It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept
the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing,
or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a
new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the
fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of
the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made
by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long
present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been
occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her
life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower
of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish
pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and
figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that
tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked
round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her
existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes
seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the
fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never
quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished.
She had not wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was
doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed
to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far
aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from
her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained
consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her
considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to
scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and
wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in
that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly
near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a
Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there
so hung about it the vision of one’s putting off one’s shoes to enter,
and even, verily, of one’s paying with one’s life if found there as an
interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying
with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite
as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain
plates. She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce have said
whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool
smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had
happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had
come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her
approach had been noted.
If this image, however, may represent our young woman’s consciousness of
a recent change in her life—a change now but a few days old—it must
at the same time be observed that she both sought and found in renewed
circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief from the idea
of having perhaps to answer for what she had done. The pagoda in her
blooming garden figured the arrangement—how otherwise was it to be
named?—by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without
breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past. She had surrendered
herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition,
and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father—the least
little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two men
beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage had marked
it as more happy than this fact of its having practically given the
elder, the lonelier, a new friend. What had moreover all the while
enriched the whole aspect of success was that the latter’s marriage had
been no more meassurably paid for than her own. His having taken the
same great step in the same free way had not in the least involved the
relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable they should have
been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for
a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was
remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each
of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support. There
were plenty of singular things they were NOT enamoured of—flights of
brilliancy, of audacity, of originality, that, speaking at least for the
dear man and herself, were not at all in their line; but they liked to
think they had given their life this unusual extension and this liberal
form, which many families, many couples, and still more many pairs
of couples, would not have found workable. That last truth had been
distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony, the quite
explicit envy, of most of their friends, who had remarked to them again
and again that they must, on all the showing, to keep on such terms, be
people of the highest amiability—equally including in the praise, of
course, Amerigo and Charlotte. It had given them pleasure—as how should
it not?—to find themselves shed such a glamour; it had certainly,
that is, given pleasure to her father and herself, both of them
distinguishably of a nature so slow to presume that they would scarce
have been sure of their triumph without this pretty reflection of it.
So it was that their felicity had fructified; so it was that the ivory
tower, visible and admirable doubtless, from any point of the social
field, had risen stage by stage. Maggie’s actual reluctance to ask
herself with proportionate sharpness why she had ceased to take comfort
in the sight of it represented accordingly a lapse from that ideal
consistency on which her moral comfort almost at any time depended. To
remain consistent she had always been capable of cutting down more or
less her prior term.
Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a
false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased
to be right—that is, to be confident—or have recognised that she was
wrong; though she tried to deal with herself, for a space, only as a
silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond and who rattles
the water from his ears. Her shake of her head, again and again, as she
went, was much of that order, and she had the resource, to which, save
for the rude equivalent of his generalising bark, the spaniel would have
been a stranger, of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had
happened to her. She had not, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no
accident and had not got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until
after she began a little to wonder if she mightn’t, with or without
exposure, have taken cold. She could at all events remember no time at
which she had felt so excited, and certainly none—which was another
special point—that so brought with it as well the necessity for
concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high
pastime, in her view, precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for
keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private
and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply
my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging young
mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her would
be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misadventure, but likewise,
all the while, only another sign of a relation that was more to her than
anything on earth. She had lived long enough to make out for herself
that any deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys, and that
we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly conscious of it.
She had never doubted of the force of the feeling that bound her to
her husband; but to become aware, almost suddenly, that it had begun to
vibrate with a violence that had some of the effect of a strain would,
rightly looked at, after all but show that she was, like thousands of
women, every day, acting up to the full privilege of passion. Why in the
world shouldn’t she, with every right—if, on consideration, she saw no
good reason against it? The best reason against it would have been the
possibility of some consequence disagreeable or inconvenient to others—
especially to such others as had never incommoded her by the egotism of
THEIR passions; but if once that danger were duly guarded against the
fulness of one’s measure amounted to no more than the equal use of
one’s faculties or the proper playing of one’s part. It had come to the
Princess, obscurely at first, but little by little more conceivably,
that her faculties had not for a good while been concomitantly used; the
case resembled in a manner that of her once-loved dancing, a matter of
remembered steps that had grown vague from her ceasing to go to balls.
She would go to balls again—that seemed, freely, even crudely, stated,
the remedy; she would take out of the deep receptacles in which she
had laid them away the various ornaments congruous with the greater
occasions, and of which her store, she liked to think, was none of
the smallest. She would have been easily to be figured for us at this
occupation; dipping, at off moments and quiet hours, in snatched visits
and by draughty candle-light, into her rich collections and seeing her
jewels again a little shyly, but all unmistakably, glow. That in fact
may pass as the very picture of her semi-smothered agitation, of the
diversion she to some extent successfully found in referring her crisis,
so far as was possible, to the mere working of her own needs.
It must be added, however, that she would have been at a loss to
determine—and certainly at first—to which order, that of self-control
or that of large expression, the step she had taken the afternoon of her
husband’s return from Matcham with his companion properly belonged. For
it had been a step, distinctly, on Maggie’s part, her deciding to do
something, just then and there, which would strike Amerigo as unusual,
and this even though her departure from custom had merely consisted
in her so arranging that he wouldn’t find her, as he would definitely
expect to do, in Eaton Square. He would have, strangely enough, as might
seem to him, to come back home for it, and there get the impression of
her rather pointedly, or at least all impatiently and independently,
awaiting him. These were small variations and mild manoeuvres, but
they went accompanied on Maggie’s part, as we have mentioned, with
an infinite sense of intention. Her watching by his fireside for her
husband’s return from an absence might superficially have presented
itself as the most natural act in the world, and the only one, into the
bargain, on which he would positively have reckoned. It fell by this
circumstance into the order of plain matters, and yet the very aspect
by which it was, in the event, handed over to her brooding fancy was
the fact that she had done with it all she had designed. She had put her
thought to the proof, and the proof had shown its edge; this was what
was before her, that she was no longer playing with blunt and idle
tools, with weapons that didn’t cut. There passed across her vision ten
times a day the gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she most
shut her eyes, most knew the impulse to cheat herself with motion and
sound. She had merely driven, on a certain Wednesday, to Portland Place,
instead of remaining in Eaton Square, and she privately repeated it
again and again—there had appeared beforehand no reason why she should
have seen the mantle of history flung, by a single sharp sweep, over so
commonplace a deed. That, all the same, was what had happened; it had
been bitten into her mind, all in an hour, that nothing she had ever
done would hereafter, in some way yet to be determined, so count for
her—perhaps not even what she had done in accepting, in their old
golden Rome, Amerigo’s proposal of marriage. And yet, by her little
crouching posture there, that of a timid tigress, she had meant nothing
recklessly ultimate, nothing clumsily fundamental; so that she called it
names, the invidious, the grotesque attitude, holding it up to her own
ridicule, reducing so far as she could the portee of what had followed
it. She had but wanted to get nearer—nearer to something indeed that
she couldn’t, that she wouldn’t, even to herself, describe; and
the degree of this achieved nearness was what had been in advance
incalculable. Her actual multiplication of distractions and
suppressions, whatever it did for her, failed to prevent her living
over again any chosen minute—for she could choose them, she could fix
them—of the freshness of relation produced by her having administered
to her husband the first surprise to which she had ever treated him.
It had been a poor thing, but it had been all her own, and the whole
passage was backwardly there, a great picture hung on the wall of her
daily life, for her to make what she would of.
It fell, for retrospect, into a succession of moments that were
WATCHABLE still; almost in the manner of the different things done
during a scene on the stage, some scene so acted as to have left a great
impression on the tenant of one of the stalls. Several of these moments
stood out beyond the others, and those she could feel again most, count
again like the firm pearls on a string, had belonged more particularly
to the lapse of time before dinner—dinner which had been so late, quite
at nine o’clock, that evening, thanks to the final lateness of Amerigo’s
own advent. These were parts of the experience—though in fact there had
been a good many of them—between which her impression could continue
sharply to discriminate. Before the subsequent passages, much later on,
it was to be said, the flame of memory turned to an equalising glow,
that of a lamp in some side-chapel in which incense was thick. The
great moment, at any rate, for conscious repossession, was doubtless the
first: the strange little timed silence which she had fully gauged, on
the spot, as altogether beyond her own intention, but which—for just
how long? should she ever really know for just how long?—she could
do nothing to break. She was in the smaller drawing-room, in which she
always “sat,” and she had, by calculation, dressed for dinner on finally
coming in. It was a wonder how many things she had calculated in respect
to this small incident—a matter for the importance of which she had
so quite indefinite a measure. He would be late—he would be very late;
that was the one certainty that seemed to look her in the face. There
was still also the possibility that if he drove with Charlotte straight
to Eaton Square he might think it best to remain there even on learning
she had come away. She had left no message for him on any such chance;
this was another of her small shades of decision, though the effect of
it might be to keep him still longer absent. He might suppose she would
already have dined; he might stay, with all he would have to tell, just
on purpose to be nice to her father. She had known him to stretch the
point, to these beautiful ends, far beyond that; he had more than once
stretched it to the sacrifice of the opportunity of dressing.
If she herself had now avoided any such sacrifice, and had made herself,
during the time at her disposal, quite inordinately fresh and quite
positively smart, this had probably added, while she waited and waited,
to that very tension of spirit in which she was afterwards to find the
image of her having crouched. She did her best, quite intensely, by
herself, to banish any such appearance; she couldn’t help it if she
couldn’t read her pale novel—ah, that, par exemple, was beyond her!
but she could at least sit by the lamp with the book, sit there with
her newest frock, worn for the first time, sticking out, all round her,
quite stiff and grand; even perhaps a little too stiff and too grand for
a familiar and domestic frock, yet marked none the less, this time,
she ventured to hope, by incontestable intrinsic merit. She had glanced
repeatedly at the clock, but she had refused herself the weak indulgence
of walking up and down, though the act of doing so, she knew, would make
her feel, on the polished floor, with the rustle and the “hang,” still
more beautifully bedecked. The difficulty was that it would also make
her feel herself still more sharply in a state; which was exactly what
she proposed not to do. The only drops of her anxiety had been when her
thought strayed complacently, with her eyes, to the front of her gown,
which was in a manner a refuge, a beguilement, especially when she was
able to fix it long enough to wonder if it would at last really satisfy
Charlotte. She had ever been, in respect to her clothes, rather timorous
and uncertain; for the last year, above all, she had lived in the
light of Charlotte’s possible and rather inscrutable judgment of them.
Charlotte’s own were simply the most charming and interesting that any
woman had ever put on; there was a kind of poetic justice in her being
at last able, in this particular, thanks to means, thanks quite to
omnipotence, freely to exercise her genius. But Maggie would have
described herself as, in these connections, constantly and intimately
“torn”; conscious on one side of the impossibility of copying her
companion and conscious on the other of the impossibility of sounding
her, independently, to the bottom. Yes, it was one of the things she
should go down to her grave without having known—how Charlotte, after
all had been said, really thought her stepdaughter looked under any
supposedly ingenious personal experiment. She had always been lovely
about the stepdaughter’s material braveries—had done, for her, the
very best with them; but there had ever fitfully danced at the back of
Maggie’s head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies, not
judgments, embodying no absolute, but only a relative, frankness. Hadn’t
Charlotte, with so perfect a critical vision, if the truth were known,
given her up as hopeless—hopeless by a serious standard, and thereby
invented for her a different and inferior one, in which, as the only
thing to be done, she patiently and soothingly abetted her? Hadn’t
she, in other words, assented in secret despair, perhaps even in secret
irritation, to her being ridiculous?—so that the best now possible
was to wonder, once in a great while, whether one mightn’t give her the
surprise of something a little less out of the true note than usual.
Something of this kind was the question that Maggie, while the absentees
still delayed, asked of the appearance she was endeavouring to present;
but with the result, repeatedly again, that it only went and lost itself
in the thick air that had begun more and more to hang, for our young
woman, over her accumulations of the unanswered. They were THERE, these
accumulations; they were like a roomful of confused objects, never
as yet “sorted,” which for some time now she had been passing and
re-passing, along the corridor of her life. She passed it when she could
without opening the door; then, on occasion, she turned the key to throw
in a fresh contribution. So it was that she had been getting things out
of the way. They rejoined the rest of the confusion; it was as if they
found their place, by some instinct of affinity, in the heap. They knew,
in short, where to go; and when she, at present, by a mental act, once
more pushed the door open, she had practically a sense of method and
experience. What she should never know about Charlotte’s thought—she
tossed THAT in. It would find itself in company, and she might at last
have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its corner. The
sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare, had her attention
been more free—the sight of the mass of vain things, congruous,
incongruous, that awaited every addition. It made her in fact, with
a vague gasp, turn away, and what had further determined this was the
final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward. The quite
different door had opened and her husband was there.
It had been as strange as she could consent, afterwards, to think it; it
had been, essentially, what had made the abrupt bend in her life: he
had come back, had followed her from the other house, VISIBLY
uncertain—this was written in the face he for the first minute showed
her. It had been written only for those seconds, and it had appeared to
go, quickly, after they began to talk; but while it lasted it had been
written large, and, though she didn’t quite know what she had expected
of him, she felt she hadn’t expected the least shade of embarrassment.
What had made the embarrassment—she called it embarrassment so as to be
able to assure herself she put it at the very worst—what had made
the particular look was his thus distinguishably wishing to see how he
should find her. Why FIRST—that had, later on, kept coming to her; the
question dangled there as if it were the key to everything. With the
sense of it on the spot, she had felt, overwhelmingly, that she was
significant, that so she must instantly strike him, and that this had
a kind of violence beyond what she had intended. It was in fact even at
the moment not absent from her view that he might easily have made an
abject fool of her—at least for the time. She had indeed, for just ten
seconds, been afraid of some such turn: the uncertainty in his face had
become so, the next thing, an uncertainty in the very air. Three words
of impatience the least bit loud, some outbreak of “What in the world
are you ‘up to’, and what do you mean?” any note of that sort would
instantly have brought her low—and this all the more that heaven knew
she hadn’t in any manner designed to be high. It was such a trifle, her
small breach with custom, or at any rate with his natural presumption,
that all magnitude of wonder had already had, before one could deprecate
the shadow of it, the effect of a complication. It had made for him some
difference that she couldn’t measure, this meeting him at home and alone
instead of elsewhere and with others, and back and back it kept coming
to her that the blankness he showed her before he was able to SEE might,
should she choose to insist on it, have a meaning—have, as who should
say, an historic value—beyond the importance of momentary expressions
in general. She had naturally had on the spot no ready notion of what he
might want to see; it was enough for a ready notion, not to speak of
a beating heart, that he DID see, that he saw his wife in her own
drawing-room at the hour when she would most properly be there. He
hadn’t in any way challenged her, it was true, and, after those instants
during which she now believed him to have been harbouring the impression
of something unusually prepared and pointed in her attitude and
array, he had advanced upon her smiling and smiling, and thus, without
hesitation at the last, had taken her into his arms. The hesitation
had been at the first, and she at present saw that he had surmounted it
without her help. She had given him no help; for if, on the one hand,
she couldn’t speak for hesitation, so on the other—and especially as he
didn’t ask her—she couldn’t explain why she was agitated. She had known
it all the while down to her toes, known it in his presence with fresh
intensity, and if he had uttered but a question it would have pressed
in her the spring of recklessness. It had been strange that the most
natural thing of all to say to him should have had that appearance; but
she was more than ever conscious that any appearance she had would
come round, more or less straight, to her father, whose life was now
so quiet, on the basis accepted for it, that any alteration of his
consciousness even in the possible sense of enlivenment, would make
their precious equilibrium waver. THAT was at the bottom of her mind,
that their equilibrium was everything, and that it was practically
precarious, a matter of a hair’s breadth for the loss of the balance. It
was the equilibrium, or at all events her conscious fear about it, that
had brought her heart into her mouth; and the same fear was, on either
side, in the silent look she and Amerigo had exchanged. The happy
balance that demanded this amount of consideration was truly thus, as by
its own confession, a delicate matter; but that her husband had also HIS
habit of anxiety and his general caution only brought them, after all,
more closely together. It would have been most beautifully, therefore,
in the name of the equilibrium, and in that of her joy at their feeling
so exactly the same about it, that she might have spoken if she had
permitted the truth on the subject of her behaviour to ring out—on the
subject of that poor little behaviour which was for the moment so very
limited a case of eccentricity.
“‘Why, why’ have I made this evening such a point of our not all dining
together? Well, because I’ve all day been so wanting you alone that I
finally couldn’t bear it, and that there didn’t seem any great reason
why I should try to. THAT came to me—funny as it may at first sound,
with all the things we’ve so wonderfully got into the way of bearing
for each other. You’ve seemed these last days—I don’t know what: more
absent than ever before, too absent for us merely to go on so. It’s all
very well, and I perfectly see how beautiful it is, all round; but there
comes a day when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to the
very brim, begins to flow over. That’s what has happened to my need of
you—the cup, all day, has been too full to carry. So here I am with it,
spilling it over you—and just for the reason that is the reason of my
life. After all, I’ve scarcely to explain that I’m as much in love with
you now as the first hour; except that there are some hours—which I
know when they come, because they almost frighten me—that show me I’m
even more so. They come of themselves—and, ah, they’ve been coming!
After all, after all—!” Some such words as those were what DIDN’T ring
out, yet it was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched here
in its own quaver. It was where utterance would have broken down by its
very weight if he had let it get so far. Without that extremity, at the
end of a moment, he had taken in what he needed to take—that his wife
was TESTIFYING, that she adored and missed and desired him. “After all,
after all,” since she put it so, she was right. That was what he had to
respond to; that was what, from the moment that, as has been said, he
“saw,” he had to treat as the most pertinent thing possible. He held
her close and long, in expression of their personal reunion—this,
obviously, was one way of doing so. He rubbed his cheek, tenderly, and
with a deep vague murmur, against her face, that side of her face she
was not pressing to his breast. That was, not less obviously, another
way, and there were ways enough, in short, for his extemporised ease,
for the good humour she was afterwards to find herself thinking of as
his infinite tact. This last was partly, no doubt, because the question
of tact might be felt as having come up at the end of a quarter of
an hour during which he had liberally talked and she had genially
questioned. He had told her of his day, the happy thought of his
roundabout journey with Charlotte, all their cathedral-hunting
adventure, and how it had turned out rather more of an affair than they
expected. The moral of it was, at any rate, that he was tired, verily,
and must have a bath and dress—to which end she would kindly excuse him
for the shortest time possible. She was to remember afterwards something
that had passed between them on this—how he had looked, for her, during
an instant, at the door, before going out, how he had met her asking
him, in hesitation first, then quickly in decision, whether she
couldn’t help him by going up with him. He had perhaps also for a moment
hesitated, but he had declined her offer, and she was to preserve, as I
say, the memory of the smile with which he had opined that at that rate
they wouldn’t dine till ten o’clock and that he should go straighter
and faster alone. Such things, as I say, were to come back to her—they
played, through her full after-sense, like lights on the whole
impression; the subsequent parts of the experience were not to have
blurred their distinctness. One of these subsequent parts, the first,
had been the not inconsiderable length, to her later and more analytic
consciousness, of this second wait for her husband’s reappearance. She
might certainly, with the best will in the world, had she gone up with
him, have been more in his way than not, since people could really,
almost always, hurry better without help than with it. Still, she could
actually hardly have made him take more time than he struck her taking,
though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking
little person’s state of mind no mere crudity of impatience. Something
had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the
drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro.
Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie’s spirit, was always, at first,
positive emergence of the sweet, and it was long since anything had been
so sweet to her as the particular quality suddenly given by her present
emotion to the sense of possession.