The Coxon Fund

IX

The thing I had been most sensible of in that talk with George Gravener was the way Saltram’s name kept out of it.  It seemed to me at the time that we were quite pointedly silent about him; but afterwards it appeared more probable there had been on my companion’s part no conscious avoidance.  Later on I was sure of this, and for the best of reasons—the simple reason of my perceiving more completely that, for evil as well as for good, he said nothing to Gravener’s imagination.  That honest man didn’t fear him—he was too much disgusted with him.  No more did I, doubtless, and for very much the same reason.  I treated my friend’s story as an absolute confidence; but when before Christmas, by Mrs. Saltram, I was informed of Lady Coxon’s death without having had news of Miss Anvoy’s return, I found myself taking for granted we should hear no more of these nuptials, in which, as obscurely unnatural, I now saw I had never too disconcertedly believed.  I began to ask myself how people who suited each other so little could please each other so much.  The charm was some material charm, some afffinity, exquisite doubtless, yet superficial some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts.  They might dote on each other’s persons, but how could they know each other’s souls?  How could they have the same prejudices, how could they have the same horizon?  Such questions, I confess, seemed quenched but not answered when, one day in February, going out to Wimbledon, I found our young lady in the house.  A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was as much of a passion as was needed.  No impulse equally strong indeed had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind myself that it was none of my business.  Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt that the difference was not simply that of her marks of mourning.  Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was: it was the difference between a handsome girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four hundred a year.  This explanation indeed didn’t wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether, buried under the ruins of his fortune and leaving next to nothing, had died a few weeks before.

“So she has come out to marry George Gravener?” I commented.  “Wouldn’t it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?”

“Hasn’t the House just met?” Adelaide replied.  “And for Mr. Gravener the House—!”  Then she added: “I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky.  If it were quite all right a self-respecting girl like Ruth would have waited for him over there.”

I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said was: “Do you mean she’ll have had to return to make it so?”

“No, I mean that she must have come out for some reason independent of it.”  Adelaide could only surmise, however, as yet, and there was more, as we found, to be revealed.  Mrs. Mulville, on hearing of her arrival, had brought the young lady out in the green landau for the Sunday.  The Coxons were in possession of the house in Regent’s Park, and Miss Anvoy was in dreary lodgings.  George Gravener had been with her when Adelaide called, but had assented graciously enough to the little visit at Wimbledon.  The carriage, with Mr. Saltram in it but not mentioned, had been sent off on some errand from which it was to return and pick the ladies up.  Gravener had left them together, and at the end of an hour, on the Saturday afternoon, the party of three had driven out to Wimbledon.  This was the girl’s second glimpse of our great man, and I was interested in asking Mrs. Mulville if the impression made by the first appeared to have been confirmed.  On her replying after consideration, that of course with time and opportunity it couldn’t fail to be, but that she was disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her use of this last word to question her further.

“Do you mean you’re disappointed because you judge Miss Anvoy to be?”

“Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening.  We had two or three people, but he scarcely opened his mouth.”

“He’ll be all the better to-night,” I opined after a moment.  Then I pursued: “What particular importance do you attach to the idea of her being impressed?”

Adelaide turned her mild pale eyes on me as for rebuke of my levity.  “Why the importance of her being as happy as we are!”

I’m afraid that at this my levity grew.  “Oh that’s a happiness almost too great to wish a person!”  I saw she hadn’t yet in her mind what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor’s actual bliss was limited to a walk in the garden with Kent Mulville.  Later in the afternoon I also took one, and I saw nothing of Miss Anvoy till dinner, at which we failed of the company of Saltram, who had caused it to be reported that he was indisposed and lying down.  This made us, most of us—for there were other friends present—convey to each other in silence some of the unutterable things that in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of expressing.  If a fine little American enquirer hadn’t been there we would have expressed them otherwise, and Adelaide would have pretended not to hear.  I had seen her, before the very fact, abstract herself nobly; and I knew that more than once, to keep it from the servants, managing, dissimulating cleverly, she had helped her husband to carry him bodily to his room.  Just recently he had been so wise and so deep and so high that I had begun to get nervous—to wonder if by chance there were something behind it, if he were kept straight for instance by the knowledge that the hated Pudneys would have more to tell us if they chose.  He was lying low, but unfortunately it was common wisdom with us in this connexion that the biggest splashes took place in the quietest pools.  We should have had a merry life indeed if all the splashes had sprinkled us as refreshingly as the waters we were even then to feel about our ears.  Kent Mulville had been up to his room, but had come back with a face that told as few tales as I had seen it succeed in telling on the evening I waited in the lecture-room with Miss Anvoy.  I said to myself that our friend had gone out, but it was a comfort that the presence of a comparative stranger deprived us of the dreary duty of suggesting to each other, in respect of his errand, edifying possibilities in which we didn’t ourselves believe.  At ten o’clock he came into the drawing-room with his waistcoat much awry but his eyes sending out great signals.  It was precisely with his entrance that I ceased to be vividly conscious of him.  I saw that the crystal, as I had called it, had begun to swing, and I had need of my immediate attention for Miss Anvoy.

Even when I was told afterwards that he had, as we might have said to-day, broken the record, the manner in which that attention had been rewarded relieved me of a sense of loss.  I had of course a perfect general consciousness that something great was going on: it was a little like having been etherised to hear Herr Joachim play.  The old music was in the air; I felt the strong pulse of thought, the sink and swell, the flight, the poise, the plunge; but I knew something about one of the listeners that nobody else knew, and Saltram’s monologue could reach me only through that medium.  To this hour I’m of no use when, as a witness, I’m appealed to—for they still absurdly contend about it—as to whether or no on that historic night he was drunk; and my position is slightly ridiculous, for I’ve never cared to tell them what it really was I was taken up with.  What I got out of it is the only morsel of the total experience that is quite my own.  The others were shared, but this is incommunicable.  I feel that now, I’m bound to say, even in thus roughly evoking the occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness.  However, I shall perhaps be as clear as is absolutely needful if I remark that our young lady was too much given up to her own intensity of observation to be sensible of mine.  It was plainly not the question of her marriage that had brought her back.  I greatly enjoyed this discovery and was sure that had that question alone been involved she would have stirred no step.  In this case doubtless Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin her.  It afterwards made me uncomfortable for her that, alone in the lodging Mrs. Mulville had put before me as dreary, she should have in any degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that I was presently relieved at hearing of her having gone to stay at Coldfield.  If she was in England at all while the engagement stood the only proper place for her was under Lady Maddock’s wing.  Now that she was unfortunate and relatively poor, perhaps her prospective sister-in-law would be wholly won over.

There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her behaviour, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, while that other night I listened to George Gravener in the railway-carriage.  I watched her in the light of this queer possibility—a formidable thing certainly to meet—and I was aware that it coloured, extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones.  At Wimbledon for instance it had appeared to me she was literally afraid of Saltram, in dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel.  I had come up to town with her the next day and had been convinced that, though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard.  She would show as little as possible before she should be ready to show everything.  What this final exhibition might be on the part of a girl perceptibly so able to think things out I found it great sport to forecast.  It would have been exciting to be approached by her, appealed to by her for advice; but I prayed to heaven I mightn’t find myself in such a predicament.  If there was really a present rigour in the situation of which Gravener had sketched for me the elements, she would have to get out of her difficulty by herself.  It wasn’t I who had launched her and it wasn’t I who could help her.  I didn’t fail to ask myself why, since I couldn’t help her, I should think so much about her.  It was in part my suspense that was responsible for this; I waited impatiently to see whether she wouldn’t have told Mrs. Mulville a portion at least of what I had learned from Gravener.  But I saw Mrs. Mulville was still reduced to wonder what she had come out again for if she hadn’t come as a conciliatory bride.  That she had come in some other character was the only thing that fitted all the appearances.  Having for family reasons to spend some time that spring in the west of England, I was in a manner out of earshot of the great oceanic rumble—I mean of the continuous hum of Saltram’s thought—and my uneasiness tended to keep me quiet.  There was something I wanted so little to have to say that my prudence surmounted my curiosity.  I only wondered if Ruth Anvoy talked over the idea of The Coxon Fund with Lady Maddock, and also somewhat why I didn’t hear from Wimbledon.  I had a reproachful note about something or other from Mrs. Saltram, but it contained no mention of Lady Coxon’s niece, on whom her eyes had been much less fixed since the recent untoward events.

X

Poor Adelaide’s silence was fully explained later—practically explained when in June, returning to London, I was honoured by this admirable woman with an early visit.  As soon as she arrived I guessed everything, and as soon as she told me that darling Ruth had been in her house nearly a month I had my question ready.  “What in the name of maidenly modesty is she staying in England for?”

“Because she loves me so!” cried Adelaide gaily.  But she hadn’t come to see me only to tell me Miss Anvoy loved her: that was quite sufficiently established, and what was much more to the point was that Mr. Gravener had now raised an objection to it.  He had protested at least against her being at Wimbledon, where in the innocence of his heart he had originally brought her himself; he called on her to put an end to their engagement in the only proper, the only happy manner.

“And why in the world doesn’t she do do?” I asked.

Adelaide had a pause.  “She says you know.”

Then on my also hesitating she added: “A condition he makes.”

“The Coxon Fund?” I panted.

“He has mentioned to her his having told you about it.”

“Ah but so little!  Do you mean she has accepted the trust?”

“In the most splendid spirit—as a duty about which there can be no two opinions.”  To which my friend added: “Of course she’s thinking of Mr. Saltram.”

I gave a quick cry at this, which, in its violence, made my visitor turn pale.  “How very awful!”

“Awful?”

“Why, to have anything to do with such an idea one’s self.”

“I’m sure you needn’t!” and Mrs. Mulville tossed her head.

“He isn’t good enough!” I went on; to which she opposed a sound almost as contentious as my own had been.  This made me, with genuine immediate horror, exclaim: “You haven’t influenced her, I hope!” and my emphasis brought back the blood with a rush to poor Adelaide’s face.  She declared while she blushed—for I had frightened her again—that she had never influenced anybody and that the girl had only seen and heard and judged for herself.  He had influenced her, if I would, as he did every one who had a soul: that word, as we knew, even expressed feebly the power of the things he said to haunt the mind.  How could she, Adelaide, help it if Miss Anvoy’s mind was haunted?  I demanded with a groan what right a pretty girl engaged to a rising M.P. had to have a mind; but the only explanation my bewildered friend could give me was that she was so clever.  She regarded Mr. Saltram naturally as a tremendous force for good.  She was intelligent enough to understand him and generous enough to admire.

“She’s many things enough, but is she, among them, rich enough?” I demanded.  “Rich enough, I mean, to sacrifice such a lot of good money?”

“That’s for herself to judge.  Besides, it’s not her own money; she doesn’t in the least consider it so.”

“And Gravener does, if not his own; and that’s the whole difficulty?”

“The difficulty that brought her back, yes: she had absolutely to see her poor aunt’s solicitor.  It’s clear that by Lady Coxon’s will she may have the money, but it’s still clearer to her conscience that the original condition, definite, intensely implied on her uncle’s part, is attached to the use of it.  She can only take one view of it.  It’s for the Endowment or it’s for nothing.”

“The Endowment,” I permitted myself to observe, “is a conception superficially sublime, but fundamentally ridiculous.”

“Are you repeating Mr. Gravener’s words?” Adelaide asked.

“Possibly, though I’ve not seen him for months.  It’s simply the way it strikes me too.  It’s an old wife’s tale.  Gravener made some reference to the legal aspect, but such an absurdly loose arrangement has no legal aspect.”

“Ruth doesn’t insist on that,” said Mrs. Mulville; “and it’s, for her, exactly this technical weakness that constitutes the force of the moral obligation.”

“Are you repeating her words?” I enquired.  I forget what else Adelaide said, but she said she was magnificent.  I thought of George Gravener confronted with such magnificence as that, and I asked what could have made two such persons ever suppose they understood each other.  Mrs. Mulville assured me the girl loved him as such a woman could love and that she suffered as such a woman could suffer.  Nevertheless she wanted to see me.  At this I sprang up with a groan.  “Oh I’m so sorry!—when?”  Small though her sense of humour, I think Adelaide laughed at my sequence.  We discussed the day, the nearest it would be convenient I should come out; but before she went I asked my visitor how long she had been acquainted with these prodigies.

“For several weeks, but I was pledged to secrecy.”

“And that’s why you didn’t write?”

“I couldn’t very well tell you she was with me without telling you that no time had even yet been fixed for her marriage.  And I couldn’t very well tell you as much as that without telling you what I knew of the reason of it.  It was not till a day or two ago,” Mrs. Mulville went on, “that she asked me to ask you if you wouldn’t come and see her.  Then at last she spoke of your knowing about the idea of the Endowment.”

I turned this over.  “Why on earth does she want to see me?”

“To talk with you, naturally, about Mr. Saltram.”

“As a subject for the prize?”  This was hugely obvious, and I presently returned: “I think I’ll sail to-morrow for Australia.”

“Well then—sail!” said Mrs. Mulville, getting up.

But I frivolously, continued.  “On Thursday at five, we said?”  The appointment was made definite and I enquired how, all this time, the unconscious candidate had carried himself.

“In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has positively been a dear.  And then, as to what we revere him for, in the most wonderful form.  His very highest—pure celestial light.  You won’t do him an ill turn?” Adelaide pleaded at the door.

“What danger can equal for him the danger to which he’s exposed from himself?” I asked.  “Look out sharp, if he has lately been too prim.  He’ll presently take a day off, treat us to some exhibition that will make an Endowment a scandal.”

“A scandal?” Mrs. Mulville dolorously echoed.

“Is Miss Anvoy prepared for that?”

My visitor, for a moment, screwed her parasol into my carpet.  “He grows bigger every day.”

“So do you!” I laughed as she went off.

That girl at Wimbledon, on the Thursday afternoon, more than justified my apprehensions.  I recognised fully now the cause of the agitation she had produced in me from the first—the faint foreknowledge that there was something very stiff I should have to do for her.  I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me.  Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that which permitted her to laugh out, as for the joy of her difficulty, into the priggish old room.  This remarkable young woman could be earnest without being solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have cursed her obstinacy I found myself watching the unstudied play of her eyebrows or the recurrence of a singularly intense whiteness produced by the parting of her lips.  These aberrations, I hasten to add, didn’t prevent my learning soon enough why she had wished to see me.  Her reason for this was as distinct as her beauty: it was to make me explain what I had meant, on the occasion of our first meeting, by Mr. Saltram’s want of dignity.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine, but she desired it there from my lips.  What she really desired of course was to know whether there was worse about him than what she had found out for herself.  She hadn’t been a month so much in the house with him without discovering that he wasn’t a man of monumental bronze.  He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project.  She put her project boldly before me: there it stood in its preposterous beauty.  She was as willing to take the humorous view of it as I could be: the only difference was that for her the humorous view of a thing wasn’t necessarily prohibitive, wasn’t paralysing.

Moreover she professed that she couldn’t discuss with me the primary question—the moral obligation: that was in her own breast.  There were things she couldn’t go into—injunctions, impressions she had received.  They were a part of the closest intimacy of her intercourse with her aunt, they were absolutely clear to her; and on questions of delicacy, the interpretation of a fidelity, of a promise, one had always in the last resort to make up one’s mind for one’s self.  It was the idea of the application to the particular case, such a splendid one at last, that troubled her, and she admitted that it stirred very deep things.  She didn’t pretend that such a responsibility was a simple matter; if it had been she wouldn’t have attempted to saddle me with any portion of it.  The Mulvilles were sympathy itself, but were they absolutely candid?  Could they indeed be, in their position—would it even have been to be desired?  Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of me—whether there was anything dreadful kept back.  She made no allusion whatever to George Gravener—I thought her silence the only good taste and her gaiety perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the effect of a determination that people shouldn’t know from herself that her relations with the man she was to marry were strained.  All the weight, however, that she left me to throw was a sufficient implication of the weight he had thrown in vain.  Oh she knew the question of character was immense, and that one couldn’t entertain any plan for making merit comfortable without running the gauntlet of that terrible procession of interrogation-points which, like a young ladies’ school out for a walk, hooked their uniform noses at the tail of governess Conduct.  But were we absolutely to hold that there was never, never, never an exception, never, never, never an occasion for liberal acceptance, for clever charity, for suspended pedantry—for letting one side, in short, outbalance another?  When Miss Anvoy threw off this appeal I could have embraced her for so delightfully emphasising her unlikeness to Mrs. Saltram.  “Why not have the courage of one’s forgiveness,” she asked, “as well as the enthusiasm of one’s adhesion?”

“Seeing how wonderfully you’ve threshed the whole thing out,” I evasively replied, “gives me an extraordinary notion of the point your enthusiasm has reached.”

She considered this remark an instant with her eyes on mine, and I divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a reference to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some aberration of sensibility, some perversion of taste.  At least I couldn’t interpret otherwise the sudden flash that came into her face.  Such a manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me; but while I was thinking how to reassure her the flush passed away in a smile of exquisite good nature.  “Oh you see one forgets so wonderfully how one dislikes him!” she said; and if her tone simply extinguished his strange figure with the brush of its compassion, it also rings in my ear to-day as the purest of all our praises.  But with what quick response of fine pity such a relegation of the man himself made me privately sigh “Ah poor Saltram!”  She instantly, with this, took the measure of all I didn’t believe, and it enabled her to go on: “What can one do when a person has given such a lift to one’s interest in life?”