It was answer enough for the moment, and the manner of it showed me to
what legend she was committed. I asked myself, while the two men faced
about to meet us, why she was committed to it, and I further considered
that if Grace Brissenden, against every appearance, was right, there
would now be something for me to see. Which of the two--the agent or the
object of the sacrifice--would take most precautions? I kept my
companion purposely, for a little while, on our side of the room,
leaving the others, interested in their observations, to take their time
to join us. It gave me occasion to wonder if the question mightn't be
cleared up on the spot. There _was_ no question, I had compunctiously
made up my mind, for Mrs. Server; but now I should see the proof of that
conclusion. The proof of it would be, between her and her imputed lover,
the absence of anything that was not perfectly natural. Mrs. Server,
with her eyes raised to the painted dome, with response charmed almost
to solemnity in her exquisite face, struck me at this moment, I had to
concede, as more than ever a person to have a lover imputed. The place,
save for its pictures of later date, a triumph of the florid decoration
of two centuries ago, evidently met her special taste, and a kind of
profane piety had dropped on her, drizzling down, in the cold light, in
silver, in crystal, in faint, mixed delicacies of colour, almost as on a
pilgrim at a shrine. I don't know what it was in her--save, that is, the
positive pitch of delicacy in her beauty--that made her, so impressed
and presented, indescribably touching. She was like an awestruck child;
she might have been herself--all Greuze tints, all pale pinks and blues
and pearly whites and candid eyes--an old dead pastel under glass.
She was not too reduced to this state, however, not to take, soon
enough, her own precaution--if a precaution it was to be deemed. I was
acutely conscious that the naturalness to which I have just alluded
would be, for either party, the only precaution worth speaking of. We
moved slowly round the room, pausing here and there for curiosity;
during which time the two men remained where we had found them. She had
begun at last to watch them and had proposed that we should see in what
they were so absorbed; but I checked her in the movement, raising my
hand in a friendly admonition to wait. We waited then, face to face,
looking at each other as if to catch a strain of music. This was what I
had intended, for it had just come to me that one of the voices was in
the air and that it had imposed close attention. The distinguished
painter listened while--to all appearance--Gilbert Long did, in the
presence of the picture, the explaining. Ford Obert moved, after a
little, but not so as to interrupt--only so as to show me his face in a
recall of what had passed between us the night before in the
smoking-room. I turned my eyes from Mrs. Server's; I allowed myself to
commune a little, across the shining space, with those of our
fellow-auditor. The occasion had thus for a minute the oddest little air
of an aesthetic lecture prompted by accidental, but immense, suggestions
and delivered by Gilbert Long.
I couldn't, at the distance, with my companion, quite follow it, but
Obert was clearly patient enough to betray that he was struck. His
impression was at any rate doubtless his share of surprise at Long's
gift of talk. This was what his eyes indeed most seemed to throw over
to me--"What an unexpected demon of a critic!" It was extraordinarily
interesting--I don't mean the special drift of Long's eloquence, which I
couldn't, as I say, catch; but the phenomenon of his, of all people,
dealing in that article. It put before me the question of whether, in
these strange relations that I believed I had thus got my glimpse of,
the action of the person "sacrificed" mightn't be quite out of
proportion to the resources of that person. It was as if these elements
might really multiply in the transfer made of them; as if the borrower
practically found himself--or herself--in possession of a greater sum
than the known property of the creditor. The surrender, in this way,
added, by pure beauty, to the thing surrendered. We all know the French
adage about that _plus belle fille du monde_ who can give but what she
has; yet if Mrs. Server, for instance, _had_ been the heroine of this
particular connection, the communication of her intelligence to her
friend would quite have falsified it. She would have given much more
than she had.
When Long had finished his demonstration and his charged voice had
dropped, we crossed to claim acquaintance with the work that had
inspired him. The place had not been completely new to Mrs. Server any
more than to myself, and the impression now made on her was but the
intenser vibration of a chord already stirred; nevertheless I was
struck with her saying, as a result of more remembrance than I had
attributed to her "Oh yes,--the man with the mask in his hand!" On our
joining the others I expressed regret at our having turned up too late
for the ideas that, on a theme so promising, they would have been sure
to produce, and Obert, quite agreeing that we had lost a treat, said
frankly, in reference to Long, but addressing himself more especially to
Mrs. Server: "He's perfectly amazing, you know--he's perfectly amazing!"
I observed that as a consequence of this Long looked neither at Mrs.
Server nor at Obert; he looked only at me, and with quite a penetrable
shade of shyness. Then again a strange thing happened, a stranger thing
even than my quick sense, the previous afternoon at the station, that he
was a changed man. It was as if he were still more changed--had altered
as much since the evening before as during the so much longer interval
of which I had originally to take account. He had altered almost like
Grace Brissenden--he looked fairly distinguished. I said to myself that,
without his stature and certain signs in his dress, I should probably
not have placed him. Engrossed an instant with this view and with not
losing touch of the uneasiness that I conceived I had fastened on him, I
became aware only after she had spoken that Mrs. Server had gaily and
gracefully asked of Obert why in the world so clever a man should _not_
have been clever. "Obert," I accordingly took upon myself to remark,
"had evidently laboured under some extraordinary delusion. He must
literally have doubted if Long _was_ clever."
"Fancy!" Mrs. Server explained with a charming smile at Long, who, still
looking pleasantly competent and not too fatuous, amiably returned it.
"They're natural, they're natural," I privately reflected; "that is,
he's natural to _her_, but he's not so to me." And as if seeing depths
in this, and to try it, I appealed to him. "Do, my dear man, let us have
it again. It's the picture, of all pictures, that most needs an
interpreter. _Don't_ we want," I asked of Mrs. Server, "to know what it
means?" The figure represented is a young man in black--a quaint, tight
black dress, fashioned in years long past; with a pale, lean, livid face
and a stare, from eyes without eyebrows, like that of some whitened
old-world clown. In his hand he holds an object that strikes the
spectator at first simply as some obscure, some ambiguous work of art,
but that on a second view becomes a representation of a human face,
modelled and coloured, in wax, in enamelled metal, in some substance not
human. The object thus appears a complete mask, such as might have been
fantastically fitted and worn.
"Yes, what in the world does it mean?" Mrs. Server replied. "One could
call it--though that doesn't get one much further--the Mask of Death."
"Why so?" I demanded while we all again looked at the picture. "Isn't it
much rather the Mask of Life? It's the man's own face that's Death. The
other one, blooming and beautiful----"
"Ah, but with an awful grimace!" Mrs. Server broke in.
"The other one, blooming and beautiful," I repeated, "is Life, and he's
going to put it on; unless indeed he has just taken it off."
"He's dreadful, he's awful--that's what I mean," said Mrs. Server. "But
what does Mr. Long think?"
"The artificial face, on the other hand," I went on, as Long now said
nothing, "is extremely studied and, when you carefully look at it,
charmingly pretty. I don't see the grimace."
"I don't see anything else!" Mrs. Server good-humouredly insisted. "And
what does Mr. Obert think?"
He kept his eyes on her a moment before replying. "He thinks it looks
like a lovely lady."
"That grinning mask? What lovely lady?"
"It does," I declared to him, really seeing what he meant--"it does look
remarkably like Mrs. Server."
She laughed, but forgivingly. "I'm immensely obliged. You deserve," she
continued to me, "that I should say the gentleman's own face is the
image of a certain other gentleman's."
"It isn't the image of yours," Obert said to me, fitting the cap, "but
it's a funny thing that it should really recall to one some face among
us here, on this occasion--I mean some face in our party--that I can't
think of." We had our eyes again on the ominous figure. "We've seen him
yesterday--we've seen him already this morning." Obert, oddly enough,
still couldn't catch it. "Who the deuce is it?"
"I know," I returned after a moment--our friend's reference having
again, in a flash, become illuminating. "But nothing would induce me to
tell."
"If _I_ were the flattered individual," Long observed, speaking for the
first time, "I've an idea that you'd give me the benefit of the
compliment. Therefore it's probably not me."
"Oh, it's not you in the least," Mrs. Server blandly took upon herself
to observe. "This face is so bad----"
"And mine is so good?" our companion laughed. "Thank you for saving me!"
I watched them look at each other, for there had been as yet between
them no complete exchange. Yes, they were natural. I couldn't have made
it out that they were not. But there was something, all the same, that
I wanted to know, and I put it immediately to Long. "Why do you bring
against me such an accusation?"
He met the question--singularly enough--as if his readiness had suddenly
deserted him. "I don't know!"--and he turned off to another picture.
It left the three of us all the more confronted with the conundrum
launched by Obert, and Mrs. Server's curiosity remained. "_Do_ name,"
she said to me, "the flattered individual."
"No, it's a responsibility I leave to Obert."
But he was clearly still at fault; he was like a man desiring, but
unable, to sneeze. "I see the fellow--yet I don't. Never mind." He
turned away too. "He'll come to me."
"The resemblance," said Long, on this, at a distance from us and not
turning, "the resemblance, which I shouldn't think would puzzle anyone,
is simply to 'poor Briss'!"
"Oh, of course!"--and Obert gave a jump round.
"Ah--I do see it," Mrs. Server conceded with her head on one side, but
as if speaking rather for harmony.
I didn't believe she saw it, but that only made her the more natural;
which was also the air she had on going to join Long, in his new
contemplation, after I had admitted that it was of Brissenden I myself
had thought. Obert and I remained together in the presence of the Man
with the Mask, and, the others being out of earshot, he reminded me that
I had promised him the night before in the smoking-room to give him
to-day the knowledge I had then withheld. If I had announced that I was
on the track of a discovery, pray had I made it yet, and what was it, at
any rate, that I proposed to discover? I felt now, in truth, more
uncomfortable than I had expected in being kept to my obligation, and I
beat about the bush a little till, instead of meeting it, I was able to
put the natural question: "What wonderful things was Long just saying to
you?"
"Oh, characteristic ones enough--whimsical, fanciful, funny. The things
he says, you know."