[1]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."
IV
Horton Vint, on being admitted that evening at the late Mr. Betterman's, walked about the room to which he had been directed and awaited there the friend of his younger time very much as we have seen that friend himself wait under stress of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of a crisis might have been almost equally sharp; he was alone for some minutes during which he shifted his place and circled, indulged in wide vague movements and vacuous stares at incongruous objects—the place being at once so spacious and so thickly provided—quite after the fashion in which Gray Fielder's nerves and imagination had on the same general scene sought and found relief at the hour of the finest suspense up to that moment possessing him. Haughty too, it would thus have appeared for the furtherance of our interest, had imagination and nerves—had in his way as much to reflect upon as we have allowed ourselves to impute to the dying Mr. Betterman's nephew. No one was dying now, all that was ended, or would be after the funeral, and the nephew himself was surely to be supposed alive, in face of great sequels, including preparations for those obsequies, with an intensity beyond all former experience. This in fact Horton had all the air of recognising under proof as soon as Gray advanced upon him with both hands out; he couldn't not have taken in the highly quickened state of the young black-clad figure so presented, even though soon and unmistakably invited to note that his own visit and his own presence had much to do with the quickening. Gray was in complete mourning, which had the effect of making his face show pale, as compared with old aspects of it remembered by his friend—who was, it may be mentioned, afterwards to describe him to Cissy Foy as looking, in the conditions, these including the air of the big bedimmed palace room, for all the world like a sort of "happy Hamlet." For so happy indeed our young man at once proclaimed himself at sight of his visitor, for so much the most interesting thing that had befallen or been offered him within the week did he take, by his immediate testimony, his reunion with this character and every element of the latter's aspect and tone, that the pitch of his acclamation clearly had, with no small delay, to drop a little under some unavoidable reminder that they met almost in the nearest presence of death. Was the reminder Horton's own, some pull, for decorum, of a longer face, some expression of his having feared to act in undue haste on the message brought him by Davey?—which might have been, we may say, in view of the appearance after a little that it was Horton rather than Gray who began to suggest a shyness, momentary, without doubt, and determined by the very plenitude of his friend's welcome, yet so far incongruous as that it was not his adoption of a manner and betrayal of a cheer that ran the risk of seeming a trifle gross, but quite these indications on the part of the fortunate heir of the old person awaiting interment somewhere above. He could only have seen with the lapse of the moments that Gray was going to be simple—admirably, splendidly simple, one would probably have pronounced it, in estimating and comparing the various possible dangers; but the simplicity of subjects tremendously educated, tremendously "cultivated" and cosmopolitised, as Horton would have called it, especially when such persons were naturally rather extra-refined and ultra-perceptive, was a different affair from the crude candour of the common sort; the consequence of which apprehensions and reflections must have been, in fine, that he presently recognised in the product of "exceptional advantages" now already more and more revealed to him such a pliability of accent as would easily keep judgment, or at least observation, suspended. Gray wasn't going to be at a loss for any shade of decency that didn't depend, to its inconvenience, on some uncertainty about a guest's prejudice; so that once the air was cleared of awkwardness by that perception, exactly, in Horton's ready mind that he and his traditions, his susceptibilities, in fact (of all the queer things!) his own very simplicities and, practically, stupidities were being superfluously allowed for and deferred to, and that this, only this, was the matter, he should have been able to surrender without a reserve to the proposed measure of their common rejoicing. Beautiful might it have been to him to find his friend so considerately glad of him that the spirit of it could consort to the last point with any, with every, other felt weight in the consciousness so attested; in accordance with which we may remark that continued embarrassment for our gallant caller would have implied on his own side, or in other words deep within his own spirit, some obscure source of confusion.
What distinguishably happened was thus that he first took Graham for exuberant and then for repentant, with the reflection accompanying this that he mustn't, to increase of subsequent shame, have been too open an accomplice in mere jubilation. Then the simple sense of his restored comrade's holding at his disposal a general confidence in which they might absolutely breathe together would have superseded everything else hadn't his individual self-consciousness been perhaps a trifle worried by the very pitch of so much openness. Open, not less generously so, was what he could himself have but wanted to be—in proof of which we may conceive him insist to the happy utmost, for promotion of his comfort, on those sides of their relation the working of which would cast no shadow. They had within five minutes got over much ground—all of which, however, must be said to have represented, and only in part, the extent of Gray's requisition of what he called just elementary human help. He was in a situation at which, as he assured his friend, he had found himself able, those several days, but blankly and inanely to stare. He didn't suppose it had been his uncle's definite design to make an idiot of him, but that seemed to threaten as the practical effect of the dear man's extraordinary course. "You see," he explained, bringing it almost pitifully out, "he appears to have left me a most monstrous fortune. I mean"—for under his appeal Haughty had still waited a little—"a really tremendous lot of money."
The effect of the tone of it was to determine in Haughty a peal of laughter quickly repressed—or reduced at least to the intention of decent cheer. "He 'appears,' my dear man? Do you mean there's an ambiguity about his will?"
Gray justified his claim of vagueness by having, with his animated eyes on his visitor's, to take an instant or two to grasp so technical an expression. "No—not an ambiguity. Mr. Crick tells me that he has never in all his experience seen such an amount of property disposed of in terms so few and simple and clear. It would seem a kind of masterpiece of a will."
"Then what's the matter with it?" Horton smiled. "Or at least what's the matter with you?—who are so remarkably intelligent and clever?"
"Oh no, I'm not the least little bit clever!" Gray in his earnestness quite excitedly protested. "I haven't a single ray of the intelligence that among you all here clearly passes for rudimentary. But the luxury of you, Haughty," he broke out on a still higher note, "the luxury, the pure luxury of you!"
Something of beauty in the very tone of which, some confounding force in the very clearness, might it have been that made Horton himself gape for a moment even as Gray had just described his own wit as gaping. They had first sat down, for hospitality offered and accepted—though with no production of the smokable or the drinkable to profane the general reference; but the agitation of all that was latent in this itself had presently broken through, and by the end of a few moments we might perhaps scarce have been able to say whether the host had more set the guest or the guest more the host in motion. Horton Vint had everywhere so the air of a prime social element that it took in any case, and above all in any case of the spacious provision or the sumptuous setting, a good deal of practically combative proof to reduce the implications of his presence to the minor right. He might inveterately have been master or, in quantitative terms, owner—so could he have been taken for the most part as offering you the enjoyment of anything fine that surrounded him: this in proportion to the scale of such matters and to any glimpse of that sense of them in you which was what came nearest to putting you on his level. All of which sprang doubtless but from the fact that his relation to things of expensive interest was so much at the mercy of his appearance; representing as it might be said to do a contradiction of the law under which it is mostly to be observed, in our modernest conditions, that the figure least congruous with scenic splendour is the figure awaiting the reference. More references than may here be detailed, at any rate, would Horton have seemed ready to gather up during the turns he had resumed his indulgence in after the original arrest and the measurements of the whole place practically determined for him by Gray's own so suggestive revolutions. It was positively now as if these last had all met, in their imperfect expression, what that young man's emotion was in the act of more sharply attaining to—the plain conveyance that if Horton had in his friendliness, not to say his fidelity, presumed to care to know, this disposition was as naught beside the knowledge apparently about to drench him. They were there, the companions, in their second brief arrest, with everything good in the world that he might have conceived or coveted just taking for him the radiant form of precious knowledges that he must be so obliging as to submit to. Let it be fairly inspiring to us to imagine the acuteness of his perception during these minutes of the possibilities of good involved; the refinement of pleasure in his seeing how the advantage thrust upon him would wear the dignity and grace of his consenting unselfishly to learn—inasmuch as, quite evidently, the more he learnt, and though it should be ostensibly and exclusively about Mr. Betterman's heir, the more vividly it all would stare at him as a marked course of his own. Wonderful thus the little space of his feeling the great wave set in motion by that quiet worthy break upon him out of Gray's face, Gray's voice, Gray's contact of hands laid all appealingly and affirmingly on his shoulders, and then as it retreated, washing him warmly down, expose to him, off in the intenser light and the uncovered prospect, something like his entire personal future. Something extraordinarily like, yes, could he but keep steady to recognise it through a deepening consciousness, at the same time, of how he was more than matching the growth of his friend's need of him by growing there at once, and to rankness, under the friend's nose, all the values to which this need supplied a soil.
"Well, I won't pretend I'm not glad you don't adopt me as pure ornament—glad you see, I mean, a few connections in which one may perhaps be able, as well as certainly desirous, to be of service to you. Only one should honestly tell you," Horton went on, "that people wanting to help you will spring up round you like mushrooms, and that you'll be able to pick and choose as even a king on his throne can't. Therefore, my boy," Haughty said, "don't exaggerate my modest worth."