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39. of what would be fine and great for her young friend, but Rosanna's
envy and admiration of possibilities, to say nothing of actualities, to
which this view was quite blind, kept the girl before her at times as a
sacrificed, truly an even prostituted creature; who yet also, it had to
be added, could often alienate sympathy by strange, by perverse
concurrences. However, Rosanna thought, Cissy wasn't in
concurrence now, but was quite otherwise preoccupied than with
what their hostess could either give her or take from her. She was
happy—this our young woman perfectly perceived, to her own very
great increase of interest; so happy that, as had been repeatedly
noticeable before, she multiplied herself through the very agitation
of it, appearing to be, for particular things they had to say to her,
particular conversational grabs and snatches, all of the most violent,
they kept attempting and mostly achieving, at the service of
everyone at once, and thereby as obliging, as humane a beauty,
after the fashion of the old term, as could have charmed the sight.
What Rosanna most noted withal, and not for the first time either,
every observation she had hitherto made seeming now but
intensified, what she most noted was the huge general familiarity,
the pitch of intimacy unmodulated, as if exactly the same tie, from
person to person, bound the whole company together and nobody
had anything to say to anyone that wasn't equally in question for all.
This, she knew, was the air and the sound, the common state, of
intimacy, and again and again, in taking it in, she had remained
unsure of whether it left her more hopelessly jealous or more rudely
independent. She would have liked to be intimate—with someone or
other, not indeed with every member of a crowd; but the faculty, as
appeared, hadn't been given her (for with whom had she ever
exercised it? not even with Cissy, she felt now,) and it was ground
on which she knew alternate languor and relief. The fact, however,
that so much as all this could be present to her while she
encountered greetings, accepted tea, and failed of felicity before
forms of address for the most part so hilarious, or at least so
ingenious, as to remind her further that she might never expect to
be funny either—that fact might have shown her as hugging a
40. treasure of consciousness rather than as seeking a soil for its
interment. What they all took for granted!—this again and again had
been before her; and never so as when Gussy Bradham after a little
became possessed of her to the extent of their sharing a settee in
one of the great porches on the lawny margin of which, before
sundry over-archings in other and quite contradictious architectural
interests began to spread, a dozen dispersed couples and trios
revolved and lingered in sight. How was he, the young man at the
other house, going to like these enormous assumptions?—that of a
sudden oddly came to her; so far indeed as it was odd that Gussy
should suggest such questions. She suggested questions in her own
way at all times; Rosanna indeed mostly saw her in a sort of
immodest glare of such, the chief being doubtless the wonder, never
assuaged, of how any circle of the supposed amenities could go on
"putting up" with her. The present was as a fact perhaps the first
time our young woman had seen her in the light of a danger to
herself. If society, or what they called such, had to reckon with her
and accepted the charge, that was society's own affair—it appeared
on the whole to understand its interest; but why should she,
Rosanna Gaw, recognise a complication she had done nothing ever
to provoke? It was literally as if the reckoning sat there between
them and all the terms they had ever made with felt differences,
intensities of separation and opposition, had now been superseded
by the need for fresh ones—forms of contact and exchange, forms of
pretended intercourse, to be improvised in presence of new truths.
So it was at any rate that Rosanna's imagination worked while she
asked herself if there mightn't be something in an idea she had more
than once austerely harboured—the possibility that Mrs. Bradham
could on occasion be afraid of her. If this lady's great note was that
of an astounding assurance based on approved impunity, how,
certainly, should a plain dull shy spinster, with an entire incapacity
for boldness and a perfect horror, in general, of intermeddling, have
broken the spell?—especially as there was no other person in the
world, not one, whom she could have dreamed of wishing to put in
fear. Deep was the discomfort for Miss Gaw of losing with her
41. entertainer the commonest advantage she perhaps knew, that of her
habit of escape from the relation of dislike, let alone of hostility,
through some active denial for the time of any relation at all. What
was there in Gussy that rendered impossible to Rosanna's sense this
very vulgarest of luxuries? She gave her always the impression of
looking at her with an exaggeration of ease, a guarded penetration,
that consciously betrayed itself; though how could one know, after
all, that this wasn't the horrid nature of her look for everyone?—
which would have been publicly denounced if people hadn't been too
much involved with her to be candid. With her wondrous bloom of
life and health and her hard confidence that had nothing to do with
sympathy, Gussy might have presented it as a matter of some
pusillanimity, her present critic at the same time felt, that one should
but detect the displeasing in such an exhibition of bright activity. The
only way not to stand off from her, no doubt, was to be of her
"bossed" party and crew, or in other words to be like everyone else;
and perhaps one might on that condition have enjoyed as a work of
nature or even of art, an example of all-efficient force, her braveries
of aspect and attitude, resources of resistance to time and thought,
things not of beauty, for some unyielding reason, and quite as little
of dignity, but things of assertion and application in an extraordinary
degree, things of a straight cold radiance and of an emphasis that
was like the stamp of hard flat feet. Even if she was to be envied it
would be across such gulfs; as it was indeed one couldn't so much
as envy her the prodigy of her "figure," which had been at eighteen,
as one had heard, that of a woman of forty and was now at forty,
one saw, that of a girl of eighteen: such a state of the person wasn't
human, to the younger woman's sombre sense, but might have been
that of some shining humming insect, a thing of the long-constricted
waist, the minimised yet caparisoned head, the fixed
disproportionate eye and tough transparent wing, gossamer
guaranteed. With all of which, however, she had pushed through
every partition and was in the centre of her guest's innermost
preserve before she had been heard coming.
42. "It's too lovely that you should have got him to do what he ought—
that dreadful old man! But I don't know if you feel how interesting
it's all going to be; in fact if you know yourself how wonderful it is
that he has already—Mr. Fielder has, I mean—such a tremendous
friend in Cissy."
Rosanna waited, facing her, noting her extraordinary perfections of
neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said
whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver,
the clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an
element that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme
attestation of care. "Take her as an advertisement of all the latest
knowledges of how to 'treat' every inch of the human surface and
where to 'get' every scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she is
enveloped, and she does achieve an effect sublime in itself and
thereby absolute in a wavering world"—with so much even as that
was Miss Gaw aware of helping to fill for her own use the interval
before she spoke. "No," she said, "I know nothing of what any of
you may suppose yourselves to know." After which, however, with a
sudden inspiration, a quick shift of thought as though catching an
alarm, "I haven't seen Mr. Fielder for a very long time, haven't seen
him at all yet here," she added; "but though I hoped immensely he
would come, and am awfully glad he has, what I want for him is to
have the very best time he possibly can; a much better one than I
shall myself at all know how to help him to."
"Why, aren't you helping him to the greatest time he can have ever
had if you've waked up his uncle to a sense of decency?" Gussy
demanded with her brightest promptness. "You needn't think,
Rosanna," she proceeded with a well-nigh fantastic development of
that ease, "you needn't think you're going to be able to dodge the
least little consequence of your having been so wonderful. He's just
going to owe you everything, and to follow that feeling up; so I don't
see why you shouldn't want to let him—it would be so mean of him
not to!—or be deprived of the credit of so good a turn. When I do
things"—Gussy always had every account of herself ready—"I want
to have them recognised; I like to make them pay, without the least
43. shame, in the way of glory gained. However, it's between
yourselves," her delicacy conceded, "and how can one judge—
except just to envy you such a lovely relation? All I want is that you
should feel that here we are if you do want help. He should have
here the best there is, and should have it, don't you think? before he
tumbles from ignorance into any mistake—mistakes have such a way
of sticking. So don't be unselfish about him, don't sacrifice him to
the fear of using your advantage: what are such advantages as you
enjoy meant for—all of them, I mean—but to be used up to the
limit? You'll see at any rate what Cissy says—she has great ideas
about him. I mean," said Mrs. Bradham with a qualification in which
the expression of Rosanna's still gaze suddenly seemed reflected, "I
mean that it's so interesting she should have all the clues."
Rosanna still gazed; she might even after a little have struck a
watcher as held in spite of herself by some heavy spell. It was an old
sense—she had already often had it: when once Gussy had got her
head up, got away and away as Davey called it, she might appear to
do what she would with her victim; appear, that is, to Gussy herself
—the appearance never corresponded for Miss Gaw to an admission
of her own. Behind the appearance, at all events, things on one side
and the other piled themselves up, and Rosanna certainly knew what
they were on her side. Nevertheless it was as a vocal note too faintly
quavered through some loud orchestral sound that she heard herself
echo: "The clues——?"
"Why, it's so funny there should be such a lot—and all gathered
about here!" To this attestation of how everything in the world, for
that matter, was gathered right there Rosanna felt herself
superficially yield; and even before she knew what was coming—for
something clearly was—she was strangely conscious of a choice
somehow involved in her attitude and dependent on her mind, and
this too as at almost the acutest moment of her life. What it came
to, with the presentiment of forces at play such as she had really
never yet had to count with, was the question, all for herself, of
whether she should be patently lying in the profession of a readiness
to hand the subject of her interest over unreservedly to all waiting,
44. all so remarkably gathering contacts and chances, or whether the
act wouldn't partake of the very finest strain of her past sincerity.
She was to remember the moment later on as if she had really by
her definition, by her selection, "behaved"—fairly feeling the breath
of her young man's experience on her cheek before knowing with
the least particularity what it would most be, and deciding then and
there to swallow down every fear of any cost of anything to herself.
She felt extraordinary in the presence of symptoms, symptoms of
life, of death, of danger, of delight, of what did she know? But this it
was exactly that cast derision, by contrast, on such poor obscurities
as her feelings, and settled it for her that when she had professed a
few minutes back that she hoped they would all, for his possible
pleasure in it, catch him up and, so far as they might, make him
theirs, she wasn't to have spoken with false frankness. Queer
enough at the same time, and a wondrous sign of her state of
sensibility, that she should see symptoms glimmer from so very far
off. What was this one that was already in the air before Mrs.
Bradham had so much as answered her question?
Well, the next moment at any rate she knew, and more
extraordinary then than anything was the spread of her
apprehension, off somehow to the incalculable, under Gussy's
mention of a name. What did this show most of all, however, but
how little the intensity of her private association with the name had
even yet died out, or at least how vividly it could revive in a
connection by which everything in her was quickened? "Haughty"
Vint, just lately conversed with by Cissy in New York, it appeared,
and now coming on to the Bradhams from one day to another, had
fed the girl with information, it also, and more wonderfully,
transpired—information about Gray's young past, all surprisingly
founded on close contacts, the most interesting, between the pair, as
well as the least suspected ever by Rosanna: to such an effect that
the transmitted trickle of it had after a moment swelled from Gussy's
lips into a stream by which our friend's consciousness was flooded.
"Clues" these connections might well be called when every touch
could now set up a vibration. It hummed away at once like a pressed
45. button—if she had been really and in the least meanly afraid of
complications she might now have sat staring at one that would do
for oddity, for the oddity of that relation of her own with Cissy's
source of anecdote which could so have come and gone and yet
thrown no light for her on anything but itself; little enough, by what
she had tried to make of it at the time, though that might have
been. It had meanwhile scarce revived for her otherwise, even if
reviving now, as we have said, to intensity, that Horton Vint's
invitation to her some three years before to bestow her hand upon
him in marriage had been attended by impressions as singular
perhaps as had ever marked a like case in an equal absence of
outward show. The connection with him remaining for her had
simply been that no young man—in the clear American social air—
had probably ever approached a young woman on such ground with
so utter a lack of ostensible warrant and had yet at the same time so
saved the situation for himself, or for what he might have called his
dignity, and even hers; to the positive point of his having left her
with the mystery, in all the world, that she could still most pull out
from old dim confusions to wonder about, and wonder all in vain,
when she had nothing better to do. Everything was over between
them save the fact that they hadn't quarrelled, hadn't indeed so
much as discussed; but here withal was association, association
unquenched—from the moment a fresh breath, as just now, could
blow upon it. He had had the appearance—it was unmistakeable—of
absolutely believing she might accept him if he but put it to her
lucidly enough and let her look at him straight enough; and the
extraordinary thing was that, for all her sense of this at the hour, she
hadn't imputed to him a real fatuity.
It had remained with her that, given certain other facts, no incident
of that order could well have had so little to confess by any of its
aspects to the taint of vulgarity. She had seen it, she believed, as he
meant it, meant it with entire conviction: he had intended a tribute,
of a high order, to her intelligence, which he had counted on, or at
least faced with the opportunity, to recognise him as a greater value,
taken all round, appraised by the whole suitability, than she was
46. likely ever again to find offered. He was of course to take or to
leave, and she saw him stand there in that light as he had then
stood, not pleading, not pressing, not pretending to anything but the
wish and the capacity to serve, only holding out her chance,
appealing to her judgment, inviting her inspection, meeting it
without either a shade of ambiguity or, so far as she could see, any
vanity beyond the facts. It had all been wonderful enough, and not
least so that, although absolutely untouched and untempted,
perfectly lucid on her own side and perfectly inaccessible, she had in
a manner admired him, in a manner almost enjoyed him, in the act
of denying him hope. Extraordinary in especial had it been that he
was probably right, right about his value, right about his rectitude, of
conscious intention at least, right even as to his general calculation
of effect, an effect probably producible on most women; right finally
in judging that should he strike at all this would be the one way. It
was only less extraordinary that no faintest shade of regret, no
lightest play of rueful imagination, no subordinate stir of pity or
wonder, had attended her memory of having left him to the mere
cold comfort of reflection. It was his truth that had fallen short, not
his error; the soundness, as it were, of his claim—so far as his fine
intelligence, matching her own, that is, could make it sound—had
had nothing to do with its propriety. She had refused him, none the
less, without disliking him, at the same time that she was at no
moment afterwards conscious of having cared whether he had
suffered. She had been too unaware of the question even to remark
that she seemed indifferent; though with a vague impression—so far
as that went—that suffering was not in his chords. His acceptance of
his check she could but call inscrutably splendid—inscrutably
perhaps because she couldn't quite feel that it had left nothing
between them. Something there was, something there had to be, if
only the marvel, so to say, of her present, her permanent, backward
vision of the force with which they had touched and separated. It
stuck to her somehow that they had touched still more than if they
had loved, held each other still closer than if they had embraced: to
such and so strange a tune had they been briefly intimate. Would
any man ever look at her so for passion as Mr. Vint had looked for
47. reason? and should her own eyes ever again so visit a man's depths
and gaze about in them unashamed to a tune to match that
adventure? Literally what they had said was comparatively
unimportant—once he had made his errand clear; whereby the rest
might all have been but his silent exhibition of his personality, so to
name it, his honour, his assumption, his situation, his life, and that
failure on her own part to yield an inch which had but the more let
him see how straight these things broke upon her. For all the
straightness, it was true, the fact that might most have affected, not
to say concerned, her had remained the least expressed. It wasn't
for her now to know what difference it could have made that he was
in relation with Gray Fielder; incontestably, however, their relation, or
their missing of one, hers and Haughty's, flushed anew in the
sudden light.
"Oh I'm so glad he has good friends here then—with such a clever
one as Mr. Vint we can certainly be easy about him." So much
Rosanna heard herself at last say, and it would doubtless have quite
served for assent to Gussy's revelation without the further support
given her by the simultaneous convergence upon them of various
members of the party, who exactly struck our young woman as
having guessed, by the sight of hostess and momentous guest
withdrawn together, that the topic of the moment was there to be
plucked from their hands. Rosanna was now on her feet—she
couldn't sit longer and just take things; and she was to ask herself
afterwards with what cold stare of denial she mightn't have
appeared quite unprecedentedly to face the inquiring rout under the
sense that now certainly, if she didn't take care, she should have
nothing left of her own. It wasn't that they weren't, all laughter and
shimmer, all senseless sound and expensive futility, the easiest
people in the world to share with, and several the very prettiest and
pleasantest, of the vaguest insistence after all, the most absurdly
small awareness of what they were eager about; but that of the
three or four things then taking place at once the brush across her
heart of Gray's possible immediate question, "Have you brought me
over then to live with these——?" had most in common with alarm.
48. It positively helped her indeed withal that she found herself, the next
thing, greeting with more sincerity of expression than she had, by
her consciousness, yet used Mrs. Bradham's final leap to action in
the form of "I want him to dinner of course right off!" She said it
with the big brave laugh that represented her main mercy for the
general public view of her native eagerness, an eagerness appraised,
not to say proclaimed, by herself as a passion for the service of
society, and in connection with which it was mostly agreed that she
never so drove her flock before her as when paying this theoretic
tribute to grace of manner. Before Rosanna could ejaculate, moved
though she was to do so, the question had been taken up by the
extremely pretty person who was known to her friends, and known
even to Rosanna, as Minnie Undle and who at once put in a plea for
Mr. Fielder's presence that evening, her own having been secured for
it. Before such a rate of procedure as this evocation implied even
Gussy appeared to recoil, but with a prompt proviso in favour of the
gentleman's figuring rather on the morrow, when Mrs. Undle, since
she seemed so impatient, might again be of the party. Mrs. Undle
agreed on the spot, though by this time Rosanna's challenge had
ceased to hang fire. "But do you really consider that you know him
so much as that?"—she let Gussy have it straight, even if at the
disadvantage that there were now as ever plenty of people to react,
to the last hilarity, at the idea that acquaintance enjoyed on either
side was needfully imputable to these participations. "That's just why
—if we don't know him!" Mrs. Undle further contributed; while Gussy
declined recognition of the relevance of any word of Miss Gaw's. She
declined it indeed in her own way, by a yet stiffer illustration of her
general resilience; an "Of course I mean, dear, that I look to you to
bring him!" expressing sufficiently her system.
"Then you really expect him when his uncle's dying——?" sprang in
all honesty from Rosanna's lips; to be taken up on the instant,
however, by a voice that was not Gussy's and that rang clear before
Gussy could speak.
"There can't be the least question of it—even if we're dying
ourselves, or even if I am at least!" was what Rosanna heard; with
49. Cissy Foy, of a sudden supremely exhibited, giving the case at once
all happy sense, all bright quick harmony with their general
immediate interest. She pressed to Rosanna straight, as if nothing as
yet had had time to pass between them—which very little in fact
had; with the result for our young woman of feeling helped, by the
lightest of turns, not to be awkward herself, or really, what came to
the same thing, not to be anything herself. It was a fine perception
she had had before—of how Cissy could on occasion "do" for one,
and this, all extraordinarily and in a sort of double sense, by
quenching one in her light at the very moment she offered it for
guidance. She quenched Gussy, she was the single person who
could, Gussy almost gruntingly consenting; she quenched Minnie
Undle, she cheapened every other presence, scattering lovely looks,
multiplying happy touches, grasping Rosanna for possession, yet at
the same time, as with her free hand, waving away every other
connection: so that a minute or two later—for it scarce seemed more
—the pair were isolated, still on the verandah somewhere, but
intensely confronted and talking at ease, or in a way that had to
pass for ease, with its not mattering at all whether their companions,
dazzled and wafted off, had dispersed and ceased to be, or whether
they themselves had simply been floated to where they wished on
the great surge of the girl's grace. The girl's grace was, after its
manner, such a force that Miss Gaw had had repeatedly, on past
occasions, to doubt even while she recognised—for could a young
creature you weren't quite sure of use a weapon of such an edge
only for good? The young creature seemed at any rate now as never
yet to give out its play for a thing to be counted on and trusted; and
with Gussy Bradham herself shown just there behind them as letting
it take everything straight out of her hands, nobody else at all daring
to touch, what were you to do but verily feel distinguished by its so
wrapping you about? The only sharpness in what had happened was
that with Cissy's act of presence Mrs. Bradham had exercised her
great function of social appraiser by staring and then, as under
conclusions drawn from it, giving way. One might have found it
redeemingly soft in her that before this particular suggestion she
could melt, or that in other words Cissy appeared the single fact in
50. all the world about which she had anything to call imagination. She
imagined her, she imagined her now, and as dealing somehow with
their massive friend; which consciousness, on the latter's part, it
must be said, played for the moment through everything else.
Not indeed that there wasn't plenty for the girl to fill the fancy with;
since nothing could have been purer than the stream that she
poured into Rosanna's as from an upturned crystal urn while she
repeated over, holding her by the two hands, gazing at her in
admiration: "I can see how you care for him—I can see, I can see!"
And she felt indeed, our young woman, how the cover was by this
light hand whisked off her secret—Cissy made it somehow a secret
in the act of laying it bare; and that she blushed for the felt
exposure as even Gussy had failed to make her. Seeing which her
companion but tilted the further vessel of confidence. "It's too funny,
it's too wonderful that I too should know something. But I do, and
I'll tell you how—not now, for I haven't time, but as soon as ever I
can; which will make you see. So what you must do for all you're
worth," said Cissy, "is to care now more than ever. You must keep
him from us, because we're not good enough and you are; you must
act in the sense of what you feel, and must feel exactly as you've a
right to—for, as I say, I know, I know!"
It was impossible, Rosanna seemed to see, that a generous young
thing should shine out in more beauty; so that what in the world
might one ever keep from her? Surpassingly strange the plea thus
radiant on the very brow of the danger! "You mean you know Mr.
Fielder's history? from your having met somebody——?"
"Oh that of course, yes; Gussy, whom I've told of my having met Mr.
Northover, will have told you. That's curious and charming," Cissy
went on, "and I want awfully we should talk of it. But it isn't what I
mean by what I know—and what you don't, my dear thing!"
Rosanna couldn't have told why, but she had begun to tremble, and
also to try not to show it. "What I don't know—about Gray Fielder?
Why, of course there's plenty!" she smiled.
51. Cissy still held her hands; but Cissy now was grave. "No, there isn't
plenty—save so far as what I mean is enough. And I haven't told it
to Gussy. It's too good for her," the girl added. "It's too good for
anyone but you."
Rosanna just waited, feeling herself perhaps grimace. "What, Cissy,
are you talking about?"
"About what I heard from Mr. Northover when we met him, when we
saw so much of him, three years ago at Ragatz, where we had gone
for Mamma and where we went through the cure with him. He and I
struck up a friendship and he often spoke to me of his stepson—who
wasn't there with him, was at that time off somewhere in the
mountains or in Italy, I forget, but to whom I could see he was
devoted. He and I hit it off beautifully together—he seemed to me
awfully charming and to like to tell me things. So what I allude to is
something he said to me."
"About me?" Rosanna gasped.
"Yes—I see now it was about you. But it's only to-day that I've
guessed that. Otherwise, otherwise——!" And as if under the weight
of her great disclosure Cissy faltered.
But she had now indeed made her friend desire it. "You mean that
otherwise you'd have told me before?"
"Yes indeed—and it's such a miracle I didn't. It's such a miracle,"
said Cissy, "that the person should all this time have been you—or
you have been the person. Of course I had no idea that all this—
everything that has taken place now, by what I understand—was
going so extraordinarily to happen. You see he never named Mr.
Betterman, or in fact, I think," the girl explained, "told me anything
about him. And he didn't name, either, Gray's friend—so that in spite
of the impression made on me you've never till to-day been
identified."
Immense, as she went, Rosanna felt, the number of things she gave
her thus together to think about. What was coming she clearly
needn't fear—might indeed, deep within, happily hold her breath for;
52. but the very interest somehow made her rest an instant, as for
refinement of suspense, on the minor surprises. "The impression
then has been so great that you call him 'Gray'?"
The girl at this ceased holding hands; she folded her arms back
together across her slim young person—the frequent habit of it in
her was of the prettiest "quaint" effect; she laughed as if submitting
to some just correction of a freedom. "Oh, but my dear, he did, the
delightful man—and isn't it borne in upon me that you do? Of course
the impression was great—and if Mr. Northover and I had met
younger I don't know," her laugh said, "what mightn't have
happened. No, I never shall have had a greater, a more intelligent
admirer! As it was we remained true, secretly true, for fond memory,
to the end: at least I did, though ever so secretly—you see I speak
of it only now—and I want to believe so in his impression. But how I
torment you!" she suddenly said in another tone.
Rosanna, nursing her patience, had a sad slow headshake. "I don't
understand."
"Of course you don't—and yet it's too beautiful. It was about Gray—
once when we talked of him, as I've told you we repeatedly did. It
was that he never would look at anyone else."
Our friend could but appear at least to cast about. "Anyone else than
whom?"
"Why than you," Cissy smiled. "The girl he had loved in boyhood.
The American girl who, years before, in Dresden, had done for him
something he could never forget."
"And what had she done?" stared Rosanna.
"Oh he didn't tell me that! But if you don't take great care, as I say,"
Cissy went on, "perhaps he may—I mean Mr. Fielder himself may
when we close round him in the way that, in your place, as I assure
you, I would certainly do everything to prevent."
Rosanna looked about as with a sudden sense of weakness, the
effect of overstrain; it was absurd, but these last minutes might
53. almost, with their queer action, and as to the ground they covered,
have been as many formidable days. A fine verandah settee again
close at hand offered her support, and she dropped upon it, as for
large retrieval of menaced ease, with a need she herself alone could
measure. The need was to recover some sense of perspective, to be
able to place her young friend's somehow portentous assault off in
such conditions, if only of mere space and time, as would make for
some greater convenience of relation with it. It did at once help her
—and really even for the tone in which she smiled across: "So you're
sure?"
Cissy hovered, shining, shifting, yet accepting the perspective as it
were—when in the world had she to fear any?—and positively
painted there in bright contradiction, her very grace again, after the
odd fashion in which it sometimes worked, seeming to deny her
sincerity, and her very candour seeming to deny her gravity. "Sure of
what? Sure I'm right about you?"
Rosanna took a minute to say—so many things worked in her; yet
when one of these came uppermost, pushing certain of the others
back, she found for putting it forward a tone grateful to her own ear.
This tone represented on her part too a substitute for sincerity, but
that was exactly what she wanted. "I don't care a fig for any
anecdote about myself—which moreover it would be very difficult for
you to have right. What I ask you if you're certain of is your being
really not fit for him. Are you absolutely," said Miss Gaw, "as bad as
that?"
The girl, placed before her, looked at her now, with raised hands
folded together, as if she had been some seated idol, a great Buddha
perched up on a shrine. "Oh Rosanna, Rosanna——!" she admiringly,
piously breathed.
But it was not such treatment that could keep Miss Gaw from
completing her chosen sense. "I should be extremely sorry—so far
as I claim any influence on him—to interfere against his getting over
here whatever impressions he may; interfere by his taking you for
more important, in any way, than seems really called for."
54. "Taking me?" Cissy smiled.
"Taking any of you—the people, in general and in particular, who
haunt this house. We mustn't be afraid for him of his having the
interest, or even the mere amusement, of learning all that's to be
learnt about us."
"Oh Rosanna, Rosanna"—the girl kept it up—"how you adore him;
and how you make me therefore, wretch that I am, fiendishly want
to see him!"
But it might quite have glanced now from our friend's idol surface.
"You're the best of us, no doubt—very much; and I immensely hope
you'll like him, since you've been so extraordinarily prepared. It's to
be supposed too that he'll have some sense of his own."
Cissy continued rapt. "Oh but you're deep—deep deep deep!"
It came out as another presence again, that of Davey Bradham, who
had the air of rather restlessly looking for her, emerged from one of
the long windows of the house, just at hand, to meet Rosanna's
eyes. She found herself glad to have him back, as if further to inform
him. Wasn't it after all rather he that was the best of them and by
no means Cissy? Her face might at any rate have conveyed as much
while she reported of that young lady. "She thinks me so deep."
It made the girl, who had not seen him, turn round; but with an
immediate equal confidence. "And she thinks me, Davey, so good!"
Davey's eyes were only on Cissy, but Rosanna seemed to feel them
on herself. "How you must have got mixed!" he exclaimed. "But your
father has come for you," he then said to Rosanna, who had got up.
"Father has walked it?"—she was amazed.
"No, he's there in a hack to take you home—and too excited to come
in."
Rosanna's surprise but grew. "Has anything happened——?"
"Wonders—I asked them. Mr. Betterman's sitting right up."
55. "Really improving——?" Then her mystification spread. "'Them,' you
say?"
"Why his nurse, as I at least suppose her," said Davey, "is with him—
apparently to give you the expert opinion."
"Of the fiend's recuperating?" Cissy cried with a wail. And then
before her friend's bewilderment, "How dreadfully horrid!" she
added.
"Whose nurse, please?" Rosanna asked of Davey.
"Why, hasn't he got a nurse?" Davey himself, as always, but desired
lucidity. "She's doing her duty by him all the same!"
On which Cissy's young wit at once apprehended. "It's one of Mr.
Betterman's taking a joy-ride in honour of his recovery! Did you ever
hear anything so cool?"
She had appealed to her friends alike, but Rosanna, under the force
of her suggestion, was already in advance. "Then father himself
must be ill!" Miss Gaw had declared, moving rapidly to the quarter in
which he so incongruously waited and leaving Davey to point a rapid
moral for Cissy's benefit while this couple followed.
"If he is so upset that he hasn't been trusted alone I'll be hanged if I
don't just see it!"
But the marvel was the way in which after an instant Cissy saw it
too. "You mean because he can't stand Mr. Betterman's perhaps not
dying?"
"Yes, dear ingenuous child—he has wanted so to see him out."
"Well then, isn't it what we're all wanting?"
"Most undoubtedly, pure pearl of penetration!" Davey returned as
they went. "His pick-up will be a sell," he ruefully added; "even
though it mayn't quite kill anyone of us but Mr. Gaw!"
BOOK SECOND
56. I
Graham's view of his case and of all his proprieties, from the
moment of his arrival, was that he should hold himself without
reserve at his uncle's immediate disposition, and even such talk as
seemed indicated, during the forenoon, with Doctor Hatch and Miss
Mumby, the nurse then in charge, did little to lighten for him the
immense prescription of delicacy. What he learnt was far from
disconcerting; the patient, aware of his presence, had shown for
soothed, not for agitated; the drop of the tension of waiting had had
the benign effect; he had repeated over to his attendant that now
"the boy" was there, all would be for the best, and had asked also
with soft iteration if he were having everything he wanted. The
happy assurance of this right turn of their affair, so far as they had
got, he was now quietly to enjoy: he was to rest two or three hours,
and if possible to sleep, while Graham, on his side, sought a like
remedy—after the full indulgence in which their meeting would take
place. The excellent fact for "the boy," who was two-and-thirty years
of age and who now quite felt as if during the last few weeks he had
lived through a dozen more, was thus that he was doing his uncle
good and that somehow, to complete that harmony, he might feel
the operation of an equal virtue. At his invitation, at his decision, the
idea of some such wondrous matter as this had of course presided—
for waiting and obliging good, which one was simply to open one's
heart or one's hand to, had struck him ever as so little of the
common stuff of life that now, at closer range, it could but figure as
still more prodigious. At the same time there was nothing he
dreaded, by his very nature, more than a fond fatuity, and he had
imposed on himself from the first to proceed at every step as if
without consideration he might well be made an ass of. It was true
that even such a danger as this presented its interest—the process
to which he should yield would be without precedent for him, and
his imagination, thank heaven, had curiosity in a large measure for
its principle; he wouldn't rush into peril, however, and flattered
himself that after all he should not recognise its symptoms too late.
57. What he said to himself just now on the spot was, at any rate, that
he should probably have been more excited if he hadn't been so
amused. To be amused to a high pitch while his nearest kinsman,
apparently nursing, as he had been told, a benevolence, lay dying a
few rooms off—let this impute levity to our young man only till we
understand that his liability to recreation represented in him a
function serious indeed. Everything played before him, everything
his senses embraced; and since his landing in New York on the
morning before this the play had been of a delightful violence. No
slightest aspect or briefest moment of it but had held and, so to say,
rewarded him: if he had come back at last for impressions, for
emotions, for the sake of the rush upon him of the characteristic,
these things he was getting in a measure beyond his dream. It was
still beyond his dream that what everything merely seen from the
window of his room meant to him during these first hours should
move him first to a smile of such ecstasy, and then to such an
inward consumption of his smile, as might have made of happiness a
substance you could sweetly put under your tongue. He recognised
—that was the secret, recognised wherever he looked—and knew
that when, from far back, during his stretch of unbroken absence, he
had still felt, and liked to feel, what air had originally breathed upon
him, these piercing intensities of salience had really peopled the
vision. He had much less remembered the actual than forecast the
inevitable, and the huge involved necessity of its all showing as he
found it seemed fairly to shout in his ear. He had brought with him a
fine intention, one of the finest of which he was capable, and wasn't
it, he put to himself, already working? Wasn't he gathering in a
perfect bloom of freshness the fruit of his design rather to welcome
the impression to extravagance, if need be, than to undervalue it by
the breadth of a hair? Inexpert he couldn't help being, but too
estranged to melt again at whatever touch might make him, that
he'd be hanged if he couldn't help, since what was the great thing
again but to hold up one's face to any drizzle of light?
There it was, the light, in a mist of silver, even as he took in the
testimony of his cool bedimmed room, where the air was toned by
58. the closing of the great green shutters. It was ample and elegant, of
an American elegance, which was so unlike any other, and so still
more unlike any lapse of it, ever met by him, that some of its
material terms and items held him as in rapt contemplation; what he
had wanted, even to intensity, being that things should prove
different, should positively glare with opposition—there would be no
fun at all were they only imperfectly like, as that wouldn't in the
least mean character. Their character might be if it would in their
consistently having none—than which deficiency nothing was more
possible; but he should have to decline to be charmed by
unsuccessful attempts at sorts of expression he had elsewhere
known more or less happily achieved. This particular disappointment
indeed he was clearly not in for, since what could at once be more
interesting than thus to note that the range and scale kept all their
parts together, that each object or effect disowned connections, as
he at least had all his life felt connections, and that his cherished
hope of the fresh start and the broken link would have its measure
filled to the brim. There was an American way for a room to be a
room, a table a table, a chair a chair and a book a book—let alone a
picture on a wall a picture, and a cold gush of water in a bath of a
hot morning a promise of purification; and of this license all about
him, in fine, he beheld the refreshing riot.
It cast on him for the time a spell; he moved about with soft steps
and long pauses, staring out between the slats of the shutters,
which he gently worked by their attachment, and then again living,
with a subtlety of sense that it was a pleasure to exercise, into the
conditions represented by whatever more nearly pressed. It was not
only that the process of assimilation, unlike any other he had yet
been engaged in, might stop short, to disaster, if he so much as
breathed too hard; but that if he made the sufficient surrender he
might absolutely himself be assimilated—and that was truly an
experience he couldn't but want to have. The great thing he held on
to withal was a decent delicacy, a dread of appearing even to
himself to take big things for granted. This of itself was restrictive as
to freedoms—it stayed familiarities, it kept uncertainty cool; for after
59. all what had his uncle done but cause to be conveyed to him across
the sea the bare wish that he should come? He had straightway
come in consequence, but on no explanation and for no signified
reward; he had come simply to avoid a possible ugliness in his not
coming. Generally addicted to such avoidances, to which it indeed
seemed to him that the quest of beauty was too often reduced, he
had found his reason sufficient until the present hour, when it was as
if all reasons, all of his own at least, had suddenly abandoned him,
to the effect of his being surrounded only with those of others, of
which he was up to now ignorant, but which somehow hung about
the large still place, somehow stiffened the vague summer Sunday
and twinkled in the universal cleanness, a real revelation to him of
that possible immunity in things. He might have been sent for
merely to be blown up for the relief of the old man's mind on the
perversity and futility of his past. There was before him at all events
no gage of anything else, no intimation other than his having been,
materially speaking, preceded by preparations, to make him throw
himself on a survey of prospects. What was before him at the least
was a "big" experience—even to have come but to be cursed and
dismissed would really be a bigger thing than yet had befallen him.
Not the form but the fact of the experience accordingly mattered—so
that wasn't it there to a fine intensity by his standing ever and anon
at the closed door of his room and feeling that with his ear intent
enough he could catch the pressure on the other side?
The pressure was at last unmistakeable, we note, in the form of Miss
Mumby, who, having gently tapped, appeared there both to remark
to him that he must surely at last want his luncheon and to affect
him afresh and in the supreme degree as a vessel of the American
want of correspondence. Miss Mumby was ample, genial, familiar
and more radiantly clean than he had ever known any vessel, to
whatever purpose destined; also the number of things she took for
granted—if it was a question of that; or perhaps rather the number
of things of which she didn't doubt and was incapable of doubting,
surrounded her together with a kind of dazzling aura, a special
radiance of disconnection. She wore a beautiful white dress, and he
60. scarce knew what apparatus of spotless apron and cuffs and floating
streamers to match; yet she could only again report to him of the
impression that had most jumped at him from the moment of his
arrival. He saw in a moment that any difficulty on his part of
beginning with her at some point in social space, so to say, at which
he had never begun before with any such person, would count for
nothing in face of her own perfect power to begin. The faculty of
beginning would be in truth Miss Mumby's very genius, and in the
moment of his apprehension of this he felt too—he had in fact
already felt it at their first meeting—how little his pale old postulates
as to persons being "such" might henceforth claim to serve him.
What person met by him during his thirty hours in American air was
"such" again as any other partaker of contact had appeared or
proved, no matter where, before his entering it? What person had
not at once so struck him in the light of violent repudiation of type,
as he might save for his sensibility have imputed type, that nothing
else in the case seemed predicable? He might have seen Miss
Mumby, he was presently to recognise, in the light of a youngish
mother perhaps, a sister, a cousin, a friend, even a possible bride,
for these were aspects independent of type and boundlessly free of
range; but a "trained nurse" was a trained nurse, and that was a
category of the most evolved—in spite of which what category in all
the world could have lifted its head in Miss Mumby's aura?
Still, she might have been a pleasant cousin, a first cousin, the very
first a man had ever had and not in any degree "removed," while
she thus proclaimed the cheerful ease of everything and everyone,
her own above all, and made him yield on the spot to her lightest
intimation. He couldn't possibly have held off from her in any way,
and if this was in part because he always collapsed at a touch before
nurses, it was at the same time not at all the nurse in her that now
so affected him, but the incalculable other force, of which he had
had no experience and which was apparently that of the familiar in
tone and manner. He had known, of a truth, familiarity greater—
much greater, but only with greater occasions and supports for it;
whereas on Miss Mumby's part it seemed independent of any or of
61. every motive. He could scarce have said in fine, as he followed her
to their repast, at which he foresaw in an instant that they were
both to sit down, whether it more alarmed or just more coolingly
enveloped him; his slight first bewilderment at any rate had dropped
—he had already forgotten the moment wasted two or three hours
before in wondering, with his sense of having known Nurses who
gloried in their title, how his dear second father, for instance, would
in his final extremity have liked the ministrations of a Miss. By those
he himself presently enjoyed in such different conditions, that is
from across the table, bare and polished and ever so delicately
charged, of the big dusky, yet just a little breezy dining-room, by
those in short under which every association he had ever had with
anything crashed down to pile itself as so much more tinklingly
shivered glass at Miss Mumby's feet, that sort of question was left
far behind—and doubtless would have been so even if the appeal of
the particular refection served to them had alone had the case in
hand. "I'm going to make you like our food, so you might as well
begin at once," his companion had announced; and he felt it on the
spot as scarce less than delicious that this element too should play,
and with such fineness, into that harmony of the amusingly exotic
which was, under his benediction, working its will on him. "Oh yes,"
she rejoiced in answer to his exhibition of the degree in which what
was before him did stir again to sweetness a chord of memory, "oh
yes, food's a great tie, it's like language—you can always understand
your own, whereas in Europe I had to learn about six others."
Miss Mumby had been to Europe, and he saw soon enough how
there was nowhere one could say she hadn't gone and nothing one
could say she hadn't done—one's perception could bear only on
what she hadn't become; so that, as he thus perceived, though she
might have affected Europe even as she was now affecting him, she
was a pure negation of its having affected herself, unless perhaps by
adding to her power to make him feel how little he could impose on
her. She knew all about his references while he only missed hers,
and that gave her a tremendous advantage—or would have done so
hadn't she been too much his cousin to take it. He at any rate
62. recognised in a moment that the so many things she had had to
learn to understand over there were not forms of speech but
alimentary systems—as to which view he quite agreed with her that
the element of the native was equally rooted in both supports of life.
This gave her of course her opportunity of remarking that she had
indeed made for the assimilation of "his" cookery—whichever of the
varieties his had most been—scarce less an effort than she must
confess now to making for that of his terms of utterance; where she
had at once again the triumph that he was nowhere, by his own
reasoning, if he pretended to an affinity with the nice things they
were now eating and yet stood off from the other ground. "Oh I
understand you, which appears to be so much more than you do
me!" he laughed; "but am I really committed to everything because
I'm committed, in the degree you see me, oh yes, to waffles and
maple syrup, followed, and on such a scale, by melons and ice-
cream? You see in the one case I have but to take in, and in the
other have to give out: so can't I have, in a quiet way the American
palate without emitting the American sounds?" Thus was he on the
straightest flattest level with Miss Mumby—it stretched, to his
imagination, without a break, a rise or a fall, à perte de vue; and
thus was it already attested that the Miss Mumbys (for it was evident
there would be thousands of them) were in society, or were, at any
rate, not out of it, society thereby becoming clearly colossal. What
was it, moreover, but the best society—as who should say anywhere
—when his companion made the bright point that if anything had to
do with sounds the palate did? returning with it also to the one
already made, her due warning that she wasn't going to have him
not like everything. "But I do, I do, I do," he declared, with his
mouth full of a seasoned and sweetened, a soft, substantial coldness
and richness that were at once the revelation of a world and the
consecration of a fate; "I revel in everything, I already wallow,
behold: I move as in a dream, I assure you, and I only fear to wake
up."
"Well, I don't know as I want you to wallow, and I certainly don't
want you to fear—though you'll wake up soon enough, I guess," his
63. entertainer continued, "whatever you do. You'll wake up to some of
our realities, and—well, we won't want anything better for you: will
we. Doctor?" Miss Mumby freely proceeded on their being joined for
a moment by the friendly physician who had greeted our young
man, on his uncle's behalf, at his hour of arrival, and who, having
been again for awhile with their interesting host, had left the second
nurse in charge and was about to be off to other cares. "I'm saying
to Mr. Fielder that he's got to wake up to some pretty big things,"
she explained to Doctor Hatch, whom it struck Gray she addressed
rather as he had heard doctors address nurses than nurses doctors;
a fact contributing offhand to his awareness, already definite, that
everyone addressed everyone as he had nowhere yet heard the
address perpetrated, and that so, evidently, there were questions
connected with it that must yet wait over. It was pertinently to be
felt furthermore that Doctor Hatch's own freedom, which also had
quite its own rare freshness of note, shared in the general property
of the whole appeal to him, the appeal of the very form of the great
sideboard, the very "school," though yet unrecognised by him, of the
pictures hung about, the very look and dress, the apparently odd
identity, of the selected and arrayed volumes in a bookcase charged
with ornament and occupying the place of highest dignity in the
room, to take his situation for guaranteed as it was surely not
common for earthly situations to be. This he could feel, however,
without knowing, to any great purpose, what it really meant; and he
was afterwards even scarce to know what had further taken place,
under Doctor Hatch's blessing, before he passed out of the house to
the verandah and the grounds, as their limitations of reach didn't
prevent their being called, and gave himself up to inquiries now
permittedly direct.
Doctor Hatch's message or momentary act of quaint bright presence
came to him thus, on the verandah, while shining expanses opened,
as an invitation to some extraordinary confidence, some flight of
optimism without a precedent, as a positive hint in fine that it
depended on himself alone to step straight into the chariot of the
sun, which on his mere nod would conveniently descend there to the
64. edge of the piazza, and whirl away for increase of acquaintance with
the time, as it was obviously going to be, of his life. This was but his
reading indeed of the funny terms in which the delightful man put it
to him that he seemed by his happy advent to have brought on for
his uncle a prospect, a rise of pitch, not dissimilar from that sort of
vision; by so high a tide of ease had the sick room above been
flooded, and such a lot of good would clearly await the patient from
seeing him after a little and at the perfect proper moment. It was to
be that of Mr. Betterman's competent choice: he lay there as just for
the foretaste of it, which was wholly tranquillising, and could be
trusted—what else did doctor and nurse engage for?—to know the
psychological hour on its striking and then, to complete felicity, have
his visitor introduced. His present mere assurance of the visitor was
in short so agreeable to him, and by the same token to Doctor Hatch
himself—which was above all what the latter had conveyed—that the
implication of the agreeable to Graham in return might fairly have
been some imponderable yet ever so sensible tissue, voluminous
interwoven gold and silver, flung as a mantle over his shoulders
while he went. Gray had never felt around him any like envelope
whatever; so that on his looking forth at all the candid clearness—
which struck him too, ever so amusingly, as even more candid when
occasionally and aggressively, that is residentially, obstructed than
when not—what he inwardly and fantastically compared it to was
some presented quarto page, vast and fair, ever so distinctly printed
and ever so unexpectedly vignetted, of a volume of which the leaves
would be turned for him one by one and with no more trouble on his
own part than when a friendly service beside him at the piano,
where he so often sat, relieved him, from sheet to sheet, of touching
his score.
Wasn't he thus now again "playing," as it had been a lifelong
resource to him to play in that other posture?—a question promoted
by the way the composition suddenly broke into the vividest
illustrational figure, that of a little man encountered on one of his
turns of the verandah and who, affecting him at first as a small
waiting and watching, an almost crouching gnome, the neat
65. domestic goblin of some old Germanic, some harmonised,
familiarised legend, sat and stared at him from the depths of an
arrested rocking-chair after a fashion nothing up to then had led him
to preconceive. This was a different note from any yet, a queer,
sharp, hard particle in all the softness; and it was sensible too, oddly
enough, that the small force of their concussion but grew with its
coming over him the next moment that he simply had before him
Rosanna Gaw's prodigious parent. Of course it was Mr. Gaw, whom
he had never seen, and of whom Rosanna in the old time had so
little talked; her mother alone had talked of him in those days, and
to his own mother only—with whom Gray had indeed himself
afterwards talked not a little; but the intensity of the certitude came
not so much by any plain as by quite the most roundabout
presumption, the fact of his always having felt that she required
some strange accounting for, and that here was the requirement met
by just the ripest revelation. She had been involved in something,
produced by something, intimately pressing upon her and yet as
different as possible from herself; and here was the concentrated
difference—which showed him too, with each lapsing second, its
quality of pressure. Abel Gaw struck him in this light as very finely
blanched, as somehow squeezed together by the operation of an
inward energy or necessity, and as animated at the same time by
the conviction that, should he sit there long enough and still enough,
the young man from Europe, known to be on the premises, might
finally reward his curiosity. Mr. Gaw was curiosity embodied—Gray
was by the end of the minute entirely assured of that; it in fact quite
seemed to him that he had never yet in all his life caught the prying
passion so shamelessly in the act. Shamelessly, he was afterwards to
remember having explained to himself, because his sense of the
reach of the sharp eyes in the small white face, and of their not
giving way for a moment before his own, suggested to him, even if
he could scarce have said why to that extent, the act of listening at
the door, at the very keyhole, of a room, combined with the attempt
to make it good under sudden detection.
66. So it was, at any rate, that our speculative friend, the impression of
the next turn of the case aiding, figured the extension, without
forms, without the shade of a form, of their unmitigated mutual
glare. The initiation of this exchange by the little old gentleman in
the chair, who gave for so long no sign of moving or speaking,
couldn't but practically determine in Graham's own face some
resistance to the purpose exhibited and for which it was clear no
apology impended. By the time he had recognised that his presence
was in question for Mr. Gaw with such an intensity as it had never
otherwise, he felt, had the benefit of, however briefly, save under
some offered gage or bribe, he had also made out that no "form"
would survive for twenty seconds in any close relation with the
personage, and that if ever he had himself known curiosity as to
what might happen when manners were consistently enough
ignored it was a point on which he should at once be enlightened.
His fellow-visitor, of whose being there Doctor Hatch and Miss
Mumby were presumably unaware, continued to ignore everything
but the opportunity he enjoyed and the certainty that Graham would
contribute to it—which certainty made in fact his profit. The profit,
that is, couldn't possibly fail unless Gray should turn his back and
walk off; which was of course possible, but would then saddle Gray
himself with the repudiation of forms: so that—yes, infallibly—in
proportion as the young man had to be commonly civil would Mr.
Gaw's perhaps unholy satisfaction of it be able to prevail. The young
man had taken it home that he couldn't simply stare long enough for
successful defence by the time that, presently moving nearer, he
uttered his adversary's name with no intimation of a doubt. Mr. Gaw
failed. Gray was afterwards to inform Rosanna, "to so much as take
this up"; he was left with everything on his hands but the character
of his identity, the indications of his face, the betrayals he should so
much less succeed in suppressing than his adversary would succeed
in reading them. The figure presented hadn't stirred from his posture
otherwise than by a motion of eye just perceptible as Graham
moved; it was drinking him in, our hero felt, and by this treatment of
the full cup, continuously applied to the lips, stillness was of course
imposed. It didn't again so much as recognise, by any sign given,
67. Graham's remark that an acquaintance with Miss Gaw from of old
involved naturally their acquaintance: there was no question of Miss
Gaw, her friend found himself after another minute divining, as there
was none of objects or appearances immediately there about them;
the question was of something a thousand times more relevant and
present, of something the interloper's silence, far more than
breathed words could have done, represented the fond hope of
mastering.
Graham thus held already, by the old man's conviction, a secret of
high value, yet which, with the occasion stretched a little, would
practically be at his service—so much as that at least, with the
passage of another moment, he had concluded to; and all the while,
in the absurdest way, without his guessing, without his at all
measuring, his secret himself. Mr. Gaw fairly made him want to—
want, that is, as a preliminary or a stopgap, to guess what it had
best, most desirably and most effectively, become; for shouldn't he
positively like to have something of the sort in order just to disoblige
this gentleman? Strange enough how it came to him at once as a
result of the father's refusal of attention to any connection he might
have glanced at with the daughter, strange enough how it came to
him, under the first flush of heat he had known since his arrival, that
two could play at such a game and that if Rosanna's interests were
to be so slighted her relative himself should miss even the minimum
of application as one of them. "He must have wanted to know, he
must have wanted to know——!" this young woman was on a later
day to have begun to explain; without going on, however, since by
that time Gray had rather made out, the still greater rush of his
impressions helping, the truth of Mr. Gaw's desire. It bore, that
appetite, upon a single point and, daughter or no daughter, on
nothing else in the world—the question of what Gray's "interest," in
the light of his uncle's intentions, might size up to; those intentions
having, to the Gaw imagination, been of course apprehensible on
the spot, and within the few hours that had lapsed, by a nephew
even of but rudimentary mind. At the present hour meanwhile, short
of the miracle which our friend's counter-scrutiny alone could have
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