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

what so brief an exchange had at this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only when he had left her. “You can come,” he said, “when you like.”

What had taken place for him, however⁠—the drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own reality⁠—apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for something else. “I see how you feel⁠—that I’m an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have any such upset, you’ll go. So it’s no matter.”

“No matter? Oh!”⁠—he quite protested now.

“If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go.”

It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. “I won’t go.”

“Then I won’t go!” she brightly declared.

“You mean you won’t come to me?”

“No⁠—never now. It’s over. But it’s all right. I mean, apart from that,” she went on, “that I won’t do anything I oughtn’t or that I’m not forced to.”

“Oh who can ever force you?” he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her encouragement. “You’re the least coercible of creatures.”

“Because, you think, I’m so free?”

“The freest person probably now in the world. You’ve got everything.”

“Well,” she smiled, “call it so. I don’t complain.”

On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. “No I know you don’t complain.”

As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His telling her she had “everything” was extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so tenderly that she didn’t complain was terrible kind gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the way she just looked him again, and it was of no attenuation that she took him up more gently than ever. “It isn’t a merit⁠—when one sees one’s way.”

“To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not.”

“I mean to keeping what one has.”

“Oh that’s success. If what one has is good,” Densher said at random, “it’s enough to try for.”

“Well, it’s my limit. I’m not trying for more.” To which then she added with a change: “And now about your book.”

“My book⁠—?” He had got in a moment so far from it.

“The one you’re now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling.”

He cast about, but he made up his mind. “I’m not doing a book.”

“Not what you said?” she asked in a wonder. “You’re not writing?”

He already felt relieved. “I don’t know, upon my honour, what I’m doing.”

It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she didn’t know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, might complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.

“Then if it’s not for your book⁠—?”

“What am I staying for?”

“I mean with your London work⁠—with all you have to do. Isn’t it rather empty for you?”

“Empty for me?” He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the vagueness of his reply. “Oh well⁠—!”

“I ask too many questions?” She settled it for herself before he could protest. “You stay because you’ve got to.”

He grasped at it. “I stay because I’ve got to.” And he couldn’t have said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan. Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of⁠—the permission from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either niece or aunt he mustn’t stir without it. All this Densher read in the girl’s sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he thought of was, in an instant, “Isn’t it enough, whatever may be one’s other complications, to stay after all for you?”

“Oh you must judge.”

He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too restless. The speech in question at least wasn’t disloyal to Kate; that was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was staying so little “for” Milly that he was staying positively against her. He didn’t, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness, didn’t care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or worse. “Well then, so long as I don’t go, you must think of me all as judging!”

II

He didn’t go home, on leaving her⁠—he didn’t want to; he walked instead, through his narrow ways and his campi with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively sequestered café where he had already more than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions. It was