That was the only thing in the whole business that was simple.It made me cling an instant the more, both for bliss and bale, to the bearing of this fact of Obert's insistence.Even as a sequel to his vision of her change, almost everything was wrong for her being all right except the one fact of my recent view, from the window, of the man unnamed.I saw him again sharply in these seconds, and to notice how he still kept clear of our company was almost to add certitude to the presumption of his rare reasons.Mrs.Server's being now, by a wonderful turn, all right would at least decidedly offer to these reasons a basis.It would be something Long's absence would fit.It would supply ground, in short, for the possibility that, by a process not less wonderful, he himself was all wrong.If he WAS all wrong my last impression of him would be amply accounted for.If he was all wrong--if he, in any case, felt himself going so--what more consequent than that he should have wished to hide it, and that the most immediate way for this should have seemed to him, markedly gregarious as he usually was, to keep away from the smokers? It came to me unspeakably that he WAS still hiding it and WAS keeping away.How, accordingly, must he not--and must not Mrs.Briss--have been in the spirit of this from the moment that, while I talked with Lady John, the sight of these two seated together had given me its message! But Obert's answer to my guarded challenge had meanwhile come."Oh, when a woman's so clever--!"That was all, with its touch of experience and its hint of philosophy;but it was stupefying.She was already then positively again "so clever?"This was really more than I could as yet provide an explanation for, but I was pressed; Brissenden would have reached his wife's room again, and I temporised."It was her cleverness that held you so that when I passed you couldn't look at me?"He looked at me at present well enough."I knew you were passing, but I wanted precisely to mark for you the difference.If you really want to know," the poor man confessed, "I was a little ashamed of myself.I had given her away to you, you know, rather, before.""And you were bound you wouldn't do it again?"He smiled in his now complete candour."Ah, there was no reason." Then he used, happily, to right himself, my own expression."She was all there.""I see--I see." Yet I really didn't see enough not to have for an instant to turn away.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To do what Brissenden came to me for."
"But I don't KNOW, you see, what Brissenden came to you for.""Well, with a message.She was to have seen me this evening, but, as she gave me no chance, I was afraid I had lost it and that, so rather awkwardly late, she didn't venture.But what he arrived for just now, at her request, was to say she does venture."My companion stared."At this extraordinary hour?""Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of yours and mine.What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it is, at all events, remarkably late, that's HER fault."Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder.
"And--a--where is it then you meet?"
"Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall.So good-night."He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification, little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me."The household sits up for you?"I wondered myself, but found an assurance."She must have squared the household! And it won't probably take us very long."His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity.
The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his ingenuity, simply baffled him."Do you mean you propose to discuss with her--?""My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's SHE--don't you see?--who proposes.""But what in the world--?"
"Oh, THAT I shall have to wait to tell you.""With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to say that I must then take his expectation as serious.But it seemed to say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted with being quite sure of me."Well, it will make a lot, really--!" But he broke off."You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know more than I!""And haven't I admitted that?"
"I'll be hanged if you DON'T know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all answer, now produced.
He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me for an instant hesitate."No, I really don't know.But it's exactly what I shall perhaps now learn.""You mean that what she has proposed is to TELL you?"His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance he had come with me, I had not at first caught.But it was a misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our whole talk, have thrown.Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this erroneous supposition of the source of my summons.It took me of course, at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the innumerable steps he had necessarily missed.
His question meanwhile, rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was temporarily answer enough."She'll tell me who he WON'Thave been!"
He looked vague."Ah, but THAT--"
"That," I declared, "will be luminous."
He made it out."As a sign, you think, that he must be the very one she denies?""The very one!" I laughed; and I left him under this simple and secure impression that my appointment was with Mrs.Server.
