The Altar of the Dead | Page 3

pretty before he found himself gaping at a fact more
portentous. "My dear fellow, let me make you acquainted with my
wife."
Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half a minute, at the
rate we live in polite society, it had practically become, for our friend,
the mere memory of a shock. They stood there and laughed and talked;
Stransom had instantly whisked the shock out of the way, to keep it for
private consumption. He felt himself grimace, he heard himself
exaggerate the proper, but was conscious of turning not a little faint.
That new woman, that hired performer, Mrs. Creston? Mrs. Creston
had been more living for him than any woman but one. This lady had a
face that shone as publicly as the jeweller's window, and in the happy
candour with which she wore her monstrous character was an effect of

gross immodesty. The character of Paul Creston's wife thus attributed
to her was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to
know perfectly that he knew. The happy pair had just arrived from
America, and Stransom hadn't needed to be told this to guess the
nationality of the lady. Somehow it deepened the foolish air that her
husband's confused cordiality was unable to conceal. Stransom recalled
that he had heard of poor Creston's having, while his bereavement was
still fresh, crossed the sea for what people in such predicaments call a
little change. He had found the little change indeed, he had brought the
little change back; it was the little change that stood there and that, do
what he would, he couldn't, while he showed those high front teeth of
his, look other than a conscious ass about. They were going into the
shop, Mrs. Creston said, and she begged Mr. Stransom to come with
them and help to decide. He thanked her, opening his watch and
pleading an engagement for which he was already late, and they parted
while she shrieked into the fog, "Mind now you come to see me right
away!" Creston had had the delicacy not to suggest that, and Stransom
hoped it hurt him somewhere to hear her scream it to all the echoes.
He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in his life to go near
her. She was perhaps a human being, but Creston oughtn't to have
shown her without precautions, oughtn't indeed to have shown her at all.
His precautions should have been those of a forger or a murderer, and
the people at home would never have mentioned extradition. This was a
wife for foreign service or purely external use; a decent consideration
would have spared her the injury of comparisons. Such was the first
flush of George Stransom's reaction; but as he sat alone that
night--there were particular hours he always passed alone--the
harshness dropped from it and left only the pity. HE could spend an
evening with Kate Creston, if the man to whom she had given
everything couldn't. He had known her twenty years, and she was the
only woman for whom he might perhaps have been unfaithful. She was
all cleverness and sympathy and charm; her house had been the very
easiest in all the world and her friendship the very firmest. Without
accidents he had loved her, without accidents every one had loved her:
she had made the passions about her as regular as the moon makes the
tides. She had been also of course far too good for her husband, but he
never suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than in

the exquisite art with which she tried to keep every one else (keeping
Creston was no trouble) from finding it out. Here was a man to whom
she had devoted her life and for whom she had given it up--dying to
bring into the world a child of his bed; and she had had only to submit
to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on her grave, no more
existence for him than a domestic servant he had replaced. The frivolity,
the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes fill; and he had that evening a
sturdy sense that he alone, in a world without delicacy, had a right to
hold up his head. While he smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his
lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his eyes, in the swarming void of
things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad
silences he looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing
it to be of her he would think. He thought for a long time of how the
closed eyes of dead women could still live--how they could open again,
in a quiet