Embarrassments | Page 8

a
woman, into the bargain."
"The person you've told?"
"No, the other person. I'm quite sure he must have told her."
"For all the good it will do her--or do me! A woman will never find
out."
"No, but she'll talk all over the place: she'll do just what you don't
want."
Vereker thought a moment, but he was not so disconcerted as I had
feared: he felt that if the harm was done it only served him right. "It
doesn't matter--don't worry."
"I'll do my best, I promise you, that your talk with me shall go no
further."
"Very good; do what you can."

"In the meantime," I pursued, "George Cor-vick's possession of the tip
may, on his part, really lead to something."
"That will be a brave day."
I told him about Corvick's cleverness, his admiration, the intensity of
his interest in my anecdote; and without making too much of the
divergence of our respective estimates mentioned that my friend was
already of opinion that he saw much further into a certain affair than
most people. He was quite as fired as I had been at Bridges. He was
moreover in love with the young lady: perhaps the two together would
puzzle something out.
Vereker seemed struck with this. "Do you mean they're to be married?"
"I daresay that's what it will come to."
"That may help them," he conceded, "but we must give them time!"
I spoke of my own renewed assault and confessed my difficulties;
whereupon he repeated his former advice: "Give it up, give it up!" He
evidently didn't think me intellectually equipped for the adventure. I
stayed half an hour, and he was most good-natured, but I couldn't help
pronouncing him a man of shifting moods. He had been free with me in
a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now in a mood he had turned
indifferent. This general levity helped me to believe that, so far as the
subject of the tip went, there wasn't much in it. I contrived however to
make him answer a few more questions about it, though he did so with
visible impatience. For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were all so
blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in the
primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He
highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another
himself. "It's the very string," he said, "that my pearls are strung on!"
The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn't want to give
us a grain of succour--our destiny was a thing too perfect in its way to
touch. He had formed the habit of depending upon it, and if the spell
was to break it must break by some force of its own. He comes back to
me from that last occasion--for I was never to speak to him again--as a

man with some safe secret for enjoyment. I wondered as I walked away
where he had got his tip.

V
When I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he made
me feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an insult. He
had instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen's ardent response was in
itself a pledge of discretion. The question would now absorb them, and
they would enjoy their fun too much to wish to share it with the crowd.
They appeared to have caught instinctively Vereker's peculiar notion of
fun. Their intellectual pride, however, was not such as to make them
indifferent to any further light I might throw on the affair they had in
hand. They were indeed of the "artistic temperament," and I was
freshly struck with my colleague's power to excite himself over a
question of art. He called it letters, he called it life--it was all one thing.
In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally for
Gwendolen, to whom, as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently better to
allow her a little leisure, he made a point of introducing me. I
remember our calling together one Sunday in August at a huddled
house in Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick's possession of a
friend who had some light to mingle with his own. He could say things
to her that I could never say to him. She had indeed no sense of humour
and, with her pretty way of holding her head on one side, was one of
those persons whom you want, as the phrase is, to shake, but who have
learnt Hungarian by themselves. She conversed perhaps in Hungarian
with Corvick; she had remarkably little English for his friend. Corvick
afterwards told me that I had chilled her by