Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Henry James

  She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn’t instantly say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. “Oh yes—I have. Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for you—!” And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one part of the room to another.

  “Horrible place, isn’t it?” said Kate.

  It brought him straight back to his inquiry. “Is it for anything awful you’ve had to come?”

  “Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything you may have. Don’t mind,” she continued, “the ‘sight of me here,’ nor whatever—which is more than I yet know myself—may be ‘in it’ for me. And kindly consider too that, after all, if you’re in trouble I can a little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it.”

  “My dear child, it’s just because of the sense of your wish—! I suppose I’m in trouble—1 suppose that’s it. He said this with so odd a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it—which he as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. “And yet I oughtn’t to be.” Which sounded indeed vaguer still.

  She waited a moment. “Is it, as you say for my own business, anything very awful?”

  “Well,” he slowly replied, “you’ll tell me if you find it so. I mean if you find my idea—”

  He was so slow that she took him up. “Awful?” A sound of impatience—the form of a laugh—at last escaped her. “I can’t find it anything at all till I know what you’re talking about.”

  It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a recall of another time—the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he might say and mightn’t. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he stopped before his companion. “The communication I speak of can’t possibly belong—so far as its date is concerned—to these last days. The post-mark, which is legible, does; but it isn’t thinkable, for anything else, that she wrote—!” He dropped, looking at her as if she’d understand.

  It was easy to understand. “On her deathbed?” But Kate took an instant’s thought. “Aren’t we agreed that there was never any one in the world like her?”

  “Yes.” And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. “There was never any one in the world like her.”

  Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her she added a question. “And won’t it further depend a little on what the communication is?”

  “A little perhaps—but not much. It’s a communication,” said Densher.

  “Do you mean a letter?”

  “Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand—in hers unmistakably.”

  Kate thought. “Do you know her hand very well?”

  “Oh perfectly.”

  It was as if his tone for this prompted—with a slight strangeness—her next demand. “Have you had many letters from her?”

  “No. Only three notes.” He spoke looking straight at her. “And very, very short ones.”

  “Ah,” said Kate, “the number doesn’t matter. Three lines would be enough if you’re sure to remember.”

  “I’m sure I remember. Besides,” Densher continued, “I’ve seen her hand in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely for that. And then she once copied me something.”

  “Oh,” said Kate almost with a smile, “I don’t ask you for the detail of your reasons. One good one’s enough.” To which however she added as if precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony: “And the writing has its usual look?”

  Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes—it was beautiful. Well,” Kate, to defer to him still, further remarked, “it’s not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything’s possible.”

  “Yes, anything’s possible”—he appeared oddly to catch at it. “That’s what I say to myself. It’s what I’ve been believing you,” he a trifle vaguely explained, “still more certain to feel.”

  She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn’t been drawn. He looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid London street—for sordid, with his other association, he felt it—as he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham’s eyes on him, in the vista of the Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousness that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so driven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him to say he would ; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the inanity of such a hope. Kate’s attention, on her side, during these minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly presented—rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try to make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that she again took him up. “You received—what you spoke of—last night?”

  It made him turn round. “Coming in from Fleet Street—earlier by an hour than usual—I found it with some other letters on my table. But my eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I recognized it, knew what it was, without touching it.”

  “One can understand.” She listened with respect. His tone however was so singular that she presently added: “You speak as if all this while you hadn’t touched it.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I’d been touching nothing else. I quite firmly,” he pursued as if to be plainer, “took hold of it.”

  “Then where is it?”

  “Oh I have it here.”

  “And you’ve brought it to show me?”

  “I’ve brought it to show you.”

  So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities, almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words. She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face. while his own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought. “But now that you’ve done so you feel you don’t want to.”

  “I want to immensely,” he said. “Only you tell me nothing.”

  She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable child. “It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You haven’t yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you require don’t come from your document itself.” Then as he answered nothing she had a flash. “You mean you haven’t read it?”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  She stared. “Then how am I to help you with it?”

  Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, and again he was before her. “By telling me this. It’s something, you know, that you wouldn’t tell me the other day.”

  She was vague. “The other day?”

  “The first time after my return—the Sunday I came to you. What’s he doing,” Densher went on, “at that hour of the morning with her? What does his having been with her there mean?”

  “Of whom are you talking?”

  “Of that man—Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?”

  “Oh with Aunt Maud?”

  “Yes, my dear—and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing; and it’s what you didn’t tell me the other day when I put you the question.”

  Kate tried to remember the other day. “You asked me nothing about any hour.”

  “I asked you when it was you last saw him—previous, I mean, to his second descent at Venice. Y
ou wouldn’t say, and as we were talking of a matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact remains, you know, my dear, that you haven’t told me.”

  Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly than the others. “I ‘wouldn’t say’?—and you ‘let it pass’?” She looked just coldly blank. “You really speak as if I were keeping something back.”

  “Well, you see,” Densher persisted, “you’re not even telling me now. All I want to know,” he nevertheless explained, “is whether there was a connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was practically—oh beyond all doubt!—the shock precipitating for her what has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously for yourself. How in the world did he know we’re engaged?”

  —V—

  Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat down, the first movement she had made. “Are you trying to fix it on me that I must have told him?”

  She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay—which he showed he immediately took in. “My dear child, I’m not trying to ‘fix’ anything; but I’m extremely tormented and I seem not to understand. What has the brute to do with us anyway?”

  “What has he indeed?” Kate asked.

  She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason. There was in it—and for his reason really—one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going to kiss her. He hadn’t been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was none the less the quieter. “What’s he doing, from ten o’clock on Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?”

  Kate looked surprised. “Didn’t she tell you he’s staying there?”

  “At Lancaster Gate?” Densher’s surprise met it. “ ‘Staying’?—since when?”

  “Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away.” And then she explained—confessing it in fact anomalous. “It’s an accident—like Aunt Maud’s having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn’t after all so monstrous. We stayed—and, with my having come here, she’s sorry now—because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people.”

  “You stayed for thinking of—Venice?”

  “Of course we did. For what else? And even a little,” Kate wonderfully added—“it’s true at least of Aunt Maud—for thinking of you.”

  He appreciated. “I see. Nice of you every way. But whom,” he inquired, “has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?”

  “His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to let—such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of money, he hasn’t had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at.”

  Densher’s attention was entire. “In spite of everything? In spite of what?”

  “Well, I don’t know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to do that sort of thing.”

  “To try to get money?”

  “To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days’ notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud, who’s deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: ‘Come then to Lancaster Gate—to sleep at least—till, like all the world, you go to the country.’ He was to have gone to the country—I think to Matcham—yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was.”

  Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement, beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. “Told you, you mean, so that you needn’t leave the house?”

  “Yes—so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was part of my reason.”

  “And was it part of your reason?”

  “A little if you like. Yet there’s plenty here—as I knew there would be—without it. So that,” she said candidly, “doesn’t matter. I’m glad I am here: even if for all the good I do—!” She implied however that that didn’t matter either. “He didn’t, as you tell me, get off then to Matcham; though he may possibly if it is possible, be going this afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable—and it’s really, I’m bound to say, quite amiable of him—is that he has declined to leave Aunt Maud, as I’ve been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone. If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it’s a procéde bj that won’t please her less. It’s small wonder therefore that she insists, on a dull day, in driving him about. I don’t pretend to know,” she wound up, “what may happen between them; but that’s all I see in it.”

  “You see in everything, and you always did,” Densher returned, “something that, while I’m with you at least, I always take from you as the truth itself.”

  She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that seemed to show how fine she found it. “Thank you.” It had for him, like everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and, yielding to the impulse to which he hadn’t yielded just before, he laid his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn’t prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid connexion and as she made it sat down again. “I’ve been trying to place exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me—spoke out.”

  “Ah there you are!” said Densher who had wheeled round.

  “Well, if I’m ‘there,’ as you so gracefully call it, by having refused to meet him as he wanted—as he pressed—I plead guilty to being so. Would you have liked me,” she went on, “to give him an answer that would have kept him from going?”

  It made him a little awkwardly think. “Did you know he was going?”

  “Never for a moment; but I’m afraid that—even if it doesn’t fit your strange suppositions—1 should have given him just the same answer if I had known. If it’s a matter I haven’t, since your return, thrust upon you, that’s simply because it’s not a matter in the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope that if I’ve satisfied you about it,” she continued, “it’s not too much to ask of you to let it rest.”

  “Certainly,” said Densher kindly, “I’ll let it rest.” But the next moment he pursued: “He saw something. He guessed.”

  “If you mean,” she presently returned, “that he was unfortunately the one person we hadn’t deceived, I can’t contradict you.”

  “No—of course not. But why,” Densher still risked, “was he unfortunately the one person—? He’s not really a bit intelligent.”

  “Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in anything so unnatural as—all things considered and when it came to the point—my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his conviction he acted.”

  Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark’s conviction as if it were a blot on the face of nature. “Do you mean because you had appeared to him to have encouraged him?”

  “Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where were we?”

  “ ‘Where’—?”

  “You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn’t mattered. What mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember that he has had all along his
impression of you. You can’t help it,” she said, “but you’re after all—well, yourself.”

  “As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and kept myself there—what,” Densher asked, “did he make of that?”

  “Your being in Venice and liking to be—which is never on any one’s part a monstrosity—was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation.”

  “In spite of Mrs. Lowder?”

  “No,” said Kate, “not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before what you call his second descent, hadn’t convinced him—all the more that my refusal of him didn’t help. But he came back convinced.” And then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: “I mean after he had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him.”

  “Milly?” Densher again but vaguely echoed.

  “That you were sincere. That it was her you loved.” It came to him from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found himself yet again at his window. “Aunt Maud, on his return here,” she meanwhile continued, “had it from him. And that’s why you’re now so well with Aunt Maud.”

  He only for a minute looked out in silence—after which he came away. “And why you are.” It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps rather if it hadn’t been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he thus finally spoke of was a different matter. “Did I understand from Mrs. Lowder that your father’s in the house?”