Part 2

His companion, as she paused for accommodation, showed him a large flat grave face in which the general intention of deference seemed somehow to confess that it was often at the mercy--and perhaps most in this particular relation--of such an inward habit of the far excursion as could but incorrigibly qualify for Rosanna Gaw certain of the forms of attention, certain of the necessities of manner. She was, sketchily speaking, so much higher-piled a person than her father that the filial attitude in her suffered at the best from the occasional air of her having to come down to him. You would have guessed that she was not a person to cultivate that air; and perhaps even if very acute would have guessed some other things bearing on the matter from the little man's careful way with her. This pair exhibited there in the great light of the summer Sunday morning more than one of the essential, or perhaps the rather finally constituted, conditions of their intercourse. Here was a parent who clearly appealed to nobody in the world but his child, and a child who condescended to nobody in the world but her parent; and this with the anomaly of a constant care not to be too humble on one side and an equal one not to be too proud on the other. Rosanna, her powerful exposed arm raised to her broad shoulder, slowly made her heavy parasol revolve, flinging with it a wide shadow that enclosed them together, for their question and answer, as in a great bestreamered tent. "Do I strike you as worked up? Why I've tried to keep as quiet about it as I possibly could--as one does when one wants a thing so tremendously much."

His eyes had been raised to her own, but after she had said this in her perfunctory way they sank as from a sense of shyness and might have rested for a little on one of their tent-pegs. "Well, daughter, that's just what I want to understand--your personal motive."

She gave a sigh for this, a strange uninforming sigh. "Ah father, 'my personal motives'--!"

With this she might have walked on, but when he barred the way it was as if she could have done so but by stepping on him. "I don't complain of your personal motives--I want you to have all you're entitled to and should like to know who's entitled to more. But couldn't you have a reason once in a while for letting me know what some of your reasons are?"

Her decent blandness dropped on him again, and she had clearly this time come further to meet him. "You've always wanted me to have things I don't care for--though really when you've made a great point of it I've often tried. But want me now to have this." And then as he watched her again to learn what "this," with the visibly rare importance she attached to it, might be: "To make up to a person for a wrong I once did him."

"You wronged the man who has come?"

"Oh dreadfully!" Rosanna said with great sweetness.

He evidently held that any notice taken of anyone, to whatever effect, by this great daughter of his was nothing less than an honour done, and probably overdone; so what preposterous "wrong" could count? The worst he could think of was still but a sign of her greatness. "You wouldn't have him round----?"

"Oh that would have been nothing!" she laughed; and this time she sailed on again.

II

Rosanna found him again after luncheon shaking his little foot from the depths of a piazza chair, but now on their own scene and at a point where this particular feature of it, the cool spreading verandah, commanded the low green cliff and a part of the immediate approach to the house from the seaward side. She left him to the only range of thought of which he was at present capable--she was so perfectly able to follow it; and it had become for that matter an old story that as he never opened a book, nor sought a chance for talk, nor took a step of exercise, nor gave in any manner a sign of an unsatisfied want, the extent of his vacancy, a detachment in which there just breathed a hint of the dryly invidious, might thus remain unbroken for hours. She knew what he was waiting for, and that if she hadn't been there to see him he would take his way across to the other house again, where the plea of solicitude for his old friend's state put him at his ease and where, moreover, as she now felt, the possibility of a sight of Graham Fielder might reward him. It was disagreeable to her that he should have such a sight while she denied it to her own eyes; but the sense of their common want of application for their faculties was a thing that repeatedly checked in her the expression of judgments. Their idleness was as mean and bare on her own side, she too much felt, as on his; and heaven knew that if he could sit with screwed-up eyes for hours the case was as flagrant in her aimless driftings, her incurable restless revolutions, as a pretence of "interests" could consort with.

She revolved and drifted then, out of his sight and in another quarter of the place, till four o'clock had passed; when on returning to him she found his chair empty and was sure of what had become of him. There was nothing else in fact for his Sunday, as he on that day denied himself the resource of driving, or rather of being driven, from which the claim of the mechanical car had not, in the Newport connection, won him, and which, deep in his barouche, behind his own admirable horses, could maintain him in meditation for meditation's sake quite as well as a poised rocking-chair. Left thus to herself, though conscious she well might have visitors, she circled slowly and repeatedly round the gallery, only pausing at last on sight of a gentleman who had come into view by a path from the cliff. He presented himself in a minute as Davey Bradham, and on drawing nearer called across to her without other greeting: "Won't you walk back with me to tea? Gussy has sent me to bring you."

"Why yes, of course I will--that's nice of Gussy," she replied; adding moreover that she wanted a walk, and feeling in the prospect, though she didn't express this, a relief to her tension and a sanction for what she called to herself her tact. She might without the diversion not quite have trusted herself not to emulate, and even with the last crudity, her father's proceeding; which she knew she should afterwards be ashamed of. "Anyone that comes here," she said, "must come on to you--they'll know;" and when Davey had replied that there wasn't the least chance of anyone's not coming on she moved with him down the path, at the end of which they entered upon the charming cliff walk, a vast carpet of undivided lawns, kept in wondrous condition, with a meandering right-of-way for a seaward fringe and bristling wide-winged villas that spoke of a seated colony; many of these huge presences reducing to marginal meanness their strip of the carpet.

Davey was, like herself, richly and healthily replete, though with less of his substance in stature; a frankly fat gentleman, blooming still at eight-and-forty, with a large smooth shining face, void of a sign of moustache or whisker and crowned with dense dark hair cropped close to his head after the fashion of a French schoolboy or the inmate of a jail. But for his half-a-dozen fixed wrinkles, as marked as the great rivers of a continent on a map, and his thick and arched and active eyebrows, which left almost nothing over for his forehead, he would have scarce exhibited features--in spite of the absence of which, however, he could look in alternation the most portentous things and the most ridiculous. He would hang up a meaning in his large empty face as if he had swung an awful example on a gibbet, or would let loose there a great grin that you somehow couldn't catch in the fact but that pervaded his expanses of cheek as poured wine pervades water. He differed certainly from Rosanna in that he enjoyed, visibly, all he carnally possessed--whereas you could see in a moment that she, poor young woman, would have been content with, would have been glad of, a scantier allowance. "You'll find Cissy Foy, to begin with," he said as they went; "she arrived last night and told me to tell you she'd have walked over with me but that Gussy wants her for something. However, as you know, Gussy always wants her for something--she wants everyone for something so much more than something for everyone--and there are none of us that are not worked hard, even though we mayn't bloom on it like Cissy, who, by the way, is looking a perfect vision."

"Awfully lovely?"--Rosanna clearly saw as she asked.

"Prettier than at any time yet, and wanting tremendously to hear from you, you know, about your protégé--what's the fellow's name? Graham Fielder?--whose arrival we're all agog about."

Rosanna pulled up in the path; she somehow at once felt her possession of this interest clouded--shared as yet as it had been only with her father, whose share she could control. It then and there came to her in one of the waves of disproportionate despair in which she felt half the impressions of life break, that she wasn't going to be able to control at all the great participations. She had a moment of reaction against what she had done; she liked Gray to be called her protégé--forced upon her as endless numbers of such were, he would be the only one in the whole collection who hadn't himself pushed at her; but with the big bright picture of the villas, the palaces, the lawns and the luxuries in her eyes, and with something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff, she felt that, without her having thought of it enough in advance, she had handed him over to complications and relations. These things shimmered in the silver air of the wondrous perspective ahead, the region off there that awaited her present approach and where Gussy hovered like a bustling goddess in the enveloping cloud of her court. The man beside her was the massive Mercury of this urgent Juno; but--without mythological comparisons, which we make for her under no hint that she could herself have dreamed of one--she found herself glad just then that she liked Davey Bradham, and much less sorry than usual that she didn't respect him. An extraordinary thing happened, and all in the instant before she spoke again. It was very strange, and it made him look at her as if he wondered that his words should have had so great an effect as even her still face showed. There was absolutely no one, roundabout and far and wide, whom she positively wanted Graham to know; no not one creature of them all--"all" figuring for her, while she stood, the great collection at the Bradhams'. She hadn't thought of this before in the least as it came to her now; yet no more had she time to be sure that even with the sharper consciousness she would, as her father was apt to say, have acted different. So much was true, yet while she still a moment longer hung fire Davey rounded himself there like something she could comparatively rest on. "How in the world," she put to him then, "do you know anything away off there--? He _has_ come to his uncle, but so quietly that I haven't yet seen him."

"Why, my dear thing, is it new to you that we're up and doing--bright and lively? We're the most intelligent community on all this great coast, and when precious knowledge is in the air we're not to be kept from it. We knew at breakfast that the New York boat had brought him, and Gussy of course wants him up to dinner tonight. Only Cissy claims, you see, that she has rights in him first--rights beyond Gussy's, I mean," Davey went on; "I don't know that she claims them beyond yours."

She looked abroad again, his companion, to earth and sea and sky; she wondered and felt threatened, yet knowing herself at the same time a long way off from the point at which menace roused her to passion. She had always to suffer so much before that, and was for the present in the phase of feeling but weak and a little sick. But there was always Davey. She started their walk again before saying more, while he himself said things that she didn't heed. "I can't for the life of me imagine," she nevertheless at last declared, "what Cissy has to do with him. When and where has she ever seen him?"

Davey did as always his best to oblige. "Somewhere abroad, some time back, when she was with her mother at some baths or some cure-place. Though when I think of it," he added, "it wasn't with the man himself--it was with some relation: hasn't he an uncle, or perhaps a stepfather? Cissy seems to know all about him, and he takes a great interest in her."

It again all but stopped Rosanna. "Gray Fielder an interest in Cissy----?"

"Let me not," laughed Davey, "sow any seed of trouble or engage for more than I can stand to. She'll tell you all about it, she'll clothe it in every grace. Only I assure you I myself am as much interested as anyone," he added--"interested, I mean, in the question of whether the old man there has really brought him out at the last gasp this way to do some decent thing about him. An impression prevails," he further explained, "that you're in some wonderful way in the old wretch's confidence, and I therefore make no bones of telling you that your arrival on our scene there, since you're so good as to consent to come, has created an impatience beyond even what your appearances naturally everywhere create. I give you warning that there's no limit to what we want to know."

Rosanna took this in now as she so often took things--working it down in silence at first: it shared in the general weight of all direct contributions to her consciousness. It might then, when she spoke, have sunk deep. She looked about again, in her way, as if under her constant oppression, and seeing, a little off from their gravelled walk, a public bench to which a possible path branched down, she said, on a visibly grave decision: "Look here, I want to talk to _you_--you're one of the few people in all your crowd to whom I really can. So come and sit down."

Davey Bradham, arrested before her, had an air for his responsibilities that quite matched her own. "Then what becomes of them all there?"

"I don't care a hang what becomes of them. But if you want to know," Rosanna said, "I do care what becomes of Mr. Fielder, and I trust you enough, being as you are the only one of your lot I do trust, to help me perhaps a little to do something about it."

"Oh, my dear lady, I'm not a bit discreet, you know," Mr. Bradham amusedly protested; "I'm perfectly unprincipled and utterly indelicate. How can a fellow not be who likes as much as I do at all times to make the kettle boil and the plot thicken? I've only got my beautiful intelligence, though, as I say, I don't in the least _want_ to embroil you. Therefore if I can really help you as the biggest babbler alive----!"

She waited again a little, but this time with her eyes on his good worn worldly face, superficially so smooth, but with the sense of it lined and scratched and hacked across much in the manner of the hard ice of a large pond at the end of a long day's skating. The amount of obstreperous exercise that had been taken on that recording field! The difference between our pair, thus confronted, might have been felt as the greater by the very fact of their outward likeness as creatures so materially weighted; it would have been written all over Rosanna for the considering eye that every grain of her load, from innermost soul to outermost sense, was that of reality and sincerity; whereas it might by the same token have been felt of Davey that in the temperature of life as he knew it his personal identity had been, save for perhaps some small tough lurking residuum, long since puffed away in pleasant spirals of vapour. Our young woman was at this moment, however, less interested in quantities than in qualities of candour; she could get what passed for it by the bushel, by the ton, whenever, right or left, she chose to chink her pocket. Her requirement for actual use was such a glimmer from the candle of truth as a mere poor woman might have managed to kindle. What was left of precious in Davey might thus have figured but as a candle-end; yet for the lack of it she should perhaps move in darkness. And her brief intensity of watch was in a moment rewarded; her companion's candle-end was his not quite burnt-out value as a gentleman. This was enough for her, and she seemed to see her way. "If I don't trust you there's nobody else in all the wide world I can. So you've got to know, and you've got to be good to me."

"Then what awful thing _have_ you done?" he was saying to her three minutes after they had taken their place temporarily on the bench.

"Well, I got at Mr. Betterman," she said, "in spite of all the difficulty. Father and he hadn't spoken for years--had had long ago the blackest, ugliest difference; believing apparently the horridest things of each other. Nevertheless it was as father's daughter that I went to him--though after a little, I think, it was simply for the worth itself of what I had to tell him that he listened to me."

"And what you had to tell him," Davey asked while she kept her eyes on the far horizon, "_was_ then that you take this tender interest in Mr. Fielder?"

"You may make my interest as ridiculous as you like----!"

"Ah, my dear thing," Davey pleadingly protested, "don't deprive me, please, of _anything_ nice there is to know!"

"There was something that had happened years ago--a wrong I perhaps had done him, though in perfect good faith. I thought I saw my way to make up for it, and I seem to have succeeded beyond even what I hoped."

"Then what have you to worry about?" said Davey.

"Just my success," she answered simply. "Here he is and I've done it."

"Made his rich uncle want him--who hadn't wanted him before? Is that it?"

"Yes, interfered afresh in his behalf--as I had interfered long ago. When one has interfered one can't help wondering," she gravely explained.

"But dear lady, ever for his benefit of course," Davey extemporised.

"Yes--except for the uncertainty of what is for a person's benefit. It's hard enough to know," said Rosanna, "what's for one's own."

"Oh, as to that," Davey joked, "I don't think that where mine's concerned I've ever a doubt! But is the point that the old man had quarrelled with him and that you've brought about a reconciliation?"

She considered again with her far-wandering eyes; as if both moved by her impulse to confidence and weighted with the sense of how much of it there all was. "Well, in as few words as possible, it was like this. He's the son but of a half-sister, the daughter of Mr. Betterman's father by a second marriage which he in his youth hadn't at all liked, and who made her case worse with him, as time went on, by marrying a man, Graham's father, whom he had also some strong objection to. Yes," she summarized, "he seems to have been difficult to please, but he's making up for it now. His brother-in-law didn't live long to suffer from the objection, and the sister, Mrs. Fielder, left a widow badly provided for, went off with her boy, then very young, to Europe. There, later on, during a couple of years that I spent abroad with my mother, we met them and for the time saw much of them; she and my dear mother greatly took to each other, they formed the friendliest relation, and we had in common that my father's business association with Mr. Betterman still at that time subsisted, though the terrible man--as he then was--hadn't at all made it up with our friend. It was while we were with her in Dresden, however, that something happened which brought about, by correspondence, some renewal of intercourse. This was a matter on which we were in her confidence and in which we took the greatest interest, for we liked also the other person concerned in it. An opportunity had come up for her to marry again, she had practically decided to embrace it, and of this, though everything between them had broken off so short, her unforgiving brother had heard, indirectly, in New York."

Davey Bradham, lighting cigarettes, and having originally placed his case, in a manner promptly appreciated, at his companion's disposal, crowned this now adjusted relation with a pertinence of comment. "And only again of course to be as horrid as possible about it! He hated husbands in general."

"Well, he himself, it was to be said, had been but little of one. He had lost his own wife early and hadn't married again--though he was to lose early also the two children born to him. The second of these deaths was recent at the time I speak of, and had had to do, I imagine, with his sudden overture to his absent relations. He let his sister know that he had learnt her intention and thought very ill of it, but also that if she would get rid of her low foreigner and come back with the boy he would be happy to see what could be done for them."

"What a jolly situation!"--Davey exhaled fine puffs. "Her second choice then--at Dresden--was a German adventurer?"

"No, an English one, Mr. Northover; an adventurer only as a man in love is always one, I suppose, and who was there for us to see and extremely to approve. He had nothing to do with Dresden beyond having come on to join her; they had met elsewhere, in Switzerland or the Tyrol, and he had shown an interest in her, and had made his own impression, from the first. She answered her brother that his demand of her was excessive in the absence of anything she could recognise that she owed him. To this he replied that she might marry then whom she liked, but that if she would give up her boy and send him home, where he would take charge of him and bring him up to prospects she would be a fool not to appreciate, there need be no more talk and she could lead her life as she perversely preferred. This crisis came up during our winter with her--it was a very cruel one, and my mother, as I have said, was all in her confidence."

"Of course"--Davey Bradham abounded; "and you were all in your mother's!"