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 lamplit room, long after they had looked their
last. They had looks that survived--had them as great poets had
quoted lines.
The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the
afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; without sense for
what was in it he had mechanically unfolded and then dropped it.
Before he went to bed he took it up, and this time, at the top of a
paragraph, he was caught by five words that made him start. He
stood staring, before the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague,
K.C.B.," the man who ten years earlier had been the nearest of his
friends and whose deposition from this eminence had practically
left it without an occupant. He had seen him after their rupture,
but hadn't now seen him for years. Standing there before the fire
he turned cold as he read what had befallen him. Promoted a short
time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton
Hague had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness
consequent on the bite of a poisonous snake. His career was
compressed by the newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of
which excited on George Stransom's part no warmer feeling than one
of relief at the absence of any mention of their quarrel, an
incident accidentally tainted at the time, thanks to their joint
immersion in large affairs, with a horrible publicity. Public
indeed was the wrong Stransom had, to his own sense, suffered, the
insult he had blankly taken from the only man with whom he had ever
been intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University years,
the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public that he
had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he had
completely overlooked it. It had made the difference for him that
friendship too was all over, but it had only made just that one.