• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3661 0

you—I call God to witness!—every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life.” That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as quiet as if it were nothing. They were in the open air, in an alley of the Gardens; the great space, which seemed to arch just then higher and spread wider for them, threw them back into deep concentration. They moved by a common instinct to a spot, within sight, that struck them as fairly sequestered, and there, before their time together was spent, they had extorted from concentration every advance it could make them. They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solemnised, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and to belong tremendously, to each other. They were to leave the place accordingly an affianced couple, but before they left it other things still had passed. Densher had declared his horror of bringing to a premature end her happy relation with her aunt; and they had worked round together to a high level of discretion. Kate’s free profession was that she wished not to deprive him of Mrs. Lowder’s countenance, which in the long run she was convinced he would continue to enjoy; and as by a blest turn Aunt Maud had demanded of him no promise that would tie his hands they should be able to propitiate their star in their own way and yet remain loyal. One difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.

“Of course it will never do—we must remember that—from the moment you allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears I don’t see that we deceive her. At a given hour, you see, she must be undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the hour and to face it. Only, after all, in that case,” the young man observed, “one doesn’t quite make out what we shall have got from her.”

“What she’ll have got from us?” Kate put it with a smile. “What she’ll have got from us,” the girl went on, “is her own affair—it’s for her to measure. I asked her for nothing,” she added; “I never put myself upon her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands them. What we shall have got from her is what we’ve already spoken of,” Kate further explained; “it’s that we shall have gained time. And so, for that matter, will she.”

Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the present hour into romantic obscurity. “Yes; no doubt, in our particular situation, time’s everything. And then there’s the joy of it.”

She hesitated. “Of our secret?”

“Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what’s represented and, as we must somehow feel, secured to us and made deeper and closer by it.” And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all his meaning. “Our being as we are.”

It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink into her. “So gone?”

“So gone. So extremely gone. However,” he smiled, “we shall go a good deal further.” Her answer to which was only the softness of her silence—a silence that looked out for them both at the far reach of their prospect. This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They were practically united and splendidly strong; but there were other things—things they were precisely strong enough to be able successfully to count with and safely to allow for; in consequence of which they would for the present, subject to some better reason, keep their understanding to themselves. It was not indeed however till after one more observation of Densher’s that they felt the question completely straightened out. “The only thing of course is that she may any day absolutely put it to you.”

Kate considered. “Ask me where, on my honour, we are? She may, naturally; but I doubt if in fact she will. While you’re away she’ll make the most of that drop of the tension. She’ll leave me alone.”

“But there’ll be my letters.”

The girl faced his letters. “Very, very many?”

“Very, very, very many—more than ever; and you know