Chapter IV: Part 4

"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."

"When you talk of my 'fate,'" he allowed himself almost the amusement of answering, "you freeze the current of my blood; but when you say 'our situation,' and that we're in it together, that's a little better, and I assure you that I shall not for a moment stay in anything, whatever it may be, in which you're not close beside me. So there you are at any rate--and I matter at least as much as this, whatever the mistake: that I have hold of you as tight as ever you've been held in your life, and that, whatever and _whatever_ the mistake, you've got to see me through."

"Well, I took my responsibility years ago, and things came of it"--so she made reply; "and the other day I took this other, and now _this_ has come of it, and that was what I wanted, and wasn't afraid of, and am not afraid of now--like the fears that came to me after the Dresden time." No more direct than that was her answer to his protest, and what she subjoined still took as little account of it. "I rather lost them, those old fears--little by little; but one of the things I most wanted the other day was to see whether before you here they wouldn't wholly die down. They're over, they're over," she repeated; "I knew three minutes of you would do it--and not a ghost of them remains."

"I can't be anything but glad that you shouldn't have fears--and it's horrid to me to learn, I assure you," he said, "that I've ever been the occasion of any. But the extent to which," he then frankly laughed, "'three minutes' of me seems to be enough for people----!"

He left it there, just throwing up his arms, passive again as he had accepted his having to be in the other place; but conscious more and more of the anomaly of her showing so markedly at such an hour a preoccupation, and of the very intensest, that should not have her father for its subject. Nothing could have more represented this than her abruptly saying to him, without recognition of his point just made, so far as it might have been a point: "If your impression of your uncle, and of his looking so fine and being so able to talk to you, makes you think he has any power really to pick up or to last, I want you to know that you're wholly mistaken. It has kept him up," she went on, "and the effect may continue a day or two more--it _will_, in fact, till certain things are done. But then the flicker will have dropped--for he won't want it not to. He'll feel all right. The extraordinary inspiration, the borrowed force, will have spent itself--it will die down and go out, but with no pain. There has been at no time much of that," she said, "and now I'm positively assured there's none. It can't come back--nothing can but the weakness. It's too lovely," she remarkably added--"so there indeed and indeed we are."

To take in these words was to be, after a fashion he couldn't have expressed, on a basis of reality with her the very rarest and queerest; so that, bristling as it did with penetrative points, her speech left him scarce knowing for the instant which penetrated furthest. That she made no more of anything he himself said than if she had just sniffed it as a pale pink rose and then tossed it into the heap of his other sweet futilities, such another heap as had seemed to grow up for him in his uncle's room, this might have pressed sharpest hadn't something else, not wholly overscored by what followed, perhaps pricked his consciousness most. "'It,' you say, has kept him up? May I ask you what 'it' then may so wonderfully have been?"

She had no more objection to say than she apparently had difficulty. "Why, his having let me get at him. _That_ was to make the whole difference."

It was somehow as much in the note of their reality as anything could well be; which was perhaps why he could but respond with "Oh I see!" and remain lolling a little with a sense of flatness--a flatness moreover exclusively his own.

So without flatness of _her_ own she didn't even mind his; something in her brushed quite above it while she observed next, as if it were the most important thing that now occurred to her: "That of course was my poor father's mistake." And then as Gray but stared: "I mean the idea that he _can_ pick up."

"It's your father's mistake that _he_ can----?"

She met it as if really a shade bewildered at his own misconception; she was literally so far off from any vision of her parent in himself, a philosopher might have said, that it took her an instant to do the question justice. "Oh no--I mean that your uncle can. It was your own report of that to him, with Miss Mumby backing you, that put things in the bad light to him."

"So bad a light that Mr. Gaw is in danger by it?" This was catching on of a truth to realities--and most of all to the one he had most to face. "I've been then at the bottom of that?"

He was to wonder afterwards if she had very actually gone so far as to let slip a dim smile for the intensity of his candour on this point, or whether her so striking freedom from intensity in the general connection had but suggested to him one of the images that were most in opposition. Her answer at any rate couldn't have had more of the eminence of her plainness. "That you yourself, after your uncertainties, should have found Mr. Betterman surprising was perfectly natural--and how indeed could you have dreamed that father so wanted him to die?" And then as Gray, affected by the extreme salience of this link in the chain of her logic, threw up his head a little for the catching of his breath, her supreme lucidity, and which was lucidity all in his interest, further shone out. "Father is indeed ill. He has had these bad times before, but nothing quite of the present gravity. He has been in a critical state for months, but one thing has kept him alive--the wish to see your uncle so far on his way that there could be no doubt. It was the appearance of doubt so suddenly this afternoon that gave him the shock." She continued to explain the case without prejudice. "To take it there from you for possible that Mr. Betterman might revive and that he should have in his own so unsteady condition to wait was simply what father couldn't stand."

"So that I just dealt the blow----?"

But it was as if she cared too little even to try to make that right. "He doesn't want, you see, to live after."

"After having found he is mistaken?"

She had a faint impatience. "He isn't of course really--since what I told you of your uncle is true. And he knows that now, having my word for it."

Gray couldn't be clear enough about her clearness. "Your word for it that my uncle has revived but for the moment?"

"Absolutely. Wasn't my giving him that," Rosanna asked, "a charming filial touch?"

This was tremendously much again to take in, but Gray's capacity grew. "Promising him, you mean, for his benefit, that my uncle _shan't_ last?"

The size of it on his lips might fairly, during the instant she looked at him, have been giving her pleasure. "Yes, making it a bribe to father's patience."

"Then why doesn't the bribe act?"

"Because it comes too late. It was amazing," she pursued, "that, feeling as he did, he could take that drive to the Bradhams'--and Miss Mumby was right in perfectly understanding that. The harm was already done--and there it is."

She had truly for the whole reference the most astounding tones. "You literally mean then," said Gray, "that while you sit here with me he's dying--dying of my want of sense?"

"You've no want of sense"--she spoke as if this were the point really involved. "You've a sense the most exquisite--and surely you had best take in soon rather than late," she went on, "how you'll never be free not to have on every occasion of life to reckon with it and pay for it."

"Oh I say!" was all the wit with which he could at once meet this charge; but she had risen as she spoke and, with a remark about there being another matter, had moved off to a piece of furniture at a distance where she appeared to take something from a drawer unlocked with a sharp snap for the purpose. When she returned to him she had this object in her hand, and Gray recognised in it an oblong envelope, addressed, largely sealed in black, and seeming to contain a voluminous letter. She kept it while he noted that the seal was intact, and she then reverted not to the discomfiture she had last produced in him but to his rueful reference of a minute before that.

"He's not dying of anything you said or did, or of anyone's act or words. He's just dying of twenty millions."

"Twenty millions?" There was a kind of enormity in her very absence of pomp, and Gray felt as if he had dropped of a sudden, from his height of simplicity, far down into a familiar relation to quantities inconceivable--out of which depths he fairly blew and splashed to emerge, the familiar relation, of all things in the world, being so strange a one. "_That's_ what you mean here when you talk of money?"

"That's what we mean," said Rosanna, "when we talk of anything at all--for of what else but money _do_ we ever talk? He's dying, at any rate," she explained, "of his having wished to have to do with it on that sort of scale. Having to do with it consists, you know, of the things you do _for_ it--which are mostly very awful; and there are all kinds of consequences that they eventually have. You pay by these consequences for what you have done, and my father has been for a long time paying." Then she added as if of a sudden to summarise and dismiss the whole ugly truth: "The effect has been to dry up his life." Her eyes, with this, reached away for the first time as in search of something not at all before her, and it was on the perfunctory note that she had the next instant concluded. "There's nothing at last left for him to pay _with._"

For Gray at least, whatever initiations he had missed, she couldn't keep down the interest. "Mr. Gaw then will _leave_ twenty millions----?"

"He has already left them--in the sense of having made his will; as your uncle, equally to my knowledge, has already made his." Something visibly had occurred to her, and in connection, it might seem, with the packet she had taken from her drawer. She looked about--there being within the scene, which was somehow at once blank and replete, sundry small scattered objects of an expensive negligibility; not one of which, till now, he could guess, had struck her as a thing of human application. Human application had sprung up, the idea of selection at once following, and she unmistakeably but wondered what would be best for her use while she completed the statement on which she had so strikingly embarked. "He has left me his whole fortune." Then holding up an article of which she had immediately afterwards, with decision, proceeded to possess herself, "Is that a thing you could at all bear?" she irrelevantly asked. She had caught sight, in her embarrassed way, of something apparently adapted to her unexplained end, and had left him afresh to assure herself of its identity, taking up from a table at first, however, a box in Japanese lacquer only to lay it down unsatisfied. She had circled thus at a distance for a time, allowing him now his free contemplation; she had tried in succession, holding them close to her eyes, several embossed or embroidered superfluities, a blotting-book covered with knobs of malachite, a silver box, flat, largely circular and finely fretted, a gold cigar case of absurd dimensions, of which she played for a moment the hinged lid. Such was the object on which she puzzlingly challenged him.

"I could bear it perhaps better if I ever used cigars."

"You don't smoke?" she almost wailed.

"Never cigars. Sometimes pipes--but mostly, thank goodness, cigarettes."

"Thank the powers then indeed!"--and, the golden case restored to the table, where she had also a moment before laid her prepared missive, she went straight to a corner of the mantel-shelf, hesitations dropping from her, and, opening there a plainer receptacle than any she had yet touched, turned the next instant with a brace of cigarettes picked out and an accent she had not yet used. "You _are_ a blessing, Gray--I'm nowhere without one!" There were matches at hand, and she had struck a light and applied it, at his lips, to the cigarette passively received by him, afterwards touching her own with it, almost before he could wonder again at the oddity of their transition. Their light smoke curled while she went back to her table; it quickened for him with each puff the marvel of a domestic altar graced at such a moment by the play of that particular flame. Almost, to his fine vision, it made Rosanna different--for wasn't there at once a gained ease in the tone with which, her sealed letter still left lying on the table, she returned to that convenience for the pocket of the rich person of which she had clicked and re-clicked the cover? What strange things, Gray thought, rich persons had!--and what strange things they did, he might mentally even have added, when she developed in a way that mystified him but the more: "I don't mean for your cigars, since you don't use them; but I want you to have from my hand something in which to keep, with all due consideration, a form of tribute that has been these last forty-eight hours awaiting you here, and which, it occurs to me, would just slide into this preposterous piece of furniture and nestle there till you may seem to feel you want it." She proceeded to recover the packet and slide it into the case, the shape of which, on a larger scale, just corresponded with its own, and then, once more making the lid catch, shook container and contents as sharply as she might have shaken a bottle of medicine. "So--there it is; I somehow don't want just to thrust at you the letter itself."

"But may I be told what the letter itself _is?_" asked Gray, who had followed these movements with interest.

"Why of course--didn't I mention? Here are safely stowed," she said, her gesture causing the smooth protective surfaces to twinkle more brightly before him, "the very last lines (and many there appear to be of them!) that, if I am not mistaken, my father's hand will have traced. He wrote them, in your interest, as he considers, when he heard of your arrival in New York, and, having sealed and directed them, gave them to me yesterday to take care of and deliver to you. I put them away for the purpose, and an hour ago, during our drive back from Mrs. Bradham's, he reminded me of my charge. Before asking Miss Mumby to tell you I should like to see you I transferred the letter from its place of safety in my room to the cabinet from which, for your benefit, I a moment ago took it. I carefully comply, as you see, with my father's request. I know nothing whatever of what he has written you, and only want you to have his words. But I want also," she pursued, "to make just this little affair of them. I want"--and she bent her eyes on the queer costliness, rubbing it with her pockethandkerchief--"to do what the Lord Mayor of London does, doesn't he? when he offers the Freedom of the City; present them in a precious casket in which they may always abide. I want in short," she wound up, "to put them, for your use, beautifully away."

Gray went from wonder to wonder. "It isn't then a thing you judge I should open at once?"

"I don't care whether you never open it in your life. But you don't, I can see, like that vulgar thing!" With which having opened her receptacle and drawn forth from it the subject of her attention she tossed back to its place on the spread of brocade the former of these trifles. The big black seal, under this discrimination, seemed to fix our young man with a sombre eye.

"Is there any objection to my just looking at the letter now?" And then when he had taken it and yet was on the instant and as by the mere feel and the nearer sight, rather less than more conscious of a free connection with it, "Is it going to be bad for me?" he said.

"Find out for yourself!"

"Break the seal?"

"Isn't it meant to break?" she asked with a shade of impatience.

He noted the impatience, sounding her nervousness, but saw at the same time that her interest in the communication, whatever it might be, was of the scantest, and that she suffered from having to defer to his own. "If I needn't answer tonight----!"

"You needn't answer ever."

"Oh well then it can wait. But you're right--it mustn't just wait in my pocket."

This pleased her. "As I say, it must have a place of its own."

He considered of that. "You mean that when I _have_ read it I may still want to treasure it?"