Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [181]
It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the tears it had started at the time. “You could do so much for me, yes. I perfectly understood you.”
“I wanted you see,” he despite this explained, “to fix your confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place.”
“Well, Lord Mark, you did—it’s just exactly now, my confidence, where you put it then. The only difference,” said Milly, “is that I seem now to have no use for it. Besides,” she then went on, “I do seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little.”
He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn’t said them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. “Are you really in any trouble?”
To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a little a light for herself. “Don’t say, don’t try to say, anything that’s impossible. There are much better things you can do.”
He looked straight at it and then straight over it. “It’s too monstrous that one can’t ask you as a friend what one wants so to know.”
“What is it you want to know?” She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a slight hardness. “Do you want to know if I’m badly ill?”
The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark winced and flushed—clearly couldn’t help it; but he kept his attitude together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. “Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a word?”
“You won’t see me suffer—don’t be afraid. I shan’t be a public nuisance. That’s why I should have liked this: it’s so beautiful in itself and yet it’s out of the gangway. You won’t know anything about anything,” she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: “And you don’t! No, not even you.” He faced her through it with the remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly—for him - bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. “I’m very badly ill.”
“And you don’t do anything?”
“I do everything. Everything’s this,” she smiled. “I’m doing it now. One can’t do more than live.”
“Oh live!” Lord Mark ejaculated.
“Well, it’s immense for me.” She finally spoke as if for amusement ; now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. “I shan’t,” she added, “have missed everything.”
“Why should you have missed anything?” She felt, as he sounded this, to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. “You’re the person in the world for whom that’s least necessary; for whom one would call it in fact most impossible; for whom ‘missing’ at all will surely require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you believe in advice, for God’s sake take mine. I know what you want.”
Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself—or almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. “I think I want not to be too much worried.”
“You want to be adored.” It came at last straight. “Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do it. It is so”—he firmly kept it up. “You’re not loved enough.”
“Enough for what, Lord Mark?”
“Why to get the full good of it.”
Well, she didn’t after all mock at him. “I see what you mean. That full good of it which consists in finding one’s self forced to love in return.” She had grasped it, but she hesitated. “Your idea is that I might find myself forced to love you?”
“Oh ‘forced’—!” He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion somehow so ill consorted—he was so much all these things that he had absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it, and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of existence that she gasped at moments to remember she must give up.