She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear, is that you're afraid
of yourself. You've had to take yourself in hand. You've had to do
yourself violence."
"So it is then you meet me?"
She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand
still stayed itself. "You absolutely _desire_ me to take it?"
"I absolutely desire you to take it."
"To do what I like with it?"
"Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain--pardon my
making the point--between you and me."
She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. "Trust me."
Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes
again rested on those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortly
before discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is to know."
"Oh I _know!_" said Merton Densher.
"Well then if we both do--!" She had already turned to the fire, nearer
to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing
into the flame. He started--but only half--as to undo her action: his
arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched,
with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. "You'll
have it all," Kate said, "from New York."
It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that
she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters--coming not as she
had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need
recognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as the
prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a
note from Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed him
by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he
had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself,
and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale's
copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the
gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the
girl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's act on
receipt of the document in question--an act as to which and to the
bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature--constituted in
strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what
Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair
since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little
vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had
at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mention
of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when
they met again the subject was made present to them--at all events till
some flare of new light--only by the intensity with which it mutely
expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet
often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of
February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate's
stay at Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt
which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at
Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of
them. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she
really despised ideas--which she didn't; "and I've taken up with my
own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
_has_ had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she's as proud
as the deuce she'll come back when she has found some reason--having
nothing in common with her disgust--of which she can make a show. She
calls it her holiday, which she's spending in her own way--the holiday
to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the
scullery have a right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shall
not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she's quite
decent; she comes often--whenever I make her a sign; and she has been
good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I
don't complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one
hoped; though I needn't, you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell _you_,
after all, you clever creature, what that was."
It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that
Densher's appearances under the good lady's roof markedly, after
Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on
his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent
was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then
acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been
painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of
which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite
high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs.
Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on
her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was
prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger
passed--he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he
would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away
westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in
this respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of
which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice
again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same
post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into the
question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly's
companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--as
a factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever it
might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest
current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned
it to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--so
that he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himself
as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the
same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce
even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he
wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental
image--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the
bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on
several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that
was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
say than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate for
him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep
within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of
these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was
none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of
publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging
to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from
view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what
Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;
in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with her
and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the
world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of
that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final
impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness
of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't
undo.
Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of
arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which
they were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that made
everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park--where Mrs.
Lowder now never drove--he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered
alleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, on
her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for
them at home--which was exactly what gave them for the first time an
appreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea--though
he didn't press it--that she had been across the town, in decency, for
a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster
Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.
It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;
which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of
cherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the way
of a large use--an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to
helping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companion
that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful
warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under
their feet. He was too horribly trusted--they had succeeded too well.
He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt
Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tying
his hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she
admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in
the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence. It was special at present--she
was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about
misapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found--and all
unconsciously now--the way to baffle them. It wasn't however that they
didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point
for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the
river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was
mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together
to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had never
been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone--he
scarce knew what to call it--had never been so bland. Not to talk of
what they _might_ have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as
if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They
concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner;
they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come
of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking
off, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described their
change--had he so far faced it as to describe it--by their being so
damned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the
point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. What
danger had there ever been of their becoming rude--after each had long
since made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things he
asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.
Yet all the while too the tension had its charm--such being the
interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such
different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a
difference for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition up;
she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never been
more agreeable nor in a way--to put it prosaically--better company: he
felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis--which he
even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at
all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people
she met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still have
something fresh for him; yet this was what she had--that on the top of
a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What a
person she would be if they _had_ been rich--with what a genius for the
so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house,
what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret at
once, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.
She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck
him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick,
but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the
impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.
She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came out
of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look
with which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated
prohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.
That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by
sitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The way
to pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we could
really _do_ anything it would be another matter."
He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus
a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with
her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the
objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such
consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the
day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They
contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting
are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,
actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,
something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a
thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the
precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The
thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person
he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again
the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out
of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, might
handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who
else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other
words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's
letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;
only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least
part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have
given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering
about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.
It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight
of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save
it--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice
of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual
ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he
cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and
guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the
inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh,
should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with which
they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one
with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn't
complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.
The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion
we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it.
This would have marked immediately the difference--had there been
nothing else to do it--between their actual terms and their other
terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been
_his_ idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they
had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision,
almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked
around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air
in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in
the place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in the
way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil
symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether,
she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these
things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her
after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of
reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely,
who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very
prompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break your
seal."
She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long
envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in
another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it--his
belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had
happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and
it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any
approach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and my
intention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to you
as not mine."
"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"
"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people in
New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well
and good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent it
back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with
his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."
Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage
signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is
touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of
possibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enough
for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"
"Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we
_know_--!"
"But you don't know," she said very gently.
"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the
handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but
one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in
the state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."
She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you
mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"
Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour.
"Well yes--something of that sort."
"So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--it
spoils the beauty?"
"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which I
confess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had
received it."
"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,
if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."
"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"
He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in the
air, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, I
wanted--in so good a case--to test you."
She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ a
good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,
"has ever been known."
"The better the case then the better the test!"
"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"
"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known
sooner."
"I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And
you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."
"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to
correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."
She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?
Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"