The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (bill gates books to read TXT) 📕

“Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one’s all⁠—! Should you positively like to live here?”

“I think I should like,” said poor Milly after an instant, “to die here.”

Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted⁠—when a person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of darkness. “Oh it’s not good enough for that! That requires picking. But can’t you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and you might do much worse⁠—I mean for your friends⁠—than show yourself here a while, three or four months, every year. But it’s not my notion for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you.”

“What sort of a use for me is it,” she smilingly enquired, “to kill me?”

“Do you mean we should kill you in England?”

“Well, I’ve seen you and I’m afraid. You’re too much for me⁠—too many. England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my form.”

“Oho, oho!”⁠—he laughed again as if to humour her. “Can’t you then buy it⁠—for a price? Depend upon it they’ll treat for money. That is for money enough.”

“I’ve exactly,” she said, “been wondering if they won’t. I think I shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it.” They were talking sincerely. “It will be my life⁠—paid for as that. It will become my great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and hunt me up.”

“Ah then you will be alive,” said Lord Mark.

“Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut.”

“Oh,” Lord Mark returned, “we, much as you mistrust us, can do better for you than that.”

“In the sense that you’ll feel it better for me really to have it over?”

He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of some duration, without his glasses⁠—which always altered the expression of his eyes⁠—he resettled the nippers on his nose and went back to the view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. “Do you remember something I said to you that day at Matcham⁠—or at least fully meant to?”

“Oh yes, I remember everything at Matcham. It’s another life.”

“Certainly it will be⁠—I mean the kind of thing: what I then wanted it to represent for you. Matcham, you know,” he continued, “is symbolic. I think I tried to rub that into you a little.”

She met him with the full memory of what he had tried⁠—not an inch, not an ounce of which was lost to her. “What I meant is that it seems a hundred years ago.”

“Oh for me it comes in better. Perhaps a part of what makes me remember it,” he pursued, “is that I was quite aware of what might have been said about what I was doing. I wanted you to take it from me that I should perhaps be able to look after you⁠—well, rather better. Rather better, of course, than certain other persons in particular.”

“Precisely⁠—than Mrs. Lowder, than Miss Croy, even than Mrs. Stringham.”

“Oh Mrs. Stringham’s all right!” Lord Mark promptly amended.

It amused her even with what she had else to think of; and she could show him at all events how little, in spite of the hundred years, she had lost what he alluded to. The way he was with her at this moment made in fact the other moment so vivid as almost to start again the tears it had started at the time. “You could do so much for me, yes. I perfectly understood you.”

“I wanted, you see,” he despite this explained, “to fix your confidence. I mean, you know, in the right place.”

“Well, Lord Mark, you did⁠—it’s just exactly now, my confidence, where you put it then. The only difference,” said Milly, “is that I seem now to have no use for it. Besides,” she then went on, “I do seem to feel you disposed to act in a way that would undermine it a little.”

He took no more notice of these last words than if she hadn’t said them, only watching her at present as with a gradual new light. “Are you really in any trouble?”

To this, on her side, she gave no heed. Making out his light was a little a light for herself. “Don’t say, don’t try to say, anything that’s impossible. There are much better things you can do.”

He looked straight at it and then straight over it. “It’s too monstrous that one can’t ask you as a friend what one wants so to know.”

“What is it you want to know?” She spoke, as by a sudden turn, with a slight hardness. “Do you want to know if I’m badly ill?”

The sound of it in truth, though from no raising of her voice, invested the idea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark winced and flushed⁠—clearly couldn’t help it; but he kept his attitude together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. “Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a word?”

“You won’t see me suffer⁠—don’t be afraid. I shan’t be a public nuisance. That’s why I should have liked this: it’s so beautiful in itself and yet it’s out of the gangway. You won’t know anything about anything,” she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: “And you don’t! No, not even you.” He faced her through it with the remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly⁠—for him⁠—bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. “I’m very badly ill.”

“And you don’t do anything?”

“I do everything. Everything’s this,” she smiled. “I’m doing it now. One can’t do more than live.”

“Ah than live in the right way, no. But is