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Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (145 page)

BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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Page 871
so closely and completely now, and with such silent reciprocities, that it would in every circumstance be adequate.
Oh, yes, he's there, I said, and at about a quarter-past seven he was in the hall.
I knew it at the time, and I was so glad!
So glad?
That it was your affair, this time, and not mine. It's a rest for me.
Did you sleep all the afternoon? I asked.
As I haven't done for months. But how did you know that?
As
you
knew, I take it, that Sir Edmund was in the hall. We shall evidently each of us know things nowwhere the other is concerned.
Where
he
is concerned, Mrs. Marden amended. It's a blessing, the way you take it, she added, with a long, mild sigh.
I take it as a man who's in love with your daughter.
Of courseof course. Intense as I now felt my desire for the girl to be, I couldn't help laughing a little at the tone of these words; and it led my companion immediately to say: Otherwise you wouldn't have seen him.
But every one doesn't see him who's in love with her, or there would be dozens.
They're not in love with her as you are.
I can, of course, only speak for myself; and I found a moment, before dinner, to do so.
She told me immediately.
And have I any hopeany chance?
That's what
I
long for, what I pray for.
Ah, how can I thank you enough? I murmured.
I believe it will all passif she loves you, Mrs. Marden continued.
It will all pass?
We shall never see him again.
Oh, if she loves me I don't care how often I see him!
Ah, you take it better than I could, said my companion. You have the happiness not to knownot to understand.
I don't indeed. What on earth does he want?
He wants to make me suffer. She turned her wan face upon me with this, and I saw now for the first time, fully, how
 
Page 872
perfectly, if this had been Sir Edmund Orme's purpose, he had succeeded. For what I did to him, Mrs. Marden explained.
And what did you do to him?
She looked at me a moment. I killed him. As I had seen him fifty yards away only five minutes before the words gave me a start. Yes, I make you jump; be careful. He's there still, but he killed himself. I broke his hearthe thought me awfully bad. We were to have been married, but I broke it offjust at the last. I saw some one I liked better; I had no reason but that. It wasn't for interest, or money, or position, or anything of that sort. All
those
things were his. It was simply that I fell in love with Captain Marden. When I saw him I felt that I couldn't marry any one else. I wasn't in love with Edmund Ormemy mother, my elder sister had brought it about. But he did love me. I told him I didn't carethat I couldn't, that I
wouldn't.
I threw him over, and he took something, some abominable drug or draught that proved fatal. It was dreadful, it was horrible, he was found that wayhe died in agony. I married Captain Marden, but not for five years. I was happy, perfectly happy; time obliterates. But when my husband died I began to see him.
I had listened intently, but I wondered. To see your husband?
Never, never
that
way, thank God! To see
him,
with Chartiealways with Chartie. The first time it nearly killed meabout seven years ago, when she first came out. Never when I'm by myselfonly with her. Sometimes not for months, then every day for a week. I've tried everything to break the spelldoctors and
régimes
and climates; I've prayed to God on my knees. That day at Brighton, on the Parade with you, when you thought I was ill, that was the first for an age. And then, in the evening, when I knocked my tea over you, and the day you were at the door with Charlotte and I saw you from the windoweach time he was there.
I see, I see. I was more thrilled than I could say.
It's an apparition like another.
Like another? Have you ever seen another?
No, I mean the sort of thing one has heard of. It's tremendously interesting to encounter a case.
 
Page 873
Do you call me a case? Mrs. Marden asked, with exquisite resentment.
I mean myself.
Oh, you're the right one! she exclaimed. I was right when I trusted you.
I'm devoutly grateful you did; but what made you do it?
I had thought the whole thing outI had had time to in those dreadful years, while he was punishing me in my daughter.
Hardly that, I objected, if she never knew.
That has been my terror, that she
will,
from one occasion to another. I've an unspeakable dread of the effect on her.
She sha'n't, she sha'n't! I declared, so loud that several people looked round. Mrs. Marden made me get up, and I had no more talk with her that evening. The next day I told her I must take my departure from Trantonit was neither comfortable nor considerate to remain as a rejected suitor. She was disconcerted, but she accepted my reasons, only saying to me out of her mournful eyes: You'll leave me alone then with my burden? It was of course understood between us that for many weeks to come there would be no discretion in worrying poor Charlotte: such were the terms in which, with odd feminine and maternal inconsistency, she alluded to an attitude on my part that she favoured. I was prepared to be heroically considerate, but it seemed to me that even this delicacy permitted me to say a word to Miss Marden before I went. I begged her, after breakfast, to take a turn with me on the terrace, and as she hesitated, looking at me distantly, I informed her that it was only to ask her a question and to say good-byeI was leaving Tranton for
her.
She came out with me, and we passed slowly round the house three or four times. Nothing is finer than this great airy platform, from which every look is a sweep of the country, with the sea on the furthest edge. It might have been that as we passed the windows we were conspicuous to our friends in the house, who would divine, sarcastically, why I was so significantly bolting. But I didn't care; I only wondered whether they wouldn't really this time make out Sir Edmund Orme, who joined us on one of our turns and strolled slowly on the other side of my companion. Of what transcendent
 
Page 874
essence he was composed I knew not; I have no theory about him (leaving that to others), any more than I have one about such or such another of my fellow-mortals whom I have elbowed in life. He was as positive, as individual, as ultimate a fact as any of these. Above all he was as respectable, as sensitive a fact; so that I should no more have thought of taking a liberty, of practicing an experiment with him, of touching him, for instance, or speaking to him, since he set the example of silence, than I should have thought of committing any other social grossness. He had always, as I saw more fully later, the perfect propriety of his positionhad always the appearance of being dressed and, in attitude and aspect, of comporting himself, as the occasion demanded. He looked strange, incontestably, but somehow he always looked
right.
I very soon came to attach an idea of beauty to his unmentionable presence, the beauty of an old story of love and pain. What I ended by feeling was that he was on my side, that he was watching over my interest, that he was looking to it that my heart shouldn't be broken. Oh, he had taken it seriously, his own catastrophehe had certainly proved that in his day. If poor Mrs. Marden, as she told me, had thought it out, I also subjected the case to the finest analysis of which my intellect was capable. It was a case of retributive justice. The mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to jilt a lover might have been transmitted to the daughter, the daughter was to be watched, so that
she
might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong. She might reproduce her mother in character as vividly as she did in face. On the day she should transgress, in other words, her eyes would be opened suddenly and unpitiedly to the perfect presence, which she would have to work as she could into her conception of a young lady's universe. I had no great fear for her, because I didn't believe she was, in any cruel degree, a coquette. We should have a good deal of ground to get over before I, at least, should be in a position to be sacrificed by her. She couldn't throw me over before she had made a little more of me.
The question I asked her on the terrace that morning was whether I might continue, during the winter, to come to Mrs. Marden's house. I promised not to come too often and not
 
Page 875
to speak to her for three months of the question I had raised the day before. She replied that I might do as I liked, and on this we parted.
I carried out the vow I had made her; I held my tongue for my three months. Unexpectedly to myself there were moments of this time when she struck me as capable of playing with a man. I wanted so to make her like me that I became subtle and ingenious, wonderfully alert, patiently diplomatic. Sometimes I thought I had earned my reward, brought her to the point of saying: Well, well, you're the best of them allyou may speak to me now. Then there was a greater blankness than ever in her beauty, and on certain days a mocking light in her eyes, of which the meaning seemed to be: If you don't take care, I
will
accept you, to have done with you the more effectually. Mrs. Marden was a great help to me simply by believing in me, and I valued her faith all the more that it continued even though there was a sudden intermission of the miracle that had been wrought for me. After our visit to Tranton Sir Edmund Orme gave us a holiday, and I confess it was at first a disappointment to me. I felt less designated, less connected with Charlotte. Oh, don't cry till you're out of the wood, her mother said; he has let me off sometimes for six months. He'll break out again when you least expect ithe knows what he's about. For her these weeks were happy, and she was wise enough not to talk about me to the girl. She was so good as to assure me that I was taking the right way, that I looked as if I felt secure and that in the long run women give way to that. She had known them do it even when the man was a fool for looking soor was a fool on any terms. For herself she felt it to be a good time, a sort of St. Martin's summer of the soul. She was better than she had been for years, and she had me to thank for it. The sense of visitation was light upon hershe wasn't in anguish every time she looked round. Charlotte contradicted me very often, but she contradicted herself still more. That winter was a wonder of mildness, and we often sat out in the sun. I walked up and down with Charlotte, and Mrs. Marden, sometimes on a bench, sometimes in a bath-chair, waited for us and smiled at us as we passed. I always looked out for a sign in her faceHe's with you, he's with you (she would see him before I
 
Page 876
should), but nothing came; the season had brought us also a sort of spiritual softness. Toward the end of April the air was so like June that, meeting my two friends one night at some Brighton sociabilityan evening party with amateur musicI drew Miss Marden unresistingly out upon a balcony to which a window in one of the rooms stood open. The night was close and thick, the stars were dim, and below us, under the cliff, we heard the regular rumble of the sea. We listened to it a little and we heard mixed with it, from within the house, the sound of a violin accompanied by a pianoa performance which had been our pretext for passing out.
Do you like me a little better? I asked, abruptly, after a minute. Could you listen to me again?
I had no sooner spoken than she laid her hand quickly, with a certain force, on my arm. Hush!isn't there some one there? She was looking into the gloom of the far end of the balcony. This balcony ran the whole width of the house, a width very great in the best of the old houses at Brighton. We were lighted a little by the open window behind us, but the other windows, curtained within, left the darkness undiminished, so that I made out but dimly the figure of a gentleman standing there and looking at us. He was in evening dress, like a guestI saw the vague shine of his white shirt and the pale oval of his faceand he might perfectly have been a guest who had stepped out in advance of us to take the air. Miss Marden took him for one at firstthen evidently, even in a few seconds, she saw that the intensity of his gaze was unconventional. What else she saw I couldn't determine; I was too taken up with my own impression to do more than feel the quick contact of her uneasiness. My own impression was in fact the strongest of sensations, a sensation of horror; for what could the thing mean but that the girl at last
saw?
I heard her give a sudden, gasping Ah! and move quickly into the house. It was only afterwards that I knew that I myself had had a totally new emotionmy horror passing into anger, and my anger into a stride along the balcony with a gesture of reprobation. The case was simplified to the vision of a frightened girl whom I loved. I advanced to vindicate her security, but I found nothing there to meet me. It was either all a mistake or Sir Edmund Orme had vanished.
BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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