It was after lunch before I was summoned to the telephone, to hear Wolf's voice at the other end. Vio would see me at three. I was to understand that my being alive had been a shock to her, and therefore all this ceremonial!
At a quarter to three I started to walk across the Common to the old Soames house on Beacon Hill. It occurred to me then that if for the living it is a strange sensation when the dead come back, for the dead it is a stranger sensation still. Not till I set out on this errand had I understood how dead I had been. I had been dead and buried; I had been mourned for and forgotten; Vio had finished her grieving and returned to every-day life. For anything I knew, she might be contemplating remarriage. Alice Mountney had said that when people were dead it was better for them to stay dead; and I began to fear it was.
Beacon Hill, as I drew near it, struck me as an illustration of that changing of the old order of which all the inner springs seemed to be within myself. It was no longer the Beacon Hill of my boyhood. It was not even the Beacon Hill of the year when I went away. To those who had stayed on the spot and watched the transformation taking place little difference might be apparent; but to me, with my newly awakened faculties, it was like coming back in autumn to a garden visited in spring. The historic State House had deployed a pair of huge white wings, to make room for which familiar landmarks round about it had for the most part disappeared. All down the slope toward the level land the Georgian and Early Victorian mansions were turning into shops and clubs. The old Soames house, with occasional panes of purple glass in otherwise normal windows, was flanked on one side by a bachelors' chambers and on the other by an antique-shop. One of the few old houses in Boston still in the hands of people connected with the original owners, it had been purchased by Vio's father from the heirs of his mother's family, while Vio's trustees had in their turn bought out Wolf's share in it. Four-square, red, with a fine white Doric portico over which a luxuriant wistaria trained, it suggested, as I approached it now, old furniture, old books, old pictures, old wines, old friendships, and all the easy, well-ordered life out of which we were called by the pistol-shot of Sarajevo.
My nervousness in crossing the street and ringing the door-bell was augmented by that sense, from which I was never free, of being guilty of a stupidity so glaring as almost to amount to crime. No ex-convict returning from the penitentiary could have had a more hangdog conviction of coming back to where he was no longer wanted than I in wiping my cheap boots on Vio's handsome door-mat. If I found any solace in the moments of waiting for an answer to my ring it was in noticing that the doorway needed paint and that nothing in the approach to the house was quite so spick and span as formerly. I call this a solace only because it helped to bring Vio nearer me by making her less supremely mistress than she used to be of everything best in the world. I noticed the same thing when the door was opened by a cheery English man-servant of sixty-odd, who was too gaily captain of his soul to be the perfect butler of the old regime.
"Couldn't see you," was his offhand response, when I had asked for Mrs. Harrowby.
"I think she'll see me."
"No, myte, and I'll tell you why. She's kind o' expectin' of 'er 'usband like. Excuse me."
The politeness was called forth by his shutting the door in my face, compelling me to speak plainly.
"I'm Mrs. Harrowby's husband."
The absurdities in my situation were dramatized in the expressions that ran successively over the man's face. Amazement having followed on incredulity, apology followed on amazement. As I was still too near to Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn to separate myself from the servants hall, my sympathy was with him.