by Henry James
She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it—his belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he “saw” nothing, and it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any approach to the object indicated. “It’s not ‘my’ seal, my dear; and my intention—which my note tried to express—was all to treat it to you as not mine.”
“Do you mean that it’s to that extent mine then?”
“Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs—that of the good people in New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well and good; but we MIGHT, you know,” he presently added, “have sent it back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied,” he smiled with his heart in his mouth, “by an absolutely kind letter.”
Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of possibilities. She was—merely to put it at that—intelligent enough for anything. “Is it what you’re proposing we SHOULD do?”
“Ah it’s too late to do it—well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we KNOW—!”
“But you don’t know,” she said very gently.
“I refer,” he went on without noticing it, “to what would have been the handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one’s assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in the state of the envelope—THAT would have been really satisfying.”
She thought an instant. “The state of the envelope proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?”
Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour. “Well yes—something of that sort.”
“So that if cognisance HAS been taken—so far as I’m concerned—it spoils the beauty?”
“It makes the difference that I’m disappointed in the hope—which I confess I entertained—that you’d bring the thing back to me as you had received it.”
“You didn’t express that hope in your letter.”
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted—oh yes, if that’s what you wish to ask me—to see what you’d do.”
“You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?”
He continued steady now; a kind of ease—from the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn’t yet have named—had come to him. “Well, I wanted—in so good a case—to test you.”
She was struck—it showed in her face—by his expression. “It IS a good case. I doubt whether a better,” she said with her eyes on him, “has ever been known.”
“The better the case then the better the test!”
“How do you know,” she asked in reply to this, “what I’m capable of?”
“I don’t, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known sooner.”
“I see”—she took it in. “But I myself shouldn’t have known at all. And you wouldn’t have known, either, what I do know.”
“Let me tell you at once,” he returned, “that if you’ve been moved to correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to.”
She just hesitated. “Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections? Can you only do it by doing it blindly?”
He waited a moment. “What is it that you speak of my doing?”
“Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not accepting—what she has done. Isn’t there some regular name in such cases? Not taking up the bequest.”
“There’s something you forget in it,” he said after a moment. “My asking you to join with me in doing so.”
Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn’t make her less firm. “How can I ‘join’ in a matter with which I’ve nothing to do?”
“How? By a single word.”
“And what word?”
“Your consent to my giving up.”
“My consent has no meaning when I can’t prevent you.”
“You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well,” he said.
She seemed to face a threat in it. “You mean you won’t give up if I DON’T consent?”
“Yes. I do nothing.”
“That, as I understand, is accepting.”
Densher paused. “I do nothing formal.”
“You won’t, I suppose you mean, touch the money.”
“I won’t touch the money.”
It had a sound—though he had been coming to it—that made for gravity. “Who then in such an event WILL?”
“Any one who wants or who can.”
Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the time she spoke he had covered ground. “How can I touch it but THROUGH you?”
“You can’t. Any more,” he added, “than I can renounce it except through you.”
“Oh ever so much less! There’s nothing,” she explained, “in my power.”
“I’m in your power,” Merton Densher said.
“In what way?”
“In the way I show—and the way I’ve always shown. When have I shown,” he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, “anything else? You surely must feel—so that you needn’t wish to appear to spare me in it—how you ‘have’ me.”
“It’s very good of you, my dear,” she nervously laughed, “to put me so thoroughly up to it!”
“I put you up to nothing. I didn’t even put you up to the chance that, as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing. Your liberty is therefore in every way complete.”
It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them in one of their short silences—something that was like an appeal from each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow before them, but which of them must meet it first? “Thank you!” Kate said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the air.
There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. “You must intensely feel that it’s the thing for which we worked together.”
She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace; she was already again occupied with a point of her own. “Is it absolutely true—for if it is, you know, it’s tremendously interesting—that you haven’t so much as a curiosity about what she has done for you?”
“Would you like,” he asked, “my formal oath on it?”
“No—but I don’t understand. It seems to me in your place—!”
“Ah,” he couldn’t help breaking in, “what do you know of my place? Pardon me,” he at once added; “my preference is the one I express.”
She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. “But won’t the facts be published?”
” ‘Published’?”—he winced.
“I mean won’t you see them in the papers?”
“Ah never! I shall know how to escape that.”
It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another insistence. “Your desire is to escape everything?”
“Everything.”
“And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to help you to renounce?”
“My sense is sufficient without being definite. I’m willing to believe that the amount of money’s not small.”
“Ah there you are!” she exclaimed.
“If she was to leave me a remembrance,” he quietly pursued, “it would inevitably not be meagre.”
Kate waited as for how to say it. “It’s wort
hy of her. It’s what she was herself—if you remember what we once said THAT was.”
He hesitated—as if there had been many things. But he remembered one of them. “Stupendous?”
“Stupendous.” A faint smile for it—ever so small—had flickered in her face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled—but that made her continue. She continued gently. “I think that what it really is must be that you’re afraid. I mean,” she explained, “that you’re afraid of ALL the truth. If you’re in love with her without it, what indeed can you be more? And you’re afraid—it’s wonderful!—to be in love with her.”
“I never was in love with her,” said Densher.
She took it, but after a little she met it. “I believe that now—for the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there. But your change came—as it might well—the day you last saw her; she died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you DID.” With which Kate slowly rose. “And I do now. She did it FOR us.” Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. “I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to THAT they reached. They cover us.”
“They cover us,” Densher said.
“That’s what I give you,” Kate gravely wound up. “That’s what I’ve done for you.”
His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment, his tears. “Do I understand then—?”
“That I do consent?” She gravely shook her head. “No—for I see. You’ll marry me without the money; you won’t marry me with it. If I don’t consent YOU don’t.”
“You lose me?” He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. “Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny.”
Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare. “Precisely—so that I must choose.”
“You must choose.”
Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath come slow, he waited for her act. “There’s but one thing that can save you from my choice.”
“From your choice of my surrender to you?”
“Yes”—and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table—”your surrender of that.”
“What is it then?”
“Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory.”
“Oh—her memory!”
“Ah”—she made a high gesture—”don’t speak of it as if you couldn’t be. i could in your place; and you’re one for whom it will do. Her memory’s your love. You WANT no other.”
He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”
“As we were?”
“As we were.”
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”
The Altar of the Dead
The Ambassadors
The American
The American Scene
The Aspern Papers
The Author of Beltraffio
The Awkward Age
The Beast in the Jungle
The Beldonald Holbein
The Bostonians: Volume I (of II)
Bostonians: Volume II (of II)
A Bundle of Letters
The Chaperon
Confidence
The Coxon Fund
Daisy Miller: A Study in Two Parts
The Death of the Lion
The Diary of a Man of Fifty
Embarrassments
Eugene Pickering
The Europeans
The Figure in the Carpet
The Finer Grain
Four Meetings
Georgina’s Reasons
Glasses
The Golden Bowl, Complete
Greville Fane
Hawthorne
An International Episode
Italian Hours
The Jolly Corner
The Lesson of the Master
A Little Tour in France
Louisa Pallant
Madame de Mauves
The Madonna of the Future
The Marriages
Nona Vincent
The Outcry
Pandora
A Passionate Pilgrim
The Patagonia
The Path of Duty
The Pension Beaurepas
Picture and Text
The Point of View
The Portrait of a Lady: Volume 1 and 2
The Portrait of a Lady: Volume 1
The Portrait of a Lady: Volume 2
The Pupil
The Real Thing
The Reverberator
Roderick Hudson
Sir Dominick Ferrand
A Small Boy and Others
Some Short Stories
The Tragic Muse
The Turn of the Screw
Washington Square
What Maisie Knew
The Wings of the Dove
Table of Contents
The Altar of the Dead
The Ambassadors
The American
The American Scene
The Aspern Papers
The Author of Beltraffio
The Awkward Age
The Beast in the Jungle
The Beldonald Holbein
The Bostonians: Volume I
The Bostonians: Volume II
A Bundle of Letters
The Chaperon
Confidence
The Coxon Fund
Daisy Miller: A Study in Two Parts
The Death of the Lion
The Diary of a Man of Fifty
Embarrassments
Eugene Pickering
The Europeans
The Figure in the Carpet
The Finer Grain
Four Meetings
Georgina’s Reasons
Glasses
The Golden Bowl
Greville Fane
Hawthorne
An International Episode
Italian Hours
The Jolly Corner
The Lesson of the Master
A Little Tour in France
A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar
Louisa Pallant
Madame de Mauves
The Madonna of the Future
The Marriages
Nona Vincent
The Outcry
Pandora
A Passionate Pilgrim
The Patagonia
The Path of Duty
The Pension Beaurepas
Picture and Text
The Point of View
The Portrait of a Lady
The Pupil