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

their engagement, all the while, remained before him. “But I don’t make out, you see, what case against me you rest⁠—”

“On everything I’m telling you? Why, the whole case⁠—the case of your having for so long so successfully deceived me. The idea of your finding something for me⁠—charming as that would have been⁠—was what had least to do with your taking a morning together at that moment. What had really to do with it,” said Maggie, “was that you had to: you couldn’t not, from the moment you were again face to face. And the reason of that was that there had been so much between you before⁠—before I came between you at all.”

Her husband had been for these last moments moving about under her eyes; but at this, as to check any show of impatience, he again stood still. “You’ve never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour⁠—unless perhaps you’ve become so at this one.”

The assurance of his speech, she could note, quite held up its head in him; his eyes met her own so, for the declaration, that it was as if something cold and momentarily unimaginable breathed upon her, from afar off, out of his strange consistency. She kept her direction still, however, under that. “Oh, the thing I’ve known best of all is that you’ve never wanted, together, to offend us. You’ve wanted quite intensely not to, and the precautions you’ve had to take for it have been for a long time one of the strongest of my impressions. That, I think,” she added, “is the way I’ve best known.”

“Known?” he repeated after a moment.

“Known. Known that you were older friends, and so much more intimate ones, than I had any reason to suppose when we married. Known there were things that hadn’t been told me⁠—and that gave their meaning, little by little, to other things that were before me.”

“Would they have made a difference, in the matter of our marriage,” the Prince presently asked, “if you had known them?”

She took her time to think. “I grant you not⁠—in the matter of ours.” And then as he again fixed her with his hard yearning, which he couldn’t keep down: “The question is so much bigger than that. You see how much what I know makes of it for me.” That was what acted on him, this iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity, of the various bearings of which, he couldn’t on the spot trust himself to pretend, in any high way, to go. What her claim, as she made it, represented for him⁠—that he couldn’t help betraying, if only as a consequence of the effect of the word itself, her repeated distinct “know, know,” on his nerves. She was capable of being sorry for his nerves at a time when he should need them for dining out, pompously, rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she was not to let that prevent her using, with all economy, so precious a chance for supreme clearness. “I didn’t force this upon you, you must recollect, and it probably wouldn’t have happened for you if you hadn’t come in.”

“Ah,” said the Prince, “I was liable to come in, you know.”

“I didn’t think you were this evening.”

“And why not?”

“Well,” she answered, “you have many liabilities⁠—of different sorts.” With which she recalled what she had said to Fanny Assingham. “And then you’re so deep.”

It produced in his features, in spite of his control of them, one of those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified as nothing else did to his race. “It’s you, cara, who are deep.”

Which, after an instant, she had accepted from him; she could so feel at last that it was true. “Then I shall have need of it all.”

“But what would you have done,” he was by this time asking, “if I hadn’t come in?”

“I don’t know.” She had hesitated. “What would you?”

“Oh; I oh⁠—that isn’t the question. I depend upon you. I go on. You would have spoken tomorrow?”

“I think I would have waited.”

“And for what?” he asked.

“To see what difference it would make for myself. My possession at last, I mean, of real knowledge.”

“Oh!” said the Prince.

“My only point now, at any rate,” she went on, “is the difference, as I say, that it may make for you. Your knowing was⁠—from the moment you did come in⁠—all I had in view.” And she sounded it again⁠—he should have it once more. “Your knowing that I’ve ceased⁠—”

“That you’ve ceased⁠—?” With her pause, in fact, she had fairly made him press her for it.

“Why, to be as I was. Not to know.”

It was once more then, after a little, that he had had to stand receptive; yet the singular effect of this was that there was still something of the same sort he was made to want. He had another hesitation, but at last this odd quantity showed. “Then does anyone else know?”

It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him at that distance. “Anyone⁠—?”

“Anyone, I mean, but Fanny Assingham.”

“I should have supposed you had had by this time particular means of learning. I don’t see,” she said, “why you ask me.”

Then, after an instant⁠—and only after an instant, as she saw⁠—he made out what she meant; and it gave her, all strangely enough, the still further light that Charlotte, for herself, knew as little as he had known. The vision loomed, in this light, it fairly glared, for the few seconds⁠—the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing and not knowing! The picture flushed at the same time with all its essential colour⁠—that of the so possible identity of her father’s motive and principle with her own. He was “deep,” as Amerigo called it, so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter; just