I stood long enough to see that it didn't in the least signify whether or no I explained, and during this interval I found myself--to my surprise--in receipt of still better assistance than any I had to give.I had happened to turn, while I awkwardly enough, no doubt, rested and shifted, to the quarter from which Mrs.Server had arrived; and there, just at the end of the same vista, I gathered material for my proper reply.Her eyes at this moment were fixed elsewhere, and that gave me still a little more time, at the end of which my reference had all its point."I supposed you to have Brissenden in your head," I said, "because it's evidently what he himself takes for granted.But let him tell you!" He was already close to us: missing her at the house, he had started again in search of her and had successfully followed.The effect on him of coming in sight of us had been for an instant to make him hang back as I had seen Mrs.Server hang.But he had then advanced just as she had done; I had waited for him to reach us; and now she saw him.She looked at him as she always looked at all of us, yet not at either of us as if we had lately been talking of him.If it was vacancy it was eloquent; if it was vigilance it was splendid.
What was most curious, at all events, was that it was now poor Briss who was disconcerted.He had counted on finding her, but not on finding her with me, and I interpreted a certain ruefulness in him as the sign of a quick, uneasy sense that he must have been in question between us.I instantly felt that the right thing was to let him know he had been, and I mentioned to him, as a joke, that he had come just in time to save himself.We had been talking of him, and I wouldn't answer for what Mrs.Server had been going to say.He took it gravely, but he took everything so gravely that I saw no symptom in that.In fact, as he appeared at first careful not to meet my eyes, I saw for a minute or two no symptom in anything--in anything, at least, but the way in which, standing beside me and before Mrs.Server's bench, he received the conscious glare of her recognition without returning it and without indeed giving her a look.He looked all about--looked, as she herself had done after our meeting, at the charming place and its marks of the hour, at the rich twilight, deeper now in the avenues, and at the tree-tops and sky, more flushed now with colour.I found myself of a sudden quite as sorry for him as I had been for Mrs.Server, and I scarce know how it was suggested to me that during the short interval since our separation something had happened that made a difference in him.Was the difference a consciousness still more charged than I had left it? I couldn't exactly say, and the question really lost itself in what soon came uppermost for me--the desire, above all, to spare them both and to spare them equally.
The difficulty, however, was to spare them in some fashion that would not be more marked than continuing to observe them.To leave them together without a decent pretext would be marked; but this, I eagerly recognised, was none the less what most concerned me.Whatever they might see in it, there was by this time little enough doubt of how it would indicate for my own mind that the wheel had completely turned.That was the point to which I had been brought by the lapse of a few hours.I had verily travelled far since the sight of the pair on the terrace had given its arrest to my first talk with Mrs.Briss.I was obliged to admit to myself that nothing could very well have been more singular than some of my sequences.I had come round to the opposite pole of the protest my companion had then drawn from me--which was the pole of agreement with herself; and it hung sharply before me that I was pledged to confess to her my revolution.I couldn't now be in the presence of the two creatures I was in the very act of finally judging to be not a whit less stricken than I had originally imagined them--Icouldn't do this and think with any complacency of the redemption of my pledge; for the process by which I had at last definitely inculpated Mrs.
Server was precisely such a process of providential supervision as made me morally responsible, so to speak, for her, and thereby intensified my scruples.Well, my scruples had the last word--they were what determined me to look at my watch and profess that, whatever sense of a margin Brissenden and Mrs.Server might still enjoy, it behoved me not to forget that I took, on such great occasions, an hour to dress for dinner.It was a fairly crude cover for my retreat; perhaps indeed I should rather say that my retreat was practically naked and unadorned.It formulated their relation.I left them with the formula on their hands, both queerly staring at it, both uncertain what to do with it.For some passage that would soon be a correction of this, however, one might surely feel that one could trust them.I seemed to feel my trust justified, behind my back, before I had got twenty yards away.By the time I had done this, I must add, something further had befallen me.Poor Briss had met my eyes just previous to my flight, and it was then I satisfied myself of what had happened to him at the house.He had met his wife; she had in some way dealt with him; he had been with her, however briefly, alone; and the intimacy of their union had been afresh impressed upon him.Poor Briss, in fine, looked ten years older.