The Golden Bowl - Henry James [45]
‘Are we to settle them all,’ he enquired, ‘to-night?’
‘I should lose it if things had happened otherwise – if I had acted with any folly.’ She had gone on in her earnestness, unheeding of his question. ‘I shouldn’t be able to bear that now. But my good conscience is my strength; no one can accuse me. The Ververs came on to Rome alone – Charlotte, after their days with her in Florence, had decided about America. Maggie, I dare say, had helped her; she must have made her a present, and a handsome one, so that many things were easy. Charlotte left them, came to England, “joined” somebody or other, sailed for New York. I have still her letter from Milan, telling me; I didn’t know at the moment all that was behind it, but I felt in it nevertheless the undertaking of a new life. Certainly, in any case, it cleared that air – I mean the dear old Roman, in which we were steeped. It left the field free – it gave me a free hand. There was no question for me of anybody else when I brought the two others together. More than that, there was no question for them. So you see,’ she concluded, ‘where that puts me.’
She got up, on the words, very much as if they were the blue daylight towards which, through a darksome tunnel, she had been pushing her way, and the elation in her voice, combined with her recovered alertness, might have signified the sharp whistle of the train that shoots at last into the open. She turned about the room; she looked out a moment into the August night; she stopped here and there before the flowers in bowls and vases. Yes, it was distinctly as if she had proved what was needing proof, as if the issue of her operation had been almost unexpectedly a success. Old arithmetic had perhaps been fallacious, but the new settled the question. Her husband oddly, however, kept his place without apparently measuring these results. As he had been amused at her intensity, so he wasn’t uplifted by her relief; his interest might in fact have been more enlisted than he allowed. ‘Do you mean,’ he presently asked, ‘that he had already forgot about Charlotte?’
She faced round as if he had touched a spring. ‘He wanted to, naturally – and it was much the best thing he could do.’ She was in possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. ‘He was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what Maggie then seemed to us.’
‘She’s very nice, but she always seems to me more than anything else the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that’s what she especially seemed to him you of course place the thing in your light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn’t, I grant you, have been so difficult.’
This pulled her up but for an instant. ‘I never said he didn’t from the first – I never said that he doesn’t more and more – like Maggie’s money.’
‘I never said I shouldn’t have liked it myself,’ Bob Assingham returned. He made no movement; he smoked another minute. ‘How much did Maggie know?’
‘How much?’ She seemed to consider – as if it were between quarts and gallons – how best to express the quantity. ‘She knew what Charlotte, in Florence, had told her.’
‘And what had Charlotte told her?’
‘Very little.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Why this – that she couldn’t tell her.’ And she explained a little what she meant. ‘There are things, my dear – haven’t you felt it yourself, coarse as you are? – that no one could tell Maggie. There are things that, upon my word, I shouldn’t care to attempt to tell her now.’
The Colonel smoked on it. ‘She’d be so scandalised?’
‘She’d be so frightened. She’d be, in her strange little way, so hurt. She wasn’t born to know evil. She must never know it.’
Bob Assingham had a queer grim laugh; the sound of which in fact fixed his wife before him. ‘We’re taking grand ways to prevent it.’
But she stood there to protest. ‘We’re not taking any ways. The ways are all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our