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

at it. “That’s what I say to myself. It’s what I’ve been believing you,” he a trifle vaguely explained, “still more certain to feel.”

She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn’t been drawn. He looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid London street⁠—for sordid, with his other association, he felt it⁠—as he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham’s eyes on him, in the vista of the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him to say he would; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the inanity of such a hope. Kate’s attention, on her side, during these minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly presented⁠—rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she again took him up. “You received⁠—what you spoke of⁠—last night?”

It made him turn round. “Coming in from Fleet Street⁠—earlier by an hour than usual⁠—I found it with some other letters on my table. But my eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it.”

“One can understand.” She listened with respect. His tone however was so singular that she presently added: “You speak as if all this while you hadn’t touched it.”

“Oh yes, I’ve touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I’d been touching nothing else. I quite firmly,” he pursued as if to be plainer, “took hold of it.”

“Then where is it?”

“Oh I have it here.”

“And you’ve brought it to show me?”

“I’ve brought it to show you.”

So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities, almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words. She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while his own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought. “But now that you’ve done so you feel you don’t want to.”

“I want to immensely,” he said. “Only you tell me nothing.”

She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable child. “It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You haven’t yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you require don’t come from your document itself.” Then as he answered nothing she had a flash. “You mean you haven’t read it?”

“I haven’t read it.”

She stared. “Then how am I to help you with it?”

Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, and again he was before her. “By telling me this. It’s something, you know, that you wouldn’t tell me the other day.”

She was vague. “The other day?”

“The first time after my return⁠—the Sunday I came to you. What’s he doing,” Densher went on, “at that hour of the morning with her? What does his having been with her there mean?”

“Of whom are you talking?”

“Of that man⁠—Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?”

“Oh with Aunt Maud?”

“Yes, my dear⁠—and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing; and it’s what you didn’t tell me the other day when I put you the question.”

Kate tried to remember the other day. “You asked me nothing about any hour.”

“I asked you when it was you last saw him⁠—previous, I mean, to his second descent at Venice. You wouldn’t say, and as we were talking of a matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact remains, you know, my dear, that you haven’t told me.”

Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly than the others. “I ‘wouldn’t say’?⁠—and you ‘let it pass’?” She looked just coldly blank. “You really speak as if I were keeping something back.”

“Well, you see,” Densher persisted, “you’re not even telling me now. All I want to know,” he nevertheless explained, “is whether there was a connection between that proceeding on his part, which was practically⁠—oh beyond all doubt!⁠—the shock precipitating for her what has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously for yourself. How in the world did he know we’re engaged?”

V

Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat down, the first movement she had made. “Are you trying to fix it on me that I must have told him?”

She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay⁠—which he showed he immediately took in. “My dear child, I’m not trying to ‘fix’ anything; but I’m extremely tormented and I seem not to understand. What has the brute to do with us anyway?”

“What has he indeed?” Kate asked.

She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason. There was in it⁠—and for his reason really⁠—one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going to kiss her. He hadn’t been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was none the less the quieter. “What’s he doing, from ten o’clock on Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?”

Kate looked surprised. “Didn’t she tell you he’s staying there?”

“At Lancaster Gate?” Densher’s surprise met it. “ ‘Staying’?⁠—since when?”

“Since day before