The Sacred Fount

THE SACRED FOUNT

I had taken his hand for farewell, and, inevitably laughing, but as the falsest of notes, I gave It a shake. “You show nothing! You’re magnificent.”

He let me keep his hand while things unspoken and untouched, unspeakable and untouchable, everything that had been between us in the wood a few hours before, were between us again. But so we could only leave them, and, with a short, sharp “Good-bye!” he completely released himself. With my hand on the latch of the closed door I watched a minute his retreat along the passage, and I remember the reflection that, before rejoining Obert, I made on it. I seemed perpetually, at Newmarch, to be taking his measure from behind.

Ford Obert has since told me that when I came back to him there were tears in my eyes, and I didn’t know at the moment how much the words with which he met me took for granted my consciousness of them. “He looks a hundred years old!”

“Oh, but you should see his shoulders, always, as he goes off! Two centuries – ten! Isn’t It amazing?”

It was so amazing that, for a little, It made us reciprocally stare. “I should have thought,” he said, “that he would have been on the contrary – ”

“Visibly rejuvenated? So should I. I must make It out,” I added. “I shall.”

But Obert, with less to go upon, couldn’t wait. It was wonderful, for that matter – and for all I had to go upon – how I myself could. I did so, at this moment, in my refreshed intensity, by the help of confusedly lighting another cigarette, which I should have no time to smoke. “I should have thought,” my friend continued, “that he too might have changed back.”

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I took in, for myself, so much more of It than I could say! “Certainly. You wouldn’t have thought he would have changed forward.” Then with an impulse that bridged over an abyss of connections I jumped to another place. “Was what you most saw while you were there with her – was this that her misery, the misery you first phrased to me, has dropped?”

“Dropped, yes.” He was clear about it. “I called her beastly unhappy to you though I even then knew that beastly unhappiness wasn’t quite all of it. It was part of it, It was enough of it; for she was – well, no doubt you could tell me. Just now, at all events” – and recalling, reflecting, deciding, he used, with the strongest effect, as he so often did in painting, the simplest term – “just now she’s all right.”

“All right?”

He couldn’t know how much more than was possible my question gave him to answer. But he answered It on what he had; he repeated: “All right.”

I wondered, in spite of the comfort I took, as I had more than once in life had occasion to take It before, at the sight of the painter-sense deeply applied. My wonder came from the fact that Lady John had also found Mrs. Server all right, and Lady John had a vision as closed as Obert’s was open. It didn’t suIt my book for both these observers to have been affected in the same way. “You mean you saw nothing whatever in her that was the least bIt strange?”

“Oh, I won’t say as much as that. But nothing that was more strange than that she should be – well, after all, all right.”

“All there, eh?” I after an instant risked.

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I couldn’t put It to him more definitely than that, though there was a temptation to try to do so. For Obert to have found her all there an hour or two after I had found her all absent, made me again, in my nervousness, feel even now a trifle menaced. Things had, from step to step, to hang together, and just here they seemed – with all allowances – to hang a little apart. My whole superstructure, I could only remember, reared itself on my view of Mrs. Server’s condition; but It was part of my predicament – really equal in its way to her own – that I couldn’t without dishonouring myself give my interlocutor a practical lead. The question of her happiness was essentially subordinate; what I stood or fell by was that of her faculty. But I couldn’t, on the other hand – and remain “straight” – insist to my friend on the whereabouts of this stolen property. If he hadn’t missed It in her for himself I mightn’t put him on the track of it; since, with the demonstration he had before my eyes received of the rate at which Long was, as one had to call it, intellectually living, nothing would be more natural than that he should make the cases fit. Now my personal problem, unaltered in the least particular by anything, was for me to have worked to the end without breathing in another ear that Long had been her lover. 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 certi-

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tude 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

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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?”

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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

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XII

I went from one room to the other, but to find only, at first, as on my previous circuit, a desert on which the sun had still not set. Mrs. Brissenden was nowhere, but the whole place waited as we had left it, with seats displaced and flowers dispetalled, a fan forgotten on a table, a book laid down upon a chair. It came over me as I looked about that if she had “squared” the household, so large an order, as they said, was a sign sufficient of what I was to have from her. I had quite rather It were her doing – not mine; but It showed with eloquence that she had after all judged some effort or other to be worth her while. Her renewed delay moreover added to my impatience of mind in respect to the nature of this effort by striking me as already part of it. What, I asked myself, could be so much worth her while as to have to be paid for by so much apparent reluctance? But at last I saw her through a vista of open doors, and as I forthwith went to her – she took no step to meet me – I was doubtless impressed afresh with the “pull” that in social intercourse a woman always has. She was able to assume on the spot by mere attitude and air the appearance of having been ready and therefore inconvenienced. Oh, I saw soon enough that she was ready and that one of the forms of her readiness would be precisely to offer herself as having

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acted entirely to oblige me – to give me, as a sequel to what had already passed between us, the opportunity for which she had assured me I should thank her before I had done with her. Yet, as I felt sure, at the same time, that she had taken a line, I was curious as to how, in her interest, our situation could be worked. What It had originally left us with was her knowing I was wrong. I had promised her, on my honour, to be candid, but even if I were disposed to cease to contest her identification of Mrs. Server I was scarce to be looked to for such an exhibition of gratitude as might be held to repay her for staying so long out of bed. There were in short elements in the business that I couldn’t quite clearly see handled as favours to me. Her dress gave, with felicity, no sign whatever of preparation for the night, and if, since our last words, she had stood with any anxiety whatever before her glass, It had not been to remove a jewel or to alter the place of a flower. She was as much under arms as she had been on descending to dinner – as fresh in her array as if that banquet were still to come. She met me in fact as admirably – that was the truth that covered every other – as if she had been able to guess the most particular curiosity with which, from my end of the series of rooms, I advanced upon her.

A part of the mixture of my thoughts during these seconds had been the possibility – absurd, preposterous though It looks when phrased here – of some change in her person that would correspond, for me to the other changes I had had such keen moments of flattering myself I had made out. I had just had them over in the smoking-room, some of these differences, and then had had time to ask myself if I were not now

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to be treated to the vision of the greatest, the most wonderful, of all. I had already, on facing her, after my last moments with Lady John, seen difference peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of It confirmed by what had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after that brief passage; It had been in her going up to bed without seeing me again; It had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own, better of that; and It had been most of all in her sending her husband down to me. Well, wouldn’t It finally be, still more than most of all – ? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there with these general symptoms so present that almost any further development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes, literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in Obert’s ejaculation on poor Briss’s hundred years, had failed to achieve for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to its opportunity. The full impression took a minute – a minute during which she said nothing; then It left me deeply and above all, as I felt, discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, the thing, I had not thought of. This It was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn’t thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly think of It while she watched me.

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