Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (56 page)

He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence of communion with her, talking her own language. “It’s a very wonderful experience.”

“Well”—and her raised face shone up at him—“that’s all I want you to feel about it. If I weren’t afraid,” she added, “there are things I should like to say to you.”

“And what are you afraid of, please?” he encouragingly asked.

“Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don’t, you know, seem to have the chance. You’re always, you know,
with
her.”

He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always with her. “Ah,” he none the less smiled, “I’m not with her now.”

“No—and I’m so glad, since I get this from it. She’s ever so much better.”

“Better? Then she
has
been worse?”

Mrs. Stringham waited. “She has been marvelous—that’s what she has been. She is marvelous. But she’s really better.”

“Oh then if she’s really better—!” But he checked himself, wanting only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the point of mystification. “We shall miss her the more at dinner.”

Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. “She’s keeping herself. You’ll see. You’ll not really need to miss anything. There’s to be a little party.”

“Ah I do see—by this aggravated grandeur.”

“Well, it is lovely, isn’t it? I want the whole thing. She’s lodged for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it—I mean bringing out all the glory of the place—makes her really happy. It’s a Veronese picture,
²³
as near as can be—with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene more honour. The old house-keeper, the woman in charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb for the evening.” These explanations and sundry others Mrs. Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that the picture closed him in. What part was there for
him,
with his attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which everything else would have it? “They won’t, however, be at dinner, the few people she expects—they come round afterwards from their respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It’s for him she has wanted to do something—to let it begin at once. We shall see more of him, because she likes him; and I’m so glad—she’ll be glad too—that you’re to see him.” The good lady, in connexion with it, was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. “So I greatly hope—!” But her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.

He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than she uttered. “What is it you hope?”

“Well, that you’ll stay on.”

“Do you mean after dinner?” She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that he could scarce tell where it ended or began.

“Oh that, of course. Why we’re to have music—beautiful instruments and songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has arranged it—or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you’re in the picture.”

“Oh—I!” said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.

“You’ll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup. What we hope,” Mrs. Stringham pursued, “is that you’ll be faithful to us—that you’ve not come for a mere foolish few days.”

Densher’s more private and particular shabby realities turned, without comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain embarrassed working-men, engaged in an unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of explaining! He couldn’t tell them how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he floundered. “I’m afraid you won’t understand when I say I’ve very tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The pinch, the pressure in London.”

But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. “Oh the daily talk and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward ? No one knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious deceiving days. Aren’t they just what I myself have given up? I’ve given up all to follow
her.
I wish you could feel as I do. And can’t you,” she asked, “write about Venice?”

He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did; and he smiled for her kindly. “Do you write about Venice?”

“No; but I would—oh wouldn’t I?—if I hadn’t so completely given up. She’s, you know, my princess, and to one’s princess—”

“One makes the whole sacrifice?”

“Precisely. There you are!”

It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places at once. “I quite understand that she’s yours. Only you see she’s not mine.” He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the moral certainty she wouldn’t repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder, who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he liked in the good lady, that she didn’t repeat, and also that she gave him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent and elastic for him, which wouldn’t engage him further than he could see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the midst. Such perceptions made occasions—well, occasions for fairly wondering if it mightn’t be best just to consent, luxuriously, to be the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn’t have liked a man to see him.
²⁴
He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a vision of great London surgeons—if this one was a surgeon—as incisive all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that in. It was a train, however, that brought up the vision of Lord Mark as well. Lord Mark had caught him twice in the fact—the fact of his absurd posture; and that made a second male. But it was comparatively easy not to mind Lord Mark.

His companion had before this taken him up, and in a tone to confirm her discretion, on the matter of Milly’s not being his princess. “Of course she’s not. You must do something first.”

Densher gave it his thought. “Wouldn’t it be rather she who must?”

It had more than he intended the effect of bringing her to a stand. “I see. No doubt, if one takes it so.” Her cheer was for the time in eclipse, and she looked over the place, avoiding his eyes, as in the wonder of what Milly could do. “And yet she has wanted to be kind.”

It made him on the spot feel a brute. “Of course she has. No one could be more charming. She has treated me as if
I
were somebody. Call her my hostess as I’ve never had nor imagined a hostess, and I’m with you altogether. Of course,” he added in the right spirit for her, “I do see that it’s quite court life.”

She promptly showed how this was almost all she wanted of him. “That’s all I mean, if you understand it of such a court as never was: one of the courts of heaven, the court of a reigning seraph, a sort of a vice-queen of an angel. That will do perfectly.”

“Oh well then I grant it. Only court life as a general thing, you know,” he observed, “isn’t supposed to pay.”

“Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book. That’s just the beauty here; it’s why she’s the great and only princess. With her, at her court,” said Mrs. Stringham, “it does pay.” Then as if she had quite settled it for him: “You’ll see for yourself.”

He waited a moment, but said nothing to discourage her. “I think you were right just now. One must do something first.”

“Well, you’ve done something.”

“No—I don’t see that. I can do more.”

Oh well, she seemed to say, if he would have it so! “You can do everything, you know.”

“Everything” was rather too much for him to take up gravely, and he modestly let it alone, speaking the next moment, to avert fatuity, of a different but a related matter. “Why has she sent for Sir Luke Strett if, as you tell me, she’s so much better?”

“She hasn’t sent. He has come of himself,” Mrs. Stringham explained. “He has wanted to come.”

“Isn’t that rather worse then—if it means he mayn’t be easy?”

“He was coming, from the first, for his holiday. She has known that these several weeks.” After which Mrs. Stringham added: “You can make him easy.”

“I
can?” he candidly wondered. It was truly the circle of petticoats. “What have I to do with it for a man like that?”

“How do you know,” said his friend, “what he’s like? He’s not like any one you’ve ever seen. He’s a great beneficent being.”

“Ah then he can do without me. I’ve no call, as an outsider, to meddle.”

“Tell him, all the same,” Mrs. Stringham urged, “what you think.”

“What I think of Miss Theale?” Densher stared. It was, as they said, a large order. But he found the right note. “It’s none of his business.”

It did seem a moment for Mrs. Stringham too the right note. She fixed him at least with an expression still bright, but searching, that showed almost to excess what she saw in it; though what this might be he was not to make out till afterwards. “Say
that
to him then. Anything will do for him as a means of getting at you.”

“And why should he get at me?”

“Give him a chance to. Let him talk to you. Then you’ll see.”

All of which, on Mrs. Stringham’s part, sharpened his sense of immersion in an element rather more strangely than agreeably warm—a sense that was moreover, during the next two or three hours, to be fed to satiety by several other impressions. Milly came down after dinner, half a dozen friends—objects of interest mainly, it appeared, to the ladies of Lancaster Gate—having by that time arrived; and with this call on her attention, the further call of her musicians ushered by Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general, a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made no splash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it; the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly, let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the traces of insensibility qualified by “beating down,” were at last almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn’t yet had occasion—circulating with a clearness intensified—to strike him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all was said, made it for
him;
and he was not to fail of the further amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett’s visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he couldn’t be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt himself too much “in” it, as he might have said: a moment’s reflexion put him more in than anyone. The way Milly neglected him for other cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of a joke, introduced him to English ladies—that was itself a proof; for nothing really of so close a communion had up to this time passed between them as the single bright look and the three gay words (all ostensibly of the last lightness) with which her confessed consciousness brushed by him.