The Jolly Corner | Page 9

at him. "You see what it has made of ME."
"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to
be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you've the perfection nothing else
could have blighted. And don't you see how, without my exile, I
shouldn't have been waiting till now - ?" But he pulled up for the
strange pang.
"The great thing to see," she presently said, "seems to me to be that it
has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at last. It hasn't
spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking - " She also however
faltered.
He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. "Do
you believe then - too dreadfully! - that I AM as good as I might ever
have been?"

"Oh no! Far from it!" With which she got up from her chair and was
nearer to him. "But I don't care," she smiled.
"You mean I'm good enough?"
She considered a little. "Will you believe it if I say so? I mean will you
let that settle your question for you?" And then as if making out in his
face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however
absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: "Oh you don't care either - but
very differently: you don't care for anything but yourself."
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!"
CHAPTER II

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.

He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm
proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue
"officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty,
he had never yet, to the best of his belief,