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

the “ninth,” in New York, the time she had seen Dr. Finch alone, and to recall what he had then said to her; and when everything had come back it was quite, at first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely mattered. He hadn’t, however, in fact; it was only as if he might perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth⁠—within ten days of their sailing⁠—that she had hurried from Boston under the alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident had happily soon announced itself as slight, and there had been, in the event, but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced again not only possible, but, as representing “change,” highly advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself with the doctor, that was, clearly, no more at his instance than at her own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange of enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of “Europe”; and this assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give. “Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn’t know or mightn’t then have known. I’ve no secret with him about you. What makes you suspect it? I don’t quite make out how you know I did see him alone.”

“No⁠—you never told me,” said Milly. “And I don’t mean,” she went on, “during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better⁠—the last thing before you went home.”

Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. “Who told you I saw him then?”

“He didn’t himself⁠—nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of it now for the first time. That’s exactly why!” Milly declared⁠—with something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and, chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with the question? “But if you’re not, as you now assure me, in his confidence,” she smiled, “it’s no matter.”

“I’m not in his confidence, and he had nothing to confide. But are you feeling unwell?”

The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she named was not at all the one that seemed to fit⁠—witness the long climb Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face, but that her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little mysteriously to smile. “I don’t know⁠—haven’t really the least idea. But it might be well to find out.”

Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy. “Are you in trouble⁠—in pain?”

“Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder⁠—!”

“Yes”⁠—she pressed: “wonder what?”

“Well, if I shall have much of it.”

Mrs. Stringham stared. “Much of what? Not of pain?”

“Of everything. Of everything I have.”

Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. “You ‘have’ everything; so that when you say ‘much’ of it⁠—”

“I only mean,” the girl broke in, “shall I have it for long? That is if I have got it.”

She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. “If you’ve got an ailment?”

“If I’ve got everything,” Milly laughed.

“Ah, that⁠—like almost nobody else.”

“Then for how long?”

Mrs. Stringham’s eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half enclosed her with urgent arms. “Do you want to see someone?” And then as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a shade more conscious: “We’ll go straight to the best near doctor.” This too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence, sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost herself. “Tell me, for God’s sake, if you’re in distress.”

“I don’t think I’ve really everything,” Milly said as if to explain⁠—and as if also to put it pleasantly.

“But what on earth can I do for you?” The girl hesitated, then seemed on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed herself otherwise. “Dear, dear thing⁠—I’m only too happy!”

It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham’s doubt. “Then what’s the matter?”

“That’s the matter⁠—that I can scarcely bear it.”

“But what is it you think you haven’t got?”

Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim show of joy. “The power to resist the bliss of what I have!”

Mrs. Stringham took it in⁠—her sense of being “put off” with it, the possible, probable irony of it⁠—and her tenderness renewed itself in the positive grimness of a long murmur. “Whom will you see?”⁠—for it was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors. “Where will you first go?”

Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came back with it to her plea of some minutes before. “I’ll tell you at supper⁠—goodbye till then.” And she left the room with a lightness that testified for her companion to something that again particularly pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a hooked needle and a ball of silk, the “fine” work with which she was always provided⁠—this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn’t really been in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess of the joy of life, and everything did then fit. She couldn’t stop for the joy, but she could go on