by Henry James
This attempted pleasantry on Miss Chancellor’s part, so unexpected, so incongruous, uttered with white lips and cold eyes, struck Ransom to that degree by its oddity that he could not resist exchanging a glance of wonder with Verena, who, if she had had the opportunity, could probably have explained to him the phenomenon. Olive had recovered herself, reminded herself that she was safe, that her companion in New York had repudiated, denounced her pursuer; and, as a proof to her own sense of her security, as well as a touching mark to Verena that now, after what had passed, she had no fear, she felt that a certain light mockery would be effective.
“Ah, Miss Olive, don’t pretend to think I love your sex so little, when you know that what you really object to in me is that I love it too much!” Ransom was not brazen, he was not impudent, he was really a very modest man; but he was aware that whatever he said or did he was condemned to seem impudent now, and he argued within himself that if he was to have the dishonour of being thought brazen he might as well have the comfort. He didn’t care a straw, in truth, how he was judged or how he might offend; he had a purpose which swallowed up such inanities as that, and he was so full of it that it kept him firm, balanced him, gave him an assurance that might easily have been confounded with a cold detachment. “This place will do me good,” he pursued; “I haven’t had a holiday for more than two years, I couldn’t have gone another day; I was finished. I would have written to you beforehand that I was coming, but I only started at a few hours’ notice. It occurred to me that this would be just what I wanted; I remembered what Miss Tarrant had said in her note, that it was a place where people could lie on the ground and wear their old clothes. I delight to lie on the ground, and all my clothes are old. I hope to be able to stay three or four weeks.”
Olive listened till he had done speaking; she stood a single moment longer, and then, without a word, a glance, she rushed into the house. Ransom saw that Miss Birdseye was immersed in her letters; so he went straight to Verena and stood before her, looking far into her eyes. He was not smiling now, as he had been in speaking to Olive. “Will you come somewhere apart, where I can speak to you alone?”
“Why have you done this? It was not right in you to come!” Verena looked still as if she were blushing, but Ransom perceived he must allow for her having been delicately scorched by the sun.
“I have come because it is necessary—because I have something very important to say to you. A great number of things.”
“The same things you said in New York? I don’t want to hear them again—they were horrible!”
“No, not the same—different ones. I want you to come out with me, away from here.”
“You always want me to come out! We can’t go out here; we are out, as much as we can be!” Verena laughed. She tried to turn it off—feeling that something really impended.
“Come down into the garden, and out beyond there—to the water, where we can speak. It’s what I have come for; it was not for what I told Miss Olive!”
He had lowered his voice, as if Miss Olive might still hear them, and there was something strangely grave—altogether solemn, indeed—in its tone. Verena looked around her, at the splendid summer day, at the much-swathed, formless figure of Miss Birdseye, holding her letter inside her hat. “Mr. Ransom!” she articulated then, simply; and as her eyes met his again they showed him a couple of tears.
“It’s not to make you suffer, I honestly believe. I don’t want to say anything that will hurt you. How can I possibly hurt you, when I feel to you as I do?” he went on, with suppressed force.
She said no more, but all her face entreated him to let her off, to spare her; and as this look deepened, a quick sense of elation and success began to throb in his heart, for it told him exactly what he wanted to know. It told him that she was afraid of him, that she had ceased to trust herself, that the way he had read her nature was the right way (she was tremendously open to attack, she was meant for love, she was meant for him), and that his arriving at the point at which he wished to arrive was only a question of time. This happy consciousness made him extraordinarily tender to her; he couldn’t put enough reassurance into his smile, his low murmur, as he said: “Only give me ten minutes; don’t receive me by turning me away. It’s my holiday—my poor little holiday; don’t spoil it.”
Three minutes later Miss Birdseye, looking up from her letter, saw them move together through the bristling garden and traverse a gap in the old fence which enclosed the further side of it. They passed into the ancient shipyard which lay beyond, and which was now a mere vague, grass-grown approach to the waterside, bestrewn with a few remnants of supererogatory timber. She saw them stroll forward to the edge of the bay and stand there, taking the soft breeze in their faces. She watched them a little, and it warmed her heart to see the stiff-necked young Southerner led captive by a daughter of New England trained in the right school, who would impose her opinions in their integrity. Considering how prejudiced he must have been he was certainly behaving very well; even at that distance Miss Birdseye dimly made out that there was something positively humble in the way he invited Verena Tarrant to seat herself on a low pile of weather-blackened planks, which constituted the principal furniture of the place, and something, perhaps, just a trifle too expressive of righteous triumph in the manner in which the girl put the suggestion by and stood where she liked, a little proudly, turning a good deal away from him. Miss Birdseye could see as much as this, but she couldn’t hear, so that she didn’t know what it was that made Verena turn suddenly back to him, at something he said. If she had known, perhaps his observation would have struck her as less singular—under the circumstances in which these two young persons met—than it may appear to the reader.
“They have accepted one of my articles; I think it’s the best.” These were the first words that passed Basil Ransom’s lips after the pair had withdrawn as far as it was possible to withdraw (in that direction) from the house.
“Oh, is it printed—when does it appear?” Verena asked that question instantly; it sprang from her lips in a manner that completely belied the air of keeping herself at a distance from him which she had worn a few moments before.
He didn’t tell her again this time, as he had told her when, on the occasion of their walk together in New York, she expressed an inconsequent hope that his fortune as a rejected contributor would take a turn—he didn’t remark to her once more that she was a delightful being; he only went on (as if her revulsion were a matter of course) to explain everything he could, so that she might as soon as possible know him better and see how completely she could trust him. “That was, at bottom, the reason I came here. The essay in question is the most important thing I have done in the way of a literary attempt, and I determined to give up the game or to persist, according as I should be able to bring it to the light or not. The other day I got a letter from the editor of the Rational Review, telling me that he should be very happy to print it, that he thought it very remarkable, and that he should be glad to hear from me again. He shall hear from me again—he needn’t be afraid! It contained a good many of the opinions I have expressed to you, and a good many more besides. I really believe it will attract some attention. At any rate, the simple fact that it is to be published makes an era in my life. This will seem pitiful to you, no doubt, who publish yourself, have been before the world these several years, and are flushed with every kind of triumph; but to me it’s simply a tremendous affair. It makes me believe I may do something; it has changed the whole way I look at my future. I have been building castles in the air, and I have put you in the biggest and fairest of them. That’s a great change, and, as I say, it’s really why I came on.”
Verena lost not a word of this gentle, conciliatory, explicit statement; it was full of surprises for her, and as soon as Ransom had stopped speaking she inquired: “Why, didn’t you feel satisfied about your future before?”
Her tone made him feel how little she had suspected he could have the weakness of a discourag
ement, how little of a question it must have seemed to her that he would one day triumph on his own erratic line. It was the sweetest tribute he had yet received to the idea that he might have ability; the letter of the editor of the Rational Review was nothing to it. “No, I felt very blue; it didn’t seem to me at all clear that there was a place for me in the world.”
“Gracious!” said Verena Tarrant.
A quarter of an hour later Miss Birdseye, who had returned to her letters (she had a correspondent at Framingham who usually wrote fifteen pages), became aware that Verena, who was now alone, was re-entering the house. She stopped her on her way, and said she hoped she hadn’t pushed Mr. Ransom overboard.
“Oh no; he has gone off—round the other way.”
“Well, I hope he is going to speak for us soon.”
Verena hesitated a moment. “He speaks with the pen. He has written a very fine article—for the Rational Review.”
Miss Birdseye gazed at her young friend complacently; the sheets of her interminable letter fluttered in the breeze. “Well, it’s delightful to see the way it goes on, isn’t it?”
Verena scarcely knew what to say; then, remembering that Doctor Prance had told her that they might lose their dear old companion any day, and confronting it with something Basil Ransom had just said—that the Rational Review was a quarterly and the editor had notified him that his article would appear only in the number after the next—she reflected that perhaps Miss Birdseye wouldn’t be there, so many months later, to see how it was her supposed consort had spoken. She might, therefore, be left to believe what she liked to believe, without fear of a day of reckoning. Verena committed herself to nothing more confirmatory than a kiss, however, which the old lady’s displaced head-gear enabled her to imprint upon her forehead and which caused Miss Birdseye to exclaim, “Why, Verena Tarrant, how cold your lips are!” It was not surprising to Verena to hear that her lips were cold; a mortal chill had crept over her, for she knew that this time she should have a tremendous scene with Olive.
She found her in her room, to which she had fled on quitting Mr. Ransom’s presence; she sat in the window, having evidently sunk into a chair the moment she came in, a position from which she must have seen Verena walk through the garden and down to the water with the intruder. She remained as she had collapsed, quite prostrate; her attitude was the same as that other time Verena had found her waiting, in New York. What Olive was likely to say to her first the girl scarcely knew; her mind, at any rate, was full of an intention of her own. She went straight to her and fell on her knees before her, taking hold of the hands which were clasped together, with nervous intensity, in Miss Chancellor’s lap. Verena remained a moment, looking up at her, and then said:
“There is something I want to tell you now, without a moment’s delay; something I didn’t tell you at the time it happened, nor afterwards. Mr. Ransom came out to see me once, at Cambridge, a little while before we went to New York. He spent a couple of hours with me; we took a walk together and saw the colleges. It was after that that he wrote to me—when I answered his letter, as I told you in New York. I didn’t tell you then of his visit. We had a great deal of talk about him, and I kept that back. I did so on purpose; I can’t explain why, except that I didn’t like to tell you, and that I thought it better. But now I want you to know everything; when you know that, you will know everything. It was only one visit—about two hours. I enjoyed it very much—he seemed so much interested. One reason I didn’t tell you was that I didn’t want you to know that he had come on to Boston, and called on me in Cambridge, without going to see you. I thought it might affect you disagreeably. I suppose you will think I deceived you; certainly I left you with a wrong impression. But now I want you to know all—all!”
Verena spoke with breathless haste and eagerness; there was a kind of passion in the way she tried to expiate her former want of candour. Olive listened, staring; at first she seemed scarcely to understand. But Verena perceived that she understood sufficiently when she broke out: “You deceived me—you deceived me! Well, I must say I like your deceit better than such dreadful revelations! And what does anything matter when he has come after you now? What does he want—what has he come for?”
“He has come to ask me to be his wife.”
Verena said this with the same eagerness, with as determined an air of not incurring any reproach this time. But as soon as she had spoken she buried her head in Olive’s lap.
Olive made no attempt to raise it again, and returned none of the pressure of her hands; she only sat silent for a time, during which Verena wondered that the idea of the episode at Cambridge, laid bare only after so many months, should not have struck her more deeply. Presently she saw it was because the horror of what had just happened drew her off from it. At last Olive asked: “Is that what he told you, off there by the water?”
“Yes”—and Verena looked up—”he wanted me to know it right away. He says it’s only fair to you that he should give notice of his intentions. He wants to try and make me like him—so he says. He wants to see more of me, and he wants me to know him better.”
Olive lay back in her chair, with dilated eyes and parted lips. “Verena Tarrant, what is there between you? what can I hold on to, what can I believe? Two hours, in Cambridge, before we went to New York?” The sense that Verena had been perfidious there—perfidious in her reticence—now began to roll over her. “Mercy of heaven, how you did act!”
“Olive, it was to spare you.”
“To spare me? If you really wished to spare me he wouldn’t be here now!”
Miss Chancellor flashed this out with a sudden violence, a spasm which threw Verena off and made her rise to her feet. For an instant the two young women stood confronted, and a person who had seen them at that moment might have taken them for enemies rather than friends. But any such opposition could last but a few seconds. Verena replied, with a tremor in her voice which was not that of passion, but of charity: “Do you mean that I expected him, that I brought him? I never in my life was more surprised at anything than when I saw him there.”
“Hasn’t he the delicacy of one of his own slave-drivers? Doesn’t he know you loathe him?”
Verena looked at her friend with a degree of majesty which, with her, was rare. “I don’t loathe him—I only dislike his opinions.”
“Dislike! Oh, misery!” And Olive turned away to the open window, leaning her forehead against the lifted sash.
Verena hesitated, then went to her, passing her arm round her. “Don’t scold me! help me—help me!” she murmured.
Olive gave her a sidelong look; then, catching her up and facing her again—”Will you come away, now, by the next train?”
“Flee from him again, as I did in New York? No, no, Olive Chancellor, that’s not the way,” Verena went on, reasoningly, as if all the wisdom of the ages were seated on her lips. “Then how can we leave Miss Birdseye, in her state? We must stay here—we must fight it out here.”
“Why not be honest, if you have been false—really honest, not only half so? Why not tell him plainly that you love him?”
“Love him, Olive? why, I scarcely know him.”
“You’ll have a chance, if he stays a month!”
“I don’t dislike him, certainly, as you do. But how can I love him when he tells me he wants me to give up everything, all our work, our faith, our future, never to give another address, to open my lips in public? How can I consent to that?” Verena went on, smiling strangely.
“He asks you that, just that way?”
“No; it’s not that way. It’s very kindly.”
“Kindly? Heaven help you, don’t grovel! Doesn’t he know it’s my house?” Olive added, in a moment.
“Of course he won’t come into it, if you forbid him.”
“So that you may meet him in other places—on the shore, in the country?”
“I certainly shan’t avoid him, hide away from him,” said Verena proudly. “I thought I made you believe, in
New York, that I really cared for our aspirations. The way for me then is to meet him, feeling conscious of my strength. What if I do like him? what does it matter? I like my work in the world, I like everything I believe in, better.”
Olive listened to this, and the memory of how, in the house in Tenth Street, Verena had rebuked her doubts, professed her own faith anew, came back to her with a force which made the present situation appear slightly less terrific. Nevertheless, she gave no assent to the girl’s logic; she only replied: “But you didn’t meet him there; you hurried away from New York, after I was willing you should stay. He affected you very much there; you were not so calm when you came back to me from your expedition to the park as you pretend to be now. To get away from him you gave up all the rest.”
“I know I wasn’t so calm. But now I have had three months to think about it—about the way he affected me there. I take it very quietly.”