Front matter (continued 4)

This unloosed then for Gray the gate of possible expression. "Of course I like it—that is of course I try to. I've been trying here, day after day, as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for anything; and yet I remain, don't you see? a wretched little worm."

"Deary, deary me," stared Horton, "that you should have to bring up your appreciation of it from such depths! You go in for it as you would for the electric light or the telephone, and then find half-way that you can't stand the expense and want the next-door man somehow to combine with you?"

"That's exactly it, Vinty, and you're the next-door man!"—Gray embraced the analogy with glee. "I can't stand the expense, and yet I don't for a moment deny I should immensely enjoy the convenience. I want," he asseverated, "to like my luck. I want to go in for it, as you say, with every inch of any such capacity as I have. And I want to believe in my capacity; I want to work it up and develop it—I assure you on my honour I do. I've lashed myself up into feeling that if I don't I shall be a base creature, a worm of worms, as I say, and fit only to be utterly ashamed. But that's where you come in. You'll help me to develop. To develop my capacity I mean," he explained with a wondrous candour.

Horton was now, small marvel, all clear faith; even, the cigarettes helping, to the verge again of hilarity. "Your capacity—I see. Not so much your property itself."

"Well"—Gray considered of it—"what will my property be except my capacity?" He spoke really as for the pleasure of seeing very finely and very far. "It won't if I don't like it, that is if I don't understand it, don't you see? enough to make it count. Yes, yes, don't revile me," he almost feverishly insisted: "I do want it to count for all it's worth, and to get everything out of it, to the very last drop of interest, pleasure, experience, whatever you may call it, that such a possession can yield. And I'm going to keep myself up to it, to the top of the pitch, by every art and prop, by every helpful dodge, that I can put my hand on. You see if I don't. I breathe defiance," he continued, with his rare radiance, "at any suspicion or doubt. But I come back," he had to add, "to my point that it's you that I essentially most depend on."

Horton again looked at him long and frankly; this subject of appeal might indeed for the moment have been as embarrassed between the various requisitions of response as Gray had just before shown himself. But as the tide could surge for one of the pair so it could surge for the other, and the large truth of what Horton most grasped appeared as soon as he had spoken. "The name of your complaint, you poor dear delightful person, or the name at least of your necessity, your predicament and your solution, is marriage to a wife at short order. I mean of course to an amiable one. There, so obviously, is your aid and your prop, there are the sources of success for interest in your fortune, and for the whole experience and enjoyment of it, as you can't find them elsewhere. What are you but just 'fixed' to marry, and what is the sense of your remarks but a more or less intelligent clamour for it?"

Triumphant indeed, as we have said, for lucidity and ease, was this question, and yet it had filled the air, for its moment, but to drop at once by the practical puncture of Gray's perfect recognition. "Oh of course I've thought of that—but it doesn't meet my case at all." Had he been capable of disappointment in his friend he might almost have been showing it now.

Horton had, however, no heat about it. "You mean you absolutely don't want a wife—in connection, so to speak, with your difficulties; or with the idea, that is, of their being resolved into blessings?"

"Well"—Gray was here at least all prompt and clear—"I keep down, in that matter, so much as I can any a priori or mere theoretic want. I see my possibly marrying as an effect, I mean—I somehow don't see it at all as a cause. A cause, that is"—he easily worked it out—"of my getting other things right. It may be, in conditions, the greatest rightness of all; but I want to be sure of the conditions."

"The first of which is, I understand then"—for this at least had been too logical for Haughty not to have to match it—"that you should fall so tremendously in love that you won't be able to help yourself."

Graham just debated; he was all intelligence here. "Falling tremendously in love—the way you grands amoureux talk of such things!"

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

Well, Gray had but to consult his memory of their young days together; there was the admission, under pressure, that he might have confused the appearances. "They were at any rate always up and at you—which seems to have left me with the impression that your life is full of them."

"Every man's life is full of them that has a door or a window they can come in by. But the question's of yourself," said Haughty, "and just exactly of the number of such that you'll have to keep open or shut in the immense façade you'll now present."

Our young man might well have struck him as before all else inconsequent. "I shall present an immense façade?"—Gray, from his tone of surprise, to call it nothing more, would have thought of this for the first time.

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

"I don't see it as any. I decline," Gray remarked, "to have a façade. And if I don't I shan't have the windows and doors."

"You've got 'em already, fifty in a row"—Haughty was remorseless—"and it isn't a question of 'having': you are a façade; stretching a mile right and left. How can you not be when I'm walking up and down in front of you?"

"Oh you walk up and down, you make the things you pass, and you can behave of course if you want like one of the giants in uniform, outside the big shops, who attend the ladies in and out. In fact," Gray went on, "I don't in the least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised as, one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I were a much greater one"—he gathered force—"my appearance of it would depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more room than may suit your taste. I'll be hanged if I consent to take up an inch more than suits mine. Even though not of the truly bloated I've at least means to be quiet. Every one among us—I mean among the moneyed—isn't a monster on exhibition." In proof of which he abounded. "I know people myself who aren't."

Horton considered him with amusement, as well apparently as the people that he knew! "Of course you may dig the biggest hole in the ground that ever was dug—spade-work comes high, but you'll have the means—and get down into it and sit at the very bottom. Only your hole will become then the feature of the scene, and we shall crowd a thousand deep all round the edge of it."

Gray stood for a moment looking down, then faced his guest as with a slight effort. "Do you know about Rosanna Gaw?" And then while Horton, for reasons of his own, failed at once to answer: "She has come in or millions——"

"Twenty-two and a fraction," Haughty said at once. "Do you mean that she sits, like Truth, at the bottom of a well?" he asked still more divertedly.

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

"You don't call her one?"—Haughty took it right up. And he added as for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man——!"

"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.

Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this time to a light, wait in silence for his word. "She does more than that"—it was brought quite dryly out. "She loathes every separate dollar she possesses."

Gray's sense of the matter, strenuous though it was, could just stare at this extravagance of assent; seeing however, on second thoughts, what there might be in it. "Well then if what I have is a molehill beside her mountain, I can the more easily emulate her in standing back."

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

Gray showed a shade of guilt, but faced his judge. "Well—so I gather."

The judge at this lost patience. "Am I to understand that you positively cultivate vagueness and water it with your tears?"

"Yes"—the culprit was at least honest—"I should rather say I do. And I want you to let me. Do let me."

"It's apparently more then than Miss Gaw does!"

"Yes"—Gray again considered; "she seems to know more or less what she's worth, and she tells me that I can't even begin to approach it."

"Very crushing of her!" his friend laughed. "You 'make the pair', as they say, and you must help each other much. Her 'loathing' it exactly is—since we know all about it!—that gives her a frontage as wide as the Capitol at Washington. Therefore your comparison proves little—though I confess it would rather help us," Horton pursued, "if you could seem, as you say, to have asked one or two of the questions that I should suppose would have been open to you.

"Asked them of Mr. Crick, you mean?"

"Well, yes—if you've nobody else, and as you appear not to have been able to have cared to look at the will yourself."

Something like a light of hope, at this, kindled in Gray's face. "Would you care to look at it, Vinty?"

The inquiry gave Horton pause. "Look at it now, you mean?"

"Well—whenever you like. I think," said Gray, "it must be in the house."

"You're not sure even of that?" his companion wailed.

"Oh I know there are two"—our young man had coloured. "I don't mean different ones, but copies of the same," he explained; "one of which Mr. Crick must have."

"And the other of which"—Horton pieced it together—"is the one you offer to show me?"

"Unless, unless——!" and Gray, casting about, bethought himself. "Unless that one——!" With his eyes on his friend's he still shamelessly wondered.

"Unless that one has happened to get lost," Horton tenderly suggested, "so that you can't after all produce it?"

"No, but it may be upstairs, upstairs——" Gray continued to turn this over. "I think it is," he then recognised, "where I had perhaps better not just now disturb it."

His recognition was nothing, apparently, however, to the clear quickness of Horton's. "It's in your uncle's own room?"

"The room," Gray assented, "where he lies in death while we talk here." This, his tone suggested, sufficiently enjoined delay.

Horton's concurrence was immediately such that, once more turning off, he measured, for the intensity of it, half the room. "I can't advise you without the facts that you're unable to give," he said as he came back, "but I don't indeed invite you to go and rummage in that presence." He might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that verily by this time, between these friends—by which I mean of course as from one of them only, the more generally assured, to the other—irony would, to an at all exhaustive analysis, have been felt to flicker in their medium. Gray might in fact, on the evidence of his next words, have found it just distinguishable.

V

"We do talk here while he lies in death"—they had in fine all serenity for it. "But the extraordinary thing is that my putting myself this way at my ease—and for that matter putting you at yours—is exactly what the dear man made to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade of a sense, and don't think I ever shall have, of not doing what he wanted of me; for what he wanted of me," our particular friend continued, "is—well, so utterly unconventional. He would like my being the right sort of well-meaning idiot that you catch me in the very fact of. I warned him, I sincerely, passionately warned him, that I'm not fit, in the smallest degree, for the use, for the care, for even the most rudimentary comprehension, of a fortune; and that exactly it was which seemed most to settle him. He wanted me clear, to the last degree, not only of the financial brain, but of any sort of faint germ of the money-sense whatever—down to the very lack of power, if he might be so happy (or if I might!) to count up to ten on my fingers. Satisfied of the limits of my arithmetic he passed away in bliss."

To this, as fairly lucid, Horton had applied his understanding. "You can't count up to ten?"

"Not all the way. Still," our young man smiled, "the greater inspiration may now give me the lift."

His guest looked as if one might by that time almost have doubted. But it was indeed an extraordinary matter. "How comes it then that your want of arithmetic hasn't given you a want of order?—unless indeed I'm mistaken and you were perhaps at sixes and sevens?"

"Well, I think I was at sixes—though I never got up to sevens! I've never had the least rule or method; but that has been a sort of thing I could more or less cover up—from others, I mean, not from myself, who have always been helplessly ashamed of it. It hasn't been the disorder of extravagance," Gray explained, "but the much more ignoble kind, the wasteful thrift that doesn't really save, that simply misses, and that neither enjoys things themselves nor enjoys their horrid little equivalent of hoarded pence. I haven't needed to count far, the fingers of one hand serving for my four or five possessions; and also I've kept straight not by taking no liberties with my means, but by taking none with my understanding of them. From fear of counting wrong, and from loathing of the act of numerical calculation, and of the humiliation of having to give it up after so few steps from the start, I've never counted at all—and that, you see, is what has saved me. That has been my sort of disorder—which you'll agree is the most pitiful of all."

Horton once more turned away from him, but slowly this time, not in impatience, rather with something of the preoccupation of a cup-bearer whose bowl has been filled to the brim and who must carry it a distance with a steady hand. So for a minute or two might he have been taking this care; at the end of which, however, Gray saw him stop in apparent admiration before a tall inlaid and brass-bound French bahut; with the effect, after a further moment, of a sharp break of their thread of talk. "You've got some things here at least to enjoy and that you ought to know how to keep hold of; though I don't so much mean," he explained, "this expensive piece of furniture as the object of interest perched on top."

"Oh the ivory tower!—yes, isn't that, Vinty, a prize piece and worthy of the lovely name?"

Vinty remained for the time all admiration, having, as you would easily have seen, lights enough to judge by. "It appears to have been your uncle's only treasure—as everything else about you here is of a newness! And it isn't so much too small, Gray," he laughed, "for you to get into it yourself, when you want to get rid of us, and draw the doors to. If it's a symbol of any retreat you really have an eye on I much congratulate you; I don't know what I wouldn't give myself for the 'run' of an ivory tower."

"Well, I can't ask you to share mine," Gray returned; "for the situation to have a sense, I take it, one must sit in one's tower alone. And I should properly say," he added after an hesitation, "that mine is the one object, all round me here, that I don't owe my uncle: it has been placed at my disposition, in the handsomest way in the world, by Rosanna Gaw."

"Ah that does increase the interest—even if susceptible of seeming to mean, to one's bewilderment, that it's the sort of thing she would like to thrust you away into; which I hope, however, is far from the case. Does she then keep ivory towers, a choice assortment?" Horton quite gaily continued; "in the sense of having a row of them ready for occupation, and with tenants to match perchable in each and signalling along the line from summit to summit? Because"—and, facing about from his contemplation, he piled up his image even as the type of object represented by it might have risen in the air—"you give me exactly, you see, the formula of that young lady herself: perched aloft in an ivory tower is what she is, and I'll be hanged if this isn't a hint to you to mount, yourself, into just such another; under the same provocation, I fancy her pleading, as she has in her own case taken for sufficient." Thus it was that, suddenly more brilliant than ever yet, to Graham's apprehension, you might well have guessed, his friend stood nearer again—stood verily quite irradiating responsive ingenuity. Markedly would it have struck you that at such instants as this, most of all, the general hush that was so thick about them pushed upward and still further upward the fine flower of the inferential. Following the pair closely from the first, and beginning perhaps with your idea that this life of the intelligence had its greatest fineness in Gray Fielder, you would by now, I dare say, have been brought to a more or less apprehensive foretaste of its possibilities in our other odd agent. For how couldn't it have been to the full stretch of his elastic imagination that Haughty was drawn out by the time of his putting a certain matter beautifully to his companion? "Don't I, 'gad, take the thing straight over from you—all of it you've been trying to convey to me here!—when I see you, up in the blue, behind your parapet, just gracefully lean over and call down to where I mount guard at your door in the dust and comparative darkness? It's well to understand"—his thumbs now in his waistcoat-holes he measured his idea as if Gray's own face fairly reflected it: "you want me to take all the trouble for you simply, in order that you may have all the fun. And you want me at the same time, in order that things shall be for you at their ideal of the easiest, to make you believe, as a salve to your conscience, that the fun isn't so mixed with the trouble as that you can't have it, on the right arrangement made with me, quite by itself. This is most ingenious of you," Horton added, "but it doesn't in the least show me, don't you see? where my fun comes in."

"I wonder if I can do that," Gray returned, "without making you understand first something of the nature of mine—or for that matter without my first understanding myself perhaps what my queer kind of it is most likely to be."

His companion showed withal for more and more ready to risk amused recognitions. "You are 'rum' with your queer kinds, and might make my flesh creep, in these conditions, if it weren't for something in me of rude pluck." Gray, in speaking, had moved towards the great French meuble with some design upon it or upon the charge it carried; which Horton's eyes just wonderingly noted—and to the effect of an exaggeration of tone in his next remark. "However, there are assurances one doesn't keep repeating: it's so little in me, I feel, to refuse you any service I'm capable of, no matter how clumsily, that if you take me but confidently enough for the agent even of your unholiest pleasures, you'll find me still putting them through for you when you've broken down in horror yourself."

"Of course it's my idea that whatever I ask you shall be of interest to you, and of the liveliest, in itself—quite apart from any virtue of my connection with it. If it speaks to you that way so much the better," Gray went on, standing now before the big bahut with both hands raised and resting on the marble top. This lifted his face almost to the level of the base of his perched treasure—so that he stared at the ivory tower without as yet touching it. He only continued to talk, though with his thought, as he brought out the rest of it, almost superseded by the new preoccupation. "I shall absolutely decline any good of anything that isn't attended by some equivalent or—what do you call it?—proportionate good for you. I shall propose to you a percentage, if that's the right expression, on every blest benefit I get from you in the way of the sense of safety." Gray now moved his hands, laying them as in finer fondness to either smoothly-plated side of the tall repository, against which a finger or two caressingly rubbed. His back turned therefore to Horton, he was divided between the growth of his response to him and that of this more sensible beauty. "Don't I kind of insure my life, my moral consciousness, I mean, for your advantage?—or with you, as it were, taking you for the officeman or actuary, if I'm not muddling: to whom I pay a handsome premium for the certainty of there being to my credit, on my demise, a sufficient sum to clear off my debts and bury me."

"You propose to me a handsome premium? Catch me," Horton laughed, "not jumping at that!"

"Yes, and you'll of course fix the premium yourself." But Gray was now quite detached, occupied only in opening his ivory doors with light fingers and then playing these a little, whether for hesitation or for the intenser pointing of inquiry, up and down the row of drawers so exposed. Against the topmost they then rested a moment—drawing out this one, however, with scant further delay and enabling themselves to feel within and so become possessed of an article contained. It was with this article in his hand that he presently faced about again, turning it over, resting his eyes on it and then raising them to his visitor, who perceived in it a heavy letter, duly addressed, to all appearance, but not stamped and as yet unopened. "The distinguished retreat, you see, has its tenant."

"Do you mean by its tenant the author of those evidently numerous pages?—unless you rather mean," Horton asked, "that you seal up in packets the love-letters addressed to you and find that charming receptacle a congruous place to keep them? Is there a packet in every drawer, and do you take them out this way to remind yourself fondly that you have them and that it mayn't be amiss for me to feel your conquests and their fine old fragrance dangled under my nose?"

Our young man, at these words, had but returned to the consideration of his odd property, attaching it first again to the superscription and then to the large firm seal. "I haven't the least idea what this is; and I'm divided in respect of it, I don't mind telling you, between curiosity and repulsion."

Horton then also eyed the ambiguity, but at his discreet distance and reaching out for it as little as his friend surrendered it. "Do you appeal to me by chance to help you to decide either way?"

Poor Gray, still wondering and fingering, had a long demur. "No—I don't think I want to decide." With which he again faced criticism. "The extent, Vinty, to which I think I must just like to drift——!"

Vinty seemed for a moment to give this indicated quantity the attention invited to it, but without more action for the case than was represented by his next saying: "Why then do you produce your question—apparently so much for my benefit?"

"Because in the first place you noticed the place it lurks in, and because in the second I like to tell you things."

This might have struck us as making the strained note in Vinty's smile more marked. "But that's exactly, confound you, what you don't do! Here have I been with you half an hour without your practically telling me anything!"

Graham, very serious, stood a minute looking at him hard; succeeding also quite it would seem in taking his words not in the least for a reproach but for a piece of information of the greatest relevance, and thus at once dismissing any minor importance. He turned back with his minor importance to his small open drawer, laid it within again and, pushing the drawer to, closed the doors of the cabinet. The act disposed of the letter, but had the air of introducing as definite a statement as Horton could have dreamt of. "It's a bequest from Mr. Gaw."

"A bequest"—Horton wondered—"of banknotes?"

"No—it's a letter addressed to me just before his death, handed me by his daughter, to whom he intrusted it, and not likely, I think, to contain money. He was then sure, apparently, of my coming in for money; and even if he hadn't been would have had no ground on earth for leaving me anything."

Horton's visible interest was yet consonant with its waiting a little for expression. "He leaves you the great Rosanna."

Graham, at this, had a stare, followed by a flush as the largest possible sense of it came out. "You suppose it perhaps the expression of a wish——?" And then as Horton forbore at first as to what he supposed: "A wish that I may find confidence to apply to his daughter for her hand?"

"That hasn't occurred to you before?" Horton asked—"nor the measure of the confidence suggested been given you by the fact of your receiving the document from Rosanna herself? You do give me, you extraordinary person," he gaily proceeded, "as good opportunities as I could possibly desire to 'help' you!"

Graham, for all the felicity of this, needed but an instant to think. "I have it from Miss Gaw herself that she hasn't an idea of what the letter contains—any more than she has the least desire that I shall for the present open it."

"Well, mayn't that very attitude in her rather point to a suspicion?" was his guest's ingenious reply. "Nothing could be less like her certainly than to appear in such a case to want to force your hand. It makes her position—with exquisite filial piety, you see—extraordinarily delicate."

Prompt as that might be, Gray appeared to show, no sportive sophistry, however charming, could work upon him. "Why should Mr. Gaw want me to marry his daughter?"

Horton again hung about a little. "Why should you be so afraid of ascertaining his idea that you don't so much as peep into what he writes on the subject?"

"Afraid? Am I afraid?" Gray fairly spoke with a shade of the hopeful, as if even that would be richer somehow than drifting.

"Well, you looked at your affair just now as you might at some small dangerous, some biting or scratching, animal whom you're not at all sure of."

"And yet you see I keep him about."

"Yes—you keep him in his cage, for which I suppose you have a key."

"I have indeed a key, a charming little golden key." With which Gray took another turn; once more facing criticism, however, to say with force: "He hated him most awfully!"

Horton appeared to wonder. "Your uncle hated old Gaw?"

"No—I don't think he cared. I speak of Mr. Gaw's own animus. He disliked so mortally his old associate, the man who lies dead upstairs—and in spite of my consideration for him I still preserve his record."

"How do you know about his hate," Horton asked, "or if your letter, since you haven't read it, is a record?"

"Well, I don't trust it—I mean not to be. I don't see what else he could have written me about. Besides," Gray added, "I've my personal impression."

"Of old Gaw? You have seen him then?"

"I saw him out there on this verandah, where he was hovering in the most extraordinary fashion, a few hours before his death. It was only for a few minutes," Gray said—"but they were minutes I shall never forget."

Horton's interest, though so deeply engaged, was not unattended with perplexity. "You mean he expressed to you such a feeling at such an hour?"

"He expressed to me in about three minutes, without speech, to which it seemed he couldn't trust himself, as much as it might have taken him, or taken anyone else, to express in three months at another time and on another subject. If you ever yourself saw him," Gray went on, "perhaps you'll understand."

"Oh I often saw him—and should indeed in your place perhaps have understood. I never heard him accused of not making people do so. But you hold," said Horton, "that he must have backed up for you further the mystic revelation?"

"He had written before he saw me—written on the chance of my being a person to be affected by it; and after seeing me he didn't destroy or keep back his message, but emphasised his wish for a punctual delivery."

"By which it is evident," Horton concluded, "that you struck him exactly as such a person."

"He saw me, by my idea, as giving my attention to what he had there ready for me." Gray clearly had talked himself into possession of his case. "That's the sort of person I succeeded in seeming to him—though I can assure you without my the least wanting to."

"What you feel is then that he thought he might attack with some sort of shock for you the character of your uncle?" Vinty's question had a special straightness.

"What I feel is that he has so attacked it, shock or no shock, and that that thing in my cabinet, which I haven't examined, can only be the proof."

It gave Horton much to turn over. "But your conviction has an extraordinary bearing. Do I understand that the thing was handed you by your friend with a knowledge of its contents?"

"Don't, please," Gray said at once, "understand anything either so hideous or so impossible. She but carried out a wish uttered on her father's deathbed, and hasn't so much as suggested that I break the portentous seal. I think in fact," he assured himself, "that she greatly prefers I shouldn't."

"Which fact," Horton observed, "but adds of course to your curiosity."

Gray's look at him betrayed on this a still finer interest in his interest. "You see the limits in me of that passion."

"Well, my dear chap, I've seen greater limits to many things than your having your little secret tucked away under your thumb. Do you mind my asking," Horton risked, "whether what deters you from action—and by action I mean opening your letter—is just a real apprehension of the effect designed by the good gentleman? Do you feel yourself exposed, by the nature of your mind or any presumption on Gaw's behalf, to give credit, vulgarly speaking, to whatever charge or charges he may bring?"

Gray weighed the question, his wide dark eyes would have told us, in, his choicest silver scales. "Neither the nature of my mind, bless it, nor the utmost force of any presumption to the contrary, prevents my having found my uncle, in his wonderful latest development, the very most charming person that I've ever seen in my life. Why he impressed me as a model of every virtue."

"I confess I don't see," said Horton, "how a relative so behaving could have failed to endear himself. With such convictions why don't you risk looking?"

Gray was but for a moment at a loss—he quite undertook to know. "Because the whole thing would be so horrible. I mean the question itself is—and even our here and at such a time discussing it."

"Nothing is horrible—to the point of making one quake," Horton opined, "that falls to the ground with a smash from the moment one drops it. The sense of your document is exactly what's to be appreciated. It would have no sense at all if you didn't believe."

Gray considered, but still differed. "Yes, to find it merely vindictive and base, and thereby to have to take it for false, that would still be an odious experience."

"Then why the devil don't you simply destroy the thing?" Horton at last quite impatiently inquired.

Gray showed perhaps he had scarce a reason, but had, to the very brightest effect, an answer. "That's just what I want you to help me to. To help me, that is," he explained, "after a little to decide for."

"After a little?" wondered Horton. "After how long?"

"Well, after long enough for me to feel sure I don't act in fear. I don't want," he went on as in fresh illustration of the pleasure taken by him, to the point, as it were, of luxury, in feeling no limit to his companion's comprehension, or to the patience involved in it either, amusedly as Horton might at moments attempt to belie that, adding thereby to the whole service something still more spacious—"I don't want to act in fear of anything or of anyone whatever; I said to myself at home three weeks ago, or whenever, that it wasn't for that I was going to come over; and I propose therefore, you see, to know so far as possible where I am and what I'm about: morally speaking at least, if not financially."

His friend but looked at him again on this in rather desperate diversion. "I don't see how you're to know where you are, I confess, if you take no means to find out."

"Well, my acquisition of property seems by itself to promise me information, and for the understanding of the lesson I shall have to take a certain time. What I want," Gray finely argued, "is to act but in the light of that."

"In the light of time? Then why do you begin by so oddly wasting it?"

"Because I think it may be the only way for me not to waste understanding. Don't be afraid," he went on, moving as by the effect of Horton's motion, which had brought that subject of appeal a few steps nearer the rare repository, "that I shall commit the extravagance of at all wasting you."

Horton, from where he had paused, looked up at the ivory tower; though as Gray was placed in the straight course of approach to it he had after a fashion to catch and meet his eyes by the way. "What you really want of me, it's clear, is to help you to fidget and fumble—or in other words to prolong the most absurd situation; and what I ought to do, if you'd believe it of me, is to take that stuff out of your hands and just deal with it myself."

"And what do you mean by dealing with it yourself?"

"Why destroying it unread by either of us—which," said Horton, looking about, "I'd do in a jiffy, on the spot, if there were only a fire in that grate. The place is clear, however, and we've matches; let me chuck your letter in and enjoy the blaze with you."

"Ah, my dear man, don't! Don't!" Gray repeated, putting it rather as a plea for indulgence than as any ghost of a defiance, but instinctively stepping backward in defence of his treasure.

His companion, for a little, gazed at the cabinet, in speculation, it might really have seemed, as to an extraordinary reach of arm. "You positively prefer to hug the beastly thing?"

"Let me alone," Gray presently returned, "and you'll probably find I've hugged it to death."

Horton took, however, on his side, a moment for further reflection. "I thought what you wanted of me to be exactly not that I should let you alone, but that I should give you on the contrary my very best attention!"

"Well," Gray found felicity to answer, "I feel that you'll see how your very best attention will sometimes consist in your not at all minding me."

So then for the minute Horton looked as if he took it. The great clock on the mantel appeared to have stopped with the stop of its late owner's life; so that he eyed his watch and startled at the hour to which they had talked. He put out his hand for good-night, and this returned grasp held them together in silence a minute. Something then in his sense of the situation determined his breaking out with an intensity not yet produced in him. "Yes—you're really prodigious. I mean for trust in a fellow. For upon my honour you know nothing whatever about me."

"That's quite what I mean," said Gray—"that I suffer from my ignorance of so much that's important, and want naturally to correct it."

"'Naturally'?" his visitor gloomed.

"Why, I do know this about you, that when we were together with old Roulet at Neuchâtel and, off on our cours that summer, had strayed into a high place, in the Oberland, where I was ass enough to have slid down to a scrap of a dizzy ledge, and so hung helpless over the void, unable to get back, in horror of staying and in greater horror of not, you got near enough to me, at the risk of your life, to lower to me the rope we so luckily had with us and that made an effort of my own possible by my managing to pass it under my arms. You helped that effort from a place of vantage above that nobody but you, in your capacity for playing up, would for a moment have taken for one, and you so hauled and steadied and supported me, in spite of your almost equal exposure, that little by little I climbed, I scrambled, my absolute confidence in you helping, for it amounted to inspiration, and got near to where you were."

"From which point," said Horton, whom this reminiscence had kept gravely attentive, "you in your turn rendered me such assistance, I remember, though I can't for the life of me imagine how you contrived, that the tables were quite turned and I shouldn't in the least have got out of my fix without you." He now pulled up short however; he stood a moment looking down. "It isn't pleasant to remember."

"It wouldn't," Gray judged, "be pleasant to forget. You gave proof of extraordinary coolness."

Horton still had his eyes on the ground. "We both kept our heads. I grant it's a decent note for us."

"If you mean we were associated in keeping our heads, you kept mine," Gray remarked, "much more than I kept yours. I should be without a head to-day if you hadn't seen so to my future, just as I should be without a heart, you must really let me remark, if I didn't look now to your past. I consider that to know that fact in it takes me of itself well-nigh far enough in appreciation of you for my curiosity, even at its most exasperated, to rest on a bed of roses. However, my imagination itself," Gray still more beautifully went on, "insists on making additions—since how can't it, for that matter, picture again the rate at which it made them then? I hadn't even at the time waited for you to save my life in order to think you a swell. If I thought you the biggest kind of one, and if in your presence now I see just as much as ever why I did, what does that amount to but that my mind isn't a blank about you?"

"Well, if mine had ever been one about you," said Horton, once more facing it, "our so interesting conversation here would have sufficed to cram it full. The least I can make of you, whether for your protection or my profit, is just that you're insanely romantic."

"Romantic—yes," Gray smiled; "but oh, but oh, so systematically!"

"It's your system that's exactly your madness. How can you take me, without a stroke of success, without a single fact of performance, to my credit, for anything but an abject failure? You're in possession of no faintest sign, kindly note, that I'm not a mere impudent ass."

Gray accepted this reminder, for all he showed to the contrary, in the admiring spirit in which he might have regarded a splendid somersault or an elegant trick with cards; indulging, that is, by his appearance, in the forward bend of attention to it, but then falling back to more serious ground. "It's my romance that's itself my reason; by which I mean that I'm never so reasonable, so deliberate, so lucid and so capable—to call myself capable at any hour!—as when I'm most romantic. I'm methodically and consistently so, and nothing could make and keep me, for any dealings with me, I hold, more conveniently safe and quiet. You see that you can lead me about by a string if you'll only tie it to my appropriate finger—which you'll find out, if you don't mind the trouble, by experience of the wrong ones, those where the attachment won't 'act.'" He drew breath to give his friend the benefit of this illustration, but another connection quickly caught him up. "How can you pretend to suggest that you're in these parts the faintest approach to an insignificant person? How can you pretend that you're not as clever as you can stick together, and with the cleverness of the right kind? For there are odious kinds, I know—the kind that redresses other people's stupidity instead of sitting upon it."

"I'll answer you those questions," Horton goodhumouredly said, "as soon as you tell me how you've come by your wonderful ground for them. Till you're able to do that I shall resent your torrent of abuse. The appalling creature you appear to wish to depict!"

"Well, you're simply a figure—what I call—in all the force of the term; one has only to look at you to see it, and I shall give up drawing conclusions from it only when I give up looking. You can make out that there's nothing in a prejudice," Gray developed, "for a prejudice maybe, or must be, so to speak, single-handed; but you can't not count with a relation—I mean one you're a party to, because a relation is exactly a fact of reciprocity. Our reciprocity, which exists and which makes me a party to it by existing for my benefit, just as it makes you one by existing for yours, can't possibly result in your not 'figuring' to me, don't you see? with the most admirable intensity. And I simply decline," our young man wound up, "not to believe tremendous things of any subject of a relation of mine."

"'Any' subject?" Vinty echoed in a tone that showed how intelligently he had followed. "That condition, I'm afraid," he smiled, "will cut down not a little your general possibilities of relation." And then as if this were cheap talk, but a point none the less remained: "In this country one's a figure (whatever you may mean by that!) on easy terms; and if I correspond to your idea of the phenomenon you'll have much to do—I won't say for my simple self, but for the comfort of your mind—to make your fond imagination fit the funny facts. You pronounce me an awful swell—which, like everything else over here, has less weight of sense in it for the saying than it could have anywhere else; but what barest evidence have you of any positive trust in me shown on any occasion or in any connection by one creature you can name?"

"Trust?"—Gray looked at the red tip of the cigarette between his fingers.

"Trust, trust, trust!"

Well, it didn't take long to say. "What do you call it but trust that such people as the Bradhams, and all the people here, as he tells me, receive you with open arms?"

"Such people as the Bradhams and as 'all the people here'!"—Horton beamed on him for the beauty of that. "Such authorities and such 'figures,' such allegations, such perfections and such proofs! Oh," he said, "I'm going to have great larks with you!"

"You give me then the evidence I want in the very act of challenging me for it. What better proof of your situation and your character than your possession exactly of such a field for whatever you like, of such a dish for serving me up? Mr. Bradham, as you know," Gray continued, "was this morning so good as to pay me a visit, and the form in which he put your glory to me—because we talked of you ever so pleasantly—was that, by his appreciation, you know your way about the place better than all the rest of the knowing put together."

Horton smiled, smoked, kept his hands in his pockets. "Dear deep old Davey!"

"Yes," said Gray consistently, "isn't he a wise old specimen? It's rather horrid for me having thus to mention, as if you had applied to me for a place, that I've picked up a good 'character' of you, but since you insist on it he assured me that I couldn't possibly have a better friend."

"Well, he's a most unscrupulous old person and ought really to be ashamed. What it comes to," Haughty added, "is that though I've repeatedly stayed with them they've to the best of his belief never missed one of the spoons. The fact is that even if they had poor Davey wouldn't know it."

"He doesn't take care of the spoons?" Gray asked in a tone that made his friend at once swing round and away. He appeared to note an unexpectedness in this, yet, "out" as he was for unexpectedness, it could grow, on the whole, clearly, but to the raising of his spirits. "Well, I shall take care of my loose valuables and, unwarned by the Bradhams and likely to have such things to all appearance in greater number than ever before, what can I do but persist in my notion of asking you to keep with me, at your convenience, some proper count of them?" After which as Horton's movement had carried him quite to the far end of the room, where the force of it even detained him a little. Gray had him again well in view for his return, and was prompted thereby to a larger form of pressure. "How can you pretend to palm off on me that women mustn't in prodigious numbers 'trust' you?"

Haughty made of his shoulders the most prodigious hunch. "What importance, under the sun, has the trust of women—in numbers however prodigious? It's never what's best in a man they trust—it's exactly what's worst, what's most irrelevant to anything or to any class but themselves. Their kind of confidence," he further elucidated, "is concerned only with the effect of their own operations or with those to which they are subject; it has no light either for a man's other friends or for his enemies: it proves nothing about him but in that particular and wholly detached relation. So neither hate me nor like me, please, for anything any woman may tell you."

Horton's hand had on this renewed and emphasised its proposal of good-night; to which his host acceded with the remark: "What superfluous precautions you take!"

"How can you call them superfluous," he asked in answer to this, "when you've been taking them at such a rate yourself?—in the interest, I mean, of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on your feet?"

"It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about life—which is what you've just been talking of. It has only been to show you that I'm silly about affairs," Gray said as they went at last through the big bedimmed hall to the house doors, which stood open to the warm summer night under the protection of the sufficient outward reaches.

"Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at the top of the steps, sought to know.

"You'll make me feel, no doubt, how much they are—which would be very good for me. Only life isn't affairs—that's my subtle distinction," Gray went on.

"I'm not sure, I'm not sure!" said Horton while he looked at the stars.

"Oh rot—I am!" Gray happily declared; to which he the next moment added: "What it makes you contend for, you see, is the fact of my silliness."

"Well, what is that but the most splendid fact about you, you jolly old sage?"—and his visitor, getting off, fairly sprang into the shade of the shrubberies.

BOOK FOURTH

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]

NOTES FOR THE IVORY TOWER

AUGUSTA BRADHAM, "Gussie" Bradham, for the big social woman. Basil Hunn I think on the whole for Hero. Graham Rising, which becomes familiarly Gray Rising, I have considered but incline to keep for another occasion.

Horton Crimper, among his friends Haughty Crimper, seems to me right and best, on the whole, for my second young man. I don't want for him a surname intrinsically pleasing; and this seems to me of about the good nuance. My Third Man hereby becomes, I seem to see, Davey Bradham; on which, I think, for the purpose and association, I can't improve.

My Girl, in the relinquished thing, was Cissy Foy; and this was all right for the figure there intended, but the girl here is a very different one, and everything is altered. I want her name moreover, her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant—also beginning with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was in the Times of two or three days ago; its only fault is a little too much meaning, but the sense here wouldn't be thrown into undue relief, and I don't want anything pretty or conventionally "pleasing." Everything of the shade of the real. Remain thus important the big, the heavy Daughter of the billionaire, with her father; in connection with whom I think I give up Betterman. That must stand over, and I want, above all, a single syllable. All the other names have two or three; and this makes an objection to the Shimple, which I originally thought of as about odd and ugly enough without being more so than I want it. But that also will keep, while I see that I have the monosyllable Hench put down; only put down for another connection. I see I thought of "Wenty" Hench, short for Wentworth, as originally good for Second Young Man. If I balance that against Haughty Crimper, I incline still to the latter, for the small amusement of the Haughty. On the other hand I am not content with Hench, though a monosyllable, for the dear Billionaire girl, in the light of whom it is alone important to consider the question, her Father so little mattering after she becomes by his death the great Heiress of the time. And I kind of want to make her Moyra; with which I just spy in the Times a wonderful and admirable "Chown"; which makes me think that Moyra Chown may do. Besides which if I keep Grabham for my "heroine" I feel the Christian name should there be of one syllable. All my others are of two; and I shall presently make the ease right for this, finding the good thing. The above provides for the time for the essential. Yet suddenly I am pulled up—Grabham, after all, won't at all do if I keep Bradham for the other connection; which I distinctly prefer: I want nothing with any shade of a special sense there. Accordingly, I don't know but what I may go in for a different note altogether and lavish on her the fine Cantupher; which I don't want however really to waste. When Cantupher is used there ought to be several of it, and above all men: no, I see it won't do, and besides I don't want anything positively fine. I like Wither, and I like Augurer, and I like, in another note, Damper, and I even see a little Bessie as a combination with it, though I don't on the whole want a Bessie. At any rate I now get on.