This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason, full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself suddenly draw back. It was not Milly"s unpacified state, in short, that now troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the suspected presence of something behind it--which, however, could scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What any fresh motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was, in short, not to be divined. It was but half an explanation to say that excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they had left behind, or tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs.
Stringham liked to call them--was once more coming into sight as objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were general appearances from which the girl"s own aspect, her really larger vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got hold of mightn"t be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the rarest--as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse--cases of American intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm--asked herself if her young friend were merely going to treat her to some complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a week, however, with their further progress, her young friend had effectively answered the question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of something that had a reality compared with which the nervous explanation would have been coa.r.s.e. Mrs. Stringham found herself from that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained a m.u.f.fled and intangible form, but that, a.s.suredly, should it take on sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would become instantly the light in which Milly was to be read.
Such a matter as this may at all events speak of the style in which our young woman could affect those who were near her, may testify to the sort of interest she could inspire. She worked--and seemingly quite without design--upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her a.s.sociates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their confusion. She reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, reduced them to a consenting bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good lady, on a last a.n.a.lysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness.
She exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because _they_ were so far from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day on the Brunig the spell of watching her had grown more than ever irresistible; a proof of what--or of a part of what--Mrs. Stringham had, with all the rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn"t pounce, she hadn"t come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps, concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly know what was the matter; and to watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way of clinging to the girl, not less than an occupation, a satisfaction in itself. The pleasure of watching, moreover, if a reason were needed, came from a sense of her beauty. Her beauty hadn"t at all originally seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs. Stringham had, even in the first flush of friendship, not named it, grossly, to any one; having seen early that, for stupid people--and who, she sometimes secretly asked herself, wasn"t stupid?--it would take a great deal of explaining. She had learned not to mention it till it was mentioned first--which occasionally happened, but not too often; and then she was there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception that met her own perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special items; while, in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of herself employing the word that most people employed. She employed it to pretend that she was also stupid and so have done with the matter; spoke of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things."
This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks, doubtless, to rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together with too little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence. When Milly smiled it was a public event--when she didn"t it was a chapter of history. They had stopped, on the Brunig, for luncheon, and there had come up for them under the charm of the place the question of a longer stay.
Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but which, on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form of silver medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-pa.s.ses attacked with alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were taken highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed her familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the best. These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like Columbus, worked out, all una.s.sisted, a conception of the other side of the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and with extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her presence. She had given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards a standard of comparison for all cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in especial--Susan was the younger--with a character that, as Mrs.
Stringham had often had occasion, through life, to say to herself, made all the difference. It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over and over again and in the most remote connections, that, thanks to her parent"s lonely, thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
There were plenty of women who were all sorts of things that she wasn"t, but who, on the other hand, were not that, and who didn"t know _she_ was (which she liked--it relegated them still further) and didn"t know, either, how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen herself so much in this light as during the actual phase of her a.s.sociated, if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness gave perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were part of the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth--the taste of honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep gorges.
Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which, essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess, the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too, made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the wearer--it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality. It might have been, possibly, with its involved loneliness and other mysteries, the weight under which she fancied her companion"s admirable head occasionally, and ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite a.s.sented at luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to look at rooms, settle questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage and horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion particularly, brought home to her--all agreeably, richly, almost grandly--what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had, in a sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question of difficulty, which she got rid of, furthermore, not in the least as one had seen many charming persons do, by merely pa.s.sing it on to others. She kept it completely at a distance: it never entered the circle; the most plaintive confidant couldn"t have dragged it in; and to tread the path of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service was in other words so easy to render that the whole thing was like court life without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of money, and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that if one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most made it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading person she couldn"t have imagined; but it was, all the same, the truth of truths that the girl couldn"t get away from her wealth. She might leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the gra.s.s as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the _mode du jour,_ that peeped from under the corresponding indifference of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of n.o.ble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had mechanically possessed herself. She couldn"t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn"t have lost it if she had tried--that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be _the_ thing you were. When at the end of an hour she had not returned to the house Mrs. Stringham, though the bright afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But the purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of a due regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once more, the good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her slightly "underhand"
even in her own eyes. She couldn"t help that, however, and she didn"t care, sure as she was that what she really wanted was not to overstep, but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop in time that she went softly, but she had on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety, the footpath she believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside and into the higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they had so often wanted, as they pa.s.sed above or below, to stray; and then it obscured itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small cl.u.s.ter of brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long before pa.s.sing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way would drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in fact, a quarter of an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led somewhere, yet apparently quite into s.p.a.ce, for the great side of the mountain appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether, though probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her uncertainty moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the presence on a fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz volume that the girl had brought out, and that therefore pointed to her shortly previous pa.s.sage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an enc.u.mbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as she hadn"t yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs.
Stringham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was quite an accident that she had not, before they were over, betrayed by her deeper agitation the fact of her own nearness.
The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall precipitously and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl"s seat was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single false movement, by a turn of the head--how could one tell? into whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in the poor lady"s ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly"s. It was a commotion that left our observer intensely still and holding her breath. What had first been offered her was the possibility of a latent intention--however wild the idea--in such a posture; of some betrayed accordance of Milly"s caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable, must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse of a few seconds had a partly rea.s.suring effect. It gave her time to receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This was the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating there, she was not meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn"t be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them, or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham had decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.
Not many minutes probably, yet they had not seemed few, and they had given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when, late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point of the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word--_a bientot!_--across the cover; then, even under the girl"s continued delay, had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw that the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction that the future was not to exist for her princess in the form of any sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn"t be for her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would be a question of taking full in the face the whole a.s.sault of life, to the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to say to herself, even after another interval of some length, that if her young friend still continued absent it wouldn"t be because--whatever the opportunity--she had cut short the thread. She wouldn"t have committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakably reserved for some more complicated pa.s.sage; this was the very vision in which she had, with no little awe, been discovered. The image that thus remained with the elder lady kept the character of revelation. During the breathless minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter"s type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery, all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham"s flame. They are things that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger on our friend"s part than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was scarce yet used to carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine of something precious.
She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared.
The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She was not thinking, either, of Milly"s gold.
VI
The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she had not the book with her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at all. Her comrade"s decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of having followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully enough, the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared itself. "Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that after all----?"
Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately made such a sign that Milly"s words gave place to visible relief at her a.s.sent. "You don"t care for our stop here--you"d rather go straight on?
We"ll start then with the peep of to-morrow"s dawn--or as early as you like; it"s only rather late now to take the road again." And she smiled to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was what the girl would have wished. "I bullied you into stopping," she added; "so it serves me right."
Milly made in general the most of her good friend"s jokes; but she humoured this one a little absently. "Oh yes, you do bully me." And it was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist"s interest in the detail of the matter--in spite of a declaration from the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere--appeared almost immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised, however, to think till supper of where, with the world all before them, they might go--supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of lighted candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry--such being the mild adventures, the refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went in for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to "lie down"; but at the end of three minutes more she was not lying down, she was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of four thousand miles: "What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when you saw him alone, Dr. Finch said to you?"
It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the "ninth," in New York, the time she had seen Dr. Finch alone, and to recall what he had then said to her; and when everything had come back it was quite, at first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely mattered. He hadn"t, however, in fact; it was only as if he might perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth--within ten days of their sailing--that she had hurried from Boston under the alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident had happily soon announced itself as slight, and there had been, in the event, but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been p.r.o.nounced again not only possible, but, as representing "change," highly advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself with the doctor, that was, clearly, no more at his instance than at her own. Almost nothing had pa.s.sed between them but an easy exchange of enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of "Europe"; and this a.s.surance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give.
"Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn"t know or mightn"t then have known. I"ve no secret with him about you. What makes you suspect it? I don"t quite make out how you know I did see him alone."
"No--you never told me," said Milly. "And I don"t mean," she went on, "during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better--the last thing before you went home."
Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who told you I saw him then?"
_"He_ didn"t himself--nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of it now for the first time. That"s exactly why!" Milly declared--with something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and, chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with the question? "But if you"re not, as you now a.s.sure me, in his confidence," she smiled, "it"s no matter."
"I"m not in his confidence, and he had nothing to confide. But are you feeling unwell?"
The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she named was not at all the one that seemed to fit--witness the long climb Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face, but that her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little mysteriously to smile. "I don"t know--haven"t really the least idea.
But it might be well to find out."
Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy. "Are you in trouble--in pain?"
"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder----!"
"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"
"Well, if I shall have much of it."
Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"
"Of everything. Of everything I have."
Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You "have"
everything; so that when you say "much" of it----"
"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if I _have_ got it."
She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. "If you"ve got an ailment?"
"If I"ve got everything," Milly laughed.
"Ah, _that_--like almost n.o.body else."
"Then for how long?"
Mrs. Stringham"s eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And then as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a shade more conscious: "We"ll go straight to the best near doctor." This too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified a.s.sent and a silence, sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost herself. "Tell me, for G.o.d"s sake, if you"re in distress."
"I don"t think I"ve really _everything,"_ Milly said as if to explain--and as if also to put it pleasantly.
"But what on earth can I do for you?" The girl hesitated, then seemed on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I"m only too happy!"
It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham"s doubt.
"Then what"s the matter?"
"That"s the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."
"But what is it you think you haven"t got?"
Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim show of joy. "The power to resist the bliss of what I _have!"_
Mrs. Stringham took it in--her sense of being "put off" with it, the possible, probable irony of it--and her tenderness renewed itself in the positive grimness of a long murmur. "Whom will you see?"--for it was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors.
"Where will you first go?"
Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came back with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I"ll tell you at supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness that testified for her companion to something that again particularly pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd pa.s.sage just concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a hooked needle and a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was always provided--this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn"t really been in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess of the joy of life, and everything _did_ then fit. She couldn"t stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great s.p.a.ces.
There was no evasion of any truth--so at least Susan Shepherd hoped--in one"s sitting there while the twilight deepened and feeling still more finely that the position of this young lady was magnificent. The evening at that height had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers had bespoken a fire with their meal; the great Alpine road a.s.serted its brave presence through the small panes of the low, clean windows, with incidents at the inn-door, the yellow _diligence,_ the great waggons, the hurrying, hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes, pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion"s position should strike her as, after all, the best meaning she could extract; for she herself was seated in the magnificence as in a court-carriage--she came back to that, and such a method of progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently have a great deal more to give. By the time the candles were lighted for supper and the short, white curtains were drawn, Milly had reappeared, and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That charm moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without further loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. "I want to go straight to London."
It was unexpected, corresponding with no view positively taken at their departure; when England had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated and postponed--seen for the moment, as who should say, at the end of an avenue of preparations and introductions. London, in short, might have been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved like a siege by gradual approaches. Milly"s actual fine stride was therefore the more exciting, as any simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham; who, besides, was afterwards to recall as the very beginning of a drama the terms in which, between their smoky candles, the girl had put her preference and in which still other things had come up, come while the clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air reached their ears, with the stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets and the foreign questions, foreign answers, that were all alike a part of the cheery converse of the road. The girl brought it out in truth as she might have brought a huge confession, something she admitted herself shy about and that would seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled over her that what she wanted of Europe was "people," so far as they were to be had, and that if her friend really wished to know, the vision of this same equivocal quant.i.ty was what had haunted her during their previous days, in museums and churches, and what was again spoiling for her the pure taste of scenery. She was all for scenery--yes; but she wanted it human and personal, and all she could say was that there would be in London--wouldn"t there? more of that kind than anywhere else. She came back to her idea that if it wasn"t for long--if nothing should happen to be so for _her_--why, the particular thing she spoke of would probably have most to give her in the time, would probably be less than anything else a waste of her remainder. She produced this last consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready--if talk of early dying was in order--to match it from her own future. Good, then; they would, eat and drink because of what might happen to-morrow; and they would direct their course from that moment with a view to such eating and drinking.
They ate and drank that night, in truth, as if in the spirit of this decision; whereby the air, before they separated, felt itself the clearer.
It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive--extensive, that is, in proportion to the signs of life presented. The idea of "people"
was not so entertained on Milly"s part as to connect itself with particular persons, and the fact remained for each of the ladies that they would, completely unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely unknowing. They had no relation already formed; this plea Mrs.
Stringham put forward to see what it would produce. It produced nothing at first but the observation on the girl"s side that what she had in mind was no thought of society nor of sc.r.a.ping acquaintance; nothing was further from her than to desire the opportunities represented for the compatriot in general by a trunkful of "letters." It wasn"t a question, in short, of the people the compatriot was after; it was the human, the English picture itself, as they might see it in their own way--the world imagined always in what one had read and dreamed. Mrs.
Stringham did every justice to this world, but when later on an occasion chanced to present itself, she made a point of not omitting to remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance even an individual. This still, however, failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch"