 CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XI I'll do anything you like." She said to her husband on one of the last days of the month, If our being here, this way at this time, seems to you too absurd or too uncomfortable or too impossible, will either take leave of them now without waiting, or will come back in time three days before they start. I'll go abroad with you, if you but say the word, to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of your old high places you would like most to see again, those beautiful ones that used to do you good after Rome and that you so often told me about. Where they were, in the conditions that prompted this offer, and where it might indeed appear ridiculous that, with the stale London September close at hand, they should content themselves with remaining, was where the desert of Portland Place looked blank as it had never looked, and where a drowsy cab man, scanning the horizon for a fare, could sink to oblivion of the risks of immobility. But Amorigo was of the odd opinion, day after day, that their situation couldn't be bettered, and he even went at no moment through the form of replying that, should their ordeal strike her as exceeding their patience, any step they might take would be for her own relief. This was no doubt partly because he stood out so wonderfully to the end, against admitting, by a weak word at least, that any element of their existence was, or ever had been, an ordeal. No trap of circumstance, no lapse of form, no accident of irritation, had landed him in that inconsequence. His wife might verily have suggested that he was consequent, consequent with the admirable appearance he had from the first so undertaken and so continued to present, rather too rigidly at her expense. Only as it happened, she was not the little person to do anything of the sort, and the strange tacit compact actually in operation between them might have been founded on an intelligent comparison, a definite collation, positively, of the kinds of patience proper to each. She was seeing him through, he'd engaged to come out at the right end if she would see him. This understanding, tacitly renewed from week to week, had fairly received, with a procession of the weeks, the consecration of time. But it scarce needed to be insisted on that she was seeing him on his terms, not all on hers, or that in other words, she must allow him as unexplained and uncharted his one practicably workable way. If that way, by one of the intimate felicities, the liability to which was so far from having even yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more bored than boring, with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but none to be persuadedly indebted to others for, what did such a false face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged? If she had questioned, or challenged, or interfered, if she had reserved herself that right, she wouldn't have been pledged, whereas there were still, and evidently would be yet a while, long, tense stretches during which their case might have been hanging for every eye on her possible, her impossible defection. She must keep it up to the last, mustn't absent herself for three minutes from her post, only on those lines assuredly would she show herself as with him and not against him. It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to make of being, of truly having been at any time with his wife. That reflection she was not exempt from as they now in their suspense supremely waited, a reflection under the brush of which she recognized her having had in respect to him as well, to do all, to go the whole way over, to move, endophaticably, while he stood as fixed in his place as some statue of one of his forefathers. The meaning of it would seem to be, she reasoned in sequestered hours, that he had a place and that this was an attribute somehow indefeasable, unquenchable, which laid upon others. From the moment they definitely wanted anything of him, the necessity of taking more of the steps that he could, of circling round him, of remembering for his benefit the famous relation of the mountain to Muhammad. It was strange if one had gone into it, but such a place as Amorigo's was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits. While Maggie's own had come to show simply as that improvised post, a post of the kind spoken of as advanced, with which she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country, in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous beadwork to sell, Maggie's own in short would have been sought in vain in the most rudimentary map of the social relations as such. The only geography marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions. The end that the prince was at all events holding out for was represented to expectation by his father-in-law's announced departure for America with Mrs. Verver. Just as that prospective event had originally figured as advising for discretion the flight of the younger couple to say nothing of the withdrawal of whatever other importinent company before the great upheaval of fawns. This residence was to be peopled for a month by porters, packers, and hammers at whose operations it had become peculiarly public, public that is for Portland Place, that Charlotte was to preside in force. Operations the quite awful appointed scale and style of which had at no moment loomed so large to Maggie's mind as one day when the dear assingham swam back into her kin besprinkled with saw-dust and looking as pale as if they had seen Samson pull down the temple. They had seen at least what she was not seeing, rich dim things under the impression of which they had retired. She having eyes at present but for the clock by which she timed her husband, or for the glass, the image perhaps would be truer, in which he was reflected to her as he timed the pair in the country. The accession of their friends from Cadogan Place contributed to all their intermissions, at any rate, a certain effect of resonance, an effect especially marked by the upshot of a prompt exchange of inquiries between Mrs. Assingham and the princess. It was noted on the occasion of that anxious lady's last approach to her young friend at Fawn's that her sympathy had ventured after much accepted privation again to become inquisitive, and it had perhaps never so yielded to that need as on this question of the present odd line of the distinguished eccentrics. You mean to say, really, that you're going to stick here, and then before Maggie could answer, what on earth will you do with your evenings? Maggie waited a moment. Maggie could still tentatively smile. When people learn we're here, and of course the papers will be full of it, they'll flock back on their hundreds from wherever they are to catch us. You see you and the Colonel have yourselves done it. As for our evenings, they won't, I dare say, be particularly different from anything else that's ours. They won't be different from our mornings or our afternoons, except perhaps that you two deers will sometimes help us to get through them. I've offered to go anywhere, she added, to take a house if he will. But this, just this and nothing else, is Amorigo's idea. He gave it yesterday, she went on, a name that, as he said, described and fitted it. So you see, and the Princess indulged again in her smile that didn't play, but that only as might have been said worked. So you see there's a method in our madness. It drew Mrs. Asingham's wonder. And what then is the name? The reduction to its simplest expression of what we are doing. That's what he called it. Whereas we're doing nothing, we're doing it in the most aggravated way, which is the way he desires. With which Maggie further said, Of course I understand. So do I, her visitor after a moment breathed. You've had to vacate the house. That was inevitable. But at least here he doesn't funk. Our young woman accepted the expression. He doesn't funk. And only, however, half-contented Fanny, who thoughtfully raised her eyebrows. He's prodigious, but what is there as you've fixed it, to dodge, unless, she pursued. It's her getting near him. It's, if you'll pardon my vulgarity, her getting at him. That, she suggested, may count with him. But it found the Princess prepared. She can get near him here. She can get at him. She can come up. Can she? Fanny asking him questioned. Can't she? Maggie returned. Their eyes, for a minute, intimately met on it, after which the elder woman said, I mean for seeing him alone. So do I, said the Princess, at which Fanny for her reasons couldn't help smiling. Oh, if it's for that he's staying. He's staying, I've made it out, to take anything that comes or calls upon him. To take, Maggie went on. Even that. Then she put it, as she had it last, put it to herself. He's staying for high decency. Decency, Mrs. Asingham gravely echoed. Decency, if she should try, well, Mrs. Asingham urged, well, I hope, hope he'll see her. Maggie hesitated, however. She made no direct reply. It's useless hoping, she presently said. She won't. But he ought to. Her friend's expression of a moment before, which had been apologized for as vulgar, prolonged its sharpness to her ear, that of an electric bell under continued pressure, stated so simply, what was it but dreadful truly, that the feasibility of Charlotte's getting at the man, who for so long had loved her, should now be in question. Strangest of all things, doubtless, this care of Maggie's as to what might make for it or make against it. After still her fairly lapsing at moments into a vague calculation of the conceivability on her own part with her husband of some direct sounding of the subject, would it be too monstrous, her suddenly breaking out to him as an alarm at the lapse of the weeks, wouldn't it really seem that you're bound in honor to do something for her privately before they go? Maggie was capable of weighing the risk of this adventure for her own spirit, capable of sinking to intense little absences even while conversing as now with the person who had most of her confidence during which she followed up the possibilities. It was true that Mrs. Asingham could at such time somewhat restore the balance by not wholly failing to guess her thought. Her thought however, just at present, had more than one face, had a series that it successively presented. These were indeed the possibilities involved in the adventure of her concerning herself for the quantity of compensation that Mrs. Verver might still look to. There was always the possibility that she was, after all, sufficiently to get at him. There was in fact that of her having again and again done so. Against this stood nothing but Fanny Asingham's apparent belief in her privation, more mercilessly imposed or more hopelessly felt, in the actual relation of the parties, over and beyond everything that from more than three months back, of course, had fostered in the Princess a light conviction. These assumptions might certainly be baseless, and as much as there were hours and hours of Amorigo's time that there was no habit, no pretense of his accounting for, and as much too as Charlotte, inevitably, had had more than once, to the undisguised knowledge of the pair in Portland Place, been obliged to come up to Eaton Square when so many of her personal possessions were in course of removal. She didn't come to Portland Place, didn't even come to ask for luncheon on two separate occasions when it reached the consciousness of the household there that she was spending the day in London. Maggie hated, she scorned, to compare hours and appearances, to weigh the idea of whether there hadn't been moments during these days when an asignation in easy conditions, a snatched interview, in an air the season had so cleared of prying eyes, mightn't perfectly work. But the very reason of this was partly that, haunted with the vision of the poor woman carrying off such bravery as she found in her hand the secret of her not being appeased. She was conscious of scant room for any alternative image. The alternative image would have been that the secret covered up was the secret of appeasement somehow obtained, somehow extorted, and cherished, and the difference between the two kinds of hiding was too great to permit of a mistake. Charlotte was hiding neither pride nor joy. She was hiding humiliation. And here it was that the princess's passion, so powerless for vindictive flights, most inevitably bruised its tenderness against the hard glass of her question. Behind the glass lurked the whole history of the relation she had so fairly flattened her nose against it to penetrate. The glass Mrs. Verver might, at this stage, had been frantically tapping from within by way of supreme, irrepressible entreaty. Maggie had said to herself complacently, after that last passage with her stepmother in the garden of fawns, that there was nothing left for her to do and that she could thereupon fold her hands. But why wasn't it still left to push further, and, from the point of view of personal pride, grovel lower? Why wasn't it still left to offer herself as the bearer of a message reporting to him their friends anguished and convincing them of her need? She could thus have translated Mrs. Verver's tap against the glass, as I have called it, into fifty forms. Could perhaps have translated it most into the form of a reminder that would pierce deep? You don't know what it is to have been loved and broken with. You haven't been broken with, because in your relation what can there have been worth speaking of to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness, and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? Why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame, O, the golden flame, a mere handful of black ashes? Our young woman so yielded at moments to what was insidious in these foredoomed ingenuities of her pity, that for minutes together sometimes the weight of a new duty seemed to rest upon her. The duty of speaking before separation should constitute its chasm of pleading for some benefit that might be carried away into exile, like the last saved object of price of the emigre, the jewel wrapped in a piece of old silk and negotiable someday in the market of misery. This imagined service to the woman who could no longer help herself was one of the traps set for Maggie's spirit at every turn of the road, the click of which catching and holding the divine faculty fast was followed inevitably by a flutter, by a struggle of wings, and even, as we may say, by a scattering of fine feathers. For they promptly enough felt, these yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy, the concussion that couldn't bring them down. The arrest produced by the so remarkably distinct figure that, at fawns for the previous weeks, was constantly crossing, in its regular revolution, the further end of any watched perspective. Whoever knew or whoever didn't, whether or to what extent Charlotte, with natural business in Eaton Square, had shuffled other opportunities under that cloak, it was all matter for the kind of quiet ponderation the little man who so kept his wandering way had made his own. It was part of the very inveteracy of his straw hat and his white waistcoat, of the trick of his hands and his pockets, of the detachment of the attention he fixed on his slow steps from behind his secure pince-nays. The thing that never failed now as an item in the picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife's immaterial tether so marked to Maggie's sense during her last month in the country. Mrs. Verver's straight neck had certainly not slipped it, nor had the other end of the long cord, oh, quite conveniently long, disengaged at smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight. To have recognized for all its tenuity the play of this gathered lasso might inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted to what tension subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its office or of its perfect durability. These reminded states for the Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping. So many things her father knew that she even yet didn't. All this at present with Mrs. Asingham passed through her in quick vibrations. She had expressed, while the revolution of her thought was incomplete, the idea of what Amarigo ought, on his side in the premises, to be capable of, and then had felt her companion's answering stare. But she insisted on what she had meant. He ought to wish to see her, and I mean in some protected and independent way as he used to, in case of her being herself able to manage it. That, said Maggie with the courage of her conviction, he ought to be ready, he ought to be happy, he ought to feel himself sworn, little as it is for the end of such a history, to take from her. This is if he wished to get off without taking anything. Mrs. Asingham deferentially amused. But for what purpose is it your idea that they should again so intimately meet? For any purpose they like. That's their affair. Fanny Asingham sharply laughed, then irrepressibly fell back to her constant position. You're splendid, perfectly splendid, to which, as the Princess, shaking an impatient head, wouldn't have it again at all, she subjoined. Or if you're not, it's because you're so sure. I mean sure of him. Ah, I'm exactly not sure of him. If I were sure of him I shouldn't doubt. But Maggie cast about her. Doubt what? Fanny pressed as she waited. Well, that he must feel how much less than she he pays and how that ought to keep her present to him. This in its turn after an instant Mrs. Asingham could meet with a smile. Trust him, my dear, to keep her present. But trust him also to keep himself absent, leave him his own way. I'll leave him everything, said Maggie. Only you know it's my nature, I think. It's your nature to think too much, Fanny Asingham a trifle coarsely rists. This but quickened, however, in the Princess, the act she reprobated. That may be, but if I hadn't thought, you wouldn't you mean have been where you are? Yes, because they on their side thought of everything but that. They thought of everything but that I might think. Or even, her friend too superficially concurred, that your father might. As to this at all events Maggie discriminated. No, that wouldn't have prevented them, for they knew that his first care would be not to make me do so. As it is, Maggie added, that has had to become his last. Fanny Asingham took it in deeper, for what it immediately made her give out louder. He's splendid, then. She sounded it almost aggressively. It was what she was reduced to. She had positively to place it. Ah, that as much as you please. Maggie said this and left it, but the tone of it had the next moment determined in her friend a fresh reaction. You think both of you so abysmally and yet so quietly, but it's what will have saved you. Oh, Maggie returned. It's what from the moment they discovered we could think at all will have saved them, for they're the ones who are saved, she went on. We're the ones who are lost. Lost? Lost to each other, father and I. And then as her friend appeared to demerer. Oh, yes, Maggie quite lucidly declared. Lost to each other much more really than Amorigo and Charledar. Since for them it's just, it's right, it's deserved, while for us it's only sad and strange, and not caused by our fault. But I don't know, she went on. Why I talk about myself. For its own father it really comes. I let him go, said Maggie. You let him, but you don't make him. I take it from him, she answered. But what else can you do? I take it from him, the Princess repeated. I do what I knew from the first I should do. I get off by giving him up. But if he gives you, Mrs. Asingham presumed to object. Doesn't it more over then, she asked, complete the very purpose with which he married, that of making you and leaving you more free? Maggie looked at her long. Yes, I help him to do that. Mrs. Asingham hesitated, but at last her bravery flared. Why not call it then frankly his complete success? Well, said Maggie, that's all that's left me to do. It's a success, her friend ingeniously developed, with which you've simply not interfered. And as if to show that she spoke without levity Mrs. Asingham went further. He has made it a success for them. Ah, there you are! Maggie responsibly mused. Yes, she said the next moment. That's why Amorigo stays. Let alone it's why Charlotte goes. That Mrs. Asingham, an emboldened, smiled. So he knows, but Maggie hung back. Amorigo, after which, however, she blushed to her companion's recognition. Your father, he knows what you know, I mean? Fanny faltered. Well, how much does he know? Maggie's silence and Maggie's eyes had in fact arrested the push of the question, which for a decent consistency she couldn't yet quite abandon. What I should rather say is does he know how much? She found it still awkward. How much, I mean, they did. How far, she touched it up. They went. Maggie had waited but only with a question. Do you think he does? Know at least something? Oh, about him I can't think. He's beyond me, said Fanny Asingham. Then do you yourself know? How much? How much? How far? Fanny had appeared to wish to make sure, but there was something she remembered, remembered in time and even with a smile. I've told you before that I know absolutely nothing. Well, that's what I know, said the princess. Her friend again hesitated. Then nobody knows. I mean, Mrs. Asingham explained. How much your father does? Oh, Maggie showed that she understood. Nobody. Not a little, Charlotte? A little, the princess echoed, to know anything would be for her to know enough. And she doesn't know anything? If she did, Maggie answered, Amorigo would. And that's just it, that he doesn't? That's just it, said the princess profoundly, on which Mrs. Asingham reflected. Then how was Charlotte so held? Just by that, by her ignorance, by her ignorance, Fanny wondered, a torment, a torment, said Maggie with tears in her eyes. Her companion a moment watched them. But the prince, then, how was he held? Maggie asked. How was he held? Oh, I can't tell you that. And the princess again broke off. End of Chapter 40. Chapter 41 of the Golden Bowl. This is the Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. The Golden Bowl by Henry James. Book 6, Chapter 41. A telegram in Charlotte's name arrived early. We shall come and ask you for tea at five, if convenient to you, and wiring for the Asingham's 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 a 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 Asingham'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 recognized 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, given instinctive push to the door she had not completely closed behind her. He had been turning twenty ways for impatience as 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 nonetheless 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 instances, 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. Only 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 there 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 eruption 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 may, by accident, miss them, for it's the last, said Maggie, the last. I take it as there 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 stopgap. 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 to also have Fanny and the Colonel. They don't want them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses. They polish them off, poor deers. 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. It wasn't at 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, though she had so all but abjectly labored for, threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters of angelic heads, the people's 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 necks in the face with which he listened. He might certainly well be puzzled in respect to his father-in-law, 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 sakes' sake, to the Earl's Court Exhibition, it will be a little, just a very, very little, like our young adventures. After which, while Amorigo 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 discoveries she had once made, but giving out a freshness, and she recognized 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 somber, 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, and replied 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 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 to the fumes of his smoke. She's stupid, he abruptly opined. Oh! Maggie protested in a long wail. It had made him, in fact, quickly change color. 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 asked 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 anyone else what she won't let me take her for. Very well, Senna-Mariego, 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. That'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, Kara, 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 hours. 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 recognize my knowledge? He did the inquiry all the honors, 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 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. Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear. It was all he could say. She wasn't talking, however, at large. She 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? Oh, 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 a monetary 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 her to pick up? That consciousness, in fact, had a pang, and she balanced intensely for the lingering moment, almost with the 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 might 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 in 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. She 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. CHAPTER 42 OF THE GOLDEN BOLLE This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. THE GOLDEN BOLLE by Henry James. BOOK VI CHAPTER 42 Later on in the afternoon before the others arrived, the form of their reunion was at least remarkable. They might in their great Easter drawing-room have been comparing notes or nerves an apprehension of some stiff official visit. Maggie's mind, in its restlessness, even played a little with the prospect. The high cool room, with its afternoon shade, with its old tapestries uncovered, with the perfect polish of its wide floor reflecting the bowls of gathered flowers and the silver and linen of the prepared tea-table, drew from her a remark in which this whole effect was mirrored, as well as something else in the Prince's movement while he solely paced and turned. WE'RE DISTINKLY BOUJOUA. She a trifle grimly threw off, as an echo of their old community. Though to a spectator sufficiently detached, they might have been quite the privileged pair they were reputed, granted only they were taken as awaiting the visit of royalty. They might have been ready, on the word passed up in advance, to repair together to the foot of the staircase, the Prince somewhat in front, advancing indeed to the open doors and even going down, for all his princedom, to meet on the stopping of the chariot, the August emergence. The time was stale, it was to be admitted, for incidents of magnitude. The September hush was in full possession at the end of the dull day, and a couple of the long windows stood open to the balcony that overhung the desolation. The balcony from which Maggie, in the springtime, has seen Amarigo and Charlotte look down together at the hour of her return from the Regent's Park, nearby with her father, the Principino, and Miss Bogle. Amarigo now again, in his punctual impatience, went out a couple of times and stood there, after which, as to report that nothing was in sight, he returned to the room with frankly nothing else to do. The Princess pretended to read. He looked at her as he passed. There hovered in her own sense the thought of other occasions when she had cheated appearances of agitation with a book. At last she felt him standing before her, and then she raised her eyes. Do you remember how, this morning, when you told me of this event, I asked you if there were anything particular you wished me to do? You spoke of my being at home, but that was a matter of course. You spoke of something else. He went on, while she sat with her book on her knee and her raised eyes. Something that makes me almost wish it may happen. You spoke, he said, of the possibility of my seeing her alone. Do you know if that comes, he asked. The use I shall make of it? And then as she waited. The use is all before me. Ah, it's your own business now, said his wife, but it had made her rise. I shall make it my own, he answered. I shall tell her I lied to her. Ah, no! She returned. And I shall tell her you did. She shook her head again. Oh, still less! With which therefore they stood at difference he with his head erected and his happy idea perched in its eagerness on his crest. And how, then, is she to know? She isn't to know. She's only still to think you don't. And therefore that I'm always a fool. She may think, said Maggie, what she likes. Make it without my protest. The princess made a movement. What business is it of yours? Isn't it my right to correct her? Maggie let his question ring, ring long enough for him to hear it himself, only then she took it up. Correct her? And it was her own now that really rang. Is she rather forgetting who she is? After which, while he quite stared for it, as it was the very first clear majesty he had known her to use, she flung down her book and raised a warning hand. The carriage, come. The come had matched, for lucid firmness, the rest of her speech, and when they were below in the hall, there was a go for him, through the open doors and between the ranged servants that matched even that. He received royalty, bareheaded, therefore, in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Verver, as it alighted on the pavement, and Maggie was at the threshold to welcome it to her house. Later on, upstairs again, she even herself felt still more the force of the limit of which she had just reminded him. At tea in Charlotte's affirmed presence, as Charlotte affirmed it, he drew a long breath of richer relief. It was the strangest once more of all impressions. But what she most felt for the half hour was that Mr. and Mrs. Verver were making the occasion easy. They were somehow conjoined in it, conjoined for a present effect as Maggie had absolutely never yet seen them. And there occurred before long a moment in which Amarigo's look met her own in recognitions that he couldn't suppress. The question of the amount of correction to which Charlotte had laid herself open rose and hovered for the instant, only to sink conspicuously by its own weight. So high a pitch she seemed to give to the unconsciousness of questions, so resplendent a show of serenity she succeeded in making. The shade of the official and her beauty and security never for a moment dropped. It was a cool, high refuge, like the deep arched recess of some colored and gilded image in which she sat and smiled and waited, drank her tea, referred to her husband, and remembered her mission. Her mission had quite taken form. It was but another name for the interests of her great opportunity, that of representing the arts and the graces to a people languishing a far-off in ignorance. Maggie had sufficiently intimated to the Prince, ten minutes before, that she needed no showing as to what their friend wouldn't consent to be taken for. But the difficulty now indeed was to choose, for explicit tribute of admiration, between the varieties of her noble aspects. She carried it off to put the matter coarsely, with a taste and a discretion that held our young woman's attention for the first quarter of an hour, to the very point of diverting it from the attitude of her overshadowed, her almost superseded companion. But Adam Verver profited indeed at this time, even with his daughter, by his so marked peculiarity of seeming on no occasion to have an attitude. And so long as they were in the room together, she felt him still simply weave his web, and play out his long fine cord, knew herself in presence of this tacit process very much as she had known herself at fawns. He had away the dear man, wherever he was, of moving about the room, noiselessly, to see what it might contain. And his manner of now resorting to this habit, acquainted as he already was with the objects in view, expressed with a certain sharpness the intention of leaving his wife to her devices. It did even more than this. It signified to the apprehension of the princess, from the moment she more directly took thought of him, almost a special view of these devices, as actually exhibited in their rarity, there with an independent, a settled appreciation of their general handsome adequacy, which scarcely required the accompaniment of his spaint contemplative hum. Charlotte throned, as who should say, between her hostess and her host, the whole scene having crystallized as soon as she took her place to the right quiet luster. The harmony was not less sustained for being superficial, and the only approach to a break in it was while Amorigo remained standing long enough for his father-in-law, vaguely wondering, to appeal to him, and vitre address him, and then in default of any such word, selected for presentation to the other visitor a plate of petty-fours. Maggie watched her husband, if it now could be called watching, offer this refreshment. She noted the consummate way, for consummate was the term she privately applied, in which Charlotte cleared her acceptance, cleared her impersonal smile, of any betrayal, any slightest value, of consciousness, and then felt the slow surge of a vision that, at the end of another minute or two, had floated her across the room to where her father stood looking at a picture, an early Florentine sacred subject that he had given her on her marriage. He might have been in silence taking his last leave of it. It was a work for which he entertained, she knew, an unqualified esteem. The tenderness represented for her by his sacrifice of such a treasure had become, to her sense, a part of the whole infusion of the immortal expression. The beauty of his sentiment looked out at her always, from the beauty of the rest, as if the frame made positively a window for his spiritual face. She might have said to herself, at this moment, that in leaving the thing behind him, held as in her clasping arms, he was doing the most possible toward leaving her a part of his palpable self. She put her hand over his shoulder, and their eyes were held again together, by the abiding felicity. They smiled in emulation vaguely, as if speech failed them through their having passed too far. She would have begun to wonder the next minute if it were reserved to them, for the last stage, to find their contact, like that of old friends reunited too much on the theory of the unchange, subject to shy lapses. It's all right, eh? Oh, my dear, rather! He had applied the question to the great fact of the picture, as she had spoken for the picture in reply, but it was as if their words for an instant afterwards symbolize another truth, so that they looked about at everything else to give them this extension. She had passed her arm into his, and the other objects in the room, the other pictures, the sofas, the chairs, the tables, the cabinets, the important pieces, supreme in their way, stood out round them consciously for recognition and applause. Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness, quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated in conversation at tea fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony. Mrs. Verver and the Prince fairly placed themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required, aesthetically, by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable. Though to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase. There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped? Lecomte est. You've got some good things. Maggie met it afresh. Ah, don't they look well? Their companions at the sound of this gave them an auspicious intermission of slow talk and attention, all of gravity, that was like an ample submission to the general duty of magnificence, sitting as still, to be thus appraised, as a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud. I'm so glad for your last look. With which, after Maggie, quite in the air, had said it, the note was struck indeed, the note of that strange accepted finality of relation, as from couple to couple, which almost escaped an awkwardness only by not attempting a gloss. Yes, this was the wonder that the occasion defied insistence precisely because of the vast quantities with which it dealt, so that separation was on a scale beyond any compass of parting. To do such an hour justice would have been in some degree to question its grounds, which was why they remained in fine the four of them in the upper air, united in the firmest abstention from pressure. There was no point visibly at which face to face either Amorigo or Charlotte had pressed, and how little she herself was in danger of doing so Maggie's scarce needed to remember. That her father wouldn't, by the tip of a toe, of that she was equally conscious. The only thing was that since he didn't she could but hold her breath for what he would do instead. Then at the end of three minutes more he had said with an effect of suddenness, Well, Mag, in the Principino, it was quite as if that were, by contrast, the hard, the truer voice. She glanced at the clock. I ordered him for half past five, which hasn't yet struck. Trust him, my dear, not to fail you. Oh, I don't want him to fail me, was Mr. Verver's reply. Yet uttered in so explicitly Jaco's relation to the possibilities of failure that even when, just afterwards, he wandered in his impatience to one of the long windows and passed out to the balcony, she asked herself but for a few seconds if reality should she follow him, would overtake or meet her there. She followed him of necessity. It came absolutely so near to his inviting her by stepping off into temporary detachment to give the others something of the chance that she and her husband had so fantastically discussed. Beside him then, while they hung over the great dull place, clear and almost colored now, colored with the odd, sad, pictured, old-fashioned look that empty London streets take on in waning afternoons of the summer's end, she felt once more how impossible such a passage would have been to them, how it would have torn them to pieces if they had so much as suffered its suppressed relations to peep out of their eyes. This danger would doubtless indeed have been more to be reckoned with if the instinct of each, she could certainly, at least answer for her own, had not so successfully acted to trump up other apparent connections for it, connections as to which they could pretend to be frank. You mustn't stay on here, you know. Adam Verver said, as a result of his unobstructed outlook, Fonz is all there for you, of course, to the end of my tenure, but Fonz so dismantled, he added with mild broufulness, Fonz, with half its contents and half its best things removed, won't seem to you, I'm afraid, particularly lively. No, Maggie answered, we should miss its best things. Its best things, my dear, have certainly been removed. To be back there, she went on. To be back there, and she paused for the force of her idea. Oh, to be back there without anything good, but she didn't hesitate now, she brought her idea forth. To be back there without Charlotte is more than I think would do. And as she smiled at him with it, so she saw him the next instant take it, take it in a way that helped her smile to pass all for an illusion to what she didn't and couldn't say, this quantity was too clear, that she couldn't at such an hour be pretending to name to him what it was, as he would have said, going to be at Fonz or anywhere else, to want for him. That was now, and in a manner exaltedly, sublimely, out of their compass and their question, so that what was she doing while they waited for the Principino, while they left the others together and their tension just sensibly threatened, what was she doing but just offer a bold but substantial substitute? Nothing was stranger moreover under the action of Charlotte's presence than the fact of a felt sincerity in her words. She felt her sincerity absolutely sound. She gave it for all it might mean. Because Charlotte, dear, you know, she said, is incomparable. It took 30 seconds, but she was to know when these were over that she had pronounced one of the happiest words of her life. They had turned from the view of the street. They leaned together against the balcony rail, with the room largely in sight from where they stood, but with the Prince and Mrs. Verver out of range. Nothing he could try, she immediately saw, was to keep his eyes from lighting, not even his taking out his cigarette case and saying before he said anything else. May I smoke? She met it for encouragement with her, my dear, again. And then while he struck his match, she had just another minute to be nervous. A minute that she made use of, however, not in the least to falter, but to reiterate with a high ring, a ring that might for all she cared, reached the pair inside. Father, father, Charlotte's great. It was not till after he had begun to smoke that he looked at her. Charlotte's great. They could close upon it, such a basis as they might immediately feel it make, and so they stood together over it quite gratefully, each recording to the other's eyes that it was firm under their feet. They had even thus a renewed weight, as for proof of it, much as if he were letting her see, while the minutes lapsed for their concealed companions, that this was finally just why, but just why. You see, he presently added, how right I was, right I mean to do it for you. Ah, rather, she murmured with her smile, and then as to be herself ideally right, I don't see what you would have done without her. The point was, he returned quietly, that I didn't see what you were to do, yet it was a risk. It was a risk, said Maggie, but I believed in it, at least for myself, she smiled. Well now, he smoked, we see. We see, I know her better, you know her best. Oh, but naturally, on which, as the warranted truth of it hung in the air, the truth warranted, as who should say, exactly by the present opportunity to pronounce, this opportunity created and accepted, she found herself lost, though with a finer thrill than she had perhaps yet known, and the vision of all he might mean. The sense of it in her rose higher, rose with each moment that he invited her thus to see him linger, and when, after a little more, he had said, smoking again and looking up, with head thrown back and hands spread on the balcony rail, at the gray gaunt front of the house. She's beautiful, beautiful. Her sensibility reported to her the shade of a new note. It was all she might have wished, for it was, with a kind of speaking competence, the note of possession and control, and yet it conveyed to her as nothing till now had done the reality of their parting. They were parting in the light of it, absolutely on Charlotte's value, the value that was filling the room out of which they had stepped as if to give it play, and with which the prince on his side was perhaps making larger acquaintance. If Maggie had desired, at so late an hour, some last conclusive comfortable category to place him in for dismissal, she might have found it here, and it's all coming back to his ability to rest upon high values. Somehow, when all was said, and with the memory of her gifts, her variety, her power, so much remained of Charlotte's. What else had she herself meant three minutes before by speaking of her as great? Great for the world that was before her, that he proposed she should be. She was not to be wasted in the application of his plan. Maggie held to this, then, that she wasn't to be wasted. To let his daughter know it, he had sought this brief privacy. What a blessing, accordingly, that she could speak her joy in it. His face, meanwhile, at all events, was turned to her, and as she met his eyes again, her joy went straight. It's success, Father. It's success, and even this, he added as the Principino, appearing alone, deep within, piped across an instant greeting. Even this isn't altogether failure. They went in to receive the boy, upon whose introduction to the room by Miss Bogle, Charlotte and the Prince got up, seemingly with an impressiveness that had caused Miss Bogle not to give further effect to her own entrance. She had retired, but the Principino's presence by itself sufficiently broke the tension. The subsidence of which, in the great room, 10 minutes later, gave to the air something of the equality produced by the cessation of a sustained rattle. Stillness, when the Prince and Princess returned from attending the visitors to their carriage, might have been said to be not so much restored as created, so that whatever next took place in it was for doomed to remarkable salience. That would have been the case, even with so natural, though so futile a movement as Maggie's going out to the balcony again to follow with her eyes her father's departure. The carriage was out of sight, it had taken her too long solemnly to re-ascend, and she looked a while only at the great gray space on which, as on the room still more, the shadow of dust had fallen. Here at first her husband had not rejoined her. He had come up with the boy, who clutching his hand abounded as usual in remarks worthy of the family archives. But the two appeared then to have proceeded to report to Miss Bogle. It meant something for the Princess that her husband had thus got their son out of the way, not bringing him back to his mother. But everything now, as she vaguely moved about, struck her as meaning so much that the unheard chorus swelled. Yet this, above all, her just being there as she was and waiting for him to come in, their freedom to be together there always was the meaning most disengaged. She stood in the cool twilight and took in all about her, where it lurked, her reason for what she had done. She knew at last really why, and how she had been inspired and guided, how she had been persistently able, how to her soul all the while. It had been for the sake of this end. Here it was then, the moment, the golden fruit that had shown from afar. Only what were these things in the fact, for the hand and for the lips, when tested, when tasted, what were they as a reward? Closer than she had ever been to the measure of her course and the full face of her act, she had an instant of the terror that, when there has been suspense, always precedes on the part of the creature to be paid, the certification of the amount. Amarigo knew it, the amount. He still held it, and the delay in his return, making her heart beat too fast to go on, was like a sudden blinding light on a wild speculation. She had thrown the dice, but his hand was over her cast. He opened the door, however, at last. He hadn't been away 10 minutes. And then, with her sight of him renewed to intensity, she seemed to have a view of the number. His presence alone, as he paused to look at her, somehow made it the highest, and even before he had spoken, she had begun to be paid in full. With that consciousness, in fact, an extraordinary thing occurred. The assurance of her safety so making her terror drop that already, within the minute, it had been changed to concern for his own anxiety, for everything that was deep in his being, and everything that was fair in his face. So far as seeing that she was paid went, he might have been holding out the money bag for her to come and take it. But what instantly rose for her between the act and her acceptance was the sense that she must strike him as waiting for a confession. This, in turn, charged her with a new horror. If that was her proper payment, she would go without money. His acknowledgement hung there, too monstrously, at the expense of Charlotte, before whose mastery of the greater style she had just been standing dazzled. All she now knew accordingly was that she should be ashamed to listen to the uttered word. All that is but that she might dispose of it on the spot forever. Isn't she too splendid? She simply said, offering it to explain and to finish. Oh, splendid, with which she came over to her. That's our help, you see, she added, to point further her moral. It kept him before her therefore, taking in or trying to, what she so wonderfully gave. He tried too clearly to please her, to meet her in her own way, but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed. See, I see nothing but you. And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast. End of chapter 42. End of The Golden Bowl by Henry James. Recording by Leanne Howlett.