The Golden Bowl - Henry James [277]
Maggie again took time. ‘You mean you don’t make out Amerigo?’
But Fanny shook her head, and it was quite as if, as an appeal to one’s intelligence, the making out of Amerigo had, in spite of everything, long been superseded. Then Maggie measured the reach of her allusion and how what she next said gave her meaning a richness. No other name was to be spoken, and Mrs Assingham had taken that without delay from her eyes – with a discretion still that fell short but by an inch. ‘You know how he feels.’
Maggie at this then slowly matched her headshake. ‘I know nothing.’
‘You know how you feel.’
But again she denied it. ‘I know nothing. If I did –!’
‘Well, if you did?’ Fanny asked as she faltered.
She had had enough, however. ‘I should die,’ she said as she turned away.
She went to her room through the quiet house; she roamed there a moment, picking up pointlessly a different fan, and then took her way to the shaded apartments in which at this hour the Principino would be enjoying his nap. She passed through the first empty room, the day nursery, and paused at an open door. The inner room, large dim and cool, was equally calm; her boy’s ample antique historical royal crib, consecrated reputedly by the guarded rest of heirs-apparent and a gift early in his career from his grandfather, ruled the scene from the centre, in the stillness of which she could almost hear the child’s soft breathing. The prime protector of his dreams was installed beside him; her father sat there with as little motion – with head thrown back and supported, with eyes apparently closed, with the fine foot that was so apt to betray nervousness at peace upon the other knee, with the unfathomable heart folded in the constant flawless freshness of the white waistcoat that could always receive in its armholes the firm prehensile thumbs. Mrs Noble had majestically melted, and the whole place signed her temporary abdication; yet the actual situation was regular, and Maggie lingered but to look. She looked over her fan, the top of which was pressed against her face, long enough to wonder if her father really slept or if, aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet. Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to take this – his forbearance from any question – only as a sign again that everything was left to her? She at all events for a minute watched his immobility – then, as if once more renewing her total submission, returned without a sound to her own quarters.
A strange impulse was sharp in her, but it wasn’t, for her part, the desire to shift the weight. She could as little have slept as she could have slept that morning, days before, when she had watched the first dawn from her window. Turned to the east, this side of her room was now in shade, with the two wings of the casement folded back and the charm she always found in her seemingly perched position – as if her outlook, from above the high terraces, was that of some castle-tower mounted on a rock. When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the woods – all of which drowsed below her at this hour in the immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked dim; the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves. Nothing therefore would have appeared to sit in the brilliant void if Maggie, at the moment she was about to turn away, hadn’t caught sight of a moving spot, a clear green sunshade in the act of descending a flight of steps. It passed down from the terrace, receding, at a distance, from sight and carried, naturally, so as to conceal the head and back of its bearer; but Maggie had quickly recognised the white dress and the particular motion of this adventurer – had taken in that Charlotte, of all people, had chosen the glare of noon for an exploration of the gardens and that she could