The Golden Bowl - Henry James [104]
‘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’s 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 Télégraphes, 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!’4 – 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 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, so that 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. Quite through it withal 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 wholly 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? Déjeunons.’5
She stood there however in spite of this appeal, her document