“To talk with you, naturally, about Mr. Saltram.”
“As a subject for the prize?” This was hugely obvious, and I presently
returned: “I think I’ll sail to-morrow for Australia.”
“Well then—sail!” said Mrs. Mulville, getting up.
But I frivolously, continued. “On Thursday at five, we said?” The
appointment was made definite and I enquired how, all this time, the
unconscious candidate had carried himself.
“In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has positively
been a dear. And then, as to what we revere him for, in the most
wonderful form. His very highest—pure celestial light. You _won’t_ do
him an ill turn?” Adelaide pleaded at the door.
“What danger can equal for him the danger to which he’s exposed from
himself?” I asked. “Look out sharp, if he has lately been too prim.
He’ll presently take a day off, treat us to some exhibition that will
make an Endowment a scandal.”
“A scandal?” Mrs. Mulville dolorously echoed.
“Is Miss Anvoy prepared for that?”
My visitor, for a moment, screwed her parasol into my carpet. “He grows
bigger every day.”
“So do you!” I laughed as she went off.
That girl at Wimbledon, on the Thursday afternoon, more than justified my
apprehensions. I recognised fully now the cause of the agitation she had
produced in me from the first—the faint foreknowledge that there was
something very stiff I should have to do for her. I felt more than ever
committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room
where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to
string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she
successively tossed me. Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she
was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked
myself whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that
which permitted her to laugh out, as for the joy of her difficulty, into
the priggish old room. This remarkable young woman could be earnest
without being solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have
cursed her obstinacy I found myself watching the unstudied play of her
eyebrows or the recurrence of a singularly intense whiteness produced by
the parting of her lips. These aberrations, I hasten to add, didn’t
prevent my learning soon enough why she had wished to see me. Her reason
for this was as distinct as her beauty: it was to make me explain what I
had meant, on the occasion of our first meeting, by Mr. Saltram’s want of
dignity. It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine, but she desired it there
from my lips. What she really desired of course was to know whether
there was worse about him than what she had found out for herself. She
hadn’t been a month so much in the house with him without discovering
that he wasn’t a man of monumental bronze. He was like a jelly minus its
mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her
interest in him and the ground of her project. She put her project
boldly before me: there it stood in its preposterous beauty. She was as
willing to take the humorous view of it as I could be: the only
difference was that for her the humorous view of a thing wasn’t
necessarily prohibitive, wasn’t paralysing.
Moreover she professed that she couldn’t discuss with me the primary
question—the moral obligation: that was in her own breast. There were
things she couldn’t go into—injunctions, impressions she had received.
They were a part of the closest intimacy of her intercourse with her
aunt, they were absolutely clear to her; and on questions of delicacy,
the interpretation of a fidelity, of a promise, one had always in the
last resort to make up one’s mind for one’s self. It was the idea of the
application to the particular case, such a splendid one at last, that
troubled her, and she admitted that it stirred very deep things. She
didn’t pretend that such a responsibility was a simple matter; if it
_had_ been she wouldn’t have attempted to saddle me with any portion of
it. The Mulvilles were sympathy itself, but were they absolutely candid?
Could they indeed be, in their position—would it even have been to be
desired? Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of me—whether
there was anything dreadful kept back. She made no allusion whatever to
George Gravener—I thought her silence the only good taste and her gaiety
perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the effect of a
determination that people shouldn’t know from herself that her relations
with the man she was to marry were strained. All the weight, however,
that she left me to throw was a sufficient implication of the weight _he_
had thrown in vain. Oh she knew the question of character was immense,
and that one couldn’t entertain any plan for making merit comfortable
without running the gauntlet of that terrible procession of
interrogation-points which, like a young ladies’ school out for a walk,
hooked their uniform noses at the tail of governess Conduct. But were we
absolutely to hold that there was never, never, never an exception,
never, never, never an occasion for liberal acceptance, for clever
charity, for suspended pedantry—for letting one side, in short,
outbalance another? When Miss Anvoy threw off this appeal I could have
embraced her for so delightfully emphasising her unlikeness to Mrs.
Saltram. “Why not have the courage of one’s forgiveness,” she asked, “as
well as the enthusiasm of one’s adhesion?”
“Seeing how wonderfully you’ve threshed the whole thing out,” I evasively
replied, “gives me an extraordinary notion of the point your enthusiasm
has reached.”
She considered this remark an instant with her eyes on mine, and I
divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a reference to
some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some aberration of
sensibility, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn’t interpret
otherwise the sudden flash that came into her face. Such a
manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me; but
while I was thinking how to reassure her the flush passed away in a smile
of exquisite good nature. “Oh you see one forgets so wonderfully how one
dislikes him!” she said; and if her tone simply extinguished his strange
figure with the brush of its compassion, it also rings in my ear to-day
as the purest of all our praises. But with what quick response of fine
pity such a relegation of the man himself made me privately sigh “Ah poor
Saltram!” She instantly, with this, took the measure of all I didn’t
believe, and it enabled her to go on: “What can one do when a person has
given such a lift to one’s interest in life?”
“Yes, what can one do?” If I struck her as a little vague it was because
I was thinking of another person. I indulged in another inarticulate
murmur—“Poor George Gravener!” What had become of the lift _he_ had
given that interest? Later on I made up my mind that she was sore and
stricken at the appearance he presented of wanting the miserable money.
This was the hidden reason of her alienation. The probable sincerity, in
spite of the illiberality, of his scruples about the particular use of it
under discussion didn’t efface the ugliness of his demand that they
should buy a good house with it. Then, as for _his_ alienation, he
didn’t, pardonably enough, grasp the lift Frank Saltram had given her
interest in life. If a mere spectator could ask that last question, with
what rage in his heart the man himself might! He wasn’t, like her, I was
to see, too proud to show me why he was disappointed.