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

felt like the horse of the adage, brought⁠—and brought by her own fault⁠—to the water, but strong, for the occasion, in the one fact that she couldn’t be forced to drink. Invited, in other words, to understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to. It was sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain, in advance, of his remark; that she heard it before it had sounded, that she already tasted, in fine, the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility. But her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred by her silence. “What I really don’t see is why, from his own point of view⁠—given, that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood⁠—he should have wished to marry at all.” There it was then⁠—exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her. Yet she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs, then and there; not to suffer, odiously, helplessly, in public⁠—which could be prevented but by her breaking off, with whatever inconsequence; by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly wanted to go home much as she had wanted, an hour or two before, to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had, abruptly, taken such vivid form⁠—but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight. Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger⁠—such light, as from open crevices, it let in; and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything else. The worst in fact came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly recognise. Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. “I’m afraid, however,” the Prince said, “that I, for some reason, distress you⁠—for which I beg your pardon. We’ve always talked so well together⁠—it has been, from the beginning, the greatest pull for me.” Nothing so much as such a tone could have quickened her collapse; she felt he had her now at his mercy, and he showed, as he went on, that he knew it. “We shall talk again, all the same, better than ever⁠—I depend on it too much. Don’t you remember what I told you, so definitely, one day before my marriage?⁠—that, moving as I did in so many ways among new things, mysteries, conditions, expectations, assumptions different from any I had known, I looked to you, as my original sponsor, my fairy godmother, to see me through. I beg you to believe,” he added, “that I look to you yet.”

His very insistence had, fortunately, the next moment, affected her as bringing her help; with which, at least, she could hold up her head to speak. “Ah, you are through⁠—you were through long ago. Or if you aren’t you ought to be.”

“Well then, if I ought to be it’s all the more reason why you should continue to help me. Because, very distinctly, I assure you, I’m not. The new things or ever so many of them⁠—are still for me new things; the mysteries and expectations and assumptions still contain an immense element that I’ve failed to puzzle out. As we’ve happened, so luckily, to find ourselves again really taking hold together, you must let me, as soon as possible, come to see you; you must give me a good, kind hour. If you refuse it me”⁠—and he addressed himself to her continued reserve⁠—“I shall feel that you deny, with a stony stare, your responsibility.”

At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate vessel. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. “Oh, I deny responsibility⁠—to you. So far as I ever had it I’ve done with it.”

He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she made his look, now, penetrate her again more. “As to whom then do you confess it?”

“Ah, mio caro, that’s⁠—if to anyone⁠—my own business!”

He continued to look at her hard. “You give me up then?”

It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and its coming from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the point of replying “Do you and she agree together for what you’ll say to me?”⁠—but she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. “I think I don’t know what to make of you.”

“You must receive me at least,” he said.

“Oh, please, not till I’m ready for you!”⁠—and, though she found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for her as if she were altogether afraid of him.

XVI

Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath. She had stood for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake. For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had, in the past, been active, for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded, at first, in her corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the window of