The Coxon Fund

Transcribed from the 1915 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email

ccx074@.org

[Picture: Book cover]

THE

COXON FUND

BY HENRY JAMES

[Picture: Decorative graphic]

* * * * *

LONDON: MARTIN SECKER

NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

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This edition first published 1915

The text follows that of the

Definitive Edition

* * * * *

I

“THEY’VE got him for life!” I said to myself that evening on my way back

to the station; but later on, alone in the compartment (from Wimbledon to

Waterloo, before the glory of the District Railway) I amended this

declaration in the light of the sense that my friends would probably

after all not enjoy a monopoly of Mr. Saltram. I won’t pretend to have

taken his vast measure on that first occasion, but I think I had achieved

a glimpse of what the privilege of his acquaintance might mean for many

persons in the way of charges accepted. He had been a great experience,

and it was this perhaps that had put me into the frame of foreseeing how

we should all, sooner or later, have the honour of dealing with him as a

whole. Whatever impression I then received of the amount of this total,

I had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles. He was to

stay all the winter: Adelaide dropped it in a tone that drew the sting

from the inevitable emphasis. These excellent people might indeed have

been content to give the circle of hospitality a diameter of six months;

but if they didn’t say he was to stay all summer as well it was only

because this was more than they ventured to hope. I remember that at

dinner that evening he wore slippers, new and predominantly purple, of

some queer carpet-stuff; but the Mulvilles were still in the stage of

supposing that he might be snatched from them by higher bidders. At a

later time they grew, poor dears, to fear no snatching; but theirs was a

fidelity which needed no help from competition to make them proud.

Wonderful indeed as, when all was said, you inevitably pronounced Frank

Saltram, it was not to be overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in

their way still more extraordinary: as striking an instance as could

easily be encountered of the familiar truth that remarkable men find

remarkable conveniences.

They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine, and there had

been an implication in Adelaide’s note—judged by her notes alone she

might have been thought silly—that it was a case in which something

momentous was to be determined or done. I had never known them not be in

a “state” about somebody, and I dare say I tried to be droll on this

point in accepting their invitation. On finding myself in the presence

of their latest discovery I had not at first felt irreverence droop—and,

thank heaven, I have never been absolutely deprived of that alternative

in Mr. Saltram’s company. I saw, however—I hasten to declare it—that

compared to this specimen their other phoenixes had been birds of

inconsiderable feather, and I afterwards took credit to myself for not

having even in primal bewilderments made a mistake about the essence of

the man. He had an incomparable gift; I never was blind to it—it dazzles

me still. It dazzles me perhaps even more in remembrance than in fact,

for I’m not unaware that for so rare a subject the imagination goes to

some expense, inserting a jewel here and there or giving a twist to a

plume. How the art of portraiture would rejoice in this figure if the

art of portraiture had only the canvas! Nature, in truth, had largely

rounded it, and if memory, hovering about it, sometimes holds her breath,

this is because the voice that comes back was really golden.

Though the great man was an inmate and didn’t dress, he kept dinner on

this occasion waiting, and the first words he uttered on coming into the

room were an elated announcement to Mulville that he had found out

something. Not catching the allusion and gaping doubtless a little at

his face, I privately asked Adelaide what he had found out. I shall

never forget the look she gave me as she replied: “Everything!” She

really believed it. At that moment, at any rate, he had found out that

the mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite. He had previously of course

discovered, as I had myself for that matter, that their dinners were

soignés. Let me not indeed, in saying this, neglect to declare that I

shall falsify my counterfeit if I seem to hint that there was in his

nature any ounce of calculation. He took whatever came, but he never

plotted for it, and no man who was so much of an absorbent can ever have

been so little of a parasite. He had a system of the universe, but he

had no system of sponging—that was quite hand-to-mouth. He had fine

gross easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought

confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with

our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I

make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was

never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger

houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of

reflexion, of emotion—particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of

resentment. No one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often,

and if it’s rendering honour to borrow wisdom I’ve a right to talk of my

sacrifices. He yielded lessons as the sea yields fish—I lived for a

while on this diet. Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his massive

monstrous failure—if failure after all it was—had been designed for my

private recreation. He fairly pampered my curiosity; but the history of

that experience would take me too far. This is not the large canvas I

just now spoke of, and I wouldn’t have approached him with my present

hand had it been a question of all the features. Frank Saltram’s

features, for artistic purposes, are verily the anecdotes that are to be

gathered. Their name is legion, and this is only one, of which the

interest is that it concerns even more closely several other persons.

Such episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas that made up the

innumerable facets of the big drama—which is yet to be reported.

II

IT is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are distinct—my

own, as it were, and this other—they equally began, in a manner, the

first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram, the night I came back

from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense of life that, in London, for

the very thrill of it, I could only walk home. Walking and swinging my

stick, I overtook, at Buckingham Gate, George Gravener, and George

Gravener’s story may be said to have begun with my making him, as our

paths lay together, come home with me for a talk. I duly remember, let

me parenthesise, that it was still more that of another person, and also

that several years were to elapse before it was to extend to a second

chapter. I had much to say to him, none the less, about my visit to the

Mulvilles, whom he more indifferently knew, and I was at any rate so

amusing that for long afterwards he never encountered me without asking

for news of the old man of the sea. I hadn’t said Mr. Saltram was old,

and it was to be seen that he was of an age to outweather George

Gravener. I had at that time a lodging in Ebury Street, and Gravener was

staying at his brother’s empty house in Eaton Square. At Cambridge, five

years before, even in our devastating set, his intellectual power had

seemed to me almost awful. Some one had once asked me privately, with

blanched cheeks, what it was then that after all such a mind as that left

standing. “It leaves itself!” I could recollect devoutly replying. I

could smile at present for this remembrance, since before we got to Ebury

Street I was struck with the fact that, save in the sense of being well

set up on his legs, George Gravener had actually ceased to tower. The

universe he laid low had somehow bloomed again—the usual eminences were

visible. I wondered whether he had lost his humour, or only, dreadful

thought, had never had any—not even when I had fancied him most

Aristophanesque. What was the need of appealing to laughter, however, I

could enviously enquire, where you might appeal so confidently to

measurement? Mr. Saltram’s queer figure, his thick nose and hanging lip,

were fresh to me: in the light of my old friend’s fine cold symmetry they

presented mere success in amusing as the refuge of conscious ugliness.

Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary

as if he were fifty and popular. In my scrap of a residence—he had a

worldling’s eye for its futile conveniences, but never a comrade’s joke—I

sounded Frank Saltram in his ears; a circumstance I mention in order to

note that even then I was surprised at his impatience of my enlivenment.

As he had never before heard of the personage it took indeed the form of

impatience of the preposterous Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like

mine, had had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the young

Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in the previous generation. When

she married Kent Mulville, who was older than Gravener and I and much

more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener practically lost one. We

reacted in different ways from the form taken by what he called their

deplorable social action—the form (the term was also his) of nasty

second-rate gush. I may have held in my ‘for intérieur’ that the good

people at Wimbledon were beautiful fools, but when he sniffed at them I

couldn’t help taking the opposite line, for I already felt that even

should we happen to agree it would always be for reasons that differed.

It came home to me that he was admirably British as, without so much as a

sociable sneer at my bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of

my little French library.

“Of course I’ve never seen the fellow, but it’s clear enough he’s a

humbug.”

“Clear ‘enough’ is just what it isn’t,” I replied; “if it only were!”

That ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of what was to

be later a long ache for final frivolous rest. Gravener was profound

enough to remark after a moment that in the first place he couldn’t be

anything but a Dissenter, and when I answered that the very note of his

fascination was his extraordinary speculative breadth my friend retorted

that there was no cad like your cultivated cad, and that I might depend

upon discovering—since I had had the levity not already to have

enquired—that my shining light proceeded, a generation back, from a

Methodist cheesemonger. I confess I was struck with his insistence, and

I said, after reflexion: “It may be—I admit it may be; but why on earth

are you so sure?”—asking the question mainly to lay him the trap of

saying that it was because the poor man didn’t dress for dinner. He took

an instant to circumvent my trap and come blandly out the other side.

“Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They’ve an infallible

hand for frauds. All their geese are swans. They were born to be duped,

they like it, they cry for it, they don’t know anything from anything,

and they disgust one—luckily perhaps!—with Christian charity.” His

vehemence was doubtless an accident, but it might have been a strange

foreknowledge. I forget what protest I dropped; it was at any rate

something that led him to go on after a moment: “I only ask one

thing—it’s perfectly simple. Is a man, in a given case, a real

gentleman?”

“A real gentleman, my dear fellow—that’s so soon said!”

“Not so soon when he isn’t! If they’ve got hold of one this time he must

be a great rascal!”

“I might feel injured,” I answered, “if I didn’t reflect that they don’t

rave about me.”

“Don’t be too sure! I’ll grant that he’s a gentleman,” Gravener

presently added, “if you’ll admit that he’s a scamp.”

“I don’t know which to admire most, your logic or your benevolence.”

My friend coloured at this, but he didn’t change the subject. “Where did

they pick him up?”

“I think they were struck with something he had published.”

“I can fancy the dreary thing!”

“I believe they found out he had all sorts of worries and difficulties.”

“That of course wasn’t to be endured, so they jumped at the privilege of

paying his debts!” I professed that I knew nothing about his debts, and

I reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles were angels they

were neither idiots nor millionaires. What they mainly aimed at was

reuniting Mr. Saltram to his wife. “I was expecting to hear he has

basely abandoned her,” Gravener went on, at this, “and I’m too glad you

don’t disappoint me.”

I tried to recall exactly what Mrs. Mulville had told me. “He didn’t

leave her—no. It’s she who has left him.”

“Left him to us?” Gravener asked. “The monster—many thanks! I decline

to take him.”

“You’ll hear more about him in spite of yourself. I can’t, no, I really

can’t resist the impression that he’s a big man.” I was already

mastering—to my shame perhaps be it said—just the tone my old friend

least liked.

“It’s doubtless only a trifle,” he returned, “but you haven’t happened to

mention what his reputation’s to rest on.”

“Why on what I began by boring you with—his extraordinary mind.”

“As exhibited in his writings?”

“Possibly in his writings, but certainly in his talk, which is far and

away the richest I ever listened to.”

“And what’s it all about?”

“My dear fellow, don’t ask me! About everything!” I pursued, reminding

myself of poor Adelaide. “About his ideas of things,” I then more

charitably added. “You must have heard him to know what I mean—it’s

unlike anything that ever was heard.” I coloured, I admit, I overcharged

a little, for such a picture was an anticipation of Saltram’s later

development and still more of my fuller acquaintance with him. However,

I really expressed, a little lyrically perhaps, my actual imagination of

him when I proceeded to declare that, in a cloud of tradition, of legend,

he might very well go down to posterity as the greatest of all great

talkers. Before we parted George Gravener had wondered why such a row

should be made about a chatterbox the more and why he should be pampered

and pensioned. The greater the wind-bag the greater the calamity. Out

of proportion to everything else on earth had come to be this wagging of

the tongue. We were drenched with talk—our wretched age was dying of it.

I differed from him here sincerely, only going so far as to concede, and

gladly, that we were drenched with sound. It was not however the mere

speakers who were killing us—it was the mere stammerers. Fine talk was

as rare as it was refreshing—the gift of the gods themselves, the one

starry spangle on the ragged cloak of humanity. How many men were there

who rose to this privilege, of how many masters of conversation could he

boast the acquaintance? Dying of talk?—why we were dying of the lack of

it! Bad writing wasn’t talk, as many people seemed to think, and even

good wasn’t always to be compared to it. From the best talk indeed the

best writing had something to learn. I fancifully added that we too

should peradventure be gilded by the legend, should be pointed at for

having listened, for having actually heard. Gravener, who had glanced at

his watch and discovered it was midnight, found to all this a retort

beautifully characteristic of him.

“There’s one little fact to be borne in mind in the presence equally of

the best talk and of the worst.” He looked, in saying this, as if he

meant great things, and I was sure he could only mean once more that

neither of them mattered if a man wasn’t a real gentleman. Perhaps it

was what he did mean; he deprived me however of the exultation of being

right by putting the truth in a slightly different way. “The only thing

that really counts for one’s estimate of a person is his conduct.” He

had his watch still in his palm, and I reproached him with unfair play in

having ascertained beforehand that it was now the hour at which I always

gave in. My pleasantry so far failed to mollify him that he promptly

added that to the rule he had just enunciated there was absolutely no

exception.

“None whatever?”

“None whatever.”

“Trust me then to try to be good at any price!” I laughed as I went with

him to the door. “I declare I will be, if I have to be horrible!”

III

IF that first night was one of the liveliest, or at any rate was the

freshest, of my exaltations, there was another, four years later, that

was one of my great discomposures. Repetition, I well knew by this time,

was the secret of Saltram’s power to alienate, and of course one would

never have seen him at his finest if one hadn’t seen him in his remorses.

They set in mainly at this season and were magnificent, elemental,

orchestral. I was quite aware that one of these atmospheric disturbances

was now due; but none the less, in our arduous attempt to set him on his

feet as a lecturer, it was impossible not to feel that two failures were

a large order, as we said, for a short course of five. This was the

second time, and it was past nine o’clock; the audience, a muster

unprecedented and really encouraging, had fortunately the attitude of

blandness that might have been looked for in persons whom the promise of

(if I’m not mistaken) An Analysis of Primary Ideas had drawn to the

neighbourhood of Upper Baker Street. There was in those days in that

region a petty lecture-hall to be secured on terms as moderate as the

funds left at our disposal by the irrepressible question of the

maintenance of five small Saltrams—I include the mother—and one large

one. By the time the Saltrams, of different sizes, were all maintained

we had pretty well poured out the oil that might have lubricated the

machinery for enabling the most original of men to appear to maintain

them.

It was I, the other time, who had been forced into the breach, standing

up there for an odious lamplit moment to explain to half a dozen thin

benches, where earnest brows were virtuously void of anything so cynical

as a suspicion, that we couldn’t so much as put a finger on Mr. Saltram.

There was nothing to plead but that our scouts had been out from the

early hours and that we were afraid that on one of his walks abroad—he

took one, for meditation, whenever he was to address such a company—some

accident had disabled or delayed him. The meditative walks were a

fiction, for he never, that any one could discover, prepared anything but

a magnificent prospectus; hence his circulars and programmes, of which I

possess an almost complete collection, are the solemn ghosts of

generations never born. I put the case, as it seemed to me, at the best;

but I admit I had been angry, and Kent Mulville was shocked at my want of

public optimism. This time therefore I left the excuses to his more

practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct appeal

from a young lady next whom, in the hall, I found myself sitting. My

position was an accident, but if it had been calculated the reason would

scarce have eluded an observer of the fact that no one else in the room

had an approach to an appearance. Our philosopher’s “tail” was

deplorably limp. This visitor was the only person who looked at her

ease, who had come a little in the spirit of adventure. She seemed to

carry amusement in her handsome young head, and her presence spoke, a

little mystifyingly, of a sudden extension of Saltram’s sphere of

influence. He was doing better than we hoped, and he had chosen such an

occasion, of all occasions, to succumb to heaven knew which of his fond

infirmities. The young lady produced an impression of auburn hair and

black velvet, and had on her other hand a companion of obscurer type,

presumably a waiting-maid. She herself might perhaps have been a foreign

countess, and before she addressed me I had beguiled our sorry interval

by finding in her a vague recall of the opening of some novel of Madame

Sand. It didn’t make her more fathomable to pass in a few minutes from

this to the certitude that she was American; it simply engendered

depressing reflexions as to the possible check to contributions from

Boston. She asked me if, as a person apparently more initiated, I would

recommend further waiting, and I answered that if she considered I was on

my honour I would privately deprecate it. Perhaps she didn’t; at any

rate our talk took a turn that prolonged it till she became aware we were

left almost alone. I presently ascertained she knew Mrs. Saltram, and

this explained in a manner the miracle. The brotherhood of the friends

of the husband was as nothing to the brotherhood, or perhaps I should say

the sisterhood, of the friends of the wife. Like the Kent Mulvilles I

belonged to both fraternities, and even better than they I think I had

sounded the abyss of Mrs. Saltram’s wrongs. She bored me to extinction,

and I knew but too well how she had bored her husband; but there were

those who stood by her, the most efficient of whom were indeed the

handful of poor Saltram’s backers. They did her liberal justice, whereas

her mere patrons and partisans had nothing but hatred for our

philosopher. I’m bound to say it was we, however—we of both camps, as it

were—who had always done most for her.

I thought my young lady looked rich—I scarcely knew why; and I hoped she

had put her hand in her pocket. I soon made her out, however, not at all

a fine fanatic—she was but a generous, irresponsible enquirer. She had

come to England to see her aunt, and it was at her aunt’s she had met the

dreary lady we had all so much on our mind. I saw she’d help to pass the

time when she observed that it was a pity this lady wasn’t intrinsically

more interesting. That was refreshing, for it was an article of faith in

Mrs. Saltram’s circle—at least among those who scorned to know her horrid

husband—that she was attractive on her merits. She was in truth a most

ordinary person, as Saltram himself would have been if he hadn’t been a

prodigy. The question of vulgarity had no application to him, but it was

a measure his wife kept challenging you to apply. I hasten to add that

the consequences of your doing so were no sufficient reason for his

having left her to starve. “He doesn’t seem to have much force of

character,” said my young lady; at which I laughed out so loud that my

departing friends looked back at me over their shoulders as if I were

making a joke of their discomfiture. My joke probably cost Saltram a

subscription or two, but it helped me on with my interlocutress. “She

says he drinks like a fish,” she sociably continued, “and yet she allows

that his mind’s wonderfully clear.” It was amusing to converse with a

pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of Saltram’s mind. I

expected next to hear she had been assured he was awfully clever. I

tried to tell her—I had it almost on my conscience—what was the proper

way to regard him; an effort attended perhaps more than ever on this

occasion with the usual effect of my feeling that I wasn’t after all very

sure of it. She had come to-night out of high curiosity—she had wanted

to learn this proper way for herself. She had read some of his papers

and hadn’t understood them; but it was at home, at her aunt’s, that her

curiosity had been kindled—kindled mainly by his wife’s remarkable

stories of his want of virtue. “I suppose they ought to have kept me

away,” my companion dropped, “and I suppose they’d have done so if I

hadn’t somehow got an idea that he’s fascinating. In fact Mrs. Saltram

herself says he is.”

“So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you’ve seen!”

My young lady raised fine eyebrows. “Do you mean in his bad faith?”

“In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some

quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the

humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us.”

“The humiliation?”

“Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the

purchaser of a ticket.”

She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. “You don’t look humiliated a

bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the

mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see.”

“Oh, you can’t ‘see’ it!” I cried.

“How then do you get at it?”

“You don’t! You mustn’t suppose he’s good-looking,” I added.

“Why his wife says he’s lovely!”

My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out

afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so

characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram’s part, of what was irritating in the

narrowness of that lady’s point of view? “Mrs. Saltram,” I explained,

“undervalues him where he’s strongest, so that, to make up for it

perhaps, she overpraises him where he’s weak. He’s not, assuredly,

superficially attractive; he’s middle-aged, fat, featureless save for his

great eyes.”

“Yes, his great eyes,” said my young lady attentively. She had evidently

heard all about his great eyes—the beaux yeux for which alone we had

really done it all.

“They’re tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But he moves

badly and dresses worse, and altogether he’s anything but smart.”

My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment appealed.

“Do you call him a real gentleman?”

I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it:

George Gravener, years before, that first flushed night, had put me face

to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn’t embarrass me

now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and disposed of it. “A real

gentleman? Emphatically not!”

My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little it

was to Gravener I was now talking. “Do you say that because he’s—what do

you call it in England?—of humble extraction?”

“Not a bit. His father was a country school-master and his mother the

widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it simply

because I know him well.”

“But isn’t it an awful drawback?”

“Awful—quite awful.”

“I mean isn’t it positively fatal?”

“Fatal to what? Not to his magnificent vitality.”

Again she had a meditative moment. “And is his magnificent vitality the

cause of his vices?”

“Your questions are formidable, but I’m glad you put them. I was

thinking of his noble intellect. His vices, as you say, have been much

exaggerated: they consist mainly after all in one comprehensive defect.”

“A want of will?”

“A want of dignity.”

“He doesn’t recognise his obligations?”

“On the contrary, he recognises them with effusion, especially in public:

he smiles and bows and beckons across the street to them. But when they

pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them in the crowd. The

recognition’s purely spiritual—it isn’t in the least social. So he

leaves all his belongings to other people to take care of. He accepts

favours, loans, sacrifices—all with nothing more deterrent than an agony

of shame. Fortunately we’re a little faithful band, and we do what we

can.” I held my tongue about the natural children, engendered, to the

number of three, in the wantonness of his youth. I only remarked that he

did make efforts—often tremendous ones. “But the efforts,” I said,

“never come to much: the only things that come to much are the

abandonments, the surrenders.”

“And how much do they come to?”

“You’re right to put it as if we had a big bill to pay, but, as I’ve told

you before, your questions are rather terrible. They come, these mere

exercises of genius, to a great sum total of poetry, of philosophy, a

mighty mass of speculation, notation, quotation. The genius is there,

you see, to meet the surrender; but there’s no genius to support the

defence.”

“But what is there, after all, at his age, to show?”

“In the way of achievement recognised and reputation established?” I

asked. “To ‘show’ if you will, there isn’t much, since his writing,

mostly, isn’t as fine, isn’t certainly as showy, as his talk. Moreover

two-thirds of his work are merely colossal projects and announcements.

‘Showing’ Frank Saltram is often a poor business,” I went on: “we

endeavoured, you’ll have observed, to show him to-night! However, if he

had lectured he’d have lectured divinely. It would just have been his

talk.”

“And what would his talk just have been?”

I was conscious of some ineffectiveness, as well perhaps as of a little

impatience, as I replied: “The exhibition of a splendid intellect.” My

young lady looked not quite satisfied at this, but as I wasn’t prepared

for another question I hastily pursued: “The sight of a great suspended

swinging crystal—huge lucid lustrous, a block of light—flashing back

every impression of life and every possibility of thought!”

This gave her something to turn over till we had passed out to the dusky

porch of the hall, in front of which the lamps of a quiet brougham were

almost the only thing Saltram’s treachery hadn’t extinguished. I went

with her to the door of her carriage, out of which she leaned a moment

after she had thanked me and taken her seat. Her smile even in the

darkness was pretty. “I do want to see that crystal!”

“You’ve only to come to the next lecture.”

“I go abroad in a day or two with my aunt.”

“Wait over till next week,” I suggested. “It’s quite worth it.”

She became grave. “Not unless he really comes!” At which the brougham

started off, carrying her away too fast, fortunately for my manners, to

allow me to exclaim “Ingratitude!”

IV

MRS. SALTRAM made a great affair of her right to be informed where her

husband had been the second evening he failed to meet his audience. She

came to me to ascertain, but I couldn’t satisfy her, for in spite of my

ingenuity I remained in ignorance. It wasn’t till much later that I

found this had not been the case with Kent Mulville, whose hope for the

best never twirled the thumbs of him more placidly than when he happened

to know the worst. He had known it on the occasion I speak of—that is

immediately after. He was impenetrable then, but ultimately confessed.

What he confessed was more than I shall now venture to make public. It

was of course familiar to me that Saltram was incapable of keeping the

engagements which, after their separation, he had entered into with

regard to his wife, a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite

irreproachable and insufferable person. She often appeared at my

chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed

her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution,

which she handed about for analysis. She had arts of her own of exciting

one’s impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption

that we were kind to her because we liked her. In reality her personal

fall had been a sort of social rise—since I had seen the moment when, in

our little conscientious circle, her desolation almost made her the

fashion. Her voice was grating and her children ugly; moreover she hated

the good Mulvilles, whom I more and more loved. They were the people who

by doing most for her husband had in the long run done most for herself;

and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a

pressure gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability. I’m bound to

say he didn’t criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired

of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary

forms. She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by

dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society.

She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she

doubtless patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me. I dare

say I should have got on with her better if she had had a ray of

imagination—if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard

Saltram’s expressions of his nature in any other manner than as separate

subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his character, pearls strung

on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging

them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he had a

character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the

irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation. One might

doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a general licence for

such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one’s

feeling that there could be none for such a woman.

I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the

disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an

English-French or other phrase-book. She triumphed in what she told me

and she may have triumphed still more in what she withheld. My friend of

the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately come to England; Lady

Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years in consequence of

her marriage with the late Sir Gregory of that name. She had a house in

the Regent’s Park, a Bath-chair and a fernery; and above all she had

sympathy. Mrs. Saltram had made her acquaintance through mutual friends.

This vagueness caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large

an independent circle Mrs. Saltram had at her command. I should have

been glad to know more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I

should know most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have

mysterious means of depriving me of my knowledge. For the present,

moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact gone

abroad accompanied by her niece. The niece, besides being immensely

clever, was an heiress, Mrs. Saltram said; the only daughter and the

light of the eyes of some great American merchant, a man, over there, of

endless indulgences and dollars. She had pretty clothes and pretty

manners, and she had, what was prettier still, the great thing of all.

The great thing of all for Mrs. Saltram was always sympathy, and she

spoke as if during the absence of these ladies she mightn’t know where to

turn for it. A few months later indeed, when they had come back, her

tone perceptibly changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to

it, rather as to persons in her debt for favours received. What had

happened I didn’t know, but I saw it would take only a little more or a

little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of social

countenance—people for whom she had vainly tried to do something. I

confess I saw how it wouldn’t be in a mere week or two that I should rid

myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose very name, when I learnt it,

I found something secretly to like. I should probably neither see her

nor hear of her again: the knight’s widow (he had been mayor of

Clockborough) would pass away and the heiress would return to her

inheritance. I gathered with surprise that she had not communicated to

his wife the story of her attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this

reticence on the easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by

overpressure the spring of the sympathy of which she boasted. The girl

at any rate would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a

husband; besides which she would lack occasion to repeat her experiment.

We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an

accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware

of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an

inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at least,

in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways and means we

were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the

syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand free

hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I laughed at our playbills

even while I stickled for them. It was indeed amusing work to be

scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed about it, so

far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass

for such a sound. He admitted with a candour all his own that he was in

truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles’ drawing-room. “Yes,” he

suggestively allowed, “it’s there, I think, that I’m at my best; quite

late, when it gets toward eleven—and if I’ve not been too much worried.”

We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour

to the superstition of sobriety. On the Saturdays I used to bring my

portmanteau, so as not to have to think of eleven o’clock trains. I had

a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its altars of

cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and

clear lamplight, we might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles

would but charge for admission. Here it was, however, that they

shamelessly broke down; as there’s a flaw in every perfection this was

the inexpugnable refuge of their egotism. They declined to make their

saloon a market, so that Saltram’s golden words continued the sole coin

that rang there. It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a

greater price than such an enchanted hush as surrounded him on his

greatest nights. The most profane, on these occasions, felt a presence;

all minor eloquence grew dumb. Adelaide Mulville, for the pride of her

hospitality, anxiously watched the door or stealthily poked the fire. I

used to call it the music-room, for we had anticipated Bayreuth. The

very gates of the kingdom of light seemed to open and the horizon of

thought to flash with the beauty of a sunrise at sea.

In the consideration of ways and means, the sittings of our little board,

we were always conscious of the creak of Mrs. Saltram’s shoes. She

hovered, she interrupted, she almost presided, the state of affairs being

mostly such as to supply her with every incentive for enquiring what was

to be done next. It was the pressing pursuit of this knowledge that, in

concatenations of omnibuses and usually in very wet weather, led her so

often to my door. She thought us spiritless creatures with editors and

publishers; but she carried matters to no great effect when she

personally pushed into back-shops. She wanted all moneys to be paid to

herself: they were otherwise liable to such strange adventures. They

trickled away into the desert—they were mainly at best, alas, a slender

stream. The editors and the publishers were the last people to take this

remarkable thinker at the valuation that has now pretty well come to be

established. The former were half-distraught between the desire to “cut”

him and the difficulty of finding a crevice for their shears; and when a

volume on this or that portentous subject was proposed to the latter they

suggested alternative titles which, as reported to our friend, brought

into his face the noble blank melancholy that sometimes made it handsome.

The title of an unwritten book didn’t after all much matter, but some

masterpiece of Saltram’s may have died in his bosom of the shudder with

which it was then convulsed. The ideal solution, failing the fee at Kent

Mulville’s door, would have been some system of subscription to projected

treatises with their non-appearance provided for—provided for, I mean, by

the indulgence of subscribers. The author’s real misfortune was that

subscribers were so wretchedly literal. When they tastelessly enquired

why publication hadn’t ensued I was tempted to ask who in the world had

ever been so published. Nature herself had brought him out in voluminous

form, and the money was simply a deposit on borrowing the work.

V

I WAS doubtless often a nuisance to my friends in those years; but there

were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the hat to George

Gravener. I never forgot our little discussion in Ebury Street, and I

think it stuck in my throat to have to treat him to the avowal I had

found so easy to Mss Anvoy. It had cost me nothing to confide to this

charming girl, but it would have cost me much to confide to the friend of

my youth, that the character of the “real gentleman” wasn’t an attribute

of the man I took such pains for. Was this because I had already

generalised to the point of perceiving that women are really the

unfastidious sex? I knew at any rate that Gravener, already quite in

view but still hungry and frugal, had naturally enough more ambition than

charity. He had sharp aims for stray sovereigns, being in view most from

the tall steeple of Clockborough. His immediate ambition was to occupy à

lui seul the field of vision of that smokily-seeing city, and all his

movements and postures were calculated for the favouring angle. The

movement of the hand as to the pocket had thus to alternate gracefully

with the posture of the hand on the heart. He talked to Clockborough in

short only less beguilingly than Frank Saltram talked to his electors;

with the difference to our credit, however, that we had already voted and

that our candidate had no antagonist but himself. He had more than once

been at Wimbledon—it was Mrs. Mulville’s work not mine—and by the time

the claret was served had seen the god descend. He took more pains to

swing his censer than I had expected, but on our way back to town he

forestalled any little triumph I might have been so artless as to express

by the observation that such a man was—a hundred times!—a man to use and

never a man to be used by. I remember that this neat remark humiliated

me almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I

hadn’t often made it myself. The difference was that on Gravener’s part

a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine. He was

able to use people—he had the machinery; and the irony of Saltram’s being

made showy at Clockborough came out to me when he said, as if he had no

memory of our original talk and the idea were quite fresh to him: “I hate

his type, you know, but I’ll be hanged if I don’t put some of those

things in. I can find a place for them: we might even find a place for

the fellow himself.” I myself should have had some fear—not, I need

scarcely say, for the “things” themselves, but for some other things very

near them; in fine for the rest of my eloquence.

Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case so

appropriate as he would have been had the polities of the gods only

coincided more exactly with those of the party. There was a distinct

moment when, without saying anything more definite to me, Gravener

entertained the idea of annexing Mr. Saltram. Such a project was

delusive, for the discovery of analogies between his body of doctrine and

that pressed from headquarters upon Clockborough—the bottling, in a word,

of the air of those lungs for convenient public uncorking in

corn-exchanges—was an experiment for which no one had the leisure. The

only thing would have been to carry him massively about, paid, caged,

clipped; to turn him on for a particular occasion in a particular

channel. Frank Saltram’s channel, however, was essentially not

calculable, and there was no knowing what disastrous floods might have

ensued. For what there would have been to do The Empire, the great

newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new misfortune that there

were delicate situations in which The Empire broke down. In fine there

was an instinctive apprehension that a clever young journalist

commissioned to report on Mr. Saltram might never come back from the

errand. No one knew better than George Gravener that that was a time

when prompt returns counted double. If he therefore found our friend an

exasperating waste of orthodoxy it was because of his being, as he said,

poor Gravener, up in the clouds, not because he was down in the dust.

The man would have been, just as he was, a real enough gentleman if he

could have helped to put in a real gentleman. Gravener’s great objection

to the actual member was that he was not one.

Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with “grounds,” at Clockborough,

which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I learned from Mrs.

Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she had gone down to resume

possession. I could see the faded red livery, the big square shoulders,

the high-walled garden of this decent abode. As the rumble of

dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed his suit, and I

found myself hoping the politics of the late Mayor’s widow wouldn’t be

such as to admonish her to ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so

far as to pray, they would naturally form a bar to any contact. I tried

to focus the many-buttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even

pushed the Bath-chair over somebody’s toes. I was destined to hear, none

the less, through Mrs. Saltram—who, I afterwards learned, was in

correspondence with Lady Coxon’s housekeeper—that Gravener was known to

have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at

Clockborough. On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy

but of experience. The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see him

in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very

justly, to think him good-looking. It would be too much to describe

myself as troubled by this play of surmise; but I occur to remember the

relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an

annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening

to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of

Frank Saltram. There were limits after all, and my mark at last had been

reached.

I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an expression;

but this was a supreme revolt. Certain things cleared up in my mind,

certain values stood out. It was all very well to have an unfortunate

temperament; there was nothing so unfortunate as to have, for practical

purposes, nothing else. I avoided George Gravener at this moment and

reflected that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving

England. I wanted to forget Frank Saltram—that was all. I didn’t want

to do anything in the world to him but that. Indignation had withered on

the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought only

by never thinking of him again. It wasn’t for anything he had done to

me; it was for what he had done to the Mulvilles. Adelaide cried about

it for a week, and her husband, profiting by the example so signally

given him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter,

the drop too much, unanswered. The letter, an incredible one, addressed

by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was

the central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features,

each more painful than whichever other we compared it with. The Pudneys

had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse. Base ingratitude, gross

indecency—one had one’s choice only of such formulas as that the more

they fitted the less they gave one rest. These are dead aches now, and I

am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business.

There are things which if I had had to tell them—well, would have stopped

me off here altogether.

I went abroad for the general election, and if I don’t know how much, on

the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed, him. At a

distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I

discovered what he had done for me. I owed him, oh unmistakeably,

certain noble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky

lamp, and lo it continued to twinkle. But the light it gave me just

showed me how much more I wanted. I was pursued of course by letters

from Mrs. Saltram which I didn’t scruple not to read, though quite aware

her embarrassments couldn’t but be now of the gravest. I sacrificed to

propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my

absence drew to an end, my eye, while I rummaged in my desk for another

paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the

packet. The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to

be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the news was two months old. A

direct question of Mrs. Saltram’s had thus remained unanswered—she had

enquired of me in a postscript what sort of man this aspirant to such a

hand might be. The great other fact about him just then was that he had

been triumphantly returned for Clockborough in the interest of the party

that had swept the country—so that I might easily have referred Mrs.

Saltram to the journals of the day. Yet when I at last wrote her that I

was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing her,

I but remarked in regard to her question that she must really put it to

Miss Anvoy.

VI

I HAD almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences,

on my return, had smartly to be faced. The season, in London, began to

breathe again and to flap its folded wings. Confidence, under the new

Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in a

social body, was a recovery of appetite. People once more fed together,

and it happened that, one Saturday night, at somebody’s house, I fed with

George Gravener. When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he

sat and begged to congratulate him. “On my election?” he asked after a

moment; so that I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that

triumph and to be alluding to the rumour of a victory still more

personal. I dare say I coloured however, for his political success had

momentarily passed out of my mind. What was present to it was that he

was to marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious

of some discomposure—I hadn’t intended to put this before everything. He

himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking

the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing my sense of what

he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his “seat.” We straightened the

matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately seen him

that his spirits might well have been fed from a twofold source. He was

so good as to say that he hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of

Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to town. Lady

Coxon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed

their arrival. I told him I had heard the marriage would be a splendid

one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed and said

“Do you mean for her?” When I had again explained what I meant he went

on: “Oh she’s an American, but you’d scarcely know it; unless, perhaps,”

he added, “by her being used to more money than most girls in England,

even the daughters of rich men. That wouldn’t in the least do for a

fellow like me, you know, if it wasn’t for the great liberality of her

father. He really has been most kind, and everything’s quite

satisfactory.” He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous

fancy to her and that during a recent visit at Coldfield she had nearly

won over Lady Maddock. I gathered from something he dropped later on

that the free-handed gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement,

but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to,

across the water, for other favours. People are simplified alike by

great contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was

Gravener’s directness that begot my own, I seem to recall that in some

turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to

ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt. My

enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, who was the oddest of women, would have

in any contingency to act under her late husband’s will, which was odder

still, saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated with

queer loopholes. There were several dreary people, Coxon cousins, old

maids, to whom she would have more or less to minister. Gravener

laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might

come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected my turning

a lantern on him, he declared quite dryly: “That’s all rot—one’s moved by

other springs!”

A fortnight later, at Lady Coxon’s own house, I understood well enough

the springs one was moved by. Gravener had spoken of me there as an old

friend, and I received a gracious invitation to dine. The Knight’s widow

was again indisposed—she had succumbed at the eleventh hour; so that I

found Miss Anvoy bravely playing hostess without even Gravener’s help,

since, to make matters worse, he had just sent up word that the House,

the insatiable House, with which he supposed he had contracted for easier

terms, positively declined to release him. I was struck with the

courage, the grace and gaiety of the young lady left thus to handle the

fauna and flora of the Regent’s Park. I did what I could to help her to

classify them, after I had recovered from the confusion of seeing her

slightly disconcerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her

intended the gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank

Saltram. I had at this moment my first glimpse of the fact that she was

a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to

judge of my sense of the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden,

when I heard the servant announce Mrs. Saltram. From what immediately

passed between the two ladies I gathered that the latter had been sent

for post-haste to fill the gap created by the absence of the mistress of

the house. “Good!” I remember crying, “she’ll be put by me;” and my

apprehension was promptly justified. Mrs. Saltram taken in to dinner,

and taken in as a consequence of an appeal to her amiability, was Mrs.

Saltram with a vengeance. I asked myself what Miss Anvoy meant by doing

such things, but the only answer I arrived at was that Gravener was

verily fortunate. She hadn’t happened to tell him of her visit to Upper

Baker Street, but she’d certainly tell him to-morrow; not indeed that

this would make him like any better her having had the innocence to

invite such a person as Mrs. Saltram on such an occasion. It could only

strike me that I had never seen a young woman put such ignorance into her

cleverness, such freedom into her modesty; this, I think, was when, after

dinner, she said to me frankly, with almost jubilant mirth: “Oh you don’t

admire Mrs. Saltram?” Why should I? This was truly a young person

without guile. I had briefly to consider before I could reply that my

objection to the lady named was the objection often uttered about people

met at the social board—I knew all her stories. Then as Miss Anvoy

remained momentarily vague I added: “Those about her husband.”

“Oh yes, but there are some new ones.”

“None for me. Ah novelty would be pleasant!”

“Doesn’t it appear that of late he has been particularly horrid?”

“His fluctuations don’t matter”, I returned, “for at night all cats are

grey. You saw the shade of this one the night we waited for him

together. What will you have? He has no dignity.”

Miss Anvoy, who had been introducing with her American distinctness,

looked encouragingly round at some of the combinations she had risked.

“It’s too bad I can’t see him.”

“You mean Gravener won’t let you?”

“I haven’t asked him. He lets me do everything.”

“But you know he knows him and wonders what some of us see in him.”

“We haven’t happened to talk of him,” the girl said.

“Get him to take you some day out to see the Mulvilles.”

“I thought Mr. Saltram had thrown the Mulvilles over.”

“Utterly. But that won’t prevent his being planted there again, to bloom

like a rose, within a month or two.”

Miss Anvoy thought a moment. Then, “I should like to see them,” she said

with her fostering smile.

“They’re tremendously worth it. You mustn’t miss them.”

“I’ll make George take me,” she went on as Mrs. Saltram came up to

interrupt us. She sniffed at this unfortunate as kindly as she had

smiled at me and, addressing the question to her, continued: “But the

chance of a lecture—one of the wonderful lectures? Isn’t there another

course announced?”

“Another? There are about thirty!” I exclaimed, turning away and feeling

Mrs. Saltram’s little eyes in my back. A few days after this I heard

that Gravener’s marriage was near at hand—was settled for Whitsuntide;

but as no invitation had reached me I had my doubts, and there presently

came to me in fact the report of a postponement. Something was the

matter; what was the matter was supposed to be that Lady Coxon was now

critically ill. I had called on her after my dinner in the Regent’s

Park, but I had neither seen her nor seen Miss Anvoy. I forget to-day

the exact order in which, at this period, sundry incidents occurred and

the particular stage at which it suddenly struck me, making me catch my

breath a little, that the progression, the acceleration, was for all the

world that of fine drama. This was probably rather late in the day, and

the exact order doesn’t signify. What had already occurred was some

accident determining a more patient wait. George Gravener, whom I met

again, in fact told me as much, but without signs of perturbation. Lady

Coxon had to be constantly attended to, and there were other good reasons

as well. Lady Coxon had to be so constantly attended to that on the

occasion of a second attempt in the Regent’s Park I equally failed to

obtain a sight of her niece. I judged it discreet in all the conditions

not to make a third; but this didn’t matter, for it was through Adelaide

Mulville that the side-wind of the comedy, though I was at first

unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because

Saltram was there, and I went at others because he wasn’t. The Pudneys,

who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a

horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the

smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed

heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the

crackle of the new chintz) and the difference only made his smirches and

bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn’t

barefoot in the mire he was sure to be unconventionally shod. These were

the things Adelaide and I, who were old enough friends to stare at each

other in silence, talked about when we didn’t speak. When we spoke it

was only about the brilliant girl George Gravener was to marry and whom

he had brought out the other Sunday. I could see that this presentation

had been happy, for Mrs. Mulville commemorated it after her sole fashion

of showing confidence in a new relation. “She likes me—she likes me”:

her native humility exulted in that measure of success. We all knew for

ourselves how she liked those who liked her, and as regards Ruth Anvoy

she was more easily won over than Lady Maddock.

VII

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 the dear woman’s own. This was his position and I

dare say 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

had begun 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 conspicuous 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 his companion paid her call—it wasn’t to the further

humiliation of any one concerned that she presently came out for him in

person, not even to show either of them what a fool she was that she drew

him in to be introduced to the bright young American. Her account of the

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 with her a little, 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 had a pause. “Immensely.”

We went no further; 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 shan’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, that of the opposed, importances of virtue

and brains. She replied that this was surely a subject on which one took

everything for granted; whereupon I 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 relative importance (relative to virtue) of

other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift—a thing handed to us

in a parcel on our first birthday; and I declared that this very enquiry

proved to me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would

have help however, the same help 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 returned: “Why my idea has been to help him!”

She had helped 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, though 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 suffered

reverses, lost so much money that it was really vexatious as showing how

much he had had. It was Adelaide who told me 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 cursed the House of Commons: I was so much interested. Of

course he’d 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 virtual promise. Mrs. Mulville let

me know what was already said: she was charming, this American girl, but

really these American fathers—! 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—he was to keep it

exclusively material. “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 enquired. 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 had to remount the stream. “It was everything one could

wish.”

Something in her tone made me laugh. “Do you mean she gave him—a dole?”

“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,” said Adelaide reassuringly, “I

take care of it for him!” The dear practical soul thought my agitation,

for I confess I was agitated, referred to the employment of the money.

Her disclosure made me for a moment muse violently, and I dare say that

during that moment I wondered if anything else in the world makes people

so gross 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 passages. “I assure you, my dear friend, he was in one of his happy

hours.”

But I wasn’t thinking of that. “Truly indeed these Americans!” I said.

“With her father in the very act, as it were, of swindling her

betrothed!”

Mrs. Mulville stared. “Oh I suppose Mr. Anvoy has scarcely gone

bankrupt—or whatever he has done—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 what you’ve enjoyed.” After a moment I added: “Had he

peradventure caught a glimpse of the money in the table-drawer?”

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 was apropos of her engagement, which I had told him about:

the idea of marriage, the philosophy, the poetry, the sublimity of it.”

It was impossible wholly to restrain one’s mirth 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?—and that he has never,

but never, had a deflexion?” 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 asking 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

wasn’t disappointed,” Adelaide pursued.

I turned it over. “Did he wear his shawl?”

“His shawl?” She hadn’t even noticed.

“I mean yours.”

“He looked very nice, and you know he’s really clean. Miss Anvoy used

such a remarkable expression—she said his mind’s 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 thought again. “Monstrously!”

VIII

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 some relations who lived near Durham.

The current of travel back to London wasn’t 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 things

weren’t well with him, but I asked no question till something dropped by

himself made, as it had made on another occasion, an absence of curiosity

invidious. 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 horrid straits—has lost no end of money.”

I waited, after expressing due concern, but I eventually said: “I hope

that raises no objection 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 reverse. Lady Coxon’s

worse again, awfully upset by the news from America, and she sends me

word that she _must_ have Ruth. How can I supply her with Ruth? I

haven’t got Ruth myself!”

“Surely you haven’t lost her?” I returned.

“She’s everything to her wretched father. She writes me 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—she’s angry at so much of her money

going to them. Besides, she’s hopelessly mad,” said Gravener very

frankly.

I don’t remember whether it was this, or what it was, that made me ask if

she hadn’t such an appreciation of Mrs. Saltram as might render that

active person of some use.

He gave me a cold glance, wanting to know 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’d 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 let me see 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 felt sure that but for this I should have had

the secret. Then the intruder, for some reason, spared us his company;

we started afresh, and my hope of a disclosure returned. My companion

held his tongue, however, and I pretended to go to sleep; in fact I

really dozed for discouragement. When I reopened my eyes he was looking

at me with an injured air. He tossed away with some vivacity the remnant

of a cigarette and then said: “If you’re not too sleepy I want to put you

a case.” I answered that I’d make every effort to attend, and welcomed

the note of interest when he went on: “As I told you a while ago, Lady

Coxon, poor dear, is demented.” His tone had much behind it—was full of

promise. I asked if her ladyship’s misfortune were a trait of her malady

or only of her character, and he pronounced it a product of both. The

case he wanted to put to me was a matter on which it concerned him to

have the impression—the judgement, he might also say—of another person.

“I mean of the average intelligent man, 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 decide between you? I decide in advance for Miss

Anvoy.”

“In advance—that’s quite right. That’s how I decided when I proposed to

her. But my story will interest you only so far as your mind isn’t 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 a moment.

“I give you Lady Coxon’s phrase. She has it on the brain.”

“She wishes to endow—?”

“Some earnest and ‘loyal’ seeker,” Gravener said. “It was a sketchy

design 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’s a dangerous thing, and a good citizen who happens to have been

an ass is worse for a community than bad sewerage. 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 loyal seeker?”

“The flower that blushes unseen for want of such a pecuniary independence

as may aid the light that’s in it to shine upon the human race. The

individual, 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 piece of solemn twaddle—which can’t fail to be attended

with consequences certainly grotesque and possibly immoral. To begin

with, fancy 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 noted.

“I’m not competent—I hate the thing. Besides, she hasn’t,” my friend

went on. “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 a ‘Werden,’

as anything but an original sign of grace, were conceivable; but it’s

precisely what makes her cling to the notion of the ‘Fund’—cling to it 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?” Gravener 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 intention has come very near lapsing. His

idea, to do him justice, was that it _should_ lapse if exactly the right

person, the perfect mixture of genius and chill penury, should fail to

turn up. Ah the poor dear woman’s very particular—she says there must be

no mistake.”

I found all this quite thrilling—I took it in with avidity. “And 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. She has a grand discretion. The proof is that

three months ago she offered to make the proceeds 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 some intensity.

My tone couldn’t have been harsh, but he coloured a little and there was

a queer light in his eye. “My dear fellow, if I ‘blamed’ the young lady

I’m engaged to I shouldn’t immediately say it even to so old a friend as

you.” I saw that some deep discomfort, some restless desire to be sided

with, reassuringly, approvingly mirrored, 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.” Yet 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 on 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 enquired 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 irreconcilable forms 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 your predicament will disappear in the very fact that the

philosopher _is_ undiscoverable.”

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 Adelaide’s anecdote of Miss Anvoy and the thirty pounds.

IX

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; but afterwards it appeared

more probable 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

simple reason of my perceiving more completely that, for evil as well as

for good, he said nothing to Gravener’s imagination. That honest man

didn’t fear him—he was too much disgusted with him. No more did 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 we should hear no

more of these nuptials, in which, as obscurely unnatural, I now saw I had

never _too_ disconcertedly believed. 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 afffinity, exquisite doubtless, yet

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 our young lady

in the house. A passion that had brought her back across the wintry

ocean was as much of a passion as was needed. 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 marks of 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 commented. “Wouldn’t

it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?”

“Hasn’t the House just met?” Adelaide replied. “And for Mr. Gravener the

House—!” Then she added: “I gather that her having come is exactly a

sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it were quite all right a

self-respecting girl like 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 she’ll have had to return to _make_ it so?”

“No, I mean that she must have come out for some reason independent of

it.” Adelaide could only surmise, however, 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 Regent’s Park, and Miss Anvoy

was in dreary lodgings. George Gravener had been with her when Adelaide

called, but 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 had left them together, and at the end of an hour,

on the Saturday afternoon, the party of three had driven 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 she was disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her

use of this last word to question her further.

“Do you mean you’re disappointed because you judge Miss Anvoy to be?”

“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 to-night,” I opined after a moment. Then I

pursued: “What particular importance do you attach to the idea of her

being impressed?”

Adelaide turned her mild pale eyes on me as for rebuke of my levity.

“Why the importance of her being as happy as _we_ are!”

I’m afraid that at this my levity grew. “Oh that’s a happiness almost

too great to wish a person!” I saw she hadn’t 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 failed of

the company of Saltram, who had caused it to be reported that he was

indisposed 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 that in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of

expressing. If a fine little American enquirer hadn’t 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 get 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 wisdom with us

in this connexion 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 face that told as few tales as I had seen it succeed in telling on

the evening I waited in the lecture-room with Miss Anvoy. I said to

myself that our friend had gone out, but it was a comfort 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 which we 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’ve 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, even in thus roughly

evoking the occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness.

However, I shall perhaps be as clear as is absolutely needful if I remark

that our young lady 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

stirred no step. 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, while that other night 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 appeared to me

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 forecast. 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 wasn’t I who had

launched her and it wasn’t 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 for this; 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 uneasiness 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.

X

POOR Adelaide’s silence was fully explained later—practically explained

when in June, returning to London, I was honoured by this admirable woman

with an early visit. As soon as she arrived I guessed everything, and as

soon as she told me that darling Ruth had been in her house nearly a

month I had my question ready. “What in the name of maidenly modesty is

she staying in England for?”

“Because she loves me so!” cried Adelaide gaily. But she hadn’t come to

see me only to tell me Miss Anvoy loved her: that was quite sufficiently

established, and what was much more to the point was that Mr. Gravener

had now raised an objection to it. He had protested at least against her

being at Wimbledon, where in the innocence of his heart he had originally

brought her himself; he called on 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 do?” I asked.

Adelaide had a pause. “She says you know.”

Then on my also hesitating she added: “A condition he makes.”

“The Coxon Fund?” I panted.

“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.” To which my friend added: “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 one’s self.”

“I’m sure _you_ needn’t!” and Mrs. Mulville tossed her head.

“He isn’t good enough!” I went on; to which she opposed a sound almost as

contentious as my own 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. _He_ had influenced her, if I would, as he did every one

who had a soul: that word, as we knew, even expressed feebly 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 to _have_ a 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 not _his_ own; 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,” I permitted myself to observe, “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 technical weakness that constitutes the force of the moral

obligation.”

“Are you repeating _her_ words?” I enquired. I forget 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 persons 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

sequence. 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 of 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 spoke of your knowing about the idea of the Endowment.”

I turned this over. “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 I presently

returned: “I think I’ll sail to-morrow for Australia.”

“Well then—sail!” said Mrs. Mulville, getting up.

But I frivolously, continued. “On Thursday at five, we said?” The

appointment was made definite and I enquired how, all this time, the

unconscious candidate had carried himself.

“In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has positively

been a dear. And then, as to what we revere him for, in the most

wonderful form. His very highest—pure celestial light. You _won’t_ do

him an ill turn?” Adelaide pleaded at the door.

“What danger can equal for him the danger to which he’s exposed from

himself?” I asked. “Look out sharp, if he has lately been too prim.

He’ll presently take a day off, 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

bigger 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 for the joy of her difficulty, into

the priggish old 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 soon enough 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 so much in the house with him without discovering

that he wasn’t a man of monumental bronze. He was like a jelly minus its

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 wasn’t

necessarily prohibitive, wasn’t 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 one’s self. 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 dreadful kept 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 _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 that there 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 appeal 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’ve 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 eyes 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 aberration of

sensibility, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn’t interpret

otherwise the sudden flash 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 flush passed away in a smile

of exquisite good nature. “Oh you see one forgets so wonderfully how one

dislikes him!” she said; 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 fine

pity 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 lift _he_ had

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.

This 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 for _his_ alienation, 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 wasn’t, like her, I was

to see, too proud to show me why he was disappointed.

XI

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. How

_could_ I satisfy her? I asked myself—how could I tell her how much had

been kept back? I didn’t even know 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 wasn’t 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

wouldn’t be a trifle that the first of these worthies shouldn’t 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 solicitude 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-coloured Common

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 devoted

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 ear: “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—and which,

precisely, 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 copious as faith; he was never so fine as on a shy return, and

even better at forgiving than at being forgiven. I dare say 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, in whatever situation, 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 his wife had called. 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 hadn’t been posted they had wasted a penny on me. I had seen

their horrid missives to the Mulvilles, but hadn’t 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’ve 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

Pudneys, across 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 weren’t contradicted they’d

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 their allegations had gone as yet only as far as

their courage, 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 his

blow; 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 Mrs. 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’s 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 hung fire. “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 of Sir 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 to you to be delivered?”

Mrs. Saltram’s embarrassment increased; 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 concern _her_?” 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.” 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 in one of those penny envelopes. My emotion, and I

fear I must add my confusion, quickly deepened; 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 take _my_ view 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’ll

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, capable of grabbing it

to 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 pledge.

XII

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 surely in that my pulses even yet

vibrated to the pleasure with which, the night before, I had rallied to

the rare analyst, the great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. 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 suppose 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

hand 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 hasn’t 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 I _was_ so 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 sweet young friend—a state of things but half satisfactory to her

so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage

itself from the merely nebulous state. 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 hasn’t 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 enquiry with

the talk we had had in the railway-carriage, and his promptitude showed

that the ashes of his eagerness weren’t yet cold. I told him there was

something I felt I ought in candour to let him know—I recognised the

obligation his friendly confidence had laid on me.

“You mean Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so herself,” he

said.

“It wasn’t to tell you so that I wanted 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

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 cried.

“Well I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was.”

“I believe she did, but such a thing’s measured by the effect. She’s not

‘discouraged,’” he said.

“That’s her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was 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’d like to see that scoundrel publicly

glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary pension?”

I braced myself. “Taking one form of public recognition with another it

seems to me on the whole I should be able to 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’ve some evidence that perhaps

would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Mss 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 that I’ve been requested to deliver to her.”

“And you don’t mean to?”

“There’s only one consideration that would make me,” I said.

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 wondered how to put the thing. “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 this is the case by Mrs. Saltram.”

“My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end,” poor Gravener

stammered.

Again for an instant I thought. “The offer I propose to make you gives

me the right to address 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’ll again become prospective husband and wife

if the obstacle in your path be removed?”

“Removed?” he anxiously repeated.

“If I send Miss Anvoy the letter I speak of she may give up her idea.”

“Then for God’s sake send it!”

“I’ll do so if you’re ready to assure me that her sacrifice would now

presumably bring about your marriage.”

“I’d marry her the next day!” my visitor cried.

“Yes, but would she marry _you_? What I ask of you of course is nothing

less than your word of honour as to your conviction of this. If you give

it me,” I said, “I’ll engage to hand her the letter before night.”

Gravener took up his hat; turning it mechanically round he stood looking

a moment hard at its unruffled perfection. Then very angrily honestly

and gallantly, “Hand it to the devil!” he broke out; with which he

clapped the hat on his head and left me.

“Will you read it or not?” I said to Ruth Anvoy, at Wimbledon, when I had

told her the story of Mrs. Saltram’s visit.

She debated for a time probably of the briefest, but long enough to make

me nervous. “Have you brought it with you?”

“No indeed. It’s at home, locked up.”

There was another great silence, and then she said “Go back and destroy

it.”

I went back, but I didn’t destroy it till after Saltram’s death, when I

burnt it unread. The Pudneys approached her again pressingly, but,

prompt as they were, The Coxon Fund had already become an operative

benefit and a general amaze: Mr. Saltram, while we gathered about, as it

were, to watch the manna descend, had begun to draw the magnificent

income. He drew it as he had always drawn everything, with a grand

abstracted gesture. Its magnificence, alas, as all the world now knows,

quite quenched him; it was the beginning of his decline. It was also

naturally a new grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as

soon as he was blighted, and who at this hour accuses us of having bribed

him, on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious

office, to become, as she says, like everybody else. The very day he

found himself able to publish he wholly ceased to produce. This deprived

us, as may easily be imagined, of much of our occupation, and especially

deprived the Mulvilles, whose want of self-support I never measured till

they lost their great inmate. They’ve no one to live on now. Adelaide’s

most frequent reference to their destitution is embodied in the remark

that dear far-away Ruth’s intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent

are even yet looking for another prop, but no one presents a true sphere

of usefulness. They complain that people are self-sufficing. With

Saltram the fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the

grander, the elder style. They’ve got their carriage back, but what’s an

empty carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer

before; even including George Gravener, who by the deaths of his brother

and his nephew has lately become Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune

clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper

House, and hasn’t yet had high office. But what are these accidents,

which I should perhaps apologise for mentioning, in the light of the

great eventual boon promised the patient by the rate at which The Coxon

Fund must be rolling up?