Part 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This might have struck us as making the strained note in Vinty's smile more marked. "But that's exactly, confound you, what you _don't_ do! Here have I been with you half an hour without your practically telling me anything!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And yet you see I keep him about."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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