Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [265]
“You see in everything, and you always did,” Densher returned, “something that, while I’m with you at least, I always take from you as the truth itself.”
She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that seemed to show how fine she found it. “Thank you.” It had for him, like everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and, yielding to the impulse to which he hadn’t yielded just before, he laid his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn’t prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid connexion and as she made it sat down again. “I’ve been trying to place exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me—spoke out.”
“Ah there you are!” said Densher who had wheeled round.
“Well, if I’m ‘there,’ as you so gracefully call it, by having refused to meet him as he wanted—as he pressed—I plead guilty to being so. Would you have liked me,” she went on, “to give him an answer that would have kept him from going?”
It made him a little awkwardly think. “Did you know he was going?”
“Never for a moment; but I’m afraid that—even if it doesn’t fit your strange suppositions—1 should have given him just the same answer if I had known. If it’s a matter I haven’t, since your return, thrust upon you, that’s simply because it’s not a matter in the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope that if I’ve satisfied you about it,” she continued, “it’s not too much to ask of you to let it rest.”
“Certainly,” said Densher kindly, “I’ll let it rest.” But the next moment he pursued: “He saw something. He guessed.”
“If you mean,” she presently returned, “that he was unfortunately the one person we hadn’t deceived, I can’t contradict you.”
“No—of course not. But why,” Densher still risked, “was he unfortunately the one person—? He’s not really a bit intelligent.”
“Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in anything so unnatural as—all things considered and when it came to the point—my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his conviction he acted.”
Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark’s conviction as if it were a blot on the face of nature. “Do you mean because you had appeared to him to have encouraged him?”
“Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where were we?”
“ ‘Where’—?”
“You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn’t mattered. What mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember that he has had all along his impression of you. You can’t help it,” she said, “but you’re after all—well, yourself.”
“As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and kept myself there—what,” Densher asked, “did he make of that?”
“Your being in Venice and liking to be—which is never on any one’s part a monstrosity—was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation.”
“In spite of Mrs. Lowder?”
“No,” said Kate, “not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before what you call his second descent, hadn’t convinced him—all the more that my refusal of him didn’t help. But he came back convinced.” And then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: “I mean after he had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him.”
“Milly?” Densher again but vaguely echoed.
“That you were sincere. That it was her you loved.” It came to him from her in such