CHAPTER VI
[ ...43] It was long past noon when he awoke.
His valet had crept several times into the room on tiptoe to see if he was stirring,
and had wondered what made his young master sleep so late.
Finally his bell sounded,
and Victor came in softly with a cup of tea,
and a pile of letters,
on a small tray of old Sèvres china,
and drew back the olive-satin curtains,
with their shimmering blue lining,
that hung in front of the three tall windows.
"Monsieur has well slept this morning,"
he said,
smiling.
"What o'clock is it,
Victor?"
asked Dorian Gray,
sleepily.
"One hour and a quarter,
monsieur."
How late it was!
He sat up,
and,
having sipped some tea,
turned over his letters.
One of them was from Lord Henry,
and had been brought by hand that morning.
He hesitated for a moment,
and then put it aside.
The others he opened listlessly.
They contained the usual collection of cards,
invitations to dinner,
tickets for private views,
programmes of charity concerts,
and the like,
that are showered on fashionable young men every morning during the season.
There was a [44] rather heavy bill,
for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set,
that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians,
who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when only unnecessary things are absolutely necessary to us;
and there were several very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest.
After about ten minutes he got up,
and,
throwing on an elaborate dressing-gown,
passed into the onyx-paved bath-room.
The cool water refreshed him after his long sleep.
He seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through.
A dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once or twice,
but there was the unreality of a dream about it.
As soon as he was dressed,
he went into the library and sat down to a light French breakfast,
that had been laid out for him on a small round table close to an open window.
It was an exquisite day.
The warm air seemed laden with spices.
A bee flew in,
and buzzed round the blue-dragon bowl,
filled with sulphur-yellow roses,
that stood in front of him.
He felt perfectly happy.
Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the portrait,
and he started.
"Too cold for Monsieur?"
asked his valet,
putting an omelette on the table.
"I shut the window?"
Dorian shook his head.
"I am not cold,"
he murmured.
Was it all true?
Had the portrait really changed?
Or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy?
Surely a painted canvas could not alter?
The thing was absurd.
It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day.
It would make him smile.
And,
yet,
how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing!
First in the dim twilight,
and then in the bright dawn,
he had seen the touch of cruelty in the warped lips.
He almost dreaded his valet leaving the room.
He knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the portrait.
He was afraid of certainty.
When the coffee and cigarettes had been brought and the man turned to go,
he felt a mad desire to tell him to remain.
As the door closed behind him he called him back.
The man stood waiting for his orders.
Dorian looked at him for a moment.
"I am not at home to any one,
Victor,"
he said,
with a sigh.
The man bowed and retired.
He rose from the table,
lit a cigarette,
and flung himself down on a luxuriously-cushioned couch that stood facing the screen.
The screen was an old one of gilt Spanish leather,
stamped and wrought with a rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern.
He scanned it curiously,
wondering if it had ever before concealed the secret of a man's life.
Should he move it aside,
after all?
Why not let it stay there?
What was the use of knowing?
If the thing was true,
it was terrible.
If it was not true,
why trouble about it?
But what if,
by some fate or deadlier chance,
other eyes than his spied behind,
and saw the horrible change?
What should he do if Basil Hallward came and asked to look at his own picture?
He would be sure to do that.
No;
the [45] thing had to be examined,
and at once.
Anything would be better than this dreadful state of doubt.
He got up,
and locked both doors.
At least he would be alone when he looked upon the mask of his shame.
Then he drew the screen aside,
and saw himself face to face.
It was perfectly true.
The portrait had altered.
As he often remembered afterwards,
and always with no small wonder,
he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest.
That such a change should have taken place was incredible to him.
And yet it was a fact.
Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms,
that shaped themselves into form and color on the canvas,
and the soul that was within him?
Could it be that what that soul thought,
they realized?
--that what it dreamed,
they made true?
Or was there some other,
more terrible reason?
He shuddered,
and felt afraid,
and,
going back to the couch,
lay there,
gazing at the picture in sickened horror.
One thing,
however,
he felt that it had done for him.
It had made him conscious how unjust,
how cruel,
he had been to Sibyl Vane.
It was not too late to make reparation for that.
She could still be his wife.
His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence,
would be transformed into some nobler passion,
and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life,
would be to him what holiness was to some,
and conscience to others,
and the fear of God to us all.
There were opiates for remorse,
drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep.
But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin.
Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.
Three o'clock struck,
and four,
and half-past four,
but he did not stir.
He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life,
and to weave them into a pattern;
to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.
He did not know what to do,
or what to think.
Finally,
he went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved,
imploring her forgiveness,
and accusing himself of madness.
He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow,
and wilder words of pain.
There is a luxury in self-reproach.
When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.
It is the confession,
not the priest,
that gives us absolution.
When Dorian Gray had finished the letter,
he felt that he had been forgiven.
Suddenly there came a knock to the door,
and he heard Lord Henry's voice outside.
"My dear Dorian,
I must see you.
Let me in at once.
I can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."
He made no answer at first,
but remained quite still.
The knocking still continued,
and grew louder.
Yes,
it was better to let Lord Henry in,
and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead,
to quarrel with him if it became necessary to quarrel,
to part if parting was inevitable.
He jumped up,
drew the screen hastily across the picture,
and unlocked the door.
"I am so sorry for it all,
my dear boy,"
said Lord Henry,
coming in.
"But you must not think about it too much."
[46] "Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?"
asked Dorian.
"Yes,
of course,"
answered Lord Henry,
sinking into a chair,
and slowly pulling his gloves off.
"It is dreadful,
from one point of view,
but it was not your fault.
Tell me,
did you go behind and see her after the play was over?"
"Yes."
"I felt sure you had.
Did you make a scene with her?"
"I was brutal,
Harry,
--perfectly brutal.
But it is all right now.
I am not sorry for anything that has happened.
It has taught me to know myself better."
"Ah,
Dorian,
I am so glad you take it in that way!
I was afraid I would find you plunged in remorse,
and tearing your nice hair."
"I have got through all that,"
said Dorian,
shaking his head,
and smiling.
"I am perfectly happy now.
I know what conscience is,
to begin with.
It is not what you told me it was.
It is the divinest thing in us.
Don't sneer at it,
Harry,
any more,
--at least not before me.
I want to be good.
I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."
"A very charming artistic basis for ethics,
Dorian!
I congratulate you on it.
But how are you going to begin?"
"By marrying Sibyl Vane."
"Marrying Sibyl Vane!"
cried Lord Henry,
standing up,
and looking at him in perplexed amazement.
"But,
my dear Dorian --"
"Yes,
Harry,
I know what you are going to say.
Something dreadful about marriage.
Don't say it.
Don't ever say things of that kind to me again.
Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me.
I am not going to break my word to her.
She is to be my wife."
"Your wife!
Dorian!
...Didn't you get my letter?
I wrote to you this morning,
and sent the note down,
by my own man."
"Your letter?
Oh,
yes,
I remember.
I have not read it yet,
Harry.
I was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like."
Lord Henry walked across the room,
and,
sitting down by Dorian Gray,
took both his hands in his,
and held them tightly.
"Dorian,"
he said,
"my letter --don't be frightened --was to tell you that Sibyl Vane is dead."
A cry of pain rose from the lad's lips,
and he leaped to his feet,
tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp.
"Dead!
Sibyl dead!
It is not true!
It is a horrible lie!"
"It is quite true,
Dorian,"
said Lord Henry,
gravely.
"It is in all the morning papers.
I wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one till I came.
There will have to be an inquest,
of course,
and you must not be mixed up in it.
Things like that make a man fashionable in Paris.
But in London people are so prejudiced.
Here,
one should never make one's début with a scandal.
One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
I don't suppose they know your name at the theatre.
If they don't,
it is all right.
Did any one see you going round to her room?
That is an important point."
Dorian did not answer for a few moments.
He was dazed with horror.
Finally he murmured,
in a stifled voice,
"Harry,
did you say an inquest?
What did you mean by that?
Did Sibyl --?
Oh,
[47] Harry,
I can't bear it!
But be quick.
Tell me everything at once."
"I have no doubt it was not an accident,
Dorian,
though it must be put in that way to the public.
As she was leaving the theatre with her mother,
about half-past twelve or so,
she said she had forgotten something up-stairs.
They waited some time for her,
but she did not come down again.
They ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of her dressing-room.
She had swallowed something by mistake,
some dreadful thing they use at theatres.
I don't know what it was,
but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it.
I should fancy it was prussic acid,
as she seems to have died instantaneously.
It is very tragic,
of course,
but you must not get yourself mixed up in it.
I see by the Standard that she was seventeen.
I should have thought she was almost younger than that.
She looked such a child,
and seemed to know so little about acting.
Dorian,
you mustn't let this thing get on your nerves.
You must come and dine with me,
and afterwards we will look in at the Opera.
It is a Patti night,
and everybody will be there.
You can come to my sister's box.
She has got some smart women with her."
"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane,"
said Dorian Gray,
half to himself,
--"murdered her as certainly as if I had cut her little throat with a knife.
And the roses are not less lovely for all that.
The birds sing just as happily in my garden.
And to-night I am to dine with you,
and then go on to the Opera,
and sup somewhere,
I suppose,
afterwards.
How extraordinarily dramatic life is!
If I had read all this in a book,
Harry,
I think I would have wept over it.
Somehow,
now that it has happened actually,
and to me,
it seems far too wonderful for tears.
Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life.
Strange,
that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl.
Can they feel,
I wonder,
those white silent people we call the dead?
Sibyl!
Can she feel,
or know,
or listen?
Oh,
Harry,
how I loved her once!
It seems years ago to me now.
She was everything to me.
Then came that dreadful night --was it really only last night?
--when she played so badly,
and my heart almost broke.
She explained it all to me.
It was terribly pathetic.
But I was not moved a bit.
I thought her shallow.
Then something happened that made me afraid.
I can't tell you what it was,
but it was awful.
I said I would go back to her.
I felt I had done wrong.
And now she is dead.
My God!
my God!
Harry,
what shall I do?
You don't know the danger I am in,
and there is nothing to keep me straight.
She would have done that for me.
She had no right to kill herself.
It was selfish of her."
"My dear Dorian,
the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
If you had married this girl you would have been wretched.
Of course you would have treated her kindly.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her.
And when a woman finds that out about her husband,
she either becomes dreadfully dowdy,
or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to [48] pay for.
I say nothing about the social mistake,
but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure."
"I suppose it would,"
muttered the lad,
walking up and down the room,
and looking horribly pale.
"But I thought it was my duty.
It is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right.
I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions,
--that they are always made too late.
Mine certainly were."
"Good resolutions are simply a useless attempt to interfere with scientific laws.
Their origin is pure vanity.
Their result is absolutely nil.
They give us,
now and then,
some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for us.
That is all that can be said for them."
"Harry,"
cried Dorian Gray,
coming over and sitting down beside him,
"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?
I don't think I am heartless.
Do you?"
"You have done too many foolish things in your life to be entitled to give yourself that name,
Dorian,"
answered Lord Henry,
with his sweet,
melancholy smile.
The lad frowned.
"I don't like that explanation,
Harry,"
he rejoined,
"but I am glad you don't think I am heartless.
I am nothing of the kind.
I know I am not.
And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should.
It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.
It has all the terrible beauty of a great tragedy,
a tragedy in which I took part,
but by which I have not been wounded."
"It is an interesting question,"
said Lord Henry,
who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism,
--"an extremely interesting question.
I fancy that the explanation is this.
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence,
their absolute incoherence,
their absurd want of meaning,
their entire lack of style.
They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.
They give us an impression of sheer brute force,
and we revolt against that.
Sometimes,
however,
a tragedy that has artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives.
If these elements of beauty are real,
the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.
Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors,
but the spectators of the play.
Or rather we are both.
We watch ourselves,
and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.
In the present case,
what is it that has really happened?
Some one has killed herself for love of you.
I wish I had ever had such an experience.
It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life.
The people who have adored me --there have not been very many,
but there have been some --have always insisted on living on,
long after I had ceased to care for them,
or they to care for me.
They have become stout and tedious,
and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences.
That awful memory of woman!
What a fearful thing it is!
And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!
One should absorb the color of life,
but one should never remember its details.
Details are always vulgar.
[49] "Of course,
now and then things linger.
I once wore nothing but violets all through one season,
as mourning for a romance that would not die.
Ultimately,
however,
it did die.
I forget what killed it.
I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me.
That is always a dreadful moment.
It fills one with the terror of eternity.
Well,
--would you believe it?
--a week ago,
at Lady Hampshire's,
I found myself seated at dinner next the lady in question,
and she insisted on going over the whole thing again,
and digging up the past,
and raking up the future.
I had buried my romance in a bed of poppies.
She dragged it out again,
and assured me that I had spoiled her life.
I am bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner,
so I did not feel any anxiety.
But what a lack of taste she showed!
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
They always want a sixth act,
and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it.
If they were allowed to have their way,
every comedy would have a tragic ending,
and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.
They are charmingly artificial,
but they have no sense of art.
You are more fortunate than I am.
I assure you,
Dorian,
that not one of the women I have known would have done for me what Sibyl Vane did for you.
Ordinary women always console themselves.
Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colors.
Never trust a woman who wears mauve,
whatever her age may be,
or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.
It always means that they have a history.
Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands.
They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face,
as if it was the most fascinating of sins.
Religion consoles some.
Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation,
a woman once told me;
and I can quite understand it.
Besides,
nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
There is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life.
Indeed,
I have not mentioned the most important one of all."
"What is that,
Harry?"
said Dorian Gray,
listlessly.
"Oh,
the obvious one.
Taking some one else's admirer when one loses one's own.
In good society that always whitewashes a woman.
But really,
Dorian,
how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the women one meets!
There is something to me quite beautiful about her death.
I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
They make one believe in the reality of the things that shallow,
fashionable people play with,
such as romance,
passion,
and love."
"I was terribly cruel to her.
You forget that."
"I believe that women appreciate cruelty more than anything else.
They have wonderfully primitive instincts.
We have emancipated them,
but they remain slaves looking for their masters,
all the same.
They love being dominated.
I am sure you were splendid.
I have never seen you angry,
but I can fancy how delightful you looked.
And,
after all,
you said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful,
but that I see now was absolutely true,
and it explains everything."
[50] "What was that,
Harry?"
"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of romance --that she was Desdemona one night,
and Ophelia the other;
that if she died as Juliet,
she came to life as Imogen."
"She will never come to life again now,"
murmured the lad,
burying his face in his hands.
"No,
she will never come to life.
She has played her last part.
But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy,
as a wonderful scene from Webster,
or Ford,
or Cyril Tourneur.
The girl never really lived,
and so she has never really died.
To you at least she was always a dream,
a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence,
a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy.
The moment she touched actual life,
she marred it,
and it marred her,
and so she passed away.
Mourn for Ophelia,
if you like.
Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled.
Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died.
But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane.
She was less real than they are."
There was a silence.
The evening darkened in the room.
Noiselessly,
and with silver feet,
the shadows crept in from the garden.
The colors faded wearily out of things.
After some time Dorian Gray looked up.
"You have explained me to myself,
Harry,"
he murmured,
with something of a sigh of relief.
"I felt all that you have said,
but somehow I was afraid of it,
and I could not express it to myself.
How well you know me!
But we will not talk again of what has happened.
It has been a marvellous experience.
That is all.
I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous."
"Life has everything in store for you,
Dorian.
There is nothing that you,
with your extraordinary good looks,
will not be able to do."
"But suppose,
Harry,
I became haggard,
and gray,
and wrinkled?
What then?"
"Ah,
then,"
said Lord Henry,
rising to go,
--"then,
my dear Dorian,
you would have to fight for your victories.
As it is,
they are brought to you.
No,
you must keep your good looks.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise,
and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
We cannot spare you.
And now you had better dress,
and drive down to the club.
We are rather late,
as it is."
"I think I shall join you at the Opera,
Harry.
I feel too tired to eat anything.
What is the number of your sister's box?"
"Twenty-seven,
I believe.
It is on the grand tier.
You will see her name on the door.
But I am sorry you won't come and dine."
"I don't feel up to it,"
said Dorian,
wearily.
"But I am awfully obliged to you for all that you have said to me.
You are certainly my best friend.
No one has ever understood me as you have."
"We are only at the beginning of our friendship,
Dorian,"
answered Lord Henry,
shaking him by the hand.
"Good-by.
I shall see you before nine-thirty,
I hope.
Remember,
Patti is singing."
As he closed the door behind him,
Dorian Gray touched the bell,
[51] and in a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down.
He waited impatiently for him to go.
The man seemed to take an interminable time about everything.
As soon as he had left,
he rushed to the screen,
and drew it back.
No;
there was no further change in the picture.
It had received the news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.
It was conscious of the events of life as they occurred.
The vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had,
no doubt,
appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison,
whatever it was.
Or was it indifferent to results?
Did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul?
he wondered,
and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes,
shuddering as he hoped it.
Poor Sibyl!
what a romance it had all been!
She had often mimicked death on the stage,
and at last Death himself had touched her,
and brought her with him.
How had she played that dreadful scene?
Had she cursed him,
as she died?
No;
she had died for love of him,
and love would always be a sacrament to him now.
She had atoned for everything,
by the sacrifice she had made of her life.
He would not think any more of what she had made him go through,
that horrible night at the theatre.
When he thought of her,
it would be as a wonderful tragic figure to show Love had been a great reality.
A wonderful tragic figure?
Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her child-like look and winsome fanciful ways and shy tremulous grace.
He wiped them away hastily,
and looked again at the picture.
He felt that the time had really come for making his choice.
Or had his choice already been made?
Yes,
life had decided that for him,
--life,
and his own infinite curiosity about life.
Eternal youth,
infinite passion,
pleasures subtle and secret,
wild joys and wilder sins,
--he was to have all these things.
The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.
A feeling of pain came over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas.
Once,
in boyish mockery of Narcissus,
he had kissed,
or feigned to kiss,
those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him.
Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty,
almost enamoured of it,
as it seemed to him at times.
Was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded?
Was it to become a hideous and loathsome thing,
to be hidden away in a locked room,
to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of the hair?
The pity of it!
the pity of it!
For a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the picture might cease.
It had changed in answer to a prayer;
perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged.
And,
yet,
who,
that knew anything about Life,
would surrender the chance of remaining always young,
however fantastic that chance might be,
or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?
Besides,
was it really under his control?
Had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution?
Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all?
If thought could exercise its [52] influence upon a living organism,
might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things?
Nay,
without thought or conscious desire,
might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions,
atom calling to atom,
in secret love or strange affinity?
But the reason was of no importance.
He would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power.
If the picture was to alter,
it was to alter.
That was all.
Why inquire too closely into it?
For there would be a real pleasure in watching it.
He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places.
This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors.
As it had revealed to him his own body,
so it would reveal to him his own soul.
And when winter came upon it,
he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer.
When the blood crept from its face,
and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes,
he would keep the glamour of boyhood.
Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade.
Not one pulse of his life would ever weaken.
Like the gods of the Greeks,
he would be strong,
and fleet,
and joyous.
What did it matter what happened to the colored image on the canvas?
He would be safe.
That was everything.
He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture,
smiling as he did so,
and passed into his bedroom,
where his valet was already waiting for him.
An hour later he was at the Opera,
and Lord Henry was leaning over his chair.
CHAPTER VII
[ ...52] As he was sitting at breakfast next morning,
Basil Hallward was shown into the room.
"I am so glad I have found you,
Dorian,"
he said,
gravely.
"I called last night,
and they told me you were at the Opera.
Of course I knew that was impossible.
But I wish you had left word where you had really gone to.
I passed a dreadful evening,
half afraid that one tragedy might be followed by another.
I think you might have telegraphed for me when you heard of it first.
I read of it quite by chance in a late edition of the Globe,
that I picked up at the club.
I came here at once,
and was miserable at not finding you.
I can't tell you how heart-broken I am about the whole thing.
I know what you must suffer.
But where were you?
Did you go down and see the girl's mother?
For a moment I thought of following you there.
They gave the address in the paper.
Somewhere in the Euston Road,
isn't it?
But I was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten.
Poor woman!
What a state she must be in!
And her only child,
too!
What did she say about it all?"
"My dear Basil,
how do I know?"
murmured Dorian,
sipping some pale-yellow wine from a delicate gold-beaded bubble of Venetian glass,
and looking dreadfully bored.
"I was at the Opera.
You should have come on there.
I met Lady Gwendolen,
Harry's sister,
for the first time.
We were in her box.
She is perfectly charming;
and Patti sang divinely.
Don't talk about horrid subjects.
If one doesn't [53] talk about a thing,
it has never happened.
It is simply expression,
as Harry says,
that gives reality to things.
Tell me about yourself and what you are painting."
"You went to the Opera?"
said Hallward,
speaking very slowly,
and with a strained touch of pain in his voice.
"You went to the Opera while Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging?
You can talk to me of other women being charming,
and of Patti singing divinely,
before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in?
Why,
man,
there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!"
"Stop,
Basil!
I won't hear it!"
cried Dorian,
leaping to his feet.
"You must not tell me about things.
What is done is done.
What is past is past."
"You call yesterday the past?"
"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it?
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions.
I want to use them,
to enjoy them,
and to dominate them."
"Dorian,
this is horrible!
Something has changed you completely.
You look exactly the same wonderful boy who used to come down to my studio,
day after day,
to sit for his picture.
But you were simple,
natural,
and affectionate then.
You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world.
Now,
I don't know what has come over you.
You talk as if you had no heart,
no pity in you.
It is all Harry's influence.
I see that."
The lad flushed up,
and,
going to the window,
looked out on the green,
flickering garden for a few moments.
"I owe a great deal to Harry,
Basil,"
he said,
at last,
--"more than I owe to you.
You only taught me to be vain."
"Well,
I am punished for that,
Dorian,
--or shall be some day."
"I don't know what you mean,
Basil,"
he exclaimed,
turning round.
"I don't know what you want.
What do you want?"
"I want the Dorian Gray I used to know."
"Basil,"
said the lad,
going over to him,
and putting his hand on his shoulder,
"you have come too late.
Yesterday when I heard that Sibyl Vane had killed herself --"
"Killed herself!
Good heavens!
is there no doubt about that?"
cried Hallward,
looking up at him with an expression of horror.
"My dear Basil!
Surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident?
Of course she killed herself It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age.
As a rule,
people who act lead the most commonplace lives.
They are good husbands,
or faithful wives,
or something tedious.
You know what I mean,
--middle-class virtue,
and all that kind of thing.
How different Sibyl was!
She lived her finest tragedy.
She was always a heroine.
The last night she played --the night you saw her --she acted badly because she had known the reality of love.
When she knew its unreality,
she died,
as Juliet might have died.
She passed again into the sphere of art.
There is something of the martyr about her.
Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of [54] martyrdom,
all its wasted beauty.
But,
as I was saying,
you must not think I have not suffered.
If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment,
--about half-past five,
perhaps,
or a quarter to six,
--you would have found me in tears.
Even Harry,
who was here,
who brought me the news,
in fact,
had no idea what I was going through.
I suffered immensely,
then it passed away.
I cannot repeat an emotion.
No one can,
except sentimentalists.
And you are awfully unjust,
Basil.
You come down here to console me.
That is charming of you.
You find me consoled,
and you are furious.
How like a sympathetic person!
You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed,
or some unjust law altered,
--I forget exactly what it was.
Finally he succeeded,
and nothing could exceed his disappointment.
He had absolutely nothing to do,
almost died of ennui,
and became a confirmed misanthrope.
And besides,
my dear old Basil,
if you really want to console me,
teach me rather to forget what has happened,
or to see it from a proper artistic point of view.
Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts?
I remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase.
Well,
I am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at Marlowe together,
the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life.
I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle.
Old brocades,
green bronzes,
lacquer-work,
carved ivories,
exquisite surroundings,
luxury,
pomp,
--there is much to be got from all these.
But the artistic temperament that they create,
or at any rate reveal,
is still more to me.
To become the spectator of one's own life,
as Harry says,
is to escape the suffering of life.
I know you are surprised at my talking to you like this.
You have not realized how I have developed.
I was a school-boy when you knew me.
I am a man now.
I have new passions,
new thoughts,
new ideas.
I am different,
but you must not like me less.
I am changed,
but you must always be my friend.
Of course I am very fond of Harry.
But I know that you are better than he is.
You are not stronger,
--you are too much afraid of life,
--but you are better.
And how happy we used to be together!
Don't leave me,
Basil,
and don't quarrel with me.
I am what I am.
There is nothing more to be said."
Hallward felt strangely moved.
Rugged and straightforward as he was,
there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness.
The lad was infinitely dear to him,
and his personality had been the great turning-point in his art.
He could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more.
After all,
his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away.
There was so much in him that was good,
so much in him that was noble.
"Well,
Dorian,"
he said,
at length,
with a sad smile,
"I won't speak to you again about this horrible thing,
after to-day.
I only trust your name won't be mentioned in connection with it.
The inquest is to take place this afternoon.
Have they summoned you?"
Dorian shook his head,
and a look of annoyance passed over his face at the mention of the word "inquest."
There was something so [55] crude and vulgar about everything of the kind.
"They don't know my name,"
he answered.
"But surely she did?"
"Only my Christian name,
and that I am quite sure she never mentioned to any one.
She told me once that they were all rather curious to learn who I was,
and that she invariably told them my name was Prince Charming.
It was pretty of her.
You must do me a drawing of her,
Basil.
I should like to have something more of her than the memory of a few kisses and some broken pathetic words."
"I will try and do something,
Dorian,
if it would please you.
But you must come and sit to me yourself again.
I can't get on without you."
"I will never sit to you again,
Basil.
It is impossible!"
he exclaimed,
starting back.
Hallward stared at him,
"My dear boy,
what nonsense!"
he cried.
"Do you mean to say you don't like what I did of you?
Where is it?
Why have you pulled the screen in front of it?
Let me look at it.
It is the best thing I have ever painted.
Do take that screen away,
Dorian.
It is simply horrid of your servant hiding my work like that.
I felt the room looked different as I came in."
"My servant has nothing to do with it,
Basil.
You don't imagine I let him arrange my room for me?
He settles my flowers for me sometimes,
--that is all.
No;
I did it myself.
The light was too strong on the portrait."
"Too strong!
Impossible,
my dear fellow!
It is an admirable place for it.
Let me see it."
And Hallward walked towards the corner of the room.
A cry of terror broke from Dorian Gray's lips,
and he rushed between Hallward and the screen.
"Basil,"
he said,
looking very pale,
"you must not look at it.
I don't wish you to."
"Not look at my own work!
you are not serious.
Why shouldn't I look at it?"
exclaimed Hallward,
laughing.
"If you try to look at it,
Basil,
on my word of honor I will never speak to you again as long as I live.
I am quite serious.
I don't offer any explanation,
and you are not to ask for any.
But,
remember,
if you touch this screen,
everything is over between us."
Hallward was thunderstruck.
He looked at Dorian Gray in absolute amazement.
He had never seen him like this before.
The lad was absolutely pallid with rage.
His hands were clinched,
and the pupils of his eyes were like disks of blue fire.
He was trembling all over.
"Dorian!"
"Don't speak!"
"But what is the matter?
Of course I won't look at it if you don't want me to,"
he said,
rather coldly,
turning on his heel,
and going over towards the window.
"But,
really,
it seems rather absurd that I shouldn't see my own work,
especially as I am going to exhibit it in Paris in the autumn.
I shall probably have to give it another coat of varnish before that,
so I must see it some day,
and why not to-day?"
"To exhibit it!
You want to exhibit it?"
exclaimed Dorian Gray,
a strange sense of terror creeping over him.
Was the world going [56] to be shown his secret?
Were people to gape at the mystery of his life?
That was impossible.
Something --he did not know what --had to be done at once.
"Yes: I don't suppose you will object to that.
Georges Petit is going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the Rue de Sèze,
which will open the first week in October.
The portrait will only be away a month.
I should think you could easily spare it for that time.
In fact,
you are sure to be out of town.
And if you hide it always behind a screen,
you can't care much about it."
Dorian Gray passed his hand over his forehead.
There were beads of perspiration there.
He felt that he was on the brink of a horrible danger.
"You told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it,"
he said.
"Why have you changed your mind?
You people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others.
The only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless.
You can't have forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world would induce you to send it to any exhibition.
You told Harry exactly the same thing."
He stopped suddenly,
and a gleam of light came into his eyes.
He remembered that Lord Henry had said to him once,
half seriously and half in jest,
"If you want to have an interesting quarter of an hour,
get Basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture.
He told me why he wouldn't,
and it was a revelation to me."
Yes,
perhaps Basil,
too,
had his secret.
He would ask him and try.
"Basil,"
he said,
coming over quite close,
and looking him straight in the face,
"we have each of us a secret.
Let me know yours,
and I will tell you mine.
What was your reason for refusing to exhibit my picture?"
Hallward shuddered in spite of himself.
"Dorian,
if I told you,
you might like me less than you do,
and you would certainly laugh at me.
I could not bear your doing either of those two things.
If you wish me never to look at your picture again,
I am content.
I have always you to look at.
If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden from the world,
I am satisfied.
Your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation."
"No,
Basil,
you must tell me,"
murmured Dorian Gray.
"I think I have a right to know."
His feeling of terror had passed away,
and curiosity had taken its place.
He was determined to find out Basil Hallward's mystery.
"Let us sit down,
Dorian,"
said Hallward,
looking pale and pained.
"Let us sit down.
I will sit in the shadow,
and you shall sit in the sunlight.
Our lives are like that.
Just answer me one question.
Have you noticed in the picture something that you did not like?
--something that probably at first did not strike you,
but that revealed itself to you suddenly?"
"Basil!"
cried the lad,
clutching the arms of his chair with trembling hands,
and gazing at him with wild,
startled eyes.
"I see you did.
Don't speak.
Wait till you hear what I have to say.
It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.
Somehow,
I had never loved a woman.
I suppose I never had time.
Perhaps,
as [57] Harry says,
a really
'grande passion' is the privilege of those who have nothing to do,
and that is the use of the idle classes in a country.
Well,
from the moment I met you,
your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me.
I quite admit that I adored you madly,
extravagantly,
absurdly.
I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke.
I wanted to have you all to myself.
I was only happy when I was with you.
When I was away from you,
you were still present in my art.
It was all wrong and foolish.
It is all wrong and foolish still.
Of course I never let you know anything about this.
It would have been impossible.
You would not have understood it;
I did not understand it myself.
One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you.
It was to have been my masterpiece.
It is my masterpiece.
But,
as I worked at it,
every flake and film of color seemed to me to reveal my secret.
I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry.
I felt,
Dorian,
that I had told too much.
Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited.
You were a little annoyed;
but then you did not realize all that it meant to me.
Harry,
to whom I talked about it,
laughed at me.
But I did not mind that.
When the picture was finished,
and I sat alone with it,
I felt that I was right.
Well,
after a few days the portrait left my studio,
and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had said anything in it,
more than that you were extremely good-looking and that I could paint.
Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.
Art is more abstract than we fancy.
Form and color tell us of form and color,
--that is all.
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
And so when I got this offer from Paris I determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition.
It never occurred to me that you would refuse.
I see now that you were right.
The picture must not be shown.
You must not be angry with me,
Dorian,
for what I have told you.
As I said to Harry,
once,
you are made to be worshipped."
Dorian Gray drew a long breath.
The color came back to his cheeks,
and a smile played about his lips.
The peril was over.
He was safe for the time.
Yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the young man who had just made this strange confession to him.
He wondered if he would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend.
Lord Harry had the charm of being very dangerous.
But that was all.
He was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of.
Would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange idolatry?
Was that one of the things that life had in store?
"It is extraordinary to me,
Dorian,"
said Hallward,
"that you should have seen this in the picture.
Did you really see it?"
"Of course I did."
"Well,
you don't mind my looking at it now?"
Dorian shook his head.
"You must not ask me that,
Basil.
I could not possibly let you stand in front of that picture."
"You will some day,
surely?"
[58] "Never."
"Well,
perhaps you are right.
And now good-by,
Dorian.
You have been the one person in my life of whom I have been really fond.
I don't suppose I shall often see you again.
You don't know what it cost me to tell you all that I have told you."
"My dear Basil,"
cried Dorian,
"what have you told me?
Simply that you felt that you liked me too much.
That is not even a compliment."
"It was not intended as a compliment.
It was a confession."
"A very disappointing one."
"Why,
what did you expect,
Dorian?
You didn't see anything else in the picture,
did you?
There was nothing else to see?"
"No: there was nothing else to see.
Why do you ask?
But you mustn't talk about not meeting me again,
or anything of that kind.
You and I are friends,
Basil,
and we must always remain so."
"You have got Harry,"
said Hallward,
sadly.
"Oh,
Harry!"
cried the lad,
with a ripple of laughter.
"Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible,
and his evenings in doing what is improbable.
Just the sort of life I would like to lead.
But still I don't think I would go to Harry if I was in trouble.
I would sooner go to you,
Basil."
"But you won't sit to me again?"
"Impossible!"
"You spoil my life as an artist by refusing,
Dorian.
No man comes across two ideal things.
Few come across one."
"I can't explain it to you,
Basil,
but I must never sit to you again.
I will come and have tea with you.
That will be just as pleasant."
"Pleasanter for you,
I am afraid,"
murmured Hallward,
regretfully.
"And now good-by.
I am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once again.
But that can't be helped.
I quite understand what you feel about it."
As he left the room,
Dorian Gray smiled to himself.
Poor Basil!
how little he knew of the true reason!
And how strange it was that,
instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret,
he had succeeded,
almost by chance,
in wresting a secret from his friend!
How much that strange confession explained to him!
Basil's absurd fits of jealousy,
his wild devotion,
his extravagant panegyrics,
his curious reticences,
--he understood them all now,
and he felt sorry.
There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.
He sighed,
and touched the bell.
The portrait must be hidden away at all costs.
He could not run such a risk of discovery again.
It had been mad of him to have the thing remain,
even for an hour,
in a room to which any of his friends had access.
CHAPTER VIII
[ ...58] When his servant entered,
he looked at him steadfastly,
and wondered if he had thought of peering behind the screen.
The man was quite impassive,
and waited for his orders.
Dorian lit a cigarette,
[59] and walked over to the glass and glanced into it.
He could see the reflection of Victor's face perfectly.
It was like a placid mask of servility.
There was nothing to be afraid of,
there.
Yet he thought it best to be on his guard.
Speaking very slowly,
he told him to tell the housekeeper that he wanted to see her,
and then to go to the frame-maker's and ask him to send two of his men round at once.
It seemed to him that as the man left the room he peered in the direction of the screen.
Or was that only his fancy?
After a few moments,
Mrs. Leaf,
a dear old lady in a black silk dress,
with a photograph of the late Mr. Leaf framed in a large gold brooch at her neck,
and old-fashioned thread mittens on her wrinkled hands,
bustled into the room.
"Well,
Master Dorian,"
she said,
"what can I do for you?
I beg your pardon,
sir,"
--here came a courtesy,
--"I shouldn't call you Master Dorian any more.
But,
Lord bless you,
sir,
I have known you since you were a baby,
and many's the trick you've played on poor old Leaf.
Not that you were not always a good boy,
sir;
but boys will be boys,
Master Dorian,
and jam is a temptation to the young,
isn't it,
sir?"
He laughed.
"You must always call me Master Dorian,
Leaf.
I will be very angry with you if you don't.
And I assure you I am quite as fond of jam now as I used to be.
Only when I am asked out to tea I am never offered any.
I want you to give me the key of the room at the top of the house."
"The old school-room,
Master Dorian?
Why,
it's full of dust.
I must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it.
It's not fit for you to see,
Master Dorian.
It is not,
indeed."
"I don't want it put straight,
Leaf.
I only want the key."
"Well,
Master Dorian,
you'll be covered with cobwebs if you goes into it.
Why,
it hasn't been opened for nearly five years,
--not since his lordship died."
He winced at the mention of his dead uncle's name.
He had hateful memories of him.
"That does not matter,
Leaf,"
he replied.
"All I want is the key."
"And here is the key,
Master Dorian,"
said the old lady,
after going over the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands.
"Here is the key.
I'll have it off the ring in a moment.
But you don't think of living up there,
Master Dorian,
and you so comfortable here?"
"No,
Leaf,
I don't.
I merely want to see the place,
and perhaps store something in it,
--that is all.
Thank you,
Leaf.
I hope your rheumatism is better;
and mind you send me up jam for breakfast."
Mrs. Leaf shook her head.
"Them foreigners doesn't understand jam,
Master Dorian.
They calls it
'compot.'
But I'll bring it to you myself some morning,
if you lets me."
"That will be very kind of you,
Leaf,"
he answered,
looking at the key;
and,
having made him an elaborate courtesy,
the old lady left the room,
her face wreathed in smiles.
She had a strong objection to the French valet.
It was a poor thing,
she felt,
for any one to be born a foreigner.
[60] As the door closed,
Dorian put the key in his pocket,
and looked round the room.
His eye fell on a large purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold,
a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century Venetian work that his uncle had found in a convent near Bologna.
Yes,
that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in.
It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead.
Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own,
worse than the corruption of death itself,
--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.
What the worm was to the corpse,
his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.
They would mar its beauty,
and eat away its grace.
They would defile it,
and make it shameful.
And yet the thing would still live on.
It would be always alive.
He shuddered,
and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away.
Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence,
and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament.
The love that he bore him --for it was really love --had something noble and intellectual in it.
It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses,
and that dies when the senses tire.
It was such love as Michael Angelo had known,
and Montaigne,
and Winckelmann,
and Shakespeare himself.
Yes,
Basil could have saved him.
But it was too late now.
The past could always be annihilated.
Regret,
denial,
or forgetfulness could do that.
But the future was inevitable.
There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet,
dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.
He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that covered it,
and,
holding it in his hands,
passed behind the screen.
Was the face on the canvas viler than before?
It seemed to him that it was unchanged;
and yet his loathing of it was intensified.
Gold hair,
blue eyes,
and rose-red lips,
--they all were there.
It was simply the expression that had altered.
That was horrible in its cruelty.
Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke,
how shallow Basil's reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been!
--how shallow,
and of what little account!
His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgment.
A look of pain came across him,
and he flung the rich pall over the picture.
As he did so,
a knock came to the door.
He passed out as his servant entered.
"The persons are here,
monsieur."
He felt that the man must be got rid of at once.
He must not be allowed to know where the picture was being taken to.
There was something sly about him,
and he had thoughtful,
treacherous eyes.
Sitting down at the writing-table,
he scribbled a note to Lord Henry,
asking him to send him round something to read,
and reminding him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.
"Wait for an answer,"
he said,
handing it to him,
"and show the men in here."
In two or three minutes there was another knock,
and Mr. Ashton himself,
the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street,
came in with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant.
Mr. Ashton was a florid,
red-whiskered little man,
whose admiration for art was considerably [61] tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the artists who dealt with him.
As a rule,
he never left his shop.
He waited for people to come to him.
But he always made an exception in favor of Dorian Gray.
There was something about Dorian that charmed everybody.
It was a pleasure even to see him.
"What can I do for you,
Mr. Gray?"
he said,
rubbing his fat freckled hands.
"I thought I would do myself the honor of coming round in person.
I have just got a beauty of a frame,
sir.
Picked it up at a sale.
Old Florentine.
Came from Fonthill,
I believe.
Admirably suited for a religious picture,
Mr. Gray."
"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round,
Mr. Ashton.
I will certainly drop in and look at the frame,
--though I don't go in much for religious art,
--but to-day I only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me.
It is rather heavy,
so I thought I would ask you to lend me a couple of your men."
"No trouble at all,
Mr. Gray.
I am delighted to be of any service to you.
Which is the work of art,
sir?"
"This,"
replied Dorian,
moving the screen back.
"Can you move it,
covering and all,
just as it is?
I don't want it to get scratched going up-stairs."
"There will be no difficulty,
sir,"
said the genial frame-maker,
beginning,
with the aid of his assistant,
to unhook the picture from the long brass chains by which it was suspended.
"And,
now,
where shall we carry it to,
Mr. Gray?"
"I will show you the way,
Mr. Ashton,
if you will kindly follow me.
Or perhaps you had better go in front.
I am afraid it is right at the top of the house.
We will go up by the front staircase,
as it is wider."
He held the door open for them,
and they passed out into the hall and began the ascent.
The elaborate character of the frame had made the picture extremely bulky,
and now and then,
in spite of the obsequious protests of Mr. Ashton,
who had a true tradesman's dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful,
Dorian put his hand to it so as to help them.
"Something of a load to carry,
sir,"
gasped the little man,
when they reached the top landing.
And he wiped his shiny forehead.
"A terrible load to carry,"
murmured Dorian,
as he unlocked the door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.
He had not entered the place for more than four years,
--not,
indeed,
since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child and then as a study when he grew somewhat older.
It was a large,
well-proportioned room,
which had been specially built by the last Lord Sherard for the use of the little nephew whom,
being himself childless,
and perhaps for other reasons,
he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance.
It did not appear to Dorian to have much changed.
There was the huge Italian cassone,
with its fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings,
in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy.
There was the satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared school-books.
On the wall behind it was hanging the same [62] ragged Flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden,
while a company of hawkers rode by,
carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists.
How well he recalled it all!
Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him,
as he looked round.
He remembered the stainless purity of his boyish life,
and it seemed horrible to him that it was here that the fatal portrait was to be hidden away.
How little he had thought,
in those dead days,
of all that was in store for him!
But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this.
He had the key,
and no one else could enter it.
Beneath its purple pall,
the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial,
sodden,
and unclean.
What did it matter?
No one could see it.
He himself would not see it.
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?
He kept his youth,
--that was enough.
And,
besides,
might not his nature grow finer,
after all?
There was no reason that the future should be so full of shame.
Some love might come across his life,
and purify him,
and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh,
--those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm.
Perhaps,
some day,
the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive mouth,
and he might show to the world Basil Hallward's masterpiece.
No;
that was impossible.
The thing upon the canvas was growing old,
hour by hour,
and week by week.
Even if it escaped the hideousness of sin,
the hideousness of age was in store for it.
The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid.
Yellow crow's-feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible.
The hair would lose its brightness,
the mouth would gape or droop,
would be foolish or gross,
as the mouths of old men are.
There would be the wrinkled throat,
the cold blue-veined hands,
the twisted body,
that he remembered in the uncle who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.
The picture had to be concealed.
There was no help for it.
"Bring it in,
Mr. Ashton,
please,"
he said,
wearily,
turning round.
"I am sorry I kept you so long.
I was thinking of something else."
"Always glad to have a rest,
Mr. Gray,"
answered the frame-maker,
who was still gasping for breath.
"Where shall we put it,
sir?"
"Oh,
anywhere,
Here,
this will do.
I don't want to have it hung up.
Just lean it against the wall.
Thanks."
"Might one look at the work of art,
sir?"
Dorian started.
"It would not interest you,
Mr. Ashton,"
he said,
keeping his eye on the man.
He felt ready to leap upon him and fling him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that concealed the secret of his life.
"I won't trouble you any more now.
I am much obliged for your kindness in coming round."
"Not at all,
not at all,
Mr. Gray.
Ever ready to do anything for you,
sir."
And Mr. Ashton tramped down-stairs,
followed by the assistant,
who glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough,
uncomely face.
He had never seen any one so marvellous.
When the sound of their footsteps had died away,
Dorian locked [63] the door,
and put the key in his pocket.
He felt safe now.
No one would ever look on the horrible thing.
No eye but his would ever see his shame.
On reaching the library he found that it was just after five o'clock,
and that the tea had been already brought up.
On a little table of dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre,
a present from his guardian's wife,
Lady Radley,
who had spent the preceding winter in Cairo,
was lying a note from Lord Henry,
and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper,
the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled.
A copy of the third edition of the St. James's Gazette had been placed on the tea-tray.
It was evident that Victor had returned.
He wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were leaving the house and had wormed out of them what they had been doing.
He would be sure to miss the picture,
--had no doubt missed it already,
while he had been laying the tea-things.
The screen had not been replaced,
and the blank space on the wall was visible.
Perhaps some night he might find him creeping up-stairs and trying to force the door of the room.
It was a horrible thing to have a spy in one's house.
He had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter,
or overheard a conversation,
or picked up a card with an address,
or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a bit of crumpled lace.
He sighed,
and,
having poured himself out some tea,
opened Lord Henry's note.
It was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper,
and a book that might interest him,
and that he would be at the club at eight-fifteen.
He opened the St. James's languidly,
and looked through it.
A red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye.
He read the following paragraph:
"INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS.
--An inquest was held this morning at the Bell Tavern,
Hoxton Road,
by Mr. Danby,
the District Coroner,
on the body of Sibyl Vane,
a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre,
Holborn.
A verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased,
who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence,
and that of Dr. Birrell,
who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased."
He frowned slightly,
and,
tearing the paper in two,
went across the room and flung the pieces into a gilt basket.
How ugly it all was!
And how horribly real ugliness made things!
He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for having sent him the account.
And it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil.
Victor might have read it.
The man knew more than enough English for that.
Perhaps he had read it,
and had begun to suspect something.
And,
yet,
what did it matter?
What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's death?
There was nothing to fear.
Dorian Gray had not killed her.
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.
What was it,
he wondered.
He went towards the little pearl-colored octagonal stand,
that had always looked to him like the work of some [64] strange Egyptian bees who wrought in silver,
and took the volume up.
He flung himself into an arm-chair,
and began to turn over the leaves.
After a few minutes,
he became absorbed.
It was the strangest book he had ever read.
It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment,
and to the delicate sound of flutes,
the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him.
Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him.
Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot,
and with only one character,
being,
indeed,
simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian,
who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own,
and to sum up,
as it were,
in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed,
loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue,
as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.
The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style,
vivid and obscure at once,
full of argot and of archaisms,
of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases,
that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Décadents.
There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids,
and as evil in color.
The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy.
One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.
It was a poisonous book.
The heavy odor of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.
The mere cadence of the sentences,
the subtle monotony of their music,
so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,
produced in the mind of the lad,
as he passed from chapter to chapter,
a form of revery,
a malady of dreaming,
that made him unconscious of the falling day and the creeping shadows.
Cloudless,
and pierced by one solitary star,
a copper-green sky gleamed through the windows.
He read on by its wan light till he could read no more.
Then,
after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour,
he got up,
and,
going into the next room,
placed the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his bedside,
and began to dress for dinner.
It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club,
where he found Lord Henry sitting alone,
in the morning-room,
looking very bored.
"I am so sorry,
Harry,"
he cried,
"but really it is entirely your fault.
That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot what the time was."
"I thought you would like it,"
replied his host,
rising from his chair.
"I didn't say I liked it,
Harry.
I said it fascinated me.
There is a great difference."
"Ah,
if you have discovered that,
you have discovered a great deal,"
murmured Lord Henry,
with his curious smile.
"Come,
let us go in to dinner.
It is dreadfully late,
and I am afraid the champagne will be too much iced."
CHAPTER IX
[65] For years,
Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this book.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it.
He procured from Paris no less than five large-paper copies of the first edition,
and had them bound in different colors,
so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed,
at times,
to have almost entirely lost control.
The hero,
the wonderful young Parisian,
in whom the romantic temperament and the scientific temperament were so strangely blended,
became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself.
And,
indeed,
the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life,
written before he had lived it.
In one point he was more fortunate than the book's fantastic hero.
He never knew --never,
indeed,
had any cause to know --that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors,
and polished metal surfaces,
and still water,
which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life,
and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once,
apparently,
been so remarkable.
It was with an almost cruel joy --and perhaps in nearly every joy,
as certainly in every pleasure,
cruelty has its place --that he used to read the latter part of the book,
with its really tragic,
if somewhat over-emphasized,
account of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others,
and in the world,
he had most valued.
He,
at any rate,
had no cause to fear that.
The boyish beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward,
and many others besides him,
seemed never to leave him.
Even those who had heard the most evil things against him (and from time to time strange rumors about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs) could not believe anything to his dishonor when they saw him.
He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world.
Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room.
There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them.
His mere presence seemed to recall to them the innocence that they had tarnished.
They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensuous.
He himself,
on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends,
or thought that they were so,
would creep up-stairs to the locked room,
open the door with the key that never left him,
and stand,
with a mirror,
in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him,
looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas,
and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass.
The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure.
He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty,
more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
He would examine with minute care,
and often with a monstrous and terrible delight,
the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth,
[66] wondering sometimes which were the more horrible,
the signs of sin or the signs of age.
He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture,
and smile.
He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
There were moments,
indeed,
at night,
when,
lying sleepless in his own delicately-scented chamber,
or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the Docks,
which,
under an assumed name,
and in disguise,
it was his habit to frequent,
he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul,
with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish.
But moments such as these were rare.
That curiosity about life that,
many years before,
Lord Henry had first stirred in him,
as they sat together in the garden of their friend,
seemed to increase with gratification.
The more he knew,
the more he desired to know.
He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.
Yet he was not really reckless,
at any rate in his relations to society.
Once or twice every month during the winter,
and on each Wednesday evening while the season lasted,
he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art.
His little dinners,
in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him,
were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited,
as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table,
with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers,
and embroidered cloths,
and antique plate of gold and silver.
Indeed,
there were many,
especially among the very young men,
who saw,
or fancied that they saw,
in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days,
a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world.
To them he seemed to belong to those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty."
Like Gautier,
he was one for whom "the visible world existed."
And,
certainly,
to him life itself was the first,
the greatest,
of the arts,
and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
Fashion,
by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal,
and Dandyism,
which,
in its own way,
is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty,
had,
of course,
their fascination for him.
His mode of dressing,
and the particular styles that he affected from time to time,
had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows,
who copied him in everything that he did,
and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful,
though to him only half-serious,
fopperies.
For,
while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age,
and found,
indeed,
a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the "Satyricon" had once been,
yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum,
to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel,
or the knotting of a necktie,
or [67] the conduct of a cane.
He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
The worship of the senses has often,
and with much justice,
been decried,
men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than ourselves,
and that we are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.
But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood,
and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain,
instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality,
of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.
As he looked back upon man moving through History,
he was haunted by a feeling of loss.
So much had been surrendered!
and to such little purpose!
There had been mad wilful rejections,
monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial,
whose origin was fear,
and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which,
in their ignorance,
they had sought to escape,
Nature in her wonderful irony driving the anchorite out to herd with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.
Yes,
there was to be,
as Lord Henry had prophesied,
a new hedonism that was to re-create life,
and to save it from that harsh,
uncomely puritanism that is having,
in our own day,
its curious revival.
It was to have its service of the intellect,
certainly;
yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience.
Its aim,
indeed,
was to be experience itself,
and not the fruits of experience,
sweet or bitter as they might be.
Of the asceticism that deadens the senses,
as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them,
it was to know nothing.
But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn,
either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death,
or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy,
when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself,
and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,
and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality,
this art being,
one might fancy,
especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of revery.
Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains,
and they appear to tremble.
Black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of the room,
and crouch there.
Outside,
there is the stirring of birds among the leaves,
or the sound of men going forth to their work,
or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills,
and wandering round the silent house,
as though it feared to wake the sleepers.
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
The wan mirrors get back their mimic life.
The flameless tapers stand where we have left them,
and beside them [68] lies the half-read book that we had been studying,
or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball,
or the letter that we had been afraid to read,
or that we had read too often.
Nothing seems to us changed.
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.
We have to resume it where we had left off,
and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits,
or a wild longing,
it may be,
that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness,
a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors,
and be changed,
or have other secrets,
a world in which the past would have little or no place,
or survive,
at any rate,
in no conscious form of obligation or regret,
the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness,
and the memories of pleasure their pain.
It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object,
or among the true objects,
of life;
and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful,
and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance,
he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature,
abandon himself to their subtle influences,
and then,
having,
as it were,
caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity,
leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament,
and that indeed,
according to certain modern psychologists,
is often a condition of it.
It was rumored of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion;
and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him.
The daily sacrifice,
more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world,
stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize.
He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement,
and with the priest,
in his stiff flowered cope,
slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle,
and raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times,
one would fain think,
is indeed the "panis caelestis,"
the bread of angels,
or,
robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ,
breaking the Host into the chalice,
and smiting his breast for his sins.
The fuming censers,
that the grave boys,
in their lace and scarlet,
tossed into the air like great gilt flowers,
had their subtle fascination for him.
As he passed out,
he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals,
and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the tarnished grating the true story of their lives.
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system,
or of mistaking,
for a house in which to live,
an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night,
or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.
Mysticism,
with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us,
and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it,
moved him for a season;
and for a [69] season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany,
and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain,
or some white nerve in the body,
delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
morbid or healthy,
normal or diseased.
Yet,
as has been said of him before,
no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.
He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
He knew that the senses,
no less than the soul,
have their mysteries to reveal.
And so he would now study perfumes,
and the secrets of their manufacture,
distilling heavily-scented oils,
and burning odorous gums from the East.
He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life,
and set himself to discover their true relations,
wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical,
and in ambergris that stirred one's passions,
and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances,
and in musk that troubled the brain,
and in champak that stained the imagination;
and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes,
and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots,
and scented pollen-laden flowers,
of aromatic balms,
and of dark and fragrant woods,
of spikenard that sickens,
of hovenia that makes men mad,
and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.
At another time he devoted himself entirely to music,
and in a long latticed room,
with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer,
he used to give curious concerts in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers,
or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes,
while grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums,
or turbaned Indians,
crouching upon scarlet mats,
blew through long pipes of reed or brass,
and charmed,
or feigned to charm,
great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders.
The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace,
and Chopin's beautiful sorrows,
and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself,
fell unheeded on his ear.
He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found,
either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations,
and loved to touch and try them.
He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians,
that women are not allowed to look at,
and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging,
and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds,
and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chili,
and the sonorous green stones that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness.
He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken;
the long clarin of the Mexicans,
into which the performer does not blow,
but through which he inhales the air;
the harsh turé of the Amazon tribes,
that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in trees,
and that can be heard,
it is said,
at a distance of three leagues;
the teponaztli,
that [70] has two vibrating tongues of wood,
and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants;
the yotl-bells of the Aztecs,
that are hung in clusters like grapes;
and a huge cylindrical drum,
covered with the skins of great serpents,
like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple,
and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description.
The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him,
and he felt a curious delight in the thought that Art,
like Nature,
has her monsters,
things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
Yet,
after some time,
he wearied of them,
and would sit in his box at the Opera,
either alone or with Lord Henry,
listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhäuser,"
and seeing in that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
On another occasion he took up the study of jewels,
and appeared at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse,
Admiral of France,
in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls.
He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected,
such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight,
the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver,
the pistachio-colored peridot,
rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,
carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars,
flame-red cinnamon-stones,
orange and violet spinels,
and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire.
He loved the red gold of the sunstone,
and the moonstone's pearly whiteness,
and the broken rainbow of the milky opal.
He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of color,
and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that was the envy of all the connoisseurs.
He discovered wonderful stories,
also,
about jewels.
In Alphonso's "Clericalis Disciplina" a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth,
and in the romantic history of Alexander he was said to have found snakes in the vale of Jordan "with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs."
There was a gem in the brain of the dragon,
Philostratus told us,
and "by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep,
and slain.
According to the great alchemist Pierre de Boniface,
the diamond rendered a man invisible,
and the agate of India made him eloquent.
The cornelian appeased anger,
and the hyacinth provoked sleep,
and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine.
The garnet cast out demons,
and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color.
The selenite waxed and waned with the moon,
and the meloceus,
that discovers thieves,
could be affected only by the blood of kids.
Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly-killed toad,
that was a certain antidote against poison.
The bezoar,
that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer,
was a charm that could cure the plague.
In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspilates,
that,
according to Democritus,
kept the wearer from any danger by fire.
The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand,
as the ceremony of his coronation.
The gates of the palace of John the Priest were "made of sardius,
with the horn of the horned [71] snake inwrought,
so that no man might bring poison within."
Over the gable were "two golden apples,
in which were two carbuncles,"
so that the gold might shine by day,
and the carbuncles by night.
In Lodge's strange romance "A Margarite of America" it was stated that in the chamber of Margarite were seen "all the chaste ladies of the world,
inchased out of silver,
looking through fair mirrours of chrysolites,
carbuncles,
sapphires,
and greene emeraults."
Marco Polo had watched the inhabitants of Zipangu place a rose-colored pearl in the mouth of the dead.
A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes,
and had slain the thief,
and mourned for seven moons over his loss.
When the Huns lured the king into the great pit,
he flung it away,
--Procopius tells the story,
--nor was it ever found again,
though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it.
The King of Malabar had shown a Venetian a rosary of one hundred and four pearls,
one for every god that he worshipped.
When the Duke de Valentinois,
son of Alexander VI.,
visited Louis XII.
of France,
his horse was loaded with gold leaves,
according to Brantôme,
and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.
Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with three hundred and twenty-one diamonds.
Richard II.
had a coat,
valued at thirty thousand marks,
which was covered with balas rubies.
Hall described Henry VIII.,
on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation,
as wearing "a jacket of raised gold,
the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones,
and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses."
The favorites of James I.
wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.
Edward II.
gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armor studded with jacinths,
and a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones,
and a skull-cap parsemé with pearls.
Henry II.
wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow,
and had a hawk-glove set with twelve rubies and fifty-two great pearls.
The ducal hat of Charles the Rash,
the last Duke of Burgundy of his race,
was studded with sapphires and hung with pear-shaped pearls.
How exquisite life had once been!
How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration!
Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
Then he turned his attention to embroideries,
and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescos in the chill rooms of the Northern nations of Europe.
As he investigated the subject,
--and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up,
--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.
He,
at any rate,
had escaped that.
Summer followed summer,
and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times,
and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame,
but he was unchanged.
No winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom.
How different it was with material things!
Where had they gone to?
Where was the great crocus-colored robe,
on which the gods fought against the giants,
that had been worked for Athena?
Where the huge velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome,
on which were represented the starry sky,
and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by [72] white gilt-reined steeds?
He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for Elagabalus,
on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic,
with its three hundred golden bees;
the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus,
and were figured with "lions,
panthers,
bears,
dogs,
forests,
rocks,
hunters,
--all,
in fact,
that a painter can copy from nature;"
and the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore,
on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "Madame,
je suis tout joyeux,"
the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread,
and each note,
a square shape in those days,
formed with four pearls.
He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy,
and was decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots,
made in broidery,
and blazoned with the king's arms,
and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies,
whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen,
the whole worked in gold."
Catherine de Médicis had a mourning-bed made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents and suns.
Its curtains were of damask,
with leafy wreaths and garlands,
figured upon a gold and silver ground,
and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls,
and it stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver.
Louis XIV.
had gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment.
The state bed of Sobieski,
King of Poland,
was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the Koran.
Its supports were of silver gilt,
beautifully chased,
and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions.
It had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna,
and the standard of Mohammed had stood under it.
And so,
for a whole year,
he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work,
getting the dainty Delhi muslins,
finely wrought,
with gold-threat palmates,
and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings;
the Dacca gauzes,
that from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air,"
and "running water,"
and "evening dew;"
strange figured cloths from Java;
elaborate yellow Chinese hangings;
books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with fleurs de lys,
birds,
and images;
veils of lacis worked in Hungary point;
Sicilian brocades,
and stiff Spanish velvets;
Georgian work with its gilt coins,
and Japanese Foukousas with their green-toned golds and their marvellously-plumaged birds.
He had a special passion,
also,
for ecclesiastical vestments,
as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church.
In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ,
who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for,
and wounded by self-inflicted pain.
He had a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask,
figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms,
beyond which on either side was the pine- [73] apple device wrought in seed-pearls.
The orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of the Virgin,
and the coronation of the Virgin was figured in colored silks upon the hood.
This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.
Another cope was of green velvet,
embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves,
from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms,
the details of which were picked out with silver thread and colored crystals.
The morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work.
The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk,
and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs,
among whom was St. Sebastian.
He had chasubles,
also,
of amber-colored silk,
and blue silk and gold brocade,
and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold,
figured with representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ,
and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems;
dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask,
decorated with tulips and dolphins and fleurs de lys;
altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen;
and many corporals,
chalice-veils,
and sudaria.
In the mystic offices to which these things were put there was something that quickened his imagination.
For these things,
and everything that he collected in his lovely house,
were to be to him means of forgetfulness,
modes by which he could escape,
for a season,
from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.
Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood,
he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life,
and had draped the purple-and-gold pall in front of it as a curtain.
For weeks he would not go there,
would forget the hideous painted thing,
and get back his light heart,
his wonderful joyousness,
his passionate pleasure in mere existence.
Then,
suddenly,
some night he would creep out of the house,
go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields,
and stay there,
day after day,
until he was driven away.
On his return he would sit in front of the picture,
sometimes loathing it and himself,
but filled,
at other times,
with that pride of rebellion that is half the fascination of sin,
and smiling,
with secret pleasure,
at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.
After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England,
and gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry,
as well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where he had more than once spent his winter.
He hated to be separated from the picture that was such a part of his life,
and he was also afraid that during his absence some one might gain access to the room,
in spite of the elaborate bolts and bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.
He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.
It was true that the portrait still preserved,
under all the foulness and ugliness of the face,
its marked likeness to himself;
but what could they learn from that?
He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him.
He had not painted it.
What was it to him how vile and full of shame it looked?
Even if he told them,
would they believe it?
Yet he was afraid.
Sometimes when he was down at his great [74] house in Nottinghamshire,
entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions,
and astounding the county by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendor of his mode of life,
he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there.
What if it should be stolen?
The mere thought made him cold with horror.
Surely the world would know his secret then.
Perhaps the world already suspected it.
For,
while he fascinated many,
there were not a few who distrusted him.
He was blackballed at a West End club of which his birth and social position fully entitled him to become a member,
and on one occasion,
when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the Carlton,
the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out.
Curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.
It was said that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel,
and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.
His extraordinary absences became notorious,
and,
when he used to reappear again in society,
men would whisper to each other in corners,
or pass him with a sneer,
or look at him with cold searching eyes,
as if they were determined to discover his secret.
Of such insolences and attempted slights he,
of course,
took no notice,
and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner,
his charming boyish smile,
and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him,
were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies (for so they called them) that were circulated about him.
It was remarked,
however,
that those who had been most intimate with him appeared,
after a time,
to shun him.
Of all his friends,
or so-called friends,
Lord Henry Wotton was the only one who remained loyal to him.
Women who had wildly adored him,
and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance,
were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.
Yet these whispered scandals only lent him,
in the eyes of many,
his strange and dangerous charm.
His great wealth was a certain element of security.
Society,
civilized society at least,
is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and charming.
It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals,
and the highest respectability is of less value in its opinion than the possession of a good chef.
And,
after all,
it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner,
or poor wine,
is irreproachable in his private life.
Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for cold entrées,
as Lord Henry remarked once,
in a discussion on the subject;
and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view.
For the canons of good society are,
or should be,
the same as the canons of art.
Form is absolutely essential to it.
It should have the dignity of a ceremony,
as well as its unreality,
and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays charming.
Is insincerity such a [75] terrible thing?
I think not.
It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Such,
at any rate,
was Dorian Gray's opinion.
He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple,
permanent,
reliable,
and of one essence.
To him,
man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations,
a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion,
and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country-house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins.
Here was Philip Herbert,
described by Francis Osborne,
in his "Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James,"
as one who was "caressed by the court for his handsome face,
which kept him not long company."
Was it young Herbert's life that he sometimes led?
Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?
Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly,
and almost without cause,
give utterance,
in Basil Hallward's studio,
to that mad prayer that had so changed his life?
Here,
in gold-embroidered red doublet,
jewelled surcoat,
and gilt-edged ruff and wrist-bands,
stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
with his silver-and-black armor piled at his feet.
What had this man's legacy been?
Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?
Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize?
Here,
from the fading canvas,
smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux,
in her gauze hood,
pearl stomacher,
and pink slashed sleeves.
A flower was in her right hand,
and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses.
On a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple.
There were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes.
He knew her life,
and the strange stories that were told about her lovers.
Had he something of her temperament in him?
Those oval heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him.
What of George Willoughby,
with his powdered hair and fantastic patches?
How evil he looked!
The face was saturnine and swarthy,
and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain.
Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so overladen with rings.
He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century,
and the friend,
in his youth,
of Lord Ferrars.
What of the second Lord Sherard,
the companion of the Prince Regent in his wildest days,
and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert?
How proud and handsome he was,
with his chestnut curls and insolent pose!
What passions had he bequeathed?
The world had looked upon him as infamous.
He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast.
Beside him hung the portrait of his wife,
a pallid,
thin-lipped woman in black.
Her blood,
also,
stirred within him.
How curious it all seemed!
Yet one had ancestors in literature,
as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament,
many of them,
and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.
There [76] were times when it seemed to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life,
not as he had lived it in act and circumstance,
but as his imagination had created it for him,
as it had been in his brain and in his passions.
He felt that he had known them all,
those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of wonder.
It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
The hero of the dangerous novel that had so influenced his life had himself had this curious fancy.
In a chapter of the book he tells how,
crowned with laurel,
lest lightning might strike him,
he had sat,
as Tiberius,
in a garden at Capri,
reading the shameful books of Elephantis,
while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer;
and,
as Caligula,
had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables,
and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse;
and,
as Domitian,
had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors,
looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days,
and sick with that ennui,
that taedium vitae,
that comes on those to whom life denies nothing;
and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the Circus,
and then,
in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules,
been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold,
and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by;
and,
as Elagabalus,
had painted his face with colors,
and plied the distaff among the women,
and brought the Moon from Carthage,
and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter,
and the chapter immediately following,
in which the hero describes the curious tapestries that he had had woven for him from Gustave Moreau's designs,
and on which were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom Vice and Blood and Weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo,
Duke of Milan,
who slew his wife,
and painted her lips with a scarlet poison;
Pietro Barbi,
the Venetian,
known as Paul the Second,
who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus,
and whose tiara,
valued at two hundred thousand florins,
was bought at the price of a terrible sin;
Gian Maria Visconti,
who used hounds to chase living men,
and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him;
the Borgia on his white horse,
with Fratricide riding beside him,
and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto;
Pietro Riario,
the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence,
child and minion of Sixtus IV.,
whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery,
and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk,
filled with nymphs and centaurs,
and gilded a boy that he might serve her at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas;
Ezzelin,
whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death,
and who had a passion for red blood,
as other men have for red wine,
--the son of the Fiend,
as was reported,
and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul;
Giambattista Cibo,
who in mockery took the name of Innocent,
and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a [77] Jewish doctor;
Sigismondo Malatesta,
the lover of Isotta,
and the lord of Rimini,
whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man,
who strangled Polyssena with a napkin,
and gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald,
and in honor of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship;
Charles VI.,
who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him,
and who could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of Love and Death and Madness;
and,
in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthus-like curls,
Grifonetto Baglioni,
who slew Astorre with his bride,
and Simonetto with his page,
and whose comeliness was such that,
as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia,
those who had hated him could not choose but weep,
and Atalanta,
who had cursed him,
blessed him.
There was a horrible fascination in them all.
He saw them at night,
and they troubled his imagination in the day.
The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning,
--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch,
by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan,
by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain.
Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
CHAPTER X
[ ...77] It was on the 7th of November,
the eve of his own thirty-second birthday,
as he often remembered afterwards.
He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's,
where he had been dining,
and was wrapped in heavy furs,
as the night was cold and foggy.
At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street a man passed him in the mist,
walking very fast,
and with the collar of his gray ulster turned up.
He had a bag in his hand.
He recognized him.
It was Basil Hallward.
A strange sense of fear,
for which he could not account,
came over him.
He made no sign of recognition,
and went on slowly,
in the direction of his own house.
But Hallward had seen him.
Dorian heard him first stopping,
and then hurrying after him.
In a few moments his hand was on his arm.
"Dorian!
What an extraordinary piece of luck!
I have been waiting for you ever since nine o'clock in your library.
Finally I took pity on your tired servant,
and told him to go to bed,
as he let me out.
I am off to Paris by the midnight train,
and I wanted particularly to see you before I left.
I thought it was you,
or rather your fur coat,
as you passed me.
But I wasn't quite sure.
Didn't you recognize me?"
"In this fog,
my dear Basil?
Why,
I can't even recognize Grosvenor Square.
I believe my house is somewhere about here,
but I don't feel at all certain about it.
I am sorry you are going away,
as I have not seen you for ages.
But I suppose you will be back soon?"
"No: I am going to be out of England for six months.
I intend [78] to take a studio in Paris,
and shut myself up till I have finished a great picture I have in my head.
However,
it wasn't about myself I wanted to talk.
Here we are at your door.
Let me come in for a moment.
I have something to say to you."
"I shall be charmed.
But won't you miss your train?"
said Dorian Gray,
languidly,
as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his latch-key.
The lamp-light struggled out through the fog,
and Hallward looked at his watch.
"I have heaps of time,"
he answered.
"The train doesn't go till twelve-fifteen,
and it is only just eleven.
In fact,
I was on my way to the club to look for you,
when I met you.
You see,
I shan't have any delay about luggage,
as I have sent on my heavy things.
All I have with me is in this bag,
and I can easily get to Victoria in twenty minutes."
Dorian looked at him and smiled.
"What a way for a fashionable painter to travel!
A Gladstone bag,
and an ulster!
Come in,
or the fog will get into the house.
And mind you don't talk about anything serious.
Nothing is serious nowadays.
At least nothing should be."
Hallward shook his head,
as he entered,
and followed Dorian into the library.
There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open hearth.
The lamps were lit,
and an open Dutch silver spirit-case stood,
with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers,
on a little table.
"You see your servant made me quite at home,
Dorian.
He gave me everything I wanted,
including your best cigarettes.
He is a most hospitable creature.
I like him much better than the Frenchman you used to have.
What has become of the Frenchman,
by the bye?"
Dorian shrugged his shoulders.
"I believe he married Lady Ashton's maid,
and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.
Anglomanie is very fashionable over there now,
I hear.
It seems silly of the French,
doesn't it?
But --do you know?
--he was not at all a bad servant.
I never liked him,
but I had nothing to complain about.
One often imagines things that are quite absurd.
He was really very devoted to me,
and seemed quite sorry when he went away.
Have another brandy-and-soda?
Or would you like hock-and-seltzer?
I always take hock-and-seltzer myself.
There is sure to be some in the next room."
"Thanks,
I won't have anything more,"
said Hallward,
taking his cap and coat off,
and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the corner.
"And now,
my dear fellow,
I want to speak to you seriously.
Don't frown like that.
You make it so much more difficult for me."
"What is it all about?"
cried Dorian,
in his petulant way,
flinging himself down on the sofa.
"I hope it is not about myself.
I am tired of myself to-night.
I should like to be somebody else."
"It is about yourself,"
answered Hallward,
in his grave,
deep voice,
"and I must say it to you.
I shall only keep you half an hour."
Dorian sighed,
and lit a cigarette.
"Half an hour!"
he murmured.
[79] "It is not much to ask of you,
Dorian,
and it is entirely for your own sake that I am speaking.
I think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said about you in London,
--things that I could hardly repeat to you."
"I don't wish to know anything about them.
I love scandals about other people,
but scandals about myself don't interest me.
They have not got the charm of novelty."
"They must interest you,
Dorian.
Every gentleman is interested in his good name.
You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded.
Of course you have your position,
and your wealth,
and all that kind of thing.
But position and wealth are not everything.
Mind you,
I don't believe these rumors at all.
At least,
I can't believe them when I see you.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face.
It cannot be concealed.
People talk of secret vices.
There are no such things as secret vices.
If a wretched man has a vice,
it shows itself in the lines of his mouth,
the droop of his eyelids,
the moulding of his hands even.
Somebody --I won't mention his name,
but you know him --came to me last year to have his portrait done.
I had never seen him before,
and had never heard anything about him at the time,
though I have heard a good deal since.
He offered an extravagant price.
I refused him.
There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated.
I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied about him.
His life is dreadful.
But you,
Dorian,
with your pure,
bright,
innocent face,
and your marvellous untroubled youth,
--I can't believe anything against you.
And yet I see you very seldom,
and you never come down to the studio now,
and when I am away from you,
and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you,
I don't know what to say.
Why is it,
Dorian,
that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it?
Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs?
You used to be a friend of Lord Cawdor.
I met him at dinner last week.
Your name happened to come up in conversation,
in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the Dudley.
Cawdor curled his lip,
and said that you might have the most artistic tastes,
but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know,
and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with.
I reminded him that I was a friend of yours,
and asked him what he meant.
He told me.
He told me right out before everybody.
It was horrible!
Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?
There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.
You were his great friend.
There was Sir Henry Ashton,
who had to leave England,
with a tarnished name.
You and he were inseparable.
What about Adrian Singleton,
and his dreadful end?
What about Lord Kent's only son,
and his career?
I met his father yesterday in St. James Street.
He seemed broken with shame and sorrow.
What about the young Duke of Perth?
What sort of life has he got now?
What gentleman would associate with him?
Dorian,
Dorian,
your reputation is infamous.
I know you and Harry are great friends.
I say nothing about that now,
but [80] surely you need not have made his sister's name a by-word.
When you met Lady Gwendolen,
not a breath of scandal had ever touched her.
Is there a single decent woman in London now who would drive with her in the Park?
Why,
even her children are not allowed to live with her.
Then there are other stories,
--stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in London.
Are they true?
Can they be true?
When I first heard them,
I laughed.
I hear them now,
and they make me shudder.
What about your country-house,
and the life that is led there?
Dorian,
you don't know what is said about you.
I won't tell you that I don't want to preach to you.
I remember Harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always said that,
and then broke his word.
I do want to preach to you.
I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you.
I want you to have a clean name and a fair record.
I want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with.
Don't shrug your shoulders like that.
Don't be so indifferent.
You have a wonderful influence.
Let it be for good,
not for evil.
They say that you corrupt every one whom you become intimate with,
and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house,
for shame of some kind to follow after you.
I don't know whether it is so or not.
How should I know?
But it is said of you.
I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.
Lord Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford.
He showed me a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in her villa at Mentone.
Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read.
I told him that it was absurd,
--that I knew you thoroughly,
and that you were incapable of anything of the kind.
Know you?
I wonder do I know you?
Before I could answer that,
I should have to see your soul."
"To see my soul!"
muttered Dorian Gray,
starting up from the sofa and turning almost white from fear.
"Yes,"
answered Hallward,
gravely,
and with infinite sorrow in his voice,
--"to see your soul.
But only God can do that."
A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man.
"You shall see it yourself,
to-night!"
he cried,
seizing a lamp from the table.
"Come: it is your own handiwork.
Why shouldn't you look at it?
You can tell the world all about it afterwards,
if you choose.
Nobody would believe you.
If they did believe you,
they'd like me all the better for it.
I know the age better than you do,
though you will prate about it so tediously.
Come,
I tell you.
You have chattered enough about corruption.
Now you shall look on it face to face."
There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered.
He stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner.
He felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret,
and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done.
"Yes,"
he continued,
coming closer to him,
and looking steadfastly into his stern eyes,
"I will show you my soul.
You shall see the thing that you fancy only God can see."
[81] Hallward started back.
"This is blasphemy,
Dorian!"
he cried.
"You must not say things like that.
They are horrible,
and they don't mean anything."
"You think so?"
He laughed again.
"I know so.
As for what I said to you to-night,
I said it for your good.
You know I have been always devoted to you."
"Don't touch me.
Finish what you have to say."
A twisted flash of pain shot across Hallward's face.
He paused for a moment,
and a wild feeling of pity came over him.
After all,
what right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray?
If he had done a tithe of what was rumored about him,
how much he must have suffered!
Then he straightened himself up,
and walked over to the fireplace,
and stood there,
looking at the burning logs with their frost-like ashes and their throbbing cores of flame.
"I am waiting,
Basil,"
said the young man,
in a hard,
clear voice.
He turned round.
"What I have to say is this,"
he cried.
"You must give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against you.
If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to end,
I will believe you.
Deny them,
Dorian,
deny them!
Can't you see what I am going through?
My God!
don't tell me that you are infamous!"
Dorian Gray smiled.
There was a curl of contempt in his lips.
"Come up-stairs,
Basil,"
he said,
quietly.
"I keep a diary of my life from day to day,
and it never leaves the room in which it is written.
I will show it to you if you come with me."
"I will come with you,
Dorian,
if you wish it.
I see I have missed my train.
That makes no matter.
I can go to-morrow.
But don't ask me to read anything to-night.
All I want is a plain answer to my question."
"That will be given to you up-stairs.
I could not give it here.
You won't have to read long.
Don't keep me waiting."
CHAPTER XI
[ ...81] He passed out of the room,
and began the ascent,
Basil Hallward following close behind.
They walked softly,
as men instinctively do at night.
The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase.
A rising wind made some of the windows rattle.
When they reached the top landing,
Dorian set the lamp down on the floor,
and taking out the key turned it in the lock.
"You insist on knowing,
Basil?"
he asked,
in a low voice.
"Yes."
"I am delighted,"
he murmured,
smiling.
Then he added,
somewhat bitterly,
"You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know everything about me.
You have had more to do with my life than you think."
And,
taking up the lamp,
he opened the door and went in.
A cold current of air passed them,
and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange.
He shuddered.
"Shut the door behind you,"
he said,
as he placed the lamp on the table.
[82] Hallward glanced round him,
with a puzzled expression.
The room looked as if it had not been lived in for years.
A faded Flemish tapestry,
a curtained picture,
an old Italian cassone,
and an almost empty bookcase,
--that was all that it seemed to contain,
besides a chair and a table.
As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was standing on the mantel-shelf,
he saw that the whole place was covered with dust,
and that the carpet was in holes.
A mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting.
There was a damp odor of mildew.
"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul,
Basil?
Draw that curtain back,
and you will see mine."
The voice that spoke was cold and cruel.
"You are mad,
Dorian,
or playing a part,"
muttered Hallward,
frowning.
"You won't?
Then I must do it myself,"
said the young man;
and he tore the curtain from its rod,
and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward's lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him.
There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing.
Good heavens!
it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at!
The horror,
whatever it was,
had not yet entirely marred that marvellous beauty.
There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips.
The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue,
the noble curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat.
Yes,
it was Dorian himself.
But who had done it?
He seemed to recognize his own brush-work,
and the frame was his own design.
The idea was monstrous,
yet he felt afraid.
He seized the lighted candle,
and held it to the picture.
In the left-hand corner was his own name,
traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody,
some infamous,
ignoble satire.
He had never done that.
Still,
it was his own picture.
He knew it,
and he felt as if his blood had changed from fire to sluggish ice in a moment.
His own picture!
What did it mean?
Why had it altered?
He turned,
and looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man.
His mouth twitched,
and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate.
He passed his hand across his forehead.
It was dank with clammy sweat.
The young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf,
watching him with that strange expression that is on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when a great artist is acting.
There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy.
There was simply the passion of the spectator,
with perhaps a flicker of triumph in the eyes.
He had taken the flower out of his coat,
and was smelling it,
or pretending to do so.
"What does this mean?"
cried Hallward,
at last.
His own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears.
"Years ago,
when I was a boy,"
said Dorian Gray,
"you met me,
devoted yourself to me,
flattered me,
and taught me to be vain of my good looks.
One day you introduced me to a friend of yours,
who explained to me the wonder of youth,
and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty.
In a mad moment,
that [83] I don't know,
even now,
whether I regret or not,
I made a wish.
Perhaps you would call it a prayer ...."
"I remember it!
Oh,
how well I remember it!
No!
the thing is impossible.
The room is damp.
The mildew has got into the canvas.
The paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them.
I tell you the thing is impossible."
"Ah,
what is impossible?"
murmured the young man,
going over to the window,
and leaning his forehead against the cold,
mist-stained glass.
"You told me you had destroyed it."
"I was wrong.
It has destroyed me."
"I don't believe it is my picture."
"Can't you see your romance in it?"
said Dorian,
bitterly.
"My romance,
as you call it ..."
"As you called it."
"There was nothing evil in it,
nothing shameful.
This is the face of a satyr."
"It is the face of my soul."
"God!
what a thing I must have worshipped!
This has the eyes of a devil."
"Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him,
Basil,"
cried Dorian,
with a wild gesture of despair.
Hallward turned again to the portrait,
and gazed at it.
"My God!
if it is true,"
he exclaimed,
"and this is what you have done with your life,
why,
you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!"
He held the light up again to the canvas,
and examined it.
The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed,
and as he had left it.
It was from within,
apparently,
that the foulness and horror had come.
Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away.
The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.
His hand shook,
and the candle fell from its socket on the floor,
and lay there sputtering.
He placed his foot on it and put it out.
Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands.
"Good God,
Dorian,
what a lesson!
what an awful lesson!"
There was no answer,
but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window.
"Pray,
Dorian,
pray,"
he murmured.
"What is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood?
'Lead us not into temptation.
Forgive us our sins.
Wash away our iniquities.'
Let us say that together.
The prayer of your pride has been answered.
The prayer of your repentance will be answered also.
I worshipped you too much.
I am punished for it.
You worshipped yourself too much.
We are both punished."
Dorian Gray turned slowly around,
and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes.
"It is too late,
Basil,"
he murmured.
"It is never too late,
Dorian.
Let us kneel down and try if we can remember a prayer.
Isn't there a verse somewhere,
'Though your sins be as scarlet,
yet I will make them as white as snow'?"
[84] "Those words mean nothing to me now."
"Hush!
don't say that.
You have done enough evil in your life.
My God!
don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"
Dorian Gray glanced at the picture,
and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him.
The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him,
and he loathed the man who was seated at the table,
more than he had ever loathed anything in his whole life.
He glanced wildly around.
Something glimmered on the top of the painted chest that faced him.
His eye fell on it.
He knew what it was.
It was a knife that he had brought up,
some days before,
to cut a piece of cord,
and had forgotten to take away with him.
He moved slowly towards it,
passing Hallward as he did so.
As soon as he got behind him,
he seized it,
and turned round.
Hallward moved in his chair as if he was going to rise.
He rushed at him,
and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear,
crushing the man's head down on the table,
and stabbing again and again.
There was a stifled groan,
and the horrible sound of some one choking with blood.
The outstretched arms shot up convulsively three times,
waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air.
He stabbed him once more,
but the man did not move.
Something began to trickle on the floor.
He waited for a moment,
still pressing the head down.
Then he threw the knife on the table,
and listened.
He could hear nothing,
but the drip,
drip on the threadbare carpet.
He opened the door,
and went out on the landing.
The house was quite quiet.
No one was stirring.
He took out the key,
and returned to the room,
locking himself in as he did so.
The thing was still seated in the chair,
straining over the table with bowed head,
and humped back,
and long fantastic arms.
Had it not been for the red jagged tear in the neck,
and the clotted black pool that slowly widened on the table,
one would have said that the man was simply asleep.
How quickly it had all been done!
He felt strangely calm,
and,
walking over to the window,
opened it,
and stepped out on the balcony.
The wind had blown the fog away,
and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's tail,
starred with myriads of golden eyes.
He looked down,
and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing a bull's-eye lantern on the doors of the silent houses.
The crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner,
and then vanished.
A woman in a ragged shawl was creeping round by the railings,
staggering as she went.
Now and then she stopped,
and peered back.
Once,
she began to sing in a hoarse voice.
The policeman strolled over and said something to her.
She stumbled away,
laughing.
A bitter blast swept across the Square.
The gas-lamps flickered,
and became blue,
and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches as if in pain.
He shivered,
and went back,
closing the window behind him.
He passed to the door,
turned the key,
and opened it.
He did not even glance at the murdered man.
He felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation.
The friend who had painted [85] the fatal portrait,
the portrait to which all his misery had been due,
had gone out of his life.
That was enough.
Then he remembered the lamp.
It was a rather curious one of Moorish workmanship,
made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished steel.
Perhaps it might be missed by his servant,
and questions would be asked.
He turned back,
and took it from the table.
How still the man was!
How horribly white the long hands looked!
He was like a dreadful wax image.
He locked the door behind him,
and crept quietly down-stairs.
The wood-work creaked,
and seemed to cry out as if in pain.
He stopped several times,
and waited.
No: everything was still.
It was merely the sound of his own footsteps.
When he reached the library,
he saw the bag and coat in the corner.
They must be hidden away somewhere.
He unlocked a secret press that was in the wainscoting,
and put them into it.
He could easily burn them afterwards.
Then he pulled out his watch.
It was twenty minutes to two.
He sat down,
and began to think.
Every year --every month,
almost --men were strangled in England for what he had done.
There had been a madness of murder in the air.
Some red star had come too close to the earth.
Evidence?
What evidence was there against him?
Basil Hallward had left the house at eleven.
No one had seen him come in again.
Most of the servants were at Selby Royal.
His valet had gone to bed.
Paris!
Yes.
It was to Paris that Basil had gone,
by the midnight train,
as he had intended.
With his curious reserved habits,
it would be months before any suspicions would be aroused.
Months?
Everything could be destroyed long before then.
A sudden thought struck him.
He put on his fur coat and hat,
and went out into the hall.
There he paused,
hearing the slow heavy tread of the policeman outside on the pavement,
and seeing the flash of the lantern reflected in the window.
He waited,
holding his breath.
After a few moments he opened the front door,
and slipped out,
shutting it very gently behind him.
Then he began ringing the bell.
In about ten minutes his valet appeared,
half dressed,
and looking very drowsy.
"I am sorry to have had to wake you up,
Francis,"
he said,
stepping in;
"but I had forgotten my latch-key.
What time is it?"
"Five minutes past two,
sir,"
answered the man,
looking at the clock and yawning.
"Five minutes past two?
How horribly late!
You must wake me at nine to-morrow.
I have some work to do."
"All right,
sir."
"Did any one call this evening?"
"Mr. Hallward,
sir.
He stayed here till eleven,
and then he went away to catch his train."
"Oh!
I am sorry I didn't see him.
Did he leave any message?"
"No,
sir,
except that he would write to you."
[86] "That will do,
Francis.
Don't forget to call me at nine tomorrow."
"No,
sir."
The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.
Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the yellow marble table,
and passed into the library.
He walked up and down the room for a quarter of an hour,
biting his lip,
and thinking.
Then he took the Blue Book down from one of the shelves,
and began to turn over the leaves.
"Alan Campbell,
152,
Hertford Street,
Mayfair."
Yes;
that was the man he wanted.
CHAPTER XII
[ ...86] At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray,
and opened the shutters.
Dorian was sleeping quite peacefully,
lying on his right side,
with one hand underneath his cheek.
He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play,
or study.
The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke,
and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips,
as though he had been having some delightful dream.
Yet he had not dreamed at all.
His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain.
But youth smiles without any reason.
It is one of its chiefest charms.
He turned round,
and,
leaning on his elbow,
began to drink his chocolate.
The mellow November sun was streaming into the room.
The sky was bright blue,
and there was a genial warmth in the air.
It was almost like a morning in May.
Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent blood-stained feet into his brain,
and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness.
He winced at the memory of all that he had suffered,
and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward,
that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair,
came back to him,
and he grew cold with passion.
The dead man was still sitting there,
too,
and in the sunlight now.
How horrible that was!
Such hideous things were for the darkness,
not for the day.
He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad.
There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them,
strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions,
and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy,
greater than any joy they brought,
or could ever bring,
to the senses.
But this was not one of them.
It was a thing to be driven out of the mind,
to be drugged with poppies,
to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself.
He passed his hand across his forehead,
and then got up hastily,
and dressed himself with even more than his usual attention,
giving a good deal of care to the selection of his necktie and scarf-pin,
and changing his rings more than once.
He spent a long time over breakfast,
tasting the various dishes,
talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of [87] getting made for the servants at Selby,
and going through his correspondence.
Over some of the letters he smiled.
Three of them bored him.
One he read several times over,
and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face.
"That awful thing,
a woman's memory!"
as Lord Henry had once said.
When he had drunk his coffee,
he sat down at the table,
and wrote two letters.
One he put in his pocket,
the other he handed to the valet.
"Take this round to 152,
Hertford Street,
Francis,
and if Mr. Campbell is out of town,
get his address."
As soon as he was alone,
he lit a cigarette,
and began sketching upon a piece of paper,
drawing flowers,
and bits of architecture,
first,
and then faces.
Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have an extraordinary likeness to Basil Hallward.
He frowned,
and,
getting up,
went over to the bookcase and took out a volume at hazard.
He was determined that he would not think about what had happened,
till it became absolutely necessary to do so.
When he had stretched himself on the sofa,
he looked at the title-page of the book.
It was Gautier's "Emaux et Camées,"
Charpentier's Japanese-paper edition,
with the Jacquemart etching.
The binding was of citron-green leather with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates.
It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton.
As he turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire,
the cold yellow hand "du supplice encore mal lavée,"
with its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune."
He glanced at his own white taper fingers,
and passed on,
till he came to those lovely verses upon Venice:
Sur une gamme chromatique,
Le sein de perles ruisselant,
La Vénus de l'Adriatique Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.
Les dômes,
sur l'azur des ondes Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
S'enflent comme des gorges rondes Que soulève un soupir d'amour.
L'esquif aborde et me dépose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une façade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier.
How exquisite they were!
As one read them,
one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city,
lying in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains.
The mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido.
The sudden flashes of color reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honey-combed Campanile,
or stalk,
with such stately grace,
through the dim arcades.
Leaning back with half-closed eyes,
he kept saying over and over to himself,
--
Devant une façade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier.
[88] The whole of Venice was in those two lines.
He remembered the autumn that he had passed there,
and a wonderful love that had stirred him to delightful fantastic follies.
There was romance in every place.
But Venice,
like Oxford,
had kept the background for romance,
and background was everything,
or almost everything.
Basil had been with him part of the time,
and had gone wild over Tintoret.
Poor Basil!
what a horrible way for a man to die!
He sighed,
and took up the book again,
and tried to forget.
He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little café at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other;
of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile,
and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered Nile,
where there are Sphinxes,
and rose-red ibises,
and white vultures with gilded claws,
and crocodiles,
with small beryl eyes,
that crawl over the green steaming mud;
and of that curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice,
the "monstre charmant" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre.
But after a time the book fell from his hand.
He grew nervous,
and a horrible fit of terror came over him.
What if Alan Campbell should be out of England?
Days would elapse before he could come back.
Perhaps he might refuse to come.
What could he do then?
Every moment was of vital importance.
They had been great friends once,
five years before,
--almost inseparable,
indeed.
Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.
When they met in society now,
it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: Alan Campbell never did.
He was an extremely clever young man,
though he had no real appreciation of the visible arts,
and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian.
His dominant intellectual passion was for science.
At Cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working in the Laboratory,
and had taken a good class in the Natural Science tripos of his year.
Indeed,
he was still devoted to the study of chemistry,
and had a laboratory of his own,
in which he used to shut himself up all day long,
greatly to the annoyance of his mother,
who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions.
He was an excellent musician,
however,
as well,
and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs.
In fact,
it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together,
--music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished,
and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it.
They had met at Lady Berkshire's the night that Rubinstein played there,
and after that used to be always seen together at the Opera,
and wherever good music was going on.
For eighteen months their intimacy lasted.
Campbell was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square.
To him,
as to many others,
Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life.
Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew.
But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when [89] they met,
and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which Dorian Gray was present.
He had changed,
too,
--was strangely melancholy at times,
appeared almost to dislike hearing music of any passionate character,
and would never himself play,
giving as his excuse,
when he was called upon,
that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise.
And this was certainly true.
Every day he seemed to become more interested in biology,
and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews,
in connection with certain curious experiments.
This was the man that Dorian Gray was waiting for,
pacing up and down the room,
glancing every moment at the clock,
and becoming horribly agitated as the minutes went by.
At last the door opened,
and his servant entered.
"Mr. Alan Campbell,
sir."
A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips,
and the color came back to his cheeks.
"Ask him to come in at once,
Francis."
The man bowed,
and retired.
In a few moments Alan Campbell walked in,
looking very stern and rather pale,
his pallor being intensified by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.
"Alan!
this is kind of you.
I thank you for coming."
"I had intended never to enter your house again,
Gray.
But you said it was a matter of life and death."
His voice was hard and cold.
He spoke with slow deliberation.
There was a look of contempt in the steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian.
He kept his hands in the pockets of his Astrakhan coat,
and appeared not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.
"It is a matter of life and death,
Alan,
and to more than one person.
Sit down."
Campbell took a chair by the table,
and Dorian sat opposite to him.
The two men's eyes met.
In Dorian's there was infinite pity.
He knew that what he was going to do was dreadful.
After a strained moment of silence,
he leaned across and said,
very quietly,
but watching the effect of each word upon the face of the man he had sent for,
"Alan,
in a locked room at the top of this house,
a room to which nobody but myself has access,
a dead man is seated at a table.
He has been dead ten hours now.
Don't stir,
and don't look at me like that.
Who the man is,
why he died,
how he died,
are matters that do not concern you.
What you have to do is this --"
"Stop,
Gray.
I don't want to know anything further.
Whether what you have told me is true or not true,
doesn't concern me.
I entirely decline to be mixed up in your life.
Keep your horrible secrets to yourself.
They don't interest me any more."
"Alan,
they will have to interest you.
This one will have to interest you.
I am awfully sorry for you,
Alan.
But I can't help myself.
You are the one man who is able to save me.
I am forced to bring you into the matter.
I have no option.
Alan,
you are a scientist.
You know about chemistry,
and things of that kind.
You have made experiments.
What you have got to do is to destroy the [90] thing that is up-stairs,
--to destroy it so that not a vestige will be left of it.
Nobody saw this person come into the house.
Indeed,
at the present moment he is supposed to be in Paris.
He will not be missed for months.
When he is missed,
there must be no trace of him found here.
You,
Alan,
you must change him,
and everything that belongs to him,
into a handful of ashes that I may scatter in the air."
"You are mad,
Dorian."
"Ah!
I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."
"You are mad,
I tell you,
--mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to help you,
mad to make this monstrous confession.
I will have nothing to do with this matter,
whatever it is.
Do you think I am going to peril my reputation for you?
What is it to me what devil's work you are up to?"
"It was a suicide,
Alan."
"I am glad of that.
But who drove him to it?
You,
I should fancy."
"Do you still refuse to do this,
for me?"
"Of course I refuse.
I will have absolutely nothing to do with it.
I don't care what shame comes on you.
You deserve it all.
I should not be sorry to see you disgraced,
publicly disgraced.
How dare you ask me,
of all men in the world,
to mix myself up in this horror?
I should have thought you knew more about people's characters.
Your friend Lord Henry Wotton can't have taught you much about psychology,
whatever else he has taught you.
Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you.
You have come to the wrong man.
Go to some of your friends.
Don't come to me."
"Alan,
it was murder.
I killed him.
You don't know what he had made me suffer.
Whatever my life is,
he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor Harry has had.
He may not have intended it,
the result was the same."
"Murder!
Good God,
Dorian,
is that what you have come to?
I shall not inform upon you.
It is not my business.
Besides,
you are certain to be arrested,
without my stirring in the matter.
Nobody ever commits a murder without doing something stupid.
But I will have nothing to do with it."
"All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment.
You go to hospitals and dead-houses,
and the horrors that you do there don't affect you.
If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it,
you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject.
You would not turn a hair.
You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong.
On the contrary,
you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race,
or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world,
or gratifying intellectual curiosity,
or something of that kind.
What I want you to do is simply what you have often done before.
Indeed,
to destroy a body must be less horrible than what you are accustomed to work at.
And,
remember,
it is the only piece of evidence against me.
If it is discovered,
I am lost;
and it is sure to be discovered unless you help me."
[91] "I have no desire to help you.
You forget that.
I am simply indifferent to the whole thing.
It has nothing to do with me."
"Alan,
I entreat you.
Think of the position I am in.
Just before you came I almost fainted with terror.
No!
don't think of that.
Look at the matter purely from the scientific point of view.
You don't inquire where the dead things on which you experiment come from.
Don't inquire now.
I have told you too much as it is.
But I beg of you to do this.
We were friends once,
Alan."
"Don't speak about those days,
Dorian: they are dead."
"The dead linger sometimes.
The man up-stairs will not go away.
He is sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms.
Alan!
Alan!
if you don't come to my assistance I am ruined.
Why,
they will hang me,
Alan!
Don't you understand?
They will hang me for what I have done."
"There is no good in prolonging this scene.
I refuse absolutely to do anything in the matter.
It is insane of you to ask me."
"You refuse absolutely?"
"Yes."
The same look of pity came into Dorian's eyes,
then he stretched out his hand,
took a piece of paper,
and wrote something on it.
He read it over twice,
folded it carefully,
and pushed it across the table.
Having done this,
he got up,
and went over to the window.
Campbell looked at him in surprise,
and then took up the paper,
and opened it.
As he read it,
his face became ghastly pale,
and he fell back in his chair.
A horrible sense of sickness came over him.
He felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.
After two or three minutes of terrible silence,
Dorian turned round,
and came and stood behind him,
putting his hand upon his shoulder.
"I am so sorry,
Alan,"
he murmured,
"but you leave me no alternative.
I have a letter written already.
Here it is.
You see the address.
If you don't help me,
I must send it.
You know what the result will be.
But you are going to help me.
It is impossible for you to refuse now.
I tried to spare you.
You will do me the justice to admit that.
You were stern,
harsh,
offensive.
You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me,
--no living man,
at any rate.
I bore it all.
Now it is for me to dictate terms."
Campbell buried his face in his hands,
and a shudder passed through him.
"Yes,
it is my turn to dictate terms,
Alan.
You know what they are.
The thing is quite simple.
Come,
don't work yourself into this fever.
The thing has to be done.
Face it,
and do it."
A groan broke from Campbell's lips,
and he shivered all over.
The ticking of the clock on the mantel-piece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony,
each of which was too terrible to be borne.
He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead,
and as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him.
The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead.
It was intolerable.
It seemed to crush him.
"Come,
Alan,
you must decide at once."
[92] He hesitated a moment.
"Is there a fire in the room up-stairs?"
he murmured.
"Yes,
there is a gas-fire with asbestos."
"I will have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."
"No,
Alan,
you need not leave the house.
Write on a sheet of note-paper what you want,
and my servant will take a cab and bring the things back to you."
Campbell wrote a few lines,
blotted them,
and addressed an envelope to his assistant.
Dorian took the note up and read it carefully.
Then he rang the bell,
and gave it to his valet,
with orders to return as soon as possible,
and to bring the things with him.
When the hall door shut,
Campbell started,
and,
having got up from the chair,
went over to the chimney-piece.
He was shivering with a sort of ague.
For nearly twenty minutes,
neither of the men spoke.
A fly buzzed noisily about the room,
and the ticking of the clock was like the beat of a hammer.
As the chime struck one,
Campbell turned around,
and,
looking at Dorian Gray,
saw that his eyes were filled with tears.
There was something in the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him.
"You are infamous,
absolutely infamous!"
he muttered.
"Hush,
Alan: you have saved my life,"
said Dorian.
"Your life?
Good heavens!
what a life that is!
You have gone from corruption to corruption,
and now you have culminated in crime.
In doing what I am going to do,
what you force me to do,
it is not of your life that I am thinking."
"Ah,
Alan,"
murmured Dorian,
with a sigh,
"I wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you."
He turned away,
as he spoke,
and stood looking out at the garden.
Campbell made no answer.
After about ten minutes a knock came to the door,
and the servant entered,
carrying a mahogany chest of chemicals,
with a small electric battery set on top of it.
He placed it on the table,
and went out again,
returning with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously-shaped iron clamps.
"Shall I leave the things here,
sir?"
he asked Campbell.
"Yes,"
said Dorian.
"And I am afraid,
Francis,
that I have another errand for you.
What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies Selby with orchids?"
"Harden,
sir."
"Yes,
--Harden.
You must go down to Richmond at once,
see Harden personally,
and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,
and to have as few white ones as possible.
In fact,
I don't want any white ones.
It is a lovely day,
Francis,
and Richmond is a very pretty place,
otherwise I wouldn't bother you about it."
"No trouble,
sir.
At what time shall I be back?"
Dorian looked at Campbell.
"How long will your experiment take,
Alan?"
he said,
in a calm,
indifferent voice.
The presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.
Campbell frowned,
and bit his lip.
"It will take about five hours,"
he answered.
[93] "It will be time enough,
then,
if you are back at half-past seven,
Francis.
Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing.
You can have the evening to yourself.
I am not dining at home,
so I shall not want you."
"Thank you,
sir,"
said the man,
leaving the room.
"Now,
Alan,
there is not a moment to be lost.
How heavy this chest is!
I'll take it for you.
You bring the other things."
He spoke rapidly,
and in an authoritative manner.
Campbell felt dominated by him.
They left the room together.
When they reached the top landing,
Dorian took out the key and turned it in the lock.
Then he stopped,
and a troubled look came into his eyes.
He shuddered.
"I don't think I can go in,
Alan,"
he murmured.
"It is nothing to me.
I don't require you,"
said Campbell,
coldly.
Dorian half opened the door.
As he did so,
he saw the face of the portrait grinning in the sunlight.
On the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying.
He remembered that the night before,
for the first time in his life,
he had forgotten to hide it,
when he crept out of the room.
But what was that loathsome red dew that gleamed,
wet and glistening,
on one of the hands,
as though the canvas had sweated blood?
How horrible it was!
--more horrible,
it seemed to him for the moment,
than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table,
the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred,
but was still there,
as he had left it.
He opened the door a little wider,
and walked quickly in,
with half-closed eyes and averted head,
determined that he would not look even once upon the dead man.
Then,
stooping down,
and taking up the gold-and-purple hanging,
he flung it over the picture.
He stopped,
feeling afraid to turn round,
and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him.
He heard Campbell bringing in the heavy chest,
and the irons,
and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work.
He began to wonder if he and Basil Hallward had ever met,
and,
if so,
what they had thought of each other.
"Leave me now,"
said Campbell.
He turned and hurried out,
just conscious that the dead man had been thrust back into the chair and was sitting up in it,
with Campbell gazing into the glistening yellow face.
As he was going downstairs he heard the key being turned in the lock.
It was long after seven o'clock when Campbell came back into the library.
He was pale,
but absolutely calm.
"I have done what you asked me to do,"
he muttered.
"And now,
good-by.
Let us never see each other again."
"You have saved me from ruin,
Alan.
I cannot forget that,"
said Dorian,
simply.
As soon as Campbell had left,
he went up-stairs.
There was a horrible smell of chemicals in the room.
But the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone.
CHAPTER XIII
[94] "There is no good telling me you are going to be good,
Dorian,"
cried Lord Henry,
dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water.
"You are quite perfect.
Pray don't change."
Dorian shook his head.
"No,
Harry,
I have done too many dreadful things in my life.
I am not going to do any more.
I began my good actions yesterday."
"Where were you yesterday?"
"In the country,
Harry.
I was staying at a little inn by myself."
"My dear boy,"
said Lord Henry smiling,
"anybody can be good in the country.
There are no temptations there.
That is the reason why people who live out of town are so uncivilized.
There are only two ways,
as you know,
of becoming civilized.
One is by being cultured,
the other is by being corrupt.
Country-people have no opportunity of being either,
so they stagnate."
"Culture and corruption,"
murmured Dorian.
"I have known something of both.
It seems to me curious now that they should ever be found together.
For I have a new ideal,
Harry.
I am going to alter.
I think I have altered."
"You have not told me yet what your good action was.
Or did you say you had done more than one?"
"I can tell you,
Harry.
It is not a story I could tell to any one else.
I spared somebody.
It sounds vain,
but you understand what I mean.
She was quite beautiful,
and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane.
I think it was that which first attracted me to her.
You remember Sibyl,
don't you?
How long ago that seems!
Well,
Hetty was not one of our own class,
of course.
She was simply a girl in a village.
But I really loved her.
I am quite sure that I loved her.
All during this wonderful May that we have been having,
I used to run down and see her two or three times a week.
Yesterday she met me in a little orchard.
The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair,
and she was laughing.
We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn.
Suddenly I determined to leave her as flower-like as I had found her."
"I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure,
Dorian,"
interrupted Lord Henry.
"But I can finish your idyl for you.
You gave her good advice,
and broke her heart.
That was the beginning of your reformation."
"Harry,
you are horrible!
You mustn't say these dreadful things.
Hetty's heart is not broken.
Of course she cried,
and all that.
But there is no disgrace upon her.
She can live,
like Perdita,
in her garden."
"And weep over a faithless Florizel,"
said Lord Henry,
laughing.
"My dear Dorian,
you have the most curious boyish moods.
Do you think this girl will ever be really contented now with any one of her own rank?
I suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman.
Well,
having met you,
and loved you,
will teach her to despise her husband,
and she will be wretched.
From a moral point of view I really don't think much of your great renunciation.
[95] Even as a beginning,
it is poor.
Besides,
how do you know that Hetty isn't floating at the present moment in some mill-pond,
with water-lilies round her,
like Ophelia?"
"I can't bear this,
Harry!
You mock at everything,
and then suggest the most serious tragedies.
I am sorry I told you now.
I don't care what you say to me,
I know I was right in acting as I did.
Poor Hetty!
As I rode past the farm this morning,
I saw her white face at the window,
like a spray of jasmine.
Don't let me talk about it any more,
and don't try to persuade me that the first good action I have done for years,
the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever known,
is really a sort of sin.
I want to be better.
I am going to be better.
Tell me something about yourself.
What is going on in town?
I have not been to the club for days."
"The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."
"I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time,"
said Dorian,
pouring himself out some wine,
and frowning slightly.
"My dear boy,
they have only been talking about it for six weeks,
and the public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months.
They have been very fortunate lately,
however.
They have had my own divorce-case,
and Alan Campbell's suicide.
Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist.
Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the gray ulster who left Victoria by the midnight train on the 7th of November was poor Basil,
and the French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris at all.
I suppose in about a fortnight we will be told that he has been seen in San Francisco.
It is an odd thing,
but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city,
and possess all the attractions of the next world."
"What do you think has happened to Basil?"
asked Dorian,
holding up his Burgundy against the light,
and wondering how it was that he could discuss the matter so calmly.
"I have not the slightest idea.
If Basil chooses to hide himself,
it is no business of mine.
If he is dead,
I don't want to think about him.
Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me.
I hate it.
One can survive everything nowadays except that.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
Let us have our coffee in the music-room,
Dorian.
You must play Chopin to me.
The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely.
Poor Victoria!
I was very fond of her.
The house is rather lonely without her."
Dorian said nothing,
but rose from the table,
and,
passing into the next room,
sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the keys.
After the coffee had been brought in,
he stopped,
and,
looking over at Lord Henry,
said,
"Harry,
did it ever occur to you that Basil was murdered?"
Lord Henry yawned.
"Basil had no enemies,
and always wore a Waterbury watch.
Why should he be murdered?
He was not clever enough to have enemies.
Of course he had a wonderful genius for painting.
But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as possible.
Basil was really rather dull.
He only interested me once,
[96] and that was when he told me,
years ago,
that he had a wild adoration for you."
"I was very fond of Basil,"
said Dorian,
with a sad look in his eyes.
"But don't people say that he was murdered?"
"Oh,
some of the papers do.
It does not seem to be probable.
I know there are dreadful places in Paris,
but Basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them.
He had no curiosity.
It was his chief defect.
Play me a nocturne,
Dorian,
and,
as you play,
tell me,
in a low voice,
how you have kept your youth.
You must have some secret.
I am only ten years older than you are,
and I am wrinkled,
and bald,
and yellow.
You are really wonderful,
Dorian.
You have never looked more charming than you do to-night.
You remind me of the day I saw you first.
You were rather cheeky,
very shy,
and absolutely extraordinary.
You have changed,
of course,
but not in appearance.
I wish you would tell me your secret.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world,
except take exercise,
get up early,
or be respectable.
Youth!
There is nothing like it.
It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth.
The only people whose opinions I listen to now with any respect are people much younger than myself.
They seem in front of me.
Life has revealed to them her last wonder.
As for the aged,
I always contradict the aged.
I do it on principle.
If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday,
they solemnly give you the opinions current in 1820,
when people wore high stocks and knew absolutely nothing.
How lovely that thing you are playing is!
I wonder did Chopin write it at Majorca,
with the sea weeping round the villa,
and the salt spray dashing against the panes?
It is marvelously romantic.
What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative!
Don't stop.
I want music to-night.
It seems to me that you are the young Apollo,
and that I am Marsyas listening to you.
I have sorrows,
Dorian,
of my own,
that even you know nothing of.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old,
but that one is young.
I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.
Ah,
Dorian,
how happy you are!
What an exquisite life you have had!
You have drunk deeply of everything.
You have crushed the grapes against your palate.
Nothing has been hidden from you.
But it has all been to you no more than the sound of music.
It has not marred you.
You are still the same.
"I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
Don't spoil it by renunciations.
At present you are a perfect type.
Don't make yourself incomplete.
You are quite flawless now.
You need not shake your head: you know you are.
Besides,
Dorian,
don't deceive yourself.
Life is not governed by will or intention.
Life is a question of nerves,
and fibres,
and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
You may fancy yourself safe,
and think yourself strong.
But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky,
a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it,
a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again,
a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play,
--I tell you,
Dorian,
that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Browning writes about that somewhere;
but our [97] own senses will imagine them for us.
There are moments when the odor of heliotrope passes suddenly across me,
and I have to live the strangest year of my life over again.
"I wish I could change places with you,
Dorian.
The world has cried out against us both,
but it has always worshipped you.
It always will worship you.
You are the type of what the age is searching for,
and what it is afraid it has found.
I am so glad that you have never done anything,
never carved a statue,
or painted a picture,
or produced anything outside of yourself!
Life has been your art.
You have set yourself to music.
Your days have been your sonnets."
Dorian rose up from the piano,
and passed his hand through his hair.
"Yes,
life has been exquisite,"
he murmured,
"but I am not going to have the same life,
Harry.
And you must not say these extravagant things to me.
You don't know everything about me.
I think that if you did,
even you would turn from me.
You laugh.
Don't laugh."
"Why have you stopped playing,
Dorian?
Go back and play the nocturne over again.
Look at that great honey-colored moon that hangs in the dusky air.
She is waiting for you to charm her,
and if you play she will come closer to the earth.
You won't?
Let us go to the club,
then.
It has been a charming evening,
and we must end it charmingly.
There is some one at the club who wants immensely to know you,
--young Lord Poole,
Bournmouth's eldest son.
He has already copied your neckties,
and has begged me to introduce him to you.
He is quite delightful,
and rather reminds me of you."
"I hope not,"
said Dorian,
with a touch of pathos in his voice.
"But I am tired to-night,
Harry.
I won't go to the club.
It is nearly eleven,
and I want to go to bed early."
"Do stay.
You have never played so well as to-night.
There was something in your touch that was wonderful.
It had more expression than I had ever heard from it before."
"It is because I am going to be good,"
he answered,
smiling.
"I am a little changed already."
"Don't change,
Dorian;
at any rate,
don't change to me.
We must always be friends."
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once.
I should not forgive that.
Harry,
promise me that you will never lend that book to any one.
It does harm."
"My dear boy,
you are really beginning to moralize.
You will soon be going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired.
You are much too delightful to do that.
Besides,
it is no use.
You and I are what we are,
and will be what we will be.
Come round tomorrow.
I am going to ride at eleven,
and we might go together.
The Park is quite lovely now.
I don't think there have been such lilacs since the year I met you."
"Very well.
I will be here at eleven,"
said Dorian.
"Good-night,
Harry."
As he reached the door he hesitated for a moment,
as if he had something more to say.
Then he sighed and went out.
It was a lovely night,
so warm that he threw his coat over his arm,
and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat.
As he strolled [98] home,
smoking his cigarette,
two young men in evening dress passed him.
He heard one of them whisper to the other,
"That is Dorian Gray."
He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out,
or stared at,
or talked about.
He was tired of hearing his own name now.
Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was.
He had told the girl whom he had made love him that he was poor,
and she had believed him.
He had told her once that he was wicked,
and she had laughed at him,
and told him that wicked people were always very old and very ugly.
What a laugh she had!
--just like a thrush singing.
And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats!
She knew nothing,
but she had everything that he had lost.
When he reached home,
he found his servant waiting up for him.
He sent him to bed,
and threw himself down on the sofa in the library,
and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.
Was it really true that one could never change?
He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood,
--his rose-white boyhood,
as Lord Henry had once called it.
He knew that he had tarnished himself,
filled his mind with corruption,
and given horror to his fancy;
that he had been an evil influence to others,
and had experienced a terrible joy in being so;
and that of the lives that had crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame.
But was it all irretrievable?
Was there no hope for him?
It was better not to think of the past.
Nothing could alter that.
It was of himself,
and of his own future,
that he had to think.
Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory,
but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know.
The excitement,
such as it was,
over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away.
It was already waning.
He was perfectly safe there.
Nor,
indeed,
was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind.
It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.
Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life.
He could not forgive him that.
It was the portrait that had done everything.
Basil had said things to him that were unbearable,
and that he had yet borne with patience.
The murder had been simply the madness of a moment.
As for Alan Campbell,
his suicide had been his own act.
He had chosen to do it.
It was nothing to him.
A new life!
That was what he wanted.
That was what he was waiting for.
Surely he had begun it already.
He had spared one innocent thing,
at any rate.
He would never again tempt innocence.
He would be good.
As he thought of Hetty Merton,
he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed.
Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been?
Perhaps if his life became pure,
he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face.
Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away.
He would go and look.
He took the lamp from the table and crept up-stairs.
As he unlocked the door,
a smile of joy flitted across his young face and [99] lingered for a moment about his lips.
Yes,
he would be good,
and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him.
He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.
He went in quietly,
locking the door behind him,
as was his custom,
and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait.
A cry of pain and indignation broke from him.
He could see no change,
unless that in the eyes there was a look of cunning,
and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite.
The thing was still loathsome,
--more loathsome,
if possible,
than before,
--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter,
and more like blood newly spilt.
Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed?
Or the desire of a new sensation,
as Lord Henry had hinted,
with his mocking laugh?
Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?
Or,
perhaps,
all these?
Why was the red stain larger than it had been?
It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers.
There was blood on the painted feet,
as though the thing had dripped,
--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife.
Confess?
Did it mean that he was to confess?
To give himself up,
and be put to death?
He laughed.
He felt that the idea was monstrous.
Besides,
who would believe him,
even if he did confess?
There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere.
Everything belonging to him had been destroyed.
He himself had burned what had been below-stairs.
The world would simply say he was mad.
They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.
Yet it was his duty to confess,
to suffer public shame,
and to make public atonement.
There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven.
Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin.
His sin?
He shrugged his shoulders.
The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him.
He was thinking of Hetty Merton.
It was an unjust mirror,
this mirror of his soul that he was looking at.
Vanity?
Curiosity?
Hypocrisy?
Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that?
There had been something more.
At least he thought so.
But who could tell?
And this murder,
--was it to dog him all his life?
Was he never to get rid of the past?
Was he really to confess?
No. There was only one bit of evidence left against him.
The picture itself,
--that was evidence.
He would destroy it.
Why had he kept it so long?
It had given him pleasure once to watch it changing and growing old.
Of late he had felt no such pleasure.
It had kept him awake at night.
When he had been away,
he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it.
It had brought melancholy across his passions.
Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy.
It had been like conscience to him.
Yes,
it had been conscience.
He would destroy it.
He looked round,
and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.
He had cleaned it many times,
till there was no stain left upon it.
It was bright,
and glistened.
As it had killed the painter,
so it [100] would kill the painter's work,
and all that that meant.
It would kill the past,
and when that was dead he would be free.
He seized it,
and stabbed the canvas with it,
ripping the thing right up from top to bottom.
There was a cry heard,
and a crash.
The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke,
and crept out of their rooms.
Two gentlemen,
who were passing in the Square below,
stopped,
and looked up at the great house.
They walked on till they met a policeman,
and brought him back.
The man rang the bell several times,
but there was no answer.
The house was all dark,
except for a light in one of the top windows.
After a time,
he went away,
and stood in the portico of the next house and watched.
"Whose house is that,
constable?"
asked the elder of the two gentlemen.
"Mr. Dorian Gray's,
sir,"
answered the policeman.
They looked at each other,
as they walked away,
and sneered.
One of them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.
Inside,
in the servants' part of the house,
the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other.
Old Mrs. Leaf was crying,
and wringing her hands.
Francis was as pale as death.
After about a quarter of an hour,
he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept up-stairs.
They knocked,
but there was no reply.
They called out.
Everything was still.
Finally,
after vainly trying to force the door,
they got on the roof,
and dropped down on to the balcony.
The windows yielded easily: the bolts were old.
When they entered,
they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him,
in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty.
Lying on the floor was a dead man,
in evening dress,
with a knife in his heart.
He was withered,
wrinkled,
and loathsome of visage.
It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.