She had the missive open there; it was emphatic, but it was brief. Eureka. Immense. That was allhe had saved the money of the signature. I shared her emotion, but I was disappointed. He doesnt say what it is.
How could hein a telegram? Hell write it.
But how does he know?
Know its the real thing? Oh, Im sure when you see it you do know. Vera incessu patuit dea!
Its you, Miss Erme, who are a dear for bringing me such news!I went all lengths in my high spirits. But fancy finding our goddess in the temple of Vishnu! How strange of George to have been able to go into the thing again in the midst of such different and such powerful solicitations!
He hasnt gone into it, I know; its the thing itself, let severely alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him like a tigress out of the jungle. He didnt take a book with himon purpose; indeed he wouldnt have needed tohe knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasnt thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure in the carpet came out. Thats the way he knew it would come and the real reasonyou didnt in the least understand, but I suppose I may tell you nowwhy he went and why I consented to his going. We knew the change would do it, the difference of thought, of scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake. We had perfectly, we had admirably calculated. The elements were all in his mind, and in the secousse of a new and intense experience they just struck light. She positively struck light herselfshe was literally, facially luminous. I stammered something about unconscious cerebration, and she continued: Hell come right homethis will bring him.
To see Vereker, you mean?
To see Verekerand to see me. Think what hell have to tell me!
I hesitated. About India?
About fiddlesticks! About Verekerabout the figure in the carpet.
But, as you say, we shall surely have that in a letter.
She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had told me long before that her face was interesting. Perhaps it wont go in a letter if its immense.
Perhaps not if its immense bosh. If he has got something that wont go in a letter he hasnt got the thing. Verekers own statement to me was exactly that the figure would go in a letter.
Well, I cabled to George an hour agotwo words, said Gwendolen.
Is it indiscreet of me to inquire what they were?
She hung fire, but at last she brought them out. Angel, write.
Good! I exclaimed. Ill make it sureIll send him the same.
VII
My words however were not absolutely the sameI put something instead of angel; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more apt, for when eventually we heard from Corvick it was merely, it was thoroughly to be tantalised. He was magnificent in his triumph, he described his discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy only obscured itthere were to be no particulars till he should have submitted his conception to the supreme authority. He had thrown up his commission, he had thrown up his book, he had thrown up everything but the instant need to hurry to Rapallo, on the Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote him a letter which was to await him at AdenI besought him to relieve my suspense. That he found my letter was indicated by a telegram which, reaching me after weary days and without my having received an answer to my laconic dispatch at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of the day, which Corvick often made use of to show he wasnt a prig. It had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face youll make! Tellement envie de voir ta tête!that was what I had to sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for I seem to remember myself at this time as rushing constantly between the little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience, Gwendolens and mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would be greater. We all spent during this episode, for people of our means, a great deal of money in telegrams, and I counted on the receipt of news from Rapallo immediately after the junction of the discoverer with the discovered. The interval seemed an age, but late one day I heard a hansom rattle up to my door with a crash engendered by a hint of liberality. I lived with my heart in my mouth and I bounded to the windowa movement which gave me a view of a young lady erect on the footboard of the vehicle and eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of me she flourished a paper with a movement that brought me straight down, the movement with which, in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves are flourished at the foot of the scaffold.
Just seen Verekernot a note wrong. Pressed me to bosomkeeps me a month. So much I read on her paper while the cabby dropped a grin from his perch. In my excitement I paid him profusely and in hers she suffered it; then as he drove away we started to walk about and talk. We had talked, heaven knows, enough before, but this was a wondrous lift. We pictured the whole scene at Rapallo, where he would have written, mentioning my name, for permission to call; that is I pictured it, having more material than my companion, whom I felt hang on my lips as we stopped on purpose before shop-windows we didnt look into. About one thing we were clear: if he was staying on for fuller communication we should at least have a letter from him that would help us through the dregs of delay. We understood his staying on, and yet each of us saw, I think, that the other hated it. The letter we were clear about arrived; it was for Gwendolen, and I called upon her in time to save her the trouble of bringing it to me. She didnt read it out, as was natural enough; but she repeated to me what it chiefly embodied. This consisted of the remarkable statement that he would tell her when they were married exactly what she wanted to know.
Only when were marriednot before, she explained. Its tantamount to sayingisnt it?that I must marry him straight off! She smiled at me while I flushed with disappointment, a vision of fresh delay that made me at first unconscious of my surprise. It seemed more than a hint that on me as well he would impose some tiresome condition. Suddenly, while she reported several more things from his letter, I remembered what he had told me before going away. He found Mr. Vereker deliriously interesting and his own possession of the secret a kind of intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him; it was in all time, in all tongues, one of the most wonderful flowers of art. Nothing, above all, when once one was face to face with it, had been more consummately done. When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that made you ashamed; and there had not been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the smallest reason why it should have been overlooked. It was immense, but it was simpleit was simple, but it was immense, and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. He intimated that the charm of such an experience, the desire to drain it, in its freshness, to the last drop, was what kept him there close to the source. Gwendolen, frankly radiant as she tossed me these fragments, showed the elation of a prospect more assured than my own. That brought me back to the question of her marriage, prompted me to ask her if what she meant by what she had just surprised me with was that she was under an engagement.
Of course I am! she answered. Didnt you know it? She appeared astonished; but I was still more so, for Corvick had told me the exact contrary. I didnt mention this, however; I only reminded her that I had not been to that degree in her confidence, or even in Corvicks, and that moreover I was not in ignorance of her mothers interdict. At bottom I was troubled by the disparity of the two assertions; but after a moment I felt that Corvicks was the one I least doubted. This simply reduced me to asking myself if the girl had on the spot improvised an engagementvamped up an old one or dashed off a newin order to arrive at the satisfaction she desired. I reflected that she had resources of which I was destitute; but she made her case slightly more intelligible by rejoining presently: What the state of things has been is that we felt of course bound to do nothing in mammas lifetime.
But now you think youll just dispense with your mothers consent?
Ah, it may not come to that! I wondered what it might come to, and she went on: Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you know, she added with a laugh, she really must!a proposition of which, on behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged the force.
VIII
Nothing more annoying had ever happened to me than to become aware before Corvicks arrival in England that I should not 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 ParisParis 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 visiblefirst in the fact that it had not saved the poor boy, who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the lungs, and second in the greater remoteness from London to which the event condemned me. I am 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 combined 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 mans avidity. These incidents certainly had larger bearings than the comparatively meagre consequence we are here concerned withthough I feel that consequence also to be a thing to speak of with some respect. Its mainly in such a light, I confess, at any rate, that at this hour the ugly fruit of my exile is present to me. Even at first indeed the spirit in which my avidity, as I have called it, made me regard this term owed no element of ease to the fact that before coming back from Rapallo George Corvick addressed me in a way I didnt like. His letter had none of the sedative action that 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 Verekers writings, and this exhaustive study, the only one that would have counted, have existed, was to turn on the new light, to utteroh, 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, said Corvick, was to 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 couldnt 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 wrote to Gwendolen for particulars, and she replied that her mother had succumbed to long-threatened failure of the heart. She didnt 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 timefor I heard from her repeatedlyI read some singular things into Gwendolens 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 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 hadnt fallen quite so low, besides which, quite properly, he would send me about my business. Mrs. Ermes death brought Corvick straight home, and within the month he was united very quietlyas quietly I suppose as he meant in his article to bring out his trouvailleto 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 was no engagement whatever. There was none at the moment she affirmed the opposite. On the other hand he certainly became 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 had not at least finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as my inquiry: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that Corvick had just settled down to it when he was interrupted by her mothers death; then, on his return, he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity plunged them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were striking, they were promising, but they didnt 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 knowledgethe knowledge for the acquisition of which I had conceived her doing prodigious things. 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 previous ceremony been enacted? I didnt like as yet to press her, though when I thought of what had passed between us on the subject in Corvicks 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!