Books: A Passionate Pilgrim
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Henry James >> A Passionate Pilgrim
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The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle's appearance was his
very limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of
his sister. The second was the preternatural redness of his hair
and beard. They intermingled over his ears and surrounded his
head like a huge lurid nimbus. His face was pale and attenuated,
the face of a scholar, a dilettante, a comparer of points and
texts, a man who lives in a library bending over books and prints
and medals. At a distance it might have passed for smooth and
rather blankly composed; but on a nearer view it revealed a
number of wrinkles, sharply etched and scratched, of a singularly
aged and refined effect. It was the complexion of a man of sixty.
His nose was arched and delicate, identical almost with the nose
of my friend. His eyes, large and deep-set, had a kind of auburn
glow, the suggestion of a keen metal red-hot--or, more plainly,
were full of temper and spirit. Imagine this physiognomy--grave
and solemn, grotesquely solemn, in spite of the bushy brightness
which made a sort of frame for it--set in motion by a queer,
quick, defiant, perfunctory, preoccupied smile, and you will have
an imperfect notion of the remarkable presence of our host;
something better worth seeing and knowing, I perceived as I quite
breathlessly took him in, than anything we had yet encountered.
How thoroughly I had entered into sympathy with my poor picked-up
friend, and how effectually I had associated my sensibilities
with his own, I had not suspected till, within the short five
minutes before the signal for dinner, I became aware, without his
giving me the least hint, of his placing himself on the
defensive. To neither of us was Mr. Searle sympathetic. I might
have guessed from her attitude that his sister entered into our
thoughts. A marked change had been wrought in her since the
morning; during the hour, indeed--as I read in the light of the
wondering glance he cast at her--that had elapsed since her
parting with her cousin. She had not yet recovered from some
great agitation. Her face was pale and she had clearly been
crying. These notes of trouble gave her a new and quite perverse
dignity, which was further enhanced by something complimentary
and commemorative in her dress.
Whether it was taste or whether it was accident I know not; but
the amiable creature, as she stood there half in the cool
twilight, half in the arrested glow of the fire as it spent
itself in the vastness of its marble cave, was a figure for a
painter. She was habited in some faded splendour of sea-green
crape and silk, a piece of millinery which, though it must have
witnessed a number of dull dinners, preserved still a festive
air. Over her white shoulders she wore an ancient web of the most
precious and venerable lace and about her rounded throat a single
series of large pearls. I went in with her to dinner, and Mr.
Searle, following with my friend, took his arm, as the latter
afterwards told me, and pretended jocosely to conduct him. As
dinner proceeded the feeling grew within me that a drama had
begun to be played in which the three persons before me were
actors--each of a really arduous part. The character allotted to
my friend, however, was certainly the least easy to represent
with effect, though I overflowed with the desire that he should
acquit himself to his honour. I seemed to see him urge his faded
faculties to take their cue and perform. The poor fellow tried to
do himself credit more seriously than ever in his old best days.
With Miss Searle, credulous passive and pitying, he had finally
flung aside all vanity and propriety and shown the bottom of his
fantastic heart. But with our host there might be no talking of
nonsense nor taking of liberties; there and then, if ever, sat a
consummate conservative, breathing the fumes of hereditary
privilege and security. For an hour, accordingly, I saw my poor
protege attempt, all in pain, to meet a new decorum. He set
himself the task of appearing very American, in order that his
appreciation of everything Mr. Searle represented might seem
purely disinterested. What his kinsman had expected him to be I
know not; but I made Mr. Searle out as annoyed, in spite of his
exaggerated urbanity, at finding him so harmless. Our host was
not the man to show his hand, but I think his best card had been
a certain implicit confidence that so provincial a parasite would
hardly have good manners.
He led the conversation to the country we had left; rather as if
a leash had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half-
domesticated animal the tendency of whose movements had to be
recognised. He spoke of it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien
to the British orbit, lately proclaimed to have the admixture of
atmospheric gases required to support animal life, but not, save
under cover of a liberal afterthought, to be admitted into one's
regular conception of things. I, for my part, felt nothing but
regret that the spheric smoothness of his universe should be
disfigured by the extrusion even of such inconsiderable particles
as ourselves.
"I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over
there," Mr. Searle mentioned; "but had scarcely followed it more
than you pretend to pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree
may drop, on the other side of your wall, in your neighbour's
garden. There was a man I knew at Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a
decent fellow too; he and I were rather cronies; I think he
afterwards went to the Middle States. They'll be, I suppose,
about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that great-uncle
of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he never
got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make
one fancy he DID get there and that you've kept him alive by one
of those beastly processes--I think you have 'em over there: what
do you call it, 'putting up' things? If you're he you've not done
a wise thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind
him. There's a ghost who comes sobbing about the house every
now and then, the ghost of one to whom he did a wrong."
"Oh mercy ON us!" cried Miss Searle in simple horror.
"Of course YOU know nothing of such things," he rather dryly
allowed. "You're too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of
ghosts."
"I'm sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a
ghost," said my friend, the light of his previous eagerness
playing up into his eyes. "Why does it sob? I feel as if that
were what we've come above all to learn."
Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment gaugingly; he held the
balance as to measure his resources. He wished to do justice to
his theme. With the long finger-nails of his left hand nervously
playing against the tinkling crystal of his wineglass and his
conscious eyes betraying that, small and strange as he sat there,
he knew himself, to his pleasure and advantage, remarkably
impressive, he dropped into our untutored minds the sombre legend
of his house. "Mr. Clement Searle, from all I gather, was a young
man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was left
a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the elder
and the more promising. She educated him with the greatest
affection and care. Of course when he came to manhood she wished
him to marry well. His means were quite sufficient to enable him
to overlook the want of money in his wife; and Mrs. Searle
selected a young lady who possessed, as she conceived, every good
gift save a fortune--a fine proud handsome girl, the daughter of
an old friend, an old lover I suspect, of her own. Clement,
however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was as
yet unprepared to choose. The young lady opened upon him in vain
the battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her
cause. Clement remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle
had a character which appears to have gone out of fashion in my
family nowadays; she was a great manager, a maitresse-femme. A
proud passionate imperious woman, she had had immense cares and
ever so many law-suits; they had sharpened her temper and her
will. She suspected that her son's affections had another object,
and this object she began to hate. Irritated by his stubborn
defiance of her wishes she persisted in her purpose. The more she
watched him the more she was convinced he loved in secret. If he
loved in secret of course he loved beneath him. He went about the
place all sombre and sullen and brooding. At last, with the
rashness of an angry woman, she threatened to bring the young
lady of her choice--who, by the way, seems to have been no
shrinking blossom--to stay in the house. A stormy scene was the
result. He threatened that if she did so he would leave the
country and sail for America. She probably disbelieved him; she
knew him to be weak, but she overrated his weakness. At all
events the rejected one arrived and Clement Searle departed. On a
dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two women,
desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this big house,
mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on
Christmas Eve, in the midst of a great snowstorm long famous in
the country, something happened that quickened their bitterness.
A young woman, battered and chilled by the storm, gained entrance
to the house and, making her way into the presence of the
mistress and her guest, poured out her tale. She was a poor
curate's daughter out of some little hole in Gloucestershire.
Clement Searle had loved her--loved her all too well! She had
been turned out in wrath from her father's house; his mother at
least might pity her--if not for herself then for the child she
was soon to bring forth. Hut the poor girl had been a second time
too trustful. The women, in scorn, in horror, with blows
possibly, drove her forth again into the storm. In the storm she
wandered and in the deep snow she died. Her lover, as you know,
perished in that hard winter weather at sea; the news came to his
mother late, but soon enough. We're haunted by the curate's
daughter!"
Mr. Searle retailed this anecdote with infinite taste and point,
the happiest art; when he ceased there was a pause of some
moments. "Ah well we may be!" Miss Searle then mournfully
murmured.
Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. "Of course, you know"--with
which he began to blush violently--"I should be sorry to claim
any identity with the poor devil my faithless namesake. But I
should be immensely gratified if the young lady's spirit,
deceived by my resemblance, were to mistake me for her cruel
lover. She's welcome to the comfort of it. What one can do in the
case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost haunt a ghost? I AM a
ghost!"
Mr. Searle stared a moment and then had a subtle sneer. "I could
almost believe you are!"
"Oh brother--and cousin!" cried Miss Searle with the gentlest yet
most appealing dignity. "How can you talk so horribly?"
The horrible talk, however, evidently possessed a potent magic
for my friend; and his imagination, checked a while by the
influence of his kinsman, began again to lead him a dance. From
this moment he ceased to steer his frail bark, to care what he
said or how he said it, so long as he expressed his passionate
appreciation of the scene around him. As he kept up this strain I
ceased even secretly to wish he wouldn't. I have wondered since
that I shouldn't have been annoyed by the way he reverted
constantly to himself. But a great frankness, for the time, makes
its own law and a great passion its own channel. There was
moreover an irresponsible indescribable effect of beauty in
everything his lips uttered. Free alike from adulation and from
envy, the essence of his discourse was a divine apprehension, a
romantic vision free as the flight of Ariel, of the poetry of his
companions' situation and their contrasted general
irresponsiveness.
"How does the look of age come?" he suddenly broke out at
dessert. "Does it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded,
unmeasured? Or do you woo it and set baits and traps for it, and
watch it like the dawning brownness of a meerschaum pipe, and
make it fast, when it appears, just where it peeps out, and light
a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to it daily? Or do you
forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it settling
and deepening about you as irresistible as fate?"
"What the deuce is the man talking about?" said the smile of our
host.
"I found a little grey hair this morning," Miss Searle
incoherently prosed.
"Well then I hope you paid it every respect!" cried her visitor.
"I looked at it for a long time in my hand-glass," she answered
with more presence of mind.
"Miss Searle can for many years to come afford to be amused at
grey hairs," I interposed in the hope of some greater ease.
It had its effect. "Ten years from last Thursday I shall be
forty-four," she almost comfortably smiled.
"Well, that's just what I am," said Searle. "If I had only come
here ten years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the
feast, but I should have had less appetite. I needed first to get
famished."
"Oh why did you wait for that?" his entertainer asked. "To think
of these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!" At the
vision of which waste and loss Mr. Searle had a fine shrill
laugh.
"Well," my friend explained, "I always had a notion--a stupid
vulgar notion if there ever was one--that to come abroad properly
one had to have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At
last I came with my empty pot!"
Mr. Searle had a wait for delicacy, but he proceeded. "You're
reduced, you're--a--straitened?"
Our companion's very breath blew away the veil. "Reduced to
nothing. Straitened to the clothes on my back!"
"You don't say so!" said Mr. Searle with a large vague gasp.
"Well--well--well!" he added in a voice which might have meant
everything or nothing; and then, in his whimsical way, went on to
finish a glass of wine. His searching eye, as he drank, met mine,
and for a moment we each rather deeply sounded the other, to the
effect no doubt of a slight embarrassment. "And you," he said by
way of carrying this off--"how about YOUR wardrobe?"
"Oh his!" cried my friend; "his wardrobe's immense. He could
dress up a regiment!" He had drunk more champagne--I admit that
the champagne was good--than was from any point of view to have
been desired. He was rapidly drifting beyond any tacit dissuasion
of mine. He was feverish and rash, and all attempt to direct
would now simply irritate him. As we rose from the table he
caught my troubled look. Passing his arm for a moment into mine,
"This is the great night!" he strangely and softly said; "the
night and the crisis that will settle me."
Mr. Searle had caused the whole lower portion of the house to be
thrown open and a multitude of lights to be placed in convenient
and effective positions. Such a marshalled wealth of ancient
candlesticks and flambeaux I had never beheld. Niched against the
dusky wainscots, casting great luminous circles upon the pendent
stiffness of sombre tapestries, enhancing and completing with
admirable effect the variety and mystery of the great ancient
house, they seemed to people the wide rooms, as our little group
passed slowly from one to another, with a dim expectant presence.
We had thus, in spite of everything, a wonderful hour of it. Mr.
Searle at once assumed the part of cicerone, and--I had not
hitherto done him justice--Mr. Searle became almost agreeable.
While I lingered behind with his sister he walked in advance with
his kinsman. It was as if he had said: "Well, if you want the old
place you shall have it--so far as the impression goes!" He
spared us no thrill--I had almost said no pang--of that
experience. Carrying a tall silver candlestick in his left hand,
he raised it and lowered it and cast the light hither and
thither, upon pictures and hangings and carvings and cornices. He
knew his house to perfection. He touched upon a hundred
traditions and memories, he threw off a cloud of rich reference
to its earlier occupants. He threw off again, in his easy elegant
way, a dozen--happily lighter--anecdotes. His relative attended
with a brooding deference. Miss Searle and I meanwhile were not
wholly silent.
"I suppose that by this time you and your cousin are almost old
friends," I remarked.
She trifled a moment with her fan and then raised her kind small
eyes. "Old friends--yet at the same time strangely new! My
cousin, my cousin"--and her voice lingered on the word--"it seems
so strange to call him my cousin after thinking these many years
that I've no one in the world but my brother. But he's really so
very odd!"
"It's not so much he as--well, as his situation, that deserves
that name," I tried to reason.
"I'm so sorry for his situation. I wish I could help it in some
way. He interests me so much." She gave a sweet-sounding sigh. "I
wish I could have known him sooner--and better. He tells me he's
but the shadow of what he used to be."
I wondered if he had been consciously practising on the
sensibilities of this gentle creature. If he had I believed he
had gained his point. But his position had in fact become to my
sense so precarious that I hardly ventured to be glad. "His
better self just now seems again to be taking shape," I said.
"It will have been a good deed on your part if you help to
restore him to all he ought to be."
She met my idea blankly. "Dear me, what can I do?"
"Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him love you. I dare
say you see in him now much to pity and to wonder at. But let him
simply enjoy a while the grateful sense of your nearness and
dearness. He'll be a better and stronger man for it, and then you
can love him, you can esteem him, without restriction."
She fairly frowned for helplessness. "It's a hard part for poor
stupid me to play!"
Her almost infantine innocence left me no choice but to be
absolutely frank. "Did you ever play any part at all?"
She blushed as if I had been reproaching her with her
insignificance. "Never! I think I've hardly lived."
"You've begun to live now perhaps. You've begun to care for
something else than your old-fashioned habits. Pardon me if I
seem rather meddlesome; you know we Americans are very rough and
ready. It's a great moment. I wish you joy!"
"I could almost believe you're laughing at me. I feel more
trouble than joy."
"Why do you feel trouble?"
She paused with her eyes fixed on our companions. "My cousin's
arrival's a great disturbance," she said at last.
"You mean you did wrong in coming to meet him? In that case the
fault's mine. He had no intention of giving you the opportunity."
"I certainly took too much on myself. But I can't find it in my
heart to regret it. I never shall regret it! I did the only thing
I COULD, heaven forgive me!"
"Heaven bless you, Miss Searle! Is any harm to come of it? I did
the evil; let me bear the brunt!"
She shook her head gravely. "You don't know my brother!"
"The sooner I master the subject the better then," I said. I
couldn't help relieving myself--at least by the tone of my voice
--of the antipathy with which, decidedly, this gentleman had
inspired me. "Not perhaps that we should get on so well
together!" After which, as she turned away, "Are you VERY much
afraid of him?" I added.
She gave me a shuddering sidelong glance. "He's looking at me!"
He was placed with his back to us, holding a large Venetian hand-
mirror, framed in chiselled silver, which he had taken from a
shelf of antiquities, just at such an angle that he caught the
reflexion of his sister's person. It was evident that I too was
under his attention, and was resolved I wouldn't be suspected
for nothing. "Miss Searle," I said with urgency, "promise me
something."
She turned upon me with a start and a look that seemed to beg me
to spare her. "Oh don't ask me--please don't!" It was as if she
were standing on the edge of a place where the ground had
suddenly fallen away, and had been called upon to make a leap. I
felt retreat was impossible, however, and that it was the greater
kindness to assist her to jump.
"Promise me," I repeated.
Still with her eyes she protested. "Oh what a dreadful day!" she
cried at last.
"Promise me to let him speak to you alone if he should ask you--
any wish you may suspect on your brother's part notwithstanding."
She coloured deeply. "You mean he has something so particular to
say?"
"Something so particular!"
"Poor cousin!"
"Well, poor cousin! But promise me."
"I promise," she said, and moved away across the long room and
out of the door.
"You're in time to hear the most delightful story," Searle began
to me as I rejoined him and his host. They were standing before
an old sombre portrait of a lady in the dress of Queen Anne's
time, whose ill-painted flesh-tints showed livid, in the candle-
light, against her dark drapery and background. "This is Mrs.
Margaret Searle--a sort of Beatrix Esmond--qui se passait ses
fantaisies. She married a paltry Frenchman, a penniless fiddler,
in the teeth of her whole family. Pretty Mrs. Margaret, you must
have been a woman of courage! Upon my word, she looks like Miss
Searle! But pray go on. What came of it all?"
Our companion watched him with an air of distaste for his
boisterous homage and of pity for his crude imagination. But he
took up the tale with an effective dryness: "I found a year ago,
in a box of very old papers, a letter from the lady in question
to a certain Cynthia Searle, her elder sister. It was dated from
Paris and dreadfully ill-spelled. It contained a most passionate
appeal for pecuniary assistance. She had just had a baby, she was
starving and dreadfully neglected by her husband--she cursed the
day she had left England. It was a most dismal production. I
never heard she found means to return."
"So much for marrying a Frenchman!" I said sententiously.
Our host had one of his waits. "This is the only lady of the
family who ever was taken in by an adventurer."
"Does Miss Searle know her history?" asked my friend with a stare
at the rounded whiteness of the heroine's cheek.
"Miss Searle knows nothing!" said our host with expression.
"She shall know at least the tale of Mrs. Margaret," their guest
returned; and he walked rapidly away in search of her.
Mr. Searle and I pursued our march through the lighted rooms.
"You've found a cousin with a vengeance," I doubtless awkwardly
enough laughed.
"Ah a vengeance?" my entertainer stiffly repeated.
"I mean that he takes as keen an interest in your annals and
possessions as yourself."
"Oh exactly so! He tells me he's a bad invalid," he added in a
moment. "I should never have supposed it."
"Within the past few hours he's a changed man. Your beautiful
house, your extreme kindness, have refreshed him immensely."
Mr. Searle uttered the vague ejaculation with which self-
conscious Britons so often betray the concussion of any especial
courtesy of speech. But he followed this by a sudden odd glare
and the sharp declaration: "I'm an honest man!" I was quite
prepared to assent; but he went on with a fury of frankness, as
if it were the first time in his life he had opened himself to
any one, as if the process were highly disagreeable and he were
hurrying through it as a task. "An honest man, mind you! I know
nothing about Mr. Clement Searle! I never expected to see him. He
has been to me a--a--!" And here he paused to select a word which
should vividly enough express what, for good or for ill, his
kinsman represented. "He has been to me an Amazement! I've no
doubt he's a most amiable man. You'll not deny, however, that
he's a very extraordinary sort of person. I'm sorry he's ill. I'm
sorry he's poor. He's my fiftieth cousin. Well and good. I'm an
honest man. He shall not have it to say that he wasn't received
at my house."
"He too, thank heaven, is an honest man!" I smiled.
"Why the devil then," cried Mr. Searle, turning almost fiercely
on me, "has he put forward this underhand claim to my property?"
The question, quite ringing out, flashed backward a gleam of
light upon the demeanour of our host and the suppressed agitation
of his sister. In an instant the jealous gentleman revealed
itself. For a moment I was so surprised and scandalised at the
directness of his attack that I lacked words to reply. As soon as
he had spoken indeed Mr. Searle appeared to feel he had been
wanting in form. "Pardon me," he began afresh, "if I speak of
this matter with heat. But I've been more disgusted than I can
say to hear, as I heard this morning from my solicitor, of the
extraordinary proceedings of Mr. Clement Searle. Gracious
goodness, sir, for what does the man take me? He pretends to the
Lord knows what fantastic admiration for my place. Let him then
show his respect for it by not taking too many liberties! Let
him, with his high-flown parade of loyalty, imagine a tithe of
what _I_ feel! I love my estate; it's my passion, my conscience,
my life! Am I to divide it up at this time of day with a beggarly
foreigner--a man without means, without appearance, without
proof, a pretender, an adventurer, a chattering mountebank? I
thought America boasted having lands for all men! Upon my soul,
sir, I've never been so shocked in my life."
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