Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [187]
“I’ve exactly,” she said, “been wondering if they won’t. I think I shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it.” They were talking sincerely. “It will be my life—paid for as that. It will become my great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and hunt me up.”
“Ah then you will be alive,” said Lord Mark.
“Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut.”
“Oh,” Lord Mark returned, “we, much as you mistrust us, can do better for you than that.”
“In the sense that you’ll feel it better for me really to have it over?”
He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of some duration, without his glasses—which always altered the expression of his eyes—he re-settled the nippersas on his nose and went back to the view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. “Do you remember something I said to you that day at Matcham—or at least fully meant to?”
“Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It’s another life.”
“Certainly it will be—I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it to represent for you. Matcham, you know,” he continued, “is symbolic. I think I tried to rub that into you a little.”
She met him with the full memory of what he had tried—not an inch, not an ounce of which was lost to her. “What I meant is that it seems a hundred years ago.”
“Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember it,” he pursued, “is that I was quite aware of what might have been said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I should perhaps be able to look after you—will, rather better. Rather better, of course, than certain other persons in particular.”
“Precisely—than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham.”
“Oh Mrs. Stringham’s all right!” Lord Mark promptly amended.
It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the tears it had started at the time. “You could do so much for me, yes. I perfectly understood you.”
“I wanted you see,” he despite this explained, “to fix your confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place.”
“Well, Lord Mark, you did—it’s just exactly now, my confidence, where you put it then. The only difference,” said Milly, “is that I seem now to have no use for it. Besides,” she then went on, “I do seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little.”
He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn’t said them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. “Are you really in any trouble?”
To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a little a light for herself. “Don’t say, don’t try to say, anything that’s impossible. There are much better things you can do.”
He looked straight at it and then straight over it. “It’s too monstrous that one can’t ask you as a friend what one wants so to know.”
“What is it you want to know?” She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a slight hardness. “Do you want to know if I’m badly ill?”
The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark winced and flushed—clearly couldn’t help it; but he kept his attitude together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. “Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a word?”
“You won’t see me suffer—don’t be afraid. I shan’t be a public nuisance. That’s why I should have liked this: it’s so beautiful in itself and yet it’s out of the gangway. You won’t know anything about anything,” she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: “And you don’t! No, not even you.” He faced her through it with the remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly—for him - bewildered;