The Golden Bowl - Henry James [103]
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 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 hadn’t she 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 habit of mostly – and more or less against his own contention – coming round to her, she showed how she could also ever, and not less gently, come halfway. ‘I speak of it only as the missing grace – the grace that’s in everything 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.’2 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 boa3 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” –?’
‘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