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—overflowed 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 nobly-terraced
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 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-in-law 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—definite and conscious at the most only in
Charlotte—that he was not, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman,
in fine, 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 different 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 offered a
certain sweet intelligibility as the note of the day? It made everything
fit; above all it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he
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. The 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
reflectively 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 affairs that he
could be bent on occasion to uses comparatively trivial. No other of her
guests would have been thus convenient for their hostess; affairs,
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 affair, it
was not of that order; it was of the order, verily, that he had been
reduced to as a not quite glorious substitute.
It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him that this vision
of being “reduced” interfered not at all with the measure of his actual
ease. It kept before him again, at moments, the so familiar fact of his
sacrifices—down to the idea of the very relinquishment, for his wife’s
convenience, of his real situation in the world; with the consequence,
thus, that he was, in the last analysis, among all these so often
inferior people, practically held cheap and made light of. But though
all this was sensible enough there was a spirit in him that could rise
above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of
them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that
of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and
harmonious, something wholly his own. He couldn’t somehow take Mr. Blint
seriously—he was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than
a Roman prince who consented to be in abeyance. Yet it was past finding
out, either, how such a woman as Lady Castledean could take him—since
this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of
English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, “well”; he had
lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various
other things with them; but the number of questions about them he
couldn’t have answered had much rather grown than shrunken, so that
experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one
residual impression. They didn’t like les situations nettes—that was
all he was very sure of. They wouldn’t have them at any price; it had
been their national genius and their national success to avoid them
at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their
wonderful spirit of compromise—the very influence of which actually so
hung about him here, from moment to moment, that the earth and the air,
the light and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, the
blue-green counties and the cold cathedrals, owed to it every accent of
their tone. Verily, as one had to feel in presence of such a picture, it
had succeeded; it had made, up to now, for that seated solidity, in the
rich sea-mist, on which the garish, the supposedly envious, peoples have
ever cooled their eyes. But it was at the same time precisely why even
much initiation left one, at given moments, so puzzled as to the element
of staleness in all the freshness and of freshness in all the staleness,
of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were
other marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would
have known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least
the small intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between a given
appearance and a taken meaning. The inquiring mind, in these present
conditions, might, it was true, be more sharply challenged; but the
result of its attention and its ingenuity, it had unluckily learned to
know, was too often to be confronted with a mere dead wall, a lapse
of logic, a confirmed bewilderment. And moreover, above all,
nothing mattered, in the relation of the enclosing scene to his own
consciousness, but its very most direct bearings.
Lady Castledean’s dream of Mr. Blint for the morning was doubtless
already, with all the spacious harmonies re-established, taking the
form of “going over” something with him, at the piano, in one of the
numerous smaller rooms that were consecrated to the less gregarious
uses; what she had wished had been effected—her convenience had
been assured. This made him, however, wonder the more where Charlotte
was—since he didn’t at all suppose her to be making a tactless third,
which would be to have accepted mere spectatorship, in the duet of their
companions. The upshot of everything for him, alike of the less and of
the more, was that the exquisite day bloomed there like a large fragrant
flower that he had only to gather. But it was to Charlotte he wished
to make the offering, and as he moved along the terrace, which rendered
visible parts of two sides of the house, he looked up at all the windows
that were open to the April morning, and wondered which of them would
represent his friend’s room. It befell thus that his question, after
no long time, was answered; he saw Charlotte appear above as if she had
been called by the pausing of his feet on the flags. She had come to the
sill, on which she leaned to look down, and she remained there a minute
smiling at him. He had been immediately struck with her wearing a hat
and a jacket—which conduced to her appearance of readiness not so much
to join him, with a beautiful uncovered head and a parasol, where he
stood, as to take with him some larger step altogether. The larger step
had been, since the evening before, intensely in his own mind, though
he had not fully thought out, even yet, the slightly difficult detail of
it; but he had had no chance, such as he needed, to speak the definite
word to her, and the face she now showed affected him, accordingly, as
a notice that she had wonderfully guessed it for herself. They had these
identities of impulse—they had had them repeatedly before; and if such
unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in
which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union
in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness. What in fact
most often happened was that her rightness went, as who should say, even
further than his own; they were conscious of the same necessity at the
same moment, only it was she, as a general thing, who most clearly saw
her way to it. Something in her long look at him now out of the old
grey window, something in the very poise of her hat, the colour of her
necktie, the prolonged stillness of her smile, touched into sudden light
for him all the wealth of the fact that he could count on her. He had
his hand there, to pluck it, on the open bloom of the day; but what
did the bright minute mean but that her answering hand was already
intelligently out? So, therefore, while the minute lasted, it passed
between them that their cup was full; which cup their very eyes, holding
it fast, carried and steadied and began, as they tasted it, to praise.
He broke, however, after a moment, the silence.
“It only wants a moon, a mandolin, and a little danger, to be a
serenade.”
“Ah, then,” she lightly called down, “let it at least have THIS!” With
which she detached a rich white rosebud from its company with another
in the front of her dress and flung it down to him. He caught it in
its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his
buttonhole. “Come down quickly!” he said in an Italian not loud but
deep.
“Vengo, vengo!” she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she
had left him the next minute to wait for her.
He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes
rested, as they had already often done, on the brave darker wash of
far-away watercolour that represented the most distant of the cathedral
towns. This place, with its great church and its high accessibility,
its towers that distinguishably signalled, its English history, its
appealing type, its acknowledged interest, this place had sounded its
name to him half the night through, and its name had become but another
name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of
things which now throbbed within him. He had kept saying to himself
“Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,” quite as if the sharpest meaning
of all the years just passed were intensely expressed in it. That
meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely
consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte,
stood there together in the very lustre of this truth. Every present
circumstance helped to proclaim it; it was blown into their faces as by
the lips of the morning. He knew why, from the first of his marriage,
he had tried with such patience for such conformity; he knew why he had
given up so much and bored himself so much; he knew why he, at any rate,
had gone in, on the basis of all forms, on the basis of his having, in
a manner, sold himself, for a situation nette. It had all been just
in order that his—well, what on earth should he call it but his
freedom?—should at present be as perfect and rounded and lustrous
as some huge precious pearl. He hadn’t struggled nor snatched; he was
taking but what had been given him; the pearl dropped itself, with its
exquisite quality and rarity, straight into his hand. Here, precisely,
it was, incarnate; its size and its value grew as Mrs. Verver appeared,
afar off, in one of the smaller doorways. She came toward him in
silence, while he moved to meet her; the great scale of this particular
front, at Matcham, multiplied thus, in the golden morning, the stages of
their meeting and the successions of their consciousness. It wasn’t
till she had come quite close that he produced for her his “Gloucester,
Gloucester, Gloucester,” and his “Look at it over there!”
She knew just where to look. “Yes—isn’t it one of the best? There are
cloisters or towers or some thing.” And her eyes, which, though her lips
smiled, were almost grave with their depths of acceptance; came back to
him. “Or the tomb of some old king.”
“We must see the old king; we must ‘do’ the cathedral,” he said; “we
must know all about it. If we could but take,” he exhaled, “the full
opportunity!” And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he
sounded again her eyes: “I feel the day like a great gold cup that we
must somehow drain together.”
“I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as you do; so
that I know ten miles off how you feel! But do you remember,” she asked,
“apropos of great gold cups, the beautiful one, the real one, that I
offered you so long ago and that you wouldn’t have? Just before your
marriage”—she brought it back to him: “the gilded crystal bowl in the
little Bloomsbury shop.”
“Oh yes!”—but it took, with a slight surprise on the ‘Prince’s part,
some small recollecting. “The treacherous cracked thing you wanted to
palm off on me, and the little swindling Jew who understood Italian and
who backed you up! But I feel this an occasion,” he immediately added,
“and I hope you don’t mean,” he smiled, “that AS an occasion it’s also
cracked.”
They spoke, naturally, more low than loud, overlooked as they were,
though at a respectful distance, by tiers of windows; but it made each
find in the other’s voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply
absorbed. “Don’t you think too much of ‘cracks,’ and aren’t you too
afraid of them? I risk the cracks,” said Charlotte, “and I’ve often
recalled the bowl and the little swindling Jew, wondering if they’ve
parted company. He made,” she said, “a great impression on me.”
“Well, you also, no doubt, made a great impression on him, and I dare
say that if you were to go back to him you’d find he has been keeping
that treasure for you. But as to cracks,” the Prince went on—“what
did you tell me the other day you prettily call them in English?-’rifts
within the lute’?—risk them as much as you like for yourself, but
don’t risk them for me.” He spoke it in all the gaiety of his just
barely-tremulous serenity. “I go, as you know, by my superstitions. And
that’s why,” he said, “I know where we are. They’re every one, to-day,
on our side.”
Resting on the parapet; toward the great view, she was silent a little,
and he saw the next moment that her eyes were closed. “I go but by one
thing.” Her hand was on the sun-warmed stone; so that, turned as they
were away from the house, he put his own upon it and covered it. “I go
by YOU,” she said. “I go by you.”
So they remained a moment, till he spoke again with a gesture that
matched. “What is really our great necessity, you know, is to go by my
watch. It’s already eleven”—he had looked at the time; “so that if we
stop here to luncheon what becomes of our afternoon?”
To this Charlotte’s eyes opened straight. “There’s not the slightest
need of our stopping here to luncheon. Don’t you see,” she asked, “how
I’m ready?” He had taken it in, but there was always more and more of
her. “You mean you’ve arranged—?”
“It’s easy to arrange. My maid goes up with my things. You’ve only to
speak to your man about yours, and they can go together.”
“You mean we can leave at once?”
She let him have it all. “One of the carriages, about which I spoke,
will already have come back for us. If your superstitions are on our
side,” she smiled, “so my arrangements are, and I’ll back my support
against yours.”
“Then you had thought,” he wondered, “about Gloucester?”
She hesitated—but it was only her way. “I thought you would think. We
have, thank goodness, these harmonies. They are food for superstition if
you like. It’s beautiful,” she went on, “that it should be Gloucester;
‘Glo’ster, Glo’ster,’ as you say, making it sound like an old song.
However, I’m sure Glo’ster, Glo’ster will be charming,” she still added;
“we shall be able easily to lunch there, and, with our luggage and our
servants off our hands, we shall have at least three or four hours. We
can wire,” she wound up, “from there.”
Ever so quietly she had brought it, as she had thought it, all out, and
it had to be as covertly that he let his appreciation expand. “Then Lady
Castledean—?”
“Doesn’t dream of our staying.”
He took it, but thinking yet. “Then what does she dream—?”
“Of Mr. Blint, poor dear; of Mr. Blint only.” Her smile for him—for
the Prince himself—was free. “Have I positively to tell you that she
doesn’t want us? She only wanted us for the others—to show she wasn’t
left alone with him. Now that that’s done, and that they’ve all gone,
she of course knows for herself—!”
“‘Knows’?” the Prince vaguely echoed.
“Why, that we like cathedrals; that we inevitably stop to see them, or
go round to take them in, whenever we’ve a chance; that it’s what our
respective families quite expect of us and would be disappointed for
us to fail of. This, as forestieri,” Mrs. Verver pursued, “would be our
pull—if our pull weren’t indeed so great all round.”
He could only keep his eyes on her. “And have you made out the very
train—?”
“The very one. Paddington—the 6.50 ‘in.’ That gives us oceans; we can
dine, at the usual hour, at home; and as Maggie will of course be in
Eaton Square I hereby invite you.”
For a while he still but looked at her; it was a minute before he spoke.
“Thank you very much. With pleasure.” To which he in a moment added:
“But the train for Gloucester?”
“A local one—11.22; with several stops, but doing it a good deal, I
forget how much, within the hour. So that we’ve time. Only,” she said,
“we must employ our time.”
He roused himself as from the mere momentary spell of her; he looked
again at his watch while they moved back to the door through which she
had advanced. But he had also again questions and stops—all as for the
mystery and the charm. “You looked it up—without my having asked you?”
“Ah, my dear,” she laughed, “I’ve seen you with Bradshaw! It takes
Anglo-Saxon blood.”
“‘Blood’?” he echoed. “You’ve that of every race!” It kept her before
him. “You’re terrible.”
Well, he could put it as he liked. “I know the name of the inn.”
“What is it then?”
“There are two—you’ll see. But I’ve chosen the right one. And I think I
remember the tomb,” she smiled.
“Oh, the tomb—!” Any tomb would do for him. “But I mean I had been
keeping my idea so cleverly for you, while there you already were with
it.”
“You had been keeping it ‘for’ me as much as you like. But how do you
make out,” she asked, “that you were keeping it FROM me?”
“I don’t—now. How shall I ever keep anything—some day when I shall
wish to?”
“Ah, for things I mayn’t want to know, I promise you shall find me
stupid.” They had reached their door, where she herself paused to
explain. “These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I’ve wanted
everything.”
Well, it was all right. “You shall have everything.”