Wilford left for England without dining again at the Hôtel d'Angleterre. We were busy 'doing' the country, and never chanced to be at Biarritz at the dinner hour. During that week I scarcely saw Sir Richard Maistre.
Another little circumstance that rankles especially now would have been ridiculous except for the way things have ended. It isn't easy to tell—it was so petty and I am so ashamed. Colonel Escott had been abusing London, describing it as the least beautiful of the capitals of Europe, comparing it unfavourably to Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. I took up the cudgels in its defence, mentioned its atmosphere, its tone; Paris Vienna, St. Petersburg were lyric, London was epic; and so forth and so forth. Then, shifting from the æsthetic to the utilitarian, I argued that of all great towns it was the healthiest, its death-rate was lowest. Sir Richard Maistre had followed my dissertation attentively, and with a countenance that signified approval; and when, with my reference to the death-rate, I paused, he suddenly burned his ships. He looked me full in the eye, and said, 'Thirty-seven, I believe?' His heightened colour, a nervous movement of the lip, betrayed the effort it had cost him; but at last he had done it—screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and spoken. And I—I can never forget it—I grow hot when I think of it—but I was possessed by a devil. His eyes hung on my face, awaiting my response, pleading for a cue. 'Go, on,' they urged. 'I have taken the first, the difficult step—make the next smoother for me.' And I—I answered lackadaisically with just a casual glance at him, 'I don't know the figures,' and absorbed myself in my viands.
Two or three days later his place was filled by a stranger, and Flaherty told me that he had left for the Riviera.
All this happened last March at Biarritz. I never saw him again till three weeks ago. It was one of those frightfully hot afternoons in July; I had come out of my club, and was walking up St. James's Street, towards Piccadilly; he was moving in an opposite sense; and thus we approached each other. He didn't see me, however, till we had drawn rather near to a conjunction: then he gave a little start of recognition, his eyes brightened, his pace slackened, his right hand prepared to advance itself—and I bowed slightly, and pursued my way. Don't ask why I did it. It is enough to confess it without having to explain it. I glanced backwards, by and by, over my shoulder. He was standing where I had met him, half turned round, and looking after me. But when he saw that I was observing him, he hastily shifted about, and continued his descent of the street.
That was only three weeks ago. Only three weeks ago I still had it in my power to act. I am sure—I don't know why I am sure, but I am sure—that I could have deterred him. For all that one can gather from the brief note he left behind, it seems he had no special, definite motive; he had met with no losses, got into no scrape; he was simply tired and sick of life and of himself. 'I have no friends,' he wrote. 'Nobody will care. People don't like me; people avoid me. I have wondered why; I have tried to watch myself and discover; I have tried to be decent. I suppose it must be that I emit a repellent fluid; I suppose I am a "bad sort."' He had a morbid notion that people didn't like him, that people avoided him! Oh, to be sure, there were the Bunns and the Krausskopfs and their ilk, plentiful enough: but he understood what it was that attracted them. Other people, the people he could have liked, kept their distance—were civil, indeed, but reserved. He wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. It never struck him, I suppose, that they attributed the reserve to him. But I—I knew that his reserve was only an effect of his shyness; I knew that he wanted bread: and that knowledge constituted my moral responsibility. I didn't know that his need was extreme; but I have tried in vain to absolve myself with the reflection. I ought to have made inquiries. When I think of that afternoon in St. James's Street—only three weeks ago—I feel like an assassin. The vision of him, as he stopped and looked after me—I can't banish it. Why didn't some good spirit move me to turn back and overtake him?
It is so hard for the mind to reconcile itself to the irretrievable. I can't shake off a sense that there is something to be done. I can't realise that it is too late.
CASTLES NEAR SPAIN
I.
That he should not have guessed it from the beginning seems odd, if you like, until one stops to consider the matter twice; then, I think, one sees that after all there was no shadow of a reason why he should have done so,—one sees, indeed, that even had a suspicion of the truth at any time crossed his mind, he would have had the best of reasons for scouting it as nonsense. It is obvious to us from the first word, because we know instinctively that otherwise there would be no story; it is that which knits a mere sequence of incidents into a coherent, communicable whole. But, to his perceptions, the thing never presented itself as a story at all. It wasn't an anecdote which somebody had buttonholed him to tell; it was an adventure in which he found himself launched, an experience to be enjoyed bit by bit, as it befell, but in no wise suggestive of any single specific climax. What earthly hint had he received from which to infer the identity of the two women? On the contrary, weren't the actions of the one totally inconsistent with what everybody assured him was the manner of life—with what the necessities of the case led him to believe would be the condition of spirit—of the other? If the tale were to be published, the fun would lie, not in attempting to mystify the reader, but in watching with him the mystification of the hero,—in showing how he played at hoodman-blind with his destiny, and how surprised he was, when, the bandage stripped from his eyes, he saw whom he had caught.