The Wings of the Dove

She did nothing but protect him⁠—she had done nothing but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth she had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing that compromised him. Milly’s act of renouncement she had described but as a change for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark’s descent, as even without her it might be known, so that she mustn’t appear to conceal it; but she had suppressed explanations and connections, and indeed, for all he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions. Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that, shaking forever, in the unrest that didn’t drop, his crossed leg, he leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came. She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn’t; but this was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly as already dead to him⁠—that being for his spirit the only thinkable way to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited her, and it wasn’t for him to go, as they said in America, behind this; which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with his interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have nothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconscious of her⁠—what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured, for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in London while the pain went on⁠—what would that do but make his days impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself⁠—and by some art about which he was vague⁠—that the sense of waiting had passed. “What in fact,” he restlessly reflected, “have I any further to do with it? Let me assume the thing actually over⁠—as it at any moment may be⁠—and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I’m good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to her.” He consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly about was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well be guessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. The days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was the taste of suspense. That he was waiting was in short at the bottom of everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel that if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was just for that reason.

She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle enough⁠—and he could see her divine it as what he wanted⁠—not to insist on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of anyone better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had been stupendous. On the other hand, however⁠—and this was what wasn’t for Densher pure peace⁠—they insisted enough that stupendous was the word. It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he came to it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, in particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression as he hadn’t spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed the perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as he couldn’t help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen’s wife might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the family-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl must have wanted to live.

“Ah yes indeed⁠—she did, she did: why in pity shouldn’t she, with everything to fill her world? The mere money of her, the darling, if it isn’t too disgusting at such a time to mention that⁠—!”

Aunt Maud mentioned it⁠—and Densher quite understood⁠—but as fairly giving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the “might have been” before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had had her own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them, and since Milly’s spirit had been after all so at one with her about them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, to herself? That came out when he named, as the horrible thing to know, the fact of their young friend’s unapproachable terror of the end, keep it down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in so naming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some object clutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured the case for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had been, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maud by this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had let her know, absolutely for the girl’s glory, how he had been received on that occasion: with a positive effect⁠—since she was indeed so perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her⁠—of