The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2

'Well, it's a beautiful sentiment; but it isn't as if she had anything to give.'

'Hasn't she got you?' Lord Mark presently asked.

'Me—to give Mrs. Lowder?' Milly had clearly not yet seen herself in the light of such an offering. 'Oh, I'm rather a poor present; and I don't feel as if, even at that, I've as yet quite been given.'

'You've been shown, and if our friend has jumped at you it comes to the same thing.' He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. 'To be seen you must recognise, is, for you, to be jumped at; and, if it's a question of being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder, already, who's getting the benefit. Look round the table and you'll make out, I think, that you're being, from top to bottom, jumped at.'

'Well, then,' said Milly, 'I seem also to feel that I like it better than being made fun of.'

It was one of the things she afterwards saw—Milly was for ever seeing things afterwards—that her companion had here had some way of his own, quite unlike any one's else, of assuring her of his consideration. She wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor protested. She said to herself, at any rate, that he had led her on; and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so. 'Does she know much about you?'

'No, she just likes us.'

Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no laugh. 'I mean you particularly. Has that lady with the charming face, which is charming, told her?'

Milly hesitated. 'Told her what?'

'Everything.'

This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her—made her feel for a moment that, as a matter of course, she was a subject for disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. 'Oh, as for that, you must ask her.'

'Your clever companion?'

'Mrs. Lowder.'

He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as, should he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell him. 'And I shall have, at any rate, in the meantime, the interest of seeing what she does with you. That will teach me more or less, you see, how much she knows.'

Milly followed this—it was lucid; but it suggested something apart. 'How much does she know about you?'

'Nothing,' said Lord Mark serenely. 'But that doesn't matter—for what she does with me.' And then, as to anticipate Milly's question about the nature of such doing: 'This, for instance—turning me straight on for you.'

The girl thought. 'And you mean she wouldn't if she did know——?'

He met it as if it were really a point. 'No. I believe, to do her justice, she still would. So you can be easy.'

Milly had the next instant, then, acted on the permission. 'Because you're even at the worst the best thing she has?'

With this he was at last amused. 'I was till you came. You're the best now.'

It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his knowing, but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of making her believe them, though still with wonder. That, really, from this first of their meetings, was what was most to abide with her: she accepted almost helplessly, she surrendered to the inevitability of being the sort of thing, as he might have said, that he at least thoroughly believed he had, in going about, seen here enough of for all practical purposes. Her submission was naturally, moreover, not to be impaired by her learning later on that he had paid at short intervals, though at a time apparently just previous to her own emergence from the obscurity of extreme youth, three separate visits to New York, where his nameable friends and his contrasted contacts had been numerous. His impression, his recollection of the whole mixed quantity, was still visibly rich. It had helped him to place her, and she was more and more sharply conscious of having—as with the door sharply slammed upon her and the guard's hand raised in signal to the train—been popped into the compartment in which she was to travel for him. It was a use of her that many a girl would have been doubtless quick to resent; and the kind of mind that thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and taking is precisely one of the charms of our subject. Milly had practically just learned from him, had made out, as it were, from her rumbling compartment, that he gave her the highest place among their friend's actual properties. She was a success, that was what it came to, he presently assured her, and that was what it was to be a success: it always happened before one could know it. One's ignorance was in fact often the greatest part of it. 'You haven't had time yet,' he said; 'this is nothing. But you'll see. You'll see everything. You can, you know—everything you dream of.'

He made her more and more wonder; she almost felt as if he were showing her visions while he spoke; and strangely enough, though it was visions that had drawn her on, she hadn't seen them in connection—that is in such preliminary and necessary connection—with such a face as Lord Mark's, such eyes and such a voice, such a tone and such a manner. He had for an instant the effect of making her ask herself if she were after all going to be afraid; so distinct was it for fifty seconds that a fear passed over her. There they were again—yes, certainly: Susie's overture to Mrs. Lowder had been their joke, but they had pressed in that gaiety an electric bell that continued to sound. Positively, while she sat there, she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered, during these moments, why the others didn't hear it. They didn't stare, they didn't smile, and the fear in her that I speak of was but her own desire to stop it. That dropped, however, as if the alarm itself had ceased; she seemed to have seen in a quick, though tempered glare that there were two courses for her, one to leave London again the first thing in the morning, the other to do nothing at all. Well, she would do nothing at all; she was already doing it; more than that, she had already done it, and her chance was gone. She gave herself up—she had the strangest sense, on the spot, of so deciding; for she had turned a corner before she went on again with Lord Mark. Inexpressive, but intensely significant, he met as no one else could have done the very question she had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the Brunig. Should she have it, whatever she did have, that question had been, for long? 'Ah, so possibly not,' her neighbour appeared to reply; 'therefore, don't you see? I'm the way.' It was vivid that he might be, in spite of his absence of flourish; the way being doubtless just in that absence. The handsome girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she felt, kept her also in view—Mrs. Lowder's striking niece would, perhaps, be the way as well, for in her too was the absence of flourish, though she had little else, so far as one could tell, in common with Lord Mark. Yet how indeed could one tell, what did one understand, and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally conscious but of their being somehow together