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 woulddonothing; and it was exactly in this question of how much I might have scared my couple into the sense Icould"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, duringmy 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 ofone. 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 indeedthan 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, sinceyou'vedone 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 stepsyou'vetrod. 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 whatImay 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 havenotseparated. 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 circusmay 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 itcanbe so for you if youareinsane."
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 isone'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 Ishouldhave 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 onlyfromyou," I explained. "And of course—yes," I mused, "I've got it. If Iamcrazy," 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'mnot." 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'sjust what you've not told me. The reason of your change——"
"I'm not speaking," she broke in, "of my change."
"Ah, butIam!" 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 crazywithme; 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 whenyoulike. 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. "Youwon'thelp 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—"ofthat?"
"You would if youwerehonest."
"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 inyourhonesty? If you can judge me, in short, as only pretending——"
"Why shouldn't you," she put in for me, "also judgeme? What have I to gain by pretending?"
"I'll tell you," I returned, laughing, "if you'll tell me whatIhave."
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 youcanleave 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 itever?" 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 figuresisn't'ever' perfectly simple. You doubtlesshavedriven 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 methis. Was the moment your change of view dawned upon youthe 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.Wasit? Was itthesituation?"
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.Wasthis '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, tobegin; 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—youneverhad my sympathy."
"Is my person then so irresistible?"
Well, she was brave. "Itwas. 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 wasmy 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."
"Hatedme?"
"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, youwere—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 ofmymoments; so that, by the same token, I simply wondered if it mightn't likewise have happened to be one of yours."
"Itwasone 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 thenalreadybacked out.Won'tyou 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 cannow?"
"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 ofhim."
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 towhat?"
"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. "Hewas."
"Heis!"
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, thoughtmea 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. "Ithought 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 thanhedoes."
"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 asnothing 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.Howdeep 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. Thesharpest 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—shallyougive 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 manœuvres, 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 indeedmore 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 savethem. 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!"
Ihad 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 thatIdo; 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 Longisjust what he always was it settles the matter, and the special clincher for us can be but your honest finalimpression, 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 theyhaveno 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 tomethey might have spoken—or to each other."
"But I thought you exactly held theyhadchattered 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 inventedher? 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'vepressed 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 Ihavetold you. I should have preferred to close our conversation on the simple announcement of my recovered sense of proportion. But youhave, 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'veappeared not to mind! But let me then at last not fail of the luxury of admitting thatImind. 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 Iam."
"I'm delighted to hear it," I cried, "for it was exactly something strong I wanted of you!"
"Itisthen 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 wherewasthe 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 Johnisthe woman."
Yet even this was prodigious. "But I thought your present position was just that she'snot!"
"Lady Johnisthe woman," Mrs. Briss again announced.
"But I thought your present position was just that nobody is!"
"Lady Johnisthe woman," she a third time declared.
It naturally left me gaping. "Then thereisone?" I cried between bewilderment and joy.
"A woman? There'sher!" 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. "Sheislost. 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,Ican'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 assheis?" 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 ofthateffect 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 youknow?"
"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 sheshouldbe 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 shethenknew 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—itissmash!"
"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 heisthe same ass—yes—theymightbe."
"Andhe 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 havingdeformed and idiotised herself," my friend subjoined.
Oh, how it sharpened my look! "No, no—she wouldn't need that."
"The great point is thathewouldn't!" Mrs. Briss laughed.
I kept it up. "She would do perfectly."
Mrs. Briss was not behind. "My dear man, she hasgotto 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 anyonewould. 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 pulledmeup 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 youhavetalked!"
It didn't confound her. "One's husband isn'ttalk. You're cruel moreover," she continued, "to my joke. It was Briss, poor dear, who talked—though, I mean, only to me.Heknows."
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 thewayhe 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 Ihadn'tto ask. He came out with it himself, andthat—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 thisevening. If you ask me what it showed him you ask more thanI'veeither 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 theyare!"
"Am I not admitting everything you tell me? But the more I admit," I explained, "the more I must understand. It'stoadmit, 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. Hehashis 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, "theeffectof 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! Iseeeffects. 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 peopleare?"
"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 rattlingdown. "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 hourat 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 justoneof 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 washerscreen 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.Thatfitted 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. "Itisthe weakness of my case," I feeblyand 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? Howcouldyou 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 markedlyasextravagant?"
She had been sufficiently interested this time to follow me. "What was it indeed?"
I greeted her acquiescence, but I insisted. "And yet if sheisextravagant—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 ofmydispositions. 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 toher—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 toyourtune, 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, sincethere 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, "whatyousay. That is," I amended, to keep perfectly straight, "what you say youdon'tsay."
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 sheisn't, that!"
"Exactly; and it's only to ask you what in the world then sheis."
"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 companionwasplain. "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 byhim?"
"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 aboutthat?"
"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 sheherself whom the words at present described! "Then what on earthdoyou 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, youarecrazy, 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—wasat 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—Ialmost 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. Ishouldcertainly 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=>insistenceopenely=>openly