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Title: The Ivory Tower

Author: Henry James

Release Date: August 19, 2020 [EBook #62979]
Last Updated: May 20, 2023

Language: English

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THE IVORY TOWER

BY

HENRY JAMES

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1917




PREFACE


The Ivory Tower, _one of the two novels which Henry James left
unfinished at his death, was designed to consist of ten books. Three
only of these were written, with one chapter of the fourth, and except
for the correction of a few obvious slips the fragment is here printed
in full and without alteration. It was composed during the summer of_
1914. _The novel seems to have grown out of another which had been
planned by Henry James in the winter of_ 1909-10. _Of this the opening
scenes had been sketched and a few pages written when it was interrupted
by illness. On taking it up again, four years later, Henry James almost
entirely recast his original scheme, retaining certain of the characters
(notably the Bradham couple,) but otherwise giving an altogether fresh
setting to the central motive. The new novel had reached the point where
it breaks off by the beginning of August_ 1914. _With the outbreak of
war Henry James found he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to
represent contemporary or recent life. The completed chapters--which he
had dictated to his secretary, in accordance with his regular habit for
many years past--were revised and laid aside, not again to be resumed._

_The pages of preliminary notes, also here printed in full, were not of
course intended for publication. It was Henry James's constant practice,
before beginning a novel, to test and explore, in a written or dictated
sketch of this kind, the possibilities of the idea which he had in mind.
Such a sketch was in no way a first draft of the novel. He used it
simply as a means of close approach to his subject, in order that he
might completely possess himself of it in all its bearings. The
arrangement of chapters and scenes would so be gradually evolved, but
the details were generally left to be determined in the actual writing
of the book. It will be noticed, for example, that in the provisional
scheme of_ The Ivory Tower _no mention is made of the symbolic object
itself or of the letter which is deposited in it. The notes, having
served their purpose, would not be referred to again, and were
invariably destroyed when the book was finished._

_In the story of_ The Death of the Lion _Henry James has exactly
described the manner of these notes, in speaking of the "written scheme
of another book" which is shewn to the narrator by Neil Paraday: "Loose
liberal confident, it might have passed for a great gossiping eloquent
letter--the overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan." If
justification were needed for the decision to publish this "overflow" it
might be found in Paraday's last injunction to his friend: "Print it as
it stands--beautifully._"


_PERCY LUBBOCK._




CONTENTS

The Ivory Tower
Notes for The Ivory Tower




THE IVORY TOWER




BOOK FIRST


I


It was but a question of leaving their own contracted "grounds," of
crossing the Avenue and proceeding then to Mr. Betterman's gate, which
even with the deliberate step of a truly massive young person she could
reach in three or four minutes. So, making no other preparation than to
open a vast pale-green parasol, a portable pavilion from which there
fluttered fringes, frills and ribbons that made it resemble the roof of
some Burmese palanquin or perhaps even pagoda, she took her way while
these accessories fluttered in the August air, the morning freshness,
and the soft sea-light. Her other draperies, white and voluminous,
yielded to the mild breeze in the manner of those of a ship held back
from speed yet with its canvas expanded; they conformed to their usual
law of suggestion that the large loose ponderous girl, mistress as she
might have been of the most expensive modern aids to the constitution of
a "figure," lived, as they said about her, in wrappers and tea-gowns; so
that, save for her enjoying obviously the rudest health, she might have
been a convalescent creeping forth from the consciousness of stale
bedclothes. She turned in at the short drive, making the firm neat
gravel creak under her tread, and at the end of fifty yards paused
before the florid villa, a structure smothered in senseless
architectural ornament, as if to put her question to its big fair
foolish face. How Mr. Betterman might be this morning, and what sort of
a night he might have had, was what she wanted to learn--an anxiety very
real with her and which, should she be challenged, would nominally and
decently have brought her; but her finer interest was in the possibility
that Graham Fielder might have come.

The clean blank windows, however, merely gave her the impression of so
many showy picture-frames awaiting their subjects; even those of them
open to the charming Newport day seemed to tell her at the most that
nothing had happened since the evening before and that the situation was
still untouched by the change she dreamt of. A person essentially
unobservant of forms, which her amplitude somehow never found of the
right measure, so that she felt the misfit in many cases ridiculous, she
now passed round the house instead of applying at the rather grandly
gaping portal--which might in all conscience have accommodated her--and,
crossing a stretch of lawn to the quarter of the place turned to the
sea, rested here again some minutes. She sought indeed after a moment
the support of an elaborately rustic bench that ministered to ease and
contemplation, whence she would rake much of the rest of the small
sloping domain; the fair prospect, the great sea spaces, the line of low
receding coast that bristled, either way she looked, with still more
costly "places," and in particular the proprietor's wide and bedimmed
verandah, this at present commonly occupied by her "prowling" father, as
she now always thought of him, though if charged she would doubtless
have admitted with the candour she was never able to fail of that she
herself prowled during these days of tension quite as much as he.

He would already have come over, she was well aware--come over on
grounds of his own, which were quite different from hers; yet she was
scarce the less struck, off at her point of vantage, with the way he now
sat unconscious of her, at the outer edge and where the light pointed
his presence, in a low basket-chair which covered him in save for little
more than his small sharp shrunken profile, detached against the bright
further distance, and his small protrusive foot, crossed over a knee and
agitated by incessant nervous motion whenever he was thus locked in
thought. Seldom had he more produced for her the appearance from which
she had during the last three years never known him to vary and which
would have told his story, all his story, every inch of it and with the
last intensity, she felt, to a spectator capable of being struck with
him as one might after all happen to be struck. What she herself
recognised at any rate, and really at this particular moment as she had
never done, was how his having retired from active business, as they
said, given up everything and entered upon the first leisure of his
life, had in the oddest way the effect but of emphasising his
absorption, denying his detachment and presenting him as steeped up to
the chin. Most of all on such occasions did what his life had meant come
home to her, and then most, frankly, did that meaning seem small; it was
exactly as the contracted size of his little huddled figure in the
basket-chair.

He was a person without an alternative, and if any had ever been open to
him, at an odd hour or two, somewhere in his inner dimness, he had long
since closed the gate against it and now revolved in the hard-rimmed
circle from which he had not a single issue. You couldn't retire without
something or somewhere to retire to, you must have planted a single tree
at least for shade or be able to turn a key in some yielding door; but
to say that her extraordinary parent was surrounded by the desert was
almost to flatter the void into which he invited one to step. He
conformed in short to his necessity of absolute interest--interest, that
is, in his own private facts, which were facts of numerical calculation
altogether: how could it not be so when he had dispossessed himself, if
there had even been the slightest selection in the matter, of every
faculty except the calculating? If he hadn't thought in figures how
could he possibly have thought at all--and oh the intensity with which
he was thinking at that hour! It was as if she literally watched him
just then and there dry up in yet another degree to everything but his
genius. His genius might at the same time have gathered in to a point of
about the size of the end of a pin. Such at least was the image of these
things, or a part of it, determined for her under the impression of the
moment.

He had come over with the same promptitude every morning of the last
fortnight and had stayed on nearly till luncheon, sitting about in
different places as if they were equally his own, smoking, always
smoking, the big portentously "special" cigars that were now the worst
thing for him and lost in the thoughts she had in general long since
ceased to wonder about, taking them now for granted with an indifference
from which the apprehension we have noted was but the briefest of
lapses. He had over and above that particular matter of her passing
perception, he had as they all had, goodness knew, and as she herself
must have done not least, the air of waiting for something he didn't
speak of and in fact couldn't gracefully mention; with which moreover
the adopted practice, and the irrepressible need of it, that she had
been having under her eye, brought out for her afresh, little as she
invited or desired any renewal of their salience, the several most
pointed parental signs--harmless oddities as she tried to content
herself with calling them, but sharp little symbols of stubborn little
facts as she would have felt them hadn't she forbidden herself to feel.
She had forbidden herself to feel, but was none the less as undefended
against one of the ugly truths that hovered there before her in the
charming silver light as against another. That the terrible little man
she watched at his meditations wanted nothing in the world so much in
these hours as to know what was "going to be left" by the old associate
of his operations and sharer of his spoils--this, as Mr. Gaw's sole
interest in the protracted crisis, matched quite her certainty of his
sense that, however their doomed friend should pan out, two-thirds of
the show would represent the unholy profits of the great wrong he
himself had originally suffered.

This she knew was what it meant--that her father should perch there like
a ruffled hawk, motionless but for his single tremor, with his beak,
which had pecked so many hearts out, visibly sharper than ever, yet only
his talons nervous; not that he at last cared a straw, really, but that
he was incapable of thought save in sublimities of arithmetic, and that
the question of what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his
swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate
and vituperation for so many years, was one of the things that could
hold him brooding, day by day and week by week, after the fashion of a
philosopher tangled in some maze of metaphysics. As the end, for the
other participant in that history, appeared to draw near, she had with
the firmest, wisest hand she could lay on it patched up the horrid
difference; had artfully induced her father to take a house at Newport
for the summer, and then, pleading, insisting, that they should in
common decency, or, otherwise expressed, in view of the sick man's sore
stricken state, meet again, had won the latter round, unable as he was
even then to do more than shuffle downstairs and take an occasional
drive, to some belief in the sincerity of her intervention. She had got
at him--under stress of an idea with which her ostensible motive had
nothing to do; she had obtained entrance, demanding as all from herself
that he should see her, and had little by little, to the further
illumination of her plan, felt that she made him wonder at her perhaps
more than he had ever wondered at anything; so that after this
everything else was a part of that impression.

Strange to say, she had presently found herself quite independently
interested; more interested than by any transaction, any chapter of
intercourse, in her whole specifically filial history. Not that it
mattered indeed if, in all probability--and positively so far back as
during the time of active hostilities--this friend and enemy of other
days had been predominantly in the right: the case, at the best and for
either party, showed so scantly for edifying that where was the light in
which her success could have figured as a moral or a sentimental
triumph? There had been no real beauty for her, at its apparent highest
pitch, in that walk of the now more complacently valid of the two men
across the Avenue, a walk taken as she and her companion had continued
regularly to take it since, that he might hold out his so long clenched
hand, under her earnest admonition, to the antagonist cut into afresh
this year by sharper knives than any even in Gaw's armoury. They had
consented alike to what she wished, and without knowing why she most
wished it: old Frank, oddly enough, because he liked her, as she felt,
for herself, once she gave him the chance and took all the trouble; and
her father because--well, that was an old story. For a long time now,
three or four years at least, she had had, as she would have said, no
difficulty with him; and she knew just when, she knew almost just how,
the change had begun to show.

Signal and supreme proof had come to him one day that save for his big
plain quiet daughter (quiet, that is, unless when she knocked over a
light gilt chair or swept off a rash table-ornament in brushing
expansively by,) he was absolutely alone on the human field, utterly
unattended by any betrayal whatever that a fellow-creature could like
him or, when the inevitable day should come, could disinterestedly miss
him. She knew how of old her inexplicable, her almost ridiculous type
had disconcerted and disappointed him; but with this, at a given moment,
it had come to him that she represented quantity and mass, that there
was a great deal of her, so that she would have pressed down even a
balance appointed to weigh bullion; and as there was nothing he was
fonder of than such attestations of value he had really ended by drawing
closer to her, as who should say, and by finding countenance in the
breadth of personal and social shadow that she projected. This was the
sole similitude about him of a living alternative, and it served only as
she herself provided it. He had actually turned into a personal relation
with her as he might have turned, out of the glare and the noise and the
harsh recognitions of the market, into some large cool dusky temple; a
place where idols other than those of his worship vaguely loomed and
gleamed, so that the effect at moments might be rather awful, but where
at least he could sit very still, could breathe very softly, could look
about obliquely and discreetly, could in fact wander a little on tiptoe
and treat the place, with a mixture of pride and fear, almost as his
own.

He had brooded and brooded, even as he was brooding now; and that habit
she at least had in common with him, though their subjects of thought
were so different. Thus it was exactly that she began to make out at the
time his actual need to wonder at her, the only fact outside his proper
range that had ever cost him a speculative impulse, still more a
speculative failure; even as she was to make it out later on in the case
of their Newport neighbour, and to recognise above all that though a
certain savour of accepted discomfort had, in the connection, to pervade
her father's consciousness, no taste of resentment was needed, as in the
present case, to sweeten it. Nothing had more interested our intelligent
young woman than to note in each of these overstrained, yet at the same
time safely resting accumulators--and to note it as a thing
unprecedented up to this latest season--an unexpressed, even though to
some extent invoked, relief under the sense, the confirmed suspicion, of
certain anomalies of ignorance and indifference as to what they
themselves stood for, anomalies they could scarcely have begun, on the
first glimmer, by so much as taking for realities. It had become verily,
on the part of the poor bandaged and bolstered and heavily-breathing
object of her present solicitude, as she had found it on that of his
still comparatively agile and intensely acute critic, the queer mark of
an inward relief to meet, so far as they had arts or terms for it, any
intimation of what she might have to tell them. From _her_ they would
take things they never could have taken, and never had, from anyone
else. There were some such intimations that her father, of old, had only
either dodged with discernible art or directly set his little white face
against; he hadn't wanted them, and had in fact been afraid of them--so
that after all perhaps his caring so little what went on in any world
not subject to his direct intelligence might have had the qualification
that he guessed she could imagine, and that to see her, or at least to
feel her, imagine was like the sense of an odd draught about him when
doors and windows were closed.

Up in the sick man's room the case was quite other; she had been
admitted there but three times, very briefly, and a week had elapsed
since the last, yet she had created in him a positive want to
communicate, or at any rate to receive communication. She shouldn't see
him again--the pair of doctors and the trio of nurses had been at one
about that; but he had caused her to be told that he liked to know of
her coming and hoped she would make herself quite at home. This she took
for an intended sign, a hint that what she had in spite of difficulties
managed to say now kept him company in the great bedimmed and
disinfected room from which other society was banished. Her father in
fine he ignored after that not particularly beautiful moment of bare
recognition brought about by her at the bedside; her father was the last
thing in the world that actually concerned him. But his not ignoring
herself could but have a positive meaning; which was that she had made
the impression she sought. Only _would_ Graham Fielder arrive in time?
She was not in a position to ask for news of him, but was sure each
morning that if there had been any gage of this Miss Mumby, the most
sympathetic of the nurses and with whom she had established a working
intelligence, would be sufficiently interested to come out and speak to
her. After waiting a while, however, she recognised that there could be
no Miss Mumby yet and went over to her father in the great porch.

"Don't you get tired," she put to him, "of just sitting round here?"

He turned to her his small neat finely-wrinkled face, of an extreme
yellowish pallor and which somehow suggested at this end of time an
empty glass that had yet held for years so much strong wine that a faint
golden tinge still lingered on from it. "I can't get any more tired than
I am already." His tone was flat, weak and so little charged with
petulance that it betrayed the long habit of an almost exasperating
mildness. This effect, at the same time, so far from suggesting any
positive tradition of civility was somehow that of a commonness
instantly and peculiarly exposed. "It's a better place than ours," he
added in a moment. "But I don't care." And then he went on: "I guess I'd
be more tired in your position."

"Oh you know I'm never tired. And now," said Rosanna, "I'm too
interested."

"Well then, so am I. Only for me it ain't a position."

His daughter still hovered with her vague look about. "Well, if it's one
for me I feel it's a good one. I mean it's the right one."

Mr. Gaw shook his little foot with renewed intensity, but his irony was
not gay. "The right one isn't always a good one. But ain't the question
what _his_ is going to be?"

"Mr. Fielder's? Why, of course," said Rosanna quietly. "That's the whole
interest."

"Well then, you've got to fix it."

"I consider that I _have_ fixed it--I mean if we can hold out."

"Well"--and Mr. Gaw shook on--"I guess _I_ can. It's pleasant here," he
went on, "even if it is funny."

"Funny?" his daughter echoed--yet inattentively, for she had become
aware of another person, a middle-aged woman, but with neatly-kept hair
already grizzled and in a white dress covered with a large white apron,
who stood at the nearest opening of the house. "Here we are, you see,
Miss Mumby--but any news?" Miss Gaw was instantly eager.

"Why he's right there upstairs," smiled the lady of the apron, who was
clearly well affected to the speaker.

This young woman flushed for pleasure. "Oh how splendid! But when did he
come?"

"Early this morning--by the New York boat. I was up at five, to change
with Miss Ruddle, and there of a sudden were his wheels. He seems so
nice!" Miss Mumby beamed.

Rosanna's interest visibly rose, though she was prompt to explain it.
"Why it's _because_ he's nice! And he has seen him?"

"He's seeing him now--alone. For five minutes. Not all at once." But
Miss Mumby was visibly serene.

This made Miss Gaw rejoice. "I'm not afraid. It will do him good. It has
got to!" she finely declared.

Miss Mumby was so much at ease that she could even sanction the joke.
"More good than the strain of waiting. They're quite satisfied." Rosanna
knew these judges for Doctor Root and Doctor Hatch, and felt the support
of her friend's firm freshness. "So we can hope," this authority
concluded.

"Well, let my daughter run it--!" Abel Gaw had got up as if this change
in the situation qualified certain proprieties, but turned his small
sharpness to Miss Mumby, who had at first produced in him no change of
posture. "Well, if he couldn't stand _me_ I suppose it was because he
knows me--and doesn't know this other man. May Mr. Fielder prove
acceptable!" he added, stepping off the verandah to the path. But as
that left Rosanna's share in the interest still apparently unlimited he
spoke again. "Is it going to make you settle over here?"

This mild irony determined her at once joining him, and they took leave
together of their friend. "Oh I feel it's right now!" She smiled back at
Miss Mumby, whose agitation of a confirmatory hand before disappearing
as she had come testified to the excellence of the understanding between
the ladies, and presently was trailing her light vague draperies over
the grass beside her father. They might have been taken to resemble as
they moved together a big ship staying its course to allow its belittled
tender to keep near, and the likeness grew when after a minute Mr. Gaw
himself stopped to address his daughter a question. He had, it was again
marked, so scant a range of intrinsic tone that he had to resort for
emphasis or point to some other scheme of signs--this surely also of no
great richness, but expressive of his possibilities when once you knew
him. "Is there any reason for your not telling me why you're so worked
up?"

His companion, as she paused for accommodation, showed him a large flat
grave face in which the general intention of deference seemed somehow to
confess that it was often at the mercy--and perhaps most in this
particular relation--of such an inward habit of the far excursion as
could but incorrigibly qualify for Rosanna Gaw certain of the forms of
attention, certain of the necessities of manner. She was, sketchily
speaking, so much higher-piled a person than her father that the filial
attitude in her suffered at the best from the occasional air of her
having to come down to him. You would have guessed that she was not a
person to cultivate that air; and perhaps even if very acute would have
guessed some other things bearing on the matter from the little man's
careful way with her. This pair exhibited there in the great light of
the summer Sunday morning more than one of the essential, or perhaps the
rather finally constituted, conditions of their intercourse. Here was a
parent who clearly appealed to nobody in the world but his child, and a
child who condescended to nobody in the world but her parent; and this
with the anomaly of a constant care not to be too humble on one side and
an equal one not to be too proud on the other. Rosanna, her powerful
exposed arm raised to her broad shoulder, slowly made her heavy parasol
revolve, flinging with it a wide shadow that enclosed them together, for
their question and answer, as in a great bestreamered tent. "Do I strike
you as worked up? Why I've tried to keep as quiet about it as I possibly
could--as one does when one wants a thing so tremendously much."

His eyes had been raised to her own, but after she had said this in her
perfunctory way they sank as from a sense of shyness and might have
rested for a little on one of their tent-pegs. "Well, daughter, that's
just what I want to understand--your personal motive."

She gave a sigh for this, a strange uninforming sigh. "Ah father, 'my
personal motives'--!"

With this she might have walked on, but when he barred the way it was as
if she could have done so but by stepping on him. "I don't complain of
your personal motives--I want you to have all you're entitled to and
should like to know who's entitled to more. But couldn't you have a
reason once in a while for letting me know what some of your reasons
are?"

Her decent blandness dropped on him again, and she had clearly this time
come further to meet him. "You've always wanted me to have things I
don't care for--though really when you've made a great point of it I've
often tried. But want me now to have this." And then as he watched her
again to learn what "this," with the visibly rare importance she
attached to it, might be: "To make up to a person for a wrong I once did
him."

"You wronged the man who has come?"

"Oh dreadfully!" Rosanna said with great sweetness.

He evidently held that any notice taken of anyone, to whatever effect,
by this great daughter of his was nothing less than an honour done, and
probably overdone; so what preposterous "wrong" could count? The worst
he could think of was still but a sign of her greatness. "You wouldn't
have him round----?"

"Oh that would have been nothing!" she laughed; and this time she sailed
on again.




II


Rosanna found him again after luncheon shaking his little foot from the
depths of a piazza chair, but now on their own scene and at a point
where this particular feature of it, the cool spreading verandah,
commanded the low green cliff and a part of the immediate approach to
the house from the seaward side. She left him to the only range of
thought of which he was at present capable--she was so perfectly able to
follow it; and it had become for that matter an old story that as he
never opened a book, nor sought a chance for talk, nor took a step of
exercise, nor gave in any manner a sign of an unsatisfied want, the
extent of his vacancy, a detachment in which there just breathed a hint
of the dryly invidious, might thus remain unbroken for hours. She knew
what he was waiting for, and that if she hadn't been there to see him he
would take his way across to the other house again, where the plea of
solicitude for his old friend's state put him at his ease and where,
moreover, as she now felt, the possibility of a sight of Graham Fielder
might reward him. It was disagreeable to her that he should have such a
sight while she denied it to her own eyes; but the sense of their common
want of application for their faculties was a thing that repeatedly
checked in her the expression of judgments. Their idleness was as mean
and bare on her own side, she too much felt, as on his; and heaven knew
that if he could sit with screwed-up eyes for hours the case was as
flagrant in her aimless driftings, her incurable restless revolutions,
as a pretence of "interests" could consort with.

She revolved and drifted then, out of his sight and in another quarter
of the place, till four o'clock had passed; when on returning to him she
found his chair empty and was sure of what had become of him. There was
nothing else in fact for his Sunday, as he on that day denied himself
the resource of driving, or rather of being driven, from which the claim
of the mechanical car had not, in the Newport connection, won him, and
which, deep in his barouche, behind his own admirable horses, could
maintain him in meditation for meditation's sake quite as well as a
poised rocking-chair. Left thus to herself, though conscious she well
might have visitors, she circled slowly and repeatedly round the
gallery, only pausing at last on sight of a gentleman who had come into
view by a path from the cliff. He presented himself in a minute as Davey
Bradham, and on drawing nearer called across to her without other
greeting: "Won't you walk back with me to tea? Gussy has sent me to
bring you."

"Why yes, of course I will--that's nice of Gussy," she replied; adding
moreover that she wanted a walk, and feeling in the prospect, though she
didn't express this, a relief to her tension and a sanction for what she
called to herself her tact. She might without the diversion not quite
have trusted herself not to emulate, and even with the last crudity, her
father's proceeding; which she knew she should afterwards be ashamed of.
"Anyone that comes here," she said, "must come on to you--they'll know;"
and when Davey had replied that there wasn't the least chance of
anyone's not coming on she moved with him down the path, at the end of
which they entered upon the charming cliff walk, a vast carpet of
undivided lawns, kept in wondrous condition, with a meandering
right-of-way for a seaward fringe and bristling wide-winged villas that
spoke of a seated colony; many of these huge presences reducing to
marginal meanness their strip of the carpet.

Davey was, like herself, richly and healthily replete, though with less
of his substance in stature; a frankly fat gentleman, blooming still at
eight-and-forty, with a large smooth shining face, void of a sign of
moustache or whisker and crowned with dense dark hair cropped close to
his head after the fashion of a French schoolboy or the inmate of a
jail. But for his half-a-dozen fixed wrinkles, as marked as the great
rivers of a continent on a map, and his thick and arched and active
eyebrows, which left almost nothing over for his forehead, he would have
scarce exhibited features--in spite of the absence of which, however, he
could look in alternation the most portentous things and the most
ridiculous. He would hang up a meaning in his large empty face as if he
had swung an awful example on a gibbet, or would let loose there a great
grin that you somehow couldn't catch in the fact but that pervaded his
expanses of cheek as poured wine pervades water. He differed certainly
from Rosanna in that he enjoyed, visibly, all he carnally
possessed--whereas you could see in a moment that she, poor young woman,
would have been content with, would have been glad of, a scantier
allowance. "You'll find Cissy Foy, to begin with," he said as they went;
"she arrived last night and told me to tell you she'd have walked over
with me but that Gussy wants her for something. However, as you know,
Gussy always wants her for something--she wants everyone for something
so much more than something for everyone--and there are none of us that
are not worked hard, even though we mayn't bloom on it like Cissy, who,
by the way, is looking a perfect vision."

"Awfully lovely?"--Rosanna clearly saw as she asked.

"Prettier than at any time yet, and wanting tremendously to hear from
you, you know, about your protégé--what's the fellow's name? Graham
Fielder?--whose arrival we're all agog about."

Rosanna pulled up in the path; she somehow at once felt her possession
of this interest clouded--shared as yet as it had been only with her
father, whose share she could control. It then and there came to her in
one of the waves of disproportionate despair in which she felt half the
impressions of life break, that she wasn't going to be able to control
at all the great participations. She had a moment of reaction against
what she had done; she liked Gray to be called her protégé--forced
upon her as endless numbers of such were, he would be the only one in
the whole collection who hadn't himself pushed at her; but with the big
bright picture of the villas, the palaces, the lawns and the luxuries in
her eyes, and with something like the chink of money itself in the
murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff, she felt
that, without her having thought of it enough in advance, she had handed
him over to complications and relations. These things shimmered in the
silver air of the wondrous perspective ahead, the region off there that
awaited her present approach and where Gussy hovered like a bustling
goddess in the enveloping cloud of her court. The man beside her was the
massive Mercury of this urgent Juno; but--without mythological
comparisons, which we make for her under no hint that she could herself
have dreamed of one--she found herself glad just then that she liked
Davey Bradham, and much less sorry than usual that she didn't respect
him. An extraordinary thing happened, and all in the instant before she
spoke again. It was very strange, and it made him look at her as if he
wondered that his words should have had so great an effect as even her
still face showed. There was absolutely no one, roundabout and far and
wide, whom she positively wanted Graham to know; no not one creature of
them all--"all" figuring for her, while she stood, the great collection
at the Bradhams'. She hadn't thought of this before in the least as it
came to her now; yet no more had she time to be sure that even with the
sharper consciousness she would, as her father was apt to say, have
acted different. So much was true, yet while she still a moment longer
hung fire Davey rounded himself there like something she could
comparatively rest on. "How in the world," she put to him then, "do you
know anything away off there--? He _has_ come to his uncle, but so
quietly that I haven't yet seen him."

"Why, my dear thing, is it new to you that we're up and doing--bright
and lively? We're the most intelligent community on all this great
coast, and when precious knowledge is in the air we're not to be kept
from it. We knew at breakfast that the New York boat had brought him,
and Gussy of course wants him up to dinner tonight. Only Cissy claims,
you see, that she has rights in him first--rights beyond Gussy's, I
mean," Davey went on; "I don't know that she claims them beyond yours."

She looked abroad again, his companion, to earth and sea and sky; she
wondered and felt threatened, yet knowing herself at the same time a
long way off from the point at which menace roused her to passion. She
had always to suffer so much before that, and was for the present in the
phase of feeling but weak and a little sick. But there was always Davey.
She started their walk again before saying more, while he himself said
things that she didn't heed. "I can't for the life of me imagine," she
nevertheless at last declared, "what Cissy has to do with him. When and
where has she ever seen him?"

Davey did as always his best to oblige. "Somewhere abroad, some time
back, when she was with her mother at some baths or some cure-place.
Though when I think of it," he added, "it wasn't with the man
himself--it was with some relation: hasn't he an uncle, or perhaps a
stepfather? Cissy seems to know all about him, and he takes a great
interest in her."

It again all but stopped Rosanna. "Gray Fielder an interest in
Cissy----?"

"Let me not," laughed Davey, "sow any seed of trouble or engage for more
than I can stand to. She'll tell you all about it, she'll clothe it in
every grace. Only I assure you I myself am as much interested as
anyone," he added--"interested, I mean, in the question of whether the
old man there has really brought him out at the last gasp this way to do
some decent thing about him. An impression prevails," he further
explained, "that you're in some wonderful way in the old wretch's
confidence, and I therefore make no bones of telling you that your
arrival on our scene there, since you're so good as to consent to come,
has created an impatience beyond even what your appearances naturally
everywhere create. I give you warning that there's no limit to what we
want to know."

Rosanna took this in now as she so often took things--working it down in
silence at first: it shared in the general weight of all direct
contributions to her consciousness. It might then, when she spoke, have
sunk deep. She looked about again, in her way, as if under her constant
oppression, and seeing, a little off from their gravelled walk, a public
bench to which a possible path branched down, she said, on a visibly
grave decision: "Look here, I want to talk to _you_--you're one of the
few people in all your crowd to whom I really can. So come and sit
down."

Davey Bradham, arrested before her, had an air for his responsibilities
that quite matched her own. "Then what becomes of them all there?"

"I don't care a hang what becomes of them. But if you want to know,"
Rosanna said, "I do care what becomes of Mr. Fielder, and I trust you
enough, being as you are the only one of your lot I do trust, to help me
perhaps a little to do something about it."

"Oh, my dear lady, I'm not a bit discreet, you know," Mr. Bradham
amusedly protested; "I'm perfectly unprincipled and utterly indelicate.
How can a fellow not be who likes as much as I do at all times to make
the kettle boil and the plot thicken? I've only got my beautiful
intelligence, though, as I say, I don't in the least _want_ to embroil
you. Therefore if I can really help you as the biggest babbler
alive----!"

She waited again a little, but this time with her eyes on his good worn
worldly face, superficially so smooth, but with the sense of it lined
and scratched and hacked across much in the manner of the hard ice of a
large pond at the end of a long day's skating. The amount of
obstreperous exercise that had been taken on that recording field! The
difference between our pair, thus confronted, might have been felt as
the greater by the very fact of their outward likeness as creatures so
materially weighted; it would have been written all over Rosanna for the
considering eye that every grain of her load, from innermost soul to
outermost sense, was that of reality and sincerity; whereas it might by
the same token have been felt of Davey that in the temperature of life
as he knew it his personal identity had been, save for perhaps some
small tough lurking residuum, long since puffed away in pleasant spirals
of vapour. Our young woman was at this moment, however, less interested
in quantities than in qualities of candour; she could get what passed
for it by the bushel, by the ton, whenever, right or left, she chose to
chink her pocket. Her requirement for actual use was such a glimmer from
the candle of truth as a mere poor woman might have managed to kindle.
What was left of precious in Davey might thus have figured but as a
candle-end; yet for the lack of it she should perhaps move in darkness.
And her brief intensity of watch was in a moment rewarded; her
companion's candle-end was his not quite burnt-out value as a gentleman.
This was enough for her, and she seemed to see her way. "If I don't
trust you there's nobody else in all the wide world I can. So you've got
to know, and you've got to be good to me."

"Then what awful thing _have_ you done?" he was saying to her three
minutes after they had taken their place temporarily on the bench.

"Well, I got at Mr. Betterman," she said, "in spite of all the
difficulty. Father and he hadn't spoken for years--had had long ago the
blackest, ugliest difference; believing apparently the horridest things
of each other. Nevertheless it was as father's daughter that I went to
him--though after a little, I think, it was simply for the worth itself
of what I had to tell him that he listened to me."

"And what you had to tell him," Davey asked while she kept her eyes on
the far horizon, "_was_ then that you take this tender interest in Mr.
Fielder?"

"You may make my interest as ridiculous as you like----!"

"Ah, my dear thing," Davey pleadingly protested, "don't deprive me,
please, of _anything_ nice there is to know!"

"There was something that had happened years ago--a wrong I perhaps had
done him, though in perfect good faith. I thought I saw my way to make
up for it, and I seem to have succeeded beyond even what I hoped."

"Then what have you to worry about?" said Davey.

"Just my success," she answered simply. "Here he is and I've done it."

"Made his rich uncle want him--who hadn't wanted him before? Is that
it?"

"Yes, interfered afresh in his behalf--as I had interfered long ago.
When one has interfered one can't help wondering," she gravely
explained.

"But dear lady, ever for his benefit of course," Davey extemporised.

"Yes--except for the uncertainty of what is for a person's benefit. It's
hard enough to know," said Rosanna, "what's for one's own."

"Oh, as to that," Davey joked, "I don't think that where mine's
concerned I've ever a doubt! But is the point that the old man had
quarrelled with him and that you've brought about a reconciliation?"

She considered again with her far-wandering eyes; as if both moved by
her impulse to confidence and weighted with the sense of how much of it
there all was. "Well, in as few words as possible, it was like this.
He's the son but of a half-sister, the daughter of Mr. Betterman's
father by a second marriage which he in his youth hadn't at all liked,
and who made her case worse with him, as time went on, by marrying a
man, Graham's father, whom he had also some strong objection to. Yes,"
she summarized, "he seems to have been difficult to please, but he's
making up for it now. His brother-in-law didn't live long to suffer from
the objection, and the sister, Mrs. Fielder, left a widow badly provided
for, went off with her boy, then very young, to Europe. There, later on,
during a couple of years that I spent abroad with my mother, we met them
and for the time saw much of them; she and my dear mother greatly took
to each other, they formed the friendliest relation, and we had in
common that my father's business association with Mr. Betterman still at
that time subsisted, though the terrible man--as he then was--hadn't at
all made it up with our friend. It was while we were with her in
Dresden, however, that something happened which brought about, by
correspondence, some renewal of intercourse. This was a matter on which
we were in her confidence and in which we took the greatest interest,
for we liked also the other person concerned in it. An opportunity had
come up for her to marry again, she had practically decided to embrace
it, and of this, though everything between them had broken off so short,
her unforgiving brother had heard, indirectly, in New York."

Davey Bradham, lighting cigarettes, and having originally placed his
case, in a manner promptly appreciated, at his companion's disposal,
crowned this now adjusted relation with a pertinence of comment. "And
only again of course to be as horrid as possible about it! He hated
husbands in general."

"Well, he himself, it was to be said, had been but little of one. He had
lost his own wife early and hadn't married again--though he was to lose
early also the two children born to him. The second of these deaths was
recent at the time I speak of, and had had to do, I imagine, with his
sudden overture to his absent relations. He let his sister know that he
had learnt her intention and thought very ill of it, but also that if
she would get rid of her low foreigner and come back with the boy he
would be happy to see what could be done for them."

"What a jolly situation!"--Davey exhaled fine puffs. "Her second choice
then--at Dresden--was a German adventurer?"

"No, an English one, Mr. Northover; an adventurer only as a man in love
is always one, I suppose, and who was there for us to see and extremely
to approve. He had nothing to do with Dresden beyond having come on to
join her; they had met elsewhere, in Switzerland or the Tyrol, and he
had shown an interest in her, and had made his own impression, from the
first. She answered her brother that his demand of her was excessive in
the absence of anything she could recognise that she owed him. To this
he replied that she might marry then whom she liked, but that if she
would give up her boy and send him home, where he would take charge of
him and bring him up to prospects she would be a fool not to appreciate,
there need be no more talk and she could lead her life as she perversely
preferred. This crisis came up during our winter with her--it was a very
cruel one, and my mother, as I have said, was all in her confidence."

"Of course"--Davey Bradham abounded; "and you were all in your
mother's!"

Rosanna leaned back on the bench, her cigarette between her strong and
rounded fingers; she sat at her ease now, this chapter of history
filling, under her view, the soft lap of space and the comfort of having
it well out, and yet of keeping it, as her friend somehow helped her to
do, well within her control, more and more operative. "Well, I was
sixteen years old, and Gray at that time fourteen. I was huge and
hideous and began then to enjoy the advantage--if advantage it was--of
its seeming so ridiculous to treat the monster I had grown as negligible
that I _had_ to be treated as important. I wasn't a bit stupider than I
am now--in fact I saw things much more sharply and simply and knew ever
so much better what I wanted and didn't. Gray and I had become excellent
friends--if you want to think of him as my 'first passion' you are
welcome to, unless you want to think of him rather as my fifth! He was a
charming little boy, much nicer than any I had ever seen; he didn't come
up higher than my shoulder, and, to tell you all, I remember how once,
in some game with a party of English and American children whom my
mother had got together for Christmas, I tried to be amusing by carrying
half-a-dozen of them successively on my back--all in order to have the
pleasure of carrying _him_, whom I felt, I remember, but as a
featherweight compared with most of the others. Such a romp was I--as
you can of course see I must have been, and at the same time so horridly
artful; which is doubtless now not so easy for you to believe of me. But
the point," Rosanna developed, "is that I entered all the way into our
friends' situation and that when I was with my mother alone we talked
for the time of nothing else. The strange, or at least the certain,
thing was that though we should have liked so to have them over here, we
hated to see them hustled even by a rich relative: we were rich
ourselves, though we rather hated that too, and there was no romance for
us in being so stuffed up. We liked Mr. Northover, their so devoted
friend, we saw how they cared for him, how even Graham did, and what an
interest he took in the boy, for whom we felt that a happy association
with him, each of them so open to it, would be a great thing; we threw
ourselves in short, and I dare say to extravagance, into the idea of the
success of Mr. Northover's suit. She was the charmingest little woman,
very pretty, very lonely, very vague, but very sympathetic, and we
perfectly understood that the pleasant Englishman, of great taste and
thoroughly a gentleman, should have felt encouraged. We didn't in the
least adore Mr. Betterman, between whom and my father the differences
that afterwards became so bad were already threatening, and when I saw
for myself how the life that might thus be opened to him where they
were, with his mother's marriage and a further good influence crowning
it, would compare with the awful game of grab, to express it mildly, for
which I was sure his uncle proposed to train him, I took upon myself to
get more roused and wound-up than I had doubtless any real right to, and
to wonder what I might really do to promote the benefit that struck me
as the greater and defeat the one against which my prejudice was
strong."

She had drawn up a moment as if what was to come required her to gather
herself, while her companion seemed to assure her by the backward set of
his head, that of a man drinking at a cool spout, how little his
attention had lapsed. "I see at once, you dear grand creature, that you
were from that moment at the bottom of everything that was to happen;
and without knowing yet what these things were I back you for it now up
to the hilt."

"Well," she said, "I'm much obliged, and you're never for an instant,
mind, to fail me; but I needed no backing then--I didn't even need my
mother's: I took on myself so much from the moment my chance turned up."

"You just walked in and settled the whole question, of course." He quite
flaunted the luxury of his interest. "Clearly what moved you _was_ one
of those crowning passions of infancy."

"Then why didn't I want, on the contrary, to have him, poor boy, where
his presence would feed my flame?" Rosanna at once inquired. "Why didn't
I obtain of my mother to say to his--for she would have said anything in
the world I wanted: 'You just quietly get married, don't disappoint this
delightful man; while we take Gray back to his uncle, which will be
awfully good for him, and let him learn to make his fortune, the decent
women that we are fondly befriending him and you and your husband coming
over whenever you like, to see how beautifully it answers.' Why if I was
so infatuated didn't I do _that?_" she repeated.

He kept her waiting not a moment. "Just because you _were_ so
infatuated. Just because when you're infatuated you're sublime." She had
turned her eyes on him, facing his gorgeous hospitality, but facing it
with a visible flush. "Rosanna Gaw"--he took undisguised advantage of
her--"you're sublime now, just as sublime as you can be, and it's what
you want to be. You liked your young man so much that you were really
capable----!"

He let it go at that, for even with his drop she had not completed his
sense. But the next thing, practically, she did so. "I've been capable
ever since--that's the point: of feeling that I did act upon him, that,
young and accessible as I found him, I gave a turn to his life."

"Well," Davey continued to comment, "he's not so young now, and no more,
naturally, are you; but I guess, all the same, you'll give many
another." And then, as facing him altogether more now, she seemed to ask
how he could be so sure: "Why, if _I'm_ so accessible, through my tough
old hide, how is the exquisite creature formed to all the sensibilities
for which you sought to provide going in the least to hold out? He owes
you clearly everything he has become, and how can he decently not want
you should know he feels it? All's well that ends well: that at least I
foresee I shall want to say when I've had more of the beginning. You
were going to tell me how it was in particular that you got your pull."

She puffed and puffed again, letting her eyes once more wander and rest;
after which, through her smoke, she recovered the sense of the past.
"One Sunday morning we went together to the great Gallery--it had been
between us for weeks that he was some day to take me and show me the
things he most admired: that wasn't at all what would have been my line
with _him._ The extent to which he was 'cleverer' than I and knew about
the things I didn't, and don't know even now----!" Greatly she made this
point. "And yet the beauty was that I felt there were ways I could help
him, all the same--I knew _that_ even with all the things I didn't know,
so that they remained ignorances of which I think I wasn't a bit
ashamed: any more in fact than I am now, there being too many things
else to be ashamed of. Never so much as that day, at any rate, had I
felt ready for my part--yes, it came to me there as my part; for after
he had called for me at our hotel and we had started together I knew
something particular was the matter and that he of a sudden didn't care
for what we were doing, though we had planned it as a great occasion
much before; that in short his thoughts were elsewhere and that I could
have made out the trouble in his face if I hadn't wished not to seem to
look for it. I hated that he should have it, whatever it was--just how I
hated it comes back to me as if from yesterday; and also how at the same
time I pretended not to notice, and he attempted not to show he did, but
to introduce me, in the rooms, to what we had come for instead--which
gave us half-an-hour that I recover vividly, recover, I assure you,
quite painfully still, as a conscious, solemn little farce. What put an
end to it was that we at last wandered away from the great things, the
famous Madonna, the Correggio, the Paul Veroneses, which he had quavered
out the properest remarks about, and got off into a small room of little
Dutch and other later masters, things that didn't matter and that we
couldn't pretend to go into, but where the German sunshine of a bright
winter day came down through some upper light and played on all the rich
little old colour and old gilding after a fashion that of a sudden
decided me. 'I don't care a hang for anything!' I stood before him and
boldly spoke out: 'I haven't cared a hang since we came in, if you want
to know--I care only for what you're worried about, and what must be
pretty bad, since I can see, if you don't mind my saying it, that it has
made you cry at home.'"

"He can hardly have thanked you for _that!_" Davey's competence threw
off.

"No, he didn't pretend to, and I had known he wouldn't; he hadn't to
tell me how a boy feels in taking such a charge from a girl. But there
he was on a small divan, swinging his legs a little and with his
head--he had taken his hat off--back against the top of the seat and the
queerest look in his flushed face. For a moment he stared hard, and
_then_ at least, I said to myself, his tears were coming up. They didn't
come, however--he only kept glaring as in fever; from which I presently
saw that I had said not a bit the wrong thing, but exactly the very
best. 'Oh if I were some good to you!' I went on--and with the sense the
next moment, ever so happily, that that was really what I was being.
'She has put it upon me to choose for myself--to think, to decide and to
settle it that way for both of us. She has put it _all_ upon me,' he
said--'and how can I choose, in such a difficulty,' he asked, 'when she
tells me, and when I believe, that she'll do exactly as I say?' 'You
mean your mother will marry Mr. Northover or give him up according as
you prefer?'--but of course I knew what he meant. It was a joy to me to
feel it clear up--with the good I had already done him, at a touch, by
making him speak. I saw how this relieved him even when he practically
spoke of his question as too frightful for his young intelligence, his
young conscience--literally his young nerves. It was as if he had
appealed to me to pronounce it positively cruel--while I had felt at the
first word that I really but blessed it. It wasn't too much for _my_
young nerves--extraordinary as it may seem to you," Rosanna pursued,
"that I should but have wished to undertake at a jump such a very large
order. I wonder now from where my lucidity came, but just as I stood
there I saw some things in a light in which, even with still better
opportunities, I've never so _much_ seen them since. It was as if I took
everything in--and what everything meant; and, flopped there on his seat
and always staring up at me, he understood that I was somehow inspired
for him."

"My dear child, you're inspired at this moment!"--Davey Bradham rendered
the tribute. "It's too splendid to hear of amid our greedy wants, our
timid ideas and our fishy passions. You ring out like Brünnhilde at the
opera. How jolly to have pronounced his doom!"

"Yes," she gravely said, "and you see how jolly I now find it. I settled
it. I was fate," Rosanna puffed. "He recognised fate--all the more that
he really wanted to; and you see therefore," she went on, "how it was to
be in every single thing that has happened since."

"You stuck him fast there"--Mr. Bradham filled in the picture. "Yet not
so fast after all," he understandingly added, "but that you've been able
to handle him again as you like. He does in other words whatever you
prescribe."

"If he did it then I don't know what I should have done had he refused
to do it now. For now everything's changed. Everyone's dead or dying.
And I believe," she wound up, "that I was quite right then, that he has
led his life and been happy."

"I see. If he hadn't been----!" Her companion's free glance ranged.

"He would have had me to thank, yes. And at the best I should have cost
him much!"

"Everything, you mean, that the old man had more or less from the first
in mind?"

Davey had taken her up; but the next moment, without direct reply, she
was on her feet. "At any rate you see!" she said to finish with it.

"Oh I see a lot! And if there's more in it than meets the eye I think I
see that too," her friend declared. "I want to see it all at any
rate--and just as you've started it. But what I want most naturally is
to see your little darling himself."

"Well, if I had been afraid of you I wouldn't have spoken. You won't
hurt him," Rosanna said as they got back to the cliff walk.

"Hurt him? Why I shall be his great warning light--or at least I shall
be yours, which is better still." To this, however, always pondering,
she answered nothing, but stood as if spent by her effort and half
disposed in consequence to retrace her steps; against which possibility
he at once protested. "You don't mean you're not coming on?"

She thought another instant; then her eyes overreached the long smooth
interval beyond which the nondescript excrescences of Gussy's "cottage,"
vast and florid, and in a kindred company of hunches and gables and
pinnacles confessed, even if in confused accents, to its monstrous
identity. The sight itself seemed after all to give her resolution.
"Yes, now for Cissy!" she said and braved the prospect.




III


Half-an-hour later, however, she still had this young lady before her in
extended perspective and as a satisfaction, if not as an embarrassment,
to come; thanks to the fact that Mrs. Bradham had forty persons, or
something like it, though all casually turning up, at tea, and that she
herself had perhaps never been so struck with the activity of the
charming girl's response to the considerations familiar alike to all of
them as Gussy's ideas about her. Gussy's ideas about her, as about
everything in the world, could on occasion do more to fill the air of
any scene over which Gussy presided than no matter what vociferation of
any massed crowd surrounding that lady: exactly which truth might have
been notable now to Rosanna in the light of Cissy's occasional clear
smile at her, always as yet from a distance, during lapses of intervals
and across shifting barriers of the more or less eminent and brilliant.
Mrs. Bradham's great idea--notoriously the most disinterested Gussy had
been known, through a career rich in announced intentions and glorious
designs, to entertain with any coherence--was that by placing and
keeping on exhibition, under her eye, the loveliest flower of girlhood a
splendid and confident society could have wished to wear on its bosom
she should at once signally enhance the dignity of the social part
played by herself and steep the precious object in a medium in which the
care of precious objects was supremely understood. "When she does so
much for me what in the world mustn't I do for _her?_" Cecilia Foy had
put that to Rosanna again and again with perfect lucidity, making her
sense of fair play shine out of it and her cultivation of that ideal
form perhaps not the least of the complications under which our elder
young woman, earnest in everything, endeavoured to stick to the just
view of her. Cissy had from the first appealed to her with restrictions,
but that was the way in which for poor brooding Rosanna every one
appealed; only there was in the present case the difference that whereas
in most cases the appeal, or rather her view of it, found itself somehow
smothered in the attendant wrong possibilities, the interest of this
bright victim of Mrs. Bradham's furtherance worked clearer, on the
whole, with the closer, with the closest, relation, never starting the
questions one might entertain about her except to dispose of them, even
if when they had been disposed of she mostly started them again.

Not often had so big a one at all events been started for Rosanna as
when she saw the girl earn her keep, as they had so often called it
together, by multiplying herself for everyone else about the place
instead of remaining as single and possessable as her anxious friend had
come over to invite her to be. Present to this observer to the last
point indeed, and yet as nothing new, was the impression of that
insolence of ease on Gussy's part which was never so great as when her
sense for any relation was least fine and least true. She was naturally
never so the vulgar rich woman able to afford herself all luxuries as
when I she was most stupid about the right enjoyment of these and most
brutally systematic, as Rosanna's inward voice phrased the matter, for
some inferior and desecrating use of them. Mrs. Bradham would deeply
have resented--as deeply as a woman might who had no depth--any
imputation on her view of what would be fine and great for her young
friend, but Rosanna's envy and admiration of possibilities, to say
nothing of actualities, to which this view was quite blind, kept the
girl before her at times as a sacrificed, truly an even prostituted
creature; who yet also, it had to be added, could often alienate
sympathy by strange, by perverse concurrences. However, Rosanna thought,
Cissy wasn't in concurrence now, but was quite otherwise preoccupied
than with what their hostess could either give her or take from her. She
was happy--this our young woman perfectly perceived, to her own very
great increase of interest; so happy that, as had been repeatedly
noticeable before, she multiplied herself through the very agitation of
it, appearing to be, for particular things they had to say to her,
particular conversational grabs and snatches, all of the most violent,
they kept attempting and mostly achieving, at the service of everyone at
once, and thereby as obliging, as humane a beauty, after the fashion of
the old term, as could have charmed the sight. What Rosanna most noted
withal, and not for the first time either, every observation she had
hitherto made seeming now but intensified, what she most noted was the
huge general familiarity, the pitch of intimacy unmodulated, as if
exactly the same tie, from person to person, bound the whole company
together and nobody had anything to say to anyone that wasn't equally in
question for all.

This, she knew, was the air and the sound, the common state, of
intimacy, and again and again, in taking it in, she had remained unsure
of whether it left her more hopelessly jealous or more rudely
independent. She would have liked to be intimate--with someone or other,
not indeed with every member of a crowd; but the faculty, as appeared,
hadn't been given her (for with whom had she ever exercised it? not even
with Cissy, she felt now,) and it was ground on which she knew alternate
languor and relief. The fact, however, that so much as all this could be
present to her while she encountered greetings, accepted tea, and failed
of felicity before forms of address for the most part so hilarious, or
at least so ingenious, as to remind her further that she might never
expect to be funny either--that fact might have shown her as hugging a
treasure of consciousness rather than as seeking a soil for its
interment. What they all took for granted!--this again and again had
been before her; and never so as when Gussy Bradham after a little
became possessed of her to the extent of their sharing a settee in one
of the great porches on the lawny margin of which, before sundry
over-archings in other and quite contradictious architectural interests
began to spread, a dozen dispersed couples and trios revolved and
lingered in sight. How was he, the young man at the other house, going
to like these enormous assumptions?--that of a sudden oddly came to her;
so far indeed as it was odd that Gussy should suggest such questions.
She suggested questions in her own way at all times; Rosanna indeed
mostly saw her in a sort of immodest glare of such, the chief being
doubtless the wonder, never assuaged, of how any circle of the supposed
amenities could go on "putting up" with her. The present was as a fact
perhaps the first time our young woman had seen her in the light of a
danger to herself. If society, or what they called such, had to reckon
with her and accepted the charge, that was society's own affair--it
appeared on the whole to understand its interest; but why should she,
Rosanna Gaw, recognise a complication she had done nothing ever to
provoke? It was literally as if the reckoning sat there between them and
all the terms they had ever made with felt differences, intensities of
separation and opposition, had now been superseded by the need for fresh
ones--forms of contact and exchange, forms of pretended intercourse, to
be improvised in presence of new truths.

So it was at any rate that Rosanna's imagination worked while she asked
herself if there mightn't be something in an idea she had more than once
austerely harboured--the possibility that Mrs. Bradham could on occasion
be afraid of her. If this lady's great note was that of an astounding
assurance based on approved impunity, how, certainly, should a plain
dull shy spinster, with an entire incapacity for boldness and a perfect
horror, in general, of intermeddling, have broken the spell?--especially
as there was no other person in the world, not one, whom she could have
dreamed of wishing to put in fear. Deep was the discomfort for Miss Gaw
of losing with her entertainer the commonest advantage she perhaps knew,
that of her habit of escape from the relation of dislike, let alone of
hostility, through some active denial for the time of any relation at
all. What was there in Gussy that rendered impossible to Rosanna's sense
this very vulgarest of luxuries? She gave her always the impression of
looking at her with an exaggeration of ease, a guarded penetration, that
consciously betrayed itself; though how could one know, after all, that
this wasn't the horrid nature of her look for everyone?--which would
have been publicly denounced if people hadn't been too much involved
with her to be candid. With her wondrous bloom of life and health and
her hard confidence that had nothing to do with sympathy, Gussy might
have presented it as a matter of some pusillanimity, her present critic
at the same time felt, that one should but detect the displeasing in
such an exhibition of bright activity. The only way not to stand off
from her, no doubt, was to be of her "bossed" party and crew, or in
other words to be like everyone else; and perhaps one might on that
condition have enjoyed as a work of nature or even of art, an example of
all-efficient force, her braveries of aspect and attitude, resources of
resistance to time and thought, things not of beauty, for some
unyielding reason, and quite as little of dignity, but things of
assertion and application in an extraordinary degree, things of a
straight cold radiance and of an emphasis that was like the stamp of
hard flat feet. Even if she was to be envied it would be across such
gulfs; as it was indeed one couldn't so much as envy her the prodigy of
her "figure," which had been at eighteen, as one had heard, that of a
woman of forty and was now at forty, one saw, that of a girl of
eighteen: such a state of the person wasn't human, to the younger
woman's sombre sense, but might have been that of some shining humming
insect, a thing of the long-constricted waist, the minimised yet
caparisoned head, the fixed disproportionate eye and tough transparent
wing, gossamer guaranteed. With all of which, however, she had pushed
through every partition and was in the centre of her guest's innermost
preserve before she had been heard coming.

"It's too lovely that you should have got him to do what he ought--that
dreadful old man! But I don't know if you feel how interesting it's all
going to be; in fact if you know yourself how wonderful it is that he
has already--Mr. Fielder has, I mean--such a tremendous friend in
Cissy."

Rosanna waited, facing her, noting her extraordinary perfections of
neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said
whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the
clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element
that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation
of care. "Take her as an advertisement of all the latest knowledges of
how to 'treat' every inch of the human surface and where to 'get' every
scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she is enveloped, and she does
achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby absolute in a wavering
world"--with so much even as that was Miss Gaw aware of helping to fill
for her own use the interval before she spoke. "No," she said, "I know
nothing of what any of you may suppose yourselves to know." After which,
however, with a sudden inspiration, a quick shift of thought as though
catching an alarm, "I haven't seen Mr. Fielder for a very long time,
haven't seen him at all yet here," she added; "but though I hoped
immensely he would come, and am awfully glad he has, what I want for him
is to have the very best time he possibly can; a much better one than I
shall myself at all know how to help him to."

"Why, aren't you helping him to the greatest time he can have ever had
if you've waked up his uncle to a sense of decency?" Gussy demanded with
her brightest promptness. "You needn't think, Rosanna," she proceeded
with a well-nigh fantastic development of that ease, "you needn't think
you're going to be able to dodge the least little consequence of your
having been so wonderful. He's just going to owe you everything, and to
follow that feeling up; so I don't see why you shouldn't want to let
him--it would be so mean of him not to!--or be deprived of the credit of
so good a turn. When I do things"--Gussy always had every account of
herself ready--"I want to have them recognised; I like to make them pay,
without the least shame, in the way of glory gained. However, it's
between yourselves," her delicacy conceded, "and how can one
judge--except just to envy you such a lovely relation? All I want is
that you should feel that here we are if you do want help. He should
have here the best there is, and should have it, don't you think? before
he tumbles from ignorance into any mistake--mistakes have such a way of
sticking. So don't be unselfish about him, don't sacrifice him to the
fear of using your advantage: what are such advantages as you enjoy
meant for--all of them, I mean--but to be used up to the limit? You'll
see at any rate what Cissy says--she has great ideas about him. I mean,"
said Mrs. Bradham with a qualification in which the expression of
Rosanna's still gaze suddenly seemed reflected, "I mean that it's so
interesting she should have all the clues."

Rosanna still gazed; she might even after a little have struck a watcher
as held in spite of herself by some heavy spell. It was an old
sense--she had already often had it: when once Gussy had got her head
up, got away and away as Davey called it, she might appear to do what
she would with her victim; appear, that is, to Gussy herself--the
appearance never corresponded for Miss Gaw to an admission of her own.
Behind the appearance, at all events, things on one side and the other
piled themselves up, and Rosanna certainly knew what they were on her
side. Nevertheless it was as a vocal note too faintly quavered through
some loud orchestral sound that she heard herself echo: "The clues----?"

"Why, it's so funny there should be such a lot--and all gathered about
here!" To this attestation of how everything in the world, for that
matter, was gathered right there Rosanna felt herself superficially
yield; and even before she knew what was coming--for something clearly
was--she was strangely conscious of a choice somehow involved in her
attitude and dependent on her mind, and this too as at almost the
acutest moment of her life. What it came to, with the presentiment of
forces at play such as she had really never yet had to count with, was
the question, all for herself, of whether she should be patently lying
in the profession of a readiness to hand the subject of her interest
over unreservedly to all waiting, all so remarkably gathering contacts
and chances, or whether the act wouldn't partake of the very finest
strain of her past sincerity. She was to remember the moment later on as
if she had really by her definition, by her selection, "behaved"--fairly
feeling the breath of her young man's experience on her cheek before
knowing with the least particularity what it would most be, and deciding
then and there to swallow down every fear of any cost of anything to
herself. She felt extraordinary in the presence of symptoms, symptoms of
life, of death, of danger, of delight, of what did she know? But this it
was exactly that cast derision, by contrast, on such poor obscurities as
her feelings, and settled it for her that when she had professed a few
minutes back that she hoped they would all, for his possible pleasure in
it, catch him up and, so far as they might, make him theirs, she wasn't
to have spoken with false frankness. Queer enough at the same time, and
a wondrous sign of her state of sensibility, that she should see
symptoms glimmer from so very far off. What was this one that was
already in the air before Mrs. Bradham had so much as answered her
question?

Well, the next moment at any rate she knew, and more extraordinary then
than anything was the spread of her apprehension, off somehow to the
incalculable, under Gussy's mention of a name. What did this show most
of all, however, but how little the intensity of her private association
with the name had even yet died out, or at least how vividly it could
revive in a connection by which everything in her was quickened?
"Haughty" Vint, just lately conversed with by Cissy in New York, it
appeared, and now coming on to the Bradhams from one day to another, had
fed the girl with information, it also, and more wonderfully,
transpired--information about Gray's young past, all surprisingly
founded on close contacts, the most interesting, between the pair, as
well as the least suspected ever by Rosanna: to such an effect that the
transmitted trickle of it had after a moment swelled from Gussy's lips
into a stream by which our friend's consciousness was flooded. "Clues"
these connections might well be called when every touch could now set up
a vibration. It hummed away at once like a pressed button--if she had
been really and in the least meanly afraid of complications she might
now have sat staring at one that would do for oddity, for the oddity of
that relation of her own with Cissy's source of anecdote which could so
have come and gone and yet thrown no light for her on anything but
itself; little enough, by what she had tried to make of it at the time,
though that might have been. It had meanwhile scarce revived for her
otherwise, even if reviving now, as we have said, to intensity, that
Horton Vint's invitation to her some three years before to bestow her
hand upon him in marriage had been attended by impressions as singular
perhaps as had ever marked a like case in an equal absence of outward
show. The connection with him remaining for her had simply been that no
young man--in the clear American social air--had probably ever
approached a young woman on such ground with so utter a lack of
ostensible warrant and had yet at the same time so saved the situation
for himself, or for what he might have called his dignity, and even
hers; to the positive point of his having left her with the mystery, in
all the world, that she could still most pull out from old dim
confusions to wonder about, and wonder all in vain, when she had
nothing better to do. Everything was over between them save the fact
that they hadn't quarrelled, hadn't indeed so much as discussed; but
here withal was association, association unquenched--from the moment a
fresh breath, as just now, could blow upon it. He had had the
appearance--it was unmistakeable--of absolutely believing she might
accept him if he but put it to her lucidly enough and let her look at
him straight enough; and the extraordinary thing was that, for all her
sense of this at the hour, she hadn't imputed to him a real fatuity.

It had remained with her that, given certain other facts, no incident of
that order could well have had so little to confess by any of its
aspects to the taint of vulgarity. She had seen it, she believed, as he
meant it, meant it with entire conviction: he had intended a tribute, of
a high order, to her intelligence, which he had counted on, or at least
faced with the opportunity, to recognise him as a greater value, taken
all round, appraised by the _whole_ suitability, than she was likely
ever again to find offered. He was of course to take or to leave, and
she saw him stand there in that light as he had then stood, not
pleading, not pressing, not pretending to anything but the wish and the
capacity to serve, only holding out her chance, appealing to her
judgment, inviting her inspection, meeting it without either a shade of
ambiguity or, so far as she could see, any vanity beyond the facts. It
had all been wonderful enough, and not least so that, although
absolutely untouched and untempted, perfectly lucid on her own side and
perfectly inaccessible, she had in a manner admired him, in a manner
almost enjoyed him, in the act of denying him hope. Extraordinary in
especial had it been that he was probably right, right about his value,
right about his rectitude, of conscious intention at least, right even
as to his general calculation of effect, an effect probably producible
on most women; right finally in judging that should he strike at all
this would be the one way. It was only less extraordinary that no
faintest shade of regret, no lightest play of rueful imagination, no
subordinate stir of pity or wonder, had attended her memory of having
left him to the mere cold comfort of reflection. It was his truth that
had fallen short, not his error; the soundness, as it were, of his
claim--so far as his fine intelligence, matching her own, that is, could
make it sound--had had nothing to do with its propriety. She had refused
him, none the less, without disliking him, at the same time that she was
at no moment afterwards conscious of having cared whether he had
suffered. She had been too unaware of the question even to remark that
she seemed indifferent; though with a vague impression--so far as that
went--that suffering was not in his chords. His acceptance of his check
she could but call inscrutably splendid--inscrutably perhaps because she
couldn't quite feel that it had left nothing between them. Something
there was, something there had to be, if only the marvel, so to say, of
her present, her permanent, backward vision of the force with which they
had touched and separated. It stuck to her somehow that they had touched
still more than if they had loved, held each other still closer than if
they had embraced: to such and so strange a tune had they been briefly
intimate. Would any man ever look at her so for passion as Mr. Vint had
looked for reason? and should her own eyes ever again so visit a man's
depths and gaze about in them unashamed to a tune to match that
adventure? Literally what they had said was comparatively
unimportant--once he had made his errand clear; whereby the rest might
all have been but his silent exhibition of his personality, so to name
it, his honour, his assumption, his situation, his life, and that
failure on her own part to yield an inch which had but the more let him
see how straight these things broke upon her. For all the straightness,
it was true, the fact that might most have affected, not to say
concerned, her had remained the least expressed. It wasn't for her now
to know what difference it could have made that he was in relation with
Gray Fielder; incontestably, however, _their_ relation, or their missing
of one, hers and Haughty's, flushed anew in the sudden light.

"Oh I'm so glad he has good friends here then--with such a clever one as
Mr. Vint we can certainly be easy about him." So much Rosanna heard
herself at last say, and it would doubtless have quite served for assent
to Gussy's revelation without the further support given her by the
simultaneous convergence upon them of various members of the party, who
exactly struck our young woman as having guessed, by the sight of
hostess and momentous guest withdrawn together, that the topic of the
moment was there to be plucked from their hands. Rosanna was now on her
feet--she couldn't sit longer and just take things; and she was to ask
herself afterwards with what cold stare of denial she mightn't have
appeared quite unprecedentedly to face the inquiring rout under the
sense that now certainly, if she didn't take care, she should have
nothing left of her own. It wasn't that they weren't, all laughter and
shimmer, all senseless sound and expensive futility, the easiest people
in the world to share with, and several the very prettiest and
pleasantest, of the vaguest insistence after all, the most absurdly
small awareness of what they were eager about; but that of the three or
four things then taking place at once the brush across her heart of
Gray's possible immediate question, "Have you brought me over then to
live with _these_----?" had most in common with alarm. It positively
helped her indeed withal that she found herself, the next thing,
greeting with more sincerity of expression than she had, by her
consciousness, yet used Mrs. Bradham's final leap to action in the form
of "I want him to dinner of course right off!" She said it with the big
brave laugh that represented her main mercy for the general public view
of her native eagerness, an eagerness appraised, not to say proclaimed,
by herself as a passion for the service of society, and in connection
with which it was mostly agreed that she never so drove her flock before
her as when paying this theoretic tribute to grace of manner. Before
Rosanna could ejaculate, moved though she was to do so, the question had
been taken up by the extremely pretty person who was known to her
friends, and known even to Rosanna, as Minnie Undle and who at once put
in a plea for Mr. Fielder's presence that evening, her own having been
secured for it. Before such a rate of procedure as this evocation
implied even Gussy appeared to recoil, but with a prompt proviso in
favour of the gentleman's figuring rather on the morrow, when Mrs.
Undle, since she seemed so impatient, might again be of the party. Mrs.
Undle agreed on the spot, though by this time Rosanna's challenge had
ceased to hang fire. "But do you really consider that you _know_ him so
much as that?"--she let Gussy have it straight, even if at the
disadvantage that there were now as ever plenty of people to react, to
the last hilarity, at the idea that acquaintance enjoyed on either side
was needfully imputable to these participations. "That's just why--if we
don't know him!" Mrs. Undle further contributed; while Gussy declined
recognition of the relevance of any word of Miss Gaw's. She declined it
indeed in her own way, by a yet stiffer illustration of her general
resilience; an "Of course I mean, dear, that I look to you to bring
him!" expressing sufficiently her system.

"Then you really expect him when his uncle's dying----?" sprang in all
honesty from Rosanna's lips; to be taken up on the instant, however, by
a voice that was not Gussy's and that rang clear before Gussy could
speak.

"There can't be the least question of it--even if we're dying ourselves,
or even if I am at least!" was what Rosanna heard; with Cissy Foy, of a
sudden supremely exhibited, giving the case at once all happy sense, all
bright quick harmony with their general immediate interest. She pressed
to Rosanna straight, as if nothing as yet had had time to pass between
them--which very little in fact had; with the result for our young woman
of feeling helped, by the lightest of turns, not to be awkward herself,
or really, what came to the same thing, not to be anything herself. It
was a fine perception she had had before--of how Cissy could on occasion
"do" for one, and this, all extraordinarily and in a sort of double
sense, by quenching one in her light at the very moment she offered it
for guidance. She quenched Gussy, she was the single person who could,
Gussy almost gruntingly consenting; she quenched Minnie Undle, she
cheapened every other presence, scattering lovely looks, multiplying
happy touches, grasping Rosanna for possession, yet at the same time, as
with her free hand, waving away every other connection: so that a minute
or two later--for it scarce seemed more--the pair were isolated, still
on the verandah somewhere, but intensely confronted and talking at ease,
or in a way that had to pass for ease, with its not mattering at all
whether their companions, dazzled and wafted off, had dispersed and
ceased to be, or whether they themselves had simply been floated to
where they wished on the great surge of the girl's grace. The girl's
grace was, after its manner, such a force that Miss Gaw had had
repeatedly, on past occasions, to doubt even while she recognised--for
_could_ a young creature you weren't quite sure of use a weapon of such
an edge only for good? The young creature seemed at any rate now as
never yet to give out its play for a thing to be counted on and trusted;
and with Gussy Bradham herself shown just there behind them as letting
it take everything straight out of _her_ hands, nobody else at all
daring to touch, what were you to do but verily feel distinguished by
its so wrapping you about? The only sharpness in what had happened was
that with Cissy's act of presence Mrs. Bradham had exercised her great
function of social appraiser by staring and then, as under conclusions
drawn from it, giving way. One might have found it redeemingly soft in
her that before this particular suggestion she could melt, or that in
other words Cissy appeared the single fact in all the world about which
she had anything to call imagination. She imagined her, she imagined her
_now_, and as dealing somehow with their massive friend; which
consciousness, on the latter's part, it must be said, played for the
moment through everything else.

Not indeed that there wasn't plenty for the girl to fill the fancy with;
since nothing could have been purer than the stream that she poured into
Rosanna's as from an upturned crystal urn while she repeated over,
holding her by the two hands, gazing at her in admiration: "I can _see_
how you care for him--I can see, I can see!" And she felt indeed, our
young woman, how the cover was by this light hand whisked off her
secret--Cissy made it somehow a secret in the act of laying it bare; and
that she blushed for the felt exposure as even Gussy had failed to make
her. Seeing which her companion but tilted the further vessel of
confidence. "It's too funny, it's too wonderful that I too should know
something. But I do, and I'll tell you how--not now, for I haven't time,
but as soon as ever I can; which will make you see. So what you must do
for all you're worth," said Cissy, "is to care now more than ever. You
must keep him from us, because we're not good enough and you _are_; you
must act in the sense of what you feel, and must feel exactly as you've
a right to--for, as I say, I know, I know!"

It was impossible, Rosanna seemed to see, that a generous young thing
should shine out in more beauty; so that what in the world might one
ever keep from her? Surpassingly strange the plea thus radiant on the
very brow of the danger! "You mean you know Mr. Fielder's history? from
your having met somebody----?"

"Oh that of course, yes; Gussy, whom I've told of my having met Mr.
Northover, will have told you. That's curious and charming," Cissy went
on, "and I want awfully we should talk of it. But it isn't what I mean
by what I know--and what you don't, my dear thing!"

Rosanna couldn't have told why, but she had begun to tremble, and also
to try not to show it. "What I don't know--about Gray Fielder? Why, of
course there's plenty!" she smiled.

Cissy still held her hands; but Cissy now was grave. "No, there isn't
plenty--save so far as what I mean is enough. And I haven't told it to
Gussy. It's too good for her," the girl added. "It's too good for anyone
but you."

Rosanna just waited, feeling herself perhaps grimace. "What, Cissy,
_are_ you talking about?"

"About what I heard from Mr. Northover when we met him, when we saw so
much of him, three years ago at Ragatz, where we had gone for Mamma and
where we went through the cure with him. He and I struck up a friendship
and he often spoke to me of his stepson--who wasn't there with him, was
at that time off somewhere in the mountains or in Italy, I forget, but
to whom I could see he was devoted. He and I hit it off beautifully
together--he seemed to me awfully charming and to like to tell me
things. So what I allude to is something he said to me."

"About me?" Rosanna gasped.

"Yes--I see now it was about you. But it's only to-day that I've guessed
that. Otherwise, otherwise----!" And as if under the weight of her great
disclosure Cissy faltered.

But she had now indeed made her friend desire it. "You mean that
otherwise you'd have told me before?"

"Yes indeed--and it's such a miracle I didn't. It's such a miracle,"
said Cissy, "that the person should all this time have been
you--or you have been the person. Of course I had no idea that all
_this_--everything that has taken place now, by what I understand--was
going so extraordinarily to happen. You see he never named Mr.
Betterman, or in fact, I think," the girl explained, "told me anything
about him. And he didn't name, either, Gray's friend--so that in spite
of the impression made on me you've never till to-day been identified."

Immense, as she went, Rosanna felt, the number of things she gave her
thus together to think about. What was coming she clearly needn't
fear--might indeed, deep within, happily hold her breath for; but the
very interest somehow made her rest an instant, as for refinement of
suspense, on the minor surprises. "The impression then has been so great
that you call him 'Gray'?"

The girl at this ceased holding hands; she folded her arms back together
across her slim young person--the frequent habit of it in her was of the
prettiest "quaint" effect; she laughed as if submitting to some just
correction of a freedom. "Oh, but my dear, _he_ did, the delightful
man--and isn't it borne in upon me that you do? Of course the impression
was great--and if Mr. Northover and I had met younger I don't know," her
laugh said, "what mightn't have happened. No, I never shall have had a
greater, a more intelligent admirer! As it was we remained true,
secretly true, for fond memory, to the end: at least I did, though ever
so secretly--you see I speak of it only now--and I want to believe so in
his impression. But how I torment you!" she suddenly said in another
tone.

Rosanna, nursing her patience, had a sad slow headshake. "I don't
understand."

"Of course you don't--and yet it's too beautiful. It was about
Gray--once when we talked of him, as I've told you we repeatedly did. It
was that he never would look at anyone else."

Our friend could but appear at least to cast about. "Anyone else than
whom?"

"Why than you," Cissy smiled. "The girl he had loved in boyhood. The
American girl who, years before, in Dresden, had done for him something
he could never forget."

"And what had she done?" stared Rosanna.

"Oh he didn't tell me _that!_ But if you don't take great care, as I
say," Cissy went on, "perhaps _he_ may--I mean Mr. Fielder himself may
when we close round him in the way that, in your place, as I assure you,
I would certainly do everything to prevent."

Rosanna looked about as with a sudden sense of weakness, the effect of
overstrain; it was absurd, but these last minutes might almost, with
their queer action, and as to the ground they covered, have been as many
formidable days. A fine verandah settee again close at hand offered her
support, and she dropped upon it, as for large retrieval of menaced
ease, with a need she herself alone could measure. The need was to
recover some sense of perspective, to be able to place her young
friend's somehow portentous assault off in such conditions, if only of
mere space and time, as would make for some greater convenience of
relation with it. It did at once help her--and really even for the tone
in which she smiled across: "So you're sure?"

Cissy hovered, shining, shifting, yet accepting the perspective as it
were--when in the world had she to fear _any?_--and positively painted
there in bright contradiction, her very grace again, after the odd
fashion in which it sometimes worked, seeming to deny her sincerity, and
her very candour seeming to deny her gravity. "Sure of what? Sure I'm
right about you?"

Rosanna took a minute to say--so many things worked in her; yet when one
of these came uppermost, pushing certain of the others back, she found
for putting it forward a tone grateful to her own ear. This tone
represented on her part too a substitute for sincerity, but that was
exactly what she wanted. "I don't care a fig for any anecdote about
myself--which moreover it would be very difficult for you to have right.
What I ask you if you're certain of is your being really not fit for
him. Are you absolutely," said Miss Gaw, "as bad as that?"

The girl, placed before her, looked at her now, with raised hands folded
together, as if she had been some seated idol, a great Buddha perched up
on a shrine. "Oh Rosanna, Rosanna----!" she admiringly, piously
breathed.

But it was not such treatment that could keep Miss Gaw from completing
her chosen sense. "I should be extremely sorry--so far as I claim any
influence on him--to interfere against his getting over here whatever
impressions he may; interfere by his taking you for more important, in
any way, than seems really called for."

"Taking _me?_" Cissy smiled.

"Taking any of you--the people, in general and in particular, who haunt
this house. We mustn't be afraid for him of his having the interest, or
even the mere amusement, of learning all that's to be learnt about us."

"Oh Rosanna, Rosanna"--the girl kept it up--"how you adore him; and how
you make me therefore, wretch that I am, fiendishly want to see him!"

But it might quite have glanced now from our friend's idol surface.
"You're the best of us, no doubt--very much; and I immensely hope you'll
like him, since you've been so extraordinarily prepared. It's to be
supposed too that he'll have some sense of his own."

Cissy continued rapt. "Oh but you're deep--deep deep deep!"

It came out as another presence again, that of Davey Bradham, who had
the air of rather restlessly looking for her, emerged from one of the
long windows of the house, just at hand, to meet Rosanna's eyes. She
found herself glad to have him back, as if further to inform him. Wasn't
it after all rather he that was the best of them and by no means Cissy?
Her face might at any rate have conveyed as much while she reported of
that young lady. "She thinks me so deep."

It made the girl, who had not seen him, turn round; but with an
immediate equal confidence. "And _she_ thinks _me_, Davey, so good!"

Davey's eyes were only on Cissy, but Rosanna seemed to feel them on
herself. "How you must have got mixed!" he exclaimed. "But your father
has come for you," he then said to Rosanna, who had got up.

"Father has walked it?"--she was amazed.

"No, he's there in a hack to take you home--and too excited to come in."

Rosanna's surprise but grew. "Has anything happened----?"

"Wonders--I asked them. Mr. Betterman's sitting right up."

"Really improving----?" Then her mystification spread. "'Them,' you
say?"

"Why his nurse, as I at least suppose her," said Davey, "is with
him--apparently to give you the expert opinion."

"Of the fiend's recuperating?" Cissy cried with a wail. And then before
her friend's bewilderment, "How dreadfully horrid!" she added.

"Whose nurse, please?" Rosanna asked of Davey.

"Why, hasn't he got a nurse?" Davey himself, as always, but desired
lucidity. "She's doing her duty by him all the same!"

On which Cissy's young wit at once apprehended. "It's one of Mr.
Betterman's taking a joy-ride in honour of his recovery! Did you ever
hear anything so cool?"

She had appealed to her friends alike, but Rosanna, under the force of
her suggestion, was already in advance. "Then father himself must be
ill!" Miss Gaw had declared, moving rapidly to the quarter in which he
so incongruously waited and leaving Davey to point a rapid moral for
Cissy's benefit while this couple followed.

"If he _is_ so upset that he hasn't been trusted alone I'll be hanged if
I don't just see it!"

But the marvel was the way in which after an instant Cissy saw it too.
"You mean because he can't stand Mr. Betterman's perhaps not dying?"

"Yes, dear ingenuous child--he has wanted so to see him out."

"Well then, isn't it what we're all wanting?"

"Most undoubtedly, pure pearl of penetration!" Davey returned as they
went. "His pick-up _will_ be a sell," he ruefully added; "even though it
mayn't quite kill anyone of us but Mr. Gaw!"




BOOK SECOND


I


Graham's view of his case and of all his proprieties, from the moment of
his arrival, was that he should hold himself without reserve at his
uncle's immediate disposition, and even such talk as seemed indicated,
during the forenoon, with Doctor Hatch and Miss Mumby, the nurse then in
charge, did little to lighten for him the immense prescription of
delicacy. What he learnt was far from disconcerting; the patient, aware
of his presence, had shown for soothed, not for agitated; the drop of
the tension of waiting had had the benign effect; he had repeated over
to his attendant that now "the boy" was there, all would be for the
best, and had asked also with soft iteration if he were having
everything he wanted. The happy assurance of this right turn of their
affair, so far as they had got, he was now quietly to enjoy: he was to
rest two or three hours, and if possible to sleep, while Graham, on his
side, sought a like remedy--after the full indulgence in which their
meeting would take place. The excellent fact for "the boy," who was
two-and-thirty years of age and who now quite felt as if during the last
few weeks he had lived through a dozen more, was thus that he was doing
his uncle good and that somehow, to complete that harmony, he might feel
the operation of an equal virtue. At his invitation, at his decision,
the idea of some such wondrous matter as this had of course
presided--for waiting and obliging good, which one was simply to open
one's heart or one's hand to, had struck him ever as so little of the
common stuff of life that now, at closer range, it could but figure as
still more prodigious. At the same time there was nothing he dreaded, by
his very nature, more than a fond fatuity, and he had imposed on himself
from the first to proceed at every step as if without consideration he
might well be made an ass of. It was true that even such a danger as
this presented its interest--the process to which he should yield would
be without precedent for him, and his imagination, thank heaven, had
curiosity in a large measure for its principle; he wouldn't rush into
peril, however, and flattered himself that after all he should not
recognise its symptoms too late.

What he said to himself just now on the spot was, at any rate, that he
should probably have been more excited if he hadn't been so amused. To
be amused to a high pitch while his nearest kinsman, apparently nursing,
as he had been told, a benevolence, lay dying a few rooms off--let this
impute levity to our young man only till we understand that his
liability to recreation represented in him a function serious indeed.
Everything played before him, everything his senses embraced; and since
his landing in New York on the morning before this the play had been of
a delightful violence. No slightest aspect or briefest moment of it but
had held and, so to say, rewarded him: if he had come back at last for
impressions, for emotions, for the sake of the rush upon him of the
characteristic, these things he was getting in a measure beyond his
dream. It was still beyond his dream that what everything merely seen
from the window of his room meant to him during these first hours should
move him first to a smile of such ecstasy, and then to such an inward
consumption of his smile, as might have made of happiness a substance
you could sweetly put under your tongue. He recognised--that was the
secret, recognised wherever he looked--and knew that when, from far
back, during his stretch of unbroken absence, he had still felt, and
liked to feel, what air had originally breathed upon him, these piercing
intensities of salience had really peopled the vision. He had much less
remembered the actual than forecast the inevitable, and the huge
involved necessity of its all showing as he found it seemed fairly to
shout in his ear. He had brought with him a fine intention, one of the
finest of which he was capable, and wasn't it, he put to himself,
already working? Wasn't he gathering in a perfect bloom of freshness the
fruit of his design rather to welcome the impression to extravagance, if
need be, than to undervalue it by the breadth of a hair? Inexpert he
couldn't help being, but too estranged to melt again at whatever touch
might make him, _that_ he'd be hanged if he couldn't help, since what
was the great thing again but to hold up one's face to _any_ drizzle of
light?

There it was, the light, in a mist of silver, even as he took in the
testimony of his cool bedimmed room, where the air was toned by the
closing of the great green shutters. It was ample and elegant, of an
American elegance, which was so unlike any other, and so still more
unlike any lapse of it, ever met by him, that some of its material terms
and items held him as in rapt contemplation; what he had wanted, even to
intensity, being that things should prove different, should positively
glare with opposition--there would be no fun at all were they only
imperfectly like, as that wouldn't in the least mean character. Their
character might be if it would in their consistently having none--than
which deficiency nothing was more possible; but he should have to
decline to be charmed by unsuccessful attempts at sorts of expression he
had elsewhere known more or less happily achieved. This particular
disappointment indeed he was clearly not in for, since what could at
once be more interesting than thus to note that the range and scale kept
all their parts together, that each object or effect disowned
connections, as he at least had all his life felt connections, and that
his cherished hope of the fresh start and the broken link would have its
measure filled to the brim. There was an American way for a room to be a
room, a table a table, a chair a chair and a book a book--let alone a
picture on a wall a picture, and a cold gush of water in a bath of a hot
morning a promise of purification; and of this license all about him, in
fine, he beheld the refreshing riot.

It cast on him for the time a spell; he moved about with soft steps and
long pauses, staring out between the slats of the shutters, which he
gently worked by their attachment, and then again living, with a
subtlety of sense that it was a pleasure to exercise, into the
conditions represented by whatever more nearly pressed. It was not only
that the process of assimilation, unlike any other he had yet been
engaged in, might stop short, to disaster, if he so much as breathed too
hard; but that if he made the sufficient surrender he might absolutely
himself be assimilated--and that was truly an experience he couldn't but
want to have. The great thing he held on to withal was a decent
delicacy, a dread of appearing even to himself to take big things for
granted. This of itself was restrictive as to freedoms--it stayed
familiarities, it kept uncertainty cool; for after all what had his
uncle done but cause to be conveyed to him across the sea the bare wish
that he should come? He had straightway come in consequence, but on no
explanation and for no signified reward; he had come simply to avoid a
possible ugliness in his not coming. Generally addicted to such
avoidances, to which it indeed seemed to him that the quest of beauty
was too often reduced, he had found his reason sufficient until the
present hour, when it was as if all reasons, all of his own at least,
had suddenly abandoned him, to the effect of his being surrounded only
with those of others, of which he was up to now ignorant, but which
somehow hung about the large still place, somehow stiffened the vague
summer Sunday and twinkled in the universal cleanness, a real revelation
to him of that possible immunity in things. He might have been sent for
merely to be blown up for the relief of the old man's mind on the
perversity and futility of his past. There was before him at all events
no gage of anything else, no intimation other than his having been,
materially speaking, preceded by preparations, to make him throw himself
on a survey of prospects. What was before him at the least was a "big"
experience--even to have come but to be cursed and dismissed would
really be a bigger thing than yet had befallen him. Not the form but the
fact of the experience accordingly mattered--so that wasn't it there to
a fine intensity by his standing ever and anon at the closed door of his
room and feeling that with his ear intent enough he could catch the
pressure on the other side?

The pressure was at last unmistakeable, we note, in the form of Miss
Mumby, who, having gently tapped, appeared there both to remark to him
that he must surely at last want his luncheon and to affect him afresh
and in the supreme degree as a vessel of the American want of
correspondence. Miss Mumby was ample, genial, familiar and more
radiantly clean than he had ever known any vessel, to whatever purpose
destined; also the number of things _she_ took for granted--if it was a
question of that; or perhaps rather the number of things of which she
didn't doubt and was incapable of doubting, surrounded her together with
a kind of dazzling aura, a special radiance of disconnection. She wore a
beautiful white dress, and he scarce knew what apparatus of spotless
apron and cuffs and floating streamers to match; yet she could only
again report to him of the impression that had most jumped at him from
the moment of his arrival. He saw in a moment that any difficulty on his
part of beginning with her at some point in social space, so to say, at
which he had never begun before with any such person, would count for
nothing in face of her own perfect power to begin. The faculty of
beginning would be in truth Miss Mumby's very genius, and in the moment
of his apprehension of this he felt too--he had in fact already felt it
at their first meeting--how little his pale old postulates as to persons
being "such" might henceforth claim to serve him. What person met by him
during his thirty hours in American air was "such" again as any other
partaker of contact had appeared or proved, no matter where, before his
entering it? What person had not at once so struck him in the light of
violent repudiation of type, as he might save for his sensibility have
imputed type, that nothing else in the case seemed predicable? He might
have seen Miss Mumby, he was presently to recognise, in the light of a
youngish mother perhaps, a sister, a cousin, a friend, even a possible
bride, for these were aspects independent of type and boundlessly free
of range; but a "trained nurse" was a trained nurse, and that was a
category of the most evolved--in spite of which what category in all the
world could have lifted its head in Miss Mumby's aura?

Still, she might have been a pleasant cousin, a first cousin, _the_ very
first a man had ever had and not in any degree "removed," while she thus
proclaimed the cheerful ease of everything and everyone, her own above
all, and made him yield on the spot to her lightest intimation. He
couldn't possibly have held off from her in any way, and if this was in
part because he always collapsed at a touch before nurses, it was at the
same time not at all the nurse in her that now so affected him, but the
incalculable other force, of which he had had no experience and which
was apparently that of the familiar in tone and manner. He had known, of
a truth, familiarity greater--much greater, but only with greater
occasions and supports for it; whereas on Miss Mumby's part it seemed
independent of any or of every motive. He could scarce have said in
fine, as he followed her to their repast, at which he foresaw in an
instant that they were both to sit down, whether it more alarmed or just
more coolingly enveloped him; his slight first bewilderment at any rate
had dropped--he had already forgotten the moment wasted two or three
hours before in wondering, with his sense of having known Nurses who
gloried in their title, how his dear second father, for instance, would
in his final extremity have liked the ministrations of a Miss. By those
he himself presently enjoyed in such different conditions, that is from
across the table, bare and polished and ever so delicately charged, of
the big dusky, yet just a little breezy dining-room, by those in short
under which every association he had ever had with anything crashed down
to pile itself as so much more tinklingly shivered glass at Miss Mumby's
feet, that sort of question was left far behind--and doubtless would
have been so even if the appeal of the particular refection served to
them had alone had the case in hand. "I'm going to make you like our
food, so you might as well begin at once," his companion had announced;
and he felt it on the spot as scarce less than delicious that this
element too should play, and with such fineness, into that harmony of
the amusingly exotic which was, under his benediction, working its will
on him. "Oh yes," she rejoiced in answer to his exhibition of the degree
in which what was before him did stir again to sweetness a chord of
memory, "oh yes, food's a great tie, it's like language--you can always
understand your own, whereas in Europe I had to learn about six others."

Miss Mumby had been to Europe, and he saw soon enough how there was
nowhere one could say she hadn't gone and nothing one could say she
hadn't done--one's perception could bear only on what she hadn't become;
so that, as he thus perceived, though she might have affected Europe
even as she was now affecting _him_, she was a pure negation of its
having affected herself, unless perhaps by adding to her power to make
him feel how little he could impose on her. She knew all about his
references while he only missed hers, and that gave her a tremendous
advantage--or would have done so hadn't she been too much his cousin to
take it. He at any rate recognised in a moment that the so many things
she had had to learn to understand over there were not forms of speech
but alimentary systems--as to which view he quite agreed with her that
the element of the native was equally rooted in both supports of life.
This gave her of course her opportunity of remarking that she had indeed
made for the assimilation of "his" cookery--whichever of the varieties
his had most been--scarce less an effort than she must confess now to
making for that of his terms of utterance; where she had at once again
the triumph that he was nowhere, by his own reasoning, if he pretended
to an affinity with the nice things they were now eating and yet stood
off from the other ground. "Oh I _understand_ you, which appears to be
so much more than you do me!" he laughed; "but am I really committed to
everything because I'm committed, in the degree you see me, oh yes, to
waffles and maple syrup, followed, and on such a scale, by melons and
ice-cream? You see in the one case I have but to take in, and in the
other have to give out: so can't I have, in a quiet way the American
palate without emitting the American sounds?" Thus was he on the
straightest flattest level with Miss Mumby--it stretched, to his
imagination, without a break, a rise or a fall, _à perte de vue_; and
thus was it already attested that the Miss Mumbys (for it was evident
there would be thousands of them) were in society, or were, at any rate,
not out of it, society thereby becoming clearly colossal. What was it,
moreover, but the best society--as who should say anywhere--when his
companion made the bright point that if anything had to do with sounds
the palate did? returning with it also to the one already made, her due
warning that she wasn't going to have him not like everything. "But I
do, I do, I do," he declared, with his mouth full of a seasoned and
sweetened, a soft, substantial coldness and richness that were at once
the revelation of a world and the consecration of a fate; "I revel in
everything, I already wallow, behold: I move as in a dream, I assure
you, and I only fear to wake up."

"Well, I don't know as I want you to wallow, and I certainly don't want
you to fear--though you'll wake up soon enough, I guess," his
entertainer continued, "whatever you do. You'll wake up to some of our
realities, and--well, we won't want anything better for you: will we.
Doctor?" Miss Mumby freely proceeded on their being joined for a moment
by the friendly physician who had greeted our young man, on his uncle's
behalf, at his hour of arrival, and who, having been again for awhile
with their interesting host, had left the second nurse in charge and was
about to be off to other cares. "I'm saying to Mr. Fielder that he's got
to wake up to some pretty big things," she explained to Doctor Hatch,
whom it struck Gray she addressed rather as he had heard doctors address
nurses than nurses doctors; a fact contributing offhand to his
awareness, already definite, that everyone addressed everyone as he had
nowhere yet heard the address perpetrated, and that so, evidently, there
were questions connected with it that must yet wait over. It was
pertinently to be felt furthermore that Doctor Hatch's own freedom,
which also had quite its own rare freshness of note, shared in the
general property of the whole appeal to him, the appeal of the very form
of the great sideboard, the very "school," though yet unrecognised by
him, of the pictures hung about, the very look and dress, the apparently
odd identity, of the selected and arrayed volumes in a bookcase charged
with ornament and occupying the place of highest dignity in the room, to
take his situation for guaranteed as it was surely not common for
earthly situations to be. This he could feel, however, without knowing,
to any great purpose, what it really meant; and he was afterwards even
scarce to know what had further taken place, under Doctor Hatch's
blessing, before he passed out of the house to the verandah and the
grounds, as their limitations of reach didn't prevent their being
called, and gave himself up to inquiries now permittedly direct.

Doctor Hatch's message or momentary act of quaint bright presence came
to him thus, on the verandah, while shining expanses opened, as an
invitation to some extraordinary confidence, some flight of optimism
without a precedent, as a positive hint in fine that it depended on
himself alone to step straight into the chariot of the sun, which on his
mere nod would conveniently descend there to the edge of the piazza, and
whirl away for increase of acquaintance with the time, as it was
obviously going to be, of his life. This was but his reading indeed of
the funny terms in which the delightful man put it to him that he seemed
by his happy advent to have brought on for his uncle a prospect, a rise
of pitch, not dissimilar from that sort of vision; by so high a tide of
ease had the sick room above been flooded, and such a lot of good would
clearly await the patient from seeing him after a little and at the
perfect proper moment. It was to be that of Mr. Betterman's competent
choice: he lay there as just for the foretaste of it, which was wholly
tranquillising, and could be trusted--what else did doctor and nurse
engage for?--to know the psychological hour on its striking and then, to
complete felicity, have his visitor introduced. His present mere
assurance of the visitor was in short so agreeable to him, and by the
same token to Doctor Hatch himself--which was above all what the latter
had conveyed--that the implication of the agreeable to Graham in return
might fairly have been some imponderable yet ever so sensible tissue,
voluminous interwoven gold and silver, flung as a mantle over his
shoulders while he went. Gray had never felt around him any like
envelope whatever; so that on his looking forth at all the candid
clearness--which struck him too, ever so amusingly, as even more candid
when occasionally and aggressively, that is residentially, obstructed
than when not--what he inwardly and fantastically compared it to was
some presented quarto page, vast and fair, ever so distinctly printed
and ever so unexpectedly vignetted, of a volume of which the leaves
would be turned for him one by one and with no more trouble on his own
part than when a friendly service beside him at the piano, where he so
often sat, relieved him, from sheet to sheet, of touching his score.

Wasn't he thus now again "playing," as it had been a lifelong resource
to him to play in that other posture?--a question promoted by the way
the composition suddenly broke into the vividest illustrational figure,
that of a little man encountered on one of his turns of the verandah and
who, affecting him at first as a small waiting and watching, an almost
crouching gnome, the neat domestic goblin of some old Germanic, some
harmonised, familiarised legend, sat and stared at him from the depths
of an arrested rocking-chair after a fashion nothing up to then had led
him to preconceive. This was a different note from any yet, a queer,
sharp, hard particle in all the softness; and it was sensible too, oddly
enough, that the small force of their concussion but grew with its
coming over him the next moment that he simply had before him Rosanna
Gaw's prodigious parent. _Of course_ it was Mr. Gaw, whom he had never
seen, and of whom Rosanna in the old time had so little talked; her
mother alone had talked of him in those days, and to his own mother
only--with whom Gray had indeed himself afterwards talked not a little;
but the intensity of the certitude came not so much by any plain as by
quite the most roundabout presumption, the fact of his always having
felt that she required some strange accounting for, and that here was
the requirement met by just the ripest revelation. She had been involved
in something, produced by something, intimately pressing upon her and
yet as different as possible from herself; and here was the concentrated
difference--which showed him too, with each lapsing second, its quality
of pressure. Abel Gaw struck him in this light as very finely blanched,
as somehow squeezed together by the operation of an inward energy or
necessity, and as animated at the same time by the conviction that,
should he sit there long enough and still enough, the young man from
Europe, known to be on the premises, might finally reward his curiosity.
Mr. Gaw was curiosity embodied--Gray was by the end of the minute
entirely assured of that; it in fact quite seemed to him that he had
never yet in all his life caught the prying passion so shamelessly in
the act. Shamelessly, he was afterwards to remember having explained to
himself, because his sense of the reach of the sharp eyes in the small
white face, and of their not giving way for a moment before his own,
suggested to him, even if he could scarce have said why to that extent,
the act of listening at the door, at the very keyhole, of a room,
combined with the attempt to make it good under sudden detection.

So it was, at any rate, that our speculative friend, the impression of
the next turn of the case aiding, figured the extension, without forms,
without the shade of a form, of their unmitigated mutual glare. The
initiation of this exchange by the little old gentleman in the chair,
who gave for so long no sign of moving or speaking, couldn't but
practically determine in Graham's own face some resistance to the
purpose exhibited and for which it was clear no apology impended. By the
time he had recognised that his presence was in question for Mr. Gaw
with such an intensity as it had never otherwise, he felt, had the
benefit of, however briefly, save under some offered gage or bribe, he
had also made out that no "form" would survive for twenty seconds in any
close relation with the personage, and that if ever he had himself known
curiosity as to what might happen when manners were consistently enough
ignored it was a point on which he should at once be enlightened. His
fellow-visitor, of whose being there Doctor Hatch and Miss Mumby were
presumably unaware, continued to ignore everything but the opportunity
he enjoyed and the certainty that Graham would contribute to it--which
certainty made in fact his profit. The profit, that is, couldn't
possibly fail unless Gray should turn his back and walk off; which was
of course possible, but would then saddle Gray himself with the
repudiation of forms: so that--yes, infallibly--in proportion as the
young man _had_ to be commonly civil would Mr. Gaw's perhaps unholy
satisfaction of it be able to prevail. The young man had taken it home
that he couldn't simply stare long enough for successful defence by the
time that, presently moving nearer, he uttered his adversary's name with
no intimation of a doubt. Mr. Gaw failed. Gray was afterwards to inform
Rosanna, "to so much as take this up"; he was left with everything on
his hands but the character of his identity, the indications of his
face, the betrayals he should so much less succeed in suppressing than
his adversary would succeed in reading them. The figure presented hadn't
stirred from his posture otherwise than by a motion of eye just
perceptible as Graham moved; it was drinking him in, our hero felt, and
by this treatment of the full cup, continuously applied to the lips,
stillness was of course imposed. It didn't again so much as recognise,
by any sign given, Graham's remark that an acquaintance with Miss Gaw
from of old involved naturally _their_ acquaintance: there was no
question of Miss Gaw, her friend found himself after another minute
divining, as there was none of objects or appearances immediately there
about them; the question was of something a thousand times more relevant
and present, of something the interloper's silence, far more than
breathed words could have done, represented the fond hope of mastering.

Graham thus held already, by the old man's conviction, a secret of high
value, yet which, with the occasion stretched a little, would
practically be at his service--so much as that at least, with the
passage of another moment, he had concluded to; and all the while, in
the absurdest way, without his guessing, without his at all measuring,
his secret himself. Mr. Gaw fairly made him want to--want, that is, as a
preliminary or a stopgap, to guess what it had best, most desirably and
most effectively, become; for shouldn't he positively _like_ to have
something of the sort in order just to disoblige this gentleman? Strange
enough how it came to him at once as a result of the father's refusal of
attention to any connection he might have glanced at with the daughter,
strange enough how it came to him, under the first flush of heat he had
known since his arrival, that two could play at such a game and that if
Rosanna's interests were to be so slighted her relative himself should
miss even the minimum of application as one of them. "He must have
wanted to know, he must have wanted to know----!" this young woman was
on a later day to have begun to explain; without going on, however,
since by that time Gray had rather made out, the still greater rush of
his impressions helping, the truth of Mr. Gaw's desire. It bore, that
appetite, upon a single point and, daughter or no daughter, on nothing
else in the world--the question of what Gray's "interest," in the light
of his uncle's intentions, might size up to; those intentions having, to
the Gaw imagination, been of course apprehensible on the spot, and
within the few hours that had lapsed, by a nephew even of but
rudimentary mind. At the present hour meanwhile, short of the miracle
which our friend's counter-scrutiny alone could have brought about,
there worked for this young intelligence, and with no small sharpness,
the fact itself of such a revealed relation to the ebb of their host's
life--upon which was thrust the appearance of its being, watch in hand,
all impatiently, or in other words all offensively, timed. The very air
at this instant tasted to Gray, quite as if something under his tongue
had suddenly turned from the sweet to the appreciably sour, of an
assumption diffused through it in respect to the rudiments of mind. He
was afterwards to date the breaking-in upon him of the general measure
of the smallest vision of business a young man might self-respectingly
confess to from Mr. Gaw's extraordinary tacit "Oh come, you can't fool
_me_: don't I know you know what I want to know--don't I know what it
must mean for you to have been here since six o'clock this morning with
nothing whatever else to do than just to take it in?"

That was it--Gray was to have taken in the more or less definite value
involved for him in his uncle's supposedly near extinction, and was to
be capable, if not of expressing it on the spot in the only terms in
which a value of any sort could exist for this worthy, yet still at
least of liability to such a betrayal as would yield him something to
conclude upon. It was only afterwards, once more, that our young man was
to master the logic of the conclusive as it prevailed for Mr. Gaw; what
concerned his curiosity was to settle whether or no they were in
presence together of a really big fact--distinguishing as the Gaw mind
did among such dimensions and addressed as it essentially was to a
special question--a question as yet unrecognised by Gray. He was
subsequently to have his friend's word to go upon--when, in the
extraordinary light of Rosanna's explication, he read clear what he had
been able on the verandah but half to glimmer out: the queer truth of
Mr. Gaw's hunger to learn to what extent he had anciently, to what
degree he had irremediably, ruined his whilom associate. He didn't
know--so strange was it, at the time and since, that, thanks to the way
Mr. Betterman had himself fixed things, he couldn't be sure; but what he
wanted, and what he hung about so displeasingly to sniff up the least
stray sign of, was a confirmation of his belief that Doctor Hatch's and
Miss Mumby's patient had never really recovered from the wound of years
before. They were nursing him now for another complaint altogether, this
one admittedly such as must, with but the scantest further reprieve,
dispose of him; whereas doubts were deep, as Mr. Gaw at least
entertained them, as to whether the damage he supposed his own just
resentment to have inflicted when propriety and opportunity combined to
inspire him was amenable even to nursing the most expert or to
medication the most subtle. These mysteries of calculation were of
course impenetrable to Gray during the moments at which we see him so
almost indescribably exposed at once and reinforced; but the effect of
the sharper and sharper sense as of a spring pressed by his companion
was that a _whole_ consciousness suddenly welled up in him and that
within a few more seconds he had become aware of a need absolutely
adverse to any trap that might be laid for his candour. He could as
little have then said why as he could vividly have phrased it under the
knowledge to come, but that his mute interlocutor desired somehow their
association in a judgment of what his uncle was "worth," a judgment from
which a comparatively conceited nephew might receive an incidental
lesson, played through him as a certitude and produced quite another
inclination. That recognition of the pleasant on which he had been
floating affirmed itself as in the very face of so embodied a pretension
to affirm the direct opposite, to thrust up at him in fine a horrid
contradiction--a contradiction which he next heard himself take, after
the happiest fashion, the straightest way to rebut.

"I'm sure you'll be glad to know that I seem to be doing my uncle a
tremendous lot of good. They tell me I'm really bringing him round"--and
Graham smiled down at little blanched Mr. Gaw. "I don't despair at all
of his getting much better."

It was on this that for the first time Mr. Gaw became articulate.
"Better----?" he strangely quavered, and as if his very eyes questioned
such conscious flippancy.

"Why yes--through cheering him up. He takes, I gather," Gray went on,
"as much pleasure as I do----!" His assurance, however, had within the
minute dropped a little--the effect of it might really reach, he
apprehended, beyond his idea. The old man had been odd enough, but now
of a sudden he looked sick, and that one couldn't desire.

"'Pleasure'----?" he was nevertheless able to echo; while it struck Gray
that no sound so weak had ever been so sharp, or none so sharp ever so
weak. "Pleasure in dying----?" Mr. Gaw asked in this flatness of doubt.

"But my dear sir," said Gray, his impulse to be jaunty still
nevertheless holding out a little, "but, my dear sir, if, as it strikes
me, he isn't dying----?"

"Oh twaddle!" snapped Mr. Gaw with the emphasis of his glare--shifted a
moment, Gray next saw, to a new object in range. Gray felt himself even
before turning for it rejoined by Miss Mumby, who, rounding the corner
of the house, had paused as in presence of an odd conjunction; not made
the less odd moreover by Mr. Gaw's instant appeal to her. "You think he
ain't then going to----?"

He had to leave it at that, but Miss Mumby supplied, with the loudest
confidence, what appeared to be wanted. "He ain't going to get better?
Oh we hope so!" she declared to Graham's delight.

It helped him to contribute in his own way. "Mr. Gaw's surprise seems
for his holding out!"

"Oh I guess he'll hold out," Miss Mumby was pleased to say.

"Then if he ain't dying what's the fuss about?" Mr. Gaw wanted to know.

"Why there ain't any fuss--but what you seem to make," Miss Mumby could
quite assure him.

"Oh well, if you answer for it----!" He got up on this, though with an
alertness that, to Gray's sense, didn't work quite truly, and stood an
instant looking from one of his companions to the other, while our young
man's eyes, for their part, put a question to Miss Mumby's--a question
which, articulated, would have had the sense of "What on earth's the
matter with him?" There seemed no knowing how Mr. Gaw would take
things--as Miss Mumby, for that matter, appeared also at once to
reflect.

"We're sure enough not to want to have you sick too," she declared
indeed with more cheer than apprehension; to which she added, however,
to cover all the ground, "You just leave Mr. Betterman to us and take
care of yourself. We never say die and we won't have you say it--either
about him or anyone else, Mr. Gaw."

This gentleman, so addressed, straightened and cleared himself in such a
manner as to show that he saw, for the moment, Miss Mumby's point; which
he then, a wondrous small concentration of studied blankness--studied,
that is, his companions were afterwards both to show they had
felt--commemorated his appreciation of in a tiny, yet triumphant, "Well,
that's all right!"

"It ain't so right but what I'm going to see you home," Miss Mumby
returned with authority; adding, however, for Graham's benefit, that she
had come down to tell him his uncle was now ready. "You just go right
up--you'll find Miss Goodenough there. And you'll see for yourself," she
said, "how fresh he is!"

"Thanks--that will be beautiful!" Gray brightly responded; but with his
eyes on Mr. Gaw, whom of a sudden, somehow, he didn't like to leave.

It at any rate determined on the little man's part a surprised inquiry.
"Then you haven't seen him yet--with your grand account of him?"

"No--but the account," Gray smiled, "has an authority beyond mine.
Besides," he kept on after this gallant reference, "I feel what I shall
do for him."

"Oh they'll have great times!"--Miss Mumby, with an arm at the old man's
service, bravely guaranteed it. But she also admonished Graham: "Don't
keep him waiting, and mind what Miss Goodenough tells you! So now, Mr.
Gaw--you're to mind _me!_" she concluded; while this subject of her more
extemporised attention so far complied as slowly to face with her in the
direction of the other house. Gray wondered about him, but immensely
trusted Miss Mumby, and only watched till he saw them step off together
to the lawn, Mr. Gaw independent of support, with something in his
consciously stiffened even if not painfully assumed little air, as noted
thus from behind, that quite warranted his protectress. Seen that way,
yes, he was a tremendous little person; and Gray, excited, immensely
readvised and turning accordingly to his own business, felt the assault
of impressions fairly shake him as he went--shake him though it
apparently seemed most capable of doing but to the effect of hilarity.




II


Whether or no by its so different appearance from that of Mr. Gaw, the
figure propped on pillows in the vast cool room and lighted in such a
way that the clear deepening west seemed to flush toward it, through a
wide high window, in the interest of its full effect, impressed our
young man as massive and expansive, as of a beautiful bland dignity
indeed--though emulating Rosanna's relative, he was at first to gather,
by a perfect readiness to stare rather than speak. Miss Goodenough had
hovered a little, for full assurance, but then had thrown off with a
_timbre_ of voice never yet used for Gray's own ear in any sick room,
"Well, I guess you won't come to blows!" and had left them face to
face--besides leaving the air quickened by the freedom of her humour.
They were face to face for the time across an interval which, to do her
justice, she had not taken upon herself to deal with directly; this in
spite of Gray's apprehension at the end of a minute that she might, by
the touch of her hand or the pitch of her spirit, push him further
forward than he had immediately judged decent to advance. He had stopped
at a certain distance from the great grave bed, stopped really for
consideration and deference, or through the instinct of submitting
himself first of all to approval, or at least to encouragement; the
space, not great enough for reluctance and not small enough for
presumption, showed him ready to obey any sign his uncle should make.
Mr. Betterman struck him, in this high quietude of contemplation, much
less as formidable than as mildly and touchingly august; he had not
supposed him, he became suddenly aware, so great a person--a presence
like that of some weary veteran of affairs, one of the admittedly
eminent whose last words would be expected to figure in history. The
large fair face, rather square than heavy, was neither clouded nor
ravaged, but finely serene; the silver-coloured hair seemed to bind the
broad high brow as with a band of splendid silk, while the eyes rested
on Gray with an air of acceptance beyond attestation by the mere play of
cheer or the comparative gloom of relief.

"Ah le beau type, le beau type!" was during these instants the visitor's
inward comment breaking into one of the strange tongues that experience
had appointed him privately to use, in many a case, for the
appropriation of aspects and appearances. It was not till afterwards
that he happened to learn how his uncle had been capable, two or three
hours before seeing him, of offering cheek and chin to the deft
ministration of a barber, a fact highly illuminating, though by that
time the gathered lights were thick. What the patient owed on the spot
to the sacrifice, he easily made out, was that look as of the last
refinement of preparation, that positive splendour of the immaculate,
which was really, on one's taking it all in, but part of an earnest
recognition of his guest's own dignity. The grave beauty of the personal
presence, the vague anticipation as of something that might go on to be
commemorated for its example, the great pure fragrant room, bathed in
the tempered glow of the afternoon's end, the general lucidity and
tranquillity and security of the whole presented case, begot in fine, on
our young friend's part, an extraordinary sense that as he himself was
important enough to be on show, so these peculiar perfections that met
him were but so many virtual honours rendered and signs of the high
level to which he had mounted. On show, yes--that was it, and more
wonderfully than could be said: Gray was sure after a little of how
right he was to stand off as yet in any interest of his own significance
that might be involved. There was clearly something his uncle so wanted
him to be that he should run no possible danger of being it to excess,
and that if he might only there and then grasp it he would ask but to
proceed, for decency's sake, according to his lights: just as so short a
time before a like force of suggestion had played upon him from Mr.
Gaw--each of these appeals clothing him in its own way with such an
oddity of pertinence, such a bristling set of attributes. This wait of
the parties to the present one for articulate expression, on either
side, of whatever it was that might most concern them together, promised
also to last as the tension had lasted down on the verandah, and would
perhaps indeed have drawn itself further out if Gray hadn't broken where
he stood into a cry of admiration--since it could scarcely be called
less--that blew to the winds every fear of overstepping.

"It's really worth one's coming so far, uncle, if you don't mind my
saying so--it's really worth a great pilgrimage to see anything so
splendid."

The old man heard, clearly, as by some process that was still deeply
active; and then after a pause that represented, Gray was sure, no
failure at all of perception, but only the wide embrace of a possibility
of pleasure, sounded bravely back: "Does it come up to what you've
seen?"

It was Gray rather who was for a moment mystified--though only to
further spontaneity when he had caught the sense of the question. "Oh,
you come up to everything--by which I mean, if I may, that nothing comes
up to _you!_ I mean, if I may," he smiled, "that you yourself, uncle,
affect me as the biggest and most native American impression that I can
possibly be exposed to."

"Well," said Mr. Betterman, and again as with a fond deliberation, "what
I'm going to like, I see, is to listen to the way you talk. That," he
added with his soft distinctness, a singleness of note somehow for the
many things meant, "that, I guess, is about what I most wanted you to
come for. Unless it be to look at you too. I like to look right at you."

"Well," Gray harmoniously laughed again, "if even that can give you
pleasure----!" He stood as for inspection, easily awkward, pleasantly
loose, holding up his head as if to make the most of no great stature.
"I've never been so sorry that there isn't more of me."

The fine old eyes on the pillow kept steadily taking him in; he could
quite see that he happened to be, as he might have called it, right; and
though he had never felt himself, within his years, extraordinarily or
excitingly wrong, so that this felicity might have turned rather flat
for him, there was still matter for emotion, for the immediate throb and
thrill, in finding success so crown him. He had been spared, thank
goodness, any positive shame, but had never known his brow brushed or so
much as tickled by the laurel or the bay. "Does it mean," he might have
murmured to himself, "the strangest shift of standards?"--but his uncle
had meanwhile spoken. "Well, there's all of you I'm going to want. And
there must be more of you than I see. Because you _are_ different," Mr.
Betterman considered.

"But different from what?" Truly was Gray interested to know.

It took Mr. Betterman a moment to say, but he seemed to convey that it
might have been guessed. "From what you'd have been if you had come."

The young man was indeed drawn in. "If I had come years ago? Well,
perhaps," he so far happily agreed--"for I've often thought of that
myself. Only, you see," he laughed, "I'm different from _that_ too. I
mean from what I was when I didn't come."

Mr. Betterman looked at it quietly. "You're different in the sense that
you're older--and you seem to me rather older than I supposed. All the
better, all the better," he continued to make out. "You're the same
person I didn't tempt, the same person I _couldn't_--that time when I
tried. I see you are, I see _what_ you are."

"You see terribly much, sir, for the few minutes!" smiled Gray.

"Oh when I _want_ to see----!" the old man comfortably enough sighed. "I
take you in, I take you in; though I grant that I don't quite see how
you can understand. Still," he pursued, "there are things for you to
tell me. You're different from _anything_, and if we had time for
particulars I should like to know a little how you've kept so. I was
afraid you wouldn't turn out perhaps so thoroughly the sort of thing I
liked to think--for I hadn't much more to go upon than what _she_ said,
you know. However," Mr. Betterman wound up as with due comfort, "it's by
what she says that I've gone--and I want her to know that I don't feel
fooled."

If Gray's wonderment could have been said to rest anywhere, hour after
hour, long enough to be detected in the act, the detaining question
would have been more than any other perhaps that of whether Miss Gaw
would "come up." Now that she did so however, in this quiet way, it had
no strangeness that his being at once glad couldn't make but a mouthful
of; and the recent interest of what she had lately written to him was as
nothing to the interest of her becoming personally his uncle's theme.
With which, at the same time, it was pleasanter to him than anything
else to speak of her himself. "If you allude to Rosanna Gaw you'll no
doubt understand how tremendously I want to see her."

The sick man waited a little--but not, it quite seemed, from lack of
understanding. "She wants tremendously to see you, Graham. You might
know that of course from her going to work so." Then again he gathered
his thoughts and again after a little went on. "She had a good idea, and
I love her for it; but I'm afraid my own hasn't been so very much to
give _her_ the satisfaction. I've wanted it myself, and--well, here I am
getting it from you. Yes," he kept up, his eyes never moving from his
nephew, "you couldn't give me more if you had tried, from so far back,
on purpose. But I can't tell you half!" He exhaled a long breath--he was
a little spent. "You tell _me._ You tell _me._"

"I'm tiring you, sir," Gray said.

"Not by letting me see--you'd only tire me if you didn't." Then for the
first time his eyes glanced about. "Haven't they put a place for you to
sit? Perhaps they knew," he suggested, while Gray reached out for a
chair, "perhaps they knew just how I'd want to see you. There seems
nothing they don't know," he contentedly threw off again.

Gray had his chair before him, his hands on the back tilting it a
little. "They're extraordinary. I've never seen anything like them. They
help me tremendously," he cheerfully confessed.

Mr. Betterman, at this, seemed to wonder. "Why, have you difficulties?"

"Well," said Gray, still with his chair, "you say I'm different--if you
mean it for my being alien from what I feel surrounding me. But if you
knew how funny all _that_ seems to me," he laughed, "you'd understand
that I clutch at protection."

"'Funny'?"--his host was clearly interested, without offence, in the
term.

"Well," Gray explained, gently shaking his chair-back, "when one simply
sees that nothing of one's former experience serves, and that one
doesn't know anything about anything----!"

More than ever at this his uncle's look might have covered him.
"Anything round here--no! That's it, that's it," the old man blandly
repeated. "That's just the way--I mean the way I hoped. _She_ knows you
don't know--and doesn't want you to either. But put down your chair," he
said; and then after, when Gray, instantly and delicately complying, had
placed the precious article with every precaution back where it had
stood: "Sit down here on the bed. There's margin."

"Yes," smiled Gray, doing with all consideration as he was told, "you
don't seem anywhere very much _à l'étroit._"

"I presume," his uncle returned, "you know French thoroughly."

Gray confessed to the complication. "Of course when one has heard it
almost from the cradle----!"

"And the other tongues too?"

He seemed to wonder if, for his advantage, he mightn't deny them. "Oh a
couple of others. In the countries there they come easy."

"Well, they wouldn't have come easy here--and I guess nothing else
would; I mean of the things _we_ principally grow. And I won't have you
tell me," Mr. Betterman said, "that if you had taken that old chance
they might have done so. We don't know anything about it, and at any
rate it would have spoiled you. I mean for what you _are._"

"Oh," returned Gray, on the bed, but pressing lightly, "oh what I
'am'----!"

"My point isn't so much for what you are as for what you're not. So I
won't have anything else; I mean I won't have you but as I want you,"
his host explained. "I want you just this way."

With which, while the young man kept his arms folded and his hands
tucked away as for compression of his personal extent and weight, they
exchanged, at their close range, the most lingering look yet.
Extraordinary to him, in the gravity of this relation, his deeper
impression of something beautiful and spreadingly clear--very much as if
the wide window and the quiet clean sea and the finer sunset light had
all had, for assistance and benediction, their word to say to it. They
seemed to combine most to remark together "What an exquisite person is
your uncle!" This is what he had for the minute the sense of taking from
them, and the expression of his assent to it was in the tone of his next
rejoinder. "If I could only know what it is you'd most like----!"

"Never mind what I most like--only tell me, only tell me," his companion
again said: "You can't say anything that won't absolutely suit me; in
fact I defy you to, though you mayn't at all see why that's the case.
I've got you--without a flaw. So!" Mr. Betterman triumphantly breathed.
Gray's sense was by this time of his being examined and appraised as
never in his life before--very much as in the exposed state of an
important "piece," an object of value picked, for finer estimation, from
under containing glass. There was nothing then but to face it, unless
perhaps also to take a certain comfort in his being, as he might feel,
practically clean and in condition. That such an hour had its meaning,
and that the meaning might be great for him, this of course surged
softly in, more and more, from every point of the circle that held him;
but with the consciousness making also more at each moment for an
uplifting, a fantastic freedom, a sort of sublime simplification, in
which nothing seemed to depend on him or to have at any time so
depended. He was _really_ face to face thus with bright immensities, and
the handsome old presence from which, after a further moment, a hand had
reached forth a little to take his own, guaranteed by the quietest of
gestures at once their truth and the irrelevance, as he could only feel
it, of their scale. Cool and not weak, to his responsive grasp, this
retaining force, to which strength was added by what next came. "It's
not for myself, it's not for myself--I mean your being as I say. What do
I matter now except to have recognised it? No, Graham--it's in another
connection." Was the connection then with Rosanna? Graham had time to
wonder, and even to think what a big thing this might make of it, before
his uncle brought out: "It's for the world."

"The world?"--Gray's vagueness again reigned.

"Well, our great public."

"Oh your great public----!"

The exclamation, the cry of alarm, even if also of amusement in face of
such a connection as that, quickened for an instant the good touch of
the cool hand. "That's the way I like you to sound. It's the way she
told me you would--I mean that would be natural to you. And it's
precisely why--being the awful great public it is--we require the
difference that you'll make. So you see you're for our people."

Poor Graham's eyes widened. "I shall make a difference for your
people----?"

But his uncle serenely went on. "Don't think you know them yet, or what
it's like over here at all. You may think so and feel you're prepared.
But you don't know till you've had the whole thing up against you."

"May I ask, sir," Gray smiled, "what you're talking about?"

His host met his eyes on it, but let it drop. "You'll see soon enough
for yourself. Don't mind what I say. That isn't the thing for you
now--it's all done. Only be true," said Mr. Betterman. "You _are_ and,
as I've said, can't help yourself." With which he relapsed again to one
of his good conclusions. "And after all don't mind the public either."

"Oh," returned Gray, "all great publics are awful."

"Ah no no--I won't have that. Perhaps they may be, but the trouble we're
concerned with is about ours--and about some other things too." Gray
felt in the hand's tenure a small emphasizing lift of the arm, while the
head moved a little as off toward the world they spoke of--which
amounted for our young man, however, but to a glance at all the outside
harmony and prosperity, bathed as these now seemed in the colour of the
flushed sky. Absurd altogether that he should be in any way enlisted
against such things. His entertainer, all the same, continued to see the
reference and to point it. "The enormous preponderance of money. Money
is their life."

"But surely even here it isn't everyone who has it. Also," he freely
laughed, "isn't it a good thing to have?"

"A very good thing indeed." Then his uncle waited as in the longest
inspection yet. "But you don't know anything about it."

"Not about large sums," Gray cheerfully admitted.

"I mean it has never been near you. That sticks out of you--the way it
hasn't. I knew it couldn't have been--and then she told me she knew. I
see you're a blank--and nobody here's a blank, not a creature I've ever
touched. That's what I've wanted," the old man went on--"a perfect clean
blank. I don't mean there aren't heaps of them that are damned fools,
just as there are heaps of others, bigger heaps probably, that are
damned knaves; except that mostly the knave is the biggest fool. But
those are not blanks; they're full of the poison--without a blest other
idea. Now you're the blank I want, if you follow--and yet you're not the
blatant ass."

"I'm not sure I quite follow," Gray laughed, "but I'm very much
obliged."

"Have you ever done three cents' worth of business?" Mr. Betterman
judicially asked.

It helped our young man to some ease of delay. "Well, I'm afraid I can't
claim to have had much business to do. Also you're wrong, sir," he
added, "about my not being a blatant ass. Oh please understand that I am
a blatant ass. Let there be no mistake about that," Gray touchingly
pleaded.

"Yes--but not on the subject of anything but business."

"Well--no doubt on the subject of business more than on any other."

Still the good eyes rested. "Tell me one thing, other than that, for
which you haven't at least some intelligence."

"Oh sir, there are no end of things, and it's odd one should have to
prove that--though it would take me long. But I allow there's nothing I
understand so little and like so little as the mystery of the 'market'
and the hustle of any sort."

"You utterly loathe and abhor the hustle! That's what I blissfully want
of you," said Mr. Betterman.

"You ask of me the declaration----?" Gray considered. "But how can I
_know_, don't you see?--when I _am_ such a blank, when I've never had
three cents' worth of business, as you say, to transact?"

"The people who don't loathe it are always finding it somehow to do,
even if preposterously for the most part, and dishonestly. Your case,"
Mr. Betterman reasoned, "is that you haven't a grain of the imagination
of any such interest. If you _had_ had," he wound up, "it would have
stirred in you that first time."

Gray followed, as his kinsman called it, enough to be able to turn his
memory a moment on this. "Yes, I think my imagination, small scrap of a
thing as it was, did work then somehow against you."

"Which was exactly against business"--the old man easily made the point.
"I was business. I've _been_ business and nothing else in the world. I'm
business at this moment still--because I can't be anything else. I mean
I've such a head for it. So don't think you can put it on me that I
haven't thought out what I'm doing to good purpose. I do what I do but
too abominably well." With which he weakened for the first time to a
faint smile. "It's none of your affair."

"Isn't it a little my affair," Gray as genially objected, "to be more
touched than I can express by your attention to me--as well (if you'll
let me say so) as rather astonished at it?" And then while his host took
this without response, only engaged as to more entire repletion in the
steady measure of him, he added further, even though aware in sounding
it of the complacency or fatuity, of the particular absurdity, his
question might have seemed to embody: "What in the world can I want but
to meet you in every way?" His perception at last was full, the great
strange sense of everything smote his eyes; so that without the force of
his effort at the most general amenity possible his lids and his young
lips might have convulsively closed. Even for his own ear "What indeed?"
was thus the ironic implication--which he felt himself quite grimace to
show he should have understood somebody else's temptation to make. Here,
however, where his uncle's smile might pertinently have broadened, the
graver blandness settled again, leaving him in face of it but the more
awkwardly assured. He felt as if he couldn't say enough to abate the
ugliness of that--and perhaps it even did come out to the fact of beauty
that no profession of the decent could appear not to coincide with the
very candour of the greedy. "I'm prepared for anything, yes--in the way
of a huge inheritance": he didn't care if it _might_ sound like that
when he next went on, since what could he do but just melt to the whole
benignity? "If I only understood what it is I can best do for you."

"Do? The question isn't of your doing, but simply of your being."

Gray cast about. "But don't they come to the same thing?"

"Well, I guess that for you they'll have to. Yes, sir," Gray
answered--"but suppose I should say 'Don't keep insisting so on me'?"
Then he had a romantic flight which was at the same time, for that
moment at least, a sincere one. "I don't know that I came out so very
much for myself."

"Well, if you didn't it only shows the more what you are"--Mr. Betterman
made the point promptly. "It shows you've got the kind of imagination
that has nothing to do with the kind I so perfectly see you haven't. And
if you don't do things for yourself," he went on, "you'll be doing them
the more for just what I say." With which too, as Graham but pleadingly
gaped: "You'll be doing them for everyone else--that is finding it
impossible to do what they do. From the moment they notice that--well,
it will be what I want. We know, we know," he remarked further and as if
this quite settled it.

Any ambiguity in his "we" after an instant cleared up; he was to have
alluded but ever so sparely, through all this scene, to Rosanna Gaw, but
he alluded now, and again it had for Gray an amount of reference that
was like a great sum of items in a bill imperfectly scanned. None the
less it left him desiring still more clearness. His whole soul centred
at this point in the need not to have contributed by some confused
accommodation to a strange theory of his future. Strange he could but
feel this one to be, however simply, that is on however large and vague
an assumption, it might suit others, amid their fathomless resources and
their luxuries or perversities of waste, to see it. He wouldn't be
smothered in the vague, whatever happened, and had now the gasp and
upward shake of the head of a man in too deep water. "What I want to
insist on," he broke out with it, "is that I mustn't consent to any
exaggeration in the interest of your, or of any other, sublime view of
me, view of my capacity of any sort. There's no sublime view of me to be
taken that consorts in the least with any truth; and I should be a very
poor creature if I didn't here and now assure you that no proof in the
world exists, or has for a moment existed, of my being capable of
anything whatever."

He might have supposed himself for a little to have produced something
of the effect that would naturally attach to a due vividness in this
truth--for didn't his uncle now look at him just a shade harder, before
the fixed eyes closed, indeed, as under a pressure to which they had at
last really to yield? They closed, and the old white face was for the
couple of minutes so thoroughly still without them that a slight
uneasiness quickened him, and it would have taken but another moment to
make a slight sound, which he had to turn his head for the explanation
of, reach him as the response to an appeal. The door of the room,
opening gently, had closed again behind Miss Goodenough, who came
forward softly, but with more gravity, Gray thought, than he had
previously seen her show. Still in his place and conscious of the
undiminished freshness of her invalid's manual emphasis, he looked at
her for some opinion as to the latter's appearance, or to the move on
his own part next indicated; during which time her judgment itself,
considering Mr. Betterman, a trifle heavily waited. Gray's doubt, before
the stillness which had followed so great even if so undiscourageable an
effort, moved him to some play of disengagement; whereupon he knew
himself again checked, and there, once more, the fine old eyes rested on
him. "I'm afraid I've tired him out," he could but say to the nurse, who
made the motion to feel her patient's pulse without the effect of his
releasing his visitor. Gray's hand was retained still, but his kinsman's
eyes and next words were directed to Miss Goodenough.

"It's all right--even more so than I told you it was going to be."

"Why of course it's all right--you look too sweet together!" she
pronounced.

"But I mean I've got him; I mean I make him squirm"--which words had
somehow the richest gravity of any yet; "but all it does for his
resistance is that he squirms right _to_ me."

"Oh we won't have any resistance!" Miss Goodenough freely declared.
"Though for all the fight you've got in you still----!" she in fine
altogether backed Mr. Betterman.

He covered his nephew again as for a final or crushing appraisement,
then going on for Miss Goodenough's benefit: "He tried something a
minute ago to settle me, but I wish you could just have heard how he
expressed himself."

"It _is_ a pleasure to hear him--when he's good!" She laughed with a
shade of impatience.

"He's never so good as when he wants to be bad. So there you are, sir!"
the old man said. "You're like the princess in the fairy-tale; you've
only to open your mouth----"

"And the pearls and diamonds pop out!"--Miss Goodenough, for her
patient's relief, completed his meaning. "So don't try for toads and
snakes!" she promptly went on to Gray. To which she added with still
more point: "And now you must go."

"Not one little minute more?" His uncle still held him.

"Not one, sir!" Miss Goodenough decided.

"It isn't to talk," the old man explained. "I like just to look at him."

"So do I," said Miss Goodenough; "but we can't always do everything we
like."

"No then, Graham--remember that. You'd like to have persuaded me that I
don't know what I mean. But you must understand you haven't."

His hand had loosened, and Gray got up, turning a face now flushed and a
little disordered from one of them to the other. "I don't pretend to
understand anything!"

It turned his uncle to their companion. "Isn't he fine?"

"Of course he's fine," said Miss Goodenough; "but you've quite worn him
out."

"Have I quite worn you out?" Mr. Betterman calmly inquired.

As if indeed finished, each thumb now in a pocket of his trousers, the
young man dimly smiled. "I think you must have--quite."

"Well, let Miss Mumby look after you. He'll find her there?" his uncle
asked of her colleague. And then as the latter showed at this her first
indecision, "Isn't she somewhere round?" he demanded.

Miss Goodenough had wavered, but as if it really mattered for the friend
there present she responsibly concluded. "Well, no--just for a while."
And she appealed to Gray's indulgence. "She's had to go to Mr. Gaw."

"Why, is Mr. Gaw sick?" Mr. Betterman asked with detachment.

"That's what we shall know when she comes back. She'll come back all
right," she continued for Gray's encouragement.

He met it with proper interest. "I'm sure I hope so!"

"Well, don't be too sure!" his uncle judiciously said.

"Oh he has only borrowed her." Miss Goodenough smoothed it down even as
she smoothed Mr. Betterman's sheet, while with the same movement of her
head she wafted Gray to the door.

"Mr. Gaw," her patient returned, "has borrowed from me before. Mr. Gaw,
Graham----!"

"Yes sir?" said Gray with the door ajar and his hand on the knob.

The fine old presence on the pillow had faltered before expression; then
it appeared rather sighingly and finally to give the question up. "Well,
Mr. Gaw's an abyss."

Gray found himself suddenly responsive. "_Isn't_ he, the strange man?"

"The strange man--that's it." This summary description sufficed now to
Mr. Betterman's achieved indifference. "But you've seen him?"

"Just for an instant."

"And that was enough?"

"Well, I don't know." Gray himself gave it up. "You're _all_ so fiercely
interesting!"

"I think Rosanna's lovely!" Miss Good enough contributed, to all
appearance as an attenuation, while she tucked their companion in.

"Oh Miss Gaw's quite another matter," our young man still paused long
enough to reply.

"Well, I don't mean but what she's interesting in her way too," Miss
Goodenough's conscience prompted.

"Oh he knows all about her. That's all right," Mr. Betterman remarked
for his nurse's benefit.

"Why of course I know it," this lady candidly answered. "Miss Mumby and
I have had to feel that. I guess he'll want to send her his love," she
continued across to Gray.

"To Miss Mumby?" asked Gray, his general bewilderment having moments of
aggravation.

"Why no--_she's_ sure of his affection. To Miss Gaw. Don't you want,"
she inquired of her patient, "to send your love to that poor anxious
girl?"

"Is she anxious?" Gray returned in advance of his uncle.

Miss Goodenough hung fire but a moment. "Well, I guess I'd be in her
place. But you'll see.

"Then," said Gray to his host, "if Rosanna's in trouble I'll go to her
at once."

The old man, at this, once more delivered himself. "She won't be in
trouble--any more than I am. But tell her--tell her----!"

"Yes, sir"--Gray had again to wait.

But Miss Goodenough now would have no more of it. "Tell her that _we're_
about as fresh as we can live!"--the wave of her hand accompanying which
Gray could take at last for his dismissal.




III


It was nevertheless not at once that he sought out the way to find his
old friend; other questions than that of at once seeing her hummed for
the next half-hour about his ears--an interval spent by him in still
further contemplative motion within his uncle's grounds. He strolled and
stopped again and stared before him without seeing; he came and went and
sat down on benches and low rocky ledges only to get up and pace afresh;
he lighted cigarettes but to smoke them a quarter out and then chuck
them away to light others. He said to himself that he was enormously
agitated, agitated as never in his life before, but that, strangely
enough, he disliked that condition far less than the menace of it would
have made him suppose. He didn't, however, like it enough to say to
himself "This is happiness!"--as could scarcely have failed if the kind
of effect on his nerves had really consorted with the kind of advantage
that he was to understand his interview with his uncle to have promised
him; so far, that is, as he was yet to understand anything. His
after-sense of the scene expanded rather than settled, became an
impression of one of those great insistent bounties that are not of this
troubled world; the anomaly expressing itself in such beauty and
dignity, with all its elements conspiring together, as would have done
honour to a great page of literary, of musical or pictorial art. The
huge grace of the matter ought somehow to have left him simply
captivated--so at least, all wondering, he hung about there to reflect;
but excess of harmony might apparently work like excess of discord,
might practically be a negation of the idea of the quiet life. Ignoble
quiet he had never asked for--this he could now with assurance remember;
but something in the pitch of his uncle's guarantee of big things,
whatever they were, which should at the same time be pleasant things,
seemed to make him an accomplice in some boundless presumption. In what
light had he ever seen himself that made it proper the pleasant should
be so big for him or the big so pleasant? Suddenly, as he looked at his
watch and saw how the time had passed--time already, didn't it seem, of
his rather standing off and quaking?--it occurred to him that the last
thing he had proposed to himself in the whole connection was to be
either publicly or privately afraid; in the act of noting which he
became aware again of Miss Mumby, who, having come out of the house
apparently to approach him, was now at no great distance. She rose
before him the next minute as in fuller possession than ever of his
fate, and yet with no accretion of reserve in her own pleasure at this.

"What I want you to do is just to go over to Miss Gaw."

"It's just what _I_ should like, thank you--and perhaps you'll be so
good as to show me the way." He wasn't quite succeeding in not being
afraid--that a moment later came to him; since if this extraordinary
woman was in touch with his destiny what did such words on his own part
represent but the impulse to cling to her and, as who should say, keep
on her right side? His uncle had spoken to him of Rosanna as
protective--and what better warrant for such a truth than that here was
he thankful on the spot even for the countenance of a person speaking
apparently in her name? All of which was queer enough, verily--since it
came to the sense of his clutching for immediate light, through the now
gathered dusk, at the surge of guiding petticoats, the charity of women
more or less strange. Miss Mumby at once took charge of him, and he
learnt more things still before they had proceeded far. One of these
truths, though doubtless the most superficial, was that Miss Gaw
proposed he should dine with her just as he was--he himself recognising
that with her father suddenly and to all appearance gravely ill it was
no time for vain forms. Wasn't the rather odd thing, none the less, that
the crisis should have suggested her desiring company?--being as it was
so acute that the doctor, Doctor Hatch himself, would even now have
arrived with a nurse, both of which pair of ears Miss Mumby required for
her report of those symptoms in their new patient that had appealed to
her practised eye an hour before. Interesting enough withal was her
explanation to Gray of what she had noted on Mr. Gaw's part as a
consequence of her joining them at that moment under Mr. Betterman's
roof; all the more that he himself had then wondered and
surmised--struck as he was with the effect on the poor man's nerves of
their visitor's announcement that her prime patient had brightened. Mr.
Gaw but too truly, our young man now learned, had taken that news
ill--as, given the state of his heart, any strong shock might determine
a bad aggravation. Such a shock Miss Mumby had, to her lively regret,
administered, though she called Gray's attention to the prompt and
intelligent action of her remorse. Feeling at once responsible she had
taken their extraordinary little subject in charge--with every care
indeed not to alarm him; to the point that, on his absolute refusal to
let her go home with him and his arresting a hack, on the public road,
which happened to come into view empty, the two had entered the vehicle
and she had not lost sight of him till, his earnest call upon his
daughter at Mrs. Bradham's achieved, he had been in effect restored to
his own house. His daughter, who lived with her eyes on his liability to
lapses, was now watching with him, and was well aware, Miss Mumby
averred, of what the crisis might mean; as to whose own due presence of
mind in the connection indeed how could there be better proof than this
present lucidity of her appeal to Mr. Betterman's guest on such a matter
as her prompt thought for sparing him delay?

"If she didn't want you to wait to dress, it can only be, I guess, to
make sure of seeing you before anything happens," his guide was at no
loss to remark; "and if she _can_ mention dinner while the old gentleman
is--well, _as_ he is--it shows she's not too beside herself to feel that
you'll at any rate want yours."

"Oh for mercy's sake don't talk of dinner!" Gray pulled up under the
influence of these revelations quite impatiently to request. "That's not
what I'm most thinking of, I beg you to believe, in the midst of such
prodigies and portents." They had crossed the small stretch of road
which separated Mr. Betterman's gate from that of the residence they
were addressed to; and now, within the grounds of this latter, which
loomed there, through vague boskages, with an effect of windows
numerously and precipitately lighted, the forces of our young friend's
consciousness were all in vibration at once. "My wondrous uncle, I don't
mind telling you, since you're so kind to me, has given me more
extraordinary things to think of than I see myself prepared in any way
to do justice to; and if I'm further to understand you that we have
between us, you and I, destroyed this valuable life, I leave you to
judge whether what we may have to face in consequence finds me eager."

"How do you know it's such a valuable life?" Miss Mumby surprisingly
rejoined; sinking that question, however, in a livelier interest, before
his surprise could express itself. "If she has sent me for you it's
because she knows what she's about, and because I also know what I
am--so that, wanting you myself so much to come, I guess I'd have gone
over for you on my own responsibility. Why, Mr. Fielder, your place is
right here _by_ her at such a time as this, and if you don't already
realise it I'm very glad I've helped you."

Such was the consecration under which, but a few minutes later, Gray
found himself turning about in the lamp-lit saloon of the Gaws very much
as he had a few hours before revolved at the other house. Miss Mumby had
introduced him into this apartment straight from the terrace to which,
in the warm air, a long window or two stood open, and then had left him
with the assurance that matters upstairs would now be in shape for their
friend to join him at once. It was perhaps because he had rather
inevitably expected matters upstairs--and this in spite of his late
companion's warning word--to assault him in some fulness with Miss Gaw's
appearance at the door, that a certain failure of any such effect when
she did appear had for him a force, even if it was hardly yet to be
called a sense, beyond any air of her advancing on the tide of pain. He
fairly took in, face to face with her, that what she first called for
was no rattle of sound, however considerately pitched, about the
question of her own fear; she had pulled no long face, she cared for no
dismal deference: she but stood there, after she had closed the door
with a backward push that took no account, in the hushed house, of some
possible resonance, she but stood there smiling in her mild extravagance
of majesty, smiling and smiling as he had seen women do as a preface to
bursting into tears. He was to remember afterwards how he had felt for
an instant that whatever he said or did would deprive her of resistance
to an inward pressure which was growing as by the sight of him, but that
she would thus break down much more under the crowned than under the
menaced moment--thanks to which appearance what could be stranger than
his inviting her to clap her hands? Still again was he later to recall
that these hands had been the moment after held in his own while he knew
himself smiling too and saying: "Well, well, well, what wonders and what
splendours!" and seeing that though there was even more of her in
presence than he had reckoned there was somehow less of her in time; as
if she had at once grown and grown and grown, grown in all sorts of ways
save the most natural one of growing visibly older. Such an oddity as
that made her another person a good deal more than her show of not
having left him behind by any break with their common youth could keep
her the same.

These perceptions took of course but seconds, with yet another on their
heels, to the effect that she had already seen him, and seen him to some
fine sense of pleasure, as himself enormously different--arriving at
that clearness before they had done more than thus waver between the
"fun," all so natural, of their meeting as the frankest of friends and
the quite other intelligence of their being parties to a crisis. It was
to remain on record for him too, and however over-scored, that their
crisis, surging up for three or four minutes by its essential force,
suffered them to stand there, with irrelevant words and motions, very
much as if it were all theirs alone and nobody's else, nobody's more
important, on either side, than they were, and so take a brush from the
wing of personal romance. He let her hands go, and then, if he wasn't
mistaken, held them afresh a moment in repeated celebration, he
exchanged with her the commonest remarks and the flattest and the
easiest, so long as it wasn't speaking but seeing, and seeing more and
more, that mattered: they literally talked of his journey and his
arrival and of whether he had had a good voyage and wasn't tired; they
said "You sit here, won't you?" and "Shan't you be better there?"--they
said "Oh I'm all right!" and "Fancy it's happening after all like this!"
before there even faintly quavered the call of a deeper note. This was
really because the deep one, from minute to minute, was that acute hush
of her so clearly finding him not a bit what she might have built up. He
had grown and grown just as she had, certainly; only here he was for her
clothed in the right interest of it, not bare of that grace as he
fancied her guessing herself in his eyes, and with the conviction
sharply thrust upon him, beyond any humour he might have cultivated,
that he was going to be so right for her and so predetermined, whatever
he did and however he should react there under conditions incalculable,
that this would perhaps more overload his consciousness than ease it. It
could have been further taken for strange, had there been somebody so to
note it, that even when their first vaguenesses dropped what she really
at once made easiest for him was to tell her that _the_ wonderful thing
had come to pass, the thing she had whisked him over for--he put it to
her that way; that it had taken place in conditions too exquisite to be
believed, and that under the bewilderment produced by these she must
regard him as still staggering.

"Then it's done, then it's done--as I knew it would be if he could but
see you." Flushed, but with her large fan held up so that scarce more
than her eyes, their lids drawn together in the same nearsighted way he
remembered, presented themselves over it, she fairly hunched her high
shoulders higher for emphasis of her success. The more it might have
embarrassed her to consider him without reserve the more she had this
relief, as he took it, of her natural, her helpful blinking; so that
what it came to really for her general advantage was that the fine
closing of the eyes, _the_ fine thing in her big face, but expressed
effective scrutiny. Below her in stature--as various other men, for that
matter, couldn't but be--he hardly came higher than her ear; and he for
the shade of an instant struck himself as a small boy, literally not of
man's estate, reporting, under some research, just to the amplest of
mothers. He had reported to Mr. Betterman, so far as intent candour in
him hadn't found itself distraught, and for the half hour had somehow
affronted the immeasurable; but that didn't at all prevent his now quick
sense of his never in his life having been so watched and waited upon by
the uncharted infinite, or so subject to its operation--since
infinities, at the rate he was sinking in, _could_ apparently operate,
and do it too without growing smaller for the purpose. He cast about,
not at all upright on the small pink satin sofa to which he had
unconsciously dropped; it was for _him_ clearly to grow bigger, as
everything about expressively smiled, smiled absolutely through the
shadow cast by doctors and nurses again, in suggestion of; which,
naturally, was what one would always want to do--but which any failure
of, he after certain moments perfectly felt, wouldn't convert to the
least difference for this friend. How could that have been more
established than by her neglect of his having presently said, out of his
particular need, that he would do anything in reason that was asked of
him, but that he fairly ached with the desire to understand----? She
blinked upon his ache to her own sufficiency, no doubt; but no further
balm dropped upon it for the moment than by her appearing to brood with
still deeper assurance, in her place and her posture, on the beauty of
the accomplished fact, the fact of her performed purpose and her freedom
now but to take care--yes, herself take care--for what would come of it.
She might understand that _he_ didn't--all the way as yet; but nothing
could be more in the line of the mild and mighty mother than her
treating that as a trifle. It attenuated a little perhaps, it just let
light into the dark warmth of her spreading possession of what she had
done, that when he had said, as a thing already ten times on his lips
and now quite having to come out, "I feel some big mistake about me
somehow at work, and want to stop it in time!" she met this with the
almost rude decision of "There's nothing you can stop now, Graham, for
your fate, or our situation, has the gained momentum of a rush that
began ever so far away and that has been growing and growing. It would
be too late even if we wanted to--and you can judge for yourself how
little that's my wish. So here we are, you see, to make the best of it."

"When you talk of my 'fate,'" he allowed himself almost the amusement of
answering, "you freeze the current of my blood; but when you say 'our
situation,' and that we're in it together, that's a little better, and I
assure you that I shall not for a moment stay in anything, whatever it
may be, in which you're not close beside me. So there you are at any
rate--and I matter at least as much as this, whatever the mistake: that
I have hold of you as tight as ever you've been held in your life, and
that, whatever and _whatever_ the mistake, you've got to see me
through."

"Well, I took my responsibility years ago, and things came of it"--so
she made reply; "and the other day I took this other, and now _this_ has
come of it, and that was what I wanted, and wasn't afraid of, and am not
afraid of now--like the fears that came to me after the Dresden time."
No more direct than that was her answer to his protest, and what she
subjoined still took as little account of it. "I rather lost them, those
old fears--little by little; but one of the things I most wanted the
other day was to see whether before you here they wouldn't wholly die
down. They're over, they're over," she repeated; "I knew three minutes
of you would do it--and not a ghost of them remains."

"I can't be anything but glad that you shouldn't have fears--and it's
horrid to me to learn, I assure you," he said, "that I've ever been the
occasion of any. But the extent to which," he then frankly laughed,
"'three minutes' of me seems to be enough for people----!"

He left it there, just throwing up his arms, passive again as he had
accepted his having to be in the other place; but conscious more and
more of the anomaly of her showing so markedly at such an hour a
preoccupation, and of the very intensest, that should not have her
father for its subject. Nothing could have more represented this than
her abruptly saying to him, without recognition of his point just made,
so far as it might have been a point: "If your impression of your uncle,
and of his looking so fine and being so able to talk to you, makes you
think he has any power really to pick up or to last, I want you to know
that you're wholly mistaken. It has kept him up," she went on, "and the
effect may continue a day or two more--it _will_, in fact, till certain
things are done. But then the flicker will have dropped--for he won't
want it not to. He'll feel all right. The extraordinary inspiration, the
borrowed force, will have spent itself--it will die down and go out, but
with no pain. There has been at no time much of that," she said, "and
now I'm positively assured there's none. It can't come back--nothing can
but the weakness. It's too lovely," she remarkably added--"so there
indeed and indeed we are."

To take in these words was to be, after a fashion he couldn't have
expressed, on a basis of reality with her the very rarest and queerest;
so that, bristling as it did with penetrative points, her speech left
him scarce knowing for the instant which penetrated furthest. That she
made no more of anything he himself said than if she had just sniffed it
as a pale pink rose and then tossed it into the heap of his other sweet
futilities, such another heap as had seemed to grow up for him in his
uncle's room, this might have pressed sharpest hadn't something else,
not wholly overscored by what followed, perhaps pricked his
consciousness most. "'It,' you say, has kept him up? May I ask you what
'it' then may so wonderfully have been?"

She had no more objection to say than she apparently had difficulty.
"Why, his having let me get at him. _That_ was to make the whole
difference."

It was somehow as much in the note of their reality as anything could
well be; which was perhaps why he could but respond with "Oh I see!" and
remain lolling a little with a sense of flatness--a flatness moreover
exclusively his own.

So without flatness of _her_ own she didn't even mind his; something in
her brushed quite above it while she observed next, as if it were the
most important thing that now occurred to her: "That of course was my
poor father's mistake." And then as Gray but stared: "I mean the idea
that he _can_ pick up."

"It's your father's mistake that _he_ can----?"

She met it as if really a shade bewildered at his own misconception; she
was literally so far off from any vision of her parent in himself, a
philosopher might have said, that it took her an instant to do the
question justice. "Oh no--I mean that your uncle can. It was your own
report of that to him, with Miss Mumby backing you, that put things in
the bad light to him."

"So bad a light that Mr. Gaw is in danger by it?" This was catching on
of a truth to realities--and most of all to the one he had most to face.
"I've been then at the bottom of that?"

He was to wonder afterwards if she had very actually gone so far as to
let slip a dim smile for the intensity of his candour on this point, or
whether her so striking freedom from intensity in the general connection
had but suggested to him one of the images that were most in opposition.
Her answer at any rate couldn't have had more of the eminence of her
plainness. "That you yourself, after your uncertainties, should have
found Mr. Betterman surprising was perfectly natural--and how indeed
could you have dreamed that father so wanted him to die?" And then as
Gray, affected by the extreme salience of this link in the chain of her
logic, threw up his head a little for the catching of his breath, her
supreme lucidity, and which was lucidity all in his interest, further
shone out. "Father is indeed ill. He has had these bad times before, but
nothing quite of the present gravity. He has been in a critical state
for months, but one thing has kept him alive--the wish to see your uncle
so far on his way that there could be no doubt. It was the appearance of
doubt so suddenly this afternoon that gave him the shock." She continued
to explain the case without prejudice. "To take it there from you for
possible that Mr. Betterman might revive and that he should have in his
own so unsteady condition to wait was simply what father couldn't
stand."

"So that I just dealt the blow----?"

But it was as if she cared too little even to try to make that right.
"He doesn't want, you see, to live after."

"After having found he is mistaken?"

She had a faint impatience. "He isn't of course really--since what I
told you of your uncle is true. And he knows that now, having my word
for it."

Gray couldn't be clear enough about her clearness. "Your word for it
that my uncle has revived but for the moment?"

"Absolutely. Wasn't my giving him that," Rosanna asked, "a charming
filial touch?"

This was tremendously much again to take in, but Gray's capacity grew.
"Promising him, you mean, for his benefit, that my uncle _shan't_ last?"

The size of it on his lips might fairly, during the instant she looked
at him, have been giving her pleasure. "Yes, making it a bribe to
father's patience."

"Then why doesn't the bribe act?"

"Because it comes too late. It was amazing," she pursued, "that, feeling
as he did, he could take that drive to the Bradhams'--and Miss Mumby was
right in perfectly understanding that. The harm was already done--and
there it is."

She had truly for the whole reference the most astounding tones. "You
literally mean then," said Gray, "that while you sit here with me he's
dying--dying of my want of sense?"

"You've no want of sense"--she spoke as if this were the point really
involved. "You've a sense the most exquisite--and surely you had best
take in soon rather than late," she went on, "how you'll never be free
not to have on every occasion of life to reckon with it and pay for it."

"Oh I say!" was all the wit with which he could at once meet this
charge; but she had risen as she spoke and, with a remark about there
being another matter, had moved off to a piece of furniture at a
distance where she appeared to take something from a drawer unlocked
with a sharp snap for the purpose. When she returned to him she had this
object in her hand, and Gray recognised in it an oblong envelope,
addressed, largely sealed in black, and seeming to contain a voluminous
letter. She kept it while he noted that the seal was intact, and she
then reverted not to the discomfiture she had last produced in him but
to his rueful reference of a minute before that.

"He's not dying of anything you said or did, or of anyone's act or
words. He's just dying of twenty millions."

"Twenty millions?" There was a kind of enormity in her very absence of
pomp, and Gray felt as if he had dropped of a sudden, from his height of
simplicity, far down into a familiar relation to quantities
inconceivable--out of which depths he fairly blew and splashed to
emerge, the familiar relation, of all things in the world, being so
strange a one. "_That's_ what you mean here when you talk of money?"

"That's what we mean," said Rosanna, "when we talk of anything at
all--for of what else but money _do_ we ever talk? He's dying, at any
rate," she explained, "of his having wished to have to do with it on
that sort of scale. Having to do with it consists, you know, of the
things you do _for_ it--which are mostly very awful; and there are all
kinds of consequences that they eventually have. You pay by these
consequences for what you have done, and my father has been for a long
time paying." Then she added as if of a sudden to summarise and dismiss
the whole ugly truth: "The effect has been to dry up his life." Her
eyes, with this, reached away for the first time as in search of
something not at all before her, and it was on the perfunctory note that
she had the next instant concluded. "There's nothing at last left for
him to pay _with._"

For Gray at least, whatever initiations he had missed, she couldn't keep
down the interest. "Mr. Gaw then will _leave_ twenty millions----?"

"He has already left them--in the sense of having made his will; as your
uncle, equally to my knowledge, has already made his." Something visibly
had occurred to her, and in connection, it might seem, with the packet
she had taken from her drawer. She looked about--there being within the
scene, which was somehow at once blank and replete, sundry small
scattered objects of an expensive negligibility; not one of which, till
now, he could guess, had struck her as a thing of human application.
Human application had sprung up, the idea of selection at once
following, and she unmistakeably but wondered what would be best for her
use while she completed the statement on which she had so strikingly
embarked. "He has left me his whole fortune." Then holding up an article
of which she had immediately afterwards, with decision, proceeded to
possess herself, "Is that a thing you could at all bear?" she
irrelevantly asked. She had caught sight, in her embarrassed way, of
something apparently adapted to her unexplained end, and had left him
afresh to assure herself of its identity, taking up from a table at
first, however, a box in Japanese lacquer only to lay it down
unsatisfied. She had circled thus at a distance for a time, allowing him
now his free contemplation; she had tried in succession, holding them
close to her eyes, several embossed or embroidered superfluities, a
blotting-book covered with knobs of malachite, a silver box, flat,
largely circular and finely fretted, a gold cigar case of absurd
dimensions, of which she played for a moment the hinged lid. Such was
the object on which she puzzlingly challenged him.

"I could bear it perhaps better if I ever used cigars."

"You don't smoke?" she almost wailed.

"Never cigars. Sometimes pipes--but mostly, thank goodness, cigarettes."

"Thank the powers then indeed!"--and, the golden case restored to the
table, where she had also a moment before laid her prepared missive, she
went straight to a corner of the mantel-shelf, hesitations dropping from
her, and, opening there a plainer receptacle than any she had yet
touched, turned the next instant with a brace of cigarettes picked out
and an accent she had not yet used. "You _are_ a blessing, Gray--I'm
nowhere without one!" There were matches at hand, and she had struck a
light and applied it, at his lips, to the cigarette passively received
by him, afterwards touching her own with it, almost before he could
wonder again at the oddity of their transition. Their light smoke curled
while she went back to her table; it quickened for him with each puff
the marvel of a domestic altar graced at such a moment by the play of
that particular flame. Almost, to his fine vision, it made Rosanna
different--for wasn't there at once a gained ease in the tone with
which, her sealed letter still left lying on the table, she returned to
that convenience for the pocket of the rich person of which she had
clicked and re-clicked the cover? What strange things, Gray thought,
rich persons had!--and what strange things they did, he might mentally
even have added, when she developed in a way that mystified him but the
more: "I don't mean for your cigars, since you don't use them; but I
want you to have from my hand something in which to keep, with all due
consideration, a form of tribute that has been these last forty-eight
hours awaiting you here, and which, it occurs to me, would just slide
into this preposterous piece of furniture and nestle there till you may
seem to feel you want it." She proceeded to recover the packet and slide
it into the case, the shape of which, on a larger scale, just
corresponded with its own, and then, once more making the lid catch,
shook container and contents as sharply as she might have shaken a
bottle of medicine. "So--there it is; I somehow don't want just to
thrust at you the letter itself."

"But may I be told what the letter itself _is?_" asked Gray, who had
followed these movements with interest.

"Why of course--didn't I mention? Here are safely stowed," she said, her
gesture causing the smooth protective surfaces to twinkle more brightly
before him, "the very last lines (and many there appear to be of them!)
that, if I am not mistaken, my father's hand will have traced. He wrote
them, in your interest, as he considers, when he heard of your arrival
in New York, and, having sealed and directed them, gave them to me
yesterday to take care of and deliver to you. I put them away for the
purpose, and an hour ago, during our drive back from Mrs. Bradham's, he
reminded me of my charge. Before asking Miss Mumby to tell you I should
like to see you I transferred the letter from its place of safety in my
room to the cabinet from which, for your benefit, I a moment ago took
it. I carefully comply, as you see, with my father's request. I know
nothing whatever of what he has written you, and only want you to have
his words. But I want also," she pursued, "to make just this little
affair of them. I want"--and she bent her eyes on the queer costliness,
rubbing it with her pockethandkerchief--"to do what the Lord Mayor of
London does, doesn't he? when he offers the Freedom of the City; present
them in a precious casket in which they may always abide. I want in
short," she wound up, "to put them, for your use, beautifully away."

Gray went from wonder to wonder. "It isn't then a thing you judge I
should open at once?"

"I don't care whether you never open it in your life. But you don't, I
can see, like that vulgar thing!" With which having opened her
receptacle and drawn forth from it the subject of her attention she
tossed back to its place on the spread of brocade the former of these
trifles. The big black seal, under this discrimination, seemed to fix
our young man with a sombre eye.

"Is there any objection to my just looking at the letter now?" And then
when he had taken it and yet was on the instant and as by the mere feel
and the nearer sight, rather less than more conscious of a free
connection with it, "Is it going to be bad for me?" he said.

"Find out for yourself!"

"Break the seal?"

"Isn't it meant to break?" she asked with a shade of impatience.

He noted the impatience, sounding her nervousness, but saw at the same
time that her interest in the communication, whatever it might be, was
of the scantest, and that she suffered from having to defer to his own.
"If I needn't answer tonight----!"

"You needn't answer ever."

"Oh well then it can wait. But you're right--it mustn't just wait in my
pocket."

This pleased her. "As I say, it must have a place of its own."

He considered of that. "You mean that when I _have_ read it I may still
want to treasure it?"

She had in hand again the great fan that hung by a long fine chain from
her girdle, and, flaring it open, she rapidly closed it again, the
motion seeming to relieve her. "I mean that my father has written you at
this end of his days--and that that's all I know about it."

"You asked him no question----?"

"As to why he should write? I wouldn't," said Rosanna, "have asked him
for the world. It's many a day since we've done that, either he or I--at
least when a question could have a sense."

"Thank you then," Gray smiled, "for answering mine." He looked about him
for whatever might still help them, and of a sudden had a light. "Why
the ivory tower!" And while her eyes followed: "That beautiful old thing
on the top of the secretary--happy thought if it _is_ old!" He had seen
at a glance that this object was what they wanted, and, a nearer view
confirming the thought, had reached for it and taken it down. "There it
was waiting for you. _Isn't_ it an ivory tower, and doesn't living in an
ivory tower just mean the most distinguished retirement? I don't want
yet awhile to settle in one myself--though I've always thought it a
thing I should like to come to; but till I do make acquaintance with
what you have for me a retreat for the mystery is pleasant to think of."
Such was the fancy he developed while he delicately placed his happy
find on the closed and polished lid of the grand piano, where the rare
surface reflected the pale rich ivory and his companion could have it
well before her. The subject of this attention might indeed pass, by a
fond conceit, on its very reduced scale, for a builded white-walled
thing, very tall in proportion to the rest of its size and rearing its
head from its rounded height as if a miniature flag might have flown
there. It was a remarkable product of some eastern, probably some
Indian, patience, and of some period as well when patience in such
causes was at the greatest--thanks to which Gray, loving ancient
artistry and having all his life seen much of it, had recognised at a
glance the one piece in the room that presented an interest. It
consisted really of a cabinet, of easily moveable size, seated in a
circular socket of its own material and equipped with a bowed door,
which dividing in the middle, after a minute gold key had been turned,
showed a superposition of small drawers that went upwards diminishing in
depth, so that the topmost was of least capacity. The high curiosity of
the thing was in the fine work required for making and keeping it
perfectly circular; an effect arrived at by the fitting together,
apparently by tiny golden rivets, of numerous small curved plates of the
rare substance, each of these, including those of the two wings of the
exquisitely convex door, contributing to the artful, the total
rotundity. The series of encased drawers worked to and fro of course
with straight sides, but also with small bowed fronts, these made up of
the same adjusted plates. The whole, its infinite neatness exhibited,
proved a wonder of wasted ingenuity, and Rosanna, pronouncing herself
stupid not to have anticipated him, rendered all justice, under her
friend's admiring emphasis, to this choicest of her resources. Of how
they had come by it, either she or her sparing parent, she couldn't at
once bethink herself: on their taking the Newport house for the few
weeks her direction had been general that an assortment of odds and ends
from New York should disperse itself, for mitigation of bleakness, in as
many of the rooms as possible; and with quite different matters to
occupy her since she had taken the desired effect for granted. Her
father's condition had precluded temporary inmates, and with Gray's
arrival also in mind she had been scarce aware of minor importances. "Of
course you know--I knew you _would!_" were the words in which she
assented to his preference for the ivory tower and which settled for
him, while he made it beautifully slide, the fact that the shallowest of
the drawers would exactly serve for his putting his document to sleep.
So then he slipped it in, rejoicing in the tight fit of the drawer,
carefully making the two divisions of the protective door meet, turning
the little gold key in its lock and finally, with his friend's
permission, attaching the key to a small silver ring carried in his
pocket and serving for a cluster of others. With this question at rest
it seemed at once, and as with an effect out of proportion to the cause,
that a great space before them had been cleared: they looked at each
other over it as if they had become more intimate, and as if now, in the
free air, the enormities already named loomed up again. All of which was
expressed in Gray's next words.

"May I ask you, in reference to something you just now said, whether my
uncle took action for leaving me money before our meeting could be in
question? Because if he did, you know, I understand less than ever. That
he should want to see me if he was thinking of me, that of course I can
conceive; but that he shouldn't wait till he had seen me is what I find
extraordinary."

If she gave him the impression of keeping her answer back a little, it
wasn't, he was next to see, that she was not fully sure of it. "He _had_
seen you."

"You mean as a small boy?"

"No--at this distance of time that didn't count." She had another wait,
but also another assurance. "He had seen you in the great fact about
you."

"And what in the world do you call that?"

"Why, that you are more out of it all, out of the air he has breathed
all his life and that in these last years has more and more sickened
him, than anyone else in the least belonging to him, that he could
possibly put his hand on."

He stood before her with his hands in his pockets--he could study her
now quite as she had studied himself. "The extent, Rosanna, to which you
must have answered for me!"

She met his scrutiny from between more narrowed lids. "I did put it all
to him--I spoke for you as earnestly as one can ever speak for another.
But you're not to gather from it," she thus a trifle awkwardly smiled,
"that I have let you in for twenty millions, or for anything
approaching. He will have left you, by my conviction, all he has; but he
has nothing at all like that. That's all I'm sure of--of no details
what--ever. Even my father doesn't know," she added; "in spite of its
having been for a long time the thing he has most wanted to, most sat
here, these weeks, on some chance of his learning. The truth, I mean, of
Mr. Betterman's affairs."

Gray felt a degree of relief at the restrictive note on his expectations
which might fairly have been taken, by its signs, for a betrayed joy in
their extent. The air had really, under Rosanna's touch, darkened itself
with numbers; but what she had just admitted was a rift of light. In
this light, which was at the same time that of her allusion to Mr. Gaw's
unappeased appetite, his vision of that gentleman at the other house
came back to him, and he said in a moment: "I see, I see. He tried to
get some notion out of me."

"Poor father!" she answered to this--but without time for more
questions, as at the moment she spoke the door of the room opened and
Doctor Hatch appeared. He paused, softly portentous, where he stood, and
so he met Rosanna's eyes. He held them a few seconds, and the effect was
to press in her, to all appearance, the same spring our young man had
just touched. "Poor, poor, poor father!" she repeated, but as if brought
back to him from far away. She took in what had happened, but not at
once nor without an effort what it called on her for; so that "Won't you
come up?" her informant had next to ask.

To this, while Gray watched her, she rallied--"If you'll stay here."
With which, looking at neither of them again, as the Doctor kept the
door open, she passed out, he then closing it on her and transferring
his eyes to Gray--who hadn't to put a question, so sharply did the
raised and dropped hands signify that all was over. The fact, in spite
of everything, startled our young man, who had with his companion a
moment's mute exchange.

"He has died while I've kept her here?"

Doctor Hatch just demurred. "You kept her through her having sent for
you to talk to you."

"Yes, I know. But it's very extraordinary!"

"You seem to _make_ people extraordinary. You've made your uncle, you
know----!"

"Yes indeed--but haven't I made _him_ better?" Gray asked.

The Doctor again for a moment hesitated. "Yes--in the sense that he must
be now at last really resting. But I go back to him."

"I'll go with you of course," said Gray, looking about for his hat. As
he found it he oddly remembered. "Why she asked me to dinner!"

It all but amused the Doctor. "You inspire remarkable efforts."

"Well, I'm incapable of making them." It seemed now queer enough. "I
can't stay to dinner."

"Then we'll go." With which however. Doctor Hatch was not too
preoccupied to have had his attention, within the minute, otherwise
taken. "What a splendid piece!" he exclaimed in presence of the ivory
tower.

"It _is_ splendid," said Gray, feeling its beauty again the brightest
note in the strangeness; but with a pang of responsibility to it taking
him too. "Miss Gaw has made me a present of it."

"Already? You do work them!"--and the good physician fairly grazed again
the act of mirth. "So you'll take it away?"

Gray paused a moment before his acquisition, which seemed to have begun
to guard, within the very minute, a secret of greater weight. Then "No,
I'll come back to it," he said as they departed by the long window that
opened to the grounds and through which Miss Mumby had brought him in.




BOOK THIRD


I


"Why I haven't so much as seen him yet," Cissy perforce confessed to her
friend, Mrs. Bradham's friend, everybody's friend, even, already and so
coincidentally, Graham Fielder's; this recipient of her avowal having
motored that day from Boston, after detention there under a necessity of
business and the stress of intolerable heat, but having reached Newport
in time for tea, a bath, a quick "change" and a still quicker impression
of blest refreshment from the fine air and from various other matters.
He had come forth again, during the time left him between these
performed rites and the more formal dressing-hour, in undisguised quest
of our young lady, who had so disposed certain signs of her whereabouts
that he was to waste but few steps in selection of a short path over the
longest stretch of lawn and the mass of seaward rocks forming its limit.
Arriving to spend with the Bradhams as many or as few days as the
conditions to be recognised on the spot might enjoin, this hero, Horton
Vint, had alighted at one of those hours of brilliant bustle which could
show him as all in his element if he chose to appear so, or could
otherwise appeal at once to his perfect aptitude for the artful escape
and the undetected counterplot. But the pitch had by that moment dropped
and the company dispersed, so far as the quarter before him was
concerned: the tennis-ground was a velvet void, the afternoon breeze
conveyed soft nothings--all of which made his occasion more spacious for
Horton. Cissy, from below, her charmingly cool cove, had watchfully
signalled up, and they met afresh, on the firm clear sand where the
drowsy waves scarce even lapsed, with forms of intimacy that the
sequestered spot happily favoured. The sense of waiting understood and
crowned gave grace to her opened arms when the young man, as he was
still called, erect, slim, active, brightly refreshed and, like herself,
given the temperature, inconsiderably attired, first showed himself
against the sky; it had cost him but a few more strides and steps, an
easy descent, to spring to her welcome with the strongest answering
emphasis. They met as on ground already so prepared that not an
uncertainty, on either side, could make reunion less brave or confidence
less fine; they had to effect no clearance, to stand off from no risk;
and, observing them thus in their freedom, you might well have asked
yourself by what infallible tact they had mastered for intercourse such
perfect reciprocities of address. You would certainly have concluded to
their entire confidence in these. "With a dozen people in the house it
is luck," Horton had at once appreciatively said; but when their
fellow-visitors had been handled between them for a minute or so only to
collapse again like aproned puppets on removal of pressure from the
squeak, he had jumped to the question of Gray Fielder and to frank
interest in Cissy's news of him. This news, the death of Mr. Betterman
that morning, quite sufficiently explained her inability to produce the
more direct impression; that worthy's nephew and heir, in close and more
and more quickened attendance on him during the previous days, had been
seen as yet, to the best of her belief, by no one at all but dear
Davey--not counting of course Rosanna Gaw, of the fact of whose own
bereavement as well Horton was naturally in possession, and who had made
it possible, she understood, for their friend to call on Graham.

"Oh Davey has called on Graham?" Horton was concerned to ask while they
sat together on a rude worn slab. "What then, if he has told you, was
his particular idea?"

"Won't his particular idea," Cissy returned, "be exactly the one he
won't have told me? What he did speak to me of yesterday morning, and
what I told him I thought would be beautiful of him, was his learning by
inquiry, in case your friend could see him, whether there was any sort
of thing he could do for him in his possible want of a man to put a hand
on. Because poor Rosanna, for all one thinks of her," said the girl,
"isn't exactly a man."

Horton's attention was deeply engaged; his hands, a little behind him,
rested, as props to his slight backward inclination, on the convenient
stone; his legs, extended before him, enabled him to dig in his heels a
little, while his eyes, attached to the stretch of sea commanded by
their rocky retreat, betrayed a fixed and quickened vision. Rich in fine
lines and proportions was his handsome face--with scarce less, moreover,
to be said of his lean, light and long-drawn, though so much more
pointed and rounded figure. His features, after a manner of their own,
announced an energy and composed an array that his expression seemed to
disavow, or at least to be indifferent to, and had the practical effect
of toning down; as if he had been conscious that his nose, of the
bravest, strongest curve and intrinsically a great success, was too bold
and big for its social connections, that his mouth protested or at least
asserted more than he cared to back it up to, that his chin and jaw were
of too tactless an importance, and his fine eyes, above all, which
suggested choice samples of the more or less precious stone called
aquamarine, too disposed to darken with the force of a straight look--so
that the right way to treat such an excess of resource had become for
him quite the incongruous way, the cultivation of every sign and gage
that liberties might be taken with him. He seemed to keep saying that he
was not, temperamentally and socially, in his own exaggerated style, and
that a bony structure, for instance, as different as possible from the
one he unfortunately had to flaunt, would have been no less in harmony
with his real nature than he sought occasion to show it was in harmony
with his conduct. His hard mouth sported, to its visible relief and the
admiration of most beholders, a beautiful mitigating moustache; his eyes
wandered and adventured as for fear of their very own stare; his smile
and his laugh went all lengths, you would almost have guessed, in order
that nothing less pleasant should occupy the ground; his chin advanced
upon you with a grace fairly tantamount to the plea, absurd as that
might have seemed, that it was in the act of receding. Thus you gained
the impression--or could do so if your fancy quickened to him--that he
would perhaps rather have been as unwrought and unfinished as so many
monstrous men, on the general peopled scene of those climes, appeared
more and more to show themselves, than appointed to bristle with a group
of accents that, for want of a sense behind them, could attach
themselves but to a group of blanks. The sense behind the outward man in
Horton Vint bore no relation, it incessantly signified, to his being
_importantly_ goodlooking; it was in itself as easily and freely human a
sense, making as much for personal reassurance, as the appeal of
opportunity in an enjoying world could ever have drawn forth and with
the happy appearance of it confirmed by the whimsical, the quite ironic,
turn given by the society in which he moved to the use of his name. It
could never have been so pronounced and written Haughty if in spite of
superficial accidents his charming clever humility and sociability
hadn't thoroughly established themselves. He lived in the air of jokes,
and yet an air in which bad ones fell flat; and there couldn't have been
a worse one than to treat his designation as true.

It might have been, at the same time, scarce in the least as a joke that
he presently said, in return for the remark on Cissy's part last
reported: "Rosanna is surely enough of a man to be much more of one than
Davey. However," he went on, "we agree, don't we? about the million of
men it would have taken to handle Gussy. A Davey the more or the less,
or with a shade more or less of the different sufficiency, would have
made no difference in _that_ question"--which had indeed no interest for
them anyhow, he conveyed, compared with the fun apparently proposed by
this advent of old Gray. That, frankly, was to him, Horton, as amusing a
thing as could have happened--at a time when if it hadn't been for
Cissy's herself happening to be for him, by exception, a comfort to
think of, there wasn't a blest thing in his life of the smallest
interest. "It hadn't struck me as probable at all, this revulsion of the
old man's," he mentioned, "and though Fielder must be now an awfully
nice chap, whom you'll like and find charming, I own I didn't imagine he
would come so tremendously forward. Over there, simply with his tastes,
his 'artistic interests,' or literary ones, or whatever--I mean his
array of intellectual resources and lack of any others--he was well
enough, by my last impression, and I liked him both for his decent life
and ways and for his liking me, if you can believe it, so
extraordinarily much as he seemed to. What the situation appears most to
mean, however, is that of a sudden he pops into a real light, a great
blazing light visible from afar--which is quite a different affair. It
can't not mean at least all sorts of odd things--or one has a right to
wonder if it _mayn't_ mean them." And Horton might have been taken up
for a minute of silence with his consideration of some of these
glimmering possibilities; a moment during which Cissy Foy maintained
their association by fairly, by quite visibly breathing with him in
unison--after a fashion that testified more to her interest than any
"cutting in" could have done. It would have been clear that they were
far beyond any stage of association at which their capacity for interest
in the contribution of either to what was between them should depend
upon verbal proof. It depended in fact as little on any other sort, such
for instance as searching eyes might invoke; she hadn't to look at her
friend to follow him further--she but looked off to those spaces where
his own vision played, and it was by pressing him close _there_ that she
followed. Her companion's imagination, by the time he spoke again, might
verily have travelled far.

"What comes to me is just the wonder of whether such a change of fortune
may possibly not spoil him--he was so right and nice as he was. I
remember he used really to exasperate me almost by seeming not to have
wants, unless indeed it was by having only those that could be satisfied
over there as a kind of matter of course and that were those I didn't
myself have--in any degree at least that could make up for the
non-satisfaction of my others. I suppose it amounted really," said
Horton, "to the fact that, being each without anything to speak of in
our pockets, or then any prospect of anything, he accepted that because
he happened to like most the pleasures that were not expensive. I on my
side raged at my inability to meet or to cultivate expense--which seemed
to me good and happy, quite the thing most worth while, in itself: as
for that matter it still seems. 'La lecture et la promenade,' which old
Roulet, our pasteur at Neuchâtel used so to enjoin on us as the highest
joys, really appealed to Gray, to all appearance, in the sense in which
Roulet regarded, or pretended to regard, them--once he could have
pictures and music and talk, which meant of course pleasant people,
thrown in. He could go in for such things on his means--ready as he was
to do all his travelling on foot (I wanted as much then to do all mine
on horseback,) and to go to the opera or the play in the shilling seats
when he couldn't go in the stalls. I loathed so everything _but_ the
stalls--the stalls everywhere in life--that if I couldn't have it that
way I didn't care to have it at all. So when I think it strikes me I
must have liked him very much not to have wanted to slay him--for I
don't remember having given way at any particular moment to threats or
other aggressions. That may have been because I felt he rather
extravagantly liked me--as I shouldn't at all wonder at his still doing.
At the same time if I had found him beyond a certain point objectionable
his showing he took me for anything wonderful would have been, I think,"
the young man reflected, "but an aggravation the more. However that may
be, I'm bound to say, I shan't in the least resent his taking me for
whatever he likes now--if he can at all go on with it himself I shall be
able to hold up my end. The dream of my life, if you must know all,
dear--the dream of my life has been to be admired, _really_ admired,
admired for all he's worth, by some awfully rich man. Being admired by a
rich woman even isn't so good--though I've tried for that too, as you
know, and equally failed of it; I mean in the sense of their being ready
to do it for all they are worth. I've only had it from the poor, haven't
I?--and we've long since had to recognise, haven't we? how little that
has done for either of us." So Horton continued--so, as if incited and
agreeably, irresistibly inspired, he played, in the soft stillness and
the protected nook, before the small salt tide that idled as if to
listen, with old things and new, with actualities and possibilities, on
top of the ancientries, that seemed to want but a bit of talking of in
order to flush and multiply. "There's one thing at any rate I'll be
hanged if I shall allow," he wound up; "I'll be hanged if what we may do
for him shall--by any consent of mine at least--spoil him for the old
relations without inspiring him for the new. He shan't become if I can
help it as beastly vulgar as the rest of us."

The thing was said with a fine sincere ring, but it drew from Cissy a
kind of quick wail of pain. "Oh, oh, oh--what a monstrous idea. Haughty,
that he possibly _could_, ever!"

It had an immediate, even a remarkable effect; it made him turn at once
to look at her, giving his lightest pleasantest laugh, than which no
sound of that sort equally manful had less of mere male stridency. Then
it made him, with a change of posture, shift his seat sufficiently
nearer to her to put his arm round her altogether and hold her close,
pressing his cheek a moment, with due precautions, against her hair.
"That's awfully nice of you. We _will_ pull something off. Is what
you're thinking of what your friend out there _dans le temps_, the
stepfather, Mr. Wendover, was it? told you about him in that grand
manner?"

"Of course it is," said Cissy in lucid surrender and as if this truth
were of a flatness almost to blush for. "Don't you know I fell so in
love with Mr. Northover, whose name you mispronounce, that I've kept
true to him forever, and haven't been really in love with you in the
least, and shall never be with Gray himself, however much I may want to,
or you perhaps may even try to make me?--any more than I shall ever be
with anyone else. What's inconceivable," she explained, "is that anyone
that dear delicious man thought good enough to talk of to me as he
talked of his stepson should be capable of anything in the least
disgusting in any way."

"I see, I see." It made Horton, for reasons, hold her but the
closer--yet not withal as if prompted by her remarks to affectionate
levity. It was a sign of the intercourse of this pair that, move each
other though they might to further affection, and therewith on occasion
to a congruous gaiety, they treated no cause and no effect of that sort
as waste; they had somehow already so worked off, in their common
interest, all possible mistakes and vain imaginings, all false starts
and false pursuits, all failures of unanimity. "Why then if he's really
so decent, not to say so superior," Haughty went on, "won't it be the
best thing in the world and a great simplification for you to fall--that
is for you to be--in love with him? That will be better for me, you
know, than if you're not; for it's the impression evidently made on you
by the late Northover that keeps disturbing my peace of mind. I feel,
though I can't quite tell you why," he explained, "that I'm never going
to be in the least jealous of Gray, and probably not even so much as
envious; so there's your chance--take advantage of it all the way. Like
him at your ease, my dear, and God send he shall like you! Only be sure
it's for himself you do it--and for your own self; as you make out your
possibilities, de part et d'autre, on your getting nearer to them."

"So as to be sure, you mean," Cissy inquired, "of not liking him for his
money?"




II


He waited a moment, and if she had not immediately after her words
sighed "Oh dear, oh dear!" in quite another, that is a much more
serious, key, the appearance would perhaps have been that for once in a
blue moon she had put into his mind a thought he couldn't have. He
couldn't have the thought that it was of the least importance she should
guard herself in the way she mentioned; and it was in the air, the very
next thing, that she couldn't so idiotically have strayed as to mean to
impute it. He quickly enough made the point that what he preferred was
her not founding her interest in Gray so very abjectly on another man's
authority--given the uncanny fact of the other man's having cast upon
her a charm which time and even his death had done so little to abate.
Yes, the late Northover had clearly had something about him that it
worried a fellow to have her perpetually rake up. _There_ she was in
peril of jealousy--his jealousy of the queer Northover ghost; unless
indeed it was she herself who was queerest, ridden as her spirit seemed
by sexagenarian charms! He could look after her with Gray--they were at
one about Gray; what would truly alienate them, should she persist,
would be his own exposure to comparison with the memory of a rococo
Briton he had no arms to combat. Which extravagance of fancy had of
course after a minute sufficiently testified to the clearance of their
common air that invariably sprang from their feeling themselves again
together and finding once more what this came to--all under sublime
palpability of proof. The renewed consciousness did perhaps nothing for
their difficulties as such, but it did everything for the interest, the
amusement, the immediate inspiration of their facing them: there was in
that such an element of their facing each other and knowing, each time
as if they had not known it before, that this had absolute beauty. It
had unmistakably never had more than now, even when their freedom in it
had rapidly led them, under Cissy's wonderment, to a consideration of
whether a happy relation with their friend (he was already thus her
friend too, without her ever having seen him!) mightn't have to count
with some inevitable claim, some natural sentiment, asserted and enjoyed
on Rosanna's part, not to speak of the effect on Graham himself of that
young woman's at once taking such an interest in him and coming in for
such a fortune.

"In addition to which who shall pretend to deny," the girl earnestly
asked, "that Rosanna has in herself the most extraordinary charm?"

"Oh you think she has extraordinary charm?"

"Of course I do--and so do you: don't be absurd! She's simply superb,"
Cissy expounded, "in her own original way, which no other woman over
here--except me a little perhaps!--has so much as a suspicion of
anything to compare with; and which, for all we know, constitutes a
luxury entirely at Graham's service." Cissy required but a single other
look at it all to go on: "I shouldn't in the least wonder if they were
already engaged."

"I don't think there's a chance of it," Haughty said, "and I hold that
if any such fear is your only difficulty you may be quite at your ease.
Not only do I so see it," he went on, "but I know _why_ I do."

Cissy just waited. "You consider that because she refused Horton Vint
she'll decline marriage altogether?"

"I think that throws a light," this gentleman smiled--"though it isn't
_all_ my ground. She turned me down, two years ago, as utterly as I
shall ever have been turned in my life--and if I chose so to look at it
the experience would do for me beautifully as that of an humiliation
served up to a man in as good form as he need desire. That it was, that
it still is when I live it through again; that it will probably remain,
for my comfort--in the sense that I'm likely never to have a worse. I've
had my dose," he figured, "of that particular black draught, and I've
got the bottle there empty on the shelf."

"And yet you signify that you're all the same glad----?" Cissy didn't
for the instant wholly follow.

"Well, it _all_ came to me then; and that it did all come is what I have
the advantage of now--I mean, you see, in being able to reassure you as
I do. I had some wonderful minutes with her--it didn't take long,"
Haughty laughed. "We saw in those few minutes, being both so horribly
intelligent; and what I recognised has remained with me. What she did is
her own affair--and that she could so perfectly make it such, without
leaving me a glimmer of doubt, is what I have, as I tell you, to blink
at forever. I may ask myself if you like," he pursued, "why I should
'mind' so much if I saw even at the moment that she wasn't at any rate
going to take someone else--and if you do I shall reply that I didn't
need that to make it bad. It was bad enough just in itself. My point is,
however," Horton concluded, "that I can give you at least the benefit of
my feeling utterly sure that Gray will have no chance. She's in the
dreadful position--and more than ever of course now--of not being able
to believe she can be loved for herself."

"You mean because _you_ couldn't make her believe it?" asked Cissy after
taking this in.

"No--not that, for I didn't so much as try. I didn't--and it was awfully
superior of me, you know--approach her at all on that basis. That," said
Horton, "is where it cuts. The basis was that of my own capacity
only--my capacity to serve her, in every particular, with every aptitude
I possess in the world, and which I could see she _saw_ I possess (it
was given me somehow to send that home to her!) without a hair's breadth
overlooked. I shouldn't have minded her taking me so for impossible,
blackly impossible, if she had done it under an illusion; but she really
believed in me as a general value, quite a first-rate value--_that_ I
stood there and didn't doubt. And yet she practically said 'You ass!'"

His encircling arm gained, for response to this, however, but the
vibration of her headshake--without so much as any shudder at the pain
he so vividly imaged. "She practically said that she was already _then_
in love with Mr. Graham, and you wouldn't have had a better chance had
a passion of your own stuck out of you. If I thought she didn't admire
you," Cissy said, "I shouldn't be able to do with her at all--it would
be too stupid of her; putting aside her not accepting you, I mean--for a
woman can't accept _every_ man she admires. I suppose you don't at
present object," she continued, "to her admiring Mr. Graham enough to
account for anything; especially as it accounts so for her having just
acted on his behalf with such extraordinary success. Doesn't that make
it out for him," she asked, "that he's admired by twenty millions _plus_
the amount that her reconciliation of him with his uncle just in time to
save it, without an hour to spare, will represent for his pocket? We
don't know what that lucky amount may be----"

"No, but we more or less _shall_"--Horton took her straight up. "Of
course, without exaggeration, that will be interesting--even though it
will be but a question, I'm quite certain, of comparatively small
things. Old Betterman--there are people who practically know, and I've
talked with them--isn't going to foot up to any faint likeness of what
Gaw does. That, however, has nothing to do with it: all that is
relevant--since I quite allow that, speculation for speculation, our
association in this sort represents finer fun than it has yet succeeded
in doing in other sorts--all that's relevant is that when you've seen
Gray you mayn't be in such a hurry to figure him as a provoker of
insatiable passions. Your insidious Northover has, as you say, worked
you up, but wait a little to see if the reality corresponds."

"He showed me a photograph, my insidious Northover," Cissy promptly
recalled; "he was _naïf_ enough, poor dear, for that. In fact he made
me a present of several, including one of himself; I owe him as well two
or three other mementos, all of which I've cherished."

"What was he up to anyway, the old corrupter of your youth?"--Horton
seemed really to wonder. "Unless it was that you simply reduced him to
infatuated babble."

"Well, there are the photographs and things to show," she answered
unembarrassed--"though I haven't them with me here; they're put away in
New York. His portrait's extremely good-looking."

"Do you mean Mr. Northover's own?"

"Oh _his_ is of course quite beautiful. But I mean Mr. Fielder's--at his
then lovely age. I remember it," said Cissy, "as a nice, nice face."

Haughty on his side indulged in the act of memory, concluding after an
instant to a head-shake. "He isn't at all remarkable for looks; but
putting his nice face at its best, granting that he _has_ a high degree
of that advantage, do you see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast
everything to the winds for him?"

Cissy weighed the question. "We've seen surely what she has been carried
away enough to do."

"She has had other reasons--independent of headlong passion. And
remember," he further argued--"if you impute to her a high degree of
that sort of sensibility--how perfectly proof she was to _my_ physical
attractions, which I declare to you without scruple leave the very
brightest you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."

Again his companion considered. "Of course you're dazzlingly handsome;
but are you, my dear, after all--I mean in appearance--so very
_interesting?_"

The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met but in the same spirit.
"Didn't you then find me so from the first minute you ever looked at
me?"

"We're not talking of me," she returned, "but of people who happen to
have been subjects less predestined and victims less abject. What," she
then at once went on, "_is_ Gray's appearance 'anyway'? Is he black, to
begin with, or white, or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or
neither one thing or t'other? Is he fat or thin or of 'medium weight'?
There are always such lots to be told about people, and never a creature
in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover, when I come to think
of it, never mentioned is size.

"Well, you _wouldn't_ mention it," Horton amiably argued. The appeal, he
showed withal, stirred him to certain recoveries. "And I should call him
black--black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather
distinctively 'slick' and soigné--the hair of a good little boy who
never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's only very middling
tall; in fact so very middling," Haughty made out, "that it probably
comes to his being rather short. But he has neither a hump nor a limp,
no marked physical deformity of any sort; has in fact a kind of futile
fidgetty quickness which suggests the little man, and the nervous and
the active and the ready; the ready, I mean, for anything in the way of
interest and talk--given that the matter isn't too big for him. The
'active,' I say, though at the same time," he noted, "I ask myself what
the deuce the activity will have been _about._"

The girl took in these impressions to the effect of desiring still more
of them. "Doesn't he happen then to have eyes and things?"

"Oh yes"--Horton bethought himself--"lots and lots of eyes, though not
perhaps so many of other things. Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think
anything whatever you may require in the way of eyes."

"Then clearly they're not 'black': I never require black ones," she
said, "in any conceivable connection: his eyes--blue-grey, or grey-blue,
whichever you may call it, and far and away the most charming kind when
one doesn't happen to be looking into your glorious green ones--his
satisfactory eyes are what will more than anything else have done the
business. They'll have done it so," she went on, "that if he isn't red
in the face, which I defy him to be, his features don't particularly
matter--though there's not the least reason either why he should have
mean or common ones. In fact he hasn't them in the photograph, and what
are photographs, the wretched things, but the very truth of life?"

"He's not red in the face," Haughty was able to state--"I think of him
rather as of a pale, very pale, clean brown; and entirely unaddicted,"
he felt sure, "to flushing or blushing. What I do sort of remember in
the feature way is that his teeth though good, fortunately, as they're
shown a good deal, are rather too small and square; for a man's, that
is, so that they make his smile a trifle----"

"A trifle irresistible of course," Cissy broke in--"through their being,
in their charming form, of the happy Latin model; extremely like my own,
be so good as to notice for once in your life, and not like the usual
Anglo-Saxon fangs. You're simply describing, you know," she added,
"about as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see."

"It's not I who am describing him--it's you, love; and ever so
delightfully." With which, in consistency with that, he himself put a
question. "What does it come to, by the way, in the sense of a
moustache? Does he, or _doesn't_ he after all, wear one? It's odd I
shouldn't remember, but what does the photograph say?"

"It seems odd indeed _I_ shouldn't"--Cissy had a moment's brooding. She
gave herself out as ashamed. "Fancy my not remembering if the photograph
is _moustachue!_"

"It can't be then _very_" Horton contributed--the point was really so
interesting.

"No," Cissy tried to settle, "the photograph can't be so very
moustachue."

"His moustaches, I mean, if he wears 'em, can't be so very prodigious;
or one could scarcely have helped noticing, could one?"

"Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice yours--and therefore
Gray's, if he has any, must indeed be very inferior. And yet he can't be
shaved like a sneak-thief--or like all the world here," she developed;
"for I won't have him with nothing at all any more than I'll have him
with anything prodigious, as you say; which is worse than nothing. When
I say I won't have him with nothing," she explained, "I mean I won't
have him subject to the so universally and stupidly applied American law
that every man's face without exception shall be scraped as clean, as
_glabre_, as a fish's--which it makes so many of them so much resemble.
I won't have him so," she said, "because I won't have him so idiotically
gregarious and without that sense of differences in things, and of their
relations and suitabilities, which such exhibitions make one so ache
for. If he's gregarious to that sort of tune we must renounce our
idea--that is you must drop yours--of my working myself up to snatch him
from the arms of Rosanna. I must believe in him, for that, I must see
him at least in my own way," she pursued; "believing in myself, or even
believing in you, is a comparative detail. I won't have him bristle with
horrid demagogic notes. I shouldn't be able to act a scrap on that
basis."

It was as if what she said had for him the interest at once of the most
intimate and the most enlarged application; it was in fact as if she
alone in all the world could touch him in such fine ways--could amuse
him, could verily instruct him, to anything like such a tune. "It seems
peculiarly a question of bristles if it all depends on his moustache.
Our suspense as to that, however, needn't so much ravage us," Haughty
added, "when we remember that Davey, who, you tell me, will by this time
have seen him, can settle the question for us as soon as we meet at
dinner. It will by the same stroke then settle that of the witchcraft
which has according to your theory so bedevilled poor dear Rosanna's
sensibility--leading it such a dance, I mean, and giving such an empire
to certain special items of our friend's 'personality,' that the
connection was practically immediate with his brilliant status."




III


Horton, looking at his watch, had got up as he spoke--which Cissy at
once also did under this recall of the lapse of their precious minutes.
There was a point, however, left for her to make; which she did with the
remark that the item they had been discussing in particular couldn't
have been by itself the force that had set their young woman originally
in motion, inasmuch as Gray wouldn't have had a moustache when a small
boy or whatever, and as since that young condition, she understood,
Rosanna hadn't again seen him. A proposition to which Haughty's assent
was to remain vague, merged as it suddenly became in the cry of "Hello,
here he is!" and a prompt gay brandish of arms up at their host Bradham,
arrayed for the evening, white-waistcoated and buttonholed, robustly
erect on an overlooking ledge and explaining his presence, from the
moment it was thus observed, by calling down that Gussy had sent him to
see if she wasn't to expect them at dinner. It was practically a summons
to Cissy, as the girl easily recognised, to leave herself at least ten
minutes to dress decently--in spite of the importance of which she so
challenged Davey on another score that, as a consequence, the good
gorgeous man, who shone with every effect of the bath and every resource
of the toilet, had within the pair of minutes picked out such easiest
patent-leather steps as would enable him to convict the companions of a
shameless dawdle. She had had time to articulate for Horton's benefit,
with no more than due distinctness, that he must have seen them, and
Horton had as quickly found the right note and the right wit for the
simple reassurance "Oh Davey----!" As occupants of a place of
procrastination that they only were not such fools as to leave unhaunted
they frankly received their visitor, any impulse in whom to sprinkle
stale banter on their search for solitude would have been forestalled,
even had it been supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by the
instant action of his younger guest's strategic curiosity.

"Has he, please, just _has_ he or no, got a moustache?"--she appealed as
if the fate of empires depended on it.

"I've been telling her," Horton explained, "whatever I can remember of
Gray Fielder, but she won't listen to anything if I can't first be sure
as to _that._ So as I want her enormously to like him, we both hang, you
see, on your lips; unless you call it, more correctly, on his."

Davey's evening bloom opened to them a dense but perfectly pathless
garden of possibilities; out of which, while he faced them, he left them
to pluck by their own act any bright flower they sufficiently desired to
reach. Wonderful during the few instants, between these flagrant
world-lings, the exchange of fine recognitions. It would have been hard
perhaps to say of them whether it was most discernible that Haughty and
Cissy trusted most his intelligence or his indifference, and whether he
most applauded or ignored the high perfection of their assurance. What
was testified to all round, at all events--[1]


"Ah then he _is_ as 'odd' as I was sure--in spite of Haughty's perverse
theory that we shall find him the flattest of the flat!"

It might have been at Haughty's perverse theory that Davey was most
moved to stare--had he not quickly betrayed, instead of this, a marked
attention to the girl herself. "Oh you little wonder and joy!"

"She is a little wonder and joy," Horton said--that at any rate came out
clear.

"What you are, my boy, I'm not pretending to say," Davey returned in
answer to this; "for I don't accept her account of your vision of Gray
as throwing any light on it at all."

"On his judgment of Mr. Fielder, do you mean," Cissy earnestly asked,
"or on your evidently awful opinion of his own dark nature?"

"Haughty knows that I lose myself in his dark nature, at my spare
moments, and with wind enough on to whistle in that dark, very much as
if I had the fine excitement of the Forêt de Bondy to deal with. He's
well aware that I know no greater pleasure of the imagination than that
sort of interest in him--when I happen also to have the time and the
nerve. Let these things serve me now, however, only to hurry you up,"
Davey went on; "and to say that I of course had with our fortunate
friend an impressive quarter of an hour--which everyone will want to
know about, so that I must keep it till we sit down. But the great thing
is after all for yourself, Haughty," he added--"and you had better know
at once that he particularly wants to see you. He'll be glad of you at
the very first moment----"

But Horton had already taken him easily up. "Of course I know, my dear
man, that he particularly wants to see me. He has written me nothing
else from the moment he arrived."

"He has written you, you wretch," Cissy at once extravagantly
echoed--"he has written you all sorts of things and you haven't so much
as told me?"

"He hasn't written me all sorts of things"--Horton directed this answer
to Davey alone--"but has written me in such straight confidence and
friendship that Eve been wondering if I mayn't go round to him this
evening."

"Gussy will no doubt excuse you for that purpose with the utmost joy,"
Davey rejoined--"though I don't think I advise you to ask her leave if
you don't want her at once to insist on going with you. Go to him alone,
very quietly--and with the happy confidence of doing him good."

It had been on Cissy that, for his part, Davey had, in speaking, rested
his eyes; and it might by the same token have been for the benefit of
universal nature, suspended to listen over the bosom of the deep, that
Horton's lips phrased his frank reaction upon their entertainer's words.
"Well then, ye powers, the amount of good that I shall undertake----!"

Davey Bradham and Cissy Foy exchanged on the whole ground for a moment a
considerable smile; his share in which, however, it might exactly have
been that prompted the young woman's further expression of their
intelligence. "It's too charming that he yearns so for Haughty--and too
sweet that Haughty can now rush to him at once." To which she then
appended in another tone: "One takes for granted of course that Rosanna
was with him."

Davey at this but continued to bloom and beam; which gave Horton, even
with a moment's delay, time to assist his better understanding. "She
doesn't even yet embrace the fact, tremendously as I've driven it into
her, that if Rosanna had been there he couldn't have breathed my name."

This made Davey, however, but throw up derisive hands; though as with an
impatient turn now for their regaining the lawn. "My dear man, Rosanna
breathes your name with all the force of her lungs!"

Horton, jerking back his head for the bright reassurance, laughed out
with amusement. "What a jolly cue then for my breathing of hers! I'll
roar it to all the echoes, and everything will be well. But what one's
talking about," he said, "is the question of Gray's naming _me._" He
looked from one of his friends to the other, and then, as gathering them
into the interest of it: "I'll bet you a fiver that he doesn't at any
rate speak to me of Miss Gaw."

"Well, what will that prove?" Davey asked, quite easy about it and
leading the way up the rocks.

"In the first place how much he thinks of her," said Cissy, who followed
close behind. "And in the second that it's ten to one Haughty will find
her there."

"I don't care if I do--not a scrap!" Horton also took his way. "I don't
care for anything now but the jolly fun, the jolly fun----!" He had
committed it all again, by the time they reached the cliff's edge, to
the bland participating elements.

"Oh the treat the poor boy is evidently going to stand us _all!_"--well,
was something that Davey, rather out of breath as they reached the lawn
again and came in sight of the villa, had just yet no more than those
light words for. He was more definite in remarking immediately after to
Cissy that Rosanna would be as little at the other house that evening as
she had been at the moment of his own visit, and that, since the nurses
and other outsiders appeared to have dispersed, there would be no one to
interfere with Gray's free welcome of his friend. The girl was so
attentive for this that it made them pause again while she brought out
in surprise: "There's nobody else there, you mean then, to watch with
the dead----?"

It made Mr. Bradham for an instant wonder, Horton, a little apart from
them now and with his back turned, seeming at the same moment, and
whether or no her inquiry reached his ear, struck with something that
had pulled him up as well and that made him stand and look down in
thought. "Why, I suppose the nephew' must be himself a sort of watcher,"
Davey found himself not other than decently vague to suggest.

But it scarce more contented Cissy than if the point had really
concerned her. She appeared indeed to question the more, though her eyes
were on Haughty's rather brooding back while she did so. "Then if he
does stay in the room, when he comes out of it to see people----?"

Her very drop seemed to present the state of things to which the poor
deceased was in that case left; for which, however, her good host
declined to be responsible. "I don't suppose he comes out for so many."

"He came out at any rate for you." The sense of it all rather remarkably
held her, and it might have been some communication of this that,
overtaking Horton at his slight distance, determined in him the impulse
to leave them, without more words, and walk by himself to the house. "We
don't surround such occasions with any form or state of
imagination--scarcely with any decency, do we?" Cissy adventured while
observing Haughty's retreat. "I should like to think for him of a
catafalque and great draped hangings--I should like to think for him of
tall flambeaux in the darkened room, and of relays of watchers, sisters
of charity or suchlike, surrounding the grand affair and counting their
beads."

Davey's rich patience had a shrug. "The grand affair, my dear child, is
_their_ affair, over there, and not mine; though when you indulge in
such fancies 'for him,' I can't but wonder who it is you mean."

"Who it is----?" She mightn't have understood his difficulty.

"Why the dead man or the living!"

They had gone on again; Horton had, with a quickened pace, disappeared;
and she had before answering cast about over the fair face of the great
house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with dressing-time glimmers from
upper windows flushing it here and there like touches of pink paint in
an elegant evening complexion. "Oh I care for the dead man, I'm afraid,
only because it's the living who appeals. I don't want him to like it."

"To like----?" Davey was again at a loss. "What on earth?"

"Why all that ugliness and bareness, that poverty of form."

He had nothing but derision for her here. "It didn't occur to me at all
to associate him with the idea of poverty."

"The place must all the same be hideous," she said, "and the conditions
mean--for him to prowl about in alone. It comes to me," she further
risked, "that if Rosanna _isn't_ there, as you say, she quite ought to
be--and that in her place I should feel it no more than decent to go
over and sit with him."

This appeared to strike Davey in a splendid number of lights--which,
however, though collectively dazzling, allowed discriminations. "It
perhaps bears a little on the point that she has herself just sustained
a grave bereavement--with her offices to her own dead to think of first.
That was present to me in your talk a moment since of Haughty's finding
her."

"Very true"--it was Cissy's practice, once struck, ever amusedly to play
with the missile: "it is of course extraordinary that those bloated old
_richards_, at one time so associated, should have flickered out almost
at the same hour. What it comes to then," she went on, "is that Mr. Gray
might be, or perhaps even ought to be, condoling over at the other house
with her. However, it's their own business, and all I really care for is
that he should be so keen as you say about seeing Haughty. I just
delight," she said, "in his being keen about Haughty."

"I'm glad it satisfies you then," Davey returned--"for I was on the
point of suggesting that with the sense of his desolation you just
expressed you might judge your own place to be at once at his side."

"That would have been helpful of you--but I'm content, dear Davey," she
smiled. "We're all devoted to Haughty--but," she added after an instant,
"there's just this. Did Mr. Graham while you were there say by chance a
word about the likes of _me?_"

"Well, really, no--our short talk didn't take your direction. That would
have been for me, I confess," Davey frankly made bold to add, "a trifle
unexpected."

"I see"--Cissy did him the justice. "But that's a little, I think,
because you don't know----!" It was more, however, than with her sigh
she could tell him.

"Don't know by this time, my dear, and after all I've been through," he
nevertheless supplied, "what the American girl always so sublimely takes
for granted?"

She looked at him on this with intensity--but that of compassion rather
than of the conscious wound. "Dear old Davey, il n'y a que vous for not
knowing, by this time, as you say, that I've notoriously nothing in
common with the creature you mention. I loathe," she said with her
purest gentleness, "the American girl."

He faced her an instant more as for a view of the whole incongruity;
then he fetched, on his side, a sigh which might have signified, at her
choice, either that he was wrong or that he was finally bored. "Well,
you do of course brilliantly misrepresent her. But we're all"--he
hastened to patch it up--"unspeakably corrupt."

"That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder if it were true," she
judiciously threw off.

"But as you're a judge you know it isn't?"

"It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim. I don't say we don't do
our best," she added; "but we're still of an innocence, an
innocence----!

"Then perhaps," Davey offered, "Mr. Fielder will help us; unless he
proves, by your measure, worse than ourselves!"

"The worse he may be the better; for it's not possible, as I see him,"
she said, "that he doesn't know."

"Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered, "how wrong we are--to be so
right?"

"Know more on _every_ subject than all of us put together!" she called
back at him as she now hurried off to dress.


[Footnote 1: There is a gap here in the MS., with the following note by
the author: "It is the security of the two others with him that is
testified to; but I mustn't make any sort of spread about it or about
anything else here now, and only put Davey on some non-committal reply
to the question addressed him, such as keeps up the mystery or ambiguity
or suspense about Gray, his moustache and everything else, so as to
connect properly with what follows. The real point is--_that_ comes back
to me, and it is in essence enough--that he pleads he doesn't remember,
didn't notice, at all; and thereby oddly enough can't say. It will come
to me right once I get into it. One sees that Davey plays with them."]




IV


Horton Vint, on being admitted that evening at the late Mr. Betterman's,
walked about the room to which he had been directed and awaited there
the friend of his younger time very much as we have seen that friend
himself wait under stress of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of
a crisis might have been almost equally sharp; he was alone for some
minutes during which he shifted his place and circled, indulged in wide
vague movements and vacuous stares at incongruous objects--the place
being at once so spacious and so thickly provided--quite after the
fashion in which Gray Fielder's nerves and imagination had on the same
general scene sought and found relief at the hour of the finest suspense
up to that moment possessing him. Haughty too, it would thus have
appeared for the furtherance of our interest, had imagination and
nerves--had in his way as much to reflect upon as we have allowed
ourselves to impute to the dying Mr. Betterman's nephew. No one was
dying now, all that was ended, or would be after the funeral, and the
nephew himself was surely to be supposed alive, in face of great
sequels, including preparations for those obsequies, with an intensity
beyond all former experience. This in fact Horton had all the air of
recognising under proof as soon as Gray advanced upon him with both
hands out; he couldn't not have taken in the highly quickened state of
the young black-clad figure so presented, even though soon and
unmistakably invited to note that his own visit and his own presence had
much to do with the quickening. Gray was in complete mourning, which had
the effect of making his face show pale, as compared with old aspects of
it remembered by his friend--who was, it may be mentioned, afterwards to
describe him to Cissy Foy as looking, in the conditions, these including
the air of the big bedimmed palace room, for all the world like a sort
of "happy Hamlet." For so happy indeed our young man at once proclaimed
himself at sight of his visitor, for so much the most interesting thing
that had befallen or been offered him within the week did he take, by
his immediate testimony, his reunion with this character and every
element of the latter's aspect and tone, that the pitch of his
acclamation clearly had, with no small delay, to drop a little under
some unavoidable reminder that they met almost in the nearest presence
of death. Was the reminder Horton's own, some pull, for decorum, of a
longer face, some expression of his having feared to act in undue haste
on the message brought him by Davey?--which might have been, we may say,
in view of the appearance after a little that it was Horton rather than
Gray who began to suggest a shyness, momentary, without doubt, and
determined by the very plenitude of his friend's welcome, yet so far
incongruous as that it was not his adoption of a manner and betrayal of
a cheer that ran the risk of seeming a trifle gross, but quite these
indications on the part of the fortunate heir of the old person awaiting
interment somewhere above. He could only have seen with the lapse of the
moments that Gray was going to be simple--admirably, splendidly simple,
one would probably have pronounced it, in estimating and comparing the
various possible dangers; but the simplicity of subjects tremendously
educated, tremendously "cultivated" and cosmopolitised, as Horton would
have called it, especially when such persons were naturally rather
extra-refined and ultra-perceptive, was a different affair from the
crude candour of the common sort; the consequence of which apprehensions
and reflections must have been, in fine, that he presently recognised in
the product of "exceptional advantages" now already more and more
revealed to him such a pliability of accent as would easily keep
judgment, or at least observation, suspended. Gray wasn't going to be at
a loss for any shade of decency that didn't depend, to its
inconvenience, on some uncertainty about a guest's prejudice; so that
once the air was cleared of awkwardness by that perception, exactly, in
Horton's ready mind that he and his traditions, his susceptibilities, in
fact (of all the queer things!) his own very simplicities and,
practically, stupidities were being superfluously allowed for and
deferred to, and that this, only this, was the matter, he should have
been able to surrender without a reserve to the proposed measure of
their common rejoicing. Beautiful might it have been to him to find his
friend so considerately glad of him that the spirit of it could consort
to the last point with any, with every, other felt weight in the
consciousness so attested; in accordance with which we may remark that
continued embarrassment for our gallant caller would have implied on his
own side, or in other words deep within his own spirit, some obscure
source of confusion.

What distinguishably happened was thus that he first took Graham for
exuberant and then for repentant, with the reflection accompanying this
that he mustn't, to increase of subsequent shame, have been too open an
accomplice in mere jubilation. Then the simple sense of his restored
comrade's holding at his disposal a general confidence in which they
might absolutely breathe together would have superseded everything else
hadn't his individual self-consciousness been perhaps a trifle worried
by the very pitch of so much openness. Open, not less generously so, was
what he could himself have but wanted to be--in proof of which we may
conceive him insist to the happy utmost, for promotion of his comfort,
on those sides of their relation the working of which would cast no
shadow. They had within five minutes got over much ground--all of which,
however, must be said to have represented, and only in part, the extent
of Gray's requisition of what he called just elementary human help. He
was in a situation at which, as he assured his friend, he had found
himself able, those several days, but blankly and inanely to stare. He
didn't suppose it had been his uncle's definite design to make an idiot
of him, but that seemed to threaten as the practical effect of the dear
man's extraordinary course. "You see," he explained, bringing it almost
pitifully out, "he appears to have left me a most monstrous fortune. I
mean"--for under his appeal Haughty had still waited a little--"a really
tremendous lot of money."

The effect of the tone of it was to determine in Haughty a peal of
laughter quickly repressed--or reduced at least to the intention of
decent cheer. "He 'appears,' my dear man? Do you mean there's an
ambiguity about his will?"

Gray justified his claim of vagueness by having, with his animated eyes
on his visitor's, to take an instant or two to grasp so technical an
expression. "No--not an ambiguity. Mr. Crick tells me that he has never
in all his experience seen such an amount of property disposed of in
terms so few and simple and clear. It would seem a kind of masterpiece
of a will."

"Then what's the matter with it?" Horton smiled. "Or at least what's the
matter with _you?_--who are so remarkably intelligent and clever?"

"Oh no, I'm not the least little bit clever!" Gray in his earnestness
quite excitedly protested. "I haven't a single ray of the intelligence
that among you all here clearly passes for rudimentary. But the luxury
of you, Haughty," he broke out on a still higher note, "the luxury, the
pure luxury of you!"

Something of beauty in the very tone of which, some confounding force in
the very clearness, might it have been that made Horton himself gape for
a moment even as Gray had just described his own wit as gaping. They had
first sat down, for hospitality offered and accepted--though with no
production of the smokable or the drinkable to profane the general
reference; but the agitation of all that was latent in this itself had
presently broken through, and by the end of a few moments we might
perhaps scarce have been able to say whether the host had more set the
guest or the guest more the host in motion. Horton Vint had everywhere
so the air of a prime social element that it took in any case, and above
all in any case of the spacious provision or the sumptuous setting, a
good deal of practically combative proof to reduce the implications of
his presence to the minor right. He _might_ inveterately have been
master or, in quantitative terms, owner--so could he have been taken for
the most part as offering you the enjoyment of anything fine that
surrounded him: this in proportion to the scale of such matters and to
any glimpse of that sense of them in you which was what came nearest to
putting you on his level. All of which sprang doubtless but from the
fact that his relation to things of expensive interest was so much at
the mercy of his appearance; representing as it might be said to do a
contradiction of the law under which it is mostly to be observed, in our
modernest conditions, that the figure least congruous with scenic
splendour is the figure awaiting the reference. More references than may
here be detailed, at any rate, would Horton have seemed ready to gather
up during the turns he had resumed his indulgence in after the original
arrest and the measurements of the whole place practically determined
for him by Gray's own so suggestive revolutions. It was positively now
as if these last had all met, in their imperfect expression, what that
young man's emotion was in the act of more sharply attaining to--the
plain conveyance that if Horton had in his friendliness, not to say his
fidelity, presumed to care to know, this disposition was as naught
beside the knowledge apparently about to drench him. They were there,
the companions, in their second brief arrest, with everything good in
the world that he might have conceived or coveted just taking for him
the radiant form of precious knowledges that he must be so obliging as
to submit to. Let it be fairly inspiring to us to imagine the acuteness
of his perception during these minutes of the possibilities of good
involved; the refinement of pleasure in his seeing how the advantage
thrust upon him would wear the dignity and grace of his consenting
unselfishly to learn--inasmuch as, quite evidently, the more he learnt,
and though it should be ostensibly and exclusively about Mr. Betterman's
heir, the more vividly it all would stare at him as a marked course of
his own. Wonderful thus the little space of his feeling the great wave
set in motion by that quiet worthy break upon him out of Gray's face,
Gray's voice, Gray's contact of hands laid all appealingly and
affirmingly on his shoulders, and then as it retreated, washing him
warmly down, expose to him, off in the intenser light and the uncovered
prospect, something like his entire personal future. Something
extraordinarily like, yes, could he but keep steady to recognise it
through a deepening consciousness, at the same time, of how he was more
than matching the growth of his friend's need of him by growing there at
once, and to rankness, under the friend's nose, all the values to which
this need supplied a soil.

"Well, I won't pretend I'm not glad you don't adopt me as pure
ornament--glad you see, I mean, a few connections in which one may
perhaps be able, as well as certainly desirous, to be of service to you.
Only one should honestly tell you," Horton went on, "that people wanting
to help you will spring up round you like mushrooms, and that you'll be
able to pick and choose as even a king on his throne can't. Therefore,
my boy," Haughty said, "don't exaggerate my modest worth."

Gray, though releasing him, still looked at him hard--so hard perhaps
that, having imagination, he might in an instant more have felt it go
down too deep. It hadn't done that, however, when "What I want of you
above all is exactly that _you_ shall pick and choose" was merely what
at first came of it. And the case was still all of the rightest as
Graham at once added: "You see 'people' are exactly my difficulty--I'm
so mortally afraid of them, and so equally sure that it's the last thing
you are. If I want you for myself I want you still more for others--by
which you may judge," said Gray, "that I've cut you out work."

"That you're mortally afraid of people is, I confess," Haughty answered,
"news to me. I seem to remember you, on the contrary, as so remarkably
and--what was it we used to call it?--so critico-analytically interested
in 'em."

"That's just it--I am so beastly interested! Don't you therefore see,"
Gray asked, "how I may dread the complication?"

"Dread it so that you seek to work it off on another?"--and Haughty
looked about as if he would after all have rather relished a cigarette.

Clearly, none the less, this awkwardness was lost on his friend. "I want
to work off on you, Vinty, every blest thing that you'll let me; and
when you've seen into my case a little further my reasons will so jump
at your eyes that I'm convinced you'll have patience with them."

"I'm not then, you think, too beastly interested myself----? I've got
such a free mind, you mean, and such a hard heart, and such a record of
failure to have been any use at all to myself, that I _must_ be just the
person, it strikes you, to save you all the trouble and secure you all
the enjoyment?" That inquiry Horton presently made, but with an addition
ere Gray could answer. "My difficulty for myself, you see, has always
been that I also am by my nature too beastly interested."

"Yes"--Gray promptly met it--"but you like it, take that easily,
immensely enjoy it and are not a bit afraid of it. You carry it off and
you don't pay for it."

"Don't you make anything," Horton simply went on, "of my being for
instance so uncannily interested in yourself?"

Gray's eyes again sounded him. "_Are_ you really and truly?--to the
extent of its not boring you?" But with all he had even at the worst to
take for granted he waited for no reassurance. "You'll be so sorry for
me that I shall wring your heart and you'll assist me for common pity."

"Well," Horton returned, a natural gaiety of response not wholly kept
under, "how can I absurdly make believe that pitying you, if it comes to
that, won't be enough against nature to have some fascination? Endowed
with every advantage, personal, physical, material, moral, in other
words, brilliantly clever, inordinately rich, strikingly handsome and
incredibly good, your state yet insists on being such as to nip in the
bud the hardy flower of envy. What's the matter with you to bring that
about would seem, I quite agree, well worth one's looking into--even if
it proves, by its perversity or its folly, something of a trial to one's
practical philosophy. When I pressed you some minutes ago for the reason
of your not facing the future with a certain ease you gave as that
reason your want of education and wit. But please understand," Horton
added, "that I've no time to waste with you on sophistry that isn't so
much as plausible." He stopped a moment, his hands in his pockets, his
head thrown all but extravagantly back, so that his considering look
might have seemed for the time to descend from a height designed a
little to emphasise Gray's comparative want of stature. That young man's
own eyes remained the while, none the less, unresentfully raised; to
such an effect indeed that, after some duration of this exchange, the
bigger man's fine irony quite visibly shaded into a still finer, and
withal frankly kinder, curiosity. Poor Gray, with a strained face and an
agitation but half controlled, breathed quick and hard, as from inward
pressure, and then, renouncing choice--there were so many things to
say--shook his head, slowly and repeatedly, after a fashion that
discouraged levity. "My dear boy," said his friend under this sharper
impression, "you do take it hard." Which made Graham turn away, move
about in vagueness of impatience and, still panting and still hesitating
for other expression, approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big
chimneypiece, reach for a box that raised a presumption of cigarettes
and, the next instant, thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The
latter's welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was
also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray's own notice
of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook,
before the box went back to its shelf. Odd again might have been for a
protected witness of this scene--which of course is exactly what you are
invited to be--the lapse of speech that marked it for the several
minutes. Horton, truly touched now, and to the finer issue we have
glanced at, waited unmistakably for the sign of something more important
than his imagination, even at its best, could give him, and which, not
less conceivably, would be the sort of thing he himself hadn't signs,
either actual or possible, for. He waited while they did the place at
last the inevitable small violence--this being long enough to make him
finally say: "Do you mean, on your honour, that you don't _like_ what
has happened to you?"

This unloosed then for Gray the gate of possible expression. "Of course
I like it--that is of course I try to. I've been trying here, day after
day, as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for anything; and yet I
remain, don't you see? a wretched little worm."

"Deary, deary me," stared Horton, "that you should have to bring up your
appreciation of it from such depths! You go in for it as you would for
the electric light or the telephone, and then find half-way that you
can't stand the expense and want the next-door man somehow to combine
with you?"

"That's exactly it, Vinty, and you're the next-door man!"--Gray embraced
the analogy with glee. "I _can't_ stand the expense, and yet I don't for
a moment deny I should immensely enjoy the convenience. I want," he
asseverated, "to like my luck. I want to go in for it, as you say, with
every inch of any such capacity as I have. And I want to believe in my
capacity; I want to work it up and develop it--I assure you on my honour
I do. I've lashed myself up into feeling that if I don't I shall be a
base creature, a worm of worms, as I say, and fit only to be utterly
ashamed. But that's where you come in. You'll help me to develop. To
develop my capacity I mean," he explained with a wondrous candour.

Horton was now, small marvel, all clear faith; even, the cigarettes
helping, to the verge again of hilarity. "Your capacity--I see. Not so
much your property itself."

"Well"--Gray considered of it--"what will my property be _except_ my
capacity?" He spoke really as for the pleasure of seeing very finely and
very far. "It won't if I don't like it, that is if I don't _understand_
it, don't you see? enough to make it count. Yes, yes, don't revile me,"
he almost feverishly insisted: "I do want it to count for all it's
worth, and to get everything out of it, to the very last drop of
interest, pleasure, experience, whatever you may call it, that such a
possession can yield. And I'm going to keep myself up to it, to the top
of the pitch, by every art and prop, by every helpful dodge, that I can
put my hand on. You see if I don't. I breathe defiance," he continued,
with his rare radiance, "at any suspicion or doubt. But I come back," he
had to add, "to my point that it's you that I essentially most depend
on."

Horton again looked at him long and frankly; this subject of appeal
might indeed for the moment have been as embarrassed between the various
requisitions of response as Gray had just before shown himself. But as
the tide could surge for one of the pair so it could surge for the
other, and the large truth of what Horton most grasped appeared as soon
as he had spoken. "The name of your complaint, you poor dear delightful
person, or the name at least of your necessity, your predicament and
your solution, is marriage to a wife at short order. I mean of course to
an amiable one. _There_, so obviously, is your aid and your prop, there
are the sources of success for interest in your fortune, and for the
whole experience and enjoyment of it, as you can't find them elsewhere.
What are you but just 'fixed' to marry, and what is the sense of your
remarks but a more or less intelligent clamour for it?"

Triumphant indeed, as we have said, for lucidity and ease, was this
question, and yet it had filled the air, for its moment, but to drop at
once by the practical puncture of Gray's perfect recognition. "Oh of
course I've thought of that--but it doesn't meet my case at all." Had he
been capable of disappointment in his friend he might almost have been
showing it now.

Horton had, however, no heat about it. "You mean you absolutely don't
want a wife--in connection, so to speak, with your difficulties; or with
the idea, that is, of their being resolved into blessings?"

"Well"--Gray was here at least all prompt and clear--"I keep down, in
that matter, so much as I can any _a priori_ or mere theoretic want. I
see my possibly marrying as an effect, I mean--I somehow don't see it at
all as a cause. A cause, that is"--he easily worked it out--"of my
getting other things right. It may be, in conditions, the greatest
rightness of all; but I want to be sure of the conditions."

"The first of which is, I understand then"--for this at least had been
too logical for Haughty not to have to match it--"that you should fall
so tremendously in love that you won't be able to help yourself."

Graham just debated; he was all intelligence here. "Falling tremendously
in love--the way you _grands amoureux_ talk of such things!"

"Where do you find, my boy," Horton asked, "that I'm a grand amoureux?"

Well, Gray had but to consult his memory of their young days together;
there was the admission, under pressure, that he might have confused the
appearances. "They were at any rate always up and at you--which seems to
have left me with the impression that your life is full of them."

"Every man's life is full of them that has a door or a window they can
come in by. But the question's of yourself," said Haughty, "and just
exactly of the number of such that you'll have to keep open or shut in
the immense façade you'll now present."

Our young man might well have struck him as before all else
inconsequent. "I shall present an immense façade?"--Gray, from his tone
of surprise, to call it nothing more, would have thought of this for the
first time.

But Horton just hesitated. "You've great ideas if you see it yourself as
a small one."

"I don't see it as any. I decline," Gray remarked, "to _have_ a façade.
And if I don't I shan't have the windows and doors."

"You've got 'em already, fifty in a row"--Haughty was remorseless--"and
it isn't a question of 'having': you _are_ a façade; stretching a mile
right and left. How can you not be when I'm walking up and down in front
of you?"

"Oh you walk up and down, you _make_ the things you pass, and you can
behave of course if you want like one of the giants in uniform, outside
the big shops, who attend the ladies in and out. In fact," Gray went on,
"I don't in the least judge that I _am_, or can be at all advertised as,
one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I
needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently
assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I
were a much greater one"--he gathered force--"my appearance of it would
depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can
take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more
room than may suit your taste. I'll be hanged if I consent to take up an
inch more than suits mine. Even though not of the truly bloated I've at
least means to be quiet. Every one among us--I mean among the
moneyed--isn't a monster on exhibition." In proof of which he abounded.
"I know people myself who aren't."

Horton considered him with amusement, as well apparently as the people
that he knew! "Of course you may dig the biggest hole in the ground that
ever was dug--spade-work comes high, but you'll have the means--and get
down into it and sit at the very bottom. Only your hole will become then
_the_ feature of the scene, and we shall crowd a thousand deep all round
the edge of it."

Gray stood for a moment looking down, then faced his guest as with a
slight effort. "Do you know about Rosanna Gaw?" And then while Horton,
for reasons of his own, failed at once to answer: "_She_ has come in for
millions----"

"Twenty-two and a fraction," Haughty said at once. "Do you mean that she
sits, like Truth, at the bottom of a well?" he asked still more
divertedly.

Gray had a sharp gesture. "If there's a person in the world whom I don't
call a façade----!"

"You don't call _her_ one?"--Haughty took it right up. And he added as
for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man----!"

"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes
every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.

Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in
the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this
time to a light, wait in silence for his word. "She does more than
that"--it was brought quite dryly out. "She loathes every separate
dollar she possesses."

Gray's sense of the matter, strenuous though it was, could just stare at
this extravagance of assent; seeing however, on second thoughts, what
there might be in it. "Well then if what I have is a molehill beside her
mountain, I can the more easily emulate her in standing back."

"What you have is a molehill?" Horton was concerned to inquire.

Gray showed a shade of guilt, but faced his judge. "Well--so I gather."

The judge at this lost patience. "Am I to understand that you positively
_cultivate_ vagueness and water it with your tears?"

"Yes"--the culprit was at least honest--"I should rather say I do. And I
want you to let me. Do let me."

"It's apparently more then than Miss Gaw does!"

"Yes"--Gray again considered; "she seems to know more or less what she's
worth, and she tells me that I can't even begin to approach it."

"Very crushing of her!" his friend laughed. "You 'make the pair', as
they say, and you must help each other much. Her 'loathing' it exactly
is--since we know all about it!--that gives her a frontage as wide as
the Capitol at Washington. Therefore your comparison proves
little--though I confess it would rather help us," Horton pursued, "if
you could seem, as you say, to have asked one or two of the questions
that I should suppose would have been open to you.

"Asked them of Mr. Crick, you mean?"

"Well, yes--if you've nobody else, and as you appear not to have been
able to have cared to look at the will yourself."

Something like a light of hope, at this, kindled in Gray's face. "Would
_you_ care to look at it, Vinty?"

The inquiry gave Horton pause. "Look at it now, you mean?"

"Well--whenever you like. I think," said Gray, "it must be in the
house."

"You're not sure even of _that?_" his companion wailed.

"Oh I know there are two"--our young man had coloured. "I don't mean
different ones, but copies of the same," he explained; "one of which Mr.
Crick must have."

"And the other of which"--Horton pieced it together--"is the one you
offer to show me?"

"Unless, unless----!" and Gray, casting about, bethought himself.
"Unless _that_ one----!" With his eyes on his friend's he still
shamelessly wondered.

"Unless that one has happened to get lost," Horton tenderly suggested,
"so that you can't after all produce it?"

"No, but it may be upstairs, upstairs----" Gray continued to turn this
over. "I think it _is_," he then recognised, "where I had perhaps better
not just now disturb it."

His recognition was nothing, apparently, however, to the clear quickness
of Horton's. "It's in your uncle's own room?"

"The room," Gray assented, "where he lies in death while we talk here."
This, his tone suggested, sufficiently enjoined delay.

Horton's concurrence was immediately such that, once more turning off,
he measured, for the intensity of it, half the room. "I can't advise you
without the facts that you're unable to give," he said as he came back,
"but I don't indeed invite you to go and rummage in that presence." He
might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that verily by this time,
between these friends--by which I mean of course as from one of them
only, the more generally assured, to the other--irony would, to an at
all exhaustive analysis, have been felt to flicker in their medium. Gray
might in fact, on the evidence of his next words, have found it just
distinguishable.




V


"We do talk here while he lies in death"--they had in fine all serenity
for it. "But the extraordinary thing is that my putting myself this way
at my ease--and for that matter putting you at yours--is exactly what
the dear man made to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade of a
sense, and don't think I ever shall have, of not doing what he wanted of
me; for what he wanted of me," our particular friend continued,
"is--well, so utterly unconventional. He would _like_ my being the right
sort of well-meaning idiot that you catch me in the very fact of. I
warned him, I sincerely, passionately warned him, that I'm not fit, in
the smallest degree, for the use, for the care, for even the most
rudimentary comprehension, of a fortune; and that exactly it was which
seemed most to settle him. He wanted me clear, to the last degree, not
only of the financial brain, but of any sort of faint germ of the
money-sense whatever--down to the very lack of power, if he might be so
happy (or if _I_ might!) to count up to ten on my fingers. Satisfied of
the limits of my arithmetic he passed away in bliss."

To this, as fairly lucid, Horton had applied his understanding. "You
can't count up to ten?"

"Not all the way. Still," our young man smiled, "the greater inspiration
may now give me the lift."

His guest looked as if one might by that time almost have doubted. But
it was indeed an extraordinary matter. "How comes it then that your want
of arithmetic hasn't given you a want of order?--unless indeed I'm
mistaken and you _were_ perhaps at sixes and sevens?"

"Well, I think I was at sixes--though I never got up to sevens! I've
never had the least rule or method; but that has been a sort of thing I
could more or less cover up--from others, I mean, not from myself, who
have always been helplessly ashamed of it. It hasn't been the disorder
of extravagance," Gray explained, "but the much more ignoble kind, the
wasteful thrift that doesn't really save, that simply misses, and that
neither enjoys things themselves nor enjoys their horrid little
equivalent of hoarded pence. I haven't needed to count far, the fingers
of one hand serving for my four or five possessions; and also I've kept
straight not by taking no liberties with my means, but by taking none
with my understanding of them. From fear of counting wrong, and from
loathing of the act of numerical calculation, and of the humiliation of
having to give it up after so few steps from the start, I've never
counted at all--and that, you see, is what has saved me. That has been
my sort of disorder--which you'll agree is the most pitiful of all."

Horton once more turned away from him, but slowly this time, not in
impatience, rather with something of the preoccupation of a cup-bearer
whose bowl has been filled to the brim and who must carry it a distance
with a steady hand. So for a minute or two might he have been taking
this care; at the end of which, however, Gray saw him stop in apparent
admiration before a tall inlaid and brass-bound French _bahut_; with the
effect, after a further moment, of a sharp break of their thread of
talk. "You've got some things here at least to enjoy and that you ought
to know how to keep hold of; though I don't so much mean," he explained,
"this expensive piece of furniture as the object of interest perched on
top."

"Oh the ivory tower!--yes, isn't that, Vinty, a prize piece and worthy
of the lovely name?"

Vinty remained for the time all admiration, having, as you would easily
have seen, lights enough to judge by. "It appears to have been your
uncle's only treasure--as everything else about you here is of a
newness! And it isn't so much too small, Gray," he laughed, "for you to
get into it yourself, when you want to get rid of us, and draw the doors
to. If it's a symbol of any retreat you really have an eye on I much
congratulate you; I don't know what I wouldn't give myself for the 'run'
of an ivory tower."

"Well, I can't ask you to share mine," Gray returned; "for the situation
to have a sense, I take it, one must sit in one's tower alone. And I
should properly say," he added after an hesitation, "that mine is the
one object, all round me here, that I don't owe my uncle: it has been
placed at my disposition, in the handsomest way in the world, by Rosanna
Gaw."

"Ah that does increase the interest--even if susceptible of seeming to
mean, to one's bewilderment, that it's the sort of thing she would like
to thrust you away into; which I hope, however, is far from the case.
Does she then _keep_ ivory towers, a choice assortment?" Horton quite
gaily continued; "in the sense of having a row of them ready for
occupation, and with tenants to match perchable in each and signalling
along the line from summit to summit? Because"--and, facing about from
his contemplation, he piled up his image even as the type of object
represented by it might have risen in the air--"you give me exactly, you
see, the formula of that young lady herself: perched aloft in an ivory
tower is what she is, and I'll be hanged if this isn't a hint to you to
mount, yourself, into just such another; under the same provocation, I
fancy her pleading, as she has in her own case taken for sufficient."
Thus it was that, suddenly more brilliant than ever yet, to Graham's
apprehension, you might well have guessed, his friend stood nearer
again--stood verily quite irradiating responsive ingenuity. Markedly
would it have struck you that at such instants as this, most of all, the
general hush that was so thick about them pushed upward and still
further upward the fine flower of the inferential. Following the pair
closely from the first, and beginning perhaps with your idea that this
life of the intelligence had its greatest fineness in Gray Fielder, you
would by now, I dare say, have been brought to a more or less
apprehensive foretaste of its possibilities in our other odd agent. For
how couldn't it have been to the full stretch of his elastic imagination
that Haughty was drawn out by the time of his putting a certain matter
beautifully to his companion? "Don't I, 'gad, take the thing straight
over from you--all of it you've been trying to convey to me here!--when
I see you, up in the blue, behind your parapet, just gracefully lean
over and call down to where I mount guard at your door in the dust and
comparative darkness? It's well to understand"--his thumbs now in his
waistcoat-holes he measured his idea as if Gray's own face fairly
reflected it: "you want me to take _all_ the trouble for you simply, in
order that you may have all the fun. And you want me at the same time,
in order that things shall be for you at their ideal of the easiest, to
make you believe, as a salve to your conscience, that the fun _isn't_ so
mixed with the trouble as that you can't have it, on the right
arrangement made with me, quite by itself. This is most ingenious of
you," Horton added, "but it doesn't in the least show me, don't you see?
where my fun comes in."

"I wonder if I can do that," Gray returned, "without making you
understand first something of the nature of mine--or for that matter
without my first understanding myself perhaps what my queer kind of it
is most likely to be."

His companion showed withal for more and more ready to risk amused
recognitions. "You _are_ 'rum' with your queer kinds, and might make my
flesh creep, in these conditions, if it weren't for something in me of
rude pluck." Gray, in speaking, had moved towards the great French
meuble with some design upon it or upon the charge it carried; which
Horton's eyes just wonderingly noted--and to the effect of an
exaggeration of tone in his next remark. "However, there are assurances
one doesn't keep repeating: it's so little in me, I feel, to refuse you
any service I'm capable of, no matter how clumsily, that if you take me
but confidently enough for the agent even of your unholiest pleasures,
you'll find me still putting them through for you when you've broken
down in horror yourself."

"Of course it's my idea that whatever I ask you shall be of interest to
you, and of the liveliest, in itself--quite apart from any virtue of my
connection with it. If it speaks to you that way so much the better,"
Gray went on, standing now before the big _bahut_ with both hands raised
and resting on the marble top. This lifted his face almost to the level
of the base of his perched treasure--so that he stared at the ivory
tower without as yet touching it. He only continued to talk, though with
his thought, as he brought out the rest of it, almost superseded
by the new preoccupation. "I shall absolutely decline any good of
anything that isn't attended by some equivalent or--what do you call
it?--proportionate good for you. I shall propose to you a percentage, if
that's the right expression, on every blest benefit I get from you in
the way of the sense of safety." Gray now moved his hands, laying them
as in finer fondness to either smoothly-plated side of the tall
repository, against which a finger or two caressingly rubbed. His back
turned therefore to Horton, he was divided between the growth of his
response to him and that of this more sensible beauty. "Don't I kind of
insure my life, my moral consciousness, I mean, for your advantage?--or
_with_ you, as it were, taking you for the officeman or actuary, if I'm
not muddling: to whom I pay a handsome premium for the certainty of
there being to my credit, on my demise, a sufficient sum to clear off my
debts and bury me."

"You propose to me a handsome premium? Catch me," Horton laughed, "not
jumping at _that!_"

"Yes, and you'll of course fix the premium yourself." But Gray was now
quite detached, occupied only in opening his ivory doors with light
fingers and then playing these a little, whether for hesitation or for
the intenser pointing of inquiry, up and down the row of drawers so
exposed. Against the topmost they then rested a moment--drawing out this
one, however, with scant further delay and enabling themselves to feel
within and so become possessed of an article contained. It was with this
article in his hand that he presently faced about again, turning it
over, resting his eyes on it and then raising them to his visitor, who
perceived in it a heavy letter, duly addressed, to all appearance, but
not stamped and as yet unopened. "The distinguished retreat, you see,
_has_ its tenant."

"Do you mean by its tenant the author of those evidently numerous
pages?--unless you rather mean," Horton asked, "that you seal up in
packets the love-letters addressed to you and find that charming
receptacle a congruous place to keep them? Is there a packet in every
drawer, and do you take them out this way to remind yourself fondly that
you have them and that it mayn't be amiss for me to feel your conquests
and their fine old fragrance dangled under my nose?"

Our young man, at these words, had but returned to the consideration of
his odd property, attaching it first again to the superscription and
then to the large firm seal. "I haven't the least idea what this is; and
I'm divided in respect of it, I don't mind telling you, between
curiosity and repulsion."

Horton then also eyed the ambiguity, but at his discreet distance and
reaching out for it as little as his friend surrendered it. "Do you
appeal to me by chance to help you to decide either way?"

Poor Gray, still wondering and fingering, had a long demur. "No--I don't
think I want to decide." With which he again faced criticism. "The
extent, Vinty, to which I think I must just _like_ to drift----!"

Vinty seemed for a moment to give this indicated quantity the attention
invited to it, but without more action for the case than was represented
by his next saying: "Why then do you produce your question--apparently
so much for my benefit?"

"Because in the first place you noticed the place it lurks in, and
because in the second I like to tell you things."

This might have struck us as making the strained note in Vinty's smile
more marked. "But that's exactly, confound you, what you _don't_ do!
Here have I been with you half an hour without your practically telling
me anything!"

Graham, very serious, stood a minute looking at him hard; succeeding
also quite it would seem in taking his words not in the least for a
reproach but for a piece of information of the greatest relevance, and
thus at once dismissing any minor importance. He turned back with his
minor importance to his small open drawer, laid it within again and,
pushing the drawer to, closed the doors of the cabinet. The act disposed
of the letter, but had the air of introducing as definite a statement as
Horton could have dreamt of. "It's a bequest from Mr. Gaw."

"A bequest"--Horton wondered--"of banknotes?"

"No--it's a letter addressed to me just before his death, handed me by
his daughter, to whom he intrusted it, and not likely, I think, to
contain money. He was then sure, apparently, of my coming in for money;
and even if he hadn't been would have had no ground on earth for leaving
me anything."

Horton's visible interest was yet consonant with its waiting a little
for expression. "He leaves you the great Rosanna."

Graham, at this, had a stare, followed by a flush as the largest
possible sense of it came out. "You suppose it perhaps the expression of
a wish----?" And then as Horton forbore at first as to what he supposed:
"A wish that I may find confidence to apply to his daughter for her
hand?"

"That hasn't occurred to you before?" Horton asked--"nor the measure of
the confidence suggested been given you by the fact of your receiving
the document from Rosanna herself? You do give me, you extraordinary
person," he gaily proceeded, "as good opportunities as I could possibly
desire to 'help' you!"

Graham, for all the felicity of this, needed but an instant to think. "I
have it from Miss Gaw herself that she hasn't an idea of what the letter
contains--any more than she has the least desire that I shall for the
present open it."

"Well, mayn't that very attitude in her rather point to a suspicion?"
was his guest's ingenious reply. "Nothing could be less like
her certainly than to appear in such a case to want to force
your hand. It makes her position--with exquisite filial piety, you
see--extraordinarily delicate."

Prompt as that might be, Gray appeared to show, no sportive sophistry,
however charming, could work upon him. "Why should Mr. Gaw want me to
marry his daughter?"

Horton again hung about a little. "Why should you be so afraid of
ascertaining his idea that you don't so much as peep into what he writes
on the subject?"

"Afraid? _Am_ I afraid?" Gray fairly spoke with a shade of the hopeful,
as if even that would be richer somehow than drifting.

"Well, you looked at your affair just now as you might at some small
dangerous, some biting or scratching, animal whom you're not at all sure
of."

"And yet you see I keep him about."

"Yes--you keep him in his cage, for which I suppose you have a key."

"I have indeed a key, a charming little golden key." With which Gray
took another turn; once more facing criticism, however, to say with
force: "He hated him most awfully!"

Horton appeared to wonder. "Your uncle hated old Gaw?"

"No--I don't think _he_ cared. I speak of Mr. Gaw's own animus. He
disliked so mortally his old associate, the man who lies dead
upstairs--and in spite of my consideration for him I still preserve his
record."

"How do you know about his hate," Horton asked, "or if your letter,
since you haven't read it, is a record?"

"Well, I don't trust it--I mean not to be. I don't see what else he
could have written me about. Besides," Gray added, "I've my personal
impression."

"Of old Gaw? You have seen him then?"

"I saw him out there on this verandah, where he was hovering in the most
extraordinary fashion, a few hours before his death. It was only for a
few minutes," Gray said--"but they were minutes I shall never forget."

Horton's interest, though so deeply engaged, was not unattended with
perplexity. "You mean he expressed to you such a feeling at such an
hour?"

"He expressed to me in about three minutes, without speech, to which it
seemed he couldn't trust himself, as much as it might have taken him, or
taken anyone else, to express in three months at another time and on
another subject. If you ever yourself saw him," Gray went on, "perhaps
you'll understand."

"Oh I often saw him--and should indeed in your place perhaps have
understood. I never heard him accused of not making people do so. But
you hold," said Horton, "that he must have backed up for you further the
mystic revelation?"

"He had written before he saw me--written on the chance of my being a
person to be affected by it; and after seeing me he didn't destroy or
keep back his message, but emphasised his wish for a punctual delivery."

"By which it is evident," Horton concluded, "that you struck him exactly
as such a person."

"He saw me, by my idea, as giving my attention to what he had there
ready for me." Gray clearly had talked himself into possession of his
case. "That's the sort of person I succeeded in seeming to him--though I
can assure you without my the least wanting to."

"What you feel is then that he thought he might attack with some sort of
shock for you the character of your uncle?" Vinty's question had a
special straightness.

"What I feel is that he has so attacked it, shock or no shock, and that
that thing in my cabinet, which I haven't examined, can only be the
proof."

It gave Horton much to turn over. "But your conviction has an
extraordinary bearing. Do I understand that the thing was handed you by
your friend with a knowledge of its contents?"

"Don't, please," Gray said at once, "understand anything either so
hideous or so impossible. She but carried out a wish uttered on her
father's deathbed, and hasn't so much as suggested that I break the
portentous seal. I think in fact," he assured himself, "that she greatly
prefers I shouldn't."

"Which fact," Horton observed, "but adds of course to your curiosity."

Gray's look at him betrayed on this a still finer interest in _his_
interest. "You see the limits in me of that passion."

"Well, my dear chap, I've seen greater limits to many things than your
having your little secret tucked away under your thumb. Do you mind my
asking," Horton risked, "whether what deters you from action--and by
action I mean opening your letter--is just a real apprehension of the
effect designed by the good gentleman? Do you feel yourself exposed, by
the nature of your mind or any presumption on Gaw's behalf, to give
credit, vulgarly speaking, to whatever charge or charges he may bring?"

Gray weighed the question, his wide dark eyes would have told us, in,
his choicest silver scales. "Neither the nature of my mind, bless it,
nor the utmost force of any presumption to the contrary, prevents my
having found my uncle, in his wonderful latest development, the very
most charming person that I've ever seen in my life. Why he impressed me
as a model of every virtue."

"I confess I don't see," said Horton, "how a relative so behaving could
have failed to endear himself. With such convictions why don't you risk
looking?"

Gray was but for a moment at a loss--he quite undertook to know.
"Because the whole thing would be so horrible. I mean the question
itself is--and even our here and at such a time discussing it."

"Nothing is horrible--to the point of making one quake," Horton opined,
"that falls to the ground with a smash from the moment one drops it. The
sense of your document is exactly what's to be appreciated. It would
have no sense at all if you didn't believe."

Gray considered, but still differed. "Yes, to find it merely vindictive
and base, and thereby to have to take it for false, that would still be
an odious experience."

"Then why the devil don't you simply destroy the thing?" Horton at last
quite impatiently inquired.

Gray showed perhaps he had scarce a reason, but had, to the very
brightest effect, an answer. "That's just what I want you to help me to.
To help me, that is," he explained, "after a little to decide for."

"After a little?" wondered Horton. "After how long?"

"Well, after long enough for me to feel sure I don't act in fear. I
don't want," he went on as in fresh illustration of the pleasure taken
by him, to the point, as it were, of luxury, in feeling no limit to his
companion's comprehension, or to the patience involved in it either,
amusedly as Horton might at moments attempt to belie that, adding
thereby to the whole service something still more spacious--"I don't
want to act in fear of anything or of anyone whatever; I said to myself
at home three weeks ago, or whenever, that it wasn't for that I was
going to come over; and I propose therefore, you see, to know so far as
possible where I am and what I'm about: morally speaking at least, if
not financially."

His friend but looked at him again on this in rather desperate
diversion. "I don't see how you're to know where you are, I confess, if
you take no means to find out."

"Well, my acquisition of property seems by itself to promise me
information, and for the understanding of the lesson I shall have to
take a certain time. What I want," Gray finely argued, "is to act but in
the light of that."

"In the light of time? Then why do you begin by so oddly wasting it?"

"Because I think it may be the only way for me not to waste
understanding. Don't be afraid," he went on, moving as by the effect of
Horton's motion, which had brought that subject of appeal a few steps
nearer the rare repository, "that I shall commit the extravagance of at
all wasting _you._"

Horton, from where he had paused, looked up at the ivory tower; though
as Gray was placed in the straight course of approach to it he had after
a fashion to catch and meet his eyes by the way. "What you really want
of me, it's clear, is to help you to fidget and fumble--or in other
words to prolong the most absurd situation; and what I ought to do, if
you'd believe it of me, is to take that stuff out of your hands and just
deal with it myself."

"And what do you mean by dealing with it yourself?"

"Why destroying it unread by either of us--which," said Horton, looking
about, "I'd do in a jiffy, on the spot, if there were only a fire in
that grate. The place is clear, however, and we've matches; let me chuck
your letter in and enjoy the blaze with you."

"Ah, my dear man, don't! Don't!" Gray repeated, putting it rather as a
plea for indulgence than as any ghost of a defiance, but instinctively
stepping backward in defence of his treasure.

His companion, for a little, gazed at the cabinet, in speculation, it
might really have seemed, as to an extraordinary reach of arm. "You
positively prefer to hug the beastly thing?"

"Let me alone," Gray presently returned, "and you'll probably find I've
hugged it to death."

Horton took, however, on his side, a moment for further reflection. "I
thought what you wanted of me to be exactly _not_ that I should let you
alone, but that I should give you on the contrary my very best
attention!"

"Well," Gray found felicity to answer, "I feel that you'll see how your
very best attention will sometimes consist in your not at all minding
me."

So then for the minute Horton looked as if he took it. The great clock
on the mantel appeared to have stopped with the stop of its late owner's
life; so that he eyed his watch and startled at the hour to which they
had talked. He put out his hand for good-night, and this returned grasp
held them together in silence a minute. Something then in his sense of
the situation determined his breaking out with an intensity not yet
produced in him. "Yes--you're really prodigious. I mean for trust in a
fellow. For upon my honour you know nothing whatever about me."

"That's quite what I mean," said Gray--"that I suffer from my ignorance
of so much that's important, and want naturally to correct it."

"'Naturally'?" his visitor gloomed.

"Why, I do know _this_ about you, that when we were together with old
Roulet at Neuchâtel and, off on our _cours_ that summer, had strayed
into a high place, in the Oberland, where I was ass enough to have slid
down to a scrap of a dizzy ledge, and so hung helpless over the void,
unable to get back, in horror of staying and in greater horror of not,
you got near enough to me, at the risk of your life, to lower to me the
rope we so luckily had with us and that made an effort of my own
possible by my managing to pass it under my arms. You helped that effort
from a place of vantage above that nobody but you, in your capacity for
playing up, would for a moment have taken for one, and you so hauled and
steadied and supported me, in spite of your almost equal exposure, that
little by little I climbed, I scrambled, my absolute confidence in you
helping, for it amounted to inspiration, and got near to where you
were."

"From which point," said Horton, whom this reminiscence had kept gravely
attentive, "you in your turn rendered me such assistance, I remember,
though I can't for the life of me imagine how you contrived, that the
tables were quite turned and I shouldn't in the least have got out of my
fix without you." He now pulled up short however; he stood a moment
looking down. "It isn't pleasant to remember."

"It wouldn't," Gray judged, "be pleasant to forget. You gave proof of
extraordinary coolness."

Horton still had his eyes on the ground. "We both kept our heads. I
grant it's a decent note for us."

"If you mean we were associated in keeping our heads, you kept mine,"
Gray remarked, "much more than I kept yours. I should be without a head
to-day if you hadn't seen so to my future, just as I should be without a
heart, you must really let me remark, if I didn't look now to your past.
I consider that to know that fact in it takes me of itself well-nigh far
enough in appreciation of you for my curiosity, even at its most
exasperated, to rest on a bed of roses. However, my imagination itself,"
Gray still more beautifully went on, "insists on making additions--since
how can't it, for that matter, picture again the rate at which it made
them then? I hadn't even at the time waited for you to save my life in
order to think you a swell. If I thought you the biggest kind of one,
and if in your presence now I see just as much as ever why I did, what
does that amount to but that my mind isn't a blank about you?"

"Well, if mine had ever been one about you," said Horton, once more
facing it, "our so interesting conversation here would have sufficed to
cram it full. The least I can make of you, whether for your protection
or my profit, is just that you're insanely romantic."

"Romantic--yes," Gray smiled; "but oh, but oh, so systematically!"

"It's your system that's exactly your madness. How can you take me,
without a stroke of success, without a single fact of performance, to my
credit, for anything but an abject failure? You're in possession of no
faintest sign, kindly note, that I'm not a mere impudent ass."

Gray accepted this reminder, for all he showed to the contrary, in the
admiring spirit in which he might have regarded a splendid somersault or
an elegant trick with cards; indulging, that is, by his appearance, in
the forward bend of attention to it, but then falling back to more
serious ground. "It's my romance that's itself my reason; by which I
mean that I'm never so reasonable, so deliberate, so lucid and so
capable--to call myself capable at any hour!--as when I'm most romantic.
I'm methodically and consistently so, and nothing could make and keep
me, for any dealings with me, I hold, more conveniently safe and quiet.
You see that you can lead me about by a string if you'll only tie it to
my appropriate finger--which you'll find out, if you don't mind the
trouble, by experience of the wrong ones, those where the attachment
won't 'act.'" He drew breath to give his friend the benefit of this
illustration, but another connection quickly caught him up. "How can you
pretend to suggest that you're in these parts the faintest approach to
an insignificant person? How can you pretend that you're not as clever
as you can stick together, and with the cleverness of the right kind?
For there are odious kinds, I know--the kind that redresses other
people's stupidity instead of sitting upon it."

"I'll answer you those questions," Horton goodhumouredly said, "as soon
as you tell me how you've come by your wonderful ground for them. Till
you're able to do that I shall resent your torrent of abuse. The
appalling creature you appear to wish to depict!"

"Well, you're simply a _figure_--what I call--in all the force of the
term; one has only to look at you to see it, and I shall give up drawing
conclusions from it only when I give up looking. You can make out that
there's nothing in a prejudice," Gray developed, "for a prejudice may
be, or must be, so to speak, single-handed; but you can't not count with
a relation--I mean one you're a party to, because a relation is exactly
a _fact_ of reciprocity. Our reciprocity, which exists and which makes
me a party to it by existing for my benefit, just as it makes you one by
existing for yours, can't possibly result in your not 'figuring' to me,
don't you see? with the most admirable intensity. And I simply decline,"
our young man wound up, "not to believe tremendous things of any subject
of a relation of mine."

"'Any' subject?" Vinty echoed in a tone that showed how intelligently he
had followed. "That condition, I'm afraid," he smiled, "will cut down
not a little your general possibilities of relation." And then as if
this were cheap talk, but a point none the less remained: "In this
country one's a figure (whatever you may mean by that!) on easy terms;
and if I correspond to your idea of the phenomenon you'll have much to
do--I won't say for my simple self, but for the comfort of your mind--to
make your fond imagination fit the funny facts. You pronounce me an
awful swell--which, like everything else over here, has less weight of
sense in it for the saying than it could have anywhere else; but what
barest evidence have you of any positive trust in me shown on any
occasion or in any connection by one creature you can name?"

"Trust?"--Gray looked at the red tip of the cigarette between his
fingers.

"Trust, trust, trust!"

Well, it didn't take long to say. "What do you call it but trust that
such people as the Bradhams, and all the people here, as he tells me,
receive you with open arms?"

"Such people as the Bradhams and as 'all the people here'!"--Horton
beamed on him for the beauty of that. "Such authorities and such
'figures,' such allegations, such perfections and such proofs! Oh," he
said, "I'm going to have great larks with you!"

"You give me then the evidence I want in the very act of challenging me
for it. What better proof of your situation and your character than your
possession exactly of such a field for whatever you like, of such a dish
for serving me up? Mr. Bradham, as you know," Gray continued, "was this
morning so good as to pay me a visit, and the form in which he put your
glory to me--because we talked of you ever so pleasantly--was that, by
his appreciation, you know your way about the place better than all the
rest of the knowing put together."

Horton smiled, smoked, kept his hands in his pockets. "Dear deep old
Davey!"

"Yes," said Gray consistently, "isn't he a wise old specimen? It's
rather horrid for me having thus to mention, as if you had applied to me
for a place, that I've picked up a good 'character' of you, but since
you insist on it he assured me that I couldn't possibly have a better
friend."

"Well, he's a most unscrupulous old person and ought really to be
ashamed. What it comes to," Haughty added, "is that though I've
repeatedly stayed with them they've to the best of his belief never
missed one of the spoons. The fact is that even if they had poor Davey
wouldn't know it."

"He doesn't take care of the spoons?" Gray asked in a tone that made his
friend at once swing round and away. He appeared to note an
unexpectedness in this, yet, "out" as he was for unexpectedness, it
could grow, on the whole, clearly, but to the raising of his spirits.
"Well, I shall take care of _my_ loose valuables and, unwarned by the
Bradhams and likely to have such things to all appearance in greater
number than ever before, what can I do but persist in my notion of
asking you to keep with me, at your convenience, some proper count of
them?" After which as Horton's movement had carried him quite to the far
end of the room, where the force of it even detained him a little. Gray
had him again well in view for his return, and was prompted thereby to a
larger form of pressure. "How can you pretend to palm off on me that
women mustn't in prodigious numbers 'trust' you?"

Haughty made of his shoulders the most prodigious hunch. "What
importance, under the sun, has the trust of women--in numbers however
prodigious? It's never what's best in a man they trust--it's exactly
what's worst, what's most irrelevant to anything or to any class but
themselves. Their _kind_ of confidence," he further elucidated, "is
concerned only with the effect of their own operations or with those to
which they are subject; it has no light either for a man's other friends
or for his enemies: it proves nothing about him but in that particular
and wholly detached relation. So neither hate me nor like me, please,
for anything any woman may tell you."

Horton's hand had on this renewed and emphasised its proposal of
good-night; to which his host acceded with the remark: "What superfluous
precautions you take!"

"How can you call them superfluous," he asked in answer to this, "when
you've been taking them at such a rate yourself?--in the interest, I
mean, of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on your feet?"

"It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about life--which is what
you've just been talking of. It has only been to show you that I'm silly
about affairs," Gray said as they went at last through the big bedimmed
hall to the house doors, which stood open to the warm summer night under
the protection of the sufficient outward reaches.

"Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at the top of the steps,
sought to know.

"You'll make me feel, no doubt, how much they are--which would be very
good for me. Only life isn't affairs--that's my subtle distinction,"
Gray went on.

"I'm not sure, I'm not sure!" said Horton while he looked at the stars.

"Oh rot--_I_ am!" Gray happily declared; to which he the next moment
added: "What it makes you contend for, you see, is the fact of my
silliness."

"Well, what is that but the most splendid fact about you, you jolly old
sage?"--and his visitor, getting off, fairly sprang into the shade of
the shrubberies.




BOOK FOURTH


I


Again and again, during the fortnight that followed his uncle's death,
were his present and his future to strike our young man as an
extraordinary blank cheque signed by Mr. Betterman and which, from the
moment he accepted it at all, he must fill out, according to his
judgment, his courage and his faith, with figures, monstrous, fantastic,
almost cabalistic, that it seemed to him he should never learn to
believe in. It was not so much the wonder of there being in various New
York institutions strange deposits of money, to amounts that, like
familiar mountain masses, appeared to begin at the blue horizon and,
sloping up and up toward him, grew bigger and bigger the nearer he or
they got, till they fairly overhung him with their purple power to meet
whatever drafts upon them he should make; it was not the tone, the
climax of dryness, of that dryest of men Mr. Crick, whose answering
remark as to any and every particular presumption of credit was "Well, I
guess I've fixed it so as you'll find _something_ there"; that sort of
thing was of course fairy-tale enough in itself, was all the while and
in a hundred connections a sweet assault on his credulity, but was at
the same time a phase of experience comparatively vulgar and that tended
to lose its edge with repetition. The real, the overwhelming sense of
his adventure was much less in the fact that he could lisp in dollars,
as it were, and see the dollars come, than in those vast vague
quantities, those spreading tracts, of his own consciousness itself on
which his kinsman's prodigious perversity had imposed, as for his
exploration, the aspect of a boundless capital. This trust of the dead
man in his having a nature that would show to advantage under a bigger
strain than it had ever dreamed of meeting, and the corresponding
desolate freedom on his own part to read back into the mystery such
refinements either, or such crude candours, of meaning and motive as
might seem best to fit it, that was the huge vague inscribable sum which
ran up into the millions and for which the signature that lettered
itself to the last neatness wherever his mind's eye rested was "good"
enough to reduce any more casual sign in the scheme of nature or of art
to the state of a negligible blur. Mr. Crick's want of colour, as Gray
qualified this gentleman's idiosyncrasy from the moment he saw how it
would be their one point of contact, became, by the extreme rarity and
clarity with which it couldn't but affect him, the very most gorgeous
gem, of the ruby or topaz order, that the smooth forehead of the actual
was for the present to flash upon him.

For dry did it appear inevitable to take the fact of a person's turning
up, from New York, with no other retinue than an attendant scribe in a
straw hat, a few hours before his uncle's last one, and being beholden
to mere Miss Mumby for simple introduction to Gray as Mr. Betterman's
lawyer. So had such sparenesses and barenesses of form to register
themselves for a mind beset with the tradition that consequences were
always somehow voluminous things; and yet the dryness was of a sort,
Gray soon apprehended, that he might take up in handfuls, as if it had
been the very sand of the Sahara, and thereby find in it, at the least
exposure to light, the collective shimmer of myriads of fine particles.
It was with the substance of the desert taken as monotonously sparkling
under any motion to dig in it that the abyss of Mr. Crick's functional
efficiency was filled. That efficiency, in respect to the things to be
done, would clearly so answer to any demand upon it within the compass
of our young man's subtlety, that the result for him could only be a
couple of days of inexpressible hesitation as to the outward air he
himself should be best advised to aim at wearing. He reminded himself at
this crisis of the proprietor of a garden, newly acquired, who might
walk about with his gardener and try to combine, in presence of
abounding plants and the vast range of luxuriant nature, an
ascertainment of names and properties and processes with a
dissimulation, for decent appearance, of the positive side of his
cockneyism. By no imagination of a state of mind so unfurnished would
the gardener ever have been visited; such gaping seams in the garment of
knowledge must affect him at the worst as mere proprietary languor, the
offhandedness of repletion; and no effective circumvention of
traditional takings for granted could late-born curiosity therefore
achieve. Gray's hesitation ceased only when he had decided that he
needn't care, comparatively speaking, for what Mr. Crick might think of
him. He was going to care for what others might--this at least he seemed
restlessly to apprehend; he was going to care tremendously, he felt
himself make out, for what Rosanna Gaw might, for what Horton Vint
might--even, it struck him, for what Davey Bradham might. But in
presence of Mr. Crick, who insisted on having no more personal identity
than the omnibus conductor stopping before you but just long enough to
bite into a piece of pasteboard with a pair of small steel jaws, the
question of his having a character either to keep or to lose declined
all relevance--and for the reason in especial that whichever way it
might turn for him would remain perhaps, so to speak, the most
unexpressed thing that should ever have happened in the world.

The effect producible by him on the persons just named, and extending
possibly to whole groups of which these were members, would be an effect
because somehow expressed and encountered as expression: when had he in
all his life, for example, so lived in the air of expression and so
depended on the help of it, as in that so thrilling night-hour just
spent with the mystifying and apparently mystified, yet also apparently
attached and, with whatever else, attaching, Vinty? It wasn't that Mr.
Crick, whose analogue he had met on every occasion of his paying his
fare in the public conveyances--where the persons to whom he paid it,
without perhaps in their particulars resembling each other, all managed
nevertheless to be felt as gathered into this reference--wasn't in a
high degree conversible; it was that the more he conversed the less Gray
found out what he thought not only of Mr. Betterman's heir but of any
other subject on which they touched. The gentleman who would, by Gray's
imagination, have been acting for the executors of his uncle's will had
not that precious document appeared to dispense with every superfluity,
could state a fact, under any rash invitation, and endow it, as a fact,
with the greatest conceivable amplitude--this too moreover not because
he was garrulous or gossiping, but because those facts with which he was
acquainted, the only ones on which you would have dreamed of appealing
to him, seemed all perfect nests or bags of other facts, bristling or
bulging thus with every intensity of the positive and leaving no room in
their interstices for mere appreciation to so much as turn round. They
were themselves appreciation--they became so by the simple force of
their existing for Mr. Crick's arid mention, and they so covered the
ground of his consciousness to the remotest edge that no breath of the
air either of his own mind or of anyone's else could have pretended to
circulate about them. Gray made the reflection--tending as he now felt
himself to waste rather more than less time in this idle trick--that the
different matters of content in some misunderstandings have so glued
themselves together that separation has quite broken down and one
continuous block, suggestive of dimensional squareness, with mechanical
perforations and other aids to use subsequently introduced, comes to
represent the whole life of the subject. What it amounted to, he might
have gathered, was that Mr. Crick was of such a common commonness as he
had never up to now seen so efficiently embodied, so completely
organised, so securely and protectedly active, in a word--not to say so
garnished and adorned with strange refinements of its own: he had
somehow been used to thinking of the extreme of that quality as a note
of defeated application, just as the extreme of rarity would have to be.
His domestic companion of these days again and again struck him as most
touching the point at issue, and that point alone, when most proclaiming
at every pore that there wasn't a difference, in all the world, between
one thing and another. The refusal of his whole person to figure as a
fact invidiously distinguishable, that of his aspect to have an
identity, of his eyes to have a consciousness, of his hair to have a
colour, of his nose to have a form, of his mouth to have a motion, of
his voice to consent to any separation of sounds, made intercourse with
him at once extremely easy and extraordinarily empty; it was deprived of
the flicker of anything by the way and resembled the act of moving
forward in a perfectly-rolling carriage with the blind of each window
neatly drawn down.

Gray sometimes advanced to the edge of trying him, so to call it, as to
the impression made on him by lack of recognitions assuredly without
precedent in any experience, any, least of all, of the ways of
beneficiaries; but under the necessity on each occasion of our young
man's falling back from the vanity of supposing himself really
presentable or apprehensible. For a grasp of him on such ground to take
place he should have had first to show himself and to catch his image
somehow reflected; simply walking up and down and shedding bland
gratitude didn't convey or exhibit or express him in this case, as he
was sure these things _had_ on the other hand truly done where everyone
else, where his uncle and Rosanna, where Mr. Gaw and even Miss Mumby,
where splendid Vinty, whom he so looked to, and awfully nice Davey
Bradham, whom he so took to, were concerned. It all came back to the
question of terms and to the perception, in varying degrees, on the part
of these persons, of his own; for there were somehow none by which Mr.
Crick was penetrable that would really tell anything about him, and he
could wonder in freedom if he wasn't then to know too that last immunity
from any tax on his fortune which would consist in his having never to
wince. Against wincing in other relations than this one he was prepared,
he only desired, to take his precautions--visionary precautions in those
connections truly swarming upon him; but apparently he was during these
first days of the mere grossness of his reality to learn something of
the clear state of seeing every fond sacrifice to superstition that he
could think of thrust back at him. If he could but have brought his
visitor to say after twenty-four hours of him "Well, you're the
damnedest little idiot Eve ever had to pretend to hold commerce with!"
_that_ would on the spot have pressed the spring of his rich sacrificial
"Oh I must be, I must be!--how can I not abjectly and gratefully be?"
Something at least would so have been done to placate the jealous gods.
But instead of that the grossness of his reality just flatly included
this supremely useful friend's perhaps supposing him a vulgar
voluptuary, or at least a mere gaping maw, cynically, which amounted to
say frivolously, indifferent to everything but the general fact of his
windfall. Strange that it should be impossible in any particular
whatever to inform or to correct Mr. Crick, who sat unapproachable in
the midst of the only knowledge that concerned him.

He couldn't help feeling it conveyed in the very breath of the summer
airs that played about him, to his fancy, in a spirit of frolic still
lighter and quicker than they had breathed in other climes, he couldn't
help almost seeing it as the spray of sea-nymphs, or hearing it as the
sounded horn of tritons, emerging, to cast their spell, from the
foam-flecked tides around, that he was regarded as a creature rather
unnaturally "quiet" there on his averted verandahs and in his darkened
halls, even at moments when quite immense things, by his own measure,
were happening to him. Everything, simply, seemed to be happening, and
happening all at once--as he could say to himself, for instance, by the
fact of such a mere matter as his pulling up at some turn of his now
renewedly ceaseless pacing to take in he could scarce have said what
huge though soft collective rumble, what thick though dispersed
exhalation, of the equipped and appointed life, the life that phrased
itself with sufficient assurance as the multitudinous throb of Newport,
borne toward him from vague regions, from behind and beyond his
temporary blest barriers, and representing for the first time in his
experience an appeal directed at him from a source not somewhat shabbily
single. An impression like that was in itself an event--so repeatedly in
his other existence (it was already his quite unconnectedly other) had
the rumour of the world, the voice of society, the harmonies of
possession, been charged, for his sensibility, with reminders which, so
far from suggesting association, positively waved him off from it. Mr.
Betterman's funeral, for all the rigour of simplicity imposed on it by
his preliminary care, had enacted itself in a ponderous, numerous, in
fact altogether swarming and resounding way; the old local cemetery on
the seaward-looking hillside, as Gray seemed to identify it, had served
for the final scene, and our young man's sense of the whole thing
reached its finest point in an unanswered question as to whether the New
York business world or the New York newspaper interest were the more
copiously present. The business world broke upon him during the recent
rites in large smooth tepid waves--he was conscious of a kind of
generalised or, as they seemed to be calling it, standardised face, as
of sharpness without edge, save when edge was unexpectedly improvised,
bent upon him for a hint of what might have been better expressed could
it but have been expressed humorously; while the newspaper interest only
fed the more full, he felt even at the time, from the perfectly bare
plate offered its flocking young emissaries by the most recognising eye
at once and the most deprecating dumbness that he could command.

He had asked Vinty, on the morrow of Vinty's evening visit, to "act" for
him in so far as this might be; upon which Vinty had said gaily--he was
unexceptionally gay now--"Do you mean as your best man at your marriage
to the bride who is so little like St. Francis's? much as you yourself
strike me, you know, as resembling the man of Assisi." Vinty, at his
great present ease, constantly put things in such wonderful ways; which
were nothing, however, to the way he mostly did them during the days he
was able to spare before going off again to other calls, other
performances in other places, braver and breezier places on the bolder
northern coast, it mostly seemed: his allusions to which excited
absolutely the more curious interest in his friend, by an odd law, in
proportion as he sketched them, under pressure, as probably altogether
alien to the friend's sympathies. That was to be for the time, by every
indication, his amusing "line"--his taking so confident and insistent a
view of what it must be in Gray's nature and tradition to like or not to
like that, as our young man for that matter himself assured him, he
couldn't have invented a more successfully insidious way of creating an
appetite than by passing under a fellow's nose every sort of whiff of
the indigestible. One thing at least was clear, namely: that, let his
presumption of a comrade's susceptibilities, his possible reactions,
under general or particular exposure, approve itself or not, the extent
to which this free interpreter was going personally to signify for the
savour of the whole stretched there as a bright assurance. Thus he was
all the while acting indeed--acting so that fond formulations of it
could only become in the promptest way mere redundancies of reference;
he acted because his approach, his look, his touch made somehow, by
their simply projecting themselves, a definite difference for any
question, great or small, in the least subject to them; and this, after
the most extraordinary fashion, not in the least through his pressing or
interfering or even so much as intending, but just as a consequence of
his having a sense and an intelligence of the given affair, such as it
might be, to which, once he was present at it, he was truly ashamed not
to conform. That concentrated passage between the two men while the
author of their situation was still unburied would of course always
hover to memory's eye like a votive object in the rich gloom of a
chapel; but it was now disconnected, attached to its hook once for all,
its whole meaning converted with such small delay into working, playing
force and multiplied tasteable fruit.

Quiet as he passed for keeping himself, by the impression I have noted,
how could Gray have felt more plunged in history, how could he by his
own sense more have waked up to it each morning and gone to bed with it
each night, sat down to it whenever he did sit down, which was never for
long, whether at a meal, at a book, at a letter, or at the wasted
endeavour to become, by way of a change, really aware of his
consciousness, than through positively missing as he did the hint of
anything in particular to do?--missing and missing it all the while and
yet at no hour paying the least of the penalties that are supposed to
attend the drop of responsibility and the substituted rule of fatuity.
How couldn't it be agitation of a really sublime order to have it come
over one that the personage in the world one must most resemble at such
a pitch would be simply, at one's choice, the Kaiser or the Czar,
potentates who only know their situation is carried on by attestation of
the fact that push it wherever they will they never find it isn't? Thus
they are referred to the existence of machinery, the working of which
machinery is answered for, they may feel, whenever their eyes rest on
one of those figures, ministerial or ceremonial, who may be, as it is
called, in waiting. Mr. Crick was in waiting, Horton Vint was in
waiting, Rosanna Gaw even, at this moment a hundred miles away, was in
waiting, and so was Davey Bradham, though with but a single appearance
at the palace as yet to his credit. Neither Horton nor Mr. Crick, it was
true, were more materially, more recurrently present than a fellow's
nerves, for the wonder of it all, could bear; but what was it but just
being Czar or Kaiser to keep thrilling on one's own side before the fact
that this made no difference? Vulgar reassurance was the greatest of
vulgarities; monarchs could still be irresponsible, thanks to their
ministers' not being, and Gray repeatedly asked himself how he should
ever have felt as he generally did if it hadn't been so absolutely
exciting that while the scattered moments of Horton's presence and the
fitful snatches of telephonic talk with him lasted the gage of
protection, perfectly certain patronising protection, added a still
pleasanter light to his eye and ring to his voice, casual and trivial as
he clearly might have liked to keep these things. Great monarchies might
be "run," but great monarchs weren't--unless of course often by the
favourite or the mistress; and one hadn't a mistress yet, goodness knew,
and if one was threatened with a favourite it would be but with a
favourite of the people too.

History and the great life surged in upon our hero through such images
as these at their fullest tide, finding him out however he might have
tried to hide from them, and shaking him perhaps even with no livelier
question than when it occurred to him for the first time within the
week, oddly enough, that the guest of the Bradhams never happened, while
his own momentary guest, to meet Mr. Crick, in his counsels, by so much
as an instant's overlapping, any more than it would chance on a single
occasion that he should name his friend to that gentleman or otherwise
hint at his existence, still less his importance. Was it just that the
king was _usually_ shy of mentioning the favourite to the head of the
treasury and that various decencies attached, by tradition, to keeping
public and private advisers separate? "Oh I absolutely decline to come
in, at any point whatever, between you and _him_; as if there were any
sort of help I can give you that he won't ever so much better!"--those
words had embodied, on the morrow, Vinty's sole allusion to the main
sense of their first talk, which he had gone on with in no direct
fashion. He had thrown a ludicrous light on his committing himself to
any such atrocity of taste while the empowered person and quite ideally
right man was about; but points would come up more and more, did come
up, in fact already had, that they doubtless might work out together
happily enough; and it took Horton in fine the very fewest hours to give
example after example of his familiar and immediate wit. Nothing could
have better illustrated this than the interest thrown by him for Gray
over a couple of subjects that, with many others indeed, beguiled three
or four rides taken by the friends along the indented shores and other
seaside stretches and reaches of their low-lying promontory in the
freshness of the early morning and when the scene might figure for
themselves alone. Gray, clinging as yet to his own premises very much
even as a stripped swimmer might loiter to enjoy an air-bath before his
dive, had yet mentioned that he missed exercise and had at once found
Vinty full of resource for his taking it in that pleasantest way.
Everything, by his assurance, was going to be delightful but the
generality of the people; thus, accordingly, was the generality of the
people not yet in evidence, thus at the sweet hour following the cool
dawn could the world he had become possessed of spread about him
unspoiled.

It was perhaps in Gray to wonder a little in these conditions what _was_
then in evidence, with decks so invidiously cleared; this being,
however, a remark he forbore to make, mystified as he had several times
been, and somehow didn't like too much being, by having had to note that
to differ at all from Vinty on occasions apparently offered was to
provoke in him at once a positive excess of agreement. He always went
further, as it were, and Gray himself, as he might say, didn't want to
go _those_ lengths, which were out of the range of practical politics
altogether. Horton's habit, as it seemed to show itself, was to make out
of saving sociability or wanton ingenuity or whatever, a distinction for
which a companion might care, but for which he himself didn't with any
sincerity, and then to give his own side of it away, from the moment
doubt had been determined, with an almost desolating sweep of surrender.
His own side of it was by that logic no better a side, in a beastly
vulgar world, than any other, and if anyone wanted to mean that such a
mundane basis was deficient why he himself had but meant it from the
first and pretended something else only not to be too shocking. He was
ready to mean the worst--was ready for anything, that is, in the
interest of ceasing from humbug. And if Gray was prepared for that
_then_ il ne s'agissait que de s'entendre. What Gray was prepared for
would really take, this young man frankly opined, some threshing out;
but it wasn't at all in readiness for the worst that he had come to
America--he had come on the contrary to indulge, by God's help, in
appreciations, comparisons, observations, reflections and other
luxuries, that were to minister, fond old prejudice aiding, to life at
the high pitch, the pitch, as who should say, of immortality. If on
occasion, under the dazzle of Horton's facility, he might ask himself
how he tracked through it the silver thread of sincerity--consistency
wasn't pretended to--something at once supervened that was better than
any answer, some benefit of information that the circumstance required,
of judgment that assisted or supported or even amused, by felicity of
contradiction, and that above all pushed the question so much further,
multiplying its relations and so giving it air and colour and the slap
of the brush, that it straightway became a picture and, for the kind of
attention Gray could best render, a conclusive settled matter. He hated
somehow to detract from his friend, wanting so much more to keep adding
to him; but it was after a little as if he had felt that his loyalty, or
whatever he might call it, could yet not be mean in deciding that
Horton's generalisations, his opinions as distinguished from his
perceptions and direct energies and images, signified little enough: if
he would only go on bristling as he promised with instances and items,
would only consent to consist at the same rate and in his very self of
material for history, one might propose to gather from it all at one's
own hours and without troubling him the occasional big inference.

How good he could be on the particular case appeared for example after
Gray had expressed to him, just subsequently to their first encounter,
a certain light and measured wonderment at Rosanna Gaw's appearing not
to intend to absent herself long enough from her cares in the other
State, immense though these conceivably were, to do what the rest of
them were doing roundabout Mr. Betterman's grave. Our young man had half
taken for granted that she would have liked, expressing it simply, to
assist with him at the last attentions to a memory that had meant, in
the current phrase, so much for them both--though of course he withal
quite remembered that her interest in it had but rested on his own and
that since his own, as promoted by her, had now taken such effect there
was grossness perhaps in looking to her for further demonstrations: this
at least in view of her being under her filial stress not unimaginably
sated with ritual. He had caught himself at any rate in the act of
dreaming that Rosanna's return for the funeral would be one of the
inevitabilities of her sympathy with his fortune--every element of which
(that was overwhelmingly certain) he owed to her; and even the due sense
that, put her jubilation or whatever at its highest, it could scarce be
expected to dance the same jig as his, didn't prevent his remarking to
his friend that clearly Miss Gaw would come, since he himself was still
in the stage of supposing that when you had the consciousness of a lot
of money you sort of did violent things. He played with the idea that
her arrival for the interment would partake of this element, proceeding
as it might from the exhilaration of her monstrous advantages, her now
assured state. "Look at the violent things _I'm_ doing," he seemed to
observe with this, "and see how natural I must feel it that any violence
should meet me. Yours, for example"--Gray really went so
far--"recognises how I want, or at least how I enjoy, a harmony; though
at the same time, I assure you, I'm already prepared for any disgusted
snub to the attitude of unlimited concern about me, gracious goodness,
that I may seem to go about taking for granted." Unlimited concern about
him on the part of the people who weren't up at the cool of dawn save in
so far as they here and there hadn't yet gone to bed--this, in
combination with something like it on the part of numberless others too,
had indeed to be faced as the inveterate essence of Vinty's forecast,
and formed perhaps the hardest nut handed to Gray's vice of cogitation
to crack; it was the thing that he just now most found himself, as they
said, up against--involving as it did some conception of reasons other
than ugly for so much patience with the boring side of him.

An interest founded on the mere beastly fact of his pecuniary luck, what
was that but an ugly thing to see, from the moment his circle, since a
circle he was apparently to have, shouldn't soon be moved to some decent
reaction from it? How was he going himself to like breathing an air in
which the reaction didn't break out, how was he going not to get sick of
finding so large a part played, over the place, by the mere
_constatation_, in a single voice, a huge monotone restlessly and
untiringly directed, but otherwise without application, of the state of
being worth dollars to inordinate amounts? Was he really going to want
to live with many specimens of the sort of person who wouldn't presently
rather loathe him than know him blindedly on such terms? would it be
possible, for that matter, that he should feel people unashamed of not
providing for their attention to him any better account of it than his
uncle's form of it had happened to supply, without his by that token
coming to regard them either as very "interested," according to the good
old word, or as themselves much too foredoomed bores to merit tolerance?
When it reached the pitch of his asking himself whether it could be
possible Vinty wouldn't at once see what he meant by that reservation,
he patched the question up but a bit provisionally perhaps by falling
back on a remark about this confidant that was almost always equally in
order. They weren't on the basis yet of any treatable reality, any that
could be directly handled and measured, other than such as were, so to
speak, the very children of accident, those the old man's still
unexplained whim had with its own special shade of grimness let him in
for. _Naturally_ must it come to pass with time that the better of the
set among whom this easy genius was the best would stop thinking money
about him to the point that prevented their thinking anything else--so
that he should only break off and not go in further after giving them a
chance to show in a less flurried way to what their range of imagination
might reach invited and encouraged. Should they markedly fail to take
that chance it would be all up with them so far as any entertainment
that _he_ should care to offer them was concerned. How could it stick
out _more_ disconcertingly--so his appeal might have run--that a fuss
about him was as yet absolutely a fuss on a vulgar basis? having begun,
by what he gathered, quite before the growth even of such independent
rumours as Horton's testimony, once he was on the spot, or as Mr.
Bradham's range of anecdote, consequent on Mr. Bradham's call, might
give warrant for: it couldn't have behind it, he felt sure, so much as a
word of Rosanna's, of the heralding or promising sort--he would so have
staked his right hand on the last impossibility of the least rash
overflow on that young woman's part.

There was this other young woman, of course, whom he heard of at these
hours for the first time from Haughty and whom he remembered well enough
to have heard praise of from his adopted father, three or four years
previous, on his rejoining the dear man after a summer's separation. She
would be, "Gussy's" charming friend, Haughty's charming friend, no end
of other people's charming friend, as appeared, the heroine of the
charming friendship his own admirable friend had formed, in a
characteristically headlong manner (some exceptional cluster of graces,
in her case, clearly much aiding) with a young American girl, the very
nicest anyone had ever seen, met at the waters of Ragatz during one of
several seasons there and afterwards described in such extravagant terms
as were to make her remain, between himself and his elder, a subject of
humorous reference and retort. It had had to do with Gray's liking his
companion of those years always better and better that persons
intrinsically distinguished inveterately took to him so naturally--even
if the number of the admirers rallying was kept down a little by the
rarity, of course, of intrinsic distinction. It wasn't, either, as if
this blest associate had been by constitution an elderly flirt, or some
such sorry type, addicted to vain philanderings with young persons he
might have fathered: he liked young persons, small blame to him, but
they had never, under Gray's observation, made a fool of him, and he was
only as much of one about the young lady in question, Cecilia Foy, yes,
of New York, as served to keep all later inquiry and pleasantry at the
proper satiric pitch. She _would_ have been a fine little creature, by
our friend's beguiled conclusion, to have at once so quickened and so
appreciated the accidental relation; for was anything truly quite so
charming in a clever girl as the capacity for admiring _disinterestedly_
a brave gentleman even to the point of willingness to take every trouble
about him?--when the disinterestedness dwelt, that is, in the very
pleasure she could seek and find, so much more creditable a matter to
her than any she could give and be complimented for giving, involved as
this could be with whatever vanity, vulgarity or other personal
pretence.

Gray remembered even his not having missed by any measure of his own
need or play of his own curiosity the gain of Miss Foy's
acquaintance--so might the felicity of the quaint affair, given the
actual parties, have been too sacred to be breathed on; he in fact
recalled, and could still recall, every aspect of their so excellent
time together reviving now in a thick rich light, how he had inwardly
closed down the cover on his stepfather's accession of fortune--which
the pretty episode really seemed to amount to; extracting from it
himself a particular relief of conscience. He could let him alone, by
this showing, without black cruelty--so little had the day come for his
ceasing to attract admirers, as they said, at public places or being
handed over to the sense of desertion. That left Gray as little as
possible haunted with the young Cecilia's image, so completely was his
interest in her, in her photograph and in her letters, one of the
incidents of his virtually filial solicitude; all the less in fact no
doubt that she had written during the aftermonths frequently and very
advertisedly, though perhaps, in spite of Mr. Northover's gay exhibition
of it, not so very remarkably. She was apparently one of the bright
persons who are not at their brightest with the pen--which question
indeed would perhaps come to the proof for him, thanks to his having it
ever so vividly, not to say derisively, from Horton that this observer
didn't really know what had stayed her hand, for the past week, from an
outpouring to the one person within her reach who would constitute a
link with the delightful old hero of her European adventure. That so
close a representative of the party to her romance was there in the
flesh and but a mile or two off, was a fact so extraordinary as to have
waked up the romance again in her and produced a state of fancy from
which she couldn't rest--for some shred of the story that might be still
afloat. Gray therefore needn't be surprised to receive some sign of this
commotion, and that he hadn't yet done so was to be explained, Haughty
guessed, by the very intensity of the passions involved.

One of them, it thus appeared, burnt also in Gussy's breast; devoted as
she was to Cissy, she had taken the fond anecdote that so occupied them
as much under her protection as she had from far back taken the girl's
every other interest, and what for the hour paralysed their action, that
of the excited pair, must simply have been that Mrs. Bradham couldn't on
the one hand listen to anything so horrid as that her young friend
should make an advance unprepared and unaccompanied, and that the ardent
girl, on the other, had for the occasion, as for all occasions, her
ideal of independence. Gray was not himself impatient--he felt no jump
in him at the chance to discuss so dear a memory in an air still
incongruous; it depended on who might propose to him the delicate
business, let alone its not making for a view of the great Gussy's fine
tact that she should even possibly put herself forward as a proposer.
However, he didn't mind thinking that if Cissy should prove all that was
likely enough their having a subject in common couldn't but practically
conduce; though the moral of it all amounted rather to a portent, the
one that Haughty, by the same token, had done least to reassure him
against, of the extent to which the native jungle harboured the female
specimen and to which its ostensible cover, the vast level of mixed
growths stirred wavingly in whatever breeze, was apt to be identifiable
but as an agitation of the latest redundant thing in ladies' hats. It
was true that when Rosanna had perfectly failed to rally, merely writing
a kind short note to the effect that she should have to give herself
wholly, for she didn't know how long, to the huge assault of her own
questions, that might have seemed to him to make such a clearance as
would count against any number of positively hovering shades. Horton had
answered for her not turning up, and nothing perhaps had made him feel
so right as this did for a faith in those general undertakings of
assurance; only, when at the end of some days he saw that vessel of
light obscured by its swing back to New York and other ranges of action,
the sense of exposure--even as exposure to nothing worse than the
lurking or pouncing ladies--became sharper through contrast with the
late guarded interval; this to the extent positively of a particular
hour at which it seemed to him he had better turn tail and simply flee,
stepping from under the too vast orb of his fate.

He was alone with that quantity on the September morning after breakfast
as he had not felt himself up to now; he had taken to pacing the great
verandah that had become his own as he had paced it when it was still
his uncle's, and it might truly have been a rush of nervous
apprehension, a sudden determination of terror, that quickened and yet
somehow refused to direct his steps. He had turned out there for the
company of sea and sky and garden, less conscious than within doors, for
some reason, that Horton was a lost luxury; but that impression was
presently to pass with a return of a queer force in his view of Rosanna
as above all somehow wanting, off and withdrawn verily to the pitch of
her having played him some trick, merely let him in where she was to
have seen him through, failed in fine of a sociability implied in all
her preliminaries. He found his attention caught, in one of his
revolutions, by the chair in which Abel Gaw had sat that first
afternoon, pulling him up for their so unexpectedly intense mutual
scrutiny, and when he turned away a moment after, quitting the spot
almost as if the strange little man's death that very night had already
made him apparitional, which was unpleasant, it was to drop upon the
lawn and renew his motion there. He circled round the house altogether
at last, looking at it more critically than had hitherto seemed
relevant, taking the measure, disconcertedly, of its unabashed ugliness,
and at the end coming to regard it very much as he might have eyed some
monstrous modern machine, one of those his generation was going to be
expected to master, to fly in, to fight in, to take the terrible women
of the future out for airings in, and that mocked at _his_ incompetence
in such matters while he walked round and round it and gave it, as for
dread of what it might do to him, the widest berth his enclosure
allowed. In the midst of all of which, quite wonderfully, everything
changed; he _wasn't_ alone with his monster, he was in, by this
reminder, for connections, nervous ass as he had just missed writing
himself, and connections fairly glittered, swarming out at him, in the
person of Mr. Bradham, who stood at the top of a flight of steps from
the gallery, which he had been ushered through the house to reach, and
there at once, by some odd felicity of friendliness, some pertinence of
presence, of promise, appeared to make up for whatever was wrong and
supply whatever was absent. It came over him with extraordinary
quickness that the way not to fear the massed ambiguity was to trust it,
and this florid, solid, smiling person, who waved a prodigious
gold-coloured straw hat as if in sign of ancient amity, had come exactly
at that moment to show him how.[2]


[Footnote 2: This ends the first chapter of Book IV. The MS. breaks off
with an unfinished sentence opening the next chapter: "Not the least
pointed of the reflections Gray was to indulge in a fortnight later and
as by a result of Davey Bradham's intervention in the very nick was that
if he had turned tail that afternoon, at the very oddest of all his
hours, if he had prematurely taken to his heels and missed the emissary
from the wonderful place of his fresh domestication, the article on
which he would most irretrievably have dished himself . . ."]




NOTES FOR THE IVORY TOWER


AUGUSTA BRADHAM, "Gussie" Bradham, for the big social woman. Basil Hunn
I think on the whole for Hero. Graham Rising, which becomes familiarly
Gray Rising, I have considered but incline to keep for another occasion.

Horton Crimper, among his friends Haughty Crimper, seems to me right and
best, on the whole, for my second young man. I don't want for him a
surname intrinsically pleasing; and this seems to me of about the good
nuance. My Third Man hereby becomes, I seem to see, Davey Bradham; on
which, I think, for the purpose and association, I can't improve.

My Girl, in the relinquished thing, was Cissy Foy; and this was all
right for the figure there intended, but the girl here is a very
different one, and everything is altered. I want her name moreover, her
Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with
that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a
consonant--also beginning with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the
latter excellent thing was in the Times of two or three days ago; its
only fault is a little too much meaning, but the sense here wouldn't be
thrown into undue relief, and I don't want anything pretty or
conventionally "pleasing." Everything of the shade of the real. Remain
thus important the big, the heavy Daughter of the billionaire, with her
father; in connection with whom I think I give up Betterman. That must
stand over, and I want, above all, a single syllable. All the other
names have two or three; and this makes an objection to the Shimple,
which I originally thought of as about odd and ugly enough without being
more so than I want it. But that also will keep, while I see that I have
the monosyllable Hench put down; only put down for another connection. I
see I thought of "Wenty" Hench, short for Wentworth, as originally good
for Second Young Man. If I balance that against Haughty Crimper, I
incline still to the latter, for the small amusement of the Haughty. On
the other hand I am not content with Hench, though a monosyllable, for
the dear Billionaire girl, in the light of whom it is alone important to
consider the question, her Father so little mattering after she becomes
by his death the great Heiress of the time. And I kind of want to make
_her_ Moyra; with which I just spy in the Times a wonderful and
admirable "Chown"; which makes me think that Moyra Chown may do. Besides
which if I keep Grabham for my "heroine" I feel the Christian name
should there be of one syllable. All my others are of two; and I shall
presently make the ease right for this, finding the good thing. The
above provides for the time for the essential. Yet suddenly I am pulled
up--Grabham, after all, won't at all do if I keep Bradham for the other
connection; which I distinctly prefer: I want nothing with any shade of
a special sense there. Accordingly, I don't know but what I may go in
for a different note altogether and lavish on her the fine Cantupher;
which I don't want however really to waste. When Cantupher is used there
ought to be several of it, and above all men: no, I see it won't do, and
besides I don't want anything positively fine. I like Wither, and I like
Augurer, and I like, in another note, Damper, and I even see a little
Bessie as a combination with it, though I don't on the whole want a
Bessie. At any rate I now get on.

[3]What I want the first Book to do is to present the Gaws, the Bradhams
and Cissy Foy, in Three Chapters or Scenes, call them Scenes of the
Acts, in such a way that I thus present with them the first immediate
facts involved; or in other words present the first essence of the
Situation. What I see is, as I further reflect, that it is better to get
Graham Fielder there within the Act, to have him on the premises
already, and learnt so to be, before it has progressed beyond the first
Scene; though he be not seen till the Second Book. When Rosanna goes
over to her Father it befals before she has had more than twenty words
with him that one of the Nurses who is most sympathetic to her appears
in the long window that opens from the house on to the verandah, and it
is thus at once disclosed that he has come. Rosanna has taken for
granted from the quiet air of the place that this event hasn't yet
occurred; but Gray has in fact arrived with the early morning, has come
on the boat from New York, the night one, and is there above with, or
ready to be with, the dying man. Perfectly natural and plausible I make
it that he doesn't begin at once to pervade the place; delicacy,
discretion, anxiety naturally operating with him; so that we know only
he is there, and that matters are more or less taking place above,
during the rest of the Book. But the fact in question immediately
determines, for proprieties' and discretions' sake, the withdrawal of
Rosanna and her Father; they return to their own abode; and I see the
rest of the business of the act as taking place partly there and partly,
by what I make out, on the Bradhams' own premises, the field of the
Third Scene. Here is the passage between the two young women that I
require, and my Heroine, I think, must be on a visit of a number of days
to Gussie. I want Davey first with Rosanna, and think I get something
like his having walked over, along the cliff, to their house, to bring
her, at his wife's request, over to tea. Yes, I have Davey's walk back
with Rosanna, and her Father's declining to come, or saying that he will
follow afterward; his real design being to sneak over again, as I may
call it, to the other house, in the exercise of his intense curiosity.
That special founded and motived condition is what we sufficiently know
him by and what he is for the time (which is all the time we have of
him) identified by. I get thus for Book 2 that Gray, latish in the
afternoon, coming down from his uncle's quarter, finds him, has a
passage or scene with him, above all an impression of him; and this
before he has had any other: we learn that he hasn't seen his uncle yet;
the judgment of the doctors about this being operative and they wishing
a further wait. I want Rosanna's Father for his first very sharp
impression; this really making, I think, Scene First of Book 2. It gives
me Scene 2 for what I shall then want without further delay of his first
introduction to his Uncle's room and his half hour, or whatever, there;
with the fact determined of the non-collapse of the latter, his good
effect from the meeting quite rather, and the duration of him determined
to end of Book 2. After Book 2 he is no more. Scene 3 of Book 2 then can
only be, for Gray, with Rosanna; that scene having functions to be
exercised with no more delay at all, by what I make out, and being put
in, straight, then and there, that we may have the support of it. I by
the same token see Book 3 now as functional entirely for the encounter
of Gray with the two other women and, for the first time, with Davey;
and also as preparing the appearance of Horton Vint, though not
producing it. I see _him_, in fact, I think, as introduced independently
of his first appearance to Gray, see it as a matter of his relation with
Cissy, and as lighting up what I immediately want of _their_ situation.
In fact don't I see this as Horton's "Act" altogether, as I shall have
seen and treated Book I as Rosanna's, and Book 2 as Gray's. By the blest
operation this time of my Dramatic principle, my law of successive
Aspects, each treated from its own centre, as, though with
qualifications. The Awkward Age, I have the great help of flexibility
and variety; my persons in turn, or at least the three or four foremost,
having control, as it were, of the Act and Aspect, and so making it his
or making it _hers._ This of course with the great inevitable and
desirable preponderance, in the Series, of Gray's particular weight. But
I seem to make out, to a certainty, at least another "Act" for Rosanna
and probably another for Horton; though perhaps not more than one, all
to herself, for Cissy. I say at least another for Horton on account of
my desire to give Gray as affecting Horton, only less than I want to
give Horton as affecting Gray. It is true that I get Gray as affecting
Horton more or less in Book 3, but as the situation developes it will
make new needs, determinations and possibilities. All this for feeling
my way and making things come, more and more come. I want an Aspect
under control of Davey, at all events--this I seem pretty definitely to
feel; but things will only come too much. At all events, to retreat,
remount, a little there are my 3 first Books sufficiently started
without my having as yet exactly noted the absolutely fundamental
antecedents. But before I do this, even, I memorise that Gray's Scene
with Rosanna for 3 of Book 2 shall be by her coming over to Mr.
Betterman's house herself that evening, all frankly and directly, to see
him there; not by his going over to her. And I seem to want it evening;
the summer night outside, with their moving about on the Terrace and
above the sea etc. Withal, by the same token, I want such interesting
things between them from immediately after the promulgation of Mr.
Betterman's Will; I want that, but of course can easily get it, so far
as anything is easy, in Book 4, the function of which is to present Gray
as face to face with the situation so created for him. This is
obviously, of course, one of Gray's Aspects, and the next will desirably
be, I dare say too; can only be, so far as I can now tell, when I
consider that the Book being my Fourth, only Six of the Ten which I most
devoutly desire to limit the thing to then remain for my full evolution
on the momentum by that time imparted. Certainly, at all events, the
Situation leaves Newport, to come to life, its full life, in New York,
where I seem to see it as going on to the end, unless I manage to treat
myself to some happy and helpful mise-en-scène or exploitation of my
memory of (say) California. The action entirely of American
localisation, as goes without saying, yet making me thus kind of hanker,
for dear "amusement's" sake, to decorate the thing with a bit of a
picture of some American Somewhere that is not either Newport or N.Y. I
even ask myself whether Boston wouldn't serve for this garniture, serve
with a narrower economy than "dragging in" California. I kind of want to
drag in Boston a little, feeling it as naturally and thriftily workable.
But these are details which will only too much come; and I seem to see
already how my action, however tightly packed down, will strain my Ten
Books, most blessedly, to cracking. That is exactly what I want, the
tight packing _and_ the beautifully audible cracking; the most
magnificent masterly little vivid economy, with a beauty of its own
equal to the beauty of the donnée itself, that ever was.

However, what the devil _are_, exactly, the little fundamentals in the
past? Fix them, focus them hard; they need only be perfectly
conceivable, but they must be of the most lucid sharpness. I want to
have it that for Gray, and essentially for Rosanna, it's a _renewal_ of
an early, almost, or even quite positively, childish beginning; and for
Gray it's the same with Horton Vint--the impression of Horton already
existing in him, a very strong and "dazzled" one, made in the quite
young time, though in a short compass of days, weeks, possibly months,
or whatever, and having lasted on (always for Gray) after a fashion that
makes virtually a sort of relation already established, small as it
ostensibly is. Such his relation with Rosanna, such his relation with
Horton--but for his relation with Cissy----? Do I want that to be also a
renewal, the residuum of an old impression, or a fresh thing altogether?
What strikes me prima facie is that it's better to have two such
pre-established origins for the affair than three; the only question is
does that sort of connection more complicate or more simplify for that
with Cissy? It more simplifies if I see myself wanting to give, by my
plan, the full effect of a revolution in her, a revolution marked the
more by the germ of the relation being thrown back, marked the more,
that is, in the sense of the shade of perfidy, treachery, the shade of
the particular element and image that is of the essence, so far as she
is concerned, of my action. How this exactly works I must in a moment go
into--hammer it out clear; but meanwhile there are these other
fundamentals. Gray then is the son of his uncle's half-sister, not
sister (on the whole, I think); whose dissociation from her rich
brother, before he was anything like _so_ rich, must have followed upon
her marrying a man with whom he, Mr. Betterman, was on some peculiarly
bad terms resulting from a business difference or quarrel of one of
those rancorous kinds that such lives (as Mr. Betterman's) are
plentifully bestrown with. The husband has been his victim, and he
hasn't hated him, or objected to him for a brother-in-law, any the less
for that. The objected-to brother-in-law has at all events died early,
and the young wife, with her boy, her scant means, her disconnection
from any advantage to her represented by her half-brother, has betaken
herself to Europe; where the rest of _that_ history has been enacted. I
see the young husband, Gray's father, himself Graham Fielder the elder
or whatever, as dying early, but probably dying in Europe, through some
catastrophe to be determined, two or three years after their going
there. This is better than his dying at home, for removal of everything
from nearness to Mr. Betterman. Betterman has been married and has had
children, a son and a daughter, this is indispensable, for diminution of
the fact of paucity of children; but he has lost successively these
belongings--there is nothing over strange in it; the death of his son,
at 16 or 18 or thereabouts, having occurred a few years, neither too few
nor too many, before my beginning, and having been the sorest fact of
his life. Well then, young Mrs. Fielder or whoever, becomes thus in
Europe an early widow, with her little boy, and there, after no long
time, marries again, marries an alien, a European of some nationality to
be determined, but probably an Englishman; which completes the effect of
alienation from her brother--easily conceivable and representable as "in
his way," disliking this union; and indeed as having made known to her,
across the sea, that if she will forbear from it (this when he first
hears of it and before it has taken place) and will come back to America
with her boy, he will "forgive" her and do for her over there what he
can. The great fact is that she declines this condition, the giving up
of her new fiancé, and thereby declines an advantage that may, or might
have, become great for her boy. Not so great then--Betterman not _then_
so rich. But in fine--With which I cry Eureka, eureka; I have found what
I want for Rosanna's connection, though it will have to make Rosanna a
little older than Gray, 2 or 3 or 3 or 4 years, instead of same age. I
see Gray's mother at any rate, with her small means, in one of the
smaller foreign cities, Florence or Dresden, probably the latter, and
also see there Rosanna and her mother, this preceding by no long time
the latter's death. Mrs. Gaw has come abroad with her daughter, for
advantages, in the American way, while the husband and father is
immersed in business cares at home; and when the two couples, mother and
son, and mother and daughter, meet in a natural way, a connection is
more or less prepared by the fact of Mr. Gaw having had the business
association with Mrs. Fielder's half-brother, Mr. Betterman, at home,
even though the considerably violent rupture or split between the two
men will have already taken place. Mrs. Gaw is a very good simple, a
bewildered and pathetic rich woman, in delicate health, and is
sympathetic to Gray's mother, on whom she more or less throws herself
for comfort and support, and Gray and Rosanna, Rosanna with a governess
and all the facilities and accessories natural to wealth, while the
boy's conditions are much leaner and plainer--the two, I say, fraternise
and are good friends; he figuring to Rosanna (say he is about 13, while
she is 16) as a tremendously initiated and informed little polyglot
European, knowing France, Germany, Italy etc. from the first. It is at
this juncture that Mrs. Fielder's second marriage has come into view, or
the question and the appearance of it; and that, very simultaneously,
the proposal has come over from her half-brother on some rumour of it
reaching him. As already mentioned, Betterman proposes to her that if
she will come back to America with her boy, and not enter upon the union
that threatens, and which must have particular elements in it of a
nature to displease and irritate him, he will look after them both,
educate the boy at home, do something substantial for them. Mrs. Fielder
takes her American friend into her confidence in every way, introduces
to her the man who desires to marry her, whom Rosanna sees and with whom
the boy himself has made great friends, so that the dilemma of the poor
lady becomes a great and lively interest to them all; the pretendant
himself forming also a very good relation with the American mother and
daughter, the friends of his friend, and putting to Mrs. Gaw very
eagerly the possibility of her throwing her weight into the scale in his
favour. Her meeting, that is Mrs. Fielder's meeting, the proposition
from New York involves absolutely her breaking off with him; and he is
very much in love with her, likes the boy, and, though he doesn't want
to stand in the latter's light, has hopes that he won't be quite thrown
over. The engagement in fact, with the marriage near at hand, must be an
existing reality. It is for Mrs. Fielder something of a dilemma; but she
is very fond of her honourable suitor, and her inclinations go strongly
to sticking to him. She takes the boy himself into her confidence, young
as he is,--perhaps I can afford him a year or two more--make him 15,
say; in which case Rosanna becomes 18, and the subsequent chronology is
thereby affected. It isn't, I must remember, as a young man in his very
first youth, at all, that I want Gray, or see him, with the opening of
the story at Newport. On the contrary all the proprieties, elements of
interest, convenience etc., are promoted by his being not less than 30.
I don't see why I shouldn't make him 33, with Rosanna thus _two_ years
older, not three. If he is 15 in Dresden and she 17, it will be old
enough for each, without being too old, I think, for Gray. 18 years will
thus have elapsed from the crisis at Florence or wherever to the arrival
at Newport. I want that time, I think, I can do with it very well for
what I see of elements operative for him; and a period of some length
moreover is required for bringing the two old men at Newport to a proper
pitch of antiquity. Mr. Betterman dies very much in the fulness of
years, and as Rosanna's parent is to pass away soon after I want him to
have come to the end. If Gray is 15, however, I mustn't make his mother
too mature to inspire the devotion of her friend; at the same time that
there must have been years enough for her to have lived awhile with her
first husband and lost him. Of course this first episode may have been
very brief--there is nothing to prevent that. If she had married at 20
she will then be, say, about 36 or so at the time of the crisis, and
this will be quite all right for the question of her second marriage.
Say she lives a considerable number of years after this, in great
happiness, her marriage having taken place; I in fact require her to do
so, for I want Gray to have had reasons fairly strong for his not having
been back to America in the interval. I may put it that he has, even,
been back for a very short time, on some matter connected with his
mother's interests, or his own, or whatever; but I complicate the case
thereby and have to deal somehow with the question of whether or no he
has then seen Mr. Betterman. No, I don't want him to have been back, and
can't do with it; keep this simple and workable. All I am doing here is
just to fix a little his chronology. Say he has been intending to go
over at about 25, when his mother's death takes place, about 10 years
after her second marriage. Say then, as is very conceivable, that his
stepfather, with whom he has become great friends, then requires and
appeals to his care and interest in a way that keeps him on and on till
the latter's death takes place just previous to Mr. Betterman's sending
for him. This gives me quite sufficiently what I want of the previous
order of things; but doesn't give me yet the fact about Rosanna's
connection in her young history which I require. I see accordingly what
has happened in Florence or Dresden as something of this kind: that Mrs.
Fielder, having put it to her boy that he shall decide, if he can, about
what they shall do, she lets Mrs. Gaw, who was at this juncture in
constant intercourse with her, know that she has done so--Mrs. Gaw and
Rosanna being, together, exceedingly interested about her, and Rosanna
extremely interested, in a young dim friendly way, about Gray; very much
as if he were the younger brother she hasn't got, and whom, or an older,
she would have given anything to have. Rosanna hates Mr. Betterman, who
has, as she understands and believes, in some iniquitous business way,
wronged or swindled her father; and isn't at all for what he has
proposed to the Fielders. In addition she is infatuated with Europe,
makes everything of being there, dreams, or would dream, of staying on
if she could, and has already in germ, in her mind, those feelings about
the dreadful American money-world of which she figures as the embodiment
or expression in the eventual situation. She knows thus that the boy has
had, practically, the decision laid upon him, and with the whole case
with all its elements and possibilities before her she takes upon
herself to act upon him, influence and determine him. She wouldn't have
him accept Mr. Betterman's cruel proposition, as she declares she sees
it, for the world. She proceeds with him as she would in fact with a
younger brother: there is a passage to be alluded to with a later
actuality, which figures for her in memory as her creation of a
responsibility; her very considerably passionate, and thereby
meddlesome, intervention. I see some long beautiful walk or stroll, some
visit to some charming old place or things--and Florence is here
indicated--during which she puts it all to him, and from which he, much
inspired and affected by her, comes back to say to his mother that he
doesn't want what is offered--at any such price as she will have to pay.
I see this occasion as really having settled it--and Rosanna's having
always felt and known that it did. She and her mother separate then from
the others; Mrs. Fielder communicates her refusal, sticks to her friend,
marries him shortly afterwards, and her subsequent years take the form I
have noted. The American mother and daughter go back across the sea; the
mother in time dies etc. I see also how much better it is to have
sufficient time for these various deaths to happen. But the point is
that the sense of responsibility, begetting gradually a considerable, a
deepening force of reflection, and even somewhat of remorse, as to all
that it has meant, is what has taken place for Rosanna in proportion as,
by the sequence of events and the happening of many things, Mr.
Betterman has grown into an apparently very rich old man with no natural
heir. His losses, his bereavements, I have already alluded to, and a
considerable relaxation of her original feeling about him in the light
of more knowledge and of other things that have happened. In the light,
for instance, of her now mature sense of what her father's career has
been and of all that his great ferocious fortune, as she believes it to
be, represents of rapacity, of financial cruelty, of consummate special
ability etc. She has kept to some extent in touch with Gray, so far that
is as knowing about his life and general situation are concerned; but
the element of compunction in her itself, and the sense of what she may
perhaps have deprived him of in the way of a great material advantage,
may be very well seen, I think, as keeping her shy and backward in
respect to following him up or remaining in intercourse. It isn't
likely, for the American truth of things, that she hasn't been back to
Europe again, more than once, whether before or after her mother's
death; but what I can easily and even interestingly see is that on
whatever occasion of being there she has yet not tried to meet him
again. She knows that neither he nor his stepfather are at all well off,
she has a good many general impressions and has tried to get knowledge
of them, without directly appealing for it to themselves, whenever she
can. Thus it is, to state things very simply, that, on hearing of the
stepfather's death, during the Newport summer, she has got at Mr.
Betterman and spoken to him about Gray; she has found him accessible to
what she wants to say, and has perceived above all what a pull it gives
her to be able to work, in her appeal, the fact, quite vivid in the
fulness of time to the old man himself indeed, that the young man, so
nearly, after all, related to him, and over there in Europe all these
years, is about the only person, who could get at him in any way, who
hasn't ever asked anything of him or tried to get something out of him.
Not only this, but he and his mother, in the time, are the only ones who
ever refused a proffered advantage. I think I must make it that Rosanna
finds that she can really tell her story to Mr. Betterman, can make a
confidant of him and so interest him only the more. She feels that he
likes her, and this a good deal on account of her enormous difference
from her father. But I need only put it here quite simply: she does
interest him, she does move him, and it is as a consequence of her
appeal that he sends for Gray and that Gray comes. What I must above all
take care of is the fact that she has represented him to the old man as
probably knowing less about money, having had less to do with it, having
moved in a world entirely outside of it, in a degree utterly unlike
anyone and everyone whom Mr. Betterman has ever seen.

But I have got it all, I needn't develop; what I want now independently
is the beginning, quite back in the early years, of some relation on
Gray's part with Horton Vint, and some effect, which I think I really
must find right, of Horton's having done something for him, in their
boyish time, something important and gallant, rather showy, but at all
events really of moment, which has always been present to Gray. This I
must find--it need present no difficulty; with something in the general
way of their having been at school together--in Switzerland, with the
service rendered in Switzerland, say on a holiday cours among the
mountains, when Horty has fished Gray out of a hole, I don't mean quite
a crevasse, but something like, or come to his aid in a tight place of
some sort, and at his own no small risk, to bring him to safety. In fine
it's something like having saved his life, though that has a tiresome
little old romantic and conventional note. However I will make the thing
right and give it the right nuance; remember that it is all allusional
only now and a matter of reference on Gray's part. What must have
further happened, I think, is that Horty has been in Europe again, in
much later years, after College, indeed only a very few years previous,
and has met Gray again and they have renewed together; to the effect of
his apprehension of Gray's (to him) utterly queer and helpless and
unbusinesslike, unfinancial, type; and of Gray's great admiration of
everything of the opposite sort in him--combined, that is, with other
very attractive (as they appear) qualities. He has made Gray think a lot
about the wonderful American world that he himself long ago cut so loose
from, and of which Horty is all redolent and reverberant; and I think
must have told him, most naturally told him, of what happened in the far
off time in Florence. Only when, then, was the passage of their being at
school, or, better still, with the Swiss pasteur, or private tutor,
together? If it was before the episode in Florence they were rather
younger than I seem to see them; if it was after they were rather older.
Yet I don't at all see why it should not have been just after--this
perfectly natural at 16 for Gray, at 17 for Horty; both thoroughly
natural ages for being with the pasteur, and for the incident
afterwards; Gray going very naturally to the pasteur, whom in fact he
may have been with already before, during the first year of his mother's
new marriage. That provides for the matter well enough, and Eve only to
see it to possess it; and gives a basis for their taking up together
somehow when they meet, wherever I may put it, in the aftertime. There
are forms of life for Gray and his stepfather to be focussed as the
right ones--Horty sees this pair _together_ somewhere; and nothing is
more arrangeable, though I don't think I want to show the latter as
having dangled and dawdled about Italy only; and on the other hand do
see that Gray's occupation and main interest, other than that of looking
after his elder companions, must be conceived and presented for him.
Again no difficulty, however, with the right imagination of it. Horty
goes back to America; the 3 or 4, or at the most 4 or 5, years elapse,
so that it is with that comparative freshness of mutual remembrance that
the two men meet again. What I do see as definite is that Horty has had
up to the time of Gray's return no sort of relation whatever with Mr.
Betterman or his affairs, or any point of the question with which the
action begins at Newport. He is on the other hand in relation with
Cissy; and there are things I have got to account for in his actual
situation. Why is he without money, with his interest in the getting of
it etc.? But that is a question exactly _of_ interest--I mean to which
the answer may afford the greatest. And settle about the degree of his
apprehension of, relation to, designs on, or general lively
consciousness of Rosanna. Important the fact that the enormous extent of
her father's fortune is known only after his death, and is larger even
than was supposed; though it is to be remembered that in American
financial conditions, with the immense public activity of money there
taking place, these things are gauged in advance and by the general
knowledge, or speculative measure, as the oldfashioned private fortune
couldn't be. But I am here up against the very nodus of my history, the
facts of Horty's connection with the affairs that come into being for
Gray under his uncle's Will; the whole mechanism, in fine, of this part
of the action, the situation so created and its consequences. Enormous
difficulty of pretending to show various things here as with a business
vision, in my total absence of business initiation; so that of course my
idea has been from the first not to show them with a business vision,
but in some other way altogether; this will take much threshing out, but
it is the very basis of the matter, the core of the subject, and I shall
worry it through with patience. But I must get it, plan it, utterly
right in advance, and this is what takes the doing. The other doing, the
use of it when schemed, is comparatively easy. What strikes me first of
all is that the amount of money that Gray comes in for must, for reasons
I needn't waste time in stating, so obvious are they, be no such huge
one, by the New York measure, as in many another case: it's a tremendous
lot of money for Gray, from his point of view and in relation to his
needs or experience. Thus the case is that if Mr. Gaw's accumulations or
whatever have distinctly surpassed expectation, the other old man's have
fallen much below it--or at least have been known to be no such great
affair anyhow. Various questions come up for me here, though there is no
impossibility of settling them if taken one by one. The whole point is
of course that Mr. Betterman _has_ been a ruthless operator or whatever,
and with doings Davey Bradham is able to give Gray so dark an account
of; therefore if the mass of money of the acquisition of which such a
picture can be made is not pretty big, the force of the picture falls a
good deal to the ground. The difficulty in that event, in view of the
bigness, is that the conception of any act on Horton's part that amounts
to a swindle practised on Gray to such a tremendous tune is neither a
desirable nor a possible one. As one presses and presses light
breaks--there are so many ways in which one begins little by little to
wonder if one may not turn it about. There is the way in the first place
of lowering the pitch altogether of the quantities concerned for either
men. I see that from the moment ill--gotten money is concerned the
essence of my subject stands firm whatever the amount of the
same--whatever the amounts in either case. I haven't proposed from the
first at all to be definite, in the least, about financial details or
mysteries--I need hardly say; and have even seen myself absolutely not
stating or formulating at all the figure of the property accruing to
Gray. I haven't the least need of that, and can make the absence of it
in fact a positively good and happy effect. That is an immense gain for
my freedom of conduct; and in fine there glimmers upon me, there
glimmers upon me----! The idea, which was vaguely my first, of the
absolute theft practised upon Gray by Horty, and which Gray's large
appeal to his cleverness and knowledge, and large trust in his
competence, his own being nil--this theft accepted and condoned by Gray
as a manner of washing his own hands of the use of the damnosa
hereditas--this thinkable enough in respect to some limited, even if
considerable, amount etc., but losing its virtue of conceivability if
applied to larger and more complicated things. Vulgar theft I don't
want, but I want something to which Horty is led on and encouraged by
Gray's whole attitude and state of mind face to face with the impression
which he gets over there of so many of the black and merciless things
that are behind the great possessions. I want Gray absolutely to inherit
the money, to have it, to have had it, and to let it go; and it seems to
me that a whole element of awkwardness will be greatly minimised for me
if I never exactly express, or anything like it, what the money is. The
difficulty is in seeing any one particular stroke by which Horty can do
what he wants; it will have to be much rather a whole train of
behaviour, a whole process of depredation and misrepresentation, which
constitutes his delinquency. This, however, would be and _could_ be only
an affair of time; and my whole intention, a straight and compact
action, would suffer from this. What I originally saw was the fact of
Gray's detection of Horty in a piece of extremely ingenious and able
malversation of his funds, the care of which he has made over to him,
and the then determination on his part simply to show the other in
silence that he understands, and on consideration will do nothing; this
being, he feels in his wrought-up condition after what he has learnt
about the history of the money, the most congruous way of his ceasing
himself to be concerned with it and of resigning it to its natural
associations. That was the essence of my subject, and I see as much in
it as ever; only I see too that it is imaginable about a comparatively
small pecuniary interest much more than about a great. It has to depend
upon the kind of malpractice involved; and I am partly tempted to ask
myself whether Horty's connection with the situation may not be
thinkable as having begun somewhat further back. One thing is certain,
however; I don't want any hocus-pocus about the Will itself--which an
anterior connection for H. would more or less amount to: I want it just
as I have planned it up to the edge of the circle in which his misdeed
is perpetrated. What glimmers upon me, as I said just now, is the
conception of an extreme frankness of understanding between the two
young men on the question of Gray's inaptitudes, which at first are not
at all disgusts--because he doesn't _know_; but which makes them, the
two, have it out together at an early stage. Yes, there glimmers, there
glimmers; something really more interesting, I think, than the mere
nefarious act; something like a profoundly nefarious attitude, or even
genius: I see, I really think I see, the real fine truth of the matter
in _that._ With which I keep present to me the whole significance and
high dramatic value of the part played in the action by Cissy Foy; have
distinct to me her active function as a wheel in the machine. How it
isn't simply Gray and Horty at all, but Gray and Horty and _her_; how it
isn't She and Gray, any more than it's She and Horty, simply, but is for
her too herself and the _two_ men: in which I see possibilities of the
most interesting. But I must put her on her feet perfectly in order to
see as I should. Without at all overstraining the point of previous
contacts for Gray with these three or four others--than which even at
the worst there is nothing in the world more verisimilitudinous--I want
some sort of relation for him with her _started_; this being a distinct
economy, purchased by no extravagance, and seeing me, to begin with, so
much further on my way. And who, when I bethink myself, have his
contacts been with, after all, over there, but Horty and Rosanna--the
relation to Mr. Betterman being but of the mere essence. Of the people
who matter the Bradhams are new to him, and that is all right; Cissy may
have been seen of him on some occasion over there that is quite recent,
as recent as I like; all the more that I must remember how if I want her
truly a Girl I must mind what I'm about with the age I'm attributing to
Gray. I want a disparity, but not too great, at the same time that
though I want her a Girl, I want her not too young a one either.
Everything about her, her intelligence, character, sense of life and
knowledge of it, imply a certain experience and a certain time for that.
The great fact is that she is the poor Girl, and the "exceptionally
clever," in a society of the rich, living her life with them, and more
or less by their bounty; being, I seem to see, already a friend and
protégée of Rosanna's, though it isn't Rosanna but the Bradhams who
put her in relation with Gray, whether designedly or not. I seem to run
here the risk a bit of exposure to the charge of more or less repeating
the figure of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl, with the Bradhams repeating
even a little the Assinghams in that fiction; but I shake this
reflection off, as having no weight beyond duly warning; the situation
being such another affair and the real characteristics and exhibited
proceedings of these three persons being likewise so other. Say
something shall have passed between Cissy at a _then_ 25, or 24 at most,
and Gray "on the other side"; this a matter of but two or three
occasions, interesting to him, shortly before his stepfather's death--a
person with whom she has then professed herself greatly struck, to whom
she has been somehow very "nice": a circumstance pleasing and touching
at the time to Gray, given his great attachment to that charming, or at
any rate to Gray very attaching, though for us slightly mysterious,
character. Say even if it doesn't take, or didn't, too much exhibition
or insistence, that the meeting has been with the stepfather only, who
has talked with her about Gray, made a point of Gray, wished she could
know Gray, excited her interest and prepared her encounter for Gray, in
some conditions in which Gray has been temporarily absent from him. Say
this little intercourse has taken place at some "health resort", some
sanatorium or other like scene of possibilities, where the stepfather,
for whom I haven't even yet a name, is established, making his cure,
staving off the affection of which he dies, while this interesting young
American creature is also there in attendance on some relative whom she
also has since lost. I multiply my orphans rather, Charlotte too having
been an orphan; but I can keep this girl only a half-orphan perhaps if I
like. I kind of want her, for the sake of the characteristic, to have a
mother, without a father; in which case her mother, who hasn't died, but
got better, will have been her companion at the health resort; though it
breaks a little into my view of the girl's dependence, her isolation
etc., her living so much with these other people, if her mother is
about. On the other hand the mother may be as gently but a charge the
more for her, and so in a manner conducive; though it's a detail, at any
rate, settling itself as I get in close--and she would be at the worst
the only mother in the business. What I seem to like to have at all
events is that Gray and Cissy, have _not_ met, yet have been in this
indirect relation--complicated further by the fact of her existing
"friendship", say, as a temporary name for it, with Horton Vint. She
arrives thus with her curiosity, her recollections, her
intelligence--for, there's no doubt about it, I am, rather as usual,
offering a group of the personally remarkable, in a high degree, all
round. Augusta Bradham, really, is about the only stupid one, the only
approach to a fool, though she too in her way is a force, a driving
one--that is the whole point; which happens to mark a difference also,
so far good, from the Assinghams, where it was the wife who had the
intelligence and the husband who was in a manner the fool. The fact of
the personal values, so to call them, thus clustered, I of course not
only accept, but cherish; that they are each the particular individual
of the particular weight being of course of the essence of my donnée.
They are interesting that way--I have no use for them here in any other.

Horton has meanwhile become in a sort tied up with Cissy, as she has
with him; through the particular conditions of their sentiment for each
other--she in love with him, so far as she, by her conviction and
theory, has allowed herself to go in that direction for a man without
money, though destined somehow to have it, as she feels; and he in love
with her under the interdict of a parity of attitude on the whole
"interested" question. The woman whom he would give truly one of his
limbs to commend himself to is Rosanna, who perfectly knows it and for
whom he serves as the very compendium and symbol of that danger of her
being approached only on that ground, the ground of her wealth, which
is, by all the mistrusts and terrors it creates, the deep note of her
character and situation; that he serves to her as the very type of what
she most dreads, not only the victory, but the very approach of it,
almost constituting thus a kind of frank relation, a kind of closeness
of contact between them, that involves for her almost a sinister (or
whatever) fascination. It is between him and my ambitious young woman (I
call her ambitious to simplify) that they are in a manner allies in what
may be called their "attitude to society"; the frankness of their
recognition, on either side, that in a world of money they can't _not_
go in for it, and that accordingly so long as neither has it, they can't
go in for each other: though how each would--each makes the other
feel--if it could all be only on a different basis! Horty's attitude is
that he's going to have it somehow, and he to a certain extent infects
her with this conviction--but that he doesn't wholly do so is exactly
part of the evidence as to that latent limitation of the _general_ trust
in him which I must a good deal depend on to explain how it is that,
with his ability, or the impression of this that he also produces, he
hasn't come on further. Deep down in the girl is her element of
participation in this mistrust too--which is part of the reason why she
hangs back, in spite of the kind of attraction he has for her, from any
consent to, say, marry him. He, for that matter, hasn't in the least
urged the case either--it hasn't been in him up to now, in spite of a
failure or two, in spite of the failure notably with Rosanna, to close
by a positive act the always possibly open door to his marrying money.
I see the recognition of all this between them as of well-nigh the
crudest and the most typical, the most "modern"; in fact I see their
relation as of a highly exhibitional value and interest. What the Girl
indeed doesn't, and doesn't want to (up to now) express, is exactly that
limit, and the ground of it, of her faith in him as a financial
conqueror. She is willing more or less to believe, to confide, in his
own confidence--she sees him indeed as more probably than not marked for
triumphant acquisition; but the latent, "deep down" thing is her
wonderment as to the character of his methods--if the so-called straight
ones won't have served or sufficed. She sees him as a fine
adventurer--which is a good deal too how she sees herself; but almost
crude though I have called their terms of mutual understanding it hasn't
come up for them, and I think it is absolutely never to come up for
them, that she so far faces this question of his "honour", or of any
capacity in him for deviation from it, as even to conjure it away. There
are depths within depths between them--and I think I understand what I
mean if I say there are also shallows beside shallows. They give each
other rope and yet at the same time remain tied; that for the moment is
a sufficient formula--once I keep the case lucid as to what their tie
is.

What accordingly does her situation in respect to Gray come to, and how
do I see it work out? The answer to that involves of course the question
of what his, in respect to her, comes to, and what it gives me for
interest. She has got her original impression about him over there as of
the man without means to speak of; but it is as the heir to a fortune
that she now first sees him, and as the person coming in virtue of that
into the world she lives in, where her power to guide, introduce and
generally help and aid and comfort him, shows from the first as
considerable. She strikes him at once as the creature, in all this
world, the most European and the most capable of, as it were,
understanding him intellectually, entering into his tastes etc. He
recognises quickly that, putting Davey Bradham perhaps somewhat aside,
she is the being, up and down the place, with whom he is going to be
able most to _communicate._ With Rosanna he isn't going to communicate
"intellectually", æsthetically, and all the rest, the least little bit:
Rosanna has no more taste than an elephant; Rosanna is only _morally_
elephantine, or whatever it is that is morally most massive and
magnificent. What I want is to get my right firm _joints_, each working
on its own hinge, and forming together the play of my machine: they
_are_ the machine, and when each of them is settled and determined it
will work as I want it. The first of these, definitely, is that Gray
does inherit, has inherited. The next is that he is face to face with
what it means to have inherited. The next to that is that one of the
things it means--though this isn't the light in which he first sees the
fact--is that the world immensely opens to him, and that one of the
things it seems most to give him, to offer and present to him, is this
brilliant, or whatever, and interesting young woman. He doesn't at first
at all see her in the light of her making up to him on account of his
money; she is too little of a crudely interested specimen for that, and
too sincere in fact to herself--feeling very much about him that she
would certainly have been drawn to him, after this making of
acquaintance, even if no such advantages attached to him and he had
remained what he had been up to then. But all the same it is a Joint,
and we see that it is by seeing _her_ as we shall; I mean I make it and
keep it one by showing "what goes on" between herself and Horton. I have
blessedly that view, that alternation of view, for my process throughout
the action. The determination of her interest towards him--that then is
a Joint. And let me make the point just here that at first he has
nothing but terror, but horror, of seeing himself affected as Rosanna
has been by her own situation--from the moment, that is, he begins to
take in that she is so affected. He takes this in betimes from various
signs--before that passes between them which gives him her case in the
full and lucid way in which he comes to have it. _She_ gives it to him
presently--but at first as her own simply, holding her hand entirely
from intimating that his need be at all like it; as she must do, for
that matter, given the fact that it is really through her action that he
was brought over to see his uncle. She thinks her feelings about her own
case right and inevitable for herself; but I want to make it an
interesting and touching inconsistency in her that she desires not to
inspire him, in respect to his circumstances, with any correspondingly
justified sense. Definite is it that what he learns, he learns not the
least mite from herself, though after a while he comes quite to
challenge her on it, but from Davey Bradham, so far as he learns it, for
the most part, concretely and directly--as many other impressions as I
can suggest helping besides. I want him at all events to have a full
large clear moment or season of exhilaration, of something like
intoxication, over the change in his conditions, before questions begin
to come up. An essential Joint is constituted by their beginning to come
up, and the difference that this begins to make. What I want of Davey
Bradham is that he is a determinant in this shift of Gray's point of
view, though I want also (and my scenario has practically provided for
that) that the immediate amusement of his contact with Davey shall be
quite compatible with his _not_ yet waking up, _not_ yet seeing
questions loom. I must keep it well before me too that his whole
enlarged vision of the money-world, so much more than any other sort of
world, that all these people constitute, operates inevitably by itself,
promotes infinite reflection, makes a hundred queer and ugly things, a
thousand, ten thousand, glare at him right and left. A Joint again is
constituted by Gray's first consciousness of malaise, first
determination of malaise, in the presence of more of a vision, and more
and more impression of everything; which determination, as I call it, I
want to proceed from some sense in him of Cissy's attitude as affected
by his own reactions, exhibition of questions, wonderments and, to put
it simply and strongly, rising disgusts. She has appealed to him at the
outset, on his first apprehension of her, exactly as a poor girl who
wasn't meant to be one, who has been formed by her nature and her
experience to rise to big brilliant conditions, carry them, take them
splendidly, in fine do all justice to them; this under all the first
flush of what I have called his own exhilaration. He hasn't then
committed himself, in the vulgar sense, at all--had only committed
himself, that is, to the appearance of being interested and charmed: his
imaginative expansion for that matter being naturally too great to
permit for the moment of particular concentration or limitations. But
isn't his incipient fear of beginning to be, of becoming, such another
example, to put it comprehensively, as Rosanna, doesn't this proceed
precisely from the stir in him of certain disconcerting, complicating,
in fact if they go a little further quite blighting, wonderments in
respect to Cissy's possibilities? She throws her weight with him into
the _happy_ view of his own; which is what he likes her, wants her, at
first encourages her to do, lending himself to it while he feels
himself, as it were, all over. Mrs. Bradham, all the while, backs her up
and backs _him_ up, and is in general as crude and hard and blatant, as
vulgar is what it essentially comes to, in her exhibited desire to bring
about their engagement, as is exactly required for producing on him just
the wrong effect. Gray's tone to the girl becomes, again to simplify:
"Oh yes, it's all right that you should be rich, should have all the
splendid things of this world; but I don't see, I'm not sure, of its
being in the least right that _I_ should--while I seem to be making out
more and more, round me, how so many of them are come by." It is the
insistence on them, the way everyone, among that lot at any rate,
appears aware of no values but those, that sets up more and more its
effect on his nerves, his moral nerves as it were, and his reflective
imagination. The girl counters to this of course--she isn't so crude a
case as not to; she denies that she's the sort of existence that he thus
imputes--all the while that she only sees in his attitude and his
position a kind of distinction that would simply add to their situation,
simply gild and after a fashion decorate it, were she to marry him. I
want to make another Joint with her beginning, all the same, to doubt of
him, to think him really perhaps capable of strange and unnatural
things, which she doesn't yet see at all clearly; but which take the
form for her of his possibly handing over great chunks of his money to
public services and interests, deciding to be munificent with it, after
the fashion of Rockefellers and their like: though with the enormous
difference that his resources are not in the slightest degree of that
calibre. He's rich, yes, but not rich enough to remain rich if he goes
in for that sort of overdone idealism. Some passage bearing on this
takes place, I can see, about at the time when he has the so to call it
momentous season, or scene, or whatever, of confidence or exchange with
Rosanna in which she goes the whole "figure", as they say, and puts to
him that exactly her misery is in having come in for resources that
should enable her to do immense things, but that are so dishonoured and
stained and blackened at their very roots, that it seems to her that
they carry their curse with them, and that she asks herself what
application to "benevolence" as commonly understood, can purge them, can
make them anything but continuators, somehow or other, of the wrongs in
which they had their origin. This, dramatically speaking, is momentous
for Gray, and it makes a sort of clearing up to realities between him
and Rosanna which offers itself in its turn, distinctly, as a Joint. It
makes its mark for value, has an effect, leaves things not as they were.

But meanwhile what do I see about Horton, about the situation between
them, so part and parcel of the situation between Gray and Cissy and
between Horton and Cissy. Absolute the importance, I of course
recognise, of such a presentation of matters between her and Horton, and
Horton and her, as shall stand behind and under everything that takes
place from this point. In my adumbration of a scenario for these earlier
aspects I have provided, I think, for this; at any rate I do hereby
provide. I want to give the effect, for all it's worth, of their being
constantly, chronically, naturally and, for my drama, determinatively,
in communication; with which it more and more comes to me that when the
great _coup_ of the action effects itself Gray shall have been brought
to it as much by the forces determining it on her behalf, in relation to
her, in a word, as by those determining it in connection with Horton.
She helps him to his solution about as much as Horton does, and,
lucidly, logically, ever so interestingly, everything between them up to
the verge is but a preparation for that. Enormous meanwhile the relation
with Horton constituted by his making over to this dazzling person (by
whom moreover he wants to be, consents to be, dazzled) the care or
administration of his fortune; for which highly characteristic, but
almost, in its freehandedness, abnormally, there must have been
preparation, absolutely, and oh, as I can see, ever so interestingly, in
Book 2, the section containing his face to face parts with Mr.
Betterman. It comes to me as awfully fine, given the way in which I
represent the old dying man as affected and determined, to sweep away
everything in the matter of precautions and usualisms, provisions for
trusteeships and suchlike, and lump the whole thing straight on to the
young man, without his having a condition or a proviso to consider. What
I have wanted is that he should at a stroke, as it were, in those last
enshrouded, but perfectly possessed hours, make over his testament
utterly and entirely, in the most simplified way possible; in short by
a sweeping codicil that annihilates what he has done before and puts
Gray in what I want practically to count as unconditioned possession.
Thank the Lord I have only to give the effect of this, for which I can
trust myself, without going into the ghost of a technicality, any
specialising demonstration. I need scarcely tell myself that I don't by
this mean that Gray makes over matters definitely and explicitly to
Horton at once, with attention called to the tightness with which his
eyes are shut and all his senses stopped or averted; but that naturally
and inevitably, also interestingly, this result proceeds, in fact very
directly and promptly springs, from his viewing and treating his friend
as his best and cleverest and vividest adviser--whom he only doesn't
rather abjectly beg to take complete and irresponsible charge because he
is ashamed of doing so. Two things very definite here; one being that
Gray isn't in the least blatant or glorious about his want, absolutely
phenomenal in that world, of any faint shade of business comprehension
or imagination, but is on the contrary so rather helplessly ashamed of
it that he keeps any attitude imputable to him as much as possible out
of the question--and in fact proceeds in the way I know. He has moments
of confidence--he tells Rosanna, makes a clean breast to her and with
Horton doesn't need to be explicit, beyond a point, since all his
conduct expresses it. What happens is that little by little, inevitably,
as a consequence of first doing this for him and then doing that and
then the other, Horton more and more gets control, gets a kind of
unlimited play of hand in the matter which practically amounts to a sort
of general power of attorney; as Gray falls into the position, under a
feeling insurmountably directing him, of signing anything, everything,
that Horton brings to him for the purpose--but only what Horton brings.
The state of mind and vision and feeling, the state of dazzlement with
reserves and reflections, the play of reserves and reflections with
dazzlement (which is my convenient word covering here all that I intend
and prefigure) is a part of the very essence of my subject--which in
fine I perfectly possess. What happens is, further, that, even with the
rapidity which is of the remarkable nature of the case, Horton shows for
a more and more monied, or call it at first a less and less non-monied
individual; with an undisguisedness in this respect which of itself
imposes and, vulgarly speaking, succeeds. I express these things here
crudely and summarily, by rude signs and hints, in order to express them
at all; but what is of so high an interest, and so bright and
characteristic, is that Horton is "splendid", plausible, delightful,
_because_ exactly so logical and happily suggestive, about all this; he
puts it to Gray that _of course_ he is helping himself by helping Gray,
that _of course_ his connection with Gray does him good in the business
world and gives him such help to do things for himself as he has never
before had. I needn't abound in this sense here, I am too well possessed
of what I see--as I find myself in general more and more. A tremendous
Joint is formed, in all this connection, when the first definite
question begins to glimmer upon Gray, under some intimation, suggestion,
impression, springing up as dramatically as I can make it, as to what
Horton is really doing with him, and as to whether or no he shall really
try to find out. That question of whether or no he _shall becomes_ the
question; just as the way he answers it, not all at once, but under
further impressions invoked, becomes a thing of the liveliest interest
for us; becomes a consideration the climax of which represents exactly
the Joint that is in a sense the climax of the Joints. He sees--well
what I see him see, and it is of course not at all this act of vision in
itself, but what takes place in consequence of it, and the process of
confrontation, reflection, resolution, that ensues--it is this that
brings me up to my high point of beautiful difficulty and clarity. An
exquisite quality of representation here of course comes in, with
everything that is involved to make it rich and interesting. A Joint
here, a Joint of the Joint, for perfect flexible working, is Horton's
vision of his vision, and Horton's exhibited mental, moral audacity of
certainty as to what that may mean for himself. There is a scene of
course in which, between them, this is what it can only be provisionally
gross and approximate to call settled: as to which I needn't insist
further, it's _there_; what I want is there; I've only to pull it out:
it's _all_ there, heaped up and pressed together and awaiting the
properest hand. So much just now for _that._

As to Cissy Foy meanwhile, the case seems to me to clear up and clear up
to the last perfection; or to be destined and committed so to do, at any
rate, as one presses it with the right pressure. How shall I put it for
the moment, _her_ case, in the very simplest and most rudimentary terms?
She sees the improvement in Horton's situation, she assists at it, it
gives her pleasure, it even to a certain extent causes her wonder, but a
wonder which the pleasure only perches on, so to speak, and converts to
its use; so does the vision appeal to her and hold her of the exercise
on his part, the more vivid exercise than any she has yet been able to
enjoy an exhibition of, of the ability and force, the _doing_ and
man-of-action quality, as to the show of which he has up to now been so
hampered. She likes his success at last, plainly, and he has it from her
that she likes it; she likes to let him know that she likes it, and we
have her for the time in contemplation, as it were, of these two
beautiful cases of possession and acquisition, out of which indeed poor
little impecunious she gets as yet no direct advantage, but which are
somehow together there _for_ her with a kind of glimmering looming
option well before her as to how they shall _come_ yet to concern her.
Awfully interesting and attractive, as one says, to mark the point (such
a Joint _this!_) at which the case begins to glimmer for Gray about her,
as it has begun to glimmer for him about Horton. I make out here, so far
as I catch the tip of the tail of it, such an interesting connection and
dependence, for what I may roughly call Gray's state of mind, as to what
is taking place within Cissy, so to speak. Since I speak of the most
primitive statement of it possible he catches the moment at which she
begins to say to herself "But if Horton, if _he_, is going to be
rich----?" as a positive arrest, say significant warning or omen, in his
own nearer approach to her; which takes on thereby a portentous, a kind
of ominous and yet enjoyable air of evidence as to his own likelihood,
at this rate, of getting poor. He catches her not asking herself withal,
at least _then_, "_How_ is Horton going to be rich, _how_, at such a
rate, has it come on, and what does it mean?"--it is only the "_If_
Horton, oh _if_----?" that he comes up against; it's as if he comes up
against, as well, some wondrous implication in it of "If, if, _if_ Mr.
Gray is, 'in such a funny way,' going to be poor----?" He sees her
_there_, seeing at the same time that it's as near as she yet gets; as
near perhaps even--for this splendid apprehension sort of begins to take
place in him--as she's going to allow herself to get; and after the
first chill of it, shock of it, pain of it (because I want him to be at
the point at which he has _that_) fades a little away for him, he
emerging or shaking himself out of it, the beautiful way in which it
falls into the general ironic apprehension, imagination, appropriation,
of the Whole, becomes for him _the_ fact about it. She has them, each on
his side, there in her balance--and this is between them, between him
and her; I must have prepared everything right for its being oh such a
fine moment. What I want to do of course is to get out of _this_
particular situation all it can give; what it most gives being, to the
last point, the dramatic quality, intensity, force, current or whatever,
of Gray's apprehension of it, once this is determined, and of course
wondering interest in it--as a light, so to speak, on both of the
persons concerned. What I see is that she gives him the measure, as it
were, of Horton's successful proceeding--and does so, in a sort, without
positively having it herself, or truly wanting to have it beyond the
fact that it is success, is promise and prospect of acquisition on a big
scale. What it comes to is that he finds her believing in Horton just at
the time and in proportion as he has found himself ceasing to believe,
so far as the latter's disinterestedness is concerned. No better, no
more vivid illustration of the force of the money-power and
money-prestige rises there before him, innumerably as other examples
assault him from all round. The effect on her is there for him to
"study," even, if he will; and in fact he does study it, studies it in a
way that (as he also sees) makes her think that this closer
consideration of her, approach to her, as it were, is the expression of
an increased sympathy, faith and good will, increased desire, in fine,
to make her like him. All the while it is, for Gray himself, something
other; yet something at the same time wellnigh as absorbing as if it
were what she takes it for. The fascination of seeing what will come of
it--that is of the situation, the state of vigilance, the wavering
equilibrium, at work, or at play, in the young woman--this "fascination"
very "amusing" to show, with everything that clusters about it. He
really enjoys getting so detached from it as to be able to have it
before him for observation and wonder as he does, and I must make the
point very much of how this fairly soothes and relieves him, begins to
glimmer upon him exactly _through_ that consciousness as something like
the sort of issue he has been worrying about and longing for. Just so
something that he makes out as distinguishable there in Horton, a
confidence more or less dissimulated but also, deeply within, more or
less determined, operates in its way as a measure for him of Horton's
intimate sense of how things will go for him; the confidence referring,
I mustn't omit, to his possibility of Cissy, after all, whom his
sentiment for makes his most disinterested interest, so to call it: all
this in a manner corresponding to that apprehension in Gray of _her_
confidence, which I have just been sketchily noting. The one
disinterested thing in Horton, that is, consists of his being so
attached to her that he really cares for her freedom, cares for her
doing what on the whole she most wants to, if it will but come as she
wants it, by the operation, the evolution, so to say, of her clear
preference. He has somehow within him a sense that anyway, whatever
happens, they shall not fail of being "friends" after all. I see myself
wanting to have Gray come up against some conclusive sign of how things
_are_ at last between them--though I say "at last" as if he has had
_much_ other light as to how such things _have_ been, precedently. I
don't want him to _have_ had much other light, though he needs of course
to have had _some_; there being people enough to tell him, he being so
in the circle of talk, reference, gossip; but with his own estimate of
the truth of ever so much of the chatter in general, and of that chatter
in particular, taking its course. What I seem to see just in this
connection is that he has "believed" so far as to take it that she _has_
"cared" for his friend in the previous time, but that Horton hasn't
really at all cared for her, keeping himself in reserve as it is of his
essence to do, and in particular (this absolutely _known_ to Gray) never
having wholly given up his views on Rosanna. Gray believes that he
hasn't, at any rate, and this helps him not to fit the fact of the
younger girl's renounced, quenched, outlived, passion, or whatever one
may call it, to any game of patience or calculation, rooted in a like
state of feeling, on Horton's part. I want the full effect of what I can
only call for convenience Gray's Discovery, his full discovery of them
"together", in some situation, and its illuminating and signifying, its
in a high degree, to repeat again my cherished word, determinant
character. This effect requires exactly what I have been roughly
marking--the line of argument in which appearances, as interpreted for
himself, have been supporting Gray. "She has been in love with him,
yes--but nothing has come of it--nothing could come of it; because,
though he has been aware, and has been nice and kind to her, he isn't
affected in the same way--is, in these matters, too cool and calculating
a bird. He likes women, yes; and has had lots to do with them; but in
the way of what a real relation with _her_ would have meant--not! She
has given him up, she has given it up--whereby one is free not to worry,
not to have scruples, not to fear to cut across the possibility of one's
friend." That's a little compendium of what I see. But it comes to me
that I also want something more--for the full effect and the exact
particular and most pointed bearing of what I dub Gray's discovery. He
must have put it to Horton, as their relations have permitted at some
suggested hour, or in some relevant connection: "Do you mind telling me
if it's true--what I've heard a good deal affirmed--that there has been
a question of an engagement between you and Miss Foy?--or that you are
so interested in her that to see somebody else making up to her would be
to you as a pang, an affront, a ground of contention or challenge or
whatever?" I seem to see that, very much indeed; and by the same token
to see Horton's straight denegation. I see Horton say emphatically
No--and this for reasons quite conceivable in him, once one apprehends
their connection with his wishing above all, beyond anything else that
he at this moment wishes, to keep well with Gray. His denegation is
plausible; Gray believes it and accepts it--all the more that at the
moment in question he _wants_ to, in the interest of his own freedom of
action. Accordingly the point I make is that when he in particular
conditions finds them all unexpectedly and unmistakably "together", the
discovery becomes for him _doubly_ illuminating. I might even better say
trebly; showing him in the very first place that Horton has lied to him,
and thereby that Horton _can_ lie. This very interesting and
important--but also, in a strange way, "fascinating" to him. It shows in
the second way how much Cissy is "thinking" of Horton, as well as he of
her; and it shows in the last place, which makes it triple, how well
Horton must think of the way his affairs are getting on that he can now
consider the possibility of a marriage--that he can feel, I mean, he can
_afford_ to marry; not having need of one of the Rosanna's to make up
for his own destitution. This clinches enormously, as by a flash of
vision, Gray's perception of what he is about; and is thus very
intensely a Joint of the first water! What I want to be carried on to
is the point at which all that he sees and feels and puts together in
this connection eventuates in a decision or attitude, in a clearing-up
of all the troubled questions, obscurities and difficulties that have
hung for him about what I call his Solution, about what he shall be
most at ease, most clear and consistent for himself, in making up his
mind to. The process here and the position on his part, with all the
implications and consequences of the same in which it results, is
difficult and delicate to formulate, but I see with the last intensity
the sense of it, and feel how it will all come and come as I get nearer
to it. What is a big and beautiful challenge to a whole fine handling
of these connections in particular is the making conceivable and clear,
or in other words credible, consistent, vivid and interesting, the
particular extraordinary relation thus constituted between the two men.
That one may make it these things for Gray is more or less calculable,
and, as I seem to make out, workable; but the greatest beauty of the
difficulty is in getting it and keeping it in the right note and at the
right pitch for Horton. Horton's "acceptance"--on what prodigious basis
save the straight and practical view of Gray's exalted queerness and
constitutional, or whatever, perversity, can _that_ be shown as resting?
Two fine things--that is one of them strikes me as very fine--here come
to me; one of these my seeing (_don't_ I see it?) how it will fall in,
not to say fall out, as of the essence of the true workability, that the
extent to which i's are not dotted between them, are left consciously
undotted, to which, to the most extraordinary tune, and yet with the
logic of it all straight, they stand off, or rather Gray does, the other
all demonstrably thus taking his cue--the way, I say, in which the
standing-off from sharp or supreme clearances is, and confirms itself as
being, a note of my hero's action in the matter, throws upon one the
most interesting work. Horton accepts it as exactly part of the
prodigious queerness which he humours and humours in proportion as Gray
will have it that he shall; the "fine thing", the second of the two,
just spoken of, being that Horton never flinches from his perfectly
splendid theory that he is "taking care", consummately, of his friend,
and that he is arranging, by my exhibition of him, just as consummately
to _show_ for so doing. No end, I think, to be got out of this wondrous
fact of Gray's sparing Horton, or saving him, the putting of anything to
a real and direct Test; such a Test as would reside in his asking
straight for a large sum of money, a big amount, really consonant with
his theoretically intact resources arid such as he with the highest
propriety in the world might simply say that he has an immediate use
for, or can make some important application of. No end, no end, as I
say, to what I see as given me by this--this huge constituted and
accepted eccentricity of Gray's holdings-off. I have the image of the
relation between them made by it in my vision thus of the way, or the
ways, they look at each other even while talking together to a tune
which would logically or consistently make these ways _other_; the sort
of education of the look that it breeds in Horton on the whole ground of
"how far he may go." The things that pass between them after this
fashion quite beautiful to do if kept from an overdoing; with Horton's
formula of his "looking after" Gray completely interwoven with his whole
ostensibility. It is with this formula that Horton meets the world all
the while--the world that at a given moment can only find itself so full
of wonderment and comment. It is with it above all that he meets Cissy,
who takes it from him in a way that absolutely helps him to keep it up;
and it _would_ be with it that he should meet Rosanna if, after a given
day or season, he might find it in him to dare, as it were, to "meet"
Rosanna at all. It is with Horton's formula, which I think I finally
show him as quite publicly delighting in, that Gray himself meets
Rosanna, whom he meets a great deal all this time; with such passages
between them as are only matched in another sense, and with all the
other values with which they swell, so to speak, by his passages with
the consummate Horton. Charming, by which I mean such interesting,
things resident in what I _there_ touch on; with the way _they_ look at
each other, Rosanna and Gray, if one is talking about looks. Gray keeps
it in comedy, so far as he can--making a tone, a spell, that Rosanna
doesn't break into, as she breaks, anything to call _really_ breaks,
into nothing as yet: I seem to see the final, from-far-back-prepared
moment when she does, for the first and last time, break as of a big and
beautiful value. _That_ will be a Joint of Joints; but meanwhile what is
between them is the sombre confidence, tenderness, fascination, anxiety,
a dozen admirable things, with which she waits on Gray's tone, not
playing up to it at all (playings-up and suchlike not being verily in
her) but taking it from him, accommodating herself to it with all her
anxiety and her confidence somehow mixed together, as if to see how far
it will carry her. Such a lot to be done with Gussie Bradham, portentous
woman, even to the very cracking or bursting of the mould meanwhile--so
functional do I see her, in spite of the crowding and pressing together
of functions, as to the production of those (after all early-determined)
reactions in Gray by the simple complete exhibition of her type and
pressure and aggressive mass. She is really worth a book by herself, or
would be should I look that way; and I just here squeeze what I most
want about her into a sort of nutshell by saying that it marks for Gray
just where and how his Solution, or at any rate some of its significant
and attendant aspects, swims into his ken, with the very first scene she
makes him about the meanness then of his conception of his opportunity.
Then it is he feels he must be getting a bit into the truth of
things--if that's the way he strikes her. His very measure of taste and
delicacy and the sympathetic and the nice and the what he wants, becomes
after a fashion what she will want most to make him a scene about. I
have it at first that he lends himself, that her great driving tone and
pressure, her would-be act of possession of him, Cissy and the question
of Cissy being the link, have amounted to a sort of trouble-saving thing
which he has let himself "go to", which he has suffered as his
convenient push or handy determinant, for the hour (sceptical even then
as to its lasting)--but which has inordinately overdosed him,
overhustled him, almost, as he feels in his old habit of financial
contraction, overspent and overruined him. He does the things, the
social things, for the moment, that she prescribes, that she foists upon
him as the least ones he can decently do; does them even with a certain
bewildered amusement--while Rosanna, brooding apart, so to speak, out of
the circle and on her own ground, but ever so attentive, draws his eye
to the effect of what one might almost call the intelligent, the
patience-inviting, wink! Oh for the pity of scant space for specific
illustration of Mrs. Bradham; where-with indeed of course I reflect on
the degree to which my planned compactness, absolutely precious and not
to be compromised with, must restrict altogether the larger
illustrational play. Intensities of foreshortening, with alternate
vividnesses of extension: that is the rough label of the process. I keep
it before me how mixed Cissy is with certain of the consequences of this
hustlement of Mrs. Bradham, and how bullyingly, so to call it almost,
she has put the whole matter of what he ought to "do for them all," on
the ground in particular of what it is so open to him, so indicated for
him, to do for that poor dear exquisite thing in especial.
Illustrational, illustrational, yes; but oh how every inch of it will
have to count. I seem to want her to have made him do some one rather
gross big thing above all, as against his own sense of fineness in these
matters; and to have this thing count somehow very much in the matter of
his relation with Cissy. I seem to want something like his having
consented to be "put up" by her to the idea of offering Cissy something
very handsome by way of a "kind" tribute to her mingled poverty and
charm--jolly, jolly, I think Eve exactly got it! I keep in mind that
Mrs. Bradham wants him to marry her--this amount of "disinterestedness"
giving the measure of Mrs. B. at her most exalted "best". Wherewith, to
consolidate this, her delicacy being capable--well, of what we shall
see, she works of course to exaggeration the idea of his "recognising"
how nice Cissy was, over there in the other time, to his poor sick
stepfather, who himself so recognised it, who wrote to her so charmingly
a couple of times "about it", after her return to America and quite
shortly before his death. Gray "knows about this", and of course will
quite see what she means. Therefore wouldn't it be nice for Gray to give
her, Cissy, something really beautiful and valuable and socially helpful
to her--as of course he can't give her money, which is what would be
most helpful. Under this hustlement, in fine, and with a sense, born of
his goodnature, his imagination, and his own delicacy, such a very
different affair, of what Gussie Bradham has done for him, by her
showing, he finds himself in for having bought a very rare single row of
pearls, such as a girl, in New York at least, may happily wear, and
presenting it to our young person as the token of recognition that Mrs.
Bradham has imagined for them. The beauty in which, I see, is that it
may be illustrational in more ways than one--illustrational of the
hustle, of the length Gray has "appreciatively" let himself go, and,
above all, of Cissy's really interesting intelligence and "subtlety".
She refuses the gift, very gently and pleadingly, but as it seems to him
really pretty well finally--refuses it as not relevant or proportionate
or congruous to any relation in which they yet stand to each other, and
as oh ever so much over-expressing any niceness she may have shown in
Europe. She does, in doing this, exactly what he has felt at the back of
his head that she would really do, and what he likes her for doing--the
effect of which is that she has furthered her interest with him
decidedly more (as she of course says to herself) than if she had taken
it. He is left with it for the moment on his hands, and what I want is
that he shall the next thing find himself, in revulsion, in reaction,
there being for him no question of selling it again etc., finds himself,
I say, offering it to Mrs. Bradham herself, who swallows it without
winking. Yet, in a way, this little history of the pearls, of her not
having had them, and of his after a fashion owing her a certain
compensation for that, owing her something she _can_ accept, is there
_between_ him and my young person. They figure again between them,
humorously, freely, ironically--the girl being of an irony!--in their
appearances on Mrs. Bradham's person, to whose huge possession of
ornament they none the less conspicuously add.

But my point here is above all that Gray exactly _doesn't_ put the
question of what is becoming of his funds under Horty's care of them to
the test by any cultivation of that courage for large drafts and big
hauls, that nerve for believing in the fairy-tale of his sudden fact of
possession, which was briefly and in a manner amusingly possible to him
at the first go off of his situation. He forbears, abstains, stands off,
and finds himself, or in particular is found by others, to the extent of
their observing, wondering and presently challenging him, to be living,
to be drawing on his supposed income, with what might pass for the most
extraordinarily timorous and limited imagination. He _likes_ this
arrest, enjoys it and feels a sort of wondrous refreshing decency, at
any rate above all a refreshing interest and curiosity about it, or,
rather, for it; but what his position involves is his explaining it to
others, his making up his mind, his having to, for a line to take about
it, without his thereby giving Horton away. He isn't to give Horton away
the least scrap from this point on; but at the same time he is to have
to deal with the world, with society, with the entourage consisting for
him, in its most pressing form, of, say, three representative
persons--he has to deal with this challenge, as I have called it, in
some way that will sort of meet it _without_ givings-away. These three
persons are in especial Rosanna and the two Bradhams; and it is before
me definitely, I think, that I want to express, and in the very vividest
way, his sense of his situation here, of what it means, and of what _he_
means, _in_ it, through what takes place for him about it with Rosanna
and with the Bradhams. It is by what he "says" to the Bradhams and to
Rosanna (in the way, that is largely, of _not_ saying) that I seem to
see my values here as best got, and the presentation of their different
states most vivified and dramatised. These are scenes, and the function
of them to serve up for us exactly, and ever so lucidly, what I desire
them to represent. If the greatest interest of them, of sorts, belongs
to them in so far as they are "with" Rosanna, there are yet particular
values that belong to the relation with Davey, and the three relations,
at any rate, work the thing for me. They are perfectly different, on
this lively ground, though the "point" involved is the same in each; and
the having each of them to do it with should enable me to do it
beautifully; I mean to squeeze _all_ the dramatic sense from it. The
great beauty is of course for the aspects with Rosanna, between whom and
him everything passes--and there is so much basis already in what has
been between them--without his "explaining", as I have called it,
anything. Even without explanations--or all the more by reason of their
very absence--there is so much of it all; of the question and the
dramatic illumination. With Gussie Bradham--_that_ aspect I needn't
linger or insist on, here, so much as a scrap. I have that, see it all,
it's _there._ But with Davey I want something very good, that is in
other words very functional; and I think I even wonder if I don't want
to see Davey as attempting to borrow money of him. This--if I do see
it--will take much putting on the right basis; and it seems to kind of
glimmer upon me richly what the right basis is. My idea has been from
the first that the Bradham money is all Gussie's; I have seen Davey, by
the very type and aspect, by all his detached irony and humour and
indiscretion and general value as the unmonied young man who has married
the heiress, as Horton would have been had he been able to marry
Rosanna. But no interfering analogy need trouble me here; Horton's not
having done that, and the essential difference between the men, eases
off any such question. Only don't I seem to want it that Gussie's
fortune, besides not having been even remotely comparable to Rosanna's,
is, though with a fair outward face, a dilapidated and undermined
quantity, much ravaged by Gussie's violent strain upon it, and
representing thus, through her general enormous habit and attitude, an
association and connection with the money world, but all the more
characteristically so, for Gray as he begins to see, that almost
everything but the pitch of Gussie's wants and arrangements and ideals
has been chucked, as it were, out of its windows and doors. Don't I
really see the Bradhams thus as _predatory?_ Predatory on the very rich,
that is; with Gussie's insistence that Gray shall _be_ and shall proceed
as quite one of the _very_, oh the very, very, exactly in order that she
_may_ so prey? Yes and so it is that Gray learns--so it is that a part
of Davey's abysses of New York financial history, is his own, their own,
but his in particular, abyss of inconvenience, abyss of inability to
keep it up combined with all the social impossibility of not doing so. I
somehow want such values of the supporting and functional and
illustrative sort in Davey that I really think I kind of want him to be
the person, _the_ person, to whom Gray gives--as a kind of recognition
of the remarkable part, the precious part, don't I feel it as being?
that Davey plays for him. He likes so the illuminating Davey, whom I'm
quite sure I want to show in no malignant or vicious light, but just as
a regular rag or sponge of saturation in the surrounding medium. He is
beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments, all scandalised states;
he is amused at what he himself does, at his general and particular
effect and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation, as it were,
and whom I somehow seem to want to show him feel as the only person in
the whole medium appreciating his genius; in other words his detached
play of mind and the deep "American humour" of it. Don't I seem to want
him even as asking for something rather big?--a kind of a lump of a sum
which Gray, always with amusement, answers that he will have to see
about. Gray's seeing about anything of this sort means, all notedly,
absolutely _all_, as I think I have it, asking Horton whether he can,
whether he may, whether Horton will give it to him, whether in short the
thing will suit Horton; even without any disposition of the sum, any
account of what he wants to do, indicated or reported or confessed to
Horton? Don't I see something like this?--that Gray, having put it to
Horton, has precisely determined, for his vision, on Horton's part, just
that first important plea of "Really you can't, you know, at this
rate"--even after Gray has been for some time so "ascetic"--"It won't be
convenient for you just now; and I must ask you really, you know, to
take my word for it that you'd much better not distract from what I am
in the act of doing for you such a sum"--by which I mean, for I am
probably using here not the terms Horton _would_ use--"much better not
make such a call (call is the word) when I am exactly doing for you
etc." What I seem to see is that Davey does have money from him, but has
it only on a scale that falls short, considerably, of his appeal or
proposal or whatever; in other words that Gray accommodates him to the
third, or some other fraction, of the whole extent; and that this
involves for him practically the need of his saying that Horton won't
let him have more. I want that, I see it as a value; I see Davey's
aspect on it as a value, I see what is determined thus between them as a
value; and I seem to see most this _covering_ by Gray of Horton in
answer to the insinuations, not indignant but amused, in answer to the
humorously fantastic picture, on Davey's lips, of the rate at which
Horton is cleaning him out or whatever, this taking of the line of so
doing and of piling up plausibilities of defence, excuse etc., so far as
poor Gray can be plausible in these difficult "technical" connections,
as the vivid image, the vividest, I am most concerned to give of what I
show him as doing. The covering of Horton, the covering of Horton--this
is much more than not giving him away; this active and positive
protection of him seems to me really what my subject logically asks.
Well then if that is it, is what it most of all, for the dramatic value,
asks, how can this be consistently less than Gray's act of going all the
way indeed? I don't know why--as it has been hovering before me--I don't
want the complete vivid sense of it to take the form of an awful, a
horrible or hideous, crisis on Horton's part which, under the stress of
it, he "suddenly" discloses to Gray, throwing himself upon him in the
most fevered, the most desperate appeal for relief. What then
constitutes the nature of the crisis, what _then_ can, or constitute the
urgency of the relief, unless the fact of his having something
altogether dreadful to confess; so dreadful that it can only involve the
very essence of his reputation, honour and decency, his safety in short
before the law? He has been guilty of some huge irregularity, say--but
which yet is a different thing from whatever irregularities he has been
guilty of in respect to Gray himself; and which up to now, at the worst,
have left a certain substantial part of Gray's funds intact. Say that,
say that; turn it over, that is, to see if it's really wanted. I think
of it as wanted because I feel the need of the effect of some _acute_
determination play up as I consider all this--and yet also see
objections; which probably will multiply as I look a little closer. I
throw this off, at all events, for the moment, as I go, to be looked at
straighter, to return to presently--after I've got away from it a bit, I
mean from this special aspect a little, in order to come back to it
fresher; picking up meanwhile two or three different matters.

The whole question of what my young man has been positively interested
in, been all the while more or less definitely occupied with, I have
found myself leaving, or at any rate have left, in abeyance, by reason
of a certain sense of its comparative unimportance. That is I have felt
my instinct to make him definitely and frankly as complete a case as
possible of the sort of thing that will make him an anomaly and an
outsider alike in the New York world of business, the N. Y. world of
ferocious acquisition, and the world there of enormities of expenditure
and extravagance, so that the real suppression for him of anything that
shall count in the American air as a money-making, or even as a
wage-earning, or as a pecuniarily picking-up character, strikes me as
wanted for my emphasis of his entire difference of sensibility and of
association. I have always wanted to do an out and out non-producer, in
the ordinary sense of non-accumulator of material gain, from the moment
one should be able to give him a positively interested aspect on another
side or in another sense, or even definitely a _generally_ responsive
intelligence. I see my figure then in this case as an absolutely frank
example of the tradition and superstition, the habit and rule so
inveterate there, frankly and serenely deviated from--these things
meaning there essentially some mode of sharp reaching out for money over
a counter or sucking it up through a thousand contorted channels. Yet I
want something as different as possible, no less different, I mean, from
the people who are "idle" there than from the people who are what is
called active; in short, as I say, an out and out case, and of course an
avowedly, an exceptionally fine and special one, which antecedents and
past history up to then may more or less vividly help to account for. A
very special case indeed is of course our Young Man--without his being
which my donnée wouldn't come off at all; his being so is just of the
very core of the subject. It's a question therefore of the way to make
him _most_ special--but I so distinctly see this that I need scarce here
waste words----! There are three or four definite facts and
considerations, however; conditions to be seen clear. I want to steer
clear of the tiresome "artistic" associations hanging about the usual
type of young Anglo-Saxon "brought up abroad"; though only indeed so far
as they _are_ tiresome. My idea involves absolutely Gray's taking his
stand, a bit ruefully at first, but quite boldly when he more and more
sees what the opposite of it over there is so much an implication of, on
the acknowledgment that, no, absolutely, he hasn't anything at all to
show in the way of work achieved--with _such_ work as he has seen
achieved, whether apologetically or pretentiously, as he has lived
about; and yet has up to now not had at all the sense of a vacuous
consciousness or a so-called wasted life. This however by reason of
course of certain things, certain ideas, possibilities, inclinations and
dispositions, that he has cared about and felt, in his way, the
fermentation of. Of course the trouble with him is a sort of excess of
"culture", so far as the form taken by his existence up to then has
represented the growth of that article. Again, however, I see that I
really am in complete possession of him, and that no plotting of it as
to any but one or two material particulars need here detain me. He
isn't, N.B., big, personally, by which I mean physically; I see that I
want him rather below than above the middling stature, and light and
nervous and restless; extremely restless above all in presence of
swarming new and more or less aggressive, in fact quite assaulting
phenomena. Of course he has had _some_ means--that he and his stepfather
were able to live in a quiet "European" way and on an income of an
extreme New York deplorability, is of course of the basis of what has
been before; with which he must have come in for whatever his late
companion has had to leave. So with what there was from his mother, very
modest, and what there is from this other source, not less so, he _can_,
he could, go back to Europe on a sufficient basis: this fact to be kept
in mind both as mitigating the prodigy of his climax in N.Y., and yet at
the same time as making whatever there is of "appeal" to him over there
conceivable enough. Note that the statement he makes, when we first know
him, to his dying uncle, the completeness of the picture of detachment
then and there drawn for him, and which, precisely, by such an
extraordinary and interesting turn, is what most "refreshes" and works
upon Mr. Betterman--note, I say, that I absolutely require the utterness
of his difference to _be_ a sort of virtual determinant in this
relation. He puts it so to Rosanna, tells her how extraordinarily he
feels that this is what it _has_ been. Heaven forbid he should
"paint"--but there glimmers before me the sense of the connection in
which I can see him as more or less covertly and waitingly, fastidiously
and often too sceptically, conscious of possibilities of "writing".
Quite frankly accept for him the complication or whatever of his
fastidiousness, yet of his recognition withal of what makes for
sterility; but again and again I have all this, I have it. His
"culture", his initiations of intelligence and experience, his
possibilities of imagination, if one will, to say nothing of other
things, make for me a sort of figure of a floating island on which he
drifts and bumps and coasts about, wanting to get alongside as much as
possible, yet always with the gap of water, the little island _fact_, to
be somehow bridged over. All of which makes him, I of course desperately
recognise, another of the "intelligent", another exposed and assaulted,
active and passive "mind" engaged in an adventure and interesting in
_itself_ by so being; but I rejoice in that aspect of my material as
dramatically and determinantly _general._ It isn't _centrally_ a drama
of fools or vulgarians; it's only circumferentially and surroundedly
so--these being enormously implied and with the effect of their hovering
and pressing upon the whole business from without, but seen and felt by
us only with that rich indirectness. So far so good; but I come back for
a moment to an issue left standing yesterday--and beyond which, for that
matter, two or three other points raise their heads. Why did it appear
to come up for me again--I having had it present to me before and then
rather waved it away--that one might see Horton in the _kind_ of crisis
that I glanced at as throwing him upon Gray with what I called violence?
Is it because I feel "something more" is wanted for the process by which
my Young Man works off the distaste, his distaste, for the ugliness of
his inheritance--something more than his just _generally_ playing into
Horton's hands? I am in presence there of a beautiful difficulty,
beautiful to solve, yet which one must be to the last point
crystal-clear about; and this difficulty is certainly added to if Gray
sees Horton as "dishonest" in relation to others over and above his
being "queer" in the condoned way I have so to picture for his relation
to Gray. Here are complexities not quite easily unravelled, yet
manageable by getting sufficiently close to them; complexities, I mean,
of the question of whether----? Horton is abysmal, yes--but with the
mixture in it that Gray sees. Ergo I want the mixture, and if I adopt
what I threw off speculatively yesterday I strike myself as letting the
mixture more or less go and having the non-mixture, that is the "bad" in
him, preponderate. It has been my idea that this "bad" figures in a
degree to Gray as after a fashion his own creation, the creation, that
is, of the enormous and fantastic opportunity and temptation he has held
out--even though these wouldn't have operated in the least, or couldn't,
without predispositions in Horton's very genius. If Gray saw him as a
mere vulgar practiser of what he does practise, the interest would by
that fact exceedingly drop; there would be no interest indeed, and the
beauty of my "psychological" picture wouldn't come off, would have no
foot to stand on. The beauty is in the complexity of the
question--which, stated in the simplest terms possible, reduces itself
to Horton's practically saying to Gray, or seeing himself as saying to
Gray should it come to the absolute touch: "You _mind_, in your
extraordinary way, how this money was accumulated and hanky-pankied, you
suffer, and cultivate a suffering, from the perpetrated wrong of which
you feel it the embodied evidence, and with which the possession of it
is thereby poisoned for you. But I don't mind one little scrap--and
there is a great deal more to be said than you seem so much as able to
understand, or so much as able to want to, about the whole question of
how money comes to those who know _how_ to make it. Here you are then,
if it's so disagreeable to you--and what can one really say, with the
chances you give me to say it, but that if you are so burdened and
afflicted, there are ways of relieving you which, upon my honour, I
should perfectly undertake to work--given the facilities that you so
morbidly, so fantastically, so all but incredibly save for the testimony
of my senses, permit me to enjoy." _That_, yes; but that is very
different from the wider range of application of the aptitudes
concerned. The confession, and the delinquency preceding it, that played
a bit up for me yesterday--what do they do but make Horton just as
vulgar as I _don't_ want him, and, as I immediately recognise, Gray
wouldn't in the least be able to stomach seeing him under any
continuance of relations. I have it, I have it, and it comes as an
answer to _why_ I _worried?_ Because of felt want of a way of providing
for some Big Haul, really big; which my situation absolutely requires.
There must be at a given moment a big haul in order to produce the big
sacrifice; the latter being of the absolute essence. I say I have it
when I ask myself why the Big Haul shouldn't simply consist of the
consequence of a confession made by Horton to Gray, yes; but made not
about what he has lost, whether dishonestly or not, for somebody else,
but what he has lost for Gray. Solutions here bristle, positively, for
the case seems to clear up from the moment I make Horton put his matter
as a mere disastrous loss, of unwisdom, of having been "done" by others
and not as a thing involving his own obliquity. What I want is that he
_pleads the loss_--whether loss to Gray, loss to another party, or loss
to both, is a detail. I incline to think loss to Gray sufficient--loss
that Gray accepts, which is different from his meeting the disaster
inflicted on another by Horton. What I want a bit is all contained in
Gray's question, afterwards determined, not absolutely present at the
moment, of whether this fact has not been a feigned or simulated one,
not a genuine gulf of accident, but an appeal for relinquishment
practised on Gray by the latter's liability to believe that the cause is
genuine. I clutch the idea of this determinant of rightness of suspicion
being one with the circumstance that Cissy in a sort of _thereupon_
manner "takes up" with Horton, instead of not doing so, as figures to
Gray as discernible if Horton were merely minus. Is it cleared up for
Gray that the cause is not genuine?--does he get, or does he seek, any
definite light on this? Does he tell any one, that is does he tell
Rosanna of the incident (though I want the thing of proportions bigger
than those of a mere incident)--does he put it to her, in short does he
take her into his confidence about it? I think I see that he does to
this extent, that she is the only person to whom he speaks, but that he
then speaks with a kind of transparent and, as it were, (as it is in her
sight) "sublime" dissimulation. Yes, I think that's the way I want
it--that he tells her what has happened, tells it to her as having
happened, as a statement of what he has done or means to do--perhaps his
mind isn't even yet made up to it; whereby I seem to get a very
interesting passage of drama and another very fine "Joint." He doesn't,
no, decidedly, communicate anything to Davey Bradham--his instinct has
been against that--and I feel herewith how much I want this D.B.
relation for him to have all its possibility of irony, "comedy",
humorous colour, so to speak. I want awfully to do D.B. to the full and
give him all his value. However, it's of the situation here with Rosanna
that the question is, and I seem to feel that still further clear up for
me. There has been the passage, the big circumstance, with Horton--as to
which, as to the sense of which and of what it involves for him, don't I
after all see him as taking time? after all see him as a bit staggered
quand même, and, as it were, _asking_ for time, though without any
betrayal of "suspicion", any expression tantamount to "What a queer
story!" Yes, yes, it seems to come to me that I want the _determination
of suspicion_ not to come at once; I want it to hang back and wait for a
big "crystallisation," a falling together of many things, which now
takes place, as it were, in Rosanna's presence and under her
extraordinary tacit action, in that atmosphere of their relation which
has already given me, or _will_ have given, not to speak presumptuously,
so much. It kind of comes over me even that I don't want _any_
articulation to _himself_ of the "integrity" question in respect to
Horton to have taken place at all--till it very momentously takes place
all at once in the air, as I say, and on the ground, and in the course,
of this present scene. Immensely interesting to have made Everything
precedent to have consisted but in preparation for this momentousness,
so that the whole effect has been gathered there ready to break. At the
same time, if I make it break not in the right way, unless I so rightly
condition its breaking, I do what I was moved just above to bar, the
giving away of Horton to Rosanna in the sense that fixing his behaviour
upon him, or inviting or allowing her to fix it, is a thing I see my
finer alternative to. The great thing, the great find, I really think,
for the moment, is this fact of his having gone to her in a sort of
still preserved uncertainty of light that amounts virtually to darkness,
and then after a time with her coming away with the uncertainty
dispelled and the remarkable light instead taking its place. That gives
me my very form and climax--in respect to the "way" that has most
perplexed me, and gathers my action up to the fulness so proposed and
desired; to the point after which I want to make it workable that there
shall be but two Books left. In other words the ideal will be that this
whole passage, using the word in the largest sense, with all the
accompanying aspects, shall constitute Book 8, "Act" 8, as I call it, of
my drama, with the dénouement occupying the space to the end--for the
foregoing is of course not in the least the dénouement, but only
prepares it, just as what is thus involved is the occupancy of Book 7 by
the history with Horton. Of course I can but reflect that to bring this
splendid economy off it must have been practised up _to_ VII with the
most intense and immense art: the scheme I have already sketched for I
and II leaving me therewith but III, IV, V, and VI to arrive at the
completeness of preparation for VII, which carries in its bosom the
completeness of preparation for VIII--this last, by a like grand law,
carrying in _its_ pocket the completeness of preparation for IX and X.
But why not? Who's afraid? and what has the very essence of my design
been but the most magnificent packed and calculated closeness? Keep this
closeness up to the notch while admirably _animating_ it, and I do what
I should simply be sickened to death not to! Of course it means the
absolute exclusively _economic_ existence and situation of every
sentence and every letter; but again what is that but the most desirable
of beauties in _itself?_ The chapters of history with Rosanna leave me
then to show, speaking simply, its effect with regard to (I assume I put
first) Gray and Horton, to Gray and Cissy, to Cissy and Horton, to Gray
and Mrs. Bradham on the one hand and to Gray and Davey on the other and
finally and supremely to Gray and Rosanna herself. It is of course
definitely on that note the thing closes--but wait a little before I
come to it. Let me state as "plainly" as may be what "happens" as the
next step in my drama, the next Joint in the action after the climax of
the "scene" with Rosanna. Obviously the first thing is a passage with
Horton, the passage _after_, which shall be a pendant to the passage
before. But don't I want some episode to interpose here on the momentous
ground of the Girl? These sequences to be absolutely planned and fitted
together, of course, up to their last point of relation; to work such
complexity into such compass can only be a difficulty of the most
inspiring--the prize being, naturally, to achieve the lucidity _with_
the complexity. What then is the lucidity for us about my heroine, and
exactly what is it that I want and don't want to show? I want something
to take place here between Gray and her that _crowns_ his vision and his
action in respect to Horton. As I of course want every point and comma
to be "functional", so there's nothing I want that more for than for
this aspect of my crisis--which does, yes, decidedly, present itself
before Gray has again seen Horton. I seem even to want this aspect, as I
call it, to be the decisive thing in respect to his "decision". I want
something to have still depended for him on the question of how she is,
what she does, what she makes him see, however little intending it, of
her sensibility to the crisis, as it were--knowing as I do what I mean
by this. But what does come up for me, and has to be faced, is all the
appearance that all this later development that I have sketched and am
sketching, rather directly involves a deviation from that _help by
alternations_ which I originally counted on, and which I began by
drawing upon in the first three or four Books. What becomes after the
first three or four then of that variation--if I make my march between
IV and VIII inclusive all a matter of what appears to Gray? Perhaps on
closer view I can for the "finer amusement" escape that
frustration--though it would take some doing; and the fact remains that
I don't really want, and can't, any other exhibition than Gray's own
_except_ in the case of Horton and the Young Woman. I should like _more_
variation than just that will yield me withal--so at least it strikes
me; but if I press a bit a possibility perhaps will rise. Two things
strike me: one of these being that instead of making Book 9 Gray's "act"
I may make it in a manner Cissy's own; save that a terrific little
question here comes up as involved in the very essence of my cherished
symmetry and "unity". The absolute prime compositional idea ruling me is
thus the unity of each Act, and I get unity with the Girl for IX only if
I keep it _to_ her and whoever else. To her and Horton, yes, to her and
Gray (Gray first) yes; only how then comes in the "passage" of Gray and
Horton without her, and which I don't want to push over to X. It would
be an "æsthetic" ravishment to make Book 10 balance with Book 1 as
Rosanna's affair; which I glimmeringly see as interestingly possible if
I can wind up somehow as I want to do between Gray and Horton. In
connection with which, however, something again glimmers--the
possibility of making Book 9 quand même Cissy and Horton and Gray;
twisting out, that is, some admirable way of her being participant in,
"present at", what here happens between them as to their own affair. I
say these things after all with the sense, so founded on past
experience, that, in closer quarters and the intimacy of composition,
pre-noted arrangements, proportions and relations, do most uncommonly
insist on making themselves different by shifts and variations, always
improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open
always to something _more_ right and _more_ related. It is subject to
that constant possibility, all the while, that one does pre-note and
tentatively sketch; a fact so constantly before one as to make too idle
any waste of words on it. At the same time I do absolutely and utterly
want to stick, even to the very depth, to the _general_ distribution
here imagined as I have groped on; and I am at least now taking a
certain rightness and conclusiveness of parts and items for granted
until the intimate tussle, as I say, happens, if it does happen, to
dislocate or modify them. Such an assumption for instance I find myself
quite loving to make in presence of the vision quite colouring up for me
yesterday of Book 9 as given to Gray and Horton and Cissy Together, as I
may rudely express it, and Book 10, to repeat, given, with a splendid
richness and comprehensiveness, to Rosanna, as I hope to have shown Book
I as so given. Variety, variety--I want to go in for that for all the
possibilities of my case may be worth; and I see, I feel, how a sort of
fond fancy of it is met by the distribution, the little cluster of
determinations, or, so to speak, for the pleasure of putting it,
determinatenesses, so noted. It gives me the central mass of the thing
for my hero's own embrace and makes beginning and end sort of confront
each other over it.

Is it vain to do anything but say, that is but feel, that this situation
of the Three in Book 9 absolutely demands the intimate grip for clearing
itself up, working itself out? Yes, perfectly vain, I reflect, as at all
precluding the high urgency and decency of my seeing in advance just how
and where I plant my feet and direct my steps. Express absolutely, to
this end, the conclusive sense, the clear firm function, of Book 9--out
of which the rest bristles. I want it, as for that matter I want each
Book, with the last longing and fullest intention, to be what it is
"amusing" and regaling to think of as "complete in itself"; otherwise a
thoroughly expressed Occasion, or as I have kept calling it Aspect, such
as one can go at, thanks to the flow of the current in it, in the
firmest possible little narrative way. The form of the Occasion is the
form that I somehow see as here very _particularly_ presenting itself
and contributing its aid to that impression of the Three Together which
I try to focus. Where, exactly, and exactly how, are they thus vividly
and workably together?--what is the most "amusing" way of making them
so? It is fundamental for me to note that my action represents and
embraces the sequences of a Year, not going beyond this and not falling
short of it. I can't get my Unity, can't keep it, on the basis of more
than a year, and can't get my complexity, don't want to, in anything a
bit less. I see a Year right, in fine, and it brings me round therefore
to the early summer from the time of my original Exposition. With which
it comes to me of course that one of the things accruing to Gray under
his Uncle's Will is the house at Newport, which belonged to the old man,
and which I have no desire to go into any reason whatever for his heir's
having got rid of. There is the house at Newport--as to which it comes
over me that I kind of see him in it once or twice during the progress
of the autumn's, the winter's, the spring's events. Isn't it also a part
of my affair that I see the Bradhams with a Newport place, and am more
or less encouraged herewith to make out the Scene of Book 9, the
embracing Occasion, of the three, as a "staying" of them, in the natural
way, the inevitable, the illustrative, under some roof that places them
vividly in relation to each other. Of _course_ Mrs. Bradham has her
great characteristic house away from N.Y., where anything and everything
may characteristically find their background--the whole case being
compatible with that lively shakiness of fortune that I have glanced at;
only I want to keep the whole thing, so far as my poor little
"documented" state permits, on the lines of absolutely current New York
practice, as I further reflect I probably don't want to move Gray an
inch out of N.Y. "during the winter", this probably a quite
unnecessarily bad economy. Having what I have of New York isn't the
question of using it, and it only, as entirely adequate from Book 4 to 8
inclusive? To keep everything as like these actualities of N.Y. as
possible, for the sake of my "atmosphere", I must be wary and wise; in
the sense for instance that said actualities don't at all comprise
people's being at Newport _early_ in the summer. How then, however, came
the Bradhams to be there at the time noted in my Book 1? I reflect
happily apropos of this that my there positing the early summer (in Book
1) is a stroke that I needn't at all now take account of; it having been
but an accident of my small vague plan as it glimmered to me from the
very first go-off. No, definitely, the time-scheme must a bit move on,
and give help there--by to the place-scheme; if I want Gray to arrive en
plein Newport, as I do for immediate control of the assault of his
impressions, it must be a matter of August rather than of June; and
nothing is simpler than to shift. Let me indeed so far modify as to
conceive that 15 or 16 months will be as workable as a Year--practically
they will count as the period both short enough and long enough; and
will bring me for Nine and Ten round to the Newport or whatever of
August, and to the whatever else of some moment of beauty and harmony in
the American autumn. Let me wind up on a kind of strong October or
perhaps even better still--yes, better still--latish November, in other
words admirable Indian Summer, note. That brings me round and makes the
circle whole. Well then I don't seem to want a repetition of Newport--as
if it were, poor old dear, the only place known to me in the
country!--for the images that this last suggestion causes more or less
to swarm. By the blessing of heaven I am possessed, sufficiently to say
so, of Lenox, and Lenox for the autumn is much more characteristic too.
What do I seem to see then?--as I don't at all want, or imagine myself
wanting at the scratch, to make a local jump between Nine and Ten. These
things come--I see them coming now. Of course it's perfectly
conceivable, and entirely characteristic, that Mrs. Bradham should have
a place at Lenox as well as at Newport; if it's necessary to posit her
for the previous summer in her own house at the latter place. It's
perfectly in order that she may have taken one there for the summer--and
that having let the Lenox place at that time may figure as a sort of
note of the crack in her financial aspect that is part, to _call_ it
part, of my concern. All of which are considerations entirely meetable
at the short range--save that I do really seem to kind of want Book 10
at Lenox and to want Nine there by the same stroke. I should like to
stick Rosanna at the beautiful Dublin, if it weren't for the grotesque
anomaly of the name; and after all what need serve my purpose better
than what I already have? It's provided for in Book I that she and her
father had only taken the house at Newport for a couple of months or
whatever; so that is all to the good. Oh yes, all that New England
mountain-land that I thus get by radiation, and thus welcome the idea of
for values surging after a fashion upon Gray, appeals to one to "do" a
bit, even in a measure beyond one's hope of space to do it. Well before
me surely too the fact that my whole action does, can only, take place
in the air of the last actuality; which supports so, and plays into, its
sense and its portée. Therefore it's a question of all the intensest
modernity of every American description; cars and telephones and
facilities and machineries and resources of certain sorts not to be
exaggerated; which I can't not take account of. Assume then, in fine,
the Bradhams this second autumn at Lenox, assume Gussie blazing away as
if at the very sincerest and validest top of her push; assume Rosanna as
naturally there in the "summer home" which has been her and her father's
only possessional alternative to N.Y. I violate verisimilitude in not
brushing them all, all of the N.Y. "social magnates", off to Paris as
soon as Lent sets in, by their prescribed oscillation; but who knows but
what it will be convenient quite exactly to shift Gussie across for the
time, as nothing then would be more in the line of truth than to have
her bustle expensively back for her Lenox proceedings of the autumn.
These things, however, are trifles. All I have wanted to thresh out a
bit has been the "placing" of Nine and Ten; and for this I have more
than enough provided.

What it seems to come to then is the "positing" of Cissy at Lenox with
the Bradhams at the time the circumstances of Book Eight have occurred;
it's coming to me with which that I seem exactly to want them to occur
in the empty town, the New York of a more or less torrid
mid-August--this I feel so "possessed of"; to which Gray has "come back"
(say from Newport where he has been for a bit alone in his own house
there, to think, as it were, with concentration); come back precisely
for the passage with Horton. So at any rate for the moment I seem to see
_that_; my actual point being, however, that Cissy is posited at Lenox,
that the Book "opens" with her, and that it is in the sense I mean "her"
Book. She is there waiting as it were on what Horton does, so far as I
allow her intelligence of this; and it is there that Gray finds her on
his going on to Lenox whether under constraint (by what has gone before)
of a visit to the Bradhams, a stay of some days with them, or under the
interest of a conceivable stay with Rosanna; a sort of thing that I
represent, or at any rate "posit", as perfectly in the line of Rosanna's
present freedom and attributes. Would I rather have him with Rosanna and
"going over" to the Bradhams? would I rather have him with the Bradhams
and going over to Rosanna?--or would I rather have him at neither place
and staying by himself at an hotel, which seems to leave me the right
margin? There has been no staying up to this point for him with either
party, and I have as free a hand as could be. With which there glimmer
upon me advantages--oh yes--in placing him in his own independence;
especially for Book 10: in short it seems to come. Don't I see Cissy as
having obtained from Gussie Bradham that Horton shall be invited--which
fact in itself I here provisionally throw off as giving me perhaps a
sort of starting value.


[Footnote 3: From this point the names of the characters, most of which
were still uncertain, are given in accordance with Henry James' final
choice; though it may be noted that he was to the end dissatisfied with
the name of Cissy Foy and meant to choose another.]






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