“And what word?”
“Your consent to my giving up.”
“My consent has no meaning when I can’t prevent you.”
“You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well,” he said.
She seemed to face a threat in it. “You mean you won’t give up if I don’t consent?”
“Yes. I do nothing.”
“That, as I understand, is accepting.”
Densher paused. “I do nothing formal.”
“You won’t, I suppose you mean, touch the money.”
“I won’t touch the money.”
It had a sound—though he had been coming to it—that made for gravity. “Who then in such an event will?”
“Anyone who wants or who can.”
Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the time she spoke he had covered ground. “How can I touch it but through you?”
“You can’t. Any more,” he added, “than I can renounce it except through you.”
“Oh ever so much less! There’s nothing,” she explained, “in my power.”
“I’m in your power,” Merton Densher said.
“In what way?”
“In the way I show—and the way I’ve always shown. When have I shown,” he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, “anything else? You surely must feel—so that you needn’t wish to appear to spare me in it—how you ‘have’ me.”
“It’s very good of you, my dear,” she nervously laughed, “to put me so thoroughly up to it!”
“I put you up to nothing. I didn’t even put you up to the chance that, as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing. Your liberty is therefore in every way complete.”
It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them in one of their short silences—something that was like an appeal from each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow before them, but which of them must meet it first? “Thank you!” Kate said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the air.
There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. “You must intensely feel that it’s the thing for which we worked together.”
She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace; she was already again occupied with a point of her own. “Is it absolutely true—for if it is, you know, it’s tremendously interesting—that you haven’t so much as a curiosity about what she has done for you?”
“Would you like,” he asked, “my formal oath on it?”
“No—but I don’t understand. It seems to me in your place—!”
“Ah,” he couldn’t help breaking in, “what do you know of my place? Pardon me,” he at once added; “my preference is the one I express.”
She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. “But won’t the facts be published?”
“ ‘Published’?”—he winced.
“I mean won’t you see them in the papers?”
“Ah never! I shall know how to escape that.”
It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another insistence. “Your desire is to escape everything?”
“Everything.”
“And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to help you to renounce?”
“My sense is sufficient without being definite. I’m willing to believe that the amount of money’s not small.”
“Ah there you are!” she exclaimed.
“If she was to leave me a remembrance,” he quietly pursued, “it would inevitably not be meagre.”
Kate waited as for how to say it. “It’s worthy of her. It’s what she was herself—if you remember what we once said that was.”
He hesitated—as if there had been many things. But he remembered one of them. “Stupendous?”
“Stupendous.” A faint smile for it—ever so small—had flickered in her face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled—but that made her continue. She continued gently. “I think that what it really is must be that you’re afraid. I mean,” she explained, “that you’re afraid of all the truth. If you’re in love with her without it, what indeed can you be more? And you’re afraid—it’s wonderful!—to be in love with her.”
“I never was in love with her,” said Densher.
She took it, but after a little she met it. “I believe that now—for the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there. But your change came—as it might well—the day you last saw her; she died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you did.” With which Kate slowly rose. “And I do now. She did it for us.” Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. “I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us.”
“They cover us,” Densher said.
“That’s what I give you,” Kate gravely wound up. “That’s what I’ve done for you.”
His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment, his tears. “Do I understand then—?”
“That I do consent?” She gravely shook her head. “No—for I see. You’ll marry me without the money; you won’t marry me with it. If I don’t consent you don’t.”
“You lose me?” He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. “Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny.”
Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare. “Precisely—so that I must choose.”
“You must choose.”
Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath come slow, he waited for her act. “There’s but one thing that can save you from my choice.”
“From your choice of my surrender to you?”
“Yes”—and she gave a nod
