The Wings of the Dove

‘Do you know what you’re a proof of, all you hard hollow people together?’ He put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. ‘Of the deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in our vulgarized brutalized life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a day when a man like me – by which I mean a parent like me – would have been for a daughter like you quite a distinct value; what’s called in the business world, I believe, an “asset”.’ He continued sociably to make it out. ‘I’m not talking only of what you might, with the right feeling, do for me, but of what you might – it’s what I call your opportunity – do with me. Unless indeed,’ he the next moment imperturbably threw off, ‘they come a good deal to the same thing. Your duty as well as your chance, if you’re capable of seeing it, is to use me.’

Aunt Maud’s intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all declined. Yet at the winter’s end, nevertheless, she could scarce have said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn’t be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people’s interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them – it seemed really the way to live – the version that met their convenience.

She noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she marvelled at the serenity – it was the poor woman’s only one – of what Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born, her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more you gave yourself the less of you was left. There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common – having anything in fact but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.

They had found themselves regarding each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that in itself after all would have been a small affair for two such handsome persons. It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.

‘But have you offered to live with your sister?’

‘I would in a moment if she’d have me. That’s all my virtue – a narrow little family feeling. I’ve a small stupid piety – I don’t know what to call it.’ Kate bravely stuck to that; she made it out. ‘Sometimes, alone, I’ve to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She went through things – they pulled her down; I know what they were now – I didn’t then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is an insolence of success. That’s what Marian keeps before me; that’s what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position’s a value, a great value, for them both.

[…]

‘It’s a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me ask myself if I’ve any right to personal happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I can be made.’

Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty: ‘I engage myself to you for ever.’ The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated nothing – couldn’t have thought of her face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face had a new light. ‘And I pledge you – I call God to witness! – every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life.’

[…]

They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and to belong tremendously, to each other.

‘You’re blasé, but you’re not enlightened. You’re familiar with everything, but conscious really of nothing. What I mean is that you’ve no imagination.’

Kate did explain, for her listening friend; every one who had anything to give – it was true they were the fewest – made the sharpest possible bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing furthermore was that this might be in cases a happy understanding. The worker in one connexion was the worked in another; it was as broad as it was long – with the wheels of the system, as might be seen, wonderfully oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of it, as Aunt Maud, by every appearance, quite like Lord Mark, and as Lord Mark, it was to be hoped, liked Mrs Lowder, since if he didn’t he was a greater brute than one could believe.

The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilization at its highest.

She took it from him with her face again giving out all it had in answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their essential wealth of life. ‘It’s you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in others.’

[There was] something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm – or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: ‘Oh the impossible romance –!’ The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. ‘Ah not to go down – never, never to go down!’ she strangely sighed to her friend.

With that there came to her a light: wouldn’t her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage of her disease? She mightn’t last, but her money would. For a man in whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be most of the ground for ‘making up’ to her, any prospective failure on her part to be long for this world might easily count as a positive attraction. Such a man, proposing to please, persuade, secure her, appropriate her for such a time, shorter or longer, as nature and the doctors should allow, would make the best of her, ill, damaged, disagreeable though she might be, for the sake of eventual benefits: she being clearly a person of the sort esteemed likely to do the handsome thing by a stricken and sorrowing husband.

‘Only I can’t listen or receive or accept – I can’t agree. I can’t make a bargain. I can’t really. You must believe that from me. It’s all I’ve wanted to say to you.’

‘I’m taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.’

‘What I don’t make out is how, caring for me, you can like it.’

‘I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.’

He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts – a few of them – which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.

‘She never wanted the truth’ – Kate had a high headshake. ‘She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet – since it was all for tenderness – she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man – that she loves you with passion.’

‘The great thing,’ Kate then resumed, ‘is that she’s satisfied. Which,’ she continued, looking across at him, ‘is what I’ve worked for.’

‘Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?’

‘Well, at peace with you.’

‘Oh “peace”!’ he murmured with his eyes on the fire. ‘The peace of having loved.’ He raised his eyes to her. ‘Is that peace?’

‘Of having been loved,’ she went on. ‘That is. Of having,’ she wound up, ‘realized her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had all she wanted.’

‘My dear man, what has happened to you?’

‘Well, that I can bear it no longer. That’s simply what has happened. Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It’s as I am that you must have me.’

He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her also not consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further – he heard her, with her clear voice – try to be intensely kind with him. ‘I don’t see, you know, what has changed.’

‘I used to call her, in my stupidity – for want of anything better – a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us.’

‘They cover us,’ [Merton] Densher said.

‘Her memory’s your love. You want no other.’

He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: ‘I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.’

‘As we were?’

‘As we were.’

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never be again as we were!’