The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  The afternoon waned, bringing with it the slight chill which, at the summer’s end, begins to mark the shortening days. She turned her face homeward, and by this time became conscious that if Verena’s companion had not yet brought her back there might be ground for uneasiness as to what had happened to them. It seemed to her that no sail-boat could have put into the town without passing more or less before her eyes and showing her whom it carried; she had seen a dozen, freighted only with the figures of men. An accident was perfectly possible (what could Ransom, with his plantation habits, know about the management of a sail?), and once that danger loomed before her—the signal loveliness of the weather had prevented its striking her before—Olive’s imagination hurried, with a bound, to the worst. She saw the boat overturned and drifting out to sea, and (after a week of nameless horror) the body of an unknown young woman, defaced beyond recognition, but with long auburn hair and in a white dress, washed up in some far-away cove. An hour before, her mind had rested with a sort of relief on the idea that Verena should sink for ever beneath the horizon, so that their tremendous trouble might never be; but now, with the lateness of the hour, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how she had understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of blindness. The twilight had become thick by the time she reached Marmion and paused for an instant in front of her house, over which the elms that stood on the grassy wayside appeared to her to hang a blacker curtain than ever before.

  There was no candle in any window, and when she pushed in and stood in the hall, listening a moment, her step awakened no answering sound. Her heart failed her; Verena’s staying out in a boat from ten o’clock in the morning till nightfall was too unnatural, and she gave a cry, as she rushed into the low, dim parlour (darkened on one side, at that hour, by the wide-armed foliage, and on the other by the veranda and trellis), which expressed only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself. The next moment she started back, with another and a different exclamation, for Verena was in the room, motionless, in a corner—the first place in which she had seated herself on re-entering the house—looking at her with a silent face which seemed strange, unnatural, in the dusk. Olive stopped short, and for a minute the two women remained as they were, gazing at each other in the dimness. After that, too, Olive still said nothing; she only went to Verena and sat down beside her. She didn’t know what to make of her manner; she had never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed crushed and humbled. This was almost the worst—if anything could be worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an irresistible impulse of compassion and assurance. From the way it lay in her own she guessed her whole feeling—saw it was a kind of shame, shame for her weakness, her swift surrender, her insane gyration, in the morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her silence itself was an appeal—an appeal to Olive to ask no questions (she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she understood, and the woefulness of it all only seemed the deeper. She would just sit there and hold her hand; that was all she could do; they were beyond each other’s help in any other way now. Verena leaned her head back and closed her eyes, and for an hour, as nightfall settled in the room, neither of the young women spoke. Distinctly, it was a kind of shame. After a while the parlour-maid, very casual, in the manner of the servants at Marmion, appeared on the threshold with a lamp; but Olive motioned her frantically away. She wished to keep the darkness. It was a kind of shame.

  The next morning Basil Ransom rapped loudly with his walking-stick on the lintel of Miss Chancellor’s house-door, which, as usual on fine days, stood open. There was no need he should wait till the servant had answered his summons; for Olive, who had reason to believe he would come, and who had been lurking in the sitting-room for a purpose of her own, stepped forth into the little hall.

  “I am sorry to disturb you; I had the hope that—for a moment—I might see Miss Tarrant.” That was the speech with which (and a measured salutation) he greeted his advancing kinswoman. She faced him an instant, and her strange green eyes caught the light.

  “It’s impossible. You may believe that when I say it.”

  “Why is it impossible?” he asked, smiling in spite of an inward displeasure. And as Olive gave him no answer, only gazing at him with a cold audacity which he had not hitherto observed in her, he added a little explanation. “It is simply to have seen her before I go—to have said five words to her. I want her to know that I have made up my mind—since yesterday—to leave this place; I shall take the train at noon.”

  It was not to gratify Olive Chancellor that he had determined to go away, or even that he told her this; yet he was surprised that his words brought no expression of pleasure to her face. “I don’t think it is of much importance whether you go away or not. Miss Tarrant herself has gone away.”

  “Miss Tarrant—gone away?” This announcement was so much at variance with Verena’s apparent intentions the night before that his ejaculation expressed chagrin as well as surprise, and in doing so it gave Olive a momentary advantage. It was the only one she had ever had, and the poor girl may be excused for having enjoyed it—so far as enjoyment was possible to her. Basil Ransom’s visible discomfiture was more agreeable to her than anything had been for a long time.

  “I went with her myself to the early train; and I saw it leave the station.” And Olive kept her eyes unaverted, for the satisfaction of seeing how he took it.

  It must be confessed that he took it rather ill. He had decided it was best he should retire, but Verena’s retiring was another matter. “And where is she gone?” he asked, with a frown.

  “I don’t think I am obliged to tell you.”

  “Of course not! Excuse my asking. It is much better that I should find it out for myself, because if I owed the information to you I should perhaps feel a certain delicacy as regards profiting by it.”

  “Gracious heaven!” cried Miss Chancellor, at the idea of Ransom’s delicacy. Then she added more deliberately: “You will not find out for yourself.”

  “You think not?”

  “I am sure of it!” And her enjoyment of the situation becoming acute, there broke from her lips a shrill, unfamiliar, troubled sound, which performed the office of a laugh, a laugh of triumph, but which, at a distance, might have passed almost as well for a wail of despair. It rang in Ransom’s ears as he quickly turned away.

  XL

  It was Mrs. Luna who received him, as she had received him on the occasion of his first visit to Charles Street; by which I do not mean quite in the same way. She had known very little about him then, but she knew too much for her happiness to-day, and she had with him now a little invidious, contemptuous manner, as if everything he should say or do could be a proof only of abominable duplicity and perversity. She had a theory that he had treated her shamefully; and he knew it—I do not mean the fact, but the theory: which led him to reflect that her resentments were as shallow as her opinions, inasmuch as if she really believed in her grievance, or if it had had any dignity, she would not have consented to see him. He had not presented himself at Miss Chancellor’s door without a very good reason, and having done so he could not turn away so long as there was any one in the house of whom he might have speech. He had sent up his name to Mrs. Luna, after being told that she was staying there, on the mere chance that she would see him; for he thought a refusal a very possible sequel to the letters she had written him during the past four or five months—letters he had scarcely read, full of allusions of the most cutting sort to proceedings of his, in the past, of which he had no recollection whatever. They bored him,
for he had quite other matters in his mind.

  “I don’t wonder you have the bad taste, the crudity,” she said, as soon as he came into the room, looking at him more sternly than he would have believed possible to her.

  He saw that this was an allusion to his not having been to see her since the period of her sister’s visit to New York; he having conceived for her, the evening of Mrs. Burrage’s party, a sentiment of aversion which put an end to such attentions. He didn’t laugh, he was too worried and preoccupied; but he replied, in a tone which apparently annoyed her as much as any indecent mirth: “I thought it very possible you wouldn’t see me.”

  “Why shouldn’t I see you, if I should take it into my head? Do you suppose I care whether I see you or not?”

  “I supposed you wanted to, from your letters.”

  “Then why did you think I would refuse?”

  “Because that’s the sort of thing women do.”

  “Women—women! You know much about them!”

  “I am learning something every day.”

  “You haven’t learned yet, apparently, to answer their letters. It’s rather a surprise to me that you don’t pretend not to have received mine.”

  Ransom could smile now; the opportunity to vent the exasperation that had been consuming him almost restored his good humour. “What could I say? You overwhelmed me. Besides, I did answer one of them.”

  “One of them? You speak as if I had written you a dozen!” Mrs. Luna cried.

  “I thought that was your contention—that you had done me the honour to address me so many. They were crushing, and when a man’s crushed, it’s all over.”

  “Yes, you look as if you were in very small pieces! I am glad that I shall never see you again.”

  “I can see now why you received me—to tell me that,” Ransom said.

  “It is a kind of pleasure. I am going back to Europe.”

  “Really? for Newton’s education?”

  “Ah, I wonder you can have the face to speak of that—after the way you deserted him!”

  “Let us abandon the subject, then, and I will tell you what I want.”

  “I don’t in the least care what you want,” Mrs. Luna remarked. “And you haven’t even the grace to ask me where I am going—over there.”

  “What difference does that make to me—once you leave these shores?”

  Mrs. Luna rose to her feet. “Ah, chivalry, chivalry!” she exclaimed. And she walked away to the window—one of the windows from which Ransom had first enjoyed, at Olive’s solicitation, the view of the Back Bay. Mrs. Luna looked forth at it with little of the air of a person who was sorry to be about to lose it. “I am determined you shall know where I am going,” she said in a moment. “I am going to Florence.”

  “Don’t be afraid!” he replied. “I shall go to Rome.”

  “And you’ll carry there more impertinence than has been seen there since the old emperors.”

  “Were the emperors impertinent, in addition to their other vices? I am determined, on my side, that you shall know what I have come for,” Ransom said. “I wouldn’t ask you if I could ask any one else; but I am very hard pressed, and I don’t know who can help me.”

  Mrs. Luna turned on him a face of the frankest derision. “Help you? Do you remember the last time I asked you to help me?”

  “That evening at Mrs. Burrage’s? Surely I wasn’t wanting then; I remember urging on your acceptance a chair, so that you might stand on it, to see and to hear.”

  “To see and to hear what, please? Your disgusting infatuation!”

  “It’s just about that I want to speak to you,” Ransom pursued. “As you already know all about it, you have no new shock to receive, and I therefore venture to ask you–-“

  “Where tickets for her lecture to-night can be obtained? Is it possible she hasn’t sent you one?”

  “I assure you I didn’t come to Boston to hear it,” said Ransom, with a sadness which Mrs. Luna evidently regarded as a refinement of outrage. “What I should like to ascertain is where Miss Tarrant may be found at the present moment.”

  “And do you think that’s a delicate inquiry to make of me?”

  “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be, but I know you don’t think it is, and that is why, as I say, I mention the matter to you only because I can imagine absolutely no one else who is in a position to assist me. I have been to the house of Miss Tarrant’s parents, in Cambridge, but it is closed and empty, destitute of any sign of life. I went there first, on arriving this morning, and rang at this door only when my journey to Monadnoc Place had proved fruitless. Your sister’s servant told me that Miss Tarrant was not staying here, but she added that Mrs. Luna was. No doubt you won’t be pleased at having been spoken of as a sort of equivalent; and I didn’t say to myself—or to the servant—that you would do as well; I only reflected that I could at least try you. I didn’t even ask for Miss Chancellor, as I am sure she would give me no information whatever.”

  Mrs. Luna listened to this candid account of the young man’s proceedings with her head turned a little over her shoulder at him, and her eyes fixed as unsympathetically as possible upon his own. “What you propose, then, as I understand it,” she said in a moment, “is that I should betray my sister to you.”

  “Worse than that; I propose that you should betray Miss Tarrant herself.”

  “What do I care about Miss Tarrant? I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Haven’t you really any idea where she is living? Haven’t you seen her here? Are Miss Olive and she not constantly together?”

  Mrs. Luna, at this, turned full round upon him, and, with folded arms and her head tossed back, exclaimed: “Look here, Basil Ransom, I never thought you were a fool, but it strikes me that since we last met you have lost your wits!”

  “There is no doubt of that,” Ransom answered, smiling.

  “Do you mean to tell me you don’t know everything about Miss Tarrant that can be known?”

  “I have neither seen her nor heard of her for the last ten weeks; Miss Chancellor has hidden her away.”

  “Hidden her away, with all the walls and fences of Boston flaming to-day with her name?”

  “Oh yes, I have noticed that, and I have no doubt that by waiting till this evening I shall be able to see her. But I don’t want to wait till this evening; I want to see her now, and not in public—in private.”

  “Do you indeed?—how interesting!” cried Mrs. Luna, with rippling laughter. “And pray what do you want to do with her?”

  Ransom hesitated a little. “I think I would rather not tell you.”