“He had wished it himself?”
“I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter of an hour. I could see that for him it was long. He’s interested,” said Mrs. Stringham.
“Do you mean in her case?”
“He says it isn’t a case.”
“What then is it?”
“It isn’t, at least,” Mrs. Stringham explained, “the case she believed it to be—though it at any rate might be—when, without my knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly—he has made sure. She’s wrong—she hasn’t what she thought.”
“And what did she think?” Mrs. Lowder demanded.
“He didn’t tell me.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“I asked nothing,” said poor Susie—“I only took what he gave me. He gave me no more than he had to—he was beautiful,” she went on. “He is, thank God, interested.”
“He must have been interested in you, dear,” Maud Manningham observed with kindness.
Her visitor met it with candor. “Yes, love, I think he is. I mean that he sees what he can do with me.”
Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. “For her.”
“For her. Anything in the world he will or he must. He can use me to the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says the great thing for her is to be happy.”
“It’s surely the great thing for every one. Why, therefore,” Mrs. Lowder handsomely asked, “should we cry so hard about it?”
“Only,” poor Susie wailed, “that it’s so strange, so beyond us. I mean if she can’t be.”
“She must be.” Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles. “She shall be.”
“Well—if you’ll help. He thinks, you know, we can help.”
Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her massive way, what Sir Luke Strett thought. She sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her, dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by one, into her capacious apron. “But is that all he came to you for—to tell you she must be happy?”
“That she must be made so—that’s the point. It seemed enough, as he told me,” Mrs. Stringham went on; “he makes it somehow such a grand possible affair.”
“Ah well, if he makes it possible!”
“I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to me, that is, as my part. The rest’s his own.”
“And what’s the rest?” Mrs. Lowder asked.
“I don’t know. His business. He means to keep hold of her.”
“Then why do you say it isn’t a ‘case’? It must be very much of one.”
Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the extent of it. “It’s only that it isn’t the case she herself supposed.”
“It’s another?”
“It’s another.”
“Examining her for what she supposed he finds something else?”
“Something else.”
“And what does he find?”
“Ah,” Mrs. Stringham cried, “God keep me from knowing!”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
But poor Susie had recovered herself. “What I mean is that if it’s there I shall know in time. He’s considering, but I can trust him for it—because he does, I feel, trust me. He’s considering,” she repeated.
“He’s in other words not sure?”
“Well, he’s watching. I think that’s what he means. She’s to get away now, but to come back to him in three months.”
“Then I think,” said Maud Lowder, “that he oughtn’t meanwhile to scare us.”
It roused Susie a little, Susie, being already enrolled in the great doctor’s cause. This came out at least in her glimmer of reproach. “Does it scare us to enlist us for her happiness?”
Mrs. Lowder was rather stiff for it. “Yes; it scares me. I’m always scared—I may call it so—till I understand. What happiness is he talking about?”
Mrs. Stringham at this came straight. “Oh you know!”
She had really said it so that her friend had to take it; which the latter in fact after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it with a certain accommodation. “Well, say one seems to see. The point is—!” But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.
“The point is will it cure?”
“Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy—the specific?”
“Well, I should think we might know!” Mrs. Stringham delicately declared.
“Ah but we haven’t the complaint.”
“Have you never, dearest, been in love?” Susan Shepherd inquired.
“Yes, my child; but not by the doctor’s direction.”
Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth, which operated—and happily too—as a challenge to her visitor’s spirit. “Oh of course we don’t ask his leave to fall. But it’s something to know he thinks it good for us.”
“My dear woman,” Mrs. Lowder cried, “it strikes me we know it without him. So that when that’s all he has to tell us—!”
“Ah,” Mrs. Stringham interposed, “it isn’t ‘all.’ I feel Sir Luke will have more; he won’t have put me off with anything inadequate. I’m to see him again; he as good as told me that he’ll wish it. So it won’t be for nothing.”
“Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?”
Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. “I showed him I understood him. That was all I could do. I didn’t feel at liberty to be explicit; but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I had from you night before last.”
“What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?”
“You had seen, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he’s here, now that I’ve met him and had my impression of him, I feel,” said Mrs. Stringham, “that you’ve been magnificent.”
“Of course I’ve been magnificent. When,” asked Maud Manningham, “was I anything else? But Milly won’t be, you know, if she marries Merton Densher.”
“Oh it’s always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we’re going fast!” Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
“The thing is to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last, to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt—I knew in my bones the man had returned.”
“That’s just where, as I say, you’re magnificent. But wait,” said Mrs. Stringham, “till you’ve seen him.”
“I shall see him immediately”—Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision. “What is then,” she asked, “your impression?”
Mrs. Stringham’s impression seemed lost in her doubts. “How can he ever care for her?”
Her companion, in her companion’s heavy manner, sat on it. “By being put in the way of it.”
“For God’s sake then,” Mrs. Stringham wailed, “put him in the way! You have him, one feels, in your hand.”
Maud Lowder’s eyes at this rested on her friend’s. “Is that your impression of him?”
“It’s my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one.”
Mrs. Lowder’s eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was a great limitation. “I don’t handle Kate.”
It suggested something that her visitor hadn’t yet had from her—something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. “Do you mean Kate cares for him?”
That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know, enshrouded, and her friend’s quick question had produced a change in her face. She blinked—then looked at the question hard; after which, whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham’s surprise, she accept
ed all results. What took place in her for Susan Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined. A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn’t have liked to hear that she hadn’t concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present, in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate’s dissimulation. She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry. “Kate thinks she cares. But she’s mistaken. And no one knows it.” These things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder’s retort. Yet they weren’t all of it. “You don’t know it—that must be your line. Or rather your line must be that you deny it utterly.”
“Deny that she cares for him?”
“Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and absolutely. Deny that you’ve so much as heard of it.”
Susie faced this new duty. “To Milly, you mean—if she asks?”
“To Milly, naturally. No one else will ask.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, “Milly won’t.”
Mrs. Lowder wondered. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, the more I think of it. And luckily for me. I lie badly.”
“I lie well, thank God,” Mrs. Lowder almost snorted, “when, as sometimes will happen, there’s nothing else so good. One must always do the best. But without lies then,” she went on, “perhaps we can work it out.” Her interest had risen; her friend saw her, as within some minutes, more enrolled and inflamed—presently felt in her what had made the difference. Mrs. Stringham, it was true, descried this at the time but dimly; she only made out at first that Maud had found a reason for helping her. The reason was that, strangely, she might help Maud too, for which she now desired to profess herself ready even to lying. What really perhaps most came out for her was that her hostess was a little disappointed at her doubt of the social solidity of this appliance; and that in turn was to become a steadier light. The truth about Kate’s delusion, as her aunt presented it, the delusion about the state of her affections, which might be removed-this was apparently the ground on which they now might more intimately meet. Mrs. Stringham saw herself recruited for the removal of Kate’s delusion—by arts, however, in truth, that she as yet quite failed to compass. Or was it perhaps to be only for the removal of Mr. Densher’s?—success in which indeed might entail other successes. Before that job, unfortunately, her heart had already failed. She felt that she believed in her bones what Milly believed, and what would now make working for Milly such a dreadful upward tug. All this within her was confusedly present—a cloud of questions out of which Maud Manningham’s large seated self loomed, however, as a mass more and more definite, taking in fact for the consultative relation something of the form of an oracle. From the oracle the sound did come—or at any rate the sense did, a sense all accordant with the insufflation she had just seen working. “Yes,” the sense was, “I’ll help you for Milly, because if that comes off I shall be helped, by its doing so, for Kate”—a view into which Mrs. Stringham could now sufficiently enter. She found herself of a sudden, strange to say, quite willing to operate to Kate’s harm, or at least to Kate’s good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself in short not caring what became of Kate—only convinced at bottom of the predominance of Kate’s star. Kate wasn’t in danger, Kate wasn’t pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy. She saw moreover by this time that her friend was traveling even beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: “You must stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at dinner.” In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to prepare that ground. “The poor child, when I was with her there while you were getting your shawl, quite gave herself away to me.”
“Oh I remember how you afterwards put it to me. Though it was nothing more,” Susie did herself the justice to observe, “than what I too had quite felt.”
But Mrs. Lowder fronted her so on this that she wondered what she had said. “I suppose I ought to be edified at what you can so beautifully give up.”
“Give up?” Mrs. Stringham echoed. “Why, I give up nothing—I cling.”
Her hostess showed impatience, turning again with some stiffness to her great brass-bound cylinder-desk and giving a push to an object or two disposed there. “I give up then. You know how little such a person as Mr. Densher was to be my idea for her. You know what I’ve been thinking perfectly possible.”
“Oh you’ve been great”—Susie was perfectly fair. “A duke, a duchess, a princess, a palace: you’ve made me believe in them too. But where we break down is that she doesn’t believe in them. Luckily for her—as it seems to be turning out—she doesn’t want them. So what’s one to do? I assure you I’ve had many dreams. But I’ve only one dream now.”
Mrs. Stringham’s tone in these last words gave so fully her meaning that Mrs. Lowder could but show herself as taking it in. They sat a moment longer confronted on it. “Her having what she does want?”
“If it will do anything for her.”
Mrs. Lowder seemed to think what it might do; but she spoke for the instant of something else. “It does provoke me a bit, you know—for of course I’m a brute. And I had thought of all sorts of things. Yet it doesn’t prevent the fact that we must be decent.”
“We must take her”—Mrs. Stringham carried that out—“as she is.”
“And we must take Mr. Densher as he is.” With which Mrs. Lowder gave a sombre laugh. “It’s a pity he isn’t better!”
“Well, if he were better,” her friend rejoined, “you’d have liked him for your niece; and in that case Milly would interfere. I mean,” Susie added, “interfere with you.”
“She interferes with me as it is—not that it matters now. But I saw Kate and her—really as soon as you came to me—set up side by side. I saw your girl—I don’t mind telling you—helping my girl; and when I say that,” Mrs. Lowder continued, “you’ll probably put in for yourself that it was part of the reason of my welcome to you. So you see what I give up. I do give it up. But when I take that line,” she further set forth, “I take it handsomely. So good-bye to it all. Good-day to Mrs. Densher! Heavens!” she growled.
Susie held herself a minute. “Even as Mrs. Densher my girl will be somebody.”
“Yes, she won’t be nobody. Besides,” said Mrs. Lowder, “we’re talking in the air.”
Her companion sadly assented. “We’re leaving everything out.”
“It’s nevertheless interesting.” And Mrs. Lowder had another thought. “He’s not quite nobody either.” It brought her back to the question she had already put and which her friend hadn’t at the time dealt with. “What in fact do you make of him?”
Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was moved a little to caution. So she remained general. “He’s charming.”
She had met Mrs. Lowder’s eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own to which people resort when they are not quite candid—a circumstance that had its effect. “Yes; he’s charming.”
The effect of the words, however, was equally marked; they almost determined in Mrs. Stringham a return of amusement. “I thought you didn’t like him!”
“I don’t like him for Kate.”
“But you don’t like him for Milly either.”
Mrs. Stringham rose as she spoke, and her friend also got up. “I like him, my dear, for myself.”
“Then that’s the best way of all.”
“Well, it’s one way. He’s not good enough for my niece, and he’s not good enough for you. One’s an aunt, one’s a wretch and one’s a fool.”
“Oh I’m not—
not either,” Susie declared.
But her companion kept on. “One lives for others. You do that. If I were living for myself I shouldn’t at all mind him.”
But Mrs. Stringham was sturdier. “Ah if I find him charming it’s however I’m living.”
Well, it broke Mrs. Lowder down. She hung fire but an instant, giving herself away with a laugh. “Of course he’s all right in himself.”
“That’s all I contend,” Susie said with more reserve; and the note in question—what Merton Densher was “in himself”—closed practically, with some inconsequence, this first of their councils.
—II—
It had at least made the difference for them, they could feel, of an informed state in respect to the great doctor, whom they were now to take as watching, waiting, studying, or at any rate as proposing to himself some such process before he should make up his mind. Mrs. Stringham understood him as considering the matter meanwhile in a spirit that, on this same occasion, at Lancaster Gate, she had come back to a rough notation of before retiring. She followed the course of his reckoning. If what they had talked of could happen—if Milly, that is, could have her thoughts taken off herself—it wouldn’t do any harm and might conceivably do much good. If it couldn’t happen—if, anxiously, though tactfully working, they themselves, conjoined, could do nothing to contribute to it—they would be in no worse a box than before. Only in this latter case the girl would have had her free range for the summer, for the autumn; she would have done her best in the sense enjoined on her, and, coming back at the end to her eminent man, would—besides having more to show him—find him more ready to go on with her. It was visible further to Susan Shepherd—as well as being ground for a second report to her old friend—that Milly did her part for a working view of the general case, inasmuch as she mentioned frankly and promptly that she meant to go and say good-bye to Sir Luke Strett and thank him. She even specified what she was to thank him for, his having been so easy about her behaviour.