BOOK SEVENTH
—I—
When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs.
Stringham on the day of her meeting them together and bringing them
to luncheon, Milly, face to face with that companion, had had one
of those moments in which the warned, the anxious fighter of the
battle of life, as if once again feeling for the sword at his side,
carries his hand straight to the quarter of his courage. She laid
hers firmly on her heart, and the two women stood there showing
each other a strange front. Susan Shepherd had received their great
doctor’s visit, which had been clearly no small affair for her; but
Milly had since then, with insistence, kept in place, against
communication and betrayal, as she now practically confessed, the
barrier of their invited guests. “You’ve been too dear. With what I
see you’re full of you treated them beautifully. Isn’t Kate
charming when she wants to be?”
Poor Susie’s expression, contending at first, as in
a high fine spasm, with different dangers, had now quite let itself
go. She had to make an effort to reach a point in space already so
remote. “Miss Croy? Oh she was pleasant and clever. She knew,” Mrs.
Stringham added. “She knew.”
Milly braced herself—but conscious above all, at
the moment, of a high compassion for her mate. She made her out as
struggling—struggling in all her nature against the betrayal of
pity, which in itself, given her nature, could only be a torment.
Milly gathered from the struggle how much there was of the pity,
and how therefore it was both in her tenderness and in her
conscience that Mrs. Stringham suffered. Wonderful and beautiful it
was that this impression instantly steadied the girl. Ruefully
asking herself on what basis of ease, with the drop of their
barrier, they were to find themselves together, she felt the
question met with a relief that was almost joy. The basis, the
inevitable basis, was that she was going to be sorry for Susie,
who, to all appearance, had been condemned in so much more
uncomfortable a manner to be sorry for her. Mrs. Stringham’s
sorrow would hurt Mrs. Stringham, but how could her own ever hurt?
She had, the poor girl, at all events, on the spot, five minutes of
exaltation in which she turned the tables on her friend with a pass
of the hand, a gesture of an energy that made a wind in the air.
“Kate knew,” she asked, “that you were full of Sir Luke
Strett?”
“She spoke of nothing, but she was gentle and nice;
she seemed to want to help me through.” Which the good lady had no
sooner said, however, than she almost tragically gasped at herself.
She glared at Milly with a pretended pluck. “What I mean is that
she saw one had been taken up with something. When I say she knows
I should say she’s a person who guesses.” And her grimace was also,
on its side, heroic. “But she doesn’t matter, Milly.”
The girl felt she by this time could face anything.
“Nobody matters, Susie. Nobody.” Which her next words, however,
rather contradicted. “Did he take it ill that I wasn’t here to see
him? Wasn’t it really just what he wanted—to have it out, so much
more simply, with you?”
“We didn’t have anything ‘out,’ Milly,” Mrs.
Stringham delicately quavered.
“Didn’t he awfully like you,” Milly went on, “and
didn’t he think you the most charming person I could possibly have
referred him to for an account of me? Didn’t you hit it off
tremendously together and in fact fall quite in love, so that it
will really be a great advantage for you to have me as a common
ground? You’re going to make, I can see, no end of a good thing of
me.”
“My own child, my own child!” Mrs. Stringham
pleadingly murmured; yet showing as she did so that she feared the
effect even of deprecation.
“Isn’t he beautiful and good too
himself?—altogether, whatever he may say, a lovely acquaintance to
have made? You’re just the right people for me—I see it now; and do
you know what, between you, you must do?” Then as Susie still but
stared, wonderstruck and holding herself: “You must simply see me
through. Any way you choose. Make it out together. I, on my side,
will be beautiful too, and we’ll be—the three of us, with whatever
others, oh as many as the case requires, any one you like!—a sight
for the gods. I’ll be as easy for you as carrying a feather.” Susie
took it for a moment in such silence that her young friend almost
saw her—and scarcely withheld the observation—as taking it for “a
part of the disease.” This accordingly helped Milly to be, as she
judged, definite and wise. “He’s at any rate awfully interesting,
isn’t he?—which is so much to the good. We haven’t at least—as we
might have, with the way we tumbled into it—got hold of one of the
dreary.”
“Interesting, dearest?”—Mrs. Stringham felt her
feet firmer. “I don’t know if he’s interesting or not; but I do
know, my own,” she continued to quaver, “that he’s just as much
interested as you could possibly desire.”
“Certainly—that’s it. Like all the world.”
“No, my precious, not like all the world. Very much
more deeply and intelligently.”
“Ah there you are!” Milly laughed. “That’s the way,
Susie, I want you. So ‘buck’ up, my dear. We’ll have beautiful
times with him. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worrying, Milly.” And poor Susie’s face
registered the sublimity of her lie.
It was at this that, too sharply penetrated, her
companion went to her, met by her with an embrace in which things
were said that exceeded speech. Each held and clasped the other as
if to console her for this unnamed woe, the woe for Mrs. Stringham
of learning the torment of helplessness, the woe for Milly of
having her, at such a time, to think of. Milly’s assumption was
immense, and the difficulty for her friend was that of not being
able to gainsay it without bringing it more to the proof than
tenderness and vagueness could permit. Nothing in fact came to the
proof between them but that they could thus cling together—except
indeed that, as we have indicated, the pledge of protection and
support was all the younger woman’s own. “I don’t ask you,” she
presently said, “what he told you for yourself, nor what he told
you to tell me, nor how he took it, really, that I had left him to
you, nor what passed between you about me in any way. It wasn’t to
get that out of you that I took my means to make sure of your
meeting freely—for there are things I don’t want to know. I shall
see him again and again and shall know more than enough. All I do
want is that you shall see me through on his basis, whatever it is;
which it’s enough—for the purpose—that you yourself should know:
that is with him to show you how. I’ll make it charming for
you—that’s what I mean; I’ll keep you up to it in such a way that
half the time you won’t know you’re doing it. And for that you’re
to rest upon me. There. It’s understood. We keep each other going,
and you may absolutely feel of me that I shan’t break down. So,
with the way you haven’t so much as a dig of the elbow to fear, how
could you be safer?”
“He told me I can help you—of course he told me
that,” Susie, on her side, eagerly contended. “Why shouldn’t he,
and for what else have I come out with you? But he told me nothing
dreadful-nothing, nothing, nothing,” the poor lady passionately
protested. “Only that you must do as you like and as he tells
you—which is just simply to do as you like.”
“I must keep in sight of him. I must from time to
time go to him. But that’s of course doing as I like. It’s lucky,”
Milly smiled, “that I like going to him.”
Mrs. Stringham was here in agreement; she gave a
clutch at the account of their situation that most showed it was
workable. “That’s what will be charming for me, and what I’m
sure he really wants of me—to help you do as you like.”
“And also a little, won’t it be,” Milly laughed,
“to save me from the consequences? Of course,” she added, “there
must first be things I like.”
“Oh I think you’ll find some,” Mrs. Stringham more
bravely said. “I think there are some—as for instance just
this one. I mean,” she explained, “really having us so.”
Milly thought. “Just as if I wanted you comfortable
about him, and him the same about you? Yes—I shall get the good of
it.”
Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this into a
slight confusion. “Which of them are you talking of?”
Milly wondered an instant—then had a light. “I’m
not talking of Mr. Densher.” With which moreover she showed
amusement. “Though if you can be comfortable about Mr. Densher too
so much the better.”
“Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he’s a
fine type. Do you know,” Susie continued, “whom he reminds me of?
Of our great man—Dr. Buttrick of Boston.”
Milly recognized Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she
dropped him after a tributary pause. “What do you think, now that
you’ve seen him, of Mr. Densher?”
It was not till after consideration, with her eyes
fixed on her friend’s, that Susie produced her answer. “I think
he’s very handsome.”
Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a
little the manner of a teacher with a pupil. “Well, that will do
for the first time. I have done,” she went on, “what I
wanted.”
“Then that’s all we want. You see there are
plenty of things.”
Milly shook her head for the “plenty.” “The best is
not to know—that includes them all. I don’t—I don’t know. Nothing
about anything—except that you’re with me. Remember that,
please. There won’t be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall
forget. So it’s all right.”
The effect of it by this time was fairly, as
intended, to sustain Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into
the reassuring. “Most certainly it’s all right. I think you ought
to understand that he sees no reason—”
“Why I shouldn’t have a grand long life?” Milly had
taken it straight up, as to understand it and for a moment consider
it. But she disposed of it otherwise. “Oh of course I know that.”
She spoke as if her friend’s point were small.
Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. “Well, what I
mean is that he didn’t say to me anything that he hasn’t said to
yourself.”
“Really?—I would in his place!” She might have been
disappointed, but she had her good humour. “He tells me to
live”—and she oddly limited the word.
It left Susie a little at sea. “Then what do you
want more?”
“My dear,” the girl presently said, “I don’t
‘want,’ as I assure you, anything. Still,” she added, “I am
living. Oh yes, I’m living.”
It put them again face to face, but it had wound
Mrs. Stringham up. “So am I then, you’ll see!”—she spoke with the
note of her recovery. Yet it was her wisdom now—meaning by it as
much as she did—not to say more than that. She had risen by Milly’s
aid to a certain command of what was before them; the ten minutes
of their talk had in fact made her more distinctly aware of the
presence in her mind of a new idea. It was really perhaps an old
idea with a new value; it had at all events begun during the last
hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a special light.
That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
descended—a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
cleared; and Susan Shepherd’s star from this time on continued to
twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with
Milly, the one spark left in the heavens. She recognized, as she
continued to watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir
Luke Strett’s visit and that the impressions immediately following
had done no more than fix it. Milly’s reappearance with Mr. Densher
at her heels—or, so oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy’s heels, Miss Croy
being at Milly’s—had contributed to this effect, though it was only
with the lapse of the greater obscurity that Susie made that out.
The obscurity had reigned during the hour of their friends’ visit,
faintly clearing indeed while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croy’s
remarkable advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and the
young man were conjoined in the other. If it hadn’t acquired on the
spot all the intensity of which it was capable, this was because
the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom, the gloom the great
benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
The intensity the circumstance in question might
wear to the informed imagination would have been sufficiently
revealed for us, no doubt—and with other things to our purpose—in
two or three of those confidential passages with Mrs. Lowder that
she now permitted herself. She hadn’t yet been so glad that she
believed in her old friend; for if she hadn’t had, at such a pass,
somebody or other to believe in she should certainly have stumbled
by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of silence; silence
was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper, however
tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate the
morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
Manningham’s own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things
that she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly
to give—the regularity depending of course much on such tests of
merit as might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She
never spared herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of
how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most
part found herself able to make. What had happened at present was
that nothing, as she felt, was left of her to report to; she was
all too sunk in the inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account
of herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first
installment of it to her hostess was that she must please let her
cry. She couldn’t cry, with Milly in observation, at the hotel,
which she had accordingly left for that purpose; and the power
happily came to her with the good opportunity. She cried and cried
at first—she confined herself to that; it was for the time the best
statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover intelligently took
it as such, though knocking off a note or two more, as she said,
while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the contagion of
tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor’s most vivid
plea for it. “I shall never be able, you know, to cry again—at
least not ever with her; so I must take it out when I can. Even if
she does herself it won’t be for me to give away; for what would
that be but a confession of despair? I’m not with her for that—I’m
with her to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won’t cry
herself.”
“I’m sure I hope,” said Mrs. Lowder, “that she
won’t have occasion to.”
“She won’t even if she does have occasion. She
won’t shed a tear. There’s something that will prevent her.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Lowder.
“Yes, her pride,” Mrs. Stringham explained in spite
of her friend’s doubt, and it was with this that her communication
took consistent form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had
hinted, that kept her from crying when other things made for
it; it had only been that these same things, at such times, made
still more for business, arrangements, correspondence, the ringing
of bells, the marshalling of servants, the taking of decisions. “I
might be crying now,” she said, “if I weren’t writing letters”—and
this quite without harshness for her anxious companion, to whom she
allowed just the administrative margin for difference. She had
interrupted her no more than she would have interrupted the
piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when Mrs. Lowder, to save
appearances and catch the post, had, with her addressed and stamped
notes, met at the door of the room the footman summoned by the
pressure of a knob, the facts of the case were sufficiently ready
for her. It took but two or three, however, given their importance,
to lay the ground for the great one—Mrs. Stringham’s interview of
the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her about
Milly.
“He had wished it himself?”
“I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was.
He stayed a quarter of an hour. I could see that for him it
was long. He’s interested,” said Mrs. Stringham.
“Do you mean in her case?”
“He says it isn’t a case.”
“What then is it?”
“It isn’t, at least,” Mrs. Stringham explained,
“the case she believed it to be—though it at any rate might
be—when, without my knowledge, she went to see him. She went
because there was something she was afraid of, and he examined her
thoroughly—he has made sure. She’s wrong—she hasn’t what she
thought.”
“And what did she think?” Mrs. Lowder
demanded.
“He didn’t tell me.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“I asked nothing,” said poor Susie—“I only took
what he gave me. He gave me no more than he had to—he was
beautiful,” she went on. “He is, thank God, interested.”
“He must have been interested in you, dear,” Maud
Manningham observed with kindness.
Her visitor met it with candor. “Yes, love, I think
he is. I mean that he sees what he can do with me.”
Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. “For
her.”
“For her. Anything in the world he will or he must.
He can use me to the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says
the great thing for her is to be happy.”
“It’s surely the great thing for every one. Why,
therefore,” Mrs. Lowder handsomely asked, “should we cry so hard
about it?”
“Only,” poor Susie wailed, “that it’s so strange,
so beyond us. I mean if she can’t be.”
“She must be.” Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles.
“She shall be.”
“Well—if you’ll help. He thinks, you know, we can
help.”
Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way,
what Sir Luke Strett thought. She sat back there, her knees apart,
not unlike a picturesque ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while
her friend, before her, dropped their items, tossed the separate
truths of the matter one by one, into her capacious apron. “But is
that all he came to you for—to tell you she must be happy?”
“That she must be made so—that’s the point.
It seemed enough, as he told me,” Mrs. Stringham went on; “he makes
it somehow such a grand possible affair.”
“Ah well, if he makes it possible!”
“I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to
me, that is, as my part. The rest’s his own.”
“And what’s the rest?” Mrs. Lowder asked.
“I don’t know. His business. He means to
keep hold of her.”
“Then why do you say it isn’t a ‘case’? It must be
very much of one.”
Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the
extent of it. “It’s only that it isn’t the case she herself
supposed.”
“It’s another?”
“It’s another.”
“Examining her for what she supposed he finds
something else?”
“Something else.”
“And what does he find?”
“Ah,” Mrs. Stringham cried, “God keep me from
knowing!”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
But poor Susie had recovered herself. “What I mean
is that if it’s there I shall know in time. He’s considering, but I
can trust him for it—because he does, I feel, trust me. He’s
considering,” she repeated.
“He’s in other words not sure?”
“Well, he’s watching. I think that’s what he means.
She’s to get away now, but to come back to him in three
months.”
“Then I think,” said Maud Lowder, “that he oughtn’t
meanwhile to scare us.”
It roused Susie a little, Susie, being already
enrolled in the great doctor’s cause. This came out at least in her
glimmer of reproach. “Does it scare us to enlist us for her
happiness?”
Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. “Yes; it
scares me. I’m always scared—I may call it so—till I
understand. What happiness is he talking about?”
Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. “Oh you
know!”
She had really said it so that her friend had to
take it; which the latter in fact after a moment showed herself as
having done. A strange light humour in the matter even perhaps
suddenly aiding, she met it with a certain accommodation. “Well,
say one seems to see. The point is—!” But, fairly too full now of
her question, she dropped.
“The point is will it cure?”
“Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy—the
specific?”
“Well, I should think we might know!” Mrs.
Stringham delicately declared.
“Ah but we haven’t the complaint.”
“Have you never, dearest, been in love?” Susan
Shepherd inquired.
“Yes, my child; but not by the doctor’s
direction.”
Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break
into momentary mirth, which operated—and happily too—as a challenge
to her visitor’s spirit. “Oh of course we don’t ask his leave to
fall. But it’s something to know he thinks it good for us.”
“My dear woman,” Mrs. Lowder cried, “it strikes me
we know it without him. So that when that’s all he has to
tell us—!”
“Ah,” Mrs. Stringham interposed, “it isn’t ‘all.’ I
feel Sir Luke will have more; he won’t have put me off with
anything inadequate. I’m to see him again; he as good as told me
that he’ll wish it. So it won’t be for nothing.”
“Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has
somebody of his own to propose? Do you mean you told him
nothing?”
Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. “I
showed him I understood him. That was all I could do. I didn’t feel
at liberty to be explicit; but I felt, even though his visit so
upset me, the comfort of what I had from you night before
last.”
“What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had
left her with Kate?”
“You had seen, apparently, in three minutes.
And now that he’s here, now that I’ve met him and had my impression
of him, I feel,” said Mrs. Stringham, “that you’ve been
magnificent.”
“Of course I’ve been magnificent. When,” asked Maud
Manningham, “was I anything else? But Milly won’t be, you know, if
she marries Merton Densher.”
“Oh it’s always magnificent to marry the man one
loves. But we’re going fast!” Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
“The thing is to go fast if I see the case right.
What had I after all but my instinct of that on coming back with
you, night before last, to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt—I knew
in my bones the man had returned.”
“That’s just where, as I say, you’re magnificent.
But wait,” said Mrs. Stringham, “till you’ve seen him.”
“I shall see him immediately”—Mrs. Lowder took it
up with decision. “What is then,” she asked, “your
impression?”
Mrs. Stringham’s impression seemed lost in her
doubts. “How can he ever care for her?”
Her companion, in her companion’s heavy manner, sat
on it. “By being put in the way of it.”
“For God’s sake then,” Mrs. Stringham wailed,
“put him in the way! You have him, one feels, in your
hand.”
Maud Lowder’s eyes at this rested on her friend’s.
“Is that your impression of him?”
“It’s my impression, dearest, of you. You handle
every one.”
Mrs. Lowder’s eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd
now felt, for a wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased
her. But there was a great limitation. “I don’t handle Kate.”
It suggested something that her visitor hadn’t yet
had from her—something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp.
“Do you mean Kate cares for him?”
That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this
moment, as we know, enshrouded, and her friend’s quick question had
produced a change in her face. She blinked—then looked at the
question hard; after which, whether she had inadvertently betrayed
herself or had only reached a decision and then been affected by
the quality of Mrs. Stringham’s surprise, she accepted all results.
What took place in her for Susan Shepherd was not simply that she
made the best of them, but that she suddenly saw more in them to
her purpose than she could have imagined. A certain impatience in
fact marked in her this transition: she had been keeping back, very
hard, an important truth, and wouldn’t have liked to hear that she
hadn’t concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless felt herself pass
as not a little of a fool with her for not having thought of it.
What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present, in the
quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate’s dissimulation. She
had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
“Kate thinks she cares. But she’s mistaken. And no one knows it.”
These things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder’s retort.
Yet they weren’t all of it. “You don’t know it—that must be your
line. Or rather your line must be that you deny it utterly.”
“Deny that she cares for him?”
“Deny that she so much as thinks that she does.
Positively and absolutely. Deny that you’ve so much as heard of
it.”
Susie faced this new duty. “To Milly, you mean—if
she asks?”
“To Milly, naturally. No one else will
ask.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, “Milly
won’t.”
Mrs. Lowder wondered. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for
me. I lie badly.”
“I lie well, thank God,” Mrs. Lowder almost
snorted, “when, as sometimes will happen, there’s nothing else so
good. One must always do the best. But without lies then,” she went
on, “perhaps we can work it out.” Her interest had risen; her
friend saw her, as within some minutes, more enrolled and
inflamed—presently felt in her what had made the difference. Mrs.
Stringham, it was true, descried this at the time but dimly; she
only made out at first that Maud had found a reason for helping
her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud too, for
which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying. What
really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a
little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this
appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The
truth about Kate’s delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion
about the state of her affections, which might be removed-this was
apparently the ground on which they now might more intimately meet.
Mrs. Stringham saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate’s
delusion—by arts, however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed
to compass. Or was it perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr.
Densher’s?—success in which indeed might entail other successes.
Before that job, unfortunately, her heart had already failed. She
felt that she believed in her bones what Milly believed, and what
would now make working for Milly such a dreadful upward tug. All
this within her was confusedly present—a cloud of questions out of
which Maud Manningham’s large seated self loomed, however, as a
mass more and more definite, taking in fact for the consultative
relation something of the form of an oracle. From the oracle the
sound did come—or at any rate the sense did, a sense all accordant
with the insufflation she had just seen working. “Yes,” the sense
was, “I’ll help you for Milly, because if that comes off I shall be
helped, by its doing so, for Kate”—a view into which Mrs. Stringham
could now sufficiently enter. She found herself of a sudden,
strange to say, quite willing to operate to Kate’s harm, or at
least to Kate’s good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured
it. She found herself in short not caring what became of Kate—only
convinced at bottom of the predominance of Kate’s star. Kate wasn’t
in danger, Kate wasn’t pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened,
would take care of Kate Croy. She saw moreover by this time that
her friend was traveling even beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had
already, in mind, drafted a rough plan of action, a plan vividly
enough thrown off as she said: “You must stay on a few days, and
you must immediately, both of you, meet him at dinner.” In addition
to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an instinct of pity,
of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to prepare that
ground. “The poor child, when I was with her there while you were
getting your shawl, quite gave herself away to me.”
“Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me.
Though it was nothing more,” Susie did herself the justice to
observe, “than what I too had quite felt.”
But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she
wondered what she had said. “I suppose I ought to be edified at
what you can so beautifully give up.”
“Give up?” Mrs. Stringham echoed. “Why, I give up
nothing—I cling.”
Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with
some stiffness to her great brass-bound cylinder-desk and giving a
push to an object or two disposed there. “I give up then. You know
how little such a person as Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her.
You know what I’ve been thinking perfectly possible.”
“Oh you’ve been great”—Susie was perfectly fair. “A
duke, a duchess, a princess, a palace: you’ve made me believe in
them too. But where we break down is that she doesn’t
believe in them. Luckily for her—as it seems to be turning out—she
doesn’t want them. So what’s one to do? I assure you I’ve had many
dreams. But I’ve only one dream now.”
Mrs. Stringham’s tone in these last words gave so
fully her meaning that Mrs. Lowder could but show herself as taking
it in. They sat a moment longer confronted on it. “Her having what
she does want?”
“If it will do anything for her.”
Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do; but
she spoke for the instant of something else. “It does provoke me a
bit, you know—for of course I’m a brute. And I had thought of all
sorts of things. Yet it doesn’t prevent the fact that we must be
decent.”
“We must take her”—Mrs. Stringham carried that
out—“as she is.”
“And we must take Mr. Densher as he is.” With which
Mrs. Lowder gave a sombre laugh. “It’s a pity he isn’t
better!”
“Well, if he were better,” her friend rejoined,
“you’d have liked him for your niece; and in that case Milly would
interfere. I mean,” Susie added, “interfere with you.”
“She interferes with me as it is—not that it
matters now. But I saw Kate and her—really as soon as you came to
me—set up side by side. I saw your girl—I don’t mind telling
you—helping my girl; and when I say that,” Mrs. Lowder continued,
“you’ll probably put in for yourself that it was part of the reason
of my welcome to you. So you see what I give up. I do give it up.
But when I take that line,” she further set forth, “I take it
handsomely. So good-bye to it all. Good-day to Mrs. Densher!
Heavens!” she growled.
Susie held herself a minute. “Even as Mrs. Densher
my girl will be somebody.”
“Yes, she won’t be nobody. Besides,” said Mrs.
Lowder, “we’re talking in the air.”
Her companion sadly assented. “We’re leaving
everything out.”
“It’s nevertheless interesting.” And Mrs. Lowder
had another thought. “He’s not quite nobody either.” It brought her
back to the question she had already put and which her friend
hadn’t at the time dealt with. “What in fact do you make of
him?”
Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even
to herself, was moved a little to caution. So she remained general.
“He’s charming.”
She had met Mrs. Lowder’s eyes with that extreme
pointedness in her own to which people resort when they are not
quite candid—a circumstance that had its effect. “Yes; he’s
charming.”
The effect of the words, however, was equally
marked; they almost determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of
amusement. “I thought you didn’t like him!”
“I don’t like him for Kate.”
“But you don’t like him for Milly either.”
Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend
also got up. “I like him, my dear, for myself.”
“Then that’s the best way of all.”
“Well, it’s one way. He’s not good enough for my
niece, and he’s not good enough for you. One’s an aunt, one’s a
wretch and one’s a fool.”
“Oh I’m not—not either,” Susie
declared.
But her companion kept on. “One lives for others.
You do that. If I were living for myself I shouldn’t at all mind
him.”
But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. “Ah if I find him
charming it’s however I’m living.”
Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but
an instant, giving herself away with a laugh. “Of course he’s all
right in himself.”
“That’s all I contend,” Susie said with more
reserve; and the note in question—what Merton Densher was “in
himself”—closed practically, with some inconsequence, this first of
their councils.
—II—
It had at least made the difference for
them, they could feel, of an informed state in respect to the great
doctor, whom they were now to take as watching, waiting, studying,
or at any rate as proposing to himself some such process before he
should make up his mind. Mrs. Stringham understood him as
considering the matter meanwhile in a spirit that, on this same
occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come back to a rough notation
of before retiring. She followed the course of his reckoning. If
what they had talked of could happen—if Milly, that is,
could have her thoughts taken off herself—it wouldn’t do any harm
and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn’t happen—if,
anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined,
could do nothing to contribute to it—they would be in no worse a
box than before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had
her free range for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done
her best in the sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end
to her eminent man, would—besides having more to show him—find him
more ready to go on with her. It was visible further to Susan
Shepherd—as well as being ground for a second report to her old
friend—that Milly did her part for a working view of the general
case, inasmuch as she mentioned frankly and promptly that she meant
to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke Strett and thank him. She even
specified what she was to thank him for, his having been so easy
about her behaviour.
“You see I didn’t know that—for the liberty I
took—I shouldn’t afterwards get a stiff note from him.”
So much Milly had said to her, and it had made her
a trifle rash. “Oh you’ll never get a stiff note from him in your
life.”
She felt her rashness, the next moment, at her
young friend’s question. “Why not, as well as any one else who has
played him a trick?”
“Well, because he doesn’t regard it as a trick. He
could understand your action. It’s all right, you see.”
“Yes—I do see. It is all right. He’s easier with me
than with any one else, because that’s the way to let me down. He’s
only making believe, and I’m not worth hauling up.”
Rueful at having provoked again this ominous flare,
poor Susie grasped at her only advantage. “Do you really accuse a
man like Sir Luke Strett of trifling with you?”
She couldn’t blind herself to the look her
companion gave her—a strange half-amused perception of what she
made of it. “Well, so far as it’s trifling with me to pity me so
much.”
“He doesn’t pity you,” Susie earnestly reasoned.
“He just—the same as any one else—likes you.”
“He has no business then to like me. He’s not the
same as any one else.”
“Why not, if he wants to work for you?”
Milly gave her another look, but this time a
wonderful smile. “Ah there you are!” Mrs. Stringham coloured, for
there indeed she was again. But Milly let her off. “Work for me,
all the same—work for me! It’s of course what I want.” Then as
usual she embraced her friend. “I’m not going to be as nasty as
this to him.”
“I’m sure I hope not!”—and Mrs. Stringham laughed
for the kiss. “I’ve no doubt, however, he’d take it from you! It’s
you, my dear, who are not the same as any one else.”
Milly’s assent to which, after an instant, gave her
the last word. “No, so that people can take anything from me.” And
what Mrs. Stringham did indeed resignedly take after this was the
absence on her part of an account of the visit then paid. It was
the beginning in fact between them of an odd independence—an
independence positively of action and custom—on the subject of
Milly’s future. They went their separate ways with the girl’s
intense assent; this being really nothing but what she had so
wonderfully put in her plea for after Mrs. Stringham’s first
encounter with Sir Luke. She fairly favored the idea that Susie had
or was to have other encounters—private pointed personal; she
favored every idea, but most of all the idea that she herself was
to go on as if nothing were the matter. Since she was to be worked
for that would be her way; and though her companions learned from
herself nothing of it this was in the event her way with her
medical adviser. She put her visit to him on the simplest ground;
she had come just to tell him how touched she had been by his good
nature. That required little explaining, for, as Mrs. Stringham had
said, he quite understood he could but reply that it was all
right.
“I had a charming quarter of an hour with that
clever lady. You’ve got good friends.”
“So each one of them thinks of all the others. But
so I also think,” Milly went on, “of all of them together. You’re
excellent for each other. And it’s in that way, I dare say, that
you’re best for me.”
There came to her on this occasion one of the
strangest of her impressions, which was at the same time one of the
finest of her alarms—the glimmer of a vision that if she should go,
as it were, too far, she might perhaps deprive their relation of
facility if not of value. Going too far was failing to try at least
to remain simple. He would be quite ready to hate her if she did,
by heading him off at every point, embarrass his exercise of a
kindness that, no doubt, rather constituted for him a high method.
Susie wouldn’t hate her, since Susie positively wanted to suffer
for her; Susie had a noble idea that she might somehow so do her
good. Such, however, was not the way in which the greatest of
London doctors was to be expected to wish to do it. He wouldn’t
have time even should he wish; whereby, in a word, Milly felt
herself intimately warned. Face to face there with her smooth
strong director, she enjoyed at a given moment quite such another
lift of feeling as she had known in her crucial talk with Susie. It
came round to the same thing; him too she would help to help her if
that could possibly be; but if it couldn’t possibly be she would
assist also to make this right. It wouldn’t have taken many minutes
more, on the basis in question, almost to reverse for her their
characters of patient and physician. What was he in fact but
patient, what was she but physician, from the moment she embraced
once for all the necessity, adopted once for all the policy, of
saving him alarms about her subtlety? She would leave the subtlety
to him: he would enjoy his use of it, and she herself, no doubt,
would in time enjoy his enjoyment. She went so far as to imagine
that the inward success of these reflexions flushed her for the
minute, to his eyes, with a certain bloom, a comparative appearance
of health; and what verily next occurred was that he gave colour to
the presumption. “Every little helps, no doubt!”—he noticed
good-humouredly her harmless sally. “But, help or no help, you’re
looking, you know, remarkably well.”
“Oh I thought I was,” she answered; and it was as
if already she saw his line. Only she wondered what he would have
guessed. If he had guessed anything at all it would be rather
remarkable of him. As for what there was to guess, he couldn’t—if
this was present to him—have arrived at it save by his own
acuteness. That acuteness was therefore immense; and if it supplied
the subtlety she thought of leaving him to, his portion would be
none so bad. Neither, for that matter, would hers be—which she was
even actually enjoying. She wondered if really then there mightn’t
be something for her. She hadn’t been sure in coming to him that
she was “better,” and he hadn’t used, he would be awfully careful
not to use, that compromising term about her; in spite of all of
which she would have been ready to say, for the amiable sympathy of
it, “Yes, I must be,” for he had this unaided sense of something
that had happened to her. It was a sense unaided, because who could
have told him of anything? Susie, she was certain, hadn’t yet seen
him again, and there were things it was impossible she could have
told him the first time. Since such was his penetration, therefore,
why shouldn’t she gracefully, in recognition of it, accept the new
circumstance, the one he was clearly wanting to congratulate her
on, as a sufficient cause? If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it
might produce an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a way of
nursing. “You gave me the other day,” she went on, “plenty to think
over, and I’ve been doing that—thinking it over—quite as you’ll
have probably wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to treat,”
she smiled, “since you’ve already done me so much good.”
The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that
he looked in advance so closely related to all one’s possibilities
that one missed the pleasure of really improving it. “Oh no, you’re
extremely difficult to treat. I’ve need with you, I assure you, of
all my wit.”
“Well, I mean I do come up.” She hadn’t meanwhile a
bit believed in his answer, convinced as she was that if she had
been difficult it would be the last thing he would have told her.
“I’m doing,” she said, “as I like.”
“Then it’s as I like. But you must really, though
we’re having such a decent month, get straight away.” In pursuance
of which, when she had replied with promptitude that her
departure—for the Tyrol and then for Venice—was quite fixed for the
fourteenth, he took her up with alacrity. “For Venice? That’s
perfect, for we shall meet there. I’ve a dream of it for October,
when I’m hoping for three weeks off; three weeks during which, if I
can get them clear, my niece, a young person who has quite the whip
hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I heard from her only
yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice.”
“That’s lovely then. I shall expect you there. And
anything that, in advance or in any way, I can do for you—!”
“Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for
me. But it will be capital to find you there.”
“I think it ought to make you feel,” she said after
a moment, “that I am easy to treat.”
But he shook his head again; he wouldn’t have it.
“You’ve not come to that yet.”
“One has to be so bad for it?”
“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever come to it—to ‘ease’
of treatment. I doubt if it’s possible. I’ve not, if it is, found
any one bad enough. The ease, you see, is for you.”
“I see—I see. ”
They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit
awkward pause on it; after which Sir Luke asked: “And that clever
lady—she goes with you?”
“Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She’ll stay with me,
I hope, to the end.”
He had a cheerful blankness. “To the end of
what?”
“Well—of everything.”
“Ah then,” he laughed, “you’re in luck. The end of
everything is far off. This, you know, I’m hoping,” said Sir Luke,
“is only the beginning.” And the next question he risked might have
been a part of his hope. “Just you and she together?”
“No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we’ve
seen more here than of any one and who are just the right people
for us.”
He thought a moment. “You’ll be four women together
then?”
“Ah,” said Milly, “we’re widows and orphans. But I
think,” she added as if to say what she saw would reassure him,
“that we shall not be unattractive, as we move, to gentlemen. When
you talk of ‘life’ I suppose you mean mainly gentlemen.”
“When I talk of ‘life,’ ” he made answer after a
moment during which he might have been appreciating her
raciness—“when I talk of life I think I mean more than anything
else the beautiful show of it, in its freshness, made by young
persons of your age. So go on as you are. I see more and more how
you are. You can’t,” he went so far as to say for pleasantness,
“better it.”
She took it from him with a great show of peace.
“One of our companions will be Miss Croy, who came with me here
first. It’s in her that life is splendid; and a part of that
is even that she’s devoted to me. But she’s above all magnificent
in herself. So that if you’d like,” she freely threw out, “to see
her—”
“Oh I shall like to see any one who’s devoted to
you, for clearly it will be jolly to be ‘in’ it. So that if she’s
to be at Venice I shall see her?”
“We must arrange it—I shan’t fail. She moreover has
a friend who may also be there”—Milly found herself going on to
this. “He’s likely to come, I believe, for he always follows
her.”
Sir Luke wondered. “You mean they’re lovers?”
“He is,” Milly smiled; “but not she. She doesn’t
care for him.”
Sir Luke took an interest. “What’s the matter with
him?”
“Nothing but that she doesn’t like him.”
Sir Luke kept it up. “Is he all right?”
“Oh he’s very nice. Indeed he’s remarkably
so.”
“And he’s to be in Venice?”
“So she tells me she fears. For if he is there
he’ll be constantly about with her.”
“And she’ll be constantly about with you?”
“As we’re great friends—yes.”
“Well then,” said Sir Luke, “you won’t be four
women alone.”
“Oh no; I quite recognize the chance of gentlemen.
But he won’t,” Milly pursued in the same wondrous way, “have come,
you see, for me.”
“No—I see. But can’t you help him?”
“Can’t you?” Milly after a moment quaintly
asked. Then for the joke of it she explained. “I’m putting you, you
see, in relation with my entourage.”
It might have been for the joke of it too, by this
time, that her eminent friend fell in. “But if this gentleman isn’t
of your ‘entourage’? I mean if he’s of—what do you call her?—Miss
Croy’s. Unless indeed you also take an interest in him.”
“Oh certainly I take an interest in him!”
“You think there may be then some chance for
him?”
“I like him,” said Milly, “enough to hope
so.”
“Then that’s all right. But what, pray,” Sir Luke
next asked, “have I to do with him?”
“Nothing,” said Milly, “except that if you’re to be
there, so may he be. And also that we shan’t in that case be simply
four dreary women.”
He considered her as if at this point she a little
tried his patience. “You’re the least ‘dreary’ woman I’ve
ever, ever seen. Ever, do you know? There’s no reason why you
shouldn’t have a really splendid life.”
“So every one tells me,” she promptly
returned.
“The conviction—strong already when I had seen you
once—is strengthened in me by having seen your friend. There’s no
doubt about it. The world’s before you.”
“What did my friend tell you?” Milly asked.
“Nothing that wouldn’t have given you pleasure. We
talked about you—and freely. I don’t deny that. But it shows me I
don’t require of you the impossible.”
She was now on her feet. “I think I know what you
require of me.”
“Nothing, for you,” he went on, “is impossible. So
go on.” He repeated it again—wanting her so to feel that to-day he
saw it. “You’re all right.”
“Well,” she smiled—“keep me so.”
“Oh you’ll get away from me.”
“Keep me, keep me,” she simply continued with her
gentle eyes on him.
She had given him her hand for good-bye, and he
thus for a moment did keep her. Something then, while he seemed to
think if there were anything more, came back to him; though
something of which there wasn’t too much to be made. “Of course if
there’s anything I can do for your friend: I mean the gentleman you
speak of—?” He gave out in short that he was ready.
“Oh Mr. Densher?” It was as if she had
forgotten.
“Mr. Densher—is that his name?”
“Yes—but his case isn’t so dreadful.” She had
within a minute got away from that.
“No doubt—if you take an interest.” She had got
away, but it was as if he made out in her eyes—though they also had
rather got away—a reason for calling her back. “Still, if there’s
anything one can do—?”
She looked at him while she thought, while she
smiled. “I’m afraid there’s really nothing one can do.”
—III—
Not yet so much as this morning had she
felt herself sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth
of the Southern summer was still in the high florid rooms, palatial
chambers where hard cool pavements took reflexions in their
lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water,
flickering up through open windows, played over the painted
“subjects” in the splendid ceilings—medallions of purple and brown,
of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold,
embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and
scalloped and gilded about, set in their great molded and figured
concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air)
and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller lights,
straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with the
Baedekers and photographs of Milly’s party dreadfully meeting the
eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This at last only,
though she had enjoyed the palace for three weeks, seemed to count
as effective occupation; perhaps because it was the first time she
had been alone—really to call alone—since she had left London, it
ministered to her first full and unembarrassed sense of what the
great Eugenio had done for her. The great Eugenio, recommended by
grand-dukes and Americans, had entered her service during the last
hours of all—had crossed from Paris, after multiplied
pourparlers aq with
Mrs. Stringham, to whom she had allowed more than ever a free hand,
on purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there,
and had dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the
treasures of his experience. She had judged him in advance—polyglot
and universal, very dear and very deep—as probably but a swindler
finished to the fingertips; for he was for ever carrying one
well-kept Italian hand to his heart and plunging the other straight
into her pocket, which, as she had instantly observed him to
recognize, fitted it like a glove. The remarkable thing was that
these elements of their common consciousness had rapidly gathered
into an indestructible link, formed the ground of a happy relation;
being by this time, strangely, grotesquely, delightfully, what most
kept up confidence between them and what most expressed it.19
She had seen quickly enough what was happening—the
usual thing again, yet once again. Eugenio had, in an interview of
five minutes, understood her, had got hold, like all the world, of
the idea not so much of the care with which she must be taken up as
of the care with which she must be let down. All the world
understood her, all the world had got hold; but for nobody yet, she
felt, would the idea have been so close a tie or won from herself
so patient a surrender. Gracefully, respectfully, consummately
enough—always with hands in position and the look, in his thick
neat white hair, smooth fat face and black professional, almost
theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too old to make
love, but with an art still to make money—did he on occasion convey
to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious career, the
one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal. The others
had come in the way of business, but for her his sentiment was
special. Confidence rested thus on her completely believing that:
there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It passed between
them every time they conversed; he was abysmal, but this intimacy
lived on the surface. He had taken his place already for her among
those who were to see her through, and meditation ranked him, in
the constant perspective, for the final function, side by side with
poor Susie—whom she was now pitying more than ever for having to be
herself so sorry and to say so little about it. Eugenio had the
general tact of a residuary legatee—which was a character that
could be definitely worn; whereas she could see Susie, in the event
of her death, in no character at all, Susie being insistently,
exclusively concerned in her mere makeshift duration.
This principle, for that matter, Milly at present,
with a renewed flare of fancy, felt she should herself have liked
to believe in. Eugenio had really done for her more than he
probably knew—he didn’t after all know everything—in having, for
the wind-up of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably,
so perfectly established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had
been: “At Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar
hotel; but, if it can be at all managed—you know what I mean—some
fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty
of them too, and the more interesting the better: part of a palace,
historic and picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be
to ourselves, with a cook, don’t you know?—with servants, frescoes,
tapestries, antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a
settlement.”
The proof of how he better and better understood
her was in all the lace; as to his masterly acquisition of which
she had from the first asked no questions. She had shown him enough
what she thought of it, and her forbearance pleased him; with the
part of the transaction that mainly concerned her she would soon
enough become acquainted, and his connexion with such values as she
would then find noted could scarce help growing, as it were, still
more residuary. Charming people, conscious Venice-lovers,
evidently, had given up their house to her, and had fled to a
distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes alike over what
they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what they had,
however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated, and
she now—her part of it was shameless—appropriated and enjoyed.
Palazzo Leporelli 20 held
its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a
solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about with pictures
and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was
here the presence revered and served: which brings us back to our
truth of a moment ago—the fact that, more than ever, this October
morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly to
and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the
sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour;
always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her
with penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her
best; amid voices she lost the sense. Voices had surrounded her for
weeks, and she had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had
answered back; these had been weeks in which there were other
things they might well prevent her from hearing. More than the
prospect had at first promised or threatened she had felt herself
going on in a crowd and with a multiplied escort; the four ladies
pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett and a phalanx comparatively
closed and detached had in fact proved a rolling snowball,
condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan Shepherd had
compared this portion of the girl’s excursion to the Empress
Catherine’s famous progress across the steps of Russia; improvised
settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers waiting
with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends in
fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder‘s, Kate Croy’s, her own; when the
addresses weren’t in the language of London they were in the more
insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even
by Susie’s social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels,
at Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay
to Aunt Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the
London “success” to which they had opened the door.
Mrs. Lowder’s success and Kate’s, amid the shock of
Milly’s and Mrs. Stringham’s compatriots, failed but little,
really, of the concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the
boom, over the sea, of the last great native novel. Those ladies
were “so different”—different, observably enough, from the ladies
so appraising them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of
a dozen at once sometimes, in Milly’s apartment, pointing, also at
once, that moral and many others. Milly’s companions were acclaimed
not only as perfectly fascinating in themselves, the nicest people
yet known to the acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially
speaking, for the eccentric young woman, evident initiators and
smoothers of her path, possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short
intervals, to her own sense, stood now for great differences, and
this renewed inhalation of her native air had somehow left her to
feel that she already, that she mainly, struck the compatriot as
queer and dissociated. She moved such a critic, it would appear, as
to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence induced by a want of
complete trust: all of which showed her in the light of a person
too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good time, and yet too
rich and too befriended—an intuitive cunning within her managing
this last—for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in short, by
what she made out, approved her friends for their expert wisdom
with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the
compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She
saw things in these days that she had never seen before, and she
couldn’t have said why save on a principle too terrible to name;
whereby she saw that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took
it for, nor New York what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in
coquetting with the plan of a series of American visits. The plan
might have been, humourously, on Mrs. Lowder’s part, for the
improvement of her social position—and it had verily in that
direction lights that were perhaps but half a century too prompt;
at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool controlled
facility that went so well, as the others said, with her particular
kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the person
enjoying them would dispose of disputations, speculations,
aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so
simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when
guiltless, like rather aggravated slang. It wasn’t that Kate hadn’t
pretended too that she should like to go to America; it was only
that with this young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more
than ever of late, on the theory of intimate confessions, private
frank ironies that made up for their public grimaces and amid
which, face to face, they wearily put off the mask.
These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite
become the form taken by their moments together, moments indeed not
increasingly frequent and not prolonged, thanks to the
consciousness of fatigue on Milly’s side whenever, as she herself
expressed it, she got out of harness. They flourished their masks,
the independent pair, as they might have flourished Spanish fans;
they smiled and sighed on removing them; but the gesture, the
smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been suspected the
greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we say, for the
volume of effusion in general would have been found by either on
measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of
relief. It was when they called each other’s attention to their
ceasing to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back
was most in the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and mainly
to Kate’s advantage: Milly didn’t quite see what her friend could
keep back, was possessed of, in fine, that would be so subject to
retention; whereas it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that
poor Milly had a treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a
shy, an abject affection—concealment, on that head, belonging to
quite another phase of such states; it was much rather a principle
of pride relatively bold and hard, a principle that played up like
a fine steel spring at the lightest pressure of too near a
football. Thus insuperably guarded was the truth about the girl’s
own conception of her validity; thus was a wondering pitying sister
condemned wistfully to look at her from the far side of the moat
she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of the connexion of
these young women show for us, such is the twilight that gathers
about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a Maeterlinck
play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk, of the
figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:
that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed,
hung about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly
still, and that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her
court who exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with
evening gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady,
with thick dark braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more
embroidered train, makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and
the broken talk, brief and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover
than to free their sense. This is because, when it fairly comes to
not having others to consider, they meet in an air that appears
rather anxiously to wait for their words. Such an impression as
that was in fact grave, and might be tragic; so that, plainly
enough, systematically at last, they settled to a care of what they
said.
There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in
particular, of the probability that if she wasn’t so proud she
might be pitied with more comfort—more to the person pitying; there
could be no spoken proof, no sharper demonstration than the
consistently considerate attitude, that this marvelous mixture of
her weakness and of her strength, her peril, if such it were, and
her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly interesting. Kate’s
predicament in the matter was, after all, very much Mrs.
Stringham’s own, and Susan Shepherd herself indeed, in our
Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the
moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her
sincerity about her friend, through this time, was deep, her
compassionate imagination strong; and that these things gave her a
virtue, a good conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak,
that were later to be precious to her. She grasped with her keen
intelligence the logic of their common duplicity, went unassisted
through the same ordeal as Milly’s other hushed follower, easily
saw that for the girl to be explicit was to betray divinations,
gratitudes, glimpses of the felt contrast between her fortune and
her fear—all of which would have contradicted her systematic
bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw: to recognize was to
bring down the avalanche—the avalanche Milly lived so in watch for
and that might be started by the lightest of breaths; though less
possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of the vain
sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With so
many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their
withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted,
on a nominal motive—which was decently represented by a joy at the
drop of chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their
steps, but they took the despairing view of it on purpose to have
ready, when face to face, some view or other of something. The
relief of getting out of harness—that was the moral of their
meetings; but the moral of this, in turn, was that they couldn’t so
much as ask each other why harness need be worn. Milly wore it as a
general armor.
She was out of it at present, for some reason, as
she hadn’t been for weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when
alone, and her companions had never yet so much as just now
affected her as dispersed and suppressed. It was as if still again,
still more tacitly and wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her,
taking it from her without a word and just bravely and brilliantly
in the name, for instance, of the beautiful day: “Yes, get me an
hour alone; take them off—I don’t care where; absorb, amuse, detain
them; drown them, kill them if you will: so that I may just a
little, all by myself, see where I am.” She was conscious of the
dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well as the others
to him—Susie who would have drowned her very self for her; gave her
up to a mercenary monster through whom she thus purchased respites.
Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness; strange
the flickers of fancy and the cheats of hope; yet lawful, all the
same—weren’t they? -those experiments tried with the truth that
consisted, at the worst, but in practicing on one’s self. She was
now playing with the thought that Eugenio might inclusively
assist her: he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that
were really quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of
some complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a
counter-move to fate. It had passed between them as preposterous
that with so much money she should just stupidly and awkwardly
want—any more want a life, a career, a consciousness, than
want a house, a carriage or a cook. It was as if she had had from
him a kind of expert professional measure of what he was in a
position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the thoroughness of
which, for that matter, she could closely compare with a looseness
on Sir Luke Strett’s part that—at least in Palazzo Leporelli when
mornings were fine - showed as almost amateurish. Sir Luke hadn’t
said to her “Pay enough money and leave the rest to
me”—which was distinctly what Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had
appeared indeed to speak of purchase and payment, but in reference
to a different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to be named nor
reckoned, and such moreover as she wasn’t sure of having at her
command. Eugenio—this was the difference—could name, could reckon,
and prices of his kind were things she had never suffered to scare
her. She had been willing, goodness knew, to pay enough for
anything, for everything, and here was simply a new view of the
sufficient quantity. She amused herself—for it came to that, since
Eugenio was there to sign the receipt—with possibilities of meeting
the bill. She was more prepared than ever to pay enough, and quite
as much as ever to pay too much. What else—if such were points at
which your most trusted servant failed—was the use of being, as the
dear Susies of earth called you, a princess in a palace?
She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place,
noble and peaceful while the summer sea, stirring here and there a
curtain or an outer blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had
a vision of clinging to it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She
was in it, as in the ark of her deluge, and filled with such a
tenderness for it that why shouldn’t this, in common mercy, be
warrant enough? She would never, never leave it—she would engage to
that; would ask nothing more than to sit tight in it and float on
and on. The beauty and intensity, the real momentary relief of this
conceit, reached their climax in the positive purpose to put the
question to Eugenio on his return as she had not yet put it; though
the design, it must be added, dropped a little when, coming back to
the great saloon from which she had started on her pensive
progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in Venice she had
been unaware, and who had now—while a servant was following her
through empty rooms—been asked, in her absence, to wait. He had
waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting—oh unmistakably; never
before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion
with patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the
chance, though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness.
The odd thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder
for what had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end
of five minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost
as glad to see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of
her solitude, as if he had already been in her thought or acting at
her suggestion. He was somehow, at the best, the end of a respite;
one might like him very much and yet feel that his presence
tempered precious solitude more than any other known to one: in
spite of all of which, as he was neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate,
nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for the least, dear Eugenio in
person, the sight of him did no damage to her sense of the
dispersal of her friends. She hadn’t been so thoroughly alone with
him since those moments of his showing her the great portrait at
Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the high-water-mark of
her security, the moments during which her tears themselves, those
she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her consciously rounding
her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf of comparative
ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His presence
now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how kind he
had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her, unexpectedly, at
a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for such kindness
and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she hadn’t
lost him—quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to receive
him there, to see him interested and charmed, as well, clearly, as
delighted to have found her without some other person to spoil
it—these things were so pleasant for the first minutes that they
might have represented on her part some happy foreknowledge.
She gave an account of her companions while he on
his side failed to press her about them, even though describing his
appearance, so unheralded, as the result of an impulse obeyed on
the spot. He had been shivering at Carlsbad, belated there and
blue, when taken by it; so that, knowing where they all were, he
had simply caught the first train. He explained how he had known
where they were; he had heard—what more natural?—from their
friends, Milly’s and his. He mentioned this betimes, but it was
with his mention, singularly, that the girl became conscious of her
inner question about his reason. She noticed his plural, which
added to Mrs. Lowder or added to Kate; but she presently noticed
also that it didn’t affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had written
to him, Kate apparently—and this was interesting—had written to
him; but their design presumably hadn’t been that he should come
and sit there as if rather relieved, so far as they were concerned,
at postponements. He only said “Oh!” and again “Oh!” when she
sketched their probable morning for him, under Eugenio’s care and
Mrs. Stringham‘s—sounding it quite as if any suggestion that he
should overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs would
leave him temporarily cold. This precisely it was that, after a
little, operated for Milly as an obscure but still fairly direct
check to confidence. He had known where they all were from the
others, but it was not for the others that, in his actual
dispositions, he had come. That, strange to say, was a pity; for,
stranger still to say, she could have shown him more confidence if
he himself had had less intention. His intention so chilled her,
from the moment she found herself divining it, that, just for the
pleasure of going on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of
their remembrance together of Matcham and the Bronzino, the climax
of her fortune, she could have fallen to pleading with him and to
reasoning, to undeceiving him in time. There had been, for ten
minutes, with the directness of her welcome to him and the way this
clearly pleased him, something of the grace of amends made, even
though he couldn’t know it-amends for her not having been
originally sure, for instance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud’s,
that he was adequately human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud’s
added itself to the hour at Matcham, added itself to other things,
to consolidate, for her present benevolence, the ease of their
relation, making it suddenly delightful that he had thus turned up.
He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the charm of the place: “What
a temple to taste and an expression of the pride of life, yet, with
all that, what a jolly home!-so that, for his entertainment,
she could offer to walk him about though she mentioned that she had
just been, for her own purposes, in a general prowl, taking
everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced her offer
without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find her
susceptible.
—IV—
She couldn’t have said what it was, in the
conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of
twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as
before something poignant in which her visitor also participated.
That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm—or nothing
rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it.
The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that
was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke with an ironic
smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over
Milly: “Oh the impossible romance—!” The romance for her, yet once
more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a
fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of
remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear
but the splash of the water against stone. The great floor on which
they moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy.
“Ah not to go down—never, never to go down!” she strangely sighed
to her friend.
“But why shouldn’t you,” he asked, “with that
tremendous old staircase in your court? There ought of course
always to be people at top and bottom, in Veronesear
costumes, to watch you do it.”
She shook her head both lightly and mournfully
enough at his not understanding. “Not even for people in Veronese
costumes. I mean that the positive beauty is that one needn’t go
down. I don’t move in fact,” she added—“now. I’ve not been out, you
know. I stay up. That’s how you happily found me.”
Lord Mark wondered—he was, oh yes, adequately
human. “You don’t go about?”
She looked over the place, the story above the
apartments in which she had received him, the sala corresponding to
the sala below and fronting the great canal with its gothic arches.
The casements between the arches were open, the ledge of the
balcony broad, the sweep of the canal, so overhung, admirable, and
the flutter toward them of the loose white curtain an invitation to
she scarce could have said what. But there was no mystery after a
moment; she had never felt so invited to anything as to make that,
and that only, just where she was, her adventure. It would be—to
this it kept coming back—the adventure of not stirring. “I go about
just here.”
“Do you mean,” Lord Mark presently asked, “that
you’re really not well?”
They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with
the fine old faded palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide
beneath; but after a minute, and before she answered, she had
closed her eyes to what she saw and unresistingly dropped her face
into her arms, which rested on the coping. She had fallen to her
knees on the cushion of the window-place, and she leaned there, in
a long silence, with her forehead down. She knew that her silence
was itself too straight an answer, but it was beyond her now to say
that she saw her way. She would have made the question itself
impossible to others—impossible for example to such a man as Merton
Densher; and she could wonder even on the spot what it was a sign
of in her feeling for Lord Mark that from his lips it almost
tempted her to break down. This was doubtless really because she
cared for him so little; to let herself go with him thus, suffer
his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the relief—since it
was actually, for her nerves, a question of relief—that would cost
her least. If he had come to her moreover with the intention she
believed, or even if this intention had but been determined in him
by the spell of their situation, he mustn’t be mistaken about her
value—for what value did she now have? It throbbed within her as
she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding herself,
not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what might
be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn’t
her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the
ravage of her disease? She mightn’t last, but her money would. For
a man in whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it
should be most of the ground for “making up” to her, any
prospective failure on her part to be long for this world might
easily count as a positive attraction. Such a man, proposing to
please, persuade, secure her, appropriate her for such a time,
shorter or longer, as nature and the doctors should allow, would
make the best of her, ill, damaged, disagreeable though she might
be, for the sake of eventual benefits: she being clearly a person
of the sort esteemed likely to do the handsome thing by a stricken
and sorrowing husband.
She had said to herself betimes, in a general way,
that whatever habits her youth might form, that of seeing an
interested suitor in every bush should certainly never grow to be
one of them—an attitude she had early judged as ignoble, as
poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact as little to do with it
as possible and she scarce knew why at the present moment she
should have had to catch herself in the act of imputing an ugly
motive. It didn’t sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark’s cool English
eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her imagination,
but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified itself:
there was a beautiful reason—indeed there were two—why her
companion’s motive shouldn’t matter. One was that even should he
desire her without a penny she wouldn’t marry him for the world;
the other was that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly,
very pleasantly and humanly, concerned for her. They were also two
things, his wishing to be well, to be very well, with her, and his
beginning to feel her as threatened, haunted, blighted; but they
were melting together for him, making him, by their combination,
only the more sure that, as he probably called it to himself, he
liked her. That was presently what remained with her—his really
doing it; and with the natural and proper incident of being
conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have had him—she
could ask herself that—disconcerted or disgusted by it? If he could
only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to raise, not
to press any question, he might render her a much better service
than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was
strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe
sympathizer. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but
she wasn’t afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She
would keep him, that is, her one easy relation—in the sense of easy
for himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what
surrounded them within and without did so much toward making
appreciative stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could
consider she hadn’t made him hang on her lips when at last, instead
of saying if she were well or ill, she repeated: “I go about here.
I don’t get tired of it. I never should—it suits me so. I adore the
place,” she went on, “and I don’t want in the least to give it
up.”
“Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with
that luck, for one’s all—! Should you positively like to
live here?”
“I think I should like,” said poor Milly after an
instant, “to die here.”
Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she
wanted—when a person did care: it was the pleasant human way,
without depths of darkness. “Oh it’s not good enough for
that! That requires picking. But can’t you keep it? It is,
you know, the sort of place to see you in; you carry out the note,
fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and you might do much
worse—I mean for your friends—than show yourself here a while,
three or four months, every year. But it’s not my notion for the
rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you.”
“What sort of a use for me is it,” she smilingly
inquired, “to kill me?”
“Do you mean we should kill you in England?”
“Well, I’ve seen you and I’m afraid. You’re too
much for me— too many. England bristles with questions. This is
more, as you say there, my form.”
“Oho, oho!”—he laughed again as if to humour her.
“Can’t you then buy it—for a price? Depend upon it they’ll treat
for money. That is for money enough.”
“I’ve exactly,” she said, “been wondering if they
won’t. I think I shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it.”
They were talking sincerely. “It will be my life—paid for as that.
It will become my great gilded shell; so that those who wish to
find me must come and hunt me up.”
“Ah then you will be alive,” said Lord Mark.
“Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken,
wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried kernel of a
nut.”
“Oh,” Lord Mark returned, “we, much as you mistrust
us, can do better for you than that.”
“In the sense that you’ll feel it better for me
really to have it over?”
He let her see now that she worried him, and after
a look at her, of some duration, without his glasses—which always
altered the expression of his eyes—he re-settled the nippersas on
his nose and went back to the view. But the view, in turn, soon
enough released him. “Do you remember something I said to you that
day at Matcham—or at least fully meant to?”
“Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It’s
another life.”
“Certainly it will be—I mean the kind of thing:
what I then wanted it to represent for you. Matcham, you know,” he
continued, “is symbolic. I think I tried to rub that into you a
little.”
She met him with the full memory of what he had
tried—not an inch, not an ounce of which was lost to her. “What I
meant is that it seems a hundred years ago.”
“Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of
what makes me remember it,” he pursued, “is that I was quite aware
of what might have been said about what I was doing. I wanted you
to take it from me that I should perhaps be able to look after
you—will, rather better. Rather better, of course, than certain
other persons in particular.”
“Precisely—than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even
than Mrs. Stringham.”
“Oh Mrs. Stringham’s all right!” Lord Mark promptly
amended.
It amused her even with what she had else to think
of; and she could show him at all events how little, in spite of
the hundred years, she had lost what he alluded to. The way he was
with her at this moment made in fact the other moment so vivid as
almost to start again the tears it had started at the time. “You
could do so much for me, yes. I perfectly understood you.”
“I wanted you see,” he despite this explained, “to
fix your confidence. I mean, you know, in the right
place.”
“Well, Lord Mark, you did—it’s just exactly now, my
confidence, where you put it then. The only difference,” said
Milly, “is that I seem now to have no use for it. Besides,” she
then went on, “I do seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that
would undermine it a little.”
He took no more notice of these last words than if
she hadn’t said them, only watching her at present as with a
gradual new light. “Are you really in any trouble?”
To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out
his light was a little a light for herself. “Don’t say, don’t try
to say, anything that’s impossible. There are much better things
you can do.”
He looked straight at it and then straight over it.
“It’s too monstrous that one can’t ask you as a friend what one
wants so to know.”
“What is it you want to know?” She spoke, as by a
sudden turn, with a slight hardness. “Do you want to know if I’m
badly ill?”
The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of
her voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror
all for others. Lord Mark winced and flushed—clearly couldn’t help
it; but he kept his attitude together and spoke even with unwonted
vivacity. “Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a
word?”
“You won’t see me suffer—don’t be afraid. I shan’t
be a public nuisance. That’s why I should have liked this: it’s so
beautiful in itself and yet it’s out of the gangway. You won’t know
anything about anything,” she added; and then as if to make with
decision an end: “And you don’t! No, not even you.” He faced
her through it with the remains of his expression, and she saw him
as clearly—for him - bewildered; which made her wish to be
sure not to have been unkind. She would be kind once for all; that
would be the end. “I’m very badly ill.”
“And you don’t do anything?”
“I do everything. Everything’s this,” she
smiled. “I’m doing it now. One can’t do more than live.”
“Oh live!” Lord Mark ejaculated.
“Well, it’s immense for me.” She finally
spoke as if for amusement ; now that she had uttered her truth,
that he had learnt it from herself as no one had yet done, her
emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There she was; but it was as if
she would never speak again. “I shan’t,” she added, “have missed
everything.”
“Why should you have missed anything?” She
felt, as he sounded this, to what, within the minute, he had made
up his mind. “You’re the person in the world for whom that’s least
necessary; for whom one would call it in fact most impossible; for
whom ‘missing’ at all will surely require an extraordinary amount
of misplaced good will. Since you believe in advice, for God’s sake
take mine. I know what you want.”
Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought
it on herself—or almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. “I think I
want not to be too much worried.”
“You want to be adored.” It came at last straight.
“Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do it. It is
so”—he firmly kept it up. “You’re not loved enough.”
“Enough for what, Lord Mark?”
“Why to get the full good of it.”
Well, she didn’t after all mock at him. “I see what
you mean. That full good of it which consists in finding one’s self
forced to love in return.” She had grasped it, but she hesitated.
“Your idea is that I might find myself forced to love
you?”
“Oh ‘forced’—!” He was so fine and so expert, so
awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a type with which
the preaching of passion somehow so ill consorted—he was so much
all these things that he had absolutely to take account of them
himself. And he did so, in a single intonation, beautifully. Milly
liked him again, liked him for such shades as that, liked him so
that it was woeful to see him spoiling it, and still more woeful to
have to rank him among those minor charms of existence that she
gasped at moments to remember she must give up. “Is it
inconceivable to you that you might try?”
“To be so favorably affected by you—?”
“To believe in me. To believe in me,” Lord Mark
repeated.
Again she hesitated. “To ‘try’ in return for your
trying?”
“Oh I shouldn’t have to!” he quickly declared. The
prompt neat accent, however, his manner of disposing of her
question, failed of real expression, as he himself the next moment
intelligently, helplessly, almost comically saw—a failure pointed
moreover by the laugh into which Milly was immediately startled. As
a suggestion to her of a healing and uplifting passion it was in
truth deficient; it wouldn’t do as the communication of a force
that should sweep them both away. And the beauty of him was that he
too, even in the act of persuasion, of self-persuasion, could
understand that, and could thereby show but the better as fitting
into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way she let him see
that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of itself, from
services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination against him
never yet made—made at least to any consciousness of his own. Born
to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first encounter
with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
gathering dusk of her personal world presented itself to him, in
her eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he
could find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions
and with dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without
her needing to speak, and simply by the fact that there could be,
in such a case, no decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had
to take it from her that practically he was afraid -whether afraid
to protest falsely enough, or only afraid of what might be
eventually disagreeable in a compromised alliance, being a minor
question. She believed she made out besides, wonderful girl, that
he had never quite expected to have to protest about anything
beyond his natural convenience—more, in fine, than his disposition
and habits, his education as well, his personal moyens,at in
short, permitted.
His predicament was therefore one he couldn’t
like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn’t he
brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy
thus having it from her that he wasn’t good for what she would have
called her reality. It wouldn’t have taken much more to enable her
positively to make out in him that he was virtually capable of
hinting—had his innermost feeling spoken—at the propriety rather,
in his interest, of some cutting down, some dressing up, of the
offensive real. He would meet that halfway, but the real must also
meet him. Milly’s sense of it for herself, which was so
conspicuously, so financially supported, couldn‘t, or wouldn’t, so
accommodate him, and the perception of that fairly showed in his
face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It had marked the one
minute during which he could again be touching to her. By the time
he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had quite ceased
to be so.
By this time she had turned from their window to
make a diversion, had walked him through other rooms, appealing
again to the inner charm of the place, going even so far for that
purpose as to point afresh her independent moral, to repeat that if
one only had such a house for one’s own and loved it and cherished
it enough, it would pay one back in kind, would close one in from
harm. He quite grasped for the quarter of an hour the perch she
held out to him—grasped it with one hand, that is, while she felt
him attached to his own clue with the other; he was by no means
either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as not to be
able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It was one
of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his native
and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
assumption that nothing—nothing to make a deadly difference for
him—ever could happen. It was, socially, a working view like
another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of
the rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the
limit of his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was
said, reappeared for her—breaking out moreover, with an effect of
strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her
state of health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he
could do in the way of making it a grievance that she should snub
him for a charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. “It’s true,
you know, all the same, and I don’t care a straw for your trying to
freeze one up.” He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how
little he cared. “Everybody knows affection often makes things out
when indifference doesn’t notice. And that’s why I know that I
notice.”
“Are you sure you’ve got it right?” the girl
smiled. “I thought rather that affection was supposed to be
blind.”
“Blind to faults, not to beauties,” Lord Mark
promptly returned.
“And are my extremely private worries, my entirely
domestic complications, which I’m ashamed to have given you a
glimpse of—are they beauties?”
“Yes, for those who care for you—as every one does.
Everything about you is a beauty. Besides which I don’t believe,”
he declared, “in the seriousness of what you tell me. It’s too
absurd you should have any trouble about which something
can’t be done. If you can’t get the right thing, who can, in
all the world, I should like to know? You’re the first young woman
of your time. I mean what I say.” He looked, to do him justice,
quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear—simply so competent, in
such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had the force
not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. “We’re all in
love with you. I’ll put it that way, dropping any claim of my own,
if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren’t
born simply to torment us—you were born to make us happy. Therefore
you must listen to us.”
She shook her head with her slowness, but this time
with all her mildness. “No, I mustn’t listen to you—that’s just
what I mustn’t do. The reason is, please, that it simply kills me.
I must be as attached to you as you will, since you give that
lovely account of yourselves. I give you in return the fullest
possible belief of what it would be—” And she pulled up a little.
“I give and give and give—there you are; stick to me as close as
you like and see if I don’t. Only I can’t listen or receive or
accept—I can’t agree. I can’t make a bargain. I can’t
really. You must believe that from me. It’s all I’ve wanted to say
to you, and why should it spoil anything?”
He let her question fall—though clearly, it might
have seemed, because, for reasons or for none, there was so much
that was spoiled. “You want somebody of your own.” He came back,
whether in good faith or in bad, to that; and it made her repeat
her headshake. He kept it up as if his faith were of the best. “You
want somebody, you want somebody.”
She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn’t been at
this juncture on the point of saying something emphatic and
vulgar—“Well, I don’t at all events want you!” What somehow
happened, nevertheless, the pity of it being greater than the
irritation—the sadness, to her vivid sense, of his being so
painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was nothing
to nourish him—was that his error amounted to positive wrongdoing.
She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn’t she stopped him off with
her first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by
the allusion she had been wishing not to make. “Do you know I don’t
think you’re doing very right?—and as a thing quite apart, I mean,
from my listening to you. That’s not right either—except that I’m
not listening. You oughtn’t to have come to Venice to see
me—and in fact you’ve not come, and you mustn’t behave as if
you had. You’ve much older friends than I, and ever so much better.
Really, if you’ve come at all, you can only have come—properly, and
if I may say so honourably—for the best friend, as I believe her to
be, that you have in the world.”
When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough,
as if he had been more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at
her very hard, and they had a moment of this during which neither
pronounced a name, each apparently determined that the other
should. It was Milly’s fine coercion, in the event, that was the
stronger. “Miss Croy?” Lord Mark asked.
It might have been difficult to make out that she
smiled. “Mrs. Lowder.” He did make out something, and then fairly
coloured for its attestation of his comparative simplicity. “I call
her on the whole the best. I can’t imagine a man’s having a
better.”
Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. “Do
you want me to marry Mrs. Lowder?”
At which it seemed to her that it was he who was
almost vulgar! But she wouldn’t in any way have that. “You know,
Lord Mark, what I mean. One isn’t in the least turning you out into
the cold world. There’s no cold world for you at all, I think,” she
went on; “nothing but a very warm and watchful and expectant world
that’s waiting for you at any moment you choose to take it
up.”
He never budged, but they were standing on the
polished concrete and he had within a few minutes possessed himself
again of his hat. “Do you want me to marry Kate Croy?”
“Mrs. Lowder wants it—I do no wrong, I think, in
saying that; and she understands moreover that you know she
does.”
Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it;
and it wasn’t obscure to her, on her side, that it was a comfort to
deal with a gentleman. “It’s ever so kind of you to see such
opportunities for me. But what’s the use of my tackling Miss
Croy?”
Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point
out. “Because she’s the handsomest and cleverest and most charming
creature I ever saw, and because if I were a man I should simply
adore her. In fact I do as it is.” It was a luxury of
response.
“Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her. But
that can’t further the case of all.”
“Ah,” she went on, “I know about ‘people.’ If the
case of one’s bad, the case of another’s good. I don’t see what you
have to fear from any one else,” she said, “save through your being
foolish, this way, about me.”
So she said, but she was aware the next moment of
what he was making of what she didn’t see. “Is it your idea—since
we’re talking of these things in these ways—that the young lady you
describe in such superlative terms is to be had for the
asking?”
“Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person. But
don’t be humble.” She was almost gay.
It was this apparently, at last, that was too much
for him. “But don’t you really know?”
As a challenge, practically, to the commonest
intelligence she could pretend to, it made her of course wish to be
fair. “I ‘know,’ yes, that a particular person’s very much in love
with her.”
“Then you must know by the same token that she’s
very much in love with a particular person.”
“Ah I beg your pardon!”—and Milly quite flushed at
having so crude a blunder imputed to her. “You’re wholly
mistaken.”
“It’s not true?”
“It’s not true.”
His stare became a smile. “Are you very, very
sure?”
“As sure as one can be”—and Milly’s manner could
match it—“when one has every assurance. I speak on the best
authority.”
He hesitated. “Mrs. Lowder’s?”
“No. I don’t call Mrs. Lowder’s the best.”
“Oh I thought you were just now saying,” he
laughed, “that everything about her’s so good.”
“Good for you”—she was perfectly clear. “For you,”
she went on, “let her authority be the best. She doesn’t believe
what you mention, and you must know yourself how little she makes
of it. So you can take it from her. I take it—” But Milly,
with the positive tremor of her emphasis, pulled up.
“You take it from Kate?”
“From Kate herself.”
“That she’s thinking of no one at all?”
“Of no one at all.” Then, with her intensity, she
went on. “She has given me her word for it.”
“Oh!” said Lord Mark. To which he next added: “And
what do you call her word?”
It made Milly, on her side, stare—though perhaps
partly but with the instinct of gaining time for the consciousness
that she was already a little further “in” than she had designed.
“Why, Lord Mark, what should you call her word?”
“Ah I’m not obliged to say. I’ve not asked her. You
apparently have.”
Well, it threw her on her defence—a defence that
she felt, however, especially as of Kate. “We’re very intimate,”
she said in a moment; “so that, without prying into each other’s
affairs, she naturally tells me things.”
Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. “You mean
then she made you of her own movement the declaration you
quote?”
Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather
than help in her sense of the way their eyes now met—met as for
their each seeing in the other more than either said. What she most
felt that she herself saw was the strange disposition on her
companion’s part to disparage Kate’s veracity. She could be only
concerned to “stand up” for that.
“I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her
having no private interest—”
“She took her oath to you?” Lord Mark
interrupted.
Milly didn’t quite see why he should so catechise
her; but she met it again for Kate. “She left me in no doubt
whatever of her being free.”
At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he
continued to smile. “And thereby in no doubt of your being
too?” It was as if as soon as he had said it, however, he felt it
as something of a mistake, and she couldn’t herself have told by
what queer glare at him she had instantly signified that. He at any
rate gave her glare no time to act further; he fell back on the
spot, and with a light enough movement, within his rights. “That’s
all very well, but why in the world, dear lady, should she be
swearing to you?”
She had to take this “dear lady” as applying to
herself; which disconcerted her when he might now so gracefully
have used it for the aspersed Kate. Once more it came to her that
she must claim her own part of the aspersion. “Because, as I’ve
told you, we’re such tremendous friends.”
“Oh,” said Lord Mark, who for the moment looked as
if that might have stood rather for an absence of such rigors. He
was going, however, as if he had in a manner, at the last, got more
or less what he wanted. Milly felt, while he addressed his next few
words to leave-taking, that she had given rather more than she
intended or than she should be able, when once more getting herself
into hand, theoretically to defend. Strange enough in fact that he
had had from her, about herself—and, under the searching spell of
the place, infinitely straight—what no one else had had: neither
Kate, nor Aunt Maud, nor Merton Densher, nor Susan Shepherd. He had
made her within a minute, in particular, she was aware, lose her
presence of mind, and she now wished he would take himself off, so
that she might either recover it or bear the loss better in
solitude. If he paused, however, she almost at the same time saw,
it was because of his watching the approach, from the end of the
sala, of one of the gondoliers, who, whatever excursions were
appointed for the party with the attendance of the others, always,
as the most decorative, most sashed and starched, remained at the
palace on the theory that she might whimsically want him—which she
never, in her caged freedom, had yet done. Brown Pasquale, slipping
in white shoes over the marble and suggesting to her perpetually
charmed vision she could scarce say what, either a mild Hindoo, too
noiseless almost for her nerves, or simply a bare-footed seaman on
the deck of a ship—Pasquale offered to sight a small salver, which
he obsequiously held out to her with its burden of a visiting-card.
Lord Mark—and as if also for admiration of him—delayed his
departure to let her receive it; on which she read it with the
instant effect of another blow to her presence of mind. This
precarious quantity was indeed now so gone that even for dealing
with Pasquale she had to do her best to conceal its disappearance.
The effort was made, none the less, by the time she had asked if
the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had come
up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of the
staircase.
“I’ll see him with pleasure.” To which she added
for her companion, while Pasquale went off: “Mr. Merton
Densher.”
“Oh!” said Lord Mark—in a manner that, making it
resound through the great cool hall, might have carried it even to
Densher’s ear as a judgement of his identity heard and noted once
before.