Over and over he called his roll, and it appeared to him compact and complete.Where should he put in another, where, if there were no other objection, would it stand in its place in the rank? He reflected, with a want of sincerity of which he was quite conscious, that it would be difficult to determine that place.
More and more, besides, face to face with his little legion, over endless histories, handling the empty shells and playing with the silence - more and more he could see that he had never introduced an alien.He had had his great companions, his indulgences - there were cases in which they had been immense; but what had his devotion after all been if it hadn't been at bottom a respect? He was, however, himself surprised at his stiffness; by the end of the winter the responsibility of it was what was uppermost in his thoughts.The refrain had grown old to them, that plea for just one more.There came a day when, for simple exhaustion, if symmetry should demand just one he was ready so far to meet symmetry.Symmetry was harmony, and the idea of harmony began to haunt him; he said to himself that harmony was of course everything.He took, in fancy, his composition to pieces, redistributing it into other lines, making other juxtapositions and contrasts.He shifted this and that candle, he made the spaces different, he effaced the disfigurement of a possible gap.There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross-reference, and moments in which he seemed to catch a glimpse of the void so sensible to the woman who wandered in exile or sat where he had seen her with the portrait of Acton Hague.Finally, in this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal, which left a clear opportunity for just another figure."Just one more - to round it off; just one more, just one," continued to hum in his head.There was a strange confusion in the thought, for he felt the day to be near when he too should be one of the Others.What in this event would the Others matter to him, since they only mattered to the living? Even as one of the Dead what would his altar matter to him, since his particular dream of keeping it up had melted away? What had harmony to do with the case if his lights were all to be quenched? What he had hoped for was an instituted thing.He might perpetuate it on some other pretext, but his special meaning would have dropped.This meaning was to have lasted with the life of the one other person who understood it.
In March he had an illness during which he spent a fortnight in bed, and when he revived a little he was told of two things that had happened.One was that a lady whose name was not known to the servants (she left none) had been three times to ask about him; the other was that in his sleep and on an occasion when his mind evidently wandered he was heard to murmur again and again: "Just one more - just one." As soon as he found himself able to go out, and before the doctor in attendance had pronounced him so, he drove to see the lady who had come to ask about him.She was not at home; but this gave him the opportunity, before his strength should fall again, to take his way to the church.He entered it alone; he had declined, in a happy manner he possessed of being able to decline effectively, the company of his servant or of a nurse.He knew now perfectly what these good people thought; they had discovered his clandestine connexion, the magnet that had drawn him for so many years, and doubtless attached a significance of their own to the odd words they had repeated to him.The nameless lady was the clandestine connexion - a fact nothing could have made clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin her.He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on his hands.His weakness, his life's weariness overtook him.It seemed to him he had come for the great surrender.At first he asked himself how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the very desire to move gradually left him.He had come, as he always came, to lose himself; the fields of light were still there to stray in; only this time, in straying, he would never come back.
