Mrs. Wardour then, to all intents and purposes, was to live with them; but Peter, so ran the deed, was “master” at Howes; while in London he and Silvia would have the wide licence of guests peculiarly privileged, at liberty to ask friends there whenever they wished. The crystallization of it, the definite statement and treaty, after infinite probings and testings on her part into Peter’s most intimate feelings on the subject, had been entirely Silvia’s. It had been she who had finally suggested it, with the proviso that anybody—by which she undoubtedly meant her husband—was to tear up the treaty without any possibility of offence, if he found it unworkable or unsatisfactory; but, as he thought over it now, he was frankly surprised at himself to find how eminently satisfactory a fulfilment of it he augured. Silvia had suggested it (there was the great point), and though he felt that he could not himself have conceivably presented a treaty like that to her for her signature, he applauded her insight in so doing. A man could hardly have suggested that to the girl he had but lately married; it would have savoured, would it not, of his considering that the ideal arrangement did not procure for them their own undiluted companionship? But she had known that he would not put such a construction on her proposition. She did not, in fact, let an attitude which would have been typically feminine deter her from adopting this more sensible and more manly pose. But that was Silvia all through: there was a robust quality about her, an impotence to harbour littlenesses....
They expected another visitor that day in the person of Peter’s father, who had, in a letter which was no less than a bouquet of flowering eloquence, indicated that for the due, the supreme, the sublime execution of the second cartoon, it was necessary for the artist to soak himself once more in the contemplation of the first, so as (this was rather involved) to catch to the fraction of a tone the key in which it was pitched. There had to be a gradual crescendo, a deliberate tuning up and up, a continual ascent throughout the series.... Shorn of the mixture of metaphor, he wanted to study the first cartoon before plunging, with the aid of his sketches, into the remainder. These sketches, he added, were, as soon as he had finished with their use, to pass out of his possession, for the charming Mrs. Henry Wardour had induced him to let her purchase them at a figure which convinced him that they would find an appreciative home.... Then the letter became slightly mysterious. The projected series of cartoons, he had reason to know, was exciting stupendous interest in artistic circles. Flattering—perhaps a man who was proud of his work ought not to say flattering—evidence of that was to hand, evidence substantial and conclusive. He had not made—this was lucky, since he would not have dreamed of going back on his bargain—he had not made any contract with Mrs. Wardour—to whom all salutations—about the rest of the series, and thought himself fortunate in not parting with them for a comparative pittance. He did not (mark you, my Peter) complain of the price she had paid him for the first of them, and he was quite sure that, with Peter’s assistance, everything would be arranged quite satisfactorily.
Peter had read this letter, which he must talk over with Silvia on her return, with the detachment of which he was so terribly capable, and had come to the conclusion that his father had somehow induced a deluded Crœsus of some sort to offer a higher price per cartoon for his future perpetrations than that which his mother-in-law had, no doubt, already given him for the first. For this deduction he had the most cordial welcome. As long as his father was dumping his “beastly” goods—so Peter was now at liberty to think—on the picture-gallery at Howes for fancy, if not fantastic prices, he could not in mere pious decency put it to Mrs. Wardour that she was paying, as he supposed, heavily, for colossal rubbish. But his father’s letter, maturely considered, made it quite certain that somebody was willing to pay more for rubbish than Mrs. Wardour. Already the general question had received his attention: Mrs. Wardour was, so he supposed, under contract to buy those melodramatic daubs for the decoration of a house that belonged to Silvia, and of which he, by attested treaty, was master. So long as his father could profitably dispose of this rubbish here, Peter was filially prohibited from any protest, but when once his father announced that he was receiving a mere pittance, though without complaint, for what he would in another market receive a less despicable dole, his son, surely, was free to welcome his taking his wares elsewhere. His son, in any case, was heart and soul allied to the new enterprise, for already Peter had experienced a vivid distaste of the fact that he countenanced, by mere acquiescence, this further decoration of Howes. He knew that if the artist had not been his father he must have already protested against the bargain which perhaps was not yet complete on either side. His acquiescence, in fact, had brought home to him that his father was profiting by his marriage....
Then, so swiftly and involuntarily that he had not time to stop the thought on the threshold, there burst into the door of his mind the inquiry as to whether he, too, as well as his father, was not unloading rubbish at a high price. And the price that he, Peter, was receiving for his rubbish was infinitely the higher. His father received, no doubt, a substantial cheque; he himself received, as far as the material consideration went, an immunity from the meaning of cheques, and, in a standard immeasurably higher, some sort of blank cheque which, as Silvia told him one night (or was in the middle of telling him when his father made that flamboyant interruption), would be honoured by her to any figure he chose to fill in, and yet leave her richer, in such standard, than ever. There, in that immortal bank, he divined then, and knew now her illimitable credit. Whatever she paid out, by that, in the royal mathematics of love, was she the richer.
The impression made by that unsolicited thought was to him like having seen some pass-book of the soul which was hers. It had blown open in front of his eyes, and before he had, so to speak, time to close it, he had caught a glimpse of sums so vast that they exceeded his powers of realization. His eye, in that involuntary survey, had received no impression of his payments into her account; the credit side was but a catalogue of her own inconceivable affluence. Every moment, it seemed, she was giving, and every moment her bounty flowed back to her. It was with some kind of sceptical envy that, in that glimpse, he realized this omnipotent finance. It was not so marvellous that love should be stronger than death; the miracle was that it could be so much stronger than life.
It was at this moment in Peter’s reflections, a moment that, only half realized, he was glad to get away from, that an interruption, reasonably claiming his attention, occurred in the shape of a little old butler, who had been drafted down here from London in view of Mrs. Wardour’s advent. He was black-eyed and grey-headed, and “perky” in movement to an extent that fully justified Peter’s exclamation of “The Jackdaw,” when he had quitted the scene last night, and now the Jackdaw’s immediate mission was to hand Peter a couple of letters on an immense silver salver, and inquire where Mr. Mainwaring, who, so the Jackdaw understood, was to arrive that evening, should be “put.” He should be “put” clearly, in the place that would please him most, for this was Peter’s undeviating creed when self-sacrifice was not involved, and beyond doubt the state-rooms, so called, would please his father inordinately.
The state-rooms had been insisted on in the rebuilding of the house by his father-in-law, in a rich vision, so Silvia had half piously, half humorously intimated, of royal personages being sumptuously housed there. There was a tremendous tapestried bedroom, en suite with a second bedroom, a breakfast-room, a sitting-room, all tapestry and oak mantelpieces and silver sconces. Yes, the state-rooms for Mr. Mainwaring. Silvia (they were on humorous terms now about Peter’s father) would enjoy that immensely.
Peter took his letters from the Jackdaw, as the latter gave a pleasant sort of croak in answer to this order, and remembered how Nellie had once said that wealth was not an accident, but an attribute, a quality. He had been disposed to dispute that at the time, but somehow his own allocation of the state-rooms to his father confirmed the suspicion that she was right. He himself, for instance, was clearly a different person in the eyes of his father now, when he could gloriously endow him with state-rooms, from what he had been when he, as on that same occasion he told Nellie, only lived in the beastly little house off the Brompton Road because free meals and free lodging were a consideration to his exiguous purse. You were different—Nellie was right—when you could dispense material magnificence instead of accepting a tolerable shelter, where, though the rain was kept out, the odour of dinner, with that careless Burrows, could not be kept in.
Still fingering his letters, and trying to insert a thumb into a too honestly adhesive envelope flap, Peter slightly amplified by corrobative illustration this thesis. How often had he, so to speak, “sung for his dinner,” accepting and welcoming such invitations as Mrs. Trentham extended to him, by which, for the pleasure of comfortable, decent food, he had gladly spent an insincere and boring evening! It had not quite been greed combined with moderate penuriousness which had enjoined that: it was the natural thing to do, if you were young and poor; to dine, that is to say, comfortably, and by way of acknowledging your indebtedness, to be towed about for the rest of the evening by a foolish, married, middle-aged woman who, for some inscrutable reason of her own, wanted to present her unblemished reputation in some sort of compromising limelight. But now, on this opulent sunny afternoon, Peter tried in vain to recapture the mood, once habitual to him, of accepting any invitation merely because it implied a good dinner and perhaps a good supper, with a boring opera in between. Certainly it had been easy for him to fulfil his part of the bargain in these evenings: it was natural and also habitual for him to make himself pleasant, to look handsome, to tell Mrs. Trentham that she had never been so marvellous, so chic, so smart, so entrancing generally. But now the mere notion of such an evening seemed foreign. If he wanted to dine at the Ritz and go to the opera and have some supper, he could do it, and secure as guests just those with whom it was pleasant to spend an evening. Henceforth if he wanted to do that he could, vulgarly speaking, “pick and choose” the recipients of his bounty.... Stated like that the whole thing sounded rather sordid, but it seemed to him that, for himself, he had got rid of that sordidness, the “court-fool-touch” which compelled you to make jokes in payment for your dinner, or (which was worse) to talk to your hostess in the serious, wistful note of an adorer, or at any rate of a dazzled and delighted guest. To be host, to pay the bill, provided you had plenty of money, was far the easier part.
There it was then: he had no longer to be asked to dine at the Ritz, and to go to the theatre or what not afterwards. He could bid to his feasts, and no more consider the expense than in the old days he would have considered whether he could afford a bus fare. Whatever enjoyments of that kind the world had to offer were his for the mere formation of his inclination to enjoy them.... And then, suddenly as a blink of distant lightning, and, so it seemed, wholly independent of his own brain, there came the question as to what he had paid for these privileges. And remote as drowsy thunder, the question supplied its own indubitable answer. He had somehow—the thing was done—convinced Silvia that he loved her. He had, at any rate, given her the signal of response that had ecstatically, rapturously contented her, when, below her breath, as she accepted him as her lover, she had whispered, “Ah, just let me love you, all I want is to love you, to be allowed to love you.”... He had known quite well what that “allow” really implied. He had to be on the same plane of emotion as she; else, to her understanding of it all, they could never have arrived at this.