by Henry James
His delicacy was absurd for her because Mora’s indecency had made this, by her logic, the only air they could now breathe; yet he knew how it nevertheless took his presence to wind her up to her actual challenge of their guest. Face to face with that personage alone she would have failed of the assurance required for such crudity; deeply unprepared as she really was, poor dear, for the crudity to which she might, as a consequence, have opened the gates. She lived altogether thus—and nothing, to her husband’s ironic view, he flattered himself, could be droller—in perpetual yearning, deprecating, in bewildered and muddled communion with the dreadful law of crudity; as if in very truth, to his amused sense, the situation hadn’t of necessity to be dressed up to the eyes for them in every sort of precaution and paraphrase. Traffle had privately reached the point of seeing it, at its high pitch of mystery and bravery, absolutely defy any common catchword. The one his wife had just employed struck him, while he hunched his shoulders at the ominous pause she had made inevitable for sturdy Puddick, as the vulgarest, and he had time largely to blush before an answer came. He had written, explicitly on Jane’s behalf, to request the favour of an interview, but had been careful not to intimate that it was to put that artless question. To have dragged a busy person, a serious person, out from town on the implication of his being treated for reward to so bète an appeal—no, one surely couldn’t appear to have been concerned in that. Puddick had been under no obligation to come—one might honestly have doubted whether he would even reply. However, his power of reply proved not inconsiderable, as consorted with his having presented himself not a bit ruefully or sulkily, but all easily and coolly, and even to a visible degree in a spirit of unprejudiced curiosity. It was as if he had practically forgotten Traffle’s own invasion of him at his studio—in addition to which who indeed knew what mightn’t have happened between the Chelsea pair in a distracting or freshly epoch-making way since then?—and was ready to show himself for perfectly good-natured, but for also naturally vague about what they could want of him again. “It depends, ma’am, on the sense I understand you to attach to that word,” was in any case the answer to which he at his convenience treated Jane.
“I attach to it the only sense,” she returned, “that could force me—by my understanding of it—to anything so painful as this inquiry. I mean are you so much lovers as to make it indispensable you should immediately marry?”
“Indispensable to who, ma’am?” was what Traffle heard their companion now promptly enough produce. To which, as it appeared to take her a little aback, he added: “Indispensable to you, do you mean, Mrs. Traffle? Of course, you see, I haven’t any measure of that.”
“Should you have any such measure”—and with it she had for her husband the effect now of quite “speaking up”—”if I were to give you my assurance that my niece will come into money when the proper means are taken of making her connection with you a little less—or perhaps I should say altogether less—distressing and irregular?”
The auditor of this exchange rocked noiselessly away from his particular point of dissociation, throwing himself at random upon another, before Mr. Pud-dick appeared again to have made up his mind, or at least to have adjusted his intelligence; but the movement had been on Traffle’s part but the instinct to stand off more and more—a vague effort of retreat that didn’t prevent the young man’s next response to pressure from ringing out in time to overtake him. “Is what you want me to understand then that you’ll handsomely pay her if she marries me? Is it to tell me that that you asked me to come?” It was queer, Sidney felt as he held his breath, how he kept liking this inferior person the better—the better for his carrying himself so little like any sort of sneak—on every minute spent in his company. They had brought him there at the very best to patronise him, and now would simply have to reckon with his showing clearly for so much more a person “of the world” than they. Traffic, it was true, was becoming, under the precious initiation opened to him by Mora, whether directly or indirectly, much more a man of the world than ever yet: as much as that at least he could turn over in his secret soul while their visitor pursued. “Perhaps you also mean, ma’am, that you suppose me to require that knowledge to determine my own behaviour—in the sense that if she comes in for money I may clutch at the way to come into it too?” He put this as the straightest of questions; yet he also, it was marked, followed up that side-issue further, as if to fight shy of what Jane wanted most to know. “Is it your idea of me that I haven’t married her because she isn’t rich enough, and that on what you now tell me I may think better of it? Is that how you see me, Mrs. Traffle?” he asked, at his quiet pitch, without heat.
It might have floored his hostess a little, to her husband’s vision, but she seemed at once to sit up, on the contrary, so much straighter, that he, after hearing her, immediately turned round. “Don’t you want, Mr. Puddick, to be able to marry a creature so beautiful and so clever?”
This was somehow, suddenly, on Jane’s part, so prodigious, for art and subtlety, Traffle recognised, that he had come forward again and a remarkable thing had followed. Their guest had noticed his return and now looked up at him from over the tea-table, looked in a manner so direct, so intelligent, so quite amusedly critical, that, afresh, before he knew it, he had treated the little fact as the flicker of a private understanding between them, and had just cynically—for it was scarce covertly—smiled back at him in the independence of it. So there he was again, Sidney Traffle; after having tacitly admitted to Mora that her aunt was a goose of geese—compared to himself and her—he was at present putting that young woman’s accomplice up to the same view of his conjugal loyalty, which might be straightway reported to the girl. Well, what was he, all the same, to do? Jane was, on all the ground that now spread immeasurably about them, a goose of geese: all that had occurred was that she more showily displayed it; and that she might indeed have had a momentary sense of triumph when the best that their friend first found to meet her withal proved still another evasion of the real point. “I don’t think, if you’ll allow me to say so, Mrs. Traffle, that you’ve any right to ask me, in respect to Miss Montravers, what I ‘want’—or that I’m under any obligation to tell you. I’ve come to you, quite in the dark, because of Mr. Traffle’s letter, and so that you shouldn’t have the shadow of anything to complain of. But please remember that I’ve neither appealed to you in any way nor put myself in a position of responsibility toward you.”
So far, but only so far, however, had he successfully proceeded before Jane was down upon him in her new trenchant form. “It’s not of your responsibility to us I’m talking, but all of your responsibility to her. We efface ourselves,” she all effectively bridled, “and we’re prepared for every reasonable sacrifice. But we do still a little care what becomes of the child to whom we gave up years of our life. If you care enough for her to live with her, don’t you care enough to work out some way of making her your very own by the aid of such help as we’re eager to render? Or are we to take from you, as against that, that, even thus with the way made easy, she’s so amazingly constituted as to prefer, in the face of the world, your actual terms of intercourse?”
The young man had kept his eyes on her without flinching, and so he continued after she had spoken. He then drank down what remained of his tea and, pushing back his chair, got up. He hadn’t the least arrogance, not the least fatuity of type—save so far as it might be offensive in such a place to show a young head modelled as with such an intention of some one of the finer economic uses, and a young face already a little worn as under stress of that economy—but he couldn’t help his looking, while he pulled down his not very fresh waistcoat, just a trifle like a person who had expected to be rather better regaled. This came indeed, for his host, to seeing that he looked bored; which was again, for that gentleman, a source of humiliation. What style of conversation, comparatively, on the showing of it, wouldn’t he and Mora meanwhile be having together? If they would only invite him, their uncle—or rathe
r no, when it came to that, not a bit, worse luck, their uncle—if they would only invite him, their humble admirer, to tea! During which play of reflection and envy, at any rate, Mr. Puddick had prepared to take his leave. “I don’t think I can talk to you, really, about my ‘terms of intercourse’ with any lady.” He wasn’t superior, exactly—wasn’t so in fact at all, but was nevertheless crushing, and all the more that his next word seemed spoken, in its persistent charity, for their help. “If it’s important you should get at that sort of thing it strikes me you should do so by the lady herself.”
Our friend, at this, no longer stayed his hand. “Mrs. Traffle doesn’t see her,” he explained to their companion—”as the situation seems to present itself.”
“You mean Mora doesn’t see me, my dear!” Mrs. Traffle replied with spirit.
He met it, however, with a smile and a gallant inclination. “Perhaps I mean that she only unsuccessfully tries to.”
“She doesn’t then take the right way!” Mora’s aunt tossed off.
Mr. Puddick looked at her blandly. “Then you lose a good deal, ma’am. For if you wish to learn from me how much I admire your niece,” he continued straight, “I don’t in the least mind answering to that that you may put my sentiments at the highest. I adore Miss Montravers,” he brought out, after a slight catch of his breath, roundly and impatiently. “I’d do anything in the world for her.”
“Then do you pretend,” said Jane with a rush, as if to break through this opening before she was checked, “then do you pretend that you’re living with her in innocence?”
Sidney Traffle had a groan for it—a hunched groan in which he exhaled the anguish, as he would have called it, of his false position; but Walter Puddick only continued, in his fine unblinking way, to meet Jane’s eyes. “I repudiate absolutely your charge of my ‘living’ with her or of her living with me. Miss Montravers is irreproachable and immaculate.”
“All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding?” Mrs. Traffle cried. “You’d do anything in the world for her, and she’d by the same token, I suppose, do anything in the world for you, and yet you ask me to believe that, all the while, you are, together, in this extraordinary way, doing nothing in the world—?” With which, to his further excruciation, her husband, with eyes averted from her, felt her face turn, as for a strained and unnatural intensity of meaning, upon himself. “He attempts, dear, to prove too much! But I only desire,” she continued to their guest, “that you should definitely understand how far I’m willing to go.”
“It is rather far you know,” Sidney, at this, in spite of everything, found himself persuasively remarking to Puddick.
It threw his wife straight upon him, and he felt her there, more massively weighted than he had ever known her, while she said: “I’ll make it four hundred and fifty. Yes, a year,” she then exaltedly pursued to their visitor. “I pass you my word of honour for it. That’s what I’ll allow Mora as your wife.”
Traffle watched him, under this—and the more that an odd spasm or shade had come into his face; which in turn made our friend wish the more to bridge somehow the dark oddity of their difference. What was all the while at bottom sharpest for him was that they might somehow pull more together. “That, you see,” he fluted for conciliation, “is her aunt’s really, you know, I think, rather magnificent message for her.”
The young man took in clearly, during a short silence, the material magnificence—while Traffle again noted how almost any sort of fineness of appreciation could show in his face. “I’m sure I’m much obliged to you,” he presently said.
“You don’t refuse to let her have it, I suppose?” Mrs. Traffle further proceeded.
Walter Puddick’s clear eyes—clear at least as his host had hitherto judged them—seemed for the minute attached to the square, spacious sum. “I don’t refuse anything. I’ll give her your message.”
“Well,” said Jane, “that’s the assurance we’ve wanted.” And she gathered herself as for relief, on her own side, at his departure.
He lingered but a moment—which was long enough, however, for her husband to see him, as with an in-tenser twinge of the special impatience just noted in him, look, all unhappily, from Mora’s aunt to Mora’s uncle. “Of course I can’t mention to her such a fact. But I wish, all the same,” he said with a queer sick smile, “that you’d just simply let us alone.”
He turned away with it, but Jane had already gone on. “Well, you certainly seem in sufficient possession of the right way to make us!”
Walter Puddick, picking up his hat and with his distinctly artistic and animated young back presented—though how it came to show so strikingly for such Sidney Traffle couldn’t have said—reached one of the doors of the room which was not right for his egress; while Sidney stood divided between the motion of correcting and guiding him and the irresistible need of covering Jane with a last woeful reproach. For he had seen something, had caught it from the sharp flicker of trouble finally breaking through Puddick’s face, caught it from the fact that—yes, positively—the upshot of their attack on him was a pair of hot tears in his eyes. They stood for queer, deep things, assuredly, these tears; they spoke portentously, since that was her note, of wonderful Mora; but there was an indelicacy in the pressure that had thus made the source of them public. “You have dished us now!” was what, for a Parthian shot, Jane’s husband would have liked to leave with her, and what in fact he would have articulately phrased if he hadn’t rather given himself to getting their guest with the least discomfort possible out of the room. Into the hall he ushered him, and there—absurd, incoherent person as he had again to know himself for—vaguely yet reassuringly, with an arm about him, patted him on the back. The full force of this victim’s original uttered warning came back to him; the probable perfect wisdom of his plea that, since he had infinitely to manage, their line, the aunt’s and the uncle’s, was just to let him feel his way; the gage of his sincerity as to this being the fact of his attachment. Sidney Traffle seemed somehow to feel the fullest force of both these truths during the moment his young friend recognised the intention of his gesture; and thus for a little, at any rate, while the closed door of the drawing-room and the shelter of the porch kept them unseen and unheard from within, they faced each other for the embarrassment that, as Traffle would have been quite ready to put it, they had in common. Their eyes met their eyes, their conscious grin their grin; hang it, yes, the screw was on Mora’s lover. Puddick’s recognition of his sympathy—well, proved that he needed something, though he didn’t need interference from the outside; which couldn’t, any way they might arrange it, seem delicate enough. Jane’s obtrusion of her four hundred and fifty affected Traffle thus as singularly gross; though part of that association might proceed for him, doubtless, from the remark in which his exasperated sensibility was, the next thing, to culminate.
“I’m afraid I can’t explain to you,” he first said, however, “why it is that in spite of my indoctrination, my wife fails to see that there’s only one answer a gentleman may make to the so intimate question she put to you.”
“I don’t know anything about that; I wasn’t at all making her a conventional reply. But I don’t mind assuring you, on my sacred honour–-“
So Walter Puddick was going on, but his host, with a firm touch of his arm, and very handsomely, as that host felt, or at least desired to feel, wouldn’t have it. “Ah, it’s none of my business; I accept what you’ve said, and it wouldn’t matter to you if I didn’t. Your situation’s evidently remarkable,” Traffle all sociably added, “and I don’t mind telling you that I, for one, have confidence in your tact. I recognised, that day I went to see you, that this was the only thing to do, and have done my best, ever since, to impress it on Mrs. Traffle. She replies to me that I talk at my ease, and the appearances are such, I recognise, that it would be odd she shouldn’t mind them. In short she has shown you how much she does mind them. I tell her,” our friend pursued, “that we mustn’t weigh appearances too mu
ch against realities—and that of those realities,” he added, balancing again a little on his toes and clasping his waist with his hands, which at the same time just worked down the back of his waistcoat, “you must be having your full share.” Traffle liked, as the effect of this, to see his visitor look at him harder; he felt how the ideal turn of their relation would be that he should show all the tact he was so incontestably showing, and yet at the same time not miss anything that would be interesting. “You see of course for yourself how little, after all, she knows Mora. She doesn’t appreciate the light hand that you must have to have with her—and that, I take it,” Sidney Traffle smiled, “is what you contend for with us.”