The Beast in the Jungle | Page 6

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 Miss
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