Part 4

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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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; 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."