The Coxon Fund | Page 4

on coming into the
room were an elated announcement to Mulville that he had found out
something. Not catching the allusion and gaping doubtless a little at his
face, I privately asked Adelaide what he had found out. I shall never
forget the look she gave me as she replied: "Everything!" She really
believed it. At that moment, at any rate, he had found out that the
mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite. He had previously of course
discovered, as I had myself for that matter, that their dinners were
soignes. Let me not indeed, in saying this, neglect to declare that I shall
falsify my counterfeit if I seem to hint that there was in his nature any
ounce of calculation. He took whatever came, but he never plotted for it,
and no man who was so much of an absorbent can ever have been so
little of a parasite. He had a system of the universe, but he had no
system of sponging--that was quite hand-to-mouth. He had fine gross
easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought
confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with
our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I
make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I
was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still
bigger houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand
of reflexion, of emotion--particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of
resentment. No one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often,
and if it's rendering honour to borrow wisdom I've a right to talk of my
sacrifices. He yielded lessons as the sea yields fish--I lived for a while
on this diet. Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his massive
monstrous failure--if failure after all it was--had been designed for my
private recreation. He fairly pampered my curiosity; but the history of
that experience would take me too far. This is not the large canvas I just
now spoke of, and I wouldn't have approached him with my present
hand had it been a question of all the features. Frank Saltram's features,
for artistic purposes, are verily the anecdotes that are to be gathered.
Their name is legion, and this is only one, of which the interest is that it
concerns even more closely several other persons. Such episodes, as
one looks back, are the little dramas that made up the innumerable

facets of the big drama--which is yet to be reported.

CHAPTER II

It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are distinct--my
own, as it were, and this other--they equally began, in a manner, the
first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram, the night I came
back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense of life that, in
London, for the very thrill of it, I could only walk home. Walking and
swinging my stick, I overtook, at Buckingham Gate, George Gravener,
and George Gravener's story may be said to have begun with my
making him, as our paths lay together, come home with me for a talk. I
duly remember, let me parenthesise, that it was still more that of
another person, and also that several years were to elapse before it was
to extend to a second chapter. I had much to say to him, none the less,
about my visit to the Mulvilles, whom he more indifferently knew, and
I was at any rate so amusing that for long afterwards he never
encountered me without asking for news of the old man of the sea. I
hadn't said Mr. Saltram was old, and it was to be seen that he was of an
age to outweather George Gravener. I had at that time a lodging in
Ebury Street, and Gravener was staying at his brother's empty house in
Eaton Square. At Cambridge, five years before, even in our devastating
set, his intellectual power had seemed to me almost awful. Some one
had once asked me privately, with blanched cheeks, what it was then
that after all such a mind as that left standing. "It leaves itself!" I could
recollect devoutly replying. I could smile at present for this
remembrance, since before we got to Ebury Street I was struck with the
fact that, save in the sense of being well set up on his legs, George
Gravener had actually ceased to tower. The universe he laid low had
somehow bloomed again--the usual eminences were visible. I
wondered whether he had lost his humour, or only, dreadful thought,
had never had any--not even when I had fancied him most
Aristophanesque. What was the need of appealing to laughter, however,
I