Rosanna found him again after luncheon shaking his little foot from the depths of a piazza chair, but now on their own scene and at a point where this particular feature of it, the cool spreading verandah, commanded the low green cliff and a part of the immediate approach to the house from the seaward side. She left him to the only range of thought of which he was at present capable—she was so perfectly able to follow it; and it had become for that matter an old story that as he never opened a book, nor sought a chance for talk, nor took a step of exercise, nor gave in any manner a sign of an unsatisfied want, the extent of his vacancy, a detachment in which there just breathed a hint of the dryly invidious, might thus remain unbroken for hours. She knew what he was waiting for, and that if she hadn't been there to see him he would take his way across to the other house again, where the plea of solicitude for his old friend's state put him at his ease and where, moreover, as she now felt, the possibility of a sight of Graham Fielder might reward him. It was disagreeable to her that he should have such a sight while she denied it to her own eyes; but the sense of their common want of application for their faculties was a thing that repeatedly checked in her the expression of judgments. Their idleness was as mean and bare on her own side, she too much felt, as on his; and heaven knew that if he could sit with screwed-up eyes for hours the case was as flagrant in her aimless driftings, her incurable restless revolutions, as a pretence of "interests" could consort with.
She revolved and drifted then, out of his sight and in another quarter of the place, till four o'clock had passed; when on returning to him she found his chair empty and was sure of what had become of him. There was nothing else in fact for his Sunday, as he on that day denied himself the resource of driving, or rather of being driven, from which the claim of the mechanical car had not, in the Newport connection, won him, and which, deep in his barouche, behind his own admirable horses, could maintain him in meditation for meditation's sake quite as well as a poised rocking-chair. Left thus to herself, though conscious she well might have visitors, she circled slowly and repeatedly round the gallery, only pausing at last on sight of a gentleman who had come into view by a path from the cliff. He presented himself in a minute as Davey Bradham, and on drawing nearer called across to her without other greeting: "Won't you walk back with me to tea? Gussy has sent me to bring you."
"Why yes, of course I will—that's nice of Gussy," she replied; adding moreover that she wanted a walk, and feeling in the prospect, though she didn't express this, a relief to her tension and a sanction for what she called to herself her tact. She might without the diversion not quite have trusted herself not to emulate, and even with the last crudity, her father's proceeding; which she knew she should afterwards be ashamed of. "Anyone that comes here," she said, "must come on to you—they'll know;" and when Davey had replied that there wasn't the least chance of anyone's not coming on she moved with him down the path, at the end of which they entered upon the charming cliff walk, a vast carpet of undivided lawns, kept in wondrous condition, with a meandering right-of-way for a seaward fringe and bristling wide-winged villas that spoke of a seated colony; many of these huge presences reducing to marginal meanness their strip of the carpet.
Davey was, like herself, richly and healthily replete, though with less of his substance in stature; a frankly fat gentleman, blooming still at eight-and-forty, with a large smooth shining face, void of a sign of moustache or whisker and crowned with dense dark hair cropped close to his head after the fashion of a French schoolboy or the inmate of a jail. But for his half-a-dozen fixed wrinkles, as marked as the great rivers of a continent on a map, and his thick and arched and active eyebrows, which left almost nothing over for his forehead, he would have scarce exhibited features—in spite of the absence of which, however, he could look in alternation the most portentous things and the most ridiculous. He would hang up a meaning in his large empty face as if he had swung an awful example on a gibbet, or would let loose there a great grin that you somehow couldn't catch in the fact but that pervaded his expanses of cheek as poured wine pervades water. He differed certainly from Rosanna in that he enjoyed, visibly, all he carnally possessed—whereas you could see in a moment that she, poor young woman, would have been content with, would have been glad of, a scantier allowance. "You'll find Cissy Foy, to begin with," he said as they went; "she arrived last night and told me to tell you she'd have walked over with me but that Gussy wants her for something. However, as you know, Gussy always wants her for something—she wants everyone for something so much more than something for everyone—and there are none of us that are not worked hard, even though we mayn't bloom on it like Cissy, who, by the way, is looking a perfect vision."
"Awfully lovely?"—Rosanna clearly saw as she asked.
"Prettier than at any time yet, and wanting tremendously to hear from you, you know, about your protégé—what's the fellow's name? Graham Fielder?—whose arrival we're all agog about."
Rosanna pulled up in the path; she somehow at once felt her possession of this interest clouded—shared as yet as it had been only with her father, whose share she could control. It then and there came to her in one of the waves of disproportionate despair in which she felt half the impressions of life break, that she wasn't going to be able to control at all the great participations. She had a moment of reaction against what she had done; she liked Gray to be called her protégé—forced upon her as endless numbers of such were, he would be the only one in the whole collection who hadn't himself pushed at her; but with the big bright picture of the villas, the palaces, the lawns and the luxuries in her eyes, and with something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff, she felt that, without her having thought of it enough in advance, she had handed him over to complications and relations. These things shimmered in the silver air of the wondrous perspective ahead, the region off there that awaited her present approach and where Gussy hovered like a bustling goddess in the enveloping cloud of her court. The man beside her was the massive Mercury of this urgent Juno; but—without mythological comparisons, which we make for her under no hint that she could herself have dreamed of one—she found herself glad just then that she liked Davey Bradham, and much less sorry than usual that she didn't respect him. An extraordinary thing happened, and all in the instant before she spoke again. It was very strange, and it made him look at her as if he wondered that his words should have had so great an effect as even her still face showed. There was absolutely no one, roundabout and far and wide, whom she positively wanted Graham to know; no not one creature of them all—"all" figuring for her, while she stood, the great collection at the Bradhams'. She hadn't thought of this before in the least as it came to her now; yet no more had she time to be sure that even with the sharper consciousness she would, as her father was apt to say, have acted different. So much was true, yet while she still a moment longer hung fire Davey rounded himself there like something she could comparatively rest on. "How in the world," she put to him then, "do you know anything away off there—? He has come to his uncle, but so quietly that I haven't yet seen him."
"Why, my dear thing, is it new to you that we're up and doing—bright and lively? We're the most intelligent community on all this great coast, and when precious knowledge is in the air we're not to be kept from it. We knew at breakfast that the New York boat had brought him, and Gussy of course wants him up to dinner tonight. Only Cissy claims, you see, that she has rights in him first—rights beyond Gussy's, I mean," Davey went on; "I don't know that she claims them beyond yours."
She looked abroad again, his companion, to earth and sea and sky; she wondered and felt threatened, yet knowing herself at the same time a long way off from the point at which menace roused her to passion. She had always to suffer so much before that, and was for the present in the phase of feeling but weak and a little sick. But there was always Davey. She started their walk again before saying more, while he himself said things that she didn't heed. "I can't for the life of me imagine," she nevertheless at last declared, "what Cissy has to do with him. When and where has she ever seen him?"
Davey did as always his best to oblige. "Somewhere abroad, some time back, when she was with her mother at some baths or some cure-place. Though when I think of it," he added, "it wasn't with the man himself—it was with some relation: hasn't he an uncle, or perhaps a stepfather? Cissy seems to know all about him, and he takes a great interest in her."