All-Story Weekly/Volume 98/Number 3/Fires Rekindled/Chapter 3

HE developments that I am trying to trace are so peculiar that I find difficulty in keeping these memoranda up to date; but I mustn't let them escape!

I had dropped in on my landlady the other day to discuss the price of milk, and as we chatted my eyes happened to fall on that row of black-bound books on her shelf which, as she had told me, contained her accounts and those of her predecessors, with lodgers going back for upward of a century.

If the Mrs. Asgard mentioned in the newspaper paragraph should happen to be the E. A. A. whose initials I had found on the window-shutter (a large "if," to be sure!), then she had lodged here, and her name would appear in one of those books.

Mrs. Blodgett readily agreed to my request to be allowed to take some of the volumes to my room for examination. "Indeed you're most welcome, Mr. 'Eathcote; but in course prices of things in old times wasn't like what they've come to be these days!"

I didn't explain that the object of my curiosity was not comparative prices. In all, there were about thirty of the series, mostly small 8vos. The series began in 1815, and I carried to my room the first half-dozen of them.

The newspaper paragraph about Mrs. Asgard had been dated in the spring of 11818. Not without a tension of the nerves did I open the volume corresponding to that epoch! I prepared myself for disappointment: the odds against success were incalculable!

The thumbed and soiled pages of the entries for that year were written in an angular hand, precise and painstaking, but unbiased as to spelling. The top lines were inscribed with the name of the landlord, Caleb Blodgett, in account with the lodger for the time being. I turned leaf after leaf slowly.

On the page dated March 1, 1818, I came upon the following:



My heart gave a jump, and I dropped back in my chair, breathing as if I had run up a hill. I sat up again and read the words over and over again. There was no mistake! Mrs. Asgard and E. A. A. were one and the same person, and she had lived in these rooms! It was Mrs. Asgard, the distinguished soprano singer, who had sung at Buckingham Palace and been honored by royalty: it was she whose influence had met me on the threshold of the apartment and had been with me ever since! It was she who had lain in that bed, sat in this chair, leaned on this table; it was here that she had received her lover!

There could be no mistake: the name of Asgard was too unusual, even without the preceding initials and the date. It was tantalizing not to know what those two initials stood for; but doubtless they would be elucidated in due time. After having been brought so far along this wonderful path, I had faith that I should arrive at the end. I could well-nigh believe she was whispering counsel in my ear, and putting in my hand the clue that should lead me through the maze!

But I presently subdued myself to a more deliberate survey of the situation.

Mrs. Asgard, even assuming her to have achieved eminence before she was thirty, and to have fulfilled her alloted span of three-score-and-ten, must have died at least a quarter of a century before I was born!

Hitherto, so powerful upon me had been her influence, I had been blind to this flagrant fact: it had seemed to me that she must still live, and might at any moment walk into the room! Even the Buckingham Palace record hadn't opened my eyes to a realization that this was a physical impossibility.

But her name in the old account-book brought me to my sober senses. A gulf a hundred years wide stretched between us. The recognition of it awed me; and yet, as I mused upon it, I found a sort of consolation, too.

For her influence—the perception that it aroused in me—had always been that of a young woman in the bloom of her career—such a woman, with bright auburn hair and sparkling dark eyes, as my fancy had conjured up standing in the presence of royalty. The century that intervened, while denying all hope of confirming this vision in the flesh, yet assured me that her freshness and beauty were beyond the reach of time; that she was an immortal reality, secure and unchangeable. She had actually existed in this world, and she could never die; she was a spirit, and for the sake of the spirit I was willing to forego the flesh, since it is the spirit that true-lovers love, and the flesh only as it is the spirit's transient vehicle! She was with me now. and we loved each other!

But here another reflection cast its shadow over me. Apparently Mrs. Asgard had been a married woman. Who and what had been her husband? He couldn't be L. H.; and the intervention of L. H. presented still another problem.

I remembered, however, that in the early part of the nineteenth century the title of Mrs. was often borne by unmarried women, especially on the stage—and, for that matter, Asgard might have been merely a stage name. But if (as I was disposed to believe) there was a husband, he could hardly have been with her in London—his presence there would not have been compatible with that of L. H. She and her husband must then have separated, she retaining, for professional purposes, her married name. That she was a widow did not seem probable, for in that case why shouldn't L. H. have married her? True, he also might have been already married; I but at this point I dismissed the speculation, perceiving that it was the identity of L. H. that really concerned me.

It concerned me because the hand that cut those initials on the shutter must have been the hand of her lover, and of her accepted lover, too; and that was a hundred years ago! The reason I had failed to consider this before was my first impulsive and irrational persuasion that L. H. and I were one. I could no longer hold to this; and what, therefore, was my standing with E. A. A.? What rights in her could I claim? How could I supplant him? And how could her spirit, which had loved him while she was still in the body, now adapt itself to mine?

I could see no escape from this dilemma; but neither, on the other hand, could I feel troubled by it. For there are certainties of the soul that disdain proof and confer the gift of belief. They convict as pusillanimous the pleas of reason, and they disclose interior truths. They are the more convincing, because beyond our fathoming.

In my life nothing else had been to me so real as was my passion for E. A. A. I could not question its verity, and inasmuch as the inmost essential of love is reciprocity, I could as little question hers for me. How to reconcile this with the apparent fact that L. H. had forestalled me, I knew not, nor was it necessary. What I knew I knew!

I felt, nevertheless, that knowledge of him would increase my knowledge of her, and must constitute the next step toward solving the enigma. The good fortune I had thus far met with encouraged me to hope for more. L. H.—who was he?"

My first unthinking notion that the letters stood for Lionel Heathcote—some inexplicable prototype of myself—must now be pronounced untenable. The man had been a contemporary of hers, and probably not greatly her senior. It was likely, too, that he had been a personage of some importance to be admitted to her acquaintance. Possibly, since she was a singer, he may have been a musician or composer; but, running over the names of such as might have fitted the conditions, I realized that the field was too extensive for guesswork. But I might consult my omniscient friend the librarian at the museum.

This suggestion directed my thoughts to the books on yonder book-shelf; by some inadvertence I had never examined the "Endymion" and the "Melodies," my divination of which had so startled Joan. That divination indicated that there should be some direct connection between the lovers and them!

I got up and drew out the volumes and brought them to my table. They were first editions, and might be worth a good price in the market. I opened the "Endymion."

There stood the deathless line in old-fashioned, unpretentious type, making its virgin appearance in the world, innocent of fame, ready to go forth on its mission of delight to all lovers of beauty! Few eyes had seen it then, which now is known to myriads: the poem of love and of lovers, thought I to myself, vague, wayward, faulty, exquisite, strange, a mirror wherein the enamored may behold their ideal rather than its reality, or if the reality, then as haloed and softened by the ideal. Beauty dawns through it like summer moonbeams through pearly mists; love glows amidst it like the blush of roses on the moist brows of a bacchante.

The voice of youth, innocent, sensuous, and musical, echoes about it; soul and flesh are interwoven in its mesh, each glorifying the other. A book, indeed, fit for the reading of the lover and his beloved, sitting cheek to cheek, breathing its aroma, tasting its sweetness, even as Paolo and Francesca in the dim Florentine chamber! Lifting their eyes intermittently from the page to one another, they know how true it is that a thing of beauty is a joy forever—a truth hidden from others revealed to them!

The poem chances to be a favorite of my own solitary youth, rhyming with youthful dreams never to be fulfilled; it wrought an impression upon me for which its actual contents could not perhaps wholly account; and even now, writing of it in this London room, I have a dreamy sensation of being something more or other than my usual self, and perceive that such a vein of apostrophe is not normally mine. May it not have been in this very chair that she and he were seated when they first opened the book and cut the leaves!

As I passed from page to page, seeking remembered passages, it was like entering the guarded temple of two lovers and treading on consecrated ground. Here they had met in their secrecies; here were depicted scenes, and thoughts uttered, which made them flush as at the thought that some spirit of the air had found its way into their privacy. But the mysteries of all lovers are open to one who loves.

That opening verse of the poem had been underscored with a delicate pencil line; and as I went on I discovered that most of what I called my passages had been similarly marked. These markings were, however, of two kinds, easily distinguishable each from the other; some had been made with the delicate touch that told of a feminine hand; others with, as it were, a masculine emphasis and impetuosity. The latter designated verses in which the amorous nature of the young poet had achieved most effective expression; the former drew attention chiefly to magical cadencies and spiritual subtleties. Together they seemed to draw aside a veil, permitting a living and intimate insight into the form and quality of these two characters. The poem blended the two into one.

As I was lingering over the latter part of the second book a belated impulse caused me to turn to the flyleaf. There, if anywhere, should be confirmation of what I had been seeking! There it was, written in a bold, somewhat unformed hand, that I read:

"This book of love"—almost the phrase I had used just now—and signed with the name by which I had been called in my childhood!

I was profoundly stirred. Oh, if the writer had but added his other name and hers! But my advance through the obscurity must be gradual: already it was carrying me beyond my rational depth and seemingly toward the fulfilment of a mystical prophecy of the spirit!

That ardent, irregular handwriting! What was this incredible message which, apart from its external purport, it seemed to have for me?

After a while I closed the book and took my pen and a sheet of paper. Without attempting a facsimile of the original, but in my own customary hand I wrote the same words in their order, and then reopened the volume and compared the two.

To an undiscriminating glance they were quite unlike. The original was larger than my copy, and lacked its trained evenness: it had been done by one unversed in niceties of penmanship, who wielded the pen with something of the freedom of a broadsword. But students of chirography are aware that careful analysis may reveal unsuspected likenesses between two apparently dissimilar scripts. They observe the manner in which letters are formed, the manner in which they are joined to one another, the spacing of the words, the slope of the lines, and such like unconscious details. The handwriting of a boy of twelve will look different from that of the same person grown to manhood; and yet an expert may be able to identify them. The inner nature, the temperament, cannot be wholly disguised, and it is this which betrays the secret.

I had received no special training in this curious science, but a professional writer acquires habits of close observation. And as I examined Lionel's writing and my own, I detected surprising affiliations. Had I lived his life, even the external resemblance might have been greater. I think, in a preceding page of this journal, I have drawn some such comparison as this between myself and my great-granduncle—and, to be sure, his name was Lionel! But how can I venture into the lawless region of surmise which such a thought suggests! Sanity warns against it.

And yet what could be more opposed to recognized laws of being than are some of the experiences that I have already met with in this house? I cannot disown these. The supersensuous impressions which I received on my first entrance here were verified by physical proof, so far as they were related to material facts; and my perceptions—I might almost say, my visions—of an adorable personality hovering about me, are too deeply rooted in me to be ignored. On their own plane they are consistent, and they bring with them the memory, or the consciousness, of innumerable logical accessories—words, backgrounds, attendant figures, small incidents—of almost overwhelming verisimilitude and naturalness—for I know not how to avoid that word.

There is a maid-servant in that kitchen—I don't mean Mrs. Blodgett's actual Kittie, but a dark-haired, clever young woman who cooks delicate little meals, brushes her mistress's hair (that glistening, floating auburn web!), helps her as tire-woman, and accompanies her on her little professional excursions—whom I know well and could instantly recognize out of a thousand, though I know she doesn't exist to bodily sight or touch! Haven't I "tipped" her with innumerable half-crowns, and even with a guinea upon occasion! She is the sole trusted confidant of our secret!

What am I saying! Why shouldn't I write down what my thought dictates? I believe I, or something in me that craves to do it, could begin here and write a complete narrative of adventures which befell me—or something in me—when George was regent in England! I have only to yield to the—to this urgency within that strives to seize and direct my pen, and the thing would be accomplished!

No, the time is not yet come! I am too much bewildered and too agitated to risk such an experiment—such a surrender! If there be in me a something, a force, an entity, distinct from, however closely allied with, my normal self, which desires to control me, to possess me, to use me for ends of its own, I am determined to resist it until, at least, I can gain some further understanding of its nature and of its relation to me.

I have already fallen too much under the dominion of these fancies. I will try the effect of rigorous application to the research for which I came hither. The dusk of the long English summer day has fallen, and I will go out and walk amid the crowds of London streets, and try to free myself from this enchanted mood.