Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [262]
“Horrible place, isn’t it?” said Kate.
It brought him straight back to his inquiry. “Is it for anything awful you’ve had to come?”
“Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything you may have. Don’t mind,” she continued, “the ‘sight of me here,’ nor whatever—which is more than I yet know myself—may be ‘in it’ for me. And kindly consider too that, after all, if you’re in trouble I can a little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it.”
“My dear child, it’s just because of the sense of your wish—! I suppose I’m in trouble—1 suppose that’s it. He said this with so odd a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it—which he as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. “And yet I oughtn’t to be.” Which sounded indeed vaguer still.
She waited a moment. “Is it, as you say for my own business, anything very awful?”
“Well,” he slowly replied, “you’ll tell me if you find it so. I mean if you find my idea—”
He was so slow that she took him up. “Awful?” A sound of impatience—the form of a laugh—at last escaped her. “I can’t find it anything at all till I know what you’re talking about.”
It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a recall of another time—the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he might say and mightn’t. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he stopped before his companion. “The communication I speak of can’t possibly belong—so far as its date is concerned—to these last days. The post-mark, which is legible, does; but it isn’t thinkable, for anything else, that she wrote—!” He dropped, looking at her as if she’d understand.
It was easy to understand. “On her deathbed?” But Kate took an instant’s thought. “Aren’t we agreed that there was never any one in the world like her?”
“Yes.” And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. “There was never any one in the world like her.”
Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her she added a question. “And won’t it further depend a little on what the communication is?”
“A little perhaps—but not much. It’s a communication,” said Densher.
“Do you mean a letter?”
“Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand—in hers unmistakably.”
Kate thought. “Do you know her hand very well?”
“Oh perfectly.”
It was as if his tone for this prompted—with a slight strangeness—her next demand. “Have you had many letters from her?”
“No. Only three notes.” He spoke looking straight at her. “And very, very short ones.”
“Ah,” said Kate, “the number doesn’t matter. Three lines would be enough if you’re sure to remember.”
“I’m sure I remember. Besides,” Densher continued, “I’ve seen her hand in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely for that. And then she once copied me something.”
“Oh,” said Kate almost with a smile, “I don’t ask you for the detail of your reasons. One good one’s enough.” To which however she added as if precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony: “And the writing has its usual look?”
Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yes—it was beautiful. Well,” Kate, to defer to him still, further remarked, “it’s not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything’s possible.”
“Yes, anything’s possible”—he appeared oddly to catch at it. “That’s what I say to myself. It’s what I’ve been believing you,” he a trifle vaguely explained, “still more certain to feel.”
She waited for