"Oh I shouldn't have to!" he quickly declared. The prompt neat accent,
however, his manner of disposing of her question, failed of real
expression, as he himself the next moment intelligently, helplessly,
almost comically saw--a failure pointed moreover by the laugh into
which Milly was immediately startled. As a suggestion to her of a
healing and uplifting passion it _was_ in truth deficient; it wouldn't
do as the communication of a force that should sweep them both away.
And the beauty of him was that he too, even in the act of persuasion,
of self-persuasion, could understand that, and could thereby show but
the better as fitting into the pleasant commerce of prosperity. The way
she let him see that she looked at him was a thing to shut him out, of
itself, from services of danger, a thing that made a discrimination
against him never yet made--made at least to any consciousness of his
own. Born to float in a sustaining air, this would be his first
encounter with a judgement formed in the sinister light of tragedy. The
gathering dusk of _her_ personal world presented itself to him, in her
eyes, as an element in which it was vain for him to pretend he could
find himself at home, since it was charged with depressions and with
dooms, with the chill of the losing game. Almost without her needing to
speak, and simply by the fact that there could be, in such a case, no
decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that
practically he was afraid--whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or
only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised
alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides,
wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest
about anything beyond his natural convenience--more, in fine, than his
disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal _moyens_,
in short, permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't
like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he
brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus
having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called
her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively
to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting--had his
innermost feeling spoken--at the propriety rather, in his interest, of
some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would
meet that halfway, but the real must also meet _him_. Milly's sense of
it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported,
couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that
fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It
had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to
her. By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had
quite ceased to be so.
By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had
walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of
the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her
independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for
one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back
in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter
of an hour the perch she held out to him--grasped it with one hand,
that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he
was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as
not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It
was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his
native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
assumption that nothing--nothing to make a deadly difference for
him--ever _could_ happen. It was, socially, a working view like
another, and it saw them easily enough through the greater part of the
rest of their adventure. Downstairs again, however, with the limit of
his stay in sight, the sign of his smarting, when all was said,
reappeared for her--breaking out moreover, with an effect of
strangeness, in another quite possibly sincere allusion to her state of
health. He might for that matter have been seeing what he could do in
the way of making it a grievance that she should snub him for a
charity, on his own part, exquisitely roused. "It's true, you know, all
the same, and I don't care a straw for your trying to freeze one up."
He seemed to show her, poor man, bravely, how little he cared.
"Everybody knows affection often makes things out when indifference
doesn't notice. And that's why I know that _I_ notice."
"Are you sure you've got it right?" the girl smiled. "I thought rather
that affection was supposed to be blind."
"Blind to faults, not to beauties," Lord Mark promptly returned.
"And are my extremely private worries, my entirely domestic
complications, which I'm ashamed to have given you a glimpse of--are
they beauties?"
"Yes, for those who care for you--as every one does. Everything about
you is a beauty. Besides which I don't believe," he declared, "in the
seriousness of what you tell me. It's too absurd you should have _any_
trouble about which something can't be done. If you can't get the right
thing, who can, in all the world, I should like to know? You're the
first young woman of your time. I mean what I say." He looked, to do
him justice, quite as if he did; not ardent, but clear--simply so
competent, in such a position, to compare, that his quiet assertion had
the force not so much perhaps of a tribute as of a warrant. "We're all
in love with you. I'll put it that way, dropping any claim of my own,
if you can bear it better. I speak as one of the lot. You weren't born
simply to torment us--you were born to make us happy. Therefore you
must listen to us."
She shook her head with her slowness, but this time with all her
mildness. "No, I mustn't listen to you--that's just what I mustn't do.
The reason is, please, that it simply kills me. I must be as attached
to you as you will, since you give that lovely account of yourselves. I
give you in return the fullest possible belief of what it would be--"
And she pulled up a little. "I give and give and give--there you are;
stick to me as close as you like and see if I don't. Only I can't
listen or receive or accept--I can't _agree_. I can't make a bargain. I
can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to
say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"
He let her question fall--though clearly, it might have seemed,
because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that _was_ spoiled.
"You want somebody of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or
in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as
if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."
She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the
point of saying something emphatic and vulgar--"Well, I don't at all
events want _you!_" What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it
being greater than the irritation--the sadness, to her vivid sense, of
his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
nothing to nourish him--was that his error amounted to positive
wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her
first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the
allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
you're doing very right?--and as a thing quite apart, I mean, from my
listening to you. That's not right either--except that I'm _not_
listening. You oughtn't to have come to Venice to see _me_--and in fact
you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much
older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you've come
at all, you can only have come--properly, and if I may say so
honourably--for the best friend, as I believe her to be, that you have
in the world."
When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough, as if he had been
more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they
had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each
apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine
coercion, in the event, that was the stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark
asked.
It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs.
Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its
attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call _her_ on the whole
the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."
Still with his eyes on her he turned it over. "Do you want me to marry
Mrs. Lowder?"
At which it seemed to her that it was he who was almost vulgar! But she
wouldn't in any way have that. "You know, Lord Mark, what I mean. One
isn't in the least turning you out into the cold world. There's no cold
world for you at all, I think," she went on; "nothing but a very warm
and watchful and expectant world that's waiting for you at any moment
you choose to take it up."
He never budged, but they were standing on the polished concrete and he
had within a few minutes possessed himself again of his hat. "Do you
want me to marry Kate Croy?"
"Mrs. Lowder wants it--I do no wrong, I think, in saying that; and she
understands moreover that you know she does."
Well, he showed how beautifully he could take it; and it wasn't obscure
to her, on her side, that it was a comfort to deal with a gentleman.
"It's ever so kind of you to see such opportunities for me. But what's
the use of my tackling Miss Croy?"
Milly rejoiced on the spot to be so able to point out. "Because she's
the handsomest and cleverest and most charming creature I ever saw, and
because if I were a man I should simply adore her. In fact I do as it
is." It was a luxury of response.
"Oh, my dear lady, plenty of people adore her. But that can't further
the case of _all._"
"Ah," she went on, "I know about 'people.' If the case of one's bad,
the case of another's good. I don't see what you have to fear from any
one else," she said, "save through your being foolish, this way, about
_me_."
So she said, but she was aware the next moment of what he was making of
what she didn't see. "Is it your idea--since we're talking of these
things in these ways--that the young lady you describe in such
superlative terms is to be had for the asking?"
"Well, Lord Mark, try. She is a great person. But don't be humble." She
was almost gay.
It was this apparently, at last, that was too much for him. "But don't
you really _know?_"
As a challenge, practically, to the commonest intelligence she could
pretend to, it made her of course wish to be fair. "I 'know' yes, that
a particular person's very much in love with her."
"Then you must know by the same token that she's very much in love with
a particular person."
"Ah I beg your pardon!"--and Milly quite flushed at having so crude a
blunder imputed to her. "You're wholly mistaken."
"It's not true?"
"It's not true."