there were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the hat
to George Gravener. I never forgot our little discussion in Ebury
Street, and I think it stuck in my throat to have to make to him the
admission I had made so easily to Miss Anvoy. It had cost me nothing
to confide to this charming girl, but it would have cost me much to
confide to the friend of my youth, that the character of the "real
gentleman" was not an attribute of the man I took such pains for. Was
this because I had already generalised to the point of perceiving that
women are really the unfastidious sex? I knew at any rate that
Gravener, already quite in view but still hungry and frugal, had
naturally enough more ambition than charity. He had sharp aims for
stray sovereigns, being in view most from the tall steeple of
Clockborough. His immediate ambition was to wholly occupy the field of
vision of that smokily-seeing city, and all his movements and postures
were calculated at this angle. The movement of the hand to the pocket
had thus to alternate gracefully with the posture of the hand on the
heart. He talked to Clockborough in short only less beguilingly than
Frank Saltram talked to his electors; with the difference in our
favour, however, that we had already voted and that our candidate had
no antagonist but himself. He had more than once been at Wimbledon--it
was Mrs. Mulville's work, not mine--and, by the time the claret was
served, had seen the god descend. He took more pains to swing his
censer than I had expected, but on our way back to town he forestalled
any little triumph I might have been so artless as to express by the
observation that such a man was--a hundred times!--a man to use and
never a man to be used by. I remember that this neat remark humiliated
me almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I
hadn't often made it myself. The difference was that on Gravener's
part a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine. He
was able to use him in short, he had the machinery; and the irony of
Saltram's being made showy at Clockborough came out to me when he
said, as if he had no memory of our original talk and the idea were
quite fresh to him: "I hate his type, you know, but I'll be hanged if
I don't put some of those things in. I can find a place for them: we
might even find a place for the fellow himself." I myself should have
had some fear, not, I need scarcely say, for the "things" themselves,
but for some other things very near them--in fine for the rest of my
eloquence.
Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case
so serviceable as he would have been had the politics of the gods only
coincided more exactly with those of the party. There was a distinct
moment when, without saying anything more definite to me, Gravener
entertained the idea of "getting hold" of Mr. Saltram. Such a project
was factitious, for the discovery of analogies between his body of
doctrine and that pressed from headquarters upon Clockborough--the
bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs for convenient public
uncorking in corn-exchanges--was an experiment for which no one had
the leisure. The only thing would have been to carry him massively
about, paid, caged, clipped: to turn him on for a particular occasion
in a particular channel. Frank Saltram's channel, however, was
essentially not calculable, and there was no knowing what disastrous
floods might have issued. For what there would have been to do "The
Empire," the great newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new
misfortune that there were delicate situations in which "The Empire"
broke down. In fine there was an instinctive apprehension that a
clever young journalist commissioned to report upon Mr. Saltram might
never come back from the errand. No one knew better than George
Gravener that that was a time when prompt returns counted double. If
he therefore found our friend an exasperating waste of orthodoxy, it
was because he was, as he said, up in the clouds; not because he was
down in the dust. He would have been a real enough gentleman if he
could have helped to put in a real gentleman. Gravener's great
objection to the actual member was that he was not one.
Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with "grounds," at
Clockborough, which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I
learned from Mrs. Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she
had gone down to resume possession. I could see the faded red livery,
the big square shoulders, the high-walled garden of this decent abode.
As the rumble of dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed
his suit, and I found myself hoping that the politics of the late
Mayor's widow would not be such as to enjoin upon her to ask him to
dinner; perhaps indeed I went so far as to hope that they would be
such as to put all countenance out of the question. I tried to focus
the page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed the
Bath-chair over somebody's toes. I was destined to hear, however,
through Mrs. Saltram (who, I afterwards learned, was in correspondence
with Lady Coxon's housekeeper), that Gravener was known to have spoken
of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at
Clockborough. On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy
but of experience. The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see
him in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and
very justly, to think him good-looking. It would be too much to say
that I was troubled by such an image; but I seem to remember the
relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an
annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its
happening to come over me about that time with a rush that I was
simply ashamed of Frank Saltram. There were limits after all, and my
mark at last had been reached.
I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an
expression; but this was a supreme revolt. Certain things cleared up
in my mind, certain values stood out. It was all very well to talk of
an unfortunate temperament; there were misfortunes that people should
themselves correct, and correct in private, without calling in
assistance. I avoided George Gravener at this moment, and reflected
that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving
England. I wanted to forget Frank Saltram--that was all. I didn't want
to do anything in the world to him but that. Indignation had withered
on the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought
only by never thinking of him again. It wasn't for anything he had
done to me; it was for something he had done to the Mulvilles.
Adelaide cried about it for a week, and her husband, profiting by the
example so signally given him of the fatal effect of a want of
character, left the letter unanswered. The letter, an incredible one,
addressed by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at
Ramsgate, was the central feature of the incident, which, however, had
many features, each more painful than whichever other we compared it
with. The Pudneys had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse. Base
ingratitude, gross indecency--one had one's choice only of such
formulas as that the more they fitted the less they gave one rest.
These are dead aches now, and I am under no obligation, thank heaven,
to be definite about the business. There are things which if I had had
to tell them--well, I wouldn't have told my story.
I went abroad for the general election, and if I don't know how much,
on the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed, him. At
a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I
discovered what he had done for me. I owed him, oh unmistakably,
certain noble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky
lamp, and lo, it continued to twinkle. But the light it gave me just
showed me how much more I wanted. I was pursued of course by letters
from Mrs. Saltram, which I didn't scruple not to read, though I was
duly conscious that her embarrassments would now be of the gravest. I
sacrificed to propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how,
one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, as I rummaged in my desk
for another paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached
itself from the packet. The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it
appeared, was engaged to be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the
news was two months old. A direct question of Mrs. Saltram's had thus
remained unanswered--she had inquired of me in a postscript what sort
of man this Mr. Gravener might be. This Mr. Gravener had been
triumphantly returned for Clockborough, in the interest of the party
that had swept the country, so that I might easily have referred Mrs.
Saltram to the journals of the day. But when I at last wrote to her
that I was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by
seeing her, I remarked in regard to her question that she must really
put it to Miss Anvoy.
VI
I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its
consequences, on my return, had squarely 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 the 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 offered him my
congratulation. "On my election?" he asked after a moment; whereupon I
feigned, jocosely not to have heard of his election and to be alluding
to something much more important, the rumour of his engagement. I
daresay I coloured however, for his political victory 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
embarrassment--I had not intended to put that 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
double 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 is 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 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 upon me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss
Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt. My inquiry
elicited 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 intermingled with
queer loopholes. There were several dreary people, Coxon relations,
old maids, whom she would have more or less to consider. Gravener
laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might
come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected that I
had turned a lantern on him, he exclaimed quite dryly: "That's all
rot--one is 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, inasmuch as, 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 to deal unaided with the possibilities of the Regent's Park.
I did what I could to help her to keep them down, or up, 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 that 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 exclaimed, "she will 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 had not happened to tell him of her visit to Upper
Baker Street, but she would certainly tell him to-morrow; not indeed
that this would make him like any better her having had the simplicity
to invite such a person as Mrs. Saltram on such an occasion. I
reflected 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? She was
truly an innocent maiden. I had briefly to consider before I could
reply that my objection to the lady in question was the objection
often formulated in regard to persons met at the social board--I knew
all her stories. Then, as Miss Anvoy remained momentarily vague, I
added: "About her husband."
"Oh yes, but there are some new ones."
"None for me. Oh, novelty would be pleasant!"
"Doesn't it appear that of late he has been particularly horrid?"
"His fluctuations don't matter," I replied; "they are all covered by
the single circumstance I mentioned the evening 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. The girl smiled at her 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 far
Whitsuntide; but as I had received no invitation I doubted it, and
presently there 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, certain
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 a drama. This was
probably rather late in the day, and the exact order doesn't matter.
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 under the circumstances 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 was not. 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 charming
girl George Gravener was to marry, whom he had brought out the other
Sunday. I could see that this introduction had been happy, for Mrs.
Mulville commemorated it in the only way in which she ever expressed
her 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.
VII
One of the consequences, for the Mulvilles, of the sacrifices they
made for Frank Saltram was that they had to give up their carriage.
Adelaide drove gently into London in a one-horse greenish thing, an
early Victorian landau, hired, near at hand, imaginatively, from a
broken-down jobmaster whose wife was in consumption--a vehicle that
made people turn round all the more when her pensioner sat beside her
in a soft white hat and a shawl, one of her own. This was his position
and I daresay his costume when on an afternoon in July she went to
return Miss Anvoy's visit. The wheel of fate had now revolved, and
amid silences deep and exhaustive, compunctions and condonations alike
unutterable, Saltram was reinstated. Was it in pride or in penance
that Mrs. Mulville began immediately to drive him about? If he was
ashamed of his ingratitude she might have been ashamed of her
forgiveness; but she was incorrigibly capable of liking him to be seen
strikingly seated in the landau while she was in shops or with her
acquaintance. However, if he was in the pillory for twenty minutes in
the Regent's Park (I mean at Lady Coxon's door, while her companion
paid her call), it was not for the further humiliation of anyone
concerned that she presently came out for him in person, not even to
show either of them what a fool she was that she drew him in to be
introduced to the clever young American. Her account of this
introduction I had in its order, but before that, very late in the
season, under Gravener's auspices, I met Miss Anvoy at tea at the
House of Commons. The member for Clockborough had gathered a group of
pretty ladies, and the Mulvilles were not of the party. On the great
terrace, as I strolled off a little with her, the guest of honour
immediately exclaimed to me: "I've seen him, you know--I've seen him!"
She told me about Saltram's call.
"And how did you find him?"
"Oh, so strange!"
"You didn't like him?"
"I can't tell till I see him again."
"You want to do that?"
She was silent a moment. "Immensely."
We stopped; I fancied she had become aware Gravener was looking at us.
She turned back toward the knot of the others, and I said: "Dislike
him as much as you will--I see you're bitten."
"Bitten?" I thought she coloured a little.
"Oh, it doesn't matter!" I laughed; "one doesn't die of it."
"I hope I sha'n't die of anything before I've seen more of Mrs.
Mulville." I rejoiced with her over plain Adelaide, whom she
pronounced the loveliest woman she had met in England; but before we
separated I remarked to her that it was an act of mere humanity to
warn her that if she should see more of Frank Saltram (which would be
likely to follow on any increase of acquaintance with Mrs. Mulville),
she might find herself flattening her nose against the clear hard pane
of an eternal question--that of the relative importance of virtue. She
replied that this was surely a subject on which one took everything
for granted; whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself
ill. What I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in
Upper Baker Street--the importance relative (relative to virtue) of
other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift--as if it were
handed to us in a parcel on our birthday; and I declared that this
very question showed me the problem had already caught her by the
skirt. She would have help however, help that I myself had once had,
in resisting its tendency to make one cross.
"What help do you mean?"
"That of the member for Clockborough."
She stared, smiled, then exclaimed: "Why, my idea has been to help
_him_!"
She _had_ helped him--I had his own word for it that at Clockborough
her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so
doubtless again and again, but I heard the very next month that this
fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the
catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterwards
confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble--great
disasters, in America, had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in
New York, had had reverses--lost so much money that no one knew what
mightn't yet come of it. It was Adelaide who told me that she had gone
off, alone, at less than a week's notice.
"Alone? Gravener has permitted that?"
"What will you have? The House of Commons?"
I'm afraid I damned the House of Commons: I was so much interested. Of
course he would follow her as soon as he was free to make her his
wife; only she mightn't now be able to bring him anything like the
marriage-portion of which he had begun by having the pleasant
confidence. Mrs. Mulville let me know what was already said: she was
charming, this Miss Anvoy, but really these American girls! What was a
man to do? Mr. Saltram, according to Mrs. Mulville, was of opinion
that a man was never to suffer his relation to money to become a
spiritual relation, but was to keep it wholesomely mechanical. "_Moi
pas comprendre!_" I commented on this; in rejoinder to which Adelaide,
with her beautiful sympathy, explained that she supposed he simply
meant that the thing was to use it, don't you know! but not to think
too much about it. "To take it, but not to thank you for it?" I still
more profanely inquired. For a quarter of an hour afterwards she
wouldn't look at me, but this didn't prevent my asking her what had
been the result, that afternoon in the Regent's Park, of her taking
our friend to see Miss Anvoy.
"Oh, so charming!" she answered, brightening. "He said he recognised
in her a nature he could absolutely trust."
"Yes, but I'm speaking of the effect on herself."
Mrs. Mulville was silent an instant. "It was everything one could
wish."
Something in her tone made me laugh. "Do you mean she gave him
something?"
"Well, since you ask me!"
"Right there--on the spot?"
Again poor Adelaide faltered. "It was to me of course she gave it."
I stared; somehow I couldn't see the scene. "Do you mean a sum of
money?"
"It was very handsome." Now at last she met my eyes though I could see
it was with an effort. "Thirty pounds."
"Straight out of her pocket?"
"Out of the drawer of a table at which she had been writing. She just
slipped the folded notes into my hand. He wasn't looking; it was while
he was going back to the carriage. Oh," said Adelaide reassuringly,
"I dole it out!" The dear practical soul thought my agitation, for I
confess I was agitated, had reference to the administration of the
money. Her disclosure made me for a moment muse violently, and I
daresay that during that moment I wondered if anything else in the
world makes people as indelicate as unselfishness. I uttered, I
suppose, some vague synthetic cry, for she went on as if she had had a
glimpse of my inward amaze at such episodes. "I assure you, my dear
friend, he was in one of his happy hours."
But I wasn't thinking of that. "Truly, indeed, these American girls!"
I said. "With her father in the very act, as it were, of cheating her
betrothed!"
Mrs. Mulville stared. "Oh, I suppose Mr. Anvoy has scarcely failed on
purpose. Very likely they won't be able to keep it up, but there it
was, and it was a very beautiful impulse."
"You say Saltram was very fine?"
"Beyond everything. He surprised even me."