Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [70]
—II—
The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she hadn’t the book with her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at all. Her comrade’s decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of having followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully enough, the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared itself. “Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that after all-?”
Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately made such a sign that Milly’s words gave place to visible relief at her assent. “You don’t care for our stop here—you’d rather go straight on? We’ll start then with the peep of tomorrow’s dawn—or as early as you like; it’s only rather late now to take the road again.” And she smiled to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was what the girl would have wished. “I bullied you into stopping,” she added; “so it serves me right.”
Milly made in general the most of her good friend’s jokes; but she humoured this one a little absently. “Oh yes, you do bully me.” And it was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist’s interest in the detail of the matter—in spite of a declaration from the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere—appeared almost immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised, however, to think till supper of where, with the world all before them, they might go—supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of lighted candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry—such being the mild adventures, the refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went in for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to “lie down”; but at the end of three minutes more she wasn’t lying down, she was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of four thousand miles: “What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when you saw him alone, Doctor Finch said to you?”
It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the “ninth,” in New York, the time she had seen Doctor Finch alone, and to recall the words he had then uttered; and when everything had come back it was quite, at first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely mattered. He hadn’t, however, in fact; it was only as if he might perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth—within ten days of their sailing—that she had hurried from Boston under the alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident had happily soon presented itself as slight, and there had been in the event but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced again not only possible, but, as representing “change,” highly advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself with the Doctor this was clearly no more at his insistence than at her own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange of enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of “Europe”; and due assurance, as the facts came back to