The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Condition/Chapter 5
V
Henry Chilver learned, however, in the course of time that he had won no victory on this, after all, rather reasonable ground—learned it from Mrs. Damerel herself, who came up to town in the spring and established herself, in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, in modest but decent quarters, where her late suitor's best friend went to pay her his respects. The great condition had, as each party saw it, been fruitlessly maintained, for neither had, under whatever pressure, found a way to give in. The most remarkable thing of all was that Chilver should so rapidly have become aware of owing his acquaintance with these facts directly to Mrs. Damerel. He had, for that matter, on the occasion of his very first call, an impression strangely new to him—the consciousness that they had already touched each other much more than any contact between them explained. They met in the air of a common knowledge, so that when, for instance, almost immediately, without precautions or approaches, she said of Bertram Braddle: 'He has gone off—heaven knows where!—to find out about me,' he was not in the least struck with the length of the jump. He was instantly sensible, on the contrary, of the greatest pleasure in showing by his reply that he needed no explanation. 'And do you think he'll succeed?'
'I don't know. He's so clever.'
This, it seemed to Henry Chilver, was a wonderful speech, and he sat there and candidly admired her for it. There were all sorts of things in it—faint, gentle ironies and humilities, and above all the fact that the description was by no means exact. Poor Braddle was not, for such a measure as hers, clever, or markedly wouldn't be for such an undertaking. The words completely, on the part of the woman who might be supposed to have had a kindness for him, gave him away; but surely that was, in the face of his attitude, a mild revenge. It seemed to Chilver that until in her little makeshift suburban drawing-room he found himself alone with Mrs. Damerel he himself had not effectively judged this position. He saw it now sharply, supremely, as the only one that had been possible to his friend, but finer still was the general state of perception, quickened to a liberal intensity, that made him so see it. He couldn't have expressed the case otherwise than by saying that poor Braddle had had to be right to be so ridiculously wrong. There might well have been, it appeared, in Mrs. Damerel's past a missing link or two; but what was the very office of such a fact—when taken with other facts not a bit less vivid—but to give one a splendid chance to show a confidence? Not the confidence that, as one could only put it to one's self, there had not been anything, but the confidence that, whatever there had been, one wouldn't find that one couldn't—for the sake of the rest—swallow it.
This was at bottom the great result of the first stages of Chilver's now independent, as he felt it to be, acquaintance with Mrs. Damerel—a sudden view of any, of every, dim passage, that was more than a tender acceptance of the particular obscurity, that partook really of the nature of affirmation and insistence. It all made her, with everything that for her advantage happened to help it on, extraordinarily touching to him, clothed her in the beauty of her general admission and her general appeal. Were not this admission and this appeal enough, and could anything be imagined more ponderously clumsy, more tactless and even truculent, than to want to gouge out the bleeding details? The charming woman was, to Chilver's view, about of his own age—not altogether so young, therefore, as Braddle, which was doubtless a note, too, in the latter's embarrassment—and that evidently did give time for a certain quantity of more or less trying, of really complicating experience. There it practically was, this experience, in the character of her delicacy, in her kindly, witty, sensitive face, worn fine, too fine perhaps, but only to its increase of expression. She was neither a young fool nor an old one, assuredly; but if the intenser acquaintance with life had made the object of one's affection neither false nor hard, how could one, on the whole, since the story might be so interesting, wish it away? Mrs. Damerel's admission was so much evidence of her truth and her appeal so much evidence of her softness. She might easily have hated them both for guessing. She was at all events just faded enough to match the small assortment of Chilver's fatigued illusions—those that he had still, for occasions, in somewhat sceptical use, but that had lost their original violence of colour.
The second time he saw her alone he came back to what she had told him of Bertram Braddle. 'If he should succeed—as to what you spoke of, wherever he has gone—would your engagement come on again?'
Mrs. Damerel hesitated, but she smiled. 'Do you mean whether he'll be likely to wish it?'
'No,' said Chilver, with something of a blush; 'I mean whether you'll be.'
She still smiled. 'Dear, no. I consider, you know, that I gave him his chance.'
'That you seem to me certainly to have done. Everything between you, then, as I understand it, is at an end?'
'It's very good of you,' said Mrs. Damerel, 'to desire so much to understand it. But I never give,' she laughed, 'but one chance!'
Chilver met her as he could. 'You evidently can't have given any one very many!'
'Oh, you know,' she replied, 'I don't in the least regard it as a matter of course that, many or few, they should be eagerly seized. Mr. Braddle has only behaved as almost any man in his situation would have done.'
Chilver at first, on this, only lost himself awhile. 'Yes, almost any man. I don't consider that the smallest blame attaches to him.'
'It would be too monstrous.'
Again he was briefly silent, but he had his inspiration. 'Yes, let us speak of him gently.' Then he added: 'You've answered me enough. You're free.'
'Free indeed is what I feel,' she replied with her light irony, 'when I talk to you with this extraordinary frankness.'
'Ah, the frankness is mine! It comes from the fact that from the first, through Braddle, I knew. And you knew I knew. And I knew that too. It has made something between us.'
'It might have made something rather different from this,' said Mrs. Damerel.
He wondered an instant. 'Different from my sitting here so intimately with you?'
'I mightn't have been able to bear that. I might have hated the sight of you.'
'Ah, that would have been only,' said Chilver, 'if you had really liked me!'
She matched quickly enough the spirit of this. 'Oh, but it wasn't so easy to like you little enough!'
'Little enough to endure me? Well, thank heaven, at any rate, we've found a sort of way!' Then he went on with real sincerity: 'I feel as if our friend had tremendously helped me. Oh, how easily I want to let him down! There it is.'
She breathed, after a moment, her assent in a sigh. 'There it is!'
There indeed it was for several days during which this sigh frequently came back to him as a note of patience, of dignity in helpless submission, penetrating beyond any that had ever reached him. She had been put completely in his power, her good name handed over to him, by no act of her own, and in all her manner in presence of the awkward fact there was something that blinked it as little as it braved it. He wondered so hard, with this, why, even after the talk I have just reported, they were each not more embarrassed, that it could only take him a tolerably short time to discover the reason. If there was something between them it had been between them, in silence and distance, from the first, from even before the moment when his friend, on the ship, by the favour of better opportunity, had tumbled in deep and temporarily blocked, as it were, the passage. Braddle was good-looking, good-humoured, well-connected, rich; and how could she have known of the impression of the man in the background any more than the man in the background could have known of hers? If she had accepted Braddle hadn't it been just to build out, in her situation, at a stroke, the worry of an alternative that was impossible? Of himself she had seen nothing but that he was out of the question, and she had agreed for conscience, for prudence, as a safeguard and a provision, to throw in her lot with a charming, fortunate fellow who was extremely in love. Chilver had, in his meditations, no sooner read these things clear than he had another flash that completed the vision. Hadn't she then, however, having done so much for reason, stood out, with her intended, on the item of the great condition—made great precisely by the insistence of each—exactly because, after all, that left the door open to her imagination, her dream, her hope? Hadn't her idea been to make for Bertram—troubled herself and wavering for the result—a calculated difficulty, a real test? Oh, if there was a test, how he was ready to meet it! Henry Chilver's insistence would take a different line from that of his predecessor. He stood at the threshold of the door, left open indeed, so that he had only to walk over. By the end of the week he had proposed.