The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) 📖
- Author: Henry James
Book online «The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) 📖». Author Henry James
They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the fewness of their steps. “She has turned her face to the wall.”
“You mean she’s worse?”
The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. “I don’t know how she is—and it’s why I’ve come to you.”
“I’m glad enough you’ve come,” he said, “and it’s quite—you make me feel—as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you.”
She showed him again her blurred eyes—she had caught at his word. “Have you been wretched?”
Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and above all that he had been still. “As still as a mouse—you’ll have seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I’ve ever been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing.”
This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. “It has been best. I’ve wondered for you. But it has been best,” she said again.
“Yet it has done no good?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been afraid you were gone.” Then as he gave a headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: “You won’t go?”
“Is to ‘go,’ ” he asked, “to be still?”
“Oh I mean if you’ll stay for me.”
“I’ll do anything for you. Isn’t it for you alone now I can?”
She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to him—these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. “Well, anything you do for me—is for her too. Only, only—!”
“Only nothing now matters?”
She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he expressed. “Then you know?”
“Is she dying?” he asked for all answer.
Mrs. Stringham waited—her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply was strange. “She hasn’t so much as named you. We haven’t spoken.”
“Not for three days?”
“No more,” she simply went on, “than if it were all over. Not even by the faintest allusion.”
“Oh,” said Densher with more light, “you mean you haven’t spoken about me?”
“About what else? No more than if you were dead.”
“Well,” he answered after a moment, “I am dead.”
“Then I am,” said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her waterproof.
It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but again: “Is she dying?”
It made her, however, as
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