THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (Complete Edition). Henry Foss James
cost, the general attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance. These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his own world of thought — of which, for that matter, in presence of them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed it to him by their merciless difference.
His interview with Aunt Maud, none the less, took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate though her nature, no doubt, Mrs. Lowder on this occasion neither threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression, her weapons of defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them untouched and unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly perceived only afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived something else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn’t have known what to call it if he hadn’t called it her really imprudent good nature. Her blandness, in other words, wasn’t mere policy — he wasn’t dangerous enough for policy: it was the result, he could see, of her fairly liking him a little. From the moment she did that she herself became more interesting, and who knew what might happen should he take to liking HER? Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought him at any rate but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her explaining it, that if she had made him wait it hadn’t been to wound him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed to say to him — not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he hadn’t taken her hint, and this enquiry assumed so many things that it immediately made discussion frank and large. He knew, with the question put, that the hint was just what he HAD taken; knew that she had made him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if he didn’t take care he should understand her, and the strength of her purpose, to say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the length of her purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the thought too that he wasn’t going to be afraid of understanding her; he was just going to understand and understand without detriment to the feeblest, even, of his passions. The play of one’s mind gave one away, at the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need for action, where simplicity was all; but when one couldn’t prevent it the thing was to make it complete. There would never be mistakes but for the original fun of mistakes. What he must USE his fatal intelligence for was to resist. Mrs. Lowder meanwhile might use it for whatever she liked.
It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate that he began on his side to reflect that — with her manner of offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to embrace it — she couldn’t half hate him. That was all, positively, she seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did her intention justice she would have nothing more disagreeable to do. “If I hadn’t been ready to go very much further, you understand, I wouldn’t have gone so far. I don’t care what you repeat to her — the more you repeat to her perhaps the better; and at any rate there’s nothing she doesn’t already know. I don’t say it for her; I say it for you — when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight.” So Aunt Maud delivered herself — as with homely benevolence, in the simplest but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a word to the wise was doubtless, in spite of the adage, NOT always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was good — was really by her measure good enough: good enough that is to give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But WAS he good enough — by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. “She’s the finest possible creature — of course you flatter yourself you know it. But I know it quite as well as you possibly can — by which I mean a good deal better yet; and the tune to which I’m ready to prove my faith compares favourably enough, I think, with anything you can do. I don’t say it because she’s my niece — that’s nothing to me: I might have had fifty nieces, and I wouldn’t have brought one of them to this place if I hadn’t found her to my taste. I don’t say I wouldn’t have done something else, but I wouldn’t have put up with her presence. Kate’s presence, by good fortune, I marked early. Kate’s presence — unluckily for YOU — is everything I could possibly wish. Kate’s presence is, in short, as fine as you know, and I’ve been keeping it for the comfort of my declining years. I’ve watched it long; I’ve been saving it up and letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate; and you may judge whether, now it has begun to pay so, I’m likely to consent to treat for it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I’ve my idea of the best.”
“Oh I quite conceive,” said Densher, “that your idea of the best isn’t me.”
It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder’s that her face in speech was like a lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain. The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take, yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help. “I didn’t ask you to come to hear what it isn’t — I asked you to come to hear what it IS.”
“Of course,” Densher laughed, “that’s very great indeed.”
His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely relevant. “I want to see her high, high up — high up and in the light.”
“Ah you naturally want to marry her to a duke and are eager to smooth away any hitch.”
She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it quite forced him at first into the sense, possibly just, of his having shown for flippant, perhaps even for low. He had been looked at so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men, but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion’s subtlety, and thereby of Kate’s possible career. “Don’t be TOO impossible!” — he feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off easily. “I want her to marry a great man.” That was all; but, more and more, it was enough; and if it hadn’t been her next words would have made it so. “And I think of her what I think. There you are.”
They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he only would. To that extent she did appeal — appealed to the intelligence she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. “Of course I’m aware how little I can answer to any fond proud dream. You’ve a view — a grand one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly understand what I’m not, and I’m much obliged to you for not reminding me of it in any rougher way.” She said nothing — she kept that up; it might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man couldn’t show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he WAS — on Mrs. Lowder’s basis, the only one in question — a very small quantity, and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be perfectly simple, yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn’t later on have said how. “You don’t really matter, I believe, so much as you think, and I’m not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they’re meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you myself — since you’re, in your way, my dear young man, delightful — and arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should. Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it’s not really necessary? It won’t — it would be too absurd! — BE necessary. I can bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I’m dealing with you now, see — and successfully judge — without opening it. I do things handsomely all round — I place you in the presence of the plan with which, from the moment it’s a case of taking you seriously, you’re incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round it — don’t be afraid you’ll hurt it! — and live on with it before you.”
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