had been “treatment,” of the consummate
sort, in his every shade and salience. The revulsion,
for our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense—this
drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his
adversary’s inscrutable manoeuvre. That
meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him;
for he could but gape at his other self in this other
anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there
for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life,
couldn’t be faced in his triumph. Wasn’t
the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and
completely spread?—so spread and so intentional
that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed
every other, the fact that one of these hands had
lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as
if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually
guarded and saved.
“Saved,” though, would it be?—Brydon
breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his
attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced,
as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant
as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself,
the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands,
as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding
in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered
and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped
into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound
he couldn’t utter; for the bared identity was
too hideous as his, and his glare was the passion
of his protest. The face, that face, Spencer
Brydon’s?—he searched it still, but
looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling
straight from his height of sublimity. It was
unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any
possibility!—He had been “sold,”
he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this:
the presence before him was a presence, the horror
within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had
been only grotesque and the success of his adventure
an irony. Such an identity fitted his at no
point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand
times yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the face
was the face of a stranger. It came upon him
nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic
images projected by the magic lantern of childhood;
for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious,
blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and
he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed
still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling
back as under the hot breath and the roused passion
of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality
before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole
vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way.
His head went round; he was going; he had gone.
