The Sacred Fount

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Title: The Sacred Fount
Author: Henry James
Release Date: June 21, 2010 [EBook #32939]
Language: English
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THE SACRED FOUNT
BY
HENRY JAMES
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
THE SACRED FOUNT
I
It was an occasion, I felt--the prospect of a large party--to look out
at the station for others, possible friends and even possible enemies,
who might be going. Such premonitions, it was true, bred fears when they
failed to breed hopes, though it was to be added that there were
sometimes, in the case, rather happy ambiguities. One was glowered at,
in the compartment, by people who on the morrow, after breakfast, were
to prove charming; one was spoken to first by people whose sociability
was subsequently to show as bleak; and one built with confidence on
others who were never to reappear at all--who were only going to
Birmingham. As soon as I saw Gilbert Long, some way up the platform,
however, I knew him as an element. It was not so much that the wish was
father to the thought as that I remembered having already more than once
met him at Newmarch. He was a friend of the house--he wouldn't be going
to Birmingham. I so little expected him, at the same time, to recognise
me that I stopped short of the carriage near which he stood--I looked
for a seat that wouldn't make us neighbours.
I had met him at Newmarch only--a place of a charm so special as to
create rather a bond among its guests; but he had always, in the
interval, so failed to know me that I could only hold him as stupid
unless I held him as impertinent. He was stupid in fact, and in that
character had no business at Newmarch; but he had also, no doubt, his
system, which he applied without discernment. I wondered, while I saw my
things put into my corner, what Newmarch could see in him--for it always
had to see something before it made a sign. His good looks, which were
striking, perhaps paid his way--his six feet and more of stature, his
low-growing, tight-curling hair, his big, bare, blooming face. He was a
fine piece of human furniture--he made a small party seem more numerous.
This, at least, was the impression of him that had revived before I
stepped out again to the platform, and it armed me only at first with
surprise when I saw him come down to me as if for a greeting. If he had
decided at last to treat me as an acquaintance made, it was none the
less a case for letting him come all the way. That, accordingly, was
what he did, and with so clear a conscience, I hasten to add, that at
the end of a minute we were talking together quite as with the tradition
of prompt intimacy. He was good-looking enough, I now again saw, but not
such a model of it as I had seemed to remember; on the other hand his
manners had distinctly gained in ease. He referred to our previous
encounters and common contacts--he was glad I was going; he peeped into
my compartment and thought it better than his own. He called a porter,
the next minute, to shift his things, and while his attention was so
taken I made out some of the rest of the contingent, who were finding or
had already found places.
This lasted till Long came back with his porter, as well as with a lady
unknown to me and to whom he had apparently mentioned that our carriage
would pleasantly accommodate her. The porter carried in fact her
dressing-bag, which he put upon a seat and the bestowal of which left
the lady presently free to turn to me with a reproach: "I don't think it
very nice of you not to speak to me." I stared, then caught at her
identity through her voice; after which I reflected that she might
easily have thought me the same sort of ass as I had thought Long. For
she was simply, it appeared, Grace Brissenden. We had, the three of us,
the carriage to ourselves, and we journeyed together for more than an
hour, during which, in my corner, I had my companions opposite. We began
at first by talking a little, and then as the train--a fast one--ran
straight and proportionately bellowed, we gave up the effort to compete
with its music. Meantime, however, we had exchanged with each other a
fact or two to turn over in silence. Brissenden was coming later--not,
indeed, that that was such a fact. But his wife was informed--she knew
about the numerous others; she had mentioned, while we waited, people
and things: that Obert, R.A., was somewhere in the train, that her
husband was to bring on Lady John, and that Mrs. Froome and Lord Lutley
were in the wondrous new fashion--and their servants too, like a single
household--starting, travelling, arriving together. It came back to me
as I sat there that when she mentioned Lady John as in charge of
Brissenden the other member of our trio had expressed interest and
surprise--expressed it so as to have made her reply with a smile:
"Didn't you really know?" This passage had taken place on the platform
while, availing ourselves of our last minute, we hung about our door.
"Why in the world _should_ I know?"
To which, with good nature, she had simply returned: "Oh, it's only that
I thought you always did!" And they both had looked at me a little
oddly, as if appealing from each other. "What in the world does she
mean?" Long might have seemed to ask; while Mrs. Brissenden conveyed
with light profundity: "_You_ know why he should as well as I, don't
you?" In point of fact I didn't in the least; and what afterwards struck
me much more as the beginning of my anecdote was a word dropped by Long
after someone had come up to speak to her. I had then given him his cue
by alluding to my original failure to place her. What in the world, in
the year or two, had happened to her? She had changed so extraordinarily
for the better. How could a woman who had been plain so long become
pretty so late?
It was just what he had been wondering. "I didn't place her at first
myself. She had to speak to me. But I hadn't seen her since her
marriage, which was--wasn't it?--four or five years ago. She's amazing
for her age."
"What then _is_ her age?"
"Oh--two or three-and-forty."
"She's prodigious for that. But can it be so great?"
"Isn't it easy to count?" he asked. "Don't you remember, when poor Briss
married her, how immensely she was older? What was it they called it?--a
case of child-stealing. Everyone made jokes. Briss isn't yet thirty."
No, I bethought myself, he wouldn't be; but I hadn't remembered the
difference as so great. What I had mainly remembered was that she had
been rather ugly. At present she was rather handsome. Long, however, as
to this, didn't agree. "I'm bound to say I don't quite call it beauty."
"Oh, I only speak of it as relative. She looks so well--and somehow so
'fine.' Why else shouldn't we have recognised her?"
"Why indeed? But it isn't a thing with which beauty has to do." He had
made the matter out with an acuteness for which I shouldn't have given
him credit. "What has happened to her is simply that--well, that nothing
has."
"Nothing has happened? But, my dear man, she has been married. That's
supposed to be something."
"Yes, but she has been married so little and so stupidly. It must be
desperately dull to be married to poor Briss. His comparative youth
doesn't, after all, make more of him. He's nothing but what he is. Her
clock has simply stopped. She looks no older--that's all."
"Ah, and a jolly good thing too, when you start where she did. But I
take your discrimination," I added, "as just. The only thing is that if
a woman doesn't grow older she may be said to grow younger; and if she
grows younger she may be supposed to grow prettier. That's all--except,
of course, that it strikes me as charming also for Brissenden himself.
_He_ had the face, I seem to recall, of a baby; so that if his wife did
flaunt her fifty years----!"
"Oh," Long broke in, "it wouldn't have mattered to him if she had.
That's the awfulness, don't you see? of the married state. People have
to get used to each other's charms as well as to their faults. He
wouldn't have noticed. It's only you and I who do, and the charm of it
is for _us_."
"What a lucky thing then," I laughed, "that, with Brissenden so out of
it and relegated to the time-table's obscure hereafter, it should be you
and I who enjoy her!" I had been struck in what he said with more things
than I could take up, and I think I must have looked at him, while he
talked, with a slight return of my first mystification. He talked as I
had never heard him--less and less like the heavy Adonis who had so
often "cut" me; and while he did so I was proportionately more conscious
of the change in him. He noticed in fact after a little the vague
confusion of my gaze and asked me--with complete good nature--why I
stared at him so hard. I sufficiently disembroiled myself to reply that
I could only be fascinated by the way he made his points; to which
he--with the same sociability--made answer that he, on the contrary,
more than suspected me, clever and critical as I was, of amusement at
his artless prattle. He stuck none the less to his idea that what we had
been discussing was lost on Brissenden. "Ah, then I hope," I said, "that
at least Lady John isn't!"
"Oh, Lady John----!" And he turned away as if there were either too much
or too little to say about her.
I found myself engaged again with Mrs. Briss while he was occupied with
a newspaper-boy--and engaged, oddly, in very much the free view of him
that he and I had just taken of herself. She put it to me frankly that
she had never seen a man so improved: a confidence that I met with
alacrity, as it showed me that, under the same impression, I had not
been astray. She had only, it seemed, on seeing him, made him out with a
great effort. I took in this confession, but I repaid it. "He hinted to
me that he had not known you more easily."
"More easily than you did? Oh, nobody does that; and, to be quite
honest, I've got used to it and don't mind. People talk of our changing
every seven years, but they make me feel as if I changed every seven
minutes. What will you have, at any rate, and how can I help it? It's
the grind of life, the wear and tear of time and misfortune. And, you
know, I'm ninety-three."
"How young you must feel," I answered, "to care to talk of your age! I
envy you, for nothing would induce me to let you know mine. You look,
you see, just twenty-five."
It evidently too, what I said, gave her pleasure--a pleasure that she
caught and held. "Well, you can't say I dress it."
"No, you dress, I make out, ninety-three. If you _would_ only dress
twenty-five you'd look fifteen."
"Fifteen in a schoolroom charade!" She laughed at this happily enough.
"Your compliment to my taste is odd. I know, at all events," she went
on, "what's the difference in Mr. Long."
"Be so good then, for my relief, as to name it."
"Well, a very clever woman has for some time past----"
"Taken"--this beginning was of course enough--"a particular interest in
him? Do you mean Lady John?" I inquired; and, as she evidently did, I
rather demurred. "Do you call Lady John a very clever woman?"
"Surely. That's why I kindly arranged that, as she was to take, I
happened to learn, the next train, Guy should come with her."
"You arranged it?" I wondered. "She's not so clever as you then."
"Because you feel that _she_ wouldn't, or couldn't? No doubt she
wouldn't have made the same point of it--for more than one reason. Poor
Guy hasn't pretensions--has nothing but his youth and his beauty. But
that's precisely why I'm sorry for him and try whenever I can to give
him a lift. Lady John's company _is_, you see, a lift."
"You mean it has so unmistakably been one to Long?"
"Yes--it has positively given him a mind and a tongue. _That's_ what has
come over him."
"Then," I said, "it's a most extraordinary case--such as one really has
never met."
"Oh, but," she objected, "it happens."
"Ah, so very seldom! Yes--I've positively never met it. Are you very
sure," I insisted, "that Lady John is the influence?"
"I don't mean to say, of course," she replied, "that he looks fluttered
if you mention her, that he doesn't in fact look as blank as a
pickpocket. But that proves nothing--or rather, as they're known to be
always together, and she from morning till night as pointed as a
hat-pin, it proves just what one sees. One simply takes it in."
I turned the picture round. "They're scarcely together when she's
together with Brissenden."
"Ah, that's only once in a way. It's a thing that from time to time such
people--don't you know?--make a particular point of: they cultivate, to
cover their game, the appearance of other little friendships. It puts
outsiders off the scent, and the real thing meanwhile goes on. Besides,
you yourself acknowledge the effect. If she hasn't made him clever, what
has she made him? She has given him, steadily, more and more intellect."
"Well, you may be right," I laughed, "though you speak as if it were
cod-liver oil. Does she administer it, as a daily dose, by the spoonful?
or only as a drop at a time? Does he take it in his food? Is he
supposed to know? The difficulty for me is simply that if I've seen the
handsome grow ugly and the ugly handsome, the fat grow thin and the thin
fat, the short grow long and the long short; if I've even, likewise,
seen the clever, as I've too fondly, at least, supposed them, grow
stupid: so have I _not_ seen--no, not once in all my days--the stupid
grow clever."
It was a question, none the less, on which she could perfectly stand up.
"All I can say is then that you'll have, the next day or two, an
interesting new experience."
"It _will_ be interesting," I declared while I thought--"and all the
more if I make out for myself that Lady John _is_ the agent."
"You'll make it out if you talk to her--that is, I mean, if you make
_her_ talk. You'll see how she _can_."
"She keeps her wit then," I asked, "in spite of all she pumps into
others?"
"Oh, she has enough for two!"
"I'm immensely struck with yours," I replied, "as well as with your
generosity. I've seldom seen a woman take so handsome a view of
another."
"It's because I like to be kind!" she said with the best faith in the
world; to which I could only return, as we entered the train, that it
was a kindness Lady John would doubtless appreciate. Long rejoined us,
and we ran, as I have said, our course; which, as I have also noted,
seemed short to me in the light of such a blaze of suggestion. To each
of my companions--and the fact stuck out of them--something
unprecedented had happened.
II
The day was as fine and the scene as fair at Newmarch as the party was
numerous and various; and my memory associates with the rest of the long
afternoon many renewals of acquaintance and much sitting and strolling,
for snatches of talk, in the long shade of great trees and through the
straight walks of old gardens. A couple of hours thus passed, and fresh
accessions enriched the picture. There were persons I was curious of--of
Lady John, for instance, of whom I promised myself an early view; but we
were apt to be carried away in currents that reflected new images and
sufficiently beguiled impatience. I recover, all the same, a full
sequence of impressions, each of which, I afterwards saw, had been
appointed to help all the others. If my anecdote, as I have mentioned,
had begun, at Paddington, at a particular moment, it gathered substance
step by step and without missing a link. The links, in fact, should I
count them all, would make too long a chain. They formed, nevertheless,
the happiest little chapter of accidents, though a series of which I can
scarce give more than the general effect.
One of the first accidents was that, before dinner, I met Ford Obert
wandering a little apart with Mrs. Server, and that, as they were known
to me as agreeable acquaintances, I should have faced them with
confidence had I not immediately drawn from their sequestered air the
fear of interrupting them. Mrs. Server was always lovely and Obert
always expert; the latter straightway pulled up, however, making me as
welcome as if their converse had dropped. She was extraordinarily
pretty, markedly responsive, conspicuously charming, but he gave me a
look that really seemed to say: "Don't--there's a good fellow--leave me
any longer alone with her!" I had met her at Newmarch before--it was
indeed only so that I had met her--and I knew how she was valued there.
I also knew that an aversion to pretty women--numbers of whom he had
preserved for a grateful posterity--was his sign neither as man nor as
artist; the effect of all of which was to make me ask myself what she
could have been doing to him. Making love, possibly--yet from that he
would scarce have appealed. She wouldn't, on the other hand, have given
him her company only to be inhuman. I joined them, at all events,
learning from Mrs. Server that she had come by a train previous to my
own; and we made a slow trio till, at a turn of the prospect, we came
upon another group. It consisted of Mrs. Froome and Lord Lutley and of
Gilbert Long and Lady John--mingled and confounded, as might be said,
not assorted according to tradition. Long and Mrs. Froome came first, I
recollect, together, and his lordship turned away from Lady John on
seeing me rather directly approach her. She had become for me, on the
spot, as interesting as, while we travelled, I had found my two friends
in the train. As the source of the flow of "intellect" that had
transmuted our young man, she had every claim to an earnest attention;
and I should soon have been ready to pronounce that she rewarded it as
richly as usual. She was indeed, as Mrs. Briss had said, as pointed as a
hat-pin, and I bore in mind that lady's injunction to look in her for
the answer to our riddle.
The riddle, I may mention, sounded afresh to my ear in Gilbert Long's
gay voice; it hovered there--before me, beside, behind me, as we all
paused--in his light, restless step, a nervous animation that seemed to
multiply his presence. He became really, for the moment, under this
impression, the thing I was most conscious of; I heard him, I felt him
even while I exchanged greetings with the sorceress by whose wand he had
been touched. To be touched myself was doubtless not quite what I
wanted; yet I wanted, distinctly, a glimpse; so that, with the smart
welcome Lady John gave me, I might certainly have felt that I was on the
way to get it. The note of Long's predominance deepened during these
minutes in a manner I can't describe, and I continued to feel that
though we pretended to talk it was to him only we listened. He had us
all in hand; he controlled for the moment all our attention and our
relations. He was in short, as a consequence of our attitude, in
possession of the scene to a tune he couldn't have dreamed of a year or
two before--inasmuch as at that period he could have figured at no such
eminence without making a fool of himself. And the great thing was that
if his eminence was now so perfectly graced he yet knew less than any of
us what was the matter with him. He was unconscious of how he had "come
out"--which was exactly what sharpened my wonder. Lady John, on her
side, was thoroughly conscious, and I had a fancy that she looked at me
to measure how far _I_ was. I cared, naturally, not in the least what
she guessed; her interest for me was all in the operation of her
influence. I am afraid I watched to catch it in the act--watched her
with a curiosity of which she might well have become aware.
What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so
successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when
people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other--that a
great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side a sufficient
show of tell-tale traces. But for Long to have been so stamped as I
found him, how the pliant wax must have been prepared and the seal of
passion applied! What an affection the woman working such a change in
him must have managed to create as a preface to her influence! With what
a sense of her charm she must have paved the way for it! Strangely
enough, however--it was even rather irritating--there was nothing more
than usual in Lady John to assist my view of the height at which the
pair so evoked must move. These things--the way other people could feel
about each other, the power not one's self, in the given instance, that
made for passion--were of course at best the mystery of mysteries;
still, there were cases in which fancy, sounding the depths or the
shallows, could at least drop the lead. Lady John, perceptibly, was no
such case; imagination, in her presence, was but the weak wing of the
insect that bumps against the glass. She was pretty, prompt, hard, and,
in a way that was special to her, a mistress at once of "culture" and of
slang. She was like a hat--with one of Mrs. Briss's hat-pins--askew on
the bust of Virgil. Her ornamental information--as strong as a coat of
furniture-polish--almost knocked you down. What I felt in her now more
than ever was that, having a reputation for "point" to keep up, she was
always under arms, with absences and anxieties like those of a celebrity
at a public dinner. She thought too much of her "speech"--of how soon it
would have to come. It was none the less wonderful, however, that, as
Grace Brissenden had said, she should still find herself with intellect
to spare--have lavished herself by precept and example on Long and yet
have remained for each other interlocutor as fresh as the clown bounding
into the ring. She cracked, for my benefit, as many jokes and turned as
many somersaults as might have been expected; after which I thought it
fair to let her off. We all faced again to the house, for dressing and
dinner were in sight.
I found myself once more, as we moved, with Mrs. Server, and I remember
rejoicing that, sympathetic as she showed herself, she didn't think it
necessary to be, like Lady John, always "ready." She was delightfully
handsome--handsomer than ever; slim, fair, fine, with charming pale eyes
and splendid auburn hair. I said to myself that I hadn't done her
justice; she hadn't organised her forces, was a little helpless and
vague, but there was ease for the weary in her happy nature and her
peculiar grace. These last were articles on which, five minutes later,
before the house, where we still had a margin, I was moved to challenge
Ford Obert.
"What was the matter just now--when, though you were so fortunately
occupied, you yet seemed to call me to the rescue?"
"Oh," he laughed, "I was only occupied in being frightened!"
"But at what?"
"Well, at a sort of sense that she wanted to make love to me."
I reflected. "Mrs. Server? Does Mrs. Server make love?"
"It seemed to me," my friend replied, "that she began on it to _you_ as
soon as she got hold of you. Weren't you aware?"
I debated afresh; I didn't know that I had been. "Not to the point of
terror. She's so gentle and so appealing. Even if she took one in hand
with violence, moreover," I added, "I don't see why terror--given so
charming a person--should be the result. It's flattering."
"Ah, you're brave," said Obert.
"I didn't know you were ever timid. How can you be, in your profession?
Doesn't it come back to me, for that matter, that--only the other
year--you painted her?"
"Yes, I faced her to that extent. But she's different now."
I scarcely made it out. "In what way different? She's as charming as
ever."
As if even for his own satisfaction my friend seemed to think a little.
"Well, her affections were not then, I imagine, at her disposal. I judge
that that's what it must have been. They were fixed--with intensity; and
it made the difference with _me_. Her imagination had, for the time,
rested its wing. At present it's ready for flight--it seeks a fresh
perch. It's trying. Take care."
"Oh, I don't flatter myself," I laughed, "that I've only to hold out my
hand! At any rate," I went on, "_I_ sha'n't call for help."
He seemed to think again. "I don't know. You'll see."
"If I do I shall see a great deal more than I now suspect." He wanted to
get off to dress, but I still held him. "Isn't she wonderfully lovely?"
"Oh!" he simply exclaimed.
"Isn't she as lovely as she seems?"
But he had already broken away. "What has that to do with it?"
"What has anything, then?"
"She's too beastly unhappy."
"But isn't that just one's advantage?"
"No. It's uncanny." And he escaped.
The question had at all events brought us indoors and so far up our
staircase as to where it branched towards Obert's room. I followed it to
my corridor, with which other occasions had made me acquainted, and I
reached the door on which I expected to find my card of designation.
This door, however, was open, so as to show me, in momentary possession
of the room, a gentleman, unknown to me, who, in unguided quest of his
quarters, appeared to have arrived from the other end of the passage. He
had just seen, as the property of another, my unpacked things, with
which he immediately connected me. He moreover, to my surprise, on my
entering, sounded my name, in response to which I could only at first
remain blank. It was in fact not till I had begun to help him place
himself that, correcting my blankness, I knew him for Guy Brissenden. He
had been put by himself, for some reason, in the bachelor wing and,
exploring at hazard, had mistaken the signs. By the time we found his
servant and his lodging I had reflected on the oddity of my having been
as stupid about the husband as I had been about the wife. He had escaped
my notice since our arrival, but I had, as a much older man, met
him--the hero of his odd union--at some earlier time. Like his wife,
none the less, he had now struck me as a stranger, and it was not till,
in his room, I stood a little face to face with him that I made out the
wonderful reason.
The wonderful reason was that I was _not_ a much older man; Guy
Brissenden, at any rate, was not a much younger. It was he who was
old--it was he who was older--it was he who was oldest. That was so
disconcertingly what he had become. It was in short what he would have
been had he been as old as he looked. He looked almost anything--he
looked quite sixty. I made it out again at dinner, where, from a
distance, but opposite, I had him in sight. Nothing could have been
stranger than the way that, fatigued, fixed, settled, he seemed to have
piled up the years. They were there without having had time to arrive.
It was as if he had discovered some miraculous short cut to the common
doom. He had grown old, in fine, as people you see after an interval
sometimes strike you as having grown rich--too quickly for the honest,
or at least for the straight, way. He had cheated or inherited or
speculated. It took me but a minute then to add him to my little
gallery--the small collection, I mean, represented by his wife and by
Gilbert Long, as well as in some degree doubtless also by Lady John: the
museum of those who put to me with such intensity the question of what
had happened to them. His wife, on the same side, was not out of my
range, and now, largely exposed, lighted, jewelled, and enjoying
moreover visibly the sense of these things--his wife, upon my honour, as
I soon remarked to the lady next me, his wife (it was too prodigious!)
looked about twenty.
"Yes--isn't it funny?" said the lady next me.
It was so funny that it set me thinking afresh and that, with the
interest of it, which became a positive excitement, I had to keep myself
in hand in order not too publicly to explain, not to break out right and
left with my reflections. I don't know why--it was a sense instinctive
and unreasoned, but I felt from the first that if I was on the scent of
something ultimate I had better waste neither my wonder nor my wisdom.
I _was_ on the scent--that I was sure of; and yet even after I was sure
I should still have been at a loss to put my enigma itself into words. I
was just conscious, vaguely, of being on the track of a law, a law that
would fit, that would strike me as governing the delicate
phenomena--delicate though so marked--that my imagination found itself
playing with. A part of the amusement they yielded came, I daresay, from
my exaggerating them--grouping them into a larger mystery (and thereby a
larger "law") than the facts, as observed, yet warranted; but that is
the common fault of minds for which the vision of life is an obsession.
The obsession pays, if one will; but to pay it has to borrow. After
dinner, but while the men were still in the room, I had some talk again
with Long, of whom I inquired if he had been so placed as to see "poor
Briss."
He appeared to wonder, and poor Briss, with our shifting of seats, was
now at a distance. "I think so--but I didn't particularly notice. What's
the matter with poor Briss?"
"That's exactly what I thought you might be able to tell me. But if
nothing, in him, strikes you----!"
He met my eyes a moment--then glanced about. "Where is he?"
"Behind you; only don't turn round to look, for he knows----" But I
dropped, having caught something directed toward me in Brissenden's
face. My interlocutor remained blank, simply asking me, after an
instant, what it was he knew. On this I said what I meant. "He knows
we've noticed."
Long wondered again. "Ah, but I _haven't_!" He spoke with some
sharpness.
"He knows," I continued, noting the sharpness too, "what's the matter
with him."
"Then what the devil is it?"
I waited a little, having for the moment an idea on my hands. "Do you
see him often?"
Long disengaged the ash from his cigarette. "No. Why should I?"
Distinctly, he was uneasy--though as yet perhaps but vaguely--at what I
might be coming to. That was precisely my idea, and if I pitied him a
little for my pressure my idea was yet what most possessed me. "Do you
mean there's nothing in him that strikes you?"
On this, unmistakably, he looked at me hard. "'Strikes' me--in that boy?
Nothing in him, that I know of, ever struck me in my life. He's not an
object of the smallest interest to me!"
I felt that if I insisted I should really stir up the old Long, the
stolid coxcomb, capable of rudeness, with whose redemption,
reabsorption, supersession--one scarcely knew what to call it--I had
been so happily impressed. "Oh, of course, if you haven't noticed, you
haven't, and the matter I was going to speak of will have no point. You
won't know what I mean." With which I paused long enough to let his
curiosity operate if his denial had been sincere. But it hadn't. His
curiosity never operated. He only exclaimed, more indulgently, that he
didn't know what I was talking about; and I recognised after a little
that if I had made him, without intention, uncomfortable, this was
exactly a proof of his being what Mrs. Briss, at the station, had called
cleverer, and what I had so much remarked while, in the garden before
dinner, he held our small company. Nobody, nothing could, in the time of
his inanity, have made him turn a hair. It was the mark of his
aggrandisement. But I spared him--so far as was consistent with my wish
for absolute certainty; changed the subject, spoke of other things, took
pains to sound disconnectedly, and only after reference to several of
the other ladies, the name over which we had just felt friction. "Mrs.
Brissenden's quite fabulous."
He appeared to have strayed, in our interval, far. "'Fabulous'?"
"Why, for the figure that, by candle-light and in cloth-of-silver and
diamonds, she is still able to make."
"Oh dear, yes!" He showed as relieved to be able to see what I meant.
"She has grown so very much less plain."
But that wasn't at all what I meant. "Ah," I said, "you put it the
other way at Paddington--which was much more the right one."
He had quite forgotten. "How then did I put it?"
As he had done before, I got rid of my ash. "She hasn't grown very much
less plain. She has only grown very much less old."
"Ah, well," he laughed, but as if his interest had quickly dropped,
"youth is--comparatively speaking--beauty."
"Oh, not always. Look at poor Briss himself."
"Well, if you like better, beauty is youth."
"Not always, either," I returned. "Certainly only when it _is_ beauty.
To see how little it may be either, look," I repeated, "at poor Briss."
"I thought you told me just now not to!" He rose at last in his
impatience.
"Well, at present you can."
I also got up, the other men at the same moment moved, and the subject
of our reference stood in view. This indeed was but briefly, for, as if
to examine a picture behind him, the personage in question suddenly
turned his back. Long, however, had had time to take him in and then to
decide. "I've looked. What then?"
"You don't see anything?"
"Nothing."
"Not what everyone else must?"
"No, confound you!"
I already felt that, to be so tortuous, he must have had a reason, and
the search for his reason was what, from this moment, drew me on. I had
in fact half guessed it as we stood there. But this only made me the
more explanatory. "It isn't really, however, that Brissenden has grown
less lovely--it's only that he has grown less young."
To which my friend, as we quitted the room, replied simply: "Oh!"
The effect I have mentioned was, none the less, too absurd. The poor
youth's back, before us, still as if consciously presented, confessed to
the burden of time. "How old," I continued, "did we make out this
afternoon that he would be?"
"That who would?"
"Why, poor Briss."
He fairly pulled up in our march. "Have you got him on the brain?"
"Don't I seem to remember, my dear man, that it was you yourself who
knew? He's thirty at the most. He can't possibly be more. And there he
is: as fine, as swaddled, as royal a mummy, to the eye, as one would
wish to see. Don't pretend! But it's all right." I laughed as I took
myself up. "I must talk to Lady John."
I did talk to her, but I must come to it. What is most to the point just
here is an observation or two that, in the smoking-room, before going
to bed, I exchanged with Ford Obert. I forbore, as I have hinted, to
show all I saw, but it was lawfully open to me to judge of what other
people did; and I had had before dinner my little proof that, on
occasion, Obert could see as much as most. Yet I said nothing more to
him for the present about Mrs. Server. The Brissendens were new to him,
and his experience of every sort of facial accident, of human sign, made
him just the touchstone I wanted. Nothing, naturally, was easier than to
turn him on the question of the fair and the foul, type and character,
weal and woe, among our fellow-visitors; so that my mention of the air
of disparity in the couple I have just named came in its order and
produced its effect. This effect was that of my seeing--which was all I
required--that if the disparity was marked for him this expert observer
could yet read it quite the wrong way. Why had so fine a young creature
married a man three times her age? He was of course astounded when I
told him the young creature was much nearer three times Brissenden's,
and this led to some interesting talk between us as to the consequences,
in general, of such association on such terms. The particular case
before us, I easily granted, sinned by over-emphasis, but it was a fair,
though a gross, illustration of what almost always occurred when twenty
and forty, when thirty and sixty, mated or mingled, lived together in
intimacy. Intimacy of course had to be postulated. Then either the high
number or the low always got the upper hand, and it was usually the high
that succeeded. It seemed, in other words, more possible to go back than
to keep still, to grow young than to remain so. If Brissenden had been
of his wife's age and his wife of Brissenden's, it would thus be he who
must have redescended the hill, it would be she who would have been
pushed over the brow. There was really a touching truth in it, the stuff
of--what did people call such things?--an apologue or a parable. "One of
the pair," I said, "has to pay for the other. What ensues is a miracle,
and miracles are expensive. What's a greater one than to have your youth
twice over? It's a second wind, another 'go'--which isn't the sort of
thing life mostly treats us to. Mrs. Briss had to get her new blood, her
extra allowance of time and bloom, somewhere; and from whom could she so
conveniently extract them as from Guy himself? She _has_, by an
extraordinary feat of legerdemain, extracted them; and he, on his side,
to supply her, has had to tap the sacred fount. But the sacred fount is
like the greedy man's description of the turkey as an 'awkward' dinner
dish. It may be sometimes too much for a single share, but it's not
enough to go round."
Obert was at all events sufficiently struck with my view to throw out a
question on it. "So that, paying to his last drop, Mr. Briss, as you
call him, can only die of the business?"
"Oh, not yet, I hope. But before _her_--yes: long."
He was much amused. "How you polish them off!"
"I only talk," I returned, "as you paint; not a bit worse! But one must
indeed wonder," I conceded, "how the poor wretches feel."
"You mean whether Brissenden likes it?"
I made up my mind on the spot. "If he loves her he must. That is if he
loves her passionately, sublimely." I saw it all. "It's in fact just
because he does so love her that the miracle, for her, is wrought."
"Well," my friend reflected, "for taking a miracle coolly----!"
"She hasn't her equal? Yes, she does take it. She just quietly, but just
selfishly, profits by it."
"And doesn't see then how her victim loses?"
"No. She can't. The perception, if she had it, would be painful and
terrible--might even be fatal to the process. So she hasn't it. She
passes round it. It takes all her flood of life to meet her own chance.
She has only a wonderful sense of success and well-being. The _other_
consciousness----"
"Is all for the other party?"
"The author of the sacrifice."
"Then how beautifully 'poor Briss,'" my companion said, "must have it!"
I had already assured myself. He had gone to bed, and my fancy followed
him. "Oh, he has it so that, though he goes, in his passion, about with
her, he dares scarcely show his face." And I made a final induction.
"The agents of the sacrifice are uncomfortable, I gather, when they
suspect or fear that you see."
My friend was charmed with my ingenuity. "How you've worked it out!"
"Well, I feel as if I were on the way to something."
He looked surprised. "Something still more?"
"Something still more." I had an impulse to tell him I scarce knew what.
But I kept it under. "I seem to snuff up----"
"_Quoi donc?_"
"The sense of a discovery to be made."
"And of what?"
"I'll tell you to-morrow. Good-night."
III
I did on the morrow several things, but the first was not to redeem that
vow. It was to address myself straight to Grace Brissenden. "I must let
you know that, in spite of your guarantee, it doesn't go at all--oh, but
not at all! I've tried Lady John, as you enjoined, and I can't but feel
that she leaves us very much where we were." Then, as my listener seemed
not quite to remember where we had been, I came to her help. "You said
yesterday at Paddington, to explain the change in Gilbert Long--don't
you recall?--that that woman, plying him with her genius and giving him
of her best, is clever enough for two. She's not clever enough then, it
strikes me, for three--or at any rate for four. I confess I don't see
it. Does she really dazzle _you_?"
My friend had caught up. "Oh, you've a standard of wit!"
"No, I've only a sense of reality--a sense not at all satisfied by the
theory of such an influence as Lady John's."
She wondered. "Such a one as whose else then?"
"Ah, that's for us still to find out! Of course this can't be easy; for
as the appearance is inevitably a kind of betrayal, it's in somebody's
interest to conceal it."
This Mrs. Brissenden grasped. "Oh, you mean in the lady's?"
"In the lady's most. But also in Long's own, if he's really tender of
the lady--which is precisely what our theory posits."
My companion, once roused, was all there. "I see. You call the
appearance a kind of betrayal because it points to the relation behind
it."
"Precisely."
"And the relation--to do that sort of thing--must be necessarily so
awfully intimate."
"_Intimissima._"
"And kept therefore in the background exactly in that proportion."
"Exactly in that proportion."
"Very well then," said Mrs. Brissenden, "doesn't Mr. Long's tenderness
of Lady John quite fall in with what I mentioned to you?"
I remembered what she had mentioned to me. "His making her come down
with poor Briss?"
"Nothing less."
"And is that all you go upon?"
"That and lots more."
I thought a minute--but I had been abundantly thinking. "I know what you
mean by 'lots.' Is Brissenden in it?"
"Dear no--poor Briss! He wouldn't like that. _I_ saw the manoeuvre,
but Guy didn't. And you must have noticed how he stuck to her all last
evening."
"How Gilbert Long stuck to Lady John? Oh yes, I noticed. They were like
Lord Lutley and Mrs. Froome. But is that what one can call being tender
of her?"
My companion weighed it. "He must speak to her _sometimes_. I'm glad you
admit, at any rate," she continued, "that it does take what you so
prettily call some woman's secretly giving him of her best to account
for him."
"Oh, that I admit with all my heart--or at least with all my head. Only,
Lady John has none of the signs----"
"Of being the beneficent woman? What then _are_ they--the signs--to be
so plain?" I was not yet quite ready to say, however; on which she
added: "It proves nothing, you know, that _you_ don't like her."
"No. It would prove more if she didn't like _me_, which--fatuous fool as
you may find me--I verily believe she does. If she hated me it would be,
you see, for my ruthless analysis of her secret. She _has_ no secret.
She would like awfully to have--and she would like almost as much to be
believed to have. Last evening, after dinner, she could feel perhaps for
a while that she _was_ believed. But it won't do. There's nothing in
it. You asked me just now," I pursued, "what the signs of such a secret
would naturally be. Well, bethink yourself a moment of what the secret
itself must naturally be."
Oh, she looked as if she knew all about _that_! "Awfully
charming--mustn't it?--to act upon a person, through an affection, so
deeply."
"Yes--it can certainly be no vulgar flirtation." I felt a little like a
teacher encouraging an apt pupil; but I could only go on with the
lesson. "Whoever she is, she gives all she has. She keeps nothing
back--nothing for herself."
"I see--because _he_ takes everything. He just cleans her out." She
looked at me--pleased at last really to understand--with the best
conscience in the world. "Who _is_ the lady then?"
But I could answer as yet only by a question. "How can she possibly be a
woman who gives absolutely nothing whatever; who scrapes and saves and
hoards; who keeps every crumb for herself? The whole show's there--to
minister to Lady John's vanity and advertise the business--behind her
smart shop-window. You can see it, as much as you like, and even amuse
yourself with pricing it. But she never parts with an article. If poor
Long depended on _her_----"
"Well, what?" She was really interested.
"Why, he'd be the same poor Long as ever. He would go as he used to
go--naked and unashamed. No," I wound up, "he deals--turned out as we
now see him--at another establishment."
"I'll grant it," said Mrs. Brissenden, "if you'll only name me the
place."
Ah, I could still but laugh and resume! "He doesn't screen Lady
John--she doesn't screen herself--with your husband or with anybody.
It's she who's herself the screen! And pleased as she is at being so
clever, and at being thought so, she doesn't even know it. She doesn't
so much as suspect it. She's an unmitigated fool about it. 'Of course
Mr. Long's clever, because he's in love with me and sits at my feet, and
don't you see how clever _I_ am? Don't you hear what good things I
say--wait a little, I'm going to say another in about three minutes; and
how, if you'll only give him time too, he comes out with them after me?
They don't perhaps sound so good, but you see where he has got them. I'm
so brilliant, in fine, that the men who admire me have only to imitate
me, which, you observe, they strikingly do.' Something like that is all
her philosophy."
My friend turned it over. "You do sound like her, you know. Yet how, if
a woman's stupid----"
"Can she have made a man clever? She can't. She can't at least have
begun it. What we shall know the real person by, in the case that you
and I are studying, is that the man himself will have made her what she
has become. She will have done just what Lady John has not done--she
will have put up the shutters and closed the shop. She will have parted,
for her friend, with her wit."
"So that she may be regarded as reduced to idiocy?"
"Well--so I can only see it."
"And that if we look, therefore, for the right idiot----"
"We shall find the right woman--our friend's mystic Egeria? Yes, we
shall be at least approaching the truth. We shall 'burn,' as they say in
hide-and-seek." I of course kept to the point that the idiot would have
to _be_ the right one. _Any_ idiot wouldn't be to the purpose. If it was
enough that a woman was a fool the search might become hopeless even in
a house that would have passed but ill for a fool's paradise. We were on
one of the shaded terraces, to which, here and there, a tall window
stood open. The picture without was all morning and August, and within
all clear dimness and rich gleams. We stopped once or twice, raking the
gloom for lights, and it was at some such moment that Mrs. Brissenden
asked me if I then regarded Gilbert Long as now exalted to the position
of the most brilliant of our companions. "The cleverest man of the
party?"--it pulled me up a little. "Hardly that, perhaps--for don't you
see the proofs I'm myself giving you? But say he _is_"--I
considered--"the cleverest but one." The next moment I had seen what she
meant. "In that case the thing we're looking for ought logically to be
the person, of the opposite sex, giving us the maximum sense of
depletion for his benefit? The biggest fool, you suggest, _must_,
consistently, be the right one? Yes again; it would so seem. But that's
not really, you see, the short cut it sounds. The biggest fool is what
we want, but the question is to discover who _is_ the biggest."
"I'm glad then _I_ feel so safe!" Mrs. Brissenden laughed.
"Oh, you're not the biggest!" I handsomely conceded. "Besides, as I say,
there must be the other evidence--the evidence of relations."
We had gone on, with this, a few steps, but my companion again checked
me, while her nod toward a window gave my attention a lead. "Won't
_that_, as it happens, then do?" We could just see, from where we stood,
a corner of one of the rooms. It was occupied by a seated couple, a lady
whose face was in sight and a gentleman whose identity was attested by
his back, a back somehow replete for us, at the moment, with a guilty
significance. There _was_ the evidence of relations. That we had
suddenly caught Long in the act of presenting his receptacle at the
sacred fount seemed announced by the tone in which Mrs. Brissenden named
the other party--"Mme. de Dreuil!" We looked at each other, I was
aware, with some elation; but our triumph was brief. The Comtesse de
Dreuil, we quickly felt--an American married to a Frenchman--wasn't at
all the thing. She was almost as much "all there" as Lady John. She was
only another screen, and we perceived, for that matter, the next minute,
that Lady John was also present. Another step had placed us within range
of her; the picture revealed in the rich dusk of the room was a group of
three. From that moment, unanimously, we gave up Lady John, and as we
continued our stroll my friend brought out her despair. "Then he has
nothing _but_ screens? The need for so many does suggest a fire!" And in
spite of discouragement she sounded, interrogatively, one after the
other, the names of those ladies the perfection of whose presence of
mind might, when considered, pass as questionable. We soon, however,
felt our process to be, practically, a trifle invidious. Not one of the
persons named could, at any rate--to do them all justice--affect us as
an intellectual ruin. It was natural therefore for Mrs. Brissenden to
conclude with scepticism. "She may exist--and exist as you require her;
but what, after all, proves that she's here? She mayn't have come down
with him. Does it necessarily follow that they always go about
together?"
I was ready to declare that it necessarily followed. I had my idea, and
I didn't see why I shouldn't bring it out. "It's my belief that he no
more goes away without her than you go away without poor Briss."
She surveyed me in splendid serenity. "But what have we in common?"
"With the parties to an abandoned flirtation? Well, you've in common
your mutual attachment and the fact that you're thoroughly happy
together."
"Ah," she good-humouredly answered, "we don't flirt!"
"Well, at all events, you don't separate. He doesn't really suffer you
out of his sight, and, to circulate in the society you adorn, you don't
leave him at home."
"Why shouldn't I?" she asked, looking at me, I thought, just a trifle
harder.
"It isn't a question of why you shouldn't--it's a question of whether
you do. You don't--do you? That's all."
She thought it over as if for the first time. "It seems to me I often
leave him when I don't want him."
"Oh, when you don't want him--yes. But when don't you want him? You want
him when you want to be right, and you want to be right when you mix in
a scene like this. I mean," I continued for my private amusement, "when
you want to be happy. Happiness, you know, is, to a lady in the full
tide of social success, even more becoming than a new French frock. You
have the advantage, for your beauty, of being admirably married. You
bloom in your husband's presence. I don't say he need always be at your
elbow; I simply say that you're most completely yourself when he's not
far off. If there were nothing else there would be the help given you by
your quiet confidence in his lawful passion."
"I'm bound to say," Mrs. Brissenden replied, "that such help is
consistent with his not having spoken to me since we parted, yesterday,
to come down here by different trains. We haven't so much as met since
our arrival. My finding him so indispensable is consistent with my not
having so much as looked at him. Indispensable, please, for what?"
"For your not being without him."
"What then do I do _with_ him?"
I hesitated--there were so many ways of putting it; but I gave them all
up. "Ah, I think it will be only _he_ who can tell you! My point is that
you've the instinct--playing in you, on either side, with all the ease
of experience--of what you are to each other. All I mean is that it's
the instinct that Long and _his_ good friend must have. They too perhaps
haven't spoken to each other. But where he comes she does, and where she
comes he does. That's why I know she's among us."
"It's wonderful what you know!" Mrs. Brissenden again laughed. "How can
you think of them as enjoying the facilities of people in _our_
situation?"
"Of people married and therefore logically in presence? I don't," I was
able to reply, "speak of their facilities as the same, and I recognise
every limit to their freedom. But I maintain, none the less, that so far
as they _can_ go, they do go. It's a relation, and they work the
relation: the relation, exquisite surely, of knowing they help each
other to shine. Why are they not, therefore, like you and Brissenden?
What I make out is that when they do shine one will find--though only
after a hunt, I admit, as you see--they must both have been involved.
Feeling their need, and consummately expert, they will have managed,
have arranged."
She took it in with her present odd mixture of the receptive and the
derisive. "Arranged what?"
"Oh, ask _her_!"
"I would if I could find her!" After which, for a moment, my
interlocutress again considered. "But I thought it was just your
contention that _she_ doesn't shine. If it's Lady John's perfect repair
that puts that sort of thing out of the question, your image, it seems
to me, breaks down."
It did a little, I saw, but I gave it a tilt up. "Not at all. It's a
case of shining as Brissenden shines." I wondered if I might go
further--then risked it. "By sacrifice."
I perceived at once that I needn't fear: her conscience was too
good--she was only amused. "Sacrifice, for mercy's sake, of what?"
"Well--for mercy's sake--of his time."
"His time?" She stared. "Hasn't he all the time he wants?"
"My dear lady," I smiled, "he hasn't all the time _you_ want!"
But she evidently had not a glimmering of what I meant. "Don't I make
things of an ease, don't I make life of a charm, for him?"
I'm afraid I laughed out. "That's perhaps exactly it! It's what Gilbert
Long does for _his_ victim--makes things, makes life, of an ease and a
charm."
She stopped yet again, really wondering at me now. "Then it's the woman,
simply, who's happiest?"
"Because Brissenden's the man who is? Precisely!"
On which for a minute, without her going on, we looked at each other.
"Do you really mean that if you only knew _me_ as I am, it would come to
you in the same way to hunt for my confederate? I mean if he weren't
made obvious, you know, by his being my husband."
I turned this over. "If you were only in flirtation--as you reminded me
just now that you're not? Surely!" I declared. "I should arrive at him,
perfectly, after all eliminations, on the principle of looking for the
greatest happiness----"
"Of the smallest number? Well, he may be a small number," she
indulgently sighed, "but he's wholly content! Look at him now there,"
she added the next moment, "and judge." We had resumed our walk and
turned the corner of the house, a movement that brought us into view of
a couple just round the angle of the terrace, a couple who, like
ourselves, must have paused in a sociable stroll. The lady, with her
back to us, leaned a little on the balustrade and looked at the gardens;
the gentleman close to her, with the same support, offered us the face
of Guy Brissenden, as recognisable at a distance as the numbered card of
a "turn"--the black figure upon white--at a music-hall. On seeing us he
said a word to his companion, who quickly jerked round. Then his wife
exclaimed to me--only with more sharpness--as she had exclaimed at Mme.
de Dreuil: "By all that's lovely--May Server!" I took it, on the spot,
for a kind of "Eureka!" but without catching my friend's idea. I was
only aware at first that this idea left me as unconvinced as when the
other possibilities had passed before us. Wasn't it simply the result of
this lady's being the only one we had happened not to eliminate? She had
not even occurred to us. She was pretty enough perhaps for any magic,
but she hadn't the other signs. I didn't believe, somehow--certainly not
on such short notice--either in her happiness or in her flatness. There
was a vague suggestion, of a sort, in our having found her there with
Brissenden: there would have been a pertinence, to our curiosity, or at
least to mine, in this juxtaposition of the two persons who paid, as I
had amused myself with calling it, so heroically; yet I had only to have
it marked for me (to see them, that is, side by side,) in order to feel
how little--at any rate superficially--the graceful, natural, charming
woman ranged herself with the superannuated youth.
She had said a word to him at sight of us, in answer to his own, and in
a minute or two they had met us. This had given me time for more than
one reflection. It had also given Mrs. Brissenden time to insist to me
on her identification, which I could see she would be much less quick to
drop than in the former cases. "We have her," she murmured; "we have
her; it's _she_!" It was by her insistence in fact that my thought was
quickened. It even felt a kind of chill--an odd revulsion--at the touch
of her eagerness. Singular perhaps that only then--yet quite certainly
then--the curiosity to which I had so freely surrendered myself began to
strike me as wanting in taste. It was reflected in Mrs. Brissenden quite
by my fault, and I can't say just what cause for shame, after so much
talk of our search and our scent, I found in our awakened and confirmed
keenness. Why in the world hadn't I found it before? My scruple, in
short, was a thing of the instant; it was in a positive flash that the
amusing question was stamped for me as none of my business. One of the
reflections I have just mentioned was that I had not had a happy hand in
making it so completely Mrs. Brissenden's. Another was, however, that
nothing, fortunately, that had happened between us really signified. For
what had so suddenly overtaken me was the consciousness of this anomaly:
that I was at the same time as disgusted as if I had exposed Mrs. Server
and absolutely convinced that I had yet _not_ exposed her.
While, after the others had greeted us and we stood in vague talk, I
caught afresh the effect of their juxtaposition, I grasped, with a
private joy that was quite extravagant--as so beyond the needed mark--at
the reassurance it offered. This reassurance sprang straight from a
special source. Brissenden's secret was so aware of itself as to be
always on the defensive. Shy and suspicious, it was as much on the
defensive at present as I had felt it to be--so far as I was
concerned--the night before. What was there accordingly in Mrs.
Server--frank and fragrant in the morning air--to correspond to any such
consciousness? Nothing whatever--not a symptom. Whatever secrets she
might have had, she had not _that_ one; she was not in the same box; the
sacred fount, in her, was not threatened with exhaustion. We all soon
re-entered the house together, but Mrs. Brissenden, during the few
minutes that followed, managed to possess herself of the subject of her
denunciation. She put me off with Guy, and I couldn't help feeling it as
a sign of her concentration. She warmed to the question just as I had
thrown it over; and I asked myself rather ruefully what on earth I had
been thinking of. I hadn't in the least had it in mind to "compromise"
an individual; but an individual would be compromised if I didn't now
take care.
IV
I have said that I did many things on this wonderful day, but perhaps
the simplest way to describe the rest of them is as a sustained attempt
to avert that disaster. I succeeded, by vigilance, in preventing my late
companion from carrying Mrs. Server off: I had no wish to see her
studied--by anyone but myself at least--in the light of my theory. I
felt by this time that I understood my theory, but I was not obliged to
believe that Mrs. Brissenden did. I am afraid I must frankly confess
that I called deception to my aid; to separate the two ladies I gave the
more initiated a look in which I invited her to read volumes. This look,
or rather the look she returned, comes back to me as the first note of a
tolerably tight, tense little drama, a little drama of which our
remaining hours at Newmarch were the all too ample stage. She understood
me, as I meant, that she had better leave me to get at the truth--owing
me some obligation, as she did, for so much of it as I had already
communicated. This step was of course a tacit pledge that she should
have the rest from me later on. I knew of some pictures in one of the
rooms that had not been lighted the previous evening, and I made these
my pretext for the effect I desired. I asked Mrs. Server if she wouldn't
come and see them with me, admitting at the same time that I could
scarce expect her to forgive me for my share in the invasion of the
quiet corner in which poor Briss had evidently managed so to interest
her.
"Oh, yes," she replied as we went our way, "he _had_ managed to interest
me. Isn't he curiously interesting? But I hadn't," she continued on my
being too struck with her question for an immediate answer--"I hadn't
managed to interest _him_. Of course you know why!" she laughed. "No one
interests him but Lady John, and he could think of nothing, while I kept
him there, but of how soon he could return to her."
These remarks--of which I give rather the sense than the form, for they
were a little scattered and troubled, and I helped them out and pieced
them together--these remarks had for me, I was to find, unexpected
suggestions, not all of which was I prepared on the spot to take up.
"And is Lady John interested in our friend?"
"Not, I suppose, given her situation, so much as he would perhaps
desire. You don't know what her situation _is_?" she went on while I
doubtless appeared to be sunk in innocence. "Isn't it rather marked that
there's only one person she's interested in?"
"One person?" I was thoroughly at sea.
But we had reached with it the great pictured saloon with which I had
proposed to assist her to renew acquaintance and in which two visitors
had anticipated us. "Why, here he is!" she exclaimed as we paused, for
admiration, in the doorway. The high frescoed ceiling arched over a
floor so highly polished that it seemed to reflect the faded pastels
set, in rococo borders, in the walls and constituting the distinction of
the place. Our companions, examining together one of the portraits and
turning their backs, were at the opposite end, and one of them was
Gilbert Long.
I immediately named the other. "Do you mean Ford Obert?"
She gave me, with a laugh, one of her beautiful looks. "Yes!"
It was answer enough for the moment, and the manner of it showed me to
what legend she was committed. I asked myself, while the two men faced
about to meet us, why she was committed to it, and I further considered
that if Grace Brissenden, against every appearance, was right, there
would now be something for me to see. Which of the two--the agent or the
object of the sacrifice--would take most precautions? I kept my
companion purposely, for a little while, on our side of the room,
leaving the others, interested in their observations, to take their time
to join us. It gave me occasion to wonder if the question mightn't be
cleared up on the spot. There _was_ no question, I had compunctiously
made up my mind, for Mrs. Server; but now I should see the proof of that
conclusion. The proof of it would be, between her and her imputed lover,
the absence of anything that was not perfectly natural. Mrs. Server,
with her eyes raised to the painted dome, with response charmed almost
to solemnity in her exquisite face, struck me at this moment, I had to
concede, as more than ever a person to have a lover imputed. The place,
save for its pictures of later date, a triumph of the florid decoration
of two centuries ago, evidently met her special taste, and a kind of
profane piety had dropped on her, drizzling down, in the cold light, in
silver, in crystal, in faint, mixed delicacies of colour, almost as on a
pilgrim at a shrine. I don't know what it was in her--save, that is, the
positive pitch of delicacy in her beauty--that made her, so impressed
and presented, indescribably touching. She was like an awestruck child;
she might have been herself--all Greuze tints, all pale pinks and blues
and pearly whites and candid eyes--an old dead pastel under glass.
She was not too reduced to this state, however, not to take, soon
enough, her own precaution--if a precaution it was to be deemed. I was
acutely conscious that the naturalness to which I have just alluded
would be, for either party, the only precaution worth speaking of. We
moved slowly round the room, pausing here and there for curiosity;
during which time the two men remained where we had found them. She had
begun at last to watch them and had proposed that we should see in what
they were so absorbed; but I checked her in the movement, raising my
hand in a friendly admonition to wait. We waited then, face to face,
looking at each other as if to catch a strain of music. This was what I
had intended, for it had just come to me that one of the voices was in
the air and that it had imposed close attention. The distinguished
painter listened while--to all appearance--Gilbert Long did, in the
presence of the picture, the explaining. Ford Obert moved, after a
little, but not so as to interrupt--only so as to show me his face in a
recall of what had passed between us the night before in the
smoking-room. I turned my eyes from Mrs. Server's; I allowed myself to
commune a little, across the shining space, with those of our
fellow-auditor. The occasion had thus for a minute the oddest little air
of an aesthetic lecture prompted by accidental, but immense, suggestions
and delivered by Gilbert Long.
I couldn't, at the distance, with my companion, quite follow it, but
Obert was clearly patient enough to betray that he was struck. His
impression was at any rate doubtless his share of surprise at Long's
gift of talk. This was what his eyes indeed most seemed to throw over
to me--"What an unexpected demon of a critic!" It was extraordinarily
interesting--I don't mean the special drift of Long's eloquence, which I
couldn't, as I say, catch; but the phenomenon of his, of all people,
dealing in that article. It put before me the question of whether, in
these strange relations that I believed I had thus got my glimpse of,
the action of the person "sacrificed" mightn't be quite out of
proportion to the resources of that person. It was as if these elements
might really multiply in the transfer made of them; as if the borrower
practically found himself--or herself--in possession of a greater sum
than the known property of the creditor. The surrender, in this way,
added, by pure beauty, to the thing surrendered. We all know the French
adage about that _plus belle fille du monde_ who can give but what she
has; yet if Mrs. Server, for instance, _had_ been the heroine of this
particular connection, the communication of her intelligence to her
friend would quite have falsified it. She would have given much more
than she had.
When Long had finished his demonstration and his charged voice had
dropped, we crossed to claim acquaintance with the work that had
inspired him. The place had not been completely new to Mrs. Server any
more than to myself, and the impression now made on her was but the
intenser vibration of a chord already stirred; nevertheless I was
struck with her saying, as a result of more remembrance than I had
attributed to her "Oh yes,--the man with the mask in his hand!" On our
joining the others I expressed regret at our having turned up too late
for the ideas that, on a theme so promising, they would have been sure
to produce, and Obert, quite agreeing that we had lost a treat, said
frankly, in reference to Long, but addressing himself more especially to
Mrs. Server: "He's perfectly amazing, you know--he's perfectly amazing!"
I observed that as a consequence of this Long looked neither at Mrs.
Server nor at Obert; he looked only at me, and with quite a penetrable
shade of shyness. Then again a strange thing happened, a stranger thing
even than my quick sense, the previous afternoon at the station, that he
was a changed man. It was as if he were still more changed--had altered
as much since the evening before as during the so much longer interval
of which I had originally to take account. He had altered almost like
Grace Brissenden--he looked fairly distinguished. I said to myself that,
without his stature and certain signs in his dress, I should probably
not have placed him. Engrossed an instant with this view and with not
losing touch of the uneasiness that I conceived I had fastened on him, I
became aware only after she had spoken that Mrs. Server had gaily and
gracefully asked of Obert why in the world so clever a man should _not_
have been clever. "Obert," I accordingly took upon myself to remark,
"had evidently laboured under some extraordinary delusion. He must
literally have doubted if Long _was_ clever."
"Fancy!" Mrs. Server explained with a charming smile at Long, who, still
looking pleasantly competent and not too fatuous, amiably returned it.
"They're natural, they're natural," I privately reflected; "that is,
he's natural to _her_, but he's not so to me." And as if seeing depths
in this, and to try it, I appealed to him. "Do, my dear man, let us have
it again. It's the picture, of all pictures, that most needs an
interpreter. _Don't_ we want," I asked of Mrs. Server, "to know what it
means?" The figure represented is a young man in black--a quaint, tight
black dress, fashioned in years long past; with a pale, lean, livid face
and a stare, from eyes without eyebrows, like that of some whitened
old-world clown. In his hand he holds an object that strikes the
spectator at first simply as some obscure, some ambiguous work of art,
but that on a second view becomes a representation of a human face,
modelled and coloured, in wax, in enamelled metal, in some substance not
human. The object thus appears a complete mask, such as might have been
fantastically fitted and worn.
"Yes, what in the world does it mean?" Mrs. Server replied. "One could
call it--though that doesn't get one much further--the Mask of Death."
"Why so?" I demanded while we all again looked at the picture. "Isn't it
much rather the Mask of Life? It's the man's own face that's Death. The
other one, blooming and beautiful----"
"Ah, but with an awful grimace!" Mrs. Server broke in.
"The other one, blooming and beautiful," I repeated, "is Life, and he's
going to put it on; unless indeed he has just taken it off."
"He's dreadful, he's awful--that's what I mean," said Mrs. Server. "But
what does Mr. Long think?"
"The artificial face, on the other hand," I went on, as Long now said
nothing, "is extremely studied and, when you carefully look at it,
charmingly pretty. I don't see the grimace."
"I don't see anything else!" Mrs. Server good-humouredly insisted. "And
what does Mr. Obert think?"
He kept his eyes on her a moment before replying. "He thinks it looks
like a lovely lady."
"That grinning mask? What lovely lady?"
"It does," I declared to him, really seeing what he meant--"it does look
remarkably like Mrs. Server."
She laughed, but forgivingly. "I'm immensely obliged. You deserve," she
continued to me, "that I should say the gentleman's own face is the
image of a certain other gentleman's."
"It isn't the image of yours," Obert said to me, fitting the cap, "but
it's a funny thing that it should really recall to one some face among
us here, on this occasion--I mean some face in our party--that I can't
think of." We had our eyes again on the ominous figure. "We've seen him
yesterday--we've seen him already this morning." Obert, oddly enough,
still couldn't catch it. "Who the deuce is it?"
"I know," I returned after a moment--our friend's reference having
again, in a flash, become illuminating. "But nothing would induce me to
tell."
"If _I_ were the flattered individual," Long observed, speaking for the
first time, "I've an idea that you'd give me the benefit of the
compliment. Therefore it's probably not me."
"Oh, it's not you in the least," Mrs. Server blandly took upon herself
to observe. "This face is so bad----"
"And mine is so good?" our companion laughed. "Thank you for saving me!"
I watched them look at each other, for there had been as yet between
them no complete exchange. Yes, they were natural. I couldn't have made
it out that they were not. But there was something, all the same, that
I wanted to know, and I put it immediately to Long. "Why do you bring
against me such an accusation?"
He met the question--singularly enough--as if his readiness had suddenly
deserted him. "I don't know!"--and he turned off to another picture.
It left the three of us all the more confronted with the conundrum
launched by Obert, and Mrs. Server's curiosity remained. "_Do_ name,"
she said to me, "the flattered individual."
"No, it's a responsibility I leave to Obert."
But he was clearly still at fault; he was like a man desiring, but
unable, to sneeze. "I see the fellow--yet I don't. Never mind." He
turned away too. "He'll come to me."
"The resemblance," said Long, on this, at a distance from us and not
turning, "the resemblance, which I shouldn't think would puzzle anyone,
is simply to 'poor Briss'!"
"Oh, of course!"--and Obert gave a jump round.
"Ah--I do see it," Mrs. Server conceded with her head on one side, but
as if speaking rather for harmony.
I didn't believe she saw it, but that only made her the more natural;
which was also the air she had on going to join Long, in his new
contemplation, after I had admitted that it was of Brissenden I myself
had thought. Obert and I remained together in the presence of the Man
with the Mask, and, the others being out of earshot, he reminded me that
I had promised him the night before in the smoking-room to give him
to-day the knowledge I had then withheld. If I had announced that I was
on the track of a discovery, pray had I made it yet, and what was it, at
any rate, that I proposed to discover? I felt now, in truth, more
uncomfortable than I had expected in being kept to my obligation, and I
beat about the bush a little till, instead of meeting it, I was able to
put the natural question: "What wonderful things was Long just saying to
you?"
"Oh, characteristic ones enough--whimsical, fanciful, funny. The things
he says, you know."
It was indeed a fresh view. "They strike you as characteristic?"
"Of the man himself and his type of mind? Surely. Don't _you_? He talks
to talk, but he's really amusing."
I was watching our companions. "Indeed he is--extraordinarily amusing."
It was highly interesting to me to hear at last of Long's "type of
mind." "See how amusing he is at the present moment to Mrs. Server."
Obert took this in; she was convulsed, in the extravagance always so
pretty as to be pardonable, with laughter, and she even looked over at
us as if to intimate with her shining, lingering eyes that we wouldn't
be surprised at her transports if we suspected what her entertainer,
whom she had never known for such a humourist, was saying. Instead of
going to find out, all the same, we remained another minute together. It
was for me, now, I could see, that Obert had his best attention. "What's
the matter with them?"
It startled me almost as much as if he had asked me what was the matter
with myself--for that something _was_, under this head, I was by this
time unable to ignore. Not twenty minutes had elapsed since our meeting
with Mrs. Server on the terrace had determined Grace Brissenden's
elation, but it was a fact that my nervousness had taken an
extraordinary stride. I had perhaps not till this instant been fully
aware of it--it was really brought out by the way Obert looked at me as
if he fancied he had heard me shake. Mrs. Server might be natural, and
Gilbert Long might be, but I should not preserve that calm unless I
pulled myself well together. I made the effort, facing my sharp
interlocutor; and I think it was at this point that I fully measured my
dismay. I had grown--that was what was the matter with me--precipitately,
preposterously anxious. Instead of dropping, the discomfort produced in
me by Mrs. Brissenden had deepened to agitation, and this in spite of
the fact that in the brief interval nothing worse, nothing but what was
right, had happened. Had I myself suddenly fallen so much in love with
Mrs. Server that the care for her reputation had become with me an
obsession? It was of no use saying I simply pitied her: what did I pity
her for if she wasn't in danger? She _was_ in danger: that rushed over
me at present--rushed over me while I tried to look easy and delayed to
answer my friend. She _was_ in danger--if only because she had caught
and held the search-light of Obert's attention. I took up his inquiry.
"The matter with them? I don't know anything but that they're young and
handsome and happy--children, as who should say, of the world; children
of leisure and pleasure and privilege."
Obert's eyes went back to them. "Do you remember what I said to you
about her yesterday afternoon? She darts from flower to flower, but she
clings, for the time, to each. You've been feeling, I judge, the force
of my remark."
"Oh, she didn't at all 'dart,'" I replied, "just now at me. I darted,
much rather, at _her_."
"Long didn't, then," Obert said, still with his eyes on them.
I had to wait a moment. "Do you mean he struck you as avoiding her?"
He in turn considered. "He struck me as having noticed with what
intensity, ever since we came down, she has kept alighting. She
inaugurated it, the instant she arrived, with _me_, and every man of us
has had his turn. I dare say it's only fair, certainly, that Long should
have."
"He's lucky to get it, the brute! She's as charming as she can possibly
be."
"That's it, precisely; and it's what no woman ought to be--as charming
as she possibly can!--more than once or twice in her life. This lady is
so every blessed minute, and to every blessed male. It's as if she were
too awfully afraid one wouldn't take it in. If she but knew how one
does! However," my friend continued, "you'll recollect that we differed
about her yesterday--and what does it signify? One should of course bear
lightly on anything so light. But I stick to it that she's different."
I pondered. "Different from whom?"
"Different from herself--as she was when I painted her. There's
something the matter with her."
"Ah, then, it's for me to ask _you_ what. I don't myself, you see,
perceive it."
He made for a little no answer, and we were both indeed by this time
taken up with the withdrawal of the two other members of our group. They
moved away together across the shining floor, pausing, looking up at the
painted vault, saying the inevitable things--bringing off their retreat,
in short, in the best order. It struck me somehow as a retreat, and yet
I insisted to myself, once more, on its being perfectly natural. At the
high door, which stood open, they stopped a moment and looked back at
us--looked frankly, sociably, as if in consciousness of our sympathetic
attention. Mrs. Server waved, as in temporary farewell, a free
explanatory hand at me; she seemed to explain that she was now trying
somebody else. Obert moreover added _his_ explanation. "That's the way
she collars us."
"Oh, Long doesn't mind," I said. "But what's the way she strikes you as
different?"
"From what she was when she sat to me? Well, a part of it is that she
can't keep still. She was as still then as if she had been paid for it.
Now she's all over the place." But he came back to something else. "I
like your talking, my dear man, of what you 'don't perceive.' I've yet
to find out what that remarkable quantity is. What you do perceive has
at all events given me so much to think about that it doubtless ought to
serve me for the present. I feel I ought to let you know that you've
made me also perceive the Brissendens." I of course remembered what I
had said to him, but it was just this that now touched my uneasiness,
and I only echoed the name, a little blankly, with the instinct of
gaining time. "You put me on them wonderfully," Obert continued, "though
of course I've kept your idea to myself. All the same it sheds a great
light."
I could again but feebly repeat it. "A great light?"
"As to what may go on even between others still. It's a jolly idea--a
torch in the darkness; and do you know what I've done with it? I've held
it up, I don't mind telling you, to just the question of the change,
since this interests you, in Mrs. Server. If you've got your mystery
I'll be hanged if I won't have mine. If you've got your Brissendens I
shall see what I can do with _her_. You've given me an analogy, and I
declare I find it dazzling. I don't see the end of what may be done with
it. If Brissenden's paying for his wife, for her amazing second bloom,
who's paying for Mrs. Server? Isn't _that_--what do the newspapers call
it?--the missing word? Isn't it perhaps in fact just what you told me
last night you were on the track of? But don't add now," he went on,
more and more amused with his divination, "don't add now that the man's
obviously Gilbert Long--for I won't be put off with anything of the
sort. She collared him much too markedly. The real man must be one she
doesn't markedly collar."
"But I thought that what you a moment ago made out was that she so
markedly collars all of us." This was my immediate reply to Obert's
blaze of ingenuity, but I none the less saw more things in it than I
could reply to. I saw, at any rate, and saw with relief, that if he
should look on the principle suggested to him by the case of the
Brissendens, there would be no danger at all of his finding it. If,
accordingly, I was nervous for Mrs. Server, all I had to do was to keep
him on this false scent. Since it was not she who was paid for, but she
who possibly paid, his fancy might harmlessly divert him till the party
should disperse. At the same time, in the midst of these reflections,
the question of the "change" in her, which he was in so much better a
position than I to measure, couldn't help having for me its portent, and
the sense of that was, no doubt, in my next words. "What makes you think
that what you speak of was what I had in my head?"
"Well, the way, simply, that the shoe fits. She's absolutely not the
same person I painted. It's exactly like Mrs. Brissenden's having been
for you yesterday not the same person you had last seen bearing her
name."
"Very good," I returned, "though I didn't in the least mean to set you
digging so hard. However, dig on your side, by all means, while I dig on
mine. All I ask of you is complete discretion."
"Ah, naturally!"
"We ought to remember," I pursued, even at the risk of showing as too
sententious, "that success in such an inquiry may perhaps be more
embarrassing than failure. To nose about for a relation that a lady has
her reasons for keeping secret----"
"Is made not only quite inoffensive, I hold"--he immediately took me
up--"but positively honourable, by being confined to psychologic
evidence."
I wondered a little. "Honourable to whom?"
"Why, to the investigator. Resting on the _kind_ of signs that the game
takes account of when fairly played--resting on psychologic signs alone,
it's a high application of intelligence. What's ignoble is the detective
and the keyhole."
"I see," I after a moment admitted. "I did have, last night, my
scruples, but you warm me up. Yet I confess also," I still added, "that
if I do muster the courage of my curiosity, it's a little because I feel
even yet, as I think you also must, altogether destitute of a material
clue. If I had a material clue I should feel ashamed: the fact would be
deterrent. I start, for my part, at any rate, quite in the dark--or in a
darkness lighted, at best, by what you have called the torch of my
analogy. The analogy too," I wound up, "may very well be only half a
help. It was easy to find poor Briss, because poor Briss is here, and
it's always easy, moreover, to find a husband. But say Mrs. Server's
poor Briss--or his equivalent, whoever it may be--_isn't_ here."
We had begun to walk away with this, but my companion pulled up at the
door of the room. "I'm sure he is. She tells me he's near."
"'Tells' you?" I challenged it, but I uncomfortably reflected that it
was just what I had myself told Mrs. Brissenden.
"She wouldn't be as she is if he weren't. Her being as she is is the
sign of it. He wasn't present--that is he wasn't present in her life at
all--when I painted her; and the difference we're impressed with is
exactly the proof that he is now."
My difficulty in profiting by the relief he had so unconsciously
afforded me resided of course in my not feeling free to show for quite
as impressed as he was. I hadn't really made out at all what he was
impressed _with_, and I should only have spoiled everything by inviting
him to be definite. This was a little of a worry, for I should have
liked to know; but on the other hand I felt my track at present
effectually covered. "Well, then, grant he's one of us. There are more
than a dozen of us--a dozen even with you and me and Brissenden counted
out. The hitch is that we're nowhere without a primary lead. As to
Brissenden there _was_ the lead."
"You mean as afforded by his wife's bloated state, which was a
signal----?"
"Precisely: for the search for something or other that would help to
explain it. Given his wife's bloated state, his own shrunken one was
what was to have been predicated. I knew definitely, in other words,
what to look for."
"Whereas we don't know here?"
"Mrs. Server's state, unfortunately," I replied, "is not bloated."
He laughed at my "unfortunately," though recognising that I spoke merely
from the point of view of lucidity, and presently remarked that he had
his own idea. He didn't say what it was, and I didn't ask, intimating
thereby that I held it to be in this manner we were playing the game;
but I indulgently questioned it in the light of its not yet having
assisted him. He answered that the minutes we had just passed were what
had made the difference; it had sprung from the strong effect produced
on him after she came in with me. "It's but now I really see her. She
did and said nothing special, nothing striking or extraordinary; but
that didn't matter--it never does: one saw how she _is_. She's nothing
but _that_."
"Nothing but what?"
"She's all _in_ it," he insisted. "Or it's all in _her_. It comes to the
same thing."
"Of course it's all in her," I said as impatiently as I could, though
his attestation--for I wholly trusted his perception--left me so much in
his debt. "That's what we start with, isn't it? It leaves us as far as
ever from what we must arrive at."
But he was too interested in his idea to heed my question. He was
wrapped in the "psychologic" glow. "I _have_ her!"
"Ah, but it's a question of having _him_!"
He looked at me on this as if I had brought him back to a mere detail,
and after an instant the light went out of his face. "So it is. I leave
it to you. I don't care." His drop had the usual suddenness of the drops
of the artistic temperament. "Look for the last man," he nevertheless,
but with more detachment, added. "I daresay it would be he."
"The last? In what sense the last?"
"Well, the last sort of creature who could be believed of her."
"Oh," I rejoined as we went on, "the great bar to that is that such a
sort of creature as the last won't _be_ here!"
He hesitated. "So much the better. I give him, at any rate, wherever he
is, up to you."
"Thank you," I returned, "for the beauty of the present! You do see,
then, that our psychologic glow doesn't, after all, prevent the
thing----"
"From being none of one's business? Yes. Poor little woman!" He seemed
somehow satisfied; he threw it all up. "It isn't any of one's business,
is it?"
"Why, that's what I was telling you," I impatiently exclaimed, "that _I_
feel!"
V
The first thing that happened to me after parting with him was to find
myself again engaged with Mrs. Brissenden, still full of the quick
conviction with which I had left her. "It _is_ she--quite unmistakably,
you know. I don't see how I can have been so stupid as not to make it
out. I haven't your cleverness, of course, till my nose is rubbed into a
thing. But when it _is_--!" She celebrated her humility in a laugh that
was proud. "The two are off together."
"Off where?"
"I don't know where, but I saw them a few minutes ago most distinctly
'slope.' They've gone for a quiet, unwatched hour, poor dears, out into
the park or the gardens. When one knows it, it's all there. But what's
that vulgar song?--'You've got to know it first!' It strikes me, if you
don't mind my telling you so, that the way _you_ get hold of things is
positively uncanny. I mean as regards what first marked her for you."
"But, my dear lady," I protested, "nothing at all first marked her for
me. She _isn't_ marked for me, first or last. It was only you who so
jumped at her."
My interlocutress stared, and I had at this moment, I remember, an
almost intolerable sense of her fatuity and cruelty. They were all
unconscious, but they were, at that stage, none the less irritating. Her
fine bosom heaved, her blue eyes expanded with her successful, her
simplified egotism. I couldn't, in short, I found, bear her being so
keen about Mrs. Server while she was so stupid about poor Briss. She
seemed to recall to me nobly the fact that _she_ hadn't a lover. No, she
was only eating poor Briss up inch by inch, but she hadn't a lover. "I
don't," I insisted, "see in Mrs. Server any of the right signs."
She looked almost indignant. "Even after your telling me that you see in
Lady John only the wrong ones?"
"Ah, but there are other women here than Mrs. Server and Lady John."
"Certainly. But didn't we, a moment ago, think of them all and dismiss
them? If Lady John's out of the question, how can Mrs. Server possibly
_not_ be in it? We want a fool----"
"Ah, _do_ we?" I interruptingly wailed.
"Why, exactly by your own theory, in which you've so much interested me!
It was you who struck off the idea."
"That we want a fool?" I felt myself turning gloomy enough. "Do we
really want anyone at all?"
She gave me, in momentary silence, a strange smile. "Ah, you want to
take it back now? You're sorry you spoke. My dear man, you may be----"
but that didn't hinder the fact, in short, that I had kindled near me a
fine, if modest and timid, intelligence. There did remain the truth of
our friend's striking development, to which I had called her attention.
Regretting my rashness didn't make the prodigy less. "You'll lead me to
believe, if you back out, that there's suddenly someone you want to
protect. Weak man," she exclaimed with an assurance from which, I
confess, I was to take alarm, "something has happened to you since we
separated! Weak man," she repeated with dreadful gaiety, "you've been
squared!"
I literally blushed for her. "Squared?"
"Does it inconveniently happen that you find you're in love with her
yourself?"
"Well," I replied on quick reflection, "do, if you like, call it that;
for you see what a motive it gives me for being, in such a matter as
this wonderful one that you and I happened to find ourselves for a
moment making so free with, absolutely sure about her. I _am_ absolutely
sure. There! She won't do. And for your postulate that she's at the
present moment in some sequestered spot in Long's company, suffer me
without delay to correct it. It won't hold water. If you'll go into the
library, through which I have just passed, you'll find her there in the
company of the Comte de Dreuil."
Mrs. Briss stared again. "Already? She _was_, at any rate, with Mr.
Long, and she told me on my meeting them that they had just come from
the pastels."
"Exactly. They met there--she and I having gone together; and they
retired together under my eyes. They must have parted, clearly, the
moment after."
She took it all in, turned it all over. "Then what does that prove but
that they're afraid to be seen?"
"Ah, they're _not_ afraid, since both you and I saw them!"
"Oh, only just long enough for them to publish themselves as not
avoiding each other. All the same, you know," she said, "they do."
"Do avoid each other? How is your belief in that," I asked, "consistent
with your belief that they parade together in the park?"
"They ignore each other in public; they foregather in private."
"Ah, but they _don't_--since, as I tell you, she's even while we talk
the centre of the mystic circle of the twaddle of M. de Dreuil; chained
to a stake if you _can_ be. Besides," I wound up, "it's not only that
she's not the 'right fool'--it's simply that she's not a fool at all.
We want the woman who has been rendered most inane. But this lady hasn't
been rendered so in any degree. She's the reverse of inane. She's in
full possession."
"In full possession of what?"
"Why, of herself."
"Like Lady John?"
I had unfortunately to discriminate here. "No, not like Lady John."
"Like whom then?"
"Like anyone. Like me; like you; like Brissenden. Don't I satisfy you?"
I asked in a moment.
She only looked at me a little, handsome and hard. "If you wished to
satisfy me so easily you shouldn't have made such a point of working me
up. I daresay I, after all, however," she added, "notice more things
than you."
"As for instance?"
"Well, May Server last evening. I was not quite conscious at the time
that I did, but when one has had the 'tip' one looks back and sees
things in a new light."
It was doubtless because my friend irritated me more and more that I met
this with a sharpness possibly excessive. "She's perfectly natural. What
I saw was a test. And so is he."
But she gave me no heed. "If there hadn't been so many people I should
have noticed of myself after dinner that there was something the matter
with her. I should have seen what it was. She was all over the place."
She expressed it as the poor lady's other critic had done, but this
didn't shut my mouth. "Ah, then, in spite of the people, you did notice.
What do you mean by 'all over the place'?"
"She couldn't keep still. She was different from the woman one had last
seen. She used to be so calm--as if she were always sitting for her
portrait. Wasn't she in fact always being painted in a pink frock and
one row of pearls, always staring out at you in exhibitions, as if she
were saying 'Here they are again'? Last night she was on the rush."
"The rush? Oh!"
"Yes, positively--from one man to another. She was on the pounce. She
talked to ten in succession, making up to them in the most extraordinary
way and leaving them still more crazily. She's as nervous as a cat. Put
it to any man here, and see if he doesn't tell you."
"I should think it quite unpleasant to put it to any man here," I
returned; "and I should have been sure you would have thought it the
same. I spoke to you in the deepest confidence."
Mrs. Brissenden's look at me was for a moment of the least
accommodating; then it changed to an intelligent smile. "How you _are_
protecting her! But don't cry out," she added, "before you're hurt.
Since your confidence has distinguished me--though I don't quite see
why--you may be sure I haven't breathed. So I all the more resent your
making me a scene on the extraordinary ground that I've observed as well
as yourself. Perhaps what you don't like is that my observation may be
turned on _you_. I confess it is."
It was difficult to bear being put in the wrong by her, but I made an
effort that I believe was not unsuccessful to recover my good humour.
"It's not in the least to your observation that I object, it's to the
extravagant inferences you draw from it. Of course, however, I admit I
always want to protect the innocent. What does she gain, on your theory,
by her rushing and pouncing? Had she pounced on Brissenden when we met
him with her? Are you so very sure he hadn't pounced on _her_? They had,
at all events, to me, quite the air of people settled; she was not, it
was clear, at that moment meditating a change. It was we, if you
remember, who had absolutely to pull them apart."
"Is it your idea to make out," Mrs. Brissenden inquired in answer to
this, "that she has suddenly had the happy thought of a passion for my
husband?"
A new possibility, as she spoke, came to me with a whirr of wings, and I
half expressed it. "She may have a sympathy."
My interlocutress gazed at space. "You mean she may be sorry for him? On
what ground?"
I had gone too far indeed; but I got off as I could. "You neglect him
so! But what is she, at any rate," I went on, "nervous--as nervous as
you describe her--_about_?"
"About her danger; the contingency of its being fixed upon them--an
intimacy so thoroughgoing that they can scarcely afford to let it be
seen even as a mere acquaintance. Think of the circumstances--_her_
personal ones, I mean, and admit that it wouldn't do. It would be too
bad a case. There's everything to make it so. They must live on pins and
needles. Anything proved would go tremendously hard for her."
"In spite of which you're surprised that I 'protect' her?"
It was a question, however, that my companion could meet. "From people
in general, no. From me in particular, yes."
In justice to Mrs. Brissenden I thought a moment. "Well, then, let us be
fair all round. That you don't, as you say, breathe is a discretion I
appreciate; all the more that a little inquiry, tactfully pursued, would
enable you to judge whether any independent suspicion does attach. A
little loose collateral evidence _might_ be picked up; and your scorning
to handle it is no more than I should, after all, have expected of you."
"Thank you for 'after all'!" My companion tossed her head. "I know for
myself what I scorn to handle. Quite apart from that there's another
matter. You must have noticed yourself that when people are so much
liked----"
"There's a kind of general, amiable consensus of blindness? Yes--one can
think of cases. Popularity shelters and hallows--has the effect of
making a good-natured world agree not to see."
My friend seemed pleased that I so sufficiently understood. "This
evidently has been a case then in which it has not only agreed not to
see, but agreed not even to look. It has agreed in fact to look straight
the other way. They say there's no smoke without fire, but it appears
there may be fire without smoke. I'm satisfied, at all events, that one
wouldn't in connection with these two find the least little puff. Isn't
that just what makes the magnificence of their success--the success that
reduces us to playing over them with mere moonshine?" She thought of it;
seemed fairly to envy it. "I've never _seen_ such luck!"
"A rare case of the beauty of impunity _as_ impunity?" I laughed. "Such
a case puts a price on passions otherwise to be deprecated? I'm glad
indeed you admit we're 'reduced.' We _are_ reduced. But what I meant to
say just now was that if you'll continue to join in the genial
conspiracy while I do the same--each of us making an exception only for
the other--I'll pledge myself absolutely to the straight course. If
before we separate I've seen reason to change my mind, I'll loyally let
you know."
"What good will that do me," she asked, "if you _don't_ change your
mind? You won't change it if you shut your eyes to her."
"Ah, I feel I can't do that now. I _am_ interested. The proof of that
is," I pursued, "that I appeal to you for another impression of your
own. I still don't see the logic of her general importunity."
"The logic is simply that she has a terror of appearing to encourage
anyone in particular."
"Why then isn't it in her own interest, for the sake of the screen, just
to _do_ that? The appearance of someone in particular would be exactly
the opposite of the appearance of Long. Your own admission is that
that's _his_ line with Lady John."
Mrs. Brissenden took her view. "Oh, she doesn't want to do anything so
like the real thing. And, as for what he does, they don't feel in the
same way. He's not nervous."
"Then why does he go in for a screen?"
"I mean"--she readily modified it--"that he's not so nervous as May. He
hasn't the same reasons for panic. A man never has. Besides, there's not
so much in Mr. Long to show----"
"What, by my notion, has taken place? Why not, if it was precisely by
the change in him that my notion was inspired? Any change in _her_ I
know comparatively little about."
We hovered so near the case of Mr. and Mrs. Brissenden that it
positively excited me, and all the more for her sustained
unconsciousness. "Oh, the man's not aware of his own change. He doesn't
see it as we do. It's all to his advantage."
"But _we_ see it to his advantage. How should that prevent?"
"We see it to the advantage of his mind and his talk, but not to that
of----"
"Well, what?" I pressed as she pulled up.
She was thinking how to name such mysteries. "His delicacy. His
consideration. His thought _for_ her. He would think for her if he
weren't selfish. But he _is_ selfish--too much so to spare her, to be
generous, to realise. It's only, after all," she sagely went on, feeding
me again, as I winced to feel, with profundity of my own sort, "it's
only an excessive case, a case that in him happens to show as what the
doctors call 'fine,' of what goes on whenever two persons are so much
mixed up. One of them always gets more out of it than the other. One of
them--you know the saying--gives the lips, the other gives the cheek."
"It's the deepest of all truths. Yet the cheek profits too," I more
prudently argued.
"It profits most. It takes and keeps and uses all the lips give. The
cheek, accordingly," she continued to point out, "is Mr. Long's. The
lips are what we began by looking for. We've found them. They're
drained--they're dry, the lips. Mr. Long finds his improvement natural
and beautiful. He revels in it. He takes it for granted. He's sublime."
It kept me for a minute staring at her. "So--do you know?--are _you_!"
She received this wholly as a tribute to her acuteness, and was
therefore proportionately gracious. "That's only because it's catching.
You've _made_ me sublime. You found me dense. You've affected me quite
as Mrs. Server has affected Mr. Long. I don't pretend I show it," she
added, "quite as much as he does."
"Because that would entail _my_ showing it as much as, by your
contention, _she_ does? Well, I confess," I declared, "I do feel
remarkably like that pair of lips. I feel drained--I feel dry!" Her
answer to this, with another toss of her head, was extravagant enough to
mean forgiveness--was that I was impertinent, and her action in support
of her charge was to move away from me, taking her course again to the
terrace, easily accessible from the room in which we had been talking.
She passed out of the window that opened to the ground, and I watched
her while, in the brighter light, she put up her pink parasol. She
walked a few paces, as if to look about her for a change of company, and
by this time had reached a flight of steps that descended to a lower
level. On observing that here, in the act to go down, she suddenly
paused, I knew she had been checked by something seen below and that
this was what made her turn the next moment to give me a look. I took it
as an invitation to rejoin her, and I perceived when I had done so what
had led her to appeal to me. We commanded from the point in question one
of the shady slopes of the park and in particular a spreading beech, the
trunk of which had been inclosed with a rustic circular bench, a
convenience that appeared to have offered, for the moment, a sense of
leafy luxury to a lady in pale blue. She leaned back, her figure
presented in profile and her head a little averted as if for talk with
some one on the other side of her, someone so placed as to be lost to
our view.
"There!" triumphed Mrs. Brissenden again--for the lady was unmistakably
Mrs. Server. Amusement was inevitable--the fact showed her as so
correctly described by the words to which I had twice had to listen. She
seemed really all over the place. "I thought you said," my companion
remarked, "that you had left her tucked away somewhere with M. de
Dreuil."
"Well," I returned after consideration, "that is obviously M. de
Dreuil."
"Are you so sure? I don't make out the person," my friend continued--"I
only see she's not alone. I understood you moreover that you had lately
left them in the house."
"They _were_ in the house, but there was nothing to keep them from
coming out. They've had plenty of time while we've talked; they must
have passed down by some of the other steps. Perhaps also," I added,
"it's another man."
But by this time she was satisfied. "It's _he_!"
"Gilbert Long? I thought you just said," I observed, "that you can make
nobody out."
We watched together, but the distance was considerable, and the second
figure continued to be screened. "It _must_ be he," Mrs. Brissenden
resumed with impatience, "since it was with him I so distinctly saw
her."
"Let me once more hold you to the fact," I answered, "that she had, to
my knowledge, succumbed to M. de Dreuil afterwards. The moments have
fled, you see, in our fascinating discussion, and various things, on
your theory of her pounce, have come and gone. Don't I moreover make out
a brown shoe, in a white gaiter, protruding from the other side of her
dress? It must be Lord Lutley."
Mrs. Brissenden looked and mused. "A brown shoe in a white gaiter?" At
this moment Mrs. Server moved, and the next--as if it were time for
another pounce--she had got up. We could, however, still distinguish but
a shoulder and an out-stretched leg of her gentleman, who, on her
movement, appeared, as in protest, to have affirmed by an emphatic shift
of his seat his preference for their remaining as they were. This
carried him further round the tree. We thus lost him, but she stood
there while we waited, evidently exhorting him; after a minute of which
she came away as in confidence that he would follow. During this
process, with a face more visible, she had looked as charming as a
pretty woman almost always does in rising eloquent before the apathetic
male. She hadn't yet noticed us, but something in her attitude and
manner particularly spoke to me. There were implications in it to which
I couldn't be blind, and I felt how my neighbour also would have caught
them and been confirmed in her certitude. In fact I felt the breath of
her confirmation in another elated "There!"--in a "Look at her _now_!"
Incontestably, while not yet aware of us, Mrs. Server confessed with
every turn of her head to a part in a relation. It stuck out of her, her
part in a relation; it hung before us, her part in a relation; it was
large to us beyond the breadth of the glade. And since, off her guard,
she so let us have it, with whom in the world could the relation--so
much of one as that--be but with Gilbert Long? The question was not
settled till she had come on some distance; then the producer of our
tension, emerging and coming after her, offered himself to our united,
to our confounded, anxiety once more as poor Briss.
That we should have been confounded was doubtless but a proof of the
impression--the singular assurance of intimacy borne toward us on the
soft summer air--that we had, however delusively, received. I should
myself have been as ready as my neighbour to say "Whoever he is, they're
in deep!"--and on grounds, moreover, quite as recklessly, as
fantastically constructive as hers. There was nothing to explain our
impression but the fact of our already having seen them figure together,
and of this we needed breathing-time to give them the natural benefit.
It was not indeed as an absolute benefit for either that Grace
Brissenden's tone marked our recognition. "Dear Guy _again_?"--but she
had recovered herself enough to laugh. "I should have thought he had had
more than his turn!" She had recovered herself in fact much more than I;
for somehow, from this instant, convinced as she had been and turning
everything to her conviction, I found myself dealing, in thought, with
still larger material. It was odd what a difference was made for me by
the renewed sight of dear Guy. I didn't of course analyse this sense at
the time; that was still to come. Our friends meanwhile had noticed us,
and something clearly passed between them--it almost produced, for an
instant, a visible arrest in their advance--on the question of their
having perhaps been for some time exposed.
They came on, however, and I waved them from afar a greeting, to which
Mrs. Server alone replied. Distances were great at Newmarch and
landscape-gardening on the grand scale; it would take them still some
minutes to reach our place of vantage or to arrive within sound of
speech. There was accordingly nothing marked in our turning away and
strolling back to the house. We had been so intent that we confessed by
this movement to a quick impulse to disown it. Yet it was remarkable
that, before we went in, Mrs. Brissenden should have struck me afresh as
having got all she wanted. Her recovery from our surprise was already so
complete that her high lucidity now alone reigned. "You don't require, I
suppose, anything more than _that_?"
"Well, I don't quite see, I'm bound to say, just where even 'that' comes
in." It incommoded me singularly little, at the point to which I had
jumped, that this statement was the exact reverse of the truth. Where it
came in was what I happened to be in the very act of seeing--seeing to
the exclusion of almost everything else. It was sufficient that I might
perhaps feel myself to have done at last with Mrs. Brissenden. I
desired, at all events, quite as if this benefit were assured me, to
leave her the honours of the last word.
She was finely enough prepared to take them. "Why, this invention of
using my husband----!" She fairly gasped at having to explain.
"Of 'using' him?"
"Trailing him across the scent as she does all of you, one after the
other. Excuse my comparing you to so many red herrings. You each have
your turn; only _his_ seems repeated, poor dear, till he's quite worn
out with it."
I kept for a little this image in my eye. "I can see of course that his
whole situation must be something of a strain for him; for I've not
forgotten what you told me yesterday of his service with Lady John. To
have to work in such a way for two of them at once"--it couldn't help, I
admitted, being a tax on a fellow. Besides, when one came to think of
it, the same man couldn't be _two_ red herrings. To show as Mrs.
Server's would directly impair his power to show as Lady John's. It
would seem, in short, a matter for his patronesses to have out together.
Mrs. Brissenden betrayed, on this, some annoyance at my levity. "Oh, the
cases are not the same, for with Lady John it amuses him: he thinks he
knows."
"Knows what?"
"What she wants him for. He doesn't know"--she kept it wonderfully
clear--"that she really doesn't want him for anything; for anything
except, of course"--this came as a droll second thought--"himself."
"And he doesn't know, either"--I tried to remain at her level--"that
Mrs. Server does."
"No," she assented, "he doesn't know what it's her idea to do with
him."
"He doesn't know, in fine," I cheerfully pursued, "the truth about
anything. And of course, by your agreement with me, he's not to learn
it."
She recognised her agreement with me, yet looked as if she had reserved
a certain measure of freedom. Then she handsomely gave up even that. "I
certainly don't want him to become conscious."
"It's his unconsciousness," I declared, "that saves him."
"Yes, even from himself."
"We must accordingly feed it." In the house, with intention, we parted
company; but there was something that, before this, I felt it due to my
claim of consistency to bring out. "It wasn't, at all events, Gilbert
Long behind the tree!"
My triumph, however, beneath the sponge she was prepared to pass again
over much of our experience, was short-lived. "Of course it wasn't. We
shouldn't have been treated to the scene if it _had_ been. What could
she possibly have put poor Briss there for but just to show it wasn't?"
VI
I saw other things, many things, after this, but I had already so much
matter for reflection that I saw them almost in spite of myself. The
difficulty with me was in the momentum already acquired by the act--as
well as, doubtless, by the general habit--of observation. I remember
indeed that on separating from Mrs. Brissenden I took a lively resolve
to get rid of my ridiculous obsession. It was absurd to have consented
to such immersion, intellectually speaking, in the affairs of other
people. One had always affairs of one's own, and I was positively
neglecting mine. Such, for a while, was my foremost reflection; after
which, in their order or out of it, came an inevitable train of others.
One of the first of these was that, frankly, my affairs were by this
time pretty well used to my neglect. There were connections enough in
which it had never failed. A whole cluster of such connections,
effectually displacing the centre of interest, now surrounded me, and I
was--though always but intellectually--drawn into their circle. I did my
best for the rest of the day to turn my back on them, but with the
prompt result of feeling that I meddled with them almost more in
thinking them over in isolation than in hovering personally about them.
Reflection was the real intensity; reflection, as to poor Mrs. Server in
particular, was an indiscreet opening of doors. She became vivid in the
light of the so limited vision of her that I already possessed--try
positively as I would not further to extend it. It was something not to
ask another question, to keep constantly away both from Mrs. Brissenden
and from Ford Obert, whom I had rashly invited to a degree of
participation; it was something to talk as hard as possible with other
persons and on other subjects, to mingle in groups much more superficial
than they supposed themselves, to give ear to broader jokes, to discuss
more tangible mysteries.
The day, as it developed, was large and hot, an unstinted splendour of
summer; excursions, exercise, organised amusement were things admirably
spared us; life became a mere arrested ramble or stimulated lounge, and
we profited to the full by the noble freedom of Newmarch, that
overarching ease which in nothing was so marked as in the tolerance of
talk. The air of the place itself, in such conditions, left one's powers
with a sense of play; if one wanted something to play at one simply
played at being there. I did this myself, with the aid, in especial, of
two or three solitary strolls, unaccompanied dips, of half an hour
a-piece, into outlying parts of the house and the grounds. I must add
that while I resorted to such measures not to see I only fixed what I
_had_ seen, what I did see, the more in my mind. One of these things had
been the way that, at luncheon, Gilbert Long, watching the chance given
him by the loose order in which we moved to it, slipped, to the visible
defeat of somebody else, into the chair of conspicuity beside clever
Lady John. A second was that Mrs. Server then occupied a place as remote
as possible from this couple, but not from Guy Brissenden, who had found
means to seat himself next her while my notice was engaged by the
others. What I was at the same time supremely struck with could
doubtless only be Mrs. Server's bright ubiquity, as it had at last come
to seem to me, and that of the companions she had recruited for the
occasion. Attended constantly by a different gentleman, she was in the
range of my vision wherever I turned--she kept repeating her picture in
settings separated by such intervals that I wondered at the celerity
with which she proceeded from spot to spot. She was never discernibly
out of breath, though the associate of her ecstasy at the given moment
might have been taken as being; and I kept getting afresh the impression
which, the day before, had so promptly followed my arrival, the odd
impression, as of something the matter with each party, that I had
gathered, in the grounds, from the sight of her advance upon me with
Obert. I had by this time of course made out--and it was absurd to shut
my eyes to it--what _that_ particular something, at least, was. It was
that Obert had quickly perceived something to be the matter with _her_,
and that she, on her side, had become aware of his discovery.
I wondered hereupon if the discovery were inevitable for each gentleman
in succession, and if this were their reason for changing so often. Did
everyone leave her, like Obert, with an uneasy impression of her, and
were these impressions now passed about with private hilarity or
profundity, though without having reached me save from the source I have
named? I affected myself as constantly catching her eye, as if she
wished to call my attention to the fact of who was with her and who was
not. I had kept my distance since our episode with the pastels, and yet
nothing could more come home to me than that I had really not, since
then, been absent from her. We met without talk, but not, thanks to
these pointed looks, without contact. I daresay that, for that matter,
my cogitations--for I must have bristled with them--would have made me
as stiff a puzzle to interpretative minds as I had suffered other
phenomena to become to my own. I daresay I wandered with a tell-tale
restlessness of which the practical detachment might well have mystified
those who hadn't suspicions. Whenever I caught Mrs. Server's eye it was
really to wonder how many suspicions _she_ had. I came upon her in great
dim chambers, and I came upon her before sweeps of view. I came upon
her once more with the Comte de Dreuil, with Lord Lutley, with Ford
Obert, with almost every other man in the house, and with several of
these, as if there had not been enough for so many turns, two or three
times over. Only at no moment, whatever the favouring frame, did I come
upon her with Gilbert Long. It was of course an anomaly that, as an easy
accident, I was not again myself set in the favouring frame. That I
consistently escaped being might indeed have been the meaning most
marked in our mute recognitions.
Discretion, then, I finally felt, played an odd part when it simply left
one more attached, morally, to one's prey. What was most evident to me
by five o'clock in the afternoon was that I was too preoccupied not to
find it the best wisdom to accept my mood. It was all very well to run
away; there would be no effectual running away but to have my things
quickly packed and catch, if possible, a train for town. On the spot I
had to _be_ on it; and it began to dawn before me that there was
something quite other I possibly might do with Mrs. Server than
endeavour ineffectually to forget her. What was none of one's business
might change its name should importunity take the form of utility. In
resisted observation that was vivid thought, in inevitable thought that
was vivid observation, through a succession, in short, of phases in
which I shall not pretend to distinguish one of these elements from the
other, I found myself cherishing the fruit of the seed dropped equally
by Ford Obert and by Mrs. Briss. What was the matter with _me_?--so much
as that I had ended by asking myself; and the answer had come as an
unmistakable return of the anxiety produced in me by my first seeing
that I had fairly let Grace Brissenden loose. My original protest
against the flash of inspiration in which she had fixed responsibility
on Mrs. Server had been in fact, I now saw, but the scared presentiment
of something in store for myself. This scare, to express it sharply, had
verily not left me from that moment; and if I had been already then
anxious it was because I had felt myself foredoomed to be sure the poor
lady herself would be. Why I should have minded this, should have been
anxious at her anxiety and scared at her scare, was a question troubling
me too little on the spot for me to suffer it to trouble me, as a
painter of my state, in this place. It is sufficient that when so much
of the afternoon had waned as to bring signs of the service of tea in
the open air, I knew how far I was gone in pity for her. For I had at
last had to take in what my two interlocutors had given me. Their
impression, coinciding and, as one might say, disinterested, couldn't,
after a little, fail in some degree to impose itself. It had its value.
Mrs. Server _was_ "nervous."
It little mattered to me now that Mrs. Briss had put it to me--that I
had even whimsically put it to myself--that I was perhaps in love with
her. That was as good a name as another for an interest springing up in
an hour, and was moreover a decent working hypothesis. The sentiment had
not indeed asserted itself at "first sight," though it might have taken
its place remarkably well among the phenomena of what is known as
second. The real fact was, none the less, that I was quite too sorry for
her to be anything except sorry. This odd feeling was something that I
may as well say I shall not even now attempt to account for--partly, it
is true, because my recital of the rest of what I was to see in no small
measure does so. It was a force that I at this stage simply found I had
already succumbed to. If it was not the result of what I had granted to
myself was the matter with her, then it was rather the very cause of my
making that concession. It was a different thing from my first prompt
impulse to shield her. I had already shielded her--fought for her so far
as I could or as the case immediately required. My own sense of how I
was affected had practically cleared up, in short, in the presence of
this deeper vision of her. My divinations and inductions had finally
brought home to me that in the whole huge, brilliant, crowded place I
was the only person save one who was in anything that could be called a
relation to her. The other person's relation was concealed, and mine,
so far as she herself was concerned, was unexpressed--so that I suppose
what most, at the juncture in question, stirred within me was the wonder
of how I might successfully express it. I felt that so long as I didn't
express it I should be haunted with the idea of something infinitely
touching and tragic in her loneliness--possibly in her torment, in her
terror. If she was "nervous" to the tune I had come to recognise, it
could only be because she had grounds. And what might her grounds more
naturally be than that, arranged and arrayed, disguised and decorated,
pursuing in vain, through our careless company, her search for the right
shade of apparent security, she felt herself none the less all the while
the restless victim of fear and failure?
Once my imagination had seen her in this light the touches it could add
to the picture might be trusted to be telling. Further observation was
to convince me of their truth, but while I waited for it with my
apprehension that it would come in spite of me I easily multiplied and
lavished them. I made out above all what she would most be trying to
hide. It was not, so to speak, the guarded primary fact--it could only
be, wretched woman, that produced, that disastrous, treacherous
consequence of the fact which her faculties would exhibit, and most of
all the snapped cord of her faculty of talk. Guy Brissenden had, at the
worst, his compromised face and figure to show and to shroud--if he
were really, that is, as much aware of them as one had suspected. She
had her whole compromised machinery of thought and speech, and if these
signs were not, like his, external, that made her case but the harder,
for she had to create, with intelligence rapidly ebbing, with wit half
gone, the illusion of an unimpaired estate. She was like some unhappy
lady robbed of her best jewels--obliged so to dispose and distribute the
minor trinkets that had escaped as still to give the impression of a
rich _écrin_. Was not that embarrassment, if one analysed a little, at
the bottom of her having been all day, in the vulgar phrase and as the
three of us had too cruelly noted, all over the place? _Was_ indeed, for
that matter, this observation confined to us, or had it at last been
irrepressibly determined on the part of the company at large? This was a
question, I hasten to add, that I would not now for the world have put
to the test. I felt I should have known how to escape had any rumour of
wonder at Mrs. Server's ways been finally conveyed to me. I might from
this moment have, as much as I liked, my own sense of it, but I was
definitely conscious of a sort of loyalty to her that would have
rendered me blank before others: though not indeed that--oh, at last,
quite the contrary!--it would have forbidden me to watch and watch. I
positively dreaded the accident of my being asked by one of the men if I
knew how everyone was talking about her. If everyone was talking about
her, I wanted positively not to know. But nobody was, probably--they
scarcely could be as yet. Without suggestive collateral evidence there
would be nobody in the house so conscientiously infernal as Mrs.
Brissenden, Obert and I.
Newmarch had always, in our time, carried itself as the great asylum of
the finer wit, more or less expressly giving out that, as invoking
hospitality or other countenance, none of the stupid, none even of the
votaries of the grossly obvious, need apply; but I could luckily at
present reflect that its measurements in this direction had not always
been my own, and that, moreover, whatever precision they possessed,
human blandness, even in such happy halls, had not been quite abolished.
There was a sound law in virtue of which one could always--alike in
privileged and unprivileged circles--rest more on people's density than
on their penetrability. Wasn't it their density too that would be
practically nearest their good nature? Whatever her successive partners
of a moment might have noticed, they wouldn't have discovered in her
reason for dropping them quickly a principle of fear that they might
notice her failure articulately to keep up. My own actual vision, which
had developed with such affluence, was that, in a given case, she could
keep up but for a few minutes and was therefore obliged to bring the
contact to an end before exposure. I had consistently mastered her
predicament: she had at once to cultivate contacts, so that people
shouldn't guess her real concentration, and to make them a literal touch
and go, so that they shouldn't suspect the enfeeblement of her mind. It
was obviously still worth everything to her that she was so charming. I
had theorised with Mrs. Brissenden on her supposititious inanity, but
the explanation of such cynicism in either of us could only be a
sensibility to the truth that attractions so great might float her even
a long time after intelligence pure and simple should have collapsed.
Was not my present uneasiness, none the less, a private curiosity to
ascertain just how much or how little of that element she had saved from
the wreck? She dodged, doubled, managed, broke off, clutching occasions,
yet doubtless risking dumbnesses, vaguenesses and other betrayals,
depending on attitudes, motions, expressions, a material personality, in
fine, in which a plain woman would have found nothing but failure; and
peace therefore might rule the scene on every hypothesis but that of her
getting, to put it crudely, worse. How I remember saying to myself that
if she didn't get better she surely _must_ get worse!--being aware that
I referred on the one side to her occult surrender and on the other to
its awful penalty. It became present to me that she possibly might
recover if anything should happen that would pull her up, turn her into
some other channel. If, however, that consideration didn't detain me
longer the fact may stand as a sign of how little I believed in any
check. Gilbert Long might die, but not the intensity he had inspired.
The analogy with the situation of the Brissendens here, I further
considered, broke down; I at any rate rather positively welcomed the
view that the sacrificed party to _that_ union might really find the
arrest of his decline, if not the renewal of his youth, in the loss of
his wife. Would this lady indeed, as an effect of _his_ death, begin to
wrinkle and shrivel? It would sound brutal to say that this was what I
should have preferred to hold, were it not that I in fact felt forced to
recognise the slightness of such a chance. She would have loved his
youth, and have made it her own, in death as in life, and he would have
quitted the world, in truth, only the more effectually to leave it to
her. Mrs. Server's quandary--which was now all I cared for--was exactly
in her own certitude of every absence of issue. But I need give little
more evidence of how it had set me thinking.
As much as anything else, perhaps, it was the fear of what one of the
men might say to me that made me for an hour or two, at this crisis,
continuously shy. Nobody, doubtless, would have said anything worse than
that she was more of a flirt than ever, that they had all compared notes
and would accordingly be interested in some hint of another, possibly a
deeper, experience. It would have been almost as embarrassing to have to
tell them how little experience I had had in fact as to have had to tell
them how much I had had in fancy--all the more that I had as yet only my
thin idea of the line of feeling in her that had led her so to spare me.
Tea on the terraces represented, meanwhile, among us, so much neglect of
everything else that my meditations remained for some time as unobserved
as I could desire. I was not, moreover, heeding much where they carried
me, and became aware of what I owed them only on at last finding myself
anticipated as the occupant of an arbour into which I had strolled. Then
I saw I had reached a remote part of the great gardens, and that for
some of my friends also secluded thought had inducements; though it was
not, I hasten to add, that either of the pair I here encountered
appeared to be striking out in any very original direction. Lady John
and Guy Brissenden, in the arbour, were thinking secludedly together;
they were together, that is, because they were scarce a foot apart, and
they were thinking, I inferred, because they were doing nothing else.
Silence, by every symptom, had definitely settled on them, and whatever
it was I interrupted had no resemblance to talk. Nothing--in the general
air of evidence--had more struck me than that what Lady John's famous
intellect seemed to draw most from Brissenden's presence was the
liberty to rest. Yet it shook off this languor as soon as she saw me; it
threw itself straight into the field; it went, I could see, through all
the motions required of it by her ladyship's fallacious philosophy. I
could mark these emotions, and what determined them, as behind clear
glass.
I found, on my side, a rare intellectual joy, the oddest secret
exultation, in feeling her begin instantly to play the part I had
attributed to her in the irreducible drama. She broke out in a manner
that could only have had for its purpose to represent to me that mere
weak amiability had committed her to such a predicament. It was to
humour her friend's husband that she had strayed so far, for she was
somehow sorry for him, and--good creature as we all knew her--had, on
principle, a kind little way of her own with silly infatuations. His
_was_ silly, but it was unmistakable, and she had for some time been
finding it, in short, a case for a special tact. That he bored her to
death I might have gathered by the way they sat there, and she could
trust me to believe--couldn't she?--that she was only musing as to how
she might most humanely get rid of him. She would lead him safely back
to the fold if I would give her time. She seemed to ask it all, oddly,
of _me_, to take me remarkably into her confidence, to refer me, for a
specimen of his behaviour, to his signal abandonment of his wife the
day before, his having waited over, to come down, for the train in which
poor _she_ was to travel. It was at all events, I felt, one of the
consequences of having caught on to so much that I by this time found
myself catching on to everything. I read into Lady John's wonderful
manner--which quite clamoured, moreover, for an interpretation--all that
was implied in the lesson I had extracted from other portions of the
business. It was distinctly poor she who gave me the lead, and it was
not less definite that she put it to me that I should render her a
service either by remaining with them or by inventing something that
would lure her persecutor away. She desired him, even at the cost of her
being left alone, distracted from his pursuit.
Poor he, in his quarter, I hasten to add, contributed to my picking out
this embroidery nothing more helpful than a sustained detachment. He
said as little as possible, seemed heedless of what was otherwise said,
and only gave me on his own account a look or two of dim suggestiveness.
Yet it was these looks that most told with me, and what they, for their
part, conveyed was a plea that directly contradicted Lady John's. I
understood him that it was he who was bored, he who had been pursued, he
for whom perversity had become a dreadful menace, he, in fine, who
pleaded for my intervention. He was so willing to trust me to relieve
him of his companion that I think he would simply have bolted without
deferring to me if I had not taken my precautions against it. I had, as
it happened, another momentary use for him than this: I wished on the
one hand not to lose him and on the other not to lose Lady John, though
I had quickly enough guessed this brilliant woman's real preference, of
which it in fact soon became my lively wish to see the proof. The union
of these two was too artificial for me not already to have connected
with it the service it might render, in her ladyship's view, to that
undetected cultivation, on her part, of a sentiment for Gilbert Long
which, through his feigned response to it, fitted so completely to the
other pieces in my collection. To see all this was at the time, I
remember, to be as inhumanly amused as if one had found one could create
something. I had created nothing but a clue or two to the larger
comprehension I still needed, yet I positively found myself overtaken by
a mild artistic glow. What had occurred was that, for my full
demonstration, I needed Long, and that, by the same stroke, I became
sure I should certainly get him by temporising a little.
Lady John was in love with him and had kicked up, to save her credit,
the dust of a fictive relation with another man--the relation one of
mere artifice and the man one in her encouragement of whom nobody would
believe. Yet she was also discoverably divided between her prudence and
her vanity, for if it was difficult to make poor Briss figure at all
vividly as an insistent satellite, the thankless tact she had to employ
gave her exactly, she argued, the right to be refreshingly fanned with
an occasional flap of the flag under which she had, as she ridiculously
fancied, truly conquered. If she was where I found her because her
escort had dragged her there, she had made the best of it through the
hope of assistance from another quarter. She had held out on the
possibility that Mr. Long--whom one _could_ without absurdity sit in an
arbour with--might have had some happy divination of her plight. He had
had such divinations before--thanks to a condition in him that made
sensibility abnormal--and the least a wretched woman could do when
betrayed by the excess of nature's bounty was to play admirer against
admirer and be "talked about" on her own terms. She would just this once
have admitted it, I was to gather, to be an occasion for pleading
guilty--oh, so harmlessly!--to a consciousness of the gentleman mutely
named between us. Well, the "proof" I just alluded to was that I had not
sat with my friends five minutes before Gilbert Long turned up.
I saw in a moment how neatly my being there with them played _his_ game;
I became in this fashion a witness for him that he could almost as
little leave Lady John alone as--well, as other people could. It may
perfectly have been the pleasure of this reflection that again made him
free and gay--produced in him, in any case, a different shade of manner
from that with which, before luncheon, as the consequence perhaps of a
vague _flair_ for my possible penetration, I had suspected him of edging
away from me. Not since my encounter with him at Paddington the
afternoon before had I had so to recognise him as the transfigured
talker. To see Lady John with him was to have little enough doubt of
_her_ recognitions, just as this spectacle also dotted each "i" in my
conviction of his venial--I can only call it that--duplicity. I made up
my mind on the spot that it had been no part of his plan to practise on
her, and that the worst he could have been accused of was a good-natured
acceptance, more apparent than real, for his own purposes, of her
theory--which she from time to time let peep out--that they would have
liked each other better if they hadn't been each, alas! so good. He
profited by the happy accident of having pleased a person so much in
evidence, and indeed it was tolerably clear to me that neither party was
duped. Lady John didn't want a lover; this would have been, as people
say, a larger order than, given the other complications of her
existence, she could meet; but she wanted, in a high degree, the
appearance of carrying on a passion that imposed alike fearless
realisations and conscious renouncements, and this circumstance fully
fell in with the convenience and the special situation of her friend.
Her vanity rejoiced, so far as she dared to let it nibble, and the
mysteries she practised, the dissimulations she elaborated, the general
danger of detection in which she flattered herself that she publicly
walked, were after all so much grist to the mill of that appetite.
By just so much, however, as it could never come up between them that
there was another woman in Gilbert's history, by just so much would it
on the other hand have been an articulate axiom that as many of the poor
Brisses of the world as she might care to accommodate would be welcome
to figure in her own. This personage, under that deeper induction, I
suddenly became aware that I also greatly pitied--pitied almost as much
as I pitied Mrs. Server; and my pity had doubtless something to do with
the fact that, after I had proposed to him that we should adjourn
together and we had, on his prompt, even though slightly dry response,
placed the invidious arbour at a certain distance, I passed my hand into
his arm. There were things I wanted of him, and the first was that he
should let me show him I could be kind to him. I had made of the
circumstance of tea at the house a pretext for our leaving the others,
each of whom I felt as rather showily calling my attention to their good
old ground for not wishing to rejoin the crowd. As to what Brissenden
wished I had made up my mind; I had made up my mind as to the subject of
his thoughts while they wandered, during his detention, from Lady John;
and if the next of my wishes was to enter into his desire, I had decided
on giving it effect by the time we reached the shortest of the vistas at
the end of which the house reared a brave front.
VII
I stayed him there while I put it to him that he would probably in fact
prefer to go back.
"You're not going then yourself?"
"No, I don't particularly want tea; and I may as well now confess to you
that I'm taking a lonely, unsociable walk. I don't enjoy such occasions
as these," I said, "unless I from time to time get off by myself
somewhere long enough to tell myself how much I do enjoy them. That's
what I was cultivating solitude for when I happened just now to come
upon you. When I found you there with Lady John there was nothing for me
but to make the best of it; but I'm glad of this chance to assure you
that, every appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, I wasn't
prowling about in search of you."
"Well," my companion frankly replied, "I'm glad you turned up. I wasn't
especially amusing myself."
"Oh, I think I know how little!"
He fixed me a moment with his pathetic old face, and I knew more than
ever that I was sorry for him. I was quite extraordinarily sorry, and I
wondered whether I mightn't without offence or indiscretion really let
him see it. It was to this end I had held him and wanted a little to
keep him, and I was reassured as I felt him, though I had now released
him, linger instead of leaving me. I had made him uneasy last night, and
a new reason or two for my doing so had possibly even since then come
up; yet these things also would depend on the way he might take them.
The look with which he at present faced me seemed to hint that he would
take them as I hoped, and there was no curtness, but on the contrary the
dawn of a dim sense that I might possibly aid him, in the tone with
which he came half-way. "You 'know'?"
"Ah," I laughed, "I know everything!"
He didn't laugh; I hadn't seen him laugh, at Newmarch, once; he was
continuously, portentously grave, and I at present remembered how the
effect of this had told for me at luncheon, contrasted as it was with
that of Mrs. Server's desperate, exquisite levity. "You know I decidedly
have too much of that dreadful old woman?"
There was a sound in the question that would have made me, to my own
sense, start, though I as quickly hoped I had not done so to
Brissenden's. I couldn't have persuaded myself, however, that I had
escaped showing him the flush of my effort to show nothing. I had taken
his disgusted allusion as to Mrs. Brissenden, and the action of that
was upsetting. But nothing, fortunately, was psychologically more
interesting than to grasp the next moment the truth of his reference. It
was only the fact of his himself looking so much older than Lady John
that had blinded me for an instant to the propriety of his not thinking
of her as young. She wasn't young as _he_ had a right to call people,
and I felt a glow--also, I feared, too visible--as soon as I had seen
whom he meant. His meaning Lady John did me somehow so much good that I
believed it would have done me still more to hear him call her a
harridan or a Jezebel. It was none of my business; how little was
anything, when it came to that, my business!--yet indefinably,
unutterably, I felt assuaged for him and comforted. I verily believe it
hung in the balance a minute or two that in my impulse to draw him out,
so that I might give him my sympathy, I was prepared to risk overturning
the edifice of my precautions. I luckily, as it happened, did nothing of
the sort; I contrived to breathe consolingly on his secret without
betraying an intention. There was almost no one in the place save two or
three of the very youngest women whom he wouldn't have had a right to
call old. Lady John was a hag, then; Mrs. Server herself was more than
on the turn; Gilbert Long was fat and forty; and I cast about for some
light in which I could show that I--_à plus forte raison_--was a
pantaloon. "Of course you can't quite see the fun of it, and it really
isn't fair to you. You struck me as much more in your element," I
ventured to add, "when, this morning, more than once, I chanced to
observe you led captive by Mrs. Server."
"Oh, that's a different affair," he answered with an accent that
promised a growth of confidence.
"Mrs. Server's an old woman," I continued, "but she can't seem to a
fellow like you as old as Lady John. She has at any rate more charm;
though perhaps not," I added, "quite so much talk."
On this he said an extraordinary thing, which all but made me start
again. "Oh, she hasn't any _talk_!"
I took, as quickly as possible, refuge in a surprised demurrer. "Not
_any_?"
"None to speak of."
I let all my wonder come. "But wasn't she chattering to you at
luncheon?" It forced him to meet my eyes at greater length, and I could
already see that my experiment--for insidiously and pardonably such I
wished to make it--was on the way to succeed. I had been right then, and
I knew where I stood. He couldn't have been "drawn" on his wife, and he
couldn't have been drawn, in the least directly, on himself, but as he
could thus easily be on Lady John, so likewise he could on other women,
or on the particular one, at least, who mattered to me. I felt I really
knew what I was about, for to draw him on Mrs. Server was in truth to
draw him indirectly on himself. It was indeed perhaps because I had by
this time in a measure expressed, in terms however general, the interest
with which he inspired me, that I now found myself free to shift the
ground of my indiscretion. I only wanted him to know that on the
question of Mrs. Server I was prepared to go as far with him as he
should care to move. How it came to me now that he was _the_ absolutely
safe person in the house to talk of her with! "I was too far away from
you to hear," I had gone on; "and I could only judge of her flow of
conversation from the animated expression of her face. It was
extraordinarily animated. But that, I admit," I added, "strikes one
always as a sort of _parti pris_ with her. She's never _not_
extraordinarily animated."
"She has no flow of conversation whatever," said Guy Brissenden.
I considered. "Really?"
He seemed to look at me quite without uneasiness now. "Why, haven't you
seen for yourself----?"
"How the case stands with her on that head? Do you mean haven't I talked
with her? Well, scarcely; for it's a fact that every man in the house
_but_ I strikes me as having been deluged with that privilege: if
indeed," I laughed, "her absence of topics suffers it to be either a
privilege or a deluge! She affects me, in any case, as determined to
have nothing to do with me. She walks all the rest of you about; she
gives you each your turn; me only she skips, she systematically ignores.
I'm half consoled for it, however," I wound up, "by seeing what short
innings any individual of you has. You personally strike me as having
had the longest."
Brissenden appeared to wonder where I was coming out, yet not as if he
feared it. There was even a particular place, if I could but guess it,
where he would have liked me to come. "Oh, she's extremely charming. But
of course she's strikingly odd."
"Odd?--really?"
"Why, in the sense, I mean, that I thought you suggested you've
noticed."
"That of extravagant vivacity? Oh, I've had to notice it at a distance,
without knowing what it represents."
He just hesitated. "You haven't any idea at all what it represents?"
"How should I have," I smiled, "when she never comes near me? I've
thought _that_, as I tell you, marked. What does her avoidance of _me_
represent? Has she happened, with you, to throw any light on it?"
"I think," said Brissenden after another moment, "that she's rather
afraid of you."
I could only be surprised. "The most harmless man in the house?"
"_Are_ you really?" he asked--and there was a touch of the comic in
hearing him put it with his inveterate gravity.
"If you take me for anything else," I replied, "I doubt if you'll find
anyone to back you."
My companion, on this, looked away for a little, turned about, fixed his
eyes on the house, seemed, as with a drop of interest, on the point of
leaving me. But instead of leaving me he brought out the next moment: "I
don't want anyone to back me. I don't care. I didn't mean just now," he
continued, "that Mrs. Server has said to me anything against you, or
that she fears you because she dislikes you. She only told me she
thought you disliked _her_."
It gave me a kind of shock. "A creature so beautiful, and so--so----"
"So what?" he asked as I found myself checked by my desire to come to
her aid.
"Well, so brilliantly happy."
I had all his attention again. "Is that what she _is_?"
"Then don't you, with your opportunities, know?" I was conscious of
rather an inspiration, a part of which was to be jocose. "What are you
trying," I laughed, "to get out of me?"
It struck me luckily that, though he remained as proof against gaiety as
ever, he was, thanks to his preoccupation, not disagreeably affected by
my tone. "Of course if you've no idea, I can get nothing."
"No idea of what?"
Then it was that I at last got it straight. "Well, of what's the matter
with her."
"Is there anything particular? If there _is_," I went on, "there's
something that I've got out of _you_!"
"How so, if you don't know what it is?"
"Do you mean if you yourself don't?" But without detaining him on this,
"Of what in especial do the signs," I asked, "consist?"
"Well, of everyone's thinking so--that there's something or other."
This again struck me, but it struck me too much. "Oh, everyone's a
fool!"
He saw, in his queer wan way, how it had done so. "Then you _have_ your
own idea?"
I daresay my smile at him, while I waited, showed a discomfort. "Do you
mean people are talking about her?"
But he waited himself. "Haven't they shown you----?"
"No, no one has spoken. Moreover I wouldn't have let them."
"Then there you _are_!" Brissenden exclaimed. "If you've kept them off,
it must be because you differ with them."
"I shan't be sure of that," I returned, "till I know what they think!
However, I repeat," I added, "that I shouldn't even then care. I don't
mind admitting that she much interests me."
"There you are, there you are!" he said again.
"That's all that's the matter with her so far as _I_'m concerned. You
see, at any rate, how little it need make her afraid of me. She's lovely
and she's gentle and she's happy."
My friend kept his eyes on me. "What is there to interest you so in
that? Isn't it a description that applies here to a dozen other women?
You can't say, you know, that you're interested in _them_, for you just
spoke of them as so many fools."
There was a certain surprise for me in so much acuteness, which,
however, doubtless admonished me as to the need of presence of mind. "I
wasn't thinking of the ladies--I was thinking of the men."
"That's amiable to _me_," he said with his gentle gloom.
"Oh, my dear Brissenden, I except 'you.'"
"And why should you?"
I felt a trifle pushed. "I'll tell you some other time. And among the
ladies I except Mrs. Brissenden, with whom, as you may have noticed,
I've been having much talk."
"And will you tell me some other time about that too?" On which, as I
but amicably shook my head for no, he had his first dimness of
pleasantry. "I'll get it then from my wife."
"Never. She won't tell you."
"She has passed you her word? That won't alter the fact that she tells
me everything."
He really said it in a way that made me take refuge for an instant in
looking at my watch. "Are you going back to tea? If you are, I'll, in
spite of my desire to roam, walk twenty steps with you." I had already
again put my hand into his arm, and we strolled for a little till I
threw off that I was sure Mrs. Server was waiting for him. To this he
replied that if I wished to get rid of him he was as willing to take
that as anything else for granted--an observation that I, on my side,
answered with an inquiry, though an inquiry that had nothing to do with
it. "Do you also tell everything to Mrs. Brissenden?"
It brought him up shorter than I had expected. "Do you ask me that in
order that I shan't speak to her of this?"
I showed myself at a loss. "Of 'this'----?"
"Why, of what we've made out----"
"About Mrs. Server, you and I? You must act as to that, my dear fellow,
quite on your own discretion. All the more that what on earth _have_ we
made out? I assure you I haven't a secret to confide to you about her,
except that I've never seen a person more unquenchably radiant."
He almost jumped at it. "Well, that's just it!"
"But just what?"
"Why, what they're all talking about. That she _is_ so awfully radiant.
That she's so tremendously happy. It's the question," he explained, "of
what in the world she has to make her so."
I winced a little, but tried not to show it. "My dear man, how do _I_
know?"
"She _thinks_ you know," he after a moment answered.
I could only stare. "Mrs. Server thinks I know what makes her happy?" I
the more easily represented such a conviction as monstrous in that it
truly had its surprise for me.
But Brissenden now was all with his own thought. "She _isn't_ happy."
"You mean that that's what's the matter with her under her
appearance----? Then what makes the appearance so extraordinary?"
"Why, exactly what I mention--that one doesn't see anything whatever in
her to correspond to it."
I hesitated. "Do you mean in her circumstances?"
"Yes--or in her character. Her circumstances are nothing wonderful. She
has none too much money; she has had three children and lost them; and
nobody that belongs to her appears ever to have been particularly nice
to her."
I turned it over. "How you _do_ get on with her!"
"Do you call it getting on with her to be the more bewildered the more I
see her?"
"Isn't to say you're bewildered only, on the whole, to say you're
charmed? That always--doesn't it?--describes more or less any engrossed
relation with a lovely lady."
"Well, I'm not sure I'm so charmed." He spoke as if he had thought this
particular question over for himself; he had his way of being lucid
without brightness. "I'm not at all easily charmed, you know," he the
next moment added; "and I'm not a fellow who goes about much after
women."
"Ah, that I never supposed! Why in the world _should_ you? It's the last
thing!" I laughed. "But isn't this--quite (what shall one call it?)
innocently--rather a peculiar case?"
My question produced in him a little gesture of elation--a gesture
emphasised by a snap of his forefinger and thumb. "I knew you knew it
was special! I knew you've been thinking about it!"
"You certainly," I replied with assurance, "have, during the last five
minutes, made me do so with some sharpness. I don't pretend that I don't
now recognise that there _must_ be something the matter. I only
desire--not unnaturally--that there _should_ be, to put me in the right
for having thought, if, as you're so sure, such a freedom as that can be
brought home to me. If Mrs. Server is beautiful and gentle and
strange," I speciously went on, "what are those things but an
attraction?"
I saw how he had them, whatever they were, before him as he slowly shook
his head. "They're not an attraction. They're too queer."
I caught in an instant my way to fall in with him; and not the less that
I by this time felt myself committed, up to the intellectual eyes, to
ascertaining just _how_ queer the person under discussion might be. "Oh,
of course I'm not speaking of her as a party to a silly flirtation, or
an object of any sort of trivial pursuit. But there are so many
different ways of being taken."
"For a fellow like you. But not for a fellow like me. For me there's
only one."
"To be, you mean, in love?"
He put it a little differently. "Well, to be thoroughly pleased."
"Ah, that's doubtless the best way and the firm ground. And you mean
you're _not_ thoroughly pleased with Mrs. Server?"
"No--and yet I want to be kind to her. Therefore what's the matter?"
"Oh, if it's what's the matter with _you_ you ask me, that extends the
question. If you want to be kind to her, you get on with her, as we were
saying, quite enough for my argument. And isn't the matter also, after
all," I demanded, "that you simply feel she desires you to be kind?"
"She does that." And he looked at me as with the sense of drawing from
me, for his relief, some greater help than I was as yet conscious of the
courage to offer. "It _is_ that she desires me. She likes it. And the
extraordinary thing is that _I_ like it."
"And why in the world shouldn't you?"
"Because she terrifies me. She has something to hide."
"But, my dear man," I asked with a gaiety singularly out of relation to
the small secret thrill produced in me by these words--"my dear man,
what woman who's worth anything hasn't?"
"Yes, but there are different ways. What _she_ tries for is this false
appearance of happiness."
I weighed it. "But isn't that the best thing?"
"It's terrible to have to keep it up."
"Ah, but if you don't _for_ her? If it all comes on herself?"
"It doesn't," Guy Brissenden presently said. "I do--'for' her--help to
keep it up." And then, still unexpectedly to me, came out the rest of
his confession. "I want to--I try to; that's what I mean by being kind
to her, and by the gratitude with which she takes it. One feels that one
doesn't want her to break down."
It was on this--from the poignant touch in it--that I at last felt I had
burnt my ships and didn't care how much I showed I was with him. "Oh,
but she won't. You must keep her going."
He stood a little with a thumb in each pocket of his trousers, and his
melancholy eyes ranging far over my head--over the tops of the highest
trees. "Who am _I_ to keep people going?"
"Why, you're just the man. Aren't you happy?"
He still ranged the tree-tops. "Yes."
"Well, then, you belong to the useful class. You've the wherewithal to
give. It's the happy people who should help the others."
He had, in the same attitude, another pause. "It's easy for _you_ to
talk!"
"Because I'm not happy?"
It made him bring his eyes again down to me. "I think you're a little so
now at my expense."
I shook my head reassuringly. "It doesn't cost you anything if--as I
confess to it now--I do to some extent understand."
"That's more, then, than--after talking of it this way with you--I feel
that _I_ do!"
He had brought that out with a sudden sigh, turning away to go on; so
that we took a few steps more. "You've nothing to trouble about," I then
freely remarked, "but that you _are_ as kind as the case requires and
that you do help. I daresay that you'll find her even now on the terrace
looking out for you." I patted his back, as we went a little further,
but as I still preferred to stay away from the house I presently stopped
again. "Don't fall below your chance. _Noblesse oblige._ We'll pull her
through."
"You say 'we,'" he returned, "but you do keep out of it!"
"Why should you wish me to interfere with you?" I asked. "I wouldn't
keep out of it if she wanted me as much as she wants you. That, by your
own admission, is exactly what she doesn't."
"Well, then," said Brissenden, "I'll make her go for you. I think I want
your assistance quite as much as she can want mine."
"Oh," I protested for this, "I've really given you already every ounce
of mine I can squeeze out. And you know for yourself far more than I
do."
"No, I don't!"--with which he became quite sharp; "for you know _how_
you know it--which I've not a notion of. It's just what I think," he
continued, facing me again, "you ought to tell me."
"I'm a little in doubt of what you're talking of, but I suppose you to
allude to the oddity of my being so much interested without my having
been more informed."
"You've got some clue," Brissenden said; "and a clue is what I myself
want."
"Then get it," I laughed, "from Mrs. Server!"
He wondered. "Does she know?"
I had still, after all, to dodge a little. "Know what?"
"Why, that you've found out what she has to hide."
"You're perfectly free to ask her. I wonder even that you haven't done
so yet."
"Well," he said with the finest stroke of unconsciousness he had yet
shown me--"well, I suppose it's because I'm afraid of her."
"But not too much afraid," I risked suggesting, "to be hoping at this
moment that you'll find her if you go back to where most of our party is
gathered. You're not going for tea--you're going for Mrs. Server: just
of whom it was, as I say, you were thinking while you sat there with
Lady John. So what is it you so greatly fear?"
It was as if I could see through his dim face a sort of gratitude for my
making all this out to him. "I don't know that it's anything that she
may do to _me_." He could make it out in a manner for himself. "It's as
if something might happen to her. It's what I told you--that she may
break down. If you ask me how, or in what," he continued, "how can I
tell you? In whatever it is that she's trying to do. I don't understand
it." Then he wound up with a sigh that, in spite of its softness, he
imperfectly stifled. "But it's something or other!"
"What would it be, then," I asked, "but what you speak of as what I've
'found out'? The effort you distinguish in her is the effort of
concealment--vain, as I gather it strikes you both, so far as _I_, in my
supernatural acuteness, am concerned."
Following this with the final ease to which my encouragement directly
ministered, he yet gave me, before he had quite arrived, a queer
sidelong glance. "Wouldn't it really be better if you were to tell me? I
don't ask her myself, you see. I don't put things to her in that way."
"Oh, no--I've shown you how I do see. That's a part of your admirable
consideration. But I must repeat that nothing would induce me to tell
you."
His poor old face fairly pleaded. "But I want so to know."
"Ah, there it is!" I almost triumphantly laughed.
"There what is?"
"Why, everything. What I've divined, between you and Mrs. Server, as the
tie. Your wanting so to know."
I felt as if he were now, intellectually speaking, plastic wax in my
hand. "And her wanting me not to?"
"Wanting _me_ not to," I smiled.
He puzzled it out. "And being willing, therefore----"
"That you--you only, for sympathy, for fellowship, for the wild wonder
of it--_should_ know? Well, for all those things, and in spite of what
you call your fear, _try_ her!" With which now at last I quitted him.
VIII
I'm afraid I can't quite say what, after that, I at first did, nor just
how I immediately profited by our separation. I felt absurdly excited,
though this indeed was what I had felt all day; there had been in fact
deepening degrees of it ever since my first mystic throb after finding
myself, the day before in our railway-carriage, shut up to an hour's
contemplation and collation, as it were, of Gilbert Long and Mrs.
Brissenden. I have noted how my first full contact with the changed
state of these associates had caused the knell of the tranquil mind
audibly to ring for me. I have spoken of my sharpened perception that
something altogether out of the common had happened, independently, to
each, and I could now certainly flatter myself that I hadn't missed a
feature of the road I had thus been beguiled to travel. It was a road
that had carried me far, and verily at this hour I _felt_ far. I daresay
that for a while after leaving poor Briss, after what I may indeed call
launching him, this was what I predominantly felt. To be where I was, to
whatever else it might lead, treated me by its help to the taste of
success. It appeared then that the more things I fitted together the
larger sense, every way, they made--a remark in which I found an
extraordinary elation. It justified my indiscreet curiosity; it crowned
my underhand process with beauty. The beauty perhaps was only for
_me_--the beauty of having been right; it made at all events an element
in which, while the long day softly dropped, I wandered and drifted and
securely floated. This element bore me bravely up, and my private
triumph struck me as all one with the charm of the moment and of the
place.
There was a general shade in all the lower reaches--a fine clear dusk in
garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater
things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless
wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air. The last calls of birds
sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious
splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I
scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in
the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively encountered
nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of the
childish imagination of the impossible. _Then_ I used to circle round
enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange
"came true." It was the coming true that was the proof of the
enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such
coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the
fruit of one's own wizardry. I was positively--so had the wheel
revolved--proud of my work. I had thought it all out, and to have
thought it was, wonderfully, to have brought it. Yet I recall how I even
then knew on the spot that there was something supreme I should have
failed to bring unless I had happened suddenly to become aware of the
very presence of the haunting principle, as it were, of my thought. This
was the light in which Mrs. Server, walking alone now, apparently, in
the grey wood and pausing at sight of me, showed herself in her clear
dress at the end of a vista. It was exactly as if she had been there by
the operation of my intelligence, or even by that--in a still happier
way--of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her,
was assuredly emotion. Yet what _was_ this feeling, really?--of which,
at the point we had thus reached, I seemed to myself to have gathered
from all things an invitation to render some account.
Well, I knew within the minute that I was moved by it as by an
extraordinary tenderness; so that this is the name I must leave it to
make the best of. It had already been my impression that I was sorry for
her, but it was marked for me now that I was sorrier than I had
reckoned. All her story seemed at once to look at me out of the fact of
her present lonely prowl. I met it without demur, only wanting her to
know that if I struck her as waylaying her in the wood, as waiting for
her there at eventide with an idea, I shouldn't in the least defend
myself from the charge. I can scarce clearly tell how many fine strange
things I thought of during this brief crisis of her hesitation. I wanted
in the first place to make it end, and while I moved a few steps toward
her I felt almost as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird
or stalking a fawn. My few steps brought me to a spot where another
perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous
circle with an evening sky above and great lengthening, arching recesses
in which the twilight thickened. Oh, it was quite sufficiently the
castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive
and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognised not only the influence,
in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this
consecrated nook, which was so much of the type of all the bemused and
remembered. We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful
old tale, and it wouldn't be the fault of Newmarch if some other green
_carrefour_, not far off, didn't balance with this one and offer the
alternative of niches, in the greenness, occupied by weather-stained
statues on florid pedestals.
I sat straight down on the nearest of our benches, for this struck me as
the best way to express the conception with which the sight of Mrs.
Server filled me. It showed her that if I watched her I also waited for
her, and that I was therefore not affected in any manner she really need
deprecate. She had been too far off for me to distinguish her face, but
her approach had faltered long enough to let me see that if she had not
taken it as too late she would, to escape me, have found some pretext
for turning off. It was just my seating myself that made the
difference--it was my being so simple with her that brought her on. She
came slowly and a little wearily down the vista, and her sad, shy
advance, with the massed wood on either side of her, was like the
reminiscence of a picture or the refrain of a ballad. What made the
difference with _me_--if any difference had remained to be made--was the
sense of this sharp cessation of her public extravagance. She had folded
up her manner in her flounced parasol, which she seemed to drag after
her as a sorry soldier his musket. It was present to me without a pang
that this was the person I had sent poor Briss off to find--the person
poor Briss would owe me so few thanks for his failure to have found. It
was equally marked to me that, however detached and casual she might, at
the first sight of me, have wished to show herself, it was to alight on
poor Briss that she had come out, it was because he had not been at the
house and might therefore, on his side, be wandering, that she had taken
care to be unaccompanied. My demonstration was complete from the moment
I thus had them in the act of seeking each other, and I was so pleased
at having gathered them in that I cared little what else they had
missed. I neither moved nor spoke till she had come quite near me, and
as she also gave no sound the meaning of our silence seemed to stare
straight out. It absolutely phrased there, in all the wonderful
conditions, a relation already established; but the strange and
beautiful thing was that as soon as we had recognised and accepted it
this relation put us almost at our ease. "You must be weary of walking,"
I said at last, "and you see I've been keeping a seat for you."
I had finally got up, as a sign of welcome, but I had directly
afterwards resumed my position, and it was an illustration of the terms
on which we met that we neither of us seemed to mind her being meanwhile
on her feet. She stood before me as if to take in--with her smile that
had by this time sunk quite to dimness--more than we should, either of
us, after all, be likely to be able to say. I even saw from this moment,
I think, that, whatever she might understand, she would be able herself
to say but little. She gave herself, in that minute, more than she
doubtless knew--gave herself, I mean, to my intenser apprehension. She
went through the form of expression, but what told me everything was the
way the form of expression broke down. Her lovely grimace, the light of
the previous hours, was as blurred as a bit of brushwork in water-colour
spoiled by the upsetting of the artist's glass. She fixed me with it as
she had fixed during the day forty persons, but it fluttered like a bird
with a broken wing. She looked about and above, down each of our dusky
avenues and up at our gilded tree-tops and our painted sky, where, at
the moment, the passage of a flight of rooks made a clamour. She
appeared to wish to produce some explanation of her solitude, but I was
quickly enough sure that she would never find a presentable one. I only
wanted to show her how little I required it. "I like a lonely walk," I
went on, "at the end of a day full of people: it's always, to me, on
such occasions, quite as if something has happened that the mind wants
to catch and fix before the vividness fades. So I mope by myself an
hour--I take stock of my impressions. But there's one thing I don't
believe you know. This is the very first time, in such a place and at
such an hour, that it has ever befallen me to come across a friend
stricken with the same perversity and engaged in the same pursuit. Most
people, don't you see?"--I kept it up as I could--"don't in the least
know what has happened to them, and don't care to know. That's one way,
and I don't deny it may be practically the best. But if one does care to
know, that's another way. As soon as I saw you there at the end of the
alley I said to myself, with quite a little thrill of elation, 'Ah, then
it's _her_ way too!' I wonder if you'll let me tell you," I floundered
pleasantly on, "that I immediately liked you the better for it. It
seemed to bring us more together. That's what I sat straight down here
to show you. 'Yes,' I wished you to understand me as frankly saying, 'I
_am_, as well as you, on the mope, or on the muse, or on whatever you
call it, and this isn't half a bad corner for such a mood.' I can't tell
you what a pleasure it is to me to see you do understand."
I kept it up, as I say, to reassure and soothe and steady her; there was
nothing, however fantastic and born of the pressure of the moment, that
I wouldn't have risked for that purpose. She was absolutely on my hands
with her secret--I felt that from the way she stood and listened to me,
silently showing herself relieved and pacified. It was marked that if I
had hitherto seen her as "all over the place," she had yet nowhere
seemed to me less so than at this furthermost point. But if, though only
nearer to her secret and still not in possession, I felt as justified as
I have already described myself, so it equally came to me that I was
quite near enough, at the pass we had reached, for what I should have to
take from it all. She was on my hands--it was she herself, poor
creature, who was: this was the thing that just now loomed large, and
the secret was a comparative detail. "I think you're very kind," she
said for all answer to the speech I have reported, and the minute after
this she had sunk down, in confessed collapse, to my bench, on which she
sat and stared before her. The mere mechanism of her expression, the
dangling paper lantern itself, was now all that was left in her face.
She remained a little as if discouraged by the sight of the weariness
that her surrender had let out. I hesitated, from just this fear of
adding to it, to commiserate her for it more directly, and she spoke
again before I had found anything to say. She brought back her attention
indeed as if with an effort and from a distance. "What is it that has
happened to you?"
"Oh," I laughed, "what is it that has happened to _you_?" My question
had not been in the least intended for pressure, but it made her turn
and look at me, and this, I quickly recognised, was all the answer the
most pitiless curiosity could have desired--all the more, as well, that
the intention in it had been no greater than in my words. Beautiful,
abysmal, involuntary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths
it would have closed. It was in short a supremely unsuccessful attempt
to say nothing. It said everything, and by the end of a minute my
chatter--none the less out of place for being all audible--was hushed to
positive awe by what it had conveyed. I saw as I had never seen before
what consuming passion can make of the marked mortal on whom, with fixed
beak and claws, it has settled as on a prey. She reminded me of a sponge
wrung dry and with fine pores agape. Voided and scraped of everything,
her shell was merely crushable. So it was brought home to me that the
victim could be abased, and so it disengaged itself from these things
that the abasement could be conscious. That was Mrs. Server's tragedy,
that her consciousness survived--survived with a force that made it
struggle and dissemble. This consciousness was all her secret--it was at
any rate all mine. I promised myself roundly that I would henceforth
keep clear of any other.
I none the less--from simply sitting with her there--gathered in the
sense of more things than I could have named, each of which, as it came
to me, made my compassion more tender. Who of us all could say that his
fall might not be as deep?--or might not at least become so with equal
opportunity. I for a while fairly forgot Mrs. Server, I fear, in the
intimacy of this vision of the possibilities of our common nature. She
became such a wasted and dishonoured symbol of them as might have put
tears in one's eyes. When I presently returned to her--our session
seeming to resolve itself into a mere mildness of silence--I saw how it
was that whereas, in such cases in general, people might have given up
much, the sort of person this poor lady was could only give up
everything. She was the absolute wreck of her storm, accordingly, but to
which the pale ghost of a special sensibility still clung, waving from
the mast, with a bravery that went to the heart, the last tatter of its
flag. There are impressions too fine for words, and I shall not attempt
to say how it was that under the touch of this one I felt how nothing
that concerned my companion could ever again be present to me but the
fact itself of her admirable state. This was the source of her wan
little glory, constituted even for her a small sublimity in the light of
which mere minor identifications turned vulgar. I knew who _he_ was now
with a vengeance, because I had learnt precisely from that who _she_
was; and nothing could have been sharper than the force with which it
pressed upon me that I had really learnt more than I had bargained for.
Nothing need have happened if I hadn't been so absurdly, so fatally
meditative about poor Long--an accident that most people, wiser people,
appeared on the whole to have steered sufficiently clear of. Compared
with my actual sense, the sense with which I sat there, that other
vision was gross, and grosser still the connection between the two.
Such were some of the reflections in which I indulged while her
eyes--with their strange intermissions of darkness or of light: who
could say which?--told me from time to time that she knew whatever I
was thinking of to be for her virtual advantage. It was prodigious what,
in the way of suppressed communication, passed in these wonderful
minutes between us. Our relation could be at the best but an equal
confession, and I remember saying to myself that if she had been as
subtle as I--which she wasn't!--she too would have put it together that
I had dreadfully talked about her. She would have traced in me my
demonstration to Mrs. Briss that, whoever she was, she must logically
have been idiotised. It was the special poignancy of her collapse that,
so far at least as I was concerned, this was a ravage the extent of
which she had ceased to try to conceal. She had been trying, and more or
less succeeding, all day: the little drama of her public unrest had had,
when one came to consider, no other argument. It had been terror that
had directed her steps; the need constantly to show herself detached and
free, followed by the sterner one not to show herself, by the same
token, limp and empty. This had been the distinct, ferocious logic of
her renewals and ruptures--the anxious mistrust of her wit, the haunting
knowledge of the small distance it would take her at once, the
consequent importance of her exactly timing herself, and the quick
instinct of flight before the menace of discovery. She couldn't let
society alone, because that would have constituted a symptom; yet, for
fear of the appearance of a worse one, she could only mingle in it with
a complex diplomacy. She was accordingly exposed on every side, and to
be with her a while thus quietly was to read back into her behaviour the
whole explanation, which was positively simple to me now. To take up
again the vivid analogy, she had been sailing all day, though scarce
able to keep afloat, under the flag of her old reputation for easy
response. She had given to the breeze any sad scrap of a substitute, for
the play of mind once supposed remarkable. The last of all the things
her stillness said to me was that I could judge from so poor a show what
had become of her conversability. What I did judge was that a frantic
art had indeed been required to make her pretty silences pass, from one
crisis to another, for pretty speeches. Half this art, doubtless, was
the glittering deceit of her smile, the sublime, pathetic overdone
geniality which represented so her share in any talk that, every other
eloquence failing, there could only be nothing at all from the moment it
abandoned its office. There _was_ nothing at all. That was the truth; in
accordance with which I finally--for everything it might mean to
myself--put out my hand and bore ever so gently on her own. Her own
rested listlessly on the stone of our seat. Of course, it had been an
immense thing for her that she was, in spite of everything, so lovely.
All this was quite consistent with its eventually coming back to me
that, though she took from me with appreciation what was expressed in
the gesture I have noted, it was certainly in quest of a still deeper
relief that she had again come forth. The more I considered her
face--and most of all, so permittedly, in her passive, conscious
presence--the more I was sure of this and the further I could go in the
imagination of her beautiful duplicity. I ended by divining that if I
was assuredly good for her, because the question of keeping up with me
had so completely dropped, and if the service I so rendered her was not
less distinct to her than to myself--I ended by divining that she had
none the less her obscure vision of a still softer ease. Guy Brissenden
had become in these few hours her positive need--a still greater need
than I had lately amused myself with making out that he had found her.
Each had, by their unprecedented plight, something for the other, some
intimacy of unspeakable confidence, that no one else in the world could
have for either. They had been feeling their way to it, but at the end
of their fitful day they had grown confusedly, yet beneficently sure.
The explanation here again was simple--they had the sense of a common
fate. They hadn't to name it or to phrase it--possibly even couldn't had
they tried; peace and support came to them, without that, in the simple
revelation of each other. Oh, how I made it out that if it was indeed
very well for the poor lady to feel thus in _my_ company that her burden
was lifted, my company would be after all but a rough substitute for
Guy's! He was a still better friend, little as he could have told the
reason; and if I could in this connection have put the words into her
mouth, here follows something of the sense that I should have made them
form.
"Yes, my dear man, I do understand you--quite perfectly now, and (by I
know not what miracle) I've really done so to some extent from the
first. Deep is the rest of feeling with you, in this way, that I'm
watched, for the time, only as you watch me. It has all stopped, and _I_
can stop. How can I make you understand what it is for me that there
isn't at last a creature any more in sight, that the wood darkens about
me, that the sounds drop and the relief goes on; what can it mean for
you even that I've given myself up to not caring whether or no, amongst
others, I'm missed and spoken of? It does help my strange case, in fine,
as you see, to let you keep me here; but I should have found still more
what I was in need of if I had only found, instead of you, him whom I
had in mind. He is as much better than you as you are than everyone
else." I finally felt, in a word, so qualified to attribute to my
companion some such mute address as that, that it could only have, as
the next consequence, a determining effect on me--an effect under the
influence of which I spoke. "I parted with him, some way from here, some
time ago. I had found him in one of the gardens with Lady John; after
which we came away from her together. We strolled a little and talked,
but I knew what he really wanted. He wanted to find you, and I told him
he would probably do so at tea on the terrace. It was visibly with that
idea--to return to the house--that he left me."
She looked at me for some time on this, taking it in, yet still afraid
of it. "You found him with Lady John?" she at last asked, and with a
note in her voice that made me see what--as there was a precaution I had
neglected--she feared.
The perception of this, in its turn, operated with me for an instant
almost as the rarest of temptations. I had puzzled out everything and
put everything together; I was as morally confident and as
intellectually triumphant as I have frankly here described myself; but
there was no objective test to which I had yet exposed my theory. The
chance to apply one--and it would be infallible--had suddenly cropped
up. There would be excitement, amusement, discernment in it; it would be
indeed but a more roundabout expression of interest and sympathy. It
would, above all, pack the question I had for so many hours been
occupied with into the compass of a needle-point. I was dazzled by my
opportunity. She had had an uncertainty, in other words, as to whom I
meant, and that it kept her for some seconds on the rack was a trifle
compared to my chance. She would give herself away supremely if she
showed she suspected me of placing my finger on the spot--if she
understood the person I had not named to be nameable as Gilbert Long.
What had created her peril, of course, was my naming Lady John. Well,
how can I say in any sufficient way how much the extraordinary beauty of
her eyes during this brevity of suspense had to do with the event? It
had everything--for it was what caused me to be touched beyond even what
I had already been, and I could literally bear no more of that. I
therefore took no advantage, or took only the advantage I had spoken
with the intention of taking. I laughed out doubtless too nervously, but
it didn't compromise my tact. "Don't you know how she's perpetually
pouncing on him?"
Still, however, I had not named him--which was what prolonged the
tension. "Do you mean--a--do you mean----?" With which she broke off on
a small weak titter and a still weaker exclamation. "There are so _many_
gentlemen!"
There was something in it that might in other conditions have been as
trivial as the giggle of a housemaid; but it had in fact for my ear the
silver ring of poetry. I told her instantly whom I meant. "Poor Briss,
you know," I said, "is always in her clutches."
Oh, how it let her off! And yet, no sooner had it done so and had I
thereby tasted on the instant the sweetness of my wisdom, than I became
aware of something much more extraordinary. It let her off--she showed
me this for a minute, in spite of herself; but the next minute she
showed me something quite different, which was, most wonderful of all,
that she wished me to see her as not quite feeling why I should so much
take for granted the person I _had_ named. "Poor Briss?" her face and
manner appeared suddenly to repeat--quite, moreover (and it was the
drollest, saddest part), as if all our friends had stood about us to
listen. Wherein did poor Briss so intimately concern her? What, pray,
was my ground for such free reference to poor Briss? She quite
repudiated poor Briss. She knew nothing at all about him, and the whole
airy structure I had erected with his aid might have crumbled at the
touch she thus administered if its solidity had depended only on that. I
had a minute of surprise which, had it lasted another minute as surprise
pure and simple, might almost as quickly have turned to something like
chagrin. Fortunately it turned instead into something even more like
enthusiasm than anything I had yet felt. The stroke _was_ extraordinary,
but extraordinary for its nobleness. I quickly saw in it, from the
moment I had got my point of view, more fine things than ever. I saw for
instance that, magnificently, she wished not to incriminate him. All
that had passed between us had passed in silence, but it was a different
matter for what might pass in sound. We looked at each other therefore
with a strained smile over any question of identities. It was as if it
had been one thing--to her confused, relaxed intensity--to give herself
up to me, but quite another thing to give up somebody else.
And yet, superficially arrested as I was for the time, I directly
afterwards recognised in this instinctive discrimination--the last, the
expiring struggle of her native lucidity--a supremely convincing bit of
evidence. It was still more convincing than if she had done any of the
common things--stammered, changed colour, shown an apprehension of what
the person named might have said to me. She had had it from me that he
and I had talked about her, but there was nothing that she accepted the
idea of his having been able to say. I saw--still more than this--that
there was nothing to my purpose (since my purpose was to understand)
that she would have had, as matters stood, coherence enough to impute to
him. It was extremely curious to me to divine, just here, that she
hadn't a glimmering of the real logic of Brissenden's happy effect on
her nerves. It was the effect, as coming from him, that a beautiful
delicacy forbade her as yet to give me her word for; and she was
certainly herself in the stage of regarding it as an anomaly. Why, on
the contrary, I might have wondered, shouldn't she have jumped at the
chance, at the comfort, of seeing a preference trivial enough to be
"worked" imputed to her? Why shouldn't she have been positively pleased
that people might helpfully couple her name with that of the wrong man?
Why, in short, in the language that Grace Brissenden and I had used
together, was not that lady's husband the perfection of a red herring?
Just because, I perceived, the relation that had established itself
between them _was_, for its function, a real relation, the relation of a
fellowship in resistance to doom.
Nothing could have been stranger than for _me_ so to know it was while
the stricken parties themselves were in ignorance; but nothing, at the
same time, could have been, as I have since made out, more magnanimous
than Mrs. Server's attitude. She moved, groping and panting, in the
gathering dusk of her fate, but there were calculations she still could
dimly make. One of these was that she must drag no one else in. I verily
believe that, for that matter, she had scruples, poignant and exquisite,
even about letting our friend himself see how much she liked to be with
him. She wouldn't, at all events, let another see. I saw what I saw, I
felt what I felt, but such things were exactly a sign that I could take
care of myself. There was apparently, I was obliged to admit, but little
apprehension in her of her unduly showing that _our_ meeting had been
anything of a blessing to her. There was no one indeed just then to be
the wiser for it; I might perhaps else even have feared that she would
have been influenced to treat the incident as closed. I had, for that
matter, no wish to prolong it beyond her own convenience; it had already
told me everything it could possibly tell. I thought I knew moreover
what she would have got from it. I preferred, none the less, that we
should separate by my own act; I wanted not to see her move in order to
be free of me. So I stood up, to put her more at her ease, and it was
while I remained before her that I tried to turn to her advantage what I
had committed myself to about Brissenden.
"I had a fancy, at any rate, that he was looking for you--all the more
that he didn't deny it."
She had not moved; she had let me take my hand from her own with as
little sign as on her first feeling its touch. She only kept her eyes on
me. "What made you have such a fancy?"
"What makes me ever have any?" I laughed. "My extraordinary interest in
my fellow-creatures. I have more than most men. I've never really seen
anyone with half so much. That breeds observation, and observation
breeds ideas. Do you know what it has done?" I continued. "It has bred
for me the idea that Brissenden's in love with you."
There was something in her eyes that struck me as betraying--and the
appeal of it went to the heart--the constant dread that if entangled in
talk she might show confusion. Nevertheless she brought out after a
moment, as naturally and charmingly as possible: "How can that be when
he's so strikingly in love with his wife?"
I gave her the benefit of the most apparent consideration. "Strikingly,
you call it?"
"Why, I thought it was noticed--what he does for her."
"Well, of course she's extremely handsome--or at least extremely fresh
and attractive. He _is_ in love with her, no doubt, if you take it by
the quarter, or by the year, like a yacht or a stable," I pushed on at
random. "But isn't there such a state also as being in love by the day?"
She waited, and I guessed from the manner of it exactly why. It was the
most obscure of intimations that she would have liked better that I
shouldn't make her talk; but obscurity, by this time, offered me no more
difficulties. The hint, none the less, a trifle disconcerted me, and,
while I vaguely sought for some small provisional middle way between
going and not going on, the oddest thing, as a fruit of my own delay,
occurred. This was neither more nor less than the revival of her
terrible little fixed smile. It came back as if with an audible
click--as a gas-burner makes a pop when you light it. It told me visibly
that from the moment she must talk she could talk only with its aid. The
effect of its aid I indeed immediately perceived.
"How do I know?" she asked in answer to my question. "I've never _been_
in love."
"Not even by the day?"
"Oh, a day's surely a long time."
"It is," I returned. "But I've none the less, more fortunately than you,
been in love for a whole one." Then I continued, from an impulse of
which I had just become conscious and that was clearly the result of the
heart-breaking facial contortion--heart-breaking, that is, when one knew
what I knew--by which she imagined herself to represent the pleasant
give-and-take of society. This sense, for me, was a quick horror of
forcing her, in such conditions, to talk at all. Poor Briss had
mentioned to me, as an incident of his contact with her, his
apprehension of her breaking down; and now, at a touch, I saw what he
had meant. She _would_ break down if I didn't look out. I found myself
thus, from one minute to the other, as greatly dreading it for her,
dreading it indeed for both of us, as I might have dreaded some physical
accident or danger, her fall from an unmanageable horse or the crack
beneath her of thin ice. It was impossible--that was the extraordinary
impression--to come too much to her assistance. We had each of us all,
in our way, hour after hour, been, as goodnaturedly as unwittingly,
giving her a lift; yet what was the end of it but her still sitting
there to assure me of a state of gratitude--that she couldn't even
articulate--for every hint of a perch that might still be held out?
What could only, therefore, in the connection, strike me as indicated
was fairly to put into her mouth--if one might do so without showing too
ungracefully as alarmed--the words one might have guessed her to wish to
use were she able to use any. It was a small service of anticipation
that I tried to render her with as little of an air as possible of being
remedial. "I daresay you wonder," I remarked on these lines, "why, at
all, I should have thrust Brissenden in."
"Oh, I _do_ so wonder!" she replied with the refined but exaggerated
glee that is a frequent form in high companies and light colloquies. I
_did_ help her--it was admirable to feel it. She liked my imposing on
her no more complex a proposition. She liked my putting the thing to her
so much better than she could have put it to me. But she immediately
afterwards looked away as if--now that we _had_ put it, and it didn't
matter which of us best--we had nothing more to do with it. She gave me
a hint of drops and inconsequences that might indeed have opened up
abysses, and all the while she smiled and smiled. Yet whatever she did
or failed of, as I even then observed to myself, how she remained
lovely! One's pleasure in that helped one somehow not to break down on
one's own side--since breaking down was in question--for commiseration.
I didn't know what she might have hours of for the man--whoever he
was--to whom her sacrifice had been made; but I doubted if for any other
person she had ever been so beautiful as she was for me at these
moments. To have kept her so, to have made her more so--how might that
result of their relation not in fact have shone as a blinding light into
the eyes of her lover? What would he have been bound to make out in her
after all but her passion and her beauty? Wasn't it enough for such
wonders as these to fill his consciousness? If they didn't fill
mine--even though occupying so large a place in it--was that not only
because I had not the direct benefit of them as the other party to the
prodigy had it? They filled mine too, for that matter, just at this
juncture, long enough for me to describe myself as rendered subject by
them to a temporary loss of my thread. What _could_ pass muster with her
as an account of my reason for evoking the blighted identity of our
friend? There came constantly into her aspect, I should say, the
strangest alternatives, as I can only most conveniently call them, of
presence and absence--something like intermissions of intensity,
cessations and resumptions of life. They were like the slow flickers of
a troubled flame, breathed upon and then left, burning up and burning
down. She had really burnt down--I mean so far as her sense of things
went--while I stood there.
I stood long enough to see that it didn't in the least signify whether
or no I explained, and during this interval I found myself--to my
surprise--in receipt of still better assistance than any I had to give.
I had happened to turn, while I awkwardly enough, no doubt, rested and
shifted, to the quarter from which Mrs. Server had arrived; and there,
just at the end of the same vista, I gathered material for my proper
reply. Her eyes at this moment were fixed elsewhere, and that gave me
still a little more time, at the end of which my reference had all its
point. "I supposed you to have Brissenden in your head," I said,
"because it's evidently what he himself takes for granted. But let him
tell you!" He was already close to us: missing her at the house, he had
started again in search of her and had successfully followed. The effect
on him of coming in sight of us had been for an instant to make him hang
back as I had seen Mrs. Server hang. But he had then advanced just as
she had done; I had waited for him to reach us; and now she saw him. She
looked at him as she always looked at all of us, yet not at either of us
as if we had lately been talking of him. If it was vacancy it was
eloquent; if it was vigilance it was splendid. What was most curious, at
all events, was that it was now poor Briss who was disconcerted. He had
counted on finding her, but not on finding her with me, and I
interpreted a certain ruefulness in him as the sign of a quick, uneasy
sense that he must have been in question between us. I instantly felt
that the right thing was to let him know he had been, and I mentioned to
him, as a joke, that he had come just in time to save himself. We had
been talking of him, and I wouldn't answer for what Mrs. Server had been
going to say. He took it gravely, but he took everything so gravely that
I saw no symptom in that. In fact, as he appeared at first careful not
to meet my eyes, I saw for a minute or two no symptom in anything--in
anything, at least, but the way in which, standing beside me and before
Mrs. Server's bench, he received the conscious glare of her recognition
without returning it and without indeed giving her a look. He looked all
about--looked, as she herself had done after our meeting, at the
charming place and its marks of the hour, at the rich twilight, deeper
now in the avenues, and at the tree-tops and sky, more flushed now with
colour. I found myself of a sudden quite as sorry for him as I had been
for Mrs. Server, and I scarce know how it was suggested to me that
during the short interval since our separation something had happened
that made a difference in him. Was the difference a consciousness still
more charged than I had left it? I couldn't exactly say, and the
question really lost itself in what soon came uppermost for me--the
desire, above all, to spare them both and to spare them equally.
The difficulty, however, was to spare them in some fashion that would
not be more marked than continuing to observe them. To leave them
together without a decent pretext would be marked; but this, I eagerly
recognised, was none the less what most concerned me. Whatever they
might see in it, there was by this time little enough doubt of how it
would indicate for my own mind that the wheel had completely turned.
That was the point to which I had been brought by the lapse of a few
hours. I had verily travelled far since the sight of the pair on the
terrace had given its arrest to my first talk with Mrs. Briss. I was
obliged to admit to myself that nothing could very well have been more
singular than some of my sequences. I had come round to the opposite
pole of the protest my companion had then drawn from me--which was the
pole of agreement with herself; and it hung sharply before me that I was
pledged to confess to her my revolution. I couldn't now be in the
presence of the two creatures I was in the very act of finally judging
to be not a whit less stricken than I had originally imagined them--I
couldn't do this and think with any complacency of the redemption of my
pledge; for the process by which I had at last definitely inculpated
Mrs. Server was precisely such a process of providential supervision as
made me morally responsible, so to speak, for her, and thereby
intensified my scruples. Well, my scruples had the last word--they were
what determined me to look at my watch and profess that, whatever sense
of a margin Brissenden and Mrs. Server might still enjoy, it behoved me
not to forget that I took, on such great occasions, an hour to dress for
dinner. It was a fairly crude cover for my retreat; perhaps indeed I
should rather say that my retreat was practically naked and unadorned.
It formulated their relation. I left them with the formula on their
hands, both queerly staring at it, both uncertain what to do with it.
For some passage that would soon be a correction of this, however, one
might surely feel that one could trust them. I seemed to feel my trust
justified, behind my back, before I had got twenty yards away. By the
time I had done this, I must add, something further had befallen me.
Poor Briss had met my eyes just previous to my flight, and it was then I
satisfied myself of what had happened to him at the house. He had met
his wife; she had in some way dealt with him; he had been with her,
however briefly, alone; and the intimacy of their union had been afresh
impressed upon him. Poor Briss, in fine, looked ten years older.
IX
I shall never forget the impressions of that evening, nor the way, in
particular, the immediate effect of some of them was to merge the light
of my extravagant perceptions in a glamour much more diffused. I
remember feeling seriously warned, while dinner lasted, not to yield
further to my idle habit of reading into mere human things an interest
so much deeper than mere human things were in general prepared to
supply. This especial hour, at Newmarch, had always a splendour that
asked little of interpretation, that even carried itself, with an
amiable arrogance, as indifferent to what the imagination could do for
it. I think the imagination, in those halls of art and fortune, was
almost inevitably accounted a poor matter; the whole place and its
participants abounded so in pleasantness and picture, in all the
felicities, for every sense, taken for granted there by the very basis
of life, that even the sense most finely poetic, aspiring to extract the
moral, could scarce have helped feeling itself treated to something of
the snub that affects--when it does affect--the uninvited reporter in
whose face a door is closed. I said to myself during dinner that these
were scenes in which a transcendent intelligence had after all no
application, and that, in short, any preposterous acuteness might easily
suffer among them such a loss of dignity as overtakes the newspaper-man
kicked out. We existed, all of us together, to be handsome and happy, to
be really what we looked--since we looked tremendously well; to be that
and neither more nor less, so not discrediting by musty secrets and
aggressive doubts our high privilege of harmony and taste. We were
concerned only with what was bright and open, and the expression that
became us all was, at worst, that of the shaded but gratified eye, the
air of being forgivingly dazzled by too much lustre.
Mrs. Server, at table, was out of my range, but I wondered if, had she
not been so, I shouldn't now have been moved to recognise in her fixed
expressiveness nothing more than our common reciprocal tribute. Hadn't
everyone my eyes could at present take in a fixed expressiveness? Was I
not very possibly myself, on this ground of physiognomic congruity, more
physiognomic than anyone else? I made my excellence, on the chance, go
as far as it would to cover my temporary doubts. I saw Mrs. Brissenden,
in another frock, naturally, and other jewels from those of the evening
before; but she gave me, across the board, no more of a look than if she
had quite done with me. It struck me that she felt she _had_ done--that,
as to the subject of our discussion, she deemed her case by this time
so established as to offer comparatively little interest. I couldn't
come to her to renew the discussion; I could only come to her to make my
submission; and it doubtless appeared to her--to do her justice--more
delicate not to triumph over me in advance. The profession of joy,
however, reigned in her handsome face none the less largely for my not
having the benefit of it. If I seem to falsify my generalisation by
acknowledging that her husband, on the same side, made no more public
profession of joy than usual, I am still justified by the fact that
there was something in a manner decorative even in Brissenden's wonted
gloom. He reminded me at this hour more than ever of some fine old
Velasquez or other portrait--a presentation of ugliness and melancholy
that might have been royal. There was as little of the common in his
dry, distinguished patience as in the case I had made out for him.
Blighted and ensconed, he looked at it over the rigid convention, his
peculiar perfection of necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat, as some aged
remnant of sovereignty at the opera looks over the ribbon of an order
and the ledge of a box.
I must add, however, that in spite of my sense of his wife's indulgence
I kept quite aware of the nearer approach, as course followed course, of
my hour of reckoning with her--more and more saw the moment of the
evening at which, frankly amused at last at having me in a cleft stick,
she would draw me a little out of the throng. Of course, also, I was
much occupied in asking myself to what degree I was prepared to be
perjured. _Was_ I ready to pretend that my candour was still
unconvinced? And was I in this case only instinctively mustering my
arguments? I was certainly as sorry that Mrs. Server was out of my view
as if I proposed still to fight; and I really felt, so far as that went,
as if there might be something to fight for after the lady on my left
had given me a piece of news. I had asked her if she happened to know,
as we couldn't see, who was next Mrs. Server, and, though unable to say
at the moment, she made no scruple, after a short interval, of
ascertaining with the last directness. The stretch forward in which she
had indulged, or the information she had caused to be passed up to her
while I was again engaged on my right, established that it was Lord
Lutley who had brought the lovely lady in and that it was Mr. Long who
was on her other side. These things indeed were not the finest point of
my companion's communication, for I saw that what she felt I would be
really interested in was the fact that Mr. Long had brought in Lady
John, who was naturally, therefore, his other neighbour. Beyond Lady
John was Mr. Obert, and beyond Mr. Obert Mrs. Froome, not, for a wonder,
this time paired, as by the immemorial tradition, so fairly comical in
its candour, with Lord Lutley. Wasn't it too funny, the kind of
grandmotherly view of their relation shown in their always being put
together? If I perhaps questioned whether "grandmotherly" were exactly
the name for the view, what yet at least was definite in the light of
this evening's arrangement was that there did occur occasions on which
they were put apart. My friend of course disposed of this observation by
the usual exception that "proved the rule"; but it was absurd how I had
thrilled with her announcement, and our exchange of ideas meanwhile
helped to carry me on.
My theory had not at all been framed to embrace the phenomenon thus
presented; it had been precisely framed, on the contrary, to hang
together with the observed inveteracy of escape, on the part of the two
persons about whom it busied itself, from public juxtaposition of more
than a moment. I was fairly upset by the need to consider at this late
hour whether going in for a new theory or bracing myself for new facts
would hold out to me the better refuge. It is perhaps not too much to
say that I should scarce have been able to sit still at all but for the
support afforded me by the oddity of the separation of Lord Lutley and
Mrs. Froome; which, though resting on a general appearance directly
opposed to that of my friends, offered somehow the relief of a
suggestive analogy. What I could directly clutch at was that if the
exception did prove the rule in the one case it might equally prove it
in the other. If on a rare occasion one of these couples might be
divided, so, by as uncommon a chance, the other might be joined; the
only difference being in the gravity of the violated law. For which pair
was the betrayal greatest? It was not till dinner was nearly ended and
the ladies were about to withdraw that I recovered lucidity to make out
how much more machinery would have had to be put into motion
consistently to prevent, than once in a way to minimise, the
disconcerting accident.
All accidents, I must add, were presently to lose themselves in the
unexpectedness of my finding myself, before we left the dining-room, in
easy talk with Gilbert Long--talk that was at least easy for _him_,
whatever it might have struck me as necessarily destined to be for me. I
felt as he approached me--for he did approach me--that it was somehow
"important"; I was so aware that something in the state of my conscience
would have prevented me from assuming conversation between us to be at
this juncture possible. The state of my conscience was that I knew too
much--that no one had really any business to know what I knew. If he
suspected but the fiftieth part of it there was no simple spirit in
which he could challenge me. It would have been simple of course to
desire to knock me down, but that was barred by its being simple to
excess. It wouldn't even have been enough for him merely to ground it
on a sudden fancy. It fitted, in fine, with my cogitations that it was
so significant for him to wish to speak to me that I didn't envy him his
attempt at the particular shade of assurance required for carrying the
thing off. He would have learned from Mrs. Server that I was not, as
regarded them, at all as others were; and thus his idea, the fruit of
that stimulation, could only be either to fathom, to felicitate, or--as
it were--to destroy me. What was at the same time obvious was that no
one of these attitudes would go quite of itself. The simple sight of him
as he quitted his chair to take one nearer my own brought home to me in
a flash--and much more than anything had yet done--the real existence in
him of the condition it was my private madness (none the less private
for Grace Brissenden's so limited glimpse of it,) to believe I had
coherently stated. Is not this small touch perhaps the best example I
can give of the intensity of amusement I had at last enabled my private
madness to yield me? I found myself owing it, from this time on and for
the rest of the evening, moments of the highest concentration.
Whatever there might have been for me of pain or doubt was washed
straight out by the special sensation of seeing how "clever" poor Long
not only would have to be, but confidently and actually _was_; inasmuch
as this apprehension seemed to put me in possession of his cleverness,
besides leaving me all my own. I made him welcome, I helped him to
another cigarette, I felt above all that I should enjoy him; my response
to his overture was, in other words, quickly enough to launch us. Yet I
fear I can do little justice to the pleasant suppressed tumult of
impression and reflection that, on my part, our ten minutes together
produced. The elements that mingled in it scarce admit of
discrimination. It was still more than previously a deep sense of being
justified. My interlocutor was for those ten minutes immeasurably
superior--superior, I mean, to himself--and he couldn't possibly have
become so save through the relation I had so patiently tracked. He faced
me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound,
thought with another ease and understood with another ear. I should put
it that what came up between us was the mere things of the occasion,
were it not for the fine point to which, in my view, the things of the
occasion had been brought. While our eyes, at all events, on either
side, met serenely, and our talk, dealing with the idea, dealing with
the extraordinary special charm, of the social day now deepening to its
end, touched our companions successively, touched the manner in which
this one and that had happened to be predominantly a part of that charm;
while such were our immediate conditions I wondered of course if he had
not, just as consciously and essentially as I, quite another business
in mind. It was not indeed that our allusion to the other business would
not have been wholly undiscoverable by a third person.
So far as it took place it was of a "subtlety," as we used to say at
Newmarch, in relation to which the common register of that pressure
would have been, I fear, too old-fashioned a barometer. I had moreover
the comfort--for it amounted to that--of perceiving after a little that
we understood each other too well for our understanding really to have
tolerated the interference of passion, such passion as would have been
represented on his side by resentment of my intelligence and on my side
by resentment of his. The high sport of such intelligence--between
gentlemen, to the senses of any other than whom it must surely be
closed--demanded and implied in its own intimate interest a certain
amenity. Yes, accordingly, I had promptly got the answer that my wonder
at his approach required: he had come to me for the high sport. He would
formerly have been incapable of it, and he was beautifully capable of it
now. It was precisely the kind of high sport--the play of perception,
expression, sociability--in which Mrs. Server would a year or two before
have borne as light a hand. I need scarcely add how little it would have
found itself in that lady's present chords. He had said to me in our ten
minutes everything amusing she couldn't have said. Yet if when our host
gave us the sign to adjourn to the drawing-room so much as all this had
grown so much clearer, I had still, figuratively speaking, a small nut
or two left to crack. By the time we moved away together, however, these
resistances had yielded. The answers had really only been waiting for
the questions. The play of Long's mind struck me as more marked, since
the morning, by the same amount, as it might have been called, as the
march of poor Briss's age; and if I had, a while before, in the wood,
had my explanation of this latter addition, so I had it now of the
former--as to which I shall presently give it.
When music, in English society, as we know, is not an accompaniment to
the voice, the voice can in general be counted on to assert its pleasant
identity as an accompaniment to music; but at Newmarch we had been
considerably schooled, and this evening, in the room in which most of us
had assembled, an interesting pianist, who had given a concert the night
before at the near county town and been brought over during the day to
dine and sleep, would scarce have felt in any sensitive fibre that he
was not having his way with us. It may just possibly have been an
hallucination of my own, but while we sat together after dinner in a
dispersed circle I could have worked it out that, as a company, we were
considerably conscious of some experience, greater or smaller from one
of us to the other, that had prepared us for the player's spell.
Felicitously scattered and grouped, we might in almost any case have had
the air of looking for a message from it--of an imagination to be
flattered, nerves to be quieted, sensibilities to be soothed. The whole
scene was as composed as if there were scarce one of us but had a secret
thirst for the infinite to be quenched. And it was the infinite that,
for the hour, the distinguished foreigner poured out to us, causing it
to roll in wonderful waves of sound, almost of colour, over our
receptive attitudes and faces. Each of us, I think, now wore the
expression--or confessed at least to the suggestion--of some
indescribable thought; which might well, it was true, have been nothing
more unmentionable than the simple sense of how the posture of deference
to this noble art has always a certain personal grace to contribute. We
neglected nothing of it that could make our general effect ample, and
whether or no we were kept quiet by the piano, we were at least
admonished, to and fro, by our mutual visibility, which each of us
clearly, desired to make a success. I have little doubt, furthermore,
that to each of us was due, as the crown of our inimitable day, the
imputation of having something quite of our own to think over.
We thought, accordingly--we continued to think, and I felt that, by the
law of the occasion, there had as yet been for everyone no such
sovereign warrant for an interest in the private affairs of everyone
else. As a result of this influence all that at dinner had begun to fade
away from me came back with a rush and hovered there with a vividness. I
followed many trains and put together many pieces; but perhaps what I
most did was to render a fresh justice to the marvel of our civilised
state. The perfection of that, enjoyed as we enjoyed it, all made a
margin, a series of concentric circles of rose-colour (shimmering away
into the pleasant vague of everything else that didn't matter,) for the
so salient little figure of Mrs. Server, still the controlling image for
me, the real principle of composition, in this affluence of fine things.
What, for my part, while I listened, I most made out was the beauty and
the terror of conditions so highly organised that under their rule her
small lonely fight with disintegration could go on without the betrayal
of a gasp or a shriek, and with no worse tell-tale contortion of lip or
brow than the vibration, on its golden stem, of that constantly renewed
flower of amenity which my observation had so often and so mercilessly
detached only to find again in its place. This flower nodded perceptibly
enough in our deeply stirred air, but there was a peace, none the less,
in feeling the spirit of the wearer to be temporarily at rest. There was
for the time no gentleman on whom she need pounce, no lapse against
which she need guard, no presumption she need create, nor any suspicion
she need destroy. In this pause in her career it came over me that I
should have liked to leave her; it would have prepared for me the
pleasant after-consciousness that I had seen her pass, as I might say,
in music out of sight.
But we were, alas! all too much there, too much tangled and involved for
that; every actor in the play that had so unexpectedly insisted on
constituting itself for me sat forth as with an intimation that they
were not to be so easily disposed of. It was as if there were some last
act to be performed before the curtain could fall. Would the definite
dramatic signal for ringing the curtain down be then only--as a grand
climax and _coup de théâtre_--the due attestation that poor Briss had
succumbed to inexorable time and Mrs. Server given way under a cerebral
lesion? Were the rest of us to disperse decorously by the simple action
of the discovery that, on our pianist's striking his last note, with its
consequence of permitted changes of attitude, Gilbert Long's victim had
reached the point of final simplification and Grace Brissenden's the
limit of age recorded of man? I could look at neither of these persons
without a sharper sense of the contrast between the tragedy of their
predicament and the comedy of the situation that did everything for them
but suspect it. They had truly been arrayed and anointed, they had
truly been isolated, for their sacrifice. I was sufficiently aware even
then that if one hadn't known it one might have seen nothing; but I was
not less aware that one couldn't know anything without seeing all; and
so it was that, while our pianist played, my wandering vision played and
played as well. It took in again, while it went from one of them to the
other, the delicate light that each had shed on the other, and it made
me wonder afresh what still more delicate support they themselves might
not be in the very act of deriving from their dim community. It was for
the glimmer of this support that I had left them together two or three
hours before; yet I was obliged to recognise that, travel between them
as my fancy might, it could detect nothing in the way of a consequent
result. I caught no look from either that spoke to me of service
rendered them; and I caught none, in particular, from one of them to the
other, that I could read as a symptom of their having compared notes.
The fellow-feeling of each for the lost light of the other remained for
me but a tie supposititious--the full-blown flower of my theory. It
would show here as another flower, equally mature, for me to have made
out a similar dim community between Gilbert Long and Mrs. Brissenden--to
be able to figure them as groping side by side, proportionately, towards
a fellowship of light overtaken; but if I failed of this, for ideal
symmetry, that seemed to rest on the general truth that joy brings
people less together than sorrow.
So much for the course of my impressions while the music lasted--a
course quite consistent with my being prepared for new combinations as
soon as it was over. Promptly, when that happened, the bow was unbent;
and the combination I first seized, amid motion and murmur and rustle,
was that, once more, of poor Briss and Lady John, the latter of whom had
already profited by the general reaction to endeavour to cultivate
afresh the vainest of her sundry appearances. She had laid on him the
same coercive hand to which I owed my having found him with her in the
afternoon, but my intervention was now to operate with less ceremony. I
chanced to be near enough to them for Brissenden, on seeing me, to fix
his eyes on me in silence, but in a manner that could only bring me
immediately nearer. Lady John never did anything in silence, but she
greeted me as I came up to them with a fine false alarm. "No, indeed,"
she cried, "you shan't carry him off this time!"--and poor Briss
disappeared, leaving us face to face, even while she breathed defiance.
He had made no joke of it, and I had from him no other recognition; it
was therefore a mere touch, yet it gave me a sensible hint that he had
begun, as things were going, to depend upon me, that I already in a
fashion figured to him--and on amazingly little evidence after all--as
his natural protector, his providence, his effective omniscience. Like
Mrs. Server herself, he was materially on my hands, and it was proper I
should "do" for him. I wondered if he were really beginning to look to
me to avert his inexorable fate. Well, if his inexorable fate was to be
an unnameable climax, it had also its special phases, and one of these I
_had_ just averted. I followed him a moment with my eyes, and I then
observed to Lady John that she decidedly took me for too simple a
person. She had meanwhile also watched the direction taken by her
liberated victim, and was the next instant prepared with a reply to my
charge. "Because he has gone to talk with May Server? I don't quite see
what you mean, for I believe him really to be in terror of her. Most of
the men here _are_, you know, and I've really assured myself that he
doesn't find her any less awful than the rest. He finds her the more so
by just the very marked extra attention that you may have noticed she
has given him."
"And does that now happen to be what he has so eagerly gone off to
impress upon her?"
Lady John was so placed that she could continue to look at our friends,
and I made out in her that she was not, in respect to them, without some
slight elements of perplexity. These were even sufficient to make her
temporarily neglect the defence of the breach I had made in her
consistency. "If you mean by 'impressing upon' her speaking to her, he
hasn't gone--you can see for yourself--to impress upon her anything;
they have the most extraordinary way, which I've already observed, of
sitting together without sound. I don't know," she laughed, "what's the
matter with such people!"
"It proves in general," I admitted, "either some coldness or some
warmth, and I quite understand that that's not the way _you_ sit with
your friends. You steer admirably clear of every extravagance. I don't
see, at any rate, why Mrs. Server is a terror----"
But she had already taken me up. "If she doesn't chatter as _I_ do?" She
thought it over. "But she does--to everyone but Mr. Briss. I mean to
every man she can pick up."
I emulated her reflection. "Do they complain of it to you?"
"They're more civil than you," she returned; "for if, when they flee
before it, they bump up against me in their flight, they don't explain
that by intimating that they're come from bad to worse. Besides, I see
what they suffer."
"And do you hear it?"
"What they suffer? No, I've taken care not to suffer myself. I don't
listen. It's none of my business."
"Is that a way of gently expressing," I ventured to ask, "that it's also
none of mine?"
"It might be," she replied, "if I had, as you appear to, the
imagination of atrocity. But I don't pretend to so much as conceive
what's your business."
"I wonder if it isn't just now," I said after a moment, "to convict you
of an attempt at duplicity that has not even had the saving grace of
success! Was it for Brissenden himself that you spoke just now as if you
believed him to wish to cling to you?"
"Well, I'm kind enough for anything," she goodnaturedly enough laughed.
"But what," she asked more sharply, "are you trying to find out?"
Such an awful lot, the answer to this would politely have been, that I
daresay the aptness of the question produced in my face a shade of
embarrassment. I felt, however, the next moment that I needn't fear too
much. What I, on approaching Lady John, had found myself moved to test,
using her in it as a happy touchstone, was the degree of the
surrounding, the latent, sense of things: an impulse confirmed by the
manner in which she had momentarily circled about the phenomenon of Mrs.
Server's avidity, about the mystery of the terms made with it by our
friend. It was present to me that if I could catch, on the part of my
interlocutress, anything of a straight scent, I might take that as the
measure of a diffused danger. I mentally applied this term to the
possibility of diffusion, because I suddenly found myself thinking with
a kind of horror of any accident by which I might have to expose to the
world, to defend against the world, to share with the world, that now so
complex tangle of hypotheses that I have had for convenience to speak of
as my theory. I could toss the ball myself, I could catch it and send it
back, and familiarity had now made this exercise--in my own inner
precincts--easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier
curiosity made me tremble for the impunity of my creation. If there had
been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of _my_ discernment,
it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some
incalculable catastrophe or some public ugliness. It wasn't for me
definitely to image the logical result of a verification by the sense of
others of the matter of my vision; but the thing had only to hang before
me as a chance for me to feel that I should utterly object to it, though
I may appear to weaken this statement if I add that the opportunity to
fix the degree of my actual companion's betrayed mystification was
almost a spell. This, I conceive, was just by reason of what was at
stake. How could I happily tell her what I was trying to find out?--tell
her, that is, not too much for security and yet enough for relief? The
best answer seemed a brave jump. I was conscious of a certain credit
open with her in my appearance of intellectual sympathy.
"Well," I brought out at last, "I'm quite aching to ask you if you'll
forgive me a great liberty, which I owe to your candid challenge my
opportunity to name. Will you allow me to say frankly that I think you
play a dangerous game with poor Briss, in whom I confess I'm interested?
I don't of course speak of the least danger to yourself; but it's an
injustice to any man to make use of him quite so flagrantly. You don't
in the least flatter yourself that the poor fellow is in love with
you--you wouldn't care a bit if he were. Yet you're willing to make him
think you like him, so far as that may be necessary to explain your so
frequently ingenious appropriation of him. He doesn't like you _too_
much, as yet; doesn't even like you quite enough. But your potency may,
after all, work on him, and then, as your interest is so obviously quite
elsewhere, what will happen will be that you'll find, to your
inconvenience, that you've gone too far. A man never likes a woman
enough unless he likes her _more_ than enough. Unfortunately it's what
the inveterate ass is sure sooner or later to do."
Lady John looked just enough interested to look detached from most of
the more vulgar liabilities to offence. "Do I understand that to be the
pretty name by which you describe Mr. Briss?"
"He has his share of it, for I'm thinking of the idiots that we everyone
of us are. I throw out a warning against a contingency."
"Are you providing for the contingency of his ceasing to care for his
wife? If you are"--and Lady John's amusement took on a breadth--"you
may be said to have a prudent mind and to be taking time by the
forelock."
At this I pricked up my ears. "Do you mean because of his apparently
incorruptible constancy?"
"I mean because the whole thing's so before one. She has him so in hand
that they're neither of them in as much danger as would count for a
mouse. It doesn't prevent his liking to dally by the way--for _she_
dallies by the way, and he does everything she does. Haven't I observed
her," Lady John continued, "dallying a little, so far as that goes, with
_you_? You've the tact to tell me that he doesn't think me good enough,
but I don't require, do I?--for such a purpose as his--to be very
extraordinarily good. You may say that you wrap it up immensely and try
to sugar the dose! Well, all the same, give up, for a quiet life, the
attempt to be a providence. You can't be a providence and not be a bore.
A real providence _knows_; whereas you," said Lady John, making her
point neatly, "have to find out--and to find out even by asking 'the
likes of' _me_. Your fine speech meanwhile doesn't a bit tell me what."
It affected me again that she could get so near without getting nearer.
True enough it was that I wanted to find out; and though I might expect,
or fear, too much of her, I wondered at her only seeing this--at her
not reading deeper. The peril of the public ugliness that haunted me
rose or fell, at this moment, with my varying view of her density. Or
rather, to be more exact, I already saw her as necessarily stupid
because I saw her as extravagantly vain. What I see now of course is
that I was on my own side almost stupidly hard with her--as I may also
at that hour have been subject to her other vice. Didn't I perhaps, in
proportion as I felt how little she saw, think awfully well of myself,
as we said at Newmarch, for seeing so much more? It comes back to me
that the sense thus established of my superior vision may perfectly have
gone a little to my head. If it was a frenzied fallacy I was all to
blame, but if it was anything else whatever it was naturally
intoxicating. I really remember in fact that nothing so much as this
confirmed presumption of my impunity had appeared to me to mark the fine
quality of my state. I think there must fairly have been a pitch at
which I was not sure that not to partake of that state was, on the part
of others, the sign of a gregarious vulgarity; as if there were a
positive advantage, an undiluted bliss, in the intensity of
consciousness that I had reached. _I_ alone was magnificently and
absurdly aware--everyone else was benightedly out of it. So I reflected
that there would be almost nothing I mightn't with safety mention to my
present subject of practice as an acknowledgment that I was meddlesome.
I could put no clue in her hand that her notorious acuteness would make
of the smallest use to her. The most she could do would be to make it of
use to myself, and the clue it seemed best to select was therefore a
complete confession of guilt.
"You've a lucidity of your own in which I'm forced to recognise that the
highest purity of motive looks shrivelled and black. You bring out
accordingly what has made me thus beat about the bush. Have you really
such a fund of indulgence for Gilbert Long as we most of us, I
gather--though perhaps in our blindness--seem to see it stick out again
that he supposes? _May_ he fondly feel that he can continue to count on
it? Or, if you object to my question in that form, is it not, frankly,
to making his attitude--after all so thoroughly public--more convenient
to each of you that (without perhaps quite measuring what you're about,)
you've gone on sacrificing poor Briss? I call it sacrificing, you see,
in spite of there having been as yet no such great harm done. And if you
ask me again what business of mine such inquiries may represent, why,
the best thing will doubtless be to say to you that, with a smaller dose
of irrepressible irony in my composition than you have in yours, I can't
make so light as you of my tendency to worry on behalf of those I care
for. Let me finally hasten to add that I'm not now including in that
category either of the two gentlemen I've named."
I freely concede, as I continue my record, that to follow me at all, at
this point, gave proof on Lady John's part of a faculty that should have
prevented my thinking of her as inordinately backward. "Then who in the
world _are_ these objects of your solicitude?"
I showed, over and above my hesitation, my regret for the need of it.
"I'm afraid I can't tell you."
At this, not unnaturally, she fairly scoffed. "Asking me everything and
telling me nothing, you nevertheless look to me to satisfy you? Do you
mean," she pursued, "that you speak for persons whose interest is more
legitimately founded than the interest you so flatteringly attribute to
myself?"
"Well, yes--let them be so described! Can't you guess," I further
risked, "who constitutes at least _one_ of my preoccupations?"
The condescension of her consent to think marked itself handsomely
enough. "Is it your idea to pretend to me that I'm keeping Grace
Brissenden awake?" There was consistency enough in her wonder. "She has
not been anything but nice to me; she's not a person whose path one
crosses without finding it out; and I can't imagine what has got into
her if any such grievance as that is what she has been pouring out to
you in your apparently so deep confabulations."
This toss of the ball was one that, I saw quickly enough, even a taste
for sport wouldn't justify my answering, and my logical interest lay
moreover elsewhere. "Dear no! Mrs. Brissenden certainly feels her
strength, and I should never presume to take under my charge any
personal situation of hers. I had in my mind a very different identity."
Lady John, as if to be patient with me, looked about at our companions
for a hint of it, wondering which of the ladies I might have been
supposed to "care for" so much as to tolerate in her a preference for a
rival; but the effect of this survey was, I the next instant observed, a
drop of her attention from what I had been saying. Her eye had been
caught by the sight of Gilbert Long within range of us, and then had
been just visibly held by the fact that the person seated with him on
one of the small sofas that almost of necessity made conversation
intimate was the person whose name, just uttered between us, was, in
default of the name she was in search of, still in the air. Gilbert Long
and Mrs. Briss were in familiar colloquy--though I was aware, at the
first flush, of nothing in this that should have made my interlocutress
stare. That is I was aware of nothing but that I had simultaneously
myself been moved to some increase of sharpness. What _could_ I have
known that should have caused me to wonder at the momentary existence of
this particular conjunction of minds unless it were simply the fact that
I hadn't seen it occur amid the many conjunctions I had already
noticed--_plus_ the fact that I had a few minutes before, in the
interest of the full roundness of my theory, actually been missing it?
These two persons had met in my presence at Paddington and had travelled
together under my eyes; I had talked of Mrs. Briss with Long and of Long
with Mrs. Briss; but the vivid picture that their social union forthwith
presented stirred within me, though so strangely late in the day, it
might have seemed, for such an emotion, more than enough freshness of
impression. Yet--now that I did have it there--why should it be vivid,
why stirring, why a picture at all? Was _any_ temporary collocation, in
a house so encouraging to sociability, out of the range of nature?
Intensely prompt, I need scarcely say, were both my freshness and my
perceived objections to it. The happiest objection, could I have taken
time to phrase it, would doubtless have been that the particular effect
of this juxtaposition--to my eyes at least--was a thing not to have been
foreseen. The parties to it looked, certainly, as I felt that I hadn't
prefigured them; though even this, for my reason, was not a description
of their aspect. Much less was it a description for the intelligence of
Lady John--to whom, however, after all, some formulation of what she
dimly saw would not be so indispensable.
We briefly watched, at any rate, together, and as our eyes met again we
moreover confessed that we had watched. And we could ostensibly have
offered each other no explanation of that impulse save that we had been
talking of those concerned as separate and that it was in consequence a
little odd to find ourselves suddenly seeing them as one. For that was
it--they _were_ as one; as one, at all events, for _my_ large reading.
My large reading had meanwhile, for the convenience of the rest of my
little talk with Lady John, to make itself as small as possible. I had
an odd sense, till we fell apart again, as of keeping my finger rather
stiffly fixed on a passage in a favourite author on which I had not
previously lighted. I held the book out of sight and behind me; I spoke
of things that were not at all in it--or not at all on that particular
page; but my volume, none the less, was only waiting. What might be
written there hummed already in my ears as a result of my mere glimpse.
Had _they_ also wonderfully begun to know? Had _she_, most wonderfully,
and had they, in that case, prodigiously come together on it? This was a
possibility into which my imagination could dip even deeper than into
the depths over which it had conceived the other pair as hovering. These
opposed couples balanced like bronze groups at the two ends of a
chimney-piece, and the most I could say to myself in lucid deprecation
of my thought was that I mustn't take them equally for granted merely
_because_ they balanced. Things in the real had a way of not balancing;
it was all an affair, this fine symmetry, of artificial proportion. Yet
even while I kept my eyes away from Mrs. Briss and Long it was vivid to
me that, "composing" there beautifully, they could scarce help playing a
part in my exhibition. The mind of man, furthermore--and my
generalisation pressed hard, with a quick twist, on the supersubtlety as
to which I had just been privately complacent--the mind of man doubtless
didn't know from one minute to the other, under the appeal of
phantasmagoric life, what it would profitably be at. It had struck me a
few seconds before as vulgarly gross in Lady John that she was curious,
or conscious, of so small a part; in spite of which I was already
secretly wincing at the hint that these others had begun to find
themselves less in the dark and perhaps even directly to exchange their
glimmerings.
My personal privilege, on the basis of the full consciousness, had
become, on the spot, in the turn of an eye, more than questionable, and
I was really quite scared at the chance of having to face--of having to
see _them_ face--another recognition. What did this alarm imply but the
complete reversal of my estimate of the value of perception? Mrs.
Brissenden and Long had been hitherto magnificently without it, and I
was responsible perhaps for having, in a mood practically much stupider
than the stupidest of theirs, put them gratuitously and helplessly _on_
it. To be without it was the most consistent, the most successful,
because the most amiable, form of selfishness; and why should people
admirably equipped for remaining so, people bright and insolent in their
prior state, people in whom this state was to have been respected as a
surface without a scratch is respected, be made to begin to vibrate, to
crack and split, from within? Wasn't it enough for _me_ to pay,
vicariously, the tax on being absurd? Were we all to be landed, without
an issue or a remedy, in a condition on which that tax would be
generally levied? It was as if, abruptly, with a new emotion, I had
wished to unthink every thought with which I had been occupied for
twenty-four hours. Let me add, however, that even had this process been
manageable I was aware of not proposing to begin it till I should have
done with Lady John.
The time she took to meet my last remark is naturally not represented by
this prolonged glance of mine at the amount of suggestion that just then
happened to reach me from the other quarter. It at all events duly came
out between us that Mrs. Server was the person I did have on my mind;
and I remember that it had seemed to me at the end of a minute to matter
comparatively little by which of us, after all, she was first
designated. There is perhaps an oddity--which I must set down to my
emotion of the moment--in my not now being able to say. I should have
been hugely startled if the sight of Gilbert Long had appeared to make
my companion suddenly think of her; and reminiscence of that shock is
not one of those I have found myself storing up. What does abide with me
is the memory of how, after a little, my apprehensions, of various
kinds, dropped--most of all under the deepening conviction that Lady
John was not a whit less agreeably superficial than I could even at the
worst have desired. The point established for me was that, whereas she
passed with herself and so many others as taking in everything, she had
taken in nothing whatever that it was to my purpose she should not take.
Vast, truly, was the world of observation, that we could both glean in
it so actively without crossing each other's steps. There we stood close
together, yet--save for the accident of a final dash, as I shall
note--were at opposite ends of the field.
It's a matter as to which the truth sounds priggish, but I can't help it
if--yes, positively--it affected me as hopelessly vulgar to have made
any induction at all about our companions _but_ those I have recorded,
in such detail, on behalf of my own energy. It was better verily not to
have touched them--which was the case of everyone else--than to have
taken them up, with knowing gestures, only to do so little with them.
That I felt the interest of May Server, that May Server felt the
interest of poor Briss, and that my feeling incongruously presented
itself as putting up, philosophically, with the inconvenience of the
lady's--these were, in fine, circumstances to which she clearly attached
ideas too commonplace for me to judge it useful to gather them in. She
read all things, Lady John, heaven knows, in the light of the universal
possibility of a "relation"; but most of the relations that she had up
her sleeve could thrust themselves into my theory only to find
themselves, the next minute, eliminated. They were of alien
substance--insoluble in the whole. Gilbert Long had for her no
connection, in my deeper sense, with Mrs. Server, nor Mrs. Server with
Gilbert Long, nor the husband with the wife, nor the wife with the
husband, nor I with either member of either pair, nor anyone with
anything, nor anything with anyone. She was thus exactly where I wanted
her to be, for, frankly, I became conscious, at this climax of my
conclusion, that I a little wanted her to be where she had distinctly
ended by betraying to me that her proper inspiration had placed her. If
I have just said that my apprehensions, of various kinds, had finally
and completely subsided, a more exact statement would perhaps have been
that from the moment our eyes met over the show of our couple on the
sofa, the question of any other calculable thing than _that_ hint of a
relation had simply known itself superseded. Reduced to its plainest
terms, this sketch of an improved acquaintance between our comrades was
designed to make Lady John think. It was designed to make me do no
less, but we thought, inevitably, on different lines.
I have already so represented my successions of reflection as rapid that
I may not appear to exceed in mentioning the amusement and philosophy
with which I presently perceived it as unmistakable that she believed in
the depth of her new sounding. It visibly went down for her much nearer
to the bottom of the sea than any plumb I might be qualified to drop.
Poor Briss was in love with his wife--that, when driven to the wall, she
had had to recognise; but she had not had to recognise that his wife was
in love with poor Briss. What was then to militate, on that lady's part,
against a due consciousness, at the end of a splendid summer day, a day
on which occasions had been so multiplied, of an impression of a special
order? What was to prove that there was "nothing in it" when two persons
sat looking so very exceptionally _much_ as if there were everything in
it, as if they were for the first time--thanks to finer
opportunity--doing each other full justice? Mustn't it indeed at this
juncture have come a little over my friend that Grace had lent herself
with uncommon good nature, the previous afternoon, to the arrangement by
which, on the way from town, her ladyship's reputation was to profit by
no worse company, precisely, than poor Briss's? Mrs. Brissenden's own
was obviously now free to profit by my companion's remembering--if the
fact had reached her ears--that Mrs. Brissenden had meanwhile had Long
for an escort. So much, at least, I saw Lady John as seeing, and my
vision may be taken as representing the dash I have confessed myself as
making from my end of our field. It offers us, to be exact, as jostling
each other just sensibly--though _I_ only might feel the bruise--in our
business of picking up straws. Our view of the improved acquaintance was
only a straw, but as I stooped to it I felt my head bump with my
neighbour's. This might have made me ashamed of my eagerness, but, oddly
enough, that effect was not to come. I felt in fact that, since we had
even pulled against each other at the straw, I carried off, in turning
away, the larger piece.
X
It was in the moment of turning away that I somehow learned, without
looking, that Mrs. Brissenden had also immediately moved. I wanted to
look and yet had my reasons for not appearing to do it too quickly; in
spite of which I found my friends, even after an interval, still
distinguishable as separating for the avoidance of comment. Gilbert
Long, rising directly after his associate, had already walked away, but
this associate, lingering where she stood and meeting me with it,
availed herself of the occasion to show that she wished to speak to me.
Such was the idea she threw out on my forthwith going to her. "For a few
minutes--presently."
"Do you mean alone? Shall I come with you?"
She hesitated long enough for me to judge her as a trifle surprised at
my being so ready--as if indeed she had rather hoped I wouldn't be;
which would have been an easy pretext to her to gain time. In fact, with
a face not quite like the brave face she had at each step hitherto shown
me, yet unlike in a fashion I should certainly not have been able to
define on the spot; with an expression, in short, that struck me as
taking refuge in a general reminder that not my convenience, but her
own, was in question, she replied: "Oh, no--but before it's too late. A
few minutes hence. Where shall you be?" she asked with a shade, as I
imagined, of awkwardness. She had looked about as for symptoms of
acceptance of the evening's end on the part of the ladies, but we could
both see our hostess otherwise occupied. "We don't go up quite yet. In
the morning," she added as with an afterthought, "I suppose you leave
early."
I debated. "I haven't thought. And you?"
She looked at me straighter now. "I haven't thought either." Then she
was silent, neither turning away nor coming to the point, as it seemed
to me she might have done, of telling me what she had in her head. I
even fancied that her momentary silence, combined with the way she faced
me--as if that might speak for her--was meant for an assurance that,
whatever train she should take in the morning, she would arrange that it
shouldn't be, as it had been the day before, the same as mine. I really
caught in her attitude a world of invidious reference to the little
journey we had already made together. She had sympathies, she had
proprieties that imposed themselves, and I was not to think that any
little journey was to be thought of again in those conditions. It came
over me that this might have been quite a matter discussed by her,
discussed and settled, with her interlocutor on the sofa. It came over
me that if, before our break-up for the night, I should happen also to
have a minute's talk with that interlocutor, I would equally get from it
the sense of an intention unfavourable to our departing in the same
group. And I wondered if this, in that case, wouldn't affect me as
marking a change back to Long's old manner--a forfeiture of the
conditions, whatever view might be taken of them, that had made him, at
Paddington, suddenly show himself as so possible and so pleasant. If
_he_ "changed back," wouldn't Grace Brissenden change by the same law?
And if Grace Brissenden did, wouldn't her husband? Wouldn't the miracle
take the form of the rejuvenation of that husband? Would it, still by
the same token, take the form of _her_ becoming very old, becoming if
not as old as her husband, at least as old, as one might say, as
herself? Would it take the form of her becoming dreadfully plain--plain
with the plainness of mere stout maturity and artificial preservation?
And if it took this form for the others, which would it take for May
Server? Would she, at a bound as marked as theirs, recover her presence
of mind and her lost equipment?
The kind of suspense that these rising questions produced for me
suffered naturally no drop after Mrs. Briss had cut everything short by
rustling voluminously away. She had something to say to me, and yet she
hadn't; she had nothing to say, and yet I felt her to have already
launched herself in a statement. There were other persons I had made
uncomfortable without at all intending it, but she at least had not
suffered from me, and I had no wish that she should; according to which
she had no pressure to fear. My suspense, in spite of this,
remained--indeed all the more sensibly that I had suddenly lost my
discomfort on the subject of redeeming my pledge to her. It had somehow
left me at a stroke, my dread of her calling me, as by our agreement, to
submit in respect to what we had talked of as the identification of the
woman. That call had been what I looked for from her after she had seen
me break with Lady John; my first idea _then_ could only be that I must
come, as it were, to time. It was strange that, the next minute, I
should find myself sure that I was, as I may put it, free; it was at all
events indisputable that as I stood there watching her recede and fairly
studying, in my preoccupation, her handsome affirmative back and the
special sweep of her long dress--it was indisputable that, on some
intimation I could, at the instant, recognise but not seize, my
consciousness was aware of having performed a full revolution. If I was
free, that was what I had been only so short a time before, what I had
been as I drove, in London, to the station. Was this now a foreknowledge
that, on the morrow, in driving away, I should feel myself restored to
that blankness? The state lost was the state of exemption from intense
obsessions, and the state recovered would therefore logically match it.
If the foreknowledge had thus, as by the stir of the air from my
friend's whisk of her train, descended upon me, my liberation was in a
manner what I was already tasting. Yet how I also felt, with it,
something of the threat of a chill to my curiosity! The taste of its
being all over, that really sublime success of the strained vision in
which I had been living for crowded hours--was this a taste that I was
sure I should particularly enjoy? Marked enough it was, doubtless, that
even in the stress of perceiving myself broken with I ruefully reflected
on all the more, on the ever so much, I still wanted to know!
Well, something of this quantity, in any case, would come, since Mrs.
Briss did want to speak to me. The suspense that remained with me, as I
have indicated, was the special fresh one she had just produced. It fed,
for a little, positively, on that survey of her fine retreating person
to which I have confessed that my eyes attached themselves. These
seconds were naturally few, and yet my memory gathers from them
something that I can only compare, in its present effect, to the scent
of a strange flower passed rapidly under my nose. I seem in other words
to recall that I received in that brush the very liveliest impression
that my whole adventure was to yield--the impression that is my reason
for speaking of myself as having at the juncture in question "studied"
Mrs. Brissenden's back. Study of a profound sort would appear needed in
truth to account for it. It was as handsome and affirmative that she at
once met and evaded my view, but was not the affirmation (as
distinguished from the handsomeness, which was a matter of stature and
mass,) fairly downright and defiant? Didn't what I saw strike me as
saying straight _at_ me, as far as possible, "I _am_ young--I am and I
_will_ be; see, _see_ if I'm not; there, there, there!"--with "there's"
as insistent and rhythmical as the undulations of her fleeing presence,
as the bejewelled nod of her averted brow? If her face had not been
hidden, should I not precisely have found myself right in believing that
it looked, exactly, for those instants, dreadfully older than it had
ever yet had to? The answer ideally cynical would have been: "Oh, any
woman of your resources can look young with her back turned! But you've
had to turn it to make that proclamation." She passed out of the room
proclaiming, and I did stand there a little defeated, even though with
her word for another chance at her. Was this word one that she would
keep? I had got off--yes, to a certainty. But so too had not she?
Naturally, at any rate, I didn't stay planted; and though it seemed long
it was probably for no great time after this that I roamed in my
impatience. I was divided between the discourtesy of wishing the ladies
would go to bed and the apprehension that if they did too soon go I
might yet lose everything. Was Mrs. Briss waiting for more privacy, or
was she only waiting for a complete escape? Of course, even while I
asked myself that, I had to remember how much I was taking for granted
on her part in the way of conscious motive. Still, if she had not a
motive for escaping, why had she not had one, five minutes before, for
coming to the point with me? This inquiry kept me hovering where she
might at any instant find me, but that was not inconsistent with my
presently passing, like herself, into another room. The first one I
entered--there were great chains of them at Newmarch--showed me once
more, at the end opposite the door, the object that all day had been,
present or absent, most in my eyes, and that there now could be no
fallacy in my recognising. Mrs. Server's unquenchable little smile had
never yet been so far from quenched as when it recognised, on its own
side, that I had just had time to note how Ford Obert was, for a change,
taking it in. These two friends of mine appeared to have moved together,
after the music, to the corner in which I should not have felt it as
misrepresenting the matter to say that I surprised them. They owed
nothing of the harmony that held them--unlike my other couple--to the
constraint of a common seat; a small glazed table, a receptacle for
minute objects of price, extended itself between them as if it had
offered itself as an occasion for their drawing toward it a pair of low
chairs; but their union had nevertheless such an air of accepted
duration as led it slightly to puzzle me. This would have been a reason
the more for not interrupting it even had I not peculiarly wished to
respect it. It was grist to my mill somehow that something or other had
happened as a consequence of which Obert had lost the impulse to repeat
to me his odd invitation to intervene. He gave me no notice as I passed;
the notice was all from his companion. It constituted, I felt, on her
part, precisely as much and precisely as little of an invitation as it
had constituted at the moment--so promptly following our arrival--of my
first seeing them linked; which is but another way of saying that
nothing in Mrs. Server appeared to acknowledge a lapse. It was nearly
midnight, but she was again under arms; everything conceivable--or
perhaps rather inconceivable--had passed between us before dinner, but
her face was exquisite again in its repudiation of any reference.
Any reference, I saw, would have been difficult to _me_, had I unluckily
been forced to approach her. What would have made the rare delicacy of
the problem was that blankness itself was the most direct reference of
all. I had, however, as I passed her by, a comprehension as inward as
that with which I had watched Mrs. Briss's retreat. "_What_ shall I see
when I next see you?" was what I had mutely asked of Mrs. Briss; but
"God grant I don't see _you_ again at all!" was the prayer sharply
determined in my heart as I left Mrs. Server behind me. I left her
behind me for ever, but the prayer has not been answered. I did see her
again; I see her now; I shall see her always; I shall continue to feel
at moments in my own facial muscles the deadly little ache of her heroic
grin. With this, however, I was not then to reckon, and my simple
philosophy of the moment could be but to get out of the room. The result
of that movement was that, two minutes later, at another doorway, but
opening this time into a great corridor, I found myself arrested by a
combination that should really have counted for me as the least of my
precious anomalies, but that--as accident happened to protect me--I
watched, so long as I might, with intensity. I should in this connection
describe my eyes as yet again engaging the less scrutable side of the
human figure, were it not that poor Briss's back, now presented to me
beside his wife's--for these were the elements of the combination--had
hitherto seemed to me the most eloquent of his aspects. It was when he
presented his face that he looked, each time, older; but it was when he
showed you, from behind, the singular stoop of his shoulders, that he
looked oldest.
They had just passed the door when I emerged, and they receded, at a
slow pace and with a kind of confidential nearness, down the long avenue
of the lobby. Her head was always high and her husband's always low, so
that I couldn't be sure--it might have been only my fancy--that the
contrast of this habit was more marked in them than usual. If I had
known nothing about them I should have just unimaginatively said that
talk was all on one side and attention all on the other. I, of course,
for that matter, _did_ know nothing about them; yet I recall how it came
to me, as my extemporised shrewdness hung in their rear, that I mustn't
think anything too grossly simple of what might be taking place between
them. My position was, in spite of myself, that of my having mastered
enough possibilities to choose from. If one of these might be--for her
face, in spite of the backward cock of her head, was turned to him--that
she was looking her time of life straight _at_ him and yet making love
to him with it as hard as ever she could, so another was that he had
been already so thoroughly got back into hand that she had no need of
asking favours, that she was more splendid than ever, and that, the same
poor Briss as before his brief adventure, he was only feeling afresh in
his soul, as a response to her, the gush of the sacred fount.
Presumptous choice as to these alternatives failed, on my part, in time,
let me say, to flower; it rose before me in time that, whatever might
be, for the exposed instant, the deep note of their encounter, only one
thing concerned me in it: its being wholly their own business. So for
that I liberally let it go, passing into the corridor, but proceeding in
the opposite sense and aiming at an issue which I judged I should reach
before they would turn in their walk. I had not, however, reached it
before I caught the closing of the door furthest from me; at the sound
of which I looked about to find the Brissendens gone. They had not
remained for another turn, but had taken their course, evidently, back
to the principal drawing-room, where, no less presumably, the procession
of the ladies bedward was even then forming. Mrs. Briss would fall
straight into it, and I _had_ accordingly lost her. I hated to appear to
pursue her, late in the day as it may appear to affirm that I put my
dignity before my curiosity.
Free again, at all events, to wait or to wander, I lingered a minute
where I had stopped--close to a wide window, as it happened, that, at
this end of the passage, stood open to the warm darkness and overhung,
from no great height, one of the terraces. The night was mild and rich,
and though the lights within were, in deference to the temperature, not
too numerous, I found the breath of the outer air a sudden corrective to
the grossness of our lustre and the thickness of our medium, our general
heavy humanity. I felt its taste sweet, and while I leaned for
refreshment on the sill I thought of many things. One of those that
passed before me was the way that Newmarch and its hospitalities were
sacrificed, after all, and much more than smaller circles, to material
frustrations. We were all so fine and formal, and the ladies in
particular at once so little and so much clothed, so beflounced yet so
denuded, that the summer stars called to us in vain. We had ignored them
in our crystal cage, among our tinkling lamps; no more free really to
alight than if we had been dashing in a locked railway-train across a
lovely land. I remember asking myself if I mightn't still take a turn
under them, and I remember that on appealing to my watch for its
sanction I found midnight to have struck. That then was the end, and my
only real alternatives were bed or the smoking-room. The difficulty with
bed was that I was in no condition to sleep, and the difficulty about
rejoining the men was that--definitely, yes--there was one of them I
desired not again to see. I felt it with sharpness as I leaned on the
sill; I felt it with sadness as I looked at the stars; I felt once more
what I had felt on turning a final back five minutes before, so
designedly, on Mrs. Server. I saw poor Briss as he had just moved away
from me, and I knew, as I had known in the other case, that my troubled
sense would fain feel I had practically done with him. It would be well,
for aught I could do _for_ him, that I should have seen the last of
him. What remained with me from that vision of his pacing there with
his wife was the conviction that his fate, whatever it was, held him
fast. It wouldn't let him go, and all I could ask of it now was that it
should let _me_. I _would_ go--I was going; if I had not had to accept
the interval of the night I should indeed already have gone. The
admonitions of that moment--only confirmed, I hasten to add, by what was
still to come--were that I should catch in the morning, with energy, an
earlier train to town than anyone else was likely to take, and get off
alone by it, bidding farewell for a long day to Newmarch. I should be in
small haste to come back, for I should leave behind me my tangled
theory, no loose thread of which need I ever again pick up, in no stray
mesh of which need my foot again trip. It was on my way to the place, in
fine, that my obsession had met me, and it was by retracing those steps
that I should be able to get rid of it. Only I must break off sharp,
must escape all reminders by forswearing all returns.
That was very well, but it would perhaps have been better still if I had
gone straight to bed. In that case I _should_ have broken off sharp--too
sharp to become aware of something that kept me a minute longer at the
window and that had the instant effect of making me wonder if, in the
interest of observation, I mightn't snap down the electric light that,
playing just behind me, must show where I stood. I resisted this
impulse and, with the thought that my position was in no way
compromising, chanced being myself observed. I presently saw moreover
that I was really not in evidence: I could take in freely what I had at
first not been sure of, the identity of the figure stationed just within
my range, but just out of that of the light projected from my window.
One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and
the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his
back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace
with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the
fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure--making no turn that
would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and
seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce
knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident
and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my
imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted
an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently
shaken off, perched again on my shoulders. It was of the deepest
interest to me to see Long in such detachment, in such apparent
concentration. These things marked and presented him more than any had
yet done, and placed him more than any yet in relation to other matters.
They showed him, I thought, as serious, his situation as grave. I
couldn't have said what they proved, but I was as affected by them as if
they proved everything. The proof simply acted from the instant the
vision of him alone there in the warm darkness was caught. It was just
with all that was in the business that he _was_, that he had fitfully
needed to be, alone. Nervous and restless after separating, under my
eyes, from Mrs. Briss, he had wandered off to the smoking-room, as yet
empty; _he_ didn't know what to do either, and was incapable of bed and
of sleep. He had observed the communication of the smoking-room with the
terrace and had come out into the air; this was what suited him, and,
with pauses and meditations, much, possibly, by this time to turn over,
he prolonged his soft vigil. But he at last moved, and I found myself
startled. I gave up watching and retraced my course. I felt, none the
less, fairly humiliated. It had taken but another turn of an eye to
re-establish all my connections.
I had not, however, gone twenty steps before I met Ford Obert, who had
entered the corridor from the other end and was, as he immediately let
me know, on his way to the smoking-room.
"Is everyone then dispersing?"
"Some of the men, I think," he said, "are following me; others, I
believe--wonderful creatures!--have gone to array themselves. Others
still, doubtless, have gone to bed."
"And the ladies?"
"Oh, they've floated away--soared aloft; to high jinks--isn't that the
idea?--in their own quarters. Don't they too, at these hours, practise
sociabilities of sorts? They make, at any rate, here, an extraordinary
picture on that great staircase."
I thought a moment. "I wish I had seen it. But I do see it.
Yes--splendid. Is the place wholly cleared of them?"
"Save, it struck me, so far as they may have left some 'black plume as a
token'----"
"Not, I trust," I returned, "of any 'lie' their 'soul hath spoken!' But
not one of them lingers?"
He seemed to wonder. "'Lingers?' For what?"
"Oh, I don't know--in this house!"
He looked at our long vista, still lighted--appeared to feel with me our
liberal ease, which implied that unseen powers waited on our good
pleasure and sat up for us. There is nothing like it in fact, the
liberal ease at Newmarch. Yet Obert reminded me--if I needed the
reminder--that I mustn't after all presume on it. "Was one of them to
linger for _you_?"
"Well, since you ask me, it was what I hoped. But since you answer for
it that my hope has not been met, I bow to a superior propriety."
"You mean you'll come and smoke with me? Do then come."
"What, if I do," I asked with an idea, "will you give me?"
"I'm afraid I can promise you nothing more that _I_ deal in than a bad
cigarette."
"And what then," I went on, "will you take from me?"
He had met my eyes, and now looked at me a little with a smile that I
thought just conscious. "Well, I'm afraid I _can't_ take any more----"
"Of the sort of stuff," I laughed, "you've already had? Sorry stuff,
perhaps--a poor thing but mine own! Such as it is, I only ask to keep it
for myself, and that isn't what I meant. I meant what flower will you
gather, what havoc will you play----?"
"Well?" he said as I hesitated.
"Among superstitions that I, after all, cherish. _Mon siège est fait_--a
great glittering crystal palace. How many panes will you reward me for
amiably sitting up with you by smashing?"
It might have been my mere fancy--but it _was_ my fancy--that he looked
at me a trifle harder. "How on earth can I tell what you're talking
about?"
I waited a moment, then went on: "Did you happen to count them?"
"Count whom?"
"Why, the ladies as they filed up. Was the number there?"
He gave a jerk of impatience. "Go and see for yourself!"
Once more I just waited. "But suppose I should find Mrs. Server----?"
"Prowling there on the chance of you? Well--I thought she was what you
wanted."
"Then," I returned, "you _could_ tell what I was talking about!" For a
moment after this we faced each other without more speech, but I
presently continued: "You didn't really notice if any lady stayed
behind?"
"I think you ask too much of me," he at last brought out. "Take care of
your ladies, my dear man, yourself! Go," he repeated, "and see."
"Certainly--it's better; but I'll rejoin you in three minutes." And
while he went his way to the smoking-room I proceeded without more delay
to assure myself, performing in the opposite sense the journey I had
made ten minutes before. It was extraordinary what the sight of Long
alone in the outer darkness had done for me: my expression of it would
have been that it had put me "on" again at the moment of my decidedly
feeling myself off. I believed that if I hadn't seen him I could now
have gone to bed without seeing Mrs. Briss; but my renewed impression
had suddenly made the difference. If that was the way he struck me, how
might not, if I could get at her, she? And she might, after all, in the
privacy at last offered us by empty rooms, be waiting for me. I went
through them all, however, only to find them empty indeed. In conformity
with the large allowances of every sort that were the law of Newmarch,
they were still open and lighted, so that if I had believed in Mrs.
Briss's reappearance I might conveniently, on the spot, have given her
five minutes more. I am not sure, for that matter, that I didn't. I
remember at least wondering if I mightn't ring somewhere for a servant
and cause a question to be sent up to her. I didn't ring, but I must
have lingered a little on the chance of the arrival of servants to
extinguish lights and see the house safe. They had not arrived, however,
by the time I again felt that I must give up.
XI
I gave up by going, decidedly, to the smoking-room, where several men
had gathered and where Obert, a little apart from them, was in charmed
communion with the bookshelves. They are wonderful, everywhere, at
Newmarch, the bookshelves, but he put a volume back as he saw me come
in, and a moment later, when we were seated, I said to him again, as a
recall of our previous passage, "Then you _could_ tell what I was
talking about!" And I added, to complete my reference, "Since you
thought Mrs. Server was the person whom, when I stopped you, I was sorry
to learn from you I had missed."
His momentary silence appeared to admit the connection I established.
"Then you find you _have_ missed her? She wasn't there for you?"
"There's no one 'there for me'; so that I fear that if you weren't, as
it happens, here for me, my amusement would be quite at an end. I had,
in fact," I continued, "already given it up as lost when I came upon
you, a while since, in conversation with the lady we've named. At that,
I confess, my prospects gave something of a flare. I said to myself
that since _your_ interest hadn't then wholly dropped, why, even at the
worst, should mine? Yours _was_ mine, wasn't it? for a little, this
morning. Or was it mine that was yours? We exchanged, at any rate, some
lively impressions. Only, before we had done, your effort dropped or
your discretion intervened: you gave up, as none of your business, the
question that had suddenly tempted us."
"And you gave it up too," said my friend.
"Yes, and it was on the idea that it was mine as little as yours that we
separated."
"Well then?" He kept his eyes, with his head thrown back, on the warm
bindings, admirable for old gilt and old colour, that covered the
opposite wall.
"Well then, if I've correctly gathered that you're, in spite of our
common renunciation, still interested, I confess to you that I am. I
took my detachment too soon for granted. I haven't been detached. I'm
not, hang me! detached now. And it's all because you were originally so
suggestive."
"Originally?"
"Why, from the moment we met here yesterday--the moment of my first
seeing you with Mrs. Server. The look you gave me then was really the
beginning of everything. Everything"--and I spoke now with real
conviction--"was traceably to spring from it."
"What do you mean," he asked, "by everything?"
"Well, this failure of detachment. What you said to me as we were going
up yesterday afternoon to dress--what you said to me then is responsible
for it. And since it comes to that," I pursued, "I make out for myself
now that you're not detached either--unless, that is, simply detached
from _me_. I had indeed a suspicion of that as I passed through the room
there."
He smoked through another pause. "You've extraordinary notions of
responsibility."
I watched him a moment, but he only stared at the books without looking
round. Something in his voice had made me more certain, and my certainty
made me laugh. "I see you _are_ serious!"
But he went on quietly enough. "You've extraordinary notions of
responsibility. I deny altogether mine."
"You _are_ serious--you _are_!" I repeated with a gaiety that I meant as
inoffensive and that I believe remained so. "But no matter. You're no
worse than I."
"I'm clearly, by your own story, not half so bad. But, as you say, no
matter. I don't care."
I ventured to keep it up. "Oh, don't you?"
His good nature was proof. "I don't care."
"Then why didn't you so much as look at me a while ago?"
"Didn't I look at you?"
"You know perfectly you didn't. Mrs. Server did--with her unutterable
intensity; making me feel afresh, by the way, that I've never seen a
woman compromise herself so little by proceedings so compromising. But
though you saw her intensity, it never diverted you for an instant from
your own."
He lighted before he answered this a fresh cigarette. "A man engaged in
talk with a charming woman scarcely selects that occasion for winking at
somebody else."
"You mean he contents himself with winking at _her_? My dear fellow,
that wasn't enough for you yesterday, and it wouldn't have been enough
for you this morning, among the impressions that led to our last talk.
It was just the fact that you did wink, that you _had_ winked, at me
that wound me up."
"And what about the fact that you had winked at _me_? _Your_
winks--come"--Obert laughed--"are portentous!"
"Oh, if we recriminate," I cheerfully said after a moment, "we agree."
"I'm not so sure," he returned, "that we agree."
"Ah, then, if we differ it's still more interesting. Because, you know,
we didn't differ either yesterday or this morning."
Without hurry or flurry, but with a decent confusion, his thoughts went
back. "I thought you said just now we did--recognising, as you ought,
that you were keen about a chase of which I washed my hands."
"No--I wasn't keen. You've just mentioned that you remember my giving
up. I washed my hands too."
It seemed to leave him with the moral of this. "Then, if our hands are
clean, what are we talking about?"
I turned, on it, a little more to him, and looked at him so long that he
had at last to look at me; with which, after holding his eyes another
moment, I made my point. "Our hands are not clean."
"Ah, speak for your own!"--and as he moved back I might really have
thought him uneasy. There was a hint of the same note in the way he went
on: "I assure you I decline all responsibility. I see the responsibility
as quite beautifully yours."
"Well," I said, "I only want to be fair. You were the first to bring it
out that she was changed."
"Well, she isn't changed!" said my friend with an almost startling
effect, for me, of suddenness. "Or rather," he immediately and
incongruously added, "she _is_. She's changed back."
"'Back'?" It made me stare.
"Back," he repeated with a certain sharpness and as if to have done at
last, for himself, with the muddle of it.
But there was that in me that could let him see he had far from done;
and something, above all, told me now that he absolutely mustn't have
before I had. I quickly moreover saw that I must, with an art, make him
want not to. "Back to what she was when you painted her?"
He had to think an instant for this. "No--not quite to that."
"To what then?"
He tried in a manner to oblige me. "To something else."
It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I
was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure. I must then get
everything I could from him without asking too much. "You don't quite
know to _what_ else?"
"No--I don't quite know." But there was a sound in it, this time, that I
took as the hint of a wish to know--almost a recognition that I might
help him.
I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the
positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered. It fitted--it fitted!
"If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is
not quite the exact name for it."
"Perhaps not." I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it
were an assistance. "She isn't at any rate what I thought her
yesterday."
It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what
possibilities it mingled. "I remember what you said of her yesterday."
I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used.
"She was so beastly unhappy." And he used them now visibly not as a
remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with
what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what
he at present perceived was immense.
"And do you mean that that's gone?"
He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and
while he waited he again looked at me. "What do _you_ mean? Don't you
think so yourself?"
I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that
betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and
lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that
failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it,
absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual
mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of
creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration
attached to some of my plunges of insight. "It would take long to tell
you what I mean."
The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him.
"Well, haven't we got the whole night?"
"Oh, it would take more than the whole night--even if we had it!"
"By which you suggest that we haven't it?"
"No--we haven't it. I want to get away."
"To go to bed? I thought you were so keen."
"I _am_ keen. Keen is no word for it. I don't want to go to bed. I want
to get away."
"To leave the house--in the middle of the night?"
"Yes--absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don't know what
you do to me."
He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the
contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him
by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me
even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing
he said. "If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell
me to-morrow?"
I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my
nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement
there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. "Oh, to-morrow I
shall be off in space!"
"Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can't we arrange, say, to
meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will
enable us to talk?"
I patted his arm again. "Thank you for your patience. It's really good
of you. Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We _are_ meeting. We
_do_ talk."
But with all I had to think of I must have fallen, on this, into the
deepest of silences, for the next thing I remember is his returning: "We
don't!" I repeated my gesture of reassurance, I conveyed that I should
be with him again in a minute, and presently, while he gave me time, he
came back to something of his own. "My wink, at all events, would have
been nothing for any question between us, as I've just said, without
yours. That's what I call your responsibility. It was, as we put the
matter, the torch of your analogy----"
"Oh, the torch of my analogy!"
I had so groaned it--as if for very ecstasy--that it pulled him up, and
I could see his curiosity as indeed reaffected. But he went on with a
coherency that somewhat admonished me: "It was your making me, as I told
you this morning, think over what you had said about Brissenden and his
wife: it was _that_----"
"That made you think over"--I took him straight up--"what you yourself
had said about our troubled lady? Yes, precisely. That _was_ the torch
of my analogy. What I showed you in the one case seemed to tell you what
to look for in the other. You thought it over. I accuse you of nothing
worse than of _having_ thought it over. But you see what thinking it
over does for it."
The way I said this appeared to amuse him. "I see what it does for
_you_!"
"No, you don't! Not at all yet. That's just the embarrassment."
"Just whose?" If I had thanked him for his patience he showed that he
deserved it. "Just yours?"
"Well, say mine. But when you do----!" And I paused as for the rich
promise of it.
"When I do see where you are, you mean?"
"The only difficulty is whether you _can_ see. But we must try. You've
set me whirling round, but we must go step by step. Oh, but it's all in
your germ!"--I kept that up. "If she isn't now beastly unhappy----"
"She's beastly happy?" he broke in, getting firmer hold, if not of the
real impression he had just been gathering under my eyes, then at least
of something he had begun to make out that my argument required. "Well,
that _is_ the way I see her difference. Her difference, I mean," he
added, in his evident wish to work with me, "her difference from her
other difference! There!" He laughed as if, also, he had found himself
fairly fantastic. "Isn't _that_ clear for you?"
"Crystalline--for _me_. But that's because I know why."
I can see again now the long look that, on this, he gave me. I made out
already much of what was in it. "So then do I!"
"But how in the world----? I know, for myself, _how_ I know."
"So then do I," he after a moment repeated.
"And can you tell me?"
"Certainly. But what I've already named to you--the torch of your
analogy."
I turned this over. "You've made evidently an admirable use of it. But
the wonderful thing is that you seem to have done so without having all
the elements."
He on his side considered. "What do you call all the elements?"
"Oh, it would take me long to tell you!" I couldn't help laughing at the
comparative simplicity with which he asked it. "That's the sort of thing
we just now spoke of taking a day for. At any rate, such as they are,
these elements," I went on, "I believe myself practically in possession
of them. But what I don't quite see is how _you_ can be."
Well, he was able to tell me. "Why in the world shouldn't your analogy
have put me?" He spoke with gaiety, but with lucidity. "I'm not an idiot
either."
"I see." But there was so much!
"Did you think I _was_?" he amiably asked.
"No. I see," I repeated. Yet I didn't, really, fully; which he presently
perceived.
"You made me think of your view of the Brissenden pair till I could
think of nothing else."
"Yes--yes," I said. "Go on."
"Well, as you had planted the theory in me, it began to bear fruit. I
began to watch them. I continued to watch them. I did nothing but watch
them."
The sudden lowering of his voice in this confession--as if it had
represented a sort of darkening of his consciousness--again amused me.
"You too? How then we've been occupied! For I, you see, have watched--or
had, until I found you just now with Mrs. Server--everyone, everything
_but_ you."
"Oh, I've watched _you_," said Ford Obert as if he had then perhaps
after all the advantage of me. "I admit that I made you out for myself
to be back on the scent; for I thought I made you out baffled."
To learn whether I really had been was, I saw, what he would most have
liked; but I also saw that he had, as to this, a scruple about asking
me. What I most saw, however, was that to tell him I should have to
understand. "What scent do you allude to?"
He smiled as if I might have fancied I could fence. "Why, the pursuit of
the identification that's none of our business--the identification of
her lover."
"Ah, it's as to that," I instantly replied, "you've judged me baffled?
I'm afraid," I almost as quickly added, "that I must admit I _have_
been. Luckily, at all events, it _is_ none of our business."
"Yes," said my friend, amused on his side, "nothing's our business that
we can't find out. I saw you hadn't found him. And what," Obert
continued, "does he matter now?"
It took but a moment to place me for seeing that my companion's
conviction on this point was a conviction decidedly to respect; and even
that amount of hesitation was but the result of my wondering how he had
reached it. "What, indeed?" I promptly replied. "But how did you see I
had failed?"
"By seeing that I myself had. For I've been looking too. He isn't here,"
said Ford Obert.
Delighted as I was that he should believe it, I was yet struck by the
complacency of his confidence, which connected itself again with my
observation of their so recent colloquy. "Oh, for you to be so sure, has
Mrs. Server squared you?"
"_Is_ he here?" he for all answer to this insistently asked.
I faltered but an instant. "No; he isn't here. It's no thanks to one's
scruples, but perhaps it's lucky for one's manners. I speak at least for
mine. If you've watched," I pursued, "you've doubtless sufficiently seen
what has already become of mine. He isn't here, at all events," I
repeated, "and we must do without his identity. What, in fact, are we
showing each other," I asked, "but that we _have_ done without it?"
"_I_ have!" my friend declared with supreme frankness and with something
of the note, as I was obliged to recognise, of my own constructive joy.
"I've done perfectly without it."
I saw in fact that he had, and it struck me really as wonderful. But I
controlled the expression of my wonder. "So that if you spoke therefore
just now of watching them----"
"I meant of course"--he took it straight up--"watching the Brissendens.
And naturally, above all," he as quickly subjoined, "the wife."
I was now full of concurrence. "Ah, naturally, above all, the wife."
So far as was required it encouraged him. "A woman's lover doesn't
matter--doesn't matter at least to anyone but himself, doesn't matter to
you or to me or to her--when once she has given him up."
It made me, this testimony of his observation, show, in spite of my
having by this time so counted on it, something of the vivacity of my
emotion. "She _has_ given him up?"
But the surprise with which he looked round put me back on my guard. "Of
what else then are we talking?"
"Of nothing else, of course," I stammered. "But the way you see----!" I
found my refuge in the gasp of my admiration.
"I do see. But"--he _would_ come back to that--"only through your having
seen first. You gave me the pieces. I've but put them together. You gave
me the Brissendens--bound hand and foot; and I've but made them, in that
sorry state, pull me through. I've blown on my torch, in other words,
till, flaring and smoking, it has guided me, through a magnificent
chiaroscuro of colour and shadow, out into the light of day."
I was really dazzled by his image, for it represented his personal work.
"You've done more than I, it strikes me--and with less to do it with. If
I gave you the Brissendens I gave you all I had."
"But all you had was immense, my dear man. The Brissendens are immense."
"Of course the Brissendens are immense! If they hadn't been immense they
wouldn't have been--_nothing_ would have been--anything." Then after a
pause, "Your image is splendid," I went on--"your being out of the cave.
But what is it exactly," I insidiously threw out, "that you _call_ the
'light of day'?"
I remained a moment, however, not sure whether I had been too subtle or
too simple. He had another of his cautions. "What do _you_----?"
But I was determined to make him give it me all himself, for it was
from my not prompting him that its value would come. "You tell me," I
accordingly rather crudely pleaded, "first."
It gave us a moment during which he so looked as if I asked too much,
that I had a fear of losing all. He even spoke with some impatience. "If
you really haven't found it for yourself, you know. I scarce see what
you _can_ have found."
Then I had my inspiration. I risked an approach to roughness, and all
the more easily that my words were strict truth. "Oh, don't be
afraid--greater things than yours!"
It succeeded, for it played upon his curiosity, and he visibly imagined
that, with impatience controlled, he should learn what these things
were. He relaxed, he responded, and the next moment I was in all but
full enjoyment of the piece wanted to make all my other pieces
right--right because of that special beauty in my scheme through which
the whole depended so on each part and each part so guaranteed the
whole. "What I call the light of day is the sense I've arrived at of her
vision."
"Her vision?"--I just balanced in the air.
"Of what they have in common. _His_--poor chap's--extraordinary
situation too."
"Bravo! And you see in that----?"
"What, all these hours, has touched, fascinated, drawn her. It has been
an instinct with her."
"Bravissimo!"
It saw him, my approval, safely into port. "The instinct of sympathy,
pity--the response to fellowship in misery; the sight of another fate as
strange, as monstrous as her own."
I couldn't help jumping straight up--I stood before him. "So that
whoever may have _been_ the man, the man _now_, the actual man----"
"Oh," said Obert, looking, luminous and straight, up at me from his
seat, "the man now, the actual man----!" But he stopped short, with his
eyes suddenly quitting me and his words becoming a formless ejaculation.
The door of the room, to which my back was turned, had opened, and I
quickly looked round. It was Brissenden himself who, to my supreme
surprise, stood there, with rapid inquiry in his attitude and face. I
saw, as soon as he caught mine, that I was what he wanted, and,
immediately excusing myself for an instant to Obert, I anticipated, by
moving across the room, the need, on poor Briss's part, of my further
demonstration. My whole sense of the situation blazed up at the touch of
his presence, and even before I reached him it had rolled over me in a
prodigious wave that I had lost nothing whatever. I can't begin to say
how the fact of his appearance crowned the communication my interlocutor
had just made me, nor in what a bright confusion of many things I found
myself facing poor Briss. One of these things was precisely that he had
never been so much poor Briss as at this moment. That ministered to the
confusion as well as to the brightness, for if his being there at all
renewed my sources and replenished my current--spoke all, in short, for
my gain--so, on the other hand, in the light of what I had just had from
Obert, his particular aspect was something of a shock. I can't present
this especial impression better than by the mention of my instant
certitude that what he had come for was to bring me a message and that
somehow--yes, indubitably--this circumstance seemed to have placed him
again at the very bottom of his hole. It was down in that depth that he
let me see him--it was out of it that he delivered himself. Poor Briss!
poor Briss!--I had asked myself before he spoke with what kindness
enough I could meet him. Poor Briss! poor Briss!--I am not even now sure
that I didn't first meet him by _that_ irrepressible murmur. It was in
it all for me that, thus, at midnight, he had traversed on his errand
the length of the great dark house. I trod with him, over the velvet and
the marble, through the twists and turns, among the glooms and glimmers
and echoes, every inch of the way, and I don't know what humiliation,
for him, was constituted there, between us, by his long pilgrimage. It
was the final expression of his sacrifice.
"My wife has something to say to you."
"Mrs. Briss? Good!"--and I could only hope the candour of my surprise
was all I tried to make it. "Is she with you there?"
"No, but she has asked me to say to you that if you'll presently be in
the drawing-room she'll come."
Who could doubt, as I laid my hand on his shoulder, fairly patting it,
in spite of myself, for applause--who could doubt where I would
presently be? "It's most uncommonly good of both of you."
There was something in his inscrutable service that, making him almost
august, gave my dissimulated eagerness the sound of a heartless
compliment. _I_ stood for the hollow chatter of the vulgar world, and
he--oh, he was as serious as he was conscious; which was enough. "She
says you'll know what she wishes--and she was sure I'd find you here. So
I may tell her you'll come?"
His courtesy half broke my heart. "Why, my dear man, with all the
pleasure----! So many thousand thanks. I'll be with her."
"Thanks to _you_. She'll be down. Good-night." He looked round the
room--at the two or three clusters of men, smoking, engaged, contented,
on their easy seats and among their popped corks; he looked over an
instant at Ford Obert, whose eyes, I thought, he momentarily held. It
was absolutely as if, for me, he were seeking such things--out of what
was closing over him--for the last time. Then he turned again to the
door, which, just not to fail humanly to accompany him a step, I had
opened. On the other side of it I took leave of him. The passage, though
there was a light in the distance, was darker than the smoking-room, and
I had drawn the door to.
"Good-night, Brissenden. I shall be gone to-morrow before you show."
I shall never forget the way that, struck by my word, he let his white
face fix me in the dusk. "'Show'? _What_ do I show?"
I had taken his hand for farewell, and, inevitably laughing, but as the
falsest of notes, I gave it a shake. "You show nothing! You're
magnificent."
He let me keep his hand while things unspoken and untouched, unspeakable
and untouchable, everything that had been between us in the wood a few
hours before, were between us again. But so we could only leave them,
and, with a short, sharp "Good-bye!" he completely released himself.
With my hand on the latch of the closed door I watched a minute his
retreat along the passage, and I remember the reflection that, before
rejoining Obert, I made on it. I seemed perpetually, at Newmarch, to be
taking his measure from behind.
Ford Obert has since told me that when I came back to him there were
tears in my eyes, and I didn't know at the moment how much the words
with which he met me took for granted my consciousness of them. "He
looks a hundred years old!"
"Oh, but you should see his shoulders, always, as he goes off! _Two_
centuries--ten! Isn't it amazing?"
It was so amazing that, for a little, it made us reciprocally stare. "I
should have thought," he said, "that he would have been on the
contrary----"
"Visibly rejuvenated? So should I. I must make it out," I added. "I
_shall_."
But Obert, with less to go upon, couldn't wait. It was wonderful, for
that matter--and for all I had to go upon--how I myself could. I did so,
at this moment, in my refreshed intensity, by the help of confusedly
lighting another cigarette, which I should have no time to smoke. "I
should have thought," my friend continued, "that he too might have
changed back."
I took in, for myself, so much more of it than I could say! "Certainly.
You wouldn't have thought he would have changed forward." Then with an
impulse that bridged over an abyss of connections I jumped to another
place. "Was what you most saw while you were there with _her_--was this
that her misery, the misery you first phrased to me, has dropped?"
"Dropped, yes." He was clear about it. "I called her beastly unhappy to
you though I even then knew that beastly unhappiness wasn't quite all
of it. It was part of it, it was enough of it; for she was--well, no
doubt you could tell _me_. Just now, at all events"--and recalling,
reflecting, deciding, he used, with the strongest effect, as he so often
did in painting, the simplest term--"just now she's all right."
"All right?"
He couldn't know how much more than was possible my question gave him to
answer. But he answered it on what he had; he repeated: "All right."
I wondered, in spite of the comfort I took, as I had more than once in
life had occasion to take it before, at the sight of the painter-sense
deeply applied. My wonder came from the fact that Lady John had also
found Mrs. Server all right, and Lady John had a vision as closed as
Obert's was open. It didn't suit my book for both these observers to
have been affected in the same way. "You mean you saw nothing whatever
in her that was the least bit strange?"
"Oh, I won't say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than
that she _should_ be--well, after all, all right."
"All there, eh?" I after an instant risked.
I couldn't put it to him more definitely than that, though there was a
temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an
hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my
nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things _had_, from step to
step, to hang together, and just here they seemed--with all
allowances--to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could
only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server's condition; but
it was part of my predicament--really equal in its way to her own--that
I couldn't without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical
lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I
stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn't, on the other
hand--and remain "straight"--insist to my friend on the whereabouts of
this stolen property. If he hadn't missed it in her for himself I
mightn't put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he
had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to
call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that
he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the
least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end
without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. That was
the only thing in the whole business that was simple. It made me cling
an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this
fact of Obert's insistence. Even as a sequel to his vision of her
change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the
one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed. I saw
him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept
clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of
his rare reasons. Mrs. Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all
right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis. It would
be something Long's absence would fit. It would supply ground, in short,
for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself
was all wrong. If he _was_ all wrong my last impression of him would be
amply accounted for. If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt
himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished
to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed
to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the
smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he _was_ still hiding it and
_was_ keeping away. How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs.
Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I
talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given
me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile
come. "Oh, when a woman's so clever----!"
That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy;
but it was stupefying. She was already then positively again "so
clever?" This was really more than I could as yet provide an
explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his
wife's room again, and I temporised. "It was her cleverness that held
you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?"
He looked at me at present well enough. "I knew you were passing, but I
wanted precisely to mark for you the difference. If you really want to
know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself. I had
given her away to you, you know, rather, before."
"And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?"
He smiled in his now complete candour. "Ah, there was no reason." Then
he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression. "She was all
there."
"I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an
instant to turn away.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To do what Brissenden came to me for."
"But I don't _know_, you see, what Brissenden came to you for."
"Well, with a message. She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she
gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather
awkwardly late, she didn't venture. But what he arrived for just now, at
her request, was to say she does venture."
My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?"
"Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part
of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of
yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it
_is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault."
Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder.
"And--a--where is it then you meet?"
"Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night."
He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification,
little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The
household sits up for you?"
I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the
household! And it won't probably take us very long."
His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity.
The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his
ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with
her----?"
"My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't
you see?--who proposes."
"But what in the world----?"
"Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you."
"With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to
say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to
say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted
with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But
he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know
more than I!"
"And haven't I admitted that?"
"I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all
answer, now produced.
He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me
for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what
I shall perhaps now learn."
"You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?"
His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen
sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance
he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a
misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a
conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it
immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our
whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this
erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course,
at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the
innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile,
rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way
of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was
temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!"
He looked vague. "Ah, but _that_----"
"That," I declared, "will be luminous."
He made it out. "As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she
denies?"
"The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure
impression that my appointment was with Mrs. Server.
XII
I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my
previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs.
Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it,
with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a
table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about
that if she _had_ "squared" the household, so large an order, as they
said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite
rather it were her doing--not mine; but it showed with eloquence that
she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her
renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the
nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I
asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for
by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of
open doors, and as I forthwith went to her--she took no step to meet
me--I was doubtless impressed afresh with the "pull" that in social
intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by
mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore
inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of
the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having
acted entirely to oblige me--to give me, as a sequel to what had already
passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should
thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same
time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her
interest, our situation could be worked. What it had originally left us
with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to
be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her
identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an
exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so
long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I
couldn't quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave,
with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if,
since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her
glass, it had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a
flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to
dinner--as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She
met me in fact as admirably--that was the truth that covered every
other--as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity
with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her.
A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the
possibility--absurd, preposterous though it looks when phrased here--of
some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other
changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out.
I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences,
and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now to be treated to
the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already,
on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference
peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what
had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after
that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me
again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own,
better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband
down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of
all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what
fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there
with these general symptoms so present that almost any further
development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was
true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I
was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes,
literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in
Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve
for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace
Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to
its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during
which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt,
discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not
thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to
speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't
thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly
think of it while she watched me.
All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I
don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable
she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to
have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance,
sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and
casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her:
it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that
she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception
in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that
occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps
best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation:
the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so
triumphantly asserted her defeat of time, and the second the conviction
that I, losing with her while, as it were, we closed, a certain
advantage I should never recover, had at no moment since the day before
made so poor a figure on my own ground. Ah, it may have been only for
six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six
seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose
with which she had come down to me. She might have been a large, fair,
rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough
to it to put me for ever in my place. It was a success, on her part,
that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt
of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it. Her being there
at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the
whole business, more and more a part of her advantage; the case for her
was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my
imagination. My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus,
in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my
indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances.
How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my
mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered,
the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in
consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic. There
remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional"
step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to
give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep
of the unsuspecting. My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of
it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so
simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me. Therefore it was all with me
again, the vision of her reasons. They were in fact sufficiently in the
sound of what she presently said. "Perhaps you don't know--but I
mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little. They're
of a kindness here, luckily----! So it's all right." It was all right,
obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of
the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous. "We shall
only take moreover," she added, "a minute."
I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute
had I not felt it as already more or less done. Yes, she might have been
twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However,
what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous
twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something
of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in
again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful
conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was
only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came
to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for,
in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't
understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so
intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has
happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of
you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so
kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called
'rope.'"
"I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for
that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she
seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't,
throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she
in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough,
and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so
impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before
I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw
in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else,
moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all
that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have
been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after
seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of
a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for
me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all
where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent
suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded
to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none
the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene
given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons,
might have been still more occult than her own. Hadn't I possibly
burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her
back? That was the flaw in her confidence. She had in spite of it her
firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a
complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's. If I didn't
fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had,
in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as
worthy of me. She was _in_ the mystic circle--not one of us more; she
knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with
everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at
all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp.
But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to
wait. "I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not
altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you
understand when I let you know about it. You stared so that I didn't
quite know what was the matter. Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the
going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to
the other. I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this
putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I
had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was
hanging about. I knew of course that she would hang about till the very
last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my
own fault!--made the effort to convey to you. She may be hanging about
still," Mrs. Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks
round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could.
I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us
together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds
us, she'll have no one but herself to thank. It's a funny house, for
that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone _has_
gone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and
_I_ do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded,
talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her. I had
meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure,
behind them all, of a new consciousness. It was full of everything she
didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was
most in her mind. We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed
come out further on. Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes,
moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what
it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what
contributed most to her present grand air.
It was in any case what evoked for me most the contrasted image, so
fresh with me, of the other, the tragic lady--the image that had so
embodied the unutterable opposite of everything actually before me. What
was actually before me was the positive pride of life and expansion, the
amplitude of conscious action and design; not the arid channel forsaken
by the stream, but the full-fed river sweeping to the sea, the volume of
water, the stately current, the flooded banks into which the source had
swelled. There was nothing Mrs. Server had been able to risk, but there
was a rich indifference to risk in the mere carriage of Grace
Brissenden's head. Her reference, for that matter, to our discussed
subject had the effect of relegating to the realm of dim shades the lady
representing it, and there was small soundness in her glance at the
possibility on the part of this person of an anxious prowl back. There
was indeed--there could be--small sincerity in any immediate
demonstration from a woman so markedly gaining time and getting her
advantages in hand. The connections between the two, certainly, were
indirect and intricate, but it was positive to me that, for the
spiritual ear, my companion's words had the sound of a hard bump, a
contact from the force of which the weaker vessel might have been felt
to crack. At last, merciful powers, it was in pieces! The shock of the
brass had told upon the porcelain, and I fancied myself for an instant
facing Mrs. Briss over the damage--a damage from which I was never, as I
knew, to see the poor banished ghost recover. As strange as anything was
this effect almost of surprise for me in the freedom of her mention of
"May." For what had she come to me, if for anything, but to insist on
her view of May, and what accordingly was more to the point than to
mention her? Yet it was almost already as if to mention her had been to
get rid of her. She was mentioned, however, inevitably and none the less
promptly, anew--even as if simply to receive a final shake before being
quite dropped. My friend kept it up. "If you were so bent on not losing
what I might have to give you that you fortunately stuck to the ship,
for poor Briss to pick you up, wasn't this also"--she roundly put it to
me--"a good deal because you've been nursing all day the grievance with
which I this morning so comfortably furnished you?"
I just waited, but fairly for admiration. "Oh, I certainly had my
reasons--as I've no less certainly had my luck--for not indeed deserting
our dear little battered, but still just sufficiently buoyant vessel,
from which everyone else appears, I recognise, to _s'être sauvé_. She'll
float a few minutes more! But (before she sinks!) do you mean by my
grievance----"
"Oh, you know what I mean by your grievance!" _She_ had no intention,
Mrs. Briss, of sinking. "I was to give you time to make up your mind
that Mrs. Server was our lady. You so resented, for some reason, my
suggesting it that I scarcely believed you'd consider it at all; only I
hadn't forgotten, when I spoke to you a while since, that you had
nevertheless handsomely promised me that you would do your best."
"Yes, and, still more handsomely, that if I changed my mind, I would
eat, in your presence, for my error, the largest possible slice of
humble pie. If you didn't see this morning," I continued, "quite why I
should have cared so much, so I don't quite see why, in your different
way, _you_ should; at the same time that I do full justice to the good
faith with which you've given me my chance. Please believe that if I
_could_ candidly embrace that chance I should feel all the joy in the
world in repaying you. It's only, alas! because I cling to my candour
that I venture to disappoint you. If I cared this morning it was really
simple enough. You didn't convince me, but I should have cared just as
much if you had. I only didn't see what _you_ saw. I needed more than
you could then give me. I knew, you see, what I needed--I mean before I
struck! It was the element of collateral support that we both lacked. I
couldn't do without it as you could. This was what I, clumsily enough,
tried to show you I felt. You, on your side," I pursued, "grasped
admirably the evident truth that that element _could_ be present only in
such doses as practically to escape detection." I kept it up as she had
done, and I remember striking myself as scarce less excitedly voluble. I
was conscious of being at a point at which I should have to go straight,
to go fast, to go it, as the phrase is, blind, in order to go at all. I
was also conscious--and it came from the look with which she listened to
me and that told me more than she wished--I felt sharply, though but
instinctively, in fine, that I should still, whatever I practically had
lost, make my personal experience most rich and most complete by putting
it definitely to her that, sorry as I might be not to oblige her, I
had, even at this hour, no submission to make. I doubted in fact whether
my making one _would_ have obliged her; but I felt that, for all so much
had come and gone, I was not there to take, for her possible profit, any
new tone with her. She would sufficiently profit, at the worst, by the
old. My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had
given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my
desire to "protect" Mrs. Server. She was certainly, with Mrs. Briss at
least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in
these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that
Mrs. Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled. But I
none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and
with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the
morning. I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady
herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to _her_ that
there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How
then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what facts _had_ I collected on
which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had
come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair
together--really together--even for three minutes, I would, I sincerely
considered, have come round. But I was to have performed this
revolution on nothing less, as I now went on to explain to her. "Of
course if you've got new evidence I shall be delighted to hear it; and
of course I can't help wondering whether the possession of it and the
desire to overwhelm me with it aren't, together, the one thing you've
been nursing till now."
Oh, how intensely she didn't like such a tone! If she hadn't looked so
handsome I would say she made a wry face over it, though I didn't even
yet see where her dislike would make her come out. Before she came out,
in fact, she waited as if it were a question of dashing her head at a
wall. Then, at last, she charged. "It's nonsense. I've nothing to tell
you. I feel there's nothing in it and I've given it up."
I almost gaped--by which I mean that I looked as if I did--for surprise.
"You agree that it's not she----?" Then, as she again waited, "It's
_you_ who've come round?" I insisted.
"To your doubt of its being May? Yes--I've come round."
"Ah, pardon me," I returned; "what I expressed this morning was, if I
remember rightly, not at all a 'doubt,' but a positive, intimate
conviction that was inconsistent with _any_ doubt. I was
emphatic--purely and simply--that I didn't see it."
She looked, however, as if she caught me in a weakness here. "Then why
did you say to me that if you should reconsider----"
"You should handsomely have it from me, and my grounds? Why, as I've
just reminded you, as a form of courtesy to you--magnanimously to help
you, as it were, to feel as comfortable as I conceived you naturally
would desire to feel in your own conviction. Only for that. And now," I
smiled, "I'm to understand from you that, in spite of that immense
allowance, you _haven't_, all this while, felt comfortable?"
She gave, on this, in a wonderful, beautiful way, a slow, simplifying
headshake. "Mrs. Server isn't in it!"
The only way then to take it from her was that her concession was a
prelude to something still better; and when I had given her time to see
this dawn upon me I had my eagerness and I jumped into the breathless.
"You've made out then who _is_?"
"Oh, I don't make out, you know," she laughed, "so much as you! _She_
isn't," she simply repeated.
I looked at it, on my inspiration, quite ruefully--almost as if I now
wished, after all, she were. "Ah, but, do you know? it really strikes me
you make out marvels. You made out this morning quite what I couldn't. I
hadn't put together anything so extraordinary as that--in the total
absence of everything--it _should_ have been our friend."
Mrs. Briss appeared, on her side, to take in the intention of this.
"What do you mean by the total absence? When I made my mistake," she
declared as if in the interest of her dignity, "I didn't think
everything absent."
"I see," I admitted. "I see," I thoughtfully repeated. "And do you,
then, think everything now?"
"I had my honest impression of the moment," she pursued as if she had
not heard me. "There were appearances that, as it at the time struck me,
fitted."
"Precisely"--and I recalled for her the one she had made most of. "There
was in especial the appearance that she was at a particular moment using
Brissenden to show whom she was not using. You felt _then_," I ventured
to observe, "the force of that."
I ventured less than, already, I should have liked to venture; yet I
none the less seemed to see her try on me the effect of the intimation
that I was going far. "Is it your wish," she inquired with much
nobleness, "to confront me, to my confusion, with my inconsistency?" Her
nobleness offered itself somehow as such a rebuke to my mere logic that,
in my momentary irritation, I might have been on the point of assenting
to her question. This imminence of my assent, justified by my horror of
her huge egotism, but justified by nothing else and precipitating
everything, seemed as marked for these few seconds as if we each had our
eyes on it. But I sat so tight that the danger passed, leaving my
silence to do what it could for my manners. She proceeded meanwhile to
add a very handsome account of her own. "You should do me the justice to
recognise how little I need have spoken another word to you, and how
little, also, this amiable explanation to you is in the interest of
one's natural pride. It seems to me I've come to you here altogether in
the interest of _yours_. You talk about humble pie, but I think that,
upon my word--with all I've said to you--it's I who have had to eat it.
The magnanimity you speak of," she continued with all her grandeur--"I
really don't see, either, whose it is but mine. I don't see what account
of anything I'm in any way obliged to give."
I granted it quickly and without reserve. "You're not obliged to give
any--you're quite right: you do it only because you're such a large,
splendid creature. I quite feel that, beside you"--I did, at least,
treat myself to the amusement of saying--"I move in a tiny circle.
Still, I won't have it"--I could also, again, keep it up--"that our
occasion has nothing for you but the taste of abasement. You gulp your
mouthful down, but hasn't it been served on gold plate? You've had a
magnificent day--a brimming cup of triumph, and you're more beautiful
and fresh, after it all, and at an hour when fatigue would be almost
positively graceful, than you were even this morning, when you met me as
a daughter of the dawn. That's the sort of sense," I laughed, "that
must sustain a woman!" And I wound up on a complete recovery of my
good-humour. "No, no. I thank you--thank you immensely. But I don't pity
you. You can afford to lose." I wanted her perplexity--the proper sharp
dose of it--to result both from her knowing and her not knowing
sufficiently what I meant; and when I in fact saw how perplexed she
could be and how little, again, she could enjoy it, I felt anew my
private wonder at her having cared and dared to meet me. Where _was_
enjoyment, for her, where the insolence of success, if the breath of
irony could chill them? Why, since she was bold, should she be
susceptible, and how, since she was susceptible, could she be bold? I
scarce know what, at this moment, determined the divination; but
everything, the distinct and the dim alike, had cleared up the next
instant at the touch of the real truth. The certitude of the source of
my present opportunity had rolled over me before we exchanged another
word. The source was simply Gilbert Long, and she was there because he
had directed it. This connection hooked itself, like a sudden picture
and with a click that fairly resounded through our empty rooms, into the
array of the other connections, to the immense enrichment, as it was
easy to feel, of the occasion, and to the immense confirmation of the
very idea that, in the course of the evening, I had come near dismissing
from my mind as too fantastic even for the rest of the company it
should enjoy there. What I now was sure of flashed back, at any rate,
every syllable of sense I could have desired into the suggestion I had,
after the music, caught from the juxtaposition of these two. Thus
solidified, this conviction, it spread and spread to a distance greater
than I could just then traverse under Mrs. Briss's eyes, but which,
exactly for that reason perhaps, quickened my pride in the kingdom of
thought I had won. I was really not to have felt more, in the whole
business, than I felt at this moment that by my own right hand I had
gained the kingdom. Long and she were together, and I was alone thus in
face of them, but there was none the less not a single flower of the
garden that my woven wreath should lack.
I must have looked queer to my friend as I grinned to myself over this
vow; but my relish of the way I was keeping things together made me
perhaps for the instant unduly rash. I cautioned myself, however,
fortunately, before it could leave her--scared a little, all the same,
even with Long behind her--an advantage to take, and, in infinitely less
time than I have needed to tell it, I had achieved my flight into
luminous ether and, alighting gracefully on my feet, reported myself at
my post. I had in other words taken in both the full prodigy of the
_entente_ between Mrs. Server's lover and poor Briss's wife, and the
finer strength it gave the last-named as the representative of their
interest. I may add too that I had even taken time fairly not to decide
which of these two branches of my vision--that of the terms of their
intercourse, or that of their need of it--was likely to prove, in
delectable retrospect, the more exquisite. All this, I admit, was a good
deal to have come and gone while my privilege trembled, in its very
essence, in the scale. Mrs. Briss had but a back to turn, and everything
was over. She had, in strictness, already uttered what saved her honour,
and her revenge on impertinence might easily be her withdrawing with one
of her sweeps. I couldn't certainly in that case hurry after her without
spilling my cards. As my accumulations of lucidity, however, were now
such as to defy all leakage, I promptly recognised the facilities
involved in a superficial sacrifice; and with one more glance at the
beautiful fact that she knew the strength of Long's hand, I again went
steadily and straight. She was acting not only for herself, and since
she had another also to serve and, as I was sure, report to, I should
sufficiently hold her. I knew moreover that I held her as soon as I had
begun afresh. "I don't mean that anything alters the fact that you lose
gracefully. It _is_ awfully charming, your thus giving yourself up, and
yet, justified as I am by it, I can't help regretting a little the
excitement I found it this morning to pull a different way from you.
Shall I tell you," it suddenly came to me to put to her, "what, for
some reason, a man feels aware of?" And then as, guarded, still uneasy,
she would commit herself to no permission: "That pulling against you
also had its thrill. You defended your cause. Oh," I quickly added, "I
know--who should know better?--that it was bad. Only--what shall I
say?--_you_ weren't bad, and one had to fight. And then there was what
one was fighting for! Well, you're not bad now, either; so that you may
ask me, of course, what more I want." I tried to think a moment. "It
isn't that, thrown back on the comparative dullness of security, I
find--as people have been known to--my own cause less good: no, it isn't
that." After which I had my illumination. "I'll tell you what it is:
it's the come-down of ceasing to work with you!"
She looked as if she were quite excusable for not following me. "To
'work'?"
I immediately explained. "Even fighting was working, for we struck,
you'll remember, sparks, and sparks were what we wanted. There we are
then," I cheerfully went on. "Sparks are what we still want, and you've
not come to me, I trust, with a mere spent match. I depend upon it that
you've another to strike." I showed her without fear all I took for
granted. "Who, then, _has_?"
She was superb in her coldness, but her stare was partly blank. "Who
then has what?"
"Why, done it." And as even at this she didn't light I gave her
something of a jog. "You haven't, with the force of your revulsion, I
hope, literally lost our thread." But as, in spite of my thus waiting
for her to pick it up she did nothing, I offered myself as fairly
stooping to the carpet for it and putting it back in her hand. "Done
what we spent the morning wondering at. Who then, if it isn't,
certainly, Mrs. Server, _is_ the woman who has made Gilbert Long--well,
what you know?"
I had needed the moment to take in the special shade of innocence she
was by this time prepared to show me. It was an innocence, in
particular, in respect to the relation of anyone, in all the vast
impropriety of things, to anyone. "I'm afraid I know nothing."
I really wondered an instant how she could expect help from such
extravagance. "But I thought you just recognised that you do enjoy the
sense of your pardonable mistake. You knew something when you knew
enough to see you had made it."
She faced me as with the frank perception that, of whatever else one
might be aware, I abounded in traps, and that this would probably be one
of my worst. "Oh, I think one generally knows when one has made a
mistake."
"That's all then I invite you--_a_ mistake, as you properly call it--to
allow me to impute to you. I'm not accusing you of having made fifty.
You made none whatever, I hold, when you agreed with me with such
eagerness about the striking change in him."
She affected me as asking herself a little, on this, whether vagueness,
the failure of memory, the rejection of nonsense, mightn't still serve
her. But she saw the next moment a better way. It all came back to her,
but from so very far off. "The change, do you mean, in poor Mr. Long?"
"Of what other change--except, as you may say, your own--have you met me
here to speak of? Your own, I needn't remind you, is part and parcel of
Long's."
"Oh, my own," she presently returned, "is a much simpler matter even
than that. My own is the recognition that I just expressed to you and
that I can't consent, if you please, to your twisting into the
recognition of anything else. It's the recognition that I know nothing
of any other change. I stick, if you'll allow me, to my ignorance."
"I'll allow you with joy," I laughed, "if you'll let me stick to it
_with_ you. Your own change is quite sufficient--it gives us all we
need. It will give us, if we retrace the steps of it, everything,
everything!"
Mrs. Briss considered. "I don't quite see, do I? why, at this hour of
the night, we should begin to retrace steps."
"Simply because it's the hour of the night you've happened, in your
generosity and your discretion, to choose. I'm struck, I confess," I
declared with a still sharper conviction, "with the wonderful charm of
it for our purpose."
"And, pray, what do you call with such solemnity," she inquired, "our
purpose?"
I had fairly recovered at last--so far from being solemn--an appropriate
gaiety. "I can only, with positiveness, answer for mine! That has
remained all day the same--to get at the truth: not, that is, to relax
my grasp of that tip of the tail of it which you so helped me this
morning to fasten to. If you've ceased to _care_ to help me," I pursued,
"that's a difference indeed. But why," I candidly, pleadingly asked,
"_should_ you cease to care?" It was more and more of a comfort to feel
her imprisoned in her inability really to explain her being there. To
show herself as she was explained it only so far as she could express
that; which was just the freedom she could least take. "What on earth is
between us, anyhow," I insisted, "but our confounded interest? That's
only quickened, for me, don't you see? by the charming way you've come
round; and I don't see how it can logically be anything less than
quickened for yourself. We're like the messengers and heralds in the
tale of Cinderella, and I protest, I assure you, against any sacrifice
of our dénoûment. We've still the glass shoe to fit."
I took pleasure at the moment in my metaphor; but this was not the
case, I soon enough perceived, with my companion. "How can I tell,
please," she demanded, "what you consider you're talking about?"
I smiled; it was so quite the question Ford Obert, in the smoking-room,
had begun by putting me. I hadn't to take time to remind myself how I
had dealt with _him_. "And you knew," I sighed, "so beautifully, you
glowed over it so, this morning!" She continued to give me, in every
way, her disconnection from this morning, so that I had only to proceed:
"You've not availed yourself of this occasion to pretend to me that poor
Mr. Long, as you call him, is, after all, the same limited person----"
"That he always was, and that you, yesterday, so suddenly discovered him
to have ceased to be?"--for with this she had waked up. But she was
still thinking how she could turn it. "You see too much."
"Oh, I know I do--ever so much too much. And much as I see, I express
only half of it--so you may judge!" I laughed. "But what will you have?
I see what I see, and this morning, for a good bit, you did me the
honour to do the same. I returned, also, the compliment, didn't I? by
seeing something of what _you_ saw. We put it, the whole thing,
together, and we shook the bottle hard. I'm to take from you, after
this," I wound up, "that what it contains is a perfectly colourless
fluid?"
I paused for a reply, but it was not to come so happily as from Obert.
"You talk too much!" said Mrs. Briss.
I met it with amazement. "Why, whom have I told?"
I looked at her so hard with it that her colour began to rise, which
made me promptly feel that she wouldn't press that point. "I mean you're
carried away--you're abused by a fine fancy: so that, with your art of
putting things, one doesn't know where one is--nor, if you'll allow me
to say so, do I quite think _you_ always do. Of course I don't deny
you're awfully clever. But you build up," she brought out with a regret
so indulgent and a reluctance so marked that she for some seconds fairly
held the blow--"you build up houses of cards."
I had been impatient to learn what, and, frankly, I was disappointed.
This broke from me, after an instant, doubtless, with a bitterness not
to be mistaken. "Long _isn't_ what he seems?"
"Seems to whom?" she asked sturdily.
"Well, call it--for simplicity--to _me_. For you see"--and I spoke as to
show _what_ it was to see--"it all stands or falls by that."
The explanation presently appeared a little to have softened her. If it
all stood or fell only by _that_, it stood or fell by something that,
for her comfort, might be not so unsuccessfully disposed of. She
exhaled, with the swell of her fine person, a comparative
blandness--seemed to play with the idea of a smile. She had, in short,
her own explanation. "The trouble with you is that you over-estimate the
penetration of others. How can it approach your own?"
"Well, yours had for a while, I should say, distinct moments of keeping
up with it. Nothing is more possible," I went on, "than that I do talk
too much; but I've done so--about the question in dispute between
us--only to _you_. I haven't, as I conceived we were absolutely not to
do, mentioned it to anyone else, nor given anyone a glimpse of our
difference. If you've not understood yourself as pledged to the same
reserve, and have consequently," I went on, "appealed to the light of
other wisdom, it shows at least that, in spite of my intellectual pace,
you must more or less have followed me. What am I _not_, in fine, to
think of your intelligence," I asked, "if, deciding for a resort to
headquarters, you've put the question to Long himself?"
"The question?" She was straight out to sea again.
"Of the identity of the lady."
She slowly, at this, headed about. "To Long himself?"
XIII
I had felt I could risk such directness only by making it
extravagant--by suggesting it as barely imaginable that she could so
have played our game; and during the instant for which I had now pulled
her up I could judge I had been right. It was an instant that settled
everything, for I saw her, with intensity, with gallantry too, surprised
but not really embarrassed, recognise that of course she must simply
lie. I had been justified by making it so possible for her to lie. "It
would have been a short cut," I said, "and even more strikingly
perhaps--to do it justice--a bold deed. But it would have been, in
strictness, a departure--wouldn't it?--from our so distinguished little
compact. Yet while I look at you," I went on, "I wonder. Bold deeds are,
after all, quite in your line; and I'm not sure I don't rather want not
to have missed so much possible comedy. 'I have it for you from Mr. Long
himself that, every appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, his
stupidity is unimpaired'--isn't that, for the beauty of it, after all,
what you've veraciously to give me?" We stood face to face a moment, and
I laughed out. "The beauty of it would be great!"
I had given her time; I had seen her safely to shore. It was quite what
I had meant to do, but she now took still better advantage than I had
expected of her opportunity. She not only scrambled up the bank, she
recovered breath and turned round. "Do you imagine he would have told
me?"
It was magnificent, but I felt she was still to better it should I give
her a new chance. "Who the lady really is? Well, hardly; and that's why,
as you so acutely see, the question of your having risked such a step
has occurred to me only as a jest. Fancy indeed"--I piled it up--"your
saying to him: 'We're all noticing that you're so much less of an idiot
than you used to be, and we've different views of the miracle'!"
I had been going on, but I was checked without a word from her. Her look
alone did it, for, though it was a look that partly spoiled her lie,
it--by that very fact--sufficed to my confidence. "I've not spoken to a
creature."
It was beautifully said, but I felt again the abysses that the mere
saying of it covered, and the sense of these wonderful things was not a
little, no doubt, in my immediate cheer. "Ah, then, we're all right!" I
could have rubbed my hands over it. "I mean, however," I quickly added,
"only as far as that. I don't at all feel comfortable about your new
theory itself, which puts me so wretchedly in the wrong."
"Rather!" said Mrs. Briss almost gaily. "Wretchedly indeed in the
wrong!"
"Yet only--equally of course," I returned after a brief brooding, "if I
come within a conceivability of accepting it. Are you conscious that, in
default of Long's own word--equivocal as that word would be--you press
it upon me without the least other guarantee?"
"And pray," she asked, "what guarantee had _you_?"
"For the theory with which we started? Why, our recognised fact. The
change in the man. You may say," I pursued, "that I was the first to
speak for him; but being the first didn't, in your view, constitute a
weakness when it came to your speaking yourself for Mrs. Server. By
which I mean," I added, "speaking against her."
She remembered, but not for my benefit. "Well, you then asked me _my_
warrant. And as regards Mr. Long and your speaking against _him_----"
"Do you describe what I say as 'against' him?" I immediately broke in.
It took her but an instant. "Surely--to have made him out horrid."
I could only want to fix it. "'Horrid'----?"
"Why, having such secrets." She was roundly ready now. "Sacrificing poor
May."
"But _you_, dear lady, sacrificed poor May! It didn't strike you as
horrid _then_."
"Well, that was only," she maintained, "because you talked me over."
I let her see the full process of my taking--or not taking--this in.
"And who is it then that--if, as you say, you've spoken to no one--has,
as I may call it, talked you under?"
She completed, on the spot, her statement of a moment before. "Not a
creature has spoken to me."
I felt somehow the wish to make her say it in as many ways as
possible--I seemed so to enjoy her saying it. This helped me to make my
tone approve and encourage. "You've communicated so little with anyone!"
I didn't even make it a question.
It was scarce yet, however, quite good enough. "So little? I've not
communicated the least mite."
"Precisely. But don't think me impertinent for having for a moment
wondered. What I should say to you if you had, you know, would be that
you just accused me."
"Accused you?"
"Of talking too much."
It came back to her dim. "Are we accusing each other?"
Her tone seemed suddenly to put us nearer together than we had ever been
at all. "Dear no," I laughed--"not each other; only with each other's
help, a few of our good friends."
"A few?" She handsomely demurred. "But one or two at the best."
"Or at the worst!"--I continued to laugh. "And not even those, it after
all appears, very much!"
She didn't like my laughter, but she was now grandly indulgent. "Well, I
accuse no one."
I was silent a little; then I concurred. "It's doubtless your best line;
and I really quite feel, at all events, that when you mentioned a while
since that I talk too much you only meant too much to _you_."
"Yes--I wasn't imputing to you the same direct appeal. I didn't
suppose," she explained, "that--to match your own supposition of
_me_--you had resorted to May herself."
"You didn't suppose I had asked her?" The point was positively that she
didn't; yet it made us look at each other almost as hard as if she did.
"No, of course you couldn't have supposed anything so cruel--all the
more that, as you knew, I had not admitted the possibility."
She accepted my assent; but, oddly enough, with a sudden qualification
that showed her as still sharply disposed to make use of any loose scrap
of her embarrassed acuteness. "Of course, at the same time, you yourself
saw that your not admitting the possibility would have taken the edge
from your cruelty. It's not the innocent," she suggestively remarked,
"that we fear to frighten."
"Oh," I returned, "I fear, mostly, I think, to frighten _any_ one. I'm
not particularly brave. I haven't, at all events, in spite of my
certitude, interrogated Mrs. Server, and I give you my word of honour
that I've not had any denial from her to prop up my doubt. It still
stands on its own feet, and it was its own battle that, when I came here
at your summons, it was prepared to fight. Let me accordingly remind
you," I pursued, "in connection with that, of the one sense in which you
were, as you a moment ago said, talked over by me. I persuaded you
apparently that Long's metamorphosis was not the work of Lady John. I
persuaded you of nothing else."
She looked down a little, as if again at a trap. "You persuaded me that
it was the work of somebody." Then she held up her head. "It came to the
same thing."
If I had credit then for my trap it at least might serve. "The same
thing as what?"
"Why, as claiming that it _was_ she."
"Poor May--'claiming'? When I insisted it wasn't!"
Mrs. Brissenden flushed. "You didn't insist it wasn't anybody!"
"Why should I when I didn't believe so? I've left you in no doubt," I
indulgently smiled, "of my beliefs. It was somebody--and it still is."
She looked about at the top of the room. "The mistake's now yours."
I watched her an instant. "Can you tell me then what one does to recover
from such mistakes?"
"One thinks a little."
"Ah, the more I've thought the deeper I've sunk! And that seemed to me
the case with you this morning," I added, "the more _you_ thought."
"Well, then," she frankly declared, "I must have stopped thinking!"
It was a phenomenon, I sufficiently showed, that thought only could
meet. "Could you tell me then at what point?"
She had to think even to do that. "At what point?"
"What in particular determined, I mean, your arrest? You surely
didn't--launched as you were--stop short all of yourself."
She fronted me, after all, still so bravely that I believed her for an
instant not to be, on this article, without an answer she could produce.
The unexpected therefore broke for me when she fairly produced none. "I
confess I don't make out," she simply said, "while you seem so little
pleased that I agree with you."
I threw back, in despair, both head and hands. "But, you poor, dear
thing, you don't in the _least_ agree with me! You flatly contradict me.
You deny my miracle."
"I don't believe in miracles," she panted.
"So I exactly, at this late hour, learn. But I don't insist on the
name. Nothing _is_, I admit, a miracle from the moment one's on the
track of the cause, which was the scent we were following. Call the
thing simply my fact."
She gave her high head a toss. "If it's yours it's nobody else's!"
"Ah, there's just the question--if we could know all! But my point is
precisely, for the present, that you do deny it."
"Of course I deny it," said Mrs. Briss.
I took a moment, but my silence held her. "Your 'of course' would be
what I would again contest, what I would denounce and brand as the word
too much--the word that spoils, were it not that it seems best, that it
in any case seems necessary, to let all question of your consistency
go."
On that I had paused, and, as I felt myself still holding her, I was not
surprised when my pause had an effect. "You do let it go?"
She had tried, I could see, to put the inquiry as all ironic. But it was
not all ironic; it was, in fact, little enough so to suggest for me some
intensification--not quite, I trust, wanton--of her suspense. I should
be at a loss to say indeed how much it suggested or half of what it
told. These things again almost violently moved me, and if I, after an
instant, in my silence, turned away, it was not only to keep her
waiting, but to make my elation more private. I turned away to that tune
that I literally, for a few minutes, quitted her, availing myself thus,
superficially, of the air of weighing a consequence. I wandered off
twenty steps and, while I passed my hand over my troubled head, looked
vaguely at objects on tables and sniffed absently at flowers in bowls. I
don't know how long I so lost myself, nor quite why--as I must for some
time have kept it up--my companion didn't now really embrace her
possible alternative of rupture and retreat. Or rather, as to her action
in this last matter, I am, and was on the spot, clear: I knew at that
moment how much _she_ knew she must not leave me without having got from
me. It came back in waves, in wider glimpses, and produced in so doing
the excitement I had to control. It could _not_ but be exciting to talk,
as we talked, on the basis of those suppressed processes and unavowed
references which made the meaning of our meeting so different from its
form. We knew ourselves--what moved me, that is, was that she knew
me--to mean, at every point, immensely more than I said or than she
answered; just as she saw me, at the same points, measure the space by
which her answers fell short. This made my conversation with her a
totally other and a far more interesting thing than any colloquy I had
ever enjoyed; it had even a sharpness that had not belonged, a few hours
before, to my extraordinary interview with Mrs. Server. She couldn't
afford to quarrel with me for catechising her; she couldn't afford not
to have kept, in her way, faith with me; she couldn't afford, after
inconceivable passages with Long, not to treat me as an observer to be
squared. She had come down to square me; she was hanging on to square
me; she was suffering and stammering and lying; she was both carrying it
grandly off and letting it desperately go: all, all to square me. And I
caught moreover perfectly her vision of her way, and I followed her way
even while I judged it, feeling that the only personal privilege I
could, after all, save from the whole business was that of
understanding. I couldn't save Mrs. Server, and I couldn't save poor
Briss; I _could_, however, guard, to the last grain of gold, my precious
sense of their loss, their disintegration and their doom; and it was for
this I was now bargaining.
It was of giving herself away just enough not to spoil for me my bargain
over my treasure that Mrs. Briss's bribe would consist. She would let me
see as far as I would if she could feel sure I would _do_ nothing; and
it was exactly in this question of how much I might have scared my
couple into the sense I _could_ "do" that the savour of my suspense most
dwelt. I could have made them uneasy, of course, only by making them
fear my intervention; and yet the idea of their being uneasy was less
wonderful than the idea of my having, with all my precautions,
communicated to them a consciousness. This was so the last thing I had
wanted to do that I felt, during my swift excursion, how much time I
should need in the future for recovery of the process--all of the finest
wind-blown intimations, woven of silence and secrecy and air--by which
their suspicion would have throbbed into life. I could only,
provisionally and sketchily, figure it out, this suspicion, as having,
little by little--not with a sudden start--felt itself in the presence
of my own, just as my own now returned the compliment. What came back to
me, as I have said, in waves and wider glimpses, was the marvel of their
exchange of signals, the phenomenon, scarce to be represented, of their
breaking ground with each other. They both had their treasure to guard,
and they had looked to each other with the instinct of help. They had
felt, on either side, the victim possibly slip, and they had connected
the possibility with an interest discernibly inspired in me by this
personage, and with a relation discoverably established by that
interest. It wouldn't have been a danger, perhaps, if the two victims
hadn't slipped together; and more amazing, doubtless, than anything else
was the recognition by my sacrificing couple of the opportunity drawn by
my sacrificed from being conjoined in my charity. How could they know,
Gilbert Long and Mrs. Briss, that actively to communicate a
consciousness to my other friends had no part in my plan? The most I had
dreamed of, I could honourably feel, was to assure myself of their
independent possession of one. These things were with me while, as I
have noted, I made Grace Brissenden wait, and it was also with me that,
though I condoned her deviation, she must take it from me as a charity.
I had presently achieved another of my full revolutions, and I faced her
again with a view of her overture and my answer to her last question.
The terms were not altogether what my pity could have wished, but I
sufficiently kept everything together to have to see that there were
limits to my choice. "Yes, I let it go, your change of front, though it
vexes me a little--and I'll in a moment tell you why--to have to. But
let us put it that it's on a condition."
"Change of front?" she murmured while she looked at me. "Your
expressions are not of the happiest."
But I saw it was only again to cover a doubt. My condition, for her, was
questionable, and I felt it would be still more so on her hearing what
it was. Meanwhile, however, in spite of her qualification of it, I had
fallen back, once and for all, on pure benignity. "It scarce matters if
I'm clumsy when you're practically so bland. I wonder if you'll
understand," I continued, "if I make you an explanation."
"Most probably," she answered, as handsome as ever, "not."
"Let me at all events try you. It's moreover the one I just promised;
which was no more indeed than the development of a feeling I've already
permitted myself to show you. I lose"--I brought it out--"by your
agreeing with me!"
"'Lose'?"
"Yes; because while we disagreed you were, in spite of that, on the
right side."
"And what do you call the right side?"
"Well"--I brought it out again--"on the same side as my imagination."
But it gave her at least a chance. "Oh, your imagination!"
"Yes--I know what you think of it; you've sufficiently hinted how little
that is. But it's precisely because you regard it as rubbish that I now
appeal to you."
She continued to guard herself by her surprises. "Appeal? I thought you
were on the ground, rather," she beautifully smiled, "of dictation."
"Well, I'm that too. I dictate my terms. But my terms are in themselves
the appeal." I was ingenious but patient. "See?"
"How in the world can I see?"
"_Voyons_, then. Light or darkness, my imagination rides me. But of
course if it's all wrong I want to get rid of it. You can't, naturally,
help me to destroy the faculty itself, but you can aid in the defeat of
its application to a particular case. It was because you so smiled,
before, on that application, that I valued even my minor difference with
you; and what I refer to as my loss is the fact that your frown leaves
me struggling alone. The best thing for me, accordingly, as I feel, is
to get rid altogether of the obsession. The way to do that, clearly,
since _you've_ done it, is just to quench the fire. By the fire I mean
the flame of the fancy that blazed so for us this morning. What the
deuce have you, for yourself, poured on it? Tell me," I pleaded, "and
teach me."
Equally with her voice her face echoed me again. "Teach you?"
"To abandon my false gods. Lead me back to peace by the steps _you've_
trod. By so much as they must have remained traceable to you, shall I
find them of interest and profit. They must in fact be most remarkable:
won't they even--for what _I_ may find in them--be more remarkable than
those we should now be taking together if we hadn't separated, if we
hadn't pulled up?" That was a proposition I could present to her with
candour, but before her absence of precipitation had permitted her much
to consider it I had already followed it on. "You'll just tell me,
however, that since I do pull up and turn back with you we shall just
have _not_ separated. Well, then, so much the better--I see you're
right. But I want," I earnestly declared, "not to lose an inch of the
journey."
She watched me now as a Roman lady at the circus may have watched an
exemplary Christian. "The journey has been a very simple one," she said
at last. "With my mind made up on a single point, it was taken at a
stride."
I was all interest. "On a single point?" Then, as, almost excessively
deliberate, she still kept me: "You mean the still commonplace character
of Long's--a--consciousness?"
She had taken at last again the time she required. "Do you know what I
think?"
"It's exactly what I'm pressing you to make intelligible."
"Well," said Mrs. Briss, "I think you're crazy."
It naturally struck me. "Crazy?"
"Crazy."
I turned it over. "But do you call that intelligible?"
She did it justice. "No: I don't suppose it _can_ be so for you if you
_are_ insane."
I risked the long laugh which might have seemed that of madness. "'If I
am' is lovely!" And whether or not it was the special sound, in my ear,
of my hilarity, I remember just wondering if perhaps I mightn't be.
"Dear woman, it's the point at issue!"
But it was as if she too had been affected. "It's not at issue for me
now."
I gave her then the benefit of my stirred speculation. "It always
happens, of course, that one is one's self the last to know. You're
perfectly convinced?"
She not ungracefully, for an instant, faltered; but since I really would
have it----! "Oh, so far as what we've talked of is concerned,
perfectly!"
"And it's actually what you've come down then to tell me?"
"Just exactly what. And if it's a surprise to you," she added, "that I
_should_ have come down--why, I can only say I was prepared for
anything."
"Anything?" I smiled.
"In the way of a surprise."
I thought; but her preparation was natural, though in a moment I could
match it. "Do you know that's what I was too?"
"Prepared----?"
"For anything in the way of a surprise. But only _from_ you," I
explained. "And of course--yes," I mused, "I've got it. If I _am_
crazy," I went on--"it's indeed simple."
She appeared, however, to feel, from the influence of my present tone,
the impulse, in courtesy, to attenuate. "Oh, I don't pretend it's
simple!"
"No? I thought that was just what you did pretend."
"I didn't suppose," said Mrs. Briss, "that you'd like it. I didn't
suppose that you'd accept it or even listen to it. But I owed it to
you----" She hesitated.
"You owed it to me to let me know what you thought of me even should it
prove very disagreeable?"
That perhaps was more than she could adopt. "I owed it to myself," she
replied with a touch of austerity.
"To let me know I'm demented?"
"To let you know I'm _not_." We each looked, I think, when she had said
it, as if she had done what she said. "That's all."
"All?" I wailed. "Ah, don't speak as if it were so little. It's much.
It's everything."
"It's anything you will!" said Mrs. Briss impatiently. "Good-night."
"Good-night?" I was aghast. "You leave me on it?"
She appeared to profess for an instant all the freshness of her own that
she was pledged to guard. "I must leave you on something. I couldn't
come to spend a whole hour."
"But do you think it's so quickly done--to persuade a man he's crazy?"
"I haven't expected to persuade you."
"Only to throw out the hint?"
"Well," she admitted, "it would be good if it could work in you. But
I've told you," she added as if to wind up and have done, "what
determined me."
"I beg your pardon"--oh, I protested! "That's just what you've not told
me. The reason of your change----"
"I'm not speaking," she broke in, "of my change."
"Ah, but _I_ am!" I declared with a sharpness that threw her back for a
minute on her reserves. "It's your change," I again insisted, "that's
the interesting thing. If I'm crazy, I must once more remind you, you
were simply crazy _with_ me; and how can I therefore be indifferent to
your recovery of your wit or let you go without having won from you the
secret of your remedy?" I shook my head with kindness, but with
decision. "You mustn't leave me till you've placed it in my hand."
The reserves I had spoken of were not, however, to fail her. "I thought
you just said that you let my inconsistency go."
"Your moral responsibility for it--perfectly. But how can I show a
greater indulgence than by positively desiring to enter into its
history? It's in that sense that, as I say," I developed, "I do speak of
your change. There must have been a given moment when the need of it--or
when, in other words, the truth of my personal state--dawned upon you.
That moment is the key to your whole position--the moment for us to
fix."
"Fix it," said poor Mrs. Briss, "when you like!"
"I had much rather," I protested, "fix it when _you_ like. I want--you
surely must understand if I want anything of it at all--to get it
absolutely right." Then as this plea seemed still not to move her, I
once more compressed my palms. "You _won't_ help me?"
She bridled at last with a higher toss. "It wasn't with such views I
came. I don't believe," she went on a shade more patiently, "I don't
believe--if you want to know the reason--that you're really sincere."
Here indeed was an affair. "Not sincere--_I_?"
"Not properly honest. I mean in giving up."
"Giving up what?"
"Why, everything."
"Everything? Is it a question"--I stared--"of _that_?"
"You would if you _were_ honest."
"Everything?" I repeated.
Again she stood to it. "Everything."
"But is that quite the readiness I've professed?"
"If it isn't then, what is?"
I thought a little. "Why, isn't it simply a matter rather of the
renunciation of a confidence?"
"In your sense and your truth?" This, she indicated, was all she asked.
"Well, what is that but everything?"
"Perhaps," I reflected, "perhaps." In fact, it no doubt was. "We'll take
it then for everything, and it's as so taking it that I renounce. I
keep nothing at all. Now do you believe I'm honest?"
She hesitated. "Well--yes, if you say so."
"Ah," I sighed, "I see you don't! What can I do," I asked, "to prove
it?"
"You can easily prove it. You can let me go."
"Does it strike you," I considered, "that I should take your going as a
sign of your belief?"
"Of what else, then?"
"Why, surely," I promptly replied, "my assent to your leaving our
discussion where it stands would constitute a very different symptom.
Wouldn't it much rather represent," I inquired, "a failure of belief on
my own part in _your_ honesty? If you can judge me, in short, as only
pretending----"
"Why shouldn't you," she put in for me, "also judge _me_? What have I to
gain by pretending?"
"I'll tell you," I returned, laughing, "if you'll tell me what _I_
have."
She appeared to ask herself if she could, and then to decide in the
negative. "If I don't understand you in any way, of course I don't in
that. Put it, at any rate," she now rather wearily quavered, "that one
of us has as little to gain as the other. I believe you," she repeated.
"There!"
"Thanks," I smiled, "for the way you say it. If you don't, as you say,
understand me," I insisted, "it's because you think me crazy. And if you
think me crazy I don't see how you _can_ leave me."
She presently met this. "If I believe you're sincere in saying you give
up I believe you've recovered. And if I believe you've recovered I don't
think you crazy. It's simple enough."
"Then why isn't it simple to understand me?"
She turned about, and there were moments in her embarrassment, now, from
which she fairly drew beauty. Her awkwardness was somehow noble; her
sense of her predicament was in itself young. "Is it _ever_?" she
charmingly threw out.
I felt she must see at this juncture how wonderful I found her, and even
that that impression--one's whole consciousness of her personal
victory--was a force that, in the last resort, was all on her side. "It
was quite worth your while, this sitting up to this hour, to show a
fellow how you bloom when other women are fagged. If that was really,
with the truth that we're so pulling about laid bare, what you did most
want to show, why, then, you've splendidly triumphed, and I congratulate
and thank you. No," I quickly went on, "I daresay, to do you justice,
the interpretation of my tropes and figures _isn't_ 'ever' perfectly
simple. You doubtless _have_ driven me into a corner with my dangerous
explosive, and my only fair course must be therefore to sit on it till
you get out of the room. I'm sitting on it now; and I think you'll find
you can get out as soon as you've told me _this_. Was the moment your
change of view dawned upon you the moment of our exchanging a while
ago, in the drawing-room, our few words?"
The light that, under my last assurances, had so considerably revived
faded in her a little as she saw me again tackle the theme of her
inconstancy; but the prospect of getting rid of me on these terms made
my inquiry, none the less, worth trying to face. "That moment?" She
showed the effort to think back.
I gave her every assistance. "It was when, after the music, I had been
talking to Lady John. You were on a sofa, not far from us, with Gilbert
Long; and when, on Lady John's dropping me, I made a slight movement
toward you, you most graciously met it by rising and giving me a chance
while Mr. Long walked away."
It was as if I had hung the picture before her, so that she had fairly
to look at it. But the point that she first, in her effort, took up was
not, superficially, the most salient. "Mr. Long walked away?"
"Oh, I don't mean to say that that had anything to do with it."
She continued to think. "To do with what?"
"With the way the situation comes back to me now as possibly marking
your crisis."
She wondered. "Was it a 'situation'?"
"That's just what I'm asking you. _Was_ it? Was it _the_ situation?"
But she had quite fallen away again. "I remember the moment you mean--it
was when I said I would come to you here. But why should it have struck
you as a crisis?"
"It didn't in the least at the time, for I didn't then know you were no
longer 'with' me. But in the light of what I've since learned from you I
seem to recover an impression which, on the spot, was only vague. The
impression," I explained, "of your taking a decision that presented some
difficulty, but that was determined by something that had then--and even
perhaps a little suddenly--come up for you. That's the point"--I
continued to unfold my case--"on which my question bears. _Was_ this
'something' your conclusion, then and there, that there's nothing in
anything?"
She kept her distance. "'In anything'?"
"And that I could only be, accordingly, out of my mind? Come," I
patiently pursued; "such a perception as that had, at some instant or
other, to _begin_; and I'm only trying to aid you to recollect when the
devil it did!"
"Does it particularly matter?" Mrs. Briss inquired.
I felt my chin. "That depends a little--doesn't it?--on what you mean by
'matter'! It matters for your meeting my curiosity, and that matters, in
its turn, as we just arranged, for my releasing you. You may ask of
course if my curiosity itself matters; but to that, fortunately, my
reply can only be of the clearest. The satisfaction of my curiosity is
the pacification of my mind. We've granted, we've accepted, I again
press upon you, in respect to that precarious quantity, its topsy-turvy
state. Only give me a lead; I don't ask you for more. Let me for an
instant see play before me any feeble reflection whatever of the flash
of new truth that unsettled you."
I thought for a moment that, in her despair, she would find something
that would do. But she only found: "It didn't come in a flash."
I remained all patience. "It came little by little? It began then
perhaps earlier in the day than the moment to which I allude? And yet,"
I continued, "we were pretty well on in the day, I must keep in mind,
when I had your last news of your credulity."
"My credulity?"
"Call it then, if you don't like the word, your sympathy."
I had given her time, however, to produce at last something that, it
visibly occurred to her, might pass. "As soon as I was not with you--I
mean with you personally--you _never_ had my sympathy."
"Is my person then so irresistible?"
Well, she was brave. "It _was_. But it's not, thank God, now!"
"Then there we are again at our mystery! I don't think, you know," I
made out for her, "it was my person, really, that gave its charm to my
theory; I think it was much more my theory that gave its charm to my
person. My person, I flatter myself, has remained through these few
hours--hours of tension, but of a tension, you see, purely
intellectual--as good as ever; so that if we're not, even in our
anomalous situation, in danger from any such source, it's simply that my
theory is dead and that the blight of the rest is involved."
My words were indeed many, but she plumped straight through them. "As
soon as I was away from you I hated you."
"Hated _me_?"
"Well, hated what you call 'the rest'--hated your theory."
"I see. Yet," I reflected, "you're not at present--though you wish to
goodness, no doubt, you _were_--away from me."
"Oh, I don't care now," she said with courage; "since--for you see I
believe you--we're away from your delusions."
"You wouldn't, in spite of your belief,"--I smiled at her--"like to be a
little further off yet?" But before she could answer, and because also,
doubtless, the question had too much the sound of a taunt, I came up, as
if for her real convenience, quite in another place. "Perhaps my
idea--my timing, that is, of your crisis--is the result, in my mind, of
my own association with that particular instant. It comes back to me
that what I was most full of while your face signed to me and your voice
then so graciously confirmed it, and while too, as I've said, Long
walked away--what I was most full of, as a consequence of another go,
just ended, at Lady John, was, once more, this same Lady John's want of
adjustability to the character you and I, in our associated speculation
of the morning, had so candidly tried to fit her with. I was still even
then, you see, speculating--all on my own hook, alas!--and it had just
rolled over me with renewed force that she was nothing whatever, not the
least little bit, to our purpose. The moment, in other words, if you
understand, happened to be one of _my_ moments; so that, by the same
token, I simply wondered if it mightn't likewise have happened to be one
of yours."
"It _was_ one of mine," Mrs. Briss replied as promptly as I could
reasonably have expected; "in the sense that--as you've only to
consider--it was to lead more or less directly to these present words of
ours."
If I had only to consider, nothing was more easy; but each time I
considered, I was ready to show, the less there seemed left by the act.
"Ah, but you had then _already_ backed out. _Won't_ you understand--for
you're a little discouraging--that I want to catch you at the earlier
stage?"
"To 'catch' me?" I had indeed expressions!
"Absolutely catch! Focus you under the first shock of the observation
that was to make everything fall to pieces for you."
"But I've told you," she stoutly resisted, "that there was no 'first'
shock."
"Well, then, the second or the third."
"There was no shock," Mrs. Briss magnificently said, "at all."
It made me somehow break into laughter. "You found it so natural
then--and you so rather liked it--to make up your mind of a sudden that
you had been steeped in the last intellectual intimacy with a maniac?"
She thought once more, and then, as I myself had just previously done,
came up in another place. "I had at the moment you speak of wholly given
up any idea of Lady John."
But it was so feeble it made me smile. "Of course you had, you poor
innocent! You couldn't otherwise, hours before, have strapped the saddle
so tight on another woman."
"I had given up everything," she stubbornly continued.
"It's exactly what, in reference to that juncture, I perfectly embrace."
"Well, even in reference to that juncture," she resumed, "you may catch
me as much as you like." With which, suddenly, during some seconds, I
saw her hold herself for a leap. "You talk of 'focussing,' but what
else, even in those minutes, were you in fact engaged in?"
"Ah, then, you do recognise them," I cried--"those minutes?"
She took her jump, though with something of a flop. "Yes--as, consenting
thus to be catechised, I cudgel my brain for your amusement--I do
recognise them. I remember what I thought. You focussed--I felt you
focus. I saw you wonder whereabouts, in what you call our associated
speculation, I would by that time be. I asked myself whether you'd
understand if I should try to convey to you simply by my expression such
a look as would tell you all. By 'all' I meant the fact that, sorry as I
was for you--or perhaps for myself--it had struck me as only fair to let
you know as straight as possible that I was nowhere. That was why I
stared so, and I of course couldn't explain to you," she lucidly
pursued, "to whom my stare had reference."
I hung on her lips. "But you can _now_?"
"Perfectly. To Mr. Long."
I remained suspended. "Ah, but this is lovely! It's what I want."
I saw I should have more of it, and more in fact came. "You were saying
just now what you were full of, and I can do the same. I was full of
_him_."
I, on my side, was now full of eagerness. "Yes? He had left you full as
he walked away?"
She winced a little at this renewed evocation of his retreat, but she
took it as she had not done before, and I felt that with another push
she would be fairly afloat. "He had reason to walk!"
I wondered. "What had you said to him?"
She pieced it out. "Nothing--or very little. But I had listened."
"And to _what_?"
"To what he says. To his platitudes."
"His platitudes?" I stared. "Long's?"
"Why, don't you know he's a prize fool?"
I mused, sceptical but reasonable. "He _was_."
"He _is_!"
Mrs. Briss was superb, but, as I quickly felt I might remind her, there
was her possibly weak judgment. "Your confidence is splendid; only
mustn't I remember that your sense of the finer kinds of cleverness
isn't perhaps absolutely secure? Don't you know?--you also, till just
now, thought _me_ a prize fool."
If I had hoped, however, here to trip her up, I had reckoned without the
impulse, and even perhaps the example, that she properly owed to me.
"Oh, no--not anything of that sort, you, at all. Only an intelligent man
gone wrong."
I followed, but before I caught up, "Whereas Long's only a stupid man
gone right?" I threw out.
It checked her too briefly, and there was indeed something of my own it
brought straight back. "I thought that just what you told me, this
morning or yesterday, was that you had never known a case of the
conversion of an idiot."
I laughed at her readiness. Well, I had wanted to make her fight! "It's
true it would have been the only one."
"Ah, you'll have to do without it!" Oh, she was brisk now. "And if you
know what I think of him, you know no more than _he_ does."
"You mean you told him?"
She hung fire but an instant. "I told him, practically--and it was in
fact all I did have to say to him. It was enough, however, and he
disgustedly left me on it. Then it was that, as you gave me the chance,
I tried to telegraph you--to say to you on the spot and under the sharp
impression: 'What on earth do you mean by your nonsense? It doesn't hold
water!' It's a pity I didn't succeed!" she continued--for she had become
almost voluble. "It would have settled the question, and I should have
gone to bed."
I weighed it with the grimace that, I feared, had become almost as fixed
as Mrs. Server's. "It would have settled the question perhaps; but I
should have lost this impression of you."
"Oh, this impression of me!"
"Ah, but don't undervalue it: it's what I want! What was it then Long
had said?"
She had it more and more, but she had it as nothing at all. "Not a word
to repeat--you wouldn't believe! He does say nothing at all. One can't
remember. It's what I mean. I tried him on purpose, while I thought of
you. But he's perfectly stupid. I don't see how we can have
fancied----!" I had interrupted her by the movement with which again,
uncontrollably tossed on one of my surges of certitude, I turned away.
_How_ deep they must have been in together for her to have so at last
gathered herself up, and in how doubly interesting a light, above all,
it seemed to present Long for the future! That was, while I warned
myself, what I most read in--literally an implication of the enhancement
of this latter side of the prodigy. If his cleverness, under the alarm
that, first stirring their consciousness but dimly, had so swiftly
developed as to make next of each a mirror for the other, and then to
precipitate for them, in some silence deeper than darkness, the exchange
of recognitions, admissions and, as they certainly would have phrased
it, tips--if his excited acuteness was henceforth to protect itself by
dissimulation, what wouldn't perhaps, for one's diversion, be the new
spectacle and wonder? I could in a manner already measure this larger
play by the amplitude freshly determined in Mrs. Briss, and I was for a
moment actually held by the thought of the possible finish our friend
would find it in him to give to a represented, a fictive ineptitude.
The sharpest jostle to my thought, in this rush, might well have been,
I confess, the reflection that as it was I who had arrested, who had
spoiled their unconsciousness, so it was natural they should fight
against me for a possible life in the state I had given them instead. I
had spoiled their unconsciousness, I had destroyed it, and it was
consciousness alone that could make them effectively cruel. Therefore,
if they were cruel, it was I who had determined it, inasmuch as,
consciously, they could only want, they could only intend, to live.
Wouldn't that question have been, I managed even now to ask myself, the
very basis on which they had inscrutably come together? "It's life, you
know," each had said to the other, "and I, accordingly, can only cling
to mine. But you, poor dear--shall _you_ give up?" "Give up?" the other
had replied; "for what do you take me? I shall fight by your side,
please, and we can compare and exchange weapons and manoeuvres, and
you may in every way count upon me."
That was what, with greater vividness, was for the rest of the occasion
before me, or behind me; and that I had done it all and had only myself
to thank for it was what, from this minute, by the same token, was more
and more for me the inner essence of Mrs. Briss's attitude. I know not
what heavy admonition of my responsibility had thus suddenly descended
on me; but nothing, under it, was indeed more sensible than that
practically it paralysed me. And I could only say to myself that this
was the price--the price of the secret success, the lonely liberty and
the intellectual joy. There were things that for so private and splendid
a revel--that of the exclusive king with his Wagner opera--I could only
let go, and the special torment of my case was that the condition of
light, of the satisfaction of curiosity and of the attestation of
triumph, was in this direct way the sacrifice of feeling. There was no
point at which my assurance could, by the scientific method, judge
itself complete enough not to regard feeling as an interference and, in
consequence, as a possible check. If it had to go I knew well who went
with it, but I wasn't there to save _them_. I was there to save my
priceless pearl of an inquiry and to harden, to that end, my heart. I
should need indeed all my hardness, as well as my brightness, moreover,
to meet Mrs. Briss on the high level to which I had at last induced her
to mount, and, even while I prolonged the movement by which I had
momentarily stayed her, the intermission of her speech became itself for
me a hint of the peculiar pertinence of caution. It lasted long enough,
this drop, to suggest that her attention was the sharper for my having
turned away from it, and I should have feared a renewed challenge if she
hadn't, by good luck, presently gone on: "There's really nothing in him
at all!"
XIV
I had faced her again just in time to take it, and I immediately made up
my mind how best to do so. "Then I go utterly to pieces!"
"You shouldn't have perched yourself," she laughed--she could by this
time almost coarsely laugh--"in such a preposterous place!"
"Ah, that's my affair," I returned, "and if I accept the consequences I
don't quite see what you've to say to it. That I do accept them--so far
as I make them out as not too intolerable and you as not intending them
to be--that I do accept them is what I've been trying to signify to you.
Only my fall," I added, "is an inevitable shock. You remarked to me a
few minutes since that you didn't recover yourself in a flash. I differ
from you, you see, in that _I_ do; I take my collapse all at once. Here
then I am. I'm smashed. I don't see, as I look about me, a piece I can
pick up. I don't attempt to account for my going wrong; I don't attempt
to account for yours with me; I don't attempt to account for anything.
If Long _is_ just what he always was it settles the matter, and the
special clincher for us can be but your honest final impression, made
precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which
you had originally yielded to my contagion."
She didn't insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts
themselves. "Oh, but add to my impression everyone else's impression!
Has anyone noticed anything?"
"Ah, I don't know what anyone has noticed. I haven't," I brooded,
"ventured--as you know--to ask anyone."
"Well, if you had you'd have seen--seen, I mean, all they don't see. If
they had been conscious they'd have talked."
I thought. "To me?"
"Well, I'm not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you
embroider on things that they're rather afraid to commit themselves or
to lead you on: they're sometimes in, you know," she luminously reminded
me, "for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do
with, or than they care to have on their hands."
I tried to do justice to this account of myself. "You mean I see so
much?"
It was a delicate matter, but she risked it. "Don't you sometimes see
horrors?"
I wondered. "Well, names are a convenience. People catch me in the act?"
"They certainly think you critical."
"And is criticism the vision of horrors?"
She couldn't quite be sure where I was taking her. "It isn't, perhaps,
so much that you see them----"
I started. "As that I perpetrate them?"
She was sure now, however, and wouldn't have it, for she was serious.
"Dear no--you don't perpetrate anything. Perhaps it would be better if
you did!" she tossed off with an odd laugh. "But--always by people's
idea--you like them."
I followed. "Horrors?"
"Well, you don't----"
"Yes----?"
But she wouldn't be hurried now. "You take them too much for what they
are. You don't seem to want----"
"To come down on them strong? Oh, but I often do!"
"So much the better then."
"Though I do like--whether for that or not," I hastened to confess, "to
look them first well in the face."
Our eyes met, with this, for a minute, but she made nothing of that.
"When they _have_ no face, then, you can't do it! It isn't at all events
now a question," she went on, "of people's keeping anything back, and
you're perhaps in any case not the person to whom it would first have
come."
I tried to think then who the person would be. "It would have come to
Long himself?"
But she was impatient of this. "Oh, one doesn't know what comes--or what
doesn't--to Long himself! I'm not sure he's too modest to
misrepresent--if he had the intelligence to play a part."
"Which he hasn't!" I concluded.
"Which he hasn't. It's to _me_ they might have spoken--or to each
other."
"But I thought you exactly held they _had_ chattered in accounting for
his state by the influence of Lady John."
She got the matter instantly straight. "Not a bit. That chatter was mine
only--and produced to meet yours. There had so, by your theory, to be a
woman----"
"That, to oblige me, you invented _her_? Precisely. But I thought----"
"You needn't have thought!" Mrs. Briss broke in. "I didn't invent her."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"I didn't invent her," she repeated, looking at me hard. "She's true." I
echoed it in vagueness, though instinctively again in protest; yet I
held my breath, for this was really the point at which I felt my
companion's forces most to have mustered. Her manner now moreover gave
me a great idea of them, and her whole air was of taking immediate
advantage of my impression. "Well, see here: since you've wanted it, I'm
afraid that, however little you may like it, you'll have to take it.
You've pressed me for explanations and driven me much harder than you
must have seen I found convenient. If I've seemed to beat about the bush
it's because I hadn't only myself to think of. One can be simple for
one's self--one can't be, always, for others."
"Ah, to whom do you say it?" I encouragingly sighed; not even yet quite
seeing for what issue she was heading.
She continued to make for the spot, whatever it was, with a certain
majesty. "I should have preferred to tell you nothing more than what I
_have_ told you. I should have preferred to close our conversation on
the simple announcement of my recovered sense of proportion. But you
_have_, I see, got me in too deep."
"O-oh!" I courteously attenuated.
"You've made of me," she lucidly insisted, "too big a talker, too big a
thinker, of nonsense."
"Thank you," I laughed, "for intimating that I trifle so agreeably."
"Oh, _you've_ appeared not to mind! But let me then at last not fail of
the luxury of admitting that _I_ mind. Yes, I mind particularly. I may
be bad, but I've a grain of gumption."
"'Bad'?" It seemed more closely to concern me.
"Bad I may be. In fact," she pursued at this high pitch and pressure,
"there's no doubt whatever I _am_."
"I'm delighted to hear it," I cried, "for it was exactly something
strong I wanted of you!"
"It _is_ then strong"--and I could see indeed she was ready to satisfy
me. "You've worried me for my motive and harassed me for my 'moment,'
and I've had to protect others and, at the cost of a decent appearance,
to pretend to be myself half an idiot. I've had even, for the same
purpose--if you must have it--to depart from the truth; to give you,
that is, a false account of the manner of my escape from your tangle.
But now the truth shall be told, and others can take care of
themselves!" She had so wound herself up with this, reached so the point
of fairly heaving with courage and candour, that I for an instant almost
miscalculated her direction and believed she was really throwing up her
cards. It was as if she had decided, on some still finer lines, just to
rub my nose into what I had been spelling out; which would have been an
anticipation of my own journey's crown of the most disconcerting sort. I
wanted my personal confidence, but I wanted nobody's confession, and
without the journey's crown where _was_ the personal confidence? Without
the personal confidence, moreover, where was the personal honour? That
would be really the single thing to which I could attach authority, for
a confession might, after all, be itself a lie. Anybody, at all events,
could fit the shoe to one. My friend's intention, however, remained but
briefly equivocal; my danger passed, and I recognised in its place a
still richer assurance. It was not the unnamed, in short, who were to be
named. "Lady John _is_ the woman."
Yet even this was prodigious. "But I thought your present position was
just that she's _not_!"
"Lady John _is_ the woman," Mrs. Briss again announced.
"But I thought your present position was just that nobody is!"
"Lady John _is_ the woman," she a third time declared.
It naturally left me gaping. "Then there _is_ one?" I cried between
bewilderment and joy.
"A woman? There's _her_!" Mrs. Briss replied with more force than
grammar. "I know," she briskly, almost breezily added, "that I said she
wouldn't do (as I had originally said she would do better than any one),
when you a while ago mentioned her. But that was to save her."
"And you don't care now," I smiled, "if she's lost!"
She hesitated. "She _is_ lost. But she can take care of herself."
I could but helplessly think of her. "I'm afraid indeed that, with what
you've done with her, _I_ can't take care of her. But why is she now to
the purpose," I articulately wondered, "any more than she was?"
"Why? On the very system you yourself laid down. When we took him for
brilliant, she couldn't be. But now that we see him as he is----"
"We can only see her also as _she_ is?" Well, I tried, as far as my
amusement would permit, so to see her; but still there were
difficulties. "Possibly!" I at most conceded. "Do you owe your
discovery, however, wholly to my system? My system, where so much made
for protection," I explained, "wasn't intended to have the effect of
exposure."
"It appears to have been at all events intended," my companion returned,
"to have the effect of driving me to the wall; and the consequence of
_that_ effect is nobody's fault but your own."
She was all logic now, and I could easily see, between my light and my
darkness, how she would remain so. Yet I was scarce satisfied. "And it's
only on 'that effect'----?"
"That I've made up my mind?" She was positively free at last to enjoy my
discomfort. "Wouldn't it be surely, if your ideas were worth anything,
enough? But it isn't," she added, "only on that. It's on something
else."
I had after an instant extracted from this the single meaning it could
appear to yield. "I'm to understand that you _know_?"
"That they're intimate enough for anything?" She faltered, but she
brought it out. "I know."
It was the oddest thing in the world for a little, the way this
affected me without my at all believing it. It was preposterous, hang
though it would with her somersault, and she had quite succeeded in
giving it the note of sincerity. It was the mere sound of it that, as I
felt even at the time, made it a little of a blow--a blow of the smart
of which I was conscious just long enough inwardly to murmur: "What if
she _should_ be right?" She had for these seconds the advantage of
stirring within me the memory of her having indeed, the day previous, at
Paddington, "known" as I hadn't. It had been really on what she _then_
knew that we originally started, and an element of our start had been
that I admired her freedom. The form of it, at least--so beautifully had
she recovered herself--was all there now. Well, I at any rate reflected,
it wasn't the form that need trouble me, and I quickly enough put her a
question that related only to the matter. "Of course if she is--it _is_
smash!"
"And haven't you yet got used to its being?"
I kept my eyes on her; I traced the buried figure in the ruins. "She's
good enough for a fool; and so"--I made it out--"is he! If he _is_ the
same ass--yes--they _might_ be."
"_And_ he is," said Mrs. Briss, "the same ass!"
I continued to look at her. "He would have no need then of her having
transformed and inspired him."
"Or of her having _de_formed and idiotised herself," my friend
subjoined.
Oh, how it sharpened my look! "No, no--she wouldn't need that."
"The great point is that _he_ wouldn't!" Mrs. Briss laughed.
I kept it up. "She would do perfectly."
Mrs. Briss was not behind. "My dear man, she has _got_ to do!"
This was brisker still, but I held my way. "Almost anyone would do."
It seemed for a little, between humour and sadness, to strike her.
"Almost anyone _would_. Still," she less pensively declared, "we want
the right one."
"Surely; the right one"--I could only echo it. "But how," I then
proceeded, "has it happily been confirmed to you?"
It pulled her up a trifle. "'Confirmed'----?"
"That he's her lover."
My eyes had been meeting hers without, as it were, hers quite meeting
mine. But at this there had to be intercourse. "By my husband."
It pulled _me_ up a trifle. "Brissenden knows?"
She hesitated; then, as if at my tone, gave a laugh. "Don't you suppose
I've told him?"
I really couldn't but admire her. "Ah--so you _have_ talked!"
It didn't confound her. "One's husband isn't talk. You're cruel
moreover," she continued, "to my joke. It was Briss, poor dear, who
talked--though, I mean, only to me. _He_ knows."
I cast about. "Since when?"
But she had it ready. "Since this evening."
Once more I couldn't but smile. "Just in time then! And the _way_ he
knows----?"
"Oh, the way!"--she had at this a slight drop. But she came up again. "I
take his word."
"You haven't then asked him?"
"The beauty of it was--half an hour ago, upstairs--that I _hadn't_ to
ask. He came out with it himself, and _that_--to give you the whole
thing--was, if you like, my moment. He dropped it on me," she continued
to explain, "without in the least, sweet innocent, knowing what he was
doing; more, at least, that is, than give her away."
"Which," I concurred, "was comparatively nothing!"
But she had no ear for irony, and she made out still more of her story.
"He's simple--but he sees."
"And when he sees"--I completed the picture--"he luckily tells."
She quite agreed with me that it was lucky, but without prejudice to his
acuteness and to what had been in him moreover a natural revulsion. "He
has seen, in short; there comes some chance when one does. His, as
luckily as you please, came this evening. If you ask me what it showed
him you ask more than _I've_ either cared or had time to ask. Do you
consider, for that matter"--she put it to me--"that one does ask?" As
her high smoothness--such was the wonder of this reascendancy--almost
deprived me of my means, she was wise and gentle with me. "Let us leave
it alone."
I fairly, while my look at her turned rueful, scratched my head. "Don't
you think it a little late for that?"
"Late for everything!" she impatiently said. "But there you are."
I fixed the floor. There indeed I was. But I tried to stay there--just
there only--as short a time as possible. Something, moreover, after all,
caught me up. "But if Brissenden already knew----?"
"If he knew----?" She still gave me, without prejudice to her
ingenuity--and indeed it was a part of this--all the work she could.
"Why, that Long and Lady John were thick?"
"Ah, then," she cried, "you admit they _are_!"
"Am I not admitting everything you tell me? But the more I admit," I
explained, "the more I must understand. It's _to_ admit, you see, that I
inquire. If Briss came down with Lady John yesterday to oblige Mr.
Long----"
"He didn't come," she interrupted, "to oblige Mr. Long!"
"Well, then, to oblige Lady John herself----"
"He didn't come to oblige Lady John herself!"
"Well, then, to oblige his clever wife----"
"He didn't come to oblige his clever wife! He came," said Mrs. Briss,
"just to amuse himself. He _has_ his amusements, and it's odd," she
remarkably laughed, "that you should grudge them to him!"
"It would be odd indeed if I did! But put his proceeding," I continued,
"on any ground you like; you described to me the purpose of it as a
screening of the pair."
"I described to you the purpose of it as nothing of the sort. I didn't
describe to you the purpose of it," said Mrs. Briss, "at all. I
described to you," she triumphantly set forth, "the _effect_ of
it--which is a very different thing."
I could only meet her with admiration. "You're of an astuteness----!"
"Of course I'm of an astuteness! I _see_ effects. And I saw that one.
How much Briss himself had seen it is, as I've told you, another matter;
and what he had, at any rate, quite taken the affair for was the sort of
flirtation in which, if one is a friend to either party, and one's own
feelings are not at stake, one may now and then give people a lift.
Haven't I asked you before," she demanded, "if you suppose he would have
given one had he had an idea where these people _are_?"
"I scarce know what you have asked me before!" I sighed; "and 'where
they are' is just what you haven't told me."
"It's where my husband was so annoyed unmistakably to discover them."
And as if she had quite fixed the point she passed to another. "He's
peculiar, dear old Briss, but in a way by which, if one uses him--by
which, I mean, if one depends on him--at all, one gains, I think, more
than one loses. Up to a certain point, in any case that's the least a
case for subtlety, he sees nothing at all; but beyond it--when once he
does wake up--he'll go through a house. Nothing then escapes him, and
what he drags to light is sometimes appalling."
"Rather," I thoughtfully responded--"since witness this occasion!"
"But isn't the interest of this occasion, as I've already suggested,"
she propounded, "simply that it makes an end, bursts a bubble, rids us
of an incubus and permits us to go to bed in peace? I thank God," she
moralised, "for dear old Briss to-night."
"So do I," I after a moment returned; "but I shall do so with still
greater fervour if you'll have for the space of another question a still
greater patience." With which, as a final movement from her seemed to
say how much this was to ask, I had on my own side a certain
exasperation of soreness for all I had to acknowledge--even were it mere
acknowledgment--that she had brought rattling down. "Remember," I
pleaded, "that you're costing me a perfect palace of thought!"
I could see too that, held unexpectedly by something in my tone, she
really took it in. Couldn't I even almost see that, for an odd instant,
she regretted the blighted pleasure of the pursuit of truth with me? I
needed, at all events, no better proof either of the sweet or of the
bitter in her comprehension than the accent with which she replied: "Oh,
those who live in glass houses----"
"Shouldn't--no, I know they shouldn't--throw stones; and that's
precisely why I don't." I had taken her immediately up, and I held her
by it and by something better still. "You, from your fortress of
granite, can chuck them about as you will! All the more reason,
however," I quickly added, "that, before my frail, but, as I maintain,
quite sublime structure, you honour me, for a few seconds, with an
intelligent look at it. I seem myself to see it again, perfect in every
part," I pursued, "even while I thus speak to you, and to feel afresh
that, weren't the wretched accident of its weak foundation, it wouldn't
have the shadow of a flaw. I've spoken of it in my conceivable regret,"
I conceded, "as already a mere heap of disfigured fragments; but that
was the extravagance of my vexation, my despair. It's in point of fact
so beautifully fitted that it comes apart piece by piece--which, so far
as that goes, you've seen it do in the last quarter of an hour at your
own touch, quite handing me the pieces, one by one, yourself and
watching me stack them along the ground. They're not even in this
state--see!" I wound up--"a pile of ruins!" I wound up, as I say, but
only for long enough to have, with the vibration, the exaltation, of my
eloquence, my small triumph as against her great one. "I should almost
like, piece by piece, to hand them back to you." And this time I
completed my figure. "I believe that, for the very charm of it, you'd
find yourself placing them by your own sense in their order and rearing
once more the splendid pile. Will you take just _one_ of them from me
again," I insisted, "and let me see if only to have it in your hands
doesn't positively start you off? That's what I meant just now by asking
you for another answer." She had remained silent, as if really in the
presence of the rising magnificence of my metaphor, and it was not too
late for the one chance left me. "There was nothing, you know, I had so
fitted as your account of poor Mrs. Server when, on our seeing them,
from the terrace, together below, you struck off your explanation that
old Briss was _her_ screen for Long."
"Fitted?"--and there was sincerity in her surprise. "I thought my stupid
idea the one for which you had exactly no use!"
"I had no use," I instantly concurred, "for your stupid idea, but I had
great use for your stupidly, alas! having it. _That_ fitted
beautifully," I smiled, "till the piece came out. And even now," I
added, "I don't feel it quite accounted for."
"Their being there together?"
"No. Your not liking it that they were."
She stared. "Not liking it?"
I could see how little indeed she minded now, but I also kept the thread
of my own intellectual history. "Yes. Your not liking it is what I speak
of as the piece. I hold it, you see, up before you. What, artistically,
would you do with it?"
But one might take a horse to water----! I held it up before her, but I
couldn't make her look at it. "How do you know what I mayn't, or may,
have liked?"
It did bring me to. "Because you were conscious of not telling me? Well,
even if you didn't----!"
"That made no difference," she inquired with a generous derision,
"because you could always imagine? Of course you could always
imagine--which is precisely what is the matter with you! But I'm
surprised at your coming to me with it once more as evidence of
anything."
I stood rebuked, and even more so than I showed her, for she need,
obviously, only decline to take one of my counters to deprive it of all
value as coin. When she pushed it across I had but to pocket it again.
"It _is_ the weakness of my case," I feebly and I daresay awkwardly
mused at her, "that any particular thing you don't grant me becomes
straightway the strength of yours. Of course, however"--and I gave
myself a shake--"I'm absolutely rejoicing (am I not?) in the strength of
yours. The weakness of my own is what, under your instruction, I'm now
going into; but don't you see how much weaker it will show if I draw
from you the full expression of your indifference? How _could_ you in
fact care when what you were at the very moment urging on me so hard was
the extravagance of Mrs. Server's conduct? That extravagance then proved
her, to your eyes, the woman who had a connection with Long to keep the
world off the scent of--though you maintained that in spite of the dust
she kicked up by it she was, at a pinch, now and then to be caught with
him. That instead of being caught with him she was caught only with
Brissenden annoyed you naturally for the moment; but what was that
annoyance compared to your appreciation of her showing--by undertaking
your husband, of all people!--just the more markedly _as_ extravagant?"
She had been sufficiently interested this time to follow me. "What was
it indeed?"
I greeted her acquiescence, but I insisted. "And yet if she _is_
extravagant--what do you do with it?"
"I thought you wouldn't hear of it!" she exclaimed.
I sought to combine firmness with my mildness. "What do you do with it?"
But she could match me at this. "I thought you wouldn't hear of it!"
"It's not a question of _my_ dispositions. It's a question of her having
been, or not been, for you 'all over the place,' and of everyone's also
being, for you, on the chatter about it. You go by that in respect to
Long--by your holding, that is, that nothing has been noticed; therefore
mustn't you go by it in respect to _her_--since I understand from you
that everything has?"
"Everything always is," Mrs. Briss agreeably replied, "in a place and a
party like this; but so little--anything in particular--that, with
people moving 'every which' way, it comes to the same as if nothing was.
Things are not, also, gouged out to _your_ tune, and it depends, still
further, on what you mean by 'extravagant.'"
"I mean whatever you yourself meant."
"Well, I myself mean no longer, you know, what I did mean."
"She isn't then----?"
But suddenly she was almost sharp with me. "Isn't what?"
"What the woman we so earnestly looked for would have to be."
"All gone?" She had hesitated, but she went on with decision. "No, she
isn't all gone, since there was enough of her left to make up to poor
Briss."
"Precisely--and it's just what we saw, and just what, with her other
dashes of the same sort, led us to have to face the question of her
being--well, what I say. Or rather," I added, "what _you_ say. That is,"
I amended, to keep perfectly straight, "what you say you _don't_ say."
I took indeed too many precautions for my friend not to have to look at
them. "Extravagant?" The irritation of the word had grown for her, yet I
risked repeating it, and with the effect of its giving her another
pause. "I tell you she _isn't_, that!"
"Exactly; and it's only to ask you what in the world then she _is_."
"She's horrid!" said Mrs. Briss.
"'Horrid'?" I gloomily echoed.
"Horrid. It wasn't," she then developed with decision, "a 'dash,' as you
say, 'of the same sort'--though goodness knows of what sort you mean; it
wasn't, to be plain, a 'dash' at all." My companion _was_ plain. "She
settled. She stuck." And finally, as I could but echo her again: "She
made love to him."
"But--a--really?"
"Really. That's how I knew."
I was at sea. "'Knew'? But you saw."
"I knew--that is I learnt--more than I saw. I knew she couldn't be
gone."
It in fact brought light. "Knew it by _him_?"
"He told me," said Mrs. Briss.
It brought light, but it brought also, I fear, for me, another queer
grimace. "Does he then regularly tell?"
"Regularly. But what he tells," she did herself the justice to declare,
"is not always so much to the point as the two things I've repeated to
you."
Their weight then suggested that I should have them over again. "His
revelation, in the first place, of Long and Lady John?"
"And his revelation in the second"--she spoke of it as a broad joke--"of
May Server and himself."
There was something in her joke that was a chill to my mind; but I
nevertheless played up. "And what does he say that's further interesting
about _that_?"
"Why, that she's awfully sharp."
I gasped--she turned it out so. "_She_--Mrs. Server?"
It made her, however, equally stare. "Why, isn't it the very thing you
maintained?"
I felt her dreadful logic, but I couldn't--with my exquisite image all
contrasted, as in a flash from flint, with this monstrosity--so much as
entertain her question. I could only stupidly again sound it. "Awfully
sharp?"
"You after all then now don't?" It was she herself whom the words at
present described! "Then what on earth _do_ you think?" The strange
mixture in my face naturally made her ask it, but everything, within a
minute, had somehow so given way under the touch of her supreme
assurance, the presentation of her own now finished system, that I dare
say I couldn't at the moment have in the least trusted myself to tell
her. She left me, however, in fact, small time--she only took enough,
with her negations arrayed and her insolence recaptured, to judge me
afresh, which she did as she gathered herself up into the strength of
twenty-five. I didn't after all--it appeared part of my smash--know the
weight of her husband's years, but I knew the weight of my own. They
might have been a thousand, and nothing but the sense of them would in a
moment, I saw, be left me. "My poor dear, you _are_ crazy, and I bid you
good-night!"
Nothing but the sense of them--on my taking it from her without a sound
and watching her, through the lighted rooms, retreat and
disappear--_was_ at first left me; but after a minute something else
came, and I grew conscious that her verdict lingered. She had so had the
last word that, to get out of its planted presence, I shook myself, as I
had done before, from my thought. When once I had started to my room
indeed--and to preparation for a livelier start as soon as the house
should stir again--I almost breathlessly hurried. Such a last word--the
word that put me altogether nowhere--was too unacceptable not to
prescribe afresh that prompt test of escape to other air for which I had
earlier in the evening seen so much reason. I _should_ certainly never
again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn't really
that I hadn't three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her
tone.
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
insistance=>insistence
openely=>openly
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