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

immediately speak?” Mrs. Stringham gathered that this was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. “How will it be against him that you know him?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It won’t be so much one’s knowing him as one’s having kept it out of sight.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Stringham, as if for comfort, “you haven’t kept it out of sight. Isn’t it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?”

“It isn’t my acquaintance with him,” Milly smiled, “that she has dissimulated.”

“She has dissimulated only her own? Well then, the responsibility’s hers.”

“Ah but,” said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, “she has a right to do as she likes.”

“Then so, my dear, have you!” smiled Susan Shepherd.

Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as if this were what one loved her for. “We’re not quarrelling about it, Kate and I, yet.”

“I only meant,” Mrs. Stringham explained, “that I don’t see what Mrs. Condrip would gain.”

“By her being able to tell Kate?” Milly thought. “I only meant that I don’t see what I myself should gain.”

“But it will have to come out⁠—that he knows you both⁠—some time.”

Milly scarce assented. “Do you mean when he comes back?”

“He’ll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it, to ‘cut’ either of you for the sake of the other.”

This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful. “I might get at him somehow beforehand,” the girl suggested; “I might give him what they call here the ‘tip’⁠—that he’s not to know me when we meet. Or, better still, I mightn’t be here at all.”

“Do you want to run away from him?”

It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. “I don’t know what I want to run away from!”

It dispelled, on the spot⁠—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it⁠—any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her that their relation was as if afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now for a moment swept over. “I’ll go anywhere else in the world you like.”

But Milly came up through it. “Dear old Susie⁠—how I do work you!”

“Oh, this is nothing yet.”

“No indeed⁠—to what it will be.”

“You’re not⁠—and it’s vain to pretend,” said dear old Susie, who had been taking her in, “as sound and strong as I insist on having you.”

“Insist, insist⁠—the more the better. But the day I look as sound and strong as that, you know,” Milly went on⁠—“on that day I shall be just sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly forever. That’s where one is,” she continued thus agreeably to embroider, “when even one’s most ‘beaux moments’ aren’t such as to qualify, so far as appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since I’ve lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive⁠—which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,” she wound up, “you’ll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I’m gone; and then you’ll only know where I’m not.”

“I’d die for you,” said Susan Shepherd after a moment.

“ ‘Thanks awfully’! Then stay here for me.”

“But we can’t be in London for August, nor for many of all these next weeks.”

“Then we’ll go back.”

Susie blenched. “Back to America?”

“No, abroad⁠—to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying here for me,” Milly pursued, “your staying with me wherever I may be, even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No,” she insisted, “I don’t know where I am, and you never will, and it doesn’t matter⁠—and I dare say it’s quite true,” she broke off, “that everything will have to come out.” Her friend would have felt of her that she joked about it now, had not her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such unnamable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn’t, that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. “I must face the music. It isn’t, at any rate, its ‘coming out,’ ” she added; “it’s that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his injury.”

Her companion wondered. “But how to his?”

“Why, if he pretends to love her⁠—!”

“And does he only ‘pretend’?”

“I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far as to make up to other people.”

The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if with gaiety, for a comfortable end. “Did he make up, the false creature, to you?”

“No⁠—but the question isn’t of that. It’s of what Kate might be made to believe.”

“That, given the fact that he evidently more or less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have been all ready if you had at all led him on?”

Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said, after a moment, as with a conscious excess of the pensive: “No, I don’t think she’d quite wish to suggest that I made up to him; for that I should have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,” she added⁠—and now at last, as with a supreme impatience⁠—“that her being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for jealousy would evidently help her, since she’s afraid of him, to do him in her sister’s mind a useful ill turn.”

Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite for motive as