My old motive--old with the prodigious antiquity the few hours had given it--had quite left me; I seemed to myself to know little now of my desire to "protect" Mrs.Server.She was certainly, with Mrs.Briss at least, past all protection; and the conviction had grown with me, in these few minutes, that there was now no rag of the queer truth that Mrs.Briss hadn't secretly--by which I meant morally--handled.But I none the less, on a perfectly simple reasoning, stood to my guns, and with no sense whatever, I must add, of now breaking my vow of the morning.I had made another vow since then--made it to the poor lady herself as we sat together in the wood; passed my word to HER that there was no approximation I pretended even to myself to have made.How then was I to pretend to Mrs.Briss, and what facts HAD I collected on which I could respectably ground an acknowledgment to her that I had come round to her belief? If I had "caught" our incriminated pair together--really together--even for three minutes, I would, I sincerely considered, have come round.But I was to have performed this revolution on nothing less, as I now went on to explain to her."Of course if you've got new evidence I shall be delighted to hear it; and of course I can't help wondering whether the possession of it and the desire to overwhelm me with it aren't, together, the one thing you've been nursing till now."Oh, how intensely she didn't like such a tone! If she hadn't looked so handsome I would say she made a wry face over it, though I didn't even yet see where her dislike would make her come out.Before she came out, in fact, she waited as if it were a question of dashing her head at a wall.
Then, at last, she charged."It's nonsense.I've nothing to tell you.Ifeel there's nothing in it and I've given it up."I almost gaped--by which I mean that I looked as if I did--for surprise.
"You agree that it's not she--?" Then, as she again waited, "It's YOU who've come round?" I insisted.
"To your doubt of its being May? Yes--I've come round.""Ah, pardon me," I returned; "what I expressed this morning was, if I remember rightly, not at all a 'doubt,' but a positive, intimate conviction that was inconsistent with ANY doubt.I was emphatic--purely and simply--that I didn't see it."She looked, however, as if she caught me in a weakness here."Then why did you say to me that if you should reconsider--""You should handsomely have it from me, and my grounds? Why, as I've just reminded you, as a form of courtesy to you--magnanimously to help you, as it were, to feel as comfortable as I conceived you naturally would desire to feel in your own conviction.Only for that.And now," I smiled, "I'm to understand from you that, in spite of that immense allowance, you HAVEN'T, all this while, felt comfortable?"She gave, on this, in a wonderful, beautiful way, a slow, simplifying headshake."Mrs.Server isn't in it!"The only way then to take it from her was that her concession was a prelude to something still better; and when I had given her time to see this dawn upon me I had my eagerness and I jumped into the breathless.
"You've made out then who IS?"
"Oh, I don't make out, you know," she laughed, "so much as you! SHEisn't," she simply repeated.
I looked at it, on my inspiration, quite ruefully--almost as if I now wished, after all, she were."Ah, but, do you know? it really strikes me you make out marvels.You made out this morning quite what I couldn't.
I hadn't put together anything so extraordinary as that--in the total absence of everything--it SHOULD have been our friend."Mrs.Briss appeared, on her side, to take in the intention of this.
"What do you mean by the total absence? When I made my mistake," she declared as if in the interest of her dignity, "I didn't think everything absent.""I see," I admitted."I see," I thoughtfully repeated."And do you, then, think everything now?""I had my honest impression of the moment," she pursued as if she had not heard me."There were appearances that, as it at the time struck me, fitted.""Precisely "--and I recalled for her the one she had made most of."There was in especial the appearance that she was at a particular moment using Brissenden to show whom she was not using.You felt THEN," I ventured to observe, "the force of that."I ventured less than, already, I should have liked to venture; yet Inone the less seemed to see her try on me the effect of the intimation that I was going far."Is it your wish," she inquired with much nobleness, "to confront me, to my confusion, with my inconsistency?" Her nobleness offered itself somehow as such a rebuke to my mere logic that, in my momentary irritation, I might have been on the point of assenting to her question.
This imminence of my assent, justified by my horror of her huge egotism, but justified by nothing else and precipitating everything, seemed as marked for these few seconds as if we each had our eyes on it.But I sat so tight that the danger passed, leaving my silence to do what it could for my manners.
