Maggie was to feel, after this passage, how they had both been helped
through it by the influence of that accident of her having been caught,
a few nights before, in the familiar embrace of her father’s wife.
His return to the saloon had chanced to coincide exactly with this
demonstration, missed moreover neither by her husband nor by
the Assinghams, who, their card-party suspended, had quitted the
billiard-room with him. She had been conscious enough at the time of
what such an impression, received by the others, might, in that extended
state, do for her case; and none the less that, as no one had appeared
to wish to be the first to make a remark about it, it had taken on
perceptibly the special shade of consecration conferred by unanimities
of silence. The effect, she might have considered, had been almost
awkward—the promptitude of her separation from Charlotte, as if
they had been discovered in some absurdity, on her becoming aware
of spectators. The spectators, on the other hand—that was the
appearance—mightn’t have supposed them, in the existing relation,
addicted to mutual endearments; and yet, hesitating with a fine scruple
between sympathy and hilarity, must have felt that almost any spoken
or laughed comment could be kept from sounding vulgar only by sounding,
beyond any permitted measure, intelligent. They had evidently looked,
the two young wives, like a pair of women “making up” effusively, as
women were supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after
a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would imply, on
her father’s part, on Amerigo’s, and on Fanny Assingham’s, some
proportionate vision of the grounds of their difference. There had
been something, there had been but too much, in the incident, for each
observer; yet there was nothing any one could have said without
seeming essentially to say: “See, see, the dear things—their quarrel’s
blissfully over!” “Our quarrel? What quarrel?” the dear things
themselves would necessarily, in that case, have demanded; and the
wits of the others would thus have been called upon for some agility of
exercise. No one had been equal to the flight of producing, off-hand, a
fictive reason for any estrangement—to take, that is, the place of the
true, which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air;
and every one, accordingly, not to be inconveniently challenged, was
pretending, immediately after, to have remarked nothing that any one
else hadn’t.
Maggie’s own measure had remained, all the same, full of the reflection
caught from the total inference; which had acted, virtually, by enabling
every one present—and oh Charlotte not least!—to draw a long breath.
The message of the little scene had been different for each, but it
had been this, markedly, all round, that it reinforced—reinforced even
immensely—the general effort, carried on from week to week and of late
distinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as if nothing in
life were the matter. Supremely, however, while this glass was held
up to her, had Maggie’s sense turned to the quality of the success
constituted, on the spot, for Charlotte. Most of all, if she was
guessing how her father must have secretly started, how her husband must
have secretly wondered, how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in
a flash, seen daylight for herself—most of all had she tasted, by
communication, of the high profit involved for her companion. She
FELT, in all her pulses, Charlotte feel it, and how publicity had been
required, absolutely, to crown her own abasement. It was the added
touch, and now nothing was wanting—which, to do her stepmother
justice, Mrs. Verver had appeared but to desire, from that evening, to
show, with the last vividness, that she recognised. Maggie lived over
again the minutes in question—had found herself repeatedly doing so; to
the degree that the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense, as
a thing appointed by some occult power that had dealt with her, that had
for instance—animated the four with just the right restlessness too,
had decreed and directed and exactly timed it in them, making their
game of bridge—however abysmal a face it had worn for her—give way,
precisely, to their common unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate
Charlotte’s impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached
detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming in her queerness
and was, for all their simulated blindness, not roaming unnoted.
If Mrs. Verver meanwhile, then, had struck her as determined in a
certain direction by the last felicity into which that night had
flowered, our young woman was yet not to fail of appreciating the truth
that she had not been put at ease, after all, with absolute permanence.
Maggie had seen her, unmistakably, desire to rise to the occasion and
be magnificent—seen her decide that the right way for this would be to
prove that the reassurance she had extorted there, under the high, cool
lustre of the saloon, a twinkle of crystal and silver, had not only
poured oil upon the troubled waters of their question, but had fairly
drenched their whole intercourse with that lubricant. She had exceeded
the limit of discretion in this insistence on her capacity to repay
in proportion a service she acknowledged as handsome. “Why handsome?”
Maggie would have been free to ask; since if she had been veracious the
service assuredly would not have been huge. It would in that case have
come up vividly, and for each of them alike, that the truth, on the
Princess’s lips, presented no difficulty. If the latter’s mood, in fact,
could have turned itself at all to private gaiety it might have failed
to resist the diversion of seeing so clever a creature so beguiled.
Charlotte’s theory of a generous manner was manifestly to express that
her stepdaughter’s word, wiping out, as she might have said, everything,
had restored them to the serenity of a relation without a cloud. It had
been, in short, in this light, ideally conclusive, so that no ghost of
anything it referred to could ever walk again. What was the ecstasy of
that, however, but in itself a trifle compromising?—as truly, within
the week, Maggie had occasion to suspect her friend of beginning,
and rather abruptly, to remember. Convinced as she was of the example
already given her by her husband, and in relation to which her
profession of trust in his mistress had been an act of conformity
exquisitely calculated, her imagination yet sought in the hidden play of
his influence the explanation of any change of surface, any difference
of expression or intention. There had been, through life, as we know,
few quarters in which the Princess’s fancy could let itself loose; but
it shook off restraint when it plunged into the figured void of
the detail of that relation. This was a realm it could people with
images—again and again with fresh ones; they swarmed there like the
strange combinations that lurked in the woods at twilight; they loomed
into the definite and faded into the vague, their main present sign
for her being, however, that they were always, that they were duskily,
agitated. Her earlier vision of a state of bliss made insecure by the
very intensity of the bliss—this had dropped from her; she had ceased
to see, as she lost herself, the pair of operatic, of high Wagnerian
lovers (she found, deep within her, these comparisons) interlocked in
their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as one’s dream of
an old German forest. The picture was veiled, on the contrary, with
the dimness of trouble; behind which she felt, indistinguishable, the
procession of forms that had lost, all so pitifully, their precious
confidence. Therefore, though there was in these days, for her, with
Amerigo, little enough even of the imitation, from day to day, of
unembarrassed references—as she had foreseen, for that matter, from the
first, that there would be—her active conception of his accessibility
to their companion’s own private and unextinguished right to break
ground was not much less active than before. So it was that her inner
sense, in spite of everything, represented him as still pulling wires
and controlling currents, or rather indeed as muffling the whole
possibility, keeping it down and down, leading his accomplice
continually on to some new turn of the road. As regards herself Maggie
had become more conscious from week to week of his ingenuities of
intention to make up to her for their forfeiture, in so dire a degree,
of any reality of frankness—a privation that had left on his lips
perhaps a little of the same thirst with which she fairly felt her own
distorted, the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens in desert sands
for the possible, the impossible, plash of water. It was just this
hampered state in him, none the less, that she kept before her when she
wished most to find grounds of dignity for the hard little passion
which nothing he had done could smother. There were hours enough,
lonely hours, in which she let dignity go; then there were others when,
clinging with her winged concentration to some deep cell of her heart,
she stored away her hived tenderness as if she had gathered it all from
flowers. He was walking ostensibly beside her, but in fact given over,
without a break, to the grey medium in which he helplessly groped; a
perception on her part which was a perpetual pang and which might last
what it would—for ever if need be—but which, if relieved at all, must
be relieved by his act alone. She herself could do nothing more for it;
she had done the utmost possible. It was meantime not the easier to bear
for this aspect under which Charlotte was presented as depending on him
for guidance, taking it from him even in doses of bitterness, and yet
lost with him in devious depths. Nothing was thus more sharply to be
inferred than that he had promptly enough warned her, on hearing from
her of the precious assurance received from his wife, that she must take
care her satisfaction didn’t betray something of her danger. Maggie
had a day of still waiting, after allowing him time to learn how
unreservedly she had lied for him—of waiting as for the light of she
scarce knew what slow-shining reflection of this knowledge in his
personal attitude. What retarded evolution, she asked herself in these
hours, mightn’t poor Charlotte all unwittingly have precipitated? She
was thus poor Charlotte again for Maggie even while Maggie’s own head
was bowed, and the reason for this kept coming back to our young woman
in the conception of what would secretly have passed. She saw her,
face to face with the Prince, take from him the chill of his stiffest
admonition, with the possibilities of deeper difficulty that it
represented for each. She heard her ask, irritated and sombre, what
tone, in God’s name—since her bravery didn’t suit him—she was then
to adopt; and, by way of a fantastic flight of divination, she heard
Amerigo reply, in a voice of which every fine note, familiar and
admirable, came home to her, that one must really manage such prudences
a little for one’s self. It was positive in the Princess that, for this,
she breathed Charlotte’s cold air—turned away from him in it with
her, turned with her, in growing compassion, this way and that, hovered
behind her while she felt her ask herself where then she should rest.
Marvellous the manner in which, under such imaginations, Maggie thus
circled and lingered—quite as if she were, materially, following
her unseen, counting every step she helplessly wasted, noting every
hindrance that brought her to a pause.
A few days of this, accordingly, had wrought a change in that
apprehension of the instant beatitude of triumph—of triumph magnanimous
and serene—with which the upshot of the night-scene on the terrace had
condemned our young woman to make terms. She had had, as we know, her
vision of the gilt bars bent, of the door of the cage forced open from
within and the creature imprisoned roaming at large—a movement, on
the creature’s part, that was to have even, for the short interval, its
impressive beauty, but of which the limit, and in yet another direction,
had loomed straight into view during her last talk under the great trees
with her father. It was when she saw his wife’s face ruefully attached
to the quarter to which, in the course of their session, he had so
significantly addressed his own—it was then that Maggie could watch for
its turning pale, it was then she seemed to know what she had meant
by thinking of her, in the shadow of his most ominous reference, as
“doomed.” If, as I say, her attention now, day after day, so circled and
hovered, it found itself arrested for certain passages during which she
absolutely looked with Charlotte’s grave eyes. What she unfailingly made
out through them was the figure of a little quiet gentleman who mostly
wore, as he moved, alone, across the field of vision, a straw hat, a
white waistcoat and a blue necktie, keeping a cigar in his teeth and his
hands in his pockets, and who, oftener than not, presented a somewhat
meditative back while he slowly measured the perspectives of the park
and broodingly counted (it might have appeared) his steps. There were
hours of intensity, for a week or two, when it was for all the world as
if she had guardedly tracked her stepmother, in the great house, from
room to room and from window to window, only to see her, here and there
and everywhere, TRY her uneasy outlook, question her issue and her fate.
Something, unmistakably, had come up for her that had never come
up before; it represented a new complication and had begotten a new
anxiety—things, these, that she carried about with her done up in the
napkin of her lover’s accepted rebuke, while she vainly hunted for some
corner where she might put them safely down. The disguised solemnity,
the prolonged futility of her search might have been grotesque to a more
ironic eye; but Maggie’s provision of irony, which we have taken for
naturally small, had never been so scant as now, and there were moments
while she watched with her, thus unseen, when the mere effect of being
near her was to feel her own heart in her throat, was to be almost
moved to saying to her: “Hold on tight, my poor dear—without TOO MUCH
terror—and it will all come out somehow.”
Even to that indeed, she could reflect, Charlotte might have replied
that it was easy to say; even to that no great meaning could attach so
long as the little meditative man in the straw hat kept coming into view
with his indescribable air of weaving his spell, weaving it off there by
himself. In whatever quarter of the horizon the appearances were scanned
he was to be noticed as absorbed in this occupation; and Maggie was to
become aware of two or three extraordinary occasions of receiving from
him the hint that he measured the impression he produced. It was not
really till after their recent long talk in the park that she knew how
deeply, how quite exhaustively, they had then communicated—so that they
were to remain together, for the time, in consequence, quite in the form
of a couple of sociable drinkers who sit back from the table over which
they have been resting their elbows, over which they have emptied to the
last drop their respective charged cups. The cups were still there
on the table, but turned upside down; and nothing was left for the
companions but to confirm by placid silences the fact that the wine had
been good. They had parted, positively, as if, on either side, primed
with it—primed for whatever was to be; and everything between them, as
the month waned, added its touch of truth to this similitude. Nothing,
truly, WAS at present between them save that they were looking at each
other in infinite trust; it fairly wanted no more words, and when they
met, during the deep summer days, met even without witnesses, when
they kissed at morning and evening, or on any of the other occasions of
contact that they had always so freely celebrated, a pair of birds of
the upper air could scarce have appeared less to invite each other to
sit down and worry afresh. So it was that in the house itself, where
more of his waiting treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she
sometimes only looked at him—from end to end of the great gallery,
the pride of the house, for instance—as if, in one of the halls of a
museum, she had been an earnest young woman with a Baedeker and he a
vague gentleman to whom even Baedekers were unknown. He had ever, of
course, had his way of walking about to review his possessions and
verify their condition; but this was a pastime to which he now struck
her as almost extravagantly addicted, and when she passed near him and
he turned to give her a smile she caught—or so she fancied—the greater
depth of his small, perpetual hum of contemplation. It was as if he
were singing to himself, sotto voce, as he went—and it was also,
on occasion, quite ineffably, as if Charlotte, hovering, watching,
listening, on her side too, kept sufficiently within earshot to make it
out as song, and yet, for some reason connected with the very manner of
it, stood off and didn’t dare.
One of the attentions she had from immediately after her marriage
most freely paid him was that of her interest in his rarities, her
appreciation of his taste, her native passion for beautiful objects and
her grateful desire not to miss anything he could teach her about them.
Maggie had in due course seen her begin to “work” this fortunately
natural source of sympathy for all it was worth. She took possession of
the mound throughout its extent; she abounded, to odd excess, one might
have remarked, in the assumption of its being for her, with her husband,
ALL the ground, the finest, clearest air and most breathable medium
common to them. It had been given to Maggie to wonder if she didn’t, in
these intensities of approbation, too much shut him up to his province;
but this was a complaint he had never made his daughter, and Charlotte
must at least have had for her that, thanks to her admirable instinct,
her range of perception marching with his own and never falling behind,
she had probably not so much as once treated him to a rasping mistake or
a revealing stupidity. Maggie, wonderfully, in the summer days, felt
it forced upon her that that was one way, after all, of being a genial
wife; and it was never so much forced upon her as at these odd moments
of her encountering the sposi, as Amerigo called them, under the coved
ceilings of Fawns while, so together, yet at the same time so separate,
they were making their daily round. Charlotte hung behind, with
emphasised attention; she stopped when her husband stopped, but at the
distance of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of objects;
and the likeness of their connection would not have been wrongly figured
if he had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed hands the
end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck. He didn’t
twitch it, yet it was there; he didn’t drag her, but she came; and those
indications that I have described the Princess as finding extraordinary
in him were two or three mute facial intimations which his wife’s
presence didn’t prevent his addressing his daughter—nor prevent his
daughter, as she passed, it was doubtless to be added, from flushing
a little at the receipt of. They amounted perhaps only to a wordless,
wordless smile, but the smile was the soft shake of the twisted silken
rope, and Maggie’s translation of it, held in her breast till she got
well away, came out only, as if it might have been overheard, when some
door was closed behind her. “Yes, you see—I lead her now by the neck, I
lead her to her doom, and she doesn’t so much as know what it is, though
she has a fear in her heart which, if you had the chances to apply your
ear there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear thump and thump and
thump. She thinks it MAY be, her doom, the awful place over there—awful
for HER; but she’s afraid to ask, don’t you see? just as she’s afraid of
not asking; just as she’s afraid of so many other things that she
sees multiplied round her now as portents and betrayals. She’ll know,
however—when she does know.”
Charlotte’s one opportunity, meanwhile, for the air of confidence she
had formerly worn so well and that agreed so with her firm and charming
type, was the presence of visitors, never, as the season advanced,
wholly intermitted—rather, in fact, so constant, with all the people
who turned up for luncheon and for tea and to see the house, now
replete, now famous, that Maggie grew to think again of this large
element of “company” as of a kind of renewed water-supply for the tank
in which, like a party of panting gold-fish, they kept afloat. It helped
them, unmistakably, with each other, weakening the emphasis of so many
of the silences of which their intimate intercourse would otherwise
have consisted. Beautiful and wonderful for her, even, at times, was the
effect of these interventions—their effect above all in bringing home
to each the possible heroism of perfunctory things. They learned fairly
to live in the perfunctory; they remained in it as many hours of the day
as might be; it took on finally the likeness of some spacious central
chamber in a haunted house, a great overarched and overglazed rotunda,
where gaiety might reign, but the doors of which opened into sinister
circular passages. Here they turned up for each other, as they said,
with the blank faces that denied any uneasiness felt in the approach;
here they closed numerous doors carefully behind them—all save the door
that connected the place, as by a straight tented corridor, with the
outer world, and, encouraging thus the irruption of society, imitated
the aperture through which the bedizened performers of the circus are
poured into the ring. The great part Mrs. Verver had socially played
came luckily, Maggie could make out, to her assistance; she had
“personal friends”—Charlotte’s personal friends had ever been, in
London, at the two houses, one of the most convenient pleasantries—who
actually tempered, at this crisis, her aspect of isolation; and it
wouldn’t have been hard to guess that her best moments were those in
which she suffered no fear of becoming a bore to restrain her appeal
to their curiosity. Their curiosity might be vague, but their clever
hostess was distinct, and she marched them about, sparing them nothing,
as if she counted, each day, on a harvest of half crowns. Maggie met
her again, in the gallery, at the oddest hours, with the party she was
entertaining; heard her draw out the lesson, insist upon the interest,
snub, even, the particular presumption and smile for the general
bewilderment—inevitable features, these latter, of almost any
occasion—in a manner that made our young woman, herself incurably
dazzled, marvel afresh at the mystery by which a creature who could be
in some connexions so earnestly right could be in others so perversely
wrong. When her father, vaguely circulating, was attended by his wife,
it was always Charlotte who seemed to bring up the rear; but he hung
in the background when she did cicerone, and it was then perhaps that,
moving mildly and modestly to and fro on the skirts of the exhibition,
his appearance of weaving his spell was, for the initiated conscience,
least to be resisted. Brilliant women turned to him in vague emotion,
but his response scarce committed him more than if he had been the
person employed to see that, after the invading wave was spent, the
cabinets were all locked and the symmetries all restored.
There was a morning when, during the hour before luncheon and shortly
after the arrival of a neighbourly contingent—neighbourly from ten
miles off—whom Mrs. Verver had taken in charge, Maggie paused on the
threshold of the gallery through which she had been about to pass,
faltered there for the very impression of his face as it met her from an
opposite door. Charlotte, half-way down the vista, held together, as
if by something almost austere in the grace of her authority, the
semi-scared (now that they were there!) knot of her visitors, who, since
they had announced themselves by telegram as yearning to inquire and
admire, saw themselves restricted to this consistency. Her voice, high
and clear and a little hard, reached her husband and her step-daughter
while she thus placed beyond doubt her cheerful submission to duty. Her
words, addressed to the largest publicity, rang for some minutes through
the place, every one as quiet to listen as if it had been a church
ablaze with tapers and she were taking her part in some hymn of praise.
Fanny Assingham looked rapt in devotion—Fanny Assingham who forsook
this other friend as little as she forsook either her host or the
Princess or the Prince or the Principino; she supported her, in slow
revolutions, in murmurous attestations of presence, at all such times,
and Maggie, advancing after a first hesitation, was not to fail of
noting her solemn, inscrutable attitude, her eyes attentively lifted,
so that she might escape being provoked to betray an impression. She
betrayed one, however, as Maggie approached, dropping her gaze to the
latter’s level long enough to seem to adventure, marvellously, on a mute
appeal. “You understand, don’t you, that if she didn’t do this there
would be no knowing what she might do?” This light Mrs. Assingham richly
launched while her younger friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain
again, and then, not too much to show it—or, rather, positively to
conceal it, and to conceal something more as well—turned short round
to one of the windows and awkwardly, pointlessly waited. “The largest
of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands, looped
round it, which, as you see, are the finest possible vieux Saxe, are not
of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste
quite so perfect. They have been put on at a later time, by a process of
which there are very few examples, and none so important as this, which
is really quite unique—so that, though the whole thing is a little
baroque, its value as a specimen is, I believe, almost inestimable.”
So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads
of gaping neighbours; so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing,
as less interested judges might have said, seemed to justify the faith
with which she was honoured. Maggie meanwhile, at the window, knew the
strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying,
or was at least on the point of it—the lighted square before her all
blurred and dim. The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for
conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which
it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain.
Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse—so that Maggie felt
herself, the next thing, turn with a start to her father. “Can’t she be
stopped? Hasn’t she done it ENOUGH?”—some such question as that she
let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half
the gallery—for he had not moved from where she had first seen him—he
struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp
identity of emotion. “Poor thing, poor thing”—it reached straight—
“ISN’T she, for one’s credit, on the swagger?” After which, as, held
thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the
pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish
even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away.
The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet
lifted Maggie as on air—so much, for deep guesses on her own side
too, it gave her to think of. There was, honestly, an awful mixture in
things, and it was not closed to her aftersense of such passages—we
have already indeed, in other cases, seen it open—that the deepest
depth of all, in a perceived penalty, was that you couldn’t be sure
some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn’t show for ridiculous.
Amerigo, that morning, for instance, had been as absent as he at this
juncture appeared to desire he should mainly be noted as being; he
had gone to London for the day and the night—a necessity that now
frequently rose for him and that he had more than once suffered to
operate during the presence of guests, successions of pretty women, the
theory of his fond interest in whom had been publicly cultivated. It had
never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at
last a high dim August dawn when she couldn’t sleep and when, creeping
restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded
acres, she found the faint flush of the east march with the perception
of that other almost equal prodigy. It rosily coloured her vision
that—even such as he was, yes—her husband could on occasion sin by
excess of candour. He wouldn’t otherwise have given as his reason for
going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging
books there. He had bought a great many of late, and he had had others,
a large number, sent from Rome—wonders of old print in which her father
had been interested. But when her imagination tracked him to the
dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a
caretaker and a kitchenmaid were alone in possession, it wasn’t to see
him, in his shirtsleeves, unpacking battered boxes.
She saw him, in truth, less easily beguiled—saw him wander, in the
closed dusky rooms, from place to place, or else, for long periods,
recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of
ceaseless cigarettes. She made him out as liking better than anything
in the world just now to be alone with his thoughts. Being herself
connected with his thoughts, she continued to believe, more than she had
ever been, it was thereby a good deal as if he were alone with HER. She
made him out as resting so from that constant strain of the perfunctory
to which he was exposed at Fawns; and she was accessible to the
impression of the almost beggared aspect of this alternative. It was
like his doing penance in sordid ways—being sent to prison or being
kept without money; it wouldn’t have taken much to make her think of
him as really kept without food. He might have broken away, might easily
have started to travel; he had a right—thought wonderful Maggie now—to
so many more freedoms than he took! His secret was of course that at
Fawns he all the while winced, was all the while in presences in respect
to which he had thrown himself back, with a hard pressure, on whatever
mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the
world, he could keep from snapping. Maggie, for some reason, had that
morning, while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure
of the ground on which he would have HAD to snatch at pretexts for
absence. It all came to her there—he got off to escape from a sound.
The sound was in her own ears still—that of Charlotte’s high coerced
quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the voice by which
she herself had been pierced the day before as by that of a creature in
anguish and by which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window, the
tears had been forced into her eyes. Her comprehension soared so high
that the wonder for her became really his not feeling the need of wider
intervals and thicker walls. Before THAT admiration she also meditated;
consider as she might now, she kept reading not less into what he
omitted than into what he performed a beauty of intention that touched
her fairly the more by being obscure. It was like hanging over a garden
in the dark; nothing was to be made of the confusion of growing things,
but one felt they were folded flowers, and their vague sweetness made
the whole air their medium. He had to turn away, but he wasn’t at least
a coward; he would wait on the spot for the issue of what he had done
on the spot. She sank to her knees with her arm on the ledge of her
window-seat, where she blinded her eyes from the full glare of seeing
that his idea could only be to wait, whatever might come, at her side.
It was to her buried face that she thus, for a long time, felt him draw
nearest; though after a while, when the strange wail of the gallery
began to repeat its inevitable echo, she was conscious of how that
brought out his pale hard grimace.