II

He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this

inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but

interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt

Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of

the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his

intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder

alone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kate

gave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them

was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him

to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had

fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard

fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to

his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare

alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been

uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,

and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she

resentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, my

dear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if to

leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this

extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the

protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their

tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their

hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his

scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed

for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been

entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf--a visitor she had been

at one time suspected of favouring too much and who had now come back

to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that the

fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragic

turn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr.

Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an

awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he

marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the

fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was

but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for

consideration, melted into it and out of sight.

He was taken up promptly with another matter--the truth of the

remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice

had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of

their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not

sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that

were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without

her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish

them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking

place had obliged him to hang off; they had--after hearing of him from

poor Susan as gone--been hoping for an early sight of him; they would

have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the

scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely--by which

she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the

memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it--was what marked him for

unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the

guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth

in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She

treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;

and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness

with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches

to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to be;

it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile

to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded,

he could "work" this association: he had but to use the house freely

for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it.

Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a

week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs.

Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him

on--brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had

private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had

others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of

candour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely

sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so

himself--everything was too real; but it was none the less not false

that he _had_ been through a mill.

It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to

him, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, "I

want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm _with_ you to the end!"

his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was

with him to the end--or she might be--in a way Kate wasn't; and even if

it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just

brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her

in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in

the world _could_ he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest

reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two

or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions--two

and a scrap--on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now

that almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turn

of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that

when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come

up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the

queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He

liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to

himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met

_him_ halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than

her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy

her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course

the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which

he was completely _free_ with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed have

come about if--for another monstrosity--he hadn't ceased to be free

with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being

alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had

been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in

fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy

moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed

herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn't have stayed to the

end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all

to his help.

"You simply couldn't stand it?"

"I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see--!" But he paused.

"Besides what?" He had been going to say more--then he saw dangers;

luckily however she had again assisted him. "Besides--oh I know!--men

haven't, in many relations, the courage of women."

"They haven't the courage of women."

"Kate or I would have stayed," she declared--"if we hadn't come away

for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated."

Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn't his behaviour

since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said--he

couldn't help going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy

would have stayed." And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was

Susan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him--she had done nothing

but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth

she had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing that

compromised him. Milly's act of renouncement she had described but as a

change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as even

without her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to conceal

it; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, for

all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions.

Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that,

shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, he

leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came.

She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn't; but this

was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had

taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as

already dead to him--that being for his spirit the only thinkable way

to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited

her, and it wasn't for him to go, as they said in America, behind this;

which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his

interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have

nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious

of her--what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,

for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in

London while the pain went on--what would that do but make his days

impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself--and by some

art about which he was vague--that the sense of waiting had passed.

"What in fact," he restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do with

it? Let me assume the thing actually over--as it at any moment may

be--and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I'm

good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to _her_." He

consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly

about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be

guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The

days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the

suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was

the taste of suspense. That he _was_ waiting was in short at the bottom

of everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that

if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just

for that reason.

She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle

enough--and he could see her divine it as what he wanted--not to insist

on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was

thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one

better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together

that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in

the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had _been_

stupendous. On the other hand, however--and this was what wasn't for

Densher pure peace--they insisted enough that stupendous was the word.

It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he came

to it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, in

particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression

as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed

the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he

couldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wife

might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the

family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl

must have wanted to live.

"Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, with

everything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, if

it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"

Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairly

giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might have

been" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had

her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,

and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her about

them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to

herself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,

the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keep

it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so

naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its

vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually

shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she

was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully

silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,

in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object

clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the

case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make

him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had

been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud

by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had

let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received

on that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed so

perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--of

princely state.

Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,

all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth

of autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained and the

situation--well, Densher said for the convenience of exquisite London

gossip, sublime. The gossip--for it came to as much at Lancaster

Gate--wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor on

the other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. He

himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the

page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation

inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half

understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding

himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these

moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity;

and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He

had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious

of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had

lost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew he had gathered

all--that passed between them mutely as in the intervals of their

associated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far

as association could go, but it was far enough when she knew the

essence. The essence was that something had happened to him too

beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered

sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't coherently

express. It would have required an explanation--fatal to Mrs. Lowder's

faith in him--of the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderful

scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence

within--they felt the charged stillness; after which, their association

deepened by it, they turned together away.

That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became by the end of a

week the very principle of reaction: so that he woke up one morning

with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to

gainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster Gate that, as a

haunted man--a man haunted with a memory--he was harmless; but the

degree to which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained his new

aspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What he

hadn't in the least stated her own manner was perpetually stating; it

was as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down.

There offered itself however to his purpose such an element as plain

honesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper

corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year

was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; the

still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked

empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep

browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks

lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it

fast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, and

then went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in a

telegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,

for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe

to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion

of past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--made

his telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,

for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was a

good deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a rich

impulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment

later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one of

their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be

reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but he

had waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically at

hand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller

now, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed he

was graver as he lingered and looked out.

Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as if

she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--that

was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,

even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return

to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had

begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might

be again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not with

ease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,

other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special

danger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he

had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all

that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.

The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the same

place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the

days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. This

and that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs over

the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which--for

they really could sit down again--they might recover the clearness of

their prime. It was to all intents however this very reference that

showed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came toward

him. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her

nearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing him

afresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, he

certainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her,

at particular moments, handsomer than ever before; one of these for

instance being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt's

eyes, at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return

from America; and another her aspect on the same spot two Sundays

ago--the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back from

Venice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got it

the other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortune

of the moment.

Whatever it had been determined by as the different hours recurred to

him, it took on at present a prompt connexion with an effect produced

for him in truth more than once during the past week, only now much

intensified. This effect he had already noted and named: it was that of

the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of

response on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn't

possibly have failed to notice. She _had_ noticed it, and she had

beautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade of

studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.

Everything of course was relative, with the shadow they were living

under; but her condonation of the way in which he now, for confidence,

distinguished Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer. She had so by her

own air consecrated the distinction, invidious in respect to herself

though it might be; and nothing, really, more than this demonstration,

could have given him had he still wanted it the measure of her

superiority. It was doubtless for that matter this superiority alone

that on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charming

courage to her eyes--a courage that deepened in them when he had

presently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joined

him not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing her

hand into his arm and turning off where they had turned of old, that he

wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing he

should ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,

whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own belief was in high

happiness for them if they would only have patience; though nothing at

the same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was only

make-believe of course, with what had taken place for them, that they

couldn't meet at home; she spoke of their opportunities as suffering at

no point. He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished the

present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a great

wintry tree, he let his entreaty come sharp.

"We've played our dreadful game and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves,

we owe it to our feeling _for_ ourselves and for each other, not to

wait another day. Our marriage will--fundamentally, somehow, don't you

see?--right everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you my

impatience. We've only to announce it--and it takes off the weight."

"To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding,

though she had listened to him without confusion.

"To accomplish it then--to-morrow if you will; _do_ it and announce it

as done. That's the least part of it--after it nothing will matter. We

shall be so right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall only

wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a

bad dream."

She looked at him without flinching--with the look she had brought at

his call; but he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. "My dear

man, what has happened to you?"

"Well, that I can bear it no longer. _That's_ simply what has happened.

Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's _as_ I am

that you must have me."

He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her also

not consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further--he heard her, with

her clear voice--try to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see, you

know, what has changed." She had a large strange smile. "We've been

going on together so well, and you suddenly desert me?"

It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches,

upon my soul--!"

"I call it perfect--from my original point of view. I'm just where I

was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for

_your_ not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're only

right as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don't

think we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in while she talked

her imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless

to see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. He

had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immoveable--which

was not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood

everything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down,

the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again most of all

her strange significant smile. "Of course if it's that you really

_know_ something--?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, he

could see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and he

only looked at her in gloom. His gloom however didn't upset her. "You

do, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to

me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in

hearing it, so that if you can _tell_ me you know--"

"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it.

"Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't, I grant you, in that case

wait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I

don't even ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content with your

moral certainty."

By this time it had come over him--it had the force of a rush. The

point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while he

recognised it, mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."

"You've not an idea?"

"I've not an idea."

"I'd consent," she said--"I'd announce it to-morrow, to-day, I'd go

home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an

idea straight _from_ you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith.

There, my dear!"--and she smiled again. "I call that really meeting

you."

If it _was_ then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he

could but stand there with his wasted passion--for it was in high

passion that he had from the morning acted--in his face. She made it

all out, bent upon her--the idea he didn't have, and the idea he had,

and his failure of insistence when it brought up _that_ challenge, and

his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her

lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but

that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to

something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and

she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,

between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,

when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she

leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented

irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an

advantage with his passion now.