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e Golden Bowl
me,” she went on, “that it’s for YOU to be sure.”
“Ah, but I AM sure,” said Adam Verver. “On matters
of importance I never speak when I’m not. So if you can
yourself FACE such a union you needn’t in the least trouble.”
She had another pause, and she might have been felt as
facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the
breath of the mild, slightly damp southwest, she met his eyes
without evasion. Yet she had at the end of another minute
debated only to the extent of saying: “I won’t pretend I don’t
think it would be good for me to marry. Good for me, I
mean,” she pursued, “because I’m so awfully unattached. I
should like to be a little less adrift. I should like to have a
home. I should like to have an existence. I should like to
have a motive for one thing more than another—a motive
outside of myself. In fact,” she said, so sincerely that it almost
showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humour,
“in fact, you know, I want to BE married. It’s—well, it’s the
condition.”
“e condition—?” He was just vague.
“It’s the state, I mean. I don’t like my own. ‘Miss,’ among
us all, is too dreadful—except for a shopgirl. I don’t want to
be a horrible English old-maid.”
“Oh, you want to be taken care of. Very well then, I’ll do
it.”
“I dare say it’s very much that. Only I don’t see why, for
what I speak of,” she smiled—”for a mere escape from my
state—I need do quite so MUCH.”
“So much as marry me in particular?”
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Her smile was as for true directness. “I might get what I
want for less.”
“You think it so much for you to do?”
“Yes,” she presently said, “I think it’s a great deal.”
en it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect
with him, and he felt he had come on far—then it was that of
a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn’t quite know
where they were. ere rose for him, with this, the fact, to be
sure, of their disparity, deny it as mercifully and perversely
as she would. He might have been her father. “Of course,
yes—that’s my disadvantage: I’m not the natural, I’m so far
from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty.
I’ve the drawback that you’ve seen me always, so inevitably,
in such another light.”
But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction
soft—made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so
complete; and he had already, before she spoke, the dim
vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he
had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely
deep. “You don’t understand me. It’s of all that it is for YOU
to do—it’s of that I’m thinking.”
Oh, with this, for him, the thing was clearer! “en you
needn’t think. I know enough what it is for me to do.”
But she shook her head again. “I doubt if you know. I
doubt if you CAN.”
“And why not, please—when I’ve had you so before me?
at I’m old has at least THAT fact about it to the good—
that I’ve known you long and from far back.”
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“Do you think you’ve ‘known’ me?” asked Charlotte
Stant. He hesitated—for the tone of it, and her look with it
might have made him doubt. Just these things in themselves,
however, with all the rest, with his xed purpose now, his
committed deed, the ne pink glow, projected forward, of
his ships, behind him, denitely blazing and crackling—
this quantity was to push him harder than any word of her
own could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover,
was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink glow. He wasn’t
rabid, but he wasn’t either, as a man of a proper spirit, to be
frightened. “What is that then—if I accept it—but as strong
a reason as I can want for just LEARNING to know you?”
She faced him always—kept it up as for honesty, and yet
at the same time, in her odd way, as for mercy. “How can you
tell whether if you did you would?”
It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt. “I
mean when it’s a question of learning, one learns sometimes
too late.”
“I think it’s a question,” he promptly enough made
answer, “of liking you the more just for your saying these
things. You should make something,” he added, “of my liking
you.”
“I make everything. But are you sure of having exhausted
all other ways?”
is, of a truth, enlarged his gaze. “But what other ways?”
“Why, you’ve more ways of being kind than anyone I ever
knew.”
“Take it then,” he answered, “that I’m simply putting
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them all together for you.” She looked at him, on this, long
again—still as if it shouldn’t be said she hadn’t given him time
or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of
her surface. is at least she was fully to have exposed. It
represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew
in what sense it aected him. On the whole, however, with
admiration. “You’re very, very honourable.”
“It’s just what I want to be. I don’t see,” she added, “why
you’re not right, I don’t see why you’re not happy, as you are.
I can not ask myself, I can not ask YOU,” she went on, “if
you’re really as much at liberty as your universal generosity
leads you to assume. Oughtn’t we,” she asked, “to think a
little of others? Oughtn’t I, at least, in loyalty—at any rate
in delicacy—to think of Maggie?” With which, intensely
gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty,
she explained. “She’s everything to you—she has always
been. Are you so certain that there’s room in your life—?”
“For another daughter?—is that what you mean?” She
had not hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up.
He had not, however, disconcerted her. “For another
young woman—very much of her age, and whose relation
to her has always been so dierent from what our marrying
would make it. For another companion,” said Charlotte
Stant.
“Can’t a man be, all his life then,” he almost ercely asked,
“anything but a father?” But he went on before she could
answer. “You talk about dierences, but they’ve been already
made—as no one knows better than Maggie. She feels the
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one she made herself by her own marriage—made, I mean,
for me. She constantly thinks of it—it allows her no rest. To
put her at peace is therefore,” he explained, “what I’m trying,
with you, to do. I can’t do it alone, but I can do it with your
help. You can make her,” he said, “positively happy about me.”
“About you?” she thoughtfully echoed. “But what can I
make her about herself?”
“Oh, if she’s at ease about me the rest will take care of itself.
e case,” he declared, “is in your hands. You’ll eectually put
out of her mind that I feel she has abandoned me.”
Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her
face, but it was all the more honourable to her, as he had just
called it that she should want to see each of the steps of his
conviction. “If you’ve been driven to the ‘likes’ of me, mayn’t
it show that you’ve felt truly forsaken?”
“Well, I’m willing to suggest that, if I can show at the
same time that I feel consoled.”
“But HAVE you,” she demanded, “really felt so?” He
hesitated.
“Consoled?”
“Forsaken.”
“No—I haven’t. But if it’s her idea—!” If it was her idea,
in short, that was enough. is enunciation of motive, the
next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly
thin, so that he gave it another touch. “at is if it’s my idea.
I happen, you see, to like my idea.”
“Well, it’s beautiful and wonderful. But isn’t it, possibly,”
Charlotte asked, “not quite enough to marry me for?”
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“Why so, my dear child? Isn’t a man’s idea usually what
he does marry for?”
Charlotte, considering, looked as if this might perhaps
be a large question, or at all events something of an extension
of one they were immediately concerned with. “Doesn’t
that a good deal depend on the sort of thing it may be?”
She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he called them,
might dier; with which, however, giving no more time to it,
she sounded another question. “Don’t you appear rather to
put it to me that I may accept your oer for Maggie’s sake?
Somehow”—she turned it over—”I don’t so clearly SEE her
quite so much nding reassurance, or even quite so much
needing it.”
“Do you then make nothing at all of her having been so
ready to leave us?”
Ah, Charlotte on the contrary made much! “She was
ready to leave us because she had to be. From the moment
the Prince wanted it she could only go with him.”
“Perfectly—so that, if you see your way, she will be able
to ‘go with him’ in future as much as she likes.”
Charlotte appeared to examine for a minute, in Maggie’s
interest, this privilege—the result of which was a limited
concession. “You’ve certainly worked it out!”
“Of course I’ve worked it out—that’s exactly what I
HAVE done. She hadn’t for a long time been so happy about
anything as at your being there with me.”
“I was to be with you,” said Charlotte, “for her security.”
“Well,” Adam Verver rang out, “this IS her security.
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You’ve only, if you can’t see it, to ask her.”
“’Ask’ her?”—the girl echoed it in wonder. “Certainly—
in so many words. Telling her you don’t believe me.”
Still she debated. “Do you mean write it to her?”
“Quite so. Immediately. To-morrow.”
“Oh, I don’t think I can write it,” said Charlotte Stant.
“When I write to her”—and she looked amused for so
dierent a shade—”it’s about the Principino’s appetite and
Dr. Brady’s visits.”
“Very good then—put it to her face to face. We’ll go
straight to Paris to meet them.”
Charlotte, at this, rose with a movement that was like a
small cry; but her unspoken sense lost itself while she stood
with her eyes on him—he keeping his seat as for the help
it gave him, a little, to make his appeal go up. Presently,
however, a new sense had come to her, and she covered him,
kindly, with the expression of it. “I do think, you know, you
must rather ‘like’ me.”
“ank you,” said Adam Verver. “You WILL put it to her
yourself then?”
She had another hesitation. “We go over, you say, to meet
them?”
“As soon as we can get back to Fawns. And wait there for
them, if necessary, till they come.”
“Wait—a—at Fawns?”
“Wait in Paris. at will be charming in itself.”
“You take me to pleasant places.” She turned it over. “You
propose to me beautiful things.”
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“It rests but with you to make them beautiful and
pleasant. You’ve made Brighton—!”
“Ah!”—she almost tenderly protested. “With what I’m
doing now?”
“You’re promising me now what I want. Aren’t you
promising me,” he pressed, getting up, “aren’t you promising
me to abide by what Maggie says?”
Oh, she wanted to be sure she was. “Do you mean she’ll
ASK it of me?”
It gave him indeed, as by communication, a sense of
the propriety of being himself certain. Yet what was he but
certain? “She’ll speak to you. She’ll speak to you FOR me.”
is at last then seemed to satisfy her. “Very good. May
we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?” He showed,
with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders
expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough,
none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience
once more exemplary. “Of course I give you time. Especially,”
he smiled, “as it’s time that I shall be spending with you. Our
keeping on together will help you perhaps to see. To see, I
mean, how I need you.”
“I already see,” said Charlotte, “how you’ve persuaded
yourself you do.” But she had to repeat it. “at isn’t,
unfortunately, all.”
“Well then, how you’ll make Maggie right.”
“’Right’?” She echoed it as if the word went far. And “O—
oh!” she still critically murmured as they moved together
away.
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XIII
He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week
later, but on the spot there this period of patience suered no
great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from
Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they
spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey;
and Maggie’s reply to his news was a telegram from Rome,
delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he
brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment
in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he
should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide
meal. His letter, at Fawns—a letter of several pages and
intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to
inform—had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a little to
his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as even
his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed
him to assume: this doubtless, however, only for reasons
naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness,
which contributed to his message something of their own
quality of impatience. e main result of their talk, for the
time, had been a dierence in his relation to his young friend,
as well as a dierence, equally sensible, in her relation to
himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his
undertaking to “speak” to her so far even as to tell her of the
communication despatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy
more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned
between them—it being rudimentary, in their actual order,
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that she mustn’t be further worried until Maggie should have
put her at her ease.
It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris—which,
suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch—
made, between him and his companion, the tension, made
the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps
to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions.
ese elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing
and involving, under one head, many abstentions and
precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders—things, verily,
he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating
for them at every step an acceptance of their reality. He was
hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person should
intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had
already occurred, been carried on to something it was out
of the power of other persons to make either less or greater.
Common conventions—that was what was odd—had to be
on this basis more thought of; those common conventions
that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had
so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. e explanation
would have been, he supposed—or would have gured it
with less of unrest—that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices
and warnings, so that if you went at all “far” there it laid
bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered
in owers, for your going further still. ere were strange
appearances in the air, and before you knew it you might be
unmistakably matching them. Since he wished therefore to
match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with
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