He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week later, but
on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great
strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton,
but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only
forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie's
reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at
noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte,
who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where
they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding
together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns--a letter of
several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but
triumphantly, to inform--had proved, on his sitting down to it,
and a little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to
frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had
allowed him to assume: this doubtless, however, only for reasons
naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which
contributed to his message something of their own quality of
impatience. The main result of their talk, for the time, had been
a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a
difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and
this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to
"speak" to her so far even as to tell her of the communication
despatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still,
all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them--it being
rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn't be further
worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.
It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris--which,
suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch--made,
between him and his companion, the tension, made the suspense,
made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional
peculiarity, of present conditions. These elements acted in a
manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many
abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders--
things, verily, he would scarce have known how to express; and
yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their
reality. He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person
should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what
had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of
the power of other persons to make either less or greater. Common
conventions--that was what was odd--had to be on this basis more
thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the
passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of
their overlooking. The explanation would have been, he supposed--
or would have figured it with less of unrest--that Paris had, in
its way, deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all
"far" there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been
viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further still.
There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew it
you might be unmistakably matching them. Since he wished
therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing
with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he
found himself, on the receipt of Maggie's missive, rejoicing with
a certain inconsistency. The announcement made her from home had,
in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him--
his personal modesty, his imagination of her prepared state for
so quick a jump, it didn't much matter which--and yet he was more
eager than not for the drop of delay and for the quicker
transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair. There
was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being
taken, as they said at the shops, on approval. Maggie, certainly,
would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively
desiring this, and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from
holding him light as a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor
girl, but from generous rigour of conscience.
These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent
with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for
it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts
had a place. The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the
more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness.
What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have
been Charlotte's simply saying to him that she didn't like him
enough. This he wouldn't have enjoyed, but he would quite have
understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him
enough--nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that
he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him
hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for
what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best
moment of conviction that--as a man, so to speak--he properly
pleased her. He said nothing--the words sufficiently did it for
him, doing it again better still as Charlotte, who had left her
chair at his approach, murmured them out. "We start to-night to
bring you all our love and joy and sympathy." There they were,
the words, and what did she want more? She didn't, however, as
she gave him back the little unfolded leaf, say they were enough
--though he saw, the next moment, that her silence was probably
not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale. Her
extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he
had always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this
change of colour; and she had again, with it, her apparent way of
subjecting herself, for explicit honesty and through her
willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his
ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced in
her. As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless he
knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she
professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a
minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly
she liked him enough--liked him enough to make him, old as he was
ready to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The
pleasure of it accordingly made him speak first. "Do you begin, a
little, to be satisfied?"
Still, however, she had to think. "We've hurried them, you see.
Why so breathless a start?"
"Because they want to congratulate us. They want," said Adam
Verver, "to SEE our happiness."
She wondered again--and this time also, for him, as publicly as
possible. "So much as that?"
"Do you think it's too much?"
She continued to think plainly. "They weren't to have started for
another week."
"Well, what then? Isn't our situation worth the little sacrifice?
We'll go back to Rome as soon as you like WITH them."
This seemed to hold her--as he had previously seen her held, just
a trifle inscrutably, by his allusions to what they would do
together on a certain contingency. "Worth it, the little
sacrifice, for whom? For us, naturally--yes," she said. "We want
to see them--for our reasons. That is," she rather dimly smiled,
"YOU do."
"And you do, my dear, too!" he bravely declared. "Yes then--I do
too," she after an instant ungrudging enough acknowledged. "For
us, however, something depends on it."
"Rather! But does nothing depend on it for them?"
"What CAN--from the moment that, as appears, they don't want to
nip us in the bud? I can imagine their rushing up to prevent us.
But an enthusiasm for us that can wait so very little--such
intense eagerness, I confess," she went on, "more than a little
puzzles me. You may think me," she also added, "ungracious and
suspicious, but the Prince can't at all want to come back so
soon. He wanted quite too intensely to get away."