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

last to get the matter, for her own sense, and with a long sigh, sufficiently straight. “It isn’t a question of belief or of proof, absent or present; it’s inevitably, with her, a question of natural perception, of insurmountable feeling. She irresistibly knows that there’s something between them. But she hasn’t ‘arrived’ at it, as you say, at all; that’s exactly what she hasn’t done, what she so steadily and intensely refuses to do. She stands off and off, so as not to arrive; she keeps out to sea and away from the rocks, and what she most wants of me is to keep at a safe distance with her⁠—as I, for my own skin, only ask not to come nearer.” After which, invariably, she let him have it all. “So far from wanting proof⁠—which she must get, in a manner, by my siding with her⁠—she wants disproof, as against herself, and has appealed to me, so extraordinarily, to side against her. It’s really magnificent, when you come to think of it, the spirit of her appeal. If I’ll but cover them up brazenly enough, the others, so as to show, round and about them, as happy as a bird, she on her side will do what she can. If I’ll keep them quiet, in a word, it will enable her to gain time⁠—time as against any idea of her father’s⁠—and so, somehow, come out. If I’ll take care of Charlotte, in particular, she’ll take care of the Prince; and it’s beautiful and wonderful, really pathetic and exquisite, to see what she feels that time may do for her.”

“Ah, but what does she call, poor little thing, ‘time’?”

“Well, this summer at Fawns, to begin with. She can live as yet, of course, but from hand to mouth; but she has worked it out for herself, I think, that the very danger of Fawns, superficially looked at, may practically amount to a greater protection. There the lovers⁠—if they are lovers!⁠—will have to mind. They’ll feel it for themselves, unless things are too utterly far gone with them.”

“And things are not too utterly far gone with them?”

She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put down her answer as, for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable article, she would have put down her last shilling. “No.”

It made him always grin at her. “Is that a lie?”

“Do you think you’re worth lying to? If it weren’t the truth, for me,” she added, “I wouldn’t have accepted for Fawns. I can, I believe, keep the wretches quiet.”

“But how⁠—at the worst?”

“Oh, ‘the worst’⁠—don’t talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work, from week to week, of itself. You’ll see.”

He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide⁠—! “Yet if it doesn’t work?”

“Ah, that’s talking about the worst!”

Well, it might be; but what were they doing, from morning to night, at this crisis, but talk? “Who’ll keep the others?”

“The others⁠—?”

“Who’ll keep them quiet? If your couple have had a life together, they can’t have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about them. They’ve had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they’ve had to arrange; for if they haven’t met, and haven’t arranged, and haven’t thereby, in some quarter or other, had to give themselves away, why are we piling it up so? Therefore if there’s evidence, up and down London⁠—”

“There must be people in possession of it? Ah, it isn’t all,” she always remembered, “up and down London. Some of it must connect them⁠—I mean,” she musingly added, “it naturally would⁠—with other places; with who knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But whatever there may have been, it will also all have been buried on the spot. Oh, they’ve known how⁠—too beautifully! But nothing, all the same, is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself.”

“Because everyone who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have been so squared?” And then inveterately, before she could say⁠—he enjoyed so much coming to this: “What will have squared Lady Castledean?”

“The consciousness”⁠—she had never lost her promptness⁠—“of having no stones to throw at anyone else’s windows. She has enough to do to guard her own glass. That was what she was doing,” Fanny said, “that last morning at Matcham when all of us went off and she kept the Prince and Charlotte over. She helped them simply that she might herself be helped⁠—if it wasn’t perhaps, rather, with her ridiculous Mr. Blint, that he might be. They put in together, therefore, of course, that day; they got it clear⁠—and quite under her eyes; inasmuch as they didn’t become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening.” On this historic circumstance Mrs. Assingham was always ready afresh to brood; but she was no less ready, after her brooding, devoutly to add “Only we know nothing whatever else⁠—for which all our stars be thanked!”

The Colonel’s gratitude was apt to be less marked. “What did they do for themselves, all the same, from the moment they got that free hand to the moment (long after dinnertime, haven’t you told me?) of their turning up at their respective homes?”

“Well, it’s none of your business!”

“I don’t speak of it as mine, but it’s only too much theirs. People are always traceable, in England, when tracings are required. Something, sooner or later, happens; somebody, sooner or later, breaks the holy calm. Murder will out.”

“Murder will⁠—but this isn’t murder. Quite the contrary perhaps! I verily believe,” she had her moments of adding, “that, for the amusement of the row, you would prefer an explosion.”

This, however, was a remark he seldom noticed; he wound up, for the most part, after a long, contemplative smoke, with a transition from which no exposed futility in it had succeeded in weaning him. “What I can’t for my life make out is your idea of the old