The Coxon Fund
Page 7
“You’ll have to open the letter. It also contains an enclosure.”
I felt it—it was fat and uncanny. “Wheels within wheels!” I exclaimed. “There’s something for me, too, to deliver.”
“So they tell me—to Miss Anvoy.”
I stared; I felt a certain thrill. “Why don’t they send it to her directly?”
Mrs. Saltram hung fire. “Because she’s staying with Mr. and Mrs. Mulville.”
“And why should that prevent?”
Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque, the unconscious perversity of her action. I was the only person save George Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware of Sir Gregory Coxon’s and of Miss Anvoy’s strange bounty. Where could there have been a more signal illustration of the clumsiness of human affairs than her having complacently selected this moment to fly in the face of it? “There’s the chance of their seeing her letters. They know Mr. Pudney’s hand.”
Still I didn’t understand; then it flashed upon me. “You mean they might intercept it? How can you imply anything so base?” I indignantly demanded.
“It’s not I—it’s Mr. Pudney!” cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush. “It’s his own idea.”
“Then why couldn’t he send the letter to you to be delivered?”
Mrs. Saltram’s embarrassment increased; she gave me another hard look. “You must make that out for yourself.”
I made it out quickly enough. “It’s a denunciation?”
“A real lady doesn’t betray her husband!” this virtuous woman exclaimed.
I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect of impertinence. “Especially to Miss Anvoy, who’s so easily shocked? Why do such things concern her?” I asked, much at a loss.
“Because she’s there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs. Pudney have been watching this: they feel she may be taken in.”
“Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make when she has lost her power to contribute?”
Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly: “There are other things in the world than money.” This hadn’t occurred to her so long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at my letter, that Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their motives. “It’s all in kindness,” she continued as she got up.
“Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view of kindness before her reverses.”
My companion smiled with some acidity. “Perhaps you’re no safer than the Mulvilles!”
I didn’t want her to think that, nor that she should report to the Pudneys that they had not been happy in their agent; and I well remember that this was the moment at which I began, with considerable emotion, to promise myself to enjoin upon Miss Anvoy never to open any letter that should come to her in one of those penny envelopes. My emotion, and I fear I must add my confusion, quickly deepened; I presently should have been as glad to frighten Mrs. Saltram as to think I might by some diplomacy restore the Pudneys to a quieter vigilance.
“It’s best you should take my view of my safety,” I at any rate soon responded. When I saw she didn’t know what I meant by this I added: “You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter, a thing you’ll profoundly regret.” My tone had a significance which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a moment, after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney’s communication into my pocket. She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing it to send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had almost given her my word I wouldn’t deliver the enclosure. The passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated observer, to some such pledge.
XII
Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed almost in pain—as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of something precious. I didn’t quite know what it was—it had a shocking resemblance to my honour. The emotion was the livelier surely in that my pulses even yet vibrated to the pleasure with which, the night before, I had rallied to the rare analyst, the great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What had dropped from me like a cumbersome garment as Saltram appeared before me in the afternoon on the heath was the disposition to haggle over his value. Hang it, one had to choose, one had to put that value somewhere; so I would put it really high and have done with it. Mrs. Mulville drove in for him at a discreet hour—the earliest she could suppose him to have got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy would also have come had she not been expecting a visit from Mr. Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I was under bonds to see this young lady, and also that I had a letter to hand to her; but I took my time, I waited from day to day. I left Mrs. Saltram to deal as her apprehensions should prompt with the Pudneys. I knew at last what I meant—I had ceased to wince at my responsibility. I gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade if it would; but it didn’t fade, and, individually, it hasn’t faded even now. During the month that I thus invited myself to stiffen again, Adelaide Mulville, perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why I was so stiff. At that season of the year I was usually oftener “with” them. She also wrote that she feared a real estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweet young friend—a state of things but half satisfactory to her so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the merely nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course the question can’t come up today. These are old frustrations now. Ruth Anvoy hasn’t married, I hear, and neither have I. During the month, toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to ask if, on a special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to knock the very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately connected my enquiry with the talk we had had in the railway carriage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his eagerness weren’t yet cold. I told him there was something I felt I ought in candour to let him know—I recognised the obligation his friendly confidence had laid on me.
“You mean Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so herself,” he said.
“It wasn’t to tell you so that I wanted to see you,” I replied; “for it seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly with herself. If however she did speak to you of our conversation she probably told you I was discouraging.”
“Discouraging?”
“On the subject of a present application of the Coxon Fund.”
“To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don’t know what you call discouraging!” Gravener cried.
“Well I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was.”
“I believe she did, but such a thing’s measured by the effect. She’s not ‘discouraged,’ ” he said.
“That’s her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that—decidedly!—I can’t undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don’t want to!”
“It’s very good of you, damn you!” my visitor laughed, red and really grave. Then he said: “You’d like to see that scoundrel publicly glorified—perched on the pedestal of a great complimentary pension?”
I braced myself. “Taking one form of public recognition with another it seems to me on the whole I should be able to bear it. When I see the compliments that are paid right and left I ask myself why this one shouldn’t take its course. This therefore is what you’re entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I’ve some evidence that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I propose to invite 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 that I’ve been requested to deliver to her.”
“And you don’t mean to?”
“There’s only one consideration that would make me,” I said.
Gravener’s clear handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but evidently without fishing up a clue to this motive—a failure by which I was almost wounded. “What does the letter contain?”
“It’s sealed, as I tell you, and I don’t know what it contains.”
“Why is it sent through you?”
“Rather than you?” I wondered how to put the thing. “The only explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end—may have been told this is the case by Mrs. Saltram.”
“My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end,” poor Gravener stammered.
Again, for an instant, I thought. “The offer I propose to make you gives me the right to address you a question remarkably direct. Are you still engaged to Miss Anvoy?”
“No, I’m not,” he slowly brought out. “But we’re perfectly good friends.”
“Such good friends that you’ll again become prospective husband and wife if the obstacle in your path be removed?”
“Removed?” he anxiously repeated.
“If I send Miss Anvoy the letter I speak of she may give up her idea.”
“Then for God’s sake send it!”
“I’ll do so if you’re ready to assure me that her sacrifice would now presumably bring about your marriage.”
“I’d marry her the next day!” my visitor cried.
“Yes, but would she marry you? What I ask of you of course is nothing less than your word of honour as to your conviction of this. If you give it to me,” I said, “I’ll engage to hand her the letter before night.”
Gravener took up his hat; turning it mechanically round he stood looking a moment hard at its unruffled perfection. Then very angrily, honestly and gallantly, “Hand it to the devil!” he broke out; with which he clapped the hat on his head and left me.
“Will you read it or not?” I said to Ruth Anvoy, at Wimbledon, when I had told her the story of Mrs. Saltram’s visit.
She debated for a time probably of the briefest, but long enough to make me nervous. “Have you brought it with you?”
“No indeed. It’s at home, locked up.”
There was another great silence, and then she said, “Go back and destroy it.”
I went back, but I didn’t destroy it till after Saltram’s death, when I burnt it unread. The Pudneys approached her again pressingly, but, prompt as they were, the Coxon Fund had already become an operative benefit and a general amaze: Mr. Saltram, while we gathered about, as it were, to watch the manna descend, had begun to draw the magnificent income. He drew it as he had always drawn everything, with a grand abstracted gesture. Its magnificence, alas, as all the world now knows, quite quenched him; it was the beginning of his decline. It was also naturally a new grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as soon as he was blighted, and who at this hour accuses us of having bribed him, on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious office, to become, as she says, like everybody else. The very day he found himself able to publish he wholly ceased to produce. This deprived us, as may easily be imagined, of much of our occupation, and especially deprived the Mulvilles, whose want of self-support I never measured till they lost their great inmate. They’ve no one to live on now. Adelaide’s most frequent reference to their destitution is embodied in the remark that dear far-away Ruth’s intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent are even yet looking for another prop, but no one presents a true sphere of usefulness. They complain that people are self-sufficing. With Saltram the fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the grander, the elder style. They’ve got their carriage back, but what’s an empty carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer before; even including George Gravener, who, by the deaths of his brother and his nephew, has lately become Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper House, and hasn’t yet had high office. But what are these accidents, which I should perhaps apologise for mentioning, in the light of the great eventual boon promised the patient by the rate at which the Coxon Fund must be rolling up?
OTHER TITLES IN THE ART OF THE NOVELLA SERIES
BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER
HERMAN MELVILLE
THE LESSON OF THE MASTER
HENRY JAMES
MY LIFE
ANTON CHEKHOV
THE DEVIL
LEO TOLSTOY
THE TOUCHSTONE
EDITH WHARTON
THE HOUND OF THE
BASKERVILLES
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
THE DEAD
JAMES JOYCE
FIRST LOVE
IVAN TURGENEV
A SIMPLE HEART
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
RUDYARD KIPLING
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS
HEINRICH VON KLEIST
THE BEACH OF FALESÁ
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
THE HORLA
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED
HADLEYBURG
MARK TWAIN
THE LIFTED VEIL
GEORGE ELIOT
THE GIRL WITH THE
GOLDEN EYES
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
BENITO CERENO
HERMAN MELVILLE
MATHILDA
MARY SHELLEY
STEMPENYU: A JEWISH ROMANCE
SHOLEM ALEICHEM
FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES
JOSEPH CONRAD
HOW THE TWO IVANS
QUARRELLED
NIKOLAI GOGOL
MAY DAY
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
RASSELAS, PRINCE ABYSSINIA
SAMUEL JOHNSON
THE DIALOGUE OF THE DOGS
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
THE LEMOINE AFFAIR
MARCEL PROUST
THE COXON FUND
HENRY JAMES
THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH
LEO TOLSTOY
TALES OF BELKIN
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
THE AWAKENING
KATE CHOPIN
ADOLPHE
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
THE COUNTRY OF
THE POINTED FIRS
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
PARNASSUS ON WHEELS
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
THE NICE OLD MAN
AND THE PRETTY GIRL
ITALO SVEVO
LADY SUSAN
JANE AUSTEN
JACOB’S ROOM
VIRGINIA WOOLF
THE DUEL
GIACOMO CASANOVA
THE DUEL
ANTON CHEKHOV
THE DUEL
JOSEPH CONRAD
THE DUEL
HEINRICH VON KLEIST
THE DUEL
ALEXANDER KUPRIN
THE ALIENIST
MACHADO DE ASSIS
ALEXANDER’S BRIDGE
WILLA CATHER
FANFARLO
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
THE DISTRACTED PREACHER
THOMAS HARDY
THE ENCHANTED WANDERER
NIKOLAI LESKOV
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