Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [134]
It wasn’t to torment him—that again he didn’t believe; but he had to come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn’t there an element in it of coming back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but visibly unused—it defied familiarity—and furnished in the ugliest of blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right, that Aunt Maud did them justice—so far, that was, as this particular time was concerned ; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear. But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They were alone—it was all right: he took in anew the shut doors and the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it amounted to was that he couldn’t have her—hanged if he could!—evasive. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t—wouldn’t have her inconvenient and elusive. He didn’t want her deeper than himself, fine as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: “Will you take me just as I am?”
She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it—which qualified to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with him. “Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way—so don’t spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man,” Kate said, “only believe in me, and it will be beautiful.”
He hadn’t come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he didn’t; but he had come back—and it all was upon him now—to seize her with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made, as happily, appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to say, almost in anger, “Do you love me, love me, love me?” and she closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was that she had been sublimely sincere. That was all he asked—sincerity making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much, and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan, and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow suddenly become a detail—her province and her care; it had grown more consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. “I certainly don’t want,” he said—and he could say it with a smile of indulgence—“to be all the while bringing it up that I don’t trust you.”
“I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?”
He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude.