I stayed him there while I put it to him that he would probably in fact
prefer to go back.
"You're not going then yourself?"
"No, I don't particularly want tea; and I may as well now confess to you
that I'm taking a lonely, unsociable walk. I don't enjoy such occasions
as these," I said, "unless I from time to time get off by myself
somewhere long enough to tell myself how much I do enjoy them. That's
what I was cultivating solitude for when I happened just now to come
upon you. When I found you there with Lady John there was nothing for me
but to make the best of it; but I'm glad of this chance to assure you
that, every appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, I wasn't
prowling about in search of you."
"Well," my companion frankly replied, "I'm glad you turned up. I wasn't
especially amusing myself."
"Oh, I think I know how little!"
He fixed me a moment with his pathetic old face, and I knew more than
ever that I was sorry for him. I was quite extraordinarily sorry, and I
wondered whether I mightn't without offence or indiscretion really let
him see it. It was to this end I had held him and wanted a little to
keep him, and I was reassured as I felt him, though I had now released
him, linger instead of leaving me. I had made him uneasy last night, and
a new reason or two for my doing so had possibly even since then come
up; yet these things also would depend on the way he might take them.
The look with which he at present faced me seemed to hint that he would
take them as I hoped, and there was no curtness, but on the contrary the
dawn of a dim sense that I might possibly aid him, in the tone with
which he came half-way. "You 'know'?"
"Ah," I laughed, "I know everything!"
He didn't laugh; I hadn't seen him laugh, at Newmarch, once; he was
continuously, portentously grave, and I at present remembered how the
effect of this had told for me at luncheon, contrasted as it was with
that of Mrs. Server's desperate, exquisite levity. "You know I decidedly
have too much of that dreadful old woman?"
There was a sound in the question that would have made me, to my own
sense, start, though I as quickly hoped I had not done so to
Brissenden's. I couldn't have persuaded myself, however, that I had
escaped showing him the flush of my effort to show nothing. I had taken
his disgusted allusion as to Mrs. Brissenden, and the action of that
was upsetting. But nothing, fortunately, was psychologically more
interesting than to grasp the next moment the truth of his reference. It
was only the fact of his himself looking so much older than Lady John
that had blinded me for an instant to the propriety of his not thinking
of her as young. She wasn't young as _he_ had a right to call people,
and I felt a glow--also, I feared, too visible--as soon as I had seen
whom he meant. His meaning Lady John did me somehow so much good that I
believed it would have done me still more to hear him call her a
harridan or a Jezebel. It was none of my business; how little was
anything, when it came to that, my business!--yet indefinably,
unutterably, I felt assuaged for him and comforted. I verily believe it
hung in the balance a minute or two that in my impulse to draw him out,
so that I might give him my sympathy, I was prepared to risk overturning
the edifice of my precautions. I luckily, as it happened, did nothing of
the sort; I contrived to breathe consolingly on his secret without
betraying an intention. There was almost no one in the place save two or
three of the very youngest women whom he wouldn't have had a right to
call old. Lady John was a hag, then; Mrs. Server herself was more than
on the turn; Gilbert Long was fat and forty; and I cast about for some
light in which I could show that I--_a plus forte raison_--was a
pantaloon. "Of course you can't quite see the fun of it, and it really
isn't fair to you. You struck me as much more in your element," I
ventured to add, "when, this morning, more than once, I chanced to
observe you led captive by Mrs. Server."
"Oh, that's a different affair," he answered with an accent that
promised a growth of confidence.
"Mrs. Server's an old woman," I continued, "but she can't seem to a
fellow like you as old as Lady John. She has at any rate more charm;
though perhaps not," I added, "quite so much talk."
On this he said an extraordinary thing, which all but made me start
again. "Oh, she hasn't any _talk_!"
I took, as quickly as possible, refuge in a surprised demurrer. "Not
_any_?"
"None to speak of."
I let all my wonder come. "But wasn't she chattering to you at
luncheon?" It forced him to meet my eyes at greater length, and I could
already see that my experiment--for insidiously and pardonably such I
wished to make it--was on the way to succeed. I had been right then, and
I knew where I stood. He couldn't have been "drawn" on his wife, and he
couldn't have been drawn, in the least directly, on himself, but as he
could thus easily be on Lady John, so likewise he could on other women,
or on the particular one, at least, who mattered to me. I felt I really
knew what I was about, for to draw him on Mrs. Server was in truth to
draw him indirectly on himself. It was indeed perhaps because I had by
this time in a measure expressed, in terms however general, the interest
with which he inspired me, that I now found myself free to shift the
ground of my indiscretion. I only wanted him to know that on the
question of Mrs. Server I was prepared to go as far with him as he
should care to move. How it came to me now that he was _the_ absolutely
safe person in the house to talk of her with! "I was too far away from
you to hear," I had gone on; "and I could only judge of her flow of
conversation from the animated expression of her face. It was
extraordinarily animated. But that, I admit," I added, "strikes one
always as a sort of _parti pris_ with her. She's never _not_
extraordinarily animated."
"She has no flow of conversation whatever," said Guy Brissenden.