His chivalry was up in arms to defend her.  But I could see also that his vanity wasn’t going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come to him.

Well, I suppose in a sense he had made her.

IV

We didn’t stay in Brussels more than a day or two.  Jevons didn’t like it.  He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn’t happy till I took him back there.  I can’t say he was exactly happy then except in so far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom.  I wasn’t very happy either.  All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons’s gloom and by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he didn’t walk gloomily into any of the canals.  As for seeing Bruges, I don’t know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not.  I only know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the melancholy of Jevons.  He made me horribly uneasy.  I thought every day that if he didn’t walk into a canal he’d have another fit of jaundice.

He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence, as if Viola hadn’t given it me already.

It was in his dejection that he showed his tact.  He had, for our remarkable circumstances, the right manner.  If Jevons had been jaunty; if he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him.  As it was, his misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming.  So was his trust in me.  He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it.  And with the same confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now.  The adventure had shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury.  I believe he would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed if I had told him it was necessary.

I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges.  He submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel.  He let me feel in the most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me.  I know I had nothing to do with Jevons’s melancholy.  The fat proprietor and his wife (who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons’s odd fascination, had confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came.  The poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)

I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact that Jevons, at any rate on Viola’s last day, had been seen very much by himself.