IV

She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the

whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful

hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her

visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection

of the charm--or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state

in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in

its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke

with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled

afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance--!" The romance for her,

yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as

in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of

remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but

the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they

moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not

to go down--never, never to go down!" she strangely sighed to her

friend.

"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that tremendous old staircase

in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and

bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."

She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not

understanding. "Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that

the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move in fact,"

she added--"now. I've not been out, you know. I stay up. That's how you

happily found me."

Lord Mark wondered--he was, oh yes, adequately human. "You don't go

about?"

She looked over the place, the storey above the apartments in which she

had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting

the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the

arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the

canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose

white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But

there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to

anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her

adventure. It would be--to this it kept coming back--the adventure of

not stirring. "I go about just here."

"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked, "that you're really not well?"

They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded

palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a

minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she

saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on

the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the

window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her

forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an

answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She

would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible

for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even

on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that

from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless

really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him

thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the

relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of

relief--that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with

the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been

determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn't be

mistaken about her value--for what value did she now have? It throbbed

within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding

herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what

might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn't

her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage

of her disease? _She_ mightn't last, but her money would. For a man in

whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be

most of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective failure on

her part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive

attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her,

appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the

doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged,

disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits:

she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the

handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.

She had said to herself betimes, in a general way, that whatever habits

her youth might form, that of seeing an interested suitor in every bush

should certainly never grow to be one of them--an attitude she had

early judged as ignoble, as poisonous. She had had accordingly in fact

as little to do with it as possible and she scarce knew why at the

present moment she should have had to catch herself in the act of

imputing an ugly motive. It didn't sit, the ugly motive, in Lord Mark's

cool English eyes; the darker side of it at any rate showed, to her

imagination, but briefly. Suspicion moreover, with this, simplified

itself: there was a beautiful reason--indeed there were two--why her

companion's motive shouldn't matter. One was that even should he desire

her without a penny she wouldn't marry him for the world; the other was

that she felt him, after all, perceptively, kindly, very pleasantly and

humanly, concerned for her. They were also two things, his wishing to

be well, to be very well, with her, and his beginning to feel her as

threatened, haunted, blighted; but they were melting together for him,

making him, by their combination, only the more sure that, as he

probably called it to himself, he liked her. That was presently what

remained with her--his really doing it; and with the natural and proper

incident of being conciliated by her weakness. Would she really have

had him--she could ask herself that--disconcerted or disgusted by it?

If he could only be touched enough to do what she preferred, not to

raise, not to press any question, he might render her a much better

service than by merely enabling her to refuse him. Again, again it was

strange, but he figured to her for the moment as the one safe

sympathiser. It would have made her worse to talk to others, but she

wasn't afraid with him of how he might wince and look pale. She would

keep him, that is, her one easy relation--in the sense of easy for

himself. Their actual outlook had meanwhile such charm, what surrounded

them within and without did so much toward making appreciative

stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could consider she

hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last, instead of saying if she

were well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't get tired of

it. I never should--it suits me so. I adore the place," she went on,

"and I don't want in the least to give it up."

"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one's

_all_--! Should you positively like to live here?"

"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an instant, "to die

here."

Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted--when a

person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of

darkness. "Oh it's not good enough for _that!_ That requires picking.

But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you

in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and

you might do much worse--I mean for your friends--than show yourself

here a while, three or four months, every year. But it's not my notion

for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you."

"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly enquired, "to kill me?"

"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"

"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too much for me--too many.

England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my

form."

"Oho, oho!"--he laughed again as if to humour her. "Can't you then buy

it--for a price? Depend upon it they'll treat for money. That is for

money enough."

"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they won't. I think I

shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it." They were talking

sincerely. "It will be my life--paid for as that. It will become my

great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and

hunt me up."

"Ah then you _will_ be alive," said Lord Mark.

"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened;

rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut."

"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you mistrust us, can do better

for you than that."

"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over?"

He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of

some duration, without his glasses--which always altered the expression

of his eyes--he re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back to the

view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. "Do you remember

something I said to you that day at Matcham--or at least fully meant

to?"

"Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It's another life."

"Certainly it will be--I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it

to represent for you. Matcham, you know," he continued, "is symbolic. I

think I tried to rub that into you a little."

She met him with the full memory of what he had tried--not an inch, not

an ounce of which was lost to her. "What I meant is that it seems a

hundred years ago."

"Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember

it," he pursued, "is that I was quite aware of what might have been

said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I

should perhaps be able to look after you--well, rather better. Rather

better, of course, than certain other persons in particular."

"Precisely--than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham."

"Oh Mrs. Stringham's all right!" Lord Mark promptly amended.

It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could

show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she

had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment

made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the

tears it had started at the time. "You could do so much for me, yes. I

perfectly understood you."

"I wanted, you see," he despite this explained, "to _fix_ your

confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place."

"Well, Lord Mark, you did--it's just exactly now, my confidence, where

you put it then. The only difference," said Milly, "is that I seem now

to have no use for it. Besides," she then went on, "I do seem to feel

you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little."

He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn't said

them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. "Are

you _really_ in any trouble?"

To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a

little a light for herself. "Don't say, don't try to say, anything

that's impossible. There are much better things you can do."

He looked straight at it and then straight over it. "It's too monstrous

that one can't ask you as a friend what one wants so to know."

"What is it you want to know?" She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a

slight hardness. "Do you want to know if I'm badly ill?"

The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested

the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark

winced and flushed--clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his attitude

together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. "Do you imagine I can

see you suffer and not say a word?"

"You won't see me suffer--don't be afraid. I shan't be a public

nuisance. That's why I should have liked _this:_ it's so beautiful in

itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about

anything," she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: "And

you _don't!_ No, not even you." He faced her through it with the

remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly--for

_him_--bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been

unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. "I'm

very badly ill."

"And you don't do anything?"

"I do everything. Everything's _this_," she smiled. "I'm doing it now.

One can't do more than live."

"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why

haven't you advice?"

He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if there were fifty

things it didn't give her, so that he suggested with urgency the most

absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice in

the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in

talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live."

"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.

"Well, it's immense for _me_." She finally spoke as if for amusement;

now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself

as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There

she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. "I shan't," she

added, "have missed everything."

"Why should you have missed _anything?_" She felt, as he sounded this,

to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. "You're the person

in the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom one would call

it in fact most impossible; for whom 'missing' at all will surely

require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you

believe in advice, for God's sake take _mine_. I know what you want."

Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself--or

almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. "I think I want not to be too much

worried."

"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry

you less. I mean as I shall do it. It _is_ so"--he firmly kept it up.

"You're not loved enough."

"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"

"Why to get the full good of it."

Well, she didn't after all mock at him. "I see what you mean. That full

good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in

return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I

might find myself forced to love _you?_"

"Oh 'forced'--!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the

least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion

somehow so ill consorted--he was so much all these things that he had

absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single

intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such

shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it,

and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of

existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up. "Is

it inconceivable to you that you might try?"

"To be so favourably affected by you--?"

"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.