Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [257]
“He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn’t not come to learn.”
“No more,” said Densher simply, “could I. On my way,” he added, “to Lancaster Gate.”
“Sweet of you.” She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and that yet had now a fresh glow. “So you have your message?”
He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he “had had” no less than what he hadn’t, that, with but the smallest hesitation, he strained the point. “Yes—my message.”
“Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings.”
“Yes—folded them.”
It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. “Unless it’s more true,” she accordingly added, “that she has spread them the wider.”
He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. “Rather, yes—spread them the wider.”
“For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater—!”
“Exactly. Greater,” Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared, that did a little warn her off.
“You were certainly,” she went on with more reserve, “entitled to direct news. Ours came late last night: I’m not sure otherwise, I shouldn’t have gone to you. But you’re coming,” she asked, “to me?”
He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of the brougham was still within range. Her rich “me,” reaching him moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest. “Squared,” Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side, understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. “Shall you be alone?” It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with the image of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical. It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this was exactly what he didn’t. The need to overflow had suddenly—since the night before—dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeper reserve.
But she had meanwhile largely responded. “Completely alone. I should otherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!” Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered hand with which she had the next moment consolingly pressed his own. “Dear friend, dear friend!”—she was deeply “with” him, and she wished to be still more so: which was what made her immediately continue. “Or wouldn’t you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine with me tête-à-tête?”
It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her—making the difference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rather mystified him. This however didn’t diminish his need of caution. “Shall you mind if I don’t tell you at once?”
“Not in the least—leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and you needn’t even send me word. I only will mention that to-day, of all days, I shall otherwise sit there alone.”
Now at least he could ask. “Without Miss Croy?”
“Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy,” said Mrs. Lowder, “is spending her Christmas in the bosom of her more immediate family.”
He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what