“Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that-I’ve taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable,” he explained. “But it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t what my affair’s to be.”
“You want something all to yourself-something that nobody else knows or has known?”
“It isn’t a question of what I ‘want’-God knows I don’t want anything. It’s only a question of the apprehension that haunts me-that I live with day by day.”
He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further impose itself. If she hadn’t been interested before she’d have been interested now.
“Is it a sense of coming violence?”
Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. “I don’t think of it as-when it does come-necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itself appear natural.”
“Then how will it appear strange?”
Marcher bethought himself. “It won’t-to me.”
“To whom then?”
“Well,” he replied, smiling at last, “say to you.”
“Oh then I’m to be present?”
“Why you are present-since you know.”
“I see.” She turned it over. “But I mean at the catastrophe.”
At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity; it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. “It will only depend on yourself-if you’ll watch with me.”
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“Don’t leave me now,” he went on.
“Are you afraid?” she repeated.
“Do you think me simply out of my mind?” he pursued instead of answering. “Do I merely strike you as a harmless lunatic?”
“No,” said May Bartram. “I understand you. I believe you.”
“You mean you feel how my obsession-poor old thing-may correspond to some possible reality?”
“To some possible reality.”
“Then you will watch with me?”
She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. “Are you afraid?”
“Did I tell you I was-at Naples?”
“No, you said nothing about it.”
“Then I don’t know. And I should like to know,” said John Marcher. “You’ll tell me yourself whether you think so. If you’ll watch with me you’ll see.”
“Very good then.” They had been moving by this time across the room, and at the door, before passing out, they paused as for the full wind-up of their understanding. “I’ll watch with you,” said May Bartram.
Chapter II
The fact that she “knew”-knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed him-had in a short time begun to constitute between them a goodly bond, which became more marked when, within the year that followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. The event that thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had succeeded-thanks to a high tone and a high temper-in not forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher’s expert attention had recognised from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn’t bristle. Nothing for a long time had made him easier than the thought that the aching must have been much soothed by Miss Bartram’s now finding herself able to set up a small home in London. She had acquired property, to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under her aunt’s extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter began to be straightened out, which indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue was at last in view. He had seen her again before that day, both because she had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality. These friends had taken him back there; he had achieved there again with Miss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt. They went together, on these latter occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large-not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance. That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to Marcher’s sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.
They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light-that is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies-the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten. The rare luck of his having again just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn’t been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his plan that any one should “know”, and mainly for the reason that it wasn’t in him to tell any one. That would have been impossible, for nothing but the amusement of a cold world would have waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearly right, because-well, because there she was. Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact-the fact only-of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her own, with things that might happen to her, things that in friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this connexion-something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.
He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He hadn’t disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were forsooth “unsettled.” If they were as unsettled as he was-he who had never been settled for an hour in his life-they would know what it meant. Yet it wasn’t, all the same, for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why he had such good-though possibly such rather colourless-manners; this was why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decently-as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely-unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion