"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.
"Whatever I do. If I want to."
"If you want to do it?"
"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.
He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."
"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.
He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"
It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it, why mayn"t we pay you our visit?"
"Will it help you to live?"
"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it"s very little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I shan"t want to miss it--!"
"Yes?"--she had dropped again.
"Well, on the day you give us a chance."
It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."
What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for something else. "I see how you feel--that I"m an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have any such upset, you"ll go. So it"s no matter."
"No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.
"If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."
It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. "I won"t go."
"Then I won"t go!" she brightly declared.
"You mean you won"t come to me?"
"No--never now. It"s over. But it"s all right. I mean, apart from that," she went on, "that I won"t do anything I oughtn"t or that I"m not forced to."
"Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You"re the least coercible of creatures."
"Because, you think, I"m so free?"
"The freest person probably now in the world. You"ve got everything."
"Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don"t complain."
On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know you don"t complain."
As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His telling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so tenderly that she didn"t complain was terrible kind gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the way she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that she took him up more gently than ever. "It isn"t a merit--when one sees one"s way."
"To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."
"I mean to keeping what one has."
"Oh that"s success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random, "it"s enough to try for."
"Well, it"s my limit. I"m not trying for more." To which then she added with a change: "And now about your book."
"My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.
"The one you"re now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling."
He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I"m not doing a book."
"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You"re not writing?"
He already felt relieved. "I don"t know, upon my honour, what I"m doing."
It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she didn"t know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
"Then if it"s not for your book--?"
"What _am_ I staying for?"
"I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn"t it rather empty for you?"
"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the vagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"
"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he could protest. "You stay because you"ve got to."
He grasped at it. "I stay because I"ve got to." And he couldn"t have said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.
Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.
He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permission from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either niece or aunt he mustn"t stir without it. All this Densher read in the girl"s sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he thought of was, in an instant, "Isn"t it enough, whatever may be one"s other complications, to stay after all for _you?_"
"Oh you must judge."
He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too restless. The speech in question at least wasn"t disloyal to Kate; that was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against her. He didn"t, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness, didn"t care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or worse. "Well then, so long as I don"t go, you must think of me all _as_ judging!"
II
He didn"t go home, on leaving her--he didn"t want to; he walked instead, through his narrow ways and his _campi_ with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively sequestered cafe where he had already more than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.
It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn"t because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities mattered. It wasn"t a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ pa.s.s everything was allowed. And her pa.s.s was now, as by the sharp click of a spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn"t would have close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on the cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read the cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the difference even survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his really bringing to a point, on Milly"s side, anything whatever. Nothing so "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or another a catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should be better, was mixed up in _him_, so that a single false motion might either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without the girl"s leave--not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it, whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate"s. It was to this his wisdom reduced itself--to the need again simply to be kind. That was the same as being still--as studying to create the minimum of vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wall of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn"t at this juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the idle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap, and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supported him. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace to dinner. He didn"t want, in short, to give that up, and he should probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He should be able to be still enough through everything.