A telegram, in Charlotte’s name, arrived early—“We shall come and ask
you for tea at five, if convenient to you. Am wiring for the Assinghams
to lunch.” This document, into which meanings were to be read, Maggie
promptly placed before her husband, adding the remark that her father
and his wife, who would have come up the previous night or that morning,
had evidently gone to an hotel. The Prince was in his “own” room, where
he often sat now alone; half-a-dozen open newspapers, the “Figaro”
notably, as well as the “Times,” were scattered about him; but, with a
cigar in his teeth and a visible cloud on his brow, he appeared actually
to be engaged in walking to and fro. Never yet, on thus approaching
him—for she had done it of late, under one necessity or another,
several times—had a particular impression so greeted her; supremely
strong, for some reason, as he turned quickly round on her entrance. The
reason was partly the look in his face—a suffusion like the flush of
fever, which brought back to her Fanny Assingham’s charge, recently
uttered under that roof, of her “thinking” too impenetrably. The word
had remained with her and made her think still more; so that, at first,
as she stood there, she felt responsible for provoking on his part an
irritation of suspense at which she had not aimed. She had been going
about him these three months, she perfectly knew, with a maintained
idea—of which she had never spoken to him; but what had at last
happened was that his way of looking at her, on occasion, seemed a
perception of the presence not of one idea, but of fifty, variously
prepared for uses with which he somehow must reckon. She knew herself
suddenly, almost strangely, glad to be coming to him, at this hour, with
nothing more abstract than a telegram; but even after she had stepped
into his prison under her pretext, while her eyes took in his face
and then embraced the four walls that enclosed his restlessness, she
recognised the virtual identity of his condition with that aspect of
Charlotte’s situation for which, early in the summer and in all the
amplitude of a great residence, she had found, with so little seeking,
the similitude of the locked cage. He struck her as caged, the man
who couldn’t now without an instant effect on her sensibility give an
instinctive push to the door she had not completely closed behind her.
He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when
she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him
in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food. There was
a difference none the less, between his captivity and Charlotte’s—the
difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and
his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in
his starting, on her entrance, as if even this were in its degree an
interference. That was what betrayed for her, practically, his fear of
her fifty ideas, and what had begun, after a minute, to make her wish to
repudiate or explain. It was more wonderful than she could have told;
it was for all the world as if she was succeeding with him beyond her
intention. She had, for these instants, the sense that he exaggerated,
that the imputation of purpose had fairly risen too high in him. She had
begun, a year ago, by asking herself how she could make him think more
of her; but what was it, after all, he was thinking now? He kept his
eyes on her telegram; he read it more than once, easy as it was, in
spite of its conveyed deprecation, to understand; during which she found
herself almost awestruck with yearning, almost on the point of marking
somehow what she had marked in the garden at Fawns with Charlotte—that
she had truly come unarmed. She didn’t bristle with intentions—she
scarce knew, as he at this juncture affected her, what had become of the
only intention she had come with. She had nothing but her old idea, the
old one he knew; she hadn’t the ghost of another. Presently in fact,
when four or five minutes had elapsed, it was as if she positively,
hadn’t so much even as that one. He gave her back her paper, asking with
it if there were anything in particular she wished him to do.
She stood there with her eyes on him, doubling the telegram together
as if it had been a precious thing and yet all the while holding her
breath. Of a sudden, somehow, and quite as by the action of their merely
having between them these few written words, an extraordinary fact came
up. He was with her as if he were hers, hers in a degree and on a
scale, with an intensity and an intimacy, that were a new and a strange
quantity, that were like the irruption of a tide loosening them where
they had stuck and making them feel they floated. What was it that, with
the rush of this, just kept her from putting out her hands to him, from
catching at him as, in the other time, with the superficial impetus he
and Charlotte had privately conspired to impart, she had so often, her
breath failing her, known the impulse to catch at her father? She
did, however, just yet, nothing inconsequent—though she couldn’t
immediately have said what saved her; and by the time she had neatly
folded her telegram she was doing something merely needful. “I wanted
you simply to know—so that you mayn’t by accident miss them. For it’s
the last,” said Maggie.
“The last?”
“I take it as their good-bye.” And she smiled as she could always smile.
“They come in state—to take formal leave. They do everything that’s
proper. Tomorrow,” she said, “they go to Southampton.”
“If they do everything that’s proper,” the Prince presently asked, “why
don’t they at least come to dine?”
She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer. “That we
must certainly ask them. It will be easy for you. But of course they’re
immensely taken—!”
He wondered. “So immensely taken that they can’t—that your father
can’t—give you his last evening in England?”
This, for Maggie, was more difficult to meet; yet she was still not
without her stop-gap. “That may be what they’ll propose—that we shall
go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebration—except that,
to round it thoroughly off, we ought also to have Fanny and the Colonel.
They don’t WANT them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they
polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them, beforehand. They want
only us together; and if they cut us down to tea,” she continued, “as
they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps it’s for the
fancy, after all, of their keeping their last night in London for each
other.”
She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them
back, even though, as she heard herself, she might have been throwing
everything to the winds. But wasn’t that the right way—for sharing his
last day of captivity with the man one adored? It was every moment more
and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison—waiting
with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French
Revolution, the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast, or a
high discourse, of their last poor resources. If she had broken with
everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply
then take it so—take it that what she had worked for was too near,
at last, to let her keep her head. She might have been losing her head
verily in her husband’s eyes—since he didn’t know, all the while, that
the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her
disposition personally to seize him. He didn’t know, either, that this
was her manner—now she was with him—of beguiling audaciously the
supremacy of suspense. For the people of the French Revolution,
assuredly, there wasn’t suspense; the scaffold, for those she was
thinking of, was certain—whereas what Charlotte’s telegram announced
was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation. Just the
point, however, was in its being clearer to herself than to him; her
clearnesses, clearances—those she had so all but abjectly laboured
for—threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters
of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron
bars, that regale, on occasion, precisely, the fevered vision of those
who are in chains. She was going to know, she felt, later on—was going
to know with compunction, doubtless, on the very morrow, how thumpingly
her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together:
she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the
consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted. She should
judge at leisure even that avidity for an issue which was making so
little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the
others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than
her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened.
He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law
and Mrs. Verver, by her glance at their possible preference for a
concentrated evening. “But it isn’t—is it?” he asked—“as if they were
leaving each other?”
“Oh no; it isn’t as if they were leaving each other. They’re only
bringing to a close—without knowing when it may open again—a time that
has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them.” Yes, she could talk
so of their “time”—she was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to
affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground. “They have
their reasons—many things to think of; how can one tell? But there’s
always, also, the chance of his proposing to me that we shall have our
last hours together; I mean that he and I shall. He may wish to take
me off to dine with him somewhere alone—and to do it in memory of old
days. I mean,” the Princess went on, “the real old days; before my grand
husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was: the
wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done,
his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains. The
way we’ve sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which
he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, we’ve stayed on
and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to
talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for,
the things he had secured or refused or lost! There were places he took
me to—you wouldn’t believe!—for often he could only have left me with
servants. If he should carry me off with him to-night, for old sake’s
sake, to the Earl’s Court Exhibition, it will be a little—just a very,
very little—like our young adventures.” After which while Amerigo
watched her, and in fact quite because of it, she had an inspiration, to
which she presently yielded. If he was wondering what she would say
next she had found exactly the thing. “In that case he will leave you
Charlotte to take care of in our absence. You’ll have to carry her off
somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with
her here. I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything,
quite beautifully. You’ll be able to do as you like.”
She couldn’t have been sure beforehand, and had really not been; but
the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that
he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion.
Nothing in the world, of a truth, had ever been so sweet to her, as his
look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it. She
troubled him—which hadn’t been at all her purpose; she mystified
him—which she couldn’t help and, comparatively, didn’t mind; then it
came over her that he had, after all, a simplicity, very considerable,
on which she had never dared to presume. It was a discovery—not like
the other discovery she had once made, but giving out a freshness; and
she recognised again in the light of it the number of the ideas of which
he thought her capable. They were all, apparently, queer for him, but
she had at least, with the lapse of the months, created the perception
that there might be something in them; whereby he stared there,
beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with.
There was something of his own in his mind, to which, she was sure, he
referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go
of it, from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room, after his
encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging
it at him, on the question of her father’s view of him, her determined
“Find out for yourself!” She had been aware, during the months, that he
had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid
the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might
reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any
other source. Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at
all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from
the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their
companions. Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he
himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the
rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that
personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between
consequence and cause, that the intention remained, like some famous
poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation.
What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer
to him, her father’s and her own, of an opportunity to separate from
Mrs. Verver with the due amount of form—and all the more that he was,
in so pathetic a way, unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on
the score of taste. Taste, in him, as a touchstone, was now all at sea;
for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine
of them, wouldn’t be, exactly, that taste by itself, the taste he had
always conformed to, had no importance whatever? If meanwhile, at all
events, he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her
profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again. She
was invoking that reflection at the very moment he brought out, in
reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and
perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity. “They’re doing
the wisest thing, you know. For if they were ever to go—!” And he
looked down at her over his cigar.
If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her father’s
age, Charlotte’s need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the
job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to “live into”
their queer future—it was high time that they should take up their
courage. This was eminent sense, but it didn’t arrest the Princess, who,
the next moment, had found a form for her challenge. “But shan’t you
then so much as miss her a little? She’s wonderful and beautiful, and I
feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically,” Maggie
went on—“she’s so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done
with life. But dying for us—for you and me; and making us feel it by
the very fact of there being so much of her left.”
The Prince smoked hard a minute. “As you say, she’s splendid, but there
is—there always will be—much of her left. Only, as you also say, for
others.”
“And yet I think,” the Princess returned, “that it isn’t as if we had
wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? It’s as if her
unhappiness had been necessary to us—as if we had needed her, at her
own cost, to build us up and start us.”
He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid inquiry.
“Why do you speak of the unhappiness of your father’s wife?”
They exchanged a long look—the time that it took her to find her reply.
“Because not to—!”
“Well, not to—?”
“Would make me have to speak of him. And I can’t,” said Maggie, “speak
of him.”
“You ‘can’t’—?”
“I can’t.” She said it as for definite notice, not to be repeated.
“There are too many things,” she nevertheless added. “He’s too great.”
The Prince looked at his cigar-tip, and then as he put back the weed:
“Too great for whom?” Upon which as she hesitated, “Not, my dear, too
great for you,” he declared. “For me—oh, as much as you like.”
“Too great for me is what I mean. I know why I think it,” Maggie said.
“That’s enough.”
He looked at her yet again as if she but fanned his wonder; he was on
the very point, she judged, of asking her why she thought it. But her
own eyes maintained their warning, and at the end of a minute he had
uttered other words. “What’s of importance is that you’re his daughter.
That at least we’ve got. And I suppose that, if I may say nothing else,
I may say at least that I value it.”
“Oh yes, you may say that you value it. I myself make the most of it.”
This again he took in, letting it presently put forth for him a striking
connection. “She ought to have known you. That’s what’s present to me.
She ought to have understood you better.”
“Better than you did?”
“Yes,” he gravely maintained, “better than I did. And she didn’t really
know you at all. She doesn’t know you now.”
“Ah, yes she does!” said Maggie.
But he shook his head—he knew what he meant. “She not only doesn’t
understand you more than I, she understands you ever so much less.
Though even I—!”
“Well, even you?” Maggie pressed as he paused. “Even I, even I even
yet—!” Again he paused and the silence held them.
But Maggie at last broke it. “If Charlotte doesn’t understand me, it is
that I’ve prevented her. I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her.”
The Prince kept his eyes on her. “I know what you’ve chosen to do. But
I’ve chosen to do the same.”
“Yes,” said Maggie after an instant—“my choice was made when I had
guessed yours. But you mean,” she asked, “that she understands YOU?”
“It presents small difficulty!”
“Are you so sure?” Maggie went on.
“Sure enough. But it doesn’t matter.” He waited an instant; then looking
up through the fumes of his smoke, “She’s stupid,” he abruptly opined.
“O—oh!” Maggie protested in a long wail.
It had made him in fact quickly change colour. “What I mean is that
she’s not, as you pronounce her, unhappy.” And he recovered, with this,
all his logic. “Why is she unhappy if she doesn’t know?”
“Doesn’t know—?” She tried to make his logic difficult.
“Doesn’t know that YOU know.”
It came from him in such a way that she was conscious, instantly, of
three or four things to answer. But what she said first was: “Do you
think that’s all it need take?” And before he could reply, “She knows,
she knows!” Maggie proclaimed.
“Well then, what?”
But she threw back her head, she turned impatiently away from him.
“Oh, I needn’t tell you! She knows enough. Besides,” she went on, “she
doesn’t believe us.”
It made the Prince stare a little. “Ah, she asks too much!” That drew,
however, from his wife another moan of objection, which determined in
him a judgment. “She won’t let you take her for unhappy.”
“Oh, I know better than any one else what she won’t let me take her
for!”
“Very well,” said Amerigo, “you’ll see.”
“I shall see wonders, I know. I’ve already seen them, and I’m
prepared for them.” Maggie recalled—she had memories enough. “It’s
terrible”—her memories prompted her to speak. “I see it’s ALWAYS
terrible for women.”
The Prince looked down in his gravity. “Everything’s terrible, cara, in
the heart of man. She’s making her life,” he said. “She’ll make it.”
His wife turned back upon him; she had wandered to a table, vaguely
setting objects straight. “A little by the way then too, while she’s
about it, she’s making ours.” At this he raised his eyes, which met her
own, and she held him while she delivered herself of some thing that had
been with her these last minutes.
“You spoke just now of Charlotte’s not having learned from you that
I ‘know.’ Am I to take from you then that you accept and recognise my
knowledge?”
He did the inquiry all the honours—visibly weighed its importance and
weighed his response. “You think I might have been showing you that a
little more handsomely?”
“It isn’t a question of any beauty,” said Maggie; “it’s only a question
of the quantity of truth.”
“Oh, the quantity of truth!” the Prince richly, though ambiguously,
murmured.
“That’s a thing by itself, yes. But there are also such things, all the
same, as questions of good faith.”
“Of course there are!” the Prince hastened to reply. After which he
brought up more slowly: “If ever a man, since the beginning of time,
acted in good faith!” But he dropped it, offering it simply for that.
For that then, when it had had time somewhat to settle, like some
handful of gold-dust thrown into the air—for that then Maggie showed
herself, as deeply and strangely taking it. “I see.” And she even wished
this form to be as complete as she could make it. “I see.”
The completeness, clearly, after an instant, had struck him as divine.
“Ah, my dear, my dear, my dear—!” It was all he could say.
She wasn’t talking, however, at large. “You’ve kept up for so long a
silence—!”
“Yes, yes, I know what I’ve kept up. But will you do,” he asked, “still
one thing more for me?”
It was as if, for an instant, with her new exposure, it had made her
turn pale. “Is there even one thing left?”
“Ah, my dear, my dear, my dear!”—it had pressed again in him the fine
spring of the unspeakable. There was nothing, however, that the Princess
herself couldn’t say. “I’ll do anything, if you’ll tell me what.”
“Then wait.” And his raised Italian hand, with its play of admonitory
fingers, had never made gesture more expressive. His voice itself
dropped to a tone—! “Wait,” he repeated. “Wait.”
She understood, but it was as if she wished to have it from him. “Till
they’ve been here, you mean?”
“Yes, till they’ve gone. Till they’re away.”
She kept it up. “Till they’ve left the country?” She had her eyes on him
for clearness; these were the conditions of a promise—so that he put
the promise, practically, into his response. “Till we’ve ceased to see
them—for as long as God may grant! Till we’re really alone.”
“Oh, if it’s only that—!” When she had drawn from him thus then, as she
could feel, the thick breath of the definite—which was the intimate,
the immediate, the familiar, as she hadn’t had them for so long—she
turned away again, she put her hand on the knob of the door. But her
hand rested at first without a grasp; she had another effort to make,
the effort of leaving him, of which everything that had just passed
between them, his presence, irresistible, overcharged with it, doubled
the difficulty. There was something—she couldn’t have told what; it was
as if, shut in together, they had come too far—too far for where they
were; so that the mere act of her quitting him was like the attempt to
recover the lost and gone. She had taken in with her something that,
within the ten minutes, and especially within the last three or four,
had slipped away from her—which it was vain now, wasn’t it? to try to
appear to clutch or to pick up. That consciousness in fact had a pang,
and she balanced, intensely, for the lingering moment, almost with a
terror of her endless power of surrender. He had only to press, really,
for her to yield inch by inch, and she fairly knew at present, while she
looked at him through her cloud, that the confession of this precious
secret sat there for him to pluck. The sensation, for the few seconds,
was extraordinary; her weakness, her desire, so long as she was yet not
saving herself, flowered in her face like a light or a darkness. She
sought for some word that would cover this up; she reverted to the
question of tea, speaking as if they shouldn’t meet sooner. “Then about
five. I count on you.”
On him too, however, something had descended; as to which this exactly
gave him his chance. “Ah, but I shall see you—! No?” he said, coming
nearer.
She had, with her hand still on the knob, her back against the door, so
that her retreat, under his approach must be less than a step, and yet
she couldn’t for her life, with the other hand, have pushed him away.
He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him,
kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his
face—frowning, smiling, she mightn’t know which; only beautiful and
strange—was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in
dreams. She closed her eyes to it, and so, the next instant, against her
purpose, she had put out her hand, which had met his own and which he
held. Then it was that, from behind her closed eyes, the right word
came. “Wait!” It was the word of his own distress and entreaty, the word
for both of them, all they had left, their plank now on the great sea.
Their hands were locked, and thus she said it again. “Wait. Wait.” She
kept her eyes shut, but her hand, she knew, helped her meaning—which
after a minute she was aware his own had absorbed. He let her go—he
turned away with this message, and when she saw him again his back was
presented, as he had left her, and his face staring out of the window.
She had saved herself and she got off.