The Wings of the Dove

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.

‘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.’

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!’