CHAPTER VIII.
Nothing more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware
before Corvick's arrival in England that I shouldn't 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 hadn't saved the poor boy,
who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the lungs,
and second in the greater break with London to which the event
condemned me. I'm 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 interlaced 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 a thing to
speak of with some respect. It's mainly in such a light, I
confess, at any rate, that the ugly fruit of my exile is at this
hour present to me. Even at first indeed the spirit in which my
avidity, as I have called it, made me regard that term owed no
element of ease to the fact that before coming back from Rapallo
George Corvick addressed me in a way I objected to. His letter had
none of the sedative action 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, according to my friend, would 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, by letter,
appealed to Gwendolen for particulars, and she wrote me that her
mother had yielded 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, both 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 seemed
to make out, 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 had been no positive pledge between them
whatever. There had been none at the moment she was affirming to
me the very opposite. On the other hand he had certainly become
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
mightn't at least have finished the great article on Vereker. Her
answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been
barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that
our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by
her mother's death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept
from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to
plunge 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 fancied her prodigiously acting. 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 nuptials taken place? 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!"
