PAGE 27
The Coxon Fund
by
“You’ll have to open the letter. It also contains an enclosure.”
I felt it–it was fat and uncanny. “Wheels within wheels!” I exclaimed. “There’s something for me too to deliver.”
“So they tell me–to Miss Anvoy.”
I stared; I felt a certain thrill. “Why don’t they send it to her directly?”
Mrs. Saltram hung fire. “Because she’s staying with Mr. and Mrs. Mulville.”
“And why should that prevent?”
Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque, the unconscious perversity of her action. I was the only person save George Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware of Sir Gregory Coxon’s and of Miss Anvoy’s strange bounty. Where could there have been a more signal illustration of the clumsiness of human affairs than her having complacently selected this moment to fly in the face of it? “There’s the chance of their seeing her letters. They know Mr. Pudney’s hand.”
Still I didn’t understand; then it flashed upon me. “You mean they might intercept it? How can you imply anything so base?” I indignantly demanded
“It’s not I–it’s Mr. Pudney!” cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush. “It’s his own idea.”
“Then why couldn’t he send the letter to you to be delivered?”
Mrs. Saltram’s embarrassment increased; she gave me another hard look. “You must make that out for yourself.”
I made it out quickly enough. “It’s a denunciation?”
“A real lady doesn’t betray her husband!” this virtuous woman exclaimed.
I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect of impertinence. “Especially to Miss Anvoy, who’s so easily shocked? Why do such things concern HER?” I asked, much at a loss.
“Because she’s there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs. Pudney have been watching this: they feel she may be taken in.”
“Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make when she has lost her power to contribute?”
Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly: “There are other things in the world than money.” This hadn’t occurred to her so long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at my letter, that Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their motives. “It’s all in kindness,” she continued as she got up.
“Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view of kindness before her reverses.”
My companion smiled with some acidity “Perhaps you’re no safer than the Mulvilles!”
I didn’t want her to think that, nor that she should report to the Pudneys that they had not been happy in their agent; and I well remember that this was the moment at which I began, with considerable emotion, to promise myself to enjoin upon Miss Anvoy never to open any letter that should come to her in one of those penny envelopes. My emotion, and I fear I must add my confusion, quickly deepened; I presently should have been as glad to frighten Mrs. Saltram as to think I might by some diplomacy restore the Pudneys to a quieter vigilance.
“It’s best you should take my view of my safety,” I at any rate soon responded. When I saw she didn’t know what I meant by this I added: “You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter, a thing you’ll profoundly regret.” My tone had a significance which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a moment, after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney’s communication into my pocket. She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing it to send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had almost given her my word I wouldn’t deliver the enclosure. The passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated observer, to some such pledge.