Yet it was these looks that most told with me, and what they, for their part, conveyed was a plea that directly contradicted Lady John's.I understood him that it was he who was bored, he who had been pursued, he for whom perversity had become a dreadful menace, he, in fine, who pleaded for my intervention.He was so willing to trust me to relieve him of his companion that I think he would simply have bolted without deferring to me if I had not taken my precautions against it.I had, as it happened, another momentary use for him than this: I wished on the one hand not to lose him and on the other not to lose Lady John, though I had quickly enough guessed this brilliant woman's real preference, of which it in fact soon became my lively wish to see the proof.The union of these two was too artificial for me not already to have connected with it the service it might render, in her ladyship's view, to that undetected cultivation, on her part, of a sentiment for Gilbert Long which, through his feigned response to it, fitted so completely to the other pieces in my collection.To see all this was at the time, I remember, to be as inhumanly amused as if one had found one could create something.I had created nothing but a clue or two to the larger comprehension I still needed, yet I positively found myself overtaken by a mild artistic glow.What had occurred was that, for my full demonstration, I needed Long, and that, by the same stroke, I became sure I should certainly get him by temporising a little.
Lady John was in love with him and had kicked up, to save her credit, the dust of a fictive relation with another man--the relation one of mere artifice and the man one in her encouragement of whom nobody would believe.
Yet she was also discoverably divided between her prudence and her vanity, for if it was difficult to make poor Briss figure at all vividly as an insistent satellite, the thankless tact she had to employ gave her exactly, she argued, the right to be refreshingly fanned with an occasional flap of the flag under which she had, as she ridiculously fancied, truly conquered.
If she was where I found her because her escort had dragged her there, she had made the best of it through the hope of assistance from another quarter.She had held out on the possibility that Mr.Long--whom one COULDwithout absurdity sit in an arbour with--might have had some happy divination of her plight.He had had such divinations before--thanks to a condition in him that made sensibility abnormal--and the least a wretched woman could do when betrayed by the excess of nature's bounty was to play admirer against admirer and be "talked about" on her own terms.She would just this once have admitted it, I was to gather, to be an occasion for pleading guilty--oh, so harmlessly!--to a consciousness of the gentleman mutely named between us.Well, the "proof" I just alluded to was that I had not sat with my friends five minutes before Gilbert Long turned up.
I saw in a moment how neatly my being there with them played HIS game;I became in this fashion a witness for him that he could almost as little leave Lady John alone as--well, as other people could.It may perfectly have been the pleasure of this reflection that again made him free and gay--produced in him, in any case, a different shade of manner from that with which, before luncheon, as the consequence perhaps of a vague flair for my possible penetration, I had suspected him of edging away from me.
Not since my encounter with him at Paddington the afternoon before had I had so to recognise him as the transfigured talker.To see Lady John with him was to have little enough doubt of HER recognitions, just as this spectacle also dotted each "i" in my conviction of his venial--I can only call it that--duplicity.I made up my mind on the spot that it had been no part of his plan to practise on her, and that the worst he could have been accused of was a good-natured acceptance, more apparent than real, for his own purposes, of her theory--which she from time to time let peep out--that they would have liked each other better if they hadn't been each, alas! so good.He profited by the happy accident of having pleased a person so much in evidence, and indeed it was tolerably clear to me that neither party was duped.Lady John didn't want a lover; this would have been, as people say, a larger order than, given the other complications of her existence, she could meet; but she wanted, in a high degree, the appearance of carrying on a passion that imposed alike fearless realisations and conscious renouncements, and this circumstance fully fell in with the convenience and the special situation of her friend.Her vanity rejoiced, so far as she dared to let it nibble, and the mysteries she practised, the dissimulations she elaborated, the general danger of detection in which she flattered herself that she publicly walked, were after all so much grist to the mill of that appetite.
By just so much, however, as it could never come up between them that there was another woman in Gilbert's history, by just so much would it on the other hand have been an articulate axiom that as many of the poor Brisses of the world as she might care to accommodate would be welcome to figure in her own.This personage, under that deeper induction, I suddenly became aware that I also greatly pitied--pitied almost as much as I pitied Mrs.Server; and my pity had doubtless something to do with the fact that, after I had proposed to him that we should adjourn together and we had, on his prompt, even though slightly dry response, placed the invidious arbour at a certain distance, I passed my hand into his arm.There were things I wanted of him, and the first was that he should let me show him I could be kind to him.I had made of the circumstance of tea at the house a pretext for our leaving the others, each of whom I felt as rather showily calling my attention to their good old ground for not wishing to rejoin the crowd.As to what Brissenden wished I had made up my mind; I had made up my mind as to the subject of his thoughts while they wandered, during his detention, from Lady John; and if the next of my wishes was to enter into his desire, I had decided on giving it effect by the time we reached the shortest of the vistas at the end of which the house reared a brave front.
