 CHAPTER 1 Everyone asks me what I think of everything, and I make answer, as I can, begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them, really, he went on, for even were it possible to meet in that standard deliverer way, so silly a demand on so big a subject, my thoughts would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself. He was talking to Miss Stavarton, with whom, for a couple of months now, he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk. This disposition, and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattainuated surprises, attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise, and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years, thirty-three to be exact, and they now seem to him to have organized their performance quite on the scale of that license. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York. He was fifty-six today, unless indeed he would have reckoned, as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling, in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Stavarton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses for the better or the worse that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked. The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability, since he had supposed himself from decade to decade to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing. He missed what he would have been sure of finding. He found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside down. The ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly. These uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm, whereas the swagger things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those which he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous inquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were, as so many traps set for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless the whole show, but it would not have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over for all the monstrosities. He had come, not only in the last analysis, but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come, putting the thing pompously, to look at his property which he had thus, for a third of a century, not been within four thousand miles of, or expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually and quite fondly described it, the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and died, in which the holidays of his over-schooled boyhood had been passed, and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers, and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so good, the jolly corner having been from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated, and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which, thanks precisely to their original excellent type, had never been depressingly low. He could live in Europe, as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelve-month fallen in, renovation at a high advance, had proved beautifully possible. These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction, as a tall mass of flats. He had exceeded some time before to overtose for this conversion, in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns, and his face addressed to those of so different an order, that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stirrer, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated of a capacity for business, and a sense for construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism, where it might be said of them, perhaps, that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present in the splendid autumn weather, the autumn at least was a pure moon in the terrible place. He loathed about his work, undeterred, secretly agitated, not in the least minding that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions in fine, and challenge explanations, and really go into figures. It amused, it verily quite charmed him, and by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Daverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better off for it as he was, and so astonishingly much. Nothing was now likely he knew ever to make her better off than she found herself in the afternoon of life as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house and Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now, better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings, which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and crisscrossed lines and figures, if he had formed for his consolation that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognized in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalization of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver. She stood oft in the awful modern crush when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to spirit, the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite far away, an antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the streetcars when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic stricken at sea scrambled for the boats. She affronted inscrutably under stress all the public concussions and ordeals, and yet with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference, with her precious reference above all to memories and histories into which he could enter. She was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower rarity to begin with, and failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge, their knowledge, this discriminating possessive was always on her lips, of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid in his case by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by Europe in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted. She had come to him one day to see how his apartment house was rising. He had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while they were there, had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite standing up to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that besides ever so prettily flushing at the time for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him, though to a slightly greater effect of irony, that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home, he would have anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper. If he had but stayed at home, he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hair and run it till it borrowed in a goldmine. He was to remember these words, while the week's elapsed, for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and muffled vibrations. It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight. It had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment. It met him there, and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least not a little, thrilled and flushed with it. Very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form, that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming with a great suppressed start on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other, and always so much the better one, which in the eastward direction formed one of the corners, the jolly one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonored and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative avenue. The avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Stavarton said, to decency. The old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray all vaguely, like some very aged person out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow in kindness for safe restoration to shelter. They went in together, our friends. He admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring for his reasons to leave the place empty under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in the neighborhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Briden had his reasons and was growingly aware of them. They seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn't name them all to his companion any more than he told her, as yet, how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned, and that from top to bottom there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick in a corner to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes, all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ample allowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant, some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a retiring pension. Yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark, she would just tell him, if he playsed, that he must ask it of somebody else. The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy woman against what one might see, and she put it frankly to Miss Stavarton that no lady could be expected to like, could she, craving up to them top stories in the avil hours. The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms, so many of them as there were too, with her glimmering taper. Miss Stavarton met her honest glare with a smile, and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Briden meanwhile held his peace for the moment. The question of the evil hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to crepe, and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit has been stowed by his own hand three weeks before at the back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard that occupied, as a fixture, the deep recess in the dining room. Just now he laughed at his companions, quickly however changing the subject, for the reason that, in the first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance, he scarce knew how to qualify it, the sounds made while he was there alone, sent back to his ear or his fancy. And that in the second he imagined Alice Stavarton for the instant on the point of asking him were the divination if he ever so proud. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted inquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts. There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly, so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friends having herself broken out after a yearning look round. But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull this to pieces. His answer came promptly with his reawakened wrath. It was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were at him for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to decent feelings. He had found the place, just as it stood, and beyond what he could express an interest and a joy. There were values other than the beastly rent values, and in short, in short, but it was thus Mrs. Stavarton took him up. In short you're going to make so good a thing of your skyscraper that living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains you can afford for a while to be sentimental here. Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talks effused, an irony without bitterness, and that came exactly from her having so much imagination. Not like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people about the world of society bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demurrer, well yes, so precisely you may put it, her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one, and he dwelt further while they lingered and wandered on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create. He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel in his hand of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead, the seventy years of the past in fine, that these things represented the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfathers, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything. She was a woman who answered intimately, but who utterly didn't chat her. She scattered abroad, therefore, no cloud of words. She could assent, she could agree. Above all, she could encourage without doing that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. And then how do you know you may still, after all, want to live here? It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words. You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it? Well, with such a home. But quite beautifully she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an eye, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could any one of any wit insist on any one else's wanting to live in New York? Oh, he said, I might have lived here since I had my opportunity early in life. I might have put in here all these years. Then everything would have been different enough. And I dare say funny enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of it, I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a deal, is just in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all, it would have to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here but dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever, not the ghost of one. They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large through an open door, into the great main saloon with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. Are you very sure the ghost of one doesn't much rather serve? He had a positive sense of turning pale, but it was as near as they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a grin. Oh, ghosts! Of course the place must swarm with them. I should be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in. Miss Stavarton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even, for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering. Simplified, like the death mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the set commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been, she produced instead a vague platitude. Well, if it were only furnished and lived in, she appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished, he might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house door and was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door, and while he repocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the desert on the traveler emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked, before they stepped into the street, his gathered answer to her speech, for me it is lived in, for me it is furnished, at which it was easy for her to sigh, ah yes, all vaguely and discreetly, since his parents and his favorite sister, to say nothing of other kin in numbers, had run their course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls, ineffacable life. It was a few days after this, that during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the two flattering curiosity among the people he met about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at not at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his thinking, thinking the better or the worse of anything there, he was wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was, moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and turned out, if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculation, which but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking, he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal. What would it have made of me? What would it have made of me? I keep forever wondering, all idiotically, as if I could possibly know. I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me to the point of exasperation that it would have made something of me as well. Only I can't make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt once or twice, after judging best for reasons to burn some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated it, I've never known what was in the letter. You may, of course, say it's a trifle. I don't say it's a trifle, Ms. Stafferton gravely interrupted. She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea, and a fitful and unseeing inspection through his single eyeglass of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. I shouldn't care if you did, he laughed, however, and it's only a figure at any rate for the way I now feel, not to have followed my perverse young course, and almost in the teeth of my father's curse, as I may say, not to have kept it up so over there from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang, not above all to have liked it, to have loved it so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference. Some variation from that, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my form. I should have stuck here if it had been possible, and I was too young at twenty-three to judge pour de sous, whether it were possible. If I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I admire them so much. The question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond that of the rank-money passion exerted by their conditions for them, has nothing to do with the matter. It's only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I may and have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small, tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate that blighted him for once and for ever. And you wonder about the flower, Miss D'Averton said. So do I, if you want to know, and so I've been wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower, she continued. I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous. Monstrous above all, her visitor echoed, and I imagined by the same stroke quite hideous and offensive. You don't believe that, she returned. If you did, you wouldn't wonder. You'd know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel, and what I feel for you, is that you'd have had power. You'd have liked me that way, he asked. She barely hung fire. How should I not have liked you? I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire? How should I not have liked you? She simply asked again. He stood before her still. Her question kept him motionless. He took it in so much there was of it, and indeed his not otherwise meeting had testified to that. I know at least what I am, he simply went on. The other side of the meddles clear enough. I've not been edifying. I believe my thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods. It must have come to you again and again. In fact, you've admitted to me as much, that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish, frivolous, scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me. She just waited, smiling at him. You see what it has made of me. Oh, you're a person who nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway. You've the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without my exile, I shouldn't have been waiting till now? But he pulled up for the strange pang. The great thing to see, she presently said, seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking. She also, however, faltered. He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. Do you believe, then, too dreadfully, that I am as good as I might ever have been? Oh, no, far from it, with which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him. But I don't care, she smiled. You mean I'm good enough? She considered it a little. Will you believe it, if I say so? I mean, will you let that settle your question for you? And then, as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away. Oh, you don't care either, but very differently. You don't care for anything but yourself. Spencer Briden recognized it. It was, in fact, what he had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified. He isn't myself. He's the just-so-totally other person. But I do want to see him, he added. And I can. And I shall. Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise expressed it. And her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity on the spot an element that was like breathable air. What she said, however, was unexpected. Well, I've seen him. You? I've seen him in a dream. Oh, a dream, it let him down. But twice over, she continued, I saw him as I see you now. You've dreamed the same dream? Twice over, she repeated, the very same. This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. You dream about me at that rate? Ah, about him, she smiled. His eyes again sounded her. Then you know all about him. And as she said nothing more, what's the wretch like? She hesitated. And it was as if he were pressing her so hard that resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. I'll tell you some other time. The Corner by Henry James, Chapter 2 And visiting the ample house from Attic to Seller, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession, and as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours. The moments he liked best were those of the gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight. This was the time of which again and again he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as it seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place. He preferred the lampless hour, and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep, crepuscular spell. Later, rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil, he watched with his glimmering light, moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by passages. The long, straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a practice he found he could perfectly work, without exciting remark. No one was in the least the wiser for it. Even Alice Daverton, who was more over a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine. He let himself in and let himself out, with the assurance of calm proprietorship, and accidents so far favored him that if a fat avenue officer had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven thirty, he had never yet to the best of his belief been noticed as emerging at two. He walked there, on the crisp November nights, arriving regularly at the evening's end. It was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel. And when he left his hotel, if he had spent part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club. Everything was easy and fine. Everything conspired and promoted. There was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly old relations. Met indeed so far as he could, new expectations, and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career of such different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Daverton, as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it to edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success, and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks, just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of ombre chinoise. He projected himself all day and thought straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads, and onto the other, the real, the waiting life, the life that as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house door began for him on the jolly corner, as built gilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand. He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black and white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood, and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung, who should say where, in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for wheel or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing. He put his stick noiselessly away in a corner, feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear of all the old baffled, foresworn possibilities. What he did, therefore, by this appeal of his hushed presence, was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren't really sinister. At least they weren't as he had hitherto felt them. Before they had taken the form he so yearned to make them take, the form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room, and from story to story. That was the essence of his vision, which was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted. It was as clear as the figure on a check presented in demand for cash. His alter ego walked. That was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to wail him and meet him. He roamed slowly, wearily, but all restlessly he himself did. Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her figure of their creping, and the presence he watched for would roam restlessly too, but it would be as cautious and as shifty. The conviction of its probable, in fact it's already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit, grew for him from night to night, laying on him finally a rigor to which nothing in his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many superficially judging persons he knew that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable than any beast of the forest. The terms, the comparison, the very practices of the chase positively came again into play. There were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman stirred memories from his younger time of moor and mountain and desert, revived for him and to the increase of his keenness by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at moments once he had placed a single light on some mantle shelf or in some recess, stepping back into shelter or shade, a-facing himself behind a door or in an embrasure as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree. He found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant the supreme suspense created by big game alone. He wasn't afraid, though putting himself the question as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger shoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it. And this indeed since here at least he might be frank because of the impression so intimate and so strange that he himself produced as yet a dread produced certainly as strain beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into categories. They fairly became familiar the signs for his own perception of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created though leaving him always to remark portentiously on his probably having formed a relation is probably enjoying a consciousness unique in the experience of man. People enough first and last had been in terror of apparitions but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself in the apparitional world an incalculable terror. He might have found the sublime had he quite dared to think of it but he didn't too much insist truly on that side of his privilege with habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light the evil looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows by accidents of the air by shifting effects of perspective putting down his dim luminary he could still wander on without it pass into other rooms and only knowing it was there behind him in case of need see his way about visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness it made him feel this acquired faculty like some monstrous stealthy cat he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes and what it mightn't verily be for the poor hard-pressed alter ego to be confronted with such a type he liked however the open shutters he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed closing them as carefully afterwards so that she shouldn't notice he liked oh this he did like and above all in the upper rooms the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window panes and scarcely less the flare of the street lamps below the white electric luster which it would have taken curtains to keep out this was human actual social this was of the world he had lived in and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance coldly general and impersonal that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him he had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side it failed him considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back but if he sometimes on his rounds was glad of his optical reach so nonetheless often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey the place was there more subdivided a large extension in particular where small rooms for servants had been multiplied abounded in nooks and corners in closets and passages in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned many a time to look far down not deterred from his gravity even while aware that he might for a spectator have figured some solemn simpleton playing at hide and seek outside in fact he might himself make that ironic rapprochement but within the walls and in spite of the clear windows his consistency was proof against the cynical light of new york it had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him since he had quite put it to himself from the first that oh distinctly he could cultivate his whole perception he had felt it as above all open to cultivation which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time he was bringing it on bringing it to perfection by practice in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions attestations of this general postulate that couldn't have broken upon him at once this was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the upper rooms the recognition absolutely unmistakable and by a turn dating from a particular hour his resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop a calculated absence of three nights of his being definitely followed tracked at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should the less confidently less arrogantly appear to himself merely to pursue it worried it finally quite broke him up for it proved of all the conceivable impressions the one least suited to his book he was kept in sight while remaining himself as regards the essence of his position sightless and his only recourse was then in abrupt turns rapid recoveries of ground he wheeled about retracing his steps as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution it was indeed true that his fully dislocalized thought of these maneuvers recalled to him pant alone at the Christmas farce buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them so that in fact this association had he suffered it to become constant would on a certain side have but ministered to his intensive gravity he had made as I have said to create on the premises the baseless sense of a reprieve his three absences and the result of the third was to confirm the after effect of the second on his return that night the night succeeding his last intermission he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known he's there at the top and waiting not as in general falling back for disappearance he's holding his ground and it's the first time which is a proof isn't it that something has happened for him so Bryden argued with his hand on the banister and his foot on the lowest stair in which position he felt as never before the air chilled by his logic he himself turned cold in it for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved hard oppressed yes he takes it in with its thus making clear to him that I've come as they say to stay he finally doesn't like and can't bear it in the sense I mean that his wrath his menaced interest now balances with his dread I've hunted him till he has turned that up there is what has happened he's the fang to the antlered animal brought at last to bay there came to him as I say but determined by an influence beyond my notation the acuteness of this certainty under which however the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as a little consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it for enterprise it marked nonetheless a prodigious thrill a thrill that represented sudden dismay no doubt but also represented and with the self same throb the strangest the most joyous possibly the next minute almost the proudest duplication of consciousness he has been dodging retreating hiding but now worked up to anger he'll fight this intense impression made a single mouthful as it were of terror and applause but what was wondrous was that the applause for the felt fact was so eager since if it was his other self he was running to earth this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him it bristled there somewhere near at hand however unseen still as the hunted sing even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle and bride and at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity it was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking should to the end not risk the open so that the drop of this danger was on the spot a great lift of the whole situation yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear so rejoicing that he could in another form actively inspire that fear and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it the apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps the most memorable or really the most interesting afterwards of his crisis was the lapse of certain instance of concentrated conscious combat the sense of a need to hold on to something even after the manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline the vivid impulse above all to move to act to charge somehow and upon something to show himself in a word that he wasn't afraid the state of holding on was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced if there had been anything in the great vacancy to seize he would presently have been aware of having clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched at the nearest chair back he had been surprised at any rate of this he was aware it is something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place he had closed his eyes held them tight for a long minute as with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision when he opened them the room the other contiguous rooms extraordinarily seemed lighter so light almost that at first he took the change for day he stood firm however that might be just where he had paused his resistance had helped him it was as if there was something he had tied it over he knew after a little what this was it had been in the imminent danger of flight he had stiffened his will against going without this he would have made for the stairs and it seemed to him that still with his eyes closed he would have descended them would have known how straight and swiftly to the bottom well as he had held out here he was still at the top among the more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others of all the rest of the house still to run when it should be his time to go he would go at his time only at his time didn't he go every night very much at the same hour he took out his watch there was light for that it was scarcely a quarter past one and he had never withdrawn so soon he reached his lodgings for the most part at two with his walk of a quarter of an hour he would wait for the last quarter he wouldn't stir till then and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it reflecting while he held it that this deliberate weight a weight with an effort which he recognized would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to make it would prove his courage unless indeed the latter might most be proved by his budging at last from his place what he mainly felt now was that since he hadn't originally scuttled he had his dignities which had never in his life seemed so many all to preserve and to carry aloft this was before him in truth as a physical image an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance that remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant with a finer light since what age of romance after all could have matched either the state of his mind or objectively as they said the wonder of his situation the only difference would have been that brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchment scroll he might then, that is in the heroic time have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp at present really the light he had set down on the mantle of the next room would have to figure his sword which utensil in the course of a minute he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of the door between the rooms was open and from the second another door open to a third these rooms as he remembered gave all three upon a common corridor as well but there was a fourth beyond them without issue saved through the proceeding to have moved to have heard his step again was appreciably a help though even in recognizing this he lingered once more a little by the chimney piece on which his light had rested when he next moved just hesitating where to turn he found himself considering a circumstance that after his first and comparatively vague apprehension of it produced in him the start that often attends some pang of recollection the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget he had come into sight of the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold the one not directly facing it placed at some distance to the left of this point it would have admitted him to the last room of the four the room without other approach or egress had it not to his intimate conviction been closed since his form of visitation the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before he stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded his sense surely it had been subsequently closed that is it had been on his previous passage indubitably open he took it full in the face that something had happened between that he couldn't have noticed before by which he meant on his original tour of all the rooms that evening that such a barrier had exceptionally presented itself he had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and inadvertently automatically on coming out have drawn the door after him the difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did it was against his whole policy as he might have said the essence of which was to keep vistas clear he had them from the first as he was well aware quite on the brain the strange apparition at the far end of one of them of his baffled prey which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to apply was the form of success his imagination had most cherished projecting into it always a refinement of beauty he had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped had fifty times gasped to himself there under some fond brief hallucination the house as the case stood admirably lent itself he might wonder at the taste the native architecture of the particular time which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors the opposite extreme to the modern the actual almost complete prescription of them but it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically as he might say focused and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the elbow it was with these considerations that his present attention was charged they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentious he couldn't by any lapse have blocked that aperture and if he hadn't if it was unthinkable why what else was clear but that there had been another agent another agent he had been catching as he felt a moment back the very breath of him but when had he been so close as in this simple this logical this completely personal act it was so logical that is that one might have taken it for personal yet for what did bride and take it he asked himself while softly panting he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets ah this time at last they were the two the opposed projections of him in presence and this time as much as one would the question of danger loomed with it rose as not before the question of courage for what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was show us how much you have it stared it glared back at him with the challenge it put to him the two alternatives should he just push it open or not oh to have this consciousness was to think and to think bride and you as he stood there was with the lapsing moments not to have acted not to have acted that was the misery in the pang was even still not to act was in fact all to feel the thing in another in a new and terrible way how long did he pause and how long did he debate there was presently nothing to measure it for his vibration had already changed as just by the effect of its intensity shut up there at bay defiant and with the prodigy of the thing palpably provably done thus giving notice like some stark signboard under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned and bryden at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to it had turned altogether to a different admonition to a supreme hint for him of the value of discretion this slowly dawned no doubt for it could take its time so perfectly on his threshold had he been stayed so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated it was the strangest of all things that now when by his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch or even his shoulder in his knee if necessary to a panel all the hunger of his prime need might have been met his high curiosity crowned his unrest unswaged it was amazing but it was also exquisite and rare that insistence should have at a touch quite dropped from him discretion he jumped at that and yet not verily at such a pitch because it saved his nerves or his skin but because much more valuably it saved the situation when I say he jumped at it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that at the end indeed of I know not how long he did move again he crossed straight to the door he wouldn't touch it it seemed now that he might if he would he would only just wait there a little to show to prove that he wouldn't he had thus another station close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him but with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness he listened as if there had been something to hear but this attitude while it lasted was his own communication if you won't then good I spare you and I give up you affect me as by the appeal positively for pity you convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime what do I know we both of us should have suffered I respect them then and though moved and privileged as I believe it has never been given to man I retire I renounce never on my honor to try again so rest forever and let me that for bryden was the deep sense of this last demonstration solemn measured directed as he felt it to be he brought it to a close he turned away and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred he retraced his steps taking up his candle burnt he observed well night of the socket and marking again lighten it as he would the distinctness of his footfall after which in a moment he knew himself at the other side of the house he did hear what he had not yet done at these hours he opened half a casement one of those in the front and let in the air of the night a thing he would have taken at any time previous for a sharp rupture of his spell his spell was broken now and it didn't matter broken by his concession and his surrender which made it idle henceforth that he should ever come back the empty street its other life so marked even by great lamp lit vacancy was within call within touch he stayed there as to be in it again high above it though he was still perched he watched as for some comforting common fact some vulgar human note the passage of a scavenger or a thief some night bird however base he would have blessed that sign of life he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he might not have felt the impulse to get into relation with it to hail it on some pretext from his fourth floor the pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name in such a case out of the papers was not definite to him he was so occupied with the thought of recording his discretion as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate adversary that the importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of proportion if there had been a ladder applied to the front of the house even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight he would have managed somehow a stride of the windowsill to compass by outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent if there had been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels a workable fire escape in the form of a notched cable or a canvas shoot he would have availed himself of it as proof well of his present delicacy he nursed that sentiment as the question stood a little in vain and even at the end of he scarce knew once more how long found it as by the action on his mind of the failure of response to the outside world sinking back to vague anguish it seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush the life of the town was itself under a spell so unnaturally up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects the blankness and the silence lasted had they ever he asked himself the hard-faced houses which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit great-builded voids great crowded stillnesses put on often in the heart of cities for the small hours a sort of sinister mask and it was of this large collective negation that bryden presently became conscious all the more that the break of day was almost incredibly now at hand proving to him what a night he had made of it he looked to get at his watch saw what had become of his time values he had taken hours for minutes not as in other tense situations minutes for hours and the strange air of the streets was but the weak the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up his choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair yet while so deeply demoralized he was capable again of an impulse denoting at least by his present measure extraordinary resolution of retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to their being in the place another presence than his own this required an effort strong enough to sicken him but he had his reason which overmastered for the moment everything else there was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present open he could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy a chance offered him to descend depart get off the ground and never again profane it this conception held together it worked but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action or rather his recent inaction had engendered the image of the presence whatever it was waiting there for him to go this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him for with all his resolution or more exactly with all his dread he did stop short he hung back from really seeing the risk was too great and his fear too definite it took at this moment an awful specific form he knew yes as he had never known anything that should he see the door open it would all to objectively be the end of him it would mean that the agent of his shame for his shame was the deep objection was once more at large and in general possession and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would determine for him it would send him straight about to the window he had left open and by that window be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street the hideous chance of this he could at least avert but he could only avert it by recoiling in time from assurance he had the whole house to deal with this fact was still there only he now knew that uncertainty alone could start him he stole back from where he had checked himself merely to do so with suddenly like safety and making blindly for the greater staircase left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind here was the top of the stairs with a fine large dim descent and three spacious landings to mark off his instinct was all for mildness but his feet were harsh on the floors and strangely when he had in a couple of minutes become aware of this it counted somehow for help he couldn't have spoken the tone of his voice would have scared him and the common conceit or resource of whistling in the dark whether literally or figuratively have appeared basely vulgar yet he liked nonetheless to hear himself go and when he had reached his first landing taking it all with no rush but quite steadily that stage of success drew from him a gasp of relief the house with all seemed immense the scale of space again inordinate the open rooms to know one of which his eyes deflected gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance but which might have been for queerness of color some watery underworld he tried to think of something noble as that his property was really grand a splendid possession but this nobleness took the form too of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it they might come in now the builders the destroyers they might come as soon as they would at the end of two flights he had dropped to another zone and from the middle of the third with only one more left he recognized the influence of the lower windows of half drawn blinds of the occasional gleam of street lamps of the glazed spaces of the vestibule this was the bottom of the sea which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisters with the marble squares of his childhood by that time indubitably he felt as he might have said in a covenor cause better it had allowed him to stop and draw breath and the case increased with the sight of the old black and white slabs but what he most felt was that now surely with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands the case was settled for what he might have seen above and he dared that last look the closed door blessedly remote now was still closed and he had only in short to reach that of the house he came down further he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight and if here again he stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape it made him shut his eyes which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs here was impunity still but impunity almost excessive in as much as the side lights and the high fan tracery of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall an appearance produced he the next instance 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 at the 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 the niche or as some black visor sentinel guarding a treasure briden 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 gray 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 recognized 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 briden 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 eyeglass of gleaming silk lapid 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 a 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 maneuver 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 bryden 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 bryden's throat gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter for the beard identity was too hideous as his and his glare was the passion of his protest the face that face spencer bryden'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 waist of his knights 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 hard oppressed still sick with the force of his shock and falling back is 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 end of chapter two chapter three of the jolly corner this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Nicholas Clifford the jolly corner by Henry James chapter three 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 Stafferton 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 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 traveled 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 born as from where he had been picked up the uttermost end of an interminable gray 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 was 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 wake 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 more over with intermissions still have been lifted and born since why and how else should he have known himself later on with the afternoon glow in tensor 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 gray fur that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling as were its pledge of truth mrs. Muldoon's face had gone but the other the second he had recognized 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 as a face 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 also 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 today 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 of 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 today 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 oh but i didn't cried bryden 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 herself had 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. moldoon that day of my going with you and she arrived as i've told you while failing to bring anyone 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 daverton as if once more with her fine intentions it wasn't only that his eyes as he lay turned back to her what more than 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 daverton 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 bride and 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 bryden 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 the 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 do you know it was i because as i told you weeks ago my mind and my imagination has worked so over what you might what you might not 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 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 bryden 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 bryden 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 arms 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 bryden i couldn't have sported mine downtown they'd have guide me there his great convex past me i saw it i recognize the kind is for his poor ruined sight and his poor right hand ah bryden 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 end of chapter three end of the jolly corner by henry james