The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  His suggestion was thrown out as for its positive charm; but Jane stood now, to do her justice, as a rock. “She’s doing something that, surely, no girl in the world ever did before—in preferring, as I so strangely understand you, that her lover shouldn’t make her the obvious reparation. But is her reason her dislike of his vulgar name?”

  “That has no weight for you, Jane?” Traffle asked in reply.

  Jane dismally shook her head. “Who, indeed, as you say, are we? Her reason—if it is her reason—is vulgarer still.”

  He didn’t believe it could be Mora’s reason, and though he had made, under the impression of the morning, a brave fight, he had after reflection to allow still for much obscurity in their question. But he had none the less retained his belief in the visibly uncommon young man, and took occasion to make of his wife an inquiry that hadn’t hitherto come up in so straight a form and that sounded of a sudden rather odd. “Are you at all attached to her? Can you give me your word for that?”

  She faced him again like a waning wintry moon. “Attached to Mora? Why she’s my sister’s child.”

  “Ah that, my dear, is no answer! Can you assure me on your honour that you’re conscious of anything you can call real affection for her?”

  Jane blankly brooded. “What has that to do with it?”

  “I think it has everything. If we don’t feel a tenderness.”

  “You certainly strike me as feeling one!” Mrs. Traffic sarcastically cried.

  He weighed it, but to the effect of his protesting. “No, not enough for me to demand of her to marry to spare my sensibility.”

  His wife continued to gloom. “What is there in what she has done to make us tender?”

  “Let us admit then, if there’s nothing, that it has made us tough! Only then we must be tough. If we’re having the strain and the pain of it let us also have the relief and the fun.”

  “Oh the ‘fun’!” Jane wailed; but adding soon after: “If she’ll marry him I’ll forgive her.”

  “Ah, that’s not enough!” he pronounced as they went to bed.

  III

  Yet he was to feel too the length that even forgiving her would have to go—for Jane at least—when, a couple of days later, they both, from the drawing-room window, saw, to their liveliest astonishment, the girl alight at the gate. She had taken a fly from the station, and their attention caught her as she paused apparently to treat with the cabman of the question of his waiting for her or coming back. It seemed settled in a moment that he should wait; he didn’t remount his box, and she came in and up the garden-path. Jane had already flushed, and with violence, at the apparition, and in reply to her companion’s instant question had said: “Yes, I’ll see her if she has come back.”

  “Well, she has come back.”

  “She’s keeping her cab—she hasn’t come to stay.” Mrs. Traffle had gained a far door of retreat.

  “You won’t speak to her?”

  “Only if she has come to stay. Then—volumes!”

  He had remained near the window, held fast there by the weight of indefinite obligation that his wife’s flight from the field shifted to his shoulders. “But if she comes back to stay what can Puddick do?”

  This kept her an instant. “To stay till he marries her is what I mean.”

  “Then if she asks for you—as she only must—am I to tell her that?”

  Flushed and exalted, her hand on the door, Jane had for this question a really grand moment. “Tell her that if he will she shall come in—with your assent—for my four hundred.”

  “Oh, oh!” he ambiguously sounded while she whisked away and the door from the hall was at the same time thrown open by the parlour-maid. “Miss Montravers!” announced, with a shake of anguish, that domestic, whose heightened colour and scared eyes conformed to her mistress’s example. Traffle felt his own cheek, for that matter, unnaturally glow, and the very first of his observations as Mora was restored to his sight might have been that she alone of them all wore her complexion with no difference. There was little doubt moreover that this charming balance of white and pink couldn’t have altered but to its loss; and indeed when they were left alone the whole immediate effect for him of the girl’s standing there in immediate bright silence was that of her having come simply to reaffirm her extraordinary prettiness. It might have been just to say: “You’ve thought, and you think, all sorts of horrible things about me, but observe how little my appearance matches them, and in fact keep up coarse views if you can in the light of my loveliness.” Yet it wasn’t as if she had changed, either, even to the extent of that sharper emphasis: he afterward reflected, as he lived over this passage, that he must have taken for granted in her, with the life she was leading, so to call it, some visibility of boldness, some significant surface—of which absurd supposition her presence, at the end of three minutes, had disabused him to the point of making all the awkwardness his and leaving none at all for her. That was a side of things, the awkward, that she clearly meant never again to recognise in conversation—though certainly from the first, ever, she had brushed it by lightly enough. She was in truth exactly the same—except for her hint that they might have forgotten how pretty she could be; and he further made sure she would incur neither pains nor costs for any new attempt on them. The Mora they had always taken her for would serve her perfectly still; that young woman was bad enough, in all conscience, to hang together through anything that might yet happen.

  So much he was to feel she had conveyed, and that it was the little person presenting herself, at her convenience, on these terms who had been all the while, in their past, their portentous inmate—since what had the portent been, by the same token, but exactly of this? By the end of three minutes more our friend’s sole thought was to conceal from her that he had looked for some vulgar sign—such as, reported to Wimbledon tea-tables, could be confidentially mumbled about: he was almost as ashamed of that elderly innocence as if she had caught him in the fact of disappointment at it. Meanwhile she had expressed her errand very simply and serenely. “I’ve come to see you because I don’t want to lose sight of you—my being no longer with you is no reason for that.” She was going to ignore, he saw—and she would put it through: she was going to ignore everything that suited her, and the quantity might become prodigious. Thus it would rest upon them, poor things, to disallow, if they must, the grace of these negatives—in which process she would watch them flounder without help. It opened out before him—a vertiginous view of a gulf; the abyss of what the ignoring would include for the convenient general commerce; of what might lie behind, in fine, should the policy foreshadow the lurking quantity.

  He knew the vague void for one he should never bridge, and that to put on emphasis where Mora chose to neglect it would be work only for those who “gathered samphire” like the unfortunates in “King Lear,” or those who, by profession, planted lightning-rods at the tips of tremendous towers. He was committed to pusillanimity, which would yet have to figure for him, before he had done with it, he knew, as a gallant independence, by letting ten minutes go without mention of Jane. Mora had put him somehow into the position of having to explain that her aunt wouldn’t see her—precisely that was the mark of the girl’s attitude. But he’d be hanged if he’d do anything of the sort.

  It was therefore like giving poor Jane basely away, his not, to any tune, speaking for her—and all the more that their visitor sat just long enough to let his helplessness grow and reach perfection. By this facility it was he who showed—and for her amusement and profit—all the change she kept him from imputing to herself. He presented her—she held him up to himself as presenting her—with a new uncle, made over, to some loss of dignity, on purpose for her; and nothing could less have suited their theory of his right relation than to have a private understanding with her at his wife’s expense. However, gracefully grave and imperturbable, inimitably armed by her charming correctness, as she sat there, it would be her line in life, he was certain, to reduce many theorie
s, solemn Wimbledon theories about the scandalous person, to the futility of so much broken looking-glass. Not naming her aunt—since he didn’t—she had of course to start, for the air of a morning call, some other day or two; she asked for news of their few local friends quite as if these good people mightn’t ruefully have “cut” her, by what they had heard, should they have met her out on the road. She spoke of Mr. Puddick with perfect complacency, and in particular held poor Traffle very much as some master’s fiddle-bow might have made him hang on the semi-tone of a silver string when she referred to the visit he had paid the artist and to the latter’s having wondered whether he liked what he saw. She liked, more and more, Mora intimated, what was offered to her own view; Puddick was going to do, she was sure, such brilliant work—so that she hoped immensely he would come again. Traffle found himself, yes—it was positive—staying his breath for this; there was in fact a moment, that of her first throwing off her free “Puddick,” when it wouldn’t have taken much more to make him almost wish that, for rounded perfection, she’d say “Walter” at once. He would scarce have guaranteed even that there hadn’t been just then some seconds of his betraying that imagination in the demoralised eyes that her straight, clear, quiet beams sounded and sounded, against every presumption of what might have been. What essentially happened, at any rate, was that by the time she went she had not only settled him in the sinister attitude of having lost all interest in her aunt, but had made him give her for the profane reason of it that he was gaining so much in herself.

  He rushed in again, for that matter, to a frank clearance the moment he had seen the girl off the premises, attended her, that is, back to her fly. He hadn’t at this climax remarked to her that she must come again—which might have meant either of two or three incoherencies and have signified thereby comparatively little; he had only fixed on her a rolling eye—for it rolled, he strangely felt, without leaving her; which had the air of signifying heaven knew what. She took it, clearly, during the moment she sat there before her start, for the most rather than for the least it might mean; which again made him gape with the certitude that ever thereafter she would make him seem to have meant what she liked. She had arrived in a few minutes at as wondrous a recipe or as quick an inspiration for this as if she had been a confectioner using some unprecedented turn of the ladle for some supersubtle cream. He was a proved conspirator from that instant on, which was practically what he had qualified Jane, within ten minutes—if Jane had only been refreshingly sharper—to pronounce him. For what else in the world did it come to, his failure of ability to attribute any other fine sense to Mora’s odd “step” than the weird design of just giving them a lead? They were to leave her alone, by her sharp prescription, and she would show them once for all how to do it. Cutting her dead wasn’t leaving her alone, any idiot could do that; conversing with her affably was the privilege she offered, and the one he had so effectually embraced—he made a clean breast of this—that he had breathed to her no syllable of the message left with him by her aunt.

  “Then you mean,” this lady now inquired, “that I’m to go and call upon her, at that impossible place, just as if she were the pink of propriety and we had no exception whatever to take to her conduct? Then you mean,” Mrs. Traffle had pursued with a gleam in her eye of more dangerous portent than any he had ever known himself to kindle there—”then you mean that I’m to grovel before a chit of a creature on whom I’ve lavished every benefit, and to whom I’ve actually offered every indulgence, and who shows herself, in return for it all, by what I make out from your rigmarole, a fiend of insolence as well as of vice?”

  The danger described by Sidney Traffle was not that of any further act of violence from Jane than this freedom of address to him, unprecedented in their long intercourse—this sustained and, as he had in a degree to allow, not unfounded note of sarcasm; such a resort to which, on his wife’s part, would, at the best, mark the prospect for him, in a form flushed with novelty, of much conscious self-discipline. What looked out of her dear foolish face, very much with the effect of a new and strange head boldly shown at an old and familiar pacific window, was just the assurance that he might hope for no abashed sense in her of differing from him on all this ground as she had never differed on any. It was as if now, unmistakably, she liked to differ, the ground being her own and he scarce more than an unwarranted poacher there. Of course it was her own, by the fact, first, of Mora’s being her, not his, sister’s child; and, second, by all the force with which her announced munificence made it so. He took a moment to think how he could best meet her challenge, and then reflected that there was, happily, nothing like the truth—his truth, of which it was the insidious nature to prevail. “What she wanted, I make out, was but to give us the best pleasure she could think of. The pleasure, I mean, of our not only recognising how little we need worry about her, but of our seeing as well how pleasant it may become for us to keep in touch with her.”

  These words, he was well aware, left his wife—given her painful narrowness—a bristling quiver of retorts to draw from; yet it was not without a silent surprise that he saw her, with her irritated eyes on him, extract the bolt of finest point. He had rarely known her to achieve that discrimination before. “The pleasure then, in her view, you ‘make out’—since you make out such wonders!—is to be all for us only?”

  He found it fortunately given him still to smile. “That will depend, dear, on our appreciating it enough to make things agreeable to her in order to get it. But as she didn’t inquire for you,” he hastened to add, “I don’t—no I don’t—advise your going to see her even for the interest I speak of!” He bethought himself. “We must wait a while.”

  “Wait till she gets worse?”

  He felt after a little that he should be able now always to command a kindly indulgent tone. “I’ll go and see her if you like.”

  “Why in the world should I like it? Is it your idea—for the pleasure you so highly appreciate, and heaven knows what you mean by it!—to cultivate with her a free relation of your own?”

  “No”—he promptly returned—”I suggest it only as acting for you. Unless,” he went on, “you decidedly wish to act altogether for yourself.”

  For some moments she made no answer; though when she at last spoke it was as if it were an answer. “I shall send for Mr. Puddick.”

  “And whom will you send?”

  “I suppose I’m capable of a note,” Jane replied.

  “Yes, or you might even telegraph. But are you sure he’ll come?”

  “Am I sure, you mean,” she asked, “that his companion will let him? I can but try, at all events, and shall at any rate have done what I can.”

  “I think he’s afraid of her–-“

  Traffle had so begun, but she had already taken him up. “And you’re not, you mean—and that’s why you’re so eager?”

  “Ah, my dear, my dear?” He met it with his strained grimace. “Let us by all means,” he also, however, said, “have him if we can.”

  On which it was, for a little, that they strangely faced each other. She let his accommodation lie while she kept her eyes on him, and in a moment she had come up, as it were, elsewhere. “If I thought you’d see her–-!”

  “That I’d see her?”—for she had paused again.

  “See her and go on with her—well, without my knowledge,” quavered poor Jane, “I assure you you’d seem to me even worse than her. So will you promise me?” she ardently added.

  “Promise you what, dear?” He spoke quite mildly.

  “Not to see her in secret—which I believe would kill me.”

  “Oh, oh, oh, love!” Traffle smiled while she positively glared.

  IV

  Three days having elapsed, however, he had to feel that things had considerably moved on his being privileged to hear his wife, in the drawing-room, where they entertained Mr. Puddick at tea, put the great question straighter to that visitor than he himself, Sidney Traffle, could either have planned or presumed t
o do. Flushed to a fever after they had beat about the bush a little, Jane didn’t flinch from her duty. “What I want to know in plain terms, if you please, is whether or no you’re Mora’s lover?” “Plain terms”—she did have inspirations! so that under the shock he turned away, humming, as ever, in his impatience, and, the others being seated over the vain pretence of the afternoon repast, left the young man to say what he might. It was a fool’s question, and there was always a gape for the wisest (the greater the wisdom and the greater the folly) in any apprehension of such. As if he were going to say, remarkable Puddick, not less remarkable in his way than Mora—to say, that is, anything that would suit Jane; and as if it didn’t give her away for a goose that she should assume he was! Traffle had never more tiptoed off to the far end of the room, whether for pretence of a sudden interest in his precious little old Copley Fielding or on any other extemporised ground, than while their guest momentarily hung fire; but though he winced it was as if he now liked to wince—the occasions she gave him for doing so were such a sign of his abdication. He had wholly stepped aside, and she could flounder as she would: he had found exactly the formula that saved his dignity, that expressed his sincerity, and that yet didn’t touch his curiosity. “I see it would be indelicate for me to go further—yes, love, I do see that:” such was the concession he had resorted to for a snap of the particular tension of which we a moment ago took the measure. This had entailed Jane’s gravely pronouncing him, for the first time in her life, ridiculous; as if, in common sense—! She used that term also with much freedom now; at the same time that it hadn’t prevented her almost immediately asking him if he would mind writing her letter. Nothing could suit him more, from the moment she was ostensibly to run the show—as for her benefit he promptly phrased the matter—than that she should involve herself in as many inconsistencies as possible; since if he did such things in spite of his scruple this was as nothing to her needing him at every step in spite of her predominance.