The Coxon Fund | Page 5

could enviously enquire, where you might appeal so confidently to
measurement? Mr. Saltram's queer figure, his thick nose and hanging

lip, were fresh to me: in the light of my old friend's fine cold symmetry
they presented mere success in amusing as the refuge of conscious
ugliness. Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and
parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular. In my scrap of a
residence--he had a worldling's eye for its futile conveniences, but
never a comrade's joke--I sounded Frank Saltram in his ears; a
circumstance I mention in order to note that even then I was surprised
at his impatience of my enlivenment. As he had never before heard of
the personage it took indeed the form of impatience of the preposterous
Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like mine, had had its origin in an early,
a childish intimacy with the young Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties
in the previous generation. When she married Kent Mulville, who was
older than Gravener and I and much more amiable, I gained a friend,
but Gravener practically lost one. We reacted in different ways from
the form taken by what he called their deplorable social action--the
form (the term was also his) of nasty second-rate gush. I may have held
in my 'for interieur' that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful
fools, but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking the opposite
line, for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it would
always be for reasons that differed. It came home to me that he was
admirably British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at my
bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my little French
library.
"Of course I've never seen the fellow, but it's clear enough he's a
humbug."
"Clear 'enough' is just what it isn't," I replied; "if it only were!" That
ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of what was to be
later a long ache for final frivolous rest. Gravener was profound enough
to remark after a moment that in the first place he couldn't be anything
but a Dissenter, and when I answered that the very note of his
fascination was his extraordinary speculative breadth my friend retorted
that there was no cad like your cultivated cad, and that I might depend
upon discovering--since I had had the levity not already to have
enquired--that my shining light proceeded, a generation back, from a
Methodist cheesemonger. I confess I was struck with his insistence, and
I said, after reflexion: "It may be--I admit it may be; but why on earth
are you so sure?"--asking the question mainly to lay him the trap of

saying that it was because the poor man didn't dress for dinner. He took
an instant to circumvent my trap and come blandly out the other side.
"Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They've an infallible
hand for frauds. All their geese are swans. They were born to be duped,
they like it, they cry for it, they don't know anything from anything, and
they disgust one--luckily perhaps!-- with Christian charity." His
vehemence was doubtless an accident, but it might have been a strange
foreknowledge. I forget what protest I dropped; it was at any rate
something that led him to go on after a moment: "I only ask one
thing--it's perfectly simple. Is a man, in a given case, a real
gentleman?"
"A real gentleman, my dear fellow--that's so soon said!"
"Not so soon when he isn't! If they've got hold of one this time he must
be a great rascal!"
"I might feel injured," I answered, "if I didn't reflect that they don't rave
about ME."
"Don't be too sure! I'll grant that he's a gentleman," Gravener presently
added, "if you'll admit that he's a scamp."
"I don't know which to admire most, your logic or your benevolence."
My friend coloured at this, but he didn't change the subject. "Where did
they pick him up?"
"I think they were struck with something he had published."
"I can fancy the dreary thing!"
"I believe they found out he had all sorts of worries and difficulties."
"That of course wasn't to be endured, so they jumped at the privilege of
paying his debts!" I professed that I knew nothing about his debts, and I
reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles were angels they
were neither idiots nor millionaires. What they mainly aimed at was
reuniting Mr. Saltram to his wife. "I was expecting to hear he has
basely abandoned her," Gravener went on, at this, "and I'm too glad you
don't disappoint me."
I tried to recall exactly what Mrs. Mulville had told me. "He didn't
leave her--no. It's she who has left