The Golden Bowl Part 54

"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. a.s.singham presumed to object. "Doesn't it moreover 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. a.s.singham 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. a.s.singham went further. "He has made it a success for THEM--!"

"Ah, there you are!" Maggie responsively mused. "Yes," she said the next moment, "that's why Amerigo stays."

"Let alone it's why Charlotte goes." that Mrs. a.s.singham, and emboldened, smiled "So he knows--?"

But Maggie hung back. "Amerigo--?" After which, however, she blushed--to her companion's recognition.

"Your father. He knows what YOU know? I mean," f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham.

"Then do you yourself know?"

"How much--?"

"How much."

"How far--?"

"How far."

f.a.n.n.y 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 n.o.body knows--? I mean," Mrs.

a.s.singham explained, "how much your father does."

Oh, Maggie showed that she understood. "n.o.body."

"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, "Amerigo would."

"And that's just it--that he doesn't?"

"That's just it," said the Princess profoundly.

On which Mrs. a.s.singham reflected. "Then how is Charlotte so held?"

"Just by that."

"By her ignorance?"

"By her ignorance." f.a.n.n.y wondered. "A torment--?"

"A torment," said Maggie with tears in her eyes.

Her companion a moment watched them. "But the Prince then--?"

"How is HE held?" Maggie asked.

"How is HE held?"

"Oh, I can't tell you that!" And the Princess again broke off.

XLI

A telegram, in Charlotte's name, arrived early--"We shall come and ask you for tea at five, if convenient to you. Am wiring for the a.s.singhams to lunch." This doc.u.ment, 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 an 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 f.a.n.n.y a.s.singham'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 recognised the virtual ident.i.ty 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 give an instinctive push to the door she had not completely closed behind her.

He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences 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 none the less, 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 instants, 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. Presently 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 their 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 quant.i.ty, that were like the irruption 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 mayn't by accident miss them. For it's the last," said Maggie.

"The last?"

"I take it as their 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 stop-gap. "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 also to have f.a.n.n.y and the Colonel.

They don't WANT them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them, beforehand. They want only us together; and if they cut us down to tea," she continued, "as they cut f.a.n.n.y 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. But wasn't that 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 n.o.ble 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, a.s.suredly, 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--those she had so all but abjectly laboured for--threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the cl.u.s.ters of angelic heads, the peopled 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 next in the face with which he listened.