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

came up. What was also, however, determined for her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image presented to her, the splendid young woman who looked so particularly handsome in impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the peculiar property of somebody else’s vision, that this fine freedom in short was the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her⁠—held as by the strange sense of seeing through that distant person’s eyes. It lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so lasting it produced an effect. It produced in fact more than one, and we take them in their order. The first was that it struck our young woman as absurd to say that a girl’s looking so to a man could possibly be without connections; and the second was that by the time Kate had got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connection it must have for herself.

She produced this commodity on the spot⁠—produced it, that is, in straight response to Kate’s frank “Well, what?” The inquiry bore of course, with Kate’s eagerness, on the issue of the morning’s scene, the great man’s latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as the cheerful demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when news is not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She couldn’t have said what it was exactly that, on the instant, determined her; the nearest description of it would perhaps have been as the more vivid impression of all her friend took for granted. The contrast between this free quantity and the maze of possibilities through which, for hours, she had herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for the moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it helped forward in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely had nothing to tell. Besides which, certainly, there was something else⁠—an influence, at the particular juncture, still more obscure. Kate had lost, on the way upstairs, the look⁠—the look⁠—that made her young hostess so subtly think and one of the signs of which was that she never kept it for many moments at once; yet she stood there, none the less, so in her bloom and in her strength, so completely again the “handsome girl” beyond all others, the “handsome girl” for whom Milly had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet her now with the note of the plaintive would amount somehow to a surrender, to a confession. She would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor would keep her, at the worst, the fewest minutes; and it was as if she had asked just with all this practical impeccability for all that was most mortal in her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly danced their dance; but the vibration produced and the dust kicked up had lasted less than our account of them. Almost before she knew it she was answering, and answering, beautifully, with no consciousness of fraud, only as with a sudden flare of the famous “willpower” she had heard about, read about, and which was what her medical adviser had mainly thrown her back on. “Oh, it’s all right. He’s lovely.”

Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs. Stringham. “You mean you’ve been absurd?”

“Absurd.” It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done something for her safety.

And Kate really hung on her lips. “There’s nothing at all the matter?”

“Nothing to worry about. I shall take a little watching, but I shan’t have to do anything dreadful, or even, in the least, inconvenient. I can do in fact as I like.” It was wonderful for Milly how just to put it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into places.

Yet even before the full effect came Kate had seized, kissed, blessed her. “My love, you’re too sweet! It’s too dear! But it’s as I was sure.” Then she grasped the full beauty. “You can do as you like?”

“Quite. Isn’t it charming?”

“Ah, but catch you,” Kate triumphed with gaiety, “not doing⁠—! And what shall you do?”

“For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy”⁠—Milly was completely luminous⁠—“having got out of my scrape.”

“Learning, you mean, so easily, that you are well.”

It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her mouth. “Learning, I mean, so easily, that I am well.”

“Only, no one’s of course well enough to stay in London now. He can’t,” Kate went on, “want this of you.”

“Mercy, no⁠—I’m to knock about. I’m to go to places.”

“But not beastly ‘climates’⁠—Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?”

“No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I’m to go in for pleasure.”

“Oh, the duck!”⁠—Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded. “But what kind of pleasure?”

“The highest,” Milly smiled.

Her friend met it as nobly. “Which is the highest?”

“Well, it’s just our chance to find out. You must help me.”

“What have I wanted to do but help you,” Kate asked, “from the moment I first laid eyes on you?” Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. “I like your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round, do you want?”

V

Milly indeed at last couldn’t say; so that she had really for the time brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor’s arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out, from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually waited for was Sir Luke Strett’s promised visit; as to her proceeding on which, however, her mind was quite made up.