The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) 📖

this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done⁠—well, I felt that too, for some reason, as I hadn’t yet felt it.”

“For ‘some’ reason? For what reason?” And then, as his wife at first said nothing: “Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?”

“She’s always so different from anyone else in the world that it’s hard to say when she’s different from herself. But she has made me,” said Fanny after an instant, “think of her differently. She drove me home.”

“Home here?”

“First to Portland Place⁠—on her leaving her father: since she does, once in a while, leave him. That was to keep me with her a little longer. But she kept the carriage and, after tea there, came with me herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived⁠—if they have arrived⁠—expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know⁠—she has clothes.”

The Colonel didn’t in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. “Oh, you mean a change?”

“Twenty changes, if you like⁠—all sorts of things. She dresses, really, Maggie does, as much for her father⁠—and she always did⁠—as for her husband or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she had it before she was married⁠—and just as the boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when she comes with him, makes herself, I assure you, at home. Si bien that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able to put them up.”

It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob Assingham could more or less enter. “Maggie and the child spread so?”

“Maggie and the child spread so.”

Well, he considered. “It is rather rum.”

“That’s all I claim”⁠—she seemed thankful for the word. “I don’t say it’s anything more⁠—but it is, distinctly, rum.”

Which, after an instant, the Colonel took up. “ ‘More’? What more could it be?”

“It could be that she’s unhappy, and that she takes her funny little way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy”⁠—Mrs. Assingham had figured it out⁠—“that’s just the way, I’m convinced, she would take. But how can she be unhappy, since⁠—as I’m also convinced⁠—she, in the midst of everything, adores her husband as much as ever?”

The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. “Then if she’s so happy, please what’s the matter?”

It made his wife almost spring at him. “You think then she’s secretly wretched?”

But he threw up his arms in deprecation. “Ah, my dear, I give them up to you. I’ve nothing more to suggest.”

“Then it’s not sweet of you.” She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. “You admit that it is ‘rum.’ ”

And this indeed fixed again, for a moment, his intention. “Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?”

“Never, that I know of, a word. It isn’t the sort of thing she does. And whom has she, after all,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to complain to?”

“Hasn’t she always you?”

“Oh, ‘me’! Charlotte and I, nowadays⁠—!” She spoke as of a chapter closed. “Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me, more and more, as extraordinary.”

A deeper shade, at the renewal of the word, had come into the Colonel’s face. “If they’re each and all so extraordinary then, isn’t that why one must just resign one’s self to wash one’s hands of them⁠—to be lost?” Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for⁠—her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back, alertly enough, to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man’s vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. “Hasn’t she then, Charlotte, always her husband⁠—?”

“To complain to? She’d rather die.”

“Oh!”⁠—and Bob Assingham’s face, at the vision of such extremities, lengthened for very docility. “Hasn’t she the Prince then?”

“For such matters? Oh, he doesn’t count.”

“I thought that was just what⁠—as the basis of our agitation⁠—he does do!”

Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. “Not a bit as a person to bore with complaints. The ground of my agitation is, exactly, that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!” And in the imagination of Mrs. Verver’s superiority to any such mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of her head⁠—as marked a tribute to that lady’s general grace, in all the conditions, as the personage referred to doubtless had ever received.

“Ah, only Maggie!” With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But it found his wife again prepared.

“No⁠—not only Maggie. A great many people in London⁠—and small wonder!⁠—bore him.”

“Maggie only worst then?” But it was a question that he had promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly before sown the seed. “You said just now that he would by this time be back with Charlotte ‘if they have arrived.’ You think it then possible that they really won’t have returned?”

His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from entertaining it. “I think there’s nothing they’re not now capable of⁠—in their so intense good faith.”

“Good faith?”⁠—he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.

“Their false position. It comes to the same thing.” And she bore down, with her decision, the superficial lack of sequence. “They may very possibly, for a demonstration⁠—as I see them⁠—not have come back.”

He wondered, visibly, at this, how she did see them. “May have bolted somewhere together?”

“May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me.