Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [28]
“Well then,” said Kate, “it’s what has wound me up. Here I am.”
He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after which, within a few seconds, he had quite congruously turned the situation about. “Do you really suppose me in a position to justify your throwing yourself upon me?”
She waited a little, but when she spoke it was clear. “Yes.”
“Well then, you’re of feebler intelligence than I should have ventured to suppose you.”
“Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom.”
“Ah how you’ve all always hated me!” he murmured with a pensive gaze again at the window.
“No one could be less of a mere cherished memory,” she declared as if she had not heard him. “You’re an actual person, if there ever was one. We agreed just now that you’re beautiful. You strike me, you know, as—in your own way—much more firm on your feet than I. Don’t put it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we’re after all parent and child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea has been that it should have some effect for each of us. I don’t at all, as I told you just now,” she pursued, “make out your life; but whatever it is I hereby offer to accept it. And, on my side, I’ll do everything I can for you.”
“I see,” said Lionel Croy. Then with the sound of extreme relevance: “And what can you?” She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her silence. “You can describe yourself—to yourself—as, in a fine flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to know, would your fine flight do me?” As she still said nothing he developed a little. “We’re not possessed of so much, at this charming pass, please to remember, as that we can afford not to take hold of any perch held out to us. I like the way you talk, my dear, about ”giving up“! One doesn’t give up the use of a spoon because one’s reduced to living on broth. And your spoon, that is your aunt, please consider, is partly mine as well.” She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her effort, in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before. She retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her father’s lips another remark—in which impatience, however, had already been replaced by a free flare of appreciation. “Oh you’re all right! Don’t muddle yourself up with me!”
His daughter turned round to him. “The condition Aunt Maud makes is that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor speak nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you shall simply cease to exist for me.”
He had always seemed—it was one of the marks of what they called the “unspeakable” in him—to walk a little more on his toes, as if for jauntiness, under the touch of offence. Nothing, however, was more wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it might be what he sometimes wouldn’t. He walked at any rate on his toes now. “A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear—I don’t hesitate to say it!” Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to go on: “That’s her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what does she engage to do? You must work it, you know.”
“You mean make her feel,” Kate asked after a moment, “how much I’m attached to you?”
“Well, what a cruel invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I’m a poor ruin of an old dad to make a stand about giving up—I quite agree. But I’m not, after all, quite the old ruin not to get something for giving up.”
“Oh I think her idea,” said Kate almost gaily now, “is that I shall get a great deal.”
He met her with his inimitable amenity. “But does she give you the items?”
The girl went through the show. “More or less, I think. But many of them are things I dare say I may take for granted—things women can do for each other and that you wouldn’t understand.”
“There’s nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn