I HAD almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences,
on my return, had smartly to be faced. The season, in London, began to
breathe again and to flap its folded wings. Confidence, under the new
Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in a
social body, was a recovery of appetite. People once more fed together,
and it happened that, one Saturday night, at somebody’s house, I fed with
George Gravener. When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he
sat and begged to congratulate him. “On my election?” he asked after a
moment; so that I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that
triumph and to be alluding to the rumour of a victory still more
personal. I dare say I coloured however, for his political success had
momentarily passed out of my mind. What was present to it was that he
was to marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious
of some discomposure—I hadn’t intended to put this before everything. He
himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking
the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing my sense of what
he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his “seat.” We straightened the
matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately seen him
that his spirits might well have been fed from a twofold source. He was
so good as to say that he hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of
Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to town. Lady
Coxon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed
their arrival. I told him I had heard the marriage would be a splendid
one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed and said
“Do you mean for her?” When I had again explained what I meant he went
on: “Oh she’s an American, but you’d scarcely know it; unless, perhaps,”
he added, “by her being used to more money than most girls in England,
even the daughters of rich men. That wouldn’t in the least do for a
fellow like me, you know, if it wasn’t for the great liberality of her
father. He really has been most kind, and everything’s quite
satisfactory.” He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous
fancy to her and that during a recent visit at Coldfield she had nearly
won over Lady Maddock. I gathered from something he dropped later on
that the free-handed gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement,
but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to,
across the water, for other favours. People are simplified alike by
great contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was
Gravener’s directness that begot my own, I seem to recall that in some
turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to
ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt. My
enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, who was the oddest of women, would have
in any contingency to act under her late husband’s will, which was odder
still, saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated with
queer loopholes. There were several dreary people, Coxon cousins, old
maids, to whom she would have more or less to minister. Gravener
laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might
come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected my turning
a lantern on him, he declared quite dryly: “That’s all rot—one’s moved by
other springs!”
A fortnight later, at Lady Coxon’s own house, I understood well enough
the springs one was moved by. Gravener had spoken of me there as an old
friend, and I received a gracious invitation to dine. The Knight’s widow
was again indisposed—she had succumbed at the eleventh hour; so that I
found Miss Anvoy bravely playing hostess without even Gravener’s help,
since, to make matters worse, he had just sent up word that the House,
the insatiable House, with which he supposed he had contracted for easier
terms, positively declined to release him. I was struck with the
courage, the grace and gaiety of the young lady left thus to handle the
fauna and flora of the Regent’s Park. I did what I could to help her to
classify them, after I had recovered from the confusion of seeing her
slightly disconcerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her
intended the gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank
Saltram. I had at this moment my first glimpse of the fact that she was
a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to
judge of my sense of the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden,
when I heard the servant announce Mrs. Saltram. From what immediately
passed between the two ladies I gathered that the latter had been sent
for post-haste to fill the gap created by the absence of the mistress of
the house. “Good!” I remember crying, “she’ll be put by me;” and my
apprehension was promptly justified. Mrs. Saltram taken in to dinner,
and taken in as a consequence of an appeal to her amiability, was Mrs.
Saltram with a vengeance. I asked myself what Miss Anvoy meant by doing
such things, but the only answer I arrived at was that Gravener was
verily fortunate. She hadn’t happened to tell him of her visit to Upper
Baker Street, but she’d certainly tell him to-morrow; not indeed that
this would make him like any better her having had the innocence to
invite such a person as Mrs. Saltram on such an occasion. It could only
strike me that I had never seen a young woman put such ignorance into her
cleverness, such freedom into her modesty; this, I think, was when, after
dinner, she said to me frankly, with almost jubilant mirth: “Oh you don’t
admire Mrs. Saltram?” Why should I? This was truly a young person
without guile. I had briefly to consider before I could reply that my
objection to the lady named was the objection often uttered about people
met at the social board—I knew all her stories. Then as Miss Anvoy
remained momentarily vague I added: “Those about her husband.”
“Oh yes, but there are some new ones.”
“None for me. Ah novelty would be pleasant!”
“Doesn’t it appear that of late he has been particularly horrid?”
“His fluctuations don’t matter”, I returned, “for at night all cats are
grey. You saw the shade of this one the night we waited for him
together. What will you have? He has no dignity.”
Miss Anvoy, who had been introducing with her American distinctness,
looked encouragingly round at some of the combinations she had risked.
“It’s too bad I can’t see him.”
“You mean Gravener won’t let you?”
“I haven’t asked him. He lets me do everything.”
“But you know he knows him and wonders what some of us see in him.”
“We haven’t happened to talk of him,” the girl said.
“Get him to take you some day out to see the Mulvilles.”
“I thought Mr. Saltram had thrown the Mulvilles over.”
“Utterly. But that won’t prevent his being planted there again, to bloom
like a rose, within a month or two.”
Miss Anvoy thought a moment. Then, “I should like to see them,” she said
with her fostering smile.
“They’re tremendously worth it. You mustn’t miss them.”
“I’ll make George take me,” she went on as Mrs. Saltram came up to
interrupt us. She sniffed at this unfortunate as kindly as she had
smiled at me and, addressing the question to her, continued: “But the
chance of a lecture—one of the wonderful lectures? Isn’t there another
course announced?”
“Another? There are about thirty!” I exclaimed, turning away and feeling
Mrs. Saltram’s little eyes in my back. A few days after this I heard
that Gravener’s marriage was near at hand—was settled for Whitsuntide;
but as no invitation had reached me I had my doubts, and there presently
came to me in fact the report of a postponement. Something was the
matter; what was the matter was supposed to be that Lady Coxon was now
critically ill. I had called on her after my dinner in the Regent’s
Park, but I had neither seen her nor seen Miss Anvoy. I forget to-day
the exact order in which, at this period, sundry incidents occurred and
the particular stage at which it suddenly struck me, making me catch my
breath a little, that the progression, the acceleration, was for all the
world that of fine drama. This was probably rather late in the day, and
the exact order doesn’t signify. What had already occurred was some
accident determining a more patient wait. George Gravener, whom I met
again, in fact told me as much, but without signs of perturbation. Lady
Coxon had to be constantly attended to, and there were other good reasons
as well. Lady Coxon had to be so constantly attended to that on the
occasion of a second attempt in the Regent’s Park I equally failed to
obtain a sight of her niece. I judged it discreet in all the conditions
not to make a third; but this didn’t matter, for it was through Adelaide
Mulville that the side-wind of the comedy, though I was at first
unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because
Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn’t. The Pudneys,
who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a
horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the
smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed
heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the
crackle of the new chintz) and the difference only made his smirches and
bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn’t
barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally shod. These were
the things Adelaide and I, who were old enough friends to stare at each
other in silence, talked about when we didn’t speak. When we spoke it
was only about the brilliant girl George Gravener was to marry and whom
he had brought out the other Sunday. I could see that this presentation
had been happy, for Mrs. Mulville commemorated it after her sole fashion
of showing confidence in a new relation. “She likes me—she likes me”:
her native humility exulted in that measure of success. We all knew for
ourselves how she liked those who liked her, and as regards Ruth Anvoy
she was more easily won over than Lady Maddock.