I
Again and again, during the fortnight that followed his uncle's death,
were his present and his future to strike our young man as an
extraordinary blank cheque signed by Mr. Betterman and which, from the
moment he accepted it at all, he must fill out, according to his
judgment, his courage and his faith, with figures, monstrous, fantastic,
almost cabalistic, that it seemed to him he should never learn to
believe in. It was not so much the wonder of there being in various New
York institutions strange deposits of money, to amounts that, like
familiar mountain masses, appeared to begin at the blue horizon and,
sloping up and up toward him, grew bigger and bigger the nearer he or
they got, till they fairly overhung him with their purple power to meet
whatever drafts upon them he should make; it was not the tone, the
climax of dryness, of that dryest of men Mr. Crick, whose answering
remark as to any and every particular presumption of credit was "Well, I
guess I've fixed it so as you'll find _something_ there"; that sort of
thing was of course fairy-tale enough in itself, was all the while and
in a hundred connections a sweet assault on his credulity, but was at
the same time a phase of experience comparatively vulgar and that tended
to lose its edge with repetition. The real, the overwhelming sense of
his adventure was much less in the fact that he could lisp in dollars,
as it were, and see the dollars come, than in those vast vague
quantities, those spreading tracts, of his own consciousness itself on
which his kinsman's prodigious perversity had imposed, as for his
exploration, the aspect of a boundless capital. This trust of the dead
man in his having a nature that would show to advantage under a bigger
strain than it had ever dreamed of meeting, and the corresponding
desolate freedom on his own part to read back into the mystery such
refinements either, or such crude candours, of meaning and motive as
might seem best to fit it, that was the huge vague inscribable sum which
ran up into the millions and for which the signature that lettered
itself to the last neatness wherever his mind's eye rested was "good"
enough to reduce any more casual sign in the scheme of nature or of art
to the state of a negligible blur. Mr. Crick's want of colour, as Gray
qualified this gentleman's idiosyncrasy from the moment he saw how it
would be their one point of contact, became, by the extreme rarity and
clarity with which it couldn't but affect him, the very most gorgeous
gem, of the ruby or topaz order, that the smooth forehead of the actual
was for the present to flash upon him.
For dry did it appear inevitable to take the fact of a person's turning
up, from New York, with no other retinue than an attendant scribe in a
straw hat, a few hours before his uncle's last one, and being beholden
to mere Miss Mumby for simple introduction to Gray as Mr. Betterman's
lawyer. So had such sparenesses and barenesses of form to register
themselves for a mind beset with the tradition that consequences were
always somehow voluminous things; and yet the dryness was of a sort,
Gray soon apprehended, that he might take up in handfuls, as if it had
been the very sand of the Sahara, and thereby find in it, at the least
exposure to light, the collective shimmer of myriads of fine particles.
It was with the substance of the desert taken as monotonously sparkling
under any motion to dig in it that the abyss of Mr. Crick's functional
efficiency was filled. That efficiency, in respect to the things to be
done, would clearly so answer to any demand upon it within the compass
of our young man's subtlety, that the result for him could only be a
couple of days of inexpressible hesitation as to the outward air he
himself should be best advised to aim at wearing. He reminded himself at
this crisis of the proprietor of a garden, newly acquired, who might
walk about with his gardener and try to combine, in presence of
abounding plants and the vast range of luxuriant nature, an
ascertainment of names and properties and processes with a
dissimulation, for decent appearance, of the positive side of his
cockneyism. By no imagination of a state of mind so unfurnished would
the gardener ever have been visited; such gaping seams in the garment of
knowledge must affect him at the worst as mere proprietary languor, the
offhandedness of repletion; and no effective circumvention of
traditional takings for granted could late-born curiosity therefore
achieve. Gray's hesitation ceased only when he had decided that he
needn't care, comparatively speaking, for what Mr. Crick might think of
him. He was going to care for what others might--this at least he seemed
restlessly to apprehend; he was going to care tremendously, he felt
himself make out, for what Rosanna Gaw might, for what Horton Vint
might--even, it struck him, for what Davey Bradham might. But in
presence of Mr. Crick, who insisted on having no more personal identity
than the omnibus conductor stopping before you but just long enough to
bite into a piece of pasteboard with a pair of small steel jaws, the
question of his having a character either to keep or to lose declined
all relevance--and for the reason in especial that whichever way it
might turn for him would remain perhaps, so to speak, the most
unexpressed thing that should ever have happened in the world.
The effect producible by him on the persons just named, and extending
possibly to whole groups of which these were members, would be an effect
because somehow expressed and encountered as expression: when had he in
all his life, for example, so lived in the air of expression and so
depended on the help of it, as in that so thrilling night-hour just
spent with the mystifying and apparently mystified, yet also apparently
attached and, with whatever else, attaching, Vinty? It wasn't that Mr.
Crick, whose analogue he had met on every occasion of his paying his
fare in the public conveyances--where the persons to whom he paid it,
without perhaps in their particulars resembling each other, all managed
nevertheless to be felt as gathered into this reference--wasn't in a
high degree conversible; it was that the more he conversed the less Gray
found out what he thought not only of Mr. Betterman's heir but of any
other subject on which they touched. The gentleman who would, by Gray's
imagination, have been acting for the executors of his uncle's will had
not that precious document appeared to dispense with every superfluity,
could state a fact, under any rash invitation, and endow it, as a fact,
with the greatest conceivable amplitude--this too moreover not because
he was garrulous or gossiping, but because those facts with which he was
acquainted, the only ones on which you would have dreamed of appealing
to him, seemed all perfect nests or bags of other facts, bristling or
bulging thus with every intensity of the positive and leaving no room in
their interstices for mere appreciation to so much as turn round. They
were themselves appreciation--they became so by the simple force of
their existing for Mr. Crick's arid mention, and they so covered the
ground of his consciousness to the remotest edge that no breath of the
air either of his own mind or of anyone's else could have pretended to
circulate about them. Gray made the reflection--tending as he now felt
himself to waste rather more than less time in this idle trick--that the
different matters of content in some misunderstandings have so glued
themselves together that separation has quite broken down and one
continuous block, suggestive of dimensional squareness, with mechanical
perforations and other aids to use subsequently introduced, comes to
represent the whole life of the subject. What it amounted to, he might
have gathered, was that Mr. Crick was of such a common commonness as he
had never up to now seen so efficiently embodied, so completely
organised, so securely and protectedly active, in a word--not to say so
garnished and adorned with strange refinements of its own: he had
somehow been used to thinking of the extreme of that quality as a note
of defeated application, just as the extreme of rarity would have to be.
His domestic companion of these days again and again struck him as most
touching the point at issue, and that point alone, when most proclaiming
at every pore that there wasn't a difference, in all the world, between
one thing and another. The refusal of his whole person to figure as a
fact invidiously distinguishable, that of his aspect to have an
identity, of his eyes to have a consciousness, of his hair to have a
colour, of his nose to have a form, of his mouth to have a motion, of
his voice to consent to any separation of sounds, made intercourse with
him at once extremely easy and extraordinarily empty; it was deprived of
the flicker of anything by the way and resembled the act of moving
forward in a perfectly-rolling carriage with the blind of each window
neatly drawn down.
Gray sometimes advanced to the edge of trying him, so to call it, as to
the impression made on him by lack of recognitions assuredly without
precedent in any experience, any, least of all, of the ways of
beneficiaries; but under the necessity on each occasion of our young
man's falling back from the vanity of supposing himself really
presentable or apprehensible. For a grasp of him on such ground to take
place he should have had first to show himself and to catch his image
somehow reflected; simply walking up and down and shedding bland
gratitude didn't convey or exhibit or express him in this case, as he
was sure these things _had_ on the other hand truly done where everyone
else, where his uncle and Rosanna, where Mr. Gaw and even Miss Mumby,
where splendid Vinty, whom he so looked to, and awfully nice Davey
Bradham, whom he so took to, were concerned. It all came back to the
question of terms and to the perception, in varying degrees, on the part
of these persons, of his own; for there were somehow none by which Mr.
Crick was penetrable that would really tell anything about him, and he
could wonder in freedom if he wasn't then to know too that last immunity
from any tax on his fortune which would consist in his having never to
wince. Against wincing in other relations than this one he was prepared,
he only desired, to take his precautions--visionary precautions in those
connections truly swarming upon him; but apparently he was during these
first days of the mere grossness of his reality to learn something of
the clear state of seeing every fond sacrifice to superstition that he
could think of thrust back at him. If he could but have brought his
visitor to say after twenty-four hours of him "Well, you're the
damnedest little idiot Eve ever had to pretend to hold commerce with!"
_that_ would on the spot have pressed the spring of his rich sacrificial
"Oh I must be, I must be!--how can I not abjectly and gratefully be?"
Something at least would so have been done to placate the jealous gods.
But instead of that the grossness of his reality just flatly included
this supremely useful friend's perhaps supposing him a vulgar
voluptuary, or at least a mere gaping maw, cynically, which amounted to
say frivolously, indifferent to everything but the general fact of his
windfall. Strange that it should be impossible in any particular
whatever to inform or to correct Mr. Crick, who sat unapproachable in
the midst of the only knowledge that concerned him.
He couldn't help feeling it conveyed in the very breath of the summer
airs that played about him, to his fancy, in a spirit of frolic still
lighter and quicker than they had breathed in other climes, he couldn't
help almost seeing it as the spray of sea-nymphs, or hearing it as the
sounded horn of tritons, emerging, to cast their spell, from the
foam-flecked tides around, that he was regarded as a creature rather
unnaturally "quiet" there on his averted verandahs and in his darkened
halls, even at moments when quite immense things, by his own measure,
were happening to him. Everything, simply, seemed to be happening, and
happening all at once--as he could say to himself, for instance, by the
fact of such a mere matter as his pulling up at some turn of his now
renewedly ceaseless pacing to take in he could scarce have said what
huge though soft collective rumble, what thick though dispersed
exhalation, of the equipped and appointed life, the life that phrased
itself with sufficient assurance as the multitudinous throb of Newport,
borne toward him from vague regions, from behind and beyond his
temporary blest barriers, and representing for the first time in his
experience an appeal directed at him from a source not somewhat shabbily
single. An impression like that was in itself an event--so repeatedly in
his other existence (it was already his quite unconnectedly other) had
the rumour of the world, the voice of society, the harmonies of
possession, been charged, for his sensibility, with reminders which, so
far from suggesting association, positively waved him off from it. Mr.
Betterman's funeral, for all the rigour of simplicity imposed on it by
his preliminary care, had enacted itself in a ponderous, numerous, in
fact altogether swarming and resounding way; the old local cemetery on
the seaward-looking hillside, as Gray seemed to identify it, had served
for the final scene, and our young man's sense of the whole thing
reached its finest point in an unanswered question as to whether the New
York business world or the New York newspaper interest were the more
copiously present. The business world broke upon him during the recent
rites in large smooth tepid waves--he was conscious of a kind of
generalised or, as they seemed to be calling it, standardised face, as
of sharpness without edge, save when edge was unexpectedly improvised,
bent upon him for a hint of what might have been better expressed could
it but have been expressed humorously; while the newspaper interest only
fed the more full, he felt even at the time, from the perfectly bare
plate offered its flocking young emissaries by the most recognising eye
at once and the most deprecating dumbness that he could command.
He had asked Vinty, on the morrow of Vinty's evening visit, to "act" for
him in so far as this might be; upon which Vinty had said gaily--he was
unexceptionally gay now--"Do you mean as your best man at your marriage
to the bride who is so little like St. Francis's? much as you yourself
strike me, you know, as resembling the man of Assisi." Vinty, at his
great present ease, constantly put things in such wonderful ways; which
were nothing, however, to the way he mostly did them during the days he
was able to spare before going off again to other calls, other
performances in other places, braver and breezier places on the bolder
northern coast, it mostly seemed: his allusions to which excited
absolutely the more curious interest in his friend, by an odd law, in
proportion as he sketched them, under pressure, as probably altogether
alien to the friend's sympathies. That was to be for the time, by every
indication, his amusing "line"--his taking so confident and insistent a
view of what it must be in Gray's nature and tradition to like or not to
like that, as our young man for that matter himself assured him, he
couldn't have invented a more successfully insidious way of creating an
appetite than by passing under a fellow's nose every sort of whiff of
the indigestible. One thing at least was clear, namely: that, let his
presumption of a comrade's susceptibilities, his possible reactions,
under general or particular exposure, approve itself or not, the extent
to which this free interpreter was going personally to signify for the
savour of the whole stretched there as a bright assurance. Thus he was
all the while acting indeed--acting so that fond formulations of it
could only become in the promptest way mere redundancies of reference;
he acted because his approach, his look, his touch made somehow, by
their simply projecting themselves, a definite difference for any
question, great or small, in the least subject to them; and this, after
the most extraordinary fashion, not in the least through his pressing or
interfering or even so much as intending, but just as a consequence of
his having a sense and an intelligence of the given affair, such as it
might be, to which, once he was present at it, he was truly ashamed not
to conform. That concentrated passage between the two men while the
author of their situation was still unburied would of course always
hover to memory's eye like a votive object in the rich gloom of a
chapel; but it was now disconnected, attached to its hook once for all,
its whole meaning converted with such small delay into working, playing
force and multiplied tasteable fruit.
Quiet as he passed for keeping himself, by the impression I have noted,
how could Gray have felt more plunged in history, how could he by his
own sense more have waked up to it each morning and gone to bed with it
each night, sat down to it whenever he did sit down, which was never for
long, whether at a meal, at a book, at a letter, or at the wasted
endeavour to become, by way of a change, really aware of his
consciousness, than through positively missing as he did the hint of
anything in particular to do?--missing and missing it all the while and
yet at no hour paying the least of the penalties that are supposed to
attend the drop of responsibility and the substituted rule of fatuity.
How couldn't it be agitation of a really sublime order to have it come
over one that the personage in the world one must most resemble at such
a pitch would be simply, at one's choice, the Kaiser or the Czar,
potentates who only know their situation is carried on by attestation of
the fact that push it wherever they will they never find it isn't? Thus
they are referred to the existence of machinery, the working of which
machinery is answered for, they may feel, whenever their eyes rest on
one of those figures, ministerial or ceremonial, who may be, as it is
called, in waiting. Mr. Crick was in waiting, Horton Vint was in
waiting, Rosanna Gaw even, at this moment a hundred miles away, was in
waiting, and so was Davey Bradham, though with but a single appearance
at the palace as yet to his credit. Neither Horton nor Mr. Crick, it was
true, were more materially, more recurrently present than a fellow's
nerves, for the wonder of it all, could bear; but what was it but just
being Czar or Kaiser to keep thrilling on one's own side before the fact
that this made no difference? Vulgar reassurance was the greatest of
vulgarities; monarchs could still be irresponsible, thanks to their
ministers' not being, and Gray repeatedly asked himself how he should
ever have felt as he generally did if it hadn't been so absolutely
exciting that while the scattered moments of Horton's presence and the
fitful snatches of telephonic talk with him lasted the gage of
protection, perfectly certain patronising protection, added a still
pleasanter light to his eye and ring to his voice, casual and trivial as
he clearly might have liked to keep these things. Great monarchies might
be "run," but great monarchs weren't--unless of course often by the
favourite or the mistress; and one hadn't a mistress yet, goodness knew,
and if one was threatened with a favourite it would be but with a
favourite of the people too.
History and the great life surged in upon our hero through such images
as these at their fullest tide, finding him out however he might have
tried to hide from them, and shaking him perhaps even with no livelier
question than when it occurred to him for the first time within the
week, oddly enough, that the guest of the Bradhams never happened, while
his own momentary guest, to meet Mr. Crick, in his counsels, by so much
as an instant's overlapping, any more than it would chance on a single
occasion that he should name his friend to that gentleman or otherwise
hint at his existence, still less his importance. Was it just that the
king was _usually_ shy of mentioning the favourite to the head of the
treasury and that various decencies attached, by tradition, to keeping
public and private advisers separate? "Oh I absolutely decline to come
in, at any point whatever, between you and _him_; as if there were any
sort of help I can give you that he won't ever so much better!"--those
words had embodied, on the morrow, Vinty's sole allusion to the main
sense of their first talk, which he had gone on with in no direct
fashion. He had thrown a ludicrous light on his committing himself to
any such atrocity of taste while the empowered person and quite ideally
right man was about; but points would come up more and more, did come
up, in fact already had, that they doubtless might work out together
happily enough; and it took Horton in fine the very fewest hours to give
example after example of his familiar and immediate wit. Nothing could
have better illustrated this than the interest thrown by him for Gray
over a couple of subjects that, with many others indeed, beguiled three
or four rides taken by the friends along the indented shores and other
seaside stretches and reaches of their low-lying promontory in the
freshness of the early morning and when the scene might figure for
themselves alone. Gray, clinging as yet to his own premises very much
even as a stripped swimmer might loiter to enjoy an air-bath before his
dive, had yet mentioned that he missed exercise and had at once found
Vinty full of resource for his taking it in that pleasantest way.
Everything, by his assurance, was going to be delightful but the
generality of the people; thus, accordingly, was the generality of the
people not yet in evidence, thus at the sweet hour following the cool
dawn could the world he had become possessed of spread about him
unspoiled.
It was perhaps in Gray to wonder a little in these conditions what _was_
then in evidence, with decks so invidiously cleared; this being,
however, a remark he forbore to make, mystified as he had several times
been, and somehow didn't like too much being, by having had to note that
to differ at all from Vinty on occasions apparently offered was to
provoke in him at once a positive excess of agreement. He always went
further, as it were, and Gray himself, as he might say, didn't want to
go _those_ lengths, which were out of the range of practical politics
altogether. Horton's habit, as it seemed to show itself, was to make out
of saving sociability or wanton ingenuity or whatever, a distinction for
which a companion might care, but for which he himself didn't with any
sincerity, and then to give his own side of it away, from the moment
doubt had been determined, with an almost desolating sweep of surrender.
His own side of it was by that logic no better a side, in a beastly
vulgar world, than any other, and if anyone wanted to mean that such a
mundane basis was deficient why he himself had but meant it from the
first and pretended something else only not to be too shocking. He was
ready to mean the worst--was ready for anything, that is, in the
interest of ceasing from humbug. And if Gray was prepared for that
_then_ il ne s'agissait que de s'entendre. What Gray was prepared for
would really take, this young man frankly opined, some threshing out;
but it wasn't at all in readiness for the worst that he had come to
America--he had come on the contrary to indulge, by God's help, in
appreciations, comparisons, observations, reflections and other
luxuries, that were to minister, fond old prejudice aiding, to life at
the high pitch, the pitch, as who should say, of immortality. If on
occasion, under the dazzle of Horton's facility, he might ask himself
how he tracked through it the silver thread of sincerity--consistency
wasn't pretended to--something at once supervened that was better than
any answer, some benefit of information that the circumstance required,
of judgment that assisted or supported or even amused, by felicity of
contradiction, and that above all pushed the question so much further,
multiplying its relations and so giving it air and colour and the slap
of the brush, that it straightway became a picture and, for the kind of
attention Gray could best render, a conclusive settled matter. He hated
somehow to detract from his friend, wanting so much more to keep adding
to him; but it was after a little as if he had felt that his loyalty, or
whatever he might call it, could yet not be mean in deciding that
Horton's generalisations, his opinions as distinguished from his
perceptions and direct energies and images, signified little enough: if
he would only go on bristling as he promised with instances and items,
would only consent to consist at the same rate and in his very self of
material for history, one might propose to gather from it all at one's
own hours and without troubling him the occasional big inference.
How good he could be on the particular case appeared for example after
Gray had expressed to him, just subsequently to their first encounter,
a certain light and measured wonderment at Rosanna Gaw's appearing not
to intend to absent herself long enough from her cares in the other
State, immense though these conceivably were, to do what the rest of
them were doing roundabout Mr. Betterman's grave. Our young man had half
taken for granted that she would have liked, expressing it simply, to
assist with him at the last attentions to a memory that had meant, in
the current phrase, so much for them both--though of course he withal
quite remembered that her interest in it had but rested on his own and
that since his own, as promoted by her, had now taken such effect there
was grossness perhaps in looking to her for further demonstrations: this
at least in view of her being under her filial stress not unimaginably
sated with ritual. He had caught himself at any rate in the act of
dreaming that Rosanna's return for the funeral would be one of the
inevitabilities of her sympathy with his fortune--every element of which
(that was overwhelmingly certain) he owed to her; and even the due sense
that, put her jubilation or whatever at its highest, it could scarce be
expected to dance the same jig as his, didn't prevent his remarking to
his friend that clearly Miss Gaw would come, since he himself was still
in the stage of supposing that when you had the consciousness of a lot
of money you sort of did violent things. He played with the idea that
her arrival for the interment would partake of this element, proceeding
as it might from the exhilaration of her monstrous advantages, her now
assured state. "Look at the violent things _I'm_ doing," he seemed to
observe with this, "and see how natural I must feel it that any violence
should meet me. Yours, for example"--Gray really went so
far--"recognises how I want, or at least how I enjoy, a harmony; though
at the same time, I assure you, I'm already prepared for any disgusted
snub to the attitude of unlimited concern about me, gracious goodness,
that I may seem to go about taking for granted." Unlimited concern about
him on the part of the people who weren't up at the cool of dawn save in
so far as they here and there hadn't yet gone to bed--this, in
combination with something like it on the part of numberless others too,
had indeed to be faced as the inveterate essence of Vinty's forecast,
and formed perhaps the hardest nut handed to Gray's vice of cogitation
to crack; it was the thing that he just now most found himself, as they
said, up against--involving as it did some conception of reasons other
than ugly for so much patience with the boring side of him.
An interest founded on the mere beastly fact of his pecuniary luck, what
was that but an ugly thing to see, from the moment his circle, since a
circle he was apparently to have, shouldn't soon be moved to some decent
reaction from it? How was he going himself to like breathing an air in
which the reaction didn't break out, how was he going not to get sick of
finding so large a part played, over the place, by the mere
_constatation_, in a single voice, a huge monotone restlessly and
untiringly directed, but otherwise without application, of the state of
being worth dollars to inordinate amounts? Was he really going to want
to live with many specimens of the sort of person who wouldn't presently
rather loathe him than know him blindedly on such terms? would it be
possible, for that matter, that he should feel people unashamed of not
providing for their attention to him any better account of it than his
uncle's form of it had happened to supply, without his by that token
coming to regard them either as very "interested," according to the good
old word, or as themselves much too foredoomed bores to merit tolerance?
When it reached the pitch of his asking himself whether it could be
possible Vinty wouldn't at once see what he meant by that reservation,
he patched the question up but a bit provisionally perhaps by falling
back on a remark about this confidant that was almost always equally in
order. They weren't on the basis yet of any treatable reality, any that
could be directly handled and measured, other than such as were, so to
speak, the very children of accident, those the old man's still
unexplained whim had with its own special shade of grimness let him in
for. _Naturally_ must it come to pass with time that the better of the
set among whom this easy genius was the best would stop thinking money
about him to the point that prevented their thinking anything else--so
that he should only break off and not go in further after giving them a
chance to show in a less flurried way to what their range of imagination
might reach invited and encouraged. Should they markedly fail to take
that chance it would be all up with them so far as any entertainment
that _he_ should care to offer them was concerned. How could it stick
out _more_ disconcertingly--so his appeal might have run--that a fuss
about him was as yet absolutely a fuss on a vulgar basis? having begun,
by what he gathered, quite before the growth even of such independent
rumours as Horton's testimony, once he was on the spot, or as Mr.
Bradham's range of anecdote, consequent on Mr. Bradham's call, might
give warrant for: it couldn't have behind it, he felt sure, so much as a
word of Rosanna's, of the heralding or promising sort--he would so have
staked his right hand on the last impossibility of the least rash
overflow on that young woman's part.
There was this other young woman, of course, whom he heard of at these
hours for the first time from Haughty and whom he remembered well enough
to have heard praise of from his adopted father, three or four years
previous, on his rejoining the dear man after a summer's separation. She
would be, "Gussy's" charming friend, Haughty's charming friend, no end
of other people's charming friend, as appeared, the heroine of the
charming friendship his own admirable friend had formed, in a
characteristically headlong manner (some exceptional cluster of graces,
in her case, clearly much aiding) with a young American girl, the very
nicest anyone had ever seen, met at the waters of Ragatz during one of
several seasons there and afterwards described in such extravagant terms
as were to make her remain, between himself and his elder, a subject of
humorous reference and retort. It had had to do with Gray's liking his
companion of those years always better and better that persons
intrinsically distinguished inveterately took to him so naturally--even
if the number of the admirers rallying was kept down a little by the
rarity, of course, of intrinsic distinction. It wasn't, either, as if
this blest associate had been by constitution an elderly flirt, or some
such sorry type, addicted to vain philanderings with young persons he
might have fathered: he liked young persons, small blame to him, but
they had never, under Gray's observation, made a fool of him, and he was
only as much of one about the young lady in question, Cecilia Foy, yes,
of New York, as served to keep all later inquiry and pleasantry at the
proper satiric pitch. She _would_ have been a fine little creature, by
our friend's beguiled conclusion, to have at once so quickened and so
appreciated the accidental relation; for was anything truly quite so
charming in a clever girl as the capacity for admiring _disinterestedly_
a brave gentleman even to the point of willingness to take every trouble
about him?--when the disinterestedness dwelt, that is, in the very
pleasure she could seek and find, so much more creditable a matter to
her than any she could give and be complimented for giving, involved as
this could be with whatever vanity, vulgarity or other personal
pretence.
Gray remembered even his not having missed by any measure of his own
need or play of his own curiosity the gain of Miss Foy's
acquaintance--so might the felicity of the quaint affair, given the
actual parties, have been too sacred to be breathed on; he in fact
recalled, and could still recall, every aspect of their so excellent
time together reviving now in a thick rich light, how he had inwardly
closed down the cover on his stepfather's accession of fortune--which
the pretty episode really seemed to amount to; extracting from it
himself a particular relief of conscience. He could let him alone, by
this showing, without black cruelty--so little had the day come for his
ceasing to attract admirers, as they said, at public places or being
handed over to the sense of desertion. That left Gray as little as
possible haunted with the young Cecilia's image, so completely was his
interest in her, in her photograph and in her letters, one of the
incidents of his virtually filial solicitude; all the less in fact no
doubt that she had written during the aftermonths frequently and very
advertisedly, though perhaps, in spite of Mr. Northover's gay exhibition
of it, not so very remarkably. She was apparently one of the bright
persons who are not at their brightest with the pen--which question
indeed would perhaps come to the proof for him, thanks to his having it
ever so vividly, not to say derisively, from Horton that this observer
didn't really know what had stayed her hand, for the past week, from an
outpouring to the one person within her reach who would constitute a
link with the delightful old hero of her European adventure. That so
close a representative of the party to her romance was there in the
flesh and but a mile or two off, was a fact so extraordinary as to have
waked up the romance again in her and produced a state of fancy from
which she couldn't rest--for some shred of the story that might be still
afloat. Gray therefore needn't be surprised to receive some sign of this
commotion, and that he hadn't yet done so was to be explained, Haughty
guessed, by the very intensity of the passions involved.
One of them, it thus appeared, burnt also in Gussy's breast; devoted as
she was to Cissy, she had taken the fond anecdote that so occupied them
as much under her protection as she had from far back taken the girl's
every other interest, and what for the hour paralysed their action, that
of the excited pair, must simply have been that Mrs. Bradham couldn't on
the one hand listen to anything so horrid as that her young friend
should make an advance unprepared and unaccompanied, and that the ardent
girl, on the other, had for the occasion, as for all occasions, her
ideal of independence. Gray was not himself impatient--he felt no jump
in him at the chance to discuss so dear a memory in an air still
incongruous; it depended on who might propose to him the delicate
business, let alone its not making for a view of the great Gussy's fine
tact that she should even possibly put herself forward as a proposer.
However, he didn't mind thinking that if Cissy should prove all that was
likely enough their having a subject in common couldn't but practically
conduce; though the moral of it all amounted rather to a portent, the
one that Haughty, by the same token, had done least to reassure him
against, of the extent to which the native jungle harboured the female
specimen and to which its ostensible cover, the vast level of mixed
growths stirred wavingly in whatever breeze, was apt to be identifiable
but as an agitation of the latest redundant thing in ladies' hats. It
was true that when Rosanna had perfectly failed to rally, merely writing
a kind short note to the effect that she should have to give herself
wholly, for she didn't know how long, to the huge assault of her own
questions, that might have seemed to him to make such a clearance as
would count against any number of positively hovering shades. Horton had
answered for her not turning up, and nothing perhaps had made him feel
so right as this did for a faith in those general undertakings of
assurance; only, when at the end of some days he saw that vessel of
light obscured by its swing back to New York and other ranges of action,
the sense of exposure--even as exposure to nothing worse than the
lurking or pouncing ladies--became sharper through contrast with the
late guarded interval; this to the extent positively of a particular
hour at which it seemed to him he had better turn tail and simply flee,
stepping from under the too vast orb of his fate.
He was alone with that quantity on the September morning after breakfast
as he had not felt himself up to now; he had taken to pacing the great
verandah that had become his own as he had paced it when it was still
his uncle's, and it might truly have been a rush of nervous
apprehension, a sudden determination of terror, that quickened and yet
somehow refused to direct his steps. He had turned out there for the
company of sea and sky and garden, less conscious than within doors, for
some reason, that Horton was a lost luxury; but that impression was
presently to pass with a return of a queer force in his view of Rosanna
as above all somehow wanting, off and withdrawn verily to the pitch of
her having played him some trick, merely let him in where she was to
have seen him through, failed in fine of a sociability implied in all
her preliminaries. He found his attention caught, in one of his
revolutions, by the chair in which Abel Gaw had sat that first
afternoon, pulling him up for their so unexpectedly intense mutual
scrutiny, and when he turned away a moment after, quitting the spot
almost as if the strange little man's death that very night had already
made him apparitional, which was unpleasant, it was to drop upon the
lawn and renew his motion there. He circled round the house altogether
at last, looking at it more critically than had hitherto seemed
relevant, taking the measure, disconcertedly, of its unabashed ugliness,
and at the end coming to regard it very much as he might have eyed some
monstrous modern machine, one of those his generation was going to be
expected to master, to fly in, to fight in, to take the terrible women
of the future out for airings in, and that mocked at _his_ incompetence
in such matters while he walked round and round it and gave it, as for
dread of what it might do to him, the widest berth his enclosure
allowed. In the midst of all of which, quite wonderfully, everything
changed; he _wasn't_ alone with his monster, he was in, by this
reminder, for connections, nervous ass as he had just missed writing
himself, and connections fairly glittered, swarming out at him, in the
person of Mr. Bradham, who stood at the top of a flight of steps from
the gallery, which he had been ushered through the house to reach, and
there at once, by some odd felicity of friendliness, some pertinence of
presence, of promise, appeared to make up for whatever was wrong and
supply whatever was absent. It came over him with extraordinary
quickness that the way not to fear the massed ambiguity was to trust it,
and this florid, solid, smiling person, who waved a prodigious
gold-coloured straw hat as if in sign of ancient amity, had come exactly
at that moment to show him how.[2]
[Footnote 2: This ends the first chapter of Book IV. The MS. breaks off
with an unfinished sentence opening the next chapter: "Not the least
pointed of the reflections Gray was to indulge in a fortnight later and
as by a result of Davey Bradham's intervention in the very nick was that
if he had turned tail that afternoon, at the very oddest of all his
hours, if he had prematurely taken to his heels and missed the emissary
from the wonderful place of his fresh domestication, the article on
which he would most irretrievably have dished himself . . ."]