The Golden Bowl, Henry James [best books to read for young adults .TXT] 📗

Amerigo’s last words. “You’re the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”

She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband’s eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard⁠—though his answer, when it came, was straight enough. “Why, isn’t that just what we have been talking about⁠—that I’ve affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure? He might show his sense of it,” the Prince went on, “by proposing to me an excursion.”

“And you would go with him?” Maggie immediately asked.

He hung fire but an instant. “Per Dio!”

She also had her pause, but she broke it⁠—since gaiety was in the air⁠—with an intense smile. “You can say that safely, because the proposal’s one that, of his own motion, he won’t make.”

She couldn’t have narrated afterwards⁠—and in fact was at a loss to tell herself⁠—by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them. She felt it in the tone with which he repeated, after her, “ ‘Safely’⁠—?”

“Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all, in such a case, too long. He’s a person to think you might easily feel yourself to be. So it won’t,” Maggie said, “come from father. He’s too modest.”

Their eyes continued to meet on it, from corner to corner of the brougham. “Oh your modesty, between you⁠—!” But he still smiled for it. “So that unless I insist⁠—?”

“We shall simply go on as we are.”

“Well, we’re going on beautifully,” he answered⁠—though by no means with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of attempted capture and achieved escape, had not taken place. As Maggie said nothing, none the less, to gainsay his remark, it was open to him to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea. “I wonder if it would do. I mean for me to break in.”

“ ‘To break in’⁠—?”

“Between your father and his wife. But there would be a way,” he said⁠—“we can make Charlotte ask him.” And then as Maggie herself now wondered, echoing it again: “We can suggest to her to suggest to him that he shall let me take him off.”

“Oh!” said Maggie.

“Then if he asks her why I so suddenly break out she’ll be able to tell him the reason.”

They were stopping, and the footman, who had alighted, had rung at the house-door. “That you think it would be so charming?”

“That I think it would be so charming. That we’ve persuaded her will be convincing.”

“I see,” Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out. “I see,” she said again; though she felt a little disconcerted. What she really saw, of a sudden, was that her stepmother might report her as above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her need that her father shouldn’t think her concerned in any degree for anything. She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat; her husband, to let her out, had passed before her, and, a little in advance, he awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high, that preceded their open entrance, on either side of which one of their servants stood. The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose before her, and there was something in Amerigo’s very face, while his eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight, that was like a conscious reminder of it. He had answered her, just before, distinctly, and it appeared to leave her nothing to say. It was almost as if, having planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was almost as if⁠—in the strangest way in the world⁠—he were paying her back, by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for the way she had slipped from him during their drive.

XXVIII

Maggie’s new uneasiness might have had time to drop, inasmuch as she not only was conscious, during several days that followed, of no fresh indication for it to feed on, but was even struck, in quite another way, with an augmentation of the symptoms of that difference she had taken it into her head to work for. She recognised by the end of a week that if she had been in a manner caught up her father had been not less so⁠—with the effect of her husband’s and his wife’s closing in, together, round them, and of their all having suddenly begun, as a party of four, to lead a life gregarious, and from that reason almost hilarious, so far as the easy sound of it went, as never before. It might have been an accident and a mere coincidence⁠—so at least she said to herself at first; but a dozen chances that furthered the whole appearance had risen to the surface, pleasant pretexts, oh certainly pleasant, as pleasant as Amerigo in particular could make them, for associated undertakings, quite for shared adventures, for its always turning out, amusingly, that they wanted to do very much the same thing at the same time and in the same way. Funny all this was, to some extent, in the light of the fact that the father and daughter, for so long, had expressed so few positive desires; yet it would be sufficiently natural that if Amerigo and Charlotte had at last got a little tired of each other’s company they should find their relief not so much in sinking to the rather low level of their companions as in wishing to pull the latter into the train in which they so constantly moved. “We’re in the train,” Maggie mutely reflected after the dinner in Eaton Square with Lady Castledean;