by Henry James
Mr. Verver considered. "Well, hasn't he been away?"
"Yes, just long enough to see how he likes it. Besides," said Charlotte, "he may not be able to join in the rosy view of our case that you impute to her. It can't in the least have appeared to him hitherto a matter of course that you should give his wife a bouncing stepmother."
Adam Verver, at this, looked grave. "I'm afraid then he'll just have to accept from us whatever his wife accepts; and accept it—if he can imagine no better reason—just because she does. That," he declared, "will have to do for him."
His tone made her for a moment meet his face; after which, "Let me," she abruptly said, "see it again"—taking from him the folded leaf that she had given back and he had kept in his hand. "Isn't the whole thing," she asked when she had read it over, "perhaps but a way like another for their gaining time?"
He again stood staring; but the next minute, with that upward spring of his shoulders and that downward pressure of his pockets which she had already, more than once, at disconcerted moments, determined in him, he turned sharply away and wandered from her in silence. He looked about in his small despair; he crossed the hotel court, which, overarched and glazed, muffled against loud sounds and guarded against crude sights, heated, gilded, draped, almost carpeted, with exotic trees in tubs, exotic ladies in chairs, the general exotic accent and presence suspended, as with wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme, the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some critical apartment of large capacity, some "dental," medical, surgical waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire, preparatory, for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism. He went as far as the porte-cochere, took counsel afresh of his usual optimism, sharpened even, somehow, just here, by the very air he tasted, and then came back smiling to Charlotte. "It is incredible to you that when a man is still as much in love as Amerigo his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants?—in the absence, that is, of special impediments to his so doing." The manner of it operated—she acknowledged with no great delay this natural possibility. "No—nothing is incredible to me of people immensely in love."
"Well, isn't Amerigo immensely in love?"
She hesitated but as for the right expression of her sense of the degree—but she after all adopted Mr. Verver's. "Immensely."
"Then there you are!"
She had another smile, however—she wasn't there quite yet. "That isn't all that's wanted."
"But what more?"
"Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that SHE really believes." With which Charlotte became still more lucidly logical. "The reality of his belief will depend in such a case on the reality of hers. The Prince may for instance now," she went on, "have made out to his satisfaction that Maggie may mainly desire to abound in your sense, whatever it is you do. He may remember that he has never seen her do anything else."
"Well," said Adam Verver, "what kind of a warning will he have found in that? To what catastrophe will he have observed such a disposition in her to lead?"
"Just to THIS one!" With which she struck him as rising straighter and clearer before him than she had done even yet.
"Our little question itself?" Her appearance had in fact, at the moment, such an effect on him that he could answer but in marvelling mildness. "Hadn't we better wait a while till we call it a catastrophe?"
Her rejoinder to this was to wait—though by no means as long as he meant. When at the end of her minute she spoke, however, it was mildly too. "What would you like, dear friend, to wait for?" It lingered between them in the air, this demand, and they exchanged for the time a look which might have made each of them seem to have been watching in the other the signs of its overt irony. These were indeed immediately so visible in Mr. Verver's face that, as if a little ashamed of having so markedly produced them—and as if also to bring out at last, under pressure, something she had all the while been keeping back—she took a jump to pure plain reason. "You haven't noticed for yourself, but I can't quite help noticing, that in spite of what you assume—WE assume, if you like—Maggie wires her joy only to you. She makes no sign of its overflow to me."
It was a point—and, staring a moment, he took account of it. But he had, as before, his presence of mind—to say nothing of his kindly humour. "Why, you complain of the very thing that's most charmingly conclusive! She treats us already as ONE."
Clearly now, for the girl, in spite of lucidity and logic, there was something in the way he said things—! She faced him in all her desire to please him, and then her word quite simply and definitely showed it. "I do like you, you know."
Well, what could this do but stimulate his humour? "I see what's the matter with you. You won't be quiet till you've heard from the Prince himself. I think," the happy man added, "that I'll go and secretly wire to him that you'd like, reply paid, a few words for yourself."
It could apparently but encourage her further to smile. "Reply paid for him, you mean—or for me?"
"Oh, I'll pay, with pleasure, anything back for you—as many words as you like." And he went on, to keep it up. "Not requiring either to see your message."
She could take it, visibly, as he meant it. "Should you require to see the Prince's?"
"Not a bit. You can keep that also to yourself."
On his speaking, however, as if his transmitting the hint were a real question, she appeared to consider—and almost as if for good taste—that the joke had gone far enough. "It doesn't matter. Unless he speaks of his own movement—! And why should it be," she asked, "a thing that WOULD occur to him?"
"I really think," Mr. Verver concurred, "that it naturally wouldn't. HE doesn't know you're morbid."
She just wondered—but she agreed. "No—he hasn't yet found it out. Perhaps he will, but he hasn't yet; and I'm willing to give him meanwhile the benefit of the doubt." So with this the situation, to her view, would appear to have cleared had she not too quickly had one of her restless relapses. "Maggie, however, does know I'm morbid. SHE hasn't the benefit."
"Well," said Adam Verver a little wearily at last, "I think I feel that you'll hear from her yet." It had even fairly come over him, under recurrent suggestion, that his daughter's omission WAS surprising. And Maggie had never in her life been wrong for more than three minutes.
"Oh, it isn't that I hold that I've a RIGHT to it," Charlotte the next instant rather oddly qualified—and the observation itself gave him a further push.
"Very well—I shall like it myself."
At this then, as if moved by his way of constantly—and more or less against his own contention—coming round to her, she showed how she could also always, and not less gently, come half way. "I speak of it only as the missing GRACE—the grace that's in everything that Maggie does. It isn't my due"—she kept it up—"but, taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have the touch. It will be beautiful."
"Then come out to breakfast." Mr. Verver had looked at his watch. "It will be here when we get back."
"If it isn't"—and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room—"if it isn't it will have had but THAT slight fault."
He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved to meet him, and, after he had fetched it, raising it to make its charming softness brush his face—for it was a wondrous product of Paris, purchased under his direct auspices the day before—he held it there a minute before giving it up. "Will you promise me then to be at peace?"
She looked, while she debated, at his admirable present. "I promise you."
"Quite for ever?"
"Quite for ever."
"Remember," he went on, to justify his demand, "remember that in wiring you she'll naturally speak even more for her husband than she has done in wiring me."
It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demur. "'Naturally'—?"
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"Why, our marriage puts him for you, you see—or puts you for him—into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me unchanged. It therefore gives him more to say to you about it."
"About its making me his stepmother-in-law—or whatever I SHOULD become?" Over which, for a little, she not undivertedly mused. "Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about that."
"Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you, in sending you a message, he'll be it ALL." And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly, critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. "Don't you think he's charming?"
"Oh, charming," said Charlotte Stant. "If he weren't I shouldn't mind."
"No more should I!" her friend harmoniously returned.
"Ah, but you DON'T mind. You don't have to. You don't have to, I mean, as I have. It's the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced. If I were you," she went on—"if I had in my life, for happiness and power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don't know," she said, "what in the world—that didn't touch my luck—I should trouble my head about."
"I quite understand you—yet doesn't it just depend," Mr. Verver asked, "on what you call one's luck? It's exactly my luck that I'm talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you've made me all right. It's only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of. It isn't they," he explained, "that make one so: it's the something else I want that makes THEM right. If you'll give me what I ask, you'll see."
She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her eyes, while she still delayed, had turned from him, engaged by another interest, though the court was by this time, the hour of dispersal for luncheon, so forsaken that they would have had it, for free talk, should they have been moved to loudness, quite to themselves. She was ready for their adjournment, but she was also aware of a pedestrian youth, in uniform, a visible emissary of the Postes et Telegraphes, who had approached, from the street, the small stronghold of the concierge and who presented there a missive taken from the little cartridge-box slung over his shoulder. The portress, meeting him on the threshold, met equally, across the court, Charlotte's marked attention to his visit, so that, within the minute, she had advanced to our friends with her cap-streamers flying and her smile of announcement as ample as her broad white apron. She raised aloft a telegraphic message and, as she delivered it, sociably discriminated. "Cette fois-ci pour madame!"—with which she as genially retreated, leaving Charlotte in possession. Charlotte, taking it, held it at first unopened. Her eyes had come back to her companion, who had immediately and triumphantly greeted it. "Ah, there you are!"
She broke the envelope then in silence, and for a minute, as with the message he himself had put before her, studied its contents without a sign. He watched her without a question, and at last she looked up. "I'll give you," she simply said, "what you ask."
The expression of her face was strange—but since when had a woman's at moments of supreme surrender not a right to be? He took it in with his own long look and his grateful silence—so that nothing more, for some instants, passed between them. Their understanding sealed itself—he already felt that she had made him right. But he was in presence too of the fact that Maggie had made HER so; and always, therefore, without Maggie, where, in fine, would he be? She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Through it all, however, he smiled. "What my child does for me—!"
Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw Charlotte, rather than heard her, reply. She held her paper wide open, but her eyes were all for his. "It isn't Maggie. It's the Prince."
"I SAY!"—he gaily rang out. "Then it's best of all."
"It's enough."
"Thank you for thinking so!" To which he added "It's enough for our question, but it isn't—is it? quite enough for our breakfast? Dejeunons."
She stood there, however, in spite of this appeal, her document always before them. "Don't you want to read it?"
He thought. "Not if it satisfies you. I don't require it."
But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. "You can if you like."
He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity. "Is it funny?"
Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. "No—I call it grave."
"Ah, then, I don't want it."
"Very grave," said Charlotte Stant.
"Well, what did I tell you of him?" he asked, rejoicing, as they started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her coat.
PART THIRD
XIV
Charlotte, half way up the "monumental" staircase, had begun by waiting alone—waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would know where to find her. She was meanwhile, though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised; but she would not have cared if she had been—so little was it, by this time, her first occasion of facing society with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly, enriched. For a couple of years now she had known as never before what it was to look "well"—to look, that is, as well as she had always felt, from far back, that, in certain conditions, she might. On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all profusely present; so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith as at the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood and meeting in consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the whole high pitch—much, in fact, as if she had pressed a finger on a chord or a key and created, for the number of seconds, an arrest of vibration, a more muffled thump. The sight of him suggested indeed that Fanny would be there, though so far as opportunity went she had not seen her. This was about the limit of what it could suggest.
The air, however, had suggestions enough—it abounded in them, many of them precisely helping to constitute those conditions with which, for our young woman, the hour was brilliantly crowned. She was herself in truth crowned, and it all hung together, melted together, in light and colour and sound: the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the PROVED private theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use—to which might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. For a crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was, doubtless, that helped her, while she waited, to the right assurance, to the right indifference, to the right expression, and above all, as she felt, to the right view of her opportunity for happiness—unless indeed the opportunity itself, rather, were, in its mere strange amplitude, the producing, the precipitating cause. The ordered revellers, rustling and shining, with sweep of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and yet, for all this, but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely vocal—the double stream of the coming and the going, flowing together where she stood, passed her, brushed her, tr
eated her to much crude contemplation and now and then to a spasm of speech, an offered hand, even in some cases to an unencouraged pause; but she missed no countenance and invited no protection: she fairly liked to be, so long as she might, just as she was—exposed a little to the public, no doubt, in her unaccompanied state, but, even if it were a bit brazen, careless of queer reflections on the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since it was a question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions of her own. She hoped no one would stop—she was positively keeping herself; it was her idea to mark in a particular manner the importance of something that had just happened. She knew how she should mark it, and what she was doing there made already a beginning.
When presently, therefore, from her standpoint, she saw the Prince come back she had an impression of all the place as higher and wider and more appointed for great moments; with its dome of lustres lifted, its ascents and descents more majestic, its marble tiers more vividly overhung, its numerosity of royalties, foreign and domestic, more unprecedented, its symbolism of "State" hospitality both emphasised and refined. This was doubtless a large consequence of a fairly familiar cause, a considerable inward stir to spring from the mere vision, striking as that might be, of Amerigo in a crowd; but she had her reasons, she held them there, she carried them in fact, responsibly and overtly, as she carried her head, her high tiara, her folded fan, her indifferent, unattended eminence; and it was when he reached her and she could, taking his arm, show herself as placed in her relation, that she felt supremely justified. It was her notion of course that she gave a glimpse of but few of her grounds for this discrimination—indeed of the most evident alone; yet she would have been half willing it should be guessed how she drew inspiration, drew support, in quantity sufficient for almost anything, from the individual value that, through all the picture, her husband's son-in-law kept for the eye, deriving it from his fine unconscious way, in the swarming social sum, of outshining, overlooking and overtopping. It was as if in separation, even the shortest, she half forgot or disbelieved how he affected her sight, so that reappearance had, in him, each time, a virtue of its own—a kind of disproportionate intensity suggesting his connection with occult sources of renewal. What did he do when he was away from her that made him always come back only looking, as she would have called it, "more so?" Superior to any shade of cabotinage, he yet almost resembled an actor who, between his moments on the stage, revisits his dressing-room and, before the glass, pressed by his need of effect, retouches his make-up. The Prince was at present, for instance, though he had quitted her but ten minutes before, still more than then the person it pleased her to be left with—a truth that had all its force for her while he made her his care for their conspicuous return together to the upper rooms. Conspicuous beyond any wish they could entertain was what, poor wonderful man, he couldn't help making it; and when she raised her eyes again, on the ascent, to Bob Assingham, still aloft in his gallery and still looking down at her, she was aware that, in spite of hovering and warning inward voices, she even enjoyed the testimony rendered by his lonely vigil to the lustre she reflected.
