The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

'Not from Mrs. Stringham—no.' He failed again however to develop this—for which her forbearance from another question gave him occasion. From whom then had he heard? He might at last, confronted with her, really have been gaining time; and as if to show that she respected this impulse she made her enquiry different. 'Should you like to go out to her—to Mrs. Stringham?'

About that at least he was clear. 'Not at all. She's alone, but she's very capable and very courageous. Besides—!' He had been going on, but he dropped.

'Besides,' she said, 'there's Eugenio? Yes, of course one remembers Eugenio.'

She had uttered the words as definitely to show them for not untender; and he showed equally every reason to assent. 'One remembers him indeed, and with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value to her—he's capable of anything. What I was going to say,' he went on, 'is that some of their people from America must quickly arrive.'

On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to satisfy him. 'Mr. Someone-or-other, the person principally in charge of Milly's affairs—her first trustee, I suppose—had just got there at Mrs. Stringham's last writing.'

'Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to me—I mean the last time before this morning. I'm relieved to hear it. So,' he said, 'they'll do.'

'Oh they'll do.' And it came from each still as if it wasn't what each was most thinking of. Kate presently got however a step nearer to that. 'But if you had been wired to by nobody what then this morning had taken you to Sir Luke?'

'Oh something else—which I'll presently tell you. It's what made me instantly need to see you; it's what I've come to speak to you of. But in a minute. I feel too many things,' he went on, 'at seeing you in this place.' He got up as he spoke; she herself remained perfectly still. His movement had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, with his back to it, to look down on her from where he stood, he confined himself to his point. 'Is it anything very bad that has brought you?'

He had now in any case said enough to justify her wish for more; so that, passing this matter by, she pressed her own challenge. 'Do you mean, if I may ask, that she, dying—?' Her face, wondering, pressed it more than her words.

'Certainly you may ask,' he after a moment said. 'What has come to me is what, as I say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind letting you know,' he went on, 'that my decision to do this took for me last night and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am.' And he indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike her as mechanical.

She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really went with her. 'You didn't want to come?'

'It would have been simple, my dear'—and he continued to smile—'if it had been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took, I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult and portentous forms. It came up for me really—well, not at all for my happiness.'

This word apparently puzzled her—she studied him in the light of it. 'You look upset—you've certainly been tormented. You're not well.'

'Oh—well enough!'

But she continued without heeding. 'You hate what you're doing.'

'My dear girl, you simplify'—and he was now serious enough. 'It isn't so simple even as that.'

She had the air of thinking what it then might be. 'I of course can't, with no clue, know what it is.' She remained none the less patient and still. 'If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand.' And then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: 'You haven't decided what to do.'

She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. 'Oh yes—I have. Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for you—!' And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one part of the room to another.

'Horrible place, isn't it?' said Kate.

It brought him straight back to his enquiry. 'Is it for anything awful you've had to come?'

'Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything you may have. Don't mind,' she continued, 'the 'sight of me here,' nor whatever—which is more than I yet know myself—may be 'in it' for me. And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it.'

'My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish—! I suppose I'm in trouble—I suppose that's it.' He said this with so odd a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it—which he as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. 'And yet I oughtn't to be.' Which sounded indeed vaguer still.

She waited a moment. 'Is it, as you say for my own business, anything very awful?'

'Well,' he slowly replied, 'you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if you find my idea—'

He was so slow that she took him up. 'Awful?' A sound of impatience—the form of a laugh—at last escaped her. 'I can't find it anything at all till I know what you're talking about.'

It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a recall of another time—the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he stopped before his companion. 'The communication I speak of can't possibly belong—so far as its date is concerned—to these last days. The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for anything else, that she wrote—!' He dropped, looking at her as if she'd understand.

It was easy to understand. 'On her deathbed?' But Kate took an instant's thought. 'Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in the world like her?'