The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

dawn, made by their meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. 'She has turned her face to the wall.'

He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences, they were simply so leaving what he saw. 'She doesn't speak at all? I don't mean not of me.'

'Of nothing—of no one.' And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take it. 'She doesn't want to die. Think of her age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is. Think of all she has. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God—!' the poor lady wound up with a wan inconsequence.

He wondered. 'You thank God—?'

'That she's so quiet.'

He continued to wonder. 'Is she so quiet?'

'She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So you see—all these days. I can't tell you— but it's better so. It would kill me if she were to tell me.'

'To tell you?' He was still at a loss.

'How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it.'

'How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it.' He had a long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought out. Milly's 'grimness' and the great hushed palace were present to him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been waiting there and listening. 'Only, what harm have you done her?'

Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. 'I don't know. I come and talk of her here with you.'

It made him again hesitate. 'Does she utterly hate me?'

'I don't know. How can I? No one ever will.'

'She'll never tell?'

'She'll never tell.'

Once more he thought. 'She must be magnificent.'

'She is magnificent.'

His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he could, all over. 'Would she see me again?'

It made his companion stare. 'Should you like to see her?'

'You mean as you describe her?' He felt her surprise, and it took him some time. 'No.'

'Ah then!' Mrs. Stringham sighed.

'But if she could bear it I'd do anything.'

She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. 'I don't see what you can do.'

'I don't either. But she might.'

Mrs. Stringham continued to think. 'It's too late.'

'Too late for her to see—?'

'Too late.'

The very decision of her despair—it was after all so lucid—kindled in him a heat. 'But the doctor, all the while —?'

'Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable smile. We don't,' said Susan Shepherd, 'talk of her.'

'By her request?'

'Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of provisions.'

'By her request too?'

'Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we liked.'

Densher took it all in. 'But he isn't any comfort to you!'

'None whatever. That, however,' she added, 'isn't his fault. Nothing's any comfort.'

'Certainly,' Densher observed, 'as I but too horribly feel, I'm not.'

'No. But I didn't come for that.'

'You came for me.'

'Well then call it that.' But she looked at him a moment with eyes filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper still. 'I came at bottom of course—'

'You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, as you say, too late for me to do anything?'