She was good enough, as it proved, for him to put to her that evening,
and with further ground for it, the next sharpest question that had
been on his lips in the morning--which his other preoccupation had
then, to his consciousness, crowded out. His opportunity was again
made, as befell, by his learning from Mrs. Stringham, on arriving, as
usual, with the close of day, at the palace, that Milly must fail them
again at dinner, but would to all appearance be able to come down
later. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where
even more candles than their friend's large common allowance--she grew
daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about
it--lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes
with the good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared--minutes
illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly's
candles.
"_May_ she come down--ought she if she isn't really up to it?"
He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by
glimpses--rare as were these--of the inner truth about the girl. There
was of course a question of health--it was in the air, it was in the
ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was
everywhere. But it was everywhere with the effect of a request to
him--to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others as well
as his own--that no allusion to it should be made. There had
practically been none, that morning, on her explained
non-appearance--the absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and
awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all
the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful
function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose
against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct
was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for
himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might
have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency, to
have it; but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings--it being so
established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a
feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate--not, by the
deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not
interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he
cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to
represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at
the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling
his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse--it was as if she had
wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
terms, he could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she
fairly invited him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're here." It was
no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve. And the
rest was fully to come.
He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence
of communion with her, talking her own language. "It's a very wonderful
experience."
"Well"--and her raised face shone up at him--"that's all I want you to
feel about it. If I weren't afraid," she added, "there are things I
should like to say to you."
"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly asked.
"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know,
seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, _with_ her."
He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which
was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description
of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm not with her now."
"No--and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much
better."
"Better? Then she _has_ been worse?"
Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous--that's what she has
been. She _is_ marvellous. But she's really better."
"Oh then if she's really better--!" But he checked himself, wanting
only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the
point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."
Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. "She's keeping herself.
You'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a
little party."
"Ah I do see--by this aggravated grandeur."
"Well, it _is_ lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged
for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it--I
mean bringing out all the glory of the place--makes her really happy.
It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable
dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for
effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in
charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my
thumb for the evening." These explanations and sundry others Mrs.
Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that
the picture closed him in. What part was there for _him_, with his
attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which
everything else would have it? "They won't, however, be at dinner, the
few people she expects--they come round afterwards from their
respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal
ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It's for
_him_ she has wanted to do something--to let it begin at once. We shall
see more of him, because she likes him; and I'm so glad--she'll be glad
too--that _you're_ to see him." The good lady, in connexion with it,
was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. "So I greatly hope--!" But
her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.
He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought,
into still more knowledge than she uttered. "What is it you hope?"
"Well, that you'll stay on."
"Do you mean after dinner?" She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that
he could scarce tell where it ended or began.
"Oh that, of course. Why we're to have music--beautiful instruments and
songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has
arranged it--or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you're
in the picture."
"Oh--I!" said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.
"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up
his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is
that you'll be faithful to us--that you've not come for a mere foolish
few days."
Densher's more private and particular shabby realities turned, without
comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he
had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way
smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese
pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an
unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest
acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of
explaining! He couldn't tell them how he had tried to work, how it was
partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost
for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that
would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not
of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but
infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which
these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle
on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the
thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold
breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he
floundered. "I'm afraid you won't understand when I say I've very
tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The
pinch, the pressure in London."
But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the
pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. "Oh the
daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one
knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious
deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've
given up all to follow _her_. I wish you could feel as I do. And can't
you," she asked, "write about Venice?"
He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did;
and he smiled for her kindly. "Do _you_ write about Venice?"
"No; but I would--oh wouldn't I?--if I hadn't so completely given up.
She's, you know, my princess, and to one's princess--"
"One makes the whole sacrifice?"
"Precisely. There you are!"
It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places
at once. "I quite understand that she's yours. Only you see she's not
mine." He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the
moral certainty she wouldn't repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder,
who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he
liked in the good lady, that she didn't repeat, and also that she gave
him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in
itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent
and elastic for him, which wouldn't engage him further than he could
see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all
was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate
wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a
way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then
Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly
what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the
midst. Such perceptions made occasions--well, occasions for fairly
wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to _be_
the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in
it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no
male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a
man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke
Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of
Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a
distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a
vision of great London surgeons--if this one was a surgeon--as incisive
all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the
ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was
not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in. It was a
train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord
Mark had caught him twice in the fact--the fact of his absurd posture;
and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind
Lord Mark.
His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm
her discretion, on the matter of Milly's not being his princess. "Of
course she's not. You must do something first."