"I see." But there was so much!
"Did you think Iwas?" 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, everythingbutyou."
"Oh, I've watchedyou," 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'vejudged me baffled? I'm afraid," I almost as quickly added, "that I must admit Ihavebeen. Luckily, at all events, itisnone 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?"
"Ishe 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 wemust do without his identity. What, in fact, are we showing each other," I asked, "but that wehavedone without it?"
"Ihave!" 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. "Shehasgiven 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"—hewouldcome 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—nothingwould 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 youcallthe '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 doyou——?"
But I was determined to make him give it meall 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 youcanhave 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 havebeenthe man, the mannow, 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 muchpoor 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 bythatirrepressible 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 hopethe 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.Istood 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 toyou. 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 failhumanly 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'?Whatdo 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 consciousnessof them. "He looks a hundred years old!"
"Oh, but you should see his shoulders, always, as he goes off!Twocenturies—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. "Ishall."
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 withher—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 eventhen 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 tellme. 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 sheshouldbe—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 ortwo after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Thingshad, 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 theone 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 hewasall 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 hewasstill hiding it andwaskeeping 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?" Thiswas 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'tknow, 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 itis, at all events, remarkably late, that'sherfault."
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'sshe—don't you see?—who proposes."
"But what in the world——?"
"Oh,thatI 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 youdon'tknow 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 totellyou?"
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 fewseconds 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 hewon'thave been!"
He looked vague. "Ah, butthat——"
"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.
Iwent 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 shehad"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 attitudeand 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 somethingby 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,thething, 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 Itell 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 forthatto have taken. However, what I clutched at, whatI clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for whichshemight 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. Wehad, 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 wasinthe mysticcircle—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 funnyhouse, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyonehasgone to bed. One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, andIdo!" 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 riskin 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 keptit 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, tos'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!"Shehad 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 quitesee why, in your different way,youshould; 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 Icouldcandidly 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 whatyousaw. 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 elementcouldbe 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 toher 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 onewouldhave 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 toherthat there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made. How then was I to pretend to Mrs. Briss, and what factshadI 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 performedthis 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'syouwho'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 withanydoubt. 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, youhaven'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 whois?"
"Oh, I don't make out, you know," she laughed, "so much as you!Sheisn'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—itshouldhave 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 declaredas 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 feltthen," 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, leavingmy 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 ofyours. 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 thesort 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. Wherewasenjoyment, 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 mymind 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 theententebetween Mrs. Server's lover and poor Briss's wife, and the finer strength it gave the last-namedas 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. Itisawfully 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 suddenlycame 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?—youweren'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'tlight 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,isthe 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—amistake, 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 mewith 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 itwithyou. 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'vehappened, 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 tocareto help me," I pursued, "that's a difference indeed. But why," I candidly, pleadingly asked, "shouldyou 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 withhim. "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 whatyousaw. 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 thinkyoualways 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. "Longisn'twhat he seems?"
"Seems to whom?" she asked sturdily.
"Well, call it—for simplicity—tome. For you see"—and I spoke as to showwhatit 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 bythat, 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, acomparative 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 toyou. 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 Inot, 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?"
Ihad 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 hadyou?"
"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 memywarrant. And as regards Mr. Long and your speaking againsthim——"
"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."
"Butyou, dear lady, sacrificed poor May! It didn't strike you as horridthen."
"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 toyou."
"Yes—I wasn't imputing to you the same direct appeal. I didn't suppose," she explained, "that—to match your own supposition ofme—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 frightenanyone. 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 itwasshe."
"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 moreyouthought."
"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 theleastagree 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 Idon't insist on the name. Nothingis, 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 fewminutes, 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 muchsheknew 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 couldnotbut 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 havekept, 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; Icould, 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.