I could again but feebly repeat it. "A great light?"
"As to what may go on even between others still. It"s a jolly idea--a torch in the darkness; and do you know what I"ve done with it? I"ve held it up, I don"t mind telling you, to just the question of the change, since this interests you, in Mrs. Server. If you"ve got your mystery I"ll be hanged if I won"t have mine. If you"ve got your Brissendens I shall see what I can do with _her_. You"ve given me an a.n.a.logy, and I declare I find it dazzling. I don"t see the end of what may be done with it. If Brissenden"s paying for his wife, for her amazing second bloom, who"s paying for Mrs. Server? Isn"t _that_--what do the newspapers call it?--the missing word? Isn"t it perhaps in fact just what you told me last night you were on the track of? But don"t add now," he went on, more and more amused with his divination, "don"t add now that the man"s obviously Gilbert Long--for I won"t be put off with anything of the sort. She collared him much too markedly. The real man must be one she doesn"t markedly collar."
"But I thought that what you a moment ago made out was that she so markedly collars all of us." This was my immediate reply to Obert"s blaze of ingenuity, but I none the less saw more things in it than I could reply to. I saw, at any rate, and saw with relief, that if he should look on the principle suggested to him by the case of the Brissendens, there would be no danger at all of his finding it. If, accordingly, I was nervous for Mrs. Server, all I had to do was to keep him on this false scent. Since it was not she who was paid for, but she who possibly paid, his fancy might harmlessly divert him till the party should disperse. At the same time, in the midst of these reflections, the question of the "change" in her, which he was in so much better a position than I to measure, couldn"t help having for me its portent, and the sense of that was, no doubt, in my next words. "What makes you think that what you speak of was what I had in my head?"
"Well, the way, simply, that the shoe fits. She"s absolutely not the same person I painted. It"s exactly like Mrs. Brissenden"s having been for you yesterday not the same person you had last seen bearing her name."
"Very good," I returned, "though I didn"t in the least mean to set you digging so hard. However, dig on your side, by all means, while I dig on mine. All I ask of you is complete discretion."
"Ah, naturally!"
"We ought to remember," I pursued, even at the risk of showing as too sententious, "that success in such an inquiry may perhaps be more embarra.s.sing than failure. To nose about for a relation that a lady has her reasons for keeping secret----"
"Is made not only quite inoffensive, I hold"--he immediately took me up--"but positively honourable, by being confined to psychologic evidence."
I wondered a little. "Honourable to whom?"
"Why, to the investigator. Resting on the _kind_ of signs that the game takes account of when fairly played--resting on psychologic signs alone, it"s a high application of intelligence. What"s ign.o.ble is the detective and the keyhole."
"I see," I after a moment admitted. "I did have, last night, my scruples, but you warm me up. Yet I confess also," I still added, "that if I do muster the courage of my curiosity, it"s a little because I feel even yet, as I think you also must, altogether dest.i.tute of a material clue. If I had a material clue I should feel ashamed: the fact would be deterrent. I start, for my part, at any rate, quite in the dark--or in a darkness lighted, at best, by what you have called the torch of my a.n.a.logy. The a.n.a.logy too," I wound up, "may very well be only half a help. It was easy to find poor Briss, because poor Briss is here, and it"s always easy, moreover, to find a husband. But say Mrs. Server"s poor Briss--or his equivalent, whoever it may be--_isn"t_ here."
We had begun to walk away with this, but my companion pulled up at the door of the room. "I"m sure he is. She tells me he"s near."
""Tells" you?" I challenged it, but I uncomfortably reflected that it was just what I had myself told Mrs. Brissenden.
"She wouldn"t be as she is if he weren"t. Her being as she is is the sign of it. He wasn"t present--that is he wasn"t present in her life at all--when I painted her; and the difference we"re impressed with is exactly the proof that he is now."
My difficulty in profiting by the relief he had so unconsciously afforded me resided of course in my not feeling free to show for quite as impressed as he was. I hadn"t really made out at all what he was impressed _with_, and I should only have spoiled everything by inviting him to be definite. This was a little of a worry, for I should have liked to know; but on the other hand I felt my track at present effectually covered. "Well, then, grant he"s one of us. There are more than a dozen of us--a dozen even with you and me and Brissenden counted out. The hitch is that we"re nowhere without a primary lead. As to Brissenden there _was_ the lead."
"You mean as afforded by his wife"s bloated state, which was a signal----?"
"Precisely: for the search for something or other that would help to explain it. Given his wife"s bloated state, his own shrunken one was what was to have been predicated. I knew definitely, in other words, what to look for."
"Whereas we don"t know here?"
"Mrs. Server"s state, unfortunately," I replied, "is not bloated."
He laughed at my "unfortunately," though recognising that I spoke merely from the point of view of lucidity, and presently remarked that he had his own idea. He didn"t say what it was, and I didn"t ask, intimating thereby that I held it to be in this manner we were playing the game; but I indulgently questioned it in the light of its not yet having a.s.sisted him. He answered that the minutes we had just pa.s.sed were what had made the difference; it had sprung from the strong effect produced on him after she came in with me. "It"s but now I really see her. She did and said nothing special, nothing striking or extraordinary; but that didn"t matter--it never does: one saw how she _is_. She"s nothing but _that_."
"Nothing but what?"
"She"s all _in_ it," he insisted. "Or it"s all in _her_. It comes to the same thing."
"Of course it"s all in her," I said as impatiently as I could, though his attestation--for I wholly trusted his perception--left me so much in his debt. "That"s what we start with, isn"t it? It leaves us as far as ever from what we must arrive at."
But he was too interested in his idea to heed my question. He was wrapped in the "psychologic" glow. "I _have_ her!"
"Ah, but it"s a question of having _him_!"
He looked at me on this as if I had brought him back to a mere detail, and after an instant the light went out of his face. "So it is. I leave it to you. I don"t care." His drop had the usual suddenness of the drops of the artistic temperament. "Look for the last man," he nevertheless, but with more detachment, added. "I daresay it would be he."
"The last? In what sense the last?"
"Well, the last sort of creature who could be believed of her."
"Oh," I rejoined as we went on, "the great bar to that is that such a sort of creature as the last won"t _be_ here!"
He hesitated. "So much the better. I give him, at any rate, wherever he is, up to you."
"Thank you," I returned, "for the beauty of the present! You do see, then, that our psychologic glow doesn"t, after all, prevent the thing----"
"From being none of one"s business? Yes. Poor little woman!" He seemed somehow satisfied; he threw it all up. "It isn"t any of one"s business, is it?"
"Why, that"s what I was telling you," I impatiently exclaimed, "that _I_ feel!"
V
The first thing that happened to me after parting with him was to find myself again engaged with Mrs. Brissenden, still full of the quick conviction with which I had left her. "It _is_ she--quite unmistakably, you know. I don"t see how I can have been so stupid as not to make it out. I haven"t your cleverness, of course, till my nose is rubbed into a thing. But when it _is_--!" She celebrated her humility in a laugh that was proud. "The two are off together."
"Off where?"
"I don"t know where, but I saw them a few minutes ago most distinctly "slope." They"ve gone for a quiet, unwatched hour, poor dears, out into the park or the gardens. When one knows it, it"s all there. But what"s that vulgar song?--"You"ve got to know it first!" It strikes me, if you don"t mind my telling you so, that the way _you_ get hold of things is positively uncanny. I mean as regards what first marked her for you."
"But, my dear lady," I protested, "nothing at all first marked her for me. She _isn"t_ marked for me, first or last. It was only you who so jumped at her."
My interlocutress stared, and I had at this moment, I remember, an almost intolerable sense of her fatuity and cruelty. They were all unconscious, but they were, at that stage, none the less irritating. Her fine bosom heaved, her blue eyes expanded with her successful, her simplified egotism. I couldn"t, in short, I found, bear her being so keen about Mrs. Server while she was so stupid about poor Briss. She seemed to recall to me n.o.bly the fact that _she_ hadn"t a lover. No, she was only eating poor Briss up inch by inch, but she hadn"t a lover. "I don"t," I insisted, "see in Mrs. Server any of the right signs."
She looked almost indignant. "Even after your telling me that you see in Lady John only the wrong ones?"
"Ah, but there are other women here than Mrs. Server and Lady John."
"Certainly. But didn"t we, a moment ago, think of them all and dismiss them? If Lady John"s out of the question, how can Mrs. Server possibly _not_ be in it? We want a fool----"
"Ah, _do_ we?" I interruptingly wailed.
"Why, exactly by your own theory, in which you"ve so much interested me!
It was you who struck off the idea."
"That we want a fool?" I felt myself turning gloomy enough. "Do we really want anyone at all?"
She gave me, in momentary silence, a strange smile. "Ah, you want to take it back now? You"re sorry you spoke. My dear man, you may be----"
but that didn"t hinder the fact, in short, that I had kindled near me a fine, if modest and timid, intelligence. There did remain the truth of our friend"s striking development, to which I had called her attention.
Regretting my rashness didn"t make the prodigy less. "You"ll lead me to believe, if you back out, that there"s suddenly someone you want to protect. Weak man," she exclaimed with an a.s.surance from which, I confess, I was to take alarm, "something has happened to you since we separated! Weak man," she repeated with dreadful gaiety, "you"ve been squared!"