Terminations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895)/The Coxon Fund/Chapter 12
XII
Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and, indeed, almost in pain, as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of something precious. I didn't quite know what it was; it had a shocking resemblance to my honor. The emotion was the livelier, doubtless, in that my pulses were still shaken with the rejoicing with which, the night before, I had rallied to the rare analyst, the great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What had dropped from me like a cumbersome garment, as Saltram appeared before me in the afternoon on the heath, was the disposition to haggle over his value. Hang it, one had to choose! one had to put that value somewhere; so I would put it really high and have done with it. Mrs. Mulville drove in for him at a discreet hour—the earliest she could suppose him to have got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy would also have come had she not been expecting a visit from Mr. Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I was under bonds to see this young lady, and also that I had a letter to deliver to her; but I took my time, I waited from day to day. I left Mrs. Saltram to deal, as her apprehensions should prompt, with the Pudneys. I knew at last what I meant—I had ceased to wince at my responsibility. I gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade, if it would; but it didn't fade, and, individually, it has not faded even now. During the month that I thus invited myself to stiffen again, Adelaide Mulville, perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why I was so stiff. At that season of the year I was usually oftener with them. She also wrote that she feared a real estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweet young friend—a state of things only partly satisfactory to her so long as the advantage accruing to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the merely nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if any thing, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesize, and of course the question can't come up to-day. These are old frustrations now. Ruth Anvoy has not married, I hear, and neither have I. During the month, toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to ask if, on a special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to knock the very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately connected my enquiry with the talk we had had in the railway carriage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his eagerness were not yet cold. I told him there was something I thought I ought in candor to let him know; I recognized the obligation his friendly confidence had laid upon me.
"You mean that Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so herself," he said.
"It was not to tell you so that I wanted to see you," I replied; "for it seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly with herself. If, however, she did speak to you of our conversation, she probably told you I was discouraging."
"Discouraging?"
"On the subject of a present application of the Coxon Fund."
"To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don't know what you call discouraging!" Gravener exclaimed.
"Well, I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was."
"I believe she did, but such a thing is measured by the effect. She's not discouraged."
"That's her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that decidedly I can't undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don't want to!"
"It's very good of you, d——— you!" my visitor laughed, red and really grave. Then he said: "You would like to see that fellow publicly glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary fortune?"
"Taking one form of public recognition with another, it seemed to me, on the whole, I could bear it. When I see the compliments that are paid right and left, I ask myself why this one shouldn't take its course. This, therefore, is what you're entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I have some evidence that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite Miss Anvoy to remain in ignorance of it."
"And to invite me to do the same?"
"Oh, you don't require it; you've evidence enough. I speak of a sealed letter which I've been requested to deliver to her."
"And you don't mean to?"
"There's only one consideration that would make me."
Gravener's clear, handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but evidently without fishing up a clew to this motive—a failure by which I was almost wounded. "What does the letter contain?"
"It's sealed, as I tell you, and I don't know what it contains."
"Why is it sent through you?"
"Rather than you?" I hesitated a moment. "The only explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end—may have been told this is the case by Mrs. Saltram."
"My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end," poor Gravener stammered.
Again, for an instant, I deliberated. "The offer I propose to make you gives me the right to put a question remarkably direct. Are you still engaged to Miss Anvoy?"
"No, I'm not," he slowly brought out. "But we're perfectly good friends."
"Such good friends that you will again become prospective husband and wife if the obstacle in your path be removed?"
"Removed?" Gravener anxiously repeated.
"If I give Miss Anvoy the letter I speak of, she may drop her project."
"Then, for God's sake give it!"
"I'll do so if you're ready to assure me that her dropping it would now presumably bring about your marriage."
"I'd marry her the next day!" my visitor cried.
"Yes, but would she marry you? What I ask of you, of course, is nothing less than your word of honor as to your conviction of this. If you give it me," I said, "I'll engage to hand her the letter before night."
Gravener took up his hat; turning it mechanically round, he stood looking a moment hard at its unruffled perfection. Then, very angrily, honestly, and gallantly: "Hand it to the devil!" he broke out; with which he clapped the hat on his head and left me.
"Will you read it or not?" I said to Ruth Anvoy at Wimbledon, when I had told her the story of Mrs. Saltram's visit.
She reflected for a period which was probably of the briefest, but which was long enough to make me nervous. "Have you brought it with you?"
"No, indeed. It's at home locked up."
There was another great silence, and then she said: "Go back and destroy it."
I went back, but I didn't destroy it till after Saltram's death, when I burned it unread. The Pudneys approached her again pressingly, but, prompt as they were, the Coxon Fund had already become an operative benefit and a general amaze: Mr. Saltram, while we gathered about, as it were, to watch the manna descend, was already drawing the magnificent income. He drew it as he had always drawn every thing, with a grand, abstracted gesture. Its magnificence, alas, as all the world now knows, quite quenched him; it was the beginning of his decline. It was also naturally a new grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as soon as he was blighted, and who at this hour accuses us of having bribed him, on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious office, to become, as she says, like every body else. The very day he found himself able to publish he wholly ceased to produce. This deprived us, as may easily be imagined, of much of our occupation, and especially deprived the Mulvilles, whose want of self-support I never measured till they lost their great inmate. They have no one to live on now. Adelaide's most frequent reference to their destitution is embodied in the remark that dear far-away Ruth's intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent are even yet looking for another prop, but no one presents a true sphere of usefulness. They complain that people are self-sufficing. With Saltram the fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the grander, the elder style. They have got their carriage back, but what's an empty carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer before; even including George Gravener, who, by the deaths of his brother and his nephew, has lately become Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper House, and he has not yet had high office. But what are these accidents, which I should, perhaps, apologize for mentioning, in the light of the great eventual boon promised the patient by the rate at which the Coxon Fund must be rolling up?