The Altar of the Dead | Page 6

easier was probably never guessed by those who simply
knew there were hours when he disappeared and for many of whom
there was a vulgar reading of what they used to call his plunges. These
plunges were into depths quieter than the deep sea-caves, and the habit
had at the end of a year or two become the one it would have cost him
most to relinquish. Now they had really, his Dead, something that was
indefensibly theirs; and he liked to think that they might in cases be the
Dead of others, as well as that the Dead of others might be invoked
there under the protection of what he had done. Whoever bent a knee
on the carpet he had laid down appeared to him to act in the spirit of his
intention. Each of his lights had a name for him, and from time to time
a new light was kindled. This was what he had fundamentally agreed
for, that there should always be room for them all. What those who
passed or lingered saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars
called suddenly into vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for
whom it evidently had a fascination, often seated there in a maze or a
doze; but half the satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and fitful
worshipper was that he found the years of his life there, and the ties, the
affections, the struggles, the submissions, the conquests, if there had
been such, a record of that adventurous journey in which the
beginnings and the endings of human relations are the lettered
mile-stones. He had in general little taste for the past as a part of his
own history; at other times and in other places it mostly seemed to him
pitiful to consider and impossible to repair; but on these occasions he
accepted it with something of that positive gladness with which one
adjusts one's self to an ache that begins to succumb to treatment. To the
treatment of time the malady of life begins at a given moment to
succumb; and these were doubtless the hours at which that truth most
came home to him. The day was written for him there on which he had
first become acquainted with death, and the successive phases of the
acquaintance were marked each with a flame.
The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom had entered
that dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one dies every day.
It was only yesterday that Kate Creston had flashed out her white fire;
yet already there were younger stars ablaze on the tips of the tapers.
Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense drew closer

to him by entering this company. He went over it, head by head, till he
felt like the shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd's vision of
differences imperceptible. He knew his candles apart, up to the colour
of the flame, and would still have known them had their positions all
been changed. To other imaginations they might stand for other
things--that they should stand for something to be hushed before was
all he desired; but he was intensely conscious of the personal note of
each and of the distinguishable way it contributed to the concert. There
were hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of
his friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this
manner a connexion more charming than, as it happened, it was
possible to enjoy with them in life. In regard to those from whom one
was separated by the long curves of the globe such a connexion could
only be an improvement: it brought them instantly within reach. Of
course there were gaps in the constellation, for Stransom knew he could
only pretend to act for his own, and it wasn't every figure passing
before his eyes into the great obscure that was entitled to a memorial.
There was a strange sanctification in death, but some characters were
more sanctified by being forgotten than by being remembered. The
greatest blank in the shining page was the memory of Acton Hague, of
which he inveterately tried to rid himself. For Acton Hague no flame
could ever rise on any altar of his.


CHAPTER IV.

Every year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he went
to church as he had done the day his idea was born. It was on this
occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he began to
observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least as frequent as
himself. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of the church, came and
went, appealing sometimes, when