The Project Gutenberg EBook of Embarrassments, by Henry James

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Title: Embarrassments

Author: Henry James

Release Date: June 25, 2007 [EBook #21932]
Last Updated: November 8, 2017

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EMBARRASSMENTS ***




Produced by David Widger





EMBARRASSMENTS

By Henry James

1896



Contents

The Figure in the Carpet

Glasses

The Next Time

The Way it Came





THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET




I

I had done a few things and earned a few pence--I had perhaps even
had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the
patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a fidgety
habit, for it’s none of the longest yet) I count my real start from
the evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came in to ask me a
service. He had done more things than I, and earned more pence, though
there were chances for cleverness I thought he sometimes missed. I could
only however that evening declare to him that he never missed one for
kindness. There was almost rapture in hearing it proposed to me to
prepare for _The Middle_, the organ of our lucubrations, so called
from the position in the week of its day of appearance, an article for
which he had made himself responsible and of which, tied up with a
stout string, he laid on my table the subject. I pounced upon my
opportunity--that is on the first volume of it--and paid scant attention
to my friend’s explanation of his appeal. What explanation could be more
to the point than my obvious fitness for the task? I had written on Hugh
Vereker, but never a word in _The Middle_, where my dealings were mainly
with the ladies and the minor poets. This was his new novel, an advance
copy, and whatever much or little it should do for his reputation I
was clear on the spot as to what it should do for mine. Moreover, if I
always read him as soon as I could get hold of him, I had a particular
reason for wishing to read him now: I had accepted an invitation to
Bridges for the following Sunday, and it had been mentioned in Lady
Jane’s note that Mr. Vereker was to be there. I was young enough to have
an emotion about meeting a man of his renown, and innocent enough to
believe the occasion would demand the display of an acquaintance with
his “last.”

Corvick, who had promised a review of it, had not even had time to
read it; he had gone to pieces in consequence of news requiring--as on
precipitate reflection he judged--that he should catch the night-mail to
Paris. He had had a telegram from Gwendolen Erme in answer to his letter
offering to fly to her aid. I knew already about Gwendolen Erme; I had
never seen her, but I had my ideas, which were mainly to the effect that
Corvick would marry her if her mother would only die. That lady seemed
now in a fair way to oblige him; after some dreadful mistake about some
climate or some waters, she had suddenly collapsed on the return from
abroad. Her daughter, unsupported and alarmed, desiring to make a
rush for home but hesitating at the risk, had accepted our friend’s
assistance, and it was my secret belief that at the sight of him Mrs.
Erme would pull round. His own belief was scarcely to be called
secret; it discernibly at any rate differed from mine. He had showed me
Gwendolen’s photograph with the remark that she wasn’t pretty but was
awfully interesting; she had published at the age of nineteen a novel
in three volumes, “Deep Down,” about which, in _The Middle_, he had been
really splendid. He appreciated my present eagerness and undertook that
the periodical in question should do no less; then at the last, with
his hand on the door, he said to me: “Of course you’ll be all right,
you know.” Seeing I was a trifle vague he added: “I mean you won’t be
silly.”

“Silly--about Vereker! Why, what do I ever find him but awfully clever?”

“Well, what’s that but silly? What on earth does ‘awfully clever’
mean? For God’s sake try to get _at_ him. Don’t let him suffer by our
arrangement. Speak of him, you know, if you can, as should have spoken
of him.”

I wondered an instant. “You mean as far and away the biggest of the
lot--that sort of thing?”

Corvick almost groaned. “Oh, you know, I don’t put them back to back
that way; it’s the infancy of art! But he gives me a pleasure so rare;
the sense of “--he mused a little--“something or other.”

I wondered again. “The sense, pray, of what?”

“My dear man, that’s just what I want _you_ to say!”

Even before Corvick had banged the door I had begun, book in hand, to
prepare myself to say it. I sat up with Vereker half the night; Corvick
couldn’t have done more than that. He was awfully clever--I stuck to
that, but he wasn’t a bit the biggest of the lot. I didn’t allude to the
lot, however; I flattered myself that I emerged on this occasion from
the infancy of art. “It’s all right,” they declared vividly at the
office; and when the number appeared I felt there was a basis on which
I could meet the great man; It gave me confidence for a day or two, and
then that confidence dropped. I had fancied him reading it with relish,
but if Corvick was not satisfied how could Vereker himself be? I
reflected indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even
than the appetite of the scribe. Corvick at all events wrote me from
Paris a little ill-humouredly. Mrs. Erme was pulling round, and I hadn’t
at all said what Vereker gave him the sense of.




II

The effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more
profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void
of angles that I blushed for the poverty of imagination involved in my
small precautions. If he was in spirits it was not because he had read
my review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn’t read
it, though _The Middle_ had been out three days and bloomed, I assured
myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals which gave one of the ormolu
tables the air of a stand at a station. The impression he made on me
personally was such that I wished him to read it, and I corrected to
this end with a surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless
conspicuity of the sheet. I am afraid I even watched the result of my
manouvre, but up to luncheon I watched in vain.

When afterwards, in the course of our gregarious walk, I found myself
for half an hour, not perhaps without another manoeuvre, at the great
man’s side, the result of his affability was a still livelier desire
that he should not remain in ignorance of the peculiar justice I had
done him. It was not that he seemed to thirst for justice; on the
contrary I had not yet caught in his talk the faintest grunt of a
grudge--a note for which my young experience had already given me an
ear. Of late he had had more recognition, and it was pleasant, as we
used to say in _The Middle_, to see that it drew him out. He wasn’t of
course popular, but I judged one of the sources of his good humour to be
precisely that his success was independent of that. He had none the less
become in a manner the fashion; the critics at least had put on a spurt
and caught up with him. We had found out at last how clever he was, and
he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly
tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how much of that
unveiling was my act; and there was a moment when I probably should have
done so had not one of the ladies of our party, snatching a place at
his other elbow, just then appealed to him in a spirit comparatively
selfish. It was very discouraging: I almost felt the liberty had been
taken with myself.

I had had on my tongue’s end, for my own part, a phrase or two about
the right word at the right time; but later on I was glad not to have
spoken, for when on our return we clustered at tea I perceived Lady
Jane, who had not been out with us, brandishing _The Middle_ with her
longest arm. She had taken it up at her leisure; she was delighted with
what she had found, and I saw that, as a mistake in a man may often be a
felicity in a woman, she would practically do for me what I hadn’t
been able to do for myself. “Some sweet little truths that needed to be
spoken,” I heard her declare, thrusting the paper at rather a bewildered
couple by the fireplace. She grabbed it away from them again on the
reappearance of Hugh Vereker, who after our walk had been upstairs to
change something. “I know you don’t in general look at this kind of
thing, but it’s an occasion really for doing so. You _haven’t_ seen it?
Then you must. The man has actually got _at_ you, at what _I_ always
feel, you know.” Lady Jane threw into her eyes a look evidently intended
to give an idea of what she always felt; but she added that she couldn’t
have expressed it. The man in the paper expressed it in a striking
manner. “Just see there, and there, where I’ve dashed it, how he brings
it out.” She had literally marked for him the brightest patches of my
prose, and if I was a little amused Vereker himself may well have been.
He showed how much he was when before us all Lady Jane wanted to read
something aloud. I liked at any rate the way he defeated her purpose
by jerking the paper affectionately out of her clutch. He would take it
upstairs with him, would look at it on going to dress. He did this half
an hour later--I saw it in his hand when he repaired to his room. That
was the moment at which, thinking to give her pleasure, I mentioned to
Lady Jane that I was the author of the review. I did give her pleasure,
I judged, but perhaps not quite so much as I had expected. If the author
was “only me” the thing didn’t seem quite so remarkable. Hadn’t I had
the effect rather of diminishing the lustre of the article than of
adding to my own? Her ladyship was subject to the most extraordinary
drops. It didn’t matter; the only effect I cared about was the one it
would have on Vereker up there by his bedroom fire.

At dinner I watched for the signs of this impression, tried to fancy
there was some happier light in his eyes; but to my disappointment
Lady Jane gave me no chance to make sure. I had hoped she would call
triumphantly down the table, publicly demand if she hadn’t been right.
The party was large--there were people from outside as well, but I had
never seen a table long enough to deprive Lady Jane of a triumph. I was
just reflecting in truth that this interminable board would deprive
_me_ of one, when the guest next me, dear woman--she was Miss Poyle, the
vicar’s sister, a robust, unmodulated person--had the happy inspiration
and the unusual courage to address herself across it to Vereker, who
was opposite, but not directly, so that when he replied they were both
leaning forward. She inquired, artless body, what he thought of Lady
Jane’s “panegyric,” which she had read--not connecting it however with
her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I
heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, with his mouth full of
bread: “Oh, it’s all right--it’s the usual twaddle!”

I had caught Vereker’s glance as he spoke, but Miss Poyle’s surprise was
a fortunate cover for my own. “You mean he doesn’t do you justice?” said
the excellent woman.

Vereker laughed out, and I was happy to be able to do the same. “It’s a
charming article,” he tossed us.

Miss Poyle thrust her chin half across the cloth.

“Oh you’re so deep!” she drove home.

“As deep as the ocean! All I pretend is, the author doesn’t see--”

A dish was at this point passed over his shoulder, and we had to wait
while he helped himself.

“Doesn’t see what?” my neighbour continued.

“Doesn’t see anything.”

“Dear me--how very stupid!”

“Not a bit,” Vereker laughed again. “Nobody does.”

The lady on his further side appealed to him, and Miss Poyle sank back
to me. “Nobody sees anything!” she cheerfully announced; to which I
replied that I had often thought so too, but had somehow taken the
thought for a proof on my own part of a tremendous eye. I didn’t tell
her the article was mine; and I observed that Lady Jane, occupied at the
end of the table, had not caught Vereker’s words.

I rather avoided him after dinner, for I confess he struck me as cruelly
conceited, and the revelation was a pain. “The usual twaddle”--my acute
little study! That one’s admiration should have had a reserve or two
could gall him to that point? I had thought him placid, and he was
placid enough; such a surface was the hard, polished glass that encased
the bauble of his vanity. I was really ruffled, the only comfort was
that if nobody saw anything George Corvick was quite as much out of
it as I. This comfort however was not sufficient, after the ladies had
dispersed, to carry me in the proper manner--I mean in a spotted
jacket and humming an air--into the smoking-room. I took my way in some
dejection to bed; but in the passage I encountered Mr. Vereker, who had
been up once more to change, coming out of his room. _He_ was humming
an air and had on a spotted jacket, and as soon as he saw me his gaiety
gave a start.

“My dear young man,” he exclaimed, “I’m so glad to lay hands on you! I’m
afraid I most unwittingly wounded you by those words of mine at dinner
to Miss Poyle. I learned but half an hour ago from Lady Jane that you
wrote the little notice in _The Middle_.”

I protested that no bones were broken; but he moved with me to my own
door, his hand on my shoulder, kindly feeling for a fracture; and on
hearing that I had come up to bed he asked leave to cross my threshold
and just tell me in three words what his qualification of my remarks had
represented. It was plain he really feared I was hurt, and the sense of
his solicitude suddenly made all the difference to me. My cheap review
fluttered off into space, and the best things I had said in it became
flat enough beside the brilliancy of his being there. I can see him
there still, on my rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his
fine, clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth. I
don’t know what he had at first meant to say, but I think the sight of
my relief touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from
far within. It was so these words presently conveyed to me something
that, as I afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any one. I have
always done justice to the generous impulse that made him speak; it was
simply compunction for a snub unconsciously administered to a man of
letters in a position inferior to his own, a man of letters moreover in
the very act of praising him. To make the thing right he talked to me
exactly as an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The
hour, the place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn’t
have done anything more exquisitely successful.




III.

“I don’t quite know how to explain it to you,” he said, “but it was the
very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of intelligence, it
was just your exceptional sharpness that produced the feeling--a very
old story with me, I beg you to believe--under the momentary influence
of which I used in speaking to that good lady the words you so naturally
resent. I don’t read the things in the newspapers unless they’re thrust
upon me as that one was--it’s always one’s best friend that does it!
But I used to read them sometimes--ten years ago. I daresay they were
in general rather stupider then; at any rate it always seemed to me that
they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when
they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. Whenever
since I’ve happened to have a glimpse of them they were still blazing
away--still missing it, I mean, deliciously. _You_ miss it, my dear
fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of your being awfully clever
and your article’s being awfully nice doesn’t make a hair’s breadth
of difference. It’s quite with you rising young men,” Vereker laughed,
“that I feel most what a failure I am!”

I listened with intense interest; it grew intenser as he talked. “_You_
a failure--heavens! What then may your ‘little point’ happen to be?”

“Have I got to _tell_ you, after all these years and labours?” There was
something in the friendly reproach of this--jocosely exaggerated--that
made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth, blush to the roots of my
hair. I’m as much in the dark as ever, though I’ve grown used in a sense
to my obtuseness; at that moment, however, Vereker’s happy accent made
me appear to myself, and probably to him, a rare donkey. I was on the
point of exclaiming, “Ah, yes, don’t tell me: for my honour, for that of
the craft, don’t!” when he went on in a manner that showed he had read
my thought and had his own idea of the probability of our some day
redeeming ourselves. “By my little point I mean--what shall I call
it?--the particular thing I’ve written my books most _for_. Isn’t there
for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most
makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which
he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of
the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely?
Well, it’s _that!_”

I considered a moment. I was fascinated--easily, you’ll say; but I
wasn’t going after all to be put off my guard. “Your description’s
certainly beautiful, but it doesn’t make what you describe very
distinct.”

“I promise you it would be distinct if it should dawn on you at all.”
 I saw that the charm of our topic overflowed for my companion into an
emotion as lively as my own. “At any rate,” he went on, “I can speak for
myself: there’s an idea in my work without which I wouldn’t have given a
straw for the whole job. It’s the finest, fullest intention of the lot,
and the application of it has been, I think, a triumph of patience,
of ingenuity. I ought to leave that to somebody else to say; but that
nobody does say it is precisely what we’re talking about. It stretches,
this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else,
comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the
texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated
a complete representation of it. So it’s naturally the thing for the
critic to look for. It strikes me,” my visitor added, smiling, “even as
the thing for the critic to find.”

This seemed a responsibility indeed. “You call it a little trick?”

“That’s only my little modesty. It’s really an exquisite scheme.”

“And you hold that you’ve carried the scheme out?”

“The way I’ve carried it out is the thing in life I think a bit well of
myself for.”

I was silent a moment. “Don’t you think you ought--just a trifle--to
assist the critic?”

“Assist him? What else have I done with every stroke of my pen? I’ve
shouted my intention in his great blank face!” At this, laughing out
again, Vereker laid his hand on my shoulder to show that the allusion
was not to my personal appearance.

“But you talk about the initiated. There must therefore, you see, be
initiation.”

“What else in heaven’s name is criticism supposed to be?” I’m afraid I
coloured at this too; but I took refuge in repeating that his account of
his silver lining was poor in something or other that a plain man knows
things by. “That’s only because you’ve never had a glimpse of it,” he
replied. “If you had had one the element in question would soon have
become practically all you’d see. To me it’s exactly as palpable as the
marble of this chimney. Besides, the critic just _isn’t_ a plain man: if
he were, pray, what would he be doing in his neighbour’s garden? You’re
anything but a plain man yourself, and the very _raison d'être_ of you
all is that you’re little demons of subtlety. If my great affair’s
a secret, that’s only because it’s a secret in spite of itself--the
amazing event has made it one. I not only never took the smallest
precaution to do so, but never dreamed of any such accident. If I had
I shouldn’t in advance have had the heart to go on. As it was I only
became aware little by little, and meanwhile I had done my work.”

“And now you quite like it?” I risked.

“My work?”

“Your secret. It’s the same thing.”

“Your guessing that,” Vereker replied, “is a proof that you’re as clever
as I say!” I was encouraged by this to remark that he would clearly be
pained to part with it, and he confessed that it was indeed with him now
the great amusement of life. “I live almost to see if it will ever be
detected.” He looked at me for a jesting challenge; something at the
back of his eyes seemed to peep out. “But I needn’t worry--it won’t!”

“You fire me as I’ve never been fired,” I returned; “you make me
determined to do or die.” Then I asked: “Is it a kind of esoteric
message?”

His countenance fell at this--he put out his hand as if to bid me
good-night. “Ah, my dear fellow, it can’t be described in cheap
journalese!”

I knew of course he would be awfully fastidious, but our talk had made
me feel how much his nerves were exposed. I was unsatisfied--I kept hold
of his hand. “I won’t make use of the expression then,” I said, “in
the article in which I shall eventually announce my discovery, though I
daresay I shall have hard work to do without it. But meanwhile, just
to hasten that difficult birth, can’t you give a fellow a clue?” I felt
much more at my ease.

“My whole lucid effort gives him a clue--every page and line and letter.
The thing’s as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a
piece of cheese in a mouse-trap. It’s stuck into every volume as your
foot is stuck into your shoe. It governs every line, it chooses every
word, it dots every i, it places every comma.”

I scratched my head. “Is it something in the style or something in the
thought? An element of form or an element of feeling?”

He indulgently shook my hand again, and I felt my questions to be crude
and my distinctions pitiful. “Good-night, my dear boy--don’t bother
about it. After all, you do like a fellow.”

“And a little intelligence might spoil it?” I still detained him.

He hesitated. “Well, you’ve got a heart in your body. Is that an element
of form or an element of feeling? What I contend that nobody has ever
mentioned in my work is the organ of life.”

“I see--it’s some idea about life, some sort of philosophy. Unless it
be,” I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still happier,
“some kind of game you’re up to with your style, something you’re after
in the language. Perhaps it’s a preference for the letter P!” I ventured
profanely to break out. “Papa, potatoes, prunes--that sort of thing?” He
was suitably indulgent: he only said I hadn’t got the right letter. But
his amusement was over; I could see he was bored. There was nevertheless
something else I had absolutely to learn. “Should you be able, pen in
hand, to state it clearly yourself--to name it, phrase it, formulate
it?”

“Oh,” he almost passionately sighed, “if I were only, pen in hand, one
of _you_ chaps!”

“That would be a great chance for you of course. But why should you
despise us chaps for not doing what you can’t do yourself?”

“Can’t do?” He opened his eyes. “Haven’t I done it in twenty volumes? I
do it in my way,” he continued. “You don’t do it in yours.”

“Ours is so devilish difficult,” I weakly observed.

“So is mine. We each choose our own. There’s no compulsion. You won’t
come down and smoke?”

“No. I want to think this thing out.”

“You’ll tell me then in the morning that you’ve laid me bare?”

“I’ll see what I can do; I’ll sleep on it. But just one word more,” I
added. We had left the room--I walked again with him a few steps along
the passage. “This extraordinary ‘general intention,’ as you call
it--for that’s the most vivid description I can induce you to make of
it--is then generally a sort of buried treasure?”

His face lighted. “Yes, call it that, though it’s perhaps not for me to
do so.”

“Nonsense!” I laughed. “You know you’re hugely proud of it.”

“Well, I didn’t propose to tell you so; but it _is_ the joy of my soul!”

“You mean it’s a beauty so rare, so great?”

He hesitated a moment. “The loveliest thing in the world!” We had
stopped, and on these words he left me; but at the end of the corridor,
while I looked after him rather yearningly, he turned and caught sight
of my puzzled face. It made him earnestly, indeed I thought quite
anxiously, shake his head and wave his finger. “Give it up--give it up!”

This wasn’t a challenge--it was fatherly advice. If I had had one of his
books at hand I would have repeated my recent act of faith--I would
have spent half the night with him. At three o’clock in the morning, not
sleeping, remembering moreover how indispensable he was to Lady Jane, I
stole down to the library with a candle. There wasn’t, so far as I could
discover, a line of his writing in the house.




IV

Returning to town I feverishly collected them all; I picked out each in
its order and held it up to the light. This gave me a maddening month,
in the course of which several things took place. One of these, the
last, I may as well immediately mention, was that I acted on Vereker’s
advice: I renounced my ridiculous attempt. I could really make nothing
of the business; it proved a dead loss. After all, before, as he had
himself observed, I liked him; and what now occurred was simply that my
new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not
only failed to find his general intention--I found myself missing the
subordinate intentions I had formerly found. His books didn’t even
remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my
search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the
more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable
to follow up the author’s hint I of course felt it a point of honour
not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I _had_ no
knowledge--nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it--they
only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my
confusion--perversely, I confess--by the idea that Vereker had made a
fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a
monstrous _pose_.

The great incident of the time however was that I told George Corvick
all about the matter and that my information had an immense effect upon
him. He had at last come back, but so, unfortunately, had Mrs. Erme,
and there was as yet, I could see, no question of his nuptials. He was
immensely stirred up by the anecdote I had brought from Bridges; it fell
in so completely with the sense he had had from the first that there was
more in Vereker than met the eye. When I remarked that the eye seemed
what the printed page had been expressly invented to meet he immediately
accused me of being spiteful because I had been foiled. Our commerce had
always that pleasant latitude. The thing Vereker had mentioned to me was
exactly the thing he, Corvick, had wanted me to speak of in my review.
On my suggesting at last that with the assistance I had now given him
he would doubtless be prepared to speak of it himself he admitted freely
that before doing this there was more he must understand. What he would
have said, had he reviewed the new book, was that there was evidently in
the writer’s inmost art something to _be_ understood. I hadn’t so much
as hinted at that: no wonder the writer hadn’t been flattered! I asked
Corvick what he really considered he meant by his own supersubtlety,
and, unmistakably kindled, he replied: “It isn’t for the vulgar--it
isn’t for the vulgar!” He had hold of the tail of something; he would
pull hard, pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker’s strange
confidence and, pronouncing me the luckiest of mortals, mentioned half a
dozen questions he wished to goodness I had had the gumption to put. Yet
on the other hand he didn’t want to be told too much--it would spoil the
fun of seeing what would come. The failure of my fun was at the moment
of our meeting not complete, but I saw it ahead, and Corvick saw that
I saw it. I, on my side, saw likewise that one of the first things he
would do would be to rush off with my story to Gwendolen.

On the very day after my talk with him I was surprised by the receipt
of a note from Hugh Vereker, to whom our encounter at Bridges had
been recalled, as he mentioned, by his falling, in a magazine, on
some article to which my signature was appended. “I read it with great
pleasure,” he wrote, “and remembered under its influence our lively
conversation by your bedroom fire. The consequence of this has been
that I begin to measure the temerity of my having saddled you with a
knowledge that you may find something of a burden. Now that the fit’s
over I can’t imagine how I came to be moved so much beyond my wont. I
had never before related, no matter in what expansion, the history of
my little secret, and I shall never speak of the business again. I was
accidentally so much more explicit with you than it had ever entered
into my game to be, that I find this game--I mean the pleasure of
playing it--suffers considerably. In short, if you can understand it,
I’ve spoiled a part of my fun. I really don’t want to give anybody what
I believe you clever young men call the tip. That’s of course a selfish
solicitude, and I name it to you for what it may be worth to you. If
you’re disposed to humour me, don’t repeat my revelation. Think me
demented--it’s your right; but don’t tell anybody why.”

The sequel to this communication was that as early on the morrow as I
dared I drove straight to Mr. Vereker’s door. He occupied in those
years one of the honest old houses in Kensington-square. He received me
immediately, and as soon as I came in I saw I had not lost my power to
minister to his mirth. He laughed out at the sight of my face,
which doubtless expressed my perturbation. I had been indiscreet--my
compunction was great. “I _have_ told somebody,” I panted, “and I’m sure
that, person will by this time have told somebody else! It’s a woman,
into the bargain.”

“The person you’ve told?”

“No, the other person. I’m quite sure he must have told her.”

“For all the good it will do her--or do _me!_ A woman will never find
out.”

“No, but she’ll talk all over the place: she’ll do just what you don’t
want.”

Vereker thought a moment, but he was not so disconcerted as I had
feared: he felt that if the harm was done it only served him right. “It
doesn’t matter--don’t worry.”

“I’ll do my best, I promise you, that your talk with me shall go no
further.”

“Very good; do what you can.”

“In the meantime,” I pursued, “George Corvick’s possession of the tip
may, on his part, really lead to something.”

“That will be a brave day.”

I told him about Corvick’s cleverness, his admiration, the intensity
of his interest in my anecdote; and without making too much of the
divergence of our respective estimates mentioned that my friend was
already of opinion that he saw much further into a certain affair than
most people. He was quite as fired as I had been at Bridges. He was
moreover in love with the young lady: perhaps the two together would
puzzle something out.

Vereker seemed struck with this. “Do you mean they’re to be married?”

“I daresay that’s what it will come to.”

“That may help them,” he conceded, “but we must give them time!”

I spoke of my own renewed assault and confessed my difficulties;
whereupon he repeated his former advice: “Give it up, give it up!” He
evidently didn’t think me intellectually equipped for the adventure. I
stayed half an hour, and he was most good-natured, but I couldn’t help
pronouncing him a man of shifting moods. He had been free with me in
a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now in a mood he had turned
indifferent. This general levity helped me to believe that, so far
as the subject of the tip went, there wasn’t much in it. I contrived
however to make him answer a few more questions about it, though he did
so with visible impatience. For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were
all so blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in
the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.
He highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another
himself. “It’s the very string,” he said, “that my pearls are strung
on!” The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn’t want to
give us a grain of succour--our destiny was a thing too perfect in its
way to touch. He had formed the habit of depending upon it, and if the
spell was to break it must break by some force of its own. He comes back
to me from that last occasion--for I was never to speak to him again--as
a man with some safe secret for enjoyment. I wondered as I walked away
where he had got _his_ tip.




V

When I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he made me
feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an insult. He had
instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen’s ardent response was in itself
a pledge of discretion. The question would now absorb them, and they
would enjoy their fun too much to wish to share it with the crowd. They
appeared to have caught instinctively Vereker’s peculiar notion of
fun. Their intellectual pride, however, was not such as to make them
indifferent to any further light I might throw on the affair they had in
hand. They were indeed of the “artistic temperament,” and I was freshly
struck with my colleague’s power to excite himself over a question of
art. He called it letters, he called it life--it was all one thing.
In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally for
Gwendolen, to whom, as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently better
to allow her a little leisure, he made a point of introducing me. I
remember our calling together one Sunday in August at a huddled house in
Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick’s possession of a friend who
had some light to mingle with his own. He could say things to her that I
could never say to him. She had indeed no sense of humour and, with her
pretty way of holding her head on one side, was one of those persons
whom you want, as the phrase is, to shake, but who have learnt Hungarian
by themselves. She conversed perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick; she had
remarkably little English for his friend. Corvick afterwards told me
that I had chilled her by my apparent indisposition to oblige her with
the detail of what Vereker had said to me. I admitted that I felt I had
given thought enough to this exposure: hadn’t I even made up my mind
that it was hollow, wouldn’t stand the test? The importance they
attached to it was irritating--it rather envenomed my dissent.

That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that
I felt humiliated at seeing other persons derive a daily joy from an
experiment which had brought me only chagrin. I was out in the cold
while, by the evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase for
which I myself had sounded the horn. They did as I had done, only
more deliberately and sociably--they went over their author from the
beginning. There was no hurry, Corvick said--the future was before them
and the fascination could only grow; they would take him page by page,
as they would take one of the classics, inhale him in slow draughts and
let him sink deep in. I doubt whether they would have got so wound up
if they had not been in love: poor Vereker’s secret gave them endless
occasion to put their young heads together. None the less it represented
the kind of problem for which Corvick had a special aptitude, drew out
the particular pointed patience of which, had he lived, he would have
given more striking and, it is to be hoped, more fruitful examples. He
at least was, in Vereker’s words, a little demon of subtlety. We had
begun by disputing, but I soon saw that without my stirring a finger his
infatuation would have its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents
as I had done--he would clap his hands over new lights and see them
blown out by the wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told
him, but the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the
cryptic character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had
Shakespeare’s own word for his being cryptic he would immediately have
accepted it. The case there was altogether different--we had nothing
but the word of Mr. Snooks. I rejoined that I was stupefied to see him
attach such importance even to the word of Mr. Vereker. He inquired
thereupon whether I treated Mr. Vereker’s word as a lie. I wasn’t
perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound, to go as far as that, but I
insisted that till the contrary was proved I should view it as too fond
an imagination. I didn’t, I confess, say--I didn’t at that time quite
know--all I felt. Deep down, as Miss Erme would have said, I was uneasy,
I was expectant. At the core of my personal confusion--for my curiosity
lived in its ashes--was the sharpness of a sense that Corvick would at
last probably come out somewhere. He made, in defence of his credulity,
a great point of the fact that from of old, in his study of this genius,
he had caught whiffs and hints of he didn’t know what, faint wandering
notes of a hidden music. That was just the rarity, that was the charm:
it fitted so perfectly into what I reported.

If I returned on several occasions to the little house in Chelsea I
daresay it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss Erme’s
mamma. The hours spent there by Corvick were present to my fancy as
those of a chessplayer bent with a silent scowl, all the lamplit winter,
over his board and his moves. As my imagination filled it out the
picture held me fast. On the other side of the table was a ghostlier
form, the faint figure of an antagonist good-humouredly but a little
wearily secure--an antagonist who leaned back in his chair with his
hands in his pockets and a smile on his fine clear face. Close to
Corvick, behind him, was a girl who had begun to strike me as pale and
wasted and even, on more familiar view, as rather handsome, and who
rested on his shoulder and hung upon his moves. He would take up a
chessman and hold it poised a while over one of the little squares,
and then he would put it back in its place with a long sigh of
disappointment. The young lady, at this, would slightly but uneasily
shift her position and look across, very hard, very long, very
strangely, at their dim participant. I had asked them at an early stage
of the business if it mightn’t contribute to their success to have some
closer communication with him. The special circumstances would surely
be held to have given me a right to introduce them. Corvick immediately
replied that he had no wish to approach the altar before he had prepared
the sacrifice. He quite agreed with our friend both as to the sport and
as to the honour--he would bring down the animal with his own rifle.
When I asked him if Miss Erme were as keen a shot he said after an
hesitation: “No; I’m ashamed to say she wants to set a trap. She’d give
anything to see him; she says she requires another tip. She’s really
quite morbid about it. But she must play fair--she _shan’t_ see him!”
 he emphatically added. I had a suspicion that they had even quarrelled a
little on the subject--a suspicion not corrected by the way he more than
once exclaimed to me: “She’s quite incredibly literary, you know--quite
fantastically!” I remember his saying of her that she felt in italics
and thought in capitals. “Oh, when I’ve run him to earth,” he also
said, “then, you know, I shall knock at his door. Rather--I beg you to
believe. I’ll have it from his own lips: ‘Right you are, my boy; you’ve
done it this time!’ He shall crown me victor--with the critical laurel.”

Meanwhile he really avoided the chances London life might have given him
of meeting the distinguished novelist; a danger however that disappeared
with Vereker’s leaving England for an indefinite absence, as the
newspapers announced--going to the south for motives connected with the
health of his wife, which had long kept her in retirement. A year--more
than a year--had elapsed since the incident at Bridges, but I had not
encountered him again. I think at bottom I was rather ashamed--I
hated to remind him that though I had irremediably missed his point a
reputation for acuteness was rapidly overtaking me. This scruple led me
a dance; kept me out of Lady Jane’s house, made me even decline, when
in spite of my bad manners she was a second time so good as to make me
a sign, an invitation to her beautiful seat. I once saw her with Vereker
at a concert and was sure I was seen by them, but I slipped out without
being caught. I felt, as on that occasion I splashed along in the rain,
that I couldn’t have done anything else; and yet I remember saying to
myself that it was hard, was even cruel. Not only had I lost the books,
but I had lost the man himself: they and their author had been alike
spoiled for me. I knew too which was the loss I most regretted. I had
liked the man still better than I had liked the books.




VI

Six months after Vereker had left England George Corvick, who made his
living by his pen, contracted for a piece of work which imposed on him
an absence of some length and a journey of some difficulty, and his
undertaking of which was much of a surprise to me. His brother-in-law
had become editor of a great provincial paper, and the great provincial
paper, in a fine flight of fancy, had conceived the idea of sending a
“special commissioner” to India. Special commissioners had begun, in
the “metropolitan press,” to be the fashion, and the journal in question
felt that it had passed too long for a mere country cousin. Corvick had
no hand, I knew, for the big brush of the correspondent, but that was
his brother-in-law’s affair, and the fact that a particular task was not
in his line was apt to be with himself exactly a reason for accepting
it. He was prepared to out-Herod the metropolitan press; he took solemn
precautions against priggishness, he exquisitely outraged taste. Nobody
ever knew it--the taste was all his own. In addition to his expenses he
was to be conveniently paid, and I found myself able to help him,
for the usual fat book, to a plausible arrangement with the usual fat
publisher. I naturally inferred that his obvious desire to make a little
money was not unconnected with the prospect of a union with Gwendolen
Erme. I was aware that her mother’s opposition was largely addressed to
his want of means and of lucrative abilities, but it so happened that,
on my saying the last time I saw him something that bore on the question
of his separation from our young lady, he exclaimed with an emphasis
that startled me: “Ah, I’m not a bit engaged to her, you know!”

“Not overtly,” I answered, “because her mother doesn’t like you. But
I’ve always taken for granted a private understanding.”

“Well, there _was_ one. But there isn’t now.” That was all he said,
except something about Mrs. Erme’s having got on her feet again in the
most extraordinary way--a remark from which I gathered he wished me to
think he meant that private understandings were of little use when the
doctor didn’t share them. What I took the liberty of really thinking
was that the girl might in some way have estranged him. Well, if he had
taken the turn of jealousy for instance it could scarcely be jealousy
of me. In that case (besides the absurdity of it) he wouldn’t have gone
away to leave us together. For some time before his departure we had
indulged in no allusion to the buried treasure, and from his silence,
of which mine was the consequence, I had drawn a sharp conclusion. His
courage had dropped, his ardour had gone the way of mine--this inference
at least he left me to enjoy. More than that he couldn’t do; he couldn’t
face the triumph with which I might have greeted an explicit admission.
He needn’t have been afraid, poor dear, for I had by this time lost all
need to triumph. In fact I considered that I showed magnanimity in not
reproaching him with his collapse, for the sense of his having thrown up
the game made me feel more than ever how much I at last depended on him.
If Corvick had broken down I should never know; no one would be of any
use if _he_ wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit true that I had ceased to care for
knowledge; little by little my curiosity had not only begun to ache
again, but had become the familiar torment of my consciousness. There
are doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly
more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don’t know after
all why I should in this connection so much as mention them. For the
few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is
concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and
courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake
on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the
revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim
gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white
face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had
met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick’s absence that she
made this analogy vivid. It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived
for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed upon her, and in her
presence I felt almost tepid. I got hold of “Deep Down” again: it was
a desert in which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a
wonderful hole in the sand--a cavity out of which Corvick had still more
remarkably pulled her.

Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I
repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to me
was: “He has got it, he has got it!”

She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean the
great thing. “Vereker’s idea?”

“His general intention. George has cabled from Bombay.”

She had the missive open there; it was emphatic, but it was brief.
“Eureka. Immense.” That was all--he had saved the money of the
signature. I shared her emotion, but I was disappointed. “He doesn’t say
what it is.”

“How could he--in a telegram? He’ll write it.”

“But how does he know?”

“Know it’s the real thing? Oh, I’m sure when you see it you do know.
_Vera incessu patuit dea!_”

“It’s you, Miss Erme, who are a dear for bringing me such news!”--I went
all lengths in my high spirits. “But fancy finding our goddess in the
temple of Vishnu! How strange of George to have been able to go into
the thing again in the midst of such different and such powerful
solicitations!”

“He hasn’t gone into it, I know; it’s the thing itself, let severely
alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him like a tigress
out of the jungle. He didn’t take a book with him--on purpose; indeed
he wouldn’t have needed to--he knows every page, as I do, by heart.
They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn’t
thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right
combination. The figure in the carpet came out. That’s the way he knew
it would come and the real reason--you didn’t in the least understand,
but I suppose I may tell you now--why he went and why I consented to
his going. We knew the change would do it, the difference of thought, of
scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake. We had perfectly,
we had admirably calculated. The elements were all in his mind, and in
the _secousse_ of a new and intense experience they just struck light.”
 She positively struck light herself--she was literally, facially
luminous. I stammered something about unconscious cerebration, and she
continued: “He’ll come right home--this will bring him.”

“To see Vereker, you mean?”

“To see Vereker--and to see _me_. Think what he’ll have to tell me!”

I hesitated. “About India?”

“About fiddlesticks! About Vereker--about the figure in the carpet.”

“But, as you say, we shall surely have that in a letter.”

She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had told
me long before that her face was interesting. “Perhaps it won’t go in a
letter if it’s ‘immense.’”

“Perhaps not if it’s immense bosh. If he has got something that won’t go
in a letter he hasn’t got _the_ thing. Vereker’s own statement to me was
exactly that the ‘figure’ _would_ go in a letter.”

“Well, I cabled to George an hour ago--two words,” said Gwendolen.

“Is it indiscreet of me to inquire what they were?”

She hung fire, but at last she brought them out. “‘Angel, write.’”

“Good!” I exclaimed. “I’ll make it sure--I’ll send him the same.”




VII

My words however were not absolutely the same--I put something instead
of “angel”; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more apt, for when
eventually we heard from Corvick it was merely, it was thoroughly to
be tantalised. He was magnificent in his triumph, he described his
discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy only obscured it--there were
to be no particulars till he should have submitted his conception to the
supreme authority. He had thrown up his commission, he had thrown up
his book, he had thrown up everything but the instant need to hurry to
Rapallo, on the Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote
him a letter which was to await him at Aden--I besought him to relieve
my suspense. That he found my letter was indicated by a telegram which,
reaching me after weary days and without my having received an answer to
my laconic dispatch at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both
communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of
the day, which Corvick often made use of to show he wasn’t a prig. It
had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly
be paraphrased. “Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the
face you’ll make!” “_Tellement envie de voir ta tête!_”--that was what I
had to sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for
I seem to remember myself at this time as rushing constantly between
the little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience, Gwendolen’s and
mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would be greater. We all
spent during this episode, for people of our means, a great deal of
money in telegrams, and I counted on the receipt of news from Rapallo
immediately after the junction of the discoverer with the discovered.
The interval seemed an age, but late one day I heard a hansom rattle up
to my door with a crash engendered by a hint of liberality. I lived with
my heart in my mouth and I bounded to the window--a movement which gave
me a view of a young lady erect on the footboard of the vehicle and
eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of me she flourished a paper
with a movement that brought me straight down, the movement with which,
in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves are flourished at the foot of
the scaffold.

“Just seen Vereker--not a note wrong. Pressed me to bosom--keeps me a
month.” So much I read on her paper while the cabby dropped a grin
from his perch. In my excitement I paid him profusely and in hers she
suffered it; then as he drove away we started to walk about and talk. We
had talked, heaven knows, enough before, but this was a wondrous lift.
We pictured the whole scene at Rapallo, where he would have written,
mentioning my name, for permission to call; that is _I_ pictured it,
having more material than my companion, whom I felt hang on my lips as
we stopped on purpose before shop-windows we didn’t look into. About one
thing we were clear: if he was staying on for fuller communication we
should at least have a letter from him that would help us through the
dregs of delay. We understood his staying on, and yet each of us saw, I
think, that the other hated it. The letter we were clear about arrived;
it was for Gwendolen, and I called upon her in time to save her the
trouble of bringing it to me. She didn’t read it out, as was natural
enough; but she repeated to me what it chiefly embodied. This consisted
of the remarkable statement that he would tell her when they were
married exactly what she wanted to know.

“Only when we’re married--not before,” she explained. “It’s tantamount
to saying--isn’t it?--that I must marry him straight off!” She smiled
at me while I flushed with disappointment, a vision of fresh delay that
made me at first unconscious of my surprise. It seemed more than a hint
that on me as well he would impose some tiresome condition. Suddenly,
while she reported several more things from his letter, I remembered
what he had told me before going away. He found Mr. Vereker deliriously
interesting and his own possession of the secret a kind of intoxication.
The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that it was there it
seemed to grow and grow before him; it was in all time, in all tongues,
one of the most wonderful flowers of art. Nothing, above all, when once
one was face to face with it, had been more consummately done. When
once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that made you
ashamed; and there had not been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of
the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the
smallest reason why it should have been overlooked. It was immense,
but it was simple--it was simple, but it was immense, and the final
knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. He intimated that the
charm of such an experience, the desire to drain it, in its freshness,
to the last drop, was what kept him there close to the source.
Gwendolen, frankly radiant as she tossed me these fragments, showed the
elation of a prospect more assured than my own. That brought me back to
the question of her marriage, prompted me to ask her if what she
meant by what she had just surprised me with was that she was under an
engagement.

“Of course I am!” she answered. “Didn’t you know it?” She appeared
astonished; but I was still more so, for Corvick had told me the exact
contrary. I didn’t mention this, however; I only reminded her that I
had not been to that degree in her confidence, or even in Corvick’s,
and that moreover I was not in ignorance of her mother’s interdict. At
bottom I was troubled by the disparity of the two assertions; but after
a moment I felt that Corvick’s was the one I least doubted. This simply
reduced me to asking myself if the girl had on the spot improvised an
engagement--vamped up an old one or dashed off a new--in order to arrive
at the satisfaction she desired. I reflected that she had resources of
which I was destitute; but she made her case slightly more intelligible
by rejoining presently: “What the state of things has been is that we
felt of course bound to do nothing in mamma’s lifetime.”

“But now you think you’ll just dispense with your mother’s consent?”

“Ah, it may not come to that!” I wondered what it might come to, and she
went on: “Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you know,” she
added with a laugh, “she really _must!_”--a proposition of which, on
behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged the force.




VIII

Nothing more annoying had ever happened to me than to become aware
before Corvick’s arrival in England that I should not be there to put
him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the alarming
illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had gone to
Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the art of
portraiture in oils. The near relative who made him an allowance had
threatened to withdraw it if he should, under specious pretexts, turn
for superior truth to Paris--Paris being somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt,
the school of evil, the abyss. I deplored this prejudice at the time,
and the deep injury of it was now visible--first in the fact that it
had not saved the poor boy, who was clever, frail and foolish, from
congestion of the lungs, and second in the greater remoteness from
London to which the event condemned me. I am afraid that what was
uppermost in my mind during several anxious weeks was the sense that if
we had only been in Paris I might have run over to see Corvick. This was
actually out of the question from every point of view: my brother, whose
recovery gave us both plenty to do, was ill for three months, during
which I never left him and at the end of which we had to face the
absolute prohibition of a return to England. The consideration of
climate imposed itself, and he was in no state to meet it alone. I took
him to Meran and there spent the summer with him, trying to show him by
example how to get back to work and nursing a rage of another sort that
I tried not to show him.

The whole business proved the first of a series of phenomena so
strangely combined that, taken together (which was how I had to take
them) they form as good an illustration as I can recall of the manner in
which, for the good of his soul doubtless, fate sometimes deals with a
man’s avidity. These incidents certainly had larger bearings than the
comparatively meagre consequence we are here concerned with--though I
feel that consequence also to be a thing to speak of with some respect.
It’s mainly in such a light, I confess, at any rate, that at this hour
the ugly fruit of my exile is present to me. Even at first indeed the
spirit in which my avidity, as I have called it, made me regard this
term owed no element of ease to the fact that before coming back from
Rapallo George Corvick addressed me in a way I didn’t like. His letter
had none of the sedative action that I must to-day profess myself
sure he had wished to give it, and the march of occurrences was not so
ordered as to make up for what it lacked. He had begun on the spot, for
one of the quarterlies, a great last word on Vereker’s writings, and
this exhaustive study, the only one that would have counted, have
existed, was to turn on the new light, to utter--oh, so quietly!--the
unimagined truth. It was in other words to trace the figure in the
carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it in every tint. The
result, said Corvick, was to be the greatest literary portrait ever
painted, and what he asked of me was just to be so good as not to
trouble him with questions till he should hang up his masterpiece before
me. He did me the honour to declare that, putting aside the great
sitter himself, all aloft in his indifference, I was individually the
connoisseur he was most working for. I was therefore to be a good boy
and not try to peep under the curtain before the show-was ready: I
should enjoy it all the more if I sat very still.

I did my best to sit very still, but I couldn’t help giving a jump
on seeing in _The Times_ after I had been a week or two in Munich and
before, as I knew, Corvick had reached London, the announcement of
the sudden death of poor Mrs. Erme. I instantly wrote to Gwendolen
for particulars, and she replied that her mother had succumbed to
long-threatened failure of the heart. She didn’t say, but I took the
liberty of reading into her words, that from the point of view of her
marriage and also of her eagerness, which was quite a match for mine,
this was a solution more prompt than could have been expected and more
radical than waiting for the old lady to swallow the dose. I candidly
admit indeed that at the time--for I heard from her repeatedly--I
read some singular things into Gwendolen’s words and some still more
extraordinary ones into her silences. Pen in hand, this way, I live the
time over, and it brings back the oddest sense of my having been for
months and in spite of myself a kind of coerced spectator. All my life
had taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to
have committed itself to keep astare. There were days when I thought of
writing to Hugh Vereker and simply throwing myself on his charity. But I
felt more deeply that I hadn’t fallen quite so low, besides which, quite
properly, he would send me about my business. Mrs. Erme’s death
brought Corvick straight home, and within the month he was united “very
quietly”--as quietly I suppose as he meant in his article to bring out
his _trouvaille_--to the young lady he had loved and quitted. I use this
last term, I may parenthetically say, because I subsequently grew sure
that at the time he went to India, at the time of his great news from
Bombay, there was no engagement whatever. There was none at the moment
she affirmed the opposite. On the other hand he certainly became engaged
the day he returned. The happy pair went down to Torquay for their
honeymoon, and there, in a reckless hour, it occurred to poor Corvick to
take his young bride a drive. He had no command of that business: this
had been brought home to me of old in a little tour we had once made
together in a dogcart. In a dogcart he perched his companion for a
rattle over Devonshire hills, on one of the likeliest of which he
brought his horse, who, it was true, had bolted, down with such violence
that the occupants of the cart were hurled forward and that he fell
horribly on his head. He was killed on the spot; Gwendolen escaped
unhurt.

I pass rapidly over the question of this unmitigated tragedy, of what
the loss of my best friend meant for me, and I complete my little
history of my patience and my pain by the frank statement of my having,
in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the receipt of the
hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband had not at least
finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as
my inquiry: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere
heartbreaking scrap. She explained that Corvick had just settled down to
it when he was interrupted by her mother’s death; then, on his return,
he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity
plunged them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were
striking, they were promising, but they didn’t unveil the idol. That
great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his climax. She
said nothing more, nothing to enlighten me as to the state of her own
knowledge--the knowledge for the acquisition of which I had conceived
her doing prodigious things. This was above all what I wanted to know:
had _she_ seen the idol unveiled? Had there been a private ceremony for
a palpitating audience of one? For what else but that ceremony had
the previous ceremony been enacted? I didn’t like as yet to press her,
though when I thought of what had passed between us on the subject in
Corvick’s absence her reticence surprised me. It was therefore not till
much later, from Meran, that I risked another appeal, risked it in some
trepidation, for she continued to tell me nothing. “Did you hear in
those few days of your blighted bliss,” I wrote, “what we desired so to
hear?” I said “we” as a little hint; and she showed me she could take a
little hint. “I heard everything,” she replied, “and I mean to keep it
to myself!”




IX

It was impossible not to be moved with the strongest sympathy for her,
and on my return to England I showed her every kindness in my power. Her
mother’s death had made her means sufficient, and she had gone to
live in a more convenient quarter. But her loss had been great and her
visitation cruel; it never would have occurred to me moreover to suppose
she could come to regard the enjoyment of a technical tip, of a piece
of literary experience, as a counterpoise to her grief. Strange to say,
none the less, I couldn’t help fancying after I had seen her a few times
that I caught a glimpse of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there
had been other things I couldn’t help fancying; and as I never felt I
was really clear about these, so, as to the point I here touch on,
I give her memory the benefit of every doubt. Stricken and solitary,
highly accomplished and now, in her deep mourning, her maturer grace,
and her uncomplaining sorrow incontestably handsome, she presented
herself as leading a life of singular dignity and beauty. I had at first
found a way to believe that I should soon get the better of the reserve
formulated the week after the catastrophe in her reply to an appeal as
to which I was not unconscious that it might strike her as mistimed.
Certainly that reserve was something of a shock to me--certainly it
puzzled me the more I thought of it, though I tried to explain it,
with moments of success, by the supposition of exalted sentiments, of
superstitious scruples, of a refinement of loyalty. Certainly it added
at the same time hugely to the price of Vereker’s secret, precious as
that mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs.
Corvick’s unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was
to fix, as they say, my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of
which I am for ever conscious. But this only helped me the more to be
artful, to be adroit, to allow time to elapse before renewing my suit.
There were plenty of speculations for the interval, and one of them was
deeply absorbing. Corvick had kept his information from his young friend
till after the removal of the last barriers to their intimacy; then he
had let the cat out of the bag. Was it Gwendolen’s idea, taking a hint
from him, to liberate this animal only on the basis of the renewal of
such a relation? Was the figure in the carpet traceable or describable
only for husbands and wives--for lovers supremely united? It came back
to me in a mystifying manner that in Kensington-square, when I told him
that Corvick would have told the girl he loved, some word had dropped
from Vereker that gave colour to this possibility. There might be little
in it, but there was enough to make me wonder if I should have to marry
Mrs. Corvick to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this
price for the blessing of her knowledge? Ah! that way madness lay--so I
said to myself at least in bewildered hours. I could see meanwhile the
torch she refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of memory--pour
through her eyes a light that made a glow in her lonely house. At the
end of six months I was fully sure of what this warm presence made up
to her for. We had talked again and again of the man who had brought us
together, of his talent, his character, his personal charm, his certain
career, his dreadful doom, and even of his clear purpose in that great
study which was to have been a supreme literary portrait, a kind of
critical Vandyke or Velasquez. She had conveyed to me in abundance that
she was tongue-tied by her perversity, by her piety, that she would
never break the silence it had not been given to the “right person,” as
she said, to break. The hour however finally arrived. One evening when I
had been sitting with her longer than usual I laid my hand firmly on her
arm.

“Now, at last, what _is_ it?”

She had been expecting me; she was ready. She gave a long, slow,
soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy
didn’t prevent its hurling at me the largest, finest, coldest “Never!”
 I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take
full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the
tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each
other; after which I slowly rose. I was wondering if some day she would
accept me; but this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed
down my hat: “I know what to think then; it’s nothing!”

A remote, disdainful pity for me shone out of her dim smile; then she
exclaimed in a voice that I hear at this moment: “It’s my _life!_” As I
stood at the door she added: “You’ve insulted him!”

“Do you mean Vereker?”

“I mean--the Dead!”

I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge. Yes,
it was her life--I recognised that too; but her life none the less made
room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year and a half
after Corvick’s death she published in a single volume her second novel,
“Overmastered,” which I pounced on in the hope of finding in it some
tell-tale echo or some peeping face. All I found was a much better book
than her younger performance, showing I thought the better company she
had kept. As a tissue tolerably intricate it was a carpet with a figure
of its own; but the figure was not the figure I was looking for. On
sending a review of it to _The Middle_ I was surprised to learn from the
office that a notice was already in type. When the paper came out I
had no hesitation in attributing this article, which I thought rather
vulgarly overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been
something of a friend of Corvick’s, yet had only within a few weeks made
the acquaintance of his widow. I had had an early copy of the book, but
Deane had evidently had an earlier. He lacked all the same the light
hand with which Corvick had gilded the gingerbread--he laid on the
tinsel in splotches.




X

Six months later appeared “The Right of Way,” the last chance, though we
didn’t know it, that we were to have to redeem ourselves. Written wholly
during Vereker’s absence, the book had been heralded, in a hundred
paragraphs, by the usual ineptitudes. I carried it, as early a copy as
any, I this time flattered myself, straightway to Mrs. Corvick. This was
the only use I had for it; I left the inevitable tribute of _The Middle_
to some more ingenious mind and some less irritated temper. “But I
already have it,” Gwendolen said. “Drayton Deane was so good as to bring
it to me yesterday, and I’ve just finished it.”

“Yesterday? How did he get it so soon?”

“He gets everything soon. He’s to review it in _The Middle_.”

“He--Drayton Deane--review Vereker?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Why not? One fine ignorance is as good as another.”

I winced, but I presently said: “You ought to review him yourself!”

“I don’t ‘review,’” she laughed. “I’m reviewed!”

Just then the door was thrown open. “Ah yes, here’s your reviewer!”
 Drayton Deane was there with his long legs and his tall forehead: he had
come to see what she thought of “The Right of Way,” and to bring news
which was singularly relevant. The evening papers were just out with a
telegram on the author of that work, who, in Rome, had been ill for some
days with an attack of malarial fever. It had at first not been thought
grave, but had taken in consequence of complications a turn that might
give rise to anxiety. Anxiety had indeed at the latest hour begun to be
felt.

I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental
detachment that Mrs. Corvick’s public regret quite failed to conceal:
it gave me the measure of her consummate independence. That independence
rested on her knowledge, the knowledge which nothing now could destroy
and which nothing could make different. The figure in the carpet might
take on another twist or two, but the sentence had virtually been
written. The writer might go down to his grave: she was the person in
the world to whom--as if she had been his favoured heir--his continued
existence was least of a need. This reminded me how I had observed at a
particular moment--after Corvick’s death--the drop of her desire to see
him face to face. She had got what she wanted without that. I had been
sure that if she hadn’t got it she wouldn’t have been restrained from
the endeavour to sound him personally by those superior reflections,
more conceivable on a man’s part than on a woman’s, which in my case had
served as a deterrent. It wasn’t however, I hasten to add, that my case,
in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn’t ambiguous enough. At the
thought that Vereker was perhaps at that moment dying there rolled over
me a wave of anguish--a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still
depended on him. A delicacy that it was my one compensation to suffer to
rule me had left the Alps and the Apennines between us, but the vision
of the waning opportunity made me feel as if I might in my despair at
last have gone to him. Of course I would really have done nothing of
the sort. I remained five minutes, while my companions talked of the
new book, and when Drayton Deane appealed to me for my opinion of it I
replied, getting up, that I detested Hugh Vereker--simply couldn’t read
him. I went away with the moral certainty that as the door closed
behind me Deane would remark that I was awfully superficial. His hostess
wouldn’t contradict him.

I continue to trace with a briefer touch our intensely odd
concatenation. Three weeks after this came Vereker’s death, and before
the year was out the death of his wife. That poor lady I had never seen,
but I had had a futile theory that, should she survive him long enough
to be decorously accessible, I might approach her with the feeble
flicker of my petition. Did she know and if she knew would she speak?
It was much to be presumed that for more reasons than one she would
have nothing to say; but when she passed out of all reach I felt
that renouncement was indeed my appointed lot. I was shut up in my
obsession for ever--my gaolers had gone off with the key. I find myself
quite as vague as a captive in a dungeon about the time that further
elapsed before Mrs. Corvick became the wife of Drayton Deane. I had
foreseen, through my bars, this end of the business, though there was no
indecent haste and our friendship had rather fallen off. They were both
so “awfully intellectual” that it struck people as a suitable match, but
I knew better than any one the wealth of understanding the bride
would contribute to the partnership. Never, for a marriage in literary
circles--so the newspapers described the alliance--had a bride been so
handsomely dowered. I began with due promptness to look for the fruit of
their union--that fruit, I mean, of which the premonitory symptoms would
be peculiarly visible in the husband. Taking for granted the splendour
of the lady’s nuptial gift, I expected to see him make a show
commensurate with his increase of means. I knew what his means had
been--his article on “The Right of Way” had distinctly given one the
figure. As he was now exactly in the position in which still more
exactly I was not I watched from month to month, in the likely
periodicals, for the heavy message poor Corvick had been unable to
deliver and the responsibility of which would have fallen on his
successor. The widow and wife would have broken by the rekindled hearth
the silence that only a widow and wife might break, and Deane would be
as aflame with the knowledge as Corvick in his own hour, as Gwendolen
in hers had been. Well, he was aflame doubtless, but the fire was
apparently not to become a public blaze. I scanned the periodicals in
vain: Drayton Deane filled them with exuberant pages, but he withheld
the page I most feverishly sought. He wrote on a thousand subjects, but
never on the subject of Vereker. His special line was to tell truths
that other people either “funked,” as he said, or overlooked, but he
never told the only truth that seemed to me in these days to signify.
I met the couple in those literary circles referred to in the papers: I
have sufficiently intimated that it was only in such circles we were all
constructed to revolve. Gwendolen was more than ever committed to them
by the publication of her third novel, and I myself definitely classed
by holding the opinion that this work was inferior to its immediate
predecessor. Was it worse because she had been keeping worse company? If
her secret was, as she had told me, her life--a fact discernible in her
increasing bloom, an air of conscious privilege that, cleverly corrected
by pretty charities, gave distinction to her appearance--it had yet
not a direct influence on her work. That only made--everything only
made--one yearn the more for it, rounded it off with a mystery finer and
subtler.




XI

It was therefore from her husband I could never remove my eyes: I
hovered about him in a manner that might have made him uneasy. I went
even so far as to engage him in conversation. _Didn’t_ he know, hadn’t
he come into it as a matter of course?--that question hummed in my
brain. Of course he knew; otherwise he wouldn’t return my stare so
queerly. His wife had told him what I wanted, and he was amiably amused
at my impotence. He didn’t laugh--he was not a laugher: his system was
to present to my irritation, so that I should crudely expose myself, a
conversational blank as vast as his big bare brow. It always happened
that I turned away with a settled conviction from these unpeopled
expanses, which seemed to complete each other geographically and to
symbolise together Drayton Deane’s want of voice, want of form. He
simply hadn’t the art to use what he knew; he literally was incompetent
to take up the duty where Corvick had left it. I went still further--it
was the only glimpse of happiness I had. I made up my mind that the
duty didn’t appeal to him. He wasn’t interested, he didn’t care. Yes, it
quite comforted me to believe him too stupid to have joy of the thing I
lacked. He was as stupid after as before, and that deepened for me the
golden glory in which the mystery was wrapped. I had of course however
to recollect that his wife might have imposed her conditions and
exactions. I had above all to recollect that with Vereker’s death the
major incentive dropped. He was still there to be honoured by what might
be done--he was no longer there to give it his sanction. Who, alas, but
he had the authority?

Two children were born to the pair, but the second cost the mother her
life. After this calamity I seemed to see another ghost of a chance. I
jumped at it in thought, but I waited a certain time for manners, and
at last my opportunity arrived in a remunerative way. His wife had been
dead a year when I met Drayton Deane in the smoking-room of a small club
of which we both were members, but where for months--perhaps because
I rarely entered it--I had not seen him. The room was empty and the
occasion propitious. I deliberately offered him, to have done with
the matter for ever, that advantage for which I felt he had long been
looking.

“As an older acquaintance of your late wife’s than even you were,” I
began, “you must let me say to you something I have on my mind. I shall
be glad to make any terms with you that you see fit to name for the
information she had from George Corvick--the information, you know, that
he, poor fellow, in one of the happiest hours of his life, had straight
from Hugh Vereker.”

He looked at me like a dim phrenological bust. “The information----?”

“Vereker’s secret, my dear man--the general intention of his books: the
string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the
carpet.”

He began to flush--the numbers on his bumps to come out. “Vereker’s
books had a general intention?”

I stared in my turn. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know it?” I
thought for a moment he was playing with me. “Mrs. Deane knew it; she
had it, as I say, straight from Corvick, who had, after infinite search
and to Vereker’s own delight, found the very mouth of the cave. Where
_is_ the mouth? He told after their marriage--and told alone--the person
who, when the circumstances were reproduced, must have told you. Have
I been wrong in taking for granted that she admitted you, as one of the
highest privileges of the relation in which you stood to her, to the
knowledge of which she was after Corvick’s death the sole depositary?
All _I_ know is that that knowledge is infinitely precious, and what I
want you to understand is that if you will in your turn admit _me_ to it
you will do me a kindness for which I shall be everlastingly grateful.”

He had turned at last very red; I daresay he had begun by thinking I had
lost my wits. Little by little he followed me; on my own side I stared
with a livelier surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he
said.

He wasn’t acting--it was the absurd truth. “She _didn’t_ tell you-----”

“Nothing about Hugh Vereker.”

I was stupefied; the room went round. It had been too good even for
that! “Upon your honour?”

“Upon my honour. What the devil’s the matter with you?” he demanded.

“I’m astounded--I’m disappointed. I wanted to get it out of you.”

“It isn’t _in_ me!” he awkwardly laughed. “And even if it were----”

“If it were you’d let me have it--oh yes, in common humanity. But I
believe you. I see--I see!” I went on, conscious, with the full turn
of the wheel, of my great delusion, my false view of the poor man’s
attitude. What I saw, though I couldn’t say it, was that his wife hadn’t
thought him worth enlightening. This struck me as strange for a woman
who had thought him worth marrying. At last I explained it by the
reflection that she couldn’t possibly have married him for his
understanding. She had married him for something else. He was to
some extent enlightened now, but he was even more astonished, more
disconcerted: he took a moment to compare my story with his quickened
memories. The result of his meditation was his presently saying with a
good deal of rather feeble form:

“This is the first I hear of what you allude to. I think you must be
mistaken as to Mrs. Drayton Deane’s having had any unmentioned, and
still less any unmentionable, knowledge about Hugh Vereker. She would
certainly have wished it--if it bore on his literary character--to be
used.”

“It _was_ used. She used it herself. She told me with her own lips that
she ‘lived’ on it.”

I had no sooner spoken than I repented of my words; he grew so pale that
I felt as if I had struck him. “Ah, ‘lived’--!” he murmured, turning
short away from me.

My compunction was real; I laid my hand on his shoulder. “I beg you to
forgive me--I’ve made a mistake. You _don’t_ know what I thought you
knew. You could, if I had been right, have rendered me a service; and I
had my reasons for assuming that you would be in a position to meet me.”

“Your reasons?” he asked. “What were your reasons?”

I looked at him well; I hesitated; I considered. “Come and sit down with
me here, and I’ll tell you.” I drew him to a sofa, I lighted another
cigarette and, beginning with the anecdote of Vereker’s one descent
from the clouds, I gave him an account of the extraordinary chain of
accidents that had in spite of it kept me till that hour in the dark.
I told him in a word just what I’ve written out here. He listened
with deepening attention, and I became aware, to my surprise, by his
ejaculations, by his questions, that he would have been after all not
unworthy to have been trusted by his wife. So abrupt an experience
of her want of trust had an agitating effect on him, but I saw that
immediate shock throb away little by little and then gather again into
waves of wonder and curiosity--waves that promised, I could perfectly
judge, to break in the end with the fury of my own highest tides. I may
say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn’t a pin to
choose between us. The poor man’s state is almost my consolation; there
are indeed moments when I feel it to be almost my revenge.




GLASSES




I


Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the thread
and let it lead me back to the first impression. The little story is all
there, I can touch it from point to point; for the thread, as I call
it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None of the beads are
missing--at least I think they’re not: that’s exactly what I shall amuse
myself with finding out.

I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down to
Folkestone for a blow. Art was long, I felt, and my holiday short; my
mother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visit when I could. I
remember how on this occasion, after weeks, in my stuffy studio, with my
nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air and cooled my eyes
with the purple sea. The place was full of lodgings, and the lodgings
were at that season full of people, people who had nothing to do but
to stare at one another on the great flat down. There were thousands of
little chairs and almost as many little Jews; and there was music in an
open rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We
all strolled to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level
cliff-top, edged in places with its iron rail, might have been the deck
of a huge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bath chairs, and there
was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of which
I always walked. There was in fine weather the coast of France to look
at, and there were the usual things to say about it; there was also
in every state of the atmosphere our friend Mrs. Meldrum, a subject of
remark not less inveterate. The widow of an officer in the Engineers,
she had settled, like many members of the martial miscellany, well
within sight of the hereditary enemy, who however had left her leisure
to form in spite of the difference of their years a close alliance with
my mother. She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women,
the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it
high aloft, with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the
breeze as if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of
a big red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at
you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such diameter
and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her
as flattening her nose against the glass of her spectacles. She was
extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects
they magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blessed conveniences
they were, in their hideous, honest strength--they showed the good lady
everything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhanced
by wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn
resistances of cut, wonderous encounters in which the art of the toilet
seemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the
voice of an angel.

In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found myself
grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had been struck
by the beauty of a face that approached us and I was still more affected
when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a window
thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it as brightly as a drapery
dropped from a sill--a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young lady
flanked with two young men, a wonderful young lady who, as we drew
nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace.
My immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in
mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend
I made more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the
stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as
the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This
was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance
to paint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval and
radiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable,
I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of winglike grace
every object they encountered. Their possessor was just back from
Boulogne, where she had spent a week with dear Mrs. Floyd-Taylor: this
accounted for the effusiveness of her reunion with dear Mrs. Meldrum.
Her black garments were of the freshest and daintiest; she suggested a
pink-and-white wreath at a showy funeral. She confounded us for three
minutes with her presence; she was a beauty of the great conscious,
public, responsible order. The young men, her companions, gazed at her
and grinned: I could see there were very few moments of the day at which
young men, these or others, would not be so occupied. The people who
approached took leave of their manners; every one seemed to linger
and gape. When she brought her face close to Mrs. Meldrum’s--and she
appeared to be always bringing it close to somebody’s--it was a marvel
that objects so dissimilar should express the same general identity,
the unmistakable character of the English gentlewoman. Mrs. Meldrum
sustained the comparison with her usual courage, but I wondered why she
didn’t introduce me: I should have had no objection to the bringing of
such a face close to mine. However, when the young lady moved on
with her escort she herself bequeathed me a sense that some such
_rapprochement_ might still occur. Was this by reason of the general
frequency of encounters at Folkestone, or by reason of a subtle
acknowledgment that she contrived to make of the rights, on the part of
others, that such beauty as hers created? I was in a position to answer
that question after Mrs. Meldrum had answered a few of mine.




II

Flora Saunt, the only daughter of an old soldier, had lost both her
parents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known them,
disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had watched the
girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, was
extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no natural
chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. Hammond
Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen.
She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking
up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been at
Boulogne, were simply horrid. The Hammond Synges were perhaps not so
vulgar, but they had no conscience in their dealings with her.

“She knows what I think of them,” said Mrs. Meldrum, “and indeed she
knows what I think of most things.”

“She shares that privilege with most of your friends!” I replied
laughing.

“No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends it makes a little
difference. That girl doesn’t care a button. She knows best of all what
I think of Flora Saunt.”

“And what may your opinion be?”

“Why, that she’s not worth talking about--an idiot too abysmal.”

“Doesn’t she care for that?”

“Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She’s too pleased
with herself for anything else to matter.”

“Surely, my dear friend,” I rejoined, “she has a good deal to be pleased
with!”

“So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had given
you a chance. However, that doesn’t signify either, for her vanity
is beyond all making or mending. She believes in herself, and she’s
welcome, after all, poor dear, having only herself to look to. I’ve
seldom met a young woman more completely at liberty to be silly. She has
a clear course--she’ll make a showy finish.”

“Well,” I replied, “as she probably will reduce many persons to the same
degraded state, her partaking of it won’t stand out so much.”

“If you mean that the world’s full of twaddlers I quite agree with you!”
 cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel.

I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mother’s
son, but I didn’t let it prevent me from insisting on her making me
acquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by the horns, urging
that she had drawn the portrait of a nature which common charity now
demanded that she should put into relation with a character really fine.
Such a frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on
my part had at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was
quite the ground I found myself taking with regard to our young lady
after I had begun to know her. I couldn’t have said what I felt about
her except that she was undefended; from the first of my sitting with
her there after dinner, under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone
of balmy nights and muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware
both that protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was
wholly indifferent to its absence.

The odd thing was that she was not appealing: she was abjectly, divinely
conceited, absurdly, fantastically happy. Her beauty was as yet all the
world to her, a world she had plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told
me more about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a
group of giggling, nudging spectators, she was not ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main business
with her would be just to have a go at her head and to arrange in that
view for an early sitting. It would have been as impossible, I think,
to be impertinent to her as it would have been to throw a stone at a
plate-glass window; so any talk that went forward on the basis of her
loveliness was the most natural thing in the world and immediately
became the most general and sociable. It was when I saw all this that I
judged how, though it was the last thing she asked for, what one would
ever most have at her service was a curious compassion. That sentiment
was coloured by the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom vanity
had put so off her guard. Hers was the only vanity I have ever known
that made its possessor superlatively soft. Mrs. Meldrum’s further
information contributed moreover to these indulgences--her account of
the girl’s neglected childhood and queer continental relegations, with
straying, squabbling, Monte-Carlo-haunting parents; the more invidious
picture, above all, of her pecuniary arrangement, still in force,
with the Hammond Synges, who really, though they never took her
out--practically she went out alone--had their hands half the time in
her pocket. She had to pay for everything, down to her share of the
wine-bills and the horses’ fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synge’s fare
in the “Underground” when he went to the City for her. She had been left
with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn’t even been put in
trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. She could spend
her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive, extravagant and
with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldn’t last very long.

“Couldn’t _you_ perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are?”
 I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. “You’re probably, with one exception, the
sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn’t scandalously fleece
her.”

“How do you know what I wouldn’t do?” my humorous friend demanded. “Of
course I’ve thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night.
But I can’t help her at all; she’ll take nothing from me. You know what
she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me, she
feels that I’ve one about her. And then she dislikes me for another
reason that I’m not quite clear about, but that I’m well aware of and
that I shall find out some day. So far as her settling with me goes it
would be impossible moreover here: she wants naturally enough a much
wider field. She must live in London--her game is there. So she takes
the line of adoring me, of saying she can never forget that I was
devoted to her mother--which I wouldn’t for the world have been--and of
giving me a wide berth. I think she positively dislikes to look at me.
It’s all right; there’s no obligation; though people in general can’t
take their eyes off me.”

“I see that at this moment,” I replied. “But what does it matter where
or how, for the present, she lives? She’ll marry infallibly, marry
early, and everything then will change.”

“Whom will she marry?” my companion gloomily asked.

“Any one she likes. She’s so abnormally pretty she can do anything.
She’ll fascinate some nabob or some prince.”

“She’ll fascinate him first and bore him afterwards. Moreover she’s not
so pretty as you make her out; she has a scrappy little figure.”

“No doubt; but one doesn’t in the least notice it.”

“Not now,” said Mrs. Meldrum, “but one will when she’s older.”

“When she’s older she’ll be a princess, so it won’t matter.”

“She has other drawbacks,” my companion went on. “Those wonderful eyes
are good for nothing but to roll about like sugar-balls--which they
greatly resemble--in a child’s mouth. She can’t use them.”

“Use them? Why, she does nothing else.”

“To make fools of young men, but not to read or write, not to do any
sort of work. She never opens a book, and her maid writes her notes.
You’ll say that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Of course I know that if I didn’t wear my goggles I shouldn’t be good
for much.”

“Do you mean that Miss Saunt ought to sport such things?” I exclaimed
with more horror than I meant to show.

“I don’t prescribe for her; I don’t know that they’re what she
requires.”

“What’s the matter with her eyes?” I asked after a moment.

“I don’t exactly know; but I heard from her mother years ago that even
as a child they had had for a while to put her into spectacles and
that, though she hated them and had been in a fury of disgust, she would
always have to be extremely careful. I’m sure I hope she is!”

I echoed the hope, but I remember well the impression this made upon
me--my immediate pang of resentment, a disgust almost equal to Flora’s
own. I felt as if a great rare sapphire had split in my hand.




III

This conversation occurred the night before I went back to town. I
settled on the morrow to take a late train, so that I had still my
morning to spend at Folkestone, where during the greater part of it I
was out with my mother. Every one in the place was as usual out with
some one else, and even had I been free to go and take leave of her I
should have been sure that Flora Saunt would not be at home. Just where
she was I presently discovered: she was at the far end of the cliff, the
point at which it overhangs the pretty view of Sandgate and Hythe. Her
back however was turned to this attraction; it rested with the aid
of her elbows, thrust slightly behind her so that her scanty little
shoulders were raised toward her ears, on the high rail that inclosed
the down. Two gentlemen stood before her whose faces we couldn’t see but
who even as observed from the rear were visibly absorbed in the charming
figure-piece submitted to them. I was freshly struck with the fact that
this meagre and defective little person, with the cock of her hat
and the flutter of her crape, with her eternal idleness, her
eternal happiness, her absence of moods and mysteries and the pretty
presentation of her feet, which especially now in the supported slope
of her posture occupied with their imperceptibility so much of the
foreground--I was reminded anew, I say, how our young lady dazzled by
some art that the enumeration of her merits didn’t explain and that
the mention of her lapses didn’t affect. Where she was amiss nothing
counted, and where she was right everything did. I say she was wanting
in mystery, but that after all was her secret. This happened to be my
first chance of introducing her to my mother, who had not much left in
life but the quiet look from under the hood of her chair at the things
which, when she should have quitted those she loved, she could still
trust to make the world good for them. I wondered an instant how much
she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while the chair stood
still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to come and speak
to her. In this way I saw that if one of Flora’s attendants was the
inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of ceremonies of her regular
court, always offering the use of a telescope and accepting that of a
cigar, the other was a personage I had not yet encountered, a small pale
youth in showy knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the glued
points of whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted and
sustained. I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and for
something of a pretender: I scarcely know why, unless because of the
motive I felt in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to
come away. He struck me a little as a young man practising the social
art of “impertinence”; but it didn’t matter, for Flora came away with
alacrity, bringing all her prettiness and pleasure and gliding over the
grass in that rustle of delicate mourning which made the endless variety
of her garments, as a painter could take heed, strike one always as the
same obscure elegance. She seated herself on the floor of my mother’s
chair, a little too much on her right instep as I afterwards gathered,
caressing her stiff hand, smiling up into her cold face, commending
and approving her without a reserve and without a doubt. She told her
immediately, as if it were something for her to hold on by, that she was
soon to sit to me for a “likeness,” and these words gave me a chance to
inquire if it would be the fate of the picture, should I finish it, to
be presented to the young man in the knickerbockers. Her lips, at
this, parted in a stare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of the
shadow-patches on the sea. She showed for the passing instant the face
of some splendid tragic mask, and I remembered for the inconsequence of
it what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I had derived from this
lady a worrying impulse to catechise her, but that didn’t seem exactly
kind; so I substituted another question, inquired who the pretty young
man in knickerbockers might happen to be.

“Oh, a gentleman I met at Boulogne. He has come over to see me.” After a
moment she added: “He’s Lord Iffield.”

I had never heard of Lord Iffield, but her mention of his having been
at Boulogne helped me to give him a niche. Mrs. Meldrum had incidentally
thrown a certain light on the manners of Mrs. Floyd-Taylor, Flora’s
recent hostess in that charming town, a lady who, it appeared, had a
special vocation for helping rich young men to find a use for their
leisure. She had always one or other in hand and she had apparently on
this occasion pointed her lesson at the rare creature on the opposite
coast. I had a vague idea that Boulogne was not a resort of the
aristocracy; at the same time there might very well have been a strong
attraction there even for one of the darlings of fortune. I could
perfectly understand in any case that such a darling should be drawn to
Folkestone by Flora Saunt. But it was not in truth of these things I was
thinking; what was uppermost in my mind was a matter which, though it
had no sort of keeping, insisted just then on coming out.

“Is it true, Miss Saunt,” I suddenly demanded, “that you’re so
unfortunate as to have had some warning about your beautiful eyes?”

I was startled by the effect of my words; the girl threw back her head,
changing colour from brow to chin. “True? Who in the world says so?”
 I repented of my question in a flash; the way she met it made it seem
cruel, and I saw that my mother looked at me in some surprise. I took
care, in answer to Flora’s challenge, not to incriminate Mrs. Meldrum.
I answered that the rumour had reached me only in the vaguest form and
that if I had been moved to put it to the test my very real interest in
her must be held responsible. Her blush died away, but a pair of still
prettier tears glistened in its track. “If you ever hear such a thing
said again you can say it’s a horrid lie!” I had brought on a commotion
deeper than any I was prepared for; but it was explained in some degree
by the next words she uttered: “I’m happy to say there’s nothing the
matter with any part of my body; not the least little thing!” She spoke
with her habitual complacency, with triumphant assurance; she smiled
again, and I could see that she was already sorry she had shown herself
too disconcerted. She turned it off with a laugh. “I’ve good eyes, good
teeth, a good digestion and a good temper. I’m sound of wind and limb!”
 Nothing could have been more characteristic than her blush and her
tears, nothing less acceptable to her than to be thought not perfect
in every particular. She couldn’t submit to the imputation of a flaw. I
expressed my delight in what she told me, assuring her I should always
do battle for her; and as if to rejoin her companions she got up from
her place on my mother’s toes. The young men presented their backs
to us; they were leaning on the rail of the cliff. Our incident had
produced a certain awkwardness, and while I was thinking of what next
to say she exclaimed irrelevantly: “Don’t you know? He’ll be Lord
Considine.” At that moment the youth marked for this high destiny turned
round, and she went on, to my mother: “I’ll introduce him to you--he’s
awfully nice.” She beckoned and invited him with her parasol; the
movement struck me as taking everything for granted. I had heard of
Lord Considine and if I had not been able to place Lord Iffield it was
because I didn’t know the name of his eldest son. The young man took no
notice of Miss Saunt’s appeal; he only stared a moment and then on
her repeating it quietly turned his back. She was an odd creature: she
didn’t blush at this; she only said to my mother apologetically, but
with the frankest, sweetest amusement: “You don’t mind, do you? He’s a
monster of shyness!” It was as if she were sorry for every one--for Lord
Iffield, the victim of a complaint so painful, and for my mother, the
object of a trifling incivility. “I’m sure I don’t want him!” said my
mother; but Flora added some remark about the rebuke she would give
him for slighting us. She would clearly never explain anything by any
failure of her own power. There rolled over me while she took leave of
us and floated back to her friends a wave of tenderness superstitious
and silly. I seemed somehow to see her go forth to her fate; and yet
what should fill out this orb of a high destiny if not such beauty and
such joy? I had a dim idea that Lord Considine was a great proprietor,
and though there mingled with it a faint impression that I shouldn’t
like his son the result of the two images was a whimsical prayer that
the girl mightn’t miss her possible fortune.




IV

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my
studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had been very
briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me some
days before his regret on learning that my “splendid portrait” of Titras
Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her own wish in the
catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser before
the close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether
I might have at his service some other memorial of the same lovely head,
some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied
that I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were
interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done.
Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into
my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds--a long, lean,
confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large,
protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark,
as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived,
in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the
queer communication matched the registered envelope. He was full of
refinements and angles, of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his
unconscious drollery his dress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold
ring into which his red necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his
boots, to conform with a high sense of modernness to the fashion before
the last. There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive
stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but
I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and
the expression of his good green eyes.

As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty however he needed explaining,
especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model;
had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a tremendous
fancy to her face. I ought doubtless to have been humiliated by the
simplicity of his judgment of it, a judgment for which the rendering was
lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He was like
the innocent reader for whom the story is “really true” and the author
a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to
purchase, and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had
never seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him
why, for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn’t be more to the
point to deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at this:
it was plain the idea frightened him. He was an extraordinary
case--personally so modest that I could see it had never occurred to
him. He had fallen in love with a painted sign and seemed content just
to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the legend
or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the outland
princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much--the link was
so missing between his sensibility and his type. He was of course
bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of
intention and quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he
ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking
no second look at the others, he expressed the wish to possess it and
fell into the extremity of confusion over the question of the price.
I simplified that problem, and he went off without having asked me a
direct question about Miss Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his
arm. His delicacy was such that he evidently considered his rights to
be limited; he had acquired none at all in regard to the original of the
picture. There were others--for I was curious about him--that I wanted
him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a
sense of ground acquired for coming back. To insure this I had probably
only to invite him, and I perfectly recall the impulse that made me
forbear. It operated suddenly from within while he hung about the door
and in spite of the diffident appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If
he was smitten with Flora’s ghost what mightn’t be the direct force of
the luminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance,
flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next
time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were
complications it was no mission of mine to bring about. If they were to
occur they might occur by a logic of their own.

Let me say at once that they did occur and that I perhaps after all had
something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed without a fresh
appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no less
adequate than that of our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly
for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the tabernacle of her
face. This prodigy was frankly there the sole object of interest; in
other places there were occasionally other objects. The freedom of her
manners continued to be stupefying; there was nothing so extraordinary
save the absence in connection with it of any catastrophe. She was kept
innocent by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put
off her mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law
unto herself. It was as a lone orphan that she came and went, as a lone
orphan that she was the centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond
Synges gave relief to this character, and she paid them handsomely to
be, as every one said, shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to India to shoot
tigers, but he returned in time for the private view: it was he who had
snapped up, as Flora called it, the gem of the exhibition.

My hope for the girl’s future had slipped ignominiously off his back,
but after his purchase of the portrait I tried to cultivate a new faith.
The girl’s own faith was wonderful. It couldn’t however be contagious:
too great was the limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her
colours were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed could a
person speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was
after all vulgar enough, and by the time I had mastered her profile and
could almost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly
tired of her perfection. There grew to be something silly in its eternal
smoothness. One moved with her moreover among phenomena mismated and
unrelated; nothing in her talk ever matched with anything out of it.
Lord Iffield was dying of love for her, but his family was leading him a
life. His mother, horrid woman, had told some one that she would rather
he should be swallowed by a tiger than marry a girl not absolutely one
of themselves. He had given his young friend unmistakable signs, but he
was lying low, gaining time: it was in his father’s power to be, both
in personal and in pecuniary ways, excessively nasty to him. His father
wouldn’t last for ever--quite the contrary; and he knew how thoroughly,
in spite of her youth, her beauty and the swarm of her admirers, some of
them positively threatening in their passion, he could trust her to hold
out. There were richer, cleverer men, there were greater personages too,
but she liked her “little viscount” just as he was, and liked to think
that, bullied and persecuted, he had her there so luxuriously to rest
upon. She came back to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be
or mightn’t. I never met my pretty model in the world--she moved, it
appeared, in exalted circles--and could only admire, in her wealth of
illustration, the grandeur of her life and the freedom of her hand.

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and
she had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such patience,
asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she
had capped my anecdote with others much more striking, revelations of
effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people who had
followed her into railway-carriages; guards and porters even who had
literally stuck there; others who had spoken to her in shops and hung
about her house-door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to
gaze their fill at her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction
through the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in these
reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only
one of a million. When therefore the next autumn she flourished into my
studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make
clear to me that if he was now in servitude it wasn’t because she had
run after him. Dawling hilariously explained that when one wished very
much to get anything one usually ended by doing so--a proposition which
led me wholly to dissent and our young lady to asseverate that she
hadn’t in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn’t have wished
to get him, but she wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if
she could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb. True
there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at
any rate would have come and gone since our separation in July. She had
spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German
cities, in Paris, many accidents might have happened.




V

I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam
of France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes.
Mrs. Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she
called them, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora would
soon be on the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices
that there was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her
breezy cliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light:
she knew so much more about everything and everybody than I could ever
squeeze out of my colour-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting on system
and absolutely declined to be interfered with: her precious reasoning
was that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a
magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really
pinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile the proper
use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar,
keep her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally
meet her match. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at
Cadenabbia; but it was Mrs. Meldrum’s conviction that nothing was to be
expected of him but the most futile flirtation. The girl had a certain
hold of him, but with a great deal of swagger he hadn’t the spirit of
a sheep: he was in fear of his father and would never commit himself in
Lord Considine’s lifetime. The most Flora might achieve would be that
he wouldn’t marry some one else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum’s
knowledge (I had told her of the young man’s visit) had attached himself
on the way back from Italy to the Hammond Synge group. My informant
was in a position to be definite about this dangler; she knew about his
people: she had heard of him before. Hadn’t he been, at Oxford, a friend
of one of her nephews? Hadn’t he spent the Christmas holidays precisely
three years before at her brother-in-law’s in Yorkshire, taking that
occasion to get himself refused with derision by wilful Betty, the
second daughter of the house? Her sister, who liked the floundering
youth, had written to her to complain of Betty, and that the young man
should now turn up as an appendage of Flora’s was one of those oft-cited
proofs that the world is small and that there are not enough people to
go round. His father had been something or other in the Treasury; his
grandfather, on the mother’s side, had been something or other in the
Church. He had come into the paternal estate, two or three thousand
a year in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously and was
generous to four ugly sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him.
The family was hideous all round, but the salt of the earth. He was
supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books,
of intellectual society and of the idea of a political career. That such
a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as
the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his
inclinations. I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all
the other things together. Betty, one of five and with views above her
station, was at any rate felt at home to have dished herself by her
perversity. Of course no one had looked at her since and no one would
ever look at her again. It would be eminently desirable that Flora
should learn the lesson of Betty’s fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptoms
on our young lady’s part of that sort of meditation. The only moral
she saw in anything was that of her incomparable countenance, which Mr.
Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the
doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice
back to London again. I afterwards learned that her version of this
episode was profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had
been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connection
with what had gone before--a coincidence at all events superficially
striking. At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his
sisters, he had found himself at the _table d’hôte_ of his inn opposite
to the full presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy
had made him dream and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so
vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the table; but the next day he
had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition.
On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his
bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to
escape by flight from a fate of which he already felt the cold breath.
That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before
it--drove him one Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the
Hammond Synges. He marched in other words close up to the cannon that
was to blow him to pieces. But three weeks, when he reappeared to me,
had elapsed since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to
carry for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back. I don’t
mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I mean
that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as the event
was to show, couldn’t have been bettered as a means of securing him. She
hadn’t calculated, but she had said “Never!” and that word had made a
bed big enough for his long-legged patience. He became from this moment
to my mind the interesting figure in the piece.

Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and
having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my
door. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity so
huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it
bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the
light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken
his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently
lame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him
left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the
literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all
seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn’t had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great
man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had
addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself
if such privileges had been an indispensable preparation to the career
on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too making
up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in
impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of
mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a
revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and
his chill, and the only thing he showed any subtlety about was this
convenience of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but
the matter comes back to me in a kind of sense of _my_ being rather the
mouthpiece, of my having had to thresh it out for him. He took it from
me without a groan, and I gave it to him, as we used to say, pretty hot;
he took it again and again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if
for the very purpose of learning how idiotically he was in love. He told
me I made him see things: to begin with, hadn’t I first made him see
Flora Saunt? I wanted him to give her up and luminously informed him
why; on which he never protested nor contradicted, never was even
so alembicated as to declare just for the sake of the drama that he
wouldn’t. He simply and undramatically didn’t, and when at the end of
three months I asked him what was the use of talking with such a fellow
his nearest approach to a justification was to say that what made him
want to help her was just the deficiencies I dwelt on. I could only
reply without pointing the moral: “Oh, if you’re as sorry for her as
that!” I too was nearly as sorry for her as that, but it only led me to
be sorrier still for other victims of this compassion. With Dawling as
with me the compassion was at first in excess of any visible motive;
so that when eventually the motive was supplied each could to a certain
extent compliment the other on the fineness of his foresight.

After he had begun to haunt my studio Miss Saunt quite gave it up, and
I finally learned that she accused me of conspiring with him to put
pressure on her to marry him. She didn’t know I would take it that way;
else she wouldn’t have brought him to see me. It was in her view a part
of the conspiracy; that to show him a kindness I asked him at last to
sit to me. I daresay moreover she was disgusted to hear that I had ended
by attempting almost as many sketches of his beauty as I had attempted
of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a hand that
luxuriated in ugliness? My relation to poor Dawling’s want of modelling
was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desert for the
buried treasure of his soul.




VI

It befell at this period, just before Christmas, that on my having gone
under pressure of the season into a great shop to buy a toy or two,
my eye, fleeing from superfluity, lighted at a distance on the bright
concretion of Flora Saunt, an exhibitability that held its own even
against the most plausible pinkness of the most developed dolls. A huge
quarter of the place, the biggest bazaar “on earth,” was peopled with
these and other effigies and fantasies, as well as with purchasers and
vendors, haggard alike in the blaze of the gas with hesitations. I was
just about to appeal to Flora to avert that stage of my errand when I
saw that she was accompanied by a gentleman whose identity,'though more
than a year had elapsed, came back to me from the Folkestone cliff.’ It
had been associated in that scene with showy knickerbockers; at
present it overflowed more splendidly into a fur-trimmed overcoat. Lord
Iffield’s presence made me waver an instant before crossing over; and
during that instant Flora, blank and undistinguishing, as if she too
were after all weary of alternatives, looked straight across at me. I
was on the point of raising my hat to her when I observed that her face
gave no sign. I was exactly in the line of her vision, but she either
didn’t see me or didn’t recognise me, or else had a reason to pretend
she didn’t. Was her reason that I had displeased her and that she wished
to punish me? I had always thought it one of her merits that she wasn’t
vindictive. She at any rate simply looked away; and at this moment one
of the shop-girls, who had apparently gone off in search of it, bustled
up to her with a small mechanical toy. It so happened that I followed
closely what then took place, afterwards recognising that I had been led
to do so, led even through the crowd to press nearer for the purpose, by
an impression of which in the act I was not fully conscious.

Flora, with the toy in her hand, looked round at her companion; then
seeing his attention had been solicited in another quarter she moved
away with the shop-girl, who had evidently offered to conduct her into
the presence of more objects of the same sort. When she reached the
indicated spot I was in a position still to observe her. She had asked
some question about the working of the toy, and the girl, taking it
herself, began to explain the little secret. Flora bent her head over
it, but she clearly didn’t understand. I saw her, in a manner that
quickened my curiosity, give a glance back at the place from which
she had come. Lord Iffield was talking with another young person: she
satisfied herself of this by the aid of a question addressed to her own
attendant. She then drew closer to the table near which she stood and,
turning her back to me, bent her head lower over the collection of toys
and more particularly over the small object the girl had attempted
to explain. She took it back and, after a moment, with her face well
averted, made an odd motion of her arms and a significant little duck of
her head. These slight signs, singular as it may appear, produced in
my bosom an agitation so great that I failed to notice Lord Iffield’s
whereabouts. He had rejoined her; he was close upon her before I knew it
or before she knew it herself. I felt at that instant the strangest
of all impulses: if it could have operated more rapidly it would have
caused me to dash between them in some such manner as to give Flora a
warning. In fact as it was I think I could have done this in time had
I not been checked by a curiosity stronger still than my impulse. There
were three seconds during which I saw the young man and yet let him come
on. Didn’t I make the quick calculation that if he didn’t catch what
Flora was doing I too might perhaps not catch it? She at any rate
herself took the alarm. On perceiving her companion’s nearness she made,
still averted, another duck of her head and a shuffle of her hands so
precipitate that a little tin steamboat she had been holding escaped
from them and rattled down to the floor with a sharpness that I hear at
this hour. Lord Iffield had already seized her arm; with a violent jerk
he brought her round toward him. Then it was that there met my eyes a
quite distressing sight: this exquisite creature, blushing, glaring,
exposed, with a pair of big black-rimmed eyeglasses, defacing her by
their position, crookedly astride of her beautiful nose. She made a grab
at them with her free hand while I turned confusedly away.




VII

I don’t remember how soon it was I spoke to Geoffrey Dawling; his
sittings were irregular, but it was certainly the very next time he gave
me one.

“Has any rumour ever reached you of Miss Saunt’s having anything the
matter with her eyes?” He stared with a candour that was a sufficient
answer to my question, backing it up with a shocked and mystified
“Never!” Then I asked him if he had observed in her any symptom, however
disguised, of embarrassed sight: on which, after a moment’s thought, he
exclaimed “Disguised?” as if my use of that word had vaguely awakened a
train. “She’s not a bit myopic,” he said; “she doesn’t blink or contract
her lids.” I fully recognised this and I mentioned that she altogether
denied the impeachment; owing it to him moreover to explain the ground
of my inquiry, I gave him a sketch of the incident that had taken place
before me at the shop. He knew all about Lord Iffield: that nobleman
had figured freely in our conversation as his preferred, his injurious
rival. Poor Daw-ling’s contention was that if there had been a definite
engagement between his lordship and the young lady, the sort of thing
that was announced in _The Morning Post_, renunciation and retirement
would be comparatively easy to him; but that having waited in vain for
any such assurance he was entitled to act as if the door were not really
closed or were at any rate not cruelly locked. He was naturally much
struck with my anecdote and still more with my interpretation of it.

“There _is_ something, there _is_ something--possibly something
very grave, certainly something that requires she should make use of
artificial aids. She won’t admit it publicly, because with her idolatry
of her beauty, the feeling she is all made up of, she sees in such aids
nothing but the humiliation and the disfigurement. She has used them in
secret, but that is evidently not enough, for the affection she suffers
from, apparently some definite ailment, has lately grown much worse. She
looked straight at me in the shop, which was violently lighted, without
seeing it was I. At the same distance, at Folkestone, where as you know
I first met her, where I heard this mystery hinted at and where she
indignantly denied the thing, she appeared easily enough to recognise
people. At present she couldn’t really make out anything the shop-girl
showed her. She has successfully concealed from the man I saw her with
that she resorts in private to a pince-nez and that she does so not only
under the strictest orders from an oculist, but because literally the
poor thing can’t accomplish without such help half the business of life.
Iffield however has suspected something, and his suspicions, whether
expressed or kept to himself, have put him on the watch. I happened to
have a glimpse of the movement at which he pounced on her and caught her
in the act.”

I had thought it all out; my idea explained many things, and Dawling
turned pale as he listened to me.

“Was he rough with her?” he anxiously asked.

“How can I tell what passed between them? I fled from the place.”

My companion stared at me a moment. “Do you mean to say her eyesight’s
going?”

“Heaven forbid! In that case how could she take life as she does?”

“How _does_ she take life? That’s the question!” He sat there
bewilderedly brooding; the tears had come into his eyes; they reminded
me of those I had seen in Flora’s the day I risked my inquiry. The
question he had asked was one that to my own satisfaction I was ready to
answer, but I hesitated to let him hear as yet all that my reflections
had suggested. I was indeed privately astonished at their ingenuity.
For the present I only rejoined that it struck me she was playing a
particular game; at which he went on as if he hadn’t heard me, suddenly
haunted with a fear, lost in the dark possibility I had opened up: “Do
you mean there’s a danger of anything very bad?” “My dear fellow, you
must ask her oculist.” “Who in the world _is_ her oculist?” “I haven’t a
conception. But we mustn’t get too excited. My impression would be
that she has only to observe a few ordinary rules, to exercise a little
common sense.”

Dawling jumped at this. “I see--to stick to the pince-nez.”

“To follow to the letter her oculist’s prescription, whatever it is
and at whatever cost to her prettiness. It’s not a thing to be trifled
with.”

“Upon my honour it _shan’t_ be trifled with!” he roundly declared; and
he adjusted himself to his position again as if we had quite settled
the business. After a considerable interval, while I botched away, he
suddenly said: “Did they make a great difference?”

“A great difference?”

“Those things she had put on.”

“Oh, the glasses--in her beauty? She looked queer of course, but it was
partly because one was unaccustomed. There are women who look charming
in nippers. What, at any rate, if she does look queer? She must be mad
not to accept that alternative.”

“She _is_ mad,” said Geoffrey Dawling.

“Mad to refuse you, I grant. Besides,” I went on, “the pince-nez, which
was a large and peculiar one, was all awry: she had half pulled it off,
but it continued to stick, and she was crimson, she was angry.”

“It must have been horrible!” my companion murmured.

“It _was_ horrible. But it’s still more horrible to defy all warnings;
it’s still more horrible to be landed in--” Without saying in what I
disgustedly shrugged my shoulders.

After a glance at me Dawling jerked round. “Then you do believe that she
may be?”

I hesitated. “The thing would be to make _her_ believe it. She only
needs a good scare.”

“But if that fellow is shocked at the precautions she does take?”

“Oh, who knows?” I rejoined with small sincerity. “I don’t suppose
Iffield is absolutely a brute.”

“I would take her with leather blinders, like a shying mare!” cried
Geoffrey Dawling.

I had an impression that Iffield wouldn’t, but I didn’t communicate it,
for I wanted to pacify my friend, whom I had discomposed too much for
the purposes of my sitting. I recollect that I did some good work that
morning, but it also comes back to me that before we separated he had
practically revealed to me that my anecdote, connecting itself in
his mind with a series of observations at the time unconscious and
unregistered, had covered with light the subject of our colloquy. He
had had a formless perception of some secret that drove Miss Saunt to
subterfuges, and the more he thought of it the more he guessed this
secret to be the practice of making believe she saw when she didn’t and
of cleverly keeping people from finding out how little she saw. When
one patched things together it was astonishing what ground they covered.
Just as he was going away he asked me from what source, at Folkestone,
the horrid tale had proceeded. When I had given him, as I saw no reason
not to do, the name of Mrs. Meldrum, he exclaimed: “Oh, I know all
about her; she’s a friend of some friends of mine!” At this I remembered
wilful Betty and said to myself that I knew some one who would probably
prove more wilful still.




VIII

A few days later I again heard Dawling on my stairs, and even before he
passed my threshold I knew he had something to tell me.

“I’ve been down to Folkestone--it was necessary I should see her!” I
forget whether he had come straight from the station; he was at any
rate out of breath with his news, which it took me however a minute to
interpret.

“You mean that you’ve been with Mrs. Meldrum?”

“Yes; to ask her what she knows and how she comes to know it. It worked
upon me awfully--I mean what you told me.” He made a visible effort to
seem quieter than he was, and it showed me sufficiently that he had
not been reassured. I laid, to comfort him and smiling at a venture, a
friendly hand on his arm, and he dropped into my eyes, fixing them an
instant, a strange, distended look which might have expressed the cold
clearness of all that was to come. “I _know_--now!” he said with an
emphasis he rarely used.

“What then did Mrs. Meldrum tell you?”

“Only one thing that signified, for she has no real knowledge. But that
one thing was everything.”

“What is it then?”

“Why, that she can’t bear the sight of her.” His pronouns required some
arranging, but after I had successfully dealt with them I replied that
I knew perfectly Miss Saunt had a trick of turning her back on the good
lady of Folkestone. But what did that prove? “Have you never guessed?
I guessed as soon as she spoke!” Dawling towered over me in dismal
triumph. It was the first time in our acquaintance that, intellectually
speaking, this had occurred; but even so remarkable an incident still
left me sufficiently at sea to cause him to continue: “Why, the effect
of those spectacles!”

I seemed to catch the tail of his idea. “Mrs. Meldrum’s?”

“They’re so awfully ugly and they increase so the dear woman’s
ugliness.” This remark began to flash a light, and when he quickly added
“She sees herself, she sees her own fate!” my response was so immediate
that I had almost taken the words out of his mouth. While I tried to
fix this sudden image of Flora’s face glazed in and cross-barred even as
Mrs. Meldrum’s was glazed and barred, he went on to assert that only the
horror of that image, looming out at herself, could be the reason of her
avoiding such a monitress. The fact he had encountered made everything
hideously vivid and more vivid than anything else that just such another
pair of goggles was what would have been prescribed to Flora.

“I see--I see,” I presently rejoined. “What would become of Lord Iffield
if she were suddenly to come out in them? What indeed would become of
every one, what would become of _everything?_” This was an inquiry that
Dawling was evidently unprepared to meet, and I completed it by saying
at last: “My dear fellow, for that matter, what would become of _you?_”

Once more he turned on me his good green eyes. “Oh, I shouldn’t mind!”

The tone of his words somehow made his ugly face beautiful, and I felt
that there dated from this moment in my heart a confirmed affection for
him. None the less, at the same time, perversely and rudely, I became
aware of a certain drollery in our discussion of such alternatives. It
made me laugh out and say to him while I laughed: “You’d take her even
with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s?”

He remained mournfully grave; I could see that he was surprised at my
rude mirth. But he summoned back a vision of the lady at Folkestone and
conscientiously replied: “Even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum’s.”
 I begged him not to think my laughter in bad taste: it was only a
practical recognition of the fact that we had built a monstrous castle
in the air. Didn’t he see on what flimsy ground the structure rested?
The evidence was preposterously small. He believed the worst, but we
were utterly ignorant.

“I shall find out the truth,” he promptly replied.

“How can you? If you question her you’ll simply drive her to perjure
herself. Wherein after all does it concern you to know the truth? It’s
the girl’s own affair.”

“Then why did you tell me your story?”

I was a trifle embarrassed. “To warn you off,” I returned smiling. He
took no more notice of these words than presently to remark that Lord
Iffield had no serious intentions. “Very possibly,” I said. “But you
mustn’t speak as if Lord Iffield and you were her only alternatives.”

Dawling thought a moment. “Wouldn’t the people she has consulted give
some information? She must have been to people. How else can she have
been condemned?”

“Condemned to what? Condemned to perpetual nippers? Of course she has
consulted some of the big specialists, but she has done it, you may be
sure, in the most clandestine manner; and even if it were supposable
that they would tell you anything--which I altogether doubt--you would
have great difficulty in finding out which men they are. Therefore leave
it alone; never show her what you suspect.”

I even, before he quitted me, asked him to promise me this. “All right,
I promise,” he said gloomily enough. He was a lover who could tacitly
grant the proposition that there was no limit to the deceit his loved
one was ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I
could see that from this moment he would be filled with a passionate
pity ever so little qualified by a sense of the girl’s fatuity and
folly. She was always accessible to him--that I knew; for if she had
told him he was an idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have
resented the imputation of having failed to make it clear that she
would always be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of her
friends--what were all of them--but repudiated idiots? I was perfectly
aware that in her conversations and confidences I myself for instance
had a niche in the gallery. As regards poor Dawling I knew how often he
still called on the Hammond Synges. It was not there but under the
wing of the Floyd-Taylors that her intimacy with Lord Iffield most
flourished. At all events when a week after the visit I have just
summarised Flora’s name was one morning brought up to me I jumped at
the conclusion that Dawling had been with her and even I fear briefly
entertained the thought that he had broken his word.




IX

She left me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her
present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten
me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably
panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in
the world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest,
saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made
me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, she
had struck me as a creature of tragedy. In showing me the whole of her
folly it lifted the curtain of her misery. I don’t know how much she
meant to tell me when she came--I think she had had plans of elaborate
misrepresentation; at any rate she found it at the end of ten minutes
the simplest way to break down and sob, to be wretched and true. When
she had once begun to let herself go the movement took her off her feet:
the relief of it was like the cessation of a cramp. She shared in a word
her long secret; she shifted her sharp pain. She brought, I confess,
tears to my own eyes, tears of helpless tenderness for her helpless
poverty. Her visit however was not quite so memorable in itself as in
some of its consequences, the most immediate of which was that I went
that afternoon to see Geoffrey Dawling, who had in those days rooms
in Welbeck Street, where I presented myself at an hour late enough to
warrant the supposition that he might have come in. He had not come
in, but he was expected, and I was invited to enter and wait for him:
a lady, I was informed, was already in his sitting-room. I hesitated, a
little at a loss: it had wildly coursed through my brain that the
lady was perhaps Flora Saunt. But when I asked if she were young and
remarkably pretty I received so significant a “No, sir!” that I risked
an advance and after a minute in this manner found myself, to my
astonishment, face to face with Mrs. Meldrum. “Oh, you dear thing,” she
exclaimed, “I’m delighted to see you: you spare me another compromising
_démarche!_ But for this I should have called on you also. Know the
worst at once: if you see me here it’s at least deliberate--it’s
planned, plotted, shameless. I came up on purpose to see him; upon my
word, I’m in love with him. Why, if you valued my peace of mind, did
you let him, the other day at Folkestone, dawn upon my delighted eyes?
I took there in half an hour the most extraordinary fancy to him. With
a perfect sense of everything that can be urged against him, I find
him none the less the very pearl of men. However, I haven’t come up to
declare my passion--I’ve come to bring him news that will interest him
much more. Above all I’ve come to urge upon him to be careful.”

“About Flora Saunt?”

“About what he says and does: he must be as still as a mouse! She’s at
last really engaged.”

“But it’s a tremendous secret?” I was moved to merriment.

“Precisely: she telegraphed me this noon, and spent another shilling to
tell me that not a creature in the world is yet to know it.”

“She had better have spent it to tell you that she had just passed an
hour with the creature you see before you.”

“She has just passed an hour with every one in the place!” Mrs. Meldrum
cried. “They’ve vital reasons, she wired, for it’s not coming out for a
month. Then it will be formally announced, but meanwhile her happiness
is delirious. I daresay Mr. Dawling already knows, and he may, as it’s
nearly seven o’clock, have jumped off London Bridge; but an effect of
the talk I had with him the other day was to make me, on receipt of my
telegram, feel it to be my duty to warn him in person against taking
action, as it were, on the horrid certitude which I could see he carried
away with him. I had added somehow to that certitude. He told me what
you had told him you had seen in your shop.”

Mrs. Meldrum, I perceived, had come to Welbeck Street on an errand
identical with my own--a circumstance indicating her rare sagacity,
inasmuch as her ground for undertaking it was a very different thing
from what Flora’s wonderful visit had made of mine. I remarked to her
that what I had seen in the shop was sufficiently striking, but that
I had seen a great deal more that morning in my studio. “In short,” I
said, “I’ve seen everything.”

She was mystified. “Everything?”

“The poor creature is under the darkest of clouds. Oh, she came to
triumph, but she remained to talk something approaching to sense! She
put herself completely in my hands--she does me the honour to intimate
that of all her friends I’m the most disinterested. After she had
announced to me that Lord Iffield was bound hands and feet and that for
the present I was absolutely the only person in the secret, she arrived
at her real business. She had had a suspicion of me ever since the day,
at Folkestone, I asked her for the truth about her eyes. The truth is
what you and I both guessed. She has no end of a danger hanging over
her.”

“But from what cause? I, who by God’s mercy have kept mine, know
everything that can be known about eyes,” said Mrs. Meldrum.

“She might have kept hers if she had profited by God’s mercy, if she had
done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if
she hadn’t in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make
her behaviour a thing of fable. She may keep them still if she’ll
sacrifice--and after all so little--that purely superficial charm. She
must do as you’ve done; she must wear, dear lady, what you wear!”

What my companion wore glittered for the moment like a melon-frame in
August. “Heaven forgive her--now I understand!” She turned pale.

But I wasn’t afraid of the effect on her good nature of her thus seeing,
through her great goggles, why it had always been that Flora held her
at such a distance. “I can’t tell you,” I said, “from what special
affection, what state of the eye, her danger proceeds: that’s the
one thing she succeeded this morning in keeping from me. She knows it
herself perfectly; she has had the best advice in Europe. ‘It’s a thing
that’s awful, simply awful’--that was the only account she would give
me. Year before last, while she was at Boulogne, she went for three days
with Mrs. Floyd-Taylor to Paris. She there surreptitiously consulted
the greatest man--even Mrs. Floyd-Taylor doesn’t know. Last autumn, in
Germany, she did the same. ‘First put on certain special spectacles
with a straight bar in the middle: then we’ll talk’--that’s practically
what they say. What _she_ says is that she’ll put on anything in nature
when she’s married, but that she must get married first. She has always
meant to do everything as soon as she’s married. Then and then only
she’ll be safe. How will any one ever look at her if she makes herself
a fright? How could she ever have got engaged if she had made herself
a fright from the first? It’s no use to insist that with her beauty she
can never _be_ a fright. She said to me this morning, poor girl, the
most characteristic, the most harrowing things. ‘My face is all I
have--and _such_ a face! I knew from the first I could do anything with
it. But I needed it all--I need it still, every exquisite inch of it. It
isn’t as if I had a figure or anything else. Oh, if God had only given
me a figure too, I don’t say! Yes, with a figure, a really good one,
like Fanny Floyd-Taylor’s, who’s hideous, I’d have risked plain glasses.
_Que voulez-vous?_ No one is perfect.’ She says she still has money
left, but I don’t believe a word of it. She has been speculating on her
impunity, on the idea that her danger would hold off: she has literally
been running a race with it. Her theory has been, as you from the first
so clearly saw, that she’d get in ahead. She swears to me that though
the ‘bar’ is too cruel she wears when she’s alone what she has been
ordered to wear. But when the deuce is she alone? It’s herself of course
that she has swindled worst: she has put herself off, so insanely
that even her vanity but half accounts for it, with little inadequate
concessions, little false measures and preposterous evasions and
childish hopes. Her great terror is now that Iffield, who already has
suspicions, who has found out her pince-nez but whom she has beguiled
with some unblushing hocus-pocus, may discover the dreadful facts; and
the essence of what she wanted this morning was in that interest to
square me, to get me to deny indignantly and authoritatively (for isn’t
she my ‘favourite sitter’?) that she has anything whatever the matter
with any part of her. She sobbed, she ‘went on,’ she entreated; after we
got talking her extraordinary nerve left her and she showed me what she
has been through--showed me also all her terror of the harm I could do
her. ‘Wait till I’m married! wait till I’m married!’ She took hold of
me, she almost sank on her knees. It seems to me highly immoral, one’s
participation in her fraud; but there’s no doubt that she _must_ be
married: I don’t know what I don’t see behind it! Therefore,” I wound
up, “Dawling must keep his hands off.”

Mrs. Meldrum had held her breath; she exhaled a long moan. “Well, that’s
exactly what I came here to tell him.”

“Then here he is.” Our unconscious host had just opened the door.
Immensely startled at finding us he turned a frightened look from one
to the other, as if to guess what disaster we were there to announce or
avert.

Mrs. Meldrum, on the spot, was all gaiety. “I’ve come to return your
sweet visit. Ah,” she laughed, “I mean to keep up the acquaintance!”

“Do--do,” he murmured mechanically and absently, continuing to look at
us. Then abruptly he broke out: “He’s going to marry her.”

I was surprised. “You already know?”

He had had in his hand an evening newspaper; he tossed it down on the
table. “It’s in that.”

“Published--already?” I was still more surprised.

“Oh, Flora can’t keep a secret!” Mrs. Meldrum humorously declared. She
went up to poor Dawling and laid a motherly hand upon him. “It’s all
right--it’s just as it ought to be: don’t think about her ever any
more.” Then as he met this adjuration with a dismal stare in which the
thought of her was as abnormally vivid as the colour of the pupil, the
excellent woman put up her funny face and tenderly kissed him on the
cheek.




X

I have spoken of these reminiscences as of a row of coloured beads, and
I confess that as I continue to straighten out my chaplet I am rather
proud of the comparison. The beads are all there, as I said--they slip
along the string in their small, smooth roundness. Geoffrey Daw-ling
accepted like a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed;
in view of which I snatched a moment to murmur him a hint to offer Mrs.
Meldrum his hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that
marriage would henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the
street may strike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital.
Circumstances arising at this time promptly led to my making an absence
from England, and circumstances already existing offered him a solid
basis for similar action. He had after all the usual resource of a
Briton--he could take to his boats.

He started on a journey round the globe, and I was left with nothing but
my inference as to what might have happened. Later observation however
only confirmed my belief that if at any time during the couple of months
that followed Flora Saunt’s brilliant engagement he had made up, as
they say, to the good lady of Folkestone, that good lady would not have
pushed him over the cliff. Strange as she was to behold I knew of cases
in which she had been obliged to administer that shove. I went to New
York to paint a couple of portraits; but I found, once on the spot,
that I had counted without Chicago, where I was invited to blot out this
harsh discrimination by the production of no less than ten. I spent a
year in America and should probably have spent a second had I not been
summoned back to England by alarming news from my mother. Her
strength had failed, and as soon as I reached London I hurried down
to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offer a welcome to some
slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse, but she was now a
little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction in having
come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio, where arrears
of work had already met me, would be my place to await whatever might
next occur. Before returning to town however I had every reason to sally
forth in search of Mrs. Meldrum, from whom, in so many months, I had
not had a line, and my view of whom, with the adjacent objects, as I had
left them, had been intercepted by a luxuriant foreground.

Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming toward me
across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar twinkle of her
great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the autumn and the esplanade
was a blank I was free to acknowledge this signal by cutting a caper
on the grass. My enthusiasm dropped indeed the next moment, for it had
taken me but a few seconds to perceive that the person thus assaulted
had by no means the figure of my military friend. I felt a shock much
greater than any I should have thought possible as on this person’s
drawing near I identified her as poor little Flora Saunt. At what moment
Flora had recognised me belonged to an order of mysteries over which, it
quickly came home to me, one would never linger again: I could intensely
reflect that once we were face to face it chiefly mattered that I should
succeed in looking still more intensely unastonished. All I saw at first
was the big gold bar crossing each of her lenses, over which something
convex and grotesque, like the eyes of a large insect, something that
now represented her whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice
of a prison, to strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it
looked smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so
far as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to
this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she made no
motion to take my offered hand.

“I had no idea you were down here!” I exclaimed; and I wondered whether
she didn’t know me at all or knew me only by my voice.

“You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum,” she very quietly remarked.

It was the quietness itself that made me feel the necessity of an answer
almost violently gay. “Oh yes,” I laughed, “you have a tremendous deal
in common with Mrs. Meldrum! I’ve just returned to England after a long
absence and I’m on my way to see her. Won’t you come with me?” It struck
me that her old reason for keeping clear of our friend was well disposed
of now.

“I’ve just left her; I’m staying with her.” She stood solemnly fixing
me with her goggles. “Would you like to paint me _now?_” she asked. She
seemed to speak, with intense gravity, from behind a mask or a cage.

There was nothing to do but to treat the question with the same
exuberance. “It would be a fascinating little artistic problem!” That
something was wrong it was not difficult to perceive; but a good deal
more than met the eye might be presumed to be wrong if Flora was under
Mrs. Meldrum’s roof. I had not for a year had much time to think of her,
but my imagination had had sufficient warrant for lodging her in more
gilded halls. One of the last things I had heard before leaving England
was that in commemoration of the new relationship she had gone to stay
with Lady Considine. This had made me take everything else for
granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my ears to possible
contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction;
they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old
one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked
beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn’t as
yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off
this danger I harried her with questions about Mrs. Meldrum and, without
waiting for replies, became profuse on the subject of my own doings. My
companion was completely silent, and I felt both as if she were watching
my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony and as if I were talking
to some different, strange person. Flora plain and obscure and soundless
was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum’s door she turned off with the
observation that as there was certainly a great deal I should have to
say to our friend she had better not go in with me. I looked at her
again--I had been keeping my eyes away from her--but only to meet her
magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs. Meldrum alone,
but there was something so pitiful in the girl’s predicament that I
hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn’t
express a compassion without seeming to take too much wretchedness for
granted. I reflected that I must really figure to her as a fool, which
was an entertainment I had never expected to give her. It rolled over me
there for the first time--it has come back to me since--that there is,
strangely, in very deep misfortune a dignity finer even than in the most
inveterate habit of being all right. I couldn’t have to her the manner
of treating it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of
what, at our last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I
was trying to think of some manner that I _could_ have she said quite
colourlessly, yet somehow as if she might never see me again: “Goodbye.
I’m going to take my walk.”

“All alone?”

She looked round the great bleak cliff-top. “With whom should I go?
Besides, I like to be alone--for the present.”

This gave me the glimmer of a vision that she regarded her disfigurement
as temporary, and the confidence came to me that she would never, for
her happiness, cease to be a creature of illusions. It enabled me to
exclaim, smiling brightly and feeling indeed idiotic: “Oh, I shall see
you again! But I hope you’ll have a very pleasant walk.”

“All my walks are very pleasant, thank you--they do me such a lot
of good.” She was as quiet as a mouse, and her words seemed to me
stupendous in their wisdom. “I take several a day,” she continued. She
might have been an ancient woman responding with humility at the church
door to the patronage of the parson. “The more I take the better I feel.
I’m ordered by the doctors to keep all the while in the air and go in
for plenty of exercise. It keeps up my general health, you know, and if
that goes on improving as it has lately done everything will soon be all
right. All that was the matter with me before--and always; it was too
reckless!--was that I neglected my general health. It acts directly on
the state of the particular organ. So I’m going three miles.”

I grinned at her from the doorstep while Mrs. Meldrum’s maid stood there
to admit me. “Oh, I’m so glad,” I said, looking at her as she paced away
with the pretty flutter she had kept and remembering the day when, while
she rejoined Lord Iffield, I had indulged in the same observation. Her
air of assurance was on this occasion not less than it had been on that;
but I recalled that she had then struck me as marching off to her doom.
Was she really now marching away from it?




XI

As soon as I saw Mrs. Meldrum I broke out to her. “Is there anything in
it? _Is_ her general health--?”

Mrs. Meldrum interrupted me with her great amused blare. “You’ve already
seen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What’s ‘in it’ is what
has been in everything she has ever done--the most comical, tragical
belief in herself. She thinks she’s doing a ‘cure.’”

“And what does her husband think?”

“Her husband? What husband?”

“Hasn’t she then married Lord Iffield?”

“_Vous-en-êtes là?_” cried my hostess. “He behaved like a regular
beast.”

“How should I know? You never wrote to me.”

Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me with what poor Flora called the
particular organ. “No, I didn’t write to you; and I abstained on
purpose. If I didn’t I thought you mightn’t, over there, hear what
had happened. If you should hear I was afraid you would stir up Mr.
Dawling.”

“Stir him up?”

“Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another
chance for him.”

“I wouldn’t have done it,” I said.

“Well,” Mrs. Meldrum replied, “it was not my business to give you an
opportunity.”

“In short you were afraid of it.”

Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thought
she considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out. Then “I was
afraid of it!” she very honestly answered.

“But doesn’t he know? Has he given no sign?”

“Every sign in life--he came straight back to her. He did everything to
get her to listen to him; but she hasn’t the smallest idea of it.”

“Has he seen her as she is now?” I presently and just a trifle awkwardly
inquired.

“Indeed he has, and borne it like a hero. He told me all about it.”

“How much you’ve all been through!” I ventured to ejaculate. “Then what
has become of him?”

“He’s at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe
by this time his old sisters. It’s not half a bad little place.”

“Yet its attractions say nothing to Flora?”

“Oh, Flora’s by no means on her back!” my interlocutress laughed.

“She’s not on her back because she’s on yours. Have you got her for the
rest of your life?”

Once more my hostess genially glared at me. “Did she tell you how much
the Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty
pounds a year.”

“That’s a good deal, but it won’t pay the oculist. What was it that at
last induced her to submit to him?”

“Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield’s rupture. She
cried her eyes out--she passed through a horror of black darkness. Then
came a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She went
into goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic Church.”

“Yet you don’t think she’ll be saved?”

“_She_ thinks she will--that’s all I can tell you. There’s no doubt that
when once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as she calls
it, she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known. That feeling,
very new and in spite of what she pays for it most refreshing, has
given her something to hold on by, begotten in her foolish little mind
a belief that, as she says, she’s on the mend and that in the course of
time, if she leads a tremendously healthy life, she’ll be able to take
off her muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her
going.”

“And what keeps _you?_ You’re good until the parties begin again.”

“Oh, she doesn’t object to me now!” smiled Mrs. Meldrum. “I’m going
to take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair.” I was struck with this
energy and after a moment I inquired the reason of it. “It’s to divert
her mind,” my friend replied, reddening again, I thought, a little. “We
shall go next week: I’ve only waited, to start, to see how your mother
would be.” I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her extraordinary
merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora’s fancying herself
still in a situation not to jump at the chance of marrying a man like
Dawling. “She says he’s too ugly; she says he’s too dreary; she says in
fact he’s ‘nobody,’” Mrs. Meldrum pursued. “She says above all that he’s
not ‘her own sort.’ She doesn’t deny that he’s good, but she insists on
the fact that he’s grotesque. He’s quite the last person she would ever
dream of.” I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest that if the
girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had perhaps served
her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just how her noble
suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and I asked
a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him the
invidious epithet I have already quoted. What had happened was simply
that Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the attempt to
put him off with an uncandid account of her infirmity and that his
lordship’s interest in her had not been proof against the discovery of
the way she had practised on him. Her dissimulation, he was obliged to
perceive, had been infernally deep. The future in short assumed a new
complexion for him when looked at through the grim glasses of a bride
who, as he had said to some one, couldn’t really, when you came to find
out, see her hand before her face. He had conducted himself like any
other jockeyed customer--he had returned the animal as unsound. He had
backed out in his own way, giving the business, by some sharp shuffle,
such a turn as to make the rupture ostensibly Flora’s, but he had none
the less remorselessly and basely backed out. He had cared for her
lovely face, cared for it in the amused and haunted way it had been her
poor little delusive gift to make men care; and her lovely face, damn
it, with the monstrous gear she had begun to rig upon it, was just what
had let him in. He had in the judgment of his family done everything
that could be expected of him; he had made--Mrs. Meldrum had herself
seen the letter--a “handsome” offer of pecuniary compensation. Oh, if
Flora, with her incredible buoyancy, was in a manner on her feet again
now, it was not that she had not for weeks and weeks been prone in the
dust. Strange were the humiliations, the prostrations it was given to
some natures to survive. That Flora had survived was perhaps after all
a sort of sign that she was reserved for some final mercy. “But she has
been in the abysses at any rate,” said Mrs. Meldrum, “and I really don’t
think I can tell you what pulled her through.”

“I think I can tell _you_,” I said. “What in the world but Mrs.
Meldrum?”

At the end of an hour Flora had not come in, and I was obliged to
announce that I should have but time to reach the station, where, in
charge of my mother’s servant, I was to find my luggage. Mrs. Meldrum
put before me the question of waiting till a later train, so as not
to lose our young lady; but I confess I gave this alternative a
consideration less profound than I pretended. Somehow I didn’t care if I
did lose our young lady. Now that I knew the worst that had befallen
her it struck me still less as possible to meet her on the ground of
condolence; and with the melancholy aspect she wore to me what other
ground was left? I lost her, but I caught my train. In truth she was
so changed that one hated to see it; and now that she was in charitable
hands one didn’t feel compelled to make great efforts. I had studied
her face for a particular beauty; I had lived with that beauty and
reproduced it; but I knew what belonged to my trade well enough to be
sure it was gone for ever.




XII

I was soon called back to Folkestone; but Mrs. Meldrum and her young
friend had already left England, finding to that end every convenience
on the spot and not having had to come up to town. My thoughts however
were so painfully engaged there that I should in any case have had
little attention for them: the event occurred that was to bring my
series of visits to a close. When this high tide had ebbed I returned to
America and to my interrupted work, which had opened out on such a scale
that, with a deep plunge into a great chance, I was three good years in
rising again to the surface. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in the
American depths: they may have had something to do with the duration of
my dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanour--the fact
that after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She had
written to me from Florence after my mother’s death and had mentioned
in a postscript that in our young lady’s calculations the lowest numbers
were now Italian counts. This was a good omen, and if in subsequent
letters there was no news of a sequel I was content to accept small
things and to believe that grave tidings, should there be any, would
come to me in due course. The gravity of what might happen to a
featherweight became indeed with time and distance less appreciable,
and I was not without an impression that Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of
proportion was not the least of her merits, had no idea of boring the
world with the ups and downs of her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky
and dim, a small fitful memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable
consciousness of how kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was
professionally more preoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms
of pretty faces in my eyes and a chorus of high voices in my ears.
Geoffrey Dawling had on his return to England written me two or three
letters: his last information had been that he was going into the
figures of rural illiteracy. I was delighted to receive it and had no
doubt that if he should go into figures they would, as they are said to
be able to prove anything, prove at least that my advice was sound and
that he had wasted time enough. This quickened on my part another hope,
a hope suggested by some roundabout rumour--I forget how it reached
me--that he was engaged to a girl down in Hampshire. He turned out not
to be, but I felt sure that if only he went into figures deep enough
he would become, among the girls down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of
those numerous prizes of battle whose defences are practically not on
the scale of their provocations. I nursed in short the thought that it
was probably open to him to become one of the types as to which, as the
years go on, frivolous and superficial spectators lose themselves in the
wonder that they ever succeeded in winning even the least winsome mates.
He never alluded to Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence about
her, quite as in Mrs. Meldrum’s, an element of instinctive tact, a brief
implication that if you didn’t happen to have been in love with her she
was not an inevitable topic.

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of which I
had always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for the first act
of “Lohengrin,” but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself
up to it with no more than a glance at the house. When it was over I
treated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a general
survey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections,
pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored
to London. There was a certain proportion of pretty women, but I
suddenly became aware that one of these was far prettier than the
others. This lady, alone in one of the smaller receptacles of the grand
tier and already the aim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained
with admirable serenity--this single exquisite figure, placed in the
quarter furthest removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately
felt, to cause one’s curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with
diamonds in her hair and pearls on her neck, she had a pale radiance
of beauty which even at that distance made her a distinguished presence
and, with the air that easily attaches to lonely loveliness in public
places, an agreeable mystery. A mystery however she remained to me only
for a minute after I had levelled my glass at her: I feel to this moment
the startled thrill, the shock almost of joy with which I suddenly
encountered in her vague brightness a rich revival of Flora Saunt. I say
a revival because, to put it crudely, I had on that last occasion left
poor Flora for dead. At present perfectly alive again, she was altered
only, as it were, by resurrection. A little older, a little quieter,
a little finer and a good deal fairer, she was simply transfigured by
recovery. Sustained by the reflection that even recovery wouldn’t enable
her to distinguish me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then
it was it came home to me that my vision of her in her great goggles
had been cruelly final. As her beauty was all there was of her, that
machinery had extinguished her, and so far as I had thought of her
in the interval I had thought of her as buried in the tomb her stern
specialist had built. With the sense that she had escaped from it came a
lively wish to return to her; and if I didn’t straightway leave my place
and rush round the theatre and up to her box it was because I was fixed
to the spot some moments longer by the simple inability to cease looking
at her.

She had been from the first of my seeing her practically motionless,
leaning back in her chair with a kind of thoughtful grace and with her
eyes vaguely directed, as it seemed to me, to one of the boxes on my
side of the house and consequently over my head and out of my sight. The
only movement she made for some time was to finger with an ungloved
hand and as if with the habit of fondness the row of pearls on her neck,
which my glass showed me to be large and splendid. Her diamonds and
pearls, in her solitude, mystified me, making me, as she had had no such
brave jewels in the days of the Hammond Synges, wonder what undreamt-of
improvement had taken place in her fortunes. The ghost of a question
hovered there a moment: could anything so prodigious have happened as
that on her tested and proved amendment Lord Iffield had taken her back?
This could not have occurred without my hearing of it; and moreover if
she had become a person of such fashion where was the little court one
would naturally see at her elbow? Her isolation was puzzling, though it
could easily suggest that she was but momentarily alone. If she had come
with Mrs. Meldrum that lady would have taken advantage of the interval
to pay a visit to some other box--doubtless the box at which Flora had
just been looking. Mrs. Meldrum didn’t account for the jewels, but the
refreshment of Flora’s beauty accounted for anything. She presently
moved her eyes over the house, and I felt them brush me again like the
wings of a dove. I don’t know what quick pleasure flickered into the
hope that she would at last see me. She did see me: she suddenly bent
forward to take up the little double-barrelled ivory glass that rested
on the edge of the box and, to all appearance, fix me with it. I smiled
from my place straight up at the searching lenses, and after an instant
she dropped them and smiled as straight back at me. Oh, her smile: it
was her old smile, her young smile, her peculiar smile made perfect! I
instantly left my stall and hurried off for a nearer view of it; quite
flushed, I remember, as I went, with the annoyance of having happened to
think of the idiotic way I had tried to paint her. Poor Iffield with his
sample of that error, and still poorer Dawling in particular with his!
I hadn’t touched her, I was professionally humiliated, and as the
attendant in the lobby opened her box for me I felt that the very first
thing I should have to say to her would be that she must absolutely sit
to me again.




XIII

She gave me the smile once more as over her shoulder, from her chair,
she turned her face to me. “Here you are again!” she exclaimed with her
disgloved hand put up a little backward for me to take. I dropped into
a chair just behind her and, having taken it and noted that one of the
curtains of the box would make the demonstration sufficiently private,
bent my lips over it and impressed them on its finger-tips. It was given
me however, to my astonishment, to feel next that all the privacy in
the world couldn’t have sufficed to mitigate the start with which she
greeted this free application of my moustache: the blood had jumped
to her face, she quickly recovered her hand and jerked at me, twisting
herself round, a vacant, challenging stare. During the next few instants
several extraordinary things happened, the first of which was that now
I was close to them the eyes of loveliness I had come up to look into
didn’t show at all the conscious light I had just been pleased to
see them flash across the house: they showed on the contrary, to my
confusion, a strange, sweet blankness, an expression I failed to give a
meaning to until, without delay, I felt on my arm, directed to it as if
instantly to efface the effect of her start, the grasp of the hand she
had impulsively snatched from me. It was the irrepressible question
in this grasp that stopped on my lips all sound of salutation. She had
mistaken my entrance for that of another person, a pair of lips without
a moustache. She was feeling me to see who I was! With the perception of
this and of her not seeing me I sat gaping at her and at the wild
word that didn’t come, the right word to express or to disguise my
stupefaction. What was the right word to commemorate one’s sudden
discovery, at the very moment too at which one had been most encouraged
to count on better things, that one’s dear old friend had gone blind?
Before the answer to this question dropped upon me--and the moving
moments, though few, seemed many--I heard, with the sound of voices, the
click of the attendant’s key on the other side of the door. Poor Flora
heard also, and with the hearing, still with her hand on my arm, she
brightened again as I had a minute since seen her brighten across the
house: she had the sense of the return of the person she had taken me
for--the person with the right pair of lips, as to whom I was for that
matter much more in the dark than she. I gasped, but my word had come:
if she had lost her sight it was in this very loss that she had found
again her beauty. I managed to speak while we were still alone, before
her companion had appeared. “You’re lovelier at this day than you
have ever been in your life!” At the sound of my voice and that of the
opening of the door her excitement broke into audible joy. She sprang
up, recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a
gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: “He has
come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he says of
me!” The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it best to
let him hear on the spot. “How beautiful she is, my dear man--but how
extraordinarily beautiful! More beautiful at this hour than ever, ever
before!”

It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush up to his
eyes; while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened astonishment,
a blessed snap of the strain that I had been under for some moments. I
wanted to embrace them both, and while the opening bars of another
scene rose from the orchestra I almost did embrace Dawling, whose
first emotion on beholding me had visibly and ever so oddly been a
consciousness of guilt. I had caught him somehow in the act, though that
was as yet all I knew; but by the time we had sunk noiselessly into
our chairs again (for the music was supreme, Wagner passed first) my
demonstration ought pretty well to have given him the limit of the
criticism he had to fear. I myself indeed, while the opera blazed, was
only too afraid he might divine in our silent closeness the very moral
of my optimism, which was simply the comfort I had gathered from seeing
that if our companion’s beauty lived again her vanity partook of its
life. I had hit on the right note--that was what eased me off: it drew
all pain for the next half-hour from the sense of the deep darkness
in which the stricken woman sat there. If the music, in that darkness,
happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unison with
those of a gratified passion. A great deal came and went between us
without profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at the end of
twenty minutes as if I knew almost everything he might in kindness have
to tell me; knew even why Flora, while I stared at her from the stalls,
had misled me by the use of ivory and crystal and by appearing to
recognise me and smile. She leaned back in her chair in luxurious ease:
I had from the first become aware that the way she fingered her pearls
was a sharp image of the wedded state. Nothing of old had seemed wanting
to her assurance; but I hadn’t then dreamed of the art with which she
would wear that assurance as a married woman. She had taken him when
everything had failed; he had taken her when she herself had done so.
His embarrassed eyes confessed it all, confessed the deep peace he found
in it. They only didn’t tell me why he had not written to me, nor clear
up as yet a minor obscurity. Flora after a while again lifted the glass
from the ledge of the box and elegantly swept the house with it. Then,
by the mere instinct of her grace, a motion but half conscious, she
inclined her head into the void with the sketch of a salute, producing,
I could see, a perfect imitation of a response to some homage. Dawling
and I looked at each other again: the tears came into his eyes. She
was playing at perfection still, and her misfortune only simplified the
process.

I recognised that this was as near as I should ever come, certainly as
I should come that night, to pressing on her misfortune. Neither of us
would name it more than we were doing then, and Flora would never name
it at all. Little by little I perceived that what had occurred was,
strange as it might appear, the best thing for her happiness. The
question was now only of her beauty and her being seen and marvelled at:
with Dawling to do for her everything in life her activity was limited
to that. Such an activity was all within her scope: it asked nothing
of her that she couldn’t splendidly give. As from time to time in our
delicate communion she turned her face to me with the parody of a look
I lost none of the signs of its strange new glory. The expression of
the eyes was a bit of pastel put in by a master’s thumb; the whole head,
stamped with a sort of showy suffering, had gained a fineness from what
she had passed through. Yes, Flora was settled for life--nothing could
hurt her further. I foresaw the particular praise she would mostly
incur--she would be incomparably “interesting.” She would charm with
her pathos more even than she had charmed with her pleasure. For herself
above all she was fixed for ever, rescued from all change and ransomed
from all doubt. Her old certainties, her old vanities were justified
and sanctified, and in the darkness that had closed upon her one
object remained clear. That object, as unfading as a mosaic mask, was
fortunately the loveliest she could possibly look upon. The greatest
blessing of all was of course that Dawling thought so. Her future was
ruled with the straightest line, and so for that matter was his. There
were two facts to which before I left my friends I gave time to sink
into my spirit. One of them was that he had changed by some process as
effective as Flora’s change; had been simplified somehow into service as
she had been simplified into success. He was such a picture of inspired
intervention as I had never yet encountered: he would exist henceforth
for the sole purpose of rendering unnecessary, or rather impossible,
any reference even on her own part to his wife’s infirmity. Oh yes, how
little desire he would ever give _me_ to refer to it! He principally
after a while made me feel--and this was my second lesson--that,
good-natured as he was, my being there to see it all oppressed him; so
that by the time the act ended I recognised that I too had filled out my
hour. Dawling remembered things; I think he caught in my very face the
irony of old judgments: they made him thresh about in his chair. I said
to Flora as I took leave of her that I would come to see her; but I may
mention that I never went. I’ll go to-morrow if I hear she wants me; but
what in the world can she ever want? As I quitted them I laid my hand on
Dawling’s arm and drew him for a moment into the lobby.

“Why did you never write to me of your marriage?”

He smiled uncomfortably, showing his long yellow teeth and something
more. “I don’t know--the whole thing gave me such a tremendous lot to
do.”

This was the first dishonest speech I had heard him make: he really
hadn’t written to me because he had an idea I would think him a still
bigger fool than before. I didn’t insist, but I tried there, in the
lobby, so far as a pressure of his hand could serve me, to give him a
notion of what I thought him. “I can’t at any rate make out,” I said,
“why I didn’t hear from Mrs. Meldrum.”

“She didn’t write to you?”

“Never a word. What has become of her?”

“I think she’s at Folkestone,” Dawling returned; “but I’m sorry to say
that practically she has ceased to see us.”

“You haven’t quarrelled with her?”

“How _could_ we? Think of all we owe her. At the time of our marriage,
and for months before, she did everything for us: I don’t know how we
should have managed without her. But since then she has never been near
us and has given us rather markedly little encouragement to try and keep
up our relations with her.”

I was struck with this though of course I admit I am struck with all
sorts of things. “Well,” I said after a moment, “even if I could imagine
a reason for that attitude it wouldn’t explain why she shouldn’t have
taken account of _my_ natural interest.”

“Just so.” Dawling’s face was a windowless wall. He could contribute
nothing to the mystery, and, quitting him, I carried it away. It was not
till I went down to see Mrs. Meldrum that it was really dispelled. She
didn’t want to hear of them or to talk of them, not a bit, and it was
just in the same spirit that she hadn’t wanted to write of them. She had
done everything in the world for them, but now, thank heaven, the hard
business was over. After I had taken this in, which I was quick to do,
we quite avoided the subject. She simply couldn’t bear it.




THE NEXT TIME

Mrs. Highmore’s errand this morning was odd enough to deserve
commemoration: she came to ask me to write a notice of her great
forthcoming work. Her great works have come forth so frequently without
my assistance that I was sufficiently entitled on this occasion to
open my eyes; but what really made me stare was the ground on which her
request reposed, and what leads me to record the incident is the train
of memory lighted by that explanation. Poor Ray Limbert, while we
talked, seemed to sit there between us: she reminded me that my
acquaintance with him had begun, eighteen years ago, with her having
come in precisely as she came in this morning to bespeak my charity for
him. If she didn’t know then how little my charity was worth she is at
least enlightened about it to-day, and this is just the circumstance
that makes the drollery of her visit. As I hold up the torch to the
dusky years--by which I mean as I cipher up with a pen that stumbles
and stops the figured column of my reminiscences--I see that Limbert’s
public hour, or at least my small apprehension of it, is rounded by
those two occasions. It was _finis_, with a little moralising flourish,
that Mrs. Highmore seemed to trace to-day at the bottom of the page.
“One of the most voluminous writers of the time,” she has often repeated
this sign; but never, I daresay, in spite of her professional command
of appropriate emotion, with an equal sense of that mystery and that
sadness of things which to people of imagination generally hover over
the close of human histories. This romance at any rate is bracketed by
her early and her late appeal; and when its melancholy protrusions had
caught the declining light again from my half-hour’s talk with her I
took a private vow to recover while that light still lingers something
of the delicate flush, to pick out with a brief patience the perplexing
lesson.

It was wonderful to observe how for herself Mrs. Highmore had already
done so: she wouldn’t have hesitated to announce to me what was the
matter with Ralph Limbert, or at all events to give me a glimpse of the
high admonition she had read in his career. There could have been no
better proof of the vividness of this parable, which we were really in
our pleasant sympathy quite at one about, than that Mrs. Highmore, of
all hardened sinners, should have been converted. This indeed was not
news to me: she impressed upon me that for the last ten years she had
wanted to do something artistic, something as to which she was prepared
not to care a rap whether or no it should sell. She brought home to me
further that it had been mainly seeing what her brother-in-law did and
how he did it that had wedded her to this perversity. As _he_ didn’t
sell, dear soul, and as several persons, of whom I was one, thought
highly of that, the fancy had taken her--taken her even quite early
in her prolific course--of reaching, if only once, the same heroic
eminence. She yearned to be, like Limbert, but of course only once, an
exquisite failure. There was something a failure was, a failure in the
market, that a success somehow wasn’t. A success was as prosaic as a
good dinner: there was nothing more to be said about it than that you
had had it. Who but vulgar people, in such a case, made gloating remarks
about the courses? It was often by such vulgar people that a success was
attested. It made if you came to look at it nothing but money; that
is it made so much that any other result showed small in comparison. A
failure now could make--oh, with the aid of immense talent of course,
for there were failures and failures--such a reputation! She did me
the honour--she had often done it--to intimate that what she meant by
reputation was seeing _me_ toss a flower. If it took a failure to catch
a failure I was by my own admission well qualified to place the laurel.
It was because she had made so much money and Mr. Highmore had taken
such care of it that she could treat herself to an hour of pure glory.
She perfectly remembered that as often as I had heard her heave that
sigh I had been prompt with my declaration that a book sold might easily
be as glorious as a book unsold. Of course she knew this, but she knew
also that it was the age of trash triumphant and that she had never
heard me speak of anything that had “done well” exactly as she had
sometimes heard me speak of something that hadn’t--with just two or
three words of respect which, when I used them, seemed to convey more
than they commonly stood for, seemed to hush up the discussion a little,
as if for the very beauty of the secret.

I may declare in regard to these allusions that, whatever I then thought
of myself as a holder of the scales I had never scrupled to laugh out
at the humour of Mrs. Highmore’s pursuit of quality at any price. It had
never rescued her even for a day from the hard doom of popularity, and
though I never gave her my word for it there was no reason at all why
it should. The public _would_ have her, as her husband used roguishly
to remark; not indeed that, making her bargains, standing up to her
publishers and even, in his higher flights, to her reviewers, he ever
had a glimpse of her attempted conspiracy against her genius, or rather
as I may say against mine. It was not that when she tried to be what
she called subtle (for wasn’t Limbert subtle, and wasn’t I?) her fond
consumers, bless them, didn’t suspect the trick nor show what they
thought of it: they straightway rose on the contrary to the morsel she
had hoped to hold too high, and, making but a big, cheerful bite of it,
wagged their great collective tail artlessly for more. It was not
given to her not to please, nor granted even to her best refinements to
affright. I have always respected the mystery of those humiliations, but
I was fully aware this morning that they were practically the reason
why she had come to me. Therefore when she said with the flush of a
bold joke in her kind, coarse face “What I feel is, you know, that _you_
could settle me if you only would.” I knew quite well what she meant. She
meant that of old it had always appeared to be the fine blade, as some
one had hyperbolically called it, of my particular opinion that snapped
the silken thread by which Limbert’s chance in the market was wont to
hang. She meant that my favour was compromising, that my praise indeed
was fatal. I had made myself a little specialty of seeing nothing in
certain celebrities, of seeing overmuch in an occasional nobody, and of
judging from a point of view that, say what I would for it (and I had a
monstrous deal to say) remained perverse and obscure. Mine was in short
the love that killed, for my subtlety, unlike Mrs. Highmore’s, produced
no tremor of the public tail. She had not forgotten how, toward the
end, when his case was worst, Limbert would absolutely come to me with
a funny, shy pathos in his eyes and say: “My dear fellow, I think I’ve
done it this time, if you’ll only keep quiet.” If my keeping quiet in
those days was to help him to appear to have hit the usual taste, for
the want of which he was starving, so now my breaking out was to help
Mrs. Highmore to appear to have hit the unusual.

The moral of all this was that I had frightened the public too much for
our late friend, but that as she was not starving this was exactly
what her grosser reputation required. And then, she good-naturedly and
delicately intimated, there would always be, if further reasons were
wanting, the price of my clever little article. I think she gave that
hint with a flattering impression--spoiled child of the booksellers as
she is--that the price of my clever little articles is high. Whatever it
is, at any rate, she had evidently reflected that poor Limbert’s
anxiety for his own profit used to involve my sacrificing mine. Any
inconvenience that my obliging her might entail would not in fine be
pecuniary. Her appeal, her motive, her fantastic thirst for quality and
her ingenious theory of my influence struck me all as excellent comedy,
and when I consented contingently to oblige her she left me the sheets
of her new novel. I could plead no inconvenience and have been looking
them over; but I am frankly appalled at what she expects of me. What
is she thinking of, poor dear, and what has put it into her head that
“quality” has descended upon her? Why does she suppose that she has been
“artistic”? She hasn’t been anything whatever, I surmise, that she has
not inveterately been. What does she imagine she has left out? What
does she conceive she has put in? She has neither left out nor put
in anything. I shall have to write her an embarrassed note. The book
doesn’t exist, and there’s nothing in life to say about it. How can
there be anything but the same old faithful rush for it?




I

This rush had already begun when, early in the seventies, in the
interest of her prospective brother-in-law, she approached me on the
singular ground of the unencouraged sentiment I had entertained for her
sister. Pretty pink Maud had cast me out, but I appear to have passed in
the flurried little circle for a magnanimous youth. Pretty pink Maud,
so lovely then, before her troubles, that dusky Jane was gratefully
conscious of all she made up for, Maud Stannace, very literary too,
very languishing and extremely bullied by her mother, had yielded,
invidiously as it might have struck me, to Ray Limbert’s suit, which
Mrs. Stannace was not the woman to stomach. Mrs. Stannace was seldom the
woman to do anything: she had been shocked at the way her children, with
the grubby taint of their father’s blood (he had published pale Remains
or flat Conversations of _his_ father) breathed the alien air of
authorship. If not the daughter, nor even the niece, she was, if I am
not mistaken, the second cousin of a hundred earls and a great stickler
for relationship, so that she had other views for her brilliant child,
especially after her quiet one (such had been her original discreet
forecast of the producer of eighty volumes) became the second wife of an
ex-army-surgeon, already the father of four children. Mrs. Stannace had
too manifestly dreamed it would be given to pretty pink Maud to detach
some one of the hundred, who wouldn’t be missed, from the cluster. It
was because she cared only for cousins that I unlearnt the way to
her house, which she had once reminded me was one of the few paths of
gentility I could hope to tread. Ralph Limbert, who belonged to nobody
and had done nothing--nothing even at Cambridge--had only the uncanny
spell he had cast upon her younger daughter to recommend him; but if her
younger daughter had a spark of filial feeling she wouldn’t commit the
indecency of deserting for his sake a deeply dependent and intensely
aggravated mother.

These things I learned from Jane Highmore, who, as if her books had been
babies (they remained her only ones) had waited till after marriage
to show what she could do and now bade fair to surround her satisfied
spouse (he took for some mysterious reason, a part of the credit) with a
little family, in sets of triplets, which properly handled would be the
support of his declining years. The young couple, neither of whom had
a penny, were now virtually engaged: the thing was subject to Ralph’s
putting his hand on some regular employment. People more enamoured
couldn’t be conceived, and Mrs. Highmore, honest woman, who had moreover
a professional sense for a love-story, was eager to take them under her
wing. What was wanted was a decent opening for Limbert, which it had
occurred to her I might assist her to find, though indeed I had not yet
found any such matter for myself. But it was well known that I was too
particular, whereas poor Ralph, with the easy manners of genius, was
ready to accept almost anything to which a salary, even a small one, was
attached. If he could only for instance get a place on a newspaper the
rest of his maintenance would come freely enough. It was true that his
two novels, one of which she had brought to leave with me, had passed
unperceived and that to her, Mrs. Highmore personally, they didn’t
irresistibly appeal; but she could all the same assure me that I should
have only to spend ten minutes with him (and our encounter must speedily
take place) to receive an impression of latent power.

Our encounter took place soon after I had read the volumes Mrs. Highmore
had left with me, in which I recognised an intention of a sort that
I had then pretty well given up the hope of meeting. I daresay that
without knowing it I had been looking out rather hungrily for an altar
of sacrifice: however that may be I submitted when I came across Ralph
Limbert to one of the rarest emotions of my literary life, the sense
of an activity in which I could critically rest. The rest was deep and
salutary, and it has not been disturbed to this hour. It has been
a long, large surrender, the luxury of dropped discriminations. He
couldn’t trouble me, whatever he did, for I practically enjoyed him as
much when he was worse as when he was better. It was a case, I suppose,
of natural prearrangement, in which, I hasten to add, I keep excellent
company. We are a numerous band, partakers of the same repose, who sit
together in the shade of the tree, by the plash of the fountain, with
the glare of the desert around us and no great vice that I know of but
the habit perhaps of estimating people a little too much by what they
think of a certain style. If it had been laid upon these few pages,
none the less, to be the history of an enthusiasm, I should not have
undertaken them: they are concerned with Ralph Limbert in relations to
which I was a stranger or in which I participated only by sympathy. I
used to talk about his work, but I seldom talk now: the brotherhood of
the faith have become, like the Trappists, a silent order. If to the
day of his death, after mortal disenchantments, the impression he first
produced always evoked the word “ingenuous,” those to whom his face was
familiar can easily imagine what it must have been when it still had the
light of youth. I had never seen a man of genius look so passive, a man
of experience so off his guard. At the period I made his acquaintance
this freshness was all un-brushed. His foot had begun to stumble, but he
was full of big intentions and of sweet Maud Stannace. Black-haired and
pale, deceptively languid, he had the eyes of a clever child and the
voice of a bronze bell. He saw more even than I had done in the girl
he was engaged to; as time went on I became conscious that we had both,
properly enough, seen rather more than there was. Our odd situation,
that of the three of us, became perfectly possible from the moment I
observed that he had more patience with her than I should have had. I
was happy at not having to supply this quantity, and she, on her side,
found pleasure in being able to be impertinent to me without incurring
the reproach of a bad wife.

Limbert’s novels appeared to have brought him no money: they had only
brought him, so far as I could then make out, tributes that took up his
time. These indeed brought him from several quarters some other things,
and on my part at the end of three months _The Blackport Beacon_. I
don’t to-day remember how I obtained for him the London correspondence
of the great northern organ, unless it was through somebody’s having
obtained it for myself. I seem to recall that I got rid of it in
Limbert’s interest, persuaded the editor that he was much the better
man. The better man was naturally the man who had pledged himself
to support a charming wife. We were neither of us good, as the event
proved, but he had a finer sort of badness. _The Blackport
Beacon_ had two London correspondents--one a supposed haunter of
political circles, the other a votary of questions sketchily classified
as literary. They were both expected to be lively, and what was held out
to each was that it was honourably open to him to be livelier than the
other. I recollect the political correspondent of that period and how
the problem offered to Ray Limbert was to try to be livelier than Pat
Moyle. He had not yet seemed to me so candid as when he undertook this
exploit, which brought matters to a head with Mrs. Stannace, inasmuch
as her opposition to the marriage now logically fell to the ground. It’s
all tears and laughter as I look back upon that admirable time, in which
nothing was so romantic as our intense vision of the real. No
fool’s paradise ever rustled such a cradle-song. It was anything but
Bohemia--it was the very temple of Mrs. Grundy. We knew we were too
critical, and that made us sublimely indulgent; we believed we did our
duty or wanted to, and that made us free to dream. But we dreamed over
the multiplication-table; we were nothing if not practical. Oh, the long
smokes and sudden ideas, the knowing hints and banished scruples! The
great thing was for Limbert to bring out his next book, which was just
what his delightful engagement with the _Beacon_ would give him
leisure and liberty to do. The kind of work, all human and elastic
and suggestive, was capital experience: in picking up things for
his bi-weekly letter he would pick up life as well, he would pick
up literature. The new publications, the new pictures, the new
people--there would be nothing too novel for us and nobody too
sacred. We introduced everything and everybody into Mrs. Stannace’s
drawing-room, of which I again became a familiar.

Mrs. Stannace, it was true, thought herself in strange company; she
didn’t particularly mind the new books, though some of them seemed
queer enough, but to the new people she had decided objections. It was
notorious however that poor Lady Robeck secretly wrote for one of the
papers, and the thing had certainly, in its glance at the doings of the
great world, a side that might be made attractive. But we were going to
make every side attractive, and we had everything to say about the sort
of thing a paper like the _Beacon_ would want. To give it what it would
want and to give it nothing else was not doubtless an inspiring, but it
was a perfectly respectable task, especially for a man with an appealing
bride and a contentious mother-in-law. I thought Lambert’s first letters
as charming as the type allowed, though I won’t deny that in spite of my
sense of the importance of concessions I was just a trifle disconcerted
at the way he had caught the tone. The tone was of course to be caught,
but need it have been caught so in the act? The creature was even
cleverer, as Maud Stannace said, than she had ventured to hope. Verily
it was a good thing to have a dose of the wisdom of the serpent. If it
had to be journalism--well, it _was_ journalism. If he had to be “chatty
“--well, he _was_ chatty. Now and then he made a hit that--it was stupid
of me--brought the blood to my face. I hated him to be so personal; but
still, if it would make his fortune--! It wouldn’t of course directly,
but the book would, practically and in the sense to which our pure ideas
of fortune were confined; and these things were all for the book.
The daily balm meanwhile was in what one knew of the book--there were
exquisite things to know; in the quiet monthly cheques from Blackport
and in the deeper rose of Maud’s little preparations, which were as
dainty, on their tiny scale, as if she had been a humming-bird building
a nest. When at the end of three months her betrothed had fairly settled
down to his correspondence--in which Mrs. Highmore was the only person,
so far as we could discover, disappointed, even she moreover being in
this particular tortuous and possibly jealous; when the situation
had assumed such a comfortable shape it was quite time to prepare.
I published at that moment my first volume, mere faded ink to-day, a
little collection of literary impressions, odds and ends of criticism
contributed to a journal less remunerative but also less chatty than the
_Beacon_, small ironies and ecstasies, great phrases and mistakes;
and the very week it came out poor Limbert devoted half of one of his
letters to it, with the happy sense this time of gratifying both himself
and me as well as the Blackport breakfast-tables. I remember his saying
it wasn’t literature, the stuff, superficial stuff, he had to write
about me; but what did that matter if it came back, as we knew, to
the making for literature in the roundabout way? I sold the thing, I
remember, for ten pounds, and with the money I bought in Vigo Street
a quaint piece of old silver for Maud Stannace, which I carried to her
with my own hand as a wedding-gift. In her mother’s small drawing-room,
a faded bower of photography fenced in and bedimmed by folding screens
out of which sallow persons of fashion with dashing signatures looked at
you from retouched eyes and little windows of plush, I was left to
wait long enough to feel in the air of the house a hushed vibration of
disaster. When our young lady came in she was very pale and her eyes too
had been retouched.

“Something horrid has happened,” I immediately said; and having really
all along but half believed in her mother’s meagre permission I risked
with an unguarded groan the introduction of Mrs. Stannace’s name.

“Yes, she has made a dreadful scene; she insists on our putting it off
again. We’re very unhappy: poor Ray has been turned off.” Her tears
began to flow again.

I had such a good conscience that I stared. “Turned off what?”

“Why, his paper of course. The _Beacon_ has given him what he calls the
sack. They don’t like his letters: they’re not the style of thing they
want.”

My blankness could only deepen. “Then what style of thing _do_ they
want?”

“Something more chatty.”

“More?” I cried, aghast.

“More gossipy, more personal. They want ‘journalism.’ They want
tremendous trash.”

“Why, that’s just what his letters have _been!_” I broke out.

This was strong, and I caught myself up, but the girl offered me the
pardon of a beautiful wan smile. “So Ray himself declares. He says he
has stooped so low.”

“Very well--he must stoop lower. He _must_ keep the place.”

“He can’t!” poor Maud wailed. “He says he has tried all he knows, has
been abject, has gone on all fours, and that if they don’t like that--”

“He accepts his dismissal?” I interposed in dismay.

She gave a tragic shrug. “What other course is open to him? He wrote to
them that such work as he has done is the very worst he can do for the
money.”

“Therefore,” I inquired with a flash of hope, “they’ll offer him more
for worse?”

“No indeed,” she answered, “they haven’t even offered him to go on at a
reduction. He isn’t funny enough.”

I reflected a moment. “But surely such a thing as his notice of my
book--!”

“It was your wretched book that was the last straw! He should have
treated it superficially.”

“Well, if he didn’t--!” I began. Then I checked myself. “_Je vous porte
malheur._”

She didn’t deny this; she only went, on: “What on earth is he to do?”

“He’s to do better than the monkeys! He’s to write!”

“But what on earth are we to marry on?”

I considered once more. “You’re to marry on _The Major Key_.”




II

_The Major Key_ was the new novel, and the great thing accordingly was
to finish it; a consummation for which three months of the _Beacon_ had
in some degree prepared the way. The action of that journal was indeed a
shock, but I didn’t know then the worst, didn’t know that in addition
to being a shock it was also a symptom. It was the first hint of the
difficulty to which poor Limbert was eventually to succumb. His state
was the happier of a truth for his not immediately seeing all that it
meant. Difficulty was the law of life, but one could thank heaven it was
exceptionally present in that horrid quarter. There was the difficulty
that inspired, the difficulty of _The Major Key_ to wit, which it was
after all base to sacrifice to the turning of somersaults for pennies.
These convictions Ray Limbert beguiled his fresh wait by blandly
entertaining: not indeed, I think, that the failure of his attempt to
be chatty didn’t leave him slightly humiliated. If it was bad enough
to have grinned through a horse-collar it was very bad indeed to have
grinned in vain. Well, he would try no more grinning or at least no more
horse-collars. The only success worth one’s powder was success in the
line of one’s idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and
what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one
happened to be? One’s things were characteristic or they were nothing.
I look back rather fondly on our having exchanged in those days these
admirable remarks and many others; on our having been very happy too, in
spite of postponements and obscurities, in spite also of such occasional
hauntings as could spring from our lurid glimpse of the fact that even
twaddle cunningly calculated was far above people’s heads. It was easy
to wave away spectres by the reflection that all one had to do was not
to write for people; it was certainly not for people that Limbert wrote
while he hammered at _The Major Key_. The taint of literature was fatal
only in a certain kind of air, which was precisely the kind against
which we had now closed our window. Mrs. Stannace rose from her crumpled
cushions as soon as she had obtained an adjournment, and Maud looked
pale and proud, quite victorious and superior, at her having obtained
nothing more. Maud behaved well, I thought, to her mother, and well
indeed for a girl who had mainly been taught to be flowerlike to every
one. What she gave Ray Limbert her fine, abundant needs made him
then and ever pay for; but the gift was liberal, almost wonderful--an
assertion I make even while remembering to how many clever women, early
and late, his work has been dear. It was not only that the woman he was
to marry was in love with him, but that (this was the strangeness)
she had really seen almost better than any one what he could do. The
greatest strangeness was that she didn’t want him to do something
different. This boundless belief was indeed the main way of her
devotion; and as an act of faith it naturally asked for miracles. She
was a rare wife for a poet if she was not perhaps the best who could
have been picked out for a poor man.

Well, we were to have the miracles at all events and we were in a
perfect state of mind to receive them. There were more of us every day,
and we thought highly even of our friend’s odd jobs and pot-boilers. The
_Beacon_ had had no successor, but he found some quiet comers and stray
chances. Perpetually poking the fire and looking out of the window, he
was certainly not a monster of facility, but he was, thanks perhaps to a
certain method in that madness, a monster of certainty. It wasn’t every
one however who knew him for this: many editors printed him but once.
He was getting a small reputation as a man it was well to have the
first time; he created obscure apprehensions as to what might happen the
second. He was good for making an impression, but no one seemed exactly
to know what the impression was good for when made. The reason was
simply that they had not seen yet _The Major Key_ that fiery-hearted
rose as to which we watched in private the formation of petal after
petal and flame after flame. Nothing mattered but this, for it had
already elicited a splendid bid, much talked about in Mrs. Highmore’s
drawing-room, where at this point my reminiscences grow particularly
thick. _Her_ roses bloomed all the year and her sociability increased
with her row of prizes. We had an idea that we “met every one” there--so
we naturally thought when we met each other. Between our hostess and Ray
Limbert flourished the happiest relation, the only cloud on which was
that her husband eyed him rather askance. When he was called clever this
personage wanted to know what he had to “show;” and it was certain that
he showed nothing that could compare with Jane Highmore. Mr. Highmore
took his stand on accomplished work and, turning up his coat-tails,
warmed his rear with a good conscience at the neat bookcase in which
the generations of triplets were chronologically arranged. The harmony
between his companions rested on the fact that, as I have already
hinted, each would have liked so much to be the other. Limbert couldn’t
but have a feeling about a woman who in addition to being the best
creature and her sister’s backer would have made, could she have
condescended, such a success with the _Beacon_. On the other hand Mrs.
Highmore used freely to say: “Do you know, he’ll do exactly the thing
that _I_ want to do? I shall never do it myself, but he’ll do it
instead. Yes, he’ll do _my_ thing, and I shall hate him for it--the
wretch.” Hating him was her pleasant humour, for the wretch was
personally to her taste.

She prevailed on her own publisher to promise to take _The Major Key_
and to engage to pay a considerable sum down, as the phrase is, on the
presumption of its attracting attention. This was good news for the
evening’s end at Mrs. Highmore’s when there were only four or five left
and cigarettes ran low; but there was better news to come, and I have
never forgotten how, as it was I who had the good fortune to bring it, I
kept it back on one of those occasions, for the sake of my effect, till
only the right people remained. The right people were now more and
more numerous, but this was a revelation addressed only to a choice
residuum--a residuum including of course Limbert himself, with whom I
haggled for another cigarette before I announced that as a consequence
of an interview I had had with him that afternoon, and of a subtle
argument I had brought to bear, Mrs. Highmore’s pearl of publishers had
agreed to put forth the new book as a serial. He was to “run” it in
his magazine and he was to pay ever so much more for the privilege. I
produced a fine gasp which presently found a more articulate relief,
but poor Limbert’s voice failed him once for all (he knew he was to walk
away with me) and it was some one else who asked me in what my subtle
argument had resided. I forget what florid description I then gave of
it: to-day I have no reason not to confess that it had resided in the
simple plea that the book was exquisite. I had said: “Come, my dear
friend, be original; just risk it for that!” My dear friend seemed
to rise to the chance, and I followed up my advantage, permitting
him honestly no illusion as to the quality of the work. He clutched
interrogatively at two or three attenuations, but I dashed them aside,
leaving him face to face with the formidable truth. It was just a pure
gem: was he the man not to flinch? His danger appeared to have acted
upon him as the anaconda acts upon the rabbit; fascinated and paralysed,
he had been engulfed in the long pink throat. When a week before, at my
request, Limbert had let me possess for a day the complete manuscript,
beautifully copied out by Maud Stannace, I had flushed with indignation
at its having to be said of the author of such pages that he hadn’t the
common means to marry. I had taken the field in a great glow to repair
this scandal, and it was therefore quite directly my fault if three
months later, when _The Major Key_ began to run, Mrs. Stannace was
driven to the wall. She had made a condition of a fixed income; and at
last a fixed income was achieved.

She had to recognise it, and after much prostration among the
photographs she recognised it to the extent of accepting some of the
convenience of it in the form of a project for a common household, to
the expenses of which each party should proportionately contribute.
Jane Highmore made a great point of her not being left alone, but Mrs.
Stannace herself determined the proportion, which on Limbert’s side at
least and in spite of many other fluctuations was never altered. His
income had been “fixed” with a vengeance: having painfully stooped to
the comprehension of it Mrs. Stannace rested on this effort to the end
and asked no further question on the subject. _The Major Key_ in other
words ran ever so long, and before it was half out Limbert and Maud had
been married and the common household set up. These first months were
probably the happiest in the family annals, with wedding-bells and
budding laurels, the quiet, assured course of the book and the friendly,
familiar note, round the corner, of Mrs. Highmore’s big guns. They gave
Ralph time to block in another picture as well as to let me know after
a while that he had the happy prospect of becoming a father. We had
at times some dispute as to whether _The Major Key_ was making an
impression, but our contention could only be futile so long as we were
not agreed as to what an impression consisted of. Several persons wrote
to the author and several others asked to be introduced to him: wasn’t
that an impression? One of the lively “weeklies,” snapping at the deadly
“monthlies,” said the whole thing was “grossly inartistic”--wasn’t
that? It was somewhere else proclaimed “a wonderfully subtle
character-study”--wasn’t that too? The strongest effect doubtless was
produced on the publisher when, in its lemon-coloured volumes, like
a little dish of three custards, the book was at last served cold: he
never got his money back and so far as I know has never got it back to
this day. _The Major Key_ was rather a great performance than a great
success. It converted readers into friends and friends into lovers; it
placed the author, as the phrase is--placed him all too definitely; but
it shrank to obscurity in the account of sales eventually rendered. It
was in short an exquisite thing, but it was scarcely a thing to have
published and certainly not a thing to have married on. I heard all
about the matter, for my intervention had much exposed me. Mrs. Highmore
said the second volume had given her ideas, and the ideas are probably
to be found in some of her works, to the circulation of which they have
even perhaps contributed. This was not absolutely yet the very thing she
wanted to do, but it was on the way to it. So much, she informed me,
she particularly perceived in the light of a critical study which I put
forth in a little magazine; which the publisher in his advertisements
quoted from profusely; and as to which there sprang up some absurd story
that Limbert himself had written it. I remember that on my asking some
one why such an idiotic thing had been said my interlocutor replied:
“Oh, because, you know, it’s just the way he _would_ have written!” My
spirit sank a little perhaps as I reflected that with such analogies in
our manner there might prove to be some in our fate.

It was during the next four or five years that our eyes were open to
what, unless something could be done, that fate, at least on Limbert’s
part, might be. The thing to be done was of course to write the book,
the book that would make the difference, really justify the burden he
had accepted and consummately express his power. For the works that
followed upon _The Major Key_ he had inevitably to accept conditions the
reverse of brilliant, at a time too when the strain upon his resources
had begun to show sharpness. With three babies in due course, an ailing
wife and a complication still greater than these, it became highly
important that a man should do only his best. Whatever Limbert did was
his best; so at least each time I thought and so I unfailingly said
somewhere, though it was not my saying it, heaven knows, that made the
desired difference. Every one else indeed said it, and there was among
multiplied worries always the comfort that his position was quite
assured. The two books that followed _The Major Key_ did more than
anything else to assure it, and Jane Highmore was always crying out:
“You stand alone, dear Ray; you stand absolutely alone!” Dear Ray
used to tell me that he felt the truth of this in feebly attempted
discussions with his bookseller. His sister-in-law gave him good advice
into the bargain; she was a repository of knowing hints, of esoteric
learning. These things were doubtless not the less valuable to him
for bearing wholly on the question of how a reputation might be with
a little gumption, as Mrs. Highmore said, “worked.” Save when she
occasionally bore testimony to her desire to do, as Limbert did,
something some day for her own very self, I never heard her speak of the
literary motive as if it were distinguishable from the pecuniary. She
cocked up his hat, she pricked up his prudence for him, reminding him
that as one seemed to take one’s self so the silly world was ready to
take one. It was a fatal mistake to be too candid even with those who
were all right--not to look and to talk prosperous, not at least to
pretend that one had beautiful sales. To listen to her you would have
thought the profession of letters a wonderful game of bluff. Wherever
one’s idea began it ended somehow in inspired paragraphs in the
newspapers. “_I_ pretend, I assure you, that you are going off like
wildfire--I can at least do that for you!” she often declared, prevented
as she was from doing much else by Mr. Highmore’s insurmountable
objection to _their_ taking Mrs. Stannace.

I couldn’t help regarding the presence of this latter lady in Limbert’s
life as the major complication: whatever he attempted it appeared given
to him to achieve as best he could in the mere margin of the space
in which she swung her petticoats. I may err in the belief that she
practically lived on him, for though it was not in him to follow
adequately Mrs. Highmore’s counsel there were exasperated confessions
he never made, scanty domestic curtains he rattled on their rings. I may
exaggerate in the retrospect his apparent anxieties, for these after all
were the years when his talent was freshest and when as a writer he most
laid down his line. It wasn’t of Mrs. Stannace nor even as time went on
of Mrs. Limbert that we mainly talked when I got at longer intervals a
smokier hour in the little grey den from which we could step out, as we
used to say, to the lawn. The lawn was the back-garden, and Limbert’s
study was behind the dining-room, with folding doors not impervious to
the clatter of the children’s tea. We sometimes took refuge from it in
the depths--a bush and a half deep--of the shrubbery, where was a bench
that gave us a view while we gossiped of Mrs. Stannace’s tiara-like
headdress nodding at an upper window. Within doors and without Limbert’s
life was overhung by an awful region that figured in his conversation,
comprehensively and with unpremeditated art, as Upstairs. It was
Upstairs that the thunder gathered, that Mrs. Stannace kept her accounts
and her state, that Mrs. Limbert had her babies and her headaches, that
the bells for ever jangled at the maids, that everything imperative in
short took place--everything that he had somehow, pen in hand, to meet
and dispose of in the little room on the garden-level. I don’t think
he liked to go Upstairs, but no special burst of confidence was needed
to make me feel that a terrible deal of service went. It was the habit
of the ladies of the Stannace family to be extremely waited on, and I’ve
never been in a house where three maids and a nursery-governess
gave such an impression of a retinue. “Oh, they’re so deucedly, so
hereditarily fine!”--I remember how that dropped from him in some
worried hour. Well, it was because Maud was so universally fine that
we had both been in love with her. It was not an air moreover for the
plaintive note: no private inconvenience could long outweigh for him the
great happiness of these years--the happiness that sat with us when we
talked and that made it always amusing to talk, the sense of his being
on the heels of success, coming closer and closer, touching it at last,
knowing that he should touch it again and hold it fast and hold it high.
Of course when we said success we didn’t mean exactly what Mrs. Highmore
for instance meant. He used to quote at me as a definition something
from a nameless page of my own, some stray dictum to the effect that
the man of his craft had achieved it when of a beautiful subject his
expression was complete. Well, wasn’t Limbert’s in all conscience
complete?




III

It was bang upon this completeness all the same that the turn arrived,
the turn I can’t say of his fortune--for what was that?--but of his
confidence, of his spirits and, what was more to the point, of his
system. The whole occasion on which the first symptom flared out is
before me as I write. I had met them both at dinner: they were diners
who had reached the penultimate stage--the stage which in theory is a
rigid selection and in practice a wan submission. It was late in the
season and stronger spirits than theirs were broken; the night was
close and the air of the banquet such as to restrict conversation to the
refusal of dishes and consumption to the sniffing of a flower. It struck
me all the more that Mrs. Limbert was flying her flag. As vivid as a
page of her husband’s prose, she had one of those flickers of freshness
that are the miracle of her sex and one of those expensive dresses that
are the miracle of ours. She had also a neat brougham in which she
had offered to rescue an old lady from the possibilities of a queer
cab-horse; so that when she had rolled away with her charge I proposed a
walk home with her husband, whom I had overtaken on the doorstep. Before
I had gone far with him he told me he had news for me--he had accepted,
of all people and of all things, an “editorial position.” It had come to
pass that very day, from one hour to another, without time for appeals
or ponderations: Mr. Bousefield, the proprietor of a “high-class
monthly,” making, as they said, a sudden change, had dropped on him
heavily out of the blue. It was all right--there was a salary and an
idea, and both of them, as such things went, rather high. We took our
way slowly through the vacant streets, and in the explanations and
revelations that as we lingered under lamp-posts I drew from him I found
with an apprehension that I tried to gulp down a foretaste of the bitter
end. He told me more than he had ever told me yet. He couldn’t balance
accounts--that was the trouble: his expenses were too rising a tide. It
was absolutely necessary that he should at last make money, and now he
must work only for that. The need this last year had gathered the force
of a crusher: it had rolled over him and laid him on his back. He had
his scheme; this time he knew what he was about; on some good occasion,
with leisure to talk it over, he would tell me the blessed whole. His
editorship would help him, and for the rest he must help himself. If he
couldn’t they would have to do something fundamental--change their
life altogether, give up London, move into the country, take a house
at thirty pounds a year, send their children to the Board-school. I saw
that he was excited, and he admitted that he was: he had waked out of a
trance. He had been on the wrong tack; he had piled mistake on mistake.
It was the vision of his remedy that now excited him: ineffably,
grotesquely simple, it had yet come to him only within a day or two. No,
he wouldn’t tell me what it was; he would give me the night to guess,
and if I shouldn’t guess it would be because I was as big an ass as
himself. However, a lone man might be an ass: he had room in his life
for his ears. Ray had a burden that demanded a back: the back must
therefore now be properly instituted. As to the editorship, it was
simply heaven-sent, being not at all another case of _The Blackport
Beacon_ but a case of the very opposite. The proprietor, the great Mr.
Bousefield, had approached him precisely because his name, which was to
be on the cover, _didn’t_ represent the chatty. The whole thing was
to be--oh, on fiddling little lines of course--a protest against
the chatty. Bousefield wanted him to be himself; it was for himself
Bousefield had picked him out. Wasn’t it beautiful and brave of
Bousefield? He wanted literature, he saw the great reaction coming,
the way the cat was going to jump. “Where will you get literature?” I
wofully asked; to which he replied with a laugh that what he had to get
was not literature but only what Bousefield would take for it.

In that single phrase without more ado I discovered his famous remedy.
What was before him for the future was not to do his work but to do what
somebody else would take for it. I had the question out with him on the
next opportunity, and of all the lively discussions into which we had
been destined to drift it lingers in my mind as the liveliest. This
was not, I hasten to add, because I disputed his conclusions: it was an
effect of the very force with which, when I had fathomed his wretched
premises, I took them to my soul. It was very well to talk with Jane
Highmore about his standing alone: the eminent relief of this position
had brought him to the verge of ruin. Several persons admired his
books--nothing was less contestable; but they appeared to have a mortal
objection to acquiring them by subscription or by purchase: they begged
or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to
commit the volumes to memory and repeat them, like the bards of old, to
listening multitudes. Some ingenious theory was required at any rate to
account for the inexorable limits of his circulation. It wasn’t a thing
for five people to live on; therefore either the objects circulated must
change their nature or the organisms to be nourished must. The former
change was perhaps the easier to consider first. Limbert considered
it with extraordinary ingenuity from that time on, and the ingenuity,
greater even than any I had yet had occasion to admire in him, made the
whole next stage of his career rich in curiosity and suspense.

“I have been butting my skull against a wall,” he had said in those
hours of confidence; “and, to be as sublime a blockhead, if you’ll allow
me the word, you, my dear fellow, have kept sounding the charge. We’ve
sat prating here of ‘success,’ heaven help us, like chanting monks in a
cloister, hugging the sweet delusion that it lies somewhere in the
work itself, in the expression, as you said, of one’s subject or the
intensification, as somebody else somewhere says, of one’s note. One has
been going on in short as if the only thing to do were to accept the law
of one’s talent and thinking that if certain consequences didn’t follow
it was only because one wasn’t logical enough. My disaster has served
me right--I mean for using that ignoble word at all. It’s a mere
distributor’s, a mere hawker’s word. What _is_ ‘success’ anyhow? When a
book’s right, it’s right--shame to it surely if it isn’t. When it sells
it sells--it brings money like potatoes or beer. If there’s dishonour
one way and inconvenience the other, it certainly is comfortable, but
it as certainly isn’t glorious to have escaped them. People of delicacy
don’t brag either about their probity or about their luck. Success be
hanged!--I want to sell. It’s a question of life and death. I must study
the way. I’ve studied too much the other way--I know the other way
now, every inch of it. I must cultivate the market--it’s a science like
another. I must go in for an infernal cunning. It will be very amusing,
I foresee that; I shall lead a dashing life and drive a roaring trade.
I haven’t been obvious--I must _be_ obvious. I haven’t been popular--I
must _be_ popular. It’s another art--or perhaps it isn’t an art at
all. It’s something else; one must find out what it is. Is it something
awfully queer?--you blush!--something barely decent? All the greater
incentive to curiosity! Curiosity’s an immense motive; we shall have
tremendous sport. They all do it; it’s only a question of how. Of course
I’ve everything to unlearn; but what is life, as Jane Highmore says,
but a lesson? I must get all I can, all she can give me, from Jane.
She can’t explain herself much; she’s all intuition; her processes are
obscure; it’s the spirit that swoops down and catches her up. But I must
study her reverently in her works. Yes, you’ve defied me before, but
now my loins are girded: I declare I’ll read one of them--I really will:
I’ll put it through if I perish!”

I won’t pretend that he made all these remarks at once; but there wasn’t
one that he didn’t make at one time or another, for suggestion and
occasion were plentiful enough, his life being now given up altogether
to his new necessity. It wasn’t a question of his having or not having,
as they say, my intellectual sympathy: the brute force of the pressure
left no room for judgment; it made all emotion a mere recourse to the
spyglass. I watched him as I should have watched a long race or a
long chase, irresistibly siding with him but much occupied with the
calculation of odds. I confess indeed that my heart, for the endless
stretch that he covered so fast, was often in my throat. I saw him peg
away over the sun-dappled plain, I saw him double and wind and gain and
lose; and all the while I secretly entertained a conviction. I wanted
him to feed his many mouths, but at the bottom of all things was my
sense that if he should succeed in doing so in this particular way I
should think less well of him. Now I had an absolute terror of that.
Meanwhile so far as I could I backed him up, I helped him: all the more
that I had warned him immensely at first, smiled with a compassion it
was very good of him not to have found exasperating over the complacency
of his assumption that a man could escape from himself. Ray Limbert at
all events would certainly never escape; but one could make believe
for him, make believe very hard--an undertaking in which at first
Mr. Bousefield was visibly a blessing. Limbert was delightful on the
business of this being at last my chance too--my chance, so miraculously
vouchsafed, to appear with a certain luxuriance. He didn’t care
how often he printed me, for wasn’t it exactly in my direction Mr.
Bousefield held that the cat was going to jump? This was the least he
could do for me. I might write on anything I liked--on anything at least
but Mr. Limbert’s second manner. He didn’t wish attention strikingly
called to his second manner; it was to operate insidiously; people were
to be left to believe they had discovered it long ago. “Ralph Limbert?
Why, when did we ever live without him?”--that’s what he wanted them
to say. Besides, they hated manners--let sleeping dogs lie. His
understanding with Mr. Bousefield--on which he had had not at all to
insist; it was the excellent man who insisted--was that he should run
one of his beautiful stories in the magazine. As to the beauty of his
story however Limbert was going to be less admirably straight than as
to the beauty of everything else. That was another reason why I mustn’t
write about his new line: Mr. Bousefield was not to be too definitely
warned that such a periodical was exposed to prostitution. By the time
he should find it out for himself the public--_le gros public_--would
have bitten, and then perhaps he would be conciliated and forgive.
Everything else would be literary in short, and above all _I_ would be;
only Ralph Limbert wouldn’t--he’d chuck up the whole thing sooner. He’d
be vulgar, he’d be rudimentary, he’d be atrocious: he’d be elaborately
what he hadn’t been before. I duly noticed that he had more trouble in
making “everything else” literary than he had at first allowed for;
but this was largely counteracted by the ease with which he was able to
obtain that his mark should not be overshot. He had taken well to heart
the old lesson of the _Beacon_; he remembered that he was after all
there to keep his contributors down much rather than to keep them up. I
thought at times that he kept them down a trifle too far, but he
assured me that I needn’t be nervous: he had his limit--his limit was
inexorable. He would reserve pure vulgarity for his serial, over which
he was sweating blood and water; elsewhere it should be qualified by
the prime qualification, the mediocrity that attaches, that endears.
Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really
good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared
for adverse comment, resolute for his noble course. Hadn’t Limbert
moreover in the event of a charge of laxity from headquarters the great
strength of being able to point to my contributions? Therefore I must
let myself go, I must abound in my peculiar sense, I must be a resource
in case of accidents. Limbert’s vision of accidents hovered mainly
over the sudden awakening of Mr. Bousefield to the stuff that in the
department of fiction his editor was palming off. He would then have to
confess in all humility that this was not what the good old man wanted,
but I should be all the more there as a salutary specimen. I would cross
the scent with something showily impossible, splendidly unpopular--I
must be sure to have something on hand. I always had plenty on
hand--poor Limbert needn’t have worried: the magazine was forearmed
each month by my care with a retort to any possible accusation of
trifling with Mr. Bousefield’s standard. He had admitted to Limbert,
after much consideration indeed, that he was prepared to be perfectly
human; but he had added that he was not prepared for an abuse of this
admission. The thing in the world I think I least felt myself was an
abuse, even though (as I had never mentioned to my friendly editor) I
too had my project for a bigger reverberation. I daresay I trusted mine
more than I trusted Limbert’s; at all events the golden mean in which
in the special case he saw his salvation as an editor was something I
should be most sure of if I were to exhibit it myself. I exhibited it
month after month in the form of a monstrous levity, only praying heaven
that my editor might now not tell me, as he had so often told me, that
my result was awfully good. I knew what that would signify--it would
signify, sketchily speaking, disaster. What he did tell me heartily was
that it was just what his game required: his new line had brought with
it an earnest assumption--earnest save when we privately laughed about
it--of the locutions proper to real bold enterprise. If I tried to keep
him in the dark even as he kept Mr. Bousefield there was nothing to
show that I was not tolerably successful: each case therefore presented
a promising analogy for the other. He never noticed my descent, and it
was accordingly possible that Mr. Bousefield would never notice his.

But would nobody notice it at all?--that was a question that added
a prospective zest to one’s possession of a critical sense. So much
depended upon it that I was rather relieved than otherwise not to know
the answer too soon. I waited in fact a year--the year for which Limbert
had cannily engaged on trial with Mr. Bousefield; the year as to which
through the same sharpened shrewdness it had been conveyed in the
agreement between them that Mr. Bousefield was not to intermeddle. It
had been Limbert’s general prayer that we would during this period let
him quite alone. His terror of my direct rays was a droll, dreadful
force that always operated: he explained it by the fact that I
understood him too well, expressed too much of his intention, saved him
too little from himself. The less he was saved the more he didn’t sell:
I literally interpreted, and that was simply fatal.

I held my breath accordingly; I did more--I closed my eyes, I guarded my
treacherous ears. He induced several of us to do that (of such devotions
we were capable) so that not even glancing at the thing from month to
month, and having nothing but his shamed, anxious silence to go by, I
participated only vaguely in the little hum that surrounded his act
of sacrifice. It was blown about the town that the public would be
surprised; it was hinted, it was printed that he was making a desperate
bid. His new work was spoken of as “more calculated for general
acceptance.” These tidings produced in some quarters much reprobation,
and nowhere more, I think, than on the part of certain persons who had
never read a word of him, or assuredly had never spent a shilling on
him, and who hung for hours over the other attractions of the
newspaper that announced his abasement. So much asperity cheered me a
little--seemed to signify that he might really be doing something. On
the other hand I had a distinct alarm; some one sent me for some alien
reason an American journal (containing frankly more than that source
of affliction) in which was quoted a passage from our friend’s last
instalment. The passage--I couldn’t for my life help reading it--was
simply superb. Ah, he _would_ have to move to the country if that was
the worst he could do! It gave me a pang to see how little after all he
had improved since the days of his competition with Pat Moyle. There was
nothing in the passage quoted in the American paper that Pat would for a
moment have owned. During the last weeks, as the opportunity of reading
the complete thing drew near, one’s suspense was barely endurable, and
I shall never forget the July evening on which I put it to rout. Coming
home to dinner I found the two volumes on my table, and I sat up with
them half the night, dazed, bewildered, rubbing my eyes, wondering at
the monstrous joke. _Was_ it a monstrous joke, his second manner--was
_this_ the new line, the desperate bid, the scheme for more general
acceptance and the remedy for material failure? Had he made a fool of
all his following, or had he most injuriously made a still bigger fool
of himself? Obvious?--where the deuce was it obvious? Popular?--how on
earth could it be popular? The thing was charming with all his charm
and powerful with all his power: it was an unscrupulous, an unsparing, a
shameless, merciless masterpiece. It was, no doubt, like the old letters
to the _Beacon_, the worst he could do; but the perversity of the
effort, even though heroic, had been frustrated by the purity of
the gift. Under what illusion had he laboured, with what wavering,
treacherous compass had he steered? His honour was inviolable, his
measurements were all wrong. I was thrilled with the whole impression
and with all that came crowding in its train. It was too grand a
collapse--it was too hideous a triumph; I exalted almost with tears--I
lamented with a strange delight. Indeed as the short night waned and,
threshing about in my emotion, I fidgeted to my high-perched window for
a glimpse of the summer dawn, I became at last aware that I was staring
at it out of eyes that had compassionately and admiringly filled. The
eastern sky, over the London housetops, had a wonderful tragic crimson.
That was the colour of his magnificent mistake.




IV

If something less had depended on my impression I daresay I should have
communicated it as soon as I had swallowed my breakfast; but the
case was so embarrassing that I spent the first half of the day in
reconsidering it, dipping into the book again, almost feverishly turning
its leaves and trying to extract from them, for my friend’s benefit,
some symptom of reassurance, some ground for felicitation. This rash
challenge had consequences merely dreadful; the wretched volumes,
imperturbable and impeccable, with their shyer secrets and their second
line of defence, were like a beautiful woman more denuded or a great
symphony on a new hearing. There was something quite sinister in the way
they stood up to me. I couldn’t however be dumb--that was to give the
wrong tinge to my disappointment; so that later in the afternoon, taking
my courage in both hands, I approached with a vain tortuosity poor
Limbert’s door. A smart victoria waited before it in which from the
bottom of the street I saw that a lady who had apparently just issued
from the house was settling herself. I recognised Jane Highmore and
instantly paused till she should drive down to me. She presently met me
half-way and as soon as she saw me stopped her carriage in agitation.
This was a relief--it postponed a moment the sight of that pale, fine
face of our friend’s fronting me for the right verdict. I gathered from
the flushed eagerness with which Mrs. Highmore asked me if I had heard
the news that a verdict of some sort had already been rendered.

“What news?--about the book?”

“About that horrid magazine. They’re shockingly upset. He has lost his
position--he has had a fearful flare-up with Mr. Bousefield.”

I stood there blank, but not unaware in my blankness of how history
repeats itself. There came to me across the years Maud’s announcement
of their ejection from the _Beacon_, and dimly, confusedly the same
explanation was in the air. This time however I had been on my guard;
I had had my suspicion. “He has made it too flippant?” I found breath
after an instant to inquire.

Mrs. Highmore’s vacuity exceeded my own. “Too ‘flippant’? He has made it
too oracular. Mr. Bousefield says he has killed it.” Then perceiving my
stupefaction: “Don’t you know what has happened?” she pursued; “isn’t it
because in his trouble, poor love, he has sent for you that you’ve come?
You’ve heard nothing at all? Then you had better know before you see
them. Get in here with me--I’ll take you a turn and tell you.” We were
close to the Park, the Regent’s, and when with extreme alacrity I had
placed myself beside her and the carriage had begun to enter it she went
on: “It was what I feared, you know. It reeked with culture. He keyed it
up too high.”

I felt myself sinking in the general collapse. “What are you talking
about?”

“Why, about that beastly magazine. They’re all on the streets. I shall
have to take mamma.”

I pulled myself together. “What on earth then did Bousefield want? He
said he wanted intellectual power.”

“Yes, but Ray overdid it.”

“Why, Bousefield said it was a thing he _couldn’t_ overdo.”

“Well, Ray managed: he took Mr. Bousefield too literally. It appears
the thing has been doing dreadfully, but the proprietor couldn’t say
anything, because he had covenanted to leave the editor quite free. He
describes himself as having stood there in a fever and seen his ship go
down. A day or two ago the year was up, so he could at last break out.
Maud says he did break out quite fearfully; he came to the house and let
poor Ray have it. Ray gave it to him back; he reminded him of his own
idea of the way the cat was going to jump.”

I gasped with dismay. “Has Bousefield abandoned that idea? Isn’t the cat
going to jump?”

Mrs. Highmore hesitated. “It appears that she doesn’t seem in a
hurry. Ray at any rate has jumped too far ahead of her. He should have
temporised a little, Mr. Bousefield says; but I’m beginning to think,
you know,” said my companion, “that Ray _can’t_ temporise.” Fresh
from my emotions of the previous twenty-four hours I was scarcely in a
position to disagree with her. “He published too much pure thought.”

“Pure thought?” I cried. “Why, it struck me so often--certainly in a due
proportion of cases--as pure drivel!”

“Oh, you’re more keyed up than he! Mr. Bousefield says that of course
he wanted things that were suggestive and clever, things that he could
point to with pride. But he contends that Ray didn’t allow for human
weakness. He gave everything in too stiff doses.”

Sensibly, I fear, to my neighbour I winced at her words; I felt a prick
that made me meditate. Then I said: “Is that, by chance, the way he
gave _me?_” Mrs. Highmore remained silent so long that I had somehow the
sense of a fresh pang; and after a minute, turning in my seat, I laid my
hand on her arm, fixed my eyes upon her face and pursued pressingly:
“Do you suppose it to be to my ‘Occasional Remarks’ that Mr. Bousefield
refers?”

At last she met my look. “Can you bear to hear it?”

“I think I can bear anything now.”

“Well then, it was really what I wanted to give you an inkling of. It’s
largely over you that they’ve quarrelled. Mr. Bousefield wants him to
chuck you.”

I grabbed her arm again. “And Limbert _won’t?_”

“He seems to cling to you. Mr. Bousefield says no magazine can afford
you.”

I gave a laugh that agitated the very coachman. “Why, my dear lady, has
he any idea of my price?”

“It isn’t your price--he says you’re dear at any price; you do so much
to sink the ship. Your ‘Remarks’ are called ‘Occasional,’ but nothing
could be more deadly regular: you’re there month after month and you’re
never anywhere else. And you supply no public want.”

“I supply the most delicious irony.”

“So Ray appears to have declared. Mr. Bousefield says that’s not in the
least a public want. No one can make out what you’re talking about and
no one would care if he could. I’m only quoting _him_, mind.”

“Quote, quote--if Limbert holds out. I think I must leave you now,
please: I must rush back to express to him what I feel.”

“I’ll drive you to his door. That isn’t all,” said Mrs. Highmore. And on
the way, when the carriage had turned, she communicated the rest.
“Mr. Bousefield really arrived with an ultimatum: it had the form of
something or other by Minnie Meadows.”

“Minnie Meadows?” I was stupefied.

“The new lady-humourist every one is talking about. It’s the first of
a series of screaming sketches for which poor Ray was to find a place.”

“Is _that_ Mr. Bousefield’s idea of literature?”

“No, but he says it’s the public’s, and you’ve got to take _some_
account of the public. _Aux grands maux les grands remèdes_. They had a
tremendous lot of ground to make up, and no one would make it up like
Minnie. She would be the best concession they could make to human
weakness; she would strike at least this note of showing that it was not
going to be quite all--well, all _you_. Now Ray draws the line at
Minnie; he won’t stoop to Minnie; he declines to touch, to look at
Minnie. When Mr. Bousefield--rather imperiously, I believe--made Minnie
a _sine quâ non_ of his retention of his post he said something rather
violent, told him to go to some unmentionable place and take Minnie with
him. That of course put the fat on the fire. They had really a
considerable scene.”

“So had he with the _Beacon_ man,” I musingly replied. “Poor dear, he
seems born for considerable scenes! It’s on Minnie, then, that they’ve
really split?” Mrs. Highmore exhaled her despair in a sound which I
took for an assent, and when we had rolled a little further I rather
in-consequently and to her visible surprise broke out of my reverie. “It
will never do in the world--he _must_ stoop to Minnie!”

“It’s too late--and what I’ve told you still isn’t all. Mr. Bousefield
raises another objection.”

“What other, pray?”

“Can’t you guess?”

I wondered. “No more of Ray’s fiction?”

“Not a line. That’s something else no magazine can stand. Now that his
novel has run its course Mr. Bousefield is distinctly disappointed.”

I fairly bounded in my place. “Then it may do?”

Mrs. Highmore looked bewildered. “Why so, if he finds it too dull?”

“Dull? Ralph Limbert? He’s as fine as a needle!”

“It comes to the same thing--he won’t penetrate leather. Mr. Bousefield
had counted on something that _would_, on something that would have a
wider acceptance. Ray says he wants iron pegs.” I collapsed again; my
flicker of elation dropped to a throb of quieter comfort; and after a
moment’s silence I asked my neighbour if she had herself read the work
our friend had just put forth. “No,” she replied, “I gave him my word at
the beginning, on his urgent request, that I wouldn’t.”

“Not even as a book?”

“He begged me never to look at it at all. He said he was trying a low
experiment. Of course I knew what he meant and I entreated him to let me
just for curiosity take a peep. But he was firm, he declared he couldn’t
bear the thought that a woman like me should see him in the depths.”

“He’s only, thank God, in the depths of distress,” I replied. “His
experiment’s nothing worse than a failure.”

“Then Bousefield _is_ right--his circulation won’t budge?”

“It won’t move one, as they say in Fleet Street. The book has
extraordinary beauty.”

“Poor duck--after trying so hard!” Jane Highmore sighed with real
tenderness. “What _will_ then become of them?”

I was silent an instant. “You must take your mother.”

She was silent too. “I must speak of it to Cecil!” she presently said.
Cecil is Mr. Highmore, who then entertained, I knew, strong views on
the inadjustability of circumstances in general to the idiosyncrasies of
Mrs. Stannace. He held it supremely happy that in an important relation
she should have met her match. Her match was Ray Limbert--not much of a
writer but a practical man. “The dear things still think, you know,”
 my companion continued, “that the book will be the beginning of their
fortune. Their illusion, if you’re right, will be rudely dispelled.”

“That’s what makes me dread to face them. I’ve just spent with his
volumes an unforgettable night. His illusion has lasted because so many
of us have been pledged till this moment to turn our faces the other
way. We haven’t known the truth and have therefore had nothing to say.
Now that we do know it indeed we have practically quite as little.
I hang back from the threshold. How can I follow up with a burst of
enthusiasm such a catastrophe as Mr. Bousefield’s visit?”

As I turned uneasily about my neighbour more comfortably snuggled.
“Well, I’m glad then I haven’t read him and have nothing unpleasant to
say!” We had come back to Limbert’s door, and I made the coachman stop
short of it. “But he’ll try again, with that determination of his: he’ll
build his hopes on the next time.”

“On what else has he built them from the very first? It’s never the
present for him that bears the fruit; that’s always postponed and for
somebody else: there has always to be another try. I admit that his
idea of a ‘new line’ has made him try harder than ever. It makes no
difference,” I brooded, still timorously lingering; “his achievement of
his necessity, his hope of a market will continue to attach themselves
to the future. But the next time will disappoint him as each last time
has done--and then the next and the next and the next!”

I found myself seeing it all with a clearness almost inspired: it
evidently cast a chill on Mrs. Highmore. “Then what on earth will become
of him?” she plaintively asked.

“I don’t think I particularly care what may become of _him_,” I returned
with a conscious, reckless increase of my exaltation; “I feel it almost
enough to be concerned with what may become of one’s enjoyment of him. I
don’t know in short what will become of his circulation; I am only quite
at my ease as to what will become of his work. It will simply keep all
its quality. He’ll try again for the common with what he’ll believe to
be a still more infernal cunning, and again the common will fatally
elude him, for his infernal cunning will have been only his genius in an
ineffectual disguise.” We sat drawn up by the pavement, facing poor
Limbert’s future as I saw it. It relieved me in a manner to know the
worst, and I prophesied with an assurance which as I look back upon it
strikes me as rather remarkable. “_Que voulez-vous?_” I went on; “you
can’t make a sow’s ear of a silk purse! It’s grievous indeed if you
like--there are people who can’t be vulgar for trying. _He_ can’t--it
wouldn’t come off, I promise you, even once. It takes more than
trying--it comes by grace. It happens not to be given to Limbert to
fall. He belongs to the heights--he breathes there, he lives there, and
it’s accordingly to the heights I must ascend,” I said as I took leave
of my conductress, “to carry him this wretched news from where _we_
move!”




V

A few months were sufficient to show how right I had been about his
circulation. It didn’t move one, as I had said; it stopped short in the
same place, fell off in a sheer descent, like some precipice gaped up at
by tourists. The public in other words drew the line for him as sharply
as he had drawn it for Minnie Meadows. Minnie has skipped with a
flouncing caper over his line, however; whereas the mark traced by a
lustier cudgel has been a barrier insurmountable to Limbert. Those
next times I had spoken of to Jane Highmore, I see them simplified by
retrocession. Again and again he made his desperate bid--again and again
he tried to. His rupture with Mr. Bousefield caused him, I fear, in
professional circles to be thought impracticable, and I am perfectly
aware, to speak candidly, that no sordid advantage ever accrued to him
from such public patronage of my performances as he had occasionally
been in a position to offer. I reflect for my comfort that any injury I
may have done him by untimely application of a faculty of analysis which
could point to no converts gained by honourable exercise was at least
equalled by the injury he did himself. More than once, as I have hinted,
I held my tongue at his request, but my frequent plea that such favours
weren’t politic never found him, when in other connections there was an
opportunity to give me a lift, anything but indifferent to the danger
of the association. He let them have me in a word whenever he could;
sometimes in periodicals in which he had credit, sometimes only at
dinner. He talked about me when he couldn’t get me in, but it was
always part of the bargain that I shouldn’t make him a topic. “How can
I successfully serve you if you do?” he used to ask: he was more afraid
than I thought he ought to have been of the charge of tit for tat. I
didn’t care, for I never could distinguish tat from tit; but as I have
intimated I dropped into silence really more than anything else because
there was a certain fascinated observation of his course which was
quite testimony enough and to which in this huddled conclusion of it he
practically reduced me.

I see it all foreshortened, his wonderful remainder--see it from the end
backward, with the direction widening toward me as if on a level with
the eye. The migration to the country promised him at first great
things--smaller expenses, larger leisure, conditions eminently conducive
on each occasion to the possible triumph of the next time. Mrs.
Stannace, who altogether disapproved of it, gave as one of her reasons
that her son-in-law, living mainly in a village on the edge of a
goose-green, would be deprived of that contact with the great world
which was indispensable to the painter of manners. She had the showiest
arguments for keeping him in touch, as she called it, with good society;
wishing to know with some force where, from the moment he ceased to
represent it from observation, the novelist could be said to be. In
London fortunately a clever man was just a clever man; there were
charming houses in which a person of Ray’s undoubted ability, even
though without the knack of making the best use of it, could always be
sure of a quiet corner for watching decorously the social kaleidoscope.
But the kaleidoscope of the goose-green, what in the world was that,
and what such delusive thrift as drives about the land (with a fearful
account for flys from the inn) to leave cards on the country magnates?
This solicitude for Limbert’s subject-matter was the specious colour
with which, deeply determined not to affront mere tolerance in a
cottage, Mrs. Stannace overlaid her indisposition to place herself under
the heel of Cecil Highmore. She knew that he ruled Upstairs as well as
down, and she clung to the fable of the association of interests in the
north of London. The Highmores had a better address--they lived now in
Stanhope Gardens; but Cecil was fearfully artful--he wouldn’t hear of
an association of interests nor treat with his mother-in-law save as
a visitor. She didn’t like false positions; but on the other hand she
didn’t like the sacrifice of everything she was accustomed to. Her
universe at all events was a universe full of card-leavings and charming
houses, and it was fortunate that she couldn’t Upstairs catch the sound
of the doom to which, in his little grey den, describing to me his
diplomacy, Limbert consigned alike the country magnates and the
opportunities of London. Despoiled of every guarantee she went to
Stanhope Gardens like a mere maidservant, with restrictions on her very
luggage, while during the year that followed this upheaval Limbert,
strolling with me on the goose-green, to which I often ran down, played
extravagantly over the theme that with what he was now going in for
it was a positive comfort not to have the social kaleidoscope. With a
cold-blooded trick in view what had life or manners or the best society
or flys from the inn to say to the question? It was as good a place as
another to play his new game. He had found a quieter corner than any
corner of the great world, and a damp old house at sixpence a year,
which, beside leaving him all his margin to educate his children, would
allow of the supreme luxury of his frankly presenting himself as a poor
man. This was a convenience that _ces dames_, as he called them, had
never yet fully permitted him.

It rankled in me at first to see his reward so meagre, his conquest so
mean; but the simplification effected had a charm that I finally felt;
it was a forcing-house for the three or four other fine miscarriages
to which his scheme was evidently condemned. I limited him to three or
four, having had my sharp impression, in spite of the perpetual broad
joke of the thing, that a spring had really snapped in him on the
occasion of that deeply disconcerting sequel to the episode of his
editorship. He never lost his sense of the grotesque want, in the
difference made, of adequate relation to the effort that had been the
intensest of his life. He had from that moment a charge of shot in him,
and it slowly worked its way to a vital part. As he met his embarrassments
each year with his punctual false remedy I wondered periodically
where he found the energy to return to the attack. He did it every time
with a rage more blanched, but it was clear to me that the tension must
finally snap the cord. We got again and again the irrepressible work of
art, but what did _he_ get, poor man, who wanted something so different?
There were likewise odder questions than this in the matter, phenomena
more curious and mysteries more puzzling, which often for sympathy if
not for illumination I intimately discussed with Mrs. Limbert. She had
her burdens, dear lady: after the removal from London and a considerable
interval she twice again became a mother. Mrs. Stannace too, in a more
restricted sense, exhibited afresh, in relation to the home she had
abandoned, the same exemplary character. In her poverty of guarantees
at Stanhope Gardens there had been least of all, it appeared, a proviso
that she shouldn’t resentfully revert again from Goneril to Regan. She
came down to the goose-green like Lear himself, with fewer knights, or
at least baronets, and the joint household was at last patched up. It
fell to pieces and was put together on various occasions before Ray
Limbert died. He was ridden to the end by the superstition that he had
broken up Mrs. Stannace’s original home on pretences that had proved
hollow and that if he hadn’t given Maud what she might have had he could
at least give her back her mother. I was always sure that a sense of the
compensations he owed was half the motive of the dogged pride with which
he tried to wake up the libraries. I believed Mrs. Stannace still had
money, though she pretended that, called upon at every turn to retrieve
deficits, she had long since poured it into the general fund. This
conviction haunted me; I suspected her of secret hoards, and I said to
myself that she couldn’t be so infamous as not some day on her deathbed
to leave everything to her less opulent daughter. My compassion for the
Limberts led me to hover perhaps indiscreetly round that closing scene,
to dream of some happy time when such an accession of means would make
up a little for their present penury.

This however was crude comfort, as in the first place I had nothing
definite to go by and in the second I held it for more and more
indicated that Ray wouldn’t outlive her. I never ventured to sound him
as to what in this particular he hoped or feared, for after the crisis
marked by his leaving London I had new scruples about suffering him
to be reminded of where he fell short. The poor man was in truth
humiliated, and there were things as to which that kept us both silent.
In proportion as he tried more fiercely for the market the old plaintiff
arithmetic, fertile in jokes, dropped from our conversation. We joked
immensely still about the process, but our treatment of the results
became sparing and superficial. He talked as much as ever, with
monstrous arts and borrowed hints, of the traps he kept setting, but we
all agreed to take merely for granted that the animal was caught. This
propriety had really dawned upon me the day that after Mr. Bousefield’s
visit Mrs. Highmore put me down at his door. Mr. Bousefield in that
juncture had been served up to me anew, but after we had disposed of him
we came to the book, which I was obliged to confess I had already
rushed through. It was from this moment--the moment at which my terrible
impression of it had blinked out at his anxious query--that the image of
his scared face was to abide with me. I couldn’t attenuate then--the
cat was out of the bag; but later, each of the next times, I did, I
acknowledge, attenuate. We all did religiously, so far as was possible;
we cast ingenious ambiguities over the strong places, the beauties that
betrayed him most, and found ourselves in the queer position of admirers
banded to mislead a confiding artist. If we stifled our cheers however
and dissimulated our joy our fond hypocrisy accomplished little, for
Limbert’s finger was on a pulse that told a plainer story. It was a
satisfaction to have secured a greater freedom with his wife, who at
last, much to her honour, entered into the conspiracy and whose sense
of responsibility was flattered by the frequency of our united appeal to
her for some answer to the marvellous riddle. We had all turned it over
till we were tired of it, threshing out the question why the note he
strained every chord to pitch for common ears should invariably insist
on addressing itself to the angels. Being, as it were, ourselves the
angels we had only a limited quarrel in each case with the event;
but its inconsequent character, given the forces set in motion, was
peculiarly baffling. It was like an interminable sum that wouldn’t
come straight; nobody had the time to handle so many figures. Limbert
gathered, to make his pudding, dry bones and dead husks; how then was
one to formulate the law that made the dish prove a feast? What was the
cerebral treachery that defied his own vigilance? There was some obscure
interference of taste, some obsession of the exquisite. All one could
say was that genius was a fatal disturber or that the unhappy man had
no effectual _flair_. When he went abroad to gather garlic he came home
with heliotrope.

I hasten to add that if Mrs. Limbert was not directly illuminating
she was yet rich in anecdote and example, having found a refuge from
mystification exactly where the rest of us had found it, in a more
devoted embrace and the sense of a finer glory. Her disappointments and
eventually her privations had been many, her discipline severe; but she
had ended by accepting the long grind of life and was now quite willing
to take her turn at the mill. She was essentially one of us--she
always understood. Touching and admirable at the last, when through the
unmistakable change in Limbert’s health her troubles were thickest, was
the spectacle of the particular pride that she wouldn’t have exchanged
for prosperity. She had said to me once--only once, in a gloomy hour in
London days when things were not going at all--that one really had to
think him a very great man because if one didn’t one would be rather
ashamed of him. She had distinctly felt it at first--and in a very
tender place--that almost every one passed him on the road; but I
believe that in these final years she would almost have been ashamed of
him if he had suddenly gone into editions. It is certain indeed that her
complacency was not subjected to that shock. She would have liked the
money immensely, but she would have missed something she had taught
herself to regard as rather rare. There is another remark I remember her
making, a remark to the effect that of course if she could have chosen
she would have liked him to be Shakespeare or Scott, but that failing
this she was very glad he wasn’t--well, she named the two gentlemen, but
I won’t. I daresay she sometimes laughed out to escape an alternative.
She contributed passionately to the capture of the second manner,
foraging for him further afield than he could conveniently go, gleaning
in the barest stubble, picking up shreds to build the nest and in
particular in the study of the great secret of how, as we always said,
they all did it laying waste the circulating libraries. If Limbert had
a weakness he rather broke down in his reading. It was fortunately not
till after the appearance of _The Hidden Heart_ that he broke down in
everything else. He had had rheumatic fever in the spring, when the book
was but half finished, and this ordeal in addition to interrupting his
work had enfeebled his powers of resistance and greatly reduced his
vitality. He recovered from the fever and was able to take up the book
again, but the organ of life was pronounced ominously weak and it was
enjoined upon him with some sharpness that he should lend himself to no
worries. It might have struck me as on the cards that his worries would
now be surmountable, for when he began to mend he expressed to me a
conviction almost contagious that he had never yet made so adroit a bid
as in the idea of _The Hidden Heart_. It is grimly droll to reflect that
this superb little composition, the shortest of his novels but perhaps
the loveliest, was planned from the first as an “adventure-story” on
approved lines. It was the way they all did the adventure-story that
he tried most dauntlessly to emulate. I wonder how many readers ever
divined to which of their book-shelves _The Hidden Heart_ was so
exclusively addressed. High medical advice early in the summer had been
quite viciously clear as to the inconvenience that might ensue to him
should he neglect to spend the winter in Egypt. He was not a man to
neglect anything; but Egypt seemed to us all then as unattainable as
a second edition. He finished _The Hidden Heart_ with the energy of
apprehension and desire, for if the book should happen to do what “books
of that class,” as the publisher said, sometimes did he might well have
a fund to draw on. As soon as I read the deep and delicate thing I knew,
as I had known in each case before, exactly how well it would do. Poor
Limbert in this long business always figured to me an undiscourageable
parent to whom only girls kept being born. A bouncing boy, a son and
heir was devoutly prayed for and almanacks and old wives consulted; but
the spell was inveterate, incurable, and _The Hidden Heart_ proved, so
to speak, but another female child. When the winter arrived accordingly
Egypt was out of the question. Jane Highmore, to my knowledge, wanted to
lend him money, and there were even greater devotees who did their best
to induce him to lean on them. There was so marked a “movement”
 among his friends that a very considerable sum would have been at his
disposal; but his stiffness was invincible: it had its root, I think,
in his sense, on his own side, of sacrifices already made. He had
sacrificed honour and pride, and he had sacrificed them precisely to the
question of money. He would evidently, should he be able to go on, have
to continue to sacrifice them, but it must be all in the way to which
he had now, as he considered, hardened himself. He had spent years in
plotting for favour, and since on favour he must live it could only be
as a bargain and a price.

He got through the early part of the season better than we feared, and I
went down in great elation to spend Christmas on the goose-green.

He told me late on Christmas eve, after our simple domestic revels had
sunk to rest and we sat together by the fire, that he had been visited
the night before in wakeful hours by the finest fancy for a really good
thing that he had ever felt descend in the darkness. “It’s just the
vision of a situation that contains, upon my honour, everything,” he
said, “and I wonder that I’ve never thought of it before.” He didn’t
describe it further, contrary to his common practice, and I only knew
later, by Mrs. Limbert, that he had begun _Derogation_ and that he was
completely full of his subject. It was a subject however that he was
not to live to treat. The work went on for a couple of months in happy
mystery, without revelations even to his wife. He had not invited her to
help him to get up his case--she had not taken the field with him as on
his previous campaigns. We only knew he was at it again but that less
even than ever had been said about the impression to be made on the
market. I saw him in February and thought him sufficiently at ease. The
great thing was that he was immensely interested and was pleased with
the omens. I got a strange, stirring sense that he had not consulted
the usual ones and indeed that he had floated away into a grand
indifference, into a reckless consciousness of art. The voice of the
market had suddenly grown faint and far: he had come back at the last,
as people so often do, to one of the moods, the sincerities of his
prime. Was he really with a blurred sense of the urgent doing something
now only for himself? We wondered and waited--we felt that he was a
little confused. What had happened, I was afterwards satisfied, was that
he had quite forgotten whether he generally sold or not. He had merely
waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed
there with a good conscience and a great idea. He stayed till death
knocked at the gate, for the pen dropped from his hand only at the
moment when from sudden failure of the heart his eyes, as he sank back
in his chair, closed for ever. _Derogation_ is a splendid fragment; it
evidently would have been one of his high successes. I am not prepared
to say it would have waked up the libraries.




THE WAY IT CAME

I find, as you prophesied, much that’s interesting, but little that
helps the delicate question--the possibility of publication. Her diaries
are less systematic than I hoped; she only had a blessed habit of noting
and narrating. She summarised, she saved; she appears seldom indeed to
have let a good story pass without catching it on the wing. I allude of
course not so much to things she heard as to things she saw and felt.
She writes sometimes of herself, sometimes of others, sometimes of the
combination. It’s under this last rubric that she’s usually most vivid.
But it’s not, you will understand, when she’s most vivid that she’s
always most publish-able. To tell the truth she’s fearfully indiscreet,
or has at least all the material for making me so. Take as an instance
the fragment I send you, after dividing it for your convenience into
several small chapters. It is the contents of a thin blank-book which
I have had copied out and which has the merit of being nearly enough a
rounded thing, an intelligible whole. These pages evidently date from
years ago. I’ve read with the liveliest wonder the statement they so
circumstantially make and done my best to swallow the prodigy they leave
to be inferred. These things would be striking, wouldn’t they? to any
reader; but can you imagine for a moment my placing such a document
before the world, even though, as if she herself had desired the world
should have the benefit of it, she has given her friends neither name
nor initials? Have you any sort of clue to their identity? I leave her
the floor.




I

I know perfectly of course that I brought it upon myself; but that
doesn’t make it any better. I was the first to speak of her to him--he
had never even heard her mentioned. Even if I had happened not to speak
some one else would have made up for it: I tried afterwards to find
comfort in that reflection. But the comfort of reflections is thin: the
only comfort that counts in life is not to have been a fool. That’s a
beatitude I shall doubtless never enjoy. “Why, you ought to meet her
and talk it over,” is what I immediately said. “Birds of a feather flock
together.” I told him who she was and that they were birds of a feather
because if he had had in youth a strange adventure she had had about
the same time just such another. It was well known to her friends--an
incident she was constantly called on to describe. She was charming,
clever, pretty, unhappy; but it was none the less the thing to which she
had originally owed her reputation.

Being at the age of eighteen somewhere abroad with an aunt she had had
a vision of one of her parents at the moment of death. The parent was in
England, hundreds of miles away and so far as she knew neither dying nor
dead. It was by day, in the museum of some great foreign town. She had
passed alone, in advance of her companions, into a small room containing
some famous work of art and occupied at that moment by two other
persons. One of these was an old custodian; the second, before observing
him, she took for a stranger, a tourist. She was merely conscious that
he was bareheaded and seated on a bench. The instant her eyes rested on
him however she beheld to her amazement her father, who, as if he
had long waited for her, looked at her in singular distress, with
an impatience that was akin to reproach. She rushed to him with a
bewildered cry, “Papa, what _is_ it?” but this was followed by an
exhibition of still livelier feeling when on her movement he simply
vanished, leaving the custodian and her relations, who were at her
heels, to gather round her in dismay. These persons, the official, the
aunt, the cousins were therefore in a manner witnesses of the fact--the
fact at least of the impression made on her; and there was the further
testimony of a doctor who was attending one of the party and to whom
it was immediately afterwards communicated. He gave her a remedy for
hysterics but said to the aunt privately: “Wait and see if something
doesn’t happen at home.” Something _had_ happened--the poor father,
suddenly and violently seized, had died that morning. The aunt, the
mother’s sister, received before the day was out a telegram announcing
the event and requesting her to prepare her niece for it. Her niece was
already prepared, and the girl’s sense of this visitation remained of
course indelible. We had all as her friends had it conveyed to us and
had conveyed it creepily to each other. Twelve years had elapsed and
as a woman who had made an unhappy marriage and lived apart from her
husband she had become interesting from other sources; but since the
name she now bore was a name frequently borne, and since moreover her
judicial separation, as things were going, could hardly count as a
distinction, it was usual to qualify her as “the one, you know, who saw
her father’s ghost.”

As for him, dear man, he had seen his mother’s. I had never heard of
that till this occasion on which our closer, our pleasanter acquaintance
led him, through some turn of the subject of our talk, to mention it and
to inspire me in so doing with the impulse to let him know that he had a
rival in the field--a person with whom he could compare notes. Later
on his story became for him, perhaps because of my unduly repeating it,
likewise a convenient wordly label; but it had not a year before been
the ground on which he was introduced to me. He had other merits, just
as she, poor thing! had others. I can honestly say that I was quite
aware of them from the first--I discovered them sooner than he
discovered mine. I remember how it struck me even at the time that his
sense of mine was quickened by my having been able to match, though not
indeed straight from my own experience, his curious anecdote. It dated,
this anecdote, as hers did, from some dozen years before--a year in
which, at Oxford, he had for some reason of his own been staying on into
the “Long.” He had been in the August afternoon on the river. Coming
back into his room while it was still distinct daylight he found his
mother standing there as if her eyes had been fixed on the door. He had
had a letter from her that morning out of Wales, where she was staying
with her father. At the sight of him she smiled with extraordinary
radiance and extended her arms to him, and then as he sprang forward
and joyfully opened his own she vanished from the place. He wrote to her
that night, telling her what had happened; the letter had been carefully
preserved. The next morning he heard of her death. He was through this
chance of our talk extremely struck with the little prodigy I was able
to produce for him. He had never encountered another case. Certainly
they ought to meet, my friend and he; certainly they would have
something in common. I would arrange this, wouldn’t I?--if _she_ didn’t
mind; for himself he didn’t mind in the least. I had promised to speak
to her of the matter as soon as possible, and within the week I was able
to do so. She “minded” as little as he; she was perfectly willing to
see him. And yet no meeting was to occur--as meetings are commonly
understood.




II

That’s just half my tale--the extraordinary way it was hindered. This
was the fault of a series of accidents; but the accidents continued
for years and became, for me and for others, a subject of hilarity with
either party. They were droll enough at first; then they grew rather
a bore. The odd thing was that both parties were amenable: it wasn’t a
case of their being indifferent, much less of their being indisposed. It
was one of the caprices of chance, aided I suppose by some opposition of
their interests and habits. His were centred in his office, his eternal
inspectorship, which left him small leisure, constantly calling him
away and making him break engagements. He liked society, but he found it
everywhere and took it at a run. I never knew at a given moment where he
was, and there were times when for months together I never saw him. She
was on her side practically suburban: she lived at Richmond and never
went “out.” She was a woman of distinction, but not of fashion,
and felt, as people said, her situation. Decidedly proud and rather
whimsical she lived her life as she had planned it. There were things
one could do with her, but one couldn’t make her come to one’s parties.
One went indeed a little more than seemed quite convenient to hers,
which consisted of her cousin, a cup of tea and the view. The tea was
good; but the view was familiar, though perhaps not, like the cousin--a
disagreeable old maid who had been of the group at the museum and with
whom she now lived--offensively so. This connection with an inferior
relative, which had partly an economical motive--she proclaimed her
companion a marvellous manager--was one of the little perversities we
had to forgive her. Another was her estimate of the proprieties created
by her rupture with her husband. That was extreme--many persons called
it even morbid. She made no advances; she cultivated scruples; she
suspected, or I should perhaps rather say she remembered slights: she
was one of the few women I have known whom that particular predicament
had rendered modest rather than bold. Dear thing! she had some delicacy.
Especially marked were the limits she had set to possible attentions
from men: it was always her thought that her husband was waiting to
pounce on her. She discouraged if she didn’t forbid the visits of male
persons not senile: she said she could never be too careful.

When I first mentioned to her that I had a friend whom fate had
distinguished in the same weird way as herself I put her quite at
liberty to say “Oh, bring him out to see me!” I should probably have
been able to bring him, and a situation perfectly innocent or at any
rate comparatively simple would have been created. But she uttered no
such word; she only said: “I must meet him certainly; yes, I shall look
out for him!” That caused the first delay, and meanwhile various things
happened. One of them was that as time went on she made, charming as
she was, more and more friends, and that it regularly befell that
these friends were sufficiently also friends of his to bring him up in
conversation. It was odd that without belonging, as it were, to the same
world or, according to the horrid term, the same set, my baffled pair
should have happened in so many cases to fall in with the same people
and make them join in the funny chorus. She had friends who didn’t know
each other but who inevitably and punctually recommended _him_. She had
also the sort of originality, the intrinsic interest that led her to be
kept by each of us as a kind of private resource, cultivated jealously,
more or less in secret, as a person whom one didn’t meet in society,
whom it was not for every one--whom it was not for the vulgar--to
approach, and with whom therefore acquaintance was particularly
difficult and particularly precious. We saw her separately, with
appointments and conditions, and found it made on the whole for harmony
not to tell each other. Somebody had always had a note from her still
later than somebody else. There was some silly woman who for a long
time, among the unprivileged, owed to three simple visits to Richmond
a reputation for being intimate with “lots of awfully clever
out-of-the-way people.”

Every one has had friends it has seemed a happy thought to bring
together, and every one remembers that his happiest thoughts have not
been his greatest successes; but I doubt if there was ever a case in
which the failure was in such direct proportion to the quantity of
influence set in motion. It is really perhaps here the quantity of
influence that was most remarkable. My lady and gentleman each declared
to me and others that it was like the subject of a roaring farce. The
reason first given had with time dropped-out of sight and fifty better
ones flourished on top of it. They were so awfully alike: they had the
same ideas and tricks and tastes, the same prejudices and superstitions
and heresies; they said the same things and sometimes did them; they
liked and disliked the same persons and places, the same books, authors
and styles; any one could see a certain identity even in their looks
and their features. It established much of a propriety that they were
in common parlance equally “nice” and almost equally handsome. But the
great sameness, for wonder and chatter, was their rare perversity in
regard to being photographed. They were the only persons ever heard of
who had never been “taken” and who had a passionate objection to it.
They just _wouldn’t_ be, for anything any one could say. I had loudly
complained of this; him in particular I had so vainly desired to be able
to show on my drawing-room chimney-piece in a Bond Street frame. It was
at any rate the very liveliest of all the reasons why they ought to know
each other--all the lively reasons reduced to naught by the strange law
that had made them bang so many doors in each other’s face, made them
the buckets in the well, the two ends of the see-saw, the two parties in
the state, so that when one was up the other was down, when one was out
the other was in; neither by any possibility entering a house till the
other had left it, or leaving it, all unawares, till the other was at
hand. They only arrived when they had been given up, which was precisely
also when they departed. They were in a word alternate and incompatible;
they missed each other with an inveteracy that could be explained only
by its being preconcerted. It was however so far from preconcerted
that it had ended--literally after several years--by disappointing and
annoying them. I don’t think their curiosity was lively till it had been
proved utterly vain. A great deal was of course done to help them, but
it merely laid wires for them to trip. To give examples I should have
to have taken notes; but I happen to remember that neither had ever been
able to dine on the right occasion. The right occasion for each was the
occasion that would be wrong for the other. On the wrong one they
were most punctual, and there were never any but wrong ones. The very
elements conspired and the constitution of man reinforced them. A cold,
a headache, a bereavement, a storm, a fog, an earthquake, a cataclysm
infallibly intervened. The whole business was beyond a joke.

Yet as a joke it had still to be taken, though one couldn’t help feeling
that the joke had made the situation serious, had produced on the part
of each a consciousness, an awkwardness, a positive dread of the last
accident of all, the only one with any freshness left, the accident that
would bring them face to face. The final effect of its predecessors had
been to kindle this instinct. They were quite ashamed--perhaps even a
little of each other. So much preparation, so much frustration: what
indeed could be good enough for it all to lead up to? A mere meeting
would be mere flatness. Did I see them at the end of years, they often
asked, just stupidly confronted? If they were bored by the joke they
might be worse bored by something else. They made exactly the same
reflections, and each in some manner was sure to hear of the other’s.

I really think it was this peculiar diffidence that finally controlled
the situation. I mean that if they had failed for the first year or
two because they couldn’t help it they kept up the habit because they
had--what shall I call it?--grown nervous. It really took some lurking
volition to account for anything so absurd.




III

When to crown our long acquaintance I accepted his renewed offer of
marriage it was humorously said, I know, that I had made the gift of his
photograph a condition. This was so far true that I had refused to
give him mine without it. At any rate I had him at last, in his
high distinction, on the chimney-piece, where the day she called to
congratulate me she came nearer than she had ever done to seeing him. He
had set her in being taken an example which I invited her to follow; he
had sacrificed his perversity--wouldn’t she sacrifice hers? She too
must give me something on my engagement--wouldn’t she give me the
companion-piece? She laughed and shook her head; she had headshakes
whose impulse seemed to come from as far away as the breeze that stirs a
flower. The companion-piece to the portrait of my future husband was the
portrait of his future wife. She had taken her stand--she could depart
from it as little as she could explain it. It was a prejudice, an
_entêtement_, a vow--she would live and die unphotographed. Now too she
was alone in that state: this was what she liked; it made her so much
more original. She rejoiced in the fall of her late associate and looked
a long time at his picture, about which she made no memorable remark,
though she even turned it over to see the back. About our engagement she
was charming--full of cordiality and sympathy. “You’ve known him even
longer than I’ve _not?_” she said, “and that seems a very long time.”
 She understood how we had jogged together over hill and dale and how
inevitable it was that we should now rest together. I’m definite about
all this because what followed is so strange that it’s a kind of relief
to me to mark the point up to which our relations were as natural as
ever. It was I myself who in a sudden madness altered and destroyed
them. I see now that she gave me no pretext and that I only found one in
the way she looked at the fine face in the Bond Street frame. How then
would I have had her look at it? What I had wanted from the first was
to make her care for him. Well, that was what I still wanted--up to the
moment of her having promised me that he would on this occasion really
aid me to break the silly spell that had kept them asunder. I had
arranged with him to do his part if she would as triumphantly do hers. I
was on a different footing now--I was on a footing to answer for him. I
would positively engage that at five on the following Saturday he would
be on that spot. He was out of town on pressing business; but pledged
to keep his promise to the letter he would return on purpose and in
abundant time. “Are you perfectly sure?” I remember she asked, looking
grave and considering: I thought she had turned a little pale. She was
tired, she was indisposed: it was a pity he was to see her after all at
so poor a moment. If he only _could_ have seen her five years before!
However, I replied that this time I was sure and that success therefore
depended simply on herself. At five o’clock on the Saturday she would
find him in a particular chair I pointed out, the one in which he
usually sat and in which--though this I didn’t mention--he had been
sitting when, the week before, he put the question of our future to me
in the way that had brought me round. She looked at it in silence, just
as she had looked at the photograph, while I repeated for the twentieth
time that it was too preposterous it shouldn’t somehow be feasible to
introduce to one’s dearest friend one’s second self. “_Am_ I your dearest
friend?” she asked with a smile that for a moment brought back her
beauty. I replied by pressing her to my bosom; after which she said:
“Well, I’ll come. I’m extraordinarily afraid, but you may count on me.”

When she had left me I began to wonder what she was afraid of, for
she had spoken as if she fully meant it. The next day, late in the
afternoon, I had three lines from her: she had found on getting home
the announcement of her husband’s death. She had not seen him for seven
years, but she wished me to know it in this way before I should hear of
it in another. It made however in her life, strange and sad to say, so
little difference that she would scrupulously keep her appointment. I
rejoiced for her--I supposed it would make at least the difference of
her having more money; but even in this diversion, far from forgetting
that she had said she was afraid, I seemed to catch sight of a reason
for her being so. Her fear as the evening went on became contagious, and
the contagion took in my breast the form of a sudden panic. It wasn’t
jealousy--it was the dread of jealousy. I called myself a fool for not
having been quiet till we were man and wife. After that I should somehow
feel secure. It was only a question of waiting another month--a trifle
surely for people who had waited so long. It had been plain enough she
was nervous, and now that she was free she naturally wouldn’t be less
so. What was her nervousness therefore but a presentiment? She had been
hitherto the victim of interference, but it was quite possible she would
henceforth be the source of it. The victim in that case would be my
simple self. What had the interference been but the finger of providence
pointing out a danger? The danger was of course for poor _me_. It had
been kept at bay by a series of accidents unexampled in their frequency;
but the reign of accident was now visibly at an end. I had an intimate
conviction that both parties would keep the tryst. It was more and more
impressed upon me that they were approaching, converging. We had talked
about breaking the spell; well, it would be effectually broken--unless
indeed it should merely take another form and overdo their encounters as
it had overdone their escapes.

This was something I couldn’t sit still for thinking of; it kept me
awake--at midnight I was full of unrest. At last I felt there was only
one way of laying the ghost. If the reign of accident was over I must
just take up the succession. I sat down and wrote a hurried note which
would meet him on his return and which as the servants had gone to bed
I sallied forth bareheaded into the empty, gusty street to drop into the
nearest pillar-box. It was to tell him that I shouldn’t be able to be at
home in the afternoon as I had hoped and that he must postpone his visit
till dinner-time. This was an implication that he would find me alone.




IV

When accordingly at five she presented herself I naturally felt false
and base. My act had been a momentary madness, but I had at least to be
consistent. She remained an hour; he of course never came; and I could
only persist in my perfidy. I had thought it best to let her come;
singular as this now seems to me I thought it diminished my guilt. Yet
as she sat there so visibly white and weary, stricken with a sense
of everything her husband’s death had opened up, I felt an almost
intolerable pang of pity and remorse. If I didn’t tell her on the
spot what I had done it was because I was too ashamed. I feigned
astonishment--I feigned it to the end; I protested that if ever I had
had confidence I had had it that day. I blush as I tell my story--I take
it as my penance. There was nothing indignant I didn’t say about him; I
invented suppositions, attenuations; I admitted in stupefaction, as the
hands of the clock travelled, that their luck hadn’t turned. She smiled
at this vision of their “luck,” but she looked anxious--she looked
unusual: the only thing that kept me up was the fact that, oddly enough,
she wore mourning--no great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous
black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried
a little muff of astrachan. This put me by the aid of some acute
reflection a little in the right. She had written to me that the
sudden event made no difference for her, but apparently it made as much
difference as that. If she was inclined to the usual forms why didn’t
she observe that of not going the first day or two out to tea? There
was some one she wanted so much to see that she couldn’t wait till her
husband was buried. Such a betrayal of eagerness made me hard and cruel
enough to practise my odious deceit, though at the same time, as the
hour waxed and waned, I suspected in her something deeper still than
disappointment and somewhat less successfully concealed. I mean a
strange underlying relief, the soft, low emission of the breath that
comes when a danger is past. What happened as she spent her barren hour
with me was that at last she gave him up. She let him go for ever. She
made the most graceful joke of it that I’ve ever seen made of anything;
but it was for all that a great date in her life. She spoke with her
mild gaiety of all the other vain times, the long game of hide-and-seek,
the unprecedented queerness of such a relation. For it was, or had been,
a relation, wasn’t it, hadn’t it? That was just the absurd part of it.
When she got up to go I said to her that it was more a relation than
ever, but that I hadn’t the face after what had occurred to propose
to her for the present another opportunity. It was plain that the only
valid opportunity would be my accomplished marriage. Of course she would
be at my wedding? It was even to be hoped that _he_ would.

“If _I_ am, he won’t be!” she declared with a laugh. I admitted there
might be something in that. The thing was therefore to get us safely
married first. “That won’t help us. Nothing will help us!” she said
as she kissed me farewell. “I shall never, never see him!” It was with
those words she left me.

I could bear her disappointment as I’ve called it; but when a couple of
hours later I received him at dinner I found that I couldn’t bear his.
The way my manoeuvre might have affected him had not been particularly
present to me; but the result of it was the first word of reproach that
had ever yet dropped from him. I say “reproach” because that expression
is scarcely too strong for the terms in which he conveyed to me his
surprise that under the extraordinary circumstances I should not have
found some means not to deprive him of such an occasion. I might really
have managed either not to be obliged to go out or to let their
meeting take place all the same. They would probably have got on in
my drawing-room without me. At this I quite broke down--I confessed my
iniquity and the miserable reason of it. I had not put her off and I had
not gone out; she had been there and after waiting for him an hour had
departed in the belief that he had been absent by his own fault.

“She must think me a precious brute!” he exclaimed. “Did she say of
me--what she had a right to say?”

“I assure you she said nothing that showed the least feeling. She looked
at your photograph, she even turned round the back of it, on which
your address happens to be inscribed. Yet it provoked her to no
demonstration. She doesn’t care so much as all that.”

“Then why are you afraid of her?”

“It was not of her I was afraid. It was of you.”

“Did you think I would fall in love with her? You never alluded to
such a possibility before,” he went on as I remained silent. “Admirable
person as you pronounced her, that wasn’t the light in which you showed
her to me.”

“Do you mean that if it _had_ been you would have managed by this time
to catch a glimpse of her? I didn’t fear things then,” I added. “I
hadn’t the same reason.”

He kissed me at this, and when I remembered that she had done so an hour
or two before I felt for an instant as if he were taking from my lips
the very pressure of hers. In spite of kisses the incident had shed a
certain chill, and I suffered horribly from the sense that he had seen
me guilty of a fraud. He had seen it only through my frank avowal, but
I was as unhappy as if I had a stain to efface. I couldn’t get over the
manner of his looking at me when I spoke of her apparent indifference to
his not having come.

For the first time since I had known him he seemed to have expressed
a doubt of my word. Before we parted I told him that I would undeceive
her, start the first thing in the morning for Richmond and there let
her know that he had been blameless. At this he kissed me again. I
would expiate my sin, I said; I would humble myself in the dust; I would
confess and ask to be forgiven. At this he kissed me once more.




V

In the train the next day this struck me as a good deal for him to have
consented to; but my purpose was firm enough to carry me on. I mounted
the long hill to where the view begins, and then I knocked at her door.
I was a trifle mystified by the fact that her blinds were still drawn,
reflecting that if in the stress of my compunction I had come early I
had certainly yet allowed people time to get up.

“At home, mum? She has left home for ever.”

I was extraordinarily startled by this announcement of the elderly
parlour-maid. “She has gone away?”

“She’s dead, mum, please.” Then as I gasped at the horrible word: “She
died last night.”

The loud cry that escaped me sounded even in my own ears like some harsh
violation of the hour. I felt for the moment as if I had killed her; I
turned faint and saw through a vagueness the woman hold out her arms to
me. Of what next happened I have no recollection, nor of anything but my
friend’s poor stupid cousin, in a darkened room, after an interval that
I suppose very brief, sobbing at me in a smothered accusatory way. I
can’t say how long it took me to understand, to believe and then to
press back with an immense effort that pang of responsibility which,
superstitiously, insanely had been at first almost all I was conscious
of. The doctor, after the fact, had been superlatively wise and clear:
he was satisfied of a long-latent weakness of the heart, determined
probably years before by the agitations and terrors to which her
marriage had introduced her. She had had in those days cruel scenes with
her husband, she had been in fear of her life. All emotion, everything
in the nature of anxiety and suspense had been after that to be strongly
deprecated, as in her marked cultivation of a quiet life she was
evidently well aware; but who could say that any one, especially a “real
lady,” could be successfully protected from every little rub? She had
had one a day or two before in the news of her husband’s death; for
there were shocks of all kinds, not only those of grief and surprise.
For that matter she had never dreamed of so near a release; it had
looked uncommonly as if he would live as long as herself. Then in the
evening, in town, she had manifestly had another: something must have
happened there which it would be indispensable to clear up. She had come
back very late--it was past eleven o’clock, and on being met in the hall
by her cousin, who was extremely anxious, had said that she was tired
and must rest a moment before mounting the stairs. They had passed
together into the dining-room, her companion proposing a glass of wine
and bustling to the sideboard to pour it out. This took but a moment,
and when my informant turned round our poor friend had not had time to
seat herself. Suddenly, with a little moan that was barely audible, she
dropped upon the sofa. She was dead. What unknown “little rub” had dealt
her the blow? What shock, in the name of wonder, _had_ she had in town?
I mentioned immediately the only one I could imagine--her having failed
to meet at my house, to which by invitation for the purpose she had
come at five o’clock, the gentleman I was to be married to, who had been
accidentally kept away and with whom she had no acquaintance whatever.
This obviously counted for little; but something else might easily
have occurred; nothing in the London streets was more possible than an
accident, especially an accident in those desperate cabs. What had she
done, where had she gone on leaving my house? I had taken for granted
she had gone straight home. We both presently remembered that in her
excursions to town she sometimes, for convenience, for refreshment,
spent an hour or two at the “Gentlewomen,” the quiet little ladies’
club, and I promised that it should be my first care to make at that
establishment thorough inquiry. Then we entered the dim and dreadful
chamber where she lay locked up in death and where, asking after a
little to be left alone with her, I remained for half an hour. Death had
made her, had kept her beautiful; but I felt above all, as I kneeled at
her bed, that it had made her, had kept her silent. It had turned the
key on something I was concerned to know.

On my return from Richmond and after another duty had been performed I
drove to his chambers. It was the first time, but I had often wanted to
see them. On the staircase, which, as the house contained twenty sets of
rooms, was unrestrictedly public, I met his servant, who went back with
me and ushered me in. At the sound of my entrance he appeared in the
doorway of a further room, and the instant we were alone I produced my
news: “She’s dead!”

“Dead?”

He was tremendously struck, and I observed that he had no need to ask
whom, in this abruptness, I meant.

“She died last evening--just after leaving me.”

He stared with the strangest expression, his eyes searching mine as
if they were looking for a trap. “Last evening--after leaving you?” He
repeated my words in stupefaction. Then he brought out so that it was in
stupefaction I heard: “Impossible! I saw her.”

“You ‘saw’ her?”

“On that spot--where you stand.”

This brought back to me after an instant, as if to help me to take it
in, the memory of the strange warning of his youth. “In the hour of
death--I understand: as you so beautifully saw your mother.”

“Ah! _not_ as I saw my mother--not that way, not that way!” He was
deeply moved by my news--far more moved, I perceived, than he would have
been the day before: it gave me a vivid sense that, as I had then said
to myself, there was indeed a relation between them and that he had
actually been face to face with her. Such an idea, by its reassertion
of his extraordinary privilege, would have suddenly presented him as
painfully abnormal had he not so vehemently insisted on the difference.
“I saw her living--I saw her to speak to her--I saw her as I see you
now!”

It is remarkable that for a moment, though only for a moment, I found
relief in the more personal, as it were, but also the more natural of
the two phenomena. The next, as I embraced this image of her having come
to him on leaving me and of just what it accounted for in the disposal
of her time, I demanded with a shade of harshness of which I was
aware--“What on earth did she come for?” He had now had a minute to
think--to recover himself and judge of effects, so that if it was still
with excited eyes he spoke he showed a conscious redness and made an
inconsequent attempt to smile away the gravity of his words.

“She came just to see me. She came--after what had passed at your
house--so that we _should_, after all, at last meet. The impulse seemed
to me exquisite, and that was the way I took it.”

I looked round the room where she had been--where she had been and I
never had been.

“And was the way you took it the way she expressed it?”

“She only expressed it by being here and by letting me look at her. That
was enough!” he exclaimed with a singular laugh.

I wondered more and more. “You mean she didn’t speak to you?”

“She said nothing. She only looked at me as I looked at her.”

“And _you_ didn’t speak either?”

He gave me again his painful smile. “I thought of _you_. The situation
was every way delicate. I used the finest tact. But she saw she had
pleased me.” He even repeated his dissonant laugh.

“She evidently pleased you!” Then I thought a moment. “How long did she
stay?”

“How can I say? It seemed twenty minutes, but it was probably a good
deal less.”

“Twenty minutes of silence!” I began to have my definite view and now
in fact quite to clutch at it. “Do you know you’re telling me a story
positively monstrous?”

He had been standing with his back to the fire; at this, with a pleading
look, he came to me. “I beseech you, dearest, to take it kindly.”

I could take it kindly, and I signified as much; but I couldn’t somehow,
as he rather awkwardly opened his arms, let him draw me to him. So
there fell between us for an appreciable time the discomfort of a great
silence.




VI

He broke it presently by saying: “There’s absolutely no doubt of her
death?”

“Unfortunately none. I’ve just risen from my knees by the bed where
they’ve laid her out.”

He fixed his eyes hard on the floor; then he raised them to mine. “How
does she look?”

“She looks--at peace.”

He turned away again, while I watched him; but after a moment he began:
“At what hour, then----?”

“It must have been near midnight. She dropped as she reached her
house--from an affection of the heart which she knew herself and her
physician knew her to have, but of which, patiently, bravely she had
never spoken to me.”

He listened intently and for a minute he was unable to speak. At last
he broke out with an accent of which the almost boyish confidence,
the really sublime simplicity rings in my ears as I write: “Wasn’t she
_wonderful_!” Even at the time I was able to do it justice enough to
remark in reply that I had always told him so; but the next minute, as
if after speaking he had caught a glimpse of what he might have made
me feel, he went on quickly: “You see that if she didn’t get home till
midnight--”

I instantly took him up. “There was plenty of time for you to have seen
her? How so,” I inquired, “when you didn’t leave my house till late?
I don’t remember the very moment--I was preoccupied. But you know that
though you said you had lots to do you sat for some time after dinner.
She, on her side, was all the evening at the ‘Gentlewomen.’ I’ve just
come from there--I’ve ascertained. She had tea there; she remained a
long, long time.”

“What was she doing all the long, long time?” I saw that he was eager to
challenge at every step my account of the matter; and the more he showed
this the more I found myself disposed to insist on that account, to
prefer, with apparent perversity, an explanation which only deepened the
marvel and the mystery, but which, of the two prodigies it had to choose
from, my reviving jealousy found easiest to accept. He stood there
pleading with a candour that now seems to me beautiful for the privilege
of having in spite of supreme defeat known the living woman; while I,
with a passion I wonder at to-day, though it still smoulders in a manner
in its ashes, could only reply that, through a strange gift shared by
her with his mother and on her own side likewise hereditary, the miracle
of his youth had been renewed for him, the miracle of hers for her. She
had been to him--yes, and by an impulse as charming as he liked; but oh!
she had not been in the body. It was a simple question of evidence. I
had had, I assured him, a definite statement of what she had done--most
of the time--at the little club. The place was almost empty, but the
servants had noticed her. She had sat motionless in a deep chair by
the drawing-room fire; she had leaned back her head, she had closed her
eyes, she had seemed softly to sleep.

“I see. But till what o’clock?”

“There,” I was obliged to answer, “the servants fail me a little. The
portress in particular is unfortunately a fool, though even she too is
supposed to be a Gentlewoman. She was evidently at that period of the
evening, without a substitute and, against regulations, absent for
some little time from the cage in which it’s her business to watch the
comings and goings. She’s muddled, she palpably prevaricates; so I can’t
positively, from her observation, give you an hour. But it was remarked
toward half-past ten that our poor friend was no longer in the club.”

“She came straight here; and from here she went straight to the train.”

“She couldn’t have run it so close,” I declared. “That was a thing she
particularly never did.”

“There was no need of running it close, my dear--she had plenty of time.
Your memory is at fault about my having left you late: I left you, as it
happens, unusually early. I’m sorry my stay with you seemed long; for I
was back here by ten.”

“To put yourself into your slippers,” I rejoined, “and fall asleep in
your chair. You slept till morning--you saw her in a dream!” He looked
at me in silence and with sombre eyes--eyes that showed me he had some
irritation to repress. Presently I went on: “You had a visit, at an
extraordinary hour, from a lady--_soit_: nothing in the world is more
probable. But there are ladies and ladies. How in the name of goodness,
if she was unannounced and dumb and you had into the bargain never
seen the least portrait of her--how could you identify the person we’re
talking of?”

“Haven’t I to absolute satiety heard her described? I’ll describe her
for you in every particular.”

“Don’t!” I exclaimed with a promptness that made him laugh once more. I
coloured at this, but I continued: “Did your servant introduce her?”

“He wasn’t here--he’s always away when he’s wanted. One of the features
of this big house is that from the street-door the different floors are
accessible practically without challenge. My servant makes love to a
young person employed in the rooms above these, and he had a long bout
of it last evening. When he’s out on that job he leaves my outer door,
on the staircase, so much ajar as to enable him to slip back without a
sound. The door then only requires a push. She pushed it--that simply
took a little courage.”

“A little? It took tons! And it took all sorts of impossible
calculations.”

“Well, she had them--she made them. Mind you, I don’t deny for a
moment,” he added, “that it was very, very wonderful!”

Something in his tone prevented me for a while from trusting myself to
speak. At last I said: “How did she come to know where you live?”

“By remembering the address on the little label the shop-people happily
left sticking to the frame I had had made for my photograph.”

“And how was she dressed?”

“In mourning, my own dear. No great depths of crape, but simple and
scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers.
She carried a little muff of astrachan. She has near the left eye,” he
continued, “a tiny vertical scar--”

I stopped him short. “The mark of a caress from her husband.” Then I
added: “How close you must have been to her!” He made no answer to this,
and I thought he blushed, observing which I broke straight off. “Well,
goodbye.”

“You won’t stay a little?” He came to me again tenderly, and this time
I suffered him. “Her visit had its beauty,” he murmured as he held me,
“but yours has a greater one.”

I let him kiss me, but I remembered, as I had remembered the day before,
that the last kiss she had given, as I supposed, in this world had been
for the lips he touched.

“I’m life, you see,” I answered. “What you saw last night was death.”

“It was life--it was life!”

He spoke with a kind of soft stubbornness, and I disengaged myself. We
stood looking at each other hard.

“You describe the scene--so far as you describe it at all--in terms that
are incomprehensible. She was in the room before you knew it?”

“I looked up from my letter-writing--at that table under the lamp, I had
been wholly absorbed in it--and she stood before me.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I sprang up with an ejaculation, and she, with a smile, laid her
finger, ever so warningly, yet with a sort of delicate dignity, to her
lips. I knew it meant silence, but the strange thing was that it seemed
immediately to explain and to justify her. We, at any rate, stood for
a time that, as I’ve told you, I can’t calculate, face to face. It was
just as you and I stand now.”

“Simply staring?”

He impatiently protested. “Ah! _we’re_ not staring!”

“Yes, but we’re talking.”

“Well, _we_ were--after a fashion.” He lost himself in the memory of it.
“It was as friendly as this.” I had it on my tongue’s end to ask if
that were saying much for it, but I remarked instead that what they had
evidently done was to gaze in mutual admiration. Then I inquired whether
his recognition of her had been immediate. “Not quite,” he replied,
“for, of course, I didn’t expect her; but it came to me long before she
went who she was--who she could only be.”

I thought a little. “And how did she at last go?”

“Just as she arrived. The door was open behind her, and she passed out.”

“Was she rapid--slow?”

“Rather quick. But looking behind her,” he added, with a smile. “I let
her go, for I perfectly understood that I was to take it as she wished.”

I was conscious of exhaling a long, vague sigh. “Well, you must take it
now as _I_ wish--you must let _me_ go.”

At this he drew near me again, detaining and persuading me, declaring
with all due gallantry that I was a very different matter. I would have
given anything to have been able to ask him if he had touched her, but
the words refused to form themselves: I knew well enough how horrid and
vulgar they would sound. I said something else--I forget exactly what;
it was feebly tortuous, and intended to make him tell me without my
putting the question. But he didn’t tell me; he only repeated, as if
from a glimpse of the propriety of soothing and consoling me, the sense
of his declaration of some minutes before--the assurance that she was
indeed exquisite, as I had always insisted, but that I was his “real”
 friend and his very own for ever. This led me to reassert, in the spirit
of my previous rejoinder, that I had at least the merit of being alive;
which in turn drew from him again the flash of contradiction I dreaded.
“Oh, _she_ was alive! she was, she was!”

“She was dead! she was dead!” I asseverated with an energy, a
determination that it should be so, which comes back to me now almost as
grotesque. But the sound of the word, as it rang out, filled me suddenly
with horror, and all the natural emotion the meaning of it might have
evoked in other conditions gathered and broke in a flood. It rolled over
me that here was a great affection quenched, and how much I had loved
and trusted her. I had a vision at the same time of the lonely beauty of
her end. “She’s gone--she’s lost to us for ever!” I burst into sobs.

“That’s exactly what I feel,” he exclaimed, speaking with extreme
kindness and pressing me to him for comfort. “She’s gone; she’s lost to
us for ever: so what does it matter now?” He bent over me, and when his
face had touched mine I scarcely knew if it were wet with my tears or
with his own.




VII

It was my theory, my conviction, it became, as I may say, my attitude,
that they had still never “met;” and it was just on this ground that I
said to myself it would be generous to ask him to stand with me beside
her grave. He did so, very modestly and tenderly, and I assumed, though
he himself clearly cared nothing for the danger, that the solemnity of
the occasion, largely made up of persons who had known them both and had
a sense of the long joke, would sufficiently deprive his presence of all
light association. On the question of what had happened the evening
of her death little more passed between us; I had been overtaken by a
horror of the element of evidence. It seemed gross and prying on either
hypothesis. He, on his side, had none to produce, none at least but a
statement of his house-porter--on his own admission a most casual
and intermittent personage--that between the hours of ten o’clock and
midnight no less than three ladies in deep black had flitted in and out
of the place. This proved far too much; we had neither of us any use for
three. He knew that I considered I had accounted for every fragment
of her time, and we dropped the matter as settled; we abstained from
further discussion. What I knew however was that he abstained to please
me rather than because he yielded to my reasons. He didn’t yield--he
was only indulgent; he clung to his interpretation because he liked it
better. He liked it better, I held, because it had more to say to his
vanity. That, in a similar position, would not have been its effect
on me, though I had doubtless quite as much; but these are things of
individual humour, as to which no person can judge for another. I should
have supposed it more gratifying to be the subject of one of those
inexplicable occurrences that are chronicled in thrilling books and
disputed about at learned meetings; I could conceive, on the part of
a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human
emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august than such
an impulse of reparation, of admonition or even of curiosity. _That_ was
beautiful, if one would, and I should in his place have thought more of
myself for being so distinguished. It was public that he had already,
that he had long been distinguished, and what was this in itself but
almost a proof? Each of the strange visitations contributed to establish
the other. He had a different feeling; but he had also, I hasten to add,
an unmistakable desire not to make a stand or, as they say, a fuss about
it. I might believe what I liked--the more so that the whole thing was
in a manner a mystery of my producing. It was an event of my history, a
puzzle of my consciousness, not of his; therefore he would take about it
any tone that struck me as convenient. We had both at all events other
business on hand; we were pressed with preparations for our marriage.

Mine were assuredly urgent, but I found as the days went on that
to believe what I “liked” was to believe what I was more and more
intimately convinced of. I found also that I didn’t like it so much as
that came to, or that the pleasure at all events was far from being the
cause of my conviction. My obsession, as I may really call it and as
I began to perceive, refused to be elbowed away, as I had hoped, by my
sense of paramount duties. If I had a great deal to do I had still more
to think about, and the moment came when my occupations were gravely
menaced by my thoughts. I see it all now, I feel it, I live it
over. It’s terribly void of joy, it’s full indeed to overflowing of
bitterness; and yet I must do myself justice--I couldn’t possibly be
other than I was. The same strange impressions, had I to meet them
again,'would produce the same deep anguish, the same sharp doubts, the
same still sharper certainties. Oh, it’s all easier to remember than to
write, but even if I could retrace the business hour by hour, could find
terms for the inexpressible, the ugliness and the pain would quickly
stay my hand. Let me then note very simply and briefly that a week
before our wedding-day, three weeks after her death, I became fully
aware that I had something very serious to look in the face, and that if
I was to make this effort I must make it on the spot and before
another hour should elapse. My unextinguished jealousy--_that_ was the
Medusa-mask. It hadn’t died with her death, it had lividly survived,
and it was fed by suspicions unspeakable. They _would_ be unspeakable
to-day, that is, if I hadn’t felt the sharp need of uttering them at the
time.

This need took possession of me--to save me, as it appeared, from my
fate. When once it had done so I saw--in the urgency of the case,
the diminishing hours and shrinking interval--only one issue, that of
absolute promptness and frankness. I could at least not do him the wrong
of delaying another day, I could at least treat my difficulty as
too fine for a subterfuge. Therefore very quietly, but none the less
abruptly and hideously, I put it before him on a certain evening that
we must reconsider our situation and recognise that it had completely
altered.

He stared bravely. “How has it altered?”

“Another person has come between us.”

He hesitated a moment. “I won’t pretend not to know whom you mean.” He
smiled in pity for my aberration, but he meant to be kind. “A woman dead
and buried!”

“She’s buried, but she’s not dead. She’s dead for the world--she’s dead
for me. But she’s not dead for _you._”

“You hark back to the different construction we put on her appearance
that evening?”

“No,” I answered, “I hark back to nothing. I’ve no need of it. I’ve more
than enough with what’s before me.”

“And pray, darling, what is that?”

“You’re completely changed.”

“By that absurdity?” he laughed.

“Not so much by that one as by other absurdities that have followed it.”

“And what may they have been?”

We had faced each other fairly, with eyes that didn’t flinch; but his
had a dim, strange light, and my certitude triumphed in his perceptible
paleness. “Do you really pretend,” I asked, “not to know what they are?”

“My dear child,” he replied, “you describe them too sketchily!”

I considered a moment. “One may well be embarrassed to finish the
picture! But from that point of view--and from the beginning--what was
ever more embarrassing than your idiosyncrasy?”

He was extremely vague. “My idiosyncrasy?”

“Your notorious, your peculiar power.”

He gave a great shrug of impatience, a groan of overdone disdain. “Oh,
my peculiar power!”

“Your accessibility to forms of life,” I coldly went on, “your command
of impressions, appearances, contacts closed--for our gain or our
loss--to the rest of us. That was originally a part of the deep interest
with which you inspired me--one of the reasons I was amused, I was
indeed positively proud to know you. It was a magnificent distinction;
it’s a magnificent distinction still. But of course I had no prevision
then of the way it would operate now; and even had that been the case I
should have had none of the extraordinary way in which its action would
affect me.”

“To what in the name of goodness,” he pleadingly inquired, “are you
fantastically alluding?” Then as I remained silent, gathering a tone for
my charge, “How in the world _does_ it operate?” he went on; “and how in
the world are you affected?”

“She missed you for five years,” I said, “but she never misses you now.
You’re making it up!”

“Making it up?” He had begun to turn from white to red.

“You see her--you see her: you see her every night!” He gave a loud
sound of derision, but it was not a genuine one. “She comes to you as
she came that evening,” I declared; “having tried it she found she liked
it!” I was able, with God’s help, to speak without blind passion or
vulgar violence; but those were the exact words--and far from “sketchy”
 they then appeared to me--that I uttered. He had turned away in his
laughter, clapping his hands at my folly, but in an instant he faced
me again, with a change of expression that struck me. “Do you dare to
deny,” I asked, “that you habitually see her?”

He had taken the line of indulgence, of meeting me halfway and kindly
humouring me. At all events, to my astonishment, he suddenly said:
“Well, my dear, what if I do?”

“It’s your natural right; it belongs to your constitution and to your
wonderful, if not perhaps quite enviable fortune. But you will easily
understand that it separates us. I unconditionally release you.”

“Release me?”

“You must choose between me and her.”

He looked at me hard. “I see.” Then he walked away a little, as if
grasping what I had said and thinking how he had best treat it. At last
he turned upon me afresh. “How on earth do you know such an awfully
private thing?”

“You mean because you’ve tried so hard to hide it? It _is_ awfully
private, and you may believe I shall never betray you. You’ve done your
best, you’ve acted your part, you’ve behaved, poor dear! loyally and
admirably. Therefore I’ve watched you in silence, playing my part too;
I’ve noted every drop in your voice, every absence in your eyes, every
effort in your indifferent hand: I’ve waited till I was utterly sure and
miserably unhappy. How _can_ you hide it when you’re abjectly in love
with her, when you’re sick almost to death with the joy of what she
gives you?” I checked his quick protest with a quicker gesture. “You
love her as you’ve _never_ loved, and, passion for passion, she gives it
straight back! She rules you, she holds you, she has you all! A woman,
in such a case as mine, divines and feels and sees; she’s not an
idiot who has to be credibly informed. You come to me mechanically,
compunctiously, with the dregs of your tenderness and the remnant of
your life. I can renounce you, but I can’t share you; the best of you is
hers; I know what it is and I freely give you up to her for ever!”

He made a gallant fight, but it couldn’t be patched up; he repeated his
denial, he retracted his admission, he ridiculed my charge, of which
I freely granted him moreover the indefensible extravagance. I didn’t
pretend for a moment that we were talking of common things; I didn’t
pretend for a moment that he and she were common people. Pray, if they
_had_ been, how should I ever have cared for them? They had enjoyed a
rare extension of being and they had caught me up in their flight; only
I couldn’t breathe in such an air and I promptly asked to be set
down. Everything in the facts was monstrous, and most of all my lucid
perception of them; the only thing allied to nature and truth was my
having to act on that perception. I felt after I had spoken in this
sense that my assurance was complete; nothing had been wanting to it but
the sight of my effect on him. He disguised indeed the effect in a cloud
of chaff, a diversion that gained him time and covered his retreat.
He challenged my sincerity, my sanity, almost my humanity, and that of
course widened our breach and confirmed our rupture. He did everything
in short but convince me either that I was wrong or that he was unhappy;
we separated, and I left him to his inconceivable communion.

He never married, any more than I’ve done. When six years later, in
solitude and silence, I heard of his death I hailed it as a direct
contribution to my theory. It was sudden, it was never properly
accounted for, it was surrounded by circumstances in which--for oh, I
took them to pieces!--I distinctly read an intention, the mark of
his own hidden hand. It was the result of a long necessity, of an
unquenchable desire. To say exactly what I mean, it was a response to an
irresistible call.

THE END





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