The Golden Bowl - Henry James [159]
‘I see – I see.’ She had paused, meeting all the while his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. ‘One quite understands, my dear.’
Yet it only kept her there sombre. ‘I naturally see, love, what you understand; which sits again perfectly in your eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest’ – and the grimness of her lucidity suddenly once more possessed her: ‘you’ve only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see,’ she said with an ineffable headshake, ‘that I don’t stand up! I’m down, down, down,’ she declared; ‘yet’ – she as quickly added – ‘there’s just one little thing that helps to save my life.’ And she kept him waiting but an instant. ‘They might easily – they would perhaps even certainly – have done something worse.’
He thought. ‘Worse than that Charlotte –?’
‘Ah don’t tell me,’ she cried, ‘that there could have been nothing worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary.’
He was almost simultaneous. ‘Extraordinary!’
‘She observes the forms,’ said Fanny Assingham.
‘With the Prince –?’
‘For the Prince. And with the others,’ she went on. ‘With Mr Verver – wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms’ – she had to do even them justice – ‘are two thirds of conduct. Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them.’
But he jerked back. ‘Ah my dear, I wouldn’t say it for the world!’
‘Say,’ she none the less pursued, ‘he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for.’
‘You mean then he doesn’t care for Charlotte –?’
This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said: ‘No!’
‘Then what on earth are they up to?’ Still however she only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time to risk soothingly another question. ‘Are the “forms” you speak of – that are two thirds of conduct – what will be keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?’
‘Yes – absolutely. Their forms.’
‘ “Theirs” –?’
‘Maggie’s and Mr Verver’s – those they impose on Charlotte and the Prince. Those,’ she developed, ‘that so perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones.’
He considered – but only now at last really to relapse into woe. ‘Your “perversity”, my dear, is exactly what I don’t understand. The state of things existing hasn’t grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round, may be in for now is at least the consequence of what they’ve done. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?’
Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it. ‘Yes – they are. To be so abjectly innocent – that is to be victims of fate.’
‘And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent –?’
It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. ‘Yes. That is they were – as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s