Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [47]
“It satisfies me beautifully,” Densher returned, “but it doesn‘t, my dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don’t, you know, really tell me anything. It’s so vague that what am I to think but that you may very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?”
“He has done everything.”
“Oh—everything! Everything’s nothing.”
“Well then,” said Kate, “he has done some particular thing. It’s known—only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. You could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about.”
Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up. “I wouldn’t find out for the world, and I’d rather lose my tongue than put a question.”
“And yet it’s a part of me,” said Kate.
“A part of you?”
“My father’s dishonour.” Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than ever yet, her note of proud still pessimism. “How can such a thing as that not be the great thing in one’s life?”
She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. “I shall ask you, for the great thing in your life,” he said, “to depend on me a little more.” After which, just debating, “Doesn’t he belong to some club?” he asked.
She had a grave headshake. “He used to—to many.”
“But he has dropped them?”
“They’ve dropped him. Of that I’m sure. It ought to do for you. I offered him,” the girl immediately continued—“and it was for that I went to him—to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is possible. But he won’t hear of it.”
Densher took this in with marked but generous wonder. “You offered him—‘impossible’ as you describe him to me—to live with him and share his disadvantages?” The young man saw for the moment only the high beauty of it. “You are gallant!”
“Because it strikes you as being brave for him?” She wouldn’t in the least have this. “It wasn’t courage—it was the opposite. I did it to save myself—to escape.”
He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer things than any one to think about. “Escape from what?”
“From everything.”
“Do you by any chance mean from me?”
“No; I spoke to him of you, told him—or what amounted to it—that I would bring you, if he would allow it, with me.”
“But he won’t allow it,” said Densher.
“Won’t hear of it on any terms. He won’t help me, won’t save me, won’t hold out a finger to me,” Kate went on. “He simply wriggles away, in his inimitable manner, and throws me back.”
“Back then, after all, thank goodness,” Densher concurred, “on me”.
But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had evoked. “It’s a pity, because you’d like him. He’s wonderful—he’s charming.” Her companion gave one of the laughs that showed again how inveterately he felt in her tone something that banished the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. “He would make himself delightful to you.”
“Even while objecting to me?”
“Well, he likes to please,” the girl explained—“personally. I’ve seen it make him wonderful. He would appreciate you and be clever with you. It’s to me he objects—that is as to my liking you.”
“Heaven be praised then,” cried Densher, “that you like me enough for the objection!”
But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. “I don’t. I offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no difference, and that