The Golden Bowl - Henry James [192]
as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come – the alarm after all was yet to be confirmed. There came an hour inevitably when she knew with a chill what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make of Charlotte for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity. The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He had been conscious at the moment of many things – conscious even not a little of desiring and thereby of needing to see what she would do in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, menaced – horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in a question that seemed just then and there quite peculiarly their own business – why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should at the worst strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected for her temporarily from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way. That precisely was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation of resumed serenity. There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince’s equivocal light, and that made for patience; yet she was none the less to have to admit after many days that the bread he had cast on the waters had come home and that she should thus be justified of her old apprehension. The consequence of this in turn was a renewed pang in presence of his remembered ingenuity. To be ingenious with her – what didn’t, what mightn’t that mean when she had so absolutely never at any point of contact with him put him by as much as the value of a penny to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having in any way whatever to reckon with her? The ingenuity had been in his simply speaking of their use of Charlotte as if it were common to them in an equal degree, and his triumph on the occasion had been just in the simplicity. She couldn’t – and he knew it – say what was true: ‘Oh you “use” her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever so differently and separately – not at all in the same way or degree. There’s nobody we really use together but ourselves, don’t you see? – by which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other of us; so why as a matter of course in such a case as this drag in Charlotte?’
She couldn’t so challenge him because it would have been – and there she was paralysed – the note. It would have translated itself on the spot for his ear into jealousy, and from reverberation to repercussion would have reached her father’s exactly in the form of a cry piercing the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact of old – the time, so strangely, seemed already far away – an inevitability in her longer passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability round about them of everything. But at present Charlotte was almost always there when Amerigo brought her to Eaton Square, where Amerigo was constantly bringing her; and Amerigo was almost always there when Charlotte brought her husband to Portland Place, where Charlotte was constantly bringing him. The fractions of occasions, the chance minutes that put