The Golden Bowl - Henry James [237]
The Prince paid her an instant the visible deference of trying to imagine what this might have been. ‘I agree with you that the coincidence is extraordinary – the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays. But I don’t see, you must let me say, the importance or the connexion –’
‘Of my having made the purchase where you failed of it?’ She had quickly taken him up; but she had, with her eyes on him once more, another drop into the order of her thoughts, to which, through whatever he might say, she was still adhering. ‘It’s not my having gone into the place at the end of four years that makes the strangeness of the coincidence; for don’t such chances as that in London easily occur? The strangeness,’ she lucidly said, ‘is in what my purchase was to represent to me after I had got it home; which value came,’ she explained, ‘from the wonder of my having found such a friend.’
‘ “Such a friend”?’ As a wonder assuredly her husband could but take it.
‘As the little man in the shop. He did for me more than he knew – I owe it to him. He took an interest in me,’ Maggie said; ‘and, taking that interest, he recalled your visit, he remembered you and spoke of you to me.’
On which the Prince passed the comment of a sceptical smile. ‘Ah but, my dear, if extraordinary things come from people’s taking an interest in you –’
‘My life in that case,’ she asked, ‘must be very agitated? Well, he liked me, I mean – very particularly. It’s only so I can account for my afterwards hearing from him – and in fact he gave me that to-day,’ she pursued, ‘he gave me it frankly, as his reason.’
‘To-day?’ the Prince enquiringly echoed.
But she was singularly able – it had been marvellously ‘given’ her, she afterwards said to herself – to abide, for her light, for her clue, by her own order. ‘I inspired him with sympathy – there you are! But the miracle is that he should have a sympathy to offer that could be of use to me. That was really the oddity of my chance,’ the Princess proceeded – ‘that I should have been moved, in my ignorance, to go precisely to him.’
He saw her so keep her course that it was as if he could at the best but stand aside to watch her and let her pass; he only made a vague demonstration that was like an ineffective gesture. ‘I’m sorry to say any ill of your friends, and the thing was a long time ago; besides which there was nothing to make me recur to it. But I remembered the man’s striking me as a horrid little beast.’
She gave a slow headshake – as if, no, after consideration, not that way were an issue. ‘I can only think of him as kind, for he had nothing to gain. He had in fact only to lose. It was what he came to tell me – that he had asked me too high a price, more than the object was really worth. There was a particular reason which he hadn’t mentioned and which had made him consider and repent. He wrote for leave to see me again – wrote in such terms that I saw him here this afternoon.’
‘Here?’ – it made the Prince look about him.
‘Downstairs – in the little red room. While he was waiting he looked at the few photographs that stand about there and recognised two of them. Though it was so long ago, he remembered the visit made him by the lady and the gentleman, and that gave him his connexion. It gave me mine, for he remembered everything and told me everything. You see you too had produced your effect; only, unlike you, he had thought of it again – he had recurred to it. He told me of your having wished to make each other presents – but of that’s not having come off. The lady was greatly taken with the piece I had bought of him, but you had your reason against receiving it from her, and you had been right. He’d think that of you more than ever now,’ Maggie went on; ‘he’d see how wisely you had guessed the flaw and how easily the bowl could be broken. I had bought it myself, you see, for