THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (Complete Edition). Henry Foss James

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СКАЧАТЬ called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose a week; his enquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground, and there were reasons of state — reasons operating at the seat of empire in Fleet Street — why the nail should be struck on the head. Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide; and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together: she was clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her, but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him too dreadfully — of course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had really occurred in Fleet Street — all the more that it was his own final reading. He was to pull the subject up — that was just what they wanted; and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them each as he might, to let HIM down. It was just because he didn’t nose about and babble, because he wasn’t the usual gossip-monger, that they had picked him out. It was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would have always to take from his example.

      “How you ought indeed, when you understand so well, to be a journalist’s wife!” Densher exclaimed in admiration even while she struck him as fairly hurrying him off.

      But she was almost impatient of the praise. “What do you expect one NOT to understand when one cares for you?”

      “Ah then I’ll put it otherwise and say ‘How much you care for me!’ “

      “Yes,” she assented; “it fairly redeems my stupidity. I SHALL, with a chance to show it,” she added, “have some imagination for you.”

      She spoke of the future this time as so little contingent that he felt a queerness of conscience in making her the report that he presently arrived at on what had passed for him with the real arbiter of their destiny. The way for that had been blocked a little by his news from Fleet Street; but in the crucible of their happy discussion this element soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that ensued the parts were not to be distinguished. The young man moreover, before taking his leave, was to see why Kate had spoken with a wisdom indifferent to that, and was to come to the vision by a devious way that deepened the final cheer. Their faces were turned to the illumined quarter as soon as he had answered her question on the score of their being to appearance able to play patience, a prodigious game of patience, with success. It was for the possibility of the appearance that she had a few days before so earnestly pressed him to see her aunt; and if after his hour with that lady it had not struck Densher that he had seen her to the happiest purpose the poor facts flushed with a better meaning as Kate, one by one, took them up.

      “If she consents to your coming why isn’t that everything?”

      “It IS everything; everything SHE thinks it. It’s the probability — I mean as Mrs. Lowder measures probability — that I may be prevented from becoming a complication for her by some arrangement, ANY arrangement, through which you shall see me often and easily. She’s sure of my want of money, and that gives her time. She believes in my having a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better my state before I put the pistol to your head in respect to sharing it. The time this will take figures for her as the time that will help her if she doesn’t spoil her chance by treating me badly. She doesn’t at all wish moreover,” Densher went on, “to treat me badly, for I believe, upon my honour, odd as it may sound to you, that she personally rather likes me and that if you weren’t in question I might almost become her pet young man. She doesn’t disparage intellect and culture — quite the contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and be associated with her name; and I’m sure it has sometimes cost her a real pang that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible.” He paused a moment, and his companion then saw how strange a smile was in his face — a smile as strange even as the adjunct in her own of this informing vision. “I quite suspect her of believing that, if the truth were known, she likes me literally better than — deep down — you yourself do: wherefore she does me the honour to think I may be safely left to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her margin. I’m not the sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use, that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride and prejudice will take care of the rest! — the pride fed full, meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you, and the prejudice excited by the comparisons she’ll enable you to make, from which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she’ll never like me so much as when she has succeeded a little better in making me look wretched. For then YOU’LL like me less.”

      Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after an instant replied: “I see, I see — what an immense affair she must think me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression.”

      “I think you’ll make no mistake,” said Densher, “in letting it go as deep as it will.”

      He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to amuse herself with. “Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as you say — that’s an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the other big things that in one’s acquaintance with people give her a place so apart.”

      “Oh she’s grand,” the young man allowed; “she’s on the scale altogether of the car of Juggernaut — which was a kind of image that came to me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The things in your drawingroom there were like the forms of the strange idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of the car to bristle.”

      “Yes, aren’t they?” the girl returned; and they had, over all that aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were complications, there were questions; but they were so much more together than they were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no word of refutation of Aunt Maud’s “big” diplomacy, and they left it there, as they would have left any other fine product, for a monument to her powers. But, Densher related further, he had had in other respects too the car of Juggernaut to face; he omitted nothing from his account of his visit, least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last — though indeed only under artful pressure — fallen foul of his very type, his want of the right marks, his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents. She had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he granted Kate, would have been dreadful if he hadn’t so let himself in for it.

      “I was really curious, you see,” he explained, “to find out from her what sort of queer creature, what sort of social anomaly, in the light of such conventions as hers, such an education as mine makes one pass for.”

      Kate said nothing for a little; but then, “Why should you care?” she asked.

      “Oh,” he laughed, “I like her so much; and then, for a man of my trade, her views, her spirit, are essentially a thing to get hold of: they belong to the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we must keep setting up ‘codes’ with. Besides,” he added, “I want to please her personally.”

      “Ah yes, we must please her personally!” his companion echoed; and the words may represent all their definite recognition, at the time, of Densher’s politic gain. They had in fact between this and his start for New York many matters to handle, and the question he now touched upon came up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he had really told her aunt more of his immediate personal story than he had ever told СКАЧАТЬ