It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. "I
see. No doubt, if one takes it so." Her cheer was for the time in
eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the
wonder of what Milly could do. "And yet she has wanted to be kind."
It made him on the spot feel a brute. "Of course she has. No one could
be more charming. She has treated me as if _I_ were somebody. Call her
my hostess as I've never had nor imagined a hostess, and I'm with you
altogether. Of course," he added in the right spirit for her, "I do see
that it's quite court life."
She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. "That's
all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of
the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a
vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly."
"Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you
know," he observed, "isn't supposed to pay."
"Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That's just the beauty
here; it's why she's the great and only princess. With her, at her
court," said Mrs. Stringham, "it does pay." Then as if she had quite
settled it for him: "You'll see for yourself."
He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. "I think you
were right just now. One must do something first."
"Well, you've done something."
"No--I don't see that. I can do more."
Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! "You can do
everything, you know."
"Everything" was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he
modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a
different but a related matter. "Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett
if, as you tell me, she's so much better?"
"She hasn't sent. He has come of himself," Mrs. Stringham explained.
"He has wanted to come."
"Isn't that rather worse then--if it means he mayn't be easy?"
"He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that
these several weeks." After which Mrs. Stringham added: "You can _make_
him easy."
"_I_ can?" he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats.
"What have I to do with it for a man like that?"
"How do you know," said his friend, "what he's like? He's not like any
one you've ever seen. He's a great beneficent being."
"Ah then he can do without me. I've no call, as an outsider, to meddle."
"Tell him, all the same," Mrs. Stringham urged, "what you think."
"What I think of Miss Theale?" Densher stared. It was, as they said, a
large order. But he found the right note. "It's none of his business."
It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed
him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that
showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be
he was not to make out till afterwards. "Say _that_ to him then.
Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you."
"And why should he get at me?"
"Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you'll see."
All of which, on Mrs. Stringham's part, sharpened his sense of
immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm--a
sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed
to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner,
half a dozen friends--objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the
ladies of Lancaster Gate--having by that time arrived; and with this
call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by
Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme
opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last
of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general,
a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he
seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made
no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all
together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of
the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took
care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland
without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during
the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and
differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly,
let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow
into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that
if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last
almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't
yet had occasion--circulating with a clearness intensified--to strike
him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with
the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky
challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her
having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming
reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the
change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all
was said, made it for _him_; and he was not to fail of the further
amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's
visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke
Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene
perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of
the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
himself too much "in" it, as he might have said: a moment's reflexion
put him more in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for other
cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of
a joke, introduced him to English ladies--that was itself a proof; for
nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed
between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all
ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed
consciousness brushed by him.
She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess, he could see, under
some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an
inevitable harmony; but what he especially recognised was the character
that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly
appeared able, by choice or by instinctive affinity, to keep down or to
display. She was the American girl as he had originally found
her--found her at certain moments, it was true, in New York, more than
at certain others; she was the American girl as, still more than then,
he had seen her on the day of her meeting him in London and in Kate's
company. It affected him as a large though queer social resource in
her--such as a man, for instance, to his diminution, would never in the
world be able to command; and he wouldn't have known whether to see it
in an extension or a contraction of "personality," taking it as he did
most directly for a confounding extension of surface. Clearly too it
was the right thing this evening all round: that came out for him in a
word from Kate as she approached him to wreak on him a second
introduction. He had under cover of the music melted away from the lady
toward whom she had first pushed him; and there was something in her to
affect him as telling evasively a tale of their talk in the Piazza. To
what did she want to coerce him as a form of penalty for what he had
done to her there? It was thus in contact uppermost for him that he had
done something; not only caused her perfect intelligence to act in his
interest, but left her unable to get away, by any mere private effort,
from his inattackable logic. With him thus in presence, and near
him--and it had been as unmistakeable through dinner--there was no
getting away for her at all, there was less of it than ever: so she
could only either deal with the question straight, either frankly yield
or ineffectually struggle or insincerely argue, or else merely express
herself by following up the advantage she did possess. It was part of
that advantage for the hour--a brief fallacious makeweight to his
pressure--that there were plenty of things left in which he must feel
her will. They only told him, these indications, how much she was, in
such close quarters, feeling his; and it was enough for him again that
her very aspect, as great a variation in its way as Milly's own, gave
him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted
him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these
minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest. He had lived
long enough to have been on occasion "liked," but it had never begun to
be allowed him to be liked to any such tune in any such quarter. It was
a liking greater than Milly's--or it would be: he felt it in him to
answer for that. So at all events he read the case while he noted that
Kate was somehow--for Kate--wanting in lustre. As a striking young
presence she was practically superseded; of the mildness that Milly
diffused she had assimilated all her share; she might fairly have been
dressed to-night in the little black frock, superficially
indistinguishable, that Milly had laid aside. This represented, he
perceived, the opposite pole from such an effect as that of her
wonderful entrance, under her aunt's eyes--he had never forgotten
it--the day of their younger friend's failure at Lancaster Gate. She
was, in her accepted effacement--it was actually her acceptance that
made the beauty and repaired the damage--under her aunt's eyes now; but
whose eyes were not effectually preoccupied? It struck him none the
less certainly that almost the first thing she said to him showed an
exquisite attempt to appear if not unconvinced at least self-possessed.
"Don't you think her good enough _now?_" Almost heedless of the danger
of overt freedoms, she eyed Milly from where they stood, noted her in
renewed talk, over her further wishes, with the members of her little
orchestra, who had approached her with demonstrations of deference
enlivened by native humours--things quite in the line of old Venetian
comedy. The girl's idea of music had been happy--a real solvent of
shyness, yet not drastic; thanks to the intermissions, discretions, a
general habit of mercy to gathered barbarians, that reflected the good
manners of its interpreters, representatives though these might be but
of the order in which taste was natural and melody rank. It was easy at
all events to answer Kate. "Ah my dear, you know how good I think her!"
"But she's _too_ nice," Kate returned with appreciation. "Everything
suits her so--especially her pearls. They go so with her old lace. I'll
trouble you really to look at them." Densher, though aware he had seen
them before, had perhaps not "really" looked at them, and had thus not
done justice to the embodied poetry--his mind, for Milly's aspects,
kept coming back to that--which owed them part of its style. Kate's
face, as she considered them, struck him: the long, priceless chain,
wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the
wearer's breast--so far down that Milly's trick, evidently unconscious,
of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced
presumably to convenience. "She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one
somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to
the ground."
"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited
her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his
companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the
figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment
that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally
under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a
power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as
one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as
well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that
such wings could in a given case--_had_, truly, in the case with which
he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for
that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and
Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't he in particular,
nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was
a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate
presently going on.
"Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one."
"They would uncommonly suit you," he frankly returned.
"Oh yes, I see myself!"
As she saw herself, suddenly, he saw her--she would have been splendid;
and with it he felt more what she was thinking of. Milly's royal
ornament had--under pressure now not wholly occult--taken on the
character of a symbol of differences, differences of which the vision
was actually in Kate's face. It might have been in her face too that,
well as she certainly would look in pearls, pearls were exactly what
Merton Densher would never be able to give her. Wasn't _that_ the great
difference that Milly to-night symbolised? She unconsciously
represented to Kate, and Kate took it in at every pore, that there was
nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl
married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least
little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till
afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose,
only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's certainly
good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's
better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to
me about it. She evidently believes her better."
"Well, if they choose to call it so--!"
"And what do _you_ call it--as against them?"
"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!"
Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to
be taught.
"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"
It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's worse. But that has
nothing to do with it."
"Nothing to do?" He wondered.
But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're
doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again
watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a
kindness that had the strange property of striking him as
inconsequent--so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness
been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."
"It's beautiful indeed."
He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it
no heed. "She's doing it for _him_"--and she nodded in the direction of
Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best. But she
can't deceive him."
Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: "And do
you think _you_ can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your
sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him--!"
Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly
doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a
direction of his own eyes--determined, in the way such things happen,
precisely by the attention of the others--as Densher became aware of
and as Kate promptly marked. "He's looking at _you_. He wants to speak
to you."
"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."
"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need," Kate went on in answer
to the previous question, "to deceive him. Aunt Maud, if it's
necessary, will do that. I mean that, knowing nothing about me, he can
see me only as she sees me. She sees me now so well. He has nothing to
do with me."
"Except to reprobate you," Densher suggested.
"For not caring for _you?_ Perfectly. As a brilliant young man driven
by it into your relation with Milly--as all _that_ I leave you to him."
"Well," said Densher sincerely enough, "I think I can thank you for
leaving me to some one easier perhaps with me than yourself."
She had been looking about again meanwhile, the lady having changed her
place, for the friend of Mrs. Lowder's to whom she had spoken of
introducing him. "All the more reason why I should commit you then to
Lady Wells."
"Oh but wait." It was not only that he distinguished Lady Wells from
afar, that she inspired him with no eagerness, and that, somewhere at
the back of his head, he was fairly aware of the question, in germ, of
whether this was the kind of person he should be involved with when
they were married. It was furthermore that the consciousness of
something he had not got from Kate in the morning, and that logically
much concerned him, had been made more keen by these very moments--to
say nothing of the consciousness that, with their general smallness of
opportunity, he must squeeze each stray instant hard. If Aunt Maud,
over there with Sir Luke, noted him as a little "attentive," that might
pass for a futile demonstration on the part of a gentleman who had to
confess to having, not very gracefully, changed his mind. Besides, just
now, he didn't care for Aunt Maud except in so far as he was
immediately to show. "How can Mrs. Lowder think me disposed of with any
finality, if I'm disposed of only to a girl who's dying? If you're
right about that, about the state of the case, you're wrong about Mrs.
Lowder's being squared. If Milly, as you say," he lucidly pursued,
"can't deceive a great surgeon, or whatever, the great surgeon won't
deceive other people--not those, that is, who are closely concerned. He
won't at any rate deceive Mrs. Stringham, who's Milly's greatest
friend; and it will be very odd if Mrs. Stringham deceives Aunt Maud,
who's her own."
Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth
his having kept her for. "Why will it be odd? I marvel at your seeing
your way so little."
Mere curiosity even, about his companion, had now for him its quick,
its slightly quaking intensities. He had compared her once, we know, to
a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and
his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of
turning the page. "Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way _you_
see it!"
"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the
nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what
you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"
"To please you."
"And how in the world can it please me?"
Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his
density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. "Well then to please
Milly." And before he could question: "Don't you feel by this time that
there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"
He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it
corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was
queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and
on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. "She's ever
so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."
"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"
Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. "Oh the
difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how
yours does serve me."
"It helps you--put it then," said Kate very simply--"to serve _me_. It
gains you time."
"Time for what?"
"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then
as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."
Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. "You're
cryptic, love!"
It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of
those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been
a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source
he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a trouble for you I never
dreamed I should take for any human creature."
Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his
reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I
can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out
again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to
make. "There _need_ be none whatever between us. There need be nothing
but our sense of each other."
It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took
up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. "You can tell
her anything you like, anything whatever."
"Mrs. Stringham? I _have_ nothing to tell her."
"You can tell her about _us_. I mean," she wonderfully pursued, "that
you do still like me."
It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. "Only not that you still
like me."
She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat
it."
"I see. To Aunt Maud."
"You don't quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else." Kate
then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he
was; and she showed it again as she went on. "_There_, accordingly, is
your time."
She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke,
though not quite all at once. "You must let me say I _do_ see. Time for
something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time
too that, I further understand, is time for you as well."
"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged visibly by his glow of
concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully
made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however, I'll
do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them."
He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was
only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly
fitted. "Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no
wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favour to
their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips
bravely moved. "To marry her."
"So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course
have money?"
It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had
only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all
along--to his stupidity, his timidity--it had been, it had been only,
what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn't
forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn't
pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as
if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. "You'll in
the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free."
"Oh, oh, oh!" Densher softly murmured.
"Yes, yes, yes." But she broke off. "Come to Lady Wells."
He never budged--there was too much else. "I'm to propose it
then--marriage--on the spot?"
There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he
spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof.
"Oh I can't go into that with you, and from the moment you don't wash
your hands of me I don't think you ought to ask me. You must act as you
like and as you can."
He thought again. "I'm far--as I sufficiently showed you this
morning--from washing my hands of you."
"Then," said Kate, "it's all right."
"All right?" His eagerness flamed. "You'll come?"
But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn't what she meant.
"You'll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance--well, quite ideal."
"Your descriptions"--her "ideal" was such a touch!--"are prodigious.
And what I don't make out is how, caring for me, you can like it."
"I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I
don't like."
It wasn't till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into
this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled
his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the
greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too,
moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what _he_ did. But
something else on his lips was uppermost. "What I don't make out then
is how you can even bear it."
"Well, when you know me better you'll find out how much I can bear."
And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many
implications. That it was left to him to know her, spiritually,
"better" after his long sacrifice to knowledge--this for instance was a
truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the face. She had
mystified him enough, heaven knew, but that was rather by his own
generosity than by hers. And what, with it, did she seem to suggest she
might incur at his hands? In spite of these questions she was carrying
him on. "All you'll have to do will be to stay."
"And proceed to my business under your eyes?"
"Oh dear no--we shall go."
"'Go?'" he wondered. "Go when, go where?"
"In a day or two--straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now."
It gave him all he could take in to think of. "Then what becomes of
Miss Theale?"
"What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her."