The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

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Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume II
Author: Henry James
Release Date: September 22, 2009 [EBook #30059]
Language: English
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THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
BY HENRY JAMES
VOLUME II
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1909
Copyright, 1902 and 1909 by Charles Scribner's Sons
BOOK SIXTH
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
I
"I say, you know, Kate--you _did_ stay!" had been Merton Densher's
punctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got out
of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him
see that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to
recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the most
helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was
flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the
street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous
corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.
But the amount of light men _did_ need!--Kate could have been eloquent
at this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck
him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his
absence and having been now half the morning together, it behooved them
to face without delay the question of handling their immediate future.
That it would require some handling, that they should still have to
deal, deal in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was the
great matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
consciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had had
twenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out where it stood, and
the time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He
had arrived at Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool the
moment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at the
station, whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he had
praised her for it on alighting from his train she had answered frankly
enough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn't care
to-day who saw her, and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow,
inevitably, she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
would become a baser creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It
was none the less for to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointed
their next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given,
with imprecations, her reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promise
to Aunt Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot and had
suggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea
that had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, but
nobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in the
refreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur the
notice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted. They would "have
something" there for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he
hadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regard
to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that
there were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually
rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
nowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and on
Kate's own suggestion--into the place where people had beer and buns,
and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as
they were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps
did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his lodging,
which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit,
the truth was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision that
once at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop
there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't
be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage,
respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further
fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on
the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the
garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,
seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the
coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make
love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for
happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,
how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If
Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house there
would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,
one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the
red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of
coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have
yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at
such a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread
of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case
that the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she
did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so
well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now
and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.
She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early
convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art
that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after
he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an
effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the
night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of
the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
He hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say
to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have
believed that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not against
Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,
made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the
court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from
such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already
suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and
subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the
names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with
love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might
have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of
course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased
whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and
he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his
money. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in
the least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for
bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to
produce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a
change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the
lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, she
might always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to do
something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now
tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that
almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at
Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden
master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His
final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one
the impossible.
She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as
their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of
unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent
interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims.
They had met there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not
again, either, in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and
tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured
halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of
an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him
for their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She
might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to
touch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
as those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn't
pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like
service. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him
it wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have
brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
the spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort of
thing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply
that to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning
interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel
about; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of
her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of
which indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't once
more have named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for
better talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate and
superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn't
exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kate
appeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--to
look about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to
remember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign of
the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in
the midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, with
inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of what
he had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched
it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about some
picture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quite
independently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dreadful
closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to
breathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed
into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engaged
together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was
probably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequently
reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He
thought of her for some reason as little, though she was of about
Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.
What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process
by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was
greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a
new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over
there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event,
however, had not returned to that, and he had of course, with so many
things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's
individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even
went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social
phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
group in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent young
persons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come back
to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American
pair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared
him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perception
that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both
yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance in
fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require
some brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their
separating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by the
aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office
later, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as a
pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to
put her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her
part, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a corner and
looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment
for the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of the
first emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His
full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a
sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow
managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more
or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,
but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.
He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,
from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it
added--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--various
troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he
really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough
of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these
first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This
at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather
than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be
part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not
meanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanations
weren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always with
the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."
Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their
stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with
this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,
for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in
with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question
he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since,
when it came to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the
sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than
as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under
providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was
concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater,
even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her
appeal--had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. He
recalled, on his bench in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy,
funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felt
himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of
her very "humour," in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that
time made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it--a
surprise as well as a relief--would do toward really simplifying. It
meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least
out of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally made
him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.
"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." And
she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be
quite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've margin
surely for my mention of you. You'll come to see _her_, and she'll
leave you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack of
betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quite
the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; it
will be the end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask
to-night," Kate had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--my
cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal--I'll make it all right."
He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it
now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself
that if it wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle.
This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other
questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge
about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear
Milly, it was sensible, _was_ somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,
popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why he
felt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her in
advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,
scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at
the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if
not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she
weren't a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden,
after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
meant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out
that--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove
them still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which did
hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet
this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more
preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.
II
It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,
when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all
the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of
a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her
appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,
and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and
fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with
the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the
American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,
they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One
couldn't say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet,
please, whenever you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to
help us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak
to Aunt Maud--it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to:
Kate had embraced all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate
embraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece
than as receiving it in a steady light. He had always felt, however,
that the more he asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he
imaged it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once even before
his absence: "You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when
we're married you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied
that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, and
the domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to
prevail. The supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a
truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his
immediate requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted
questions the questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted her
patience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for
instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do
nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think
possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms
of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some
occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me
these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so
accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And
it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He
was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you
see we can't work it anyhow."
If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it was
because of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shown
himself as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that you
hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was as beautifully
good-humoured. "You might of course get used to her--you _will._ You're
quite right--so long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,
lucidly, that the dear things couldn't _help_, simply as charming
friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak to Aunt Maud, but they
won't shut their doors to us: that would be another matter. A friend
always helps--and she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham by this
time out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. "Besides, she
particularly likes us. She particularly likes _you_. I say, old boy,
make something of that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just
made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the best, they
could work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly of
the sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from the
first not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect of
them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think in
truth that she wasn't really minding. She took him up, none the less,
on a minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but you see it's just
what we do. What could be more lovely than this?"
It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to
come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at
her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming
back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he
knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster
Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one
of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but
visibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of
blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and
Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,
that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular
time was concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear.
But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him
now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They
_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors and
the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They
connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in
him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it
amounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if he
could!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have her
inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fine
as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where
their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse
independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Will
you take me just as I am?"
She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified
to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he
found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant
into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with
him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't
spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only
believe in me, and it will be beautiful."
He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he
didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her
with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,
as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to
say, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she
closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she
could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response
her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited
by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which
they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the
certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger
than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was
that she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sincerity
making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to
swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact
only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up
more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan,
and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted
was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow
suddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown more
consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
certainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile of
indulgence--"to be all the while bringing it up that I don't trust you."
"I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?"
He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the
first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after
all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most
people would call us fools for." But his visit passed, all the same,
without his again attempting to make "just as he was" serve. He had no
more money just as he was than he had had just as he had been, or than
he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would
be; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of some
months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how
their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity
than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand
he couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her
indifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he was
would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that
she seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite other
terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sèvres, of complicated
brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact
by saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressed
her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he
would understand. "Do you mean," he asked at this, "that there's any
_definite_ sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,
"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after
all, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as
there is going--remember that she can play with us quite as much as we
play with her."
"She doesn't want to play with _me_, my dear," Kate lucidly replied;
"she doesn't want to make me suffer a bit more than she need. She cares
for me too much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a value.
_This_ has a value--her being as she has been about us to-day. I
believe she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herself
while you're here with me. But that isn't 'playing'--not a bit."
"What is it then," the young man returned--"from the moment it isn't
her blessing and a cheque?"
Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There is
something in her above trifles. She _generally_ trusts us; she doesn't
propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a
thing--why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really
but one fault--she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken about
us, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in
detail we fight her."
"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's thought of this,
"that it's in detail we deceive her"--a speech that, as soon as he had
uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,
to the afterglow of their recent embrace.
Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate,
whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to
make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she
explained, "meet here."
Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If
Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come
back at all?"
"Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's
in love with you."
But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't make
out, you know, that every one's in love with me."
She hesitated. "I don't say every one."
"You said just now Miss Theale."
"I said she liked you--yes."
"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which, however, he pursued:
"Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for
_this_--as from myself."
"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the
implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general
prudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"
Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very well
tell her all."
It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a
manner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her
anything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her;
make her see how clever you are--only without letting her see that
you're trying. If you're charming to her you've nothing else to do."
But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming' to her, so far as I
see, only by letting her suppose I give you up--which I'll be hanged if
I do! It _is_," he said with feeling, "a game."
"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose you give me up--or I
give _you_--if you keep reminding her how you enjoy our interviews."
"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant," Densher asked,
"what good does it do?"
Kate was for a moment checked. "What good does what--?"
"Does my pleasing her--does anything. I _can't_," he impatiently
declared, "please her."
Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency;
but it appeared to determine in her something better than a mere
complaint. "Then _I_ can! Leave it to me." With which she came to him
under the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and
took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was her
form of entreaty renewed and repeated, which made after all, as he met
it, their great fact clear. And it somehow clarified _all_ things so to
possess each other. The effect of it was that, once more, on these
terms, he could only be generous. He had so on the spot then left
everything to her that she reverted in the course of a few moments to
one of her previous--and as positively seemed--her most precious ideas.
"You accused me just now of saying that Milly's in love with you. Well,
if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. That's the good
she'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you--so that she'll help
us to go on."
Densher stared--she was wondrous all round. "And what sort of a basis
does it make for my seeing _her?_"
"Oh I don't mind!" Kate smiled.
"Don't mind my leading her on?"
She put it differently. "Don't mind her leading _you_."
"Well, she won't--so it's nothing not to mind. But how can that
'help,'" he pursued, "with what she knows?"
"What she knows? That needn't prevent."
He wondered. "Prevent her loving us?"
"Prevent her helping you. She's _like_ that," Kate Croy explained.
It took indeed some understanding. "Making nothing of the fact that I
love another?"
"Making everything," said Kate. "To console you."
"But for what?"
"For not getting your other."
He continued to stare. "But how does she know--?"
"That you _won't_ get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she
doesn't know you will. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of
Aunt Maud's stand. _That_"--Kate was lucid--"gives her the chance to be
nice to you."
"And what does it give _me_," the young man none the less rationally
asked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug to her?"
Kate so possessed her facts, as it were, that she smiled at his
violence. "You'll extraordinarily like her. She's exquisite. And there
are reasons. I mean others."
"What others?"
"Well, I'll tell you another time. Those I give you," the girl added,
"are enough to go on with."
"To go on to what?"
"Why, to seeing her again--say as soon as you can: which, moreover, on
all grounds, is no more than decent of you."
He of course took in her reference, and he had fully in mind what had
passed between them in New York. It had been no great quantity, but it
had made distinctly at the time for his pleasure; so that anything in
the nature of an appeal in the name of it could have a slight kindling
consequence. "Oh I shall naturally call again without delay. Yes," said
Densher, "her being in love with me is nonsense; but I must, quite
independently of that, make every acknowledgement of favours received."
It appeared practically all Kate asked. "Then you see. I shall meet you
there."
"I don't quite see," he presently returned, "why she should wish to
receive you for it."
"She receives me for myself--that is for _her_ self. She thinks no end
of me. That I should have to drum it into you!"
Yet still he didn't take it. "Then I confess she's beyond me."
Well, Kate could but leave it as she saw it. "She regards me as
already--in these few weeks--her dearest friend. It's quite separate.
We're in, she and I, ever so deep." And it was to confirm this that, as
if it had flashed upon her that he was somewhere at sea, she threw out
at last her own real light. "She doesn't of course know I care for
_you_. She thinks I care so little that it's not worth speaking of."
That he had been somewhere at sea these remarks made quickly clear, and
Kate hailed the effect with surprise. "Have you been supposing that she
does know--?"
"About our situation? Certainly, if you're such friends as you show
me--and if you haven't otherwise represented it to her." She uttered at
this such a sound of impatience that he stood artlessly vague. "You
_have_ denied it to her?"
She threw up her arms at his being so backward. "'Denied it'? My dear
man, we've never spoken of you."
"Never, never?"
"Strange as it may appear to your glory--never."
He couldn't piece it together. "But won't Mrs. Lowder have spoken?"
"Very probably. But of _you_. Not of me."
This struck him as obscure. "How does she know me but as part and
parcel of you?"
"How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly to make nothing of it, to
have nothing to do with it, to stick consistently to her line about it.
Aunt Maud's line is to keep all reality out of our relation--that is
out of my being in danger from you--by not having so much as suspected
or heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it
and sinking it--if she only does so hard enough. Therefore _she_, in
her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwise
than as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowed
either to Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they say,
distinguished you."
"And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that they must have made it out
for themselves?"
"No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared, "after Milly's so
funnily bumping against us on Tuesday."
"She doesn't see from _that_--?"
"That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that
you regard me with a complacent eye--for you show it, I think, always
too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it too
much; I don't perhaps--to please you completely where others are
concerned--show it enough."
"Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher demanded.
It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent. "Not where
_you_ are concerned. Beyond seeing that you're rather gone," she went
on, "Milly only sees that I'm decently good to you."
"Very good indeed she must think it!"
"Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate smiled, "as very good
indeed."
The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take some explaining."
"Then I explain." She was really fine; it came back to her essential
plea for her freedom of action and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she
added, "I _will_ explain."
"And what will I do?"
"Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks." But here in
truth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone that, for the moment,
took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she had
returned to remembrance and prudence. They were now not to forget that,
Aunt Maud's liberality having put them on their honour, they mustn't
spoil their case by abusing it. He must leave her in time; they should
probably find it would help them. But she came back to Milly too. "Mind
you go to see her."
Densher still, however, took up nothing of this. "Then I may come
again?"
"For Aunt Maud--as much as you like. But we can't again," said Kate,
"play her _this trick_. I can't see you here alone."
"Then where?"
"Go to see Milly," she for all satisfaction repeated.
"And what good will that do me?"
"Try it and you'll see."
"You mean you'll manage to be there?" Densher asked. "Say you are, how
will that give us privacy?"
"Try it--you'll see," the girl once more returned. "We must manage as
we can."
"That's precisely what _I_ feel. It strikes me we might manage better."
His idea of this was a thing that made him an instant hesitate; yet he
brought it out with conviction. "Why won't you come to _me?_"
It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him he was scarce
generous in expecting her definitely to answer, and by looking to him
to wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made him
feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness that he
thus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and of
his flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yet
again on the subject of her singular remedy for their embarrassment. It
might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her
mind a stupid corner. "You'll see," she said, "the difference it will
make."
Well, since she wasn't stupid she was intelligent; it was he who was
stupid--the proof of which was that he would do what she liked. But he
made a last effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference"
bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something subtle but
strong even as he spoke. "Is what you meant a moment ago that the
difference will be in her being made to believe you hate me?"
Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of her
more marked shows of impatience; with which in fact she sharply closed
their discussion. He opened the door on a sign from her, and she
accompanied him to the top of the stairs with an air of having so put
their possibilities before him that questions were idle and doubts
perverse. "I verily believe I _shall_ hate you if you spoil for me the
beauty of what I see!"
III
He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from her of what she saw;
and the very next occasion had for him still other surprises than that.
He received from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to Kate the
telegraphic expression of a hope that he might be free to dine with
them that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate even
though in some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting American
friends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of American
friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to
the last bitterness. This apprehension, however, we hasten to add,
enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage;
the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after
his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham came
in alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of the
hour, made dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as he
was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in the
field. He had thus had with her several bewildering
moments--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation to
him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what
he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_
supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy
achievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer
herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want of
you, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity of
the article required was what might especially have caused him to
stagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder
dealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed
it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after
all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting
his wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of a
small strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,
truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that he
feared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always a
comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
ashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,
quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also
avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit
him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was of
being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little
that he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his position
that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him.
"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in
convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick
irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had
already seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes as
ugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--could
afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a
gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of this
impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yet
been so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in the
world as while he waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her
few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the
amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a
plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware of
America, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the
idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurred
to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her
favourite dream. He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; this
helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and
blameless. She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by
the beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received support
all round, for no young man could have been less formidable than the
person to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. The
ostensible, in Kate, struck him altogether, on this occasion, as
prodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his
own reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions--a
relation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly loving nor
lingering, yet searching and soft, that, on the part of their hostess,
the girl had to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from head
to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again
the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually
and consummately reckoned.
That was the story--that she was always, for her beneficent dragon,
under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to
the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this
estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so
that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the
plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in
respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a
person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way
to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the
character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--things
all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet
criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the
last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt
Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the
performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on
parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at
the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor
actress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poor
performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance
accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions
as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the
point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel
almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself as
having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any case
he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and
at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thus
came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between
_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to
mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to
fear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of
the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special
intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
sign to the person in the house she loved best.
The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went
on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray
gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly
presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a
like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At
opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the
"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of
two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefore what now
offered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless
and full of the compunction of having had to come alone. Her companion,
at the last moment, had been indisposed--positively not well enough,
and so had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's illness was the
first thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner,
without bravado, to have ten minutes "naturally," as she called
it--which wasn't what _he_ did--together; but it was already as if the
young man had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not been
wholly deprived of Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiar
to the enthusiastic younger as to the sagacious older man. Any
knowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to as the most
privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't it he who had in a manner
invented the wonderful creature--through having seen her first, caught
her in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved the way for her
by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a
friendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharp
flashlight or two?
He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with
interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist as
he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his
pen--oh his "pen!"--at the service of private distinction. The ear of
society?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly
paragraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he
appeared to perceive, that fairly waked _him_ up, and he settled
himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the
full revelation. His embarrassment came naturally from the fact that if
he could claim no credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
gracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. What
touched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the air
of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
career. There was of course more said about the heroine than if she
hadn't been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the range
of Milly's triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the two
wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with hypocrisy,
professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed
to know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she
been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function
of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared
benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as if
she wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, but
would let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it
in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respect
to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move American nerves.
He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it
came to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--taken
a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this lady
striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was
himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,
that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced
and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry
New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American
complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding
relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he
perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough
of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked
if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own
country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder
herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were
the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose or
with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.
The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that
they saw in London--for all that was said--much further than in the
States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged, that they had taught
the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native
product. He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny--though she was
weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that
New York, in having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck. There
_were_ plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were
awfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thank
goodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the
Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in truth wasn't to be
calculated--a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,
without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her
young friend _had_ seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no
manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the
moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the
good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine--which she set forth at a
certain length--made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest
approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had left
them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly
addressing him. "You know nothing, sir--but not the least little
bit--about my friend."
He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs.
Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn
meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean,
but while doing so he defended himself. "I certainly don't know
enormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York,
as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously
appreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then
present."
"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what it
expressed he failed at the time to make out.
"You weren't present _then_, dearest," Mrs. Lowder richly concurred.
"You don't know," she continued with mellow gaiety, "how far things may
have gone."
It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had
more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps
it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
foolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of the
foolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which
affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense
produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,
as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even
already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham
perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
precisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vast
opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,
long."
It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right
for him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with it
that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."
"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now
to keep well with him.
He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I
knew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I had
endlessly more to see."
"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing
archness.
"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming
impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others
about her."
"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed
firmness.
"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very
often quite prove the depth of the impression?"
He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all
they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as
deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued
for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an
authority about her."
Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friend
had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being
easy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than one
sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her
and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say,
half so much."
The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the
fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross
circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious
companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an
old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in
the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and
fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as
for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute
communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more
determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;
though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in
thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the
things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.
Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as a
feature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest
of them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that has
happened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You
don't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it and
followed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, at
this, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the case
was a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorter
than one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but
in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The
little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,
harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but
it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene,
by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock,
gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd
had drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.
There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably
the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events
characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his
scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,
in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a
feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble
nature of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that would
be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.
Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author
of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was
only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being
inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the
creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently
marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.
So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had
thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of
society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of
independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
civilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle was
within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but
there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the great
world?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a result
of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when she
struck him as having quite answered: "Dear no--for what do you take me?
Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless,
imitation." What she might have passed for saying, however, was
practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to
relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leave
London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find
your friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jigging
away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn't know them.
She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of
having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He
_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had
developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen,
but she wasn't the person he had "backed."
Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these
pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making
light of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--which
property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was
also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.
Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the
feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal
only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her
passion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little
life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she
entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the
drift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as
if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to
admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found it
somehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
this view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had it
from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with
her. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got at
that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,
she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of
Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there
was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet
Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were
practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her
friend's chemical change, wound up with the comparatively
unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little
perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!"
This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as
might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could
measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really
covered ground.
IV
The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his
element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs
upstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in
this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction not to sit too tight.
Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room;
he made it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on,
foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in this
general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks
to which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house that
intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open;
whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songs
sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly.
Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small
sofa--a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism,
of their remarkably good conscience. "To seem not to know each
other--once you're here--would be," the girl said, "to overdo it"; and
she arranged it charmingly that they _must_ have some passage to put
Aunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the
world they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, the
profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor;
there were in particular at present more things in his mind than he
could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other
hand, that she suddenly met most of them--and more than he could see on
the spot--by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was not
in the key of those made at dinner. "She's not a bit right, you know. I
mean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you
she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible."
He took this in such patience as he could muster. "What in the world's
the matter with her?"
But Kate continued without saying. "Unless indeed your being here has
been just a reason for her funking it."
"What in the world's the matter with her?" Densher asked again.
"Why just what I've told you--that she likes you so much."
"Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?"
Kate cast about--it would take so long to explain. "And perhaps it's
true that she _is_ bad. She easily may be."
"Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who's visibly
preoccupied and worried."
"Visibly enough. Yet it mayn't," said Kate, "be only for that."
"For what then?"
But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. "Why, if it's
anything real, doesn't that poor lady go home? She'd be anxious, and
she has done all she need to be civil."
"I think," Densher remarked, "she has been quite beautifully civil."
It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was
already, in a manner, explaining. "Her preoccupation is probably on two
different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other
makes her stay. She's commissioned to tell Milly all about you."
"Well then," said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, "I'm glad I
felt, downstairs, a kind of 'drawing' to her. Wasn't I rather decent to
her?"
"Awfully nice. You've instincts, you fiend. It's all," Kate declared,
"as it should be."
"Except perhaps," he after a moment cynically suggested, "that she
isn't getting much good of me now. Will she report to Milly on _this?_"
And then as Kate seemed to wonder what "this" might be: "On our present
disregard for appearances."
"Ah leave appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make
them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged
that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had
indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match--had for instance
another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to
respond just in order to make that impression."
"Well," Densher dropped with some humour, "life's very interesting! I
hope it's really as much so for you as you make it for others; I mean
judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as
thrilling for _ces dames_, and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud,
Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what _is_," he wound up, "the matter? Do you
mean she's as ill as she looks?"
Kate's face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech
deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her
own--the need to make the point that "as ill as she looked" was what
Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could
scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near.
She believed herself nevertheless--and Kate couldn't help believing her
too--seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on
the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled
up. "We bade them good-bye--or all but--Aunt Maud and I, the night
before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a
farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a
day or two later. But they've not got off--they're not getting off.
When I see them--and I saw them this morning--they have showy reasons.
They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl
brought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as a
man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but
Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind.
She wants not to miss you--though she wants also not to show she wants
you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have
hung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--she
doesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has opened
out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."
Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling me
she has had?"
"That's it. There's a shadow across it."
"The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?"
"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's scared. She has so much
to lose. And she wants more."
"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort,
"couldn't one say to her that she can't have everything?"
"No--for one wouldn't want to. She really," Kate went on, "has been
somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girl
oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It has
all come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it
certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
success--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--and
she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with
a thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kind
of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the
facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and
Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from
_me_. There she is." Kate expressed above all what it most came to.
"It's open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I
assure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite
plain."
Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good
then on earth can I do her?"
Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."
"And for what?"
"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't
care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then as
it made him laugh not quite happily: "I shouldn't trouble about her if
there were one thing she did have." The girl spoke indeed with a noble
compassion. "She has nothing."
"Not all the young dukes?"
"Well we must see--see if anything can come of them. She at any rate
does love life. To have met a person like you," Kate further explained,
"is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of
life. Oh she has you arranged!"
"_You_ have, it strikes me, my dear"--and he looked both detached and
rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?"
"Oh the dukes will be disappointed!"
"Then why shan't I be?"
"You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you
_will_ be. You'll have expected enough for that."
"Yet it's what you want to let me in for?"
"I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for
the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and
you're therefore what I use most."
He looked at her long. "I wish I could use _you_ a little more." After
which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?"
he asked.
Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I
think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?"
"People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she
has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's
really as if her appearance put her outside of such things--being, in
spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's
conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as
a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these
days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She
has _had_ her wreck--she has met her adventure."
"Oh I grant you her wreck!"--Kate was all response so far. "But do let
her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures."
"Well--if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in
short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that
she has none of the effect--on one's nerves or whatever--of an invalid."
Kate on her side did this justice. "No--that's the beauty of her."
"The beauty--?"
"Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that, any more than your
watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you
convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won't die, she
won't live, by inches. She won't smell, as it were, of drugs. She won't
taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know."
"Then what," he demanded, frankly mystified now, "are we talking about?
In what extraordinary state _is_ she?"
Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. "I
believe that if she's ill at all she's very ill. I believe that if
she's bad she's not a _little_ bad. I can't tell you why, but that's
how I see her. She'll really live or she'll really not. She'll have it
all or she'll miss it all. Now I don't think she'll have it all."
Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having
thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid.
"You 'think' and you 'don't think,' and yet you remain all the while
without an inkling of her complaint?"
"No, not without an inkling; but it's a matter in which I don't want
knowledge. She moreover herself doesn't want one to want it: she has,
as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a
kind of--I don't know what to call it--intensity of pride. And then and
then--" But with this she faltered.
"And then what?"
"I'm a brute about illness. I hate it. It's well for you, my dear,"
Kate continued, "that you're as sound as a bell."
"Thank you!" Densher laughed. "It's rather good then for yourself too
that you're as strong as the sea."
She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their
young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at
least without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the
personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that
very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the
poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good
they, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this. "How
we're talking about her!" Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were
the facts. "From illness I keep away."
"But you don't--since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the
midst of it."
"Ah I'm only watching--!"
"And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!"
"Oh," said Kate, "I'm breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of
what I shall expect of you. One can't begin too soon."
She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the
hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning
brought him back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's a case
for surgery?"
"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come
to that. Of course she's in the highest hands."
"The doctors are after her then?"
"She's after _them_--it's the same thing. I think I'm free to say it
now--she sees Sir Luke Strett."
It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after an
instant: "One seems to guess."
Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only do as I tell you."
For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it
before him. "What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl."
"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect you as sick. You
understand moreover just how much--and just how little."
"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you think I understand."
"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she returned, "that has
been your way of breaking _me_ in. Besides which, so far as making up
to her goes, plenty of others will."
Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing
their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown,
amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility.
"Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free."
"But so are you, my dear!"
She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had
sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at
her. "You're prodigious!"
"Of course I'm prodigious!"--and, as immediately happened, she gave a
further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby
had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately
finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the
announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the
less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to the
visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly
rose to meet it. "I don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And then
for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher--who has just come back from
America."
"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said nothing--occupied as he
mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He
recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have
appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn't, that is, he
knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot, however great the superficial
resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was
the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training and
experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a
thing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest of
curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to
which he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask
Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would find Mrs.
Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.
"Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?--as I seemed to hear outside, from
below, Mrs. Stringham's unmistakeable voice."
"Yes, but Mrs. Stringham's alone. Milly's unwell," the girl explained,
"and was compelled to disappoint us."
"Ah 'disappoint'--rather!" And, lingering a little, he kept his eyes on
Densher. "She isn't really bad, I trust?"
Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in
Milly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man with
whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without
visible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he was
doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was
aided by Kate, who produced a prompt: "Oh dear no; I think not. I've
just been reassuring Mr. Densher," she added--"who's as concerned as
the rest of us. I've been calming his fears."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark again--and again it was just as good. That was for
Densher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for the
others: "_My_ fears would want calming. We must take great care of her.
This way?"
She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave
them frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy.
What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently
with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this time
quite ready for her. "It's _he_ who's your aunt's man?"
"Oh immensely."
"I mean for _you._"
"That's what I mean too," Kate smiled. "There he is. Now you can judge."
"Judge of what?"
"Judge of him."
"Why should I judge of him?" Densher asked. "I've nothing to do with
him."
"Then why do you ask about him?"
"To judge of you--which is different."
Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. "To take the
measure, do you mean, of my danger?"
He hesitated; then he said: "I'm thinking, I dare say, of Miss
Theale's. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her--?"
"With his interest in me?"
"With her own interest in you," Densher said while she reflected. "If
that interest--Mrs. Lowder's--takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn't he
rather to look out for the forms _he_ takes?"
Kate seemed interested in the question, but "Oh he takes them easily,"
she answered. "The beauty is that she doesn't trust him."
"That Milly doesn't?"
"Yes--Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really."
Densher gave it his wonder. "Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he
cheats?"
"Yes," said Kate--"that's the way people are. What they think of their
enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with
what they think of their friends. Milly's own state of mind, however,"
she went on, "is lucky. That's Aunt Maud's security, though she doesn't
yet fully recognise it--besides being Milly's own."
"You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?"
She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. "You oughtn't to
make me say too much. But I'm glad I don't."
"Don't say too much?"
"Don't care for Lord Mark."
"Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his lordship's own. To which
he added: "You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?"
"Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!" It had made her again
impatient.
Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You scarcely call him, I
suppose, one of the dukes."
"Mercy, no--far from it. He's not, compared with other possibilities,
'in' it. Milly, it's true," she said, to be exact, "has no natural
sense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differences
or know who's who or what's what."
"I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason for liking _me_."
"Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate, "who at least know
what I lose."
Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. "And
Aunt Maud--why shouldn't _she_ know? I mean that your friend there
isn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?"
"Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That's
undeniably something. He's the best moreover we can get."
"Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.
"It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on without heeding this;
"because perhaps in the line of that alone--as he has no money--more
could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the
sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his
family and at the other end of the string. _The_ thing's his genius."
"And do you believe in that?"
"In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had
yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so
that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in
time with a very sufficient "Yes!"
"Political?"
"Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it
when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence,
without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an
effect without his being in any traceable way a cause."
"Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality,
"isn't agreeable--?"
"Oh but it is!"
"Not surely for every one."
"If you mean not for you," Kate returned, "you may have reasons--and
men don't count. Women don't know if it's agreeable or not."
"Then there you are!"
"Yes, precisely--that takes, on his part, genius."
Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus
promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been
found, should it have come to an analysis, to "take." Something
suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and
overflowed--the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the
future she promised, the interest she supplied. "All women but you are
stupid. How can I look at another? You're different and different--and
then you're different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you--except
that you're so much too good for what she builds _for_. Even 'society'
won't know how good for it you are; it's too stupid, and you're beyond
it. You'd have to pull it uphill--it's you yourself who are at the top.
The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read?
You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he
ached, from the depth of his content. "Upon my word I've a
subscription!"
She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in
answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their
essential wealth of life. "It's you who draw me out. I exist in you.
Not in others."
It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself
pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. "See
here, you know: don't, _don't_--!"
"Don't what?"
"Don't fail me. It would kill me."
She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. "So you think
you'll kill _me_ in time to prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the
next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she
had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come
back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely
connected that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a
distance to go. "You do then see your way?" She put it to him before
they joined--as was high time--the others. And she made him understand
she meant his way with Milly.
He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had
brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this
light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
undispelled since his return. "There's something you must definitely
tell me. If our friend knows that all the while--?"
She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though
quite to smooth it down. "All the while she and I here were growing
intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me."
"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"
"She doesn't suppose it."
"How then can she imagine you never named her?"
"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her. I've told her everything.
She's in possession of reasons that will perfectly do."
Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you exactly as I take
them?"
"Exactly as you take them."
"She's just such another victim?"
"Just such another. You're a pair."
"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we can console each other?"
"Ah something _may_ indeed happen," she returned, "if you'll only go
straight!"
He watched the others an instant through the window. "What do you mean
by going straight?"
"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've told you before, and
you'll see. You'll have me perfectly, always, to refer to."
"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"
It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her back. There you are.
You won't be able to say I haven't made it smooth for you."
He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn't the
queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous
silken web, and it was amusing. "You spoil me!"
He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had
caught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, her
attention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through and
who was now, none too soon, taking leave of her. They were followed by
Lord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened before
any dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate found
time to say to him with furtive emphasis: "You must go now!" Another
was that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drew
near to him with an almost reproachful "Come and talk to _me!_"--a
challenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness of
their installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not the
same he himself had just occupied with her. Still another was that Mrs.
Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him as
looking at him with a small grave intimation, something into which he
afterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a few
words with her after dinner he would have found her ready. This
impression was naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of
something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhaps
a slightly sharper shade from the mild formality of her "Good-night,
sir!" as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothing
more to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by this
time had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This personage
had forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently--with
a view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs on
Milly--proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurred
was that Aunt Maud, having released her, immediately had a word for
himself. It was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she both
detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he
hadn't yet given her, as happened, a sign of withdrawal.
"Return to our little friend. You'll find her really interesting."
"If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly not forget her.
But you must remember that, so far as her 'interest' is concerned, I
myself discovered, I--as was said at dinner--invented her."
"Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn't taken out the
patent. Don't, I only mean, in the press of other things, too much
neglect her."
Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate's, he
asked himself quickly if it mightn't help him with her. He at any rate
could but try. "You're all looking after my manners. That's exactly,
you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to me. _She_ keeps me up--she
has had so much to say about them."
He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of his
passage with Kate that, while quite veracious, might be reassuring to
herself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as
if her confidence were supplied with other props. If she saw his
intention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance;
she only said imperturbably: "Yes, she'll herself do anything for her
friend; so that she but preaches what she practises."
Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate's devotion
went. He was moreover a little puzzled by this special harmony; in face
of which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herself
of the American girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate's mastery of
the subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt.
What might really _become_ in all this of the American girl was
therefore a question that, on the latter contingency, would lose none
of its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, so
far as he understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. "It isn't a bit, all the
same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale charming."
Well, it was all she wanted. "Then don't miss a chance."
"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's--naturally now--leaving
town and, as I take it, going abroad."
Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing
with this difficulty. "She won't go," she smiled in spite of it, "till
she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go--" She paused, leaving him
uncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. "We shall go
too."
He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. "And what
good will that do _me?_"
"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll come out to us."
"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed
putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use he
rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make
of it. "There are all sorts of things," he vaguely remarked, "to
consider."
"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
"And pray what's that?"
"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I'm
treating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you. I _can_--I can
smooth your path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good. And her
fortune's a real fortune."
Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he
felt her thus buying him off, and buying him--it would have been funny
if it hadn't been so grave--with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm much obliged to you
for the handsome offer--"
"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say it
does--but there's no reason it shouldn't to _you_. Mind you,
moreover"--she kept it up--"I'm not one who talks in the air. And you
owe me something--if you want to know why."
Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her
consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive
an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that
she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this
light did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of
course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
inviting me for instance to-night--!"
"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But you don't know," she
added, "how far I've gone for you."
He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he
laughed again as he could. "I see how far you're going."
"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for
you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only
made him stare: "To start you it _was_ necessary. From _me_ it has the
weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with
surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you."
Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which,
speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see
what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now to
make me right!"
The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had
left the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short,
under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the
square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his
brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly
Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She had
affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. He
made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its
starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that
Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--the
very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So
Milly was successfully deceived.
V
To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to
see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three
visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to
face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition,
with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had
been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their
excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
American relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express
in names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had
both since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was his
mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if
the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
other than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, at
her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with
a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for
him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so
oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her
interesting. She had been interesting enough without them--that
appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as
was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped
in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still
perfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of his
breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own
good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which
ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and
which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice
in the possession of. Many men--he practically made the
reflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost
patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,
thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate of
this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one
way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, had
not been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since the
night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so much that he failed of
being the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of
man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minor
evil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every one
concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable. He liked
Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He
liked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him the
evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had never
known himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events,
whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muff
not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should he
find he couldn't work it there would still be time enough. The idea of
working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promise
much interest--fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a
margin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found his
burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced for
him turned round on the spot to present him another face. This was
simply the face of his old impression, which he now fully
recovered--the impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the
world. Had what had happened been that this specimen of the class was
from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent _could_
ever make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probable
than on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed with her in
Kate's society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, to
Densher's view, while bringing him, with his companion, from the
National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was therefore
scarce supposable that complications had become so soon too much for
her. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
simplest; the least he could decently do, given their happy
acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she had
been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there
was the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at any
rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared
with Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was finding
her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad to
see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but
that she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was well
enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this,
of the comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn't absent from his
thought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account because
expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
might turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom of
mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
_might_ have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy her behaving as
if she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of
surprise; she didn't a bit overdo it: the lesson of which was,
perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care
of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, on
his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had
apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibility
of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did he
understand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner in
which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he
couldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that
could pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation.
It soon made one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She had
let him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend's
explanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but
she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as with
the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance for
insistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she had
reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for desiring to appear.
Kate's account of her as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so
personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly
disposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one he
was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of the
appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest had
been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so
much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorry
for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make
out. Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?--inasmuch as,
whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly
longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement and
then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.
Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pity
hadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned
round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat
it--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. His
situation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject for
that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it
as something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him,
the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself
quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wasted
charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of
conscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of which
he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had
spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was
because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
came up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite
an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. His
immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him
almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other party
to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,
had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it
so expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, so
his right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a way
quite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence.
_There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy consideration
on a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kept
on, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to
miss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing on
whatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he had
himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description of
him, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibility
would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point
was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this
difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that
was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think
_she_ doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she _does_ like me awfully!"--that
would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time
but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be
virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and
this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it
would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so
extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the
complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one
loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain
length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the
abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in
presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one
nothing but good.
Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at the
immensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence have
wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. She
would absolutely never say to him: "_Is_ it so impossible she shall
ever care for you seriously?"--without which nothing could well be less
delicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate would be free
to do that if Kate, in some prudence, some contrition, for some better
reason in fine, should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
failing this, _he_ could do that wouldn't be after all more gross than
doing nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of the
fact that the poor girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own,
on a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already supplied her
with the pretext she required. The ground was there, that is, in the
impression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed as
she did made her sure at last that she might act; so that what Densher
therefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a
pure pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this pure
pleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were things
she seemed to say that took the words out of his mouth. These were not
all the things she did say; they were rather what such things meant in
the light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off the
question of how she was, the quick brave little art with which she did
that, represented to his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for
_you_--that's all you have to do with or need trouble about: I shall
never be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you are; worry
about me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in
short, to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see, even now
while you sit here, that there aren't lots of others. Only do _them_
justice and we shall get on beautifully." This was what was folded
finely up in her talk--all quite ostensibly about her impressions and
her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on his American doings,
but he wouldn't have that to-day. As he thought of the way in which,
the other afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently "jawing," he
accused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at least
apparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about
London, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat her
as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches
and pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at
Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had met
this with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature of
the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--they
fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their
interrupted encounter in New York.
At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for
them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just so
sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of
their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they had
originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to
remembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the
time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so complicated,
whether by what they said or by what they didn't say, that it might
have been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one
of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their
beginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about the
steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss,
and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on;
which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to
communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingled
themselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hard
to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in
their situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of
the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their
control. The current thus determined had positively become for him, by
the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for
the absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he would
freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
acquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young woman
could do nothing more, at the most, than go, and his actual experiment
went and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as
the marked circumstance that they had spoken all the while not a word
about Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a question
for them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had but the night before
appealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but he
fairly winced to find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
course how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shown
him by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealt
with, but it produced in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her before
going further--to make sure she really meant him to succeed quite so
much. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it came
up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and never
renew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the argument against
that issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful little
eloquence involved in Milly's avoidances.
Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact that
she was proceeding in the sense of the assurances she had taken. Over
the latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the merit
of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; the
chance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to her
freedom. It was what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, _I?_
Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was to do, it thus
appeared, as she was doing: our young man's glimpse of which was just
what would have been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar
brutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance of
heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She
would be charming to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would incur
whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight--should she continue to
be exposed to the sight--of the adorer thrown with the adored. It
wouldn't really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn't
before him one of those rare cases of exaltation--food for fiction,
food for poetry--in which a man's fortune with the woman who doesn't
care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as if
Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can at least meet her in my
society, if that's anything to him; so that my line can only be to make
my society attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a different
impression if she _had_ so reasoned. All of which, none the less,
didn't prevent his soon enough saying to her, quite as if she were to
be whirled into space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do you
begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she
would, couldn't help betraying to him something of her suppressed view
of the possibility--ever, ever perhaps--of any such proceedings. They
weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks
somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we've
only been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything's done
and the wind's in our sails."
"May you scud then happily before it! But when," he asked, "do you come
back?"
She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: "Oh when the wind
turns. And what do you do with your summer?"
"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work
in your country counts for play as well. You see what's thought of the
pleasure your country can give. My holiday's over."
"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at such a different time
from ours. If you could but have worked while we've been working--"
"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn't so great
with me. There's a little of each for me, of work and of play, in
either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder--you
all," he went on, "have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real
physical toil. Your rest is something you've earned and you need. My
labour's comparatively light."
"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like mine."
"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested. Oh I could go far."
He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?--since you've got here, as I
learn, the whole place in your pocket."
"Well, it's a kind of economy--I'm saving things up. I've enjoyed so
what you speak of--though your account of it's fantastic--that I'm
watching over its future, that I can't help being anxious and careful.
I want--in the interest itself of what I've had and may still have--not
to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again
to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,"
she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her
statement--"I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
"Ah then you _will_ return? Can you promise one that?"
Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if
bargaining a little. "Isn't London rather awful in winter?"
He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he
checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to
social life. "No--I like it, with one thing and another; it's less of a
mob than later on; and it would have for _us_ the merit--should you
come here then--that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear
for us--if it isn't a question of climate."
She looked at that a little graver. "If what isn't a question--?"
"Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going
somewhere for that."
"For better air?"--she remembered. "Oh yes, one certainly wants to get
out of London in August."
"Rather, of course!"--he fully understood. "Though I'm glad you've hung
on long enough for me to catch you. Try us at any rate," he continued,
"once more."
"Whom do you mean by 'us'?" she presently asked.
It pulled him up an instant--representing, as he saw it might have
seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he was
proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue
was easy. "I mean all of us together, every one you'll find ready to
surround you with sympathy."
It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him
afresh. "Why do you say sympathy?"
"Well, it's doubtless a pale word. What we _shall_ feel for you will be
much nearer worship."
"As near then as you like!" With which at last Kate's name was sounded.
"The people I'd most come back for are the people you know. I'd do it
for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me."
"So she has to _me_," said Densher. "I feel," he added as she at first
answered nothing, "that, quite contrary to anything I originally
expected, I've made a good friend of her."
"I didn't expect it either--its turning out as it has. But I did," said
Milly, "with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I'd do anything"--she
kept it up--"for Kate."
Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might
for the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of the
ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together
and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at
that moment hung for him by a hair. "Oh I know what one would do for
Kate!"--it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he
felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness
stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his
silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for
Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was
trying the next minute but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself.
"Of course I know what friends you are--and of course I understand," he
permitted himself to add, "any amount of devotion to a person so
charming. That's the good turn then she'll do us all--I mean her
working for your return."
"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm really on her hands."
He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show
he knew. "Ah she's very masterful."
"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."
"No--that's not the way. At any rate it isn't hers," he smiled. He
remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways
was just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject no further
than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of
representing a truth: "I don't feel as if I knew her--really to call
know."
"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she laughed. The words
gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for
his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity.
Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far--if it _was_
too far--without being false. His observation was one he would
perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and
before Milly did, he took time for more still--for feeling how just
here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up
not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner--and fairly put
there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to
turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have
given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled
for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August
afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy
carriage-wheels and of horses trained to "step." A rumble, a great
shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeeded
by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a
due display of diminished prancing and stamping. "You've a visitor,"
Densher laughed, "and it must be at least an ambassador."
"It's only my own carriage; it does that--isn't it wonderful?--every
day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of our
hearts, very amusing." She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself
of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together on
the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed
a brave show. "Is it very awful?"
It was to Densher's eyes--save for its absurd heaviness--only
pleasantly pompous. "It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do I
know? You're mistress of these things, in contact with the highest
wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which your
carriage--well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one."
But she was going out, and he mustn't stand in her way. What had
happened the next minute was first that she had denied she was going
out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said
she would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive--that in fact
there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her
to-day of several in particular, and that this in short was why the
carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these
things, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, they
found Milly's servant announcing the carriage and prepared to accompany
her. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling the
matter--on the basis, that is, of Densher's happy response. Densher's
happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we have
described in him operating by this time with extreme intensity. The
system of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought him
headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just now
it was, with a vengeance, that he must do either one thing or the
other. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to
him longer than they were; this was because he was anxiously watching
himself wait. He couldn't keep that up for ever; and since one thing or
the other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presently
became conscious of having decided. If he had been drifting it settled
itself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against a
firm object in the stream. "Oh yes; I'll go with you with pleasure.
It's a charming idea."
She gave no look to thank him--she rather looked away; she only said at
once to her servant, "In ten minutes"; and then to her visitor, as the
man went out, "We'll go somewhere--I shall like that. But I must ask of
you time--as little as possible--to get ready." She looked over the
room to provide for him, keep him there. "There are books and
things--plenty; and I dress very quickly." He caught her eyes only as
she went, on which he thought them pretty and touching.
Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce have
said; it was involved, it was lost in the sense of her wishing to
oblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so that
she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige
_her;_ which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quite
round it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and he
stood there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes more--remained
with several very living little matters to think about. One of these
was the phenomenon--typical, highly American, he would have said--of
Milly's extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had sought
refuge--refuge from another question--in the almost exclusive
contemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even
to a sound generalisation about American girls. It was spontaneous for
his young friend to have asked him to drive with her alone--since she
hadn't mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no more
advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn't an American
girl, might have struck him in not doing it. Besides, Kate _would_ have
done it, though Kate wasn't at all, in the same sense as Milly,
spontaneous. And then in addition Kate _had_ done it--or things very
like it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate--even if his ostensibly not
being put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at any
rate, the relation between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate,
was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as to
anything, with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give
herself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved about
the room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed at
his disposal. Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced;
whereas Kate was backward--backward still, comparatively, as an English
girl--and yet advanced in a high degree. However--though this didn't
straighten it out--Kate was of course two or three years older; which
at their time of life considerably counted.
Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued slowly to wander;
yet without keeping at bay for long the sense of having rounded his
corner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the option
of taking advantage of Milly's absence to retrace his steps. If he
might have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, he
couldn't turn tail now; he must simply wait there with his
consciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issue
was closed from without; in the course of three minutes more Miss
Theale's servant had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had met,
obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom, throwing open the door,
he loudly announced as Miss Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped
short at sight of Densher--only, after an instant, as the young man saw
with free amusement, not from surprise and still less from
discomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation--Miss Theale had
gone to prepare to drive--on receipt of which the servant effaced
himself.
"And you're going with her?" Kate asked.
"Yes--with your approval; which I've taken, as you see, for granted."
"Oh," she laughed, "my approval's complete!" She was thoroughly
consistent and handsome about it.
"What I mean is of course," he went on--for he was sensibly affected by
her gaiety--"at your so lively instigation."
She had looked about the room--she might have been vaguely looking for
signs of the duration, of the character of his visit, a momentary aid
in taking a decision. "Well, instigation then, as much as you like."
She treated it as pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she made
a fresh joke of this direct impression of it. "So much so as that? Do
you know I think I won't wait?"
"Not to see her--after coming?"
"Well, with you in the field--! I came for news of her, but she must be
all right. If she _is_--"
But he took her straight up. "Ah how do I know?" He was moved to say
more. "It's not I who am responsible for her, my dear. It seems to me
it's you." She struck him as making light of a matter that had been
costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn't both be quite just.
Either she was too easy or he had been too anxious. He didn't want at
all events to feel a fool for that. "I'm doing nothing--and shall not,
I assure you, do anything but what I'm told."
Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis he had given his
words; and he had taken it from her the next moment that he really
needn't get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked
it, with interest, for all answer. "Isn't she better--if she's able to
see you?"
"She assures me she's in perfect health."
Kate's interest grew. "I knew she would." On which she added: "It won't
have been really for illness that she stayed away last night."
"For what then?"
"Well--for nervousness."
"Nervousness about what?"
"Oh you know!" She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the
next moment. "I've told you that."
He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it
was as if what he saw there prompted him to say: "What have you told
_her?_"
She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered
where they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, even
stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right
feeling. Milly's room would be close at hand, and yet they were saying
things--! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. "Ask _her_, if
you like; you're free--she'll tell you. Act as you think best; don't
trouble about what you think I may or mayn't have told. I'm all right
with her," said Kate. "So there you are."
"If you mean _here_ I am," he answered, "it's unmistakeable. If you
also mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you're so
far right as that she certainly does believe in you."
"Well then take example by her."
"She's really doing it for you," Densher continued. "She's driving me
out for you."
"In that case," said Kate with her soft tranquillity, "you can do it a
little for _her_. I'm not afraid," she smiled.
He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on it
and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in
this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his
relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under such impressions, a
question of words. "I do nothing for any one in the world but you. But
for you I'll do anything."
"Good, good," said Kate. "That's how I like you."
He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to it?"
"To 'it'? To what?"
"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that, you know, that I'm
letting you do--well, God knows what with me."
She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture--the sense of
which she immediately further expressed. "If you don't believe in me
then, after all, hadn't you better break off before you've gone
further?"
"Break off with you?"
"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she said, "and I'll stay and
explain to her why it is."
He wondered--as if it struck him. "What would you say?"
"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that there's nothing for me
but to bear with you as I best may."
He considered of this. "How much do you abuse me to her?"
"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."
Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought to mind her attitude."
"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my best for you."
He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of
itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came
back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he
now weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding me
here--be rather more sure there's something between us?"
Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course greatly upset her.
But you needn't trouble about that. She won't die of it."
"Do you mean she _will?_" Densher presently asked.
"Don't put me questions when you don't believe what I say. You make too
many conditions."
She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of
pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it
suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of
any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of
being able to show--imagination, tact, positively even humour. The
circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the
speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should
begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"
She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more
than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
"Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settled
something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out
his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to
check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that
she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and
renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of
where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual
victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had
dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It
was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish,"
he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that
he had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on which
she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
"If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding you
with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'll
understand."
She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he had
before she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understand
enough, you know, without understanding too much."
"You don't need to see."
He required then a last injunction. "I must simply go it blind?"
"You must simply be kind to her."
"And leave the rest to you?"
"Leave the rest to _her_," said Kate disappearing.
It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three
minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat,
so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for
an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded
fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their
friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he
said--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his
corner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less.
She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed
over whatever might be awkward. "I'm sorry--but I of course often see
_her_." He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it
should now be wholly left.
BOOK SEVENTH
I
When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs. Stringham on the day of her
meeting them together and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to
face with that companion, had had one of those moments in which the
warned, the anxious fighter of the battle of life, as if once again
feeling for the sword at his side, carries his hand straight to the
quarter of his courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the two
women stood there showing each other a strange front. Susan Shepherd
had received their great doctor's visit, which had been clearly no
small affair for her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept
in place, against communication and betrayal, as she now practically
confessed, the barrier of their invited guests. "You've been too dear.
With what I see you're full of you treated them beautifully. _Isn't_
Kate charming when she wants to be?"
Poor Susie's expression, contending at first, as in a high fine spasm,
with different dangers, had now quite let itself go. She had to make an
effort to reach a point in space already so remote. "Miss Croy? Oh she
was pleasant and clever. She knew," Mrs. Stringham added. "She knew."
Milly braced herself--but conscious above all, at the moment, of a high
compassion for her mate. She made her out as struggling--struggling in
all her nature against the betrayal of pity, which in itself, given her
nature, could only be a torment. Milly gathered from the struggle how
much there was of the pity, and how therefore it was both in her
tenderness and in her conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered.
Wonderful and beautiful it was that this impression instantly steadied
the girl. Ruefully asking herself on what basis of ease, with the drop
of their barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt the
question met with a relief that was almost joy. The basis, the
inevitable basis, was that she was going to be sorry for Susie, who, to
all appearance, had been condemned in so much more uncomfortable a
manner to be sorry for _her_. Mrs. Stringham's sorrow would hurt Mrs.
Stringham, but how could her own ever hurt? She had, the poor girl, at
all events, on the spot, five minutes of exaltation in which she turned
the tables on her friend with a pass of the hand, a gesture of an
energy that made a wind in the air. "Kate knew," she asked, "that you
were full of Sir Luke Strett?"
"She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice; she seemed to want
to help me through." Which the good lady had no sooner said, however,
than she almost tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly with
a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she saw one had been taken up
with something. When I say she knows I should say she's a person who
guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side, heroic. "But _she_
doesn't matter, Milly."
The girl felt she by this time could face anything. "Nobody matters,
Susie. Nobody." Which her next words, however, rather contradicted.
"Did he take it ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
just what he wanted--to have it out, so much more simply, with _you_?"
"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs. Stringham delicately
quavered.
"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on, "and didn't he think you
the most charming person I could possibly have referred him to for an
account of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together and in fact
fall quite in love, so that it will really be a great advantage for you
to have me as a common ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end
of a good thing of me."
"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham pleadingly murmured; yet
showing as she did so that she feared the effect even of deprecation.
"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?--altogether, whatever he may
say, a lovely acquaintance to have made? You're just the right people
for me--I see it now; and do you know what, between you, you must do?"
Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck and holding herself: "You
must simply see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out together.
I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and we'll be--the three of us,
with whatever others, oh as many as the case requires, any one you
like!--a sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying a
feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence that her young
friend almost saw her--and scarcely withheld the observation--as taking
it for "a part of the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate awfully interesting,
isn't he?--which is so much to the good. We haven't at least--as we
might have, with the way we tumbled into it--got hold of one of the
dreary."
"Interesting, dearest?"--Mrs. Stringham felt her feet firmer. "I don't
know if he's interesting or not; but I do know, my own," she continued
to quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you could possibly
desire."
"Certainly--that's it. Like all the world."
"No, my precious, not like all the world. Very much more deeply and
intelligently."
"Ah there you are!" Milly laughed. "That's the way, Susie, I want you.
So 'buck' up, my dear. We'll have beautiful times with him. Don't
worry."
"I'm not worrying, Milly." And poor Susie's face registered the
sublimity of her lie.
It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her companion went to her,
met by her with an embrace in which things were said that exceeded
speech. Each held and clasped the other as if to console her for this
unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham of learning the torment of
helplessness, the woe for Milly of having _her_, at such a time, to
think of. Milly's assumption was immense, and the difficulty for her
friend was that of not being able to gainsay it without bringing it
more to the proof than tenderness and vagueness could permit. Nothing
in fact came to the proof between them but that they could thus cling
together--except indeed that, as we have indicated, the pledge of
protection and support was all the younger woman's own. "I don't ask
you," she presently said, "what he told you for yourself, nor what he
told you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that I had left him to
you, nor what passed between you about me in any way. It wasn't to get
that out of you that I took my means to make sure of your meeting
freely--for there are things I don't want to know. I shall see him
again and again and shall know more than enough. All I do want is that
you shall see me through on _his_ basis, whatever it is; which it's
enough--for the purpose--that you yourself should know: that is with
him to show you how. I'll make it charming for you--that's what I mean;
I'll keep you up to it in such a way that half the time you won't know
you're doing it. And for that you're to rest upon me. There. It's
understood. We keep each other going, and you may absolutely feel of me
that I shan't break down. So, with the way you haven't so much as a dig
of the elbow to fear, how could you be safer?"
"He told me I _can_ help you--of course he told me that," Susie, on her
side, eagerly contended. "Why shouldn't he, and for what else have I
come out with you? But he told me nothing dreadful--nothing, nothing,
nothing," the poor lady passionately protested. "Only that you must do
as you like and as he tells you--which _is_ just simply to do as you
like."
"I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to time go to him. But
that's of course doing as I like. It's lucky," Milly smiled, "that I
like going to him."
Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave a clutch at the account
of their situation that most showed it as workable. "That's what _will_
be charming for me, and what I'm sure he really wants of me--to help
you to do as you like."
"And also a little, won't it be," Milly laughed, "to save me from the
consequences? Of course," she added, "there must first _be_ things I
like."
"Oh I think you'll find some," Mrs. Stringham more bravely said. "I
think there _are_ some--as for instance just this one. I mean," she
explained, "really having us so."
Milly thought. "Just as if I wanted you comfortable about _him_, and
him the same about you? Yes--I shall get the good of it."
Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this into a slight confusion.
"Which of them are you talking of?"
Milly wondered an instant--then had a light. "I'm not talking of Mr.
Densher." With which moreover she showed amusement. "Though if you can
be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much the better."
"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's a fine type. Do you
know," Susie continued, "whom he reminds me of? Of _our_ great man--Dr.
Buttrick of Boston."
Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she dropped him after a
tributary pause. "What do you think, now that you've seen him, of Mr.
Densher?"
It was not till after consideration, with her eyes fixed on her
friend's, that Susie produced her answer. "I think he's very handsome."
Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a little the manner of
a teacher with a pupil. "Well, that will do for the first time. I
_have_ done," she went on, "what I wanted."
"Then that's all _we_ want. You see there are plenty of things."
Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best is not to know--that
includes them all. I don't--I don't know. Nothing about
anything--except that you're _with_ me. Remember that, please. There
won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall forget. So it's
all right."
The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended, to sustain
Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into the reassuring. "Most
certainly it's all right. I think you ought to understand that he sees
no reason--"
"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly had taken it straight
up, as to understand it and for a moment consider it. But she disposed
of it otherwise. "Oh of course I know _that_." She spoke as if her
friend's point were small.
Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what I mean is that he
didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself."
"Really?--I would in his place!" She might have been disappointed, but
she had her good humour. "He tells me to _live_"--and she oddly limited
the word.
It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you want more?"
"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I assure you,
anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."
It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So
am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet
it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say
more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of
what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made
her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It
was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events
begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a
special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to
twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly,
the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to
watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit
and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than
fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so
oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had
contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the
greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned
during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while,
in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified
the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If
it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was
capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom,
the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
The intensity the circumstance in question _might_ wear to the informed
imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and
with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential
passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't
yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't
had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should
certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of
silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper,
however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate
the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that
she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to
give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as
might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had
behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found
herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as
she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give
it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was
that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in
observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that
purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.
She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for
the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more,
as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the
contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most
vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at
least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if
she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that
be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her
to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."
"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."
"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.
There's something that will prevent her."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's
doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent
form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept
_her_ from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that
these same things, at such times, made still more for business,
arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of
servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said,
"if I weren't writing letters"--and this quite without harshness for
her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative
margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would
have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when
Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her
addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman
summoned by the pressure of a knob, the facts of the case were
sufficiently ready for her. It took but two or three, however, given
their importance, to lay the ground for the great one--Mrs. Stringham's
interview of the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her
about Milly.
"He had wished it himself?"
"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter
of an hour. I could see that for _him_ it was long. He's interested,"
said Mrs. Stringham.
"Do you mean in her case?"
"He says it _isn't_ a case."
"What then is it?"
"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained, "the case she believed
it to be--thought it at any rate _might_ be--when, without my
knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something
she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly--he has made sure.
She's wrong--she hasn't what she thought."
"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
"He didn't tell me."
"And you didn't ask?"
"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He
gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He
_is_, thank God, interested."
"He must have been interested in _you_, dear," Maud Manningham observed
with kindness.
Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he _is_. I mean
that he sees what he can do with me."
Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For _her_."
"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must. He can use me to
the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says the great thing for
her is to be happy."
"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why, therefore," Mrs.
Lowder handsomely asked, "should we cry so hard about it?"
"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange, so beyond us. I mean
if she can't be."
"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles. "She _shall_ be."
"Well--if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we _can_ help."
Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way, what Sir Luke Strett
thought. She sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque
ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her,
dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by
one, into her capacious apron. "But is that all he came to you for--to
tell you she must be happy?"
"That she must be _made_ so--that's the point. It seemed enough, as he
told me," Mrs. Stringham went on; "he makes it somehow such a grand
possible affair."
"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"
"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to me, that is, as
_my_ part. The rest's his own."
"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.
"I don't know. _His_ business. He means to keep hold of her."
"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must be very much of one."
Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the extent of it. "It's only
that it isn't _the_ case she herself supposed."
"It's another?"
"It's another."
"Examining her for what she supposed he finds something else?"
"Something else."
"And what does he find?"
"Ah," Mrs. Stringham cried, "God keep me from knowing!"
"He didn't tell you that?"
But poor Susie had recovered herself. "What I mean is that if it's
there I shall know in time. He's considering, but I can trust him for
it--because he does, I feel, trust me. He's considering," she repeated.
"He's in other words not sure?"
"Well, he's watching. I think that's what he means. She's to get away
now, but to come back to him in three months."
"Then I think," said Maud Lowder, "that he oughtn't meanwhile to scare
us."
It roused Susie a little, Susie being already enrolled in the great
doctor's cause. This came out at least in her glimmer of reproach.
"Does it scare us to enlist us for her happiness?"
Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. "Yes; it scares _me_. I'm always
scared--I may call it so--till I understand. What happiness is he
talking about?"
Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. "Oh you know!"
She had really said it so that her friend had to take it; which the
latter in fact after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange
light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems to see. The point
is--!" But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.
"The point is will it _cure?_"
"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy--the specific?"
"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs. Stringham delicately
declared.
"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan Shepherd enquired.
"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth,
which operated--and happily too--as a challenge to her visitor's
spirit. "Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But it's
something to know he thinks it good for us."
"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes me we know it without
him. So that when _that's_ all he has to tell us--!"
"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.' I feel Sir Luke will
have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate. I'm to
see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So it won't be
for nothing."
"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to
propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?"
Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I showed him I understood
him. That was all I could do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit;
but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I
had from you night before last."
"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"
"You had _seen_, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he's here,
now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs.
Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."
"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I
anything else? But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
Densher."
"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we're going
fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
"The thing _is_ to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after
all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last,
to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt--I knew in my bones the man had
returned."
"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent. But wait," said Mrs.
Stringham, "till you've seen him."
"I shall see him immediately"--Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision.
"What is then," she asked, "your impression?"
Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts. "How can he ever
care for her?"
Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it. "By being
put in the way of it."
"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "_put_ him in the way!
You have him, one feels, in your hand."
Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's. "Is that your
impression of him?"
"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one."
Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a
wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was
a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate."
It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from
her--something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you
mean Kate cares for _him?_"
That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know,
enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in
her face. She blinked--then looked at the question hard; after which,
whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a
decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's
surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan
Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she
suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had
been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have
liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having
thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present,
in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
"Kate thinks she cares. But she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These
things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort. Yet they
weren't all of it. "_You_ don't know it--that must be your line. Or
rather your line must be that you deny it utterly."
"Deny that she cares for him?"
"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and
absolutely. Deny that you've so much as heard of it."
Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean--if she asks?"
"To Milly, naturally. No one else _will_ ask."
"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, "Milly won't."
Mrs. Lowder wondered. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for _me_. I lie badly."
"_I_ lie well, thank God," Mrs. Lowder almost snorted, "when, as
sometimes will happen, there's nothing else so good. One must always do
the best. But without lies then," she went on, "perhaps we can work it
out." Her interest had risen; her friend saw her, as within some
minutes, more enrolled and inflamed--presently felt in her what had
made the difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried this at the
time but dimly; she only made out at first that Maud had found a reason
for helping her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud
too, for which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying.
What really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a
little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this
appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The truth
about Kate's delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion about the
state of her affections, which might be removed--this was apparently
the ground on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs. Stringham
saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate's delusion--by arts,
however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it
perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr. Densher's?--success in which
indeed might entail other successes. Before that job, unfortunately,
her heart had already failed. She felt that she believed in her bones
what Milly believed, and what would now make working for Milly such a
dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly present--a
cloud of questions out of which Maud Manningham's large seated self
loomed, however, as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact for
the consultative relation something of the form of an oracle. From the
oracle the sound did come--or at any rate the sense did, a sense all
accordant with the insufflation she had just seen working. "Yes," the
sense was, "I'll help you for Milly, because if that comes off I shall
be helped, by its doing so, for Kate"--a view into which Mrs. Stringham
could now sufficiently enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange to
say, quite willing to operate to Kate's harm, or at least to Kate's
good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself
in short not caring what became of Kate--only convinced at bottom of
the predominance of Kate's star. Kate wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't
pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy.
She saw moreover by this time that her friend was travelling even
beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough
plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must
stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at
dinner." In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an
instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to
prepare that ground. "The poor child, when I was with her there while
you were getting your shawl, quite gave herself away to me."
"Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me. Though it was nothing
more," Susie did herself the justice to observe, "than what I too had
quite felt."
But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she wondered what she had
said. "I suppose I ought to be edified at what you can so beautifully
give up."
"Give up?" Mrs. Stringham echoed. "Why, I give up nothing--I cling."
Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with some stiffness to her
great brass-bound cylinder-desk and giving a push to an object or two
disposed there. "I give up then. You know how little such a person as
Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know what I've been thinking
perfectly possible."
"Oh you've been great"--Susie was perfectly fair. "A duke, a duchess, a
princess, a palace: you've made me believe in them too. But where we
break down is that _she_ doesn't believe in them. Luckily for her--as
it seems to be turning out--she doesn't want them. So what's one to do?
I assure you I've had many dreams. But I've only one dream now."
Mrs. Stringham's tone in these last words gave so fully her meaning
that Mrs. Lowder could but show herself as taking it in. They sat a
moment longer confronted on it. "Her having what she does want?"
"If it _will_ do anything for her."
Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do; but she spoke for the
instant of something else. "It does provoke me a bit, you know--for of
course I'm a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things. Yet it
doesn't prevent the fact that we must be decent."
"We must take her"--Mrs. Stringham carried that out--"as she is."
"And we must take Mr. Densher as _he_ is." With which Mrs. Lowder gave
a sombre laugh. "It's a pity he isn't better!"
"Well, if he were better," her friend rejoined, "you'd have liked him
for your niece; and in that case Milly would interfere. I mean," Susie
added, "interfere with _you_."
"She interferes with me as it is--not that it matters now. But I saw
Kate and her--really as soon as you came to me--set up side by side. I
saw your girl--I don't mind telling--you helping my girl; and when I
say that," Mrs. Lowder continued, "you'll probably put in for yourself
that it was part of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what I
give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line," she further set
forth, "I take it handsomely. So good-bye to it all. Good-day to Mrs.
Densher! Heavens!" she growled.
Susie held herself a minute. "Even as Mrs. Densher my girl will be
somebody."
"Yes, she won't be nobody. Besides," said Mrs. Lowder, "we're talking
in the air."
Her companion sadly assented. "We're leaving everything out."
"It's nevertheless interesting." And Mrs. Lowder had another thought.
"_He's_ not quite nobody either." It brought her back to the question
she had already put and which her friend hadn't at the time dealt with.
"What in fact do you make of him?"
Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was
moved a little to caution. So she remained general. "He's charming."
She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own
to which people resort when they are not quite candid--a circumstance
that had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
The effect of the words, however, was equally marked; they almost
determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of amusement. "I thought you
didn't like him!"
"I don't like him for Kate."
"But you don't like him for Milly either."
Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend also got up. "I like
him, my dear, for myself."
"Then that's the best way of all."
"Well, it's one way. He's not good enough for my niece, and he's not
good enough for you. One's an aunt, one's a wretch and one's a fool."
"Oh _I'm_ not--not either," Susie declared.
But her companion kept on. "One lives for others. _You_ do that. If I
were living for myself I shouldn't at all mind him."
But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. "Ah if I find him charming it's
however I'm living."
Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but an instant, giving
herself away with a laugh. "Of course he's all right in himself."
"That's all I contend," Susie said with more reserve; and the note in
question--what Merton Densher was "in himself"--closed practically,
with some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
II
It had at least made the difference for them, they could feel, of an
informed state in respect to the great doctor, whom they were now to
take as watching, waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to
himself some such process before he should make up his mind. Mrs.
Stringham understood him as considering the matter meanwhile in a
spirit that, on this same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come
back to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed the course of
his reckoning. If what they had talked of _could_ happen--if Milly,
that is, could have her thoughts taken off herself--it wouldn't do any
harm and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn't happen--if,
anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined, could
do nothing to contribute to it--they would be in no worse a box than
before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had her free range
for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done her best in the
sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her eminent man,
would--besides having more to show him--find him more ready to go on
with her. It was visible further to Susan Shepherd--as well as being
ground for a second report to her old friend--that Milly did her part
for a working view of the general case, inasmuch as she mentioned
frankly and promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke
Strett and thank him. She even specified what she was to thank him for,
his having been so easy about her behaviour.
"You see I didn't know that--for the liberty I took--I shouldn't
afterwards get a stiff note from him."
So much Milly had said to her, and it had made her a trifle rash. "Oh
you'll never get a stiff note from him in your life."
She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her young friend's question.
"Why not, as well as any one else who has played him a trick?"
"Well, because he doesn't regard it as a trick. He could understand
your action. It's all right, you see."
"Yes--I do see. It _is_ all right. He's easier with me than with any
one else, because that's the way to let me down. He's only making
believe, and I'm not worth hauling up."
Rueful at having provoked again this ominous flare, poor Susie grasped
at her only advantage. "Do you really accuse a man like Sir Luke Strett
of trifling with you?"
She couldn't blind herself to the look her companion gave her--a
strange half-amused perception of what she made of it. "Well, so far as
it's trifling with me to pity me so much."
"He doesn't pity you," Susie earnestly reasoned. "He just--the same as
any one else--likes you."
"He has no business then to like me. He's not the same as any one else."
"Why not, if he wants to work for you?"
Milly gave her another look, but this time a wonderful smile. "Ah there
you are!" Mrs. Stringham coloured, for there indeed she was again. But
Milly let her off. "Work for me, all the same--work for me! It's of
course what I want." Then as usual she embraced her friend. "I'm not
going to be as nasty as this to _him_."
"I'm sure I hope not!"--and Mrs. Stringham laughed for the kiss. "I've
no doubt, however, he'd take it from you! It's _you_, my dear, who are
not the same as any one else."
Milly's assent to which, after an instant, gave her the last word. "No,
so that people can take anything from me." And what Mrs. Stringham did
indeed resignedly take after this was the absence on her part of any
account of the visit then paid. It was the beginning in fact between
them of an odd independence--an independence positively of action and
custom--on the subject of Milly's future. They went their separate ways
with the girl's intense assent; this being really nothing but what she
had so wonderfully put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham's first
encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favoured the idea that Susie had or
was to have other encounters--private pointed personal; she favoured
every idea, but most of all the idea that she herself was to go on as
if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be worked for that would
be her way; and though her companions learned from herself nothing of
it this was in the event her way with her medical adviser. She put her
visit to him on the simplest ground; she had come just to tell him how
touched she had been by his good nature. That required little
explaining, for, as Mrs. Stringham had said, he quite understood he
could but reply that it was all right.
"I had a charming quarter of an hour with that clever lady. You've got
good friends."
"So each one of them thinks of all the others. But so I also think,"
Milly went on, "of all of them together. You're excellent for each
other. And it's in that way, I dare say, that you're best for me."
There came to her on this occasion one of the strangest of her
impressions, which was at the same time one of the finest of her
alarms--the glimmer of a vision that if she should go, as it were, too
far, she might perhaps deprive their relation of facility if not of
value. Going too far was failing to try at least to remain simple. He
would be quite ready to hate her if she did, by heading him off at
every point, embarrass his exercise of a kindness that, no doubt,
rather constituted for him a high method. Susie wouldn't hate her,
since Susie positively wanted to suffer for her; Susie had a noble idea
that she might somehow so do her good. Such, however, was not the way
in which the greatest of London doctors was to be expected to wish to
do it. He wouldn't have time even should he wish; whereby, in a word,
Milly felt herself intimately warned. Face to face there with her
smooth strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment quite such
another lift of feeling as she had known in her crucial talk with
Susie. It came round to the same thing; him too she would help to help
her if that could possibly be; but if it couldn't possibly be she would
assist also to make this right.
It wouldn't have taken many minutes more, on the basis in question,
almost to reverse for her their characters of patient and physician.
What _was_ he in fact but patient, what was she but physician, from the
moment she embraced once for all the necessity, adopted once for all
the policy, of saving him alarms about her subtlety? She would leave
the subtlety to him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no
doubt, would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went so far as to imagine
that the inward success of these reflexions flushed her for the minute,
to his eyes, with a certain bloom, a comparative appearance of health;
and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour to the
presumption. "Every little helps, no doubt!"--he noticed
good-humouredly her harmless sally. "But, help or no help, you're
looking, you know, remarkably well."
"Oh I thought I was," she answered; and it was as if already she saw
his line. Only she wondered what he would have guessed. If he had
guessed anything at all it would be rather remarkable of him. As for
what there _was_ to guess, he couldn't--if this was present to
him--have arrived at it save by his own acuteness. That acuteness was
therefore immense; and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of
leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad. Neither, for that
matter, would hers be--which she was even actually enjoying. She
wondered if really then there mightn't be something for her. She hadn't
been sure in coming to him that she was "better," and he hadn't used,
he would be awfully careful not to use, that compromising term about
her; in spite of all of which she would have been ready to say, for the
amiable sympathy of it, "Yes, I _must_ be," for he had this unaided
sense of something that had happened to her. It was a sense unaided,
because who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was certain,
hadn't yet seen him again, and there were things it was impossible she
could have told him the first time. Since such was his penetration,
therefore, why shouldn't she gracefully, in recognition of it, accept
the new circumstance, the one he was clearly wanting to congratulate
her on, as a sufficient cause? If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it
might produce an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a way of
nursing. "You gave me the other day," she went on, "plenty to think
over, and I've been doing that--thinking it over--quite as you'll have
probably wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to treat," she
smiled, "since you've already done me so much good."
The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that he looked in advance
so closely related to all one's possibilities that one missed the
pleasure of really improving it. "Oh no, you're extremely difficult to
treat. I've need with you, I assure you, of all my wit."
"Well, I mean I do come up." She hadn't meanwhile a bit believed in his
answer, convinced as she was that if she _had_ been difficult it would
be the last thing he would have told her. "I'm doing," she said, "as I
like."
"Then it's as _I_ like. But you must really, though we're having such a
decent month, get straight away." In pursuance of which, when she had
replied with promptitude that her departure--for the Tyrol and then for
Venice--was quite fixed for the fourteenth, he took her up with
alacrity. "For Venice? That's perfect, for we shall meet there. I've a
dream of it for October, when I'm hoping for three weeks off; three
weeks during which, if I can get them clear, my niece, a young person
who has quite the whip hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I
heard from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice."
"That's lovely then. I shall expect you there. And anything that, in
advance or in any way, I can do for you--!"
"Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for me. But it will be
capital to find you there."
"I think it ought to make you feel," she said after a moment, "that I
_am_ easy to treat."
But he shook his head again; he wouldn't have it. "You've not come to
that _yet_."
"One has to be so bad for it?"
"Well, I don't think I've ever come to it--to 'ease' of treatment. I
doubt if it's possible. I've not, if it is, found any one bad enough.
The ease, you see, is for _you_."
"I see--I see."
They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on
it; after which Sir Luke asked: "And that clever lady--she goes with
you?"
"Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She'll stay with me, I hope, to the end."
He had a cheerful blankness. "To the end of what?"
"Well--of everything."
"Ah then," he laughed, "you're in luck. The end of everything is far
off. This, you know, I'm hoping," said Sir Luke, "is only the
beginning." And the next question he risked might have been a part of
his hope. "Just you and she together?"
"No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we've seen more here than of
any one and who are just the right people for us."
He thought a moment. "You'll be four women together then?"
"Ah," said Milly, "we're widows and orphans. But I think," she added as
if to say what she saw would reassure him, "that we shall not be
unattractive, as we move, to gentlemen. When you talk of 'life' I
suppose you mean mainly gentlemen."
"When I talk of 'life,'" he made answer after a moment during which he
might have been appreciating her raciness--"when I talk of life I think
I mean more than anything else the beautiful show of it, in its
freshness, made by young persons of your age. So go on as you are. I
see more and more _how_ you are. You can't," he went so far as to say
for pleasantness, "better it."
She took it from him with a great show of peace. "One of our companions
will be Miss Croy, who came with me here first. It's in _her_ that life
is splendid; and a part of that is even that she's devoted to me. But
she's above all magnificent in herself. So that if you'd like," she
freely threw out, "to see _her_--"
"Oh I shall like to see any one who's devoted to you, for clearly it
will be jolly to be 'in' it. So that if she's to be at Venice I _shall_
see her?"
"We must arrange it--I shan't fail. She moreover has a friend who may
also be there"--Milly found herself going on to this. "He's likely to
come, I believe, for he always follows her."
Sir Luke wondered. "You mean they're lovers?"
"_He_ is," Milly smiled; "but not she. She doesn't care for him."
Sir Luke took an interest. "What's the matter with him?"
"Nothing but that she doesn't like him."
Sir Luke kept it up. "Is he all right?"
"Oh he's very nice. Indeed he's remarkably so."
"And he's to be in Venice?"
"So she tells me she fears. For if he is there he'll be constantly
about with her."
"And she'll be constantly about with you?"
"As we're great friends--yes."
"Well then," said Sir Luke, "you won't be four women alone."
"Oh no; I quite recognise the chance of gentlemen. But he won't," Milly
pursued in the same wondrous way, "have come, you see, for me."
"No--I see. But can't you help him?"
"Can't _you?_" Milly after a moment quaintly asked. Then for the joke
of it she explained. "I'm putting you, you see, in relation with my
entourage."
It might have been for the joke of it too, by this time, that her
eminent friend fell in. "But if this gentleman _isn't_ of your
'entourage '? I mean if he's of--what do you call her?--Miss Croy's.
Unless indeed you also take an interest in him."
"Oh certainly I take an interest in him!"
"You think there may be then some chance for him?"
"I like him," said Milly, "enough to hope so."
"Then that's all right. But what, pray," Sir Luke next asked, "have I
to do with him?"
"Nothing," said Milly, "except that if you're to be there, so may he
be. And also that we shan't in that case be simply four dreary women."
He considered her as if at this point she a little tried his patience.
"_You're_ the least 'dreary' woman I've ever, ever seen. Ever, do you
know? There's no reason why you shouldn't have a really splendid life."
"So every one tells me," she promptly returned.
"The conviction--strong already when I had seen you once--is
strengthened in me by having seen your friend. There's no doubt about
it. The world's before you."
"What did my friend tell you?" Milly asked.
"Nothing that wouldn't have given you pleasure. We talked about
you--and freely. I don't deny that. But it shows me I don't require of
you the impossible."
She was now on her feet. "I think I know what you require of me."
"Nothing, for you," he went on, "_is_ impossible. So go on." He
repeated it again--wanting her so to feel that to-day he saw it.
"You're all right."
"Well," she smiled--"keep me so."
"Oh you'll get away from me."
"Keep me, keep me," she simply continued with her gentle eyes on him.
She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he thus for a moment did
keep her. Something then, while he seemed to think if there were
anything more, came back to him; though something of which there wasn't
too much to be made. "Of course if there's anything I _can_ do for your
friend: I mean the gentleman you speak of--?" He gave out in short that
he was ready.
"Oh Mr. Densher?" It was as if she had forgotten.
"Mr. Densher--is that his name?"
"Yes--but his case isn't so dreadful." She had within a minute got away
from that.
"No doubt--if _you_ take an interest." She had got away, but it was as
if he made out in her eyes--though they also had rather got away--a
reason for calling her back. "Still, if there's anything one can do--?"
She looked at him while she thought, while she smiled. "I'm afraid
there's really nothing one can do."
III
Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into
possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was
still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool
pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun
on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played
over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of
purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old
reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all
flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded
and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of
the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller
lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with
the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the
eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This at last only,
though she had enjoyed the palace for three weeks, seemed to count as
effective occupation; perhaps because it was the first time she had
been alone--really to call alone--since she had left London, it
ministered to her first full and unembarrassed sense of what the great
Eugenio had done for her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes
and Americans, had entered her service during the last hours of
all--had crossed from Paris, after multiplied _pourparlers_ with Mrs.
Stringham, to whom she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on
purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had
dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures
of his experience. She had judged him in advance--polyglot and
universal, very dear and very deep--as probably but a swindler finished
to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian
hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket,
which, as she had instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a
glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements of their common
consciousness had rapidly gathered into an indestructible link, formed
the ground of a happy relation; being by this time, strangely,
grotesquely, delightfully, what most kept up confidence between them
and what most expressed it.
She had seen quickly enough what was happening--the usual thing again,
yet once again. Eugenio had, in an interview of five minutes,
understood her, had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so
much of the care with which she must be taken up as of the care with
which she must be let down. All the world understood her, all the world
had got hold; but for nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so
close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender. Gracefully,
respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and
the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black
professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too
old to make love, but with an art still to make money--did he on
occasion convey to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious
career, the one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal.
The others had come in the way of business, but for her his sentiment
was special. Confidence rested thus on her completely believing that:
there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It passed between them
every time they conversed; he was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on
the surface. He had taken his place already for her among those who
were to see her through, and meditation ranked him, in the constant
perspective, for the final function, side by side with poor Susie--whom
she was now pitying more than ever for having to be herself so sorry
and to say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact of a
residuary legatee--which was a character that could be definitely worn;
whereas she could see Susie, in the event of her death, in no character
at all, Susie being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere
makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter, Milly at present,
with a renewed flare of fancy, felt she should herself have liked to
believe in. Eugenio had really done for her more than he probably
knew--he didn't after all know everything--in having, for the wind-up
of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably, so perfectly
established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At
Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it
can be at all managed--you know what I mean--some fine old rooms,
wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the
more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and
picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves,
with a cook, don't you know?--with servants, frescoes, tapestries,
antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement."
The proof of how he better and better understood her was in all the
place; as to his masterly acquisition of which she had from the first
asked no questions. She had shown him enough what she thought of it,
and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the transaction that
mainly concerned her she would soon enough become acquainted, and his
connexion with such values as she would then find noted could scarce
help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming people,
conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had given up their house to her,
and had fled to a distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes
alike over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what
they had, however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated,
and she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyed.
Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a
painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about
with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable
character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us
back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this
October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly
to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the
sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour;
always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with
penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid
voices she lost the sense. Voices had surrounded her for weeks, and she
had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these
had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent
her from hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or
threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a
multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett
as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a
rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the
Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia;
improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers
waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends
in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the
addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more
insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even by
Susie's social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels, at
Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the London "success"
to which they had opened the door.
Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs.
Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the
concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of
the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so
different"--different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising
them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once
sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly
fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the
acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the
eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path,
possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own
sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of
her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she
mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such
a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence
induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the
light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good
time, and yet too rich and too befriended--an intuitive cunning within
her managing this last--for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in
short, by what she made out, approved her friends for their expert
wisdom with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the
compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
things in these days that she had never seen before, and she couldn't
have said why save on a principle too terrible to name; whereby she saw
that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor New York
what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the plan of a
series of American visits. The plan might have been, humorously, on
Mrs. Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social position--and it
had verily in that direction lights that were perhaps but half a
century too prompt; at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool
controlled facility that went so well, as the others said, with her
particular kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the
person enjoying them _would_ dispose of disputations, speculations,
aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so
simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless,
like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too
that _she_ should like to go to America; it was only that with this
young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late,
on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made
up for their public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they wearily
put off the mask.
These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken
by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and
not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue on Milly's side
whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They
flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have
flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but
the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been
suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we
say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by
either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of
relief. It was when they called each other's attention to their ceasing
to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in
the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and mainly to Kate's
advantage: Milly didn't quite see what her friend could keep back, was
possessed of, in fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas
it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor Milly had a
treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a shy, an abject
affection--concealment, on that head, belonging to quite another phase
of such states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively bold
and hard, a principle that played up like a fine steel spring at the
lightest pressure of too near a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was
the truth about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus was a
wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully to look at her from the
far side of the moat she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of
the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight
that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a
Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk,
of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung
about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and
that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her court who
exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening
gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady, with thick dark
braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered train,
makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and the broken talk, brief
and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense.
This is because, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,
they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their
words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be
tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled
to a care of what they said.
There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular, of the
probability that if she wasn't so proud she might be pitied with more
comfort--more to the person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no
sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate attitude, that
this marvellous mixture of her weakness and of her strength, her peril,
if such it were, and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly
interesting. Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all, very much
Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd herself indeed, in our
Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the
moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate
imagination strong; and that these things gave her a virtue, a good
conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to
be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of
their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as
Milly's other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be
explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses of the felt
contrast between her fortune and her fear--all of which would have
contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw:
to recognise was to bring down the avalanche--the avalanche Milly lived
so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths;
though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of
the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With
so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their
withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a
nominal motive--which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of
chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their steps, but they
took the despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when face to
face, some view or other of something. The relief of getting out of
harness--that was the moral of their meetings; but the moral of this,
in turn, was that they couldn't so much as ask each other why harness
need be worn. Milly wore it as a general armour.
She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she hadn't been for
weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when alone, and her
companions had never yet so much as just now affected her as dispersed
and suppressed. It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it from her without a
word and just bravely and brilliantly in the name, for instance, of the
beautiful day: "Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off--I don't care
where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will:
so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am." She was
conscious of the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
as the others to him--Susie who would have drowned her very self for
her; gave her up to a mercenary monster through whom she thus purchased
respites. Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;
strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of hope; yet lawful, all
the same--weren't they?--those experiments tried with the truth that
consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now
playing with the thought that Eugenio might _inclusively_ assist her:
he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really
quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete
use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It
had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she
should just stupidly and awkwardly _want_--any more want a life, a
career, a consciousness, than want a house, a carriage or a cook. It
was as if she had had from him a kind of expert professional measure of
what he was in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the
thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could closely compare with
a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's part that--at least in Palazzo
Leporelli when mornings were fine--showed as almost amateurish. Sir
Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and leave the rest to
_me_"--which was distinctly what Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared
indeed to speak of purchase and payment, but in reference to a
different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to be named nor
reckoned, and such moreover as she wasn't sure of having at her
command. Eugenio--this was the difference--could name, could reckon,
and prices of _his_ kind were things she had never suffered to scare
her. She had been willing, goodness knew, to pay enough for anything,
for everything, and here was simply a new view of the sufficient
quantity. She amused herself--for it came to that, since Eugenio was
there to sign the receipt--with possibilities of meeting the bill. She
was more prepared than ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to
pay too much. What else--if such were points at which your most trusted
servant failed--was the use of being, as the dear Susies of earth
called you, a princess in a palace?
She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful
while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer
blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to
it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was _in_ it, as in the ark
of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why
shouldn't this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never,
never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than
to sit tight in it and float on and on. The beauty and intensity, the
real momentary relief of this conceit, reached their climax in the
positive purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return as she
had not yet put it; though the design, it must be added, dropped a
little when, coming back to the great saloon from which she had started
on her pensive progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
Venice she had been unaware, and who had now--while a servant was
following her through empty rooms--been asked, in her absence, to wait.
He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never
before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with
patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness. The odd
thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder for what
had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end of five
minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost as glad to
see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of her solitude,
as if he had already been in her thought or acting at her suggestion.
He was some-how, at the best, the end of a respite; one might like him
very much and yet feel that his presence tempered precious solitude
more than any other known to one: in spite of all of which, as he was
neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for
the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him did no damage to
her sense of the dispersal of her friends. She hadn't been so
thoroughly alone with him since those moments of his showing her the
great portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the
high-water-mark of her security, the moments during which her tears
themselves, those she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her
consciously rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf
of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His
presence now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how
kind he had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her,
unexpectedly, at a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for
such kindness and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she
hadn't lost him--quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
receive him there, to see him interested and charmed, as well, clearly,
as delighted to have found her without some other person to spoil
it--these things were so pleasant for the first minutes that they might
have represented on her part some happy foreknowledge. She gave an
account of her companions while he on his side failed to press her
about them, even though describing his appearance, so unheralded, as
the result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been shivering at
Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when taken by it; so that, knowing
where they all were, he had simply caught the first train. He explained
how he had known where they were; he had heard--what more
natural?--from their friends, Milly's and his. He mentioned this
betimes, but it was with his mention, singularly, that the girl became
conscious of her inner question about his reason. She noticed his
plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to Kate; but she presently
noticed also that it didn't affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had
written to him, Kate apparently--and this was interesting--had written
to him; but their design presumably hadn't been that he should come and
sit there as if rather relieved, so far as _they_ were concerned, at
postponements. He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!" when she sketched
their probable morning for him, under Eugenio's care and Mrs.
Stringham's--sounding it quite as if any suggestion that he should
overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs would leave him
temporarily cold. This precisely it was that, after a little, operated
for Milly as an obscure but still fairly direct check to confidence. He
had known where they all were from the others, but it was not for the
others that, in his actual dispositions, he had come. That, strange to
say, was a pity; for, stranger still to say, she could have shown him
more confidence if he himself had had less intention. His intention so
chilled her, from the moment she found herself divining it, that, just
for the pleasure of going on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of
their remembrance together of Matcham and the Bronzino, the climax of
her fortune, she could have fallen to pleading with him and to
reasoning, to undeceiving him in time. There had been, for ten minutes,
with the directness of her welcome to him and the way this clearly
pleased him, something of the grace of amends made, even though he
couldn't know it--amends for her not having been originally sure, for
instance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's added itself to the hour at
Matcham, added itself to other things, to consolidate, for her present
benevolence, the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the
charm of the place: "What a temple to taste and an expression of the
pride of life, yet, with all that, what a jolly _home!_"--so that, for
his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about though she
mentioned that she had just been, for her own purposes, in a general
prowl, taking everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced
her offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find
her susceptible.
IV
She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the
whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful
hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her
visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection
of the charm--or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state
in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in
its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke
with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled
afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance--!" The romance for her,
yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as
in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of
remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but
the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they
moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not
to go down--never, never to go down!" she strangely sighed to her
friend.
"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that tremendous old staircase
in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and
bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."
She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not
understanding. "Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that
the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move in fact,"
she added--"now. I've not been out, you know. I stay up. That's how you
happily found me."
Lord Mark wondered--he was, oh yes, adequately human. "You don't go
about?"
She looked over the place, the storey above the apartments in which she
had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting
the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the
arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the
canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But
there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to
anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her
adventure. It would be--to this it kept coming back--the adventure of
not stirring. "I go about just here."
"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked, "that you're really not well?"
They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded
palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a
minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on
the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the
window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her
forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She
would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible
for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even
on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that
from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless
really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him
thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the
relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of
relief--that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with
the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been
determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn't be
mistaken about her value--for what value did she now have? It throbbed
within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what
might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn't
her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage
of her disease? _She_ mightn't last, but her money would. For a man in
whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be
most of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective failure on
her part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive
attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her,
appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the
doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged,
disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits:
she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the
handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.
She had said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits
her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush
should certainly never grow to be one of them--an attitude she had
early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact
as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the
present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of
imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark's
cool English eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her
imagination, but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified
itself: there was a beautiful reason--indeed there were two--why her
companion's motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire
her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world; the other was
that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and
humanly, concerned for her. They were also two things, his wishing to
be well, to be very well, with her, and his beginning to feel her as
threatened, haunted, blighted; but they were melting together for him,
making him, by their combination, only the more sure that, as he
probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was presently what
remained with her--his really doing it; and with the natural and proper
incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have
had him--she could ask herself that--disconcerted or disgusted by it?
If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to
raise, not to press any question, he might render her a much better
service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was
strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe
sympathiser. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but she
wasn't afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She would
keep him, that is, her one easy relation--in the sense of easy for
himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded
them within and without did so much toward making appreciative
stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could consider she
hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last, instead of saying if she
were well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't get tired of
it. I never should--it suits me so. I adore the place," she went on,
"and I don't want in the least to give it up."
"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one's
_all_--! Should you positively like to live here?"
"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an instant, "to die
here."
Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted--when a
person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of
darkness. "Oh it's not good enough for _that!_ That requires picking.
But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you
in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and
you might do much worse--I mean for your friends--than show yourself
here a while, three or four months, every year. But it's not my notion
for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you."
"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly enquired, "to kill me?"
"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"
"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too much for me--too many.
England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my
form."
"Oho, oho!"--he laughed again as if to humour her. "Can't you then buy
it--for a price? Depend upon it they'll treat for money. That is for
money enough."
"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they won't. I think I
shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it." They were talking
sincerely. "It will be my life--paid for as that. It will become my
great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and
hunt me up."
"Ah then you _will_ be alive," said Lord Mark.
"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened;
rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut."
"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you mistrust us, can do better
for you than that."
"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over?"
He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of
some duration, without his glasses--which always altered the expression
of his eyes--he re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back to the
view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. "Do you remember
something I said to you that day at Matcham--or at least fully meant
to?"
"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It's another life."
"Certainly it will be--I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it
to represent for you. Matcham, you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I
think I tried to rub that into you a little."
She met him with the full memory of what he had tried--not an inch, not
an ounce of which was lost to her. "What I meant is that it seems a
hundred years ago."
"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember
it," he pursued, "is that I was quite aware of what might have been
said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I
should perhaps be able to look after you--well, rather better. Rather
better, of course, than certain other persons in particular."
"Precisely--than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham."
"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark promptly amended.
It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could
show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she
had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment
made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the
tears it had started at the time. "You could do so much for me, yes. I
perfectly understood you."
"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained, "to _fix_ your
confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place."
"Well, Lord Mark, you did--it's just exactly now, my confidence, where
you put it then. The only difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now
to have no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do seem to feel
you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little."
He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn't said
them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. "Are
you _really_ in any trouble?"
To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a
little a light for herself. "Don't say, don't try to say, anything
that's impossible. There are much better things you can do."
He looked straight at it and then straight over it. "It's too monstrous
that one can't ask you as a friend what one wants so to know."
"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a
slight hardness. "Do you want to know if I'm badly ill?"
The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested
the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark
winced and flushed--clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his attitude
together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. "Do you imagine I can
see you suffer and not say a word?"
"You won't see me suffer--don't be afraid. I shan't be a public
nuisance. That's why I should have liked _this:_ it's so beautiful in
itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
anything," she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: "And
you _don't!_ No, not even you." He faced her through it with the
remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly--for
_him_--bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been
unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. "I'm
very badly ill."
"And you don't do anything?"
"I do everything. Everything's _this_," she smiled. "I'm doing it now.
One can't do more than live."
"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why
haven't you advice?"
He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if there were fifty
things it didn't give her, so that he suggested with urgency the most
absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice in
the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in
talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live."
"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.
"Well, it's immense for _me_." She finally spoke as if for amusement;
now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself
as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There
she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. "I shan't," she
added, "have missed everything."
"Why should you have missed _anything?_" She felt, as he sounded this,
to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. "You're the person
in the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom one would call
it in fact most impossible; for whom 'missing' at all will surely
require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you
believe in advice, for God's sake take _mine_. I know what you want."
Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself--or
almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. "I think I want not to be too much
worried."
"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry
you less. I mean as I shall do it. It _is_ so"--he firmly kept it up.
"You're not loved enough."
"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
"Why to get the full good of it."
Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see what you mean. That full
good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in
return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I
might find myself forced to love _you?_"
"Oh 'forced'--!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the
least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion
somehow so ill consorted--he was so much all these things that he had
absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single
intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such
shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it,
and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of
existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. "Is
it inconceivable to you that you might try?"
"To be so favourably affected by you--?"
"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.
Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your trying?"
"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent,
however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real
expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
almost comically saw--a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into
which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a
healing and uplifting passion it _was_ in truth deficient; it wouldn't
do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away.
And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but
the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way
she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of
itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination
against him never yet made--made at least to any consciousness of his
own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first
encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
gathering dusk of _her_ personal world presented itself to him, in her
eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could
find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with
dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to
speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no
decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that
practically he was afraid--whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or
only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised
alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides,
wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest
about anything beyond his natural convenience--more, in fine, than his
disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal _moyens_,
in short, permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't
like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he
brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus
having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called
her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively
to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting--had his
innermost feeling spoken--at the propriety rather, in his interest, of
some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would
meet that halfway, but the real must also meet _him_. Milly's sense of
it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported,
couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that
fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It
had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to
her. By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had
quite ceased to be so.
By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had
walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of
the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her
independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for
one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back
in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter
of an hour the perch she held out to him--grasped it with one hand,
that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he
was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as
not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It
was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his
native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
assumption that nothing--nothing to make a deadly difference for
him--ever _could_ happen. It was, socially, a working view like
another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the
rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the limit of
his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said,
reappeared for her--breaking out moreover, with an effect of
strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of
health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in
the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a
charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. "It's true, you know, all
the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up."
He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how little he cared.
"Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference
doesn't notice. And that's why I know that _I_ notice."
"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled. "I thought rather
that affection was supposed to be blind."
"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark promptly returned.
"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely domestic
complications, which I'm ashamed to have given you a glimpse of--are
they beauties?"
"Yes, for those who care for you--as every one does. Everything about
you is a beauty. Besides which I don't believe," he declared, "in the
seriousness of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should have _any_
trouble about which something can't be done. If you can't get the right
thing, who can, in all the world, I should like to know? You're the
first young woman of your time. I mean what I say." He looked, to do
him justice, quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear--simply so
competent, in such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. "We're all
in love with you. I'll put it that way, dropping any claim of my own,
if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
simply to torment us--you were born to make us happy. Therefore you
must listen to us."
She shook her head with her slowness, but this time with all her
mildness. "No, I mustn't listen to you--that's just what I mustn't do.
The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
to you as you will, since you give that lovely account of yourselves. I
give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be--"
And she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give--there you are;
stick to me as close as you like and see if I don't. Only I can't
listen or receive or accept--I can't _agree_. I can't make a bargain. I
can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to
say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
He let her question fall--though clearly, it might have seemed,
because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that _was_ spoiled.
"You want somebody of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or
in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as
if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the
point of saying something emphatic and vulgar--"Well, I don't at all
events want _you!_" What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it
being greater than the irritation--the sadness, to her vivid sense, of
his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
nothing to nourish him--was that his error amounted to positive
wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her
first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the
allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
you're doing very right?--and as a thing quite apart, I mean, from my
listening to you. That's not right either--except that I'm _not_
listening. You oughtn't to have come to Venice to see _me_--and in fact
you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much
older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you've come
at all, you can only have come--properly, and if I may say so
honourably--for the best friend, as I believe her to be, that you have
in the world."
When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough, as if he had been
more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they
had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each
apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine
coercion, in the event, that was the stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark
asked.
It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs.
Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its
attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call _her_ on the whole
the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do you want me to marry
Mrs. Lowder?"
At which it seemed to her that it was he who was almost vulgar! But she
wouldn't in any way have that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world. There's no cold
world for you at all, I think," she went on; "nothing but a very warm
and watchful and expectant world that's waiting for you at any moment
you choose to take it up."
He never budged, but they were standing on the polished concrete and he
had within a few minutes possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you
want me to marry Kate Croy?"
"Mrs. Lowder wants it--I do no wrong, I think, in saying that; and she
understands moreover that you know she does."
Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it; and it wasn't obscure
to her, on her side, that it was a comfort to deal with a gentleman.
"It's ever so kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But what's
the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point out. "Because she's
the handsomest and cleverest and most charming creature I ever saw, and
because if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact I do as it
is." It was a luxury of response.
"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her. But that can't further
the case of _all._"
"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If the case of one's bad,
the case of another's good. I don't see what you have to fear from any
one else," she said, "save through your being foolish, this way, about
_me_."
So she said, but she was aware the next moment of what he was making of
what she didn't see. "Is it your idea--since we're talking of these
things in these ways--that the young lady you describe in such
superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person. But don't be humble." She
was almost gay.
It was this apparently, at last, that was too much for him. "But don't
you really _know?_"
As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence she could
pretend to, it made her of course wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that
a particular person's very much in love with her."
"Then you must know by the same token that she's very much in love with
a particular person."
"Ah I beg your pardon!"--and Milly quite flushed at having so crude a
blunder imputed to her. "You're wholly mistaken."
"It's not true?"
"It's not true."
His stare became a smile. "Are you very, very sure?"
"As sure as one can be"--and Milly's manner could match it--"when one
has every assurance. I speak on the best authority."
He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"
"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."
"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he laughed, "that everything
about her's so good."
"Good for you"--she was perfectly clear. "For you," she went on, "let
her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and
you must know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can take it
from her. _I_ take it--" But Milly, with the positive tremor of her
emphasis, pulled up.
"You take it from Kate?"
"From Kate herself."
"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has
given me her word for it."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her
word?"
It made Milly, on her side, stare--though perhaps partly but with the
instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a
little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should
_you_ call her word?"
"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."
Well, it threw her on her defence--a defence that she felt, however,
especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so
that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
things."
Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you
of her own movement the declaration you quote?"
Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her
sense of the way their eyes now met--met as for their each seeing in
the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself
saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage
Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.
"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private
interest--"
"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.
Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise her; but she met it
again for Kate. "She left me in no doubt whatever of her being free."
At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. "And
thereby in no doubt of _your_ being too?" It was as if as soon as he
had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him she had instantly
signified that. He at any rate gave her glare no time to act further;
he fell back on the spot, and with a light enough movement, within his
rights. "That's all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should
she be swearing to you?"
She had to take this "dear lady" as applying to herself; which
disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully have used it for the
aspersed Kate. Once more it came to her that she must claim her own
part of the aspersion. "Because, as I've told you, we're such
tremendous friends."
"Oh," said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as if that might have
stood rather for an absence of such rigours. He was going, however, as
if he had in a manner, at the last, got more or less what he wanted.
Milly felt, while he addressed his next few words to leave-taking, that
she had given rather more than she intended or than she should be able,
when once more getting herself into hand, theoretically to defend.
Strange enough in fact that he had had from her, about herself--and,
under the searching spell of the place, infinitely straight--what no
one else had had: neither Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher, nor
Susan Shepherd. He had made her within a minute, in particular, she was
aware, lose her presence of mind, and she now wished he would take
himself off, so that she might either recover it or bear the loss
better in solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time
saw, it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the
sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were appointed
for the party with the attendance of the others, always, as the most
decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the palace on the
theory that she might whimsically want him--which she never, in her
caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping in white shoes
over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually charmed vision she
could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too noiseless almost for
her nerves, or simply a barefooted seaman on the deck of a
ship--Pasquale offered to sight a small salver, which he obsequiously
held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card. Lord Mark--and as
if also for admiration of him--delayed his departure to let her receive
it; on which she read it with the instant effect of another blow to her
presence of mind. This precarious quantity was indeed now so gone that
even for dealing with Pasquale she had to do her best to conceal its
disappearance. The effort was made, none the less, by the time she had
asked if the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had
come up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of
the staircase.
"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added for her companion,
while Pasquale went off: "Mr. Merton Densher."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark--in a manner that, making it resound through the
great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a
judgement of his identity heard and noted once before
BOOK EIGHTH
I
Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel--and all the
more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same
discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the
polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American,
mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was
touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet
it was pure Attic beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It
made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had
been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
pleasant irritation of paddling away--away from the concert of false
notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families
and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a
lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with
tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he
should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The
shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the
end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small
independent _quartiere_, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once
occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also
with a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The
humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further
befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto
in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of
his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of
his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions to which he
responded with force. He had been almost without cessation, since his
arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad
weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at
home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a
museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled
something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name
for. He might have been looking for the name while he gave himself up,
subsequently, to the ramble--he saw that even after years he couldn't
lose his way--crowned with his stare across the water at the little
white papers.
He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched
there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had then been out with
the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until
Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of
two circumstances connected with this disposition of his person he was
even now not unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate
had addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have been
taken--yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate--for inscrutable
parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget was
that he had, before the two others, as it struck him--that was to say
especially before Kate--done exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself
up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with
him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of
whether the awkwardness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business
of his leaving it--they could but make, in submission, for a
landing-place that was none of the best--had furnished his friends with
such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange
intelligent smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later
alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The
strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily
easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because
when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that
made it so. At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting
with his sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very
much more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
her--that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an
angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet
complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel, the
star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little
American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom
certainly--though without making too much of it for either of them--he
was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming
in on purpose, but there was nothing in that--from the moment she was
always at home--that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the
least bit high that had even yet sounded between them was this
admission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She
wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her
palace--with all its romance and art and history--had set up round her
a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't
therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all
the centuries: in respect to which Densher granted good-humouredly that
they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked,
through space.
Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he
suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for
his pains; and though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so far
see it as an impression he might make that he wondered if the same
image wouldn't have occurred to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again
the difference came up--the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of
his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what
Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing--and that had
been his notion of his life--anything he himself had conceived. The
difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under
which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best
of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto,
even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied,
across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had done for the
past, would it do for the present? would it play in any manner into the
general necessity of which he was conscious? That necessity of making
the best was the instinct--as he indeed himself knew--of a man somehow
aware that if he let go at one place he should let go everywhere. If he
took off his hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute
and admit the light. It was really a matter of nerves; it was exactly
because he was nervous that he _could_ go straight; yet if that
condition should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in
short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the
proprieties--once he could face at all remaining there--reduced
themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him,
and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one
foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her
management of him. It wasn't that she had put him in danger--to be in
real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for
him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn't having; an exasperation, a
resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state. It
was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless
that he was perpetually bent to her will? His idea from the first, from
the very first of his knowing her, had been to be, as the French called
it, _bon prince_ with her, mindful of the good humour and generosity,
the contempt, in the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally afraid. There
were things enough, goodness knew--for it was the moral of his
plight--that he couldn't afford; but what had had a charm for him if
not the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in another way?
of not at all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap
edition. All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed
actually as present as ever--how he had admired and envied what he
called to himself her pure talent for life, as distinguished from his
own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only
it irritated him the more that this was exactly what was now, ever so
characteristically, standing out in her.
It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily, that he was just
where he was and that he was above all just _how_ he was. The proof of
a decent reaction in him against so much passivity was, with no great
richness, that he at least knew--knew, that is, how he was, and how
little he liked it as a thing accepted in mere helplessness. He was,
for the moment, wistful--that above all described it; that was so large
a part of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him,
on his traghetto, positively throbbing with his question. His question
connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered
soreness, his sense almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame
were less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions about him,
regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the
conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved,
had been willing, without a pang, to see him ridiculously--ridiculously
so far as just complacently--exposed to. How little it _could_ be
complacently he was to feel with the last thoroughness before he had
moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it,
was the interesting question of whether he had really no will left. How
could he know--that was the point--without putting the matter to the
test? It had been right to be _bon prince,_ and the joy, something of
the pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now
compatible with the impulse to look into their account; but he held his
breath a little as it came home to him with supreme sharpness that,
whereas he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had
done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine that his idea of
the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring itself,
in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern
night--"conditions" these, such as we just spoke of--to the glimmer,
more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers
on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch he had
been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and
reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he had found his answer
to the idea that had grown so importunate. Since a proof of his will
was wanted it was indeed very exactly in wait for him--it lurked there
on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little pier had from
time to time accosted him; but it was a part of the play of his
nervousness to turn his back on that facility. He would go over, but he
walked, very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the Rialto.
The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there
with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the
ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in
their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly
veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come
in on the morrow.
He was amusing about it that evening at dinner--in spite of an odd
first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it
merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, this propriety,
he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving,
in the course of talk, that the incident would minister to innocent
gaiety. Such was quite its effect, with the aid of his picture--an
evocation of the quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own
high chambers, though they were a thousand grand things, weren't really
this; made it in fact with such success that she presently declared it
his plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
as yet--he could feel it as felt among them all--no such clear wish to
go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or an
autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or Gianbellini.
It was constantly Densher's view that, as between himself and Kate,
things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her,
as she but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it, the whole
soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This
view was so far justified to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her
company was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing
to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and
foretold that she was--and this was what most struck him--sufficiently
gratified and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality of his
response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant
instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost
shamelessly, in a mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her
failure of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
planning for--that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part of
her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable of guessing
and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up a turn or
two further, none the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision
by which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever apprehension of
his motive in shifting his abode might have brushed her with its wings,
she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their
friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him;
there had been in the prospect from the first a definite particular
point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name,
would have to begin. Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not
recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference
in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been--just what he
was trying not to be--fully hardened and fully base. So rapid in fact
was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of
impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively scaring him. It
gave him a measure of the intensity, the reality of his now mature
motive. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but
it made them as vivid as if they already flushed with success. It was
before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The
dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only that was
in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly should, in this projection
of necessities, strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a
hateful idea, and above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
game--the adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with
one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there,
already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's
beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were
things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air;
but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them
would do nobody any good. The discrimination and the scruple were for
_him_. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however--when hadn't it
to be his last word?--Kate was always sublime.
That came up in all connexions during the rest of these first days;
came up in especial under pressure of the fact that each time our
plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an
hour together, they were doomed--though Densher felt it as all by _his_
act--to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and
in study of its queer character. This was the case after he might be
supposed to have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
the girl--ready always, as we say, with the last word--had given him
the benefit of her righting of every wrong appearance, a support
familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case
after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what
idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was--and
that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed--he had only to see
how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's
reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention
hadn't been occult, even for _his_ vividness, from the moment she had
written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see
his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage he would
find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maud really to do such things in such
ways; just as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such others
as he must now strike them all--didn't he?--as committed to. Mrs.
Lowder's admonition had been of course a direct reference to what she
had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly
had failed them through illness; only it had at least matched that
remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it
attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation--which
were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself--suffered a
little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything
off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, in
solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder had
simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what could be done
with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he had come. If she
had taken for granted his good nature she was as justified as Kate
declared. This awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his
general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits,
to be a mode of life like another--certainly better than some, and
particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he
had really come for--this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the
style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high
wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when
there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him
wrong.
In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile, for one thing,
the interest of seeing--and quite for the first time in his
life--whether, on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to
happiness as was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment never
doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure--he who had never
thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was
able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his
hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was
finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty
_campi_, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the
enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall
deserted--during these interludes he entertained cold views, even to
the point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are
the best, of thinking of immediate departure as not only possible but
as indicated. He had however only to cross again the threshold of
Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business compose, as
painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that
departure wouldn't curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and
that above all, as he hadn't really "begun" anything, had only
submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the
beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with
superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications
was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman--to which
was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that
complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of
the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten
to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three
women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could
never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet
had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be
a brute--in return for amiabilities. He hadn't come all the way out
from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a
brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her
suggestion he had understood her--he hadn't done that either to be a
brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anti-climax
was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender--_as_ a
gentleman, oh that indubitably!--to the unexpected impression made by
poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
conditions, than any ever known to him.
This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity--he
scarce knew by what strange name to call it--for which he said to
himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her
frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as
he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of
her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the
observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for
effect and harmony, as much as it gave--her whole attitude had, to his
imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere
ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively
well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it
off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't,
that--well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in
advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking
even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what
in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that
really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they
were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly
effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with
his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He
breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had
passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing
himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's high style and
state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had
produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know
her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day
at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence
had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them,
from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if
it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion
with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had
more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment,
at some point in the drive, that he was not _there_, not just as he was
in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
Milly's own, and through himself and _his_ own, unmistakeably--as well
as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time
in New York.
II
There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when
he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an
answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs.
Lowder's view of her profit--a view so hard to reconcile with the
chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied
the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him
rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so
grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this
note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him
visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out
of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she
expressively echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
very much out of our meetings?"
"On the contrary--they're starvation diet. All I mean is--and it's all
I've meant from the day I came--that we at least get more than Aunt
Maud."
"Ah but you see," Kate replied, "you don't understand what Aunt Maud
gets."
"Exactly so--and it's what I don't understand that keeps me so
fascinated with the question. _She_ gives me no light; she's
prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural--!"
"She takes it as 'of a natural' that at this rate I shall be making my
reflexions about you. There's every appearance for her," Kate went on,
"that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that
what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The
very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for
yourself, is that when she adopts a view she--well, to her own sense,
really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any
other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I've
often thought success comes to her"--Kate continued to study the
phenomenon--"by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to
prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of
everything, become the right one."
Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response.
"Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn't not
'understand.' I'm condemned to that," he on his side presently
explained, "only when understanding fails." He took a moment; then he
pursued: "Does she think she terrorises _us?_" To which he added while,
without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: "Does she
believe anything so stiff as that you've really changed about me?" He
knew now that he was probing the girl deep--something told him so; but
that was a reason the more. "Has she got it into her head that you
dislike me?"
To this, of a sudden, Kate's answer was strong. "You could yourself
easily put it there!"
He wondered. "By telling her so?"
"No," said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity; "I don't ask that
of you."
"Oh my dear," Densher laughed, "when you ask, you know, so little--!"
There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist
the impulse to take up. "I'm perfectly justified in what I've asked,"
she quietly returned. "It's doing beautifully for you." Their eyes
again intimately met, and the effect was to make her proceed. "You're
not a bit unhappy."
"Oh ain't I?" he brought out very roundly.
"It doesn't practically show--which is enough for Aunt Maud. You're
wonderful, you're beautiful," Kate said; "and if you really want to
know whether I believe you're doing it you may take from me perfectly
that I see it coming." With which, by a quick transition, as if she had
settled the case, she asked him the hour.
"Oh only twelve-ten"--he had looked at his watch. "We've taken but
thirteen minutes; we've time yet."
"Then we must walk. We must go toward them."
Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of
the Square. "They're still in their shop. They're safe for half an
hour."
"That shows then, that shows!" said Kate.
This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco,
always, as a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber
of amenity, favourable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the
middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse
after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and
pinnacled, but a little way behind them, and they had in front the vast
empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement
and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice
of the visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the
parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual
feasts, their prospect was clear and they could see their companions
hadn't yet been, and weren't for a while longer likely to be, disgorged
by the lace-shop, in one of the _loggie_, where, shortly before, they
had left them for a look-in--the expression was artfully Densher's--at
Saint Mark's. Their morning had happened to take such a turn as brought
this chance to the surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn't
been an overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that
could be said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially
in presence--in presence of every one; every one consisting at this
juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly.
But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could become
special was furnished precisely by this view of the compatibility of
their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had
assented to their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the least
the others could do. What had really helped them this morning was the
fact that, on his turning up, as he always called it, at the palace,
Milly had not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom and use
had hitherto seemed fairly established; on his coming round, day after
day--eight days had been now so conveniently marked--their friends,
Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her
till luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he
had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there
was that amount of justification for Kate's vision of success. He
_had_, for Mrs. Lowder--he couldn't help it while sitting there--the
air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess
each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only to-day that
she hadn't been well enough to see him.
That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in the way in which,
gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all
bright and cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
they--the rest of them--simply looked at each other. It was
lurid--lurid, in all probability, for each of them privately--that they
had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above
all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to _that_ degree, the hush of
gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the
most the case--that of the guests--could permit itself. The hush, for
that matter, continued after the party of four had gone down to the
gondola and taken their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she
hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had
produced a second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one
quite as well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for
the alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as
pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out, Mrs.
Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any
of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in
exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure,
approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at
home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory which was the
slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she had invented a
preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had remembered the fond
dreams of the visitation of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had,
the day before, spoken of the part played by fatality in her own
failure of real acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark's. Densher's
sense of Susan Shepherd's conscious intervention had by this time a
corner of his mind all to itself; something that had begun for them at
Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action,
ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him as for the
most part subtly, even when not superficially, in his own interest.
They were not, as a pair, as a "team," really united; there were too
many persons, at least three, and too many things, between them; but
meanwhile something was preparing that would draw them closer. He
scarce knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some hour when
it would be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood
him. He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the
understanding of every one else would fail and this deep little
person's alone survive.
Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as we may say, that
hung about our young friends; these had been the small accidents and
quiet forces to which they owed the advantage we have seen them in some
sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to deepen for them as they
stayed their course again; the splendid Square, which had so
notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than
any equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness from
earshot, with solitude and security. It was as if, being in possession,
they could say what they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence
of that, each had an apprehension of what the other wanted to say. It
was most of all for them, moreover, as if this very quantity, seated on
their lips in the bright historic air, where the only sign for their
ears was the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart of each a fear.
There might have been a betrayal of that in the way Densher broke the
silence resting on her last words. "What did you mean just now that I
can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For myself, stupidly, if you will,
I don't see, from the moment I can't lie to her, what else there is but
lying."
Well, she could tell him. "You can say something both handsome and
sincere to her about Milly--whom you honestly like so much. That
wouldn't be lying; and, coming from you, it would have an effect. You
don't, you know, say much about her."
And Kate put before him the fruit of observation. "You don't, you know,
speak of her at all."
"And has Aunt Maud," Densher asked, "told you so?" Then as the girl,
for answer, only seemed to bethink herself, "You must have
extraordinary conversations!" he exclaimed.
Yes, she had bethought herself. "We have extraordinary conversations."
His look, while their eyes met, marked him as disposed to hear more
about them; but there was something in her own, apparently, that
defeated the opportunity. He questioned her in a moment on a different
matter, which had been in his mind a week, yet in respect to which he
had had no chance so good as this. "Do you happen to know then, as such
wonderful things pass between you, what she makes of the incident, the
other day, of Lord Mark's so very superficial visit?--his having spent
here, as I gather, but the two or three hours necessary for seeing our
friend and yet taken no time at all, since he went off by the same
night's train, for seeing any one else. What can she make of his not
having waited to see _you_, or to see herself--with all he owes her?"
"Oh of course," said Kate, "she understands. He came to make Milly his
offer of marriage--he came for nothing but that. As Milly wholly
declined it his business was for the time at an end. He couldn't quite
on the spot turn round to make up to _us_."
Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of taste on such an
adventurer's part, Densher shouldn't see it. But Densher was lost in
another thought. "Do you mean that when, turning up myself, I found him
leaving her, that was what had been taking place between them?"
"Didn't you make it out, my dear?" Kate enquired.
"What sort of a blundering weathercock then _is_ he?" the young man
went on in his wonder.
"Oh don't make too little of him!" Kate smiled. "Do you pretend that
Milly didn't tell you?"
"How great an ass he had made of himself?"
Kate continued to smile. "You _are_ in love with her, you know."
He gave her another long look. "Why, since she has refused him, should
my opinion of Lord Mark show it? I'm not obliged, however, to think
well of him for such treatment of the other persons I've mentioned, and
I feel I don't understand from you why Mrs. Lowder should."
"She doesn't--but she doesn't care," Kate explained. "You know
perfectly the terms on which lots of London people live together even
when they're supposed to live very well. He's not committed to us--he
was having his try. Mayn't an unsatisfied man," she asked, "always have
his try?"
"And come back afterwards, with confidence in a welcome, to the victim
of his inconstancy?"
Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of as a victim. "Oh but
he has _had_ his try at _me_. So it's all right."
"Through your also having, you mean, refused him?"
She balanced an instant during which Densher might have just wondered
if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight strain. But she dropped
on the right side. "I haven't let it come to that. I've been too
discouraging. Aunt Maud," she went on--now as lucid as
ever--"considers, no doubt, that she has a pledge from him in respect
to me; a pledge that would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
As the case stands that makes no difference."
Densher laughed out. "It isn't _his_ merit that he has failed."
"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark. He's just what he
was, and what he knew he was. It's not for me either to reflect on him
after I've so treated him."
"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated him beautifully."
"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be jealous." But before he
could take it up she had more to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle
you that Milly's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything
else can displease her. What does she see but that Milly herself
recognises her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a
recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree
your own recognition. Out of which she therefore gets it that the more
you have for Milly the less you have for me."
There were moments again--we know that from the first they had been
numerous--when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her
mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at
once to conviction and to reaction. And this effect, however it be
named, now broke into his tone. "Oh if she began to know what I have
for you--!"
It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it. "Luckily for us we may
really consider she doesn't. So successful have we been."
"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what you give me, and I
suppose that, to be consistent--to stand on my feet where I do stand at
all--I ought to thank you. Only, you know, what you give me seems to
me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job. It
seems to me more than anything else what you expect of me. It never
seems to me somehow what I may expect of _you_. There's so much you
_don't_ give me."
She appeared to wonder. "And pray what is it I don't--?"
"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me none."
"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment ventured to ask.
"Your doing something for me."
She considered with surprise. "Am I not doing _this_ for you? Do you
call this nothing?"
"Nothing at all."
"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short. "I
thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you
risk nothing!"
It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he
had seen her at a loss. He judged the next instant moreover that she
didn't like it--either the being so or the being seen, for she soon
spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that
produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of
indulgence. "What then do you wish me to risk?"
The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make him, as he would
have said, worse. "What I wish is to be loved. How can I feel at this
rate that I _am_?" Oh she understood him, for all she might so bravely
disguise it, and that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't.
Deep, always, was his sense of life with her--deep as it had been from
the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky London of two
winters ago they had originally exchanged. He had never taken her for
unguarded, ignorant, weak; and if he put to her a claim for some
intenser faith between them this was because he believed it could reach
her and she could meet it. "I can go on perhaps," he said, "with help.
But I can't go on without."
She looked away from him now, and it showed him how she understood. "We
ought to be there--I mean when they come out."
"They _won't_ come out--not yet. And I don't care if they do." To which
he straightway added, as if to deal with the charge of selfishness that
his words, sounding for himself, struck him as enabling her to make:
"Why not have done with it all and face the music as we are?" It broke
from him in perfect sincerity. "Good God, if you'd only _take_ me!"
It brought her eyes round to him again, and he could see how, after
all, somewhere deep within, she felt his rebellion more sweet than
bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her sense was visibly to hold her
an instant. "We've gone too far," she none the less pulled herself
together to reply. "Do you want to kill her?"
He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill, you mean, Aunt
Maud?"
"You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies."
Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have told none!"
He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had
naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. "Thank
you very much."
Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already
risen to his lips. "Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance
of it I'll go this very night."
"Then go," said Kate Croy.
He knew after a little, while they walked on again together, that what
was in the air for him, and disconcertingly, was not the violence, but
much rather the cold quietness, of the way this had come from her. They
walked on together, and it was for a minute as if their difference had
become of a sudden, in all truth, a split--as if the basis of his
departure had been settled. Then, incoherently and still more suddenly,
recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the
arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that
produced for them another pause. "I'll tell any lie you want, any your
idea requires, if you'll only come to me."
"Come to you?"
"Come to me."
"How? Where?"
She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in
her being so equal to him. "To my rooms, which are perfectly possible,
and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt,
in view. We can arrange it--with two grains of courage. People in our
case always arrange it." She listened as for the good information, and
there was support for him--since it was a question of his going step by
step--in the way she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had
in truth not expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence
of it only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of
possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely to
_see_ her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the
light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere
listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn't yet
done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ,
beautiful. "There's nothing for me possible but to feel that I'm not a
fool. It's all I have to say, but you must know what it means. _With_
you I can do it--I'll go as far as you demand or as you will yourself.
Without you--I'll be hanged! And I must be sure."
She listened so well that she was really listening after he had ceased
to speak. He had kept his grasp of her, drawing her close, and though
they had again, for the time, stopped walking, his talk--for others at
a distance--might have been, in the matchless place, that of any
impressed tourist to any slightly more detached companion. On
possessing himself of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced
afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of which his eyes moved
while she twiddled her parasol. She now, however, made a motion that
confronted them finally with the opposite end. Then only she
spoke--"Please take your hand out of my arm." He understood at once:
she had made out in the shade of the gallery the issue of the others
from their place of purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it
was all right. The others had seen them as well and waited for them,
complacent enough, under one of the arches. They themselves too--he
argued that Kate would argue--looked perfectly ready, decently patient,
properly accommodating. They themselves suggested nothing worse--always
by Kate's system--than a pair of the children of a supercivilised age
making the best of an awkwardness. They didn't nevertheless hurry--that
would overdo it; so he had time to feel, as it were, what he felt. He
felt, ever so distinctly--it was with this he faced Mrs. Lowder--that
he was already in a sense possessed of what he wanted. There was more
to come--everything; he had by no means, with his companion, had it all
out. Yet what he was possessed of was real--the fact that she hadn't
thrown over his lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of
this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled was in itself
of the nature of bliss. The danger had dropped--it was behind him there
in the great sunny space. So far she was good for what he wanted.
III
She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put to her that evening,
and with further ground for it, the next sharpest question that had
been on his lips in the morning--which his other preoccupation had
then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity was again
made, as befell, by his learning from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as
usual, with the close of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them
again at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come down
later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where
even more candles than their friend's large common allowance--she grew
daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about
it--lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes
with the good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared--minutes
illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly's
candles.
"_May_ she come down--ought she if she isn't really up to it?"
He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by
glimpses--rare as were these--of the inner truth about the girl. There
was of course a question of health--it was in the air, it was in the
ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was
everywhere. But it was everywhere with the effect of a request to
him--to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others as well
as his own--that no allusion to it should be made. There had
practically been none, that morning, on her explained
non-appearance--the absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and
awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all
the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful
function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose
against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct
was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for
himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might
have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency, to
have it; but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings--it being so
established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a
feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate--not, by the
deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not
interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he
cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to
represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at
the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling
his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse--it was as if she had
wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she
fairly invited him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're here." It was
no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve. And the
rest was fully to come.
He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence
of communion with her, talking her own language. "It's a very wonderful
experience."
"Well"--and her raised face shone up at him--"that's all I want you to
feel about it. If I weren't afraid," she added, "there are things I
should like to say to you."
"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly asked.
"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know,
seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, _with_ her."
He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which
was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description
of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm not with her now."
"No--and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much
better."
"Better? Then she _has_ been worse?"
Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous--that's what she has
been. She _is_ marvellous. But she's really better."
"Oh then if she's really better--!" But he checked himself, wanting
only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the
point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. "She's keeping herself.
You'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a
little party."
"Ah I do see--by this aggravated grandeur."
"Well, it _is_ lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged
for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it--I
mean bringing out all the glory of the place--makes her really happy.
It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable
dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for
effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in
charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my
thumb for the evening." These explanations and sundry others Mrs.
Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that
the picture closed him in. What part was there for _him_, with his
attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which
everything else would have it? "They won't, however, be at dinner, the
few people she expects--they come round afterwards from their
respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It's for
_him_ she has wanted to do something--to let it begin at once. We shall
see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad--she'll be glad
too--that _you're_ to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it,
was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope--!" But
her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.
He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought,
into still more knowledge than she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
"Well, that you'll stay on."
"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that
he could scarce tell where it ended or began.
"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music--beautiful instruments and
songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has
arranged it--or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you're
in the picture."
"Oh--I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.
"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up
his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is
that you'll be faithful to us--that you've not come for a mere foolish
few days."
Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without
comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he
had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way
smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese
pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an
unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of
explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was
partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that
would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not
of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but
infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which
these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle
on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the
thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold
breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when I say I've very
tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The
pinch, the pressure in London."
But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the
pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. "Oh the
daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious
deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've
given up all to follow _her_. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't
you," she asked, "write about Venice?"
He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did;
and he smiled for her kindly. "Do _you_ write about Venice?"
"No; but I would--oh wouldn't I?--if I hadn't so completely given up.
She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess--"
"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
"Precisely. There you are!"
It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places
at once. "I quite understand that she's yours. Only you see she's not
mine." He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the
moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder,
who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he
liked in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave
him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in
itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent
and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could
see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all
was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate
wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then
Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly
what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the
midst. Such perceptions made occasions--well, occasions for fairly
wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to _be_
the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in
it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no
male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a
man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke
Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of
Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a
distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a
vision of great London surgeons--if this one was a surgeon--as incisive
all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was
not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in. It was a
train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
Mark had caught him twice in the fact--the fact of his absurd posture;
and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind
Lord Mark.
His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm
her discretion, on the matter of Milly's not being his princess. "Of
course she's not. You must do something first."
Densher gave it his thought. "Wouldn't it be rather _she_ who must?"
It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. "I
see. No doubt, if one takes it so." Her cheer was for the time in
eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the
wonder of what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be kind."
It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course she has. No one could
be more charming. She has treated me as if _I_ were somebody. Call her
my hostess as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you
altogether. Of course," he added in the right spirit for her, "I do see
that it's quite court life."
She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. "That's
all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of
the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you
know," he observed, "isn't supposed to pay."
"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That's just the beauty
here; it's why she's the great and only princess. With her, at her
court," said Mrs. Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. "I think you
were right just now. One must do something first."
"Well, you've done something."
"No--I don't see that. I can do more."
Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! "You can do
everything, you know."
"Everything" was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he
modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a
different but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett
if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs. Stringham explained.
"He has wanted to come."
"Isn't that rather worse then--if it means he mayn't be easy?"
"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that
these several weeks." After which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can _make_
him easy."
"_I_ can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats.
"What have I to do with it for a man like that?"
"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's like? He's not like any
one you've ever seen. He's a great beneficent being."
"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an outsider, to meddle."
"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged, "what you think."
"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared. It was, as they said, a
large order. But he found the right note. "It's none of his business."
It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed
him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that
showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be
he was not to make out till afterwards. "Say _that_ to him then.
Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you."
"And why should he get at me?"
"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you'll see."
All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of
immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm--a
sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed
to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner,
half a dozen friends--objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the
ladies of Lancaster Gate--having by that time arrived; and with this
call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by
Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme
opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last
of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general,
a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he
seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made
no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all
together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of
the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took
care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland
without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during
the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and
differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly,
let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow
into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that
if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last
almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't
yet had occasion--circulating with a clearness intensified--to strike
him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with
the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky
challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her
having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming
reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the
change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all
was said, made it for _him_; and he was not to fail of the further
amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's
visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke
Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene
perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of
the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
himself too much "in" it, as he might have said: a moment's reflexion
put him more in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for other
cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of
a joke, introduced him to English ladies--that was itself a proof; for
nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed
between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all
ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed
consciousness brushed by him.
She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he could see, under
some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an
inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character
that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly
appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to
display. She was the American girl as he had originally found
her--found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than
at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then,
he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kate's
company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in
her--such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the
world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it
in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did
most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it
was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a
word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second
introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady
toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to
affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To
what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had
done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had
done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his
interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort,
from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near
him--and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner--there was no
getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she
could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield
or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express
herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of
that advantage for the hour--a brief fallacious makeweight to his
pressure--that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel
her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in
such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that
her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Milly's own, gave
him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted
him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest. He had lived
long enough to have been on occasion "liked," but it had never begun to
be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter. It was
a liking greater than Milly's--or it would be: he felt it in him to
answer for that. So at all events he read the case while he noted that
Kate was somehow--for Kate--wanting in lustre. As a striking young
presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly
diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been
dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially
indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he
perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her
wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes--he had never forgotten
it--the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She
was, in her accepted effacement--it was actually her acceptance that
made the beauty and repaired the damage--under her aunt's eyes now; but
whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the
less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an
exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
"Don't you think her good enough _now?_" Almost heedless of the danger
of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little
orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference
enlivened by native humours--things quite in the line of old Venetian
comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy--a real solvent of
shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a
general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good
manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but
of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at
all events to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!"
"But she's _too_ nice," Kate returned with appreciation. "Everything
suits her so--especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll
trouble you really to look at them." Densher, though aware he had seen
them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not
done justice to the embodied poetry--his mind, for Milly's aspects,
kept coming back to that--which owed them part of its style. Kate's
face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain,
wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
wearer's breast--so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious,
of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced
presumably to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one
somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to
the ground."
"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited
her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his
companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the
figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment
that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a
power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as
one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as
well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that
such wings could in a given case--_had_, truly, in the case with which
he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for
that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and
Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular,
nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was
a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate
presently going on.
"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."
"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.
"Oh yes, I see myself!"
As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her--she would have been splendid;
and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal
ornament had--under pressure now not wholly occult--taken on the
character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision
was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that,
well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what
Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't _that_ the great
difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously
represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was
nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl
married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least
little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till
afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose,
only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's certainly
good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's
better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to
me about it. She evidently believes her better."
"Well, if they choose to call it so--!"
"And what do _you_ call it--as against them?"
"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!"
Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to
be taught.
"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"
It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's worse. But that has
nothing to do with it."
"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're
doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again
watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a
kindness that had the strange property of striking him as
inconsequent--so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness
been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
"It's beautiful indeed."
He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it
no heed. "She's doing it for _him_"--and she nodded in the direction of
Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best. But she
can't deceive him."
Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: "And do
you think _you_ can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your
sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him--!"
Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly
doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a
direction of his own eyes--determined, in the way such things happen,
precisely by the attention of the others--as Densher became aware of
and as Kate promptly marked. "He's looking at _you_. He wants to speak
to you."
"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."
"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need," Kate went on in answer
to the previous question, "to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's
necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can
see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to
do with me."
"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
"For not caring for _you?_ Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven
by it into your relation with Milly--as all _that_ I leave you to him."
"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think I can thank you for
leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself."
She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her
place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder's to whom she had spoken of
introducing him. "All the more reason why I should commit you then to
Lady Wells."
"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished Lady Wells from
afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at
the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of
whether this was the kind of person he should be involved with when
they were married. It was furthermore that the consciousness of
something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically
much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments--to
say nothing of the consciousness that, with their general smallness of
opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maud,
over there with Sir Luke, noted him as a little "attentive," that might
pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to
confess to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind. Besides, just
now, he didn't care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was
immediately to show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with any
finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying? If you're
right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs.
Lowder's being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly pursued,
"can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the great surgeon won't
deceive other people--not those, that is, who are closely concerned. He
won't at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's greatest
friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maud,
who's her own."
Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth
his having kept her for. "Why will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing
your way so little."
Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now for him its quick,
its slightly quaking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to
a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and
his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of
turning the page. "Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way _you_
see it!"
"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the
nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what
you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"
"To please you."
"And how in the world can it please me?"
Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his
density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. "Well then to please
Milly." And before he could question: "Don't you feel by this time that
there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"
He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it
corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was
queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and
on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. "She's ever
so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."
"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"
Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. "Oh the
difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how
yours does serve me."
"It helps you--put it then," said Kate very simply--"to serve _me_. It
gains you time."
"Time for what?"
"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then
as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."
Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. "You're
cryptic, love!"
It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of
those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been
a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source
he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a trouble for you I never
dreamed I should take for any human creature."
Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his
reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I
can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out
again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to
make. "There _need_ be none whatever between us. There need be nothing
but our sense of each other."
It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took
up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. "You can tell
her anything you like, anything whatever."
"Mrs. Stringham? I _have_ nothing to tell her."
"You can tell her about _us_. I mean," she wonderfully pursued, "that
you do still like me."
It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. "Only not that you still
like me."
She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat
it."
"I see. To Aunt Maud."
"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else." Kate
then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he
was; and she showed it again as she went on. "_There_, accordingly, is
your time."
She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke,
though not quite all at once. "You must let me say I _do_ see. Time for
something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time
too that, I further understand, is time for you as well."
"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged visibly by his glow of
concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully
made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however, I'll
do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them."
He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was
only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly
fitted. "Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no
wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favour to
their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
bravely moved. "To marry her."
"So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course
have money?"
It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had
only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all
along--to his stupidity, his timidity--it had been, it had been only,
what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn't
forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't
pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as
if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. "You'll in
the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free."
"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to Lady Wells."
He never budged--there was too much else. "I'm to propose it
then--marriage--on the spot?"
There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he
spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof.
"Oh I can't go into that with you, and from the moment you don't wash
your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask me. You must act as you
like and as you can."
He thought again. "I'm far--as I sufficiently showed you this
morning--from washing my hands of you."
"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll come?"
But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't what she meant.
"You'll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance--well, quite ideal."
"Your descriptions"--her "ideal" was such a touch!--"are prodigious.
And what I don't make out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I
don't like."
It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into
this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled
his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the
greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too,
moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what _he_ did. But
something else on his lips was uppermost. "What I don't make out then
is how you can even bear it."
"Well, when you know me better you'll find out how much I can bear."
And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many
implications. That it was left to him to know her, spiritually,
"better" after his long sacrifice to knowledge--this for instance was a
truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the face. She had
mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own
generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she
might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying
him on. "All you'll have to do will be to stay."
"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
"Oh dear no--we shall go."
"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
"In a day or two--straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now."
It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then what becomes of
Miss Theale?"
"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her."
He stared. "All alone?"
She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. "You're old
enough--with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it,
as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these
successive cues, that he was essentially "seeing what she would
say"--an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a
need to know her better to which she had a moment before done
injustice. If it hadn't been appearing to him in gleams that she would
somewhere break down, he probably couldn't have gone on. Still, as she
wasn't breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. "Is
your going Mrs. Lowder's idea?"
"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I
don't," she added, "refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of
the general propriety of it."
"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment. "It makes
everything fit."
"Everything."
The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the
while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he
had in fact been looking at something else. "You leave her here then to
die?"
"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay. I mean," Kate
explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
"And that's all that's necessary?"
Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we long ago agree that what
she believes is the principal thing for us?"
He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. "Oh yes.
I can't deny it." Then he added: "So that if I stay--"
"It won't"--she was prompt--"be our fault."
"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing
more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn't
presently found: "But what if she doesn't accept me?"
It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her
tone the next moment touch him. "You can but try."
"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard
to propose to a dying girl."
"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined in Kate the
flash of _justesse_ he could perhaps most, on consideration, have
admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the
fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her
eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them,
literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to
where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so
that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side,
happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them
in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the
value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together
again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their
plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out
afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last
spoke it was under cover.
"I might stay, you know, without trying."
"Oh to stay _is_ to try."
"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?"
"I don't see how you can have the appearance more."
Densher waited. "You think it then possible she may _offer_ marriage?"
"I can't think--if you really want to know--what she may _not_ offer!"
"In the manner of princesses, who do such things?"
"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be for me then to
accept. But that's the way it must come."
Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: "You'll,
on your honour, stay then?"
His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. "Without
you, you mean?"
"Without us."
"And you yourselves go at latest--?"
"Not later than Thursday."
It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay, on my honour, if
you'll come to me. On your honour."
Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigour out of
which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigour was more to
him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the
woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a "dodge."
She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain.
Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady Wells is
tired of waiting: she's coming--see--to _us_."
Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to
cross, and he still had time. "If you decline to understand me I wholly
decline to understand you. I'll do nothing."
"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase
was--and for vulgar triumphs too--seen he meant it. She looked again at
Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. "And if I do
understand?"
"I'll do everything."
She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly
playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his
relation with her, of anything so sharp--too sharp for mere
sweetness--as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the
conflict. "Well, I understand."
"On your honour?"
"On my honour."
"You'll come?"
"I'll come."
BOOK NINTH
I
It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was
most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from
the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,
within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of
that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen
it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his
hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had
risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely
engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the
name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had
come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession
importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant
memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but
itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and this
not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for
bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;
yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what
survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't
have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though
there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified
a consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea he
had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the
ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that
this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an
historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
present, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office
and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had
in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,
and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the
value to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
possessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turning
round and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?
It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of a
treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of
finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old
key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again
and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no
other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the
hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to
whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view
as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could
be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the
play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He
remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual
orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low and
slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged no
approach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a
third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have
profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate have
broken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence of
anything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself
up--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewed
engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of
the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the
way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been
magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--such
items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and
fastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we have
spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat
chilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If it
was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the
warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and
it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant
still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath
him; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of
which the other name was careful action.
Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than the
immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be
faithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
straight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was
time to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the check
was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he
always shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once he
had got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much more
after hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he felt
free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was
_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as he
left it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face and
made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his
inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yet
what--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him but
virtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;
there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and
that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any
case, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He
then fairly perceived that--even putting their purity of motive at its
highest--it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to
Milly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it was
neither of them who practically purged it--if practically purged it
was. Milly herself did everything--so far at least as he was
concerned--Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps still more than
anything else, Milly's imagination, Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed
a little aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to ask
himself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought for
them--for him and Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
and doubtless ever so much better than they: which wasn't a reason,
however--its being so much better--for them not to profit by it. Not to
profit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to go
directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at present engendered
in Densher could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go
directly against Milly.
To go _with_ her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which,
from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, was
possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course on
the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations--which was exactly
why Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening of
the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reach
out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It
was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be
almost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it and
call it by--it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence,
of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,
couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered
about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe
it; that would quite do for her--it even would have done for her, he
could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he
was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet
Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never
took a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that; but he had none
the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving
them alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintance
with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had
supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were
three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same
degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels
incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure
Kate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much in
some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the
last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have
induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his
lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in
respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could
only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the
palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,
in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time
ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this
creature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the
relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the
very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had
to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the
young women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have the
truth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no
way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--or
didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of
which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub
him as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't that
have been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the
sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
token, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; he
had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest
sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from
London was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, much
appreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this hour,
out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly's
uttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he must
meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy
everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of
their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done
so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied
for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its
half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her
mercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single
thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's
letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy
inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was
yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;
whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept
on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with
Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--he
felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just
sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more
to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four
inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,
letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty
of the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted by
Titian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the
difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost
explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.
The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your book here?"
"I hope to begin it."
"It's something you haven't begun?"
"Well, only just."
"And since you came?"
She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too
easily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken
ground."
Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper.
"I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time."
"Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on for now is precisely to
repair that ravage."
"Then you mustn't mind me, you know."
"You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little I shall mind
anything."
"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your
days."
He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh
I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for _you_."
And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he
visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for
comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and
also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual
effort. This at least was his crucifixion--that Milly was so
interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he
found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently
answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite
particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea
with him--an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. "We depend
on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming"--the
extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact.
Facing their visit itself--to that, no matter what he might have to do,
he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though
it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the
top of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough,
deep within, if Kate's view of that especial propriety had not been
modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite
likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact.
It pleased him to think of "tact" as his present prop in doubt; that
glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the
sensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long as it would
serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten
Milly's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still less
wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,
casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he put
his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. "Will it be
safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?"
"'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but
he didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,
she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with
her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had
not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he
saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for
the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he
couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.
Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
bad?"
He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had
mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'll
believe whatever you tell me."
"Well then, I'm splendid."
"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."
"I mean I'm capable of life."
"I've never doubted it."
"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live--!"
"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
"Well, that I know I _can_."
"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.
"Whatever I do. If I want to."
"If you want to do it?"
"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.
He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the
pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow
turned for him to mere light and sound.
He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"
It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,
why mayn't we pay you our visit?"
"Will it help you to live?"
"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, in
general, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"
"Yes?"--she had dropped again.
"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with
him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something
inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only
when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."
What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,
of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his
face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for
something else. "I see how you feel--that I'm an awful bore about it
and that, sooner than have any such upset, you'll go. So it's no
matter."
"No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.
"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."
It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at
any rate, he shook his head. "I won't go."
"Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.
"You mean you won't come to me?"
"No--never now. It's over. But it's all right. I mean, apart from
that," she went on, "that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'm
not forced to."
"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at
all times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You're the least
coercible of creatures."
"Because, you think, I'm so free?"
"The freest person probably now in the world. You've got everything."
"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."
On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know you
don't complain."
As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His
telling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereas
his knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kind
gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well
have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the
way she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that she
took him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit--when one sees
one's way."
"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
"I mean to keeping what one has."
"Oh that's success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random,
"it's enough to try for."
"Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more." To which then she added
with a change: "And now about your book."
"My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.
"The one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie
or me to run the risk of spoiling."
He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not doing a book."
"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You're not writing?"
He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm
doing."
It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was
afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he
feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of
the sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearly
wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps
able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however,
she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see
her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
"Then if it's not for your book--?"
"What _am_ I staying for?"
"I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn't it rather
empty for you?"
"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose
marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally
begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a
loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the
vagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"
"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he could
protest. "You stay because you've got to."
He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't have
said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It
gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.
Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.
He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permission
from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either
niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in the
girl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he
was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he
thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's
other complications, to stay after all for _you?_"
"Oh you must judge."
He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too
restless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that
was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was
staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against
her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or
worse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all _as_
judging!"
II
He didn't go home, on leaving her--he didn't want to; he walked
instead, through his narrow ways and his _campi_ with gothic arches, to
a small and comparatively sequestered café where he had already more
than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with
solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.
It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror
and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might
have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen
his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took
sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly
on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on
the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities
mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ pass
everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
a spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of her
deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have
close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his
hands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on
the cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read the
cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made
him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for
three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more
cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him
had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action
itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the difference
even survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep
from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil
lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might
have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the
perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to
destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his
really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothing
so "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or another a
catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should
be better, was mixed up in _him_, so that a single false motion might
either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these
considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously
amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all
with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without
the girl's leave--not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it,
whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate's. It was to this
his wisdom reduced itself--to the need again simply to be kind. That
was the same as being still--as studying to create the minimum of
vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wall
of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step
would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware
when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn't at this
juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was
wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the
idle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap,
and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supported
him. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace to
dinner. He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and he should
probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He should
be able to be still enough through everything.
He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of not
having failed. There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn't
trying--quite the contrary--to be either distant or dull. That would
not have been being "nice," which in its own form was the real law.
That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert; so
that he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, as
it were, to let himself go--go in the direction, that is to say, of
staying. It depended on where he went; which was what he meant by
taking care. When one went on tiptoe one could turn off for retreat
without betraying the manoeuvre. Perfect tact--the necessity for which
he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised--was to keep all
intercourse in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thus
for instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
well that her being the American girl was, just in time and for the
relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If,
at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative
of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't
diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as
possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keeping
her, with his idea, well up to it--wouldn't have been in fine for want
of his encouragement and reminder. He didn't perhaps in so many words
speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to
intermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself was
an impersonal way, and this held it there before her--since he was
careful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when all
was said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was so
elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not
stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within
bounds. And he _had_ meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much
disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the
queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted,
even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once
in saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of
facilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have
to be English to measure it!"--and that too, strangely enough, without
prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as
doing--that is of being--what he liked in order perhaps only to judge
where it would take them. They really as it went on _saw_ each other at
the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception,
and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, and
yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the
line they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all for
us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what
figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above
and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have
been felicity--certainly too little of the right lubricant--had not the
national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely,
in Milly's chords. It made up her unity and was the one thing he could
unlimitedly take for granted.
He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of the
undue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in his
nervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand to
mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake. All
women had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; but
the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her,
practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national character
that, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtual
non-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days
had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the
information that the signorina padrona was not "receiving." The
announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the
gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the
knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown,
could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli
among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among
the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he
recognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither of
the two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not
prepared to say that either was _poco bene_. He was yet not prepared to
say that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Densher
mentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in
whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses--not a vain surface, but a
place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always
ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour
the force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention, any
cognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health
was never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be
taken for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on
carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend Eugenio,
whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes,
protected from the weather, he was confronted in the gallery that led
from the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, in
meditation, his friend; seeing it was so elegantly presumable he would
have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which
required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for
each--an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything
but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from
occult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely
formal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn't
himself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again;
it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the
court.
The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first
sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost invidiously brought him
down the outer staircase--the massive ascent, the great feature of the
court, to Milly's _piano nobile_. This was to pay him--it was the one
chance--for all imputations; the imputation in particular that, clever,
_tanto bello_ and not rich, the young man from London was--by the
obvious way--pressing Miss Theale's fortune hard. It was to pay him for
the further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young
lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high
attraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such a
connexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odious
to Densher for the simple reason that they might have been so true of
the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone, accordingly,
had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his critic
sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of
politeness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend's
servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the third
was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him after
all no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that
might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to
fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that
came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as "my friend"
because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made him
see on the same lines in the course of their present interview was ever
so much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, as
insisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on the
pursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it only in the
augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time established
between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a word to Miss
Theale from such a pair of lips would cost him his place; but he could
also bethink himself that, so long as the word never came--and it was,
on the basis he had arranged, impossible--he enjoyed the imagination of
mounting guard. He had never so mounted guard, Densher could see, as
during these minutes in the damp _loggia_ where the storm-gusts were
strong; and there came in fact for our young man, as a result of his
presence, a sudden sharp sense that everything had turned to the
dismal. Something had happened--he didn't know what; and it wasn't
Eugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought
the ladies--as if their liability had been equal--were a "leetle"
fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it.
It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a
profundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter's
Italian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,
slightly smiled at him in the process--but ever so slightly this time,
his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing,
whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace.
This manner, while they stood a long minute facing each other over all
they didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden jar to Densher's
protected state. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for
them alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if they really
could have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low black
sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest and
interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled,
stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges.
Our young man's mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such
a depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightly
prolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were equally
weak. Each had verily something in mind that would have made a hash of
mutual suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility, they were
more united than disjoined. But it was to have been a moment for
Densher that nothing could ease off--not even the formal propriety with
which his interlocutor finally attended him to the _portone_ and bowed
upon his retreat. Nothing had passed about his coming back, and the air
had made itself felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew of
course, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's invitation to return
was not what he missed; yet he knew at the same time that what had
happened to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyond
the _fondamenta_ that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, out
where the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled
his umbrella closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
enough by others--the base predicament of having, by a concatenation,
just to _take_ such things: such things as the fact that one very acute
person in the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, no
disproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing. One had come to a
queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it had
been quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable accordingly that the
vision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.
Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off with the more
impatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spite
of weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the
Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the
high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the
limit of the expanse, the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of the
Lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd for
him, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference--if the
difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed of
a welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh
note and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with,
and it was to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at
a stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The
margin had been his name for it--for the thing that, though it had held
out, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come, and he
wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as
himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. There
were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the
grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than
ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders with
brown men whose hats askew, and the loose sleeves of whose pendent
jackets, made them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and chairs
that overflowed from the cafés were gathered, still with a pretence of
service, into the arcade, and here and there a spectacled German, with
his coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These were
impressions for Densher too, but he had made the whole circuit thrice
before he stopped short, in front of Florian's, with the force of his
sharpest. His eye had caught a face within the café--he had spotted an
acquaintance behind the glass. The person he had thus paused long
enough to look at twice was seated, well within range, at a small table
on which a tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, still
remained; and though he had on his knee, as he leaned back, a copy of a
French newspaper--the heading of the _Figaro_ was visible--he stared
straight before him at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him
for a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identity
produced, however quickly, all the effect of establishing
connexions--connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it were
the one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of the
head, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of being
noticed. This wider view showed him _all_ Lord Mark--Lord Mark as
encountered, several weeks before, the day of the first visit of each
to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark that was going out,
on that occasion, as he came in--he had felt it, in the hall, at the
time; and he was accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a few
seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface, the same
potential quantity.
It was a matter, the whole passage--it could only be--but of a few
seconds; for as he might neither stand there to stare nor on the other
hand make any advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk, this
time to another pace. It had been for all the world, during his pause,
as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had
simply faced him--as he had faced _him_, not placed by him, not at
first--as one of the damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hanging
fire, had then clearly come; yet no light of salutation had been struck
from these certainties. Acquaintance between them was scant enough for
neither to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, what
now mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in the
place at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher, as inevitably
a haunter of the great meeting-ground, would in that case have seen him
before. He paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for him
even as he sat there was of his train or of his boat. He had come back
for something--as a sequel to his earlier visit; and whatever he had
come back for it had had time to be done. He might have arrived but
last night or that morning; he had already made the difference. It was
a great thing for Densher to get this answer. He held it close, he
hugged it, quite leaned on it as he continued to circulate. It kept him
going and going--it made him no less restless. But it explained--and
that was much, for with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice in
the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate. The weather
had changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible,
_because_ of Lord Mark. It was because of him, _a fortiori_, that the
palace was closed. Densher went round again twice; he found the visitor
each time as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staring
before him; the next time he was looking over his _Figaro_, which he
had opened out. Densher didn't again stop, but left him apparently
unconscious of his passage--on another repetition of which Lord Mark
had disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would be off that night;
he had now gone to his hotel for arrangements. These things were as
plain to Densher as if he had had them in words. The obscure had
cleared for him--if cleared it was; there was something he didn't see,
the great thing; but he saw so round it and so close to it that this
was almost as good. He had been looking at a man who had done what he
had come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man
had come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit
would have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it was
the reason why he himself had found her door shut.
He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, that
he only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he could
now mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled,
as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he asked himself why it
should prevent this that he could feel, in connexion with the crisis,
so remarkably blameless. He gave the appearances before him all the
benefit of being critical, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn't
feel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, had
touched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The ability
so to think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to a
kind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,
by the visible conditions--sharp, striking, ugly to him--of Lord Mark's
return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which there
were many, was as a demonstration on the face of it sinister even to
his own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeing
it as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty," to know more about it
than he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't drop
on the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a
visit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely
one or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to
spare her. Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
reflexion--which he positively, with occasion, might have brought
straight out--that the only delicate and honourable way of treating a
person in such a state was to treat her as _he_, Merton Densher, did.
With time, actually--for the impression but deepened--this sense of the
contrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief,
and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world--and he
drew a long breath on it--as if a special danger for him had passed.
Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got it
straight out of the way. It was _he_, the brute, who had stumbled into
just the wrong inspiration and who had therefore produced, for the very
person he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparative
innocence, that was almost like purification. The person he had wished
to hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. To
keep still meanwhile was, for this person, more comprehensively, to
keep it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed on
consideration best, not, for the day or two, to go back to the palace.
The day or two passed--stretched to three days; and with the effect,
extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washed
but the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have the
better effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without the
particular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by either of
the women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That was
impossible--the being again denied; for it made him practically
answerable, and answerable was what he wasn't. There was no neglect
either in absence, inasmuch as, from the moment he didn't get in, the
one message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health.
Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden him
he had only to wait--which he was actually helped to do by his feeling
with the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days in
themselves were anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted,
the fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world about
was broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and
listened to the wind--listened also to tinkles of bells and watched for
some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note never
came; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When he
wasn't at home he was in circulation again as he had been at the hour
of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square with the herd of
refugees; he raked the approaches and the cafés on the chance the
brute, as he now regularly imaged him, _might_ be still there. He could
only be there, he knew, to be received afresh; and that--one had but to
think of it--would be indeed stiff. He had gone, however--it was
proved; though Densher's care for the question either way only added to
what was most acrid in the taste of his present ordeal. It all came
round to what he was doing for Milly--spending days that neither relief
nor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abject
for a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but
sordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops
and to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find
himself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible
meeting would produce? There recurred moments when in spite of
everything he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on the
third day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he
wouldn't have budged for the world.
He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at all
events thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intensely
wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything
else, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for her
wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium,
stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the
pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified
though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be
accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a
proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it
were--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have
been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium
as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof.
These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what
she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a
qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such
things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she
had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as
he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own
intensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch of
talk--sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken: "Letters?
Never--_now_. Think of it. Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently
caught her sense--into which he read, all the same, a strange
inconsequence--they had practically wrapped their understanding in the
breach of their correspondence. He had moreover, on losing her, done
justice to her law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must have written
had he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, and
her idea had been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Only
it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left _him_,
in the conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, on
the afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,
with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed dreariness,
for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the grinning padrona threw
open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound a
difference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. It
appeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that she
allowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman without
consciousness or care, and that her face, under her veil, richly rosy
with the driving wind, was--and the veil too--as splashed as if the
rain were her tears.
III
They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the
fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."
"You mean she's worse?"
The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the
instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight
of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to
relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet
veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not
to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't
know _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."
"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make me
feel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."
She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word.
"Have you been wretched?"
Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for
him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his
visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp
draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she
had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and
above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll have
seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever
been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."
This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for
his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has
been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.
"Yet it has done no good?"
"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a
headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"
"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was
taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms
themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to
him--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she
had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all
in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her
conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told
Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything
you do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"
"Only nothing now matters?"
She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he
expressed. "Then you know?"
"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply
was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
"Not for three days?"
"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by
the faintest allusion."
"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about
_me?_"
"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
"Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."
"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her
waterproof.
It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;
it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none
but the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, by
mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the very
impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it
withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"
It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material
pangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"
"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_
do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
"Everything?"
Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.
That's why I've come."
"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it
affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned
him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,
was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in
possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired
it. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,
so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by
an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and
it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so
far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own
abasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush
of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened
when she met his groan with an attenuation.
"We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."
It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to
feel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever
he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him
something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand
had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with
her sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't then
measured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,
in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly of
me?"
And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous
effusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have
believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what
helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.
She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,
accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal
ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower
she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the
consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any
rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their
meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the
larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,
they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I
don't mean not of me."
"Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out
as she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of her
age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.
Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging
to it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a wan
inconsequence.
He wondered. "You thank God--?"
"That she's so quiet."
He continued to wonder. "_Is_ she so quiet?"
"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So
you see--all these days. I can't tell you--but it's better so. It would
kill me if she _were_ to tell me."
"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."
"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had a
long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they
could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought
out. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to
him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been
waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have _you_ done her?"
Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come and
talk of her here with you."
It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly hate me?"
"I don't know. How _can_ I? No one ever will."
"She'll never tell?"
"She'll never tell."
Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
"She _is_ magnificent."
His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he
could, all over. "Would she see me again?"
It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"
"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him
some time. "No."
"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. "I don't
see what you can do."
"I don't either. But _she_ might."
Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."
"Too late for her to see--?"
"Too late."
The very decision of her despair--it was after all so lucid--kindled in
him a heat. "But the doctor, all the while--?"
"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved
and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that
I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly
enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has
told him, generously--for she _thinks_ of me, dear creature--that he
may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to
entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and
meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an
agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of
her."
"By her request?"
"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of
provisions."
"By her request too?"
"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first
time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we
liked."
Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort to you!"
"None whatever. That, however," she added, "isn't his fault. Nothing's
any comfort."
"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly feel, _I'm_ not."
"No. But I didn't come for that."
"You came for _me_."
"Well then call it that." But she looked at him a moment with eyes
filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper
still. "I came at bottom of course--"
"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, as
you say, too late for me to do anything?"
She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow
in her, from the truth itself. "So I did say. But, with you here"--and
she turned her vision again strangely about her--"with you here, and
with everything, I feel we mustn't abandon her."
"God forbid we should abandon her."
"Then you _won't?_" His tone had made her flush again.
"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons _me?_ What can I do if she
won't see me?"
"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. I
shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I
could help her. But even then," Densher pursued without faith, "she
would have to want it first herself. And there," he continued to make
out, "is the devil of it. She _won't_ want it herself. She _can't!_"
He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he
helplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and
even for that there are difficulties. But there _is_ that." He stood
before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from
her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave
to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on
the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but,
as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you really
know yourself what it is."
He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said--rather!--there
were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment;
he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider,
like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood
at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in
fact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the first
again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer
to her last remark--he only started from that. He said, as he came back
to her, "Let me, you know, _see_--one must understand," almost as if he
had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was
where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't _he_ be the one
least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without
him?"
"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired the
first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only
he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
"Well then that's something."
She considered. "Something--yes. She likes him."
"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in
October--that night when she was in white, when she had people there
and those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for
both of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take
him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher
said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
"He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
"Ah I know nothing about that."
"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you
saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps
will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."
"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged
_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in
her--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."
He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she
saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his
distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly
confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,
dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when he
was here, we all liked him."
"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,
with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said,
"yourself."
Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke
of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and
nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had
plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his
professional propriety."
"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was
something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I
couldn't _talk_ to him about her!"
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
"I can't talk to any one about her."
"Except to _me_," his friend continued.
"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had
waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For
honesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he was
sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His
visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching
him hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,
precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk
was impossible for us, and--"
"And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"was
more impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she had
straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--that
there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."
"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept
together."
Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight
back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,
of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into
which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was
perpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and he
could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
believe that he thinks she's gone."
She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter what I believe."
"Well, we shall see"--and he felt almost basely superficial. More and
more, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought something
with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to
postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; he
was sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of
Mrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of
Kate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus prolonged, had cast on
it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent
to his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,
absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the
first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibility
so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid,
and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.
"Meanwhile," he added for his companion, "it has been everything for me
to see you." She slowly rose at the words, which might almost have
conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she
had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness
would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for
insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover,
she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist.
Besides, she had already said it. "Will you do it if _he_ asks you? I
mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him"--oh she
was earnest now!--"the opportunity to put it to you?"
"The opportunity to put what?"
"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."
Densher felt himself--as had already once befallen him in the quarter
of an hour--turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had,
however, for him, as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign of
his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. "If I
deny what to her?"
Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn't he all along been
letting her see that he knew? "Why, what Lord Mark told her."
"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"
Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment--of seeing him as suddenly
perverse. "I've been judging that you yourself know." And it was she
who now blushed deep.
It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too by other things.
"Then _you_ know--"
"Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's what has done it."
"Yes--I understand that. But you also know--"
He had faltered again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. "I'm
speaking," she said soothingly, "of what he told her. It's _that_ that
I've taken you as knowing."
"Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.
It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment, the quality of
relief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else.
Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've known
it for _true!_"
Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that he had betrayed
himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw still
better. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there
was no postponing. They were left with her idea--the one she was
wishing to make him recognise. He had expressed ten minutes before his
need to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only what
he was to understand was no small matter; it might be larger even than
as yet appeared.
He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said; he
mooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window; and of course
she could see that she had driven him to the wall. She did clearly,
without delay, see it; on which her sense of having "caught" him became
as promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What I mean
is that he told her you've been all the while engaged to Miss Croy."
He gave a jerk round; it was almost--to hear it--the touch of a lash;
and he said--idiotically, as he afterwards knew--the first thing that
came into his head. "All _what_ while?"
"Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness. "I only repeat to
you what he told her."
Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had already caught
himself up. "Pardon my brutality. Of course I know what you're talking
about. I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained, "in the
Piazza; only just saw him--through the glass at Florian's--without any
words. In fact I scarcely know him--there wouldn't have been occasion.
It was but once, moreover--he must have gone that night. But I knew he
wouldn't have come for nothing, and I turned it over--what he would
have come for."
Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."
Densher approved. "He came to let her know that he knows better than
she for whom it was she had a couple of months before, in her fool's
paradise, refused him."
"How you _do_ know!"--and Mrs. Stringham almost smiled.
"I know that--but I don't know the good it does him."
"The good, he thinks, if he has patience--not too much--may be to come.
He doesn't know what he has done to her. Only _we_, you see, do that."
He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him--what she felt?"
"She was able--I'm sure of it--not to show anything. He dealt her his
blow, and she took it without a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain,
spoke by book, and it brought into play again her appreciation of what
she related. "She's magnificent."
Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"
"And _he_," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."
"An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on the stupid doom in
it, they looked at each other. "Yet he's thought so awfully clever."
"So awfully--it's Maud Lowder's own view. And he was nice, in London,"
said Mrs. Stringham, "to _me_. One could almost pity him--he has had
such a good conscience."
"That's exactly the inevitable ass."
"Yes, but it wasn't--I could see from the only few things she first
told me--that he meant _her_ the least harm. He intended none whatever."
"That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned. "He only of
course meant harm to me."
"And good to himself--he thought that would come. He had been unable to
swallow," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "what had happened on his other
visit. He had been then too sharply humiliated."
"Oh I saw that."
"Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as it were, while he
was turned away."
"Perfectly," Densher said--"I've filled it out. And also that he has
known meanwhile for _what_ I was then received. For a stay of all these
weeks. He had had it to think of."
"Precisely--it was more than he could bear. But he has it," said Mrs.
Stringham, "to think of still."
"Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself somehow, at this point,
was having more to think of even than he had yet had--"only, after all,
how has he happened to know? That is, to know enough."
"What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.
"He can only have acted--it would have been his sole safety--from full
knowledge."
He had gone on without heeding her question; but, face to face as they
were, something had none the less passed between them. It was this
that, after an instant, made her again interrogative. "What do you mean
by full knowledge?"
Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been since October?"
"I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I've reason to
believe, straight from there."
"Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"
"Well, to try again--with the help perhaps of a new fact. To make
himself possibly right with her--a different attempt from the other. He
had at any rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his
opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed half
an hour would be just what was most effective. It _has_ been!" said
Susan Shepherd.
Her companion took it in, understanding but too well; yet as she
lighted the matter for him more, really, than his own courage had quite
dared--putting the absent dots on several i's--he saw new questions
swarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused; and
they fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her was
at any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lowder."
"Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Milly."
He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally, upon news of _me?_"
His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
"I've given her none that hasn't been decently good. This will have
been the first."
"'This'?" Densher was thinking.
"Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as she is."
He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs. Lowder written about him?
Has she written that he has been with them?"
"She has mentioned him but once--it was in her letter before the last.
Then she said something."
"And what did she say?"
Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well it was in reference to
Miss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I
should say rather that he was thinking of _her_--only it seemed this
time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the way more open to him."
Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raised
them to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware of
a queerness in his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged to
_propose_ to her niece?"
"I don't know what she means."
"Of course not"--he recovered himself; "and I oughtn't to seem to
trouble you to piece together what I can't piece myself. Only I
'guess,'" he added, "I _can_ piece it."
She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I dare say I can piece
it too."
It was one of the things in her--and his conscious face took it from
her as such--that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to mark
for him, as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.
They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deep
down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it
wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful--at
least this one was. But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so,
most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been
feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all _such_
petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that,
in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with his
putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark.
"Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our friend?"
"Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "_her_ friend also. But not a single word
that I know of."
He had taken it for certain she hadn't--the thing being after all but a
shade more strange than his having himself, with Milly, never for six
weeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter but
a shade more strange than Milly's not having mentioned her. In spite of
which, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.
He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest he
could get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had been
judging. "How did he manage to get _at_ her? She had only--with what
had passed between them before--to say she couldn't see him."
"Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier," the good lady
explained with a slight embarrassment, "than at the other time."
"Easier?"
"She was off her guard. There was a difference."
"Yes. But exactly not _the_ difference."
"Exactly not the difference of her having to be harsh. Perfectly. She
could afford to be the opposite." With which, as he said nothing, she
just impatiently completed her sense. "She had had _you_ here for six
weeks."
"Oh!" Densher softly groaned.
"Besides, I think he must have written her first--written I mean in a
tone to smooth his way. That it would be a kindness to himself. Then on
the spot--"
"On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked? The horrid little beast!"
It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as for
hope, the intensity of her look at him. "Oh he went off without an
alarm."
"And he must have gone off also without a hope."
"Ah that, certainly."
"Then it _was_ mere base revenge. Hasn't he known her, into the
bargain," the young man asked--"didn't he, weeks before, see her, judge
her, feel her, as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than a
few months to live?"
Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at him in silence; and
it gave more force to what she then remarkably added. "He has doubtless
been aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself been aware."
"He has wanted her, you mean, just _because_--?"
"Just because," said Susan Shepherd.
"The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He moved off, however, with a
hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention in
his visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more
taken counsel of the dreariness without he turned to his companion.
"Shall we have lights--a lamp or the candles?"
"Not for me."
"Nothing?"
"Not for me."
He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a
thought. "He _will_ have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what has
happened."
Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge."
"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too--only _she_, poor
lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"--Densher
continued to make it out--"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
"And you've been clear to him _as_ the reason?"
"Not too clear--since I'm sticking here and since that has been a fact
to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has
believed," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason at
Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in
Venice."
Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up to
what?"
"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To some
duplicity."
"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous
supposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute--sensibly long for
each--fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute,
which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.
This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it
even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their
further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an
advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the
absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she
addressed him--so differently, for confidence--in words she had already
used. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for
_him_, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so
dreadfully to believe?"
Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutely
certain then that she does believe it?"
"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"
He took his time again to judge. "Do _you_ believe it?"
He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a
little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered
none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believe
will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly
settle it--if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if,
to save her life, you consent to a denial."
"But a denial, when it comes to that--confound the whole thing, don't
you see!--of exactly what?"
It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged.
"Of everything."
Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. "Oh!"
he simply moaned into the gloom.
IV
The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought
also blessedly an abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, the
stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days,
but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an
almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and
called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the
scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of
vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this
on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.
He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at
present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was where
the event had landed him--where no event in his life had landed him
before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more
than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of
them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not,
as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in
other words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if he
had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,
nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It
would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,
to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something
of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his
going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.
Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth
of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet
had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,
he possibly _could_.
It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the
station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet
turned over so long. What then was his odious position but that again
and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousness
as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time
proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his
life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was
afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might
prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the
great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's
brief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had
brought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.
Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them
made him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It
was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever
it was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it
went a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced the
platform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he had
presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything
that followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of an
anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and
hesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce
have said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
might have suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise in
presence of the fact.
Sir Luke had clean forgotten--so Densher read--the rather remarkable
young man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him up
again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felt
himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof
of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was now
connected the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him.
The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours as
he needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
him. An exquisite case awaited him--of which, in this queer way, the
remarkable young man was an outlying part; but the single motion of his
face, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred
its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had
suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress
now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as a
symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one's self be concerned,
of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated, everything that,
in contact, he appeared to accept--if only, for much, not to trouble to
sink it: what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Densher
began wondering, at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
make of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had been
on the platform, in the respectful rear, and the gondola from the
palace, under his direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching
mixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
together. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity
refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the
palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this
susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. All
he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps--they could see him,
the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
headshake, "go there now."
"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of it; so that the
thing was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite
inevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of it
that he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't
moreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classic
craft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke from
the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,
a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black
hump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heard
Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm
swerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondola
of his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as in
Venice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for some
time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as
he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest
about Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
instantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cry
and saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of the
personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts
of her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn't
only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of
smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,
all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct
interest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one's
really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
_cliché_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding
in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to
reflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young man
had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest
of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the
outrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it had
been--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had
been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present
befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,
had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person and quite
on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher's nerves,
absolutely his heart-beats too, had measured the change before he on
this occasion moved away.
The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance
grimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense, and this was to
be the way he was now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
making vision not only possible but inevitable, the one thing left to
be thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should
one be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
It was, however, far from plain to Densher for the first day or two
that he was again to see his distinguished friend at all. That he
couldn't, on any basis actually serving, return to the palace--this was
as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature of his case, the fact
of the publicity attaching to his proscription through his not having
taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli
gondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined to
meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither time
nor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them unless the
great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Densher
further reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's
having decided to--as they might say--turn him on. It would depend as
well--for there would be practically some difference to her--on her
actually attempting it; and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke
would make of such an overture. Densher had for that matter his own
view of the amount, to say nothing of the particular sort, of response
it might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be
prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked
himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the
worst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great man
should come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him
for a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, and
consequently there was nothing to hope.
It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this violence to all
probability; but it pressed on him that there were few possible
diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was
so odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid of
Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previous
taste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.
The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in his
tread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, for
the time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for the
difference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to
Densher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not
as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had
quite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard that
value as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of
the old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forcibly
phrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after all
did want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that Sir
Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were
his worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny
made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In
mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,
he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his
original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth
his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave it
time, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhile
this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign he
knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him
no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had
described as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--if
on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--not
to be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enough
saw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For
stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had
gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent
himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five
days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable
sacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of the highest
medical lights in the world; so that really when the personage in
question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the
doorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the
magnitude--he shrank from calling it anything else--of Milly's case.
The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her
immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some
hope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, with
his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things
at once--the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke _was_
still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and
quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis--plainly even now to
be prolonged for him--was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not
only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't
dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show that
during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in
sight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. The
demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previous
acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made him
come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, but
there were things of interest he should like to see again meanwhile. It
was for these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity of
Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he
had looked his young man up--producing on the latter's part, as soon as
the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined
itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing
could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface--and Densher was
well aware of it--than the relief he found during this short period in
the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his visitor's
entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting the
fact also directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had come to say
he had saved her--he had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how she
might _be_ saved--he had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for all
their distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just
as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did
wonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he would
have said, quiet.
The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after
a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep
superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but
he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right
stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and
they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--Sir
Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old
wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed above
all the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.
Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keeping
them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching
his face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this was
all he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it
in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of
it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his
response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that
held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in
spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for
it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to let
him off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn't
aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on
system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being a
man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that Sir
Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. A
man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered what
man, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.
He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what mattered
and what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,
the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one were
concerned with him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whatever
he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might
have been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was the
way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have
exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's now
complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing could
have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the
station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densher
would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken a
dose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.
That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the
three or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merely
wondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced
term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, the
Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our
friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,
naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's
personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for
that?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his
call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--as
had immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been living
with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was
proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when the
Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, his
companion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed face
as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highest
authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness
affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite
awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was
short, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,
was mounting guard over the compartment he had secured. The strain,
though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,
prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that he
involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as
only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the
right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,
and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,
questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him
now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly
knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
Luke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial
habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken from
it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meeting
his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely
looked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
one time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even a
shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher for
ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at
last spoken made him start.
"I shall come back."
"Then she's better?"
"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding
the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they
hadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
see her."
Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare
betrayed. "She asks me?"
Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had
closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little
but not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,
as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought
the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.
Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"
"She can receive you."
"And you're coming back--?"
"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."
"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of his
friend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had
announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ then
come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the
colourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of the
world to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--was
but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand
remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did.
"I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but in
his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had
slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and
the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
"Then she's better?"
Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it at
the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was
to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so
successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had
to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply
reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed
him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained
observation of Eugenio.
BOOK TENTH
I
"Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without your
making a sign?"
Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate
and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it
straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her
instinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibility
between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general
trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh
sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else,
something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still
more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had
been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on
either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her
as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed
of taking in, with his thrill, that--even going by the mere first
look--she had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in the
firelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through the London
fog, as the flower of her difference; just as her difference
itself--part of which was her striking him as older in a degree for
which no mere couple of months could account--was the fruit of their
intimate relation. If she was different it was because they had chosen
together that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of their
wisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happened--of what in
fact, for the spirit of each, was still happening--been showing it to
him for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered days, so
still, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have to
tackle; with which consciousness indeed he had made a clean breast of
it in finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to his present
visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the finer way; and it would
doubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to write
to Kate. Venice was three weeks behind him--he had come up slowly; but
it was still as if even in London he must conform to her law. That was
exactly how he was able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to
her feeling for the situation and explain his stretched delicacy. He
had come to tell her everything, so far as occasion would serve them;
and if nothing was more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits,
his delay to reopen communication had kept pace with this resolve, so
the inconsequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements of
intensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell
her. That took time, and the proof was that, as he felt on the spot, he
couldn't have brought it all with him before this afternoon. He _had_
brought it, to the last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn't
be hard--as he in fact found--to produce, for Kate's understanding, his
first reason.
"A fortnight, yes--it was a fortnight Friday; but I've only been
keeping in, you see, with our wonderful system." He was so easily
justified as that this of itself plainly enough prevented her saying
she didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly still vivid for
her; and such a gage of its equal vividness for himself was precisely
what she must have asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond the
remark that on the very face of it, she would remember, their wonderful
system attached no premium to rapidities of transition. "I couldn't
quite--don't you know?--take my rebound with a rush; and I suppose I've
been instinctively hanging off to minimise, for you as well as for
myself, the appearances of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But I
knew you'd understand." It was presently as if she really understood so
well that she almost appealed from his insistence--yet looking at him
too, he was not unconscious, as if this mastery of fitnesses was a
strong sign for her of what she had done to him. He might have struck
her as expert for contingencies in the very degree of her having in
Venice struck _him_ as expert. He smiled over his plea for a renewal
with stages and steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, and
graduated; though--finely as she must respond--she met the smile but as
she had met his entrance five minutes before. Her soft gravity at that
moment--which was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness
charged with life to the brim and wishing not to overflow--had not
qualified her welcome; what had done this being much more the presence
in the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman who had introduced
him and who had been interrupted in preparing the tea-table.
Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to appoint the tea-hour,
five o'clock on Sunday, for his seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired
him, without a signature, "Come on Sunday _before_ tea--about a quarter
of an hour, which will help us"; and he had arrived therefore
scrupulously at twenty minutes to five. Kate was alone in the room and
hadn't delayed to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily gathered,
was to be, for the interval--not long but precious--engaged with an old
servant, retired and pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and who
was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs. They were to have
the scrap of time, after the withdrawal of the footman, to themselves,
and there was a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in
spite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety of shades, it
proclaimed itself indeed precious. And all without prejudice--that was
what kept it noble--to Kate's high sobriety and her beautiful
self-command. If he had his discretion she had her perfect manner,
which was _her_ decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he had, to finish with the
question of his delay, furthermore observed, Mrs. Stringham would have
written to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so that it
wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them. They'd know he was no longer
there.
"Yes, we've known it."
"And you continue to hear?"
"From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I mean Aunt Maud does."
"Then you've recent news?"
Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day or two I believe. But
haven't _you?_"
"No--I've heard nothing." And it was now that he felt how much he had
to tell her. "I don't get letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowder
does." With which he added: "Then of course you know." He waited as if
she would show what she knew; but she only showed in silence the dawn
of a surprise that she couldn't control. There was nothing but for him
to ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"
Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you _know?_"
"How should I, my dear--in the absence of everything?" And he himself
stared as for light. "She's dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she
slowly shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on her
lips, but the one she presently put was: "Is it very terrible?"
"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying?" He had to
think a moment. "Well, yes--since you ask me: very terrible to _me_--so
far as, before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't think,"
he went on, "that--though I'll try--I _can_ quite tell you what it was,
what it is, for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you," he
explained, "as if I hoped it might be over."
She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so
far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the
wish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respect
for misfortune. The more she studied him too--and he had never so felt
her closely attached to his face--the more the choice of an attitude
would become impossible to her. There would simply be a feeling
uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grew
in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the
quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too
far, with a wonderful: "What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
the sound--wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out
himself?--of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of
everything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she would
confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him--yes--that she
wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and
that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer
to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that
at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.
That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him
handsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how
dreadful for you much of it must have been."
He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished
first to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say as
little as she could. "She _is_ dying?"
"She's dying."
It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate
could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of
Milly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--his
present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir Luke
Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"
"I believe he's there now."
"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke
otherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen
him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."
"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.
"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again
three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having
gone. He had started I believe some days before."
"And won't then by this time be back?"
Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."
"He won't leave her then"--Densher had turned it over--"while she
lives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."
"I think _she_ is," said Kate.
It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from
him rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"
"Well, she's after all my friend."
It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least
expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant,
his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it.
You _were_ sure of it."
"Of course I was sure of it."
And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however,
presently broke. "If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what
do you think of Lord Mark's?"
She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"
"You haven't seen him?"
"Not since he saw her."
"You've known then of his seeing her?"
"Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."
"And have you known," Densher went on, "the rest?"
Kate wondered. "What rest?"
"Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't stand--it was what
then took place that simply killed her."
"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw
that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't
put on. "Mrs. Stringham hasn't said _that_."
He observed none the less that she didn't ask what had then taken
place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. "The way
it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond
all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him
pursue.
"One can see now that she was living by will--which was very much what
you originally told me of her."
"I remember. That was it."
"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse
was determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke. He told her, the
scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged."
Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know it!"
"That doesn't matter. _She_ did by the time he had left her. Besides,"
Densher added, "he does know it. When," he continued, "did you last see
him?"
But she was lost now in the picture before her. "_That_ was what made
her worse?"
He watched her take it in--it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he
spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he
continued consistently: "She learned it, you see, too soon--since of
course one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.
And she _had_ felt sure--through everything we had done--of there not
being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she
need regard as a warning."
She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't through anything _you_
did--whatever that may have been--that she gained her certainty. It was
by the conviction she got from me."
"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"
"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"
Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,
which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect
absolutely of what they would have called between them her
straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could
ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't
suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our
responsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question
for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such
impressions as it was our idea to give."
"It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.
He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained
character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an idea
born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have
been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord
Mark's."
Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"
"Why for you."
"To tell her he lied?"
"To tell her he's mistaken."
Densher stared--he was stupefied; the "possible" thus glanced at by
Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to
put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference
in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We _are_,
my dear child," he said, "I suppose, still engaged."
"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her life--!"
He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to
be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense
of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many
things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to
admiration. "Well, if you must know--and I want you to be clear about
it--I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question
of it--_as_ possibly saving her--was put to me definitely enough; but
to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
wouldn't have done any good."
"You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?" She had
spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib;
but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she
meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"
"I hadn't even a chance."
Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it
all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. "She wouldn't
see you?"
"Not after your friend had been with her."
She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"
It made him also think, but with a difference. "She had turned her face
to the wall."
This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now
for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the
minimum of light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"
"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was miserably, prohibitively
ill."
"Well, that was what she had been before."
"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted, "it didn't; and I don't
pretend that she's not magnificent."
"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.
He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear. But that's how it is,"
he wound up; "and there we are."
His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more
deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had
fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far,
as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the
same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to
hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining if
her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had
fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on
Milly's part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place.
But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such
things were concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressure
on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general
that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then
that after Lord Mark's interference you never again met?"
It was what he had been all the while coming to. "No; we met once--so
far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed--I didn't come away."
"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."
"Precisely"--he felt himself wonderful; "and I wanted to be no less.
She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice."
His companion waited. "Wouldn't _that_ then have been your chance?"
"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if before her there I had
wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying."
"Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not just _because_ she was
dying?" She had however all her discretion. "But of course I know that
seeing her you could judge."
"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied
you moreover," Densher said with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to
it."
She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that to
convince her you'd have insisted or somehow proved--?"
"I mean that to convince _you_ I'd have insisted or somehow proved--!"
Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"
"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it
back afterwards."
With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour
flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?
You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save your
conscience?"
"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see
how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of
it. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,
remember what I say."
Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he
pointed. "You've fallen in love with her."
"Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does
it matter?"
It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of
relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,
from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it
gave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.
Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone still
different, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
"It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you
moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you
say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,
to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that
she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--the
truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me
for it."
"She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted
_you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been
glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her
from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it
was all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you and
clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear
man--that she loves you with passion."
"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And
then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just
once more to look at you?"
"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any
longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at
first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of
taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in
another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said
Densher, "affected her."
"Of course it affected her."
Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow
for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to
know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
wished herself to tell me so."
"And she did tell you so?"
"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
"And as _you_ of course did."
"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I
did. I hadn't desired it in the least."
"You only went to oblige her?"
"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having
stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."
"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,
such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate
added--"to see her die."
"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the
visit--just like another."
"Like another person?"
"Like another visit."
"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting
his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it
indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he
had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her
room?"
"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in that
glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her
inveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you remember what you
originally said to me of her?"
"Ah I've said so many things."
"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she wouldn't taste of medicine.
Well, she didn't."
"So that it was really almost happy?"
It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feeling
how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone
that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. "I
don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day--perhaps.
For it would be worth it for us."
"Some day--certainly." She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spoke
again abruptly. "She'll recover."
"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she show anything of her
feeling? I mean," Kate explained, "of her feeling of having been
misled."
She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he would
have rather to glide. "She showed nothing but her beauty and her
strength."
"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of her strength?"
He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon given
it up. "She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way."
"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you have that she was ever
alienated."
"I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me."
"But she was ill."
"That hadn't prevented her--as you yourself a moment ago said--during
the previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made no
difference with her."
"She would still have received you?"
"She would still have received me."
"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know--!"
"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham."
"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
"Everything."
She looked at him longer. "Everything?"
"Everything."
"Because you've told her?"
"Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's a
person who does see."
Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious.
You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So you
needn't be afraid."
"I'm not afraid," said Densher.
Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked
five. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's huge
silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not
soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. "Well, it's all most
wonderful!" she exclaimed as she rather too profusely--a sign her
friend noticed--ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming
water. "You'll have some?"
He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait--?"
"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant--the deprecation, by their old
law, of betrayals of the intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
done it!"
"Humbugged her?"
"Squared her. You've pleased her."
Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something
else, and his thought in a moment came out. "What a brute then I must
be!"
"A brute--?"
"To have pleased so many people."
"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've done it to please
_me_." But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. "What I
don't understand is--won't you have any sugar?"
"Yes, please."
"What I don't understand," she went on when she had helped him, "is
what it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave you
up for days and days, what brought her back to you?"
She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him
ready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their going
into it over the tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
back. His visit, his presence there did it."
"He brought her back then to life."
"Well, to what I saw."
"And by interceding for you?"
"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know what he did."
Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"
"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn't speak of
her."
Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"
"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before--"
"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"
"He understood," said Densher.
"But understood what?"
He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully well."
"Ah, and made _her_ understand? I see," she went on as he said nothing.
"But how did he convince her?"
Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You must ask Sir Luke."
He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. "The
great thing," Kate then resumed, "is that she's satisfied. Which," she
continued, looking across at him, "is what I've worked for."
"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"
"Well, at peace with you."
"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.
"The peace of having loved."
He raised his eyes to her. "Is _that_ peace?"
"Of having _been_ loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound
up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had _all_
she wanted."
Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority
that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look
at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he
intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so
take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. "You may think it
hideous that I should now, that I should _yet_"--she made a point of
the word--"pretend to draw conclusions. But we've not failed."
"Oh!" he only again murmured.
She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came
to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and
enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing
that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that
knowledge. "We've succeeded." She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made him wince, but she
insisted. "And you won't have loved _me_."
II
He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this
inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but
interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of
the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his
intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder
alone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kate
gave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them
was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him
to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had
fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard
fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to
his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare
alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been
uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,
and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she
resentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, my
dear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if to
leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this
extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the
protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their
tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their
hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his
scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed
for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been
entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf--a visitor she had been
at one time suspected of favouring too much and who had now come back
to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that the
fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragic
turn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr.
Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an
awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he
marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the
fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was
but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for
consideration, melted into it and out of sight.
He was taken up promptly with another matter--the truth of the
remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice
had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of
their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not
sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that
were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without
her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish
them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking
place had obliged him to hang off; they had--after hearing of him from
poor Susan as gone--been hoping for an early sight of him; they would
have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the
scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely--by which
she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the
memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it--was what marked him for
unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the
guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth
in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She
treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;
and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness
with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches
to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to be;
it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile
to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded,
he could "work" this association: he had but to use the house freely
for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it.
Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a
week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs.
Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him
on--brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had
private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had
others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of
candour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely
sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so
himself--everything was too real; but it was none the less not false
that he _had_ been through a mill.
It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to
him, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, "I
want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm _with_ you to the end!"
his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was
with him to the end--or she might be--in a way Kate wasn't; and even if
it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just
brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her
in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in
the world _could_ he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest
reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two
or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions--two
and a scrap--on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now
that almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn
of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that
when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come
up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the
queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He
liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to
himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met
_him_ halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than
her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy
her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course
the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which
he was completely _free_ with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed have
come about if--for another monstrosity--he hadn't ceased to be free
with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being
alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had
been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in
fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy
moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed
herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn't have stayed to the
end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all
to his help.
"You simply couldn't stand it?"
"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see--!" But he paused.
"Besides what?" He had been going to say more--then he saw dangers;
luckily however she had again assisted him. "Besides--oh I know!--men
haven't, in many relations, the courage of women."
"They haven't the courage of women."
"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared--"if we hadn't come away
for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated."
Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn't his behaviour
since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said--he
couldn't help going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy
would have stayed." And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was
Susan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him--she had done nothing
but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth
she had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing that
compromised him. Milly's act of renouncement she had described but as a
change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as even
without her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to conceal
it; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, for
all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions.
Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that,
shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he
leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came.
She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn't; but this
was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had
taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as
already dead to him--that being for his spirit the only thinkable way
to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited
her, and it wasn't for him to go, as they said in America, behind this;
which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his
interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have
nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious
of her--what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,
for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in
London while the pain went on--what would that do but make his days
impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself--and by some
art about which he was vague--that the sense of waiting had passed.
"What in fact," he restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with
it? Let me assume the thing actually over--as it at any moment may
be--and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I'm
good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to _her_." He
consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly
about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be
guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The
days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the
suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was
the taste of suspense. That he _was_ waiting was in short at the bottom
of everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that
if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just
for that reason.
She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle
enough--and he could see her divine it as what he wanted--not to insist
on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was
thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one
better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together
that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in
the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had _been_
stupendous. On the other hand, however--and this was what wasn't for
Densher pure peace--they insisted enough that stupendous was the word.
It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he came
to it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, in
particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression
as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed
the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he
couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife
might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the
family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl
must have wanted to live.
"Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, with
everything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, if
it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"
Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairly
giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might have
been" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had
her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,
and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her about
them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to
herself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,
the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keep
it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so
naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its
vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually
shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she
was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully
silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,
in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object
clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the
case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make
him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had
been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud
by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had
let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received
on that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed so
perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--of
princely state.
Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,
all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth
of autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained and the
situation--well, Densher said for the convenience of exquisite London
gossip, sublime. The gossip--for it came to as much at Lancaster
Gate--wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on
the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. He
himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the
page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation
inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half
understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding
himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these
moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity;
and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He
had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious
of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had
lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew he had gathered
all--that passed between them mutely as in the intervals of their
associated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far
as association could go, but it was far enough when she knew the
essence. The essence was that something had happened to him too
beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered
sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't coherently
express. It would have required an explanation--fatal to Mrs. Lowder's
faith in him--of the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful
scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence
within--they felt the charged stillness; after which, their association
deepened by it, they turned together away.
That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became by the end of a
week the very principle of reaction: so that he woke up one morning
with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to
gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster Gate that, as a
haunted man--a man haunted with a memory--he was harmless; but the
degree to which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained his new
aspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What he
hadn't in the least stated her own manner was perpetually stating; it
was as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down.
There offered itself however to his purpose such an element as plain
honesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper
corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year
was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; the
still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked
empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep
browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks
lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it
fast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, and
then went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in a
telegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,
for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion
of past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--made
his telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was a
good deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a rich
impulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one of
their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be
reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but he
had waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically at
hand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller
now, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed he
was graver as he lingered and looked out.
Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as if
she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--that
was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,
even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return
to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might
be again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not with
ease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,
other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special
danger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he
had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all
that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.
The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the same
place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the
days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. This
and that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs over
the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which--for
they really could sit down again--they might recover the clearness of
their prime. It was to all intents however this very reference that
showed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came toward
him. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her
nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing him
afresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, he
certainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her,
at particular moments, handsomer than ever before; one of these for
instance being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt's
eyes, at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return
from America; and another her aspect on the same spot two Sundays
ago--the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back from
Venice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got it
the other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortune
of the moment.
Whatever it had been determined by as the different hours recurred to
him, it took on at present a prompt connexion with an effect produced
for him in truth more than once during the past week, only now much
intensified. This effect he had already noted and named: it was that of
the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of
response on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn't
possibly have failed to notice. She _had_ noticed it, and she had
beautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade of
studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.
Everything of course was relative, with the shadow they were living
under; but her condonation of the way in which he now, for confidence,
distinguished Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer. She had so by her
own air consecrated the distinction, invidious in respect to herself
though it might be; and nothing, really, more than this demonstration,
could have given him had he still wanted it the measure of her
superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this superiority alone
that on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charming
courage to her eyes--a courage that deepened in them when he had
presently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joined
him not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing her
hand into his arm and turning off where they had turned of old, that he
wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing he
should ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,
whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own belief was in high
happiness for them if they would only have patience; though nothing at
the same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was only
make-believe of course, with what had taken place for them, that they
couldn't meet at home; she spoke of their opportunities as suffering at
no point. He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished the
present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a great
wintry tree, he let his entreaty come sharp.
"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves,
we owe it to our feeling _for_ ourselves and for each other, not to
wait another day. Our marriage will--fundamentally, somehow, don't you
see?--right everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you my
impatience. We've only to announce it--and it takes off the weight."
"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding,
though she had listened to him without confusion.
"To accomplish it then--to-morrow if you will; _do_ it and announce it
as done. That's the least part of it--after it nothing will matter. We
shall be so right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only
wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a
bad dream."
She looked at him without flinching--with the look she had brought at
his call; but he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. "My dear
man, what has happened to you?"
"Well, that I can bear it no longer. _That's_ simply what has happened.
Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's _as_ I am
that you must have me."
He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her also
not consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further--he heard her, with
her clear voice--try to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see, you
know, what has changed." She had a large strange smile. "We've been
going on together so well, and you suddenly desert me?"
It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches,
upon my soul--!"
"I call it perfect--from my original point of view. I'm just where I
was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for
_your_ not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're only
right as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don't
think we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in while she talked
her imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless
to see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. He
had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immoveable--which
was not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood
everything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down,
the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again most of all
her strange significant smile. "Of course if it's that you really
_know_ something--?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, he
could see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and he
only looked at her in gloom. His gloom however didn't upset her. "You
do, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to
me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in
hearing it, so that if you can _tell_ me you know--"
"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it.
"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't, I grant you, in that case
wait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I
don't even ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content with your
moral certainty."
By this time it had come over him--it had the force of a rush. The
point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while he
recognised it, mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."
"You've not an idea?"
"I've not an idea."
"I'd consent," she said--"I'd announce it to-morrow, to-day, I'd go
home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an
idea straight _from_ you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith.
There, my dear!"--and she smiled again. "I call that really meeting
you."
If it _was_ then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he
could but stand there with his wasted passion--for it was in high
passion that he had from the morning acted--in his face. She made it
all out, bent upon her--the idea he didn't have, and the idea he had,
and his failure of insistence when it brought up _that_ challenge, and
his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her
lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but
that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to
something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and
she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,
between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,
when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she
leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented
irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an
advantage with his passion now.
III
He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had
"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made of
her--happened he meant since the account he had given, after his
return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--they
had brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, in
preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.
Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the
night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely
first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation
with her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own small
quarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected
him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the
next hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilessly
wakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous to
distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow
hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his
sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his
difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,
and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the
other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared
and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of
monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and
the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before
him; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,
for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the
event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light of
convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He
stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow
determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety in
doubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very
commonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in his
life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to
another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and
his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he
felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more
state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
Christmas day.
Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a
certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his
final prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less
urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,
once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained
sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive
earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a
reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the
dusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus
to turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the night
before had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just
mentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item to
assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham was
drawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought him
for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was long
enough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caught
his breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day
Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was
back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,
and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt
himself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectile
that has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truth
that what he wanted _more_ than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness
who had just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be in his
presence and to hear his voice--which was the spasm of his
consciousness that produced the flash. Fortunately for him, on the
spot, there supervened something in which the flash went out. He became
aware within this minute that the coachman on the box of the brougham
had a face known to him, whereas he had never seen before, to his
knowledge, the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box was just the face
that, in coming and going at Lancaster Gate, he would vaguely have
noticed, outside, in attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote from his own,
presented herself for news; and news, in the house, she was clearly
getting, since her brougham had stayed. Sir Luke _was_ then back--only
Mrs. Lowder was with him.
It was under the influence of this last reflexion that Densher again
delayed; and it was while he delayed that something else occurred to
him. It was all round, visibly--given his own new contribution--a case
of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate, for quicker knowledge,
might have come out with her aunt. The possibility that in this event
she might be sitting in the carriage--the thing most likely--had had
the effect, before he could check it, of bringing him within range of
the window. It wasn't there he had wished to see her; yet if she _was_
there he couldn't pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
made out was that if some one was there it wasn't Kate Croy. It was,
with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him a
conscious face from behind the clear plate of a café in Venice. The
great glass at Florian's was a medium less obscure, even with the
window down, than the air of the London Christmas; yet at present also,
none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions could
occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest--which, he disgustedly
remembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as
his special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touched
the bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at by
Kate's friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for
the time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
young man had in a manner assisted at the departure of the
disconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any more
than he had looked from his bench at his café. Densher was thinking
that _he_ seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He was
thinking of the other as--in spite of the difference of situation--more
ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend of
the person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous,
associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, beside
Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficient
identity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened and
Mrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that _she_
wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; with
presence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in the
brougham, didn't matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to her
passage with the gentleman who had rung. "_I'll_ tell Mr. Densher; you
needn't wait!" And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on the
steps.
"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn't not come
to learn."
"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On my way," he added, "to
Lancaster Gate."
"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was
attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and
he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and
that yet had now a fresh glow. "So you _have_ had your message?"
He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he "_had_
had" no less than what he hadn't, that, with but the smallest
hesitation, he strained the point. "Yes--my message."
"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings."
"Yes--folded them."
It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and
she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. "Unless it's
more true," she accordingly added, "that she has spread them the wider."
He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words
fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. "Rather, yes--spread them
the wider."
"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater--!"
"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared,
that did a little warn her off.
"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve, "entitled to
direct news. Ours came late last night: I'm not sure otherwise I
shouldn't have gone to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to _me?_"
He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of
the brougham was still within range. Her rich "me," reaching him
moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest.
"Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just
now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they
stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage
might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side,
understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with the
image of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical.
It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had suddenly--since the
night before--dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeper
reserve.
But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely alone. I should
otherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!"
Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
with which she had the next moment condolingly pressed his own. "Dear
friend, dear friend!"--she was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be
still more so: which was what made her immediately continue. "Or
wouldn't you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine with
me _tête-à-tête?_"
It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her--making the
difference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rather
mystified him. This however didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall
you mind if I don't tell you at once?"
"Not in the least--leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and you
needn't even send me word. I only _will_ mention that to-day, of all
days, I shall otherwise sit there alone."
Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"
"Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs. Lowder, "is spending her
Christmas in the bosom of her more immediate family."
He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his face might show. "You
mean she has left you?"
Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the enquiry with a
consciousness in which he saw a reflexion of events. He was made sure
by it, even at the moment and as he had never been before, that since
he had known these two women no confessed nor commented tension, no
crisis of the cruder sort would really have taken form between them:
which was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered her boat. The
situation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's present expression lighted up by
contrast that superficial smoothness; which afterwards, with his time
to think of it, was to put before him again the art, the particular
gift, in the girl, now so placed and classed, so intimately familiar
for him, as her talent for life. The peace, within a day or two--since
his seeing her last--had clearly been broken; differences, deep down,
kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as deep, had been shaken to
the surface by some exceptional jar; with which, in addition, he felt
Lord Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season vaguely
associated. The talent for life indeed, it at the same time struck him,
would probably have shown equally in the breach, or whatever had
occurred; Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a strain rather than a
stroke. Of these quick thoughts, at all events, that lady was already
abreast. "She went yesterday morning--and not with my approval, I don't
mind telling you--to her sister: Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean,
who lives somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs--that I
should have to say such things to-day!--are a constant worry; so that
Kate, in consequence--well, of events!--has simply been called in. My
own idea, I'm bound to say, was that with _such_ events she need have,
in her situation, next to nothing to do."
"But she differed with you?"
"She differed with me. And when Kate differs with you--!"
"Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point in the scale of hypocrisy
at which he could ask himself why a little more or less should signify.
Besides, with the intention he had had he _must_ know. Kate's move, if
he didn't know, might simply disconcert him; and of being disconcerted
his horror was by this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don't
allude to events at all calamitous."
"No--only horrid and vulgar."
"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure, had discovered in
free speech to him a momentary balm. "They've the misfortune to have, I
suppose you know, a dreadful horrible father."
"Oh!" said Densher again.
"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come upon Marian, and Marian
has shrieked for help."
Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his curiosity compromised
for an instant with his discretion. "Come upon her--for money?"
"Oh for that of course always. But, at _this_ blessed season, for
refuge, for safety: for God knows what. He's _there_, the brute. And
Kate's with them. And that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the
steps, "is her Christmas."
She had stopped again at the bottom while he thought of an answer.
"Yours then is after all rather better."
"It's at least more decent." And her hand once more came out. "But why
do I talk of _our_ troubles? Come if you can."
He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."
"And now--I dare say--you'll go to church?"
She had asked it, with her good intention, rather in the air and by way
of sketching for him, in the line of support, something a little more
to the purpose than what she had been giving him. He felt it as
finishing off their intensities of expression that he found himself to
all appearance receiving her hint as happy. "Why yes--I think I will":
after which, as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had opened
from within, he was free to turn his back. He heard the door, behind
him, sharply close again and the vehicle move off in another direction
than his own.
He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed he
was at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to the
south. That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because
there had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finally
talked, an instant recognition of his necessary course. Nothing was
open to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than the
influence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself that
possessed him. Her complications, which had fairly, with everything
else, an awful sound--what were they, a thousand times over, but his
own? His present business was to see that they didn't escape an hour
longer taking their proper place in his life. He accordingly would have
held his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he had just lied
to Mrs. Lowder--a term it perversely eased him to keep using--even more
than was necessary. To what church was he going, to what church, in
such a state of his nerves, _could_ he go?--he pulled up short again,
as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowder's carriage, to ask it. And
yet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word. He
was just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and he
bethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. He
had but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon before
it. At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really--as it
struck him--consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid
service--the flocking crowd told of it--which glittered and resounded,
from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of
organ and choir. It didn't match his own day, but it was much less of a
discord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory in
short, to make him right, would do.
IV
The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon--dusk thick from an
early hour--had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in
Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt
independently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club
library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while,
closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the
night. Before doing this indeed he had written--it was the first thing
he did--a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place,
he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.
He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to
trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return
with a gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to face with
Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief that
his notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extent
prepared; which simplified a little--if a little, at the present pass,
counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of
his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp
and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen
her. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt's
pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied
ceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as
the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a
still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with
her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs.
Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not
flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
stranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making the
best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing
was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a
stranger in it than she.
A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprang
from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by
the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,
for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the
case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The
curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed
circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the
florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many
mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.
Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements
Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point
of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they
asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly
having a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them in
reference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing to
him, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.
He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly played
him, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very specially
sorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start in
the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he
might say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but it
wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow
make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, that
is, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as
what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he
took in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creature
she was if what was just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't made
for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the
same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her
companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with
assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt
her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel
her and how above all must she not feel them?
Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted the
tall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination but
the fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet
left play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their trouble
and failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.
So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given their
conditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
nothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she might
be able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look at
her that his promptitude was already having for her its principal
reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," he
explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rather
gathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as she
did tell me, so suddenly come here."
"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contracted
firelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.
He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett's
door. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it's
what _you_ mean."
"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,
after a pause during which she waited, was apparently not the rest of
that. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.
But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will have
taken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.
Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situation
bequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn't
stay."
Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense that
he was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"
"No--I've had no telegram."
She wondered. "But not a letter--?"
"Not from Mrs. Stringham--no." He failed again however to develop
this--for which her forbearance from another question gave him
occasion. From whom then had he heard? He might at last, confronted
with her, really have been gaining time; and as if to show that she
respected this impulse she made her enquiry different. "Should you like
to go out to her--to Mrs. Stringham?"
About that at least he was clear. "Not at all. She's alone, but she's
very capable and very courageous. Besides--!" He had been going on, but
he dropped.
"Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of course one remembers
Eugenio."
She had uttered the words as definitely to show them for not untender;
and he showed equally every reason to assent. "One remembers him
indeed, and with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value to
her--he's capable of anything. What I was going to say," he went on,
"is that some of their people from America must quickly arrive."
On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to satisfy him. "Mr.
Someone-or-other, the person principally in charge of Milly's
affairs--her first trustee, I suppose--had just got there at Mrs.
Stringham's last writing."
"Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to me--I mean the last
time before this morning. I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said,
"they'll do."
"Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as if it wasn't what each
was most thinking of. Kate presently got however a step nearer to that.
"But if you had been wired to by nobody what then this morning had
taken you to Sir Luke?"
"Oh something else--which I'll presently tell you. It's what made me
instantly need to see you; it's what I've come to speak to you of. But
in a minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at seeing you in
this place." He got up as he spoke; she herself remained perfectly
still. His movement had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with
his back to it, to look down on her from where he stood, he confined
himself to his point. "Is it anything very bad that has brought you?"
He had now in any case said enough to justify her wish for more; so
that, passing this matter by, she pressed her own challenge. "Do you
mean, if I may ask, that _she_, dying--?" Her face, wondering, pressed
it more than her words.
"Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said. "What has come to me
is what, as I say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind letting
you know," he went on, "that my decision to do this took for me last
night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." And
he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her
as mechanical.
She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really went
with her. "You didn't want to come?"
"It would have been simple, my dear"--and he continued to smile--"if it
had been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took,
I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult and
portentous forms. It came up for me really--well, not at all for my
happiness."
This word apparently puzzled her--she studied him in the light of it.
"You look upset--you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."
"Oh--well enough!"
But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."
"My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn't
so simple even as that."
She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,
with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient and
still. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite
at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And
then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved
explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You
_haven't_ decided what to do."
She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly
say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.
Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for
you--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one
part of the room to another.
"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awful
you've had to come?"
"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.
Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor
whatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.
And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a
little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."
"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! I
suppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd
a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which he
as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I
oughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.
She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything
very awful?"
"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if
you find my idea--"
He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of
impatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find it
anything at all till I know what you're talking about."
It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by
making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,
turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a
recall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and
storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as
Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he
might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow
the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he
stopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can't
possibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.
The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for
anything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as if
she'd understand.
It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took an
instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in
the world like her?"
"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was
never any one in the world like her."
Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the
unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her
she added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what the
communication is?"
"A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.
"Do you mean a letter?"
"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."
Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"
"Oh perfectly."
It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--her
next demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"
"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,
very short ones."
"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be
enough if you're sure you remember."
"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand
in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to
Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely _for_ that. And then she
once copied me something."
"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of
your reasons. One good one's enough." To which however she added as if
precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony:
"And the writing has its usual look?"
Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It's
beautiful."
"Yes--it _was_ beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further
remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything's
possible."
"Yes, anything's possible"--he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's
what I say to myself. It's what I've been believing you," he a trifle
vaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."
She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his
pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the
room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn. He
looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid
London street--for sordid, with his other association, he felt it--as
he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of
the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness
that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of
his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so
driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him
to say he _would_; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the
inanity of such a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during these
minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly
presented--rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to
things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try
to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she
again took him up. "You received--what you spoke of--last night?"
It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet Street--earlier by an
hour than usual--I found it with some other letters on my table. But my
eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I
recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."
"One can understand." She listened with respect. His tone however was
so singular that she presently added: "You speak as if all this while
you _hadn't_ touched it."
"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touching
nothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "took
hold of it."
"Then where is it?"
"Oh I have it here."
"And you've brought it to show me?"
"I've brought it to show you."
So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities,
almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words.
She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while his
own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought.
"But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."
"I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell me nothing."
She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable
child. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You
haven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you
require don't come from your document itself." Then as he answered
nothing she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"
"I haven't read it."
She stared. "Then how am I to help you with it?"
Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, and
again he was before her. "By telling me _this_. It's something, you
know, that you wouldn't tell me the other day."
She was vague. "The other day?"
"The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's he
doing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? What
does his having been with her there mean?"
"Of whom are you talking?"
"Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"
"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
"Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing;
and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you the
question."
Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about any
hour."
"I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to his
second descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a
matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact
remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."
Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly
than the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She looked
just coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping something
back."
"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now.
All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was a
connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was
practically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her what
has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously
for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
V
Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat
down, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on me
that I must have told him?"
She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showed
he immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'
anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild
allowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reason
really--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with
him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was
knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She
stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested
her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going
to kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was
none the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock on
Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"
Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's staying there?"
"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it. "'Staying'?--since
when?"
"Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away." And then
she explained--confessing it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident--like
Aunt Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn't
after all so monstrous. _We_ stayed--and, with my having come here,
she's sorry now--because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for
the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people."
"You stayed for thinking of--Venice?"
"Of course we did. For what else? And even a little," Kate wonderfully
added--"it's true at least of Aunt Maud--for thinking of you."
He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way. But whom," he enquired,
"has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?"
"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has
some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
let--such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of
money, he hasn't had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at."
Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything? In spite of
what?"
"Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to
do that sort of thing."
"To try to get money?"
"To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has
had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days'
notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud,
who's deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: 'Come then
to Lancaster Gate--to sleep at least--till, like all the world, you go
to the country.' He was to have gone to the country--I think to
Matcham--yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was."
Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement,
beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. "Told you, you mean, so that
you needn't leave the house?"
"Yes--so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was
part of my reason."
"And _was_ it part of your reason?"
"A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here--as I knew there would
be--without it. So that," she said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm glad
I am here: even if for all the good I do--!" She implied however that
that didn't matter either. "He didn't, as you tell me, get off then to
Matcham; though he may possibly, if it is possible, be going this
afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable--and it's really, I'm
bound to say, quite amiable of him--is that he has declined to leave
Aunt Maud, as I've been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone.
If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it's a _procédé_ that won't
please her less. It's small wonder therefore that she insists, on a
dull day, in driving him about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,
"what may happen between them; but that's all I see in it."
"You see in everything, and you always did," Densher returned,
"something that, while I'm with you at least, I always take from you as
the truth itself."
She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the
sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that
seemed to show how fine she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, like
everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and,
yielding to the impulse to which he hadn't yielded just before, he laid
his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a
little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled
things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he
applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an
instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all
passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn't
prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was
enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid
connexion and as she made it sat down again. "I've been trying to place
exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were
in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me--spoke out."
"Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled round.
"Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it, by having refused
to meet him as he wanted--as he pressed--I plead guilty to being so.
Would you have liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer that
would have kept him from going?"
It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you know he was going?"
"Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that--even if it doesn't fit your
strange suppositions--I should have given him just the same answer if I
had known. If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust upon
you, that's simply because it's not a matter in the memory of which I
find a particular joy. I hope that if I've satisfied you about it," she
continued, "it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."
"Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest." But the next
moment he pursued: "He saw something. He guessed."
"If you mean," she presently returned, "that he was unfortunately the
one person we hadn't deceived, I can't contradict you."
"No--of course not. But _why_," Densher still risked, "was he
unfortunately the one person--? He's not really a bit intelligent."
"Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in
anything so unnatural as--all things considered and when it came to the
point--my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his
conviction he acted."
Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's conviction as if it
were a blot on the face of nature. "Do you mean because you had
appeared to him to have encouraged him?"
"Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where _were_ we?"
"'Where'--?"
"You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn't mattered. What
mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember
that he has had all along his impression of _you_. You can't help it,"
she said, "but you're after all--well, yourself."
"As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and
kept myself there--what," Densher asked, "did he make of that?"
"Your being in Venice and liking to be--which is never on any one's
part a monstrosity--was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite
capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."
"In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"
"No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before
what you call his second descent, hadn't convinced him--all the more
that my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back convinced." And
then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: "I mean after he
had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."
"Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.
"That you were sincere. That it was _her_ you loved." It came to him
from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found
himself yet again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return here," she
meanwhile continued, "had it from him. And that's why you're now so
well with Aunt Maud."
He only for a minute looked out in silence--after which he came away.
"And why _you_ are." It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect
between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps
rather if it hadn't been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp
because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument
so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while
they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of
everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word
might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he
drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his
waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her
eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place
and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and
unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he
thus finally spoke of was a different matter. "Did I understand from
Mrs. Lowder that your father's in the house?"
If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it was
not to take her so now. "In the house, yes. But we needn't fear his
interruption"--she spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in bed."
"Do you mean with illness?"
She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill. He's a marvel. He's
only--endless."
Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you with him?"
"Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. "By our
making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him--and for
Marian too."
"I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't--could I?--not have
come."
"No, you couldn't not have come."
"But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as possible?"
Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day, put ugly words into my
mouth. I've enough of my trouble without it."
"I know--I know!" He spoke in instant pleading. "It's all only that I'm
as troubled _for_ you. When did he come?"
"Three days ago--after he hadn't been near her for more than a year,
after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember her
existence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in."
Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such want--?"
"No, not of food, of necessary things--not even, so far as his
appearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But he
was--well, in terror."
"In terror of what?"
"I don't know. Of somebody--of something. He wants, he says, to be
quiet. But his quietness is awful."
She suffered, but he couldn't not question. "What does he do?"
It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."
Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. "What _has_ he done?"
It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face.
Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. "If you love
me--now--don't ask me about father."
He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because I love you that I'm
here. It's because I love you that I've brought you this." And he drew
from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.
But her eyes only--though he held it out--met the offer. "Why you've
not broken the seal!"
"If I had broken the seal--exactly--I should know what's within. It's
for _you_ to break the seal that I bring it."
She looked--still not touching the thing--inordinately grave. "To break
the seal of something to you from _her?_"
"Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by whatever you think
of it."
"I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you yourself think?" And then
as he didn't answer: "It seems to me _I_ think you know. You have your
instinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."
Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, an
accusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way to
face. "I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried it
out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour." He held up
his letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. "This thing
had been timed."
"For Christmas Eve?"
"For Christmas Eve."
Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season of gifts!" After which,
as he said nothing, she went on: "And had been written, you mean, while
she could write, and kept to _be_ so timed?"
Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn't reply. "What do
_you_ mean by the proof?"
"Why of the beauty with which you've been loved. But I won't," she
said, "break your seal."
"You positively decline?"
"Positively. Never." To which she added oddly: "I know without."
He had another pause. "And what is it you know?"
"That she announces to you she has made you rich."
His pause this time was longer. "Left me her fortune?"
"Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But money to a large
amount. I don't care," Kate went on, "to know how much." And her
strange smile recurred. "I trust her."
"Did she tell you?" Densher asked.
"Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought. "That wouldn't, on my
part, have been playing fair with her. And I did," she added, "play
fair."
Densher, who had believed her--he couldn't help it--continued, holding
his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had
somehow passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and that's why--since
we talk of proofs--I want to give _you_ one. I've wanted to let you
see--and in preference even to myself--something I feel as sacred."
She frowned a little. "I don't understand."
"I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can
peculiarly recognise--"
"Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he dropped.
"The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice
of an act of splendid generosity."
"And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?"
He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol of my attitude."
She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear, is that you're afraid
of yourself. You've had to take yourself in hand. You've had to do
yourself violence."
"So it is then you meet me?"
She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand
still stayed itself. "You absolutely _desire_ me to take it?"
"I absolutely desire you to take it."
"To do what I like with it?"
"Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain--pardon my
making the point--between you and me."
She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. "Trust me."
Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes
again rested on those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is to know."
"Oh I _know!_" said Merton Densher.
"Well then if we both do--!" She had already turned to the fire, nearer
to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing
into the flame. He started--but only half--as to undo her action: his
arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched,
with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. "You'll
have it all," Kate said, "from New York."
It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that
she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters--coming not as she
had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need
recognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as the
prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a
note from Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed him
by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he
had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself,
and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale's
copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the
gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the
girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's act on
receipt of the document in question--an act as to which and to the
bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature--constituted in
strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what
Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair
since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little
vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had
at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mention
of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when
they met again the subject was made present to them--at all events till
some flare of new light--only by the intensity with which it mutely
expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of
February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's
stay at Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt
which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at
Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of
them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she
really despised ideas--which she didn't; "and I've taken up with my
own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
_has_ had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she's as proud
as the deuce she'll come back when she has found some reason--having
nothing in common with her disgust--of which she can make a show. She
calls it her holiday, which she's spending in her own way--the holiday
to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the
scullery have a right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she's quite
decent; she comes often--whenever I make her a sign; and she has been
good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I
don't complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one
hoped; though I needn't, you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell _you_,
after all, you clever creature, what that was."
It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that
Densher's appearances under the good lady's roof markedly, after
Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on
his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent
was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then
acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been
painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of
which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite
high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs.
Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on
her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was
prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger
passed--he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he
would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away
westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in
this respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of
which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice
again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same
post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into the
question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly's
companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--as
a factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever it
might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest
current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned
it to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--so
that he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himself
as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the
same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce
even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he
wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental
image--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the
bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on
several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that
was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
say than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate for
him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep
within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of
these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was
none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of
publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging
to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from
view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what
Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;
in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with her
and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the
world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of
that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final
impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness
of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't
undo.
Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of
arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which
they were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that made
everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park--where Mrs.
Lowder now never drove--he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered
alleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, on
her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for
them at home--which was exactly what gave them for the first time an
appreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea--though
he didn't press it--that she had been across the town, in decency, for
a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster
Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.
It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of
cherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the way
of a large use--an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to
helping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companion
that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful
warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under
their feet. He was too horribly trusted--they had succeeded too well.
He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tying
his hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she
admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in
the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence. It was special at present--she
was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about
misapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found--and all
unconsciously now--the way to baffle them. It wasn't however that they
didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point
for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the
river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was
mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together
to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had never
been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone--he
scarce knew what to call it--had never been so bland. Not to talk of
what they _might_ have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as
if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They
concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner;
they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come
of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
off, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described their
change--had he so far faced it as to describe it--by their being so
damned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. What
danger had there ever been of their becoming rude--after each had long
since made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things he
asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.
Yet all the while too the tension had its charm--such being the
interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such
different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a
difference for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition up;
she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never been
more agreeable nor in a way--to put it prosaically--better company: he
felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis--which he
even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at
all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people
she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still have
something fresh for him; yet this was what she had--that on the top of
a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What a
person she would be if they _had_ been rich--with what a genius for the
so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house,
what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret at
once, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.
She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck
him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick,
but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the
impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.
She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came out
of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look
with which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated
prohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.
That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by
sitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The way
to pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we could
really _do_ anything it would be another matter."
He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus
a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with
her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the
objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such
consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the
day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They
contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting
are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,
actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,
something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a
thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the
precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The
thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person
he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again
the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out
of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, might
handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who
else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other
words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's
letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;
only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least
part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have
given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering
about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.
It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight
of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save
it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice
of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual
ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he
cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and
guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the
inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh,
should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which
they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one
with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't
complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.
The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion
we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it.
This would have marked immediately the difference--had there been
nothing else to do it--between their actual terms and their other
terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been
_his_ idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they
had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision,
almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air
in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in
the place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in the
way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil
symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether,
she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these
things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her
after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of
reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very
prompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break your
seal."
She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long
envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in
another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it--his
belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had
happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and
it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any
approach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and my
intention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to you
as not mine."
"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"
"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people in
New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well
and good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent it
back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with
his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."
Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage
signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is
touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of
possibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enough
for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"
"Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we
_know_--!"
"But you don't know," she said very gently.
"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the
handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but
one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in
the state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."
She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you
mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"
Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour.
"Well yes--something of that sort."
"So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--it
spoils the beauty?"
"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which I
confess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had
received it."
"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,
if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."
"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"
He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in the
air, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, I
wanted--in so good a case--to test you."
She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ a
good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,
"has ever been known."
"The better the case then the better the test!"
"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"
"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known
sooner."
"I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And
you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."
"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to
correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."
She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?
Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"
He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"
"Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not
accepting--what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in such
cases? Not taking up the bequest."
"There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "My
asking you to join with me in doing so."
Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make her
less firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
"How? By a single word."
"And what word?"
"Your consent to my giving up."
"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."
"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.
She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I
_don't_ consent?"
"Yes. I do nothing."
"That, as I understand, is accepting."
Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."
"I won't touch the money."
It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity.
"Who then in such an event _will?_"
"Any one who wants or who can."
Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the
time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_
you?"
"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through
you."
"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."
"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
"In what way?"
"In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"
he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
must feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--how
you 'have' me."
"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so
thoroughly up to it!"
"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,
as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing.
Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."
It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,
and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a
dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them
in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from
each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate
said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no
further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed
them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the
air.
There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You must
intensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."
She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;
she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is it
absolutely true--for if it is, you know, it's tremendously
interesting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she has
done for you?"
"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"
"No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"
"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?
Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."
She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't the
facts be published?"
"'Published'?"--he winced.
"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another
insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"
"Everything."
"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to
help you to renounce?"
"My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believe
that the amount of money's not small."
"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would
inevitably not be meagre."
Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she
was herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."
He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered one
of them. "Stupendous?"
"Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in her
face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less
uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled--but that
made her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it really
is must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you're
afraid of _all_ the truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
indeed can you be more? And you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be in
love with her."
"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--for
the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there.
But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; she
died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you
_did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_
us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "I
used to call her, in my stupidity--for want of anything better--a dove.
Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to _that_ they reached.
They cover us."
"They cover us," Densher said.
"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've done
for you."
His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment,
his tears. "Do I understand then--?"
"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'll
marry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
consent _you_ don't."
"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of
her high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every
penny."
Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare.
"Precisely--so that I must choose."
"You must choose."
Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it,
while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath
come slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can save
you from my choice."
"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
"Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"your
surrender of that."
"What is it then?"
"Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."
"Oh--her memory!"
"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't
be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Her
memory's your love. You _want_ no other."
He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then
he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."
"As we were?"
"As we were."
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We
shall never be again as we were!"
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
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