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.