The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw grow in her, from the truth itself. 'So I did say. But, with you here'—and she turned her vision again strangely about her—'with you here, and with everything, I feel we mustn't abandon her.'

'God forbid we should abandon her.'

'Then you won't?' His tone had made her flush again.

'How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons me? What can I do if she won't see me?'

'But you said just now you wouldn't like it.'

'I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. I shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I could help her. But even then,' Densher pursued without faith, 'she would have to want it first herself. And there,' he continued to make out, 'is the devil of it. She won't want it herself. She can't!'

He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he helplessly moved. 'There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and even for that there are difficulties. But there is that.' He stood before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. 'I think you really know yourself what it is.'

He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said—rather!—there were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment; he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider, like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact, for the minute, as if she had 'had' him, and he was the first again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer to her last remark—he only started from that. He said, as he came back to her, 'Let me, you know, see—one must understand,' almost as if he had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't he be the one least of all to do it? 'Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without him?'

'Oh,' said Mrs. Stringham, 'it's he who has kept me going. I wired the first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon.'

'Well then that's something.'

She considered. 'Something—yes. She likes him.'

'Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in October—that night when she was in white, when she had people there and those musicians—she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for both of us—she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved,' Densher said with a quick sad smile, 'that she liked him.'

'He liked you,' Susan Shepherd presently risked.

'Ah I know nothing about that.'

'You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful.'

'Well,' the young man admitted, 'that's what he is—in having judged her. He hasn't,' he went on, 'judged her for nothing. His interest in her—which we must make the most of—can only be supremely beneficent.'

He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly confessed to. 'I'm glad,' she dropped, 'you like him!'

There was something for him in the sound of it. 'Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you like him. Surely, when he was here, we all liked him.'

'Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think, with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it,' she said, 'yourself.'

Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. 'We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us.'

Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. 'That was his professional propriety.'

'Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was something more besides.' And he spoke with sudden intensity. 'I couldn't talk to him about her!'

'Oh!' said Susan Shepherd.

'I can't talk to any one about her.'

'Except to me,' his friend continued.

'Except to you.' The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For honesty too—that is for his own words—he had quickly coloured: he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching him hold it down. And he had to hold it down—the effort of which, precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet. She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his statement, but he really modified it. 'Sir Luke, at all events, had nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and—'

'And real'—she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis—'was more impossible still.' No doubt—he didn't deny it; and she had straightway drawn her conclusion. 'Then that proves what I say— that there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered.'

'I dare say,' Densher granted, 'we were both thinking of her.'