The Altar of the Dead | Page 4

lamplit room, long after they had looked their last. They had
looks that survived--had them as great poets had quoted lines.
The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the afternoon
and the servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it
he had mechanically unfolded and then dropped it. Before he went to
bed he took it up, and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was
caught by five words that made him start. He stood staring, before the
fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.," the man who ten years
earlier had been the nearest of his friends and whose deposition from
this eminence had practically left it without an occupant. He had seen
him after their rupture, but hadn't now seen him for years. Standing
there before the fire he turned cold as he read what had befallen him.
Promoted a short time previous to the governorship of the Westward
Islands, Acton Hague had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an
illness consequent on the bite of a poisonous snake. His career was
compressed by the newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of which
excited on George Stransom's part no warmer feeling than one of relief
at the absence of any mention of their quarrel, an incident accidentally
tainted at the time, thanks to their joint immersion in large affairs, with
a horrible publicity. Public indeed was the wrong Stransom had, to his
own sense, suffered, the insult he had blankly taken from the only man
with whom he had ever been intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his
University years, the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public

that he had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he had
completely overlooked it. It had made the difference for him that
friendship too was all over, but it had only made just that one. The
shock of interests had been private, intensely so; but the action taken by
Hague had been in the face of men. To-day it all seemed to have
occurred merely to the end that George Stransom should think of him
as "Hague" and measure exactly how much he himself could resemble
a stone. He went cold, suddenly and horribly cold, to bed.


CHAPTER III.

The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb, he knew his
long walk had tired him. In the dreadful cemetery alone he had been on
his feet an hour. Instinctively, coming back, they had taken him a
devious course, and it was a desert in which no circling cabman
hovered over possible prey. He paused on a corner and measured the
dreariness; then he made out through the gathered dusk that he was in
one of those tracts of London which are less gloomy by night than by
day, because, in the former case of the civil gift of light. By day there
was nothing, but by night there were lamps, and George Stransom was
in a mood that made lamps good in themselves. It wasn't that they
could show him anything, it was only that they could burn clear. To his
surprise, however, after a while, they did show him something: the arch
of a high doorway approached by a low terrace of steps, in the depth of
which--it formed a dim vestibule--the raising of a curtain at the
moment he passed gave him a glimpse of an avenue of gloom with a
glow of tapers at the end. He stopped and looked up, recognising the
place as a church. The thought quickly came to him that since he was
tired he might rest there; so that after a moment he had in turn pushed
up the leathern curtain and gone in. It was a temple of the old
persuasion, and there had evidently been a function--perhaps a service
for the dead; the high altar was still a blaze of candles. This was an
exhibition he always liked, and he dropped into a seat with relief. More

than it had ever yet come home to him it struck him as good there
should be churches.
This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; a verger
shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed to Stransom there
was hospitality in the thick sweet air. Was it only the savour of the
incense or was it something of larger intention? He had at any rate
quitted the great grey suburb and come nearer to the warm centre. He
presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at last even a sense of
community with the only worshipper in his neighbourhood, the sombre
presence of a woman, in mourning unrelieved, whose back was all he
could