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?"