“A terrible load to carry,” murmured Dorian, as he unlocked the door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.

He had not entered the place for more than four years,—­not, indeed, since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child and then as a study when he grew somewhat older.  It was a large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord Sherard for the use of the little nephew whom, being himself childless, and perhaps for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance.  It did not appear to Dorian to have much changed.  There was the huge Italian cassone, with its fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy.  There was the satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared school-books.  On the wall behind it was hanging the same [62] ragged Flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists.  How well he recalled it all!  Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him, as he looked round.  He remembered the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here that the fatal portrait was to be hidden away.  How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him!

But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this.  He had the key, and no one else could enter it.  Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean.  What did it matter?  No one could see it.  He himself would not see it.  Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?  He kept his youth,—­that was enough.  And, besides, might not his nature grow finer, after all?  There was no reason that the future should be so full of shame.  Some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh,—­those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm.  Perhaps, some day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to the world Basil Hallward’s masterpiece.

No; that was impossible.  The thing upon the canvas was growing old, hour by hour, and week by week.  Even if it escaped the hideousness of sin, the hideousness of age was in store for it.  The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid.  Yellow crow’s-feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible.  The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are.  There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the uncle who had been so stern to him in his boyhood.  The picture had to be concealed.  There was no help for it.