The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2

He at last brought himself round. 'Do you know, dear, you make me sick? I've tried to be clear, and it isn't fair.'

But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. 'Father!'

'I don't quite see what's the matter with you,' he said, 'and if you can't pull yourself together I'll—upon my honour—take you in hand. Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate.'

She was really absent, distant. 'Father.'

It was too much, and he met it sharply. 'Well?'

'Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there's a good you can do me and a help you can render.'

'Isn't it then exactly what I've been trying to make you feel?'

'Yes,' she answered patiently, 'but so in the wrong way. I'm perfectly honest in what I say, and I know what I'm talking about. It isn't that I'll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid or support from you. The case is changed—that's what has happened; my difficulty's a new one. But even now it's not a question of anything I should ask you in a way to 'do.' It's simply a question of your not turning me away—taking yourself out of my life. It's simply a question of your saying: 'Yes then, since you will, we'll stand together. We won't worry in advance about how or where; we'll have a faith and find a way.' That's all—that would be the good you'd do me. I should have you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?'

If he didn't it was not for want of looking at her hard. 'The matter with you is that you're in love, and that your aunt knows and—for reasons, I'm sure, perfect—hates and opposes it. Well she may! It's a matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please.' Though he spoke not in anger—rather in infinite sadness—he fairly turned her out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. 'I'm sorry for her, deluded woman, if she builds on you.'

Kate stood a moment in the draught. 'She's not the person I pity most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she's not the person who's most so. I mean,' she explained, 'if it's a question of what you call building on me.'

He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of it. 'You're deceiving two persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?'

She shook her head with detachment. 'I've no intention of that sort with respect to any one now—to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail me'—she seemed to make it out for herself—'that has the merit at least that it simplifies. I shall go my way—as I see my way.'

'Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a penny?'

'You ask a great deal of satisfaction,' she observed, 'for the little you give.'

It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to be hustled; and, though he glared at her a little, this had long been the practical limit to his general power of objection. 'If you're base enough to incur your aunt's disgust, you're base enough for my argument. What, if you're not thinking of an utterly improper person, do your speeches to me signify? Who is the beggarly sneak?' he demanded as her response failed. Her response, when it came, was cold but distinct. 'He has every disposition to make the best of you. He only wants in fact to be kind to you.'

'Then he must be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to improve him for me,' her father pursued, 'that he's also destitute and impossible? There are asses and asses, even—the right and the wrong—and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong. Your aunt knows them, by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell you, her judgment for them; and you may take it from me once for all that I won't hear of any one of whom she won't.' Which led up to his last word. 'If you should really defy us both——!'

'Well, papa?'

'Well, my sweet child, I think that—reduced to insignificance as you may fondly believe me—I should still not be quite without some way of making you regret it.'

She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might measure this danger. 'If I shouldn't do it, you know, it wouldn't be because I'm afraid of you.'

'Oh, if you don't do it,' he retorted, 'you may be as bold as you like!'

'Then you can do nothing at all for me?'

He showed her, this time unmistakably—it was before her there on the landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the strange smell that seemed to cling to them—how vain her appeal remained. 'I've never pretended to do more than my duty; I've given you the best and the clearest advice.' And then came up the spring that moved him. 'If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be consoled.' What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marian her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them. She should have divided it with him.

II

She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death—gone with an effort the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them, reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been nothing else to do—not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money on, since everything belonged to the 'estate.' How the estate would turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it had proved, in fact, since then a residuum a trifle less scant than, with Marian, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that she wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up—to abandon her own interest, which she, no doubt, would already have done had not the point been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all declined. Yet at the winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them—it seemed really the way to live—the version that met their convenience.

The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her, through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved,