He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had
"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made of
her--happened he meant since the account he had given, after his
return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--they
had brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, in
preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.
Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the
night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely
first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation
with her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own small
quarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected
him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the
next hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilessly
wakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous to
distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow
hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his
sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his
difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,
and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the
other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared
and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of
monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and
the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before
him; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned
his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,
for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the
event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light of
convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He
stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow
determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety in
doubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very
commonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in his
life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to
another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and
his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he
felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more
state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
Christmas day.
Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a
certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his
final prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less
urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,
once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained
sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive
earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a
reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the
dusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus
to turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the night
before had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just
mentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item to
assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham was
drawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought him
for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was long
enough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caught
his breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day
Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was
back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,
and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt
himself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectile
that has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truth
that what he wanted _more_ than to see Kate Croy was to see the witness
who had just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be in his
presence and to hear his voice--which was the spasm of his
consciousness that produced the flash. Fortunately for him, on the
spot, there supervened something in which the flash went out. He became
aware within this minute that the coachman on the box of the brougham
had a face known to him, whereas he had never seen before, to his
knowledge, the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he came
nearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box was just the face
that, in coming and going at Lancaster Gate, he would vaguely have
noticed, outside, in attendance. With this the rest came: the lady of
Lancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote from his own,
presented herself for news; and news, in the house, she was clearly
getting, since her brougham had stayed. Sir Luke _was_ then back--only
Mrs. Lowder was with him.
It was under the influence of this last reflexion that Densher again
delayed; and it was while he delayed that something else occurred to
him. It was all round, visibly--given his own new contribution--a case
of pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate, for quicker knowledge,
might have come out with her aunt. The possibility that in this event
she might be sitting in the carriage--the thing most likely--had had
the effect, before he could check it, of bringing him within range of
the window. It wasn't there he had wished to see her; yet if she _was_
there he couldn't pretend not to. What he had however the next moment
made out was that if some one was there it wasn't Kate Croy. It was,
with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him a
conscious face from behind the clear plate of a café in Venice. The
great glass at Florian's was a medium less obscure, even with the
window down, than the air of the London Christmas; yet at present also,
none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions could
occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest--which, he disgustedly
remembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as
his special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touched
the bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at by
Kate's friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for
the time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged
young man had in a manner assisted at the departure of the
disconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any more
than he had looked from his bench at his café. Densher was thinking
that _he_ seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He was
thinking of the other as--in spite of the difference of situation--more
ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend of
the person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous,
associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, beside
Mrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficient
identity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened and
Mrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that _she_
wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; with
presence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in the
brougham, didn't matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firm
word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to her
passage with the gentleman who had rung. "_I'll_ tell Mr. Densher; you
needn't wait!" And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on the
steps.
"He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn't not come
to learn."
"No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On my way," he added, "to
Lancaster Gate."
"Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was
attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and
he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost
functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and
that yet had now a fresh glow. "So you _have_ had your message?"
He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he "_had_
had" no less than what he hadn't, that, with but the smallest
hesitation, he strained the point. "Yes--my message."
"Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings."
"Yes--folded them."
It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and
she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. "Unless it's
more true," she accordingly added, "that she has spread them the wider."
He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words
fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. "Rather, yes--spread them
the wider."
"For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater--!"
"Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared,
that did a little warn her off.
"You were certainly," she went on with more reserve, "entitled to
direct news. Ours came late last night: I'm not sure otherwise I
shouldn't have gone to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to _me?_"
He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of
the brougham was still within range. Her rich "me," reaching him
moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest.
"Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just
now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they
stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage
might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side,
understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shall
you be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with the
image of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical.
It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was
exactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had suddenly--since the
night before--dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeper
reserve.
But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely alone. I should
otherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!"
Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand
with which she had the next moment condolingly pressed his own. "Dear
friend, dear friend!"--she was deeply "with" him, and she wished to be
still more so: which was what made her immediately continue. "Or
wouldn't you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine with
me _tête-à-tête?_"
It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her--making the
difference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rather
mystified him. This however didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shall
you mind if I don't tell you at once?"
"Not in the least--leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and you
needn't even send me word. I only _will_ mention that to-day, of all
days, I shall otherwise sit there alone."