MRS. SALTRAM left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed almost in
pain—as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of something precious.
I didn’t quite know what it was—it had a shocking resemblance to my
honour. The emotion was the livelier surely in that my pulses even yet
vibrated to the pleasure with which, the night before, I had rallied to
the rare analyst, the great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What
had dropped from me like a cumbersome garment as Saltram appeared before
me in the afternoon on the heath was the disposition to haggle over his
value. Hang it, one had to choose, one had to put that value somewhere;
so I would put it really high and have done with it. Mrs. Mulville drove
in for him at a discreet hour—the earliest she could suppose him to have
got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy would also have come had she not
been expecting a visit from Mr. Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I
was under bonds to see this young lady, and also that I had a letter to
hand to her; but I took my time, I waited from day to day. I left Mrs.
Saltram to deal as her apprehensions should prompt with the Pudneys. I
knew at last what I meant—I had ceased to wince at my responsibility. I
gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade if it would; but it
didn’t fade, and, individually, it hasn’t faded even now. During the
month that I thus invited myself to stiffen again, Adelaide Mulville,
perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why I _was_ so stiff. At
that season of the year I was usually oftener “with” them. She also
wrote that she feared a real estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener
and her sweet young friend—a state of things but half satisfactory to her
so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage
itself from the merely nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet
young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated
that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There
never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course
the question can’t come up to-day. These are old frustrations now. Ruth
Anvoy hasn’t married, I hear, and neither have I. During the month,
toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to ask if, on a special
errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to knock the very
next day at my door. I saw he had immediately connected my enquiry with
the talk we had had in the railway-carriage, and his promptitude showed
that the ashes of his eagerness weren’t yet cold. I told him there was
something I felt I ought in candour to let him know—I recognised the
obligation his friendly confidence had laid on me.
“You mean Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so herself,” he
said.
“It wasn’t to tell you so that I wanted to see you,” I replied; “for it
seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly with herself.
If however she did speak to you of our conversation she probably told you
I was discouraging.”
“Discouraging?”
“On the subject of a present application of The Coxon Fund.”
“To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don’t know what you call
discouraging!” Gravener cried.
“Well I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was.”
“I believe she did, but such a thing’s measured by the effect. She’s not
‘discouraged,’” he said.
“That’s her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that it
appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that—decidedly!—I can’t
undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don’t want to!”
“It’s very good of you, damn you!” my visitor laughed, red and really
grave. Then he said: “You’d like to see that scoundrel publicly
glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary pension?”
I braced myself. “Taking one form of public recognition with another it
seems to me on the whole I should be able to bear it. When I see the
compliments that _are_ paid right and left I ask myself why this one
shouldn’t take its course. This therefore is what you’re entitled to
have looked to me to mention to you. I’ve some evidence that perhaps
would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Mss Anvoy to remain
in ignorance of it.”
“And to invite me to do the same?”
“Oh you don’t require it—you’ve evidence enough. I speak of a sealed
letter that I’ve been requested to deliver to her.”
“And you don’t mean to?”
“There’s only one consideration that would make me,” I said.
Gravener’s clear handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but evidently
without fishing up a clue to this motive—a failure by which I was almost
wounded. “What does the letter contain?”
“It’s sealed, as I tell you, and I don’t know what it contains.”
“Why is it sent through you?”
“Rather than you?” I wondered how to put the thing. “The only
explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have
imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end—may have been
told this is the case by Mrs. Saltram.”
“My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end,” poor Gravener
stammered.
Again for an instant I thought. “The offer I propose to make you gives
me the right to address you a question remarkably direct. Are you still
engaged to Miss Anvoy?”
“No, I’m not,” he slowly brought out. “But we’re perfectly good
friends.”
“Such good friends that you’ll again become prospective husband and wife
if the obstacle in your path be removed?”
“Removed?” he anxiously repeated.
“If I send Miss Anvoy the letter I speak of she may give up her idea.”
“Then for God’s sake send it!”
“I’ll do so if you’re ready to assure me that her sacrifice would now
presumably bring about your marriage.”
“I’d marry her the next day!” my visitor cried.
“Yes, but would she marry _you_? What I ask of you of course is nothing
less than your word of honour as to your conviction of this. If you give
it me,” I said, “I’ll engage to hand her the letter before night.”
Gravener took up his hat; turning it mechanically round he stood looking
a moment hard at its unruffled perfection. Then very angrily honestly
and gallantly, “Hand it to the devil!” he broke out; with which he
clapped the hat on his head and left me.
“Will you read it or not?” I said to Ruth Anvoy, at Wimbledon, when I had
told her the story of Mrs. Saltram’s visit.
She debated for a time probably of the briefest, but long enough to make
me nervous. “Have you brought it with you?”
“No indeed. It’s at home, locked up.”
There was another great silence, and then she said “Go back and destroy
it.”
I went back, but I didn’t destroy it till after Saltram’s death, when I
burnt it unread. The Pudneys approached her again pressingly, but,
prompt as they were, The Coxon Fund had already become an operative
benefit and a general amaze: Mr. Saltram, while we gathered about, as it
were, to watch the manna descend, had begun to draw the magnificent
income. He drew it as he had always drawn everything, with a grand
abstracted gesture. Its magnificence, alas, as all the world now knows,
quite quenched him; it was the beginning of his decline. It was also
naturally a new grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as
soon as he was blighted, and who at this hour accuses us of having bribed
him, on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious
office, to become, as she says, like everybody else. The very day he
found himself able to publish he wholly ceased to produce. This deprived
us, as may easily be imagined, of much of our occupation, and especially
deprived the Mulvilles, whose want of self-support I never measured till
they lost their great inmate. They’ve no one to live on now. Adelaide’s
most frequent reference to their destitution is embodied in the remark
that dear far-away Ruth’s intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent
are even yet looking for another prop, but no one presents a true sphere
of usefulness. They complain that people are self-sufficing. With
Saltram the fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the
grander, the elder style. They’ve got their carriage back, but what’s an
empty carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer
before; even including George Gravener, who by the deaths of his brother
and his nephew has lately become Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune
clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper
House, and hasn’t yet had high office. But what are these accidents,
which I should perhaps apologise for mentioning, in the light of the
great eventual boon promised the patient by the rate at which The Coxon
Fund must be rolling up?