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

Not that she would confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him⁠—yes⁠—that she wouldn’t want details, that she positively wouldn’t take them, and that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him. Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her. She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with him. That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him handsomely. “I can believe,” she said with perfect consideration, “how dreadful for you much of it must have been.”

He didn’t however take this up; there were things about which he wished first to be clear. “There’s no other possibility, by what you now know? I mean for her life.” And he had just to insist⁠—she would say as little as she could. “She is dying?”

“She’s dying.”

It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of Milly, wasn’t strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour⁠—his present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. “Has Sir Luke Strett,” he asked, “gone back to her?”

“I believe he’s there now.”

“Then,” said Densher, “it’s the end.”

She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke otherwise after a minute. “You won’t know, unless you’ve perhaps seen him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him.”

“Oh!” Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.

“For real news,” Kate herself after an instant added.

“She hasn’t thought Mrs. Stringham’s real?”

“It’s perhaps only I who haven’t. It was on Aunt Maud’s trying again three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having gone. He had started I believe some days before.”

“And won’t then by this time be back?”

Kate shook her head. “She sent yesterday to know.”

“He won’t leave her then”⁠—Densher had turned it over⁠—“while she lives. He’ll stay to the end. He’s magnificent.”

“I think she is,” said Kate.

It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from him rather oddly was: “Oh you don’t know!”

“Well, she’s after all my friend.”

It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant, his old sense of her variety. “I see. You would have been sure of it. You were sure of it.”

“Of course I was sure of it.”

And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however, presently broke. “If you don’t think Mrs. Stringham’s news ‘real’ what do you think of Lord Mark’s?”

She didn’t think anything. “Lord Mark’s?”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“Not since he saw her.”

“You’ve known then of his seeing her?”

“Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham.”

“And have you known,” Densher went on, “the rest?”

Kate wondered. “What rest?”

“Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn’t stand⁠—it was what then took place that simply killed her.”

“Oh!” Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connections, it wasn’t put on. “Mrs. Stringham hasn’t said that.”

He observed none the less that she didn’t ask what had then taken place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. “The way it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond all power to care again, and that’s why she’s dying.”

“Oh!” Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him pursue.

“One can see now that she was living by will⁠—which was very much what you originally told me of her.”

“I remember. That was it.”

“Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse was determined by that fellow’s dastardly stroke. He told her, the scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged.”

Kate gave a quick glare. “But he doesn’t know it!”

“That doesn’t matter. She did by the time he had left her. Besides,” Densher added, “he does know it. When,” he continued, “did you last see him?”

But she was lost now in the picture before her. “That was what made her worse?”

He watched her take it in⁠—it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. “She turned her face to the wall.”

“Poor Milly!” said Kate.

Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he continued consistently: “She learned it, you see, too soon⁠—since of course one’s idea had been that she might never even learn it at all. And she had felt sure⁠—through everything we had done⁠—of there not being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she need regard as a warning.”

She took another moment for thought. “It wasn’t through anything you did⁠—whatever that may have been⁠—that she gained her certainty. It was by the conviction she got from me.”

“Oh it’s very handsome,” Densher said, “for you to take your share!”

“Do you suppose,” Kate asked, “that I think of denying it?”

Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment, which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect absolutely of what they would have called between them her straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. “Of course I don’t suppose anything but that we’re together in our recognitions, our responsibilities⁠—whatever we choose to call them. It isn’t a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such impressions as it was our idea to give.”

“It wasn’t your idea to give impressions,” said Kate.

He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained character, as queer. “Don’t go into that!”

It was perhaps not as going