"The only thing is," he went on, "that she's--naturally now--leaving
town and, as I take it, going abroad."
Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing
with this difficulty. "She won't go," she smiled in spite of it, "till
she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go--" She paused, leaving him
uncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. "We shall go
too."
He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. "And what
good will that do _me?_"
"We shall be near them somewhere, and you'll come out to us."
"Oh!" he said a little awkwardly.
"I'll see that you do. I mean I'll write to you."
"Ah thank you, thank you!" Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed
putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use he
rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make
of it. "There are all sorts of things," he vaguely remarked, "to
consider."
"No doubt. But there's above all the great thing."
"And pray what's that?"
"Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I'm
treating you handsomely, I'm looking after it for you. I _can_--I can
smooth your path. She's charming, she's clever and she's good. And her
fortune's a real fortune."
Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he
felt her thus buying him off, and buying him--it would have been funny
if it hadn't been so grave--with Miss Theale's money. He ventured,
derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. "I'm much obliged to you
for the handsome offer--"
"Of what doesn't belong to me?" She wasn't abashed. "I don't say it
does--but there's no reason it shouldn't to _you_. Mind you,
moreover"--she kept it up--"I'm not one who talks in the air. And you
owe me something--if you want to know why."
Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her
consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive
an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that
she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well,
while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this
light did Kate believe him? But that wasn't what he asked aloud. "Of
course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your
inviting me for instance to-night--!"
"Yes, my inviting you to-night's a part of it. But you don't know," she
added, "how far I've gone for you."
He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he
laughed again as he could. "I see how far you're going."
"I'm the most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for
you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only
made him stare: "To start you it _was_ necessary. From _me_ it has the
weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with
surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you."
Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which,
speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see
what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend upon you now to
make me right!"
The minute's reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had
left the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short,
under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the
square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his
brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly
Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She had
affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. He
made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its
starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that
Milly might be compassionate too. "Proper" indeed it was, her lie--the
very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So
Milly was successfully deceived.
V
To see her alone, the poor girl, he none the less promptly felt, was to
see her after all very much on the old basis, the basis of his three
visits in New York; the new element, when once he was again face to
face with her, not really amounting to much more than a recognition,
with a little surprise, of the positive extent of the old basis.
Everything but that, everything embarrassing fell away after he had
been present five minutes: it was in fact wonderful that their
excellent, their pleasant, their permitted and proper and harmless
American relation--the legitimacy of which he could thus scarce express
in names enough--should seem so unperturbed by other matters. They had
both since then had great adventures--such an adventure for him was his
mental annexation of her country; and it was now, for the moment, as if
the greatest of them all were this acquired consciousness of reasons
other than those that had already served. Densher had asked for her, at
her hotel, the day after Aunt Maud's dinner, with a rich, that is with
a highly troubled, preconception of the part likely to be played for
him at present, in any contact with her, by Kate's and Mrs. Lowder's so
oddly conjoined and so really superfluous attempts to make her
interesting. She had been interesting enough without them--that
appeared to-day to come back to him; and, admirable and beautiful as
was the charitable zeal of the two ladies, it might easily have nipped
in the bud the germs of a friendship inevitably limited but still
perfectly open to him. What had happily averted the need of his
breaking off, what would as happily continue to avert it, was his own
good sense and good humour, a certain spring of mind in him which
ministered, imagination aiding, to understandings and allowances and
which he had positively never felt such ground as just now to rejoice
in the possession of. Many men--he practically made the
reflexion--wouldn't have taken the matter that way, would have lost
patience, finding the appeal in question irrational, exorbitant; and,
thereby making short work with it, would have let it render any further
acquaintance with Miss Theale impossible. He had talked with Kate of
this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one
way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her. Such, however, had
not been the tune to which his at first bewildered view had, since the
night before, cleared itself up. It wasn't so much that he failed of
being the kind of man who "chucked," for he knew himself as the kind of
man wise enough to mark the case in which chucking might be the minor
evil and the least cruelty. It was that he liked too much every one
concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable. He liked
Kate, goodness knew, and he also clearly enough liked Mrs. Lowder. He
liked in particular Milly herself; and hadn't it come up for him the
evening before that he quite liked even Susan Shepherd? He had never
known himself so generally merciful. It was a footing, at all events,
whatever accounted for it, on which he should surely be rather a muff
not to manage by one turn or another to escape disobliging. Should he
find he couldn't work it there would still be time enough. The idea of
working it crystallised before him in such guise as not only to promise
much interest--fairly, in case of success, much enthusiasm; but
positively to impart to failure an appearance of barbarity.
Arriving thus in Brook Street both with the best intentions and with a
margin consciously left for some primary awkwardness, he found his
burden, to his great relief, unexpectedly light. The awkwardness
involved in the responsibility so newly and so ingeniously traced for
him turned round on the spot to present him another face. This was
simply the face of his old impression, which he now fully
recovered--the impression that American girls, when, rare case, they
had the attraction of Milly, were clearly the easiest people in the
world. Had what had happened been that this specimen of the class was
from the first so committed to ease that nothing subsequent _could_
ever make her difficult? That affected him now as still more probable
than on the occasion of the hour or two lately passed with her in
Kate's society. Milly Theale had recognised no complication, to
Densher's view, while bringing him, with his companion, from the
National Gallery and entertaining them at luncheon; it was therefore
scarce supposable that complications had become so soon too much for
her. His pretext for presenting himself was fortunately of the best and
simplest; the least he could decently do, given their happy
acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she had
been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there
was the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at any
rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared
with Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was finding
her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad to
see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but
that she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was well
enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this,
of the comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn't absent from his
thought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account because
expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
might turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom of
mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
_might_ have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy her behaving as
if she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of
surprise; she didn't a bit overdo it: the lesson of which was,
perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care
of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, on
his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had
apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibility
of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did he
understand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner in
which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he
couldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that
could pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation.
It soon made one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She had
let him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend's
explanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but
she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as with
the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and every chance for
insistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she had
reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for desiring to appear.
Kate's account of her as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so
personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly
disposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one he
was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of the
appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest had
been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so
much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorry
for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make
out. Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?--inasmuch as,
whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly
longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement and
then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.
Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pity
hadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned
round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat
it--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. His
situation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject for
that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it
as something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
honesty, have very soon to reckon with.
Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him,
the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself
quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wasted
charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of
conscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of which
he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had
spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was
because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above all was what
came up for him--how clear an impression of this attitude, how definite
an account of his own failure, Kate must have given her friend. His
immediate quarter of an hour there with the girl lighted up for him
almost luridly such an inference; it was almost as if the other party
to their remarkable understanding had been with them as they talked,
had been hovering about, had dropped in to look after her work. The
value of the work affected him as different from the moment he saw it
so expressed in poor Milly. Since it was false that he wasn't loved, so
his right was quite quenched to figure on that ground as important; and
if he didn't look out he should find himself appreciating in a way
quite at odds with straightness the good faith of Milly's benevolence.
_There_ was the place for scruples; there the need absolutely to mind
what he was about. If it wasn't proper for him to enjoy consideration
on a perfectly false footing, where was the guarantee that, if he kept
on, he mightn't soon himself pretend to the grievance in order not to
miss the sweet? Consideration--from a charming girl--was soothing on
whatever theory; and it didn't take him far to remember that he had
himself as yet done nothing deceptive. It was Kate's description of
him, his defeated state, it was none of his own; his responsibility
would begin, as he might say, only with acting it out. The sharp point
was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this
difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it
with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that
was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think
_she_ doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she _does_ like me awfully!"--that
would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time
but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be
virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and
this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it
would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so
extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the
complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one
loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain
length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the
abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in
presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one
nothing but good.
Densher had quite to steady himself not to be awestruck at the
immensity of the good his own friend must on all this evidence have
wanted to do him. Of one thing indeed meanwhile he was sure: Milly
Theale wouldn't herself precipitate his necessity of intervention. She
would absolutely never say to him: "_Is_ it so impossible she shall
ever care for you seriously?"--without which nothing could well be less
delicate than for him aggressively to set her right. Kate would be free
to do that if Kate, in some prudence, some contrition, for some better
reason in fine, should revise her plan; but he asked himself what,
failing this, _he_ could do that wouldn't be after all more gross than
doing nothing. This brought him round again to the acceptance of the
fact that the poor girl liked him. She put it, for reasons of her own,
on a simple, a beautiful ground, a ground that already supplied her
with the pretext she required. The ground was there, that is, in the
impression she had received, retained, cherished; the pretext, over and
above it, was the pretext for acting on it. That she now believed as
she did made her sure at last that she might act; so that what Densher
therefore would have struck at would be the root, in her soul, of a
pure pleasure. It positively lifted its head and flowered, this pure
pleasure, while the young man now sat with her, and there were things
she seemed to say that took the words out of his mouth. These were not
all the things she did say; they were rather what such things meant in
the light of what he knew. Her warning him for instance off the
question of how she was, the quick brave little art with which she did
that, represented to his fancy a truth she didn't utter. "I'm well for
_you_--that's all you have to do with or need trouble about: I shall
never be anything so horrid as ill for you. So there you are; worry
about me, spare me, please, as little as you can. Don't be afraid, in
short, to ignore my 'interesting' side. It isn't, you see, even now
while you sit here, that there aren't lots of others. Only do _them_
justice and we shall get on beautifully." This was what was folded
finely up in her talk--all quite ostensibly about her impressions and
her intentions. She tried to put Densher again on his American doings,
but he wouldn't have that to-day. As he thought of the way in which,
the other afternoon, before Kate, he had sat complacently "jawing," he
accused himself of excess, of having overdone it, having made--at least
apparently--more of a "set" at their entertainer than he was at all
events then intending. He turned the tables, drawing her out about
London, about her vision of life there, and only too glad to treat her
as a person with whom he could easily have other topics than her aches
and pains. He spoke to her above all of the evidence offered him at
Lancaster Gate that she had come but to conquer; and when she had met
this with full and gay assent--"How could I help being the feature of
the season, the what-do-you-call-it, the theme of every tongue?"--they
fraternised freely over all that had come and gone for each since their
interrupted encounter in New York.
At the same time, while many things in quick succession came up for
them, came up in particular for Densher, nothing perhaps was just so
sharp as the odd influence of their present conditions on their view of
their past ones. It was as if they hadn't known how "thick" they had
originally become, as if, in a manner, they had really fallen to
remembrance of more passages of intimacy than there had in fact at the
time quite been room for. They were in a relation now so complicated,
whether by what they said or by what they didn't say, that it might
have been seeking to justify its speedy growth by reaching back to one
of those fabulous periods in which prosperous states place their
beginnings. He recalled what had been said at Mrs. Lowder's about the
steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss,
and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on;
which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to
communicate to Milly. The matters he couldn't mention mingled
themselves with those he did; so that it would doubtless have been hard
to say which of the two groups now played most of a part. He was kept
face to face with this young lady by a force absolutely resident in
their situation and operating, for his nerves, with the swiftness of
the forces commonly regarded by sensitive persons as beyond their
control. The current thus determined had positively become for him, by
the time he had been ten minutes in the room, something that, but for
the absurdity of comparing the very small with the very great, he would
freely have likened to the rapids of Niagara. An uncriticised
acquaintance between a clever young man and a responsive young woman
could do nothing more, at the most, than go, and his actual experiment
went and went and went. Nothing probably so conduced to make it go as
the marked circumstance that they had spoken all the while not a word
about Kate; and this in spite of the fact that, if it were a question
for them of what had occurred in the past weeks, nothing had occurred
comparable to Kate's predominance. Densher had but the night before
appealed to her for instruction as to what he must do about her, but he
fairly winced to find how little this came to. She had foretold him of
course how little; but it was a truth that looked different when shown
him by Milly. It proved to him that the latter had in fact been dealt
with, but it produced in him the thought that Kate might perhaps again
conveniently be questioned. He would have liked to speak to her before
going further--to make sure she really meant him to succeed quite so
much. With all the difference that, as we say, came up for him, it came
up afresh, naturally, that he might make his visit brief and never
renew it; yet the strangest thing of all was that the argument against
that issue would have sprung precisely from the beautiful little
eloquence involved in Milly's avoidances.
Precipitate these well might be, since they emphasised the fact that
she was proceeding in the sense of the assurances she had taken. Over
the latter she had visibly not hesitated, for hadn't they had the merit
of giving her a chance? Densher quite saw her, felt her take it; the
chance, neither more nor less, of help rendered him according to her
freedom. It was what Kate had left her with: "Listen to him, _I?_
Never! So do as you like." What Milly "liked" was to do, it thus
appeared, as she was doing: our young man's glimpse of which was just
what would have been for him not less a glimpse of the peculiar
brutality of shaking her off. The choice exhaled its shy fragrance of
heroism, for it was not aided by any question of parting with Kate. She
would be charming to Kate as well as to Kate's adorer; she would incur
whatever pain could dwell for her in the sight--should she continue to
be exposed to the sight--of the adorer thrown with the adored. It
wouldn't really have taken much more to make him wonder if he hadn't
before him one of those rare cases of exaltation--food for fiction,
food for poetry--in which a man's fortune with the woman who doesn't
care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does. It was as if
Milly had said to herself: "Well, he can at least meet her in my
society, if that's anything to him; so that my line can only be to make
my society attractive." She certainly couldn't have made a different
impression if she _had_ so reasoned. All of which, none the less,
didn't prevent his soon enough saying to her, quite as if she were to
be whirled into space: "And now, then, what becomes of you? Do you
begin to rush about on visits to country-houses?"
She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she
would, couldn't help betraying to him something of her suppressed view
of the possibility--ever, ever perhaps--of any such proceedings. They
weren't at any rate for her now. "Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks
somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we've
only been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything's done
and the wind's in our sails."
"May you scud then happily before it! But when," he asked, "do you come
back?"
She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: "Oh when the wind
turns. And what do you do with your summer?"
"Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work
in your country counts for play as well. You see what's thought of the
pleasure your country can give. My holiday's over."
"I'm sorry you had to take it," said Milly, "at such a different time
from ours. If you could but have worked while we've been working--"
"I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn't so great
with me. There's a little of each for me, of work and of play, in
either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder--you
all," he went on, "have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real
physical toil. Your rest is something you've earned and you need. My
labour's comparatively light."
"Very true," she smiled; "but all the same I like mine."
"It doesn't leave you 'done'?"
"Not a bit. I don't get tired when I'm interested. Oh I could go far."
He bethought himself. "Then why don't you?--since you've got here, as I
learn, the whole place in your pocket."
"Well, it's a kind of economy--I'm saving things up. I've enjoyed so
what you speak of--though your account of it's fantastic--that I'm
watching over its future, that I can't help being anxious and careful.
I want--in the interest itself of what I've had and may still have--not
to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again
to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,"
she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her
statement--"I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return."
"Ah then you _will_ return? Can you promise one that?"
Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if
bargaining a little. "Isn't London rather awful in winter?"
He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he
checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to
social life. "No--I like it, with one thing and another; it's less of a
mob than later on; and it would have for _us_ the merit--should you
come here then--that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear
for us--if it isn't a question of climate."