Part 17 (2/2)

”You've done more than I, it strikes me--and with less to do it with. If I gave you the Brissendens I gave you all I had.”

”But all you had was immense, my dear man. The Brissendens are immense.”

”Of course the Brissendens are immense! If they hadn't been immense they wouldn't have been--_nothing_ would have been--anything.” Then after a pause, ”Your image is splendid,” I went on--”your being out of the cave.

But what is it exactly,” I insidiously threw out, ”that you _call_ the 'light of day'?”

I remained a moment, however, not sure whether I had been too subtle or too simple. He had another of his cautions. ”What do _you_----?”

But I was determined to make him give it me all himself, for it was from my not prompting him that its value would come. ”You tell me,” I accordingly rather crudely pleaded, ”first.”

It gave us a moment during which he so looked as if I asked too much, that I had a fear of losing all. He even spoke with some impatience. ”If you really haven't found it for yourself, you know. I scarce see what you _can_ have found.”

Then I had my inspiration. I risked an approach to roughness, and all the more easily that my words were strict truth. ”Oh, don't be afraid--greater things than yours!”

It succeeded, for it played upon his curiosity, and he visibly imagined that, with impatience controlled, he should learn what these things were. He relaxed, he responded, and the next moment I was in all but full enjoyment of the piece wanted to make all my other pieces right--right because of that special beauty in my scheme through which the whole depended so on each part and each part so guaranteed the whole. ”What I call the light of day is the sense I've arrived at of her vision.”

”Her vision?”--I just balanced in the air.

”Of what they have in common. _His_--poor chap's--extraordinary situation too.”

”Bravo! And you see in that----?”

”What, all these hours, has touched, fascinated, drawn her. It has been an instinct with her.”

”Bravissimo!”

It saw him, my approval, safely into port. ”The instinct of sympathy, pity--the response to fellows.h.i.+p in misery; the sight of another fate as strange, as monstrous as her own.”

I couldn't help jumping straight up--I stood before him. ”So that whoever may have _been_ the man, the man _now_, the actual man----”

”Oh,” said Obert, looking, luminous and straight, up at me from his seat, ”the man now, the actual man----!” But he stopped short, with his eyes suddenly quitting me and his words becoming a formless e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.

The door of the room, to which my back was turned, had opened, and I quickly looked round. It was Brissenden himself who, to my supreme surprise, stood there, with rapid inquiry in his att.i.tude and face. I saw, as soon as he caught mine, that I was what he wanted, and, immediately excusing myself for an instant to Obert, I antic.i.p.ated, by moving across the room, the need, on poor Briss's part, of my further demonstration. My whole sense of the situation blazed up at the touch of his presence, and even before I reached him it had rolled over me in a prodigious wave that I had lost nothing whatever. I can't begin to say how the fact of his appearance crowned the communication my interlocutor had just made me, nor in what a bright confusion of many things I found myself facing poor Briss. One of these things was precisely that he had never been so much poor Briss as at this moment. That ministered to the confusion as well as to the brightness, for if his being there at all renewed my sources and replenished my current--spoke all, in short, for my gain--so, on the other hand, in the light of what I had just had from Obert, his particular aspect was something of a shock. I can't present this especial impression better than by the mention of my instant cert.i.tude that what he had come for was to bring me a message and that somehow--yes, indubitably--this circ.u.mstance seemed to have placed him again at the very bottom of his hole. It was down in that depth that he let me see him--it was out of it that he delivered himself. Poor Briss!

poor Briss!--I had asked myself before he spoke with what kindness enough I could meet him. Poor Briss! poor Briss!--I am not even now sure that I didn't first meet him by _that_ irrepressible murmur. It was in it all for me that, thus, at midnight, he had traversed on his errand the length of the great dark house. I trod with him, over the velvet and the marble, through the twists and turns, among the glooms and glimmers and echoes, every inch of the way, and I don't know what humiliation, for him, was const.i.tuted there, between us, by his long pilgrimage. It was the final expression of his sacrifice.

”My wife has something to say to you.”

”Mrs. Briss? Good!”--and I could only hope the candour of my surprise was all I tried to make it. ”Is she with you there?”

”No, but she has asked me to say to you that if you'll presently be in the drawing-room she'll come.”

Who could doubt, as I laid my hand on his shoulder, fairly patting it, in spite of myself, for applause--who could doubt where I would presently be? ”It's most uncommonly good of both of you.”

There was something in his inscrutable service that, making him almost august, gave my dissimulated eagerness the sound of a heartless compliment. _I_ stood for the hollow chatter of the vulgar world, and he--oh, he was as serious as he was conscious; which was enough. ”She says you'll know what she wishes--and she was sure I'd find you here. So I may tell her you'll come?”

His courtesy half broke my heart. ”Why, my dear man, with all the pleasure----! So many thousand thanks. I'll be with her.”

”Thanks to _you_. She'll be down. Good-night.” He looked round the room--at the two or three cl.u.s.ters of men, smoking, engaged, contented, on their easy seats and among their popped corks; he looked over an instant at Ford Obert, whose eyes, I thought, he momentarily held. It was absolutely as if, for me, he were seeking such things--out of what was closing over him--for the last time. Then he turned again to the door, which, just not to fail humanly to accompany him a step, I had opened. On the other side of it I took leave of him. The pa.s.sage, though there was a light in the distance, was darker than the smoking-room, and I had drawn the door to.

<script>