Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [222]
“You mean as you describe her?” He felt her surprise, and it took him some time. “No.”
“Ah then!” Mrs. Stringham sighed.
“But if she could bear it I’d do anything.”
She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. “I don’t see what you can do.”
“I don’t either. But she might.”
Mrs. Stringham continued to think. “It’s too late.”
“Too late for her to see—?”
“Too late.”
The very decision of her despair—it was after all so lucid—kindled in him a heat. “But the doctor, all the while—?”
“Tacchini? Oh he’s kind. He comes. He’s proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he’s waiting on events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable smile. We don’t,” said Susan Shepherd, “talk of her.”
“By her request?”
“Absolutely. I don’t do what she doesn’t wish. We talk of the price of provisions.”
“By her request too?”
“Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we liked.”
Densher took it all in. “But he isn’t any comfort to you!”
“None whatever. That, however,” she added, “isn’t his fault. Nothing’s any comfort.”
“Certainly,” Densher observed, “as I but too horribly feel, I’m not.”
“No. But I didn’t come for that.”
“You came for me.”
“Well then call it that.” But she looked at him a moment with eyes filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper still. “I came at bottom of course—”
“You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it’s, as you say, too late for me to do anything?”
She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow in her, from the truth itself. “So I did say. But, with you here”—and she turned her vision again strangely about her “with you here, and with everything, I feel we mustn’t abandon her.”
“God forbid we should abandon her.”
“Then you won’t?” His tone had made her flush again.
“How do you mean I ‘won’t,’ if she abandons me? What can I do if she won’t see me?”
“But you said just now you wouldn’t like it.”
“I said I shouldn’t like it in the light of what you tell me. I shouldn’t like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I could help her. But even then,” Densher pursued without faith, “she would have to want it first herself. And there,” he continued to make out, “is the devil of it. She won’t want it herself. She can’t!”
He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he helplessly moved. “There’s one thing you can do. There’s only that, and even for that there are difficulties. But there is that.” He stood before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. “I think you really know yourself what it is.”
He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said—rather!—there were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment; he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider, like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact, for the minute, as if she had “had” him, and he was the first again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer to her last remark—he only started from that. He said, as he came back to her,