Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [207]
“I don’t see how you can have the appearance more.”
Densher waited. “You think it then possible she may offer marnage? ”
“I can’t think—if you really want to know—what she may not offer!”
“In the manner of princesses, who do such things?”
“In any manner you like. So be prepared.”
Well, he looked as if he almost were. “It will be for me then to accept. But that’s the way it must come.”
Kate’s silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: “You’ll, on your honour, stay then?”
His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. “Without you, you mean?”
“Without us.”
“And you yourselves go at latest—?”
“Not later than Thursday.”
It made three days. “Well,” he said, “I’ll stay, on my honour, if you’ll come to me. On your honour.”
Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigor out of which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigor was more to him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a “dodge.” She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain. Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. “Lady Wells is tired of waiting: she’s coming—see—to us.”
Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to cross, and he still had time. “If you decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand you. I’ll do nothing.”
“Nothing?” It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
“I’ll do nothing. I’ll go off before you. I’ll go tomorrow.”
He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase was—and for vulgar triumphs too—seen he meant it. She looked again at Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. “And if I do understand?”
“I’ll do everything.”
She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his relation with her, of anything so sharp—too sharp for mere sweetness—as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the conflict. “Well, I understand.”
“On your honour?”
“On my honour.”
“You’ll come?”
“I’ll come.”
BOOK NINTH
—I—
It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation, within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which—if relief was the name—he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned with, in fact of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once—and this not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking; yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn’t have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn’t wish, even though there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified a consequence of his act. It had simply worked, his idea, the idea he had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as directly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into an historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at present, with the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had in fine judged his friend