She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of scientific mind--his _being_ the even highest, magnificently because otherwise, obviously, it wouldn"t be there; but she could at the same time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged couldn"t be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly, pity; and when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now--she would always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the greater ease to himself as there wasn"t one of her divinations that--as her own--he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was making her talk she _was_ talking; and what it could, at any rate, come to for him was that she wasn"t afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn"t; which undertaking of hers--not to have misled him--was what she counted at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really _be_ misled; and there actually pa.s.sed between them for some seconds a sign, a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and the whole thing wound up, for that consummation, with its kind dim smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but brightness--that even of sharp steel--was of course for the other side of the business, and it would all come in for her in one way or another. "Do you mean," he asked, "that you"ve no relations at all?--not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?"
She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or a freak of nature at a show. "n.o.body whatever." But the last thing she had come for was to be dreary about it. "I"m a survivor--a survivor of a general wreck. You see," she added, "how that"s to be taken into account--that everyone else _has_ gone. When I was ten years old there were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I"m all that"s left. But they died," she went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I"m American. Not that I mean that makes me worse. However, you"ll probably know what it makes me."
"Yes," he discreetly indulged her; "I know perfectly what it makes you.
It makes you, to begin with, a capital case."
She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before the social scene.
"Ah, there you are!"
"Oh, no; there "we" aren"t at all. There I am only--but as much as you like. I"ve no end of American friends: there _they_ are, if you please, and it"s a fact that you couldn"t very well be in a better place than in their company. It puts you with plenty of others--and that isn"t pure solitude." Then he pursued: "I"m sure you"ve an excellent spirit; but don"t try to bear more things than you need." Which after an instant he further explained. "Hard things have come to you in youth, but you mustn"t think life will be for you all hard things. You"ve the right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which happiness may come."
"Oh, I"ll accept any whatever!" she almost gaily returned. "And it seems to me, for that matter, that I"m accepting a new one every day.
Now _this!"_ she smiled.
"This is very well so far as it goes. You can depend on me," the great man said, "for unlimited interest. But I"m only, after all, one element in fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don"t mind who knows.
Knows, I mean, that you and I are friends."
"Ah, you do want to see some one!" she broke out. "You want to get at some one who cares for me." With which, however, as he simply met this spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often had it from young persons of her race, and that he was familiar even with the possibilities of their familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain by his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the most reasonable thing she could say. This would be, precisely, on the subject of that freedom, which she now quickly spoke of as complete.
"That"s of course by itself a great boon; so please don"t think I don"t know it. I can do exactly what I like--anything in all the wide world.
I haven"t a creature to ask--there"s not a finger to stop me. I can shake about till I"m black and blue. That perhaps isn"t _all_ joy; but lots of people, I know, would like to try it." He had appeared about to put a question, but then had let her go on, which she promptly did, for she understood him the next moment as having thus taken it from her that her means were as great as might be. She had simply given it to him so, and this was all that would ever pa.s.s between them on the odious head. Yet she couldn"t help also knowing that an important effect, for his judgment, or at least for his amus.e.m.e.nt--which was his feeling, since, marvellously, he did have feeling--was produced by it.
All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him like the morsels of coloured gla.s.s that used to make combinations, under the hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood. "So that if it"s a question of my doing anything under the sun that will help----!"
"You"ll _do_ anything under the sun? Good." He took that beautifully, ever so pleasantly, for what it was worth; but time was needed--ten minutes or so were needed on the spot--to deal even provisionally, with the substantive question. It was convenient, in its degree, that there was nothing she wouldn"t do; but it seemed also highly and agreeably vague that she should have to do anything. They thus appeared to be taking her, together, for the moment, and almost for sociability, as prepared to proceed to gratuitous extremities; the upshot of which was in turn, that after much interrogation, auscultation, exploration, much noting of his own sequences and neglecting of hers, had duly kept up the vagueness, they might have struck themselves, or may at least strike us, as coming back from an undeterred but useless voyage to the north pole. Milly was ready, under orders, for the north pole; which fact was doubtless what made a blinding anticlimax of her friend"s actual abstention from orders. "No," she heard him again distinctly repeat it, "I don"t want you for the present to do anything at all; anything, that is, but obey a small prescription or two that will be made clear to you, and let me within a few days come to see you at home."
It was at first heavenly. "Then you"ll see Mrs. Stringham." But she didn"t mind a bit now.
"Well, I shan"t be afraid of Mrs. Stringham." And he said it once more as she asked once more: "Absolutely not; I "send" you nowhere.
England"s all right--anywhere that"s pleasant, convenient, decent, will be all right. You say you can do exactly as you like. Oblige me therefore by being so good as to do it. There"s only one thing: you ought of course, now, as soon as I"ve seen you again, to get out of London."
Milly thought. "May I then go back to the continent?"
"By all means back to the continent. Do go back to the continent."
"Then how will you keep seeing me? But perhaps," she quickly added, "you won"t want to keep seeing me."
He had it all ready; he had really everything all ready. "I shall follow you up; though if you mean that I don"t want you to keep seeing _me_----"
"Well?" she asked.
It was only just here that he struck her the least bit as stumbling.
"Well, see all you can. That"s what it comes to. Worry about nothing.
You _have_ at least no worries. It"s a great, rare chance."
She had got up, for she had had from him both that he would send her something and would advise her promptly of the date of his coming to her, by which she was virtually dismissed. Yet, for herself, one or two things kept her. "May I come back to England too?"
"Rather! Whenever you like. But always, when you do come, immediately let me know."
"Ah," said Milly, "it won"t be a great going to and fro."
"Then if you"ll stay with us, so much the better."
It touched her, the way he controlled his impatience of her; and the fact itself affected her as so precious that she yielded to the wish to get more from it. "So you don"t think I"m out of my mind?"
"Perhaps that _is,"_ he smiled, "all that"s the matter."
She looked at him longer. "No, that"s too good. Shall I, at any rate, suffer?"
"Not a bit."
"And yet then live?"
"My dear young lady," said her distinguished friend, "isn"t to "live"
exactly what I"m trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?"
XIII
She had gone out with these last words so in her ears that when once she was well away--back this time in the great square alone--it was as if some instant application of them had opened out there before her. It was positively, this effect, an excitement that carried her on; she went forward into s.p.a.ce under the sense of an impulse received--an impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up for the hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to come by herself.
No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside her without some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush, that her only company must be the human race at large, present all round her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be, then and there, the grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had somehow of a sudden become her element; grey immensity was what her distinguished friend had, for the moment, furnished her world with and what the question of "living," as he put it to her, living by option, by volition, inevitably took on for its immediate face. She went straight before her, without weakness, altogether with strength; and still as she went she was more glad to be alone, for n.o.body--not Kate Croy, not Susan Shepherd either--would have wished to rush with her as she rushed. She had asked him at the last whether, being on foot, she might go home so, or elsewhere, and he had replied as if almost amused again at her extravagance: "You"re active, luckily, by nature--it"s beautiful: therefore rejoice in it. _Be_ active, without folly--for you"re not foolish: be as active as you can and as you like." That had been in fact the final push, as well as the touch that most made a mixture of her consciousness--a strange mixture that tasted at one and the same time of what she had lost and what had been given her. It was wonderful to her, while she took her random course, that these quant.i.ties felt so equal: she had been treated--hadn"t she?--as if it were in her power to live; and yet one wasn"t treated so--was one?--unless it came up, quite as much, that one might die. The beauty of the bloom had gone from the small old sense of safety--that was distinct: she had left it behind her there forever. But the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had been offered her instead. It was as if she had had to pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress; and to take up and shoulder as a subst.i.tute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a spear, a battle-axe conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture. She felt this instrument, for that matter, already on her back, so that she proceeded now in very truth as a soldier on a march--proceeded as if, for her initiation, the first charge had been sounded. She pa.s.sed along unknown streets, over dusty littery ways, between long rows of fronts not enhanced by the August light; she felt good for miles and only wanted to get lost; there were moments at corners, where she stopped and chose her direction, in which she quite lived up to his injunction to rejoice that she was active. It was like a new pleasure to have so new a reason; she would affirm, without delay, her option, her volition; taking this personal possession of what surrounded her was a fair affirmation to start with; and she really didn"t care if she made it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder in due course "whatever," as they said at the hotel, had become of her; yet this would be nothing either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended her steps: it was quite as if she saw in people"s eyes the reflection of her appearance and pace. She found herself moving at times in regions visibly not haunted by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped, sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the fear of overdoing this character she would here and there have begun conversation, have asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as that would help the requirements of adventure, her way was exactly what she wanted not to know. The difficulty was that she at last accidentally found it; she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent"s Park, round which, on two or three occasions with Kate Croy, her public chariot had solemnly rolled. But she went into it further now; this was the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous roads, well within the centre and on the stretches of shabby gra.s.s.
Here were benches and s.m.u.tty sheep; here were idle lads at games of ball, with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers, anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim breathing-s.p.a.ce, but the practical question of life?
They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so; she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the information, feeling it altered, a.s.similated, recognising it again as something, in a slightly different shape, familiar enough, the blessed old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, with superiority, a fee.
The last sc.r.a.p of superiority had soon enough left her, if only because she before long knew herself for more tired than she had proposed. This and the charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made her linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the sense that n.o.body in the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before, at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly able to put it to herself that that hadn"t been a life. This present kind of thing therefore might be--which was where precisely her distinguished friend seemed to be wishing her to come out. He wished her also, it was true, not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too much of her isolation; at the same time however as he clearly desired to deny her no decent source of interest. He was interested--she arrived at that--in her appealing to as many sources as possible; and it fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it herself she would have called it bolstering--the bolstering that was simply for the weak; and she thought and thought as she put together the proofs that it was as one of the weak he was treating her. It was of course as one of the weak that she had gone to him--but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that he might p.r.o.nounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable young lioness! What indeed she was really confronted with was the consciousness that he had not, after all, p.r.o.nounced her anything: she nursed herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out of it.
Did he think, however, she wondered, that he could keep out of it to the end?--though, as she weighed the question, she yet felt it a little unjust. Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions numerous and strange; but she had, happily, before she moved, worked round to a simplification. Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect of its rolling over her that, when one considered it, he might perhaps have "got out" by one door but to come in with a beautiful, beneficent dishonesty by another. It kept her more intensely motionless there that what he might fundamentally be "up to" was some disguised intention of standing by her as a friend. Wasn"t that what women always said they wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they couldn"t more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt, sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn"t make husbands. And she didn"t even reason that it was, by a similar law, the expedient of doctors in general for the invalids of whom they couldn"t make patients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that _her_ doctor was--however fatuous it might sound--exceptionally moved. This was the d.a.m.ning little fact--if she could talk of d.a.m.nation: that she could believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking her. She hadn"t gone to him to be liked, she had gone to him to be judged; and he was quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a rule, of observing the difference. She could like _him,_ as she distinctly did--that was another matter; all the more that her doing so was now, so obviously for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it would have been all portentously mixed had not, as we say, a final, merciful wave, chilling rather, but washing clear, come to her a.s.sistance.
It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was spent. She had been asking herself why, if her case was grave--and she knew what she meant by that--he should have talked to her at all about what she might with futility "do"; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her little lonely acuteness--as acuteness went during the dog-days in the Regent"s Park--in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was ill; or she didn"t matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was "acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter--until he should prove the contrary. It was too evident that a person at his high pressure must keep his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest amus.e.m.e.nts, only for the very greatest occasions. Her prevision, in fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that judgment in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the judgment it was that made her sensation simple. He _had_ distinguished her--that was the chill. He hadn"t known--how could he?--that she was devilishly subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected, the suspicious, the condemned. He in fact confessed to it, in his way, as to an interest in her combinations, her funny race, her funny losses, her funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt, above all, her funny manners--funny, like those of Americans at their best, without being vulgar, legitimating amiability and helping to pa.s.s it off. In his appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for her the compa.s.sion he so signally permitted himself to waste; but its operation for herself was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced her to her ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl with her rent to pay for example--staring before her in a great city. Milly had her rent to pay, her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters. This was the sensation the great man had doubtless not purposed. Well, she must go home, like the poor girl, and see. There might after all be ways; the poor girl too would be thinking. It came back for that matter perhaps to views already presented. She looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered, melancholy comrades--some of them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs in the gra.s.s, turned away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would live if one could.
She found after this, for the day or two, more amus.e.m.e.nt than she had ventured to count on in the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of deceiving Susie; and she presently felt that what made the difference was the mere fancy--as this _was_ one--of a countermove to her great man. His taking on himself--should he do so--to get at her companion made her suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any notion of her own all right for her; though indeed at the very moment she invited herself to enjoy this impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise, or at least for speculation. Her idea would rather have been that Mrs.
Stringham would have looked at her hard--her sketch of the grounds of her long, independent excursion showing, she could feel, as almost cynically superficial. Yet the dear woman so failed, in the event, to avail herself of any right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting, for an hour, to wonder if Kate Croy had been playing perfectly fair.
Hadn"t she possibly, from motives of the highest benevolence, promptings of the finest anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would have called the straight tip? It must immediately be mentioned, however, that, quite apart from a remembrance of the distinctness of Kate"s promise, Milly, the next thing, found her explanation in a truth that had the merit of being general. If Susie, at this crisis, suspiciously spared her, it was really that Susie was always suspiciously sparing her--yet occasionally, too, with portentous and exceptional mercies. The girl was conscious of how she dropped at times into inscrutable, impenetrable deferences--att.i.tudes that, though without at all intending it, made a difference for familiarity, for the ease of intimacy. It was as if she recalled herself to manners, to the law of court-etiquette--which last note above all helped our young woman to a just appreciation. It was definite for her, even if not quite solid, that to treat her as a princess was a positive need of her companion"s mind; wherefore she couldn"t help it if this lady had her transcendent view of the way the cla.s.s in question were treated. Susan had read history, had read Gibbon and Froude and Saint-Simon; she had high-lights as to the special allowances made for the cla.s.s, and, since she saw them, when young, as effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic and infinitely refined, one must take it for amusing if she inclined to an indulgence verily Byzantine. If one _could_ only be Byzantine!--wasn"t _that_ what she insidiously led one on to sigh?
Milly tried to oblige her--for it really placed Susan herself so handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that race--it would be somewhere in Gibbon--weren"t, apparently, questioned about their mysteries. But oh, poor Milly and hers! Susan at all events proved scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic at Ravenna. Susan was a porcelain monument to the odd moral that consideration might, like cynicism, have abysses. Besides, the Puritan finally disenc.u.mbered----! What starved generations wasn"t Mrs. Stringham, in fancy, going to make up for?
Kate Croy came straight to the hotel--came that evening shortly before dinner; specifically and publicly moreover, in a hansom that, driven apparently very fast, pulled up beneath their windows almost with the clatter of an accident, a "smash." Milly, alone, as happened, in the great garnished void of their sitting-room, where, a little, really, like a caged Byzantine, she had been pacing through the queer, long-drawn, almost sinister delay of night, an effect she yet liked--Milly, at the sound, one of the French windows standing open, pa.s.sed out to the balcony that overhung, with pretensions, the general entrance, and so was in time for the look that Kate, alighting, paying her cabman, happened to send up to the front. The visitor moreover had a shilling back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony, looked down at her, and a mute exchange, but with smiles and nods, took place between them on what had occurred in the morning. It was what Kate had called for, and the tone was thus, almost by accident, determined for Milly before her friend came up. What was also, however, determined for her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image presented to her, the splendid young woman who looked so particularly handsome in impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the peculiar property of somebody else"s vision, that this fine freedom in short was the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her--held as by the strange sense of seeing through that distant person"s eyes. It lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so lasting it produced an effect. It produced in fact more than one, and we take them in their order. The first was that it struck our young woman as absurd to say that a girl"s looking so to a man could possibly be without connections; and the second was that by the time Kate had got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connection it must have for herself.
She produced this commodity on the spot--produced it, that is, in straight response to Kate"s frank "Well, what?" The inquiry bore of course, with Kate"s eagerness, on the issue of the morning"s scene, the great man"s latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as the cheerful demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when news is not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She couldn"t have said what it was exactly that, on the instant, determined her; the nearest description of it would perhaps have been as the more vivid impression of all her friend took for granted. The contrast between this free quant.i.ty and the maze of possibilities through which, for hours, she had herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for the moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it helped forward in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely had nothing to tell. Besides which, certainly, there was something else--an influence, at the particular juncture, still more obscure.
Kate had lost, on the way upstairs, the look--_the_ look--that made her young hostess so subtly think and one of the signs of which was that she never kept it for many moments at once; yet she stood there, none the less, so in her bloom and in her strength, so completely again the "handsome girl" beyond all others, the "handsome girl" for whom Milly had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet her now with the note of the plaintive would amount somehow to a surrender, to a confession.
_She_ would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor would keep her, at the worst, the fewest minutes; and it was as if she had asked just _with_ all this practical impeccability for all that was most mortal in her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly danced their dance; but the vibration produced and the dust kicked up had lasted less than our account of them. Almost before she knew it she was answering, and answering, beautifully, with no consciousness of fraud, only as with a sudden flare of the famous "will-power" she had heard about, read about, and which was what her medical adviser had mainly thrown her back on. "Oh, it"s all right. He"s lovely."
Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs.
Stringham. "You mean you"ve been absurd?"
"Absurd." It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done something for her safety.
And Kate really hung on her lips. "There"s nothing at all the matter?"
"Nothing to worry about. I shall take a little watching, but I shan"t have to do anything dreadful, or even, in the least, inconvenient. I can do in fact as I like." It was wonderful for Milly how just to put it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into places.