The Golden Bowl by Henry James (free ebook reader for android TXT) 📕

“You find means to call it then, this whitewashing of his crime, being ‘loyal’ to Maggie?”

“Oh, about that particular crime there is always much to say. It is always more interesting to us than any other crime; it has at least that for it. But of course I call everything I have in mind at all being loyal to Maggie. Being loyal to her is, more than anything else, helping her with her father⁠—which is what she most wants and needs.”

The Colonel had had it before, but he could apparently never have too much of it. “Helping her ‘with’ him⁠—?”

“Helping her against him then. Against what we’ve already so fully talked of⁠—its having to be recognised between them that he doubts. That’s where my part is so plain⁠—to see her through, to see her through to the end.” Exaltation, for the moment, always lighted Mrs. Assingham’s reference to this plainness; yet she at the same time seldom failed, the next instant, to qualify her view of it. “When I talk of my obligation as clear I mean that it’s absolute; for just how, from day to day and through thick and thin, to keep the thing up is, I grant you, another matter. There’s one way, luckily, nevertheless, in which I’m strong. I can perfectly count on her.”

The Colonel seldom failed here, as from the insidious growth of an excitement, to wonder, to encourage. “Not to see you’re lying?”

“To stick to me fast, whatever she sees. If I stick to her⁠—that is to my own poor struggling way, under providence, of watching over them all⁠—she’ll stand by me to the death. She won’t give me away. For, you know, she easily can.”

This, regularly, was the most lurid turn of their road; but Bob Assingham, with each journey, met it as for the first time. “Easily?”

“She can utterly dishonour me with her father. She can let him know that I was aware, at the time of his marriage⁠—as I had been aware at the time of her own⁠—of the relations that had preexisted between his wife and her husband.”

“And how can she do so if, up to this minute, by your own statement, she is herself in ignorance of your knowledge?”

It was a question that Mrs. Assingham had ever, for dealing with, a manner to which repeated practice had given almost a grand effect; very much as if she was invited by it to say that about this, exactly, she proposed to do her best lying. But she said, and with full lucidity, something quite other: it could give itself a little the air, still, of a triumph over his coarseness. “By acting, immediately with the blind resentment with which, in her place, ninety-nine women out of a hundred would act; and by so making Mr. Verver, in turn, act with the same natural passion, the passion of ninety-nine men out of a hundred. They’ve only to agree about me,” the poor lady said; “they’ve only to feel at one over it, feel bitterly practised upon, cheated and injured; they’ve only to denounce me to each other as false and infamous, for me to be quite irretrievably dished. Of course it’s I who have been, and who continue to be, cheated⁠—cheated by the Prince and Charlotte; but they’re not obliged to give me the benefit of that, or to give either of us the benefit of anything. They’ll be within their rights to lump us all together as a false, cruel, conspiring crew, and, if they can find the right facts to support them, get rid of us root and branch.”

This, on each occasion, put the matter so at the worst that repetition even scarce controlled the hot flush with which she was compelled to see the parts of the whole history, all its ugly consistency and its temporary gloss, hang together. She enjoyed, invariably, the sense of making her danger present, of making it real, to her husband, and of his almost turning pale, when their eyes met, at this possibility of their compromised state and their shared discredit. The beauty was that, as under a touch of one of the ivory notes at the left of the keyboard, he sounded out with the short sharpness of the dear fond stupid uneasy man. “Conspiring⁠—so far as you were concerned⁠—to what end?”

“Why, to the obvious end of getting the Prince a wife⁠—at Maggie’s expense. And then to that of getting Charlotte a husband at Mr. Verver’s.”

“Of rendering friendly services, yes⁠—which have produced, as it turns out, complications. But from the moment you didn’t do it for the complications, why shouldn’t you have rendered them?”

It was extraordinary for her, always, in this connection, how, with time given him, he fell to speaking better for her than she could, in the presence of her clear-cut image of the “worst,” speak for herself. Troubled as she was she thus never wholly failed of her amusement by the way. “Oh, isn’t what I may have meddled ‘for’⁠—so far as it can be proved I did meddle⁠—open to interpretation; by which I mean to Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s? Mayn’t they see my motive, in the light of that appreciation, as the wish to be decidedly more friendly to the others than to the victimised father and daughter?” She positively liked to keep it up. “Mayn’t they see my motive as the determination to serve the Prince, in any case, and at any price, first; to ‘place’ him comfortably; in other words to find him his fill of money? Mayn’t it have all the air for them of a really equivocal, sinister bargain between us⁠—something quite unholy and louche?”

It produced in the poor Colonel, infallibly, the echo. “ ‘Louche,’ love⁠—?”

“Why, haven’t you said as much yourself?⁠—haven’t you put your finger on that awful possibility?”

She had a way now, with his felicities, that made him enjoy being reminded of them. “In speaking of your having always had such a ‘mash’⁠—?”

“Such a mash,