The day was as fine and the scene as fair at Newmarch as the party was
numerous and various; and my memory associates with the rest of the long
afternoon many renewals of acquaintance and much sitting and strolling,
for snatches of talk, in the long shade of great trees and through the
straight walks of old gardens. A couple of hours thus passed, and fresh
accessions enriched the picture. There were persons I was curious of--of
Lady John, for instance, of whom I promised myself an early view; but we
were apt to be carried away in currents that reflected new images and
sufficiently beguiled impatience. I recover, all the same, a full
sequence of impressions, each of which, I afterwards saw, had been
appointed to help all the others. If my anecdote, as I have mentioned,
had begun, at Paddington, at a particular moment, it gathered substance
step by step and without missing a link. The links, in fact, should I
count them all, would make too long a chain. They formed, nevertheless,
the happiest little chapter of accidents, though a series of which I can
scarce give more than the general effect.
One of the first accidents was that, before dinner, I met Ford Obert
wandering a little apart with Mrs. Server, and that, as they were known
to me as agreeable acquaintances, I should have faced them with
confidence had I not immediately drawn from their sequestered air the
fear of interrupting them. Mrs. Server was always lovely and Obert
always expert; the latter straightway pulled up, however, making me as
welcome as if their converse had dropped. She was extraordinarily
pretty, markedly responsive, conspicuously charming, but he gave me a
look that really seemed to say: "Don't--there's a good fellow--leave me
any longer alone with her!" I had met her at Newmarch before--it was
indeed only so that I had met her--and I knew how she was valued there.
I also knew that an aversion to pretty women--numbers of whom he had
preserved for a grateful posterity--was his sign neither as man nor as
artist; the effect of all of which was to make me ask myself what she
could have been doing to him. Making love, possibly--yet from that he
would scarce have appealed. She wouldn't, on the other hand, have given
him her company only to be inhuman. I joined them, at all events,
learning from Mrs. Server that she had come by a train previous to my
own; and we made a slow trio till, at a turn of the prospect, we came
upon another group. It consisted of Mrs. Froome and Lord Lutley and of
Gilbert Long and Lady John--mingled and confounded, as might be said,
not assorted according to tradition. Long and Mrs. Froome came first, I
recollect, together, and his lordship turned away from Lady John on
seeing me rather directly approach her. She had become for me, on the
spot, as interesting as, while we travelled, I had found my two friends
in the train. As the source of the flow of "intellect" that had
transmuted our young man, she had every claim to an earnest attention;
and I should soon have been ready to pronounce that she rewarded it as
richly as usual. She was indeed, as Mrs. Briss had said, as pointed as a
hat-pin, and I bore in mind that lady's injunction to look in her for
the answer to our riddle.
The riddle, I may mention, sounded afresh to my ear in Gilbert Long's
gay voice; it hovered there--before me, beside, behind me, as we all
paused--in his light, restless step, a nervous animation that seemed to
multiply his presence. He became really, for the moment, under this
impression, the thing I was most conscious of; I heard him, I felt him
even while I exchanged greetings with the sorceress by whose wand he had
been touched. To be touched myself was doubtless not quite what I
wanted; yet I wanted, distinctly, a glimpse; so that, with the smart
welcome Lady John gave me, I might certainly have felt that I was on the
way to get it. The note of Long's predominance deepened during these
minutes in a manner I can't describe, and I continued to feel that
though we pretended to talk it was to him only we listened. He had us
all in hand; he controlled for the moment all our attention and our
relations. He was in short, as a consequence of our attitude, in
possession of the scene to a tune he couldn't have dreamed of a year or
two before--inasmuch as at that period he could have figured at no such
eminence without making a fool of himself. And the great thing was that
if his eminence was now so perfectly graced he yet knew less than any of
us what was the matter with him. He was unconscious of how he had "come
out"--which was exactly what sharpened my wonder. Lady John, on her
side, was thoroughly conscious, and I had a fancy that she looked at me
to measure how far _I_ was. I cared, naturally, not in the least what
she guessed; her interest for me was all in the operation of her
influence. I am afraid I watched to catch it in the act--watched her
with a curiosity of which she might well have become aware.
What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so
successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when
people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other--that a
great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side a sufficient
show of tell-tale traces. But for Long to have been so stamped as I
found him, how the pliant wax must have been prepared and the seal of
passion applied! What an affection the woman working such a change in
him must have managed to create as a preface to her influence! With what
a sense of her charm she must have paved the way for it! Strangely
enough, however--it was even rather irritating--there was nothing more
than usual in Lady John to assist my view of the height at which the
pair so evoked must move. These things--the way other people could feel
about each other, the power not one's self, in the given instance, that
made for passion--were of course at best the mystery of mysteries;
still, there were cases in which fancy, sounding the depths or the
shallows, could at least drop the lead. Lady John, perceptibly, was no
such case; imagination, in her presence, was but the weak wing of the
insect that bumps against the glass. She was pretty, prompt, hard, and,
in a way that was special to her, a mistress at once of "culture" and of
slang. She was like a hat--with one of Mrs. Briss's hat-pins--askew on
the bust of Virgil. Her ornamental information--as strong as a coat of
furniture-polish--almost knocked you down. What I felt in her now more
than ever was that, having a reputation for "point" to keep up, she was
always under arms, with absences and anxieties like those of a celebrity
at a public dinner. She thought too much of her "speech"--of how soon it
would have to come. It was none the less wonderful, however, that, as
Grace Brissenden had said, she should still find herself with intellect
to spare--have lavished herself by precept and example on Long and yet
have remained for each other interlocutor as fresh as the clown bounding
into the ring. She cracked, for my benefit, as many jokes and turned as
many somersaults as might have been expected; after which I thought it
fair to let her off. We all faced again to the house, for dressing and
dinner were in sight.
I found myself once more, as we moved, with Mrs. Server, and I remember
rejoicing that, sympathetic as she showed herself, she didn't think it
necessary to be, like Lady John, always "ready." She was delightfully
handsome--handsomer than ever; slim, fair, fine, with charming pale eyes
and splendid auburn hair. I said to myself that I hadn't done her
justice; she hadn't organised her forces, was a little helpless and
vague, but there was ease for the weary in her happy nature and her
peculiar grace. These last were articles on which, five minutes later,
before the house, where we still had a margin, I was moved to challenge
Ford Obert.
"What was the matter just now--when, though you were so fortunately
occupied, you yet seemed to call me to the rescue?"
"Oh," he laughed, "I was only occupied in being frightened!"
"But at what?"
"Well, at a sort of sense that she wanted to make love to me."