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.

‘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.

When Milly smiled it was a public event – when she didn’t it was a chapter of history.

‘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 couldn’t help that – it came; and the reason it came was that she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair – as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead.

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.’

‘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.’