This made us, most of us--for there were other friends present--convey to each other in silence some of the unutterable things that in those years our eyes had inevitably acquired the art of expressing.If a fine little American enquirer hadn't 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 in this connexion 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 it was a comfort 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 afterwards 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 etherised 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've never cared to tell them what it really was Iwas 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, even in thus roughly evoking the occasion, and it takes something from my pride of clearness.However, I shall perhaps be as clear as is absolutely needful if I remark that our young lady 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 stirred no step.In this case doubtless Gravener would, in spite of the House of Commons, have found means to rejoin her.It afterwards 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 behaviour, as I caught gleams of it, ministered to the image that had taken birth in my mind, to my private amusement, while that other night 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 coloured, extravagantly perhaps, my interpretation of her very looks and tones.At Wimbledon for instance it had appeared to me 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 everything.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 rigour in the situation of which Gravener had sketched for me the elements, she would have to get out of her difficulty by herself.It wasn't I who had launched her and it wasn't 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 some time 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.
