by Henry James
“We shall at all events—if that’s anything—be together.”
It was his own good impulse in herself. “It’s what I’ve ventured to feel. It’s much.” She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with her sole and single boldness—and also on grounds he hadn’t then measured—that Mrs. Stringham was a person who WOULDN’T, at a pinch, in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in which Kate was always showing. “You don’t think then very horridly of me?”
And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous effusion—quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what helped him. “Oh you’ve been extraordinary!”
It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there. She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also, accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. “She has turned her face to the wall.”
He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences, they were simply so leaving what he saw. “She doesn’t speak at all? I don’t mean not of me.”
“Of nothing—of no one.” And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take it. “She doesn’t WANT to die. Think of her age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is. Think of all she HAS. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God—!” the poor lady wound up with a wan inconsequence.
He wondered. “You thank God—?”
“That she’s so quiet.”
He continued to wonder. “IS she so quiet?”
“She’s more than quiet. She’s grim. It’s what she has never been. So you see—all these days. I can’t tell you—but it’s better so. It would kill me if she WERE to tell me.”
“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 S
trett. 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, as 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.”
“0h!” 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 recognise. 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.”