The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1

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Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2
Author: Henry James
Release Date: July 19, 2009 [EBook #29452]
Language: English
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THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
BY HENRY JAMES
VOLUME I
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1902
Copyright, 1902, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
----
Published, August, 1902
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
BOOK FIRST
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
I
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in
the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation
that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place,
moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed
cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery
and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and
at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in
coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness,
to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she
had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small
balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar
little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar
little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow
black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low
even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such
privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room--the
hundred like it or worse--in the street. Each time she turned in again,
each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a
deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the
failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was
really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of
individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the
street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece
and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither
shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet--as
including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared
herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be
sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn't be
sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and
chalk-marked by fate like a "lot" at a common auction, if not in these
merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings?
Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of her two lost
brothers--the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine
florid, voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no
words, no notes at all. Why should a set of people have been put in
motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a
profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch
themselves in the wayside dust without a reason? The answer to these
questions was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves
bristled there, and the girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the
chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape
from them. Was it not in fact the partial escape from this "worst" in
which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable
to see? She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be
staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black,
closely-feathered hat; retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of her
dusky hair; kept her eyes, aslant, no less on her beautiful averted
than on her beautiful presented oval. She was dressed altogether in
black, which gave an even tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made
her hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes
showed as blue; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She
was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids;
a circumstance moreover playing its part at almost any time in the
impression she produced. The impression was one that remained, but as
regards the sources of it no sum in addition would have made up the
total. She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence
without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow
always in the line of the eye--she counted singularly for its pleasure.
More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than other women, or
less dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably could
not have given the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
which her friends were conscious--those friends whose general
explanation was to say that she was clever, whether or no it were taken
by the world as the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
more things than her fine face in the dull glass of her father's
lodgings, she might have seen that, after all, she was not herself a
fact in the collapse. She didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make
for misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-marked for the
auction. She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was
the last word, would end with a sort of meaning. There was a minute
during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite visibly lost
herself in the thought of the way she might still pull things round had
she only been a man. It was the name, above all, she would take in
hand--the precious name she so liked and that, in spite of the harm her
wretched father had done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound. But what could a
penniless girl do with it but let it go?
When her father at last appeared she became, as usual, instantly aware
of the futility of any effort to hold him to anything. He had written
her that he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he must see
her without delay; and if this had been, as was probable, the sketch of
a design, he was indifferent even to the moderate finish required for
deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities that he called
reasons, to see her, just as she herself had sharpened for a talk; but
she now again felt, in the inevitability of the freedom he used with
her, all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that he couldn't
touch you ever so lightly without setting up. No relation with him
could be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
and this, in the strangest way in the world, not because he desired it
to be--feeling often, as he surely must, the profit for him of its not
being--but because there was never a mistake for you that he could
leave unmade or a conviction of his impossibility in you that he could
approach you without strengthening. He might have awaited her on the
sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed in bed and received her
in that situation. She was glad to be spared the sight of such
_penetralia,_ but it would have reminded her a little less that there
was no truth in him. This was the weariness of every fresh meeting; he
dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the
game of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him. The
inconvenience--as always happens in such cases--was not that you minded
what was false, but that you missed what was true. He might be ill, and
it might suit you to know it, but no contact with him, for this, could
ever be straight enough. Just so he even might die, but Kate fairly
wondered on what evidence of his own she would some day have to believe
it.
He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be
above the one they were in: he had already been out of the house,
though he would either, should she challenge him, deny it or present it
as a proof of his extremity. She had, however, by this time, quite
ceased to challenge him; not only, face to face with him, vain
irritation dropped, but he breathed upon the tragic consciousness in
such a way that after a moment nothing of it was left. The difficulty
was not less that he breathed in the same way upon the comic: she
almost believed that with this latter she might still have found a
foothold for clinging to him. He had ceased to be amusing--he was
really too inhuman. His perfect look, which had floated him so long,
was practically perfect still; but one had long since for every
occasion taken it for granted. Nothing could have better shown than the
actual how right one had been. He looked exactly as much as usual--all
pink and silver as to skin and hair, all straitness and starch as to
figure and dress--the man in the world least connected with anything
unpleasant. He was so particularly the English gentleman and the
fortunate, settled, normal person. Seen at a foreign _table d'hôte,_
he suggested but one thing: "In what perfection England produces them!"
He had kind, safe eyes, and a voice which, for all its clean fulness,
told, in a manner, the happy history of its having never had once to
raise itself. Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to
walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to
choose the pace. Those who knew him a little said, "How he does
dress!"--those who knew him better said, "How _does_ he?" The one stray
gleam of comedy just now in his daughter's eyes was the funny feeling
he momentarily made her have of being herself "looked up" by him in
sordid lodgings. For a minute after he came in it was as if the place
were her own and he the visitor with susceptibilities. He gave you
funny feelings, he had indescribable arts, that quite turned the
tables: that had been always how he came to see her mother so long as
her mother would see him. He came from places they had often not known
about, but he patronised Lexham Gardens. Kate's only actual expression
of impatience, however, was "I'm glad you're so much better!"
"I'm not so much better, my dear--I'm exceedingly unwell; the proof of
which is, precisely, that I've been out to the chemist's--that beastly
fellow at the corner." So Mr. Croy showed he could qualify the humble
hand that assuaged him. "I'm taking something he has made up for me.
It's just why I've sent for you--that you may see me as I really am."
"Oh papa, it's long since I've ceased to see you otherwise than as you
really are! I think we've all arrived by this time at the right word
for that: 'You're beautiful--_n'en parlons plus.'_ You're as beautiful
as ever--you look lovely." He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as
she knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating,
sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he
continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she
virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least
indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass
he had reached, could give him pleasure, and she had come back, on
these occasions, to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome,
that she was, in her way, a sensible value. It was at least as marked,
nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as
they _were_ similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome,
but he certainly didn't care. The hitch here, of course, was that, with
whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four
bouncing children, was not a sensible value. She asked him, the next
thing, how long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how
little it mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably
have in common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer,
truthful or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her
own side to say to him. This was really what had made her wait--what
superseded the small remainder of her resentment at his constant
practical impertinence; the result of all of which was that, within a
minute, she had brought it out. "Yes--even now I'm willing to go with
you. I don't know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if
you hadn't written you would within a day or two have heard from me.
Things have happened, and I've only waited, for seeing you, till I
should be quite sure. I _am_ quite sure. I'll go with you."
It produced an effect. "Go with me where?"
"Anywhere. I'll stay with you. Even here." She had taken off her gloves
and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.
Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way--hovered there as if, in
consequence of her words, looking for a pretext to back out easily: on
which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called,
what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him,
still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with
some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to
have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no
state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been
to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means
been to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a
straw for his embarrassment--feeling how little, on her own part, she
was moved by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many
attitudes that she could now deprive him quite without compunction of
the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone
as he said: "Oh my child, I can never consent to that!"
"What then are you going to do?"
"I'm turning it over," said Lionel Croy. "You may imagine if I'm not
thinking."
"Haven't you thought then," his daughter asked, "of what I speak of? I
mean of my being ready."
Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little
apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising
on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. "No. I
haven't. I couldn't. I wouldn't." It was so respectable, a show that
she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair
at home, how little his appearance ever by any chance told about him.
His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother's crosses;
inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that
was horrid--thank God they didn't really know!--that he had done. He
had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a
terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously
on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept
directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no
light thing for her to leave uncompanioned a parent with such a face
and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed
of, it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite
familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he
recognised his younger daughter's happy aspect as a sensible value, he
had from the first still more exactly appraised his own. The great
wonder was not that in spite of everything his own had helped him; the
great wonder was that it hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to
its old, eternal, recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop
into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.
She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you
really ask me to believe you've been making up your mind to that?"
She had to consider her own line. "I don't think I care, papa, what you
believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything;
hardly more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever think of you
as yourself believed. I don't know you, father, you see."
"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"
"Oh dear, no; not at all. That's no part of the question. If I haven't
understood you by this time, I never shall, and it doesn't matter. It
has seemed to me that you may be lived with, but not that you may be
understood. Of course I've not the least idea how you get on."
"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
His daughter took in the place again, and it might well have seemed odd
that in so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What
showed was the ugliness--so positive and palpable that it was somehow
sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all,
a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly put a point into her answer.
"Oh, I beg your pardon. You flourish."
"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly inquired, "that I've
not made away with myself?"
She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real
things. "You know how all our anxieties, under mamma's will, have come
out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don't know how we
lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for
me, but I give up a hundred to Marian."
"Oh, you weak thing!" her father kindly sighed.
"For you and me together," she went on, "the other hundred would do
something."
"And what would do the rest?"
"Can you yourself do nothing?" He gave her a look; then, slipping his
hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the
window she had left open. She said nothing more--she had placed him
there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by
the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild
March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room,
and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved
nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. "I don't see what has
so suddenly wound you up."
"I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell
you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a
condition. She wants to keep me."
"And what in the world else _could_ she possibly want?"
"Oh, I don't know--many things. I'm not so precious a capture," the
girl a little dryly explained. "No one has ever wanted to keep me
before."
Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more
surprised than interested. "You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if
that were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if indeed such an
admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high
spirit and general form.
"Not from rich relations. She's extremely kind to me, but it's time,
she says, that we should understand each other."
Mr. Croy fully assented. "Of course it is--high time; and I can quite
imagine what she means by it."
"Are you very sure?"
"Oh, perfectly. She means that she'll 'do' for you handsomely if you'll
break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her
condition's of course that."
"Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound me up. Here I am."
He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after
which, within a few seconds, he had, quite congruously, turned the
situation about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to justify
your throwing yourself upon me?"
She waited a little, but when she spoke it was clear. "Yes."
"Well then, you're a bigger fool than I should have ventured to suppose
you."
"Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom."
"Ah, how you've all always hated me!" he murmured with a pensive gaze
again at the window.
"No one could be less of a mere cherished memory," she declared as if
she had not heard him. "You're an actual person, if there ever was one.
We agreed just now that you're beautiful. You strike me, you know,
as--in your own way--much more firm on your feet than I am. Don't put
it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we are, after all,
parent and child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea
has been that it should have some effect for each of us. I don't at
all, as I told you just now," she pursued, "make out your life; but
whatever it is I hereby offer you to accept it. And, on my side, I'll
do everything I can for you."
"I see," said Lionel Croy. Then, with the sound of extreme relevance,
"And what _can_ you?" She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her
silence. "You can describe yourself--_to_ yourself--as, in a fine
flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to
know, would your fine flight do me?" As she still said nothing he
developed a little. "We're not possessed of so much, at this charming
pass, please to remember, as that we can afford not to take hold of any
perch held out to us. I like the way you talk, my dear, about 'giving
up!' One doesn't give up the use of a spoon because one's reduced to
living on broth. And your spoon, that is your aunt, please consider, is
partly mine as well." She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her
effort, in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and
moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before.
She retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her
father's lips another remark in which impatience, however, had already
been replaced by a funny flare of appreciation. "Oh, you're all right!
Don't muddle yourself up with _me!"_
His daughter turned round to him. "The condition Aunt Maud makes is
that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor
speak, nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor
hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you
shall simply cease to exist for me."
He had always seemed--it was one of the marks of what they called the
"unspeakable" in him--to walk a little more on his toes, as if for
jauntiness, in the presence of offence. Nothing, however, was more
wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it
might be what he sometimes wouldn't. He walked at any rate on his toes
now. "A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear--I don't
hesitate to say it!" Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent
at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to
go on: "That's her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what
does she engage to do? You must work it, you know."
"You mean make her feel," Kate asked after a moment, "how much I'm
attached to you?"
"Well, what a cruel, invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I'm a poor
old dad to make a stand about giving up--I quite agree. But I'm not,
after all, quite the old dad not to get something _for_ giving up."
"Oh, I think her idea," said Kate almost gaily now, "is that I shall
get a great deal."
He met her with his inimitable amenity. "But does she give you the
items?"
The girl went through the show. "More or less, I think. But many of
them are things I dare say I may take for granted--things women can do
for each other and that you wouldn't understand."
"There's nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn't!
But what I want to do, you see," he went on, "is to put it to your
conscience that you've an admirable opportunity; and that it's moreover
one for which, after all, damn you, you've really to thank _me."_
"I confess I don't see," Kate observed, "what my 'conscience' has to do
with it."
"Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you
know what you're a proof of, all you hard, hollow people together?" He
put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. "Of the
deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in
our vulgarised, brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a
day when a man like me--by which I mean a parent like me--would have
been for a daughter like you a quite distinct value; what's called in
the business world, I believe, an 'asset.'" He continued sociably to
make it out. "I'm not talking only of what you might, with the right
feeling do _for_ me, but of what you might--it's what I call your
opportunity--do _with_ me. Unless indeed," he the next moment
imperturbably threw off, "they come a good deal to the same thing. Your
duty as well as your chance, if you're capable of seeing it, is to use
me. Show family feeling by seeing what I'm good for. If you had it as
_I_ have it you'd see I'm still good--well, for a lot of things.
There's in fact, my dear," Mr. Croy wound up, "a coach-and-four to be
got out of me." His drop, or rather his climax, failed a little of
effect, indeed, through an undue precipitation of memory. Something his
daughter had said came back to him. "You've settled to give away half
your little inheritance?"
Her hesitation broke into laughter. "No--I haven't 'settled' anything."
"But you mean, practically, to let Marian collar it?" They stood there
face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could
only go on. "You've a view of three hundred a year for her in addition
to what her husband left her with? Is _that,"_ the remote progenitor of
such wantonness audibly wondered, "your morality?"
Kate found her answer without trouble. "Is it your idea that I should
give you everything?"
The "everything" clearly struck him--to the point even of determining
the tone of his reply. "Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse
what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I
think I've sufficiently expressed it, and it's at any rate to take or
to leave. It's the only one, I may nevertheless add; it's the basket
with all my eggs. It's my conception, in short, of your duty."
The girl's tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small
grotesque visibility. "You're wonderful on such subjects! I think I
should leave you in no doubt," she pursued, "that if I were to sign my
aunt's agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter."
"Rather, my own love! It's just your honour that I appeal to. The only
way to play the game _is_ to play it. There's no limit to what your
aunt can do for you."
"Do you mean in the way of marrying me?"
"What else should I mean? Marry properly----"
"And then?" Kate asked as he hung fire.
"And then--well, I _will_ talk with you. I'll resume relations."
She looked about her and picked up her parasol. "Because you're not so
afraid of any one else in the world as you are of _her?_ My husband, if
I should marry, would be, at the worst, less of a terror? If that's
what you mean, there may be something in it. But doesn't it depend a
little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However," Kate
added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, "I don't
suppose your idea of him is _quite_ that he should persuade you to live
with us."
"Dear no--not a bit." He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the
hope she imputed; met both imputations, in fact, with a sort of
intellectual relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your aunt's
hands. I take her view, with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence
any man she selects. If he's good enough for _her_--elephantine snob as
she is--he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that
she'll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My
only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so beastly
poor, my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if I can help it."
"Well then, good-bye, papa," the girl said after a reflection on this
that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate.
"Of course you understand that it may be for long."
Her companion, hereupon, had one of his finest inspirations. "Why not,
frankly, for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don't do
things, that I've never done them, by halves--that if I offer you to
efface myself, it's for the final, fatal sponge that I ask, well
saturated and well applied."
She turned her handsome, quiet face upon him at such length that it
might well have been for the last time. "I don't know what you're like."
"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in trying, in vain, to
discover. Like nothing--more's the pity. If there had been many of us,
and we could have found each other out, there's no knowing what we
mightn't have done. But it doesn't matter now. Good-bye, love." He
looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.
She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. "I wish there
were some one here who might serve--for any contingency--as a witness
that I _have_ put it to you that I'm ready to come."
"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call the landlady?"
"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I came really hoping you
might have found some way. I'm very sorry, at all events, to leave you
unwell." He turned away from her, on this, and, as he had done before,
took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. "Let me put
it--unfortunately without a witness," she added after a moment, "that
there's only one word you really need speak."
When he took this up it was still with his back to her. "If I don't
strike you as having already spoken it, our time has been singularly
wasted."
"I'll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants
of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I _will_
choose. I'll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune."
He at last brought himself round. "Do you know, dear, you make me sick?
I've tried to be clear, and it isn't fair."
But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. "Father!"
"I don't quite see what's the matter with you," he said, "and if you
can't pull yourself together I'll--upon my honour--take you in hand.
Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate."
She was really absent, distant. "Father."
It was too much, and he met it sharply. "Well?"
"Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there's a good you can
do me and a help you can render."
"Isn't it then exactly what I've been trying to make you feel?"
"Yes," she answered patiently, "but so in the wrong way. I'm perfectly
honest in what I say, and I know what I'm talking about. It isn't that
I'll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid
or support from you. The case is changed--that's what has happened; my
difficulty's a new one. But even now it's not a question of anything I
should ask you in a way to 'do.' It's simply a question of your not
turning me away--taking yourself out of my life. It's simply a question
of your saying: 'Yes then, since you will, we'll stand together. We
won't worry in advance about how or where; we'll have a faith and find
a way.' That's all--_that_ would be the good you'd do me. I should
_have_ you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?"
If he didn't it was not for want of looking at her hard. "The matter
with you is that you're in love, and that your aunt knows and--for
reasons, I'm sure, perfect--hates and opposes it. Well she may! It's a
matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please." Though he
spoke not in anger--rather in infinite sadness--he fairly turned her
out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he
felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep
disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. "I'm sorry for her,
deluded woman, if she builds on you."
Kate stood a moment in the draught. "She's not the person _I_ pity
most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she's not the person
who's most so. I mean," she explained, "if it's a question of what you
call building on me."
He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of
it. "You're deceiving _two_ persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody
else?"
She shook her head with detachment. "I've no intention of that sort
with respect to any one now--to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail
me"--she seemed to make it out for herself--"that has the merit at
least that it simplifies. I shall go my way--as I see my way."
"Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a
penny?"
"You ask a great deal of satisfaction," she observed, "for the little
you give."
It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to
be hustled; and, though he glared at her a little, this had long been
the practical limit to his general power of objection. "If you're base
enough to incur your aunt's disgust, you're base enough for my
argument. What, if you're not thinking of an utterly improper person,
do your speeches to me signify? Who _is_ the beggarly sneak?" he
demanded as her response failed. Her response, when it came, was cold
but distinct. "He has every disposition to make the best of you. He
only wants in fact to be kind to you."
"Then he _must_ be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to
improve him for me," her father pursued, "that he's also destitute and
impossible? There are asses and asses, even--the right and the
wrong--and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong.
Your aunt knows _them,_ by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell
you, her judgment for them; and you may take it from me once for all
that I won't hear of any one of whom _she_ won't." Which led up to his
last word. "If you should really defy us both----!"
"Well, papa?"
"Well, my sweet child, I think that--reduced to insignificance as you
may fondly believe me--I should still not be quite without some way of
making you regret it."
She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might
measure this danger. "If I shouldn't do it, you know, it wouldn't be
because I'm afraid of you."
"Oh, if you don't do it," he retorted, "you may be as bold as you like!"
"Then you can do nothing at all for me?"
He showed her, this time unmistakably--it was before her there on the
landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the
strange smell that seemed to cling to them--how vain her appeal
remained. "I've never pretended to do more than my duty; I've given you
the best and the clearest advice." And then came up the spring that
moved him. "If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be
consoled." What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marian her
scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them.
She should have divided it with _him._
II
She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death--gone with an effort
the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them,
reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been
nothing else to do--not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid
bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and
the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money
on, since everything belonged to the "estate." How the estate would
turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it
had proved, in fact, since then a residuum a trifle less scant than,
with Marian, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the
beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of
Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that _she_
wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up--to abandon her
own interest, which she, no doubt, would already have done had not the
point been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's
intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was
that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all
declined. Yet at the winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have
said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first
time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other
people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to
them--it seemed really the way to live--the version that met their
convenience.
The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the
Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her,
through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague
young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else
in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,
by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight,
discouraging vistas, which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas
almost everything else in life was either, at the worst, round about
Cromwell Road, or, at the furthest, in the nearer parts of Kensington
Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only "real" aunt, not the wife of an
uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when the greater
trouble came, the person, of all persons, properly to make some sign;
in accord with which our young woman's feeling was founded on the
impression, quite cherished for years, that the signs made across the
interval just mentioned had never been really in the note of the
situation. The main office of this relative, for the young Croys--apart
from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness--had struck
them as being to form them to a conception of what they were not to
expect. When Kate came to think matters over with the aid of knowledge,
she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been different--she
had rather perceived by this time how many other things might have
been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously lived
under a liability to the chill breath of _ultima Thule_ they couldn't,
either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the event
appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she had
yet not disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate been
for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that she
sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them to
her house, and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the terms
that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a grievance.
This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged her
resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself, to
the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which
they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to
Aunt Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they
sufficed--thanks awfully--to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate
lived to discern, was that this was only because _she_ didn't suffice
to them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet
not, really, because it was excessive. It wounded them--there was the
rub!--because it fell short.
The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high
south window that hung over the Park--this number was so great (though
some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of
other matters, done up), that life at present turned to her view from
week to week more and more the face of a striking and distinguished
stranger. She had reached a great age--for it quite seemed to her that
at twenty-five it was late to reconsider; and her most general sense
was a shade of regret that she had not known earlier. The world was
different--whether for worse or for better--from her rudimentary
readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only
known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it. She made,
at all events, discoveries every day, some of which were about herself
and others about other persons. Two of these--one under each head--more
particularly engaged, in alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had
never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she
blushed to see, that if, in contrast with some of its old aspects, life
now affected her as a dress successfully "done up," this was exactly by
reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and
velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She
liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her--liked them
literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything; and
nothing could have been more uneasy than her suspicion of her
relative's view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious--she had
never done her relative justice. These larger conditions all tasted of
her, from morning till night; but she was a person in respect to whom
the growth of acquaintance could only--strange as it might seem--keep
your heart in your mouth.
The girl's second great discovery was that, so far from having been for
Mrs. Lowder a subject of superficial consideration, the blighted home
in Lexham Gardens had haunted her nights and her days. Kate had spent,
all winter, hours of observation that were not less pointed for being
spent alone; recent events, which her mourning explained, assured her a
measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her
neighbour's influence worked. Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet
a presence from which a sensitive niece could feel herself extremely
under pressure. She knew herself now, the sensitive niece, as having
been marked from far back. She knew more than she could have told you,
by the upstairs fire, in a whole dark December afternoon. She knew so
much that her knowledge was what fairly kept her there, making her at
times more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa that stood for
her in the firelight and the great grey map of Middlesex spread beneath
her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some of her
discoveries half-way, to have to face them or fly before them; whereas
they were at such a height only like the rumble of a far-off siege
heard in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked, in these weeks,
what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother,
the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the
confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial,
of her having to recognise that, should she behave, as she called it,
decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself
wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and
stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly
postponed was the question of a surrender--though she could not yet
have said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything--that was
at moments the way it presented itself--to Aunt Maud's looming
"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,
and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air
of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and
parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim
and the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly
present to Kate that she might be devoured, and she likened herself to
a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but
sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness.
The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office, her counting-house, her
battlefield, her especial scene, in fine, of action, situated on the
ground-floor, opening from the main hall and figuring rather to our
young woman on exit and entrance as a guard house or a toll-gate. The
lioness waited--the kid had at least that consciousness; was aware of
the neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose tender. She
would have been meanwhile a wonderful lioness for a show, an
extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles
and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair,
a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and
that--as if the skin were too tight--told especially at curves and
corners. Her niece had a quiet name for her--she kept it quiet;
thinking of her, with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she
talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place--Britannia
unmistakable, but with a pen in her ear, and felt she should not be
happy till she might on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply a
helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was not in truth, however,
that the forces with which, as Kate felt, she would have to deal were
those most suggested by an image simple and broad; she was learning,
after all, each day, to know her companion, and what she had already
most perceived was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies. There was
a whole side of Britannia, the side of her florid philistinism, her
plumes and her train, her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the
false gods of her taste and false notes of her talk, the sole
contemplation of which would be dangerously misleading. She was a
complex and subtle Britannia, as passionate as she was practical, with
a reticule for her prejudices as deep as that other pocket, the pocket
full of coins stamped in her image, that the world best knew her by.
She carried on, in short, behind her aggressive and defensive front,
operations determined by her wisdom. It was in fact, we have hinted, as
a besieger that our young lady, in the provisioned citadel, had for the
present most to think of her, and what made her formidable in this
character was that she was unscrupulous and immoral. So, at all events,
in silent sessions and a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently
pictured her: what this sufficiently represented being that her weight
was in the scale of certain dangers--those dangers that, by our
showing, made the younger woman linger and lurk above, while the elder,
below, both militant and diplomatic, covered as much of the ground as
possible. Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the dangers of
life and of London? Mrs. Lowder _was_ London, _was_ life--the roar of
the siege and the thick of the fray. There were some things, after all,
of which Britannia was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of nothing--not
even, it would appear, of arduous thought. These impressions, none the
less, Kate kept so much to herself that she scarce shared them with
poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her frequent visits to whom yet
continued to be to talk over everything. One of her reasons for holding
off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was that she might be the
more free to commit herself to this so much nearer and so much less
fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, directly, almost
nothing to do. The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile, was exactly
that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of casting down her
courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense of the part, not
always either uplifting or sweetening, that the bond of blood might
play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of
blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have
"come into" by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as
her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting, harrassing
father, her menacing, uncompromising aunt, her portionless little
nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety
superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself--but
more especially in respect to Marian--was that she saw what you might
be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity. She had taken, in
the old days, as she supposed, the measure of this liability; those
being the days when, as the second-born, she had thought no one in the
world so pretty as Marian, no one so charming, so clever, so assured,
in advance, of happiness and success. The view was different now, but
her attitude had been obliged, for many reasons, to show as the same.
The subject of this estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved, disappointed,
demoralised, querulous, she was all the more sharply and insistently
Kate's elder and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling about her was
that she would make her, Kate, do things; and always, in comfortless
Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she
couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself,
before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She
noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she
marvelled at the serenity--it was the poor woman's only one--of what
Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born,
her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed, in that
view, wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which
moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one
was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never
occur to _them_ that they were eating one up. They did that without
tasting.
There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she
further reasoned, as to be formed at once for being and for seeing. You
always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you
got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition. However, as
she never really let Marian see what she was, Marian might well not
have been aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own
vision, not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was
a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was
not herself. What she most kept was the particular sentiment with which
she watched her sister instinctively neglect nothing that would make
for her submission to their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps
marked most sharply how poor you might become when you minded so much
the absence of wealth. It was through Kate that Aunt Maud should be
worked, and nothing mattered less than what might become of Kate in the
process. Kate was to burn her ships, in short, so that Marian should
profit; and Marian's desire to profit was quite oblivious of a dignity
that had, after all, its reasons--if it had only cared for them--for
keeping itself a little stiff. Kate, to be properly stiff for both of
them, would therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer an
ideal of behaviour--than which nothing, ever, was more selfish--to the
possibility of stray crumbs for the four small creatures. The tale of
Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had
lost little of its point; the incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr.
Condrip, the parson of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile
which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on record to keep
criticism consistent. He had presented his profile on system, having,
goodness knew, nothing else to present--nothing at all to full-face the
world with, no imagination of the propriety of living and minding his
business. Criticism had remained on Aunt Maud's part consistent enough;
she was not a person to regard such proceedings as less of a mistake
for having acquired more of the privilege of pathos. She had not been
forgiving, and the only approach she made to overlooking them was by
overlooking--with the surviving delinquent--the solid little phalanx
that now represented them. Of the two sinister ceremonies that she
lumped together, the marriage and the interment, she had been present
at the former, just as she had sent Marian, before it, a liberal
cheque; but this had not been for her more than the shadow of an
admitted link with Mrs. Condrip's course. She disapproved of clamorous
children for whom there was no prospect; she disapproved of weeping
widows who couldn't make their errors good; and she had thus put within
Marian's reach one of the few luxuries left when so much else had gone,
an easy pretext for a constant grievance. Kate Croy remembered well
what their mother, in a different quarter, had made of it; and it was
Marian's marked failure to pluck the fruit of resentment that committed
them, as sisters, to an almost equal fellowship in abjection. If the
theory was that, yes, alas, one of the pair had ceased to be noticed,
but that the other was noticed enough to make up for it, who would fail
to see that Kate couldn't separate herself without a cruel pride? That
lesson became sharp for our young lady the day after her interview with
her father.
"I can't imagine," Marian on this occasion said to her, "how you can
think of anything else in the world but the horrid way we're situated."
"And, pray, how do you know," Kate inquired in reply, "anything about
my thoughts? It seems to me I give you sufficient proof of how much I
think of _you._ I don't, really, my dear, know what else you've to do
with!"
Marian's retort, on this, was a stroke as to which she had supplied
herself with several kinds of preparation, but there was, none the
less, something of an unexpected note in its promptitude. She had
foreseen her sister's general fear; but here, ominously, was the
special one. "Well, your own business is of course your own business,
and you may say there's no one less in a position than I to preach to
you. But, all the same, if you wash your hands of me for ever for it, I
won't, for this once, keep back that I don't consider you've a right,
as we all stand, to throw yourself away."
It was after the children's dinner, which was also their mother's, but
which their aunt mostly contrived to keep from ever becoming her own
luncheon; and the two young women were still in the presence of the
crumpled table-cloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the
lingering odour of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony, if she
might put up a window a little, and Mrs. Condrip had replied without it
that she might do as she liked. She often received such inquiries as if
they reflected in a manner on the pure essence of her little ones. The
four had retired, with much movement and noise, under imperfect control
of the small Irish governess whom their aunt had hunted out for them
and whose brooding resolve not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she
already more than suspected. Their mother had become for Kate--who took
it just for the effect of being their mother--quite a different thing
from the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow expansively
obscured that image. She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain,
prosaic result of him, as if she had somehow been pulled through him as
through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and
with nothing in her but what he accounted for. She had grown red and
almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning; less and less like
any Croy, particularly a Croy in trouble, and sensibly like her
husband's two unmarried sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's view,
much too often and stayed too long, with the consequence of inroads
upon the tea and bread-and-butter--matters as to which Kate, not
unconcerned with the tradesmen's books, had feelings. About them,
moreover, Marian _was_ touchy, and her nearer relative, who observed
and weighed things, noted as an oddity that she would have taken any
reflection on them as a reflection on herself. If that was what
marriage necessarily did to you, Kate Croy would have questioned
marriage. It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man--and such
a man!--might make of a woman. She could see how the Condrip pair
pressed their brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud--who wasn't,
after all, _their_ aunt; made her, over their interminable cups,
chatter and even swagger about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar
than it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly become on such
a subject. They laid it down, they rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate
was to be kept in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so that,
curiously, or at all events sadly, our young woman was sure of being,
in her own person, more permitted to them as an object of comment than
they would in turn ever be permitted to herself. The beauty of which,
too, was that Marian didn't love them. But they were Condrips--they had
grown near the rose; they were almost like Bertie and Maudie, like
Kitty and Guy. They talked of the dead to her, which Kate never did; it
being a relation in which Kate could but mutely listen. She couldn't
indeed too often say to herself that if that was what marriage did to
you----! It may easily be guessed, therefore, that the ironic light of
such reserves fell straight across the field of Marian's warning. "I
don't quite see," she answered, "where, in particular, it strikes you
that my danger lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the least
'disposition' to throw myself anywhere. I feel as if, for the present,
I have been quite sufficiently thrown."
"You don't feel"--Marian brought it all out--"as if you would like to
marry Merton Densher?"
Kate took a moment to meet this inquiry. "Is it your idea that if I
should feel so I would be bound to give you notice, so that you might
step in and head me off? Is that your idea?" the girl asked. Then, as
her sister also had a pause, "I don't know what makes you talk of Mr.
Densher," she observed.
"I talk of him just because you don't. That you never do, in spite of
what I know--that's what makes me think of him. Or rather perhaps it's
what makes me think of _you._ If you don't know by this time what I
hope for you, what I dream of--my attachment being what it is--it's no
use my attempting to tell you." But Marian had in fact warmed to her
work, and Kate was sure she had discussed Mr. Densher with the Miss
Condrips. "If I name that person I suppose it's because I'm so afraid
of him. If you want really to know, he fills me with terror. If you
want really to know, in fact, I dislike him as much as I dread him."
"And yet don't think it dangerous to abuse him to me?"
"Yes," Mrs. Condrip confessed, "I do think it dangerous; but how can I
speak of him otherwise? I dare say, I admit, that I shouldn't speak of
him at all. Only I do want you for once, as I said just now, to know."
"To know what, my dear?"
"That I should regard it," Marian promptly returned, "as far and away
the worst thing that has happened to us yet."
"Do you mean because he hasn't money?"
"Yes, for one thing. And because I don't believe in him."
Kate was civil, but perfunctory. "What do you mean by not believing in
him?"
"Well, being sure he'll never get it. And you _must_ have it. You
_shall_ have it."
"To give it to you?"
Marian met her with a readiness that was practically pert. "To _have_
it, first. Not, at any rate, to go on not having it. Then we should
see."
"We should indeed!" said Kate Croy. It was talk of a kind she loathed,
but if Marian chose to be vulgar what was one to do? It made her think
of the Miss Condrips with renewed aversion. "I like the way you arrange
things--I like what you take for granted. If it's so easy for us to
marry men who want us to scatter gold, I wonder we any of us do
anything else. I don't see so many of them about, nor what interest I
might ever have for them. You live, my dear," she presently added, "in
a world of vain thoughts."
"Not so much as you, Kate; for I see what I see, and you can't turn it
off that way." The elder sister paused long enough for the younger's
face to show, in spite of superiority, an apprehension. "I'm not
talking of any man but Aunt Maud's man, nor of any money, even, if you
like, but Aunt Maud's money. I'm not talking of anything but your doing
what _she_ wants. You're wrong if you speak of anything that I want of
you; I want nothing but what she does. That's good enough for me!"--and
Marian's tone struck her companion as dreadful. "If I don't believe in
Merton Densher, I do at least in Mrs. Lowder."
"Your ideas are the more striking," Kate returned, "that they're the
same as papa's. I had them from him, you may be interested to know--and
with all the brilliancy you may imagine--yesterday."
Marian clearly was interested to know. "He has been to see you?"
"No, I went to him."
"Really?" Marian wondered. "For what purpose?"
"To tell him I'm ready to go to him."
Marian stared. "To leave Aunt Maud----?"
"For my father, yes."
She had fairly flushed, poor Mrs. Condrip, with horror. "You're
ready----?"
"So I told him. I couldn't tell him less."
"And, pray, could you tell him more?" Marian gasped in her distress.
"What in the world is he _to_ us? You bring out such a thing as that
this way?"
They faced each other--the tears were in Marian's eyes. Kate watched
them there a moment and then said: "I had thought it well over--over
and over. But you needn't feel injured. I'm not going. He won't have
me."
Her companion still panted--it took time to subside. "Well, _I_
wouldn't have you--wouldn't receive you at all, I can assure you--if he
had made you any other answer. I do feel injured--at your having been
willing. If you were to go to papa, my dear, you would have to stop
coming to me." Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of
privation from which her companion might shrink. Such were the threats
she could complacently make, could think herself masterful for making.
"But if he won't take you," she continued, "he shows at least his
sharpness."
Marian had always her views of sharpness; she was, as her sister
privately commented, great on it. But Kate had her refuge from
irritation. "He won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he believes,
like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens me with his curse if I leave her."
"So you _won't?"_ As the girl at first said nothing her companion
caught at it. "You won't, of course? I see you won't. But I don't see
why, nevertheless, I shouldn't insist to you once for all on the plain
truth of the whole matter. The truth, my dear, of your duty. Do you
ever think about _that?_ It's the greatest duty of all."
"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's also immense on my duty."
"Oh, I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend to know more than you
do of life; more even perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of a kinder irony.
"Poor old papa!"
She sighed it with as many condonations as her sister's ear had more
than once caught in her "Dear old Aunt Maud!" These were things that
made Kate, for the time, turn sharply away, and she gathered herself
now to go. They were the note again of the abject; it was hard to say
which of the persons in question had most shown how little they liked
her. The younger woman proposed, at any rate, to let discussion rest,
and she believed that, for herself, she had done so during the ten
minutes that, thanks to her wish not to break off short, elapsed before
she could gracefully withdraw. It then appeared, however, that Marian
had been discussing still, and there was something that, at the last,
Kate had to take up. "Whom do you mean by Aunt Maud's young man?"
"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"
"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her
clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"
She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the
grace to which she had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her ground of complaint.
She desired her to "work" Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of
abundance could be worked; but she now didn't see why advantage should
be taken of the bloated connection to put an affront on her own poor
home. She appeared in fact for the moment to take the position that
Kate kept her in her "hole" and then heartlessly reflected on her being
in it. Yet she didn't explain how she had picked up the report on which
her sister had challenged her--so that it was thus left to her sister
to see in it, once more, a sign of the creeping curiosity of the Miss
Condrips. They lived in a deeper hole than Marian, but they kept their
ear to the ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian,
in garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger,
never prowled. There were times when Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips
were offered her by fate as a warning for her own future--to be taken
as showing her what she herself might become at forty if she let things
too recklessly go. What was expected of her by others--and by so many
of them--could, all the same, on occasion, present itself as beyond a
joke; and this was just now the aspect it particularly wore. She was
not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to oblige her five
spectators--with the Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set
forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the
premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand had attached it, and it
figured at the end of the course as a bell that would ring, break out
into public clamour, as soon as touched. Kate reflected sharply enough
on the weak points of this fond fiction, with the result at last of a
certain chill for her sister's confidence; though Mrs. Condrip still
took refuge in the plea--which was after all the great point--that
their aunt would be munificent when their aunt should be pleased. The
exact identity of her candidate was a detail; what was of the essence
was her conception of the kind of match it was open to her niece to
make with her aid. Marian always spoke of marriages as "matches," but
that was again a detail. Mrs. Lowder's "aid" meanwhile awaited them--if
not to light the way to Lord Mark, then to somebody better. Marian
would put up, in fine, with somebody better; she only wouldn't put up
with somebody so much worse. Kate had, once more, to go through all
this before a graceful issue was reached. It was reached by her paying
with the sacrifice of Mr. Densher for her reduction of Lord Mark to the
absurd. So they separated softly enough. She was to be let off hearing
about Lord Mark so long as she made it good that she wasn't underhand
about anybody else. She had denied everything and every one, she
reflected as she went away--and that was a relief; but it also made
rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that
already gave her something in common with the Miss Condrips.
BOOK SECOND
III
Merton Densher, who passed the best hours of each night at the office
of his newspaper, had at times, during the day, to make up for it, a
sense, or at least an appearance, of leisure, in accordance with which
he was not infrequently to be met, in different parts of the town, at
moments when men of business are hidden from the public eye. More than
once, during the present winter's end, he had deviated, toward three
o'clock, or toward four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might for a
while, on each occasion, have been observed to demean himself as a
person with nothing to do. He made his way indeed, for the most part,
with a certain directness, over to the north side; but once that ground
was reached his behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved
seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and
remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a
bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the
vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with
nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was
not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make
had the effect of causing the burden of proof, in certain directions,
to rest on him. It was a little the fault of his aspect, his personal
marks, which made it almost impossible to name his profession.
He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on
certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman,
by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally
sound and generally pleasant; yet, though to that degree neither
extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play straight into
an observer's hands. He was young for the House of Commons, he was
loose for the army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the
city, and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, he was sceptical, it
might have been felt, for the church. On the other hand he was
credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was
perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry, and
yet too little in them for art. You would have got fairly near him by
making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but you
would have quite fallen away again on the question of the ideas
themselves. The difficulty with Densher was that he looked vague
without looking weak--idle without looking empty. It was the accident,
possibly, of his long legs, which were apt to stretch themselves; of
his straight hair and his well-shaped head, never, the latter, neatly
smooth, and apt, into the bargain, at the time of quite other calls
upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by his
uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscionable
periods in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops, the sky. He was
in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever, liable to drop what
was near and to take up what was far; he was more a respecter, in
general, than a follower of custom. He suggested above all, however,
that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or
less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of
the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for
comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that
if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable subtlety--a law
that, in intercourse with him, it might be of profit, though not easy,
to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for you surprises
of tolerance as well as of temper.
He loitered, on the best of the relenting days, the several occasions
we speak of, along the part of the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate,
and when, always, in due time, Kate Croy came out of her aunt's house,
crossed the road and arrived by the nearest entrance, there was a
general publicity in the proceeding which made it slightly anomalous.
If their meeting was to be bold and free it might have taken place
within doors; if it was to be shy or secret it might have taken place
almost anywhere better than under Mrs. Lowder's windows. They failed
indeed to remain attached to that spot; they wandered and strolled,
taking in the course of more than one of these interviews a
considerable walk, or else picked out a couple of chairs under one of
the great trees and sat as much apart--apart from every one else--as
possible. But Kate had, each time, at first, the air of wishing to
expose herself to pursuit and capture if those things were in question.
She made the point that she was not underhand, any more than she was
vulgar; that the Gardens were charming in themselves and this use of
them a matter of taste; and that, if her aunt chose to glare at her
from the drawing-room or to cause her to be tracked and overtaken, she
could at least make it convenient that this should be easily done. The
fact was that the relation between these young persons abounded in such
oddities as were not inaptly symbolised by assignations that had a good
deal more appearance than motive. Of the strength of the tie that held
them we shall sufficiently take the measure; but it was meanwhile
almost obvious that if the great possibility had come up for them it
had done so, to an exceptional degree, under the protection of the
famous law of contraries. Any deep harmony that might eventually govern
them would not be the result of their having much in common--having
anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its
explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the
other was rich. It is nothing new indeed that generous young persons
often admire most what nature hasn't given them--from which it would
appear, after all, that our friends were both generous.
Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and from far back--that
he should be a fool not to marry a woman whose value would be in her
differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so
philosophised, had quickly recognised in the young man a precious
unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and
certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the
high, dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side
of the mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious and strong;
and he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making
that element real. She had had, all her days, to take it terribly on
trust; no creature she had ever encountered having been able in any
degree to testify for it directly. Vague rumours of its existence had
made their precarious way to her; but nothing had, on the whole, struck
her as more likely than that she should live and die without the chance
to verify them. The chance had come--it was an extraordinary one--on
the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour
that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of. That
occasion indeed, for everything that straightway flowered in it, would
be worthy of high commemoration; Densher's perception went out to meet
the young woman's and quite kept pace with her own recognition. Having
so often concluded on the fact of his weakness, as he called it, for
life--his strength merely for thought--life, he logically opined, was
what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess. This was so much a
necessity that thought by itself only went on in the void; it was from
the immediate air of life that it must draw its breath. So the young
man, ingenious but large, critical but ardent too, made out both his
case and Kate Croy's. They had originally met before her mother's
death--an occasion marked for her as the last pleasure permitted by the
approach of that event; after which the dark months had interposed a
screen and, for all Kate knew, made the end one with the beginning.
The beginning--to which she often went back--had been a scene, for our
young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired
by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to
be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy
of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at
large--in the name of these and other attractions the company in which,
by a rare privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked. She
lived under her mother's roof, as she considered, obscurely, and was
acquainted with few persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared, with such--two
or three through whom the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused,
could thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles. A good-natured
lady in fine, a friend of her mother and a relative of the lady of the
gallery, had offered to take her to the party in question and had there
fortified her, further, with two or three of those introductions that,
at large parties, lead to other things--that had at any rate, on this
occasion, culminated for her in conversation with a tall, fair,
slightly unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the whole not dreary,
young man. The young man had affected her as detached, as--it was
indeed what he called himself--awfully at sea, as much more distinct
from what surrounded them than any one else appeared to be, and even as
probably quite disposed to be making his escape when pulled up to be
placed in relation with her. He gave her his word for it indeed, that
same evening, that only their meeting had prevented his flight, but
that now he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it. This point
they had reached by midnight, and though in respect to such remarks
everything was in the tone, the tone was by midnight there too. She had
had originally her full apprehension of his coerced, certainly of his
vague, condition--full apprehensions often being with her immediate;
then she had had her equal consciousness that, within five minutes,
something between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but
_come._ It was nothing, but it was somehow everything--it was that
something for each of them had happened.
They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a
longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but
that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been
something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes
had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well,
and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact she saw
it, in the oddest way, as a particular performance. She had observed a
ladder against a garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb it as
to be able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On
reaching the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman
engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers
had remained confronted on their ladders. The great point was that for
the rest of that evening they had been perched--they had not climbed
down; and indeed, during the time that followed, Kate at least had had
the perched feeling--it was as if she were there aloft without a
retreat. A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but that they
had taken each other in with interest; and without a happy hazard six
months later the incident would have closed in that account of it. The
accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as anything in London ever is:
Kate had one afternoon found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the
Underground Railway. She had entered the train at Sloane Square to go
to Queen's Road, and the carriage in which she had found a place was
all but full. Densher was already in it--on the other bench and at the
furthest angle; she was sure of him before they had again started. The
day and the hour were darkness, there were six other persons, and she
had been busy placing herself; but her consciousness had gone to him as
straight as if they had come together in some bright level of the
desert. They had on neither part a second's hesitation; they looked
across the choked compartment exactly as if she had known he would be
there and he had expected her to come in; so that, though in the
conditions they could only exchange the greeting of movements, smiles,
silence, it would have been quite in the key of these passages that
they should have alighted for ease at the very next station. Kate was
in fact sure that the very next station was the young man's true
goal--which made it clear that he was going on only from the wish to
speak to her. He had to go on, for this purpose, to High Street,
Kensington, as it was not till then that the exit of a passenger gave
him his chance.
His chance put him, however, in quick possession of the seat facing
her, the alertness of his capture of which seemed to show her his
impatience. It helped them, moreover, with strangers on either side,
little to talk; though this very restriction perhaps made such a mark
for them as nothing else could have done. If the fact that their
opportunity had again come round for them could be so intensely
expressed between them without a word, they might very well feel on the
spot that it had not come round for nothing. The extraordinary part of
the matter was that they were not in the least meeting where they had
left off, but ever so much further on, and that these added links added
still another between High Street and Notting Hill Gate, and then
between the latter station and Queen's Road an extension really
inordinate. At Notting Hill Gate, Kate's right-hand neighbour
descended, whereupon Densher popped straight into that seat; only there
was not much gained when a lady, the next instant, popped into
Densher's. He could say almost nothing to her--she scarce knew, at
least, what he said; she was so occupied with a certainty that one of
the persons opposite, a youngish man with a single eyeglass, which he
kept constantly in position, had made her out from the first as
visibly, as strangely affected. If such a person made her out, what
then did Densher do?--a question in truth sufficiently answered when,
on their reaching her station, he instantly followed her out of the
train. That had been the real beginning--the beginning of everything
else; the other time, the time at the party, had been but the beginning
of _that._ Never in life before had she so let herself go; for always
before--so far as small adventures could have been in question for
her--there had been, by the vulgar measure, more to go upon. He had
walked with her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had walked with him
away from it--for all the world, she said to herself, like the
housemaid giggling to the baker.
This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had been all in order for
a relation that might precisely best be described in the terms of the
baker and the housemaid. She could say to herself that from that hour
they had kept company; that had come to represent, technically
speaking, alike the range and the limit of their tie. He had on the
spot, naturally, asked leave to call upon her--which, as a young person
who wasn't really young, who didn't pretend to be a sheltered flower,
she as rationally gave. That--she was promptly clear about it--was now
her only possible basis; she was just the contemporary London female,
highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free. She had of course
taken her aunt straight into her confidence--had gone through the form
of asking her leave; and she subsequently remembered that though, on
this occasion, she had left the history of her new alliance as scant as
the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had struck her at the time
surprisingly mild. It had been, in every way, the occasion, full of the
reminder that her hostess was deep: it was definitely then that she had
begun to ask herself what Aunt Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to."
"You may receive, my dear, whom you like"--that was what Aunt Maud, who
in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and
it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were
many explanations, and they were all amusing--amusing, that is, in the
line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her
actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs.
Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her
niece to see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday following,
in order to invite him to dinner; and when, after dining, he came
again--which he did three times, she found means to treat his visit as
preponderantly to herself. Kate's conviction that she didn't like him
made that remarkable; it added to the evidence, by this time
voluminous, that she was remarkable all round. If she had been, in the
way of energy, merely usual, she would have kept her dislike direct;
whereas it was now as if she were seeking to know him in order to see
best where to "have" him. That was one of the reflections made in our
young woman's high retreat; she smiled from her lookout, in the silence
that was only the fact of hearing irrelevant sounds, as she caught the
truth that you could easily accept people when you wanted them so to be
delivered to you. When Aunt Maud wished them despatched, it was not to
be done by deputy; it was clearly always a matter reserved for her own
hand. But what made the girl wonder most was the implications of so
much diplomacy in respect to her own value. What view might she take of
her position in the light of this appearance that her companion feared
so, as yet, to upset her? It was as if Densher were accepted partly
under the dread that if he hadn't been she would act in resentment.
Hadn't her aunt considered the danger that she would in that case have
broken off, have seceded? The danger was exaggerated--she would have
done nothing so gross; but that, it seemed, was the way Mrs. Lowder saw
her and believed her to be reckoned with. What importance therefore did
she really attach to her, what strange interest could she take on their
keeping on terms? Her father and her sister had their answer to
this--even without knowing how the question struck her; they saw the
lady of Lancaster Gate as panting to make her fortune, and the
explanation of that appetite was that, on the accident of a nearer view
than she had before enjoyed, she had been charmed, been dazzled. They
approved, they admired in her one of the belated fancies of rich,
capricious, violent old women--the more marked, moreover, because the
result of no plot; and they piled up the possible results for the
person concerned. Kate knew what to think of her own power thus to
carry by storm; she saw herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and
felt herself as clever but as cold; and as so much too imperfectly
ambitious, furthermore, that it was a pity, for a quiet life, she
couldn't settle to be either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her
intelligence sometimes kept her still--too still--but her want of it
was restless; so that she got the good, it seemed to her, of neither
extreme. She saw herself at present, none the less, in a situation, and
even her sad, disillusioned mother, dying, but with Aunt Maud
interviewing the nurse on the stairs, had not failed to remind her that
it was of the essence of situations to be, under Providence, worked.
The dear woman had died in the belief that she was actually working the
one then produced.
Kate took one of her walks with Densher just after her visit to Mr.
Croy; but most of it went, as usual, to their sitting in talk. They
had, under the trees, by the lake, the air of old friends--phases of
apparent earnestness, in particular, in which they might have been
settling every question in their vast young world; and periods of
silence, side by side, perhaps even more, when "a long engagement!"
would have been the final reading of the signs on the part of a passer
struck with them, as it was so easy to be. They would have presented
themselves thus as very old friends rather than as young persons who
had met for the first time but a year before and had spent most of the
interval without contact. It was indeed for each, already, as if they
were older friends; and though the succession of their meetings might,
between them, have been straightened out, they only had a confused
sense of a good many, very much alike, and a confused intention of a
good many more, as little different as possible. The desire to keep
them just as they were had perhaps to do with the fact that in spite of
the presumed diagnosis of the stranger there had been for them as yet
no formal, no final understanding. Densher had at the very first
pressed the question, but that, it had been easy to reply, was too
soon; so that a singular thing had afterwards happened. They had
accepted their acquaintance as too short for an engagement, but they
had treated it as long enough for almost anything else, and marriage
was somehow before them like a temple without an avenue. They belonged
to the temple and they met in the grounds; they were in the stage at
which grounds in general offered much scattered refreshment. But Kate
had meanwhile had so few confidants that she wondered at the source of
her father's suspicions. The diffusion of rumour was of course, in
London, remarkable, and for Marian not less--as Aunt Maud touched
neither directly--the mystery had worked. No doubt she had been seen.
Of course she had been seen. She had taken no trouble not to be seen,
and it was a thing, clearly, she was incapable of taking. But she had
been seen how?--and _what_ was there to see? She was in love--she knew
that: but it was wholly her own business, and she had the sense of
having conducted herself, of still so doing, with almost violent
conformity.
"I've an idea--in fact I feel sure--that Aunt Maud means to write to
you; and I think you had better know it." So much as this she said to
him as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it: "So as to make
up your mind how to take her. I know pretty well what she'll say to
you."
"Then will you kindly tell me?"
She thought a little. "I can't do that. I should spoil it. She'll do
the best for her own idea."
"Her idea, you mean, that I'm a sort of a scoundrel; or, at the best,
not good enough for you?"
They were side by side again in their penny chairs, and Kate had
another pause. "Not good enough for _her."_
"Oh, I see. And that's necessary."
He put it as a truth rather more than as a question; but there had been
plenty of truths between them that each had contradicted. Kate,
however, let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next moment:
"She has behaved extraordinarily."
"And so have we," Densher declared. "I think, you know, we've been
awfully decent."
"For ourselves, for each other, for people in general, yes. But not for
_her._ For her," said Kate, "we've been monstrous. She has been giving
us rope. So if she does send for you," the girl repeated, "you must
know where you are."
"That I always know. It's where _you_ are that concerns me."
"Well," said Kate after an instant, "her idea of that is what you'll
have from her." He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who
wouldn't let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long
looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What
she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make
them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough
that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work
them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them, and yet,
as regards the rigour of it, pay no price. She looked it well in the
face, she took it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced
to herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing of the name; but,
distinguished creature that, in her way, she was, she took a view of
this character that scarce squared with the conventional. The character
itself she insisted on as their right, taking that so for granted that
it didn't seem even bold; but Densher, though he agreed with her, found
himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her values. Life might
prove difficult--was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each
other, and that was everything. This was her reasoning, but meanwhile,
for _him,_ each other was what they didn't have, and it was just the
point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange
and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was
impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too
close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point,
do what they would to take her in. And she came in, always, while they
sat together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-in-four; she
drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives
round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with
majesty. It was our young man's sense that she was magnificently
vulgar, but yet, quite, that this wasn't all. It wasn't with her
vulgarity that she felt his want of means, though that might have
helped her richly to embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity
that she was strong, original, dangerous.
His want of means--of means sufficient for anyone but himself--was
really the great ugliness, and was, moreover, at no time more ugly for
him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, shameless, face to
face with the elements in Kate's life colloquially and conveniently
classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so
often vivid to him, of his own consciousness--his private inability to
believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in
truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis,
to understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any
one else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness
of his being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a
dunce nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and
also, strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not
prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in
respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his
case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the
line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or
listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the
right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise--one or
the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the
question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her
chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance
could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too,
otherwise, marrying for money mightn't after all be a smaller cause of
shame than the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations
of mood and view, all the same, the mark on his forehead stood clear;
he saw himself remain without whether he married or not. It was a line
on which his fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of
making money were beautifully present to him; he could have handled
them, for his newspaper, as easily as he handled everything. He was
quite aware how he handled everything; it was another mark on his
forehead; the pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on
the passive fleece, dated from the primal hour and kept each other
company. He wrote, as for print, with deplorable ease; since there had
been nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so there was as little
at twenty; it was part of his fate in the first place and part of the
wretched public's in the second. The innumerable ways of making money
were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination often was busy with
after he had tilted his chair and thrown back his head with his hands
clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged that attitude,
moreover, was the reflection that the ways were ways only for others.
Within the minute, now--however this might be--he was aware of a nearer
view than he had yet quite had of those circumstances on his
companion's part that made least for simplicity of relation. He saw
above all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them at present
with the last frankness, telling him of her visit to her father and
giving him, in an account of her subsequent scene with her sister, an
instance of how she was perpetually reduced to patching up, in one way
or another, that unfortunate woman's hopes.
"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a failure as a family!" With
which he had it again all from her--and this time, as it seemed to him,
more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and
cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned,
despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as
remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her
two young brothers--one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by
typhoid fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had
afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the
flower of the flock, a middy on the _Britannia,_ dreadfully drowned,
and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while
bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a
holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural
marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to
fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy
children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors--these things
completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of
fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it
was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous
colour, partly--and that charm was the greatest--as if to work off, for
her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and she was so
intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore
when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was
almost as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the
fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be
definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no
other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them.
They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would--or, in
other words, they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each
other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was
thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for
them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at
special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption
that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it
must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most
by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always seemed to
him that she had more life than he to react from, and when she
recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard, odd
offset of her present exaltation--since as exaltation it was apparently
to be considered--he felt his own grey domestic annals to make little
show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her
father's character that engaged him most, but her picture of her
adventure in Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that
character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr.
Croy had originally done?
"I don't know--and I don't want to. I only know that years and years
ago--when I was about fifteen--something or other happened that made
him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and
then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn't know it at the
time," Kate explained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough,
my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her
now--the way, one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account of an
extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church, she broke it to me by the
school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp--when we
didn't go to church we had to read history-books--and I suddenly heard
her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and _apropos_ of
nothing: 'Papa has done something wicked.' And the curious thing was
that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though
she could tell me nothing more--neither what was the wickedness, nor
how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it.
We had our sense, always, that all sorts of things _had_ happened, were
all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was
sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that
that was enough, I took her word for it--it seemed somehow so natural.
We were not, however, to ask mother--which made it more natural still,
and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to
me, in time, of her own accord very much later on. He hadn't been with
us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some
fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it
was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done:
'If you hear anything against your father--anything I mean, except that
he's odious and vile--remember it's perfectly false.' That was the way
I knew--it was true, though I recall that I said to her then that I of
course knew it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and yet have
trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I
should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I
think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however," the
girl went on, "I've never had occasion, and I've been conscious of it
with a sort of surprise. It has made the world, at times, seem more
decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of
the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the
world, has washed him out. He doesn't exist for people. And yet I'm as
sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I'm more
sure. And that," she wound up, "is what I sit here and tell you about
my own father. If you don't call it a proof of confidence I don't know
what will satisfy you."
"It satisfies me beautifully," Densher declared, "but it doesn't, my
dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don't, you know, really tell
me anything. It's so vague that what am I to think but that you may
very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?"
"He has done everything."
"Oh--everything! Everything's nothing."
"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular thing. It's
known--only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. You
could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about."
Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up.
"I wouldn't find out for the world, and I'd rather lose my tongue than
put a question."
"And yet it's a part of me," said Kate.
"A part of you?"
"My father's dishonour." Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than
ever yet, her note of proud, still pessimism. "How can such a thing as
that not be the great thing in one's life?"
She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she
took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. "I shall ask you, for the
great thing in your life," he said, "to depend on _me_ a little more."
After which, just hesitating, "Doesn't he belong to some club?" he
inquired.
She had a grave headshake. "He used to--to many."
"But he has dropped them?"
"They've dropped _him._ Of that I'm sure. It ought to do for you. I
offered him," the girl immediately continued--"and it was for that I
went to him--to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is
possible. But he won't hear of it."
Densher took this in with visible, but generous, wonder. "You offered
him--'impossible' as you describe him to me--to live with him and share
his disadvantages?" The young man saw for the moment but the high
beauty of it. "You _are_ gallant!"
"Because it strikes you as being brave for him?" She wouldn't in the
least have this. "It wasn't courage--it was the opposite. I did it to
save myself--to escape."
He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer
things than any one to think about. "Escape from what?"
"From everything."
"Do you by any chance mean from me?"
"No; I spoke to him of you, told him--or what amounted to it--that I
would bring you, if he would allow it, with me."
"But he won't allow it," said Densher.
"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help me, won't save me, won't
hold out a finger to me," Kate went on; "he simply wriggles away, in
his inimitable manner, and throws me back."
"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher concurred, "on me."
But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had
evoked. "It's a pity, because you'd like him. He's wonderful--he's
charming." Her companion gave one of the laughs that marked in him,
again, his feeling in her tone, inveterately, something that banished
the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull
desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. "He would
make himself delightful to you."
"Even while objecting to me?"
"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained--"personally. He would
appreciate you and be clever with you. It's to _me_ he objects--that is
as to my liking you."
"Heaven be praised then," Densher exclaimed, "that you like me enough
for the objection!"
But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. "I don't. I
offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no
difference, and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining me
on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don't escape."
Densher wondered. "But if you didn't wish to escape _me?"_
"I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it's through her and
through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it's
through her, and through her only, that I can help _her._ That's what I
mean," she again explained, "by their turning me back."
The young man thought. "Your sister turns you back too?"
"Oh, with a push!"
"But have you offered to live with your sister?"
"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
little family feeling. I've a small stupid piety--I don't know what to
call it." Kate bravely sustained it; she made it out. "Sometimes,
alone, I've to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She
went through things--they pulled her down; I know what they were now--I
didn't then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is
an insolence of success. That's what Marian keeps before me; that's
what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position's a value,
a great value, for them both"--she followed and followed. Lucid and
ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. "It's _the_ value--the only one
they have."
Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their
pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure--the quickness and anxiety
playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly,
as he had never done before. "And the fact you speak of holds you!"
"Of course, it holds me. It's a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me
ask myself if I've any right to personal happiness, any right to
anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I
can be made."
Densher had a pause. "Oh, you might, with good luck, have the personal
happiness too."
Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which
she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly:
"Darling!"
It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. "Will
you settle it by our being married to-morrow--as we can, with perfect
ease, civilly?"
"Let us wait to arrange it," Kate presently replied, "till after you've
seen her."
"Do you call that adoring me?" Densher demanded.
They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of
deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the
tone of it than the way she at last said: "You're afraid of her
yourself."
He gave a smile a trifle glassy. "For young persons of a great
distinction and a very high spirit, we're a caution!"
"Yes," she took it straight up; "we're hideously intelligent. But
there's fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think," she
added, and for that matter, not without courage, "our relation's
beautiful. It's not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in
things."
It made him break into a laugh which had more freedom than his smile.
"How you must be afraid you'll chuck me!"
"No, no, _that_ would be vulgar. But, of course, I do see my danger,"
she admitted, "of doing something base."
"Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?"
"I _shan't_ sacrifice you; don't cry out till you're hurt. I shall
sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that I want
and that I shall try for everything. That," she wound up, "is how I see
myself, and how I see you quite as much, acting for them."
"For 'them'?" and the young man strongly, extravagantly marked his
coldness. "Thank you!"
"Don't you care for them?"
"Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?"
As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the
unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his
roughness--and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was
one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild
glow. "I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we
avoid stupidity we may do _all._ We may keep her."
He stared. "Make her pension us?"
"Well, wait at least till we have seen."
He thought. "Seen what can be got out of her?"
Kate for a moment said nothing. "After all I never asked her; never,
when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded
claws."
"You speak," Densher observed, "as if she were a vulture."
"Call it an eagle--with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great
flights. If she's a thing of the air, in short--say at once a
balloon--I never myself got into her car. I was her choice."
It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great
style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master.
"What she must see in you!"
"Wonders!" And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. "Everything.
There it is."
Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face
it. "So that what you mean is that I'm to do my part in somehow
squaring her?"
"See her, see her," Kate said with impatience.
"And grovel to her?"
"Ah, do what you like!" And she walked in her impatience away.
IV
His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he
overtook her, to make out more than ever, in the poise of her head, the
pride of her step--he didn't know what best to call it--a part, at
least, of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously winced while he figured
his presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though, at the
same moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration thus before
him, he was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or
profitable compromise, to his companion's easy injunction. He would do
as _she_ liked--his own liking might come off as it would. He would
help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of that day and
the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her
beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the
high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps--he
wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous,
reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be
clever, with all his cleverness--which he now shook hard, as he
sometimes shook his poor, dear, shabby, old watch, to start it up
again. It wasn't, thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that,
and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the
credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and
surrender--surrender so early, so immediate--should have to ensue. It
was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a
direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged--it which was enough
as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing
Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast
drawing-room--the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the
first as of prodigious extent--he awaited her, at her request, conveyed
in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging
to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really
enlarged to the scale of the place.
He had the place for a long time--it seemed to him a quarter of an
hour--to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while
observation and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself what was to
be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the
hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but
part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to
and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive, florid
furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as
little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found
himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on,
and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man
could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no
show--literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there
all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect,
were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. "When
all's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"--he had once
all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it
back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it.
It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite
felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It
bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow,
strangely, it didn't in the least imply that Aunt Maud was dull or
stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there
was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament.
She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and
he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip--the whip, in a
word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved
the girl--which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had
mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking
of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking
it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in
some way to their advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage
he could turn it; but the case grew less simple the longer he waited.
Decidedly there was something he hadn't enough of. He stood as one fast.
His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he
paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at
the sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as
little as before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate
looked rich--that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any
state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly,
more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and
they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction.
He hadn't known--and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own
rebellions of taste--that he should "mind" so much how an independent
lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself
that spoke to him, writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and
freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities
of the mistress. Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything so
gregariously ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have
found this last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played
into the subject for an article--that his impression put straight into
his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still
flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of
its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should
have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove, after all, but a small amount
of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even
while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less
easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He
couldn't describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either
Mid-Victorian or Early; not being at all sure they were rangeable under
one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were
furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and they
abounded in rare material--precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He
had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and
corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled everywhere so thick. He
had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush,
so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was, above all, the
solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general
attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance.
These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his
own world of thought--of which, for that matter, in the presence of
them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed
it to him by their merciless difference. His interview with Aunt Maud,
none the less, took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate
though her nature, no doubt Mrs. Lowder, on this occasion, neither
threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression, her weapons of
defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them untouched and
unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly perceived only
afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived something
else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn't have known what
to call it if he hadn't called it her really imprudent good-nature. Her
blandness, in other words, was not mere policy--he wasn't dangerous
enough for policy; it was the result, he could see, of her fairly
liking him a little. From the moment she did that she herself became
more interesting; and who knew what might happen should he take to
liking _her?_ Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought
him, at any rate, but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray
powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her
explaining it, that if she had made him wait it had not been to wound
him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her
intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed
to say to him--not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come
home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her
first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he
hadn't taken her hint, and this inquiry assumed so many things that it
made discussion, immediately, frank and large. He knew, with the
question put, that the hint was just what he _had_ taken; knew that she
had made him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if
he didn't take care he should understand her, and the strength of her
purpose, to say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the
length of her purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the
thought, too, that he was not going to be afraid of understanding her;
he was just going to understand and understand without detriment to the
feeblest, even, of his passions. The play of one's mind let one in, at
the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need of action, where
simplicity was all; but when one couldn't prevent it the thing was to
make it complete. There would never be mistakes but for the original
fun of mistakes. What he must use his fatal intelligence for was to
resist. Mrs. Lowder, meanwhile, might use it for whatever she liked.
It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate
that he began, on his side, to reflect that--with her manner of
offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to
embrace--it she couldn't half hate him. That was all, positively, she
seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did
her intention justice, she would have nothing more disagreeable to do.
"If I hadn't been ready to go very much further, you understand, I
wouldn't have gone so far. I don't care what you repeat to her--the
more you repeat to her, perhaps the better; and, at any rate, there's
nothing she doesn't already know. I don't say it for her; I say it for
you--when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight." So
Aunt Maud delivered herself--as with homely benevolence, in the
simplest, but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a
word to the wise was, doubtless, in spite of the advantage, _not_
always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our
young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was
good--was really, by her measure, good enough: good enough, that is, to
give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But _was_ he good
enough--by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully
expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. "She's the
finest possible creature--of course you flatter yourself that you know
it. But I know it, quite as well as you possibly can--by which I mean a
good deal better yet; and the tune to which I'm ready to prove my faith
compares favourably enough, I think, with anything _you_ can do. I
don't say it because she's my niece--that's nothing to me: I might have
had fifty nieces, and I wouldn't have brought one of them to this place
if I hadn't found her to my taste. I don't say I wouldn't have done
something else, but I wouldn't have put up with her presence. Kate's
presence, by good fortune, I marked early; Kate's presence--unluckily
for _you_--is everything I could possibly wish; Kate's presence is, in
short, as fine as you know, and I've been keeping it for the comfort of
my declining years. I've watched it long; I've been saving it up and
letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate, and you may judge
whether, now it has begun to pay so, I'm likely to consent to treat for
it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I've my
idea of the best."
"Oh, I quite conceive," said Densher, "that your idea of the best isn't
me."
It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder's that her face in speech was like a
lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain.
The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take;
yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her
surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help. "I didn't ask
you to come to hear what it isn't--I asked you to come to hear what it
is."
"Of course," Densher laughed, "it's very great indeed."
His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely
relevant. "I want to see her high, high up--high up and in the light."
"Ah, you naturally want to marry her to a duke, and are eager to smooth
away any hitch."
She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it
quite forced him, at first, into the sense, possibly just, of having
affected her as flip pant, perhaps even as low. He had been looked at
so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men,
but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than
anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion's subtlety, and
thereby of Kate's possible career. "Don't be _too_ impossible!"--he
feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and
then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off
easily. "I want her to marry a great man." That was all; but, more and
more, it was enough; and if it hadn't been her next words would have
made it so. "And I think of her what I think. There you are."
They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of
something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he
only would. To that extent she did appeal--appealed to the intelligence
she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at
all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. "Of course I'm
aware how little I can answer to any fond, proud dream. You've a
view--a magnificent one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly
understand what I'm not, and I'm much obliged to you for not reminding
me of it in any rougher way." She said nothing--she kept that up; it
might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in
the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man
couldn't show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he
preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he _was_--on
Mrs. Lowder's basis, the only one in question--a very small quantity,
and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be
perfectly simple; yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension
throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn't later on
have said how. "You don't really matter, I believe, so much as you
think, and I'm not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your
performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they're
meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you
myself--since you're, in your way, my dear young man, delightful--and
arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should.
Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it's not really
necessary? It won't--it would be too absurd!--_be_ necessary. I can
bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I'm
dealing with you now, see--and successfully judge--without opening it.
I do things handsomely all round--I place you in the presence of the
plan with which, from the moment it's a case of taking you seriously,
you're incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round
it--don't be afraid you'll hurt it!--and live on with it before you."
He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely phrased all this it
was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He
was so pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not
proposing he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to
interfere, that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem.
Immediately afterwards, then, he spoke of these things to Kate, and
what then came back to him first of all was the way he had said to
her--he mentioned it to the girl--very much as one of a pair of lovers
says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely, of course, that
you'll always regard me as a friend." This had perhaps been going
far--he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in
it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own
light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the
close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating
him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was
moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage
with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night
before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a
service--so flatteringly was the case expressed--by going, for fifteen
or twenty weeks, to America. The idea of a series of letters from the
United States from the strictly social point of view had for some time
been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment
was now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had,
in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into
Densher's face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up
in surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter
to Kate was that he couldn't refuse--not being in a position, as yet,
to refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand
confounded his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce
knowing how to measure the honour, which struck him as equivocal; he
had not quite supposed himself the man for the class of job. This
confused consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed
to his manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question
surprisingly clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle
that was not in his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened
this time not to want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons,
about as good as he could let them come; he was to play his own little
tune and not be afraid; that was the whole point.
It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one
still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as
they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of
June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose
a week; his inquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground,
and there were reasons of State--reasons operating at the seat of
empire in Fleet Street--why the nail should be struck on the head.
Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide;
and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to
speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as
that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together; she was
clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her;
but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his
prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him intensely--of
course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke
with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of
this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with
scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily
bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had
really occurred in Fleet Street--all the more that it was his own final
reading. He was to pull the subject up--that was just what they wanted;
and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them
each as he might, to let _him_ down. It was just because he didn't nose
about and wasn't the usual gossipmonger that they had picked him out;
it was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently
wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would
have always to take from his example.
"How you ought indeed, when you understand so well, to be a
journalist's wife!" Densher exclaimed in admiration, even while she
struck him as fairly hurrying him off.
But she was almost impatient of the praise. "What do you expect one
_not_ to understand when one cares for you?"
"Ah then, I'll put it otherwise and say 'How much you care for me!'"
"Yes," she assented; "it fairly redeems my stupidity. I _shall,_ with a
chance to show it," she added, "have some imagination for you."
She spoke of the future this time as so little contingent, that he felt
a queerness of conscience in making her the report that he presently
arrived at on what had passed for him with the real arbiter of their
destiny. The way for that had been blocked a little by his news from
Fleet Street; but in the crucible of their happy discussion this
element soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that ensued the
parts were not to be distinguished. The young man moreover, before
taking his leave, was to see why Kate had just spoken of the future as
if they now really possessed it, and was to come to the vision by a
devious way that deepened the final cheer. Their faces were turned to
the illumined quarter as soon as he had answered her question in
respect to the appearance of their being able to play a waiting game
with success. It was for the possibility of that appearance that she
had, a few days before, so earnestly pressed him to see her aunt; and
if after his hour with that lady it had not struck Densher that he had
seen her to the happiest purpose the poor facts flushed with a better
meaning as Kate, one by one, took them up.
"If she consents to your coming, why isn't that everything?"
"It _is_ everything; everything _she_ thinks it. It's the
probability--I mean as Mrs. Lowder measures probability--that I may be
prevented from becoming a complication for her by some arrangement,
_any_ arrangement, through which you shall see me often and easily.
She's sure of my want of money, and that gives her time. She believes
in my having a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better my
state before I put the pistol to your head in respect to sharing it.
The time that will take figures for her as the time that will help her
if she doesn't spoil her chance by treating me badly. She doesn't at
all wish moreover," Densher went on, "to treat me badly, for I believe,
upon my honour, funny as it may sound to you, that she personally
rather likes me, and that if you weren't in question I might almost
become her pet young man. She doesn't disparage intellect and
culture--quite the contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and be
named in her programme; and I'm sure it has sometimes cost her a real
pang that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible." He
paused a moment, and his companion then saw that a strange smile was in
his face--a smile as strange even as the adjunct, in her own, of this
informing vision. "I quite suspect her of believing that, if the truth
were known, she likes me literally better than--deep down--you yourself
do: wherefore she does me the honour to think that I may be safely left
to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her margin. I'm not the
sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use,
that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride
and prejudice will take care of the rest! the pride fed full,
meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you, and the
prejudice excited by the comparison she'll enable you to make, from
which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she'll never like me so
much as when she succeeded a little better in making me look wretched.
For then _you'll_ like me less."
Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was
a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after
an instant replied: "I see, I see; what an immense affair she must
think me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression."
"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher, "in letting it go as
deep as it will."
He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to
consider. "Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as
you say--that's an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the
other big things that, in one's acquaintance with people, give her a
place so apart."
"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded; "she's on the scale,
altogether, of the car of Juggernaut which was a kind of image that
came to me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The
things in your drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange
idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of
the car to bristle."
"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they had, over all that
aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges
that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were
complications, there were questions; but they were so much more
together than they were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no word
of refutation of Aunt Maud's "big" diplomacy, and they left it there,
as they would have left any other fine product, for a monument to her
powers. But, Densher related further, he had had in other respects too
the car of Juggernaut to face; he omitted nothing from his account of
his visit, least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last--though
indeed only under artful pressure--fallen foul of his very type, his
want of the right marks, his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents.
She had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he granted Kate,
would have been dreadful if he hadn't so let himself in for it.
"I was really curious, you see," he explained, "to find out from her
what sort of queer creature, what sort of social anomaly, in the light
of such conventions as hers, such an education as mine makes one pass
for."
Kate said nothing for a little; but then, "Why should you care?" she
asked.
"Oh," he laughed, "I like her so much; and then, for a man of my trade,
her views, her spirit, are essentially a thing to get hold of; they
belong to the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we
must keep setting up 'codes' with. Besides," he added, "I want to
please her personally."
"Ah, yes, we must please her personally!" his companion echoed; and the
words may represent all their definite recognition, at the time, of
Densher's politic gain. They had in fact between this and his start for
New York many matters to handle, and the question he now touched upon
came up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he had really told
her aunt more of his immediate personal story than he had ever told
herself. That, if it were so, was an accident, and it put him, for half
an hour, on as much of the picture of his early years abroad, his
migratory parents, his Swiss schools, his German university, as she had
easy attention for. A man, he intimated, a man of their world, would
have spotted him straight as to many of these points; a man of their
world, so far as they had a world, would have been through the English
mill. But it was none the less charming to make his confession to a
woman; women had, in fact, for such differences, so much more
imagination. Kate showed at present all his case could require; when
she had had it from beginning to end she declared that she now made out
more than ever yet of what she loved him for. She had herself, as a
child, lived with some continuity in the world across the Channel,
coming home again still a child; and had participated after that, in
her teens, in her mother's brief but repeated retreats to Dresden, to
Florence, to Biarritz, weak and expensive attempts at economy from
which there stuck to her--though in general coldly expressed, through
the instinctive avoidance of cheap raptures--the religion of foreign
things. When it was revealed to her how many more foreign things were
in Merton Densher than he had hitherto taken the trouble to catalogue,
she almost faced him as if he were a map of the continent or a handsome
present of a delightful new "Murray." He hadn't meant to swagger, he
had rather meant to plead, though with Mrs. Lowder he had meant also a
little to explain. His father had been, in strange countries, in twenty
settlements of the English, British chaplain, resident or occasional,
and had had for years the unusual luck of never wanting a billet. His
career abroad had therefore been unbroken, and, as his stipend had
never been great, he had educated his children at the smallest cost, in
the schools nearest; which was also a saving of railway fares.
Densher's mother, it further appeared, had practised on her side a
distinguished industry, to the success of which--so far as success ever
crowned it--this period of exile had much contributed: she copied,
patient lady, famous pictures in great museums, having begun with a
happy natural gift and taking in betimes the scale of her opportunity.
Copyists abroad of course swarmed, but Mrs. Densher had had a sense and
a hand of her own, had arrived at a perfection that persuaded, that
even deceived, and that made the disposal of her work blissfully usual.
Her son, who had lost her, held her image sacred, and the effect of his
telling Kate all about her, as well as about other matters until then
mixed and dim, was to render his history rich, his sources full, his
outline anything but common. He had come round, he had come back, he
insisted abundantly, to being a Briton: his Cambridge years, his happy
connection, as it had proved, with his father's college, amply
certified to that, to say nothing of his subsequent plunge into London,
which filled up the measure. But brave enough though his descent to
English earth, he had passed, by the way, through zones of air that had
left their ruffle on his wings, had been exposed to initiations
ineffaceable. Something had happened to him that could never be undone.
When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought her not to insist,
declaring that this indeed was what was too much the matter with him,
that he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for insular use.
On which, not unnaturally, she insisted the more, assuring him, without
mitigation, that if he was complicated and brilliant she wouldn't for
the world have had him any thing less; so that he was reduced in the
end to accusing her of putting the dreadful truth to him in the hollow
guise of flattery. She was making out how abnormal he was in order that
she might eventually find him impossible; and, as she could fully make
it out but with his aid, she had to bribe him by feigned delight to
help her. If her last word for him, in the connection, was that the way
he saw himself was just a precious proof the more of his having tasted
of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her to eat, this gives
the happy tone of their whole talk, the measure of the flight of time
in the near presence of his settled departure. Kate showed, however,
that she was to be more literally taken when she spoke of the relief
Aunt Maud would draw from the prospect of his absence.
"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied, "when she fears me so
little."
His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea is that she likes you so
much that she'll even go so far as to regret losing you?"
Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive way. "Since what she
builds on is the gradual process of your alienation, she may take the
view that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't I be there to
keep it going? It's in my exile that it may languish."
He went on with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend.
He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her
own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even
through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm,
transparent irony, into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging
like a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary
beauty: "I engage myself to you for ever."
The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated
nothing--couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole
joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you--I call God to
witness!--every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life."
That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as
quiet as if it were nothing. They were in the open air, in an alley of
the Gardens; the great space, which seemed to arch just then higher and
spread wider for them, threw them back into deep concentration. They
moved by a common instinct to a spot, within sight, that struck them as
fairly sequestered, and there, before their time together was spent,
they had extorted from concentration every advance it could make them.
They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact,
solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted
eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and
to belong tremendously, to each other. They were to leave the place
accordingly an affianced couple; but before they left it other things
still had passed. Densher had declared his horror of bringing to a
premature end her happy relation with her aunt; and they had worked
round together to a high level of wisdom and patience. Kate's free
profession was that she wished not to deprive _him_ of Mrs. Lowder's
countenance, which, in the long run, she was convinced he would
continue to enjoy; and as, by a blessed turn, Aunt Maud had demanded of
him no promise that would tie his hands, they should be able to
cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain loyal. One
difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.
"Of course it will never do--we must remember that--from the moment you
allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long
as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears, I
don't see that we deceive her. At a given moment, you see, she must be
undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the moment and
to face it. Only, after all, in that case," the young man observed,
"one doesn't quite make out what we shall have got from her."
"What she'll have got from _us?"_ Kate inquired with a smile. "What
she'll have got from us," the girl went on, "is her own affair--it's
for _her_ to measure. I asked her for nothing," she added; "I never put
myself upon her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands
them. What we shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of,"
Kate further explained; "it's that we shall have gained time. And so,
for that matter, will she."
Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the
present hour into romantic obscurity. "Yes; no doubt, in our particular
situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it."
She hesitated. "Of our secret?"
"Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what's represented
and, as we must somehow feel, protected and made deeper and closer by
it." And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all
his meaning. "Our being as we are."
It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink into her. "So gone?"
"So gone. So extremely gone. However," he smiled, "we shall go a good
deal further." Her answer to which was only the softness of her
silence--a silence that looked out for them both at the far reach of
their prospect. This was immense, and they thus took final possession
of it. They were practically united and they were splendidly strong;
but there were other things--things they were precisely strong enough
to be able successfully to count with and safely to allow for; in
consequence of which they would, for the present, subject to some
better reason, keep their understanding to themselves. It was not
indeed, however, till after one more observation of Densher's that they
felt the question completely straightened out. "The only thing of
course is that she may any day absolutely put it to you."
Kate considered. "Ask me where, on my honour, we are? She may,
naturally; but I doubt if in fact she will. While you're away she'll
make the most of it. She'll leave me alone."
"But there'll be my letters."
The girl faced his letters. "Very, very many?"
"Very, very, very many--more than ever; and you know what that is! And
then," Densher added, "there'll be yours."
"Oh, I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I shall post them myself."
He looked at her a moment. "Do you think then I had best address you
elsewhere?" After which, before she could quite answer, he added with
some emphasis: "I'd rather not, you know. It's straighter."
She might again have just waited. "Of course it's straighter. Don't be
afraid I shan't be straight. Address me," she continued, "where you
like. I shall be proud enough of its being known you write to me."
He turned it over for the last clearness. "Even at the risk of its
really bringing down the inquisition?"
Well, the last clearness now filled her. "I'm not afraid of the
inquisition. If she asks if there's anything definite between us, I
know perfectly what I shall say."
"That I _am,_ of course, 'gone' for you?"
"That I love you as I shall never in my life love any one else, and
that she can make what she likes of that." She said it out so
splendidly that it was like a new profession of faith, the fulness of a
tide breaking through; and the effect of that, in turn, was to make her
companion meet her with such eyes that she had time again before he
could otherwise speak. "Besides, she's just as likely to ask _you."_
"Not while I'm away."
"Then when you come back."
"Well then," said Densher, "we shall have had our particular joy. But
what I feel is," he candidly added, "that, by an idea of her own, her
superior policy, she _won't_ ask me. She'll let me off. I shan't have
to lie to her."
"It will be left all to me?" asked Kate.
"All to you!" he tenderly laughed.
But it was, oddly, the very next moment as if he had perhaps been a
shade too candid. His discrimination seemed to mark a possible, a
natural reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account the
girl had just given of her own intention. There _was_ a difference in
the air--even if none other than the supposedly usual difference in
truth between man and woman; and it was almost as if the sense of this
provoked her. She seemed to cast about an instant, and then she went
back a little resentfully to something she had suffered to pass a
minute before. She appeared to take up rather more seriously than she
need the joke about her freedom to deceive. Yet she did this too in a
beautiful way. "Men are too stupid--even you. You didn't understand
just now why, if I post my letters myself, it won't be for any thing so
vulgar as to hide them."
"Oh, you said--for the pleasure."
"Yes; but you didn't, you don't understand what the pleasure may be.
There are refinements----!" she more patiently dropped. "I mean of
consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation," she went on. "No," she
sadly insisted--_"men_ don't know. They know, in such matters, almost
nothing but what women show them."
This was one of the speeches, frequent in her, that, liberally,
joyfully, intensely adopted and, in itself, as might be, embraced, drew
him again as close to her, and held him as long, as their conditions
permitted. "Then that's exactly why we've such an abysmal need of you!"
BOOK THIRD
V
The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss season, had been warned
that their design was unconsidered, that the passes would not be clear,
nor the air mild, nor the inns open--the two ladies who,
characteristically, had braved a good deal of possibly interested
remonstrance were finding themselves, as their adventure turned out,
wonderfully sustained. It was the judgment of the head-waiters and
other functionaries on the Italian lakes that approved itself now as
interested; they themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of
bolder dreams--at least the younger had; so that one of the things they
made out together--making out as they did an endless variety--was that
in those operatic palaces of the Villa d'Este, of Cadenabbia, of
Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however reinforced by a
travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to be beguiled and
undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest; they had for
instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way by the
Brünig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we meet them, and
were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of the early
high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the places to pause
and rest more numerous.
Such at least had been the intimated attitude of Mrs. Stringham, the
elder of the companions, who had her own view of the impatiences of the
younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition but of the most
circuitous. She moved, the admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of
observation and suspicion; she was in the position, as she believed, of
knowing much more about Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet
of having to darken her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman
in the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for
duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal
subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
relation; had now in fact to recognise that an education in the
occult--she could scarce say what to call it--had begun for her the day
she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that
purpose; had seen little of the girl--or rather had seen her but
briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much,
saw everything--before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly
placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated
as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in
many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In Boston, the winter
before, the young lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her, dropped into her mind the
shy conceit of some assistance, some devotion to render. Mrs.
Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits--secret
dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls without,
for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its
rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link
with the remarkable young thing from New York--_had_ mustered courage:
had perched, on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find,
and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later,
it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.
Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent
making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was
not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements,
in the interest of the particular peace that New York could not give.
It was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many
things--perhaps even too many--New York _could_ give; but this was felt
to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to
do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your
situation as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else
could, and it had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such
measure of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the
moment had not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in
any degree ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then
unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately
haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than
two-and-twenty in spite of her marks, whose hair was some how
exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently
confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for
robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New
York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history,
confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers,
sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep
that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of
affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by
most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's
back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken,
she was rich, and, in particular, she was strange--a combination in
itself of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the
strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as
she was that it was much greater than any one else--any one but the
sole Susan Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston
was not in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing
Boston, and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was
delusive and vain. She was seeing her, and she had quite the deepest
moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision.
She couldn't explain it--no one would understand. They would say clever
Boston things--Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington, Vermont, which she
boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far
south"--but they would only darken counsel.
There could be no better proof, than this quick intellectual split, of
the impression made on our friend, who shone, herself, she was well
aware, with but the reflected light of the admirable city. She too had
had her discipline, but it had not made her striking; it had been
prosaically usual, though doubtless a decent dose; and had only made
her usual to match it--usual, that is, as Boston went. She had lost
first her husband, and then her mother, with whom, on her husband's
death, she had lived again; so that now, childless, she was but more
sharply single than before. But she sat rather coldly light, having, as
she called it, enough to live on--so far, that is, as she lived by
bread alone: how little indeed she was regularly content with that diet
appeared from the name she had made--Susan Shepherd Stringham--as a
contributor to the best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she
fondly believed she had her "note," the art of showing New England
without showing it wholly in the kitchen. She had not herself been
brought up in the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to speak
for them had thus become with her a literary mission. To _be_ in truth
literary had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her
bright little nippers perpetually in position. There were masters,
models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom she finely accounted so and
in whose light she ingeniously laboured; there were others whom,
however chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for she was full of
discrimination; but all categories failed her--they ceased at least to
signify--as soon as she found herself in presence of the real thing,
the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred--what
positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. She had
had, it seemed to her, a revelation--such as even New England refined
and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as she was of small
neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions, mixed
with something moral, personal, that was still more intensely
responsive, she felt her new friend would have done her an ill turn if
their friendship shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would be left
of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender of everything
else that she was, however, quite prepared, and while she went about
her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she was really
all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so
Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so
truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached
her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance
on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each
evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense and
resignation; she attended her almost daily concert with the same
expenditure of patience and the same economy of passion; she flitted in
and out of the Public Library with the air of conscientiously returning
or bravely carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
finally--it was what she most did--she watched the thin trickle of a
fictive "love-interest" through that somewhat serpentine channel, in
the magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it. But the
real thing, all the while, was elsewhere; the real thing had gone back
to New York, leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
distinct, of why it _was_ real, and whether she should ever be so near
it again.
For the figure to which these questions attached themselves she had
found a convenient description--she thought of it for herself, always,
as that of a girl with a background. The great reality was in the fact
that, very soon, after but two or three meetings, the girl with the
background, the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once more rebellious in its
gloom and more frivolous in its frills, had told her she had never seen
any one like her. They had met thus as opposed curiosities, and that
simple remark of Milly's--if simple it was--became the most important
thing that had ever happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for
the time, of actuality and even of pertinence; it moved her first, in
short, in a high degree, to gratitude, and then to no small compassion.
Yet in respect to this relation at least it was what did prove the key
of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else could do the poor young
woman's history. That the potential heiress of all the ages should
never have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber, after all, to
the "Transcript" was a truth that--in especial as announced with
modesty, with humility, with regret--described a situation. It laid
upon the elder woman, as to the void to be filled, a weight of
responsibility; but in particular it led her to ask whom poor Mildred
_had_ then seen, and what range of contacts it had taken to produce
such queer surprises. That was really the inquiry that had ended by
clearing the air: the key of knowledge was felt to click in the lock
from the moment it flashed upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had been
starved for culture. Culture was what she herself represented for her,
and it was living up to that principle that would surely prove the
great business. She knew, the clever lady, what the principle itself
represented, and the limits of her own store; and a certain alarm would
have grown upon her if something else hadn't grown faster.
This was, fortunately for her--and we give it in her own words--the
sense of a harrowing pathos. That, primarily, was what appealed to her,
what seemed to open the door of romance for her still wider than any,
than a still more reckless, connection with the "picture-papers." For
such was essentially the point: it was rich, romantic, abysmal, to
have, as was evident, thousands and thousands a year, to have youth and
intelligence and if not beauty, at least, in equal measure, a high,
dim, charming, ambiguous oddity, which was even better, and then on top
of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the freedom of the wind in the
desert--it was unspeakably touching to be so equipped and yet to have
been reduced by fortune to little humble-minded mistakes.
It brought our friend's imagination back again to New York, where
aberrations were so possible in the intellectual sphere, and it in fact
caused a visit she presently paid there to overflow with interest. As
Milly had beautifully invited her, so she would hold out if she could
against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the
remarkable thing was that even at the end of three weeks she _had_ held
out. But by this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free;
it was dealing with new quantities, a different proportion
altogether--and that had made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone
home in convenient possession of her subject. New York was vast, New
York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite
backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got
nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final
flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living
ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in
the marble of famous French chisels--all this, to say nothing of the
effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small
world-space both crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all events
effected an exchange; the elder friend had been as consciously
intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding in personal
revelation, had been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
poetry--it was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune
even than Maeterlink and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She
appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her hostess,
rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but what they
managed and what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim depths
of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her
central clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious
enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single alarm--the fear that
she really might act on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was
positively afraid of what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to
avoid it with piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to
leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, however light,
however just, however earnest and anxious, would be half good enough,
would be anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection--this now imposed
itself as a consistent, an inspiring thought.
Less than a month after the event that had so determined Mrs.
Stringham's attitude--close upon the heels, that is, of her return from
New York--she was reached by a proposal that brought up for her the
kind of question her delicacy might have to contend with. Would she
start for Europe with her young friend at the earliest possible date,
and should she be willing to do so without making conditions? The
inquiry was launched by wire; explanations, in sufficiency, were
promised; extreme urgency was suggested, and a general surrender
invited. It was to the honour of her sincerity that she made the
surrender on the spot, though it was not perhaps altogether to that of
her logic. She had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give
something up for her new acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that
she was practically giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of
a particular impression, the impression that had throughout more and
more supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might
by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the
creature's greatness. She would have been content so to leave it;
unless indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the
biggest impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest
account of her, and none but a big, clearly, would do. Her situation,
as such things were called, was on the grand scale; but it still was
not that. It was her nature, once for all--a nature that reminded Mrs.
Stringham of the term always used in the newspapers about the great new
steamers, the inordinate number of "feet of water" they drew; so that
if, in your little boat, you had chosen to hover and approach, you had
but yourself to thank, when once motion was started, for the way the
draught pulled you. Milly drew the feet of water, and odd though it
might seem that a lonely girl, who was not robust and who hated sound
and show, should stir the stream like a leviathan, her companion
floated off with the sense of rocking violently at her side. More than
prepared, however, for that excitement, Mrs. Stringham mainly failed of
ease in respect to her own consistency. To attach herself for an
indefinite time seemed a roundabout way of holding her hands off. If
she wished to be sure of neither touching nor smutching, the straighter
plan would doubtless have been not to keep her friend within reach.
This in fact she fully recognised, and with it the degree to which she
desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain to be so
much finer than that of anybody else. The difficulty, however, by good
fortune, cleared away as soon as she had further recognised, as she was
speedily able to do, that she, Susan Shepherd--the name with which
Milly for the most part amused herself--was _not_ anybody else. She had
renounced that character; she had now no life to lead; and she honestly
believed that she was thus supremely equipped for leading Milly's own.
No other person whatever, she was sure, had to an equal degree this
qualification, and it was really to assert it that she fondly embarked.
Many things, though not in many weeks, had come and gone since then,
and one of the best of them, doubtless, had been the voyage itself, by
the happy southern course, to the succession of Mediterranean ports,
with the dazzled wind-up at Naples. Two or three others had preceded
this; incidents, indeed rather lively marks, of their last fortnight at
home, and one of which had determined on Mrs. Stringham's part a rush
to New York, forty-eight breathless hours there, previous to her final
rally. But the great sustained sea-light had drunk up the rest of the
picture, so that for many days other questions and other possibilities
sounded with as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound
in a Wagner overture. It was the Wagner overture that practically
prevailed, up through Italy, where Milly had already been, still
further up and across the Alps, which were also partly known to Mrs.
Stringham; only perhaps "taken" to a time not wholly congruous, hurried
in fact on account of the girl's high restlessness. She had been
expected, she had frankly promised, to be restless--that was partly why
she was "great"--or was a consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet
she had not perhaps altogether announced herself as straining so hard
at the cord. It was familiar, it was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that
she had arrears to make up, the chances that had lapsed for her through
the wanton ways of forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher
sides, and fond almost of nothing else; but the vagueness, the
openness, the eagerness without point and the interest without
pause--all a part of the charm of her oddity as at first presented--had
become more striking in proportion as they triumphed over movement and
change. She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could
have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them;
such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it
as light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear
as noon; of being unmistakably gay, and yet making it as soft as dusk.
Mrs. Stringham by this time understood everything, was more than ever
confirmed in wonder and admiration, in her view that it was life enough
simply to feel her companion's feelings; but there were special keys
she had not yet added to her bunch, impressions that, of a sudden, were
apt to affect her as new.
This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason,
full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some
deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such
depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself
suddenly draw back. It was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that
now troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American
sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the
suspected presence of something behind it--which, however, could
scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What any
fresh motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was, in short,
not to be divined. It was but half an explanation to say that
excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they
had left behind, or tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs.
Stringham liked to call them--was once more coming into sight as
objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were
general appearances from which the girl's own aspect, her really larger
vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to
a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her
taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got
hold of mightn't be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the
rarest--as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse--cases
of American intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm--asked
herself if her young friend were merely going to treat her to some
complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a week, however, with their
further progress, her young friend had effectively answered the
question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of
something that had a reality compared with which the nervous
explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from
that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained
a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on
sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would
become instantly the light in which Milly was to be read.
Such a matter as this may at all events speak of the style in which our
young woman could affect those who were near her, may testify to the
sort of interest she could inspire. She worked--and seemingly quite
without design--upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her
associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer
to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their
confusion. She reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, reduced
them to a consenting bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good
lady, on a last analysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness.
She exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because _they_ were
so far from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day on the Brünig
the spell of watching her had grown more than ever irresistible; a
proof of what--or of a part of what--Mrs. Stringham had, with all the
rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young
friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't
pounce, she hadn't come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention
secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck
herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps,
concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly
know what was the matter; and to watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way
of clinging to the girl, not less than an occupation, a satisfaction in
itself. The pleasure of watching, moreover, if a reason were needed,
came from a sense of her beauty. Her beauty hadn't at all originally
seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs. Stringham had, even in the
first flush of friendship, not named it, grossly, to any one; having
seen early that, for stupid people--and who, she sometimes secretly
asked herself, wasn't stupid?--it would take a great deal of
explaining. She had learned not to mention it till it was mentioned
first--which occasionally happened, but not too often; and then she was
there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception that met her own
perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special items; while,
in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of herself
employing the word that most people employed. She employed it to
pretend that she was also stupid and so have done with the matter;
spoke of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially
dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things."
This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks, doubtless, to
rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together
with too little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was
expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence. When
Milly smiled it was a public event--when she didn't it was a chapter of
history. They had stopped, on the Brünig, for luncheon, and there had
come up for them under the charm of the place the question of a longer
stay.
Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small
sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but
which, on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed
itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of
her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a
term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form
of silver medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked
with alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were
taken highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed
her familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the
best. These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the
pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like
Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of
the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and with
extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had
embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her
presence. She had given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and
Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards a standard of
comparison for all cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in
especial--Susan was the younger--with a character that, as Mrs.
Stringham had often had occasion, through life, to say to herself, made
all the difference. It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over
and over again and in the most remote connections, that, thanks to her
parent's lonely, thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
There were plenty of women who were all sorts of things that she
wasn't, but who, on the other hand, were not that, and who didn't know
_she_ was (which she liked--it relegated them still further) and didn't
know, either, how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen
herself so much in this light as during the actual phase of her
associated, if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness
gave perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The
irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were part of
the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like
an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth--the taste of
honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of
streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
gorges.
Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at
moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed
it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the
confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess,
the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the
wearer--it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality. It
might have been, possibly, with its involved loneliness and other
mysteries, the weight under which she fancied her companion's admirable
head occasionally, and ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite
assented at luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to look at
rooms, settle questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage
and horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion
particularly, brought home to her--all agreeably, richly, almost
grandly--what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had, in a
sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question of difficulty,
which she got rid of, furthermore, not in the least as one had seen
many charming persons do, by merely passing it on to others. She kept
it completely at a distance: it never entered the circle; the most
plaintive confidant couldn't have dragged it in; and to tread the path
of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service was in other
words so easy to render that the whole thing was like court life
without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of money,
and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that if
one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this
incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most
made it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading
person she couldn't have imagined; but it was, all the same, the truth
of truths that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might
leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible
and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was
in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that
she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the
curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the
_mode du jour,_ that peeped from under the corresponding indifference
of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of
noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but
antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had
mechanically possessed herself. She couldn't dress it away, nor walk it
away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it
away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She
couldn't have lost it if she had tried--that was what it was to be
really rich. It had to be _the_ thing you were. When at the end of an
hour she had not returned to the house Mrs. Stringham, though the
bright afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same
direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But the
purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of a due
regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once more, the
good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her slightly "underhand"
even in her own eyes. She couldn't help that, however, and she didn't
care, sure as she was that what she really wanted was not to overstep,
but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop in time that she went
softly, but she had on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for
she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety, the footpath she
believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside and into the
higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they had so often
wanted, as they passed above or below, to stray; and then it obscured
itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham
reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered
old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that
sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long before
passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way would
drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in fact, a quarter of
an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led somewhere,
yet apparently quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether, though
probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her uncertainty
moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the presence on a
fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz volume that the
girl had brought out, and that therefore pointed to her shortly
previous passage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an
encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as
she hadn't yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs.
Stringham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was
quite an accident that she had not, before they were over, betrayed by
her deeper agitation the fact of her own nearness.
The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a
sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall
precipitously and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great
extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the
promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not
stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her
friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path
somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl's seat
was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that
merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so
placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last
completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what
she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her
liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single
false movement, by a turn of the head--how could one tell? into
whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in
the poor lady's ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly's. It
was a commotion that left our observer intensely still and holding her
breath. What had first been offered her was the possibility of a latent
intention--however wild the idea--in such a posture; of some betrayed
accordance of Milly's caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But
since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable,
must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse of
a few seconds had a partly reassuring effect. It gave her time to
receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly
retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This was
the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating
there, she was not meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she
sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had
nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of
the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain,
it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among
them, or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham
had decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she
saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to
sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to
withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her
breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.
Not many minutes probably, yet they had not seemed few, and they had
given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while
waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when,
late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point
of the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the
pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word--_à
bientôt!_--across the cover; then, even under the girl's continued
delay, had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw
that the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction
that the future was not to exist for her princess in the form of any
sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn't be for
her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would
be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to
the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly
presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to
say to herself, even after another interval of some length, that if her
young friend still continued absent it wouldn't be because--whatever
the opportunity--she had cut short the thread. She wouldn't have
committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakably reserved for some more
complicated passage; this was the very vision in which she had, with no
little awe, been discovered. The image that thus remained with the
elder lady kept the character of revelation. During the breathless
minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter's
type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery,
all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had
been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham's flame. They are things
that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly
represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger on our friend's part
than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was scarce yet used to
carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine of something precious.
She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared.
The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She
was not thinking, either, of Milly's gold.
VI
The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the
Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she had not the book
with her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at
all. Her comrade's decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of
having followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully
enough, the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared
itself. "Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that
after all----?"
Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the
question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately
made such a sign that Milly's words gave place to visible relief at her
assent. "You don't care for our stop here--you'd rather go straight on?
We'll start then with the peep of to-morrow's dawn--or as early as you
like; it's only rather late now to take the road again." And she smiled
to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was
what the girl would have wished. "I bullied you into stopping," she
added; "so it serves me right."
Milly made in general the most of her good friend's jokes; but she
humoured this one a little absently. "Oh yes, you do bully me." And it
was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they
would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist's
interest in the detail of the matter--in spite of a declaration from
the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere--appeared
almost immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised,
however, to think till supper of where, with the world all before them,
they might go--supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of
lighted candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles
at wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the
evening meal a peculiar poetry--such being the mild adventures, the
refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went in
for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to "lie
down"; but at the end of three minutes more she was not lying down, she
was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of
four thousand miles: "What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when
you saw him alone, Dr. Finch said to you?"
It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question
had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the
effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false
answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the "ninth," in New
York, the time she had seen Dr. Finch alone, and to recall what he had
then said to her; and when everything had come back it was quite, at
first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely
mattered. He hadn't, however, in fact; it was only as if he might
perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth--within ten
days of their sailing--that she had hurried from Boston under the
alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had
suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an
upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident
had happily soon announced itself as slight, and there had been, in the
event, but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced
again not only possible, but, as representing "change," highly
advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself
with the doctor, that was, clearly, no more at his instance than at her
own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange of
enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of "Europe"; and this
assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give.
"Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn't know or
mightn't then have known. I've no secret with him about you. What makes
you suspect it? I don't quite make out how you know I did see him
alone."
"No--you never told me," said Milly. "And I don't mean," she went on,
"during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your
heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better--the last
thing before you went home."
Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who told you I saw him then?"
_"He_ didn't himself--nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of
it now for the first time. That's exactly why!" Milly declared--with
something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her
companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and,
chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with
the question? "But if you're not, as you now assure me, in his
confidence," she smiled, "it's no matter."
"I'm not in his confidence, and he had nothing to confide. But are you
feeling unwell?"
The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she
named was not at all the one that seemed to fit--witness the long climb
Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face,
but that her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often
brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little
mysteriously to smile. "I don't know--haven't really the least idea.
But it might be well to find out."
Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy. "Are you in trouble--in
pain?"
"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder----!"
"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"
"Well, if I shall have much of it."
Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"
"Of everything. Of everything I have."
Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You 'have'
everything; so that when you say 'much' of it----"
"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if
I _have_ got it."
She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of
perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by
something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet
actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. "If you've got
an ailment?"
"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
"Ah, _that_--like almost nobody else."
"Then for how long?"
Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half
enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And then
as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a
shade more conscious: "We'll go straight to the best near doctor." This
too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence,
sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost
herself. "Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in distress."
"I don't think I've really _everything,"_ Milly said as if to
explain--and as if also to put it pleasantly.
"But what on earth can I do for you?" The girl hesitated, then seemed
on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed
herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I'm only too happy!"
It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham's doubt.
"Then what's the matter?"
"That's the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."
"But what is it you think you haven't got?"
Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim
show of joy. "The power to resist the bliss of what I _have!"_
Mrs. Stringham took it in--her sense of being "put off" with it, the
possible, probable irony of it--and her tenderness renewed itself in
the positive grimness of a long murmur. "Whom will you see?"--for it
was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors.
"Where will you first go?"
Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came
back with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I'll tell you at
supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness
that testified for her companion to something that again particularly
pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just
concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a
hooked needle and a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was
always provided--this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no
doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn't really been
in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but
the excess of the joy of life, and everything _did_ then fit. She
couldn't stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the
sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces.
There was no evasion of any truth--so at least Susan Shepherd hoped--in
one's sitting there while the twilight deepened and feeling still more
finely that the position of this young lady was magnificent. The
evening at that height had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers
had bespoken a fire with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted its
brave presence through the small panes of the low, clean windows, with
incidents at the inn-door, the yellow _diligence,_ the great waggons,
the hurrying, hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful
friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes,
pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of
strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest
interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It
was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion's
position should strike her as, after all, the best meaning she could
extract; for she herself was seated in the magnificence as in a
court-carriage--she came back to that, and such a method of
progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently have a
great deal more to give. By the time the candles were lighted for
supper and the short, white curtains were drawn, Milly had reappeared,
and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That charm
moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without further
loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. "I want to go straight to
London."
It was unexpected, corresponding with no view positively taken at their
departure; when England had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated
and postponed--seen for the moment, as who should say, at the end of an
avenue of preparations and introductions. London, in short, might have
been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved like a siege by
gradual approaches. Milly's actual fine stride was therefore the more
exciting, as any simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham;
who, besides, was afterwards to recall as the very beginning of a drama
the terms in which, between their smoky candles, the girl had put her
preference and in which still other things had come up, come while the
clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air reached their ears, with the
stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets and the foreign questions,
foreign answers, that were all alike a part of the cheery converse of
the road. The girl brought it out in truth as she might have brought a
huge confession, something she admitted herself shy about and that
would seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled over her that what
she wanted of Europe was "people," so far as they were to be had, and
that if her friend really wished to know, the vision of this same
equivocal quantity was what had haunted her during their previous days,
in museums and churches, and what was again spoiling for her the pure
taste of scenery. She was all for scenery--yes; but she wanted it human
and personal, and all she could say was that there would be in
London--wouldn't there? more of that kind than anywhere else. She came
back to her idea that if it wasn't for long--if nothing should happen
to be so for _her_--why, the particular thing she spoke of would
probably have most to give her in the time, would probably be less than
anything else a waste of her remainder. She produced this last
consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again
disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready--if talk of early dying was
in order--to match it from her own future. Good, then; they would, eat
and drink because of what might happen to-morrow; and they would direct
their course from that moment with a view to such eating and drinking.
They ate and drank that night, in truth, as if in the spirit of this
decision; whereby the air, before they separated, felt itself the
clearer.
It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive--extensive, that
is, in proportion to the signs of life presented. The idea of "people"
was not so entertained on Milly's part as to connect itself with
particular persons, and the fact remained for each of the ladies that
they would, completely unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely
unknowing. They had no relation already formed; this plea Mrs.
Stringham put forward to see what it would produce. It produced nothing
at first but the observation on the girl's side that what she had in
mind was no thought of society nor of scraping acquaintance; nothing
was further from her than to desire the opportunities represented for
the compatriot in general by a trunkful of "letters." It wasn't a
question, in short, of the people the compatriot was after; it was the
human, the English picture itself, as they might see it in their own
way--the world imagined always in what one had read and dreamed. Mrs.
Stringham did every justice to this world, but when later on an
occasion chanced to present itself, she made a point of not omitting to
remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance even an
individual. This still, however, failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch"
Milly, so that she had presently to go all the way. "Haven't I
understood from you, for that matter, that you gave Mr. Densher
something of a promise?"
There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look had to be taken as
representing one of two things--either that she was completely vague
about the promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started no train.
But she really couldn't be so vague about the promise, her
interlocutress quickly saw, without attaching it to something; it had
to be a promise to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In the
event, accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so
unusually clever young Englishman who had made his appearance in New
York on some special literary business--wasn't it?--shortly before
their departure, and who had been three or four times in her house
during the brief period between her visit to Boston and her companion's
subsequent stay with her; but she required much reminding before it
came back to her that she had mentioned to this companion just
afterwards the confidence expressed by the personage in question in her
never doing so dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase
was, looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his
confidence, the form of which might have appeared a trifle free--that
she now reasserted; she had done nothing either to impair or to enhance
it; but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the connection and at the
time, rather sorry to have missed Mr. Densher. She had thought of him
again after that, the elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to
notice that Milly appeared not to have done so--which the girl might
easily have betrayed; and, interested as she was in everything that
concerned her, she had made out for herself, for herself only and
rather idly, that, but for interruptions, the young Englishman might
have become a better acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was
one of the signs that in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a
young person with the world before her, for sympathy and wonder.
Isolated, unmothered, unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her
big house, her big fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to
"receive," for all her few years, as an older woman might have done--as
was done, precisely, by princesses who had public considerations to
observe and who came of age very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs.
Stringham then that Mr. Densher had gone off somewhere else in
connection with his errand before her visit to New York, it had been
also not undiscoverable that he had come back for a day or two later
on, that is after her own second excursion--that he had in fine
reappeared on a single occasion on his way to the West: his way from
Washington as she believed, though he was out of sight at the time of
her joining her friend for their departure. It had not occurred to her
before to exaggerate--it had not occurred to her that she could; but
she seemed to become aware to-night that there had been just enough in
this relation to meet, to provoke, the free conception of a little more.
She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or no promise, Milly
would, at a pinch, be able, in London, to act on his permission to make
him a sign; to which Milly replied with readiness that her ability,
though evident, would be none the less quite wasted, inasmuch as the
gentleman would, to a certainty, be still in America. He had a great
deal to do there--which he would scarce have begun; and in fact she
might very well not have thought of London at all if she hadn't been
sure he wasn't yet near coming back. It was perceptible to her
companion that the moment our young woman had so far committed herself
she had a sense of having overstepped; which was not quite patched up
by her saying the next minute, possibly with a certain failure of
presence of mind, that the last thing she desired was the air of
running after him. Mrs. Stringham wondered privately what question
there could be of any such appearance--the danger of which thus
suddenly came up; but she said, for the time, nothing of it--she only
said other things: one of which was, for instance, that if Mr. Densher
was away he was away, and that this was the end of it; also that of
course they must be discreet at any price. But what was the measure of
discretion, and how was one to be sure? So it was that, as they sat
there, she produced her own case: _she_ had a possible tie with London,
which she desired as little to disown as she might wish to risk
presuming on it. She treated her companion, in short, for their
evening's end, to the story of Maud Manningham, the odd but interesting
English girl who had formed her special affinity in the old days at the
Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with a
regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed, yet
that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so
that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the occasion of the
marriage of each. They had then once more fondly, scrupulously
written--Mrs. Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
afterwards passed. This, however, had been the end--though with no
rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a
great marriage, while she herself had made a small; on top of which,
moreover, distance, difference, diminished community and impossible
reunion had done the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
that reunion had begun to show as possible--if the other party to it,
that is, should be still in existence. That was exactly what it now
struck our friend as interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and
another, she believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all
events now make if Milly didn't object.
Milly in general objected to nothing, and, though she asked a question
or two, she raised no present plea. Her questions--or at least her own
answers to them--kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's part, a backward train:
she hadn't known till tonight how much she remembered, or how fine it
might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured Maud, florid,
exotic and alien--which had been just the spell--even to the
perceptions of youth. There was the danger--she frankly touched
it--that such a temperament mightn't have matured, with the years, all
in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger that, in renewing
relations after long breaks, one had always to look in the face. To
gather in strayed threads was to take a risk--for which, however, she
was prepared if Milly was. The possible "fun," she confessed, was by
itself rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this--wound up a
little as she was--the note of fun as the harmless final right of fifty
years of mere New England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards
to recall was the indescribable look dropped on her, at this, by her
companion; she was still seated there between the candles and before
the finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to
figure for her as an inscrutable comment on _her_ notion of freedom.
Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed
perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been
mainly soundless, her friend's story--produced as a resource
unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve--half surprised, half beguiled
her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that, she brought
out, before she went to bed, an easy, a light "Risk everything!"
This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud
Lowder's evoked presence--as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became,
in excited reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
when the girl had left her, took place in her--nameless but, as soon as
she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this
fulness of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage, just
sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had
left her behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the
corresponding date in her own life--not the second, the sad one, with
its dignity of sadness, but the first, with the meagreness of its
supposed felicity--she had been, in the same spirit, almost
patronisingly pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased to
matter, had never quite died out for her, there was doubtless some
oddity in its now offering itself as a link, rather than as another
break, in the chain; and indeed there might well have been for her a
mood in which the notion of the development of patronage in her quondam
schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was
actually settled--if the case be worth our analysis--by the happy
consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her having
at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company, had appeared
to have so much, and would now--for wasn't it also, in general, quite
the rich law of English life?--have, with accretions, promotions,
expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might be; she
rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might
have to show--and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice--she
would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy
producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late--till the candles
were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat
portfolio. She had not lost the old clue; there were connections she
remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She
wrote on the spot.
BOOK FOURTH
VII
It had all gone so fast after this that Milly uttered but the truth
nearest to hand in saying to the gentleman on her right--who was, by
the same token, the gentleman on her hostess's left--that she scarce
even then knew where she was: the words marking her first full sense of
a situation really romantic. They were already dining, she and her
friend, at Lancaster Gate, and surrounded, as it seemed to her, with
every English accessory; though her consciousness of Mrs. Lowder's
existence, and still more of her remarkable identity, had been of so
recent and so sudden a birth. Susie, as she was apt to call her
companion for a lighter change, had only had to wave a neat little wand
for the fairy-tale to begin at once; in consequence of which Susie now
glittered--for, with Mrs. Stringham's new sense of success, it came to
that--in the character of a fairy godmother. Milly had almost insisted
on dressing her, for the present occasion, as one; and it was no fault
of the girl's if the good lady had not now appeared in a peaked hat, a
short petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch.
The good lady, in truth, bore herself not less contentedly than if
these insignia had marked her work; and Milly's observation to Lord
Mark had just been, doubtless, the result of such a light exchange of
looks with her as even the great length of the table had not baffled.
There were twenty persons between them, but this sustained passage was
the sharpest sequel yet to that other comparison of views during the
pause on the Swiss pass. It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune
had been unduly precipitated--as if, properly, they were in the
position of having ventured on a small joke and found the answer out of
proportion grave. She could not at this moment, for instance, have said
whether, with her quickened perceptions, she were more enlivened or
oppressed; and the case might in fact have been serious had she not, by
good fortune, from the moment the picture loomed, quickly made up her
mind that what finally most concerned her was neither to seek nor to
shirk, was not even to wonder too much, but was to let things come as
they would, since there was little enough doubt of how they would go.
Lord Mark had been brought to her before dinner--not by Mrs. Lowder,
but by the handsome girl, that lady's niece, who was now at the other
end and on the same side as Susie; he had taken her in, and she meant
presently to ask him about Miss Croy, the handsome girl, actually
offered to her sight--though now in a splendid way--but for the second
time. The first time had been the occasion--only three days before--of
her calling at their hotel with her aunt and then making, for our other
two heroines, a great impression of beauty and eminence. This
impression had remained so with Milly that, at present, and although
her attention was aware at the same time of everything else, her eyes
were mainly engaged with Kate Croy when not engaged with Susie. That
wonderful creature's eyes moreover readily met them--she ranked now as
a wonderful creature; and it seemed a part of the swift prosperity of
the American visitors that, so little in the original reckoning, she
should yet appear conscious, charmingly, frankly conscious, of
possibilities of friendship for them. Milly had easily and, as a guest,
gracefully generalised: English girls had a special, strong beauty, and
it particularly showed in evening dress--above all when, as was
strikingly the case with this one, the dress itself was what it should
be. That observation she had all ready for Lord Mark when they should,
after a little, get round to it. She seemed even now to see that there
might be a good deal they would get round to; the indication being
that, taken up once for all with her other neighbour, their hostess
would leave them much to themselves. Mrs. Lowder's other neighbour was
the Bishop of Murrum--a real bishop, such as Milly had never seen, with
a complicated costume, a voice like an old-fashioned wind instrument,
and a face all the portrait of a prelate; while the gentleman on our
young lady's left, a gentleman thick-necked, large and literal, who
looked straight before him and as if he were not to be diverted by vain
words from that pursuit, clearly counted as an offset to the possession
of Lord Mark. As Milly made out these things--with a shade of
exhilaration at the way she already fell in--she saw how she was
justified of her plea for people and her love of life. It wasn't then,
as the prospect seemed to show, so difficult to get into the current,
or to stand, at any rate, on the bank. It was easy to get near--if they
_were_ near; and yet the elements were different enough from any of her
old elements, and positively rich and strange.
She asked herself if her right-hand neighbour would understand what she
meant by such a description of them, should she throw it off; but
another of the things to which, precisely, her sense was awakened was
that no, decidedly, he wouldn't. It was nevertheless by this time open
to her that his line would be to be clever; and indeed, evidently, no
little of the interest was going to be in the fresh reference and fresh
effect both of people's cleverness and of their simplicity. She
thrilled, she consciously flushed, and turned pale with the
certitude--it had never been so present--that she should find herself
completely involved: the very air of the place, the pitch of the
occasion, had for her so positive a taste and so deep an undertone. The
smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the
sound of words, especially of names, across the table, the shape of the
forks, the arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants,
the walls of the room, were all touches in a picture and denotements in
a play; and they marked for her, moreover, her alertness of vision. She
had never, she might well believe, been in such a state of vibration;
her sensibility was almost too sharp for her comfort: there were, for
example, more indications than she could reduce to order in the manner
of the friendly niece, who struck her as distinguished and interesting,
as in fact surprisingly genial. This young woman's type had, visibly,
other possibilities; yet here, of its own free movement, it had already
sketched a relation. Were they, Miss Croy and she, to take up the tale
where their two elders had left it off so many years before?--were they
to find they liked each other and to try for themselves if a scheme of
constancy on more modern lines could be worked? She had doubted, as
they came to England, of Maud Manningham, had believed her a broken
reed and a vague resource, had seen their dependence on her as a state
of mind that would have been shamefully silly--so far as it _was_
dependence--had they wished to do any thing so inane as "get into
society." To have made their pilgrimage all for the sake of such
society as Mrs. Lowder might have in reserve for them--that didn't bear
thinking of at all, and she herself had quite chosen her course for
curiosity about other matters. She would have described this curiosity
as a desire to see the places she had read about, and _that_
description of her motive she was prepared to give her neighbour--even
though, as a consequence of it, he should find how little she had read.
It was almost at present as if her poor prevision had been rebuked by
the majesty--she could scarcely call it less--of the event, or at all
events by the commanding character of the two figures--she could
scarcely call _that_ less either--mainly presented. Mrs. Lowder and her
niece, however dissimilar, had at least in common that each was a great
reality. That was true, primarily, of the aunt--so true that Milly
wondered how her own companion had arrived, in other days, at so odd an
alliance; yet she none the less felt Mrs. Lowder as a person of whom
the mind might in two or three days roughly make the circuit. She would
sit there massive, at least, while one attempted it; whereas Miss Croy,
the handsome girl, would indulge in incalculable movements that might
interfere with one's tour. She was real, none the less, and everything
and everybody were real; and it served them right, no doubt, the pair
of them, for having rushed into their adventure.
Lord Mark's intelligence meanwhile, however, had met her own quite
sufficiently to enable him to tell her how little he could clear up her
situation. He explained, for that matter--or at least he hinted--that
there was no such thing, to-day in London, as saying where any one was.
Every one was everywhere--nobody was anywhere. He should be put to
it--yes, frankly--to give a name of any sort or kind to their hostess's
"set." _Was_ it a set at all, or wasn't it, and were there not really
no such things as sets, in the place, any more?--was there any thing
but the senseless shifting tumble, like that of some great greasy sea
in mid-Channel, of an overwhelming melted mixture? He threw out the
question, which seemed large; Milly felt that at the end of five
minutes he had thrown out a great many, though he followed none more
than a step or two; perhaps he would prove suggestive, but he helped
her as yet to no discriminations: he spoke as if he had given them up
from too much knowledge. He was thus at the opposite extreme from
herself, but, as a consequence of it, also wandering and lost; and he
was furthermore, for all his temporary incoherence, to which she
guessed there would be some key, as great a reality as either Mrs.
Lowder or Kate. The only light in which he placed the former of these
ladies was that of an extraordinary woman--a most extraordinary woman,
and "the more extraordinary the more one knows her," while of the
latter he said nothing, for the moment, but that she was tremendously,
yes, quite tremendously, good-looking. It was some time, she thought,
before his talk showed his cleverness, and yet each minute she believed
in it more, quite apart from what her hostess had told her on first
naming him. Perhaps he was one of the cases she had heard of at
home--those characteristic cases of people in England who concealed
their play of mind so much more than they showed it. Even Mr. Densher a
little did that. And what made Lord Mark, at any rate, so real either,
when this was a thing he so definitely insisted on? His type some how,
as by a life, a need, an intention of its own, insisted _for_ him; but
that was all. It was difficult to guess his age--whether he were a
young man who looked old or an old man who looked young; it seemed to
prove nothing, as against other things, that he was bald and, as might
have been said, slightly stale, or, more delicately perhaps, dry: there
was such a fine little fidget of preoccupied life in him, and his eyes,
at moments--though it was an appearance they could suddenly lose--were
as candid and clear as those of a pleasant boy. Very neat, very light,
and so fair that there was little other indication of his moustache
than his constantly feeling it--which was again boyish--he would have
affected her as the most intellectual person present if he had not
affected her as the most frivolous. The latter quality was rather in
his look than in anything else, though he constantly wore his double
eyeglass, which was, much more, Bostonian and thoughtful.
The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal
designation, which represented--as yet, for our young woman, a little
confusedly--a connection with an historic patriciate, a class that, in
turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element
that she had never heard otherwise described than as "fashion." The
supreme social element in New York had never known itself but as
reduced to that category, and though Milly was aware that, as applied
to a territorial and political aristocracy, the label was probably too
simple, she had for the time none other at hand. She presently, it is
true, enriched her idea with the perception that her interlocutor was
indifferent; yet this, indifferent as aristocracies notoriously were,
saw her but little further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first
place, he would much rather get on with her than not, and in the second
was only thinking of too many matters of his own. If he kept her in
view on the one hand and kept so much else on the other--the way he
crumbed up his bread was a proof--why did he hover before her as a
potentially insolent noble? She couldn't have answered the question,
and it was precisely one of those that swarmed. They were complicated,
she might fairly have said, by his visibly knowing, having known from
afar off, that she was a stranger and an American, and by his none the
less making no more of it than if she and her like were the chief of
his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, irreclaimably,
for granted, and it wouldn't in the least help that she herself knew
him, as quickly, for having been in her country and threshed it out.
There would be nothing for her to explain or attenuate or brag about;
she could neither escape nor prevail by her strangeness; he would have,
for that matter, on such a subject, more to tell her than to learn from
her. She might learn from _him_ why she was so different from the
handsome girl--which she didn't know, being merely able to feel it; or
at any rate might learn from him why the handsome girl was so different
from her.
On these lines, however, they would move later; the lines immediately
laid down were, in spite of his vagueness for his own convenience,
definite enough. She was already, he observed to her, thinking what she
should say on her other side--which was what Americans were always
doing. She needn't in conscience say anything at all; but Americans
never knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (_she_ had interposed
the "poor creatures!") what not to do. The burdens they took on--the
things, positively, they made an affair of! This easy and, after all,
friendly jibe at her race was really for her, on her new friend's part,
the note of personal recognition so far as she required it; and she
gave him a prompt and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting
that her desire to be, herself, "lovely" all round was justly founded
on the lovely way Mrs. Lowder had met her. He was directly interested
in that, and it was not till afterwards that she fully knew how much
more information about their friend he had taken than given. Here
again, for instance, was a pertinent note for her: she had, on the
spot, with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a society
constituted from far back, encountered the interesting phenomenon of
complicated, of possibly sinister motive. However, Maud Manningham (her
name, even in her presence, somehow still fed the fancy) _had,_ all the
same, been lovely, and one was going to meet her now quite as far on as
one had one's self been met. She had been with them at their
hotel--they were a pair--before even they had supposed she could have
got their letter. Of course indeed they had written in advance, but
they had followed that up very fast. She had thus engaged them to dine
but two days later, and on the morrow again, without waiting for a
return visit, waiting for anything, she had called with her niece. It
was as if she really cared for them, and it was magnificent
fidelity--fidelity to Mrs. Stringham, her own companion and Mrs.
Lowder's former schoolmate, the lady with the charming face and the
rather high dress down there at the end.
Lord Mark took in through his nippers these balanced attributes of
Susie. "But isn't Mrs. Stringham's fidelity then equally magnificent?"
"Well, it's a beautiful sentiment; but it isn't as if she had anything
to _give."_
"Hasn't she got you?" Lord Mark presently asked.
"Me--to give Mrs. Lowder?" Milly had clearly not yet seen herself in
the light of such an offering. "Oh, I'm rather a poor present; and I
don't feel as if, even at that, I've as yet quite been given."
"You've been shown, and if our friend has jumped at you it comes to the
same thing." He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for
himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. "To be seen you must
recognise, _is,_ for you, to be jumped at; and, if it's a question of
being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your
friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder, already, who's getting the benefit.
Look round the table and you'll make out, I think, that you're being,
from top to bottom, jumped at."
"Well, then," said Milly, "I seem also to feel that I like it better
than being made fun of."
It was one of the things she afterwards saw--Milly was for ever seeing
things afterwards--that her companion had here had some way of his own,
quite unlike any one's else, of assuring her of his consideration. She
wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor
protested. She said to herself, at any rate, that he had led her on;
and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so. "Does
she know much about you?"
"No, she just likes us."
Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no
laugh. "I mean _you_ particularly. Has that lady with the charming
face, which _is_ charming, told her?"
Milly hesitated. "Told her what?"
"Everything."
This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her--made
her feel for a moment that, as a matter of course, she was a subject
for disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. "Oh, as for that,
you must ask _her."_
"Your clever companion?"
"Mrs. Lowder."
He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were
certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly
upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as,
should he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell
him. "And I shall have, at any rate, in the meantime, the interest of
seeing what she does with you. That will teach me more or less, you
see, how much she knows."
Milly followed this--it was lucid; but it suggested something apart.
"How much does she know about _you?"_
"Nothing," said Lord Mark serenely. "But that doesn't matter--for what
she does with me." And then, as to anticipate Milly's question about
the nature of such doing: "This, for instance--turning me straight on
for _you."_
The girl thought. "And you mean she wouldn't if she did know----?"
He met it as if it were really a point. "No. I believe, to do her
justice, she still would. So you can be easy."
Milly had the next instant, then, acted on the permission. "Because
you're even at the worst the best thing she has?"
With this he was at last amused. "I was till you came. You're the best
now."
It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his
knowing, but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of
making her believe them, though still with wonder. That, really, from
this first of their meetings, was what was most to abide with her: she
accepted almost helplessly, she surrendered to the inevitability of
being the sort of thing, as he might have said, that he at least
thoroughly believed he had, in going about, seen here enough of for all
practical purposes. Her submission was naturally, moreover, not to be
impaired by her learning later on that he had paid at short intervals,
though at a time apparently just previous to her own emergence from the
obscurity of extreme youth, three separate visits to New York, where
his nameable friends and his contrasted contacts had been numerous. His
impression, his recollection of the whole mixed quantity, was still
visibly rich. It had helped him to place her, and she was more and more
sharply conscious of having--as with the door sharply slammed upon her
and the guard's hand raised in signal to the train--been popped into
the compartment in which she was to travel for him. It was a use of her
that many a girl would have been doubtless quick to resent; and the
kind of mind that thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and
taking is precisely one of the charms of our subject. Milly had
practically just learned from him, had made out, as it were, from her
rumbling compartment, that he gave her the highest place among their
friend's actual properties. She was a success, that was what it came
to, he presently assured her, and that was what it was to be a success:
it always happened before one could know it. One's ignorance was in
fact often the greatest part of it. "You haven't had time yet," he
said; "this is nothing. But you'll see. You'll see everything. You can,
you know--everything you dream of."
He made her more and more wonder; she almost felt as if he were showing
her visions while he spoke; and strangely enough, though it was visions
that had drawn her on, she hadn't seen them in connection--that is in
such preliminary and necessary connection--with such a face as Lord
Mark's, such eyes and such a voice, such a tone and such a manner. He
had for an instant the effect of making her ask herself if she were
after all going to be afraid; so distinct was it for fifty seconds that
a fear passed over her. There they were again--yes, certainly: Susie's
overture to Mrs. Lowder had been their joke, but they had pressed in
that gaiety an electric bell that continued to sound. Positively, while
she sat there, she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered,
during these moments, why the others didn't hear it. They didn't stare,
they didn't smile, and the fear in her that I speak of was but her own
desire to stop it. That dropped, however, as if the alarm itself had
ceased; she seemed to have seen in a quick, though tempered glare that
there were two courses for her, one to leave London again the first
thing in the morning, the other to do nothing at all. Well, she would
do nothing at all; she was already doing it; more than that, she had
already done it, and her chance was gone. She gave herself up--she had
the strangest sense, on the spot, of so deciding; for she had turned a
corner before she went on again with Lord Mark. Inexpressive, but
intensely significant, he met as no one else could have done the very
question she had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the Brünig. Should
she have it, whatever she did have, that question had been, for long?
"Ah, so possibly not," her neighbour appeared to reply; "therefore,
don't you see? _I'm_ the way." It was vivid that he might be, in spite
of his absence of flourish; the way being doubtless just _in_ that
absence. The handsome girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she
felt, kept her also in view--Mrs. Lowder's striking niece would,
perhaps, be the way as well, for in her too was the absence of
flourish, though she had little else, so far as one could tell, in
common with Lord Mark. Yet how indeed _could_ one tell, what did one
understand, and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally
conscious but of their being somehow together in what they represented?
Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess
at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then
did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did
that represent, as between them, anything particular, and should she
have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual
intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? Nothing was so
odd as that she should have to recognise so quickly in each of these
glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation; and this
anomaly itself, had she had more time to give to it, might well, might
almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast.
It was queerly a question of the short run and the consciousness
proportionately crowded.
These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs.
Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so
admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have
been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was
just a part, likewise, that while plates were changed and dishes
presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted
and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like
plashes of a slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more
stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison,
more thinly improvised and more different--different, that is, from
every one and everything: it was just a part that while this process
went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny
again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place
herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. Whatever it was it
had showed in this brief interval as better than the alternative; and
it now presented itself altogether in the image and in the place in
which she had left it. The image was that of her being, as Lord Mark
had declared, a success. This depended more or less of course on his
idea of the thing--into which at present, however, she wouldn't go.
But, renewing soon, she had asked him what he meant then that Mrs.
Lowder would do with her, and he had replied that this might safely be
left. "She'll get back," he pleasantly said, "her money." He could say
it too--which was singular--without affecting her either as vulgar or
as "nasty "; and he had soon explained himself by adding: "Nobody here,
you know, does anything for nothing."
"Ah, if you mean that we shall reward her as hard as ever we can,
nothing is more certain. But she's an idealist," Milly continued, "and
idealists, in the long run, I think, _don't_ feel that they lose."
Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm, to find this
charming. "Ah, she strikes you as an idealist?"
"She idealises _us,_ my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a
light," said Milly. "That's all I've got to hold on by. So don't
deprive me of it."
"I wouldn't for the world. But do you think," he continued as if it
were suddenly important for him--"do you think she sees _me_ in a
light?"
She neglected his question for a little, partly because her attention
attached itself more and more to the handsome girl, partly because,
placed so near their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing her
too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering in the other quarter a
course in which she called at subjects as if they were islets in an
archipelago, continued to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy, at the
same time, steadily revealed herself as interesting. Milly in fact
found, of a sudden, her ease--found it all--as she bethought herself
that what Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her
quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value from Lord Mark. She
wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what
he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so mattered remained to be
seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined
Milly's rejoinder. "No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And
you all, here, know each other--I see that--so far as you know
anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being used to
it--that, and that only--that makes you. But there are things you don't
know."
He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point.
"Things that _I_ don't--with all the pains I take and the way I've run
about the world to leave nothing unlearned?"
Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth of his claim--its not
being negligible--that sharpened her impatience and thereby her wit.
"You're _blasé,_ but you're not enlightened. You're familiar with
everything, but conscious, really of nothing. What I mean is that
you've no imagination."
Lord Mark, at this, threw back his head, ranging with his eyes the
opposite side of the room and showing himself at last so much more
completely as diverted that it fairly attracted their hostess's notice.
Mrs. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something
racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her
screw, her cruise among the islands. "Oh, I've heard that," the young
man replied, "before!"
"There it is then. You've heard everything before. You've heard _me_ of
course before, in my country, often enough."
"Oh, never too often," he protested; "I'm sure I hope I shall still
hear you again and again."
"But what good then has it done you?" the girl went on as if now
frankly to amuse him.
"Oh, you'll see when you know me."
"But, most assuredly, I shall never know you."
"Then that will be exactly," he laughed, "the good!"
If it established thus that they couldn't, or Wouldn't, mix, why, none
the less, did Milly feel, through it, a perverse quickening of the
relation to which she had been, in spite of herself, appointed?
What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking--for it
was what they had arrived at--almost intimately? She wished to get away
from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was
present to him. She saw already--wonderful creature, after all, herself
too--that there would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and
that the special sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out
of the question. Everything else might come in--only never that; and
with such an arrangement they might even go far. This in fact might
quite have begun, on the spot, with her returning again to the topic of
the handsome girl. If she was to keep herself out she could naturally
best do so by putting in somebody else. She accordingly put in Kate
Croy, being ready to that extent--as she was not at all afraid for
her--to sacrifice her if necessary. Lord Mark himself, for that matter,
had made it easy by saying a little while before that no one among them
did anything for nothing. "What then"--she was aware of being
abrupt--"does Miss Croy, if she's so interested, do it for? What has
she to gain by _her_ lovely welcome? Look at her _now!"_ Milly broke
out with characteristic freedom of praise, though pulling herself up
also with a compunctious "Oh!" as the direction thus given to their
eyes happened to coincide with a turn of Kate's face to them. All she
had meant to do was to insist that this face was fine; but what she had
in fact done was to renew again her effect of showing herself to its
possessor as conjoined with Lord Mark for some interested view of it.
He had, however, promptly met her question.
"To gain? Why, your acquaintance."
"Well, what's my acquaintance to her? She can care for me--she must
feel that--only by being sorry for me; and that's why she's lovely: to
be already willing to take the trouble to be. It's the height of the
disinterested."
There were more things in this than one that Lord Mark might have taken
up; but in a minute he had made his choice. "Ah then, I'm nowhere, for
I'm afraid _I'm_ not sorry for you in the least. What do you make
then," he asked, "of your success?"
"Why, just the great reason of all. It's just because our friend there
sees it that she pities me. She understands," Milly said; "she's better
than any of you. She's beautiful."
He appeared struck with this at last--with the point the girl made of
it; to which she came back even after a diversion created by a dish
presented between them. "Beautiful in character, I see. _Is_ she so?
You must tell me about her."
Milly wondered. "But haven't you known her longer than I? Haven't you
seen her for yourself?"
"No--I've failed with her. It's no use. I don't make her out. And I
assure you I really should like to." His assurance had in fact for his
companion a positive suggestion of sincerity; he affected her as now
saying something that he felt; and she was the more struck with it as
she was still conscious of the failure even of curiosity he had just
shown in respect to herself. She had meant something--though indeed for
herself almost only--in speaking of their friend's natural pity; it had
been a note, doubtless, of questionable taste, but it had quavered out
in spite of her; and he had not so much as cared to inquire "Why
'natural'?" Not that it wasn't really much better for her that he
shouldn't: explanations would in truth have taken her much too far.
Only she now perceived that, in comparison, her word about this other
person really "drew" him; and there were things in that, probably, many
things, as to which she would learn more and which glimmered there
already as part and parcel of that larger "real" with which, in her new
situation, she was to be beguiled. It was in fact at the very moment,
this element, not absent from what Lord Mark was further saying. "So
you're wrong, you see, as to our knowing all about each other. There
are cases where we break down. I at any rate give _her_ up--up, that
is, to you. You must do her for me--tell me, I mean, when you know
more. You'll notice," he pleasantly wound up, "that I've confidence in
you."
"Why shouldn't you have?" Milly asked, observing in this, as she
thought, a fine, though, for such a man, a surprisingly artless,
fatuity. It was as if there might have been a question of her
falsifying for the sake of her own show--that is of her honesty not
being proof against her desire to keep well with him herself. She
didn't, none the less, otherwise protest against his remark; there was
something else she was occupied in seeing. It was the handsome girl
alone, one of his own species and his own society, who had made him
feel uncertain; of his certainties about a mere little American, a
cheap exotic, imported almost wholesale, and whose habitat, with its
conditions of climate, growth, and cultivation, its immense profusion,
but its few varieties and thin development, he was perfectly satisfied.
The marvel was, too, that Milly understood his satisfaction--feeling
that she expressed the truth in presently saying: "Of course; I make
out that she must be difficult; just as I see that I myself must be
easy." And that was what, for all the rest of this occasion, remained
with her--as the most interesting thing that could remain. She was more
and more content herself to be easy; she would have been resigned, even
had it been brought straighter home to her, to passing for a cheap
exotic. Provisionally, at any rate, that protected her wish to keep
herself, with Lord Mark, in abeyance. They _had_ all affected her as
inevitably knowing each other, and if the handsome girl's place among
them was something even their initiation couldn't deal with--why, then,
she would indeed be a quantity.
VIII
That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was indeed doubtless what
most prevailed at first for our slightly gasping American pair; it
found utterance for them in their frequent remark to each other that
they had no one but themselves to thank. It dropped from Milly more
than once that if she had ever known it was so easy--! though her
exclamation mostly ended without completing her idea. This, however,
was a trifle to Mrs. Stringham, who cared little whether she meant that
in this case she would have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner,
and she perhaps, on the contrary, meant--for it would have been like
her--that she wouldn't have come at all; why it was so easy being at
any rate a matter as to which her companion had begun quickly to pick
up views. Susie kept some of these lights for the present to herself,
since, freely communicated, they might have been a little disturbing;
with which, moreover, the quantities that we speak of as surrounding
the two ladies were, in many cases, quantities of things--and of other
things--to talk about. Their immediate lesson, accordingly, was that
they just had been caught up by the incalculable strength of a wave
that was actually holding them aloft and that would naturally dash them
wherever it liked. They meanwhile, we hasten to add, make the best of
their precarious position, and if Milly had had no other help for it
she would have found not a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd's
state. The girl had had nothing to say to her, for three days, about
the "success" announced by Lord Mark--which they saw, besides,
otherwise established; she was too taken up, too touched, by Susie's
own exaltation. Susie glowed in the light of her justified faith;
everything had happened that she had been acute enough to think least
probable; she had appealed to a possible delicacy in Maud Manningham--a
delicacy, mind you, but _barely_ possible--and her appeal had been met
in a way that was an honour to human nature. This proved sensibility of
the lady of Lancaster Gate performed verily, for both our friends,
during these first days, the office of a fine floating gold-dust,
something that threw over the prospect a harmonising blur. The forms,
the colours behind it were strong and deep--we have seen how they
already stood out for Milly; but nothing, comparatively, had had so
much of the dignity of truth as the fact of Maud's fidelity to a
sentiment. That was what Susie was proud of, much more than of her
great place in the world, which she was moreover conscious of not as
yet wholly measuring. That was what was more vivid even than her
being--in senses more worldly and in fact almost in the degree of a
revelation--English and distinct and positive, with almost no inward,
but with the finest outward resonance.
Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again, was that she was
"large"; yet it was not exactly a case, as to the soul, of echoing
chambers: she might have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly as possible over its
accumulated contents--a packed mass, for her American admirer, of
curious detail. When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
figured her friends as not small--which was the way she mostly figured
them--there was a certain implication that they were spacious because
they were empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spacious because
she was full, because she had something in common, even in repose, with
a projectile, of great size, loaded and ready for use. That indeed, to
Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as half the charm of their
renewal--a charm as of sitting in springtime, during a long peace, on
the daisied, grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress. True to her
psychological instincts, certainly, Mrs. Stringham had noted that the
"sentiment" she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all a
matter of action and movement, was not, save for the interweaving of a
more frequent plump "dearest" than she would herself perhaps have used,
a matter of much other embroidery. She brooded, with interest, on this
further remark of race, feeling in her own spirit a different economy.
The joy, for her, was to know _why_ she acted--the reason was half the
business; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there might have been no reason:
"why" was the trivial seasoning-substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg,
omittable from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it. Mrs. Lowder's
desire was clearly sharp that their young companions should also
prosper together; and Mrs. Stringham's account of it all to Milly,
during the first days, was that when, at Lancaster Gate, she was not
occupied in telling, as it were, about her, she was occupied in hearing
much of the history of her hostess's brilliant niece.
They had plenty, on these lines, the two elder women, to give and to
take, and it was even not quite clear to the pilgrim from Boston that
what she should mainly have arranged for in London was not a series of
thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience, indeed almost a sense of
immorality, in having to recognise that she was, as she said, carried
away. She laughed to Milly when she also said that she didn't know
where it would end; and the principal of her uneasiness was that Mrs.
Lowder's life bristled for her with elements that she was really having
to look at for the first time. They represented, she believed, the
world, the world that, as a consequence of the cold shoulder turned to
it by the Pilgrim Fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston--it
would surely have sunk the stoutest Cunarder--and she couldn't pretend
that she faced the prospect simply because Milly had had a caprice. She
was in the act herself of having one, directed precisely to their
present spectacle. She could but seek strength in the thought that she
had never had one--or had never yielded to one, which came to the same
thing--before. The sustaining sense of it all, moreover, as literary
material--that quite dropped from her. She must wait, at any rate, she
should see: it struck her, so far as she had got, as vast, obscure,
lurid. She reflected in the watches of the night that she was probably
just going to love it for itself--that is for itself and Milly. The odd
thing was that she could think of Milly's loving it without dread--or
with dread, at least not on the score of conscience, only on the score
of peace. It was a mercy, at all events, for the hour, that their
fancies jumped together.
While, for this first week that followed their dinner, she drank deep
at Lancaster Gate, her companion was no less happily, appeared to be
indeed on the whole quite as romantically, provided for. The handsome
English girl from the heavy English house had been as a figure in a
picture stepping by magic out of its frame: it was a case, in truth,
for which Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image. She had
lost none of her grasp, but quite the contrary, of that other conceit
in virtue of which Milly was the wandering princess: so what could be
more in harmony now than to see the princess waited upon at the city
gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the burgesses? It
was the real again, evidently, the amusement of the meeting for the
princess too; princesses living for the most part, in such an appeased
way, on the plane of mere elegant representation. That was why they
pounced, at city gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was
why, after effigies, processions, and other stately games, frank human
company was pleasant to them. Kate Croy really presented herself to
Milly--the latter abounded for Mrs. Stringham in accounts of it--as the
wondrous London girl in person, by what she had conceived, from far
back, of the London girl; conceived from the tales of travellers and
the anecdotes of New York, from old porings over _Punch_ and a liberal
acquaintance with the fiction of the day. The only thing was that she
was nicer, for the creature in question had rather been, to our young
woman, an image of dread. She had thought of her, at her best, as
handsome just as Kate was, with turns of head and tones of voice,
felicities of stature and attitude, things "put on" and, for that
matter, put off, all the marks of the product of a packed society who
should be at the same time the heroine of a strong story. She placed
this striking young person from the first in a story, saw her, by a
necessity of the imagination, for a heroine, felt it the only character
in which she wouldn't be wasted; and this in spite of the heroine's
pleasant abruptness, her forbearance from gush, her umbrellas and
jackets and shoes--as these things sketched themselves to Milly--and
something rather of a breezy boy in the carriage of her arms and the
occasional freedom of her slang.
When Milly had settled that the extent of her goodwill itself made her
shy, she had found for the moment quite a sufficient key, and they were
by that time thoroughly afloat together. This might well have been the
happiest hour they were to know, attacking in friendly independence
their great London--the London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly
interesting to Milly, as well as of museums, monuments, "sights" oddly
unfamiliar to Kate, while their elders pursued a separate course, both
rejoicing in their intimacy and each thinking the other's young woman a
great acquisition for her own. Milly expressed to Susan Shepherd more
than once that Kate had some secret, some smothered trouble, besides
all the rest of her history; and that if she had so good-naturedly
helped Mrs. Lowder to meet them this was exactly to create a diversion,
to give herself something else to think about. But on the case thus
postulated our young American had as yet had no light: she only felt
that when the light should come it would greatly deepen the colour; and
she liked to think she was prepared for anything. What she already
knew, moreover, was full to her vision, of English, of eccentric, of
Thackerayan character, Kate Croy having gradually become not a little
explicit on the subject of her situation, her past, her present, her
general predicament, her small success, up to the present hour, in
contenting at the same time her father, her sister, her aunt and
herself. It was Milly's subtle guess, imparted to her Susie, that the
girl had somebody else as well, as yet unnamed, to content, it being
manifest that such a creature couldn't help having; a creature not
perhaps, if one would, exactly formed to inspire passions, since that
always implied a certain silliness, but essentially seen, by the
admiring eye of friendship, under the clear shadow of some probably
eminent male interest. The clear shadow, from whatever source
projected, hung, at any rate, over Milly's companion the whole week,
and Kate Croy's handsome face smiled out of it, under bland skylights,
in the presence alike of old masters passive in their glory and of
thoroughly new ones, the newest, who bristled restlessly with pins and
brandished snipping shears.
It was meanwhile a pretty part of the intercourse of these young ladies
that each thought the other more remarkable than herself--that each
thought herself, or assured the other she did, a comparatively dusty
object and the other a favourite of nature and of fortune. Kate was
amused, amazed at the way her friend insisted on "taking" her, and
Milly wondered if Kate were sincere in finding her the most
extraordinary--quite apart from her being the most charming--person she
had come across. They had talked, in long drives, and quantities of
history had not been wanting--in the light of which Mrs. Lowder's niece
might superficially seem to have had the best of the argument. Her
visitor's American references, with their bewildering immensities,
their confounding moneyed New York, their excitements of high pressure,
their opportunities of wild freedom, their record of used-up relatives,
parents, clever, eager, fair, slim brothers--these the most loved--all
engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians, in a high
extravagance of speculation and dissipation that had left this
exquisite being her black dress, her white face and her vivid hair as
the mere last broken link: such a picture quite threw into the shade
the brief biography, however sketchily amplified, of a mere
middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And though that indeed might be but a
Bayswater way of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the
stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so far prevailed that,
like Mrs. Stringham herself, she fairly got her companion to accept
from her that she was quite the nearest approach to a practical
princess Bayswater could hope ever to know. It was a fact--it became
one at the end of three days--that Milly actually began to borrow from
the handsome girl a sort of view of her state; the handsome girl's
impression of it was clearly so sincere. This impression was a tribute,
a tribute positively to power, power the source of which was the last
thing Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages, under all their
skylights, the succession of their shops being large, in which the
latter's easy, yet the least bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that
if she had had so deep a pocket----!
It was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of
expenditure that she appeared to charge her friend, but with not having
the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree
the habit of a conscious dependence on others. Such moments, when all
Wigmore Street, for instance, seemed to rustle about and the pale girl
herself to be facing the different rustlers, usually so
undiscriminated, as individual Britons too, Britons personal, parties
to a relation and perhaps even intrinsically remarkable--such moments
in especial determined in Kate a perception of the high happiness of
her companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus immense; she had to ask
nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her
fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her,
she could sniff up at every step its fumes. And Kate, in these days,
was altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the
phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on
together, she would abide in that generosity. She had, at such a point
as this, no suspicion of a rift within the lute--by which we mean not
only none of anything's coming between them, but none of any definite
flaw in so much clearness of quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at
Mrs. Lowder's banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark as kindly
used by the young woman on the other side because of some faintly-felt
special propriety in it, so there really did match with this,
privately, on the young woman's part, a feeling not analysed but
divided, a latent impression that Mildred Theale was not, after all, a
person to change places, to change even chances with. Kate, verily,
would perhaps not quite have known what she meant by this reservation,
and she came near naming it only when she said to herself that, rich as
Milly was, one probably wouldn't--which was singular--ever hate her for
it. The handsome girl had, with herself, these felicities and
crudities: it wasn't obscure to her that, without some very particular
reason to help, it might have proved a test of one's philosophy not to
be irritated by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were, who, as
a girl, so easily might have been, like herself, only vague and fatally
female. She was by no means sure of liking Aunt Maud as much as she
deserved, and Aunt Maud's command of funds was obviously inferior to
Milly's. There was thus clearly, as pleading for the latter, some
influence that would later on become distinct; and meanwhile,
decidedly, it was enough that she was as charming as she was queer and
as queer as she was charming--all of which was a rare amusement; as
well, for that matter, as further sufficient that there were objects of
value she had already pressed on Kate's acceptance. A week of her
society in these conditions--conditions that Milly chose to sum up as
ministering immensely, for a blind, vague pilgrim, to aid and
comfort--announced itself from an early hour as likely to become a week
of presents, acknowledgments, mementos, pledges of gratitude and
admiration that were all on one side. Kate as promptly embraced the
propriety of making it clear that she must forswear shops till she
should receive some guarantee that the contents of each one she entered
as a humble companion should not be placed at her feet; yet that was in
truth not before she had found herself in possession, under whatever
protests, of several precious ornaments and other minor conveniences.
Great was the absurdity, too, that there should have come a day, by the
end of the week, when it appeared that all Milly would have asked in
definite "return," as might be said, was to be told a little about Lord
Mark and to be promised the privilege of a visit to Mrs. Condrip. Far
other amusements had been offered her, but her eagerness was
shamelessly human, and she seemed really to count more on the
revelation of the anxious lady of Chelsea than on the best nights of
the opera. Kate admired, and showed it, such an absence of fear: to the
fear of being bored, in such a connection, she would have been so
obviously entitled. Milly's answer to this was the plea of her
curiosities--which left her friend wondering as to their odd direction.
Some among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible, and Kate had
heard without wonder that she was blank about Lord Mark. This young
lady's account of him, at the same time, professed itself as frankly
imperfect; for what they best knew him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing
difficult to explain. One knew people in general by something they had
to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched
or named or proved; and she could think of no other case of a value
taken as so great and yet flourishing untested. His value was his
future, which had somehow got itself as accepted by Aunt Maud as if it
had been his good cook or his steam-launch. She, Kate, didn't mean she
thought him a humbug; he might do great things--but they were all, as
yet, so to speak, he had done. On the other hand it was of course
something of an achievement, and not open to every one, to have got
one's self taken so seriously by Aunt Maud. The best thing about him,
doubtless, on the whole, was that Aunt Maud believed in him. She was
often fantastic, but she knew a humbug, and--no, Lord Mark wasn't that.
He had been a short time in the House, on the Tory side, but had lost
his seat on the first opportunity, and this was all he had to point to.
However, he pointed to nothing; which was very possibly just a sign of
his real cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in common
with the really void. Even Aunt Maud frequently admitted that there was
a good deal, for her view of him, to come up in the rear. And he wasn't
meanwhile himself indifferent--indifferent to himself--for he was
working Lancaster Gate for all it was worth: just as it was, no doubt,
working _him,_ and just as the working and the worked were in London,
as one might explain, the parties to every relation.
Kate did explain, for her listening friend: every one who had anything
to give--it was true they were the fewest--made the sharpest possible
bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing,
furthermore, was that this might be, in cases, a happy understanding.
The worker in one connection was the worked in another; it was as broad
as it was long--with the wheels of the system, as might be seen,
wonderfully oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of
it, as Aunt Maud, by every appearance, quite liked Lord Mark, and as
Lord Mark, it was to be hoped, liked Mrs. Lowder, since if he didn't he
was a greater brute than one could believe. She, Kate, had not yet, it
was true, made out what he was doing for her--besides which the dear
woman needed him, even at the most he could do, much less than she
imagined; so far as all of which went, moreover, there were plenty of
things on every side she had not yet made out. She believed, on the
whole, in any one Aunt Maud took up; and she gave it to Milly as worth
thinking of that, whatever wonderful people this young lady might meet
in the land, she would meet no more extraordinary woman. There were
greater celebrities by the million, and of course greater swells, but a
bigger _person,_ by Kate's view, and a larger natural handful every
way, would really be far to seek. When Milly inquired with interest if
Kate's belief in _her_ was primarily on the lines of what Mrs. Lowder
"took up," her interlocutress could handsomely say yes, since by the
same principle she believed in herself. Whom but Aunt Maud's niece,
pre-eminently, had Aunt Maud taken up, and who was thus more in the
current, with her, of working and of being worked? "You may ask," Kate
said, "what in the world I have to give; and that indeed is just what
I'm trying to learn. There must be something, for her to think she can
get it out of me. She _will_ get it--trust her; and then I shall see
what it is; which I beg you to believe I should never have found out
for myself." She declined to treat any question of Milly's own "paying"
power as discussable; that Milly would pay a hundred per cent.--and
even to the end, doubtless, through the nose--was just the beautiful
basis on which they found themselves.
These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all these luxuries
of gossip and philosophies of London and of life, and they became
quickly, between the pair, the common form of talk, Milly professing
herself delighted to know that something was to be done with her. If
the most remarkable woman in England was to do it, so much the better,
and if the most remarkable woman in England had them both in hand
together, why, what could be jollier for each? When she reflected
indeed a little on the oddity of her wanting two at once, Kate had the
natural reply that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She
invariably gave way to feeling, and feeling had distinctly popped up in
her on the advent of her girlhood's friend. The way the cat would jump
was always, in presence of anything that moved her, interesting to see;
visibly enough, moreover, for a long time, it hadn't jumped anything
like so far. This, in fact, as we already know, remained the marvel for
Milly Theale, who, on sight of Mrs. Lowder, found fifty links in
respect to Susie absent from the chain of association. She knew so
herself what she thought of Susie that she would have expected the lady
of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different; the failure of
which endlessly mystified her. But her mystification was the cause for
her of another fine impression, inasmuch as when she went so far as to
observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd--and especially Susan Shepherd
emerging so uninvited from an irrelevant past--ought, by all the
proprieties, simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her confidant agreed with
her without a protest and abounded in the sense of her wonder. Susan
Shepherd at least bored the niece--that was plain; this young woman saw
nothing in her--nothing to account for anything, not even for Milly's
own indulgence: which little fact became in turn to the latter's mind a
fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome girl--representing
more than merely showed--that poor Susie was simply as nought to her.
This was, in a manner too, a general admonition to poor Susie's
companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which she
had best most look out.
It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was good enough and to
spare for Milly Theale shouldn't be good enough for another girl;
though, oddly enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder
herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it, and Kate Croy felt
it with ease; yet in the end, be it added, she grasped the reason, and
the reason enriched her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason that
the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least
bit brutal too, and didn't she suggest, as no one yet had ever done for
her new friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a
strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal--which Milly had hitherto
benightedly supposed the only way; she wasn't even aggressively so, but
rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be said, by the habit
of anticipation. She simplified in advance, was beforehand with her
doubts, and knew with singular quickness what she wasn't, as they said
in New York, going to like. In that way at least people were clearly
quicker in England than at home; and Milly could quite see, after a
little, how such instincts might become usual in a world in which
dangers abounded. There were more dangers, clearly, round about
Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or could dream of in
Boston. At all events, with more sense of them, there were more
precautions, and it was a remarkable world altogether in which there
could be precautions, on whatever ground, against Susie.
IX
She certainly made up with Susie directly, however, for any allowance
she might have had privately to extend to tepid appreciation; since the
late and long talks of these two embraced not only everything offered
and suggested by the hours they spent apart, but a good deal more
besides. She might be as detached as the occasion required at four
o'clock in the afternoon, but she used no such freedom to any one about
anything as she habitually used about everything to Susan Shepherd at
midnight. All the same, it should with much less delay than this have
been mentioned, she had not yet--had not, that is, at the end of six
days--produced any news for her comrade to compare with an announcement
made her by the latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Lowder, for a
change, in the remarkable Battersea Park. The elder friends had
sociably revolved there while the younger ones followed bolder fancies
in the admirable equipage appointed to Milly at the hotel--a heavier,
more emblazoned, more amusing chariot than she had ever, with "stables"
notoriously mismanaged, known at home; whereby, in the course of the
circuit, more than once repeated, it had "come out," as Mrs. Stringham
said, that the couple at Lancaster Gate were, of all people, acquainted
with Mildred's other English friend--the gentleman, the one connected
with the English newspaper (Susie hung fire a little over his name) who
had been with her in New York so shortly previous to present
adventures. He had been named of course in Battersea Park--else he
couldn't have been identified; and Susie had naturally, before she
could produce her own share in the matter as a kind of confession, to
make it plain that her allusion was to Mr. Merton Densher. This was
because Milly had at first a little air of not knowing whom she meant;
and the girl really kept, as well, a certain control of herself while
she remarked that the case was surprising, the chance one in a
thousand. They knew him, both Maud and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered
too, rather well, though indeed it was not on any show of intimacy that
he had happened to be mentioned. It had not been--Susie made the
point--she herself who brought him in: he had in fact not been brought
in at all, but only referred to as a young journalist known to Mrs.
Lowder and who had lately gone to their wonderful country--Mrs. Lowder
always said "your wonderful country"--on behalf of his journal. But
Mrs. Stringham had taken it up--with the tips of her fingers indeed;
and that was the confession: she had, without meaning any harm,
recognised Mr. Densher as an acquaintance of Milly's, though she had
also pulled herself up before getting in too far. Mrs. Lowder had been
struck, clearly--it wasn't too much to say; then she also, it had
rather seemed, had pulled herself up; and there had been a little
moment during which each might have been keeping something from the
other. "Only," said Milly's mate, "I luckily remembered in time that I
had nothing whatever to keep--which was much simpler and nicer. I don't
know what Maud has, but there it is. She was interested, distinctly, in
your knowing him--in his having met you over there with so little loss
of time. But I ventured to tell her it hadn't been so long as to make
you as yet great friends. I don't know if I was right."
Whatever time this explanation might have taken, there had been moments
enough in the matter now--before the elder woman's conscience had done
itself justice--to enable Milly to reply that although the fact in
question doubtless had its importance she imagined they wouldn't find
the importance overwhelming. It _was_ odd that their one Englishman
should so instantly fit; it wasn't, however, miraculous--they surely
all had often seen that, as every one said, the world was
extraordinarily "small." Undoubtedly, too, Susie had done just the
plain thing in not letting his name pass. Why in the world should there
be a mystery?--and what an immense one they would appear to have made
if he should come back and find they had concealed their knowledge of
him! "I don't know, Susie dear," the girl observed, "what you think I
have to conceal."
"It doesn't matter, at a given moment," Mrs. Stringham returned, "what
you know or don't know as to what I think; for you always find out the
very next moment, and when you do find out, dearest, you never _really_
care. Only," she presently asked, "have you heard of him from Miss
Croy?"
"Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven't mentioned him. Why
should we?"
"That _you_ haven't, I understand; but that she hasn't," Susie opined,
"may mean something."
"May mean what?"
"Well," Mrs. Stringham presently brought out, "I tell you all when I
tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be
better for the present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to her
niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first. But Maud thinks
she won't."
Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in respect to the facts--as
they so far possessed them--it all sounded a little complicated. "Is it
because there's anything between them?"
"No--I gather not; but Maud's state of mind is precautionary. She's
afraid of something. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say she's
afraid of everything."
"She's afraid, you mean," Milly asked, "of their--a--liking each other?"
Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. "My dear child, we
move in a labyrinth."
"Of course we do. That's just the fun of it!" said Milly with a strange
gaiety. Then she added: "Don't tell me that--in this for
instance--there are not abysses. I want abysses."
Her friend looked at her--it was not unfrequently the case--a little
harder than the surface of the occasion seemed to require; and another
person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought
of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much
her disposition, no doubt, to treat her young companion's words as
symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the less, however, her
highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be
quaint with the new quaintness--the great Boston gift; it had been,
happily, her note in the magazines; and Maud Lowder, to whom it was new
indeed and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite
cherished her, as a social resource, for it. It should not therefore
fail her now; with it in fact one might face most things. "Ah, then let
us hope we shall sound the depths--I'm prepared for the worst--of
sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece--we're not ignorant of
that, are we?--to marry Lord Mark. Hasn't she told you so?"
"Hasn't Mrs. Lowder told me?"
"No; hasn't Kate? It isn't, you know, that she doesn't know it."
Milly had, under her comrade's eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She
had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as
deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many
directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her
as in a clear cold way that there was a possible account of their
relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have
figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn't. She
couldn't say, at any rate, whether or no she had made the point that
her aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come
out--which had been, moreover, eminently guessable--that she was
involved in her aunt's designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over
nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt
extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all
values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she
couldn't in the least have defined--and she was at least, even during
these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the
difference it did make. Yet, all the same, the effect for her was,
almost violently, of Mr. Densher's having been there--having been where
she had stood till now in her simplicity--before her. It would have
taken but another free moment to make her see abysses--since abysses
were what she wanted--in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in
New York, about his English friends. There had really been in New York
little time for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it
out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy, and that
Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was
to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been
labyrinthe--which was absurd in view of all the other things too he
couldn't possibly have spoken of--this was exactly what must suit her,
since it fell under the head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie.
These things, however, came and went, and it set itself up between the
companions, for the occasion, in the oddest way, both that their
happening all to know Mr. Densher--except indeed that Susie didn't, but
probably would,--was a fact belonging, in a world of rushing about, to
one of the common orders of chance; and yet further that it was
amusing--oh, awfully amusing!--to be able fondly to hope that there was
"something in" its having been left to crop up with such suddenness.
There seemed somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were, the
air might, in a manner, have undergone some pleasing preparation;
though the question of this possibility would probably, after all, have
taken some threshing out. The truth, moreover--and there they were,
already, our pair, talking about it, the "truth!"--had not in fact
quite cropped out. This, obviously, in view of Mrs. Lowder's request to
her old friend.
It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder's recommendation that nothing should
be said to Kate--it was on this rich attitude of Aunt Maud's that the
idea of an interesting complication might best hope to perch; and when,
in fact, after the colloquy we have reported Milly saw Kate again
without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the
newer by reason of its containing a small element of anxiety: when she
had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more
free. Yet it _was,_ none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a
still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate
continued, even now, pre-eminently to remain for her; and a
reason--this was the great point--of which the young woman herself
could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two or three hours
together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the
light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes
had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had
looked, rather _more_ beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled
herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as
beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might
one's self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was
to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had
doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as
the "other," the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was
aware of this; but the other side was what had, of a sudden, been
turned straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher's propinquity.
She hadn't the excuse of knowing it for Kate's own, since nothing
whatever as yet proved it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was
with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went,
kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked, as usual, of
everything but--as it had so abruptly become for Milly--_the_ thing.
Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply
a difference in this pair of occasions had she not been tasting so
peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that
afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter had not mainly
been that she herself was so "other," so taken up with the unspoken;
the strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she
asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became
conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should
never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly
Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never--and not from
ill-will, nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common
terms--reduce it to such a one's comprehension or put it within her
convenience.
It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more,
Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a
one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved,
to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of
his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of "poor Marian," so often
referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our
young woman's first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the
sense of how, in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
could be opposed, how common ground, for a place in the world, could
quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in
an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order
Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void,
as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity--though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark
could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same
time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as
might have been said, in quite another geography. She would not, in
short, have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if
her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final
relief of their benevolent "Here!" The interval was bridged, of course,
but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the impression left Milly to
wonder whether, in the general connection, it were of bridges or of
intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself
most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast, there were
neither--neither the difference itself, from position to position, nor,
on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the
conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it. The
conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the
difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social
atlas--these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady,
in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary
legend--a mixed, wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps
mostly of Dickens--under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much
appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening,
that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the
adored author of _The Newcomes_, in fine, had been on the whole the
note: the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather
perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of
Pickwickian outline. She explained how she meant by this that Mrs.
Condrip had not altogether proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even--for
she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate
had spoken--a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Micawber.
Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly
that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life
such experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed
"booked"--as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying--to miss:
she had begun to have a little, for her fellow-observer, these moments
of fanciful reaction--reaction in which she was once more all Susan
Shepherd--against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her
overwhelming connection with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never
lost sight, for long, of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always
there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to
pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for
it. They had, however, to-night, another matter in hand; which proved
to be presently, on the girl's part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea,
the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was
away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small
complaint, had suddenly, without its being in the least "led up to,"
broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with
impatience as a person in love with her sister. "She wished me, if I
cared for Kate, to know," Milly said--"for it would be quite too
dreadful, and one might do something."
Susie wondered. "Prevent anything coming of it? That's easily said. Do
what?"
Milly had a dim smile. "I think that what she would like is that I
should come a good deal to see her about it."
"And doesn't she suppose you've anything else to do?"
The girl had by this time clearly made it out. "Nothing but to admire
and make much of her sister--whom she doesn't, however, herself in the
least understand--and give up one's time, and everything else, to it."
It struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented
approach to sharpness; as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather specially
disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham
seen her companion as exalted, and by the very play of something
within, into a vague golden air that left irritation below. That was
the great thing with Milly--it was her characteristic poetry; or at
least it was Susan Shepherd's. "But she made a point," the former
continued, "of my keeping what she says from Kate. I'm not to mention
that she has spoken."
"And why," Mrs. Stringham presently asked, "is Mr. Densher so dreadful?"
Milly had, she thought, an hesitation--something that suggested a
fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than she inclined perhaps to report. "It
isn't so much he himself." Then the girl spoke a little as for the
romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where romance would come
in. "It's the state of his fortunes."
"And is that very bad?"
"He has no 'private means,' and no prospect of any. He has no income,
and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He's as poor,
she calls it, as 'poverty,' and she says she knows what that is."
Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something.
"But isn't he brilliantly clever?"
Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. "I haven't
the least idea."
To which, for the time, Susie only answered "Oh!"--though by the end of
a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing "I see"; and that
in turn with: "It's quite what Maud Lowder thinks."
"That he'll never do anything?"
"No--quite the contrary: that he's exceptionally able."
"Oh yes; I know"--Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had
already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. "But Mrs.
Condrip's own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won't hear of any
such person. Mr. Densher, she holds that's the way, at any rate, it was
explained to me--won't ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he
were public she'd be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were
rich--without being anything else--she'd do her best to swallow him. As
it is, she taboos him."
"In short," said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, "she told
you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him," she added.
"Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that."
"Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely."
"Then there it is!" On which, with a drop and one of those sudden,
slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue
that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion,
Milly turned away. Yet the matter was not left so, that night, between
them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first
come back to it. Milly's own nearest approach, at least, for a little,
to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all--every one they
saw--to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh,
not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a
subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to
others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have
told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud
Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences--if it
mightn't better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand
occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in
justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of
fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in
the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if
with a clever high manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and
bright, as if it weren't there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at
all--which was possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any
rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might be said, in
order to get at her nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece
of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was
keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would
figure as large, as honourably unselfish, on the day they should take
effect. She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a
person or two shouldn't lose a benefit by not submitting if they could
be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views
couldn't be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested
for. It was too soon, since she wasn't interested for herself. Even the
richest woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly's motive doubtless
had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple,
sublime without it--whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it
or not; and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be
these things just as much. Only then she might very well have, like
Aunt Maud, a manner. Such were the connections, at all events, in which
the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flickered up--in which it came
round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the
afternoon, named Mr. Densher as an acquaintance.
"Oh no--I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered," the girl
explained, "Mrs. Lowder's wish."
"But that," her friend observed after a moment, "was for silence to
Kate."
"Yes--but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate."
"Why so?--since she must dislike to talk about him."
"Mrs. Condrip must?" Milly thought. "What she would like most is that
her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she
can tell her will help that--" But Milly dropped suddenly here, as if
her companion would see.
Her companion's interest, however, was all for what she herself saw.
"You mean she'll immediately speak?" Mrs. Stringham gathered that this
was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. "How will it be
against him that you know him?"
"Oh, I don't know. It won't be so much one's knowing him as one's
having kept it out of sight."
"Ah," said Mrs. Stringham, as if for comfort, _"you_ haven't kept it
out of sight. Isn't it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?"
"It isn't my acquaintance with him," Milly smiled, "that she has
dissimulated."
"She has dissimulated only her own? Well then, the responsibility's
hers."
"Ah but," said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, "she has
a right to do as she likes."
"Then so, my dear, have you!" smiled Susan Shepherd.
Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as
if this were what one loved her for. "We're not quarrelling about it,
Kate and I, _yet."_
"I only meant," Mrs. Stringham explained, "that I don't see what Mrs.
Condrip would gain."
"By her being able to tell Kate?" Milly thought. "I only meant that I
don't see what I myself should gain."
"But it will have to come out--that he knows you both--some time."
Milly scarce assented. "Do you mean when he comes back?"
"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it,
to 'cut' either of you for the sake of the other."
This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful.
"I might get at him somehow beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might
give him what they call here the tip--that he's not to know me when we
meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be here at all."
"Do you want to run away from him?"
It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. "I don't
know _what_ I want to run away from!"
It dispelled, on the spot--something, to the elder woman's ear, in the
sad, sweet sound of it--any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense
was constant for her that their relation was as if afloat, like some
island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, for every
conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere of general emotion; and
the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the
sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now
for a moment swept over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you like."
But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie--how I do work you!"
"Oh, this is nothing yet."
"No indeed--to what it will be."
"You're not--and it's vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had
been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."
"Insist, insist--the more the better. But the day I _look_ as sound and
strong as that, you know," Milly went on--"on that day I shall be just
sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That's
where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even
one's _most_ 'beaux moments' aren't such as to qualify, so far as
appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since
I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as
if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,"
she wound up, "you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when
I'm gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not."
"I'd die _for_ you," said Susan Shepherd after a moment.
"'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me."
"But we can't be in London for August, nor for many of all these next
weeks."
"Then we'll go back."
Susie blenched. "Back to America?"
"No, abroad--to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying
here for me," Milly pursued, "your staying with me wherever I may be,
even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No," she
insisted, "I _don't_ know where I am, and you never will, and it
doesn't matter--and I dare say it's quite true," she broke off, "that
everything will have to come out." Her friend would have felt of her
that she joked about it now, had not her scale from grave to gay been a
thing of such unnamable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She
made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn't,
that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was
certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. "I
must face the music. It isn't, at any rate, its 'coming out,'" she
added; "it's that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his
injury."
Her companion wondered. "But how to _his?"_
"Why, if he pretends to love her----!"
"And does he only 'pretend'?"
"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far
as to make up to other people."
The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if with gaiety, for a
comfortable end. "Did he make up, the false creature, to _you?"_
"No--but the question isn't of that. It's of what Kate might be made to
believe."
"That, given the fact that he evidently more or less followed up his
acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he
must have been all ready if you had at all led him on?"
Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said, after a
moment, as with a conscious excess of the pensive: "No, I don't think
she'd quite wish to suggest that I made up to _him;_ for that I should
have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,"
she added--and now at last, as with a supreme impatience "that her
being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for
jealousy would evidently help her, since she's afraid of him, to do him
in her sister's mind a useful ill turn."
Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite
for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New
England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was
what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the
moment to make out how many really her young friend had undertaken to
see round. Finally, too, weren't they braving the deeps? They got their
amusement where they could. "Isn't it only," she asked, "rather
probable she'd see that Kate's knowing him as (what's the pretty old
word?) _volage_----?"
"Well?" She hadn't filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could
Milly.
"Well, might but do what that often does--by all _our_ blessed little
laws and arrangements at least; excite Kate's own sentiment instead of
depressing it."
The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. "Kate's own
sentiment? Oh, she didn't speak of that. I don't think," she added as
if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, "I don't think
Mrs. Condrip imagines _she's_ in love."
It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. "Then what's her fear?"
"Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher's possibly himself keeping it
up--the fear of some final result from _that._
"Oh," said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted--"she looks far
ahead!"
At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague "sports."
"No--it's only we who do."
"Well, don't let us be more interested for them than they are for
themselves!"
"Certainly not"--the girl promptly assented. A certain interest
nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. "It wasn't of
anything on Kate's own part she spoke."
"You mean she thinks her sister does _not_ care for him?"
It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she
meant; but there it presently was. "If she did care Mrs. Condrip would
have told me."
What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then
they had been talking so. "But did you ask her?"
"Ah, no!"
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn't have asked her for
the world.
BOOK FIFTH
X
Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a
confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was
entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that
his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something,
that is, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she
_were_ confessing--all the while it was quite the case that neither
justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He
had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan
Shepherd at home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade,
and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and
missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides
letting them easily see that if it hadn't by this time been the end of
everything--which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the
season at its last gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were
such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at
any rate their modest general plea--that there was no place they would
have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked,
wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was
highly the case as to their current consciousness--which could be
indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course;
impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been
gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful
of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering--they had
been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each
other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have
been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He
had administered the touch that, under light analysis, made the
difference--the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the
spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and
for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and
interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs.
Lowder's not having lost it either, though it was with Mrs. Lowder,
superficially, they had come, and though it was further with that lady
that our young woman was directly engaged during the half-hour or so of
her most agreeably inward response to the scene.
The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as
the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau-composition, a tone
as of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air, summer
full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much, by her
measure, for the previous hour, appeared, in connection with this
revelation of it, to have happened to her--a quantity expressed in
introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armour,
of pictures, of cabinets, of tapestry, of tea-tables, in an assault of
reminders that this largeness of style was the sign of _appointed_
felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing vessel, while
everything else, the pleasant personal affluence, the easy, murmurous
welcome, the honoured age of illustrious host and hostess, all at once
so distinguished and so plain, so public and so shy, became but this or
that element of the infusion. The elements melted together and seasoned
the draught, the essence of which might have struck the girl as
distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted
from somebody, while a fuller flood, somehow, kept bearing her up--all
the freshness of response of her young life the freshness of the first
and only prime. What had perhaps brought on just now a kind of climax
was the fact of her appearing to make out, through Aunt Maud, what was
really the matter. It couldn't be less than a climax for a poor shaky
maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the
matter--for that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder's part, it came
to. Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was
doubtless precisely a part of the brilliant life--since the brilliant
life, as one had faintly figured it, clearly _was_ humanly led--that
all impressions within its area partook of its brilliancy; still,
letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal
for one to be able to take in so comfortably one's companion's broad
blandness. "You must stay among us--you must stay; anything else is
impossible and ridiculous; you don't know yet, no doubt--you can't; but
you will soon enough: you can stay in _any_ position." It had been as
the murmurous consecration to follow the murmurous welcome; and even if
it were but part of Aunt Maud's own spiritual ebriety--for the dear
woman, one could see, was spiritually "keeping" the day--it served to
Milly, then and afterwards, as a high-water mark of the imagination.
It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the
other day at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark's informing her that she was
a "success"--the key thus again struck; and though no distinct, no
numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been
plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as
much, and all gratuitous and genial--if, in portions, not exactly
hitherto _the_ revelation--as three unprepared weeks could have been
expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for them, but
out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat
roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close--reasons completely
personal--she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as
deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the
admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure
either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was
doing, Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk
herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It
was fine, the girl fully felt, the way she did talk _her,_ little as,
at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at
fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful
absorption of iced coffee--qualified by a sharp doubt of her
wisdom--that she most had in view Lord Mark's relation to her being
there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It
wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her
feel that this relation was charming. It might, once more, simply have
been that everything, anything, was charming when one was so justly and
completely charmed; but, frankly, she had not supposed anything so
serenely sociable could define itself between them as the friendly
understanding that was at present somehow in the air. They were, many
of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on a stretch
of sward as a temple of refreshment and that happened to have the
property--which was all to the good of making Milly think of a
"durbar"; her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, in
which, further, the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into
place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of
"native princes"--familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious
term!--and Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for
choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family.
The Lancaster Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included
its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy--a young person
blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her,
and she was the handsomest thing there--this last a declaration made by
Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madness, a straight skylark-flight
of charity, to Aunt Maud.
Kate had, for her new friend's eyes, the extraordinary and attaching
property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful
stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the
imagination for the time make what it would of them--make her merely a
person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but
who was above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given
her, as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this
sense--which sprang up at its own hours--of being as curious about her
as if one hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon
as Milly had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her
knowledge of Merton Densher; she had _looked_ then other and, as Milly
knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective; and our
young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often
look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and
Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a
little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could
almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would
place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a
figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be
waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling
that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever
it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably
ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them
would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses.
Milly was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great social uses
might be--unless, as a good example, exerting just that sort of glamour
in just that sort of frame were one of them: she would have fallen back
on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all events for her friend.
It imputed a primness, all round, to be reduced but to saying, by way
of a translation of one's amusement, that she was always so
_right_--since that, too often, was what the _insupportables_
themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to Aunt Maud, what she had to
content herself withal--save for the lame enhancement of saying she was
lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened the bond
that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled in short its
drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view. That was really the
view Milly had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to give herself
to immediately taking in; but it didn't prevent the continued play of
those swift cross-lights, odd beguilements of the mind, at which we
have already glanced.
Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to
Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she
expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't
it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very
luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and
waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the
circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming
together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed
slowly to pass and repass and conveniently to linger before them; he
was personally the note of the blue--like a suspended skein of silk
within reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving shuttle
took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the intermixed
truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly
knew he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with
her at Mrs. Lowder's expense, which she would have none of; she
wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he
wouldn't have launched them at Matcham--or whatever it was he _had_
done--only for Aunt Maud's _beaux yeux._ What he had done, it would
have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in
vain to do; and what they were all now profiting by was a change
comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused
the cessation easily showed itself as none of Milly's business; and she
was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him
directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why
then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation
that he might absolutely have been saying to her "Yes, let the dear
woman take her own tone? Since she's here she may stay," he might have
been adding--"for whatever she can make of it. But you and I are
different." Milly knew _she_ was different in truth--his own difference
was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all, even at their
distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this line would be tacit. He
practically placed her--it came round again to that--under no
obligation whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover, her
letting Mrs. Lowder take a tone. She might have taken twenty--they
would have spoiled nothing.
"You must stay on with us; you _can,_ you know, in any position you
like; any, any, _any,_ my dear child"--and her emphasis went deep. "You
must make your home with us; and it's really open to you to make the
most beautiful one in the world. You mustn't be under a mistake--under
any of any sort; and you must let us all think for you a little, take
care of you and watch over you. Above all you must help me with Kate,
and you must stay a little _for_ her; nothing for a long time has
happened to me so good as that you and she should have become friends.
It's beautiful; it's great; it's everything. What makes it perfect is
that it should have come about through our dear delightful Susie,
restored to me, after so many years, by such a miracle. No--that's more
charming to me than even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been
good to one--positively; for I couldn't, at my age, have made a new
friend--undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It's
like changing one's bankers--after fifty: one doesn't do that. That's
why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your
wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper--coming back at last as
straight as out of a fairy-tale and with you as an attendant fairy."
Milly hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of
herself made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender its
trimming; but Aunt Maud was not to be deterred by a weak joke from
keeping it up. Her interlocutress could feel besides that she kept it
up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy
woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her
affections and her views were moving as never before in concert.
Unquestionably she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate and loved Lord
Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved every one within
range, down to the very servant who came to receive Milly's empty
iceplate--down, for that matter, to Milly herself, who was, while she
talked, really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle,
a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for
wishing-purposes of one's own, was a thing to be on rather than under;
still, however, if the girl should fail of breath it wouldn't be, she
could feel, by Mrs. Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going on to say that she
and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything.
It was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan,
enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly's prosperity too for
its full operation, just as Milly's prosperity at the same time
involved Kate's. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it
was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our young woman
understand things Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities as well as
characterisations that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most
frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a
natural force.
XI
A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be
fully present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this
stage, with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of
an hour--her only one--with Lord Mark. "Have you seen the picture in
the house, the beautiful one that's so like you?"--he was asking that
as he stood before her; having come up at last with his smooth
intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her
of wasn't quite a reason for his having no joy at all.
"I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures. But if I'm 'like'
anything so beautiful as most of them seemed to me----!" It needed in
short for Milly some evidence, which he only wanted to supply. She was
the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on
every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away; the more
easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round
her its mystic circle. Their progress, meanwhile, was not of the
straightest; it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable
natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by
the appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples,
in groups, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate "I say,
Mark." What they said she never quite made out; it was their all so
domestically knowing him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck her,
while her impression, for the rest, was but of fellow-strollers more
vaguely afloat than themselves, supernumeraries mostly a little
battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They
might have been moving a good deal by a momentum that had begun far
back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for
continuance as long again, and they gave her, in especial collectively,
a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of
friendly, empty words and kind, lingering eyes. The lingering eyes
looked her over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost confessed
simplicity, with the pointless "I say, Mark "; and what was really most
sensible of all was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn't
mind, he seemed to suggest their letting people, poor dear things, have
the benefit of her.
The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in
the benefit, measured by him in mere manner--for wonderful, of a truth,
was, as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis--that her
present good-nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild
common carnival of good-nature--a mass of London people together, of
sorts and sorts, but who mainly knew each other and who, in their way,
did, no doubt, confess to curiosity. It had gone round that she was
there; questions about her would be passing; the easiest thing was to
run the gauntlet with _him_--just as the easiest thing was in fact to
trust him generally. Couldn't she know for herself, passively, how
little harm they meant her?--to that extent that it made no difference
whether or not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Milly
was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she
could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such
cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It was so little her fault,
this oddity of what had "gone round" about her, that to accept it
without question might be as good a way as another of feeling life. It
was inevitable to supply the probable description--that of the awfully
rich young American who was so queer to behold, but nice, by all
accounts, to know; and she had really but one instant of speculation as
to fables or fantasies perchance originally launched. She asked herself
once only if Susie could, inconceivably, have been blatant about her;
for the question, on the spot, was really blown away for ever. She knew
in fact on the spot and with sharpness just why she had "elected" Susan
Shepherd: she had had from the first hour the conviction of her being
precisely the person in the world least possibly a trumpeter. So it
wasn't their fault, it wasn't their fault, and anything might happen
that would, and everything now again melted together, and kind eyes
were always kind eyes--if it were never to be worse than that! She got
with her companion into the house; they brushed, beneficently, past all
their accidents. The Bronzino was, it appeared, deep within, and the
long afternoon light lingered for them on patches of old colour and
waylaid them, as they went, in nooks and opening vistas.
It was all the while for Milly as if Lord Mark had really had something
other than this spoken pretext in view; as if there were something he
wanted to say to her and were only--consciously yet not awkwardly, just
delicately--hanging fire. At the same time it was as if the thing had
practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture;
since what it appeared to amount to was "Do let a fellow who isn't a
fool take care of you a little." The thing somehow, with the aid of the
Bronzino, was done; it hadn't seemed to matter to her before if he were
a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she liked his not being;
and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of
the same sound as Mrs. Lowder's so recent reminder. She too wished to
take care of her--and wasn't it, _à peu près_ what all the people with
the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together--the
beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer
glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an
apotheosis, coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as
she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in
particular--it was she herself who said all. She couldn't help that--it
came; and the reason it came was that she found herself, for the first
moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it
was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair--as wonderful
as he had said: the face of a young woman, all magnificently drawn,
down to the hands, and magnificently dressed; a face almost livid in
hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair rolled
back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family
resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her
slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full
lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds,
was a very great personage--only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was
dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had
nothing to do with her. "I shall never be better than this."
He smiled for her at the portrait. "Than she? You'd scarce need to be
better, for surely that's well enough. But you _are,_ one feels, as it
happens, better; because, splendid as she is, one doubts if she was
good."
He hadn't understood. She was before the picture, but she had turned to
him, and she didn't care if, for the minute, he noticed her tears. It
was probably as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was
perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in
any connection whatever. "I mean that everything this afternoon has
been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be
so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it."
Though he still didn't understand her he was as nice as if he had; he
didn't ask for insistence, and that was just a part of his looking
after her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a
world of practice in it. "Oh, we must talk about these things!"
Ah, they had already done that, she knew, as much as she ever would;
and she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a
world, on her side, of slowness. "I wish I could see the resemblance.
Of course her complexion's green," she laughed; "but mine's several
shades greener."
"It's down to the very hands," said Lord Mark.
"Her hands are large," Milly went on, "but mine are larger. Mine are
huge."
"Oh, you go her, all round, 'one better'--which is just what I said.
But you're a pair. You must surely catch it," he added as if it were
important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have
invented his plea.
"I don't know one never knows one's self. It's a funny fancy, and I
don't imagine it would have occurred----"
"I see it _has_ occurred"--he has already taken her up. She had her
back, as she faced the picture, to one of the doors of the room, which
was open, and on her turning, as he spoke, she saw that they were in
the presence of three other persons, also, as appeared, interested
inquirers. Kate Croy was one of these; Lord Mark had just become aware
of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made the best
of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought
a lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was
showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a reinforcement. Kate
herself had spoken, however, before he had had time to tell her so.
_"You_ had noticed too?"--she smiled at him without looking at Milly.
"Then I'm not original--which one always hopes one has been. But the
likeness is so great." And now she looked at Milly--for whom again it
was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. "Yes, there you are, my dear,
if you want to know. And you're superb." She took now but a glance at
the picture, though it was enough to make her question to her friends
not too straight. "Isn't she superb?"
"I brought Miss Theale," Lord Mark explained to the latter, "quite off
my own bat."
"I wanted Lady Aldershaw," Kate continued to Milly, "to see for
herself."
_"Les grands esprits se rencontrent!"_ laughed her attendant gentleman,
a high, but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person, who
represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front
teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.
Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the
Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. "Superb, superb. Of course I had
noticed you. It is wonderful," she went on with her back to the
picture, but with some other eagerness which Milly felt gathering,
directing her motions now. It was enough--they were introduced, and she
was saying "I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming----"
She was not fresh, for she was not young, even though she denied at
every pore that she was old; but she was vivid and much bejewelled for
the midsummer daylight; and she was all in the palest pinks and blues.
She didn't think, at this pass, that she could "come" anywhere--Milly
didn't; and she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from
the question. He had interposed, taking the words out of the lady's
mouth and not caring at all if the lady minded. That was clearly the
right way to treat her--at least for him; as she had only dropped,
smiling, and then turned away with him. She had been dealt with--it
would have done an enemy good. The gentleman still stood, a little
helpless, addressing himself to the intention of urbanity as if it were
a large loud whistle; he had been signing sympathy, in his way, while
the lady made her overture; and Milly had, in this light, soon arrived
at their identity. They were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was
the clever one. A minute or two later the situation had changed, and
she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate.
She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie
could be found; but she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it.
The prospect, through opened doors, stretched before her into other
rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady
Aldershaw, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from
behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been
left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was
standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was
all for _her;_ she had the sense of the poor gentleman's having somehow
been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there, he
shambled a little; then he bethought himself of the Bronzino, before
which, with his eyeglass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd, vague
sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and a "Humph--most
remarkable!" which lighted Kate's face with amusement. The next moment
he had creaked away, over polished floors, after the others, and Milly
was feeling as if _she_ had been rude. But Lord Aldershaw was in every
way a detail, and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn't ill.
Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and
the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the
while seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in
something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were
strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had
had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it, at the same time,
was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape
from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her
friend's appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even
through the call made by the others on her attention; something that
was perversely _there,_ she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at
least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every
renewal of their meeting. "Is it the way she looks to _him?"_ she asked
herself--the perversity being that she kept in remembrance that Kate
was known to him. It wasn't a fault in Kate--nor in him assuredly; and
she had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them
as if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn't make it up--he was
too far away; but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She
did so now with a strange soft energy--the impulse immediately acting.
"Will you render me to-morrow a great service?"
"Any service, dear child, in the world."
"But it's a secret one--nobody must know. I must be wicked and false
about it."
"Then I'm your woman," Kate smiled, "for that's the kind of thing I
love. _Do_ let us do something bad. You're impossibly without sin, you
know."
Milly's eyes, on this, remained a little with their companion's. "Ah, I
shan't perhaps come up to your idea. It's only to deceive Susan
Shepherd."
"Oh!" said Kate as if this were indeed mild.
"But thoroughly--as thoroughly as I can."
"And for cheating," Kate asked, "my powers will contribute? Well, I'll
do my best for you." In accordance with which it was presently settled
between them that Milly should have the aid and comfort of her presence
for a visit to Sir Luke Strett. Kate had needed a minute for
enlightenment, and it was quite grand for her comrade that this name
should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself it had for some days
been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she
explained, the greatest of medical lights if she had got hold, as she
believed (and she had used to this end the wisdom of the serpent) of
the right, the special man. She had written to him three days before,
and he had named her an hour, eleven-twenty; only it had come to her,
on the eve, that she couldn't go alone. Her maid, on the other hand,
wasn't good enough, and Susie was too good. Kate had listened, above
all, with high indulgence. "And I'm betwixt and between, happy thought!
Too good for what?"
Milly thought. "Why, to be worried if it's nothing. And to be still
more worried--I mean before she need be--if it isn't."
Kate fixed her with deep eyes. "What in the world is the matter with
you?" It had inevitably a sound of impatience, as if it had been a
challenge really to produce something; so that Milly felt her for the
moment only as a much older person, standing above her a little,
doubting the imagined ailments, suspecting the easy complaints, of
ignorant youth. It somewhat checked her, further, that the matter with
her was what exactly as yet she wanted knowledge about; and she
immediately declared, for conciliation, that if she were merely
fanciful Kate would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered, in
return, the hope that, since she could come out and be so charming,
could so universally dazzle and interest, she wasn't all the while in
distress or in anxiety--didn't believe herself, in short, to be in any
degree seriously menaced. "Well, I want to make out--to make out!" was
all that this consistently produced. To which Kate made clear answer:
"Ah then, let us by all means!"
"I thought," Milly said, "you would like to help me. But I must ask
you, please, for the promise of absolute silence."
"And how, if you _are_ ill, can your friends remain in ignorance?"
"Well, if I am, it must of course finally come out. But I can go for a
long time." Milly spoke with her eyes again on her painted
sister's--almost as if under their suggestion. She still sat there
before Kate, yet not without a light in her face. "That will be one of
my advantages. I think I could die without its being noticed."
"You're an extraordinary young woman," her friend, visibly held by her,
declared at last. "What a remarkable time to talk of such things!"
"Well, we won't talk, precisely"--Milly got herself together again. "I
only wanted to make sure of you."
"Here in the midst of----!" But Kate could only sigh for wonder--almost
visibly too for pity.
It made a moment during which her companion waited on her word; partly
as if from a yearning, shy but deep, to have her case put to her just
as Kate was struck by it; partly as if the hint of pity were already
giving a sense to her whimsical "shot," with Lord Mark, at Mrs.
Lowder's first dinner. Exactly this--the handsome girl's compassionate
manner, her friendly descent from her own strength--was what she had
then foretold. She took Kate up as if positively for the deeper taste
of it. "Here in the midst of what?"
"Of everything. There's nothing you can't have. There's nothing you
can't do."
"So Mrs. Lowder tells me."
It just kept Kate's eyes fixed as possibly for more of that; then,
however, without waiting, she went on. "We all adore you."
"You're wonderful--you dear things!" Milly laughed.
"No, it's _you."_ And Kate seemed struck with the real interest of it.
"In three weeks!"
Milly kept it up. "Never were people on such terms! All the more
reason," she added, "that I shouldn't needlessly torment you."
"But me? what becomes of _me?"_ said Kate.
"Well, you--" Milly thought--"if there's anything to bear, you'll bear
it."
"But I _won't_ bear it!" said Kate Croy.
"Oh yes, you will: all the same! You'll pity me awfully, but you'll
help me very much. And I absolutely trust you. So there we are." There
they were, then, since Kate had so to take it; but there, Milly felt,
she herself in particular was; for it was just the point at which she
had wished to arrive. She had wanted to prove to herself that she
didn't horribly blame her friend for any reserve; and what better proof
could there be than this quite special confidence? If she desired to
show Kate that she really believed the latter liked her, how could she
show it more than by asking her for help?
XII
What it really came to, on the morrow, this first time--the time Kate
went with her--was that the great man had, a little, to excuse himself;
had, by a rare accident--for he kept his consulting-hours in general
rigorously free--but ten minutes to give her; ten mere minutes which he
yet placed at her service in a manner that she admired even more than
she could meet it: so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention
that he set between them on the table. He was presently to jump into
his carriage, but he promptly made the point that he must see her
again, see her within a day or two; and he named for her at once
another hour--easing her off beautifully too even then in respect to
her possibly failing of justice to her errand. The minutes affected her
in fact as ebbing more swiftly than her little army of items could
muster, and they would probably have gone without her doing much more
than secure another hearing, had it not been for her sense, at the
last, that she had gained above all an impression. The impression--all
the sharp growth of the final few moments--was neither more nor less
than that she might make, of a sudden, in quite another world, another
straight friend, and a friend who would moreover be, wonderfully, the
most appointed, the most thoroughly adjusted of the whole collection,
inasmuch as he would somehow wear the character scientifically,
ponderably, proveably--not just loosely and sociably. Literally,
furthermore, it wouldn't really depend on herself, Sir Luke Strett's
friendship, in the least; perhaps what made her most stammer and pant
was its thus queerly coming over her that she might find she had
interested him even beyond her intention, find she was in fact launched
in some current that would lose itself in the sea of science. At the
same time that she struggled, however, she also surrendered; there was
a moment at which she almost dropped the form of stating, of
explaining, and threw herself, without violence, only with a supreme
pointless quaver that had turned, the next instant, to an intensity of
interrogative stillness, upon his general goodwill. His large, settled
face, though firm, was not, as she had thought at first, hard; he
looked, in the oddest manner, to her fancy, half like a general and
half like a bishop, and she was soon sure that, within some such
handsome range, what it would show her would be what was good, what was
best for her. She had established, in other words, in this time-saving
way, a relation with it; and the relation was the special trophy that,
for the hour, she bore off. It was like an absolute possession, a new
resource altogether, something done up in the softest silk and tucked
away under the arm of memory. She hadn't had it when she went in, and
she had it when she came out; she had it there under her cloak, but
dissimulated, invisibly carried, when smiling, smiling, she again faced
Kate Croy. That young lady had of course awaited her in another room,
where, as the great man was to absent himself, no one else was in
attendance; and she rose for her with such a face of sympathy as might
have graced the vestibule of a dentist. "Is it out?" she seemed to ask
as if it had been a question of a tooth; and Milly indeed kept her in
no suspense at all.
"He's a dear. I'm to come again."
"But what does he say?"
Milly was almost gay. "That I'm not to worry about anything in the
world, and that if I'll be a good girl and do exactly what he tells me,
he'll take care of me for ever and ever."
Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. "But does he allow then that
you're ill?"
"I don't know what he allows, and I don't care. I shall know, and
whatever it is it will be enough. He knows all about me, and I like it.
I don't hate it a bit."
Still, however, Kate stared. "But could he, in so few minutes, ask you
enough----?"
"He asked me scarcely anything--he doesn't need to do anything so
stupid," Milly said. "He can tell. He knows," she repeated; "and when I
go back--for he'll have thought me over a little--it will be all right."
Kate, after a moment, made the best of this. "Then when are we to come?"
It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked--at least it
was one of the reasons--she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the
light of her _other_ identity, the identity she would have for Mr.
Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable
light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on,
necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from
the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves
that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were
twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This, in
particular, was of course not a juncture at which the least of them
would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly
saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a
quick glimmer, and with it all Kate's unconsciousness; and then she
shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her
response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for
loyalty, would somehow do. "Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken
I shan't trouble _you_ again."
"You'll come alone?"
"Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute
discretion still."
Outside, before the door, on the wide pavement of the great square,
they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept,
completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for
reasons of his own. The footman was there, and had indicated that he
was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. "But don't
you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?"
This pulled Milly up still shorter--so short in fact that she yielded
as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. "I see.
Then you _can_ tell."
"I don't want to 'tell,'" said Kate. "I'll be as silent as the tomb if
I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn't
keep from me how you find out that you really are."
"Well then, I won't, ever. But you see for yourself," Milly went on,
"how I really am. I'm satisfied. I'm happy."
Kate looked at her long. "I believe you like it. The way things turn
out for you----!"
Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken.
She had ceased to be Mr. Densher's image; she was all her own memento
and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a
fair bargain, and it would do. "Of course I like it. I feel--I can't
otherwise describe it--as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest.
I've confessed and I've been absolved. It has been lifted off."
Kate's eyes never quitted her. "He must have liked _you."_
"Oh--doctors!" Milly said. "But I hope," she added, "he didn't like me
too much." Then as if to escape a little from her friend's deeper
sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes,
turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness,
however, was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London
with its dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a
thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the
sense--an impression that broke, the next moment, through the girl's
tightened lips. "Oh, it's a beautiful big world, and everyone, yes,
everyone----!" It presently brought her back to Kate, and she hoped she
didn't actually look as much as if she were crying as she must have
looked to Lord Mark among the portraits at Matcham.
Kate at all events understood. "Everyone wants to be so nice?"
"So nice," said the grateful Milly.
"Oh," Kate laughed, "we'll pull you through! And won't you now bring
Mrs. Stringham?"
But Milly after an instant was again clear about that. "Not till I've
seen him once more."
She was to have found this preference, two days later, abundantly
justified; and yet when, in prompt accordance with what had passed
between them, she reappeared before her distinguished friend--that
character having, for him, in the interval, built itself up still
higher--the first thing he asked her was whether she had been
accompanied. She told him, on this, straightway, everything; completely
free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even--as she
felt she might become--to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of
no alarm from his thus perhaps wishing that she had not come alone. It
was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her
acquaintance with him had somehow increased, and his own knowledge in
particular received mysterious additions. They had been together,
before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation, the one the ten minutes
had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this
not, on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside
manner, which she would have disliked--much rather from a quiet,
pleasant air in him of having positively asked about her, asked here
and there and found out. Of course he couldn't in the least have asked,
or have wanted to; there was no source of information to his hand, and
he had really needed none: he had found out simply by his genius--and
found out, she meant, literally everything. Now she knew not only that
she didn't dislike this--the state of being found out about; but that,
on the contrary, it was truly what she had come for, and that, for the
time at least, it would give her something firm to stand on. She struck
herself as aware, aware as she had never been, of really not having had
from the beginning anything firm. It would be strange for the firmness
to come, after all, from her learning in these agreeable conditions
that she was in some way doomed; but above all it would prove how
little she had hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now to be held
up by the mere process--since that was perhaps on the cards--of being
let down, this would only testify in turn to her queer little history.
_That_ sense of loosely rattling had been no process at all; and it was
ridiculously true that her thus sitting there to see her life put into
the scales represented her first approach to the taste of orderly
living. Such was Milly's romantic version--that her life, especially by
the fact of this second interview, _was_ put into the scales; and just
the best part of the relation established might have been, for that
matter, that the great grave charming man knew, had known at once, that
it was romantic, and in that measure allowed for it. Her only doubt,
her only fear, was whether he perhaps wouldn't even take advantage of
her being a little romantic to treat her as romantic altogether. This
doubtless was her danger with him; but she should see, and dangers in
general meanwhile dropped and dropped.
The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious, "handsome"
room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat
sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer--the
very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself
solidly round her as with promises and certainties. She had come forth
to see the world, and this then was to be the world's light, the rich
dusk of a London "back," these the world's walls, those the world's
curtains and carpet. She should be intimate with the great bronze clock
and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in gratitude and long
ago; she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries,
photographed, engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and
glazed, who made up the rest of the decoration, and made up as well so
much of the human comfort; and while she thought of all the clean
truths, unfringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained
into pauses and waits, would again and again, for years, have kept
distinct, she also wondered what she would eventually decide upon to
present in gratitude. She would give something better at least than the
brawny Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance of what she
felt he knew of her before he had done with her: that she was secretly
romancing at that rate, in the midst of so much else that was more
urgent, all over the place. So much for her secrets with him, none of
which really required to be phrased. It would have been, for example, a
secret for her from any one else that without a dear lady she had
picked up just before coming over she wouldn't have a decently near
connection, of any sort, for such an appeal as she was making, to put
forward: no one in the least, as it were, to produce for
respectability. But _his_ seeing it she didn't mind a scrap, and not a
scrap either his knowing how she had left the dear lady in the dark.
She had come alone, putting her friend off with a fraud: giving a
pretext of shops, of a whim, of she didn't know what--the amusement of
being for once in the streets by herself. The streets by herself were
new to her--she had always had in them a companion, or a maid; and he
was never to believe, moreover, that she couldn't take full in the face
anything he might have to say. He was softly amused at her account of
her courage; though he yet showed it somehow without soothing her too
grossly. Still, he did want to know whom she had. Hadn't there been a
lady with her on Wednesday?
"Yes--a different one. Not the one who's travelling with me. I've told
_her."_
Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air--the greatest charm
of all--of giving her lots of time. "You've told her what?"
"Well," said Milly, "that I visit you in secret."
"And how many persons will she tell?"
"Oh, she's devoted. Not one."
"Well, if she's devoted doesn't that make another friend for you?"
It didn't take much computation, but she nevertheless had to think a
moment, conscious as she was that he distinctly _would_ want to fill
out his notion of her--even a little, as it were, to warm the air for
her. That, however--and better early than late--he must accept as of no
use; and she herself felt for an instant quite a competent certainty on
the subject of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale, was, from
the very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a
considerable chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she
could tell him nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that
it would importantly simplify. "Yes, it makes another; but they all
together wouldn't make--well, I don't know what to call it but the
difference. I mean when one is--really alone. I've never seen anything
like the kindness." She pulled up a minute while he waited--waited
again as if with his reasons for letting her, for almost making her,
talk. What she herself wanted was not, for the third time, to cry, as
it were, in public. She _had_ never seen anything like the kindness,
and she wished to do it justice; but she knew what she was about, and
justice was not wronged by her being able presently to stick to her
point. "Only one's situation is what it is. It's me it concerns. The
rest is delightful and useless. Nobody can really help. That's why I'm
by myself to-day. I _want_ to be--in spite of Miss Croy, who came with
me last. If you can help, so much the better and also of course if one
can, a little, one's self. Except for that--you and me doing our
best--I like you to see me just as I am. Yes, I like it--and I don't
exaggerate. Shouldn't one, at the start, show the worst--so that
anything after that may be better? It wouldn't make any real
difference--it _won't_ make any, anything that may happen won't--to any
one. Therefore I feel myself, this way, with you, just as I am; and--if
you do in the least care to know--it quite positively bears me up." She
put it as to his caring to know, because his manner seemed to give her
all her chance, and the impression was there for her to take. It was
strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did, accordingly,
take it straight home. It showed him--showed him in spite of
himself--as allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively
remote, things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside,
delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested, on her behalf,
in other questions beside the question of what was the matter with her.
She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of
scientific mind--his _being_ the even highest, magnificently because
otherwise, obviously, it wouldn't be there; but she could at the same
time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that
might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know
more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged
couldn't be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but
some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When
that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly,
pity; and when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike,
in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference
but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now--she would
always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment
she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the
greater ease to himself as there wasn't one of her divinations that--as
her own--he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was
making her talk she _was_ talking; and what it could, at any rate, come
to for him was that she wasn't afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest
thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn't;
which undertaking of hers--not to have misled him--was what she counted
at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as
good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really _be_
misled; and there actually passed between them for some seconds a sign,
a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This
made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then
what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and
the whole thing wound up, for that consummation, with its kind dim
smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but
brightness--that even of sharp steel--was of course for the other side
of the business, and it would all come in for her in one way or
another. "Do you mean," he asked, "that you've no relations at
all?--not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?"
She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or
a freak of nature at a show. "Nobody whatever." But the last thing she
had come for was to be dreary about it. "I'm a survivor--a survivor of
a general wreck. You see," she added, "how that's to be taken into
account--that everyone else _has_ gone. When I was ten years old there
were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I'm all that's left. But
they died," she went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I'm American. Not that I
mean that makes me worse. However, you'll probably know what it makes
me."
"Yes," he discreetly indulged her; "I know perfectly what it makes you.
It makes you, to begin with, a capital case."
She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before the social scene.
"Ah, there you are!"
"Oh, no; there 'we' aren't at all. There I am only--but as much as you
like. I've no end of American friends: there _they_ are, if you please,
and it's a fact that you couldn't very well be in a better place than
in their company. It puts you with plenty of others--and that isn't
pure solitude." Then he pursued: "I'm sure you've an excellent spirit;
but don't try to bear more things than you need." Which after an
instant he further explained. "Hard things have come to you in youth,
but you mustn't think life will be for you all hard things. You've the
right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept
any form in which happiness may come."
"Oh, I'll accept any whatever!" she almost gaily returned. "And it
seems to me, for that matter, that I'm accepting a new one every day.
Now _this!"_ she smiled.
"This is very well so far as it goes. You can depend on me," the great
man said, "for unlimited interest. But I'm only, after all, one element
in fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don't mind who knows.
Knows, I mean, that you and I are friends."
"Ah, you do want to see some one!" she broke out. "You want to get at
some one who cares for me." With which, however, as he simply met this
spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often had it from young
persons of her race, and that he was familiar even with the
possibilities of their familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain
by his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the most
reasonable thing she could say. This would be, precisely, on the
subject of that freedom, which she now quickly spoke of as complete.
"That's of course by itself a great boon; so please don't think I don't
know it. I can do exactly what I like--anything in all the wide world.
I haven't a creature to ask--there's not a finger to stop me. I can
shake about till I'm black and blue. That perhaps isn't _all_ joy; but
lots of people, I know, would like to try it." He had appeared about to
put a question, but then had let her go on, which she promptly did, for
she understood him the next moment as having thus taken it from her
that her means were as great as might be. She had simply given it to
him so, and this was all that would ever pass between them on the
odious head. Yet she couldn't help also knowing that an important
effect, for his judgment, or at least for his amusement--which was his
feeling, since, marvellously, he did have feeling--was produced by it.
All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him like the
morsels of coloured glass that used to make combinations, under the
hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood. "So
that if it's a question of my doing anything under the sun that will
help----!"
"You'll _do_ anything under the sun? Good." He took that beautifully,
ever so pleasantly, for what it was worth; but time was needed--ten
minutes or so were needed on the spot--to deal even provisionally, with
the substantive question. It was convenient, in its degree, that there
was nothing she wouldn't do; but it seemed also highly and agreeably
vague that she should have to do anything. They thus appeared to be
taking her, together, for the moment, and almost for sociability, as
prepared to proceed to gratuitous extremities; the upshot of which was
in turn, that after much interrogation, auscultation, exploration, much
noting of his own sequences and neglecting of hers, had duly kept up
the vagueness, they might have struck themselves, or may at least
strike us, as coming back from an undeterred but useless voyage to the
north pole. Milly was ready, under orders, for the north pole; which
fact was doubtless what made a blinding anticlimax of her friend's
actual abstention from orders. "No," she heard him again distinctly
repeat it, "I don't want you for the present to do anything at all;
anything, that is, but obey a small prescription or two that will be
made clear to you, and let me within a few days come to see you at
home."
It was at first heavenly. "Then you'll see Mrs. Stringham." But she
didn't mind a bit now.
"Well, I shan't be afraid of Mrs. Stringham." And he said it once more
as she asked once more: "Absolutely not; I 'send' you nowhere.
England's all right--anywhere that's pleasant, convenient, decent, will
be all right. You say you can do exactly as you like. Oblige me
therefore by being so good as to do it. There's only one thing: you
ought of course, now, as soon as I've seen you again, to get out of
London."
Milly thought. "May I then go back to the continent?"
"By all means back to the continent. Do go back to the continent."
"Then how will you keep seeing me? But perhaps," she quickly added,
"you won't want to keep seeing me."
He had it all ready; he had really everything all ready. "I shall
follow you up; though if you mean that I don't want you to keep seeing
_me_----"
"Well?" she asked.
It was only just here that he struck her the least bit as stumbling.
"Well, see all you can. That's what it comes to. Worry about nothing.
You _have_ at least no worries. It's a great, rare chance."
She had got up, for she had had from him both that he would send her
something and would advise her promptly of the date of his coming to
her, by which she was virtually dismissed. Yet, for herself, one or two
things kept her. "May I come back to England too?"
"Rather! Whenever you like. But always, when you do come, immediately
let me know."
"Ah," said Milly, "it won't be a great going to and fro."
"Then if you'll stay with us, so much the better."
It touched her, the way he controlled his impatience of her; and the
fact itself affected her as so precious that she yielded to the wish to
get more from it. "So you don't think I'm out of my mind?"
"Perhaps that _is,"_ he smiled, "all that's the matter."
She looked at him longer. "No, that's too good. Shall I, at any rate,
suffer?"
"Not a bit."
"And yet then live?"
"My dear young lady," said her distinguished friend, "isn't to 'live'
exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?"
XIII
She had gone out with these last words so in her ears that when once
she was well away--back this time in the great square alone--it was as
if some instant application of them had opened out there before her. It
was positively, this effect, an excitement that carried her on; she
went forward into space under the sense of an impulse received--an
impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up
for the hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to come by herself.
No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no
tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside
her without some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush,
that her only company must be the human race at large, present all
round her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be,
then and there, the grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had
somehow of a sudden become her element; grey immensity was what her
distinguished friend had, for the moment, furnished her world with and
what the question of "living," as he put it to her, living by option,
by volition, inevitably took on for its immediate face. She went
straight before her, without weakness, altogether with strength; and
still as she went she was more glad to be alone, for nobody--not Kate
Croy, not Susan Shepherd either--would have wished to rush with her as
she rushed. She had asked him at the last whether, being on foot, she
might go home so, or elsewhere, and he had replied as if almost amused
again at her extravagance: "You're active, luckily, by nature--it's
beautiful: therefore rejoice in it. _Be_ active, without folly--for
you're not foolish: be as active as you can and as you like." That had
been in fact the final push, as well as the touch that most made a
mixture of her consciousness--a strange mixture that tasted at one and
the same time of what she had lost and what had been given her. It was
wonderful to her, while she took her random course, that these
quantities felt so equal: she had been treated--hadn't she?--as if it
were in her power to live; and yet one wasn't treated so--was
one?--unless it came up, quite as much, that one might die. The beauty
of the bloom had gone from the small old sense of safety--that was
distinct: she had left it behind her there forever. But the beauty of
the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in
which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had
been offered her instead. It was as if she had had to pluck off her
breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a
little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress; and to take up and
shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a
spear, a battle-axe conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking
appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture. She
felt this instrument, for that matter, already on her back, so that she
proceeded now in very truth as a soldier on a march--proceeded as if,
for her initiation, the first charge had been sounded. She passed along
unknown streets, over dusty littery ways, between long rows of fronts
not enhanced by the August light; she felt good for miles and only
wanted to get lost; there were moments at corners, where she stopped
and chose her direction, in which she quite lived up to his injunction
to rejoice that she was active. It was like a new pleasure to have so
new a reason; she would affirm, without delay, her option, her
volition; taking this personal possession of what surrounded her was a
fair affirmation to start with; and she really didn't care if she made
it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder in due course
"whatever," as they said at the hotel, had become of her; yet this
would be nothing either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended her steps: it was
quite as if she saw in people's eyes the reflection of her appearance
and pace. She found herself moving at times in regions visibly not
haunted by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped,
sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with
extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in
byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers
carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her
shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the
fear of overdoing this character she would here and there have begun
conversation, have asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as that
would help the requirements of adventure, her way was exactly what she
wanted not to know. The difficulty was that she at last accidentally
found it; she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent's Park,
round which, on two or three occasions with Kate Croy, her public
chariot had solemnly rolled. But she went into it further now; this was
the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous
roads, well within the centre and on the stretches of shabby grass.
Here were benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of
ball, with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers,
anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others
just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was
it, in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question of life?
They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been
told so; she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the
information, feeling it altered, assimilated, recognising it again as
something, in a slightly different shape, familiar enough, the blessed
old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with
them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that
she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair
that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, with
superiority, a fee.
The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left her, if only because
she before long knew herself for more tired than she had proposed. This
and the charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made her
linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in
the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that
this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before,
at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly
able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life. This present
kind of thing therefore might be--which was where precisely her
distinguished friend seemed to be wishing her to come out. He wished
her also, it was true, not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too
much of her isolation; at the same time however as he clearly desired
to deny her no decent source of interest. He was interested--she
arrived at that--in her appealing to as many sources as possible; and
it fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was
essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it herself she would
have called it bolstering--the bolstering that was simply for the weak;
and she thought and thought as she put together the proofs that it was
as one of the weak he was treating her. It was of course as one of the
weak that she had gone to him--but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that
he might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable young
lioness! What indeed she was really confronted with was the
consciousness that he had not, after all, pronounced her anything: she
nursed herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out of it.
Did he think, however, she wondered, that he could keep out of it to
the end?--though, as she weighed the question, she yet felt it a little
unjust. Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions numerous
and strange; but she had, happily, before she moved, worked round to a
simplification. Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect of
its rolling over her that, when one considered it, he might perhaps
have "got out" by one door but to come in with a beautiful, beneficent
dishonesty by another. It kept her more intensely motionless there that
what he might fundamentally be "up to" was some disguised intention of
standing by her as a friend. Wasn't that what women always said they
wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they
couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt,
sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make
husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was, by a similar law, the
expedient of doctors in general for the invalids of whom they couldn't
make patients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that _her_ doctor
was--however fatuous it might sound--exceptionally moved. This was the
damning little fact--if she could talk of damnation: that she could
believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking
her. She hadn't gone to him to be liked, she had gone to him to be
judged; and he was quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
rule, of observing the difference. She could like _him,_ as she
distinctly did--that was another matter; all the more that her doing so
was now, so obviously for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it
would have been all portentously mixed had not, as we say, a final,
merciful wave, chilling rather, but washing clear, come to her
assistance.
It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was spent. She had been
asking herself why, if her case was grave--and she knew what she meant
by that--he should have talked to her at all about what she might with
futility "do"; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should
attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
little lonely acuteness--as acuteness went during the dog-days in the
Regent's Park--in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was
ill; or she didn't matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter--until he should
prove the contrary. It was too evident that a person at his high
pressure must keep his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
amusements, only for the very greatest occasions. Her prevision, in
fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that
judgment in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the
judgment it was that made her sensation simple. He _had_ distinguished
her--that was the chill. He hadn't known--how could he?--that she was
devilishly subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected, the
suspicious, the condemned. He in fact confessed to it, in his way, as
to an interest in her combinations, her funny race, her funny losses,
her funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt, above all, her funny
manners--funny, like those of Americans at their best, without being
vulgar, legitimating amiability and helping to pass it off. In his
appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for her the
compassion he so signally permitted himself to waste; but its operation
for herself was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced
her to her ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl with her rent
to pay for example--staring before her in a great city. Milly had her
rent to pay, her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet
it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters. This was the sensation the
great man had doubtless not purposed. Well, she must go home, like the
poor girl, and see. There might after all be ways; the poor girl too
would be thinking. It came back for that matter perhaps to views
already presented. She looked about her again, on her feet, at her
scattered, melancholy comrades--some of them so melancholy as to be
down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing;
she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between
which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps
superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it
was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would
live if one could.
She found after this, for the day or two, more amusement than she had
ventured to count on in the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of
deceiving Susie; and she presently felt that what made the difference
was the mere fancy--as this _was_ one--of a countermove to her great
man. His taking on himself--should he do so--to get at her companion
made her suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any notion of her own
all right for her; though indeed at the very moment she invited herself
to enjoy this impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise, or
at least for speculation. Her idea would rather have been that Mrs.
Stringham would have looked at her hard--her sketch of the grounds of
her long, independent excursion showing, she could feel, as almost
cynically superficial. Yet the dear woman so failed, in the event, to
avail herself of any right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting,
for an hour, to wonder if Kate Croy had been playing perfectly fair.
Hadn't she possibly, from motives of the highest benevolence,
promptings of the finest anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would
have called the straight tip? It must immediately be mentioned,
however, that, quite apart from a remembrance of the distinctness of
Kate's promise, Milly, the next thing, found her explanation in a truth
that had the merit of being general. If Susie, at this crisis,
suspiciously spared her, it was really that Susie was always
suspiciously sparing her--yet occasionally, too, with portentous and
exceptional mercies. The girl was conscious of how she dropped at times
into inscrutable, impenetrable deferences--attitudes that, though
without at all intending it, made a difference for familiarity, for the
ease of intimacy. It was as if she recalled herself to manners, to the
law of court-etiquette--which last note above all helped our young
woman to a just appreciation. It was definite for her, even if not
quite solid, that to treat her as a princess was a positive need of her
companion's mind; wherefore she couldn't help it if this lady had her
transcendent view of the way the class in question were treated. Susan
had read history, had read Gibbon and Froude and Saint-Simon; she had
high-lights as to the special allowances made for the class, and, since
she saw them, when young, as effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic
and infinitely refined, one must take it for amusing if she inclined to
an indulgence verily Byzantine. If one _could_ only be
Byzantine!--wasn't _that_ what she insidiously led one on to sigh?
Milly tried to oblige her--for it really placed Susan herself so
handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that race--it would
be somewhere in Gibbon--weren't, apparently, questioned about their
mysteries. But oh, poor Milly and hers! Susan at all events proved
scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic at Ravenna. Susan
was a porcelain monument to the odd moral that consideration might,
like cynicism, have abysses. Besides, the Puritan finally
disencumbered----! What starved generations wasn't Mrs. Stringham, in
fancy, going to make up for?
Kate Croy came straight to the hotel--came that evening shortly before
dinner; specifically and publicly moreover, in a hansom that, driven
apparently very fast, pulled up beneath their windows almost with the
clatter of an accident, a "smash." Milly, alone, as happened, in the
great garnished void of their sitting-room, where, a little, really,
like a caged Byzantine, she had been pacing through the queer,
long-drawn, almost sinister delay of night, an effect she yet
liked--Milly, at the sound, one of the French windows standing open,
passed out to the balcony that overhung, with pretensions, the general
entrance, and so was in time for the look that Kate, alighting, paying
her cabman, happened to send up to the front. The visitor moreover had
a shilling back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony,
looked down at her, and a mute exchange, but with smiles and nods, took
place between them on what had occurred in the morning. It was what
Kate had called for, and the tone was thus, almost by accident,
determined for Milly before her friend came up. What was also, however,
determined for her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image
presented to her, the splendid young woman who looked so particularly
handsome in impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the
peculiar property of somebody else's vision, that this fine freedom in
short was the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she
looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her--held as by
the strange sense of seeing through that distant person's eyes. It
lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so
lasting it produced an effect. It produced in fact more than one, and
we take them in their order. The first was that it struck our young
woman as absurd to say that a girl's looking so to a man could possibly
be without connections; and the second was that by the time Kate had
got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connection
it must have for herself.
She produced this commodity on the spot--produced it, that is, in
straight response to Kate's frank "Well, what?" The inquiry bore of
course, with Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's scene, the
great man's latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as
the cheerful demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when
news is not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She
couldn't have said what it was exactly that, on the instant, determined
her; the nearest description of it would perhaps have been as the more
vivid impression of all her friend took for granted. The contrast
between this free quantity and the maze of possibilities through which,
for hours, she had herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for
the moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it
helped forward in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely
had nothing to tell. Besides which, certainly, there was something
else--an influence, at the particular juncture, still more obscure.
Kate had lost, on the way upstairs, the look--_the_ look--that made her
young hostess so subtly think and one of the signs of which was that
she never kept it for many moments at once; yet she stood there, none
the less, so in her bloom and in her strength, so completely again the
"handsome girl" beyond all others, the "handsome girl" for whom Milly
had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet her now with the note
of the plaintive would amount somehow to a surrender, to a confession.
_She_ would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor would keep
her, at the worst, the fewest minutes; and it was as if she had asked
just _with_ all this practical impeccability for all that was most
mortal in her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly danced their
dance; but the vibration produced and the dust kicked up had lasted
less than our account of them. Almost before she knew it she was
answering, and answering, beautifully, with no consciousness of fraud,
only as with a sudden flare of the famous "will-power" she had heard
about, read about, and which was what her medical adviser had mainly
thrown her back on. "Oh, it's all right. He's lovely."
Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the
further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs.
Stringham. "You mean you've been absurd?"
"Absurd." It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for
our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done
something for her safety.
And Kate really hung on her lips. "There's nothing at all the matter?"
"Nothing to worry about. I shall take a little watching, but I shan't
have to do anything dreadful, or even, in the least, inconvenient. I
can do in fact as I like." It was wonderful for Milly how just to put
it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into places.
Yet even before the full effect came Kate had seized, kissed, blessed
her. "My love, you're too sweet! It's too dear! But it's as I was
sure." Then she grasped the full beauty. "You can do as you like?"
"Quite. Isn't it charming?"
"Ah, but catch you," Kate triumphed with gaiety, _"not_ doing----! And
what _shall_ you do?"
"For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy"--Milly was completely
luminous--"having got out of my scrape."
"Learning, you mean, so easily, that you _are_ well."
It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her
mouth. "Learning, I mean, so easily, that I _am_ well."
"Only, no one's of course well enough to stay in London now. He can't,"
Kate went on, "want this of you."
"Mercy, no--I'm to knock about. I'm to go to places."
"But not beastly 'climates'--Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?"
"No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I'm to go in for pleasure."
"Oh, the duck!"--Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded.
"But what kind of pleasure?"
"The highest," Milly smiled.
Her friend met it as nobly. "Which is the highest?"
"Well, it's just our chance to find out. You must help me."
"What have I wanted to do but help you," Kate asked, "from the moment I
first laid eyes on you?" Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. "I like
your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round,
do you want?"
XIV
Milly indeed at last couldn't say; so that she had really for the time
brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor's
arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out,
from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily
perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually
waited for was Sir Luke Strett's promised visit; as to her proceeding
on which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get
at Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would
see how he liked it. What was between _them_ they might settle as
between them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they
were at liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire
Susan Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at
the worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion, in a word, was what it
would come up for the interested pair to organise, she was herself
ready to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to
her of her "appetite" her account of which, she felt, must have been
vague. But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of
the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous--these were doubtless the proper
names for her: she was at all events resigned in advance to the
machinations of sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion
was to be the last but two or three of their stay in London; and the
evening of that day practically ranked for them as, in the matter of
outside relations, the last of all. People were by this time quite
scattered, and many of those who had so liberally manifested in calls,
in cards, in evident sincerity about visits, later on, over the land,
had positively passed in music out of sight; whether as members, these
latter, more especially, of Mrs. Lowder's immediate circle or as
members of Lord Mark's--our friends being by this time able to make the
distinction. The general pitch had thus, decidedly, dropped, and the
occasions still to be dealt with were special and few. One of these,
for Milly, announced itself as the doctor's call already mentioned, as
to which she had now had a note from him: the single other, of
importance, was their appointed leave-taking--for the shortest
separation--in respect to Mrs. Lowder and Kate. The aunt and the niece
were to dine with them alone, intimately and easily--as easily as
should be consistent with the question of their afterwards going on
together to some absurdly belated party, at which they had had it from
Aunt Maud that they would do well to show. Sir Luke was to make his
appearance on the morrow of this, and in respect to that complication
Milly had already her plan.
The night was, at all events, hot and stale, and it was late enough by
the time the four ladies had been gathered in, for their small session,
at the hotel, where the windows were still open to the high balconies
and the flames of the candles, behind the pink shades--disposed as for
the vigil of watchers--were motionless in the air in which the season
lay dead. What was presently settled among them was that Milly, who
betrayed on this occasion a preference more marked than usual, should
not hold herself obliged to climb that evening the social stair,
however it might stretch to meet her, and that, Mrs. Lowder and Mrs.
Stringham facing the ordeal together, Kate Croy should remain with her
and await their return. It was a pleasure to Milly, ever, to send Susan
Shepherd forth; she saw her go with complacency, liked, as it were, to
put people off with her, and noted with satisfaction, when she so moved
to the carriage, the further denudation--a markedly ebbing tide--of her
little benevolent back. If it wasn't quite Aunt Maud's ideal, moreover,
to take out the new American girl's funny friend instead of the new
American girl herself, nothing could better indicate the range of that
lady's merit than the spirit in which--as at the present hour for
instance--she made the best of the minor advantage. And she did this
with a broad, cheerful absence of illusion; she did it--confessing even
as much to poor Susie--because, frankly, she _was_ good-natured. When
Mrs. Stringham observed that her own light was too abjectly borrowed
and that it was as a link alone, fortunately not missing, that she was
valued, Aunt Maud concurred to the extent of the remark: "Well, my
dear, you're better than nothing." To-night, furthermore, it came up
for Milly that Aunt Maud had something particular in mind. Mrs.
Stringham, before adjourning with her, had gone off for some shawl or
other accessory, and Kate, as if a little impatient for their
withdrawal, had wandered out to the balcony, where she hovered, for the
time, unseen, though with scarce more to look at than the dim London
stars and the cruder glow, up the street, on a corner, of a small
public-house, in front of which a fagged cab-horse was thrown into
relief. Mrs. Lowder made use of the moment: Milly felt as soon as she
had spoken that what she was doing was somehow for use.
"Dear Susan tells me that you saw, in America, Mr. Densher--whom I've
never till now, as you may have noticed, asked you about. But do you
mind at last, in connection with him, doing something for me?" She had
lowered her fine voice to a depth, though speaking with all her rich
glibness; and Milly, after a small sharpness of surprise, was already
guessing the sense of her appeal. "Will you name him, in any way you
like, to _her"_--and Aunt Maud gave a nod at the window; "so that you
may perhaps find out whether he's back?"
Ever so many things, for Milly, fell into line at this; it was a
wonder, she afterwards thought, that she could be conscious of so many
at once. She smiled hard, however, for them all. "But I don't know that
it's important to me to 'find out.'" The array of things was further
swollen, however, even as she said this, by its striking her as too
much to say. She therefore tried as quickly to say less. "Except you
mean, of course, that it's important to _you."_ She fancied Aunt Maud
was looking at her almost as hard as she was herself smiling, and that
gave her another impulse. "You know I never _have_ yet named him to
her; so that if I should break out now----"
"Well?"--Mrs. Lowder waited.
"Why, she may wonder what I've been making a mystery of. She hasn't
mentioned him, you know," Milly went on, "herself."
"No"--her friend a little heavily weighed it--"she wouldn't. So it's
she, you see then, who has made the mystery."
Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so much. "There has been
of course no particular reason." Yet that indeed was neither here nor
there. "Do you think," she asked, "he is back?"
"It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a comfort to me
definitely to know."
"Then can't you ask her yourself?"
"Ah, we never speak of him!"
It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience of a puzzled pause.
"Do you mean he's an acquaintance of whom you disapprove for her?"
Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. "I disapprove of _her_ for the poor
young man. She doesn't care for him."
"And _he_ cares so much----?"
"Too much, too much. And my fear is," said Mrs. Lowder, "that he
privately besets her. She keeps it to herself, but I don't want her
worried. Neither, in truth," she both generously and confidentially
concluded, "do I want _him."_
Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case. "But what can _I_ do?"
"You can find out where they are. If I myself try," Mrs. Lowder
explained, "I shall appear to treat them as if I supposed them
deceiving me."
"And you don't. You don't," Milly mused for her, "suppose them
deceiving you."
"Well," said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes failed to blink, even
though Milly's questions might have been taken as drawing her rather
further than she had originally meant to go--"well, Kate is thoroughly
aware of my views for her, and that I take her being with me, at
present, in the way she is with me, if you know what I mean, as a loyal
assent to them. Therefore as my views don't happen to provide a place,
at all, for Mr. Densher, much, in a manner, as I like him"--therefore,
therefore in short she had been prompted to this step, though she
completed her sense, but sketchily, with the rattle of her large fan.
It assisted them perhaps, however, for the moment, that Milly was able
to pick out of her sense what might serve as the clearest part of it.
"You do like him then?"
"Oh dear, yes. Don't you?"
Milly hesitated, for the question was somehow as the sudden point of
something sharp on a nerve that winced. She just caught her breath, but
she had ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really having
failed to choose with quickness sufficient, out of fifteen possible
answers, the one that would best serve her. She was then almost proud,
as well, that she had cheerfully smiled. "I did--three times--in New
York." So came and went for her, in these simple words, the speech that
was to figure for her, later on, that night, as the one she had ever
uttered that cost her most. She was to lie awake, at all events, half
the night, for the gladness of not having taken any line so really
inferior as the denial of a happy impression.
For Mrs. Lowder also, moreover, her simple words were the right ones;
they were at any rate, that lady's laugh showed, in the natural note of
the racy. "You dear American thing! But people may be very good, and
yet not good for what one wants."
"Yes," the girl assented, "even I suppose when what one wants is
something very good."
"Oh, my child, it would take too long just now to tell you all _I_
want! I want everything at once and together--and ever so much for you
too, you know. But you've seen us," Aunt Maud continued; "you'll have
made out."
"Ah," said Milly, "I _don't_ make out"; for again--it came that way in
rushes--she felt an obscurity in things. "Why, if our friend here
doesn't like him----"
"Should I conceive her interested in keeping things from me?" Mrs.
Lowder did justice to the question. "My dear, how can you ask? Put
yourself in her place. She meets me, but on _her_ terms. Proud young
women are proud young women. And proud old ones are--well, what _I_ am.
Fond of you as we both are, you can help us."
Milly tried to be inspired. "Does it come back then to my asking her
straight?"
At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her up. "Oh, if you've so
many reasons not----!"
"I've not so many," Milly smiled "but I've one. If I break out so
suddenly as knowing him, what will she make of my not having spoken
before?"
Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. "Why should you care what she makes?
You may have only been decently discreet."
"Ah, I _have_ been," the girl made haste to say.
"Besides," her friend went on, "I suggested to you, through Susan, your
line."
"Yes, that reason's a reason for _me."_
"And for _me,"_ Mrs. Lowder insisted. "She's not therefore so stupid as
not to do justice to grounds so marked. You can tell her perfectly that
I had asked you to say nothing."
"And may I tell her that you've asked me now to speak?"
Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly, this pulled her up.
"You can't do it without----?"
Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many difficulties. "I'll do
what I can if you'll kindly tell me one thing more." She faltered a
little--it was so prying; but she brought it out. "Will he have been
writing to her?"
"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to know." Mrs. Lowder was at
last impatient. "Push in for yourself, and I dare say she'll tell you."
Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. "It will be
pushing in," she continued to smile, "for _you"_ She allowed her
companion, however, no time to take this up. "The point will be that if
he _has_ been writing she may have answered."
"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"
"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple," Milly said, "that
if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me."
"Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?"
The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural that her
interlocutress herself should so fail of subtlety. "It will make the
difference that he will have written to her in answer that he knows me.
And that, in turn," our young woman explained, "will give an oddity to
my own silence."
"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The
only oddity," Aunt Maud lucidly professed, "is for yourself. It's in
_her_ not having spoken."
"Ah, there we are!" said Milly.
And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend.
"Then it _has_ troubled you?"
But ah, the inquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with
fine inconsequence, to her face. "Not, really, the least little bit!"
And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the
point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap
how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the
intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was, in the first
place, already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of
her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her
face of her uppermost motive--it was so little, in its hard, smooth
sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke
fair; the only thing was that when she spoke hard she likewise didn't
look soft. Something, none the less, had arisen in her now--a full
appreciable tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced
that if what she had asked was to prove in the least a bore her young
friend was not to dream of it; making her young friend at the same
time, by the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely. She
spoke with a belated light, Milly could apprehend--she could always
apprehend--from pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl,
was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate, keeping her
secret, had been straight with her. From Kate distinctly then, as to
why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby
simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own character. This
fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by a kindled
preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest than her
own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must have been
thinking, round the case, much more than she had supposed; and this
remark could, at once, affect the girl as sharply as any other form of
the charge of weakness. It was what everyone, if she didn't look out,
would soon be saying--"There's something the matter with you!" What one
was therefore one's self concerned immediately to establish was that
there was nothing at all. "I shall like to help you; I shall like, so
far as that goes, to help Kate herself," she made such haste as she
could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the
room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a
little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to
begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity
this friend was giving them--referring it, however, so far as words
went, to the other friend, breaking off with an amused: "How
tremendously Susie must be beautifying!"
It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her
allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure
that must signify some enriched benevolence. "Let it go, my dear. We
shall, after all, soon enough see."
"If he _has_ come back we shall certainly see," Milly after a moment
replied; "for he'll probably feel that he can't quite civilly not come
to see me. Then _there,"_ she remarked, "we shall be. It wouldn't then,
you see, come through Kate at all--it would come through him. Except,"
she wound up with a smile, "that he won't find me."
She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her interlocutress,
in spite of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so
floated her on that she couldn't stop--by very much the same trick it
had played her with her doctor. "Shall you run away from him?"
She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. "Then," she
went on, "you'll deal with Kate directly."
"Shall you run away from _her?"_ Mrs. Lowder profoundly inquired, while
they became aware of Susie's return through the room, opening out
behind them, in which they had dined.
This affected Milly as giving her but an instant; and suddenly, with
it, everything she felt in the connection rose to her lips in a
question that, even as she put it, she knew she was failing to keep
colourless. "Is it your own belief that he _is_ with her?"
Aunt Maud took it in--took in, that is, everything of the tone that she
just wanted her not to; and the result for some seconds, was but to
make their eyes meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them and
was asking if Kate had gone--an inquiry at once answered by this young
lady's reappearance. They saw her again in the open window, where,
looking at them, she had paused--producing thus, on Aunt Maud's part,
almost too impressive a "Hush!" Mrs. Lowder indeed, without loss of
time, smothered any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie; but
Milly's words to her, just uttered, about dealing with her niece
directly, struck our young woman as already recoiling on herself.
Directness, however evaded, would be, fully, for _her;_ nothing in fact
would ever have been for her so direct as the evasion. Kate had
remained in the window, very handsome and upright, the outer dark
framing in a highly favourable way her summery simplicities and
lightnesses of dress. Milly had, given the relation of space, no real
fear she had heard their talk; only she hovered there as with conscious
eyes and some added advantage. Then indeed, with small delay, her
friend sufficiently saw. The conscious eyes, the added advantage were
but those she had now always at command--those proper to the person
Milly knew as known to Merton Densher. It was for several seconds again
as if the _total_ of her identity had been that of the person known to
him--a determination having for result another sharpness of its own.
Kate had positively but to be there just as she was to tell her he had
come back. It seemed to pass between them, in fine, without a word,
that he was in London, that he was perhaps only round the corner; and
surely therefore no dealing of Milly's with her would yet have been so
direct.
XV
It was doubtless because this queer form of directness had in itself,
for the hour, seemed so sufficient that Milly was afterwards aware of
having really, all the while--during the strange, indescribable session
before the return of their companions--done nothing to intensify it. If
she was most aware only afterwards, under the long, discurtained ordeal
of the morrow's dawn, that was because she had really, till their
evening's end came, ceased, after a little, to miss anything from their
ostensible comfort. What was behind showed but in gleams and glimpses;
what was in front never at all confessed to not holding the stage.
Three minutes had not passed before Milly quite knew she should have
done nothing Aunt Maud had just asked her. She knew it moreover by much
the same light that had acted for her with that lady and with Sir Luke
Strett. It pressed upon her then and there that she was still in a
current determined, through her indifference, timidity, bravery,
generosity--she scarce could say which--by others; that not she but the
current acted, and that somebody else, always, was the keeper of the
lock or the dam. Kate for example had but to open the flood-gate: the
current moved in its mass--the current, as it had been, of her doing as
Kate wanted. What, somehow, in the most extraordinary way in the world,
_had_ Kate wanted but to be, of a sudden, more interesting than she had
ever been? Milly, for their evening then, quite held her breath with
the appreciation of it. If she hadn't been sure her companion would
have had nothing, from her moments with Mrs. Lowder, to go by, she
would almost have seen the admirable creature "cutting in" to
anticipate a danger. This fantasy indeed, while they sat together,
dropped after a little; even if only because other fantasies multiplied
and clustered, making fairly, for our young woman, the buoyant medium
in which her friend talked and moved. They sat together, I say, but
Kate moved as much as she talked; she figured there, restless and
charming, just perhaps a shade perfunctory, repeatedly quitting her
place, taking slowly, to and fro, in the trailing folds of her light
dress, the length of the room, and almost avowedly performing for the
pleasure of her hostess.
Mrs. Lowder had said to Milly at Matcham that she and her niece, as
allies, could practically conquer the world; but though it was a speech
about which there had even then been a vague, grand glamour, the girl
read into it at present more of an approach to a meaning. Kate, for
that matter, by herself, could conquer anything, and _she,_ Milly
Theale, was probably concerned with the "world" only as the small scrap
of it that most impinged on her and that was therefore first to be
dealt with. On this basis of being dealt with she would doubtless
herself do her share of the conquering: she would have something to
supply, Kate something to take--each of them thus, to that tune,
something for squaring with Aunt Maud's ideal. This in short was what
it came to now--that the occasion, in the quiet late lamplight, had the
quality of a rough rehearsal of the possible big drama. Milly knew
herself dealt with--handsomely, completely: she surrendered to the
knowledge, for so it was, she felt, that she supplied her helpful
force. And what Kate had to take Kate took as freely and, to all
appearance, as gratefully; accepting afresh, with each of her long,
slow walks, the relation between them so established and consecrating
her companion's surrender simply by the interest she gave it. The
interest to Milly herself we naturally mean; the interest to Kate Milly
felt as probably inferior. It easily and largely came for their present
talk, for the quick flight of the hour before the breach of the
spell--it all came, when considered, from the circumstance, not in the
least abnormal, that the handsome girl was in extraordinary "form."
Milly remembered her having said that she was at her best late at
night; remembered it by its having, with its fine assurance, made her
wonder when _she_ was at her best and how happy people must be who had
such a fixed time. She had no time at all; she was never at her
best--unless indeed it were exactly, as now, in listening, watching,
admiring, collapsing. If Kate moreover, quite mercilessly, had never
been so good, the beauty and the marvel of it was that she had never
really been so frank; being a person of such a calibre, as Milly would
have said, that, even while "dealing" with you and thereby, as it were,
picking her steps, she could let herself go, could, in irony, in
confidence, in extravagance, tell you things she had never told before.
That was the impression--that she was telling things, and quite
conceivably for her own relief as well; almost as if the errors of
vision, the mistakes of proportion, the residuary innocence of spirit
still to be remedied on the part of her auditor had their moments of
proving too much for her nerves. She went at them just now, these
sources of irritation, with an amused energy that it would have been
open to Milly to regard as cynical and that was nevertheless called
for--as to this the other was distinct--by the way that in certain
connections the American mind broke down. It seemed at least--the
American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly--not to
understand English society without a separate confrontation with _all_
the cases. It couldn't proceed by--there was some technical term she
lacked until Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and then,
differently, instinct, none of which were right: it had to be led up
and introduced to each aspect of the monster, enabled to walk all round
it, whether for the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still
more as appeared to this critic disproportionate shock. It might, the
monster, Kate conceded, loom large for those born amid forms less
developed and therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some sides
be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated to devour the unwary, to
abase the proud, to scandalize the good; but if one had to live with it
one must, not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was virtually
in short to-night what the handsome girl showed herself as teaching.
She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster Gate and everything
it contained; she gave away, hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued
to note, Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt Maud's
complacencies; she gave herself away most of all, and it was naturally
what most contributed to her candour. She didn't speak to her friend
once more, in Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale the skies;
she spoke, by her bright, perverse preference on this occasion, of the
need, in the first place, of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might
have been a lesson, for our young American, in the art of seeing things
as they were--a lesson so various and so sustained that the pupil had,
as we have shown, but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore
was that it could serve its purpose while explicitly disavowing every
personal bias. It wasn't that she disliked Aunt Maud, who was
everything she had on other occasions declared; but the dear woman,
ineffaceably stamped by inscrutable nature and a dreadful art,
wasn't--how _could_ she be?--what she wasn't. She wasn't any one. She
wasn't anything. She wasn't anywhere. Milly mustn't think it--one
couldn't, as a good friend, let her. Those hours at Matcham were
_inespérées,_ were pure manna from heaven; or if not wholly that
perhaps, with humbugging old Lord Mark as a backer, were vain as a
ground for hopes and calculations. Lord Mark was very well, but he
wasn't _the_ cleverest creature in England, and even if he had been he
still wouldn't have been the most obliging. He weighed it out in
ounces, and indeed each of the pair was really waiting for what the
other would put down.
"She has put down _you."_ said Milly, attached to the subject still;
"and I think what you mean is that, on the counter, she still keeps
hold of you."
"Lest"--Kate took it up--"he should suddenly grab me and run? Oh, as he
isn't ready to run, he's much less ready, naturally, to grab. I
_am_--you're so far right as that--on the counter, when I'm not in the
shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus conveniently, commercially
whisked: the essence, all of it, of my position, and the price, as
properly, of my aunt's protection." Lord Mark was substantially what
she had begun with as soon as they were alone; the impression was even
yet with Milly of her having sounded his name, having imposed it, as a
topic, in direct opposition to the other name that Mrs. Lowder had left
in the air and that all her own look, as we have seen, kept there at
first for her companion. The immediate strange effect had been that of
her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi--which, successfully, she
so found. She had worked it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the
course marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had quite, so to
speak, broken it in. "The bore is that if she wants him so much--wants
him, heaven forgive her! for _me_--he has put us all out, since your
arrival, by wanting somebody else. I don't mean somebody else than you."
Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake her head. "Then I
haven't made out who it is. If I'm any part of his alternative he had
better stop where he is."
"Truly, truly?--always, always?"
Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety. "Would you like me to
swear?"
Kate appeared for a moment--though that was doubtless but gaiety
too--to think. "Haven't we been swearing enough?"
"You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to give you the
equivalent. At any rate there it is. Truly, truly as you say--'always,
always.' So I'm not in the way."
"Thanks," said Kate--"but that doesn't help me."
"Oh, it's as simplifying for _him_ that I speak of it."
"The difficulty really is that he's a person with so many ideas that
it's particularly hard to simplify for him. That's exactly of course
what Aunt Maud has been trying. He won't," Kate firmly continued, "make
up his mind about me."
"Well," Milly smiled, "give him time."
Her friend met it in perfection. "One is _doing_ that--one _is._ But
one remains, all the same, but one of his ideas."
"There's no harm in that," Milly returned, "if you come out in the end
as the best of them. What's a man," she pursued, "especially an
ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?"
"No doubt. The more the merrier." And Kate looked at her grandly. "One
can but hope to come out, and do nothing to prevent it."
All of which made for the impression, fantastic or not, of the _alibi._
The splendour, the grandeur were, for Milly, the bold ironic spirit
behind it, so interesting too in itself. What, moreover, was not less
interesting was the fact, as our young woman noted it, that Kate
confined her point to the difficulties, so far as _she_ was concerned,
raised only by Lord Mark. She referred now to none that her own taste
might present; which circumstance again played its little part. She was
doing what she liked in respect to another person, but she was in no
way committed to the other person, and her furthermore talking of Lord
Mark as not young and not true were only the signs of her clear
self-consciousness, were all in the line of her slightly hard, but
scarce the less graceful extravagance. She didn't wish to show too much
her consent to be arranged for, but that was a different thing from not
wishing sufficiently to give it. There was something moreover, on it
all, that Milly still found occasion to say, "If your aunt has been, as
you tell me, put out by me, I feel that she has remained remarkably
kind."
"Oh, but she has--whatever might have happened in that respect--plenty
of use for you! You put her in, my dear, more than you put her out. You
don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat. You can do
anything--you can do, I mean, lots that _we_ can't. You're an outsider,
independent and standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative to
tiers and tiers of others." And Kate, facing in that direction, went
further and further; wound up, while Milly gaped, with extraordinary
words. "We're of no use to you--it's decent to tell you. You'd be of
use to us, but that's a different matter. My honest advice to you would
be--" she went indeed all lengths--"to drop us while you can. It would
be funny if you didn't soon see how awfully better you can do. We've
not really done for you the least thing worth speaking of--nothing you
mightn't easily have had in some other way. Therefore you're under no
obligation. You won't want us next year; we shall only continue to want
_you._ But that's no reason for you, and you mustn't pay too dreadfully
for poor Mrs. Stringham's having let you in. She has the best
conscience in the world; she's enchanted with what she has done; but
you shouldn't take your people from _her._ It has been quite awful to
see you do it."
Milly tried to be amused, so as not--it was too absurd--to be fairly
frightened. Strange enough indeed--if not natural enough--that, late at
night thus, in a mere mercenary house, with Susie away, a want of
confidence should possess her. She recalled, with all the rest of it,
the next day, piecing things together in the dawn, that she had felt
herself alone with a creature who paced like a panther. That was a
violent image, but it made her a little less ashamed of having been
scared. For all her scare, none the less, she had now the sense to find
words. "And yet without Susie I shouldn't have had you."
It had been at this point, however, that Kate flickered highest. "Oh,
you may very well loathe me yet!"
Really at last, thus, it had been too much; as, with her own least
feeble flare, after a wondering watch, Milly had shown. She hadn't
cared; she had too much wanted to know; and, though a small solemnity
of reproach, a sombre strain, had broken into her tone, it was to
figure as her nearest approach to serving Mrs. Lowder. "Why do you say
such things to me?"
This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a
happy speech. She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before
her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly
hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were
often touched by her. "Because you're a dove." With which she felt
herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with
familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the
manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a
finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed.
It even came to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that
this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had
just said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she
found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath
with relief, the name so given her. She met it on the instant as she
would have met the revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in
which she lately had walked. _That_ was what was the matter with her.
She was a dove. Oh, _wasn't_ she?--it echoed within her as she became
aware of the sound, outside, of the return of their friends. There was,
the next thing, little enough doubt about it after Aunt Maud had been
two minutes in the room. She had come up, Mrs. Lowder, with
Susan--which she needn't have done, at that hour, instead of letting
Kate come down to her; so that Milly could be quite sure it was to
catch hold, in some way, of the loose end they had left. Well, the way
she did catch was simply to make the point that it didn't now in the
least matter. She had mounted the stairs for this, and she had her
moment again with her younger hostess while Kate, on the spot, as the
latter at the time noted, gave Susan Shepherd unwonted opportunities.
Kate was in other words, as Aunt Maud engaged her friend, listening
with the handsomest response to Mrs. Stringham's impression of the
scene they had just quitted. It was in the tone of the fondest
indulgence--almost, really, that of dove cooing to dove--that Mrs.
Lowder expressed to Milly the hope that it had all gone beautifully.
Her "all" had an ample benevolence; it soothed and simplified; she
spoke as if it were the two young women, not she and her comrade, who
had been facing the town together. But Milly's answer had prepared
itself while Aunt Maud was on the stair; she had felt in a rush all the
reasons that would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it, while
she was about it, as earnest, as candid. "I don't _think,_ dear lady,
he's here."
It gave her straightway the measure of the success she could have as a
dove: that was recorded in the long look of deep criticism, a look
without a word, that Mrs. Lowder poured forth. And the word, presently,
bettered it still. "Oh, you exquisite thing!" The luscious innuendo of
it, almost startling, lingered in the room, after the visitors had
gone, like an oversweet fragrance. But left alone with Mrs. Stringham
Milly continued to breathe it: she studied again the dovelike and so
set her companion to mere rich reporting that she averted all inquiry
into her own case.
That, with the new day, was once more her law--though she saw before
her, of course, as something of a complication, her need, each time, to
decide. She should have to be clear as to how a dove _would_ act. She
settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting
her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett. That, she was pleased to
reflect, had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent
drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after breakfast, began by staring at
it as if it had been a priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at
her feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes, in leaving
her to make the best of it. "Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to
see me at eleven, but I'm going out on purpose. He's to be told,
please, deceptively, that I'm at home, and, you, as my representative,
when he comes up, are to see him instead. He will like that, this time,
better. So do be nice to him." It had taken, naturally, more
explanation, and the mention, above all, of the fact that the visitor
was the greatest of doctors; yet when once the key had been offered
Susie slipped it on her bunch, and her young friend could again feel
her lovely imagination operate. It operated in truth very much as Mrs.
Lowder's, at the last, had done the night before: it made the air heavy
once more with the extravagance of assent. It might, afresh, almost
have frightened our young woman to see how people rushed to meet her:
_had_ she then so little time to live that the road must always be
spared her? It was as if they were helping her to take it out on the
spot. Susie--she couldn't deny, and didn't pretend to--might, of a
truth, on _her_ side, have treated such news as a flash merely lurid;
as to which, to do Susie justice, the pain of it was all there. But,
none the less, the margin always allowed her young friend was all there
as well; and the proposal now made her what was it in short but
Byzantine? The vision of Milly's perception of the propriety of the
matter had, at any rate, quickly engulfed, so far as her attitude was
concerned, any surprise and any shock; so that she only desired, the
next thing, perfectly to possess the facts. Milly could easily speak,
on this, as if there were only one: she made nothing of such another as
that she had felt herself menaced. The great fact, in fine, was that
she _knew_ him to desire just now, more than anything else, to meet,
quite apart, some one interested in her. Who therefore so interested as
her faithful Susan? The only other circumstance that, by the time she
had quitted her friend, she had treated as worth mentioning was the
circumstance of her having at first intended to keep quiet. She had
originally best seen herself as sweetly secretive. As to that she had
changed, and her present request was the result. She didn't say why she
had changed, but she trusted her faithful Susan. Their visitor would
trust her not less, and she herself would adore their visitor. Moreover
he wouldn't--the girl felt sure--tell her anything dreadful. The worst
would be that he was in love and that he needed a confidant to work it.
And now she was going to the National Gallery.
XVI
The idea of the National Gallery had been with her from the moment of
her hearing from Sir Luke Strett about his hour of coming. It had been
in her mind as a place so meagrely visited, as one of the places that
had seemed at home one of the attractions of Europe and one of its
highest aids to culture, but that--the old story--the typical frivolous
always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She had had perfectly,
at those whimsical moments on the Brünig, the half-shamed sense of
turning her back on such opportunities for real improvement as had
figured to her, from of old, in connection with the continental tour,
under the general head of "pictures and things"; and now she knew for
what she had done so. The plea had been explicit--she had done so for
life, as opposed to learning; the upshot of which had been that life
was now beautifully provided for. In spite of those few dips and dashes
into the many-coloured stream of history for which of late Kate Croy
had helped her to find time, there were possible great chances she had
neglected, possible great moments she should, save for to-day, have all
but missed. She might still, she had felt, overtake one or two of them
among the Titians and the Turners; she had been honestly nursing the
hour, and, once she was in the benignant halls, her faith knew itself
justified. It was the air she wanted and the world she would now
exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but
slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say "If I
could lose myself _here!"_ There were people, people in plenty, but,
admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal
question; but she had blissfully left it outside, and the nearest it
came, for a quarter of an hour, to glimmering again into sight was when
she watched for a little one of the more earnest of the lady-copyists.
Two or three in particular, spectacled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her
sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right
way to live. She should have been a lady copyist--it met so the case.
The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at
once impersonal and firm. There it was before one--one had only to
stick and stick.
Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost ashamed; she watched
the lady-copyists till she found herself wondering what would be
thought by others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who should
appear to regard them as the pride of the place. She would have liked
to talk to them, to get, as it figured to her, into their lives, and
was deterred but by the fact that she didn't quite see herself as
purchasing imitations and yet feared she might excite the expectation
of purchase. She really knew before long that what held her was the
mere refuge, that something within her was after all too weak for the
Turners and Titians. They joined hands about her in a circle too vast,
though a circle that a year before she would only have desired to
trace. They were truly for the larger, not for the smaller life, the
life of which the actual pitch, for example, was an interest, the
interest of compassion, in misguided efforts. She marked absurdly her
little stations, blinking, in her shrinkage of curiosity, at the
glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on vistas and approaches, so that
she shouldn't be flagrantly caught. The vistas and approaches drew her
in this way from room to room, and she had been through many parts of
the show, as she supposed, when she sat down to rest. There were chairs
in scant clusters, places from which one could gaze. Milly indeed at
present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance, first,
that she couldn't quite, after all, have accounted to an examiner for
the order of her "schools," and then on that of her being more tired
than she had meant, in spite of her having been so much less
intelligent. They found, her eyes, it should be added, other occupation
as well, which she let them freely follow: they rested largely, in her
vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they attached themselves
in especial, with mixed results, to the surprising stream of her
compatriots. She was struck with the circumstance that the great
museum, early in August, was haunted with these pilgrims, as also with
that of her knowing them from afar, marking them easily, each and all,
and recognising not less promptly that they had ever new lights for
her--new lights on their own darkness. She gave herself up at last, and
it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the
National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the copyists and reckon
the Baedekers. That perhaps was the moral of a menaced state of
health--that one would sit in public places and count the Americans. It
passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already the second line of
defence, and this notwithstanding the pattern, so unmistakable, of her
country-folk. They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
mounted; but their relation to her failed to act--they somehow did
nothing for her. Partly, no doubt, they didn't so much as notice or
know her, didn't even recognise their community of collapse with her,
the sign on her, as she sat there, that for her too Europe was "tough."
It came to her idly thus--for her humour could still play--that she
didn't seem then the same success with them as with the inhabitants of
London, who had taken her up on scarce more of an acquaintance. She
could wonder if they would be different should she go back with that
glamour attached; and she could also wonder, if it came to that,
whether she should ever go back. Her friends straggled past, at any
rate, in all the vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even
at last the sense of taking a mean advantage. There was a finer
instant, however, at which three ladies, clearly a mother and
daughters, had paused before her under compulsion of a comment
apparently just uttered by one of them and referring to some object on
the other side of the room. Milly had her back to the object, but her
face very much to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken and in
whose look she perceived a certain gloom of recognition. Recognition,
for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she _knew_ the three,
generically, as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap would know
the answer in class; she felt, like the schoolboy, guilty
enough--questioned, as honour went, as to her right so to possess, to
dispossess, people who hadn't consciously provoked her. She would have
been able to say where they lived, and how, had the place and the way
been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home, eternally named,
with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and existing
only as some one who could be financially heard from. The mother, the
puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no relation to her
apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically clean and dry; her
companions wore an air of vague resentment humanised by fatigue; and
the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans were doubtless
conceivable as different, but the cloaks, curiously, only thinkable as
one. "Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so." It was the mother who
had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which Milly took
the reference as to a picture: "In the English style." The three pair
of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for an instant rested,
with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last
characterisation--with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of
the daughters than murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to
them while they turned their backs; she said to herself that they ought
to have known her, that there was something between them they might
have beautifully put together. But she had lost _them_ also--they were
cold; they left her in her weak wonder as to what they had been looking
at. The "handsome" disposed her to turn--all the more that the "English
style" would be the English school, which she liked; only she saw,
before moving, by the array on the side facing her, that she was in
fact among small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
appreciable--the dim surmise that it wouldn't then be by a picture that
the spring in the three ladies had been pressed. It was at all events
time she should go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had had
behind her one of the entrances and various visitors who had come in
while she sat, visitors single and in pairs--by one of the former of
whom she felt her eyes suddenly held.
This was a gentleman in the middle of the place, a gentleman who had
removed his hat and was for a moment, while he glanced, absently, as
she could see, at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead
with his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held him long enough to
give Milly time to take for granted--and a few seconds sufficed--that
his face was the object just observed by her friends. This could only
have been because she concurred in their tribute, even qualified, and
indeed "the English style" of the gentleman--perhaps by instant
contrast to the American--was what had had the arresting power. This
arresting power, at the same time--and that was the marvel--had already
sharpened almost to pain, for in the very act of judging the bared head
with detachment she felt herself shaken by a knowledge of it. It was
Merton Densher's own, and he was standing there, standing long enough
unconscious for her to fix him and then hesitate. These successions
were swift, so that she could still ask herself in freedom if she had
best let him see her. She could still reply to that that she shouldn't
like him to catch her in the effort to prevent this; and she might
further have decided that he was too preoccupied to see anything had
not a perception intervened that surpassed the first in violence. She
was unable to think afterwards how long she had looked at him before
knowing herself as otherwise looked at; all she was coherently to put
together was that she had had a second recognition without his having
noticed her. The source of this latter shock was nobody less than Kate
Croy--Kate Croy who was suddenly also in the line of vision and whose
eyes met her eyes at their next movement. Kate was but two yards
off--Mr. Densher wasn't alone. Kate's face specifically said so, for
after a stare as blank at first as Milly's it broke into a far smile.
That was what, wonderfully--in addition to the marvel of their
meeting--passed from her for Milly; the instant reduction to easy terms
of the fact of their being there, the two young women, together. It was
perhaps only afterwards that the girl fully felt the connection between
this touch and her already established conviction that Kate was a
prodigious person; yet on the spot she none the less, in a degree, knew
herself handled and again, as she had been the night before, dealt
with--absolutely even dealt with for her greater pleasure. A minute in
fine hadn't elapsed before Kate had somehow made her provisionally take
everything as natural. The provisional was just the charm--acquiring
that character from one moment to the other; it represented happily so
much that Kate would explain on the very first chance. This left
moreover--and that was the greatest wonder--all due margin for
amusement at the way things happened, the monstrous oddity of their
turning up in such a place on the very heels of their having separated
without allusion to it. The handsome girl was thus literally in control
of the scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim with a
high flush, or a vivid blush--one didn't distinguish the embarrassment
from the joy--"Why, Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why, Miss Theale: what
luck!"
Miss Theale had meanwhile the sense that for him too, on Kate's part,
something wonderful and unspoken was determinant; and this although,
distinctly, his companion had no more looked at him with a hint than he
had looked at her with a question. He had looked and he was looking
only at Milly herself, ever so pleasantly and considerately--she scarce
knew what to call it; but without prejudice to her consciousness, all
the same, that women got out of predicaments better than men. The
predicament of course wasn't definite or phraseable--and the way they
let all phrasing pass was presently to recur to our young woman as a
characteristic triumph of the civilised state; but she took it for
granted, insistently, with a small private flare of passion, because
the one thing she could think of to do for him was to show him how she
eased him off. She would really, tired and nervous, have been much
disconcerted, were it not that the opportunity in question had saved
her. It was what had saved her most, what had made her, after the first
few seconds, almost as brave for Kate as Kate was for her, had made her
only ask herself what their friend would like of her. That he was at
the end of three minutes, without the least complicated reference, so
smoothly "their" friend was just the effect of their all being
sublimely civilised. The flash in which he saw this was, for Milly,
fairly inspiring--to that degree in fact that she was even now, on such
a plane, yearning to be supreme. It took, no doubt, a big dose of
inspiration to treat as not funny--or at least as not unpleasant--the
anomaly, for Kate, that _she_ knew their gentleman, and for herself,
that Kate was spending the morning with him; but everything continued
to make for this after Milly had tasted of her draught. She was to
wonder in subsequent reflection what in the world they had actually
said, since they had made such a success of what they didn't say; the
sweetness of the draught for the time, at any rate, was to feel success
assured. What depended on this for Mr. Densher was all obscurity to
her, and she perhaps but invented the image of his need as a short cut
to service. Whatever were the facts, their perfect manners, all round,
saw them through. The finest part of Milly's own inspiration, it may
further be mentioned, was the quick perception that what would be of
most service was, so to speak, her own native wood-note. She had long
been conscious with shame for her thin blood, or at least for her poor
economy, of her unused margin as an American girl--closely indeed as,
in English air, the text might appear to cover the page. She still had
reserves of spontaneity, if not of comicality; so that all this cash in
hand could now find employment. She became as spontaneous as possible
and as American as it might conveniently appeal to Mr. Densher, after
his travels, to find her. She said things in the air, and yet flattered
herself that she struck him as saying them not in the tone of agitation
but in the tone of New York. In the tone of New York agitation was
beautifully discounted, and she had now a sufficient view of how much
it might accordingly help her.
The help was fairly rendered before they left the place; when her
friends presently accepted her invitation to adjourn with her to
luncheon at her hotel, it was in the Fifth Avenue that the meal might
have waited. Kate had never been there so straight, but Milly was at
present taking her; and if Mr. Densher had been he had at least never
had to come so fast. She proposed it as the natural thing--proposed it
as the American girl; and she saw herself quickly justified by the pace
at which she was followed. The beauty of the case was that to do it all
she had only to appear to take Kate's hint. This had said, in its fine
first smile, "Oh yes, our look is queer--but give me time;" and the
American girl could give time as nobody else could. What Milly thus
gave she therefore made them take--even if, as they might surmise, it
was rather more than they wanted. In the porch of the museum she
expressed her preference for a four-wheeler; they would take their
course in that guise precisely to multiply the minutes. She was more
than ever justified by the positive charm that her spirit imparted even
to their use of this conveyance; and she touched her highest
point--that is, certainly, for herself--as she ushered her companions
into the presence of Susie. Susie was there with luncheon, with her
return, in prospect; and nothing could now have filled her own
consciousness more to the brim than to see this good friend take in how
little she was abjectly anxious. The cup itself actually offered to
this good friend might in truth well be startling, for it was composed
beyond question of ingredients oddly mixed. She caught Susie fairly
looking at her as if to know whether she had brought in guests to hear
Sir Luke Strett's report. Well, it was better her companion should have
too much than too little to wonder about; she had come out "anyway," as
they said at home, for the interest of the thing; and interest truly
sat in her eyes. Milly was none the less, at the sharpest crisis, a
little sorry for her; she could of necessity extract from the odd scene
so comparatively little of a soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher
suddenly popping up, but she saw nothing else that had happened. She
saw in the same way her young friend indifferent to her young friend's
doom, and she lacked what would explain it. The only thing to keep her
in patience was the way, after luncheon, Kate almost, as might be said,
made up to her. This was actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly
herself in patience. It had in fact for our young woman a positive
beauty--was so marked as a deviation from the handsome girl's previous
courses. Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the change was
now suggestive. The two sat together, after they had risen from table,
in the apartment in which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the
other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for
the latter personage, was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part,
like a prayer to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be
"thrown with" Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that
said practically everything. It didn't perhaps altogether say why she
had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought,
about as much as she could say to his face.
Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate's behaviour, the
probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love,
and Kate couldn't help it--could only be sorry and kind: wouldn't that,
without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it
as a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the
front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it
didn't, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she
could herself supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her
great question, the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all
that, as she called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of
him would be different from the impression received in New York. That
had held her from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her
company through their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a
quarter of an hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at
this crisis that no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on
this point, was to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply
go to pieces. She couldn't tell if he were different or not, and she
didn't know nor care if _she_ were: these things had ceased to matter
in the light of the only thing she did know. This was that she liked
him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and if that were to
amount to liking a new person the amusement would be but the greater.
She had thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery from his
original confusion; though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet
perceived, had not been due to such vagueness on the subject of her
reintensified identity as the probable sight, over there, of many
thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified. No, he was
quiet, inevitably, for the first half of the time, because Milly's own
lively line--the line of spontaneity--made everything else relative;
and because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely
in the air among them that the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards,
when they had got a little more used, as it were, to each other's
separate felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought
himself, at a given moment, of what _his_ natural lively line would be.
It would be to take for granted she must wish to hear of the States,
and to give her, in its order, everything he had seen and done there.
He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he returned, after breaks,
to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the more odd as he gave no
clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went, or to what he hadn't.
He simply drenched her with his sociable story--especially during the
time they were away from the others. She had stopped then being
American--all to let him be English; a permission of which he took, she
could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage. She had really
never cared less for the "States" than at this moment; but that had
nothing to do with the matter. It would have been the occasion of her
life to learn about them, for nothing could put him off, and he
ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself. It might
have been almost as if he had known that the greatest of all these
adventures was her doing just what she did then.
It was at this point that she saw the smash of her great question as
complete, saw that all she had to do with was the sense of being there
with him. And there was no chill for this in what she also presently
saw--that, however he had begun, he was now acting from a particular
desire, determined either by new facts or new fancies, to be like
everyone else, simplifyingly "kind" to her. He had caught on already as
to manner--fallen into line with everyone else; and if his spirits
verily _had_ gone up it might well be that he had thus felt himself
lighting on the remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or he
didn't, Milly knew she should still like him--there was no alternative
to that; but her heart could none the less sink a little on feeling how
much his view of her was destined to have in common with--as she now
sighed over it--_the_ view. She could have dreamed of his not having
_the_ view, of his having something or other, if need be quite
viewless, of his own; but he might have what he could with least
trouble, and _the_ view wouldn't be, after all, a positive bar to her
seeing him. The defect of it in general--if she might so ungraciously
criticise--was that, by its sweet universality, it made relations
rather prosaically a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded
the--likewise sweet--operation of real affinities. It was this that was
doubtless marked in her power to keep him now--this and her glassy
lustre of attention to his pleasantness about the scenery in the
Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring her success in detaining
him by Kate's success in "standing" Susan. It would not be, if she
could help it, Mr. Densher who should first break down. Such at least
was one of the forms of the girl's inward tension; but beneath even
this deep reason was a motive still finer. What she had left at home on
going out to give it a chance was meanwhile still, was more sharply and
actively, there. What had been at the top of her mind about it and then
been violently pushed down--this quantity was again working up. As soon
as their friends should go Susie would break out, and what she would
break out upon wouldn't be--interested in that gentleman as she had
more than once shown herself--the personal fact of Mr. Densher. Milly
had found in her face at luncheon a feverish glitter, and it told what
she was full of. She didn't care now for Mr. Densher's personal fact.
Mr. Densher had risen before her only to find his proper place in her
imagination already, of a sudden, occupied. His personal fact failed,
so far as she was concerned, to be personal, and her companion noted
the failure. This could only mean that she was full to the brim, of Sir
Luke Strett, and of what she had had from him. What _had_ she had from
him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do well to
know, though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's glitter. It
was therefore, on the whole, because Densher's young hostess was
divided from it by so thin a partition that she continued to cling to
the Rockies.
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