IT was impossible not to be moved with the strongest sympathy for her,
and on my return to England I showed her every kindness in my power. Her
mother’s death had made her means sufficient, and she had gone to live in
a more convenient quarter. But her loss had been great and her
visitation cruel; it never would have occurred to me moreover to suppose
she could come to feel the possession of a technical tip, of a piece of
literary experience, a counterpoise to her grief. Strange to say, none
the less, I couldn’t help believing after I had seen her a few times that
I caught a glimpse of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there had
been other things I couldn’t help believing, or at least imagining; and
as I never felt I was really clear about these, so, as to the point I
here touch on, I give her memory the benefit of the doubt. Stricken and
solitary, highly accomplished and now, in her deep mourning, her maturer
grace and her uncomplaining sorrow, incontestably handsome, she presented
herself as leading a life of singular dignity and beauty. I had at first
found a way to persuade myself that I should soon get the better of the
reserve formulated, the week after the catastrophe in her reply to an
appeal as to which I was not unconscious that it might strike her as
mistimed. Certainly that reserve was something of a shock to
me—certainly it puzzled me the more I thought of it and even though I
tried to explain it (with moments of success) by an imputation of exalted
sentiments, of superstitious scruples, of a refinement of loyalty.
Certainly it added at the same time hugely to the price of Vereker’s
secret, precious as this mystery already appeared. I may as well confess
abjectly that Mrs. Corvick’s unexpected attitude was the final tap on the
nail that was to fix fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession
of which I’m for ever conscious.
But this only helped me the more to be artful, to be adroit, to allow
time to elapse before renewing my suit. There were plenty of
speculations for the interval, and one of them was deeply absorbing.
Corvick had kept his information from his young friend till after the
removal of the last barrier to their intimacy—then only had he let the
cat out of the bag. Was it Gwendolen’s idea, taking a hint from him, to
liberate this animal only on the basis of the renewal of such a relation?
Was the figure in the carpet traceable or describable only for husbands
and wives—for lovers supremely united? It came back to me in a
mystifying manner that in Kensington Square, when I mentioned that
Corvick would have told the girl he loved, some word had dropped from
Vereker that gave colour to this possibility. There might be little in
it, but there was enough to make me wonder if I should have to marry Mrs.
Corvick to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for
the blessing of her knowledge? Ah that way madness lay!—so I at least
said to myself in bewildered hours. I could see meanwhile the torch she
refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of memory—pour through her
eyes a light that shone in her lonely house. At the end of six months I
was fully sure of what this warm presence made up to her for. We had
talked again and again of the man who had brought us together—of his
talent, his character, his personal charm, his certain career, his
dreadful doom, and even of his clear purpose in that great study which
was to have been a supreme literary portrait, a kind of critical Vandyke
or Velasquez. She had conveyed to me in abundance that she was
tongue-tied by her perversity, by her piety, that she would never break
the silence it had not been given to the “right person,” as she said, to
break. The hour however finally arrived. One evening when I had been
sitting with her longer than usual I laid my hand firmly on her arm.
“Now at last what _is_ it?”
She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless
headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn’t
prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest “Never!” I had yet,
in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the
face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears had come
into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each other; after
which I slowly rose, I was wondering if some day she would accept me; but
this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed down my hat: “I
know what to think then. It’s nothing!”
A remote disdainful pity for me gathered in her dim smile; then she spoke
in a voice that I hear at this hour: “It’s my _life_!” As I stood at the
door she added: “You’ve insulted him!”
“Do you mean Vereker?”
“I mean the Dead!”
I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge. Yes,
it was her life—I recognised that too; but her life none the less made
room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year and a half
after Corvick’s death she published in a single volume her second novel,
“Overmastered,” which I pounced on in the hope of finding in it some
tell-tale echo or some peeping face. All I found was a much better book
than her younger performance, showing I thought the better company she
had kept. As a tissue tolerably intricate it was a carpet with a figure
of its own; but the figure was not the figure I was looking for. On
sending a review of it to _The Middle_ I was surprised to learn from the
office that a notice was already in type. When the paper came out I had
no hesitation in attributing this article, which I thought rather
vulgarly overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been
something of a friend of Corvick’s, yet had only within a few weeks made
the acquaintance of his widow. I had had an early copy of the book, but
Deane had evidently had an earlier. He lacked all the same the light
hand with which Corvick had gilded the gingerbread—he laid on the tinsel
in splotches.