The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought
also blessedly an abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, the
stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days,
but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an
almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the
bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and
called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the
scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of
vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this
on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.
He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at
present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was where
the event had landed him--where no event in his life had landed him
before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more
than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of
them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him
almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not,
as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in
other words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if he
had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,
nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It
would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,
to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was something
of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his
going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.
Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouth
of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet
had deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,
he possibly _could_.
It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to the
station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yet
turned over so long. What then was his odious position but that again
and again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousness
as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time
proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his
life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was
afraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend might
prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a
current that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equal
aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally
prevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, the
great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's
brief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had
brought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.
Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed them
made him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It
was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever
it was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as it
went a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced the
platform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he had
presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything
that followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of an
anti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and
hesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce
have said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that
might have suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise in
presence of the fact.
Sir Luke had clean forgotten--so Densher read--the rather remarkable
young man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him up
again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felt
himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof
of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was now
connected the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him.
The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours as
he needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited
him. An exquisite case awaited him--of which, in this queer way, the
remarkable young man was an outlying part; but the single motion of his
face, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred
its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had
suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppress
now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as a
symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one's self be concerned,
of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated, everything that,
in contact, he appeared to accept--if only, for much, not to trouble to
sink it: what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Densher
began wondering, at the great water-steps outside, what use he would
make of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had been
on the platform, in the respectful rear, and the gondola from the
palace, under his direction, bestirred itself, with its attaching
mixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station
together. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity
refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the
palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this
susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. All
he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps--they could see him,
the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sad
headshake, "go there now."
"Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of it; so that the
thing was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite
inevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of it
that he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't
moreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classic
craft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke from
the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,
a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black
hump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heard
Pasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm
swerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondola
of his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as in
Venice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for some
time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left
him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as
he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest
about Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference
instantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cry
and saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of the
personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts
of her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn't
only, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,
within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of
smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,
all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he
now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct
interest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one's
really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
_cliché_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge
of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding
in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to
reflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young man
had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest
of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the
outrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it had
been--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had
been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present
befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,
had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person and quite
on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher's nerves,
absolutely his heart-beats too, had measured the change before he on
this occasion moved away.
The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance
grimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense, and this was to
be the way he was now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,
making vision not only possible but inevitable, the one thing left to
be thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which, should
one be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.
It was, however, far from plain to Densher for the first day or two
that he was again to see his distinguished friend at all. That he
couldn't, on any basis actually serving, return to the palace--this was
as solid to him, every whit, as the other feature of his case, the fact
of the publicity attaching to his proscription through his not having
taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli
gondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined to
meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither time
nor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them unless the
great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Densher
further reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's
having decided to--as they might say--turn him on. It would depend as
well--for there would be practically some difference to her--on her
actually attempting it; and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke
would make of such an overture. Densher had for that matter his own
view of the amount, to say nothing of the particular sort, of response
it might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such a
personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be
prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher asked
himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the
worst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great man
should come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him
for a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, and
consequently there was nothing to hope.
It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this violence to all
probability; but it pressed on him that there were few possible
diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was
so odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid of
Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previous
taste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.
The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in his
tread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, for
the time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for the
difference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to
Densher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not
as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had
quite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard that
value as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of
the old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forcibly
phrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after all
did want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that Sir
Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were
his worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny
made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In
mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,
he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his
original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth
his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave it
time, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhile
this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign he
knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him
no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had
described as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--if
on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--not
to be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.
That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enough
saw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For
stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had
gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent
himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five
days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable
sacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of the highest
medical lights in the world; so that really when the personage in
question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the
doorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut
like a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the
magnitude--he shrank from calling it anything else--of Milly's case.
The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her
immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some
hope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, with
his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things
at once--the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke _was_
still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and
quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis--plainly even now to
be prolonged for him--was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not
only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn't
dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show that
during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in
sight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. The
demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previous
acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made him
come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, but
there were things of interest he should like to see again meanwhile. It
was for these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity of
Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he
had looked his young man up--producing on the latter's part, as soon as
the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined
itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing
could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface--and Densher was
well aware of it--than the relief he found during this short period in
the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news
nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his visitor's
entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting the
fact also directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had come to say
he had saved her--he had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how she
might _be_ saved--he had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say she
was lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for all
their distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just
as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did
wonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he would
have said, quiet.
The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm after
a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep
superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but
he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right
stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and
they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--Sir
Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old
wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed above
all the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.
Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keeping
them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching
his face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.
He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this was
all he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approach
to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it
in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of
it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his
response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that
held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in
spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for
it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,
because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to let
him off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn't
aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on
system or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being a
man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that Sir
Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. A
man's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered what
man, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.
He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what mattered
and what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,
the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one were
concerned with him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whatever
he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might
have been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was the
way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have
exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's now
complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing could
have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the
station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densher
would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken a
dose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.
That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the
three or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merely
wondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced
term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, the
Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our
friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,
naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's
personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for
that?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his
call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--as
had immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been living
with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was
proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when the
Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, his
companion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed face
as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highest
authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness
affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite
awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was
short, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,
was mounting guard over the compartment he had secured. The strain,
though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,
prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that he
involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as
only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the
right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,
and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,
questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him
now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly
knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
Luke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial
habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken from
it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meeting
his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely
looked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
one time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even a
shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher for
ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at
last spoken made him start.
"I shall come back."
"Then she's better?"
"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding
the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they
hadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
see her."
Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare
betrayed. "She asks me?"
Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had
closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little
but not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,
as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."
Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought
the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.
Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"
"She can receive you."
"And you're coming back--?"
"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."
"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of his
friend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had
announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ then
come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the
colourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of the
world to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--was
but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand
remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did.
"I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but in
his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had
slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and
the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
"Then she's better?"
Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it at
the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was
to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so
successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had
to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply
reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed
him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained
observation of Eugenio.