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e Golden Bowl
because they can’t be anything else, from the moment that,
having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be
able to bear herself if she didn’t keep them so. at’s the way
she’s inevitably WITH us,” said Charlotte over her smile.
“We hang, essentially, together.”
Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home
to him. Every way it worked out. “Yes, I see. We hang,
essentially, together.”
His friend had a shrug—a shrug that had a grace. “Cosa
volete?” e eect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman.
“Ah, beyond doubt, it’s a case.”
He stood looking at her. “It’s a case. ere can’t,” he said,
“have been many.”
“Perhaps never, never, never any other. at,” she smiled,
“I confess I should like to think. Only ours.”
“Only ours—most probably. Speriamo.” To which, as
after hushed connections, he presently added: “Poor Fanny!”
But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand,
turned from a glance at the clock. She sailed away to dress,
while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed
her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished.
Something in the sight, however, appeared to have renewed
the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again
upon the air. “Poor, poor Fanny!”
It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent
with the spirit of these words that, the party at Matcham
breaking up and multitudinously dispersing, he should
be able to meet the question of the social side of the
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process of repatriation with due presence of mind. It was
impossible, for reasons, that he should travel to town with
the Assinghams; it was impossible, for the same reasons, that
he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had
for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might
have been said profoundly, thinking out. e result of his
thought was already precious to him, and this put at his
service, he suciently believed, the right tone for disposing
of his elder friend’s suggestion, an assumption in fact equally
full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently
take the same train and occupy the same compartment as
the Colonel and herself. e extension of the idea to Mrs.
Verver had been, precisely, a part of Mrs. Assingham’s
mildness, and nothing could better have characterised her
sense for social shades than her easy perception that the
gentleman from Portland Place and the lady from Eaton
Square might now confess, quite without indiscretion, to
simultaneity of movement. She had made, for the four days,
no direct appeal to the latter personage, but the Prince was
accidental witness of her taking a fresh start at the moment
the company were about to scatter for the last night of their
stay. ere had been, at this climax, the usual preparatory
talk about hours and combinations, in the midst of which
poor Fanny gently approached Mrs. Verver. She said “You
and the Prince, love,”—quite, apparently, without blinking;
she took for granted their public withdrawal together; she
remarked that she and Bob were alike ready, in the interest
of sociability, to take any train that would make them all one
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party. “I feel really as if, all this time, I had seen nothing of
you”—that gave an added grace to the candour of the dear
thing’s approach. But just then it was, on the other hand,
that the young man found himself borrow most eectively
the secret of the right tone for doing as he preferred. His
preference had, during the evening, not failed of occasion to
press him with mute insistences; practically without words,
without any sort of straight telegraphy, it had arrived at a felt
identity with Charlotte’s own. She spoke all for their friend
while she answered their friend’s question, but she none the
less signalled to him as denitely as if she had uttered a
white handkerchief from a window. “It’s awfully sweet of
you, darling—our going together would be charming. But
you mustn’t mind us—you must suit yourselves we’ve settled,
Amerigo and I, to stay over till after luncheon.”
Amerigo, with the chink of this gold in his ear, turned
straight away, so as not to be instantly appealed to; and
for the very emotion of the wonder, furthermore, of what
divination may achieve when winged by a community of
passion. Charlotte had uttered the exact plea that he had been
keeping ready for the same foreseen necessity, and had uttered
it simply as a consequence of their deepening unexpressed
need of each other and without the passing between them
of a word. He hadn’t, God knew, to take it from her—he was
too conscious of what he wanted; but the lesson for him was
in the straight clear tone that Charlotte could thus distil, in
the perfect felicity of her adding no explanation, no touch for
plausibility, that she wasn’t strictly obliged to add, and in the
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truly superior way in which women, so situated, express and
distinguish themselves. She had answered Mrs. Assingham
quite adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap
larger than the smallest that would serve, and she had, above
all, thrown o, for his stretched but covered attention, an
image that ashed like a mirror played at the face of the sun.
e measure of EVERYTHING, to all his sense, at these
moments, was in it—the measure especially of the thought
that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that
began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having,
by perfect parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole
consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with a
truth of an exquisite order, at the glow of which she too had,
so unmistakably then, been warming herself—the truth that
the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn’t possibly,
save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still
other and still greater beauty. It had already told them, with
an hourly voice, that it had a meaning—a meaning that their
associated sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the
plough through the sands and the sight, afar, of the palmcluster, might drink in at last the promised well in the desert.
ere had been beauty, day after day, and there had been, for
the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive taste of it; yet
it was all, none the less, as if their response had remained
below their fortune. How to bring it, by some brave, free
lift, up to the same height was the idea with which, behind
and beneath everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in
the exploration of which, as in that of the sun-chequered
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greenwood of romance, his spirit thus, at the opening of a
vista, met hers. ey were already, from that moment, so
hand-in-hand in the place that he found himself making use,
ve minutes later, of exactly the same tone as Charlotte’s for
telling Mrs. Assingham that he was likewise, in the matter of
the return to London, sorry for what mightn’t be.
is had become, of a sudden, the simplest thing in
the world—the sense of which moreover seemed really to
amount to a portent that he should feel, forevermore, on the
general head, conveniently at his ease with her. He went in
fact a step further than Charlotte—put the latter forward
as creating his necessity. She was staying over luncheon to
oblige their hostess—as a consequence of which he must also
stay to see her decently home. He must deliver her safe and
sound, he felt, in Eaton Square. Regret as he might, too, the
dierence made by this obligation, he frankly didn’t mind,
inasmuch as, over and above the pleasure itself, his scruple
would certainly gratify both Mr. Verver and Maggie. ey
never yet had absolutely and entirely learned, he even found
deliberation to intimate, how little he really neglected the
rst—as it seemed nowadays quite to have become—of his
domestic duties: therefore he still constantly felt how little he
must remit his eort to make them remark it. To which he
added with equal lucidity that they would return in time for
dinner, and if he didn’t, as a last word, subjoin that it would
be “lovely” of Fanny to nd, on her own return, a moment to
go to Eaton Square and report them as struggling bravely on,
this was not because the impulse, down to the very name for
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the amiable act, altogether failed to rise. His inward assurance,
his general plan, had at moments, where she was concerned,
its drops of continuity, and nothing would less have pleased
him than that she should suspect in him, however tempted,
any element of conscious “cheek.” But he was always—that
was really the upshot—cultivating thanklessly the considerate
and the delicate: it was a long lesson, this unlearning, with
people of English race, all the little superstitions that
accompany friendship. Mrs. Assingham herself was the rst
to say that she would unfailingly “report”; she brought it out
in fact, he thought, quite wonderfully—having attained the
summit of the wonderful during the brief interval that had
separated her appeal to Charlotte from this passage with
himself. She had taken the ve minutes, obviously, amid the
rest of the talk and the movement, to retire into her tent
for meditation—which showed, among several things, the
impression Charlotte had made on her. It was from the tent
she emerged, as with arms refurbished; though who indeed
could say if the manner in which she now met him spoke
most, really, of the glitter of battle or of the white waver
of the ag of truce? e parley was short either way; the
gallantry of her oer was all sucient.
“I’ll go to our friends then—I’ll ask for luncheon. I’ll tell
them when to expect you.”
“at will be charming. Say we’re all right.”
“All right—precisely. I can’t say more,” Mrs. Assingham
smiled.
“No doubt.” But he considered, as for the possible
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importance of it. “Neither can you, by what I seem to feel,
say less.”
“Oh, I WON’T say less!” Fanny laughed; with which, the
next moment, she had turned away. But they had it again,
not less bravely, on the morrow, after breakfast, in the thick
of the advancing carriages and the exchange of farewells. “I
think I’ll send home my maid from Euston,” she was then
prepared to amend, “and go to Eaton Square straight. So you
can be easy.”
“Oh, I think we’re easy,” the Prince returned. “Be sure to
say, at any rate, that we’re bearing up.”
“You’re bearing up—good. And Charlotte returns to
dinner?”
“To dinner. We’re not likely, I think, to make another
night away.”
“Well then, I wish you at least a pleasant day,”
“Oh,” he laughed as they separated, “we shall do our best
for it!”—after which, in due course, with the announcement
of their conveyance, the Assinghams rolled o.
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XXII
It was quite, for the Prince, after this, as if the view had
further cleared; so that the half-hour during which he strolled
on the terrace and smoked—the day being lovely—overowed
with the plenitude of its particular quality. Its general
brightness was composed, doubtless, of many elements, but
what shone out of it as if the whole place and time had been
a great picture, from the hand of genius, presented to him
as a prime ornament for his collection and all varnished
and framed to hang up—what marked it especially for the
highest appreciation was his extraordinarily unchallenged,
his absolutely appointed and enhanced possession of it. Poor
Fanny Assingham’s challenge amounted to nothing: one of
the things he thought of while he leaned on the old marble
balustrade—so like others that he knew in still more noblyterraced Italy—was that she was squared, all-conveniently
even to herself, and that, rumbling toward London with this
contentment, she had become an image irrelevant to the
scene. It further passed across him, as his imagination was, for
reasons, during the time, unprecedentedly active,—that he
had, after all, gained more from women than he had ever lost
by them; there appeared so, more and more, on those mystic
books that are kept, in connection with such commerce, even
by men of the loosest business habits, a balance in his favour
that he could pretty well, as a rule, take for granted. What
were they doing at this very moment, wonderful creatures,
but combine and conspire for his advantage?—from Maggie
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herself, most wonderful, in her way, of all, to his hostess of
the present hour, into whose head it had so inevitably come
to keep Charlotte on, for reasons of her own, and who had
asked, in this benevolent spirit, why in the world, if not
obliged, without plausibility, to hurry, her husband’s son-inlaw should not wait over in her company. He would at least
see, Lady Castledean had said, that nothing dreadful should
happen to her, either while still there or during the exposure
of the run to town; and, for that matter, if they exceeded
a little their license it would positively help them to have
done so together. Each of them would, in this way, at home,
have the other comfortably to blame. All of which, besides,
in Lady Castledean as in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in
Charlotte herself, was working; for him without provocation
or pressure, by the mere play of some vague sense on their
part—denite and conscious at the most only in Charlotte—
that he was not, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman, in
ne, below his remarkable fortune.
But there were more things before him than even these;
things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed
his sense of beauty. If the outlook was in every way spacious—
and the towers of three cathedrals, in dierent counties, as
had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim
silver, in the rich sameness of tone—didn’t he somehow the
more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean had kept
over a man of her own, and that this oered a certain sweet
intelligibility as the note of the day? It made everything t;
above all it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he
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lingered and waited, his meditative smile. She had detained
Charlotte because she wished to detain Mr. Blint, and she
couldn’t detain Mr. Blint, disposed though he clearly was
to oblige her, without spreading over the act some ampler
drapery. Castledean had gone up to London; the place was
all her own; she had had a fancy for a quiet morning with
Mr. Blint, a sleek, civil, accomplished young man—distinctly
younger than her ladyship—who played and sang delightfully
(played even “bridge” and sang the English-comic as well as
the French-tragic), and the presence—which really meant
the absence—of a couple of other friends, if they were happily
chosen, would make everything all right. e Prince had the
sense, all good-humouredly, of being happily chosen, and it
was not spoiled for him even by another sense that followed
in its train and with which, during his life in England, he had
more than once had reectively to deal: the state of being
reminded how, after all, as an outsider, a foreigner, and even
as a mere representative husband and son-in-law, he was so
irrelevant to the working of aairs that he could be bent on
occasion to uses comparatively trivial. No other of her guests
would have been thus convenient for their hostess; aairs, of
whatever sorts, had claimed, by early trains, every active, easy,
smoothly-working man, each in his way a lubricated item of
the great social, political, administrative engrenage—claimed
most of all Castledean himself, who was so very oddly, given
the personage and the type, rather a large item. If he, on the
other hand, had an aair, it was not of that order; it was of
the order, verily, that he had been reduced to as a not quite
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