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

“You do, I believe, only you’ve a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in hearing it, so that if you can tell me you know⁠—”

“Well?” he asked as she still kept what depended on it.

“Why then I’ll do what you want. We needn’t, I grant you, in that case wait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I don’t even ask you,” she continued, “for a proof. I’m content with your moral certainty.”

By this time it had come over him⁠—it had the force of a rush. The point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while he recognised it, mantled in his face. “I know nothing whatever.”

“You’ve not an idea?”

“I’ve not an idea.”

“I’d consent,” she said⁠—“I’d announce it tomorrow, today, I’d go home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean an idea straight from you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith. There, my dear!”⁠—and she smiled again. “I call that really meeting you.”

If it was then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he could but stand there with his wasted passion⁠—for it was in high passion that he had from the morning acted⁠—in his face. She made it all out, bent upon her⁠—the idea he didn’t have, and the idea he had, and his failure of insistence when it brought up that challenge, and his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and she had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this, between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him, when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as she leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented irresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had an advantage with his passion now.

III

He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had “happened” to him as a cause for the demand he there made of her⁠—happened he meant since the account he had given, after his return, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days⁠—they had brought him to Christmas morning⁠—he was conscious enough, in preparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score. Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking the night to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutely first, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relation with her. The fact itself had met him there⁠—in his own small quarters⁠—on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affected him as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for the next hours took its measure⁠—a process that made his night mercilessly wakeful⁠—the consequences possibly implied were numerous to distraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slow hours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was his difficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives, and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to the other. They were not in a perspective in which they might be compared and considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair of monsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath and the huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight before him; he wouldn’t for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turned his head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still⁠—was not, for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after the event, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light of convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him⁠—that safety in doubt was not action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very commonness. In his case there was nothing of that⁠—in no case in his life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft Christmas day.

Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his final prime decision hadn’t been to call at the door of Sir Luke Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience, once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the dusky festal desert. Sir Luke’s great square was not near, but he walked the distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus to turn over his view⁠—the view to which what had