The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  “She’s dying.”

  It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of Milly, wasn’t strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour—his present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. “Has Sir Luke Strett,” he asked, “gone back to her?”

  “I believe he’s there now.”

  “Then,” said Densher, “it’s the end.”

  She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke otherwise after a minute. “You won’t know, unless you’ve perhaps seen him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him.”

  “Oh!” Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.

  “For real news,” Kate herself after an instant added.

  “She hasn’t thought Mrs. Stringham’s real?”

  “It’s perhaps only I who haven’t. It was on Aunt Maud’s trying again three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having gone. He had started I believe some days before.”

  “And won’t then by this time be back?”

  Kate shook her head. “She sent yesterday to know.”

  “He won’t leave her then”—Densher had turned it over—“while she lives. He’ll stay to the end. He’s magnificent.”

  “I think she is,” said Kate.

  It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from him rather oddly was: “Oh you don’t know!”

  “Well, she’s after all my friend.”

  It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant, his old sense of her variety. “I see. You would have been sure of it. You were sure of it.”

  “Of course I was sure of it.”

  And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however, presently broke. “If you don’t think Mrs. Stringham’s news ‘real’ what do you think of Lord Mark’s?”

  She didn’t think anything. “Lord Mark’s?”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “Not since he saw her.”

  “You’ve known then of his seeing her?”

  “Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham.”

  “And have you known,” Densher went on, “the rest?”

  Kate wondered. “What rest?”

  “Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn’t stand—it was what then took place that simply killed her.”

  “Oh!” Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn’t put on. “Mrs. Stringham hasn’t said that.”

  He observed none the less that she didn’t ask what had then taken place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. “The way it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond all power to care again, and that’s why she’s dying.”

  “Oh!” Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him pursue.

  “One can see now that she was living by will—which was very much what you originally told me of her.”

  “I remember. That was it.”

  “Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse was determined by that fellow’s dastardly stroke. He told her, the scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged.”

  Kate gave a quick glare. “But he doesn’t know it!”

  “That doesn’t matter. She did by the time he had left her. Besides,” Densher added, “he does know it. When,” he continued, “did you last see him?”

  But she was lost now in the picture before her. “That was what made her worse?”

  He watched her take it in—it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. “She turned her face to the wall.”

  “Poor Milly!” said Kate.

  Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he continued consistently: “She learned it, you see, too soon—since of course one’s idea had been that she might never even learn it at all. And she had felt sure—through everything we had done—of there not being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she need regard as a warning.”

  She took another moment for thought. “It wasn’t through anything you did—whatever that may have been—that she gained her certainty. It was by the conviction she got from me.”

  “Oh it’s very handsome,” Densher said, “for you to take your share!”

  “Do you suppose,” Kate asked, “that I think of denying it?”

  Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment, which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect absolutely of what they would have called between them her straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. “Of course I don’t suppose anything but that we’re together in our recognitions, our responsibilities—whatever we choose to call them. It isn’t a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such impressions as it was our idea to give.”

  “It wasn’t your idea to give impressions,” said Kate.

  He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained character, as queer. “Don’t go into that!”

  It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea—an idea born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. “Wouldn’t it have been possible then to deny the truth of the information ? I mean of Lord Mark’s.”

  Densher wondered. “Possible for whom?”

  “Why for you.”

  “To tell her he lied?”

  “To tell her he’s mistaken.”

  Densher stared—he was stupefied; the “possible” thus glanced at by Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference in their view of it. “And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We are, my dear child,” he said, “I suppose, still engaged.”

  “Of course we’re still engaged. But to save her life—!”

  He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to admiration. “Well, if you must know—and I want you to be clear about it—I didn’t even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question of it—as possibly saving her—was put to me definitely enough; but to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides,” he added, “it wouldn’t have done any good.”

  “You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?” She had spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib; but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she meanwhile went on. “Did you try?”

  “I hadn’t even a chance.”

  Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. “She wouldn’t see you?”

  “Not after your friend had been with her.”

  She hesitated. “Couldn’t you write?”

  It made him also think, but with a difference. “She had turned her face to the wall.”

  This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the minimum of light. “She refused even to let you speak to her?”

  “My dear girl,” Densher returned, “she was miserably, prohibitively ill.”

  “Well, that was what she had been before.”

  “And it didn’t prevent? No,” Densher admitted, “it didn’t; and I don’t pretend that she’s not magnificent.”

  “She’s prodigious,” said Kate Croy.

  He looked at her a moment. “So are you, my dear. But that’s how it is,” he wound up; “and there we are.”

  His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more deeply, ask
ing him above all two or three specific things. He had fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far, as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared of course for everything. Wasn’t he prepared for her ascertaining if her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on Milly’s part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place. But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such things were concerned his readiness wouldn’t be taxed. Kate’s pressure on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. “So then that after Lord Mark’s interference you never again met?”

  It was what he had been all the while coming to. “No; we met once—so far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed—I didn’t come away.”

  “That,” said Kate, “was no more than decent.”

  “Precisely”—he felt himself wonderful; “and I wanted to be no less. She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice.”

  His companion waited. “Wouldn’t that then have been your chance?”

  “To refute Lord Mark’s story? No, not even if before her there I had wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying.”

  “Well,” Kate in a manner persisted, “why not just because she was dying?” She had however all her discretion. “But of course I know that seeing her you could judge.”

  “Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied you moreover,” Densher said with his eyes on her, “I’d have stuck to it.”

  She took for a moment the intention of his face. “You mean that to convince her you’d have insisted or somehow proved—?”

  “I mean that to convince you I’d have insisted or somehow proved—!”

  Kate looked for her moment at a loss. “To convince ‘me’?”

  “I wouldn’t have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it back afterwards.”

  With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour flamed. “Oh you’d have broken with me to make your denial a truth? You’d have ‘chucked’ me”—she embraced it perfectly—“to save your conscience?”

  “I couldn’t have done anything else,” said Merton Densher. “So you see how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of it. If it ever again appears to you that I might have done so, remember what I say.”

  Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he pointed. “You’ve fallen in love with her.”

  “Well then say so—with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does it matter?”

  It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first, from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it gave them their most extraordinary moment. “Wait till she is dead! Mrs. Stringham,” Kate added, “is to telegraph.” After which, in a tone still different, “For what then,” she asked, “did Milly send for you?”

  “It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I might deny; and what, to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that she’d put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips—so I saw it—the truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me for it.”

  “She never wanted the truth”—Kate had a high headshake. “She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet—since it was all for tenderness—she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man—that she loves you with passion.” 26

  “Oh my ‘strength’!” Densher coldly murmured.

  “Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?” And then—quite without irony—as he waited a moment to say: “Was it just once more to look at you?”

  “She had nothing to ask of me—nothing, that is, but not to stay any longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at first—after he had been with her—that I had seen the propriety of taking myself off. Then since I hadn’t—seeing my propriety as I did in another way—she found, days later, that I was still there. This,” said Densher, “affected her.”

  “Of course it affected her.”

  Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. “If it was somehow for her I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she wished herself to tell me so.”

  “And she did tell you so?”

  “Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired.”

  “And as you of course did.”

  “No, Kate,” he returned with all their mutual consideration; “not as I did. I hadn’t desired it in the least.”

  “You only went to oblige her?”

  “To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you.”

  “Oh for myself certainly I’m glad.”

  “‘Glad’?”—he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.

  “I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having stayed. But that was all?” Kate went on. “That you mustn’t wait?”

  “That was really all—and in perfect kindness.”

  “Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a—well, such an effort. That you mustn’t wait—that was the point,” Kate added—“to see her die.”

  “That was the point, my dear,” Densher said.

  “And it took twenty minutes to make it?”

  He thought a little. “I didn’t time it to a second. I paid her the visit—just like another.”

  “Like another person?”

  “Like another visit.”

  “Oh!” said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting his speech—an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he had braced himself. “Did she receive you—in her condition—in her room?”

  “Not she,” said Merton Densher. “She received me just as usual: in that glorious great salone,bh in the dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner on her sofa.” And his face for the moment conveyed the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. “Do you remember what you originally said to me of her?”

  “Ah I’ve said so many things.”

  “That she wouldn’t smell of drugs, that she wouldn’t taste of medicine. Well, she didn’t.”

  “So that it was really almost happy?”

  It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feeling how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. “I don’t think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps. For it would be worth it for us.”

  “Some day—certainly.” She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spoke again abruptly. “She’ll recover.”

  “Well,” said Densher, “you’ll see.”

  She had the air an instant of trying to. “Did she show anything of her feeling? I mean,” Kate explained, “of her feeling of having been misled.”

  She didn’t press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he would have rather to glide. “She showed nothing but her beauty and her strength.”

  “Then,” his companion asked, “what’s the use of her strength?”

  He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon given it up. “She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way.”

  “Naturally. But I don’t see then what proof you have that s
he was ever alienated.”

  “I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me.”

  “But she was ill.”

  “That hadn’t prevented her—as you yourself a moment ago said—during the previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made no difference with her.”

  “She would still have received you?”

  “She would still have received me.”

  “Oh well,” said Kate, “if you know—!”

  “Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham.”

  “And what does Mrs. Stringham know?”

  “Everything.”

  She looked at him longer. “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “Because you’ve told her?”

  “Because she has seen for herself. I’ve told her nothing. She’s a person who does see.”

  Kate thought. “That’s by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious. You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So you needn’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said Densher.

  Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked five. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud’s huge silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. “Well, it’s all most wonderful!” she exclaimed as she rather too profusely—a sign her friend noticed—ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming water. “You’ll have some?”

  He hesitated. “Hadn’t we better wait—?”

  “For Aunt Maud?” She saw what he meant—the deprecation, by their old law, of betrayals of the intimate note. “Oh you needn’t mind now. We’ve done it!”

  “Humbugged her?”

  “Squared her. You’ve pleased her.”

  Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something else, and his thought in a moment came out. “What a brute then I must be!”

  “A brute—?”

  “To have pleased so many people.”

  “Ah,” said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, “you’ve done it to please me.” But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. “What I don’t understand is—won’t you have any sugar?”