The Golden Bowl - Henry James [90]
Mr Verver met his young friend, at certain hours, in the day-nursery, very much as he had regularly met the child’s fond mother – Charlotte having, as she clearly considered, given Maggie equal pledges and desiring never to fail of the last word for the daily letter she had promised to write. She wrote with high fidelity, she let her companion know, and the effect of it was, remarkably enough, that he himself didn’t write. The reason of this was partly that Charlotte ‘told all about him’ – which she also let him know she did – and partly that he enjoyed feeling, as a consequence, that he was generally, quite systematically, eased and, as they said, ‘done’ for. Committed, as it were, to this charming and clever young woman, who, by becoming for him a domestic resource had become for him practically a new person – and committed especially in his own house, which somehow made his sense of it a deeper thing – he took an interest in seeing how far the connexion could carry him, could perhaps even lead him, and in thus putting to the test, for pleasant verification, what Fanny Assingham had said at the last about the difference such a girl could make. She was really making one now, in their simplified existence, and a very considerable one, though there was no one to compare her with, as there had been so usefully for Fanny – no Mrs Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty Lutch, to help her to be felt, according to Fanny’s diagnosis, as real. She was real, decidedly, from other causes, and Mr Verver grew in time even a little amused at the amount of machinery Mrs Assingham had seemed to see needed for pointing it. She was directly and immediately real, real on a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than during those – at which we have just glanced – when Mrs Noble made them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the queen-mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the heir. Treated on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the petites entrées3 but quite external to the State, which began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china lap-dogs.
Every evening after dinner Charlotte Stant played to him; seated at the piano and requiring no music she went through his ‘favourite things’ – and he had many favourites – with a facility that never failed, or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice. She could play anything, she could play everything – always shockingly, she of course insisted, but always, by his own vague measure, very much as if she might, slim sinuous and strong, and with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and rhythmically waltzing. His love of music, unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations – while, I say, he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was ever absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless