There had been, from far back—that is from the Christmas time on—a
plan that the parent and the child should “do something lovely”
together, and they had recurred to it on occasion, nursed it and brought
it up theoretically, though without as yet quite allowing it to put its
feet to the ground. The most it had done was to try a few steps on the
drawing-room carpet, with much attendance, on either side, much holding
up and guarding, much anticipation, in fine, of awkwardness or accident.
Their companions, by the same token, had constantly assisted at the
performance, following the experiment with sympathy and gaiety, and
never so full of applause, Maggie now made out for herself, as when the
infant project had kicked its little legs most wildly—kicked them, for
all the world, across the Channel and half the Continent, kicked them
over the Pyrenees and innocently crowed out some rich Spanish name. She
asked herself at present if it had been a “real” belief that they were
but wanting, for some such adventure, to snatch their moment; whether
either had at any instant seen it as workable, save in the form of a toy
to dangle before the other, that they should take flight, without
wife or husband, for one more look, “before they died,” at the Madrid
pictures as well as for a drop of further weak delay in respect to three
or four possible prizes, privately offered, rarities of the first water,
responsibly reported on and profusely photographed, still patiently
awaiting their noiseless arrival in retreats to which the clue had not
otherwise been given away. The vision dallied with during the duskier
days in Eaton Square had stretched to the span of three or four weeks
of springtime for the total adventure, three or four weeks in the very
spirit, after all, of their regular life, as their regular life had
been persisting; full of shared mornings, afternoons, evenings, walks,
drives, “looks-in,” at old places, on vague chances; full also, in
especial, of that purchased social ease, the sense of the comfort and
credit of their house, which had essentially the perfection of something
paid for, but which “came,” on the whole, so cheap that it might have
been felt as costing—as costing the parent and child—nothing. It was
for Maggie to wonder, at present, if she had been sincere about their
going, to ask herself whether she would have stuck to their plan even if
nothing had happened.
Her view of the impossibility of sticking to it now may give us the
measure of her sense that everything had happened. A difference had been
made in her relation to each of her companions, and what it compelled
her to say to herself was that to behave as she might have behaved
before would be to act, for Amerigo and Charlotte, with the highest
hypocrisy. She saw in these days that a journey abroad with her father
would, more than anything else, have amounted, on his part and her own,
to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of
the idea, in fact, had been in some such sublimity. Day after day
she put off the moment of “speaking,” as she inwardly and very
comprehensively, called it—speaking, that is, to her father; and all
the more that she was ridden by a strange suspense as to his himself
breaking silence. She gave him time, gave him, during several days, that
morning, that noon, that night, and the next and the next and the next;
even made up her mind that if he stood off longer it would be proof
conclusive that he too wasn’t at peace. They would then have been, all
successfully, throwing dust in each other’s eyes; and it would be at
last as if they must turn away their faces, since the silver mist that
protected them had begun to grow sensibly thin. Finally, at the end of
April, she decided that if he should say nothing for another period of
twenty-four hours she must take it as showing that they were, in her
private phraseology, lost; so little possible sincerity could there be
in pretending to care for a journey to Spain at the approach of a summer
that already promised to be hot. Such a proposal, on his lips, such an
extravagance of optimism, would be HIS way of being consistent—for that
he didn’t really want to move, or to move further, at the worst, than
back to Fawns again, could only signify that he wasn’t, at heart,
contented. What he wanted, at any rate, and what he didn’t want were, in
the event, put to the proof for Maggie just in time to give her a fresh
wind. She had been dining, with her husband, in Eaton Square, on the
occasion of hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to Lord and Lady
Castledean. The propriety of some demonstration of this sort had been
for many days before our group, the question reduced to the mere issue
of which of the two houses should first take the field. The issue had
been easily settled—in the manner of every issue referred in any degree
to Amerigo and Charlotte: the initiative obviously belonged to Mrs.
Verver, who had gone to Matcham while Maggie had stayed away, and the
evening in Eaton Square might have passed for a demonstration all the
more personal that the dinner had been planned on “intimate” lines. Six
other guests only, in addition to the host and the hostess of Matcham,
made up the company, and each of these persons had for Maggie the
interest of an attested connection with the Easter revels at that
visionary house. Their common memory of an occasion that had clearly
left behind it an ineffaceable charm—this air of beatific reference,
less subdued in the others than in Amerigo and Charlotte, lent them,
together, an inscrutable comradeship against which the young woman’s
imagination broke in a small vain wave.
It wasn’t that she wished she had been of the remembered party and
possessed herself of its secrets; for she didn’t care about its
secrets—she could concern herself at present, absolutely, with no
secret but her own. What occurred was simply that she became aware, at a
stroke, of the quantity of further nourishment required by her own, and
of the amount of it she might somehow extract from these people; whereby
she rose, of a sudden, to the desire to possess and use them, even to
the extent of braving, of fairly defying, of directly exploiting, of
possibly quite enjoying, under cover of an evil duplicity, the felt
element of curiosity with which they regarded her. Once she was
conscious of the flitting wing of this last impression—the perception,
irresistible, that she was something for their queer experience, just as
they were something for hers—there was no limit to her conceived design
of not letting them escape. She went and went, again, to-night, after
her start was taken; went, positively, as she had felt herself going,
three weeks before, on the morning when the vision of her father and
his wife awaiting her together in the breakfast-room had been so
determinant. In this other scene it was Lady Castledean who was
determinant, who kindled the light, or at all events the heat, and who
acted on the nerves; Lady Castledean whom she knew she, so oddly, didn’t
like, in spite of reasons upon reasons, the biggest diamonds on the
yellowest hair, the longest lashes on the prettiest, falsest eyes,
the oldest lace on the most violet velvet, the rightest manner on the
wrongest assumption. Her ladyship’s assumption was that she kept, at
every moment of her life, every advantage—it made her beautifully soft,
very nearly generous; so she didn’t distinguish the little protuberant
eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such a range, from
the other decorative spots on their bodies and wings. Maggie had liked,
in London, and in the world at large, so many more people than she
had thought it right to fear, right even to so much as judge, that it
positively quickened her fever to have to recognise, in this case, such
a lapse of all the sequences. It was only that a charming clever woman
wondered about her—that is wondered about her as Amerigo’s wife, and
wondered, moreover, with the intention of kindness and the spontaneity,
almost, of surprise.
The point of view—that one—was what she read in their free
contemplation, in that of the whole eight; there was something in
Amerigo to be explained, and she was passed about, all tenderly
and expertly, like a dressed doll held, in the right manner, by its
firmly-stuffed middle, for the account she could give. She might have
been made to give it by pressure of her stomach; she might have been
expected to articulate, with a rare imitation of nature, “Oh yes, I’m
HERE all the while; I’m also in my way a solid little fact and I cost
originally a great deal of money: cost, that is, my father, for
my outfit, and let in my husband for an amount of pains—toward my
training—that money would scarce represent.” Well, she WOULD meet them
in some such way, and she translated her idea into action, after dinner,
before they dispersed, by engaging them all, unconventionally, almost
violently, to dine with her in Portland Place, just as they were, if
they didn’t mind the same party, which was the party she wanted. Oh she
was going, she was going—she could feel it afresh; it was a good deal
as if she had sneezed ten times or had suddenly burst into a comic song.
There were breaks in the connection, as there would be hitches in the
process; she didn’t wholly see, yet, what they would do for her, nor
quite how, herself, she should handle them; but she was dancing up and
down, beneath her propriety, with the thought that she had at least
begun something—she so fairly liked to feel that she was a point for
convergence of wonder. It wasn’t after all, either, that THEIR wonder so
much signified—that of the cornered six, whom it glimmered before her
that she might still live to drive about like a flock of sheep: the
intensity of her consciousness, its sharpest savour, was in the theory
of her having diverted, having, as they said, captured the attention
of Amerigo and Charlotte, at neither of whom, all the while, did she
so much as once look. She had pitched them in with the six, for that
matter, so far as they themselves were concerned; they had dropped, for
the succession of minutes, out of contact with their function—had, in
short, startled and impressed, abandoned their post. “They’re paralysed,
they’re paralysed!” she commented, deep within; so much it helped her
own apprehension to hang together that they should suddenly lose their
bearings.
Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion to her view of
causes; but it came to her then and there that if she could only get the
facts of appearance straight, only jam them down into their place, the
reasons lurking behind them, kept uncertain, for the eyes, by their
wavering and shifting, wouldn’t perhaps be able to help showing. It
wasn’t of course that the Prince and Mrs. Verver marvelled to see her
civil to their friends; it was rather, precisely, that civil was just
what she wasn’t: she had so departed from any such custom of delicate
approach—approach by the permitted note, the suggested “if,” the
accepted vagueness—as would enable the people in question to put
her off if they wished. And the profit of her plan, the effect of the
violence she was willing to let it go for, was exactly in their BEING
the people in question, people she had seemed to be rather shy of before
and for whom she suddenly opened her mouth so wide. Later on, we may
add, with the ground soon covered by her agitated but resolute step, it
was to cease to matter what people they were or weren’t; but meanwhile
the particular sense of them that she had taken home to-night had done
her the service of seeming to break the ice where that formation was
thickest. Still more unexpectedly, the service might have been the same
for her father; inasmuch as, immediately, when everyone had gone, he did
exactly what she had been waiting for and despairing of—and did it, as
he did everything, with a simplicity that left any purpose of sounding
him deeper, of drawing him out further, of going, in his own frequent
phrase, “behind” what he said, nothing whatever to do. He brought it out
straight, made it bravely and beautifully irrelevant, save for the plea
of what they should lose by breaking the charm: “I guess we won’t go
down there after all, will we, Mag?—just when it’s getting so pleasant
here.” That was all, with nothing to lead up to it; but it was done
for her at a stroke, and done, not less, more rather, for Amerigo and
Charlotte, on whom the immediate effect, as she secretly, as she almost
breathlessly measured it, was prodigious. Everything now so fitted for
her to everything else that she could feel the effect as prodigious even
while sticking to her policy of giving the pair no look. There were thus
some five wonderful minutes during which they loomed, to her sightless
eyes, on either side of her, larger than they had ever loomed before,
larger than life, larger than thought, larger than any danger or any
safety. There was thus a space of time, in fine, fairly vertiginous for
her, during which she took no more account of them than if they were not
in the room.
She had never, never treated them in any such way—not even just now,
when she had plied her art upon the Matcham band; her present manner was
an intenser exclusion, and the air was charged with their silence while
she talked with her other companion as if she had nothing but him to
consider. He had given her the note amazingly, by his allusion to the
pleasantness—that of such an occasion as his successful dinner—which
might figure as their bribe for renouncing; so that it was all as if
they were speaking selfishly, counting on a repetition of just such
extensions of experience. Maggie achieved accordingly an act of
unprecedented energy, threw herself into her father’s presence as by the
absolute consistency with which she held his eyes; saying to herself,
at the same time that she smiled and talked and inaugurated her system,
“What does he mean by it? That’s the question—what does he mean?”
but studying again all the signs in him that recent anxiety had made
familiar and counting the stricken minutes on the part of the others. It
was in their silence that the others loomed, as she felt; she had had
no measure, she afterwards knew, of this duration, but it drew out
and out—really to what would have been called in simpler conditions
awkwardness—as if she herself were stretching the cord. Ten minutes
later, however, in the homeward carriage, to which her husband, cutting
delay short, had proceeded at the first announcement, ten minutes later
she was to stretch it almost to breaking. The Prince had permitted her
to linger much less, before his move to the door, than they usually
lingered at the gossiping close of such evenings; which she, all
responsive, took for a sign of his impatience to modify for her the
odd effect of his not having, and of Charlotte’s not having, instantly
acclaimed the issue of the question debated, or more exactly, settled,
before them. He had had time to become aware of this possible impression
in her, and his virtually urging her into the carriage was connected
with his feeling that he must take action on the new ground. A certain
ambiguity in her would absolutely have tormented him; but he had already
found something to soothe and correct—as to which she had, on her side,
a shrewd notion of what it would be. She was herself, for that matter,
prepared, and she was, of a truth, as she took her seat in the brougham,
amazed at her preparation. It allowed her scarce an interval; she
brought it straight out.
“I was certain that was what father would say if I should leave him
alone. I HAVE been leaving him alone, and you see the effect. He
hates now to move—he likes too much to be with us. But if you see the
effect”—she felt herself magnificently keeping it up—“perhaps you
don’t see the cause. The cause, my dear, is too lovely.”
Her husband, on taking his place beside her, had, during a minute or
two, for her watching sense, neither said nor done anything; he had
been, for that sense, as if thinking, waiting, deciding: yet it was
still before he spoke that he, as she felt it to be, definitely
acted. He put his arm round her and drew her close—indulged in the
demonstration, the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the infinite
pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so
often suggested and prescribed. Held, accordingly, and, as she could but
too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited, she had said the thing she
was intending and desiring to say, and as to which she felt, even more
than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do she mustn’t be
irresponsible. Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what
that was; but she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived
responsibility, and the extraordinary thing was that, of the two
intensities, the second was presently to become the sharper. He took his
time for it meanwhile, but he met her speech after a fashion.
“The cause of your father’s deciding not to go?”
“Yes, and of my having wanted to let it act for him quietly—I mean
without my insistence.” She had, in her compressed state, another pause,
and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting. Strange enough
was this sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing, by
miraculous help, some advantage that, absolutely then and there, in the
carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep. Strange,
inexpressibly strange—so distinctly she saw that if she did give it up
she should somehow give up everything for ever. And what her husband’s
grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she SHOULD
give it up: it was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing
magic. He KNEW HOW to resort to it—he could be, on occasion, as she had
lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover: all of which was,
precisely, a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in
him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for
charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life. She should have but
to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it
definite for him that she didn’t resist. To this, as they went, every
throb of her consciousness prompted her—every throb, that is, but one,
the throb of her deeper need to know where she “really” was. By the time
she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping
her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of
the carriage-window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had
risen, indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk. She was making
an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn’t cry out, her eyes
swam in her silence. With them, all the same, through the square opening
beside her, through the grey panorama of the London night, she achieved
the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted; and her lips helped
and protected her by being able to be gay. “It’s not to leave YOU, my
dear—for that he’ll give up anything; just as he would go off anywhere,
I think, you know, if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone,”
Maggie pursued with her gaze out of her window.
For which Amerigo’s answer again took him a moment. “Ah, the dear old
boy! You would like me to propose him something—?”
“Well, if you think you could bear it.”
“And leave,” the Prince asked, “you and Charlotte alone?”
“Why not?” Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke it came
clear. “Why shouldn’t Charlotte be just one of MY reasons—my not liking
to leave her? She has always been so good, so perfect, to me—but
never so wonderfully as just now. We have somehow been more
together—thinking, for the time, almost only of each other; it has been
quite as in old days.” And she proceeded consummately, for she felt it
as consummate: “It’s as if we had been missing each other, had got a
little apart—though going on so side by side. But the good moments,
if one only waits for them,” she hastened to add, “come round of
themselves. Moreover you’ve seen for yourself, since you’ve made it
up so to father; feeling, for yourself, in your beautiful way, every
difference, every air that blows; not having to be told or pushed, only
being perfect to live with, through your habit of kindness and your
exquisite instincts. But of course you’ve seen, all the while, that both
he and I have deeply felt how you’ve managed; managed that he hasn’t
been too much alone and that I, on my side, haven’t appeared, to—what
you might call—neglect him. This is always,” she continued, “what I
can never bless you enough for; of all the good things you’ve done for
me you’ve never done anything better.” She went on explaining as for the
pleasure of explaining—even though knowing he must recognise, as a
part of his easy way too, her description of his large liberality. “Your
taking the child down yourself, those days, and your coming, each
time, to bring him away—nothing in the world, nothing you could have
invented, would have kept father more under the charm. Besides, you know
how you’ve always suited him, and how you’ve always so beautifully let
it seem to him that he suits you. Only it has been, these last weeks, as
if you wished—just in order to please him—to remind him of it afresh.
So there it is,” she wound up; “it’s your doing. You’ve produced your
effect—that of his wanting not to be, even for a month or two, where
you’re not. He doesn’t want to bother or bore you—THAT, I think, you
know, he never has done; and if you’ll only give me time I’ll come round
again to making it my care, as always, that he shan’t. But he can’t bear
you out of his sight.”
She had kept it up and up, filling it out, crowding it in; and all,
really, without difficulty, for it was, every word of it, thanks to a
long evolution of feeling, what she had been primed to the brim
with. She made the picture, forced it upon him, hung it before him;
remembering, happily, how he had gone so far, one day, supported by the
Principino, as to propose the Zoo in Eaton Square, to carry with him
there, on the spot, under this pleasant inspiration, both his elder and
his younger companion, with the latter of whom he had taken the tone
that they were introducing Granddaddy, Granddaddy nervous and rather
funking it, to lions and tigers more or less at large. Touch by touch
she thus dropped into her husband’s silence the truth about his good
nature and his good manners; and it was this demonstration of his
virtue, precisely, that added to the strangeness, even for herself, of
her failing as yet to yield to him. It would be a question but of
the most trivial act of surrender, the vibration of a nerve, the mere
movement of a muscle; but the act grew important between them just
through her doing perceptibly nothing, nothing but talk in the very tone
that would naturally have swept her into tenderness. She knew more
and more—every lapsing minute taught her—how he might by a single
rightness make her cease to watch him; that rightness, a million miles
removed from the queer actual, falling so short, which would consist
of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy
inconsequence. “Come away with me, somewhere, YOU—and then we needn’t
think, we needn’t even talk, of anything, of anyone else:” five words
like that would answer her, would break her utterly down. But they were
the only ones that would so serve. She waited for them, and there was
a supreme instant when, by the testimony of all the rest of him, she
seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips; only they didn’t
sound, and as that made her wait again so it made her more intensely
watch. This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how
much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn’t come. Yes, it
wouldn’t come if he didn’t answer her, if he but said the wrong things
instead of the right. If he could say the right everything would
come—it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise for their
recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility glowed at her,
however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn cold, and as it fell away
from her she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed
to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her
attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being. They had silences,
at last, that were almost crudities of mutual resistance—silences that
persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he
had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking
to him, as a manner of making love to him. Ah, it was no such manner,
heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if this had been in
question, better than that! On top of which it came to her presently
to say, keeping in with what she had already spoken: “Except of course
that, for the question of going off somewhere, he’d go readily, quite
delightedly, with you. I verily believe he’d like to have you for a
while to himself.”
“Do you mean he thinks of proposing it?” the Prince after a moment
sounded.
“Oh no—he doesn’t ask, as you must so often have seen. But I believe
he’d go ‘like a shot,’ as you say, if you were to suggest it.”
It had the air, she knew, of a kind of condition made, and she had asked
herself while she spoke if it wouldn’t cause his arm to let her go. The
fact that it didn’t suggested to her that she had made him, of a sudden,
still more intensely think, think with such concentration that he could
do but one thing at once. And it was precisely as if the concentration
had the next moment been proved in him. He took a turn inconsistent with
the superficial impression—a jump that made light of their approach to
gravity and represented for her the need in him to gain time. That she
made out, was his drawback—that the warning from her had come to him,
and had come to Charlotte, after all, too suddenly. That they were in
face of it rearranging, that they had to rearrange, was all before her
again; yet to do as they would like they must enjoy a snatch, longer or
shorter, of recovered independence. Amerigo, for the instant, was but
doing as he didn’t like, and it was as if she were watching his effort
without disguise. “What’s your father’s idea, this year, then, about
Fawns? Will he go at Whitsuntide, and will he then stay on?”
Maggie went through the form of thought. “He will really do, I imagine,
as he has, in so many ways, so often done before; do whatever may seem
most agreeable to yourself. And there’s of course always Charlotte to be
considered. Only their going early to Fawns, if they do go,” she said,
“needn’t in the least entail your and my going.”
“Ah,” Amerigo echoed, “it needn’t in the least entail your and my
going?”
“We can do as we like. What they may do needn’t trouble us, since
they’re by good fortune perfectly happy together.”
“Oh,” the Prince returned, “your father’s never so happy as with you
near him to enjoy his being so.”
“Well, I may enjoy it,” said Maggie, “but I’m not the cause of it.”
“You’re the cause,” her husband declared, “of the greater part of
everything that’s good among us.” But she received this tribute in
silence, and the next moment he pursued: “If Mrs. Verver has arrears
of time with you to make up, as you say, she’ll scarcely do it—or you
scarcely will—by our cutting, your and my cutting, too loose.”
“I see what you mean,” Maggie mused.
He let her for a little to give her attention to it; after which, “Shall
I just quite, of a sudden,” he asked, “propose him a journey?”
Maggie hesitated, but she brought forth the fruit of reflection. “It
would have the merit that Charlotte then would be with me—with me, I
mean, so much more. Also that I shouldn’t, by choosing such a time for
going away, seem unconscious and ungrateful, seem not to respond,
seem in fact rather to wish to shake her off. I should respond, on the
contrary, very markedly—by being here alone with her for a month.”
“And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?”
“I could do with it beautifully. Or we might even,” she said quite
gaily, “go together down to Fawns.”
“You could be so very content without me?” the Prince presently
inquired.
“Yes, my own dear—if you could be content for a while with father. That
would keep me up. I might, for the time,” she went on, “go to stay there
with Charlotte; or, better still, she might come to Portland Place.”
“Oho!” said the Prince with cheerful vagueness.
“I should feel, you see,” she continued, “that the two of us were
showing the same sort of kindness.”
Amerigo thought. “The two of us? Charlotte and I?”
Maggie again hesitated. “You and I, darling.”
“I see, I see”—he promptly took it in. “And what reason shall I
give—give, I mean, your father?”
“For asking him to go off? Why, the very simplest—if you
conscientiously can. The desire,” said Maggie, “to be agreeable to him.
Just that only.”
Something in this reply made her husband again reflect.
“‘Conscientiously?’ Why shouldn’t I conscientiously? It wouldn’t, by
your own contention,” he developed, “represent any surprise for him. I
must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the
world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”
Ah, there it was again, for Maggie—the note already sounded, the note
of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she
asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least,
as little as herself? With their stillness together so perfect, what
had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them? Her inner
vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it, in the others,
as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to
Charlotte. Before she was well aware, accordingly, she had echoed in
this intensity of thought Amerigo’s last words. “You’re the last person
in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”
She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it
the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband’s eyes on her
face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her
because he was struck, and looking hard—though his answer, when it
came, was straight enough. “Why, isn’t that just what we have been
talking about—that I’ve affected you as fairly studying his comfort and
his pleasure? He might show his sense of it,” the Prince went on, “by
proposing to ME an excursion.”
“And you would go with him?” Maggie immediately asked.
He hung fire but an instant. “Per Dio!”
She also had her pause, but she broke it—since gaiety was in the
air—with an intense smile. “You can say that safely, because the
proposal’s one that, of his own motion, he won’t make.”
She couldn’t have narrated afterwards—and in fact was at a loss to tell
herself—by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change
in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of
interval established, almost confessed to, between them. She felt it in
the tone with which he repeated, after her, “‘Safely’—?”
“Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all, in such a
case, too long. He’s a person to think you might easily feel yourself to
be. So it won’t,” Maggie said, “come from father. He’s too modest.”
Their eyes continued to meet on it, from corner to corner of the
brougham. “Oh your modesty, between you—!” But he still smiled for it.
“So that unless I insist—?”
“We shall simply go on as we are.”
“Well, we’re going on beautifully,” he answered—though by no means
with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of
attempted capture and achieved escape, had not taken place. As Maggie
said nothing, none the less, to gainsay his remark, it was open to him
to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea. “I
wonder if it would do. I mean for me to break in.”
“‘To break in’—?”
“Between your father and his wife. But there would be a way,” he
said—“we can make Charlotte ask him.” And then as Maggie herself now
wondered, echoing it again: “We can suggest to her to suggest to him
that he shall let me take him off.”
“Oh!” said Maggie.
“Then if he asks her why I so suddenly break out she’ll be able to tell
him the reason.”
They were stopping, and the footman, who had alighted, had rung at the
house-door. “That you think it would be so charming?”
“That I think it would be so charming. That we’ve persuaded HER will be
convincing.”
“I see,” Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out. “I
see,” she said again; though she felt a little disconcerted. What she
really saw, of a sudden, was that her stepmother might report her as
above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her
need that her father shouldn’t think her concerned in any degree for
anything. She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat;
her husband, to let her out, had passed before her, and, a little in
advance, he awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high,
that preceded their open entrance, on either side of which one of their
servants stood. The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose
before her, and there was something in Amerigo’s very face, while his
eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight, that was like a
conscious reminder of it. He had answered her, just before, distinctly,
and it appeared to leave her nothing to say. It was almost as if, having
planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was
almost as if—in the strangest way in the world—he were paying her
back, by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for
the way she had slipped from him during their drive.