by Henry James
He didn’t offer her, as he looked about, the mere obvious “I see you’ve had visitors, or a visitor, and have smoked a pipe with them and haven’t bored yourself the least mite”—he broke straight into: “He has come out here again then, the wretch, and you’ve done him more justice? You’ve done him a good deal, my dear,” he laughed in the grace of his advantage, “if you’ve done him even half as much as he appears to have done your tea-table!” For this the quick flash-light of his imagination—that’s what it was for her to have married an imaginative man—was just the drop of a flying-machine into her castle court while she stood on guard at the gate. She gave him a harder look, and he feared he might kindle by too great an ease—as he was far from prematurely wishing to do—her challenge of his own experience. Her flush of presumption turned in fact, for the instant, to such a pathetically pale glare that, before he knew it, conscious of his resources and always coming characteristically round to indulgence as soon as she at all gave way, he again magnanimously abdicated. “He came to say it’s no use?” he went on, and from that moment knew himself committed to secrecy. It had tided him over the few seconds of his danger—that of Jane’s demanding of him what he had been up to. He didn’t want to be asked, no; and his not being asked guarded his not—yes—positively lying; since what most of all now filled his spirit was that he shouldn’t himself positively have to speak. His not doing so would be his keeping something all to himself—as Jane would have liked, for the six-and-a-half minutes of her strained, her poor fatuous chance, to keep her passage with Puddick; or to do this, in any case, till he could feel her resist what would certainly soon preponderantly make for her wish to see him stare at her producible plum. It wasn’t, moreover, that he could on his own side so fully withstand wonder; the wonder of this new singular ground of sociability between persons hitherto seeing so little with the same eyes. There were things that fitted—fitted somehow the fact of the young man’s return, and he could feel in his breastpocket, when it came to that, the presence of the very key to almost any blind or even wild motion, as a sign of trouble, on poor Puddick’s part; but what and where was the key to the mystery of Jane’s sudden pride in his surely at the best very queer communication? The eagerness of this pride it was, at all events, that after a litde so worked as to enable him to breathe again for his own momentarily menaced treasure. “They’re married—they’ve been married a month; not a bit as one would have wished, or by any form decent people recognise, but with the effect, at least, he tells me, that she’s now legally his wife and he legally her husband, so that neither can marry any one else, and that—and that–-“
“And that she has taken his horrid name, under our pressure, in exchange for her beautiful one—the one that so fitted her and that we ourselves, when all was said, did like so to keep repeating, in spite of everything, you won’t deny, for the pleasant showy thing, compared with our own and most of our friends’, it was to have familiarly about?” He took her up with this, as she had faltered a little over the other sources of comfort provided for them by the union so celebrated; in addition to which his ironic speech gained him time for the less candid, and thereby more cynically indulgent, profession of entire surprise. And he immediately added: “They’ve gone in for the mere civil marriage?”
“She appears to have consented to the very least of one that would do: they looked in somewhere, at some dingy office, jabbered a word or two to a man without h’s and with a pen behind his ear, signed their names, and then came out as good as you and me; very much as you and I the other day sent off that little postal-packet to Paris from our grocer’s back-shop.”
Traffle showed his interest—he took in the news. “Well, you know, you didn’t make Church a condition.”
“No—fortunately not. I was clever enough,” Jane bridled, “for that.”
She had more for him, her manner showed—she had that to which the bare fact announced was as nothing; but he saw he must somehow, yes, pay by knowing nothing more than he could catch at by brilliant guesses. That had after an instant become a comfort to him: it would legitimate dissimulation, just as this recognised necessity would make itself quickly felt as the mere unregarded underside of a luxury. “And they’re at all events, I take it,” he went on, “sufficiently tied to be divorced.”
She kept him—but only for a moment. “Quite sufficiently, I gather; and that,” she said, “may come.”
She made him, with it, quite naturally start. “Are they thinking of it already?”
She looked at him another instant hard, as with the rich expression of greater stores of private knowledge than she could adapt all at once to his intelligence. “You’ve no conception—not the least.—of how he feels.”
Her husband hadn’t hereupon, he admitted to himself, all artificially to gape. “Of course I haven’t, love.” Now that he had decided not to give his own observation away—and this however Puddick might “feel”—he should find it doubtless easy to be affectionate. “But he has been telling you all about it?”
“He has been here nearly two hours—as you of course, so far as that went, easily guessed. Nominally—at first—he had come out to see you; but he asked for me on finding you absent, and when I had come in to him seemed to want nothing better–—”
“Nothing better than to stay and stay, Jane?” he smiled as he took her up. “Why in the world should he? What I ask myself,” Traffle went on, “is simply how in the world you yourself could bear it.” She turned away from him, holding him now, she judged, in a state of dependence; she reminded him even of himself, at similar moments of her own asservissement, when he turned his back upon her to walk about and keep her unsatisfied; an analogy markedly perceptible on her pausing a moment as under her first impression of the scattered tea-things and then ringing to have them attended to. Their domestic, retarded Rebecca, almost fiercely appeared, and her consequent cold presence in the room and inevitably renewed return to it, by the open door, for several minutes, drew out an interval during which he felt nervous again lest it should occur to his wife to wheel round on him with a question. She did nothing of the sort, fortunately; she was as stuffed with supersessive answers as if she were the latest number of a penny periodical: it was only a matter still of his continuing to pay his penny. She wasn’t, moreover, his attention noted, trying to be portentous; she was much rather secretly and perversely serene—the basis of which condition did a little tax his fancy. What on earth had Puddick done to her—since he hadn’t been able to bring her out Mora—that had made her distinguishably happier, beneath the mere grimness of her finally scoring at home, than she had been for so many months? The best she could have learned from him—Sidney might even at this point have staked his life upon it—wouldn’t have been that she could hope to make Mrs. Puddick the centre of a grand rehabilitative tea-party. “Why then,” he went on again, “if they were married a month ago and he was so ready to stay with you two hours, hadn’t he come sooner?”
“He didn’t come to tell me they were married—not on purpose for that,” Jane said after a little and as if the fact itself were scarce more than a trifle—compared at least with others she was possessed of, but that she didn’t yet mention.
“Well”—Traffle frankly waited now—”what in the world did he come to tell you?”
She made no great haste with it. “His fears.”
“What fears—at present?” he disingenuously asked.
“‘At present?’ Why, it’s just ‘at present’ that he feels he has got to look out.” Yes, she was distinctly, she was strangely placid about it. “It’s worse to have to have them now that she’s his wife, don’t you understand?” she pursued as if he were really almost beginning to try her patience. “His difficulties aren’t over,” she nevertheless condescended further to mention.
She was irritating, decidedly; but he could always make the reflection that if she had been truly appointed to wear him out she would long since have done so. “What difficulties,” he accord
ingly continued, “are you talking about?”
“Those my splendid action—for he grants perfectly that it is and will remain splendid—have caused for him.” But her calmness, her positive swagger of complacency over it, was indeed amazing.
“Do you mean by your having so forced his hand?” Traffie had now no hesitation in risking.
“By my having forced hers,” his wife presently returned. “By my glittering bribe, as he calls it.”
He saw in a moment how she liked what her visitor had called things; yet it made him, himself, but want more. “She found your bribe so glittering that she couldn’t resist it?”
“She couldn’t resist it.” And Jane sublimely stalked. “She consented to perform the condition attached—as I’ve mentioned to you—for enjoying it.”
Traffle artfully considered. “If she has met you on that arrangement where do the difficulties come in?”
Jane looked at him a moment with wonderful eyes. “For me? They don’t come in!” And she again turned her back on him.
It really tempted him to permit himself a certain impatience—which in fact he might have shown hadn’t he by this time felt himself more intimately interested in Jane’s own evolution than in Mr. Puddick’s, or even, for the moment, in Mora’s. That interest ministered to his art. “You must tell me at your convenience about yours, that is about your apparently feeling yourself now so beautifully able to sink yours. What I’m asking you about is his—if you’ve put them so at your ease.”
“I haven’t put them a bit at their ease!”—and she was at him with it again almost as in a glow of triumph.
He aimed at all possible blankness. “But surely four hundred and fifty more a year–-!”
“Four hundred and fifty more is nothing to her.”
“Then why the deuce did she marry him for it?—since she apparently couldn’t bring herself to without it.”
“She didn’t marry him that she herself should get my allowance—she married him that he should.”
At which Traffle had a bit genuinely to wonder. “It comes at any rate to the same if you pay it to her.”
Nothing, it would seem, could possibly have had on Jane’s state of mind a happier effect. “I sha’n’t pay it to her.”
Her husband could again but stare. “You won’t, dear?” he deprecated.
“I don’t,” she nobly replied. And then as at last for one of her greater cards: “I pay it to him.”
“But if he pays it to her–-?”
“He doesn’t. He explains.”
Traffle cast about. “Explains—a—to Mora?”
“Explains to me. He has,” she almost defiantly bridled, “perfectly explained.”
Her companion smiled at her. “Ah, that then is what took him two hours!” He went on, however, before she could either attenuate or amplify: “It must have taken him that of course to arrange with you—as I understand?—for his monopolising the money?”
She seemed to notify him now that from her high command of the situation she could quite look down on the spiteful sarcastic touch. “We have plenty to arrange. We have plenty to discuss. We shall often—if you want to know—have occasion to meet.” After which, “Mora,” she quite gloriously brought forth, “hates me worse than ever.”
He opened his eyes to their widest. “For settling on her a substantial fortune?”
“For having”—and Jane had positively a cold smile for it—”believed her not respectable.”
“Then was she?” Traffle gaped.
It did turn on him the tables! “Mr. Puddick continues to swear it.” But even though so gracefully patient of him she remained cold.
“You yourself, however, haven’t faith?”
“No,” said Mrs. Traffle.
“In his word, you mean?”
She had a fine little wait. “In her conduct In his knowledge of it.”
Again he had to rise to it. “With other persons?”
“With other persons. Even then.”
Traffle thought. “But even when?”
“Even from the first,” Jane grandly produced.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he found himself crying with a flush. He had had occasion to colour in the past for her flatness, but never for such an audacity of point. Wonderful, all round, in the light of reflection, seemed what Mora was doing for them. “It won’t be her husband, at all events, who has put you up to that!”
She took this in as if it might have been roguishly insinuating in respect to her own wit—though not, as who should say, to make any great use of it. “It’s what I read–-“
“What you ‘read’—?” he asked as she a little hung fire.
“Well, into the past that from far back so troubled me. I had plenty to tell him!” she surprisingly went on.
“Ah, my dear, to the detriment of his own wife?” our friend broke out.
It earned him, however, but her at once harder and richer look. Clearly she was at a height of satisfaction about something—it spread and spread more before him. “For all that really, you know, she is now his wife!”
He threw himself amazedly back. “You mean she practically isn’t?” And then as her eyes but appeared to fill it out: “Is that what you’ve been having from him?—and is that what we’ve done?”
She looked away a little—she turned off again. “Of course I’ve wanted the full truth—as to what I’ve done.”
Our friend could imagine that, at strict need; but wondrous to him with it was this air in her as of the birth of a new detachment. “What you’ve ‘done,’ it strikes me, might be a little embarrassing for us; but you speak as if you really quite enjoyed it!”
This was a remark, he had to note, by which she wasn’t in the least confounded; so that if he had his impression of that odd novelty in her to which allusion has just been made, it might indeed have been quite a new Jane who now looked at him out of her conscious eyes. “He likes to talk to me, poor dear.”
She treated his observation as if that quite met it—which couldn’t but slightly irritate him; but he hadn’t in the least abjured self-control, he was happy to feel, on his returning at once: “And you like to talk with him, obviously—since he appears so beautifully and quickly to have brought you round from your view of him as merely low.”
She flushed a little at this reminder, but it scarcely pulled her up. “I never thought him low”—she made no more of it than that; “but I admit,” she quite boldly smiled, “that I did think him wicked.”
“And it’s now your opinion that people can be wicked without being low?”
Prodigious really, he found himself make out while she just hesitated, the opinions over the responsibility of which he should yet see her—and all as a consequence of this one afternoon of his ill-inspired absence—ready thus unnaturally to smirk at him. “It depends,” she complacently brought out, “on the kind.”
“On the kind of wickedness?”
“Yes, perhaps. And”—it didn’t at all baffle her—”on the kind of people.”
“I see. It’s all, my dear, I want to get at—for a proper understanding of the extraordinary somersault you appear to have turned. Puddick has just convinced you that his immoralities are the right ones?”
“No, love—nothing will ever convince me that any immoralities deserve that name. But some,” she went on, “only seem wrong till they’re explained.”
“And those are the ones that, as you say, he has been explaining?” Traffle asked with a glittering cheerful patience.
“He has explained a great deal, yes”—Jane bore up under it; “but I think that, by the opportunity for a good talk with him, I’ve at last understood even more. We weren’t, you see, before,” she obligingly added, “in his confidence.”
“No, indeed,” her husband opined, “we could scarcely be said to be. But now we are, and it makes the difference?”
“It makes the difference to me,” Jane nobly contented herself with claiming. “If I’ve been remiss, however,” she s
howed herself prepared to pursue, “I must make it up. And doubtless I have been.”
“‘Remiss,’” he stared, “when you’re in full enjoyment of my assent to our making such sacrifices for her?”
She gave it, in her superior way, a moment’s thought. “I don’t mean remiss in act; no, that, thank goodness, we haven’t been. But remiss in feeling,” she quite unbearably discriminated.
“Ah, that, par exemple,” he protested, “I deny that I’ve been for a moment!”