The Coxon Fund by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page B

nature overflowed. But even Miss Anvoy was now quite tired of her. Gravener told me more about the crash in New York and the annoyance it had been to him, and we also glanced here and there in other directions; but by the time we got to Doncaster the principal thing he had let me see was that he was keeping something back. We stopped at that station, and, at the carriage door, someone made a movement to get in. Gravener uttered a sound of impatience, and I felt sure that but for this I should have had the secret. Then the intruder, for some reason, spared us his company; we started afresh, and my hope of a disclosure returned. My companion held his tongue, however, and I pretended to go to sleep; in fact I really dozed for discouragement. When I reopened my eyes he was looking at me with an injured air. He tossed away with some vivacity the remnant of a cigarette and then said: “If you’re not too sleepy I want to put to you a case.” I answered that I’d make every effort to attend,and welcomed the note of interest when he went on: “As I told you a while ago, Lady Coxon, poor dear, is demented.” His tone had much behind it—was full of promise. I asked if her ladyship’s misfortune were a trait of her malady or only of her character, and he pronounced it a product of both. The case he wanted to put to me was a matter on which it concerned him to have the impression—the judgment, he might also say—of another person. “I mean of the average intelligent man, but you see I take what I can get.” There would be the technical, the strictly legal view; then there would be the way the question would strike a man of the world. He had lighted another cigarette while he talked, and I saw he was glad to have it to handle when he brought out at last, with a laugh slightly artificial: “In fact it’s a subject on which Miss Anvoy and I are pulling different ways.”
    “And you want me to decide between you? I decide in advance for Miss Anvoy.”
    “In advance—that’s quite right. That’s how I decided when I proposed to her. But my story will interest you only so far as your mind isn’t made up.” Gravener puffed his cigarette a minute and then continued: “Are you familiar with the idea of the Endowment of Research?”
    “Of Research?” I was at sea a moment.
    “I give you Lady Coxon’s phrase. She has it on the brain.”
    “She wishes to endow—?”
    “Some earnest and ‘loyal’ seeker,” Gravener said. “It was a sketchy design of her late husband’s, and hehanded it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but of which, should she eventually see her opportunity—the matter was left largely to her discretion—she would best honour his memory by determining the exemplary public use. This sum of money, no less than thirteen thousand pounds, was to be called the Coxon Fund; and poor Sir Gregory evidently proposed to himself that the Coxon Fund should cover his name with glory—be universally desired and admired. He left his wife a full declaration of his views, so far at least as that term may be applied to views vitiated by a vagueness really infantine. A little learning’s a dangerous thing, and a good citizen who happens to have been an ass is worse for a community than bad sewerage. He’s worst of all when he’s dead, because then he can’t be stopped. However, such as they were, the poor man’s aspirations are now in his wife’s bosom, or fermenting rather in her foolish brain: it lies with her to carry them out. But of course she must first catch her hare.”
    “Her earnest loyal seeker?”
    “The flower that blushes unseen for want of such a pecuniary independence as may aid the light that’s in it to shine upon the human race. The individual, in a word, who, having the rest of the machinery, the spiritual, the intellectual, is most hampered in his search.”
    “His search for what?”
    “For Moral Truth. That’s what