Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [219]
“I’ve never doubted it.”
“I mean,” she went on, “that I want so to live—!”
“Well?” he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
“Well, that I know I can.”
“Whatever you do?” He shrank from solemnity about it.
“Whatever I do. If I want to.”
“If you want to do it?”
“If I want to live. I can,” Milly repeated.
He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the pity of it. “Ah then that I believe.”
“I will, I will,” she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.
He felt himself smiling through a mist. “You simply must!”
It brought her straight again to the fact. “Well then, if you say it, why mayn’t we pay you our visit?”
“Will it help you to live?”
“Every little helps,” she laughed, “and it’s very little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I shan’t want to miss it—!”
“Yes?”—she had dropped again.
“Well, on the day you give us a chance.”
It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only when he had left her. “You can come,” he said, “when you like.”
What had taken place for him, however—the drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own reality—apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for something else. “I see how you feel—that I’m an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have any such upset, you’ll go. So it’s no matter.”
“No matter? Oh!”—he quite protested now.
“If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go.”
It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. “I won’t go.”
“Then I won’t go!” she brightly declared.
“You mean you won’t come to me?”
“No—never now. It’s over. But it’s all right. I mean, apart from that,” she went on, “that I won’t do anything I oughtn’t or that I’m not forced to.”
“Oh who can ever force you?” he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her encouragement. “You’re the least coercible of creatures.”
“Because, you think, I’m so free?”
“The freest person probably now in the world. You’ve got everything.”
“Well,” she smiled, “call it so. I don’t complain.”
On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. “No I know you don’t complain.”
As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His telling her she had “everything” was extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so tenderly that she didn’t complain was terrible kind gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the way she just looked him again, and it was of no attenuation that she took him up more gently than ever. “It isn’t a merit-when one sees one’s way.”
“To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not.”
“I mean to keeping what one has.”
“Oh that’s success. If what one has is good,” Densher said at random, “it’s enough to try for.”
“Well, it’s my limit. I’m not trying for more.” To which then she added with a change: “And now about your book.”
“My book—?” He had got in a moment so far from it.
“The one you’re now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling.”
He cast about, but he made up his mind. “I’m not doing a book.”
“Not what you said?” she asked in a wonder. “You’re not writing?”
He already felt relieved. “I don’t know, upon my honour, what I’m doing.”
It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she didn’t know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, might complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might