• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7070 0

Rome from which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence – the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter – of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised2 hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hat’s and the frock’s own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it hadn’t yet done: it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently there, to be wounded or shocked.

What had happened in short was that Charlotte and he had by a single turn of the wrist of fate – ‘led up’ to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed – been placed face to face in a freedom that extraordinarily partook of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was – into which he had lived quite intimately by the end of a quarter of an hour – that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown. On that morning in the Park there had been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised confidence. The emphasis, for their general comfort, was what Charlotte had come to apply; inasmuch as, though it was not what she definitely began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were alone – even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then directly replied; it was the meaning of everything else, down to the conscious quaintness of her rickety ‘growler’3 and the conscious humility of her toneless dress. It had helped him a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass without an answer. He could ask her instead what had become of her carriage and why above all she wasn’t using it in such weather.

‘It’s just because of the weather,’ she explained. ‘It’s my little idea. It makes me feel as I used to – when I could do as I liked.’

5

This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. ‘But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?’

‘It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It’s the charm, at any rate,’ she said from her place at the fire, ‘of trying again the old feelings. They come back – they come back. Everything,’ she went on, ‘comes back. Besides,’ she wound up, ‘you know for yourself.’

He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. ‘Ah I haven’t your courage. Moreover,’ he laughed, ‘it seems to me that so far as that goes I do live in hansoms. But you must awfully want your tea,’ he quickly added; ‘so let me give you a good stiff cup.’

He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that while she talked he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her visit, as the moments passed,