BOOK SIXTH
—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.
Tomorrow, 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 today 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,amof
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.17
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 J 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 peryerse. “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.an 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 tonight 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.ao 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,” Derisher 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,
ap 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 leav- ing 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 ++cid. “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 way 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 crystallized 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 recognized 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 way. 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 dong 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 today. 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 than 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 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 fraternized 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 uncriticized 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
emphasized 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 case 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 recognize 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 minutes 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 generalization 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
unmistakable. 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.”18
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 favor and how it justified Kate. This was
Milly’s tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it should now
be wholly left.