VIII

I'm afraid I can't quite say what, after that, I at first did, nor just

how I immediately profited by our separation. I felt absurdly excited,

though this indeed was what I had felt all day; there had been in fact

deepening degrees of it ever since my first mystic throb after finding

myself, the day before in our railway-carriage, shut up to an hour's

contemplation and collation, as it were, of Gilbert Long and Mrs.

Brissenden. I have noted how my first full contact with the changed

state of these associates had caused the knell of the tranquil mind

audibly to ring for me. I have spoken of my sharpened perception that

something altogether out of the common had happened, independently, to

each, and I could now certainly flatter myself that I hadn't missed a

feature of the road I had thus been beguiled to travel. It was a road

that had carried me far, and verily at this hour I _felt_ far. I daresay

that for a while after leaving poor Briss, after what I may indeed call

launching him, this was what I predominantly felt. To be where I was, to

whatever else it might lead, treated me by its help to the taste of

success. It appeared then that the more things I fitted together the

larger sense, every way, they made--a remark in which I found an

extraordinary elation. It justified my indiscreet curiosity; it crowned

my underhand process with beauty. The beauty perhaps was only for

_me_--the beauty of having been right; it made at all events an element

in which, while the long day softly dropped, I wandered and drifted and

securely floated. This element bore me bravely up, and my private

triumph struck me as all one with the charm of the moment and of the

place.

There was a general shade in all the lower reaches--a fine clear dusk in

garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater

things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless

wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air. The last calls of birds

sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious

splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I

scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in

the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively encountered

nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of the

childish imagination of the impossible. _Then_ I used to circle round

enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange

"came true." It was the coming true that was the proof of the

enchantment, which, moreover, was naturally never so great as when such

coming was, to such a degree and by the most romantic stroke of all, the

fruit of one's own wizardry. I was positively--so had the wheel

revolved--proud of my work. I had thought it all out, and to have

thought it was, wonderfully, to have brought it. Yet I recall how I even

then knew on the spot that there was something supreme I should have

failed to bring unless I had happened suddenly to become aware of the

very presence of the haunting principle, as it were, of my thought. This

was the light in which Mrs. Server, walking alone now, apparently, in

the grey wood and pausing at sight of me, showed herself in her clear

dress at the end of a vista. It was exactly as if she had been there by

the operation of my intelligence, or even by that--in a still happier

way--of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her,

was assuredly emotion. Yet what _was_ this feeling, really?--of which,

at the point we had thus reached, I seemed to myself to have gathered

from all things an invitation to render some account.

Well, I knew within the minute that I was moved by it as by an

extraordinary tenderness; so that this is the name I must leave it to

make the best of. It had already been my impression that I was sorry for

her, but it was marked for me now that I was sorrier than I had

reckoned. All her story seemed at once to look at me out of the fact of

her present lonely prowl. I met it without demur, only wanting her to

know that if I struck her as waylaying her in the wood, as waiting for

her there at eventide with an idea, I shouldn't in the least defend

myself from the charge. I can scarce clearly tell how many fine strange

things I thought of during this brief crisis of her hesitation. I wanted

in the first place to make it end, and while I moved a few steps toward

her I felt almost as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird

or stalking a fawn. My few steps brought me to a spot where another

perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous

circle with an evening sky above and great lengthening, arching recesses

in which the twilight thickened. Oh, it was quite sufficiently the

castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive

and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognised not only the influence,

in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this

consecrated nook, which was so much of the type of all the bemused and

remembered. We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful

old tale, and it wouldn't be the fault of Newmarch if some other green

_carrefour_, not far off, didn't balance with this one and offer the

alternative of niches, in the greenness, occupied by weather-stained

statues on florid pedestals.

I sat straight down on the nearest of our benches, for this struck me as

the best way to express the conception with which the sight of Mrs.

Server filled me. It showed her that if I watched her I also waited for

her, and that I was therefore not affected in any manner she really need

deprecate. She had been too far off for me to distinguish her face, but

her approach had faltered long enough to let me see that if she had not

taken it as too late she would, to escape me, have found some pretext

for turning off. It was just my seating myself that made the

difference--it was my being so simple with her that brought her on. She

came slowly and a little wearily down the vista, and her sad, shy

advance, with the massed wood on either side of her, was like the

reminiscence of a picture or the refrain of a ballad. What made the

difference with _me_--if any difference had remained to be made--was the

sense of this sharp cessation of her public extravagance. She had folded

up her manner in her flounced parasol, which she seemed to drag after

her as a sorry soldier his musket. It was present to me without a pang

that this was the person I had sent poor Briss off to find--the person

poor Briss would owe me so few thanks for his failure to have found. It

was equally marked to me that, however detached and casual she might, at

the first sight of me, have wished to show herself, it was to alight on

poor Briss that she had come out, it was because he had not been at the

house and might therefore, on his side, be wandering, that she had taken

care to be unaccompanied. My demonstration was complete from the moment

I thus had them in the act of seeking each other, and I was so pleased

at having gathered them in that I cared little what else they had

missed. I neither moved nor spoke till she had come quite near me, and

as she also gave no sound the meaning of our silence seemed to stare

straight out. It absolutely phrased there, in all the wonderful

conditions, a relation already established; but the strange and

beautiful thing was that as soon as we had recognised and accepted it

this relation put us almost at our ease. "You must be weary of walking,"

I said at last, "and you see I've been keeping a seat for you."

I had finally got up, as a sign of welcome, but I had directly

afterwards resumed my position, and it was an illustration of the terms

on which we met that we neither of us seemed to mind her being meanwhile

on her feet. She stood before me as if to take in--with her smile that

had by this time sunk quite to dimness--more than we should, either of

us, after all, be likely to be able to say. I even saw from this moment,

I think, that, whatever she might understand, she would be able herself

to say but little. She gave herself, in that minute, more than she

doubtless knew--gave herself, I mean, to my intenser apprehension. She

went through the form of expression, but what told me everything was the

way the form of expression broke down. Her lovely grimace, the light of

the previous hours, was as blurred as a bit of brushwork in water-colour

spoiled by the upsetting of the artist's glass. She fixed me with it as

she had fixed during the day forty persons, but it fluttered like a bird

with a broken wing. She looked about and above, down each of our dusky

avenues and up at our gilded tree-tops and our painted sky, where, at

the moment, the passage of a flight of rooks made a clamour. She

appeared to wish to produce some explanation of her solitude, but I was

quickly enough sure that she would never find a presentable one. I only

wanted to show her how little I required it. "I like a lonely walk," I

went on, "at the end of a day full of people: it's always, to me, on

such occasions, quite as if something has happened that the mind wants

to catch and fix before the vividness fades. So I mope by myself an

hour--I take stock of my impressions. But there's one thing I don't

believe you know. This is the very first time, in such a place and at

such an hour, that it has ever befallen me to come across a friend

stricken with the same perversity and engaged in the same pursuit. Most

people, don't you see?"--I kept it up as I could--"don't in the least

know what has happened to them, and don't care to know. That's one way,

and I don't deny it may be practically the best. But if one does care to

know, that's another way. As soon as I saw you there at the end of the

alley I said to myself, with quite a little thrill of elation, 'Ah, then

it's _her_ way too!' I wonder if you'll let me tell you," I floundered

pleasantly on, "that I immediately liked you the better for it. It

seemed to bring us more together. That's what I sat straight down here

to show you. 'Yes,' I wished you to understand me as frankly saying, 'I

_am_, as well as you, on the mope, or on the muse, or on whatever you

call it, and this isn't half a bad corner for such a mood.' I can't tell

you what a pleasure it is to me to see you do understand."

I kept it up, as I say, to reassure and soothe and steady her; there was

nothing, however fantastic and born of the pressure of the moment, that

I wouldn't have risked for that purpose. She was absolutely on my hands

with her secret--I felt that from the way she stood and listened to me,

silently showing herself relieved and pacified. It was marked that if I

had hitherto seen her as "all over the place," she had yet nowhere

seemed to me less so than at this furthermost point. But if, though only

nearer to her secret and still not in possession, I felt as justified as

I have already described myself, so it equally came to me that I was

quite near enough, at the pass we had reached, for what I should have to

take from it all. She was on my hands--it was she herself, poor

creature, who was: this was the thing that just now loomed large, and

the secret was a comparative detail. "I think you're very kind," she

said for all answer to the speech I have reported, and the minute after

this she had sunk down, in confessed collapse, to my bench, on which she

sat and stared before her. The mere mechanism of her expression, the

dangling paper lantern itself, was now all that was left in her face.

She remained a little as if discouraged by the sight of the weariness

that her surrender had let out. I hesitated, from just this fear of

adding to it, to commiserate her for it more directly, and she spoke

again before I had found anything to say. She brought back her attention

indeed as if with an effort and from a distance. "What is it that has

happened to you?"

"Oh," I laughed, "what is it that has happened to _you_?" My question

had not been in the least intended for pressure, but it made her turn

and look at me, and this, I quickly recognised, was all the answer the

most pitiless curiosity could have desired--all the more, as well, that

the intention in it had been no greater than in my words. Beautiful,

abysmal, involuntary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths

it would have closed. It was in short a supremely unsuccessful attempt

to say nothing. It said everything, and by the end of a minute my

chatter--none the less out of place for being all audible--was hushed to

positive awe by what it had conveyed. I saw as I had never seen before

what consuming passion can make of the marked mortal on whom, with fixed

beak and claws, it has settled as on a prey. She reminded me of a sponge

wrung dry and with fine pores agape. Voided and scraped of everything,

her shell was merely crushable. So it was brought home to me that the

victim could be abased, and so it disengaged itself from these things

that the abasement could be conscious. That was Mrs. Server's tragedy,

that her consciousness survived--survived with a force that made it

struggle and dissemble. This consciousness was all her secret--it was at

any rate all mine. I promised myself roundly that I would henceforth

keep clear of any other.

I none the less--from simply sitting with her there--gathered in the

sense of more things than I could have named, each of which, as it came

to me, made my compassion more tender. Who of us all could say that his

fall might not be as deep?--or might not at least become so with equal

opportunity. I for a while fairly forgot Mrs. Server, I fear, in the

intimacy of this vision of the possibilities of our common nature. She

became such a wasted and dishonoured symbol of them as might have put

tears in one's eyes. When I presently returned to her--our session

seeming to resolve itself into a mere mildness of silence--I saw how it

was that whereas, in such cases in general, people might have given up

much, the sort of person this poor lady was could only give up

everything. She was the absolute wreck of her storm, accordingly, but to

which the pale ghost of a special sensibility still clung, waving from

the mast, with a bravery that went to the heart, the last tatter of its

flag. There are impressions too fine for words, and I shall not attempt

to say how it was that under the touch of this one I felt how nothing

that concerned my companion could ever again be present to me but the

fact itself of her admirable state. This was the source of her wan

little glory, constituted even for her a small sublimity in the light of

which mere minor identifications turned vulgar. I knew who _he_ was now

with a vengeance, because I had learnt precisely from that who _she_

was; and nothing could have been sharper than the force with which it

pressed upon me that I had really learnt more than I had bargained for.

Nothing need have happened if I hadn't been so absurdly, so fatally

meditative about poor Long--an accident that most people, wiser people,

appeared on the whole to have steered sufficiently clear of. Compared

with my actual sense, the sense with which I sat there, that other

vision was gross, and grosser still the connection between the two.

Such were some of the reflections in which I indulged while her

eyes--with their strange intermissions of darkness or of light: who

could say which?--told me from time to time that she knew whatever I

was thinking of to be for her virtual advantage. It was prodigious what,

in the way of suppressed communication, passed in these wonderful

minutes between us. Our relation could be at the best but an equal

confession, and I remember saying to myself that if she had been as

subtle as I--which she wasn't!--she too would have put it together that

I had dreadfully talked about her. She would have traced in me my

demonstration to Mrs. Briss that, whoever she was, she must logically

have been idiotised. It was the special poignancy of her collapse that,

so far at least as I was concerned, this was a ravage the extent of

which she had ceased to try to conceal. She had been trying, and more or

less succeeding, all day: the little drama of her public unrest had had,

when one came to consider, no other argument. It had been terror that

had directed her steps; the need constantly to show herself detached and

free, followed by the sterner one not to show herself, by the same

token, limp and empty. This had been the distinct, ferocious logic of

her renewals and ruptures--the anxious mistrust of her wit, the haunting

knowledge of the small distance it would take her at once, the

consequent importance of her exactly timing herself, and the quick

instinct of flight before the menace of discovery. She couldn't let

society alone, because that would have constituted a symptom; yet, for

fear of the appearance of a worse one, she could only mingle in it with

a complex diplomacy. She was accordingly exposed on every side, and to

be with her a while thus quietly was to read back into her behaviour the

whole explanation, which was positively simple to me now. To take up

again the vivid analogy, she had been sailing all day, though scarce

able to keep afloat, under the flag of her old reputation for easy

response. She had given to the breeze any sad scrap of a substitute, for

the play of mind once supposed remarkable. The last of all the things

her stillness said to me was that I could judge from so poor a show what

had become of her conversability. What I did judge was that a frantic

art had indeed been required to make her pretty silences pass, from one

crisis to another, for pretty speeches. Half this art, doubtless, was

the glittering deceit of her smile, the sublime, pathetic overdone

geniality which represented so her share in any talk that, every other

eloquence failing, there could only be nothing at all from the moment it

abandoned its office. There _was_ nothing at all. That was the truth; in

accordance with which I finally--for everything it might mean to

myself--put out my hand and bore ever so gently on her own. Her own

rested listlessly on the stone of our seat. Of course, it had been an

immense thing for her that she was, in spite of everything, so lovely.

All this was quite consistent with its eventually coming back to me

that, though she took from me with appreciation what was expressed in

the gesture I have noted, it was certainly in quest of a still deeper

relief that she had again come forth. The more I considered her

face--and most of all, so permittedly, in her passive, conscious

presence--the more I was sure of this and the further I could go in the

imagination of her beautiful duplicity. I ended by divining that if I

was assuredly good for her, because the question of keeping up with me

had so completely dropped, and if the service I so rendered her was not

less distinct to her than to myself--I ended by divining that she had

none the less her obscure vision of a still softer ease. Guy Brissenden

had become in these few hours her positive need--a still greater need

than I had lately amused myself with making out that he had found her.

Each had, by their unprecedented plight, something for the other, some

intimacy of unspeakable confidence, that no one else in the world could

have for either. They had been feeling their way to it, but at the end

of their fitful day they had grown confusedly, yet beneficently sure.

The explanation here again was simple--they had the sense of a common

fate. They hadn't to name it or to phrase it--possibly even couldn't had

they tried; peace and support came to them, without that, in the simple

revelation of each other. Oh, how I made it out that if it was indeed

very well for the poor lady to feel thus in _my_ company that her burden

was lifted, my company would be after all but a rough substitute for

Guy's! He was a still better friend, little as he could have told the

reason; and if I could in this connection have put the words into her

mouth, here follows something of the sense that I should have made them

form.

"Yes, my dear man, I do understand you--quite perfectly now, and (by I

know not what miracle) I've really done so to some extent from the

first. Deep is the rest of feeling with you, in this way, that I'm

watched, for the time, only as you watch me. It has all stopped, and _I_

can stop. How can I make you understand what it is for me that there

isn't at last a creature any more in sight, that the wood darkens about

me, that the sounds drop and the relief goes on; what can it mean for

you even that I've given myself up to not caring whether or no, amongst

others, I'm missed and spoken of? It does help my strange case, in fine,

as you see, to let you keep me here; but I should have found still more

what I was in need of if I had only found, instead of you, him whom I

had in mind. He is as much better than you as you are than everyone

else." I finally felt, in a word, so qualified to attribute to my

companion some such mute address as that, that it could only have, as

the next consequence, a determining effect on me--an effect under the

influence of which I spoke. "I parted with him, some way from here, some

time ago. I had found him in one of the gardens with Lady John; after

which we came away from her together. We strolled a little and talked,

but I knew what he really wanted. He wanted to find you, and I told him

he would probably do so at tea on the terrace. It was visibly with that

idea--to return to the house--that he left me."

She looked at me for some time on this, taking it in, yet still afraid

of it. "You found him with Lady John?" she at last asked, and with a

note in her voice that made me see what--as there was a precaution I had

neglected--she feared.

The perception of this, in its turn, operated with me for an instant

almost as the rarest of temptations. I had puzzled out everything and

put everything together; I was as morally confident and as

intellectually triumphant as I have frankly here described myself; but

there was no objective test to which I had yet exposed my theory. The

chance to apply one--and it would be infallible--had suddenly cropped

up. There would be excitement, amusement, discernment in it; it would be

indeed but a more roundabout expression of interest and sympathy. It

would, above all, pack the question I had for so many hours been

occupied with into the compass of a needle-point. I was dazzled by my

opportunity. She had had an uncertainty, in other words, as to whom I

meant, and that it kept her for some seconds on the rack was a trifle

compared to my chance. She would give herself away supremely if she

showed she suspected me of placing my finger on the spot--if she

understood the person I had not named to be nameable as Gilbert Long.

What had created her peril, of course, was my naming Lady John. Well,

how can I say in any sufficient way how much the extraordinary beauty of

her eyes during this brevity of suspense had to do with the event? It

had everything--for it was what caused me to be touched beyond even what

I had already been, and I could literally bear no more of that. I

therefore took no advantage, or took only the advantage I had spoken

with the intention of taking. I laughed out doubtless too nervously, but

it didn't compromise my tact. "Don't you know how she's perpetually

pouncing on him?"

Still, however, I had not named him--which was what prolonged the

tension. "Do you mean--a--do you mean----?" With which she broke off on

a small weak titter and a still weaker exclamation. "There are so _many_

gentlemen!"

There was something in it that might in other conditions have been as

trivial as the giggle of a housemaid; but it had in fact for my ear the

silver ring of poetry. I told her instantly whom I meant. "Poor Briss,

you know," I said, "is always in her clutches."

Oh, how it let her off! And yet, no sooner had it done so and had I

thereby tasted on the instant the sweetness of my wisdom, than I became

aware of something much more extraordinary. It let her off--she showed

me this for a minute, in spite of herself; but the next minute she

showed me something quite different, which was, most wonderful of all,

that she wished me to see her as not quite feeling why I should so much

take for granted the person I _had_ named. "Poor Briss?" her face and

manner appeared suddenly to repeat--quite, moreover (and it was the

drollest, saddest part), as if all our friends had stood about us to

listen. Wherein did poor Briss so intimately concern her? What, pray,

was my ground for such free reference to poor Briss? She quite

repudiated poor Briss. She knew nothing at all about him, and the whole

airy structure I had erected with his aid might have crumbled at the

touch she thus administered if its solidity had depended only on that. I

had a minute of surprise which, had it lasted another minute as surprise

pure and simple, might almost as quickly have turned to something like

chagrin. Fortunately it turned instead into something even more like

enthusiasm than anything I had yet felt. The stroke _was_ extraordinary,

but extraordinary for its nobleness. I quickly saw in it, from the

moment I had got my point of view, more fine things than ever. I saw for

instance that, magnificently, she wished not to incriminate him. All

that had passed between us had passed in silence, but it was a different

matter for what might pass in sound. We looked at each other therefore

with a strained smile over any question of identities. It was as if it

had been one thing--to her confused, relaxed intensity--to give herself

up to me, but quite another thing to give up somebody else.

And yet, superficially arrested as I was for the time, I directly

afterwards recognised in this instinctive discrimination--the last, the

expiring struggle of her native lucidity--a supremely convincing bit of

evidence. It was still more convincing than if she had done any of the

common things--stammered, changed colour, shown an apprehension of what

the person named might have said to me. She had had it from me that he

and I had talked about her, but there was nothing that she accepted the

idea of his having been able to say. I saw--still more than this--that

there was nothing to my purpose (since my purpose was to understand)

that she would have had, as matters stood, coherence enough to impute to

him. It was extremely curious to me to divine, just here, that she

hadn't a glimmering of the real logic of Brissenden's happy effect on

her nerves. It was the effect, as coming from him, that a beautiful

delicacy forbade her as yet to give me her word for; and she was

certainly herself in the stage of regarding it as an anomaly. Why, on

the contrary, I might have wondered, shouldn't she have jumped at the

chance, at the comfort, of seeing a preference trivial enough to be

"worked" imputed to her? Why shouldn't she have been positively pleased

that people might helpfully couple her name with that of the wrong man?

Why, in short, in the language that Grace Brissenden and I had used

together, was not that lady's husband the perfection of a red herring?

Just because, I perceived, the relation that had established itself

between them _was_, for its function, a real relation, the relation of a

fellowship in resistance to doom.

Nothing could have been stranger than for _me_ so to know it was while

the stricken parties themselves were in ignorance; but nothing, at the

same time, could have been, as I have since made out, more magnanimous

than Mrs. Server's attitude. She moved, groping and panting, in the

gathering dusk of her fate, but there were calculations she still could

dimly make. One of these was that she must drag no one else in. I verily

believe that, for that matter, she had scruples, poignant and exquisite,

even about letting our friend himself see how much she liked to be with

him. She wouldn't, at all events, let another see. I saw what I saw, I

felt what I felt, but such things were exactly a sign that I could take

care of myself. There was apparently, I was obliged to admit, but little

apprehension in her of her unduly showing that _our_ meeting had been

anything of a blessing to her. There was no one indeed just then to be

the wiser for it; I might perhaps else even have feared that she would

have been influenced to treat the incident as closed. I had, for that

matter, no wish to prolong it beyond her own convenience; it had already

told me everything it could possibly tell. I thought I knew moreover

what she would have got from it. I preferred, none the less, that we

should separate by my own act; I wanted not to see her move in order to

be free of me. So I stood up, to put her more at her ease, and it was

while I remained before her that I tried to turn to her advantage what I

had committed myself to about Brissenden.

"I had a fancy, at any rate, that he was looking for you--all the more

that he didn't deny it."

She had not moved; she had let me take my hand from her own with as

little sign as on her first feeling its touch. She only kept her eyes on

me. "What made you have such a fancy?"

"What makes me ever have any?" I laughed. "My extraordinary interest in

my fellow-creatures. I have more than most men. I've never really seen

anyone with half so much. That breeds observation, and observation

breeds ideas. Do you know what it has done?" I continued. "It has bred

for me the idea that Brissenden's in love with you."

There was something in her eyes that struck me as betraying--and the

appeal of it went to the heart--the constant dread that if entangled in

talk she might show confusion. Nevertheless she brought out after a

moment, as naturally and charmingly as possible: "How can that be when

he's so strikingly in love with his wife?"

I gave her the benefit of the most apparent consideration. "Strikingly,

you call it?"

"Why, I thought it was noticed--what he does for her."

"Well, of course she's extremely handsome--or at least extremely fresh

and attractive. He _is_ in love with her, no doubt, if you take it by

the quarter, or by the year, like a yacht or a stable," I pushed on at

random. "But isn't there such a state also as being in love by the day?"

She waited, and I guessed from the manner of it exactly why. It was the

most obscure of intimations that she would have liked better that I

shouldn't make her talk; but obscurity, by this time, offered me no more

difficulties. The hint, none the less, a trifle disconcerted me, and,

while I vaguely sought for some small provisional middle way between

going and not going on, the oddest thing, as a fruit of my own delay,

occurred. This was neither more nor less than the revival of her

terrible little fixed smile. It came back as if with an audible

click--as a gas-burner makes a pop when you light it. It told me visibly

that from the moment she must talk she could talk only with its aid. The

effect of its aid I indeed immediately perceived.

"How do I know?" she asked in answer to my question. "I've never _been_

in love."

"Not even by the day?"

"Oh, a day's surely a long time."

"It is," I returned. "But I've none the less, more fortunately than you,

been in love for a whole one." Then I continued, from an impulse of

which I had just become conscious and that was clearly the result of the

heart-breaking facial contortion--heart-breaking, that is, when one knew

what I knew--by which she imagined herself to represent the pleasant

give-and-take of society. This sense, for me, was a quick horror of

forcing her, in such conditions, to talk at all. Poor Briss had

mentioned to me, as an incident of his contact with her, his

apprehension of her breaking down; and now, at a touch, I saw what he

had meant. She _would_ break down if I didn't look out. I found myself

thus, from one minute to the other, as greatly dreading it for her,

dreading it indeed for both of us, as I might have dreaded some physical

accident or danger, her fall from an unmanageable horse or the crack

beneath her of thin ice. It was impossible--that was the extraordinary

impression--to come too much to her assistance. We had each of us all,

in our way, hour after hour, been, as goodnaturedly as unwittingly,

giving her a lift; yet what was the end of it but her still sitting

there to assure me of a state of gratitude--that she couldn't even

articulate--for every hint of a perch that might still be held out?

What could only, therefore, in the connection, strike me as indicated

was fairly to put into her mouth--if one might do so without showing too

ungracefully as alarmed--the words one might have guessed her to wish to

use were she able to use any. It was a small service of anticipation

that I tried to render her with as little of an air as possible of being

remedial. "I daresay you wonder," I remarked on these lines, "why, at

all, I should have thrust Brissenden in."

"Oh, I _do_ so wonder!" she replied with the refined but exaggerated

glee that is a frequent form in high companies and light colloquies. I

_did_ help her--it was admirable to feel it. She liked my imposing on

her no more complex a proposition. She liked my putting the thing to her

so much better than she could have put it to me. But she immediately

afterwards looked away as if--now that we _had_ put it, and it didn't

matter which of us best--we had nothing more to do with it. She gave me

a hint of drops and inconsequences that might indeed have opened up

abysses, and all the while she smiled and smiled. Yet whatever she did

or failed of, as I even then observed to myself, how she remained

lovely! One's pleasure in that helped one somehow not to break down on

one's own side--since breaking down was in question--for commiseration.

I didn't know what she might have hours of for the man--whoever he

was--to whom her sacrifice had been made; but I doubted if for any other

person she had ever been so beautiful as she was for me at these

moments. To have kept her so, to have made her more so--how might that

result of their relation not in fact have shone as a blinding light into

the eyes of her lover? What would he have been bound to make out in her

after all but her passion and her beauty? Wasn't it enough for such

wonders as these to fill his consciousness? If they didn't fill

mine--even though occupying so large a place in it--was that not only

because I had not the direct benefit of them as the other party to the

prodigy had it? They filled mine too, for that matter, just at this

juncture, long enough for me to describe myself as rendered subject by

them to a temporary loss of my thread. What _could_ pass muster with her

as an account of my reason for evoking the blighted identity of our

friend? There came constantly into her aspect, I should say, the

strangest alternatives, as I can only most conveniently call them, of

presence and absence--something like intermissions of intensity,

cessations and resumptions of life. They were like the slow flickers of

a troubled flame, breathed upon and then left, burning up and burning

down. She had really burnt down--I mean so far as her sense of things

went--while I stood there.

I stood long enough to see that it didn't in the least signify whether

or no I explained, and during this interval I found myself--to my

surprise--in receipt of still better assistance than any I had to give.

I had happened to turn, while I awkwardly enough, no doubt, rested and

shifted, to the quarter from which Mrs. Server had arrived; and there,

just at the end of the same vista, I gathered material for my proper

reply. Her eyes at this moment were fixed elsewhere, and that gave me

still a little more time, at the end of which my reference had all its

point. "I supposed you to have Brissenden in your head," I said,

"because it's evidently what he himself takes for granted. But let him

tell you!" He was already close to us: missing her at the house, he had

started again in search of her and had successfully followed. The effect

on him of coming in sight of us had been for an instant to make him hang

back as I had seen Mrs. Server hang. But he had then advanced just as

she had done; I had waited for him to reach us; and now she saw him. She

looked at him as she always looked at all of us, yet not at either of us

as if we had lately been talking of him. If it was vacancy it was

eloquent; if it was vigilance it was splendid. What was most curious, at

all events, was that it was now poor Briss who was disconcerted. He had

counted on finding her, but not on finding her with me, and I

interpreted a certain ruefulness in him as the sign of a quick, uneasy

sense that he must have been in question between us. I instantly felt

that the right thing was to let him know he had been, and I mentioned to

him, as a joke, that he had come just in time to save himself. We had

been talking of him, and I wouldn't answer for what Mrs. Server had been

going to say. He took it gravely, but he took everything so gravely that

I saw no symptom in that. In fact, as he appeared at first careful not

to meet my eyes, I saw for a minute or two no symptom in anything--in

anything, at least, but the way in which, standing beside me and before

Mrs. Server's bench, he received the conscious glare of her recognition

without returning it and without indeed giving her a look. He looked all

about--looked, as she herself had done after our meeting, at the

charming place and its marks of the hour, at the rich twilight, deeper

now in the avenues, and at the tree-tops and sky, more flushed now with

colour. I found myself of a sudden quite as sorry for him as I had been

for Mrs. Server, and I scarce know how it was suggested to me that

during the short interval since our separation something had happened

that made a difference in him. Was the difference a consciousness still

more charged than I had left it? I couldn't exactly say, and the

question really lost itself in what soon came uppermost for me--the

desire, above all, to spare them both and to spare them equally.

The difficulty, however, was to spare them in some fashion that would

not be more marked than continuing to observe them. To leave them

together without a decent pretext would be marked; but this, I eagerly

recognised, was none the less what most concerned me. Whatever they

might see in it, there was by this time little enough doubt of how it

would indicate for my own mind that the wheel had completely turned.

That was the point to which I had been brought by the lapse of a few

hours. I had verily travelled far since the sight of the pair on the

terrace had given its arrest to my first talk with Mrs. Briss. I was

obliged to admit to myself that nothing could very well have been more

singular than some of my sequences. I had come round to the opposite

pole of the protest my companion had then drawn from me--which was the

pole of agreement with herself; and it hung sharply before me that I was

pledged to confess to her my revolution. I couldn't now be in the

presence of the two creatures I was in the very act of finally judging

to be not a whit less stricken than I had originally imagined them--I

couldn't do this and think with any complacency of the redemption of my

pledge; for the process by which I had at last definitely inculpated

Mrs. Server was precisely such a process of providential supervision as

made me morally responsible, so to speak, for her, and thereby

intensified my scruples. Well, my scruples had the last word--they were

what determined me to look at my watch and profess that, whatever sense

of a margin Brissenden and Mrs. Server might still enjoy, it behoved me

not to forget that I took, on such great occasions, an hour to dress for

dinner. It was a fairly crude cover for my retreat; perhaps indeed I

should rather say that my retreat was practically naked and unadorned.

It formulated their relation. I left them with the formula on their

hands, both queerly staring at it, both uncertain what to do with it.

For some passage that would soon be a correction of this, however, one

might surely feel that one could trust them. I seemed to feel my trust

justified, behind my back, before I had got twenty yards away. By the

time I had done this, I must add, something further had befallen me.

Poor Briss had met my eyes just previous to my flight, and it was then I

satisfied myself of what had happened to him at the house. He had met

his wife; she had in some way dealt with him; he had been with her,

however briefly, alone; and the intimacy of their union had been afresh

impressed upon him. Poor Briss, in fine, looked ten years older.