The Ivory Tower (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)/The Ivory Tower/Book 3/Chapter 2
II
He waited a moment, and if she had not immediately after her words sighed "Oh dear, oh dear!" in quite another, that is a much more serious, key, the appearance would perhaps have been that for once in a blue moon she had put into his mind a thought he couldn't have. He couldn't have the thought that it was of the least importance she should guard herself in the way she mentioned; and it was in the air, the very next thing, that she couldn't so idiotically have strayed as to mean to impute it. He quickly enough made the point that what he preferred was her not founding her interest in Gray so very abjectly on another man's authority—given the uncanny fact of the other man's having cast upon her a charm which time and even his death had done so little to abate. Yes, the late Northover had clearly had something about him that it worried a fellow to have her perpetually rake up. There she was in peril of jealousy—his jealousy of the queer Northover ghost; unless indeed it was she herself who was queerest, ridden as her spirit seemed by sexagenarian charms! He could look after her with Gray—they were at one about Gray; what would truly alienate them, should she persist, would be his own exposure to comparison with the memory of a rococo Briton he had no arms to combat. Which extravagance of fancy had of course after a minute sufficiently testified to the clearance of their common air that invariably sprang from their feeling themselves again together and finding once more what this came to—all under sublime palpability of proof. The renewed consciousness did perhaps nothing for their difficulties as such, but it did everything for the interest, the amusement, the immediate inspiration of their facing them: there was in that such an element of their facing each other and knowing, each time as if they had not known it before, that this had absolute beauty. It had unmistakably never had more than now, even when their freedom in it had rapidly led them, under Cissy's wonderment, to a consideration of whether a happy relation with their friend (he was already thus her friend too, without her ever having seen him!) mightn't have to count with some inevitable claim, some natural sentiment, asserted and enjoyed on Rosanna's part, not to speak of the effect on Graham himself of that young woman's at once taking such an interest in him and coming in for such a fortune.
"In addition to which who shall pretend to deny," the girl earnestly asked, "that Rosanna has in herself the most extraordinary charm?"
"Oh you think she has extraordinary charm?"
"Of course I do—and so do you: don't be absurd! She's simply superb," Cissy expounded, "in her own original way, which no other woman over here—except me a little perhaps!—has so much as a suspicion of anything to compare with; and which, for all we know, constitutes a luxury entirely at Graham's service." Cissy required but a single other look at it all to go on: "I shouldn't in the least wonder if they were already engaged."
"I don't think there's a chance of it," Haughty said, "and I hold that if any such fear is your only difficulty you may be quite at your ease. Not only do I so see it," he went on, "but I know why I do."
Cissy just waited. "You consider that because she refused Horton Vint she'll decline marriage altogether?"
"I think that throws a light," this gentleman smiled—"though it isn't all my ground. She turned me down, two years ago, as utterly as I shall ever have been turned in my life—and if I chose so to look at it the experience would do for me beautifully as that of an humiliation served up to a man in as good form as he need desire. That it was, that it still is when I live it through again; that it will probably remain, for my comfort—in the sense that I'm likely never to have a worse. I've had my dose," he figured, "of that particular black draught, and I've got the bottle there empty on the shelf."
"And yet you signify that you're all the same glad———?" Cissy didn't for the instant wholly follow.
"Well, it all came to me then; and that it did all come is what I have the advantage of now—I mean, you see, in being able to reassure you as I do. I had some wonderful minutes with her—it didn't take long," Haughty laughed. "We saw in those few minutes, being both so horribly intelligent; and what I recognised has remained with me. What she did is her own affair—and that she could so perfectly make it such, without leaving me a glimmer of doubt, is what I have, as I tell you, to blink at forever. I may ask myself if you like," he pursued, "why I should 'mind' so much if I saw even at the moment that she wasn't at any rate going to take someone else—and if you do I shall reply that I didn't need that to make it bad. It was bad enough just in itself. My point is, however," Horton concluded, "that I can give you at least the benefit of my feeling utterly sure that Gray will have no chance. She's in the dreadful position—and more than ever of course now—of not being able to believe she can be loved for herself."
"You mean because you couldn't make her believe it?" asked Cissy after taking this in.
"No—not that, for I didn't so much as try. I didn't—and it was awfully superior of me, you know—approach her at all on that basis. That," said Horton, "is where it cuts. The basis was that of my own capacity only—my capacity to serve her, in every particular, with every aptitude I possess in the world, and which I could see she saw I possess (it was given me somehow to send that home to her!) without a hair's breadth overlooked. I shouldn't have minded her taking me so for impossible, blackly impossible, if she had done it under an illusion; but she really believed in me as a general value, quite a first-rate value—that I stood there and didn't doubt. And yet she practically said 'You ass!'"
His encircling arm gained, for response to this, however, but the vibration of her headshake—without so much as any shudder at the pain he so vividly imaged. "She practically said that she was already then in love with Mr. Graham, and you wouldn't have had a better chance had a passion of your own stuck out of you. If I thought she didn't admire you," Cissy said, "I shouldn't be able to do with her at all—it would be too stupid of her; putting aside her not accepting you, I mean for a woman can't accept every man she admires. I suppose you don't at present object," she continued, "to her admiring Mr. Graham enough to account for anything; especially as it accounts so for her having just acted on his behalf with such extraordinary success. Doesn't that make it out for him," she asked, "that he's admired by twenty millions plus the amount that her reconciliation of him with his uncle just in time to save it, without an hour to spare, will represent for his pocket? We don't know what that lucky amount may be———"
"No, but we more or less shall"—Horton took her straight up. "Of course, without exaggeration, that will be interesting—even though it will be but a question, I'm quite certain, of comparatively small things. Old Betterman—there are people who practically know, and I've talked with them—isn't going to foot up to any faint likeness of what Gaw does. That, however, has nothing to do with it: all that is relevant—since I quite allow that, speculation for speculation, our association in this sort represents finer fun than it has yet succeeded in doing in other sorts—all that's relevant is that when you've seen Gray you mayn't be in such a hurry to figure him as a provoker of insatiable passions. Your insidious Northover has, as you say, worked you up, but wait a little to see if the reality corresponds."
"He showed me a photograph, my insidious Northover," Cissy promptly recalled; "he was naïf enough, poor dear, for that. In fact he made me a present of several, including one of himself; I owe him as well two or three other mementos, all of which I've cherished."
"What was he up to anyway, the old corrupter of your youth?"—Horton seemed really to wonder. "Unless it was that you simply reduced him to infatuated babble."
"Well, there are the photographs and things to show," she answered unembarrassed—"though I haven't them with me here; they're put away in New York. His portrait's extremely good-looking."
"Do you mean Mr. Northover's own?"
"Oh his is of course quite beautiful. But I mean Mr. Fielder's—at his then lovely age. I remember it," said Cissy, "as a nice, nice face."
Haughty on his side indulged in the act of memory, concluding after an instant to a headshake. "He isn't at all remarkable for looks; but putting his nice face at its best, granting that he has a high degree of that advantage, do you see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast everything to the winds for him?"
Cissy weighed the question. "We've seen surely what she has been carried away enough to do."
"She has had other reasons—independent of headlong passion. And remember," he further argued—"if you impute to her a high degree of that sort of sensibility—how perfectly proof she was to my physical attractions, which I declare to you without scruple leave the very brightest you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."
Again his companion considered. "Of course you're dazzlingly handsome; but are you, my dear, after all—I mean in appearance—so very interesting?"
The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met but in the same spirit. "Didn't you then find me so from the first minute you ever looked at me?"
"We're not talking of me," she returned, "but of people who happen to have been subjects less predestined and victims less abject. What," she then at once went on, "is Gray's appearance, 'anyway'? Is he black, to begin with, or white, or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or neither one thing or t'other? Is he fat or thin or of 'medium weight'? There are always such lots to be told about people, and never a creature in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover, when I come to think of it, never mentioned his size."
"Well, you wouldn't mention it," Horton amiably argued. The appeal, he showed withal, stirred him to certain recoveries. "And I should call him black—black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather distinctively 'slick' and soigné—the hair of a good little boy who never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's only very middling tall; in fact so very middling," Haughty made out, "that it probably comes to his being rather short. But he has neither a hump nor a limp, no marked physical deformity of any sort; has in fact a kind of futile fidgetty quickness which suggests the little man, and the nervous and the active and the ready; the ready, I mean, for anything in the way of interest and talk—given that the matter isn't too big for him. The 'active', I say, though at the same time," he noted, "I ask myself what the deuce the activity will have been about."
The girl took in these impressions to the effect of desiring still more of them. "Doesn't he happen then to have eyes and things?"
"Oh yes"—Horton bethought himself—"lots and lots of eyes, though not perhaps so many of other things. Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think anything whatever you may require in the way of eyes."
"Then clearly they're not 'black': I never require black ones," she said, "in any conceivable connection: his eyes—blue-grey, or grey-blue, whichever you may call it, and far and away the most charming kind when one doesn't happen to be looking into your glorious green ones—his satisfactory eyes are what will more than anything else have done the business. They'll have done it so," she went on, "that if he isn't red in the face, which I defy him to be, his features don't particularly matter—though there's not the least reason either why he should have mean or common ones. In fact he hasn't them in the photograph, and what are photographs, the wretched things, but the very truth of life?"
"He's not red in the face," Haughty was able to state—"I think of him rather as of a pale, very pale, clean brown; and entirely unaddicted," he felt sure, "to flushing or blushing. What I do sort of remember in the feature way is that his teeth though good, fortunately, as they're shown a good deal, are rather too small and square; for a man's, that is, so that they make his smile a trifle———"
"A trifle irresistible of course," Cissy broke in—"through their being, in their charming form, of the happy Latin model; extremely like my own, be so good as to notice for once in your life, and not like the usual Anglo-Saxon fangs. You're simply describing, you know," she added, "about as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see."
"It's not I who am describing him—it's you, love; and ever so delightfully." With which, in consistency with that, he himself put a question. "What does it come to, by the way, in the sense of a moustache? Does he, or doesn't he after all, wear one? It's odd I shouldn't remember, but what does the photograph say?"
"It seems odd indeed I shouldn't—"Cissy had a moment's brooding. She gave herself out as ashamed. "Fancy my not remembering if the photograph is moustachue!"
"It can't be then very," Horton contributed—the point was really so interesting.
"No," Cissy tried to settle, "the photograph can't be so very moustachue."
"His moustaches, I mean, if he wears 'em, can't be so very prodigious; or one could scarcely have helped noticing, could one?"
"Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice yours—and therefore Gray's, if he has any, must indeed be very inferior. And yet he can't be shaved like a sneak-thief—or like all the world here," she developed; "for I won't have him with nothing at all any more than I'll have him with anything prodigious, as you say; which is worse than nothing. When I say I won't have him with nothing," she explained, "I mean I won't have him subject to the so universally and stupidly applied American law that every man's face without exception shall be scraped as clean, as glabre, as a fish's—which it makes so many of them so much resemble. I won't have him so," she said, "because I won't have him so idiotically gregarious and without that sense of differences in things, and of their relations and suitabilities, which such exhibitions make one so ache for. If he's gregarious to that sort of tune we must renounce our idea—that is you must drop yours—of my working myself up to snatch him from the arms of Rosanna. I must believe in him, for that, I must see him at least in my own way," she pursued; "believing in myself, or even believing in you, is a comparative detail. I won't have him bristle with horrid demagogic notes. I shouldn't be able to act a scrap on that basis."
It was as if what she said had for him the interest at once of the most intimate and the most enlarged application; it was in fact as if she alone in all the world could touch him in such fine ways—could amuse him, could verily instruct him, to anything like such a tune. "It seems peculiarly a question of bristles if it all depends on his moustache. Our suspense as to that, however, needn't so much ravage us," Haughty added, "when we remember that Davey, who, you tell me, will by this time have seen him, can settle the question for us as soon as we meet at dinner. It will by the same stroke then settle that of the witchcraft which has according to your theory so bedevilled poor dear Rosanna's sensibility—leading it such a dance, I mean, and giving such an empire to certain special items of our friend's 'personality', that the connection was practically immediate with his brilliant status."