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Chapter 9


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 Gray, 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 talk about a thing, it has never happened.
It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.
I may mention that she was not the woman's only child.  There is
a son, a charming fellow, I believe.  But he is not on the stage.
He is a sailor, or something.  And now, 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, day after day,
used to come down to my studio 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 for
a few moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden.
"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 paint," said the artist sadly.

"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."

The elder man buried his face in his hands.  "How fearful,"
he muttered, and a shudder ran through him.

"No," said Dorian Gray, "there is nothing fearful about it.
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 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 Marlow 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 schoolboy 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."

The painter felt strangely moved.  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 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 Sibyl, 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 can never sit to you again, Basil.  It is impossible!"
he exclaimed, starting back.

The painter 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 done.
Do take the screen away, Dorian.  It is simply disgraceful
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!  Surely not, 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 the painter 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 honour 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 actually pallid with rage.  His hands were clenched,
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 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 Seze, 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 keep 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 cried.
"Why have you changed your mind?  You people who go in for being consistent
have just as many moods as others have.  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 a strange 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 shall tell you mine.  What was your reason for refusing
to exhibit my picture?"

The painter 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," insisted 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 the painter, looking troubled.
"Let us sit down.  And just answer me one question.
Have you noticed in the picture something curious?--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.
Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most
extraordinary influence over me.  I was dominated, soul, brain, and power,
by you.  You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen
ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.
I worshipped you.  I grew 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 you were away from me, you were still present
in my art.... Of course, I never let you know anything about this.
It would have been impossible.  You would not have understood it.
I hardly understood it myself.  I only knew that I had seen perfection
face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--
too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril,
the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them....
Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you.
Then came a new development.  I had drawn you as Paris in
dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished
boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on
the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile.
You had leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland and seen
in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own face.
And it had all been what art should be--unconscious, ideal, and remote.
One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint
a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume
of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time.
Whether it was the realism of the method, or the mere wonder
of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without
mist or veil, I cannot tell.  But I know that as I worked at it,
every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret.
I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry.  I felt, Dorian,
that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.
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 thing 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 seen 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 always more abstract than we fancy.  Form and colour tell
us of form and colour--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 cannot 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 colour 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 painter who had just made this strange
confession to him, and wondered if he himself would ever
be so dominated by the personality of a friend.  Lord Henry
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 portrait.  Did you really see it?"

"I saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed
to me very curious."

"Well, you don't mind my looking at the thing 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?"

"Never."

"Well, perhaps you are right.  And now good-bye, Dorian.
You have been the one person in my life who has really influenced
my art.  Whatever I have done that is good, I owe to you.
Ah! you don't know what it cost me to tell you all that I have
told you."

"My dear Basil," said Dorian, "what have you told me?
Simply that you felt that you admired me too much.
That is not even a compliment."

"It was not intended as a compliment.  It was a confession.
Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me.
Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."

"It was a very disappointing confession."

"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 worship.  It is foolish.  You and I
are friends, Basil, and we must always remain so."

"You have got Harry," said the painter 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 were in trouble.
I would sooner go to you, Basil."

"You will 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.
There is something fatal about a portrait.  It has a life of its own.
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-bye. 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!
The painter's absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion,
his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences--
he understood them all now, and he felt sorry.  There seemed
to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured
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 allowed the thing to remain,
even for an hour, in a room to which any of his friends
had access.
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Variety is the spice of life

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Chapter 10


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 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 house-keeper that he wanted
to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker and ask him to send two of his
men round at once.  It seemed to him that as the man left the room his eyes
wandered in the direction of the screen.  Or was that merely his own fancy?

After a few moments, in her black silk dress, with old-fashioned thread
mittens on her wrinkled hands, Mrs. Leaf bustled into the library.
He asked her for the key of the schoolroom.

"The old schoolroom, Mr. Dorian?" she exclaimed.  "Why, it is full of dust.
I must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it.  It is not fit
for you to see, sir.  It is not, indeed."

"I don't want it put straight, Leaf.  I only want the key."

"Well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it.  Why, it hasn't
been opened for nearly five years--not since his lordship died."

He winced at the mention of his grandfather.  He had hateful memories of him.
"That does not matter," he answered.  "I simply want to see the place--
that is all.  Give me the key."

"And here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over
the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands.
"Here is the key.  I'll have it off the bunch in a moment.
But you don't think of living up there, sir, and you so
comfortable here?"

"No, no," he cried petulantly.  "Thank you, Leaf.  That will do."

She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail
of the household.  He sighed and told her to manage things as she
thought best.  She left the room, wreathed in smiles.

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 grandfather 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 nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual.
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 Michelangelo 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 judgement.  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. Hubbard himself,
the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street, came in with a
somewhat rough-looking young assistant.  Mr. Hubbard was a florid,
red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was considerably 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 favour 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 honour 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 subject,
Mr. Gray."

"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round,
Mr. Hubbard.  I shall certainly drop in and look at the frame--
though I don't go in much at present 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 upstairs."

"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. Hubbard, 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. Hubbard, who had the true tradesman's spirited 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.

"I am afraid it is rather heavy," 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 Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange
likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always
hated and desired to keep at a distance.  It appeared to Dorian
to have but little 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 the satinwood book-case filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks.
On the wall behind it was hanging the same 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 remembered it all!  Every moment
of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round.
He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible
to him that it was here 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.  Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing
upon the canvas was growing old.  It might escape the hideousness
of sin, but 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 grandfather 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. Hubbard, 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. Hubbard,"
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 shan'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. Hubbard tramped downstairs, 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
the door and put the key in his pocket.  He felt safe now.
No one would ever look upon 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 Lady Radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty
professional invalid 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 set back, and a blank space was visible on the wall.
Perhaps some night he might find him creeping upstairs 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 shred 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.  It drew attention to 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, and tearing the paper in two, went across
the room and flung the pieces away.  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 report.
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-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him
like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver,
and taking up the volume, 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 that 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 Symbolistes.
There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour.
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 odour 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 reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him
unconscious of the falling day and 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 much 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 how the time
was going."

"Yes, 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, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry.
And they passed into the dining-room.
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Chapter 11


For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence
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 nine large-paper copies of the first edition,
and had them bound in different colours, 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
and the scientific temperaments 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 novel'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 beau 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 overemphasized, account of the sorrow
and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world,
he had most dearly valued.

For the wonderful 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 rumours about his mode of life
crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs--
could not believe anything to his dishonour 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 memory of 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 sensual.

Often, 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,
he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door
with the key that never left him now, 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 sometimes with a monstrous
and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling
forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, 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 which 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 be of the company of 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 from time
to time he affected, 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 once had 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 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 themselves,
and that they 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 out the anchorite to feed 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 recreate 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 us 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 reverie.  Gradually white
fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble.
In black fantastic shapes, dumb 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 and yet must needs call forth sleep from
her purple cave.  Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms and colours 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 had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut 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 refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure,
a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours,
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 amongst 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 colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference
that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
of it.

It was rumoured 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 watch the priest,
in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving
aside the veil of the tabernacle, or 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 worn
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 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 spiritual 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 gipsies 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 and, crouching upon scarlet mats,
slim turbaned Indians 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 Chile,
and the sonorous green jaspers 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 ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by
the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard,
it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that 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 "Tannhauser" and seeing
in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of
his own soul.

On one 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.
This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said
never to have left him.  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 wirelike line of silver,
the pistachio-coloured 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 colour, 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,
the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan
snakes "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 colour.
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
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 the queen one could behold "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 seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured
pearls in the mouths 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 its 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 to a certain Venetian
a rosary of three 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 Brantome,
and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.
Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four 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 favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.
Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded
with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a
skull-cap parseme with pearls.  Henry II wore jewelled gloves reaching
to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two
great orients.  The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke
of Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studded
with sapphires.

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 frescoes 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
flowerlike bloom.  How different it was with material things!
Where had they passed to?  Where was the great crocus-coloured robe,
on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena?  Where the huge
velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome,
that Titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky,
and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined steeds?
He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest
of the Sun, 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, of 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 Medicis 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 beneath the tremulous gilt of its
canopy.

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-thread 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-lis, 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 possessed 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-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 coloured 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 coloured 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-coloured 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-lis; altar frontals
of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals,
chalice-veils, and sudaria.  In the mystic offices to which
such things were put, there was something that quickened
his imagination.

For these treasures, 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 in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall 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
absorption 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 her times, with that pride of individualism
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 they
had more than once spent the winter.  He hated to be separated from
the picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid
that during his absence some one might gain access to the room,
in spite of the elaborate 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 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 splendour 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 very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth
and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it
was said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into
the smoking-room of the Churchill, 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 rumoured 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 though 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 termed them, that were circulated about him.
It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been
most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun 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 increased 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 fascinating.  It feels instinctively that
manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion,
the highest respectability is of much less value 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 half-cold entrees,
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
delightful to us.  Is insincerity such a 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 the mad prayer that had so changed
his life?  Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat,
and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
with his silver-and-black armour 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?  These 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 Beckenham, 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!
And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist,
wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got from her.
He had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty
of others.  She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress.
There were vine leaves in her hair.  The purple spilled
from the cup she was holding.  The carnations of the painting
had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth
and brilliancy of colour.  They seemed to follow him wherever he
went.

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 were times when it appeared 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 subtlety.  It seemed to him that in some mysterious
way their lives had been his own.

The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy.  In the seventh chapter 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 terrible
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 colours, 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 two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some
curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, 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
that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled;
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 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 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 honour 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, when his brain had sickened and grown strange,
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 acanthuslike 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.
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Chapter 12


It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth 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 grey ulster turned up.
He had a bag in his hand.  Dorian 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 quickly in the direction of his
own house.

But Hallward had seen him.  Dorian heard him first stopping
on the pavement 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 in your library ever since nine o'clock. 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 particularly wanted 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 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 lamplight 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 marqueterie table.

"You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian.  He gave me
everything I wanted, including your best gold-tipped 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 Radley's maid,
and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.  Anglomania 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 the painter,
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.

"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 against you in London."

"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
rumours 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 sometimes of secret vices.
There are no such things.  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 or invite
you to theirs?  You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley.
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.  Staveley 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 fatal 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's 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?"

"Stop, Basil.  You are talking about things of which you know nothing,"
said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt
in his voice.  "You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.
It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows
anything about mine.  With such blood as he has in his veins, how could
his record be clean?  You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.
Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?
If Kent's silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me?
If Adrian Singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am I his keeper?
I know how people chatter in England.  The middle classes air their moral
prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they
call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend
that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people
they slander.  In this country, it is enough for a man to have
distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral,
lead themselves?  My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land
of the hypocrite."

"Dorian," cried Hallward, "that is not the question.
England is bad enough I know, and English society is all wrong.
That is the reason why I want you to be fine.  You have not
been fine.  One has a right to judge of a man by the effect
he has over his friends.  Yours seem to lose all sense of honour,
of goodness, of purity.  You have filled them with a madness
for pleasure.  They have gone down into the depths.
You led them there.  Yes:  you led them there, and yet you
can smile, as you are smiling now.  And there is worse behind.
I know you and Harry are inseparable.  Surely for that reason,
if for none other, you should not have made his sister's name
a by-word."

"Take care, Basil.  You go too far."

"I must speak, and you must listen.  You shall listen.
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 began by saying that,
and then proceeded to break 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 with whom you become intimate,
and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house
for shame of some kind to follow after.  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 deep-toned 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 would 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 shall show you my soul.  You shall see
the thing that you fancy only God can see."

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 a stanch friend to you."

"Don't touch me.  Finish what you have to say."

A twisted flash of pain shot across the painter'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 rumoured about him,
how much he must have suffered!  Then he straightened himself up,
and walked over to the fire-place, and stood there, looking at
the burning logs with their frostlike 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 shall 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 bad, and corrupt,
and shameful."

Dorian Gray smiled.  There was a curl of contempt in his lips.
"Come upstairs, 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 shall show it to you if you come with me."

"I shall 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 shall be given to you upstairs.  I could not give it here.
You will not have to read long."
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Chapter 13


He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward following
close behind.  They walked softly, as men do instinctively 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 answered, smiling.  Then he added,
somewhat harshly, "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 whispered,
as he placed the lamp on the table.

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 book-case--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 mantelshelf, 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 odour
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 the painter's lips as he saw
in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning 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 spoiled that marvellous beauty.  There was still some
gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth.
The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue,
the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled
nostrils and from plastic throat.  Yes, it was Dorian himself.
But who had done it?  He seemed to recognize his own brushwork,
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
in a moment from fire to sluggish ice.  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 mantelshelf, watching him
with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those
who are absorbed in a play when some 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 his 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, crushing the flower
in his hand, "you met 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, even now, I don't know 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.  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 ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.

"My ideal, as you call it.  . ."

"As you called it."

"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful.  You were to me such
an ideal as I shall never meet again.  This is the face of a satyr."

"It is the face of my soul."

"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped!  It 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 faltered.

"It is never too late, Dorian.  Let us kneel down and try if we
cannot remember a prayer.  Isn't there a verse somewhere,
'Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white
as snow'?"

"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, as though
it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas,
whispered into his ear by those grinning lips.  The mad
passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed
the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole
life he had ever loathed anything.  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 stirred 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.  Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively,
waving grotesque, stiff-fingered hands in the air.  He stabbed him twice 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
absolutely quiet.  No one was about.  For a few seconds he stood
bending over the balustrade and peering down into the black seething
well of darkness.  Then 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 was slowly widening 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 the long
beam of his 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 fluttering shawl was creeping slowly 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 to and fro.  He shivered and went back, closing the window
behind him.

Having reached the door, he 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 the fatal 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, and studded with coarse turquoises.
Perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would
be asked.  He hesitated for a moment, then he turned back and took
it from the table.  He could not help seeing the dead thing.
How still it was!  How horribly white the long hands looked!
It was like a dreadful wax image.

Having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs.
The woodwork 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, a press in which he kept his own curious disguises,
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.  . . . And yet, 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, and by the midnight train, as he had intended.
With his curious reserved habits, it would be months before any
suspicions would be roused.  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 on the pavement outside and
seeing the flash of the bull's-eye reflected in the window.
He waited and held his breath.

After a few moments he drew back the latch and slipped out,
shutting the door very gently behind him.  Then he began
ringing the bell.  In about five 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?"

"Ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock
and blinking.

"Ten 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 from Paris,
if he did not find you at the club."

"That will do, Francis.  Don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow."

"No, sir."

The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.

Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed
into the library.  For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down
the room, biting his lip and thinking.  Then he took down the Blue
Book 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.
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Chapter 14


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 lost in 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 upon his elbow, began to sip his chocolate.
The mellow November sun came streaming into the room.  The sky was bright,
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.

When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead,
and then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his
usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie
and scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once.  He spent a long
time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his
valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made
for the servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence.
At 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.

After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his
lips slowly with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait,
and going over to the table, sat down 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 first flowers and bits of architecture,
and then human faces.  Suddenly he remarked that every face that
he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward.
He frowned, and getting up, went over to the book-case and took
out a volume at hazard.  He was determined that he would not think
about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that
he should 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 Camees,
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 lavee,"
with its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune."  He glanced
at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite
of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas
upon Venice:

     Sur une gamme chromatique,
       Le sein de peries ruisselant,
     La Venus de l'Adriatique
       Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

     Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
       Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
     S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
       Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

     L'esquif aborde et me depose,
       Jetant son amarre au pilier,
     Devant une facade 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,
seated 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 colour reminded him of the gleam of
the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall
honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace,
through the dim, dust-stained arcades.  Leaning back with
half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself:

     "Devant une facade rose,
        Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

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 mad delightful follies.  There was romance in every place.
But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and,
to the true romantic, 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 volume again, and tried to forget.
He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little
cafe 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; he read 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;
he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music
from kiss-stained marble, tell 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 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, 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 Dorian Gray was waiting for.  Every second
he kept glancing at the clock.  As the minutes went by he became
horribly agitated.  At last he got up and began to pace up
and down the room, looking like a beautiful caged thing.
He took long stealthy strides.  His hands were curiously cold.

The suspense became unbearable.  Time seemed to him to be crawling
with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards
the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice.  He knew what was
waiting for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank
hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain
of sight and driven the eyeballs back into their cave.  It was useless.
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Then, suddenly, time stopped for him.  Yes:  that blind, slow-breathing thing
crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on
in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him.
He stared at it.  Its very horror made him stone.

At last the door opened and his servant entered.  He turned
glazed eyes upon him.

"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.

A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came
back to his cheeks.

"Ask him to come in at once, Francis."  He felt that he was himself again.
His mood of cowardice had passed away.

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 seemed
not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.

"Yes:  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 him 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 scientific.
You know about chemistry and things of that kind.  You have made experiments.
What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs--
to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left.  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 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, without
my stirring in the matter, you are certain to be arrested.
Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
But I will have nothing to do with it."

"You must have something to do with it.  Wait, wait a moment;
listen to me.  Only listen, Alan.  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 for the blood to flow through, 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 merely what you have often done before.
Indeed, to destroy a body must be far 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."

"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.
You may know terror yourself some day.  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 upstairs 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 absolutely refuse
to do anything in the matter.  It is insane of you to ask me."

"You refuse?"

"Yes."

"I entreat you, Alan."

"It is useless."

The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray'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 for you, 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.
If you don't help me, I will 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 mantelpiece 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, 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."

"I cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter things.

"You must.  You have no choice.  Don't delay."

He hesitated a moment.  "Is there a fire in the room upstairs?"

"Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos."

"I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."

"No, Alan, you must not leave the house.  Write out on a sheet
of notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab
and bring the things back to you."

Campbell scrawled 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.

As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up
from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with
a kind 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 round, 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 large mahogany chest of chemicals, 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.

"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 his portrait leering in the sunlight.  On the floor in front
of it the torn curtain was lying.  He remembered that the night
before he had forgotten, for the first time in his life,
to hide the fatal canvas, and was about to rush forward,
when he drew back with a shudder.

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 heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider,
and with half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in,
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 right over the picture.

There 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 a stern voice behind him.

He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man
had been thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing
into a glistening yellow face.  As he was going downstairs,
he heard the key being turned in the lock.

It was long after seven 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-bye. 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 upstairs.  There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room.  But the thing that had been sitting
at the table was gone.
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Chapter 15


That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants.  His forehead was throbbing
with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner
as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever.
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed
that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age.
Those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin,
nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness.  He himself
could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment
felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough,
who was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe
as the remains of really remarkable ugliness.  She had proved
an excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having
buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she
had herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich,
rather elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures
of French fiction, French cookery, and French esprit when she could
get it.

Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him
that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life.
"I know, my dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you,"
she used to say, "and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake.
It is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time.
As it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were
so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that I never had even a
flirtation with anybody.  However, that was all Narborough's fault.
He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking
in a husband who never sees anything."

Her guests this evening were rather tedious.  The fact was,
as she explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan,
one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay
with her, and, to make matters worse, had actually brought her
husband with her.  "I think it is most unkind of her, my dear,"
she whispered.  "Of course I go and stay with them every summer
after I come from Homburg, but then an old woman like me must
have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them up.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there.
It is pure unadulterated country life.  They get up early,
because they have so much to do, and go to bed early,
because they have so little to think about.  There has not been
a scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of Queen Elizabeth,
and consequently they all fall asleep after dinner.
You shan't sit next either of them.  You shall sit by me and
amuse me."

Dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round
the room.  Yes:  it was certainly a tedious party.
Two of the people he had never seen before, and the others
consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those middle-aged
mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies,
but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; Lady Ruxton,
an overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose,
who was always trying to get herself compromised, but was
so peculiarly plain that to her great disappointment no
one would ever believe anything against her; Mrs. Erlynne,
a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp and Venetian-red hair;
Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy dull girl,
with one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen,
are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked,
white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class,
was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for
an entire lack of ideas.

He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough,
looking at the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy
curves on the mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed:  "How horrid
of Henry Wotton to be so late!  I sent round to him this morning
on chance and he promised faithfully not to disappoint me."

It was some consolation that Harry was to be there, and when the door opened
and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some insincere apology,
he ceased to feel bored.

But at dinner he could not eat anything.  Plate after plate went
away untasted.  Lady Narborough kept scolding him for what she
called "an insult to poor Adolphe, who invented the menu
specially for you," and now and then Lord Henry looked across
at him, wondering at his silence and abstracted manner.
From time to time the butler filled his glass with champagne.
He drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase.

"Dorian," said Lord Henry at last, as the chaud-froid was being handed round,
"what is the matter with you to-night? You are quite out of sorts."

"I believe he is in love," cried Lady Narborough, "and that he is
afraid to tell me for fear I should be jealous.  He is quite right.
I certainly should."

"Dear Lady Narborough," murmured Dorian, smiling, "I have not been in love
for a whole week--not, in fact, since Madame de Ferrol left town."

"How you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old lady.
"I really cannot understand it."

"It is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl,
Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry.  "She is the one link between us
and your short frocks."

"She does not remember my short frocks at all, Lord Henry.
But I remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago,
and how decolletee she was then."

"She is still decolletee," he answered, taking an olive in his long fingers;
"and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an edition de luxe
of a bad French novel.  She is really wonderful, and full of surprises.
Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary.  When her third husband
died, her hair turned quite gold from grief."

"How can you, Harry!" cried Dorian.

"It is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess.
"But her third husband, Lord Henry!  You don't mean to say Ferrol
is the fourth?"

"Certainly, Lady Narborough."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"Well, ask Mr. Gray.  He is one of her most intimate friends."

"Is it true, Mr. Gray?"

"She assures me so, Lady Narborough," said Dorian.  "I asked her whether,
like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and hung at
her girdle.  She told me she didn't, because none of them had had any
hearts at all."

"Four husbands!  Upon my word that is trop de zele."

"Trop d'audace, I tell her," said Dorian.

"Oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear.  And what is Ferrol like?
I don't know him."

"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,"
said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.

Lady Narborough hit him with her fan.  "Lord Henry, I am not at all surprised
that the world says that you are extremely wicked."

"But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows.
"It can only be the next world.  This world and I are on excellent terms."

"Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady,
shaking her head.

Lord Henry looked serious for some moments.  "It is perfectly monstrous,"
he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying things against one
behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."

"Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair.

"I hope so," said his hostess, laughing.  "But really,
if you all worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way,
I shall have to marry again so as to be in the fashion."

"You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord Henry.
"You were far too happy.  When a woman marries again, it is
because she detested her first husband.  When a man marries again,
it is because he adored his first wife.  Women try their luck;
men risk theirs."

"Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady.

"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady,"
was the rejoinder.  "Women love us for our defects.
If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything,
even our intellects.  You will never ask me to dinner again
after saying this, I am afraid, Lady Narborough, but it is
quite true."

"Of course it is true, Lord Henry.  If we women did not love you for
your defects, where would you all be?  Not one of you would ever be married.
You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors.  Not, however, that that
would alter you much.  Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors,
and all the bachelors like married men."

"Fin de siecle," murmured Lord Henry.

"Fin du globe," answered his hostess.

"I wish it were fin du globe," said Dorian with a sigh.
"Life is a great disappointment."

"Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves,
"don't tell me that you have exhausted life.  When a man says that
one knows that life has exhausted him.  Lord Henry is very wicked,
and I sometimes wish that I had been; but you are made to be good--
you look so good.  I must find you a nice wife.  Lord Henry, don't you
think that Mr. Gray should get married?"

"I am always telling him so, Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry with a bow.

"Well, we must look out for a suitable match for him.
I shall go through Debrett carefully to-night and draw out a list
of all the eligible young ladies."

"With their ages, Lady Narborough?" asked Dorian.

"Of course, with their ages, slightly edited.  But nothing must be done
in a hurry.  I want it to be what The Morning Post calls a suitable alliance,
and I want you both to be happy."

"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry.
"A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."

"Ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair
and nodding to Lady Ruxton.  "You must come and dine with me soon again.
You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what Sir Andrew prescribes
for me.  You must tell me what people you would like to meet, though.  I want
it to be a delightful gathering."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past," he answered.
"Or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?"

"I fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up.  "A thousand pardons,
my dear Lady Ruxton," she added, "I didn't see you hadn't finished
your cigarette."

"Never mind, Lady Narborough.  I smoke a great deal too much.
I am going to limit myself, for the future."

"Pray don't, Lady Ruxton," said Lord Henry.  "Moderation is a fatal thing.
Enough is as bad as a meal.  More than enough is as good as a feast."

Lady Ruxton glanced at him curiously.  "You must come and explain that to me
some afternoon, Lord Henry.  It sounds a fascinating theory," she murmured,
as she swept out of the room.

"Now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal,"
cried Lady Narborough from the door.  "If you do, we are sure to
squabble upstairs."

The men laughed, and Mr. Chapman got up solemnly
from the foot of the table and came up to the top.
Dorian Gray changed his seat and went and sat by Lord Henry.
Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about the situation
in the House of Commons.  He guffawed at his adversaries.
The word doctrinaire--word full of terror to the British mind--
reappeared from time to time between his explosions.
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.
He hoisted the Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought.
The inherited stupidity of the race--sound English common sense
he jovially termed it--was shown to be the proper bulwark
for society.

A smile curved Lord Henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at Dorian.

"Are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked.  "You seemed rather
out of sorts at dinner."

"I am quite well, Harry.  I am tired.  That is all."

"You were charming last night.  The little duchess is quite devoted to you.
She tells me she is going down to Selby."

"She has promised to come on the twentieth."

"Is Monmouth to be there, too?"

"Oh, yes, Harry."

"He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her.  She is very clever,
too clever for a woman.  She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.  Her feet
are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay.  White porcelain feet,
if you like.  They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy,
it hardens.  She has had experiences."

"How long has she been married?" asked Dorian.

"An eternity, she tells me.  I believe, according to the peerage,
it is ten years, but ten years with Monmouth must have been like eternity,
with time thrown in.  Who else is coming?"

"Oh, the Willoughbys, Lord Rugby and his wife, our hostess,
Geoffrey Clouston, the usual set.  I have asked Lord Grotrian."

"I like him," said Lord Henry.  "A great many people don't, but I find
him charming.  He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed
by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type."

"I don't know if he will be able to come, Harry.  He may have to go to Monte
Carlo with his father."

"Ah! what a nuisance people's people are!  Try and make him come.
By the way, Dorian, you ran off very early last night.
You left before eleven.  What did you do afterwards?  Did you go
straight home?"

Dorian glanced at him hurriedly and frowned.

"No, Harry," he said at last, "I did not get home till nearly three."

"Did you go to the club?"

"Yes," he answered.  Then he bit his lip.  "No, I don't mean that.
I didn't go to the club.  I walked about.  I forget what I did.
. . . How inquisitive you are, Harry!  You always want to know what
one has been doing.  I always want to forget what I have been doing.
I came in at half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time.
I had left my latch-key at home, and my servant had to let me in.
If you want any corroborative evidence on the subject, you can ask
him."

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "My dear fellow, as if I cared!
Let us go up to the drawing-room. No sherry, thank you, Mr. Chapman.
Something has happened to you, Dorian.  Tell me what it is.
You are not yourself to-night."

"Don't mind me, Harry.  I am irritable, and out of temper.
I shall come round and see you to-morrow, or next day.
Make my excuses to Lady Narborough.  I shan't go upstairs.
I shall go home.  I must go home."

"All right, Dorian.  I dare say I shall see you to-morrow at tea-time.
The duchess is coming."

"I will try to be there, Harry," he said, leaving the room.
As he drove back to his own house, he was conscious that the sense
of terror he thought he had strangled had come back to him.
Lord Henry's casual questioning had made him lose his
nerves for the moment, and he wanted his nerve still.
Things that were dangerous had to be destroyed.  He winced.
He hated the idea of even touching them.

Yet it had to be done.  He realized that, and when he had
locked the door of his library, he opened the secret press
into which he had thrust Basil Hallward's coat and bag.
A huge fire was blazing.  He piled another log on it.
The smell of the singeing clothes and burning leather was horrible.
It took him three-quarters of an hour to consume everything.
At the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some Algerian
pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and
forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar.

Suddenly he started.  His eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed
nervously at his underlip.  Between two of the windows stood a large
Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony and inlaid with ivory and blue lapis.
He watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate and make afraid,
as though it held something that he longed for and yet almost loathed.
His breath quickened.  A mad craving came over him.  He lit a cigarette
and then threw it away.  His eyelids drooped till the long fringed
lashes almost touched his cheek.  But he still watched the cabinet.
At last he got up from the sofa on which he had been lying,
went over to it, and having unlocked it, touched some hidden spring.
A triangular drawer passed slowly out.  His fingers moved instinctively
towards it, dipped in, and closed on something.  It was a small
Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought,
the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with
round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads.  He opened it.
Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy
and persistent.

He hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his face.
Then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly hot, he drew
himself up and glanced at the clock.  It was twenty minutes to twelve.
He put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as he did so, and went into
his bedroom.

As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian Gray,
dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat,
crept quietly out of his house.  In Bond Street he found a hansom
with a good horse.  He hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver
an address.

The man shook his head.  "It is too far for me," he muttered.

"Here is a sovereign for you," said Dorian.  "You shall have another if you
drive fast."

"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour,"
and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove
rapidly towards the river.
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Chapter 16


A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly
in the dripping mist.  The public-houses were just closing, and dim
men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors.
From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter.  In others,
drunkards brawled and screamed.

Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead,
Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame
of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself
the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day
they had met, "To cure the soul by means of the senses,
and the senses by means of the soul."  Yes, that was the secret.
He had often tried it, and would try it again now.
There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror
where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness
of sins that were new.

The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull.  From time to time
a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.
The gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy.
Once the man lost his way and had to drive back half a mile.
A steam rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles.
The sidewindows of the hansom were clogged with a grey-flannel mist.

"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses
by means of the soul!"  How the words rang in his ears!
His soul, certainly, was sick to death.  Was it true that
the senses could cure it?  Innocent blood had been spilled.
What could atone for that?  Ah! for that there was no atonement;
but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was
possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp
the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that
had stung one.  Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken
to him as he had done?  Who had made him a judge over others?
He had said things that were dreadful, horrible, not to
be endured.

On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him,
at each step.  He thrust up the trap and called to the man
to drive faster.  The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw
at him.  His throat burned and his delicate hands twitched
nervously together.  He struck at the horse madly with his stick.
The driver laughed and whipped up.  He laughed in answer,
and the man was silent.

The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black
web of some sprawling spider.  The monotony became unbearable,
and as the mist thickened, he felt afraid.

Then they passed by lonely brickfields.  The fog was lighter here,
and he could see the strange, bottle-shaped kilns with their orange,
fanlike tongues of fire.  A dog barked as they went by,
and far away in the darkness some wandering sea-gull screamed.
The horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside and broke into
a gallop.

After some time they left the clay road and rattled again
over rough-paven streets.  Most of the windows were dark,
but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against
some lamplit blind.  He watched them curiously.  They moved
like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things.
He hated them.  A dull rage was in his heart.  As they turned
a corner, a woman yelled something at them from an open door,
and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards.
The driver beat at them with his whip.

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.
Certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray
shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul
and sense, till he had found in them the full expression,
as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval,
passions that without such justification would still have
dominated his temper.  From cell to cell of his brain crept
the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible
of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling
nerve and fibre.  Ugliness that had once been hateful
to him because it made things real, became dear to him
now for that very reason.  Ugliness was the one reality.
The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence
of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast,
were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression,
than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song.
They were what he needed for forgetfulness.  In three days he would
be free.

Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane.
Over the low roofs and jagged chimney-stacks of the houses rose
the black masts of ships.  Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly
sails to the yards.

"Somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through the trap.

Dorian started and peered round.  "This will do," he answered,
and having got out hastily and given the driver the extra fare
he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay.
Here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman.
The light shook and splintered in the puddles.  A red glare came from
an outward-bound steamer that was coaling.  The slimy pavement looked
like a wet mackintosh.

He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see
if he was being followed.  In about seven or eight minutes he reached
a small shabby house that was wedged in between two gaunt factories.
In one of the top-windows stood a lamp.  He stopped and gave a
peculiar knock.

After a little time he heard steps in the passage and the chain
being unhooked.  The door opened quietly, and he went in without
saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened
itself into the shadow as he passed.  At the end of the hall
hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in
the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street.
He dragged it aside and entered a long low room which looked
as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. Shrill
flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the fly-blown mirrors
that faced them, were ranged round the walls.  Greasy reflectors
of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering disks of light.
The floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here
and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor.
Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with
bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered.
In one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled
over a table, and by the tawdrily painted bar that ran across one
complete side stood two haggard women, mocking an old man who was
brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust.
"He thinks he's got red ants on him," laughed one of them,
as Dorian passed by.  The man looked at her in terror and began
to whimper.

At the end of the room there was a little staircase,
leading to a darkened chamber.  As Dorian hurried up its
three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him.
He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure.
When he entered, a young man with smooth yellow hair, who was
bending over a lamp lighting a long thin pipe, looked up at him
and nodded in a hesitating manner.

"You here, Adrian?" muttered Dorian.

"Where else should I be?" he answered, listlessly.  "None of the chaps
will speak to me now."

"I thought you had left England."

"Darlington is not going to do anything.  My brother paid the bill at last.
George doesn't speak to me either.  . . . I don't care," he added
with a sigh.  "As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends.
I think I have had too many friends."

Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that
lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses.
The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes,
fascinated him.  He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering,
and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy.
They were better off than he was.  He was prisoned in thought.
Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.  From time
to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him.
Yet he felt he could not stay.  The presence of Adrian Singleton
troubled him.  He wanted to be where no one would know who he was.
He wanted to escape from himself.

"I am going on to the other place," he said after a pause.

"On the wharf?"

"Yes."

"That mad-cat is sure to be there.  They won't have her in this place now."

Dorian shrugged his shoulders.  "I am sick of women who love one.
Women who hate one are much more interesting.  Besides, the stuff
is better."

"Much the same."

"I like it better.  Come and have something to drink.
I must have something."

"I don't want anything," murmured the young man.

"Never mind."

Adrian Singleton rose up wearily and followed Dorian to the bar.
A half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a
hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers
in front of them.  The women sidled up and began to chatter.
Dorian turned his back on them and said something in a low voice to
Adrian Singleton.

A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one
of the women.  "We are very proud to-night," she sneered.

"For God's sake don't talk to me," cried Dorian, stamping his
foot on the ground.  "What do you want?  Money?  Here it is.
Don't ever talk to me again."

Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes,
then flickered out and left them dull and glazed.  She tossed
her head and raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers.
Her companion watched her enviously.

"It's no use," sighed Adrian Singleton.  "I don't care to go back.
What does it matter?  I am quite happy here."

"You will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said Dorian,
after a pause.

"Perhaps."

"Good night, then."

"Good night," answered the young man, passing up the steps and wiping
his parched mouth with a handkerchief.

Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face.
As he drew the curtain aside, a hideous laugh broke from
the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money.
"There goes the devil's bargain!" she hiccoughed, in a
hoarse voice.

"Curse you!" he answered, "don't call me that."

She snapped her fingers.  "Prince Charming is what you like to be called,
ain't it?" she yelled after him.

The drowsy sailor leaped to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly round.
The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear.  He rushed out as
if in pursuit.

Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain.
His meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered
if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door,
as Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult.
He bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad.
Yet, after all, what did it matter to him?  One's days were too
brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders.
Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.
The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.
One had to pay over and over again, indeed.  In her dealings with man,
destiny never closed her accounts.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for
what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body,
as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.
Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will.  They move
to their terrible end as automatons move.  Choice is taken from them,
and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give
rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm.  For all sins,
as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience.
When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was
as a rebel that he fell.

Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul
hungry for rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his
step as he went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway,
that had served him often as a short cut to the ill-famed place
where he was going, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind,
and before he had time to defend himself, he was thrust back
against the wall, with a brutal hand round his throat.

He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched
the tightening fingers away.  In a second he heard the click
of a revolver, and saw the gleam of a polished barrel,
pointing straight at his head, and the dusky form of a short,
thick-set man facing him.

"What do you want?" he gasped.

"Keep quiet," said the man.  "If you stir, I shoot you."

"You are mad.  What have I done to you?"

"You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," was the answer,
"and Sibyl Vane was my sister.  She killed herself.  I know it.
Her death is at your door.  I swore I would kill you in return.
For years I have sought you.  I had no clue, no trace.
The two people who could have described you were dead.
I knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call you.
I heard it to-night by chance.  Make your peace with God,
for to-night you are going to die."

Dorian Gray grew sick with fear.  "I never knew her," he stammered.
"I never heard of her.  You are mad."

"You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane,
you are going to die."  There was a horrible moment.  Dorian did
not know what to say or do.  "Down on your knees!" growled the man.
"I give you one minute to make your peace--no more.  I go on board
to-night for India, and I must do my job first.  One minute.
That's all."

Dorian's arms fell to his side.  Paralysed with terror, he did not
know what to do.  Suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain.
"Stop," he cried.  "How long ago is it since your sister died?
Quick, tell me!"

"Eighteen years," said the man.  "Why do you ask me?
What do years matter?"

"Eighteen years," laughed Dorian Gray, with a touch of triumph in his voice.
"Eighteen years!  Set me under the lamp and look at my face!"

James Vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant.
Then he seized Dorian Gray and dragged him from the archway.

Dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to show
him the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen,
for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom
of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth.  He seemed little more
than a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all,
than his sister had been when they had parted so many years ago.
It was obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed
her life.

He loosened his hold and reeled back.  "My God! my God!"
he cried, "and I would have murdered you!"

Dorian Gray drew a long breath.  "You have been on the brink of
committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly.
"Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your
own hands."

"Forgive me, sir," muttered James Vane.  "I was deceived.
A chance word I heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track."

"You had better go home and put that pistol away, or you may get
into trouble," said Dorian, turning on his heel and going slowly
down the street.

James Vane stood on the pavement in horror.  He was trembling
from head to foot.  After a little while, a black shadow
that had been creeping along the dripping wall moved out into
the light and came close to him with stealthy footsteps.
He felt a hand laid on his arm and looked round with a start.
It was one of the women who had been drinking at the bar.

"Why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting haggard face
quite close to his.  "I knew you were following him when you
rushed out from Daly's. You fool!  You should have killed him.
He has lots of money, and he's as bad as bad."

"He is not the man I am looking for," he answered, "and I want
no man's money.  I want a man's life.  The man whose life I want
must be nearly forty now.  This one is little more than a boy.
Thank God, I have not got his blood upon my hands."

The woman gave a bitter laugh.  "Little more than a boy!" she sneered.
"Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what
I am."

"You lie!" cried James Vane.

She raised her hand up to heaven.  "Before God I am telling the truth,"
she cried.

"Before God?"

"Strike me dumb if it ain't so.  He is the worst one that comes here.
They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face.  It's nigh
on eighteen years since I met him.  He hasn't changed much since then.
I have, though," she added, with a sickly leer.

"You swear this?"

"I swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth.
"But don't give me away to him," she whined; "I am afraid of him.
Let me have some money for my night's lodging."

He broke from her with an oath and rushed to the corner of the street,
but Dorian Gray had disappeared.  When he looked back, the woman had
vanished also.
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Variety is the spice of life

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Chapter 17


A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby Royal,
talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband,
a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests.
It was tea-time, and the mellow light of the huge, lace-covered lamp
that stood on the table lit up the delicate china and hammered
silver of the service at which the duchess was presiding.
Her white hands were moving daintily among the cups, and her full red
lips were smiling at something that Dorian had whispered to her.
Lord Henry was lying back in a silk-draped wicker chair, looking at them.
On a peach-coloured divan sat Lady Narborough, pretending to listen
to the duke's description of the last Brazilian beetle that he had
added to his collection.  Three young men in elaborate smoking-suits
were handing tea-cakes to some of the women.  The house-party
consisted of twelve people, and there were more expected to arrive on
the next day.

"What are you two talking about?" said Lord Henry, strolling over to
the table and putting his cup down.  "I hope Dorian has told you about
my plan for rechristening everything, Gladys.  It is a delightful idea."

"But I don't want to be rechristened, Harry," rejoined the duchess,
looking up at him with her wonderful eyes.  "I am quite satisfied
with my own name, and I am sure Mr. Gray should be satisfied
with his."

"My dear Gladys, I would not alter either name for the world.
They are both perfect.  I was thinking chiefly of flowers.
Yesterday I cut an orchid, for my button-hole. It was a marvellous
spotted thing, as effective as the seven deadly sins.
In a thoughtless moment I asked one of the gardeners what it
was called.  He told me it was a fine specimen of Robinsoniana,
or something dreadful of that kind.  It is a sad truth,
but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
Names are everything.  I never quarrel with actions.
My one quarrel is with words.  That is the reason I hate vulgar
realism in literature.  The man who could call a spade a spade
should be compelled to use one.  It is the only thing he is fit
for."

"Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked.

"His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian.

"I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess.

"I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair.
"From a label there is no escape!  I refuse the title."

"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.

"You wish me to defend my throne, then?"

"Yes."

"I give the truths of to-morrow."

"I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered.

"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood.

"Of your shield, Harry, not of your spear."

"I never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand.

"That is your error, Harry, believe me.  You value beauty far too much."

"How can you say that?  I admit that I think that it is better
to be beautiful than to be good.  But on the other hand,
no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better
to be good than to be ugly."

"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess.
"What becomes of your simile about the orchid?"

"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys.  You, as a good Tory,
must not underrate them.  Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have
made our England what she is."

"You don't like your country, then?" she asked.

"I live in it."

"That you may censure it the better."

"Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he inquired.

"What do they say of us?"

"That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop."

"Is that yours, Harry?"

"I give it to you."

"I could not use it.  It is too true."

"You need not be afraid.  Our countrymen never recognize a description."

"They are practical."

"They are more cunning than practical.  When they make up their ledger,
they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."

"Still, we have done great things."

"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."

"We have carried their burden."

"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."

She shook her head.  "I believe in the race," she cried.

"It represents the survival of the pushing."

"It has development."

"Decay fascinates me more."

"What of art?" she asked.

"It is a malady."

"Love?"

"An illusion."

"Religion?"

"The fashionable substitute for belief."

"You are a sceptic."

"Never!  Scepticism is the beginning of faith."

"What are you?"

"To define is to limit."

"Give me a clue."

"Threads snap.  You would lose your way in the labyrinth."

"You bewilder me.  Let us talk of some one else."

"Our host is a delightful topic.  Years ago he was christened
Prince Charming."

"Ah! don't remind me of that," cried Dorian Gray.

"Our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess, colouring.
"I believe he thinks that Monmouth married me on purely scientific principles
as the best specimen he could find of a modern butterfly."

"Well, I hope he won't stick pins into you, Duchess," laughed Dorian.

"Oh! my maid does that already, Mr. Gray, when she is annoyed with me."

"And what does she get annoyed with you about, Duchess?"

"For the most trivial things, Mr. Gray, I assure you.
Usually because I come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her
that I must be dressed by half-past eight."

"How unreasonable of her!  You should give her warning."

"I daren't, Mr. Gray.  Why, she invents hats for me.
You remember the one I wore at Lady Hilstone's garden-party?
You don't, but it is nice of you to pretend that you do.
Well, she made if out of nothing.  All good hats are made out
of nothing."

"Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry.
"Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity."

"Not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women
rule the world.  I assure you we can't bear mediocrities.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men
love with your eyes, if you ever love at all."

"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured Dorian.

"Ah! then, you never really love, Mr. Gray," answered the duchess
with mock sadness.

"My dear Gladys!" cried Lord Henry.  "How can you say that?
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an
appetite into an art.  Besides, each time that one loves is
the only time one has ever loved.  Difference of object does
not alter singleness of passion.  It merely intensifies it.
We can have in life but one great experience at best,
and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often
as possible."

"Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?" asked the duchess
after a pause.

"Especially when one has been wounded by it," answered Lord Henry.

The duchess turned and looked at Dorian Gray with a curious
expression in her eyes.  "What do you say to that, Mr. Gray?"
she inquired.

Dorian hesitated for a moment.  Then he threw his head back and laughed.
"I always agree with Harry, Duchess."

"Even when he is wrong?"

"Harry is never wrong, Duchess."

"And does his philosophy make you happy?"

"I have never searched for happiness.  Who wants happiness?
I have searched for pleasure."

"And found it, Mr. Gray?"

"Often.  Too often."

The duchess sighed.  "I am searching for peace," she said,
"and if I don't go and dress, I shall have none this evening."

"Let me get you some orchids, Duchess," cried Dorian, starting to his feet
and walking down the conservatory.

"You are flirting disgracefully with him," said Lord Henry to his cousin.
"You had better take care.  He is very fascinating."

"If he were not, there would be no battle."

"Greek meets Greek, then?"

"I am on the side of the Trojans.  They fought for a woman."

"They were defeated."

"There are worse things than capture," she answered.

"You gallop with a loose rein."

"Pace gives life," was the riposte.

"I shall write it in my diary to-night."

"What?"

"That a burnt child loves the fire."

"I am not even singed.  My wings are untouched."

"You use them for everything, except flight."

"Courage has passed from men to women.  It is a new experience for us."

"You have a rival."

"Who?"

He laughed.  "Lady Narborough," he whispered.  "She perfectly adores him."

"You fill me with apprehension.  The appeal to antiquity is fatal
to us who are romanticists."

"Romanticists!  You have all the methods of science."

"Men have educated us."

"But not explained you."

"Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.

"Sphinxes without secrets."

She looked at him, smiling.  "How long Mr. Gray is!" she said.
"Let us go and help him.  I have not yet told him the colour of
my frock."

"Ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys."

"That would be a premature surrender."

"Romantic art begins with its climax."

"I must keep an opportunity for retreat."

"In the Parthian manner?"

"They found safety in the desert.  I could not do that."

"Women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had
he finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory
came a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall.
Everybody started up.  The duchess stood motionless in horror.
And with fear in his eyes, Lord Henry rushed through the flapping
palms to find Dorian Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a
deathlike swoon.

He was carried at once into the blue drawing-room and laid
upon one of the sofas.  After a short time, he came to himself
and looked round with a dazed expression.

"What has happened?" he asked.  "Oh!  I remember.  Am I safe here, Harry?"
He began to tremble.

"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, "you merely fainted.  That was all.
You must have overtired yourself.  You had better not come down to dinner.
I will take your place."

"No, I will come down," he said, struggling to his feet.
"I would rather come down.  I must not be alone."

He went to his room and dressed.  There was a wild recklessness
of gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then
a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that,
pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a
white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.
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Veteran foruma
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Chapter 18


The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most
of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying,
and yet indifferent to life itself.  The consciousness of
being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him.
If the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook.
The dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed
to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets.
When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face peering
through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to lay its
hand upon his heart.

But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out
of the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him.
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical
in the imagination.  It was the imagination that set remorse
to dog the feet of sin.  It was the imagination that made
each crime bear its misshapen brood.  In the common world
of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded.
Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
That was all.  Besides, had any stranger been prowling round
the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the keepers.
Had any foot-marks been found on the flower-beds, the gardeners
would have reported it.  Yes, it had been merely fancy.
Sibyl Vane's brother had not come back to kill him.
He had sailed away in his ship to founder in some winter sea.
From him, at any rate, he was safe.  Why, the man did not know
who he was, could not know who he was.  The mask of youth had
saved him.

And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it
was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms,
and give them visible form, and make them move before one!
What sort of life would his be if, day and night,
shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners,
to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat
at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep!
As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror,
and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder.
Oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend!
How ghastly the mere memory of the scene!  He saw it all again.
Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror.
Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet,
rose the image of his sin.  When Lord Henry came in at
six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will
break.

It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out.
There was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that
winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness
and his ardour for life.  But it was not merely the physical
conditions of environment that had caused the change.
His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish
that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm.
With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so.
Their strong passions must either bruise or bend.  They either
slay the man, or themselves die.  Shallow sorrows and shallow
loves live on.  The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed
by their own plenitude.  Besides, he had convinced himself that
he had been the victim of a terror-stricken imagination, and looked
back now on his fears with something of pity and not a little
of contempt.

After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden
and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. The crisp frost
lay like salt upon the grass.  The sky was an inverted cup of blue metal.
A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake.

At the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey Clouston,
the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun.
He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home,
made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and
rough undergrowth.

"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.

"Not very good, Dorian.  I think most of the birds have gone to the open.
I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new ground."

Dorian strolled along by his side.  The keen aromatic air,
the brown and red lights that glimmered in the wood,
the hoarse cries of the beaters ringing out from time to time,
and the sharp snaps of the guns that followed, fascinated him
and filled him with a sense of delightful freedom.
He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high
indifference of joy.

Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front
of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing
it forward, started a hare.  It bolted for a thicket of alders.
Sir Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something
in the animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed Dorian Gray,
and he cried out at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey.  Let it live."

"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare
bounded into the thicket, he fired.  There were two cries heard,
the cry of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony,
which is worse.

"Good heavens!  I have hit a beater!" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey.
"What an ass the man was to get in front of the guns!
Stop shooting there!" he called out at the top of his voice.
"A man is hurt."

The head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand.

"Where, sir?  Where is he?" he shouted.  At the same time,
the firing ceased along the line.

"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
"Why on earth don't you keep your men back?  Spoiled my shooting for
the day."

Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump,
brushing the lithe swinging branches aside.  In a few moments
they emerged, dragging a body after them into the sunlight.
He turned away in horror.  It seemed to him that misfortune
followed wherever he went.  He heard Sir Geoffrey ask if the man
was really dead, and the affirmative answer of the keeper.
The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with faces.
There was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of voices.
A great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the

boughs overhead.

After a few moments--that were to him, in his perturbed state,
like endless hours of pain--he felt a hand laid on his shoulder.
He started and looked round.

"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting
is stopped for to-day. It would not look well to go on."

"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered bitterly.
"The whole thing is hideous and cruel.  Is the man ... ?"

He could not finish the sentence.

"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry.  "He got the whole charge of shot
in his chest.  He must have died almost instantaneously.  Come; let us
go home."

They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly fifty
yards without speaking.  Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry and said,
with a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."

"What is?" asked Lord Henry.  "Oh! this accident, I suppose.
My dear fellow, it can't be helped.  It was the man's own fault.
Why did he get in front of the guns?  Besides, it is nothing to us.
It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course.  It does not do to
pepper beaters.  It makes people think that one is a wild shot.
And Geoffrey is not; he shoots very straight.  But there is no use talking
about the matter."

Dorian shook his head.  "It is a bad omen, Harry.  I feel
as if something horrible were going to happen to some of us.
To myself, perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes,
with a gesture of pain.

The elder man laughed.  "The only horrible thing in the world
is ennui, Dorian.  That is the one sin for which there is
no forgiveness.  But we are not likely to suffer from it unless
these fellows keep chattering about this thing at dinner.
I must tell them that the subject is to be tabooed.
As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen.
Destiny does not send us heralds.  She is too wise or too cruel
for that.  Besides, what on earth could happen to you, Dorian?
You have everything in the world that a man can want.
There is no one who would not be delighted to change places
with you."

"There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry.
Don't laugh like that.  I am telling you the truth.  The wretched
peasant who has just died is better off than I am.  I have no
terror of death.  It is the coming of death that terrifies me.
Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me.
Good heavens! don't you see a man moving behind the trees there,
watching me, waiting for me?"

Lord Henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand
was pointing.  "Yes," he said, smiling, "I see the gardener waiting for you.
I suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on the table
to-night. How absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow!  You must come
and see my doctor, when we get back to town."

Dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching.
The man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at Lord Henry in a
hesitating manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed
to his master.  "Her Grace told me to wait for an answer,"
he murmured.

Dorian put the letter into his pocket.  "Tell her Grace that I am coming in,"
he said, coldly.  The man turned round and went rapidly in the direction of
the house.

"How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord Henry.
"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most.  A woman
will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are
looking on."

"How fond you are of saying dangerous things, Harry!  In the present instance,
you are quite astray.  I like the duchess very much, but I don't love her."

"And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less,
so you are excellently matched."

"You are talking scandal, Harry, and there is never any basis for scandal."

"The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said Lord Henry,
lighting a cigarette.

"You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."

"The world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer.

"I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray with a deep note
of pathos in his voice.  "But I seem to have lost the passion
and forgotten the desire.  I am too much concentrated on myself.
My own personality has become a burden to me.  I want to escape,
to go away, to forget.  It was silly of me to come down here at all.
I think I shall send a wire to Harvey to have the yacht got ready.
On a yacht one is safe."

"Safe from what, Dorian?  You are in some trouble.  Why not tell
me what it is?  You know I would help you."

"I can't tell you, Harry," he answered sadly.  "And I dare say it
is only a fancy of mine.  This unfortunate accident has upset me.
I have a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen
to me."

"What nonsense!"

"I hope it is, but I can't help feeling it.  Ah! here is
the duchess, looking like Artemis in a tailor-made gown.
You see we have come back, Duchess."

"I have heard all about it, Mr. Gray," she answered.  "Poor Geoffrey is
terribly upset.  And it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare.
How curious!"

"Yes, it was very curious.  I don't know what made me say it.
Some whim, I suppose.  It looked the loveliest of little
live things.  But I am sorry they told you about the man.
It is a hideous subject."

"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry.  "It has no psychological
value at all.  Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting
he would be!  I should like to know some one who had committed a real murder."

"How horrid of you, Harry!" cried the duchess.  "Isn't it,
Mr. Gray?  Harry, Mr. Gray is ill again.  He is going to faint."

Dorian drew himself up with an effort and smiled.  "It is nothing, Duchess,"
he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order.  That is all.
I am afraid I walked too far this morning.  I didn't hear what Harry said.
Was it very bad?  You must tell me some other time.  I think I must go and
lie down.  You will excuse me, won't you?"

They had reached the great flight of steps that led from the conservatory
on to the terrace.  As the glass door closed behind Dorian, Lord Henry turned
and looked at the duchess with his slumberous eyes.  "Are you very much
in love with him?" he asked.

She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
"I wish I knew," she said at last.

He shook his head.  "Knowledge would be fatal.  It is the uncertainty
that charms one.  A mist makes things wonderful."

"One may lose one's way."

"All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."

"What is that?"

"Disillusion."

"It was my debut in life," she sighed.

"It came to you crowned."

"I am tired of strawberry leaves."

"They become you."

"Only in public."

"You would miss them," said Lord Henry.

"I will not part with a petal."

"Monmouth has ears."

"Old age is dull of hearing."

"Has he never been jealous?"

"I wish he had been."

He glanced about as if in search of something.  "What are you looking for?"
she inquired.

"The button from your foil," he answered.  "You have dropped it."

She laughed.  "I have still the mask."

"It makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply.

She laughed again.  Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit.

Upstairs, in his own room, Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa,
with terror in every tingling fibre of his body.  Life had suddenly
become too hideous a burden for him to bear.  The dreadful death
of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal,
had seemed to him to pre-figure death for himself also.
He had nearly swooned at what Lord Henry had said in a chance mood
of cynical jesting.

At five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave
him orders to pack his things for the night-express to town,
and to have the brougham at the door by eight-thirty. He
was determined not to sleep another night at Selby Royal.
It was an ill-omened place.  Death walked there in the sunlight.
The grass of the forest had been spotted with blood.

Then he wrote a note to Lord Henry, telling him that he was going up to town
to consult his doctor and asking him to entertain his guests in his absence.
As he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to the door, and his
valet informed him that the head-keeper wished to see him.  He frowned and bit
his lip.  "Send him in," he muttered, after some moments' hesitation.

As soon as the man entered, Dorian pulled his chequebook out of a drawer
and spread it out before him.

"I suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident
of this morning, Thornton?" he said, taking up a pen.

"Yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper.

"Was the poor fellow married?  Had he any people dependent on him?"
asked Dorian, looking bored.  "If so, I should not like them to be left
in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary."

"We don't know who he is, sir.  That is what I took the liberty
of coming to you about."

"Don't know who he is?" said Dorian, listlessly.  "What do you mean?
Wasn't he one of your men?"

"No, sir.  Never saw him before.  Seems like a sailor, sir."

The pen dropped from Dorian Gray's hand, and he felt as if his
heart had suddenly stopped beating.  "A sailor?" he cried out.
"Did you say a sailor?"

"Yes, sir.  He looks as if he had been a sort of sailor;
tattooed on both arms, and that kind of thing."

"Was there anything found on him?" said Dorian, leaning forward and looking
at the man with startled eyes.  "Anything that would tell his name?"

"Some money, sir--not much, and a six-shooter. There was no name of any kind.
A decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. A sort of sailor we think."

Dorian started to his feet.  A terrible hope fluttered past him.
He clutched at it madly.  "Where is the body?" he exclaimed.
"Quick!  I must see it at once."

"It is in an empty stable in the Home Farm, sir.  The folk
don't like to have that sort of thing in their houses.
They say a corpse brings bad luck."

"The Home Farm!  Go there at once and meet me.  Tell one of the grooms
to bring my horse round.  No. Never mind.  I'll go to the stables myself.
It will save time."

In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the long
avenue as hard as he could go.  The trees seemed to sweep past him in
spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path.
Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him.  He lashed
her across the neck with his crop.  She cleft the dusky air like an arrow.
The stones flew from her hoofs.

At last he reached the Home Farm.  Two men were loitering in the yard.
He leaped from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them.
In the farthest stable a light was glimmering.  Something seemed
to tell him that the body was there, and he hurried to the door
and put his hand upon the latch.

There he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink
of a discovery that would either make or mar his life.
Then he thrust the door open and entered.

On a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body
of a man dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers.
A spotted handkerchief had been placed over the face.
A coarse candle, stuck in a bottle, sputtered beside it.

Dorian Gray shuddered.  He felt that his could not be the hand to take
the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants to come
to him.

"Take that thing off the face.  I wish to see it," he said,
clutching at the door-post for support.

When the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward.
A cry of joy broke from his lips.  The man who had been shot in
the thicket was James Vane.

He stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body.
As he rode home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew
he was safe.
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