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

if these were crudities, almost material pangs, only say as before: “Then you know?”

“Yes,” he at last returned, “I know. But the marvel to me is that you do. I’ve no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do.”

“You may,” said Susan Shepherd, “all the same. I know.”

“Everything?”

Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. “No⁠—not everything. That’s why I’ve come.”

“That I shall really tell you?” With which, as she hesitated and it affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting “Oh, oh!” It turned him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him, was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired it. That was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less, so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him, that she hadn’t come to judge him; had come rather, so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own abasement⁠—that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when she met his groan with an attenuation.

“We shall at all events⁠—if that’s anything⁠—be together.”

It was his own good impulse in herself. “It’s what I’ve ventured to feel. It’s much.” She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with her sole and single boldness⁠—and also on grounds he hadn’t then measured⁠—that Mrs. Stringham was a person who wouldn’t, at a pinch, in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in which Kate was always showing. “You don’t think then very horridly of me?”

And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous effusion⁠—quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what helped him. “Oh you’ve been extraordinary!”

It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there. She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also, accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. “She has turned her face to the wall.”

He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences, they were simply so leaving what he saw. “She doesn’t speak at all? I don’t mean not of me.”

“Of nothing⁠—of no one.” And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take it. “She doesn’t want to die. Think of her age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is. Think of all she has. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God⁠—!” the poor lady wound up with a wan inconsequence.

He wondered. “You thank God⁠—?”

“That she’s so quiet.”

He continued to wonder. “Is she so quiet?”

“She’s more than quiet. She’s grim. It’s what she has never been. So you see⁠—all these days. I can’t tell you⁠—but it’s better so. It would kill me if she were to tell me.”

“To tell you?” He was still at a loss.

“How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn’t want it.”

“How she doesn’t want to die? Of course she doesn’t want it.” He had a long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought out. Milly’s “grimness” and the great hushed palace were present to him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been waiting there and listening. “Only, what harm have you done her?”

Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. “I don’t know. I come and talk of her here with you.”

It made him again hesitate. “Does she utterly hate me?”

“I don’t know. How can I? No one ever will.”

“She’ll never tell?”

“She’ll never tell.”

Once more he thought. “She must be magnificent.”

“She is magnificent.”

His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he could, all over. “Would she see me again?”

It made his companion stare. “Should you like to see her?”

“You mean as you describe her?” He felt her surprise, and it took him some time. “No.”

“Ah then!” Mrs. Stringham sighed.

“But if she could bear it I’d do anything.”

She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. “I don’t see what you can do.”

“I don’t either. But she might.”

Mrs. Stringham continued to think. “It’s too late.”

“Too late for her to see⁠—?”

“Too late.”

The very decision of her despair⁠—it was after all so lucid⁠—kindled in him a heat. “But the doctor, all the while⁠—?”

“Tacchini? Oh he’s kind. He comes. He’s proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he’s waiting on events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously⁠—for she thinks of me, dear creature⁠—that he may come, that he may stay, for my