Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [156]
“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