What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much
less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of
things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible
the years of light. A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard
at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of
another, and the preliminary would have been weak and wanting if the
good faith of it had been less. His comparative blindness had made
the good faith, which in its turn had made the soil propitious for the
flower of the supreme idea. He had had to LIKE forging and sweating, he
had had to like polishing and piling up his arms. They were things at
least he had had to believe he liked, just as he had believed he liked
transcendent calculation and imaginative gambling all for themselves,
the creation of “interests” that were the extinction of other interests,
the livid vulgarity, even, of getting in, or getting out, first. That
had of course been so far from really the case—with the supreme idea,
all the while, growing and striking deep, under everything, in the warm,
rich earth. He had stood unknowing, he had walked and worked where it
was buried, and the fact itself, the fact of his fortune, would have
been a barren fact enough if the first sharp tender shoot had never
struggled into day. There on one side was the ugliness his middle time
had been spared; there on the other, from all the portents, was the
beauty with which his age might still be crowned. He was happier,
doubtless, than he deserved; but THAT, when one was happy at all, it
was easy to be. He had wrought by devious ways, but he had reached the
place, and what would ever have been straighter, in any man’s life,
than his way, now, of occupying it? It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the
sanctions of civilization; it was positively civilization condensed,
concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock—a
house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty
millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the
land. In this house, designed as a gift, primarily, to the people of his
adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the
bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of
museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple
was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his
spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said,
for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final
rites.
These would be the “opening exercises,” the august dedication of the
place. His imagination, he was well aware, got over the ground faster
than his judgment; there was much still to do for the production of his
first effect. Foundations were laid and walls were rising, the structure
of the shell all determined; but raw haste was forbidden him in a
connection so intimate with the highest effects of patience and piety;
he should belie himself by completing without a touch at least of the
majesty of delay a monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the
exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price. He was far
from knowing as yet where he would end, but he was admirably definite
as to where he wouldn’t begin. He wouldn’t begin with a small show—he
would begin with a great, and he could scarce have indicated, even had
he wished to try, the line of division he had drawn. He had taken no
trouble to indicate it to his fellow-citizens, purveyors and consumers,
in his own and the circumjacent commonwealths, of comic matter in large
lettering, diurnally “set up,” printed, published, folded and delivered,
at the expense of his presumptuous emulation of the snail. The snail
had become for him, under this ironic suggestion, the loveliest beast
in nature, and his return to England, of which we are present witnesses,
had not been unconnected with the appreciation so determined. It marked
what he liked to mark, that he needed, on the matter in question,
instruction from no one on earth. A couple of years of Europe again, of
renewed nearness to changes and chances, refreshed sensibility to the
currents of the market, would fall in with the consistency of wisdom,
the particular shade of enlightened conviction, that he wished to
observe. It didn’t look like much for a whole family to hang about
waiting—they being now, since the birth of his grandson, a whole
family; and there was henceforth only one ground in all the world, he
felt, on which the question of appearance would ever really again count
for him. He cared that a work of art of price should “look like” the
master to whom it might perhaps be deceitfully attributed; but he had
ceased on the whole to know any matter of the rest of life by its looks.
He took life in general higher up the stream; so far as he was not
actually taking it as a collector, he was taking it, decidedly, as a
grandfather. In the way of precious small pieces he had handled nothing
so precious as the Principino, his daughter’s first-born, whose Italian
designation endlessly amused him and whom he could manipulate
and dandle, already almost toss and catch again, as he couldn’t a
correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre. He could take
the small clutching child from his nurse’s arms with an iteration grimly
discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of
high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had,
moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his
silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been
so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude—reduce it, he
said, to that—in his easy weeks at Fawns. The element of attitude was
all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot, even
more than he had hoped: enjoying it in spite of Mrs. Rance and the Miss
Lutches; in spite of the small worry of his belief that Fanny Assingham
had really something for him that she was keeping back; in spite of
his full consciousness, overflowing the cup like a wine too generously
poured, that if he had consented to marry his daughter, and thereby to
make, as it were, the difference, what surrounded him now was, exactly,
consent vivified, marriage demonstrated, the difference, in fine,
definitely made. He could call back his prior, his own wedded
consciousness—it was not yet out of range of vague reflection. He had
supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, as married as
anyone could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the
name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple
now before him carried the matter. In especial since the birth of their
boy, in New York—the grand climax of their recent American period,
brought to so right an issue—the happy pair struck him as having
carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern
his imagination, at any rate, to follow them. Extraordinary, beyond
question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment—it
characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty: the
strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether
Maggie’s mother had, after all, been capable of the maximum. The maximum
of tenderness he meant—as the terms existed for him; the maximum of
immersion in the fact of being married. Maggie herself was capable;
Maggie herself at this season, was, exquisitely, divinely, the maximum:
such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the
practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for
the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe—such was the
impression he daily received from her. She was her mother, oh yes—but
her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him,
and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should
prove at this time of day possible.
He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process
of his introduction to his present interests—an introduction that
had depended all on himself, like the “cheek” of the young man who
approaches a boss without credentials or picks up an acquaintance, makes
even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street. HIS real
friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which
nobody had put him in relation. He had knocked at the door of that
essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been
immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back,
he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed
stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained
confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of
the place it had been never again to come away. All of which success
represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride. Pride in
the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in
something that had come, in comparison, so easily. The right ground
for elation was difficulty mastered, and his difficulty—thanks to his
modesty—had been to believe in his facility. THIS was the problem he
had worked out to its solution—the solution that was now doing more
than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he
wished to feel “good,” as they said at American City, he had but to
retrace his immense development. That was what the whole thing came back
to—that the development had not been somebody’s else passing falsely,
accepted too ignobly, for his. To think how servile he might have been
was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to
admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded
to his touch was always there to press—the memory of his freedom as
dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter
divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his
wife’s death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in
particular that he could usually best recover, with the way that
there, above all, where the princes and Popes had been before him, his
divination of his faculty most went to his head. He was a plain American
citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes, for days together, there
were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read
a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art.
He was ashamed of them really, if he wasn’t afraid, and he had on the
whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal
of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were “placed” by their
treatment of Michael Angelo. Far below the plain American citizen—in
the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain
to be Adam Verver. Going to our friend’s head, moreover, some of the
results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed
there. His freedom to see—of which the comparisons were part—what
could it do but steadily grow and grow?
It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for ALL freedom—since,
for example, it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs.
Rance’s conspiring against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the
Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our
circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other
license of the present and the near future: the license to pass the hour
as he would have found convenient; the license to stop remembering, for
a little, that, though if proposed to—and not only by this aspirant but
by any other—he wouldn’t prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none
the less, in such a fashion, rather cruelly conditioned; the license
in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate,
orientate, himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of
the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly
stimulated. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from
church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when
it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impression—this
was the point—took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press
home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that
is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special
deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could
be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs. Rance
struck him as potentially bristling, were not of a sort, really, to be
met by one’s self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said,
or as good as said, “I’m restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and
also because I’m proud and refined; but if it WASN’T for Mr. Rance and
for my refinement and my pride!”—the possibility of them, I say, turned
to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle
of petticoats, of scented, many-paged letters, of voices as to which,
distinguish themselves as they might from each other, it mattered
little in what part of the resounding country they had learned to make
themselves prevail. The Assinghams and the Miss Lutches had taken the
walk, through the park, to the little old church, “on the property,”
that our friend had often found himself wishing he were able to
transport, as it stood, for its simple sweetness, in a glass case, to
one of his exhibitory halls; while Maggie had induced her husband,
not inveterate in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the
somewhat longer pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it
happened to be, of the faith—her own as it had been her mother’s, and
as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing, always, to let it be
taken for his—without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm
and smooth, the drama of her marriage might not have been acted out.
What at last appeared to have happened, however, was that the divided
parties, coming back at the same moment, had met outside and then
drifted together, from empty room to room, yet not in mere aimless quest
of the pair of companions they had left at home. The quest had carried
them to the door of the billiard-room, and their appearance, as it
opened to admit them, determined for Adam Verver, in the oddest way in
the world, a new and sharp perception. It was really remarkable: this
perception expanded, on the spot, as a flower, one of the strangest,
might, at a breath, have suddenly opened. The breath, for that matter,
was more than anything else, the look in his daughter’s eyes—the look
with which he SAW her take in exactly what had occurred in her absence:
Mrs. Rance’s pursuit of him to this remote locality, the spirit and
the very form, perfectly characteristic, of his acceptance of the
complication—the seal set, in short, unmistakably, on one of Maggie’s
anxieties. The anxiety, it was true, would have been, even though not
imparted, separately shared; for Fanny Assingham’s face was, by the
same stroke, not at all thickly veiled for him, and a queer light, of
a colour quite to match, fairly glittered in the four fine eyes of the
Miss Lutches. Each of these persons—counting out, that is, the Prince
and the Colonel, who didn’t care, and who didn’t even see that the
others did—knew something, or had at any rate had her idea; the idea,
precisely, that this was what Mrs. Rance, artfully biding her time,
WOULD do. The special shade of apprehension on the part of the Miss
Lutches might indeed have suggested the vision of an energy supremely
asserted. It was droll, in truth, if one came to that, the position
of the Miss Lutches: they had themselves brought, they had guilelessly
introduced Mrs. Rance, strong in the fact of Mr. Rance’s having been
literally beheld of them; and it was now for them, positively, as if
their handful of flowers—since Mrs. Rance was a handful!—had been but
the vehicle of a dangerous snake. Mr. Verver fairly felt in the air the
Miss Lutches’ imputation—in the intensity of which, really, his own
propriety might have been involved.
That, none the less, was but a flicker; what made the real difference,
as I have hinted, was his mute passage with Maggie. His daughter’s
anxiety alone had depths, and it opened out for him the wider that it
was altogether new. When, in their common past, when till this moment,
had she shown a fear, however dumbly, for his individual life? They
had had fears together, just as they had had joys, but all of hers, at
least, had been for what equally concerned them. Here of a sudden was
a question that concerned him alone, and the soundless explosion of it
somehow marked a date. He was on her mind, he was even in a manner on
her hands—as a distinct thing, that is, from being, where he had always
been, merely deep in her heart and in her life; too deep down, as it
were, to be disengaged, contrasted or opposed, in short objectively
presented. But time finally had done it; their relation was altered:
he SAW, again, the difference lighted for her. This marked it to
himself—and it wasn’t a question simply of a Mrs. Rance the more or the
less. For Maggie too, at a stroke, almost beneficently, their visitor
had, from being an inconvenience, become a sign. They had made vacant,
by their marriage, his immediate foreground, his personal precinct—they
being the Princess and the Prince. They had made room in it for
others—so others had become aware. He became aware himself, for that
matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with
the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see, he had the sense of what
she saw HIM. This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest
perception had there not, the next instant, been more for him in Fanny
Assingham. Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of
everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing.