VIII

Nothing more annoying had ever happened to me than to become aware

before Corvick’s arrival in England that I should not 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

had not saved the poor boy, who was clever, frail and foolish, from

congestion of the lungs, and second in the greater remoteness from

London to which the event condemned me. I am 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 combined 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 to be a thing to speak of with some respect.

It’s mainly in such a light, I confess, at any rate, that at this hour

the ugly fruit of my exile is present to me. Even at first indeed the

spirit in which my avidity, as I have called it, made me regard this

term owed no element of ease to the fact that before coming back from

Rapallo George Corvick addressed me in a way I didn’t like. His letter

had none of the sedative action that 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, said Corvick, was to 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 wrote to Gwendolen

for particulars, and she replied that her mother had succumbed 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 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 suppose 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 was no engagement whatever. There was none at the moment

she affirmed the opposite. On the other hand he certainly became 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 had not at least

finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as

my inquiry: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere

heartbreaking scrap. She explained that Corvick had just settled down to

it when he was interrupted by her mother’s death; then, on his return,

he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity

plunged 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 conceived

her doing prodigious things. 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 previous ceremony been enacted? 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!”