Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [235]
“Not for me.”
“Nothing?”
“Not for me.”
He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a thought. “He will have proposed to Miss Croy. That’s what has happened.”
Her reserve continued, “It’s you who must judge.”
“Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too—only she, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy’s refusal of him will have struck him”—Densher continued to make it out—“as a phenomenon requiring a reason.”
“And you’ve been clear to him as the reason?”
“Not too clear—since I’m sticking here and since that has been a fact to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has believed,” said Densher bravely, “that I may have been a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in Venice.”
Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. “ ‘Up to’ something? Up to what?”
“God knows. To some ‘game,’ as they say. To some deviltry. To some duplicity.”
“Which of course,” Mrs. Stringham observed, “is a monstrous supposition.” Her companion, after a stiff minute—sensibly long for each—fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute, which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets. This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she addressed him—so differently, for confidence—in words she had already used. “If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for him, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been so dreadfully to believe?”
Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: “You’re absolutely certain then that she does believe it?”
“Certain?” She appealed to their whole situation. “Judge!”
He took his time again to judge. “Do you believe it?”
He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him a little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. “What I believe will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly settle it—if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if, to save her life, you consent to a denial.”
“But a denial, when it comes to that—confound the whole thing, don’t you see!—of exactly what?”
It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged. “Of everything.”
Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. “Oh!” he simply moaned into the gloom.25
—IV—
The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, brought also blessedly an abatement of other rigors. The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days, but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and splashed and called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor. He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at present his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was where the event had landed him—where no event in his life had landed him before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts—a few of them—which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not, as to the prohibition