Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (68 page)

Kate thought. “That’s by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious. You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So you needn’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Densher.

Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked five. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud’s huge silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. “Well, it’s all most wonderful!” she exclaimed as she rather too profusely—a sign her friend noticed—ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming water. “You’ll have some?”

He hesitated. “Hadn’t we better wait—?”

“For Aunt Maud?” She saw what he meant—the deprecation, by their old law, of betrayals of the intimate note. “Oh you needn’t mind now. We’ve done it!”

“Humbugged her?”

“Squared her. You’ve pleased her.”

Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something else, and his thought in a moment came out. “What a brute then I must be!”

“A brute—?”

“To have pleased so many people.”

“Ah,” said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, “you’ve done it to please me.” But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. “What I don’t understand is—won’t you have any sugar?”

“Yes, pease.”

“What I don’t understand,” she went on when she had helped him, “is what it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave you up for days and days, what brought her back to you?”

She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him ready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their going into it over the tea-table. “It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her back. His visit, his presence there did it.”

“He brought her back then to life.”

“Well, to what I saw.”

“And by interceding for you?”

“I don’t think he interceded. I don’t indeed know what he did.”

Kate wondered. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“I didn’t ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn’t speak of her.”

Kate stared. “Then how do you know?”

“I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before—”

“Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?”

“He understood,” said Densher.

“But understood what?”

He waited a moment. “That I had meant awfully well.”

“Ah, and made
her
understand? I see,” she went on as he said nothing. “But how did he convince her?”

Densher put down his cup and turned away. “You must ask Sir Luke.”

He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. “The great thing,” Kate then resumed, “is that she’s satisfied. Which,” she continued, looking across at him, “is what I’ve worked for.”

“Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?”

“Well, at peace with you.”

“Oh ‘peace’!” he murmured with his eyes on the fire.

“The peace of having loved.”

He raised his eyes to her. “Is
that
peace?”

“Of having
been
loved,” she went on. “That is. Of having,” she wound up, “realized her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had
all
she wanted.”

Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. “You may think it hideous that I should now, that I should
yet”—
she made a point of the word—“pretend to draw conclusions. But we’ve not failed.”

“Oh!” he only again murmured.

She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that knowledge. “We’ve succeeded.” She spoke with her eyes deep in his own. “She won’t have loved you for nothing.” It made him wince, but she insisted. “And you won’t have loved
me.”

He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder alone for which she soon gave him—or for which perhaps rather Kate gave him—full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion’s rare alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them, and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she resentfully named gave her ample support. “Had you quite understood, my dear, that it’s full three weeks—?” And she effaced herself as if to leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been entertaining their visitor on her aunt’s behalf—a visitor she had been at one time suspected of favoring too much and who had now come back to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn’t that the fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn’t, in its tragic turn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr. Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher’s eyes, and he marvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for consideration, melted into it and out of sight.

He was taken up promptly with another matter—the truth of the remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks of their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her that were absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup without her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking place had obliged him to hang off; they had—after hearing of him from poor Susan as gone—been hoping for an early sight of him; they would have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely—by which she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it—was what marked him for unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth in the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. She treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft; and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness with her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches to Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn’t yet begun to be; it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostile to any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded, he could “work” this association : he had but to use the house freely for his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it. Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of a week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs. Lowder’s view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him on—brought him on a distance that he couldn’t again retrace. He had private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of candor was Aunt Maud’s wealth of sentiment. She was hugely sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn’t so himself—everything was too real; but it was none the less not false that he
had
been through a mill.

It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said to him, on the Sunday, almost cozily, from her sofa behind the tea, “I want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I’m
with
you to the end!” his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She was with him to the end—or she might be—in a way Kate wasn’t; and even if it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must just brush away the question of why it shouldn’t. Was he professing to her in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn’t real? How in the world could he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions—two and a scrap-on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now that almost as never yet he had license to ask for her, the queer turn of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn that when he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to come up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He liked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say to himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met
him
halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than her loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy her to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of course the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which he was completely
free
with this lady; and it wouldn’t indeed have come about if—for another monstrosity—he hadn’t ceased to be free with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasy moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed herself, she referred to her regret that he mightn’t have stayed to the end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all to his help.

“You simply couldn’t stand it?”

“I simply couldn’t stand it. Besides you see—!” But he paused.

“Besides what?” He had been going to say more—then he saw dangers; luckily however she had again assisted him. “Besides—oh I know!—men haven’t, in many relations, the courage of women.”

“They haven’t the courage of women.”

“Kate or I would have stayed,” she declared—“if we hadn’t come away for the special reason that you so frankly appreciated.”

Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn’t his behaviour since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said—he couldn’t help going so far: “I don’t doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy would have stayed.” And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was Susan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him—she had done nothing but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth she had yet, it was plain, favored this lady with nothing that compromised him. Milly’s act of renouncement she had described but as a change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark’s descent, as even without her it might be known, so that she mustn’t appear to conceal it; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, for all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions. Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that, shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn’t drop, his crossed leg, he leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came. She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn’t; but this was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as already dead to him—that being for his spirit the only thinkable way to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited her, and it wasn’t for him to go, as they said in America, behind this; which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious of her—what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured, for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in London while the pain went on—what would that do but make his days impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself—and by some art about which he was vague—that the sense of waiting had passed. “What in fact,” he restlessly reflected, “have I any further to do with it? Let me assume the thing actually over—as it at any moment may be—and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I’m good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to
her.”
He consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was the taste of suspense. That he
was
waiting was in short at the bottom of everything ; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just for that reason.