Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [264]
—V—
Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat down, the first movement she had made. “Are you trying to fix it on me that I must have told him?”
She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay—which he showed he immediately took in. “My dear child, I’m not trying to ‘fix’ anything; but I’m extremely tormented and I seem not to understand. What has the brute to do with us anyway?”
“What has he indeed?” Kate asked.
She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason. There was in it—and for his reason really—one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going to kiss her. He hadn’t been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was none the less the quieter. “What’s he doing, from ten o’clock on Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?”
Kate looked surprised. “Didn’t she tell you he’s staying there?”
“At Lancaster Gate?” Densher’s surprise met it. “ ‘Staying’?—since when?”
“Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away.” And then she explained—confessing it in fact anomalous. “It’s an accident—like Aunt Maud’s having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn’t after all so monstrous. We stayed—and, with my having come here, she’s sorry now—because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people.”
“You stayed for thinking of—Venice?”
“Of course we did. For what else? And even a little,” Kate wonderfully added—“it’s true at least of Aunt Maud—for thinking of you.”
He appreciated. “I see. Nice of you every way. But whom,” he inquired, “has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?”
“His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to let—such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of money, he hasn’t had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at.”
Densher’s attention was entire. “In spite of everything? In spite of what?”
“Well, I don’t know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to do that sort of thing.”
“To try to get money?”
“To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he has had for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days’ notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud, who’s deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: ‘Come then to Lancaster Gate—to sleep at least—till, like all the world, you go to the country.’ He was to have gone to the country—I think to Matcham—yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was.”
Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement, beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. “Told you, you mean, so that you needn’t leave the house?”
“Yes—so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was part of my reason.”
“And was it part of your reason?”
“A little if you like. Yet there’s plenty here—as I knew there would be—without it. So that,” she said candidly, “doesn’t matter. I’m glad I am here: even if for all the good I do—!” She implied however that that didn’t matter either. “He didn’t, as you tell me, get off then to Matcham; though he may possibly if it is possible, be going this afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable—and it’s really, I’m bound to say, quite amiable of him—is that he has declined to leave Aunt Maud, as I’ve been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone. If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it’s a procéde bj that won’t please her less. It’s small wonder therefore that she insists,