there was one. But there isn’t now.” That was all he said, except something about Mrs. Erme’s having got on her feet again in the most extraordinary way—a remark from which I gathered he wished me to think he meant that private understandings were of little use when the doctor didn’t share them. What I took the liberty of really thinking was that the girl might in some way have estranged him. Well, if he had taken the turn of jealousy for instance it could scarcely be jealousy of me. In that case (besides the absurdity of it) he wouldn’t have gone away to leave us together. For some time before his departure we had indulged in no allusion to the buried treasure, and from his silence, of which mine was the consequence, I had drawn a sharp conclusion. His courage had dropped, his ardour had gone the way of mine—this inference at least he left me to enjoy. More than that he couldn’t do; he couldn’t face the triumph with which I might have greeted an explicit admission. He needn’t have been afraid, poor dear, for I had by this time lost all need to triumph. In fact I considered that I showed magnanimity in not reproaching him with his collapse, for the sense of his having thrown up the game made me feel more than ever how much I at last depended on him. If Corvick had broken down I should never know; no one would be of any use if he wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit true that I had ceased to care for knowledge; little by little my curiosity had not only begun to ache again, but had become the familiar torment of my consciousness. There are doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don’t know after all why I should in this connection so much as mention them. For the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick’s absence that she made this analogy vivid. It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed upon her, and in her presence I felt almost tepid. I got hold of “Deep Down” again: it was a desert in which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a wonderful hole in the sand—a cavity out of which Corvick had still more remarkably pulled her.
Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to me was: “He has got it, he has got it!”
She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean the great thing. “Vereker’s idea?”
“His general intention. George has cabled from Bombay.”
She had the missive open there; it was emphatic, but it was brief. “Eureka. Immense.” That was all—he had saved the money of the signature. I shared her emotion, but I was disappointed. “He doesn’t say what it is.”
“How could he—in a telegram? He’ll write it.”
“But how does he know?”
“Know it’s the real thing? Oh, I’m sure when you see it you do know. Vera incessu patuit dea!”
“It’s you, Miss Erme, who are a dear for bringing me such news!”—I went all lengths in my high spirits. “But fancy finding our goddess in the temple of Vishnu! How strange of George to have been able to go into the thing again in the midst of such different and such powerful solicitations!”
“He hasn’t gone into it, I know; it’s the thing itself, let severely alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him like a tigress out of the jungle. He didn’t take a book with him—on purpose; indeed he wouldn’t have needed to—he knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn’t thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure in the carpet came out. That’s the way he knew it would come and the real reason—you didn’t in the least understand, but I suppose I may tell you now—why he went and why I consented to his going. We knew the change would do it, the difference of thought, of scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake. We had perfectly, we had admirably calculated. The elements were all in his mind, and in the secousse of a new and intense experience they just struck light.” She positively struck light herself—she was literally, facially luminous. I stammered something about unconscious cerebration, and she continued: “He’ll come right home—this will bring him.”
“To see Vereker, you mean?”
“To see Vereker—and to see me. Think what he’ll have to tell me!”
I hesitated. “About India?”
“About fiddlesticks! About Vereker—about the figure in the carpet.”
“But, as you say, we shall surely have that in a letter.”
She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had told me long before that her face was interesting. “Perhaps it won’t go in a letter if it’s ‘immense.’”
“Perhaps not if it’s immense bosh. If he has got something that won’t go in a letter he hasn’t got the thing. Vereker’s own statement to me was exactly that the ‘figure’ would go in a letter.”
“Well, I cabled to George an hour ago—two words,” said Gwendolen.
“Is it indiscreet of me to inquire what they were?”
She hung fire, but at last she brought them out. “‘Angel, write.’”
“Good!” I exclaimed. “I’ll make it sure—I’ll send him the same.”
VII
My words however were not absolutely the same—I put something instead of “angel”; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more apt, for when eventually we heard from Corvick it was merely, it was thoroughly to be tantalised. He was magnificent in his triumph, he described his discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy only obscured it—there were to be no particulars till he should have submitted his conception to the supreme authority. He had thrown up his commission, he had thrown up his book, he had thrown up everything but the instant need to hurry to Rapallo, on the Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote him a letter which was to await him at Aden—I besought him to relieve my suspense. That he found my letter was indicated by a telegram which, reaching me after weary days and without my having received an answer to my laconic dispatch at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of the day, which Corvick often made use of to show he wasn’t a prig. It had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. “Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you’ll make!” “Tellement envie de voir ta tête!”—that was what I had to sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for I seem to remember myself at this time as rushing constantly between the little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience, Gwendolen’s and mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would be greater. We all spent during this episode, for people of our means, a great deal of money in telegrams, and I counted on the receipt of news from Rapallo immediately after the junction of the discoverer with the discovered. The interval seemed an age, but late one day I heard a hansom rattle up to my door with a crash engendered by a hint of liberality. I lived with my heart in my mouth and I bounded to the window—a movement which gave me a view of a young lady erect on the footboard of the vehicle and eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of me she flourished a paper with a movement that brought me straight down, the movement with which, in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves are
