III

Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into

possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was

still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool

pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun

on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played

over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of

purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old

reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all

flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded

and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of

the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller

lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with

the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the

eye, to make of the place an apartment of state. This at last only,

though she had enjoyed the palace for three weeks, seemed to count as

effective occupation; perhaps because it was the first time she had

been alone--really to call alone--since she had left London, it

ministered to her first full and unembarrassed sense of what the great

Eugenio had done for her. The great Eugenio, recommended by grand-dukes

and Americans, had entered her service during the last hours of

all--had crossed from Paris, after multiplied _pourparlers_ with Mrs.

Stringham, to whom she had allowed more than ever a free hand, on

purpose to escort her to the Continent and encompass her there, and had

dedicated to her, from the moment of their meeting, all the treasures

of his experience. She had judged him in advance--polyglot and

universal, very dear and very deep--as probably but a swindler finished

to the finger-tips; for he was forever carrying one well-kept Italian

hand to his heart and plunging the other straight into her pocket,

which, as she had instantly observed him to recognise, fitted it like a

glove. The remarkable thing was that these elements of their common

consciousness had rapidly gathered into an indestructible link, formed

the ground of a happy relation; being by this time, strangely,

grotesquely, delightfully, what most kept up confidence between them

and what most expressed it.

She had seen quickly enough what was happening--the usual thing again,

yet once again. Eugenio had, in an interview of five minutes,

understood her, had got hold, like all the world, of the idea not so

much of the care with which she must be taken up as of the care with

which she must be let down. All the world understood her, all the world

had got hold; but for nobody yet, she felt, would the idea have been so

close a tie or won from herself so patient a surrender. Gracefully,

respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and

the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black

professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too

old to make love, but with an art still to make money--did he on

occasion convey to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious

career, the one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal.

The others had come in the way of business, but for her his sentiment

was special. Confidence rested thus on her completely believing that:

there was nothing of which she felt more sure. It passed between them

every time they conversed; he was abysmal, but this intimacy lived on

the surface. He had taken his place already for her among those who

were to see her through, and meditation ranked him, in the constant

perspective, for the final function, side by side with poor Susie--whom

she was now pitying more than ever for having to be herself so sorry

and to say so little about it. Eugenio had the general tact of a

residuary legatee--which was a character that could be definitely worn;

whereas she could see Susie, in the event of her death, in no character

at all, Susie being insistently, exclusively concerned in her mere

makeshift duration. This principle, for that matter, Milly at present,

with a renewed flare of fancy, felt she should herself have liked to

believe in. Eugenio had really done for her more than he probably

knew--he didn't after all know everything--in having, for the wind-up

of the autumn, on a weak word from her, so admirably, so perfectly

established her. Her weak word, as a general hint, had been: "At

Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it

can be at all managed--you know what I mean--some fine old rooms,

wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the

more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and

picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves,

with a cook, don't you know?--with servants, frescoes, tapestries,

antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement."

The proof of how he better and better understood her was in all the

place; as to his masterly acquisition of which she had from the first

asked no questions. She had shown him enough what she thought of it,

and her forbearance pleased him; with the part of the transaction that

mainly concerned her she would soon enough become acquainted, and his

connexion with such values as she would then find noted could scarce

help growing, as it were, still more residuary. Charming people,

conscious Venice-lovers, evidently, had given up their house to her,

and had fled to a distance, to other countries, to hide their blushes

alike over what they had, however briefly, alienated, and over what

they had, however durably, gained. They had preserved and consecrated,

and she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyed.

Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a

painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about

with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable

character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us

back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this

October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly

to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the

sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour;

always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with

penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid

voices she lost the sense. Voices had surrounded her for weeks, and she

had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these

had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent

her from hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or

threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a

multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett

as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a

rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan

Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the

Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia;

improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers

waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends

in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the

addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more

insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even by

Susie's social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels, at

Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt

Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the London "success"

to which they had opened the door.

Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs.

Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the

concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of

the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so

different"--different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising

them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once

sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and

many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly

fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the

acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the

eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path,

possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own

sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of

her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she

mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such

a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence

induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the

light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good

time, and yet too rich and too befriended--an intuitive cunning within

her managing this last--for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in

short, by what she made out, approved her friends for their expert

wisdom with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the

compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw

things in these days that she had never seen before, and she couldn't

have said why save on a principle too terrible to name; whereby she saw

that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor New York

what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the plan of a

series of American visits. The plan might have been, humorously, on

Mrs. Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social position--and it

had verily in that direction lights that were perhaps but half a

century too prompt; at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool

controlled facility that went so well, as the others said, with her

particular kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the

person enjoying them _would_ dispose of disputations, speculations,

aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so

simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless,

like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too

that _she_ should like to go to America; it was only that with this

young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late,

on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made

up for their public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they wearily

put off the mask.

These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken

by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and

not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue on Milly's side

whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They

flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have

flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but

the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been

suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we

say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by

either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of

relief. It was when they called each other's attention to their ceasing

to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in

the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and mainly to Kate's

advantage: Milly didn't quite see what her friend could keep back, was

possessed of, in fine, that would be so subject to retention; whereas

it was comparatively plain sailing for Kate that poor Milly had a

treasure to hide. This was not the treasure of a shy, an abject

affection--concealment, on that head, belonging to quite another phase

of such states; it was much rather a principle of pride relatively bold

and hard, a principle that played up like a fine steel spring at the

lightest pressure of too near a footfall. Thus insuperably guarded was

the truth about the girl's own conception of her validity; thus was a

wondering pitying sister condemned wistfully to look at her from the

far side of the moat she had dug round her tower. Certain aspects of

the connexion of these young women show for us, such is the twilight

that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a

Maeterlinck play; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk,

of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful:

that of the angular pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung

about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and

that of the upright restless slow-circling lady of her court who

exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening

gleams, fitful questions and answers. The upright lady, with thick dark

braids down her back, drawing over the grass a more embroidered train,

makes the whole circuit, and makes it again, and the broken talk, brief

and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense.

This is because, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider,

they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their

words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be

tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled

to a care of what they said.

There could be no gross phrasing to Milly, in particular, of the

probability that if she wasn't so proud she might be pitied with more

comfort--more to the person pitying; there could be no spoken proof, no

sharper demonstration than the consistently considerate attitude, that

this marvellous mixture of her weakness and of her strength, her peril,

if such it were, and her option, made her, kept her, irresistibly

interesting. Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all, very much

Mrs. Stringham's own, and Susan Shepherd herself indeed, in our

Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the

moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity

about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate

imagination strong; and that these things gave her a virtue, a good

conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to

be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of

their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as

Milly's other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be

explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses of the felt

contrast between her fortune and her fear--all of which would have

contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw:

to recognise was to bring down the avalanche--the avalanche Milly lived

so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths;

though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of

the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With

so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their

withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a

nominal motive--which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of

chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their steps, but they

took the despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when face to

face, some view or other of something. The relief of getting out of

harness--that was the moral of their meetings; but the moral of this,

in turn, was that they couldn't so much as ask each other why harness

need be worn. Milly wore it as a general armour.

She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she hadn't been for

weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when alone, and her

companions had never yet so much as just now affected her as dispersed

and suppressed. It was as if still again, still more tacitly and

wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it from her without a

word and just bravely and brilliantly in the name, for instance, of the

beautiful day: "Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off--I don't care

where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will:

so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am." She was

conscious of the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well

as the others to him--Susie who would have drowned her very self for

her; gave her up to a mercenary monster through whom she thus purchased

respites. Strange were the turns of life and the moods of weakness;

strange the flickers of fancy and the cheats of hope; yet lawful, all

the same--weren't they?--those experiments tried with the truth that

consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's self. She was now

playing with the thought that Eugenio might _inclusively_ assist her:

he had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really

quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrasped, of some complete

use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate. It

had passed between them as preposterous that with so much money she

should just stupidly and awkwardly _want_--any more want a life, a

career, a consciousness, than want a house, a carriage or a cook. It

was as if she had had from him a kind of expert professional measure of

what he was in a position, at a stretch, to undertake for her; the

thoroughness of which, for that matter, she could closely compare with

a looseness on Sir Luke Strett's part that--at least in Palazzo

Leporelli when mornings were fine--showed as almost amateurish. Sir

Luke hadn't said to her "Pay enough money and leave the rest to

_me_"--which was distinctly what Eugenio did say. Sir Luke had appeared

indeed to speak of purchase and payment, but in reference to a

different sort of cash. Those were amounts not to be named nor

reckoned, and such moreover as she wasn't sure of having at her

command. Eugenio--this was the difference--could name, could reckon,

and prices of _his_ kind were things she had never suffered to scare

her. She had been willing, goodness knew, to pay enough for anything,

for everything, and here was simply a new view of the sufficient

quantity. She amused herself--for it came to that, since Eugenio was

there to sign the receipt--with possibilities of meeting the bill. She

was more prepared than ever to pay enough, and quite as much as ever to

pay too much. What else--if such were points at which your most trusted

servant failed--was the use of being, as the dear Susies of earth

called you, a princess in a palace?

She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful

while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer

blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to

it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was _in_ it, as in the ark

of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why

shouldn't this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never,

never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than

to sit tight in it and float on and on. The beauty and intensity, the

real momentary relief of this conceit, reached their climax in the

positive purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return as she

had not yet put it; though the design, it must be added, dropped a

little when, coming back to the great saloon from which she had started

on her pensive progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in

Venice she had been unaware, and who had now--while a servant was

following her through empty rooms--been asked, in her absence, to wait.

He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never

before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with

patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,

though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness. The odd

thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder for what

had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end of five

minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost as glad to

see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of her solitude,

as if he had already been in her thought or acting at her suggestion.

He was some-how, at the best, the end of a respite; one might like him

very much and yet feel that his presence tempered precious solitude

more than any other known to one: in spite of all of which, as he was

neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for

the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him did no damage to

her sense of the dispersal of her friends. She hadn't been so

thoroughly alone with him since those moments of his showing her the

great portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the

high-water-mark of her security, the moments during which her tears

themselves, those she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her

consciously rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf

of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His

presence now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how

kind he had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her,

unexpectedly, at a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for

such kindness and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she

hadn't lost him--quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to

receive him there, to see him interested and charmed, as well, clearly,

as delighted to have found her without some other person to spoil

it--these things were so pleasant for the first minutes that they might

have represented on her part some happy foreknowledge. She gave an

account of her companions while he on his side failed to press her

about them, even though describing his appearance, so unheralded, as

the result of an impulse obeyed on the spot. He had been shivering at

Carlsbad, belated there and blue, when taken by it; so that, knowing

where they all were, he had simply caught the first train. He explained

how he had known where they were; he had heard--what more

natural?--from their friends, Milly's and his. He mentioned this

betimes, but it was with his mention, singularly, that the girl became

conscious of her inner question about his reason. She noticed his

plural, which added to Mrs. Lowder or added to Kate; but she presently

noticed also that it didn't affect her as explaining. Aunt Maud had

written to him, Kate apparently--and this was interesting--had written

to him; but their design presumably hadn't been that he should come and

sit there as if rather relieved, so far as _they_ were concerned, at

postponements. He only said "Oh!" and again "Oh!" when she sketched

their probable morning for him, under Eugenio's care and Mrs.

Stringham's--sounding it quite as if any suggestion that he should

overtake them at the Rialto or the Bridge of Sighs would leave him

temporarily cold. This precisely it was that, after a little, operated

for Milly as an obscure but still fairly direct check to confidence. He

had known where they all were from the others, but it was not for the

others that, in his actual dispositions, he had come. That, strange to

say, was a pity; for, stranger still to say, she could have shown him

more confidence if he himself had had less intention. His intention so

chilled her, from the moment she found herself divining it, that, just

for the pleasure of going on with him fairly, just for the pleasure of

their remembrance together of Matcham and the Bronzino, the climax of

her fortune, she could have fallen to pleading with him and to

reasoning, to undeceiving him in time. There had been, for ten minutes,

with the directness of her welcome to him and the way this clearly

pleased him, something of the grace of amends made, even though he

couldn't know it--amends for her not having been originally sure, for

instance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately

human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's added itself to the hour at

Matcham, added itself to other things, to consolidate, for her present

benevolence, the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful

that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the

charm of the place: "What a temple to taste and an expression of the

pride of life, yet, with all that, what a jolly _home!_"--so that, for

his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about though she

mentioned that she had just been, for her own purposes, in a general

prowl, taking everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced

her offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find

her susceptible.