THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (Complete Edition). Henry Foss James
He might really take none at all, yet she virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass he had reached, could give him pleasure, and had come back on these occasions to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome, that she was in her way a tangible value. It was at least as marked, nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as they WERE similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome, but he certainly didn’t care. The hitch here of course was that, with whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four bouncing children, had no such measure. She asked him the next thing how long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how little it mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably have in common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer, truthful or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her own side to say to him. This was really what had made her wait — what superseded the small remainder of her resentment at his constant practical impertinence; the result of all of which was that within a minute she had brought it out. “Yes — even now I’m willing to go with you. I don’t know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if you hadn’t written you would within a day or two have heard from me. Things have happened, and I’ve only waited, for seeing you, till I should be quite sure. I AM quite sure. I’ll go with you.”
It produced an effect. “Go with me where?”
“Anywhere. I’ll stay with you. Even here.” She had taken off her gloves and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.
Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way — hovered there as if looking, in consequence of her words, for a pretext to back out easily: on which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called, what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him, still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means been to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a straw for his embarrassment — feeling how little, on her own part, she was moved by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many attitudes that she could now deprive him quite without compunction of the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone as he said: “Oh my child, I can never consent to that!”
“What then are you going to do?”
“I’m turning it over,” said Lionel Croy. “You may imagine if I’m not thinking.”
“Haven’t you thought then,” his daughter asked, “of what I speak of? I mean of my being ready.”
Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. “No — I haven’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.” It was so respectable a show that she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair at home, how little his appearance ever by any chance told about him. His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother’s crosses; inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that was horrid — thank God they didn’t really know! — that he had done. He had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept directly present to Kate her self that it might, on some sides, prove no light thing for her to leave uncompanion’d a parent with such a face and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognised his younger daughter’s happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great wonder was that they hadn’t helped him more. However, it was, to its eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment. She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. “Do you really ask me to believe you’ve been making up your mind to that?”
She had to consider her own line. “I don’t think I care, papa, what you believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything; hardly more,” she permitted herself to add, “than I ever think of you as yourself believed. I don’t know you, father, you see.”
“And it’s your idea that you may make that up?”
“Oh dear, no; not at all. That’s no part of the question. If I haven’t understood you by this time I never shall, and it doesn’t matter. It has seemed to me you may be lived with, but not that you may be understood. Of course I’ve not the least idea how you get on.”
“I don’t get on,” Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
His daughter took the place in again, and it might well have seemed odd that with so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What showed was the ugliness — so positive and palpable that it was somehow sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all, a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly gave point to her answer. “Oh I beg your pardon. You flourish.”
“Do you throw it up at me again,” he pleasantly put to her, “that I’ve not made away with myself?”
She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real things. “You know how all our anxieties, under mamma’s will, have come out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don’t know how we lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for me, but I give up a hundred to Marian.”
“Oh you weak thing!” her father sighed as from depths of enlightened experience.
“For you and me together,” she went on, “the other hundred would do something.”
“And what would do the rest?”
“Can you yourself do nothing?”
He gave her a look; then, slipping his hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the window she had left open. She said nothing more — she had placed him there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room, and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. “I don’t see what has so suddenly wound you up.”
“I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a condition. She wants to keep me.”
“And what in the world else COULD she possibly want?”
“Oh I don’t know — many things. I’m not so precious a capture,” the girl a little dryly explained. “No one has ever wanted to keep me before.”
Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more surprised than interested. “You’ve not had proposals?” He spoke as if that were incredible of Lionel Croy’s daughter; as if indeed such an admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high spirit and general form.
“Not from rich relations. She’s extremely kind to me, but it’s time, she says, that we should understand each other.”
Mr. Croy fully assented. “Of course it is — high time; and I can quite imagine what she means by it.”
“Are you very sure?”
“Oh perfectly. She means that she’ll ‘do’ for you handsomely if you’ll break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her condition’s of course that.”
“Well then,” said Kate, “it’s what has wound me up. Here I am.”
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