The Golden Bowl - Henry James [298]
‘Ah rather!’ she murmured with her smile. And then as to be herself ideally right: ‘I don’t see what you would have done without her.’
‘The point was,’ he returned quietly, ‘that I didn’t see what you were to do. Yet it was a risk.’
‘It was a risk,’ said Maggie – ‘but I believed in it. At least for myself!’ she smiled.
‘Well now,’ he smoked, ‘we see.’
‘We see.’
‘I know her better.’
‘You know her best.’
‘Oh but naturally!’ On which, as the warranted truth of it hung in the air – the truth warranted, as who should say, exactly by the present opportunity to pronounce, this opportunity created and accepted – she found herself lost, though with a finer thrill than she had perhaps yet known, in the vision of all he might mean. The sense of it in her rose higher, rose with each moment that he invited her thus to see him linger; and when, after a little more, he had said, smoking again and looking up, with head thrown back and hands spread on the balcony rail, at the grey gaunt front of the house, ‘She’s beautiful, beautiful!’ her sensibility reported to her the shade of a new note. It was all she might have wished, for it was, with a kind of speaking competence, the note of possession and control; and yet it conveyed to her as nothing till now had done the reality of their parting. They were parting, in the light of it, absolutely on Charlotte’s value – the value that was filling the room out of which they had stepped as if to give it play, and with which the Prince on his side was perhaps making larger acquaintance. If Maggie had desired at so late an hour some last conclusive comfortable category to place him in for dismissal, she might have found it here in its all coming back to his ability to rest upon high values. Somehow, when all was said, and with the memory of her gifts, her variety, her power, so much remained of Charlotte’s! What else had she herself meant three minutes before by speaking of her as great? Great for the world that was before her – that he proposed she should be: she wasn’t to be wasted in the application of his plan. Maggie held to this then – that she wasn’t to be wasted. To let his daughter know it he had sought this brief privacy. What a blessing accordingly that she could speak her joy in it! His face meanwhile at all events was turned to her, and as she met his eyes again her joy went straight. ‘It’s success, father.’
‘It’s success. And even this,’ he added as the Principino, appearing alone, deep within, piped across an instant greeting – ‘even this isn’t altogether failure!’
They went in to receive the boy, upon whose introduction to the room by Miss Bogle Charlotte and the Prince got up – seemingly with an impressiveness that had caused Miss Bogle not to give further effect to her own entrance. She had retired, but the Principino’s presence by itself sufficiently broke the tension – the subsidence of which, in the great room, ten minutes later, gave to the air something of the quality produced by the cessation of a sustained rattle. Stillness, when the Prince and Princess returned from attending the visitors to their carriage, might have been said to be not so much restored as created; so that whatever next took place in it was foredoomed to remarkable salience. That would have been the case even with so natural, though so futile, a movement as Maggie’s going out to the balcony again to follow with her eyes her father’s departure. The carriage was out of sight – it had taken her too long solemnly to reascend, and she looked a while only at the great grey space on which, as on the room still more, the shadow of dusk had fallen. Here at first her husband hadn’t rejoined her; he had come up with the boy, who, clutching his hand, abounded, as usual, in remarks worthy of the family archives; but the two appeared then to have proceeded to report to Miss Bogle. It meant