"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."
"I won't touch the money."
It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity.
"Who then in such an event _will?_"
"Any one who wants or who can."
Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the
time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_
you?"
"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through
you."
"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."
"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
"In what way?"
"In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"
he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely
must feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--how
you 'have' me."
"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so
thoroughly up to it!"
"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,
as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing.
Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."
It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,
and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a
dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them
in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from
each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate
said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no
further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed
them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the
air.
There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You must
intensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."
She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;
she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is it
absolutely true--for if it is, you know, it's tremendously
interesting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she has
done for you?"
"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"
"No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"
"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?
Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."
She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't the
facts be published?"
"'Published'?"--he winced.
"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"
"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."
It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another
insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"
"Everything."
"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to
help you to renounce?"
"My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believe
that the amount of money's not small."
"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.
"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would
inevitably not be meagre."
Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she
was herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."
He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered one
of them. "Stupendous?"
"Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in her
face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less
uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled--but that
made her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it really
is must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you're
afraid of _all_ the truth. If you're in love with her without it, what
indeed can you be more? And you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be in
love with her."
"I never was in love with her," said Densher.
She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--for
the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there.
But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; she
died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you
_did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_
us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "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," Densher said.
"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've done
for you."
His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment,
his tears. "Do I understand then--?"
"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'll
marry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't
consent _you_ don't."
"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of
her high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every
penny."
Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare.
"Precisely--so that I must choose."
"You must choose."
Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it,
while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath
come slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can save
you from my choice."
"From your choice of my surrender to you?"
"Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"your
surrender of that."
"What is it then?"
"Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."
"Oh--her memory!"
"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't
be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. 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!"