It was therefore from her husband I could never remove my eyes: I beset him in a manner that might have made him uneasy. I went even so far as to engage him in conversation. Didn’t he know, hadn’t he come into it as a matter of course? — that question hummed in my brain. Of course he knew; otherwise he wouldn’t return my stare so queerly. His wife had told him what I wanted and he was amiably amused at my impotence. He didn’t laugh — he wasn’t a laugher: his system was to present to my irritation, so that I should crudely expose myself, a conversational blank as vast as his big bare brow. It always happened that I turned away with a settled conviction from these unpeopled expanses, which seemed to complete each other geographically and to symbolise together Drayton Deane’s want of voice, want of form. He simply hadn’t the art to use what he knew; he literally was incompetent to take up the duty where Corvick had left it. I went still further — it was the only glimpse of happiness I had. I made up my mind that the duty didn’t appeal to him. He wasn’t interested, he didn’t care. Yes, it quite comforted me to believe him too stupid to have joy of the thing I lacked. He was as stupid after as he had been before, and that deepened for me the golden glory in which the mystery was wrapped. I had of course none the less to recollect that his wife might have imposed her conditions and exactions. I had above all to remind myself that with Vereker’s death the major incentive dropped. He was still there to be honoured by what might be done — he was no longer there to give it his sanction. Who alas but he had the authority?
Two children were born to the pair, but the second cost the mother her life. After this stroke I seemed to see another ghost of a chance. I jumped at it in thought, but I waited a certain time for manners, and at last my opportunity arrived in a remunerative way. His wife had been dead a year when I met Drayton Deane in the smoking-room of a small club of which we both were members, but where for months — perhaps because I rarely entered it — I hadn’t seen him. The room was empty and the occasion propitious. I deliberately offered him, to have done with the matter for ever, that advantage for which I felt he had long been looking.
“As an older acquaintance of your late wife’s than even you were,” I began, “you must let me say to you something I have on my mind. I shall be glad to make any terms with you that you see fit to name for the information she must have had from George Corvick — the information you know, that had come to him, poor chap, in one of the happiest hours of his life, straight from Hugh Vereker.”
He looked at me like a dim phrenological bust. “The information —?”
“Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.”
He began to flush — the numbers on his bumps to come out. “Vereker’s books had a general intention?”
I stared in my turn. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know it?” I thought for a moment he was playing with me. “Mrs. Deane knew it; she had it, as I say, straight from Corvick, who had, after infinite search and to Vereker’s own delight, found the very mouth of the cave. Where IS the mouth? He told after their marriage — and told alone — the person who, when the circumstances were reproduced, must have told you. Have I been wrong in taking for granted that she admitted you, as one of the highest privileges of the relation in which you stood to her, to the knowledge of which she was after Corvick’s death the sole depositary? All I know is that that knowledge is infinitely precious, and what I want you to understand is that if you’ll in your tu............