I WAS unable this time to stay to dinner: such at any rate was the plea
on which I took leave. I desired in truth to get away from my young
lady, for that obviously helped me not to pretend to satisfy her. How
_could_ I satisfy her? I asked myself—how could I tell her how much had
been kept back? I didn’t even know and I certainly didn’t desire to
know. My own policy had ever been to learn the least about poor
Saltram’s weaknesses—not to learn the most. A great deal that I had in
fact learned had been forced upon me by his wife. There was something
even irritating in Miss Anvoy’s crude conscientiousness, and I wondered
why, after all, she couldn’t have let him alone and been content to
entrust George Gravener with the purchase of the good house. I was sure
he would have driven a bargain, got something excellent and cheap. I
laughed louder even than she, I temporised, I failed her; I told her I
must think over her case. I professed a horror of responsibilities and
twitted her with her own extravagant passion for them. It wasn’t really
that I was afraid of the scandal, the moral discredit for the Fund; what
troubled me most was a feeling of a different order. Of course, as the
beneficiary of the Fund was to enjoy a simple life-interest, as it was
hoped that new beneficiaries would arise and come up to new standards, it
wouldn’t be a trifle that the first of these worthies shouldn’t have been
a striking example of the domestic virtues. The Fund would start badly,
as it were, and the laurel would, in some respects at least, scarcely be
greener from the brows of the original wearer. That idea, however, was
at that hour, as I have hinted, not the source of solicitude it ought
perhaps to have been, for I felt less the irregularity of Saltram’s
getting the money than that of this exalted young woman’s giving it up.
I wanted her to have it for herself, and I told her so before I went
away. She looked graver at this than she had looked at all, saying she
hoped such a preference wouldn’t make me dishonest.
It made me, to begin with, very restless—made me, instead of going
straight to the station, fidget a little about that many-coloured Common
which gives Wimbledon horizons. There was a worry for me to work off, or
rather keep at a distance, for I declined even to admit to myself that I
had, in Miss Anvoy’s phrase, been saddled with it. What could have been
clearer indeed than the attitude of recognising perfectly what a world of
trouble The Coxon Fund would in future save us, and of yet liking better
to face a continuance of that trouble than see, and in fact contribute
to, a deviation from attainable bliss in the life of two other persons in
whom I was deeply interested? Suddenly, at the end of twenty minutes,
there was projected across this clearness the image of a massive
middle-aged man seated on a bench under a tree, with sad far-wandering
eyes and plump white hands folded on the head of a stick—a stick I
recognised, a stout gold-headed staff that I had given him in devoted
days. I stopped short as he turned his face to me, and it happened that
for some reason or other I took in as I had perhaps never done before the
beauty of his rich blank gaze. It was charged with experience as the sky
is charged with light, and I felt on the instant as if we had been
overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a bridge or the great dome
of a temple. Doubtless I was rendered peculiarly sensitive to it by
something in the way I had been giving him up and sinking him. While I
met it I stood there smitten, and I felt myself responding to it with a
sort of guilty grimace. This brought back his attention in a smile which
expressed for me a cheerful weary patience, a bruised noble gentleness.
I had told Miss Anvoy that he had no dignity, but what did he seem to me,
all unbuttoned and fatigued as he waited for me to come up, if he didn’t
seem unconcerned with small things, didn’t seem in short majestic? There
was majesty in his mere unconsciousness of our little conferences and
puzzlements over his maintenance and his reward.
After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big soft
shoulder—wherever you touched him you found equally little firmness—and
said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on my own ear: “Come
back to town with me, old friend—come back and spend the evening.” I
wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him, and at Waterloo, an hour later,
I telegraphed possessively to the Mulvilles. When he objected, as
regards staying all night, that he had no things, I asked him if he
hadn’t everything of mine. I had abstained from ordering dinner, and it
was too late for preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and
fried fish at my rooms—reduced also to the transcendent. Something had
come up which made me want him to feel at peace with me—and which,
precisely, was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion. I had
too often had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but it gives
me pleasure now to think that on that particular evening I didn’t even
mention Mrs. Saltram and the children. Late into the night we smoked and
talked; old shames and old rigours fell away from us; I only let him see
that I was conscious of what I owed him. He was as mild as contrition
and as copious as faith; he was never so fine as on a shy return, and
even better at forgiving than at being forgiven. I dare say it was a
smaller matter than that famous night at Wimbledon, the night of the
problematical sobriety and of Miss Anvoy’s initiation; but I was as much
in it on this occasion as I had been out of it then. At about 1.30 he
was sublime.
He never, in whatever situation, rose till all other risings were over,
and his breakfasts, at Wimbledon, had always been the principal reason
mentioned by departing cooks. The coast was therefore clear for me to
receive her when, early the next morning, to my surprise, it was
announced to me his wife had called. I hesitated, after she had come up,
about telling her Saltram was in the house, but she herself settled the
question, kept me reticent by drawing forth a sealed letter which,
looking at me very hard in the eyes, she placed, with a pregnant absence
of comment, in my hand. For a single moment there glimmered before me
the fond hope that Mrs. Saltram had tendered me, as it were, her
resignation and desired to embody the act in an unsparing form. To bring
this about I would have feigned any humiliation; but after my eyes had
caught the superscription I heard myself say with a flatness that
betrayed a sense of something very different from relief: “Oh the
Pudneys!” I knew their envelopes though they didn’t know mine. They
always used the kind sold at post-offices with the stamp affixed, and as
this letter hadn’t been posted they had wasted a penny on me. I had seen
their horrid missives to the Mulvilles, but hadn’t been in direct
correspondence with them.
“They enclosed it to me, to be delivered. They doubtless explain to you
that they hadn’t your address.”
I turned the thing over without opening it. “Why in the world should
they write to me?”
“Because they’ve something to tell you. The worst,” Mrs. Saltram dryly
added.
It was another chapter, I felt, of the history of their lamentable
quarrel with her husband, the episode in which, vindictively,
disingenuously as they themselves had behaved, one had to admit that he
had put himself more grossly in the wrong than at any moment of his life.
He had begun by insulting the matchless Mulvilles for these more specious
protectors, and then, according to his wont at the end of a few months,
had dug a still deeper ditch for his aberration than the chasm left
yawning behind. The chasm at Wimbledon was now blessedly closed; but the
Pudneys, across their persistent gulf, kept up the nastiest fire. I
never doubted they had a strong case, and I had been from the first for
not defending him—reasoning that if they weren’t contradicted they’d
perhaps subside. This was above all what I wanted, and I so far
prevailed that I did arrest the correspondence in time to save our little
circle an infliction heavier than it perhaps would have borne. I knew,
that is I divined, that their allegations had gone as yet only as far as
their courage, conscious as they were in their own virtue of an exposed
place in which Saltram could have planted a blow. It was a question with
them whether a man who had himself so much to cover up would dare his
blow; so that these vessels of rancour were in a manner afraid of each
other. I judged that on the day the Pudneys should cease for some reason
or other to be afraid they would treat us to some revelation more
disconcerting than any of its predecessors. As I held Mrs. Saltram’s
letter in my hand it was distinctly communicated to me that the day had
come—they had ceased to be afraid. “I don’t want to know the worst,” I
presently declared.
“You’ll have to open the letter. It also contains an enclosure.”
I felt it—it was fat and uncanny. “Wheels within wheels!” I exclaimed.
“There’s something for me too to deliver.”
“So they tell me—to Miss Anvoy.”
I stared; I felt a certain thrill. “Why don’t they send it to her
directly?”
Mrs. Saltram hung fire. “Because she’s staying with Mr. and Mrs.
Mulville.”
“And why should that prevent?”
Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque, the
unconscious perversity of her action. I was the only person save George
Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware of Sir Gregory Coxon’s and of
Miss Anvoy’s strange bounty. Where could there have been a more signal
illustration of the clumsiness of human affairs than her having
complacently selected this moment to fly in the face of it? “There’s the
chance of their seeing her letters. They know Mr. Pudney’s hand.”
Still I didn’t understand; then it flashed upon me. “You mean they might
intercept it? How can you imply anything so base?” I indignantly
demanded.
“It’s not I—it’s Mr. Pudney!” cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush. “It’s his
own idea.”
“Then why couldn’t he send the letter to you to be delivered?”
Mrs. Saltram’s embarrassment increased; she gave me another hard look.
“You must make that out for yourself.”