Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [205]
It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain. “You can tell her anything you like, anything whatever.”
“Mrs. Stringham? I have nothing to tell her.”
“You can tell her about us. I mean,” she wonderfully pursued, “that you do still like me.”
It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. “Only not that you still like me.”
She let his amusement pass. “I’m absolutely certain she wouldn’t repeat it.”
“I see. To Aunt Maud.”
“You don’t quite see. Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else.” Kate then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he was; and she showed it again as she went on. “There, accordingly, is your time.”
She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke, though not quite all at once. “You must let me say I do see. Time for something in particular that I understand you regard as possible. Time too that, I further understand, is time for you as well.”
“Time indeed for me as well.” And encouraged visibly by his glow of concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully made clear. Yet she was still on her guard. “Don’t think, however, I’ll do all the work for you. If you want things named you must name them.”
He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted. “Since she’s to die I’m to marry her?”
It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favor to their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips bravely moved. “To marry her.”
“So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course have money?”
It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all along—to his stupidity, his timidity—it had been, it had been only, what she meant. Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn’t forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn’t pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched. “You’ll in the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” Densher softly murmured.
“Yes, yes, yes.” But she broke off. “Come to Lady Wells.”
He never budged—there was too much else. “I’m to propose it then—marriage—on the spot?”
There was no ironic sound he needed to give it; the more simply he spoke the more he seemed ironic. But she remained consummately proof. “Oh I can’t go into that with you, and from the moment you don’t wash your hands of me I don’t think you ought to ask me. You must act as you like and as you can.”
He thought again. “I’m far—as I sufficiently showed you this morning—from washing my hands of you.”
“Then,” said Kate, “it’s all right.”
“All right?” His eagerness flamed. “You’ll come?”
But he had had to see in a moment that it wasn’t what she meant. “You’ll have a free hand, a clear field, a chance—well, quite ideal.”
“Your descriptions”—her “ideal” was such a touch!—“are prodigious. And what I don’t make out is how, caring of me, you can like it.”
“I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.”
It wasn’t till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled his own incapacity for action. Yet he saw indeed even at the time the greatness of knowing so well what one wanted. At the time too, moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what he did. But something else on his lips was uppermost. “What I don’t make out then is how you can even bear it.”
“Well, when you know me better you’ll find out how much I can bear.