I was unable this time to stay to dinner: such at any rate was the plea on which I took leave.I desired in truth to get away from my young lady, for that obviously helped me not to pretend to satisfy her.How COULD I satisfy her? I asked myself--how could I tell her how much had been kept back? I didn't even know and Icertainly didn't desire to know.My own policy had ever been to learn the least about poor Saltram's weaknesses--not to learn the most.A great deal that I had in fact learned had been forced upon me by his wife.There was something even irritating in Miss Anvoy's crude conscientiousness, and I wondered why, after all, she couldn't have let him alone and been content to entrust George Gravener with the purchase of the good house.I was sure he would have driven a bargain, got something excellent and cheap.Ilaughed louder even than she, I temporised, I failed her; I told her I must think over her case.I professed a horror of responsibilities and twitted her with her own extravagant passion for them.It wasn't really that I was afraid of the scandal, the moral discredit for the Fund; what troubled me most was a feeling of a different order.Of course, as the beneficiary of the Fund was to enjoy a simple life-interest, as it was hoped that new beneficiaries would arise and come up to new standards, it wouldn't be a trifle that the first of these worthies shouldn't have been a striking example of the domestic virtues.The Fund would start badly, as it were, and the laurel would, in some respects at least, scarcely be greener from the brows of the original wearer.That idea, however, was at that hour, as I have hinted, not the source of solicitude it ought perhaps to have been, for I felt less the irregularity of Saltram's getting the money than that of this exalted young woman's giving it up.I wanted her to have it for herself, and I told her so before I went away.She looked graver at this than she had looked at all, saying she hoped such a preference wouldn't make me dishonest.
It made me, to begin with, very restless--made me, instead of going straight to the station, fidget a little about that many-coloured Common which gives Wimbledon horizons.There was a worry for me to work off, or rather keep at a distance, for I declined even to admit to myself that I had, in Miss Anvoy's phrase, been saddled with it.What could have been clearer indeed than the attitude of recognising perfectly what a world of trouble The Coxon Fund would in future save us, and of yet liking better to face a continuance of that trouble than see, and in fact contribute to, a deviation from attainable bliss in the life of two other persons in whom Iwas deeply interested? Suddenly, at the end of twenty minutes, there was projected across this clearness the image of a massive middle-aged man seated on a bench under a tree, with sad far-wandering eyes and plump white hands folded on the head of a stick--a stick I recognised, a stout gold-headed staff that I had given him in devoted days.I stopped short as he turned his face to me, and it happened that for some reason or other I took in as I had perhaps never done before the beauty of his rich blank gaze.It was charged with experience as the sky is charged with light, and Ifelt on the instant as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple.
Doubtless I was rendered peculiarly sensitive to it by something in the way I had been giving him up and sinking him.While I met it Istood there smitten, and I felt myself responding to it with a sort of guilty grimace.This brought back his attention in a smile which expressed for me a cheerful weary patience, a bruised noble gentleness.I had told Miss Anvoy that he had no dignity, but what did he seem to me, all unbuttoned and fatigued as he waited for me to come up, if he didn't seem unconcerned with small things, didn't seem in short majestic? There was majesty in his mere unconsciousness of our little conferences and puzzlements over his maintenance and his reward.
After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big soft shoulder--wherever you touched him you found equally little firmness--and said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on my own ear: "Come back to town with me, old friend--come back and spend the evening." I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him, and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to the Mulvilles.When he objected, as regards staying all night, that he had no things, I asked him if he hadn't everything of mine.I had abstained from ordering dinner, and it was too late for preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish at my rooms--reduced also to the transcendent.Something had come up which made me want him to feel at peace with me--and which, precisely, was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion.Ihad too often had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but it gives me pleasure now to think that on that particular evening Ididn't even mention Mrs.Saltram and the children.Late into the night we smoked and talked; old shames and old rigours fell away from us; I only let him see that I was conscious of what I owed him.He was as mild as contrition and as copious as faith; he was never so fine as on a shy return, and even better at forgiving than at being forgiven.I dare say it was a smaller matter than that famous night at Wimbledon, the night of the problematical sobriety and of Miss Anvoy's initiation; but I was as much in it on this occasion as I had been out of it then.At about 1.30 he was sublime.
