The Altar of the Dead

Chapter 4

He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but

occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday

afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories.

There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by

side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of

these winter afternoons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware after

he had seated himself that the lady he had so often seen at church

was in the place next him and was evidently alone, as he also this

time happened to be. She was at first too absorbed in the

consideration of the programme to heed him, but when she at last

glanced at him he took advantage of the movement to speak to her,

greeting her with the remark that he felt as if he already knew

her. She smiled as she said "Oh yes, I recognise you"; yet in

spite of this admission of long acquaintance it was the first he

had seen of her smile. The effect of it was suddenly to contribute

more to that acquaintance than all the previous meetings had done.

He hadn't "taken in," he said to himself, that she was so pretty.

Later, that evening - it was while he rolled along in a hansom on

his way to dine out - he added that he hadn't taken in that she was

so interesting. The next morning in the midst of his work he quite

suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression of her,

beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last

reached the sea.

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of

what had now passed between them. It wasn't much, but it had just

made the difference. They had listened together to Beethoven and

Schumann; they had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at

the door, to which they moved together, he had asked her if he

could help her in the matter of getting away. She had thanked him

and put up her umbrella, slipping into the crowd without an

allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him to remember at

leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual scene of

that coincidence. This omission struck him now as natural and then

again as perverse. She mightn't in the least have allowed his

warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he would have

judged her an underbred woman. It was odd that when nothing had

really ever brought them together he should have been able

successfully to assume they were in a manner old friends - that

this negative quantity was somehow more than they could express.

His success, it was true, had been qualified by her quick escape,

so that there grew up in him an absurd desire to put it to some

better test. Save in so far as some other poor chance might help

him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at church. Left

to himself he would have gone to church the very next afternoon,

just for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there. But

he wasn't left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last,

after he had virtually made up his mind to go. The influence that

kept him away really revealed to him how little to himself his Dead

EVER left him. He went only for THEM - for nothing else in the

world.

The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hated to

connect the place with anything but his offices or to give a

glimpse of the curiosity that had been on the point of moving him.

It was absurd to weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a

custom of devotion that might with ease have been daily or hourly;

yet the tangle got itself woven. He was sorry, he was

disappointed: it was as if a long happy spell had been broken and

he had lost a familiar security. At the last, however, he asked

himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear of this

muddle about motives. After an interval neither longer nor shorter

than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that he

should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the

concert. This indifference didn't prevent his at once noting that

for the only time since he had first seen her she wasn't on the

spot. He had now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but

she didn't arrive, and when he went away still missing her he was

profanely and consentingly sorry. If her absence made the tangle

more intricate, that was all her own doing. By the end of another

year it was very intricate indeed; but by that time he didn't in

the least care, and it was only his cultivated consciousness that

had given him scruples. Three times in three months he had gone to

church without finding her, and he felt he hadn't needed these

occasions to show him his suspense had dropped. Yet it was,

incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacy that

had kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of course

immediately have recognised his description of her, whether she had

been seen at other hours. His delicacy had kept him from asking

any question about her at any time, and it was exactly the same

virtue that had left him so free to be decently civil to her at the

concert.

This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him when she

finally met his eyes - it was after a fourth trial - to

predetermine quite fixedly his awaiting her retreat. He joined her

in the street as soon as she had moved, asking her if he might

accompany her a certain distance. With her placid permission he

went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which she had

business: she let him know it was not where she lived. She lived,

as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in

connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties

and regular occupations. She wasn't, the mourning niece, in her

first youth, and her vanished freshness had left something behind

that, for Stransom, represented the proof it had been tragically

sacrificed. Whatever she gave him the assurance of she gave

without references. She might have been a divorced duchess - she

might have been an old maid who taught the harp.