Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (54 page)

In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile, for one thing, the interest of seeing—and quite for the first time in his life—whether, on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to happiness as was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment never doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure—he who had never thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was able at moments to say to himself that he mustn’t fall below it. At his hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty
campi,
^ax
overhung with mouldering palaces,
²¹
where he paused in disgust at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall deserted—during these interludes he entertained cold views, even to the point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are the best, of thinking of immediate departure as not only possible but as indicated. He had however only to cross again the threshold of Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business compose, as painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that departure wouldn’t curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and that above all, as he hadn’t really “begun” anything, had only submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with superstitious rigor. The single thing that was clear in complications was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman—to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of the question of how a gentleman would behave.
²²
This question, I hasten to add, was not in the last resort Densher’s greatest worry. Three women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be a brute—in return for amiabilities. He hadn’t come all the way out from England to be a brute. He hadn’t thought of what it might give him to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a brute. He hadn’t treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her suggestion he had understood her—he hadn’t done that either to be a brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anticlimax was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender—ds a gentleman, oh that indubitably! -to the unexpected impression made by poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the conditions, than any ever known to him.

This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity—he scarce knew by what strange name to call it—for which he said to himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer’s part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave—her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn’t put it off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn’t, that—well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly effect of “blurting out” might easily be produced. He came back with his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favoring air. He breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly’s high style and state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance, which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day at Mrs. Lowder’s; and this was in especial what had made him feel its influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them, from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment, at some point in the drive, that he was not there, not just as he was in so doing it, through Kate and Kate’s idea, but through Milly and Milly’s own, and through himself and his own, unmistakably—as well as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time in New York.

There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect. His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs. Lowder’s view of her profit—a view so hard to reconcile with the chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. “ ‘Meet,’ my dear man,” she expressively echoed; “does it strike you that we get, after all, so very much out of our meetings?”

“On the contrary—they’re starvation diet. All I mean is—and it’s all I’ve meant from the day I came—that we at least get more than Aunt Maud.”

“Ah but you see,” Kate replied, “you don’t understand what Aunt Maud gets.”

“Exactly so—and it’s what I don’t understand that keeps me so fascinated with the question. She gives me no light; she’s prodigious. She takes everything as of a natural—!”

“She takes it as ‘of a natural’ that at this rate I shall be making my reflexions about you. There’s every appearance for her,” Kate went on, “that what she had made her mind up to as possible is possible; that what she had thought more likely than not to happen is happening. The very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for yourself, is that when she adopts a view she—well, to her own sense, really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I’ve often thought success comes to her”—Kate continued to study the phenomenon—“by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of everything, become the right one.”

Densher had for this, as he listened, a smile of the largest response. “Ah my dear child, if you can explain I of course needn’t not ‘understand.’ I’m condemned to that,” he on his side presently explained, “only when understanding fails.” He took a moment; then he pursued: “Does she think she terrorizes
us?
”
To which he added while, without immediate speech, Kate but looked over the place: “Does she believe anything so stiff as that you’ve really changed about me?” He knew now that he was probing the girl deep—something told him so; but that was a reason the more. “Has she got it into her head that you dislike me?”

To this, of a sudden, Kate’s answer was strong. “You could yourself easily put it there!”

He wondered. “By telling her so?”

“No,” said Kate as with amusement at his simplicity; “I don’t ask that of you.”

“Oh my dear,” Densher laughed, “when you ask, you know, so little—!”

There was a full irony in this, on his own part, that he saw her resist the impulse to take up. “I’m perfectly justified in what I’ve asked,” she quietly returned. “It’s doing beautifully for you.” Their eyes again intimately met, and the effect was to make her proceed. “You’re not a bit unhappy.”

“Oh ain’t I?” he brought out very roundly.

“It doesn’t practically show—which is enough for Aunt Maud. You’re wonderful, you’re beautiful,” Kate said; “and if you really want to know whether I believe you’re doing it you may take from me perfectly that I see it coming.” With which, by a quick transition, as if she had settled the case, she asked him the hour.

“Oh only twelve-ten”—he had looked at his watch. “We’ve taken but thirteen minutes; we’ve time yet.”

“Then we must walk. We must go toward them.”

Densher, from where they had been standing, measured the long reach of the Square. “They’re still in their shop. They’re safe for half an hour.”

“That shows then, that shows!” said Kate.

This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco, always, as a great social saloon, a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity, favorable to talk; or rather, to be exact, not in the middle, but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse after leaving the great mosque-like church. It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but a little way behind them, and they had in front the vast empty space, enclosed by its arcades, to which at that hour movement and traffic were mostly confined. Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the visitor and the possible acquaintance, and, except for the parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual feasts, their prospect was clear and they could see their companions hadn’t yet been, and weren’t for a while longer likely to be, disgorged by the lace-shop, in one of the
loggie,
^ay
where, shortly before, they had left them for a look-in—the expression was artfully Densher’s—at Saint Mark’s. Their morning had happened to take such a turn as brought this chance to the surface; yet his allusion, just made to Kate, hadn’t been an overstatement of their general opportunity. The worst that could be said of their general opportunity was that it was essentially in presence—in presence of every one; every one consisting at this juncture, in a peopled world, of Susan Shepherd, Aunt Maud and Milly. But the proof how, even in presence, the opportunity could become special was furnished precisely by this view of the compatibility of their comfort with a certain amount of lingering. The others had assented to their not waiting in the shop; it was of course the least the others could do. What had really helped them this morning was the fact that, on his turning up, as he always called it, at the palace, Milly had not, as before, been able to present herself. Custom and use had hitherto seemed fairly established; on his coming round, day after day—eight days had been now so conveniently marked—their friends, Milly’s and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her till luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there was that amount of justification for Kate’s vision of success. He
had,
for Mrs. Lowder—he couldn’t help it while sitting there—the air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only to-day that she hadn’t been well enough to see him.

That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in the way in which, gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all bright and cool and beflowered, as always, to re- ceive her descent, they—the rest of them—simply looked at each other. It was lurid—lurid, in all probability, for each of them privately—that they had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to that degree, the hush of gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the most the case—that of the guests—could permit itself. The hush, for that matter, continued after the party of four had gone down to the gondola and taken their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had produced a second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one quite as well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for the alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out, Mrs. Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure, approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory which was the slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she had invented a preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had remembered the fond dreams of the visitation of lace that had hitherto always been brushed away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had, the day before, spoken of the part played by fatality in her own failure of real acquaintance with the inside of Saint Mark’s. Densher’s sense of Susan Shepherd’s conscious intervention had by this time a corner of his mind all to itself; something that had begun for them at Lancaster Gate was now a sentiment clothed in a shape; her action, ineffably discreet, had at all events a way of affecting him as for the most part subtly, even when not superficially, in his own interest. They were not, as a pair, as a “team,” really united; there were too many persons, at least three, and too many things, between them; but meanwhile something was preparing that would draw them closer. He scarce knew what: probably nothing but his finding, at some hour when it would be a service to do so, that she had all the while understood him. He even had a presentiment of a juncture at which the understanding of every one else would fail and this deep little person’s alone survive.