Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [240]
“He brought her back then to life.”
“Well, to what I saw.”
“And by interceding for you?”
“I don’t think he interceded. I don’t indeed know what he did.”
Kate wondered. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“I didn’t ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn’t speak of her.”
Kate stared. “Then how do you know?”
“I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before—”
“Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?”
“He understood,” said Densher.
“But understood what?”
He waited a moment. “That I had meant awfully well.”
“Ah, and made her understand? I see,” she went on as he said nothing. “But how did he convince her?”
Densher put down his cup and turned away. “You must ask Sir Luke.”
He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. “The great thing,” Kate then resumed, “is that she’s satisfied. Which,” she continued, looking across at him, “is what I’ve worked for.”
“Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?”
“Well, at peace with you.”
“Oh ‘peace’!” he murmured with his eyes on the fire.
“The peace of having loved.”
He raised his eyes to her. “Is that peace?”
“Of having been loved,” she went on. “That is. Of having,” she wound up, “realized her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had all she wanted.”
Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. “You may think it hideous that I should now, that I should yet”—she made a point of the word—“pretend to draw conclusions. But we’ve not failed.”
“Oh!” he only again murmured.
She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that knowledge. “We’ve succeeded.” She spoke with her eyes deep in his own. “She won’t have loved you for nothing.” It made him wince, but she insisted. “And you won’t have loved me.”
—II—
He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder alone for which she soon gave him—or for which perhaps rather Kate gave him—full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion’s rare alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them, and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she resentfully named gave her ample support. “Had you quite understood, my dear, that it’s full three weeks—?” And she effaced herself as if to leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been entertaining their visitor on her aunt’s behalf—a visitor she had been at one time suspected of favoring too much and who had now come back to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn