The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon--dusk thick from an
early hour--had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He had
gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in
Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt
independently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectly
achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club
library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while,
closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the
night. Before doing this indeed he had written--it was the first thing
he did--a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place,
he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.
He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to
trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return
with a gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to face with
Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief that
his notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extent
prepared; which simplified a little--if a little, at the present pass,
counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of
his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp
and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen
her. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt's
pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied
ceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as
the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a
still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with
her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs.
Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not
flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
stranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making the
best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing
was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a
stranger in it than she.
A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprang
from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by
the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,
for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the
case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The
curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed
circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the
florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many
mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.
Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements
Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point
of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they
asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly
having a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them in
reference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing to
him, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.
He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly played
him, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very specially
sorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start in
the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he
might say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but it
wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow
make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, that
is, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as
what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he
took in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creature
she was if what was just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't made
for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the
same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her
companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with
assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt
her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel
her and how above all must she not feel them?
Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted the
tall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination but
the fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet
left play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their trouble
and failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.
So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given their
conditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
nothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she might
be able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look at
her that his promptitude was already having for her its principal
reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," he
explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rather
gathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as she
did tell me, so suddenly come here."
"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contracted
firelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.
He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett's
door. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it's
what _you_ mean."
"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,
after a pause during which she waited, was apparently not the rest of
that. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.
But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will have
taken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.
Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situation
bequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn't
stay."
Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense that
he was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"
"No--I've had no telegram."