Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [103]
“He’s a dear. I’m to come again.”
“But what does he say?”
Milly was almost gay. “That I’m not to worry about anything in the world, and that if I’ll be a good girl and do exactly what he tells me he’ll take care of me for ever and ever.”
Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. “But does he allow then that you’re ill?”
“I don’t know what he allows, and I don’t care. I shall know, and whatever it is it will be enough. He knows all about me, and I like it. I don’t hate it a bit.”
Still, however, Kate stared. “But could he, in so few minutes, ask you enough—?”
“He asked me scarcely anything—he doesn’t need to do anything so stupid,” Milly said. “He can tell. He knows,” she repeated; “and when I go back—for he’ll have thought me over a little—it will be all right.”
Kate after a moment made the best of this. “Then when are we to come?”
It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked—at least it was one of the reasons—she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the light of her other identity, the identity she would have for Mr. Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on, necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This in particular was of course not a juncture at which the least of them would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a quick glimmer, and with it all Kate’s unconsciousness; and then she shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for loyalty, would somehow do. “Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken I shan’t trouble you again.”13 “You’ll come alone?” “Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute discretion still.”
Outside, at a distance from the door, on the wide pavement of the great contiguous square, they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept, completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for reasons of his own. The footman was there and had indicated that he was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. “But don’t you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?”
This pulled Milly up still shorter—so short in fact that she yielded as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. “I see. Then you can tell.”
“I don’t want to ‘tell,’” said Kate. “I’ll be as silent as the tomb if I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn’t keep from me how you find out that you really are.”
“Well then I won’t ever. But you see for yourself,” Milly went on, “how I really am. I’m satisfied. I’m happy.”
Kate looked at her long. “I believe you like it. The way things turn out for you—!”
Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken. She had ceased to be Mr. Densher’s image; she stood for nothing but herself, and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a fair bargain and it would do. “Of course I like it. I feel—I can’t otherwise describe it—as if I had been on my knees to the priest. I’ve confessed and I’ve been absolved. It has been lifted off.”
Kate’s eyes never quitted her. “He must have liked you.”
“Oh—doctors!” Milly said.