Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (26 page)

“And is that very bad?”

“He has no ‘private means,’ and no prospect of any. He has no income, and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He’s as poor, she calls it, as ‘poverty,’ and she says she knows what that is.”

Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something. “But isn’t he brilliantly clever?”

Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. “I haven’t the least idea.”

To which, for the time, Susie only replied “Oh!”—though by the end of a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing “I see”; and that in turn with: “It’s quite what Maud Lowder thinks.”

“That he’ll never do anything?”

“No—quite the contrary: that he’s exceptionally able.”

“Oh yes; I know”—Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. “But Mrs. Condrip’s own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won’t hear of any such person. Mr. Densher, she holds—that’s the way, at any rate, it was explained to me—won’t ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he were public she’d be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were rich—without being anything else—she’d do her best to swallow him. As it is she taboos him.”

“In short,” said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, “she told you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him,” she added.

“Mrs. Condrip didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely.”

“Then there it is!” On which, with a drop and one of those sudden slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion, Milly turned away. Yet the matter wasn’t left so, that night, between them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first come back to it. Milly’s own nearest approach at least, for a little, to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all—every one they saw—to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh, not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn’t have told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences—if it mightn’t better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if with a masterful high manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and bright, as if it weren’t there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at all—which was possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn’t, as might be said, in order to get at her nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would figure as large, as honourably unselfish, on the day they should take effect. She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a person or two shouldn’t lose a benefit by not submitting if they could be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views couldn’t be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested for. It was too soon, since she wasn’t interested for herself. Even the richest woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly’s motive doubtless had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple, sublime without it—whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it or not; and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be these things just as much. Only then she might very well have, like Aunt Maud, a manner. Such were the connexions, at all events, in which the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flickered up—in which it came round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the afternoon, named Mr. Densher as an acquaintance.

“Oh no—I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered,” the girl explained, “Mrs. Lowder’s wish.”

“But that,” her friend observed after a moment, “was for silence to Kate.”

“Yes—but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate.”

“Why soP—since she must dislike to talk about him.”

“Mrs. Condrip must?” Milly thought. “What she would like most is that her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she can tell her will help that—” But the girl dropped suddenly here, as if her companion would see.

Her companion’s interest, however, was all for what she herself saw. “You mean she’ll immediately speak?” Mrs. Stringham gathered that this was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. “How will it be against him that you know him?”

“Oh how can I say? It won’t be so much one’s knowing him as one’s having kept it out of sight.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Stringham as for comfort, “you haven’t kept it out of sight. Isn’t it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?”

“It isn’t my acquaintance with him,” Milly smiled, “that she has dissimulated.”

“She has dissimulated only her own? Well then the responsibility’s hers.”

“Ah but,” said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, “she has a right to do as she likes.”

“Then so, my dear, have you!” smiled Susan Shepherd.

Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as if this were what one loved her for. “We’re not quarrelling about it, Kate and I, yet.”

“I only meant,” Mrs. Stringham explained, “that I don’t see what Mrs. Condrip would gain.”

“By her being able to tell Kate?” Milly thought. “I only meant that I don’t see what I myself should gain.”

“But it will have to come out—that he knows you both—some time.”

Milly scarce assented. “Do you mean when he comes back?”

“He’ll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it, to ‘cut’ either of you for the sake of the other.”

This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful. “I might get at him somehow beforehand,” the girl suggested; “I might give him what they call here the ‘tip’—that he’s not to know me when we meet. Or, better still, I mightn’t be here at all.”

“Do you want to run away from him?”

It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. “I don’t know
what
I want to run away from!”

It dispelled, on the spot—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it—any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now for a moment swept over. “I’ll go anywhere else in the world you like.”

But Milly came up through it. “Dear old Susie—how I do work you!”

“Oh this is nothing yet.”

“No indeed -to what it will be.”

“You’re not—and it’s vain to pretend,” said dear old Susie, who had been taking her in, “as sound and strong as I insist on having you.”

“Insist, insist—the more the better. But the day I
look
as sound and strong as that, you know,” Milly went on—“on that day I shall be just sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That’s where one is,” she continued thus agreeably to embroider, “when even one’s
most
‘beaux moments’
^x
aren’t such as to qualify, so far as appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since I’ve lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive—which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,” she wound up, “you’ll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I’m gone; and then you’ll only know where I’m not.”

“I’d die for you,” said Susan Shepherd after a moment.

“ ‘Thanks awfully’! Then stay here for me.”

“But we can’t be in London for August, nor for many of all these next weeks.”

“Then we’ll go back.”

Susie blenched. “Back to America?”

“No, abroad—to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying ‘here’ for me,” Milly pursued, “your staying with me wherever I may be, even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No,” she insisted, “I
don’t
know where I am, and you never will, and it doesn’t matter—and I dare say it’s quite true,” she broke off, “that everything will have to come out.” Her friend would have felt of her that she joked about it now, hadn’t her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such unnameable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn’t, that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. “I must face the music. It isn’t at any rate its ‘coming out,’ ” she added; “it’s that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his injury”.

Her companion wondered. “But how to his?”

“Why if he pretends to love her—!”

“And does he only ‘pretend’?”

“I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far as to make up to other people.”

The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as with gaiety, for a comfortable end. “Did he make up, the false creature, to you?”

“No—but the question isn’t of that. It’s of what Kate might be made to believe.”

“That, given the fact of his having evidently more or less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have been all ready if you had a little bit led him on?”

Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said after a moment and as with a conscious excess of the pensive: “No, I don’t think she’d quite wish to suggest that I made up to
him;
for that I should have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,” she added—and now at last as with a supreme impatience—“ that her being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy would evidently help her, since she’s afraid of him, to do him in her sister’s mind a useful ill turn.”

Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the moment to make out how many her young friend had actually undertaken to see round. Finally, too, weren’t they braving the deeps? They got their amusement where they could. “Isn’t it only,” she asked, “rather probable she’d see that Kate’s knowing him as (what’s the pretty old word?)
volage—?”
^y

“Well?” She hadn’t filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could Milly.

“Well, might but do what that often does—by all
our
blessed littlelaws and arrangements at least: excite Kate’s own sentiment instead of depressing it.”

The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. “Kate’s own sentiment? Oh she didn’t speak of that. I don’t think,” she added as if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, “I don’t think Mrs. Condrip imagines she’s in love.”

It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. “Then what’s her fear?”

“Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher’s possibly himself keeping it up—the fear of some final result from
that.”

“Oh,” said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted—“she looks far ahead!”

At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague “sports.” “No—it’s only we who do.”

“Well, don’t let us be more interested for them than they are for themselves!”

“Certainly not”—the girl promptly assented. A certain interest nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. “It wasn’t of anything on Kate’s own part she spoke.”

“You mean she thinks her sister distinctly doesn’t care for him?”

It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she meant; but there it presently was. “If she did care Mrs. Condrip would have told me.”

What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then they had been talking so. “But did you ask her?”

“Ah no!”

“Oh!” said Susan Shepherd.

Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn’t have asked her for the world.

Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she
were
confessing—all the while it was quite the case that neither justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan Shepherd at home, had been “civil” to Susan—it was just that shade, and Susan’s fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides letting them easily see that if it hadn’t by this time been the end of everything—which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the season at its last gasp—the places they might have liked to go to were such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was—or at any rate their modest general plea—that there was no place they would have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked, wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was highly the case as to their current consciousness—which could be indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course; impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering—they had been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He had administered the touch that, under light analysis, made the difference—the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs. Lowder’s not having lost it either, though it was superficially with Mrs. Lowder they had come, and though it was further with that lady that our young woman was directly engaged during the half-hour or so of her most agreeably inward response to the scene.