Amerigo was away from her again, as she sat there, as she walked there
without him—for she had, with the difference of his presence in the
house, ceased to keep herself from moving about; but the hour was filled
nevertheless with the effect of his nearness, and above all with the
effect, strange in an intimacy so established, of an almost renewed
vision of the facts of his aspect. She had seen him last but five days
since, yet he had stood there before her as if restored from some far
country, some long voyage, some combination of dangers or fatigues. This
unquenchable variety in his appeal to her interest, what did it mean
but that—reduced to the flatness of mere statement—she was married,
by good fortune, to an altogether dazzling person? That was an old,
old story, but the truth of it shone out to her like the beauty of some
family picture, some mellow portrait of an ancestor, that she might
have been looking at, almost in surprise, after a long intermission. The
dazzling person was upstairs and she was down, and there were moreover
the other facts of the selection and decision that this demonstration
of her own had required, and of the constant care that the equilibrium
involved; but she had, all the same, never felt so absorbingly married,
so abjectly conscious of a master of her fate. He could do what he would
with her; in fact what was actually happening was that he was actually
doing it. “What he would,” what he REALLY would—only that quantity
itself escaped perhaps, in the brightness of the high harmony, familiar
naming and discussing. It was enough of a recognition for her that,
whatever the thing he might desire, he would always absolutely bring
it off. She knew at this moment, without a question, with the fullest
surrender, how he had brought off, in her, by scarce more than a single
allusion, a perfect flutter of tenderness. If he had come back tired,
tired from his long day, the exertion had been, literally, in her
service and her father’s. They two had sat at home at peace, the
Principino between them, the complications of life kept down, the bores
sifted out, the large ease of the home preserved, because of the way
the others held the field and braved the weather. Amerigo never
complained—any more than, for that matter, Charlotte did; but she
seemed to see to-night as she had never yet quite done that their
business of social representation, conceived as they conceived it,
beyond any conception of her own, and conscientiously carried out, was
an affair of living always in harness. She remembered Fanny Assingham’s
old judgment, that friend’s description of her father and herself as not
living at all, as not knowing what to do or what might be done for them;
and there came back to her with it an echo of the long talk they had
had together, one September day at Fawns, under the trees, when she put
before him this dictum of Fanny’s.
That occasion might have counted for them—she had already often made
the reflection—as the first step in an existence more intelligently
arranged. It had been an hour from which the chain of causes and
consequences was definitely traceable—so many things, and at the head
of the list her father’s marriage, having appeared to her to flow from
Charlotte’s visit to Fawns, and that event itself having flowed from
the memorable talk. But what perhaps most came out in the light of these
concatenations was that it had been, for all the world, as if Charlotte
had been “had in,” as the servants always said of extra help, because
they had thus suffered it to be pointed out to them that if their family
coach lumbered and stuck the fault was in its lacking its complement of
wheels. Having but three, as they might say, it had wanted another, and
what had Charlotte done from the first but begin to act, on the spot,
and ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth? Nothing had been,
immediately, more manifest than the greater grace of the movement of the
vehicle—as to which, for the completeness of her image, Maggie was now
supremely to feel how every strain had been lightened for herself. So
far as SHE was one of the wheels she had but to keep in her place; since
the work was done for her she felt no weight, and it wasn’t too much
to acknowledge that she had scarce to turn round. She had a long pause
before the fire during which she might have been fixing with intensity
her projected vision, have been conscious even of its taking an absurd,
fantastic shape. She might have been watching the family coach pass and
noting that, somehow, Amerigo and Charlotte were pulling it while she
and her father were not so much as pushing. They were seated inside
together, dandling the Principino and holding him up to the windows, to
see and be seen, like an infant positively royal; so that the exertion
was ALL with the others. Maggie found in this image a repeated
challenge; again and yet again she paused before the fire: after which,
each time, in the manner of one for whom a strong light has suddenly
broken, she gave herself to livelier movement. She had seen herself at
last, in the picture she was studying, suddenly jump from the coach;
whereupon, frankly, with the wonder of the sight, her eyes opened wider
and her heart stood still for a moment. She looked at the person so
acting as if this person were somebody else, waiting with intensity
to see what would follow. The person had taken a decision—which was
evidently because an impulse long gathering had at last felt a
sharpest pressure. Only how was the decision to be applied?—what, in
particular, would the figure in the picture do? She looked about her,
from the middle of the room, under the force of this question, as if
THERE, exactly, were the field of action involved. Then, as the door
opened again, she recognised, whatever the action, the form, at any
rate, of a first opportunity. Her husband had reappeared—he stood
before her refreshed, almost radiant, quite reassuring. Dressed,
anointed, fragrant, ready, above all, for his dinner, he smiled at her
over the end of their delay. It was as if her opportunity had depended
on his look—and now she saw that it was good. There was still, for the
instant, something in suspense, but it passed more quickly than on his
previous entrance. He was already holding out his arms. It was, for
hours and hours, later on, as if she had somehow been lifted aloft,
were floated and carried on some warm high tide beneath which stumbling
blocks had sunk out of sight. This came from her being again, for the
time, in the enjoyment of confidence, from her knowing, as she believed,
what to do. All the next day, and all the next, she appeared to herself
to know it. She had a plan, and she rejoiced in her plan: this consisted
of the light that, suddenly breaking into her restless reverie, had
marked the climax of that vigil. It had come to her as a question—“What
if I’ve abandoned THEM, you know? What if I’ve accepted too passively
the funny form of our life?” There would be a process of her own by
which she might do differently in respect to Amerigo and Charlotte—a
process quite independent of any process of theirs. Such a solution had
but to rise before her to affect her, to charm her, with its simplicity,
an advantageous simplicity she had been stupid, for so long, not to
have been struck by; and the simplicity meanwhile seemed proved by the
success that had already begun to attend her. She had only had herself
to do something to see how immediately it answered. This consciousness
of its having answered with her husband was the uplifting, sustaining
wave. He had “met” her—she so put it to herself; met her with an effect
of generosity and of gaiety, in especial, on his coming back to her
ready for dinner, which she wore in her breast as the token of an escape
for them both from something not quite definite, but clearly, much less
good. Even at that moment, in fact, her plan had begun to work; she had
been, when he brightly reappeared, in the act of plucking it out of the
heart of her earnestness—plucking it, in the garden of thought, as if
it had been some full-blown flower that she could present to him on the
spot. Well, it was the flower of participation, and as that, then and
there, she held it out to him, putting straightway into execution the
idea, so needlessly, so absurdly obscured, of her SHARING with him,
whatever the enjoyment, the interest, the experience might be—and
sharing also, for that matter, with Charlotte.
She had thrown herself, at dinner, into every feature of the recent
adventure of the companions, letting him see, without reserve, that she
wished to hear everything about it, and making Charlotte in particular,
Charlotte’s judgment of Matcham, Charlotte’s aspect, her success
there, her effect traceably produced, her clothes inimitably worn,
her cleverness gracefully displayed, her social utility, in fine,
brilliantly exemplified, the subject of endless inquiry. Maggie’s
inquiry was most empathetic, moreover, for the whole happy thought of
the cathedral-hunt, which she was so glad they had entertained, and
as to the pleasant results of which, down to the cold beef and
bread-and-cheese, the queer old smell and the dirty table-cloth at the
inn, Amerigo was good-humouredly responsive. He had looked at her across
the table, more than once, as if touched by the humility of this
welcome offered to impressions at second-hand, the amusements, the
large freedoms only of others—as if recognising in it something fairly
exquisite; and at the end, while they were alone, before she had rung
for a servant, he had renewed again his condonation of the little
irregularity, such as it was, on which she had ventured. They had risen
together to come upstairs; he had been talking at the last about some of
the people, at the very last of all about Lady Castledean and Mr. Blint;
after which she had once more broken ground on the matter of the “type”
of Gloucester. It brought her, as he came round the table to join her,
yet another of his kind conscious stares, one of the looks, visibly
beguiled, but at the same time not invisibly puzzled, with which he had
already shown his sense of this charming grace of her curiosity. It
was as if he might for a moment be going to say:—“You needn’t PRETEND,
dearest, quite so hard, needn’t think it necessary to care quite so
much!”—it was as if he stood there before her with some such easy
intelligence, some such intimate reassurance, on his lips. Her answer
would have been all ready—that she wasn’t in the least pretending; and
she looked up at him, while he took her hand, with the maintenance, the
real persistence, of her lucid little plan in her eyes. She wanted him
to understand from that very moment that she was going to be WITH him
again, quite with them, together, as she doubtless hadn’t been since
the “funny” changes—that was really all one could call them—into
which they had each, as for the sake of the others, too easily and too
obligingly slipped. They had taken too much for granted that their life
together required, as people in London said, a special “form”—which was
very well so long as the form was kept only for the outside world and
was made no more of among themselves than the pretty mould of an iced
pudding, or something of that sort, into which, to help yourself, you
didn’t hesitate to break with the spoon. So much as that she would, with
an opening, have allowed herself furthermore to observe; she wanted him
to understand how her scheme embraced Charlotte too; so that if he
had but uttered the acknowledgment she judged him on the point of
making—the acknowledgment of his catching at her brave little idea for
their case—she would have found herself, as distinctly, voluble almost
to eloquence.
What befell, however, was that even while she thus waited she felt
herself present at a process taking place rather deeper within him than
the occasion, on the whole, appeared to require—a process of weighing
something in the balance, of considering, deciding, dismissing. He had
guessed that she was there with an idea, there in fact by reason of her
idea; only this, oddly enough, was what at the last stayed his words.
She was helped to these perceptions by his now looking at her still
harder than he had yet done—which really brought it to the turn of a
hair, for her, that she didn’t make sure his notion of her idea was the
right one. It was the turn of a hair, because he had possession of
her hands and was bending toward her, ever so kindly, as if to see, to
understand, more, or possibly give more—she didn’t know which; and that
had the effect of simply putting her, as she would have said, in
his power. She gave up, let her idea go, let everything go; her one
consciousness was that he was taking her again into his arms. It was
not till afterwards that she discriminated as to this; felt how the act
operated with him instead of the words he hadn’t uttered—operated, in
his view, as probably better than any words, as always better, in fact,
at any time, than anything. Her acceptance of it, her response to it,
inevitable, foredoomed, came back to her, later on, as a virtual assent
to the assumption he had thus made that there was really nothing such
a demonstration didn’t anticipate and didn’t dispose of, and that the
spring acting within herself moreover might well have been, beyond any
other, the impulse legitimately to provoke it. It made, for any issue,
the third time since his return that he had drawn her to his breast; and
at present, holding her to his side as they left the room, he kept her
close for their moving into the hall and across it, kept her for
their slow return together to the apartments above. He had been right,
overwhelmingly right, as to the felicity of his tenderness and the
degree of her sensibility, but even while she felt these things sweep
all others away she tasted of a sort of terror of the weakness they
produced in her. It was still, for her, that she had positively
something to do, and that she mustn’t be weak for this, must much rather
be strong. For many hours after, none the less, she remained weak—if
weak it was; though holding fast indeed to the theory of her success,
since her agitated overture had been, after all, so unmistakably met.
She recovered soon enough on the whole, the sense that this left her
Charlotte always to deal with—Charlotte who, at any rate, however
SHE might meet overtures, must meet them, at the worst, more or less
differently. Of that inevitability, of such other ranges of response as
were open to Charlotte, Maggie took the measure in approaching her, on
the morrow of her return from Matcham, with the same show of desire to
hear all her story. She wanted the whole picture from her, as she had
wanted it from her companion, and, promptly, in Eaton Square, whither,
without the Prince, she repaired, almost ostentatiously, for the
purpose, this purpose only, she brought her repeatedly back to the
subject, both in her husband’s presence and during several scraps of
independent colloquy. Before her father, instinctively, Maggie took the
ground that his wish for interesting echoes would be not less than her
own—allowing, that is, for everything his wife would already have had
to tell him, for such passages, between them, as might have occurred
since the evening before. Joining them after luncheon, reaching them, in
her desire to proceed with the application of her idea, before they
had quitted the breakfast-room, the scene of their mid-day meal, she
referred, in her parent’s presence, to what she might have lost by
delay, and expressed the hope that there would be an anecdote or two
left for her to pick up. Charlotte was dressed to go out, and her
husband, it appeared, rather positively prepared not to; he had left
the table, but was seated near the fire with two or three of the morning
papers and the residuum of the second and third posts on a stand beside
him—more even than the usual extravagance, as Maggie’s glance made
out, of circulars, catalogues, advertisements, announcements of sales,
foreign envelopes and foreign handwritings that were as unmistakable as
foreign clothes. Charlotte, at the window, looking into the side-street
that abutted on the Square, might have been watching for their visitor’s
advent before withdrawing; and in the light, strange and coloured, like
that of a painted picture, which fixed the impression for her, objects
took on values not hitherto so fully shown. It was the effect of her
quickened sensibility; she knew herself again in presence of a
problem, in need of a solution for which she must intensely work: that
consciousness, lately born in her, had been taught the evening before to
accept a temporary lapse, but had quickly enough again, with her getting
out of her own house and her walking across half the town—for she had
come from Portland Place on foot—found breath still in its lungs.
It exhaled this breath in a sigh, faint and unheard; her tribute, while
she stood there before speaking, to realities looming through the golden
mist that had already begun to be scattered. The conditions facing her
had yielded, for the time, to the golden mist—had considerably melted
away; but there they were again, definite, and it was for the next
quarter of an hour as if she could have counted them one by one on
her fingers. Sharp to her above all was the renewed attestation of her
father’s comprehensive acceptances, which she had so long regarded as of
the same quality with her own, but which, so distinctly now, she should
have the complication of being obliged to deal with separately. They had
not yet struck her as absolutely extraordinary—which had made for her
lumping them with her own, since her view of her own had but so lately
begun to change; though it instantly stood out for her that there
was really no new judgment of them she should be able to show without
attracting in some degree his attention, without perhaps exciting his
surprise and making thereby, for the situation she shared with him, some
difference. She was reminded and warned by the concrete image; and for
a minute Charlotte’s face, immediately presented to her, affected her
as searching her own to see the reminder tell. She had not less promptly
kissed her stepmother, and then had bent over her father, from behind,
and laid her cheek upon him; little amenities tantamount heretofore
to an easy change of guard—Charlotte’s own frequent, though always
cheerful, term of comparison for this process of transfer. Maggie
figured thus as the relieving sentry, and so smoothly did use and
custom work for them that her mate might even, on this occasion, after
acceptance of the pass-word, have departed without irrelevant and,
in strictness, unsoldierly gossip. This was not, none the less, what
happened; inasmuch as if our young woman had been floated over her first
impulse to break the existing charm at a stroke, it yet took her but
an instant to sound, at any risk, the note she had been privately
practising. If she had practised it the day before, at dinner, on
Amerigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs. Verver,
and it immensely helped her, for that matter, to be able at once to
speak of the Prince as having done more to quicken than to soothe her
curiosity. Frankly and gaily she had come to ask—to ask what, in their
unusually prolonged campaign, the two had achieved. She had got out of
her husband, she admitted, what she could, but husbands were never the
persons who answered such questions ideally. He had only made her more
curious, and she had arrived early, this way, in order to miss as little
as possible of Charlotte’s story.
“Wives, papa,” she said; “are always much better reporters—though I
grant,” she added for Charlotte, “that fathers are not much better than
husbands. He never,” she smiled, “tells me more than a tenth of what you
tell him; so I hope you haven’t told him everything yet, since in that
case I shall probably have lost the best part of it.” Maggie went, she
went—she felt herself going; she reminded herself of an actress who had
been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage,
before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the
text. It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept
her up, made her rise higher: just as it was the sense of action that
logically involved some platform—action quite positively for the
first time in her life, or, counting in the previous afternoon, for the
second. The platform remained for three or four days thus sensibly under
her feet, and she had all the while, with it, the inspiration of quite
remarkably, of quite heroically improvising. Preparation and practice
had come but a short way; her part opened out, and she invented from
moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art—to
keep within bounds and not lose her head; certainly she might see for
a week how far that would take her. She said to herself, in her
excitement, that it was perfectly simple: to bring about a difference,
touch by touch, without letting either of the three, and least of all
her father, so much as suspect her hand. If they should suspect they
would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that she wasn’t
ready with a reason—not, that is, with what she would have called a
reasonable one. She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as
having dealt, all her life, at her father’s side and by his example,
only in reasonable reasons; and what she would really have been most
ashamed of would be to produce for HIM, in this line, some inferior
substitute. Unless she were in a position to plead, definitely, that she
was jealous she should be in no position to plead, decently, that she
was dissatisfied. This latter condition would be a necessary implication
of the former; without the former behind it it would HAVE to fall to the
ground. So had the case, wonderfully, been arranged for her; there was a
card she could play, but there was only one, and to play it would be
to end the game. She felt herself—as at the small square green table,
between the tall old silver candlesticks and the neatly arranged
counters—her father’s playmate and partner; and what it constantly came
back to, in her mind, was that for her to ask a question, to raise a
doubt, to reflect in any degree on the play of the others, would be
to break the charm. The charm she had to call it, since it kept
her companion so constantly engaged, so perpetually seated and so
contentedly occupied. To say anything at all would be, in fine, to have
to say WHY she was jealous; and she could, in her private hours, but
stare long, with suffused eyes, at that impossibility.
By the end of a week, the week that had begun, especially, with her
morning hour, in Eaton Square, between her father and his wife, her
consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily
greater than her consciousness of anything else; and I must add,
moreover, that she at last found herself rather oddly wondering what
else, as a consciousness, could have been quite so overwhelming.
Charlotte’s response to the experiment of being more with her OUGHT, as
she very well knew, to have stamped the experiment with the feeling of
success; so that if the success itself seemed a boon less substantial
than the original image of it, it enjoyed thereby a certain analogy with
our young woman’s aftertaste of Amerigo’s own determined demonstrations.
Maggie was to have retained, for that matter, more than one aftertaste,
and if I have spoken of the impressions fixed in her as soon as she had,
so insidiously, taken the field, a definite note must be made of her
perception, during those moments, of Charlotte’s prompt uncertainty. She
had shown, no doubt—she couldn’t not have shown—that she had arrived
with an idea; quite exactly as she had shown her husband, the night
before, that she was awaiting him with a sentiment. This analogy in the
two situations was to keep up for her the remembrance of a kinship of
expression in the two faces in respect to which all she as yet
professed to herself was that she had affected them, or at any rate the
sensibility each of them so admirably covered, in the same way. To make
the comparison at all was, for Maggie, to return to it often, to brood
upon it, to extract from it the last dregs of its interest—to play with
it, in short, nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have played
with a medallion containing on either side a cherished little portrait
and suspended round her neck by a gold chain of a firm fineness that no
effort would ever snap. The miniatures were back to back, but she saw
them forever face to face, and when she looked from one to the other
she found in Charlotte’s eyes the gleam of the momentary “What does she
really want?” that had come and gone for her in the Prince’s. So again,
she saw the other light, the light touched into a glow both in Portland
Place and in Eaton Square, as soon as she had betrayed that she wanted
no harm—wanted no greater harm of Charlotte, that is, than to take in
that she meant to go out with her. She had been present at that process
as personally as she might have been present at some other domestic
incident—the hanging of a new picture, say, or the fitting of the
Principino with his first little trousers.
She remained present, accordingly, all the week, so charmingly and
systematically did Mrs. Verver now welcome her company. Charlotte had
but wanted the hint, and what was it but the hint, after all, that,
during the so subdued but so ineffaceable passage in the breakfast-room,
she had seen her take? It had been taken moreover not with resignation,
not with qualifications or reserves, however bland; it had been taken
with avidity, with gratitude, with a grace of gentleness that supplanted
explanations. The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed
have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter—as if
it had fairly written the Princess down as a person of variations and
had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these
caprices for law. The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that
the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, till the fit had
changed, become the sign, unfailingly, of the advent of the other; and
it was emblazoned, in rich colour, on the bright face of this period,
that Mrs. Verver only wished to know, on any occasion, what was expected
of her, only held herself there for instructions, in order even to
better them if possible. The two young women, while the passage lasted,
became again very much the companions of other days, the days of
Charlotte’s prolonged visits to the admiring and bountiful Maggie, the
days when equality of condition for them had been all the result of the
latter’s native vagueness about her own advantages. The earlier elements
flushed into life again, the frequency, the intimacy, the high pitch of
accompanying expression—appreciation, endearment, confidence; the rarer
charm produced in each by this active contribution to the felicity of
the other: all enhanced, furthermore—enhanced or qualified, who should
say which?—by a new note of diplomacy, almost of anxiety, just sensible
on Charlotte’s part in particular; of intensity of observance, in the
matter of appeal and response, in the matter of making sure the Princess
might be disposed or gratified, that resembled an attempt to play again,
with more refinement, at disparity of relation. Charlotte’s attitude
had, in short, its moments of flowering into pretty excesses of
civility, self-effacements in the presence of others, sudden little
formalisms of suggestion and recognition, that might have represented
her sense of the duty of not “losing sight” of a social distinction.
This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier
intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her companion’s
inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated,
of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting,
too, familiarly, that in addition to being important she was also
sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind
of silver tissue of decorum. It hung there above them like a canopy of
state, a reminder that though the lady-in-waiting was an established
favourite, safe in her position, a little queen, however, good-natured,
was always a little queen and might, with small warning, remember it.
And yet another of these concomitants of feverish success, all the
while, was the perception that in another quarter too things were
being made easy. Charlotte’s alacrity in meeting her had, in one sense,
operated slightly overmuch as an intervention: it had begun to reabsorb
her at the very hour of her husband’s showing her that, to be all
there, as the phrase was, he likewise only required—as one of the other
phrases was too—the straight tip. She had heard him talk about the
straight tip, in his moods of amusement at English slang, in his
remarkable displays of assimilative power, power worthy of better causes
and higher inspirations; and he had taken it from her, at need, in a way
that, certainly in the first glow of relief, had made her brief interval
seem large. Then, however, immediately, and even though superficially,
there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was,
once more, practically a little sacrificed. “I must do everything,” she
had said, “without letting papa see what I do—at least till it’s done!”
but she scarce knew how she proposed, even for the next few days, to
blind or beguile this participant in her life. What had in fact promptly
enough happened, she presently recognised, was that if her stepmother
had beautifully taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been
rather snatched again thereby from her husband’s side, so, on the
other hand, this had, with as little delay, entailed some very charming
assistance for her in Eaton Square. When she went home with Charlotte,
from whatever happy demonstration, for the benefit of the world in which
they supposed themselves to live, that there was no smallest reason why
their closer association shouldn’t be public and acclaimed—at these
times she regularly found that Amerigo had come either to sit with his
father-in-law in the absence of the ladies, or to make, on his side,
precisely some such display of the easy working of the family life as
would represent the equivalent of her excursions with Charlotte. Under
this particular impression it was that everything in Maggie most
melted and went to pieces—every thing, that is, that belonged to
her disposition to challenge the perfection of their common state. It
divided them again, that was true, this particular turn of the tide—cut
them up afresh into pairs and parties; quite as if a sense for the
equilibrium was what, between them all, had most power of insistence;
quite as if Amerigo himself were all the while, at bottom, equally
thinking of it and watching it. But, as against that, he was making her
father not miss her, and he could have rendered neither of them a more
excellent service. He was acting in short on a cue, the cue given him
by observation; it had been enough for him to see the shade of change
in her behaviour; his instinct for relations, the most exquisite
conceivable, prompted him immediately to meet and match the difference,
to play somehow into its hands. That was what it was, she renewedly
felt, to have married a man who was, sublimely, a gentleman; so that,
in spite of her not wanting to translate ALL their delicacies into the
grossness of discussion, she yet found again and again, in Portland
Place, moments for saying: “If I didn’t love you, you know, for
yourself, I should still love you for HIM.” He looked at her, after
such speeches, as Charlotte looked, in Eaton Square, when she called HER
attention to his benevolence: through the dimness of the almost musing
smile that took account of her extravagance, harmless though it might
be, as a tendency to reckon with. “But my poor child,” Charlotte might
under this pressure have been on the point of replying, “that’s the way
nice people ARE, all round—so that why should one be surprised about
it? We’re all nice together—as why shouldn’t we be? If we hadn’t been
we wouldn’t have gone far—and I consider that we’ve gone very far
indeed. Why should you ‘take on’ as if you weren’t a perfect dear
yourself, capable of all the sweetest things?—as if you hadn’t in fact
grown up in an atmosphere, the atmosphere of all the good things that
I recognised, even of old, as soon as I came near you, and that you’ve
allowed me now, between you, to make so blessedly my own.” Mrs. Verver
might in fact have but just failed to make another point, a point
charmingly natural to her as a grateful and irreproachable wife. “It
isn’t a bit wonderful, I may also remind you, that your husband should
find, when opportunity permits, worse things to do than to go about with
mine. I happen, love, to appreciate my husband—I happen perfectly to
understand that his acquaintance should be cultivated and his company
enjoyed.”
Some such happily-provoked remarks as these, from Charlotte, at the
other house, had been in the air, but we have seen how there was also
in the air, for our young woman, as an emanation from the same source,
a distilled difference of which the very principle was to keep down
objections and retorts. That impression came back—it had its hours of
doing so; and it may interest us on the ground of its having prompted
in Maggie a final reflection, a reflection out of the heart of which a
light flashed for her like a great flower grown in a night. As soon as
this light had spread a little it produced in some quarters a surprising
distinctness, made her of a sudden ask herself why there should have
been even for three days the least obscurity. The perfection of her
success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been
noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking
at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her.
The word for it, the word that flashed the light, was that they were
TREATING her, that they were proceeding with her—and, for that matter,
with her father—by a plan that was the exact counterpart of her own.
It was not from her that they took their cue, but—and this was what
in particular made her sit up—from each other; and with a depth of
unanimity, an exact coincidence of inspiration that, when once her
attention had begun to fix it, struck her as staring out at her in
recovered identities of behaviour, expression and tone. They had a view
of her situation, and of the possible forms her own consciousness of it
might take—a view determined by the change of attitude they had had,
ever so subtly, to recognise in her on their return from Matcham. They
had had to read into this small and all-but-suppressed variation a mute
comment—on they didn’t quite know what; and it now arched over the
Princess’s head like a vault of bold span that important communication
between them on the subject couldn’t have failed of being immediate.
This new perception bristled for her, as we have said, with odd
intimations, but questions unanswered played in and out of it as
well—the question, for instance, of why such promptitude of harmony
SHOULD have been important. Ah, when she began to recover, piece by
piece, the process became lively; she might have been picking small
shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent,
in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged to the last grain the
refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of
Amerigo, that evening, in arrest at the door of her salottino while her
eyes, from her placed chair, took him in—then it was that this immense
little memory gave out its full power. Since the question was of doors,
she had afterwards, she now saw, shut it out; she had responsibly shut
in, as we have understood, shut in there with her sentient self, only
the fact of his reappearance and the plenitude of his presence. These
things had been testimony, after all, to supersede any other, for on the
spot, even while she looked, the warmly-washing wave had travelled far
up the strand. She had subsequently lived, for hours she couldn’t count,
under the dizzying, smothering welter positively in submarine
depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and
mother-of-pearl; though indeed she had got her head above them, for
breath, when face to face with Charlotte again, on the morrow, in Eaton
Square. Meanwhile, none the less, as was so apparent, the prior, the
prime impression had remained, in the manner of a spying servant, on the
other side of the barred threshold; a witness availing himself, in time,
of the lightest pretext to re-enter. It was as if he had found this
pretext in her observed necessity of comparing—comparing the obvious
common elements in her husband’s and her stepmother’s ways of now
“taking” her. With or without her witness, at any rate, she was led by
comparison to a sense of the quantity of earnest intention operating,
and operating so harmoniously, between her companions; and it was in
the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had made out the
promise of her dawn.
It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her, for their
behaving to her quite nobly; to which each had, in some winning way,
induced the other to contribute, and which therefore, so far as that
went, proved that she had become with them a subject of intimate study.
Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously,
before they SHOULD, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled
from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which, for all these
days, her own idea had been profiting. They had built her in with their
purpose—which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch;
so that she sat there, in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in
a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of
which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck. Baths of
benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of
some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not
so immersed save by one’s request. It wasn’t in the least what she
had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired
flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra
allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all she hadn’t complained, not by the
quaver of a syllable—so what wound in particular had she shown her fear
of receiving? What wound HAD she received—as to which she had exchanged
the least word with them? If she had ever whined or moped they might
have had some reason; but she would be hanged—she conversed with
herself in strong language—if she had been, from beginning to end,
anything but pliable and mild. It all came back, in consequence, to some
required process of their own, a process operating, quite positively,
as a precaution and a policy. They had got her into the bath and, for
consistency with themselves—which was with each other—must keep her
there. In that condition she wouldn’t interfere with the policy, which
was established, which was arranged. Her thought, over this, arrived at
a great intensity—had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to
take afterwards a further and lighter spring. The ground was well-nigh
covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as
directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement. Policy or no
policy, it was they themselves who were arranged. She must be kept in
position so as not to DISarrange them. It fitted immensely together, the
whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive; for, strangely
as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she had hitherto not
imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her
own. Of course they were arranged—all four arranged; but what had
the basis of their life been, precisely, but that they were arranged
together? Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she—to
confine the matter only to herself—was arranged apart. It rushed over
her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of
the breaking wave of ten days before; and as her father himself seemed
not to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during the first
shock of complete perception, she tried to steady herself, she felt very
much alone.