"Well--whenever you like. I think," said Gray, "it must be in the
house."
"You're not sure even of _that?_" his companion wailed.
"Oh I know there are two"--our young man had coloured. "I don't mean
different ones, but copies of the same," he explained; "one of which Mr.
Crick must have."
"And the other of which"--Horton pieced it together--"is the one you
offer to show me?"
"Unless, unless----!" and Gray, casting about, bethought himself.
"Unless _that_ one----!" With his eyes on his friend's he still
shamelessly wondered.
"Unless that one has happened to get lost," Horton tenderly suggested,
"so that you can't after all produce it?"
"No, but it may be upstairs, upstairs----" Gray continued to turn this
over. "I think it _is_," he then recognised, "where I had perhaps better
not just now disturb it."
His recognition was nothing, apparently, however, to the clear quickness
of Horton's. "It's in your uncle's own room?"
"The room," Gray assented, "where he lies in death while we talk here."
This, his tone suggested, sufficiently enjoined delay.
Horton's concurrence was immediately such that, once more turning off,
he measured, for the intensity of it, half the room. "I can't advise you
without the facts that you're unable to give," he said as he came back,
"but I don't indeed invite you to go and rummage in that presence." He
might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that verily by this time,
between these friends--by which I mean of course as from one of them
only, the more generally assured, to the other--irony would, to an at
all exhaustive analysis, have been felt to flicker in their medium. Gray
might in fact, on the evidence of his next words, have found it just
distinguishable.
V
"We do talk here while he lies in death"--they had in fine all serenity
for it. "But the extraordinary thing is that my putting myself this way
at my ease--and for that matter putting you at yours--is exactly what
the dear man made to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade of a
sense, and don't think I ever shall have, of not doing what he wanted of
me; for what he wanted of me," our particular friend continued,
"is--well, so utterly unconventional. He would _like_ my being the right
sort of well-meaning idiot that you catch me in the very fact of. I
warned him, I sincerely, passionately warned him, that I'm not fit, in
the smallest degree, for the use, for the care, for even the most
rudimentary comprehension, of a fortune; and that exactly it was which
seemed most to settle him. He wanted me clear, to the last degree, not
only of the financial brain, but of any sort of faint germ of the
money-sense whatever--down to the very lack of power, if he might be so
happy (or if _I_ might!) to count up to ten on my fingers. Satisfied of
the limits of my arithmetic he passed away in bliss."
To this, as fairly lucid, Horton had applied his understanding. "You
can't count up to ten?"
"Not all the way. Still," our young man smiled, "the greater inspiration
may now give me the lift."
His guest looked as if one might by that time almost have doubted. But
it was indeed an extraordinary matter. "How comes it then that your want
of arithmetic hasn't given you a want of order?--unless indeed I'm
mistaken and you _were_ perhaps at sixes and sevens?"
"Well, I think I was at sixes--though I never got up to sevens! I've
never had the least rule or method; but that has been a sort of thing I
could more or less cover up--from others, I mean, not from myself, who
have always been helplessly ashamed of it. It hasn't been the disorder
of extravagance," Gray explained, "but the much more ignoble kind, the
wasteful thrift that doesn't really save, that simply misses, and that
neither enjoys things themselves nor enjoys their horrid little
equivalent of hoarded pence. I haven't needed to count far, the fingers
of one hand serving for my four or five possessions; and also I've kept
straight not by taking no liberties with my means, but by taking none
with my understanding of them. From fear of counting wrong, and from
loathing of the act of numerical calculation, and of the humiliation of
having to give it up after so few steps from the start, I've never
counted at all--and that, you see, is what has saved me. That has been
my sort of disorder--which you'll agree is the most pitiful of all."
Horton once more turned away from him, but slowly this time, not in
impatience, rather with something of the preoccupation of a cup-bearer
whose bowl has been filled to the brim and who must carry it a distance
with a steady hand. So for a minute or two might he have been taking
this care; at the end of which, however, Gray saw him stop in apparent
admiration before a tall inlaid and brass-bound French _bahut_; with the
effect, after a further moment, of a sharp break of their thread of
talk. "You've got some things here at least to enjoy and that you ought
to know how to keep hold of; though I don't so much mean," he explained,
"this expensive piece of furniture as the object of interest perched on
top."
"Oh the ivory tower!--yes, isn't that, Vinty, a prize piece and worthy
of the lovely name?"
Vinty remained for the time all admiration, having, as you would easily
have seen, lights enough to judge by. "It appears to have been your
uncle's only treasure--as everything else about you here is of a
newness! And it isn't so much too small, Gray," he laughed, "for you to
get into it yourself, when you want to get rid of us, and draw the doors
to. If it's a symbol of any retreat you really have an eye on I much
congratulate you; I don't know what I wouldn't give myself for the 'run'
of an ivory tower."
"Well, I can't ask you to share mine," Gray returned; "for the situation
to have a sense, I take it, one must sit in one's tower alone. And I
should properly say," he added after an hesitation, "that mine is the
one object, all round me here, that I don't owe my uncle: it has been
placed at my disposition, in the handsomest way in the world, by Rosanna
Gaw."
"Ah that does increase the interest--even if susceptible of seeming to
mean, to one's bewilderment, that it's the sort of thing she would like
to thrust you away into; which I hope, however, is far from the case.
Does she then _keep_ ivory towers, a choice assortment?" Horton quite
gaily continued; "in the sense of having a row of them ready for
occupation, and with tenants to match perchable in each and signalling
along the line from summit to summit? Because"--and, facing about from
his contemplation, he piled up his image even as the type of object
represented by it might have risen in the air--"you give me exactly, you
see, the formula of that young lady herself: perched aloft in an ivory
tower is what she is, and I'll be hanged if this isn't a hint to you to
mount, yourself, into just such another; under the same provocation, I
fancy her pleading, as she has in her own case taken for sufficient."
Thus it was that, suddenly more brilliant than ever yet, to Graham's
apprehension, you might well have guessed, his friend stood nearer
again--stood verily quite irradiating responsive ingenuity. Markedly
would it have struck you that at such instants as this, most of all, the
general hush that was so thick about them pushed upward and still
further upward the fine flower of the inferential. Following the pair
closely from the first, and beginning perhaps with your idea that this
life of the intelligence had its greatest fineness in Gray Fielder, you
would by now, I dare say, have been brought to a more or less
apprehensive foretaste of its possibilities in our other odd agent. For
how couldn't it have been to the full stretch of his elastic imagination
that Haughty was drawn out by the time of his putting a certain matter
beautifully to his companion? "Don't I, 'gad, take the thing straight
over from you--all of it you've been trying to convey to me here!--when
I see you, up in the blue, behind your parapet, just gracefully lean
over and call down to where I mount guard at your door in the dust and
comparative darkness? It's well to understand"--his thumbs now in his
waistcoat-holes he measured his idea as if Gray's own face fairly
reflected it: "you want me to take _all_ the trouble for you simply, in
order that you may have all the fun. And you want me at the same time,
in order that things shall be for you at their ideal of the easiest, to
make you believe, as a salve to your conscience, that the fun _isn't_ so
mixed with the trouble as that you can't have it, on the right
arrangement made with me, quite by itself. This is most ingenious of
you," Horton added, "but it doesn't in the least show me, don't you see?
where my fun comes in."
"I wonder if I can do that," Gray returned, "without making you
understand first something of the nature of mine--or for that matter
without my first understanding myself perhaps what my queer kind of it
is most likely to be."
His companion showed withal for more and more ready to risk amused
recognitions. "You _are_ 'rum' with your queer kinds, and might make my
flesh creep, in these conditions, if it weren't for something in me of
rude pluck." Gray, in speaking, had moved towards the great French
meuble with some design upon it or upon the charge it carried; which
Horton's eyes just wonderingly noted--and to the effect of an
exaggeration of tone in his next remark. "However, there are assurances
one doesn't keep repeating: it's so little in me, I feel, to refuse you
any service I'm capable of, no matter how clumsily, that if you take me
but confidently enough for the agent even of your unholiest pleasures,
you'll find me still putting them through for you when you've broken
down in horror yourself."
"Of course it's my idea that whatever I ask you shall be of interest to
you, and of the liveliest, in itself--quite apart from any virtue of my
connection with it. If it speaks to you that way so much the better,"
Gray went on, standing now before the big _bahut_ with both hands raised
and resting on the marble top. This lifted his face almost to the level
of the base of his perched treasure--so that he stared at the ivory
tower without as yet touching it. He only continued to talk, though with
his thought, as he brought out the rest of it, almost superseded
by the new preoccupation. "I shall absolutely decline any good of
anything that isn't attended by some equivalent or--what do you call
it?--proportionate good for you. I shall propose to you a percentage, if
that's the right expression, on every blest benefit I get from you in
the way of the sense of safety." Gray now moved his hands, laying them
as in finer fondness to either smoothly-plated side of the tall
repository, against which a finger or two caressingly rubbed. His back
turned therefore to Horton, he was divided between the growth of his
response to him and that of this more sensible beauty. "Don't I kind of
insure my life, my moral consciousness, I mean, for your advantage?--or
_with_ you, as it were, taking you for the officeman or actuary, if I'm
not muddling: to whom I pay a handsome premium for the certainty of
there being to my credit, on my demise, a sufficient sum to clear off my
debts and bury me."
"You propose to me a handsome premium? Catch me," Horton laughed, "not
jumping at _that!_"
"Yes, and you'll of course fix the premium yourself." But Gray was now
quite detached, occupied only in opening his ivory doors with light
fingers and then playing these a little, whether for hesitation or for
the intenser pointing of inquiry, up and down the row of drawers so
exposed. Against the topmost they then rested a moment--drawing out this
one, however, with scant further delay and enabling themselves to feel
within and so become possessed of an article contained. It was with this
article in his hand that he presently faced about again, turning it
over, resting his eyes on it and then raising them to his visitor, who
perceived in it a heavy letter, duly addressed, to all appearance, but
not stamped and as yet unopened. "The distinguished retreat, you see,
_has_ its tenant."
"Do you mean by its tenant the author of those evidently numerous
pages?--unless you rather mean," Horton asked, "that you seal up in
packets the love-letters addressed to you and find that charming
receptacle a congruous place to keep them? Is there a packet in every
drawer, and do you take them out this way to remind yourself fondly that
you have them and that it mayn't be amiss for me to feel your conquests
and their fine old fragrance dangled under my nose?"
Our young man, at these words, had but returned to the consideration of
his odd property, attaching it first again to the superscription and
then to the large firm seal. "I haven't the least idea what this is; and
I'm divided in respect of it, I don't mind telling you, between
curiosity and repulsion."
Horton then also eyed the ambiguity, but at his discreet distance and
reaching out for it as little as his friend surrendered it. "Do you
appeal to me by chance to help you to decide either way?"
Poor Gray, still wondering and fingering, had a long demur. "No--I don't
think I want to decide." With which he again faced criticism. "The
extent, Vinty, to which I think I must just _like_ to drift----!"
Vinty seemed for a moment to give this indicated quantity the attention
invited to it, but without more action for the case than was represented
by his next saying: "Why then do you produce your question--apparently
so much for my benefit?"
"Because in the first place you noticed the place it lurks in, and
because in the second I like to tell you things."
This might have struck us as making the strained note in Vinty's smile
more marked. "But that's exactly, confound you, what you _don't_ do!
Here have I been with you half an hour without your practically telling
me anything!"
Graham, very serious, stood a minute looking at him hard; succeeding
also quite it would seem in taking his words not in the least for a
reproach but for a piece of information of the greatest relevance, and
thus at once dismissing any minor importance. He turned back with his
minor importance to his small open drawer, laid it within again and,
pushing the drawer to, closed the doors of the cabinet. The act disposed
of the letter, but had the air of introducing as definite a statement as
Horton could have dreamt of. "It's a bequest from Mr. Gaw."
"A bequest"--Horton wondered--"of banknotes?"
"No--it's a letter addressed to me just before his death, handed me by
his daughter, to whom he intrusted it, and not likely, I think, to
contain money. He was then sure, apparently, of my coming in for money;
and even if he hadn't been would have had no ground on earth for leaving
me anything."
Horton's visible interest was yet consonant with its waiting a little
for expression. "He leaves you the great Rosanna."
Graham, at this, had a stare, followed by a flush as the largest
possible sense of it came out. "You suppose it perhaps the expression of
a wish----?" And then as Horton forbore at first as to what he supposed:
"A wish that I may find confidence to apply to his daughter for her
hand?"
"That hasn't occurred to you before?" Horton asked--"nor the measure of
the confidence suggested been given you by the fact of your receiving
the document from Rosanna herself? You do give me, you extraordinary
person," he gaily proceeded, "as good opportunities as I could possibly
desire to 'help' you!"
Graham, for all the felicity of this, needed but an instant to think. "I
have it from Miss Gaw herself that she hasn't an idea of what the letter
contains--any more than she has the least desire that I shall for the
present open it."
"Well, mayn't that very attitude in her rather point to a suspicion?"
was his guest's ingenious reply. "Nothing could be less like
her certainly than to appear in such a case to want to force
your hand. It makes her position--with exquisite filial piety, you
see--extraordinarily delicate."
Prompt as that might be, Gray appeared to show, no sportive sophistry,
however charming, could work upon him. "Why should Mr. Gaw want me to
marry his daughter?"
Horton again hung about a little. "Why should you be so afraid of
ascertaining his idea that you don't so much as peep into what he writes
on the subject?"
"Afraid? _Am_ I afraid?" Gray fairly spoke with a shade of the hopeful,
as if even that would be richer somehow than drifting.
"Well, you looked at your affair just now as you might at some small
dangerous, some biting or scratching, animal whom you're not at all sure
of."
"And yet you see I keep him about."
"Yes--you keep him in his cage, for which I suppose you have a key."
"I have indeed a key, a charming little golden key." With which Gray
took another turn; once more facing criticism, however, to say with
force: "He hated him most awfully!"