The Wings of the Dove, Henry James [thriller books to read .TXT] 📗

he really needn’t get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked it, with interest, for all answer. “Isn’t she better⁠—if she’s able to see you?”

“She assures me she’s in perfect health.”

Kate’s interest grew. “I knew she would.” On which she added: “It won’t have been really for illness that she stayed away last night.”

“For what then?”

“Well⁠—for nervousness.”

“Nervousness about what?”

“Oh you know!” She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the next moment. “I’ve told you that.”

He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it was as if what he saw there prompted him to say: “What have you told her?”

She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered where they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, even stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right feeling. Milly’s room would be close at hand, and yet they were saying things⁠—! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. “Ask her, if you like; you’re free⁠—she’ll tell you. Act as you think best; don’t trouble about what you think I may or mayn’t have told. I’m all right with her,” said Kate. “So there you are.”

“If you mean here I am,” he answered, “it’s unmistakeable. If you also mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you’re so far right as that she certainly does believe in you.”

“Well then take example by her.”

“She’s really doing it for you,” Densher continued. “She’s driving me out for you.”

“In that case,” said Kate with her soft tranquillity, “you can do it a little for her. I’m not afraid,” she smiled.

He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on it and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn’t, under such impressions, a question of words. “I do nothing for anyone in the world but you. But for you I’ll do anything.”

“Good, good,” said Kate. “That’s how I like you.”

He waited again an instant. “Then you swear to it?”

“To ‘it’? To what?”

“Why that you do ‘like’ me. Since it’s all for that, you know, that I’m letting you do⁠—well, God knows what with me.”

She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture⁠—the sense of which she immediately further expressed. “If you don’t believe in me then, after all, hadn’t you better break off before you’ve gone further?”

“Break off with you?”

“Break off with Milly. You might go now,” she said, “and I’ll stay and explain to her why it is.”

He wondered⁠—as if it struck him. “What would you say?”

“Why that you find you can’t stand her, and that there’s nothing for me but to bear with you as I best may.”

He considered of this. “How much do you abuse me to her?”

“Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude.”

Again he thought. “It doesn’t seem to me I ought to mind her attitude.”

“Well then, just as you like. I’ll stay and do my best for you.”

He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape; and it was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he now weighed the consequence. “Won’t it make her⁠—her not finding me here⁠—be rather more sure there’s something between us?”

Kate thought. “Oh I don’t know. It will of course greatly upset her. But you needn’t trouble about that. She won’t die of it.”

“Do you mean she will?” Densher presently asked.

“Don’t put me questions when you don’t believe what I say. You make too many conditions.”

She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of being able to show⁠—imagination, tact, positively even humour. The circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: “What if I should begin to bore this creature?” And that, within a few seconds, had translated itself. “If you’ll swear again you love me⁠—!”

She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more than he said. “Here? There’s nothing between us here,” Kate smiled.

“Oh isn’t there?” Her smile itself, with this, had so settled something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly’s. It was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. “I’ll do all you wish,” he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that he had practically, after all, drawn from her⁠—a declaration on which she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.

“If you are as good as that I go. You’ll tell her that, finding you with her, I wouldn’t wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She’ll understand.”

She had reached the door with it⁠—she was full of decision; but he had