One of the consequences, for the Mulvilles, of the sacrifices they made for Frank Saltram was that they had to give up their carriage.
Adelaide drove gently into London in a one-horse greenish thing, an early Victorian landau, hired, near at hand, imaginatively, from a broken-down jobmaster whose wife was in consumption--a vehicle that made people turn round all the more when her pensioner sat beside her in a soft white hat and a shawl, one of the dear woman's own.
This was his position and I dare say his costume when on an afternoon in July she went to return Miss Anvoy's visit.The wheel of fate had now revolved, and amid silences deep and exhaustive, compunctions and condonations alike unutterable, Saltram was reinstated.Was it in pride or in penance that Mrs.Mulville had begun immediately to drive him about? If he was ashamed of his ingratitude she might have been ashamed of her forgiveness; but she was incorrigibly capable of liking him to be conspicuous in the landau while she was in shops or with her acquaintance.However, if he was in the pillory for twenty minutes in the Regent's Park--Imean at Lady Coxon's door while his companion paid her call--it wasn't to the further humiliation of any one concerned that she presently came out for him in person, not even to show either of them what a fool she was that she drew him in to be introduced to the bright young American.Her account of the introduction I had in its order, but before that, very late in the season, under Gravener's auspices, I met Miss Anvoy at tea at the House of Commons.The member for Clockborough had gathered a group of pretty ladies, and the Mulvilles were not of the party.On the great terrace, as I strolled off with her a little, the guest of honour immediately exclaimed to me: "I've seen him, you know--I've seen him!" She told me about Saltram's call.
"And how did you find him?"
"Oh so strange!"
"You didn't like him?"
"I can't tell till I see him again."
"You want to do that?"
She had a pause."Immensely."
We went no further; I fancied she had become aware Gravener was looking at us.She turned back toward the knot of the others, and I said: "Dislike him as much as you will--I see you're bitten.""Bitten?" I thought she coloured a little.
"Oh it doesn't matter!" I laughed; "one doesn't die of it.""I hope I shan't die of anything before I've seen more of Mrs.
Mulville." I rejoiced with her over plain Adelaide, whom she pronounced the loveliest woman she had met in England; but before we separated I remarked to her that it was an act of mere humanity to warn her that if she should see more of Frank Saltram--which would be likely to follow on any increase of acquaintance with Mrs.
Mulville--she might find herself flattening her nose against the clear hard pane of an eternal question--that of the relative, that of the opposed, importances of virtue and brains.She replied that this was surely a subject on which one took everything for granted;whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill.What I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper Baker Street--the relative importance (relative to virtue) of other gifts.She asked me if I called virtue a gift--a thing handed to us in a parcel on our first birthday; and I declared that this very enquiry proved to me the problem had already caught her by the skirt.She would have help however, the same help I myself had once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.
"What help do you mean?"
"That of the member for Clockborough."
She stared, smiled, then returned: "Why my idea has been to help HIM!"She HAD helped him--I had his own word for it that at Clockborough her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in.She would do so doubtless again and again, though I heard the very next month that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse.News of the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs.Saltram, and it was afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble--great disasters in America had suddenly summoned her home.Her father, in New York, had suffered reverses, lost so much money that it was really vexatious as showing how much he had had.It was Adelaide who told me she had gone off alone at less than a week's notice.
"Alone? Gravener has permitted that?"