The Golden Bowl - Henry James [224]
Mrs Assingham wondered during these instants how much she even now knew; it had taken a minute to perceive how gently she was speaking. With that perception of its being no challenge of wrath, no heat of the deceived soul, but only a free exposure of the completeness of past ignorance, inviting derision even if it must, the elder woman felt first a strange barely credible relief: she drew in, as if it had been the warm summer scent of a flower, the sweet certainty of not meeting, any way she should turn, any consequence of judgement. She shouldn’t be judged – save by herself; which was her own wretched business. The next moment however at all events she inwardly blushed not for her immediate cowardice: she had thought of herself, thought of ‘getting off’, before so much as thinking – that is of pitifully seeing – that she was in presence of an appeal that was all an appeal, that utterly accepted its necessity. ‘In a general way, dear child, yes. But not – a – in connexion with what you’ve been telling me.’
‘They were intimate, you see. Intimate,’ said the Princess.
Fanny continued to face her, taking from her excited eyes this history, so dim and faint for all her anxious emphasis, of the far-away other time. ‘There’s always the question of what one considers –!’
‘What one considers intimate? Well, I know what I consider intimate now. Too intimate,’ said Maggie, ‘to let me know anything about it.’
It was quiet – yes; but not too quiet for Fanny Assingham’s capacity to wince. ‘Only compatible with letting me, you mean?’ She had asked it after a pause, but turning again to the new ornament of the chimney and wondering even while she took relief from it at this gap in her experience. ‘But here are things, my dear, of which my ignorance is perfect.’
‘They went about together – they’re known to have done it. And I don’t mean only before – I mean after.’
‘After?’ said Fanny Assingham.
‘Before we were married – yes; but after we were engaged.’
‘Ah I’ve known nothing about that!’ And she said it with a braver assurance – clutching with comfort at something that was apparently new to her.
‘That bowl,’ Maggie went on, ‘is, so strangely – too strangely almost to believe at this time of day – the proof. They were together all the while – up to the very eve of our marriage. Don’t you remember how just before that she came back so unexpectedly from America?’
The question had for Mrs Assingham – and whether all consciously or not – the oddest pathos of simplicity. ‘Oh yes, dear, of course I remember how she came back from America – and how she stayed with us, and what view one had of it.’
Maggie’s eyes still all the time pressed and penetrated; so that during a moment just here she might have given the little flare, have made the little pounce, of asking what then ‘one’s’ view had been. To the small flash of this eruption Fanny stood for her minute wittingly exposed; but she saw it as quickly cease to threaten – quite saw the Princess, even though in all her pain, refuse, in the interest of their strange and exalted bargain, to take advantage of the opportunity for planting the stab of reproach, the opportunity thus coming all of itself. She saw her – or believed she saw her – look at her chance for straight denunciation, look at it and then pass it by; and she felt herself with this fact hushed well-nigh to awe at the lucid higher intention that no distress could confound and that no discovery – since it was, however obscurely, a case of ‘discovery’ – could make less needful. These seconds were brief – they rapidly passed; but they lasted long enough to renew our friend’s sense of her own extraordinary undertaking, the function again imposed on her, the answerability again drilled into her, by this intensity of intimation. She was reminded of the terms on which she was let off – her quantity of release having made its sufficient show in that recall of her relation to Charlotte’s old reappearance; and deep within the whole impression glowed – ah so inspiringly when