Front matter (continued 2)

"Oh that of course, yes; Gussy, whom I've told of my having met Mr. Northover, will have told you. That's curious and charming," Cissy went on, "and I want awfully we should talk of it. But it isn't what I mean by what I know—and what you don't, my dear thing!"

Rosanna couldn't have told why, but she had begun to tremble, and also to try not to show it. "What I don't know—about Gray Fielder? Why, of course there's plenty!" she smiled.

Cissy still held her hands; but Cissy now was grave. "No, there isn't plenty—save so far as what I mean is enough. And I haven't told it to Gussy. It's too good for her," the girl added. "It's too good for anyone but you."

Rosanna just waited, feeling herself perhaps grimace. "What, Cissy, are you talking about?"

"About what I heard from Mr. Northover when we met him, when we saw so much of him, three years ago at Ragatz, where we had gone for Mamma and where we went through the cure with him. He and I struck up a friendship and he often spoke to me of his stepson—who wasn't there with him, was at that time off somewhere in the mountains or in Italy, I forget, but to whom I could see he was devoted. He and I hit it off beautifully together—he seemed to me awfully charming and to like to tell me things. So what I allude to is something he said to me."

"About me?" Rosanna gasped.

"Yes—I see now it was about you. But it's only to-day that I've guessed that. Otherwise, otherwise——!" And as if under the weight of her great disclosure Cissy faltered.

But she had now indeed made her friend desire it. "You mean that otherwise you'd have told me before?"

"Yes indeed—and it's such a miracle I didn't. It's such a miracle," said Cissy, "that the person should all this time have been you—or you have been the person. Of course I had no idea that all this—everything that has taken place now, by what I understand—was going so extraordinarily to happen. You see he never named Mr. Betterman, or in fact, I think," the girl explained, "told me anything about him. And he didn't name, either, Gray's friend—so that in spite of the impression made on me you've never till to-day been identified."

Immense, as she went, Rosanna felt, the number of things she gave her thus together to think about. What was coming she clearly needn't fear—might indeed, deep within, happily hold her breath for; but the very interest somehow made her rest an instant, as for refinement of suspense, on the minor surprises. "The impression then has been so great that you call him 'Gray'?"

The girl at this ceased holding hands; she folded her arms back together across her slim young person—the frequent habit of it in her was of the prettiest "quaint" effect; she laughed as if submitting to some just correction of a freedom. "Oh, but my dear, he did, the delightful man—and isn't it borne in upon me that you do? Of course the impression was great—and if Mr. Northover and I had met younger I don't know," her laugh said, "what mightn't have happened. No, I never shall have had a greater, a more intelligent admirer! As it was we remained true, secretly true, for fond memory, to the end: at least I did, though ever so secretly—you see I speak of it only now—and I want to believe so in his impression. But how I torment you!" she suddenly said in another tone.

Rosanna, nursing her patience, had a sad slow headshake. "I don't understand."

"Of course you don't—and yet it's too beautiful. It was about Gray—once when we talked of him, as I've told you we repeatedly did. It was that he never would look at anyone else."

Our friend could but appear at least to cast about. "Anyone else than whom?"

"Why than you," Cissy smiled. "The girl he had loved in boyhood. The American girl who, years before, in Dresden, had done for him something he could never forget."

"And what had she done?" stared Rosanna.

"Oh he didn't tell me that! But if you don't take great care, as I say," Cissy went on, "perhaps he may—I mean Mr. Fielder himself may when we close round him in the way that, in your place, as I assure you, I would certainly do everything to prevent."

Rosanna looked about as with a sudden sense of weakness, the effect of overstrain; it was absurd, but these last minutes might almost, with their queer action, and as to the ground they covered, have been as many formidable days. A fine verandah settee again close at hand offered her support, and she dropped upon it, as for large retrieval of menaced ease, with a need she herself alone could measure. The need was to recover some sense of perspective, to be able to place her young friend's somehow portentous assault off in such conditions, if only of mere space and time, as would make for some greater convenience of relation with it. It did at once help her—and really even for the tone in which she smiled across: "So you're sure?"

Cissy hovered, shining, shifting, yet accepting the perspective as it were—when in the world had she to fear any?—and positively painted there in bright contradiction, her very grace again, after the odd fashion in which it sometimes worked, seeming to deny her sincerity, and her very candour seeming to deny her gravity. "Sure of what? Sure I'm right about you?"

Rosanna took a minute to say—so many things worked in her; yet when one of these came uppermost, pushing certain of the others back, she found for putting it forward a tone grateful to her own ear. This tone represented on her part too a substitute for sincerity, but that was exactly what she wanted. "I don't care a fig for any anecdote about myself—which moreover it would be very difficult for you to have right. What I ask you if you're certain of is your being really not fit for him. Are you absolutely," said Miss Gaw, "as bad as that?"

The girl, placed before her, looked at her now, with raised hands folded together, as if she had been some seated idol, a great Buddha perched up on a shrine. "Oh Rosanna, Rosanna——!" she admiringly, piously breathed.

But it was not such treatment that could keep Miss Gaw from completing her chosen sense. "I should be extremely sorry—so far as I claim any influence on him—to interfere against his getting over here whatever impressions he may; interfere by his taking you for more important, in any way, than seems really called for."

"Taking me?" Cissy smiled.

"Taking any of you—the people, in general and in particular, who haunt this house. We mustn't be afraid for him of his having the interest, or even the mere amusement, of learning all that's to be learnt about us."

"Oh Rosanna, Rosanna"—the girl kept it up—"how you adore him; and how you make me therefore, wretch that I am, fiendishly want to see him!"

But it might quite have glanced now from our friend's idol surface. "You're the best of us, no doubt—very much; and I immensely hope you'll like him, since you've been so extraordinarily prepared. It's to be supposed too that he'll have some sense of his own."

Cissy continued rapt. "Oh but you're deep—deep deep deep!"

It came out as another presence again, that of Davey Bradham, who had the air of rather restlessly looking for her, emerged from one of the long windows of the house, just at hand, to meet Rosanna's eyes. She found herself glad to have him back, as if further to inform him. Wasn't it after all rather he that was the best of them and by no means Cissy? Her face might at any rate have conveyed as much while she reported of that young lady. "She thinks me so deep."

It made the girl, who had not seen him, turn round; but with an immediate equal confidence. "And she thinks me, Davey, so good!"

Davey's eyes were only on Cissy, but Rosanna seemed to feel them on herself. "How you must have got mixed!" he exclaimed. "But your father has come for you," he then said to Rosanna, who had got up.

"Father has walked it?"—she was amazed.

"No, he's there in a hack to take you home—and too excited to come in."

Rosanna's surprise but grew. "Has anything happened——?"

"Wonders—I asked them. Mr. Betterman's sitting right up."

"Really improving——?" Then her mystification spread. "'Them,' you say?"

"Why his nurse, as I at least suppose her," said Davey, "is with him—apparently to give you the expert opinion."

"Of the fiend's recuperating?" Cissy cried with a wail. And then before her friend's bewilderment, "How dreadfully horrid!" she added.

"Whose nurse, please?" Rosanna asked of Davey.

"Why, hasn't he got a nurse?" Davey himself, as always, but desired lucidity. "She's doing her duty by him all the same!"

On which Cissy's young wit at once apprehended. "It's one of Mr. Betterman's taking a joy-ride in honour of his recovery! Did you ever hear anything so cool?"

She had appealed to her friends alike, but Rosanna, under the force of her suggestion, was already in advance. "Then father himself must be ill!" Miss Gaw had declared, moving rapidly to the quarter in which he so incongruously waited and leaving Davey to point a rapid moral for Cissy's benefit while this couple followed.

"If he is so upset that he hasn't been trusted alone I'll be hanged if I don't just see it!"

But the marvel was the way in which after an instant Cissy saw it too. "You mean because he can't stand Mr. Betterman's perhaps not dying?"

"Yes, dear ingenuous child—he has wanted so to see him out."

"Well then, isn't it what we're all wanting?"

"Most undoubtedly, pure pearl of penetration!" Davey returned as they went. "His pick-up will be a sell," he ruefully added; "even though it mayn't quite kill anyone of us but Mr. Gaw!"

BOOK SECOND

I

Graham's view of his case and of all his proprieties, from the moment of his arrival, was that he should hold himself without reserve at his uncle's immediate disposition, and even such talk as seemed indicated, during the forenoon, with Doctor Hatch and Miss Mumby, the nurse then in charge, did little to lighten for him the immense prescription of delicacy. What he learnt was far from disconcerting; the patient, aware of his presence, had shown for soothed, not for agitated; the drop of the tension of waiting had had the benign effect; he had repeated over to his attendant that now "the boy" was there, all would be for the best, and had asked also with soft iteration if he were having everything he wanted. The happy assurance of this right turn of their affair, so far as they had got, he was now quietly to enjoy: he was to rest two or three hours, and if possible to sleep, while Graham, on his side, sought a like remedy—after the full indulgence in which their meeting would take place. The excellent fact for "the boy," who was two-and-thirty years of age and who now quite felt as if during the last few weeks he had lived through a dozen more, was thus that he was doing his uncle good and that somehow, to complete that harmony, he might feel the operation of an equal virtue. At his invitation, at his decision, the idea of some such wondrous matter as this had of course presided—for waiting and obliging good, which one was simply to open one's heart or one's hand to, had struck him ever as so little of the common stuff of life that now, at closer range, it could but figure as still more prodigious. At the same time there was nothing he dreaded, by his very nature, more than a fond fatuity, and he had imposed on himself from the first to proceed at every step as if without consideration he might well be made an ass of. It was true that even such a danger as this presented its interest—the process to which he should yield would be without precedent for him, and his imagination, thank heaven, had curiosity in a large measure for its principle; he wouldn't rush into peril, however, and flattered himself that after all he should not recognise its symptoms too late.

What he said to himself just now on the spot was, at any rate, that he should probably have been more excited if he hadn't been so amused. To be amused to a high pitch while his nearest kinsman, apparently nursing, as he had been told, a benevolence, lay dying a few rooms off—let this impute levity to our young man only till we understand that his liability to recreation represented in him a function serious indeed. Everything played before him, everything his senses embraced; and since his landing in New York on the morning before this the play had been of a delightful violence. No slightest aspect or briefest moment of it but had held and, so to say, rewarded him: if he had come back at last for impressions, for emotions, for the sake of the rush upon him of the characteristic, these things he was getting in a measure beyond his dream. It was still beyond his dream that what everything merely seen from the window of his room meant to him during these first hours should move him first to a smile of such ecstasy, and then to such an inward consumption of his smile, as might have made of happiness a substance you could sweetly put under your tongue. He recognised—that was the secret, recognised wherever he looked—and knew that when, from far back, during his stretch of unbroken absence, he had still felt, and liked to feel, what air had originally breathed upon him, these piercing intensities of salience had really peopled the vision. He had much less remembered the actual than forecast the inevitable, and the huge involved necessity of its all showing as he found it seemed fairly to shout in his ear. He had brought with him a fine intention, one of the finest of which he was capable, and wasn't it, he put to himself, already working? Wasn't he gathering in a perfect bloom of freshness the fruit of his design rather to welcome the impression to extravagance, if need be, than to undervalue it by the breadth of a hair? Inexpert he couldn't help being, but too estranged to melt again at whatever touch might make him, that he'd be hanged if he couldn't help, since what was the great thing again but to hold up one's face to any drizzle of light?

There it was, the light, in a mist of silver, even as he took in the testimony of his cool bedimmed room, where the air was toned by the closing of the great green shutters. It was ample and elegant, of an American elegance, which was so unlike any other, and so still more unlike any lapse of it, ever met by him, that some of its material terms and items held him as in rapt contemplation; what he had wanted, even to intensity, being that things should prove different, should positively glare with opposition—there would be no fun at all were they only imperfectly like, as that wouldn't in the least mean character. Their character might be if it would in their consistently having none—than which deficiency nothing was more possible; but he should have to decline to be charmed by unsuccessful attempts at sorts of expression he had elsewhere known more or less happily achieved. This particular disappointment indeed he was clearly not in for, since what could at once be more interesting than thus to note that the range and scale kept all their parts together, that each object or effect disowned connections, as he at least had all his life felt connections, and that his cherished hope of the fresh start and the broken link would have its measure filled to the brim. There was an American way for a room to be a room, a table a table, a chair a chair and a book a book—let alone a picture on a wall a picture, and a cold gush of water in a bath of a hot morning a promise of purification; and of this license all about him, in fine, he beheld the refreshing riot.

It cast on him for the time a spell; he moved about with soft steps and long pauses, staring out between the slats of the shutters, which he gently worked by their attachment, and then again living, with a subtlety of sense that it was a pleasure to exercise, into the conditions represented by whatever more nearly pressed. It was not only that the process of assimilation, unlike any other he had yet been engaged in, might stop short, to disaster, if he so much as breathed too hard; but that if he made the sufficient surrender he might absolutely himself be assimilated—and that was truly an experience he couldn't but want to have. The great thing he held on to withal was a decent delicacy, a dread of appearing even to himself to take big things for granted. This of itself was restrictive as to freedoms—it stayed familiarities, it kept uncertainty cool; for after all what had his uncle done but cause to be conveyed to him across the sea the bare wish that he should come? He had straightway come in consequence, but on no explanation and for no signified reward; he had come simply to avoid a possible ugliness in his not coming. Generally addicted to such avoidances, to which it indeed seemed to him that the quest of beauty was too often reduced, he had found his reason sufficient until the present hour, when it was as if all reasons, all of his own at least, had suddenly abandoned him, to the effect of his being surrounded only with those of others, of which he was up to now ignorant, but which somehow hung about the large still place, somehow stiffened the vague summer Sunday and twinkled in the universal cleanness, a real revelation to him of that possible immunity in things. He might have been sent for merely to be blown up for the relief of the old man's mind on the perversity and futility of his past. There was before him at all events no gage of anything else, no intimation other than his having been, materially speaking, preceded by preparations, to make him throw himself on a survey of prospects. What was before him at the least was a "big" experience—even to have come but to be cursed and dismissed would really be a bigger thing than yet had befallen him. Not the form but the fact of the experience accordingly mattered—so that wasn't it there to a fine intensity by his standing ever and anon at the closed door of his room and feeling that with his ear intent enough he could catch the pressure on the other side?

The pressure was at last unmistakeable, we note, in the form of Miss Mumby, who, having gently tapped, appeared there both to remark to him that he must surely at last want his luncheon and to affect him afresh and in the supreme degree as a vessel of the American want of correspondence. Miss Mumby was ample, genial, familiar and more radiantly clean than he had ever known any vessel, to whatever purpose destined; also the number of things she took for granted—if it was a question of that; or perhaps rather the number of things of which she didn't doubt and was incapable of doubting, surrounded her together with a kind of dazzling aura, a special radiance of disconnection. She wore a beautiful white dress, and he scarce knew what apparatus of spotless apron and cuffs and floating streamers to match; yet she could only again report to him of the impression that had most jumped at him from the moment of his arrival. He saw in a moment that any difficulty on his part of beginning with her at some point in social space, so to say, at which he had never begun before with any such person, would count for nothing in face of her own perfect power to begin. The faculty of beginning would be in truth Miss Mumby's very genius, and in the moment of his apprehension of this he felt too—he had in fact already felt it at their first meeting—how little his pale old postulates as to persons being "such" might henceforth claim to serve him. What person met by him during his thirty hours in American air was "such" again as any other partaker of contact had appeared or proved, no matter where, before his entering it? What person had not at once so struck him in the light of violent repudiation of type, as he might save for his sensibility have imputed type, that nothing else in the case seemed predicable? He might have seen Miss Mumby, he was presently to recognise, in the light of a youngish mother perhaps, a sister, a cousin, a friend, even a possible bride, for these were aspects independent of type and boundlessly free of range; but a "trained nurse" was a trained nurse, and that was a category of the most evolved—in spite of which what category in all the world could have lifted its head in Miss Mumby's aura?

Still, she might have been a pleasant cousin, a first cousin, the very first a man had ever had and not in any degree "removed," while she thus proclaimed the cheerful ease of everything and everyone, her own above all, and made him yield on the spot to her lightest intimation. He couldn't possibly have held off from her in any way, and if this was in part because he always collapsed at a touch before nurses, it was at the same time not at all the nurse in her that now so affected him, but the incalculable other force, of which he had had no experience and which was apparently that of the familiar in tone and manner. He had known, of a truth, familiarity greater—much greater, but only with greater occasions and supports for it; whereas on Miss Mumby's part it seemed independent of any or of every motive. He could scarce have said in fine, as he followed her to their repast, at which he foresaw in an instant that they were both to sit down, whether it more alarmed or just more coolingly enveloped him; his slight first bewilderment at any rate had dropped—he had already forgotten the moment wasted two or three hours before in wondering, with his sense of having known Nurses who gloried in their title, how his dear second father, for instance, would in his final extremity have liked the ministrations of a Miss. By those he himself presently enjoyed in such different conditions, that is from across the table, bare and polished and ever so delicately charged, of the big dusky, yet just a little breezy dining-room, by those in short under which every association he had ever had with anything crashed down to pile itself as so much more tinklingly shivered glass at Miss Mumby's feet, that sort of question was left far behind—and doubtless would have been so even if the appeal of the particular refection served to them had alone had the case in hand. "I'm going to make you like our food, so you might as well begin at once," his companion had announced; and he felt it on the spot as scarce less than delicious that this element too should play, and with such fineness, into that harmony of the amusingly exotic which was, under his benediction, working its will on him. "Oh yes," she rejoiced in answer to his exhibition of the degree in which what was before him did stir again to sweetness a chord of memory, "oh yes, food's a great tie, it's like language—you can always understand your own, whereas in Europe I had to learn about six others."

Miss Mumby had been to Europe, and he saw soon enough how there was nowhere one could say she hadn't gone and nothing one could say she hadn't done—one's perception could bear only on what she hadn't become; so that, as he thus perceived, though she might have affected Europe even as she was now affecting him, she was a pure negation of its having affected herself, unless perhaps by adding to her power to make him feel how little he could impose on her. She knew all about his references while he only missed hers, and that gave her a tremendous advantage—or would have done so hadn't she been too much his cousin to take it. He at any rate recognised in a moment that the so many things she had had to learn to understand over there were not forms of speech but alimentary systems—as to which view he quite agreed with her that the element of the native was equally rooted in both supports of life. This gave her of course her opportunity of remarking that she had indeed made for the assimilation of "his" cookery—whichever of the varieties his had most been—scarce less an effort than she must confess now to making for that of his terms of utterance; where she had at once again the triumph that he was nowhere, by his own reasoning, if he pretended to an affinity with the nice things they were now eating and yet stood off from the other ground. "Oh I understand you, which appears to be so much more than you do me!" he laughed; "but am I really committed to everything because I'm committed, in the degree you see me, oh yes, to waffles and maple syrup, followed, and on such a scale, by melons and ice-cream? You see in the one case I have but to take in, and in the other have to give out: so can't I have, in a quiet way the American palate without emitting the American sounds?" Thus was he on the straightest flattest level with Miss Mumby—it stretched, to his imagination, without a break, a rise or a fall, à perte de vue; and thus was it already attested that the Miss Mumbys (for it was evident there would be thousands of them) were in society, or were, at any rate, not out of it, society thereby becoming clearly colossal. What was it, moreover, but the best society—as who should say anywhere—when his companion made the bright point that if anything had to do with sounds the palate did? returning with it also to the one already made, her due warning that she wasn't going to have him not like everything. "But I do, I do, I do," he declared, with his mouth full of a seasoned and sweetened, a soft, substantial coldness and richness that were at once the revelation of a world and the consecration of a fate; "I revel in everything, I already wallow, behold: I move as in a dream, I assure you, and I only fear to wake up."

"Well, I don't know as I want you to wallow, and I certainly don't want you to fear—though you'll wake up soon enough, I guess," his entertainer continued, "whatever you do. You'll wake up to some of our realities, and—well, we won't want anything better for you: will we. Doctor?" Miss Mumby freely proceeded on their being joined for a moment by the friendly physician who had greeted our young man, on his uncle's behalf, at his hour of arrival, and who, having been again for awhile with their interesting host, had left the second nurse in charge and was about to be off to other cares. "I'm saying to Mr. Fielder that he's got to wake up to some pretty big things," she explained to Doctor Hatch, whom it struck Gray she addressed rather as he had heard doctors address nurses than nurses doctors; a fact contributing offhand to his awareness, already definite, that everyone addressed everyone as he had nowhere yet heard the address perpetrated, and that so, evidently, there were questions connected with it that must yet wait over. It was pertinently to be felt furthermore that Doctor Hatch's own freedom, which also had quite its own rare freshness of note, shared in the general property of the whole appeal to him, the appeal of the very form of the great sideboard, the very "school," though yet unrecognised by him, of the pictures hung about, the very look and dress, the apparently odd identity, of the selected and arrayed volumes in a bookcase charged with ornament and occupying the place of highest dignity in the room, to take his situation for guaranteed as it was surely not common for earthly situations to be. This he could feel, however, without knowing, to any great purpose, what it really meant; and he was afterwards even scarce to know what had further taken place, under Doctor Hatch's blessing, before he passed out of the house to the verandah and the grounds, as their limitations of reach didn't prevent their being called, and gave himself up to inquiries now permittedly direct.

Doctor Hatch's message or momentary act of quaint bright presence came to him thus, on the verandah, while shining expanses opened, as an invitation to some extraordinary confidence, some flight of optimism without a precedent, as a positive hint in fine that it depended on himself alone to step straight into the chariot of the sun, which on his mere nod would conveniently descend there to the edge of the piazza, and whirl away for increase of acquaintance with the time, as it was obviously going to be, of his life. This was but his reading indeed of the funny terms in which the delightful man put it to him that he seemed by his happy advent to have brought on for his uncle a prospect, a rise of pitch, not dissimilar from that sort of vision; by so high a tide of ease had the sick room above been flooded, and such a lot of good would clearly await the patient from seeing him after a little and at the perfect proper moment. It was to be that of Mr. Betterman's competent choice: he lay there as just for the foretaste of it, which was wholly tranquillising, and could be trusted—what else did doctor and nurse engage for?—to know the psychological hour on its striking and then, to complete felicity, have his visitor introduced. His present mere assurance of the visitor was in short so agreeable to him, and by the same token to Doctor Hatch himself—which was above all what the latter had conveyed—that the implication of the agreeable to Graham in return might fairly have been some imponderable yet ever so sensible tissue, voluminous interwoven gold and silver, flung as a mantle over his shoulders while he went. Gray had never felt around him any like envelope whatever; so that on his looking forth at all the candid clearness—which struck him too, ever so amusingly, as even more candid when occasionally and aggressively, that is residentially, obstructed than when not—what he inwardly and fantastically compared it to was some presented quarto page, vast and fair, ever so distinctly printed and ever so unexpectedly vignetted, of a volume of which the leaves would be turned for him one by one and with no more trouble on his own part than when a friendly service beside him at the piano, where he so often sat, relieved him, from sheet to sheet, of touching his score.

Wasn't he thus now again "playing," as it had been a lifelong resource to him to play in that other posture?—a question promoted by the way the composition suddenly broke into the vividest illustrational figure, that of a little man encountered on one of his turns of the verandah and who, affecting him at first as a small waiting and watching, an almost crouching gnome, the neat domestic goblin of some old Germanic, some harmonised, familiarised legend, sat and stared at him from the depths of an arrested rocking-chair after a fashion nothing up to then had led him to preconceive. This was a different note from any yet, a queer, sharp, hard particle in all the softness; and it was sensible too, oddly enough, that the small force of their concussion but grew with its coming over him the next moment that he simply had before him Rosanna Gaw's prodigious parent. Of course it was Mr. Gaw, whom he had never seen, and of whom Rosanna in the old time had so little talked; her mother alone had talked of him in those days, and to his own mother only—with whom Gray had indeed himself afterwards talked not a little; but the intensity of the certitude came not so much by any plain as by quite the most roundabout presumption, the fact of his always having felt that she required some strange accounting for, and that here was the requirement met by just the ripest revelation. She had been involved in something, produced by something, intimately pressing upon her and yet as different as possible from herself; and here was the concentrated difference—which showed him too, with each lapsing second, its quality of pressure. Abel Gaw struck him in this light as very finely blanched, as somehow squeezed together by the operation of an inward energy or necessity, and as animated at the same time by the conviction that, should he sit there long enough and still enough, the young man from Europe, known to be on the premises, might finally reward his curiosity. Mr. Gaw was curiosity embodied—Gray was by the end of the minute entirely assured of that; it in fact quite seemed to him that he had never yet in all his life caught the prying passion so shamelessly in the act. Shamelessly, he was afterwards to remember having explained to himself, because his sense of the reach of the sharp eyes in the small white face, and of their not giving way for a moment before his own, suggested to him, even if he could scarce have said why to that extent, the act of listening at the door, at the very keyhole, of a room, combined with the attempt to make it good under sudden detection.

So it was, at any rate, that our speculative friend, the impression of the next turn of the case aiding, figured the extension, without forms, without the shade of a form, of their unmitigated mutual glare. The initiation of this exchange by the little old gentleman in the chair, who gave for so long no sign of moving or speaking, couldn't but practically determine in Graham's own face some resistance to the purpose exhibited and for which it was clear no apology impended. By the time he had recognised that his presence was in question for Mr. Gaw with such an intensity as it had never otherwise, he felt, had the benefit of, however briefly, save under some offered gage or bribe, he had also made out that no "form" would survive for twenty seconds in any close relation with the personage, and that if ever he had himself known curiosity as to what might happen when manners were consistently enough ignored it was a point on which he should at once be enlightened. His fellow-visitor, of whose being there Doctor Hatch and Miss Mumby were presumably unaware, continued to ignore everything but the opportunity he enjoyed and the certainty that Graham would contribute to it—which certainty made in fact his profit. The profit, that is, couldn't possibly fail unless Gray should turn his back and walk off; which was of course possible, but would then saddle Gray himself with the repudiation of forms: so that—yes, infallibly—in proportion as the young man had to be commonly civil would Mr. Gaw's perhaps unholy satisfaction of it be able to prevail. The young man had taken it home that he couldn't simply stare long enough for successful defence by the time that, presently moving nearer, he uttered his adversary's name with no intimation of a doubt. Mr. Gaw failed. Gray was afterwards to inform Rosanna, "to so much as take this up"; he was left with everything on his hands but the character of his identity, the indications of his face, the betrayals he should so much less succeed in suppressing than his adversary would succeed in reading them. The figure presented hadn't stirred from his posture otherwise than by a motion of eye just perceptible as Graham moved; it was drinking him in, our hero felt, and by this treatment of the full cup, continuously applied to the lips, stillness was of course imposed. It didn't again so much as recognise, by any sign given, Graham's remark that an acquaintance with Miss Gaw from of old involved naturally their acquaintance: there was no question of Miss Gaw, her friend found himself after another minute divining, as there was none of objects or appearances immediately there about them; the question was of something a thousand times more relevant and present, of something the interloper's silence, far more than breathed words could have done, represented the fond hope of mastering.

Graham thus held already, by the old man's conviction, a secret of high value, yet which, with the occasion stretched a little, would practically be at his service—so much as that at least, with the passage of another moment, he had concluded to; and all the while, in the absurdest way, without his guessing, without his at all measuring, his secret himself. Mr. Gaw fairly made him want to—want, that is, as a preliminary or a stopgap, to guess what it had best, most desirably and most effectively, become; for shouldn't he positively like to have something of the sort in order just to disoblige this gentleman? Strange enough how it came to him at once as a result of the father's refusal of attention to any connection he might have glanced at with the daughter, strange enough how it came to him, under the first flush of heat he had known since his arrival, that two could play at such a game and that if Rosanna's interests were to be so slighted her relative himself should miss even the minimum of application as one of them. "He must have wanted to know, he must have wanted to know——!" this young woman was on a later day to have begun to explain; without going on, however, since by that time Gray had rather made out, the still greater rush of his impressions helping, the truth of Mr. Gaw's desire. It bore, that appetite, upon a single point and, daughter or no daughter, on nothing else in the world—the question of what Gray's "interest," in the light of his uncle's intentions, might size up to; those intentions having, to the Gaw imagination, been of course apprehensible on the spot, and within the few hours that had lapsed, by a nephew even of but rudimentary mind. At the present hour meanwhile, short of the miracle which our friend's counter-scrutiny alone could have brought about, there worked for this young intelligence, and with no small sharpness, the fact itself of such a revealed relation to the ebb of their host's life—upon which was thrust the appearance of its being, watch in hand, all impatiently, or in other words all offensively, timed. The very air at this instant tasted to Gray, quite as if something under his tongue had suddenly turned from the sweet to the appreciably sour, of an assumption diffused through it in respect to the rudiments of mind. He was afterwards to date the breaking-in upon him of the general measure of the smallest vision of business a young man might self-respectingly confess to from Mr. Gaw's extraordinary tacit "Oh come, you can't fool me: don't I know you know what I want to know—don't I know what it must mean for you to have been here since six o'clock this morning with nothing whatever else to do than just to take it in?"

That was it—Gray was to have taken in the more or less definite value involved for him in his uncle's supposedly near extinction, and was to be capable, if not of expressing it on the spot in the only terms in which a value of any sort could exist for this worthy, yet still at least of liability to such a betrayal as would yield him something to conclude upon. It was only afterwards, once more, that our young man was to master the logic of the conclusive as it prevailed for Mr. Gaw; what concerned his curiosity was to settle whether or no they were in presence together of a really big fact—distinguishing as the Gaw mind did among such dimensions and addressed as it essentially was to a special question—a question as yet unrecognised by Gray. He was subsequently to have his friend's word to go upon—when, in the extraordinary light of Rosanna's explication, he read clear what he had been able on the verandah but half to glimmer out: the queer truth of Mr. Gaw's hunger to learn to what extent he had anciently, to what degree he had irremediably, ruined his whilom associate. He didn't know—so strange was it, at the time and since, that, thanks to the way Mr. Betterman had himself fixed things, he couldn't be sure; but what he wanted, and what he hung about so displeasingly to sniff up the least stray sign of, was a confirmation of his belief that Doctor Hatch's and Miss Mumby's patient had never really recovered from the wound of years before. They were nursing him now for another complaint altogether, this one admittedly such as must, with but the scantest further reprieve, dispose of him; whereas doubts were deep, as Mr. Gaw at least entertained them, as to whether the damage he supposed his own just resentment to have inflicted when propriety and opportunity combined to inspire him was amenable even to nursing the most expert or to medication the most subtle. These mysteries of calculation were of course impenetrable to Gray during the moments at which we see him so almost indescribably exposed at once and reinforced; but the effect of the sharper and sharper sense as of a spring pressed by his companion was that a whole consciousness suddenly welled up in him and that within a few more seconds he had become aware of a need absolutely adverse to any trap that might be laid for his candour. He could as little have then said why as he could vividly have phrased it under the knowledge to come, but that his mute interlocutor desired somehow their association in a judgment of what his uncle was "worth," a judgment from which a comparatively conceited nephew might receive an incidental lesson, played through him as a certitude and produced quite another inclination. That recognition of the pleasant on which he had been floating affirmed itself as in the very face of so embodied a pretension to affirm the direct opposite, to thrust up at him in fine a horrid contradiction—a contradiction which he next heard himself take, after the happiest fashion, the straightest way to rebut.

"I'm sure you'll be glad to know that I seem to be doing my uncle a tremendous lot of good. They tell me I'm really bringing him round"—and Graham smiled down at little blanched Mr. Gaw. "I don't despair at all of his getting much better."

It was on this that for the first time Mr. Gaw became articulate. "Better——?" he strangely quavered, and as if his very eyes questioned such conscious flippancy.

"Why yes—through cheering him up. He takes, I gather," Gray went on, "as much pleasure as I do——!" His assurance, however, had within the minute dropped a little—the effect of it might really reach, he apprehended, beyond his idea. The old man had been odd enough, but now of a sudden he looked sick, and that one couldn't desire.

"'Pleasure'——?" he was nevertheless able to echo; while it struck Gray that no sound so weak had ever been so sharp, or none so sharp ever so weak. "Pleasure in dying——?" Mr. Gaw asked in this flatness of doubt.

"But my dear sir," said Gray, his impulse to be jaunty still nevertheless holding out a little, "but, my dear sir, if, as it strikes me, he isn't dying——?"

"Oh twaddle!" snapped Mr. Gaw with the emphasis of his glare—shifted a moment, Gray next saw, to a new object in range. Gray felt himself even before turning for it rejoined by Miss Mumby, who, rounding the corner of the house, had paused as in presence of an odd conjunction; not made the less odd moreover by Mr. Gaw's instant appeal to her. "You think he ain't then going to——?"

He had to leave it at that, but Miss Mumby supplied, with the loudest confidence, what appeared to be wanted. "He ain't going to get better? Oh we hope so!" she declared to Graham's delight.

It helped him to contribute in his own way. "Mr. Gaw's surprise seems for his holding out!"

"Oh I guess he'll hold out," Miss Mumby was pleased to say.

"Then if he ain't dying what's the fuss about?" Mr. Gaw wanted to know.

"Why there ain't any fuss—but what you seem to make," Miss Mumby could quite assure him.

"Oh well, if you answer for it——!" He got up on this, though with an alertness that, to Gray's sense, didn't work quite truly, and stood an instant looking from one of his companions to the other, while our young man's eyes, for their part, put a question to Miss Mumby's—a question which, articulated, would have had the sense of "What on earth's the matter with him?" There seemed no knowing how Mr. Gaw would take things—as Miss Mumby, for that matter, appeared also at once to reflect.

"We're sure enough not to want to have you sick too," she declared indeed with more cheer than apprehension; to which she added, however, to cover all the ground, "You just leave Mr. Betterman to us and take care of yourself. We never say die and we won't have you say it—either about him or anyone else, Mr. Gaw."

This gentleman, so addressed, straightened and cleared himself in such a manner as to show that he saw, for the moment, Miss Mumby's point; which he then, a wondrous small concentration of studied blankness—studied, that is, his companions were afterwards both to show they had felt—commemorated his appreciation of in a tiny, yet triumphant, "Well, that's all right!"

"It ain't so right but what I'm going to see you home," Miss Mumby returned with authority; adding, however, for Graham's benefit, that she had come down to tell him his uncle was now ready. "You just go right up—you'll find Miss Goodenough there. And you'll see for yourself," she said, "how fresh he is!"

"Thanks—that will be beautiful!" Gray brightly responded; but with his eyes on Mr. Gaw, whom of a sudden, somehow, he didn't like to leave.

It at any rate determined on the little man's part a surprised inquiry. "Then you haven't seen him yet—with your grand account of him?"

"No—but the account," Gray smiled, "has an authority beyond mine. Besides," he kept on after this gallant reference, "I feel what I shall do for him."

"Oh they'll have great times!"—Miss Mumby, with an arm at the old man's service, bravely guaranteed it. But she also admonished Graham: "Don't keep him waiting, and mind what Miss Goodenough tells you! So now, Mr. Gaw—you're to mind me!" she concluded; while this subject of her more extemporised attention so far complied as slowly to face with her in the direction of the other house. Gray wondered about him, but immensely trusted Miss Mumby, and only watched till he saw them step off together to the lawn, Mr. Gaw independent of support, with something in his consciously stiffened even if not painfully assumed little air, as noted thus from behind, that quite warranted his protectress. Seen that way, yes, he was a tremendous little person; and Gray, excited, immensely readvised and turning accordingly to his own business, felt the assault of impressions fairly shake him as he went—shake him though it apparently seemed most capable of doing but to the effect of hilarity.

II

Whether or no by its so different appearance from that of Mr. Gaw, the figure propped on pillows in the vast cool room and lighted in such a way that the clear deepening west seemed to flush toward it, through a wide high window, in the interest of its full effect, impressed our young man as massive and expansive, as of a beautiful bland dignity indeed—though emulating Rosanna's relative, he was at first to gather, by a perfect readiness to stare rather than speak. Miss Goodenough had hovered a little, for full assurance, but then had thrown off with a timbre of voice never yet used for Gray's own ear in any sick room, "Well, I guess you won't come to blows!" and had left them face to face—besides leaving the air quickened by the freedom of her humour. They were face to face for the time across an interval which, to do her justice, she had not taken upon herself to deal with directly; this in spite of Gray's apprehension at the end of a minute that she might, by the touch of her hand or the pitch of her spirit, push him further forward than he had immediately judged decent to advance. He had stopped at a certain distance from the great grave bed, stopped really for consideration and deference, or through the instinct of submitting himself first of all to approval, or at least to encouragement; the space, not great enough for reluctance and not small enough for presumption, showed him ready to obey any sign his uncle should make. Mr. Betterman struck him, in this high quietude of contemplation, much less as formidable than as mildly and touchingly august; he had not supposed him, he became suddenly aware, so great a person—a presence like that of some weary veteran of affairs, one of the admittedly eminent whose last words would be expected to figure in history. The large fair face, rather square than heavy, was neither clouded nor ravaged, but finely serene; the silver-coloured hair seemed to bind the broad high brow as with a band of splendid silk, while the eyes rested on Gray with an air of acceptance beyond attestation by the mere play of cheer or the comparative gloom of relief.

"Ah le beau type, le beau type!" was during these instants the visitor's inward comment breaking into one of the strange tongues that experience had appointed him privately to use, in many a case, for the appropriation of aspects and appearances. It was not till afterwards that he happened to learn how his uncle had been capable, two or three hours before seeing him, of offering cheek and chin to the deft ministration of a barber, a fact highly illuminating, though by that time the gathered lights were thick. What the patient owed on the spot to the sacrifice, he easily made out, was that look as of the last refinement of preparation, that positive splendour of the immaculate, which was really, on one's taking it all in, but part of an earnest recognition of his guest's own dignity. The grave beauty of the personal presence, the vague anticipation as of something that might go on to be commemorated for its example, the great pure fragrant room, bathed in the tempered glow of the afternoon's end, the general lucidity and tranquillity and security of the whole presented case, begot in fine, on our young friend's part, an extraordinary sense that as he himself was important enough to be on show, so these peculiar perfections that met him were but so many virtual honours rendered and signs of the high level to which he had mounted. On show, yes—that was it, and more wonderfully than could be said: Gray was sure after a little of how right he was to stand off as yet in any interest of his own significance that might be involved. There was clearly something his uncle so wanted him to be that he should run no possible danger of being it to excess, and that if he might only there and then grasp it he would ask but to proceed, for decency's sake, according to his lights: just as so short a time before a like force of suggestion had played upon him from Mr. Gaw—each of these appeals clothing him in its own way with such an oddity of pertinence, such a bristling set of attributes. This wait of the parties to the present one for articulate expression, on either side, of whatever it was that might most concern them together, promised also to last as the tension had lasted down on the verandah, and would perhaps indeed have drawn itself further out if Gray hadn't broken where he stood into a cry of admiration—since it could scarcely be called less—that blew to the winds every fear of overstepping.

"It's really worth one's coming so far, uncle, if you don't mind my saying so—it's really worth a great pilgrimage to see anything so splendid."

The old man heard, clearly, as by some process that was still deeply active; and then after a pause that represented, Gray was sure, no failure at all of perception, but only the wide embrace of a possibility of pleasure, sounded bravely back: "Does it come up to what you've seen?"

It was Gray rather who was for a moment mystified—though only to further spontaneity when he had caught the sense of the question. "Oh, you come up to everything—by which I mean, if I may, that nothing comes up to you! I mean, if I may," he smiled, "that you yourself, uncle, affect me as the biggest and most native American impression that I can possibly be exposed to."

"Well," said Mr. Betterman, and again as with a fond deliberation, "what I'm going to like, I see, is to listen to the way you talk. That," he added with his soft distinctness, a singleness of note somehow for the many things meant, "that, I guess, is about what I most wanted you to come for. Unless it be to look at you too. I like to look right at you."

"Well," Gray harmoniously laughed again, "if even that can give you pleasure——!" He stood as for inspection, easily awkward, pleasantly loose, holding up his head as if to make the most of no great stature. "I've never been so sorry that there isn't more of me."

The fine old eyes on the pillow kept steadily taking him in; he could quite see that he happened to be, as he might have called it, right; and though he had never felt himself, within his years, extraordinarily or excitingly wrong, so that this felicity might have turned rather flat for him, there was still matter for emotion, for the immediate throb and thrill, in finding success so crown him. He had been spared, thank goodness, any positive shame, but had never known his brow brushed or so much as tickled by the laurel or the bay. "Does it mean," he might have murmured to himself, "the strangest shift of standards?"—but his uncle had meanwhile spoken. "Well, there's all of you I'm going to want. And there must be more of you than I see. Because you are different," Mr. Betterman considered.

"But different from what?" Truly was Gray interested to know.

It took Mr. Betterman a moment to say, but he seemed to convey that it might have been guessed. "From what you'd have been if you had come."

The young man was indeed drawn in. "If I had come years ago? Well, perhaps," he so far happily agreed—"for I've often thought of that myself. Only, you see," he laughed, "I'm different from that too. I mean from what I was when I didn't come."

Mr. Betterman looked at it quietly. "You're different in the sense that you're older—and you seem to me rather older than I supposed. All the better, all the better," he continued to make out. "You're the same person I didn't tempt, the same person I couldn't—that time when I tried. I see you are, I see what you are."

"You see terribly much, sir, for the few minutes!" smiled Gray.

"Oh when I want to see——!" the old man comfortably enough sighed. "I take you in, I take you in; though I grant that I don't quite see how you can understand. Still," he pursued, "there are things for you to tell me. You're different from anything, and if we had time for particulars I should like to know a little how you've kept so. I was afraid you wouldn't turn out perhaps so thoroughly the sort of thing I liked to think—for I hadn't much more to go upon than what she said, you know. However," Mr. Betterman wound up as with due comfort, "it's by what she says that I've gone—and I want her to know that I don't feel fooled."

If Gray's wonderment could have been said to rest anywhere, hour after hour, long enough to be detected in the act, the detaining question would have been more than any other perhaps that of whether Miss Gaw would "come up." Now that she did so however, in this quiet way, it had no strangeness that his being at once glad couldn't make but a mouthful of; and the recent interest of what she had lately written to him was as nothing to the interest of her becoming personally his uncle's theme. With which, at the same time, it was pleasanter to him than anything else to speak of her himself. "If you allude to Rosanna Gaw you'll no doubt understand how tremendously I want to see her."

The sick man waited a little—but not, it quite seemed, from lack of understanding. "She wants tremendously to see you, Graham. You might know that of course from her going to work so." Then again he gathered his thoughts and again after a little went on. "She had a good idea, and I love her for it; but I'm afraid my own hasn't been so very much to give her the satisfaction. I've wanted it myself, and—well, here I am getting it from you. Yes," he kept up, his eyes never moving from his nephew, "you couldn't give me more if you had tried, from so far back, on purpose. But I can't tell you half!" He exhaled a long breath—he was a little spent. "You tell me. You tell me."

"I'm tiring you, sir," Gray said.

"Not by letting me see—you'd only tire me if you didn't." Then for the first time his eyes glanced about. "Haven't they put a place for you to sit? Perhaps they knew," he suggested, while Gray reached out for a chair, "perhaps they knew just how I'd want to see you. There seems nothing they don't know," he contentedly threw off again.

Gray had his chair before him, his hands on the back tilting it a little. "They're extraordinary. I've never seen anything like them. They help me tremendously," he cheerfully confessed.

Mr. Betterman, at this, seemed to wonder. "Why, have you difficulties?"

"Well," said Gray, still with his chair, "you say I'm different—if you mean it for my being alien from what I feel surrounding me. But if you knew how funny all that seems to me," he laughed, "you'd understand that I clutch at protection."

"'Funny'?"—his host was clearly interested, without offence, in the term.

"Well," Gray explained, gently shaking his chair-back, "when one simply sees that nothing of one's former experience serves, and that one doesn't know anything about anything——!"

More than ever at this his uncle's look might have covered him. "Anything round here—no! That's it, that's it," the old man blandly repeated. "That's just the way—I mean the way I hoped. She knows you don't know—and doesn't want you to either. But put down your chair," he said; and then after, when Gray, instantly and delicately complying, had placed the precious article with every precaution back where it had stood: "Sit down here on the bed. There's margin."

"Yes," smiled Gray, doing with all consideration as he was told, "you don't seem anywhere very much à l'étroit."

"I presume," his uncle returned, "you know French thoroughly."

Gray confessed to the complication. "Of course when one has heard it almost from the cradle——!"

"And the other tongues too?"

He seemed to wonder if, for his advantage, he mightn't deny them. "Oh a couple of others. In the countries there they come easy."

"Well, they wouldn't have come easy here—and I guess nothing else would; I mean of the things we principally grow. And I won't have you tell me," Mr. Betterman said, "that if you had taken that old chance they might have done so. We don't know anything about it, and at any rate it would have spoiled you. I mean for what you are."

"Oh," returned Gray, on the bed, but pressing lightly, "oh what I 'am'——!"

"My point isn't so much for what you are as for what you're not. So I won't have anything else; I mean I won't have you but as I want you," his host explained. "I want you just this way."

With which, while the young man kept his arms folded and his hands tucked away as for compression of his personal extent and weight, they exchanged, at their close range, the most lingering look yet. Extraordinary to him, in the gravity of this relation, his deeper impression of something beautiful and spreadingly clear—very much as if the wide window and the quiet clean sea and the finer sunset light had all had, for assistance and benediction, their word to say to it. They seemed to combine most to remark together "What an exquisite person is your uncle!" This is what he had for the minute the sense of taking from them, and the expression of his assent to it was in the tone of his next rejoinder. "If I could only know what it is you'd most like——!"

"Never mind what I most like—only tell me, only tell me," his companion again said: "You can't say anything that won't absolutely suit me; in fact I defy you to, though you mayn't at all see why that's the case. I've got you—without a flaw. So!" Mr. Betterman triumphantly breathed. Gray's sense was by this time of his being examined and appraised as never in his life before—very much as in the exposed state of an important "piece," an object of value picked, for finer estimation, from under containing glass. There was nothing then but to face it, unless perhaps also to take a certain comfort in his being, as he might feel, practically clean and in condition. That such an hour had its meaning, and that the meaning might be great for him, this of course surged softly in, more and more, from every point of the circle that held him; but with the consciousness making also more at each moment for an uplifting, a fantastic freedom, a sort of sublime simplification, in which nothing seemed to depend on him or to have at any time so depended. He was really face to face thus with bright immensities, and the handsome old presence from which, after a further moment, a hand had reached forth a little to take his own, guaranteed by the quietest of gestures at once their truth and the irrelevance, as he could only feel it, of their scale. Cool and not weak, to his responsive grasp, this retaining force, to which strength was added by what next came. "It's not for myself, it's not for myself—I mean your being as I say. What do I matter now except to have recognised it? No, Graham—it's in another connection." Was the connection then with Rosanna? Graham had time to wonder, and even to think what a big thing this might make of it, before his uncle brought out: "It's for the world."

"The world?"—Gray's vagueness again reigned.

"Well, our great public."

"Oh your great public——!"

The exclamation, the cry of alarm, even if also of amusement in face of such a connection as that, quickened for an instant the good touch of the cool hand. "That's the way I like you to sound. It's the way she told me you would—I mean that would be natural to you. And it's precisely why—being the awful great public it is—we require the difference that you'll make. So you see you're for our people."

Poor Graham's eyes widened. "I shall make a difference for your people——?"

But his uncle serenely went on. "Don't think you know them yet, or what it's like over here at all. You may think so and feel you're prepared. But you don't know till you've had the whole thing up against you."

"May I ask, sir," Gray smiled, "what you're talking about?"

His host met his eyes on it, but let it drop. "You'll see soon enough for yourself. Don't mind what I say. That isn't the thing for you now—it's all done. Only be true," said Mr. Betterman. "You are and, as I've said, can't help yourself." With which he relapsed again to one of his good conclusions. "And after all don't mind the public either."

"Oh," returned Gray, "all great publics are awful."

"Ah no no—I won't have that. Perhaps they may be, but the trouble we're concerned with is about ours—and about some other things too." Gray felt in the hand's tenure a small emphasizing lift of the arm, while the head moved a little as off toward the world they spoke of—which amounted for our young man, however, but to a glance at all the outside harmony and prosperity, bathed as these now seemed in the colour of the flushed sky. Absurd altogether that he should be in any way enlisted against such things. His entertainer, all the same, continued to see the reference and to point it. "The enormous preponderance of money. Money is their life."

"But surely even here it isn't everyone who has it. Also," he freely laughed, "isn't it a good thing to have?"

"A very good thing indeed." Then his uncle waited as in the longest inspection yet. "But you don't know anything about it."

"Not about large sums," Gray cheerfully admitted.

"I mean it has never been near you. That sticks out of you—the way it hasn't. I knew it couldn't have been—and then she told me she knew. I see you're a blank—and nobody here's a blank, not a creature I've ever touched. That's what I've wanted," the old man went on—"a perfect clean blank. I don't mean there aren't heaps of them that are damned fools, just as there are heaps of others, bigger heaps probably, that are damned knaves; except that mostly the knave is the biggest fool. But those are not blanks; they're full of the poison—without a blest other idea. Now you're the blank I want, if you follow—and yet you're not the blatant ass."

"I'm not sure I quite follow," Gray laughed, "but I'm very much obliged."

"Have you ever done three cents' worth of business?" Mr. Betterman judicially asked.

It helped our young man to some ease of delay. "Well, I'm afraid I can't claim to have had much business to do. Also you're wrong, sir," he added, "about my not being a blatant ass. Oh please understand that I am a blatant ass. Let there be no mistake about that," Gray touchingly pleaded.

"Yes—but not on the subject of anything but business."

"Well—no doubt on the subject of business more than on any other."

Still the good eyes rested. "Tell me one thing, other than that, for which you haven't at least some intelligence."

"Oh sir, there are no end of things, and it's odd one should have to prove that—though it would take me long. But I allow there's nothing I understand so little and like so little as the mystery of the 'market' and the hustle of any sort."

"You utterly loathe and abhor the hustle! That's what I blissfully want of you," said Mr. Betterman.

"You ask of me the declaration——?" Gray considered. "But how can I know, don't you see?—when I am such a blank, when I've never had three cents' worth of business, as you say, to transact?"

"The people who don't loathe it are always finding it somehow to do, even if preposterously for the most part, and dishonestly. Your case," Mr. Betterman reasoned, "is that you haven't a grain of the imagination of any such interest. If you had had," he wound up, "it would have stirred in you that first time."

Gray followed, as his kinsman called it, enough to be able to turn his memory a moment on this. "Yes, I think my imagination, small scrap of a thing as it was, did work then somehow against you."

"Which was exactly against business"—the old man easily made the point. "I was business. I've been business and nothing else in the world. I'm business at this moment still—because I can't be anything else. I mean I've such a head for it. So don't think you can put it on me that I haven't thought out what I'm doing to good purpose. I do what I do but too abominably well." With which he weakened for the first time to a faint smile. "It's none of your affair."

"Isn't it a little my affair," Gray as genially objected, "to be more touched than I can express by your attention to me—as well (if you'll let me say so) as rather astonished at it?" And then while his host took this without response, only engaged as to more entire repletion in the steady measure of him, he added further, even though aware in sounding it of the complacency or fatuity, of the particular absurdity, his question might have seemed to embody: "What in the world can I want but to meet you in every way?" His perception at last was full, the great strange sense of everything smote his eyes; so that without the force of his effort at the most general amenity possible his lids and his young lips might have convulsively closed. Even for his own ear "What indeed?" was thus the ironic implication—which he felt himself quite grimace to show he should have understood somebody else's temptation to make. Here, however, where his uncle's smile might pertinently have broadened, the graver blandness settled again, leaving him in face of it but the more awkwardly assured. He felt as if he couldn't say enough to abate the ugliness of that—and perhaps it even did come out to the fact of beauty that no profession of the decent could appear not to coincide with the very candour of the greedy. "I'm prepared for anything, yes—in the way of a huge inheritance": he didn't care if it might sound like that when he next went on, since what could he do but just melt to the whole benignity? "If I only understood what it is I can best do for you."

"Do? The question isn't of your doing, but simply of your being."

Gray cast about. "But don't they come to the same thing?"

"Well, I guess that for you they'll have to. Yes, sir," Gray answered—"but suppose I should say 'Don't keep insisting so on me'?" Then he had a romantic flight which was at the same time, for that moment at least, a sincere one. "I don't know that I came out so very much for myself."

"Well, if you didn't it only shows the more what you are"—Mr. Betterman made the point promptly. "It shows you've got the kind of imagination that has nothing to do with the kind I so perfectly see you haven't. And if you don't do things for yourself," he went on, "you'll be doing them the more for just what I say." With which too, as Graham but pleadingly gaped: "You'll be doing them for everyone else—that is finding it impossible to do what they do. From the moment they notice that—well, it will be what I want. We know, we know," he remarked further and as if this quite settled it.

Any ambiguity in his "we" after an instant cleared up; he was to have alluded but ever so sparely, through all this scene, to Rosanna Gaw, but he alluded now, and again it had for Gray an amount of reference that was like a great sum of items in a bill imperfectly scanned. None the less it left him desiring still more clearness. His whole soul centred at this point in the need not to have contributed by some confused accommodation to a strange theory of his future. Strange he could but feel this one to be, however simply, that is on however large and vague an assumption, it might suit others, amid their fathomless resources and their luxuries or perversities of waste, to see it. He wouldn't be smothered in the vague, whatever happened, and had now the gasp and upward shake of the head of a man in too deep water. "What I want to insist on," he broke out with it, "is that I mustn't consent to any exaggeration in the interest of your, or of any other, sublime view of me, view of my capacity of any sort. There's no sublime view of me to be taken that consorts in the least with any truth; and I should be a very poor creature if I didn't here and now assure you that no proof in the world exists, or has for a moment existed, of my being capable of anything whatever."

He might have supposed himself for a little to have produced something of the effect that would naturally attach to a due vividness in this truth—for didn't his uncle now look at him just a shade harder, before the fixed eyes closed, indeed, as under a pressure to which they had at last really to yield? They closed, and the old white face was for the couple of minutes so thoroughly still without them that a slight uneasiness quickened him, and it would have taken but another moment to make a slight sound, which he had to turn his head for the explanation of, reach him as the response to an appeal. The door of the room, opening gently, had closed again behind Miss Goodenough, who came forward softly, but with more gravity, Gray thought, than he had previously seen her show. Still in his place and conscious of the undiminished freshness of her invalid's manual emphasis, he looked at her for some opinion as to the latter's appearance, or to the move on his own part next indicated; during which time her judgment itself, considering Mr. Betterman, a trifle heavily waited. Gray's doubt, before the stillness which had followed so great even if so undiscourageable an effort, moved him to some play of disengagement; whereupon he knew himself again checked, and there, once more, the fine old eyes rested on him. "I'm afraid I've tired him out," he could but say to the nurse, who made the motion to feel her patient's pulse without the effect of his releasing his visitor. Gray's hand was retained still, but his kinsman's eyes and next words were directed to Miss Goodenough.

"It's all right—even more so than I told you it was going to be."

"Why of course it's all right—you look too sweet together!" she pronounced.

"But I mean I've got him; I mean I make him squirm"—which words had somehow the richest gravity of any yet; "but all it does for his resistance is that he squirms right to me."

"Oh we won't have any resistance!" Miss Goodenough freely declared. "Though for all the fight you've got in you still——!" she in fine altogether backed Mr. Betterman.

He covered his nephew again as for a final or crushing appraisement, then going on for Miss Goodenough's benefit: "He tried something a minute ago to settle me, but I wish you could just have heard how he expressed himself."

"It is a pleasure to hear him—when he's good!" She laughed with a shade of impatience.

"He's never so good as when he wants to be bad. So there you are, sir!" the old man said. "You're like the princess in the fairy-tale; you've only to open your mouth——"

"And the pearls and diamonds pop out!"—Miss Goodenough, for her patient's relief, completed his meaning. "So don't try for toads and snakes!" she promptly went on to Gray. To which she added with still more point: "And now you must go."

"Not one little minute more?" His uncle still held him.

"Not one, sir!" Miss Goodenough decided.

"It isn't to talk," the old man explained. "I like just to look at him."

"So do I," said Miss Goodenough; "but we can't always do everything we like."

"No then, Graham—remember that. You'd like to have persuaded me that I don't know what I mean. But you must understand you haven't."

His hand had loosened, and Gray got up, turning a face now flushed and a little disordered from one of them to the other. "I don't pretend to understand anything!"

It turned his uncle to their companion. "Isn't he fine?"

"Of course he's fine," said Miss Goodenough; "but you've quite worn him out."

"Have I quite worn you out?" Mr. Betterman calmly inquired.

As if indeed finished, each thumb now in a pocket of his trousers, the young man dimly smiled. "I think you must have—quite."

"Well, let Miss Mumby look after you. He'll find her there?" his uncle asked of her colleague. And then as the latter showed at this her first indecision, "Isn't she somewhere round?" he demanded.

Miss Goodenough had wavered, but as if it really mattered for the friend there present she responsibly concluded. "Well, no—just for a while." And she appealed to Gray's indulgence. "She's had to go to Mr. Gaw."

"Why, is Mr. Gaw sick?" Mr. Betterman asked with detachment.

"That's what we shall know when she comes back. She'll come back all right," she continued for Gray's encouragement.

He met it with proper interest. "I'm sure I hope so!"

"Well, don't be too sure!" his uncle judiciously said.

"Oh he has only borrowed her." Miss Goodenough smoothed it down even as she smoothed Mr. Betterman's sheet, while with the same movement of her head she wafted Gray to the door.

"Mr. Gaw," her patient returned, "has borrowed from me before. Mr. Gaw, Graham——!"

"Yes sir?" said Gray with the door ajar and his hand on the knob.

The fine old presence on the pillow had faltered before expression; then it appeared rather sighingly and finally to give the question up. "Well, Mr. Gaw's an abyss."

Gray found himself suddenly responsive. "Isn't he, the strange man?"

"The strange man—that's it." This summary description sufficed now to Mr. Betterman's achieved indifference. "But you've seen him?"

"Just for an instant."

"And that was enough?"

"Well, I don't know." Gray himself gave it up. "You're all so fiercely interesting!"

"I think Rosanna's lovely!" Miss Good enough contributed, to all appearance as an attenuation, while she tucked their companion in.

"Oh Miss Gaw's quite another matter," our young man still paused long enough to reply.

"Well, I don't mean but what she's interesting in her way too," Miss Goodenough's conscience prompted.

"Oh he knows all about her. That's all right," Mr. Betterman remarked for his nurse's benefit.

"Why of course I know it," this lady candidly answered. "Miss Mumby and I have had to feel that. I guess he'll want to send her his love," she continued across to Gray.

"To Miss Mumby?" asked Gray, his general bewilderment having moments of aggravation.

"Why no—she's sure of his affection. To Miss Gaw. Don't you want," she inquired of her patient, "to send your love to that poor anxious girl?"

"Is she anxious?" Gray returned in advance of his uncle.

Miss Goodenough hung fire but a moment. "Well, I guess I'd be in her place. But you'll see.

"Then," said Gray to his host, "if Rosanna's in trouble I'll go to her at once."

The old man, at this, once more delivered himself. "She won't be in trouble—any more than I am. But tell her—tell her——!"

"Yes, sir"—Gray had again to wait.

But Miss Goodenough now would have no more of it. "Tell her that we're about as fresh as we can live!"—the wave of her hand accompanying which Gray could take at last for his dismissal.

III

It was nevertheless not at once that he sought out the way to find his old friend; other questions than that of at once seeing her hummed for the next half-hour about his ears—an interval spent by him in still further contemplative motion within his uncle's grounds. He strolled and stopped again and stared before him without seeing; he came and went and sat down on benches and low rocky ledges only to get up and pace afresh; he lighted cigarettes but to smoke them a quarter out and then chuck them away to light others. He said to himself that he was enormously agitated, agitated as never in his life before, but that, strangely enough, he disliked that condition far less than the menace of it would have made him suppose. He didn't, however, like it enough to say to himself "This is happiness!"—as could scarcely have failed if the kind of effect on his nerves had really consorted with the kind of advantage that he was to understand his interview with his uncle to have promised him; so far, that is, as he was yet to understand anything. His after-sense of the scene expanded rather than settled, became an impression of one of those great insistent bounties that are not of this troubled world; the anomaly expressing itself in such beauty and dignity, with all its elements conspiring together, as would have done honour to a great page of literary, of musical or pictorial art. The huge grace of the matter ought somehow to have left him simply captivated—so at least, all wondering, he hung about there to reflect; but excess of harmony might apparently work like excess of discord, might practically be a negation of the idea of the quiet life. Ignoble quiet he had never asked for—this he could now with assurance remember; but something in the pitch of his uncle's guarantee of big things, whatever they were, which should at the same time be pleasant things, seemed to make him an accomplice in some boundless presumption. In what light had he ever seen himself that made it proper the pleasant should be so big for him or the big so pleasant? Suddenly, as he looked at his watch and saw how the time had passed—time already, didn't it seem, of his rather standing off and quaking?—it occurred to him that the last thing he had proposed to himself in the whole connection was to be either publicly or privately afraid; in the act of noting which he became aware again of Miss Mumby, who, having come out of the house apparently to approach him, was now at no great distance. She rose before him the next minute as in fuller possession than ever of his fate, and yet with no accretion of reserve in her own pleasure at this.

"What I want you to do is just to go over to Miss Gaw."

"It's just what I should like, thank you—and perhaps you'll be so good as to show me the way." He wasn't quite succeeding in not being afraid—that a moment later came to him; since if this extraordinary woman was in touch with his destiny what did such words on his own part represent but the impulse to cling to her and, as who should say, keep on her right side? His uncle had spoken to him of Rosanna as protective—and what better warrant for such a truth than that here was he thankful on the spot even for the countenance of a person speaking apparently in her name? All of which was queer enough, verily—since it came to the sense of his clutching for immediate light, through the now gathered dusk, at the surge of guiding petticoats, the charity of women more or less strange. Miss Mumby at once took charge of him, and he learnt more things still before they had proceeded far. One of these truths, though doubtless the most superficial, was that Miss Gaw proposed he should dine with her just as he was—he himself recognising that with her father suddenly and to all appearance gravely ill it was no time for vain forms. Wasn't the rather odd thing, none the less, that the crisis should have suggested her desiring company?—being as it was so acute that the doctor, Doctor Hatch himself, would even now have arrived with a nurse, both of which pair of ears Miss Mumby required for her report of those symptoms in their new patient that had appealed to her practised eye an hour before. Interesting enough withal was her explanation to Gray of what she had noted on Mr. Gaw's part as a consequence of her joining them at that moment under Mr. Betterman's roof; all the more that he himself had then wondered and surmised—struck as he was with the effect on the poor man's nerves of their visitor's announcement that her prime patient had brightened. Mr. Gaw but too truly, our young man now learned, had taken that news ill—as, given the state of his heart, any strong shock might determine a bad aggravation. Such a shock Miss Mumby had, to her lively regret, administered, though she called Gray's attention to the prompt and intelligent action of her remorse. Feeling at once responsible she had taken their extraordinary little subject in charge—with every care indeed not to alarm him; to the point that, on his absolute refusal to let her go home with him and his arresting a hack, on the public road, which happened to come into view empty, the two had entered the vehicle and she had not lost sight of him till, his earnest call upon his daughter at Mrs. Bradham's achieved, he had been in effect restored to his own house. His daughter, who lived with her eyes on his liability to lapses, was now watching with him, and was well aware, Miss Mumby averred, of what the crisis might mean; as to whose own due presence of mind in the connection indeed how could there be better proof than this present lucidity of her appeal to Mr. Betterman's guest on such a matter as her prompt thought for sparing him delay?

"If she didn't want you to wait to dress, it can only be, I guess, to make sure of seeing you before anything happens," his guide was at no loss to remark; "and if she can mention dinner while the old gentleman is—well, as he is—it shows she's not too beside herself to feel that you'll at any rate want yours."

"Oh for mercy's sake don't talk of dinner!" Gray pulled up under the influence of these revelations quite impatiently to request. "That's not what I'm most thinking of, I beg you to believe, in the midst of such prodigies and portents." They had crossed the small stretch of road which separated Mr. Betterman's gate from that of the residence they were addressed to; and now, within the grounds of this latter, which loomed there, through vague boskages, with an effect of windows numerously and precipitately lighted, the forces of our young friend's consciousness were all in vibration at once. "My wondrous uncle, I don't mind telling you, since you're so kind to me, has given me more extraordinary things to think of than I see myself prepared in any way to do justice to; and if I'm further to understand you that we have between us, you and I, destroyed this valuable life, I leave you to judge whether what we may have to face in consequence finds me eager."

"How do you know it's such a valuable life?" Miss Mumby surprisingly rejoined; sinking that question, however, in a livelier interest, before his surprise could express itself. "If she has sent me for you it's because she knows what she's about, and because I also know what I am—so that, wanting you myself so much to come, I guess I'd have gone over for you on my own responsibility. Why, Mr. Fielder, your place is right here by her at such a time as this, and if you don't already realise it I'm very glad I've helped you."

Such was the consecration under which, but a few minutes later, Gray found himself turning about in the lamp-lit saloon of the Gaws very much as he had a few hours before revolved at the other house. Miss Mumby had introduced him into this apartment straight from the terrace to which, in the warm air, a long window or two stood open, and then had left him with the assurance that matters upstairs would now be in shape for their friend to join him at once. It was perhaps because he had rather inevitably expected matters upstairs—and this in spite of his late companion's warning word—to assault him in some fulness with Miss Gaw's appearance at the door, that a certain failure of any such effect when she did appear had for him a force, even if it was hardly yet to be called a sense, beyond any air of her advancing on the tide of pain. He fairly took in, face to face with her, that what she first called for was no rattle of sound, however considerately pitched, about the question of her own fear; she had pulled no long face, she cared for no dismal deference: she but stood there, after she had closed the door with a backward push that took no account, in the hushed house, of some possible resonance, she but stood there smiling in her mild extravagance of majesty, smiling and smiling as he had seen women do as a preface to bursting into tears. He was to remember afterwards how he had felt for an instant that whatever he said or did would deprive her of resistance to an inward pressure which was growing as by the sight of him, but that she would thus break down much more under the crowned than under the menaced moment—thanks to which appearance what could be stranger than his inviting her to clap her hands? Still again was he later to recall that these hands had been the moment after held in his own while he knew himself smiling too and saying: "Well, well, well, what wonders and what splendours!" and seeing that though there was even more of her in presence than he had reckoned there was somehow less of her in time; as if she had at once grown and grown and grown, grown in all sorts of ways save the most natural one of growing visibly older. Such an oddity as that made her another person a good deal more than her show of not having left him behind by any break with their common youth could keep her the same.

These perceptions took of course but seconds, with yet another on their heels, to the effect that she had already seen him, and seen him to some fine sense of pleasure, as himself enormously different—arriving at that clearness before they had done more than thus waver between the "fun," all so natural, of their meeting as the frankest of friends and the quite other intelligence of their being parties to a crisis. It was to remain on record for him too, and however over-scored, that their crisis, surging up for three or four minutes by its essential force, suffered them to stand there, with irrelevant words and motions, very much as if it were all theirs alone and nobody's else, nobody's more important, on either side, than they were, and so take a brush from the wing of personal romance. He let her hands go, and then, if he wasn't mistaken, held them afresh a moment in repeated celebration, he exchanged with her the commonest remarks and the flattest and the easiest, so long as it wasn't speaking but seeing, and seeing more and more, that mattered: they literally talked of his journey and his arrival and of whether he had had a good voyage and wasn't tired; they said "You sit here, won't you?" and "Shan't you be better there?"—they said "Oh I'm all right!" and "Fancy it's happening after all like this!" before there even faintly quavered the call of a deeper note. This was really because the deep one, from minute to minute, was that acute hush of her so clearly finding him not a bit what she might have built up. He had grown and grown just as she had, certainly; only here he was for her clothed in the right interest of it, not bare of that grace as he fancied her guessing herself in his eyes, and with the conviction sharply thrust upon him, beyond any humour he might have cultivated, that he was going to be so right for her and so predetermined, whatever he did and however he should react there under conditions incalculable, that this would perhaps more overload his consciousness than ease it. It could have been further taken for strange, had there been somebody so to note it, that even when their first vaguenesses dropped what she really at once made easiest for him was to tell her that the wonderful thing had come to pass, the thing she had whisked him over for—he put it to her that way; that it had taken place in conditions too exquisite to be believed, and that under the bewilderment produced by these she must regard him as still staggering.

"Then it's done, then it's done—as I knew it would be if he could but see you." Flushed, but with her large fan held up so that scarce more than her eyes, their lids drawn together in the same nearsighted way he remembered, presented themselves over it, she fairly hunched her high shoulders higher for emphasis of her success. The more it might have embarrassed her to consider him without reserve the more she had this relief, as he took it, of her natural, her helpful blinking; so that what it came to really for her general advantage was that the fine closing of the eyes, the fine thing in her big face, but expressed effective scrutiny. Below her in stature—as various other men, for that matter, couldn't but be—he hardly came higher than her ear; and he for the shade of an instant struck himself as a small boy, literally not of man's estate, reporting, under some research, just to the amplest of mothers. He had reported to Mr. Betterman, so far as intent candour in him hadn't found itself distraught, and for the half hour had somehow affronted the immeasurable; but that didn't at all prevent his now quick sense of his never in his life having been so watched and waited upon by the uncharted infinite, or so subject to its operation—since infinities, at the rate he was sinking in, could apparently operate, and do it too without growing smaller for the purpose. He cast about, not at all upright on the small pink satin sofa to which he had unconsciously dropped; it was for him clearly to grow bigger, as everything about expressively smiled, smiled absolutely through the shadow cast by doctors and nurses again, in suggestion of; which, naturally, was what one would always want to do—but which any failure of, he after certain moments perfectly felt, wouldn't convert to the least difference for this friend. How could that have been more established than by her neglect of his having presently said, out of his particular need, that he would do anything in reason that was asked of him, but that he fairly ached with the desire to understand——? She blinked upon his ache to her own sufficiency, no doubt; but no further balm dropped upon it for the moment than by her appearing to brood with still deeper assurance, in her place and her posture, on the beauty of the accomplished fact, the fact of her performed purpose and her freedom now but to take care—yes, herself take care—for what would come of it. She might understand that he didn't—all the way as yet; but nothing could be more in the line of the mild and mighty mother than her treating that as a trifle. It attenuated a little perhaps, it just let light into the dark warmth of her spreading possession of what she had done, that when he had said, as a thing already ten times on his lips and now quite having to come out, "I feel some big mistake about me somehow at work, and want to stop it in time!" she met this with the almost rude decision of "There's nothing you can stop now, Graham, for your fate, or our situation, has the gained momentum of a rush that began ever so far away and that has been growing and growing. It would be too late even if we wanted to—and you can judge for yourself how little that's my wish. So here we are, you see, to make the best of it."