The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/Maud-Evelyn/Chapter 7
VII
I might push it away, but I couldn't really get rid of it; nor, on the whole, doubtless, did I want to, for to have in one's life, year after year, a particular question or two that one couldn't comfortably and imposingly make up one's mind about was just the sort of thing to keep one from turning stupid. There had been little need of my enjoining reserve upon Lavinia: she obeyed, in respect to impenetrable silence save with myself, an instinct, an interest of her own. We never therefore gave poor Marmaduke, as you call it, 'away'; we were much too tender, let alone that she was also too proud; and, for himself, evidently, there was not, to the end, in London, another person in his confidence. No echo of the queer part he played ever came back to us; and I can't tell you how this fact, just by itself, brought home to me, little by little, a sense of the charm he was under. I met him 'out' at long intervals—met him usually at dinner. He had grown like a person with a position and a history. Rosy and rich-looking, fat, moreover, distinctly fat at last, there was almost in him something of the bland—yet not too bland—young head of an hereditary business. If the Dedricks had been bankers, he might have constituted the future of the house. There was none the less a long middle stretch during which, though we were all so much in London, he dropped out of my talks with Lavinia. We were conscious, she and I, of his absence from them; but we clearly felt in each quarter that there are things after all unspeakable, and the fact, in any case, had nothing to do with her seeing or not seeing our friend. I was sure, as it happened, that she did see him. But there were moments that for myself still stand out.
One of these was a certain Sunday afternoon when it was so dismally wet that, taking for granted I should have no visitors, I had drawn up to the fire with a book—a successful novel of the day—that I promised myself comfortably to finish. Suddenly, in my absorption, I heard a firm rat-tat-tat; on which I remember giving a groan of inhospitality. But my visitor proved in due course Marmaduke, and Marmaduke proved—in a manner even less, at the point we had reached, to have been counted on—still more attaching than my novel. I think it was only an accident that he became so; it would have been the turn of a hair either way. He hadn't come to speak—he had only come to talk, to show once more that we could continue good old friends without his speaking. But somehow there were the circumstances: the insidious fireside, the things in the room, with their reminders of his younger time; perhaps even too the open face of my book, looking at him from where I had laid it down for him and giving him a chance to feel that he could supersede Wilkie Collins. There was at all events a promise of intimacy, of opportunity for him in the cold lash of the windows by the storm. We should be alone; it was cosy; it was safe.
The action of these impressions was the more marked that what was touched by them, I afterwards saw, was not at all a desire for an effect—was just simply a spirit of happiness that needed to overflow. It had finally become too much for him. His past, rolling up year after year, had grown too interesting. But he was, all the same, directly stupefying. I forget what turn of our preliminary gossip brought it out, but it came, in explanation of something or other, as it had not yet come: 'When a man has had for a few months what I had, you know!' The moral appeared to be that nothing in the way of human experience of the exquisite could again particularly matter. He saw, however, that I failed immediately to fit his reflection to a definite case, and he went on with the frankest smile: 'You look as bewildered as if you suspected me of alluding to some sort of thing that isn't usually spoken of; but I assure you I mean nothing more reprehensible than our blessed engagement itself.'
'Your blessed engagement?' I couldn't help the tone in which I took him up; but the way he disposed of that was something of which I feel to this hour the influence. It was only a look, but it put an end to my tone forever. It made me, on my side, after an instant, look at the fire—look hard and even turn a little red. During this moment I saw my alternatives and I chose; so that when I met his eyes again I was fairly ready. 'You still feel,' I asked with sympathy, 'how much it did for you?'
I had no sooner spoken than I saw that that would be from that moment the right way. It instantly made all the difference. The main question would be whether I could keep it up. I remember that only a few minutes later, for instance, this question gave a flare. His reply had been abundant and imperturbable—had included some glance at the way death brings into relief even the faintest things that have preceded it; on which I felt myself suddenly as restless as if I had grown afraid of him. I got up to ring for tea; he went on talking—talking about Maud-Evelyn and what she had been for him; and when the servant had come up I prolonged, nervously, on purpose, the order I had wished to give. It made time, and I could speak to the footman sufficiently without thinking: what I thought of really was the risk of turning right round with a little outbreak. The temptation was strong; the same influences that had worked for my companion just worked, in their way, during that minute or two, for me. Should I, taking him unaware, flash at him a plain 'I say, just settle it for me once for all. Are you the boldest and basest of fortune-hunters, or have you only, more innocently and perhaps more pleasantly, suffered your brain slightly to soften?' But I missed the chance—which I didn't in fact afterwards regret. My servant went out, and I faced again to my visitor, who continued to converse. I met his eyes once more, and their effect was repeated. If anything had happened to his brain this effect was perhaps the domination of the madman's stare. Well, he was the easiest and gentlest of madmen. By the time the footman came back with tea I was in for it; I was in for everything. By 'everything' I mean my whole subsequent treatment of the case. It was—the case was—really beautiful. So, like all the rest, the hour comes back to me: the sound of the wind and the rain; the look of the empty, ugly, cabless square and of the stormy spring light; the way that, uninterrupted and absorbed, we had tea together by my fire. So it was that he found me receptive and that I found myself able to look merely grave and kind when he said, for example: 'Her father and mother, you know, really, that first day'—the day they picked me up on the Splügen—recognised me as the proper one.'
'The proper one?'
'To make their son-in-law. They wanted her so,' he went on, 'to have had, don't you know, just everything.'
'Well, if she did have it'—I tried to be cheerful—'isn't the whole thing then all right?'
'Oh, it's all right now, he replied—'now that we've got it all there before us. You see, they couldn't like me so much'—he wished me thoroughly to understand—'without wanting me to have been the man.'
'I see—that was natural.'
'Well,' said Marmaduke, 'it prevented the possibility of any one else.'
'Ah, that would never have done!' I laughed.
His own pleasure at it was impenetrable, splendid. 'You see, they couldn't do much, the old people—and they can do still less now—with the future; so they had to do what they could with the past.'
'And they seem to have done,' I concurred, 'remarkably much.'
'Everything, simply. Everything,' he repeated. Then he had an idea, though without insistence or importunity—I noticed it just flicker in his face. 'If you were to come to Westbourne Terrace———'
'Oh, don't speak of that!' I broke in. 'It wouldn't be decent now. I should have come, if at all, ten years ago.'
But he saw, with his good humour, further than this. 'I see what you mean. But there's much more in the place now than then.'
'I dare say. People get new things. All the same———!' I was at bottom but resisting my curiosity.
Marmaduke didn't press me, but he wanted me to know. 'There are our rooms—the whole set; and I don't believe you ever saw anything more charming, for her taste was extraordinary. I'm afraid, too, that I myself have had much to say to them.' Then as he made out that I was again a little at sea, 'I'm talking,' he went on, 'of the suite prepared for her marriage.' He 'talked' like a crown prince. 'They were ready, to the last touch—there was nothing more to be done. And they're just as they were—not an object moved, not an arrangement altered, not a person but ourselves coming in: they're only exquisitely kept. All our presents are there—I should have liked you to see them.'
It had become a torment by this time—I saw that I had made a mistake. But I carried it off. 'Oh, I couldn't have borne it!'
'They're not sad,' he smiled—'they're too lovely to be sad. They're happy. And the things———!' He seemed, in the excitement of our talk, to have them before him.
'They're so very wonderful?'
'Oh, selected with a patience that makes them almost priceless. It's really a museum. There was nothing they thought too good for her.'
I had lost the museum, but I reflected that it could contain no object so rare as my visitor. 'Well, you've helped them—you could do that.
He quite eagerly assented. 'I could do that, thank God—I could do that! I felt it from the first, and it's what I have done.' Then as if the connection were direct: 'All my things are there.'
I thought a moment. 'Your presents?'
'Those I made her. She loved each one, and I remember about each the particular thing she said. Though I do say it,' he continued, 'none of the others, as a matter of fact, come near mine. I look at them every day, and I assure you I'm not ashamed.' Evidently, in short, he had spared nothing, and he talked on and on. He really quite swaggered.