Saltram was always sympathy, and she spoke as if during the absence of these ladies she mightn't know where to turn for it.A few months later indeed, when they had come back, her tone perceptibly changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to it, rather as to persons in her debt for favours received.What had happened I didn't know, but I saw it would take only a little more or a little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of social countenance--people for whom she had vainly tried to do something.I confess I saw how it wouldn't be in a mere week or two that I should rid myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose very name, when I learnt it, I found something secretly to like.Ishould probably neither see her nor hear of her again: the knight's widow (he had been mayor of Clockborough) would pass away and the heiress would return to her inheritance.I gathered with surprise that she had not communicated to his wife the story of her attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this reticence on the easy supposition that Mrs.Saltram had fatigued by overpressure the spring of the sympathy of which she boasted.The girl at any rate would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a husband;besides which she would lack occasion to repeat her experiment.
We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at least, in the very conception of a series.In our scrutiny of ways and means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself Ilaughed at our playbills even while I stickled for them.It was indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a sound.He admitted with a candour all his own that he was in truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles' drawing-room."Yes," he suggestively allowed, "it's there, I think, that I'm at my best; quite late, when it gets toward eleven--and if I've not been too much worried."We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour to the superstition of sobriety.On the Saturdays I used to bring my portmanteau, so as not to have to think of eleven o'clock trains.I had a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its altars of cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and clear lamplight, we might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles would but charge for admission.Here it was, however, that they shamelessly broke down;as there's a flaw in every perfection this was the inexpugnable refuge of their egotism.They declined to make their saloon a market, so that Saltram's golden words continued the sole coin that rang there.It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a greater price than such an enchanted hush as surrounded him on his greatest nights.The most profane, on these occasions, felt a presence; all minor eloquence grew dumb.Adelaide Mulville, for the pride of her hospitality, anxiously watched the door or stealthily poked the fire.I used to call it the music-room, for we had anticipated Bayreuth.The very gates of the kingdom of light seemed to open and the horizon of thought to flash with the beauty of a sunrise at sea.
In the consideration of ways and means, the sittings of our little board, we were always conscious of the creak of Mrs.Saltram's shoes.She hovered, she interrupted, she almost presided, the state of affairs being mostly such as to supply her with every incentive for enquiring what was to be done next.It was the pressing pursuit of this knowledge that, in concatenations of omnibuses and usually in very wet weather, led her so often to my door.She thought us spiritless creatures with editors and publishers; but she carried matters to no great effect when she personally pushed into back-shops.She wanted all moneys to be paid to herself: they were otherwise liable to such strange adventures.They trickled away into the desert--they were mainly at best, alas, a slender stream.The editors and the publishers were the last people to take this remarkable thinker at the valuation that has now pretty well come to be established.The former were half-distraught between the desire to "cut" him and the difficulty of finding a crevice for their shears; and when a volume on this or that portentous subject was proposed to the latter they suggested alternative titles which, as reported to our friend, brought into his face the noble blank melancholy that sometimes made it handsome.The title of an unwritten book didn't after all much matter, but some masterpiece of Saltram's may have died in his bosom of the shudder with which it was then convulsed.The ideal solution, failing the fee at Kent Mulville's door, would have been some system of subscription to projected treatises with their non-appearance provided for--provided for, I mean, by the indulgence of subscribers.The author's real misfortune was that subscribers were so wretchedly literal.When they tastelessly enquired why publication hadn't ensued I was tempted to ask who in the world had ever been so published.Nature herself had brought him out in voluminous form, and the money was simply a deposit on borrowing the work.