The Figure in the Carpet | Page 8

it to you for what it may be worth to you. If
you're disposed to humour me don't repeat my revelation. Think me
demented--it's your right; but don't tell anybody why."
The sequel to this communication was that as early on the morrow as I
dared I drove straight to Mr. Vereker's door. He occupied in those years
one of the honest old houses in Kensington Square. He received me
immediately, and as soon as I came in I saw I hadn't lost my power to
minister to his mirth. He laughed out at sight of my face, which
doubtless expressed my perturbation. I had been indiscreet--my
compunction was great. "I HAVE told somebody," I panted, "and I'm
sure that person will by this time have told somebody else! It's 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 wasn't 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 Corvick'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 dare say 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 unstable 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 density was a thing too perfect in its way to
touch. He had formed the habit of depending on 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 preserve for sport. I wondered as I walked away where
he had got HIS tip.

CHAPTER 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
would offer them a pastime too precious to be shared with the crowd.
They appeared to have caught instinctively at Vereker's high idea of
enjoyment. 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'd call it letters, he'd call it life, but it was all one
thing. In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke
equally for Gwendolen, to whom, as