But we were, alas! all too much there, too much tangled and involved for that; every actor in the play that had so unexpectedly insisted on constituting itself for me sat forth as with an intimation that they were not to be so easily disposed of.It was as if there were some last act to be performed before the curtain could fall.Would the definite dramatic signal for ringing the curtain down be then only--as a grand climax and coup de theatre--the due attestation that poor Briss had succumbed to inexorable time and Mrs.Server given way under a cerebral lesion? Were the rest of us to disperse decorously by the simple action of the discovery that, on our pianist's striking his last note, with its consequence of permitted changes of attitude, Gilbert Long's victim had reached the point of final simplification and Grace Brissenden's the limit of age recorded of man?
I could look at neither of these persons without a sharper sense of the contrast between the tragedy of their predicament and the comedy of the situation that did everything for them but suspect it.They had truly been arrayed and anointed, they had truly been isolated, for their sacrifice.
I was sufficiently aware even then that if one hadn't known it one might have seen nothing; but I was not less aware that one couldn't know anything without seeing all; and so it was that, while our pianist played, my wandering vision played and played as well.It took in again, while it went from one of them to the other, the delicate light that each had shed on the other, and it made me wonder afresh what still more delicate support they themselves might not be in the very act of deriving from their dim community.
It was for the glimmer of this support that I had left them together two or three hours before; yet I was obliged to recognise that, travel between them as my fancy might, it could detect nothing in the way of a consequent result.I caught no look from either that spoke to me of service rendered them; and I caught none, in particular, from one of them to the other, that I could read as a symptom of their having compared notes.The fellow-feeling of each for the lost light of the other remained for me but a tie supposititious--the full-blown flower of my theory.It would show here as another flower, equally mature, for me to have made out a similar dim community between Gilbert Long and Mrs.Brissenden--to be able to figure them as groping side by side, proportionately, towards a fellowship of light overtaken; but if I failed of this, for ideal symmetry, that seemed to rest on the general truth that joy brings people less together than sorrow.
So much for the course of my impressions while the music lasted--a course quite consistent with my being prepared for new combinations as soon as it was over.Promptly, when that happened, the bow was unbent; and the combination I first seized, amid motion and murmur and rustle, was that, once more, of poor Briss and Lady John, the latter of whom had already profited by the general reaction to endeavour to cultivate afresh the vainest of her sundry appearances.She had laid on him the same coercive hand to which I owed my having found him with her in the afternoon, but my intervention was now to operate with less ceremony.I chanced to be near enough to them for Brissenden, on seeing me, to fix his eyes on me in silence, but in a manner that could only bring me immediately nearer.Lady John never did anything in silence, but she greeted me as I came up to them with a fine false alarm."No, indeed," she cried, "you shan't carry him off this time!"--and poor Briss disappeared, leaving us face to face, even while she breathed defiance.He had made no joke of it, and I had from him no other recognition;it was therefore a mere touch, yet it gave me a sensible hint that he had begun, as things were going, to depend upon me, that I already in a fashion figured to him--and on amazingly little evidence after all--as his natural protector, his providence, his effective omniscience.Like Mrs.Server herself, he was materially on my hands, and it was proper I should "do"for him.I wondered if he were really beginning to look to me to avert his inexorable fate.Well, if his inexorable fate was to be an unnameable climax, it had also its special phases, and one of these I HAD just averted.
I followed him a moment with my eyes and I then observed to Lady John that she decidedly took me for too simple a person.She had meanwhile also watched the direction taken by her liberated victim, and was the next instant prepared with a reply to my charge."Because he has gone to talk with May Server?
I don't quite see what you mean, for I believe him really to be in terror of her.Most of the men here ARE, you know, and I've really assured myself that he doesn't find her any less awful than the rest.He finds her the more so by just the very marked extra attention that you may have noticed she has given him.""And does that now happen to be what he has so eagerly gone off to impress upon her?"Lady John was so placed that she could continue to look at our friends, and I made out in her that she was not, in respect to them, without some slight elements of perplexity.These were even sufficient to make her temporarily neglect the defence of the breach I had made in her consistency."If you mean by 'impressing upon' her speaking to her, he hasn't gone--you can see for yourself--to impress upon her anything; they have the most extraordinary way, which I've already observed, of sitting together without sound.Idon't know," she laughed, "what's the matter with such people!""It proves in general," I admitted, "either some coldness or some warmth, and I quite understand that that's not the way you sit with your friends.
