 | II. A passionate pilgrim |  |
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.
| II. A passionate pilgrim | |