“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely.
We shouldn’t like that!” I went on.
“No--I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.”
“We have the others--we have indeed the others,” I concurred.
“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands
in his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much
count, do they?”
I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call
‘much’!”
“Yes”--with all accommodation--“everything depends!” On this,
however, he faced to the window again and presently reached it with
his vague, restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with
his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs
I knew and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of
“work,” behind which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with
it there as I had repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I
have described as the moments of my knowing the children to be given to
something from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of
being prepared for the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped
on me as I extracted a meaning from the boy’s embarrassed back--none
other than the impression that I was not barred now. This inference
grew in a few minutes to sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the
direct perception that it was positively _he_ who was. The frames and
squares of the great window were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of
failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or shut out. He
was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a throb of
hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted pane, for something he
couldn’t see?--and wasn’t it the first time in the whole business
that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it
a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself;
he had been anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little
manner he sat at table, had needed all his small strange genius to give
it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet me, it was almost as
if this genius had succumbed. “Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees
with _me_!”
“You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours,
a good deal more of it than for some time before. I hope,” I went on
bravely, “that you’ve been enjoying yourself.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been ever so far; all round about--miles and miles
away. I’ve never been so free.”
He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. “Well, do you like it?”
He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--“Do
_you_?”--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words
contain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he
continued as if with the sense that this was an impertinence to be
softened. “Nothing could be more charming than the way you take it,
for of course if we’re alone together now it’s you that are alone
most. But I hope,” he threw in, “you don’t particularly mind!”
“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your company,--you’re
so beyond me,--I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay
on for?”
He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. “You
stay on just for _that_?”
“Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest
I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
your while. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I
felt it impossible to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I
told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that
there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”
“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had
a tone to master; but he was so much more successful than I that,
laughing out through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly
jesting. “Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for
_you_!”
“It was partly to get you to do something,” I conceded. “But, you
know, you didn’t do it.”
“Oh, yes,” he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, “you
wanted me to tell you something.”
“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you
know.”
“Ah, then, is _that_ what you’ve stayed over for?”
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express
the effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It
was as if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish
me. “Well, yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it. It was
precisely for that.”
He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating
the assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally
said was: “Do you mean now--here?”
“There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked round him
uneasily, and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the very
first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It
was as if he were suddenly afraid of me--which struck me indeed as
perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”
“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little
bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He
had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling
it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a
perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in _any_ way was an act
of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea
of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for
me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn’t
it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I
suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn’t have
had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted
with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come. So
we circled about, with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring
to close. But it was for each other we feared! That kept us a little
longer suspended and unbruised. “I’ll tell you everything,”
Miles said--“I mean I’ll tell you anything you like. You’ll stay
on with me, and we shall both be all right and I _will_ tell you--I
_will_. But not now.”
“Why not now?”
My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin
drop. Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom,
outside, someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. “I
have to see Luke.”
I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. “Well,
then, go to Luke, and I’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in
return for that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller
request.”
He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
little to bargain. “Very much smaller----?”
“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”--oh, my work
preoccupied me, and I was off-hand!--“if, yesterday afternoon, from
the table in the hall, you took, you know, my letter.”