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“To tell you?” He was still at a loss.
“How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn’t want it.”
“How she doesn’t want to die? Of course she doesn’t want it.” He had a long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought out. Milly’s “grimness” and the great hushed palace were present to him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been waiting there and listening. “Only, what harm have you done her?”
Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. “I don’t know. I come and talk of her here with you.”
It made him again hesitate. “Does she utterly hate me?”
“I don’t know. How can I? No one ever will.”
“She’ll never tell?”
“She’ll never tell.”
Once more he thought. “She must be magnificent.”
“She is magnificent.”
His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he could, all over. “Would she see me again?”
It made his companion stare. “Should you like to see her?”
“You mean as you describe her?” He felt her surprise, and it took him some time. “No.”
“Ah then!” Mrs. Stringham sighed.
“But if she could bear it I’d do anything.”
She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. “I don’t see what you can do.”
“I don’t either. But she might.”
Mrs. Stringham continued to think. “It’s too late.”
“Too late for her to see—?”
“Too late.”
The very decision of her despair—it was after all so lucid—kindled in him a heat. “But the doctor, all the while—?”
“Tacchini? Oh he’s kind. He comes. He’s proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he’s waiting on events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable smile. We don’t,” said Susan Shepherd, “talk of her.”
“By her request?”
“Absolutely. I don’t do what she doesn’t wish. We talk of the price of provisions.”
“By her request too?”
“Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we liked.”
Densher took it all in. “But he isn’t any comfort to you!”
“None whatever. That, however,” she added, “isn’t his fault. Nothing’s any comfort.”
“Certainly,” Densher observed, “as I but too horribly feel, I’m not.”
“No. But I didn’t come for that.”
“You came for me.”
“Well then call it that.” But she looked at him a moment with eyes filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper still. “I came at bottom of course—”
“You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it’s, as you say, too late for me to do anything?”
She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow in her, from the truth itself. “So I did say. But, with you here”—and she turned her vision again strangely about her 
“with you here, and with everything, I feel we mustn’t abandon her.”
“God forbid we should abandon her.”
“Then you won’t?” His tone had made her flush again.
“How do you mean I ‘won’t,’ if she abandons me? What can I do if she won’t see me?”
“But you said just now you wouldn’t like it.”
“I said I shouldn’t like it in the light of what you tell me. I shouldn’t like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I could help her. But even then,” Densher pursued without faith, “she would have to want it first herself. And there,” he continued to make out, “is the devil of it. She won’t want it herself. She can’t!”
He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he helplessly moved. “There’s one thing you can do. There’s only that, and even for that there are difficulties. But there is that.” He stood before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. “I think you really know yourself what it is.”
He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said—rather!—there were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment; he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider, like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact, for the minute, as if she had “had” him, and he was the first again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer to her last remark—he only started from that. He said, as he came back to her, “Let me, you know, see—one must understand,” almost as if he had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn’t he be the one least of all to do it? “Aren’t we, at the worst, in the dark without him?”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Stringham, “it’s he who has kept me going. I wired the first night, and he answered like an angel. He’ll come like one. Only he can’t arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon.”
“Well then that’s something.”
She considered. “Something—yes. She likes him.”
“Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in October—that night when she was in white, when she had people there and those musicians—she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for both of us—she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved,” Densher said with a quick sad smile, “that she liked him.”
“He liked you,” Susan Shepherd presently risked.
“Ah I know nothing about that.”
“You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember telling me myself that if he hadn’t been a great surgeon he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful.”
“Well,” the young man admitted, “that’s what he is—in having judged her. He hasn’t,” he went on, “judged her for nothing. His interest in her—which we must make the most of—can only be supremely beneficent.”
He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly confessed to. “I’m glad,” she dropped, “you like him!”
There was something for him in the sound of it. “Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you like him. Surely, when he was here, we all liked him.”
“Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think, with all the time you spent with him, you’d know it,” she said, “yourself.”
Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. “We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us.”
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. “That was his professional propriety.”
“Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was something more besides.” And he spoke with sudden intensity. “I couldn’t talk to him about her!”
“Oh!” said Susan Shepherd.
“I can’t talk to any one about her.”
“Except to me,” his friend continued.
“Except to you.” The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For honesty too—that is for his own words—he had quickly coloured: he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching him hold it down. And he had to hold it down—the effort of which, precisely, made him red. He couldn’t let it come up; at least not yet. She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his statement, but he really modified it. “Sir Luke, at all events, had nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and—”
“And real”— she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis—“ was more impossible still.” No doubt—he didn’t deny it; and she had straightway drawn her conclusion. “Then that proves what I say—that there were immensities between you. Otherwise you’d have chattered.”
“I dare say,” Densher granted, “we were both thinking of her.”
“You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That’s why you kept together.”
Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight back to what he had originally said. “I haven’t a notion, all the same, of what he thinks.” She faced him, visibly, with the question into which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was perpetually flowering, right and left—“Are you very sure?”—and he could only note her apparent difference from himself. “You, I judge, believe that he thinks she’s gone.”
She took it, but she bore up. “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“Well, we shall see”—and he felt almost basely superficial. More and more, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought something with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; he was sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it wasn’t of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of Mrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn‘t, strange to say, of Kate either, for Kate’s presence affected him suddenly as having swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd’s, thus prolonged, had cast on it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent to his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure, absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibility so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid, and that even, if he didn’t take care, he should infallibly be more so. “Meanwhile,” he added for his companion, “it has been everything for me to see you.”
She slowly rose at the words, which might almost have conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover, she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist. Besides, she had already said it. “Will you do it if he asks you? I mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him”—oh she was earnest now!—“the opportunity to put it to you?”
“The opportunity to put what?”
“That if you deny it to her, that may still do something.”
Densher felt himself—as had already once befallen him in the quarter of an hour—turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had, however, for him, a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted: his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign of his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. “If I deny what to her?”
Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn’t he all along been letting her see that he knew? “Why, what Lord Mark told her.”
“And what did Lord Mark tell her?”
Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment—of seeing him as suddenly perverse. “I’ve been judging that you yourself know.” And it was she who now blushed deep.
It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too by other things. “Then you know—”
“Of his dreadful visit?” She stared. “Why it’s what has done it.”
“Yes—I understand that. But you also know—”
He had faltered again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. “I’m speaking,” she said soothingly, “of what he told her. It’s that that I’ve taken you as knowing.”
“Oh!” he sounded in spite of himself.
It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment, the quality of relief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else. Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. “Oh you thought I’ve known it for true!”
Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that he had betrayed himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw still better. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least there was no postponing. They were left with her idea—the one she was wishing to make him recognize. He had expressed ten minutes before his need to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only what he was to understand was no small matter; it might be larger even than as yet appeared.
He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said; he mooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window; and of course she could see that she had driven him to the wall. She did clearly, without delay, see it; on which her sense of having “caught” him became as promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. “What I mean is that he told her you’ve been all the while engaged to Miss Croy.”
He gave a jerk round; it was almost—to hear it—the touch of a lash; and he said—idiotically, as he afterwards knew—the first thing that came into his head. “All what while?”
“Oh it’s not I who say it.” She spoke in gentleness. “I only repeat to you what he told her.”
Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had already caught himself up. “Pardon my brutality. Of course I know what you’re talking about. I saw him, toward the evening,” he further explained, “in the Piazza; only just saw him—through the glass at Florian’s—without any words. In fact I scarcely know him—there wouldn’t have been occasion. It was but once, moreover—he must have gone that night. But I knew he wouldn’t have come for nothing, and I turned it over—what he would have come for.”
Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. “He came for exasperation.”
Densher approved. “He came to let her know that he knows better than she for whom it was she had a couple of months before, in her fool’s paradise, refused him.”
“How you do know!”—and Mrs. Stringham almost smiled.
“I know that—but I don’t know the good it does him.”
“The good, he thinks, if he has patience—not too much—may be to come. He doesn’t know what he has done to her. Only we, you see, do that.”
He saw, but he wondered. “She kept from him—what she felt?”
“She was able—I’m sure of it—not to show anything. He dealt her his blow, and she took it without a sign.” Mrs. Stringham, it was plain, spoke by book, and it brought into play again her appreciation of what she related. “She’s magnificent.”
Densher again gravely assented. “Magnificent!”
“And he,” she went on, “is an idiot of idiots.”
“An idiot of idiots.” For a moment, on it all, on the stupid doom in it, they looked at each other. “Yet he’s thought so awfully clever.”
“So awfully—it’s Maud Lowder’s own view. And he was nice, in London,” said Mrs. Stringham, “to me. One could almost pity him—he has had such a good conscience.”
“That’s exactly the inevitable ass.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t—I could see from the only few things she first told me—that he meant her the least harm. He intended none whatever.”
“That’s always the ass at his worst,” Densher returned. “He only of course meant harm to me.”
“And good to himself—he thought that would come. He had been unable to swallow,” Mrs. Stringham pursued, “what had happened on his other visit. He had been then too sharply humiliated.”
“Oh I saw that.”
“Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as it were, while he was turned away.”
“Perfectly,” Densher said—“I’ve filled it out. And also that he has known meanwhile for what I was then received. For a stay of all these weeks. He had had it to think of.”
“Precisely—it was more than he could bear. But he has it,” said Mrs. Stringham, “to think of still.”
“Only, after all,” asked Densher, who himself somehow, at this point, was having more to think of even than he had yet had—“only, after all, how has he happened to know? That is, to know enough.”
“What do you call enough?” Mrs. Stringham inquired.
“He can only have acted—it would have been his sole safety—from full knowledge.”
He had gone on without heeding her question; but, face to face as they were, something had none the less passed between them. It was this that, after an instant, made her again interrogative. “What do you mean by full knowledge?”
Densher met it indirectly. “Where has he been since October?”
“I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I’ve reason to believe, straight from there.”
“Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?”
“Well, to try again—with the help perhaps of a new fact. To make himself possibly right with her—a different attempt from the other. He had at any rate something to tell her, and he didn’t know his opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed half an hour would be just what was most effective. It has been!” said Susan Shepherd.
Her companion took it in, understanding but too well; yet as she lighted the matter for him more, really, than his own courage had quite dared—putting the absent dots on several i’s—he saw new questions swarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused; and they fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her was at any rate abrupt. “Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lowder.”
“Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Milly.”
He hesitated. “And does she depend, naturally, upon news of me?”
His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.
“I’ve given her none that hasn’t been decently good. This will
have been the first.”
“ ‘This’?” Densher was thinking.
“Lord Mark’s having been here, and her being as she is.”
He thought a moment longer. “What has Mrs. Lowder written about him? Has she written that he has been with them?”
“She has mentioned him but once—it was in her letter before the last. Then she said something.”
“And what did she say?”
Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. “Well it was in reference to Miss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps I should say rather that he was thinking of her— only it seemed this time to have struck Maud that he was seeing the way more open to him.”
Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raised them to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware of a queerness in his question. “Does she mean he has been encouraged to propose to her niece?”
“I don’t know what she means.”
“Of course not”—he recovered himself; “and I oughtn’t to seem to trouble you to piece together what I can’t piece myself. Only I ‘guess,”’ he added, “I can piece it.”
She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. “I dare say I can piece it too.”
It was one of the things in her—and his conscious face took it from her as such—that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to mark for him, as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception. They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deep down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it wasn’t he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful—at least this one was. But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so, most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all such petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that, in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with his putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark. “Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our friend?”
“Oh,” Mrs. Stringham amended, “her friend also. But not a single word that I know of.”
He had taken it for certain she hadn’t—the thing being after all but a shade more strange than his having himself, with Milly, never for six weeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter but a shade more strange than Milly’s not having mentioned her. In spite of which, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate’s silence. He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest he could get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had been judging. “How did he manage to get at her? She had only—with what had passed between them before—to say she couldn’t see him.”
“Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier,” the good lady explained with a slight embarrassment, “than at the other time.”
“Easier?”
“She was off her guard. There was a difference.”
“Yes. But exactly not the difference.”
“Exactly not the difference of her having to be harsh. Perfectly. She could afford to be the opposite.” With which, as he said nothing, she just impatiently completed her sense. “She had had you here for six weeks.”
“Oh!” Densher softly groaned.
“Besides, I think he must have written her first—written I mean in a tone to smooth his way. That it would be a kindness to himself. Then on the spot—”
“On the spot,” Densher broke in, “he unmasked? The horrid little beast!”
It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as for hope, the intensity of her look at him. “Oh he went off without an alarm.”
“And he must have gone off also without a hope.”
“Ah that, certainly.”
“Then it was mere base revenge. Hasn’t he known her, into the bargain,” the young man asked—“didn’t he, weeks before, see her, judge her, feel her, as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than a few months to live?”
Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at him in silence; and it gave more force to what she then remarkably added. “He has doubtless been aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself been aware.”
“He has wanted her, you mean, just because—? ”
“Just because,” said Susan Shepherd.
“The hound!” Merton Densher brought out. He moved off, however, with a hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention in his visitor’s reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more taken counsel of the dreariness without he turned to his companion. “Shall we have lights—a lamp or the candles?”
“Not for me.”
“Nothing?”
“Not for me.”
He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a thought. “He will have proposed to Miss Croy. That’s what has happened.”
Her reserve continued, “It’s you who must judge.”
“Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too—only she, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy’s refusal of him will have struck him”—Densher continued to make it out—“as a phenomenon requiring a reason.”
“And you’ve been clear to him as the reason?”
“Not too clear—since I’m sticking here and since that has been a fact to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has believed,” said Densher bravely, “that I may have been a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in Venice.”
Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. “ ‘Up to’ something? Up to what?”
“God knows. To some ‘game,’ as they say. To some deviltry. To some duplicity.”
“Which of course,” Mrs. Stringham observed, “is a monstrous supposition.” Her companion, after a stiff minute—sensibly long for each—fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute, which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets. This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she addressed him—so differently, for confidence—in words she had already used. “If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for him, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been so dreadfully to believe?”
Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: “You’re absolutely certain then that she does believe it?”
“Certain?” She appealed to their whole situation. “Judge!”
He took his time again to judge. “Do you believe it?”
He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. “What I believe will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly settle it—if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if, to save her life, you consent to a denial.”
“But a denial, when it comes to that—confound the whole thing, don’t you see!—of exactly what?”
It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged. “Of everything.”
Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. “Oh!” he simply moaned into the gloom.25
—IV—
T he near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought also blessedly an abatement of other rigors. 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 splashed 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 unmistakable—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.
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