The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “Well,” Densher dropped with some humour, “life’s very interesting! I hope it’s really as much so for you as you make it for others; I mean judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as thrilling for ces dames, in a different way for each: Aunt Maud, Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what IS,” he wound up, “the matter? Do you mean she’s as ill as she looks?”

  Kate’s face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her own—the need to make the point that “as ill as she looked” was what Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near. She believed herself nevertheless—and Kate couldn’t help believing her too—seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on the point of leaving town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled up. “We bade them good-bye—or all but—Aunt Maud and I, the night before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a day or two later. But they’ve not got off—they’re not getting off. When I see them and I saw them this morning—they have showy reasons. They do mean to go, but they’ve postponed it.” With which the girl brought out: “They’ve postponed it for YOU.” He protested so far as a man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever, understood herself. “You’ve made Milly change her mind. She wants not to miss you—though she wants also not to show she wants you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have hung back to-night. She doesn’t know when she may see you again—she doesn’t know she ever may. She doesn’t see the future. It has opened out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing.”

  Densher wondered. “After the tremendous time you’ve all been telling me she has had?”

  “That’s it. There’s a shadow across it.”

  “The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?”

  “Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She’s scared. She has so much to lose. And she wants more.”

  “Ah well,” said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort, “couldn’t one say to her that she can’t have everything?”

  “No—for one wouldn’t want to. She really,” Kate went on, “has been somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud—you may think me prejudiced,” the girl oddly smiled. “Aunt Maud will tell you—the world’s before her. It has all come since you saw her, and it’s a pity you’ve missed it, for it certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect success—I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time—and she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with a thumping bank-account you’ll have the simplest expression of the kind of thing. Her fortune’s absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from ‘Susie,’ and Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from ME. There she is.” Kate expressed above all what it most came to. “It’s open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I assure you we’re not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite plain.”

  Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. “But what good then on earth can I do her?”

  Well, she had it ready. “You can console her.”

  “And for what?”

  “For all that, if she’s stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn’t care for her if she hadn’t so much,” Kate very simply said. And then as it made him laugh not quite happily: “I shouldn’t trouble about her if there were one thing she did have.” The girl spoke indeed with a noble compassion. “She has nothing.”

  “Not all the young dukes?”

  “Well we must see—see if anything can come of them. She at any rate does love life. To have met a person like you,” Kate further explained, “is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of life. Oh she has you arranged!”

  “YOU have, it strikes me, my dear”—and he looked both detached and rueful. “Pray what am I to do with the dukes?”

  “Oh the dukes will be disappointed!”

  “Then why shan’t I be?”

  “You’ll have expected less,” Kate wonderfully smiled. “Besides, you WILL be. You’ll have expected enough for that.”

  “Yet it’s what you want to let me in for?”

  “I want,” said the girl, “to make things pleasant for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have. You’re what I have of most precious, and you’re therefore what I use most.”

  He looked at her long. “I wish I could use YOU a little more.” After which, as she continued to smile at him, “Is it a bad case of lungs?” he asked.

  Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. “Not lungs, I think. Isn’t consumption, taken in time, now curable?”

  “People are, no doubt, patched up.” But he wondered. “Do you mean she has something that’s past patching?” And before she could answer: “It’s really as if her appearance put her outside of such things—being, in spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it’s conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She has HAD her wreck—she has met her adventure.”

  “Oh I grant you her wreck!”—Kate was all response so far. “But do let her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures.”

  “Well—if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!” Densher in short was willing, but he came back to his point. “What I mean is that she has none of the effect—on one’s nerves or whatever—of an invalid.”

  Kate on her side did this justice. “No—that’s the beauty of her.”

  “The beauty—?”

  “Yes, she’s so wonderful. She won’t show for that, any more than your watch, when it’s about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won’t die, she won’t live, by inches. She won’t smell, as it were, of drugs. She won’t taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know.”

  “Then what,” he demanded, frankly mystified now, “are we talking about? In what extraordinary state IS she?”

  Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. “I believe that if she’s ill at all she’s very ill. I believe that if she’s bad she’s not a LITTLE bad. I can’t tell you why, but that’s how I see her. She’ll really live or she’ll really not. She’ll have it all or she’ll miss it all. Now I don’t think she’ll have it all.”

  Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than lucid. “You ‘think’ and you ‘don’t think,’ and yet you remain all the while without an inkling of her complaint?”

  “No, not without an inkling; but it’s a matter in which I don’t want knowledge. She moreover herself doesn’t want one to want it: she has, as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a kind of—I don’t know what to call it—intensity of pride. And then and then—” But with this she faltered.

  “And then what?”

  “I’m a brute about illness. I hate it. It’s well for you, my dear,” Kate continued, “that you’re as sound as a bell.”

  “Thank you!” Densher laughed. “It’s rather good then for yourself too that you’re as strong as the sea.”

  She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at least without a flaw—each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good they, alas, didn’t have, but failed on the other hand of this. “How we’re talking about her!” Kate compunctio
usly sighed. But there were the facts. “From illness I keep away.”

  “But you don’t—since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the midst of it.”

  “Ah I’m only watching—!”

  “And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!”

  “Oh,” said Kate, “I’m breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of what I shall expect of you. One can’t begin too soon.”

  She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning brought him back to attention. “You haven’t even an idea if it’s a case for surgery?”

  “I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come to that. Of course she’s in the highest hands.”

  “The doctors are after her then?”

  “She’s after THEM—it’s the same thing. I think I’m free to say it now—she sees Sir Luke Strett.”

  It made him quickly wince. “Ah fifty thousand knives!” Then after an instant: “One seems to guess.”

  Yes, but she waved it away. “Don’t guess. Only do as I tell you.”

  For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it before him. “What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl.”

  “Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn’t affect you as sick. You understand moreover just how much—and just how little.”

  “It’s amazing,” he presently answered, “what you think I understand.”

  “Well, if you’ve brought me to it, my dear,” she returned, “that has been your way of breaking ME in. Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty of others will.”

  Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility. “Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free.”

  “But so are you, my dear!”

  She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at her. “You’re prodigious!”

  “Of course I’m prodigious!”—and, as immediately happened, she gave a further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate’s welcome to the visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly rose to meet it. “I don’t know whether you know Lord Mark.” And then for the other party: “Mr. Merton Densher—who has just come back from America.”

  “Oh!” said the other party while Densher said nothing—occupied as he mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn’t, that is, he knew, the “Oh!” of the idiot, however great the superficial resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training and experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a thing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest of curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to which he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would find Mrs. Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.

  “Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?—as I seemed to hear outside, from below, Mrs. Stringham’s unmistakeable voice.”

  “Yes, but Mrs. Stringham’s alone. Milly’s unwell,” the girl explained, “and was compelled to disappoint us.”

  “Ah ‘disappoint’—rather!” And, lingering a little, he kept his eyes on Densher. “She isn’t really bad, I trust?”

  Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in Milly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man with whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without visible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he was doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was aided by Kate, who produced a prompt: “Oh dear no; I think not. I’ve just been reassuring Mr. Densher,” she added—”who’s as concerned as the rest of us. I’ve been calming his fears.”

  “Oh!” said Lord Mark again—and again it was just as good. That was for Densher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for the others: “MY fears would want calming. We must take great care of her. This way?”

  She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave them frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy. What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest.

  Densher was by this time quite ready for her. “It’s HE who’s your aunt’s man?”

  “Oh immensely.”

  “I mean for YOU.”

  “That’s what I mean too,” Kate smiled. “There he is. Now you can judge.”

  “Judge of what?”

  “Judge of him.”

  “Why should I judge of him?” Densher asked. “I’ve nothing to do with him.”

  “Then why do you ask about him?”

  “To judge of you—which is different.”

  Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. “To take the measure, do you mean, of my danger?”

  He hesitated; then he said: “I’m thinking, I dare say, of Miss Theale’s. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her—?”

  “With his interest in me?”

  “With her own interest in you,” Densher said while she reflected. “If that interest—Mrs. Lowder’s—takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn’t he rather to look out for the forms HE takes?”

  Kate seemed interested in the question, but “Oh he takes them easily,” she answered. “The beauty is that she doesn’t trust him.”

  “That Milly doesn’t?”

  “Yes—Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really.”

  Densher gave it his wonder. “Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he cheats?”

  “Yes,” said Kate—”that’s the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I’m still more struck with what they think of their friends. Milly’s own state of mind, however,” she went on, “is lucky. That’s Aunt Maud’s security, though she doesn’t yet fully recognise it—besides being Milly’s own.”

  “You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?”

  She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. “You oughtn’t to make me say too much. But I’m glad I don’t.”

  “Don’t say too much?”

  “Don’t care for Lord Mark.”

  “Oh!” Densher answered with a sound like his lordship’s own. To which he added: “You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn’t?”

  “Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!” It had made her again impatient.

  Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. “You scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes.”

  “Mercy, no—far from it. He’s not, compared with other possibilities, ‘in’ it. Milly, it’s true,” she said, to be exact, “has no natural sense of social values, doesn’t in the least understand our differences or know who’s who or what’s what.”

  “I see. That,” Densher laughed, “is her reason for liking ME.”

  “Precisely. She doesn’t resemble me,” said Kate, “who at least know what I lose.”

  Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. “And Aunt Maud—why shouldn’t SHE know? I mean that your friend there isn’t really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?”

  “Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That’s undeniably something. He’s the best moreover we can get.”

  “Oh, oh!” said Densher; and his doubt wa
s not all derisive.

  “It isn’t Lord Mark’s grandeur,” she went on without heeding this; “because perhaps in the line of that alone—as he has no money—more could be done. But she’s not a bit sordid; she only counts with the sordidness of others. Besides, he’s grand enough, with a duke in his family and at the other end of the string. THE thing’s his genius.”

  “And do you believe in that?”

  “In Lord Mark’s genius?” Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in time with a very sufficient “Yes!”

  “Political?”

  “Universal. I don’t know at least,” she said, “what else to call it when a man’s able to make himself without effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being in any traceable way a cause.”