She looked at me straighter now. "I haven't thought either." Then she
was silent, neither turning away nor coming to the point, as it seemed
to me she might have done, of telling me what she had in her head. I
even fancied that her momentary silence, combined with the way she faced
me--as if that might speak for her--was meant for an assurance that,
whatever train she should take in the morning, she would arrange that it
shouldn't be, as it had been the day before, the same as mine. I really
caught in her attitude a world of invidious reference to the little
journey we had already made together. She had sympathies, she had
proprieties that imposed themselves, and I was not to think that any
little journey was to be thought of again in those conditions. It came
over me that this might have been quite a matter discussed by her,
discussed and settled, with her interlocutor on the sofa. It came over
me that if, before our break-up for the night, I should happen also to
have a minute's talk with that interlocutor, I would equally get from it
the sense of an intention unfavourable to our departing in the same
group. And I wondered if this, in that case, wouldn't affect me as
marking a change back to Long's old manner--a forfeiture of the
conditions, whatever view might be taken of them, that had made him, at
Paddington, suddenly show himself as so possible and so pleasant. If
_he_ "changed back," wouldn't Grace Brissenden change by the same law?
And if Grace Brissenden did, wouldn't her husband? Wouldn't the miracle
take the form of the rejuvenation of that husband? Would it, still by
the same token, take the form of _her_ becoming very old, becoming if
not as old as her husband, at least as old, as one might say, as
herself? Would it take the form of her becoming dreadfully plain--plain
with the plainness of mere stout maturity and artificial preservation?
And if it took this form for the others, which would it take for May
Server? Would she, at a bound as marked as theirs, recover her presence
of mind and her lost equipment?
The kind of suspense that these rising questions produced for me
suffered naturally no drop after Mrs. Briss had cut everything short by
rustling voluminously away. She had something to say to me, and yet she
hadn't; she had nothing to say, and yet I felt her to have already
launched herself in a statement. There were other persons I had made
uncomfortable without at all intending it, but she at least had not
suffered from me, and I had no wish that she should; according to which
she had no pressure to fear. My suspense, in spite of this,
remained--indeed all the more sensibly that I had suddenly lost my
discomfort on the subject of redeeming my pledge to her. It had somehow
left me at a stroke, my dread of her calling me, as by our agreement, to
submit in respect to what we had talked of as the identification of the
woman. That call had been what I looked for from her after she had seen
me break with Lady John; my first idea _then_ could only be that I must
come, as it were, to time. It was strange that, the next minute, I
should find myself sure that I was, as I may put it, free; it was at all
events indisputable that as I stood there watching her recede and fairly
studying, in my preoccupation, her handsome affirmative back and the
special sweep of her long dress--it was indisputable that, on some
intimation I could, at the instant, recognise but not seize, my
consciousness was aware of having performed a full revolution. If I was
free, that was what I had been only so short a time before, what I had
been as I drove, in London, to the station. Was this now a foreknowledge
that, on the morrow, in driving away, I should feel myself restored to
that blankness? The state lost was the state of exemption from intense
obsessions, and the state recovered would therefore logically match it.
If the foreknowledge had thus, as by the stir of the air from my
friend's whisk of her train, descended upon me, my liberation was in a
manner what I was already tasting. Yet how I also felt, with it,
something of the threat of a chill to my curiosity! The taste of its
being all over, that really sublime success of the strained vision in
which I had been living for crowded hours--was this a taste that I was
sure I should particularly enjoy? Marked enough it was, doubtless, that
even in the stress of perceiving myself broken with I ruefully reflected
on all the more, on the ever so much, I still wanted to know!
Well, something of this quantity, in any case, would come, since Mrs.
Briss did want to speak to me. The suspense that remained with me, as I
have indicated, was the special fresh one she had just produced. It fed,
for a little, positively, on that survey of her fine retreating person
to which I have confessed that my eyes attached themselves. These
seconds were naturally few, and yet my memory gathers from them
something that I can only compare, in its present effect, to the scent
of a strange flower passed rapidly under my nose. I seem in other words
to recall that I received in that brush the very liveliest impression
that my whole adventure was to yield--the impression that is my reason
for speaking of myself as having at the juncture in question "studied"
Mrs. Brissenden's back. Study of a profound sort would appear needed in
truth to account for it. It was as handsome and affirmative that she at
once met and evaded my view, but was not the affirmation (as
distinguished from the handsomeness, which was a matter of stature and
mass,) fairly downright and defiant? Didn't what I saw strike me as
saying straight _at_ me, as far as possible, "I _am_ young--I am and I
_will_ be; see, _see_ if I'm not; there, there, there!"--with "there's"
as insistent and rhythmical as the undulations of her fleeing presence,
as the bejewelled nod of her averted brow? If her face had not been
hidden, should I not precisely have found myself right in believing that
it looked, exactly, for those instants, dreadfully older than it had
ever yet had to? The answer ideally cynical would have been: "Oh, any
woman of your resources can look young with her back turned! But you've
had to turn it to make that proclamation." She passed out of the room
proclaiming, and I did stand there a little defeated, even though with
her word for another chance at her. Was this word one that she would
keep? I had got off--yes, to a certainty. But so too had not she?
Naturally, at any rate, I didn't stay planted; and though it seemed long
it was probably for no great time after this that I roamed in my
impatience. I was divided between the discourtesy of wishing the ladies
would go to bed and the apprehension that if they did too soon go I
might yet lose everything. Was Mrs. Briss waiting for more privacy, or
was she only waiting for a complete escape? Of course, even while I
asked myself that, I had to remember how much I was taking for granted
on her part in the way of conscious motive. Still, if she had not a
motive for escaping, why had she not had one, five minutes before, for
coming to the point with me? This inquiry kept me hovering where she
might at any instant find me, but that was not inconsistent with my
presently passing, like herself, into another room. The first one I
entered--there were great chains of them at Newmarch--showed me once
more, at the end opposite the door, the object that all day had been,
present or absent, most in my eyes, and that there now could be no
fallacy in my recognising. Mrs. Server's unquenchable little smile had
never yet been so far from quenched as when it recognised, on its own
side, that I had just had time to note how Ford Obert was, for a change,
taking it in. These two friends of mine appeared to have moved together,
after the music, to the corner in which I should not have felt it as
misrepresenting the matter to say that I surprised them. They owed
nothing of the harmony that held them--unlike my other couple--to the
constraint of a common seat; a small glazed table, a receptacle for
minute objects of price, extended itself between them as if it had
offered itself as an occasion for their drawing toward it a pair of low
chairs; but their union had nevertheless such an air of accepted
duration as led it slightly to puzzle me. This would have been a reason
the more for not interrupting it even had I not peculiarly wished to
respect it. It was grist to my mill somehow that something or other had
happened as a consequence of which Obert had lost the impulse to repeat
to me his odd invitation to intervene. He gave me no notice as I passed;
the notice was all from his companion. It constituted, I felt, on her
part, precisely as much and precisely as little of an invitation as it
had constituted at the moment--so promptly following our arrival--of my
first seeing them linked; which is but another way of saying that
nothing in Mrs. Server appeared to acknowledge a lapse. It was nearly
midnight, but she was again under arms; everything conceivable--or
perhaps rather inconceivable--had passed between us before dinner, but
her face was exquisite again in its repudiation of any reference.
Any reference, I saw, would have been difficult to _me_, had I unluckily
been forced to approach her. What would have made the rare delicacy of
the problem was that blankness itself was the most direct reference of
all. I had, however, as I passed her by, a comprehension as inward as
that with which I had watched Mrs. Briss's retreat. "_What_ shall I see
when I next see you?" was what I had mutely asked of Mrs. Briss; but
"God grant I don't see _you_ again at all!" was the prayer sharply
determined in my heart as I left Mrs. Server behind me. I left her
behind me for ever, but the prayer has not been answered. I did see her
again; I see her now; I shall see her always; I shall continue to feel
at moments in my own facial muscles the deadly little ache of her heroic
grin. With this, however, I was not then to reckon, and my simple
philosophy of the moment could be but to get out of the room. The result
of that movement was that, two minutes later, at another doorway, but
opening this time into a great corridor, I found myself arrested by a
combination that should really have counted for me as the least of my
precious anomalies, but that--as accident happened to protect me--I
watched, so long as I might, with intensity. I should in this connection
describe my eyes as yet again engaging the less scrutable side of the
human figure, were it not that poor Briss's back, now presented to me
beside his wife's--for these were the elements of the combination--had
hitherto seemed to me the most eloquent of his aspects. It was when he
presented his face that he looked, each time, older; but it was when he
showed you, from behind, the singular stoop of his shoulders, that he
looked oldest.
They had just passed the door when I emerged, and they receded, at a
slow pace and with a kind of confidential nearness, down the long avenue
of the lobby. Her head was always high and her husband's always low, so
that I couldn't be sure--it might have been only my fancy--that the
contrast of this habit was more marked in them than usual. If I had
known nothing about them I should have just unimaginatively said that
talk was all on one side and attention all on the other. I, of course,
for that matter, _did_ know nothing about them; yet I recall how it came
to me, as my extemporised shrewdness hung in their rear, that I mustn't
think anything too grossly simple of what might be taking place between
them. My position was, in spite of myself, that of my having mastered
enough possibilities to choose from. If one of these might be--for her
face, in spite of the backward cock of her head, was turned to him--that
she was looking her time of life straight _at_ him and yet making love
to him with it as hard as ever she could, so another was that he had
been already so thoroughly got back into hand that she had no need of
asking favours, that she was more splendid than ever, and that, the same
poor Briss as before his brief adventure, he was only feeling afresh in
his soul, as a response to her, the gush of the sacred fount.
Presumptous choice as to these alternatives failed, on my part, in time,
let me say, to flower; it rose before me in time that, whatever might
be, for the exposed instant, the deep note of their encounter, only one
thing concerned me in it: its being wholly their own business. So for
that I liberally let it go, passing into the corridor, but proceeding in
the opposite sense and aiming at an issue which I judged I should reach
before they would turn in their walk. I had not, however, reached it
before I caught the closing of the door furthest from me; at the sound
of which I looked about to find the Brissendens gone. They had not
remained for another turn, but had taken their course, evidently, back
to the principal drawing-room, where, no less presumably, the procession
of the ladies bedward was even then forming. Mrs. Briss would fall
straight into it, and I _had_ accordingly lost her. I hated to appear to
pursue her, late in the day as it may appear to affirm that I put my
dignity before my curiosity.
Free again, at all events, to wait or to wander, I lingered a minute
where I had stopped--close to a wide window, as it happened, that, at
this end of the passage, stood open to the warm darkness and overhung,
from no great height, one of the terraces. The night was mild and rich,
and though the lights within were, in deference to the temperature, not
too numerous, I found the breath of the outer air a sudden corrective to
the grossness of our lustre and the thickness of our medium, our general
heavy humanity. I felt its taste sweet, and while I leaned for
refreshment on the sill I thought of many things. One of those that
passed before me was the way that Newmarch and its hospitalities were
sacrificed, after all, and much more than smaller circles, to material
frustrations. We were all so fine and formal, and the ladies in
particular at once so little and so much clothed, so beflounced yet so
denuded, that the summer stars called to us in vain. We had ignored them
in our crystal cage, among our tinkling lamps; no more free really to
alight than if we had been dashing in a locked railway-train across a
lovely land. I remember asking myself if I mightn't still take a turn
under them, and I remember that on appealing to my watch for its
sanction I found midnight to have struck. That then was the end, and my
only real alternatives were bed or the smoking-room. The difficulty with
bed was that I was in no condition to sleep, and the difficulty about
rejoining the men was that--definitely, yes--there was one of them I
desired not again to see. I felt it with sharpness as I leaned on the
sill; I felt it with sadness as I looked at the stars; I felt once more
what I had felt on turning a final back five minutes before, so
designedly, on Mrs. Server. I saw poor Briss as he had just moved away
from me, and I knew, as I had known in the other case, that my troubled
sense would fain feel I had practically done with him. It would be well,
for aught I could do _for_ him, that I should have seen the last of
him. What remained with me from that vision of his pacing there with
his wife was the conviction that his fate, whatever it was, held him
fast. It wouldn't let him go, and all I could ask of it now was that it
should let _me_. I _would_ go--I was going; if I had not had to accept
the interval of the night I should indeed already have gone. The
admonitions of that moment--only confirmed, I hasten to add, by what was
still to come--were that I should catch in the morning, with energy, an
earlier train to town than anyone else was likely to take, and get off
alone by it, bidding farewell for a long day to Newmarch. I should be in
small haste to come back, for I should leave behind me my tangled
theory, no loose thread of which need I ever again pick up, in no stray
mesh of which need my foot again trip. It was on my way to the place, in
fine, that my obsession had met me, and it was by retracing those steps
that I should be able to get rid of it. Only I must break off sharp,
must escape all reminders by forswearing all returns.
That was very well, but it would perhaps have been better still if I had
gone straight to bed. In that case I _should_ have broken off sharp--too
sharp to become aware of something that kept me a minute longer at the
window and that had the instant effect of making me wonder if, in the
interest of observation, I mightn't snap down the electric light that,
playing just behind me, must show where I stood. I resisted this
impulse and, with the thought that my position was in no way
compromising, chanced being myself observed. I presently saw moreover
that I was really not in evidence: I could take in freely what I had at
first not been sure of, the identity of the figure stationed just within
my range, but just out of that of the light projected from my window.
One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and
the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his
back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace
with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the
fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure--making no turn that
would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and
seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce
knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident
and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my
imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted
an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently
shaken off, perched again on my shoulders. It was of the deepest
interest to me to see Long in such detachment, in such apparent
concentration. These things marked and presented him more than any had
yet done, and placed him more than any yet in relation to other matters.
They showed him, I thought, as serious, his situation as grave. I
couldn't have said what they proved, but I was as affected by them as if
they proved everything. The proof simply acted from the instant the
vision of him alone there in the warm darkness was caught. It was just
with all that was in the business that he _was_, that he had fitfully
needed to be, alone. Nervous and restless after separating, under my
eyes, from Mrs. Briss, he had wandered off to the smoking-room, as yet
empty; _he_ didn't know what to do either, and was incapable of bed and
of sleep. He had observed the communication of the smoking-room with the
terrace and had come out into the air; this was what suited him, and,
with pauses and meditations, much, possibly, by this time to turn over,
he prolonged his soft vigil. But he at last moved, and I found myself
startled. I gave up watching and retraced my course. I felt, none the
less, fairly humiliated. It had taken but another turn of an eye to
re-establish all my connections.
I had not, however, gone twenty steps before I met Ford Obert, who had
entered the corridor from the other end and was, as he immediately let
me know, on his way to the smoking-room.
"Is everyone then dispersing?"
"Some of the men, I think," he said, "are following me; others, I
believe--wonderful creatures!--have gone to array themselves. Others
still, doubtless, have gone to bed."
"And the ladies?"
"Oh, they've floated away--soared aloft; to high jinks--isn't that the
idea?--in their own quarters. Don't they too, at these hours, practise
sociabilities of sorts? They make, at any rate, here, an extraordinary
picture on that great staircase."
I thought a moment. "I wish I had seen it. But I do see it.
Yes--splendid. Is the place wholly cleared of them?"
"Save, it struck me, so far as they may have left some 'black plume as a
token'----"
"Not, I trust," I returned, "of any 'lie' their 'soul hath spoken!' But
not one of them lingers?"