第27章

"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 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 Inever 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?

End