to-day, broken the record, the manner in which that attention had been
rewarded relieved me of a sense of loss. I had of course a perfect
general consciousness that something great was going on: it was a
little like having been etherised to hear Herr Joachim play. The old
music was in the air; I felt the strong pulse of thought, the sink and
swell, the flight, the poise, the plunge; but I knew something about
one of the listeners that nobody else knew, and Saltram's monologue
could reach me only through that medium. To this hour I'm of no use
when, as a witness, I'm appealed to (for they still absurdly contend
about it), as to whether or no on that historic night he was drunk;
and my position is slightly ridiculous, for I have never cared to tell
them what it really was I was taken up with. What I got out of it is
the only morsel of the total experience that is quite my own. The
others were shared, but this is incommunicable. I feel that now, I'm
bound to say, in even thus roughly evoking the occasion, and it takes
something from my pride of clearness. However, I shall perhaps be as
clear as is absolutely necessary if I remark that she was too much
given up to her own intensity of observation to be sensible of mine.
It was plainly not the question of her marriage that had brought her
back. I greatly enjoyed this discovery and was sure that had that
question alone been involved she would have remained away. In this
case doubtless Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have
found means to rejoin her. It afterwards made me uncomfortable for her
that, alone in the lodging Mrs. Mulville had put before me as dreary,
she should have in any degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that
I was presently relieved at hearing of her having gone to stay at
Coldfield. If she was in England at all while the engagement stood the
only proper place for her was under Lady Maddock's wing. Now that she
was unfortunate and relatively poor, perhaps her prospective
sister-in-law would be wholly won over. There would be much to say, if
I had space, about the way her behaviour, as I caught gleams of it,
ministered to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private
amusement, as I listened to George Gravener in the railway carriage. I
watched her in the light of this queer possibility--a formidable thing
certainly to meet--and I was aware that it coloured, extravagantly
perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones. At Wimbledon
for instance it had seemed to me that she was literally afraid of
Saltram, in dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel. I
had come up to town with her the next day and had been convinced that,
though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard. She would
show as little as possible before she should be ready to show
everything. What this final exhibition might be on the part of a girl
perceptibly so able to think things out I found it great sport to
conjecture. It would have been exciting to be approached by her,
appealed to by her for advice; but I prayed to heaven I mightn't find
myself in such a predicament. If there was really a present rigour in
the situation of which Gravener had sketched for me the elements she
would have to get out of her difficulty by herself. It was not I who
had launched her and it was not I who could help her. I didn't fail to
ask myself why, since I couldn't help her, I should think so much
about her. It was in part my suspense that was responsible for this: I
waited impatiently to see whether she wouldn't have told Mrs. Mulville
a portion at least of what I had learned from Gravener. But I saw Mrs.
Mulville was still reduced to wonder what she had come out again for
if she hadn't come as a conciliatory bride. That she had come in some
other character was the only thing that fitted all the appearances.
Having for family reasons to spend some time that spring in the west
of England, I was in a manner out of earshot of the great oceanic
rumble (I mean of the continuous hum of Saltram's thought), and my
nervousness tended to keep me quiet. There was something I wanted so
little to have to say that my prudence surmounted my curiosity. I only
wondered if Ruth Anvoy talked over the idea of the Coxon Fund with
Lady Maddock, and also somewhat why I didn't hear from Wimbledon. I
had a reproachful note about something or other from Mrs. Saltram, but
it contained no mention of Lady Coxon's niece, on whom her eyes had
been much less fixed since the recent untoward events.
X
Adelaide's silence was fully explained later; it was practically
explained when in June, returning to London, I was honoured by this
admirable woman with an early visit. As soon as she appeared I guessed
everything, and as soon as she told me that darling Ruth had been in
her house nearly a month I exclaimed: "What in the name of maidenly
modesty is she staying in England for?"
"Because she loves me so!" cried Adelaide gaily. But she had not come
to see me only to tell me Miss Anvoy loved her: that was now
sufficiently established, and what was much more to the point was that
Mr. Gravener had now raised an objection to it. That is he had
protested against her being at Wimbledon, where in the innocence of
his heart he had originally brought her himself; in short he wanted
her to put an end to their engagement in the only proper, the only
happy manner.
"And why in the world doesn't she do so?" I inquired.
Adelaide hesitated. "She says you know." Then on my also hesitating
she added: "A condition he makes."
"The Coxon Fund?" I cried.
"He has mentioned to her his having told you about it."
"Ah, but so little! Do you mean she has accepted the trust!"
"In the most splendid spirit--as a duty about which there can be no
two opinions." Then said Adelaide after an instant: "Of course she's
thinking of Mr. Saltram."
I gave a quick cry at this, which, in its violence, made my visitor
turn pale. "How very awful!"
"Awful?"
"Why, to have anything to do with such an idea oneself."
"I'm sure you needn't!" Mrs. Mulville gave a slight toss of her head.
"He isn't good enough!" I went on; to which she responded with an
ejaculation almost as lively as mine had been. This made me, with
genuine, immediate horror, exclaim: "You haven't influenced her, I
hope!" and my emphasis brought back the blood with a rush to poor
Adelaide's face. She declared while she blushed (for I had frightened
her again), that she had never influenced anybody and that the girl
had only seen and heard and judged for herself. _He_ had influenced
her, if I would, as he did everyone who had a soul: that word, as we
knew, even expressed feebly the power of the things he said to haunt
the mind. How could she, Adelaide, help it if Miss Anvoy's mind was
haunted? I demanded with a groan what right a pretty girl engaged to a
rising M.P. had to _have_ a mind; but the only explanation my
bewildered friend could give me was that she was so clever. She
regarded Mr. Saltram naturally as a tremendous force for good. She was
intelligent enough to understand him and generous enough to admire.
"She's many things enough, but is she, among them, rich enough?" I
demanded. "Rich enough, I mean, to sacrifice such a lot of good
money?"
"That's for herself to judge. Besides, it's not her own money; she
doesn't in the least consider it so."
"And Gravener does, if not _his_ own: and that's the whole
difficulty?"
"The difficulty that brought her back, yes: she had absolutely to see
her poor aunt's solicitor. It's clear that by Lady Coxon's will she
may have the money, but it's still clearer to her conscience that the
original condition, definite, intensely implied on her uncle's part,
is attached to the use of it. She can only take one view of it. It's
for the Endowment or it's for nothing."
"The Endowment is a conception superficially sublime but fundamentally
ridiculous."
"Are you repeating Mr. Gravener's words?" Adelaide asked.
"Possibly, though I've not seen him for months. It's simply the way it
strikes me too. It's an old wife's tale. Gravener made some reference
to the legal aspect, but such an absurdly loose arrangement has no
legal aspect."
"Ruth doesn't insist on that," said Mrs. Mulville; "and it's, for her,
exactly this weakness that constitutes the force of the moral
obligation."
"Are you repeating her words?" I inquired. I forgot what else Adelaide
said, but she said she was magnificent. I thought of George Gravener
confronted with such magnificence as that, and I asked what could have
made two such people ever suppose they understood each other. Mrs.
Mulville assured me the girl loved him as such a woman could love and
that she suffered as such a woman could suffer. Nevertheless she
wanted to see me. At this I sprang up with a groan. "Oh, I'm so
sorry!--when?" Small though her sense of humour, I think Adelaide
laughed at my tone. We discussed the day, the nearest, it would be
convenient I should come out; but before she went I asked my visitor
how long she had been acquainted with these prodigies.
"For several weeks, but I was pledged to secrecy."
"And that's why you didn't write?"
"I couldn't very well tell you she was with me without telling you
that no time had even yet been fixed for her marriage. And I couldn't
very well tell you as much as that without telling you what I knew of
the reason for it. It was not till a day or two ago," Mrs. Mulville
went on, "that she asked me to ask you if you wouldn't come and see
her. Then at last she said that you knew about the idea of the
Endowment."
I considered a little. "Why on earth does she want to see me?"
"To talk with you, naturally, about Mr. Saltram."
"As a subject for the prize?" This was hugely obvious, and presently
exclaimed: "I think I'll sail to-morrow for Australia."
"Well then--sail!" said Mrs. Mulville, getting up.
"On Thursday at five, we said?" I frivolously continued. The
appointment was made definite and I inquired how, all this time, the
unconscious candidate had carried himself.
"In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has 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 is exposed from
himself?" I asked. "Look out sharp, if he has lately been reasonable.
He will presently 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 larger 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 if in the joy of
her difficulty, into the _blasée_ 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 in the house with him, that way, without discovering that
he wasn't a man of starch and whalebone. He was like a jelly without a
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 was not
necessarily prohibitive, was not 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 oneself. 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 that 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 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 inquiry 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 have 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 eye 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 fanciful
transfigurement, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn't
interpret otherwise the sudden flush 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 colour I speak of 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 compassion 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. It 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 was not, like her, I was to see, too proud to show
me why he was disappointed.
XI
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, myself, 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 was not 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 would not
be a trifle that the first of these worthies should not 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 anxiety 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 throbbing 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 car:
"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, which 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 abundant as
faith; he was never so fine as on a shy return, and even better at
forgiving than at being forgiven. I daresay 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, under any circumstances, 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 that 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 had not been
posted they had wasted a penny on me. I had seen their horrid missives
to the Mulvilles, but had not 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 have 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 were not
contradicted they would 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 they had
produced as yet as much as they dared, 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; 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 Mr. 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 is 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 hesitated! "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 colour deepened; she gave me another hard look. "You
must make that out for yourself."
I made it out quickly enough. "It's a denunciation?"