Part 3

Rosanna leaned back on the bench, her cigarette between her strong and rounded fingers; she sat at her ease now, this chapter of history filling, under her view, the soft lap of space and the comfort of having it well out, and yet of keeping it, as her friend somehow helped her to do, well within her control, more and more operative. "Well, I was sixteen years old, and Gray at that time fourteen. I was huge and hideous and began then to enjoy the advantage--if advantage it was--of its seeming so ridiculous to treat the monster I had grown as negligible that I _had_ to be treated as important. I wasn't a bit stupider than I am now--in fact I saw things much more sharply and simply and knew ever so much better what I wanted and didn't. Gray and I had become excellent friends--if you want to think of him as my 'first passion' you are welcome to, unless you want to think of him rather as my fifth! He was a charming little boy, much nicer than any I had ever seen; he didn't come up higher than my shoulder, and, to tell you all, I remember how once, in some game with a party of English and American children whom my mother had got together for Christmas, I tried to be amusing by carrying half-a-dozen of them successively on my back--all in order to have the pleasure of carrying _him_, whom I felt, I remember, but as a featherweight compared with most of the others. Such a romp was I--as you can of course see I must have been, and at the same time so horridly artful; which is doubtless now not so easy for you to believe of me. But the point," Rosanna developed, "is that I entered all the way into our friends' situation and that when I was with my mother alone we talked for the time of nothing else. The strange, or at least the certain, thing was that though we should have liked so to have them over here, we hated to see them hustled even by a rich relative: we were rich ourselves, though we rather hated that too, and there was no romance for us in being so stuffed up. We liked Mr. Northover, their so devoted friend, we saw how they cared for him, how even Graham did, and what an interest he took in the boy, for whom we felt that a happy association with him, each of them so open to it, would be a great thing; we threw ourselves in short, and I dare say to extravagance, into the idea of the success of Mr. Northover's suit. She was the charmingest little woman, very pretty, very lonely, very vague, but very sympathetic, and we perfectly understood that the pleasant Englishman, of great taste and thoroughly a gentleman, should have felt encouraged. We didn't in the least adore Mr. Betterman, between whom and my father the differences that afterwards became so bad were already threatening, and when I saw for myself how the life that might thus be opened to him where they were, with his mother's marriage and a further good influence crowning it, would compare with the awful game of grab, to express it mildly, for which I was sure his uncle proposed to train him, I took upon myself to get more roused and wound-up than I had doubtless any real right to, and to wonder what I might really do to promote the benefit that struck me as the greater and defeat the one against which my prejudice was strong."

She had drawn up a moment as if what was to come required her to gather herself, while her companion seemed to assure her by the backward set of his head, that of a man drinking at a cool spout, how little his attention had lapsed. "I see at once, you dear grand creature, that you were from that moment at the bottom of everything that was to happen; and without knowing yet what these things were I back you for it now up to the hilt."

"Well," she said, "I'm much obliged, and you're never for an instant, mind, to fail me; but I needed no backing then--I didn't even need my mother's: I took on myself so much from the moment my chance turned up."

"You just walked in and settled the whole question, of course." He quite flaunted the luxury of his interest. "Clearly what moved you _was_ one of those crowning passions of infancy."

"Then why didn't I want, on the contrary, to have him, poor boy, where his presence would feed my flame?" Rosanna at once inquired. "Why didn't I obtain of my mother to say to his--for she would have said anything in the world I wanted: 'You just quietly get married, don't disappoint this delightful man; while we take Gray back to his uncle, which will be awfully good for him, and let him learn to make his fortune, the decent women that we are fondly befriending him and you and your husband coming over whenever you like, to see how beautifully it answers.' Why if I was so infatuated didn't I do _that?_" she repeated.

He kept her waiting not a moment. "Just because you _were_ so infatuated. Just because when you're infatuated you're sublime." She had turned her eyes on him, facing his gorgeous hospitality, but facing it with a visible flush. "Rosanna Gaw"--he took undisguised advantage of her--"you're sublime now, just as sublime as you can be, and it's what you want to be. You liked your young man so much that you were really capable----!"

He let it go at that, for even with his drop she had not completed his sense. But the next thing, practically, she did so. "I've been capable ever since--that's the point: of feeling that I did act upon him, that, young and accessible as I found him, I gave a turn to his life."

"Well," Davey continued to comment, "he's not so young now, and no more, naturally, are you; but I guess, all the same, you'll give many another." And then, as facing him altogether more now, she seemed to ask how he could be so sure: "Why, if _I'm_ so accessible, through my tough old hide, how is the exquisite creature formed to all the sensibilities for which you sought to provide going in the least to hold out? He owes you clearly everything he has become, and how can he decently not want you should know he feels it? All's well that ends well: that at least I foresee I shall want to say when I've had more of the beginning. You were going to tell me how it was in particular that you got your pull."

She puffed and puffed again, letting her eyes once more wander and rest; after which, through her smoke, she recovered the sense of the past. "One Sunday morning we went together to the great Gallery--it had been between us for weeks that he was some day to take me and show me the things he most admired: that wasn't at all what would have been my line with _him._ The extent to which he was 'cleverer' than I and knew about the things I didn't, and don't know even now----!" Greatly she made this point. "And yet the beauty was that I felt there were ways I could help him, all the same--I knew _that_ even with all the things I didn't know, so that they remained ignorances of which I think I wasn't a bit ashamed: any more in fact than I am now, there being too many things else to be ashamed of. Never so much as that day, at any rate, had I felt ready for my part--yes, it came to me there as my part; for after he had called for me at our hotel and we had started together I knew something particular was the matter and that he of a sudden didn't care for what we were doing, though we had planned it as a great occasion much before; that in short his thoughts were elsewhere and that I could have made out the trouble in his face if I hadn't wished not to seem to look for it. I hated that he should have it, whatever it was--just how I hated it comes back to me as if from yesterday; and also how at the same time I pretended not to notice, and he attempted not to show he did, but to introduce me, in the rooms, to what we had come for instead--which gave us half-an-hour that I recover vividly, recover, I assure you, quite painfully still, as a conscious, solemn little farce. What put an end to it was that we at last wandered away from the great things, the famous Madonna, the Correggio, the Paul Veroneses, which he had quavered out the properest remarks about, and got off into a small room of little Dutch and other later masters, things that didn't matter and that we couldn't pretend to go into, but where the German sunshine of a bright winter day came down through some upper light and played on all the rich little old colour and old gilding after a fashion that of a sudden decided me. 'I don't care a hang for anything!' I stood before him and boldly spoke out: 'I haven't cared a hang since we came in, if you want to know--I care only for what you're worried about, and what must be pretty bad, since I can see, if you don't mind my saying it, that it has made you cry at home.'"

"He can hardly have thanked you for _that!_" Davey's competence threw off.

"No, he didn't pretend to, and I had known he wouldn't; he hadn't to tell me how a boy feels in taking such a charge from a girl. But there he was on a small divan, swinging his legs a little and with his head--he had taken his hat off--back against the top of the seat and the queerest look in his flushed face. For a moment he stared hard, and _then_ at least, I said to myself, his tears were coming up. They didn't come, however--he only kept glaring as in fever; from which I presently saw that I had said not a bit the wrong thing, but exactly the very best. 'Oh if I were some good to you!' I went on--and with the sense the next moment, ever so happily, that that was really what I was being. 'She has put it upon me to choose for myself--to think, to decide and to settle it that way for both of us. She has put it _all_ upon me,' he said--'and how can I choose, in such a difficulty,' he asked, 'when she tells me, and when I believe, that she'll do exactly as I say?' 'You mean your mother will marry Mr. Northover or give him up according as you prefer?'--but of course I knew what he meant. It was a joy to me to feel it clear up--with the good I had already done him, at a touch, by making him speak. I saw how this relieved him even when he practically spoke of his question as too frightful for his young intelligence, his young conscience--literally his young nerves. It was as if he had appealed to me to pronounce it positively cruel--while I had felt at the first word that I really but blessed it. It wasn't too much for _my_ young nerves--extraordinary as it may seem to you," Rosanna pursued, "that I should but have wished to undertake at a jump such a very large order. I wonder now from where my lucidity came, but just as I stood there I saw some things in a light in which, even with still better opportunities, I've never so _much_ seen them since. It was as if I took everything in--and what everything meant; and, flopped there on his seat and always staring up at me, he understood that I was somehow inspired for him."

"My dear child, you're inspired at this moment!"--Davey Bradham rendered the tribute. "It's too splendid to hear of amid our greedy wants, our timid ideas and our fishy passions. You ring out like Brünnhilde at the opera. How jolly to have pronounced his doom!"

"Yes," she gravely said, "and you see how jolly I now find it. I settled it. I was fate," Rosanna puffed. "He recognised fate--all the more that he really wanted to; and you see therefore," she went on, "how it was to be in every single thing that has happened since."

"You stuck him fast there"--Mr. Bradham filled in the picture. "Yet not so fast after all," he understandingly added, "but that you've been able to handle him again as you like. He does in other words whatever you prescribe."

"If he did it then I don't know what I should have done had he refused to do it now. For now everything's changed. Everyone's dead or dying. And I believe," she wound up, "that I was quite right then, that he has led his life and been happy."

"I see. If he hadn't been----!" Her companion's free glance ranged.

"He would have had me to thank, yes. And at the best I should have cost him much!"

"Everything, you mean, that the old man had more or less from the first in mind?"

Davey had taken her up; but the next moment, without direct reply, she was on her feet. "At any rate you see!" she said to finish with it.

"Oh I see a lot! And if there's more in it than meets the eye I think I see that too," her friend declared. "I want to see it all at any rate--and just as you've started it. But what I want most naturally is to see your little darling himself."

"Well, if I had been afraid of you I wouldn't have spoken. You won't hurt him," Rosanna said as they got back to the cliff walk.

"Hurt him? Why I shall be his great warning light--or at least I shall be yours, which is better still." To this, however, always pondering, she answered nothing, but stood as if spent by her effort and half disposed in consequence to retrace her steps; against which possibility he at once protested. "You don't mean you're not coming on?"

She thought another instant; then her eyes overreached the long smooth interval beyond which the nondescript excrescences of Gussy's "cottage," vast and florid, and in a kindred company of hunches and gables and pinnacles confessed, even if in confused accents, to its monstrous identity. The sight itself seemed after all to give her resolution. "Yes, now for Cissy!" she said and braved the prospect.

III

Half-an-hour later, however, she still had this young lady before her in extended perspective and as a satisfaction, if not as an embarrassment, to come; thanks to the fact that Mrs. Bradham had forty persons, or something like it, though all casually turning up, at tea, and that she herself had perhaps never been so struck with the activity of the charming girl's response to the considerations familiar alike to all of them as Gussy's ideas about her. Gussy's ideas about her, as about everything in the world, could on occasion do more to fill the air of any scene over which Gussy presided than no matter what vociferation of any massed crowd surrounding that lady: exactly which truth might have been notable now to Rosanna in the light of Cissy's occasional clear smile at her, always as yet from a distance, during lapses of intervals and across shifting barriers of the more or less eminent and brilliant. Mrs. Bradham's great idea--notoriously the most disinterested Gussy had been known, through a career rich in announced intentions and glorious designs, to entertain with any coherence--was that by placing and keeping on exhibition, under her eye, the loveliest flower of girlhood a splendid and confident society could have wished to wear on its bosom she should at once signally enhance the dignity of the social part played by herself and steep the precious object in a medium in which the care of precious objects was supremely understood. "When she does so much for me what in the world mustn't I do for _her?_" Cecilia Foy had put that to Rosanna again and again with perfect lucidity, making her sense of fair play shine out of it and her cultivation of that ideal form perhaps not the least of the complications under which our elder young woman, earnest in everything, endeavoured to stick to the just view of her. Cissy had from the first appealed to her with restrictions, but that was the way in which for poor brooding Rosanna every one appealed; only there was in the present case the difference that whereas in most cases the appeal, or rather her view of it, found itself somehow smothered in the attendant wrong possibilities, the interest of this bright victim of Mrs. Bradham's furtherance worked clearer, on the whole, with the closer, with the closest, relation, never starting the questions one might entertain about her except to dispose of them, even if when they had been disposed of she mostly started them again.

Not often had so big a one at all events been started for Rosanna as when she saw the girl earn her keep, as they had so often called it together, by multiplying herself for everyone else about the place instead of remaining as single and possessable as her anxious friend had come over to invite her to be. Present to this observer to the last point indeed, and yet as nothing new, was the impression of that insolence of ease on Gussy's part which was never so great as when her sense for any relation was least fine and least true. She was naturally never so the vulgar rich woman able to afford herself all luxuries as when I she was most stupid about the right enjoyment of these and most brutally systematic, as Rosanna's inward voice phrased the matter, for some inferior and desecrating use of them. Mrs. Bradham would deeply have resented--as deeply as a woman might who had no depth--any imputation on her view 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 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 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.

"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."