Merton Densher, who passed the best hours of each night at the office
of his newspaper, had at times, during the day, to make up for it, a
sense, or at least an appearance, of leisure, in accordance with which
he was not infrequently to be met, in different parts of the town, at
moments when men of business are hidden from the public eye. More than
once, during the present winter's end, he had deviated, toward three
o'clock, or toward four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might for a
while, on each occasion, have been observed to demean himself as a
person with nothing to do. He made his way indeed, for the most part,
with a certain directness, over to the north side; but once that ground
was reached his behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved
seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and
remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a
bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the
vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with
nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was
not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make
had the effect of causing the burden of proof, in certain directions,
to rest on him. It was a little the fault of his aspect, his personal
marks, which made it almost impossible to name his profession.
He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on
certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman,
by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally
sound and generally pleasant; yet, though to that degree neither
extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play straight into
an observer's hands. He was young for the House of Commons, he was
loose for the army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the
city, and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, he was sceptical, it
might have been felt, for the church. On the other hand he was
credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was
perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry, and
yet too little in them for art. You would have got fairly near him by
making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but you
would have quite fallen away again on the question of the ideas
themselves. The difficulty with Densher was that he looked vague
without looking weak--idle without looking empty. It was the accident,
possibly, of his long legs, which were apt to stretch themselves; of
his straight hair and his well-shaped head, never, the latter, neatly
smooth, and apt, into the bargain, at the time of quite other calls
upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by his
uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscionable
periods in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops, the sky. He was
in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever, liable to drop what
was near and to take up what was far; he was more a respecter, in
general, than a follower of custom. He suggested above all, however,
that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or
less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of
the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for
comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that
if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable subtlety--a law
that, in intercourse with him, it might be of profit, though not easy,
to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for you surprises
of tolerance as well as of temper.
He loitered, on the best of the relenting days, the several occasions
we speak of, along the part of the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate,
and when, always, in due time, Kate Croy came out of her aunt's house,
crossed the road and arrived by the nearest entrance, there was a
general publicity in the proceeding which made it slightly anomalous.
If their meeting was to be bold and free it might have taken place
within doors; if it was to be shy or secret it might have taken place
almost anywhere better than under Mrs. Lowder's windows. They failed
indeed to remain attached to that spot; they wandered and strolled,
taking in the course of more than one of these interviews a
considerable walk, or else picked out a couple of chairs under one of
the great trees and sat as much apart--apart from every one else--as
possible. But Kate had, each time, at first, the air of wishing to
expose herself to pursuit and capture if those things were in question.
She made the point that she was not underhand, any more than she was
vulgar; that the Gardens were charming in themselves and this use of
them a matter of taste; and that, if her aunt chose to glare at her
from the drawing-room or to cause her to be tracked and overtaken, she
could at least make it convenient that this should be easily done. The
fact was that the relation between these young persons abounded in such
oddities as were not inaptly symbolised by assignations that had a good
deal more appearance than motive. Of the strength of the tie that held
them we shall sufficiently take the measure; but it was meanwhile
almost obvious that if the great possibility had come up for them it
had done so, to an exceptional degree, under the protection of the
famous law of contraries. Any deep harmony that might eventually govern
them would not be the result of their having much in common--having
anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its
explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the
other was rich. It is nothing new indeed that generous young persons
often admire most what nature hasn't given them--from which it would
appear, after all, that our friends were both generous.
Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and from far back--that
he should be a fool not to marry a woman whose value would be in her
differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so
philosophised, had quickly recognised in the young man a precious
unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and
certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the
high, dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side
of the mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious and strong;
and he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making
that element real. She had had, all her days, to take it terribly on
trust; no creature she had ever encountered having been able in any
degree to testify for it directly. Vague rumours of its existence had
made their precarious way to her; but nothing had, on the whole, struck
her as more likely than that she should live and die without the chance
to verify them. The chance had come--it was an extraordinary one--on
the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour
that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of. That
occasion indeed, for everything that straightway flowered in it, would
be worthy of high commemoration; Densher's perception went out to meet
the young woman's and quite kept pace with her own recognition. Having
so often concluded on the fact of his weakness, as he called it, for
life--his strength merely for thought--life, he logically opined, was
what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess. This was so much a
necessity that thought by itself only went on in the void; it was from
the immediate air of life that it must draw its breath. So the young
man, ingenious but large, critical but ardent too, made out both his
case and Kate Croy's. They had originally met before her mother's
death--an occasion marked for her as the last pleasure permitted by the
approach of that event; after which the dark months had interposed a
screen and, for all Kate knew, made the end one with the beginning.
The beginning--to which she often went back--had been a scene, for our
young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired
by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to
be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy
of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at
large--in the name of these and other attractions the company in which,
by a rare privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked. She
lived under her mother's roof, as she considered, obscurely, and was
acquainted with few persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared, with such--two
or three through whom the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused,
could thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles. A good-natured
lady in fine, a friend of her mother and a relative of the lady of the
gallery, had offered to take her to the party in question and had there
fortified her, further, with two or three of those introductions that,
at large parties, lead to other things--that had at any rate, on this
occasion, culminated for her in conversation with a tall, fair,
slightly unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the whole not dreary,
young man. The young man had affected her as detached, as--it was
indeed what he called himself--awfully at sea, as much more distinct
from what surrounded them than any one else appeared to be, and even as
probably quite disposed to be making his escape when pulled up to be
placed in relation with her. He gave her his word for it indeed, that
same evening, that only their meeting had prevented his flight, but
that now he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it. This point
they had reached by midnight, and though in respect to such remarks
everything was in the tone, the tone was by midnight there too. She had
had originally her full apprehension of his coerced, certainly of his
vague, condition--full apprehensions often being with her immediate;
then she had had her equal consciousness that, within five minutes,
something between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but
_come._ It was nothing, but it was somehow everything--it was that
something for each of them had happened.
They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a
longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but
that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been
something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes
had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well,
and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact she saw
it, in the oddest way, as a particular performance. She had observed a
ladder against a garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb it as
to be able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On
reaching the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman
engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers
had remained confronted on their ladders. The great point was that for
the rest of that evening they had been perched--they had not climbed
down; and indeed, during the time that followed, Kate at least had had
the perched feeling--it was as if she were there aloft without a
retreat. A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but that they
had taken each other in with interest; and without a happy hazard six
months later the incident would have closed in that account of it. The
accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as anything in London ever is:
Kate had one afternoon found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the
Underground Railway. She had entered the train at Sloane Square to go
to Queen's Road, and the carriage in which she had found a place was
all but full. Densher was already in it--on the other bench and at the
furthest angle; she was sure of him before they had again started. The
day and the hour were darkness, there were six other persons, and she
had been busy placing herself; but her consciousness had gone to him as
straight as if they had come together in some bright level of the
desert. They had on neither part a second's hesitation; they looked
across the choked compartment exactly as if she had known he would be
there and he had expected her to come in; so that, though in the
conditions they could only exchange the greeting of movements, smiles,
silence, it would have been quite in the key of these passages that
they should have alighted for ease at the very next station. Kate was
in fact sure that the very next station was the young man's true
goal--which made it clear that he was going on only from the wish to
speak to her. He had to go on, for this purpose, to High Street,
Kensington, as it was not till then that the exit of a passenger gave
him his chance.
His chance put him, however, in quick possession of the seat facing
her, the alertness of his capture of which seemed to show her his
impatience. It helped them, moreover, with strangers on either side,
little to talk; though this very restriction perhaps made such a mark
for them as nothing else could have done. If the fact that their
opportunity had again come round for them could be so intensely
expressed between them without a word, they might very well feel on the
spot that it had not come round for nothing. The extraordinary part of
the matter was that they were not in the least meeting where they had
left off, but ever so much further on, and that these added links added
still another between High Street and Notting Hill Gate, and then
between the latter station and Queen's Road an extension really
inordinate. At Notting Hill Gate, Kate's right-hand neighbour
descended, whereupon Densher popped straight into that seat; only there
was not much gained when a lady, the next instant, popped into
Densher's. He could say almost nothing to her--she scarce knew, at
least, what he said; she was so occupied with a certainty that one of
the persons opposite, a youngish man with a single eyeglass, which he
kept constantly in position, had made her out from the first as
visibly, as strangely affected. If such a person made her out, what
then did Densher do?--a question in truth sufficiently answered when,
on their reaching her station, he instantly followed her out of the
train. That had been the real beginning--the beginning of everything
else; the other time, the time at the party, had been but the beginning
of _that._ Never in life before had she so let herself go; for always
before--so far as small adventures could have been in question for
her--there had been, by the vulgar measure, more to go upon. He had
walked with her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had walked with him
away from it--for all the world, she said to herself, like the
housemaid giggling to the baker.
This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had been all in order for
a relation that might precisely best be described in the terms of the
baker and the housemaid. She could say to herself that from that hour
they had kept company; that had come to represent, technically
speaking, alike the range and the limit of their tie. He had on the
spot, naturally, asked leave to call upon her--which, as a young person
who wasn't really young, who didn't pretend to be a sheltered flower,
she as rationally gave. That--she was promptly clear about it--was now
her only possible basis; she was just the contemporary London female,
highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free. She had of course
taken her aunt straight into her confidence--had gone through the form
of asking her leave; and she subsequently remembered that though, on
this occasion, she had left the history of her new alliance as scant as
the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had struck her at the time
surprisingly mild. It had been, in every way, the occasion, full of the
reminder that her hostess was deep: it was definitely then that she had
begun to ask herself what Aunt Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to."
"You may receive, my dear, whom you like"--that was what Aunt Maud, who
in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and
it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were
many explanations, and they were all amusing--amusing, that is, in the
line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her
actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs.
Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her
niece to see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday following,
in order to invite him to dinner; and when, after dining, he came
again--which he did three times, she found means to treat his visit as
preponderantly to herself. Kate's conviction that she didn't like him
made that remarkable; it added to the evidence, by this time
voluminous, that she was remarkable all round. If she had been, in the
way of energy, merely usual, she would have kept her dislike direct;
whereas it was now as if she were seeking to know him in order to see
best where to "have" him. That was one of the reflections made in our
young woman's high retreat; she smiled from her lookout, in the silence
that was only the fact of hearing irrelevant sounds, as she caught the
truth that you could easily accept people when you wanted them so to be
delivered to you. When Aunt Maud wished them despatched, it was not to
be done by deputy; it was clearly always a matter reserved for her own
hand. But what made the girl wonder most was the implications of so
much diplomacy in respect to her own value. What view might she take of
her position in the light of this appearance that her companion feared
so, as yet, to upset her? It was as if Densher were accepted partly
under the dread that if he hadn't been she would act in resentment.
Hadn't her aunt considered the danger that she would in that case have
broken off, have seceded? The danger was exaggerated--she would have
done nothing so gross; but that, it seemed, was the way Mrs. Lowder saw
her and believed her to be reckoned with. What importance therefore did
she really attach to her, what strange interest could she take on their
keeping on terms? Her father and her sister had their answer to
this--even without knowing how the question struck her; they saw the
lady of Lancaster Gate as panting to make her fortune, and the
explanation of that appetite was that, on the accident of a nearer view
than she had before enjoyed, she had been charmed, been dazzled. They
approved, they admired in her one of the belated fancies of rich,
capricious, violent old women--the more marked, moreover, because the
result of no plot; and they piled up the possible results for the
person concerned. Kate knew what to think of her own power thus to
carry by storm; she saw herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and
felt herself as clever but as cold; and as so much too imperfectly
ambitious, furthermore, that it was a pity, for a quiet life, she
couldn't settle to be either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her
intelligence sometimes kept her still--too still--but her want of it
was restless; so that she got the good, it seemed to her, of neither
extreme. She saw herself at present, none the less, in a situation, and
even her sad, disillusioned mother, dying, but with Aunt Maud
interviewing the nurse on the stairs, had not failed to remind her that
it was of the essence of situations to be, under Providence, worked.
The dear woman had died in the belief that she was actually working the
one then produced.
Kate took one of her walks with Densher just after her visit to Mr.
Croy; but most of it went, as usual, to their sitting in talk. They
had, under the trees, by the lake, the air of old friends--phases of
apparent earnestness, in particular, in which they might have been
settling every question in their vast young world; and periods of
silence, side by side, perhaps even more, when "a long engagement!"
would have been the final reading of the signs on the part of a passer
struck with them, as it was so easy to be. They would have presented
themselves thus as very old friends rather than as young persons who
had met for the first time but a year before and had spent most of the
interval without contact. It was indeed for each, already, as if they
were older friends; and though the succession of their meetings might,
between them, have been straightened out, they only had a confused
sense of a good many, very much alike, and a confused intention of a
good many more, as little different as possible. The desire to keep
them just as they were had perhaps to do with the fact that in spite of
the presumed diagnosis of the stranger there had been for them as yet
no formal, no final understanding. Densher had at the very first
pressed the question, but that, it had been easy to reply, was too
soon; so that a singular thing had afterwards happened. They had
accepted their acquaintance as too short for an engagement, but they
had treated it as long enough for almost anything else, and marriage
was somehow before them like a temple without an avenue. They belonged
to the temple and they met in the grounds; they were in the stage at
which grounds in general offered much scattered refreshment. But Kate
had meanwhile had so few confidants that she wondered at the source of
her father's suspicions. The diffusion of rumour was of course, in
London, remarkable, and for Marian not less--as Aunt Maud touched
neither directly--the mystery had worked. No doubt she had been seen.
Of course she had been seen. She had taken no trouble not to be seen,
and it was a thing, clearly, she was incapable of taking. But she had
been seen how?--and _what_ was there to see? She was in love--she knew
that: but it was wholly her own business, and she had the sense of
having conducted herself, of still so doing, with almost violent
conformity.
"I've an idea--in fact I feel sure--that Aunt Maud means to write to
you; and I think you had better know it." So much as this she said to
him as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it: "So as to make
up your mind how to take her. I know pretty well what she'll say to
you."
"Then will you kindly tell me?"
She thought a little. "I can't do that. I should spoil it. She'll do
the best for her own idea."
"Her idea, you mean, that I'm a sort of a scoundrel; or, at the best,
not good enough for you?"
They were side by side again in their penny chairs, and Kate had
another pause. "Not good enough for _her."_
"Oh, I see. And that's necessary."
He put it as a truth rather more than as a question; but there had been
plenty of truths between them that each had contradicted. Kate,
however, let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next moment:
"She has behaved extraordinarily."
"And so have we," Densher declared. "I think, you know, we've been
awfully decent."
"For ourselves, for each other, for people in general, yes. But not for
_her._ For her," said Kate, "we've been monstrous. She has been giving
us rope. So if she does send for you," the girl repeated, "you must
know where you are."
"That I always know. It's where _you_ are that concerns me."
"Well," said Kate after an instant, "her idea of that is what you'll
have from her." He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who
wouldn't let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long
looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What
she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make
them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough
that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work
them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them, and yet,
as regards the rigour of it, pay no price. She looked it well in the
face, she took it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced
to herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing of the name; but,
distinguished creature that, in her way, she was, she took a view of
this character that scarce squared with the conventional. The character
itself she insisted on as their right, taking that so for granted that
it didn't seem even bold; but Densher, though he agreed with her, found
himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her values. Life might
prove difficult--was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each
other, and that was everything. This was her reasoning, but meanwhile,
for _him,_ each other was what they didn't have, and it was just the
point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange
and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was
impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too
close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point,
do what they would to take her in. And she came in, always, while they
sat together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-in-four; she
drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives
round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with
majesty. It was our young man's sense that she was magnificently
vulgar, but yet, quite, that this wasn't all. It wasn't with her
vulgarity that she felt his want of means, though that might have
helped her richly to embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity
that she was strong, original, dangerous.
His want of means--of means sufficient for anyone but himself--was
really the great ugliness, and was, moreover, at no time more ugly for
him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, shameless, face to
face with the elements in Kate's life colloquially and conveniently
classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so
often vivid to him, of his own consciousness--his private inability to
believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in
truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis,
to understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any
one else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness
of his being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a
dunce nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and
also, strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not
prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in
respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his
case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the
line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or
listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the
right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise--one or
the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the
question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her
chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance
could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too,
otherwise, marrying for money mightn't after all be a smaller cause of
shame than the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations
of mood and view, all the same, the mark on his forehead stood clear;
he saw himself remain without whether he married or not. It was a line
on which his fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of
making money were beautifully present to him; he could have handled
them, for his newspaper, as easily as he handled everything. He was
quite aware how he handled everything; it was another mark on his
forehead; the pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on
the passive fleece, dated from the primal hour and kept each other
company. He wrote, as for print, with deplorable ease; since there had
been nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so there was as little
at twenty; it was part of his fate in the first place and part of the
wretched public's in the second. The innumerable ways of making money
were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination often was busy with
after he had tilted his chair and thrown back his head with his hands
clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged that attitude,
moreover, was the reflection that the ways were ways only for others.
Within the minute, now--however this might be--he was aware of a nearer
view than he had yet quite had of those circumstances on his
companion's part that made least for simplicity of relation. He saw
above all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them at present
with the last frankness, telling him of her visit to her father and
giving him, in an account of her subsequent scene with her sister, an
instance of how she was perpetually reduced to patching up, in one way
or another, that unfortunate woman's hopes.
"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a failure as a family!" With
which he had it again all from her--and this time, as it seemed to him,
more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and
cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned,
despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as
remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her
two young brothers--one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by
typhoid fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had
afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the
flower of the flock, a middy on the _Britannia,_ dreadfully drowned,
and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while
bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a
holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural
marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to
fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy
children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors--these things
completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of
fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it
was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous
colour, partly--and that charm was the greatest--as if to work off, for
her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and she was so
intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore
when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was
almost as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the
fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be
definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no
other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them.
They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would--or, in
other words, they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each
other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was
thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for
them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at
special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption
that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it
must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most
by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always seemed to
him that she had more life than he to react from, and when she
recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard, odd
offset of her present exaltation--since as exaltation it was apparently
to be considered--he felt his own grey domestic annals to make little
show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her
father's character that engaged him most, but her picture of her
adventure in Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that
character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr.
Croy had originally done?
"I don't know--and I don't want to. I only know that years and years
ago--when I was about fifteen--something or other happened that made
him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and
then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn't know it at the
time," Kate explained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough,
my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her
now--the way, one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account of an
extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church, she broke it to me by the
school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp--when we
didn't go to church we had to read history-books--and I suddenly heard
her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and _apropos_ of
nothing: 'Papa has done something wicked.' And the curious thing was
that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though
she could tell me nothing more--neither what was the wickedness, nor
how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it.
We had our sense, always, that all sorts of things _had_ happened, were
all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was
sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that
that was enough, I took her word for it--it seemed somehow so natural.
We were not, however, to ask mother--which made it more natural still,
and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to
me, in time, of her own accord very much later on. He hadn't been with
us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some
fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it
was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done:
'If you hear anything against your father--anything I mean, except that
he's odious and vile--remember it's perfectly false.' That was the way
I knew--it was true, though I recall that I said to her then that I of
course knew it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and yet have
trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I
should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I
think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however," the
girl went on, "I've never had occasion, and I've been conscious of it
with a sort of surprise. It has made the world, at times, seem more
decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of
the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the
world, has washed him out. He doesn't exist for people. And yet I'm as
sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I'm more
sure. And that," she wound up, "is what I sit here and tell you about
my own father. If you don't call it a proof of confidence I don't know
what will satisfy you."
"It satisfies me beautifully," Densher declared, "but it doesn't, my
dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don't, you know, really tell
me anything. It's so vague that what am I to think but that you may
very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?"
"He has done everything."
"Oh--everything! Everything's nothing."
"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular thing. It's
known--only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. You
could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about."
Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up.
"I wouldn't find out for the world, and I'd rather lose my tongue than
put a question."
"And yet it's a part of me," said Kate.
"A part of you?"
"My father's dishonour." Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than
ever yet, her note of proud, still pessimism. "How can such a thing as
that not be the great thing in one's life?"
She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she
took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. "I shall ask you, for the
great thing in your life," he said, "to depend on _me_ a little more."
After which, just hesitating, "Doesn't he belong to some club?" he
inquired.