# Terminations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895)/The Coxon Fund/Chapter 9

IX
The thing I had been most sensible of in that talk with George Gravener was the way Saltram's name kept out of it. It seemed to me at the time that we were quite pointedly silent about him; but afterward it appeared more probable there had been on my companion's part no conscious avoidance. Later on I was sure of this, and for the best of reasons the simple reason of my perceiving more completely that, for evil as well as for good, he said nothing to Gravener's imagination. Gravener was not afraid of him; he was too much disgusted with him. No more was I, doubtless, and for very much the same reason. I treated my friend's story as an absolute confidence; but when before Christmas, by Mrs. Saltram, I was informed of Lady Coxon's death without having had news of Miss Anvoy's return, I found myself taking for ​granted that we should hear no more of these nuptials, in which I now recognized an element incongruous from the first. I began to ask myself how people who suited each other so little could please each other so much. The charm was some material charm, some affinity, exquisite doubtless, yet superficial; some surrender to youth and beauty and passion, to force and grace and fortune, happy accidents and easy contacts. They might dote on each other's persons, but how could they know each other's souls? How could they have the same prejudices; how could they have the same horizon? Such questions, I confess, seemed quenched but not answered, when, one day in February, going out to Wimbledon, I found our young lady in the house. A passion that had brought her back across the wintry ocean was as much of a passion as was necessary. No impulse equally strong, indeed, had drawn George Gravener to America; a circumstance on which, however, I reflected only long enough to remind myself that it was none of my business. Ruth Anvoy was distinctly different, and I felt that the difference was not simply that of her being in mourning. Mrs. Mulville told me soon enough what it was; it was the difference between a handsome girl with large expectations and a handsome girl with only four hundred a year. This explanation, indeed, did not wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double cause—learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way ​altogether, buried under the ruins of his fortune, and leaving next to nothing, had died a few weeks before.
"So she has come out to marry George Gravener?" I demanded. "Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?"
"Hasn't the House just met?" said Adelaide. Then she added: "I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it were certain, a self-respecting girl like Ruth would have waited for him over there."
I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said was: "Do you mean that she has returned to make it a certainty?"
"No, I mean that I figure she has come out for some reason independent of it." Adelaide could only figure as yet, and there was more, as we found, to be revealed. Mrs. Mulville, on hearing of her arrival, had brought the young lady out in the green landau for the Sunday. The Coxons were in possession of the house in Regent's Park, and Miss Anvoy was in dreary lodgings. George Gravener was with her when Adelaide called, but he had assented graciously enough to the little visit at Wimbledon. The carriage, with Mr. Saltram in it but not mentioned, had been sent off on some errand from which it was to return and pick the ladies up. Gravener left them together, and at the end of an hour, on the Saturday afternoon, the party of three drove out to Wimbledon. This was the girl's second glimpse of our ​great man, and I was interested in asking Mrs. Mulville if the impression made by the first appeared to have been confirmed. On her replying, after consideration, that of course with time and opportunity it couldn't fail to be, but as yet she was disappointed, I was sufficiently struck with her use of this last word to question her further.
"Do you mean that you're disappointed because you judge that Miss Anvoy is?"
"Yes; I hoped for a greater effect last evening. We had two or three people, but he scarcely opened his mouth."
"He'll be all the better this evening," I added, after a moment. "What particular importance do you attach to the idea of her being impressed?"
Adelaide turned her mild, pale eyes on me as if she were amazed at my levity: "Why, the importance of her being as happy as we are!"
I'm afraid that at this my levity increased. "Oh, that's a happiness almost too great to wish a person!" I saw she had not yet in her mind what I had in mine, and at any rate the visitor's actual bliss was limited to a walk in the garden with Kent Mulville. Later in the afternoon I also took one, and I saw nothing of Miss Anvoy till dinner, at which we were without the company of Sal tram, who had caused it to be reported that he was indisposed, lying down. This made us, most of us—for there were other friends present—convey to each other in silence some of the unutterable things which in those years our eyes had ​inevitably acquired the art of expressing. If an American enquirer had not been there we would have expressed them otherwise, and Adelaide would have pretended not to hear. I had seen her, before the very fact, abstract herself nobly; and I knew that more than once, to keep it from the servants, managing, dissimulating cleverly, she had helped her husband to carry him bodily to his room. Just recently he had been so wise and so deep and so high that I had begun to get nervous—to wonder if by chance there were something behind it, if he were kept straight for instance by the knowledge that the hated Pudneys would have more to tell us, if they chose. He was lying low, but unfortunately it was common wisdom with us that the biggest splashes took place in the quietest pools. We should have had a merry life indeed if all the splashes had sprinkled us as refreshingly as the waters we were even then to feel about our ears. Kent Mulville had been up to his room, but had come back with a face that told as few tales as I had seen it succeed in telling on the evening I waited in the lecture-room with Miss Anvoy. I said to myself that our friend had gone out, but I was glad that the presence of a comparative stranger deprived us of the dreary duty of suggesting to each other, in respect of his errand, edifying possibilities in which we didn't ourselves believe. At ten o'clock he came into the drawing-room with his waistcoat much awry, but his eyes sending out great signals. It was precisely with his entrance ​that I ceased to be vividly conscious of him. I saw that the crystal, as I had called it, had begun to swing, and I had need of my immediate attention for Miss Anvoy.
Even when I was told afterward that he had, as we might have said to-day, broken the record, the manner in which that attention had been rewarded relieved me of a sense of loss. I had of course a perfect general consciousness that something great was going on: it was a little like having been etherized to hear Herr Joachim play. The old music was in the air; I felt the strong pulse of thought, the sink and swell, the flight, the poise, the plunge; but I knew something about one of the listeners that nobody else knew, and Saltram's monologue could reach me only through that medium. To this hour I'm of no use when, as a witness, I'm appealed to (for they still absurdly contend about it) as to whether or no on that historic night he was drunk; and my position is slightly ridiculous, for I have never cared to tell them what it really was I was taken up with. What I got out of it is the only morsel of the total experience that is quite my own. The others were shared, but this is incommunicable. I feel that now, I'm bound to say, in even thus roughly evoking the occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness. However, I shall perhaps be as clear as is absolutely necessary if I remark that she was too much given up to her own intensity of observation to be sensible of mine. It was plainly ​not the question of her marriage that had brought her back. I greatly enjoyed this discovery, and was sure that, had that question alone been involved, she would have remained away. In this case, doubtless, Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin her. It afterward made me uncomfortable for her that, alone in the lodging Mrs. Mulville had put before me as dreary, she should have in any degree the air of waiting for her fate; so that I was presently relieved at hearing of her having gone to stay at Coldfield. If she was in England at all while the engagement stood, the only proper place for her was under Lady Maddock's wing. Now that she was unfortunate and relatively poor, perhaps her prospective sister-in-law would be wholly won over. There would be much to say, if I had space, about the way her behavior, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, as I listened to George Gravener in the railway-carriage. I watched her in the light of this queer possibility—a formidable thing certainly to meet—and I was aware that it colored, extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones. At Wimbledon, for instance, it had seemed to me that she was literally afraid of Saltram; in dread of a coercion that she had begun already to feel. I had come up to town with her the next day and had been convinced that, though deeply interested, she was immensely on her guard. She ​would show as little as possible before she should be ready to show every thing. What this final exhibition might be, on the part of a girl perceptibly so able to think things out, I found it great sport to forecast. It would have been exciting to be approached by her, appealed to by her for advice; but I prayed to Heaven I mightn't find myself in such a predicament. If there was really a present rigor in the situation of which Gravener had sketched for me the elements, she would have to get out of her difficulty by herself. It was not I who had launched her, and it was not I who could help her. I didn't fail to ask myself why, since I couldn't help her, I should think so much about her. It was in part my suspense that was responsible for this; I waited impatiently to see whether she wouldn't have told Mrs. Mulville a portion at least of what I had learned from Gravener. But I saw Mrs. Mulville was still reduced to wonder what she had come out again for, if she hadn't come as a conciliatory bride. That she had come in some other character was the only thing that fitted all the appearances. Having, for family reasons, to spend sometime that spring in the west of England, I was in a manner out of earshot of the great oceanic rumble (I mean of the continuous hum of Saltram's thought), and my uneasiness tended to keep me quiet. There was something I wanted so little to have to say that my prudence surmounted my curiosity. I only wondered if Ruth Anvoy talked over the idea of the Coxon Fund with Lady ​Maddock, and also somewhat why I didn't hear from Wimbledon. I had a reproachful note about something or other from Mrs. Saltram, but it contained no mention of Lady Coxon's niece, on whom her eyes had been much less fixed since the recent untoward events.