I thought my young lady looked rich—I scarcely knew why; and I hoped she had put her hand in her pocket. I soon made her out, however, not at all a fine fanatic—she was but a generous, irresponsible enquirer. She had come to England to see her aunt, and it was at her aunt’s she had met the dreary lady we had all so much on our mind. I saw she’d help to pass the time when she observed that it was a pity this lady wasn’t intrinsically more interesting. That was refreshing, for it was an article of faith in Mrs. Saltram’s circle—at least among those who scorned to know her horrid husband—that she was attractive on her merits. She was in truth a most ordinary person, as Saltram himself would have been if he hadn’t been a prodigy. The question of vulgarity had no application to him, but it was a measure his wife kept challenging you to apply. I hasten to add that the consequences of your doing so were no sufficient reason for his having left her to starve. “He doesn’t seem to have much force of character,” said my young lady; at which I laughed out so loud that my departing friends looked back at me over their shoulders as if I were making a joke of their discomfiture. My joke probably cost Saltram a subscription or two, but it helped me on with my interlocutress. “She says he drinks like a fish,” she sociably continued, “and yet she allows that his mind’s wonderfully clear.” It was amusing to converse with a pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of Saltram’s mind. I expected next to hear she had been assured he was awfully clever. I tried to tell her—I had it almost on my conscience—what was the proper way to regard him; an effort attended perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual effect of my feeling that I wasn’t after all very sure of it. She had come tonight out of high curiosity—she had wanted to learn this proper way for herself. She had read some of his papers and hadn’t understood them; but it was at home, at her aunt’s, that her curiosity had been kindled—kindled mainly by his wife’s remarkable stories of his want of virtue. “I suppose they ought to have kept me away,” my companion dropped, “and I suppose they’d have done so if I hadn’t somehow got an idea that he’s fascinating. In fact Mrs. Saltram herself says he is.”
“So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you’ve seen!”
My young lady raised fine eyebrows. “Do you mean in his bad faith?”
“In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us.”
“The humiliation?”
“Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the purchaser of a ticket.”
She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. “You don’t look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see.”
“Oh, you can’t ‘see’ it!” I cried.
“How then do you get at it?”
“You don’t! You mustn’t suppose he’s good-looking,” I added.
“Why, his wife says he’s lovely!”
My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram’s part, of what was irritating in the narrowness of that lady’s point of view? “Mrs. Saltram,” I explained, “undervalues him where he’s strongest, so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he’s weak. He’s not, assuredly, superficially attractive; he’s middle-aged, fat, featureless save for his great eyes.”
“Yes, his great eyes,” said my young lady attentively. She had evidently heard all about his great eyes—the beaux yeux for which alone we had really done it all.
“They’re tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But he moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he’s anything but smart.”
My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment appealed. “Do you call him a real gentleman?”
I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it: George Gravener, years before, that first flushed night, had put me face to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn’t embarrass me now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and disposed of it. “A real gentleman? Emphatically not!”
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little it was to Gravener I was now talking. “Do you say that because he’s—what do you call it in England?—of humble extraction?”
“Not a bit. His father was a country schoolmaster and his mother the widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it simply because I know him well.”
“But isn’t it an awful drawback?”
“Awful—quite awful.”
“I mean isn’t it positively fatal?”
“Fatal to what? Not to his magnificent vitality.”
Again she had a meditative moment. “And is his magnificent vitality the cause of his vices?”
“Your questions are formidable, but I’m glad you put them. I was thinking of his noble intellect. His vices, as you say, have been much exaggerated: they consist mainly after all in one comprehensive defect.”
“A want of will?”
“A want of dignity.”
“He doesn’t recognise his obligations?”
“On the contrary, he recognises them with effusion, especially in public: he smiles and bows and beckons across the street to them. But when they pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them in the crowd. The recognition’s purely spiritual—it isn’t in the least social. So he leaves all his belongings to other people to take care of. He accepts favours, loans, sacrifices—all with nothing more deterrent than an agony of shame. Fortunately we’re a little faithful band, and we do what we can.” I held my tongue about the natural children, engendered, to the number of three, in the wantonness of his youth. I only remarked that he did make efforts—often tremendous ones. “But the efforts,” I said, “never come to much: the only things that come to much are the abandonments, the surrenders.”
“And how much do they come to?”
“You’re right to put it as if we had a big bill to pay, but, as I’ve told you before, your questions are rather terrible. They come, these mere exercises of genius, to a great sum total of poetry, of philosophy, a mighty mass of speculation, notation, quotation. The genius is there, you see, to meet the surrender; but there’s no genius to support the defence.”
“But what is there, after all, at his age, to show?”
“In the way of achievement recognised and reputation established?” I asked. “To ‘show’ if you will, there isn’t much, since his writing, mostly, isn’t as fine, isn’t certainly as showy, as his talk. Moreover two-thirds of his work are merely colossal projects and announcements. ‘Showing’ Frank Saltram is often a poor business,” I went on: “we endeavoured, you’ll have observed, to show him tonight! However, if he had lectured he’d have lectured divinely. It would just have been his talk.”
“And what would his talk just have been?”
I was conscious of some ineffectiveness, as well perhaps as of a little impatience, as I replied: “The exhibition of a splendid intellect.” My young lady looked not quite satisfied at this, but as I wasn’t prepared for another question I hastily pursued: “The sight of a great suspended swinging crystal—huge, lucid, lustrous, a block of light—flashing back every impression of life and every possibility of thought!”
This gave her something to turn over till we had passed out to the dusky porch of the hall, in front of which the lamps of a quiet brougham were almost the only thing Saltram’s treachery hadn’t extinguished. I went with her to the door of her carriage, out of which she leaned a moment after she had thanked me and taken her seat. Her smile even in the darkness was pretty. “I do want to see that crystal!”
“You’ve only to come to the next lecture.”
“I go abroad in a day or two with my aunt.”
“Wait over till next week,” I su
ggested. “It’s quite worth it.”
She became grave. “Not unless he really comes!” At which the brougham started off, carrying her away too fast, fortunately for my manners, to allow me to exclaim “Ingratitude!”
IV
Mrs. Saltram made a great affair of her right to be informed where her husband had been the second evening he failed to meet his audience. She came to me to ascertain, but I couldn’t satisfy her, for in spite of my ingenuity I remained in ignorance. It wasn’t till much later that I found this had not been the case with Kent Mulville, whose hope for the best never twirled the thumbs of him more placidly than when he happened to know the worst. He had known it on the occasion I speak of—that is immediately after. He was impenetrable then, but ultimately confessed. What he confessed was more than I shall now venture to make public. It was of course familiar to me that Saltram was incapable of keeping the engagements which, after their separation, he had entered into with regard to his wife, a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person. She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis. She had arts of her own of exciting one’s impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption that we were kind to her because we liked her. In reality her personal fall had been a sort of social rise—since I had seen the moment when, in our little conscientious circle, her desolation almost made her the fashion. Her voice was grating and her children ugly; moreover she hated the good Mulvilles, whom I more and more loved. They were the people who by doing most for her husband had in the long run done most for herself; and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a pressure gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability. I’m bound to say he didn’t criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary forms. She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society. She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she doubtless patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me. I daresay I should have got on with her better if she had had a ray of imagination—if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard Saltram’s expressions of his nature in any other manner than as separate subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his character, pearls strung on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he had a character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation. One might doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a general licence for such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one’s feeling that there could be none for such a woman.
I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an English–French or other phrasebook. She triumphed in what she told me and she may have triumphed still more in what she withheld. My friend of the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately come to England; Lady Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years in consequence of her marriage with the late Sir Gregory of that name. She had a house in the Regent’s Park, a Bath-chair and a fernery; and above all she had sympathy. Mrs. Saltram had made her acquaintance through mutual friends. This vagueness caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large an independent circle Mrs. Saltram had at her command. I should have been glad to know more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I should know most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have mysterious means of depriving me of my knowledge. For the present, moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact gone abroad accompanied by her niece. The niece, besides being immensely clever, was an heiress, Mrs. Saltram said; the only daughter and the light of the eyes of some great American merchant, a man, over there, of endless indulgences and dollars. She had pretty clothes and pretty manners, and she had, what was prettier still, the great thing of all. The great thing of all for Mrs. Saltram was always sympathy, and she spoke as if during the absence of these ladies she mightn’t know where to turn for it. A few months later indeed, when they had come back, her tone perceptibly changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to it, rather as to persons in her debt for favours received. What had happened I didn’t know, but I saw it would take only a little more or a little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of social countenance—people for whom she had vainly tried to do something. I confess I saw how it wouldn’t be in a mere week or two that I should rid myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose very name, when I learnt it, I found something secretly to like. I should probably neither see her nor hear of her again: the knight’s widow (he had been mayor of Clockborough) would pass away and the heiress would return to her inheritance. I gathered with surprise that she had not communicated to his wife the story of her attempt to hear Mr. Saltram, and I founded this reticence on the easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by overpressure the spring of the sympathy of which she boasted. The girl at any rate would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a husband; besides which she would lack occasion to repeat her experiment.
We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at least, in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways and means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I laughed at our playbills even while I stickled for them. It was indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a sound. He admitted with a candour all his own that he was in truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles’ drawing room. “Yes,” he suggestively allowed, “it’s there, I think, that I’m at my best; quite late, when it gets toward eleven—and if I’ve not been too much worried.” We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour to the superstition of sobriety. On the Saturdays I used to bring my portmanteau, so as not to have to think of eleven o’clock trains. I had a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its altars of cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and clear lamplight, we might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles would but charge for admission. Here it was, however, that they shamelessly broke down; as there’s a flaw in every perfection this was the inexpugnable refuge of their egotism. They declined to make their saloon a market, so that Saltram’s golden words continued the sole coin that rang there. It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a greater price than such an enchanted hush as surrounded him on his greatest nights. The most profane, on these occasions, felt a presence; all minor eloquence grew dumb. Adelaide Mulville, for the pride of her hospitality, anxiously watched the door or stealthily poked the fire. I used to call it the music room, for we had anticipated Bayreuth. The very gates of the kingdom of light seemed to open and the horizon of thought to flash with the beauty of a sunrise at sea.