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

alien⁠—which had been just the spell⁠—even to the perceptions of youth. There was the danger⁠—she frankly touched it⁠—that such a temperament mightn’t have matured, with the years, all in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger that, in renewing relations after long breaks, one had always to look in the face. To gather in strayed threads was to take a risk⁠—for which, however, she was prepared if Milly was. The possible “fun,” she confessed, was by itself rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this⁠—wound up a little as she was⁠—the note of fun as the harmless final right of fifty years of mere New England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards to recall was the indescribable look dropped on her, at this, by her companion; she was still seated there between the candles and before the finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to figure for her as an inscrutable comment on her notion of freedom. Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been mainly soundless, her friend’s story⁠—produced as a resource unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve⁠—half surprised, half beguiled her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that, she brought out, before she went to bed, an easy, a light “Risk everything!”

This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud Lowder’s evoked presence⁠—as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became, in excited reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant, when the girl had left her, took place in her⁠—nameless but, as soon as she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this fullness of time, that she had been, after Maud’s marriage, just sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had left her behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the corresponding date in her own life⁠—not the second, the sad one, with its dignity of sadness, but the first, with the meagreness of its supposed felicity⁠—she had been, in the same spirit, almost patronisingly pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased to matter, had never quite died out for her, there was doubtless some oddity in its now offering itself as a link, rather than as another break, in the chain; and indeed there might well have been for her a mood in which the notion of the development of patronage in her quondam schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was actually settled⁠—if the case be worth our analysis⁠—by the happy consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her having at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company, had appeared to have so much, and would now⁠—for wasn’t it also, in general, quite the rich law of English life?⁠—have, with accretions, promotions, expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might be; she rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might have to show⁠—and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice⁠—she would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late⁠—till the candles were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat portfolio. She had not lost the old clue; there were connections she remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She wrote on the spot.

Book IV I

It had all gone so fast after this that Milly uttered but the truth nearest to hand in saying to the gentleman on her right⁠—who was, by the same token, the gentleman on her hostess’s left⁠—that she scarce even then knew where she was: the words marking her first full sense of a situation really romantic. They were already dining, she and her friend, at Lancaster Gate, and surrounded, as it seemed to her, with every English accessory; though her consciousness of Mrs. Lowder’s existence, and still more of her remarkable identity, had been of so recent and so sudden a birth. Susie, as she was apt to call her companion for a lighter change, had only had to wave a neat little wand for the fairytale to begin at once; in consequence of which Susie now glittered⁠—for, with Mrs. Stringham’s new sense of success, it came to that⁠—in the character of a fairy godmother. Milly had almost insisted on dressing her, for the present occasion, as one; and it was no fault of the girl’s if the good lady had not now appeared in a peaked hat, a short petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch. The good lady, in truth, bore herself not less contentedly than if these insignia had marked her work; and Milly’s observation to Lord Mark had just been, doubtless, the result of such a light exchange of looks with her as even the great length of the table had not baffled. There were twenty persons between them, but this sustained passage was the sharpest sequel yet to that other comparison of views during the pause on the Swiss pass. It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune had been unduly precipitated⁠—as if, properly, they were in the position of having ventured on a small joke and found the answer out of proportion grave. She could not at this moment, for instance, have said whether, with her quickened perceptions, she were more enlivened or oppressed; and the case might in fact have been serious had she not, by good fortune, from the moment the picture loomed, quickly made up her mind that what finally most concerned her was neither to seek nor to shirk, was not even to wonder too much, but was to let things come as they would, since there was little enough doubt of how they would go.

Lord Mark had been brought to her before dinner⁠—not by Mrs. Lowder, but by the handsome girl, that lady’s niece, who