by Henry James
It was all the while for Milly as if Lord Mark had really had something other than this spoken pretext in view; as if there were something he wanted to say to her and were only—consciously yet not awkwardly, just delicately—hanging fire. At the same time it was as if the thing had practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture; since what it appeared to amount to was “Do let a fellow who isn’t a fool take care of you a little.” The thing somehow, with the aid of the Bronzino, was done; it hadn’t seemed to matter to her before if he were a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she liked his not being; and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of the same sound as Mrs. Lowder’s so recent reminder. She too wished to take care of her—and wasn’t it, à peu près,ae what all the people with the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together—the beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in particular—it was she herself who said all. She couldn’t help that—it came; and the reason it came was that she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair—as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own.af The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. “I shall never be better than this.”
He smiled for her at the portrait. “Than she? You’d scarce need to be better, for surely that’s well enough. But you are, one feels, as it happens, better; because, splendid as she is, one doubts if she was good.”
He hadn’t understood. She was before the picture, but she had turned to him, and she didn’t care if for the minute he noticed her tears. It was probably as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in any connexion whatever. “I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.”
Though he still didn’t understand her he was as nice as if he had; he didn’t ask for insistence, and that was just a part of his looking after her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a world of practice in it. “Oh we must talk about these things!”
Ah they had already done that, she knew, as much as she ever would; and she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a world, on her side, of slowness. “I wish I could see the resemblance. Of course her complexion’s green,” she laughed; “but mine’s several shades greener.”12
“It’s down to the very hands,” said Lord Mark.
“Her hands are large,” Milly went on, “but mine are larger. Mine are huge.”
“Oh you go her, all round, ‘one better’—which is just what I said. But you’re a pair. You must surely catch it,” he added as if it were important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have invented his plea.
“I don’t know—one never knows one’s self. It’s a funny fancy, and I don’t imagine it would have occurred—”
“I see it has occurred”—he had already taken her up. She had her back, as she faced the picture, to one of the doors of the room, which was open, and on her turning as he spoke she saw that they were in the presence of three other persons, also, as appeared, interested enquirers. Kate Croy was one of these; Lord Mark had just become aware of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made the best of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought a lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a re-enforcement. Kate herself had spoken, however, before he had had time to tell her so.
“You had noticed too?”—she smiled at him without looking at Milly. “Then I’m not original—which one always hopes one has been. But the likeness is so great.” And now she looked at Milly—for whom again it was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. “Yes, there you are, my dear, if you want to know. And you’re superb.” She took now but a glance at the picture, though it was enough to make her question to her friends not too straight. “Isn’t she superb?”
“I brought Miss Theale,” Lord Mark explained to the latter, “quite off my own bat.”
“I wanted Lady Aldershaw,” Kate continued to Milly, “to see for herself.”
“Les grands esprits se rencontrent!”aglaughed her attendant gentleman, a high but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person who represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.
Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. “Superb, superb. Of course I had noticed you. It is wonderful,” she went on with her back to the picture, but with some other eagerness which Milly felt gathering, felt directing her motions now. It was enough—they were introduced, and she was saying “I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming—” She wasn’t fresh, for she wasn’t young, even though she denied at every pore that she was old; but she was vivid and much bejewelled for the midsummer daylight; and she was all in the palest pinks and blues. She didn’t think, at this pass, that she could “come” anywhere—Milly didn’t; and she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from the question. He had interposed, taking the words out of the lady’s mouth and not caring at all if the lady minded. That was clearly the right way to treat her—at least for him; as she had only dropped, smiling, and then turned away with him. She had been dealt with—it would have done an enemy good. The gentleman still stood, a little helpless, addressing himself to the intention of urbanity as if it were a large loud whistle; he had been sighing sympathy, in his way, while the lady made her overture; and Milly had in this light soon arrived at their identity. They were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was the clever one. A minute or two later the situation had changed, and she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate. She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie could be found; but she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it. The prospect, through opened doors, stretched before her into other rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady Aldershaw, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was all for her; she had the sense of the poor gentleman’s having somehow been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there, he shambled a little; then he bethought himself of the Bronzino, before which, with his eye-glass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd vague sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and a “Humph—most remarkable!” which lighted Kate’s face with amusement. The next moment he had creaked away over polished floors after the others and Milly was feeling as if she had been rude. But Lord Aldershaw was in every way a detail and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn’t ill.
Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the while seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had had to accept it, all suddenly,
and nothing about it, at the same time, was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her friend’s appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even through the call made by the others on her attention; something that was perversely there, she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every renewal of their meeting. “Is it the way she looks to him?” she asked herself—the perversity being how she kept in remembrance that Kate was known to him. It wasn’t a fault in Kate—nor in him assuredly; and she had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them as if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn’t make it up—he was too far away; but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She did so now with a strange soft energy—the impulse immediately acting. “Will you render me to-morrow a great service?”
“Any service, dear child, in the world.”
“But it’s a secret one—nobody must know. I must be wicked and false about it.”
“Then I’m your woman,” Kate smiled, “for that’s the kind of thing I love. Do let us do something bad. You’re impossibly without sin, you know.”
Milly’s eyes, on this, remained a little with their companion’s. “Ah I shan’t perhaps come up to your idea. It’s only to deceive Susan Shepherd.”
“Oh!” said Kate as if this were indeed mild.
“But thoroughly—as thoroughly as I can.”
“And for cheating,” Kate asked, “my powers will contribute?
Well, I’ll do my best for you.” In accordance with which it was presently settled between them that Milly should have the aid and comfort of her presence for a visit to Sir Luke Strett. Kate had needed a minute for enlightenment, and it was quite grand for her comrade that this name should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself it had for some days been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she explained, the greatest of medical lights—if she had got hold, as she believed (and she had used to this end the wisdom of the serpent) of the right, the special man. She had written to him three days before, and he had named her an hour, eleven-twenty; only it had come to her on the eve that she couldn’t go alone. Her maid on the other hand wasn’t good enough, and Susie was too good. Kate had listened above all with high indulgence. ”And I’m betwixt and between, happy thought! Too good for what?”
Milly thought. “Why to be worried if it’s nothing. And to be still more worried—I mean before she need be—if it isn’t.”
Kate fixed her with deep eyes. “What in the world is the matter with you?” It had inevitably a sound of impatience, as if it had been a challenge really to produce something; so that Milly felt her for the moment only as a much older person, standing above her a little, doubting the imagined ailments, suspecting the easy complaints, of ignorant youth. It somewhat checked her, further, that the matter with her was what exactly as yet she wanted knowledge about; and she immediately declared, for conciliation, that if she were merely fanciful Kate would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered, in return, the hope that, since she could come out and be so charming, could so universally dazzle and interest, she wasn’t all the while in distress or in anxiety—didn’t believe herself to be in any degree seriously menaced. “Well, I want to make out—to make out!” was all that this consistently produced. To which Kate made clear answer: “Ah then let us by all means!”
“I thought,” Milly said, “you’d like to help me. But I must ask you, please, for the promise of absolute silence.”
“And how, if you are ill, can your friends remain in ignorance?”
“Well, if I am it must of course finally come out. But I can go for a long time.” Milly spoke with her, eyes again on her painted sister’s—almost as if under their suggestion. She still sat there before Kate, yet not without a light in her face. “That will be one of my advantages. I think I could die without its being noticed.”
“You’re an extraordinary young woman,” her friend, visibly held by her, declared at last. “What a remarkable time to talk of such things!”
“Well, we won’t talk, precisely”—Milly got herself together again. “I only wanted to make sure of you.”
“Here in the midst of—!” But Kate could only sigh for wonder—almost visibly too for pity.
It made a moment during which her companion waited on her word; partly as if from a yearning, shy but deep, to have her case put to her just as Kate was struck by it; partly as if the hint of pity were already giving a sense to her whimsical “shot,” with Lord Mark, at Mrs. Lowder’s first dinner. Exactly this—the handsome girl’s compassionate manner, her friendly descent from her own strength—was what she had then foretold. She took Kate up as if positively for the deeper taste of it. “Here in the midst of what?”
“Of everything. There’s nothing you can’t have. There’s nothing you can’t do.”
“So Mrs. Lowder tells me.”
It just kept Kate’s eyes fixed as possibly for more of that; then, however, without waiting, she went on. “We all adore you.”
“You’re wonderful—you dear things!” Milly laughed.
“No, it’s you.” And Kate seemed struck with the real interest of it. “In three weeks!”
Milly kept it up. “Never were people on such terms! All the more reason,” she added, “that I shouldn’t needlessly torment you.”
“But me? what becomes of me?” said Kate.
“Well, you”—Milly thought—“if there’s anything to bear you’ll bear it.”
“But I won’t bear it!” said Kate Croy.
“Oh yes you will: all the same! You’ll pity me awfully, but you’ll help me very much. And I absolutely trust you. So there we are.” There they were then, since Kate had so to take it; but there, Milly felt, she herself in particular was; for it was just the point at which she had wished to arrive. She had wanted to prove to herself that she didn’t horribly blame her friend for any reserve; and what better proof could there be than this quite special confidence? If she desired to show Kate that she really believed Kate liked her, could she show it more than by asking her help?
—III—
What it really came to, on the morrow, this first time—the time Kate went with her—was that the great man had, a little, to excuse himself; had, by a rare accident—for he kept his consulting-hours in general rigorously free—but ten minutes to give her; ten mere minutes which he yet placed at her service in a manner that she admired still more than she could meet it: so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table. He was presently to jump into his carriage, but he promptly made the point that he must see her again, see her within a day or two; and he named for her at once another hour—easing her off beautifully too even then in respect to her possibly failing of justice to her errand. The minutes affected her in fact as ebbing more swiftly than her little army of items could muster, and they would probably have gone without her doing much more than secure another hearing, hadn’t it been for her sense, at the last, that she had gained above all an impression. The impression—all the sharp growth of the final few moments—was neither more nor less than that she might make, of a sudden, in quite another world, another straight friend, and a friend who would moreover be, wonderfully, the most appointed, the most thoroughly adjusted of the whole collection, inasmuch as he would somehow wear the character scientifically, ponderably, proveably—not just loosely and sociably. Literally, furthermore, it wouldn’t really depend on herself, Sir Luke Strett’s friendship, in the least: perhaps what made her most stammer and pant was its thus queerly coming over her that she might find she had interested him even beyond her intention, find she was in fact launched in some current that would lose itself in the sea of science. At the same time that she struggled, however, she also surrendered; there was a moment at which she almost dropped the form of stating, of explaining, and threw herself, without violence, only with
a supreme pointless quaver that had turned the next instant to an intensity of interrogative stillness, upon his general good will. His large settled face, though firm, was not, as she had thought at first, hard; he looked, in the oddest manner, to her fancy, half like a general and half like a bishop, and she was soon sure that, within some such handsome range, what it would show her would be what was good, what was best for her. She had established, in other words, in this time-saving way, a relation with it; and the relation was the special trophy that, for the hour, she bore off. It was like an absolute possession, a new resource altogether, something done up in the softest silk and tucked away under the arm of memory. She hadn’t had it when she went in, and she had it when she came out, she had it there under her cloak, but dissimulated, invisibly carried, when smiling, smiling, she again faced Kate Croy. That young lady had of course awaited her in another room, where, as the great man was to absent himself, no one else was in attendance; and she rose for her with such a face of sympathy as might have graced the vestibule of a dentist. “Is it out?” she seemed to ask as if it had been a question of a tooth; and Milly indeed kept her in no suspense at all.
