Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case so serviceable as he would have been had the politics of the G.o.ds only coincided more exactly with those of the party. There was a distinct moment when, without saying anything more definite to me, Gravener entertained the idea of "getting hold" of Mr. Saltram. Such a project was fact.i.tious, for the discovery of a.n.a.logies between his body of doctrine and that pressed from headquarters upon Clockborough--the bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs for convenient public uncorking in corn-exchanges--was an experiment for which no one had the leisure. The only thing would have been to carry him ma.s.sively about, paid, caged, clipped: to turn him on for a particular occasion in a particular channel. Frank Saltram's channel, however, was essentially not calculable, and there was no knowing what disastrous floods might have issued. For what there would have been to do "The Empire," the great newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new misfortune that there were delicate situations in which "The Empire"

broke down. In fine there was an instinctive apprehension that a clever young journalist commissioned to report upon Mr. Saltram might never come back from the errand. No one knew better than George Gravener that that was a time when prompt returns counted double. If he therefore found our friend an exasperating waste of orthodoxy, it was because he was, as he said, up in the clouds; not because he was down in the dust. He would have been a real enough gentleman if he could have helped to put in a real gentleman. Gravener's great objection to the actual member was that he was not one.

Lady c.o.xon had a fine old house, a house with "grounds," at Clockborough, which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I learned from Mrs. Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she had gone down to resume possession. I could see the faded red livery, the big square shoulders, the high-walled garden of this decent abode.

As the rumble of dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed his suit, and I found myself hoping that the politics of the late Mayor's widow would not be such as to enjoin upon her to ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so far as to hope that they would be such as to put all countenance out of the question. I tried to focus the page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed the Bath-chair over somebody's toes. I was destined to hear, however, through Mrs. Saltram (who, I afterwards learned, was in correspondence with Lady c.o.xon's housekeeper), that Gravener was known to have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at Clockborough. On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy but of experience. The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see him in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very justly, to think him good-looking. It would be too much to say that I was troubled by such an image; but I seem to remember the relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of Frank Saltram. There were limits after all, and my mark at last had been reached.

I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an expression; but this was a supreme revolt. Certain things cleared up in my mind, certain values stood out. It was all very well to talk of an unfortunate temperament; there were misfortunes that people should themselves correct, and correct in private, without calling in a.s.sistance. I avoided George Gravener at this moment, and reflected that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving England. I wanted to forget Frank Saltram--that was all. I didn't want to do anything in the world to him but that. Indignation had withered on the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought only by never thinking of him again. It wasn't for anything he had done to me; it was for something he had done to the Mulvilles.

Adelaide cried about it for a week, and her husband, profiting by the example so signally given him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter unanswered. The letter, an incredible one, addressed by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was the central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features, each more painful than whichever other we compared it with. The Pudneys had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse. Base ingrat.i.tude, gross indecency--one had one's choice only of such formulas as that the more they fitted the less they gave one rest.

These are dead aches now, and I am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business. There are things which if I had had to tell them--well, I wouldn't have told my story.

I went abroad for the general election, and if I don't know how much, on the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed, him. At a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I discovered what he had done for me. I owed him, oh unmistakably, certain n.o.ble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky lamp, and lo, it continued to twinkle. But the light it gave me just showed me how much more I wanted. I was pursued of course by letters from Mrs. Saltram, which I didn't scruple not to read, though I was duly conscious that her embarra.s.sments would now be of the gravest. I sacrificed to propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, as I rummaged in my desk for another paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the packet. The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the news was two months old. A direct question of Mrs. Saltram's had thus remained unanswered--she had inquired of me in a postscript what sort of man this Mr. Gravener might be. This Mr. Gravener had been triumphantly returned for Clockborough, in the interest of the party that had swept the country, so that I might easily have referred Mrs.

Saltram to the journals of the day. But when I at last wrote to her that I was coming home and would discharge my acc.u.mulated burden by seeing her, I remarked in regard to her question that she must really put it to Miss Anvoy.

VI

I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences, on my return, had squarely to be faced. The season, in London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings.

Confidence, under the new ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in the social body, was a recovery of appet.i.te.

People once more fed together, and it happened that, one Sat.u.r.day night, at somebody's house, I fed with George Gravener. When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he sat and offered him my congratulation. "On my election?" he asked after a moment; whereupon I feigned, jocosely not to have heard of his election and to be alluding to something much more important, the rumour of his engagement. I daresay I coloured however, for his political victory had momentarily pa.s.sed out of my mind. What was present to it was that he was to marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious of some embarra.s.sment--I had not intended to put that before everything. He himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking the whole man was in this a.s.sumption, that in expressing my sense of what he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his "seat." We straightened the matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately seen him that his spirits might well have been fed from a double source. He was so good as to say that he hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to town. Lady c.o.xon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed their arrival. I told him I had heard the marriage would be a splendid one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed and said: "Do you mean for _her_?" When I had again explained what I meant he went on: "Oh, she's an American, but you'd scarcely know it; unless, perhaps," he added, "by her being used to more money than most girls in England, even the daughters of rich men. That wouldn't in the least do for a fellow like me, you know, if it wasn't for the great liberality of her father. He really has been most kind, and everything is quite satisfactory." He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous fancy to her and that during a recent visit at Coldfield she had nearly won over Lady Maddock. I gathered from something he dropped later that the free-handed gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement, but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to, across the water, for other favours. People are simplified alike by great contentments and great yearnings, and whether or no it was Gravener's directness that begot my own, I seem to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it upon me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt. My inquiry elicited that Lady c.o.xon, who was the oddest of women, would have in any contingency to act under her late husband's will, which was odder still, saddling her with a ma.s.s of queer obligations intermingled with queer loopholes. There were several dreary people, c.o.xon relations, old maids, whom she would have more or less to consider. Gravener laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected that I had turned a lantern on him, he exclaimed quite dryly: "That's all rot--one is moved by other springs!"

A fortnight later, at Lady c.o.xon's own house, I understood well enough the springs one was moved by. Gravener had spoken of me there as an old friend, and I received a gracious invitation to dine. The knight's widow was again indisposed--she had succ.u.mbed at the eleventh hour; so that I found Miss Anvoy bravely playing hostess, without even Gravener's help, inasmuch as, to make matters worse, he had just sent up word that the House, the insatiable House, with which he supposed he had contracted for easier terms, positively declined to release him. I was struck with the courage, the grace and gaiety of the young lady left to deal unaided with the possibilities of the Regent's Park.

I did what I could to help her to keep them down, or up, after I had recovered from the confusion of seeing her slightly disconcerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her intended the gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank Saltram. I had at that moment my first glimpse of the fact that she was a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to judge of my sense of the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden when I heard the servant announce Mrs. Saltram. From what immediately pa.s.sed between the two ladies I gathered that the latter had been sent for post-haste to fill the gap created by the absence of the mistress of the house.

"Good!" I exclaimed, "she will be put by _me_!" and my apprehension was promptly justified. Mrs. Saltram taken in to dinner, and taken in as a consequence of an appeal to her amiability, was Mrs. Saltram with a vengeance. I asked myself what Miss Anvoy meant by doing such things, but the only answer I arrived at was that Gravener was verily fortunate. She had not happened to tell him of her visit to Upper Baker Street, but she would certainly tell him to-morrow; not indeed that this would make him like any better her having had the simplicity to invite such a person as Mrs. Saltram on such an occasion. I reflected that I had never seen a young woman put such ignorance into her cleverness, such freedom into her modesty: this, I think, was when, after dinner, she said to me frankly, with almost jubilant mirth: "Oh, you don't admire Mrs. Saltram!" Why should I? She was truly an innocent maiden. I had briefly to consider before I could reply that my objection to the lady in question was the objection often formulated in regard to persons met at the social board--I knew all her stories. Then, as Miss Anvoy remained momentarily vague, I added: "About her husband."

"Oh yes, but there are some new ones."

"None for me. Oh, novelty would be pleasant!"

"Doesn't it appear that of late he has been particularly horrid?"

"His fluctuations don't matter," I replied; "they are all covered by the single circ.u.mstance I mentioned the evening we waited for him together. What will you have? He has no dignity."

Miss Anvoy, who had been introducing with her American distinctness, looked encouragingly round at some of the combinations she had risked.

"It's too bad I can't see him."

"You mean Gravener won't let you?"

"I haven't asked him. He lets me do everything."

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

"We haven't happened to talk of him," the girl said.

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

"I thought Mr. Saltram had thrown the Mulvilles over."

"Utterly. But that won't prevent his being planted there again, to bloom like a rose, within a month or two."

Miss Anvoy thought a moment. Then, "I should like to see them," she said with her fostering smile.

"They're tremendously worth it. You mustn't miss them."

"I'll make George take me," she went on as Mrs. Saltram came up to interrupt us. The girl smiled at her as kindly as she had smiled at me, and addressing the question to her, continued: "But the chance of a lecture--one of the wonderful lectures? Isn't there another course announced!"

"Another? There are about thirty!" I exclaimed, turning away and feeling Mrs. Saltram's little eyes in my back. A few days after this, I heard that Gravener's marriage was near at hand--was settled far Whitsuntide; but as I had received no invitation I doubted it, and presently there came to me in fact the report of a postponement.

Something was the matter; what was the matter was supposed to be that Lady c.o.xon was now critically ill. I had called on her after my dinner in the Regent's Park, but I had neither seen her nor seen Miss Anvoy.

I forget to-day the exact order in which, at this period, certain incidents occurred and the particular stage at which it suddenly struck me, making me catch my breath a little, that the progression, the acceleration was for all the world that of a drama. This was probably rather late in the day, and the exact order doesn't matter.

What had already occurred was some accident determining a more patient wait. George Gravener, whom I met again, in fact told me as much, but without signs of perturbation. Lady c.o.xon had to be constantly attended to, and there were other good reasons as well. Lady c.o.xon had to be so constantly attended to that on the occasion of a second attempt in the Regent's Park I equally failed to obtain a sight of her niece. I judged it discreet under the circ.u.mstances not to make a third; but this didn't matter, for it was through Adelaide Mulville that the side-wind of the comedy, though I was at first unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because Saltram was there and I went at others because he was not. The Pudneys, who had taken him to Birmingham, had already got rid of him, and we had a horrible consciousness of his wandering roofless, in dishonour, about the smoky Midlands, almost as the injured Lear wandered on the storm-lashed heath. His room, upstairs, had been lately done up (I could hear the crackle of the new chintz), and the difference only made his smirches and bruises, his splendid tainted genius, the more tragic. If he wasn't barefoot in the mire, he was sure to be unconventionally shod. These were the things Adelaide and I, who were old enough friends to stare at each other in silence, talked about when we didn't speak. When we spoke it was only about the charming girl George Gravener was to marry, whom he had brought out the other Sunday. I could see that this introduction had been happy, for Mrs.

Mulville commemorated it in the only way in which she ever expressed her confidence in a new relation. "She likes me--she likes me": her native humility exulted in that measure of success. We all knew for ourselves how she liked those who liked her, and as regards Ruth Anvoy she was more easily won over than Lady Maddock.

VII

One of the consequences, for the Mulvilles, of the sacrifices they made for Frank Saltram was that they had to give up their carriage.

Adelaide drove gently into London in a one-horse greenish thing, an early Victorian landau, hired, near at hand, imaginatively, from a broken-down jobmaster whose wife was in consumption--a vehicle that made people turn round all the more when her pensioner sat beside her in a soft white hat and a shawl, one of her own. This was his position and I daresay his costume when on an afternoon in July she went to return Miss Anvoy's visit. The wheel of fate had now revolved, and amid silences deep and exhaustive, compunctions and condonations alike unutterable, Saltram was reinstated. Was it in pride or in penance that Mrs. Mulville began immediately to drive him about? If he was ashamed of his ingrat.i.tude she might have been ashamed of her forgiveness; but she was incorrigibly capable of liking him to be seen strikingly seated in the landau while she was in shops or with her acquaintance. However, if he was in the pillory for twenty minutes in the Regent's Park (I mean at Lady c.o.xon's door, while her companion paid her call), it was not for the further humiliation of anyone concerned that she presently came out for him in person, not even to show either of them what a fool she was that she drew him in to be introduced to the clever young American. Her account of this introduction I had in its order, but before that, very late in the season, under Gravener's auspices, I met Miss Anvoy at tea at the House of Commons. The member for Clockborough had gathered a group of pretty ladies, and the Mulvilles were not of the party. On the great terrace, as I strolled off a little with her, the guest of honour immediately exclaimed to me: "I've seen him, you know--I've seen him!"

She told me about Saltram's call.

"And how did you find him?"

"Oh, so strange!"

"You didn't like him?"

"I can't tell till I see him again."

"You want to do that?"

She was silent a moment. "Immensely."

We stopped; I fancied she had become aware Gravener was looking at us.

She turned back toward the knot of the others, and I said: "Dislike him as much as you will--I see you're bitten."

"Bitten?" I thought she coloured a little.

"Oh, it doesn't matter!" I laughed; "one doesn't die of it."

"I hope I sha'n't die of anything before I've seen more of Mrs.

Mulville." I rejoiced with her over plain Adelaide, whom she p.r.o.nounced the loveliest woman she had met in England; but before we separated I remarked to her that it was an act of mere humanity to warn her that if she should see more of Frank Saltram (which would be likely to follow on any increase of acquaintance with Mrs. Mulville), she might find herself flattening her nose against the clear hard pane of an eternal question--that of the relative importance of virtue. She replied that this was surely a subject on which one took everything for granted; whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper Baker Street--the importance relative (relative to virtue) of other gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift--as if it were handed to us in a parcel on our birthday; and I declared that this very question showed me the problem had already caught her by the skirt. She would have help however, help that I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.

"What help do you mean?"

"That of the member for Clockborough."

She stared, smiled, then exclaimed: "Why, my idea has been to help _him_!"

She _had_ helped him--I had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do so doubtless again and again, but I heard the very next month that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble--great disasters, in America, had suddenly summoned her home. Her father, in New York, had had reverses--lost so much money that no one knew what mightn't yet come of it. It was Adelaide who told me that she had gone off, alone, at less than a week's notice.

"Alone? Gravener has permitted that?"