The Golden Bowl - Henry James [119]
The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel’s next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife. They were united for the most part but by his exhausted patience; so that indulgent despair was generally at the best his note. He at present however actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps. He literally asked in short an intelligent, well-nigh a sympathising, question. ‘Gratitude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel – that, you mean, should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of her boat?’
‘Taking it in the right way.’ Fanny, catching at this gleam, emphasised the proviso.
‘But doesn’t it rather depend on what she may most feel to be the right way?’
‘No – it depends on nothing. Because there’s only one way – for duty or delicacy.’
‘Oh – delicacy!’ Bob Assingham rather crudely murmured.
‘I mean the highest kind – moral. Charlotte’s perfectly capable of appreciating that. By every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone.’
‘Then you’ve made up your mind it’s all poor Charlotte?’ he asked with an effect of abruptness.
The effect, whether intended or not, reached her – brought her face short round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which the bottom somehow dropped out of her recovered comfort. ‘Then you’ve made up yours differently? It really struck you that there is something?’
The movement itself apparently made him once more stand off. He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question. ‘Perhaps that’s just what she’s doing: showing him how much she’s letting him alone – pointing it out to him from day to day.’
‘Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the staircase in the manner you described to me?’
‘I really, my dear, described to you a manner?’ – the Colonel clearly, from want of habit, scarce recognised himself in the imputation.
‘Yes – for once in a way; in those few words we had after you had watched them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn’t tell me very much – that you couldn’t for your life; but I saw for myself that, strange to say, you had received your impression, and I felt therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for you so to betray it.’ She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him with his proved sensibility to the occasion – confronted him because of her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at the time, it came over her that he had been struck with something, even he, poor dear man; and that for this to have occurred there must have been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value; for so recorded, she felt, none of it would escape – she should have it at hand for reference. ‘Come, my dear – you thought what you thought: in the presence of what you saw you couldn’t resist thinking. I don’t ask more of it than that. And your idea is worth, this time, quite as much as any of mine – so that you can’t pretend as usual that mine has run away with me. I haven’t caught up with you. I stay where I am. But I see,’ she concluded, ‘where you are, and I’m much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point