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 a.s.sented. "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 was as if afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, 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."
But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie--how I do work you!"
"Oh, this is nothing yet."
"No indeed--to what it will be."
"You"re not--and it"s vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."
"Insist, insist--the more the better. But the day I _look_ as sound and strong as that, you know," Milly went on--"on that day I shall be just sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That"s where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even one"s _most_ "beaux moments" aren"t such as to qualify, so far as appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since I"ve lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,"
she wound up, "you"ll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I"m gone; and then you"ll only know where I"m not."
"I"d die _for_ you," said Susan Shepherd after a moment.
""Thanks awfully"! Then stay here for me."
"But we can"t be in London for August, nor for many of all these next weeks."
"Then we"ll go back."
Susie blenched. "Back to America?"
"No, abroad--to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying here for me," Milly pursued, "your staying with me wherever I may be, even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No," she insisted, "I _don"t_ know where I am, and you never will, and it doesn"t matter--and I dare say it"s quite true," she broke off, "that everything will have to come out." Her friend would have felt of her that she joked about it now, had not her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such unnamable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn"t, that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. "I must face the music. It isn"t, at any rate, its "coming out,"" she added; "it"s that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his injury."
Her companion wondered. "But how to _his?"_
"Why, if he pretends to love her----!"
"And does he only "pretend"?"
"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far as to make up to other people."
The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if with gaiety, for a comfortable end. "Did he make up, the false creature, to _you?"_
"No--but the question isn"t of that. It"s of what Kate might be made to believe."
"That, given the fact that he evidently more or less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have been all ready if you had at all led him on?"
Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said, after a moment, as with a conscious excess of the pensive: "No, I don"t think she"d quite wish to suggest that I made up to _him;_ for that I should have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,"
she added--and now at last, as with a supreme impatience "that her being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy would evidently help her, since she"s afraid of him, to do him in her sister"s mind a useful ill turn."
Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appet.i.te for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the moment to make out how many really her young friend had undertaken to see round. Finally, too, weren"t they braving the deeps? They got their amus.e.m.e.nt where they could. "Isn"t it only," she asked, "rather probable she"d see that Kate"s knowing him as (what"s the pretty old word?) _volage_----?"
"Well?" She hadn"t filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could Milly.
"Well, might but do what that often does--by all _our_ blessed little laws and arrangements at least; excite Kate"s own sentiment instead of depressing it."
The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. "Kate"s own sentiment? Oh, she didn"t speak of that. I don"t think," she added as if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, "I don"t think Mrs. Condrip imagines _she"s_ in love."
It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. "Then what"s her fear?"
"Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher"s possibly himself keeping it up--the fear of some final result from _that._
"Oh," said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted--"she looks far ahead!"
At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague "sports."
"No--it"s only we who do."
"Well, don"t let us be more interested for them than they are for themselves!"
"Certainly not"--the girl promptly a.s.sented. A certain interest nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. "It wasn"t of anything on Kate"s own part she spoke."
"You mean she thinks her sister does _not_ care for him?"
It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she meant; but there it presently was. "If she did care Mrs. Condrip would have told me."
What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then they had been talking so. "But did you ask her?"
"Ah, no!"
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn"t have asked her for the world.
BOOK FIFTH
X
Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was ent.i.tled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something, that is, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she _were_ confessing--all the while it was quite the case that neither justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan Shepherd at home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade, and Susan"s fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides letting them easily see that if it hadn"t by this time been the end of everything--which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the season at its last gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at any rate their modest general plea--that there was no place they would have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked, wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was highly the case as to their current consciousness--which could be indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course; impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been gathered for them into a splendid cl.u.s.ter, an offering like an armful of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering--they had been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He had administered the touch that, under light a.n.a.lysis, made the difference--the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs.