"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it
back afterwards."
With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour
flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?
You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save your
conscience?"
"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see
how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of
it. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,
remember what I say."
Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he
pointed. "You've fallen in love with her."
"Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does
it matter?"
It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of
relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,
from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it
gave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.
Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone still
different, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"
"It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you
moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you
say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,
to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that
she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--the
truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me
for it."
"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."
"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And
then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just
once more to look at you?"
"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any
longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at
first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of
taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in
another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said
Densher, "affected her."
"Of course it affected her."
Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow
for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to
know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
wished herself to tell me so."
"And she did tell you so?"
"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
"And as _you_ of course did."
"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I
did. I hadn't desired it in the least."
"You only went to oblige her?"
"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."
"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having
stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."
"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,
such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate
added--"to see her die."
"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"
He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the
visit--just like another."
"Like another person?"
"Like another visit."
"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting
his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it
indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he
had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her
room?"
"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in that
glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her
inveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyed
the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you remember what you
originally said to me of her?"
"Ah I've said so many things."
"That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she wouldn't taste of medicine.
Well, she didn't."
"So that it was really almost happy?"
It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feeling
how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone
that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. "I
don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day--perhaps.
For it would be worth it for us."
"Some day--certainly." She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spoke
again abruptly. "She'll recover."
"Well," said Densher, "you'll see."
She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she show anything of her
feeling? I mean," Kate explained, "of her feeling of having been
misled."
She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he would
have rather to glide. "She showed nothing but her beauty and her
strength."
"Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of her strength?"
He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon given
it up. "She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way."
"Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you have that she was ever
alienated."
"I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me."
"But she was ill."
"That hadn't prevented her--as you yourself a moment ago said--during
the previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made no
difference with her."
"She would still have received you?"
"She would still have received me."
"Oh well," said Kate, "if you know--!"
"Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham."
"And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"
"Everything."