The Golden Bowl - Henry James [185]
‘Yes, and of my having wanted to let it act for him quietly – I mean without my insistence.’ She had, in her compressed state, another pause, and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting. Strange enough was this sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing, by miraculous help, some advantage that, absolutely then and there, in the carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep. Strange, inexpressibly strange – so distinctly she saw that if she did give it up she should somehow give up everything for ever. And what her husband’s grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she should give it up: it was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing magic. He knew how to resort to it – he could be on occasion, as she had lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover: all of which was precisely a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life. She should have but to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it definite for him that she didn’t resist. To this as they went every throb of her consciousness prompted her – every throb, that is, but one, the throb of her deeper need to know where she ‘really’ was. By the time she had uttered the rest of her idea therefore she was still keeping her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of the carriage-window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had risen, happily perhaps indistinguishable in the dusk. She was making an effort that horribly hurt her, and as she couldn’t cry out her eyes swam in her silence. With them, all the same, through the square opening beside her, through the grey panorama of the London night, she achieved the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted; and her lips helped and protected her by being able to be gay. ‘Its not to leave you, my dear – for that he’ll give you anything; just as he would go off anywhere, I think, you know, if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone,’ Maggie pursued with her gaze out of her window.
For which Amerigo’s answer again took him a moment. ‘Ah the dear old boy! You’d like me to propose him something –?’
‘Well, if you think you could bear it.’
‘And leave,’ the Prince asked, ‘you and Charlotte alone?’
‘Why not?’ Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke it came clear. ‘Why shouldn’t Charlotte be just one of my reasons – my not liking to leave her? She has always been so good, so perfect, to me – but never so wonderfully as just now. We have somehow been more together – thinking for the time almost only of each other; it has been quite as in old days.’ And she proceeded consummately, for she felt it as consummate: ‘It’s as if we had been missing each other, had got a little apart – though going on so side by side. But the good moments, if one only waits for them,’ she hastened to add, ‘come round of themselves. Moreover you’ve seen for yourself, since you’ve made it up so to father; feeling for yourself in your beautiful way every difference, every air that blows; not having to be told or pushed, only being perfect to live with, through your habit of kindness and your exquisite instincts. But of course you’ve seen, all the while, that both he and I have deeply felt how you’ve managed; managed that he hasn’t been too much alone and that I on my side haven’t appeared to – what you might call – neglect him. This is always,’ she continued, ‘what I can never bless you enough for; of all the good things you’ve done for me you’ve never done