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e Golden Bowl
absolutely, when she came to think, the rst thing Amerigo
had ever asked of her. “She doesn’t count of course his
having asked of her to marry him”— this was Mr. Verver’s
indulgent criticism; but he found Charlotte, equally touched
by the ingenuous Maggie, in easy agreement with him over
the question. If the Prince had asked something of his wife
every day in the year, this would be still no reason why the
poor dear man should not, in a beautiful t of homesickness,
revisit, without reproach, his native country.
What his father-in-law frankly counselled was that the
reasonable, the really too reasonable, pair should, while they
were about it, take three or four weeks of Paris as well—
Paris being always, for Mr. Verver, in any stress of sympathy,
a suggestion that rose of itself to the lips. If they would
only do that, on their way back, or however they preferred
it, Charlotte and he would go over to join them there for
a small look—though even then, assuredly, as he had it at
heart to add, not in the least because they should have found
themselves bored at being left together. e fate of this last
proposal indeed was that it reeled, for the moment, under an
assault of destructive analysis from Maggie, who—having, as
she granted, to choose between being an unnatural daughter
or an unnatural mother, and “electing” for the former—
wanted to know what would become of the Principino if
the house were cleared of everyone but the servants. Her
question had fairly resounded, but it had afterwards, like
many of her questions, dropped still more eectively than it
had risen: the highest moral of the matter being, before the
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couple took their departure, that Mrs. Noble and Dr. Brady
must mount unchallenged guard over the august little crib.
If she hadn’t supremely believed in the majestic value of the
nurse, whose experience was in itself the amplest of pillows,
just as her attention was a spreading canopy from which
precedent and reminiscence dropped as thickly as parted
curtains—if she hadn’t been able to rest in this condence she
would fairly have sent her husband on his journey without
her. In the same manner, if the sweetest—for it was so she
qualied him—of little country doctors hadn’t proved to her
his wisdom by rendering irresistible, especially on rainy days
and in direct proportion to the frequency of his calls, adapted
to all weathers, that she should converse with him for hours
over causes and consequences, over what he had found to
answer with his little ve at home, she would have drawn
scant support from the presence of a mere grandfather and
a mere brilliant friend. ese persons, accordingly, her own
predominance having thus, for the time, given way, could
carry with a certain ease, and above all with mutual aid, their
consciousness of a charge. So far as their oce weighed they
could help each other with it—which was in fact to become,
as Mrs. Noble herself loomed larger for them, not a little of
a relief and a diversion.
Mr. Verver met his young friend, at certain hours, in the
day-nursery, very much as he had regularly met the child’s
fond mother—Charlotte having, as she clearly considered,
given Maggie equal pledges and desiring never to fail of the
last word for the daily letter she had promised to write. She
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wrote with high delity, she let her companion know, and
the eect of it was, remarkably enough, that he himself didn’t
write. e reason of this was partly that Charlotte “told all
about him”—which she also let him know she did—and
partly that he enjoyed feeling, as a consequence, that he was
generally, quite systematically, eased and, as they said, “done”
for. Committed, as it were, to this charming and clever young
woman, who, by becoming for him a domestic resource, had
become for him practically a new person—and committed,
especially, in his own house, which somehow made his sense
of it a deeper thing—he took an interest in seeing how far
the connection could carry him, could perhaps even lead him,
and in thus putting to the test, for pleasant verication, what
Fanny Assingham had said, at the last, about the dierence
such a girl could make. She was really making one now, in
their simplied existence, and a very considerable one, though
there was no one to compare her with, as there had been,
so usefully, for Fanny—no Mrs. Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty
Lutch, to help her to be felt, according to Fanny’s diagnosis,
as real. She was real, decidedly, from other causes, and Mr.
Verver grew in time even a little amused at the amount of
machinery Mrs. Assingham had seemed to see needed for
pointing it. She was directly and immediately real, real on
a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments
more so than during those—at which we have just glanced—
when Mrs. Noble made them both together feel that she,
she alone, in the absence of the queen-mother, was regent
of the realm and governess of the heir. Treated on such
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occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal
court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triers entitled
to the petites entrees but quite external to the State, which
began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in
quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace,
there to digest their gilded insignicance and cultivate, in
regard to the true Executive, such snu-taking ironies as
might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china
lap-dogs.
Every evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played
to him; seated at the piano and requiring no music, she
went through his “favourite things”—and he had many
favourites—with a facility that never failed, or that failed but
just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his tful voice.
She could play anything, she could play everything—always
shockingly, she of course insisted, but always, by his own vague
measure, very much as if she might, slim, sinuous and strong,
and with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis
or endlessly and rhythmically waltzing. His love of music,
unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while, on
his comparatively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always
smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere,
the cigars of his youth, rank with associations—while, I say,
he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was ever
absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct,
the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless
carpet, a surface delightfully soft to the pressure of his
interest. It was a manner of passing the time that rather
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replaced conversation, but the air, at the end, none the less,
before they separated, had a way of seeming full of the echoes
of talk. ey separated, in the hushed house, not quite easily,
yet not quite awkwardly either, with tapers that twinkled in
the large dark spaces, and for the most part so late that the
last solemn servant had been dismissed for the night.
Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end
of October, there had been a full word or two dropped into
the still-stirring sea of other voices—a word or two that
aected our friend even at the moment, and rather oddly,
as louder and rounder than any previous sound; and then
he had lingered, under pretext of an opened window to be
made secure, after taking leave of his companion in the hall
and watching her glimmer away up the staircase. He had
for himself another impulse than to go to bed; picking up a
hat in the hall, slipping his arms into a sleeveless cape and
lighting still another cigar, he turned out upon the terrace
through one of the long drawing-room windows and moved
to and fro there for an hour beneath the sharp autumn stars.
It was where he had walked in the afternoon sun with Fanny
Assingham, and the sense of that other hour, the sense of the
suggestive woman herself, was before him again as, in spite
of all the previous degustation we have hinted at, it had not
yet been. He thought, in a loose, an almost agitated order, of
many things; the power that was in them to agitate having
been part of his conviction that he should not soon sleep.
He truly felt for a while that he should never sleep again till
something had come to him; some light, some idea, some
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mere happy word perhaps, that he had begun to want, but
had been till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly
groping for. “Can you really then come if we start early?”—
that was practically all he had said to the girl as she took
up her bedroom light. And “Why in the world not, when
I’ve nothing else to do, and should, besides, so immensely
like it?”—this had as denitely been, on her side, the limit
of the little scene. ere had in fact been nothing to call a
scene, even of the littlest, at all—though he perhaps didn’t
quite know why something like the menace of one hadn’t
proceeded from her stopping half-way upstairs to turn and
say, as she looked down on him, that she promised to content
herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and a sponge.
ere hovered about him, at all events, while he walked,
appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were
new, and not the least vivid of the former connected itself
with that sense of being treated with consideration which
had become for him, as we have noted, one of the minor yet
so far as there were any such, quite one of the compensatory,
incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him, up to
now, that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo,
as through some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the
secret; so that he found himself wondering if it had come to
Charlotte, who had unmistakably acquired it, through the
young man’s having amiably passed it on. She made use, for
her so quietly grateful host, however this might be, of quite
the same shades of attention and recognition, was mistress
in an equal degree of the regulated, the developed art of
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placing him high in the scale of importance. at was even
for his own thought a clumsy way of expressing the element
of similarity in the agreeable eect they each produced on
him, and it held him for a little only because this coincidence
in their felicity caused him vaguely to connect or associate
them in the matter of tradition, training, tact, or whatever
else one might call it. It might almost have been—if such a
link between them was to be imagined—that Amerigo had,
a little, “coached” or incited their young friend, or perhaps
rather that she had simply, as one of the signs of the general
perfection Fanny Assingham commended in her, proted
by observing, during her short opportunity before the start
of the travellers, the pleasant application by the Prince of
his personal system. He might wonder what exactly it was
that they so resembled each other in treating him like—from
what noble and propagated convention, in cases in which the
exquisite “importance” was to be neither too grossly attributed
nor too grossly denied, they had taken their specic lesson;
but the diculty was here of course that one could really
never know—couldn’t know without having been one’s self
a personage; whether a Pope, a King, a President, a Peer, a
General, or just a beautiful Author.
Before such a question, as before several others when
they recurred, he would come to a pause, leaning his arms
on the old parapet and losing himself in a far excursion. He
had as to so many of the matters in hand a divided view,
and this was exactly what made him reach out, in his unrest,
for some idea, lurking in the vast freshness of the night, at
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the breath of which disparities would submit to fusion, and
so, spreading beneath him, make him feel that he oated.
What he kept nding himself return to, disturbingly enough,
was the reection, deeper than anything else, that in forming
a new and intimate tie he should in a manner abandon,
or at the best signally relegate, his daughter. He should
reduce to denite form the idea that he had lost her—as
was indeed inevitable—by her own marriage; he should
reduce to denite form the idea of his having incurred an
injury, or at the best an inconvenience, that required some
makeweight and deserved some amends. And he should
do this the more, which was the great point, that he should
appear to adopt, in doing it, the sentiment, in fact the very
conviction, entertained, and quite suciently expressed, by
Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had
suered—putting it with extravagance—at her hands. If she
put it with extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for
it came—which she put with extravagance too—from her
persistence, always, in thinking, feeling, talking about him, as
young. He had had glimpses of moments when to hear her
thus, in her absolutely unforced compunction, one would have
supposed the special edge of the wrong she had done him to
consist in his having still before him years and years to groan
under it. She had sacriced a parent, the pearl of parents,
no older than herself: it wouldn’t so much have mattered if
he had been of common parental age. at he wasn’t, that
he was just her extraordinary equal and contemporary, this
was what added to her act the long train of its eect. Light
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broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence of the
fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual
garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which
opened out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath
with wonder. He was afterwards to recall how, just then,
the autumn night seemed to clear to a view in which the
whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace where
he stood, the others, with their steps, below, the gardens, the
park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some
strange midnight sun. It all met him during these instants as
a vast expanse of discovery, a world that looked, so lighted,
extraordinarily new, and in which familiar objects had taken
on a distinctness that, as if it had been a loud, a spoken
pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to he scarce knew
what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character and,
verily, an inordinate size. is hallucination, or whatever he
might have called it, was brief, but it lasted long enough to
leave him gasping. e gasp of admiration had by this time,
however, lost itself in an intensity that quickly followed—the
way the wonder of it, since wonder was in question, truly had
been the strange DELAY of his vision. He had these several
days groped and groped for an object that lay at his feet and
as to which his blindness came from his stupidly looking
beyond. It had sat all the while at his hearth-stone, whence it
now gazed up in his face.
Once he had recognised it there everything became
coherent. e sharp point to which all his light converged
was that the whole call of his future to him, as a father, would
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be in his so managing that Maggie would less and less appear
to herself to have forsaken him. And it not only wouldn’t be
decently humane, decently possible, not to make this relief
easy to her—the idea shone upon him, more than that, as
exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with
what might be otherwise possible; it stood there absolutely
confronted with the material way in which it might be met.
e way in which it might be met was by his putting his
child at peace, and the way to put her at peace was to provide
for his future—that is for hers—by marriage, by a marriage
as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he
fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the
meaning of recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte
could contribute—what he hadn’t seen was what she could
contribute TO. When it had all supremely cleared up and
he had simply settled this service to his daughter well before
him as the proper direction of his young friend’s leisure, the
cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral
lucidity was constituted. It wasn’t only moreover that the
word, with a click, so tted the riddle, but that the riddle, in
such perfection, tted the word. He might have been equally
in want and yet not have had his remedy. Oh, if Charlotte
didn’t accept him, of course the remedy would fail; but, as
everything had fallen together, it was at least there to be tried.
And success would be great—that was his last throb—if the
measure of relief eected for Maggie should at all prove to
have been given by his own actual sense of felicity. He really
didn’t know when in his life he had thought of anything
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