her father had brought them, his folly and cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her two young brothers — one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by typhoid fever contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the flower of the flock, a middy on the Britannia, dreadfully drowned, and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian’s unnatural marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors — these things completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous colour, partly — and that charm was the greatest — as if to work off, for her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things. She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and was so intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was quite as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them. They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would — in other words they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always struck him she had more life than he to react from, and when she recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard odd offset of her present exaltation — since as exaltation it was apparently to be considered — he felt his own grey domestic annals make little show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her father’s character that engaged him most, but her picture of her adventure in Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr. Croy had originally done?
“I don’t know — and I don’t want to. I only know that years and years ago — when I was about fifteen — something or other happened that made him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn’t know it at the time,” Kate explained, “but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough, my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her now — the way, one cold black Sunday morning when, on account of an extraordinary fog, we hadn’t gone to church, she broke it to me by the schoolroom fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp — when we didn’t go to church we had to read history-books — and I suddenly heard her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and apropos of nothing: ‘Papa has done something wicked.’ And the curious thing was that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though she could tell me nothing more — neither what was the wickedness, nor how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it. We had our sense always that all sorts of things HAD happened, were all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that that was enough, I took her word for it — it seemed somehow so natural. We were not, however, to ask mother — which made it more natural still, and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to me, in time, of her own accord — this was very much later on. He hadn’t been with us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done: ‘If you hear anything against your father — anything I mean except that he’s odious and vile — remember it’s perfectly false.’ That was the way I knew it was true, though I recall my saying to her then that I of course knew it wasn’t. She might have told me it was true, and yet have trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I should meet — to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however,” the girl went on, “I’ve never had occasion, and I’ve been conscious of it with a sort of surprise. It has made the world seem at times more decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the world, has washed him out. He doesn’t exist for people. And yet I’m as sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I’m more sure. And that,” she wound up, “is what I sit here and tell you about my own father. If you don’t call it a proof of confidence I don’t know what will satisfy you.”
“It satisfies me beautifully,” Densher returned, “but it doesn’t, my dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don’t, you know, really tell me anything. It’s so vague that what am I to think but that you may very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?”
“He has done everything.”
“Oh — everything! Everything’s nothing.”
“Well then,” said Kate, “he has done some particular thing. It’s known — only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. YOU could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about.”
Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up. “I wouldn’t find out for the world, and I’d rather lose my tongue than put a question “
“And yet it’s a part of me,” said Kate.
“A part of you?”
“My father’s dishonour.” Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than ever yet, her note of proud still pessimism. “How can such a thing as that not be the great thing in one’s life?”
She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. “I shall ask you, for the great thing in your life,” he said, “to depend on ME a little more.” After which, just debating, “Doesn’t he belong to some club?” he asked.
She had a grave headshake. “He used to — to many.”
“But he has dropped them?”
“They’ve dropped HIM. Of that I’m sure. It ought to do for you. I offered him,” the girl immediately continued— “and it was for that I went to him — to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is possible. But he won’t hear of it.”
Densher took this in with marked but generous wonder. “You offered him— ‘impossible’ as you describe him to me — to live with him and share his disadvantages?” The young man saw for the moment only the high beauty of it. “You ARE gallant!”
“Because it strikes you as being brave for him?” She wouldn’t in the least have this. “It wasn’t courage — it was the opposite. I did it to save myself — to escape.”
He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer things than any one to think about. “Escape from what?”
“From everything.”
“Do you by any chance mean from me?”
“No; I spoke to him of you, told him — or what amounted to it — that I would bring
