The Golden Bowl - Henry James [199]
‘To hate it –?’ Maggie had invoked vagueness.
‘To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off. And I dare say I should have hated it for you even more than for myself.’
‘That’s not unlikely perhaps when it was for me, after all, that you did it.’
He had hesitated, but only a moment. ‘I never told you so.’
‘Well, Charlotte herself soon enough told me.’
‘But I never told her,’ her father had answered.
‘Are you very sure?’ she had presently asked.
‘Well, I like to think how thoroughly I was taken with her, and how right I was, and how fortunate, to have that for my basis. I told her all the good I thought of her.’
‘Then that,’ Maggie had returned, ‘was precisely part of the good. I mean it was precisely part of it that she could so beautifully understand.’
‘Yes – understand everything.’
‘Everything – and in particular your reasons. Her telling me – that showed me how she had understood.’
They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his colour rise; it was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image, the enacted scene, of her passage with Charlotte, which he was actually hearing of for the first time and as to which it would have been natural he should question her further. His forbearance to do so would but mark precisely the complication of his fears. ‘What she does like,’ he finally said, ‘is the way it has succeeded.’
‘Your marriage?’
‘Yes – my whole idea. The way I’ve been justified. That’s the joy I give her. If for her either it had failed –!’ That however wasn’t worth talking about; he had broken off. ‘You think then you could now risk Fawns?’
‘ “Risk” it?’
‘Well, morally – from the point of view I was talking of; that of our sinking deeper into sloth. Our selfishness somehow seems at its biggest down there.’
Maggie had allowed him the amusement of her not taking this up. ‘Is Charlotte,’ she had simply asked, ‘really ready?’
‘Oh if you and I and Amerigo are. Whenever one corners Charlotte,’ he had developed more at his ease, ‘one finds that she only wants to know what we want. Which is what we got her for!’
‘What we got her for – exactly!’ And so for a little, even though with a certain effect of oddity in their more or less successful ease, they left it; left it till Maggie made the remark that it was all the same wonderful her stepmother should be willing, before the season was out, to exchange so much company for so much comparative solitude.
‘Ah,’ he had then made answer, ‘that’s because her idea, I think, this time, is that we shall have more people, more than we’ve hitherto had, in the country. Don’t you remember that that, originally, was what we were to get her for?’
‘Oh yes – to give us a life.’ Maggie had gone through the form of recalling this, and the light of their ancient candour, shining from so far back, had seemed to bring out some things so strangely that, with the sharpness of the vision, she had risen to her feet. ‘Well, with a “life” Fawns will certainly do.’ He had remained in his place while she looked over his head; the picture, in her vision, had suddenly swarmed. The vibration was that of one of the lurches of the mystic train in which, with her companion, she was travelling; but she was having to steady herself this time before meeting his eyes. She had measured indeed the full