IV

Horton Vint, on being admitted that evening at the late Mr. Betterman's,

walked about the room to which he had been directed and awaited there

the friend of his younger time very much as we have seen that friend

himself wait under stress of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of

a crisis might have been almost equally sharp; he was alone for some

minutes during which he shifted his place and circled, indulged in wide

vague movements and vacuous stares at incongruous objects--the place

being at once so spacious and so thickly provided--quite after the

fashion in which Gray Fielder's nerves and imagination had on the same

general scene sought and found relief at the hour of the finest suspense

up to that moment possessing him. Haughty too, it would thus have

appeared for the furtherance of our interest, had imagination and

nerves--had in his way as much to reflect upon as we have allowed

ourselves to impute to the dying Mr. Betterman's nephew. No one was

dying now, all that was ended, or would be after the funeral, and the

nephew himself was surely to be supposed alive, in face of great

sequels, including preparations for those obsequies, with an intensity

beyond all former experience. This in fact Horton had all the air of

recognising under proof as soon as Gray advanced upon him with both

hands out; he couldn't not have taken in the highly quickened state of

the young black-clad figure so presented, even though soon and

unmistakably invited to note that his own visit and his own presence had

much to do with the quickening. Gray was in complete mourning, which had

the effect of making his face show pale, as compared with old aspects of

it remembered by his friend--who was, it may be mentioned, afterwards to

describe him to Cissy Foy as looking, in the conditions, these including

the air of the big bedimmed palace room, for all the world like a sort

of "happy Hamlet." For so happy indeed our young man at once proclaimed

himself at sight of his visitor, for so much the most interesting thing

that had befallen or been offered him within the week did he take, by

his immediate testimony, his reunion with this character and every

element of the latter's aspect and tone, that the pitch of his

acclamation clearly had, with no small delay, to drop a little under

some unavoidable reminder that they met almost in the nearest presence

of death. Was the reminder Horton's own, some pull, for decorum, of a

longer face, some expression of his having feared to act in undue haste

on the message brought him by Davey?--which might have been, we may say,

in view of the appearance after a little that it was Horton rather than

Gray who began to suggest a shyness, momentary, without doubt, and

determined by the very plenitude of his friend's welcome, yet so far

incongruous as that it was not his adoption of a manner and betrayal of

a cheer that ran the risk of seeming a trifle gross, but quite these

indications on the part of the fortunate heir of the old person awaiting

interment somewhere above. He could only have seen with the lapse of the

moments that Gray was going to be simple--admirably, splendidly simple,

one would probably have pronounced it, in estimating and comparing the

various possible dangers; but the simplicity of subjects tremendously

educated, tremendously "cultivated" and cosmopolitised, as Horton would

have called it, especially when such persons were naturally rather

extra-refined and ultra-perceptive, was a different affair from the

crude candour of the common sort; the consequence of which apprehensions

and reflections must have been, in fine, that he presently recognised in

the product of "exceptional advantages" now already more and more

revealed to him such a pliability of accent as would easily keep

judgment, or at least observation, suspended. Gray wasn't going to be at

a loss for any shade of decency that didn't depend, to its

inconvenience, on some uncertainty about a guest's prejudice; so that

once the air was cleared of awkwardness by that perception, exactly, in

Horton's ready mind that he and his traditions, his susceptibilities, in

fact (of all the queer things!) his own very simplicities and,

practically, stupidities were being superfluously allowed for and

deferred to, and that this, only this, was the matter, he should have

been able to surrender without a reserve to the proposed measure of

their common rejoicing. Beautiful might it have been to him to find his

friend so considerately glad of him that the spirit of it could consort

to the last point with any, with every, other felt weight in the

consciousness so attested; in accordance with which we may remark that

continued embarrassment for our gallant caller would have implied on his

own side, or in other words deep within his own spirit, some obscure

source of confusion.

What distinguishably happened was thus that he first took Graham for

exuberant and then for repentant, with the reflection accompanying this

that he mustn't, to increase of subsequent shame, have been too open an

accomplice in mere jubilation. Then the simple sense of his restored

comrade's holding at his disposal a general confidence in which they

might absolutely breathe together would have superseded everything else

hadn't his individual self-consciousness been perhaps a trifle worried

by the very pitch of so much openness. Open, not less generously so, was

what he could himself have but wanted to be--in proof of which we may

conceive him insist to the happy utmost, for promotion of his comfort,

on those sides of their relation the working of which would cast no

shadow. They had within five minutes got over much ground--all of which,

however, must be said to have represented, and only in part, the extent

of Gray's requisition of what he called just elementary human help. He

was in a situation at which, as he assured his friend, he had found

himself able, those several days, but blankly and inanely to stare. He

didn't suppose it had been his uncle's definite design to make an idiot

of him, but that seemed to threaten as the practical effect of the dear

man's extraordinary course. "You see," he explained, bringing it almost

pitifully out, "he appears to have left me a most monstrous fortune. I

mean"--for under his appeal Haughty had still waited a little--"a really

tremendous lot of money."

The effect of the tone of it was to determine in Haughty a peal of

laughter quickly repressed--or reduced at least to the intention of

decent cheer. "He 'appears,' my dear man? Do you mean there's an

ambiguity about his will?"

Gray justified his claim of vagueness by having, with his animated eyes

on his visitor's, to take an instant or two to grasp so technical an

expression. "No--not an ambiguity. Mr. Crick tells me that he has never

in all his experience seen such an amount of property disposed of in

terms so few and simple and clear. It would seem a kind of masterpiece

of a will."

"Then what's the matter with it?" Horton smiled. "Or at least what's the

matter with _you?_--who are so remarkably intelligent and clever?"

"Oh no, I'm not the least little bit clever!" Gray in his earnestness

quite excitedly protested. "I haven't a single ray of the intelligence

that among you all here clearly passes for rudimentary. But the luxury

of you, Haughty," he broke out on a still higher note, "the luxury, the

pure luxury of you!"

Something of beauty in the very tone of which, some confounding force in

the very clearness, might it have been that made Horton himself gape for

a moment even as Gray had just described his own wit as gaping. They had

first sat down, for hospitality offered and accepted--though with no

production of the smokable or the drinkable to profane the general

reference; but the agitation of all that was latent in this itself had

presently broken through, and by the end of a few moments we might

perhaps scarce have been able to say whether the host had more set the

guest or the guest more the host in motion. Horton Vint had everywhere

so the air of a prime social element that it took in any case, and above

all in any case of the spacious provision or the sumptuous setting, a

good deal of practically combative proof to reduce the implications of

his presence to the minor right. He _might_ inveterately have been

master or, in quantitative terms, owner--so could he have been taken for

the most part as offering you the enjoyment of anything fine that

surrounded him: this in proportion to the scale of such matters and to

any glimpse of that sense of them in you which was what came nearest to

putting you on his level. All of which sprang doubtless but from the

fact that his relation to things of expensive interest was so much at

the mercy of his appearance; representing as it might be said to do a

contradiction of the law under which it is mostly to be observed, in our

modernest conditions, that the figure least congruous with scenic

splendour is the figure awaiting the reference. More references than may

here be detailed, at any rate, would Horton have seemed ready to gather

up during the turns he had resumed his indulgence in after the original

arrest and the measurements of the whole place practically determined

for him by Gray's own so suggestive revolutions. It was positively now

as if these last had all met, in their imperfect expression, what that

young man's emotion was in the act of more sharply attaining to--the

plain conveyance that if Horton had in his friendliness, not to say his

fidelity, presumed to care to know, this disposition was as naught

beside the knowledge apparently about to drench him. They were there,

the companions, in their second brief arrest, with everything good in

the world that he might have conceived or coveted just taking for him

the radiant form of precious knowledges that he must be so obliging as

to submit to. Let it be fairly inspiring to us to imagine the acuteness

of his perception during these minutes of the possibilities of good

involved; the refinement of pleasure in his seeing how the advantage

thrust upon him would wear the dignity and grace of his consenting

unselfishly to learn--inasmuch as, quite evidently, the more he learnt,

and though it should be ostensibly and exclusively about Mr. Betterman's

heir, the more vividly it all would stare at him as a marked course of

his own. Wonderful thus the little space of his feeling the great wave

set in motion by that quiet worthy break upon him out of Gray's face,

Gray's voice, Gray's contact of hands laid all appealingly and

affirmingly on his shoulders, and then as it retreated, washing him

warmly down, expose to him, off in the intenser light and the uncovered

prospect, something like his entire personal future. Something

extraordinarily like, yes, could he but keep steady to recognise it

through a deepening consciousness, at the same time, of how he was more

than matching the growth of his friend's need of him by growing there at

once, and to rankness, under the friend's nose, all the values to which

this need supplied a soil.

"Well, I won't pretend I'm not glad you don't adopt me as pure

ornament--glad you see, I mean, a few connections in which one may

perhaps be able, as well as certainly desirous, to be of service to you.

Only one should honestly tell you," Horton went on, "that people wanting

to help you will spring up round you like mushrooms, and that you'll be

able to pick and choose as even a king on his throne can't. Therefore,

my boy," Haughty said, "don't exaggerate my modest worth."

Gray, though releasing him, still looked at him hard--so hard perhaps

that, having imagination, he might in an instant more have felt it go

down too deep. It hadn't done that, however, when "What I want of you

above all is exactly that _you_ shall pick and choose" was merely what

at first came of it. And the case was still all of the rightest as

Graham at once added: "You see 'people' are exactly my difficulty--I'm

so mortally afraid of them, and so equally sure that it's the last thing

you are. If I want you for myself I want you still more for others--by

which you may judge," said Gray, "that I've cut you out work."

"That you're mortally afraid of people is, I confess," Haughty answered,

"news to me. I seem to remember you, on the contrary, as so remarkably

and--what was it we used to call it?--so critico-analytically interested

in 'em."

"That's just it--I am so beastly interested! Don't you therefore see,"

Gray asked, "how I may dread the complication?"

"Dread it so that you seek to work it off on another?"--and Haughty

looked about as if he would after all have rather relished a cigarette.

Clearly, none the less, this awkwardness was lost on his friend. "I want

to work off on you, Vinty, every blest thing that you'll let me; and

when you've seen into my case a little further my reasons will so jump

at your eyes that I'm convinced you'll have patience with them."

"I'm not then, you think, too beastly interested myself----? I've got

such a free mind, you mean, and such a hard heart, and such a record of

failure to have been any use at all to myself, that I _must_ be just the

person, it strikes you, to save you all the trouble and secure you all

the enjoyment?" That inquiry Horton presently made, but with an addition

ere Gray could answer. "My difficulty for myself, you see, has always

been that I also am by my nature too beastly interested."

"Yes"--Gray promptly met it--"but you like it, take that easily,

immensely enjoy it and are not a bit afraid of it. You carry it off and

you don't pay for it."

"Don't you make anything," Horton simply went on, "of my being for

instance so uncannily interested in yourself?"

Gray's eyes again sounded him. "_Are_ you really and truly?--to the

extent of its not boring you?" But with all he had even at the worst to

take for granted he waited for no reassurance. "You'll be so sorry for

me that I shall wring your heart and you'll assist me for common pity."

"Well," Horton returned, a natural gaiety of response not wholly kept

under, "how can I absurdly make believe that pitying you, if it comes to

that, won't be enough against nature to have some fascination? Endowed

with every advantage, personal, physical, material, moral, in other

words, brilliantly clever, inordinately rich, strikingly handsome and

incredibly good, your state yet insists on being such as to nip in the

bud the hardy flower of envy. What's the matter with you to bring that

about would seem, I quite agree, well worth one's looking into--even if

it proves, by its perversity or its folly, something of a trial to one's

practical philosophy. When I pressed you some minutes ago for the reason

of your not facing the future with a certain ease you gave as that

reason your want of education and wit. But please understand," Horton

added, "that I've no time to waste with you on sophistry that isn't so

much as plausible." He stopped a moment, his hands in his pockets, his

head thrown all but extravagantly back, so that his considering look

might have seemed for the time to descend from a height designed a

little to emphasise Gray's comparative want of stature. That young man's

own eyes remained the while, none the less, unresentfully raised; to

such an effect indeed that, after some duration of this exchange, the

bigger man's fine irony quite visibly shaded into a still finer, and

withal frankly kinder, curiosity. Poor Gray, with a strained face and an

agitation but half controlled, breathed quick and hard, as from inward

pressure, and then, renouncing choice--there were so many things to

say--shook his head, slowly and repeatedly, after a fashion that

discouraged levity. "My dear boy," said his friend under this sharper

impression, "you do take it hard." Which made Graham turn away, move

about in vagueness of impatience and, still panting and still hesitating

for other expression, approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big

chimneypiece, reach for a box that raised a presumption of cigarettes

and, the next instant, thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The

latter's welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was

also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray's own notice

of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook,

before the box went back to its shelf. Odd again might have been for a

protected witness of this scene--which of course is exactly what you are

invited to be--the lapse of speech that marked it for the several

minutes. Horton, truly touched now, and to the finer issue we have

glanced at, waited unmistakably for the sign of something more important

than his imagination, even at its best, could give him, and which, not

less conceivably, would be the sort of thing he himself hadn't signs,

either actual or possible, for. He waited while they did the place at

last the inevitable small violence--this being long enough to make him

finally say: "Do you mean, on your honour, that you don't _like_ what

has happened to you?"

This unloosed then for Gray the gate of possible expression. "Of course

I like it--that is of course I try to. I've been trying here, day after

day, as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for anything; and yet I

remain, don't you see? a wretched little worm."

"Deary, deary me," stared Horton, "that you should have to bring up your

appreciation of it from such depths! You go in for it as you would for

the electric light or the telephone, and then find half-way that you

can't stand the expense and want the next-door man somehow to combine

with you?"

"That's exactly it, Vinty, and you're the next-door man!"--Gray embraced

the analogy with glee. "I _can't_ stand the expense, and yet I don't for

a moment deny I should immensely enjoy the convenience. I want," he

asseverated, "to like my luck. I want to go in for it, as you say, with

every inch of any such capacity as I have. And I want to believe in my

capacity; I want to work it up and develop it--I assure you on my honour

I do. I've lashed myself up into feeling that if I don't I shall be a

base creature, a worm of worms, as I say, and fit only to be utterly

ashamed. But that's where you come in. You'll help me to develop. To

develop my capacity I mean," he explained with a wondrous candour.

Horton was now, small marvel, all clear faith; even, the cigarettes

helping, to the verge again of hilarity. "Your capacity--I see. Not so

much your property itself."

"Well"--Gray considered of it--"what will my property be _except_ my

capacity?" He spoke really as for the pleasure of seeing very finely and

very far. "It won't if I don't like it, that is if I don't _understand_

it, don't you see? enough to make it count. Yes, yes, don't revile me,"

he almost feverishly insisted: "I do want it to count for all it's

worth, and to get everything out of it, to the very last drop of

interest, pleasure, experience, whatever you may call it, that such a

possession can yield. And I'm going to keep myself up to it, to the top

of the pitch, by every art and prop, by every helpful dodge, that I can

put my hand on. You see if I don't. I breathe defiance," he continued,

with his rare radiance, "at any suspicion or doubt. But I come back," he

had to add, "to my point that it's you that I essentially most depend

on."

Horton again looked at him long and frankly; this subject of appeal

might indeed for the moment have been as embarrassed between the various

requisitions of response as Gray had just before shown himself. But as

the tide could surge for one of the pair so it could surge for the

other, and the large truth of what Horton most grasped appeared as soon

as he had spoken. "The name of your complaint, you poor dear delightful

person, or the name at least of your necessity, your predicament and

your solution, is marriage to a wife at short order. I mean of course to

an amiable one. _There_, so obviously, is your aid and your prop, there

are the sources of success for interest in your fortune, and for the

whole experience and enjoyment of it, as you can't find them elsewhere.

What are you but just 'fixed' to marry, and what is the sense of your

remarks but a more or less intelligent clamour for it?"

Triumphant indeed, as we have said, for lucidity and ease, was this

question, and yet it had filled the air, for its moment, but to drop at

once by the practical puncture of Gray's perfect recognition. "Oh of

course I've thought of that--but it doesn't meet my case at all." Had he

been capable of disappointment in his friend he might almost have been

showing it now.

Horton had, however, no heat about it. "You mean you absolutely don't

want a wife--in connection, so to speak, with your difficulties; or with

the idea, that is, of their being resolved into blessings?"

"Well"--Gray was here at least all prompt and clear--"I keep down, in

that matter, so much as I can any _a priori_ or mere theoretic want. I

see my possibly marrying as an effect, I mean--I somehow don't see it at

all as a cause. A cause, that is"--he easily worked it out--"of my

getting other things right. It may be, in conditions, the greatest

rightness of all; but I want to be sure of the conditions."

"The first of which is, I understand then"--for this at least had been

too logical for Haughty not to have to match it--"that you should fall

so tremendously in love that you won't be able to help yourself."

Graham just debated; he was all intelligence here. "Falling tremendously

in love--the way you _grands amoureux_ talk of such things!"

"Where do you find, my boy," Horton asked, "that I'm a grand amoureux?"

Well, Gray had but to consult his memory of their young days together;

there was the admission, under pressure, that he might have confused the

appearances. "They were at any rate always up and at you--which seems to

have left me with the impression that your life is full of them."

"Every man's life is full of them that has a door or a window they can

come in by. But the question's of yourself," said Haughty, "and just

exactly of the number of such that you'll have to keep open or shut in

the immense façade you'll now present."

Our young man might well have struck him as before all else

inconsequent. "I shall present an immense façade?"--Gray, from his tone

of surprise, to call it nothing more, would have thought of this for the

first time.

But Horton just hesitated. "You've great ideas if you see it yourself as

a small one."

"I don't see it as any. I decline," Gray remarked, "to _have_ a façade.

And if I don't I shan't have the windows and doors."

"You've got 'em already, fifty in a row"--Haughty was remorseless--"and

it isn't a question of 'having': you _are_ a façade; stretching a mile

right and left. How can you not be when I'm walking up and down in front

of you?"

"Oh you walk up and down, you _make_ the things you pass, and you can

behave of course if you want like one of the giants in uniform, outside

the big shops, who attend the ladies in and out. In fact," Gray went on,

"I don't in the least judge that I _am_, or can be at all advertised as,

one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I

needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently

assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I

were a much greater one"--he gathered force--"my appearance of it would

depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can

take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more

room than may suit your taste. I'll be hanged if I consent to take up an

inch more than suits mine. Even though not of the truly bloated I've at

least means to be quiet. Every one among us--I mean among the

moneyed--isn't a monster on exhibition." In proof of which he abounded.

"I know people myself who aren't."

Horton considered him with amusement, as well apparently as the people

that he knew! "Of course you may dig the biggest hole in the ground that

ever was dug--spade-work comes high, but you'll have the means--and get

down into it and sit at the very bottom. Only your hole will become then

_the_ feature of the scene, and we shall crowd a thousand deep all round

the edge of it."

Gray stood for a moment looking down, then faced his guest as with a

slight effort. "Do you know about Rosanna Gaw?" And then while Horton,

for reasons of his own, failed at once to answer: "_She_ has come in for

millions----"

"Twenty-two and a fraction," Haughty said at once. "Do you mean that she

sits, like Truth, at the bottom of a well?" he asked still more

divertedly.

Gray had a sharp gesture. "If there's a person in the world whom I don't

call a façade----!"

"You don't call _her_ one?"--Haughty took it right up. And he added as

for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man----!"

"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes

every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.

Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in

the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this

time to a light, wait in silence for his word. "She does more than

that"--it was brought quite dryly out. "She loathes every separate

dollar she possesses."

Gray's sense of the matter, strenuous though it was, could just stare at

this extravagance of assent; seeing however, on second thoughts, what

there might be in it. "Well then if what I have is a molehill beside her

mountain, I can the more easily emulate her in standing back."

"What you have is a molehill?" Horton was concerned to inquire.