1 files changed, 3139 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/8080-0.txt b/8080-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c33d0b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/8080-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3139 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Passionate Pilgrim, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: A Passionate Pilgrim
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: June 12, 2003 [eBook #8080]
+[Most recently updated: November 7, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Eve Sobol and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PASSIONATE PILGRIM ***
+
+
+
+
+A PASSIONATE PILGRIM
+
+By Henry James
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I determined to
+spend the interval of six weeks in England, to which country my mind’s
+eye only had as yet been introduced. I had formed in Italy and France a
+resolute preference for old inns, considering that what they sometimes
+cost the ungratified body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival
+in London, therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much
+to the east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably
+figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay, I
+descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of the genius
+of “attendance” in the person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had
+I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt I had cut a
+golden-ripe crop of English “impressions.” The coffee-room of the Red
+Lion, like so many other places and things I was destined to see in the
+motherland, seemed to have been waiting for long years, with just that
+sturdy sufferance of time written on its visage, for me to come and
+extract the romantic essence of it.
+
+The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most
+characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile failed
+to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so deeply buried
+in the soil of our early culture that, without some great upheaval
+of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when and where and how it
+begins. It makes an American’s enjoyment of England an emotion more
+searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of
+the Red Lion years ago, at home--at Saragossa Illinois--in books, in
+visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small
+and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular
+screens of mahogany, something higher than a man’s stature, furnished
+on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient
+Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a narrow table--a
+table expected under stress to accommodate no less than four pairs of
+active British elbows. High pressure indeed had passed away from the
+Red Lion for ever. It now knew only that of memories and ghosts and
+atmosphere. Round the room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent
+panelling of mahogany, so dark with time and so polished with unremitted
+friction that by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out
+the dim reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just
+arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated by
+the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a
+dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age--the Derby favourite of
+the year 1807, the Bank of England, her Majesty the Queen. On the floor
+was a Turkey carpet--as old as the mahogany almost, as the Bank
+of England, as the Queen--into which the waiter had in his lonely
+revolutions trodden so many massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing
+beer that the glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have
+recognised it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type
+would be altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having
+dreamed of lamb and spinach and a _salade de saison_, I sat down in
+penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against
+the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the mahogany
+partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that must have
+expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy screen refused even
+to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency.
+
+While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a person
+whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be a fellow
+lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like myself, to have
+submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on the other side of my
+partition had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to the fire,
+exposed his back to it and, after consulting his watch, looked directly
+out of the window and indirectly at me. He was a man of something less
+than middle age and more than middle stature, though indeed you would
+have called him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for
+his emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his head,
+was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey, unsuited,
+perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not altogether out
+of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion. His nose was aquiline
+and delicate; beneath it his moustache languished much rather than
+bristled. His mouth and chin were negative, or at the most provisional;
+not vulgar, doubtless, but ineffectually refined. A cold fatal
+gentlemanly weakness was expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His
+eye was restless and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of
+shifting his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head,
+told of exhausted intentions, of a will relaxed. His dress was neat and
+“toned down”--he might have been in mourning. I made up my mind on three
+points: he was a bachelor, he was out of health, he was not indigenous
+to the soil. The waiter approached him, and they conversed in accents
+barely audible. I heard the words “claret,” “sherry” with a tentative
+inflexion, and finally “beer” with its last letter changed to “ah.”
+ Perhaps he was a Russian in reduced circumstances; he reminded me
+slightly of certain sceptical cosmopolite Russians whom I had met on the
+Continent. While in my extravagant way I followed this train--for
+you see I was interested--there appeared a short brisk man with
+reddish-brown hair, with a vulgar nose, a sharp blue eye and a red
+beard confined to his lower jaw and chin. My putative Russian, still in
+possession of the rug, let his mild gaze stray over the dingy ornaments
+of the room. The other drew near, and his umbrella dealt a playful
+poke at the concave melancholy waistcoat. “A penny ha’penny for your
+thoughts!”
+
+My friend, as I call him, uttered an exclamation, stared, then laid
+his two hands on the other’s shoulders. The latter looked round at me
+keenly, compassing me in a momentary glance. I read in its own vague
+light that this was a transatlantic eyebeam; and with such confidence
+that I hardly needed to see its owner, as he prepared, with his
+companion, to seat himself at the table adjoining my own, take from his
+overcoat-pocket three New York newspapers and lay them beside his
+plate. As my neighbours proceeded to dine I felt the crumbs of their
+conversation scattered pretty freely abroad. I could hear almost all
+they said, without straining to catch it, over the top of the partition
+that divided us. Occasionally their voices dropped to recovery of
+discretion, but the mystery pieced itself together as if on purpose to
+entertain me. Their speech was pitched in the key that may in English
+air be called alien in spite of a few coincidences. The voices were
+American, however, with a difference; and I had no hesitation in
+assigning the softer and clearer sound to the pale thin gentleman, whom
+I decidedly preferred to his comrade. The latter began to question him
+about his voyage.
+
+“Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the hour we left New York.”
+
+“Well, you do look considerably reduced,” said the second-comer.
+
+“Reduced! I’ve been on the verge of the grave. I haven’t slept six hours
+for three weeks.” This was said with great gravity.
+
+“Well, I’ve made the voyage for the last time.”
+
+“The plague you have! You mean to locate here permanently?”
+
+“Oh it won’t be so very permanent!”
+
+There was a pause; after which: “You’re the same merry old boy, Searle.
+Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?”
+
+“I almost wish I were.”
+
+“You’re not so sweet on England then? I’ve heard people say at home that
+you dress and talk and act like an Englishman. But I know these people
+here and I know you. You’re not one of this crowd, Clement Searle, not
+you. You’ll go under here, sir; you’ll go under as sure as my name’s
+Simmons.”
+
+Following this I heard a sudden clatter as of the drop of a knife and
+fork. “Well, you’re a delicate sort of creature, if it IS your ugly
+name! I’ve been wandering about all day in this accursed city, ready
+to cry with homesickness and heartsickness and every possible sort of
+sickness, and thinking, in the absence of anything better, of meeting
+you here this evening and of your uttering some sound of cheer and
+comfort and giving me some glimmer of hope. Go under? Ain’t I under now?
+I can’t do more than get under the ground!”
+
+Mr. Simmons’s superior brightness appeared to flicker a moment in this
+gust of despair, but the next it was burning steady again. “_Don’t_ ‘cry,’
+Searle,” I heard him say. “Remember the waiter. I’ve grown Englishman
+enough for that. For heaven’s sake don’t let’s have any nerves. Nerves
+won’t do anything for you here. It’s best to come to the point. Tell me
+in three words what you expect of me.”
+
+I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had collapsed in his
+chair. “Upon my word, sir, you’re quite inconceivable. You never got my
+letter?”
+
+“Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to get anything in my
+life.”
+
+At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath, which it was well
+perhaps that I but partially heard. “Abijah Simmons,” he then cried,
+“what demon of perversity possesses you? Are you going to betray me here
+in a foreign land, to turn out a false friend, a heartless rogue?”
+
+“Go on, sir,” said sturdy Simmons. “Pour it all out. I’ll wait till
+you’ve done. Your beer’s lovely,” he observed independently to the
+waiter. “I’ll have some more.”
+
+“For God’s sake explain yourself!” his companion appealed.
+
+There was a pause, at the end of which I heard Mr. Simmons set down his
+empty tankard with emphasis. “You poor morbid mooning man,” he resumed,
+“I don’t want to say anything to make you feel sore. I regularly pity
+you. But you must allow that you’ve acted more like a confirmed crank
+than a member of our best society--in which every one’s so sensible.”
+
+Mr. Searle seemed to have made an effort to compose himself. “Be so good
+as to tell me then what was the meaning of your letter.”
+
+“Well, you had got on _my_ nerves, if you want to know, when I wrote it.
+It came of my always wishing so to please folks. I had much better have
+let you alone. To tell you the plain truth I never was so horrified in
+my life as when I found that on the strength of my few kind words you
+had come out here to seek your fortune.”
+
+“What then did you expect me to do?”
+
+“I expected you to wait patiently till I had made further enquiries and
+had written you again.”
+
+“And you’ve made further enquiries now?”
+
+“Enquiries! I’ve committed assaults.”
+
+“And you find I’ve no claim?”
+
+“No claim that one of _these_ big bugs will look at. It struck me at first
+that you had rather a neat little case. I confess the look of it took
+hold of me--”
+
+“Thanks to your liking so to please folks!” Mr. Simmons appeared for
+a moment at odds with something; it proved to be with his liquor. “I
+rather think your beer’s too good to be true,” he said to the waiter. “I
+guess I’ll take water. Come, old man,” he resumed, “don’t challenge me
+to the arts of debate, or you’ll have me right down on you, and then you
+_will_ feel me. My native sweetness, as I say, was part of it. The idea
+that if I put the thing through it would be a very pretty feather in
+my cap and a very pretty penny in my purse was part of it. And the
+satisfaction of seeing a horrid low American walk right into an old
+English estate was a good deal of it. Upon my word, Searle, when I think
+of it I wish with all my heart that, extravagant vain man as you are, I
+_could_, for the charm of it, put you through! I should hardly care what
+you did with the blamed place when you got it. I could leave you alone
+to turn it into Yankee notions--into ducks and drakes as they call ‘em
+here. I should like to see you tearing round over it and kicking up its
+sacred dust in their very faces!”
+
+“You don’t know me one little bit,” said Mr. Searle, rather shirking,
+I thought, the burden of this tribute and for all response to the
+ambiguity of the compliment.
+
+“I should be very glad to think I didn’t, sir. I’ve been to no small
+amount of personal inconvenience for you. I’ve pushed my way right up
+to the headspring. I’ve got the best opinion that’s to be had. The best
+opinion that’s to be had just gives you one leer over its spectacles. I
+guess that look will fix you if you ever get it straight. I’ve been
+able to tap, indirectly,” Mr. Simmons went on, “the solicitor of your
+usurping cousin, and he evidently knows something to be in the wind. It
+seems your elder brother twenty years ago put out a feeler. So you’re
+not to have the glory of even making them sit up.”
+
+“I never made any one sit up,” I heard Mr. Searle plead. “I shouldn’t
+begin at this time of day. I should approach the subject like a
+gentleman.”
+
+“Well, if you want very much to do something like a gentleman you’ve got
+a capital chance. Take your disappointment like a gentleman.”
+
+I had finished my dinner and had become keenly interested in poor Mr.
+Searle’s unencouraging--or unencouraged--claim; so interested that I
+at last hated to hear his trouble reflected in his voice without being
+able--all respectfully!--to follow it in his face. I left my place, went
+over to the fire, took up the evening paper and established a post of
+observation behind it.
+
+His cold counsellor was in the act of choosing a soft chop from the
+dish--an act accompanied by a great deal of prying and poking with that
+gentleman’s own fork. My disillusioned compatriot had pushed away his
+plate; he sat with his elbows on the table, gloomily nursing his head
+with his hands. His companion watched him and then seemed to wonder--to
+do Mr. Simmons justice--how he could least ungracefully give him up.
+“I say, Searle,”--and for my benefit, I think, taking me for a native
+ingenuous enough to be dazzled by his wit, he lifted his voice a little
+and gave it an ironical ring--“in this country it’s the inestimable
+privilege of a loyal citizen, under whatsoever stress of pleasure or of
+pain, to make a point of eating his dinner.”
+
+Mr. Searle gave his plate another push. “Anything may happen now. I
+don’t care a straw.”
+
+“You ought to care. Have another chop and you _will_ care. Have some
+better tipple. Take my advice!” Mr. Simmons went on.
+
+My friend--I adopt that name for him--gazed from between his two hands
+coldly before him. “I’ve had enough of your advice.”
+
+“A little more,” said Simmons mildly; “I shan’t trouble you again. What
+do you mean to do?”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“Oh come!”
+
+“Nothing, nothing, nothing!”
+
+“Nothing but starve. How about meeting expenses?”
+
+“Why do you ask?” said my friend. “You don’t care.”
+
+“My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer you twenty pounds you set
+most clumsily about it. You said just now I don’t know you,” Mr. Simmons
+went on. “Possibly. Come back with me then,” he said kindly enough, “and
+let’s improve our acquaintance.”
+
+“I won’t go back. I shall never go back.”
+
+“Never?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+Mr. Simmons thought it shrewdly over. “Well, you _are_ sick!” he exclaimed
+presently. “All I can say is that if you’re working out a plan for cold
+poison, or for any other act of desperation, you had better give it
+right up. You can’t get a dose of the commonest kind of cold poison
+for nothing, you know. Look here, Searle”--and the worthy man made what
+struck me as a very decent appeal. “If you’ll consent to return home
+with me by the steamer of the twenty-third I’ll pay your passage down.
+More than that, I’ll pay for your beer.”
+
+My poor gentleman met it. “I believe I never made up my mind to anything
+before, but I think it’s made up now. I shall stay here till I take my
+departure for a newer world than any patched-up newness of ours. It’s an
+odd feeling--I rather like it! What should I do at home?”
+
+“You said just now you were homesick.”
+
+“I meant I was sick for a home. Don’t I belong here? Haven’t I longed to
+get here all my life? Haven’t I counted the months and the years till I
+should be able to ‘go’ as we say? And now that I’ve ‘gone,’ that is that
+I’ve come, must I just back out? No, no, I’ll move on. I’m much obliged
+to you for your offer. I’ve enough money for the present. I’ve about my
+person some forty pounds’ worth of British gold, and the same amount,
+say, of the toughness of the heaven-sent idiot. They’ll see me through
+together! After they’re gone I shall lay my head in some English
+churchyard, beside some ivied tower, beneath an old gnarled black yew.”
+
+I had so far distinctly followed the dialogue; but at this point the
+landlord entered and, begging my pardon, would suggest that number 12,
+a most superior apartment, having now been vacated, it would give him
+pleasure if I would look in. I declined to look in, but agreed for
+number 12 at a venture and gave myself again, with dissimulation, to
+my friends. They had got up; Simmons had put on his overcoat; he stood
+polishing his rusty black hat with his napkin. “Do you mean to go down
+to the place?” he asked.
+
+“Possibly. I’ve thought of it so often that I should like to see it.”
+
+“Shall you call on Mr. Searle?”
+
+“Heaven forbid!”
+
+“Something has just occurred to me,” Simmons pursued with a grin that
+made his upper lip look more than ever denuded by the razor and jerked
+the ugly ornament of his chin into the air. “There’s a certain Miss
+Searle, the old man’s sister.”
+
+“Well?” my gentleman quavered.
+
+“Well, sir!--you talk of moving on. You might move on the damsel.”
+
+Mr. Searle frowned in silence and his companion gave him a tap on the
+stomach. “Line those ribs a bit first!” He blushed crimson; his eyes
+filled with tears. “You ARE a coarse brute,” he said. The scene
+quite harrowed me, but I was prevented from seeing it through by the
+reappearance of the landlord on behalf of number 12. He represented to
+me that I ought in justice to him to come and see how tidy they _had_
+made it. Half an hour afterwards I was rattling along in a hansom toward
+Covent Garden, where I heard Madame Bosio in _The Barber of Seville_. On
+my return from the opera I went into the coffee-room; it had occurred
+to me I might catch there another glimpse of Mr. Searle. I was not
+disappointed. I found him seated before the fire with his head sunk on
+his breast: he slept, dreaming perhaps of Abijah Simmons. I watched him
+for some moments. His closed eyes, in the dim lamplight, looked even
+more helpless and resigned, and I seemed to see the fine grain of his
+nature in his unconscious mask. They say fortune comes while we sleep,
+and, standing there, I felt really tender enough--though otherwise most
+unqualified--to be poor Mr. Searle’s fortune. As I walked away I noted
+in one of the little prandial pews I have described the melancholy
+waiter, whose whiskered chin also reposed on the bulge of his
+shirt-front. I lingered a moment beside the old inn-yard in which, upon
+a time, the coaches and post-chaises found space to turn and disgorge.
+Above the dusky shaft of the enclosing galleries, where lounging lodgers
+and crumpled chambermaids and all the picturesque domesticity of a
+rattling tavern must have leaned on their elbows for many a year, I made
+out the far-off lurid twinkle of the London constellations. At the foot
+of the stairs, enshrined in the glittering niche of her well-appointed
+bar, the landlady sat napping like some solemn idol amid votive brass
+and plate.
+
+The next morning, not finding the subject of my benevolent curiosity in
+the coffee-room, I learned from the waiter that he had ordered breakfast
+in bed. Into this asylum I was not yet prepared to pursue him. I spent
+the morning in the streets, partly under pressure of business, but
+catching all kinds of romantic impressions by the way. To the searching
+American eye there is no tint of association with which the great grimy
+face of London doesn’t flush. As the afternoon approached, however,
+I began to yearn for some site more gracefully classic than what
+surrounded me, and, thinking over the excursions recommended to the
+ingenuous stranger, decided to take the train to Hampton Court. The day
+was the more propitious that it yielded just that dim subaqueous light
+which sleeps so fondly upon the English landscape.
+
+At the end of an hour I found myself wandering through the apartments of
+the great palace. They follow each other in infinite succession, with no
+great variety of interest or aspect, but with persistent pomp and a fine
+specific effect. They are exactly of their various times. You pass from
+painted and panelled bedchambers and closets, anterooms, drawing-rooms,
+council-rooms, through king’s suite, queen’s suite, prince’s suite,
+until you feel yourself move through the appointed hours and stages
+of some rigid monarchical day. On one side are the old monumental
+upholsteries, the big cold tarnished beds and canopies, with the
+circumference of disapparelled royalty symbolised by a gilded
+balustrade, and the great carved and yawning chimney-places where
+dukes-in-waiting may have warmed their weary heels; on the other,
+in deep recesses, rise the immense windows, the framed and draped
+embrasures where the sovereign whispered and favourites smiled, looking
+out on terraced gardens and misty park. The brown walls are dimly
+illumined by innumerable portraits of courtiers and captains, more
+especially with various members of the Batavian _entourage_ of William
+of Orange, the restorer of the palace; with good store too of the
+lily-bosomed models of Lely and Kneller. The whole tone of this
+processional interior is singularly stale and sad. The tints of all
+things have both faded and darkened--you taste the chill of the place
+as you walk from room to room. It was still early in the day and in
+the season, and I flattered myself that I was the only visitor. This
+complacency, however, dropped at sight of a person standing motionless
+before a simpering countess of Sir Peter Lely’s creation. On hearing
+my footstep this victim of an evaporated spell turned his head and I
+recognised my fellow lodger of the Red Lion. I was apparently recognised
+as well; he looked as if he could scarce wait for me to be kind to him,
+and in fact didn’t wait. Seeing I had a catalogue he asked the name of
+the portrait. On my satisfying him he appealed, rather timidly, as to my
+opinion of the lady.
+
+“Well,” said I, not quite timidly enough perhaps, “I confess she strikes
+me as no great matter.”
+
+He remained silent and was evidently a little abashed. As we strolled
+away he stole a sidelong glance of farewell at his leering shepherdess.
+To speak with him face to face was to feel keenly that he was no less
+interesting than infirm. We talked of our inn, of London, of the palace;
+he uttered his mind freely, but seemed to struggle with a weight of
+depression. It was an honest mind enough, with no great cultivation but
+with a certain natural love of excellent things. I foresaw that I
+should find him quite to the manner born--to ours; full of glimpses and
+responses, of deserts and desolations. His perceptions would be fine and
+his opinions pathetic; I should moreover take refuge from his sense of
+proportion in his sense of humour, and then refuge from _that_, ah me!--in
+what? On my telling him that I was a fellow citizen he stopped short,
+deeply touched, and, silently passing his arm into my own, suffered me
+to lead him through the other apartments and down into the gardens. A
+large gravelled platform stretches itself before the basement of the
+palace, taking the afternoon sun. Parts of the great structure are
+reserved for private use and habitation, occupied by state-pensioners,
+reduced gentlewomen in receipt of the Queen’s bounty and other deserving
+persons. Many of the apartments have their dependent gardens, and here
+and there, between the verdure-coated walls, you catch a glimpse of
+these somewhat stuffy bowers. My companion and I measured more than once
+this long expanse, looking down on the floral figures of the rest of the
+affair and on the stoutly-woven tapestry of creeping plants that muffle
+the foundations of the huge red pile. I thought of the various images of
+old-world gentility which, early and late, must have strolled in front
+of it and felt the protection and security of the place. We peeped
+through an antique grating into one of the mossy cages and saw an old
+lady with a black mantilla on her head, a decanter of water in one hand
+and a crutch in the other, come forth, followed by three little dogs and
+a cat, to sprinkle a plant. She would probably have had an opinion on
+the virtue of Queen Caroline. Feeling these things together made us
+quickly, made us extraordinarily, intimate. My companion seemed to ache
+with his impression; he scowled, all gently, as if it gave him pain. I
+proposed at last that we should dine somewhere on the spot and take
+a late train to town. We made our way out of the gardens into the
+adjoining village, where we entered an inn which I pronounced, very
+sincerely, exactly what we wanted. Mr. Searle had approached our board
+as shyly as if it had been a cold bath; but, gradually warming to his
+work, he declared at the end of half an hour that for the first time in
+a month he enjoyed his victuals.
+
+“I’m afraid you’re rather out of health,” I risked.
+
+“Yes, sir--I’m an incurable.”
+
+The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered about the entrance
+of Bushey Park, and after we had dined we lounged along into the
+celebrated avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare emotion, familiar
+to every intelligent traveller, in which the mind seems to swallow the
+sum total of its impressions at a gulp. You take in the whole place,
+whatever it be. You feel England, you feel Italy, and the sensation
+involves for the moment a kind of thrill. I had known it from time to
+time in Italy and had opened my soul to it as to the spirit of the
+Lord. Since my landing in England I had been waiting for it to arrive. A
+bottle of tolerable Burgundy, at dinner, had perhaps unlocked to it the
+gates of sense; it arrived now with irresistible force. Just the scene
+around me was the England of one’s early reveries. Over against us, amid
+the ripeness of its gardens, the dark red residence, with its formal
+facings and its vacant windows, seemed to make the past definite and
+massive; the little village, nestling between park and palace, around
+a patch of turfy common, with its taverns of figurative names, its
+ivy-towered church, its mossy roofs, looked like the property of a
+feudal lord. It was in this dark composite light that I had read the
+British classics; it was this mild moist air that had blown from the
+pages of the poets; while I seemed to feel the buried generations in the
+dense and elastic sod. And that I must have testified in some form or
+other to what I have called my thrill I gather, remembering it, from a
+remark of my companion’s.
+
+“You’ve the advantage over me in coming to all this with an educated
+eye. You already know what old things can be. I’ve never known it but by
+report. I’ve always fancied I should like it. In a small way at home, of
+course, I did try to stand by my idea of it. I must be a conservative by
+nature. People at home used to call me a cockney and a fribble. But it
+wasn’t true,” he went on; “if it had been I should have made my way over
+here long ago: before--before--” He paused, and his head dropped sadly
+on his breast.
+
+The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue; I had but to choose my
+time for learning his story. Something told me that I had gained his
+confidence and that, so far as attention and attitude might go, I was
+“in” for responsibilities. But somehow I didn’t dread them. “Before you
+lost your health,” I suggested.
+
+“Before I lost my health,” he answered. “And my property--the little I
+had. And my ambition. And any power to take myself seriously.”
+
+“Come!” I cried. “You shall recover everything. This tonic English
+climate will wind you up in a month. And _then_ see how you’ll take
+yourself--and how I shall take you!”
+
+“Oh,” he gratefully smiled, “I may turn to dust in your hands! I should
+like,” he presently pursued, “to be an old genteel pensioner, lodged
+over there in the palace and spending my days in maundering about these
+vistas. I should go every morning, at the hour when it gets the sun,
+into that long gallery where all those pretty women of Lely’s are
+hung--I know you despise them!--and stroll up and down and say something
+kind to them. Poor precious forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted
+in their day, so neglected now! Offering up their shoulders and ringlets
+and smiles to that musty deadly silence!”
+
+I laid my hand on my friend’s shoulder. “Oh sir, you’re all right!”
+
+Just at this moment there came cantering down the shallow glade of the
+avenue a young girl on a fine black horse--one of those little budding
+gentlewomen, perfectly mounted and equipped, who form to alien eyes one
+of the prettiest incidents of English scenery. She had distanced her
+servant and, as she came abreast of us, turned slightly in her saddle
+and glanced back at him. In the movement she dropped the hunting-crop
+with which she was armed; whereupon she reined up and looked shyly at
+us and at the implement. “This is something better than a Lely,” I
+said. Searle hastened forward, picked up the crop and, with a particular
+courtesy that became him, handed it back to the rider. Fluttered and
+blushing she reached forward, took it with a quick sweet sound, and the
+next moment was bounding over the quiet turf. Searle stood watching her;
+the servant, as he passed us, touched his hat. When my friend turned
+toward me again I saw that he too was blushing. “Oh sir, you’re all
+right,” I repeated.
+
+At a short distance from where we had stopped was an old stone bench. We
+went and sat down on it and, as the sun began to sink, watched the light
+mist powder itself with gold. “We ought to be thinking of the train back
+to London, I suppose,” I at last said.
+
+“Oh hang the train!” sighed my companion.
+
+“Willingly. There could be no better spot than this to feel the English
+evening stand still.” So we lingered, and the twilight hung about us,
+strangely clear in spite of the thickness of the air. As we sat there
+came into view an apparition unmistakeable from afar as an immemorial
+vagrant--the disowned, in his own rich way, of all the English ages. As
+he approached us he slackened pace and finally halted, touching his cap.
+He was a man of middle age, clad in a greasy bonnet with false-looking
+ear-locks depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red
+scarf, tucked into his waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote
+affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a stick; on
+his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of withered
+vegetables at the bottom. His face was pale haggard and degraded beyond
+description--as base as a counterfeit coin, yet as modelled somehow as
+a tragic mask. He too, like everything else, had a history. From what
+height had he fallen, from what depth had he risen? He was the perfect
+symbol of generated constituted baseness; and I felt before him in
+presence of a great artist or actor.
+
+“For God’s sake, gentlemen,” he said in the raucous tone of
+weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat exacerbated
+by perpetual gin, “for God’s sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor
+fern-collector!”--turning up his stale daisies. “Food hasn’t passed my
+lips, gentlemen, for the last three days.” We gaped at him and at each
+other, and to our imagination his appeal had almost the force of a
+command. “I wonder if half-a-crown would help?” I privately wailed. And
+our fasting botanist went limping away through the park with the grace
+of controlled stupefaction still further enriching his outline.
+
+“I feel as if I had seen my _Doppelgänger_,” said Searle. “He reminds me
+of myself. What am I but a mere figure in the landscape, a wandering
+minstrel or picker of daisies?”
+
+“What are you ‘anyway,’ my friend?” I thereupon took occasion to ask.
+“Who are you? kindly tell me.”
+
+The colour rose again to his pale face and I feared I had offended
+him. He poked a moment at the sod with the point of his umbrella before
+answering. “Who am I?” he said at last. “My name is Clement Searle. I
+was born in New York, and that’s the beginning and the end of me.”
+
+“Ah not the end!” I made bold to plead.
+
+“Then it’s because I _have_ no end--any more than an ill-written book. I
+just stop anywhere; which means I’m a failure,” the poor man all lucidly
+and unreservedly pursued: “a failure, as hopeless and helpless, sir, as
+any that ever swallowed up the slender investments of the widow and
+the orphan. I don’t pay five cents on the dollar. What I might have
+been--once!--there’s nothing left to show. I was rotten before I was
+ripe. To begin with, certainly, I wasn’t a fountain of wisdom. All the
+more reason for a definite channel--for having a little character and
+purpose. But I hadn’t even a little. I had nothing but nice tastes, as
+they call them, and fine sympathies and sentiments. Take a turn through
+New York to-day and you’ll find the tattered remnants of these things
+dangling on every bush and fluttering in every breeze; the men to whom
+I lent money, the women to whom I made love, the friends I trusted, the
+follies I invented, the poisonous fumes of pleasure amid which nothing
+was worth a thought but the manhood they stifled! It was my fault that I
+believed in pleasure here below. I believe in it still, but as I believe
+in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal, certainly--if
+you’ve got one; but most people haven’t. Pleasure would be right if it
+were pleasure straight through; but it never is. My taste was to be the
+best in the world; well, perhaps it was. I had a little money; it went
+the way of my little wit. Here in my pocket I have the scant dregs
+of it. I should tell you I was the biggest kind of ass. Just now that
+description would flatter me; it would assume there’s something left of
+me. But the ghost of a donkey--what’s that? I think,” he went on with
+a charming turn and as if striking off his real explanation, “I should
+have been all right in a world arranged on different lines. Before
+heaven, sir--whoever you are--I’m in practice so absurdly tender-hearted
+that I can afford to say it: I entered upon life a perfect gentleman.
+I had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found them
+nowhere--found a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without shade,
+without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery
+of colour. To furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own
+soul. I went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very
+pretty chiaroscuro you’ll find in my track! Sitting here in this old
+park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of
+what might have been! I should have been born here and not there; here
+my makeshift distinctions would have found things they’d have been true
+of. How it was I never got free is more than I can say. It might have
+cut the knot, but the knot was too tight. I was always out of health or
+in debt or somehow desperately dangling. Besides, I had a horror of the
+great black sickening sea. A year ago I was reminded of the existence of
+an old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes of
+my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I confess it’s a
+bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means sure that to this hour
+I’ve got the hang of it. You look as if you had a clear head: some other
+time, if you consent, we’ll have a go at it, such as it is, together.
+Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and tried to commit the
+‘points’ of our case to memory, as I used to get nine-times-nine by
+heart as a boy. I dreamed of it for six months, half-expecting to wake
+up some fine morning and hear through a latticed casement the cawing of
+an English rookery. A couple of months ago there came out to England on
+business of his own a man who once got me out of a dreadful mess (not
+that I had hurt anyone but myself), a legal practitioner in our courts,
+a very rough diamond, but with a great deal of _flair_, as they say in New
+York. It was with him yesterday you saw me dining. He undertook, as
+he called it, to ‘nose round’ and see if anything could be made of our
+questionable but possible show. The matter had never seriously been
+taken up. A month later I got a letter from Simmons assuring me that it
+seemed a very good show indeed and that he should be greatly surprised
+if I were unable to do something. This was the greatest push I had ever
+got in my life; I took a deliberate step, for the first time; I sailed
+for England. I’ve been here three days: they’ve seemed three months.
+After keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours my legal adviser makes his
+appearance last night and states to me, with his mouth full of mutton,
+that I haven’t a leg to stand on, that my claim is moonshine, and that
+I must do penance and take a ticket for six more days of purgatory
+with his presence thrown in. My friend, my friend--shall I say I was
+disappointed? I’m already resigned. I didn’t really believe I had
+any case. I felt in my deeper consciousness that it was the crowning
+illusion of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor legal
+adviser!--I forgive him with all my heart. But for him I shouldn’t be
+sitting in this place, in this air, under these impressions. This is a
+world I could have got on with beautifully. There’s an immense charm in
+its having been kept for the last. After it nothing else would have been
+tolerable. I shall now have a month of it, I hope, which won’t be long
+enough for it to “go back on me. There’s one thing!”--and here, pausing,
+he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before him--“I wish it were
+possible you should be with me to the end.”
+
+“I promise you to leave you only when you kick me downstairs.” But I
+suggested my terms. “It must be on condition of your omitting from your
+conversation this intolerable flavour of mortality. I know nothing of
+‘ends.’ I’m all for beginnings.”
+
+He kept on me his sad weak eyes. Then with a faint smile: “Don’t cut
+down a man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it. I’m bankrupt.”
+
+“Oh health’s money!” I said. “Get well, and the rest will take care of
+itself. I’m interested in your questionable claim--it’s the question
+that’s the charm; and pretenders, to anything big enough, have always
+been, for me, an attractive class. Only their first duty’s to be
+gallant.”
+
+“Their first duty’s to understand their own points and to know their own
+mind,” he returned with hopeless lucidity. “Don’t ask me to climb our
+family tree now,” he added; “I fear I haven’t the head for it. I’ll try
+some day--if it will bear my weight; or yours added to mine. There’s
+no doubt, however, that we, as they say, go back. But I know nothing of
+business. If I were to take the matter in hand I should break in two the
+poor little silken thread from which everything hangs. In a better world
+than this I think I should be listened to. But the wind doesn’t set to
+ideal justice. There’s no doubt that a hundred years ago we suffered
+a palpable wrong. Yet we made no appeal at the time, and the dust of a
+century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!”
+
+“What then,” I asked, “is the estimated value of your interest?”
+
+“We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise. Compared with
+the whole property our ideas have been small. We were once advised in
+the sense of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Why a hundred and
+thirty I’m sure I don’t know. Don’t beguile me into figures.”
+
+“Allow me one more question,” I said. “Who’s actually in possession?”
+
+“A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing about him.”
+
+“He’s in some way related to you?”
+
+“Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make us?”
+
+“Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin live?”
+
+“At a place called Lackley--in Middleshire.”
+
+I thought it over. “Well, suppose we look up Lackley in Middleshire!”
+
+He got straight up. “Go and see it?”
+
+“Go and see it.”
+
+“Well,” he said, “with you I’ll go anywhere.”
+
+On our return to town we determined to spend three days there together
+and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one as the other of
+that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those superstitious pilgrims
+who feel it the mother-city of their race, the distributing heart of
+their traditional life. Certain characteristics of the dusky Babylon,
+certain aspects, phases, features, “say” more to the American spiritual
+ear than anything else in Europe. The influence of these things on
+Searle it charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as
+I pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
+appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from long
+inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and his talk.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+We looked out the topography of Middleshire in a county-guide, which
+spoke highly, as the phrase is, of Lackley Park, and took up our abode,
+our journey ended, at a wayside inn where, in the days of leisure, the
+coach must have stopped for luncheon and burnished pewters of rustic
+ale been handed up as straight as possible to outsiders athirst with
+the sense of speed. We stopped here for mere gaping joy of its
+steep-thatched roof, its latticed windows, its hospitable porch, and
+allowed a couple of days to elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet
+sentimental observance of the land before approaching the particular
+business that had drawn us on. The region I allude to is a compendium
+of the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
+scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely knew whether
+we were looking at it for the first or the last time, made it arrest us
+at every step. The countryside, in the full warm rains of the last
+of April, had burst into sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the
+hedgerows had turned into blooming screens, the sodden verdure of lawn
+and meadow been washed over with a lighter brush. We went forth without
+loss of time for a long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested
+central billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which
+you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties,
+within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations.
+Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered
+slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of
+the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish
+blur of habitation, taking the mild English light.
+
+We gave an irrepressible attention to this same solar reserve, and found
+in it only a refinement of art. The sky never was empty and never idle;
+the clouds were continually at play for our benefit. Over against
+us, from our station on the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved,
+condensed and shifted, blotting the blue with sullen rain-spots,
+stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of grey, bursting into
+an explosion of light or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our
+way along the rounded ridge of the downs and reached, by a descent,
+through slanting angular fields, green to cottage-doors, a russet
+village that beckoned us from the heart of the maze in which the hedges
+wrapped it up. Close beside it, I admit, the roaring train bounces out
+of a hole in the hills; yet there broods upon this charming hamlet an
+old-time quietude that makes a violation of confidence of naming it so
+far away. We struck through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its
+barriers of hawthorn; it led us to a superb old farmhouse, now rather
+rudely jostled by the multiplied roads and by-ways that have reduced its
+ancient appanage. It stands there in stubborn picturesqueness, doggedly
+submitting to be pointed out and sketched. It is a wonderful image of
+the domiciliary conditions of the past--cruelly complete; with bended
+beams and joists, beneath the burden of gables, that seem to ache and
+groan with memories and regrets. The short low windows, where lead and
+glass combine equally to create an inward gloom, retain their opacity as
+a part of the primitive idea of defence. Such an old house provokes on
+the part of an American a luxury of respect. So propped and patched, so
+tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central
+English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanised with ages
+of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed to offer to our
+grateful eyes a small rude symbol of the great English social order.
+Passing out upon the highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch,
+the “village-green” of the tales of our youth. Nothing was absent: the
+shaggy mouse-coloured donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge
+proboscis, the geese, the old woman--_the_ old woman, in person, with
+her red cloak and her black bonnet, frilled about the face and
+double-frilled beside her decent placid cheeks--the towering ploughman
+with his white smock-frock puckered on chest and back, his short
+corduroys, his mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these
+things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and
+mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the
+handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle
+whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy
+but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a
+meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a
+surface of fine plush. We followed it from field to field and from
+stile to stile; it was all adorably the way to church. At the church we
+finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the
+workday world by the broad stillness of pastures--a grey, grey tower, a
+huge black yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and
+protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to ache with
+consecration that my sensitive companion gave way to the force of it.
+
+“You must bury me here, you know”--he caught at my arm. “It’s the first
+place of worship I’ve seen in my life. How it makes a Sunday where it
+stands!”
+
+It took the Church, we agreed, to make churches, but we had the sense
+the next day of seeing still better why. We walked over some seven
+miles, to the nearer of the two neighbouring seats of that lesson; and
+all through such a mist of local colour that we felt ourselves a pair
+of Smollett’s pedestrian heroes faring tavernward for a night of
+adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass of
+the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue; and
+as we got closer stopped on a bridge and looked down at the reflexion of
+the solid minster in a yellow stream. Going further yet we entered
+the russet town--where surely Miss Austen’s heroines, in chariots
+and curricles, must often have come a-shopping for their sandals and
+mittens; we lounged in the grassed and gravelled precinct and gazed
+insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning wasting
+afternoon light, the visible ether that feels the voices of the chimes
+cling far aloft to the quiet sides of the cathedral-tower; saw it linger
+and nestle and abide, as it loves to do on all perpendicular spaces,
+converting them irresistibly into registers and dials; tasted too, as
+deeply, of the peculiar stillness of this place of priests; saw a rosy
+English lad come forth and lock the door of the old foundation-school
+that dovetailed with cloister and choir, and carry his big responsible
+key into one of the quiet canonical houses: and then stood musing
+together on the effect on one’s mind of having in one’s boyhood gone and
+come through cathedral-shades as a King’s scholar, and yet kept ruddy
+with much cricket in misty river meadows. On the third morning we betook
+ourselves to Lackley, having learned that parts of the “grounds” were
+open to visitors, and that indeed on application the house was sometimes
+shown.
+
+Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of the
+hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound and circled
+from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
+glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at
+everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and untended
+as I had found a few of the large loose villas of old Italy, and I was
+still never to see the angular fact of English landlordism muffle itself
+in so many concessions. The weather had just become perfect; it was one
+of the dozen exquisite days of the English year--days stamped with a
+purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap. It was as if the
+mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which starred the
+dark waysides like petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been
+meted out to us by the cubic foot--distilled from an alchemist’s
+crucible. From this pastoral abundance we moved upon the more composed
+scene, the park proper--passed through a second lodge-gate, with
+weather-worn gilding on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where the
+great trees stood singly and the tame deer browsed along the bed of
+a woodland stream. Here before us rose the gabled grey front of the
+Tudor-time, developed and terraced and gardened to some later loss, as
+we were afterwards to know, of type.
+
+“Here you can wander all day,” I said to Searle, “like an exiled
+prince who has come back on tiptoe and hovers about the dominion of the
+usurper.”
+
+“To think of ‘others’ having hugged this all these years!” he answered.
+“I know what I am, but what might I have been? What do such places make
+of a man?”
+
+“I dare say he gets stupidly used to them,” I said. “But I dare say too,
+even then, that when you scratch the mere owner you find the perfect
+lover.”
+
+“What a perfect scene and background it forms!” my friend, however,
+had meanwhile gone on. “What legends, what histories it knows! My heart
+really breaks with all I seem to guess. There’s Tennyson’s Talking Oak!
+What summer days one could spend here! How I could lounge the rest of my
+life away on this turf of the middle ages! Haven’t I some maiden-cousin
+in that old hall, or grange, or court--what in the name of enchantment
+do you call the thing?--who would give me kind leave?” And then he
+turned almost fiercely upon me. “Why did you bring me here? Why did you
+drag me into this distraction of vain regrets?”
+
+At this moment there passed within call a decent lad who had emerged
+from the gardens and who might have been an underling in the stables. I
+hailed him and put the question of our possible admittance to the house.
+He answered that the master was away from home, but that he thought it
+probable the housekeeper would consent to do the honours. I passed my
+arm into Searle’s. “Come,” I said; “drain the cup, bitter-sweet though
+it be. We must go in.” We hastened slowly and approached the fine front.
+The house was one of the happiest fruits of its freshly-feeling era,
+a multitudinous cluster of fair gables and intricate chimneys, brave
+projections and quiet recesses, brown old surfaces weathered to silver
+and mottled roofs that testified not to seasons but to centuries. Two
+broad terraces commanded the wooded horizon. Our appeal was answered by
+a butler who condescended to our weakness. He renewed the assertion that
+Mr. Searle was away from home, but he would himself lay our case before
+the housekeeper. We would be so good, however, as to give him our cards.
+This request, following so directly on the assertion that Mr. Searle
+was absent, was rather resented by my companion. “Surely not for the
+housekeeper.”
+
+The butler gave a diplomatic cough. “Miss Searle is at home, sir.”
+
+“Yours alone will have to serve,” said my friend. I took out a card and
+pencil and wrote beneath my name _New York_. As I stood with the pencil
+poised a temptation entered into it. Without in the least considering
+proprieties or results I let my implement yield--I added above my name
+that of Mr. Clement Searle. What would come of it?
+
+Before many minutes the housekeeper waited upon us--a fresh rosy little
+old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown; a quaint
+careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our pleasure, to say
+nothing of any other. She had the accent of the country, but the manners
+of the house. Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments,
+duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour,
+with a hundred ornaments and treasures. The pictures were especially
+valuable. The two Vandykes, the trio of rosy Rubenses, the sole and
+sombre Rembrandt, glowed with conscious authenticity. A Claude, a
+Murillo, a Greuze, a couple of Gainsboroughs, hung there with high
+complacency. Searle strolled about, scarcely speaking, pale and grave,
+with bloodshot eyes and lips compressed. He uttered no comment on what
+we saw--he asked but a question or two. Missing him at last from my side
+I retraced my steps and found him in a room we had just left, on a faded
+old ottoman and with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in
+his hands. Before him, ranged on a great _crédence_, was a magnificent
+collection of old Italian majolica; plates of every shape, with their
+glaze of happy colour, jugs and vases nobly bellied and embossed. There
+seemed to rise before me, as I looked, a sudden vision of the young
+English gentleman who, eighty years ago, had travelled by slow stages to
+Italy and been waited on at his inn by persuasive toymen. “What is it,
+my dear man?” I asked. “Are you unwell?”
+
+He uncovered his haggard face and showed me the flush of a consciousness
+sharper, I think, to myself than to him. “A memory of the past!
+There comes back to me a china vase that used to stand on the parlour
+mantel-shelf when I was a boy, with a portrait of General Jackson
+painted on one side and a bunch of flowers on the other. How long do you
+suppose that majolica has been in the family?”
+
+“A long time probably. It was brought hither in the last century, into
+old, old England, out of old, old Italy, by some contemporary dandy with
+a taste for foreign gimcracks. Here it has stood for a hundred years,
+keeping its clear firm hues in this quiet light that has never sought to
+advertise it.”
+
+Searle sprang to his feet. “I say, for mercy’s sake, take me away! I
+can’t stand this sort of thing. Before I know it I shall do something
+scandalous. I shall steal some of their infernal crockery. I shall
+proclaim my identity and assert my rights. I shall go blubbering to Miss
+Searle and ask her in pity’s name to ‘put me up.’”
+
+If he could ever have been said to threaten complications he rather
+visibly did so now. I began to regret my officious presentation of
+his name and prepared without delay to lead him out of the house. We
+overtook the housekeeper in the last room of the series, a small unused
+boudoir over whose chimney-piece hung a portrait of a young man in a
+powdered wig and a brocaded waistcoat. I was struck with his resemblance
+to my companion while our guide introduced him. “This is Mr. Clement
+Searle, Mr. Searle’s great-uncle, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He died young,
+poor gentleman; he perished at sea, going to America.”
+
+“He was the young buck who brought the majolica out of Italy,” I
+supplemented.
+
+“Indeed, sir, I believe he did,” said the housekeeper without wonder.
+
+“He’s the image of you, my dear Searle,” I further observed.
+
+“He’s remarkably like the gentleman, saving his presence,” said the
+housekeeper.
+
+My friend stood staring. “Clement Searle--at sea--going to America--?”
+ he broke out. Then with some sharpness to our old woman: “Why the devil
+did he go to America?”
+
+“Why indeed, sir? You may well ask. I believe he had kinsfolk there. It
+was for them to come to him.”
+
+Searle broke into a laugh. “It was for them to come to him! Well, well,”
+ he said, fixing his eyes on our guide, “they’ve come to him at last!”
+
+She blushed like a wrinkled rose-leaf. “Indeed, sir, I verily believe
+you’re one of _us!_”
+
+“My name’s the name of that beautiful youth,” Searle went on. “Dear
+kinsman I’m happy to meet you! And what do you think of this?” he
+pursued as he grasped me by the arm. “I have an idea. He perished at
+sea. His spirit came ashore and wandered about in misery till it got
+another incarnation--in this poor trunk!” And he tapped his hollow
+chest. “Here it has rattled about these forty years, beating its wings
+against its rickety cage, begging to be taken home again. And I never
+knew what was the matter with me! Now at last the bruised spirit can
+escape!”
+
+Our old lady gaped at a breadth of appreciation--if not at the
+disclosure of a connexion--beyond her. The scene was really
+embarrassing, and my confusion increased as we became aware of another
+presence. A lady had appeared in the doorway and the housekeeper dropped
+just audibly: “Miss Searle!” My first impression of Miss Searle was that
+she was neither young nor beautiful. She stood without confidence on the
+threshold, pale, trying to smile and twirling my card in her fingers.
+I immediately bowed. Searle stared at her as if one of the pictures had
+stepped out of its frame.
+
+“If I’m not mistaken one of you gentlemen is Mr. Clement Searle,” the
+lady adventured.
+
+“My friend’s Mr. Clement Searle,” I took upon myself to reply. “Allow me
+to add that I alone am responsible for your having received his name.”
+
+“I should have been sorry not to--not to see him,” said Miss Searle,
+beginning to blush. “Your being from America has led me--perhaps to
+intrude!”
+
+“The intrusion, madam, has been on our part. And with just that
+excuse--that we come from so far away.”
+
+Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he stood
+silent beneath Sir Joshua’s portrait. The housekeeper, agitated and
+mystified, fairly let herself go. “Heaven preserve us, Miss! It’s your
+great-uncle’s picture come to life.”
+
+“I’m not mistaken then,” said Miss Searle--“we must be distantly
+related.” She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was almost
+anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her with gentle
+wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his thoughts. This
+then was his maiden-cousin, prospective mistress of these hereditary
+treasures. She was of some thirty-five years of age, taller than was
+then common and perhaps stouter than is now enjoined. She had small
+kind grey eyes, a considerable quantity of very light-brown hair and a
+smiling well-formed mouth. She was dressed in a lustreless black
+satin gown with a short train. Disposed about her neck was a blue
+handkerchief, and over this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string
+of amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was large yet somehow
+vague, mature yet undeveloped. Her manner of addressing us spoke of all
+sorts of deep diffidences. Searle, I think, had prefigured to himself
+some proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved at finding
+the lady timid and not obtrusively fair. He at once had an excellent
+tone.
+
+“We’re distant cousins, I believe. I’m happy to claim a relationship
+which you’re so good as to remember. I hadn’t counted on your knowing
+anything about me.”
+
+“Perhaps I’ve done wrong.” And Miss Searle blushed and smiled anew. “But
+I’ve always known of there being people of our blood in America, and
+have often wondered and asked about them--without ever learning much.
+To-day, when this card was brought me and I understood a Clement Searle
+to be under our roof as a stranger, I felt I ought to do something. But,
+you know, I hardly knew what. My brother’s in London. I’ve done what I
+think he would have done. Welcome as a cousin.” And with a resolution
+that ceased to be awkward she put out her hand.
+
+“I’m welcome indeed if he would have done it half so graciously!” Again
+Searle, taking her hand, acquitted himself beautifully.
+
+“You’ve seen what there is, I think,” Miss Searle went on. “Perhaps now
+you’ll have luncheon.” We followed her into a small breakfast-room where
+a deep bay window opened on the mossy flags of a terrace. Here, for some
+moments, she remained dumb and abashed, as if resting from a measurable
+effort. Searle too had ceased to overflow, so that I had to relieve the
+silence. It was of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and
+mansion, and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no
+impulses nor graces--scarce even any manners; she was queerly, almost
+frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an antique sweetness,
+a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so simple, among those
+complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so fresh, so modest and yet
+so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in which Searle and I had
+imagined human life to be steeped in such places as that. This figure
+was to the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood what a fact is to a fairy-tale,
+an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were to our hostess
+subjects of a curiosity not cunningly veiled.
+
+“I should like so to go abroad!” she exclaimed suddenly, as if she meant
+us to take the speech for an expression of interest in ourselves.
+
+“Have you never been?” one of us asked.
+
+“Only once. Three years ago my brother took me to Switzerland. We
+thought it extremely beautiful. Except for that journey I’ve always
+lived here. I was born in this house. It’s a dear old place indeed, and
+I know it well. Sometimes one wants a change.” And on my asking her
+how she spent her time and what society she saw, “Of course it’s very
+quiet,” she went on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in
+the manner of a person called upon for the first time to analyse to that
+extent her situation. “We see very few people. I don’t think there are
+many nice ones hereabouts. At least we don’t know them. Our own family’s
+very small. My brother cares for nothing but riding and books. He had
+a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and his only son, a dear
+little boy, who of course would have had everything. Do you know that
+that makes me the heir, as they’ve done something--I don’t quite
+know what--to the entail? Poor old me! Since his loss my brother has
+preferred to be quite alone. I’m sorry he’s away. But you must wait till
+he comes back. I expect him in a day or two.” She talked more and more,
+as if our very strangeness led her on, about her circumstances, her
+solitude, her bad eyes, so that she couldn’t read, her flowers, her
+ferns, her dogs, and the vicar, recently presented to the living by
+her brother and warranted quite safe, who had lately begun to light his
+altar candles; pausing every now and then to gasp in self-surprise, yet,
+in the quaintest way in the world, keeping up her story as if it were
+a slow rather awkward old-time dance, a difficult _pas seul_ in which
+she would have been better with more practice, but of which she must
+complete the figure. Of all the old things I had seen in England this
+exhibited mind of Miss Searle’s seemed to me the oldest, the most handed
+down and taken for granted; fenced and protected as it was by convention
+and precedent and usage, thoroughly acquainted with its subordinate
+place. I felt as if I were talking with the heroine of a last-century
+novel. As she talked she rested her dull eyes on her kinsman with
+wondering kindness. At last she put it to him: “Did you mean to go away
+without asking for us?”
+
+“I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined not to trouble
+you. You’ve shown me how unfriendly I should have been.”
+
+“But you knew of the place being ours, and of our relationship?”
+
+“Just so. It was because of these things that I came down here--because
+of them almost that I came to England. I’ve always liked to think of
+them,” said my companion.
+
+“You merely wished to look then? We don’t pretend to be much to look
+at.”
+
+He waited; her words were too strange. “You don’t know what you are,
+Miss Searle.”
+
+“You like the old place then?”
+
+Searle looked at her again in silence. “If I could only tell you!” he
+said at last.
+
+“Do tell me. You must come and stay with us.”
+
+It moved him to an oddity of mirth. “Take care, take care--I should
+surprise you! I’m afraid I should bore you. I should never leave you.”
+
+“Oh you’d get homesick--for your real home!”
+
+At this he was still more amused. “By the way, tell Miss Searle about
+our real home,” he said to me. And he stepped, through the window, out
+upon the terrace, followed by two beautiful dogs, a setter and a young
+stag-hound who from the moment we came in had established the fondest
+relation with him. Miss Searle looked at him, while he went, as if she
+vaguely yearned over him; it began to be plain that she was interested
+in her exotic cousin. I suddenly recalled the last words I had heard
+spoken by my friend’s adviser in London and which, in a very crude form,
+had reference to his making a match with this lady. If only Miss Searle
+could be induced to think of that, and if one had but the tact to put it
+in a light to her! Something assured me that her heart was virgin-soil,
+that the flower of romantic affection had never bloomed there. If I
+might just sow the seed! There seemed to shape itself within her the
+perfect image of one of the patient wives of old.
+
+“He has lost his heart to England,” I said. “He ought to have been born
+here.”
+
+“And yet he doesn’t look in the least an Englishman,” she still rather
+guardedly prosed.
+
+“Oh it isn’t his looks, poor fellow.”
+
+“Of course looks aren’t everything. I never talked with a foreigner
+before; but he talks as I have fancied foreigners.”
+
+“Yes, he’s foreign enough.”
+
+“Is he married?”
+
+“His wife’s dead and he’s all alone in the world.”
+
+“Has he much property?”
+
+“None to speak of.”
+
+“But he has means to travel.”
+
+I meditated. “He has not expected to travel far,” I said at last. “You
+know, he’s in very poor health.”
+
+“Poor gentleman! So I supposed.”
+
+“But there’s more of him to go on with than he thinks. He came here
+because he wanted to see your place before he dies.”
+
+“Dear me--kind man!” And I imagined in the quiet eyes the hint of a
+possible tear. “And he was going away without my seeing him?”
+
+“He’s very modest, you see.”
+
+“He’s very much the gentleman.”
+
+I couldn’t but smile. “He’s _all_--”
+
+At this moment we heard on the terrace a loud harsh cry. “It’s the great
+peacock!” said Miss Searle, stepping to the window and passing out while
+I followed her. Below us, leaning on the parapet, stood our appreciative
+friend with his arm round the neck of the setter. Before him on
+the grand walk strutted the familiar fowl of gardens--a splendid
+specimen--with ruffled neck and expanded tail. The other dog had
+apparently indulged in a momentary attempt to abash the gorgeous biped,
+but at Searle’s summons had bounded back to the terrace and leaped upon
+the ledge, where he now stood licking his new friend’s face. The scene
+had a beautiful old-time air: the peacock flaunting in the foreground
+like the genius of stately places; the broad terrace, which flattered
+an innate taste of mine for all deserted walks where people may have sat
+after heavy dinners to drink coffee in old Sevres and where the stiff
+brocade of women’s dresses may have rustled over grass or gravel; and
+far around us, with one leafy circle melting into another, the timbered
+acres of the park. “The very beasts have made him welcome,” I noted as
+we rejoined our companion.
+
+“The peacock has done for you, Mr. Searle,” said his cousin, “what he
+does only for very great people. A year ago there came here a great
+person--a grand old lady--to see my brother. I don’t think that since
+then he has spread his tail as wide for any one else--not by a dozen
+feathers.”
+
+“It’s not alone the peacock,” said Searle. “Just now there came slipping
+across my path a little green lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard
+of literature! And if you’ve a ghost, broad daylight though it be,
+I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of your house, Miss
+Searle?”
+
+“Oh dear, no! You must ask my brother for all those things.”
+
+“You ought to have a collection of legends and traditions. You ought to
+have loves and murders and mysteries by the roomful. I shall be ashamed
+of you if you haven’t.”
+
+“Oh Mr. Searle! We’ve always been a very well-behaved family,” she quite
+seriously pleaded. “Nothing out of the way has ever happened, I think.”
+
+“Nothing out of the way? Oh that won’t do! We’ve managed better than
+that in America. Why I myself!”--and he looked at her ruefully enough,
+but enjoying too his idea that he might embody the social scandal or
+point to the darkest drama of the Searles. “Suppose I should turn out
+a better Searle than you--better than you nursed here in romance and
+extravagance? Come, don’t disappoint me. You’ve some history among you
+all, you’ve some poetry, you’ve some accumulation of legend. I’ve been
+famished all my days for these things. Don’t you understand? Ah you
+can’t understand! Tell me,” he rambled on, “something tremendous. When
+I think of what must have happened here; of the lovers who must have
+strolled on this terrace and wandered under the beeches, of all the
+figures and passions and purposes that must have haunted these walls!
+When I think of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings, the
+young hopes and the old regrets, the rich experience of life--!” He
+faltered a moment with the increase of his agitation. His humour of
+dismay at a threat of the commonplace in the history he felt about him
+had turned to a deeper reaction. I began to fear however that he was
+really losing his head. He went on with a wilder play. “To see it all
+called up there before me, if the Devil alone could do it I’d make a
+bargain with the Devil! Ah Miss Searle,” he cried, “I’m a most unhappy
+man!”
+
+“Oh dear, oh dear!” she almost wailed while I turned half away.
+
+“Look at that window, that dear little window!” I turned back to see him
+point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved against the purple
+brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and curtained with ivy.
+
+“It’s my little room,” she said.
+
+“Of course it’s a woman’s room. Think of all the dear faces--all of them
+so mild and yet so proud--that have looked out of that lattice, and of
+all the old-time women’s lives whose principal view of the world has
+been this quiet park! Every one of them was a cousin of mine. And you,
+dear lady, you’re one of them yet.” With which he marched toward her and
+took her large white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her eyes
+and pressing her other hand to her breast. “You’re a woman of the past.
+You’re nobly simple. It has been a romance to see you. It doesn’t matter
+what I say to you. You didn’t know me yesterday, you’ll not know me
+to-morrow. Let me to-day do a mad sweet thing. Let me imagine in you the
+spirit of all the dead women who have trod the terrace-flags that lie
+here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement of a church. Let me say I
+delight in you!”--he raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it
+and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her eyes the next instant I
+saw the tears had come. The Sleeping Beauty was awake.
+
+There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue was suddenly presented by
+the appearance of the butler bearing a letter. “A telegram, Miss,” he
+announced.
+
+“Oh what shall I do?” cried Miss Searle. “I can’t open a telegram.
+Cousin, help me.”
+
+Searle took the missive, opened it and read aloud: “_I shall be home to
+dinner. Keep the American._”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+“Keep the American!” Miss Searle, in compliance with the injunction
+conveyed in her brother’s telegram (with something certainly of
+telegraphic curtness), lost no time in expressing the pleasure it would
+give her that our friend should remain. “Really you must,” she said;
+and forthwith repaired to the house-keeper to give orders for the
+preparation of a room.
+
+“But how in the world did he know of my being here?” my companion put to
+me.
+
+I answered that he had probably heard from his solicitor of the other’s
+visit. “Mr. Simmons and that gentleman must have had another interview
+since your arrival in England. Simmons, for reasons of his own, has
+made known to him your journey to this neighbourhood, and Mr. Searle,
+learning this, has immediately taken for granted that you’ve formally
+presented yourself to his sister. He’s hospitably inclined and wishes
+her to do the proper thing by you. There may even,” I went on, “be more
+in it than that. I’ve my little theory that he’s the very phoenix of
+usurpers, that he has been very much struck with what the experts have
+had to say for you, and that he wishes to have the originality of making
+over to you your share--so limited after all--of the estate.”
+
+“I give it up!” my friend mused. “Come what come will!”
+
+“You, of course,” said Miss Searle, reappearing and turning to me, “are
+included in my brother’s invitation. I’ve told them to see about a room
+for you. Your luggage shall immediately be sent for.”
+
+It was arranged that I in person should be driven over to our little inn
+and that I should return with our effects in time to meet Mr. Searle at
+dinner. On my arrival several hours later I was immediately conducted
+to my room. The servant pointed out to me that it communicated by a
+door and a private passage with that of my fellow visitor. I made my way
+along this passage--a low narrow corridor with a broad latticed casement
+through which there streamed upon a series of grotesquely sculptured
+oaken closets and cupboards the vivid animating glow of the western
+sun--knocked at his door and, getting no answer, opened it. In an
+armchair by the open window sat my friend asleep, his arms and legs
+relaxed and head dropped on his breast. It was a great relief to see him
+rest thus from his rhapsodies, and I watched him for some moments before
+waking him. There was a faint glow of colour in his cheek and a light
+expressive parting of his lips, something nearer to ease and peace than
+I had yet seen in him. It was almost happiness, it was almost health. I
+laid my hand on his arm and gently shook it. He opened his eyes, gazed
+at me a moment, vaguely recognised me, then closed them again. “Let me
+dream, let me dream!”
+
+“What are you dreaming about?”
+
+A moment passed before his answer came. “About a tall woman in a quaint
+black dress, with yellow hair and a sweet, sweet smile, and a soft low
+delicious voice! I’m in love with her.”
+
+“It’s better to see her than to dream about her,” I said. “Get up and
+dress; then we’ll go down to dinner and meet her.”
+
+“Dinner--dinner--?” And he gradually opened his eyes again. “Yes, upon
+my word I shall dine!”
+
+“Oh you’re all right!” I declared for the twentieth time as he rose to
+his feet. “You’ll live to bury Mr. Simmons.” He told me he had spent the
+hours of my absence with Miss Searle--they had strolled together half
+over the place. “You must be very intimate,” I smiled.
+
+“She’s intimate with _me_. Goodness knows what rigmarole I’ve treated her
+to!” They had parted an hour ago; since when, he believed, her brother
+had arrived.
+
+The slow-fading twilight was still in the great drawing-room when we
+came down. The housekeeper had told us this apartment was rarely used,
+there being others, smaller and more convenient, for the same needs.
+It seemed now, however, to be occupied in my comrade’s honour. At the
+furthest end, rising to the roof like a royal tomb in a cathedral, was
+a great chimney-piece of chiselled white marble, yellowed by time, in
+which a light fire was crackling. Before the fire stood a small short
+man, with his hands behind him; near him was Miss Searle, so transformed
+by her dress that at first I scarcely knew her. There was in our
+entrance and reception something remarkably chilling and solemn. We
+moved in silence up the long room; Mr. Searle advanced slowly, a dozen
+steps, to meet us; his sister stood motionless. I was conscious of her
+masking her visage with a large white tinselled fan, and that her eyes,
+grave and enlarged, watched us intently over the top of it. The master
+of Lackley grasped in silence the proffered hand of his kinsman and eyed
+him from head to foot, suppressing, I noted, a start of surprise at his
+resemblance to Sir Joshua’s portrait. “This is a happy day.” And then
+turning to me with an odd little sharp stare: “My cousin’s friend is my
+friend.” Miss Searle lowered her fan.
+
+The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle’s appearance was his very
+limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of his sister.
+The second was the preternatural redness of his hair and beard. They
+intermingled over his ears and surrounded his head like a huge lurid
+nimbus. His face was pale and attenuated, the face of a scholar, a
+dilettante, a comparer of points and texts, a man who lives in a library
+bending over books and prints and medals. At a distance it might have
+passed for smooth and rather blankly composed; but on a nearer view
+it revealed a number of wrinkles, sharply etched and scratched, of a
+singularly aged and refined effect. It was the complexion of a man of
+sixty. His nose was arched and delicate, identical almost with the nose
+of my friend. His eyes, large and deep-set, had a kind of auburn glow,
+the suggestion of a keen metal red-hot--or, more plainly, were full
+of temper and spirit. Imagine this physiognomy--grave and solemn,
+grotesquely solemn, in spite of the bushy brightness which made a sort
+of frame for it--set in motion by a queer, quick, defiant, perfunctory,
+preoccupied smile, and you will have an imperfect notion of the
+remarkable presence of our host; something better worth seeing and
+knowing, I perceived as I quite breathlessly took him in, than anything
+we had yet encountered. How thoroughly I had entered into sympathy
+with my poor picked-up friend, and how effectually I had associated my
+sensibilities with his own, I had not suspected till, within the short
+five minutes before the signal for dinner, I became aware, without his
+giving me the least hint, of his placing himself on the defensive. To
+neither of us was Mr. Searle sympathetic. I might have guessed from her
+attitude that his sister entered into our thoughts. A marked change had
+been wrought in her since the morning; during the hour, indeed--as
+I read in the light of the wondering glance he cast at her--that had
+elapsed since her parting with her cousin. She had not yet recovered
+from some great agitation. Her face was pale and she had clearly
+been crying. These notes of trouble gave her a new and quite perverse
+dignity, which was further enhanced by something complimentary and
+commemorative in her dress.
+
+Whether it was taste or whether it was accident I know not; but the
+amiable creature, as she stood there half in the cool twilight, half in
+the arrested glow of the fire as it spent itself in the vastness of its
+marble cave, was a figure for a painter. She was habited in some faded
+splendour of sea-green crape and silk, a piece of millinery which,
+though it must have witnessed a number of dull dinners, preserved still
+a festive air. Over her white shoulders she wore an ancient web of the
+most precious and venerable lace and about her rounded throat a single
+series of large pearls. I went in with her to dinner, and Mr. Searle,
+following with my friend, took his arm, as the latter afterwards told
+me, and pretended jocosely to conduct him. As dinner proceeded the
+feeling grew within me that a drama had begun to be played in which the
+three persons before me were actors--each of a really arduous part. The
+character allotted to my friend, however, was certainly the least easy
+to represent with effect, though I overflowed with the desire that he
+should acquit himself to his honour. I seemed to see him urge his faded
+faculties to take their cue and perform. The poor fellow tried to do
+himself credit more seriously than ever in his old best days. With Miss
+Searle, credulous passive and pitying, he had finally flung aside all
+vanity and propriety and shown the bottom of his fantastic heart.
+But with our host there might be no talking of nonsense nor taking
+of liberties; there and then, if ever, sat a consummate conservative,
+breathing the fumes of hereditary privilege and security. For an hour,
+accordingly, I saw my poor protege attempt, all in pain, to meet a new
+decorum. He set himself the task of appearing very American, in order
+that his appreciation of everything Mr. Searle represented might seem
+purely disinterested. What his kinsman had expected him to be I know
+not; but I made Mr. Searle out as annoyed, in spite of his exaggerated
+urbanity, at finding him so harmless. Our host was not the man to
+show his hand, but I think his best card had been a certain implicit
+confidence that so provincial a parasite would hardly have good manners.
+
+He led the conversation to the country we had left; rather as if a leash
+had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half-domesticated
+animal the tendency of whose movements had to be recognised. He spoke of
+it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien to the British orbit, lately
+proclaimed to have the admixture of atmospheric gases required
+to support animal life, but not, save under cover of a liberal
+afterthought, to be admitted into one’s regular conception of things. I,
+for my part, felt nothing but regret that the spheric smoothness of
+his universe should be disfigured by the extrusion even of such
+inconsiderable particles as ourselves.
+
+“I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over there,” Mr.
+Searle mentioned; “but had scarcely followed it more than you pretend to
+pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree may drop, on the other side
+of your wall, in your neighbour’s garden. There was a man I knew at
+Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a decent fellow too; he and I were rather
+cronies; I think he afterwards went to the Middle States. They’ll be,
+I suppose, about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that
+great-uncle of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he
+never got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make
+one fancy he _did_ get there and that you’ve kept him alive by one of
+those beastly processes--I think you have ‘em over there: what do you
+call it, ‘putting up’ things? If you’re he you’ve not done a wise thing
+to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There’s a ghost
+who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one
+to whom he did a wrong.”
+
+“Oh mercy _on_ us!” cried Miss Searle in simple horror.
+
+“Of course _you_ know nothing of such things,” he rather dryly allowed.
+“You’re too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts.”
+
+“I’m sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost,” said
+my friend, the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes.
+“Why does it sob? I feel as if that were what we’ve come above all to
+learn.”
+
+Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment gaugingly; he held the balance as
+to measure his resources. He wished to do justice to his theme. With
+the long finger-nails of his left hand nervously playing against the
+tinkling crystal of his wineglass and his conscious eyes betraying that,
+small and strange as he sat there, he knew himself, to his pleasure and
+advantage, remarkably impressive, he dropped into our untutored minds
+the sombre legend of his house. “Mr. Clement Searle, from all I gather,
+was a young man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was
+left a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the elder and
+the more promising. She educated him with the greatest affection and
+care. Of course when he came to manhood she wished him to marry well.
+His means were quite sufficient to enable him to overlook the want of
+money in his wife; and Mrs. Searle selected a young lady who possessed,
+as she conceived, every good gift save a fortune--a fine proud handsome
+girl, the daughter of an old friend, an old lover I suspect, of her own.
+Clement, however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was
+as yet unprepared to choose. The young lady opened upon him in vain the
+battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her cause. Clement
+remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle had a character which
+appears to have gone out of fashion in my family nowadays; she was a
+great manager, a _maîtresse-femme_. A proud passionate imperious woman,
+she had had immense cares and ever so many law-suits; they had sharpened
+her temper and her will. She suspected that her son’s affections had
+another object, and this object she began to hate. Irritated by his
+stubborn defiance of her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more
+she watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he
+loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the place
+all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the rashness of an
+angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady of her choice--who,
+by the way, seems to have been no shrinking blossom--to stay in the
+house. A stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if she did
+so he would leave the country and sail for America. She probably
+disbelieved him; she knew him to be weak, but she overrated his
+weakness. At all events the rejected one arrived and Clement Searle
+departed. On a dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two
+women, desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this big house,
+mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on Christmas
+Eve, in the midst of a great snowstorm long famous in the country,
+something happened that quickened their bitterness. A young woman,
+battered and chilled by the storm, gained entrance to the house and,
+making her way into the presence of the mistress and her guest, poured
+out her tale. She was a poor curate’s daughter out of some little hole
+in Gloucestershire. Clement Searle had loved her--loved her all too
+well! She had been turned out in wrath from her father’s house; his
+mother at least might pity her--if not for herself then for the child
+she was soon to bring forth. But the poor girl had been a second time
+too trustful. The women, in scorn, in horror, with blows possibly, drove
+her forth again into the storm. In the storm she wandered and in the
+deep snow she died. Her lover, as you know, perished in that hard winter
+weather at sea; the news came to his mother late, but soon enough. We’re
+haunted by the curate’s daughter!”
+
+Mr. Searle retailed this anecdote with infinite taste and point, the
+happiest art; when he ceased there was a pause of some moments. “Ah well
+we may be!” Miss Searle then mournfully murmured.
+
+Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. “Of course, you know”--with which he
+began to blush violently--“I should be sorry to claim any identity
+with the poor devil my faithless namesake. But I should be immensely
+gratified if the young lady’s spirit, deceived by my resemblance, were
+to mistake me for her cruel lover. She’s welcome to the comfort of it.
+What one can do in the case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost haunt
+a ghost? I _am_ a ghost!”
+
+Mr. Searle stared a moment and then had a subtle sneer. “I could almost
+believe you are!”
+
+“Oh brother--and cousin!” cried Miss Searle with the gentlest yet most
+appealing dignity. “How can you talk so horribly?” The horrible talk,
+however, evidently possessed a potent magic for my friend; and his
+imagination, checked a while by the influence of his kinsman, began
+again to lead him a dance. From this moment he ceased to steer his frail
+bark, to care what he said or how he said it, so long as he expressed
+his passionate appreciation of the scene around him. As he kept up this
+strain I ceased even secretly to wish he wouldn’t. I have wondered since
+that I shouldn’t have been annoyed by the way he reverted constantly to
+himself. But a great frankness, for the time, makes its own law and
+a great passion its own channel. There was moreover an irresponsible
+indescribable effect of beauty in everything his lips uttered. Free
+alike from adulation and from envy, the essence of his discourse was a
+divine apprehension, a romantic vision free as the flight of Ariel, of
+the poetry of his companions’ situation and their contrasted general
+irresponsiveness.
+
+“How does the look of age come?” he suddenly broke out at dessert. “Does
+it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded, unmeasured? Or do you woo it
+and set baits and traps for it, and watch it like the dawning brownness
+of a meerschaum pipe, and make it fast, when it appears, just where it
+peeps out, and light a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to it
+daily? Or do you forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it
+settling and deepening about you as irresistible as fate?”
+
+“What the deuce is the man talking about?” said the smile of our host.
+
+“I found a little grey hair this morning,” Miss Searle incoherently
+prosed.
+
+“Well then I hope you paid it every respect!” cried her visitor.
+
+“I looked at it for a long time in my hand-glass,” she answered with
+more presence of mind.
+
+“Miss Searle can for many years to come afford to be amused at grey
+hairs,” I interposed in the hope of some greater ease. It had its
+effect. “Ten years from last Thursday I shall be forty-four,” she almost
+comfortably smiled.
+
+“Well, that’s just what I am,” said Searle. “If I had only come here ten
+years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the feast, but I should
+have had less appetite. I needed first to get famished.”
+
+“Oh why did you wait for that?” his entertainer asked. “To think of
+these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!” At the vision of
+which waste and loss Mr. Searle had a fine shrill laugh.
+
+“Well,” my friend explained, “I always had a notion--a stupid vulgar
+notion if there ever was one--that to come abroad properly one had to
+have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At last I came with my
+empty pot!”
+
+Mr. Searle had a wait for delicacy, but he proceeded. “You’re reduced,
+you’re--a--straitened?”
+
+Our companion’s very breath blew away the veil. “Reduced to nothing.
+Straitened to the clothes on my back!”
+
+“You don’t say so!” said Mr. Searle with a large vague gasp.
+“Well--well--well!” he added in a voice which might have meant
+everything or nothing; and then, in his whimsical way, went on to finish
+a glass of wine. His searching eye, as he drank, met mine, and for a
+moment we each rather deeply sounded the other, to the effect no doubt
+of a slight embarrassment. “And you,” he said by way of carrying this
+off--“how about _your_ wardrobe?”
+
+“Oh his!” cried my friend; “his wardrobe’s immense. He could dress up a
+regiment!” He had drunk more champagne--I admit that the champagne
+was good--than was from any point of view to have been desired. He was
+rapidly drifting beyond any tacit dissuasion of mine. He was feverish
+and rash, and all attempt to direct would now simply irritate him. As
+we rose from the table he caught my troubled look. Passing his arm for
+a moment into mine, “This is the great night!” he strangely and softly
+said; “the night and the crisis that will settle me.”
+
+Mr. Searle had caused the whole lower portion of the house to be thrown
+open and a multitude of lights to be placed in convenient and effective
+positions. Such a marshalled wealth of ancient candlesticks and
+flambeaux I had never beheld. Niched against the dusky wainscots,
+casting great luminous circles upon the pendent stiffness of sombre
+tapestries, enhancing and completing with admirable effect the variety
+and mystery of the great ancient house, they seemed to people the wide
+rooms, as our little group passed slowly from one to another, with a
+dim expectant presence. We had thus, in spite of everything, a wonderful
+hour of it. Mr. Searle at once assumed the part of cicerone, and--I had
+not hitherto done him justice--Mr. Searle became almost agreeable. While
+I lingered behind with his sister he walked in advance with his kinsman.
+It was as if he had said: “Well, if you want the old place you shall
+have it--so far as the impression goes!” He spared us no thrill--I
+had almost said no pang--of that experience. Carrying a tall silver
+candlestick in his left hand, he raised it and lowered it and cast the
+light hither and thither, upon pictures and hangings and carvings and
+cornices. He knew his house to perfection. He touched upon a hundred
+traditions and memories, he threw off a cloud of rich reference to
+its earlier occupants. He threw off again, in his easy elegant way, a
+dozen--happily lighter--anecdotes. His relative attended with a brooding
+deference. Miss Searle and I meanwhile were not wholly silent.
+
+“I suppose that by this time you and your cousin are almost old
+friends,” I remarked.
+
+She trifled a moment with her fan and then raised her kind small
+eyes. “Old friends--yet at the same time strangely new! My cousin, my
+cousin”--and her voice lingered on the word--“it seems so strange to
+call him my cousin after thinking these many years that I’ve no one in
+the world but my brother. But he’s really so very odd!”
+
+“It’s not so much he as--well, as his situation, that deserves that
+name,” I tried to reason.
+
+“I’m so sorry for his situation. I wish I could help it in some way. He
+interests me so much.” She gave a sweet-sounding sigh. “I wish I could
+have known him sooner--and better. He tells me he’s but the shadow of
+what he used to be.”
+
+I wondered if he had been consciously practising on the sensibilities of
+this gentle creature. If he had I believed he had gained his point. But
+his position had in fact become to my sense so precarious that I hardly
+ventured to be glad. “His better self just now seems again to be taking
+shape,” I said. “It will have been a good deed on your part if you help
+to restore him to all he ought to be.”
+
+She met my idea blankly. “Dear me, what can I do?”
+
+“Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him love you. I dare say you
+see in him now much to pity and to wonder at. But let him simply enjoy
+a while the grateful sense of your nearness and dearness. He’ll be
+a better and stronger man for it, and then you can love him, you can
+esteem him, without restriction.”
+
+She fairly frowned for helplessness. “It’s a hard part for poor stupid
+me to play!”
+
+Her almost infantine innocence left me no choice but to be absolutely
+frank. “Did you ever play any part at all?”
+
+She blushed as if I had been reproaching her with her insignificance.
+“Never! I think I’ve hardly lived.”
+
+“You’ve begun to live now perhaps. You’ve begun to care for something
+else than your old-fashioned habits. Pardon me if I seem rather
+meddlesome; you know we Americans are very rough and ready. It’s a great
+moment. I wish you joy!”
+
+“I could almost believe you’re laughing at me. I feel more trouble than
+joy.”
+
+“Why do you feel trouble?”
+
+She paused with her eyes fixed on our companions. “My cousin’s arrival’s
+a great disturbance,” she said at last.
+
+“You mean you did wrong in coming to meet him? In that case the fault’s
+mine. He had no intention of giving you the opportunity.”
+
+“I certainly took too much on myself. But I can’t find it in my heart to
+regret it. I never shall regret it! I did the only thing I _could_, heaven
+forgive me!”
+
+“Heaven bless you, Miss Searle! Is any harm to come of it? I did the
+evil; let me bear the brunt!”
+
+She shook her head gravely. “You don’t know my brother!”
+
+“The sooner I master the subject the better then,” I said. I couldn’t
+help relieving myself--at least by the tone of my voice--of the
+antipathy with which, decidedly, this gentleman had inspired me. “Not
+perhaps that we should get on so well together!” After which, as she
+turned away, “Are you _very_ much afraid of him?” I added.
+
+She gave me a shuddering sidelong glance. “He’s looking at me!”
+
+He was placed with his back to us, holding a large Venetian hand-mirror,
+framed in chiselled silver, which he had taken from a shelf of
+antiquities, just at such an angle that he caught the reflexion of his
+sister’s person. It was evident that I too was under his attention, and
+was resolved I wouldn’t be suspected for nothing. “Miss Searle,” I said
+with urgency, “promise me something.”
+
+She turned upon me with a start and a look that seemed to beg me to
+spare her. “Oh don’t ask me--please don’t!” It was as if she were
+standing on the edge of a place where the ground had suddenly fallen
+away, and had been called upon to make a leap. I felt retreat was
+impossible, however, and that it was the greater kindness to assist her
+to jump.
+
+“Promise me,” I repeated.
+
+Still with her eyes she protested. “Oh what a dreadful day!” she cried
+at last.
+
+“Promise me to let him speak to you alone if he should ask you--any wish
+you may suspect on your brother’s part notwithstanding.” She coloured
+deeply. “You mean he has something so particular to say?”
+
+“Something so particular!”
+
+“Poor cousin!”
+
+“Well, poor cousin! But promise me.”
+
+“I promise,” she said, and moved away across the long room and out of
+the door.
+
+“You’re in time to hear the most delightful story,” Searle began to me
+as I rejoined him and his host. They were standing before an old sombre
+portrait of a lady in the dress of Queen Anne’s time, whose ill-painted
+flesh-tints showed livid, in the candle-light, against her dark drapery
+and background. “This is Mrs. Margaret Searle--a sort of Beatrix
+Esmond--_qui se passait ses fantaisies_. She married a paltry Frenchman,
+a penniless fiddler, in the teeth of her whole family. Pretty Mrs.
+Margaret, you must have been a woman of courage! Upon my word, she looks
+like Miss Searle! But pray go on. What came of it all?”
+
+Our companion watched him with an air of distaste for his boisterous
+homage and of pity for his crude imagination. But he took up the tale
+with an effective dryness: “I found a year ago, in a box of very old
+papers, a letter from the lady in question to a certain Cynthia Searle,
+her elder sister. It was dated from Paris and dreadfully ill-spelled.
+It contained a most passionate appeal for pecuniary assistance. She
+had just had a baby, she was starving and dreadfully neglected by her
+husband--she cursed the day she had left England. It was a most dismal
+production. I never heard she found means to return.”
+
+“So much for marrying a Frenchman!” I said sententiously.
+
+Our host had one of his waits. “This is the only lady of the family who
+ever was taken in by an adventurer.”
+
+“Does Miss Searle know her history?” asked my friend with a stare at the
+rounded whiteness of the heroine’s cheek.
+
+“Miss Searle knows nothing!” said our host with expression.
+
+“She shall know at least the tale of Mrs. Margaret,” their guest
+returned; and he walked rapidly away in search of her.
+
+Mr. Searle and I pursued our march through the lighted rooms. “You’ve
+found a cousin with a vengeance,” I doubtless awkwardly enough laughed.
+
+“Ah a vengeance?” my entertainer stiffly repeated.
+
+“I mean that he takes as keen an interest in your annals and possessions
+as yourself.”
+
+“Oh exactly so! He tells me he’s a bad invalid,” he added in a moment.
+“I should never have supposed it.”
+
+“Within the past few hours he’s a changed man. Your beautiful house,
+your extreme kindness, have refreshed him immensely.” Mr. Searle uttered
+the vague ejaculation with which self-conscious Britons so often betray
+the concussion of any especial courtesy of speech. But he followed this
+by a sudden odd glare and the sharp declaration: “I’m an honest man!” I
+was quite prepared to assent; but he went on with a fury of frankness,
+as if it were the first time in his life he had opened himself to any
+one, as if the process were highly disagreeable and he were hurrying
+through it as a task. “An honest man, mind you! I know nothing about Mr.
+Clement Searle! I never expected to see him. He has been to me a--a--!”
+ And here he paused to select a word which should vividly enough express
+what, for good or for ill, his kinsman represented. “He has been to me
+an Amazement! I’ve no doubt he’s a most amiable man. You’ll not deny,
+however, that he’s a very extraordinary sort of person. I’m sorry he’s
+ill. I’m sorry he’s poor. He’s my fiftieth cousin. Well and good. I’m
+an honest man. He shall not have it to say that he wasn’t received at my
+house.”
+
+“He too, thank heaven, is an honest man!” I smiled.
+
+“Why the devil then,” cried Mr. Searle, turning almost fiercely on me,
+“has he put forward this underhand claim to my property?”
+
+The question, quite ringing out, flashed backward a gleam of light upon
+the demeanour of our host and the suppressed agitation of his sister. In
+an instant the jealous gentleman revealed itself. For a moment I was so
+surprised and scandalised at the directness of his attack that I lacked
+words to reply. As soon as he had spoken indeed Mr. Searle appeared to
+feel he had been wanting in form. “Pardon me,” he began afresh, “if I
+speak of this matter with heat. But I’ve been more disgusted than I
+can say to hear, as I heard this morning from my solicitor, of the
+extraordinary proceedings of Mr. Clement Searle. Gracious goodness,
+sir, for what does the man take me? He pretends to the Lord knows what
+fantastic admiration for my place. Let him then show his respect for it
+by not taking too many liberties! Let him, with his high-flown parade
+of loyalty, imagine a tithe of what _I_ feel! I love my estate; it’s my
+passion, my conscience, my life! Am I to divide it up at this time of
+day with a beggarly foreigner--a man without means, without appearance,
+without proof, a pretender, an adventurer, a chattering mountebank? I
+thought America boasted having lands for all men! Upon my soul, sir,
+I’ve never been so shocked in my life.”
+
+I paused for some moments before speaking, to allow his passion fully to
+expend itself and to flicker up again if it chose; for so far as I was
+concerned in the whole awkward matter I but wanted to deal with him
+discreetly. “Your apprehensions, sir,” I said at last, “your not
+unnatural surprise, perhaps, at the candour of our interest, have acted
+too much on your nerves. You’re attacking a man of straw, a creature
+of unworthy illusion; though I’m sadly afraid you’ve wounded a man
+of spirit and conscience. Either my friend has no valid claim on your
+estate, in which case your agitation is superfluous; or he _has_ a valid
+claim--”
+
+Mr. Searle seized my arm and glared at me; his pale face paler still
+with the horror of my suggestion, his great eyes of alarm glowing and
+his strange red hair erect and quivering. “A valid claim!” he shouted.
+“Let him try it--let him bring it into court!”
+
+We had emerged into the great hall and stood facing the main doorway.
+The door was open into the portico, through the stone archway of which
+I saw the garden glitter in the blue light of a full moon. As the master
+of the house uttered the words I have just repeated my companion came
+slowly up into the porch from without, bareheaded, bright in the outer
+moonlight, dark in the shadow of the archway, and bright again in the
+lamplight at the entrance of the hall. As he crossed the threshold the
+butler made an appearance at the head of the staircase on our left,
+faltering visibly a moment at sight of Mr. Searle; after which, noting
+my friend, he gravely descended. He bore in his hand a small silver
+tray. On the tray, gleaming in the light of the suspended lamp, lay a
+folded note. Clement Searle came forward, staring a little and startled,
+I think, by some quick nervous prevision of a catastrophe. The butler
+applied the match to the train. He advanced to my fellow visitor, all
+solemnly, with the offer of his missive. Mr. Searle made a movement as
+if to spring forward, but controlled himself. “Tottenham!” he called in
+a strident voice.
+
+“Yes, sir!” said Tottenham, halting.
+
+“Stand where you are. For whom is that note?”
+
+“For Mr. Clement Searle,” said the butler, staring straight before him
+and dissociating himself from everything.
+
+“Who gave it to you?”
+
+“Mrs. Horridge, sir.” This personage, I afterwards learned, was our
+friend the housekeeper.
+
+“Who gave it Mrs. Horridge?”
+
+There was on Tottenham’s part just an infinitesimal pause before
+replying.
+
+“My dear sir,” broke in Searle, his equilibrium, his ancient ease,
+completely restored by the crisis, “isn’t that rather my business?”
+
+“What happens in my house is my business, and detestable things seem to
+be happening.” Our host, it was clear, now so furiously detested them
+that I was afraid he would snatch the bone of contention without more
+ceremony. “Bring me that thing!” he cried; on which Tottenham stiffly
+moved to obey.
+
+“Really this is too much!” broke out my companion, affronted and
+helpless.
+
+So indeed it struck me, and before Mr. Searle had time to take the note
+I possessed myself of it. “If you’ve no consideration for your sister
+let a stranger at least act for her.” And I tore the disputed object
+into a dozen pieces.
+
+“In the name of decency, what does this horrid business mean?” my
+companion quavered.
+
+Mr. Searle was about to open fire on him, but at that moment our hostess
+appeared on the staircase, summoned evidently by our high-pitched
+contentious voices. She had exchanged her dinner-dress for a dark
+wrapper, removed her ornaments and begun to disarrange her hair, a
+thick tress of which escaped from the comb. She hurried down with a
+pale questioning face. Feeling distinctly that, for ourselves, immediate
+departure was in the air, and divining Mr. Tottenham to be a person of
+a few deep-seated instincts and of much latent energy, I seized the
+opportunity to request him, _sotto voce_, to send a carriage to the door
+without delay. “And put up our things,” I added.
+
+Our host rushed at his sister and grabbed the white wrist that escaped
+from the loose sleeve of her dress. “What was in that note?” he quite
+hissed at her.
+
+Miss Searle looked first at its scattered fragments and then at her
+cousin. “Did you read it?”
+
+“No, but I thank you for it!” said Searle.
+
+Her eyes, for an instant, communicated with his own as I think they had
+never, never communicated with any other source of meaning; then she
+transferred them to her brother’s face, where the sense went out of
+them, only to leave a dull sad patience. But there was something even
+in this flat humility that seemed to him to mock him, so that he flushed
+crimson with rage and spite and flung her away. “You always were an
+idiot! Go to bed.”
+
+In poor Searle’s face as well the gathered serenity had been by this
+time all blighted and distorted and the reflected brightness of his
+happy day turned to blank confusion. “Have I been dealing these three
+hours with a madman?” he woefully cried.
+
+“A madman, yes, if you will! A man mad with the love of his home and the
+sense of its stability. I’ve held my tongue till now, but you’ve been
+too much for me. Who the devil are you, and what and why and whence?”
+ the terrible little man continued. “From what paradise of fools do you
+come that you fancy I shall make over to you, for the asking, a part
+of my property and my life? I’m forsooth, you ridiculous person, to go
+shares with you? Prove your preposterous claim! There isn’t _that_ in it!”
+ And he kicked one of the bits of paper on the floor.
+
+Searle received this broadside gaping. Then turning away he went and
+seated himself on a bench against the wall and rubbed his forehead
+amazedly. I looked at my watch and listened for the wheels of our
+carriage.
+
+But his kinsman was too launched to pull himself up. “Wasn’t it enough
+that you should have plotted against my rights? Need you have come into
+my very house to intrigue with my sister?”
+
+My friend put his two hands to his face. “Oh, oh, oh!” he groaned while
+Miss Searle crossed rapidly and dropped on her knees at his side.
+
+“Go to bed, you fool!” shrieked her brother.
+
+“Dear cousin,” she said, “it’s cruel you’re to have so to think of us!”
+
+“Oh I shall think of _you_ as you’d like!” He laid a hand on her head.
+
+“I believe you’ve done nothing wrong,” she brought bravely out.
+
+“I’ve done what I could,” Mr. Searle went on--“but it’s arrant folly to
+pretend to friendship when this abomination lies between us. You were
+welcome to my meat and my wine, but I wonder you could swallow them. The
+sight spoiled _my_ appetite!” cried the master of Lackley with a laugh.
+“Proceed with your trumpery case! My people in London are instructed and
+prepared.”
+
+“I shouldn’t wonder if your case had improved a good deal since you gave
+it up,” I was moved to observe to Searle.
+
+“Oho! you don’t feign ignorance then?” and our insane entertainer shook
+his shining head at me. “It’s very kind of you to give it up! Perhaps
+you’ll also give up my sister!”
+
+Searle sat staring in distress at his adversary. “Ah miserable man--I
+thought we had become such beautiful friends.”
+
+“Boh, you hypocrite!” screamed our host.
+
+Searle seemed not to hear him. “Am I seriously expected,” he slowly and
+painfully pursued, “to defend myself against the accusation of any real
+indelicacy--to prove I’ve done nothing underhand or impudent? Think what
+you please!” And he rose, with an effort, to his feet. “I know what _you_
+think!” he added to Miss Searle.
+
+The wheels of the carriage resounded on the gravel, and at the same
+moment a footman descended with our two portmanteaux. Mr. Tottenham
+followed him with our hats and coats.
+
+“Good God,” our host broke out again, “you’re not going away?”--an
+ejaculation that, after all that had happened, had the grandest
+comicality. “Bless my soul,” he then remarked as artlessly, “of course
+you’re going!”
+
+“It’s perhaps well,” said Miss Searle with a great effort, inexpressibly
+touching in one for whom great efforts were visibly new and strange,
+“that I should tell you what my poor little note contained.”
+
+“That matter of your note, madam,” her brother interrupted, “you and I
+will settle together!”
+
+“Let me imagine all sorts of kind things!” Searle beautifully pleaded.
+
+“Ah too much has been imagined!” she answered simply. “It was only a
+word of warning. It was to tell you to go. I knew something painful was
+coming.”
+
+He took his hat. “The pains and the pleasures of this day,” he said to
+his kinsman, “I shall equally never forget. Knowing you,” and he offered
+his hand to Miss Searle, “has been the pleasure of pleasures. I hoped
+something more might have come of it.”
+
+“A monstrous deal too much has come of it!” Mr. Searle irrepressibly
+declared.
+
+His departing guest looked at him mildly, almost benignantly, from head
+to foot, and then with closed eyes and some collapse of strength, “I’m
+afraid so, I can’t stand more,” he went on. I gave him my arm and we
+crossed the threshold. As we passed out I heard Miss Searle break into
+loud weeping.
+
+“We shall hear from each other yet, I take it!” her brother pursued,
+harassing our retreat.
+
+My friend stopped, turning round on him fiercely. “You very impossible
+man!” he cried in his face.
+
+“Do you mean to say you’ll not prosecute?” Mr. Searle kept it up. “I
+shall force you to prosecute! I shall drag you into court, and you shall
+be beaten--beaten--beaten!” Which grim reiteration followed us on our
+course.
+
+We drove of course to the little wayside inn from which we had departed
+in the morning so unencumbered, in all broad England, either with
+enemies or friends. My companion, as the carriage rolled along, seemed
+overwhelmed and exhausted. “What a beautiful horrible dream!” he
+confusedly wailed. “What a strange awakening! What a long long day! What
+a hideous scene! Poor me! Poor woman!” When we had resumed possession of
+our two little neighbouring rooms I asked him whether Miss Searle’s
+note had been the result of anything that had passed between them on
+his going to rejoin her. “I found her on the terrace,” he said, “walking
+restlessly up and down in the moonlight. I was greatly excited--I
+hardly know what I said. I asked her, I think, if she knew the story of
+Margaret Searle. She seemed frightened and troubled, and she used
+just the words her brother had used--‘I know nothing.’ For the moment,
+somehow, I felt as a man drunk. I stood before her and told her, with
+great emphasis, how poor Margaret had married a beggarly foreigner--all
+in obedience to her heart and in defiance to her family. As I talked the
+sheeted moonlight seemed to close about us, so that we stood there in
+a dream, in a world quite detached. She grew younger, prettier, more
+attractive--I found myself talking all kinds of nonsense. Before I knew
+it I had gone very far. I was taking her hand and calling her ‘Margaret,
+dear Margaret!’ She had said it was impossible, that she could do
+nothing, that she was a fool, a child, a slave. Then with a sudden
+sense--it was odd how it came over me there--of the reality of my
+connexion with the place, I spoke of my claim against the estate. ‘It
+exists,’ I declared, ‘but I’ve given it up. Be generous! Pay me for my
+sacrifice.’ For an instant her face was radiant. ‘If I marry you,’
+she asked, ‘will it make everything right?’ Of that I at once assured
+her--in our marriage the whole difficulty would melt away like a
+rain-drop in the great sea. ‘Our marriage!’ she repeated in wonder; and
+the deep ring of her voice seemed to wake us up and show us our folly.
+‘I love you, but I shall never see you again,’ she cried; and she
+hurried away with her face in her hands. I walked up and down the
+terrace for some moments, and then came in and met you. That’s the only
+witchcraft I’ve used!”
+
+The poor man was at once so roused and so shaken by the day’s events
+that I believed he would get little sleep. Conscious on my own part that
+I shouldn’t close my eyes, I but partly undressed, stirred my fire
+and sat down to do some writing. I heard the great clock in the little
+parlour below strike twelve, one, half-past one. Just as the vibration
+of this last stroke was dying on the air the door of communication with
+Searle’s room was flung open and my companion stood on the threshold,
+pale as a corpse, in his nightshirt, shining like a phantom against the
+darkness behind him. “Look well at me!” he intensely gasped; “touch me,
+embrace me, revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost!”
+
+“Gracious goodness, what do you mean?”
+
+“Write it down!” he went on. “There, take your pen. Put it into dreadful
+words. How do I look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red? Am I speaking
+English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?”
+
+I confess there came upon me by contact a kind of supernatural shock. I
+shall always feel by the whole communication of it that I too have seen
+a ghost. My first movement--I can smile at it now--was to spring to the
+door, close it quickly and turn the key upon the gaping blackness from
+which Searle had emerged. I seized his two hands; they were wet with
+perspiration. I pushed my chair to the fire and forced him to sit down
+in it; then I got on my knees and held his hands as firmly as possible.
+They trembled and quivered; his eyes were fixed save that the pupil
+dilated and contracted with extraordinary force. I asked no questions,
+but waited there, very curious for what he would say. At last he spoke.
+“I’m not frightened, but I’m--oh excited! This is life! This is living!
+My nerves--my heart--my brain! They’re throbbing--don’t you feel it? Do
+you tingle? Are you hot? Are you cold? Hold me tight--tight--tight! I
+shall tremble away into waves--into surges--and know all the secrets of
+things and all the reasons and all the mysteries!” He paused a moment
+and then went on: “A woman--as clear as that candle: no, far clearer! In
+a blue dress, with a black mantle on her head and a little black muff.
+Young and wonderfully pretty, pale and ill; with the sadness of all
+the women who ever loved and suffered pleading and accusing in her
+wet-looking eyes. God knows I never did any such thing! But she took me
+for my elder, for the other Clement. She came to me here as she would
+have come to me there. She wrung her hands and she spoke to me ‘marry
+me!’ she moaned; ‘marry me and put an end to my shame!’ I sat up in bed,
+just as I sit here, looked at her, heard her--heard her voice melt away,
+watched her figure fade away. Bless us and save us! Here I be!”
+
+I made no attempt either to explain or to criticise this extraordinary
+passage. It’s enough that I yielded for the hour to the strange force
+of my friend’s emotion. On the whole I think my own vision was the
+more interesting of the two. He beheld but the transient irresponsible
+spectre--I beheld the human subject hot from the spectral presence. Yet
+I soon recovered my judgement sufficiently to be moved again to try to
+guard him against the results of excitement and exposure. It was easily
+agreed that he was not for the night to return to his room, and I made
+him fairly comfortable in his place by my fire. Wishing above all to
+preserve him from a chill I removed my bedding and wrapped him in the
+blankets and counterpane. I had no nerves either for writing or for
+sleep; so I put out my lights, renewed the fuel and sat down on the
+opposite side of the hearth. I found it a great and high solemnity just
+to watch my companion. Silent, swathed and muffled to his chin, he sat
+rigid and erect with the dignity of his adventure. For the most part
+his eyes were closed; though from time to time he would open them with
+a steady expansion and stare, never blinking, into the flame, as if he
+again beheld without terror the image of the little woman with the muff.
+His cadaverous emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles intensified by the
+upward glow from the hearth, his distorted moustache, his extraordinary
+gravity and a certain fantastical air as the red light flickered over
+him, all re-enforced his fine likeness to the vision-haunted knight of
+La Mancha when laid up after some grand exploit. The night passed wholly
+without speech. Toward its close I slept for half an hour. When I awoke
+the awakened birds had begun to twitter and Searle, unperturbed, sat
+staring at me. We exchanged a long look, and I felt with a pang that his
+glittering eyes had tasted their last of natural sleep. “How is it? Are
+you comfortable?” I nevertheless asked.
+
+He fixed me for a long time without replying and then spoke with a
+weak extravagance and with such pauses between his words as might have
+represented the slow prompting of an inner voice. “You asked me when
+you first knew me what I was. ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing of any
+consequence.’ Nothing I’ve always supposed myself to be. But I’ve
+wronged myself--I’m a great exception. I’m a haunted man!”
+
+If sleep had passed out of his eyes I felt with even a deeper pang that
+sanity had abandoned his spirit. From this moment I was prepared for
+the worst. There were in my friend, however, such confirmed habits of
+mildness that I found myself not in the least fearing he would prove
+unmanageable. As morning began fully to dawn upon us I brought our
+curious vigil to a close. Searle was so enfeebled that I gave him
+my hands to help him out of his chair, and he retained them for some
+moments after rising to his feet, unable as he seemed to keep his
+balance. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been once favoured, but don’t think I
+shall be favoured again. I shall soon be myself as fit to ‘appear’ as
+any of them. I shall haunt the master of Lackley! It can only mean
+one thing--that they’re getting ready for me on the other side of the
+grave.”
+
+When I touched the question of breakfast he replied that he had his
+breakfast in his pocket; and he drew from his travelling-bag a phial of
+morphine. He took a strong dose and went to bed. At noon I found him
+on foot again, dressed, shaved, much refreshed. “Poor fellow,” he said,
+“you’ve got more than you bargained for--not only a man with a grievance
+but a man with a ghost. Well, it won’t be for long!” It had of course
+promptly become a question whither we should now direct our steps. “As
+I’ve so little time,” he argued for this, “I should like to see the
+best, the best alone.” I answered that either for time or eternity I had
+always supposed Oxford to represent the English maximum, and for Oxford
+in the course of an hour we accordingly departed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Of that extraordinary place I shall not attempt to speak with any order
+or indeed with any coherence. It must ever remain one of the supreme
+gratifications of travel for any American aware of the ancient pieties
+of race. The impression it produces, the emotions it kindles in the
+mind of such a visitor, are too rich and various to be expressed in the
+halting rhythm of prose. Passing through the small oblique streets in
+which the long grey battered public face of the colleges seems to watch
+jealously for sounds that may break upon the stillness of study, you
+feel it the most dignified and most educated of cities. Over and through
+it all the great corporate fact of the University slowly throbs after
+the fashion of some steady bass in a concerted piece or that of the
+mediaeval mystical presence of the Empire in the old States of Germany.
+The plain perpendicular of the so mildly conventual fronts, masking
+blest seraglios of culture and leisure, irritates the imagination
+scarce less than the harem-walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching
+portals, however, you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and
+the dark verdure soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green
+quadrangles stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of
+the humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a marshalled
+host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our arrival my friend and
+I wandered forth in the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge
+that under-spans the walls of Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower,
+delicately fluted and embossed, rise in temperate beauty--the perfect
+prose of Gothic--wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained
+of day. We entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little
+court that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows niche more
+lovingly in the tangled ivy than elsewhere in Oxford, and passed into
+the quiet cloister and studied the small sculptured monsters on the
+entablature of the arcade. I rejoiced in every one of my unhappy
+friend’s responsive vibrations, even while feeling that they might as
+direfully multiply as those that had preceded them. I may say that from
+this time forward I found it difficult to distinguish in his company
+between the riot of fancy and the labour of thought, or to fix the
+balance between what he saw and what he imagined. He had already begun
+playfully to exchange his identity for that of the earlier Clement
+Searle, and he now delivered himself almost wholly in the character of
+his old-time kinsman.
+
+“_This_ was my college, you know,” he would almost anywhere break out,
+applying the words wherever we stood--“the sweetest and noblest in
+the whole place. How often have I strolled in this cloister with my
+intimates of the other world! They are all dead and buried, but many a
+young fellow as we meet him, dark or fair, tall or short, reminds me of
+the past age and the early attachment. Even as we stand here, they say,
+the whole thing feels about its massive base the murmurs of the tide of
+time; some of the foundation-stones are loosened, some of the breaches
+will have to be repaired. Mine was the old unregenerate Oxford, the home
+of rank abuses, of distinctions and privileges the most delicious and
+invidious. What cared I, who was a perfect gentleman and with my pockets
+full of money? I had an allowance of a thousand a year.”
+
+It was at once plain to me that he had lost the little that remained of
+his direct grasp on life and was unequal to any effort of seeing things
+in their order. He read my apprehension in my eyes and took pains to
+assure me I was right. “I’m going straight down hill. Thank heaven it’s
+an easy slope, coated with English turf and with an English churchyard
+at the foot.” The hysterical emotion produced by our late dire
+misadventure had given place to an unruffled calm in which the scene
+about us was reflected as in an old-fashioned mirror. We took an
+afternoon walk through Christ-Church meadow and at the river-bank
+procured a boat which I pulled down the stream to Iffley and to the
+slanting woods of Nuneham--the sweetest flattest reediest stream-side
+landscape that could be desired. Here of course we encountered the
+scattered phalanx of the young, the happy generation, clad in white
+flannel and blue, muscular fair-haired magnificent fresh, whether
+floated down the current by idle punts and lounging in friendly couples
+when not in a singleness that nursed ambitions, or straining together
+in rhythmic crews and hoarsely exhorted from the near bank. When to the
+exhibition of so much of the clearest joy of wind and limb we added the
+great sense of perfumed protection shed by all the enclosed lawns and
+groves and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic shades
+must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion found himself
+less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a series of gardens
+and spent long hours sitting in their greenest places. They struck us as
+the fairest things in England and the ripest and sweetest fruit of the
+English system. Locked in their antique verdure, guarded, as in the case
+of New College, by gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the
+matted leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and
+memories, a sort of chorus of tradition; with vaguely-generous youths
+sprawling bookishly on the turf as if to spare it the injury of
+their boot-heels, and with the great conservative college countenance
+appealing gravely from the restless outer world, they seem places to
+lie down on the grass in for ever, in the happy faith that life is all
+a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon. This
+charmed seclusion was especially grateful to my friend, and his sense of
+it reached its climax, I remember, on one of the last of such occasions
+and while we sat in fascinated _flânerie_ over against the sturdy back of
+Saint John’s. The wide discreetly-windowed wall here perhaps broods upon
+the lawn with a more effective air of property than elsewhere. Searle
+dropped into fitful talk and spun his humour into golden figures. Any
+passing undergraduate was a peg to hang a fable, every feature of the
+place a pretext for more embroidery.
+
+“Isn’t it all a delightful lie?” he wanted to know. “Mightn’t one fancy
+this the very central point of the world’s heart, where all the echoes
+of the general life arrive but to falter and die? Doesn’t one feel the
+air just thick with arrested voices? It’s well there should be such
+places, shaped in the interest of factitious needs, invented to minister
+to the book-begotten longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked
+and believe unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all’s well in
+a world where so much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth and
+fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful unachieved
+especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world’s made--work’s over.
+Now for leisure! England’s safe--now for Theocritus and Horace, for
+lawn and sky! What a sense it all gives one of the composite life of
+the country and of the essential furniture of its luckier minds! Thank
+heaven they had the wit to send me here in the other time. I’m not much
+visibly the braver perhaps, but think how I’m the happier! The misty
+spires and towers, seen far off on the level, have been all these years
+one of the constant things of memory. Seriously, what do the spires and
+towers do for these people? Are they wiser, gentler, finer, cleverer?
+My diminished dignity reverts in any case at moments to the naked
+background of our own education, the deadly dry air in which we gasp for
+impressions and comparisons. I assent to it all with a sort of desperate
+calmness; I accept it with a dogged pride. We’re nursed at the opposite
+pole. Naked come we into a naked world. There’s a certain grandeur
+in the lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young
+imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which has to
+invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-air, with
+a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we dwell. _Noblesse
+oblige_--Oxford must damnably do so. What a horrible thing not to rise
+to such examples! If you pay the pious debt to the last farthing of
+interest you may go through life with her blessing; but if you let it
+stand unhonoured you’re a worse barbarian than we! But for the better or
+worse, in a myriad private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the
+youthful sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of
+the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls. Think of
+the centuries’ tale of dead lads--dead alike with the end of the young
+days to which these haunts were a present world, and the close of
+the larger lives which the general mother-scene has dropped into less
+bottomless traps. What are those two young fellows kicking their heels
+over on the grass there? One of them has the _Saturday Review;_ the
+other--upon my soul--the other has Artemus Ward! Where do they live,
+how do they live, to what end do they live? Miserable boys! How can they
+read Artemus Ward under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think
+loveliest in all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that
+one yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice
+and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a hundred
+years ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken cornice. Don’t
+pretend it’s not a common thing to have one’s bosom friend at another
+college. Pray was I committed to common things? He was a charming
+fellow. By the way, he was a good deal like you. Of course his cocked
+hat, his long hair in a black ribbon, his cinnamon velvet suit and his
+flowered waistcoat made a difference. We gentlemen used to wear swords.”
+
+There was really the touch of grace in my poor friend’s divagations--the
+disheartened dandy had so positively turned rhapsodist and seer. I
+was particularly struck with his having laid aside the diffidence and
+self-consciousness of the first days of our acquaintance. He had become
+by this time a disembodied observer and critic; the shell of sense,
+growing daily thinner and more transparent, transmitted the tremor of
+his quickened spirit. He seemed to pick up acquaintances, in the course
+of our contemplations, merely by putting out his hand. If I left him for
+ten minutes I was sure to find him on my return in earnest conversation
+with some affable wandering scholar. Several young men with whom he had
+thus established relations invited him to their rooms and entertained
+him, as I gathered, with rather rash hospitality. For myself, I chose
+not to be present at these symposia; I shrank partly from being held
+in any degree responsible for his extravagance, partly from the pang of
+seeing him yield to champagne and an admiring circle. He reported such
+adventures with less keen a complacency than I had supposed he might
+use, but a certain method in his madness, a certain dignity in his
+desire to fraternise, appeared to save him from mischance. If they
+didn’t think him a harmless lunatic they certainly thought him a
+celebrity of the Occident. Two things, however, grew evident--that he
+drank deeper than was good for him and that the flagrant freshness of
+his young patrons rather interfered with his predetermined sense of the
+element of finer romance. At the same time it completed his knowledge
+of the place. Making the acquaintance of several tutors and fellows,
+he dined in hall in half a dozen colleges, alluding afterwards to these
+banquets with religious unction. One evening after a participation
+indiscreetly prolonged he came back to the hotel in a cab, accompanied
+by a friendly undergraduate and a physician and looking deadly pale. He
+had swooned away on leaving table and remained so rigidly unconscious
+as much to agitate his banqueters. The following twenty-four hours he of
+course spent in bed, but on the third day declared himself strong enough
+to begin afresh. On his reaching the street his strength once more
+forsook him, so that I insisted on his returning to his room. He
+besought me with tears in his eyes not to shut him up. “It’s my last
+chance--I want to go back for an hour to that garden of Saint John’s.
+Let me eat and drink--to-morrow I die.” It seemed to me possible that
+with a Bath-chair the expedition might be accomplished. The hotel, it
+appeared, possessed such a convenience, which was immediately produced.
+It became necessary hereupon that we should have a person to propel the
+chair. As there was no one on the spot at liberty I was about to perform
+the office; but just as my patient had got seated and wrapped--he now
+had a perpetual chill--an elderly man emerged from a lurking-place near
+the door and, with a formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman.
+We assented, and he proceeded solemnly to trundle the chair before him.
+I recognised him as a vague personage whom I had observed to lounge
+shyly about the doors of the hotels, at intervals during our stay, with
+a depressed air of wanting employment and a poor semblance of finding
+it. He had once indeed in a half-hearted way proposed himself as an
+amateur cicerone for a tour through the colleges; and I now, as I
+looked at him, remembered with a pang that I had too curtly declined his
+ministrations. Since then his shyness, apparently, had grown less or
+his misery greater, for it was with a strange grim avidity that he
+now attached himself to our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby
+gentility and the dinginess of “reduced circumstances.” He would
+have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard
+unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable
+disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden of his days and
+tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly
+compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled
+under a month’s neglect of the razor. In all this rusty forlornness
+lurked a visible assurance of our friend’s having known better days.
+Obviously he was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the market
+value of pure gentility. There had been something terribly affecting in
+the way he substituted for the attempt to touch the greasy rim of his
+antiquated hat some such bow as one man of the world might make another.
+Exchanging a few words with him as we went I was struck with the
+decorum of his accent. His fine whole voice should have been congruously
+cracked.
+
+“Take me by some long roundabout way,” said Searle, “so that I may see
+as many college-walls as possible.”
+
+“You know,” I asked of our attendant, “all these wonderful ins and
+outs?”
+
+“I ought to, sir,” he said, after a moment, with pregnant gravity. And
+as we were passing one of the colleges, “That used to be my place,” he
+added.
+
+At these words Searle desired him to stop and come round within sight.
+“You say that’s _your_ college?”
+
+“The place might deny me, sir; but heaven forbid I should seem to take
+it ill of her. If you’ll allow me to wheel you into the quad I’ll show
+you my windows of thirty years ago.”
+
+Searle sat staring, his huge pale eyes, which now left nothing else
+worth mentioning in his wasted face, filled with wonder and pity. “If
+you’ll be so kind,” he said with great deference. But just as this
+perverted product of a liberal education was about to propel him across
+the threshold of the court he turned about, disengaged the mercenary
+hands, with one of his own, from the back of the chair, drew their owner
+alongside and turned to me. “While we’re here, my dear fellow,” he said,
+“be so good as to perform this service. You understand?” I gave our
+companion a glance of intelligence and we resumed our way. The latter
+showed us his window of the better time, where a rosy youth in a scarlet
+smoking-fez now puffed a cigarette at the open casement. Thence we
+proceeded into the small garden, the smallest, I believe, and certainly
+the sweetest, of all the planted places of Oxford. I pushed the chair
+along to a bench on the lawn, turned it round, toward the front of
+the college and sat down by it on the grass. Our attendant shifted
+mournfully from one foot to the other, his patron eyeing him
+open-mouthed. At length Searle broke out: “God bless my soul, sir, you
+don’t suppose I expect you to stand! There’s an empty bench.”
+
+“Thank you,” said our friend, who bent his joints to sit.
+
+“You English are really fabulous! I don’t know whether I most admire or
+most abominate you! Now tell me: who are you? what are you? what brought
+you to this?”
+
+The poor fellow blushed up to his eyes, took off his hat and wiped his
+forehead with an indescribable fabric drawn from his pocket. “My name’s
+Rawson, sir. Beyond that it’s a long story.”
+
+“I ask out of sympathy,” said Searle. “I’ve a fellow-feeling. If you’re
+a poor devil I’m a poor devil as well.”
+
+“I’m the poorer devil of the two,” said the stranger with an assurance
+for once presumptuous.
+
+“Possibly. I suppose an English poor devil’s the poorest of all
+poor devils. And then you’ve fallen from a height. From a gentleman
+commoner--is that what they called you?--to a propeller of Bath-chairs.
+Good heavens, man, the fall’s enough to kill you!”
+
+“I didn’t take it all at once, sir. I dropped a bit one time and a bit
+another.”
+
+“That’s me, that’s me!” cried Searle with all his seriousness.
+
+“And now,” said our friend, “I believe I can’t drop any further.”
+
+“My dear fellow”--and Searle clasped his hand and shook it--“I too am at
+the very bottom of the hole.”
+
+Mr. Rawson lifted his eyebrows. “Well, sir, there’s a difference between
+sitting in such a pleasant convenience and just trudging behind it!”
+
+“Yes--there’s a shade. But I’m at my last gasp, Mr. Rawson.”
+
+“I’m at my last penny, sir.”
+
+“Literally, Mr. Rawson?”
+
+Mr. Rawson shook his head with large loose bitterness. “I’ve almost come
+to the point of drinking my beer and buttoning my coat figuratively; but
+I don’t talk in figures.”
+
+Fearing the conversation might appear to achieve something like gaiety
+at the expense of Mr. Rawson’s troubles, I took the liberty of asking
+him, with all consideration, how he made a living.
+
+“I don’t make a living,” he answered with tearful eyes; “I can’t make
+a living. I’ve a wife and three children--and all starving, sir. You
+wouldn’t believe what I’ve come to. I sent my wife to her mother’s, who
+can ill afford to keep her, and came to Oxford a week ago, thinking I
+might pick up a few half-crowns by showing people about the colleges.
+But it’s no use. I haven’t the assurance. I don’t look decent. They
+want a nice little old man with black gloves and a clean shirt and a
+silver-headed stick. What do I look as if I knew about Oxford, sir?”
+
+“Mercy on us,” cried Searle, “why didn’t you speak to us before?”
+
+“I wanted to; half a dozen times I’ve been on the point of it. I knew
+you were Americans.”
+
+“And Americans are rich!” cried Searle, laughing. “My dear Mr. Rawson,
+American as I am I’m living on charity.”
+
+“And I’m exactly not, sir! There it is. I’m dying for the lack of that
+same. You say you’re a pauper, but it takes an American pauper to go
+bowling about in a Bath-chair. America’s an easy country.”
+
+“Ah me!” groaned Searle. “Have I come to the most delicious corner of
+the ancient world to hear the praise of Yankeeland?”
+
+“Delicious corners are very well, and so is the ancient world,” said Mr.
+Rawson; “but one may sit here hungry and shabby, so long as one isn’t
+too shabby, as well as elsewhere. You’ll not persuade me that it’s not
+an easier thing to keep afloat yonder than here. I wish _I_ were in
+Yankeeland, that’s all!” he added with feeble force. Then brooding for
+a moment on his wrongs: “Have you a bloated brother? or you, sir? It
+matters little to you. But it has mattered to me with a vengeance!
+Shabby as I sit here I can boast that advantage--as he his five thousand
+a year. Being but a twelvemonth my elder he swaggers while I go thus.
+There’s old England for you! A very pretty place for _him!_”
+
+“Poor old England!” said Searle softly.
+
+“Has your brother never helped you?” I asked.
+
+“A five-pound note now and then! Oh I don’t say there haven’t been times
+when I haven’t inspired an irresistible sympathy. I’ve not been what I
+should. I married dreadfully out of the way. But the devil of it is that
+he started fair and I started foul; with the tastes, the desires, the
+needs, the sensibilities of a gentleman--and not another blessed ‘tip.’
+I can’t afford to live in England.”
+
+“_This_ poor gentleman fancied a couple of months ago that he couldn’t
+afford to live in America,” I fondly explained.
+
+“I’d ‘swap’--do you call it?--chances with him!” And Mr. Rawson looked
+quaintly rueful over his freedom of speech.
+
+Searle sat supported there with his eyes closed and his face twitching
+for violent emotion, and then of a sudden had a glare of gravity. “My
+friend, you’re a dead failure! Be judged! Don’t talk about ‘swapping.’
+Don’t talk about chances. Don’t talk about fair starts and false starts.
+I’m at that point myself that I’ve a right to speak. It lies neither
+in one’s chance nor one’s start to make one a success; nor in anything
+one’s brother--however bloated--can do or can undo. It lies in one’s
+character. You and I, sir, have _had_ no character--that’s very plain.
+We’ve been weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we are for it--sitting
+staring in each other’s faces and reading our weakness in each other’s
+eyes. We’re of no importance whatever, Mr. Rawson!”
+
+Mr. Rawson received this sally with a countenance in which abject
+submission to the particular affirmed truth struggled with the
+comparative propriety of his general rebellion against fate. In the
+course of a minute a due self-respect yielded to the warm comfortable
+sense of his being relieved of the cares of an attitude. “Go on, sir, go
+on,” he said. “It’s wholesome doctrine.” And he wiped his eyes with what
+seemed his sole remnant of linen.
+
+“Dear, dear,” sighed Searle, “I’ve made you cry! Well, we speak as from
+man to man. I should be glad to think you had felt for a moment the
+side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit which precedes--which
+precedes the grand illumination of death.”
+
+Mr. Rawson sat silent a little, his eyes fixed on the ground and his
+well-cut nose but the more deeply dyed by his agitation. Then at last
+looking up: “You’re a very good-natured man, sir, and you’ll never
+persuade me you don’t come of a kindly race. Say what you please about a
+chance; when a man’s fifty--degraded, penniless, a husband and father--a
+chance to get on his legs again is not to be despised. Something tells
+me that my luck may be in your country--which has brought luck to so
+many. I can come on the parish here of course, but I don’t want to come
+on the parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty
+years of life before me yet. If only by God’s help I could have a real
+change of air! It’s a fixed idea of mine. I’ve had it for the last ten
+years. It’s not that I’m a low radical. Oh I’ve no vulgar opinions. Old
+England’s good enough for me, but I’m not good enough for old England.
+I’m a shabby man that wants to get out of a room full of staring
+gentlefolk. I’m for ever put to the blush. It’s a perfect agony of
+spirit; everything reminds me of my younger and better self. The thing
+for me would be a cooling cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the
+unknown! I lie awake thinking of it.”
+
+Searle closed his eyes, shivering with a long-drawn tremor which I
+hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of mental
+pain. In a moment I saw it was neither. “Oh my country, my country,
+my country!” he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat for some time
+abstracted and lost. I signalled our companion that it was time we
+should bring our small session to a close, and he, without hesitating,
+possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-chair and pushed it before
+him. We had got halfway home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly
+in the High Street, as we passed a chop-house from whose open doors we
+caught a waft of old-fashioned cookery and other restorative elements,
+he motioned us to halt. “This is my last five pounds”--and he drew a
+note from his pocket-book. “Do me the favour, Mr. Rawson, to accept
+it. Go in there and order the best dinner they can give you. Call for a
+bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my eternal rest!”
+
+Mr. Rawson stiffened himself up and received the gift with fingers
+momentarily irresponsive. But Mr. Rawson had the nerves of a gentleman.
+I measured the spasm with which his poor dispossessed hand closed upon
+the crisp paper, I observed his empurpled nostril convulsive under the
+other solicitation. He crushed the crackling note in his palm with a
+passionate pressure and jerked a spasmodic bow. “I shall not do you the
+wrong, sir, of anything but the best!” The next moment the door swung
+behind him.
+
+Searle sank again into his apathy, and on reaching the hotel I helped
+him to get to bed. For the rest of the day he lay without motion or
+sound and beyond reach of any appeal. The doctor, whom I had constantly
+in attendance, was sure his end was near. He expressed great surprise
+that he should have lasted so long; he must have been living for a
+month on the very dregs of his strength. Toward evening, as I sat by his
+bedside in the deepening dusk, he roused himself with a purpose I had
+vaguely felt gathering beneath his stupor. “My cousin, my cousin,” he
+said confusedly. “Is she here?” It was the first time he had spoken of
+Miss Searle since our retreat from her brother’s house, and he continued
+to ramble. “I was to have married her. What a dream! That day was like
+a string of verses--rhymed hours. But the last verse is bad measure.
+What’s the rhyme to ‘love’? _Above!_ Was she a simple woman, a kind sweet
+woman? Or have I only dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her touch
+would have cured my madness. I want you to do something. Write three
+lines, three words: ‘Good-bye; remember me; be happy.’” And then after
+a long pause: “It’s strange a person in my state should have a wish. Why
+should one eat one’s breakfast the day one’s hanged? What a creature
+is man! What a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a mere throbbing
+fever-point; I breathe and nothing more, and yet I _desire!_ My desire
+lives. If I could see her! Help me out with it and let me die.”
+
+Half an hour later, at a venture, I dispatched by post a note to Miss
+Searle: “_Your cousin is rapidly sinking. He asks to see you._” I was
+conscious of a certain want of consideration in this act, since it would
+bring her great trouble and yet no power to face the trouble; but out
+of her distress I fondly hoped a sufficient force might be born. On the
+following day my friend’s exhaustion had become so great that I began
+to fear his intelligence altogether broken up. But toward evening he
+briefly rallied, to maunder about many things, confounding in a sinister
+jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years. “By the
+way,” he said suddenly, “I’ve made no will. I haven’t much to bequeath.
+Yet I have something.” He had been playing listlessly with a large
+signet-ring on his left hand, which he now tried to draw off. “I leave
+you this”--working it round and round vainly--“if you can get it off.
+What enormous knuckles! There must be such knuckles in the mummies of
+the Pharaohs. Well, when I’m gone--! No, I leave you something more
+precious than gold--the sense of a great kindness. But I’ve a little
+gold left. Bring me those trinkets.” I placed on the bed before him
+several articles of jewellery, relics of early foppery: his watch
+and chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some odds and ends
+of goldsmith’s work. He trifled with them feebly for some moments,
+murmuring various names and dates associated with them. At last, looking
+up with clearer interest, “What has become,” he asked, “of Mr. Rawson?”
+
+“You want to see him?”
+
+“How much are these things worth?” he went on without heeding me. “How
+much would they bring?” And he weighed them in his weak hands. “They’re
+pretty heavy. Some hundred or so? Oh I’m richer than I thought!
+Rawson--Rawson--you want to get out of this awful England?”
+
+I stepped to the door and requested the servant whom I kept in constant
+attendance in our adjacent sitting-room to send and ascertain if Mr.
+Rawson were on the premises. He returned in a few moments, introducing
+our dismal friend. Mr. Rawson was pale even to his nose and derived from
+his unaffectedly concerned state an air of some distinction. I led him
+up to the bed. In Searle’s eyes, as they fell on him, there shone for a
+moment the light of a human message.
+
+“Lord have mercy!” gasped Mr. Rawson.
+
+“My friend,” said Searle, “there’s to be one American the less--so let
+there be at the same time one the more. At the worst you’ll be as good a
+one as I. Foolish me! Take these battered relics; you can sell them; let
+them help you on your way. They’re gifts and mementoes, but this is a
+better use. Heaven speed you! May America be kind to you. Be kind, at
+the last, to your own country!”
+
+“Really this is too much; I can’t,” the poor man protested, almost
+scared and with tears in his eyes. “Do come round and get well and I’ll
+stop here. I’ll stay with you and wait on you.”
+
+“No, I’m booked for my journey, you for yours. I hope you don’t mind the
+voyage.”
+
+Mr. Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude, appealing piteously
+from so strange a windfall. “It’s like the angel of the Lord who bids
+people in the Bible to rise and flee!”
+
+Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, quite used up; I led Mr. Rawson
+back into the sitting-room, where in three words I proposed to him
+a rough valuation of our friend’s trinkets. He assented with perfect
+good-breeding; they passed into my possession and a second bank-note
+into his.
+
+From the collapse into which this wondrous exercise of his imagination
+had plunged him my charge then gave few signs of being likely to emerge.
+He breathed, as he had said, and nothing more. The twilight deepened; I
+lighted the night-lamp. The doctor sat silent and official at the foot
+of the bed; I resumed my constant place near the head. Suddenly our
+patient opened his eyes wide. “She’ll not come,” he murmured. “Amen!
+she’s an English sister.” Five minutes passed; he started forward.
+“She’s come, she’s here!” he confidently quavered. His words conveyed to
+my mind so absolute an assurance that I lightly rose and passed into the
+sitting-room. At the same moment, through the opposite door, the
+servant introduced a lady. A lady, I say; for an instant she was simply
+such--tall pale dressed in deep mourning. The next instant I had uttered
+her name--“Miss Searle!” She looked ten years older.
+
+She met me with both hands extended and an immense question in her
+face. “He has just announced you,” I said. And then with a fuller
+consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance: “What has
+happened?”
+
+“Oh death, death!” she wailed. “You and I are left.”
+
+There came to me with her words a sickening shock, the sense of poetic
+justice somehow cheated, defeated. “Your brother?” I panted.
+
+She laid her hand on my arm and I felt its pressure deepen as she spoke.
+“He was thrown from his horse in the park. He died on the spot. Six days
+have passed. Six months!”
+
+She accepted my support and a moment later we had entered the room and
+approached the bedside, from which the doctor withdrew. Searle opened
+his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to make
+out her mourning. “Already!” he cried audibly and with a smile, as I
+felt, of pleasure.
+
+She dropped on her knees and took his hand. “Not for you, cousin,” she
+whispered. “For my poor brother.”
+
+He started, in all his deathly longitude, as with a galvanic shock.
+“Dead! _He_ dead! Life itself!” And then after a moment and with a slight
+rising inflexion: “You’re free?”
+
+“Free, cousin. Too sadly free. And now--_now_--with what use for freedom?”
+
+He looked steadily into her eyes, dark in the heavy shadow of her musty
+mourning-veil. “For me wear colours!”
+
+In a moment more death had come, the doctor had silently attested it,
+and she had burst into sobs.
+
+We buried him in the little churchyard in which he had expressed the
+wish to lie; beneath one of the blackest and widest of English yews and
+the little tower than which none in all England has a softer and hoarier
+grey. A year has passed; Miss Searle, I believe, has begun to wear
+colours.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PASSIONATE PILGRIM ***
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that:
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+