The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2

They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the tone of it than the way she at last said: 'You're afraid of her yourself.'

He gave a smile a trifle glassy. 'For young persons of a great distinction and a very high spirit, we're a caution!'

'Yes,' she took it straight up; 'we're hideously intelligent. But there's fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think,' she added, and for that matter, not without courage, 'our relation's beautiful. It's not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in things.'

It made him break into a laugh which had more freedom than his smile. 'How you must be afraid you'll chuck me!'

'No, no, that would be vulgar. But, of course, I do see my danger,' she admitted, 'of doing something base.'

'Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?'

'I shan't sacrifice you; don't cry out till you're hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That,' she wound up, 'is how I see myself, and how I see you quite as much, acting for them.'

'For 'them'?' and the young man strongly, extravagantly marked his coldness. 'Thank you!'

'Don't you care for them?'

'Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?'

As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his roughness—and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild glow. 'I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we avoid stupidity we may do all. We may keep her.'

He stared. 'Make her pension us?'

'Well, wait at least till we have seen.'

He thought. 'Seen what can be got out of her?'

Kate for a moment said nothing. 'After all I never asked her; never, when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her. She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.'

'You speak,' Densher observed, 'as if she were a vulture.'

'Call it an eagle—with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great flights. If she's a thing of the air, in short—say at once a balloon—I never myself got into her car. I was her choice.'

It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master. 'What she must see in you!'

'Wonders!' And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. 'Everything. There it is.'

Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face it. 'So that what you mean is that I'm to do my part in somehow squaring her?'

'See her, see her,' Kate said with impatience.

'And grovel to her?'

'Ah, do what you like!' And she walked in her impatience away.

IV

His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he overtook her, to make out more than ever, in the poise of her head, the pride of her step—he didn't know what best to call it—a part, at least, of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously winced while he figured his presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though, at the same moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration thus before him, he was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or profitable compromise, to his companion's easy injunction. He would do as she liked—his own liking might come off as it would. He would help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of that day and the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps—he wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous, reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be clever, with all his cleverness—which he now shook hard, as he sometimes shook his poor, dear, shabby, old watch, to start it up again. It wasn't, thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that, and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and surrender—surrender so early, so immediate—should have to ensue. It was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged—it which was enough as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast drawing-room—the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the first as of prodigious extent—he awaited her, at her request, conveyed in a 'reply-paid' telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really enlarged to the scale of the place.

He had the place for a long time—it seemed to him a quarter of an hour—to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while observation and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself what was to be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive, florid furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on, and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no show—literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect, were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. 'When all's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar'—he had once all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it. It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow, strangely, it didn't in the least imply that Aunt Maud was dull or stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament. She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip—the whip, in a word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved the girl—which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in some way to their advantage. He