It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. “You can tell her anything you like, anything whatever.”
“Mrs. Stringham? I have nothing to tell her.”
“You can tell her about us. I mean,” she wonderfully pursued, “that you do still like me.”
It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. “Only not that you still like me.”
She let his amusement pass. “I’m absolutely certain she wouldn’t repeat it.”
“I see. To Aunt Maud.”
“You don’t quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else.” Kate then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he was; and she showed it again as she went on. “There, accordingly, is your time.”
She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke, though not quite all at once. “You must let me say I do see. Time for something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time too that, I further understand, is time for you as well.”
“Time indeed for me as well.” And encouraged visibly by his glow of concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. “Don’t think, however, I’ll do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them.”
He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted. “Since she’s to die I’m to marry her?”
It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favor to their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips bravely moved. “To marry her.”
“So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course have money?”
It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all along—to his stupidity, his timidity—it had been, it had been only, what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn’t forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn’t pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. “You’ll in the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” Densher softly murmured.
“Yes, yes, yes.” But she broke off. “Come to Lady Wells.”
He never budged—there was too much else. “I’m to propose it then—marriage—on the spot?”
There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof. “Oh I can’t go into that with you, and from the moment you don’t wash your hands of me I don’t think you ought to ask me. You must act as you like and as you can.”
He thought again. “I’m far—as I sufficiently showed you this morning—from washing my hands of you.”
“Then,” said Kate, “it’s all right.”
“All right?” His eagerness flamed. “You’ll come?”
But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn’t what she meant. “You’ll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance—well, quite ideal.”
“Your descriptions”—her “ideal” was such a touch!—“are prodigious. And what I don’t make out is how, caring of me, you can like it.”
“I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.”
It wasn’t till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too, moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what he did. But something else on his lips was uppermost. “What I don’t make out then is how you can even bear it.”
“Well, when you know me better you’ll find out how much I can bear.” And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many implications. That it was left to him to know her, spiritually, “better” after his long sacrifice to knowledge—this for instance was a truth he hadn’t been ready to receive so full in the face. She had mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying him on. “All you’ll have to do will be to stay.”
“And proceed to my business under your eyes?”
“Oh dear no—we shall go.”
“ ‘Go?’ ” he wondered. “Go when, go where?”
“In a day or two—straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now.”
It gave him all he could take in to think of. “Then what becomes of Miss Theale?”
“What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her.”
He stared. “All alone?”
She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. “You’re old enough—with plenty of Mrs. Stringham.”
Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it, as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these successive cues, that he was essentially “seeing what she would say”—an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a need to know her better to which she had a moment before done injustice. If it hadn’t been appearing to him in gleams that she would somewhere break down, he probably couldn’t have gone on. Still, as she wasn’t breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. “Is your going Mrs. Lowder’s idea?”
“Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I don’t,” she added, “refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud’s view of the general propriety of it.”
“I see again, as you say,” Densher said after a moment. “It makes everything fit.”
“Everything.”
The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he had in fact been looking at something else. “You leave her here then to die?”
“Ah she believes she won’t die. Not if you stay. I mean,” Kate explained, “Aunt Maud believes.”
“And that’s all that’s necessary?”
Still indeed she didn’t break down. “Didn’t we long ago agree that what she believes is the principal thing for us?”
He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. “Oh yes. I can’t deny it.” Then he added: “So that if I stay-”
“It won’t”—she was prompt—“be our fault.”
“If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?”
“If she still suspects us. But she won’t.”
Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn’t presently found: “But what if she doesn’t accept me?”
It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her tone the next moment touch him. “You can but try.”
“Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard to propose to a dying girl.”
“She isn’t for you as if she’s dying.” It had determined in Kate the flash of justesseaz he could perhaps most, on consideration, have admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them, literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side, happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them in response all the candor of her smile, the luster of her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for i
t, and they had for a time only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last spoke it was under cover.
“I might stay, you know, without trying.”
“Oh to stay is to try.”
“To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?”
“I don’t see how you can have the appearance more.”
Densher waited. “You think it then possible she may offer marnage? ”
“I can’t think—if you really want to know—what she may not offer!”
“In the manner of princesses, who do such things?”
“In any manner you like. So be prepared.”
Well, he looked as if he almost were. “It will be for me then to accept. But that’s the way it must come.”
Kate’s silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: “You’ll, on your honour, stay then?”
His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. “Without you, you mean?”
“Without us.”
“And you yourselves go at latest—?”
“Not later than Thursday.”
It made three days. “Well,” he said, “I’ll stay, on my honour, if you’ll come to me. On your honour.”
Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigor out of which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigor was more to him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a “dodge.” She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain. Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. “Lady Wells is tired of waiting: she’s coming—see—to us.”
Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to cross, and he still had time. “If you decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand you. I’ll do nothing.”
“Nothing?” It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
“I’ll do nothing. I’ll go off before you. I’ll go tomorrow.”
He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase was—and for vulgar triumphs too—seen he meant it. She looked again at Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. “And if I do understand?”
“I’ll do everything.”
She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his relation with her, of anything so sharp—too sharp for mere sweetness—as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the conflict. “Well, I understand.”
“On your honour?”
“On my honour.”
“You’ll come?”
“I’ll come.”
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 th
at 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.