The Golden Bowl - Henry James [154]
It made his wife almost spring at him. ‘You think then she’s secretly wretched?’
But he threw up his arms in deprecation. ‘Ah my dear, I give them up to you. I’ve nothing more to suggest.’
‘Then it’s not sweet of you.’ She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. ‘You admit that it is “rum”.’
And this indeed fixed again for a moment his intention. ‘Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?’
‘Never, that I know of, a word. It isn’t the sort of thing she does. And whom has she after all,’ Mrs Assingham added, ‘to complain to?’
‘Hasn’t she always you?’
‘Oh “me”! Charlotte and I, nowadays –!’ She spoke as of a chapter closed. ‘Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me more and more as extraordinary.’
A deeper shade, at the re-echo of the word, had come into the Colonel’s face. ‘If they’re each and all so extraordinary then, isn’t that why one must just resign one’s self to wash one’s hands of them – to be lost?’ Her face however so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for – her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back alertly enough to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man’s vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. ‘Hasn’t she then, Charlotte, always her husband –?’
‘To complain to? She’d rather die.’
‘Oh!’ – and Bob Assingham’s face, at the vision of such extremities, lengthened for very docility. ‘Hasn’t she the Prince then?’
‘For such matters? Oh he doesn’t count.’
‘I thought that was just what – as the basis of our agitation – he does do!’
Mrs Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. ‘Not a bit as a person to bore with complaints. The ground of my agitation is exactly that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!’ And in the imagination of Mrs Verver’s superiority to any such mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of her head – as marked a tribute to that lady’s general grace, in all the conditions, as the personage referred to doubtless had ever received.
‘Ah only Maggie!’ With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But it found his wife again prepared.
‘No – not only Maggie. A great many people in London – and small wonder! – bore him.’
‘Maggie only worst then?’ But it was a question that he had promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly before sown the seed. ‘You said just now that he would by this time be back with Charlotte “if they have arrived”. You think it then possible that they really won’t have returned?’
His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from entertaining it. ‘I think there’s nothing they’re not now capable of – in their so intense good faith.’
‘Good faith?’ – he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.
‘Their false position. It comes to the same thing.’ And she bore down with her decision the superficial lack of sequence. ‘They may very possibly, for a demonstration – as I see them – not have come back.’
He could but wonder, at this, how she did see them. ‘May have bolted somewhere together?’
‘May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done,’ Fanny Assingham continued, ‘God knows what!’ She went on suddenly with more emotion – which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision, broke out in a wail of distress imperfectly smothered. ‘Whatever they’ve done I shall never know. Never, never – because I don’t want to and because nothing will induce me. So they may do as they like. But I’ve worked for them all!’ She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him. She passed into the dusky drawing-room where during his own prowl shortly previous he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of