The Golden Bowl - Henry James [97]
‘Ah but I am sure,’ said Adam Verver. ‘On matters of importance I never speak when I’m not. So if you can yourself face such a union you needn’t in the least trouble.’
She had another pause, and she might have been felt as facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the breath of the mild slightly damp south-west, she met his eyes without evasion. Yet she had at the end of another minute debated only to the extent of saying: ‘I won’t pretend I don’t think it would be good for me to marry. Good for me, I mean,’ she pursued, ‘because I’m so awfully unattached. I should like to be a little less adrift. I should like to have a home. I should like to have an existence. I should like to have a motive for one thing more than another – a motive outside of myself. In fact,’ she said, so sincerely that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humour, ‘in fact, you know, I want to be married. It’s – well, it’s the condition.’
‘The condition –?’ He was just vague.
‘It’s the state, I mean. I don’t like my own. “Miss”, among us all, is too dreadful – except for a shopgirl. I don’t want to be a horrible English old-maid.’
‘Oh you want to be taken care of. Very well then I’ll do it.’
‘I dare say it’s very much that. Only I don’t see why, for what I speak of,’ she smiled – ‘for a mere escape from my state – I need do quite so much.’
‘So much as marry me in particular?’
Her smile was as for true directness. ‘I might get what I want for less.’
‘You think it’s so much for you to do?’
‘Yes,’ she presently said, ‘I think it’s a great deal.’
Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far – then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn’t quite know where they were. There rose for him with this the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, ignore it as mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father. ‘Of course, yes – that’s my disadvantage: I’m not the natural, I’m so far from being the ideal, match to your youth and your beauty. I’ve the drawback that you’ve seen me always, and so inevitably, in such another light.’
But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction soft – made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete; and he had already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely deep. ‘You don’t understand me. It’s of all that it is for you to do – it’s of that I’m thinking.’
Oh with this for him the thing was clearer! ‘Then you needn’t think. I know enough what it is for me to do.’
But she shook her head again. ‘I doubt if you know. I doubt if you can.’
‘And why not, please – when I’ve had you so before me? That I’m old has at least that fact about it to the good – that I’ve known you long and from far back.’
‘Do you think you’ve “known” me?’ asked Charlotte Stant.
He debated – for the tone of it, and her look with it might have made him doubt. Just these things in themselves, however, with all the rest, with his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and crackling – this quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink glow. He wasn’t rabid, but he wasn’t either, as a man of a proper spirit,