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.