BOOK NINTH
—I—
It was after they had gone that he truly
felt the difference, which was most to be felt moreover in his
faded old rooms. He had recovered from the first a part of his
attachment to this scene of contemplation, within sight, as it was,
of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of that arch of
associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen it in a
particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his hands
adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had risen
at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely engaged
and absorbed him, and relief from which—if relief was the name—he
could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had come to
pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to
all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories,
at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself
irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
with, in fact of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once—and
this not from any failure of their need, but from such
impossibilities, for bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was
at the last no blinking; yet she had come, that once, to stay, as
people called it; and what survived of her, what reminded and
insisted, was something he couldn’t have banished if he had wished.
Luckily he didn’t wish, even though there might be for a man almost
a shade of the awful in so unqualified a consequence of his act. It
had simply worked, his idea, the idea he had made her
accept; and all erect before him, really covering the ground as far
as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that this
represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an
historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
present, with the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge
its office and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of
its own. He had in fine judged his friend’s pledge in advance as an
inestimable value, and what he must now know his case for was that
of a possession of the value to the full. Wasn’t it perhaps even
rather the value that possessed him, kept him thinking of it
and waiting on it, turning round and round it and making sure of it
again from this side and that?
It played for him—certainly in this prime
afterglow—the part of a treasure kept at home in safety and
sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its place when, with
each return, he worked his heavy old key in the lock. The door had
but to open for him to be with it again and for it to be all there;
so intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible to
him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination, of intimacy.
Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to whatever aspect he gave for
the instant the advantage, it was in view as nothing of the moment,
nothing begotten of time or of chance could be, or ever would; it
was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the play on the stage
is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He remained thus,
in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual orchestra to
the ordered drama, the confirmed “run”; playing low and slow,
moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged
no approach; he couldn’t for his life, he felt, have opened his
door to a third person. Such a person would have interrupted him,
would have profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at
any rate have broken the spell of what he conceived himself—in the
absence of anything “to show”—to be inwardly doing. He was giving
himself up—that was quite enough—to the general feeling of his
renewed engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the
quantity of the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the
contract, the way, above all, as a service for which the price
named by him had been magnificently paid, his equivalent office was
to take effect—such items might well fill his consciousness when
there was nothing from outside to interfere. Never was a
consciousness more rounded and fastened down over what filled it;
which is precisely what we have spoken of as, in its degree, the
oppression of success, the somewhat chilled state—tending to the
solitary—of supreme recognition. If it was slightly awful to feel
so justified, this was by the loss of the warmth of the element of
mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and it was into the lucid
that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of it a dozen times a
day, tried to break by his own act his constant still communion. It
wasn’t still communion she had meant to bequeath him; it was the
very different business of that kind of fidelity of which the other
name was careful action.
Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful
action than the immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand
queerness was that to be faithful to Kate he had positively to take
his eyes, his arms, his lips straight off her—he had to let her
alone. He had to remember it was time to go to the palace—which in
truth was a mercy, since the check was not less effectual than
imperative. What it came to, fortunately, as yet, was that when he
closed the door behind him for an absence he always shut her in.
Shut her out—it came to that rather, when once he had got a little
away; and before he reached the palace, much more after hearing at
his heels the bang of the greater portone,ba
he felt free enough not to know his position as oppressively false.
As Kate was all in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her
left for the grander, it was only on reflexion that the falseness
came out; so long as he left it to the mercy of beneficent chance
it offered him no face and made of him no claim that he couldn’t
meet without aggravation of his inward sense. This aggravation had
been his original horror; yet what—in Milly’s presence, each
day—was horror doing with him but virtually letting him off? He
shouldn’t perhaps get off to the end; there was time enough still
for the possibility of shame to pounce. Still, however, he did
constantly a little more what he liked best, and that kept him for
the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any case, to know
why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty well, in
this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He then
fairly perceived that—even putting their purity of motive at its
highest—it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to
Milly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it was
neither of them who practically purged it—if practically purged it
was. Milly herself did everything—so far at least as he was
concerned—Milly herself, and Milly’s house, and Milly’s
hospitality, and Milly’s manner, and Milly’s character, and,
perhaps still more than anything else, Milly’s imagination, Mrs.
Stringham and Sir Luke indeed a little aiding: whereby he knew the
blessing of a fair pretext to ask himself what more he had to do.
Something incalculable wrought for them—for him and Kate; something
outside, beyond, above themselves, and doubtless ever so much
better than they: which wasn’t a reason, however—its being so much
better—for them not to profit by it. Not to profit by it, so far as
profit could be reckoned, would have been to go directly against
it; and the spirit of generosity at present engendered in Densher
could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go directly
against Milly.
To go with her was the thing, so far as she
could herself go; which, from the moment her tenure of her loved
palace stretched on, was possible but by his remaining near her.
This remaining was of course on the face of it the most “marked” of
demonstrations—which was exactly why Kate had required it; it was
so marked that on the very evening of the day it had taken effect
Milly herself hadn’t been able not to reach out to him, with an
exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It was as if she had
wanted from him some name that, now they were to be almost alone
together, they could, for their further ease, know it and call it
by—it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence, of
which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,
couldn’t but have for himself some definite basis. She only
wondered about the basis it would have for himself, and how he
would describe it; that would quite do for her—it even would have
done for her, he could see, had he produced some reason merely
trivial, had he said he was waiting for money or clothes, for
letters or for orders from Fleet Street, without which, as she
might have heard, newspaper men never took a step. He hadn’t in the
event quite sunk to that; but he had none the less had there with
her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham’s leaving them alone—Mrs.
Stringham proved really prodigious—his acquaintance with a shade of
awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had supposed
himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there
were three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in
the same degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked
feels incapable of purchase. It even didn’t help him, oddly, that
he was sure Kate would in some way have spoken for him—or rather
not so much in some way as in one very particular way. He hadn’t
asked her, at the last, what she might, in the connexion, have
said; nothing would have induced him to put such a question after
she had been to see him: his lips were so sealed by that passage,
his spirit in fact so hushed, in respect to any charge upon her
freedom. There was something he could only therefore read back into
the probabilities, and when he left the palace an hour afterwards
it was with a sense of having breathed there, in the very air, the
truth he had been guessing.
Just this perception it was, however, that had made
him for the time ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was
horrible, with this creature, to be awkward; it was odious
to be seeking excuses for the relation that involved it. Any
relation that involved it was by the very fact as much discredited
as a dish would be at dinner if one had to take medicine as a
sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the young women’s last
talks was that—if Milly absolutely must have the truth about it—Mr.
Densher was staying because she had really seen no way but to
require it of him. If he stayed he didn’t follow her—or didn’t
appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
following her Mrs. Lowder couldn’t pretend, in scenes, the renewal
of which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn’t
snub him as she might. She did nothing in fact but snub
him—wouldn’t that have been part of the story?—only Aunt Maud’s
suspicions were of the sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with.
He had been, by the same token, reasonable enough—as he now, for
that matter, well might; he had consented to oblige them, aunt and
niece, by giving the plainest sign possible that he could exist
away from London. To exist away from London was to exist away from
Kate Croy—which was a gain, much appreciated, to the latter’s
comfort. There was a minute, at this hour, out of Densher’s three,
during which he knew the terror of Milly’s uttering some such
allusion to their friend’s explanation as he must meet with words
that wouldn’t destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy everything,
to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular by a
breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of their
own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had
done so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What
it implied for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon,
noble in its half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of
his young hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable
in her mercy—what it implied was that he should lie with his lips.
The single thing, of all things, that could save him from it would
be Milly’s letting him off after having thus scared him. What made
her mercy inscrutable was that if she had already more than once
saved him it was yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was
lost.
These were transcendent motions, not the less blest
for being obscure; whereby yet once more he was to feel the
pressure lighten. He was kept on his feet in short by the felicity
of her not presenting him with Kate’s version as a version to
adopt. He couldn’t stand up to lie—he felt as if he should have to
go down on his knees. As it was he just sat there shaking a little
for nervousness the leg he had crossed over the other. She was
sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more to subscribe
to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four inanities he
had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He scrambled
a little higher than the reference to money and clothes, letters
and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty of
the chance for him—there before him like a temptress painted by
Titian—to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on
the difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was
precipitate, almost explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a
book.
The explosion lighted her face. “You’ll do your
book here?”
“I hope to begin it.”
“It’s something you haven’t begun?”
“Well, only just.”
“And since you came?”
She was so full of interest that he shouldn’t
perhaps after all be too easily let off. “I tried to think a few
days ago that I had broken ground.”
Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have
let him in deeper. “I’m afraid we’ve made an awful mess of your
time.”
“Of course you have. But what I’m hanging on for
now is precisely to repair that ravage.”
“Then you mustn’t mind me, you know.”
“You’ll see,” he tried to say with ease, “how
little I shall mind anything.”
“You’ll want”—Milly had thrown herself into it—“the
best part of your days.”
He thought a moment: he did what he could to
wreathe it in smiles. “Oh I shall make shift with the worst part.
The best will be for you.” And he wished Kate could hear
him. It didn’t help him moreover that he visibly, even
pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for comfort
against discipline. He was to bury Kate’s so signal snub, and also
the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual
effort. This at least was his crucifixion—that Milly was so
interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if
he found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently
answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite
particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to
tea with him—an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. “We
depend on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we’re
coming”—the extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it
demanded all his tact. Facing their visit itself—to that, no matter
what he might have to do, he would never consent, as we know, to be
pushed; and this even though it might be exactly such a
demonstration as would figure for him at the top of Kate’s list of
his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough, deep within, if
Kate’s view of that especial propriety had not been modified by a
subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite likely
not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact. It
pleased him to think of “tact” as his present prop in doubt; that
glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the
sensitive and the kind. He wasn’t inhuman, in fine, so long as it
would serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to
sweeten Milly’s hopes. He didn’t want to be rude to them, but he
still less wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion;
so that, casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet
her, he put his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place.
“Will it be safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving
the house?”
“‘Safe’—?” She had for twenty seconds an exquisite
pale glare. Oh but he didn’t need it, by that time, to wince; he
had winced for himself as soon as he had made his mistake. He had
done what, so unforgettably, she had asked him in London not to do;
he had touched, all alone with her here, the supersensitive nerve
of which she had warned him. He had not, since the occasion in
London, touched it again till now; but he saw himself freshly
warned that it was able to bear still less. So for the moment he
knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his life. He
couldn’t emphasize that he thought of her as dying, yet he couldn’t
pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions. Meanwhile
too she had narrowed his choice. “You suppose me so awfully
bad?”
He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the
time the colour had mounted to the roots of his hair he had found
what he wanted. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me.”
“Well then, I’m splendid.”
“Oh I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“I mean I’m capable of life.”
“I’ve never doubted it.”
“I mean,” she went on, “that I want so to
live—!”
“Well?” he asked while she paused with the
intensity of it.
“Well, that I know I can.”
“Whatever you do?” He shrank from solemnity about
it.
“Whatever I do. If I want to.”
“If you want to do it?”
“If I want to live. I can,” Milly
repeated.
He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he
hesitated with all the pity of it. “Ah then that I
believe.”
“I will, I will,” she declared; yet with the weight
of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.
He felt himself smiling through a mist. “You simply
must!”
It brought her straight again to the fact. “Well
then, if you say it, why mayn’t we pay you our visit?”
“Will it help you to live?”
“Every little helps,” she laughed, “and it’s very
little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I shan’t want to
miss it—!”
“Yes?”—she had dropped again.
“Well, on the day you give us a chance.”
It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at
this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving
way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to
become clear to him only when he had left her. “You can come,” he
said, “when you like.”
What had taken place for him, however—the drop,
almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own
reality—apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even so
vividly that she could take it for something else. “I see how you
feel—that I’m an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have any
such upset, you’ll go. So it’s no matter.”
“No matter? Oh!”—he quite protested now.
“If it drives you away to escape us. We want you
not to go.”
It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham.
Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. “I won’t
go.”
“Then I won’t go!” she brightly
declared.
“You mean you won’t come to me?”
“No—never now. It’s over. But it’s all right. I
mean, apart from that,” she went on, “that I won’t do anything I
oughtn’t or that I’m not forced to.”
“Oh who can ever force you?” he asked with his
hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her encouragement.
“You’re the least coercible of creatures.”
“Because, you think, I’m so free?”
“The freest person probably now in the world.
You’ve got everything.”
“Well,” she smiled, “call it so. I don’t
complain.”
On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in.
“No I know you don’t complain.”
As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the
pity in it. His telling her she had “everything” was extravagant
kind humour, whereas his knowing so tenderly that she didn’t
complain was terrible kind gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the
difference; he might as well have praised her outright for looking
death in the face. This was the way she just looked him
again, and it was of no attenuation that she took him up more
gently than ever. “It isn’t a merit-when one sees one’s way.”
“To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not.”
“I mean to keeping what one has.”
“Oh that’s success. If what one has is good,”
Densher said at random, “it’s enough to try for.”
“Well, it’s my limit. I’m not trying for more.” To
which then she added with a change: “And now about your
book.”
“My book—?” He had got in a moment so far from
it.
“The one you’re now to understand that nothing will
induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling.”
He cast about, but he made up his mind. “I’m not
doing a book.”
“Not what you said?” she asked in a wonder. “You’re
not writing?”
He already felt relieved. “I don’t know, upon my
honour, what I’m doing.”
It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in
another way, he was afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in
fact exactly what he feared, but again his honour, as he called it,
was saved even while she didn’t know she had threatened it. Taking
his words for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side,
might complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him
some such patience as he should be perhaps able to arrive at with
her indirect help. Still more clearly, however, she wanted to be
sure of how far she might venture; and he could see her make out in
a moment that she had a sort of test.
“Then if it’s not for your book—?”
“What am I staying for?”
“I mean with your London work—with all you have to
do. Isn’t it rather empty for you?”
“Empty for me?” He remembered how Kate had held
that she might propose marriage, and he wondered if this were the
way she would naturally begin it. It would leave him, such an
incident, he already felt, at a loss, and the note of his finest
anxiety might have been in the vagueness of his reply. “Oh
well—!”
“I ask too many questions?” She settled it for
herself before he could protest. “You stay because you’ve got
to.”
He grasped at it. “I stay because I’ve got to.” And
he couldn’t have said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to
Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip
of the ear of her plan. Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a
plain statement of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would
have told her of—the permission from Lancaster Gate to come any
nearer. To remain friends with either niece or aunt he mustn’t stir
without it. All this Densher read in the girl’s sense of the spirit
of his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and he had to
think of something to correct that. What he thought of was, in an
instant, “Isn’t it enough, whatever you may be one’s other
complications, to stay after all for you?”
“Oh you must judge.”
He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and
was also at last too restless. The speech in question at least
wasn’t disloyal to Kate; that was the very tone of their bargain.
So was it, by being loyal, another kind of lie, the lie of the
uncandid profession of a motive. He was staying so little “for”
Milly that he was staying positively against her. He didn’t, none
the less, know, and at last, thank goodness, didn’t care. The only
thing he could say might make it either better or worse. “Well
then, so long as I don’t go, you must think of me all as
judging!”
—II—
He didn’t go home, on leaving her—he didn’t
want to; he walked instead, through his narrow ways and his
campi with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively
sequestered café where he had already more than once found
refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that
consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions. It was a
literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid
mirror and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his
tobacco, might have been regarded by him as a little less limp than
usual. This wasn’t because, before getting to his feet again, there
was a step he had seen his way to; it was simply because the
acceptance of his position took sharper effect from his sense of
what he had just had to deal with. When half an hour before, at the
palace, he had turned about to Milly on the question of the
impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under
her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his seeing much
further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities
mattered. It wasn’t a case for pedantry; when people were at her
pass everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp
click of a spring, just completely his own—to the extent, as he
felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or
shouldn’t would have close reference to her life, which was thus
absolutely in his hands—and ought never to have reference to
anything else. It was on the cards for him that he might kill
her—that was the way he read the cards as he sat in his customary
corner. The fear in this thought made him let everything go, kept
him there actually, all motionless, for three hours on end. He
renewed his consumption and smoked more cigarettes than he had ever
done in the time. What had come out for him had come out, with this
first intensity, as a terror; so that action itself, of any sort,
the right as well as the wrong—if the difference even survived—had
heard it in a vivid “Hush!” the injunction to keep from that moment
intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil lasted of
several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might have
served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
What he finally took home, when he ventured to
leave the place, was the perceived truth that he might on any other
system go straight to destruction. Destruction was represented for
him by the idea of his really bringing to a point, on Milly’s side,
anything whatever. Nothing so “brought,” he easily argued, but
must be in one way or another a catastrophe. He was mixed up
in her fate, or her fate, if that should be better, was mixed up in
him, so that a single false motion might either way snap the
coil. They helped him, it was true, these considerations, to a
degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously amounted to was
that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all with the
burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without the
girl’s leave—not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it,
whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate’s. It was to
this his wisdom reduced itself—to the need again simply to be kind.
That was the same as being still—as studying to create the minimum
of vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the
wall of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false
step would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He
was aware when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn’t
at this juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire
that he was wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His
money for the idle life might be none too much; happily, however,
Venice was cheap, and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in
a manner supported him. The greatest of his expenses really was to
walk to the palace to dinner. He didn’t want, in short, to give
that up, and he should probably be able, he felt, to stay his
breath and his hand. He should be able to be still enough through
everything.
He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after
a little of not having failed. There had to be a delicate art in
it, for he wasn’t trying—quite the contrary—to be either distant or
dull. That would not have been being “nice,” which in its own form
was the real law. That too might just have produced the vibration
he desired to avert; so that he best kept everything in place by
not hesitating or fearing, as it were, to let himself go—go in the
direction, that is to say, of staying. It depended on where he
went; which was what he meant by taking care. When one went on
tiptoe one could turn off for retreat without betraying the
maneuver. Perfect tact—the necessity for which he had from the
first, as we know, happily recognized—was to keep all intercourse
in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thus for
instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as
well that her being the American girl was, just in time and for the
relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable.
If, at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her
prerogative of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she
didn’t diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record
herself as possessed of it, this wouldn’t have been for want of
Densher’s keeping her, with his idea, well up to it—wouldn’t have
been in fine for want of his encouragement and reminder. He didn’t
perhaps in so many words speak to her of the quantity itself as of
the thing she was least to intermit; but he talked of it, freely,
in what he flattered himself was an impersonal way, and this held
it there before her—since he was careful also to talk pleasantly.
It was at once their idea, when all was said, and the most marked
of their conveniences. The type was so elastic that it could be
stretched to almost anything; and yet, not stretched, it kept down,
remained normal, remained properly within bounds. And he had
meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much disconcerted, the
sense, for the girl’s part of the business, of the queerest
conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted, even
though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once
in saying: “Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it’s a kind
of facilitation to you that we don’t quite measure: I think one
would have to be English to measure it!”—and that too, strangely
enough, without prejudice to her good nature. She might have been
conceived as doing—that is of being—what he liked in order perhaps
only to judge where it would take them. They really as it went on
saw each other at the game; she knowing he tried to keep her
in tune with his conception, and he knowing she thus knew it. Add
that he again knew she knew, and yet that nothing was spoiled by
it, and we get a fair impression of the line they found most
completely workable. The strangest fact of all for us must be that
the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what figured to
his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above and
beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have
been felicity—certainly too little of the right lubricant—had not
the national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than
entirely, in Milly’s chords. It made up her unity and was the one
thing he could unlimitedly take for granted.
He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without
deepened fear of the undue vibration that was keeping him watchful.
He knew in his nervousness that he was living at best from day to
day and from hand to mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in
avoiding a mistake. All women had alternatives, and Milly’s would
doubtless be shaky too; but the national character was firm in her,
whether as all of her, practically, by this time, or but as a part;
the national character that, in a woman still so young, made of the
air breathed a virtual non-conductor. It wasn’t till a certain
occasion when the twenty days had passed that, going to the palace
at tea-time, he was met by the information that the signorina
padronabb was
not “receiving.” The announcement met him, in the court, on the
lips of one of the gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a
conscious eye as the knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto
conspicuously shown, could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not
been at Palazzo Leporelli among the mere receivable, but had taken
his place once for all among the involved and included, so that on
being so flagrantly braved he recognized after a moment the
propriety of a further appeal. Neither of the two ladies, it
appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not prepared to say that
either was poco bene.bc He
was yet not prepared to say that either was anything, and he would
have been blank, Densher mentally noted, if the term could ever
apply to members of a race in whom vacancy was but a nest of
darknesses—not a vain surface, but a place of withdrawal in which
something obscure, something always ominous, indistinguishably
lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hour the force of the veto
laid within the palace on any mention, any cognition, of the
liabilities of its mistress. The state of her health was never
confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply be taken
for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on
carrying his question further. This appeal was to his friend
Eugenio, whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich
minutes, protected from the weather, he was confronted in the
gallery that led from the water-steps to the court, and whom he
always called, in meditation, his friend; seeing it was so
elegantly presumable he would have put an end to him if he could.
That produced a relation which required a name of its own, an
intimacy of consciousness in truth for each—an intimacy of eye, of
ear, of general sensibility, of everything but tongue. It had been,
in other words, for the five weeks, far from occult to our young
man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finely formal than
essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn’t himself
raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again; it
was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the
court.
The weather, from early morning, had turned to
storm, the first sea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost
invidiously brought him down the outer staircase—the massive
ascent, the great feature of the court, to Milly’s piano
nobile.bd This
was to pay him—it was the one chance—for all imputations; the
imputation in particular that, clever, tanto bellobe and
not rich, the young man from London was—by the obvious way—pressing
Miss Theale’s fortune hard. It was to pay him for the further
ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the young lady’s
most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high
attraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such
a connexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were
odious to Densher for the simple reason that they might have been
so true of the attitude of an inferior man, and three things alone,
accordingly, had kept him from righting himself. One of these was
that his critic sought expression only in an impersonality, a
positive inhumanity, of politeness ; the second was that
refinements of expression in a friend’s servant were not a thing a
visitor could take action on; and the third was the fact that the
particular attribution of motive did him after all no wrong. It was
his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that might have been
taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to fit him. He
apparently wasn’t so different from inferior men as that came to.
If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as “my friend”
because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made
him see on the same lines in the course of their present interview
was ever so much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no
doubt, as insisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier’s
answer, on the pursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it
only in the augmented, the exalted distance that was by this time
established between them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a
word to Miss Theale from such a pair of lips would cost him his
place; but he could also bethink himself that, so long as the word
never came—and it was, on the basis he had arranged, impossible—he
enjoyed the imagination of mounting guard. He had never so mounted
guard, Densher could see, as during these minutes in the damp
loggia where the storm-gusts were strong; and there came in fact
for our young man, as a result of his presence, a sudden sharp
sense that everything had turned to the dismal. Something had
happened—he didn’t know what; and it wasn’t Eugenio who would tell
him. What Eugenio told him was that he thought the ladies—as if
their liability had been equal—were a “leetle” fatigued, just a
“leetle leetle,” and without any cause named for it. It was one of
the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a profundity, a true
deviltry of resource, he always met the latter’s Italian with
English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual, slightly
smiled at him in the process—but ever so slightly this time, his
manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing,
whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace.
This manner, while they stood a long minute facing
each other over all they didn’t say, played a part as well in the
sudden jar to Densher’s protected state. It was a Venice all of
evil that had broken out for them alike, so that they were together
in their anxiety, if they really could have met on it; a Venice of
cold lashing rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging
through narrow passes, of general arrest and interruption, with the
people engaged in all the water-life huddled, stranded and
wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges. Our young
man’s mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile such a
depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightly
prolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were
equally weak. Each had verily something in mind that would have
made a hash of mutual suspicion and in presence of which, as
possibility, they were more united than disjoined. But it was to
have been a moment for Densher that nothing could ease off—not even
the formal propriety with which his interlocutor finally attended
him to the portone and bowed upon his retreat. Nothing had
passed about his coming back, and the air had made itself felt as a
nonconductor of messages. Densher knew of course, as he took his
way again, that Eugenio’s invitation to return was not what he
missed; yet he knew at the same time that what had happened to him
was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyond the
fondamentabf that
gave access to the landgate of the palace, out where the wind was
higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled his umbrella
closer down. It couldn’t be, his consciousness, unseen enough by
others—the base predicament of having, by a concatenation, just to
take such things: such things as the fact that one very
acute person in the world, whom he couldn’t dispose of as an
interested scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no
attacking, no disproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing.
One had come to a queer pass when a servant’s opinion so mattered.
Eugenio’s would have mattered even if, as founded on a low vision
of appearances, it had been quite wrong. It was the more
disagreeable accordingly that the vision of appearances was quite
right, and yet was scarcely less low.
Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off
with the more impatience that he was independently restless. He had
to walk in spite of weather, and he took his course, through
crooked ways, to the Piazza, where he should have the shelter of
the galleries. Here, in the high arcade, half Venice was crowded
close, while, on the Molo, at the limit of the expanse, the old
columns of the Saint Theodore and of the Lion were the frame of a
door wide open to the storm. It was odd for him, as he moved, that
it should have made such a difference—if the difference wasn’t only
that the palace had for the first time failed of a welcome. There
was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh note and broke
the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with, and it was
to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at a
stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The
margin had been his name for it—for the thing that, though it had
held out, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come,
and he wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as
vague as himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in
shops. There were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of
red marble, greasy now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in
its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of
its detail, was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the
drawing-room of Europe, profaned and bewildered by some reverse of
fortune. He brushed shoulders with brown men whose hats askew, and
the loose sleeves of whose pendent jackets, made them resemble
melancholy maskers. The tables and chairs that overflowed from the
cafés were gathered, still with a pretense of service, into the
arcade, and here and there a spectacled German, with his
coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These were
impressions for Densher too, but he had made the whole circuit
thrice before he stopped short, in front of Florian’s with the
force of his sharpest. His eye had caught a face within the café—he
had spotted an acquaintance behind the glass. The person he had
thus paused long enough to look at twice was seated, well within
range, at a small table on which a tumbler, half-emptied and
evidently neglected, still remained; and though he had on his knee,
as he leaned back, a copy of a French newspaper—the heading of the
Figaro was visible—he stared straight before him at the
little opposite rococo wall. Densher had him for a minute in
profile, had him for a time during which his identity produced,
however quickly, all the effect of establishing
connexions—connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it were
the one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of
the head, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of
being noticed. This wider view showed him all Lord Mark—Lord
Mark as encountered, several weeks before, the day of the first
visit of each to Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark
that was going out, on that occasion, as he came in—he had felt it,
in the hall, at the time; and he was accordingly the less at a loss
to recognize in a few seconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the
surface, the same potential quantity.
It was a matter, the whole passage—it could only
be—but of a few seconds; for as he might neither stand there to
stare nor on the other hand make any advance from it, he had
presently resumed his walk, this time to another pace. It had been
for all the world, during his pause, as if he had caught his answer
to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark had simply faced him—as he had
faced him, not placed by him, not at first—as one of the
damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hanging fire, had then
clearly come; yet no light of salutation had been struck from these
certainties. Acquaintance between them was scant enough for neither
to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, what now
mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian’s should be in the
place at all. He couldn’t have been in it long; Densher, as
inevitably a haunter of the great meeting-ground, would in that
case have seen him before. He paid short visits; he was on the
wing; the question for him even as he sat there was of his train or
of his boat. He had come back for something—as a sequel to his
earlier visit; and whatever he had come back for it had had time to
be done. He might have arrived but last night or that morning; he
had already made the difference. It was a great thing for Densher
to get this answer. He held it close, he hugged it, quite leaned on
it as he continued to circulate. It kept him going and going—it
made him no less restless. But it explained—and that was much, for
with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice in the air,
otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate. The weather had
changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible
because of Lord Mark. It was because of him, a fortiori,
that the palace was closed. Densher went round again twice; he
found the visitor each time as he had found him first. Once, that
is, he was staring before him; the next time he was looking over
his Figaro, which he had opened out. Densher didn’t again
stop, but left him apparently unconscious of his passage—on another
repetition of which Lord Mark had disappeared. He had spent but the
day; he would be off that night; he had now gone to his hotel for
arrangements. These things were as plain to Densher as if he had
had them in words. The obscure had cleared for him—if cleared it
was; there was something he didn’t see, the great thing; but he saw
so round it and so close to it that this was almost as good. He had
been looking at a man who had done what he had come for, and for
whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The man had come again to
see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visit would have taken
place just before or just after luncheon, and it was the reason why
he himself had found her door shut.
He said to himself that evening, he still said even
on the morrow, that he only wanted a reason, and that with this
perception of one he could now mind, as he called it, his business.
His business, he had settled, as we know, was to keep thoroughly
still; and he asked himself why it should prevent this that he
could feel, in connexion with the crisis, so remarkably blameless.
He gave the appearances before him all the benefit of being
critical, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn’t feel he had
dodged it. But it wasn’t a bit he who, that day, had touched her,
and if she was upset it wasn’t a bit his act. The ability so to
think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to a kind
of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,
by the visible conditions—sharp, striking, ugly to him—of Lord
Mark’s return. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of
which there were many, was as a demonstration on the face of it
sinister even to his own actual ignorance. He didn’t need, for
seeing it as evil, seeing it as, to a certainty, in a high degree
“nasty,” to know more about it than he had so easily and so
wonderfully picked up. You couldn’t drop on the poor girl that way
without, by the fact, being brutal. Such a visit was a descent, an
invasion, an aggression, constituting precisely one or other of the
stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought to spare her.
Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to the
reflexion—which he positively, with occasion, might have brought
straight out—that the only delicate and honourable way of treating
a person in such a state was to treat her as he, Merton Densher,
did. With time, actually—for the impression but deepened—this sense
of the contrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense
of relief, and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the
world—and he drew a long breath on it—as if a special danger for
him had passed. Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such
a service, got it straight out of the way. It was he, the brute,
who had stumbled into just the wrong inspiration and who had
therefore produced, for the very person he had wished to hurt, an
impunity that was comparative innocence, that was almost like
purification. The person he had wished to hurt could only be the
person so unaccountably hanging about. To keep still meanwhile was,
for this person, more comprehensively, to keep it all up; and to
keep it all up was, if that seemed on consideration best, not, for
the day or two, to go back to the palace.
The day or two passed—stretched to three days; and
with the effect, extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the
course of them washed but the more clean. Some sign would come if
his return should have the better effect; and he was at all events,
in absence, without the particular scruple. It wouldn’t have been
meant for him by either of the women that he was to come back but
to face Eugenio. That was impossible—the being again denied; for it
made him practically answerable, and answerable was what he wasn’t.
There was no neglect either in absence, inasmuch as, from the
moment he didn’t get in, the one message he could send up would be
some hope on the score of health. Since accordingly that sort of
expression was definitely forbidden him he had only to wait—which
he was actually helped to do by his feeling with the lapse of each
day more and more wound up to it. The days in themselves were
anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted, the fireless
cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world about was
broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms and
listened to the wind—listened also to tinkles of bells and watched
for some servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note
never came; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it.
When he wasn’t at home he was in circulation again as he had been
at the hour of his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square
with the herd of refugees; he raked the approaches and the cafés on
the chance the brute, as he now regularly imaged him, might
be still there. He could only be there, he knew, to be received
afresh; and that—one had but to think of it—would be indeed stiff.
He had gone, however—it was proved; though Densher’s care for the
question either way only added to what was most acrid in the taste
of his present ordeal. It all came round to what he was doing for
Milly—spending days that neither relief nor escape could purge of a
smack of the abject. What was it but abject for a man of his parts
to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it but sordid for him,
shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shops and to
consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to find himself
wondering what, as between him and another man, a possible meeting
would produce? There recurred moments when in spite of everything
he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on the third
day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that he
wouldn’t have budged for the world.
He thought of the two women, in their silence, at
last—he at all events thought of Milly—as probably, for her
reasons, now intensely wishing him to go. The cold breath of her
reasons was, with everything else, in the air; but he didn’t care
for them any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay in
spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite perhaps of some
final experience that would be, for the pain of it, all but
unbearable. That would be his one way, purified though he was, to
mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the
disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a proof of his
not having stayed for the thing—the agreeable, as it were—that Kate
had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have been the odium
of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium as actual
too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof. These were
the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what she had
done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a qualification.
It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such things so
soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she had
provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as
he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own
intensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch of
talk—sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final
and deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken:
“Letters? Never-now. Think of it. Impossible.” So that as he had
sufficiently caught her sense—into which he read, all the same, a
strange inconsequence—they had practically wrapped their
understanding in the breach of their correspondence. He had
moreover, on losing her, done justice to her law of silence; for
there was doubtless a finer delicacy in his not writing to her than
in his writing as he must have written had he spoken of themselves.
That would have been a turbid strain, and her idea had been to be
noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Only it left her, for the
pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left him, in the
conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, on the
afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,
with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed
dreariness, for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the
grinning padrona threw open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham.
That made at a bound a difference, especially when he saw that his
visitor was weighted. It appeared part of her weight that she was
in a wet waterproof, that she allowed her umbrella to be taken from
her by the good woman without consciousness or care, and that her
face, under her veil, richly rosy with the driving wind, was—and
the veil too—as splashed as if the rain were her tears.
—III—
They came to it almost immediately; he was
to wonder afterwards at the fewness of their steps. “She has turned
her face to the wall.”
“You mean she’s worse?”
The poor lady stood there as she had stopped;
Densher had, in instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all
responsive at sight of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona,
who had offered to relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked
vaguely about through her wet veil, intensely alive now to the step
she had taken and wishing it not to have been in the dark, but
clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. “I don’t know how she
is—and it’s why I’ve come to you.”
“I’m glad enough you’ve come,” he said, “and it’s
quite—you make me feel—as if I had been wretchedly waiting for
you.”
She showed him again her blurred eyes—she had
caught at his word. “Have you been wretched?”
Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It
would have sounded for him like a complaint, and before something
he already made out in his visitor he knew his own trouble as
small. Hers, under her damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a
fire, was great, and he felt she had brought it all with her. He
answered that he had been patient and above all that he had been
still. “As still as a mouse—you’ll have seen it for yourself.
Stiller, for three days together, than I’ve ever been in my life.
It has seemed to me the only thing.”
This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy
was straightway for his friend, he saw, a light that her own light
could answer. “It has been best. I’ve wondered for you. But it has
been best,” she said again.
“Yet it has done no good?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been afraid you were gone.”
Then as he gave a headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature:
“You won’t go?
“Is to ‘go,”’ he asked, “to be still?”
“Oh I mean if you’ll stay for me.”
“I’ll do anything for you. Isn’t it for you alone
now I can?”
She thought of it, and he could see even more of
the relief she was taking from him. His presence, his face, his
voice, the old rooms themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where
Kate had admirably been to him—these things counted for her, now
she had them, as the help she had been wanting: so that she still
only stood there taking them all in. With it however popped up
characteristically a throb of her conscience. What she thus tasted
was almost a personal joy. It told Densher of the three days she on
her side had spent. “Well, anything you do for me—is for her
too. Only, only—!”
“Only nothing now matters?”
She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact
itself that he expressed. “Then you know?”
“Is she dying?” he asked for all answer.
Mrs. Stringham waited—her face seemed to sound him.
Then her own reply was strange. “She hasn’t so much as named you.
We haven’t spoken.”
“Not for three days?”
“No more,” she simply went on, “than if it were all
over. Not even by the faintest allusion.”
“Oh,” said Densher with more light, “you mean you
haven’t spoken about me?”
“About what else? No more than if you were
dead.”
“Well,” he answered after a moment, “I am
dead.”
“Then I am,” said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her
arms on her waterproof.
It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself
in its dry despair ; it represented, in the bleak place, which had
no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of
which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be
reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And
Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but again: “Is she
dying?”
It made her, however, as if these were crudities,
almost material pangs, only say as before: “Then you know?”
“Yes,” he at last returned, “I know. But the marvel
to me is that you do. I’ve no right in fact to imagine or to assume
that you do.”
“You may,” said Susan Shepherd, “all the same. I
know.”
“Everything?”
Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him.
“No—not everything. That’s why I’ve come.”
“That I shall really tell you?” With which, as she
hesitated and it affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting
“Oh, oh!” It turned him from her to the place itself, which was a
part of what was in him, was the abode, the worn shrine more than
ever, of the fact in possession, the fact, now a thick association,
for which he had hired it. That was not for telling, but
Susan Shepherd was, none the less, so decidedly wonderful that the
sense of it might really have begun, by an effect already
operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred
him, that she hadn’t come to judge him; had come rather, so far as
she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own abasement—that, at
any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush of friendliness
that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when she met
his groan with an attenuation.
“We shall at all events—if that’s anything—be
together.”
It was his own good impulse in herself. “It’s what
I’ve ventured to feel. It’s much.” She replied in effect, silently,
that it was whatever he liked; on which, so far as he had been
afraid for anything, he knew his fear had dropped. The comfort was
huge, for it gave back to him something precious, over which, in
the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly closed.
Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with her sole and single
boldness—and also on grounds he hadn’t then measured—that Mrs.
Stringham was a person who wouldn’t, at a pinch, in a
stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
which Kate was always showing. “You don’t think then very horridly
of me?”
And her answer was the more valuable that it came
without nervous effusion—quite as if she understood what he might
conceivably have believed. She turned over in fact what she
thought, and that was what helped him. “Oh you’ve been
extraordinary!”
It made him aware the next moment of how they had
been planted there. She took off her cloak with his aid, though
when she had also, accepting a seat, removed her veil, he
recognized in her personal ravage that the words she had just
uttered to him were the one flower she had to throw. They were all
her consolation for him, and the consolation even still depended on
the event. She sat with him at any rate in the grey clearance, as
sad as a winter dawn, made by their meeting. The image she again
evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. “She has turned her
face to the wall.”
He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if,
in their silences, they were simply so leaving what he saw. “She
doesn’t speak at all? I don’t mean not of me.”
“Of nothing—of no one.” And she went on, Susan
Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take it. “She doesn’t
want to die. Think of her age. Think of her goodness. Think
of her beauty. Think of all she is. Think of all she has.
She lies there stiffening herself and clinging to it all. So I
thank God—!” the poor lady wound up with a wan inconsequence.
He wondered. “You thank God—?”
“That she’s so quiet.”
He continued to wonder. “Is she so
quiet?”
“She’s more than quiet. She’s grim. It’s what she
has never been. So you see—all these days. I can’t tell you—but
it’s better so. It would kill me if she were to tell me.”
“To tell you?” He was still at a loss.
“How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn’t
want it.”
“How she doesn’t want to die? Of course she doesn’t
want it.” He had a long pause, and they might have been thinking
together of what they could even now do to prevent it. This,
however, was not what he brought out. Milly’s “grimness” and the
great hushed palace were present to him; present with the little
woman before him as she must have been waiting there and listening.
“Only, what harm have you done her?”
Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. “I
don’t know. I come and talk of her here with you.”
It made him again hesitate. “Does she utterly hate
me?”
“I don’t know. How can I? No one ever
will.”
“She’ll never tell?”
“She’ll never tell.”
Once more he thought. “She must be
magnificent.”
“She is magnificent.”
His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned
it, so far as he could, all over. “Would she see me again?”
It made his companion stare. “Should you like to
see her?”
“You mean as you describe her?” He felt her
surprise, and it took him some time. “No.”
“Ah then!” Mrs. Stringham sighed.
“But if she could bear it I’d do anything.”
She had for the moment her vision of this, but it
collapsed. “I don’t see what you can do.”
“I don’t either. But she might.”
Mrs. Stringham continued to think. “It’s too
late.”
“Too late for her to see—?”
“Too late.”
The very decision of her despair—it was after all
so lucid—kindled in him a heat. “But the doctor, all the
while—?”
“Tacchini? Oh he’s kind. He comes. He’s proud of
having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly
in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other
patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he
treats her like royalty; he’s waiting on events. But she has barely
consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for
she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he
may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at
her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in
that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in
doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable
intolerable smile. We don’t,” said Susan Shepherd, “talk of
her.”
“By her request?”
“Absolutely. I don’t do what she doesn’t wish. We
talk of the price of provisions.”
“By her request too?”
“Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when
she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me he
might stay as much as we liked.”
Densher took it all in. “But he isn’t any comfort
to you!”
“None whatever. That, however,” she added, “isn’t
his fault. Nothing’s any comfort.”
“Certainly,” Densher observed, “as I but too
horribly feel, I’m not.”
“No. But I didn’t come for that.”
“You came for me.”
“Well then call it that.” But she looked at him a
moment with eyes filled full, and something came up in her the next
instant from deeper still. “I came at bottom of course—”
“You came at bottom of course for our friend
herself. But if it’s, as you say, too late for me to do
anything?”
She continued to look at him, and with an
irritation, which he saw grow in her, from the truth itself. “So I
did say. But, with you here”—and she turned her vision again
strangely about her “with you here, and with everything, I
feel we mustn’t abandon her.”
“God forbid we should abandon her.”
“Then you won’t?” His tone had made her
flush again.
“How do you mean I ‘won’t,’ if she abandons
me? What can I do if she won’t see me?”
“But you said just now you wouldn’t like it.”
“I said I shouldn’t like it in the light of what
you tell me. I shouldn’t like it only to see her as you make me. I
should like it if I could help her. But even then,” Densher pursued
without faith, “she would have to want it first herself. And
there,” he continued to make out, “is the devil of it. She
won’t want it herself. She can’t!”
He had got up in his impatience of it, and she
watched him while he helplessly moved. “There’s one thing you can
do. There’s only that, and even for that there are difficulties.
But there is that.” He stood before her with his hands in his
pockets, and he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was
coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to utter it, and as
he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on the Canal, the
renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if
still with her fear, she only half-spoke. “I think you really know
yourself what it is.”
He did know what it was, and with it even, as she
said—rather!—there were difficulties. He turned away on them, on
everything, for a moment; he moved to the other window and looked
at the sheeted channel, wider, like a river, where the houses
opposite, blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance.
Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact, for the minute,
as if she had “had” him, and he was the first again to speak. When
he did so, however, it was not in straight answer to her last
remark—he only started from that. He said, as he came back to her,
“Let me, you know, see—one must understand,” almost as if he
had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was
where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn’t he be
the one least of all to do it? “Aren’t we, at the worst, in the
dark without him?”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Stringham, “it’s he who has kept me
going. I wired the first night, and he answered like an angel.
He’ll come like one. Only he can’t arrive, at the nearest, till
Thursday afternoon.”
“Well then that’s something.”
She considered. “Something—yes. She likes
him.”
“Rather! I can see it still, the face with which,
when he was here in October—that night when she was in white, when
she had people there and those musicians—she committed him to my
care. It was beautiful for both of us—she put us in relation. She
asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so, and we quite
hit it off. That proved,” Densher said with a quick sad smile,
“that she liked him.”
“He liked you,” Susan Shepherd presently
risked.
“Ah I know nothing about that.”
“You ought to then. He went with you to galleries
and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him the choicest
things, and you perhaps will remember telling me myself that if he
hadn’t been a great surgeon he might really have been a great
judge. I mean of the beautiful.”
“Well,” the young man admitted, “that’s what he
is—in having judged her. He hasn’t,” he went on, “judged her for
nothing. His interest in her—which we must make the most of—can
only be supremely beneficent.”
He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in
his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently
betrayed, trying to keep his distance from the recognition he had a
few moments before partly confessed to. “I’m glad,” she dropped,
“you like him!”
There was something for him in the sound of it.
“Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you
like him. Surely, when he was here, we all liked him.”
“Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And
I should think, with all the time you spent with him, you’d know
it,” she said, “yourself.”
Densher stopped short, though at first without a
word. “We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to
sound her name, and nothing whatever in connexion with her passed
between us.”
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this
picture. But she had plainly an idea that after an instant resisted
it. “That was his professional propriety.”
“Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue
in him, and it was something more besides.” And he spoke with
sudden intensity. “I couldn’t talk to him about her!”
“Oh!” said Susan Shepherd.
“I can’t talk to any one about her.”
“Except to me,” his friend continued.
“Except to you.” The ghost of her smile, a gleam of
significance, had waited on her words, and it kept him, for
honesty, looking at her. For honesty too—that is for his own
words—he had quickly coloured: he was sinking so, at a stroke, the
burden of his discourse with Kate. His visitor, for the minute,
while their eyes met, might have been watching him hold it down.
And he had to hold it down—the effort of which, precisely,
made him red. He couldn’t let it come up; at least not yet. She
might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
statement, but he really modified it. “Sir Luke, at all events, had
nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe
talk was impossible for us, and—”
“And real”—she had taken him right up with a
huge emphasis—“ was more impossible still.” No doubt—he didn’t deny
it; and she had straightway drawn her conclusion. “Then that proves
what I say—that there were immensities between you. Otherwise you’d
have chattered.”
“I dare say,” Densher granted, “we were both
thinking of her.”
“You were neither of you thinking of any one else.
That’s why you kept together.”
Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her;
but he came straight back to what he had originally said. “I
haven’t a notion, all the same, of what he thinks.” She faced him,
visibly, with the question into which he had already observed that
her special shade of earnestness was perpetually flowering, right
and left—“Are you very sure?”—and he could only note her apparent
difference from himself. “You, I judge, believe that he thinks
she’s gone.”
She took it, but she bore up. “It doesn’t matter
what I believe.”
“Well, we shall see”—and he felt almost basely
superficial. More and more, for the last five minutes, had he known
she had brought something with her, and never in respect to
anything had he had such a wish to postpone. He would have liked to
put everything off till Thursday; he was sorry it was now Tuesday;
he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it wasn’t of Sir Luke, who was
coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of Mrs. Stringham, who was
sitting there. It wasn‘t, strange to say, of Kate either, for
Kate’s presence affected him suddenly as having swooned or trembled
away. Susan Shepherd’s, thus prolonged, had cast on it some
influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent to
his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,
absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the
first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his
sensibility so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of
himself he was afraid, and that even, if he didn’t take care, he
should infallibly be more so. “Meanwhile,” he added for his
companion, “it has been everything for me to see you.”
She slowly rose at the words, which might almost
have conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there
as if she had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But
the abruptness would have been in this case so marked as fairly to
offer ground for insistence to her imagination of his state. It
would take her moreover, she clearly showed him she was thinking,
but a minute or two to insist. Besides, she had already said it.
“Will you do it if he asks you? I mean if Sir Luke himself
puts it to you. And will you give him”—oh she was earnest now!—“the
opportunity to put it to you?”
“The opportunity to put what?”
“That if you deny it to her, that may still do
something.”
Densher felt himself—as had already once befallen
him in the quarter of an hour—turn red to the top of his forehead.
Turning red had, however, for him, a sign of shame, been, so to
speak, discounted: his consciousness of it at the present moment
was rather as a sign of his fear. It showed him sharply enough of
what he was afraid. “If I deny what to her?”
Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for
hadn’t he all along been letting her see that he knew? “Why, what
Lord Mark told her.”
“And what did Lord Mark tell her?”
Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment—of seeing
him as suddenly perverse. “I’ve been judging that you yourself
know.” And it was she who now blushed deep.
It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too
by other things. “Then you know—”
“Of his dreadful visit?” She stared. “Why it’s what
has done it.”
“Yes—I understand that. But you also know—”
He had faltered again, but all she knew she now
wanted to say. “I’m speaking,” she said soothingly, “of what he
told her. It’s that that I’ve taken you as knowing.”
“Oh!” he sounded in spite of himself.
It appeared to have for her, he saw the next
moment, the quality of relief, as if he had supposed her thinking
of something else. Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. “Oh
you thought I’ve known it for true!”
Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that
he had betrayed himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he
immediately saw still better. There it was now, all of it at last,
and this at least there was no postponing. They were left with her
idea—the one she was wishing to make him recognize. He had
expressed ten minutes before his need to understand, and she was
acting after all but on that. Only what he was to understand was no
small matter; it might be larger even than as yet appeared.
He took again one of his turns, not meeting what
she had last said; he mooned a minute, as he would have called it,
at a window; and of course she could see that she had driven him to
the wall. She did clearly, without delay, see it; on which her
sense of having “caught” him became as promptly a scruple, which
she spoke as if not to press. “What I mean is that he told her
you’ve been all the while engaged to Miss Croy.”
He gave a jerk round; it was almost—to hear it—the
touch of a lash; and he said—idiotically, as he afterwards knew—the
first thing that came into his head. “All what while?”
“Oh it’s not I who say it.” She spoke in
gentleness. “I only repeat to you what he told her.”
Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had
already caught himself up. “Pardon my brutality. Of course I know
what you’re talking about. I saw him, toward the evening,” he
further explained, “in the Piazza; only just saw him—through the
glass at Florian’s—without any words. In fact I scarcely know
him—there wouldn’t have been occasion. It was but once, moreover—he
must have gone that night. But I knew he wouldn’t have come for
nothing, and I turned it over—what he would have come for.”
Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. “He came for
exasperation.”
Densher approved. “He came to let her know that he
knows better than she for whom it was she had a couple of months
before, in her fool’s paradise, refused him.”
“How you do know!”—and Mrs. Stringham almost
smiled.
“I know that—but I don’t know the good it does
him.”
“The good, he thinks, if he has patience—not too
much—may be to come. He doesn’t know what he has done to her. Only
we, you see, do that.”
He saw, but he wondered. “She kept from him—what
she felt?”
“She was able—I’m sure of it—not to show anything.
He dealt her his blow, and she took it without a sign.” Mrs.
Stringham, it was plain, spoke by book, and it brought into play
again her appreciation of what she related. “She’s
magnificent.”
Densher again gravely assented.
“Magnificent!”
“And he,” she went on, “is an idiot of
idiots.”
“An idiot of idiots.” For a moment, on it all, on
the stupid doom in it, they looked at each other. “Yet he’s thought
so awfully clever.”
“So awfully—it’s Maud Lowder’s own view. And he was
nice, in London,” said Mrs. Stringham, “to me. One could almost
pity him—he has had such a good conscience.”
“That’s exactly the inevitable ass.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t—I could see from the only few
things she first told me—that he meant her the least harm. He
intended none whatever.”
“That’s always the ass at his worst,” Densher
returned. “He only of course meant harm to me.”
“And good to himself—he thought that would come. He
had been unable to swallow,” Mrs. Stringham pursued, “what had
happened on his other visit. He had been then too sharply
humiliated.”
“Oh I saw that.”
“Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as
it were, while he was turned away.”
“Perfectly,” Densher said—“I’ve filled it out. And
also that he has known meanwhile for what I was then
received. For a stay of all these weeks. He had had it to think
of.”
“Precisely—it was more than he could bear. But he
has it,” said Mrs. Stringham, “to think of still.”
“Only, after all,” asked Densher, who himself
somehow, at this point, was having more to think of even than he
had yet had—“only, after all, how has he happened to know? That is,
to know enough.”
“What do you call enough?” Mrs. Stringham
inquired.
“He can only have acted—it would have been his sole
safety—from full knowledge.”
He had gone on without heeding her question; but,
face to face as they were, something had none the less passed
between them. It was this that, after an instant, made her again
interrogative. “What do you mean by full knowledge?”
Densher met it indirectly. “Where has he been since
October?”
“I think he has been back to England. He came in
fact, I’ve reason to believe, straight from there.”
“Straight to do this job? All the way for his
half-hour?”
“Well, to try again—with the help perhaps of a new
fact. To make himself possibly right with her—a different attempt
from the other. He had at any rate something to tell her, and he
didn’t know his opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or
perhaps indeed half an hour would be just what was most effective.
It has been!” said Susan Shepherd.
Her companion took it in, understanding but too
well; yet as she lighted the matter for him more, really, than his
own courage had quite dared—putting the absent dots on several
i’s—he saw new questions swarm. They had been till now in a bunch,
entangled and confused; and they fell apart, each showing for
itself. The first he put to her was at any rate abrupt. “Have you
heard of late from Mrs. Lowder.”
“Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally
upon news of Milly.”
He hesitated. “And does she depend, naturally, upon
news of me?”
His friend matched for an instant his
deliberation.
“I’ve given her none that hasn’t been decently
good. This will
have been the first.”
“ ‘This’?” Densher was thinking.
“Lord Mark’s having been here, and her being as she
is.”
He thought a moment longer. “What has Mrs. Lowder
written about him? Has she written that he has been with
them?”
“She has mentioned him but once—it was in her
letter before the last. Then she said something.”
“And what did she say?”
Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. “Well it
was in reference to Miss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking
of him. Or perhaps I should say rather that he was thinking of
her—only it seemed this time to have struck Maud that he was
seeing the way more open to him.”
Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but
he presently raised them to speak, and there was that in his face
which proved him aware of a queerness in his question. “Does she
mean he has been encouraged to propose to her niece?”
“I don’t know what she means.”
“Of course not”—he recovered himself; “and I
oughtn’t to seem to trouble you to piece together what I can’t
piece myself. Only I ‘guess,”’ he added, “I can piece it.”
She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. “I
dare say I can piece it too.”
It was one of the things in her—and his conscious
face took it from her as such—that from the moment of her coming in
had seemed to mark for him, as to what concerned him, the long jump
of her perception. They had parted four days earlier with many
things, between them, deep down. But these things were now on their
troubled surface, and it wasn’t he who had brought them so quickly
up. Women were wonderful—at least this one was. But so, not less,
was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so, most of all, was his very Kate. Well,
he already knew what he had been feeling about the circle of
petticoats. They were all such petticoats! It was just the fineness
of his tangle. The sense of that, in its turn, for us too, might
have been not unconnected with his putting to his visitor a
question that quite passed over her remark. “Has Miss Croy
meanwhile written to our friend?”
“Oh,” Mrs. Stringham amended, “her friend
also. But not a single word that I know of.”
He had taken it for certain she hadn’t—the thing
being after all but a shade more strange than his having himself,
with Milly, never for six weeks mentioned the young lady in
question. It was for that matter but a shade more strange than
Milly’s not having mentioned her. In spite of which, and however
inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate’s silence. He got away
from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest he could
get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had been judging.
“How did he manage to get at her? She had only—with what had
passed between them before—to say she couldn’t see him.”
“Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier,”
the good lady explained with a slight embarrassment, “than at the
other time.”
“Easier?”
“She was off her guard. There was a
difference.”
“Yes. But exactly not the difference.”
“Exactly not the difference of her having to be
harsh. Perfectly. She could afford to be the opposite.” With which,
as he said nothing, she just impatiently completed her sense. “She
had had you here for six weeks.”
“Oh!” Densher softly groaned.
“Besides, I think he must have written her
first—written I mean in a tone to smooth his way. That it would be
a kindness to himself. Then on the spot—”
“On the spot,” Densher broke in, “he unmasked? The
horrid little beast!”
It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though
quickening, as for hope, the intensity of her look at him. “Oh he
went off without an alarm.”
“And he must have gone off also without a
hope.”
“Ah that, certainly.”
“Then it was mere base revenge. Hasn’t he known
her, into the bargain,” the young man asked—“didn’t he, weeks
before, see her, judge her, feel her, as having for such a suit as
his not more perhaps than a few months to live?”
Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at
him in silence; and it gave more force to what she then remarkably
added. “He has doubtless been aware of what you speak of, just as
you have yourself been aware.”
“He has wanted her, you mean, just
because—?”
“Just because,” said Susan Shepherd.
“The hound!” Merton Densher brought out. He moved
off, however, with a hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious
again of an intention in his visitor’s reserve. Dusk was now
deeper, and after he had once more taken counsel of the dreariness
without he turned to his companion. “Shall we have lights—a lamp or
the candles?”
“Not for me.”
“Nothing?”
“Not for me.”
He waited at the window another moment and then
faced his friend with a thought. “He will have proposed to
Miss Croy. That’s what has happened.”
Her reserve continued, “It’s you who must
judge.”
“Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so
too—only she, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy’s refusal of him
will have struck him”—Densher continued to make it out—“as a
phenomenon requiring a reason.”
“And you’ve been clear to him as the
reason?”
“Not too clear—since I’m sticking here and since
that has been a fact to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant.
But clear enough. He has believed,” said Densher bravely, “that I
may have been a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time
have been up to something in Venice.”
Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. “ ‘Up
to’ something? Up to what?”
“God knows. To some ‘game,’ as they say. To some
deviltry. To some duplicity.”
“Which of course,” Mrs. Stringham observed, “is a
monstrous supposition.” Her companion, after a stiff
minute—sensibly long for each—fell away from her again, and then
added to it another minute, which he spent once more looking out
with his hands in his pockets. This was no answer, he perfectly
knew, to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state for his
own ears that no answer was possible. She left him to himself, and
he was glad she had declined, for their further colloquy, the
advantage of lights. These would have been an advantage mainly to
herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence of them.
It came out in her very tone when at last she addressed him—so
differently, for confidence—in words she had already used. “If Sir
Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for him,
will you deny to Milly herself what she has been so dreadfully to
believe?”
Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said:
“You’re absolutely certain then that she does believe it?”
“Certain?” She appealed to their whole situation.
“Judge!”
He took his time again to judge. “Do you
believe it?”
He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her
hard; it eased him a little that her answer must be a pain to her
discretion. She answered none the less, and he was truly the harder
pressed. “What I believe will inevitably depend more or less on
your action. You can perfectly settle it—if you care. I promise to
believe you down to the ground if, to save her life, you consent to
a denial.”
“But a denial, when it comes to that—confound the
whole thing, don’t you see!—of exactly what?”
It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but
in fact she enlarged. “Of everything.”
Everything had never even yet seemed to him so
incalculably much. “Oh!” he simply moaned into the gloom.25
—IV—
The near Thursday, coming nearer and
bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought also blessedly an abatement of
other rigors. The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and
the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days, but now hot and almost
vindictive, came into its own again and, with an almost audible
paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the bright
colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and splashed and
called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the
scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a
hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher
rejoiced in this on the occasion of his going to the station to
meet the great doctor. He went after consideration, which, as he
was constantly aware, was at present his imposed, his only, way of
doing anything. That was where the event had landed him—where no
event in his life had landed him before. He had thought, no doubt,
from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except
indeed that he remembered thoughts—a few of them—which at the
moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like
adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not, as to
the prohibition of impulse, accident, range—the prohibition in
other words of freedom—hitherto known. The great oddity was that if
he had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an
adventure, nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his
staying. It would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go
back, above all, to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but
there was something of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and
involved sort in his going on as he was. That was the effect in
particular of Mrs. Stringham’s visit, which had left him as with
such a taste in his mouth of what he couldn’t do. It had made this
quantity clear to him, and yet had deprived him of the sense, the
other sense, of what, for a refuge, he possibly could.
It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he
knew, to go to the station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at
all events, had he yet turned over so long. What then was his
odious position but that again and again he was afraid? He
stiffened himself under this consciousness as if it had been a tax
levied by a tyrant. He hadn’t at any time proposed to himself to
live long enough for fear to preponderate in his life. Such was
simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was afraid for
instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might prove
for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen,
the great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young
woman’s brief sacrifice to society—and the hour of Mrs. Stringham’s
appeal had brought it well to the surface—shown him marked
benevolence. Mrs. Stringham’s comments on the relation in which
Milly had placed them made him—it was unmistakable—feel things he
perhaps hadn’t felt. It was in the spirit of seeking a chance to
feel again adequately whatever it was he had missed—it was, no
doubt, in that spirit, so far as it went a stroke for freedom, that
Densher, arriving betimes, paced the platform before the train came
in. Only, after it had come and he had presented himself at the
door of Sir Luke’s compartment with everything that followed—only,
as the situation developed, the sense of an anti-climax to so many
intensities deprived his apprehensions and hesitations even of the
scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce have said if the
visitor’s manner less showed the remembrance that might have
suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise in presence
of the fact.
Sir Luke had clean forgotten—so Densher read—the
rather remarkable young man he had formerly gone about with, though
he picked him up again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The
young man felt himself so picked, and the thing immediately
affected him as the proof of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the
waste with which he was now connected the exhibition was of a
nature quite nobly to admonish him. The eminent pilgrim, in the
train, all the way, had used the hours as he needed, thinking not a
moment in advance of what finally awaited him. An exquisite case
awaited him—of which, in this queer way, the remarkable young man
was an outlying part; but the single motion of his face, the motion
into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred its
stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had
suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress
now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became
as a symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one’s self be
concerned, of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated,
everything that, in contact, he appeared to accept—if only, for
much, not to trouble to sink it: what one missed was the inward use
he made of it. Densher began wondering, at the great water-steps
outside, what use he would make of the anomaly of their having
there to separate. Eugenio had been on the platform, in the
respectful rear, and the gondola from the palace, under his
direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching mixture of alacrity
and dignity, on their coming out of the station together. Densher
didn’t at all mind now that, he himself of necessity refusing a
seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the palace, he
had Milly’s three emissaries for spectators; and this
susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind.
All he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps—they could see
him, the donkeys, as shut out as they would. “I don’t,” he said
with a sad headshake, “go there now.”
“Oh!” Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of
it; so that the thing was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an
inscrutability quite inevitable and unconscious. His friend
appeared not even to make of it that he supposed it might be for
respect to the crisis. He didn’t moreover afterwards make much more
of anything—after the classic craft, that is, obeying in the main
Pasquale’s inimitable stroke from the poop, had performed the
maneuver by which it presented, receding, a back, so to speak,
rendered positively graceful by the high black hump of its
felze.bg
Densher watched the gondola out of sight—he heard Pasquale’s cry,
borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm swerve into a
side-canal, a short cut to the palace. he had no gondola of his
own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly—as in Venice
it is humble—walked away, though not without having for some time
longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and
as he couldn’t have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the
truest about Milly. He couldn’t have reckoned on the force of the
difference instantly made—for it was all in the air as he heard
Pasquale’s cry and saw the boat disappear—by the mere visibility,
on the spot, of the personage summoned to her aid. He hadn’t only
never been near the facts of her condition—which counted so as a
blessing for him; he hadn’t only, with all the world, hovered
outside an impenetrable ring fence, within which there reigned a
kind of expensive vagueness made up of smiles and silences and
beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to
breaking ; but he had also, with every one else, as he now felt,
actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct interest of
every one’s good manner, every one’s pity, every one’s really quite
generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
cliché went, to which no one had made an exception, the
great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain
and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech
that consented to reflect it. “The mere aesthetic instinct of
mankind—!” our young man had more than once, in the connexion, said
to himself; letting the rest of the proposition drop, but touching
again thus sufficiently on the outrage even to taste involved in
one’s having to see. So then it had been—a general conscious fool’s
paradise, from which the specified had been chased like a dangerous
animal. What therefore had at present befallen was that the
specified, standing all the while at the gate, had now crossed the
threshold as in Sir Luke Strett’s person and quite on such a scale
as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher’s nerves, absolutely his
heart-beats too, had measured the change before he on this occasion
moved away.
The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain,
of the chance grimly. narrowed, had been made, at a stroke,
intense, and this was to be the way he was now to feel them. The
clearance of the air, in short, making vision not only possible but
inevitable, the one thing left to be thankful for was the breadth
of Sir Luke’s shoulders, which, should one be able to keep in line
with them, might in some degree interpose. It was, however, far
from plain to Densher for the first day or two that he was again to
see his distinguished friend at all. That he couldn’t, on any basis
actually serving, return to the palace—this was as solid to him,
every whit, as the other feature of his case, the fact of the
publicity attaching to his proscription through his not having
taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli
gondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined to
meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither
time nor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them
unless the great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing
that, Densher further reflected, wouldn’t even simply depend on
Mrs. Stringham’s having decided to—as they might say—turn him on.
It would depend as well—for there would be practically some
difference to her—on her actually attempting it; and it would
depend above all on what Sir Luke would make of such an overture.
Densher had for that matter his own view of the amount, to say
nothing of the particular sort, of response it might expect from
him. He had his own view of the ability of such a personage even to
understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be prepared, and
what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked himself
these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the worst. He
should miss the great man completely unless the great man should
come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him for a
purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn’t come at all, and
consequently there was nothing to hope.
It wasn’t in the least that Densher invoked this
violence to all probability; but it pressed on him that there were
few possible diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his
predicament was so odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he
was not afraid of Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung
to, based on a previous taste of the visitor’s company, that he
would somehow let him off. The truth about Milly perched on his
shoulders and sounded in his tread, became by the fact of his
presence the name and the form, for the time, of everything in the
place; but it didn’t, for the difference, sit in his face, the face
so squarely and easily turned to Densher at the earlier season. His
presence on the first occasion, not as the result of a summons, but
as a friendly whim of his own, had had quite another value; and
though our young man could scarce regard that value as recoverable
he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of the old contact.
He didn’t propose, as he privately and forcibly phrased the matter,
to be a hog; but there was something he after all did want for
himself. It was something—this stuck to him—that Sir Luke would
have had for him if it hadn’t been impossible. These were his worst
days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
tension at the palace didn’t much help him not to feel that his
destiny made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it,
so down. In mean conditions, without books, without society, almost
without money, he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support
really was his original idea, which didn’t leave him, of waiting
for the deepest depth his predicament could sink him to. Fate would
invent, if he but gave it time, some refinement of the horrible. It
was just inventing meanwhile this suppression of Sir Luke. When the
third day came without a sign he knew what to think. He had given
Mrs. Stringham during her call on him no such answer as would have
armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had described as ready for
him when he should be ready was therefore—if on no other
ground than her want of this power to answer for him—not to be
presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he
desired.
That was not, either, we hasten to declare—as
Densher then soon enough saw—the idea with which Sir Luke finally
stood before him again. For stand before him again he finally did;
just when our friend had gloomily embraced the belief that the
limit of his power to absent himself from London obligations would
have been reached. Four or five days, exclusive of journeys,
represented the largest supposable sacrifice—to a head not
crowned—on the part of one of the highest medical lights in the
world; so that really when the personage in question, following up
a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the doorway, it was to impose
on Densher a vision that for the instant cut like a knife. It
spoke, in fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the magnitude—he
shrank from calling it anything else—of Milly’s case. The great man
had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her immense need was
so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some hope, were
flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, with his
reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things
at once—the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke
was still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however,
and quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis—plainly even
now to be prolonged for him—was to have none of that sound
simplicity. Not only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about
Milly, he hadn’t dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped
in fairly to show that during the brief remainder of his stay, the
end of which was now in sight, as little as possible of that was to
be looked for. The demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of
their previous acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance
that had made him come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday
next at hand, but there were things of interest he should like to
see again meanwhile. It was for these things of interest, for
Venice and the opportunity of Venice, for a prowl or two, as he
called it, and a turn about, that he had looked his young man
up—producing on the latter’s part, as soon as the case had, with
the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined itself, the
most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing could in
fact have been more monstrous on the surface—and Densher was well
aware of it—than the relief he found during this short period in
the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing
news nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his
visitor’s entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were
connecting the fact also directly and intensely with Milly’s state.
He had come to say he had saved her—he had come, as from Mrs.
Stringham, to say how she might be saved—he had come, in spite of
Mrs. Stringham, to say she was lost: the distinct throbs of hope,
of fear, simultaneous for all their distinctness, merged their
identity in a bound of the heart just as immediate and which
remained after they had passed. It simply did wonders for him—this
was the truth—that Sir Luke was, as he would have said,
quiet.
The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of
a blest calm after a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we
know, to keep superlatively still, and trying it largely in
solitude and silence; but he looked back on it now as on the heart
of fever. The real, the right stillness was this particular form of
society. They walked together and they talked, looked up pictures
again and recovered impressions—Sir Luke knew just what he wanted;
haunted a little the dealers in old wares; sat down at Florian’s
for rest and mild drinks; blessed above all the grand weather, a
bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light. Once or twice while
they rested the great man closed his eyes—keeping them so for some
minutes while his companion, the more easily watching his face for
it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep. He had
been up at night with her—he in person, for hours; but this was all
he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take
it in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking
out of it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a
throb of his response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an
experience that held its own, and he continued to know why, in
spite of his deserts, in spite of his folly, in spite of
everything, he had so fondly hoped for it. He had hoped for it, had
sat in his room there waiting for it, because he had thus divined
in it, should it come, some power to let him off. He was
being let off; dealt with in the only way that didn’t
aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn’t
on system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by
being a man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real,
that Sir Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many
women. A man’s sense of it, another man‘s, changed the air; and he
wondered what man, had he chosen, would have been more to his
purpose than this one. He was large and easy—that was the
benediction; he knew what mattered and what didn’t, he
distinguished between the essence and the shell, the just grounds
and the unjust for fussing. One was thus—if one were concerned with
him or exposed to him at all—in his hands for whatever he should
do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might have
been by his rigor. The grand thing—it did come to that—was the way
he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn’t taken it so, could have
exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher’s now
complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing
could have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man’s
own abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at
the station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it,
Densher would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling
that of doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might
have taken a dose—except that the cue was pleasant in the
taking.
That was why one could leave it to his tacit
discretion, why for the three or four days Densher again and again
did so leave it; merely wondering a little, at the most, on the eve
of Saturday, the announced term of the episode. Waiting once more
on this latter occasion, the Saturday morning, for Sir Luke’s
reappearance at the station, our friend had to recognize the drop
of his own borrowed ease, the result, naturally enough, of the
prospect of losing a support. The difficulty was that, on such
lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke’s personal
presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for that?—and
without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his errand?
Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his call,
and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that—as
had immediately to appear—no gleam of light on what he had been
living with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been
doing was proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet
when the Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached,
his companion, watching from the watersteps, studied his fine
closed face as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the
highest authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its
blankness affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling
it quite awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly’s having ceased
to exist. And the suspense continued after they had passed
together, as time was short, directly into the station, where
Eugenio, in the field early, was mounting guard over the
compartment he had secured. The strain, though probably lasting, at
the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes, prolonged itself so for
our poor gentleman’s nerves that he involuntarily directed a long
look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as only Eugenio could. Sir
Luke’s attention was given for the time to the right bestowal of
his numerous effects, about which he was particular, and Densher
fairly found himself, so far as silence could go, questioning the
representative of the palace. It didn’t humiliate him now; it
didn’t humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly knew
how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
Luke—to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his
facial habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had
taken from it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with
a hand out for farewell. He offered the hand at first without
speech; only on meeting his eyes could our young man see that they
had never yet so completely looked at him. It was never, with Sir
Luke, that they looked harder at one time than at another; but they
looked longer, and this, even a shade of it, might mean on his part
everything. It meant, Densher for ten seconds believed, that Milly
Theale was dead; so that the word at last spoken made him
start.
“I shall come back.”
“Then she’s better?”
“I shall come back within the month,” Sir Luke
repeated without heeding the question. He had dropped Densher’s
hand, but he held him otherwise still. “I bring you a message from
Miss Theale,” he said as if they hadn’t spoken of her. “I’m
commissioned to ask you from her to go and see her.”
Densher’s rebound from his supposition had a
violence that his stare betrayed. “She asks me?”
Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of
which the guard had closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the
window, bending a little but not leaning out. “She told me she’d
like it, and I promised that, as I expected to find you here, I’d
let you know.”
Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but
what he took brought the blood into his face quite as what he had
had to take from Mrs. Stringham. And he was also bewildered. “Then
she can receive—?”
“She can receive you.”
“And you’re coming back—?”
“Oh because I must. She’s not to move. She’s to
stay. I come to her.”
“I see, I see,” said Densher, who indeed did
see—saw the sense of his friend’s words and saw beyond it as well.
What Mrs. Stringham had announced, and what he had yet expected not
to have to face, had then come. Sir Luke had kept it for the
last, but there it was, and the colourless compact form it was now
taking—the tone of one man of the world to another, who, after what
had happened, would understand—was but the characteristic manner of
his appeal. Densher was to understand remarkably much; and the
great thing certainly was to show that he did. “I’m particularly
obliged, I’ll go to-day.” He brought that out, but in his pause,
while they continued to look at each other, the train had slowly
creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and the
young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
“Then she’s better?”
Sir Luke’s face was wonderful. “Yes, she’s better.”
And he kept it at the window while the train receded, holding him
with it still. It was to be his nearest approach to the utter
reference they had hitherto so successfully avoided. If it stood
for everything, never had a face had to stand for more. So Densher,
held after the train had gone, sharply reflected; so he reflected,
asking himself into what abyss it pushed him, even while conscious
of retreating under the maintained observation of Eugenio.