It came back to her dim."Are we accusing each other?"Her tone seemed suddenly to put us nearer together than we had ever been at all."Dear no," I laughed--"not each other; only with each other's help, a few of our good friends.""A few?" She handsomely demurred."But one or two at the best.""Or at the worst!"--I continued to laugh."And not even those, it after all appears, very much!"She didn't like my laughter, but she was now grandly indulgent."Well, I accuse no one."I was silent a little; then I concurred."It's doubtless your best line;and I really quite feel, at all events, that when you mentioned a while since that I talk too much you only meant too much to YOU.""Yes--I wasn't imputing to you the same direct appeal.I didn't suppose,"she explained, "that--to match your own supposition of ME--you had resorted to May herself.""You didn't suppose I had asked her?" The point was positively that she didn't; yet it made us look at each other almost as hard as if she did."No, of course you couldn't have supposed anything so cruel--all the more that, as you knew, I had not admitted the possibility."She accepted my assent; but, oddly enough, with a sudden qualification that showed her as still sharply disposed to make use of any loose scrap of her embarrassed acuteness."Of course, at the same time, you yourself saw that your not admitting the possibility would have taken the edge from your cruelty.It's not the innocent," she suggestively remarked, "that we fear to frighten.""Oh," I returned, "I fear, mostly, I think, to frighten ANY one.I'm not particularly brave.I haven't, at all events, in spite of my certitude, interrogated Mrs.Server, and I give you my word of honour that I've not had any denial from her to prop up my doubt.It still stands on its own feet, and it was its own battle that, when I came here at your summons, it was prepared to fight.Let me accordingly remind you," I pursued, "in connection with that, of the one sense in which you were, as you a moment ago said, talked over by me.I persuaded you apparently that Long's metamorphosis was not the work of Lady John.I persuaded you of nothing else."She looked down a little, as if again at a trap."You persuaded me that it was the work of somebody." Then she held up her head."It came to the same thing."If I had credit then for my trap it at least might serve."The same thing as what?""Why, as claiming that it WAS she."
"Poor May--'claiming'? When I insisted it wasn't!"Mrs.Brissenden flushed."You didn't insist it wasn't anybody!""Why should I when I didn't believe so? I've left you in no doubt,"I indulgently smiled, "of my beliefs.It was somebody--and it still is."1
I watched her an instant."Can you tell me then what one does to recover from such mistakes?""One thinks a little."
"Ah, the more I've thought the deeper I've sunk! And that seemed to me the case with you this morning," I added, "the more YOU thought.""Well, then," she frankly declared, "I must have stopped thinking!"It was a phenomenon, I sufficiently showed, that thought only could meet."Could you tell me then at what point?"She had to think even to do that."At what point?""What in particular determined, I mean, your arrest? You surely didn't--launched as you were--stop short all of yourself."She fronted me, after all, still so bravely that I believed her for an instant not to be, on this article, without an answer she could produce.
The unexpected therefore broke for me when she fairly produced none."Iconfess I don't make out," she simply said, "why you seem so little pleased that I agree with you."I threw back, in despair, both head and hands."But, you poor, dear thing, you don't in the LEAST agree with me! You flatly contradict me.
You deny my miracle."
"I don't believe in miracles," she panted.
"So I exactly, at this late hour, learn.But I don't insist on the name.
Nothing is, I admit, a miracle from the moment one's on the track of the cause, which was the scent we were following.Call the thing simply my fact."She gave her high head a toss."If it's yours it's nobody else's!""Ah, there's just the question--if we could know all! But my point is precisely, for the present, that you do deny it.""Of course I deny it," said Mrs.Briss.
I took a moment, but my silence held her."Your 'of course' would be what I would again contest, what I would denounce and brand as the word too much--the word that spoils, were it not that it seems best, that it in any case seems necessary, to let all question of your consistency go."On that I had paused, and, as I felt myself still holding her, I was not surprised when my pause had an effect."You do let it go?"She had tried, I could see, to put the inquiry as all ironic.But it was not all ironic; it was, in fact, little enough so to suggest for me some intensification--not quite, I trust, wanton--of her suspense.I should be at a loss to say indeed how much it suggested or half of what it told.
These things again almost violently moved me, and if I, after an instant, in my silence, turned away, it was not only to keep her waiting, but to make my elation more private.I turned away to that tune that I literally, for a few minutes, quitted her, availing myself thus, superficially, of the air of weighing a consequence.I wandered off twenty steps and, while I passed my hand over my troubled head, looked vaguely at objects on tables and sniffed absently at flowers in bowls.I don't know how long I so lost myself, nor quite why--as I must for some time have kept it up--my companion didn't now really embrace her possible alternative of rupture and retreat.