The Wings of the Dove Henry James (android based ebook reader TXT) đ
- Author: Henry James
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âI shall come back.â
âThen sheâs better?â
âI shall come back within the month,â Sir Luke repeated without heeding the question. He had dropped Densherâs hand, but he held him otherwise still. âI bring you a message from Miss Theale,â he said as if they hadnât spoken of her. âIâm commissioned to ask you from her to go and see her.â
Densherâs rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare betrayed. âShe asks me?â
Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little but not leaning out. âShe told me sheâd like it, and I promised that, as I expected to find you here, Iâd let you know.â
Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs. Stringham. And he was also bewildered. âThen she can receiveâ â?â
âShe can receive you.â
âAnd youâre coming backâ â?â
âOh because I must. Sheâs not to move. Sheâs to stay. I come to her.â
âI see, I see,â said Densher, who indeed did seeâ âsaw the sense of his friendâs words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, had then come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the colourless compact form it was now takingâ âthe tone of one man of the world to another, who, after what had happened, would understandâ âwas but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did. âIâm particularly obliged, Iâll go today.â He brought that out, but in his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration. âThen sheâs better?â
Sir Lukeâs face was wonderful. âYes, sheâs better.â And he kept it at the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained observation of Eugenio.
Book X IâThen it has beenâ âwhat do you say? a whole fortnight?â âwithout your making a sign?â
Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her instinctâ âwhich was a system as wellâ âof not admitting the possibility between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else, something no less vivid but quite separate, hadnât stirred him still more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed of taking in, with his thrill, thatâ âeven going by the mere first lookâ âshe had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in the firelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through the London fog, as the flower of her difference; just as her difference itselfâ âpart of which was her striking him as older in a degree for which no mere couple of months could accountâ âwas the fruit of their intimate relation. If she was different it was because they had chosen together that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of their wisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happenedâ âof what in fact, for the spirit of each, was still happeningâ âbeen showing it to him for pride. His having returned and yet kept, for numbered days, so still, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have to tackle; with which consciousness indeed he had made a clean breast of it in finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to his present visit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the finer way; and it would doubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to write to Kate. Venice was three weeks behind himâ âhe had come up slowly; but it was still as if even in London he must conform to her law. That was exactly how he was able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal to her feeling for the situation and explain his stretched delicacy. He had come to tell her everything, so far as occasion would serve them; and if nothing was more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits, his delay to reopen communication had kept pace with this resolve, so the inconsequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements of intensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should
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