"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."