The Altar of the Dead | Page 2

them failed, all sound of them
ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked
so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every
day, of the hard usage of life. They had no organised service, no
reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety. Even ungenerous
people provided for the living, but even those who were called most
generous did nothing for the others. So on George Stransom's part had
grown up with the years a resolve that he at least would do something,
do it, that is, for his own--would perform the great charity without
reproach. Every man HAD his own, and every man had, to meet this
charity, the ample resources of the soul.

It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; as
the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion
with these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called
in his thoughts the Others. He spared them the moments, he organised
the charity. Quite how it had risen he probably never could have told
you, but what came to pass was that an altar, such as was after all
within everybody's compass, lighted with perpetual candles and
dedicated to these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritual spaces. He
had wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a
religion; being very sure, and not a little content, that he hadn't at all
events the religion some of the people he had known wanted him to
have. Gradually this question was straightened out for him: it became
clear to him that the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had
been simply the religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it
satisfied his spirit, it gave employment to his piety. It answered his love
of great offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no shrine could be
more bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than those to which his
worship was attached. He had no imagination about these things but
that they were accessible to any one who should feel the need of them.
The poorest could build such temples of the spirit--could make them
blaze with candles and smoke with incense, make them flush with
pictures and flowers. The cost, in the common phrase, of keeping them
up fell wholly on the generous heart.


CHAPTER II.

He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as happened, an
emotion not unconnected with that range of feeling. Walking home at
the close of a busy day he was arrested in the London street by the
particular effect of a shop-front that lighted the dull brown air with its
mercenary grin and before which several persons were gathered. It was
the window of a jeweller whose diamonds and sapphires seemed to
laugh, in flashes like high notes of sound, with the mere joy of knowing

how much more they were "worth" than most of the dingy pedestrians
staring at them from the other side of the pane. Stransom lingered long
enough to suspend, in a vision, a string of pearls about the white neck
of Mary Antrim, and then was kept an instant longer by the sound of a
voice he knew. Next him was a mumbling old woman, and beyond the
old woman a gentleman with a lady on his arm. It was from him, from
Paul Creston, the voice had proceeded: he was talking with the lady of
some precious object in the window. Stransom had no sooner
recognised him than the old woman turned away; but just with this
growth of opportunity came a felt strangeness that stayed him in the
very act of laying his hand on his friend's arm. It lasted but the instant,
only that space sufficed for the flash of a wild question. Was NOT Mrs.
Creston dead?--the ambiguity met him there in the short drop of her
husband's voice, the drop conjugal, if it ever was, and in the way the
two figures leaned to each other. Creston, making a step to look at
something else, came nearer, glanced at him, started and
exclaimed--behaviour the effect of which was at first only to leave
Stransom staring, staring back across the months at the different face,
the wholly other face, the poor man had shown him last, the blurred
ravaged mask bent over the open grave by which they had stood
together. That son of affliction wasn't in mourning now; he detached
his arm from his companion's to grasp the hand of the older friend. He
coloured as well as smiled in the strong light of the shop when
Stransom raised a tentative hat to the lady. Stransom had just time to
see she was