THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (Complete Edition). Henry Foss James
surrounds him, the silence that, for the world, has washed him out. He doesn’t exist for people. And yet I’m as sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I’m more sure. And that,” she wound up, “is what I sit here and tell you about my own father. If you don’t call it a proof of confidence I don’t know what will satisfy you.”
“It satisfies me beautifully,” Densher returned, “but it doesn’t, my dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don’t, you know, really tell me anything. It’s so vague that what am I to think but that you may very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?”
“He has done everything.”
“Oh — everything! Everything’s nothing.”
“Well then,” said Kate, “he has done some particular thing. It’s known — only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. YOU could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about.”
Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up. “I wouldn’t find out for the world, and I’d rather lose my tongue than put a question “
“And yet it’s a part of me,” said Kate.
“A part of you?”
“My father’s dishonour.” Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than ever yet, her note of proud still pessimism. “How can such a thing as that not be the great thing in one’s life?”
She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. “I shall ask you, for the great thing in your life,” he said, “to depend on ME a little more.” After which, just debating, “Doesn’t he belong to some club?” he asked.
She had a grave headshake. “He used to — to many.”
“But he has dropped them?”
“They’ve dropped HIM. Of that I’m sure. It ought to do for you. I offered him,” the girl immediately continued— “and it was for that I went to him — to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is possible. But he won’t hear of it.”
Densher took this in with marked but generous wonder. “You offered him— ‘impossible’ as you describe him to me — to live with him and share his disadvantages?” The young man saw for the moment only the high beauty of it. “You ARE gallant!”
“Because it strikes you as being brave for him?” She wouldn’t in the least have this. “It wasn’t courage — it was the opposite. I did it to save myself — to escape.”
He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer things than any one to think about. “Escape from what?”
“From everything.”
“Do you by any chance mean from me?”
“No; I spoke to him of you, told him — or what amounted to it — that I would bring you, if he would allow it, with me.”
“But he won’t allow it,” said Densher.
“Won’t hear of it on any terms. He won’t help me, won’t save me, won’t hold out a finger to me,” Kate went on. “He simply wriggles away, in his inimitable manner, and throws me back.”
“Back then, after all, thank goodness,” Densher concurred, “on me.”
But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had evoked. “It’s a pity, because you’d like him. He’s wonderful — he’s charming.” Her companion gave one of the laughs that showed again how inveterately he felt in her tone something that banished the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. “He would make himself delightful to you.”
“Even while objecting to me?”
“Well, he likes to please,” the girl explained— “personally. I’ve seen it make him wonderful. He would appreciate you and be clever with you. It’s to ME he objects — that is as to my liking you.”
“Heaven be praised then,” cried Densher, “that you like me enough for the objection!”
But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. “I don’t. I offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no difference, and that’s what I mean,” she pursued, “by his declining me on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don’t escape.”
Densher wondered. “But if you didn’t wish to escape ME?”
“I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it’s through her and through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it’s through her, and through her only, that I can help HER. That’s what I mean,” she again explained, “by their turning me back.”
The young man thought. “Your sister turns you back too?”
“Oh with a push!”
“But have you offered to live with your sister?”
“I would in a moment if she’d have me. That’s all my virtue — a narrow little family feeling. I’ve a small stupid piety — I don’t know what to call it.” Kate bravely stuck to that; she made it out. “Sometimes, alone, I’ve to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She went through things — they pulled her down; I know what they were now — I didn’t then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is an insolence of success. That’s what Marian keeps before me; that’s what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position’s a value, a great value, for them both” — she followed and followed. Lucid and ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. “It’s THE value — the only one they have.”
Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure — the quickness and anxiety playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly, as he had never done before. “And the fact you speak of holds you!”
“Of course it holds me. It’s a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me ask myself if I’ve any right to personal happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I can be made.”
Densher had a pause. “Oh you might by good luck have the personal happiness too.”
Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly: “Darling!”
It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. “Will you settle it by our being married tomorrow — as we can, with perfect ease, civilly?”
“Let us wait to arrange it,” Kate presently replied, “till after you’ve seen her.”
“Do you call that adoring me?” Densher demanded.
They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the tone of it than the way she at last said: “You’re afraid of her yourself.”
He gave rather a glazed smile. “For young persons of a great distinction and a very high spirit we’re a caution!”
“Yes,” she took it straight up; “we’re hideously intelligent. But there’s fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think,” she added, and for that matter not without courage, “our relation’s quite beautiful. It’s not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in things.”
It made him break into a laugh that had more freedom than his smile. “How you must be afraid you’ll chuck me!”
“No, no, THAT would be vulgar. But of course,” she admitted, “I do see my danger of doing something base.”
“Then