by Henry James
He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight and if here again he stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his eyes - which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive; inasmuch as the side-lights and the high fantracery of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall; an appearance produced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of that again the QUESTION sprang at him, making his eyes, as he felt, half-start from his head, as they had done, at the top of the house, before the sign of the other door. If he had left that one open, hadn’t he left this one closed, and wasn’t he now in MOST immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a knife in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked - to shift and expand and contract.
It was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the sense that here WAS at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know - something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be - this only till he recognised, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried, as for dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute - his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been “treatment,” of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience. The revulsion, for our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense - this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary’s inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that HE, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph. Wasn’t the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread? - so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.
“Saved,” though, WOULD it be? - Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as HIS, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, THAT face, Spencer Brydon’s? - he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility! - He had been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at NO point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.
CHAPTER III
What had next brought him back, clearly - though after how long? - was Mrs. Muldoon’s voice, coming to him from quite near, from so near that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground, but half-raised and upheld - conscious, yes, of tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at his service; then another face intervened, bending more directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were cold, these marble squares of his youth; but HE somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousness - the most wonderful hour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had come back, yes - come back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled; but it was strange how with this sense what he had come back TO seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sake of it. Slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself; he had been miraculously CARRIED back - lifted and carefully borne as from where he had been picked up, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage. Even with this he was suffered to rest, and what had now brought him to knowledge was the break in the long mild motion.
It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge - yes, this was the beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his patience - that he had only to let it shine on him. He must moreover, with intermissions, still have been lifted and borne; since why and how else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his stairs - situated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel - but on a deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands k
ept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon’s face had gone, but the other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in, and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon’s having plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key - and on her having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered near the house. She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle - her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman’s visit; but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there, and they had entered together. He had then lain, beyond the vestibule, very much as he was lying now - quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in a depth of stupor. What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.
“It must have been that I WAS.” He made it out as she held him. “Yes - I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only,” he wondered, his eyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?”
It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything.
“And now I keep you,” she said.
“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situation - of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back. “Yet how did you know - ?”
“I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember - and you had sent no word.”
“Yes, I remember - I was to have gone to you at one to-day.” It caught on to their “old” life and relation - which were so near and so far. “I was still out there in my strange darkness - where was it, what was it? I must have stayed there so long.” He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.
“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.
“Since this morning - it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to- day. Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “where have I been?” He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. “What a long dark day!”
All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. “In the cold dim dawn?” she quavered.
But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. “As I didn’t turn up you came straight - ?”
She barely cast about. “I went first to your hotel - where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn’t been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club.”
“So you had the idea of THIS - ?”
“Of what?” she asked in a moment.
“Well - of what has happened.”
“I believed at least you’d have been here. I’ve known, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”
“‘Known’ it -?”
“Well, I’ve believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago - but I felt sure. I knew you WOULD,” she declared.
“That I’d persist, you mean?”
“That you’d see him.”
“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail. “There’s somebody - an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it’s not me.”
At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. “No - it’s not you.” And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. “No, thank heaven,” she repeated, “it’s not you! Of course it wasn’t to have been.”
“Ah but it WAS,” he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. “I was to have known myself.”
“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, “But it wasn’t only THAT, that you hadn’t been at home,” she went on. “I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intentions - “it wasn’t only that.”
His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. “What more then?”
She met it, the wonder she had stirred. “In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.”
“Saw ME - ?”
“Saw HIM,” said Alice Staverton. “It must have been at the same moment.”
He lay an instant taking it in - as if he wished to be quite reasonable. “At the same moment?”
“Yes - in my dream again, the same one I’ve named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you.”
At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. “HE didn’t come to me.”
“You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled.
“Ah I’ve come to myself now - thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face - this brute’s a black stranger. He’s none of ME, even as I MIGHT have been,” Brydon sturdily declared.
But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”
He almost scowled for it. “As different as THAT - ?”
Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. “Haven’t you exactly wanted to know HOW different? So this morning,” she said, “you appeared to me.”
“Like HIM?”
“A black stranger!”
“Then how did you know it was I?”
“Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been - to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me - that my wonder might be answered. So I knew,” she went on; “and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had - and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. HE seemed to tell me of that. So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?”
It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. “You ‘like’ that horror - ?”
“I COULD have liked him. And to me,” she said, “he was no horror. I had accepted him.”
“‘Accepted’ - ?” Brydon oddly sounded.
“Before, for the interest of his difference - yes. And as I didn’t disown him, as I knew him - which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t, my dear, - well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.”
She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand - still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, “You ‘pitied’ him?” he grudgingly, resentfully asked.
“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,” she said.
“And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I - you’ve only to look at me! - ravaged?”
“Ah I don’t say I like him BETTER,” she granted after a thought. “But he’s grim, he’s worn - and things have happened to him. He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.”
“No” - it struck Brydon; “I couldn
’t have sported mine ‘down-town.’ They’d have guyed me there.”
“His great convex pince-nez - I saw it, I recognised the kind - is for his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand - !”
“Ah!” Brydon winced - whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, “He has a million a year,” he lucidly added. “But he hasn’t you.”
“And he isn’t - no, he isn’t - YOU!” she murmured, as he drew her to his breast.