One of the consequences, for the Mulvilles, of the sacrifices they made for Frank Saltram was that they had to give up their carriage. Adelaide drove gently into London in a one-horse greenish thing, an early Victorian landau, hired, near at hand, imaginatively, from a broken-down jobmaster whose wife was in consumption—a vehicle that made people turn round all the more when her pensioner sat beside her in a soft white hat and a shawl, one of her own. This was his position and I daresay his costume when on an afternoon in July she went to return Miss Anvoy's visit. The wheel of fate had now revolved, and amid silences deep and exhaustive, compunctions and condonations alike unutterable, Saltram was reinstated. Was it in pride or in penance that Mrs. Mulville began immediately to drive him about? If he was ashamed of his ingratitude she might have been ashamed of her forgiveness; but she was incorrigibly capable of liking him to be seen strikingly seated in the landau while she was in shops or with her acquaintance. However, if he was in the pillory for twenty minutes in the Regent's Park (I mean at Lady Coxon's door, while her companion paid her call), it was not for the further humiliation of anyone concerned that she presently came out for him in person, not even to show either of them what a fool she wasthat she drew him in to be introduced to the clever young American. Her account of this introduction I had in its order, but before that, very late in the season, under Gravener's auspices, I met Miss Anvoy at tea at the House of Commons. The member for Clockborough had gathered a group of pretty ladies, and the Mulvilles were not of the party. On the great terrace, as I strolled off a little with her, the guest of honour immediately exclaimed to me:“I've seen him, you know—I've seen him!”She told me about Saltram's call.
“And how did you find him?”
“Oh, so strange!”
“You didn't like him?”
“I can't tell till I see him again.”
“You want to do that?”
She was silent a moment.“Immensely.”
We stopped; I fancied she had become aware Gravener was looking at us. She turned back toward the knot of the others, and I said:“Dislike him as much as you will—I see you're bitten.”
“Bitten?”I thought she coloured a little.
“Oh, it doesn't matter!”I laughed;“one doesn't die of it.”
“I hope I sha'n't die of anything before I've seen more of Mrs. Mulville.”I rejoiced with her over plain Adelaide, whom she pronounced the loveliest woman she had met in England; but before we separated I remarked to her that it was an act of mere humanity to warn her that if she should see more of Frank Saltram (which would be likely to follow on any increase of acquaintance with Mrs. Mulville), she might find herself flattening her nose against the clear hard pane of an eternal question—that of the relative importance of virtue. She replied that this was surely a subject on which one took everything for granted; whereuponI admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper Baker Street—the importance relative (relative to virtue) of other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift—as if it were handed to us in a parcel on our birthday; and I declared that this very question showed me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would have help however, help that I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.
“What help do you mean?”
“That of the member for Clockborough.”
She stared, smiled, then exclaimed:“Why, my idea has been to helphim!”
Shehadhelped him—I had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so doubtless again and again, but I heard the very next month that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble—great disasters, in America, had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New York, had had reverses—lost so much money that no one knew what mightn't yet come of it. It was Adelaide who told me that she had gone off, alone, at less than a week's notice.
“Alone? Gravener has permitted that?”
“What will you have? The House of Commons?”
I'm afraid I damned the House of Commons: I was so much interested. Of course he would follow her as soon as he was free to make her his wife; only she mightn't now be able to bring him anything like the marriage-portion of which he had begun by having the pleasant confidence. Mrs. Mulville let me know what was already said: she was charming, this Miss Anvoy,but really these American girls! What was a man to do? Mr. Saltram, according to Mrs. Mulville, was of opinion that a man was never to suffer his relation to money to become a spiritual relation, but was to keep it wholesomely mechanical.“Moi pas comprendre!”I commented on this; in rejoinder to which Adelaide, with her beautiful sympathy, explained that she supposed he simply meant that the thing was to use it, don't you know! but not to think too much about it.“To take it, but not to thank you for it?”I still more profanely inquired. For a quarter of an hour afterwards she wouldn't look at me, but this didn't prevent my asking her what had been the result, that afternoon in the Regent's Park, of her taking our friend to see Miss Anvoy.
“Oh, so charming!”she answered, brightening.“He said he recognised in her a nature he could absolutely trust.”
“Yes, but I'm speaking of the effect on herself.”
Mrs. Mulville was silent an instant.“It was everything one could wish.”
Something in her tone made me laugh.“Do you mean she gave him something?”
“Well, since you ask me!”
“Right there—on the spot?”
Again poor Adelaide faltered.“It was to me of course she gave it.”
I stared; somehow I couldn't see the scene.“Do you mean a sum of money?”
“It was very handsome.”Now at last she met my eyes though I could see it was with an effort.“Thirty pounds.”
“Straight out of her pocket?”
“Out of the drawer of a table at which she had been writing. She just slipped the folded notes into my hand. He wasn't looking; it was while he was going back to the carriage. Oh,”saidAdelaide reassuringly,“I dole it out!”The dear practical soul thought my agitation, for I confess I was agitated, had reference to the administration of the money. Her disclosure made me for a moment muse violently, and I daresay that during that moment I wondered if anything else in the world makes people as indelicate as unselfishness. I uttered, I suppose, some vague synthetic cry, for she went on as if she had had a glimpse of my inward amaze at such episodes.“I assure you, my dear friend, he was in one of his happy hours.”
But I wasn't thinking of that.“Truly, indeed, these American girls!”I said.“With her father in the very act, as it were, of cheating her betrothed!”
Mrs. Mulville stared.“Oh, I suppose Mr. Anvoy has scarcely failed on purpose. Very likely they won't be able to keep it up, but there it was, and it was a very beautiful impulse.”
“You say Saltram was very fine?”
“Beyond everything. He surprised even me.”
“And I know whatyou'veheard.”After a moment I added:“Had he peradventure caught a glimpse of the money in the table-drawers?”
At this my companion honestly flushed.“How can you be so cruel when you know how little he calculates?”
“Forgive me, I do know it. But you tell me things that act on my nerves. I'm sure he hadn't caught a glimpse of anything but some splendid idea.”
Mrs. Mulville brightly concurred.“And perhaps even of her beautiful listening face.”
“Perhaps, even! And what was it all about?”
“His talk? It wasà proposof her engagement, which I had told him about: the idea of marriage, the philosophy, the poetry, the profundity of it.”It was impossible wholly to restrain one'smirth at this, and some rude ripple that I emitted again caused my companion to admonish me.“It sounds a little stale, but you know his freshness.”
“Of illustration? Indeed I do!”
“And how he has always been right on that great question.”
“On what great question, dear lady, hasn't he been right?”
“Of what other great men can you equally say it? I mean that he has never, butnever, had a deviation?”Mrs. Mulville exultantly demanded.
I tried to think of some other great man, but I had to give it up.“Didn't Miss Anvoy express her satisfaction in any less diffident way than by her charming present?”I was reduced to inquiring instead.
“Oh yes, she overflowed to me on the steps while he was getting into the carriage.”These words somehow brushed up a picture of Saltram's big shawled back as he hoisted himself into the green landau.“She said she was not disappointed,”Adelaide pursued.
I meditated a moment.“Did he wear his shawl?”
“His shawl?”She had not even noticed.
“I mean yours.”
“He looked very nice, and you know he's always clean. Miss Anvoy used such a remarkable expression—she said his mind is like a crystal!”
I pricked up my ears.“A crystal?”
“Suspended in the moral world—swinging and shining and flashing there. She's monstrously clever, you know.”
I reflected again.“Monstrously!”
George Gravener didn't follow her, for late in September, after the House had risen, I met him in a railway-carriage. He was coming up from Scotland, and I had just quitted the abode of a relation who lived near Durham. The current of travel back to London was not yet strong; at any rate on entering the compartment I found he had had it for some time to himself. We fared in company, and though he had a blue-book in his lap and the open jaws of his bag threatened me with the white teeth of confused papers, we inevitably, we even at last sociably, conversed. I saw that things were not well with him, but I asked no question until something dropped by himself made an absence of curiosity almost rude. He mentioned that he was worried about his good old friend Lady Coxon, who, with her niece likely to be detained some time in America, lay seriously ill at Clockborough, much on his mind and on his hands.
“Ah, Miss Anvoy's in America?”
“Her father has got into a horrid mess, lost no end of money.”
I hesitated, after expressing due concern, but I presently said,“I hope that raises no obstacle to your marriage.”
“None whatever; moreover it's my trade to meet objections. But it may create tiresome delays, of which there have been too many, from various causes, already. Lady Coxon got very bad, then she got much better. Then Mr. Anvoy suddenly began to totter, and now he seems quite on his back. I'm afraid he's really in for some big disaster. Lady Coxon is worse again, awfully upset by the news from America, and she sends me wordthat shemusthave Ruth. How can I give her Ruth? I haven't got Ruth myself!”
“Surely you haven't lost her,”I smiled.
“She's everything to her wretched father. She writes me by every post, telling me to smooth her aunt's pillow. I've other things to smooth; but the old lady, save for her servants, is really alone. She won't receive her Coxon relations, because she's angry at so much of her money going to them. Besides, she's off her head,”said Gravener very frankly.
I don't remember whether it was this, or what it was, that made me ask if she had not such an appreciation of Mrs. Saltram as might render that active person of some use.
He gave me a cold glance, asking me what had put Mrs. Saltram into my head, and I replied that she was unfortunately never out of it. I happened to remember the wonderful accounts she had given me of the kindness Lady Coxon had shown her. Gravener declared this to be false: Lady Coxon, who didn't care for her, hadn't seen her three times. The only foundation for it was that Miss Anvoy, who used, poor girl, to chuck money about in a manner she must now regret, had for an hour seen in the miserable woman (you could never know what she would see in people), an interesting pretext for the liberality with which her nature overflowed. But even Miss Anvoy was now quite tired of her. Gravener told me more about the crash in New York and the annoyance it had been to him, and we also glanced here and there in other directions; but by the time we got to Doncaster the principal thing he had communicated was that he was keeping something back. We stopped at that station, and, at the carriage door, some one made a movement to get in. Gravener uttered a sound of impatience, and I said to myself that but for this I should have had the secret. Then the intruder, for some reason, sparedus his company; we started afresh, and my hope of the secret returned. Gravener remained silent however, and I pretended to go to sleep; in fact, in discouragement, I really dozed. When I opened my eyes I found he was looking at me with an injured air. He tossed away with some vivacity the remnant of a cigarette and then he said:“If you're not too sleepy I want to put you a case.”I answered that I would make every effort to attend, and I felt it was going to be interesting when he went on:“As I told you a while ago, Lady Coxon, poor dear, is a maniac.”His tone had much behind it—was full of promise. I inquired if her ladyship's misfortune were a feature of her malady or only of her character, and he replied that it was a product of both. The case he wanted to put me was a matter on which it would interest him to have the impression—the judgment, he might also say—of another person.“I mean of the average intelligent man,”he said:“but you see I take what I can get.”There would be the technical, the strictly legal view; then there would be the way the question would strike a man of the world. He had lighted another cigarette while he talked, and I saw he was glad to have it to handle when he brought out at last, with a laugh slightly artificial:“In fact it's a subject on which Miss Anvoy and I are pulling different ways.”
“And you want me to pronounce between you? I pronounce in advance for Miss Anvoy.”
“In advance—that's quite right. That's how I pronounced when I asked her to marry me. But my story will interest you only so far as your mind is not made up.”Gravener puffed his cigarette a minute and then continued:“Are you familiar with the idea of the Endowment of Research?”
“Of Research?”I was at sea for a moment.
“I give you Lady Coxon's phrase. She has it on the brain.”
“She wishes to endow——?”
“Some earnest and disinterested seeker,”Gravener said.“It was a half-baked plan of her late husband's, and he handed it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but of which, should she eventually see her opportunity—the matter was left largely to her discretion—she would best honour his memory by determining the exemplary public use. This sum of money, no less than thirteen thousand pounds, was to be called the Coxon Fund; and poor Sir Gregory evidently proposed to himself that the Coxon Fund should cover his name with glory—be universally desired and admired. He left his wife a full declaration of his views; so far at least as that term may be applied to views vitiated by a vagueness really infantine. A little learning is a dangerous thing, and a good citizen who happens to have been an ass is worse for a community than the small-pox. He's worst of all when he's dead, because then he can't be stopped. However, such as they were, the poor man's aspirations are now in his wife's bosom, or fermenting rather in her foolish brain: it lies with her to carry them out. But of course she must first catch her hare.”
“Her earnest, disinterested seeker?”
“The man suffering most from want of means, want of the pecuniary independence necessary to cause the light that is in him to shine upon the human race. The man, in a word, who, having the rest of the machinery, the spiritual, the intellectual, is most hampered in his search.”
“His search for what?”
“For Moral Truth. That's what Sir Gregory calls it.”
I burst out laughing.“Delightful, munificent Sir Gregory! It's a charming idea.”
“So Miss Anvoy thinks.”
“Has she a candidate for the Fund?”
“Not that I know of; and she's perfectly reasonable about it. But Lady Coxon has put the matter before her, and we've naturally had a lot of talk.”
“Talk that, as you've so interestingly intimated, has landed you in a disagreement.”
“She considers there's something in it,”Gravener said.
“And you consider there's nothing?”
“It seems to me a puerility fraught with consequences inevitably grotesque and possibly immoral. To begin with, fancy the idea of constituting an endowment without establishing a tribunal—a bench of competent people, of judges.”
“The sole tribunal is Lady Coxon?”
“And any one she chooses to invite.”
“But she has invited you.”
“I'm not competent—I hate the thing. Besides, she hasn't. The real history of the matter, I take it, is that the inspiration was originally Lady Coxon's own, that she infected him with it, and that the flattering option left her is simply his tribute to her beautiful, her aboriginal enthusiasm. She came to England forty years ago, a thin transcendental Bostonian, and even her odd, happy, frumpy Clockborough marriage never really materialised her. She feels indeed that she has become very British—as if that, as a process, as aWerden, were conceivable; but it's precisely what makes her cling to the notion of the 'Fund' as to a link with the ideal.”
“How can she cling if she's dying?”
“Do you mean how can she act in the matter?”my companion asked.“That's precisely the question. She can't! As she has never yet caught her hare, never spied out her lucky impostor (how should she, with the life she has led?) her husband's intentionhas come very nearlapsing. His idea, to do him justice, was that itshouldlapse if exactly the right person, the perfect mixture of genius and chill penury, should fail to turn up. Ah! Lady Coxon's very particular—she says there must be no mistake.”
I found all this quite thrilling—I took it in with avidity.“If she dies without doing anything, what becomes of the money?”I demanded.
“It goes back to his family, if she hasn't made some other disposition of it.”
“She may do that, then—she may divert it?”
“Her hands are not tied. The proof is that three months ago she offered to make it over to her niece.”
“For Miss Anvoy's own use?”
“For Miss Anvoy's own use—on the occasion of her prospective marriage. She was discouraged—the earnest seeker required so earnest a search. She was afraid of making a mistake; every one she could think of seemed either not earnest enough or not poor enough. On the receipt of the first bad news about Mr. Anvoy's affairs she proposed to Ruth to make the sacrifice for her. As the situation in New York got worse she repeated her proposal.”
“Which Miss Anvoy declined?”
“Except as a formal trust.”
“You mean except as committing herself legally to place the money?”
“On the head of the deserving object, the great man frustrated,”said Gravener.“She only consents to act in the spirit of Sir Gregory's scheme.”
“And you blame her for that?”I asked with an excited smile.
My tone was not harsh, but he coloured a little and there was aqueer light in his eye.“My dear fellow, if I 'blamed' the young lady I'm engaged to, I shouldn't immediately say so even to so old a friend as you.”I saw that some deep discomfort, some restless desire to be sided with, reassuringly, becomingly reflected, had been at the bottom of his drifting so far, and I was genuinely touched by his confidence. It was inconsistent with his habits; but being troubled about a woman was not, for him, a habit: that itself was an inconsistency. George Gravener could stand straight enough before any other combination of forces. It amused me to think that the combination he had succumbed to had an American accent, a transcendental aunt and an insolvent father; but all my old loyalty to him mustered to meet this unexpected hint that I could help him. I saw that I could from the insincere tone in which he pursued:“I've criticised her of course, I've contended with her, and it has been great fun.”It clearly couldn't have been such great fun as to make it improper for me presently to ask if Miss Anvoy had nothing at all settled upon herself. To this he replied that she had only a trifle from her mother—a mere four hundred a year, which was exactly why it would be convenient to him that she shouldn't decline, in the face of this total change in her prospects, an accession of income which would distinctly help them to marry. When I inquired if there were no other way in which so rich and so affectionate an aunt could cause the weight of her benevolence to be felt, he answered that Lady Coxon was affectionate indeed, but was scarcely to be called rich. She could let her project of the Fund lapse for her niece's benefit, but she couldn't do anything else. She had been accustomed to regard her as tremendously provided for, and she was up to her eyes in promises to anxious Coxons. She was a woman of an inordinate conscience, and her conscience was now a distress to her, hovering round her bed in irreconcilableforms of resentful husbands, portionless nieces and undiscoverable philosophers.
We were by this time getting into the whirr of fleeting platforms, the multiplication of lights.“I think you'll find,”I said with a laugh,“that the difficulty will disappear in the very fact that the philosopherisundiscoverable.”
He began to gather up his papers.“Who can set a limit to the ingenuity of an extravagant woman?”
“Yes, after all, who indeed?”I echoed as I recalled the extravagance commemorated in Mrs. Mulville's anecdote of Miss Anvoy and the thirty pounds.
The thing I had been most sensible of in that talk with George Gravener was the way Saltram's name kept out of it. It seemed to me at the time that we were quite pointedly silent about him; yet afterwards I inclined to think that there had been on my companion's part no conscious avoidance. Later on I was sure of this, and for the best of reasons—the reason, namely, of my perceiving more completely that, for evil as well as for good, he left Gravener's imagination utterly cold. Gravener was not afraid of him; he was too much disgusted with him. No more was I, doubtless, and for very much the same reason. I treated my friend's story as an absolute confidence; but when before Christmas, by Mrs. Saltram, I was informed of Lady Coxon's death without having had news of Miss Anvoy's return, I found myself taking for granted that we should hear no more of these nuptials, in which I now recognised an element incongruous fromthe first. I began to ask myself how people who suited each other so little could please each other so much. The charm was some material charm, some affinity exquisite doubtless, but superficial; some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They might dote on each other's persons, but how could they know each other's souls? How could they have the same prejudices, how could they have the same horizon? Such questions, I confess, seemed quenched but not answered when, one day in February, going out to Wimbledon, I found my young lady in the house. A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was as much of a passion as was necessary. No impulse equally strong indeed had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt that the difference was not simply that of her being in mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was: it was the difference between a handsome girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four hundred a year. This explanation indeed didn't wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether, buried under the ruins of his fortune and leaving next to nothing, had died a few weeks before.
“So she has come out to marry George Gravener?”I demanded.“Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?”
“Hasn't the House just met?”said Adelaide. Then she added:“I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it were certain, so self-respecting a girl as Ruth would have waited for him over there.”
I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said was:“Do you mean that she has returned to make it a certainty?”
“No, I mean that I imagine she has come out for some reason independent of it.”Adelaide could only imagine as yet, and there was more, as we found, to be revealed. Mrs. Mulville, on hearing of her arrival, had brought the young lady out, in the green landau, for the Sunday. The Coxons were in possession of the house in the Regent's Park, and Miss Anvoy was in dreary lodgings. George Gravener was with her when Adelaide called, but he had assented graciously enough to the little visit at Wimbledon. The carriage, with Mr. Saltram in it but not mentioned, had been sent off on some errand from which it was to return and pick the ladies up. Gravener left them together, and at the end of an hour, on the Saturday afternoon, the party of three drove out to Wimbledon. This was the girl's second glimpse of our great man, and I was interested in asking Mrs. Mulville if the impression made by the first appeared to have been confirmed. On her replying, after consideration, that of course with time and opportunity it couldn't fail to be, but that as yet she was disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her use of this last word to question her further.
“Do you mean that you're disappointed because you judge that Miss Anvoy is?”
“Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening. We had two or three people, but he scarcely opened his mouth.”
“He'll be all the better this evening,”I added after a moment.“What particular importance do you attach to the idea of her being impressed?”
Adelaide turned her clear, pale eyes on me as if she were amazed at my levity.“Why, the importance of her being as happy asweare!”
I'm afraid that at this my levity increased.“Oh, that's a happiness almost too great to wish a person!”I saw she had not yet in her mind what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor's actual bliss was limited to a walk in the garden with Kent Mulville. Later in the afternoon I also took one, and I saw nothing of Miss Anvoy till dinner, at which we were without the company of Saltram, who had caused it to be reported that he was out of sorts and lying down. This made us, most of us—for there were other friends present—convey to each other in silence some of the unutterable things which in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of expressing. If an American inquirer had not been there we would have expressed them otherwise, and Adelaide would have pretended not to hear. I had seen her, before the very fact, abstract herself nobly; and I knew that more than once, to keep it from the servants, managing, dissimulating cleverly, she had helped her husband to carry him bodily to his room. Just recently he had been so wise and so deep and so high that I had begun to be nervous—to wonder if by chance there were something behind it, if he were kept straight, for instance, by the knowledge that the hated Pudneys would have more to tell us if they chose. He was lying low, but unfortunately it was common knowledge with us that the biggest splashes took place in the quietest pools. We should have had a merry life indeed if all the splashes had sprinkled us as refreshingly as the waters we were even then to feel about our ears. Kent Mulville had been up to his room, but had come back with a facial inscrutability that I had seen him achieve in equal measure only on the evening I waited in the lecture-room with Miss Anvoy. I said to myself that our friend had gone out, but I was glad that the presence of a comparative stranger deprived us of the dreary duty of suggesting to each other, in respect of his errand, edifying possibilities in whichwe didn't ourselves believe. At ten o'clock he came into the drawing-room with his waistcoat much awry but his eyes sending out great signals. It was precisely with his entrance that I ceased to be vividly conscious of him. I saw that the crystal, as I had called it, had begun to swing, and I had need of my immediate attention for Miss Anvoy.
Even when I was told afterwards that he had, as we might have said to-day, broken the record, the manner in which that attention had been rewarded relieved me of a sense of loss. I had of course a perfect general consciousness that something great was going on: it was a little like having been etherised to hear Herr Joachim play. The old music was in the air; I felt the strong pulse of thought, the sink and swell, the flight, the poise, the plunge; but I knew something about one of the listeners that nobody else knew, and Saltram's monologue could reach me only through that medium. To this hour I'm of no use when, as a witness, I'm appealed to (for they still absurdly contend about it), as to whether or no on that historic night he was drunk; and my position is slightly ridiculous, for I have never cared to tell them what it really was I was taken up with. What I got out of it is the only morsel of the total experience that is quite my own. The others were shared, but this is incommunicable. I feel that now, I'm bound to say, in even thus roughly evoking the occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness. However, I shall perhaps be as clear as is absolutely necessary if I remark that she was too much given up to her own intensity of observation to be sensible of mine. It was plainly not the question of her marriage that had brought her back. I greatly enjoyed this discovery and was sure that had that question alone been involved she would have remained away. In this case doubtless Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin her.It afterwards made me uncomfortable for her that, alone in the lodging Mrs. Mulville had put before me as dreary, she should have in any degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that I was presently relieved at hearing of her having gone to stay at Coldfield. If she was in England at all while the engagement stood the only proper place for her was under Lady Maddock's wing. Now that she was unfortunate and relatively poor, perhaps her prospective sister-in-law would be wholly won over. There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her behaviour, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, as I listened to George Gravener in the railway carriage. I watched her in the light of this queer possibility—a formidable thing certainly to meet—and I was aware that it coloured, extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones. At Wimbledon for instance it had seemed to me that she was literally afraid of Saltram, in dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel. I had come up to town with her the next day and had been convinced that, though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard. She would show as little as possible before she should be ready to show everything. What this final exhibition might be on the part of a girl perceptibly so able to think things out I found it great sport to conjecture. It would have been exciting to be approached by her, appealed to by her for advice; but I prayed to heaven I mightn't find myself in such a predicament. If there was really a present rigour in the situation of which Gravener had sketched for me the elements she would have to get out of her difficulty by herself. It was not I who had launched her and it was not I who could help her. I didn't fail to ask myself why, since I couldn't help her, I should think so much about her. It was in part my suspense that was responsible forthis: I waited impatiently to see whether she wouldn't have told Mrs. Mulville a portion at least of what I had learned from Gravener. But I saw Mrs. Mulville was still reduced to wonder what she had come out again for if she hadn't come as a conciliatory bride. That she had come in some other character was the only thing that fitted all the appearances. Having for family reasons to spend some time that spring in the west of England, I was in a manner out of earshot of the great oceanic rumble (I mean of the continuous hum of Saltram's thought), and my nervousness tended to keep me quiet. There was something I wanted so little to have to say that my prudence surmounted my curiosity. I only wondered if Ruth Anvoy talked over the idea of the Coxon Fund with Lady Maddock, and also somewhat why I didn't hear from Wimbledon. I had a reproachful note about something or other from Mrs. Saltram, but it contained no mention of Lady Coxon's niece, on whom her eyes had been much less fixed since the recent untoward events.
Adelaide's silence was fully explained later; it was practically explained when in June, returning to London, I was honoured by this admirable woman with an early visit. As soon as she appeared I guessed everything, and as soon as she told me that darling Ruth had been in her house nearly a month I exclaimed:“What in the name of maidenly modesty is she staying in England for?”
“Because she loves me so!”cried Adelaide gaily. But she had not come to see me only to tell me Miss Anvoy loved her:that was now sufficiently established, and what was much more to the point was that Mr. Gravener had now raised an objection to it. That is he had protested against her being at Wimbledon, where in the innocence of his heart he had originally brought her himself; in short he wanted her to put an end to their engagement in the only proper, the only happy manner.
“And why in the world doesn't she do so?”I inquired.
Adelaide hesitated.“She says you know.”Then on my also hesitating she added:“A condition he makes.”
“The Coxon Fund?”I cried.
“He has mentioned to her his having told you about it.”
“Ah, but so little! Do you mean she has accepted the trust!”
“In the most splendid spirit—as a duty about which there can be no two opinions.”Then said Adelaide after an instant:“Of course she's thinking of Mr. Saltram.”
I gave a quick cry at this, which, in its violence, made my visitor turn pale.“How very awful!”
“Awful?”
“Why, to have anything to do with such an idea oneself.”
“I'm sure you needn't!”Mrs. Mulville gave a slight toss of her head.
“He isn't good enough!”I went on; to which she responded with an ejaculation almost as lively as mine had been. This made me, with genuine, immediate horror, exclaim:“You haven't influenced her, I hope!”and my emphasis brought back the blood with a rush to poor Adelaide's face. She declared while she blushed (for I had frightened her again), that she had never influenced anybody and that the girl had only seen and heard and judged for herself.Hehad influenced her, if I would, as he did everyone who had a soul: that word, as we knew, even expressedfeebly the power of the things he said to haunt the mind. How could she, Adelaide, help it if Miss Anvoy's mind was haunted? I demanded with a groan what right a pretty girl engaged to a rising M.P. had tohavea mind; but the only explanation my bewildered friend could give me was that she was so clever. She regarded Mr. Saltram naturally as a tremendous force for good. She was intelligent enough to understand him and generous enough to admire.
“She's many things enough, but is she, among them, rich enough?”I demanded.“Rich enough, I mean, to sacrifice such a lot of good money?”
“That's for herself to judge. Besides, it's not her own money; she doesn't in the least consider it so.”
“And Gravener does, if nothisown: and that's the whole difficulty?”
“The difficulty that brought her back, yes: she had absolutely to see her poor aunt's solicitor. It's clear that by Lady Coxon's will she may have the money, but it's still clearer to her conscience that the original condition, definite, intensely implied on her uncle's part, is attached to the use of it. She can only take one view of it. It's for the Endowment or it's for nothing.”
“The Endowment is a conception superficially sublime but fundamentally ridiculous.”
“Are you repeating Mr. Gravener's words?”Adelaide asked.
“Possibly, though I've not seen him for months. It's simply the way it strikes me too. It's an old wife's tale. Gravener made some reference to the legal aspect, but such an absurdly loose arrangement has no legal aspect.”
“Ruth doesn't insist on that,”said Mrs. Mulville;“and it's, for her, exactly this weakness that constitutes the force of the moral obligation.”
“Are you repeating her words?”I inquired. I forgot what else Adelaide said, but she said she was magnificent. I thought of George Gravener confronted with such magnificence as that, and I asked what could have made two such people ever suppose they understood each other. Mrs. Mulville assured me the girl loved him as such a woman could love and that she suffered as such a woman could suffer. Nevertheless she wanted to see me. At this I sprang up with a groan.“Oh, I'm so sorry!—when?”Small though her sense of humour, I think Adelaide laughed at my tone. We discussed the day, the nearest, it would be convenient I should come out; but before she went I asked my visitor how long she had been acquainted with these prodigies.
“For several weeks, but I was pledged to secrecy.”
“And that's why you didn't write?”
“I couldn't very well tell you she was with me without telling you that no time had even yet been fixed for her marriage. And I couldn't very well tell you as much as that without telling you what I knew of the reason for it. It was not till a day or two ago,”Mrs. Mulville went on,“that she asked me to ask you if you wouldn't come and see her. Then at last she said that you knew about the idea of the Endowment.”
I considered a little.“Why on earth does she want to see me?”
“To talk with you, naturally, about Mr. Saltram.”
“As a subject for the prize?”This was hugely obvious, and presently exclaimed:“I think I'll sail to-morrow for Australia.”
“Well then—sail!”said Mrs. Mulville, getting up.
“On Thursday at five, we said?”I frivolously continued. The appointment was made definite and I inquired how, all this time, the unconscious candidate had carried himself.
“In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has been a dear. And then, as to what we revere him for, in the most wonderful form. His very highest—pure celestial light. Youwon'tdo him an ill turn?”Adelaide pleaded at the door.
“What danger can equal for him the danger to which he is exposed from himself?”I asked.“Look out sharp, if he has lately been reasonable. He will presently treat us to some exhibition that will make an Endowment a scandal.”
“A scandal?”Mrs. Mulville dolorously echoed.
“Is Miss Anvoy prepared for that?”
My visitor, for a moment, screwed her parasol into my carpet.“He grows larger every day.”
“So do you!”I laughed as she went off.
That girl at Wimbledon, on the Thursday afternoon, more than justified my apprehensions. I recognised fully now the cause of the agitation she had produced in me from the first—the faint foreknowledge that there was something very stiff I should have to do for her. I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me. Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that which permitted her to laugh out, as if in the joy of her difficulty, into theblaséeold room. This remarkable young woman could be earnest without being solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have cursed her obstinacy I found myself watching the unstudied play of her eyebrows or the recurrence of a singularly intense whiteness produced by the parting of her lips. These aberrations, I hasten to add, didn't prevent my learning soonenough why she had wished to see me. Her reason for this was as distinct as her beauty: it was to make me explain what I had meant, on the occasion of our first meeting, by Mr. Saltram's want of dignity. It wasn't that she couldn't imagine, but she desired it there from my lips. What she really desired of course was to know whether there was worse about him than what she had found out for herself. She hadn't been a month in the house with him, that way, without discovering that he wasn't a man of starch and whalebone. He was like a jelly without a mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project. She put her project boldly before me: there it stood in its preposterous beauty. She was as willing to take the humorous view of it as I could be: the only difference was that for her the humorous view of a thing was not necessarily prohibitive, was not paralysing.
Moreover she professed that she couldn't discuss with me the primary question—the moral obligation: that was in her own breast. There were things she couldn't go into—injunctions, impressions she had received. They were a part of the closest intimacy of her intercourse with her aunt, they were absolutely clear to her; and on questions of delicacy, the interpretation of a fidelity, of a promise, one had always in the last resort to make up one's mind for oneself. It was the idea of the application to the particular case, such a splendid one at last, that troubled her, and she admitted that it stirred very deep things. She didn't pretend that such a responsibility was a simple matter; if it had been she wouldn't have attempted to saddle me with any portion of it. The Mulvilles were sympathy itself; but were they absolutely candid? Could they indeed be, in their position—would it even have been to be desired? Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of me—whether there was anything dreadfulkept back. She made no allusion whatever to George Gravener—I thought her silence the only good taste and her gaiety perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the effect of a determination that people shouldn't know from herself that her relations with the man she was to marry were strained. All the weight, however, that she left me to throw was a sufficient implication of the weight that he had thrown in vain. Oh, she knew the question of character was immense, and that one couldn't entertain any plan for making merit comfortable without running the gauntlet of that terrible procession of interrogation-points which, like a young ladies' school out for a walk, hooked their uniform noses at the tail of governess Conduct. But were we absolutely to hold thatthere was never, never, never an exception, never, never, never an occasion for liberal acceptance, for clever charity, for suspended pedantry—for letting one side, in short, outbalance another? When Miss Anvoy threw off this inquiry I could have embraced her for so delightfully emphasising her unlikeness to Mrs. Saltram.“Why not have the courage of one's forgiveness,”she asked,“as well as the enthusiasm of one's adhesion?”
“Seeing how wonderfully you have threshed the whole thing out,”I evasively replied,“gives me an extraordinary notion of the point your enthusiasm has reached.”
She considered this remark an instant with her eye on mine, and I divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a reference to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some fanciful transfigurement, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn't interpret otherwise the sudden flush that came into her face. Such a manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me; but while I was thinking how to reassure her the colour I speak of passed away in a smile of exquisite good nature.“Oh, you see, one forgets so wonderfully how one dislikes him!”shesaid; and if her tone simply extinguished his strange figure with the brush of its compassion, it also rings in my ear to-day as the purest of all our praises. But with what quick response of compassion such a relegation of the man himself made me privately sigh:“Ah, poor Saltram!”She instantly, with this, took the measure of all I didn't believe, and it enabled her to go on:“What can one do when a person has given such a lift to one's interest in life?”
“Yes, what can one do?”If I struck her as a little vague it was because I was thinking of another person. I indulged in another inarticulate murmur—“Poor George Gravener!”What had become of the lifthehad given that interest? Later on I made up my mind that she was sore and stricken at the appearance he presented of wanting the miserable money. It was the hidden reason of her alienation. The probable sincerity, in spite of the illiberality, of his scruples about the particular use of it under discussion didn't efface the ugliness of his demand that they should buy a good house with it. Then, as forhisalienation, he didn't, pardonably enough, grasp the lift Frank Saltram had given her interest in life. If a mere spectator could ask that last question, with what rage in his heart the man himself might! He was not, like her, I was to see, too proud to show me why he was disappointed.
I was unable, this time, to stay to dinner: such, at any rate, was the plea on which I took leave. I desired in truth to get away from my young lady, for that obviously helped me not to pretend to satisfy her. HowcouldI satisfy her? I asked myself—howcould I tell her how much had been kept back? I didn't even know, myself, and I certainly didn't desire to know. My own policy had ever been to learn the least about poor Saltram's weaknesses—not to learn the most. A great deal that I had in fact learned had been forced upon me by his wife. There was something even irritating in Miss Anvoy's crude conscientiousness, and I wondered why after all she couldn't have let him alone and been content to entrust George Gravener with the purchase of the good house. I was sure he would have driven a bargain, got something excellent and cheap. I laughed louder even than she, I temporised, I failed her; I told her I must think over her case. I professed a horror of responsibilities and twitted her with her own extravagant passion for them. It was not really that I was afraid of the scandal, the moral discredit for the Fund; what troubled me most was a feeling of a different order. Of course, as the beneficiary of the Fund was to enjoy a simple life-interest, as it was hoped that new beneficiaries would arise and come up to new standards, it would not be a trifle that the first of these worthies should not have been a striking example of the domestic virtues. The Fund would start badly, as it were, and the laurel would, in some respects at least, scarcely be greener from the brows of the original wearer. That idea however was at that hour, as I have hinted, not the source of anxiety it ought perhaps to have been, for I felt less the irregularity of Saltram's getting the money than that of this exalted young woman's giving it up. I wanted her to have it for herself, and I told her so before I went away. She looked graver at this than she had looked at all, saying she hoped such a preference wouldn't make me dishonest.
It made me, to begin with, very restless—made me, instead of going straight to the station, fidget a little about that many-colouredCommon which gives Wimbledon horizons. There was a worry for me to work off, or rather keep at a distance, for I declined even to admit to myself that I had, in Miss Anvoy's phrase, been saddled with it. What could have been clearer indeed than the attitude of recognising perfectly what a world of trouble the Coxon Fund would in future save us, and of yet liking better to face a continuance of that trouble than see, and in fact contribute to, a deviation from attainable bliss in the life of two other persons in whom I was deeply interested? Suddenly, at the end of twenty minutes, there was projected across this clearness the image of a massive, middle-aged man seated on a bench, under a tree, with sad, far-wandering eyes and plump white hands folded on the head of a stick—a stick I recognised, a stout gold-headed staff that I had given him in throbbing days. I stopped short as he turned his face to me, and it happened that for some reason or other I took in as I had perhaps never done before the beauty of his rich blank gaze. It was charged with experience as the sky is charged with light, and I felt on the instant as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple. Doubtless I was rendered peculiarly sensitive to it by something in the way I had been giving him up and sinking him. While I met it I stood there smitten, and I felt myself responding to it with a sort of guilty grimace. This brought back his attention in a smile which expressed for me a cheerful, weary patience, a bruised noble gentleness. I had told Miss Anvoy that he had no dignity, but what did he seem to me, all unbuttoned and fatigued as he waited for me to come up, if he didn't seem unconcerned with small things, didn't seem in short majestic? There was majesty in his mere unconsciousness of our little conferences and puzzlements over his maintenance and his reward.
After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big soft shoulder (wherever you touched him you found equally little firmness,) and said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on my own car:“Come back to town with me, old friend—come back and spend the evening.”I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him, and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to the Mulvilles. When he objected, as regards staying all night, that he had no things, I asked him if he hadn't everything of mine. I had abstained from ordering dinner, and it was too late for preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish at my rooms—reduced also to the transcendent. Something had come up which made me want him to feel at peace with me, which was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion. I had too often had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but it gives me pleasure now to think that on that particular evening I didn't even mention Mrs. Saltram and the children. Late into the night we smoked and talked; old shames and old rigours fell away from us; I only let him see that I was conscious of what I owed him. He was as mild as contrition and as abundant as faith; he was never so fine as on a shy return, and even better at forgiving than at being forgiven. I daresay it was a smaller matter than that famous night at Wimbledon, the night of the problematical sobriety and of Miss Anvoy's initiation; but I was as much in it on this occasion as I had been out of it then. At about 1.30 he was sublime.
He never, under any circumstances, rose till all other risings were over, and his breakfasts, at Wimbledon, had always been the principal reason mentioned by departing cooks. The coast was therefore clear for me to receive her when, early the next morning, to my surprise, it was announced to me that his wife hadcalled. I hesitated, after she had come up, about telling her Saltram was in the house, but she herself settled the question, kept me reticent, by drawing forth a sealed letter which, looking at me very hard in the eyes, she placed, with a pregnant absence of comment, in my hand. For a single moment there glimmered before me the fond hope that Mrs. Saltram had tendered me, as it were, her resignation and desired to embody the act in an unsparing form. To bring this about I would have feigned any humiliation; but after my eyes had caught the superscription I heard myself say with a flatness that betrayed a sense of something very different from relief:“Oh, the Pudneys?”I knew their envelopes, though they didn't know mine. They always used the kind sold at post-offices with the stamp affixed, and as this letter had not been posted they had wasted a penny on me. I had seen their horrid missives to the Mulvilles, but had not been in direct correspondence with them.
“They enclosed it to me, to be delivered. They doubtless explain to you that they hadn't your address.”
I turned the thing over without opening it.“Why in the world should they write to me?”
“Because they have something to tell you. The worst,”Mrs. Saltram dryly added.
It was another chapter, I felt, of the history of their lamentable quarrel with her husband, the episode in which, vindictively, disingenuously as they themselves had behaved, one had to admit that he had put himself more grossly in the wrong than at any moment of his life. He had begun by insulting the matchless Mulvilles for these more specious protectors, and then, according to his wont at the end of a few months, had dug a still deeper ditch for his aberration than the chasm left yawning behind. The chasm at Wimbledon was now blessedly closed; but the Pudneysacross their persistent gulf, kept up the nastiest fire. I never doubted they had a strong case, and I had been from the first for not defending him—reasoning that if they were not contradicted they would perhaps subside. This was above all what I wanted, and I so far prevailed, that I did arrest the correspondence in time to save our little circle an infliction heavier than it perhaps would have borne. I knew, that is I divined, that they had produced as yet as much as they dared, conscious as they were in their own virtue of an exposed place in which Saltram could have planted a blow. It was a question with them whether a man who had himself so much to cover up would dare; so that these vessels of rancour were in a manner afraid of each other. I judged that on the day the Pudneys should cease for some reason or other to be afraid they would treat us to some revelation more disconcerting than any of its predecessors. As I held Mr. Saltram's letter in my hand it was distinctly communicated to me that the day had come—they had ceased to be afraid.“I don't want to know the worst,”I presently declared.
“You'll have to open the letter. It also contains an enclosure.”
I felt it—it was fat and uncanny.“Wheels within wheels!”I exclaimed.“There is something for me too to deliver.”
“So they tell me—to Miss Anvoy.”
I stared; I felt a certain thrill.“Why don't they send it to her directly?”
Mrs. Saltram hesitated!“Because she's staying with Mr. and Mrs. Mulville.”
“And why should that prevent?”
Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque, the unconscious perversity of her action. I was the only person save George Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware ofSir Gregory Coxon's and of Miss Anvoy's strange bounty. Where could there have been a more signal illustration of the clumsiness of human affairs than her having complacently selected this moment to fly in the face of it?“There's the chance of their seeing her letters. They know Mr. Pudney's hand.”
Still I didn't understand; then it flashed upon me.“You mean they might intercept it? How can you imply anything so base?”I indignantly demanded.
“It's not I; it's Mr. Pudney!”cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush.“It's his own idea.”
“Then why couldn't he send the letter toyouto be delivered?”
Mrs. Saltram's colour deepened; she gave me another hard look.“You must make that out for yourself.”
I made it out quickly enough.“It's a denunciation?”
“A real lady doesn't betray her husband!”this virtuous woman exclaimed.
I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect of impertinence.
“Especially to Miss Anvoy, who's so easily shocked? Why do such things concernher?”I asked, much at a loss.
“Because she's there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs. Pudney have been watching this; they feel she may be taken in.”
“Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make, when she has lost her power to contribute?”
Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly:“There are other things in the world than money,”she remarked. This hadn't occurred to her so long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at my letter, that Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their motives.“It's all in kindness,”she continued as she got up.
“Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view of kindness before her reverses.”
My companion smiled with some acidity.“Perhaps you're no safer than the Mulvilles!”
I didn't want her to think that, nor that she should report to the Pudneys that they had not been happy in their agent; and I well remember that this was the moment at which I began, with considerable emotion, to promise myself to enjoin upon Miss Anvoy never to open any letter that should come to her with a stamp worked into the envelope. My emotion and I fear I must add my confusion quickly increased; I presently should have been as glad to frighten Mrs. Saltram as to think I might by some diplomacy restore the Pudneys to a quieter vigilance.“It's best you should takemyview of my safety,”I at any rate soon responded. When I saw she didn't know what I meant by this I added:“You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter, a thing you will profoundly regret.”My tone had a significance which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a moment, after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them, that I instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney's communication into my pocket. She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, as if she might grab it and send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had almost given her my word I wouldn't deliver the enclosure. The passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated observer, to some such promise.
Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed almost in pain—as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of something precious. I didn't quite know what it was—it had a shocking resemblance to my honour. The emotion was the livelier doubtless in that my pulses were still shaken with the great rejoicing with which, the night before, I had rallied to the most potent inspirer it could ever have been a man's fortune to meet. What had dropped from me like a cumbersome garment as Saltram appeared before me in the afternoon on the heath was the disposition to haggle over his value. Hang it, one had to choose, one had to put that value somewhere; so I would put it really high and have done with it. Mrs. Mulville drove in for him at a discreet hour—the earliest she could presume him to have got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy would also have come had she not been expecting a visit from Mr. Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I was under bonds to see this young lady, and also that I had a letter to deliver to her; but I took my time, I waited from day to day. I left Mrs. Saltram to deal as her apprehensions should prompt with the Pudneys. I knew at last what I meant—I had ceased to wince at my responsibility. I gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade if it would; but it didn't fade, and, individually, it has not faded even now. During the month that I thus invited myself to stiffen again Adelaide Mulville, perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why Iwasso stiff. At that season of the year I was usually oftener with them. She also wrote that she feared a real estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweetyoung friend—a state of things only partly satisfactory to her so long as the advantage accruing to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the cold mists of theory. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course the question can't come up to-day. These are old frustrations now. Ruth Anvoy has not married, I hear, and neither have I. During the month, toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to ask if, on a special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to knock the very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately connected my inquiry with the talk we had had in the railway carriage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his eagerness were not yet cold. I told him there was something I thought I ought in candour to let him know—I recognised the obligation his friendly confidence had laid upon me.
“You mean that Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so herself,”he said.
“It was not to tell so thatIwanted to see you,”I replied;“for it seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly with herself. If however she did speak to you of our conversation she probably told you that I was discouraging.”
“Discouraging?”
“On the subject of a present application of the Coxon Fund.”
“To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don't know what you call discouraging!”Gravener exclaimed.
“Well, I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was.”
“I believe she did, but such a thing is measured by the effect. She's not discouraged.”
“That's her own affair. The reason I asked you to see mewas that it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that decidedly I can't undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don't want to!”
“It's very good of you, damn you!”my visitor laughed, red and really grave. Then he said:“You would like to see that fellow publicly glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary fortune?”
“Taking one form of public recognition with another, it seems to me on the whole I could bear it. When I see the compliments that are paid right and left, I ask myself why this one shouldn't take its course. This therefore is what you're entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I have some evidence that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Miss Anvoy to remain in ignorance of it.”
“And to invite me to do the same?”
“Oh, you don't require it—you've evidence enough. I speak of a sealed letter which I've been requested to deliver to her.”
“And you don't mean to?”
“There's only one consideration that would make me.”
Gravener's clear, handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute; but evidently without fishing up a clue to this motive—a failure by which I was almost wounded.“What does the letter contain?”
“It's sealed, as I tell you, and I don't know what it contains.”
“Why is it sent through you?”
“Rather than you?”I hesitated a moment.“The only explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end—may have been told they were by Mrs. Saltram.”
“My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end,”poor Gravener stammered.
Again, for an instant, I deliberated.“The offer I propose to make you gives me the right to put you a question remarkably direct. Are you still engaged to Miss Anvoy?”
“No, I'm not,”he slowly brought out.“But we're perfectly good friends.”
“Such good friends that you will again become prospective husband and wife if the obstacle in your path be removed?”
“Removed?”Gravener vaguely repeated.
“If I give Miss Anvoy the letter I speak of she may drop her project.”
“Then for God's sake give it!”
“I'll do so if you're ready to assure me that her dropping it would now presumably bring about your marriage.”
“I'd marry her the next day!”my visitor cried.