"Yes--yes," I said. "Go on."
"Well, as you had planted the theory in me, it began to bear fruit. I began to watch them. I continued to watch them. I did nothing but watch them."
The sudden lowering of his voice in this confession--as if it had represented a sort of darkening of his consciousness--again amused me.
"You too? How then we"ve been occupied! For I, you see, have watched--or had, until I found you just now with Mrs. Server--everyone, everything _but_ you."
"Oh, I"ve watched _you_," said Ford Obert as if he had then perhaps after all the advantage of me. "I admit that I made you out for myself to be back on the scent; for I thought I made you out baffled."
To learn whether I really had been was, I saw, what he would most have liked; but I also saw that he had, as to this, a scruple about asking me. What I most saw, however, was that to tell him I should have to understand. "What scent do you allude to?"
He smiled as if I might have fancied I could fence. "Why, the pursuit of the identification that"s none of our business--the identification of her lover."
"Ah, it"s as to that," I instantly replied, "you"ve judged me baffled?
I"m afraid," I almost as quickly added, "that I must admit I _have_ been. Luckily, at all events, it _is_ none of our business."
"Yes," said my friend, amused on his side, "nothing"s our business that we can"t find out. I saw you hadn"t found him. And what," Obert continued, "does he matter now?"
It took but a moment to place me for seeing that my companion"s conviction on this point was a conviction decidedly to respect; and even that amount of hesitation was but the result of my wondering how he had reached it. "What, indeed?" I promptly replied. "But how did you see I had failed?"
"By seeing that I myself had. For I"ve been looking too. He isn"t here,"
said Ford Obert.
Delighted as I was that he should believe it, I was yet struck by the complacency of his confidence, which connected itself again with my observation of their so recent colloquy. "Oh, for you to be so sure, has Mrs. Server squared you?"
"_Is_ he here?" he for all answer to this insistently asked.
I faltered but an instant. "No; he isn"t here. It"s no thanks to one"s scruples, but perhaps it"s lucky for one"s manners. I speak at least for mine. If you"ve watched," I pursued, "you"ve doubtless sufficiently seen what has already become of mine. He isn"t here, at all events," I repeated, "and we must do without his ident.i.ty. What, in fact, are we showing each other," I asked, "but that we _have_ done without it?"
"_I_ have!" my friend declared with supreme frankness and with something of the note, as I was obliged to recognise, of my own constructive joy.
"I"ve done perfectly without it."
I saw in fact that he had, and it struck me really as wonderful. But I controlled the expression of my wonder. "So that if you spoke therefore just now of watching them----"
"I meant of course"--he took it straight up--"watching the Brissendens.
And naturally, above all," he as quickly subjoined, "the wife."
I was now full of concurrence. "Ah, naturally, above all, the wife."
So far as was required it encouraged him. "A woman"s lover doesn"t matter--doesn"t matter at least to anyone but himself, doesn"t matter to you or to me or to her--when once she has given him up."
It made me, this testimony of his observation, show, in spite of my having by this time so counted on it, something of the vivacity of my emotion. "She _has_ given him up?"
But the surprise with which he looked round put me back on my guard. "Of what else then are we talking?"
"Of nothing else, of course," I stammered. "But the way you see----!" I found my refuge in the gasp of my admiration.
"I do see. But"--he _would_ come back to that--"only through your having seen first. You gave me the pieces. I"ve but put them together. You gave me the Brissendens--bound hand and foot; and I"ve but made them, in that sorry state, pull me through. I"ve blown on my torch, in other words, till, flaring and smoking, it has guided me, through a magnificent chiaroscuro of colour and shadow, out into the light of day."
I was really dazzled by his image, for it represented his personal work.
"You"ve done more than I, it strikes me--and with less to do it with. If I gave you the Brissendens I gave you all I had."
"But all you had was immense, my dear man. The Brissendens are immense."
"Of course the Brissendens are immense! If they hadn"t been immense they wouldn"t have been--_nothing_ would have been--anything." Then after a pause, "Your image is splendid," I went on--"your being out of the cave.
But what is it exactly," I insidiously threw out, "that you _call_ the "light of day"?"
I remained a moment, however, not sure whether I had been too subtle or too simple. He had another of his cautions. "What do _you_----?"
But I was determined to make him give it me all himself, for it was from my not prompting him that its value would come. "You tell me," I accordingly rather crudely pleaded, "first."
It gave us a moment during which he so looked as if I asked too much, that I had a fear of losing all. He even spoke with some impatience. "If you really haven"t found it for yourself, you know. I scarce see what you _can_ have found."
Then I had my inspiration. I risked an approach to roughness, and all the more easily that my words were strict truth. "Oh, don"t be afraid--greater things than yours!"
It succeeded, for it played upon his curiosity, and he visibly imagined that, with impatience controlled, he should learn what these things were. He relaxed, he responded, and the next moment I was in all but full enjoyment of the piece wanted to make all my other pieces right--right because of that special beauty in my scheme through which the whole depended so on each part and each part so guaranteed the whole. "What I call the light of day is the sense I"ve arrived at of her vision."
"Her vision?"--I just balanced in the air.
"Of what they have in common. _His_--poor chap"s--extraordinary situation too."
"Bravo! And you see in that----?"
"What, all these hours, has touched, fascinated, drawn her. It has been an instinct with her."
"Bravissimo!"
It saw him, my approval, safely into port. "The instinct of sympathy, pity--the response to fellowship in misery; the sight of another fate as strange, as monstrous as her own."
I couldn"t help jumping straight up--I stood before him. "So that whoever may have _been_ the man, the man _now_, the actual man----"
"Oh," said Obert, looking, luminous and straight, up at me from his seat, "the man now, the actual man----!" But he stopped short, with his eyes suddenly quitting me and his words becoming a formless e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.
The door of the room, to which my back was turned, had opened, and I quickly looked round. It was Brissenden himself who, to my supreme surprise, stood there, with rapid inquiry in his att.i.tude and face. I saw, as soon as he caught mine, that I was what he wanted, and, immediately excusing myself for an instant to Obert, I antic.i.p.ated, by moving across the room, the need, on poor Briss"s part, of my further demonstration. My whole sense of the situation blazed up at the touch of his presence, and even before I reached him it had rolled over me in a prodigious wave that I had lost nothing whatever. I can"t begin to say how the fact of his appearance crowned the communication my interlocutor had just made me, nor in what a bright confusion of many things I found myself facing poor Briss. One of these things was precisely that he had never been so much poor Briss as at this moment. That ministered to the confusion as well as to the brightness, for if his being there at all renewed my sources and replenished my current--spoke all, in short, for my gain--so, on the other hand, in the light of what I had just had from Obert, his particular aspect was something of a shock. I can"t present this especial impression better than by the mention of my instant cert.i.tude that what he had come for was to bring me a message and that somehow--yes, indubitably--this circ.u.mstance seemed to have placed him again at the very bottom of his hole. It was down in that depth that he let me see him--it was out of it that he delivered himself. Poor Briss!
poor Briss!--I had asked myself before he spoke with what kindness enough I could meet him. Poor Briss! poor Briss!--I am not even now sure that I didn"t first meet him by _that_ irrepressible murmur. It was in it all for me that, thus, at midnight, he had traversed on his errand the length of the great dark house. I trod with him, over the velvet and the marble, through the twists and turns, among the glooms and glimmers and echoes, every inch of the way, and I don"t know what humiliation, for him, was const.i.tuted there, between us, by his long pilgrimage. It was the final expression of his sacrifice.
"My wife has something to say to you."
"Mrs. Briss? Good!"--and I could only hope the candour of my surprise was all I tried to make it. "Is she with you there?"
"No, but she has asked me to say to you that if you"ll presently be in the drawing-room she"ll come."
Who could doubt, as I laid my hand on his shoulder, fairly patting it, in spite of myself, for applause--who could doubt where I would presently be? "It"s most uncommonly good of both of you."
There was something in his inscrutable service that, making him almost august, gave my dissimulated eagerness the sound of a heartless compliment. _I_ stood for the hollow chatter of the vulgar world, and he--oh, he was as serious as he was conscious; which was enough. "She says you"ll know what she wishes--and she was sure I"d find you here. So I may tell her you"ll come?"
His courtesy half broke my heart. "Why, my dear man, with all the pleasure----! So many thousand thanks. I"ll be with her."
"Thanks to _you_. She"ll be down. Good-night." He looked round the room--at the two or three cl.u.s.ters of men, smoking, engaged, contented, on their easy seats and among their popped corks; he looked over an instant at Ford Obert, whose eyes, I thought, he momentarily held. It was absolutely as if, for me, he were seeking such things--out of what was closing over him--for the last time. Then he turned again to the door, which, just not to fail humanly to accompany him a step, I had opened. On the other side of it I took leave of him. The pa.s.sage, though there was a light in the distance, was darker than the smoking-room, and I had drawn the door to.