerous that guests couldwander at their will, hang back from the principal group and in caseswhere they took such matters with the last seriousness give themselvesup to mysterious appreciations and measurements.  There were personsto be observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-waycorners with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quiteas with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell.  When they weretwo they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silencesof even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion thatgave it for Marcher much the air of the “look round,” previousto a sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, thedream of acquisition.  The dream of acquisition at Weatherend wouldhave had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among suchsuggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those whoknew too much and by that of those who knew nothing.  The greatrooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he neededsome straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though thisimpulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his companions,to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to havebeen calculated.

It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closermeeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance,as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely bytroubling him rather pleasantly.  It affected him as the sequelof something of which he had lost the beginning.  He knew it, andfor the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn’tknow what it continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greateras he was also somehow aware—yet without a direct sign from her—thatthe young woman herself hadn’t lost the thread.  She hadn’tlost it, but she wouldn’t give it back to him, he saw, withoutsome putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, butsaw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the factthat at the moment some accident of grouping brought them face to facehe was still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact betweenthem in the past would have had no importance.  If it had had noimportance he scarcely knew why his actual impression of her shouldso seem to have so much; the answer to which, however, was that in sucha life as they all appeared to be leading for the moment one could buttake things as they came.  He was satisfied, without in the leastbeing able to say why, that this young lady might roughly have rankedin the house as a poor relation; satisfied also that she was not thereon a brief visit, but was more or less a part of the establishment—almosta working, a remunerated part.  Didn’t she enjoy at periodsa protection that she paid for by helping, among other services, toshow the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome people, answerquestions about the dates of the building, the styles of the furniture,the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn’t that she looked as if you could have given her shillings—itwas impossible to look less so.  Yet when she finally drifted towardhim, distinctly handsome, though ever so much older—older thanwhen he had seen her before—it might have been as an effect ofher guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more imaginationto her than to all the others put together, and had thereby penetratedto a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for.  She wasthere on harder terms than any one; she was there as a consequence ofthings suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; andshe remembered him very much as she was remembered—only a gooddeal better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in oneof the rooms—remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-place—outof which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that evenbefore they had spoken they had practically arranged with each otherto stay behind for talk.  The charm, happily, was in other thingstoo—partly in there being scarce a spot at Weatherend withoutsomething to stay behind for.  It was in the way the autumn daylooked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breakingat the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaftand played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the way she came to him as if, since shehad been turned on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should hechoose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention fora part of her general business.  As soon as he heard her voice,however, the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied; the slightirony he divined in her attitude lost its advantage.  He almostjumped at it to get there before her.  “I met you years andyears ago in Rome.  I remember all about it.”  She confessedto disappointment—she had been so sure he didn’t; and toprove how well he did he began to pour forth the particular recollectionsthat popped up as he called for them.  Her face and her voice,all at his service now, worked the miracle—the impression operatinglike the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one,a long row of gas-jets.  Marcher flattered himself the illuminationwas brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him,with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had gotmost things rather wrong.  It hadn’t been at Rome—ithad been at Naples; and it hadn’t been eight years before—ithad been more nearly ten.  She hadn’t been, either, withher uncle and aunt, but with her mother and brother; in addition towhich it was not with the Pembles hehad been, but with the Boyers,coming down in their company from Rome—a point on which she insisted,a little to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand. The Boyers she had known, but didn’t know the Pembles, thoughshe had heard of them, and it was the people he was with who had madethem acquainted.  The incident of the thunderstorm that had ragedround them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an excavation—thisincident had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii,on an occasion when they had been present there at an important find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though themoral of them was, she pointed out, that he reallydidn’tremember the least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawbackthat when all was made strictly historic there didn’t appear muchof anything left.  They lingered together still, she neglectingher office—for from the moment he was so clever she had no properright to him—and both neglecting the house, just waiting as tosee if a memory or two more wouldn’t again breathe on them. It hadn’t taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on thetable, like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respectivehands; only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect—thatthe past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally,no more than it had.  It had made them anciently meet—herat twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they seemedto say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn’t donea little more for them.  They looked at each other as with thefeeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much betterif the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn’tbeen so stupidly meagre.  There weren’t, apparently, allcounted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in comingto pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness,stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried—toodeeply (didn’t it seem?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some service—savedher from a capsized boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag,filched from her cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with astiletto.  Or it would have been nice if he could have been takenwith fever all alone at his hotel, and she could have come to look afterhim, to write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Thenthey would be in possession of the something or other thattheir actual show seemed to lack.  It yet somehow presented itself,this show, as too good to be spoiled; so that they were reduced fora few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly why—sincethey seemed to know a certain number of the same people—theirreunion had been so long averted.  They didn’t use that namefor it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the others wasa kind of confession that they didn’t quite want it to be a failure. Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met butshowed how little they knew of each other.  There came in facta moment when Marcher felt a positive pang.  It was vain to pretendshe was an old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spiteof which it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough—was surrounded with them for instance onthe stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldn’thave so much as noticed her.  He would have liked to invent something,get her to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic orcritical kind hadoriginally occurred.  He was really almostreaching out in imagination—as against time—for somethingthat would do, and saying to himself that if it didn’t come thissketch of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They would have tried and not succeeded.  Then it was, just atthe turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everythingelse failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were,save the situation.  He felt as soon as she spoke that she hadbeen consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get on withoutit; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when, by the end ofthree or four minutes more, he was able to measure it.  What shebrought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and supplied the link—thelink it was so odd he should frivolously have managed to lose.

“You know you told me something I’ve never forgottenand that again and again has made me think of you since; it was thattremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for thebreeze.  What I allude to was what you said to me, on the way back,as we sat under the awning of the boat enjoying the cool.  Haveyou forgotten?”

He had forgotten, and was even more surprised than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any“sweet” speech.  The vanity of women had long memories,but she was making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different one, he might have feared therecall possibly even some imbecile “offer.”  So, inhaving to say that he had indeed forgotten, he was conscious ratherof a loss than of a gain; he already saw an interest in the matter ofher mention.  “I try to think—but I give it up. Yet I remember the Sorrento day.”

“I’m not very sure you do,” May Bartram after amoment said; “and I’m not very sure I ought to want youto.  It’s dreadful to bring a person back at any time towhat he was ten years before.  If you’ve lived away fromit,” she smiled, “so much the better.”

“Ah if youhaven’t why should I?” he asked.

“Lived away, you mean, from what I myself was?”

“From what Iwas.  I was of course an ass,”Marcher went on; “but I would rather know from you just the sortof ass I was than—from the moment you have something in your mind—notknow anything.”

Still, however, she hesitated.  “But if you’ve completelyceased to be that sort—?”

“Why I can then all the more bear to know.  Besides, perhapsI haven’t.”

“Perhaps.  Yet if you haven’t,” she added,“I should suppose you’d remember.  Not indeed thatIin the least connect with my impression the invidious nameyou use.  If I had only thought you foolish,” she explained,“the thing I speak of wouldn’t so have remained with me. It was about yourself.”  She waited as if it might come tohim; but as, only meeting her eyes in wonder, he gave no sign, she burnther ships.  “Has it ever happened?”

Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a light broke forhim and the blood slowly came to his face, which began to burn withrecognition.

“Do you mean I told you—?”  But he faltered,lest what came to him shouldn’t be right, lest he should onlygive himself away.

“It was something about yourself that it was natural one shouldn’tforget—that is if one remembered you at all.  That’swhy I ask you,” she smiled, “if the thing you then spokeof has ever come to pass?”

Oh then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and found himself embarrassed. This, he also saw, made her sorry for him, as if her allusion had beena mistake.  It took him but a moment, however, to feel it hadn’tbeen, much as it had been a surprise.  After the first little shockof it her knowledge on the contrary began, even if rather strangely,to taste sweet to him.  She was the only other person in the worldthen who would have it, and she had had it all these years, while thefact of his having so breathed his secret had unaccountably faded fromhim.  No wonder they couldn’t have met as if nothing hadhappened.  “I judge,” he finally said, “thatI know what you mean.  Only I had strangely enough lost any senseof having taken you so far into my confidence.”

“Is it because you’ve taken so many others as well?”

“I’ve taken nobody.  Not a creature since then.”

“So that I’m the only person who knows?”

“The only person in the world.”

“Well,” she quickly replied, “I myself have neverspoken.  I’ve never, never repeated of you what you toldme.”  She looked at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it in such a way that he was without a doubt. “And I never will.”

She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put himat ease about her possible derision.  Somehow the whole questionwas a new luxury to him—that is from the moment she was in possession. If she didn’t take the sarcastic view she clearly took the sympathetic,and that was what he had had, in all the long time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was that he couldn’t at present have begun to tellher, and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of havingdone so of old.  “Please don’t then.  We’rejust right as it is.”

“Oh I am,” she laughed, “if you are!” To which she added: “Then you do still feel in the same way?”

It was impossible he shouldn’t take to himself that she wasreally interested, though it all kept coming as a perfect surprise. He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he wasn’talone a bit.  He hadn’t been, it appeared, for an hour—sincethose moments on the Sorrento boat.  It was she who had been, heseemed to see as he looked at her—she who had been made so bythe graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity.  To tell her whathe had told her—what had it been but to ask something of her?something that she had given, in her charity, without his having, bya remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing another encounter,so much as thanked her.  What he had asked of her had been simplyat first not to laugh at him.  She had beautifully not done sofor ten years, and she was not doing so now.  So he had endlessgratitude to make up.  Only for that he must see just how he hadfigured to her.  “What, exactly, was the account I gave—?”

“Of the way you did feel?  Well, it was very simple. You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing withinyou, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possiblyprodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you,that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, andthat would perhaps overwhelm you.”

“Do you call that very simple?” John Marcher asked.

She thought a moment.  “It was perhaps because I seemed,as you spoke, to understand it.”

“You do understand it?” he eagerly asked.

Again she kept her kind eyes on him.  “You still havethe belief?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed helplessly.  There was too muchto say.

“Whatever it’s to be,” she clearly made out, “ithasn’t yet come.”

He shook his head in complete surrender now.  “It hasn’tyet come.  Only, you know, it isn’t anything I’m todo, to achieve in the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I’m not such an ass as that.  It would be much better,no doubt, if I were.”

“It’s to be something you’re merely to suffer?”

“Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to seesuddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness,possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only alteringeverything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to theconsequences, however they shape themselves.”

She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him notto be that of mockery.  “Isn’t what you describe perhapsbut the expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiarto so many people—of falling in love?”

John Marcher thought.  “Did you ask me that before?”

“No—I wasn’t so free-and-easy then.  But it’swhat strikes me now.”

“Of course,” he said after a moment, “it strikesyou.  Of course it strikes me.  Of course what’sin store for me may be no more than that.  The only thing is,”he went on, “that I think if it had been that I should by thistime know.”

“Do you mean because you’ve beenin love?” And then as he but looked at her in silence: “You’ve beenin love, and it hasn’t meant such a cataclysm, hasn’t provedthe great affair?”

“Here I am, you see.  It hasn’t been overwhelming.”

“Then it hasn’t been love,” said May Bartram.

“Well, I at least thought it was.  I took it for that—I’vetaken it till now.  It was agreeable, it was delightful, it wasmiserable,” he explained.  “But it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t what my affair’s to be.”

“You want something all to yourself—something that nobodyelse knows or hasknown?”

“It isn’t a question of what I ‘want’—Godknows I don’t want anything.  It’s only a questionof the apprehension that haunts me—that I live with day by day.”

He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it furtherimpose itself.  If she hadn’t been interested before she’dhave been interested now.

“Is it a sense of coming violence?”

Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it.  “I don’tthink of it as—when it does come—necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it simply as thething.  Thething willof itself appear natural.”

“Then how will it appear strange?”

Marcher bethought himself.  “It won’t—to me.”

“To whom then?”

“Well,” he replied, smiling at last, “say to you.”

“Oh then I’m to be present?”

“Why you are present—since you know.”

“I see.”  She turned it over.  “But Imean at the catastrophe.”

At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity;it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. “It will only depend on yourself—if you’ll watch withme.”

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Don’t leave me now,” he went on.

“Are you afraid?” she repeated.

“Do you think me simply out of my mind?” he pursued insteadof answering.  “Do I merely strike you as a harmless lunatic?”

“No,” said May Bartram.  “I understand you. I believe you.”

“You mean you feel how my obsession—poor old thing—maycorrespond to some possible reality?”

“To some possible reality.”

“Then you willwatch with me?”

She hesitated, then for the third time put her question.  “Areyou afraid?”

“Did I tell you I was—at Naples?”

“No, you said nothing about it.”

“Then I don’t know.  And I should like to know,”said John Marcher.  “You’ll tell me yourself whetheryou think so.  If you’ll watch with me you’ll see.”

“Very good then.”  They had been moving by thistime across the room, and at the door, before passing out, they pausedas for the full wind-up of their understanding.  “I’llwatch with you,” said May Bartram.

CHAPTER II

The fact that she “knew”—knew and yet neither chaffedhim nor betrayed him—had in a short time begun to constitute betweenthem a goodly bond, which became more marked when, within the year thatfollowed their afternoon at Weatherend, the opportunities for meetingmultiplied.  The event that thus promoted these occasions was thedeath of the ancient lady her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losingher mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, thoughbut the widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had succeeded—thanksto a high tone and a high temper—in not forfeiting the supremeposition at the great house.  The deposition of this personagearrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made inparticular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher’sexpert attention had recognised from the first a dependent with a pridethat might ache though it didn’t bristle.  Nothing for along time had made him easier than the thought that the aching musthave been much soothed by Miss Bartram’s now finding herself ableto set up a small home in London.  She had acquired property, toan amount that made that luxury just possible, under her aunt’sextremely complicated will, and when the whole matter began to be straightenedout, which indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue wasat last in view.  He had seen her again before that day, both becauseshe had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and becausehe had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made ofWeatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality.  These friendshad taken him back there; he had achieved there again with Miss Bartramsome quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in persuadingher to more than one brief absence from her aunt.  They went together,on these latter occasions, to the National Gallery and the South KensingtonMuseum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large—notnow attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth andtheir ignorance.  That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, hadserved its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were,to Marcher’s sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters oftheir stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down thecurrent.

They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked,quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buriedtreasure of her knowledge.  He had with his own hands dug up thislittle hoard, brought to light—that is to within reach of thedim day constituted by their discretions and privacies—the objectof value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into theground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten.  The rare luckof his having again just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent toany other question; he would doubtless have devoted more time to theodd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn’t been moved todevote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future,that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh.  It had neverentered into his plan that any one should “know”, and mainlyfor the reason that it wasn’t in him to tell any one.  Thatwould have been impossible, for nothing but the amusement of a coldworld would have waited on it.  Since, however, a mysterious fatehad opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he would count that acompensation and profit by it to the utmost.  That the right personshouldknow tempered the asperity of his secret more even thanhis shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearlyright, because—well, because there she was.  Her knowledgesimply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had shebeen wrong.  There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposedhim too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light forhim from the fact—the fact only—of her interest in his predicament;from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard himas the funniest of the funny.  Aware, in fine, that her price forhim was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirablyspared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her own,with things that might happen to her, things that in friendshipone should likewise take account of.  Something fairly remarkablecame to pass with him, for that matter, in this connexion—somethingrepresented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the suddenestway, from one extreme to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterestedperson in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetualsuspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving othersno glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them noallowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He hadn’t disturbed people with the queerness of their havingto know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptationon hearing them say they were forsooth “unsettled.” If they were as unsettled as he was—he who had never been settledfor an hour in his life—they would know what it meant.  Yetit wasn’t, all the same, for him to make them, and he listenedto them civilly enough.  This was why he had such good—thoughpossibly such rather colourless—manners; this was why, above all,he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decently—as infact perhaps even a little sublimely—unselfish.  Our pointis accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measurehis present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himselfto be much on his guard.  He was quite ready, none the less, tobe selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion forit had come to him.  “Just a little,” in a word, wasjust as much as Miss Bartram, taking one day with another, would lethim.  He never would be in the least coercive, and would keep wellbefore him the lines on which consideration for her—the very highest—oughtto proceed.  He would thoroughly establish the heads under whichher affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities—he went so faras to give them the latitude of that name—would come into theirintercourse.  All this naturally was a sign of how much he tookthe intercourse itself for granted.  There was nothing more tobe done about that.  It simply existed; had sprung into being withher first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out largewas the form of their marrying.  But the devil in this was thatthe very basis itself put marrying out of the question.  His conviction,his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn’t a privilegehe could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was preciselywhat was the matter with him.  Something or other lay in wait forhim, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, likea crouching Beast in the Jungle.  It signified little whether thecrouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain.  Thedefinite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definitelesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himselfto be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.  Such was the imageunder which he had ended by figuring his life.

They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent together,made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he was handsomelyalert to give that he didn’t expect, that he in fact didn’tcare, always to be talking about it.  Such a feature in one’soutlook was really like a hump on one’s back.  The differenceit made every minute of the day existed quite independently of discussion. One discussed of course likea hunchback, for there was always,if nothing else, the hunchback face.  That remained, and she waswatching him; but people watched best, as a general thing, in silence,so that such would be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn’t want, at the same time, to be tense and solemn;tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much showed for with otherpeople.  The thing to be, with the one person who knew, was easyand natural—to make the reference rather than be seeming to avoidit, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, inany case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous. Some such consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind forinstance when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the greatthing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more thanthis circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a housein London.  It was the first allusion they had yet again made,needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after havinggiven him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with such a trifleas the climax to so special a suspense, she almost set him wonderingif she hadn’t even a larger conception of singularity for himthan he had for himself.  He was at all events destined to becomeaware little by little, as time went by, that she was all the whilelooking at his life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thingshe knew, which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years,never mentioned between them save as “the real truth” abouthim.  That had always been his own form of reference to it, butshe adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the end of a period,he knew there was no moment at which it was traceable that she had,as he might say, got inside his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifullyindulging for that of still more beautifully believing him.

It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as themost harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run—since it coveredso much ground—was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in spite of it and waspractically, against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremuneratedbut fairly amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputablyoccupied.  The rest of the world of course thought him queer, butshe, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was preciselywhat enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took his gaiety from him—since it had to pass with them forgaiety—as she took everything else; but she certainly so far justifiedby her unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to which he hadended by convincing her.  Sheat least never spoke of thesecret of his life except as “the real truth about you,”and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, thesecret of her own life too.  That was in fine how he so constantlyfelt her as allowing for him; he couldn’t on the whole call itanything else.  He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowedstill more; partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter,she traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course intowhich he could scarce follow it.  He knew how he felt, but, besidesknowing that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the thingsof importance he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could addup the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weighton his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, cleveras he was, he fell short.  Above all she was in the secret of thedifference between the forms he went through—those of his littleoffice under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony, forhis library, for his garden in the country, for the people in Londonwhose invitations he accepted and repaid—and the detachment thatreigned beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that couldin the least be called behaviour, a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with the socialsimper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an expressionnot in the least matching the other features.  This the stupidworld, even after years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable,the feat of at once—or perhaps it was only alternately—meetingthe eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over hisshoulder, with their peep through the apertures.

So while they grew older together she did watch with him, and soshe let this association give shape and colour to her own existence. Beneath herforms as well detachment had learned to sit, andbehaviour had become for her, in the social sense, a false account ofherself.  There was but one account of her that would have beentrue all the while and that she could give straight to nobody, leastof all to John Marcher.  Her whole attitude was a virtual statement,but the perception of that only seemed called to take its place forhim as one of the many things necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. If she had moreover, like himself, to make sacrifices to their realtruth, it was to be granted that her compensation might have affectedher as more prompt and more natural.  They had long periods, inthis London time, during which, when they were together, a strangermight have listened to them without in the least pricking up his ears;on the other hand the real truth was equally liable at any moment torise to the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered indeedwhat they were talking about.  They had from an early hour madeup their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the marginallowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces. Yet there were still moments when the situation turned almost fresh—usuallyunder the effect of some expression drawn from herself.  Her expressionsdoubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals were generous. “What saves us, you know, is that we answer so completely to sousual an appearance: that of the man and woman whose friendship hasbecome such a daily habit—or almost—as to be at last indispensable.” That for instance was a remark she had frequently enough had occasionto make, though she had given it at different times different developments. What we are especially concerned with is the turn it happened to takefrom her one afternoon when he had come to see her in honour of herbirthday.  This anniversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a seasonof thick fog and general outward gloom; but he had brought her his customaryoffering, having known her now long enough to have established a hundredsmall traditions.  It was one of his proofs to himself, the presenthe made her on her birthday, that he hadn’t sunk into real selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it was always fineof its kind, and he was regularly careful to pay for it more than hethought he could afford.  “Our habit saves you, at least,don’t you see? because it makes you, after all, for the vulgar,indistinguishable from other men.  What’s the most inveteratemark of men in general?  Why the capacity to spend endless timewith dull women—to spend it I won’t say without being bored,but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a tangentby it; which comes to the same thing.  I’m your dull woman,a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church.  That coversyour tracks more than anything.”

“And what covers yours?” asked Marcher, whom his dullwoman could mostly to this extent amuse.  “I see of coursewhat you mean by your saving me, in this way and that, so far as otherpeople are concerned—I’ve seen it all along.  Onlywhat is it that saves you?  I often think, you know, ofthat.”

She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather ina different way.  “Where other people, you mean, are concerned?”

“Well, you’re really so in with me, you know—asa sort of result of my being so in with yourself.  I mean of myhaving such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindfulof all you’ve done for me.  I sometimes ask myself if it’squite fair.  Fair I mean to have so involved and—since onemay say it—interested you.  I almost feel as if you hadn’treally had time to do anything else.”

“Anything else but be interested?” she asked.  “Ahwhat else does one ever want to be?  If I’ve been ‘watching’with you, as we long ago agreed I was to do, watching’s alwaysin itself an absorption.”

“Oh certainly,” John Marcher said, “if you hadn’thad your curiosity—!  Only doesn’t it sometimes cometo you as time goes on that your curiosity isn’t being particularlyrepaid?”

May Bartram had a pause.  “Do you ask that, by any chance,because you feel at all that yours isn’t?  I mean becauseyou have to wait so long.”

Oh he understood what she meant!  “For the thing to happenthat never does happen?  For the Beast to jump out?  No, I’mjust where I was about it.  It isn’t a matter as to whichI can choose, I can decide for a change.  It isn’tone as to which there canbe a change.  It’s in thelap of the gods.  One’s in the hands of one’s law—thereone is.  As to the form the law will take, the way it will operate,that’s its own affair.”

“Yes,” Miss Bartram replied; “of course one’sfate’s coming, of course it hascome in its own form andits own way, all the while.  Only, you know, the form and the wayin your case were to have been—well, something so exceptionaland, as one may say, so particularly yourown.”

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion.  “Yousay ‘were to havebeen,’ as if in your heart youhad begun to doubt.”

“Oh!” she vaguely protested.

“As if you believed,” he went on, “that nothingwill now take place.”

She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably.  “You’refar from my thought.”

He continued to look at her.  “What then is the matterwith you?”

“Well,” she said after another wait, “the matterwith me is simply that I’m more sure than ever my curiosity, asyou call it, will be but too well repaid.”

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turnedonce more about the little drawing-room to which, year after year, hebrought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have said,tasted their intimate community with every sauce, where every objectwas as familiar to him as the things of his own house and the very carpetswere worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-housesare worn by the elbows of generations of clerks.  The generationsof his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the writtenhistory of his whole middle life.  Under the impression of whathis friend had just said he knew himself, for some reason, more awareof these things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. “Is it possibly that you’ve grown afraid?”

“Afraid?”  He thought, as she repeated the word,that his question had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lesthe should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: “Youremember that that was what you asked melong ago—thatfirst day at Weatherend.”

“Oh yes, and you told me you didn’t know—that Iwas to see for myself.  We’ve said little about it since,even in so long a time.”

“Precisely,” Marcher interposed—“quite asif it were too delicate a matter for us to make free with.  Quiteas if we might find, on pressure, that I amafraid.  Forthen,” he said, “we shouldn’t, should we? quite knowwhat to do.”

She had for the time no answer to this question.  “Therehave been days when I thought you were.  Only, of course,”she added, “there have been days when we have thought almost anything.”

“Everything.  Oh!” Marcher softly groaned, as witha gasp, half spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it hadbeen for a long while, of the imagination always with them.  Ithad always had it’s incalculable moments of glaring out, quiteas with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them,they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose fromthe depths of his being.  All they had thought, first and last,rolled over him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barrenspeculation.  This in fact was what the place had just struck himas so full of—the simplification of everything but the state ofsuspense.  That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surroundingit.  Even his original fear, if fear it as had been, had lost itselfin the desert.  “I judge, however,” he continued, “thatyou see I’m not afraid now.”

“What I see, as I make it out, is that you’ve achievedsomething almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely you’ve lost your sense ofit; you know it’s there, but you’re indifferent, and youcease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark.  Consideringwhat the danger is,” May Bartram wound up, “I’m boundto say I don’t think your attitude could well be surpassed.”

John Marcher faintly smiled.  “It’s heroic?”

“Certainly—call it that.”

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it.  “Iamthen a man of courage?”

“That’s what you were to show me.”

He still, however, wondered.  “But doesn’t the manof courage know what he’s afraid of—or not afraid of? I don’t know that, you see.  I don’t focus it. I can’t name it.  I only know I’m exposed.”

“Yes, but exposed—how shall I say?—so directly. So intimately.  That’s surely enough.”

“Enough to make you feel then—as what we may call theend and the upshot of our watch—that I’m not afraid?”

“You’re not afraid.  But it isn’t,”she said, “the end of our watch.  That is it isn’tthe end of yours.  You’ve everything still to see.”

“Then why haven’t you?” he asked.  He hadhad, all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, andhe still had it.  As this was his first impression of that it quitemade a date.  The case was the more marked as she didn’tat first answer; which in turn made him go on.  “You knowsomething I don’t.”  Then his voice, for that of aman of courage, trembled a little.  “You know what’sto happen.”  Her silence, with the face she showed, was almosta confession—it made him sure.  “You know, and you’reafraid to tell me.  It’s so bad that you’re afraidI’ll find out.”

All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to her,he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the real climax wasthat he himself, at all events, needn’t.  “You’llnever find out.”

CHAPTER III

It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date; whichcame out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals,other things that passed between them were in relation to this hourbut the character of recalls and results.  Its immediate effecthad been indeed rather to lighten insistence—almost to provokea reaction; as if their topic had dropped by its own weight and as ifmoreover, for that matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasionalwarnings against egotism.  He had kept up, he felt, and very decentlyon the whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish,and it was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptlyenough trying to press the scales the other way.  He often repairedhis fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompanyhim to the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to showhe didn’t wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind,he was the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in themonth.  It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, heoccasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the evening,and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal but alwayscareful little supper that awaited his pleasure.  His point wasmade, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her on himself;made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that, her piano athand and each of them familiar with it, they went over passages of theopera together.  It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however,that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain question hehad put to her during the talk that had taken place between them onher last birthday.  “What is it that saves you?”—savedher, he meant, from that appearance of variation from the usual humantype.  If he had practically escaped remark, as she pretended,by doing, in the most important particular, what most men do—findthe answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a womanno better than himself—how had she escaped it, and how could thealliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more orless noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about?

“I never said,” May Bartram replied, “that it hadn’tmade me a good deal talked about.”

“Ah well then you’re not ‘saved.’”

“It hasn’t been a question for me.  If you’vehad your woman I’ve had,” she said, “my man.”

“And you mean that makes you all right?”

Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!

“I don’t know why it shouldn’t make me—humanly,which is what we’re speaking of—as right as it makes you.”

“I see,” Marcher returned.  “‘Humanly,’no doubt, as showing that you’re living for something.  Not,that is, just for me and my secret.”

May Bartram smiled.  “I don’t pretend it exactlyshows that I’m not living for you.  It’s my intimacywith you that’s in question.”

He laughed as he saw what she meant.  “Yes, but since,as you say, I’m only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you’re—aren’tyou? no more than ordinary either.  You help me to pass for a manlike another.  So if I am, as I understand you, you’renot compromised.  Is that it?”

She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. “That’s it.  It’s all that concerns me—tohelp you to pass for a man like another.”

He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely.  “Howkind, how beautiful, you are to me!  How shall I ever repay you?”

She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But she chose.  “By going on as you are.”

It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and reallyfor so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further soundingof their depths.  These depths, constantly bridged over by a structurefirm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillationin the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interestof their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of theabyss.  A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by thefact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebuttinghis charge of an idea within her that she didn’t dare to express—acharge uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussionsended.  It had come up for him then that she “knew”something and that what she knew was bad—too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he mightfind it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let aloneand yet, for Marcher’s special sensibility, almost too formidableagain to touch.  He circled about it at a distance that alternatelynarrowed and widened and that still wasn’t much affected by theconsciousness in him that there was nothing she could “know,”after all, any better than he did.  She had no source of knowledgehe hadn’t equally—except of course that she might have finernerves.  That was what women had where they were interested; theymade out things, where people were concerned, that the people oftencouldn’t have made out for themselves.  Their nerves, theirsensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and thebeauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself soto his case.  He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he hadnever felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe—somecatastrophe that yet wouldn’t at all be the catastrophe: partlybecause she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more usefulto him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertaintyin her health, co-incident and equally new.  It was characteristicof the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully cultivated andto which our whole account of him is a reference, it was characteristicthat his complications, such as they were, had never yet seemed so asat this crisis to thicken about him, even to the point of making himask himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound,within touch or reach, within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thingthat waited.

When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed tohim her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadowof a change and the chill of a shock.  He immediately began toimagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her perilas the direct menace for himself of personal privation.  This indeedgave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeableto him—it showed him that what was still first in his mind wasthe loss she herself might suffer.  “What if she should haveto die before knowing, before seeing—?”  It would havebeen brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that questionto her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own concern, andthe possibility was what most made him sorry for her.  If she did“know,” moreover, in the sense of her having had some—whatshould he think?—mystical irresistible light, this would makethe matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoptionof his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life.  Shehad been living to see what would beto be seen, and it wouldquite lacerate her to have to give up before the accomplishment of thevision.  These reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity;yet, make them as he might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the period,more and more disconcerted.  It lapsed for him with a strange steadysweep, and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently ofthe threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive surprisehis career, if career it could be called, had yet offered him. She kept the house as she had never done; he had to go to her to seeher—she could meet him nowhere now, though there was scarce acorner of their loved old London in which she hadn’t in the past,at one time or another, done so; and he found her always seated by herfire in the deep old-fashioned chair she was less and less able to leave. He had been struck one day, after an absence exceeding his usual measure,with her suddenly looking much older to him than he had ever thoughtof her being; then he recognised that the suddenness was all on hisside—he had just simply and suddenly noticed.  She lookedolder because inevitably, after so many years, she wasold, oralmost; which was of course true in still greater measure of her companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it washer showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth hometo him.  His surprises began here; when once they had begun theymultiplied; they came rather with a rush: it was as if, in the oddestway in the world, they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster,for the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in generalthe unexpected has died out.

One of them was that he should have caught himself—for he hadso done—reallywondering if the great accident would takeform now as nothing more than his being condemned to see this charmingwoman, this admirable friend, pass away from him.  He had neverso unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with sucha possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him thatas an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so finea feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax.  It wouldrepresent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity underthe shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesquesof failures.  He had been far from holding it a failure—longas he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success. He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that. The breath of his good faith came short, however, as he recognised howlong he had waited, or how long at least his companion had.  Thatshe, at all events, might be recorded as having waited in vain—thisaffected him sharply, and all the more because of his at first havingdone little more than amuse himself with the idea.  It grew moregrave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind itproduced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had beensome definite disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for anotherof his surprises.  This conjoined itself still with another, thereally stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowedto shape itself had he dared.  What did everything mean—what,that is, did shemean, she and her vain waiting and her probabledeath and the soundless admonition of it all—unless that, at thistime of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late?  Hehad never at any stage of his queer consciousness admitted the whisperof such a correction; he had never till within these last few monthsbeen so false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to cometo him had time, whether hestruck himself as having it or not. That at last, at last, he certainly hadn’t it, to speak of, orhad it but in the scantiest measure—such, soon enough, as thingswent with him, became the inference with which his old obsession hadto reckon: and this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmedappearance that the great vagueness casting the long shadow in whichhe had lived had, to attest itself, almost no margin left.  Sinceit was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time thathis fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longerbeing young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that,in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matterbeside.  It all hung together; they were subject, he and the greatvagueness, to an equal and indivisible law.  When the possibilitiesthemselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the godshad grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only,was failure.  It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt,dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-fortwist, he wondered not a little as he groped.  He didn’tcare what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or whatmonstrosity he might yet be associated—since he wasn’t afterall too utterly old to suffer—if it would only be decently proportionateto the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presenceof it.  He had but one desire left—that he shouldn’thave been “sold.”

CHAPTER IV

Then it was that, one afternoon, while the spring of the year wasyoung and new she met all in her own way his frankest betrayal of thesealarms.  He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn’tsettled and she was presented to him in that long fresh light of waningApril days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyesthours of autumn.  The week had been warm, the spring was supposedto have begun early, and May Bartram sat, for the first time in theyear, without a fire; a fact that, to Marcher’s sense, gave thescene of which she formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air ofknowing, in its immaculate order and cold meaningless cheer, that itwould never see a fire again.  Her own aspect—he could scarcehave said why—intensified this note.  Almost as white aswax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine asif they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies relievedby a faded green scarf on the delicate tone of which the years had furtherrefined, she was the picture of a serene and exquisite but impenetrablesphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powderedwith silver.  She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and greenfronds she might have been a lily too—only an artificial lily,wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, thoughnot exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, undersome clear glass bell.  The perfection of household care, of highpolish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now lookedmost as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so thatshe might sit with folded hands and with nothing more to do.  Shewas “out of it,” to Marcher’s vision; her work wasover; she communicated with him as across some gulf or from some islandof rest that she had already reached, and it made him feel strangelyabandoned.  Was it—or rather wasn’t it—that iffor so long she had been watching with him the answer to their questionmust have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her occupationwas verily gone?  He had as much as charged her with this in sayingto her, many months before, that she even then knew something she waskeeping from him.  It was a point he had never since ventured topress, vaguely fearing as he did that it might become a difference,perhaps a disagreement, between them.  He had in this later timeturned nervous, which was what he in all the other years had never been;and the oddity was that his nervousness should have waited till he hadbegun to doubt, should have held off so long as he was sure.  Therewas something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring downon his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everythingugly.  He wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if dropit could, by its own august weight.  If she was to forsake himit was surely for her to take leave.  This was why he didn’tdirectly ask her again what she knew; but it was also why, approachingthe matter from another side, he said to her in the course of his visit:“What do you regard as the very worst that at this time of daycanhappen to me?”

He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with theodd irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchangedideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals,washed like figures traced in sea-sand.  It had ever been the markof their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a littledismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently. “Oh yes, I’ve repeatedly thought, only it always seemedto me of old that I couldn’t quite make up my mind.  I thoughtof dreadful things, between which it was difficult to choose; and somust you have done.”

“Rather!  I feel now as if I had scarce done anythingelse.  I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking ofnothing but dreadful things.  A great many of them I’ve atdifferent times named to you, but there were others I couldn’tname.”

“They were too, too dreadful?”

“Too, too dreadful—some of them.”

She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, aninconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness,were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only beautiful witha strange cold light—a light that somehow was a part of the effect,if it wasn’t rather a part of the cause, of the pale hard sweetnessof the season and the hour.  “And yet,” she said atlast, “there are horrors we’ve mentioned.”

It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in sucha picture, talk of “horrors,” but she was to do in a fewminutes something stranger yet—though even of this he was to takethe full measure but afterwards—and the note of it already trembled. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes werehaving again the high flicker of their prime.  He had to admit,however, what she said.  “Oh yes, there were times when wedid go far.”  He caught himself in the act of speaking asif it all were over.  Well, he wished it were; and the consummationdepended for him clearly more and more on his friend.

But she had now a soft smile.  “Oh far—!”

It was oddly ironic.  “Do you mean you’re preparedto go further?”

She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look athim, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread.  “Doyou consider that we went far?”

“Why I thought it the point you were just making—thatwe hadlooked most things in the face.”

“Including each other?”  She still smiled. “But you’re quite right.  We’ve had togethergreat imaginations, often great fears; but some of them have been unspoken.”

“Then the worst—we haven’t faced that.  Icouldface it, I believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel,” he explained, “as if I had lost my power to conceivesuch things.”  And he wondered if he looked as blank as hesounded.  “It’s spent.”

“Then why do you assume,” she asked, “that mineisn’t?”

“Because you’ve given me signs to the contrary. It isn’t a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isn’t a question now of choosing.”  At last he cameout with it.  “You know something I don’t.  You’veshown me that before.”

These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment, exceedingly,and she spoke with firmness.  “I’ve shown you, my dear,nothing.”

He shook his head.  “You can’t hide it.”

“Oh, oh!” May Bartram sounded over what she couldn’thide.  It was almost a smothered groan.

“You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as ofsomething you were afraid I should find out.  Your answer was thatI couldn’t, that I wouldn’t, and I don’t pretend Ihave.  But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now howit must have been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities,has settled itself for you as the worst.  This,” he wenton, “is why I appeal to you.  I’m only afraid of ignoranceto-day—I’m not afraid of knowledge.”  And thenas for a while she said nothing: “What makes me sure is that Isee in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances,that you’re out of it.  You’ve done.  You’vehad your experience.  You leave me to my fate.”

Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as on a decisionto be made, so that her manner was fairly an avowal, though still, witha small fine inner stiffness, an imperfect surrender.  “Itwouldbe the worst,” she finally let herself say. “I mean the thing I’ve never said.”

It hushed him a moment.  “More monstrous than all themonstrosities we’ve named?”

“More monstrous.  Isn’t that what you sufficientlyexpress,” she asked, “in calling it the worst?”

Marcher thought.  “Assuredly—if you mean, as I do,something that includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable.”

“It would if it shouldhappen,” said May Bartram. “What we’re speaking of, remember, is only my idea.”

“It’s your belief,” Marcher returned.  “That’senough for me.  I feel your beliefs are right.  Thereforeif, having this one, you give me no more light on it, you abandon me.”

“No, no!” she repeated.  “I’m with you—don’tyou see?—still.”  And as to make it more vivid to himshe rose from her chair—a movement she seldom risked in thesedays—and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairnessand slimness.  “I haven’t forsaken you.”

It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance,and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, it wouldhave touched him to pain more than to pleasure.  But the cold charmin her eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest ofher person, so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of youth. He couldn’t pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed—ascapable even yet of helping him.  It was as if, at the same time,her light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the mostof it.  There passed before him with intensity the three or fourthings he wanted most to know; but the question that came of itselfto his lips really covered the others.  “Then tell me ifI shall consciously suffer.”

She promptly shook her head.  “Never!”

It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced onhim an extraordinary effect.  “Well, what’s betterthan that?  Do you call that the worst?”

“You think nothing is better?” she asked.

She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered,though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief.  “Whynot, if one doesn’t know?”  After which, astheir eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened,and something to his purpose came prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and hegasped with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everythingfitted.  The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became articulate. “I see—if I don’t suffer!”

In her own look, however, was doubt.  “You see what?”

“Why what you mean—what you’ve always meant.”

She again shook her head.  “What I mean isn’t whatI’ve always meant.  It’s different.”

“It’s something new?”

She hung back from it a little.  “Something new. It’s not what you think.  I see what you think.”

His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong. “It isn’t that I ama blockhead?” he askedbetween faintness and grimness.  “It isn’t that it’sall a mistake?”

“A mistake?” she pityingly echoed.  Thatpossibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteedhim the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she hadin mind.  “Oh no,” she declared; “it’snothing of that sort.  You’ve been right.”

Yet he couldn’t help asking himself if she weren’t, thuspressed, speaking but to save him.  It seemed to him he shouldbe most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude. “Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan’t have beena bigger idiot than I can bear to know?  I haven’tlived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven’t waited but to see the door shut in my face?”

She shook her head again.  “However the case stands thatisn’t the truth.  Whatever the reality, it isa reality. The door isn’t shut.  The door’s open,” saidMay Bartram.

“Then something’s to come?”

She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him. “It’s never too late.”  She had, with her glidingstep, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer tohim, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken. Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she wasat once hesitating and deciding to say.  He had been standing bythe chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small perfect oldFrench clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture;and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped ita little as for support and encouragement.  She only kept him waiting,however; that is he only waited.  It had become suddenly, fromher movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had somethingmore to give him; her wasted face delicately shone with it—itglittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in her expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her face was the truth,and strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadfulwas still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefullyfor her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent,her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and hisstare all kind but all expectant.  The end, none the less, wasthat what he had expected failed to come to him.  Something elsetook place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closingof her eyes.  She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder,and though he remained staring—though he stared in fact but theharder—turned off and regained her chair.  It was the endof what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.

“Well, you don’t say—?”

She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunkback strangely pale.  “I’m afraid I’m too ill.”

“Too ill to tell me?” it sprang up sharp to him, andalmost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light. He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but sheanswered as if she had heard the words.

“Don’t you know—now?”

“‘Now’—?”   She had spokenas if some difference had been made within the moment.  But hermaid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them.  “Iknow nothing.”  And he was afterwards to say to himself thathe must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as toshow that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the wholequestion.

“Oh!” said May Bartram.

“Are you in pain?” he asked as the woman went to her.

“No,” said May Bartram.

Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room,fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which,however, he showed once more his mystification.

“What then has happened?”

She was once more, with her companion’s help, on her feet,and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hatand gloves and had reached the door.  Yet he waited for her answer. “What wasto,” she said.

CHAPTER V

He came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him, andas it was literally the first time this had occurred in the long stretchof their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry—orfeeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the beginningof the end—and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially withthe one he was least able to keep down.  She was dying and he wouldlose her; she was dying and his life would end.  He stopped inthe Park, into which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrentdoubt.  Away from her the doubt pressed again; in her presencehe had believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himselfinto the explanation that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserablewarmth for him and least of a cold torment.  She had deceived himto save him—to put him off with something in which he should beable to rest.  What could the thing that was to happen to him be,after all, but just this thing that had began to happen?  Her dying,her death, his consequent solitude—that was what he had figuredas the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of thegods.  He had had her word for it as he left her—what elseon earth could she have meant?  It wasn’t a thing of a monstrousorder; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune thatoverwhelmed and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waitinghe would bend his pride to accept it.  He sat down on a bench inthe twilight.  He hadn’t been a fool.  Something hadbeen, as she had said, to come.  Before he rose indeed ithad quite struck him that the final fact really matched with the longavenue through which he had had to reach it.  As sharing his suspenseand as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, shehad come with him every step of the way.  He had lived by her aid,and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming than that?

Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him a whileat bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of days on eachof which he asked about her only again to have to turn away, she endedhis trial by receiving him where she had always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some hazard into the presence of somany of the things that were, consciously, vainly, half their past,and there was scant service left in the gentleness of her mere desire,all too visible, to check his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly what she wanted; the one thing more for her own peacewhile she could still put out her hand.  He was so affected byher state that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everythinggo; it was she herself therefore who brought him back, took up again,before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time.  Sheshowed how she wished to leave their business in order.  “I’mnot sure you understood.  You’ve nothing to wait for more. It hascome.”

Oh how he looked at her!  “Really?”

“Really.”

“The thing that, as you said, wasto?”

“The thing that we began in our youth to watch for.”

Face to face with her once more he believed her; it was a claim towhich he had so abjectly little to oppose.  “You mean thatit has come as a positive definite occurrence, with a name and a date?”

“Positive.  Definite.  I don’t know about the‘name,’ but, oh with a date!”

He found himself again too helplessly at sea.  “But comein the night—come and passed me by?”

May Bartram had her strange faint smile.  “Oh no, it hasn’tpassed you by!”

“But if I haven’t been aware of it and it hasn’ttouched me—?”

“Ah your not being aware of it”—and she seemedto hesitate an instant to deal with this—“your not beingaware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness.  It’sthe wonder ofthe wonder.”  She spoke as with thesoftness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all,with the perfect straightness of a sibyl.  She visibly knew thatshe knew, and the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in itshigh character, with the law that had ruled him.  It was the truevoice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded. “It hastouched you,” she went on.  “Ithas done its office.  It has made you all its own.”

“So utterly without my knowing it?”

“So utterly without your knowing it.”  His hand,as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smilingalways now, she placed her own on it.  “It’s enoughif Iknow it.”

“Oh!” he confusedly breathed, as she herself of lateso often had done.

“What I long ago said is true.  You’ll never knownow, and I think you ought to be content.  You’ve hadit,” said May Bartram.

“But had what?”

“Why what was to have marked you out.  The proof of yourlaw.  It has acted.  I’m too glad,” she then bravelyadded, “to have been able to see what it’s not.”

He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that itwas all beyond him, and that shewas too, he would still havesharply challenged her hadn’t he so felt it an abuse of her weaknessto do more than take devoutly what she gave him, take it hushed as toa revelation.  If he did speak, it was out of the foreknowledgeof his loneliness to come.  “If you’re glad of whatit’s ‘not’ it might then have been worse?”

She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her; with whichafter a moment: “Well, you know our fears.”

He wondered.  “It’s something then we never feared?”

On this slowly she turned to him.  “Did we ever dream,with all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus?”

He tried for a little to make out that they had; but it was as iftheir dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick coldmist through which thought lost itself.  “It might have beenthat we couldn’t talk.”

“Well”—she did her best for him—“notfrom this side.  This, you see,” she said, “is theotherside.”

“I think,” poor Marcher returned, “that all sidesare the same to me.”  Then, however, as she gently shookher head in correction: “We mightn’t, as it were, have gotacross—?”

“To where we are—no.  We’re here”—shemade her weak emphasis.

“And much good does it do us!” was her friend’sfrank comment.

“It does us the good it can.  It does us the good thatitisn’t here.  It’s past.  It’sbehind,” said May Bartram.  “Before—” buther voice dropped.

He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his yearning. She after all told him nothing but that his light had failed—whichhe knew well enough without her.  “Before—?”he blankly echoed.

“Before you see, it was always to come.  That keptit present.”

“Oh I don’t care what comes now!  Besides,”Marcher added, “it seems to me I liked it better present, as yousay, than I can like it absent with yourabsence.”

“Oh mine!”—and her pale hands made light of it.

“With the absence of everything.”  He had a dreadfulsense of standing there before her for—so far as anything butthis proved, this bottomless drop was concerned—the last timeof their life.  It rested on him with a weight he felt he couldscarce bear, and this weight it apparently was that still pressed outwhat remained in him of speakable protest.  “I believe you;but I can’t begin to pretend I understand.  Nothing,for me, is past; nothing willpass till I pass myself, whichI pray my stars may be as soon as possible.  Say, however,”he added, “that I’ve eaten my cake, as you contend, to thelast crumb—how can the thing I’ve never felt at all be thething I was marked out to feel?”

She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. “You take your ‘feelings’ for granted.  You wereto suffer your fate.  That was not necessarily to know it.”

“How in the world—when what is such knowledge but suffering?”

She looked up at him a while in silence.  “No—youdon’t understand.”

“I suffer,” said John Marcher.

“Don’t, don’t!”

“How can I help at least that?”

“Don’t!” May Bartram repeated.

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, thathe stared an instant—stared as if some light, hitherto hidden,had shimmered across his vision.  Darkness again closed over it,but the gleam had already become for him an idea.  “BecauseI haven’t the right—?”

“Don’t know—when you needn’t,”she mercifully urged.  “You needn’t—for we shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t?”  If he could but know what shemeant!

“No— it’s too much.”

“Too much?” he still asked but with a mystification thatwas the next moment of a sudden to give way.  Her words, if theymeant something, affected him in this light—the light also ofher wasted face—as meaning all, and the sense of what knowledgehad been for herself came over him with a rush which broke through intoa question.  “Is it of that then you’re dying?”

She but watched him, gravely at first, as to see, with this, wherehe was, and she might have seen something or feared something that movedher sympathy.  “I would live for you still—if I could.” Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she werefor a last time trying.  “But I can’t!” she saidas she raised them again to take leave of him.

She couldn’t indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared,and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darknessand doom.  They had parted for ever in that strange talk; accessto her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbiddenhim; he was feeling now moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, thetwo or three relatives attracted doubtless by the presumption of whatshe had to “leave,” how few were the rights, as they werecalled in such cases, that he had to put forward, and how odd it mighteven seem that their intimacy shouldn’t have given him more ofthem.  The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even though she hadbeen nothing in such a person’s life.  She had been a featureof features in his, for what else was it to have been so indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence, baffling for him theanomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it mightyet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed held to recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was the case more sharplyon the occasion of the last offices rendered, in the great grey Londoncemetery, to what had been mortal, to what had been precious, in hisfriend.  The concourse at her grave was not numerous, but he sawhimself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than if therehad been a thousand others.  He was in short from this moment faceto face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little bythe interest May Bartram had taken in him.  He couldn’t quitehave said what he expected, but he hadn’t surely expected thisapproach to a double privation.  Not only had her interest failedhim, but he seemed to feel himself unattended—and for a reasonhe couldn’t seize—by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety,if nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved.  It was as if, inthe view of society he had not beenmarkedly bereaved, as ifthere still failed some sign or proof of it, and as if none the lesshis character could never be affirmed nor the deficiency ever made up. There were moments as the weeks went by when he would have liked, bysome almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of hisloss, in order that it mightbe questioned and his retort, tothe relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an irritationmore helpless followed fast on these, the moments during which, turningthings over with a good conscience but with a bare horizon, he foundhimself wondering if he oughtn’t to have begun, so to speak, furtherback.

He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last speculationhad others to keep it company.  What could he have done, afterall, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as it were, away? He couldn’t have made known she was watching him, for that wouldhave published the superstition of the Beast.  This was what closedhis mouth now—now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancyand that the Beast had stolen away.  It sounded too foolish andtoo flat; the difference for him in this particular, the extinctionin his life of the element of suspense, was such as in fact to surprisehim.  He could scarce have said what the effect resembled; theabrupt cessation, the positive prohibition, of music perhaps, more thananything else, in some place all adjusted and all accustomed to sonorityand to attention.  If he could at any rate have conceived liftingthe veil from his image at some moment of the past (what had he done,after all, if not lift it to her?) so to do this to-day, to talkto people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide to them that henow felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them listen asto a goodwife’s tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded throughhis beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, whereno evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguelylooking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it. He walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious,and, stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life struckhim as closer, asked himself yearningly, wondered secretly and sorely,if it would have lurked here or there.  It would have at all eventssprung; what was at least complete was his belief in the truth itselfof the assurance given him.  The change from his old sense to hisnew was absolute and final: what was to happen had so absolutely andfinally happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his futureas to know a hope; so absent in short was any question of anything stillto come.  He was to live entirely with the other question, thatof his unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrablymuffled and masked.

The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he couldn’tperhaps have consented to live but for the possibility of guessing. She had told him, his friend, not to guess; she had forbidden him, sofar as he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied the powerin him to learn: which were so many things, precisely, to deprive himof rest.  It wasn’t that he wanted, he argued for fairness,that anything past and done should repeat itself; it was only that heshouldn’t, as an anticlimax, have been taken sleeping so soundas not to be able to win back by an effort of thought the lost stuffof consciousness.  He declared to himself at moments that he wouldeither win it back or have done with consciousness for ever; he madethis idea his one motive in fine, made it so much his passion that noneother, to compare with it, seemed ever to have touched him.  Thelost stuff of consciousness became thus for him as a strayed or stolenchild to an unappeasable father; he hunted it up and down very muchas if he were knocking at doors and enquiring of the police.  Thiswas the spirit in which, inevitably, he set himself to travel; he startedon a journey that was to be as long as he could make it; it danced beforehim that, as the other side of the globe couldn’t possibly haveless to say to him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have more. Before he quitted London, however, he made a pilgrimage to May Bartram’sgrave, took his way to it through the endless avenues of the grim suburbannecropolis, sought it out in the wilderness of tombs, and, though hehad come but for the renewal of the act of farewell, found himself,when he had at last stood by it, beguiled into long intensities. He stood for an hour, powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetratethe darkness of death; fixing with his eyes her inscribed name and date,beating his forehead against the fact of the secret they kept, drawinghis breath, while he waited, as if some sense would in pity of him risefrom the stones.  He kneeled on the stones, however, in vain; theykept what they concealed; and if the face of the tomb did become a facefor him it was because her two names became a pair of eyes that didn’tknow him.  He gave them a last long look, but no palest light broke.

CHAPTER VI

He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths ofAsia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlativesanctity; but what was present to him everywhere was that for a manwho had known what hehad known the world was vulgar and vain. The state of mind in which he had lived for so many years shone outto him, in reflexion, as a light that coloured and refined, a lightbeside which the glow of the East was garish cheap and thin.  Theterrible truth was that he had lost—with everything else—adistinction as well; the things he saw couldn’t help being commonwhen he had become common to look at them.  He was simply now oneof them himself—he was in the dust, without a peg for the senseof difference; and there were hours when, before the temples of godsand the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for nobleness of associationto the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb.  That hadbecome for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one witnessof a past glory.  It was all that was left to him for proof orpride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thoughtof it.  Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrowof his return.  He was drawn there this time as irresistibly asthe other, yet with a confidence, almost, that was doubtless the effectof the many months that had elapsed.  He had lived, in spite ofhimself, into his change of feeling, and in wandering over the earthhad wandered, as might be said, from the circumference to the centreof his desert.  He had settled to his safety and accepted perforcehis extinction; figuring to himself, with some colour, in the likenessof certain little old men he remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagreand wizened as they might look, it was related that they had in theirtime fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesses.  Theyindeed had been wondrous for others while he was but wondrous for himself;which, however, was exactly the cause of his haste to renew the wonderby getting back, as he might put it, into his own presence.  Thathad quickened his steps and checked his delay.  If his visit wasprompt it was because he had been separated so long from the part ofhimself that alone he now valued.

It’s accordingly not false to say that he reached his goalwith a certain elation and stood there again with a certain assurance. The creature beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangelynow, the place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression. It met him in mildness—not, as before, in mockery; it wore forhim the air of conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in thingsthat have closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselvesto the connexion.  The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tendedflowers affected him so as belonging to him that he resembled for thehour a contented landlord reviewing a piece of property.  Whateverhad happened—well, had happened.  He had not come back thistime with the vanity of that question, his former worrying “What,what?” now practically so spent.  Yet he would nonethe less never again so cut himself off from the spot; he would comeback to it every month, for if he did nothing else by its aid he atleast held up his head.  It thus grew for him, in the oddest way,a positive resource; he carried out his idea of periodical returns,which took their place at last among the most inveterate of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplifiedworld this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth onwhich he could still most live.  It was as if, being nothing anywhereelse for any one, nothing even for himself, he were just everythinghere, and if not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witnessbut John Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he couldscan like an open page.  The open page was the tomb of his friend,and there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life, therethe backward reaches in which he could lose himself.  He did thisfrom time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander throughthe old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in themost extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander,which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence—notwandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his revolution,never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so to speak,of orientation.  Thus in short he settled to live—feedingall on the sense that he once hadlived, and dependent on itnot alone for a support but for an identity.

It sufficed him in its way for months and the year elapsed; it woulddoubtless even have carried him further but for an accident, superficiallyslight, which moved him, quite in another direction, with a force beyondany of his impressions of Egypt or of India.  It was a thing ofthe merest chance—the turn, as he afterwards felt, of a hair,though he was indeed to live to believe that if light hadn’t cometo him in this particular fashion it would still have come in another. He was to live to believe this, I say, though he was not to live, Imay not less definitely mention, to do much else.  We allow himat any rate the benefit of the conviction, struggling up for him atthe end, that, whatever might have happened or not happened, he wouldhave come round of himself to the light.  The incident of an autumnday had put the match to the train laid from of old by his misery. With the light before him he knew that even of late his ache had onlybeen smothered.  It was strangely drugged, but it throbbed; atthe touch it began to bleed.  And the touch, in the event, wasthe face of a fellow-mortal.  This face, one grey afternoon whenthe leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher’s own,at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade.  Hefelt it, that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady thrust. The person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had noticed,on reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance away,a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor would probablymatch it for frankness.  This fact alone forbade further attention,though during the time he stayed he remained vaguely conscious of hisneighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose bowed back,among the clustered monuments and mortuary yews, was constantly presented. Marcher’s theory that these were elements in contact with whichhe himself revived, had suffered, on this occasion, it may be granted,a marked, an excessive check.  The autumn day was dire for himas none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had notyet known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram’s name. He rested without power to move, as if some spring in him, some spellvouchsafed, had suddenly been broken for ever.  If he could havedone that moment as he wanted he would simply have stretched himselfon the slab that was ready to take him, treating it as a place preparedto receive his last sleep.  What in all the wide world had he nowto keep awake for?  He stared before him with the question, andit was then that, as one of the cemetery walks passed near him, he caughtthe shock of the face.

His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself, withforce enough in him, would have done by now, and was advancing alongthe path on his way to one of the gates.  This brought him close,and his pace, was slow, so that—and all the more as there wasa kind of hunger in his look—the two men were for a minute directlyconfronted.  Marcher knew him at once for one of the deeply stricken—aperception so sharp that nothing else in the picture comparatively lived,neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and class;nothing lived but the deep ravage of the features that he showed. He showedthem—that was the point; he was moved, as hepassed, by some impulse that was either a signal for sympathy or, morepossibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow.  He might already havebeen aware of our friend, might at some previous hour have noticed inhim the smooth habit of the scene, with which the state of his own sensesso scantly consorted, and might thereby have been stirred as by an overtdiscord.  What Marcher was at all events conscious of was in thefirst place that the image of scarred passion presented to him was conscioustoo—of something that profaned the air; and in the second that,roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment looking afterit, as it went, with envy.  The most extraordinary thing that hadhappened to him—though he had given that name to other mattersas well—took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequenceof this impression.  The stranger passed, but the raw glare ofhis grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, whatwound it expressed, what injury not to be healed.  What had theman had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?

Something—and this reached him with a pang—that he,John Marcher, hadn’t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher’sarid end.  No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passionmeant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been hisdeep ravage?  The extraordinary thing we speak of was the suddenrush of the result of this question.  The sight that had just methis eyes named to him, as in letters of quick flame, something he hadutterly, insanely missed, and what he had missed made these things atrain of fire, made them mark themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had seen outsideof his life, not learned it within, the waya woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself: such was theforce of his conviction of the meaning of the stranger’s face,which still flared for him as a smoky torch.  It hadn’t cometo him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had brushed him,jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolenceof accident.  Now that the illumination had begun, however, itblazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there gazing at wasthe sounded void of his life.  He gazed, he drew breath, in pain;he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharperincision than ever the open page of his story.  The name on thetable smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, and what itsaid to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed. This was the awful thought, the answer to all the past, the vision atthe dread clearness of which he turned as cold as the stone beneathhim.  Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed;leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance—hehad emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, theman, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.  That was therare stroke—that was his visitation.  So he saw it, as wesay, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted.  So shehad seen it while he didn’t, and so she served at this hour todrive the truth home.  It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, thatall the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.  Thisthe companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she hadthen offered him the chance to baffle his doom.  One’s doom,however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him his own hadcome down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offeredhim.

The escape would have been to love her; then, thenhe wouldhave lived.  Shehad lived—who could say now withwhat passion?—since she had loved him for himself; whereas hehad never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in thechill of his egotism and the light of her use.  Her spoken wordscame back to him—the chain stretched and stretched.  TheBeast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; ithad sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted,but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risenfrom her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelesslyturned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen whereit wasto fall.  He had justified his fear and achievedhis fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was tofail of; and a moan now rose to his lips as he remembered she had prayedhe mightn’t know.  This horror of waking—thiswas knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears inhis eyes seemed to freeze.  Through them, none the less, he triedto fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he mightfeel the pain.  That at least, belated and bitter, had somethingof the taste of life.  But the bitterness suddenly sickened him,and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty ofhis image, what had been appointed and done.  He saw the Jungleof his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceivedit, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap thatwas to settle him.  His eyes darkened—it was close; and,instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself,face down, on the tomb.

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