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We get tired of each other at times, but after a call from the people in the next house, we return with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting." "And you never," I ventured, making my jocosity as ironical as possible, "wear upon each other?" "Horribly!" said Alderling, and his wife smiled contentedly, behind him.
"Pretty much," she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke. "But I didn't see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling," I said. She had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her husband's, but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house. "The housekeeping is enough," she answered, with her tranquil smile.
He took one lamp and I the other, and he started up stairs before me. If he were not coming down again, he meant to let the hanging-lamp burn, and I had nothing to say about that; but I suggested, concerning the wide-open door behind me, "Shall I close the door, Alderling?" and he answered, without looking round, "I don't shut it."
Suddenly I heard a joyful shout from the attic overhead: "I am coming! I am coming!" It was Alderling calling out through his window, and then a cry came from over the water, which seemed to answer him, but which there is no reason in the world to believe was not a girlish shout from one of the yachts, swallowed up in the fog.
You are very welcome to the Alderling incident, my dear Acton, if you think you can do anything with it, and I will give it as circumstantially as possible. The thing has its limitations, I should think, for the fictionist, chiefly in a sort of roundedness which leaves little play to the imagination.
There was something in Alderling's tone and manner that made me, instead of answering directly that I did not, temporize and ask, "Why?" "Because because," and Alderling caught his breath, like a child that is trying to keep itself from crying, "because I don't."
"Oh, I'll tell him fast enough," said Alderling, nursing his knee, and bringing it well up toward his chin, between his clasped hands. "Marion has always had the notion that I should live again if I believed I should, and that as I don't believe I shall, I am not going to. The joke of it is," and he began to splutter laughter round the stem of his pipe, "she's as much of an agnostic as I am.
I answered her, 'I am ready now! and then Norrey scuffled to his feet, with a conventional face of sympathy, and said, 'No hurry, my dear Alderling, and I knew he had not heard or seen anything, as well as I did afterwards when I questioned him. He thought I was giving them notice that they could take her away. What do you think?" "How what do I think?" I asked. "Do you think that it happened?"
The fever might have gone the worse with her because of her over-fed robustness; at any rate it went badly enough. I first heard of her death from Minver at the club, and I heard with still greater astonishment that Alderling was down there alone where she had died. Minver said that somebody ought to go down and look after the poor old fellow, but nobody seemed to feel it exactly his office.
He stared, and answered, "Oh!" and went without other words, carrying his lamp with him and moving with a weak-kneed shuffle, like a very old man. He was going to leave the door open behind him, but I called out, "I wish you'd shut me in, Alderling," and after a hesitation, he came back and closed the door.
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