The Beast in the Jungle | Page 2

the place and explain it, deal with the
tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building, the
styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the favourite
haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given
her shillings--it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she finally
drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much
older--older than when he had seen her before--it might have been as an
effect of her guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted
more imagination to her than to all the others put together, and had
thereby penetrated to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for.
She was there on harder terms than any one; she was there as a
consequence of things suffered, one way and another, in the interval of
years; and she remembered him very much as she was
remembered--only a good deal better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one of
the rooms--remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-place--out
of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even
before they had spoken they had practically arranged with each other to
stay behind for talk. The charm, happily, was in other things too--partly
in there being scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay
behind for. It was in the way the autumn day looked into the high
windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from
under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old
wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps
in the way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal
with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole
thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general
business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up
and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude
lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. "I met
you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She
confessed to disappointment--she had been so sure he didn't; and to
prove how well he did he began to pour forth the particular
recollections that popped up as he called for them. Her face and her
voice, all at his service now, worked the miracle--the impression
operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by
one, a long row of gas-jets. Marcher flattered himself the illumination
was brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him,
with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got
most things rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome--it had been at Naples;
and it hadn't been eight years before--it had been more nearly ten. She
hadn't been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but with her mother and
brother; in addition to which it was not with the Pembles he had been,
but with the Boyers, coming down in their company from Rome--a
point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion, and as to which
she had her evidence in hand. The Boyers she had known, but didn't
know the Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people
he was with who had made them acquainted. The incident of the
thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to drive
them for refuge into an excavation--this incident had not occurred at the
Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had

been present there at an important find.
He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the
moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really didn't remember the
least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that when all
was made strictly historic there didn't appear much of anything left.
They lingered together still, she neglecting her office--for from the
moment he was so clever she had no proper right to him--and both
neglecting the house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more
wouldn't again breathe on them. It hadn't taken them many minutes,
after all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that
constituted their respective hands; only what came out was that the
pack was unfortunately not perfect--that the past, invoked, invited,
encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more than it had. It had
made them anciently meet--her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but
nothing