"James, Henry - The Altar of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (James Henry)

loved her; she had made the passions about her as regular as the moon makes the
tides. She had been also, of course, far too good for her husband, but he never
suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than in the exquisite
art with which she tried to keep everyone else (keeping Creston was no trouble)
from finding it out. Here was a man to whom she had devoted her life and for
whom she had given it up--dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and
she had had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on her
grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had replaced. The
frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes fill; and he had that
evening a rich, almost happy sense that he alone, in a world without delicacy,
had a right to hold up his head. While he smoked, after dinner, he had a book in
his lap, but he had no eyes for his page; his eyes, in the swarming void of
things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences
he looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing that it was of
her he would think. He thought, for a long time, of how the closed eyes of dead
women could still live--how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long
after they had looked their last. They had looks that remained, as great poets
had quoted lines.
The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the afternoon, and the
servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it, he had
mechanically unfolded and then dropped it. Before he went to bed he took it up,
and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by five words that made
him start. He stood staring, before the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague,
K.C.B.," the man who, ten years earlier, had been the nearest of his friends,
and whose deposition from this eminence had practically left it without an
occupant. He had seen him after that catastrophe, but he had not seen him for
years. Standing there before the fire, he turned cold as he read what had
befallen him. Promoted a short time previous to the governorship of the Westward
Islands, Acton Hague had died, in the bleak honor of this exile, of an illness
consequent on the bite of a poisonous snake. His career was compressed by the
newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of which excited on George Stransom's
part no warmer feeling than one of relief at the absence of any mention of their
quarrel, an incident accidentally tainted at the time, thanks to their joint
immersion in large affairs, with a horrible publicity. Public, indeed, was the
wrong Stransom had, to his own sense, suffered, the insult he had blankly taken
from the only man with whom he had ever been intimate; the friend, almost
adored, of his university years, the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty;
so public that he had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he
had completely overlooked it. It had made the difference for him that friendship
too was all over, but it had only made just that one. The shock of interests had
been private, intensely so; but the action taken by Hague had been in the face
of men. Today it all seemed to have occurred merely to the end that George
Stransom should think of him as "Hague," and measure exactly how much he himself
could feel like a stone. He went cold, suddenly, and horribly cold, to bed.
III
The next day, in the afternoon, in the great gray suburb, he felt that his long
walk had tired him. In the dreadful cemetery alone he had been on his feet an
hour. Instinctively, coming back, they had taken him a devious course, and it
was a desert in which no circling cabman hovered over possible prey. He paused
on a corner and measured the dreariness; then he became aware in the gathered