I carried out the vow I had made her; I held my tongue for my three months. Unexpectedly to myself there were moments of this time when she struck me as capable of playing with a man. I wanted so to make her like me that I became subtle and ingenious, wonderfully alert, patiently diplomatic. Sometimes I thought I had earned my reward, brought her to the point of saying: ‘Well, well, you’re the best of them all – you may speak to me now.’ Then there was a greater blankness than ever in her beauty, and on certain days a mocking light in her eyes, of which the meaning seemed to be: ‘If you don’t take care, I will accept you, to have done with you the more effectually.’ Mrs Marden was a great help to me simply by believing in me, and I valued her faith all the more that it continued even though there was a sudden intermission of the miracle that had been wrought for me. After our visit to Tranton Sir Edmund Orme gave us a holiday, and I confess it was at first a disappointment to me. I felt less designated, less connected with Charlotte. ‘Oh, don’t cry till you’re out of the wood,’ her mother said; ‘he has let me off sometimes for six months. He’ll break out again when you least expect it – he knows what he’s about.’ For her these weeks were happy, and she was wise enough not to talk about me to the girl. She was so good as to assure me that I was taking the right way, that I looked as if I felt secure and that in the long run women give way to that. She had known them do it even when the man was a fool for looking so – or was a fool on any terms. For herself she felt it to be a good time, a sort of St Martin’s summer of the soul. She was better than she had been for years, and she had me to thank for it. The sense of visitation was light upon her – she wasn’t in anguish every time she looked round. Charlotte contradicted me very often, but she contradicted herself still more. That winter was a wonder of mildness, and we often sat out in the sun. I walked up and down with Charlotte, and Mrs Marden, sometimes on a bench, sometimes in a bath-chair, waited for us and smiled at us as we passed. I always looked out for a sign in her face – ‘He’s with you, he’s with you’ (she would see him before I should), but nothing came; the season had brought us also a sort of spiritual softness. Toward the end of April the air was so like June that, meeting my two friends one night at some Brighton sociability – an evening party with amateur music – I drew Miss Marden unresistingly out upon a balcony to which a window in one of the rooms stood open. The night was close and thick, the stars were dim, and below us, under the cliff, we heard the regular rumble of the sea. We listened to it a little and we heard mixed with it, from within the house, the sound of a violin accompanied by a piano – a performance which had been our pretext for passing out.
‘Do you like me a little better?’ I asked, abruptly, after a minute. ‘Could you listen to me again?’
I had no sooner spoken than she laid her hand quickly, with a certain force, on my arm. ‘Hush! – isn’t there some one there?’ She was looking into the gloom of the far end of the balcony. This balcony ran the whole width of the house, a width very great in the best of the old houses at Brighton. We were lighted a little by the open window behind us, but the other windows, curtained within, left the darkness undiminished, so that I made out but dimly the figure of a gentleman standing there and looking at us. He was in evening dress, like a guest – I saw the vague shine of his white shirt and the pale oval of his face – and he might perfectly have been a guest who had stepped out in advance of us to take the air. Miss Marden took him for one at first – then evidently, even in a few seconds, she saw that the intensity of his gaze was unconventional. What else she saw I couldn’t determine; I was too taken up with my own impression to do more than feel the quick contact of her uneasiness. My own impression was in fact the strongest of sensations, a sensation of horror; for what could the thing mean but that the girl at last saw? I heard her give a sudden, gasping ‘Ah!’ and move quickly into the house. It was only afterwards that I knew that I myself had had a totally new emotion – my horror passing into anger, and my anger into a stride along the balcony with a gesture of reprobation. The case was simplified to the vision of a frightened girl whom I loved. I advanced to vindicate her security, but I found nothing there to meet me. It was either all a mistake or Sir Edmund Orme had vanished.
I followed Miss Marden immediately, but there were symptoms of confusion in the drawing-room when I passed in. A lady had fainted, the music had stopped; there was a shuffling of chairs and a pressing forward. The lady was not Charlotte, as I feared, but Mrs Marden, who had suddenly been taken ill. I remember the relief with which I learned this, for to see Charlotte stricken would have been anguish, and her mother’s condition gave a channel to her agitation. It was of course all a matter for the people of the house and for the ladies, and I could have no share in attending to my friends or in conducting them to their carriage. Mrs Marden revived and insisted on going home, after which I uneasily withdrew.
I called the next morning to ask about her and was informed that she was better, but when I asked if Miss Marden would see me the message sent down was that it was impossible. There was nothing for me to do all day but to roam about with a beating heart. But toward evening I received a line in pencil, brought by hand – ‘Please come; mother wishes you.’ Five minutes afterward I was at the door again and ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs Marden lay upon the sofa, and as soon as I looked at her I saw the shadow of death in her face. But the first thing she said was that she was better, ever so much better; her poor old heart had been behaving queerly again, but now it was quiet. She gave me her hand and I bent over her with my eyes in hers, and in this way I was able to read what she didn’t speak – ‘I’m really very ill, but appear to take what I say exactly as I say it.’ Charlotte stood there beside her, looking not frightened now, but intensely grave, and not meeting my eyes. ‘She has told me – she has told me!’ her mother went on.
‘She has told you?’ I stared from one of them to the other, wondering if Mrs Marden meant that the girl had spoken to her of the circumstances on the balcony.
‘That you spoke to her again – that you’re admirably faithful.’
I felt a thrill of joy at this; it showed me that that memory had been uppermost, and also that Charlotte had wished to say the thing that would soothe her mother most, not the thing that would alarm her. Yet I now knew, myself, as well as if Mrs Marden had told me, that she knew and had known at the moment what her daughter had seen. ‘I spoke – I spoke, but she gave me no answer,’ I said.
‘She will now, won’t you, Chartie? I want it so, I want it!’ the poor lady murmured, with ineffable wistfulness.
‘You’re very good to me,’ Charlotte said to me, seriously and sweetly, looking fixedly on the carpet. There was something different in her, different from all the past. She had recognised something, she felt a coercion. I could see that she was trembling.
‘Ah, if you would let me show you how good I can be!’ I exclaimed, holding out my hands to her. As I uttered the words I was touched with the knowledge that something had happened. A form had constituted itself on the other side of the bed, and the form leaned over Mrs Marden. My whole being went forth into a mute prayer that Charlotte shouldn’t see it and that I should be able to betray nothing. The impulse to glance toward Mrs Marden was even stronger than the involuntary movement of taking in Sir Edmund Orme; but I could resist even that, and Mrs Marden was perfectly still. Charlotte got up to give me her hand, and with the definite act she saw. She gave, with a shriek, one stare of dismay, and another sound, like a wail of one of the lost, fell at the same instant on my ear. But I had already sprung toward the girl to cover her, to veil her face. She had already thrown herself into my arms. I held her there a moment – bending over her, given up to her, feeling each of her throbs with my own and not knowing which was which; then, all of a sudden, coldly, I gathered that we were alone. She released herself. The figure beside the sofa had vanished; but Mrs Marden lay in her place with closed eyes, with something in her stillness that gave us both another terror. Charlotte expre
ssed it in the cry of ‘Mother, mother!’ with which she flung herself down. I fell on my knees beside her. Mrs Marden had passed away.
Was the sound I heard when Chartie shrieked – the other and still more tragic sound I mean – the despairing cry of the poor lady’s death-shock or the articulate sob (it was like a waft from a great tempest), of the exorcised and pacified spirit? Possibly the latter, for that was, mercifully, the last of Sir Edmund Orme.
ABOUT THE INTRODUCER
JOHN BAYLEY is former Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His many books include The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen; An Essay on Hardy, Shakespeare and Tragedy; Tolstoy and the Novel; Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary and a detailed study of A. E. Housman’s poems. He has also written several novels.
Henry James, Collected Stories
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