The Ivory Tower (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)/The Ivory Tower/Book 3/Chapter 3
III
Horton, looking at his watch, had got up as he spoke—which Cissy at once also did under this recall of the lapse of their precious minutes. There was a point, however, left for her to make; which she did with the remark that the item they had been discussing in particular couldn't have been by itself the force that had set their young woman originally in motion, inasmuch as Gray wouldn't have had a moustache when a small boy or whatever, and as since that young condition, she understood, Rosanna hadn't again seen him. A proposition to which Haughty's assent was to remain vague, merged as it suddenly became in the cry of "Hello, here he is!" and a prompt gay brandish of arms up at their host Bradham, arrayed for the evening, white-waistcoated and buttonholed, robustly erect on an overlooking ledge and explaining his presence, from the moment it was thus observed, by calling down that Gussy had sent him to see if she wasn't to expect them at dinner. It was practically a summons to Cissy, as the girl easily recognised, to leave herself at least ten minutes to dress decently—in spite of the importance of which she so challenged Davey on another score that, as a consequence, the good gorgeous man, who shone with every effect of the bath and every resource of the toilet, had within the pair of minutes picked out such easiest patent-leather steps as would enable him to convict the companions of a shameless dawdle. She had had time to articulate for Horton's benefit, with no more than due distinctness, that he must have seen them, and Horton had as quickly found the right note and the right wit for the simple reassurance "Oh Davey———!" As occupants of a place of procrastination that they only were not such fools as to leave unhaunted they frankly received their visitor, any impulse in whom to sprinkle stale banter on their search for solitude would have been forestalled, even had it been supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by the instant action of his younger guest's strategic curiosity.
"Has he, please, just has he or no, got a moustache?—"she appealed as if the fate of empires depended on it.
"I've been telling her," Horton explained, "whatever I can remember of Gray Fielder, but she won't listen to anything if I can't first be sure as to that. So as I want her enormously to like him, we both hang, you see, on your lips; unless you call it, more correctly, on his."
Davey's evening bloom opened to them a dense but perfectly pathless garden of possibilities; out of which, while he faced them, he left them to pluck by their own act any bright flower they sufficiently desired to reach. Wonderful during the few instants, between these flagrant worldlings, the exchange of fine recognitions. It would have been hard perhaps to say of them whether it was most discernible that Haughty and Cissy trusted most his intelligence or his indifference, and whether he most applauded or ignored the high perfection of their assurance. What was testified to all round, at all events—[1]
"Ah then he is as 'odd' as I was sure—in spite of Haughty's perverse theory that we shall find him the flattest of the flat!"
It might have been at Haughty's perverse theory that Davey was most moved to stare had he not quickly betrayed, instead of this, a marked attention to the girl herself. "Oh you little wonder and joy!"
"She is a little wonder and joy," Horton said—that at any rate came out clear.
"What you are, my boy, I'm not pretending to say," Davey returned in answer to this; "for I don't accept her account of your vision of Gray as throwing any light on it at all."
"On his judgment of Mr. Fielder, do you mean," Cissy earnestly asked, "or on your evidently awful opinion of his own dark nature?"
"Haughty knows that I lose myself in his dark nature, at my spare moments, and with wind enough on to whistle in that dark, very much as if I had the fine excitement of the Forêt de Bondy to deal with. He's well aware that I know no greater pleasure of the imagination than that sort of interest in him—when I happen also to have the time and the nerve. Let these things serve me now, however, only to hurry you up," Davey went on; "and to say that I of course had with our fortunate friend an impressive quarter of an hour—which everyone will want to know about, so that I must keep it till we sit down. But the great thing is after all for yourself, Haughty," he added—"and you had better know at once that he particularly wants to see you. He'll be glad of you at the very first moment———"
But Horton had already taken him easily up. "Of course I know, my dear man, that he particularly wants to see me. He has written me nothing else from the moment he arrived."
"He has written you, you wretch," Cissy at once extravagantly echoed—"he has written you all sorts of things and you haven't so much as told me?"
"He hasn't written me all sorts of things"—Horton directed this answer to Davey alone—"but has written me in such straight confidence and friendship that I've been wondering if I mayn't go round to him this evening."
"Gussy will no doubt excuse you for that purpose with the utmost joy," Davey rejoined—"though I don't think I advise you to ask her leave if you don't want her at once to insist on going with you. Go to him alone, very quietly—and with the happy confidence of doing him good."
It had been on Cissy that, for his part, Davey had, in speaking, rested his eyes; and it might by the same token have been for the benefit of universal nature, suspended to listen over the bosom of the deep, that Horton's lips phrased his frank reaction upon their entertainer's words. "Well then, ye powers, the amount of good that I shall undertake———!"
Davey Bradham and Cissy Foy exchanged on the whole ground for a moment a considerable smile; his share in which, however, it might exactly have been that prompted the young woman's further expression of their intelligence. "It's too charming that he yearns so for Haughty—and too sweet that Haughty can now rush to him at once." To which she then appended in another tone: "One takes for granted of course that Rosanna was with him."
Davey at this but continued to bloom and beam; which gave Horton, even with a moment's delay, time to assist his better understanding. "She doesn't even yet embrace the fact, tremendously as I've driven it into her, that if Rosanna had been there he couldn't have breathed my name."
This made Davey, however, but throw up derisive hands; though as with an impatient turn now for their regaining the lawn. "My dear man, Rosanna breathes your name with all the force of her lungs!"
Horton, jerking back his head for the bright reassurance, laughed out with amusement. "What a jolly cue then for my breathing of hers! I'll roar it to all the echoes, and everything will be well. But what one's talking about," he said, "is the question of Gray's naming me." He looked from one of his friends to the other, and then, as gathering them into the interest of it: "I'll bet you a fiver that he doesn't at any rate speak to me of Miss Gaw."
"Well, what will that prove?" Davey asked, quite easy about it and leading the way up the rocks.
"In the first place how much he thinks of her," said Cissy, who followed close behind. "And in the second that it's ten to one Haughty will find her there."
"I don't care if I do—not a scrap!" Horton also took his way. "I don't care for anything now but the jolly fun, the jolly fun———!" He had committed it all again, by the time they reached the cliff's edge, to the bland participating elements.
"Oh the treat the poor boy is evidently going to stand us all!"—well, was something that Davey, rather out of breath as they reached the lawn again and came in sight of the villa, had just yet no more than those light words for. He was more definite in remarking immediately after to Cissy that Rosanna would be as little at the other house that evening as she had been at the moment of his own visit, and that, since the nurses and other outsiders appeared to have dispersed, there would be no one to interfere with Gray's free welcome of his friend. The girl was so attentive for this that it made them pause again while she brought out in surprise: "There's nobody else there, you mean then, to watch with the dead———?"
It made Mr. Bradham for an instant wonder, Horton, a little apart from them now and with his back turned, seeming at the same moment, and whether or no her inquiry reached his ear, struck with something that had pulled him up as well and that made him stand and look down in thought. "Why, I suppose the nephew must be himself a sort of watcher," Davey found himself not other than decently vague to suggest.
But it scarce more contented Cissy than if the point had really concerned her. She appeared indeed to question the more, though her eyes were on Haughty's rather brooding back while she did so. "Then if he does stay in the room, when he comes out of it to see people———?"
Her very drop seemed to present the state of things to which the poor deceased was in that case left; for which, however, her good host declined to be responsible. "I don't suppose he comes out for so many."
"He came out at any rate for you." The sense of it all rather remarkably held her, and it might have been some communication of this that, overtaking Horton at his slight distance, determined in him the impulse to leave them, without more words, and walk by himself to the house. "We don't surround such occasions with any form or state of imagination—scarcely with any decency, do we?" Cissy adventured while observing Haughty's retreat. "I should like to think for him of a catafalque and great draped hangings—I should like to think for him of tall flambeaux in the darkened room, and of relays of watchers, sisters of charity or suchlike, surrounding the grand affair and counting their beads."
Davey's rich patience had a shrug. "The grand affair, my dear child, is their affair, over there, and not mine; though when you indulge in such fancies 'for him', I can't but wonder who it is you mean."
"Who it is———?" She mightn't have understood his difficulty.
"Why the dead man or the living!"
They had gone on again; Horton had, with a quickened pace, disappeared; and she had before answering cast about over the fair face of the great house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with dressing-time glimmers from upper windows flushing it here and there like touches of pink paint in an elegant evening complexion. "Oh I care for the dead man, I'm afraid, only because it's the living who appeals. I don't want him to like it."
"To like———?" Davey was again at a loss. "What on earth?"
"Why all that ugliness and bareness, that poverty of form."
He had nothing but derision for her here. "It didn't occur to me at all to associate him with the idea of poverty."
"The place must all the same be hideous," she said, "and the conditions mean—for him to prowl about in alone. It comes to me," she further risked, "that if Rosanna isn't there, as you say, she quite ought to be—and that in her place I should feel it no more than decent to go over and sit with him."
This appeared to strike Davey in a splendid number of lights—which, however, though collectively dazzling, allowed discriminations. "It perhaps bears a little on the point that she has herself just sustained a grave bereavement—with her offices to her own dead to think of first. That was present to me in your talk a moment since of Haughty 's finding her."
"Very true"—it was Cissy's practice, once struck, ever amusedly to play with the missile: "it is of course extraordinary that those bloated old richards, at one time so associated, should have flickered out almost at the same hour. What it comes to then," she went on, "is that Mr. Gray might be, or perhaps even ought to be, condoling over at the other house with her. However, it's their own business, and all I really care for is that he should be so keen as you say about seeing Haughty. I just delight," she said, "in his being keen about Haughty."
"I'm glad it satisfies you then," Davey returned—"for I was on the point of suggesting that with the sense of his desolation you just expressed you might judge your own place to be at once at his side."
"That would have been helpful of you—but I'm content, dear Davey," she smiled. "We're all devoted to Haughty—but," she added after an instant, "there's just this. Did Mr. Graham while you were there say by chance a word about the likes of me?"
"Well, really, no—our short talk didn't take your direction. That would have been for me, I confess," Davey frankly made bold to add, "a trifle unexpected."
"I see"—Cissy did him the justice. "But that's a little, I think, because you don't know———!" It was more, however, than with her sigh she could tell him.
"Don't know by this time, my dear, and after all I've been through," he nevertheless supplied, "what the American girl always so sublimely takes for granted?"
She looked at him on this with intensity—but that of compassion rather than of the conscious wound. "Dear old Davey, il n'y a que vous for not knowing, by this time, as you say, that I've notoriously nothing in common with the creature you mention. I loathe," she said with her purest gentleness, "the American girl."
He faced her an instant more as for a view of the whole incongruity; then he fetched, on his side, a sigh which might have signified, at her choice, either that he was wrong or that he was finally bored. "Well, you do of course brilliantly misrepresent her. But we're all"—he hastened to patch it up—"unspeakably corrupt."
"That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder if it were true," she judiciously threw off.
"But as you're a judge you know it isn't?"
"It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim. I don't say we don't do our best," she added; "but we're still of an innocence, an innocence———!"
"Then perhaps," Davey offered, "Mr. Fielder will help us; unless he proves, by your measure, worse than ourselves!"
"The worse he may be the better; for it's not possible, as I see him," she said, "that he doesn't know."
"Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered, "how wrong we are—to be so right?"
"Know more on every subject than all of us put together!" she called back at him as she now hurried off to dress.
- ↑ There is a gap here in the MS., with the following note by the author: "It is the security of the two others with him that is testified to; but I mustn't make any sort of spread about it or about anything else here now, and only put Davey on some non-committal reply to the question addressed him, such as keeps up the mystery or ambiguity or suspense about Gray, his moustache and everything else, so as to connect properly with what follows. The real point is—that comes back to me, and it is in essence enough—that he pleads he doesn't remember, didn't notice, at all; and thereby oddly enough can't say. It will come to me right once I get into it. One sees that Davey plays with them."