BOOK EIGHTH
—I—
Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his
hotel—and all the more promptly that he had had occasion of old to
make the same discrimination. The establishment, choked at that
season with the polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly
German, mainly American, mainly English, it appeared as the
corresponding sensitive nerve was touched, sounded loud and now
sweet, sounded anything and everything but Italian, but Venetian.
The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet it was pure Attic
beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It made, “abroad,”
both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel at almost
any point how he had been through everything before. He had been
three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
pleasant irritation of paddling away—away from the concert of false
notes in the vulgarized hall, away from the amiable American
families and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms
for a lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled
with tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of
which he should easily know again in passing on canal or through
campo. The shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found
himself at the end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to
a small independent quartiere,au
far down the Grand Canal, which he had once occupied for a month
with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also with a growth of
initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The humour of
those days came back to him for an hour, and what further befell in
this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghettoav in
sight of the recognized house, he made out on the green shutters of
his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the
course of his very first walk apart, a walk replete with
impressions to which he responded with force. He had been almost
without cessation, since his arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where,
as happened, a turn of bad weather on the second day had kept the
whole party continuously at home. The episode had passed for him
like a series of hours in a museum, though without the fatigue of
that; and it had also resembled something that he was still, with a
stirred imagination, to find a name for. He might have been looking
for the name while he gave himself up, subsequently, to the
ramble—he saw that even after years he couldn’t lose his
way—crowned with his stare across the water at the little white
papers.
He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and
he had lunched there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had
then been out with the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder,
Mrs. Stringham and Kate, and had kept afloat with them, under a
sufficient Venetian spell, until Aunt Maud had directed him to
leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of two circumstances
connected with this disposition of his person he was even now not
unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate had
addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have
been taken—yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate—for
inscrutable parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive
to forget was that he had, before the two others, as it struck
him—that was to say especially before Kate—done exactly as he was
bidden, gathered himself up without a protest and retraced his way
to the palace. Present with him still was the question of whether
he looked a fool for it, of whether the awkwardness he felt as the
gondola rocked with the business of his leaving it—they could but
make, in submission, for a landing-place that was none of the
best—had furnished his friends with such entertainment as was to
cause them, behind his back, to exchange intelligent smiles. He had
found Milly Theale twenty minutes later alone, and he had sat with
her till the others returned to tea. The strange part of this was
that it had been very easy, extraordinarily easy. He knew it for
strange only when he was away from her, because when he was away
from her he was in contact with particular things that made it so.
At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting with his
sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very much
more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
her—that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as
an angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn’t as yet
complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel,
the star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the
little American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to
whom certainly—though without making too much of it for either of
them—he was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated
his coming in on purpose, but there was nothing in that—from the
moment she was always at home—that they couldn’t easily keep up.
The only note the least bit high that had even yet sounded between
them was this admission on her part that she found it best to
remain within. She wouldn’t let him call it keeping quiet, for she
insisted that her palace—with all its romance and art and
history—had set up round her a whirlwind of suggestion that never
dropped for an hour. It wasn’t therefore, within such walls,
confinement, it was the freedom of all the centuries: in respect to
which Densher granted good-humouredly that they were then blown
together, she and he, as much as she liked, through space.
Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to
say to him that he suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin
afflicted, and bored for his pains; and though he denied on the
spot the “bored” he could so far see it as an impression he might
make that he wondered if the same image wouldn’t have occurred to
Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again the difference came up—the
oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of his having sunk so deep.
It was sinking because it was all doing what Kate had conceived for
him; it wasn’t in the least doing—and that had been his notion of
his life—anything he himself had conceived. The difference,
accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under which he
had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best of
the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the
traghetto, even while, with his preoccupation about changing
quarters, he studied, across the canal, the look of his former
abode. It had done for the past, would it do for the present? would
it play in any manner into the general necessity of which he was
conscious? That necessity of making the best was the instinct—as he
indeed himself knew—of a man somehow aware that if he let go at one
place he should let go everywhere. If he took off his hand, the
hand that at least helped to hold it together, the whole queer
fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute and admit the
light. It was really a matter of nerves; it was exactly because he
was nervous that he could go straight; yet if that condition should
increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in short on a high
ridge, steep down on either side, where the proprieties—once he
could face at all remaining there—reduced themselves to his keeping
his head. It was Kate who had so perched him, and there came up for
him at moments, as he found himself planting one foot exactly
before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her management
of him. It wasn’t that she had put him in danger—to be in real
danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for
him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn’t having; an
exasperation, a resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience
of desire, in respect to his postponed and relegated, his so
extremely manipulated state. It was beautifully done of her, but
what was the real meaning of it unless that he was perpetually bent
to her will? His idea from the first, from the very first of his
knowing her, had been to be, as the French called it, bon
princeaw with
her, mindful of the good humour and generosity, the contempt, in
the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small savings, that
belonged to the man who wasn’t generally afraid. There were things
enough, goodness knew—for it was the moral of his plight—that he
couldn’t afford; but what had had a charm for him if not the notion
of living handsomely, to make up for it, in another way? of not at
all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap edition.
All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed
actually as present as ever—how he had admired and envied what he
called to himself her pure talent for life, as distinguished from
his own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched
up; only it irritated him the more that this was exactly what was
now, ever so characteristically, standing out in her.
It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily,
that he was just where he was and that he was above all just how he
was. The proof of a decent reaction in him against so much
passivity was, with no great richness, that he at least knew—knew,
that is, how he was, and how little he liked it as a thing accepted
in mere helplessness. He was, for the moment, wistful—that above
all described it; that was so large a part of the force that, as
the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him, on his traghetto,
positively throbbing with his question. His question connected
itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered soreness,
his sense almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame were less
as he let himself, with the help of the conditions about him,
regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the
conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently
braved, had been willing, without a pang, to see him
ridiculously—ridiculously so far as just complacently-exposed to.
How little it could be complacently he was to feel with the last
thoroughness before he had moved from his point of vantage. His
question, as we have called it, was the interesting question of
whether he had really no will left. How could he know—that was the
point—without putting the matter to the test? It had been right to
be bon prince, and the joy, something of the pride, of
having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now compatible with
the impulse to look into their account; but he held his breath a
little as it came home to him with supreme sharpness that, whereas
he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had
done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine that his idea
of the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring
itself, in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern
night—“conditions” these, such as we just spoke of—to the glimmer,
more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white
papers on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his
watch he had been for a quarter of an hour at this post of
observation and reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he
had found his answer to the idea that had grown so importunate.
Since a proof of his will was wanted it was indeed very exactly in
wait for him—it lurked there on the other side of the Canal. A
ferryman at the little pier had from time to time accosted him; but
it was a part of the play of his nervousness to turn his back on
that facility. He would go over, but he walked, very quickly, round
and round, crossing finally by the Rialto. The rooms, in the event,
were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there with her smile all a
radiance but her recognition all a fable; the ancient rickety
objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in their decay,
as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly veracious;
so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come in on
the morrow.
He was amusing about it that evening at dinner—in
spite of an odd first impulse, which at the palace quite melted
away, to treat it merely as a matter for his own satisfaction. This
need, this propriety, he had taken for granted even up to the
moment of suddenly perceiving, in the course of talk, that the
incident would minister to innocent gaiety. Such was quite its
effect, with the aid of his picture—an evocation of the quaint, of
the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior in the true old note.
He made the point for his hostess that her own high chambers,
though they were a thousand grand things, weren’t really this; made
it in fact with such success that she presently declared it his
plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
as yet—he could feel it as felt among them all—no such clear wish
to go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or
an autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titan or
Gianbellini. It was constantly Densher’s view that, as between
himself and Kate, things were understood without saying, so that he
could catch in her, as she but too freely could in him, innumerable
signs of it, the whole soft breath of consciousness meeting and
promoting consciousness. This view was so far justified to-night as
that Milly’s offer to him of her company was to his sense taken up
by Kate in spite of her doing nothing to show it. It fell in so
perfectly with what she had desired and foretold that she was—and
this was what most struck him—sufficiently gratified and blinded by
it not to know, from the false quality of his response, from his
tone and his very look, which for an instant instinctively sought
her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost shamelessly, in a
mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her failure of
perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
planning for—that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part
of her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he
had announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable of
guessing and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him
up a turn or two further, none the less, to impute to her now a
weakness of vision by which he could himself feel the stronger.
Whatever apprehension of his motive in shifting his abode might
have brushed her with its wings, she at all events certainly didn’t
guess that he was giving their friend a hollow promise. That was
what she had herself imposed on him; there had been in the prospect
from the first a definite particular point at which hollowness, to
call it by its least compromising name, would have to begin.
Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms
for, he had not recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made
no more difference in his expression of happy readiness than if he
had been—just what he was trying not to be—fully hardened and fully
base. So rapid in fact was the rhythm of his inward drama that the
quick vision of impossibility produced in him by his hostess’s
direct and unexpected appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of
positively scaring him. It gave him a measure of the intensity, the
reality of his now mature motive. It prompted in him certainly no
quarrel with these things, but it made them as vivid as if they
already flushed with success. It was before the flush of success
that his heart beat almost to dread. The dread was but the dread of
the happiness to be compassed; only that was in itself a symptom.
That a visit from Milly should, in this projection of necessities,
strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a hateful idea, and
above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his game—the
adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with one
of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated
there, already unpacked and settled, for Milly’s innocence, for
Milly’s beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with.
There were things she would never recognize, never feel, never
catch in the air; but this made no difference in the fact that her
brushing against them would do nobody any good. The discrimination
and the scruple were for him. So he felt all the parts of
the case together, while Kate showed admirably as feeling none of
them. Of course, however—when hadn’t it to be his last word?—Kate
was always sublime.
That came up in all connexions during the rest of
these first days; came up in especial under pressure of the fact
that each time our plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the
good fortune of half an hour together, they were doomed—though
Densher felt it as all by his act—to spend a part of the rare
occasion in wonder at their luck and in study of its queer
character. This was the case after he might be supposed to have
got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after the girl—ready
always, as we say, with the last word—had given him the benefit of
her righting of every wrong appearance, a support familiar to him
now in reference to other phases. It was still the case after he
possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely insisted,
have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what idea on
Mrs. Lowder’s part had determined it. Such as the idea was—and that
it suited Kate’s own book she openly professed—he had only to see
how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified.
Densher’s reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt
Maud’s intervention hadn’t been occult, even for his
vividness, from the moment she had written him, with characteristic
concentration, that if he should see his way to come to Venice for
a fortnight she should engage he would find it no blunder. It took
Aunt Maud really to do such things in such ways; just as it took
him, he was ready to confess, to do such others as he must now
strike them all—didn’t he?—as committed to Mrs. Lowder’s admonition
had been of course a direct reference to what she had said to him
at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly had failed
them through illness; only it had at least matched that remarkable
outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it attributed to
him. The young man’s discussions of his situation—which were
confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself—suffered a
little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn’t put
everything off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His
ears in solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs.
Lowder had simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what
could be done with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he
had come. If she had taken for granted his good nature she was as
justified as Kate declared. This awkwardness of his conscience,
both in respect to his general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling
plasticity, within limits, to be a mode of life like
another—certainly better than some, and particularly in respect to
such confusion as might reign about what he had really come
for—this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the style,
charming as that was, of Kate’s poetic versions. Even the high
wonder and delight of Kate couldn’t set him right with himself when
there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him
wrong.
In default of being right with himself he had
meanwhile, for one thing, the interest of seeing—and quite for the
first time in his life—whether, on a given occasion, that might be
quite so necessary to happiness as was commonly assumed and as he
had up to this moment never doubted. He was engaged distinctly in
an adventure—he who had never thought himself cut out for them, and
it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself
that he mustn’t fall below it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in
the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take
through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty campi,ax
overhung with mouldering palaces,21 where
he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a
rare footstep on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded
dancer in a banquet-hall deserted—during these interludes he
entertained cold views, even to the point, at moments, on the
principle that the shortest follies are the best, of thinking of
immediate departure as not only possible but as indicated. He had
however only to cross again the threshold of Palazzo Leporelli to
see all the elements of the business compose, as painters called
it, differently. It began to strike him then that departure
wouldn’t curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and that
above all, as he hadn’t really “begun” anything, had only
submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the
beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with
superstitious rigor. The single thing that was clear in
complications was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a
gentleman—to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less
shining truth that complications might sometimes have their tedium
beguiled by a study of the question of how a gentleman would
behave.22 This
question, I hasten to add, was not in the last resort Densher’s
greatest worry. Three women were looking to him at once, and,
though such a predicament could never be, from the point of view of
facility, quite the ideal, it yet had, thank goodness, its
immediate workable law. The law was not to be a brute—in return for
amiabilities. He hadn’t come all the way out from England to be a
brute. He hadn’t thought of what it might give him to have a
fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a brute.
He hadn’t treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her suggestion
he had understood her—he hadn’t done that either to be a brute. And
what he had prepared least of all for such an anticlimax was the
prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender—ds a gentleman, oh
that indubitably! -to the unexpected impression made by poor pale
exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
conditions, than any ever known to him.
This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an
authority, a felicity—he scarce knew by what strange name to call
it—for which he said to himself that he had not consciously
bargained. Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness,
brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments
to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and
by the perception at the same time, on the observer’s part, that
this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony,
as much as it gave—her whole attitude had, to his imagination,
meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping
and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts
of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively well
for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn’t put it
off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously
wouldn’t, that—well, that he had been rather taken in by not having
known in advance! There had been now five days of it all without
his risking even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have
known and of what in particular therefore had taken him in. The
truth was doubtless that really, when it came to any free handling
and naming of things, they were living together, the five of them,
in an air in which an ugly effect of “blurting out” might easily be
produced. He came back with his friend on each occasion to the
blest miracle of renewed propinquity, which had a double virtue in
that favoring air. He breathed on it as if he could scarcely
believe it, yet the time had passed, in spite of this privilege,
without his quite committing himself, for her ear, to any such
comment on Milly’s high style and state as would have corresponded
with the amount of recognition it had produced in him. Behind
everything for him was his renewed remembrance, which had fairly
become a habit, that he had been the first to know her. This was
what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day at Mrs.
Lowder’s; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its
influence had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling
carriage with them, from the moment she took him to drive, covering
them in together as if it had been a rug of softest silk. It had
worked as a clear connexion with something lodged in the past,
something already their own. He had more than once recalled how he
had said to himself even at that moment, at some point in the
drive, that he was not there, not just as he was in so doing it,
through Kate and Kate’s idea, but through Milly and Milly’s own,
and through himself and his own, unmistakably—as well as through
the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time in New
York.
—II—
There was at last, with everything that made for
it, an occasion when he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as
his eternal refrain, an answer of which he was to measure
afterwards the precipitating effect. His eternal refrain was the
way he came back to the riddle of Mrs. Lowder’s view of her
profit—a view so hard to reconcile with the chances she gave them
to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied the chances, wanting
to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him rather straight,
whether he felt their opportunities as anything so grand. He looked
at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this note; it was the
least he could let her off with for having made him visibly flush.
For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out of her
tone, which became sweet and sincere. “ ‘Meet,’ my dear man,” she
expressively echoed; “does it strike you that we get, after all, so
very much out of our meetings?”
“On the contrary—they’re starvation diet. All I
mean is—and it’s all I’ve meant from the day I came—that we at
least get more than Aunt Maud.”
“Ah but you see,” Kate replied, “you don’t
understand what Aunt Maud gets.”
“Exactly so—and it’s what I don’t understand that
keeps me so fascinated with the question. She gives me no light;
she’s prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural—!”
“She takes it as ‘of a natural’ that at this rate I
shall be making my reflexions about you. There’s every appearance
for her,” Kate went on, “that what she had made her mind up to as
possible is possible; that what she had thought more likely than
not to happen is happening. The very essence of her, as you surely
by this time have made out for yourself, is that when she adopts a
view she—well, to her own sense, really brings the thing about,
fairly terrorizes with her view any other, any opposite view, and
those, not less, who represent that. I’ve often thought success
comes to her”—Kate continued to study the phenomenon—“by the spirit
in her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one.
One has seen it so again and again, in the face of everything,
become the right one.”
Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of
the largest response. “Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of
course needn’t not ‘understand.’ I’m condemned to that,” he on his
side presently explained, “only when understanding fails.” He took
a moment; then he pursued: “Does she think she terrorizes
us?” To which he added while, without immediate
speech, Kate but looked over the place: “Does she believe anything
so stiff as that you’ve really changed about me?” He knew now that
he was probing the girl deep—something told him so; but that was a
reason the more. “Has she got it into her head that you dislike
me?”
To this, of a sudden, Kate’s answer was strong.
“You could yourself easily put it there!”
He wondered. “By telling her so?”
“No,” said Kate as with amusement at his
simplicity; “I don’t ask that of you.”
“Oh my dear,” Densher laughed, “when you ask, you
know, so little—!”
There was a full irony in this, on his own part,
that he saw her resist the impulse to take up. “I’m perfectly
justified in what I’ve asked,” she quietly returned. “It’s doing
beautifully for you.” Their eyes again intimately met, and the
effect was to make her proceed. “You’re not a bit unhappy.”
“Oh ain’t I?” he brought out very roundly.
“It doesn’t practically show—which is enough for
Aunt Maud. You’re wonderful, you’re beautiful,” Kate said; “and if
you really want to know whether I believe you’re doing it you may
take from me perfectly that I see it coming.” With which, by a
quick transition, as if she had settled the case, she asked him the
hour.
“Oh only twelve-ten”—he had looked at his watch.
“We’ve taken but thirteen minutes; we’ve time yet.”
“Then we must walk. We must go toward them.”
Densher, from where they had been standing,
measured the long reach of the Square. “They’re still in their
shop. They’re safe for half an hour.”
“That shows then, that shows!” said Kate.
This colloquy had taken place in the middle of
Piazza San Marco, always, as a great social saloon, a
smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity, favorable to talk;
or rather, to be exact, not in the middle, but at the point where
our pair had paused by a common impulse after leaving the great
mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but a little
way behind them, and they had in front the vast empty space,
enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement and traffic
were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the
visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the parties
of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual feasts,
their prospect was clear and they could see their companions hadn’t
yet been, and weren’t for a while longer likely to be, disgorged by
the lace-shop, in one of the loggie,ay
where, shortly before, they had left them for a look-in—the
expression was artfully Densher’s—at Saint Mark’s. Their morning
had happened to take such a turn as brought this chance to the
surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn’t been an
overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that could be
said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially in
presence—in presence of every one; every one consisting at this
juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and
Milly. But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could
become special was furnished precisely by this view of the
compatibility of their comfort with a certain amount of lingering.
The others had assented to their not waiting in the shop; it was of
course the least the others could do. What had really helped them
this morning was the fact that, on his turning up, as he always
called it, at the palace, Milly had not, as before, been able to
present herself. Custom and use had hitherto seemed fairly
established; on his coming round, day after day—eight days had been
now so conveniently marked—their friends, Milly’s and his,
conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her till luncheon.
Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he had been,
as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there was
that amount of justification for Kate’s vision of success. He
had, for Mrs. Lowder—he couldn’t help it while sitting
there—the air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption
in Kate sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young
hostess each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only
to-day that she hadn’t been well enough to see him.
That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in
the way in which, gathered in the room of state, with the place,
from the right time, all bright and cool and beflowered, as always,
to re- ceive her descent, they—the rest of them—simply looked at
each other. It was lurid—lurid, in all probability, for each of
them privately—that they had uttered no common regrets. It was
strange for our young man above all that, if the poor girl was
indisposed to that degree, the hush of gravity, of apprehension, of
significance of some sort, should be the most the case—that of the
guests—could permit itself. The hush, for that matter, continued
after the party of four had gone down to the gondola and taken
their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she hoped they
would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had produced a
second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one quite as
well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for the
alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as
pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out,
Mrs. Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better
than any of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as
acting in exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively
obscure, approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary
to stay at home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory
which was the slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she
had invented a preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had
remembered the fond dreams of the visitation of lace that had
hitherto always been brushed away by accidents, and it had come up
as well for her that Kate had, the day before, spoken of the part
played by fatality in her own failure of real acquaintance with the
inside of Saint Mark’s. Densher’s sense of Susan Shepherd’s
conscious intervention had by this time a corner of his mind all to
itself; something that had begun for them at Lancaster Gate was now
a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action, ineffably discreet, had
at all events a way of affecting him as for the most part subtly,
even when not superficially, in his own interest. They were not, as
a pair, as a “team,” really united; there were too many persons, at
least three, and too many things, between them; but meanwhile
something was preparing that would draw them closer. He scarce knew
what: probably nothing but his finding, at some hour when it would
be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood him.
He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the understanding
of every one else would fail and this deep little person’s alone
survive.
Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air,
as we may say, that hung about our young friends; these had been
the small accidents and quiet forces to which they owed the
advantage we have seen them in some sort enjoying. It seemed in
fact fairly to deepen for them as they stayed their course again;
the splendid Square, which had so notoriously, in all the years,
witnessed more of the joy of life than any equal area in Europe,
furnished them, in their remoteness from earshot, with solitude and
security. It was as if, being in possession, they could say what
they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence of that, each had
an apprehension of what the other wanted to say. It was most of all
for them, moreover, as if this very quantity, seated on their lips
in the bright historic air, where the only sign for their ears was
the flutter of the doves, begot in the heart of each a fear. There
might have been a betrayal of that in the way Densher broke the
silence resting on her last words. “What did you mean just now that
I can do to make Mrs. Lowder believe? For myself, stupidly, if you
will, I don’t see, from the moment I can’t lie to her, what else
there is but lying.”
Well, she could tell him. “You can say something
both handsome and sincere to her about Milly—whom you honestly like
so much. That wouldn’t be lying; and, coming from you, it would
have an effect. You don‘t, you know, say much about her.” And Kate
put before him the fruit of observation. “You don’t, you know,
speak of her at all.”
“And has Aunt Maud,” Densher asked, “told you so?”
Then as the girl, for answer, only seemed to bethink herself, “You
must have extraordinary conversations!” he exclaimed.
Yes, she had bethought herself. “We have
extraordinary conversations.”
His look, while their eyes met, marked him as
disposed to hear more about them; but there was something in her
own, apparently, that defeated the opportunity. He questioned her
in a moment on a different matter, which had been in his mind a
week, yet in respect to which he had had no chance so good as this.
“Do you happen to know then, as such wonderful things pass between
you, what she makes of the incident, the other day, of Lord Mark’s
so very superficial visit?—his having spent here, as I gather, but
the two or three hours necessary for seeing our friend and yet
taken no time at all, since he went off by the same night’s train,
for seeing any one else. What can she make of his not having waited
to see you, or to see herself—with all he owes her?”
“Oh of course,” said Kate, “she understands. He
came to make Milly his offer of marriage—he came for nothing but
that. As Milly wholly declined it his business was for the time at
an end. He couldn’t quite on the spot turn round to make up to
us.”
Kate had looked surprised that, as a matter of
taste on such an adventurer’s part, Densher shouldn’t see it. But
Densher was lost in another thought. “Do you mean that when,
turning up myself, I found him leaving her, that was what had been
taking place between them?”
“Didn’t you make it out, my dear?” Kate
inquired.
“What sort of a blundering weathercock then is he?”
the young man went on in his wonder.
“Oh don’t make too little of him!” Kate smiled. “Do
you pretend that Milly didn’t tell you?”
“How great an ass he had made of himself?”
Kate continued to smile. “You are in love
with her, you know.”
He gave her another long look. “Why, since she has
refused him, should my opinion of Lord Mark show it? I’m not
obliged, however, to think well of him for such treatment of the
other persons I’ve mentioned, and I feel I don’t understand from
you why Mrs. Lowder should.”
“She doesn’t—but she doesn’t care,” Kate explained.
“You know perfectly the terms on which lots of London people live
together even when they’re supposed to live very well. He’s not
committed to us—he was having his try. Mayn’t an unsatisfied man,”
she asked, “always have his try?”
“And come back afterwards, with confidence in a
welcome, to the victim of his inconstancy?”
Kate consented, as for argument, to be thought of
as a victim. “Oh but he has had his try at me. So it’s all
right.”
“Through your also having, you mean, refused
him?”
She balanced an instant during which Densher might
have just wondered if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight
strain. But she dropped on the right side. “I haven’t let it come
to that. I’ve been too discouraging. Aunt Maud,” she went on—now as
lucid as ever—“considers, no doubt, that she has a pledge from him
in respect to me; a pledge that would have been broken if Milly had
accepted him. As the case stands that makes no difference.”
Densher laughed out. “It isn’t his merit
that he has failed.”
“It’s still his merit, my dear, that he’s Lord
Mark. He’s just what he was, and what he knew he was. It’s not for
me either to reflect on him after I’ve so treated him.”
“Oh,” said Densher impatiently, “you’ve treated him
beautifully.”
“I’m glad,” she smiled, “that you can still be
jealous.” But before he could take it up she had more to say. “I
don’t see why it need puzzle you that Milly’s so marked line
gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything else can displease her. What
does she see but that Milly herself recognizes her situation with
you as too precious to be spoiled? Such a recognition as that can’t
but seem to her to involve in some degree your own recognition. Out
of which she therefore gets it that the more you have for Milly the
less you have for me.”
There were moments again—we know that from the
first they had been numerous—when he felt with a strange mixed
passion the mastery of her mere way of putting things. There was
something in it that bent him at once to conviction and to
reaction. And this effect, however it be named, now broke into his
tone. “Oh if she began to know what I have for you—!”
It wasn’t ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it.
“Luckily for us we may really consider she doesn’t. So successful
have we been.”
“Well,” he presently said, “I take from you what
you give me, and I suppose that, to be consistent—to stand on my
feet where I do stand at all—I ought to thank you. Only, you know,
what you give me seems to me, more than anything else, the larger
and larger size of my job. It seems to me more than anything else
what you expect of me. It never seems to me somehow what I may
expect of you. There’s so much you don’t give me.”
She appeared to wonder. “And pray what is it I
don’t—?”
“I give you proof,” said Densher. “You give me
none.”
“What then do you call proof?” she after a moment
ventured to ask.
“You doing something for me.”
She considered with surprise. “Am I not doing
this for you? Do you call this nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it.”
They had strolled slowly further, but he was
brought up short. “I thought you exactly contend that, with your
aunt so bamboozled, you risk nothing!”
It was the first time since the launching of her
wonderful idea that he had seen her at a loss. He judged the next
instant moreover that she didn’t like it—either the being so or the
being seen, for she soon spoke with an impatience that showed her
as wounded; an appearance that produced in himself, he no less
quickly felt, a sharp pang of indulgence. “What then do you wish me
to risk?”
The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make
him, as he would have said, worse. “What I wish is to be loved. How
can I feel at this rate that I am?” Oh she understood him,
for all she might so bravely disguise it, and that made him feel
straighter than if she hadn’t. Deep, always, was his sense of life
with her—deep as it had been from the moment of those signs of life
that in the dusky London of two winters ago they had originally
exchanged. He had never taken her for unguarded, ignorant, weak;
and if he put to her a claim for some intenser faith between them
this was because he believed it could reach her and she could meet
it. “I can go on perhaps,” he said, “with help. But I can’t go on
without.”
She looked away from him now, and it showed him how
she understood. “We ought to be there—I mean when they come
out.”
“They won’t come out—not yet. And I don’t care if
they do.” To which he straightway added, as if to deal with the
charge of selfishness that his words, sounding for himself, struck
him as enabling her to make: “Why not have done with it all and
face the music as we are?” It broke from him in perfect sincerity.
“Good God, if you’d only take me!”
It brought her eyes round to him again, and he
could see how, after all, somewhere deep within, she felt his
rebellion more sweet than bitter. Its effect on her spirit and her
sense was visibly to hold her an instant. “We’ve gone too far,” she
none the less pulled herself together to reply. “Do you want to
kill her?”
He had an hesitation that wasn’t all candid. “Kill,
you mean, Aunt Maud?”
“You know whom I mean. We’ve told too many
lies.”
Oh at this his head went up. “I, my dear, have told
none!”
He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him
good, but he had naturally, none the less, to take the look it made
her give him. “Thank you very much.”
Her expression, however, failed to check the words
that had already risen to his lips. “Rather than lay myself open to
the least appearance of it I’ll go this very night.”
“Then go,” said Kate Croy.
He knew after a little, while they walked on again
together, that what was in the air for him, and disconcertingly,
was not the violence, but much rather the cold quietness, of the
way this had come from her. They walked on together, and it was for
a minute as if their difference had become of a sudden, in all
truth, a split-as if the basis of his departure had been settled.
Then, incoherently and still more suddenly, recklessly moreover,
since they now might easily, from under the arcades, be observed,
he passed his hand into her arm with a force that produced for them
another pause. “I’ll tell any lie you want, any your idea requires,
if you’ll only come to me.”
“Come to you?”
“Come to me.”
“How? Where?”
She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his
uncertainty, a wonder in her being so equal to him. “To my rooms,
which are perfectly possible, and in taking which, the other day, I
had you, as you must have felt, in view. We can arrange it—with two
grains of courage. People in our case always arrange it.” She
listened as for the good information, and there was support for
him—since it was a question of his going step by step—in the way
she took no refuge in showing herself shocked. He had in truth not
expected of her that particular vulgarity, but the absence of it
only added the thrill of a deeper reason to his sense of
possibilities. For the knowledge of what she was he had absolutely
to see her now, incapable of refuge, stand there for him in all the
light of the day and of his admirable merciless meaning. Her mere
listening in fact made him even understand himself as he hadn’t yet
done. Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ,
beautiful. “There’s nothing for me possible but to feel that I’m
not a fool. It’s all I have to say, but you must know what it
means. With you I can do it—I’ll go as far as you demand or as you
will yourself. Without you—I’ll be hanged! And I must be
sure.”
She listened so well that she was really listening
after he had ceased to speak. He had kept his grasp of her, drawing
her close, and though they had again, for the time, stopped
walking, his talk—for others at a distance—might have been, in the
matchless place, that of any impressed tourist to any slightly more
detached companion. On possessing himself of her arm he had made
her turn, so that they faced afresh to Saint Mark’s, over the great
presence of which his eyes moved while she twiddled her parasol.
She now, however, made a motion that confronted them finally with
the opposite end. Then only she spoke—“Please take your hand out of
my arm.” He understood at once: she had made out in the shade of
the gallery the issue of the others from their place of purchase.
So they went to them side by side, and it was all right. The others
had seen them as well and waited for them, complacent enough, under
one of the arches. They themselves too—he argued that Kate would
argue—looked perfectly ready, decently patient, properly
accommodating. They themselves suggested nothing worse—always by
Kate’s system—than a pair of the children of a supercivilized age
making the best of an awkwardness. They didn’t nevertheless
hurry—that would overdo it; so he had time to feel, as it were,
what he felt. He felt, ever so distinctly—it was with this he faced
Mrs. Lowder—that he was already in a sense possessed of what he
wanted. There was more to come—everything; he had by no means, with
his companion, had it all out. Yet what he was possessed of was
real—the fact that she hadn’t thrown over his lucidity the horrid
shadow of cheap reprobation. Of this he had had so sore a fear that
its being dispelled was in itself of the nature of bliss. The
danger had dropped—it was behind him there in the great sunny
space. So far she was good for what he wanted.
—III—
She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put
to her that evening, and with further ground for it, the next
sharpest question that had been on his lips in the morning—which
his other preoccupation had then, to his consciousness, crowded
out. His opportunity was again made, as befell, by his learning
from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as usual, with the close of day,
at the palace, that Milly must fail them again at dinner, but would
to all appearance be able to come down later. He had found Susan
Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where even more candles than
their friend’s large common allowance—she grew daily more splendid;
they were all struck with it and chaffed her about it-lighted up
the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes with the
good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared—minutes illumined
indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly’s
candles.
“May she come down—ought she if she isn’t
really up to it?” He had asked that in the wonderment always
stirred in him by glimpses—rare as were these—of the inner truth
about the girl. There was of course a question of health—it was in
the air, it was in the ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in
the sounds he heard, it was everywhere. But it was everywhere with
the effect of a request to him—to his very delicacy, to the common
discretion of others as well as his own—that no allusion to it
should be made. There had practically been none, that morning, on
her explained non-appearance-the absence of it, as we know, quite
monstrous and awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered
him his first license to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held
them closed; all the more that his doing so performed for his own
spirit a useful function. If he positively wanted not to be brought
up with his nose against Milly’s facts, what better proof could he
have that his conduct was marked by straightness? It was perhaps
pathetic for her, and for himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but
he hadn’t even the amount of curiosity that he would have had about
an ordinary friend. He might have shaken himself at moments to try,
for a sort of dry decency, to have it; but that too, it appeared,
wouldn’t come. In what therefore was the duplicity? He was at least
sure about his feelings—it being so established that he had none at
all. They were all for Kate, without a feather’s weight to spare.
He was acting for Kate—not, by the deviation of an inch, for her
friend. He was accordingly not interested, for had he been
interested he would have cared, and had he cared he would have
wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn’t have been purely
passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to represent his
dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at the same
time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling his
little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse—it was as if she had
wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted,
she fairly invited him to open his eyes. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
It was no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to
serve. And the rest was fully to come.
He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a
kind of consequence of communion with her, talking her own
language. “It’s a very wonderful experience.”
“Well”—and her raised face shone up at him—“that’s
all I want you to feel about it. If I weren’t afraid,” she added,
“there are things I should like to say to you.”
“And what are you afraid of, please?” he
encouragingly asked.
“Of other things that I may possibly spoil.
Besides, I don’t, you know, seem to have the chance. You’re always,
you know, with her.”
He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his
fixed smile; which was the more fixed as he felt in these last
words an exact description of his course. It was an odd thing to
have come to, but he was always with her. “Ah,” he none the less
smiled, “I’m not with her now.”
“No—and I’m so glad, since I get this from it.
She’s ever so much better.”
“Better? Then she has been worse?”
Mrs. Stringham waited. “She has been
marvelous—that’s what she has been. She is marvelous. But she’s
really better.”
“Oh then if she’s really better—!” But he checked
himself, wanting only to be easy about it and above all not to
appear engaged to the point of mystification. “We shall miss her
the more at dinner.”
Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him.
“She’s keeping herself. You’ll see. You’ll not really need to miss
anything. There’s to be a little party.”
“Ah I do see—by this aggravated grandeur.”
“Well, it is lovely, isn’t it? I want the whole
thing. She’s lodged for the first time as she ought, from her type,
to be; and doing it—I mean bringing out all the glory of the
place—makes her really happy. It’s a Veronese picture,23 as near
as can be—with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor,
put into a corner of the foreground for effect. If I only had a
hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene
more honour. The old house-keeper, the woman in charge here, has a
big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb for the
evening.” These explanations and sundry others Mrs. Stringham gave,
though not all with the result of making him feel that the picture
closed him in. What part was there for him, with his
attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which
everything else would have it? “They won’t, however, be at dinner,
the few people she expects—they come round afterwards from their
respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It’s
for him she has wanted to do something—to let it begin at once. We
shall see more of him, because she likes him; and I’m so
glad—she’ll be glad too—that you’re to see him.” The good lady, in
connexion with it, was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. “So I
greatly hope—!” But her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light
of her cheer.
He considered a little this appearance, while she
let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than she uttered.
“What is it you hope?”
“Well, that you’ll stay on.”
“Do you mean after dinner?” She meant, he seemed to
feel, so much that he could scarce tell where it ended or
began.
“Oh that, of course. Why we’re to have
music—beautiful instruments and songs; and not Tasso declaimed as
in the guide-books either. She has arranged it—or at least I have.
That is Eugenio has. Besides, you’re in the picture.”
“Oh—I!” said Densher almost with the gravity of a
real protest.
“You’ll be the grand young man who surpasses the
others and holds up his head and the wine-cup. What we hope,” Mrs.
Stringham pursued, “is that you’ll be faithful to us—that you’ve
not come for a mere foolish few days.”
Densher’s more private and particular shabby
realities turned, without comfort, he was conscious, at this touch,
in the artificial repose he had in his anxiety about them but
half-managed to induce. The way smooth ladies, travelling for their
pleasure and housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain
embarrassed working-men, engaged in an unprecedented sacrifice of
time and of the opportunity for modest acquisition! The things they
took for granted and the general misery of explaining! He couldn’t
tell them how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he had
moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost for the first
time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that would give
them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not of the
degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly,
to add to that weight as of expected performance which these very
moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle on his
heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the
thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold
breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
floundered. “I’m afraid you won’t understand when I say I’ve very
tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The
pinch, the pressure in London.”
But she understood in perfection; she rose to the
pinch and the pressure and showed how they had been her own very
element. “Oh the daily talk and the daily wage, the golden guerdon
or reward ? No one knows better than I how they haunt one in the
flight of the precious deceiving days. Aren’t they just what I
myself have given up? I’ve given up all to follow her. I
wish you could feel as I do. And can’t you,” she asked, “write
about Venice?”
He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he
could feel as she did; and he smiled for her kindly. “Do you write
about Venice?”
“No; but I would—oh wouldn’t I?—if I hadn’t so
completely given up. She’s, you know, my princess, and to one’s
princess—”
“One makes the whole sacrifice?”
“Precisely. There you are!”
It pressed on him with this that never had a man
been in so many places at once. “I quite understand that she’s
yours. Only you see she’s not mine.” He felt he could somehow, for
honesty, risk that, as he had the moral certainty she wouldn’t
repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder, who would find in it a
disturbing implication. This was part of what he liked in the good
lady, that she didn’t repeat, and also that she gave him a delicate
sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in itself a
hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent and
elastic for him, which wouldn’t engage him further than he could
see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all
was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing
Kate wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so
different a way and from a motive so different, even though scarce
less deep. Then Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her
exuberance, exactly what each of the others did; and he was between
them all, he was in the midst. Such perceptions made
occasions—well, occasions for fairly wondering if it mightn’t be
best just to consent, luxuriously, to be the ass the whole thing
involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in it was of the two
things the more asinine. He was glad there was no male witness; it
was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn’t have liked a man to see
him.24 He only
had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke Strett, the great
master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in
commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance,
just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a
vision of great London surgeons—if this one was a surgeon—as
incisive all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly
escape the ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be
able to do was not to care; while he was trying not to he could
take that in. It was a train, however, that brought up the vision
of Lord Mark as well. Lord Mark had caught him twice in the
fact—the fact of his absurd posture; and that made a second male.
But it was comparatively easy not to mind Lord Mark.
His companion had before this taken him up, and in
a tone to confirm her discretion, on the matter of Milly’s not
being his princess. “Of course she’s not. You must do something
first.”
Densher gave it his thought. “Wouldn’t it be rather
she who must?”
It had more than he intended the effect of bringing
her to a stand. “I see. No doubt, if one takes it so.” Her cheer
was for the time in eclipse, and she looked over the place,
avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of what Milly could do. “And
yet she has wanted to be kind.”
It made him on the spot feel a brute. “Of course
she has. No one could be more charming. She has treated me as if
I were somebody. Call her my hostess as I’ve never had nor
imagined a hostess, and I’m with you altogether. Of course,” he
added in the right spirit for her, “I do see that it’s quite court
life.”
She promptly showed how this was almost all she
wanted of him. “That’s all I mean, if you understand it of such a
court as never was: one of the courts of heaven, the court of a
reigning seraph, a sort of a vice-queen of an angel. That will do
perfectly.”
“Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a
general thing, you know,” he observed, “isn’t supposed to
pay.”
“Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.
That’s just the beauty here; it’s why she’s the great and only
princess. With her, at her court,” said Mrs. Stringham, “it does
pay.” Then as if she had quite settled it for him: “You’ll see for
yourself.”
He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage
her. “I think you were right just now. One must do something
first.”
“Well, you’ve done something.”
“No—I don’t see that. I can do more.”
Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so!
“You can do everything, you know.”
“Everything” was rather too much for him to take up
gravely, and he modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to
avert fatuity, of a different but a related matter. “Why has she
sent for Sir Luke Strett if, as you tell me, she’s so much
better?”
“She hasn’t sent. He has come of himself,” Mrs.
Stringham explained. “He has wanted to come.”
“Isn’t that rather worse then—if it means he mayn’t
be easy?”
“He was coming, from the first, for his holiday.
She has known that these several weeks.” After which Mrs. Stringham
added: “You can make him easy.”
“I can?” he candidly wondered. It was truly
the circle of petticoats. “What have I to do with it for a man like
that?”
“How do you know,” said his friend, “what he’s
like? He’s not like any one you’ve ever seen. He’s a great
beneficent being.”
“Ah then he can do without me. I’ve no call, as an
outsider, to meddle.”
“Tell him, all the same,” Mrs. Stringham urged,
“what you think.”
“What I think of Miss Theale?” Densher stared. It
was, as they said, a large order. But he found the right note.
“It’s none of his business.”
It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the
right note. She fixed him at least with an expression still bright,
but searching, that showed almost to excess what she saw in it;
though what this might be he was not to make out till afterwards.
“Say that to him then. Anything will do for him as a means
of getting at you.”
“And why should he get at me?”
“Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then
you’ll see.”
All of which, on Mrs. Stringham’s part, sharpened
his sense of immersion in an element rather more strangely than
agreeably warm—a sense that was moreover, during the next two or
three hours, to be fed to satiety by several other impressions.
Milly came down after dinner, half a dozen friends—objects of
interest mainly, it appeared, to the ladies of Lancaster
Gate—having by that time arrived; and with this call on her
attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by Eugenio,
but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme opportunity
offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last of all,
he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general, a
beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he
seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it
made no splash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they
were all together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool.
The effect of the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much
to do with it; the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art
in themselves, took care, as an influence, of the general manner,
and made people bland without making them solemn. They were only
people, as Mrs. Stringham had said, staying for the week or two at
the inns, people who during the day had fingered their Baedekers,
gaped at their frescoes and differed, over fractions of francs,
with their gondoliers. But Milly, let loose among them in a
wonderful white dress, brought them somehow into relation with
something that made them more finely genial; so that if the
Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was not
quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
traces of insensibility qualified by “beating down,” were at last
almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she
hadn’t yet had occasion—circulating with a clearness intensified—to
strike him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger,
fairer, with the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not
altogether lucky challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to
explain it by her having quitted this once, for some obscure yet
doubtless charming reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto
inveterate black. Much as the change did for the value of her
presence, she had never yet, when all was said, made it for
him; and he was not to fail of the further amusement of
judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett’s visit. If
he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke Strett,
whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene perhaps
than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of the
saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
couldn’t be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
himself too much “in” it, as he might have said: a moment’s
reflexion put him more in than anyone. The way Milly neglected him
for other cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the
attenuation of a joke, introduced him to English ladies—that was
itself a proof; for nothing really of so close a communion had up
to this time passed between them as the single bright look and the
three gay words (all ostensibly of the last lightness) with which
her confessed consciousness brushed by him.
She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he
could see, under some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half
her nerves and half an inevitable harmony; but what he especially
recognized was the character that had already several times broken
out in her and that she so oddly appeared able, by choice or by
instinctive affinity, to keep down or to display. She was the
American girl as he had originally found her—found her at moments,
it was true, in New York, more than at certain others; she was the
American girl as, still more than then, he had seen her on the day
of her meeting him in London and in Kate’s company. It affected him
as a large though queer social resource in her—such as a man, for
instance, to his diminution, would never in the world be able to
command; and he wouldn’t have known whether to see it in an
extension or a contraction of “personality,” taking it as he did
most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too
it was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for
him in a word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a
second introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away
from the lady toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was
something in her to affect him as telling evasively a tale of their
talk in the Piazza. To what did she want to coerce him as a form of
penalty for what he had done to her there? It was thus in contact
uppermost for him that he had done something; not only caused her
perfect intelligence to act in his interest, but left her unable to
get away, by any mere private effort, from his inattackable logic.
With him thus in presence, and near him—and it had been as
unmistakable through dinner—there was no getting away for her at
all, there was less of it than ever: so she could only either deal
with the question straight, either frankly yield or ineffectually
struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express herself by
following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of that
advantage for the hour—a brief fallacious makeweight to his
pressure—that there were plenty of things left in which he must
feel her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she
was, in such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him
again that her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as
Milly’s own, gave him back the sense of his action. It had never
yet in life been granted him to know, almost materially to taste,
as he could do in these minutes, the state of what was vulgarly
called conquest. He had lived long enough to have been on occasion
“liked,” but it had never begun to be allowed him to be liked to
any such tune in any such quarter. It was a liking greater than
Milly’s—or it would be: he felt it in him to answer for that. So at
all events he read the case while he noted that Kate was
somehow—for Kate-wanting in luster. As a striking young presence
she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly diffused
she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been
dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially
indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he
perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her
wonderful entrance, under her aunt’s eyes—he had never forgotten
it—the day of their younger friend’s failure at Lancaster Gate. She
was, in her accepted effacement—it was actually her acceptance that
made the beauty and repaired the damage—under her aunt’s eyes now;
but whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none
the less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him
showed an exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least
self-possessed.
“Don’t you think her good enough now?”
Almost heedless of the danger of overt freedoms,
she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in renewed talk,
over her further wishes, with the members of her little orchestra,
who had approached her with demonstrations of deference enlivened
by native humours—things quite in the line of old Venetian comedy.
The girl’s idea of music had been happy—a real solvent of shyness,
yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a
general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the
good manners of its interpreters, representatives though these
might be but of the order in which taste was natural and melody
rank. It was easy at all events to answer Kate. “Ah my dear, you
know how good I think her!”
“But she’s too nice,” Kate returned with
appreciation. “Everything suits her so—especially her pearls. They
go so with her old lace. I’ll trouble you really to look at them.”
Densher, though aware he had seen them before, had perhaps not
“really” looked at them, and had thus not done justice to the
embodied poetry—his mind, for Milly’s aspects, kept coming back to
that—which owed them part of its style. Kate’s face, as she
considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain, wound twice
round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
wearer’s breast—so far down that Milly’s trick, evidently
unconscious, of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part
of it, conduced presumably to convenience. “She’s a dove,” Kate
went on, “and one somehow doesn’t think of doves as bejewelled. Yet
they suit her down to the ground.”
“Yes—down to the ground is the word.” Densher saw
now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of
something intense in his companion’s feeling about them. Milly was
indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her
spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons
hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element
of wealth in her which was a power, which was a great power, and
which was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have
wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tender tints and
soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that such wings could in a
given case—had, truly, in the case with which he was
concerned—spread themselves for protection. Hadn’t they, for that
matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren’t Kate and Mrs.
Lowder, weren’t Susan Shepherd and he, wasn’t he in
particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate
ease? All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of
which he heard Kate presently going on.
“Pearls have such a magic that they suit every
one.”
“They would uncommonly suit you,” he frankly
returned.
“Oh yes, I see myself!”
As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her—she would
have been splendid; and with it he felt more what she was thinking
of. Milly’s royal ornament had—under pressure now not wholly
occult-taken on the character of a symbol of differences,
differences of which the vision was actually in Kate’s face. It
might have been in her face too that, well as she certainly would
look in pearls, pearls were exactly what Merton Densher would never
be able to give her. Wasn’t that the great difference that Milly
tonight symbolized? She unconsciously represented to Kate, and Kate
took it in at every pore, that there was nobody with whom she had
less in common than a remarkably handsome girl married to a man
unable to make her on any such lines as that the least little
present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till afterwards
that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose, only of
what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
come back to his friend’s question of a minute ago. “She’s
certainly good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I’m
assured she’s better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in
great feather to me about it. She evidently believes her
better.”
“Well, if they choose to call it so—!”
“And what do you call it—as against
them?”
“I don’t call it anything to anyone but you. I’m
not ‘against’ them!” Kate added as with just a fresh breath of
impatience for all he had to be taught.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “What do
you call it to me?”
It made her wait a little. “She isn’t better. She’s
worse. But that has nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing to do?” He wondered.
But she was clear. “Nothing to do with us.
Except of course that we’re doing our best for her. We’re making
her want to live.” And Kate again watched her. “To-night she does
want to live.” She spoke with a kindness that had the strange
property of striking him as inconsequent—so much, and doubtless so
unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the hard.
“It’s wonderful. It’s beautiful.”
“It’s beautiful indeed.”
He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note;
but she had given it no heed. “She’s doing it for him”—and
she nodded in the direction of Milly’s medical visitor. “She wants
to be for him at her best. But she can’t deceive him.”
Densher had been looking too; which made him say in
a moment : “And do you think you can? I mean, if he’s to be
with us here, about your sentiments. If Aunt Maud’s so thick with
him—!”
Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side
and was visibly doing her best to entertain him, though this failed
to prevent such a direction of his own eyes—determined, in the way
such things happen, precisely by the attention of the others—as
Densher became aware of and as Kate promptly marked. “He’s looking
at you. He wants to speak to you.”
“So Mrs. Stringham,” the young man laughed,
“advised me he would.”
“Then let him. Be right with him. I don’t need,”
Kate went on in answer to the previous question, “to deceive him.
Aunt Maud, if it’s necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing
nothing about me, he can see me only as he sees me. She sees me now
so well. He has nothing to do with me.”
“Except to reprobate you,” Densher suggested.
“For not caring for you? Perfectly. As a brilliant
young man driven by it into your relation with Milly—as all
that I leave you to him.”
“Well,” said Densher sincerely enough, “I think I
can thank you for leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me
than yourself.”
She had been looking about again meanwhile, the
lady having changed her place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder’s to
whom she had spoken of introducing him. “All the more reason why I
should commit you then to Lady Wells.”
“Oh but wait.” It was not only that he
distinguished Lady Wells from afar, that she inspired him with no
eagerness, and that, somewhere at the back of his head, he was
fairly aware of the question, in germ, of whether this was the kind
of person he should be involved with when they were married. It was
furthermore that the consciousness of something he had not got from
Kate in the morning, and that logically much concerned him, had
been made more keen by these very moments—to say nothing of the
consciousness that, with their general smallness of opportunity, he
must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maud, over there with
Sir Luke, noted him as a little “attentive,” that might pass for a
futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to confess
to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind. Besides, just
now, he didn’t care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was
immediately to show. “How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with
any finality, if I’m disposed of only to a girl who’s dying? If
you’re right about that, about the state of the case, you’re wrong
about Mrs. Lowder’s being squared. If Milly, as you say,” he
lucidly pursued, “can’t deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the
great surgeon won’t deceive other people—not those, that is, who
are closely concerned. He won’t at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham,
who’s Milly’s greatest friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs.
Stringham deceives Aunt Maud, who’s her own.”
Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea
that really was worth his having kept her for. “Why will it be odd?
I marvel at your seeing your way so little.”
Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now
for him its quick, its slightly quaking intensities. He had
compared her once, we know, to a “new book,” an uncut volume of the
highest, the rarest quality; and his emotion (to justify that) was
again and again like the thrill of turning the page. “Well, you
know how deeply I marvel at the way you see it!”
“It doesn’t in the least follow,” Kate went on,
“that anything in the nature of what you call deception on Mrs.
Stringham’s part will be what you call odd. Why shouldn’t she hide
the truth?”
“From Mrs. Lowder?” Densher stared. “Why should
she?”
“To please you.”
“And how in the world can it please me?”
Kate turned her head away as if really at last
almost tired of his density. But she looked at him again as she
spoke. “Well then to please Milly.” And before he could question:
“Don’t you feel by this time that there’s nothing Susan Shepherd
won’t do for you?”
He had verily after an instant to take it in, so
sharply it corresponded with the good lady’s recent reception of
him. It was queerer than anything again, the way they all came
together round him. But that was an old story, and Kate’s
multiplied lights led him on and on. It was with a reserve,
however, that he confessed this. “She’s ever so kind. Only her view
of the right thing may not be the same as yours.”
“How can it be anything different if it’s the view
of serving you?”
Densher for an instant, but only for an instant,
hung fire. “Oh the difficulty is that I don’t, upon my honour, even
yet quite make out how yours does serve me.”
“It helps you—put it then,” said Kate very
simply—“to serve me. It gains you time.”
“Time for what?”
“For everything!” She spoke at first, once more,
with impatience; then as usual she qualified. “For anything that
may happen.”
Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as
strained. “You’re cryptic, love!”
It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus
see that, by one of those incalculable motions in her without which
she wouldn’t have been a quarter so interesting, they half-filled
with tears from some source he had too roughly touched. “I’m taking
a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human
creature.”
Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he
soon enough felt his reply on his lips. “Well, isn’t my whole
insistence to you now that I can conjure trouble away?” And he let
it, his insistence, come out again; it had so constantly had, all
the week, but its step or two to make. “There need be none whatever
between us. There need be nothing but our sense of each
other.”
It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew
dry while she took up again one of the so numerous links in her
close chain. “You can tell her anything you like, anything
whatever.”
“Mrs. Stringham? I have nothing to tell
her.”
“You can tell her about us. I mean,” she
wonderfully pursued, “that you do still like me.”
It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him.
“Only not that you still like me.”
She let his amusement pass. “I’m absolutely certain
she wouldn’t repeat it.”
“I see. To Aunt Maud.”
“You don’t quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to
any one else.” Kate then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much
more, after all, than he was; and she showed it again as she went
on. “There, accordingly, is your time.”
She did at last make him think, and it was fairly
as if light broke, though not quite all at once. “You must let me
say I do see. Time for something in particular that I understand
you regard as possible. Time too that, I further understand, is
time for you as well.”
“Time indeed for me as well.” And encouraged
visibly by his glow of concentration, she looked at him as through
the air she had painfully made clear. Yet she was still on her
guard. “Don’t think, however, I’ll do all the work for you.
If you want things named you must name them.”
He had quite, within the minute, been turning names
over; and there was only one, which at last stared at him there
dreadful, that properly fitted. “Since she’s to die I’m to marry
her?”
It struck him even at the moment as fine in her
that she met it with no wincing nor mincing. She might for the
grace of silence, for favor to their conditions, have only answered
him with her eyes. But her lips bravely moved. “To marry
her.”
“So that when her death has taken place I shall in
the natural course have money?”
It was before him enough now, and he had nothing
more to ask; he had only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold
with the thought that all along—to his stupidity, his timidity—it
had been, it had been only, what she meant. Now that he was in
possession moreover she couldn’t forbear, strangely enough, to
pronounce the words she hadn’t pronounced: they broke through her
controlled and colourless voice as if she should be ashamed, to the
very end, to have flinched. “You’ll in the natural course have
money. We shall in the natural course be free.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” Densher softly murmured.
“Yes, yes, yes.” But she broke off. “Come to Lady
Wells.”
He never budged—there was too much else. “I’m to
propose it then—marriage—on the spot?”
There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the
more simply he spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained
consummately proof. “Oh I can’t go into that with you, and from the
moment you don’t wash your hands of me I don’t think you ought to
ask me. You must act as you like and as you can.”
He thought again. “I’m far—as I sufficiently showed
you this morning—from washing my hands of you.”
“Then,” said Kate, “it’s all right.”
“All right?” His eagerness flamed. “You’ll
come?”
But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn’t
what she meant. “You’ll have a free hand, a clear field, a
chance—well, quite ideal.”
“Your descriptions”—her “ideal” was such a
touch!—“are prodigious. And what I don’t make out is how, caring of
me, you can like it.”
“I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness,
who can do what I don’t like.”
It wasn’t till afterwards that, going back to it,
he was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of
character that belittled his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw
indeed even at the time the greatness of knowing so well what one
wanted. At the time too, moreover, he next reflected that he after
all knew what he did. But something else on his lips was uppermost.
“What I don’t make out then is how you can even bear it.”
“Well, when you know me better you’ll find out how
much I can bear.” And she went on before he could take up, as it
were, her too many implications. That it was left to him to know
her, spiritually, “better” after his long sacrifice to
knowledge—this for instance was a truth he hadn’t been ready to
receive so full in the face. She had mystified him enough, heaven
knew, but that was rather by his own generosity than by hers. And
what, with it, did she seem to suggest she might incur at his
hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying him on. “All
you’ll have to do will be to stay.”
“And proceed to my business under your eyes?”
“Oh dear no—we shall go.”
“ ‘Go?’ ” he wondered. “Go when, go where?”
“In a day or two—straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it
now.”
It gave him all he could take in to think of. “Then
what becomes of Miss Theale?”
“What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with
her.”
He stared. “All alone?”
She had a smile that was apparently for his tone.
“You’re old enough—with plenty of Mrs. Stringham.”
Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could
he have measured it, as his being able to feel, quite while he drew
from her these successive cues, that he was essentially “seeing
what she would say”—an instinct compatible for him therefore with
that absence of a need to know her better to which she had a moment
before done injustice. If it hadn’t been appearing to him in gleams
that she would somewhere break down, he probably couldn’t have gone
on. Still, as she wasn’t breaking down there was nothing for him
but to continue. “Is your going Mrs. Lowder’s idea?”
“Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it
does for us. And I don’t,” she added, “refer only to our going, but
to Aunt Maud’s view of the general propriety of it.”
“I see again, as you say,” Densher said after a
moment. “It makes everything fit.”
“Everything.”
The word, for a little, held the air, and he might
have seemed the while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all
it stood for. But he had in fact been looking at something else.
“You leave her here then to die?”
“Ah she believes she won’t die. Not if you stay. I
mean,” Kate explained, “Aunt Maud believes.”
“And that’s all that’s necessary?”
Still indeed she didn’t break down. “Didn’t we long
ago agree that what she believes is the principal thing for
us?”
He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from
long ago. “Oh yes. I can’t deny it.” Then he added: “So that if I
stay-”
“It won’t”—she was prompt—“be our fault.”
“If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects
us?”
“If she still suspects us. But she won’t.”
Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared
to leave him nothing more; and he might in fact well have found
nothing if he hadn’t presently found: “But what if she doesn’t
accept me?”
It produced in her a look of weariness that made
the patience of her tone the next moment touch him. “You can but
try.”
“Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to
try a little hard to propose to a dying girl.”
“She isn’t for you as if she’s dying.” It had
determined in Kate the flash of justesseaz
he could perhaps most, on consideration, have admired, since her
retort touched the truth. There before him was the fact of how
Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her eyes in
his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them,
literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head
to where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his,
so that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other
side, happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across
toward them in response all the candor of her smile, the luster of
her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It
brought them together again with faces made fairly grave by the
reality she put into their plan. Kate herself grew a little pale
for it, and they had for a time only a silence. The music, however,
gay and vociferous, had broken out afresh and protected more than
interrupted them. When Densher at last spoke it was under
cover.
“I might stay, you know, without trying.”
“Oh to stay is to try.”
“To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of
it?”
“I don’t see how you can have the appearance
more.”
Densher waited. “You think it then possible she may
offer marnage? ”
“I can’t think—if you really want to know—what she
may not offer!”
“In the manner of princesses, who do such
things?”
“In any manner you like. So be prepared.”
Well, he looked as if he almost were. “It will be
for me then to accept. But that’s the way it must come.”
Kate’s silence, so far, let it pass; but she
presently said: “You’ll, on your honour, stay then?”
His answer made her wait, but when it came it was
distinct. “Without you, you mean?”
“Without us.”
“And you yourselves go at latest—?”
“Not later than Thursday.”
It made three days. “Well,” he said, “I’ll stay, on
my honour, if you’ll come to me. On your honour.”
Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid,
with a rigor out of which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her.
Her rigor was more to him, nevertheless, than all her readiness;
for her readiness was the woman herself, and this other thing a
mask, a stop-gap and a “dodge.” She cast about, however, as
happened, and not for the instant in vain. Her eyes, turned over
the room, caught at a pretext. “Lady Wells is tired of waiting:
she’s coming—see—to us.”
Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for
their visitor to cross, and he still had time. “If you decline to
understand me I wholly decline to understand you. I’ll do
nothing.”
“Nothing?” It was as if she tried for the minute to
plead.
“I’ll do nothing. I’ll go off before you. I’ll go
tomorrow.”
He was to have afterwards the sense of her having
then, as the phrase was—and for vulgar triumphs too—seen he meant
it. She looked again at Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly
came back. “And if I do understand?”
“I’ll do everything.”
She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend:
he was fairly playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew,
tasted, in all his relation with her, of anything so sharp—too
sharp for mere sweetness—as the vividness with which he saw himself
master in the conflict. “Well, I understand.”
“On your honour?”
“On my honour.”
“You’ll come?”
“I’ll come.”