The day was as fine and the scene as fair at Newmarch as the party was numerous and various; and my memory associates with the rest of the long afternoon many renewals of acquaintance and much sitting and strolling, for snatches of talk, in the long shade of great trees and through the straight walks of old gardens.A couple of hours thus passed, and fresh accessions enriched the picture.There were persons I was curious of--of Lady John, for instance, of whom I promised myself an early view; but we were apt to be carried away in currents that reflected new images and sufficiently beguiled impatience.I recover, all the same, a full sequence of impressions, each of which, I afterwards saw, had been appointed to help all the others.
If my anecdote, as I have mentioned, had begun, at Paddington, at a particular moment, it gathered substance step by step and without missing a link.
The links, in fact, should I count them all, would make too long a chain.
They formed, nevertheless, the happiest little chapter of accidents, though a series of which I can scarce give more than the general effect.
One of the first accidents was that, before dinner, I met Ford Obert wandering a little apart with Mrs.Server, and that, as they were known to me as agreeable acquaintances, I should have faced them with confidence had I not immediately drawn from their sequestered air the fear of interrupting them.Mrs.Server was always lovely and Obert always expert; the latter straightway pulled up, however, making me as welcome as if their converse had dropped.She was extraordinarily pretty, markedly responsive, conspicuously charming, but he gave me a look that really seemed to say: "Don't--there's a good fellow--leave me any longer alone with her!" I had met her at Newmarch before--it was indeed only so that I had met her--and I knew how she was valued there.I also knew that an aversion to pretty women--numbers of whom he had preserved for a grateful posterity--was his sign neither as man nor as artist; the effect of all of which was to make me ask myself what she could have been doing to him.Making love, possibly--yet from that he would scarce have appealed.She wouldn't, on the other hand, have given him her company only to be inhuman.I joined them, at all events, learning from Mrs.Server that she had come by a train previous to my own;and we made a slow trio till, at a turn of the prospect, we came upon another group.It consisted of Mrs.Froome and Lord Lutley and of Gilbert Long and Lady John--mingled and confounded, as might be said, not assorted according to tradition.Long and Mrs.Froome came first, I recollect, together, and his lordship turned away from Lady John on seeing me rather directly approach her.She had become for me, on the spot, as interesting as, while we travelled, I had found my two friends in the train.As the source of the flow of "intellect"that had transmuted our young man, she had every claim to an earnest attention;and I should soon have been ready to pronounce that she rewarded it as richly as usual.She was indeed, as Mrs.Briss had said, as pointed as a hat-pin, and I bore in mind that lady's injunction to look in her for the answer to our riddle.
The riddle, I may mention, sounded afresh to my ear in Gilbert Long's gay voice; it hovered there--before me, beside, behind me, as we all paused--in his light, restless step, a nervous animation that seemed to multiply his presence.He became really, for the moment, under this impression, the thing I was most conscious of; I heard him, I felt him even while I exchanged greetings with the sorceress by whose wand he had been touched.To be touched myself was doubtless not quite what I wanted; yet I wanted, distinctly, a glimpse; so that, with the smart welcome Lady John gave me, I might certainly have felt that I was on the way to get it.The note of Long's predominance deepened during these minutes in a manner I can't describe, and I continued to feel that though we pretended to talk it was to him only we listened.
He had us all in hand; he controlled for the moment all our attention and our relations.He was in short, as a consequence of our attitude, in possession of the scene to a tune he couldn't have dreamed of a year or two before--inasmuch as at that period he could have figured at no such eminence without making a fool of himself.And the great thing was that if his eminence was now so perfectly graced he yet knew less than any of us what was the matter with him.He was unconscious of how he had "come out"--which was exactly what sharpened my wonder.Lady John, on her side, was thoroughly conscious, and I had a fancy that she looked at me to measure how far I was.I cared, naturally, not in the least what she guessed; her interest for me was all in the operation of her influence.I am afraid I watched to catch it in the act--watched her with a curiosity of which she might well have become aware.
What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other--that a great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side a sufficient show of tell-tale traces.But for Long to have been so stamped as I found him, how the pliant wax must have been prepared and the seal of passion applied!
