Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [263]
Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of possibilities. She was—merely to put it at that—intelligent enough for anything. “Is it what you’re proposing we should do?”
“Ah it’s too late to do it—well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we know—!”
“But you don’t know,” she said very gently.
“I refer,” he went on without noticing it, “to what would have been the handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one’s assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in the state of the envelope—that would have been really satisfying.”
She thought an instant. “The state of the envelope proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?”
Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour. “Well yes—something of that sort.”
“So that if cognisance has been taken—so far as I’m concerned—it spoils the beauty?”
“It makes the difference that I’m disappointed in the hope—which I confess I entertained—that you’d bring the thing back to me as you had received it.”
“You didn’t express that hope in your letter.”
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted—oh yes, if that’s what you wish to ask me—to see what you’d do.”
“You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?”
He continued steady now; a kind of ease—from the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn’t yet have named—had come to him. “Well, I wanted—in so good a case—to test you.”
She was struck—it showed in her face—by his expression. “It is a good case. I doubt whether a better,” she said with her eyes on him, “has ever been known.”
“The better the case then the better the test!”
“How do you know,” she asked in reply to this, “what I’m capable of?”
“I don’t, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known sooner.”
“I see”—she took it in. “But I myself shouldn’t have known at all. And you wouldn’t have known, either, what I do know.”
“Let me tell you at once,” he returned, “that if you’ve been moved to correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to.”
She just hesitated. “Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections ? Can you only do it by doing it blindly?”
He waited a moment. “What is it that you speak of my doing?”
“Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not accepting—what she has done. Isn’t there some regular name in such cases? Not taking up the bequest.”
“There’s something you forget in it,” he said after a moment. “My asking you to join with me in doing so.”
Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn’t make her less firm. “How can I ‘join’ in a matter with which I’ve nothing to do?”
“How? By a single word.”
“And what word?”
“Your consent to my giving up.”
“My consent has no meaning when I can’t prevent you.”
“You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well,” he said.
She seemed to face a threat in it. “You mean you won’t give up if I don’t consent?”
“Yes. I do nothing.”
“That, as I understand, is accepting.”
Densher paused. “I do nothing formal.”
“You won’t, I suppose you mean, touch the money.”
“I won’t touch the money.”
It had a sound—though he had been coming to it—that made for gravity. “Who then in such an event will?”
“Any one who wants or who can.”
Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the time she spoke he had covered ground. “How can I touch it but through you?”
“You can’t. Any more,” he added, “then I can renounce it except through you.”
“Oh ever so much less! There’s nothing,” she explained, “in my power.”
“I’m in your power,” Merton Densher said.
“In what way?”
“In the way I show—and the way I’ve always shown. When have I shown,” he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, “anything else? You surely must feel—