Produced by David Widger
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Amoung the frets and checks to the course that "never did run smooth,"there is one which is sufficiently frequent, for many a reader willremember the irritation it caused him. You have counted on a meetingwith the beloved one unwitnessed by others, an interchange of confessionsand vows which others may not hear. You have arranged almost the wordsin which your innermost heart is to be expressed; pictured to yourselfthe very looks by which those words will have their sweetest reply. Thescene you have thus imagined appears to you vivid and distinct, as ifforeshown in a magic glass. And suddenly, after long absence, themeeting takes place in the midst of a common companionship: nothing thatyou wished to say can be said. The scene you pictured is painted out bythe irony of Chance; and groups and backgrounds of which you had neverdreamed start forth from the disappointing canvas. Happy if that be all!But sometimes, by a strange, subtle intuition, you feel that the personherself is changed; and sympathetic with that change, a terrible chillcomes over your own heart.
Before Graham had taken his seat at the table beside Isaura, he felt thatshe was changed to him. He felt it by her very touch as their hands metat the first greeting,—by the tone of her voice in the few words thatpassed between them,—by the absence of all glow in the smile which hadonce lit up her face, as a burst of sunshine lights up a day in spring,and gives a richer gladness of colour to all its blooms. Once seatedside by side they remained for some moments silent. Indeed, it wouldhave been rather difficult for anything less than the wonderfulintelligence of lovers between whom no wall can prevent the stoleninterchange of tokens, to have ventured private talk of their own amidthe excited converse which seemed all eyes, all tongues, all ears,admitting no one present to abstract himself from the common emotion.Englishmen do not recognise the old classic law which limited the numberof guests, where banquets are meant to be pleasant, to that of the Nine-Muses. They invite guests so numerous, and so shy of launching talkacross the table, that you may talk to the person next to you not lesssecure from listeners than you would be in talking with the stranger whomyou met at a well in the Sahara. It is not so, except on stateoccasions, at Paris. Difficult there to retire into solitude with yournext neighbour. The guests collected by Duplessis completed with himselfthe number of the Sacred Nine—the host, Valerie, Rochebriant, Graham,Isaura, Signora Venosta, La Duchesse de Tarascon, the wealthy and high-born Imperialist, Prince ————, and last and least, one who shall benameless.
I have read somewhere, perhaps in one of the books which Americansuperstition dedicates to the mysteries of Spiritualism, how a giftedseer, technically styled medium, sees at the opera a box which to othereyes appears untenanted and empty, but to him is full of ghosts, welldressed in costume de-regle, gazing on the boards and listening to themusic. Like such ghosts are certain beings whom I call Lookers-on.Though still living, they have no share in the life they survey, theycome as from another world to hear and to see what is passing in ours.In ours they lived once, but that troubled sort of life they havesurvived. Still we amuse them as stage-players and puppets amuseourselves. One of these Lookers-on completed the party at the house ofDuplessis.
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