I
It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was
most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from
the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,
within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of
that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen
it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his
hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had
risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely
engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the
name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had
come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession
importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant
memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but
itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and this
not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for
bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;
yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what
survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't
have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though
there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified
a consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea he
had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the
ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that
this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an
historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
present, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office
and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had
in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,
and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the
value to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
possessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turning
round and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?
It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of a
treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of
finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old
key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again
and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no
other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the
hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to
whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view
as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could
be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the
play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He
remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual
orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low and
slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged no
approach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a
third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have
profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate have
broken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence of
anything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself
up--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewed
engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of
the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the
way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had been
magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--such
items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and
fastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we have
spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat
chilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If it
was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the
warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and
it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant
still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath
him; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of
which the other name was careful action.
Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than the
immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be
faithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
straight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was
time to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the check
was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he
always shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once he
had got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much more
after hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he felt
free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was
_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as he
left it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face and
made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his
inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yet
what--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him but
virtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;
there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and
that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any
case, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He
then fairly perceived that--even putting their purity of motive at its
highest--it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation to
Milly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it was
neither of them who practically purged it--if practically purged it
was. Milly herself did everything--so far at least as he was
concerned--Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,
and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps still more than
anything else, Milly's imagination, Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeed
a little aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to ask
himself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought for
them--for him and Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,
and doubtless ever so much better than they: which wasn't a reason,
however--its being so much better--for them not to profit by it. Not to
profit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to go
directly against it; and the spirit of generosity at present engendered
in Densher could have felt no greater pang than by his having to go
directly against Milly.
To go _with_ her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which,
from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, was
possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course on
the face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations--which was exactly
why Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening of
the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reach
out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It
was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be
almost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it and
call it by--it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence,
of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,
couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered
about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe
it; that would quite do for her--it even would have done for her, he
could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he
was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet
Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never
took a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that; but he had none
the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving
them alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintance
with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had
supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were
three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same
degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels
incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure
Kate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much in
some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the
last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have
induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his
lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in
respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could
only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the
palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,
in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time
ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this
creature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the
relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the
very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had
to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the
young women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have the
truth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no
way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--or
didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of
which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub
him as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't that
have been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the
sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
token, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; he
had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest
sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from
London was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, much
appreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this hour,
out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly's
uttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he must
meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy
everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of
their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done
so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied
for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its
half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her
mercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single
thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's
letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy
inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was
yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;
whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept
on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with
Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--he
felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just
sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more
to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four
inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,
letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty
of the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted by
Titian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the
difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost
explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.