CHAPTER IX.
It was impossible not to be moved with the strongest sympathy for
her, and on my return to England I showed her every kindness in my
power. Her mother's death had made her means sufficient, and she
had gone to live in a more convenient quarter. But her loss had
been great and her visitation cruel; it never would have occurred
to me moreover to suppose she could come to feel the possession of
a technical tip, of a piece of literary experience, a counterpoise
to her grief. Strange to say, none the less, I couldn't help
believing after I had seen her a few times that I caught a glimpse
of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there had been other
things I couldn't help believing, or at least imagining; and as I
never felt I was really clear about these, so, as to the point I
here touch on, I give her memory the benefit of the doubt.
Stricken and solitary, highly accomplished and now, in her deep
mourning, her maturer grace and her uncomplaining sorrow,
incontestably handsome, she presented herself as leading a life of
singular dignity and beauty. I had at first found a way to
persuade myself that I should soon get the better of the reserve
formulated, the week after the catastrophe in her reply to an
appeal as to which I was not unconscious that it might strike her
as mistimed. Certainly that reserve was something of a shock to
me--certainly it puzzled me the more I thought of it and even
though I tried to explain it (with moments of success) by an
imputation of exalted sentiments, of superstitious scruples, of a
refinement of loyalty. Certainly it added at the same time hugely
to the price of Vereker's secret, precious as this mystery already
appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's
unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix
fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I'm
for ever conscious.
But this only helped me the more to be artful, to be adroit, to
allow time to elapse before renewing my suit. There were plenty of
speculations for the interval, and one of them was deeply
absorbing. Corvick had kept his information from his young friend
till after the removal of the last barrier to their intimacy--then
only had he let the cat out of the bag. Was it Gwendolen's idea,
taking a hint from him, to liberate this animal only on the basis
of the renewal of such a relation? Was the figure in the carpet
traceable or describable only for husbands and wives--for lovers
supremely united? It came back to me in a mystifying manner that
in Kensington Square, when I mentioned that Corvick would have told
the girl he loved, some word had dropped from Vereker that gave
colour to this possibility. There might be little in it, but there
was enough to make me wonder if I should have to marry Mrs. Corvick
to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for
the blessing of her knowledge? Ah that way madness lay!--so I at
least said to myself in bewildered hours. I could see meanwhile
the torch she refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of
memory--pour through her eyes a light that shone in her lonely
house. At the end of six months I was fully sure of what this warm
presence made up to her for. We had talked again and again of the
man who had brought us together--of his talent, his character, his
personal charm, his certain career, his dreadful doom, and even of
his clear purpose in that great study which was to have been a
supreme literary portrait, a kind of critical Vandyke or Velasquez.
She had conveyed to me in abundance that she was tongue-tied by her
perversity, by her piety, that she would never break the silence it
had not been given to the "right person," as she said, to break.
The hour however finally arrived. One evening when I had been
sitting with her longer than usual I laid my hand firmly on her
arm. "Now at last what IS it?"
She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow
soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This
mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest
"Never!" I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials,
had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with
the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we
sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose, I was
wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I
brought out. I said as I smoothed down my hat: "I know what to
think then. It's nothing!"
A remote disdainful pity for me gathered in her dim smile; then she
spoke in a voice that I hear at this hour: "It's my LIFE!" As I
stood at the door she added: "You've insulted him!"
"Do you mean Vereker?"
"I mean the Dead!"
I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge.
Yes, it was her life--I recognised that too; but her life none the
less made room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year
and a half after Corvick's death she published in a single volume
her second novel, "Overmastered," which I pounced on in the hope of
finding in it some tell-tale echo or some peeping face. All I
found was a much better book than her younger performance, showing
I thought the better company she had kept. As a tissue tolerably
intricate it was a carpet with a figure of its own; but the figure
was not the figure I was looking for. On sending a review of it to
The Middle I was surprised to learn from the office that a notice
was already in type. When the paper came out I had no hesitation
in attributing this article, which I thought rather vulgarly
overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been something
of a friend of Corvick's, yet had only within a few weeks made the
acquaintance of his widow. I had had an early copy of the book,
but Deane had evidently had an earlier. He lacked all the same the
light hand with which Corvick had gilded the gingerbread--he laid
on the tinsel in splotches.
