NOTHING more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware
before Corvick’s arrival in England that I shouldn’t be there to put him
through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the alarming
illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had gone to Munich
to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the art of portraiture in
oils. The near relative who made him an allowance had threatened to
withdraw it if he should, under specious pretexts, turn for superior
truth to Paris—Paris being somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt, the school of
evil, the abyss. I deplored this prejudice at the time, and the deep
injury of it was now visible—first in the fact that it hadn’t saved the
poor boy, who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the
lungs, and second in the greater break with London to which the event
condemned me. I’m afraid that what was uppermost in my mind during
several anxious weeks was the sense that if we had only been in Paris I
might have run over to see Corvick. This was actually out of the
question from every point of view: my brother, whose recovery gave us
both plenty to do, was ill for three months, during which I never left
him and at the end of which we had to face the absolute prohibition of a
return to England. The consideration of climate imposed itself, and he
was in no state to meet it alone. I took him to Meran and there spent
the summer with him, trying to show him by example how to get back to
work and nursing a rage of another sort that I tried _not_ to show him.
The whole business proved the first of a series of phenomena so strangely
interlaced that, taken together—which was how I had to take them—they
form as good an illustration as I can recall of the manner in which, for
the good of his soul doubtless, fate sometimes deals with a man’s
avidity. These incidents certainly had larger bearings than the
comparatively meagre consequence we are here concerned with—though I feel
that consequence also a thing to speak of with some respect. It’s mainly
in such a light, I confess, at any rate, that the ugly fruit of my exile
is at this hour present to me. Even at first indeed the spirit in which
my avidity, as I have called it, made me regard that term owed no element
of ease to the fact that before coming back from Rapallo George Corvick
addressed me in a way I objected to. His letter had none of the sedative
action I must to-day profess myself sure he had wished to give it, and
the march of occurrences was not so ordered as to make up for what it
lacked. He had begun on the spot, for one of the quarterlies, a great
last word on Vereker’s writings, and this exhaustive study, the only one
that would have counted, have existed, was to turn on the new light, to
utter—oh, so quietly!—the unimagined truth. It was in other words to
trace the figure in the carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it
in every tint. The result, according to my friend, would be the greatest
literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me was just to be so
good as not to trouble him with questions till he should hang up his
masterpiece before me. He did me the honour to declare that, putting
aside the great sitter himself, all aloft in his indifference, I was
individually the connoisseur he was most working for. I was therefore to
be a good boy and not try to peep under the curtain before the show was
ready: I should enjoy it all the more if I sat very still.
I did my best to sit very still, but I couldn’t help giving a jump on
seeing in _The Times_, after I had been a week or two in Munich and
before, as I knew, Corvick had reached London, the announcement of the
sudden death of poor Mrs. Erme. I instantly, by letter, appealed to
Gwendolen for particulars, and she wrote me that her mother had yielded
to long-threatened failure of the heart. She didn’t say, but I took the
liberty of reading into her words, that from the point of view of her
marriage and also of her eagerness, which was quite a match for mine,
this was a solution more prompt than could have been expected and more
radical than waiting for the old lady to swallow the dose. I candidly
admit indeed that at the time—for I heard from her repeatedly—I read some
singular things into Gwendolen’s words and some still more extraordinary
ones into her silences. Pen in hand, this way, I live the time over, and
it brings back the oddest sense of my having been, both for months and in
spite of myself, a kind of coerced spectator. All my life had taken
refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to have
committed itself to keep astare. There were days when I thought of
writing to Hugh Vereker and simply throwing myself on his charity. But I
felt more deeply that I hadn’t fallen quite so low—besides which, quite
properly, he would send me about my business. Mrs. Erme’s death brought
Corvick straight home, and within the month he was united “very
quietly”—as quietly, I seemed to make out, as he meant in his article to
bring out his trouvaille—to the young lady he had loved and quitted. I
use this last term, I may parenthetically say, because I subsequently
grew sure that at the time he went to India, at the time of his great
news from Bombay, there had been no positive pledge between them
whatever. There had been none at the moment she was affirming to me the
very opposite. On the other hand he had certainly become engaged the day
he returned. The happy pair went down to Torquay for their honeymoon,
and there, in a reckless hour, it occurred to poor Corvick to take his
young bride a drive. He had no command of that business: this had been
brought home to me of old in a little tour we had once made together in a
dogcart. In a dogcart he perched his companion for a rattle over
Devonshire hills, on one of the likeliest of which he brought his horse,
who, it was true, had bolted, down with such violence that the occupants
of the cart were hurled forward and that he fell horribly on his head.
He was killed on the spot; Gwendolen escaped unhurt.
I pass rapidly over the question of this unmitigated tragedy, of what the
loss of my best friend meant for me, and I complete my little history of
my patience and my pain by the frank statement of my having, in a
postscript to my very first letter to her after the receipt of the
hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband mightn’t at least
have finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as
my question: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere
heartbreaking scrap. She explained that our friend, abroad, had just
settled down to it when interrupted by her mother’s death, and that then,
on his return, he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which
that calamity was to plunge them. The opening pages were all that
existed; they were striking, they were promising, but they didn’t unveil
the idol. That great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his
climax. She said nothing more, nothing to enlighten me as to the state
of her own knowledge—the knowledge for the acquisition of which I had
fancied her prodigiously acting. This was above all what I wanted to
know: had _she_ seen the idol unveiled? Had there been a private
ceremony for a palpitating audience of one? For what else but that
ceremony had the nuptials taken place? I didn’t like as yet to press
her, though when I thought of what had passed between us on the subject
in Corvick’s absence her reticence surprised me. It was therefore not
till much later, from Meran, that I risked another appeal, risked it in
some trepidation, for she continued to tell me nothing. “Did you hear in
those few days of your blighted bliss,” I wrote, “what we desired so to
hear?” I said, “we,” as a little hint and she showed me she could take a
little hint; “I heard everything,” she replied, “and I mean to keep it to
myself!”