The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  “Oh!” said the other party while Densher said nothing—occupied as he mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn’t, that is, he knew, the “Oh!” of the idiot, however great the superficial resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it was the very specialty of the speaker, and a deal of expensive training and experience had gone to producing it. Densher felt somehow that, as a thing of value accidentally picked up, it would retain an interest of curiosity. The three stood for a little together in an awkwardness to which he was conscious of contributing his share; Kate failing to ask Lord Mark to be seated, but letting him know that he would find Mrs. Lowder, with some others, on the balcony.

  “Oh and Miss Theale I suppose?—as I seemed to hear outside, from below, Mrs. Stringham’s unmistakeable voice.”

  “Yes, but Mrs. Stringham’s alone. Milly’s unwell,” the girl explained, “and was compelled to disappoint us.”

  “Ah ‘disappoint’—rather!” And, lingering a little, he kept his eyes on Densher. “She isn’t really bad, I trust?”

  Densher, after all he had heard, easily supposed him interested in Milly; but he could imagine him also interested in the young man with whom he had found Kate engaged and whom he yet considered without visible intelligence. That young man concluded in a moment that he was doing what he wanted, satisfying himself as to each. To this he was aided by Kate, who produced a prompt: “Oh dear no; I think not. I’ve just been reassuring Mr. Densher,” she added—“who’s as concerned as the rest of us. I’ve been calming his fears.”

  “Oh!” said Lord Mark again—and again it was just as good. That was for Densher, the latter could see, or think he saw. And then for the others: “My fears would want calming. We must take great care of her. This way?”

  She went with him a few steps, and while Densher, hanging about, gave them frank attention, presently paused again for some further colloquy. What passed between them their observer lost, but she was presently with him again, Lord Mark joining the rest. Densher was by this time quite ready for her. “It’s he who’s your aunt’s man?”

  “Oh immensely.”

  “I mean for you.”

  “That’s what I mean too,” Kate smiled. “There he is. Now you can judge.”

  “Judge of what?”

  “Judge of him.”

  “Why should I judge of him?” Densher asked. “I’ve nothing to do with him.”

  “Then why do you ask about him?”

  “To judge of you—which is different.”

  Kate seemed for a little to look at the difference. “To take the measure, do you mean, of my danger?”

  He hesitated; then he said: “I’m thinking, I dare say, of Miss Theale’s. How does your aunt reconcile his interest in her—?”

  “With his interest in me?”

  “With her own interest in you,” Densher said while she reflected. “If that interest—Mrs. Lowder’s—takes the form of Lord Mark, hasn’t he rather to look out for the forms he takes?”

  Kate seemed interested in the question, but “Oh he takes them easily,” she answered. “The beauty is that she doesn’t trust him. ”

  “That Milly doesn’t?”

  “Yes—Milly either. But I mean Aunt Maud. Not really.”

  Densher gave it his wonder. “Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he cheats?”

  “Yes,” said Kate—“that’s the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I’m still more struck with what they think of their friends. Milly’s own state of mind, however,” she went on, “is lucky. That’s Aunt Maud’s security, though she doesn’t yet fully recognise it—besides being Milly’s own.”

  “You conceive it a real escape then not to care for him?”

  She shook her head in beautiful grave deprecation. “You oughtn’t to make me say too much. But I’m glad I don’t.”

  “Don’t say too much?”

  “Don’t care for Lord Mark.”

  “Oh!” Densher answered with a sound like his lordship’s own. To which he added: “You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn’t?”

  “Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!” It had made her again impatient.

  Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. “You scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes.”

  “Mercy, no—far from it. He’s not, compared with other possibilities, ‘in’ it. Milly, it’s true,” she said, to be exact, “has no natural sense of social values, doesn’t in the least understand our differences or know who’s who or what’s what.”

  “I see. That,” Densher laughed, “is her reason for liking me.”

  “Precisely. She doesn’t resemble me,” said Kate, “who at least know what I lose.”

  Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. “And Aunt Maud—why shouldn’t she know? I mean that your friend there isn’t really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?”

  “Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That’s undeniably something. He’s the best moreover we can get.”

  “Oh, oh!” said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive.

  “It isn’t Lord Mark’s grandeur,” she went on without heeding this; “because perhaps in the line of that alone—as he has no money—more could be done. But she’s not a bit sordid; she only counts with the sordidness of others. Besides, he’s grand enough, with a duke in his family and at the other end of the string. The thing’s his genius.”

  “And do you believe in that?”

  “In Lord Mark’s genius?” Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in time with a very sufficient “Yes!”

  “Political?”

  “Universal. I don’t know at least,” she said, “what else to call it when a man’s able to make himself without effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being in any traceable way a cause.”

  “Ah but if the effect,” said Densher with conscious superficiality, “isn’t agreeable—?”

  “Oh but it is!”

  “Not surely for every one.”

  “If you mean not for you,” Kate returned, “you may have reasons—and men don’t count. Women don’t know if it’s agreeable or not.”

  “Then there you are!”

  “Yes, precisely—that takes, on his part, genius.”

  Densher stood before her as if he wondered what everything she thus promptly, easily and above all amusingly met him with, would have been found, should it have come to an analysis, to “take.” Something suddenly, as if under a last determinant touch, welled up in him and overflowed—the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the future she promised, the interest she supplied. “All women but you are stupid. How can I look at another? You’re different and different—and then you’re different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you—except that you’re so much too good for what she builds for. Even ‘society’ won’t know how good for it you are; it’s too stupid, and you’re beyond it. You’d have to pull it uphill—it’s you yourself who are at the top. The women one meets—what are they but books one has already read? You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.” He almost moaned, he ached, from the depth of his content. “Upon my word I’ve a subscription!”

  She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their essential wealth of life. “It’s you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in others.”

  It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. “See here, you know: don‘t, don’t—”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t fa
il me. It would kill me.”

  She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. “So you think you’ll kill me in time to prevent it?” She smiled, but he saw her the next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely connected that Densher’s were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a distance to go. “You do then see your way?” She put it to him before they joined—as was high time-the others. And she made him understand she meant his way with Milly.

  He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was, undispelled since his return. “There’s something you must definitely tell me. If our friend knows that all the while—?”

  She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though quite to smooth it down. “All the while she and I here were growing intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that, yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me.”

  “Then how could she suppose you weren’t answering?”

  “She doesn’t suppose it.”

  “How then can she imagine you never named her?”

  “She doesn’t. She knows now I did name her. I’ve told her everything. She’s in possession of reasons that will perfectly do.”

  Still he just brooded. “She takes things from you exactly as I take them?”

  “Exactly as you take them.”

  “She’s just such another victim?”

  “Just such another. You’re a pair.”

  “Then if anything happens,” said Densher, “we can console each other?”

  “Ah something may indeed happen,” she returned, “if you’ll only go straight!”

  He watched the others an instant through the window. “What do you mean by going straight?”

  “Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I’ve told you before, and you’ll see. You’ll have me perfectly, always, to refer to.”

  “Oh rather, I hope! But if she’s going away?”

  It pulled Kate up but a moment. “I’ll bring her back. There you are. You won’t be able to say I haven’t made it smooth for you.”

  He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn’t the queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous silken web, and it was amusing. “You spoil me!”

  He wasn’t sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had caught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, her attention being given to Mrs. Stringham, with whom she came through and who was now, none too soon, taking leave of her. They were followed by Lord Mark and by the other men, but two or three things happened before any dispersal of the company began. One of these was that Kate found time to say to him with furtive emphasis: “You must go now!” Another was that she next addressed herself in all frankness to Lord Mark, drew near to him with an almost reproachful “Come and talk to me!”—a challenge resulting after a minute for Densher in a consciousness of their installation together in an out-of-the-way corner, though not the same he himself had just occupied with her. Still another was that Mrs. Stringham, in the random intensity of her farewells, affected him as looking at him with a small grave intimation, something into which he afterwards read the meaning that if he had happened to desire a few words with her after dinner he would have found her ready. This impression was naturally light, but it just left him with the sense of something by his own act overlooked, unappreciated. It gathered perhaps a slightly sharper shade from the mild formality of her “Good-night, sir!” as she passed him; a matter as to which there was now nothing more to be done, thanks to the alertness of the young man he by this time had appraised as even more harmless than himself. This personage had forestalled him in opening the door for her and was evidently—with a view, Densher might have judged, to ulterior designs on Milly—proposing to attend her to her carriage. What further occurred was that Aunt Maud, having released her, immediately had a word for himself. It was an imperative “Wait a minute,” by which she both detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he hadn’t yet given her, as happened, a sign of withdrawal.

  “Return to our little friend. You’ll find her really interesting.”

  “If you mean Miss Theale,” he said, “I shall certainly not forget her. But you must remember that, so far as her ‘interest’ is concerned, I myself discovered, I—as was said at dinner—invented her.”

  “Well, one seemed rather to gather that you hadn’t taken out the patent. Don’t, I only mean, in the press of other things, too much neglect her.”

  Affected, surprised by the coincidence of her appeal with Kate’s, he asked himself quickly if it mightn’t help him with her. He at any rate could but try. “You’re all looking after my manners. That’s exactly, you know, what Miss Croy has been saying to me. She keeps me up—she has had so much to say about them.”

  He found pleasure in being able to give his hostess an account of his passage with Kate that, while quite veracious, might be reassuring to herself. But Aunt Maud, wonderfully and facing him straight, took it as if her confidence were supplied with other props. If she saw his intention in it she yet blinked neither with doubt nor with acceptance; she only said imperturbably: “Yes, she’ll herself do anything for her friend; so that she but preaches what she practises.”

  Densher really quite wondered if Aunt Maud knew how far Kate’s devotion went. He was moreover a little puzzled by this special harmony; in face of which he quickly asked himself if Mrs. Lowder had bethought herself of the American girl as a distraction for him, and if Kate’s mastery of the subject were therefore but an appearance addressed to her aunt. What might really become in all this of the American girl was therefore a question that, on the latter contingency, would lose none of its sharpness. However, questions could wait, and it was easy, so far as he understood, to meet Mrs. Lowder. “It isn’t a bit, all the same, you know, that I resist. I find Miss Theale charming.”

  Well, it was all she wanted. “Then don’t miss a chance.”

  “The only thing is,” he went on, “that she’s—naturally now-leaving town and, as I take it, going abroad.”

  Aunt Maud looked indeed an instant as if she herself had been dealing with this difficulty. “She won’t go,” she smiled in spite of it, “till she has seen you. Moreover, when she does go—” She paused, leaving him uncertain. But the next minute he was still more at sea. “We shall go too.”

  He gave a smile that he himself took for slightly strange. “And what good will that do me?”

  “We shall be near them somewhere, and you’ll come out to us.”

  “Oh!” he said a little awkwardly.

  “I’ll see that you do. I mean I’ll write to you.”

  “Ah thank you, thank you!” Merton Densher laughed. She was indeed putting him on his honour, and his honour winced a little at the use he rather helplessly saw himself suffering her to believe she could make of it. “There are all sorts of things,” he vaguely remarked, “to consider.”

  “No doubt. But there’s above all the great thing.”

  “And pray what’s that?”

  “Why the importance of your not losing the occasion of your life. I’m treating you handsomely, I’m looking after it for you. I can— I can smooth your path. She’s charming, she’s clever and she’s good. And her fortune’s a real fortune.”

  Ah there she was, Aunt Maud! The pieces fell together for him as he felt her thus buying him off, and buying him—it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grave—with Miss Theale’s money. He ventured, derisive, fairly to treat it as extravagant. “I’m much obliged to you for the handsome offer—”

  “Of what doesn’t belong to me?” She wasn’t abashed. “I don’t say it does—but there’s no reason it shouldn’t to you. Mind
you, moreover”—she kept it up—“I’m not one who talks in the air. And you owe me something—if you want to know why.”

  Distinct he felt her pressure; he felt, given her basis, her consistency; he even felt, to a degree that was immediately to receive an odd confirmation, her truth. Her truth, for that matter, was that she believed him bribeable: a belief that for his own mind as well, while they stood there, lighted up the impossible. What then in this light did Kate believe him? But that wasn’t what he asked aloud. “Of course I know I owe you thanks for a deal of kind treatment. Your inviting me for instance to-night—!”

  “Yes, my inviting you to-night’s a part of it. But you don’t know,” she added, “how far I’ve gone for you.”

  He felt himself red and as if his honour were colouring up; but he laughed again as he could. “I see how far you’re going.”

  “I’m the most honest woman in the world, but I’ve nevertheless done for you what was necessary.” And then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him stare: “To start you it was necessary. From me it has the weight.” He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with surprise. “Don’t you understand me? I’ve told the proper lie for you.” Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which, speaking with force and as if he must with a minute’s reflexion see what she meant, she turned away from him. “I depend upon you now to make me right!”

  The minute’s reflexion he was of course more free to take after he had left the house. He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short, under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn’t care for him. She had affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his. He made it out, he made it out, and he could see what she meant by its starting him. She had described Kate as merely compassionate, so that Milly might be compassionate too. “Proper” indeed it was, her lie—the very properest possible and the most deeply, richly diplomatic. So Milly was successfully deceived.