SIX months later appeared “The Right of Way,” the last chance, though we
didn’t know it, that we were to have to redeem ourselves. Written wholly
during Vereker’s sojourn abroad, the book had been heralded, in a hundred
paragraphs, by the usual ineptitudes. I carried it, as early a copy as
any, I this time flattered myself, straightway to Mrs. Corvick. This was
the only use I had for it; I left the inevitable tribute of _The Middle_
to some more ingenious mind and some less irritated temper. “But I
already have it,” Gwendolen said. “Drayton Deane was so good as to bring
it to me yesterday, and I’ve just finished it.”
“Yesterday? How did he get it so soon?”
“He gets everything so soon! He’s to review it in _The Middle_.”
“He—Drayton Deane—review Vereker?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“’Why not? One fine ignorance is as good as another.”
I winced but I presently said: “You ought to review him yourself!”
“I don’t ‘review,’” she laughed. “I’m reviewed!”
Just then the door was thrown open. “Ah yes, here’s your reviewer!”
Drayton Deane was there with his long legs and his tall forehead: he had
come to see what she thought of “The Right of Way,” and to bring news
that was singularly relevant. The evening papers were just out with a
telegram on the author of that work, who, in Rome, had been ill for some
days with an attack of malarial fever. It had at first not been thought
grave, but had taken, in consequence of complications, a turn that might
give rise to anxiety. Anxiety had indeed at the latest hour begun to be
felt.
I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental
detachment that Mrs. Corvick’s overt concern quite failed to hide: it
gave me the measure of her consummate independence. That independence
rested on her knowledge, the knowledge which nothing now could destroy
and which nothing could make different. The figure in the carpet might
take on another twist or two, but the sentence had virtually been
written. The writer might go down to his grave: she was the person in
the world to whom—as if she had been his favoured heir—his continued
existence was least of a need. This reminded me how I had observed at a
particular moment—after Corvick’s death—the drop of her desire to see him
face to face. She had got what she wanted without that. I had been sure
that if she hadn’t got it she wouldn’t have been restrained from the
endeavour to sound him personally by those superior reflexions, more
conceivable on a man’s part than on a woman’s, which in my case had
served an a deterrent. It wasn’t however, I hasten to add, that my case,
in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn’t ambiguous enough. At the
thought that Vereker was perhaps at that moment dying there rolled over
me a wave of anguish—a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still
depended on him. A delicacy that it was my one compensation to suffer to
rule me had left the Alps and the Apennines between us, but the sense of
the waning occasion suggested that I might in my despair at last have
gone to him. Of course I should really have done nothing of the sort. I
remained five minutes, while my companions talked of the new book, and
when Drayton Deane appealed to me for my opinion of it I made answer,
getting up, that I detested Hugh Vereker and simply couldn’t read him. I
departed with the moral certainty that as the door closed behind me Deane
would brand me for awfully superficial. His hostess wouldn’t contradict
_that_ at least.
I continue to trace with a briefer touch our intensely odd successions.
Three weeks after this came Vereker’s death, and before the year was out
the death of his wife. That poor lady I had never seen, but I had had a
futile theory that, should she survive him long enough to be decorously
accessible, I might approach her with the feeble flicker of my plea. Did
she know and if she knew would she speak? It was much to be presumed
that for more reasons than one she would have nothing to say; but when
she passed out of all reach I felt renannouncement indeed my appointed
lot. I was shut up in my obsession for ever—my gaolers had gone off with
the key. I find myself quite as vague as a captive in a dungeon about
the tinge that further elapsed before Mrs. Corvick became the wife of
Drayton Deane. I had foreseen, through my bars, this end of the
business, though there was no indecent haste and our friendship had
fallen rather off. They were both so “awfully intellectual” that it
struck people as a suitable match, but I had measured better than any one
the wealth of understanding the bride would contribute to the union.
Never, for a marriage in literary circles—so the newspapers described the
alliance—had a lady been so bravely dowered. I began with due promptness
to look for the fruit of the affair—that fruit, I mean, of which the
premonitory symptoms would be peculiarly visible in the husband. Taking
for granted the splendour of the other party’s nuptial gift, I expected
to see him make a show commensurate with his increase of means. I knew
what his means had been—his article on “The Right of Way” had distinctly
given one the figure. As he was now exactly in the position in which
still more exactly I was not I watched from month to month, in the likely
periodicals, for the heavy message poor Corvick had been unable to
deliver and the responsibility of which would have fallen on his
successor. The widow and wife would have broken by the rekindled hearth
the silence that only a widow and wife might break, and Deane would be as
aflame with the knowledge as Corvick in his own hour, as Gwendolen in
hers, had been. Well, he was aflame doubtless, but the fire was
apparently not to become a public blaze. I scanned the periodicals in
vain: Drayton Deane filled them with exuberant pages, but he withheld the
page I most feverishly sought. He wrote on a thousand subjects, but
never on the subject of Vereker. His special line was to tell truths
that other people either “funked,” as he said, or overlooked, but he
never told the only truth that seemed to me in these days to signify. I
met the couple in those literary circles referred to in the papers: I
have sufficiently intimated that it was only in such circles we were all
constructed to revolve. Gwendolen was more than ever committed to them
by the publication of her third novel, and I myself definitely classed by
holding the opinion that this work was inferior to its immediate
predecessor. Was it worse because she had been keeping worse company?
If her secret was, as she had told me, her life—a fact discernible in her
increasing bloom, an air of conscious privilege that, cleverly corrected
by pretty charities, gave distinction to her appearance—it had yet not a
direct influence on her work. That only made one—everything only made
one—yearn the more for it; only rounded it off with a mystery finer and
subtler.