The Golden Bowl - Henry James [32]
‘That’s your good fortune and your point of view. You own – or you soon practically will own – so much of it. Charlotte owns almost nothing in the world, she tells me, but two colossal trunks – only one of which I’ve given her leave to introduce into this house. She’ll depreciate to you,’ Mrs Assingham added, ‘your property.’
He thought of these things, he thought of everything; but he had always his resource at hand of turning all to the easy. ‘Has she come with designs upon me?’ And then in a moment, as if even this were almost too grave, he sounded the note that had least to do with himself. ‘Est-elle toujours aussi belle?’16 That was the furthest point, somehow, to which Charlotte Stant could be relegated.
Mrs Assingham treated it freely. ‘Just the same. The person in the world, to my sense, whose looks are most subject to appreciation. It’s all in the way she affects you. One admires her if one doesn’t happen not to. So, as well, one criticises her.’
‘Ah that’s not fair!’ said the Prince.
‘To criticise her? Then there you are! You’re answered.’
‘I’m answered.’ He took it, humorously, as his lesson – sank his previous self-consciousness, with excellent effect, in grateful docility. ‘I only meant that there are perhaps better things to be done with Miss Stant than to criticise her. When once you begin that, with any one –!’ He was vague and kind.
‘I quite agree that it’s better to keep out of it as long as one can. But when one must do it –’
‘Yes?’ he asked as she paused.
‘Then know what you mean.’
‘I see. Perhaps,’ he smiled, ‘I don’t know what I mean.’
‘Well, it’s what, just now, in all ways, you particularly should know.’ Mrs Assingham however made no more of this, having before anything else apparently a scruple about the tone she had just used. ‘I quite understand of course that, given her great friendship with Maggie, she should have wanted to be present. She has acted impulsively – but she has acted generously.’
‘She has acted beautifully,’ said the Prince.
‘I say “generously” because I mean she hasn’t in any way counted the cost. She’ll have it to count in a manner now,’ his hostess continued. ‘But that doesn’t matter.’
He could see how little. ‘You’ll look after her.’
‘I’ll look after her.’
‘So it’s all right.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs Assingham.
‘Then why are you troubled?’
It pulled her up – but only for a minute. ‘I’m not – any more than you.’
The Prince’s dark blue eyes were of the finest and, on occasion, precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look itself at such times suggested an image – that of some very noble personage who, expected, acclaimed by the crowd in the street and with old precious stuffs falling over the sill for his support, had gaily and gallantly come to show himself: always moreover less in his own interest than in that of spectators and subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was periodically to be considered. The young man’s expression became after this fashion something vivid and concrete – a beautiful personal presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior, patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of a function. It had been happily said of his face that the figure thus appearing in the great frame was the ghost of some proudest ancestor. Whoever the ancestor now, at all events, the Prince was, for Mrs Assingham’s benefit, in view of the people. He seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He looked younger than his years; he was beautiful innocent vague. ‘Oh well, I’m not!’ he rang out clear.
‘I should like to see you, sir!’ she said. ‘For you wouldn’t have a shadow of excuse.’ He showed how he agreed that he would have been at a loss for one, and the fact of their serenity was thus made as important as if some danger of its opposite had directly menaced them. The only thing