Chapter 9

AND yet this was no solution, especially after he had talked again
to his friend of all it had been his plan she should finally do for
him. He had talked in the other days, and she had responded with a
frankness qualified only by a courteous reluctance, a reluctance
that touched him, to linger on the question of his death. She had
then practically accepted the charge, suffered him to feel he could
depend upon her to be the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it
was in the name of what had so passed between them that he appealed
to her not to forsake him in his age. She listened at present with
shining coldness and all her habitual forbearance to insist on her
terms; her deprecation was even still tenderer, for it expressed
the compassion of her own sense that he was abandoned. Her terms,
however, remained the same, and scarcely the less audible for not
being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more than he
she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have
provided her. They both missed the rich future, but she missed it
most, because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it
was her acceptance of the loss that gave him the full measure of
her preference for the thought of Acton Hague over any other
thought whatever. He had humour enough to laugh rather grimly when
he said to himself: "Why the deuce does she like him so much more
than she likes me?" - the reasons being really so conceivable. But
even his faculty of analysis left the irritation standing, and this
irritation proved perhaps the greatest misfortune that had ever
overtaken him. There had been nothing yet that made him so much
want to give up. He had of course by this time well reached the
age of renouncement; but it had not hitherto been vivid to him that
it was time to give up everything.

Practically, at the end of six months, he had renounced the
friendship once so charming and comforting. His privation had two
faces, and the face it had turned to him on the occasion of his
last attempt to cultivate that friendship was the one he could look
at least. This was the privation he inflicted; the other was the
privation he bore. The conditions she never phrased he used to
murmur to himself in solitude: "One more, one more - only just
one." Certainly he was going down; he often felt it when he caught
himself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice to that
inanity. There was proof enough besides in his being so weak and
so ill. His irritation took the form of melancholy, and his
melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite failed.
His altar moreover had ceased to exist; his chapel, in his dreams,
was a great dark cavern. All the lights had gone out - all his
Dead had died