If Long _is_ just what he always was it settles the matter, and the special clincher for us can be but your honest final impression, made precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which you had originally yielded to my contagion."
She didn"t insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts themselves. "Oh, but add to my impression everyone else"s impression!
Has anyone noticed anything?"
"Ah, I don"t know what anyone has noticed. I haven"t," I brooded, "ventured--as you know--to ask anyone."
"Well, if you had you"d have seen--seen, I mean, all they don"t see. If they had been conscious they"d have talked."
I thought. "To me?"
"Well, I"m not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you embroider on things that they"re rather afraid to commit themselves or to lead you on: they"re sometimes in, you know," she luminously reminded me, "for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do with, or than they care to have on their hands."
I tried to do justice to this account of myself. "You mean I see so much?"
It was a delicate matter, but she risked it. "Don"t you sometimes see horrors?"
I wondered. "Well, names are a convenience. People catch me in the act?"
"They certainly think you critical."
"And is criticism the vision of horrors?"
She couldn"t quite be sure where I was taking her. "It isn"t, perhaps, so much that you see them----"
I started. "As that I perpetrate them?"
She was sure now, however, and wouldn"t have it, for she was serious.
"Dear no--you don"t perpetrate anything. Perhaps it would be better if you did!" she tossed off with an odd laugh. "But--always by people"s idea--you like them."
I followed. "Horrors?"
"Well, you don"t----"
"Yes----?"
But she wouldn"t be hurried now. "You take them too much for what they are. You don"t seem to want----"
"To come down on them strong? Oh, but I often do!"
"So much the better then."
"Though I do like--whether for that or not," I hastened to confess, "to look them first well in the face."
Our eyes met, with this, for a minute, but she made nothing of that.
"When they _have_ no face, then, you can"t do it! It isn"t at all events now a question," she went on, "of people"s keeping anything back, and you"re perhaps in any case not the person to whom it would first have come."
I tried to think then who the person would be. "It would have come to Long himself?"
But she was impatient of this. "Oh, one doesn"t know what comes--or what doesn"t--to Long himself! I"m not sure he"s too modest to misrepresent--if he had the intelligence to play a part."
"Which he hasn"t!" I concluded.
"Which he hasn"t. It"s to _me_ they might have spoken--or to each other."
"But I thought you exactly held they _had_ chattered in accounting for his state by the influence of Lady John."
She got the matter instantly straight. "Not a bit. That chatter was mine only--and produced to meet yours. There had so, by your theory, to be a woman----"
"That, to oblige me, you invented _her_? Precisely. But I thought----"
"You needn"t have thought!" Mrs. Briss broke in. "I didn"t invent her."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"I didn"t invent her," she repeated, looking at me hard. "She"s true." I echoed it in vagueness, though instinctively again in protest; yet I held my breath, for this was really the point at which I felt my companion"s forces most to have mustered. Her manner now moreover gave me a great idea of them, and her whole air was of taking immediate advantage of my impression. "Well, see here: since you"ve wanted it, I"m afraid that, however little you may like it, you"ll have to take it.
You"ve pressed me for explanations and driven me much harder than you must have seen I found convenient. If I"ve seemed to beat about the bush it"s because I hadn"t only myself to think of. One can be simple for one"s self--one can"t be, always, for others."
"Ah, to whom do you say it?" I encouragingly sighed; not even yet quite seeing for what issue she was heading.
She continued to make for the spot, whatever it was, with a certain majesty. "I should have preferred to tell you nothing more than what I _have_ told you. I should have preferred to close our conversation on the simple announcement of my recovered sense of proportion. But you _have_, I see, got me in too deep."
"O-oh!" I courteously attenuated.
"You"ve made of me," she lucidly insisted, "too big a talker, too big a thinker, of nonsense."
"Thank you," I laughed, "for intimating that I trifle so agreeably."
"Oh, _you"ve_ appeared not to mind! But let me then at last not fail of the luxury of admitting that _I_ mind. Yes, I mind particularly. I may be bad, but I"ve a grain of gumption."
""Bad"?" It seemed more closely to concern me.
"Bad I may be. In fact," she pursued at this high pitch and pressure, "there"s no doubt whatever I _am_."
"I"m delighted to hear it," I cried, "for it was exactly something strong I wanted of you!"
"It _is_ then strong"--and I could see indeed she was ready to satisfy me. "You"ve worried me for my motive and hara.s.sed me for my "moment,"
and I"ve had to protect others and, at the cost of a decent appearance, to pretend to be myself half an idiot. I"ve had even, for the same purpose--if you must have it--to depart from the truth; to give you, that is, a false account of the manner of my escape from your tangle.
But now the truth shall be told, and others can take care of themselves!" She had so wound herself up with this, reached so the point of fairly heaving with courage and candour, that I for an instant almost miscalculated her direction and believed she was really throwing up her cards. It was as if she had decided, on some still finer lines, just to rub my nose into what I had been spelling out; which would have been an antic.i.p.ation of my own journey"s crown of the most disconcerting sort. I wanted my personal confidence, but I wanted n.o.body"s confession, and without the journey"s crown where _was_ the personal confidence? Without the personal confidence, moreover, where was the personal honour? That would be really the single thing to which I could attach authority, for a confession might, after all, be itself a lie. Anybody, at all events, could fit the shoe to one. My friend"s intention, however, remained but briefly equivocal; my danger pa.s.sed, and I recognised in its place a still richer a.s.surance. It was not the unnamed, in short, who were to be named. "Lady John _is_ the woman."
Yet even this was prodigious. "But I thought your present position was just that she"s _not_!"
"Lady John _is_ the woman," Mrs. Briss again announced.
"But I thought your present position was just that n.o.body is!"
"Lady John _is_ the woman," she a third time declared.
It naturally left me gaping. "Then there _is_ one?" I cried between bewilderment and joy.