"What has anything, then?"
"She's too beastly unhappy."
"But isn't that just one's advantage?"
"No. It's uncanny." And he escaped.
The question had at all events brought us indoors and so far up our
staircase as to where it branched towards Obert's room. I followed it to
my corridor, with which other occasions had made me acquainted, and I
reached the door on which I expected to find my card of designation.
This door, however, was open, so as to show me, in momentary possession
of the room, a gentleman, unknown to me, who, in unguided quest of his
quarters, appeared to have arrived from the other end of the passage. He
had just seen, as the property of another, my unpacked things, with
which he immediately connected me. He moreover, to my surprise, on my
entering, sounded my name, in response to which I could only at first
remain blank. It was in fact not till I had begun to help him place
himself that, correcting my blankness, I knew him for Guy Brissenden. He
had been put by himself, for some reason, in the bachelor wing and,
exploring at hazard, had mistaken the signs. By the time we found his
servant and his lodging I had reflected on the oddity of my having been
as stupid about the husband as I had been about the wife. He had escaped
my notice since our arrival, but I had, as a much older man, met
him--the hero of his odd union--at some earlier time. Like his wife,
none the less, he had now struck me as a stranger, and it was not till,
in his room, I stood a little face to face with him that I made out the
wonderful reason.
The wonderful reason was that I was _not_ a much older man; Guy
Brissenden, at any rate, was not a much younger. It was he who was
old--it was he who was older--it was he who was oldest. That was so
disconcertingly what he had become. It was in short what he would have
been had he been as old as he looked. He looked almost anything--he
looked quite sixty. I made it out again at dinner, where, from a
distance, but opposite, I had him in sight. Nothing could have been
stranger than the way that, fatigued, fixed, settled, he seemed to have
piled up the years. They were there without having had time to arrive.
It was as if he had discovered some miraculous short cut to the common
doom. He had grown old, in fine, as people you see after an interval
sometimes strike you as having grown rich--too quickly for the honest,
or at least for the straight, way. He had cheated or inherited or
speculated. It took me but a minute then to add him to my little
gallery--the small collection, I mean, represented by his wife and by
Gilbert Long, as well as in some degree doubtless also by Lady John: the
museum of those who put to me with such intensity the question of what
had happened to them. His wife, on the same side, was not out of my
range, and now, largely exposed, lighted, jewelled, and enjoying
moreover visibly the sense of these things--his wife, upon my honour, as
I soon remarked to the lady next me, his wife (it was too prodigious!)
looked about twenty.
"Yes--isn't it funny?" said the lady next me.
It was so funny that it set me thinking afresh and that, with the
interest of it, which became a positive excitement, I had to keep myself
in hand in order not too publicly to explain, not to break out right and
left with my reflections. I don't know why--it was a sense instinctive
and unreasoned, but I felt from the first that if I was on the scent of
something ultimate I had better waste neither my wonder nor my wisdom.
I _was_ on the scent--that I was sure of; and yet even after I was sure
I should still have been at a loss to put my enigma itself into words. I
was just conscious, vaguely, of being on the track of a law, a law that
would fit, that would strike me as governing the delicate
phenomena--delicate though so marked--that my imagination found itself
playing with. A part of the amusement they yielded came, I daresay, from
my exaggerating them--grouping them into a larger mystery (and thereby a
larger "law") than the facts, as observed, yet warranted; but that is
the common fault of minds for which the vision of life is an obsession.
The obsession pays, if one will; but to pay it has to borrow. After
dinner, but while the men were still in the room, I had some talk again
with Long, of whom I inquired if he had been so placed as to see "poor
Briss."
He appeared to wonder, and poor Briss, with our shifting of seats, was
now at a distance. "I think so--but I didn't particularly notice. What's
the matter with poor Briss?"
"That's exactly what I thought you might be able to tell me. But if
nothing, in him, strikes you----!"