CHAPTER II
It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of
a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the
particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to
what he more and more believed to be his privilege. It was what in
these weeks he was living for - since he really felt life to begin
but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the
ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew
himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let
himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the
moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short
autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he
found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him, most
intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine
attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the
great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished
he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later
- rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil -
he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it
high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in
open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by
passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called
it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a practice
he found he could perfectly "work" without exciting remark; no one
was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was
moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine.
He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm
proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat
Avenue "officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at
eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been
noticed as emerging at two. He walked there on the crisp November
nights, arrived regularly at the evening's end; it was as easy to
do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his
hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was
ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he
had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to
his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and
promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience
something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified,
all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed,
loosely and pleasantly, old relations - met indeed, so far as he
could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in
spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had
spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who
might have watched it, to edification, he was positively rather
liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success - and all
with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere
surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their
corks - just as his gestures of response were the extravagant
shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game
of OMBRES CHINOISES. He projected himself all day, in thought,
straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into
the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he
had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for
him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars
of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick
on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white
squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and
that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an
early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating
tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where? - in the
depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that
might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe,
abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he
put his stick noiselessly away in a corner - feeling the place once
more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave
crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round
its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical
other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the
sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear,
of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did
therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them
into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They
were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren't really
sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto felt them -
before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the
Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on
tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from
storey to storey.
That was the essence of his vision - which was all rank folly, if
one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied,
but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed
and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as
clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash. His
ALTER EGO "walked" - that was the note of his image of him, while
his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to
waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all
restlessly, he himself did - Mrs. Muldoon had been right,
absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence he
watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious
and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already
quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from
night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in
his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many
superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that
life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure
so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that
demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a
creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any
beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very
practices of the chase positively came again into play; there were
even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a
sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor and
mountain and desert, revived for him - and to the increase of his
keenness - by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at
moments - once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf
or in some recess - stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing
himself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old
the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself holding his breath
and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created
by big game alone.
He wasn't afraid (though putting himself the question as he
believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters with
the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having
put it); and this indeed - since here at least he might be frank! -
because of the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he
himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain,
beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into
categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his own
perception, of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created;
though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on his probably
having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness,
unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last,
had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so
turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an
incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite
dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that
side of his privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an
extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances
and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence
the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in
the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting
effects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he could
still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing
it was there behind him in case of need, see his way about,
visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness. It made
him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat;
he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large
shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't verily be, for the poor
hard-pressed ALTER EGO, to be confronted with such a type.
He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs.
Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that
she shouldn't notice: he liked - oh this he did like, and above
all in the upper rooms! - the sense of the hard silver of the
autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare
of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would
have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social;
this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease
certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that
all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.
He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and
the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central
shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his
rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the
rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The
place was there more subdivided; a large "extension" in particular,
where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in
nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications
especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a
time, to look far down - not deterred from his gravity even while
aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn
simpleton playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact he might
himself make that ironic RAPPROCHEMENT; but within the walls, and
in spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against
the cynical light of New York.
It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of
his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it
to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate"
his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to
cultivation - which indeed was but another name for his manner of
spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to
perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so
fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his
general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him at once.
This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite
frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition - absolutely
unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his
resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated
absence of three nights - of his being definitely followed, tracked
at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should
the less confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to
pursue. It worried, it finally quite broke him up, for it proved,
of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his
book. He was kept in sight while remaining himself - as regards
the essence of his position - sightless, and his only recourse then
was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about,
retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least
the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true
that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvres recalled to
him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from
behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of
the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, so
that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become
constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his
intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the
premises the baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and
the result of the third was to confirm the after-effect of the
second.
On his return that night - the night succeeding his last
intermission - he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase
with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known. "He's
THERE, at the top, and waiting - not, as in general, falling back
for disappearance. He's holding his ground, and it's the first
time - which is a proof, isn't it? that something has happened for
him." So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his foot
on the lowest stair; in which position he felt as never before the
air chilled by his logic. He himself turned cold in it, for he
seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. "Harder pressed?
- yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I've
come, as they say, 'to stay.' He finally doesn't like and can't
bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced
interest, now balances with his dread. I've hunted him till he has
'turned'; that, up there, is what has happened - he's the fanged or
the antlered animal brought at last to bay." There came to him, as
I say - but determined by an influence beyond my notation! - the
acuteness of this certainty; under which however the next moment he
had broken into a sweat that he would as little have consented to
attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it
for enterprise. It marked none the less a prodigious thrill, a
thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also
represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most
joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication
of consciousness.
"He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to
anger, he'll fight!" - this intense impression made a single
mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was
wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager,
since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this
ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him.
It bristled there - somewhere near at hand, however unseen still -
as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at
last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a
sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent
with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in
just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the
drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole
situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was
already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be
in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form,
actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form
in which he might passively know it.
The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in
him, and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most
memorable or really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis,
was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious COMBAT,
the sense of a need to hold on to something, even after the manner
of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline; the vivid
impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge, somehow and upon
something - to show himself, in a word, that he wasn't afraid. The
state of "holding on" was thus the state to which he was
momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the great
vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having
clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the
nearest chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate - of this he
WAS aware - into something unprecedented since his original
appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held them
tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that
terror of vision. When he opened them the room, the other
contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed lighter - so light,
almost, that at first he took the change for day. He stood firm,
however that might be, just where he had paused; his resistance had
helped him - it was as if there were something he had tided over.
He knew after a little what this was - it had been in the imminent
danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without
this he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that,
still with his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would
have known how, straight and swiftly, to the bottom.
Well, as he had held out, here he was - still at the top, among the
more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others, of
all the rest of the house, still to run when it should be his time
to go. He would go at his time - only at his time: didn't he go
every night very much at the same hour? He took out his watch -
there was light for that: it was scarcely a quarter past one, and
he had never withdrawn so soon. He reached his lodgings for the
most part at two - with his walk of a quarter of an hour. He would
wait for the last quarter - he wouldn't stir till then; and he kept
his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting while he held it
that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which he
recognised, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to
make. It would prove his courage - unless indeed the latter might
most be proved by his budging at last from his place. What he
mainly felt now was that, since he hadn't originally scuttled, he
had his dignities - which had never in his life seemed so many -
all to preserve and to carry aloft. This was before him in truth
as a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater
romance. That remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the
next instant with a finer light; since what age of romance, after
all, could have matched either the state of his mind or,
"objectively," as they said, the wonder of his situation? The only
difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his
head as in a parchment scroll, he might then - that is in the
heroic time - have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his
other grasp.
At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the
next room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the
course of a minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to
possess himself of. The door between the rooms was open, and from
the second another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he
remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well, but
there was a fourth, beyond them, without issue save through the
preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step again, was
appreciably a help; though even in recognising this he lingered
once more a little by the chimney-piece on which his light had
rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he
found himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and
comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start
that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of
having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the
door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he
now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing
it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would
have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without
other approach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction,
been closed SINCE his former visitation, the matter probably of a
quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the
wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding
his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely it had been
SUBSEQUENTLY closed - that is it had been on his previous passage
indubitably open!
He took it full in the face that something had happened between -
that he couldn't have noticed before (by which he meant on his
original tour of all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier
had exceptionally presented itself. He had indeed since that
moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have
muddled for him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself
that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and,
inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door
after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never
did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the
essence of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the
first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain: the strange
apparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled "prey"
(which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to
apply!) was the form of success his imagination had most cherished,
projecting into it always a refinement of beauty. He had known
fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped;
had fifty times gasped to himself. "There!" under some fond brief
hallucination. The house, as the case stood, admirably lent
itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of
the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication
of doors - the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost
complete proscription of them; but it had fairly contributed to
provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically,
as he might say, focused and studied in diminishing perspective and
as by a rest for the elbow.
It was with these considerations that his present attention was
charged - they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous.
He COULDN'T, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he
hadn't, if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that
there had been another agent? Another agent? - he had been
catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but
when had he been so close as in this simple, this logical, this
completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that one
might have TAKEN it for personal; yet for what did Brydon take it,
he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt his eyes almost
leave their sockets. Ah this time at last they WERE, the two, the
opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as much as
one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not
before, the question of courage - for what he knew the blank face
of the door to say to him was "Show us how much you have!" It
stared, it glared back at him with that challenge; it put to him
the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not? Oh to
have this consciousness was to THINK - and to think, Brydon knew,
as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have
acted! Not to have acted - that was the misery and the pang - was
even still not to act; was in fact ALL to feel the thing in
another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how
long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for
his vibration had already changed - as just by the effect of its
intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of
the thing palpably proveably DONE, thus giving notice like some
stark signboard - under that accession of accent the situation
itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind
on what it had turned to.
It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme
hint, for him, of the value of Discretion! This slowly dawned, no
doubt - for it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold,
had he been stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or
retreated. It was the strangest of all things that now when, by
his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his
shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of
his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his
unrest assuaged - it was amazing, but it was also exquisite and
rare, that insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from
him. Discretion - he jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such
a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much
more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he "jumped" at
it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that - at the
end indeed of I know not how long - he did move again, he crossed
straight to the door. He wouldn't touch it - it seemed now that he
might if he would: he would only just wait there a little, to
show, to prove, that he wouldn't. He had thus another station,
close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him; but
with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of
stillness. He listened as if there had been something to hear, but
this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication. "If you
won't then - good: I spare you and I give up. You affect me as by
the appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons
rigid and sublime - what do I know? - we both of us should have
suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged
as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce
- never, on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever - and let
ME!"
That, for Brydon, was the deep sense of this last demonstration -
solemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to be. He brought it to
a close, he turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had
been stirred. He retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt,
he observed, well-nigh to the socket, and marking again, lighten it
as he would, the distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a
moment, he knew himself at the other side of the house. He did
here what he had not yet done at these hours - he opened half a
casement, one of those in the front, and let in the air of the
night; a thing he would have taken at any time previous for a sharp
rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now, and it didn't
matter - broken by his concession and his surrender, which made it
idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street -
its other life so marked even by great lamp-lit vacancy - was
within call, within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again,
high above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some
comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a
scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base. He would have
blessed that sign of life; he would have welcomed positively the
slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had hitherto
only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come
into sight he mightn't have felt the impulse to get into relation
with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.
The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising,
the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his
name, in such a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him:
he was so occupied with the thought of recording his Discretion -
as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate
adversary - that the importance of this loomed large and something
had overtaken all ironically his sense of proportion. If there had
been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the
vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and
sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed somehow,
astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and arm
that mode of descent. If there had been some such uncanny thing as
he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire-escape in the
form of notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed
himself of it as a proof - well, of his present delicacy. He
nursed that sentiment, as the question stood, a little in vain, and
even - at the end of he scarce knew, once more, how long - found
it, as by the action on his mind of the failure of response of the
outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It seemed to him he
had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of
the town was itself under a spell - so unnaturally, up and down the
whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and
the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-
faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had
they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great
builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the
heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and
it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently
became conscious - all the more that the break of day was, almost
incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what a night he had made of
it.
He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time-
values (he had taken hours for minutes - not, as in other tense
situations, minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets
was but the weak, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything
was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window
had been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at last
as for a worse despair. Yet while so deeply demoralised he was
capable again of an impulse denoting - at least by his present
measure - extraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps to the
spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last pulse
of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his
own. This required an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he
had his reason, which over-mastered for the moment everything else.
There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how
should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were
at present open? He could hold to the idea that the closing had
practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to
descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it.
This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him
depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent
action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The image
of the "presence" whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -
this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he
stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to
him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his
dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The
risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this
moment an awful specific form.
He knew - yes, as he had never known anything - that, SHOULD he see
the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It
would mean that the agent of his shame - for his shame was the deep
abjection - was once more at large and in general possession; and
what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would
determine for him. It would send him straight about to the window
he had left open, and by that window, be long ladder and dangling
rope as absent as they would, he saw himself uncontrollably
insanely fatally take his way to the street. The hideous chance of
this he at least could avert; but he could only avert it by
recoiling in time from assurance. He had the whole house to deal
with, this fact was still there; only he now knew that uncertainty
alone could start him. He stole back from where he had checked
himself - merely to do so was suddenly like safety - and, making
blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding
passages behind. Here was the top of the stairs, with a fine large
dim descent and three spacious landings to mark off. His instinct
was all for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors, and,
strangely, when he had in a couple of minutes become aware of this,
it counted somehow for help. He couldn't have spoken, the tone of
his voice would have scared him, and the common conceit or resource
of "whistling in the dark" (whether literally or figuratively) have
appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to hear himself
go, and when he had reached his first landing - taking it all with
no rush, but quite steadily - that stage of success drew from him a
gasp of relief.
The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again
inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which his eyes deflected,
gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the
high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for
him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been,
for queerness of colour, some watery under-world. He tried to
think of something noble, as that his property was really grand, a
splendid possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the
clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it. They
might come in now, the builders, the destroyers - they might come
as soon as they would. At the end of two flights he had dropped to
another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more
left, he recognised the influence of the lower windows, of half-
drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of street-lamps, of the
glazed spaces of the vestibule. This was the bottom of the sea,
which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved
- when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the
banisters - with the marble squares of his childhood. By that time
indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a commoner cause,
better; it had allowed him to stop and draw breath, and the case
increased with the sight of the old black-and-white slabs. But
what he most felt was that now surely, with the element of impunity
pulling him as by hard firm hands, the case was settled for what he
might have seen above had he dared that last look. The closed
door, blessedly remote now, was still closed - and he had only in
short to reach that of the house.
He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to
the last flight and if here again he stopped an instant it was
almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape. It made
him shut his eyes - which opened again to the straight slope of the
remainder of the stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity
almost excessive; inasmuch as the side-lights and the high
fantracery of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall;
an appearance produced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that
the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door
had been thrown far back. Out of that again the QUESTION sprang at
him, making his eyes, as he felt, half-start from his head, as they
had done, at the top of the house, before the sign of the other
door. If he had left that one open, hadn't he left this one
closed, and wasn't he now in MOST immediate presence of some
inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a
knife in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to
lose itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn,
glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular
margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he
looked - to shift and expand and contract.
It was as if there had been something within it, protected by
indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface
behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of
which the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him
even while he stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or
challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his
step he let himself go with the sense that here WAS at last
something to meet, to touch, to take, to know - something all
unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition
for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The penumbra,
dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in
it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored
sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was
to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during
the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering
margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking
the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his
curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it
was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance
and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to
dismay. This only could it be - this only till he recognised, with
his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised
hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in
defiance, it was buried, as for dark deprecation. So Brydon,
before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher
light, hard and acute - his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his
grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of
evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk
lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and
polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have
presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with
more art, as if there had been "treatment," of the consummate sort,
in his every shade and salience. The revulsion, for our friend,
had become, before he knew it, immense - this drop, in the act of
apprehension, to the sense of his adversary's inscrutable
manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him;
for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape
as a proof that HE, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed,
the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the
proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread?
- so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity
that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had
lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally
shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.
"Saved," though, WOULD it be? - Brydon breathed his wonder till the
very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes
produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant
as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of
a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open;
then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it
uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into
Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter; for
the bared identity was too hideous as HIS, and his glare was the
passion of his protest. The face, THAT face, Spencer Brydon's? -
he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and
denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was
unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility! -
He had been "sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this:
the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a
horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the
success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at
NO point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as
it came upon him nearer now, the face was the face of a stranger.
It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding
fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for
the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar,
had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground.
Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and
falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a
life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his
own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his
very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had
gone.
