Spencer Brydon recognised it—it was in
fact what he had absolutely professed. Yet he
importantly qualified. “He isn’t
myself. He’s the just so totally other
person. But I do want to see him,” he added.
“And I can. And I shall.”
Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from
something in hers that she divined his strange sense.
But neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her
apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no
easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything
yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the
spot, an element that was like breatheable air.
What she said however was unexpected. “Well,
I’ve seen him.”
“You—?”
“I’ve seen him in a dream.”
“Oh a ’dream’—!” It
let him down.
“But twice over,” she continued.
“I saw him as I see you now.”
“You’ve dreamed the same dream—?”
“Twice over,” she repeated. “The
very same.”
This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also
gratified him. “You dream about me at
that rate?”
“Ah about him!” she smiled.
His eyes again sounded her. “Then you
know all about him.” And as she said nothing
more: “What’s the wretch like?”
She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her
so hard that, resisting for reasons of her own, she
had to turn away. “I’ll tell you
some other time!”
It was after this that there was most of a virtue
for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous
secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender
to his obsession and of address to what he more and
more believed to be his privilege. It was what
in these weeks he was living for—since
he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon
had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample
house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone,
he knew himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly
expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came
twice in the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked
best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn
twilight; this was the time of which, again and again,
he found himself hoping most. Then he could,
as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait,
linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never
in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great
vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and
only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep
crepuscular spell. Later—rarely much
before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil—he
watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly,
holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all,
as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of communication
between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance
or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation
he pretended to invite. It was a practice he
found he could perfectly “work” without
exciting remark; no one was in the least the wiser
for it; even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well
of discretion, didn’t quite fully imagine.
