HE developments that I am trying to trace are so peculiar that I find difficulty in keeping these memoranda up to date; but I mustn't let them escape!
I had dropped in on my landlady the other day to discuss the price of milk, and as we chatted my eyes happened to fall on that row of black-bound books on her shelf which, as she had told me, contained her accounts and those of her predecessors, with lodgers going back for upward of a century.
If the Mrs. Asgard mentioned in the newspaper paragraph should happen to be the E. A. A. whose initials I had found on the window-shutter (a large "if," to be sure!), then she had lodged here, and her name would appear in one of those books.
Mrs. Blodgett readily agreed to my request to be allowed to take some of the volumes to my room for examination. "Indeed you're most welcome, Mr. 'Eathcote; but in course prices of things in old times wasn't like what they've come to be these days!"
I didn't explain that the object of my curiosity was not comparative prices. In all, there were about thirty of the series, mostly small 8vos. The series began in 1815, and I carried to my room the first half-dozen of them.
The newspaper paragraph about Mrs. Asgard had been dated in the spring of 11818. Not without a tension of the nerves did I open the volume corresponding to that epoch! I prepared myself for disappointment: the odds against success were incalculable!
The thumbed and soiled pages of the entries for that year were written in an angular hand, precise and painstaking, but unbiased as to spelling. The top lines were inscribed with the name of the landlord, Caleb Blodgett, in account with the lodger for the time being. I turned leaf after leaf slowly.
On the page dated March 1, 1818, I came upon the following:
My heart gave a jump, and I dropped back in my chair, breathing as if I had run up a hill. I sat up again and read the words over and over again. There was no mistake! Mrs. Asgard and E. A. A. were one and the same person, and she had lived in these rooms! It was Mrs. Asgard, the distinguished soprano singer, who had sung at Buckingham Palace and been honored by royalty: it was she whose influence had met me on the threshold of the apartment and had been with me ever since! It was she who had lain in that bed, sat in this chair, leaned on this table; it was here that she had received her lover!
There could be no mistake: the name of Asgard was too unusual, even without the preceding initials and the date. It was tantalizing not to know what those two initials stood for; but doubtless they would be elucidated in due time. After having been brought so far along this wonderful path, I had faith that I should arrive at the end. I could well-nigh believe she was whispering counsel in my ear, and putting in my hand the clue that should lead me through the maze!
But I presently subdued myself to a more deliberate survey of the situation.
Mrs. Asgard, even assuming her to have achieved eminence before she was thirty, and to have fulfilled her alloted span of three-score-and-ten, must have died at least a quarter of a century before I was born!
Hitherto, so powerful upon me had been her influence, I had been blind to this flagrant fact: it had seemed to me that she must still live, and might at any moment walk into the room! Even the Buckingham Palace record hadn't opened my eyes to a realization that this was a physical impossibility.
But her name in the old account-book brought me to my sober senses. A gulf a hundred years wide stretched between us. The recognition of it awed me; and yet, as I mused upon it, I found a sort of consolation, too.
For her influence—the perception that it aroused in me—had always been that of a young woman in the bloom of her career—such a woman, with bright auburn hair and sparkling dark eyes, as my fancy had conjured up standing in the presence of royalty. The century that intervened, while denying all hope of confirming this vision in the flesh, yet assured me that her freshness and beauty were beyond the reach of time; that she was an immortal reality, secure and unchangeable. She had actually existed in this world, and she could never die; she was a spirit, and for the sake of the spirit I was willing to forego the flesh, since it is the spirit that true-lovers love, and the flesh only as it is the spirit's transient vehicle! She was with me now. and we loved each other!
But here another reflection cast its shadow over me. Apparently Mrs. Asgard had been a married woman. Who and what had been her husband? He couldn't be L. H.; and the intervention of L. H. presented still another problem.