Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with "grounds," at Clockborough, which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I learned from Mrs.Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she had gone down to resume possession.I could see the faded red livery, the big square shoulders, the high-walled garden of this decent abode.As the rumble of dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed his suit, and I found myself hoping the politics of the late Mayor's widow wouldn't be such as to admonish her to ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so far as to pray, they would naturally form a bar to any contact.I tried to focus the many-buttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed the Bath-chair over somebody's toes.I was destined to hear, none the less, through Mrs.Saltram--who, I afterwards learned, was in correspondence with Lady Coxon's housekeeper--that Gravener was known to have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at Clockborough.On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy but of experience.The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see him in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very justly, to think him good-looking.It would be too much to describe myself as troubled by this play of surmise; but I occur to remember the relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of Frank Saltram.There were limits after all, and my mark at last had been reached.
I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an expression; but this was a supreme revolt.Certain things cleared up in my mind, certain values stood out.It was all very well to have an unfortunate temperament; there was nothing so unfortunate as to have, for practical purposes, nothing else.I avoided George Gravener at this moment and reflected that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving England.I wanted to forget Frank Saltram--that was all.I didn't want to do anything in the world to him but that.Indignation had withered on the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought only by never thinking of him again.It wasn't for anything he had done to me;it was for what he had done to the Mulvilles.Adelaide cried about it for a week, and her husband, profiting by the example so signally given him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter, the drop too much, unanswered.The letter, an incredible one, addressed by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was the central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features, each more painful than whichever other we compared it with.The Pudneys had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse.Base ingratitude, gross indecency--one had one's choice only of such formulas as that the more they fitted the less they gave one rest.These are dead aches now, and I am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business.There are things which if I had had to tell them--well, would have stopped me off here altogether.
I went abroad for the general election, and if I don't know how much, on the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much Imissed, him.At a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I discovered what he had done for me.I owed him, oh unmistakeably, certain noble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky lamp, and lo it continued to twinkle.
But the light it gave me just showed me how much more I wanted.Iwas pursued of course by letters from Mrs.Saltram which I didn't scruple not to read, though quite aware her embarrassments couldn't but be now of the gravest.I sacrificed to propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, while I rummaged in my desk for another paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the packet.The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to be married to Mr.George Gravener; and the news was two months old.A direct question of Mrs.Saltram's had thus remained unanswered--she had enquired of me in a postscript what sort of man this aspirant to such a hand might be.The great other fact about him just then was that he had been triumphantly returned for Clockborough in the interest of the party that had swept the country--so that I might easily have referred Mrs.Saltram to the journals of the day.Yet when I at last wrote her that I was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing her, I but remarked in regard to her question that she must really put it to Miss Anvoy.
