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The Coxon Fund
by
“And that’s why you didn’t write?”
“I couldn’t very well tell you she was with me without telling you that no time had even yet been fixed for her marriage. And I couldn’t very well tell you as much as that without telling you what I knew of the reason of it. It was not till a day or two ago,” Mrs. Mulville went on, “that she asked me to ask you if you wouldn’t come and see her. Then at last she spoke of your knowing about the idea of the Endowment.”
I turned this over. “Why on earth does she want to see me?”
“To talk with you, naturally, about Mr. Saltram.”
“As a subject for the prize?” This was hugely obvious, and I presently returned: “I think I’ll sail to-morrow for Australia.”
“Well then–sail!” said Mrs. Mulville, getting up.
But I frivolously, continued. “On Thursday at five, we said?” The appointment was made definite and I enquired how, all this time, the unconscious candidate had carried himself.
“In perfection, really, by the happiest of chances: he has positively been a dear. And then, as to what we revere him for, in the most wonderful form. His very highest–pure celestial light. You won’t do him an ill turn?” Adelaide pleaded at the door.
“What danger can equal for him the danger to which he’s exposed from himself?” I asked. “Look out sharp, if he has lately been too prim. He’ll presently take a day off, treat us to some exhibition that will make an Endowment a scandal.”
“A scandal?” Mrs. Mulville dolorously echoed.
“Is Miss Anvoy prepared for that?”
My visitor, for a moment, screwed her parasol into my carpet. “He grows bigger every day.”
“So do you!” I laughed as she went off.
That girl at Wimbledon, on the Thursday afternoon, more than justified my apprehensions. I recognised fully now the cause of the agitation she had produced in me from the first–the faint foreknowledge that there was something very stiff I should have to do for her. I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me. Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that which permitted her to laugh out, as for the joy of her difficulty, into the priggish old room. This remarkable young woman could be earnest without being solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have cursed her obstinacy I found myself watching the unstudied play of her eyebrows or the recurrence of a singularly intense whiteness produced by the parting of her lips. These aberrations, I hasten to add, didn’t prevent my learning soon enough why she had wished to see me. Her reason for this was as distinct as her beauty: it was to make me explain what I had meant, on the occasion of our first meeting, by Mr. Saltram’s want of dignity. It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine, but she desired it there from my lips. What she really desired of course was to know whether there was worse about him than what she had found out for herself. She hadn’t been a month so much in the house with him without discovering that he wasn’t a man of monumental bronze. He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project. She put her project boldly before me: there it stood in its preposterous beauty. She was as willing to take the humorous view of it as I could be: the only difference was that for her the humorous view of a thing wasn’t necessarily prohibitive, wasn’t paralysing.