The Ivory Tower (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)/The Ivory Tower/Book 3/Chapter 5
V
"We do talk here while he lies in death"—they had in fine all serenity for it. "But the extraordinary thing is that my putting myself this way at my ease—and for that matter putting you at yours—is exactly what the dear man made to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade of a sense, and don't think I ever shall have, of not doing what he wanted of me; for what he wanted of me," our particular friend continued, "is—well, so utterly unconventional. He would like my being the right sort of well-meaning idiot that you catch me in the very fact of. I warned him, I sincerely, passionately warned him, that I'm not fit, in the smallest degree, for the use, for the care, for even the most rudimentary comprehension, of a fortune; and that exactly it was which seemed most to settle him. He wanted me clear, to the last degree, not only of the financial brain, but of any sort of faint germ of the money-sense whatever—down to the very lack of power, if he might be so happy (or if I might!) to count up to ten on my fingers. Satisfied of the limits of my arithmetic he passed away in bliss."
To this, as fairly lucid, Horton had applied his understanding. "You can't count up to ten?"
"Not all the way. Still," our young man smiled, "the greater inspiration may now give me the lift."
His guest looked as if one might by that time almost have doubted. But it was indeed an extraordinary matter. "How comes it then that your want of arithmetic hasn't given you a want of order?—unless indeed I'm mistaken and you were perhaps at sixes and sevens?"
"Well, I think I was at sixes—though I never got up to sevens! I've never had the least rule or method; but that has been a sort of thing I could more or less cover up—from others, I mean, not from myself, who have always been helplessly ashamed of it. It hasn't been the disorder of extravagance," Gray explained, "but the much more ignoble kind, the wasteful thrift that doesn't really save, that simply misses, and that neither enjoys things themselves nor enjoys their horrid little equivalent of hoarded pence. I haven't needed to count far, the fingers of one hand serving for my four or five possessions; and also I've kept straight not by taking no liberties with my means, but by taking none with my understanding of them. From fear of counting wrong, and from loathing of the act of numerical calculation, and of the humiliation of having to give it up after so few steps from the start, I've never counted at all—and that, you see, is what has saved me. That has been my sort of disorder—which you'll agree is the most pitiful of all."
Horton once more turned away from him, but slowly this time, not in impatience, rather with something of the preoccupation of a cup-bearer whose bowl has been filled to the brim and who must carry it a distance with a steady hand. So for a minute or two might he have been taking this care; at the end of which, however, Gray saw him stop in apparent admiration before a tall inlaid and brass-bound French bahut; with the effect, after a further moment, of a sharp break of their thread of talk. "You've got some things here at least to enjoy and that you ought to know how to keep hold of; though I don't so much mean," he explained, "this expensive piece of furniture as the object of interest perched on top."
"Oh the ivory tower!—yes, isn't that, Vinty, a prize piece and worthy of the lovely name?"
Vinty remained for the time all admiration, having, as you would easily have seen, lights enough to judge by. "It appears to have been your uncle's only treasure—as everything else about you here is of a newness! And it isn't so much too small, Gray," he laughed, "for you to get into it yourself, when you want to get rid of us, and draw the doors to. If it's a symbol of any retreat you really have an eye on I much congratulate you; I don't know what I wouldn't give myself for the 'run' of an ivory tower."
"Well, I can't ask you to share mine," Gray returned; "for the situation to have a sense, I take it, one must sit in one's tower alone. And I should properly say," he added after an hesitation, "that mine is the one object, all round me here, that I don't owe my uncle: it has been placed at my disposition, in the handsomest way in the world, by Rosanna Gaw."
"Ah that does increase the interest—even if susceptible of seeming to mean, to one's bewilderment, that it's the sort of thing she would like to thrust you away into; which I hope, however, is far from the case. Does she then keep ivory towers, a choice assortment?" Horton quite gaily continued; "in the sense of having a row of them ready for occupation, and with tenants to match perchable in each and signalling along the line from summit to summit? Because"—and, facing about from his contemplation, he piled up his image even as the type of object represented by it might have risen in the air—"you give me exactly, you see, the formula of that young lady herself: perched aloft in an ivory tower is what she is, and I'll be hanged if this isn't a hint to you to mount, yourself, into just such another; under the same provocation, I fancy her pleading, as she has in her own case taken for sufficient." Thus it was that, suddenly more brilliant than ever yet, to Graham's apprehension, you might well have guessed, his friend stood nearer again—stood verily quite irradiating responsive ingenuity. Markedly would it have struck you that at such instants as this, most of all, the general hush that was so thick about them pushed upward and still further upward the fine flower of the inferential. Following the pair closely from the first, and beginning perhaps with your idea that this life of the intelligence had its greatest fineness in Gray Fielder, you would by now, I dare say, have been brought to a more or less apprehensive foretaste of its possibilities in our other odd agent. For how couldn't it have been to the full stretch of his elastic imagination that Haughty was drawn out by the time of his putting a certain matter beautifully to his companion? "Don't I, 'gad, take the thing straight over from you—all of it you've been trying to convey to me here!—when I see you, up in the blue, behind your parapet, just gracefully lean over and call down to where I mount guard at your door in the dust and comparative darkness? It's well to understand"—his thumbs now in his waistcoat-holes he measured his idea as if Gray's own face fairly reflected it: "you want me to take all the trouble for you simply, in order that you may have all the fun. And you want me at the same time, in order that things shall be for you at their ideal of the easiest, to make you believe, as a salve to your conscience, that the fun isn't so mixed with the trouble as that you can't have it, on the right arrangement made with me, quite by itself. This is most ingenious of you," Horton added, "but it doesn't in the least show me, don't you see? where my fun comes in."
"I wonder if I can do that," Gray returned, "without making you understand first something of the nature of mine—or for that matter without my first understanding myself perhaps what my queer kind of it is most likely to be."
His companion showed withal for more and more ready to risk amused recognitions. "You are 'rum' with your queer kinds, and might make my flesh creep, in these conditions, if it weren't for something in me of rude pluck." Gray, in speaking, had moved towards the great French meuble with some design upon it or upon the charge it carried; which Morton's eyes just wonderingly noted—and to the effect of an exaggeration of tone in his next remark. "However, there are assurances one doesn't keep repeating: it's so little in me, I feel, to refuse you any service I'm capable of, no matter how clumsily, that if you take me but confidently enough for the agent even of your unholiest pleasures, you'll find me still putting them through for you when you've broken down in horror yourself."
"Of course it's my idea that whatever I ask you shall be of interest to you, and of the liveliest, in itself—quite apart from any virtue of my connection with it. If it speaks to you that way so much the better," Gray went on, standing now before the big bahut with both hands raised and resting on the marble top. This lifted his face almost to the level of the base of his perched treasure—so that he stared at the ivory tower without as yet touching it. He only continued to talk, though with his thought, as he brought out the rest of it, almost superseded by the new preoccupation. "I shall absolutely decline any good of anything that isn't attended by some equivalent or—what do you call it?—proportionate good for you. I shall propose to you a percentage, if that's the right expression, on every blest benefit I get from you in the way of the sense of safety." Gray now moved his hands, laying them as in finer fondness to either smoothly-plated side of the tall repository, against which a finger or two caressingly rubbed. His back turned therefore to Horton, he was divided between the growth of his response to him and that of this more sensible beauty. "Don't I kind of insure my life, my moral consciousness, I mean, for your advantage?—or with you, as it were, taking you for the officeman or actuary, if I'm not muddling: to whom I pay a handsome premium for the certainty of there being to my credit, on my demise, a sufficient sum to clear off my debts and bury me."
"You propose to me a handsome premium? Catch me," Horton laughed, "not jumping at that!"
"Yes, and you'll of course fix the premium yourself." But Gray was now quite detached, occupied only in opening his ivory doors with light fingers and then playing these a little, whether for hesitation or for the intenser pointing of inquiry, up and down the row of drawers so exposed. Against the topmost they then rested a moment drawing out this one, however, with scant further delay and enabling themselves to feel within and so become possessed of an article contained. It was with this article in his hand that he presently faced about again, turning it over, resting his eyes on it and then raising them to his visitor, who perceived in it a heavy letter, duly addressed, to all appearance, but not stamped and as yet unopened. "The distinguished retreat, you see, has its tenant."
"Do you mean by its tenant the author of those evidently numerous pages?—unless you rather mean," Horton asked, "that you seal up in packets the love-letters addressed to you and find that charming receptacle a congruous place to keep them? Is there a packet in every drawer, and do you take them out this way to remind yourself fondly that you have them and that it mayn't be amiss for me to feel your conquests and their fine old fragrance dangled under my nose?"
Our young man, at these words, had but returned to the consideration of his odd property, attaching it first again to the superscription and then to the large firm seal. "I haven't the least idea what this is; and I'm divided in respect of it, I don't mind telling you, between curiosity and repulsion."
Horton then also eyed the ambiguity, but at his discreet distance and reaching out for it as little as his friend surrendered it. "Do you appeal to me by chance to help you to decide either way?"
Poor Gray, still wondering and fingering, had a long demur. "No—I don't think I want to decide." With which he again faced criticism. "The extent, Vinty, to which I think I must just like to drift———!"
Vinty seemed for a moment to give this indicated quantity the attention invited to it, but without more action for the case than was represented by his next saying: "Why then do you produce your question—apparently so much for my benefit?"
"Because in the first place you noticed the place it lurks in, and because in the second I like to tell you things."
This might have struck us as making the strained note in Vinty's smile more marked. "But that's exactly, confound you, what you don't do! Here have I been with you half an hour without your practically telling me anything!"
Graham, very serious, stood a minute looking at him hard; succeeding also quite it would seem in taking his words not in the least for a reproach but for a piece of information of the greatest relevance, and thus at once dismissing any minor importance. He turned back with his minor importance to his small open drawer, laid it within again and, pushing the drawer to, closed the doors of the cabinet. The act disposed of the letter, but had the air of introducing as definite a statement as Horton could have dreamt of. "It's a bequest from Mr. Gaw."
"A bequest"—Horton wondered—"of banknotes?"
"No—it's a letter addressed to me just before his death, handed me by his daughter, to whom he intrusted it, and not likely, I think, to contain money. He was then sure, apparently, of my coming in for money; and even if he hadn't been would have had no ground on earth for leaving me anything."
Horton's visible interest was yet consonant with its waiting a little for expression. "He leaves you the great Rosanna."
Graham, at this, had a stare, followed by a flush as the largest possible sense of it came out. "You suppose it perhaps the expression of a wish———?" And then as Horton forebore at first as to what he supposed: "A wish that I may find confidence to apply to his daughter for her hand?"
"That hasn't occurred to you before?" Horton asked—"nor the measure of the confidence suggested been given you by the fact of your receiving the document from Rosanna herself? You do give me, you extraordinary person," he gaily proceeded, "as good opportunities as I could possibly desire to 'help' you!"
Graham, for all the felicity of this, needed but an instant to think. "I have it from Miss Gaw herself that she hasn't an idea of what the letter contains—any more than she has the least desire that I shall for the present open it."
"Well, mayn't that very attitude in her rather point to a suspicion?" was his guest's ingenious reply. "Nothing could be less like her certainly than to appear in such a case to want to force your hand. It makes her position—with exquisite filial piety, you see—extraordinarily delicate."
Prompt as that might be, Gray appeared to show, no sportive sophistry, however charming, could work upon him. "Why should Mr. Gaw want me to marry his daughter?"
Horton again hung about a little. "Why should you be so afraid of ascertaining his idea that you don't so much as peep into what he writes on the subject?"
"Afraid? Am I afraid?" Gray fairly spoke with a shade of the hopeful, as if even that would be richer somehow than drifting.
"Well, you looked at your affair just now as you might at some small dangerous, some biting or scratching, animal whom you're not at all sure of."
"And yet you see I keep him about."
"Yes—you keep him in his cage, for which I suppose you have a key."
"I have indeed a key, a charming little golden key." With which Gray took another turn; once more facing criticism, however, to say with force: "He hated him most awfully!"
Horton appeared to wonder. "Your uncle hated old Gaw?"
"No—I don't think he cared. I speak of Mr. Gaw's own animus. He disliked so mortally his old associate, the man who lies dead upstairs—and in spite of my consideration for him I still preserve his record."
"How do you know about his hate," Horton asked, "or if your letter, since you haven't read it, is a record?"
"Well, I don't trust it—I mean not to be. I don't see what else he could have written me about. Besides," Gray added, "I've my personal impression."
"Of old Gaw? You had seen him then?"
"I saw him out there on this verandah, where he was hovering in the most extraordinary fashion, a few hours before his death. It was only for a few minutes," Gray said—"but they were minutes I shall never forget."
Horton's interest, though so deeply engaged, was not unattended with perplexity. "You mean he expressed to you such a feeling at such an hour?"
"He expressed to me in about three minutes, without speech, to which it seemed he couldn't trust himself, as much as it might have taken him, or taken anyone else, to express in three months at another time and on another subject. If you ever yourself saw him," Gray went on, "perhaps you'll understand."
"Oh I often saw him—and should indeed in your place perhaps have understood. I never heard him accused of not making people do so. But you hold," said Horton, "that he must have backed up for you further the mystic revelation?"
"He had written before he saw me—written on the chance of my being a person to be affected by it; and after seeing me he didn't destroy or keep back his message, but emphasised his wish for a punctual delivery."
"By which it is evident," Horton concluded, "that you struck him exactly as such a person."
"He saw me, by my idea, as giving my attention to what he had there ready for me." Gray clearly had talked himself into possession of his case. "That's the sort of person I succeeded in seeming to him—though I can assure you without my the least wanting to."
"What you feel is then that he thought he might attack with some sort of shock for you the character of your uncle?" Vinty's question had a special straightness.
"What I feel is that he has so attacked it, shock or no shock, and that that thing in my cabinet, which I haven't examined, can only be the proof."
It gave Horton much to turn over. "But your conviction has an extraordinary bearing. Do I understand that the thing was handed you by your friend with a knowledge of its contents?"
"Don't, please," Gray said at once, "understand anything either so hideous or so impossible. She but carried out a wish uttered on her father's deathbed, and hasn't so much as suggested that I break the portentous seal. I think in fact," he assured himself, "that she greatly prefers I shouldn't."
"Which fact," Horton observed, "but adds of course to your curiosity."
Gray's look at him betrayed on this a still finer interest in his interest. "You see the limits in me of that passion."
"Well, my dear chap, I've seen greater limits to many things than your having your little secret tucked away under your thumb. Do you mind my asking," Horton risked, "whether what deters you from action—and by action I mean opening your letter—is just a real apprehension of the effect designed by the good gentleman? Do you feel yourself exposed, by the nature of your mind or any presumption on Gaw's behalf, to give credit, vulgarly speaking, to whatever charge or charges he may bring?"
Gray weighed the question, his wide dark eyes would have told us, in his choicest silver scales. "Neither the nature of my mind, bless it, nor the utmost force of any presumption to the contrary, prevents my having found my uncle, in his wonderful latest development, the very most charming person that I've ever seen in my life. Why he impressed me as a model of every virtue."
"I confess I don't see," said Horton, "how a relative so behaving could have failed to endear himself. With such convictions why don't you risk looking?"
Gray was but for a moment at a loss he quite undertook to know. "Because the whole thing would be so horrible. I mean the question itself is—and even our here and at such a time discussing it."
"Nothing is horrible—to the point of making one quake," Horton opined, "that falls to the ground with a smash from the moment one drops it. The sense of your document is exactly what's to be appreciated. It would have no sense at all if you didn't believe."
Gray considered, but still differed. "Yes, to find it merely vindictive and base, and thereby to have to take it for false, that would still be an odious experience."
"Then why the devil don't you simply destroy the thing?" Horton at last quite impatiently inquired.
Gray showed perhaps he had scarce a reason, but had, to the very brightest effect, an answer. "That's just what I want you to help me to. To help me, that is," he explained, "after a little to decide for."
"After a little?" wondered Horton. "After how long?"
"Well, after long enough for me to feel sure I don't act in fear. I don't want," he went on as in fresh illustration of the pleasure taken by him, to the point, as it were, of luxury, in feeling no limit to his companion's comprehension, or to the patience involved in it either, amusedly as Horton might at moments attempt to belie that, adding thereby to the whole service something still more spacious—"I don't want to act in fear of anything or of anyone whatever; I said to myself at home three weeks ago, or whenever, that it wasn't for that I was going to come over; and I propose therefore, you see, to know so far as possible where I am and what I'm about: morally speaking at least, if not financially."
His friend but looked at him again on this in rather desperate diversion. "I don't see how you're to know where you are, I confess, if you take no means to find out."
"Well, my acquisition of property seems by itself to promise me information, and for the understanding of the lesson I shall have to take a certain time. What I want," Gray finely argued, "is to act but in the light of that."
"In the light of time? Then why do you begin by so oddly wasting it?"
"Because I think it may be the only way for me not to waste understanding. Don't be afraid," he went on, moving as by the effect of Horton's motion, which had brought that subject of appeal a few steps nearer the rare repository, "that I shall commit the extravagance of at all wasting you."
Horton, from where he had paused, looked up at the ivory tower; though as Gray was placed in the straight course of approach to it he had after a fashion to catch and meet his eyes by the way. "What you really want of me, it's clear, is to help you to fidget and fumble—or in other words to prolong the most absurd situation; and what I ought to do, if you'd believe it of me, is to take that stuff out of your hands and just deal with it myself."
"And what do you mean by dealing with it yourself?"
"Why destroying it unread by either of us—which," said Horton, looking about, "I'd do in a jiffy, on the spot, if there were only a fire in that grate. The place is clear, however, and we've matches; let me chuck your letter in and enjoy the blaze with you."
"Ah, my dear man, don't! Don't!" Gray repeated, putting it rather as a plea for indulgence than as any ghost of a defiance, but instinctively stepping backward in defence of his treasure.
His companion, for a little, gazed at the cabinet, in speculation, it might really have seemed, as to an extraordinary reach of arm. "You positively prefer to hug the beastly thing?"
"Let me alone," Gray presently returned, "and you'll probably find I've hugged it to death."
Horton took, however, on his side, a moment for further reflection. "I thought what you wanted of me to be exactly not that I should let you alone, but that I should give you on the contrary my very best attention."
"Well," Gray found felicity to answer, "I feel that you'll see how your very best attention will sometimes consist in your not at all minding me."
So then for the minute Horton looked as if he took it. The great clock on the mantel appeared to have stopped with the stop of its late owner's life; so that he eyed his watch and startled at the hour to which they had talked. He put out his hand for good-night, and this returned grasp held them together in silence a minute. Something then in his sense of the situation determined his breaking out with an intensity not yet produced in him. "Yes—you're really prodigious. I mean for trust in a fellow. For upon my honour you know nothing whatever about me."
"That's quite what I mean," said Gray—"that I suffer from my ignorance of so much that's important, and want naturally to correct it."
"'Naturally'?" his visitor gloomed.
"Why, I do know this about you, that when we were together with old Roulet at Neuchâtel and, off on our cours that summer, had strayed into a high place, in the Oberland, where I was ass enough to have slid down to a scrap of a dizzy ledge, and so hung helpless over the void, unable to get back, in horror of staying and in greater horror of not, you got near enough to me, at the risk of your life, to lower to me the rope we so luckily had with us and that made an effort of my own possible by my managing to pass it under my arms. You helped that effort from a place of vantage above that nobody but you, in your capacity for playing up, would for a moment have taken for one, and you so hauled and steadied and supported me, in spite of your almost equal exposure, that little by little I climbed, I scrambled, my absolute confidence in you helping, for it amounted to inspiration, and got near to where you were."
"From which point," said Horton, whom this reminiscence had kept gravely attentive, "you in your turn rendered me such assistance, I remember, though I can't for the life of me imagine how you contrived, that the tables were quite turned and I shouldn't in the least have got out of my fix without you." He now pulled up short however; he stood a moment looking down. "It isn't pleasant to remember."
"It wouldn't," Gray judged, "be pleasant to forget. You gave proof of extraordinary coolness."
Horton still had his eyes on the ground. "We both kept our heads. I grant it's a decent note for us."
"If you mean we were associated in keeping our heads, you kept mine," Gray remarked, "much more than I kept yours. I should be without a head to-day if you hadn't seen so to my future, just as I should be without a heart, you must really let me remark, if I didn't look now to your past. I consider that to know that fact in it takes me of itself well-nigh far enough in appreciation of you for my curiosity, even at its most exasperated, to rest on a bed of roses. However, my imagination itself," Gray still more beautifully went on, "insists on making additions—since how can't it, for that matter, picture again the rate at which it made them then? I hadn't even at the time waited for you to save my life in order to think you a swell. If I thought you the biggest kind of one, and if in your presence now I see just as much as ever why I did, what does that amount to but that my mind isn't a blank about you?"
"Well, if mine had ever been one about you," said Horton, once more facing it, "our so interesting conversation here would have sufficed to cram it full. The least I can make of you, whether for your protection or my profit, is just that you're insanely romantic."
"Romantic—yes," Gray smiled; "but oh, but oh, so systematically!"
"It's your system that's exactly your madness. How can you take me, without a stroke of success, without a single fact of performance, to my credit, for anything but an abject failure? You're in possession of no faintest sign, kindly note, that I'm not a mere impudent ass."
Gray accepted this reminder, for all he showed to the contrary, in the admiring spirit in which he might have regarded a splendid somersault or an elegant trick with cards; indulging, that is, by his appearance, in the forward bend of attention to it, but then falling back to more serious ground. "It's my romance that's itself my reason; by which I mean that I'm never so reasonable, so deliberate, so lucid and so capable—to call myself capable at any hour!—as when I'm most romantic. I'm methodically and consistently so, and nothing could make and keep me, for any dealings with me, I hold, more conveniently safe and quiet. You see that you can lead me about by a string if you'll only tie it to my appropriate finger—which you'll find out, if you don't mind the trouble, by experience of the wrong ones, those where the attachment won't 'act'." He drew breath to give his friend the benefit of this illustration, but another connection quickly caught him up. "How can you pretend to suggest that you're in these parts the faintest approach to an insignificant person? How can you pretend that you're not as clever as you can stick together, and with the cleverness of the right kind? For there are odious kinds, I know—the kind that redresses other people's stupidity instead of sitting upon it."
"I'll answer you those questions," Horton goodhumouredly said, "as soon as you tell me how you've come by your wonderful ground for them. Till you're able to do that I shall resent your torrent of abuse. The appalling creature you appear to wish to depict!"
"Well, you're simply a figure—what I call—in all the force of the term; one has only to look at you to see it, and I shall give up drawing conclusions from it only when I give up looking. You can make out that there's nothing in a prejudice," Gray developed, "for a prejudice may be, or must be, so to speak, single-handed; but you can't not count with a relation—I mean one you're a party to, because a relation is exactly a fact of reciprocity. Our reciprocity, which exists and which makes me a party to it by existing for my benefit, just as it makes you one by existing for yours, can't possibly result in your not 'figuring' to me, don't you see? with the most admirable intensity. And I simply decline," our young man wound up, "not to believe tremendous things of any subject of a relation of mine."
"'Any' subject?" Vinty echoed in a tone that showed how intelligently he had followed. "That condition, I'm afraid," he smiled, "will cut down not a little your general possibilities of relation." And then as if this were cheap talk, but a point none the less remained: "In this country one's a figure (whatever you may mean by that!) on easy terms; and if I correspond to your idea of the phenomenon you'll have much to do—I won't say for my simple self, but for the comfort of your mind—to make your fond imagination fit the funny facts. You pronounce me an awful swell—which, like everything else over here, has less weight of sense in it for the saying than it could have anywhere else; but what barest evidence have you of any positive trust in me shown on any occasion or in any connection by one creature you can name?"
"Trust?"—Gray looked at the red tip of the cigarette between his fingers.
"Trust, trust, trust!"
Well, it didn't take long to say. "What do you call it but trust that such people as the Bradhams, and all the people here, as he tells me, receive you with open arms?"
"Such people as the Bradhams and as 'all the people here'!"—Horton beamed on him for the beauty of that. "Such authorities and such 'figures,' such allegations, such perfections and such proofs! Oh," he said, "I'm going to have great larks with you!"
"You give me then the evidence I want in the very act of challenging me for it. What better proof of your situation and your character than your possession exactly of such a field for whatever you like, of such a dish for serving me up? Mr. Bradham, as you know," Gray continued, "was this morning so good as to pay me a visit, and the form in which he put your glory to me —because we talked of you ever so pleasantly—was that, by his appreciation, you know your way about the place better than all the rest of the knowing put together."
Horton smiled, smoked, kept his hands in his pockets. "Dear deep old Davey!"
"Yes," said Gray consistently, "isn't he a wise old specimen? It's rather horrid for me having thus to mention, as if you had applied to me for a place, that I've picked up a good 'character' of you, but since you insist on it he assured me that I couldn't possibly have a better friend."
"Well, he's a most unscrupulous old person and ought really to be ashamed. What it comes to," Haughty added, "is that though I've repeatedly stayed with them they've to the best of his belief never missed one of the spoons. The fact is that even if they had poor Davey wouldn't know it."
"He doesn't take care of the spoons?" Gray asked in a tone that made his friend at once swing round and away. He appeared to note an unexpectedness in this, yet, "out" as he was for unexpectedness, it could grow, on the whole, clearly, but to the raising of his spirits. "Well, I shall take care of my loose valuables and, unwarned by the Bradhams and likely to have such things to all appearance in greater number than ever before, what can I do but persist in my notion of asking you to keep with me, at your convenience, some proper count of them?" After which as Horton's movement had carried him quite to the far end of the room, where the force of it even detained him a little, Gray had him again well in view for his return, and was prompted thereby to a larger form of pressure. "How can you pretend to palm off on me that women mustn't in prodigious numbers 'trust' you?"
Haughty made of his shoulders the most prodigious hunch. "What importance, under the sun, has the trust of women—in numbers however prodigious? It's never what's best in a man they trust—it's exactly what's worst, what's most irrelevant to anything or to any class but themselves. Their kind of confidence," he further elucidated, "is concerned only with the effect of their own operations or with those to which they are subject; it has no light either for a man's other friends or for his enemies: it proves nothing about him but in that particular and wholly detached relation. So neither hate me nor like me, please, for anything any woman may tell you."
Horton's hand had on this renewed and emphasised its proposal of good-night; to which his host acceded with the remark: "What superfluous precautions you take!"
"How can you call them superfluous," he asked in answer to this, "when you've been taking them at such a rate yourself?—in the interest, I mean, of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on your feet?"
"It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about life—which is what you've just been talking of. It has only been to show you that I'm silly about affairs," Gray said as they went at last through the big bedimmed hall to the house doors, which stood open to the warm summer night under the protection of the sufficient outward reaches.
"Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at the top of the steps, sought to know.
"You'll make me feel, no doubt, how much they are—which would be very good for me. Only life isn't affairs—that's my subtle distinction," Gray went on.
"I'm not sure, I'm not sure!" said Horton while he looked at the stars.
"Oh rot—I am!" Gray happily declared; to which he the next moment added: "What it makes you contend for, you see, is the fact of my silliness."
"Well, what is that but the most splendid fact about you, you jolly old sage?" and his visitor, getting off, fairly sprang into the shade of the shrubberies.