Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (19 page)

The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall precipitously and to become a “view” pure and simple, a view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl’s seat was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to the right at gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single false movement, by a turn of the head—how could one tell?—into whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in the poor lady’s ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly’s. It was a commotion that left our observer intensely still and holding her breath. What had first been offered her was the possibility of a latent intention—however wild the idea—in such a posture; of some betrayed accordance of Milly’s caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable, must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse of a few seconds had partly a reassuring effect. It gave her time to receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This was the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating there she wasn’t meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham had decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.

Not many minutes probably, yet they hadn’t seemed few, and they had given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when, late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point of the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word—
à bientôt!
^s
—
across the cover; after which, even under the girl’s continued delay, she had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw that the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction that the future wasn’t to exist for her princess in the form of any sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn’t be for her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to say to herself during still another wait of some length that if her young friend still continued absent it wouldn’t be because—what-everthe opportunity—she had cut short the thread. She wouldn’t have committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakeably reserved for some more complicated passage; this was the very vision in which she had, with no little awe, been discovered. The image that thus remained with the elder lady kept the character of a revelation. During the breathless minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter’s type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery, all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham’s flame. They are things that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger on our friend’s part than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was scarce yet used to carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine of something precious. She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared. The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She wasn’t thinking, either, of Milly’s gold.

The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she hadn’t the book with her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at all. Her comrade’s decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of having followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully enough, the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared itself. “Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that after all-?”

Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately made such a sign that Milly’s words gave place to visible relief at her assent. “You don’t care for our stop here—you’d rather go straight on? We’ll start then with the peep of tomorrow’s dawn—or as early as you like; it’s only rather late now to take the road again.” And she smiled to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was what the girl would have wished. “I bullied you into stopping,” she added; “so it serves me right.”

Milly made in general the most of her good friend’s jokes; but she humoured this one a little absently. “Oh yes, you do bully me.” And it was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist’s interest in the detail of the matter—in spite of a declaration from the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere—appeared almost immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised, however, to think till supper of where, with the world all before them, they might go—supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of lighted candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry—such being the mild adventures, the refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went in for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to “lie down”; but at the end of three minutes more she wasn’t lying down, she was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of four thousand miles: “What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when you saw him alone, Doctor Finch said to you?”

It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the “ninth,” in New York, the time she had seen Doctor Finch alone, and to recall the words he had then uttered; and when everything had come back it was quite, at first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely mattered. He hadn’t, however, in fact; it was only as if he might perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth—within ten days of their sailing—that she had hurried from Boston under the alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident had happily soon presented itself as slight, and there had been in the event but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced again not only possible, but, as representing “change,” highly advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself with the Doctor this was clearly no more at his insistence than at her own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange of enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of “Europe”; and due assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give. “Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn’t know or mightn’t then have known. I’ve no secret with him about you. What makes you suspect it? I don’t quite make out how you know I did see him alone.”

“No—you never told me,” said Milly. “And I don’t mean,” she went on, “during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better—the last thing before you went home.”

Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. “Who told you I saw him then?”

“He didn’t himself—nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of it now for the first time. That’s exactly why!” Milly declared—with something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and, chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with the question? “But if you’re not, as you now assure me, in his confidence,” she smiled, “it’s no matter.”

“I’m not in his confidence—he had nothing to confide. But are you feeling unwell?”

The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she named was not at all the one that seemed to fit—witness the long climb Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face, but this her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little mysteriously to smile. “I don’t know—haven’t really the least idea. But it might be well to find out.”

Mrs. Stringham at this flared into sympathy. “Are you in trouble—in pain?”

“Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder—!”

“Yes”—she pressed: “wonder what?”

“Well, if I shall have much of it.”

Mrs. Stringham stared. “Much of what? Not of pain?”

“Of everything. Of everything I have.”

Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. “You ‘have’ everything; so that when you say ‘much’ of it—”

“I only mean,” the girl broke in, “shall I have it for long? That is if I
have
got it.”

She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. “If you’ve got an ailment?”

“If I’ve got everything,” Milly laughed.

“Ah
that—
like almost nobody else.”

“Then for how long?”

Mrs. Stringham’s eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half-enclosed her with urgent arms. “Do you want to see some one?” And then as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a shade more conscious: “We’ll go straight to the best near doctor.” This too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence, sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost herself. “Tell me, for God’s sake, if you’re in distress.”

“I don’t think I’ve really
everything,”
Milly said as if to explain—and as if also to put it pleasantly.

“But what on earth can I do for you?”

The girl debated, then seemed on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed herself otherwise. “Dear, dear thing—I’m only too happy!”

It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham’s doubt. “Then what’s the matter?”

“That’s the matter—that I can scarcely bear it.”

“But what is it you think you haven’t got?”

Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim show of joy. “The power to resist the bliss of what I
have!”

Mrs. Stringham took it in—her sense of being “put off” with it, the possible, probable irony of it—and her tenderness renewed itself in the positive grimness of a long murmur. “Whom will you see?”—for it was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors. “Where will you first go?”

Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came back with it to her plea of some minutes before. “I’ll tell you at supper—good-bye till then.” And she left the room with a lightness that testified for her companion to something that again particularly pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a hooked needle and a ball of silk, the “fine” work with which she was always provided—this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn’t really been in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess of the joy of life, and everything
did
then fit. She couldn’t stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the pulse of her going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces. There was no evasion of any truth—so at least Susan Shepherd hoped—in one’s sitting there while the twilight deepened and feeling still more finely that the position of this young lady was magnificent. The evening at that height had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers had bespoken a fire with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted its brave presence through the small panes of the low clean windows, with incidents at the inn-door, the yellow diligence,
^t
the great waggons, the hurrying hooded private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes, pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion’s position should strike her as after all the best meaning she could extract; for she herself was seated in the magnificence as in a court-carriage—she came back to that, and such a method of progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently have a great deal more to give. By the time the candles were lighted for supper and the short white curtains drawn Milly had reappeared, and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That charm moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without further loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. “I want to go straight to London.”