Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [31]
He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description c)f it. “You’re deceiving two persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?”
She shook her head with detachment. “I’ve no intention of that sort with respect to any one now—to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail me”—she seemed to make it out for herself—“that has the merit at least that it simplifies. I shall go my way—as I see my way.”
“Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a penny?”
“You demand a great deal of satisfaction,” she observed, “for the little you give.”
It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to be hustled, and though he glared at her a little this had long been the practical limit to his general power of objection. “If you’re base enough to incur your aunt’s reprobation you’re base enough for my argument. What, if you’re not thinking of an utterly improper person, do your speeches to me signify? Who is the beggarly sneak?” he went on as her response failed.
Her response, when it came, was cold but distinct. “He has every disposition to make the best of you. He only wants in fact to be kind to you.”
“Then he must be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to improve him for me,” her father pursued, “that he’s also destitute and impossible? There are boobies and boobies even-the right and the wrong—and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong. Your aunt knows them, by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell you, her judgement for them; and you may take it from me once for all that I won’t hear of any one of whom she won’t.” Which led up to his last word. “If you should really defy us both—!”
“Well, papa?”
“Well, my sweet child, I think that—reduced to insignificance as you may fondly believe me—I should still not be quite without some way of making you regret it.”
She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might measure this danger. “If I shouldn’t do it, you know, it wouldn’t be because I’m afraid of you.”
“Oh if you don’t do it,” he retorted, “you may be as bold as you like!”
“Then you can do nothing at all for me?”
He showed her, this time unmistakeably—it was before her there on the landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the strange smell that seemed to cling to them—how vain her appeal remained. “I’ve never pretended to do more than my duty; I’ve given you the best and the clearest advice.” And then came up the spring that moved him. “If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be consoled.” What he couldn’t forgive was her dividing with Marian her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them. She should have divided it with him.
—II—
She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother’s death—gone with an effort the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them, reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been nothing else to do—not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money on, since everything belonged to the “estate.” How the estate would turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it had proved in fact since then a residuum a trifle less scant than, with her sister, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that she wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up—to abandon her own interest, which she doubtless would already have done hadn’t the point been subject to Aunt Maud’s sharp intervention. Aunt Maud’s intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all declined. Yet at the winter