XVII

It appeared thus that they might enjoy together extraordinary

freedom, the two friends, from the moment they should understand

their position aright. With the Prince himself, from an early

stage, not unnaturally, Charlotte had made a great point of their

so understanding it; she had found frequent occasion to describe

to him this necessity, and, her resignation tempered, or her

intelligence at least quickened, by irrepressible irony, she

applied at different times different names to the propriety of

their case. The wonderful thing was that her sense of propriety

had been, from the first, especially alive about it. There were

hours when she spoke of their taking refuge in what she called

the commonest tact--as if this principle alone would suffice to

light their way; there were others when it might have seemed, to

listen to her, that their course would demand of them the most

anxious study and the most independent, not to say original,

interpretation of signs. She talked now as if it were indicated,

at every turn, by finger-posts of almost ridiculous prominence;

she talked again as if it lurked in devious ways and were to be

tracked through bush and briar; and she even, on occasion,

delivered herself in the sense that, as their situation was

unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars. "'Do'?" she

once had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though

briefly, occurring between them on her return from the visit to

America that had immediately succeeded her marriage, determined

for her by this event as promptly as an excursion of the like

strange order had been prescribed in his own case. "Isn't the

immense, the really quite matchless beauty of our position that

we have to 'do' nothing in life at all?--nothing except the

usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one's not

being more of a fool than one can help. That's all--but that's as

true for one time as for another. There has been plenty of

'doing,' and there will doubtless be plenty still; but it's all

theirs, every inch of it; it's all a matter of what they've done

TO us." And she showed how the question had therefore been only

of their taking everything as everything came, and all as quietly

as might be. Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a

conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair: no more

extraordinary decree had ever been launched against such victims

than this of forcing them against their will into a relation of

mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid.

She was to remember not a little, meanwhile, the particular

prolonged silent look with which the Prince had met her allusion

to these primary efforts at escape. She was inwardly to dwell on

the element of the unuttered that her tone had caused to play up

into his irresistible eyes; and this because she considered with

pride and joy that she had, on the spot, disposed of the doubt,

the question, the challenge, or whatever else might have been,

that such a look could convey. He had been sufficiently off his

guard to show some little wonder as to their having plotted so

very hard against their destiny, and she knew well enough, of

course, what, in this connection, was at the bottom of his

thought, and what would have sounded out more or less if he had

not happily saved himself from words. All men were brutes enough

to catch when they might at such chances for dissent--for all the

good it really did them; but the Prince's distinction was in

being one of the few who could check himself before acting on the

impulse. This, obviously, was what counted in a man as delicacy.

If her friend had blurted or bungled he would have said, in his

simplicity, "Did we do 'everything to avoid' it when we faced

your remarkable marriage?"--quite handsomely of course using the

plural, taking his share of the case, by way of a tribute of

memory to the telegram she had received from him in Paris after

Mr. Verver had despatched to Rome the news of their engagement.

That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them--

an acceptance quite other than perfunctory--she had never

destroyed; though reserved for no eyes but her own it was still

carefully reserved. She kept it in a safe place--from which, very

privately, she sometimes took it out to read it over. "A la

guerre comme a la guerre then"--it had been couched in the French

tongue. "We must lead our lives as we see them; but I am charmed

with your courage and almost surprised at my own." The message

had remained ambiguous; she had read it in more lights than one;

it might mean that even without her his career was up-hill work

for him, a daily fighting-matter on behalf of a good appearance,

and that thus, if they were to become neighbours again, the event

would compel him to live still more under arms. It might mean on

the other hand that he found he was happy enough, and that

accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she

was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned

and secure. On his arrival in Paris with his wife, none the less,

she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself had not

asked if the document were still in her possession. Such an

inquiry, everything implied, was beneath him--just as it was

beneath herself to mention to him, uninvited, that she had

instantly offered, and in perfect honesty, to show the telegram

to Mr. Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word

she would immediately have put it before him. She had thereby

forborne to call his attention to her consciousness that such an

exposure would, in all probability, straightway have dished her

marriage; that all her future had in fact, for the moment, hung

by the single hair of Mr. Verver's delicacy (as she supposed they

must call it); and that her position, in the matter of

responsibility, was therefore inattackably straight.

For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time, in its measured

allowance, had originally much helped him--helped him in the

sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up; in spite of

which it was just this accessory element that seemed, at present,

with wonders of patience, to lie in wait. Time had begotten at

first, more than anything else, separations, delays and

intervals; but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the

moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the question of

what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of

being married than he had, on the whole, expected; less,

strangely, for the state of being married even as he was married.

And there was a logic in the matter, he knew; a logic that but

gave this truth a sort of solidity of evidence. Mr. Verver,

decidedly, helped him with it--with his wedded condition; helped

him really so much that it made all the difference. In the degree

in which he rendered it the service on Mr. Verver's part was

remarkable--as indeed what service, from the first of their

meeting, had not been? He was living, he had been living these

four or five years, on Mr. Verver's services: a truth scarcely

less plain if he dealt with them, for appreciation, one by one,

than if he poured them all together into the general pot of his

gratitude and let the thing simmer to a nourishing broth. To the

latter way with them he was undoubtedly most disposed; yet he

would even thus, on occasion, pick out a piece to taste on its

own merits. Wondrous at such hours could seem the savour of the

particular "treat," at his father-in-law's expense, that he more

and more struck himself as enjoying. He had needed months and

months to arrive at a full appreciation--he couldn't originally

have given offhand a name to his deepest obligation; but by the

time the name had flowered in his mind he was practically living

at the ease guaranteed him. Mr. Verver then, in a word, took care

of his relation to Maggie, as he took care, and apparently always

would, of everything else. He relieved him of all anxiety about

his married life in the same manner in which he relieved him on

the score of his bank-account. And as he performed the latter

office by communicating with the bankers, so the former sprang as

directly from his good understanding with his daughter. This

understanding had, wonderfully--THAT was in high evidence--the

same deep intimacy as the commercial, the financial association

founded, far down, on a community of interest. And the

correspondence, for the Prince, carried itself out in identities

of character the vision of which, fortunately, rather tended to

amuse than to--as might have happened--irritate him. Those

people--and his free synthesis lumped together capitalists and

bankers, retired men of business, illustrious collectors,

American fathers-in-law, American fathers, little American

daughters, little American wives--those people were of the same

large lucky group, as one might say; they were all, at least, of

the same general species and had the same general instincts; they

hung together, they passed each other the word, they spoke each

other's language, they did each other "turns." In this last

connection it of course came up for our young man at a given

moment that Maggie's relation with HIM was also, on the perceived

basis, taken care of. Which was in fact the real upshot of the

matter. It was a "funny" situation--that is it was funny just as

it stood. Their married life was in question, but the solution

was, not less strikingly, before them. It was all right for

himself, because Mr. Verver worked it so for Maggie's comfort;

and it was all right for Maggie, because he worked it so for her

husband's.

The fact that time, however, was not, as we have said, wholly on

the Prince's side might have shown for particularly true one dark

day on which, by an odd but not unprecedented chance, the

reflections just noted offered themselves as his main recreation.

They alone, it appeared, had been appointed to fill the hours for

him, and even to fill the great square house in Portland Place,

where the scale of one of the smaller saloons fitted them but

loosely. He had looked into this room on the chance that he might

find the Princess at tea; but though the fireside service of the

repast was shiningly present the mistress of the table was not,

and he had waited for her, if waiting it could be called, while

he measured again and again the stretch of polished floor. He

could have named to himself no pressing reason for seeing her at

this moment, and her not coming in, as the half-hour elapsed,

became in fact quite positively, however perversely, the

circumstance that kept him on the spot. Just there, he might have

been feeling, just there he could best take his note. This

observation was certainly by itself meagre amusement for a dreary

little crisis; but his walk to and fro, and in particular his

repeated pause at one of the high front windows, gave each of the

ebbing minutes, none the less, after a time, a little more of the

quality of a quickened throb of the spirit. These throbs scarce

expressed, however, the impatience of desire, any more than they

stood for sharp disappointment: the series together resembled

perhaps more than anything else those fine waves of clearness

through which, for a watcher of the east, dawn at last trembles

into rosy day. The illumination indeed was all for the mind, the

prospect revealed by it a mere immensity of the world of thought;

the material outlook was all the while a different matter. The

March afternoon, judged at the window, had blundered back into

autumn; it had been raining for hours, and the colour of the

rain, the colour of the air, of the mud, of the opposite houses,

of life altogether, in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade,

was an unutterable dirty brown. There was at first even, for the

young man, no faint flush in the fact of the direction taken,

while he happened to look out, by a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab

which, awkwardly deflecting from the middle course, at the

apparent instance of a person within, began to make for the

left-hand pavement and so at last, under further instructions,

floundered to a full stop before the Prince's windows. The person

within, alighting with an easier motion, proved to be a lady who

left the vehicle to wait and, putting up no umbrella, quickly

crossed the wet interval that separated her from the house. She

but flitted and disappeared; yet the Prince, from his standpoint,

had had time to recognise her, and the recognition kept him for

some minutes motionless.

Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a

waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax

of his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a

congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence.

The effect of her coming to see him, him only, had, while he

stood waiting, a singular intensity--though after some minutes

had passed the certainty of this began to drop. Perhaps she had

NOT come, or had come only for Maggie; perhaps, on learning below

that the Princess had not returned, she was merely leaving a

message, writing a word on a card. He should see, at any rate;

and meanwhile, controlling himself, would do nothing. This

thought of not interfering took on a sudden force for him; she

would doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit

to him be all of her own choosing. And his view of a reason for

leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking no

step, he yet intensely hoped. The harmony of her breaking into

sight while the superficial conditions were so against her was a

harmony with conditions that were far from superficial and that

gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value to her

presence. The value deepened strangely, moreover, with the rigour

of his own attitude--with the fact too that, listening hard, he

neither heard the house-door close again nor saw her go back to

her cab; and it had risen to a climax by the time he had become

aware, with his quickened sense, that she had followed the butler

up to the landing from which his room opened. If anything could

further then have added to it, the renewed pause outside, as if

she had said to the man "Wait a moment!" would have constituted

this touch. Yet when the man had shown her in, had advanced to

the tea-table to light the lamp under the kettle and had then

busied himself, all deliberately, with the fire, she made it easy

for her host to drop straight from any height of tension and to

meet her, provisionally, on the question of Maggie. While the

butler remained it was Maggie that she had come to see and Maggie

that--in spite of this attendant's high blankness on the subject

of all possibilities on that lady's part--she would cheerfully,

by the fire, wait for. As soon as they were alone together,

however, she mounted, as with the whizz and the red light of a

rocket, from the form to the fact, saying straight out, as she

stood and looked at him: "What else, my dear, what in the world

else can we do?"

It was as if he then knew, on the spot, why he had been feeling,

for hours, as he had felt--as if he in fact knew, within the

minute, things he had not known even while she was panting, as

from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He

knew at the same time, none the less, that she knew still more

than he--in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents

that might count for them; and his vision of alternative--she

could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions--

opened out, altogether, with this tangible truth of her attitude

by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the

gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and

her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a

foot to dry. He couldn't have told what particular links and gaps

had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and

bridged; for he remembered no occasion, in Rome, from which the

picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that

is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy

four-wheeler waited, and while, though having left her waterproof

downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence--the

positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter--

of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a

point of insisting on their time of life and their moral

intention, the hat's and the frock's own, as well as on the irony

of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome

rain-freshened face. The sense of the past revived for him

nevertheless as it had not yet done: it made that other time

somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his

watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so

handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce

retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently THERE, to

be wounded or shocked.

What had happened, in short, was that Charlotte and he had, by a

single turn of the wrist of fate--"led up" to indeed, no doubt,

by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed--been

placed face to face in a freedom that partook, extraordinarily,

of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without

their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this

occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an

undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his

marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and

again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why

it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way

that filled the room. The reason was--into which he had lived,

quite intimately, by the end of a quarter-of-an-hour--that just

this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled

receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time

elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with

billows of eiderdown. On that morning; in the Park there had

been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale

this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised confidence.

The emphasis, for their general comfort, was what Charlotte had

come to apply; inasmuch as, though it was not what she definitely

began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the

meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were

alone--even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he

had not then directly replied; it was the meaning of everything

else, down to the conscious quaintness of her ricketty "growler"

and the conscious humility of her dress. It had helped him a

little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her

immediate appeal pass without an answer. He could ask her instead

what had become of her carriage and why, above all, she was not

using it in such weather.

"It's just because of the weather," she explained. "It's my

little idea. It makes me feel as I used to--when I could do as I

liked."