The Sacred Fount

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! She isn'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 I none 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. She proceeded meanwhile to add a very handsome account of her own. "You should do me the justice to recognise how little I need have spoken another word to you, and how little, also, this amiable explanation to you is in the interest of one's natural pride. It seems to me I've come to you here altogether in the interest of yours. You talk about humble pie, but I think that, upon my word—with all I've said to you—it's I who have had to eat it. The magnanimity you speak of," she continued with all her grandeur—"I really don't see, either, whose it is but mine. I don't see what account of anything I'm in any way obliged to give."

I granted it quickly and without reserve. "You're not obliged to give any—you're quite right: you do it only because you're such a large, splendid creature. I quite feel that, beside you"—I did, at least, treat myself to the amusement of saying—"I move in a tiny circle. Still, I won't have it"—I could also, again, keep it up—"that our occasion has nothing for you but the taste of abasement. You gulp your mouthful down, but hasn't it been served on gold plate? You've had a magnificent day—a brimming cup of triumph, and you're more beautiful and fresh, after it all, and at an hour when fatigue would be almost positively graceful, than you were even this morning, when you met me as a daughter of the dawn. That's the sort of sense," I laughed, "that must sustain a woman!" And I wound up on a complete recovery of my good-humour. "No, no. I thank you—thank you immensely. But I don't pity you. You can afford to lose." I wanted her perplexity—the proper sharp dose of it—to result both from her knowing and her not knowing sufficiently what I meant; and when I in fact saw how perplexed she could be and how little, again, she could enjoy it, I felt anew my private wonder at her having cared and dared to meet me. Where was enjoyment, for her, where the insolence of success, if the breath of irony could chill them? Why, since she was bold, should she be susceptible, and how, since she was susceptible, could she be bold? I scarce know what, at this moment, determined the divination; but everything, the distinct and the dim alike, had cleared up the next instant at the touch of the real truth. The certitude of the source of my present opportunity had rolled over me before we exchanged another word. The source was simply Gilbert Long, and she was there because he had directed it. This connection hooked itself, like a sudden picture and with a click that fairly resounded through our empty rooms, into the array of the other connections, to the immense enrichment, as it was easy to feel, of the occasion, and to the immense confirmation of the very idea that, in the course of the evening, I had come near dismissing from my mind as too fantastic even for the rest of the company it should enjoy there. What I now was sure of flashed back, at any rate, every syllable of sense I could have desired into the suggestion I had, after the music, caught from the juxtaposition of these two. Thus solidified, this conviction, it spread and spread to a distance greater than I could just then traverse under Mrs. Briss's eyes, but which, exactly for that reason perhaps, quickened my pride in the kingdom of thought I had won. I was really not to have felt more, in the whole business, than I felt at this moment that by my own right hand I had gained the kingdom. Long and she were together, and I was alone thus in face of them, but there was none the less not a single flower of the garden that my woven wreath should lack.

I must have looked queer to my friend as I grinned to myself over this vow; but my relish of the way I was keeping things together made me perhaps for the instant unduly rash. I cautioned myself, however, fortunately, before it could leave her—scared a little, all the same, even with Long behind her—an advantage to take, and, in infinitely less time than I have needed to tell it, I had achieved my flight into luminous ether and, alighting gracefully on my feet, reported myself at my post. I had in other words taken in both the full prodigy of the entente between Mrs. Server's lover and poor Briss's wife, and the finer strength it gave the last-named as the representative of their interest. I may add too that I had even taken time fairly not to decide which of these two branches of my vision—that of the terms of their intercourse, or that of their need of it—was likely to prove, in delectable retrospect, the more exquisite. All this, I admit, was a good deal to have come and gone while my privilege trembled, in its very essence, in the scale. Mrs. Briss had but a back to turn, and everything was over. She had, in strictness, already uttered what saved her honour, and her revenge on impertinence might easily be her withdrawing with one of her sweeps. I couldn't certainly in that case hurry after her without spilling my cards. As my accumulations of lucidity, however, were now such as to defy all leakage, I promptly recognised the facilities involved in a superficial sacrifice; and with one more glance at the beautiful fact that she knew the strength of Long's hand, I again went steadily and straight. She was acting not only for herself, and since she had another also to serve and, as I was sure, report to, I should sufficiently hold her. I knew moreover that I held her as soon as I had begun afresh. "I don't mean that anything alters the fact that you lose gracefully. It is awfully charming, your thus giving yourself up, and yet, justified as I am by it, I can't help regretting a little the excitement I found it this morning to pull a different way from you. Shall I tell you," it suddenly came to me to put to her, "what, for some reason, a man feels aware of?" And then as, guarded, still uneasy, she would commit herself to no permission: "That pulling against you also had its thrill. You defended your cause. Oh," I quickly added, "I know—who should know better?—that it was bad. Only—what shall I say?—you weren't bad, and one had to fight. And then there was what one was fighting for! Well, you're not bad now, either; so that you may ask me, of course, what more I want." I tried to think a moment. "It isn't that, thrown back on the comparative dullness of security, I find—as people have been known to—my own cause less good: no, it isn't that." After which I had my illumination. "I'll tell you what it is: it's the come-down of ceasing to work with you!"

She looked as if she were quite excusable for not following me. "To 'work'?"

I immediately explained. "Even fighting was working, for we struck, you'll remember, sparks, and sparks were what we wanted. There we are then," I cheerfully went on. "Sparks are what we still want, and you've not come to me, I trust, with a mere spent match. I depend upon it that you've another to strike." I showed her without fear all I took for granted. "Who, then, has?"

She was superb in her coldness, but her stare was partly blank. "Who then has what?"

"Why, done it." And as even at this she didn't light I gave her something of a jog. "You haven't, with the force of your revulsion, I hope, literally lost our thread." But as, in spite of my thus waiting for her to pick it up she did nothing, I offered myself as fairly stooping to the carpet for it and putting it back in her hand. "Done what we spent the morning wondering at. Who then, if it isn't, certainly, Mrs. Server, is the woman who has made Gilbert Long—well, what you know?"

I had needed the moment to take in the special shade of innocence she was by this time prepared to show me. It was an innocence, in particular, in respect to the relation of anyone, in all the vast impropriety of things, to anyone. "I'm afraid I know nothing."

I really wondered an instant how she could expect help from such extravagance. "But I thought you just recognised that you do enjoy the sense of your pardonable mistake. You knew something when you knew enough to see you had made it."

She faced me as with the frank perception that, of whatever else one might be aware, I abounded in traps, and that this would probably be one of my worst. "Oh, I think one generally knows when one has made a mistake."

"That's all then I invite you—a mistake, as you properly call it—to allow me to impute to you. I'm not accusing you of having made fifty. You made none whatever, I hold, when you agreed with me with such eagerness about the striking change in him."

She affected me as asking herself a little, on this, whether vagueness, the failure of memory, the rejection of nonsense, mightn't still serve her. But she saw the next moment a better way. It all came back to her, but from so very far off. "The change, do you mean, in poor Mr. Long?"

"Of what other change—except, as you may say, your own—have you met me here to speak of? Your own, I needn't remind you, is part and parcel of Long's."

"Oh, my own," she presently returned, "is a much simpler matter even than that. My own is the recognition that I just expressed to you and that I can't consent, if you please, to your twisting into the recognition of anything else. It's the recognition that I know nothing of any other change. I stick, if you'll allow me, to my ignorance."

"I'll allow you with joy," I laughed, "if you'll let me stick to it with you. Your own change is quite sufficient—it gives us all we need. It will give us, if we retrace the steps of it, everything, everything!"

Mrs. Briss considered. "I don't quite see, do I? why, at this hour of the night, we should begin to retrace steps."

"Simply because it's the hour of the night you've happened, in your generosity and your discretion, to choose. I'm struck, I confess," I declared with a still sharper conviction, "with the wonderful charm of it for our purpose."

"And, pray, what do you call with such solemnity," she inquired, "our purpose?"

I had fairly recovered at last—so far from being solemn—an appropriate gaiety. "I can only, with positiveness, answer for mine! That has remained all day the same—to get at the truth: not, that is, to relax my grasp of that tip of the tail of it which you so helped me this morning to fasten to. If you've ceased to care to help me," I pursued, "that's a difference indeed. But why," I candidly, pleadingly asked, "should you cease to care?" It was more and more of a comfort to feel her imprisoned in her inability really to explain her being there. To show herself as she was explained it only so far as she could express that; which was just the freedom she could least take. "What on earth is between us, anyhow," I insisted, "but our confounded interest? That's only quickened, for me, don't you see? by the charming way you've come round; and I don't see how it can logically be anything less than quickened for yourself. We're like the messengers and heralds in the tale of Cinderella, and I protest, I assure you, against any sacrifice of our dénoûment. We've still the glass shoe to fit."

I took pleasure at the moment in my metaphor; but this was not the case, I soon enough perceived, with my companion. "How can I tell, please," she demanded, "what you consider you're talking about?"

I smiled; it was so quite the question Ford Obert, in the smoking-room, had begun by putting me. I hadn't to take time to remind myself how I had dealt with him. "And you knew," I sighed, "so beautifully, you glowed over it so, this morning!" She continued to give me, in every way, her disconnection from this morning, so that I had only to proceed: "You've not availed yourself of this occasion to pretend to me that poor Mr. Long, as you call him, is, after all, the same limited person–"

"That he always was, and that you, yesterday, so suddenly discovered him to have ceased to be?"—for with this she had waked up. But she was still thinking how she could turn it. "You see too much."

"Oh, I know I do—ever so much too much. And much as I see, I express only half of it—so you may judge!" I laughed. "But what will you have? I see what I see, and this morning, for a good bit, you did me the honour to do the same. I returned, also, the compliment, didn't I? by seeing something of what you saw. We put it, the whole thing, together, and we shook the bottle hard. I'm to take from you, after this," I wound up, "that what it contains is a perfectly colourless fluid?"

I paused for a reply, but it was not to come so happily as from Obert. "You talk too much!" said Mrs. Briss.

I met it with amazement. "Why, whom have I told?"

I looked at her so hard with it that her colour began to rise, which made me promptly feel that she wouldn't press that point. "I mean you're carried away—you're abused by a fine fancy: so that, with your art of putting things, one doesn't know where one is—nor, if you'll allow me to say so, do I quite think you always do. Of course I don't deny you're awfully clever. But you build up," she brought out with a regret so indulgent and a reluctance so marked that she for some seconds fairly held the blow—"you build up houses of cards."

I had been impatient to learn what, and, frankly, I was disappointed. This broke from me, after an instant, doubtless, with a bitterness not to be mistaken. "Long isn't what he seems?"

"Seems to whom?" she asked sturdily.

"Well, call it—for simplicity—to me. For you see"—and I spoke as to show what it was to see—"it all stands or falls by that."

The explanation presently appeared a little to have softened her. If it all stood or fell only by that, it stood or fell by something that, for her comfort, might be not so unsuccessfully disposed of. She exhaled, with the swell of her fine person, a comparative blandness—seemed to play with the idea of a smile. She had, in short, her own explanation. "The trouble with you is that you over-estimate the penetration of others. How can it approach your own?"

"Well, yours had for a while, I should say, distinct moments of keeping up with it. Nothing is more possible," I went on, "than that I do talk too much; but I've done so—about the question in dispute between us—only to you. I haven't, as I conceived we were absolutely not to do, mentioned it to anyone else, nor given anyone a glimpse of our difference. If you've not understood yourself as pledged to the same reserve, and have consequently," I went on, "appealed to the light of other wisdom, it shows at least that, in spite of my intellectual pace, you must more or less have followed me. What am I not, in fine, to think of your intelligence," I asked, "if, deciding for a resort to headquarters, you've put the question to Long himself?"

"The question?" She was straight out to sea again.

"Of the identity of the lady."

She slowly, at this, headed about. "To Long himself?"

XIII

I had felt I could risk such directness only by making it extravagant—by suggesting it as barely imaginable that she could so have played our game; and during the instant for which I had now pulled her up I could judge I had been right. It was an instant that settled everything, for I saw her, with intensity, with gallantry too, surprised but not really embarrassed, recognise that of course she must simply lie. I had been justified by making it so possible for her to lie. "It would have been a short cut," I said, "and even more strikingly perhaps—to do it justice—a bold deed. But it would have been, in strictness, a departure—wouldn't it?—from our so distinguished little compact. Yet while I look at you," I went on, "I wonder. Bold deeds are, after all, quite in your line; and I'm not sure I don't rather want not to have missed so much possible comedy. 'I have it for you from Mr. Long himself that, every appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, his stupidity is unimpaired'—isn't that, for the beauty of it, after all, what you've veraciously to give me?" We stood face to face a moment, and I laughed out. "The beauty of it would be great!"

I had given her time; I had seen her safely to shore. It was quite what I had meant to do, but she now took still better advantage than I had expected of her opportunity. She not only scrambled up the bank, she recovered breath and turned round. "Do you imagine he would have told me?"

It was magnificent, but I felt she was still to better it should I give her a new chance. "Who the lady really is? Well, hardly; and that's why, as you so acutely see, the question of your having risked such a step has occurred to me only as a jest. Fancy indeed"—I piled it up—"your saying to him: 'We're all noticing that you're so much less of an idiot than you used to be, and we've different views of the miracle'!"

I had been going on, but I was checked without a word from her. Her look alone did it, for, though it was a look that partly spoiled her lie, it—by that very fact—sufficed to my confidence. "I've not spoken to a creature."

It was beautifully said, but I felt again the abysses that the mere saying of it covered, and the sense of these wonderful things was not a little, no doubt, in my immediate cheer. "Ah, then, we're all right!" I could have rubbed my hands over it. "I mean, however," I quickly added, "only as far as that. I don't at all feel comfortable about your new theory itself, which puts me so wretchedly in the wrong."

"Rather!" said Mrs. Briss almost gaily. "Wretchedly indeed in the wrong!"

"Yet only—equally of course," I returned after a brief brooding, "if I come within a conceivability of accepting it. Are you conscious that, in default of Long's own word—equivocal as that word would be—you press it upon me without the least other guarantee?"

"And pray," she asked, "what guarantee had you?"

"For the theory with which we started? Why, our recognised fact. The change in the man. You may say," I pursued, "that I was the first to speak for him; but being the first didn't, in your view, constitute a weakness when it came to your speaking yourself for Mrs. Server. By which I mean," I added, "speaking against her."

She remembered, but not for my benefit. "Well, you then asked me my warrant. And as regards Mr. Long and your speaking against him——"

"Do you describe what I say as 'against' him?" I immediately broke in.

It took her but an instant. "Surely—to have made him out horrid."

I could only want to fix it. "'Horrid'–?"

"Why, having such secrets." She was roundly ready now. "Sacrificing poor May."

"But you, dear lady, sacrificed poor May! It didn't strike you as horrid then."

"Well, that was only," she maintained, "because you talked me over."

I let her see the full process of my taking—or not taking—this in. "And who is it then that—if, as you say, you've spoken to no one—has, as I may call it, talked you under?"

She completed, on the spot, her statement of a moment before. "Not a creature has spoken to me."

I felt somehow the wish to make her say it in as many ways as possible—I seemed so to enjoy her saying it. This helped me to make my tone approve and encourage. "You've communicated so little with anyone!" I didn't even make it a question.

It was scarce yet, however, quite good enough. "So little? I've not communicated the least mite."

"Precisely. But don't think me impertinent for having for a moment wondered. What I should say to you if you had, you know, would be that you just accused me."

"Accused you?"

"Of talking too much."

It came back to her dim. "Are we accusing each other?"

Her tone seemed suddenly to put us nearer together than we had ever been at all. "Dear no," I laughed—"not each other; only with each other's help, a few of our good friends."

"A few?" She handsomely demurred. "But one or two at the best."

"Or at the worst!"—I continued to laugh. "And not even those, it after all appears, very much!"

She didn't like my laughter, but she was now grandly indulgent. "Well, I accuse no one."

I was silent a little; then I concurred. "It's doubtless your best line; and I really quite feel, at all events, that when you mentioned a while since that I talk too much you only meant too much to you."

"Yes—I wasn't imputing to you the same direct appeal. I didn't suppose," she explained, "that—to match your own supposition of me—you had resorted to May herself."

"You didn't suppose I had asked her?" The point was positively that she didn't; yet it made us look at each other almost as hard as if she did. "No, of course you couldn't have supposed anything so cruel—all the more that, as you knew, I had not admitted the possibility."

She accepted my assent; but, oddly enough, with a sudden qualification that showed her as still sharply disposed to make use of any loose scrap of her embarrassed acuteness. "Of course, at the same time, you yourself saw that your not admitting the possibility would have taken the edge from your cruelty. It's not the innocent," she suggestively remarked, "that we fear to frighten."

"Oh," I returned, "I fear, mostly, I think, to frighten any one. I'm not particularly brave. I haven't, at all events, in spite of my certitude, interrogated Mrs. Server, and I give you my word of honour that I've not had any denial from her to prop up my doubt. It still stands on its own feet, and it was its own battle that, when I came here at your summons, it was prepared to fight. Let me accordingly remind you," I pursued, "in connection with that, of the one sense in which you were, as you a moment ago said, talked over by me. I persuaded you apparently that Long's metamorphosis was not the work of Lady John. I persuaded you of nothing else."