Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (73 page)

“Ah there you are!” said Densher who had wheeled round.

“Well, if I’m ‘there,’ as you so gracefully call it, by having refused to meet him as he wanted—as he pressed—I plead guilty to being so. Would you have liked me,” she went on, “to give him an answer that would have kept him from going?”

It made him a little awkwardly think. “Did you know he was going?”

“Never for a moment; but I’m afraid that—even if it doesn’t fit your strange suppositions—1 should have given him just the same answer if I had known. If it’s a matter I haven’t, since your return, thrust upon you, that’s simply because it’s not a matter in the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope that if I’ve satisfied you about it,” she continued, “it’s not too much to ask of you to let it rest.”

“Certainly,” said Densher kindly, “I’ll let it rest.” But the next moment he pursued: “He saw something. He guessed.”

“If you mean,” she presently returned, “that he was unfortunately the one person we hadn’t deceived, I can’t contradict you.”

“No—of course not. But
why,”
Densher still risked, “was he unfortunately the one person—? He’s not really a bit intelligent.”

“Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in anything so unnatural as—all things considered and when it came to the point—my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his conviction he acted.”

Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark’s conviction as if it were a blot on the face of nature. “Do you mean because you had appeared to him to have encouraged him?”

“Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where were we?”

“ ‘Where’—?”

“You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn’t mattered. What mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember that he has had all along his impression of you. You can’t help it,” she said, “but you’re after all—well, yourself.”

“As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and kept myself there—what,” Densher asked, “did he make of that?”

“Your being in Venice and liking to be—which is never on any one’s part a monstrosity—was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation.”

“In spite of Mrs. Lowder?”

“No,” said Kate, “not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before what you call his second descent, hadn’t convinced him—all the more that my refusal of him didn’t help. But he came back convinced.” And then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: “I mean after he had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him.”

“Milly?” Densher again but vaguely echoed.

“That you were sincere. That it was
her
you loved.” It came to him from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found himself yet again at his window. “Aunt Maud, on his return here,” she meanwhile continued, “had it from him. And that’s why you’re now so well with Aunt Maud.”

He only for a minute looked out in silence—after which he came away. “And why you are.” It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps rather if it hadn’t been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he thus finally spoke of was a different matter. “Did I understand from Mrs. Lowder that your father’s in the house?”

If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it was not to take her so now. “In the house, yes. But we needn’t fear his interruption” —she spoke as if he had thought of that. “He’s in bed.”

“Do you mean with illness?”

She sadly shook her head. “Father’s never ill. He’s a marvel. He’s only—endless.”

Densher thought. “Can I in any way help you with him?”

“Yes.” She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. “By our making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him—and for Marian too.”

“I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn’t—could I?—not have come.”

“No, you couldn’t not have come.”

“But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as possible?”

Quickly it almost upset her. “Ah don’t, to-day, put ugly words into my mouth. I’ve enough of my trouble without it.”

“I know—I know!” He spoke in instant pleading. “It’s all only that I’m as troubled
for
you. When did he come?”

“Three days ago—after he hadn’t been near her for more than a year, after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember her existence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in.”

Densher hesitated. “Do you mean in such want—?”

“No, not of food, of necessary things—not even, so far as his appearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But he was—well, in terror.”

“In terror of what?”

“I don’t know. Of somebody—of something. He wants, he says, to be quiet. But his quietness is awful.”

She suffered, but he couldn’t not question. “What does he do?”

It made Kate herself hesitate. “He cries.”

Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. “What
has
he done?”

It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face. Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. “If you love me—now—don’t ask me about father.”

He waited again a moment. “I love you. It’s because I love you that I’m here. It’s because I love you that I’ve brought you this.” And he drew from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.

But her eyes only—though he held it out—met the offer. “Why you’ve not broken the seal!”

“If I had broken the seal—exactly—I should know what’s within. It’s for
you
to break the seal that I bring it.”

She looked—still not touching the thing—inordinately grave. “To break the seal of something to you from
her?”

“Ah precisely because it’s from her. I’ll abide by whatever you think of it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kate. “What do you yourself think?” And then as he didn’t answer: “It seems to me I think you know. You have your instinct. You don’t need to read. It’s the proof.”

Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, an accusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way to face. “I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried it out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour.” He held up his letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. “This thing had been timed.”

“For Christmas Eve?”

“For Christmas Eve.”

Kate had suddenly a strange smile. “The season of gifts!” After which, as he said nothing, she went on: “And had been written, you mean, while she could write, and kept to
be
so timed?”

Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn’t reply. “What do you mean by the proof?”

“Why of the beauty with which you’ve been loved. But I won’t,” she said, “break your seal.”

“You positively decline?”

“Positively. Never.” To which she added oddly: “I know without.”

He had another pause. “And what is it you know?”

“That she announces to you she has made you rich.”

His pause this time was longer. “Left me her fortune?”

“Not all of it, no doubt, for it’s immense. But money to a large amount. I don’t care,” Kate went on, “to know how much.” And her strange smile recurred. “I trust her.”

“Did she tell you?” Densher asked.

“Never!” Kate visibly flushed at the thought. “That wouldn’t, on my part, have been playing fair with her. And I did,” she added, “play fair.”

Densher, who had believed her—he couldn’t help it—continued, holding his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had somehow passed. “You played fair with me, Kate; and that’s why—since we talk of proofs—I want to give you one. I’ve wanted to let you see—and in preference even to myself—something I feel as sacred.”

She frowned a little. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can peculiarly recognize—”

“Peculiarly recognize what?” she demanded as he dropped.

“The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice of an act of splendid generosity.”

“And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?”

He made a movement. “It’s all I can do as a symbol of my attitude.”

She looked at him long. “Your attitude, my dear, is that you’re afraid of yourself. You’ve had to take yourself in hand. You’ve had to do yourself violence.”

“So it is then you meet me?”

She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand still stayed itself. “You absolutely
desire
me to take it?”

“I absolutely desire you to take it.”

“To do what I like with it?”

“Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain—pardon my making the point—between you and me.”

She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. “Trust me.” Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes again rested on those fine characters of Milly’s that they had shortly before discussed. “To hold it,” she brought out, “is to know.”

“Oh I
know!”
said Merton Densher.

“Well then if we both do—!” She had already turned to the fire, nearer to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing into the flame. He started—but only half—as to undo her action: his arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched, with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. “You’ll have it all,” Kate said, “from New York.”

I
t was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters—coming not as she had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need recognized in the first instance by herself, even though also as the prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a note from Densher accompanying a letter, “just to hand,” addressed him by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself, and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale’s copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the girl’s death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher’s act on receipt of the document in question—an act as to which and to the bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature—constituted in strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate’s mention of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when they met again the subject was made present to them—at all events till some flare of new light—only by the intensity with which it mutely expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate’s stay at Mrs. Condrip’s prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of them. “It’s her idea,” Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she really despised ideas—which she didn’t; “and I’ve taken up with my own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She
has
had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she’s as proud as the deuce she’ll come back when she has found some reason—having nothing in common with her disgust—of which she can make a show. She calls it her holiday to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the scullery have a right. So we’re taking it on that basis. But we shall not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she’s quite decent; she comes often—whenever I make her a sign; and she has been good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I don’t complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one hoped; though I needn’t, you know,” Aunt Maud wound up, “tell you, after all, you clever creature, what that was.”

It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that Densher’s appearances under the good lady’s roof markedly, after Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs. Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger passed—he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in this respect, after Milly’s death, the silence as to the sense of which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn’t gone into the question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly’s companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature—as a factor, he would have said in his newspaper—of the time whatever it might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned it to Kate. She had put him no question, no “Don’t you ever hear?”—so that he hadn’t been brought to the point. This he described to himself as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce even wincing while he recognized it as the one connexion in which he wasn’t straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental image—he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn’t say than for what they did—this fact failed somehow to mitigate for him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep within him that he had absolutely shown to no one—to the companion of these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew—what Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of which it was as if his
act,
so deeply associated with her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other’s arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn’t undo.