Terminations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895)/The Altar of the Dead/Chapter 7
VII
He learned in that instant two things: one of them was that even in so long a time she had gathered no knowledge of his great intimacy and his great quarrel; the other was that, in spite of this ignorance, strangely enough, she supplied on the spot a reason for his confusion. "How extraordinary," he presently exclaimed, "that we should never have known!"
She gave a wan smile, which seemed to Stransom stranger even than the fact itself. "I never, never spoke of him."
Stransom looked about the room again. "Why then, if your life had been so full of him?"
"Mayn't I put you that question as well. Hadn't your life also been full of him?"
"Any one's, every one's life was who had the wonderful experience of knowing him. I never spoke of him," Stransom added in a moment, "because he did me—years ago—an unforgetable wrong." She was silent, and with the full effect of his presence all about them it almost startled her visitor to hear no protest escape from her. She accepted his words; he turned his eyes to her again to see in what manner she accepted them. It was with rising tears, and an extraordinary sweetness in the movement of putting out her hand to take his own. Nothing more wonderful had ever appeared to Stransom than, in that little chamber of remembrance and homage, to see her convey with such exquisite mildness that, as from Acton Hague, any injury was credible. The clock ticked in the stillness—Hague had probably given it to her—and while he let her hold his hand with a tenderness that was almost an assumption of responsibility for his old pain as well as his new, Stransom after a minute broke out: "Good God, how he must have used you!"
She dropped his hand at this, got up and, moving across the room, made straight a small picture to which, on examining it, he had given a slight push. Then, turning round on him, with her pale gayety recovered: "I've forgiven him!" she declared.
"I know what you've done," said Stransom; "I know what you've done for years." For a moment they looked at each other across the room, with their long community of service in their eyes. This short passage made, to Stransom's sense, for the woman before him, an immense, an absolutely naked confession; which was presently, suddenly blushing red and changing her place again, what she appeared to become aware that he perceived in it. He got up. "How you must have loved him!"
"Women are not like men. They can love even where they've suffered."
"Women are wonderful," said Stransom. "But I assure you I've forgiven him too."
"If I had known of any thing so strange I wouldn't have brought you here."
"So that we might have gone on in our ignorance to the last?"
"What do you call the last?" she asked, smiling still.
At this he could smile back at her. "You'll see—when it comes."
She reflected a moment. "This is better perhaps; but as we were—it was good."
"Did it never happen that he spoke of me?" Stransom enquired.
Considering more intently, she made no answer, and he quickly recognized that he would have been adequately answered by her asking how often he himself had spoken of their terrible friend. Suddenly a brighter light broke in her face, and an excited idea sprang to her lips in the question: "You have forgiven him?"
"How, if I hadn't, could I linger here?"
She winced, for an instant, at the deep but unintended irony of this; but even while she did so she panted quickly: "Then in the lights on your altar?"
"There's never a light for Acton Hague!"
She stared, with a great visible fall. "But if he's one of your Dead?"
"He's one of the world's, if you like—he's one of yours. But he's not one of mine. Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me. They're mine in death because they were mine in life."
"He was yours in life, then, even if for a while he ceased to be. If you forgave him you went back to him. Those whom we've once loved———"
"Are those who can hurt us most," Stransom broke in.
"Ah, it's not true—you've not forgiven him!" she wailed, with a passion that startled him.
He looked at her a moment. "What was it he did to you?"
"Every thing!" Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell. "Good-by."
He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read of the death of Acton Hague. "You mean that we meet no more?"
"Not as we have met—not there!"
He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement that rang out in the word she so passionately emphasized. "But what's changed—for you?"
She hesitated, in all the vividness of a trouble that, for the first time since he had known her, made her splendidly stern. "How can you understand now when you didn't understand before?"
"I didn't understand before only because I didn't know. Now that I know, I see what I've been living with for years," Stransom went on very gently.
She looked at him with a larger allowance, as if she appreciated his good-nature. "How can I, then, with this new knowledge of my own, ask you to continue to live with it?"
"I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings———" Stransom began; but she quickly interrupted him:
"You set up your altar, and when I wanted one most I found it magnificently ready. I used it, with the gratitude I've always shown you, for I knew from of old that it was dedicated to Death. I told you, long ago, that my Dead were not many. Yours were, but all you had done for them was none too much for my worship! You had placed a great light for Each—I gathered them together for One!"
"We had simply different intentions," Stransom replied. "That, as you say, I perfectly knew, and I don't see why your intention shouldn't still sustain you."
"That's because you're generous—you can imagine and think. But the spell is broken."
It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance, that it really was, and the prospect stretched gray and void before him. All, however, that he could say was: "I hope you'll try before you give up."
"If I had known you had ever known him, I should have taken for granted he had his candle," she presently rejoined. "What's changed, as you say, is that on making the discovery I find he never has had it. That makes my attitude"—she paused a moment, as if thinking how to express it, then said simply—"all wrong."
"Come once again," Stransom pleaded.
"Will you give him his candle?" she asked.
He hesitated, but only because it would sound ungracious; not because he had a doubt of his feeling. "I can't do that!" he declared at last.
"Then good-by." And she gave him her hand again.
He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation of every thing that had opened out to him, he felt the need to recover himself as he could only do in solitude. Yet he lingered—lingered to see if she had no compromise to express, no attenuation to propose. But he only met her great lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was as sorry for him as for any one else. This made him say: "At least, at any rate, I may see you here."
"Oh, yes! come if you like. But I don't think it will do."
Stransom looked round the room once more; he felt in truth by no means sure it would do. He felt also stricken and more and more cold, and his chill was like an ague in which he had to make an effort not to shake. "I must try on my side, if you can't try on yours," he dolefully rejoined. She came out with him to the hall and into the doorway, and here he put to her the question that seemed to him the one he could least answer from his own wit. "Why have you never let me come before?"
"Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should have had to tell her how I came to know you."
"And what would have been the objection to that?"
"It would have entailed other explanations; there would at any rate have been that danger."
"Surely she knew you went every day to church," Stransom objected.
"She didn't know what I went for."
"Of me then she never even heard?"
"You'll think I was deceitful. But I didn't need to be!"
Stransom was now on the lower doorstep, and his hostess held the door half-closed behind him. Through what remained of the opening he saw her framed face. He made a supreme appeal. "What did he do to you?"
"It would have come out—she would have told you. That fear, at my heart—that was my reason!" And she closed the door, shutting him out.