MY words however were not absolutely the same—I put something instead of
“angel”; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more apt, for when
eventually we heard from our traveller it was merely, it was thoroughly
to be tantalised. He was magnificent in his triumph, he described his
discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy only obscured it—there were to
be no particulars till he should have submitted his conception to the
supreme authority. He had thrown up his commission, he had thrown up his
book, he had thrown up everything but the instant need to hurry to
Rapallo, on the Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote
him a letter which was to await him at Aden—I besought him to relieve my
suspense. That he had found my letter was indicated by a telegram which,
reaching me after weary days and in the absence of any answer to my
laconic dispatch to him at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to
both communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French
of the day, which Covick often made use of to show he wasn’t a prig. It
had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly be
paraphrased. “Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the
face you’ll make!” “Tellement envie de voir ta tête!”—that was what I
had to sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for
I seem to remember myself at this time as rattling constantly between the
little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience, Gwendolen’s and
mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would be greater. We all
spent during this episode, for people of our means, a great deal of money
in telegrams and cabs, and I counted on the receipt of news from Rapallo
immediately after the junction of the discoverer with the discovered.
The interval seemed an age, but late one day I heard a hansom
precipitated to my door with the crash engendered by a hint of
liberality. I lived with my heart in my mouth and accordingly bounded to
the window—a movement which gave me a view of a young lady erect on the
footboard of the vehicle and eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of
me she flourished a paper with a movement that brought me straight down,
the movement with which, in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves are
flourished at the foot of the scaffold.
“Just seen Vereker—not a note wrong. Pressed me to bosom—keeps me a
month.” So much I read on her paper while the cabby dropped a grin from
his perch. In my excitement I paid him profusely and in hers she
suffered it; then as he drove away we started to walk about and talk. We
had talked, heaven knows, enough before, but this was a wondrous lift.
We pictured the whole scene at Rapallo, where he would have written,
mentioning my name, for permission to call; that is _I_ pictured it,
having more material than my companion, whom I felt hang on my lips as we
stopped on purpose before shop-windows we didn’t look into. About one
thing we were clear: if he was staying on for fuller communication we
should at least have a letter from him that would help us through the
dregs of delay. We understood his staying on, and yet each of us saw, I
think, that the other hated it. The letter we were clear about arrived;
it was for Gwendolen, and I called on her in time to save her the trouble
of bringing it to me. She didn’t read it out, as was natural enough; but
she repeated to me what it chiefly embodied. This consisted of the
remarkable statement that he’d tell her after they were married exactly
what she wanted to know.
“Only _then_, when I’m his wife—not before,” she explained. “It’s
tantamount to saying—isn’t it?—that I must marry him straight off!” She
smiled at me while I flushed with disappointment, a vision of fresh delay
that made me at first unconscious of my surprise. It seemed more than a
hint that on me as well he would impose some tiresome condition.
Suddenly, while she reported several more things from his letter, I
remembered what he had told me before going away. He had found Mr.
Vereker deliriously interesting and his own possession of the secret a
real intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that
it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him; it would have been,
through all time and taking all tongues, one of the most wonderful
flowers of literary art. Nothing, in especial, once you were face to
face with it, could show for more consummately _done_. When once it came
out it came out, was there with a splendour that made you ashamed; and
there hadn’t been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of the age, with
every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the smallest reason
why it should have been overlooked. It was great, yet so simple, was
simple, yet so great, and the final knowledge of it was an experience
quite apart. He intimated that the charm of such an experience, the
desire to drain it, in its freshness, to the last drop, was what kept him
there close to the source. Gwendolen, frankly radiant as she tossed me
these fragments, showed the elation of a prospect more assured than my
own. That brought me back to the question of her marriage, prompted me
to ask if what she meant by what she had just surprised me with was that
she was under an engagement.
“Of course I am!” she answered. “Didn’t you know it?” She seemed
astonished, but I was still more so, for Corvick had told me the exact
contrary. I didn’t mention this, however; I only reminded her how little
I had been on that score in her confidence, or even in Corvick’s, and
that, moreover I wasn’t in ignorance of her mother’s interdict. At
bottom I was troubled by the disparity of the two accounts; but after a
little I felt Corvick’s to be the one I least doubted. This simply
reduced me to asking myself if the girl had on the spot improvised an
engagement—vamped up an old one or dashed off a new—in order to arrive at
the satisfaction she desired. She must have had resources of which I was
destitute, but she made her case slightly more intelligible by returning
presently: “What the state of things has been is that we felt of course
bound to do nothing in mamma’s lifetime.”
“But now you think you’ll just dispense with mamma’s consent?”
“Ah it mayn’t come to that!” I wondered what it might come to, and she
went on: “Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you know,” she
added with a laugh, “she really _must_!”—a proposition of which, on
behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged the force.