The Altar of the Dead | Page 7

they disappeared, to a vague or to a
particular recognition; but this unfailing presence was always to be
observed when he arrived and still in possession when he departed. He

was surprised, the first time, at the promptitude with which it assumed
an identity for him- -the identity of the lady whom two years before, on
his anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic
face he had had so flitting a vision. Given the time that had passed, his
recollection of her was fresh enough to make him wonder. Of himself
she had of course no impression, or rather had had none at first: the
time came when her manner of transacting her business suggested her
having gradually guessed his call to be of the same order. She used his
altar for her own purpose--he could only hope that sad and solitary as
she always struck him, she used it for her own Dead. There were
interruptions, infidelities, all on his part, calls to other associations and
duties; but as the months went on he found her whenever he returned,
and he ended by taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her
almost the contentment he had given himself. They worshipped side by
side so often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure,
so straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in
their rites. She was younger than he, but she looked as if her Dead were
at least as numerous as his candles. She had no colour, no sound, no
fault, and another of the things about which he had made up his mind
was that she had no fortune. Always black-robed, she must have had a
succession of sorrows. People weren't poor, after all, whom so many
losses could overtake; they were positively rich when they had had so
much to give up. But the air of this devoted and indifferent woman,
who always made, in any attitude, a beautiful accidental line, conveyed
somehow to Stransom that she had known more kinds of trouble than
one.
He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but
occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday
afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories. There
were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by side with
whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of these winter
afternoons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware after he had seated
himself that the lady he had so often seen at church was in the place
next him and was evidently alone, as he also this time happened to be.
She was at first too absorbed in the consideration of the programme to
heed him, but when she at last glanced at him he took advantage of the
movement to speak to her, greeting her with the remark that he felt as if

he already knew her. She smiled as she said "Oh yes, I recognise you";
yet in spite of this admission of long acquaintance it was the first he
had seen of her smile. The effect of it was suddenly to contribute more
to that acquaintance than all the previous meetings had done. He hadn't
"taken in," he said to himself, that she was so pretty. Later, that
evening--it was while he rolled along in a hansom on his way to dine
out--he added that he hadn't taken in that she was so interesting. The
next morning in the midst of his work he quite suddenly and
irrelevantly reflected that his impression of her, beginning so far back,
was like a winding river that had at last reached the sea.
His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of what
had now passed between them. It wasn't much, but it had just made the
difference. They had listened together to Beethoven and Schumann;
they had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to which
they moved together, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter
of getting away. She had thanked him and put up her umbrella, slipping
into the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yet again and
leaving him to remember at leisure that not a word had been exchanged
about the usual scene of that coincidence. This omission struck him
now as natural and then again as perverse. She mightn't in the least
have allowed his warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he
would have judged her an underbred woman. It was odd that when
nothing had really ever brought them together he should have been able
successfully to assume they were in