And her pass 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.
He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of not having failed.
There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn't trying—quite the contrary—to be either distant or dull.
That would not have been being "nice," which in its own form was the real law.
That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert; so that he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, as it were, to let himself go—go in the direction, that is to say, of staying.
It depended on where he went; which was what he meant by taking care.
When one went on tiptoe one could turn off for retreat without betraying the manoeuvre.
Perfect tact—the necessity for which he had from the first, as we know, happily recognised—was to keep all intercourse in the key of the absolutely settled.
It was settled thus for instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled as well that her being the American girl was, just in time and for the relation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable.
If, at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogative of the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn't diviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself as possessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keeping her, with his idea, well up to it—wouldn't have been in fine for want of his encouragement and reminder.
He didn't perhaps in so many words speak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least to intermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself was an impersonal way, and this held it there before her—since he was careful also to talk pleasantly.
It was at once their idea, when all was said, and the most marked of their conveniences.
The type was so elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within bounds.
And he had meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted, even though without her quite seeing why.
She fairly touched this once in saying:
"Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of facilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have to be English to measure it!"—and that too, strangely enough, without prejudice to her good nature.
She might have been conceived as doing—that is of being—what he liked in order perhaps only to judge where it would take them.
They really as it went on saw each other at the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception, and he knowing she thus knew it.
Add that he again knew she knew, and yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of the line they found most completely workable.
The strangest fact of all for us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what figured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, above and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency.
There would scarce have been felicity—certainly too little of the right lubricant—had not the national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely, in Milly's chords.
It made up her unity and was the one thing he could unlimitedly take for granted.
He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of the undue vibration that was keeping him watchful.
He knew in his nervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand to mouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake.
All women had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; but the national character was firm in her, whether as all of her, practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national character that, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtual non-conductor.
It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty days had passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by the information that the signorina padrona was not "receiving."
The announcement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of the gondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as the knowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown, could scarce fail to beget.
Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelli among the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all among the involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved he recognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal.
Neither of the two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was not prepared to say that either was poco bene.