Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [161]
Kate thought. “Oh I don’t know. It will of course greatly upset her. But you needn’t trouble about that. She won’t die of it.”
“Do you mean she will?” Densher presently asked.
“Don’t put me questions when you don’t believe what I say. You make too many conditions.”
She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of being able to show—imagination, tact, positively even humour. The circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: “What if I should begin to bore this creature?” And that, within a few seconds, had translated itself. “If you’ll swear again you love me—!”
She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more than he said. “Here? There’s nothing between us here,” Kate smiled.
“Oh isn’t there?” Her smile itself, with this, had so settled something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly’s. It was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. “I’ll do all you wish,” he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that he had practically, after all, drawn from her—a declaration on which she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
“If you are as good as that I go. You’ll tell her that, finding you with her, I wouldn’t wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She’ll understand.”
She had reached the door with it—she was full of decision; but he had before she left him one more doubt. “I don’t see how she can understand enough, you know, without understanding too much.”
“You don’t need to see.”18
He required then a last injunction. “I must simply go it blind?”
“You must simply be kind to her.”
“And leave the rest to you?”
“Leave the rest to her,” said Kate disappearing. It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array—her big black hat, so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their friend’s visit and flight. “She hadn’t known she’d find me,” he said—and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his corner that it wasn’t a question of a word more or less.
She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed over whatever might be awkward. “I’m sorry—but I of course often see her.” He felt the discrimination in his favor and how it justified Kate. This was Milly’s tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it should now be wholly left.
BOOK SEVENTH
—I—
When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs. Stringham on the day of her meeting them together and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to face with that companion, had had one of those moments in which the warned, the anxious fighter of the battle of life, as if once again feeling for the sword at his side, carries his hand straight to the quarter of his courage. She laid hers firmly on her heart, and the two women stood there showing each other a strange front. Susan Shepherd had received their great doctor’s visit, which had been clearly no small affair for her; but Milly had since then, with insistence, kept in place, against communication and betrayal, as she now practically confessed, the barrier of their invited guests.