The Sacred Fount Part 3

"The sense of a discovery to be made."

"And of what?"

"I'll tell you to-morrow. Good-night."

III

I did on the morrow several things, but the first was not to redeem that vow. It was to address myself straight to Grace Brissenden. "I must let you know that, in spite of your guarantee, it doesn't go at all--oh, but not at all! I've tried Lady John, as you enjoined, and I can't but feel that she leaves us very much where we were." Then, as my listener seemed not quite to remember where we had been, I came to her help. "You said yesterday at Paddington, to explain the change in Gilbert Long--don't you recall?--that that woman, plying him with her genius and giving him of her best, is clever enough for two. She's not clever enough then, it strikes me, for three--or at any rate for four. I confess I don't see it. Does she really dazzle _you_?"

My friend had caught up. "Oh, you've a standard of wit!"

"No, I've only a sense of reality--a sense not at all satisfied by the theory of such an influence as Lady John's."

She wondered. "Such a one as whose else then?"

"Ah, that's for us still to find out! Of course this can't be easy; for as the appearance is inevitably a kind of betrayal, it's in somebody's interest to conceal it."

This Mrs. Brissenden grasped. "Oh, you mean in the lady's?"

"In the lady's most. But also in Long's own, if he's really tender of the lady--which is precisely what our theory posits."

My companion, once roused, was all there. "I see. You call the appearance a kind of betrayal because it points to the relation behind it."

"Precisely."

"And the relation--to do that sort of thing--must be necessarily so awfully intimate."

"_Intimissima._"

"And kept therefore in the background exactly in that proportion."

"Exactly in that proportion."

"Very well then," said Mrs. Brissenden, "doesn't Mr. Long's tenderness of Lady John quite fall in with what I mentioned to you?"

I remembered what she had mentioned to me. "His making her come down with poor Briss?"

"Nothing less."

"And is that all you go upon?"

"That and lots more."

I thought a minute--but I had been abundantly thinking. "I know what you mean by 'lots.' Is Brissenden in it?"

"Dear no--poor Briss! He wouldn't like that. _I_ saw the manoeuvre, but Guy didn't. And you must have noticed how he stuck to her all last evening."

"How Gilbert Long stuck to Lady John? Oh yes, I noticed. They were like Lord Lutley and Mrs. Froome. But is that what one can call being tender of her?"

My companion weighed it. "He must speak to her _sometimes_. I'm glad you admit, at any rate," she continued, "that it does take what you so prettily call some woman's secretly giving him of her best to account for him."

"Oh, that I admit with all my heart--or at least with all my head. Only, Lady John has none of the signs----"

"Of being the beneficent woman? What then _are_ they--the signs--to be so plain?" I was not yet quite ready to say, however; on which she added: "It proves nothing, you know, that _you_ don't like her."

"No. It would prove more if she didn't like _me_, which--fatuous fool as you may find me--I verily believe she does. If she hated me it would be, you see, for my ruthless a.n.a.lysis of her secret. She _has_ no secret.

She would like awfully to have--and she would like almost as much to be believed to have. Last evening, after dinner, she could feel perhaps for a while that she _was_ believed. But it won't do. There's nothing in it. You asked me just now," I pursued, "what the signs of such a secret would naturally be. Well, bethink yourself a moment of what the secret itself must naturally be."

Oh, she looked as if she knew all about _that_! "Awfully charming--mustn't it?--to act upon a person, through an affection, so deeply."

"Yes--it can certainly be no vulgar flirtation." I felt a little like a teacher encouraging an apt pupil; but I could only go on with the lesson. "Whoever she is, she gives all she has. She keeps nothing back--nothing for herself."

"I see--because _he_ takes everything. He just cleans her out." She looked at me--pleased at last really to understand--with the best conscience in the world. "Who _is_ the lady then?"

But I could answer as yet only by a question. "How can she possibly be a woman who gives absolutely nothing whatever; who sc.r.a.pes and saves and h.o.a.rds; who keeps every crumb for herself? The whole show's there--to minister to Lady John's vanity and advertise the business--behind her smart shop-window. You can see it, as much as you like, and even amuse yourself with pricing it. But she never parts with an article. If poor Long depended on _her_----"

"Well, what?" She was really interested.

"Why, he'd be the same poor Long as ever. He would go as he used to go--naked and unashamed. No," I wound up, "he deals--turned out as we now see him--at another establishment."

"I'll grant it," said Mrs. Brissenden, "if you'll only name me the place."

Ah, I could still but laugh and resume! "He doesn't screen Lady John--she doesn't screen herself--with your husband or with anybody.

It's she who's herself the screen! And pleased as she is at being so clever, and at being thought so, she doesn't even know it. She doesn't so much as suspect it. She's an unmitigated fool about it. 'Of course Mr. Long's clever, because he's in love with me and sits at my feet, and don't you see how clever _I_ am? Don't you hear what good things I say--wait a little, I'm going to say another in about three minutes; and how, if you'll only give him time too, he comes out with them after me?

They don't perhaps sound so good, but you see where he has got them. I'm so brilliant, in fine, that the men who admire me have only to imitate me, which, you observe, they strikingly do.' Something like that is all her philosophy."

My friend turned it over. "You do sound like her, you know. Yet how, if a woman's stupid----"

"Can she have made a man clever? She can't. She can't at least have begun it. What we shall know the real person by, in the case that you and I are studying, is that the man himself will have made her what she has become. She will have done just what Lady John has not done--she will have put up the shutters and closed the shop. She will have parted, for her friend, with her wit."

"So that she may be regarded as reduced to idiocy?"

"Well--so I can only see it."

"And that if we look, therefore, for the right idiot----"

"We shall find the right woman--our friend's mystic Egeria? Yes, we shall be at least approaching the truth. We shall 'burn,' as they say in hide-and-seek." I of course kept to the point that the idiot would have to _be_ the right one. _Any_ idiot wouldn't be to the purpose. If it was enough that a woman was a fool the search might become hopeless even in a house that would have pa.s.sed but ill for a fool's paradise. We were on one of the shaded terraces, to which, here and there, a tall window stood open. The picture without was all morning and August, and within all clear dimness and rich gleams. We stopped once or twice, raking the gloom for lights, and it was at some such moment that Mrs. Brissenden asked me if I then regarded Gilbert Long as now exalted to the position of the most brilliant of our companions. "The cleverest man of the party?"--it pulled me up a little. "Hardly that, perhaps--for don't you see the proofs I'm myself giving you? But say he _is_"--I considered--"the cleverest but one." The next moment I had seen what she meant. "In that case the thing we're looking for ought logically to be the person, of the opposite s.e.x, giving us the maximum sense of depletion for his benefit? The biggest fool, you suggest, _must_, consistently, be the right one? Yes again; it would so seem. But that's not really, you see, the short cut it sounds. The biggest fool is what we want, but the question is to discover who _is_ the biggest."

"I'm glad then _I_ feel so safe!" Mrs. Brissenden laughed.

"Oh, you're not the biggest!" I handsomely conceded. "Besides, as I say, there must be the other evidence--the evidence of relations."

We had gone on, with this, a few steps, but my companion again checked me, while her nod toward a window gave my attention a lead. "Won't _that_, as it happens, then do?" We could just see, from where we stood, a corner of one of the rooms. It was occupied by a seated couple, a lady whose face was in sight and a gentleman whose ident.i.ty was attested by his back, a back somehow replete for us, at the moment, with a guilty significance. There _was_ the evidence of relations. That we had suddenly caught Long in the act of presenting his receptacle at the sacred fount seemed announced by the tone in which Mrs. Brissenden named the other party--"Mme. de Dreuil!" We looked at each other, I was aware, with some elation; but our triumph was brief. The Comtesse de Dreuil, we quickly felt--an American married to a Frenchman--wasn't at all the thing. She was almost as much "all there" as Lady John. She was only another screen, and we perceived, for that matter, the next minute, that Lady John was also present. Another step had placed us within range of her; the picture revealed in the rich dusk of the room was a group of three. From that moment, unanimously, we gave up Lady John, and as we continued our stroll my friend brought out her despair. "Then he has nothing _but_ screens? The need for so many does suggest a fire!" And in spite of discouragement she sounded, interrogatively, one after the other, the names of those ladies the perfection of whose presence of mind might, when considered, pa.s.s as questionable. We soon, however, felt our process to be, practically, a trifle invidious. Not one of the persons named could, at any rate--to do them all justice--affect us as an intellectual ruin. It was natural therefore for Mrs. Brissenden to conclude with scepticism. "She may exist--and exist as you require her; but what, after all, proves that she's here? She mayn't have come down with him. Does it necessarily follow that they always go about together?"