And yet, after all, they had not covered them. They had only betrayed the fact that they had tried. Had they? And which of them? Tanqueray in the matter of obliteration would at any rate have been aware of the utter inadequacy of india-rubber. To dash at a thing like india-rubber was more the sudden, futile inspiration of a woman made frantic by her terror of detection.
It was clear that Jane had not wanted him to know that Tanqueray was at Chagford. She had not told him. Why had she not told him? She knew of the plight they were in at the office, of the hue and cry after the unappearing manuscript.
So his brain worked, with a savage independence. He seemed to himself two men, a man with a brain that worked, following a lucid argument to an obscure conclusion, and a man who looked on and watched its working without attaching the least importance to it. It was as if this man knew all the time what the other did not know. He had his own light, his own secret. He had never thought about it before (his secret), still less had he talked about it. Thinking about it was a kind of profanity; talking would have been inconceivable sacrilege. It was self-evident as the existence of God to the soul that loves him; a secret only in that it was profounder than appearances, in that it stood by the denial of appearances, so that, if appearances were against it, what of that?
He was thinking about it now, obscurely, without images, barely with words, as if it had been indeed a thing occult and metaphysical.
Thinking about it—that meant, of course, that he had for a moment doubted it? It was coming back to him now, clothed with the mortal pathos of its imperfection. She was dearer to him—unspeakably dearer, for his doubt.
The man with the brain approached slowly and unwillingly the conclusion that now emerged, monstrous and abominable, from the obscurity. If that be so, he said, she is deliberately deceiving me.
And he who watched, he with the illuminating, incommunicable secret, smiled as he watched, in scorn and pity. Scorn of the slow and ugly movements of the intellect, and pity for a creature so mean as to employ them.
In the silence that he kept he had not heard the deep breathing of the woman at his side. Now he was aware of it and her.
He was positively relieved when the servant announced Mrs. Levine.
There was a look on Sophy's face that Brodrick knew, a look of importance and of competence, a look it always had when Sophy was about to deal with a situation. Gertrude's silent disappearance marked her sense of a situation to be dealt with.