The taste of its being all over, that really sublime success of the strained vision in which I had been living for crowded hours--was this a taste that I was sure I should particularly enjoy? Marked enough it was, doubtless, that even in the stress of perceiving myself broken with I ruefully reflected on all the more, on the ever so much, I still wanted to know!
Well, something of this quantity, in any case, would come, since Mrs.
Briss did want to speak to me.The suspense that remained with me, as Ihave indicated, was the special fresh one she had just produced.It fed, for a little, positively, on that survey of her fine retreating person to which I have confessed that my eyes attached themselves.These seconds were naturally few, and yet my memory gathers from them something that I can only compare, in its present effect, to the scent of a strange flower passed rapidly under my nose.I seem in other words to recall that I received in that brush the very liveliest impression that my whole adventure was to yield--the impression that is my reason for speaking of myself as having at the juncture in question "studied" Mrs.Brissenden's back.Study of a profound sort would appear needed in truth to account for it.It was as handsome and affirmative that she at once met and evaded my view, but was not the affirmation (as distinguished from the handsomeness, which was a matter of stature and mass,) fairly downright and defiant? Didn't what I saw strike me as saying straight at me, as far as possible, "I am young--I am and I WILL be; see, SEE if I'm not; there, there, there!"--with "there's" as insistent and rhythmical as the undulations of her fleeing presence, as the bejewelled nod of her averted brow? If her face had not been hidden, should I not precisely have found myself right in believing that it looked, exactly, for those instants, dreadfully older than it had ever yet had to? The answer ideally cynical would have been: "Oh, any woman of your resources can look young with her back turned! But you've had to turn it to make that proclamation." She passed out of the room proclaiming, and I did stand there a little defeated, even though with her word for another chance at her.Was this word one that she would keep? I had got off--yes, to a certainty.But so too had not she?
Naturally, at any rate, I didn't stay planted; and though it seemed long it was probably for no great time after this that I roamed in my impatience.
I was divided between the discourtesy of wishing the ladies would go to bed and the apprehension that if they did too soon go I might yet lose everything.Was Mrs.Briss waiting for more privacy, or was she only waiting for a complete escape? Of course, even while I asked myself that, I had to remember how much I was taking for granted on her part in the way of conscious motive.Still, if she had not a motive for escaping, why had she not had one, five minutes before, for coming to the point with me?
This inquiry kept me hovering where she might at any instant find me, but that was not inconsistent with my presently passing, like herself, into another room.The first one I entered--there were great chains of them at Newmarch--showed me once more, at the end opposite the door, the object that all day had been, present or absent, most in my eyes, and that there now could be no fallacy in my recognising.Mrs.Server's unquenchable little smile had never yet been so far from quenched as when it recognised, on its own side, that I had just had time to note how Ford Obert was, for a change, taking it in.These two friends of mine appeared to have moved together, after the music, to the corner in which I should not have felt it as misrepresenting the matter to say that I surprised them.They owed nothing of the harmony that held them--unlike my other couple--to the constraint of a common seat; a small glazed table, a receptacle for minute objects of price, extended itself between them as if it had offered itself as an occasion for their drawing toward it a pair of low chairs; but their union had nevertheless such an air of accepted duration as led it slightly to puzzle me.This would have been a reason the more for not interrupting it even had I not peculiarly wished to respect it.It was grist to my mill somehow that something or other had happened as a consequence of which Obert had lost the impulse to repeat to me his odd invitation to intervene.
He gave me no notice as I passed; the notice was all from his companion.
It constituted, I felt, on her part, precisely as much and precisely as little of an invitation as it had constituted at the moment--so promptly following our arrival--of my first seeing them linked; which is but another way of saying that nothing in Mrs.Server appeared to acknowledge a lapse.
It was nearly midnight, but she was again under arms; everything conceivable--or perhaps rather inconceivable--had passed between us before dinner, but her face was exquisite again in its repudiation of any reference.