The Figure in the Carpet | Page 4

at the
end of the table, had not caught Vereker's words.
I rather avoided him after dinner, for I confess he struck me as cruelly
conceited, and the revelation was a pain. "The usual twaddle"--my
acute little study! That one's admiration should have had a reserve or
two could gall him to that point! I had thought him placid, and he was
placid enough; such a surface was the hard polished glass that encased
the bauble of his vanity. I was really ruffled, and the only comfort was
that if nobody saw anything George Corvick was quite as much out of
it as I. This comfort however was not sufficient, after the ladies had
dispersed, to carry me in the proper manner--I mean in a spotted jacket
and humming an air--into the smoking-room. I took my way in some
dejection to bed; but in the passage I encountered Mr. Vereker, who
had been up once more to change, coming out of his room. HE was
humming an air and had on a spotted jacket, and as soon as he saw me
his gaiety gave a start.
"My dear young man," he exclaimed, "I'm so glad to lay hands on you!
I'm afraid I most unwittingly wounded you by those words of mine at
dinner to Miss Poyle. I learned but half an hour ago from Lady Jane
that you're the author of the little notice in The Middle."
I protested that no bones were broken; but he moved with me to my
own door, his hand, on my shoulder, kindly feeling for a fracture; and
on hearing that I had come up to bed he asked leave to cross my
threshold and just tell me in three words what his qualification of my
remarks had represented. It was plain he really feared I was hurt, and
the sense of his solicitude suddenly made all the difference to me. My
cheap review fluttered off into space, and the best things I had said in it
became flat enough beside the brilliancy of his being there. I can see
him there still, on my rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his fine
clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth. I don't

know what he had at first meant to say, but I think the sight of my relief
touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from far within.
It was so these words presently conveyed to me something that, as I
afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any one. I've always done
justice to the generous impulse that made him speak; it was simply
compunction for a snub unconsciously administered to a man of letters
in a position inferior to his own, a man of letters moreover in the very
act of praising him. To make the thing right he talked to me exactly as
an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the
place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn't have
done anything more intensely effective.

CHAPTER III.

"I don't quite know how to explain it to you," he said, "but it was the
very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of intelligence, it was
just your exceptional sharpness, that produced the feeling--a very old
story with me, I beg you to believe--under the momentary influence of
which I used in speaking to that good lady the words you so naturally
resent. I don't read the things in the newspapers unless they're thrust
upon me as that one was--it's always one's best friend who does it! But
I used to read them sometimes--ten years ago. I dare say they were in
general rather stupider then; at any rate it always struck me they missed
my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted
me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. Whenever since
I've happened to have a glimpse of them they were still blazing
away--still missing it, I mean, deliciously. YOU miss it, my dear fellow,
with inimitable assurance; the fact of your being awfully clever and
your article's being awfully nice doesn't make a hair's breadth of
difference. It's quite with you rising young men," Vereker laughed,
"that I feel most what a failure I am!"
I listened with keen interest; it grew keener as he talked. "YOU a
failure--heavens! What then may your 'little point' happen to be?"
"Have I got to TELL you, after all these years and labours?" There was
something in the friendly reproach of this--jocosely exaggerated--that

made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth, blush to the roots of my
hair. I'm as much in the dark as ever, though I've grown used