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

She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he was not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception that he could name, and could act on, was something that now, at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but, as her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, in the glory of which⁠—as it almost might be called⁠—what he gave her back had the value of what she had, given him. “They’re extraordinarily happy.”

Oh, Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. “Beatifically.”

“That’s the great thing,” he went on; “so that it doesn’t matter, really, that one doesn’t understand. Besides, you do⁠—enough.”

“I understand my husband perhaps,” she after an instant conceded. “I don’t understand your wife.”

“You’re of the same race, at any rate⁠—more or less; of the same general tradition and education, of the same moral paste. There are things you have in common with them. But I, on my side, as I’ve gone on trying to see if I haven’t some of these things too⁠—I, on my side, have more and more failed. There seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can’t help seeing it⁠—I’m decidedly too different.”

“Yet you’re not”⁠—Charlotte made the important point⁠—“too different from me.”

“I don’t know⁠—as we’re not married. That brings things out. Perhaps if we were,” he said, “you would find some abyss of divergence.”

“Since it depends on that then,” she smiled, “I’m safe⁠—as you are anyhow. Moreover, as one has so often had occasion to feel, and even to remark, they’re very, very simple. That makes,” she added, “a difficulty for belief; but when once one has taken it in it makes less difficulty for action. I have at last, for myself, I think, taken it in. I’m not afraid.”

He wondered a moment. “Not afraid of what?”

“Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of any mistake founded on one’s idea of their difference. For that idea,” Charlotte developed, “positively makes one so tender.”

“Ah, but rather!”

“Well then, there it is. I can’t put myself into Maggie’s skin⁠—I can’t, as I say. It’s not my fit⁠—I shouldn’t be able, as I see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I’d do anything⁠—to shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her too,” she went on, “I think I’m still more so for my husband. He’s in truth of a sweet simplicity⁠—!”

The Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of Mr. Verver. “Well, I don’t know that I can choose. At night all cats are grey. I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them⁠—and how, to do ourselves justice, we do. It represents for us a conscious care⁠—”

“Of every hour, literally,” said Charlotte. She could rise to the highest measure of the facts. “And for which we must trust each other⁠—!”

“Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,” the Prince hastened to add, “we can.” With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge it involved, their hands instinctively found their hands. “It’s all too wonderful.”

Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. “It’s too beautiful.”

And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past even had seen them. They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. “It’s sacred,” he said at last.

“It’s sacred,” she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge.

He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny Assingham didn’t now matter⁠—the “now” he had even himself supplied, as no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour, so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the Foreign Office. With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward, since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her, have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed