The Wings of the Dove - Henry James (classic literature books TXT) 📗

never see you, nor speak, nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you shall simply cease to exist for me.”

He had always seemed⁠—it was one of the marks of what they called the “unspeakable” in him⁠—to walk a little more on his toes, as if for jauntiness, in the presence of offence. Nothing, however, was more wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it might be what he sometimes wouldn’t. He walked at any rate on his toes now. “A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear⁠—I don’t hesitate to say it!” Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to go on: “That’s her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what does she engage to do? You must work it, you know.”

“You mean make her feel,” Kate asked after a moment, “how much I’m attached to you?”

“Well, what a cruel, invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I’m a poor old dad to make a stand about giving up⁠—I quite agree. But I’m not, after all, quite the old dad not to get something for giving up.”

“Oh, I think her idea,” said Kate almost gaily now, “is that I shall get a great deal.”

He met her with his inimitable amenity. “But does she give you the items?”

The girl went through the show. “More or less, I think. But many of them are things I dare say I may take for granted⁠—things women can do for each other and that you wouldn’t understand.”

“There’s nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn’t! But what I want to do, you see,” he went on, “is to put it to your conscience that you’ve an admirable opportunity; and that it’s moreover one for which, after all, damn you, you’ve really to thank me.”

“I confess I don’t see,” Kate observed, “what my ‘conscience’ has to do with it.”

“Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you know what you’re a proof of, all you hard, hollow people together?” He put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. “Of the deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in our vulgarised, brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a day when a man like me⁠—by which I mean a parent like me⁠—would have been for a daughter like you a quite distinct value; what’s called in the business world, I believe, an ‘asset.’ ” He continued sociably to make it out. “I’m not talking only of what you might, with the right feeling do for me, but of what you might⁠—it’s what I call your opportunity⁠—do with me. Unless indeed,” he the next moment imperturbably threw off, “they come a good deal to the same thing. Your duty as well as your chance, if you’re capable of seeing it, is to use me. Show family feeling by seeing what I’m good for. If you had it as I have it you’d see I’m still good⁠—well, for a lot of things. There’s in fact, my dear,” Mr. Croy wound up, “a coach-and-four to be got out of me.” His drop, or rather his climax, failed a little of effect, indeed, through an undue precipitation of memory. Something his daughter had said came back to him. “You’ve settled to give away half your little inheritance?”

Her hesitation broke into laughter. “No⁠—I haven’t ‘settled’ anything.”

“But you mean, practically, to let Marian collar it?” They stood there face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could only go on. “You’ve a view of three hundred a year for her in addition to what her husband left her with? Is that,” the remote progenitor of such wantonness audibly wondered, “your morality?”

Kate found her answer without trouble. “Is it your idea that I should give you everything?”

The “everything” clearly struck him⁠—to the point even of determining the tone of his reply. “Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I think I’ve sufficiently expressed it, and it’s at any rate to take or to leave. It’s the only one, I may nevertheless add; it’s the basket with all my eggs. It’s my conception, in short, of your duty.”

The girl’s tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small grotesque visibility. “You’re wonderful on such subjects! I think I should leave you in no doubt,” she pursued, “that if I were to sign my aunt’s agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter.”

“Rather, my own love! It’s just your honour that I appeal to. The only way to play the game is to play it. There’s no limit to what your aunt can do for you.”

“Do you mean in the way of marrying me?”

“What else should I mean? Marry properly⁠—”

“And then?” Kate asked as he hung fire.

“And then⁠—well, I will talk with you. I’ll resume relations.”

She looked about her and picked up her parasol. “Because you’re not so afraid of anyone else in the world as you are of her? My husband, if I should marry, would be, at the worst, less of a terror? If that’s what you mean, there may be something in it. But doesn’t it depend a little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However,” Kate added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, “I don’t suppose your idea of him is quite that he should persuade you to live with us.”

“Dear no⁠—not a bit.” He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the hope she imputed; met both imputations, in fact, with a sort of intellectual relief. “I place the case for you