The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder’s recommendation that nothing should be said to Kate—it was on all this might cover in Aunt Maud that the idea of an interesting complication could best hope to perch; and when in fact, after the colloquy we have reported, Milly saw Kate again without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the newer by its containing measurably a small element of anxiety: when she had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more free. Yet it WAS, none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate continued even now pre-eminently to remain for her; and a reason—this was the great point—of which the young woman herself could have no suspicion. Twice over thus, for two or three hours together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her, in the light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher’s eyes had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked, rather MORE beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might one’s self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as the “other,” the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was aware of this; but the other side was what had, of a sudden, been turned straight toward her by the show of Mr. Densher’s propinquity. She hadn’t the excuse of knowing it for Kate’s own, since nothing whatever as yet proved it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went, kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked, as usual, of everything but—as it had so abruptly become for Milly—THE thing. Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply a difference in this pair of occasions hadn’t she been tasting so peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter hadn’t mainly been that she herself was so “other,” so taken up with the unspoken; the strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never—and not from ill will nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common terms—reduce it to such a one’s comprehension or put it within her convenience.

  It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more, Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved, to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of “poor Marian,” so often referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our young woman’s first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the sense of how in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters could be opposed, how common ground for a place in the world could quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity—though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear Mrs. Condrip was, as might have been said, in quite another geography. She wouldn’t have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final relief of their benevolent “Here!” The interval was bridged of course, but the bridge verily was needed, and the impression left Milly to wonder if, in the general connexion, it were of bridges or of intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast, there were neither—neither the difference itself, from position to position, nor, on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it. The conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas—these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady, in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary legend—a mixed wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps mostly of Dickens—under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening, that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the adored author of “The Newcomes,” in fine, had been on the whole the note: the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of Pickwickian outline. She explained how she meant by this that Mrs. Condrip hadn’t altogether proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even—for she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate had spoken—a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Micawber.

  Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life such experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed “booked”—as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying—to miss: she had begun to have a little, for her fellow observer, these moments of fanciful reaction (reaction in which she was once more all Susan Shepherd) against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her overwhelming connexion with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never lost sight for long of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for it. They had, however, to-night another matter in hand; which proved to be presently, on the girl’s part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea, the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small complaint, had suddenly (without its being in the least “led up to”) broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with impatience as a person in love with her sister. “She wished me, if I cared for Kate, to know,” Milly said—”for it would be quite too dreadful, and one might do something.”

  Susie wondered. “Prevent anything coming of it? That’s easily said. Do what?”

  Milly had a dim smile. “I think that what she would like is that I should come a good deal to see HER about it.”

  “And doesn’t she suppose you’ve anything else to do?”

  The girl had by this time clearly made it out. “Nothing but to admire and make much of her sister—whom she doesn’t, however, herself in the least understand—and give up one’s time, and everything else, to it.” It struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented approach to sharpness; as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather indescribably disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham seen her companion exalted, and by the very play of something within, into a vague golden air that left irritation below. That was the great thing with Milly—it was her characteristic poetry, or at least it was Susan Shepherd’s. “But she made a point,” the former continued, “of my keeping what she says from Kate. I’m not to mention that she has spoken.”

  “And why,” Mrs. Stringham presently asked, “is Mr. Densher so dreadful?”

  Milly had, she thought, a delay to answer—something that suggested a fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than she inclined perhaps to report. “It isn’t so much he himself.” Then the girl spoke a little as for the romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where romance would come in. “It’s the state of his fortunes.”

  “And is that very bad?”

  “He has no ‘private means,’ and no prospect of any. He has no income, and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He’s as poor, she calls it, as ‘poverty,’ and she says she knows what that is
.”

  Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something. “But isn’t he brilliantly clever?”

  Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. “I haven’t the least idea.”

  To which, for the time, Susie only replied “Oh!”—though by the end of a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing “I see”; and that in turn with: “It’s quite what Maud Lowder thinks.”

  “That he’ll never do anything?”

  “No—quite the contrary: that he’s exceptionally able.”

  “Oh yes; I know”—Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. “But Mrs. Condrip’s own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won’t hear of any such person. Mr. Densher, she holds—that’s the way, at any rate, it was explained to me—won’t ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he were public she’d be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were rich—without being anything else—she’d do her best to swallow him. As it is she taboos him.”

  “In short,” said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, “she told you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him,” she added.

  “Mrs. Condrip didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely.”

  “Then there it is!” On which, with a drop and one of those sudden slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion, Milly turned away. Yet the matter wasn’t left so, that night, between them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first come back to it. Milly’s own nearest approach at least, for a little, to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all—every one they saw—to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh, not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn’t have told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences—if it mightn’t better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if with a masterful high manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and bright, as if it weren’t there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at all—which was possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn’t, as might be said, in order to get at her nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would figure as large, as honourably unselfish, on the day they should take effect. She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a person or two shouldn’t lose a benefit by not submitting if they could be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views couldn’t be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested for. It was too soon, since she wasn’t interested for herself. Even the richest woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly’s motive doubtless had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple, sublime without it—whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it or not; and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be these things just as much. Only then she might very well have, like Aunt Maud, a manner. Such were the connexions, at all events, in which the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flickered up—in which it came round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the afternoon, named Mr. Densher as an acquaintance.

  “Oh no—I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered,” the girl explained, “Mrs. Lowder’s wish.”

  “But that,” her friend observed after a moment, “was for silence to Kate.”

  “Yes—but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate.”

  “Why so?—since she must dislike to talk about him.”

  “Mrs. Condrip must?” Milly thought. “What she would like most is that her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she can tell her will help that—” But the girl dropped suddenly here, as if her companion would see.

  Her companion’s interest, however, was all for what she herself saw. “You mean she’ll immediately speak?” Mrs. Stringham gathered that this was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. “How will it be against him that you know him?”

  “Oh how can I say? It won’t be so much one’s knowing him as one’s having kept it out of sight.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Stringham as for comfort, “YOU haven’t kept it out of sight. Isn’t it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?”

  “It isn’t my acquaintance with him,” Milly smiled, “that she has dissimulated.”

  “She has dissimulated only her own? Well then the responsibility’s hers.”

  “Ah but,” said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, “she has a right to do as she likes.”

  “Then so, my dear, have you!” smiled Susan Shepherd.

  Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as if this were what one loved her for. “We’re not quarrelling about it, Kate and I, YET.”

  “I only meant,” Mrs. Stringham explained, “that I don’t see what Mrs. Condrip would gain.”

  “By her being able to tell Kate?” Milly thought. “I only meant that I don’t see what I myself should gain.”

  “But it will have to come out—that he knows you both—some time.”

  Milly scarce assented. “Do you mean when he comes back?”

  “He’ll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it, to ‘cut’ either of you for the sake of the other.”

  This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful. “I might get at him somehow beforehand,” the girl suggested; “I might give him what they call here the ‘tip’—that he’s not to know me when we meet. Or, better still, I mightn’t be here at all.”

  “Do you want to run away from him?”

  It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. “I don’t know WHAT I want to run away from!”

  It dispelled, on the spot—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it—any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now for a moment swept over. “I’ll go anywhere else in the world you like.”