A Passionate Pilgrim

I paused for some moments before speaking, to allow his passion fully to expend itself and to flicker up again if it chose; for so far as I was concerned in the whole awkward matter I but wanted to deal with him discreetly. “Your apprehensions, sir,” I said at last, “your not unnatural surprise, perhaps, at the candour of our interest, have acted too much on your nerves. You’re attacking a man of straw, a creature of unworthy illusion; though I’m sadly afraid you’ve wounded a man of spirit and conscience. Either my friend has no valid claim on your estate, in which case your agitation is superfluous; or he HAS a valid claim—”

Mr. Searle seized my arm and glared at me; his pale face paler still with the horror of my suggestion, his great eyes of alarm glowing and his strange red hair erect and quivering. “A valid claim!” he shouted. “Let him try it—let him bring it into court!”

We had emerged into the great hall and stood facing the main doorway. The door was open into the portico, through the stone archway of which I saw the garden glitter in the blue light of a full moon. As the master of the house uttered the words I have just repeated my companion came slowly up into the porch from without, bareheaded, bright in the outer moonlight, dark in the shadow of the archway, and bright again in the lamplight at the entrance of the hall. As he crossed the threshold the butler made an appearance at the head of the staircase on our left, faltering visibly a moment at sight of Mr. Searle; after which, noting my friend, he gravely descended. He bore in his hand a small silver tray. On the tray, gleaming in the light of the suspended lamp, lay a folded note. Clement Searle came forward, staring a little and startled, I think, by some quick nervous prevision of a catastrophe. The butler applied the match to the train. He advanced to my fellow visitor, all solemnly, with the offer of his missive. Mr. Searle made a movement as if to spring forward, but controlled himself. “Tottenham!” he called in a strident voice.

“Yes, sir!” said Tottenham, halting.

“Stand where you are. For whom is that note?”

“For Mr. Clement Searle,” said the butler, staring straight before him and dissociating himself from everything.

“Who gave it to you?”

“Mrs. Horridge, sir.” This personage, I afterwards learned, was our friend the housekeeper.

“Who gave it Mrs. Horridge?”

There was on Tottenham’s part just an infinitesimal pause before replying.

“My dear sir,” broke in Searle, his equilibrium, his ancient ease, completely restored by the crisis, “isn’t that rather my business?”

“What happens in my house is my business, and detestable things seem to be happening.” Our host, it was clear, now so furiously detested them that I was afraid he would snatch the bone of contention without more ceremony. “Bring me that thing!” he cried; on which Tottenham stiffly moved to obey.

“Really this is too much!” broke out my companion, affronted and helpless.

So indeed it struck me, and before Mr. Searle had time to take the note I possessed myself of it. “If you’ve no consideration for your sister let a stranger at least act for her.” And I tore the disputed object into a dozen pieces.

“In the name of decency, what does this horrid business mean?” my companion quavered.

Mr. Searle was about to open fire on him, but at that moment our hostess appeared on the staircase, summoned evidently by our high-pitched contentious voices. She had exchanged her dinner-dress for a dark wrapper, removed her ornaments and begun to disarrange her hair, a thick tress of which escaped from the comb. She hurried down with a pale questioning face. Feeling distinctly that, for ourselves, immediate departure was in the air, and divining Mr. Tottenham to be a person of a few deep-seated instincts and of much latent energy, I seized the opportunity to request him, sotto voce, to send a carriage to the door without delay. “And put up our things,” I added.

Our host rushed at his sister and grabbed the white wrist that escaped from the loose sleeve of her dress. “What was in that note?” he quite hissed at her.

Miss Searle looked first at its scattered fragments and then at her cousin. “Did you read it?”

“No, but I thank you for it!” said Searle.

Her eyes, for an instant, communicated with his own as I think they had never, never communicated with any other source of meaning; then she transferred them to her brother’s face, where the sense went out of them, only to leave a dull sad patience. But there was something even in this flat humility that seemed to him to mock him, so that he flushed crimson with rage and spite and flung her away. “You always were an idiot! Go to bed.”

In poor Searle’s face as well the gathered serenity had been by this time all blighted and distorted and the reflected brightness of his happy day turned to blank confusion. “Have I been dealing these three hours with a madman?” he woefully cried.

“A madman, yes, if you will! A man mad with the love of his home and the sense of its stability. I’ve held my tongue till now, but you’ve been too much for me. Who the devil are you, and what and why and whence?” the terrible little man continued. “From what paradise of fools do you come that you fancy I shall make over to you, for the asking, a part of my property and my life? I’m forsooth, you ridiculous person, to go shares with you? Prove your preposterous claim! There isn’t THAT in it!” And he kicked one of the bits of paper on the floor.

Searle received this broadside gaping. Then turning away he went and seated himself on a bench against the wall and rubbed his forehead amazedly. I looked at my watch and listened for the wheels of our carriage.

But his kinsman was too launched to pull himself up. “Wasn’t it enough that you should have plotted against my rights? Need you have come into my very house to intrigue with my sister?”

My friend put his two hands to his face. “Oh, oh, oh!” he groaned while Miss Searle crossed rapidly and dropped on her knees at his side.

“Go to bed, you fool!” shrieked her brother.

“Dear cousin,” she said, “it’s cruel you’re to have so to think of us!”

“Oh I shall think of YOU as you’d like!” He laid a hand on her head.

“I believe you’ve done nothing wrong,” she brought bravely out.

“I’ve done what I could,” Mr. Searle went on—“but it’s arrant folly to pretend to friendship when this abomination lies between us. You were welcome to my meat and my wine, but I wonder you could swallow them. The sight spoiled MY appetite!” cried the master of Lackley with a laugh. “Proceed with your trumpery case! My people in London are instructed and prepared.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if your case had improved a good deal since you gave it up,” I was moved to observe to Searle.

“Oho! you don’t feign ignorance then?” and our insane entertainer shook his shining head at me. “It’s very kind of you to give it up! Perhaps you’ll also give up my sister!”

Searle sat staring in distress at his adversary. “Ah miserable man—I thought we had become such beautiful friends.”

“Boh, you hypocrite!” screamed our host.

Searle seemed not to hear him. “Am I seriously expected,” he slowly and painfully pursued, “to defend myself against the accusation of any real indelicacy—to prove I’ve done nothing underhand or impudent? Think what you please!” And he rose, with an effort, to his feet. “I know what YOU think!” he added to Miss Searle.

The wheels of the carriage resounded on the gravel, and at the same moment a footman descended with our two portmanteaux. Mr. Tottenham followed him with our hats and coats.

“Good God,” our host broke out again, “you’re not going away?”—an ejaculation that, after all that had happened, had the grandest comicality. “Bless my soul,” he then remarked as artlessly, “of course you’re going!”

“It’s perhaps well,” said Miss Searle with a great effort, inexpressibly touching in one for whom great efforts were visibly new and strange, “that I should tell you what my poor little note contained.”

“That matter of your note, madam,” her brother interrupted, “you and I will settle together!”

“Let me imagine all sorts of kind things!” Searle beautifully pleaded.

“Ah too much has been imagined!” she answered simply. “It was only a word of warning. It was to tell you to go. I knew something painful was coming.”

He took his hat. “The pains and the pleasures of this day,” he said to his kinsman, “I shall equally never forget. Knowing you,” and he offered his hand to Miss Searle, “has been the pleasure of pleasures. I hoped something more might have come of it.”

“A monstrous deal too much has come of it!” Mr. Searle irrepressibly declared.

His departing guest looked at him mildly, almost benignantly, from head to foot, and then with closed eyes and some collapse of strength, “I’m afraid so, I can’t stand more,” he went on. I gave him my arm and we crossed the threshold. As we passed out I heard Miss Searle break into loud weeping.

“We shall hear from each other yet, I take it!” her brother pursued, harassing our retreat.

My friend stopped, turning round on him fiercely. “You very impossible man!” he cried in his face.

“Do you mean to say you’ll not prosecute?” Mr. Searle kept it up. “I shall force you to prosecute! I shall drag you into court, and you shall be beaten—beaten—beaten!” Which grim reiteration followed us on our course.

We drove of course to the little wayside inn from which we had departed in the morning so unencumbered, in all broad England, either with enemies or friends. My companion, as the carriage rolled along, seemed overwhelmed and exhausted. “What a beautiful horrible dream!” he confusedly wailed. “What a strange awakening! What a long long day! What a hideous scene! Poor me! Poor woman!” When we had resumed possession of our two little neighbouring rooms I asked him whether Miss Searle’s note had been the result of anything that had passed between them on his going to rejoin her. “I found her on the terrace,” he said, “walking restlessly up and down in the moonlight. I was greatly excited—I hardly know what I said. I asked her, I think, if she knew the story of Margaret Searle. She seemed frightened and troubled, and she used just the words her brother had used—‘I know nothing.’ For the moment, somehow, I felt as a man drunk. I stood before her and told her, with great emphasis, how poor Margaret had married a beggarly foreigner—all in obedience to her heart and in defiance to her family. As I talked the sheeted moonlight seemed to close about us, so that we stood there in a dream, in a world quite detached. She grew younger, prettier, more attractive—I found myself talking all kinds of nonsense. Before I knew it I had gone very far. I was taking her hand and calling her ‘Margaret, dear Margaret!’ She had said it was impossible, that she could do nothing, that she was a fool, a child, a slave. Then with a sudden sense—it was odd how it came over me there—of the reality of my connexion with the place, I spoke of my claim against the estate. ‘It exists,’ I declared, ‘but I’ve given it up. Be generous! Pay me for my sacrifice.’ For an instant her face was radiant. ‘If I marry you,’ she asked, ‘will it make everything right?’ Of that I at once assured her—in our marriage the whole difficulty would melt away like a rain-drop in the great sea. ‘Our marriage!’ she repeated in wonder; and the deep ring of her voice seemed to wake us up and show us our folly. ‘I love you, but I shall never see you again,’ she cried; and she hurried away with her face in her hands. I walked up and down the terrace for some moments, and then came in and met you. That’s the only witchcraft I’ve used!”

The poor man was at once so roused and so shaken by the day’s events that I believed he would get little sleep. Conscious on my own part that I shouldn’t close my eyes, I but partly undressed, stirred my fire and sat down to do some writing. I heard the great clock in the little parlour below strike twelve, one, half-past one. Just as the vibration of this last stroke was dying on the air the door of communication with Searle’s room was flung open and my companion stood on the threshold, pale as a corpse, in his nightshirt, shining like a phantom against the darkness behind him. “Look well at me!” he intensely gasped; “touch me, embrace me, revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost!”

“Gracious goodness, what do you mean?”

“Write it down!” he went on. “There, take your pen. Put it into dreadful words. How do I look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red? Am I speaking English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?”

I confess there came upon me by contact a kind of supernatural shock. I shall always feel by the whole communication of it that I too have seen a ghost. My first movement—I can smile at it now—was to spring to the door, close it quickly and turn the key upon the gaping blackness from which Searle had emerged. I seized his two hands; they were wet with perspiration. I pushed my chair to the fire and forced him to sit down in it; then I got on my knees and held his hands as firmly as possible. They trembled and quivered; his eyes were fixed save that the pupil dilated and contracted with extraordinary force. I asked no questions, but waited there, very curious for what he would say. At last he spoke. “I’m not frightened, but I’m—oh excited! This is life! This is living! My nerves—my heart—my brain! They’re throbbing—don’t you feel it? Do you tingle? Are you hot? Are you cold? Hold me tight—tight—tight! I shall tremble away into waves—into surges—and know all the secrets of things and all the reasons and all the mysteries!” He paused a moment and then went on: “A woman—as clear as that candle: no, far clearer! In a blue dress, with a black mantle on her head and a little black muff. Young and wonderfully pretty, pale and ill; with the sadness of all the women who ever loved and suffered pleading and accusing in her wet-looking eyes. God knows I never did any such thing! But she took me for my elder, for the other Clement. She came to me here as she would have come to me there. She wrung her hands and she spoke to me ‘marry me!’ she moaned; ‘marry me and put an end to my shame!’ I sat up in bed, just as I sit here, looked at her, heard her—heard her voice melt away, watched her figure fade away. Bless us and save us! Here I be!”

I made no attempt either to explain or to criticise this extraordinary passage. It’s enough that I yielded for the hour to the strange force of my friend’s emotion. On the whole I think my own vision was the more interesting of the two. He beheld but the transient irresponsible spectre—I beheld the human subject hot from the spectral presence. Yet I soon recovered my judgement sufficiently to be moved again to try to guard him against the results of excitement and exposure. It was easily agreed that he was not for the night to return to his room, and I made him fairly comfortable in his place by my fire. Wishing above all to preserve him from a chill I removed my bedding and wrapped him in the blankets and counterpane. I had no nerves either for writing or for sleep; so I put out my lights, renewed the fuel and sat down on the opposite side of the hearth. I found it a great and high solemnity just to watch my companion. Silent, swathed and muffled to his chin, he sat rigid and erect with the dignity of his adventure. For the most part his eyes were closed; though from time to time he would open them with a steady expansion and stare, never blinking, into the flame, as if he again beheld without terror the image of the little woman with the muff. His cadaverous emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles intensified by the upward glow from the hearth, his distorted moustache, his extraordinary gravity and a certain fantastical air as the red light flickered over him, all re-enforced his fine likeness to the vision-haunted knight of La Mancha when laid up after some grand exploit. The night passed wholly without speech. Toward its close I slept for half an hour. When I awoke the awakened birds had begun to twitter and Searle, unperturbed, sat staring at me. We exchanged a long look, and I felt with a pang that his glittering eyes had tasted their last of natural sleep. “How is it? Are you comfortable?” I nevertheless asked.

He fixed me for a long time without replying and then spoke with a weak extravagance and with such pauses between his words as might have represented the slow prompting of an inner voice. “You asked me when you first knew me what I was. ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing of any consequence.’ Nothing I’ve always supposed myself to be. But I’ve wronged myself—I’m a great exception. I’m a haunted man!”

If sleep had passed out of his eyes I felt with even a deeper pang that sanity had abandoned his spirit. From this moment I was prepared for the worst. There were in my friend, however, such confirmed habits of mildness that I found myself not in the least fearing he would prove unmanageable. As morning began fully to dawn upon us I brought our curious vigil to a close. Searle was so enfeebled that I gave him my hands to help him out of his chair, and he retained them for some moments after rising to his feet, unable as he seemed to keep his balance. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been once favoured, but don’t think I shall be favoured again. I shall soon be myself as fit to ‘appear’ as any of them. I shall haunt the master of Lackley! It can only mean one thing—that they’re getting ready for me on the other side of the grave.”

When I touched the question of breakfast he replied that he had his breakfast in his pocket; and he drew from his travelling-bag a phial of morphine. He took a strong dose and went to bed. At noon I found him on foot again, dressed, shaved, much refreshed. “Poor fellow,” he said, “you’ve got more than you bargained for—not only a man with a grievance but a man with a ghost. Well, it won’t be for long!” It had of course promptly become a question whither we should now direct our steps. “As I’ve so little time,” he argued for this, “I should like to see the best, the best alone.” I answered that either for time or eternity I had always supposed Oxford to represent the English maximum, and for Oxford in the course of an hour we accordingly departed.

IV

Of that extraordinary place I shall not attempt to speak with any order or indeed with any coherence. It must ever remain one of the supreme gratifications of travel for any American aware of the ancient pieties of race. The impression it produces, the emotions it kindles in the mind of such a visitor, are too rich and various to be expressed in the halting rhythm of prose. Passing through the small oblique streets in which the long grey battered public face of the colleges seems to watch jealously for sounds that may break upon the stillness of study, you feel it the most dignified and most educated of cities. Over and through it all the great corporate fact of the University slowly throbs after the fashion of some steady bass in a concerted piece or that of the mediaeval mystical presence of the Empire in the old States of Germany. The plain perpendicular of the so mildly conventual fronts, masking blest seraglios of culture and leisure, irritates the imagination scarce less than the harem-walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching portals, however, you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and the dark verdure soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green quadrangles stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of the humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a marshalled host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our arrival my friend and I wandered forth in the luminous early dusk. We reached the bridge that under-spans the walls of Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower, delicately fluted and embossed, rise in temperate beauty—the perfect prose of Gothic—wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained of day. We entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little court that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows niche more lovingly in the tangled ivy than elsewhere in Oxford, and passed into the quiet cloister and studied the small sculptured monsters on the entablature of the arcade. I rejoiced in every one of my unhappy friend’s responsive vibrations, even while feeling that they might as direfully multiply as those that had preceded them. I may say that from this time forward I found it difficult to distinguish in his company between the riot of fancy and the labour of thought, or to fix the balance between what he saw and what he imagined. He had already begun playfully to exchange his identity for that of the earlier Clement Searle, and he now delivered himself almost wholly in the character of his old-time kinsman.

“THIS was my college, you know,” he would almost anywhere break out, applying the words wherever we stood—“the sweetest and noblest in the whole place. How often have I strolled in this cloister with my intimates of the other world! They are all dead and buried, but many a young fellow as we meet him, dark or fair, tall or short, reminds me of the past age and the early attachment. Even as we stand here, they say, the whole thing feels about its massive base the murmurs of the tide of time; some of the foundation-stones are loosened, some of the breaches will have to be repaired. Mine was the old unregenerate Oxford, the home of rank abuses, of distinctions and privileges the most delicious and invidious. What cared I, who was a perfect gentleman and with my pockets full of money? I had an allowance of a thousand a year.”

It was at once plain to me that he had lost the little that remained of his direct grasp on life and was unequal to any effort of seeing things in their order. He read my apprehension in my eyes and took pains to assure me I was right. “I’m going straight down hill. Thank heaven it’s an easy slope, coated with English turf and with an English churchyard at the foot.” The hysterical emotion produced by our late dire misadventure had given place to an unruffled calm in which the scene about us was reflected as in an old-fashioned mirror. We took an afternoon walk through Christ-Church meadow and at the river-bank procured a boat which I pulled down the stream to Iffley and to the slanting woods of Nuneham—the sweetest flattest reediest stream-side landscape that could be desired. Here of course we encountered the scattered phalanx of the young, the happy generation, clad in white flannel and blue, muscular fair-haired magnificent fresh, whether floated down the current by idle punts and lounging in friendly couples when not in a singleness that nursed ambitions, or straining together in rhythmic crews and hoarsely exhorted from the near bank. When to the exhibition of so much of the clearest joy of wind and limb we added the great sense of perfumed protection shed by all the enclosed lawns and groves and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic shades must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion found himself less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a series of gardens and spent long hours sitting in their greenest places. They struck us as the fairest things in England and the ripest and sweetest fruit of the English system. Locked in their antique verdure, guarded, as in the case of New College, by gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the matted leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and memories, a sort of chorus of tradition; with vaguely-generous youths sprawling bookishly on the turf as if to spare it the injury of their boot-heels, and with the great conservative college countenance appealing gravely from the restless outer world, they seem places to lie down on the grass in for ever, in the happy faith that life is all a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon. This charmed seclusion was especially grateful to my friend, and his sense of it reached its climax, I remember, on one of the last of such occasions and while we sat in fascinated flanerie over against the sturdy back of Saint John’s. The wide discreetly-windowed wall here perhaps broods upon the lawn with a more effective air of property than elsewhere. Searle dropped into fitful talk and spun his humour into golden figures. Any passing undergraduate was a peg to hang a fable, every feature of the place a pretext for more embroidery.

“Isn’t it all a delightful lie?” he wanted to know. “Mightn’t one fancy this the very central point of the world’s heart, where all the echoes of the general life arrive but to falter and die? Doesn’t one feel the air just thick with arrested voices? It’s well there should be such places, shaped in the interest of factitious needs, invented to minister to the book-begotten longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked and believe unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all’s well in a world where so much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth and fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful unachieved especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world’s made—work’s over. Now for leisure! England’s safe—now for Theocritus and Horace, for lawn and sky! What a sense it all gives one of the composite life of the country and of the essential furniture of its luckier minds! Thank heaven they had the wit to send me here in the other time. I’m not much visibly the braver perhaps, but think how I’m the happier! The misty spires and towers, seen far off on the level, have been all these years one of the constant things of memory. Seriously, what do the spires and towers do for these people? Are they wiser, gentler, finer, cleverer? My diminished dignity reverts in any case at moments to the naked background of our own education, the deadly dry air in which we gasp for impressions and comparisons. I assent to it all with a sort of desperate calmness; I accept it with a dogged pride. We’re nursed at the opposite pole. Naked come we into a naked world. There’s a certain grandeur in the lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which has to invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-air, with a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we dwell. Noblesse oblige—Oxford must damnably do so. What a horrible thing not to rise to such examples! If you pay the pious debt to the last farthing of interest you may go through life with her blessing; but if you let it stand unhonoured you’re a worse barbarian than we! But for the better or worse, in a myriad private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the youthful sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls. Think of the centuries’ tale of dead lads—dead alike with the end of the young days to which these haunts were a present world, and the close of the larger lives which the general mother-scene has dropped into less bottomless traps. What are those two young fellows kicking their heels over on the grass there? One of them has the Saturday Review; the other—upon my soul—the other has Artemus Ward! Where do they live, how do they live, to what end do they live? Miserable boys! How can they read Artemus Ward under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think loveliest in all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that one yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a hundred years ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken cornice. Don’t pretend it’s not a common thing to have one’s bosom friend at another college. Pray was I committed to common things? He was a charming fellow. By the way, he was a good deal like you. Of course his cocked hat, his long hair in a black ribbon, his cinnamon velvet suit and his flowered waistcoat made a difference. We gentlemen used to wear swords.”