Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [267]
“For Christmas Eve?”
“For Christmas Eve.”
Kate had suddenly a strange smile. “The season of gifts!” After which, as he said nothing, she went on: “And had been written, you mean, while she could write, and kept to be so timed?”
Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn’t reply. “What do you mean by the proof?”
“Why of the beauty with which you’ve been loved. But I won’t,” she said, “break your seal.”
“You positively decline?”
“Positively. Never.” To which she added oddly: “I know without.”
He had another pause. “And what is it you know?”
“That she announces to you she has made you rich.”
His pause this time was longer. “Left me her fortune?”
“Not all of it, no doubt, for it’s immense. But money to a large amount. I don’t care,” Kate went on, “to know how much.” And her strange smile recurred. “I trust her.”
“Did she tell you?” Densher asked.
“Never!” Kate visibly flushed at the thought. “That wouldn’t, on my part, have been playing fair with her. And I did,” she added, “play fair.”
Densher, who had believed her—he couldn’t help it—continued, holding his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had somehow passed. “You played fair with me, Kate; and that’s why—since we talk of proofs—I want to give you one. I’ve wanted to let you see—and in preference even to myself—something I feel as sacred.”
She frowned a little. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can peculiarly recognize—”
“Peculiarly recognize what?” she demanded as he dropped.
“The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice of an act of splendid generosity.”
“And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?”
He made a movement. “It’s all I can do as a symbol of my attitude.”
She looked at him long. “Your attitude, my dear, is that you’re afraid of yourself. You’ve had to take yourself in hand. You’ve had to do yourself violence.”
“So it is then you meet me?”
She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand still stayed itself. “You absolutely desire me to take it?”
“I absolutely desire you to take it.”
“To do what I like with it?”
“Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain—pardon my making the point—between you and me.”
She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. “Trust me.” Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes again rested on those fine characters of Milly’s that they had shortly before discussed. “To hold it,” she brought out, “is to know.”
“Oh I know!” said Merton Densher.
“Well then if we both do—!” She had already turned to the fire, nearer to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing into the flame. He started—but only half—as to undo her action: his arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched, with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. “You’ll have it all,” Kate said, “from New York.”
—VI—
It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters—coming not as she had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need recognized in the first instance by herself, even though also as the prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a note from Densher accompanying a letter, “just to hand,” addressed him by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself, and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale’s copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the girl’s death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher’s act on receipt of the document in question—an act as to which and to the bearings of which his