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.”
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