"Oh!" said Merton Densher.
Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure, had discovered in free speech to him a momentary balm.
"They've the misfortune to have, I suppose you know, a dreadful horrible father."
"Oh!" said Densher again.
"He's too bad almost to name, but he has come upon Marian, and Marian has shrieked for help."
Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his curiosity compromised for an instant with his discretion.
"Come upon her—for money?"
"Oh for that of course always.
But, at this blessed season, for refuge, for safety: for God knows what.
He's there, the brute.
And Kate's with them.
And that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down the steps, "is her Christmas."
She had stopped again at the bottom while he thought of an answer.
"Yours then is after all rather better."
"It's at least more decent." And her hand once more came out. "But why do I talk of our troubles?
Come if you can."
He showed a faint smile.
"Thanks.
If I can."
"And now—I dare say—you'll go to church?"
She had asked it, with her good intention, rather in the air and by way of sketching for him, in the line of support, something a little more to the purpose than what she had been giving him.
He felt it as finishing off their intensities of expression that he found himself to all appearance receiving her hint as happy.
"Why yes—I think I will": after which, as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had opened from within, he was free to turn his back.
He heard the door, behind him, sharply close again and the vehicle move off in another direction than his own.
He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed he was at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to the south.
That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, because there had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finally talked, an instant recognition of his necessary course.
Nothing was open to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than the influence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself that possessed him.
Her complications, which had fairly, with everything else, an awful sound—what were they, a thousand times over, but his own?
His present business was to see that they didn't escape an hour longer taking their proper place in his life.
He accordingly would have held his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he had just lied to Mrs. Lowder—a term it perversely eased him to keep using—even more than was necessary.
To what church was he going, to what church, in such a state of his nerves, could he go?—he pulled up short again, as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowder's carriage, to ask it.
And yet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word.
He was just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and he bethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand.
He had but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon before it.
At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really—as it struck him—consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendid service—the flocking crowd told of it—which glittered and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell of organ and choir.
It didn't match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible.
The Oratory in short, to make him right, would do.
IV
The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon—dusk thick from an early hour—had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door.
He had gone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself in Chelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attempt independently to make a meal.
This, in the event, he but imperfectly achieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the club library, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while, closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during the night.
Before doing this indeed he had written—it was the first thing he did—a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place, he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.
He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, to trust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to return with a gage of delivery.
When at four o'clock he was face to face with Kate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief that his notification had reached her.
She was expectant and to that extent prepared; which simplified a little—if a little, at the present pass, counted.
Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment of his coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharp and suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seen her.
He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt's pompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storied ceilings of Venice.
He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs. Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished stranger—a stranger to the little Chelsea street—who was making the best of a queer episode and a place of exile.
The extraordinary thing was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a stranger in it than she.