They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the
fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."
"You mean she's worse?"
The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the
instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight
of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to
relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet
veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not
to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't
know _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."
"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make me
feel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."
She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word.
"Have you been wretched?"
Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for
him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his
visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp
draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she
had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and
above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll have
seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever
been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."
This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for
his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has
been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.
"Yet it has done no good?"
"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a
headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"
"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was
taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms
themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to
him--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she
had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all
in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her
conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told
Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything
you do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"
"Only nothing now matters?"
She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he
expressed. "Then you know?"
"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply
was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
"Not for three days?"
"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by
the faintest allusion."
"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about
_me?_"
"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
"Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."
"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her
waterproof.
It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;
it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none
but the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, by
mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the very
impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it
withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"
It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material
pangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"
"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_
do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
"Everything?"
Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.
That's why I've come."
"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it
affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned
him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,
was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in
possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired
it. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,
so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by
an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and
it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so
far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own
abasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush
of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened
when she met his groan with an attenuation.
"We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."
It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to
feel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever
he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him
something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand
had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with
her sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't then
measured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,
in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly of
me?"
And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous
effusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have
believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what
helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"
It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.
She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,
accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal
ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower
she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the
consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any
rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their
meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the
larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,
they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I
don't mean not of me."
"Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out
as she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of her
age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.
Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging
to it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a wan
inconsequence.