Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [206]
“And proceed to my business under your eyes?”
“Oh dear no—we shall go.”
“ ‘Go?’ ” he wondered. “Go when, go where?”
“In a day or two—straight home. Aunt Maud wishes it now.”
It gave him all he could take in to think of. “Then what becomes of Miss Theale?”
“What I tell you. She stays on, and you stay with her.”
He stared. “All alone?”
She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. “You’re old enough—with plenty of Mrs. Stringham.”
Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it, as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these successive cues, that he was essentially “seeing what she would say”—an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a need to know her better to which she had a moment before done injustice. If it hadn’t been appearing to him in gleams that she would somewhere break down, he probably couldn’t have gone on. Still, as she wasn’t breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. “Is your going Mrs. Lowder’s idea?”
“Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I don’t,” she added, “refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud’s view of the general propriety of it.”
“I see again, as you say,” Densher said after a moment. “It makes everything fit.”
“Everything.”
The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he had in fact been looking at something else. “You leave her here then to die?”
“Ah she believes she won’t die. Not if you stay. I mean,” Kate explained, “Aunt Maud believes.”
“And that’s all that’s necessary?”
Still indeed she didn’t break down. “Didn’t we long ago agree that what she believes is the principal thing for us?”
He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. “Oh yes. I can’t deny it.” Then he added: “So that if I stay-”
“It won’t”—she was prompt—“be our fault.”
“If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?”
“If she still suspects us. But she won’t.”
Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn’t presently found: “But what if she doesn’t accept me?”
It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her tone the next moment touch him. “You can but try.”
“Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard to propose to a dying girl.”
“She isn’t for you as if she’s dying.” It had determined in Kate the flash of justesseaz he could perhaps most, on consideration, have admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them, literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side, happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them in response all the candor of her smile, the luster of her pearls, the value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last spoke it was under cover.
“I might stay, you know, without trying.”
“Oh to stay is to try.”
“To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?