V
The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss season, had been warned
that their design was unconsidered, that the passes would not be clear,
nor the air mild, nor the inns open--the two ladies who,
characteristically, had braved a good deal of possibly interested
remonstrance were finding themselves, as their adventure turned out,
wonderfully sustained. It was the judgment of the head-waiters and
other functionaries on the Italian lakes that approved itself now as
interested; they themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of
bolder dreams--at least the younger had; so that one of the things they
made out together--making out as they did an endless variety--was that
in those operatic palaces of the Villa d'Este, of Cadenabbia, of
Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however reinforced by a
travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to be beguiled and
undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest; they had for
instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way by the
Brünig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we meet them, and
were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of the early
high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the places to pause
and rest more numerous.
Such at least had been the intimated attitude of Mrs. Stringham, the
elder of the companions, who had her own view of the impatiences of the
younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition but of the most
circuitous. She moved, the admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of
observation and suspicion; she was in the position, as she believed, of
knowing much more about Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet
of having to darken her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman
in the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for
duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal
subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
relation; had now in fact to recognise that an education in the
occult--she could scarce say what to call it--had begun for her the day
she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that
purpose; had seen little of the girl--or rather had seen her but
briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much,
saw everything--before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly
placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated
as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in
many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In Boston, the winter
before, the young lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her, dropped into her mind the
shy conceit of some assistance, some devotion to render. Mrs.
Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits--secret
dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls without,
for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its
rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link
with the remarkable young thing from New York--_had_ mustered courage:
had perched, on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find,
and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later,
it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.
Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent
making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was
not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements,
in the interest of the particular peace that New York could not give.
It was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many
things--perhaps even too many--New York _could_ give; but this was felt
to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to
do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your
situation as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else
could, and it had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such
measure of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the
moment had not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in
any degree ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then
unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately
haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than
two-and-twenty in spite of her marks, whose hair was some how
exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently
confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for
robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New
York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history,
confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers,
sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep
that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of
affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by
most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's
back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken,
she was rich, and, in particular, she was strange--a combination in
itself of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the
strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as
she was that it was much greater than any one else--any one but the
sole Susan Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston
was not in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing
Boston, and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was
delusive and vain. She was seeing her, and she had quite the deepest
moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision.
She couldn't explain it--no one would understand. They would say clever
Boston things--Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington, Vermont, which she
boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far
south"--but they would only darken counsel.
There could be no better proof, than this quick intellectual split, of
the impression made on our friend, who shone, herself, she was well
aware, with but the reflected light of the admirable city. She too had
had her discipline, but it had not made her striking; it had been
prosaically usual, though doubtless a decent dose; and had only made
her usual to match it--usual, that is, as Boston went. She had lost
first her husband, and then her mother, with whom, on her husband's
death, she had lived again; so that now, childless, she was but more
sharply single than before. But she sat rather coldly light, having, as
she called it, enough to live on--so far, that is, as she lived by
bread alone: how little indeed she was regularly content with that diet
appeared from the name she had made--Susan Shepherd Stringham--as a
contributor to the best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she
fondly believed she had her "note," the art of showing New England
without showing it wholly in the kitchen. She had not herself been
brought up in the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to speak
for them had thus become with her a literary mission. To _be_ in truth
literary had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her
bright little nippers perpetually in position. There were masters,
models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom she finely accounted so and
in whose light she ingeniously laboured; there were others whom,
however chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for she was full of
discrimination; but all categories failed her--they ceased at least to
signify--as soon as she found herself in presence of the real thing,
the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred--what
positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. She had
had, it seemed to her, a revelation--such as even New England refined
and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as she was of small
neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions, mixed
with something moral, personal, that was still more intensely
responsive, she felt her new friend would have done her an ill turn if
their friendship shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would be left
of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender of everything
else that she was, however, quite prepared, and while she went about
her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she was really
all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so
Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so
truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached
her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance
on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each
evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense and
resignation; she attended her almost daily concert with the same
expenditure of patience and the same economy of passion; she flitted in
and out of the Public Library with the air of conscientiously returning
or bravely carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
finally--it was what she most did--she watched the thin trickle of a
fictive "love-interest" through that somewhat serpentine channel, in
the magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it. But the
real thing, all the while, was elsewhere; the real thing had gone back
to New York, leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
distinct, of why it _was_ real, and whether she should ever be so near
it again.
For the figure to which these questions attached themselves she had
found a convenient description--she thought of it for herself, always,
as that of a girl with a background. The great reality was in the fact
that, very soon, after but two or three meetings, the girl with the
background, the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once more rebellious in its
gloom and more frivolous in its frills, had told her she had never seen
any one like her. They had met thus as opposed curiosities, and that
simple remark of Milly's--if simple it was--became the most important
thing that had ever happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for
the time, of actuality and even of pertinence; it moved her first, in
short, in a high degree, to gratitude, and then to no small compassion.
Yet in respect to this relation at least it was what did prove the key
of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else could do the poor young
woman's history. That the potential heiress of all the ages should
never have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber, after all, to
the "Transcript" was a truth that--in especial as announced with
modesty, with humility, with regret--described a situation. It laid
upon the elder woman, as to the void to be filled, a weight of
responsibility; but in particular it led her to ask whom poor Mildred
_had_ then seen, and what range of contacts it had taken to produce
such queer surprises. That was really the inquiry that had ended by
clearing the air: the key of knowledge was felt to click in the lock
from the moment it flashed upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had been
starved for culture. Culture was what she herself represented for her,
and it was living up to that principle that would surely prove the
great business. She knew, the clever lady, what the principle itself
represented, and the limits of her own store; and a certain alarm would
have grown upon her if something else hadn't grown faster.
This was, fortunately for her--and we give it in her own words--the
sense of a harrowing pathos. That, primarily, was what appealed to her,
what seemed to open the door of romance for her still wider than any,
than a still more reckless, connection with the "picture-papers." For
such was essentially the point: it was rich, romantic, abysmal, to
have, as was evident, thousands and thousands a year, to have youth and
intelligence and if not beauty, at least, in equal measure, a high,
dim, charming, ambiguous oddity, which was even better, and then on top
of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the freedom of the wind in the
desert--it was unspeakably touching to be so equipped and yet to have
been reduced by fortune to little humble-minded mistakes.
It brought our friend's imagination back again to New York, where
aberrations were so possible in the intellectual sphere, and it in fact
caused a visit she presently paid there to overflow with interest. As
Milly had beautifully invited her, so she would hold out if she could
against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the
remarkable thing was that even at the end of three weeks she _had_ held
out. But by this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free;
it was dealing with new quantities, a different proportion
altogether--and that had made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone
home in convenient possession of her subject. New York was vast, New
York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite
backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got
nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final
flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living
ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in
the marble of famous French chisels--all this, to say nothing of the
effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small
world-space both crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all events
effected an exchange; the elder friend had been as consciously
intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding in personal
revelation, had been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
poetry--it was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune
even than Maeterlink and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She
appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her hostess,
rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but what they
managed and what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim depths
of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her
central clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious
enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single alarm--the fear that
she really might act on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was
positively afraid of what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to
avoid it with piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to
leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, however light,
however just, however earnest and anxious, would be half good enough,
would be anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection--this now imposed
itself as a consistent, an inspiring thought.
Less than a month after the event that had so determined Mrs.
Stringham's attitude--close upon the heels, that is, of her return from
New York--she was reached by a proposal that brought up for her the
kind of question her delicacy might have to contend with. Would she
start for Europe with her young friend at the earliest possible date,
and should she be willing to do so without making conditions? The
inquiry was launched by wire; explanations, in sufficiency, were
promised; extreme urgency was suggested, and a general surrender
invited. It was to the honour of her sincerity that she made the
surrender on the spot, though it was not perhaps altogether to that of
her logic. She had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give
something up for her new acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that
she was practically giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of
a particular impression, the impression that had throughout more and
more supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might
by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the
creature's greatness. She would have been content so to leave it;
unless indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the
biggest impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest
account of her, and none but a big, clearly, would do. Her situation,
as such things were called, was on the grand scale; but it still was
not that. It was her nature, once for all--a nature that reminded Mrs.
Stringham of the term always used in the newspapers about the great new
steamers, the inordinate number of "feet of water" they drew; so that
if, in your little boat, you had chosen to hover and approach, you had
but yourself to thank, when once motion was started, for the way the
draught pulled you. Milly drew the feet of water, and odd though it
might seem that a lonely girl, who was not robust and who hated sound
and show, should stir the stream like a leviathan, her companion
floated off with the sense of rocking violently at her side. More than
prepared, however, for that excitement, Mrs. Stringham mainly failed of
ease in respect to her own consistency. To attach herself for an
indefinite time seemed a roundabout way of holding her hands off. If
she wished to be sure of neither touching nor smutching, the straighter
plan would doubtless have been not to keep her friend within reach.
This in fact she fully recognised, and with it the degree to which she
desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain to be so
much finer than that of anybody else. The difficulty, however, by good
fortune, cleared away as soon as she had further recognised, as she was
speedily able to do, that she, Susan Shepherd--the name with which
Milly for the most part amused herself--was _not_ anybody else. She had
renounced that character; she had now no life to lead; and she honestly
believed that she was thus supremely equipped for leading Milly's own.
No other person whatever, she was sure, had to an equal degree this
qualification, and it was really to assert it that she fondly embarked.
Many things, though not in many weeks, had come and gone since then,
and one of the best of them, doubtless, had been the voyage itself, by
the happy southern course, to the succession of Mediterranean ports,
with the dazzled wind-up at Naples. Two or three others had preceded
this; incidents, indeed rather lively marks, of their last fortnight at
home, and one of which had determined on Mrs. Stringham's part a rush
to New York, forty-eight breathless hours there, previous to her final
rally. But the great sustained sea-light had drunk up the rest of the
picture, so that for many days other questions and other possibilities
sounded with as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound
in a Wagner overture. It was the Wagner overture that practically
prevailed, up through Italy, where Milly had already been, still
further up and across the Alps, which were also partly known to Mrs.
Stringham; only perhaps "taken" to a time not wholly congruous, hurried
in fact on account of the girl's high restlessness. She had been
expected, she had frankly promised, to be restless--that was partly why
she was "great"--or was a consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet
she had not perhaps altogether announced herself as straining so hard
at the cord. It was familiar, it was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that
she had arrears to make up, the chances that had lapsed for her through
the wanton ways of forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher
sides, and fond almost of nothing else; but the vagueness, the
openness, the eagerness without point and the interest without
pause--all a part of the charm of her oddity as at first presented--had
become more striking in proportion as they triumphed over movement and
change. She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could
have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them;
such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it
as light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear
as noon; of being unmistakably gay, and yet making it as soft as dusk.
Mrs. Stringham by this time understood everything, was more than ever
confirmed in wonder and admiration, in her view that it was life enough
simply to feel her companion's feelings; but there were special keys
she had not yet added to her bunch, impressions that, of a sudden, were
apt to affect her as new.
This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason,
full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some
deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such
depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself
suddenly draw back. It was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that
now troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American
sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the
suspected presence of something behind it--which, however, could
scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What any
fresh motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was, in short,
not to be divined. It was but half an explanation to say that
excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they
had left behind, or tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs.
Stringham liked to call them--was once more coming into sight as
objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were
general appearances from which the girl's own aspect, her really larger
vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to
a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her
taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got
hold of mightn't be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the
rarest--as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse--cases
of American intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm--asked
herself if her young friend were merely going to treat her to some
complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a week, however, with their
further progress, her young friend had effectively answered the
question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of
something that had a reality compared with which the nervous
explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from
that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained
a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on
sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would
become instantly the light in which Milly was to be read.
Such a matter as this may at all events speak of the style in which our
young woman could affect those who were near her, may testify to the
sort of interest she could inspire. She worked--and seemingly quite
without design--upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her
associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer
to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their
confusion. She reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, reduced
them to a consenting bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good
lady, on a last analysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness.
She exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because _they_ were
so far from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day on the Brünig
the spell of watching her had grown more than ever irresistible; a
proof of what--or of a part of what--Mrs. Stringham had, with all the
rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young
friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't
pounce, she hadn't come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention
secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck
herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps,
concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly
know what was the matter; and to watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way
of clinging to the girl, not less than an occupation, a satisfaction in
itself. The pleasure of watching, moreover, if a reason were needed,
came from a sense of her beauty. Her beauty hadn't at all originally
seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs. Stringham had, even in the
first flush of friendship, not named it, grossly, to any one; having
seen early that, for stupid people--and who, she sometimes secretly
asked herself, wasn't stupid?--it would take a great deal of
explaining. She had learned not to mention it till it was mentioned
first--which occasionally happened, but not too often; and then she was
there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception that met her own
perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special items; while,
in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of herself
employing the word that most people employed. She employed it to
pretend that she was also stupid and so have done with the matter;
spoke of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially
dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things."
This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks, doubtless, to
rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together
with too little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was
expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence. When
Milly smiled it was a public event--when she didn't it was a chapter of
history. They had stopped, on the Brünig, for luncheon, and there had
come up for them under the charm of the place the question of a longer
stay.
Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small
sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but
which, on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed
itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of
her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a
term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form
of silver medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked
with alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were
taken highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed
her familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the
best. These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the
pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like
Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of
the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and with
extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had
embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her
presence. She had given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and
Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards a standard of
comparison for all cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in
especial--Susan was the younger--with a character that, as Mrs.
Stringham had often had occasion, through life, to say to herself, made
all the difference. It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over
and over again and in the most remote connections, that, thanks to her
parent's lonely, thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
There were plenty of women who were all sorts of things that she
wasn't, but who, on the other hand, were not that, and who didn't know
_she_ was (which she liked--it relegated them still further) and didn't
know, either, how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen
herself so much in this light as during the actual phase of her
associated, if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness
gave perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The
irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were part of
the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like
an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth--the taste of
honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of
streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
gorges.
Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at
moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed
it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the
confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess,
the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the
wearer--it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality. It
might have been, possibly, with its involved loneliness and other
mysteries, the weight under which she fancied her companion's admirable
head occasionally, and ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite
assented at luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to look at
rooms, settle questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage
and horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion
particularly, brought home to her--all agreeably, richly, almost
grandly--what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had, in a
sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question of difficulty,
which she got rid of, furthermore, not in the least as one had seen
many charming persons do, by merely passing it on to others. She kept
it completely at a distance: it never entered the circle; the most
plaintive confidant couldn't have dragged it in; and to tread the path
of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service was in other
words so easy to render that the whole thing was like court life
without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of money,
and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that if
one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this
incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most
made it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading
person she couldn't have imagined; but it was, all the same, the truth
of truths that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might
leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible
and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was
in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that
she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the
curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the
_mode du jour,_ that peeped from under the corresponding indifference
of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of
noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but
antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had
mechanically possessed herself. She couldn't dress it away, nor walk it
away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it
away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She
couldn't have lost it if she had tried--that was what it was to be
really rich. It had to be _the_ thing you were. When at the end of an
hour she had not returned to the house Mrs. Stringham, though the
bright afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same
direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But the
purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of a due
regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once more, the
good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her slightly "underhand"
even in her own eyes. She couldn't help that, however, and she didn't
care, sure as she was that what she really wanted was not to overstep,
but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop in time that she went
softly, but she had on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for
she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety, the footpath she
believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside and into the
higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they had so often
wanted, as they passed above or below, to stray; and then it obscured
itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham
reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered
old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that
sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long before
passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way would
drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in fact, a quarter of
an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led somewhere,
yet apparently quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether, though
probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her uncertainty
moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the presence on a
fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz volume that the
girl had brought out, and that therefore pointed to her shortly
previous passage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an
encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as
she hadn't yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs.
Stringham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was
quite an accident that she had not, before they were over, betrayed by
her deeper agitation the fact of her own nearness.
The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a
sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall
precipitously and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great
extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the
promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not
stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her
friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path
somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl's seat
was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that
merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so
placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last
completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what
she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her
liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single
false movement, by a turn of the head--how could one tell? into
whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in
the poor lady's ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly's. It
was a commotion that left our observer intensely still and holding her
breath. What had first been offered her was the possibility of a latent
intention--however wild the idea--in such a posture; of some betrayed
accordance of Milly's caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But
since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable,
must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse of
a few seconds had a partly reassuring effect. It gave her time to
receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly
retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This was
the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating
there, she was not meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she
sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had
nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of
the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain,
it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among
them, or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham
had decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she
saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to
sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to
withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her
breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.
Not many minutes probably, yet they had not seemed few, and they had
given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while
waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when,
late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point
of the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the
pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word--_à
bientôt!_--across the cover; then, even under the girl's continued
delay, had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw
that the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction
that the future was not to exist for her princess in the form of any
sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn't be for
her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would
be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to
the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly
presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to
say to herself, even after another interval of some length, that if her
young friend still continued absent it wouldn't be because--whatever
the opportunity--she had cut short the thread. She wouldn't have
committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakably reserved for some more
complicated passage; this was the very vision in which she had, with no
little awe, been discovered. The image that thus remained with the
elder lady kept the character of revelation. During the breathless
minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter's
type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery,
all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had
been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham's flame. They are things
that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly
represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger on our friend's part
than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was scarce yet used to
carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine of something precious.
She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared.
The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She
was not thinking, either, of Milly's gold.