IX

So much mute communication was doubtless, all this time,

marvellous, and we may confess to having perhaps read into the

scene, prematurely, a critical character that took longer to

develop. Yet the quiet hour of reunion enjoyed that afternoon by

the father and the daughter did really little else than deal with

the elements definitely presented to each in the vibration

produced by the return of the church-goers. Nothing allusive,

nothing at all insistent, passed between them either before or

immediately after luncheon--except indeed so far as their failure

soon again to meet might be itself an accident charged with

reference. The hour or two after luncheon--and on Sundays with

especial rigour, for one of the domestic reasons of which it

belonged to Maggie quite multitudinously to take account--were

habitually spent by the Princess with her little boy, in whose

apartment she either frequently found her father already

established or was sooner or later joined by him. His visit to

his grandson, at some hour or other, held its place, in his day,

against all interventions, and this without counting his

grandson's visits to HIM, scarcely less ordered and timed, and

the odd bits, as he called them, that they picked up together

when they could--communions snatched, for the most part, on the

terrace, in the gardens or the park, while the Principino, with

much pomp and circumstance of perambulator, parasol, fine lace

over-veiling and incorruptible female attendance, took the air.

In the private apartments, which, occupying in the great house

the larger part of a wing of their own, were not much more easily

accessible than if the place had been a royal palace and the

small child an heir-apparent--in the nursery of nurseries the

talk, at these instituted times, was always so prevailingly with

or about the master of the scene that other interests and other

topics had fairly learned to avoid the slighting and inadequate

notice there taken of them. They came in, at the best, but as

involved in the little boy's future, his past, or his

comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead

their own merits or to complain of being neglected. Nothing

perhaps, in truth, had done more than this united participation

to confirm in the elder parties that sense of a life not only

uninterrupted but more deeply associated, more largely combined,

of which, on Adam Verver's behalf, we have made some mention. It

was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful

baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a

husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity,

converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a

grandpapa. The Principino, for a chance spectator of this

process, might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless

half-orphan, with the place of immediate male parent swept bare

and open to the next nearest sympathy.

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of

what the Prince might be or might do for his son--the sum of

service, in his absence, so completely filled itself out. It was

not in the least, moreover, that there was doubt of him, for he

was conspicuously addicted to the manipulation of the child, in

the frank Italian way, at such moments as he judged discreet in

respect to other claims: conspicuously, indeed, that is, for

Maggie, who had more occasion, on the whole, to speak to her

husband of the extravagance of her father than to speak to her

father of the extravagance of her husband. Adam Verver had, all

round, in this connection, his own serenity. He was sure of his

son-in-law's auxiliary admiration--admiration, he meant, of his

grand-son; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but

the instinct--or it might fairly have been the tradition--of the

latter's making the child so solidly beautiful as to HAVE to be

admired? What contributed most to harmony in this play of

relations, however, was the way the young man seemed to leave it

to be gathered that, tradition for tradition, the grandpapa's own

was not, in any estimate, to go for nothing. A tradition, or

whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively in the Princess

herself--well, Amerigo's very discretions were his way of taking

account of it. His discriminations in respect to his heir were,

in fine, not more angular than any others to be observed in him;

and Mr. Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an

impression of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he

received from this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged

nursery hours. It was as if the grandpapa's special show of the

character were but another side for the observer to study,

another item for him to note. It came back, this latter personage

knew, to his own previous perception--that of the Prince's

inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to CONCLUDE.

The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be

demonstrated--on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This

last was, after all, the point; he really worked, poor young man,

for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension.

And how, when you came to that, COULD you know that a horse

wouldn't shy at a brass-band, in a country road, because it

didn't shy at a traction-engine? It might have been brought up to

traction-engines without having been brought up to brass-bands.

Little by little, thus, from month to month, the Prince was

learning what his wife's father had been brought up to; and now

it could be checked off--he had been brought, up to the romantic

view of principini. Who would have thought it, and where would it

all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr. Verver was a

certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt that

the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the

positive side. He didn't know--he was learning, and it was funny

for him--to how many things he HAD been brought up. If the Prince

could only strike something to which he hadn't! This wouldn't, it

seemed to him, ruffle the smoothness, and yet MIGHT, a little,

add to the interest.

What was now clear, at all events, for the father and the

daughter, was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to

be together--at any cost, as it were; and their necessity so

worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter

hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and cause

them to wander, unseen, unfollowed, along a covered walk in the

"old" garden, as it was called, old with an antiquity of formal

things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of brick wall that

had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out of a door

in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it,

1713, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then had before

them a small white gate, intensely white and clean amid all the

greenness, through which they gradually passed to where some of

the grandest trees spaciously clustered and where they would find

one of the quietest places. A bench had been placed, long ago,

beneath a great oak that helped to crown a mild eminence, and the

ground sank away below it, to rise again, opposite, at a distance

sufficient to enclose the solitude and figure a bosky horizon.

Summer, blissfully, was with them yet, and the low sun made a

splash of light where it pierced the looser shade; Maggie, coming

down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, as, over her

charming bare head, she now handled it, gave, with the big straw

hat that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped

back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it

was "sequestered"--they had praised it for that together, before,

and liked the word; and after they had begun to linger there they

could have smiled (if they hadn't been really too serious, and if

the question hadn't so soon ceased to matter), over the probable

wonder of the others as to what would have become of them.

The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any

judgment of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak

but for the way that, as a rule, they almost equally had others

on their mind? They each knew that both were full of the

superstition of not "hurting," but might precisely have been

asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at this moment,

whether that was to be, after all, the last word of their

conscientious development. Certain it was, at all events, that,

in addition to the Assinghams and the Lutches and Mrs. Rance, the

attendance at tea, just in the right place on the west terrace,

might perfectly comprise the four or five persons--among them the

very pretty, the typically Irish Miss Maddock, vaunted, announced

and now brought--from the couple of other houses near enough, one

of these the minor residence Of their proprietor, established,

thriftily, while he hired out his ancestral home, within sight

and sense of his profit. It was not less certain, either, that,

for once in a way, the group in question must all take the case

as they found it. Fanny Assingham, at any time, for that matter,

might perfectly be trusted to see Mr. Verver and his daughter, to

see their reputation for a decent friendliness, through any

momentary danger; might be trusted even to carry off their

absence for Amerigo, for Amerigo's possible funny Italian

anxiety; Amerigo always being, as the Princess was well aware,

conveniently amenable to this friend's explanations,

beguilements, reassurances, and perhaps in fact rather more than

less dependent on them as his new life--since that was his own

name for it--opened out. It was no secret to Maggie--it was

indeed positively a public joke for her--that she couldn't

explain as Mrs. Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking

explanations, liking them almost as if he collected them, in the

manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his

requisition of this luxury had to be met. He didn't seem to want

them as yet for use--rather for ornament and amusement, innocent

amusement of the kind he most fancied and that was so

characteristic of his blessed, beautiful, general, slightly

indolent lack of more dissipated, or even just of more

sophisticated, tastes.

However that might be, the dear woman had come to be frankly and

gaily recognised--and not least by herself--as filling in the

intimate little circle an office that was not always a sinecure.

It was almost as if she had taken, with her kind, melancholy

Colonel at her heels, a responsible engagement; to be within

call, as it were, for all those appeals that sprang out of talk,

that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of leisure. It

naturally led her position in the household, as, she called it,

to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good

couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under

form of protest. She was there to keep him quiet--it was

Amerigo's own description of her influence; and it would only

have needed a more visible disposition to unrest in him

to make the account perfectly fit. Fanny herself limited indeed,

she minimised, her office; you didn't need a jailor, she

contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon. This

was not an animal to be controlled--it was an animal to be, at

the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was

educative--which Maggie was so aware that she herself,

inevitably, wasn't; so it came round to being true that what she

was most in charge of was his mere intelligence. This left,

goodness knew, plenty of different calls for Maggie to meet--in a

case in which so much pink ribbon, as it might be symbolically

named, was lavished on the creature. What it all amounted to, at

any rate, was that Mrs. Assingham would be keeping him quiet now,

while his wife and his father-in-law carried out their own little

frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less neededly

in respect to the members of the circle that were with them there

than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the

first time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear,

when he was with his wife, almost any queerness on the part of

people, strange English types, who bored him, beyond convenience,

by being so little as he himself was; for this was one of the

ways in which a wife was practically sustaining. But she was as

positively aware that she hadn't yet learned to see him as

meeting such exposure in her absence. How did he move and talk,

how above all did he, or how WOULD he, look--he who, with his so

nobly handsome face, could look such wonderful things--in case of

being left alone with some of the subjects of his wonder? There

were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie

herself had her own odd way--which didn't moreover the least

irritate him--of really liking them in proportion as they could

strike her as strange. It came out in her by heredity, he amused

himself with declaring, this love of chinoiseries; but she

actually this evening didn't mind--he might deal with her Chinese

as he could.

Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they

oftener occurred, the impression made on her by a word of Mrs.

Assingham's, a word referring precisely to that appetite in

Amerigo for the explanatory which we have just found in our path.

It wasn't that the Princess could be indebted to another person,

even to so clever a one as this friend, for seeing anything in

her husband that she mightn't see unaided; but she had ever,

hitherto, been of a nature to accept with modest gratitude any

better description of a felt truth than her little limits--

terribly marked, she knew, in the direction of saying the right

things--enabled her to make. Thus it was, at any rate, that she

was able to live more or less in the light of the fact expressed

so lucidly by their common comforter--the fact that the Prince

was saving up, for some very mysterious but very fine eventual

purpose, all the wisdom, all the answers to his questions, all

the impressions and generalisations, he gathered; putting them

away and packing them down because he wanted his great gun to be

loaded to the brim on the day he should decide to let it off. He

wanted first to make sure of the whole of the subject that was

unrolling itself before him; after which the innumerable facts he

had collected would find their use. He knew what he was about---

trust him at last therefore to make, and to some effect, his big

noise. And Mrs. Assingham had repeated that he knew what he was

about. It was the happy form of this assurance that had remained

with Maggie; it could always come in for her that Amerigo knew

what he was about. He might at moments seem vague, seem absent,

seem even bored: this when, away from her father, with whom it

was impossible for him to appear anything but respectfully

occupied, he let his native gaiety go in outbreaks of song, or

even of quite whimsical senseless sound, either expressive of

intimate relaxation or else fantastically plaintive. He might at

times reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that

the case was for a good while yet absolutely settled in regard to

what he still had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to

the main seat of his affection, the house in Rome, the big black

palace, the Palazzo Nero, as he was fond of naming it, and also

on the question of the villa in the Sabine hills, which she had,

at the time of their engagement, seen and yearned over, and the

Castello proper, described by him always as the "perched" place,

that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the pedestal of its

mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as the head

and front of the princedom. He might rejoice in certain moods

over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed

all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases

and charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of

use--all without counting the cloud of mortgages that had, from

far back, buried them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a

shroud as thick as the layer once resting on the towns at the

foot of Vesuvius, and actually making of any present restorative

effort a process much akin to slow excavation. Just so he might

with another turn of his humour almost wail for these brightest

spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an idiot not to

be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices--sacrifices

resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr. Verver--necessary for

winning them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the

wife meanwhile--one of those easy certitudes they could be merely

gay about--was that she never admired him so much, or so found

him heartbreakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very

degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as

when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that

had then begun, once for all, to constitute HER substance. There

was really nothing they had talked of together with more intimate

and familiar pleasantry than of the license and privilege, the

boundless happy margin, thus established for each: she going so

far as to put it that, even should he some day get drunk and beat

her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no

matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it,

charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most

deeply moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would

therefore be more open to him than to keep her in love with him?

He agreed, with all his heart, at these light moments, that his

course wouldn't then be difficult, inasmuch as, so simply

constituted as he was on all the precious question--and why

should he be ashamed of it?--he knew but one way with the fair.

They had to be fair--and he was fastidious and particular, his

standard was high; but when once this was the case what relation

with them was conceivable, what relation was decent, rudimentary,

properly human, but that of a plain interest in the fairness? His

interest, she always answered, happened not to be "plain," and

plainness, all round, had little to do with the matter, which was

marked, on the contrary, by the richest variety of colour; but

the working basis, at all events, had been settled--the Miss

Maddocks of life been assured of their importance for him. How

conveniently assured Maggie--to take him too into the joke--had

more than once gone so far as to mention to her father; since it

fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember

she might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence.

This was one of her rules-full as she was of little rules,

considerations, provisions. There were things she of course

couldn't tell him, in so many words, about Amerigo and herself, and

about their happiness and their union and their deepest depths--and

there were other things she needn't; but there were also those

that were both true and amusing, both communicable and real, and

of these, with her so conscious, so delicately cultivated scheme

of conduct as a daughter, she could make her profit at will.

A pleasant hush, for that matter, had fallen on most of the

elements while she lingered apart with her companion; it

involved, this serenity, innumerable complete assumptions: since

so ordered and so splendid a rest, all the tokens, spreading

about them, of confidence solidly supported, might have suggested

for persons of poorer pitch the very insolence of facility.

Still, they weren't insolent--THEY weren't, our pair could

reflect; they were only blissful and grateful and personally

modest, not ashamed of knowing, with competence, when great

things were great, when good things were good, and when safe

things were safe, and not, therefore, placed below their fortune

by timidity which would have been as bad as being below it by

impudence. Worthy of it as they were, and as each appears, under

our last possible analysis, to have wished to make the other feel

that they were, what they most finally exhaled into the evening

air as their eyes mildly met may well have been a kind of

helplessness in their felicity. Their rightness, the

justification of everything--something they so felt the pulse

of--sat there with them; but they might have been asking

themselves a little blankly to what further use they could

put anything so perfect. They had created and nursed and

established it; they had housed it here in dignity and crowned it

with comfort; but mightn't the moment possibly count for them--or

count at least for us while we watch them with their fate all

before them--as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn't always

meet ALL contingencies to be right? Otherwise why should Maggie

have found a word of definite doubt--the expression of the fine

pang determined in her a few hours before--rise after a time to

her lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion's

intelligence of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question

could say it all. "What is it, after all, that they want to do to

you?" "They" were for the Princess too the hovering forces of

which Mrs. Rance was the symbol, and her father, only smiling

back now, at his ease, took no trouble to appear not to know what

she meant. What she meant--when once she had spoken--could come

out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after they had

come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great

defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and

Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying: "What has really

happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered." He

accepted equally, for the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he

still failed to challenge her even when she added that it

wouldn't so much matter if he hadn't been so terribly young. He

uttered a sound of protest only when she went to declare that she

ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited. Yet by

that time she was already herself admitting that she should have

had to wait long--if she waited, that is, till he was old. But

there was a way. "Since you ARE an irresistible youth, we've got

to face it. That, somehow, is what that woman has made me feel.

There'll be others."

X

To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him.

"Yes, there'll be others. But you'll see me through."