Horton, looking at his watch, had got up as he spoke--which Cissy at
once also did under this recall of the lapse of their precious minutes.
There was a point, however, left for her to make; which she did with the
remark that the item they had been discussing in particular couldn't
have been by itself the force that had set their young woman originally
in motion, inasmuch as Gray wouldn't have had a moustache when a small
boy or whatever, and as since that young condition, she understood,
Rosanna hadn't again seen him. A proposition to which Haughty's assent
was to remain vague, merged as it suddenly became in the cry of "Hello,
here he is!" and a prompt gay brandish of arms up at their host Bradham,
arrayed for the evening, white-waistcoated and buttonholed, robustly
erect on an overlooking ledge and explaining his presence, from the
moment it was thus observed, by calling down that Gussy had sent him to
see if she wasn't to expect them at dinner. It was practically a summons
to Cissy, as the girl easily recognised, to leave herself at least ten
minutes to dress decently--in spite of the importance of which she so
challenged Davey on another score that, as a consequence, the good
gorgeous man, who shone with every effect of the bath and every resource
of the toilet, had within the pair of minutes picked out such easiest
patent-leather steps as would enable him to convict the companions of a
shameless dawdle. She had had time to articulate for Horton's benefit,
with no more than due distinctness, that he must have seen them, and
Horton had as quickly found the right note and the right wit for the
simple reassurance "Oh Davey----!" As occupants of a place of
procrastination that they only were not such fools as to leave unhaunted
they frankly received their visitor, any impulse in whom to sprinkle
stale banter on their search for solitude would have been forestalled,
even had it been supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by the
instant action of his younger guest's strategic curiosity.
"Has he, please, just _has_ he or no, got a moustache?"--she appealed as
if the fate of empires depended on it.
"I've been telling her," Horton explained, "whatever I can remember of
Gray Fielder, but she won't listen to anything if I can't first be sure
as to _that._ So as I want her enormously to like him, we both hang, you
see, on your lips; unless you call it, more correctly, on his."
Davey's evening bloom opened to them a dense but perfectly pathless
garden of possibilities; out of which, while he faced them, he left them
to pluck by their own act any bright flower they sufficiently desired to
reach. Wonderful during the few instants, between these flagrant
world-lings, the exchange of fine recognitions. It would have been hard
perhaps to say of them whether it was most discernible that Haughty and
Cissy trusted most his intelligence or his indifference, and whether he
most applauded or ignored the high perfection of their assurance. What
was testified to all round, at all events--[1]
"Ah then he _is_ as 'odd' as I was sure--in spite of Haughty's perverse
theory that we shall find him the flattest of the flat!"
It might have been at Haughty's perverse theory that Davey was most
moved to stare--had he not quickly betrayed, instead of this, a marked
attention to the girl herself. "Oh you little wonder and joy!"
"She is a little wonder and joy," Horton said--that at any rate came out
clear.
"What you are, my boy, I'm not pretending to say," Davey returned in
answer to this; "for I don't accept her account of your vision of Gray
as throwing any light on it at all."
"On his judgment of Mr. Fielder, do you mean," Cissy earnestly asked,
"or on your evidently awful opinion of his own dark nature?"
"Haughty knows that I lose myself in his dark nature, at my spare
moments, and with wind enough on to whistle in that dark, very much as
if I had the fine excitement of the Forêt de Bondy to deal with. He's
well aware that I know no greater pleasure of the imagination than that
sort of interest in him--when I happen also to have the time and the
nerve. Let these things serve me now, however, only to hurry you up,"
Davey went on; "and to say that I of course had with our fortunate
friend an impressive quarter of an hour--which everyone will want to
know about, so that I must keep it till we sit down. But the great thing
is after all for yourself, Haughty," he added--"and you had better know
at once that he particularly wants to see you. He'll be glad of you at
the very first moment----"
But Horton had already taken him easily up. "Of course I know, my dear
man, that he particularly wants to see me. He has written me nothing
else from the moment he arrived."
"He has written you, you wretch," Cissy at once extravagantly
echoed--"he has written you all sorts of things and you haven't so much
as told me?"
"He hasn't written me all sorts of things"--Horton directed this answer
to Davey alone--"but has written me in such straight confidence and
friendship that Eve been wondering if I mayn't go round to him this
evening."
"Gussy will no doubt excuse you for that purpose with the utmost joy,"
Davey rejoined--"though I don't think I advise you to ask her leave if
you don't want her at once to insist on going with you. Go to him alone,
very quietly--and with the happy confidence of doing him good."
It had been on Cissy that, for his part, Davey had, in speaking, rested
his eyes; and it might by the same token have been for the benefit of
universal nature, suspended to listen over the bosom of the deep, that
Horton's lips phrased his frank reaction upon their entertainer's words.
"Well then, ye powers, the amount of good that I shall undertake----!"
Davey Bradham and Cissy Foy exchanged on the whole ground for a moment a
considerable smile; his share in which, however, it might exactly have
been that prompted the young woman's further expression of their
intelligence. "It's too charming that he yearns so for Haughty--and too
sweet that Haughty can now rush to him at once." To which she then
appended in another tone: "One takes for granted of course that Rosanna
was with him."
Davey at this but continued to bloom and beam; which gave Horton, even
with a moment's delay, time to assist his better understanding. "She
doesn't even yet embrace the fact, tremendously as I've driven it into
her, that if Rosanna had been there he couldn't have breathed my name."
This made Davey, however, but throw up derisive hands; though as with an
impatient turn now for their regaining the lawn. "My dear man, Rosanna
breathes your name with all the force of her lungs!"
Horton, jerking back his head for the bright reassurance, laughed out
with amusement. "What a jolly cue then for my breathing of hers! I'll
roar it to all the echoes, and everything will be well. But what one's
talking about," he said, "is the question of Gray's naming _me._" He
looked from one of his friends to the other, and then, as gathering them
into the interest of it: "I'll bet you a fiver that he doesn't at any
rate speak to me of Miss Gaw."
"Well, what will that prove?" Davey asked, quite easy about it and
leading the way up the rocks.
"In the first place how much he thinks of her," said Cissy, who followed
close behind. "And in the second that it's ten to one Haughty will find
her there."
"I don't care if I do--not a scrap!" Horton also took his way. "I don't
care for anything now but the jolly fun, the jolly fun----!" He had
committed it all again, by the time they reached the cliff's edge, to
the bland participating elements.
"Oh the treat the poor boy is evidently going to stand us _all!_"--well,
was something that Davey, rather out of breath as they reached the lawn
again and came in sight of the villa, had just yet no more than those
light words for. He was more definite in remarking immediately after to
Cissy that Rosanna would be as little at the other house that evening as
she had been at the moment of his own visit, and that, since the nurses
and other outsiders appeared to have dispersed, there would be no one to
interfere with Gray's free welcome of his friend. The girl was so
attentive for this that it made them pause again while she brought out
in surprise: "There's nobody else there, you mean then, to watch with
the dead----?"
It made Mr. Bradham for an instant wonder, Horton, a little apart from
them now and with his back turned, seeming at the same moment, and
whether or no her inquiry reached his ear, struck with something that
had pulled him up as well and that made him stand and look down in
thought. "Why, I suppose the nephew' must be himself a sort of watcher,"
Davey found himself not other than decently vague to suggest.
But it scarce more contented Cissy than if the point had really
concerned her. She appeared indeed to question the more, though her eyes
were on Haughty's rather brooding back while she did so. "Then if he
does stay in the room, when he comes out of it to see people----?"
Her very drop seemed to present the state of things to which the poor
deceased was in that case left; for which, however, her good host
declined to be responsible. "I don't suppose he comes out for so many."
"He came out at any rate for you." The sense of it all rather remarkably
held her, and it might have been some communication of this that,
overtaking Horton at his slight distance, determined in him the impulse
to leave them, without more words, and walk by himself to the house. "We
don't surround such occasions with any form or state of
imagination--scarcely with any decency, do we?" Cissy adventured while
observing Haughty's retreat. "I should like to think for him of a
catafalque and great draped hangings--I should like to think for him of
tall flambeaux in the darkened room, and of relays of watchers, sisters
of charity or suchlike, surrounding the grand affair and counting their
beads."
Davey's rich patience had a shrug. "The grand affair, my dear child, is
_their_ affair, over there, and not mine; though when you indulge in
such fancies 'for him,' I can't but wonder who it is you mean."
"Who it is----?" She mightn't have understood his difficulty.
"Why the dead man or the living!"
They had gone on again; Horton had, with a quickened pace, disappeared;
and she had before answering cast about over the fair face of the great
house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with dressing-time glimmers from
upper windows flushing it here and there like touches of pink paint in
an elegant evening complexion. "Oh I care for the dead man, I'm afraid,
only because it's the living who appeals. I don't want him to like it."
"To like----?" Davey was again at a loss. "What on earth?"
"Why all that ugliness and bareness, that poverty of form."
He had nothing but derision for her here. "It didn't occur to me at all
to associate him with the idea of poverty."
"The place must all the same be hideous," she said, "and the conditions
mean--for him to prowl about in alone. It comes to me," she further
risked, "that if Rosanna _isn't_ there, as you say, she quite ought to
be--and that in her place I should feel it no more than decent to go
over and sit with him."
This appeared to strike Davey in a splendid number of lights--which,
however, though collectively dazzling, allowed discriminations. "It
perhaps bears a little on the point that she has herself just sustained
a grave bereavement--with her offices to her own dead to think of first.
That was present to me in your talk a moment since of Haughty's finding
her."
"Very true"--it was Cissy's practice, once struck, ever amusedly to play
with the missile: "it is of course extraordinary that those bloated old
_richards_, at one time so associated, should have flickered out almost
at the same hour. What it comes to then," she went on, "is that Mr. Gray
might be, or perhaps even ought to be, condoling over at the other house
with her. However, it's their own business, and all I really care for is
that he should be so keen as you say about seeing Haughty. I just
delight," she said, "in his being keen about Haughty."
"I'm glad it satisfies you then," Davey returned--"for I was on the
point of suggesting that with the sense of his desolation you just
expressed you might judge your own place to be at once at his side."
"That would have been helpful of you--but I'm content, dear Davey," she
smiled. "We're all devoted to Haughty--but," she added after an instant,
"there's just this. Did Mr. Graham while you were there say by chance a
word about the likes of _me?_"
"Well, really, no--our short talk didn't take your direction. That would
have been for me, I confess," Davey frankly made bold to add, "a trifle
unexpected."
"I see"--Cissy did him the justice. "But that's a little, I think,
because you don't know----!" It was more, however, than with her sigh
she could tell him.
"Don't know by this time, my dear, and after all I've been through," he
nevertheless supplied, "what the American girl always so sublimely takes
for granted?"
She looked at him on this with intensity--but that of compassion rather
than of the conscious wound. "Dear old Davey, il n'y a que vous for not
knowing, by this time, as you say, that I've notoriously nothing in
common with the creature you mention. I loathe," she said with her
purest gentleness, "the American girl."
He faced her an instant more as for a view of the whole incongruity;
then he fetched, on his side, a sigh which might have signified, at her
choice, either that he was wrong or that he was finally bored. "Well,
you do of course brilliantly misrepresent her. But we're all"--he
hastened to patch it up--"unspeakably corrupt."
"That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder if it were true," she
judiciously threw off.
"But as you're a judge you know it isn't?"
"It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim. I don't say we don't do
our best," she added; "but we're still of an innocence, an
innocence----!
"Then perhaps," Davey offered, "Mr. Fielder will help us; unless he
proves, by your measure, worse than ourselves!"
"The worse he may be the better; for it's not possible, as I see him,"
she said, "that he doesn't know."
"Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered, "how wrong we are--to be so
right?"
"Know more on _every_ subject than all of us put together!" she called
back at him as she now hurried off to dress.
[Footnote 1: There is a gap here in the MS., with the following note by
the author: "It is the security of the two others with him that is
testified to; but I mustn't make any sort of spread about it or about
anything else here now, and only put Davey on some non-committal reply
to the question addressed him, such as keeps up the mystery or ambiguity
or suspense about Gray, his moustache and everything else, so as to
connect properly with what follows. The real point is--_that_ comes back
to me, and it is in essence enough--that he pleads he doesn't remember,
didn't notice, at all; and thereby oddly enough can't say. It will come
to me right once I get into it. One sees that Davey plays with them."]