The Golden Bowl - Henry James [44]
‘Then it’s grave,’ said the Colonel.
She briefly weighed it. ‘Do you mean grave for me?’
‘Oh that everything’s grave for “you” is what we take for granted and are fundamentally talking about. It’s grave – it was – for Charlotte. And it’s grave for Maggie. That is it was – when he did see her. Or when she did see him.’
‘You don’t torment me as much as you would like,’ she presently went on, ‘because you think of nothing that I haven’t a thousand times thought of, and because I think of everything that you never will. It would all,’ she recognised, ‘have been grave if it hadn’t all been right. You can’t make out,’ she contended, ‘that we got to Rome before the end of February.’
He more than agreed. ‘There’s nothing in life, my dear, that I can make out.’
Well, there was apparently nothing in life that she at real need couldn’t. ‘Charlotte, who had been there that year from early, early in November, left suddenly, you’ll quite remember, about the tenth of April. She was to have stayed on – she was to have stayed, naturally, more or less, for us; and she was to have stayed all the more that the Ververs, due all winter, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at last really coming. They were coming – that is Maggie was – largely to see her, and above all to be with her there. It was all altered – by Charlotte’s going to Florence. She went from one day to the other – you forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd at the time; I had a sense that something must have happened. The difficulty was that though I knew a little I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know her relation with him had been, as you say, a “near” thing – that is I didn’t know how near. The poor girl’s departure was a flight – she went to save herself.’
He had listened more than he showed – as came out in his tone. ‘To save herself?’
‘Well, also really I think to save him too. I saw it afterwards – I see it all now. He’d have been sorry – he didn’t want to hurt her.’
‘Oh I dare say,’ the Colonel laughed. ‘They generally don’t!’
‘At all events,’ his wife pursued, ‘she escaped – they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn’t be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines3 between them the better. It had taken them, it’s true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known – though it was a good deal known. More, certainly,’ she said, ‘than I then imagined – though I don’t know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he might have done – things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I haven’t’ – and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures – ‘so I haven’t, I say to myself, been a fool.’
‘Well, are you trying to make out that I’ve said you have? All their case wants, at any rate,’ Bob Assingham declared, ‘is that you should leave it well alone. It’s theirs now; they’ve bought it, over the counter, and paid for it. It has ceased to be yours.’
‘Of which case,’ she asked, ‘are you speaking?’
He smoked a minute: then with a groan: ‘Lord, are there so many?’
‘There’s Maggie’s and the Prince’s, and there’s the Prince’s and Charlotte’s.’
‘Oh yes; and then,’ the Colonel scoffed, ‘there’s Charlotte’s and the Prince’s.’
‘There’s Maggie’s and Charlotte’s,’ she went on – ‘and there’s also Maggie’s and mine. I think too that there’s Charlotte’s and mine.