The fact that she "knew"--knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed him--had in a short time begun to constitute between them a goodly bond, which became more marked when, within the year that followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the opportunities for meeting multiplied.The event that thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had succeeded--thanks to a high tone and a high temper--in not forfeiting the supreme position at the great house.The deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had recognised from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn't bristle.Nothing for a long time had made him easier than the thought that the aching must have been much soothed by Miss Bartram's now finding herself able to set up a small home in London.She had acquired property, to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under her aunt's extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter began to be straightened out, which indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue was at last in view.He had seen her again before that day, both because she had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality.These friends had taken him back there; he had achieved there again with Mss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt.
They went together, on these latter occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large--not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance.
That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to Marcher's sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.
They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge.He had with his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light--that is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies--the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten.The rare luck of his having again just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn't been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh.It had never entered into his plan that any one should "know", and mainly for the reason that it wasn't in him to tell any one.That would have been impossible, for nothing but the amusement of a cold world would have waited on it.Since, however, a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost.
That the right person SHOULD know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearly right, because--well, because there she was.Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong.There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact--the fact only--of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny.Aware, in fine, that her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her own, with things that might happen to HER, things that in friendship one should likewise take account of.Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this connexion--something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.
He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked.He hadn't disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were forsooth "unsettled." If they were as unsettled as he was--he who had never been settled for an hour in his life--they would know what it meant.Yet it wasn't, all the same, for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough.This was why he had such good--though possibly such rather colourless--manners; this was why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decently--as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely--unselfish.