by Henry James
“No”—and she fairly mused at him; “you seemed to have all sorts of ideas; while I,” she conceded, “had only one, which, so far as it went, was good. But it didn’t go far enough.”
He watched her a moment. “I doubtless don’t know what idea you mean,” he smiled, “but how far does it go now?”
She hadn’t, with her preoccupied eyes on him, so much as noticed the ironic ring of it. “Well, you’ll see for yourself. I mustn’t abandon him.”
“Abandon Puddick? Who the deuce then ever said you must?”
“Didn’t you a little,” she blandly inquired, “all the while you were so great on our not ‘interfering’?”
“I was great—if great you call it—only,” he returned, “so far as I was great for our just a little understanding.”
“Well, what I’m telling you is that I think I do at present just a little understand.”
“And doesn’t it make you feel just a little badly?”
“No”—she serenely shook her head; “for my intention was so good. He does justice now,” she explained, “to my intention; or he will very soon—he quite let me see that, and it’s why I’m what you call ‘happy’ With which,” she wound up, “there’s so much more I can still do. There are bad days, you see, before him—and then he’ll have only me. For if she was respectable,” Jane proceeded, reverting as imperturbably to their question of a while back, “she’s certainly not nice now.”
He’d be hanged, Traffle said to himself, if he wouldn’t look at her hard. “Do you mean by not coming to thank you?” And then as she but signified by a motion that this she had now made her terms with: “What else then is the matter with her?”
“The matter with her,” said Jane on the note of high deliberation and competence, and not without a certain pity for his own want of light, “the matter with her is that she’s quite making her preparations, by what he’s convinced, for leaving him.”
“Leaving him?”—he met it with treasures of surprise.
These were nothing, however, he could feel, to the wealth of authority with which she again gave it out “Leaving him.”
“A month after marriage?”
“A month after—their form; and she seems to think it handsome, he says, that she waited the month. That,” she added, “is what he came above all that we should know.”
He took in, our friend, many things in silence; but he presently had his comment. “We’ve done our job then to an even livelier tune than we could have hoped!”
Again this moral of it all didn’t appear to shock her. “He doesn’t reproach me,” she wonderfully said.
“I’m sure it’s very good of him then!” Traffle cried.
But her blandness, her mildness, was proof. “My dear Sidney, Walter is very good.”
She brought it out as if she had made, quite unaided, the discovery; though even this perhaps was not what he most stared at. “Do you call him Walter?”
“Surely”—and she returned surprise for surprise—”isn’t he my nephew?”
Traffle bethought himself. “You recognise the Registrar then for that.”
She could perfectly smile back. “I don’t know that I would if our friend weren’t so interesting.”
It was quite for Sidney Traffle, at this, as if he hadn’t known up to that moment, filled for him with her manner of intimating her reason, what sort of a wife—for coolness and other things—he rejoiced in. Really he had to take time—and to throw himself, while he did so, into pretences. “The Registrar?”
“Don’t be a goose, dear!”—she showed she could humour him at last; and it was perhaps the most extraordinary impression he had ever in his life received. “But you’ll see,” she continued in this spirit. “I mean how I shall interest you.” And then as he but seemed to brood at her: “Interest you, I mean, in my interest—for I sha’n’t content myself,” she beautifully professed, “with your simply not minding it.”
“Minding your interest?” he frowned.
“In my poor ravaged, lacerated, pathetic nephew. I shall expect you in some degree to share it.”
“Oh, I’ll share it if you like, but you must remember how little I’m responsible.”
She looked at him abysmally. “No—it was mainly me. He brings that home to me, poor dear. Oh, he doesn’t scare me!”—she kept it up; “and I don’t know that I want him to, for it seems to clear the whole question, and really to ease me a little, that he should put everything before me, his grievance with us, I mean, and that I should know just how he has seen our attitude, or at any rate mine. I was stupid the other day when he came—he saw but a part of it then. It’s settled,” she further mentioned, “that I shall go to him.”
“Go to him—?” Traffle blankly echoed.
“At his studio, dear, you know,” Jane promptly supplied. “I want to see his work—for we had some talk about that too. He has made me care for it.”
Her companion took these things in—even so many of them as there now seemed to be: they somehow left him, in point of fact, so stranded. “Why not call on her at once?”
“That will be useless when she won’t receive me. Never, never!” said Jane with a sigh so confessedly superficial that her husband found it peculiarly irritating.
“He has brought that ‘home’ to you?” he consequently almost jibed.
She winced no more, however, than if he had tossed her a flower. “Ah, what he has made me realise is that if he has definitely lost her, as he feels, so we ourselves assuredly have, for ever and a day. But he doesn’t mean to lose sight of her, and in that way–-“
“In that way?”—Traffle waited.
“Well, I shall always hear whatever there may be. And there’s no knowing,” she developed as with an open and impartial appetite, “what that mayn’t come to.”
He turned away—with his own conception of this possible expansive quantity and a sore sense of how the combinations of things were appointed to take place without his aid or presence, how they kept failing to provide for him at all. It was his old irony of fate, which seemed to insist on meeting him at every turn. Mora had testified in the morning to no further use for him than might reside in his making her shuffled-off lover the benevolent business of his life; but even in this cold care, clearly, he was forestalled by a person to whom it would come more naturally. It was by his original and independent measure that the whole case had become interesting and been raised above the level of a mere vulgar scandal; in spite of which he could now stare but at the prospect of exclusion, and of his walking round it, through the coming years—to walk vaguely round and round announcing itself thus at the best as the occupation of his future—in wider and remoter circles. As against this, for warmth, there would nestle in his breast but a prize of memory, the poor little secret of the passage at the Gallery that the day had bequeathed him. He might propose to hug this treasure of consciousness, to make it, by some ingenuity he couldn’t yet forecast, his very own; only it was a poor thing in view of their positive privation, and what Jane was getting out of the whole business—her ingenuity it struck him he could quite forecast—would certainly be a comparative riot of sympathy. He stood with his hands in his pockets and gazed a little, very sightlessly—that is with an other than ranging vision, even though not other than baffled one too—out of the glimmering square of the window. Then, however, he recalled himself, slightly shook himself, and the next moment had faced about with a fresh dissimulation. “If you talk of her leaving him, and he himself comes in for all your bounty, what then is she going to live upon?”
“On her wits, he thinks and fears; on her beauty, on her audacity. Oh, it’s a picture—!” Jane was now quite unshrinkingly able to report from her visitor. Traffle, morally fingering, as it were, the mystic medal under his shirt, was at least equally qualified, on his side, to gloom all yearningly at her; but she had meanwhile testified further to her consistent command of their position. “He believes her to be more than ever—not ‘respectable.’�
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“How, ‘more than ever,’ if respectable was what she was?”
“It was what she wasn’t!” Jane returned.
He had a prodigious shrug—it almost eased him for the moment of half his impatience. “I understood that you told me a moment ago the contrary.”
“Then you understood wrong. All I said was that he says she was—but that I don’t believe him.”
He wondered, following. “Then how does he come to describe her as less so?”
Jane straightened it out—Jane surpassed herself. “He doesn’t describe her as less so than she ‘was’—I only put her at that. He“—oh, she was candid and clear about it!—”simply puts her at less so than she might be. In order, don’t you see,” she luminously reasoned, “that we shall have it on our conscience that we took the case out of his hands.”
“And you allowed to him then that that’s how we do have it?”
To this her face lighted as never yet. “Why, it’s just the point of what I tell you—that I feel I must.”
He turned it over. “But why so if you’re right?”
She brought up her own shoulders for his density. “I haven’t been right. I’ve been wrong.”
He could only glare about. “In holding her then already to have fallen–-?”
“Oh dear no, not that! In having let it work me up. Of course I can but take from him now,” she elucidated, “what he insists on.”
Her husband measured it. “Of course, in other words, you can but believe she was as bad as possible, and yet pretend to him he has persuaded you of the contrary?”
“Exactly, love—so that it shall make us worse. As bad as he wants us,” she smiled.
“In order,” Traffle said after a moment, “that he may comfortably take the money?”
She welcomed this gleam. “In order that he may comfortably take it.”
He could but gaze at her again. “You have arranged it!”
“Certainly I have—and that’s why I’m calm. He considers, at any rate,” she continued, “that it will probably be Sir Bruce. I mean that she’ll leave him for.”
“And who in the world is Sir Bruce?”
She consulted her store of impressions. “Sir Bruce Bagley, Bart., I think he said.”
Traffle fitted it in silence. “A soldier?” he then asked.
“I’m uncertain—but, as I seem to remember, a patron. He buys pictures.”
Traffle could privately imagine it. “And that’s how she knows him?”
Jane allowed for his simplicity. “Oh, how she ‘knows’ people–-!”
It still held him, however, an instant. “What sort of a type?”
She seemed to wonder a little at his press of questions, but after just facing it didn’t pretend to more than she knew. She was, on this basis of proper relations that she had settled, more and more willing, besides, to oblige. “I’ll find out for you.”
It came in a tone that made him turn off. “Oh, I don’t mind.” With which he was back at the window.
She hovered—she didn’t leave him; he felt her there behind him as if she had noted a break in his voice or a moisture in his eyes—a tribute to a natural pang even for a not real niece. He wouldn’t renew with her again, and would have been glad now had she quitted him; but there grew for him during the next moments the strange sense that, with what had so bravely happened for her—to the point of the triumph of displaying it to him inclusive—the instinct of compassion worked in her; though whether in respect of the comparative solitude to which her duties to “Walter” would perhaps more or less relegate him, or on the score of his having brought home to him, as she said, so much that was painful, she hadn’t yet made up her mind. This, after a little, however, she discreetly did; she decided in the sense of consideration for his nerves. She lingered—he felt her more vaguely about; and in the silence that thus lasted between them he felt also, with its importance, the determination of their life for perhaps a long time to come. He was wishing she’d go—he was wanting not then again to meet her eyes; but still more than either of these things he was asking himself, as from time to time during the previous months he had all subtly and idly asked, what would have been the use, after all, of so much imagination as constantly worked in him. Didn’t it let him into more deep holes than it pulled him out of? Didn’t it make for him more tight places than it saw him through? Or didn’t it at the same time, not less, give him all to himself a life, exquisite, occult, dangerous and sacred, to which everything ministered and which nothing could take away?
He fairly lost himself in that aspect—which it was clear only the vision and the faculty themselves could have hung there, of a sudden, so wantonly, before him; and by the moment attention for nearer things had re-emerged he seemed to know how his wife had interpreted his air of musing melancholy absence. She had dealt with it after her own fashion; had given him a moment longer the benefit of a chance to inquire or appeal afresh; and then, after brushing him good-humouredly, in point of fact quite gaily, with her skirts, after patting and patronising him gently with her finger-tips, very much as he had patted and patronised Walter Puddick that day in the porch, had put him in his place, on the whole matter of the issue of their trouble, or at least had left him in it, by a happy last word. She had judged him more upset, more unable to conclude or articulate, about Mora and Sir Bruce, than she, with her easier power of rebound, had been; and her final wisdom, indeed her final tenderness, would be to show him cheerful and helpful mercy. “No then, I see I mustn’t rub it in. You sha’n’t be worried. I’ll keep it all to myself, dear.” With which she would have floated away—with which and some other things he was sensibly, relievingly alone. But he remained staring out at the approach of evening—and it was of the other things he was more and more conscious while the vague grey prospect held him. Even while he had looked askance in the greyness at the importunate fiend of fancy it was riding him again as the very genius of twilight; it played the long reach of its prompt lantern over Sir Bruce Bagley, the patron of promising young lives. He wondered about Sir Bruce, recalling his face and his type and his effect—his effect, so immediate, on Mora; wondered how he had proceeded, how he would still proceed, how far perhaps even they had got by that time. Lord, the fun some people did have! Even Jane, with her conscientious new care—even Jane, unmistakably, was in for such a lot.
A ROUND OF VISITS
I
HE had been out but once since his arrival, Mark Monteith; that was the next day after—he had disembarked by night on the previous; then everything had come at once, as he would have said, everything had changed. He had got in on Tuesday; he had spent Wednesday for the most part down town, looking into the dismal subject of his anxiety—the anxiety that, under a sudden decision, had brought him across the unfriendly sea at mid-winter, and it was through information reaching him on Wednesday evening that he had measured his loss, measured above all his pain. These were two distinct things, he felt, and, though both bad, one much worse than the other. It wasn’t till the next three days had pretty well ebbed, in fact, that he knew himself for so badly wounded. He had waked up on Thursday morning, so far as he had slept at all, with the sense, together, of a blinding New York blizzard and of a deep sore inward ache. The great white savage storm would have kept him at the best within doors, but his stricken state was by itself quite reason enough.
He so felt the blow indeed, so gasped, before what had happened to him, at the ugliness, the bitterness, and, beyond these things, the sinister strangeness, that, the matter of his dismay little by little detaching and projecting itself, settling there face to face with him as something he must now live with always, he might have been in charge of some horrid alien thing, some violent, scared, unhappy creature whom there was small joy, of a truth, in remaining with, but whose behaviour wouldn’t perhaps bring him under notice, nor otherwise compromise him, so long as he should stay to watch it. A young jibbering ape of one of the more formidable sorts, or an ominous infant pa
nther, smuggled into the great gaudy hotel and whom it might yet be important he shouldn’t advertise, couldn’t have affected him as needing more domestic attention. The great gaudy hotel—The Pocahontas, but carried out largely on “Du Barry” lines—made all about him, beside, behind, below, above, in blocks and tiers and superpositions, a sufficient defensive hugeness; so that, between the massive labyrinth and the New York weather, life in a lighthouse during a gale would scarce have kept him more apart. Even when in the course of that worse Thursday it had occurred to him for vague relief that the odious certified facts couldn’t be all his misery, and that, with his throat and a probable temperature, a brush of the epidemic, which was for ever brushing him, accounted for something, even then he couldn’t resign himself to bed and broth and dimness, but only circled and prowled the more within his high cage, only watched the more from his tenth story the rage of the elements.
In the afternoon he had a doctor—the caravanserai, which supplied everything in quantities, had one for each group of so many rooms—just in order to be assured that he was grippé enough for anything. What his visitor, making light of his attack, perversely told him was that he was, much rather, “blue” enough, and from causes doubtless known to himself—which didn’t come to the same thing; but he “gave him something,” prescribed him warmth and quiet and broth and courage, and came back the next day as to readminister this last dose. He then pronounced him better, and on Saturday pronounced him well—all the more that the storm had abated and the snow had been dealt with as New York, at a push, knew how to deal with things. Oh, how New York knew how to deal—to deal, that is, with other accumulations lying passive to its hand—was exactly what Mark now ached with his impression of; so that, still threshing about in this consciousness, he had on the Saturday come near to breaking out as to what was the matter with him. The Doctor brought in somehow the air of the hotel—which, cheerfully and conscientiously, by his simple philosophy, the good man wished to diffuse; breathing forth all the echoes of other woes and worries and pointing the honest moral that, especially with such a thermometer, there were enough of these to go round.