Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [185]
—IV—
She couldn’t have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm—or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: “Oh the impossible romance—!” The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but the splash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. “Ah not to go down—never, never to go down!” she strangely sighed to her friend.
“But why shouldn’t you,” he asked, “with that tremendous old staircase in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and bottom, in Veronesear costumes, to watch you do it.”
She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not understanding. “Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that the positive beauty is that one needn’t go down. I don’t move in fact,” she added—“now. I’ve not been out, you know. I stay up. That’s how you happily found me.”
Lord Mark wondered—he was, oh yes, adequately human. “You don’t go about?”
She looked over the place, the story above the apartments in which she had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her adventure. It would be—to this it kept coming back—the adventure of not stirring. “I go about just here.”
“Do you mean,” Lord Mark presently asked, “that you’re really not well?”
They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She would have made the question itself impossible to others—impossible for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the relief—since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of relief—that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn’t be mistaken about her value—for what value did she now have? It throbbed within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn’t her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the