Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [152]
Kate on her side did this justice. “No—that’s the beauty of her.”
“The beauty-?”
“Yes, she’s so wonderful. She won’t show for that, any more than your watch, when it’s about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won’t die, she won’t live, by inches. She won’t smell, as it were, of drugs. She won’t taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know.”
“Then what,” he demanded, frankly mystified now, “are we talking about? In what extraordinary state is she?”
Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. “I believe that if she’s ill at all she’s very ill. I believe that if she’s bad she’s not a little bad. I can’t tell you why, but that’s how I see her. She’ll really live or she’ll really not. She’ll have it all or she’ll miss it all. Now I don’t think she’ll have it all.”
Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than ++cid. “You ‘think’ and you ‘don’t think,’ and yet you remain all the while without an inkling of her complaint?”
“No, not without an inkling; but it’s a matter in which I don’t want knowledge. She moreover herself doesn’t want one to want it: she has, as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a kind of—I don’t know what to call it—intensity of pride. And then and then—” But with this she faltered.
“And then what?”
“I’m a brute about illness. I hate it. It’s well for you, my dear,” Kate continued, “that you’re as sound as a bell.”
“Thank you!” Densher laughed. “It’s rather good then for yourself too that you’re as strong as the sea.”
She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at least without a flaw—each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good they, alas, didn’t have, but failed on the other hand of this. “How we’re talking about her!” Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were the facts. “From illness I keep away.”
“But you don’t—since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the midst of it.”
“Ah I’m only watching—!”
“And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!”
“Oh,” said Kate, “I’m breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of what I shall expect of you. One can’t begin too soon.”
She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning brought him back to attention. “You haven’t even an idea if it’s a case for surgery?”
“I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come to that. Of course she’s in the highest hands.”
“The doctors are after her then?”
“She’s after them—it’s the same thing. I think I’m free to say it now—she sees Sir Luke Strett.”
It made him quickly wince. “Ah fifty thousand knives!” Then after an instant: “One seems to guess.”
Yes, but she waved it away. “Don’t guess. Only do as I tell you.”
For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it before him. “What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl.”
“Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn’t affect you as sick. You understand moreover just how much—and just how little.”
“It’s amazing,” he presently answered, “what you think I understand.”
“Well, if you’ve brought me to it, my dear,” she returned, “that has been your way of breaking me in. Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty of others will.”
Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility. “Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free.”
“But so are you, my dear!”
She