"Of everything. Of everything I have."
Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You 'have'
everything; so that when you say 'much' of it----"
"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if
I _have_ got it."
She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of
perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by
something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet
actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. "If you've got
an ailment?"
"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
"Ah, _that_--like almost nobody else."
"Then for how long?"
Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half
enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And then
as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a
shade more conscious: "We'll go straight to the best near doctor." This
too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence,
sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost
herself. "Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in distress."
"I don't think I've really _everything,"_ Milly said as if to
explain--and as if also to put it pleasantly.
"But what on earth can I do for you?" The girl hesitated, then seemed
on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed
herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I'm only too happy!"
It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham's doubt.
"Then what's the matter?"
"That's the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."
"But what is it you think you haven't got?"
Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim
show of joy. "The power to resist the bliss of what I _have!"_
Mrs. Stringham took it in--her sense of being "put off" with it, the
possible, probable irony of it--and her tenderness renewed itself in
the positive grimness of a long murmur. "Whom will you see?"--for it
was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors.
"Where will you first go?"
Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came
back with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I'll tell you at
supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness
that testified for her companion to something that again particularly
pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just
concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a
hooked needle and a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was
always provided--this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no
doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn't really been
in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but
the excess of the joy of life, and everything _did_ then fit. She
couldn't stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the
sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces.
There was no evasion of any truth--so at least Susan Shepherd hoped--in
one's sitting there while the twilight deepened and feeling still more
finely that the position of this young lady was magnificent. The
evening at that height had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers
had bespoken a fire with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted its
brave presence through the small panes of the low, clean windows, with
incidents at the inn-door, the yellow _diligence,_ the great waggons,
the hurrying, hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful
friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes,
pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of
strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest
interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It
was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion's
position should strike her as, after all, the best meaning she could
extract; for she herself was seated in the magnificence as in a
court-carriage--she came back to that, and such a method of
progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently have a
great deal more to give. By the time the candles were lighted for
supper and the short, white curtains were drawn, Milly had reappeared,
and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That charm
moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without further
loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. "I want to go straight to
London."
It was unexpected, corresponding with no view positively taken at their
departure; when England had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated
and postponed--seen for the moment, as who should say, at the end of an
avenue of preparations and introductions. London, in short, might have
been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved like a siege by
gradual approaches. Milly's actual fine stride was therefore the more
exciting, as any simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham;
who, besides, was afterwards to recall as the very beginning of a drama
the terms in which, between their smoky candles, the girl had put her
preference and in which still other things had come up, come while the
clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air reached their ears, with the
stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets and the foreign questions,
foreign answers, that were all alike a part of the cheery converse of
the road. The girl brought it out in truth as she might have brought a
huge confession, something she admitted herself shy about and that
would seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled over her that what
she wanted of Europe was "people," so far as they were to be had, and
that if her friend really wished to know, the vision of this same
equivocal quantity was what had haunted her during their previous days,
in museums and churches, and what was again spoiling for her the pure
taste of scenery. She was all for scenery--yes; but she wanted it human
and personal, and all she could say was that there would be in
London--wouldn't there? more of that kind than anywhere else. She came
back to her idea that if it wasn't for long--if nothing should happen
to be so for _her_--why, the particular thing she spoke of would
probably have most to give her in the time, would probably be less than
anything else a waste of her remainder. She produced this last
consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again
disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready--if talk of early dying was
in order--to match it from her own future. Good, then; they would, eat
and drink because of what might happen to-morrow; and they would direct
their course from that moment with a view to such eating and drinking.
They ate and drank that night, in truth, as if in the spirit of this
decision; whereby the air, before they separated, felt itself the
clearer.
It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive--extensive, that
is, in proportion to the signs of life presented. The idea of "people"
was not so entertained on Milly's part as to connect itself with
particular persons, and the fact remained for each of the ladies that
they would, completely unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely
unknowing. They had no relation already formed; this plea Mrs.
Stringham put forward to see what it would produce. It produced nothing
at first but the observation on the girl's side that what she had in
mind was no thought of society nor of scraping acquaintance; nothing
was further from her than to desire the opportunities represented for
the compatriot in general by a trunkful of "letters." It wasn't a
question, in short, of the people the compatriot was after; it was the
human, the English picture itself, as they might see it in their own
way--the world imagined always in what one had read and dreamed. Mrs.
Stringham did every justice to this world, but when later on an
occasion chanced to present itself, she made a point of not omitting to
remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance even an
individual. This still, however, failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch"
Milly, so that she had presently to go all the way. "Haven't I
understood from you, for that matter, that you gave Mr. Densher
something of a promise?"
There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look had to be taken as
representing one of two things--either that she was completely vague
about the promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started no train.
But she really couldn't be so vague about the promise, her
interlocutress quickly saw, without attaching it to something; it had
to be a promise to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In the
event, accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so
unusually clever young Englishman who had made his appearance in New
York on some special literary business--wasn't it?--shortly before
their departure, and who had been three or four times in her house
during the brief period between her visit to Boston and her companion's
subsequent stay with her; but she required much reminding before it
came back to her that she had mentioned to this companion just
afterwards the confidence expressed by the personage in question in her
never doing so dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase
was, looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his
confidence, the form of which might have appeared a trifle free--that
she now reasserted; she had done nothing either to impair or to enhance
it; but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the connection and at the
time, rather sorry to have missed Mr. Densher. She had thought of him
again after that, the elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to
notice that Milly appeared not to have done so--which the girl might
easily have betrayed; and, interested as she was in everything that
concerned her, she had made out for herself, for herself only and
rather idly, that, but for interruptions, the young Englishman might
have become a better acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was
one of the signs that in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a
young person with the world before her, for sympathy and wonder.
Isolated, unmothered, unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her
big house, her big fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to
"receive," for all her few years, as an older woman might have done--as
was done, precisely, by princesses who had public considerations to
observe and who came of age very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs.
Stringham then that Mr. Densher had gone off somewhere else in
connection with his errand before her visit to New York, it had been
also not undiscoverable that he had come back for a day or two later
on, that is after her own second excursion--that he had in fine
reappeared on a single occasion on his way to the West: his way from
Washington as she believed, though he was out of sight at the time of
her joining her friend for their departure. It had not occurred to her
before to exaggerate--it had not occurred to her that she could; but
she seemed to become aware to-night that there had been just enough in
this relation to meet, to provoke, the free conception of a little more.
She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or no promise, Milly
would, at a pinch, be able, in London, to act on his permission to make
him a sign; to which Milly replied with readiness that her ability,
though evident, would be none the less quite wasted, inasmuch as the
gentleman would, to a certainty, be still in America. He had a great
deal to do there--which he would scarce have begun; and in fact she
might very well not have thought of London at all if she hadn't been
sure he wasn't yet near coming back. It was perceptible to her
companion that the moment our young woman had so far committed herself
she had a sense of having overstepped; which was not quite patched up
by her saying the next minute, possibly with a certain failure of
presence of mind, that the last thing she desired was the air of
running after him. Mrs. Stringham wondered privately what question
there could be of any such appearance--the danger of which thus
suddenly came up; but she said, for the time, nothing of it--she only
said other things: one of which was, for instance, that if Mr. Densher
was away he was away, and that this was the end of it; also that of
course they must be discreet at any price. But what was the measure of
discretion, and how was one to be sure? So it was that, as they sat
there, she produced her own case: _she_ had a possible tie with London,
which she desired as little to disown as she might wish to risk
presuming on it. She treated her companion, in short, for their
evening's end, to the story of Maud Manningham, the odd but interesting
English girl who had formed her special affinity in the old days at the
Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with a
regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed, yet
that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so
that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the occasion of the
marriage of each. They had then once more fondly, scrupulously
written--Mrs. Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
afterwards passed. This, however, had been the end--though with no
rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a
great marriage, while she herself had made a small; on top of which,
moreover, distance, difference, diminished community and impossible
reunion had done the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
that reunion had begun to show as possible--if the other party to it,
that is, should be still in existence. That was exactly what it now
struck our friend as interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and
another, she believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all
events now make if Milly didn't object.
Milly in general objected to nothing, and, though she asked a question
or two, she raised no present plea. Her questions--or at least her own
answers to them--kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's part, a backward train:
she hadn't known till tonight how much she remembered, or how fine it
might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured Maud, florid,
exotic and alien--which had been just the spell--even to the
perceptions of youth. There was the danger--she frankly touched
it--that such a temperament mightn't have matured, with the years, all
in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger that, in renewing
relations after long breaks, one had always to look in the face. To
gather in strayed threads was to take a risk--for which, however, she
was prepared if Milly was. The possible "fun," she confessed, was by
itself rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this--wound up a
little as she was--the note of fun as the harmless final right of fifty
years of mere New England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards
to recall was the indescribable look dropped on her, at this, by her
companion; she was still seated there between the candles and before
the finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to
figure for her as an inscrutable comment on _her_ notion of freedom.
Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed
perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been
mainly soundless, her friend's story--produced as a resource
unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve--half surprised, half beguiled
her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that, she brought
out, before she went to bed, an easy, a light "Risk everything!"
This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud
Lowder's evoked presence--as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became,
in excited reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
when the girl had left her, took place in her--nameless but, as soon as
she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this
fulness of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage, just
sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had
left her behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the
corresponding date in her own life--not the second, the sad one, with
its dignity of sadness, but the first, with the meagreness of its
supposed felicity--she had been, in the same spirit, almost
patronisingly pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased to
matter, had never quite died out for her, there was doubtless some
oddity in its now offering itself as a link, rather than as another
break, in the chain; and indeed there might well have been for her a
mood in which the notion of the development of patronage in her quondam
schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was
actually settled--if the case be worth our analysis--by the happy
consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her having
at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company, had appeared
to have so much, and would now--for wasn't it also, in general, quite
the rich law of English life?--have, with accretions, promotions,
expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might be; she
rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might
have to show--and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice--she
would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy
producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late--till the candles
were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat
portfolio. She had not lost the old clue; there were connections she
remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She
wrote on the spot.