"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!"