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

“Charlotte’s too inconceivably funny husband? I have no idea.”

“I beg your pardon⁠—you’ve just shown it. You never speak of him but as too inconceivably funny.”

“Well, he is,” she always confessed. “That is he may be, for all I know, too inconceivably great. But that’s not an idea. It represents only my weak necessity of feeling that he’s beyond me⁠—which isn’t an idea either. You see he may be stupid too.”

“Precisely⁠—there you are.”

“Yet on the other hand,” she always went on, “he may be sublime: sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But we shall never know.” With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of soreness for the single exemption she didn’t yearningly welcome. “That I can see.”

“Oh, I say⁠—!” It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of privation.

“I’m not sure, even, that Charlotte will.”

“Oh, my dear, what Charlotte doesn’t know⁠—!”

But she brooded and brooded. “I’m not sure even that the Prince will.” It seemed privation, in short, for them all. “They’ll be mystified, confounded, tormented. But they won’t know⁠—and all their possible putting their heads together won’t make them. That,” said Fanny Assingham, “will be their punishment.” And she ended, ever, when she had come so far, at the same pitch. “It will probably also⁠—if I get off with so little⁠—be mine.”

“And what,” her husband liked to ask, “will be mine?”

“Nothing⁠—you’re not worthy of any. One’s punishment is in what one feels, and what will make ours effective is that we shall feel.” She was splendid with her “ours”; she flared up with this prophecy. “It will be Maggie herself who will mete it out.”

“Maggie⁠—?”

“She’ll know⁠—about her father; everything. Everything,” she repeated. On the vision of which, each time, Mrs. Assingham, as with the presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. “But she’ll never tell us.”

If Maggie had not so firmly made up her mind never to say, either to her good friend or to anyone else, more than she meant about her father, she might have found herself betrayed into some such overflow during the week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned to Fawns for the summer. This was because of the odd element of the unnatural imparted to the so simple fact of their brief separation by the assumptions resident in their course of life hitherto. She was used, herself, certainly, by this time, to dealing with odd elements; but she dropped, instantly, even from such peace as she had patched up, when it was a question of feeling that her unpenetrated parent might be alone with them. She thought of him as alone with them when she thought of him as alone with Charlotte⁠—and this, strangely enough, even while fixing her sense to the full on his wife’s power of preserving, quite of enhancing, every felicitous appearance. Charlotte had done that⁠—under immeasurably fewer difficulties indeed⁠—during the numerous months of their hymeneal absence from England, the period prior to that wonderful reunion of the couples, in the interest of the larger play of all the virtues of each, which was now bearing, for Mrs. Verver’s stepdaughter at least, such remarkable fruit. It was the present so much briefer interval, in a situation, possibly in a relation, so changed⁠—it was the new terms of her problem that would tax Charlotte’s art. The Princess could pull herself up, repeatedly, by remembering that the real “relation” between her father and his wife was a thing that she knew nothing about and that, in strictness, was none of her business; but she none the less failed to keep quiet, as she would have called it, before the projected image of their ostensibly happy isolation. Nothing could have had less of the quality of quietude than a certain queer wish that fitfully flickered up in her, a wish that usurped, perversely, the place of a much more natural one. If Charlotte, while she was about it, could only have been worse!⁠—that idea Maggie fell to invoking instead of the idea that she might desirably have been better. For, exceedingly odd as it was to feel in such ways, she believed she mightn’t have worried so much if she didn’t somehow make her stepmother out, under the beautiful trees and among the dear old gardens, as lavish of fifty kinds of confidence and twenty kinds, at least, of gentleness. Gentleness and confidence were certainly the right thing, as from a charming woman to her husband, but the fine tissue of reassurance woven by this lady’s hands and flung over her companion as a light, muffling veil, formed precisely a wrought transparency through which she felt her father’s eyes continually rest on herself. The reach of his gaze came to her straighter from a distance; it showed him as still more conscious, down there alone, of the suspected, the felt elaboration of the process of their not alarming or hurting him. She had herself now, for weeks and weeks, and all unwinkingly, traced the extension of this pious effort; but her perfect success in giving no sign⁠—she did herself that credit⁠—would have been an achievement quite wasted if Mrs. Verver should make with him those mistakes of proportion, one set of them too abruptly, too incoherently designed to correct another set, that she had made with his daughter. However, if she had been worse, poor woman, who should say that her husband would, to a certainty, have been better?

One groped noiselessly among such questions, and it was actually not even definite for the Princess that her own Amerigo, left alone with her in town, had arrived at the golden mean of non-precautionary gallantry which would tend, by his calculation, to brush private criticism from its last perching-place. The truth was, in this connection, that she had different sorts of terrors, and there were hours when it came to her that these days were a prolonged repetition of that night-drive, of weeks before, from the other house to their