The Golden Bowl - Henry James [91]
Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October, there had been a full word or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other voices – a word or two that affected our friend even at the moment, and rather oddly, as louder and rounder than any previous sound; and then he had lingered, under pretext of an opened window to be made secure, after taking leave of his companion in the hall and watching her glimmer away up the staircase. He had for himself another impulse than to go to bed; picking up a hat in the hall, slipping his arms into a sleeveless cape and lighting still another cigar, he turned out upon the terrace through one of the long drawing-room windows and moved to and fro there for an hour beneath the sharp autumn stars. It was where he had walked in the afternoon sun with Fanny Assingham, and the sense of that other hour, the sense of the suggestive woman herself, was before him again as, in spite of all the previous degustation we have hinted at, it hadn’t yet been. He thought, in a loose, an almost agitated order, of many things; the power that was in them to agitate having been part of his conviction that he shouldn’t soon sleep. He truly felt for a while that he should never sleep again till something had come to him; some light, some idea, some mere happy word perhaps, that he had begun to want, but had been till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly groping for. ‘Can you really then come if we start early?’ – that was practically all he had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And ‘Why in the world not, when I’ve nothing else to do and should besides so immensely like it?’ – this had as definitely been, on her side, the limit of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene, even of the littlest, at all – though he perhaps didn’t quite know why something like the menace of one hadn’t proceeded from her stopping halfway upstairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and a sponge. There hovered about him at all events, while he walked, appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have noted, one of the minor, yet, so far as there were any such, quite one of the compensatory, incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him up to now that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo, owing to some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret; so that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had unmistakeably acquired it, through the young man’s having amiably passed it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this might be, of quite the same shades of attention and recognition, was mistress in an equal degree of the regulated, the developed art of placing him high in the scale of importance. That was even for his own thought a clumsy way of expressing the element of similarity in the agreeable effect they each produced on him, and it held him for a little only because this coincidence in their felicity caused him vaguely to connect or associate them in the matter of tradition, training, tact, or whatever else one might call it. It might almost have been – if such a link between them was to be imagined – that Amerigo had a little ‘coached’ or incited their young friend, or perhaps rather that she had simply, as one of the signs of the general perfection Fanny Assingham commended in