The Sacred Fount Part 15

"Count whom?"

"Why, the ladies as they filed up. Was the number there?"

He gave a jerk of impatience. "Go and see for yourself!"

Once more I just waited. "But suppose I should find Mrs. Server----?"

"Prowling there on the chance of you? Well--I thought she was what you wanted."

"Then," I returned, "you _could_ tell what I was talking about!" For a moment after this we faced each other without more speech, but I presently continued: "You didn't really notice if any lady stayed behind?"

"I think you ask too much of me," he at last brought out. "Take care of your ladies, my dear man, yourself! Go," he repeated, "and see."

"Certainly--it's better; but I'll rejoin you in three minutes." And while he went his way to the smoking-room I proceeded without more delay to a.s.sure myself, performing in the opposite sense the journey I had made ten minutes before. It was extraordinary what the sight of Long alone in the outer darkness had done for me: my expression of it would have been that it had put me "on" again at the moment of my decidedly feeling myself off. I believed that if I hadn't seen him I could now have gone to bed without seeing Mrs. Briss; but my renewed impression had suddenly made the difference. If that was the way he struck me, how might not, if I could get at her, she? And she might, after all, in the privacy at last offered us by empty rooms, be waiting for me. I went through them all, however, only to find them empty indeed. In conformity with the large allowances of every sort that were the law of Newmarch, they were still open and lighted, so that if I had believed in Mrs.

Briss's reappearance I might conveniently, on the spot, have given her five minutes more. I am not sure, for that matter, that I didn't. I remember at least wondering if I mightn't ring somewhere for a servant and cause a question to be sent up to her. I didn't ring, but I must have lingered a little on the chance of the arrival of servants to extinguish lights and see the house safe. They had not arrived, however, by the time I again felt that I must give up.

XI

I gave up by going, decidedly, to the smoking-room, where several men had gathered and where Obert, a little apart from them, was in charmed communion with the bookshelves. They are wonderful, everywhere, at Newmarch, the bookshelves, but he put a volume back as he saw me come in, and a moment later, when we were seated, I said to him again, as a recall of our previous pa.s.sage, "Then you _could_ tell what I was talking about!" And I added, to complete my reference, "Since you thought Mrs. Server was the person whom, when I stopped you, I was sorry to learn from you I had missed."

His momentary silence appeared to admit the connection I established.

"Then you find you _have_ missed her? She wasn't there for you?"

"There's no one 'there for me'; so that I fear that if you weren't, as it happens, here for me, my amus.e.m.e.nt would be quite at an end. I had, in fact," I continued, "already given it up as lost when I came upon you, a while since, in conversation with the lady we've named. At that, I confess, my prospects gave something of a flare. I said to myself that since _your_ interest hadn't then wholly dropped, why, even at the worst, should mine? Yours _was_ mine, wasn't it? for a little, this morning. Or was it mine that was yours? We exchanged, at any rate, some lively impressions. Only, before we had done, your effort dropped or your discretion intervened: you gave up, as none of your business, the question that had suddenly tempted us."

"And you gave it up too," said my friend.

"Yes, and it was on the idea that it was mine as little as yours that we separated."

"Well then?" He kept his eyes, with his head thrown back, on the warm bindings, admirable for old gilt and old colour, that covered the opposite wall.

"Well then, if I've correctly gathered that you're, in spite of our common renunciation, still interested, I confess to you that I am. I took my detachment too soon for granted. I haven't been detached. I'm not, hang me! detached now. And it's all because you were originally so suggestive."

"Originally?"

"Why, from the moment we met here yesterday--the moment of my first seeing you with Mrs. Server. The look you gave me then was really the beginning of everything. Everything"--and I spoke now with real conviction--"was traceably to spring from it."

"What do you mean," he asked, "by everything?"

"Well, this failure of detachment. What you said to me as we were going up yesterday afternoon to dress--what you said to me then is responsible for it. And since it comes to that," I pursued, "I make out for myself now that you're not detached either--unless, that is, simply detached from _me_. I had indeed a suspicion of that as I pa.s.sed through the room there."

He smoked through another pause. "You've extraordinary notions of responsibility."

I watched him a moment, but he only stared at the books without looking round. Something in his voice had made me more certain, and my certainty made me laugh. "I see you _are_ serious!"

But he went on quietly enough. "You've extraordinary notions of responsibility. I deny altogether mine."

"You _are_ serious--you _are_!" I repeated with a gaiety that I meant as inoffensive and that I believe remained so. "But no matter. You're no worse than I."

"I'm clearly, by your own story, not half so bad. But, as you say, no matter. I don't care."

I ventured to keep it up. "Oh, don't you?"

His good nature was proof. "I don't care."

"Then why didn't you so much as look at me a while ago?"

"Didn't I look at you?"

"You know perfectly you didn't. Mrs. Server did--with her unutterable intensity; making me feel afresh, by the way, that I've never seen a woman compromise herself so little by proceedings so compromising. But though you saw her intensity, it never diverted you for an instant from your own."

He lighted before he answered this a fresh cigarette. "A man engaged in talk with a charming woman scarcely selects that occasion for winking at somebody else."

"You mean he contents himself with winking at _her_? My dear fellow, that wasn't enough for you yesterday, and it wouldn't have been enough for you this morning, among the impressions that led to our last talk.

It was just the fact that you did wink, that you _had_ winked, at me that wound me up."

"And what about the fact that you had winked at _me_? _Your_ winks--come"--Obert laughed--"are portentous!"

"Oh, if we recriminate," I cheerfully said after a moment, "we agree."

"I'm not so sure," he returned, "that we agree."

"Ah, then, if we differ it's still more interesting. Because, you know, we didn't differ either yesterday or this morning."

Without hurry or flurry, but with a decent confusion, his thoughts went back. "I thought you said just now we did--recognising, as you ought, that you were keen about a chase of which I washed my hands."

"No--I wasn't keen. You've just mentioned that you remember my giving up. I washed my hands too."

It seemed to leave him with the moral of this. "Then, if our hands are clean, what are we talking about?"

I turned, on it, a little more to him, and looked at him so long that he had at last to look at me; with which, after holding his eyes another moment, I made my point. "Our hands are not clean."

"Ah, speak for your own!"--and as he moved back I might really have thought him uneasy. There was a hint of the same note in the way he went on: "I a.s.sure you I decline all responsibility. I see the responsibility as quite beautifully yours."

"Well," I said, "I only want to be fair. You were the first to bring it out that she was changed."

"Well, she isn't changed!" said my friend with an almost startling effect, for me, of suddenness. "Or rather," he immediately and incongruously added, "she _is_. She's changed back."

"'Back'?" It made me stare.

"Back," he repeated with a certain sharpness and as if to have done at last, for himself, with the muddle of it.

But there was that in me that could let him see he had far from done; and something, above all, told me now that he absolutely mustn't have before I had. I quickly moreover saw that I must, with an art, make him want not to. "Back to what she was when you painted her?"