X
Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a
confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was
entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that
his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something,
that is, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she
_were_ confessing--all the while it was quite the case that neither
justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He
had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan
Shepherd at home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade,
and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and
missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides
letting them easily see that if it hadn't by this time been the end of
everything--which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the
season at its last gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were
such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at
any rate their modest general plea--that there was no place they would
have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked,
wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was
highly the case as to their current consciousness--which could be
indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course;
impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been
gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful
of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering--they had
been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each
other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have
been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He
had administered the touch that, under light analysis, made the
difference--the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the
spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and
for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and
interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs.
Lowder's not having lost it either, though it was with Mrs. Lowder,
superficially, they had come, and though it was further with that lady
that our young woman was directly engaged during the half-hour or so of
her most agreeably inward response to the scene.
The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as
the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau-composition, a tone
as of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air, summer
full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much, by her
measure, for the previous hour, appeared, in connection with this
revelation of it, to have happened to her--a quantity expressed in
introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armour,
of pictures, of cabinets, of tapestry, of tea-tables, in an assault of
reminders that this largeness of style was the sign of _appointed_
felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing vessel, while
everything else, the pleasant personal affluence, the easy, murmurous
welcome, the honoured age of illustrious host and hostess, all at once
so distinguished and so plain, so public and so shy, became but this or
that element of the infusion. The elements melted together and seasoned
the draught, the essence of which might have struck the girl as
distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted
from somebody, while a fuller flood, somehow, kept bearing her up--all
the freshness of response of her young life the freshness of the first
and only prime. What had perhaps brought on just now a kind of climax
was the fact of her appearing to make out, through Aunt Maud, what was
really the matter. It couldn't be less than a climax for a poor shaky
maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the
matter--for that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder's part, it came
to. Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was
doubtless precisely a part of the brilliant life--since the brilliant
life, as one had faintly figured it, clearly _was_ humanly led--that
all impressions within its area partook of its brilliancy; still,
letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal
for one to be able to take in so comfortably one's companion's broad
blandness. "You must stay among us--you must stay; anything else is
impossible and ridiculous; you don't know yet, no doubt--you can't; but
you will soon enough: you can stay in _any_ position." It had been as
the murmurous consecration to follow the murmurous welcome; and even if
it were but part of Aunt Maud's own spiritual ebriety--for the dear
woman, one could see, was spiritually "keeping" the day--it served to
Milly, then and afterwards, as a high-water mark of the imagination.
It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the
other day at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark's informing her that she was
a "success"--the key thus again struck; and though no distinct, no
numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been
plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as
much, and all gratuitous and genial--if, in portions, not exactly
hitherto _the_ revelation--as three unprepared weeks could have been
expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for them, but
out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat
roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close--reasons completely
personal--she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as
deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the
admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure
either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was
doing, Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk
herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It
was fine, the girl fully felt, the way she did talk _her,_ little as,
at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at
fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful
absorption of iced coffee--qualified by a sharp doubt of her
wisdom--that she most had in view Lord Mark's relation to her being
there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It
wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her
feel that this relation was charming. It might, once more, simply have
been that everything, anything, was charming when one was so justly and
completely charmed; but, frankly, she had not supposed anything so
serenely sociable could define itself between them as the friendly
understanding that was at present somehow in the air. They were, many
of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on a stretch
of sward as a temple of refreshment and that happened to have the
property--which was all to the good of making Milly think of a
"durbar"; her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, in
which, further, the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into
place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of
"native princes"--familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious
term!--and Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for
choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family.
The Lancaster Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included
its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy--a young person
blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her,
and she was the handsomest thing there--this last a declaration made by
Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madness, a straight skylark-flight
of charity, to Aunt Maud.
Kate had, for her new friend's eyes, the extraordinary and attaching
property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful
stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the
imagination for the time make what it would of them--make her merely a
person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but
who was above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given
her, as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this
sense--which sprang up at its own hours--of being as curious about her
as if one hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon
as Milly had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her
knowledge of Merton Densher; she had _looked_ then other and, as Milly
knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective; and our
young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often
look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and
Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a
little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could
almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would
place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a
figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be
waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling
that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever
it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably
ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them
would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses.
Milly was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great social uses
might be--unless, as a good example, exerting just that sort of glamour
in just that sort of frame were one of them: she would have fallen back
on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all events for her friend.
It imputed a primness, all round, to be reduced but to saying, by way
of a translation of one's amusement, that she was always so
_right_--since that, too often, was what the _insupportables_
themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to Aunt Maud, what she had to
content herself withal--save for the lame enhancement of saying she was
lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened the bond
that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled in short its
drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view. That was really the
view Milly had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to give herself
to immediately taking in; but it didn't prevent the continued play of
those swift cross-lights, odd beguilements of the mind, at which we
have already glanced.
Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to
Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she
expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't
it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very
luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and
waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the
circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming
together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed
slowly to pass and repass and conveniently to linger before them; he
was personally the note of the blue--like a suspended skein of silk
within reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving shuttle
took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the intermixed
truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly
knew he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with
her at Mrs. Lowder's expense, which she would have none of; she
wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he
wouldn't have launched them at Matcham--or whatever it was he _had_
done--only for Aunt Maud's _beaux yeux._ What he had done, it would
have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in
vain to do; and what they were all now profiting by was a change
comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused
the cessation easily showed itself as none of Milly's business; and she
was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him
directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why
then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation
that he might absolutely have been saying to her "Yes, let the dear
woman take her own tone? Since she's here she may stay," he might have
been adding--"for whatever she can make of it. But you and I are
different." Milly knew _she_ was different in truth--his own difference
was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all, even at their
distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this line would be tacit. He
practically placed her--it came round again to that--under no
obligation whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover, her
letting Mrs. Lowder take a tone. She might have taken twenty--they
would have spoiled nothing.
"You must stay on with us; you _can,_ you know, in any position you
like; any, any, _any,_ my dear child"--and her emphasis went deep. "You
must make your home with us; and it's really open to you to make the
most beautiful one in the world. You mustn't be under a mistake--under
any of any sort; and you must let us all think for you a little, take
care of you and watch over you. Above all you must help me with Kate,
and you must stay a little _for_ her; nothing for a long time has
happened to me so good as that you and she should have become friends.
It's beautiful; it's great; it's everything. What makes it perfect is
that it should have come about through our dear delightful Susie,
restored to me, after so many years, by such a miracle. No--that's more
charming to me than even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been
good to one--positively; for I couldn't, at my age, have made a new
friend--undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It's
like changing one's bankers--after fifty: one doesn't do that. That's
why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your
wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper--coming back at last as
straight as out of a fairy-tale and with you as an attendant fairy."
Milly hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of
herself made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender its
trimming; but Aunt Maud was not to be deterred by a weak joke from
keeping it up. Her interlocutress could feel besides that she kept it
up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy
woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her
affections and her views were moving as never before in concert.
Unquestionably she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate and loved Lord
Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved every one within
range, down to the very servant who came to receive Milly's empty
iceplate--down, for that matter, to Milly herself, who was, while she
talked, really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle,
a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for
wishing-purposes of one's own, was a thing to be on rather than under;
still, however, if the girl should fail of breath it wouldn't be, she
could feel, by Mrs. Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going on to say that she
and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything.
It was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan,
enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly's prosperity too for
its full operation, just as Milly's prosperity at the same time
involved Kate's. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it
was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our young woman
understand things Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities as well as
characterisations that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most
frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a
natural force.