 | A passionate pilgrim |  |
A Passionate Pilgrim.
1. I.
INTENDING to sail for America in the early part
of June, I determined to spend the interval of
six weeks in England, of which I had dreamed much
but as yet knew nothing. I had formed in Italy and
France a resolute preference for old inns, deeming that
what they sometimes cost the ungratified body they
repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London,
therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry far to
the east of Temple Bar, deep in what I used to denominate
the Johnsonian city. Here, on the first evening
of my stay, I descended to the little coffee-room and
bespoke my dinner of the genius of decorum, in the
person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had I crossed
the threshold of this apartment than I felt I had
mown the first swath in my golden-ripe crop of British
“impressions.” The coffee-room of the Red-Lion, like
so many other places and things I was destined to
see in England, seemed to have been waiting for long
on its visage, for me to come and gaze, ravished but
unamazed.
The latent preparedness of the American mind for
even the most delectable features of English life is a
fact which I never fairly probed to its depths. The
roots of it are so deeply buried in the virgin soil of
our primary culture, that, without some great upheaval
of experience, it would be hard to say exactly when
and where and how it begins. It makes an American's
enjoyment of England an emotion more fatal and
sacred than his enjoyment, say, of Italy or Spain. I
had seen the coffee-room of the Red-Lion years ago, at
home, — at Saragossa, Illinois, — in books, in visions,
in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, and Boswell. It
was small, and subdivided into six small compartments
by a series of perpendicular screens of mahogany,
something higher than a man's stature, furnished on
either side with a narrow uncushioned ledge, denominated
in ancient Britain a seat. In each of the little
dining-boxes thus immutably constituted was a small
table, which in crowded seasons was expected to accommodate
the several agents of a fourfold British
hungriness. But crowded seasons had passed away
from the Red-Lion forever. It was crowded only with
memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the
room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling
with unremitted friction, that by gazing awhile into its
lucid blackness I fancied I could discern the lingering
images of a party of gentlemen in periwigs and short-clothes,
just arrived from York by the coach. On the
dark yellow walls, coated by the fumes of English coal,
of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a dozen
melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age, — the Derby
favorite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her
Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpet,
— as old as the mahogany, almost, as the Bank of
England, as the Queen, — into which the waiter in his
lonely revolutions had trodden so many massive soot-flakes
and drops of overflowing beer, that the glowing
looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognized
it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this superior
being would be altogether to misrepresent the process,
owing to which, having dreamed of lamb and spinach,
and a charlotte-russe, I sat down in penitence to a mutton-chop
and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against
the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to
the mahogany partition behind me that vigorous dorsal
resistance which expresses the old-English idea of repose.
The sturdy screen refused even to creak; but
my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency. While
I was waiting for my chop there came into the room a
person whom I took to be my sole fellow-lodger. He
for dinner; the table on the other side of my partition
had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to
the fire, exposed his back to it, consulted his watch,
and looked apparently out of the window, but really
at me. He was a man of something less than middle
age and more than middle stature, though indeed you
would have called him neither young nor tall. He was
chiefly remarkable for his exaggerated leanness. His
hair, very thin on the summit of his head, was dark,
short, and fine. His eye was of a pale, turbid gray,
unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and brow, but not
altogether out of harmony with his colorless, bilious
complexion. His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath
it hung a thin, comely, dark mustache. His
mouth and chin were meagre and uncertain of outline;
not vulgar, perhaps, but weak. A cold, fatal, gentlemanly
weakness, indeed, seemed expressed in his attenuated
person. His eye was restless and deprecating;
his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting his
weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his
head, told of exhausted purpose, of a will relaxed. His
dress was neat and careful, with an air of half-mourning.
I made up my mind on three points: he was
unmarried, he was ill, he was not an Englishman. The
waiter approached him, and they murmured momentarily
in barely audible tones. I heard the words
finally “beer,” with a gentle affirmative. Perhaps he
was a Russian in reduced circumstances; he reminded
me of a certain type of Russian which I had met on
the Continent. While I was weighing this hypothesis,
— for you see I was interested, — there appeared a
short, brisk man with reddish-brown hair, a vulgar
nose, a sharp blue eye, and a red beard, confined to
his lower jaw and chin. My impecunious Russian was
still standing on the rug, with his mild gaze bent on
vacancy; the other marched up to him, and with his
umbrella gave him a playful poke in the concave frontage
of his melancholy waistcoat. “A penny-ha'penny
for your thoughts!” said the new-comer.
His companion uttered an exclamation, stared, then
laid his two hands on the other's shoulders. The
latter looked round at me keenly, compassing me in
a momentary glance. I read in its own high light
that this was an American eyebeam; and with such
confidence that I hardly needed to see its owner, as
he prepared, with his friend, to seat himself at the
table adjoining my own, take from his overcoat-pocket
three New York papers and lay them beside his plate.
As my neighbors proceeded to dine, I became conscious
that, through no indiscretion of my own, a large
portion of their conversation made its way over the
top of our dividing partition and mingled its savor
tone was lowered, as with the intention of secrecy;
but I heard a phrase here and a phrase there distinctly
enough to grow very curious as to the burden
of the whole, and, in fact, to succeed at last in guessing
it. The two voices were pitched in an unforgotten
key, and equally native to our Cisatlantic air; they
seemed to fall upon the muffled medium of surrounding
parlance as the rattle of pease on the face of a
drum. They were American, however, with a difference;
and I had no hesitation in assigning the lighter
and softer of the two to the pale, thin gentleman,
whom I decidedly preferred to his comrade. The
latter began to question him about his voyage.
“Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the
hour we left New York.”
“Well, you do look considerably reduced,” his friend
affirmed.
“Reduced! I 've been on the verge of the grave.
I have n't slept six hours in three weeks.” This was
said with great gravity. “Well, I have made the
voyage for the last time.”
“The deuce you have! You mean to stay here
forever?”
“Here, or somewhere! It 's likely to be a short
forever.”
There was a pause; after which: “You 're the
eh?”
“I almost wish I were.”
“You 're not in love with England, then? I 've
heard people say at home that you dressed and talked
and acted like an Englishman. But I know Englishmen,
and I know you. You 're not one of them,
Searle, not you. You 'll go under here, sir; you 'll
go under as sure as my name is Simmons.”
Following this, I heard a sudden clatter, as of the
dropping of a knife and fork. “Well, you 're a delicate
sort of creature, Simmons! I have been wandering
about all day in this accursed city, ready to
cry with home-sickness and heart-sickness and every
possible sort of sickness, and thinking, in the absence
of anything better, of meeting you here this evening,
and of your uttering some syllable of cheer and comfort,
and giving me some feeble ray of hope. Go
under? Am I not under now? I can't sink lower,
except to sink into my grave!”
Mr. Simmons seems to have staggered a moment
under this outbreak of passion. But the next,
“Don't cry, Searle,” I heard him say. “Remember
the waiter. I 've grown Englishman enough for
that. For heaven's sake, don't let us have any feelings.
Feelings will do nothing for you here. It 's
best to come to the point. Tell me in three words
what you expect of me.”
I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had
collapsed in his chair. “Upon my word, Simmons,
you are inconceivable. You got my letter?”
“Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to
get anything in my life.”
At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath,
which it was well perhaps that I but partially heard.
“John Simmons,” he cried, “what devil possesses
you? Are you going to betray me here in a foreign
land, to turn out a false friend, a heartless rogue?”
“Go on, sir,” said sturdy Simmons. “Pour it all
out. I 'll wait till you have done. — Your beer is
very bad,” to the waiter. “I 'll have some more.”
“For God's sake, explain yourself!” cried Searle.
There was a pause, at the end of which I heard
Mr. Simmons set down his empty tankard with emphasis.
“You poor morbid man,” he resumed, “I
don't want to say anything to make you feel sore.
I pity you. But you must allow me to say that
you have acted like a blasted fool!”
Mr. Searle seemed to have made an effort to compose
himself. “Be so good as to tell me what was
the meaning of your letter.”
“I was a fool, myself, to have written that letter.
It came of my infernal meddlesome benevolence. I
had much better have let you alone. To tell you
the plain truth, I never was so horrified in my life
you had come out here to seek your fortune.”
“What did you expect me to do?”
“I expected you to wait patiently till I had made
further inquiries and had written to you again.”
“You have made further inquiries now?”
“Inquiries! I have made assaults.”
“And you find I have no claim?”
“No claim to call a claim. It looked at first as
if you had a very pretty one. I confess the idea
took hold of me —”
“Thanks to your preposterous benevolence!”
Mr. Simmons seemed for a moment to experience
a difficulty in swallowing. “Your beer is undrinkable,”
he said to the waiter. “I 'll have some brandy.
— Come, Searle,” he resumed, “don't challenge me
to the arts of debate, or I 'll settle right down on
you. Benevolence, as I say, was part of it. The
reflection that if I put the thing through it would be
a very pretty feather in my cap and a very pretty
penny in my purse was part of it. And the satisfaction
of seeing a poor nobody of a Yankee walk
right into an old English estate was a good deal of
it. Upon my word, Searle, when I think of it, I
wish with all my heart that, erratic genius as you
are, you had a claim, for the very beauty of it! I
should hardly care what you did with the confounded
turn it into Yankee notions, — into ducks and drakes,
as they call it here. I should like to see you stamping
over it and kicking up its sacred dust in their very
faces!”
“You don't know me, Simmons!” said Searle, for
all response to this untender benediction.
“I should be very glad to think I did n't, Searle.
I have been to no small amount of trouble for you.
I have consulted by main force three first-rate men.
They smile at the idea. I should like you to see
the smile negative of one of these London big-wigs.
If your title were written in letters of fire, it would
n't stand being sniffed at in that fashion. I sounded
in person the solicitor of your distinguished kinsman.
He seemed to have been in a manner forewarned
and forearmed. It seems your brother George, some
twenty years ago, put forth a feeler. So you are
not to have the glory of even frightening them.”
“I never frightened any one,” said Searle. “I
should n't begin at this time of day. I should approach
the subject like a gentleman.”
“Well, if you want very much to do something
like a gentleman, you 've got a capital chance. Take
your disappointment like a gentleman.”
I had finished my dinner, and I had become keenly
interested in poor Mr. Searle's mysterious claim;
reflected in his voice without noting them in
his face. I left my place, went over to the fire, took
up the evening paper, and established a post of observation
behind it.
Lawyer Simmons was in the act of choosing a
soft chop from the dish, — an act accompanied by a
great deal of prying and poking with his own personal
fork. My disillusioned compatriot had pushed
away his plate; he sat with his elbows on the table,
gloomily nursing his head with his hands. His
companion stared at him a moment, I fancied half
tenderly; I am not sure whether it was pity or
whether it was beer and brandy. “I say, Searle,”
— and for my benefit, I think, taking me for an
impressible native, he attuned his voice to something
of a pompous pitch, — “in this country it is
the inestimable privilege of a loyal citizen, under
whatsoever stress of pleasure or of pain, to make a
point of eating his dinner.”
Searle disgustedly gave his plate another push.
“Anything may happen, now!” he said. “I don't
care a straw.”
“You ought to care. Have another chop, and you
will care. Have some brandy. Take my advice!”
Searle from between his two hands looked at him.
“I have had enough of your advice!” he said.
“A little more,” said Simmons, mildly; “I sha' n't
trouble you again. What do you mean to do?”
“Nothing.”
“O, come!”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing!”
“Nothing but starve. How about your money?”
“Why do you ask? You don't care.”
“My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer
you twenty pounds, you set most clumsily about it.
You said just now I don't know you. Possibly!
There is, perhaps, no such enormous difference between
knowing you and not knowing you. At any
rate, you don't know me. I expect you to go
home.”
“I won't go home! I have crossed the ocean for
the last time.”
“What is the matter? Are you afraid?”
“Yes, I 'm afraid! `I thank thee, Jew, for teaching
me that word!”'
“You 're more afraid to go than to stay?”
“I sha' n't stay. I shall die.”
“O, are you sure of that?”
“One can always be sure of that.”
Mr. Simmons started and stared: his mild cynic had
turned grim stoic. “Upon my soul,” he said, “one
would think that Death had named the day!”
“We have named it, between us.”
This was too much even for Mr. Simmons's easy
morality. “I say, Searle,” he cried, “I 'm not more of
a stickler than the next man, but if you are going to
blaspheme, I shall wash my hands of you. If you 'll
consent to return home with me by the steamer of the
23d, I 'll pay your passage down. More than that, I 'll
pay your wine bill.”
Searle meditated. “I believe I never willed anything
in my life,” he said; “but I feel sure that I have
willed this, that I stay here till I take my leave for a
newer world than that poor old New World of ours.
It 's an odd feeling, — I rather like it! What should
I do at home?”
“You said just now you were homesick.”
“So I was — for a morning. But have n't I been
all my life long sick for Europe? And now that I 've
got it, am I to cast it off again? I 'm much obliged to
you for your offer. I have enough for the present. I
have about my person some forty pounds' worth of
British gold and the same amount, say, of Yankee vitality.
They 'll last me out together! After they are
gone, I shall lay my head in some English churchyard;
beside some ivied tower, beneath an English yew.”
I had thus far distinctly followed the dialogue; but
at this point the landlord came in, and, begging my
pardon, would suggest that No. 12, a most superior
apartment, having now been vacated, it would give him
I transferred my attention back to my friends. They
had risen to their feet; Simmons had put on his overcoat;
he stood polishing his rusty black hat with his
napkin. “Do you mean to go down to the place?” he
asked.
“Possibly. I have dreamed of it so much I should
like to see it.”
“Shall you call on Mr. Searle?”
“Heaven forbid!”
“Something has just occurred to me,” Simmons pursued,
with an unhandsome grin, as if Mephistopheles
were playing at malice. “There 's a Miss Searle, the
old man's sister.”
“Well?” said the other, frowning.
“Well, sir! suppose, instead of dying, you should
marry!”
Mr. Searle frowned in silence. Simmons gave him
a tap on the stomach. “Line those ribs a bit first!”
The poor gentleman blushed crimson and his eyes filled
with tears. “You are a coarse brute,” he said. The
scene was pathetic. I was prevented from seeing the
conclusion of it by the reappearance of the landlord,
on behalf of No. 12. He insisted on my coming to
inspect the premises. Half an hour afterwards I was
rattling along in a Hansom toward Covent Garden,
where I heard Madame Bosio in the Barber of Seville.
vaguely fancying I might catch another glimpse
of Mr. Searle. I was not disappointed. I found him
sitting before the fire, with his head fallen on his
breast, sunk in the merciful stupor of tardy sleep. I
looked at him for some moments. His face, pale and
refined in the dim lamplight, impressed me with an
air of helpless, ineffective delicacy. They say fortune
comes while we sleep. Standing there I felt benignant
enough to be poor Mr. Searle's fortune. As I walked
away, I perceived amid the shadows of one of the little
dining stalls which I have described the lonely ever-dressed
waiter, dozing attendance on my friend, and
shifting aside for a while the burden of waiterhood. I
lingered a moment beside the old inn-yard, in which,
upon a time, the coaches and postchaises found space
to turn and disgorge. Above the upward vista of the
enclosing galleries, from which lounging lodgers and
crumpled chambermaids and all the picturesque domesticity
of an antique tavern must have watched the
great entrances and exits of the posting and coaching
drama, I descried the distant lurid twinkle of the London
constellations. At the foot of the stairs, enshrined
in the glittering niche of her well-appointed bar, the
landlady sat napping like some solemn idol amid votive
brass and plate.
The next morning, not finding the innocent object of
from the waiter that he had ordered breakfast in
bed. Into this asylum I was not yet prepared to
pursue him. I spent the morning running about
London, chiefly on business, but snatching by the
way many a vivid impression of its huge metropolitan
interest. Beneath the sullen black and gray of
that hoary civic world the hungry American mind
detects the magic colors of association. As the afternoon
approached, however, my impatient heart began
to babble of green fields; it was of English meadows
I had chiefly dreamed. Thinking over the suburban
lions, I fixed upon Hampton Court. The day was the
more propitious that it yielded just that dim, subaqueous
light which sleeps so fondly upon the English
landscape.
At the end of an hour I found myself wandering
through the multitudinous rooms of the great palace.
They follow each other in infinite succession, with
no great variety of interest or aspect, but with a sort
of regal monotony, and a fine specific flavor. They
are most exactly of their various times. You pass
from great painted and panelled bedchambers and closets,
anterooms, drawing-rooms, council-rooms, through
king's suite, queen's suite, and prince's suite, until
you feel as if you were strolling through the appointed
hours and stages of some decorous monarchical
the vast cold tarnished beds and canopies,
with the circumference of disapparelled royalty attested
by a gilded balustrade, and the great carved
and yawning chimney-places, where dukes-in-waiting
may have warmed their weary heels; on the other
side, in deep recesses, the immense windows, the
framed and draped embrasures where the sovereign
whispered and favorites smiled, looking out on the
terraced gardens and the misty glades of Bushey Park.
The dark walls are gravely decorated by innumerable
dark portraits of persons attached to Court and State,
more especially with various members of the Dutch-looking
entourage of William of Orange, the restorer
of the palace; with good store, too, of the lily-bosomed
models of Lely and Kneller. The whole tone
of this long-drawn interior is immensly sombre, prosaic,
and sad. The tints of all things have sunk to a cold
and melancholy brown, and the great palatial void
seems to hold no stouter tenantry than a sort of pungent
odorous chill. I seemed to be the only visitor.
I held ungrudged communion with the formal genius
of the spot. Poor mortalized kings! ineffective lure
of royalty! This, or something like it, was the
murmured burden of my musings. They were interrupted
suddenly by my coming upon a person standing
in devout contemplation before a simpering countess
this person turned his head, and I recognized my
fellow-lodger at the Red-Lion. I was apparently recognized
as well; I detected an air of overture in his
glance. In a few moments, seeing I had a catalogue,
he asked the name of the portrait. On my
ascertaining it, he inquired, timidly, how I liked
the lady.
“Well,” said I, not quite timidly enough, perhaps,
“I confess she seems to me rather a light piece of
work.”
He remained silent, and a little abashed, I think.
As we strolled away he stole a sidelong glance of
farewell at his leering shepherdess. To speak with
him face to face was to feel keenly that he was
weak and interesting. We talked of our inn, of
London, of the palace; he uttered his mind freely,
but he seemed to struggle with a weight of depression.
It was a simple mind enough, with no great
culture, I fancied, but with a certain appealing
native grace. I foresaw that I should find him a
true American, full of that perplexing interfusion
of refinement and crudity which marks the American
mind. His perceptions, I divined, were delicate;
his opinions, possibly, gross. On my telling him
that I too was an American, he stopped short and
seemed overcome with emotion: then silently passing
him through the rest of the palace and down into
the gardens. A vast gravelled platform stretches itself
before the basement of the palace, taking the
afternoon sun. A portion of the edifice is reserved
as a series of private apartments, occupied by state
pensioners, reduced gentlewomen in receipt of the
Queen's bounty, and other deserving persons. Many
of these apartments have their little private gardens;
and here and there, between their verdure-coated walls,
you catch a glimpse of these dim horticultural closets.
My companion and I took many a turn up and
down this spacious level, looking down on the antique
geometry of the lower garden and on the stoutly woven
tapestry of vine and blossom which muffles the foundations
of the huge red pile. I thought of the various
images of old-world gentility, which, early and late,
must have strolled upon that ancient terrace and felt
the great protecting quietude of the solemn palace.
We looked through an antique grating into one of
the little private gardens, and saw an old lady with
a black mantilla on her head, a decanter of water in
one hand and a crutch in the other, come forth, followed
by three little dogs and a cat, to sprinkle a
plant. She had an opinion, I fancied, on the virtue
of Queen Caroline. There are few sensations so exquisite
in life as to stand with a companion in a
the alien savor of the air and the tonic
picturesqueness of things. This common relish of
local color makes comrades of strangers. My companion
seemed oppressed with vague amazement.
He stared and lingered and scanned the scene with
a gentle scowl. His enjoyment appeared to give
him pain. I proposed, at last, that we should dine
in the neighborhood and take a late train to town.
We made our way out of the gardens into the adjoining
village, where we found an excellent inn.
Mr. Searle sat down to table with small apparent
interest in the repast, but gradually warming to his
work, he declared at the end of half an hour that
for the first time in a month he felt an appetite.
“You 're an invalid?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered. “A hopeless one!”
The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered
about the broad entrance of Bushey Park.
After we had dined we lounged along into the hazy
vista of the great avenue of horse-chestnuts. There
is a rare emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveller,
in which the mind, with a great passionate
throb, achieves a magical synthesis of its impressions.
You feel England; you feel Italy. The reflection
for the moment has an extraordinary poignancy.
I had known it from time to time in Italy,
the Lord. Since my arrival in England I had been
waiting for it to come. A bottle of excellent Burgundy
at dinner had perhaps unlocked to it the
gates of sense; it came now with a conquering
tread. Just the scene around me was the England
of my visions. Over against us, amid the deep-hued
bloom of its ordered gardens, the dark red palace, with
its formal copings and its vacant windows, seemed to
tell of a proud and splendid past; the little village
nestling between park and palace, around a patch of
turfy common, with its tavern of gentility, its ivy-towered
church, its parsonage, retained to my modernized
fancy the lurking semblance of a feudal hamlet.
It was in this dark composite light that I had read all
English prose; it was this mild moist air that had
blown from the verses of English poets; beneath these
broad acres of rain-deepened greenness a thousand
honored dead lay buried.
“Well,” I said to my friend, “I think there is no
mistake about this being England. We may like it
or not, it 's positive! No more dense and stubborn
fact ever settled down on an expectant tourist. It
brings my heart into my throat.”
Searle was silent. I looked at him; he was looking
up at the sky, as if he were watching some visible
descent of the elements. “On me too,” he said, “it 's
give me strength to bear it!”
“O mighty world,” I cried, “to hold at once so rare
an Italy and so brave an England!”
“To say nothing of America,” added Searle.
“O,” I answered, “America has a world to herself!”
“You have the advantage over me,” my companion
resumed, after a pause, “in coming to all this with
an educated eye. You already know the old. I have
never known it but by report. I have always fancied
I should like it. In a small way at home, you know,
I have tried to stick to the old. I must be a conservative
by nature. People at home — a few people —
used to call me a snob.”
“I don't believe you were a snob,” I cried. “You
look too amiable.”
He smiled sadly. “There it is,” he said. “It 's the
old story! I 'm amiable! I know what that means!
I was too great a fool to be even a snob! If I had
been I should probably have come abroad earlier in
life — before — before —” He paused, and his head
dropped sadly on his breast.
The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue.
I felt that my learning his story was merely a question
of time. Something told me that I had gained his
confidence and he would unfold himself. “Before you
lost your health,” I said.
“Before I lost my health,” he answered. “And my
property, — the little I had. And my ambition. And
my self-esteem.”
“Come!” I said. “You shall get them all back.
This tonic English climate will wind you up in a
month. And with the return of health, all the rest
will return.”
He sat musing, with his eyes fixed on the distant
palace. “They are too far gone, — self-esteem especially!
I should like to be an old genteel pensioner,
lodged over there in the palace, and spending my days
in maundering about these classic haunts. I should
go every morning, at the hour when it gets the sun,
into that long gallery where all those pretty women of
Lely's are hung, — I know you despise them! — and
stroll up and down and pay them compliments. Poor,
precious, forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted
in their day, so neglected now! Offering up their
shoulders and ringlets and smiles to that inexorable
solitude!”
I patted my friend on the shoulder. “You shall be
yourself again yet,” I said.
Just at this moment there came cantering down the
shallow glade of the avenue a young girl on a fine
black horse, — one of those lovely budding gentlewomen,
perfectly mounted and equipped, who form to
American eyes the sweetest incident of English scenery.
abreast of us, turned slightly in her saddle and looked
back at him. In the movement she dropped her whip.
Drawing in her horse, she cast upon the ground a
glance of maidenly alarm. “This is something better
than a Lely,” I said. Searle hastened forward, picked
up the whip, and removing his hat with an air of great
devotion, presented it to the young girl. Fluttered
and blushing, she reached forward, took it with softly
murmured gratitude, and the next moment was bounding
over the elastic turf. Searle stood watching her;
the servant, as he passed us, touched his hat. When
Searle turned toward me again, I saw that his face
was glowing with a violent blush. “I doubt of your
having come abroad too late!” I said, laughing.
A short distance from where we had stopped was an
old stone bench. We went and sat down on it and
watched the light mist turning to sullen gold in the
rays of the evening sun. “We ought to be thinking
of the train back to London, I suppose,” I said at last.
“O, hang the train!” said Searle.
“Willingly! There could be no better spot than
this to feel the magic of an English twilight.” So we
lingered, and the twilight lingered around us, — a light
and not a darkness. As we sat, there came trudging
along the road an individual whom, from afar, I recognized
as a member of the genus “tramp.” I had read
him, and I brought my historic consciousness to bear
upon the present specimen. As he approached us he
slackened pace and finally halted, touching his cap.
He was a man of middle age, clad in a greasy bonnet,
with greasy ear-locks depending from its sides. Round
his neck was a grimy red scarf, tucked into his waistcoat;
his coat and trousers had a remote affinity with
those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a
stick; on his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a
handful of withered green stuff in the bottom. His
face was pale, haggard, and degraded beyond description,
— a singular mixture of brutality and finesse.
He had a history. From what height had he fallen,
from what depth had he risen? Never was a form of
rascally beggarhood more complete. There was a
merciless fixedness of outline about him which filled
me with a kind of awe. I felt as if I were in the presence
of a personage, — an artist in vagrancy.
“For God's sake, gentlemen,” he said, in that raucous
tone of weather-beaten poverty suggestive of
chronic sore-throat exacerbated by perpetual gin, —
“for God's sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor fern-collector!”
— turning up his stale dandelions. “Food
has n't passed my lips, gentlemen, in the last three
days.”
We gaped responsive, in the precious pity of guileless
crown would be enough?” And our fasting botanist
went limping away through the park with a mystery
of satirical gratitude superadded to his general mystery.
“I feel as if I had seen my doppel-ganger,” said
Searle. “He reminds me of myself. What am I but
a tramp?”
Upon this hint I spoke. “What are you, my
friend?” I asked. “Who are you?”
A sudden blush rose to his pale face, so that I feared
I had offended him. He poked a moment at the
sod with the point of his umbrella, before answering.
“Who am I?” he said at last. “My name is Clement
Searle. I was born in New York. I have lived in
New York. What am I? That 's easily told. Nothing!
I assure you, nothing.”
“A very good fellow, apparently,” I protested.
“A very good fellow! Ah, there it is! You 've said
more than you mean. It 's by having been a very good
fellow all my days that I 've come to this. I have
drifted through life. I 'm a failure, sir, — a failure as
hopeless and helpless as any that ever swallowed up
the slender investments of the widow and the orphan.
I don't pay five cents on the dollar. Of what I was to
begin with no memory remains. I have been ebbing
away, from the start, in a steady current which, at
with, certainly, I was not a fountain of wisdom. All
the more reason for a definite channel, — for will and
purpose and direction. I walked by chance and sympathy
and sentiment. Take a turn through New York
and you 'll find my tattered sympathies and sentiments
dangling on every bush and fluttering in every breeze;
the men to whom I lent money, the women to whom I
made love, the friends I trusted, the dreams I cherished,
the poisonous fumes of pleasure, amid which
nothing was sweet or precious but the manhood they
stifled! It was my fault that I believed in pleasure
here below. I believe in it still, but as I believe in
God and not in man! I believed in eating your cake
and having it. I respected Pleasure, and she made a
fool of me. Other men, treating her like the arrant
strumpet she is, enjoyed her for the hour, but kept
their good manners for plain-faced Business, with the
larger dowry, to whom they are now lawfully married.
My taste was to be delicate; well, perhaps I
was so! I had a little money; it went the way of
my little wit. Here in my pocket I have forty pounds
of it left. The only thing I have to show for my
money and my wit is a little volume of verses, printed
at my own expense, in which fifteen years ago I made
bold to sing the charms of love and idleness. Six
months since I got hold of the volume; it reads like
I had n't seen Hampton Court then. When I was
thirty I married. It was a sad mistake, but a generous
one. The young girl was poor and obscure, but
beautiful and proud. I fancied she would make an
incomparable woman. It was a sad mistake! She
died at the end of three years, leaving no children.
Since then I have idled long. I have had bad habits.
To this impalpable thread of existence the current of
my life has shrunk. To-morrow I shall be high and
dry. Was I meant to come to this? Upon my
soul I was n't! If I say what I feel, you 'll fancy
my vanity quite equal to my folly, and set me
down as one of those dreary theorizers after the
fact, who draw any moral from their misfortunes
but the damning moral that vice is vice and that 's
an end of it. Take it for what it 's worth. I have
always fancied that I was meant for a gentler world.
Before heaven, sir, — whoever you are, — I 'm in practice
so absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to
say it, — I came into the world an aristocrat. I was
born with a soul for the picturesque. It condemns
me, I confess; but in a measure, too, it absolves me.
I found it nowhere. I found a world all hard lines
and harsh lights, without shade, without composition,
as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery
of color. To furnish color, I melted down the very
brush, touching up and toning down; a very pretty
chiaroscuro you 'll find in my track! Sitting here,
in this old park, in this old land, I feel — I feel that
I hover on the misty verge of what might have been!
I should have been born here and not there; here
my vulgar idleness would have been — don't laugh
now! — would have been elegant leisure. How it was
that I never came abroad is more than I can say. It
might have cut the knot; but the knot was too tight.
I was always unwell or in debt or entangled. Besides,
I had a horror of the sea, — with reason, heaven
knows! A year ago I was reminded of the existence
of an old claim to a portion of an English estate,
cherished off and on by various members of my family
for the past eighty years. It 's undeniably slender and
desperately hard to define. I am by no means sure
that to this hour I have mastered it. You look as
if you had a clear head. Some other time, if you 'll
consent, we 'll puzzle it out, such as it is, together.
Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and
got my claim by heart, as I used to get nine times
nine as a boy. I dreamed about it for six months,
half expecting to wake up some fine morning to hear
through a latticed casement the cawing of an English
rookery. A couple of months since there came out
here on business of his own a sort of half-friend of
fellow, but a man with an eye for the weak point and
the strong point. It was with him yesterday that you
saw me dining. He undertook, as he expressed it, to
`nose round' and see if anything could be made of
this pretended right. The matter had never seriously
been taken up. A month later I got a letter from
Simmons, assuring me that things looked mighty well,
that he should be vastly amazed if I had n't a case.
I took fire in a humid sort of way; I acted, for the
first time in my life; I sailed for England. I have
been here three days: it seems three months. After
keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours, last evening
my precious Simmons makes his appearance and informs
me, with his mouth full of mutton, that I was
a blasted fool to have taken him at his word; that he
had been precipitate; that I had been precipitate; that
my claim was moonshine; and that I must do penance
and take a ticket for another fortnight of seasickness
in his agreeable society. My friend, my friend! Shall
I say I was disappointed? I 'm already resigned. I
doubted the practicability of my claim. I felt in my
deeper consciousness that it was the crowning illusion
of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor
Simmons! I forgive him with all my heart. But for
him I should n't be sitting in this place, in this air,
with these thoughts. This is a world I could have
for the last. After this nothing would have been tolerable.
I shall now have a month of it, I hope, and
I shall not have a chance to be disenchanted. There 's
one thing!” — and here, pausing, he laid his hand on
mine; I rose and stood before him, — “I wish it were
possible you should be with me to the end.”
“I promise you,” I said, “to leave you only at your
own request. But it must be on condition of your
omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavor
of mortality. The end! Perhaps it 's the beginning.”
He shook his head. “You don't know me. It 's a
long story. I 'm incurably ill.”
“I know you a little. I have a strong suspicion
that your illness is in great measure a matter of mind
and spirits. All that you 've told me is but another
way of saying that you have lived hitherto in yourself.
The tenement 's haunted! Live abroad! Take
an interest!”
He looked at me for a moment with his sad weak
eyes. Then with a faint smile: “Don't cut down a
man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it.
I 'm bankrupt.”
“O, health is money!” I said. “Get well, and the
rest will take care of itself. I 'm interested in your
claim.”
“Don't ask me to expound it now! It 's a sad
muddle. Let it alone. I know nothing of business.
If I myself were to take the matter in hand, I should
break short off the poor little silken thread of my
expectancy. In a better world than this I think I
should be listened to. But in this hard world there 's
small bestowal of ideal justice. There is no doubt, I
fancy, that, a hundred years ago, we suffered a palpable
wrong. But we made no appeal at the time, and
the dust of a century now lies heaped upon our
silence. Let it rest!”
“What is the estimated value of your interest?”
“We were instructed from the first to accept a
compromise. Compared with the whole property, our
utmost right is extremely small. Simmons talked of
eighty-five thousand dollars. Why eighty-five I 'm
sure I don't know. Don't beguile me into figures.”
“Allow me one more question. Who is actually in
possession?”
“A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing
about him.”
“He is in some way related to you?”
“Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What
does that make?”
“Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your
twentieth cousin live?”
“At Lockley Park, Herefordshire.”
I pondered awhile. “I 'm interested in you, Mr.
Searle,” I said. “In your story, in your title, such as
it is, and in this Lockley Park, Herefordshire. Suppose
we go down and see it.”
He rose to his feet with a certain alertness. “I
shall make a sound man of him, yet,” I said to
myself.
“I should n't have the heart,” he said, “to accomplish
the melancholy pilgrimage alone. But with you
I 'll go anywhere.”
On our return to London we determined to spend
three days there together, and then to go into the
country. We felt to excellent purpose the sombre
charm of London, the mighty mother-city of our
mighty race, the great distributing heart of our traditional
life. Certain London characteristics — monuments,
relics, hints of history, local moods and memories
— are more deeply suggestive to an American
soul than anything else in Europe. With an equal attentive
piety my friend and I glanced at these things.
Their influence on Searle was deep and singular.
His observation I soon perceived to be extremely
acute. His almost passionate relish for the old, the
artificial, and social, wellnigh extinct from its long
inanition, began now to tremble and thrill with a
tardy vitality. I watched in silent wonderment this
strange metaphysical renascence.
Between the fair boundaries of the counties of
Hereford and Worcester rise in a long undulation the
sloping pastures of the Malvern Hills. Consulting a
big red book on the castles and manors of England,
we found Lockley Park to be seated near the base
of this grassy range, — though in which county I
forget. In the pages of this genial volume, Lockley
Park and its appurtenances made a very handsome
figure. We took up our abode at a certain little wayside
inn, at which in the days of leisure the coach
must have stopped for lunch, and burnished pewters
of rustic ale been tenderly exalted to “outsides” athirst
with breezy progression. Here we stopped, for sheer
admiration of its steep thatched roof, its latticed windows,
and its homely porch. We allowed a couple
of days to elapse in vague, undirected strolls and
sweet sentimental observance of the land, before we
prepared to execute the especial purpose of our journey.
This admirable region is a compendium of the
general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness
of the scenery, its subtle old-friendliness, the
magical familiarity of multitudinous details, appealed
to us at every step and at every glance. Deep in our
souls a natural affection answered. The whole land, in
the full, warm rains of the last of April, had burst into
sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the hedgerows
had turned into blooming screens; the sodden
ranker freshness. We went forth without loss of time
for a long walk on the hills. Reaching their summits,
you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen
broad counties, within the vast range of your vision,
commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath
us lay the dark, rich flats of hedgy Worcestershire and
the copse-checkered slopes of rolling Hereford, white
with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points
of the large expanse two great cathedral towers rise
sharply, taking the light, from the settled shadow
of their circling towns, — the light, the ineffable English
light! “Out of England,” cried Searle, “it 's but
a garish world!”
The whole vast sweep of our surrounding prospect
lay answering in a myriad fleeting shades the cloudy
process of the tremendous sky. The English heaven
is a fit antithesis to the complex English earth. We
possess in America the infinite beauty of the blue;
England possesses the splendor of combined and animated
clouds. Over against us, from our station on
the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved, compacted
and shifted, blotting the azure with sullen rain spots,
stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of gray,
bursting into a storm of light or melting into a drizzle
of silver. We made our way along the rounded
summits of these well-grazed heights, — mild, breezy
slopes of fields, green to cottage doors, to where a
rural village beckoned us from its seat among the
meadows. Close beside it, I admit, the railway shoots
fiercely from its tunnel in the hills; and yet there
broods upon this charming hamlet an old-time quietude
and privacy, which seems to make it a violation
of confidence to tell its name so far away. We struck
through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its
height of hedges; it led us to a superb old farm-house,
now jostled by the multiplied lanes and roads
which have curtailed its ancient appanage. It stands
in stubborn picturesqueness, at the receipt of sad-eyed
contemplation and the sufferance of “sketches.” I
doubt whether out of Nuremberg — or Pompeii! —
you may find so forcible an image of the domiciliary
genius of the past. It is cruelly complete; its bended
beams and joists, beneath the burden of its gables,
seem to ache and groan with memories and regrets.
The short, low windows, where lead and glass combine
in equal proportions to hint to the wondering stranger
of the mediæval gloom within, still prefer their darksome
office to the grace of modern day. Such an old
house fills an American with an indefinable feeling of
respect. So propped and patched and tinkered with
clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central
English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanized
it seemed to offer to our grateful eyes a small,
rude synthesis of the great English social order. Passing
out upon the high-road, we came to the common
browsing-patch, the “village green” of the tales of our
youth. Nothing was wanting; the shaggy, mouse-colored
donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and
huge proboscis, the geese, the old woman, — the old
woman, in person, with her red cloak and her black
bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside
her decent, placid cheeks, — the towering ploughman
with his white smock-frock, puckered on chest and
back, his short corduroys, his mighty calves, his big,
red, rural face. We greeted these things as children
greet the loved pictures in a story-book, lost and
mourned and found again. It was marvellous how
well we knew them. Beside the road we saw a
ploughboy straddle, whistling, on a stile. Gainsborough
might have painted him. Beyond the stile,
across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath lay,
like a thread of darker woof. We followed it from
field to field and from stile to stile. It was the way
to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in
its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the work-day
world by the broad stillness of pastures, — a gray,
gray tower, a huge black yew, a cluster of village
graves, with crooked headstones, in grassy, low relief.
was overcome.
“You must bury me here,” he cried. “It 's the
first church I have seen in my life. How it makes a
Sunday where it stands!”
The next day we saw a church of statelier proportions.
We walked over to Worcester, through such a
mist of local color, that I felt like one of Smollett's
pedestrian heroes, faring tavernward for a night of
adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw
the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high, rise
far into the cloud-freckled blue. And as we came
nearer still, we stopped on the bridge and viewed the
solid minster reflected in the yellow Severn. And
going farther yet we entered the town, — where surely
Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots and curricles, must
often have come a shopping for swan's-down boas and
high lace mittens; — we lounged about the gentle
close and gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing
sight, the waning, wasting afternoon light, the visible
ether which feels the voices of the chimes, far aloft on
the broad perpendicular field of the cathedral tower;
saw it linger and nestle and abide, as it loves to do
on all bold architectural spaces, converting them graciously
into registers and witnesses of nature; tasted,
too, as deeply of the peculiar stillness of this clerical
precinct; saw a rosy English lad come forth and lock
its hoary basement to the soaring Gothic of the church,
and carry his big responsible key into one of the quiet
canonical houses; and then stood musing together on
the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood
haunted such cathedral shades as a King's scholar, and
yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty meadows
by the Severn. On the third morning we betook ourselves
to Lockley Park, having learned that the greater
part of it was open to visitors, and that, indeed, on
application, the house was occasionally shown.
Within its broad enclosure many a declining spur
of the great hills melted into parklike slopes and dells.
A long avenue wound and circled from the outermost
gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and
bosky recesses, — at everything except the limits of
the place. It was as free and wild and untended as
the villa of an Italian prince; and I have never seen
the stern English fact of property put on such an air
of innocence. The weather had just become perfect;
it was one of the dozen exquisite days of the English
year, — days stamped with a refinement of purity unknown
in more liberal climes. It was as if the mellow
brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which
starred the dark waysides like petals wind-scattered
over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by the
external region we passed into the heart of the park,
through a second lodge-gate, with weather-worn gilding
on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where
the great trees stood singly and the tame deer browsed
along the bed of a woodland stream. Hence, before
us, we perceived the dark Elizabethan manor among
its blooming parterres and terraces.
“Here you can wander all day,” I said to Searle,
“like a proscribed and exiled prince, hovering about
the dominion of the usurper.”
“To think,” he answered, “of people having enjoyed
this all these years! I know what I am, — what
might I have been? What does all this make of
you?”
“That it makes you happy,” I said, “I should hesitate
to believe. But it 's hard to suppose that such a
place has not some beneficent action of its own.”
“What a perfect scene and background it forms!”
Searle went on. “What legends, what histories it
knows! My heart is breaking with unutterable visions.
There 's Tennyson's Talking Oak. What summer
days one could spend here! How I could lounge
my bit of life away on this shady stretch of turf!
Have n't I some maiden-cousin in yon moated grange
who would give me kind leave?” And then turning
almost fiercely upon me: “Why did you bring me
vain regrets?”
At this moment there passed near us a servant
who had emerged from the gardens of the great
house. I hailed him and inquired whether we should
be likely to gain admittance. He answered that Mr.
Searle was away from home, and that he thought
it probable the housekeeper would consent to do
the honors of the mansion. I passed my arm into
Searle's. “Come,” I said. “Drain the cup, bittersweet
though it be. We shall go in.” We passed another
lodge-gate and entered the gardens. The house
was an admirable specimen of complete Elizabethan,
a multitudinous cluster of gables and porches, oriels
and turrets, screens of ivy and pinnacles of slate.
Two broad terraces commanded the great wooded
horizon of the adjacent domain. Our summons was
answered by the butler in person, solemn and tout
de noir habillé. He repeated the statement that Mr.
Searle was away from home, and that he would present
our petition to the housekeeper. We would be so
good, however, as to give him our cards. This request,
following so directly on the assertion that Mr. Searle
was absent, seemed to my companion not distinctly
pertinent. “Surely not for the housekeeper,” he said.
The butler gave a deferential cough. “Miss Searle
is at home.”
“Yours alone will suffice,” said Searle. I took out
a card and pencil, and wrote beneath my name, New
York. Standing with the pencil in my hand I felt
a sudden impulse. Without in the least weighing
proprieties or results, I yielded to it. I added above
my name, Mr. Clement Searle. What would come
of it?
Before many minutes the housekeeper attended us,
— a fresh rosy little old woman in a dowdy clean
cap and a scanty calico gown; an exquisite specimen
of refined and venerable servility. She had the
accent of the country, but the manners of the house.
Under her guidance we passed through a dozen
apartments, duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry,
old carvings, old armor, with all the constituent
properties of an English manor. The pictures
were especially valuable. The two Vandykes, the trio
of rosy Rubenses, the sole and sombre Rembrandt,
glowed with conscious authenticity. A Claude, a
Murillo, a Greuze, and a Gainsborough hung gracious
in their chosen places. Searle strolled about silent,
pale, and grave, with bloodshot eyes and lips compressed.
He uttered no comment and asked no question.
Missing him, at last, from my side, I retraced
my steps and found him in a room we had just left,
on a tarnished silken divan, with his face buried in
his hands. Before him, ranged on an antique buffet,
huge platters radiant with their steady colors, jugs
and vases nobly bellied and embossed. There came
to me, as I looked, a sudden vision of the young English
gentleman, who, eighty years ago, had travelled
by slow stages to Italy and been waited on at his
inn by persuasive toymen. “What is it, Searle?” I
asked. “Are you unwell?”
He uncovered his haggard face and showed a burning
blush. Then smiling in hot irony: “A memory
of the past! I was thinking of a china vase that
used to stand on the parlor mantel-shelf while I was
a boy, with the portrait of General Jackson painted
on one side and a bunch of flowers on the other.
How long do you suppose that majolica has been
in the family?”
“A long time probably. It was brought hither in
the last century, into old, old England, out of old, old
Italy, by some old young buck of this excellent house
with a taste for chinoiseries. Here it has stood for a
hundred years, keeping its clear, firm hues in this
aristocratic twilight.”
Searle sprang to his feet. “I say,” he cried, “in
heaven's name take me away! I can't stand this.
Before I know it I shall do something I shall be
ashamed of. I shall steal one of their d—d majolicas.
I shall proclaim my identity and assert my rights!
pity's name to keep me here for a month!”
If poor Searle could ever have been said to look
“dangerous,” he looked so now. I began to regret
my officious presentation of his name, and prepared
without delay to lead him out of the house. We
overtook the housekeeper in the last room of the
suite, a small, unused boudoir, over the chimney-piece
of which hung a noble portrait of a young man
in a powdered wig and a brocaded waistcoat. I was
immediately struck with his resemblance to my companion.
“This is Mr. Clement Searle, Mr. Searle's great-uncle,
by Sir Joshua Reynolds,” quoth the housekeeper.
“He died young, poor gentleman. He perished
at sea, going to America.”
“He 's the young buck,” I said, “who brought the
majolica out of Italy.”
“Indeed, sir, I believe he did,” said the housekeeper,
staring.
“He 's the image of you, Searle,” I murmured.
“He 's wonderfully like the gentleman, saving his
presence,” said the housekeeper.
My friend stood gazing. “Clement Searle — at sea
— going to America — ” he muttered. Then harshly,
to the housekeeper, “Why the deuce did he go to
America?”
“Why, indeed, sir? You may well ask. I believe
he had kinsfolk there. It was for them to come to
him.”
Searle broke into a laugh. “It was for them to
have come to him! Well, well,” he said, fixing his
eyes on the little old woman, “they have come to
him at last!”
She blushed like a wrinkled rose-leaf. “Indeed,
sir,” she said, “I verily believe that you are one of
us!”
“My name is the name of that lovely youth,” Searle
went on. “Kinsman, I salute you! Attend!” And
he grasped me by the arm. “I have an idea! He
perished at sea. His spirit came ashore and wandered
forlorn till it got lodgment again in my poor body.
In my poor body it has lived, homesick, these forty
years, shaking its rickety cage, urging me, stupid, to
carry it back to the scenes of its youth. And I never
knew what was the matter with me! Let me exhale
my spirit here!”
The housekeeper essayed a timorous smile. The
scene was embarrassing. My confusion was not allayed
when I suddenly perceived in the doorway the
figure of a lady. “Miss Searle!” whispered the housekeeper.
My first impression of Miss Searle was that
she was neither young nor beautiful. She stood with
a timid air on the threshold, pale, trying to smile, and
Searle, I think, gazed marvelling.
“If I am not mistaken,” said the lady, “one of you
gentlemen is Mr. Clement Searle.”
“My friend is Mr. Clement Searle,” I replied. “Allow
me to add that I alone am responsible for your
having received his name.”
“I should have been sorry not to receive it,” said
Miss Searle, beginning to blush. “Your being from
America has led me to — to interrupt you.”
“The interruption, madam, has been on our part.
And with just that excuse, — that we are from America.”
Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on
my friend, as he stood silent beneath Sir Joshua's
portrait. The housekeeper, amazed and mystified,
took a liberty. “Heaven preserve us, Miss! It 's
your great-uncle's picture come to life.”
“I 'm not mistaken, then,” said Miss Searle. “We
are distantly related.” She had the aspect of an extremely
modest woman. She was evidently embarrassed
at having to proceed unassisted in her overture.
Searle eyed her with gentle wonder from head to foot.
I fancied I read his thoughts. This, then, was Miss
Searle, his maiden-cousin, prospective heiress of these
manorial acres and treasures. She was a person of
about thirty-three years of age, taller than most women,
of her shape. She had a small blue eye, a
massive chignon of yellow hair, and a mouth at once
broad and comely. She was dressed in a lustreless
black satin gown, with a short train. Around her
neck she wore a blue silk handkerchief, and over
this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string of
amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was
large, yet not imposing; girlish, yet mature. Her
glance and accent, in addressing us, were simple, too
simple. Searle, I think, had been fancying some
proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved
at finding the lady timid and plain. His person
was suddenly illumined with an old disused gallantry.
“We are distant cousins, I believe. I am happy
to claim a relationship which you are so good as to
remember. I had not in the least counted on your
doing so.”
“Perhaps I have done wrong,” and Miss Searle
blushed anew and smiled. “But I have always known
of there being people of our blood in America, and I
have often wondered and asked about them; without
learning much, however. To-day, when this card was
brought me and I knew of a Clement Searle wandering
about the house like a stranger, I felt as if I
ought to do something. I hardly knew what! My
would have done. Welcome, as a cousin.” And
with a gesture, at once frank and shy, she put out
her hand.
“I 'm welcome indeed,” said Searle, taking it, “if
he would have done it half as graciously.”
“You 've seen the show,” Miss Searle went on.
“Perhaps now you 'll have some lunch.” We followed
her into a small breakfast-room, where a deep
bay-window opened on the mossy flags of the great
terrace. Here, for some moments, she remained
silent and shy, in the manner of a person resting
from a great effort. Searle, too, was formal and reticent,
so that I had to busy myself with providing
small-talk. It was of course easy to descant on the
beauties of park and mansion. Meanwhile I observed
our hostess. She had small beauty and scanty grace;
her dress was out of taste and out of season; yet
she pleased me well. There was about her a sturdy
sweetness, a homely flavor of the sequestered châtelaine
of feudal days. To be so simple amid this massive
luxury, so mellow and yet so fresh, so modest
and yet so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in
which I had fancied human life to be steeped in
many a park-circled home. Miss Searle was to the
Belle au Bois Dormant what a fact is to a fairy-tale,
an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were
possible English breeding still marvels visibly at the
native American. Miss Searle's wonderment was
guileless enough to have been more overt and yet
inoffensive; there was no taint of offence indeed in
her utterance of the unvarying amenity that she had
met an American family on the Lake of Como whom
she would have almost taken to be English.
“If I lived here,” I said, “I think I should hardly
need to go away, even to the Lake of Como.”
“You might perhaps get tired of it. And then
the Lake of Como! If I could only go abroad
again!”
“You have been but once?”
“Only once. Three years ago my brother took me
to Switzerland. We thought it extremely beautiful.
Except for this journey, I have always lived here.
Here I was born. It 's a dear old place, indeed, and I
know it well. Sometimes I fancy I 'm a little tired.”
And on my asking her how she spent her time and
what society she saw, “It 's extremely quiet,” she went
on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in
the manner of a person summoned for the first time to
define her situation and enumerate the elements of her
life. “We see very few people. I don't think there
are many nice people hereabouts. At least we don't
know them. Our own family is very small. My
had a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and
his only son, a dear little boy, who would have succeeded
him in the estates. Do you know that I 'm
likely to have them now? Poor me! Since his loss
my brother has preferred to be quite alone. I 'm sorry
he 's away. But you must wait till he comes back. I
expect him in a day or two.” She talked more and
more, with a rambling, earnest vapidity, about her circumstances,
her solitude, her bad eyes, so that she
could n't read, her flowers, her ferns, her dogs, and the
curate, recently inducted by her brother and warranted
sound orthodox, who had lately begun to light his altar
candles; pausing every now and then to blush in self-surprise,
and yet moving steadily from point to point
in the deepening excitement of temptation and occasion.
Of all the old things I had seen in England,
this mind of Miss Searle's seemed to me the oldest,
the quaintest, the most ripely verdant; so fenced and
protected by convention and precedent and usage; so
passive and mild and docile. I felt as if I were talking
with a potential heroine of Miss Burney. As she
talked, she rested her dull, kind eyes upon her kinsman
with a sort of fascinated stare. At last, “Did you
mean to go away,” she demanded, “without asking for
us?”
“I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined
unfriendly I should have been.”
“But you knew of the place being ours and of our
relationship?”
“Just so. It was because of these things that I
came down here, — because of them, almost, that I
came to England. I have always liked to think of
them.”
“You merely wished to look, then? We don't pretend
to be much to look at.”
“You don't know what you are, Miss Searle,” said
my friend, gravely.
“You like the old place, then?”
Searle looked at her in silence. “If I could only
tell you,” he said at last.
“Do tell me! You must come and stay with us.”
Searle began to laugh. “Take care, take care,” he
cried. “I should surprise you. At least I should bore
you. I should never leave you.”
“O, you 'd get homesick for America!”
At this Searle laughed the more. “By the way,” he
cried to me, “tell Miss Searle about America!” And
he stepped through the window out upon the terrace,
followed by two beautiful dogs, a pointer and a young
stag-hound, who from the moment we came in had established
the fondest relation with him. Miss Searle
looked at him as he went, with a certain tender wonder
she was interested. I suddenly recalled the last words
I had heard spoken by my friend's adviser in London:
“Instead of dying you 'd better marry.” If Miss
Searle could be gently manipulated. O for a certain
divine tact! Something assured me that her heart was
virgin soil; that sentiment had never bloomed there.
If I could but sow the seed! There lurked within her
the perfect image of one of the patient wives of old.
“He has lost his heart to England,” I said. “He
ought to have been born here.”
“And yet,” said Miss Searle, “he 's not in the least
an Englishman.”
“How do you know that?”
“I hardly know how. I never talked with a foreigner
before; but he looks and talks as I have fancied
foreigners.”
“Yes, he 's foreign enough!”
“Is he married?”
“He 's a widower, — without children.”
“Has he property?”
“Very little.”
“But enough to travel?”
I meditated. “He has not expected to travel far,”
I said at last. “You know he 's in poor health.”
“Poor gentleman! So I fancied.”
“He 's better, though, than he thinks. He came
dies.”
“Poor fellow!” And I fancied I perceived in her
eye the lustre of a rising tear. “And he was going off
without my seeing him?”
“He 's a modest man, you see.”
“He 's very much of a gentleman.”
“Assuredly!”
At this moment we heard on the terrace a loud,
harsh cry. “It 's the great peacock!” said Miss Searle,
stepping to the window and passing out. I followed
her. Below us on the terrace, leaning on the parapet,
stood our friend, with his arm round the neck of the
pointer. Before him, on the grand walk, strutted a
splendid peacock, with ruffled neck and expanded tail.
The other dog had apparently indulged in a momentary
attempt to abash the gorgeous fowl; but at Searle's
voice he had bounded back to the terrace and leaped
upon the parapet, where he now stood licking his new
friend's face. The scene had a beautiful old-time air;
the peacock flaunting in the foreground, like the very
genius of antique gardenry; the broad terrace, which
flattered an innate taste of mine for all deserted promenades
to which people may have adjourned from formal
dinners, to drink coffee in old Sêvres, and where
the stiff brocade of women's dresses may have rustled
autumnal leaves; and far around us, with one leafy
park. “The very beasts have made him welcome,” I
said, as we rejoined our companion.
“The peacock has done for you, Mr. Searle,” said his
cousin, “what he does only for very great people. A
year ago there came here a duchess to see my brother.
I don't think that since then he has spread his tail as
wide for any one else by a dozen feathers.”
“It 's not alone the peacock,” said Searle. “Just
now there came slipping across my path a little green
lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard of literature!
And if you have a ghost, broad daylight though it be,
I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of
your house, Miss Searle?”
“O dear, no! You must ask my brother for all
those things.”
“You ought to have a book full of legends and traditions.
You ought to have loves and murders and
mysteries by the roomful. I count upon it.”
“O Mr. Searle! We have always been a very well-behaved
family. Nothing out of the way has ever
happened, I think.”
“Nothing out of the way? O horrors! We have
done better than that in America. Why, I myself!” —
and he gazed at her a moment with a gleam of malice,
and then broke into a laugh. “Suppose I should turn
out a better Searle than you? Better than you, nursed
disappoint me. You have some history among you all,
you have some poetry. I have been famished all my
days for these things. Do you understand? Ah, you
can't understand! Tell me something! When I think
of what must have happened here! when I think of
the lovers who must have strolled on this terrace and
wandered through those glades! of all the figures and
passions and purposes that must have haunted these
walls! of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings,
the young hopes and the old regrets, the intense
experience —” And here he faltered a moment, with
the increase of his vehemence. The gleam in his eye,
which I have called a gleam of malice, had settled into
a deep unnatural light. I began to fear he had become
over-excited. But he went on with redoubled passion.
“To see it all evoked before me,” he cried, “if the
Devil alone could do it, I 'd make a bargain with the
Devil! O Miss Searle, I 'm a most unhappy man!”
“O dear, O dear!” said Miss Searle.
“Look at that window, that blessed oriel!” And
he pointed to a small, protruding casement above us,
relieved against the purple brick-work, framed in chiselled
stone, and curtained with ivy.
“It 's my room,” said Miss Searle.
“Of course it 's a woman's room. Think of the forgotten
loveliness which has peeped from that window;
chiefly that outlook on this bosky world. O gentle
cousins! And you, Miss Searle, you 're one of them
yet.” And he marched towards her and took her
great white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her
eyes, and pressing her other hand to her breast.
“You 're a woman of the past. You 're nobly simple.
It has been a romance to see you. It does n't matter
what I say to you. You did n't know me yesterday,
you 'll not know me to-morrow. Let me to-day do
a mad, sweet thing. Let me fancy you the soul of
all the dead women who have trod these terrace-flags,
which lie here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement
of a church. Let me say I worship you!” And he
raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it,
and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her
eyes the next moment, I saw that they were filled
with tears. The Belle au Bois Dormant was awake.
There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue
was suddenly presented by the appearance of the butler
bearing a letter. “A telegram, Miss,” he said.
“Dear me!” cried Miss Searle, “I can't open a telegram.
Cousin, help me.”
Searle took the missive, opened it, and read aloud:
“I shall be home to dinner. Keep the American.”
2. II.
“KEEP the American!” Miss Searle, in compliance
with the injunction conveyed in her
brother's telegram (with something certainly of telegraphic
curtness), lost no time in expressing the pleasure
it would give her to have my companion remain.
“Really you must,” she said; and forthwith repaired
to the housekeeper, to give orders for the preparation
of a room.
“How in the world,” asked Searle, “did he know of
my being here?”
“He learned, probably,” I expounded, “from his
solicitor of the visit of your friend Simmons. Simmons
and the solicitor must have had another interview
since your arrival in England. Simmons, for
reasons of his own, has communicated to the solicitor
your journey to this neighborhood, and Mr. Searle,
learning this, has immediately taken for granted that
you have formally presented yourself to his sister.
He 's hospitably inclined, and he wishes her to do the
proper thing by you. More, perhaps! I have my little
theory that he is the very Phœnix of usurpers, that
of the men of law, and that he means gracefully to
surrender you your fractional interest in the estate.”
“I give it up!” said my friend, musing. “Come
what come will!”
“You of course,” said Miss Searle, reappearing and
turning to me, “are included in my brother's invitation.
I have bespoken your lodging as well. Your
luggage shall immediately be sent for.”
It was arranged that I in person should be driven
over to our little inn, and that I should return with
our effects in time to meet Mr. Searle at dinner. On
my arrival, several hours later, I was immediately conducted
to my room. The servant pointed out to me
that it communicated by a door and a private passage
with that of my companion. I made my way along
this passage, — a low, narrow corridor, with a long
latticed casement, through which there streamed, upon
a series of grotesquely sculptured oaken closets and
cupboards, the lurid animating glow of the western
sun, — knocked at his door, and, getting no answer,
opened it. In an arm-chair by the open window sat
my friend, sleeping, with arms and legs relaxed and
head placidly reverted. It was a great relief to find
him resting from his rhapsodies, and I watched him
for some moments before waking him. There was a
faint glow of color in his cheek and a light parting of
soundness than I had yet seen in him. It was almost
happiness, it was almost health. I laid my hand on
his arm and gently shook it. He opened his eyes,
gazed at me a moment, vaguely recognized me, then
closed them again. “Let me dream, let me dream!”
he said.
“What are you dreaming about?”
A moment passed before his answer came. “About
a tall woman in a quaint black dress, with yellow hair,
and a sweet, sweet smile, and a soft, low, delicious
voice! I 'm in love with her.”
“It 's better to see her,” I said, “than to dream
about her. Get up and dress, and we shall go down
to dinner and meet her.”
“Dinner — dinner —” And he gradually opened his
eyes again. “Yes, upon my word, I shall dine!”
“You 're a well man!” I said, as he rose to his feet.
“You 'll live to bury Mr. Simmons.” He had spent
the hours of my absence, he told me, with Miss Searle.
They had strolled together over the park and through
the gardens and green-houses. “You must already be
intimate!” I said, smiling.
“She is intimate with me,” he answered. “Heaven
knows what rigmarole I 've treated her to!” They
had parted an hour ago, since when, he believed, her
brother had arrived.
The slow-fading twilight still abode in the great
drawing-room as we entered it. The housekeeper had
told us that this apartment was rarely used, there
being a smaller and more convenient one for the same
needs. It seemed now, however, to be occupied in
my comrade's honor. At the farther end of it, rising
to the roof, like a ducal tomb in a cathedral, was a
great chimney-piece of chiselled white marble, yellowed
by time, in which a light fire was crackling.
Before the fire stood a small short man with his hands
behind him; near him stood Miss Searle, so transformed
by her dress that at first I scarcely knew her.
There was in our entrance and reception something
profoundly chilling and solemn. We moved in silence
up the long room. Mr. Searle advanced slowly a
dozen steps to meet us. His sister stood motionless.
I was conscious of her masking her visage with a
large white tinselled fan, and of her eyes, grave and
expanded, watching us intently over the top of it.
The master of Lockley Park grasped in silence the
proffered hand of his kinsman, and eyed him from
head to foot, suppressing, I think, a start of surprise
at his resemblance to Sir Joshua's portrait. “This is
a happy day!” he said. And then turning to me
with a bow, “My cousin's friend is my friend.” Miss
Searle lowered her fan.
The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle's appearance
less by half a head than that of his sister. The second
was the preternatural redness of his hair and beard.
They intermingled over his ears and surrounded his
head like a huge lurid nimbus. His face was pale
and attenuated, like the face of a scholar, a dilettante,
a man who lives in a library, bending over books and
prints and medals. At a distance it had an oddly
innocent and youthful look; but on a nearer view it
revealed a number of finely etched and scratched
wrinkles, of a singularly aged and cunning effect. It
was the complexion of a man of sixty. His nose was
arched and delicate, identical almost with the nose
of my friend. In harmony with the effect of his hair
was that of his eyes, which were large and deep-set,
with a sort of vulpine keenness and redness, but full
of temper and spirit. Imagine this physiognomy —
grave and solemn in aspect, grotesquely solemn, almost,
in spite of the bushy brightness in which it was
encased — set in motion by a smile which seemed to
whisper terribly, “I am the smile, the sole and official,
the grin to command,” and you will have an imperfect
notion of the remarkable presence of our host; something
better worth seeing and knowing, I fancied as I
covertly scrutinized him, than anything our excursion
had yet introduced us to. Of how thoroughly I had
entered into sympathy with my companion and how
I had small suspicion until, within the short five minutes
which preceded the announcement of dinner, I
distinctly perceived him place himself, morally speaking,
on the defensive. To neither of us was Mr. Searle,
as the Italians would say, sympathetic. I might have
fancied from her attitude that Miss Searle apprehended
our thoughts. A signal change had been wrought in
her since the morning; during the hour, indeed (as I
read in the light of the wondering glance he cast at
her), that had elapsed since her parting with her
cousin. She had not yet recovered from some great
agitation. Her face was pale and her eyes red with
weeping. These tragic betrayals gave an unexpected
dignity to her aspect, which was further enhanced by
the rare picturesqueness of her dress.
Whether it was taste or whether it was accident,
I know not; but Miss Searle, as she stood there,
half in the cool twilight, half in the arrested glow
of the fire as it spent itself in the vastness of its
marble cave, was a figure for a cunning painter.
She was dressed in the faded splendor of a beautiful
tissue of combined and blended silk and crape
of a tender sea-green color, festooned and garnished
and puffed into a massive bouillonnement; a piece
of millinery which, though it must have witnessed
a number of stately dinner, preserved still an
she wore an ancient web of the most precious and
venerable lace, and about her rounded throat a necklace
of heavy pearls. I went with her in to dinner,
and Mr. Searle, following with my friend, took his
arm (as the latter afterwards told me) and pretended
sportively to conduct him. As dinner proceeded, the
feeling grew within me that a drama had begun to
be played in which the three persons before me were
actors, each of a most exacting part. The part of my
friend, however, seemed the most heavily charged, and
I was filled with a strong desire that he should acquit
himself with honor. I seemed to see him summon
his shadowy faculties to obey his shadowy will.
The poor fellow sat playing solemnly at self-esteem.
With Miss Searle, credulous, passive, and pitying, he
had finally flung aside all vanity and propriety, and
shown her the bottom of his fantastic heart. But with
our host there might be no talking of nonsense nor
taking of liberties; there and then, if ever, sat a
double-distilled conservative, breathing the fumes of
hereditary privilege and security. For an hour, then,
I saw my poor friend turn faithfully about to speak
graciously of barren things. He was to prove himself
a sound American, so that his relish of this
elder world might seem purely disinterested. What
his kinsman had expected to find him, I know not;
unable to repress a shade of annoyance at finding
him likely to speak graciously at all. Mr. Searle
was not the man to show his hand, but I think his
best card had been a certain implicit confidence that
this exotic parasite would hardly have good manners.
Our host, with great decency, led the conversation
to America, talking of it rather as if it were some
fabled planet, alien to the British orbit, lately proclaimed
indeed to have the proportion of atmospheric
gases required to support animal life, but not,
save under cover of a liberal afterthought, to be
admitted into one's regular conception of things.
I, for my part, felt nothing but regret that the
spheric smoothness of his universe should be strained
to cracking by the intrusion of our square shoulders.
“I knew in a general way,” said Mr. Searle, “of
my having relations in America; but you know one
hardly realizes those things. I could hardly more
have imagined people of our blood there, than I
could have imagined being there myself. There
was a man I knew at college, a very odd fellow, a
nice fellow too; he and I were rather cronies; I
think he afterwards went to America; to the Argentine
Republic, I believe. Do you know the Argentine
Republic? What an extraordinary name, by
the way! And then, you know, there was that
went to America, but he never got there. He was
lost at sea. You look enough like him to have one
fancy he did get there, and that he has lived along
till now. If you are he, you 've not done a wise
thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name
behind him. There 's a ghost who comes sobbing
about the house every now and then, the ghost of
one against whom he wrought a great evil!”
“O brother!” cried Miss Searle, in simple horror.
“Of course you know nothing of such things,”
said Mr. Searle. “You 're too sound a sleeper to
hear the sobbing of ghosts.”
“I 'm sure I should like immensely to hear the
sobbing of a ghost!” said my friend, with the light
of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes.
“Why does it sob? Unfold the wondrous tale.”
Mr. Searle eyed his audience for a moment gaugingly;
and then, as the French say, se receuillit, as if
he were measuring his own imaginative force.
He wished to do justice to his theme. With the
five finger-nails of his left hand nervously playing
against the tinkling crystal of his wineglass, and his
bright eye telling of a gleeful sense that, small and
grotesque as he sat there, he was for the moment
profoundly impressive, he distilled into our untutored
minds the sombre legend of his house. “Mr. Clement
talents but a weak disposition. His mother was left
a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was
the older and the more promising. She educated him
with the utmost fondness and care. Of course, when
he came to manhood she wished him to marry well.
His means were quite sufficient to enable him to overlook
the want of means in his wife; and Mrs. Searle
selected a young lady who possessed, as she conceived,
every good gift save a fortune, — a fine, proud, handsome
girl, the daughter of an old friend, — an old
lover, I fancy, of her own. Clement, however, as it
appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was as yet
unprepared to choose. The young lady discharged upon
him in vain the battery of her attractions; in vain
his mother urged her cause. Clement remained cold,
insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle possessed a native
force of which in its feminine branch the family seems
to have lost the trick. A proud, passionate, imperious
woman, she had had great cares and a number of law-suits;
they had given her a great will. She suspected
that her son's affections were lodged elsewhere, and
lodged amiss. Irritated by his stubborn defiance of
her wishes, she persisted in her urgency. The more
she watched him the more she believed that he loved
in secret. If he loved in secret, of course he loved
beneath him. He went about sombre, sullen, and
angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady
of her choice — who, by the way, seems to have been
no shrinking blossom — to stay in the house. A
stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if
she did so, he would leave the country and sail for
America. She probably disbelieved him; she knew
him to be weak, but she overrated his weakness. At
all events, the fair rejected arrived and Clement departed.
On a dark December day he took ship at
Southampton. The two women, desperate with rage
and sorrow, sat alone in this great house, mingling
their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on
Christmas eve, in the midst of a great snow-storm,
long famous in the country, there came to them a
mighty quickening of their bitterness. A young woman,
soaked and chilled by the storm, gained entrance
to the house and made her way into the presence of
the mistress and her guest. She poured out her tale.
She was a poor curate's daughter of Hereford. Clement
Searle had loved her; loved her all too well. She
had been turned out in wrath from her father's house;
his mother, at least, might pity her; if not for herself,
then for the child she was soon to bring forth. The
poor girl had been a second time too trustful. The
women, in scorn, in horror, with blows, possibly, turned
her forth again into the storm. In the storm she
as you know, perished in that hard winter weather at
sea; the news came to his mother late, but soon
enough. We are haunted by the curate's daughter!”
There was a pause of some moments. “Ah, well
we may be!” said Miss Searle, with a great pity.
Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. “Of course you
know,” — and suddenly he began to blush violently, —
“I should be sorry to claim any identity with my
faithless namesake, poor fellow. But I shall be hugely
tickled if this poor ghost should be deceived by my
resemblance and mistake me for her cruel lover.
She 's welcome to the comfort of it. What one can do
in the case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost
haunt a ghost? I am a ghost!”
Mr. Searle stared a moment, and then smiling
superbly: “I could almost believe you are!” he
said.
“O brother — cousin!” cried Miss Searle, with the
gentlest, yet most appealing dignity, “how can you
talk so horribly?”
This horrible talk, however, evidently possessed a
potent magic for my friend; and his imagination,
chilled for a while by the frigid contact of his kinsman,
began to glow again with its earlier fire. From
this moment he ceased to steer his cockle-shell, to
care what he said or how he said it, so long as he
about him. As he talked I ceased even mentally
to protest. I have wondered since that I should
not have resented the exhibition of so rank and
florid an egotism. But a great frankness for the
time makes its own law, and a great passion its
own channel. There was, moreover, an immense
sweetness in the manner of my friend's speech.
Free alike from either adulation or envy, the very
soul of it was a divine apprehension, an imaginative
mastery, free as the flight of Ariel, of the
poetry of his companions' situation and of the contrasted
prosiness of their attitude.
“How does the look of age come?” he demanded,
at dessert. “Does it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded,
unmeasured? Or do you woo it and set
baits and traps for it, and watch it like the dawning
brownness of a meerschaum pipe, and nail it
down when it appears, just where it peeps out, and
light a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to
it daily? Or do you forbid it and fight it and
resist it, and yet feel it settling and deepening about
you, as irresistible as fate?”
“What the deuce is the man talking about?”
said the smile of our host.
“I found a gray hair this morning,” said Miss
Searle.
“Good heavens! I hope you respected it,” cried
Searle.
“I looked at it for a long time in my little
glass,” said his cousin, simply.
“Miss Searle, for many years to come, can afford
to be amused at gray hairs,” I said.
“Ten years hence I shall be forty-three,” she answered.
“That 's my age,” said Searle. “If I had only
come here ten years ago! I should have had more
time to enjoy the feast, but I should have had less
of an appetite. I needed to get famished for it.”
“Why did you wait for the starving point?” asked
Mr. Searle. “To think of these ten years that we
might have been enjoying you!” And at the thought
of these wasted ten years Mr. Searle broke into a violent
nervous laugh.
“I always had a notion, — a stupid, vulgar notion,
if there ever was one, — that to come abroad
properly one ought to have a pot of money. My
pot was too nearly empty. At last I came with
my empty pot!”
Mr. Searle coughed with an air of hesitation.
“You 're a — you 're in limited circumstances?”
My friend apparently was vastly tickled to have
his bleak situation called by so soft a name. “Limited
circumstances!” he cried with a long, light
laugh; “I 'm in no circumstances at all!”
“Upon my word!” murmured Mr. Searle, with
an air of being divided between his sense of the
indecency and his sense of the rarity of a gentleman
taking just that tone about his affairs. “Well
— well — well!” he added, in a voice which might
have meant everything or nothing; and proceeded,
with a twinkle in his eye, to finish a glass of wine.
His sparkling eye, as he drank, encountered mine
over the top of his glass, and, for a moment, we
exchanged a long deep glance, — a glance so keen
as to leave a slight embarrassment on the face of
each. “And you,” said Mr. Searle, by way of carrying
it off, “how about your circumstances?”
“O, his,” said my friend, “his are unlimited! He
could buy up Lockley Park!” He had drunk, I
think, a rather greater number of glasses of port —
I admit that the port was infinitely drinkable —
than was to have been desired in the interest of perfect
self-control. He was rapidly drifting beyond
any tacit dissuasion of mine. A certain feverish
harshness in his glance and voice warned me that
to attempt to direct him would simply irritate him.
As we rose from the table he caught my troubled
look. Passing his arm for a moment into mine,
“This is the great night!” he whispered. “The night
of fatality, the night of destiny!”
Mr. Searle had caused the whole lower region of
to be placed in convenient and effective positions.
Such a marshalled wealth of ancient candlesticks and
flambeaux I had never beheld. Niched against the
dark panellings, casting great luminous circles upon
the pendent stiffness of sombre tapestries, enhancing
and completing with admirable effect the vastness
and mystery of the ancient house, they seemed to
people the great rooms, as our little group passed
slowly from one to another, with a dim, expectant
presence. We had a delightful hour of it. Mr. Searle
at once assumed the part of cicerone, and — I had
not hitherto done him justice — Mr. Searle became
agreeable. While I lingered behind with Miss Searle,
he walked in advance with his kinsman. It was as
if he had said, “Well, if you want the old place,
you shall have it — metaphysically!” To speak vulgarly,
he rubbed it in. Carrying a great silver candlestick
in his left hand, he raised it and lowered it
and cast the light hither and thither, upon pictures
and hangings and bits of carving and a hundred
lurking architectural treasures. Mr. Searle knew his
house. He hinted at innumerable traditions and
memories, and evoked with a very pretty wit the
figures of its earlier occupants. He told a dozen
anecdotes with an almost reverential gravity and neatness.
His companion attended, with a sort of brooding
not wholly silent.
“I suppose that by this time,” I said, “you and
your cousin are almost old friends.”
She trifled a moment with her fan, and then raising
her homely candid gaze: “Old friends, and at the
same time strangely new! My cousin, — my cousin,”
— and her voice lingered on the word, — “it seems
so strange to call him my cousin, after thinking
these many years that I had no cousin! He 's a
most singular man.”
“It 's not so much he as his circumstances that
are singular,” I ventured to say.
“I 'm so sorry for his circumstances. I wish I
could help him in some way. He interests me so
much.” And here Miss Searle gave a rich, mellow
sigh. “I wish I had known him a long time ago. He
told me that he is but the shadow of what he was.”
I wondered whether Searle had been consciously
playing upon the fancy of this gentle creature. If
he had, I believed he had gained his point. But in
fact, his position had become to my sense so charged
with opposing forces, that I hardly ventured wholly
to rejoice. “His better self just now,” I said, “seems
again to be taking shape. It will have been a good
deed on your part, Miss Searle, if you help to restore
him to soundness and serenity.”
“Ah, what can I do?”
“Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him
love you! You see in him now, doubtless, much to
pity and to wonder at. But let him simply enjoy
awhile the grateful sense of your nearness and dearness.
He will be a better and stronger man for it,
and then you can love him, you can respect him
without restriction.”
Miss Searle listened with a puzzled tenderness of
gaze. “It 's a hard part for poor me to play!”
Her almost infantine gentleness left me no choice
but to be absolutely frank. “Did you ever play any
part at all?” I asked.
Her eyes met mine, wonderingly; she blushed, as
with a sudden sense of my meaning. “Never! I
think I have hardly lived.”
“You 've begun now, perhaps. You have begun to
care for something outside the narrow circle of habit
and duty. (Excuse me if I am rather too outspoken:
you know I 'm a foreigner.) It 's a great moment:
I wish you joy!”
“I could almost fancy you are laughing at me.
I feel more trouble than joy.”
“Why do you feel trouble?”
She paused, with her eyes fixed on our two companions.
“My cousin's arrival,” she said at last, “is
a great disturbance.”
“You mean that you did wrong in recognizing
him? In that case the fault is mine. He had no
intention of giving you the opportunity.”
“I did wrong, after a fashion! But I can't find
it in my heart to regret it. I never shall regret it!
I did what I thought proper. Heaven forgive me!”
“Heaven bless you, Miss Searle! Is any harm to
come of it? I did the evil; let me bear the brunt!”
She shook her head gravely. “You don't know
my brother!”
“The sooner I do know him, then, the better!”
And hereupon I felt a dull irritation which had been
gathering force for more than hour explode into sudden
wrath. “What on earth is your brother?” I
demanded. She turned away. “Are you afraid of
him?” I asked.
She gave me a tearful sidelong glance. “He 's
looking at me!” she murmured.
I looked at him. He was standing with his back
to us, holding a large Venetian hand-mirror, framed
in rococo silver, which he had taken from a shelf of
antiquities, in just such a position that he caught
the reflection of his sister's person. Shall I confess
it? Something in this performance so tickled my
sense of the picturesque, that it was with a sort of
blunted anger that I muttered, “The sneak!” Yet
I felt passion enough to urge me forward. It seemed
watched. I should not be watched for nothing!
“Miss Searle,” I said, insisting upon her attention,
“promise me something.”
She turned upon me with a start and the glance
of one appealing from some great pain. “O, don't
ask me!” she cried. It was as if she were standing
on the verge of some sudden lapse of familiar ground
and had been summoned to make a leap. I felt
that retreat was impossible, and that it was the greater
kindness to beckon her forward.
“Promise me,” I repeated.
Still with her eyes she protested. “O, dreadful
day!” she cried, at last.
“Promise me to let him speak to you, if he should
ask you, any wish you may suspect on your brother's
part notwithstanding.”
She colored deeply. “You mean,” she said,—“you
mean that he — has something particular to say.”
“Something most particular!”
“Poor cousin!”
I gave her a deeply questioning look. “Well,
poor cousin! But promise me.”
“I promise,” she said, and moved away across the
long room and out of the door.
“You 're in time to hear the most delightful
story!” said my friend, as I rejoined the two gentlemen.
of a lady in the dress of Queen Anne's time,
with her ill-painted flesh-tints showing livid in the
candlelight against her dark drapery and background.
“This is Mistress Margaret Searle, — a sort of Beatrix
Esmond, — who did as she pleased. She married a
paltry Frenchman, a penniless fiddler, in the teeth
of her whole family. Fair Margaret, my compliments!
Upon my soul, she looks like Miss Searle! Pray
go on. What came of it all?”
Mr. Searle looked at his kinsman for a moment with
an air of distaste for his boisterous homage, and of pity
for his crude imagination. Then resuming, with a
very effective dryness of tone: “I found a year ago, in
a box of very old papers, a letter from Mistress Margaret
to Cynthia Searle, her elder sister. It was dated
from Paris and dreadfully ill-spelled. It contained a
most passionate appeal for — a — for pecuniary assistance.
She had just been confined, she was starving,
and neglected by her husband; she cursed the day she
left England. It was a most dismal effusion. I never
heard that she found means to return.”
“So much for marrying a Frenchman!” I said, sententiously.
Mr. Searle was silent for some moments. “This was
the first,” he said, finally, “and the last of the family
who has been so d—d un-English!”
“Does Miss Searle know her history?” asked my
friend, staring at the rounded whiteness of the lady's
heavy cheek.
“Miss Searle knows nothing!” said our host, with
zeal.
This utterance seemed to kindle in my friend a generous
opposing zeal. “She shall know at least the tale
of Mistress Margaret,” he cried, and walked rapidly
away in search of her.
Mr. Searle and I pursued our march through the
lighted rooms. “You've found a cousin,” I said, “with
a vengeance.”
“Ah, a vengeance?” said my host, stiffly.
“I mean that he takes as keen an interest in your
annals and possessions as yourself.”
“O, exactly so!” and Mr. Searle burst into resounding
laughter. “He tells me,” he resumed, in a moment,
“that he is an invalid. I should never have
fancied it.”
“Within the past few hours,” I said, “he 's a changed
man. Your place and your kindness have refreshed
him immensely.”
Mr. Searle uttered the little shapeless ejaculation
with which many an Englishman is apt to announce
the concussion of any especial courtesy of speech. He
bent his eyes on the floor frowningly, and then, to my
surprise, he suddenly stopped and looked at me with a
was quite prepared to assent; but he went on, with a
sort of fury of frankness, as if it was the first time in
his life that he had been prompted to expound himself,
as if the process was mightily unpleasant to him and
he was hurrying through it as a task. “An honest
man, mind you! I know nothing about Mr. Clement
Searle! I never expected to see him. He has been to
me a — a — ” And here Mr. Searle paused to select
a word which should vividly enough express what, for
good or for ill, his kinsman had been to him. “He
has been to me an amazement! I have no doubt he is
a most amiable man! You 'll not deny, however, that
he 's a very odd style of person. I 'm sorry he 's ill!
I 'm sorry he 's poor! He 's my fiftieth cousin! Well
and good! I 'm an honest man. He shall not have it
to say that he was not received at my house.”
“He, too, thank heaven! is an honest man!” I said,
smiling.
“Why the deuce, then,” cried Mr. Searle, turning
almost fiercely upon me, “has he established this
underhand claim to my property?”
This startling utterance flashed backward a gleam of
light upon the demeanor of our host and the suppressed
agitation of his sister. In an instant the jealous soul
of the unhappy gentleman revealed itself. For a moment
I was so amazed and scandalized at the directness
as he had spoken, Mr. Searle appeared to feel that he
had struck too hard a blow. “Excuse me, sir,” he hurried
on, “if I speak of this matter with heat. But I
have seldom suffered so grievous a shock as on learning,
as I learned this morning from my solicitor, the
monstrous proceedings of Mr. Clement Searle. Great
heaven, sir, for what does the man take me? He pretends
to the Lord knows what fantastic passion for my
place. Let him respect it, then. Let him, with his
tawdry parade of imagination, imagine a tithe of what
I feel. I love my estate; it 's my passion, my life,
myself! Am I to make a great hole in it for a beggarly
foreigner, a man without means, without proof,
a stranger, an adventurer, a Bohemian? I thought
America boasted that she had land for all men! Upon
my soul, sir, I have never been so shocked in my life.”
I paused for some moments before speaking, to allow
his passion fully to expend itself and to flicker up
again if it chose; for on my own part it seemed well
that I should answer him once for all. “Your really
absurd apprehensions, Mr. Searle,” I said at last, —
“your terrors, I may call them, — have fairly overmastered
your common-sense. You are attacking a
man of straw, a creature of base illusion; though I 'm
sadly afraid you have wounded a man of spirit and of
conscience. Either my friend has no valid claim on
or he has a valid claim — ”
Mr. Searle seized my arm and glared at me, as I
may say; his pale face paler still with the horror of
my suggestion, his great keen eyes flashing, and his
flamboyant hair erect and quivering.
“A valid claim!” he whispered. “Let him try it!”
We had emerged into the great hall of the mansion
and stood facing the main doorway. The door stood
open into the porch, through whose stone archway I
saw the garden glittering in the blue light of a full
moon. As Mr. Searle uttered the words I have just
repeated, I beheld my companion come slowly up into
the porch from without, bareheaded, bright in the
outer moonlight, dark then in the shadow of the
archway, and bright again in the lamplight on the
threshold of the hall. As he crossed the threshold
the butler made his appearance at the head of the
staircase on our left, faltered visibly a moment on
seeing Mr. Searle; but then, perceiving my friend, he
gravely descended. He bore in his hand a small
plated salver. On the salver, gleaming in the light
of the suspended lamp, lay a folded note. Clement
Searle came forward, staring a little and startled, I
think, by some fine sense of a near explosion. The
butler applied the match. He advanced toward my
friend, extending salver and note. Mr. Searle made a
“Tottenham!” he shouted, in a strident voice.
“Yes, sir!” said Tottenham, halting.
“Stand where you are. For whom is that note?”
“For Mr. Clement Searle,” said the butler, staring
straight before him as if to discredit a suspicion of his
having read the direction.
“Who gave it to you?”
“Mrs. Horridge, sir.” (The housekeeper.)
“Who gave it Mrs. Horridge?”
There was on Tottenham's part just an infinitesimal
pause before replying.
“My dear sir,” broke in Searle, completely sobered
by the sense of violated courtesy, “is n't that rather
my business?”
“What happens in my house is my business; and
mighty strange things seem to be happening.” Mr.
Searle had become exasperated to that point that, a
rare thing for an Englishman, he compromised himself
before a servant.
“Bring me the note!” he cried. The butler
obeyed.
“Really, this is too much!” cried my companion,
affronted and helpless.
I was disgusted. Before Mr. Searle had time to
take the note, I possessed myself of it. “If you have
no regard for your sister,” I said, “let a stranger, at
into a dozen pieces.
“In the name of decency,” cried Searle, “what does
this horrid business mean?”
Mr. Searle was about to break out upon him; but
at this moment his sister appeared on the staircase,
summoned evidently by our high-pitched and angry
voices. She had exchanged her dinner-dress for
a dark dressing-gown, removed her ornaments, and
begun to disarrange her hair, a heavy tress of which
escaped from the comb. She hurried downward, with
a pale, questioning face. Feeling distinctly that, for
ourselves, immediate departure was in the air, and
divining Mr. Tottenham to be a butler of remarkable
intuitions and extreme celerity, I seized the opportunity
to request him, sotto voce, to send a carriage
to the door without delay. “And put up our things,”
I added.
Our host rushed at his sister and seized the white
wrist which escaped from the loose sleeve of her
dress. “What was in that note?” he demanded.
Miss Searle looked first at its scattered fragments
and then at her cousin. “Did you read it?” she asked.
“No, but I thank you for it!” said Searle.
Her eyes for an instant communed brightly with
his own; then she transferred them to her brother's
face, where the light went out of them and left a
to find it: he flushed crimson with rage and the sense
of his unhandsomeness, and flung her away. “You 're
a child!” he cried. “Go to bed.”
In poor Searle's face as well the gathered serenity
was twisted into a sickened frown, and the reflected
brightness of his happy day turned to blank confusion.
“Have I been dealing these three hours with a
madman?” he asked plaintively.
“A madman, yes, if you will! A man mad with
the love of his home and the sense of its stability.
I have held my tongue till now, but you have been
too much for me. Who are you, what are you?
From what paradise of fools do you come, that you
fancy I shall cut off a piece of my land, my home,
my heart, to toss to you? Forsooth, I shall share
my land with you? Prove your infernal claim!
There is n't that in it!” And he kicked one of the
bits of paper on the floor.
Searle received this broadside gaping. Then turning
away, he went and seated himself on a bench
against the wall and rubbed his forehead amazedly.
I looked at my watch, and listened for the wheels of
our carriage.
Mr. Searle went on. “Was n't it enough that you
should have practised against my property? Need
you have come into my very house to practise against
my sister?”
Searle put his two hands to his face. “Oh, oh, oh!”
he softly roared.
Miss Searle crossed rapidly and dropped on her
knees at his side.
“Go to bed, you fool!” shrieked her brother.
“Dear cousin,” said Miss Searle, “it 's cruel that
you are to have to think of us so!”
“O, I shall think of you!” he said. And he laid
a hand on her head.
“I believe you have done nothing wrong!” she
murmured.
“I 've done what I could,” her brother pursued.
“But it 's arrant folly to pretend to friendship when
this abomination lies between us. You were welcome
to my meat and my wine, but I wonder you
could swallow them. The sight spoiled my appetite!”
cried the furious little man, with a laugh.
“Proceed with your case! My people in London are
instructed and prepared.”
“I have a fancy,” I said to Searle, “that your
case has vastly improved since you gave it up.”
“Oho! you don't feign ignorance, then?” and he
shook his flaming chevelure at me. “It is very kind
of you to give it up!” And he laughed resoundingly.
“Perhaps you will also give up my sister!”
Searle sat in his chair in a species of collapse,
staring at his adversary. “O miserable man!” he
friends!”
“Boh! you imbecile!” cried our host.
Searle seemed not to hear him. “Am I seriously
expected,” he pursued, slowly and painfully, —
“am I seriously expected — to — to sit here and defend
myself — to prove I have done nothing wrong?
Think what you please.” And he rose, with an effort,
to his feet. “I know what you think!” he
added, to Miss Searle.
The carriage wheels resounded on the gravel, and
at the same moment the footman descended with
our two portmanteaus. Mr. Tottenham followed him
with our hats and coats.
“Good God!” cried Mr. Searle; “you are not going
away!” This ejaculation, under the circumstances,
had a grand comicality which prompted me to
violent laughter. “Bless my soul!” he added; “of
course you are going.”
“It 's perhaps well,” said Miss Searle, with a great
effort, inexpressibly touching in one for whom great
efforts were visibly new and strange, “that I should
tell you what my poor little note contained.”
“That matter of your note, madam,” said her brother,
“you and I will settle together!”
“Let me imagine its contents,” said Searle.
“Ah! they have been too much imagined!” she
I knew something painful was coming.”
Searle took his hat. “The pains and the pleasures
of this day,” he said to his kinsman, “I shall equally
never forget. Knowing you,” and he offered his hand
to Miss Searle, “has been the pleasure of pleasures.
I hoped something more was to come of it.”
“A deal too much has come of it!” cried our host,
irrepressibly.
Searle looked at him mildly, almost benignantly,
from head to foot; and then closing his eyes with
an air of sudden physical distress: “I 'm afraid so!
I can't stand more of this.” I gave him my arm,
and crossed the threshold. As we passed out I
heard Miss Searle burst into a torrent of sobs.
“We shall hear from each other yet, I take it!”
cried her brother, harassing our retreat.
Searle stopped and turned round on him sharply,
almost fiercely. “O ridiculous man!” he cried.
“Do you mean to say you shall not prosecute?”
screamed the other. “I shall force you to prosecute!
I shall drag you into court, and you shall be
beaten — beaten — beaten!” And this soft vocable
continued to ring in our ears as we drove away.
We drove, of course, to the little wayside inn
whence we had departed in the morning so unencumbered,
in all broad England, with either enemies
along, seemed utterly overwhelmed and exhausted.
“What a dream!” he murmured stupidly. “What
an awakening! What a long, long day! What a
hideous scene! Poor me! Poor woman!” When
we had resumed possession of our two little neighboring
rooms, I asked him if Miss Searle's note had
been the result of anything that had passed between
them on his going to rejoin her. “I found her on
the terrace, he said, “walking a restless walk in the
moonlight. I was greatly excited; I hardly know
what I said. I asked her, I think, if she knew the
story of Margaret Searle. She seemed frightened and
troubled, and she used just the words her brother
had used, `I know nothing.' For the moment, somehow,
I felt as a man drunk. I stood before her and
told her, with great emphasis, how sweet Margaret
Searle had married a beggarly foreigner, in obedience
to her heart and in defiance of her family. As
I talked the sheeted moonlight seemed to close about
us, and we stood in a dream, in a solitude, in a romance.
She grew younger, fairer, more gracious. I
trembled with a divine loquacity. Before I knew it
I had gone far. I was taking her hand and calling
her `Margaret!' She had said that it was impossible;
that she could do nothing; that she was a fool,
a child, a slave. Then, with a sudden huge conviction,
exists, then?' she said. `It exists,' I answered, `but
I have foregone it. Be generous! Pay it from your
heart!' For an instant her face was radiant. `If
I marry you,' she cried, `it will repair the trouble.'
`In our marriage,' I affirmed, `the trouble will melt
away like a rain-drop in the ocean.' `Our marriage!'
she repeated, wonderingly; and the deep, deep ring
of her voice seemed to shatter the crystal walls of
our illusion. `I must think, I must think!' she
said; and she hurried away with her face in her
hands. I walked up and down the terrace for some
moments, and then came in and met you. This is
the only witchcraft I have used!”
The poor fellow was at once so excited and so exhausted
by the day's events, that I fancied he would
get little sleep. Conscious, on my own part, of a
stubborn wakefulness, I but partly undressed, set my
fire a blazing, and sat down to do some writing. I
heard the great clock in the little parlor below strike
twelve, one, half past one. Just as the vibration of
this last stroke was dying on the air the door of communication
into Searle's room was flung open, and my
companion stood on the threshold, pale as a corpse, in
his nightshirt, standing like a phantom against the
darkness behind him. “Look at me!” he said, in a
low voice, “touch me, embrace me, revere me! You
see a man who has seen a ghost!”
“Great heaven, what do you mean?”
“Write it down!” he went on. “There, take your
pen. Put it into dreadful words. Make it of all
ghost-stories the ghostliest, the truest! How do I
look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red? Am
I speaking English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?”
I confess, there came upon me, by contact, a great
supernatural shock. I shall always feel that I, too,
have seen a ghost. My first movement — I can't
smile at it even now — was to spring to the door,
close it with a great blow, and then turn the key upon
the gaping blackness from which Searle had emerged.
I seized his two hands; they were wet with perspiration.
I pushed my chair to the fire and forced him to
sit down in it. I kneeled down before him and held
his hands as firmly as possible. They trembled and
quivered; his eyes were fixed, save that the pupil
dilated and contracted with extraordinary force. I
asked no questions, but waited with my heart in my
throat. At last he spoke. “I 'm not frightened, but
I 'm — O, EXCITED! This is life! This is living!
My nerves — my heart — my brain! They are throbbing
with the wildness of a myriad lives! Do you
feel it? Do you tingle? Are you hot? Are you
cold? Hold me tight — tight — tight! I shall tremble
away into waves — waves — waves, and know the
moment and then went on: “A woman — as clear as
that candle. — No, far clearer! In a blue dress, with
a black mantle on her head, and a little black muff.
Young, dreadfully pretty, pale and ill, with the sadness
of all the women who ever loved and suffered pleading
and accusing in her dead dark eyes. God knows I
never did any such thing! But she took me for my
elder, for the other Clement. She came to me here as
she would have come to me there. She wrung her
hands and spoke to me. `Marry me!' she moaned;
`marry me and right me!' I sat up in bed just as I
sit here, looked at her, heard her, — heard her voice
melt away, watched her figure fade away. Heaven
and earth! Here I am!”
I made no attempt either to explain my friend's
vision or to discredit it. It is enough that I felt for
the hour the irresistible contagion of his own agitation.
On the whole, I think my own vision was the more
interesting of the two. He beheld but the transient,
irresponsible spectre: I beheld the human subject,
hot from the spectral presence. Nevertheless, I soon
recovered my wits sufficiently to feel the necessity of
guarding my friend's health against the evil results of
excitement and exposure. It was tacitly established
that, for the night, he was not to return to his
room; and I soon made him fairly comfortable in his
chill, I removed my bedding and wrapped him about
with multitudinous blankets and counterpanes. I
had no nerves either for writing or sleep; so I put
out my lights, renewed the fire, and sat down on the
opposite side of the hearth. I found a kind of solemn
entertainment in watching my friend. Silent, swathed
and muffled to his chin, he sat rigid and erect with
the dignity of his great adventure. For the most
part his eyes were closed; though from time to time
he would open them with a vast steady expansion
and gaze unblinking into the firelight, as if he again
beheld, without terror, the image of that blighted maid.
With his cadaverous, emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles,
intensified by the upward glow from the hearth,
his drooping black mustache, his transcendent gravity,
and a certain high fantastical air in the flickering alternations
of his brow, he looked like the vision-haunted
knight of La Mancha, nursed by the Duke and Duchess.
The night passed wholly without speech. Towards
its close I slept for half an hour. When I awoke
the awakened birds had begun to twitter. Searle sat
unperturbed, staring at me. We exchanged a long
look; I felt with a pang that his glittering eyes had
tasted their last of natural sleep. “How is it? are
you comfortable?” I asked.
He gazed for some time without replying. Then
with pauses between his words, as if an inner voice
were slowly prompting him. “You asked me, when
you first knew me, what I was. `Nothing,' I said, —
`nothing.' Nothing I have always deemed myself.
But I have wronged myself. I 'm a personage! I 'm
rare among men! I 'm a haunted man!”
Sleep had passed out of his eyes: I felt with a
deeper pang that perfect sanity had passed out of his
voice. From this moment I prepared myself for the
worst. There was in my friend, however, such an
essential gentleness and conservative patience, that to
persons surrounding him the worst was likely to come
without hurry or violence. He had so confirmed a
habit of good manners that, at the core of reason, the
process of disorder might have been long at work
without finding an issue. As morning began fully
to dawn upon us, I brought our grotesque vigil to an
end. Searle appeared so weak that I gave him my
hands to help him to rise from his chair; he retained
them for some moments after rising to his feet, from
an apparent inability to keep his balance. “Well,”
he said, “I 've seen one ghost, but I doubt of my living
to see another. I shall soon be myself as brave a
ghost as the best of them. I shall haunt Mr. Searle!
It can only mean one thing, — my near, dear death.”
On my proposing breakfast, “This shall be my
a phial of morphine. He took a strong dose and
went to bed. At noon I found him on foot again,
dressed, shaved, and apparently refreshed. “Poor
fellow!” he said, “you have got more than you bargained
for, — a ghost-encumbered comrade. But it
won't be for long.” It immediately became a question,
of course, whither we should now direct our steps.
“As I have so little time,” said Searle, “I should
like to see the best, the best alone.” I answered that,
either for time or eternity, I had imagined Oxford to
be the best thing in England; and for Oxford in the
course of an hour we accordingly departed.
Of Oxford I feel small vocation to speak in detail.
It must long remain for an American one of the supreme
gratifications of travel. The impression it produces,
the emotions it stirs, in an American mind, are
too large and various to be compassed by words. It
seems to embody with undreamed completeness a kind
of dim and sacred ideal of the Western intellect, — a
scholastic city, an appointed home of contemplation.
No other spot in Europe, I imagine, extorts from our
barbarous hearts so passionate an admiration. A finer
pen than mine must enumerate the splendid devices by
which it performs this great office; I can bear testimony
only to the dominant tone of its effect. Passing
through the various streets in which the obverse longitude
antique stillness, you feel this to be the most dignified
of towns. Over all, through all, the great corporate
fact of the University prevails and penetrates, like
some steady bass in a symphony of lighter chords, like
the mediæval and mystical presence of the Empire in
the linked dispersion of lesser states. The plain Gothic
of the long street-fronts of the colleges — blessed
seraglios of culture and leisure — irritate the fancy
like the blank harem-walls of Eastern towns. Within
their arching portals, however, you perceive more sacred
and sunless courts, and the dark verdure grateful
and restful to bookish eyes. The gray-green quadrangles
stand forever open with a noble and trustful hospitality.
The seat of the humanities is stronger in the
admonitory shadow of her great name than in a marshalled
host of wardens and beadles. Directly after
our arrival my friend and I strolled eagerly forth in
the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge
which passes beneath the walls of Magdalen and saw
the eight-spired tower, embossed with its slender shaftings,
rise in temperate beauty, — the perfect prose of
Gothic, — wooing the eyes to the sky, as it was slowly
drained of day. We entered the little monkish doorway
and stood in that dim, fantastic outer court, made
narrow by the dominant presence of the great tower,
in which the heart beats faster, and the swallows niche
in Oxford. We passed thence into the great
cloister, and studied the little sculptured monsters
along the entablature of the arcade. I was pleased to
see that Searle became extremely interested; but I
very soon began to fear that the influence of the place
would prove too potent for his unbalanced imagination.
I may say that from this time forward, with my unhappy
friend, I found it hard to distinguish between
the play of fancy and the labor of thought, and to fix
the balance between perception and illusion. He had
already taken a fancy to confound his identity with
that of the earlier Clement Searle; he now began to
speak almost wholly as from the imagined consciousness
of his old-time kinsman.
“This was my college, you know,” he said, “the noblest
in all Oxford. How often I have paced this gentle
cloister, side by side with a friend of the hour! My
friends are all dead, but many a young fellow as we
meet him, dark or fair, tall or short, reminds me of
them. Even Oxford, they say, feels about its massive
base the murmurs of the tide of time; there are things
eliminated, things insinuated! Mine was ancient Oxford,
— the fine old haunt of rank abuses, of precedent
and privilege. What cared I, who was a perfect gentleman,
with my pockets full of money? I had an
allowance of two thousand a year.”
It became evident to me, on the following day, that
his strength had begun to ebb, and that he was unequal
to the labor of regular sight-seeing. He read my
apprehension in my eyes, and took pains to assure me
that I was right. “I am going down hill. Thank
heaven it 's an easy slope, coated with English turf
and with an English churchyard at the foot.” The
almost hysterical emotion produced by our adventure
at Lockley Park had given place to a broad, calm satisfaction,
in which the scene around us was reflected
as in the depths of a lucid lake. We took an afternoon
walk through Christ-Church Meadow, and at the
river-bank procured a boat, which I pulled up the
stream to Iffley and to the slanting woods of Nuneham,
— the sweetest, flattest, reediest stream-side landscape
that the heart need demand. Here, of course,
we encountered in hundreds the mighty lads of England,
clad in white flannel and blue, immense, fair-haired,
magnificent in their youth, lounging down the
current in their idle punts, in friendly couples or in
solitude possibly portentous of scholastic honors; or
pulling in straining crews and hoarsely exhorted from
the near bank. When, in conjunction with all this
magnificent sport, you think of the verdant quietude
and the silvery sanctities of the college gardens, you
cannot but consider that the youth of England have
their porridge well salted. As my companion found
three successive days to these scholastic domains, and
spent long hours sitting in their greenest places. They
seemed to us the fairest things in England and the
ripest and sweetest fruits of the English system.
Locked in their antique verdure, guarded (as in the
case of New College) by gentle battlements of silver-gray,
outshouldering the matted leafage of centenary
vines, filled with perfumes and privacy and memories,
with students lounging bookishly on the turf (as if
tenderly to spare it the pressure of their boot-heels),
and with the great conservative presence of the college
front appealing gravely from the restless outer world,
they seem places to lie down on the grass in forever,
in the happy faith that life is all a vast old English
garden, and time an endless English afternoon. This
charmed seclusion was especially grateful to my friend,
and his sense of it reached its climax, I remember, on
the last afternoon of our three, as we sat dreaming in
the spacious garden of St. John's. The long college
façade here, perhaps, broods over the lawn with a more
effective air of property than elsewhere. Searle fell
into unceasing talk and exhaled his swarming impressions
with a tender felicity, compounded of the oddest
mixture of wisdom and folly. Every student who
passed us was the subject of an extemporized romance,
and every feature of the place the theme of a lyric
rhapsody.
“Is n't it all,” he demanded, “a delightful lie?
Might n't one fancy this the very central point of the
world's heart, where all the echoes of the world's life
arrive only to falter and die? Listen! The air is thick
with arrested voices. It is well there should be such
places, shaped in the interest of factitious needs;
framed to minister to the book-begotten longing for a
medium in which one may dream unwaked, and believe
unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all is well
in this weary world, all perfect and rounded, mellow
and complete in this sphere of the pitiful unachieved
and the dreadful uncommenced. The world 's made!
Work 's over! Now for leisure! England 's safe!
Now for Theocritus and Horace, for lawn and sky!
What a sense it all gives one of the composite life of
England, and how essential a factor of the educated,
British consciousness one omits in not thinking of Oxford!
Thank heaven they had the wit to send me here
in the other time. I 'm not much with it, perhaps; but
what should I have been without it? The misty spires
and towers of Oxford seen far off on the level have been
all these years one of the constant things of memory.
Seriously, what does Oxford do for these people? Are
they wiser, gentler, richer, deeper? At moments when
its massive influence surges into my mind like a tidal
wave, I take it as a sort of affront to my dignity. My
soul reverts to the naked background of our own education,
parts. I assent to it all with a sort of desperate calmness;
I bow to it with a dogged pride. We are nursed
at the opposite pole. Naked come we into a naked
world. There is a certain grandeur in the absence of a
mise en scène, a certain heroic strain in those young
imaginations of the West, which find nothing made to
their hands, which have to concoct their own mysteries,
and raise high into our morning air, with a ringing
hammer and nails, the castles in which they dwell.
Noblesse oblige: Oxford obliges. What a horrible thing
not to respond to such obligations. If you pay the
pious debt to the last farthing of interest, you may
go through life with her blessing; but if you let it
stand unhonored, you are a worse barbarian than we!
But for better or worse, in a myriad private hearts,
think how she must be loved! How the youthful sentiment
of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her!
Think of the young lives now taking color in her corridors
and cloisters. Think of the centuries' tale of
dead lads, — dead alike with the close of the young
days to which these haunts were a present world and
the ending of the larger lives which a sterner mother-scene
has gathered into her massive history! What
are those two young fellows kicking their heels over
on the grass there? One of them has the Saturday
Review; the other — upon my soul — the other has
live, to what end do they live? Miserable boys! How
can they read Artemus Ward under those windows of
Elizabeth? What do you think loveliest in all Oxford?
The poetry of certain windows. Do you see
that one yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with
the broken mullion and open casement? That used to
be the window of my fidus Achates, a hundred years
ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken
mullion. Don't tell me it 's not a common thing to
have one's fidus Achates at another college. Pray, was
I pledged to common things? He was a charming
fellow. By the way, he was a good deal like you.
Of course his cocked hat, his long hair in a black
ribbon, his cinnamon velvet suit, and his flowered
waistcoat made a difference! We gentlemen used to
wear swords.”
There was something surprising and impressive in
my friend's gushing magniloquence. The poor disheartened
loafer had turned rhapsodist and seer. I
was particularly struck with his having laid aside
the diffidence and shy self-consciousness which had
marked him during the first days of our acquaintance.
He was becoming more and more a disembodied observer
and critic; the shell of sense, growing daily
thinner and more transparent, transmitted the tremor
of his quickened spirit. He revealed an unexpected
gownsmen whom we met in our vague peregrinations.
If I left him for ten minutes, I was sure to find
him, on my return, in earnest conversation with some
affable wandering scholar. Several young men with
whom he had thus established relations invited him
to their rooms and entertained him, as I gathered,
with boisterous hospitality. For myself, I chose not
to be present on these occasions; I shrunk partly
from being held in any degree responsible for his
vagaries, and partly from witnessing that painful
aggravation of them which I feared might be induced
by champagne and youthful society. He reported
these adventures with less eloquence than I had
fancied he might use; but, on the whole, I suspect
that a certain method in his madness, a certain firmness
in his most melting bonhomie, had insured him
perfect respect. Two things, however, became evident,
— that he drank more champagne than was good for
him, and that the boyish grossness of his entertainers
tended rather, on reflection, to disturb in his mind
the pure image of Oxford. At the same time it
completed his knowledge of the place. Making the
acquaintance of several tutors and fellows, he dined
in Hall in half a dozen colleges, and alluded afterwards
to these banquets with a sort of religious
unction. One evening, at the close of one of these
accompanied by a friendly student and a physician,
looking deadly pale. He had swooned away on leaving
table, and had remained so stubbornly unconscious
as to excite great alarm among his companions.
The following twenty-four hours, of course, he spent
in bed; but on the third day he declared himself
strong enough to go out. On reaching the street his
strength again forsook him, and I insisted upon his
returning to his room. He besought me with tears
in his eyes not to shut him up. “It 's my last
chance,” he said. “I want to go back for an hour
to that garden of St. John's. Let me look and feel;
to-morrow I die.” It seemed to me possible that
with a Bath-chair the expedition might be accomplished.
The hotel, it appeared, possessed such a convenience:
it was immediately produced. It became
necessary hereupon that we should have a person to
propel the chair. As there was no one available on
the spot, I prepared to perform the office; but just
as Searle had got seated and wrapped (he had come
to suffer acutely from cold), an elderly man emerged
from a lurking-place near the door, and, with a
formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman.
We assented, and he proceeded solemnly to trundle
the chair before him. I recognized him as an individual
whom I had seen lounging shyly about the
air of wanting employment and a hopeless
doubt of finding any. He had once, indeed, in a
half-hearted way, proposed himself as an amateur
cicerone for a tour through the colleges; and I now,
as I looked at him, remembered with a pang that I
had declined his services with untender curtness.
Since then, his shyness, apparently, had grown less
or his misery greater; for it was with a strange,
grim avidity that he now attached himself to our
service. He was a pitiful image of shabby gentility
and the dinginess of “reduced circumstances.” He
imparted an original force to the term “seedy.” He
was, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale,
haggard, unwholesome visage, his plaintive, drooping
carriage, and the irremediable decay of his apparel,
seemed to add to the burden of his days and experience.
His eyes were bloodshot and weak-looking,
his handsome nose had turned to purple, and his
sandy beard, largely streaked with gray, bristled with
a month's desperate indifference to the razor. In all
this rusty forlornness there lurked a visible assurance
of our friend's having known better days. Obviously,
he was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the
market value of pure gentility. There had been
something terribly pathetic in the way he fiercely
merged the attempt to touch the greasy rim of his
from jaunty equal to equal. Exchanging a few
words with him as we went along, I was struck
with the refinement of his tone.
“Take me by some long roundabout way,” said
Searle, “so that I may see as many college walls as
possible.”
“You can wander without losing your way?” I
asked of our attendant.
“I ought to be able to, sir,” he said, after a moment,
with pregnant gravity. And as we were passing Wadham
College, “That 's my college, sir,” he added.
At these words, Searle commanded him to stop and
come and stand in front of him. “You say that is
your college?” he demanded.
“Wadham might deny me, sir; but Heaven forbid I
should deny Wadham. If you 'll allow me to take you
into the quad, I 'll show you my windows, thirty years
ago!”
Searle sat staring, with his huge, pale eyes, which
now had come to usurp the greatest place in his
wasted visage, filled with wonder and pity. “If you 'll
be so kind,” he said, with immense politeness. But
just as this degenerate son of Wadham was about to
propel him across the threshold of the court, he turned
about, disengaged his hands, with his own hand, from
the back of the chair, drew him alongside of him and
he said, “be so good as to perform this service. You
understand?” I smiled sufferance at our companion,
and we resumed our way. The latter showed us his
window of thirty years ago, where now a rosy youth in
a scarlet smoking-fez was puffing a cigarette in the
open lattice. Thence we proceeded into the little garden,
the smallest, I believe, and certainly the sweetest
of all the bosky resorts in Oxford. I pushed the chair
along to a bench on the lawn, wheeled it about toward
the façade of the college, and sat down on the grass.
Our attendant shifted himself mournfully from one
foot to the other. Searle eyed him open-mouthed.
At length he broke out: “God bless my soul, sir, you
don't suppose that I expect you to stand! There 's an
empty bench.”
“Thank you,” said our friend, bending his joints to
sit.
“You English,” said Searle, “are really fabulous!
I don't know whether I most admire you or despise
you! Now tell me: who are you? what are you?
what brought you to this?”
The poor fellow blushed up to his eyes, took off his
hat, and wiped his forehead with a ragged handkerchief.
“My name is Rawson, sir. Beyond that, it 's a
long story.”
“I ask out of sympathy,” said Searle. “I have a
devil too.”
“I 'm the poorer devil of the two,” said the stranger,
with a little emphatic nod of the head.
“Possibly. I suppose an English poor devil is the
poorest of all poor devils. And then, you have fallen
from a height. From Wadham College as a gentleman
commoner (is that what they called you?) to Wadham
College as a Bath-chair man! Good heavens, man,
the fall 's enough to kill you!”
“I did n't take it all at once, sir. I dropped a bit
one time and a bit another.”
“That 's me, that 's me!” cried Searle, clapping his
hands.
“And now,” said our friend, “I believe I can't
drop further.”
“My dear fellow,” and Searle clasped his hand
and shook it, “there 's a perfect similarity in our
lot.”
Mr. Rawson lifted his eyebrows. “Save for the
difference of sitting in a Bath-chair and walking behind
it!”
“O, I 'm at my last gasp, Mr. Rawson.”
“I 'm at my last penny, sir.”
“Literally, Mr. Rawson?”
Mr. Rawson shook his head, with a world of vague
bitterness. “I have almost come to the point,” he
figuratively; but I don't talk in figures.”
Fearing that the conversation had taken a turn
which might seem to cast a rather fantastic light upon
Mr. Rawson's troubles, I took the liberty of asking
him with great gravity how he made a living.
“I don't make a living,” he answered, with tearful
eyes, “I can't make a living. I have a wife and three
children, starving, sir. You would n't believe what I
have come to. I sent my wife to her mother's, who
can ill afford to keep her, and came to Oxford a week
ago, thinking I might pick up a few half-crowns by
showing people about the colleges. But it 's no use.
I have n't the assurance. I don't look decent. They
want a nice little old man with black gloves, and a
clean shirt, and a silver-headed stick. What do I
look as if I knew about Oxford, sir?”
“Dear me,” cried Searle, “why did n't you speak to
us before?”
“I wanted to; half a dozen times I have been on
the point of it. I knew you were Americans.”
“And Americans are rich!” cried Searle, laughing.
“My dear Mr. Rawson, American as I am, I 'm living
on charity.”
“And I 'm not, sir! There it is. I 'm dying for
the want of charity. You say you 're a pauper; it
takes an American pauper to go bowling about in a
Bath-chair. America 's an easy country.”
“Ah me!” groaned Searle. “Have I come to Wadham
gardens to hear the praise of America?”
“Wadham gardens are very well!” said Mr. Rawson;
“but one may sit here hungry and shabby, so
long as one is n't too shabby, as well as elsewhere.
You 'll not persuade me that it 's not an easier thing
to keep afloat yonder than here. I wish I were there,
that 's all!” added Mr. Rawson, with a sort of feeble-minded
energy. Then brooding for a moment on his
wrongs: “Have you a brother? or you, sir? It matters
little to you. But it has mattered to me with a
vengeance! Shabby as I sit here, I have a brother
with his five thousand a year. Being a couple of years
my senior, he gorges while I starve. There 's England
for you! A very pretty place for him!”
“Poor England!” said Searle, softly.
“Has your brother never helped you?” I asked.
“A twenty-pound note now and then! I don't say
that there have not been times when I have sorely
tried his generosity. I have not been what I should.
I married dreadfully amiss. But the devil of it is
that he started fair and I started foul; with the
tastes, the desires, the needs, the sensibilities of a
gentleman, — and nothing else! I can't afford to live
in England.”
“This poor gentleman,” said I, “fancied a couple of
months ago that he could n't afford to live in America.”
“I 'd change chances with him!” And Mr. Rawson
gave a passionate slap to his knee.
Searle reclined in his chair with his eyes closed and
his face twitching with violent emotion. Suddenly he
opened his eyes with a look of awful gravity. “My
friend,” he said, “you 're a failure! Be judged!
Don't talk about chances. Don't talk about fair starts
and foul starts. I 'm at that point myself that I have
a right to speak. It lies neither in one's chance nor
one's start to make one a success; nor in anything
one's brother can do or can undo. It lies in one's will!
You and I, sir, have had none; that 's very plain!
We have been weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we
are, sitting staring in each other's faces and reading
our weakness in each other's eyes. We are of no
account!”
Mr. Rawson received this address with a countenance
in which heartfelt conviction was oddly mingled
with a vague suspicion that a proper self-respect
required him to resent its unflattering candor. In the
course of a minute a proper self-respect yielded to the
warm, comfortable sense of his being understood, even
to his light dishonor. “Go on, sir, go on,” he said.
“It 's wholesome truth.” And he wiped his eyes with
his dingy handkerchief.
“Dear me!” cried Searle. “I 've made you cry.
Well! we speak as from man to man. I should be
side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit
which precedes — which precedes the grand illumination
of death.”
Mr. Rawson sat silent for a moment, with his eyes
fixed on the ground and his well-cut nose more deeply
tinged by the force of emotion. Then at last, looking
up: “You 're a very good-natured man, sir; and you 'll
not persuade me that you don't come of a good-natured
race. Say what you please about a chance; when a
man 's fifty, — degraded, penniless, a husband and
father, — a chance to get on his legs again is not to
be despised. Something tells me that my chance is
in your country, — that great home of chances. I can
starve here, of course; but I don't want to starve.
Hang it, sir, I want to live. I see thirty years of life
before me yet. If only, by God's help, I could spend
them there! It 's a fixed idea of mine. I 've had it
for the last ten years. It 's not that I 'm a radical.
I 've no ideas! Old England 's good enough for me,
but I 'm not good enough for old England. I 'm a
shabby man that wants to get out of a room full of
staring gentlefolks. I 'm forever put to the blush.
It 's a perfect agony of spirit. Everything reminds
me of my younger and better self. O, for a cooling,
cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the unknown!
I lie awake thinking of it.”
Searle closed his eyes and shivered with a long-drawn
tremor which I hardly knew whether to take
for an expression of physical or of mental pain. In
a moment I perceived it was neither. “O my country,
my country, my country!” he murmured in a broken
voice; and then sat for some time abstracted and
depressed. I intimated to our companion that it was
time we should bring our séance to a close, and he,
without hesitating, possessed himself of the little handrail
of the Bath-chair and pushed it before him. We
had got half-way home before Searle spoke or moved.
Suddenly in the High Street, as we were passing in
front of a chop-house, from whose open doors there
proceeded a potent suggestion of juicy joints and suet
puddings, he motioned us to halt. “This is my last
five pounds,” he said, drawing a note from his pocket-book.
“Do me the favor, Mr. Rawson, to accept it.
Go in there and order a colossal dinner. Order a
bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my immortal
health!” Mr. Rawson stiffened himself up and received
the gift with momentarily irresponsive fingers.
But Mr. Rawson had the nerves of a gentleman. I
saw the titillation of his pointed finger-tips as they
closed upon the crisp paper; I noted the fine tremor
in his empurpled nostril as it became more deeply
conscious of the succulent flavor of the spot. He
crushed the crackling note in his palm with a convulsive
pressure.
“It shall be Chambertin!” he said, jerking a spasmodic
bow. The next moment the door swung behind
him.
Searle relapsed into his feeble stupor, and on reaching
the hotel I helped him to get to bed. For the
rest of the day he lay in a half-somnolent state, without
motion or speech. The doctor, whom I had constantly
in attendance, declared that his end was near.
He expressed great surprise that he should have lasted
so long; he must have been living for a month on a
cruelly extorted strength. Toward evening, as I sat
by his bedside in the deepening dusk, he aroused
himself with a purpose which I had vaguely felt gathering
beneath his quietude. “My cousin, my cousin,”
he said, confusedly. “Is she here?” It was the first
time he had spoken of Miss Searle since our exit from
her brother's house. “I was to have married her,”
he went on. “What a dream! That day was like a
string of verses — rhymed hours. But the last verse
is bad measure. What 's the rhyme to `love'?
Above! Was she a simple person, a sweet person?
Or have I dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her
touch would have cured my madness. I want you to
do something. Write three lines, three words: `Good
by; remember me; be happy.”' And then, after a
long pause: “It 's strange a man in my condition
should have a wish. Need a man eat his breakfast
a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a mere
throbbing fever-point; I breathe and nothing more,
and yet I desire! My desire lives. If I could see
her! Help me out with it and let me die.”
Half an hour later, at a venture, I despatched a note
to Miss Searle: “Your cousin is rapidly dying. He
asks to see you.” I was conscious of a certain unkindness
in doing so. It would bring a great trouble, and
no power to face the trouble. But out of her distress
I fondly hoped a sufficient energy might be born. On
the following day my friend's exhaustion had become
so total that I began to fear that his intelligence
was altogether gone. But towards evening he rallied
awhile, and talked in a maundering way about many
things, confounding in a ghastly jumble the memories
of the past weeks and those of bygone years. “By
the way,” he said suddenly, “I have made no will. I
have n't much to bequeath. Yet I 've something.”
He had been playing listlessly with a large signet-ring
on his left hand, which he now tried to draw off. “I
leave you this,” working it round and round vainly, “if
you can get it off. What mighty knuckles! There
must be such knuckles in the mummies of the Pharaohs.
Well, when I 'm gone! Nay, I leave you something
more precious than gold, — the sense of a great
kindness. But I have a little gold left. Bring me
articles of jewelry, relics of early elegance: his
watch and chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some
shirt-buttons and scarf-pins. He trifled with them
feebly for some moments, murmuring various names
and dates associated with them. At last, looking up
with a sudden energy, “What 's become of Mr. Rawson?”
“You want to see him?”
“How much are these things worth?” he asked,
without heeding me. “How much would they bring?”
And he held them up in his weak hands. “They have
a great weight. Two hundred pounds? I am richer
than I thought! Rawson — Rawson — you want to
get out of this awful England.”
I stepped to the door and requested the servant,
whom I kept in constant attendance in the adjoining
sitting-room, to send and ascertain if Mr. Rawson was
on the premises. He returned in a few moments, introducing
our shabby friend. Mr. Rawson was pale,
even to his nose, and, with his suppressed agitation, had
an air of great distinction. I led him up to the bed.
In Searle's eyes, as they fell on him, there shone for a
moment the light of a high fraternal greeting.
“Great God!” said Mr. Rawson, fervently.
“My friend,” said Searle, “there is to be one American
the less. Let there be one the more. At the
Take these trinkets; let them help you on your way.
They are gifts and memories, but this is a better use.
Heaven speed you! May America be kind to you.
Be kind, at the last, to your own country!”
“Really, this is too much; I can't,” our friend protested
in a tremulous voice. “Do get well, and I 'll
stop here!”
“Nay; I 'm booked for my journey, you for yours.
I hope you don't suffer at sea.”
Mr. Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude,
appealing piteously from so awful a good fortune.
“It 's like the angel of the Lord,” he said, “who bids
people in the Bible to rise and flee!”
Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, exhausted: I
led Mr. Rawson back into the sitting-room, where in
three words I proposed to him a rough valuation of our
friend's trinkets. He assented with perfect good breeding;
they passed into my possession and a second
bank-note into his.
From the collapse into which this beneficent interview
had plunged him, Searle gave few signs of being
likely to emerge. He breathed, as he had said, and
nothing more. The twilight deepened: I lit the
night-lamp. The doctor sat silent and official at the
foot of the bed; I resumed my constant place near
the head. Suddenly Searle opened his eyes widely.
English sister.” Five minutes passed. He started
forward. “She has come, she is here!” he whispered.
His words conveyed to my mind so absolute an assurance,
that I lightly rose and passed into the sitting-room.
At the same moment, through the opposite
door, the servant introduced a lady. A lady, I say;
for an instant she was simply such; tall, pale, dressed
in deep mourning. The next moment I had uttered
her name — “Miss Searle!” She looked ten years
older.
She met me, with both hands extended, and an
immense question in her face. “He has just spoken
your name,” I said. And then, with a fuller consciousness
of the change in her dress and countenance:
“What has happened?”
“O death, death!” said Miss Searle. “You and I
are left.”
There came to me with her words a sort of sickening
shock, the sense of poetic justice having been
grimly shuffled away. “Your brother?” I demanded.
She laid her hand on my arm, and I felt its pressure
deepen as she spoke. “He was thrown from his horse
in the park. He died on the spot. Six days have
passed. — Six months!”
She took my arm. A moment later we had entered
the room and approached the bedside. The doctor
from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to perceive
her mourning. “Already!” he cried, audibly; with
a smile, as I believe, of pleasure.
She dropped on her knees and took his hand.
“Not for you, cousin,” she whispered. “For my
poor brother.”
He started in all his deathly longitude as with a
galvanic shock. “Dead! he dead! Life itself!” And
then, after a moment, with a slight rising inflection:
“You are free?”
“Free, cousin. Sadly free. And now — now — with
what use for freedom?”
He looked steadily a moment into her eyes, dark in
the heavy shadow of her musty mourning veil. “For
me,” he said, “wear colors!”
In a moment more death had come, the doctor had
silently attested it, and Miss Searle had burst into
sobs.
We buried him in the little churchyard in which
he had expressed the wish to lie; beneath one of the
mightiest of English yews and the little tower than
which none in all England has a softer and hoarier
gray. A year has passed. Miss Searle, I believe, has
begun to wear colors.
| A passionate pilgrim | |