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 regard the enjoyment of a technical tip, of a piece
of literary experience, as a counterpoise to her grief. Strange to say,
none the less, I couldn’t help fancying 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 fancying; 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 every 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 believe 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, though I tried to explain it,
with moments of success, by the supposition 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
that 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, as they say, my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of
which I am 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 barriers to their intimacy; then he
had 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 told him
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
said to myself at least 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 made a glow 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; she 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 shone out of her dim smile; then she
exclaimed in a voice that I hear at this moment: “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.
X
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 absence, 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 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.”