“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
which 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 public regret quite failed to conceal:
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 reflections,
more conceivable on a man’s part than on a woman’s, which in my case had
served as 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 vision
of the waning opportunity made me feel as if I might in my despair at
last have gone to him. Of course I would 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
replied, getting up, that I detested Hugh Vereker--simply couldn’t read
him. I went away with the moral certainty that as the door closed
behind me Deane would remark that I was awfully superficial. His hostess
wouldn’t contradict him.
I continue to trace with a briefer touch our intensely odd
concatenation. 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 petition. 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
that renouncement was 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 time 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 rather fallen off. They were both
so “awfully intellectual” that it struck people as a suitable match, but
I knew better than any one the wealth of understanding the bride
would contribute to the partnership. Never, for a marriage in literary
circles--so the newspapers described the alliance--had a bride been so
handsomely dowered. I began with due promptness to look for the fruit of
their union--that fruit, I mean, of which the premonitory symptoms would
be peculiarly visible in the husband. Taking for granted the splendour
of the lady’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--everything only
made--one yearn the more for it, rounded it off with a mystery finer and
subtler.