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

at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here. They’re beautiful,” she declared.

“The Prince and Charlotte?”

“The Prince and Charlotte. That’s how they’re so remarkable. And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others.”

“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following. “Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of themselves.”

The Colonel wondered. “Of themselves? Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”

Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes⁠—of such blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”

He turned it over. “That danger being the blindness⁠—?”

“That danger being their position. What their position contains⁠—of all the elements⁠—I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily⁠—for that’s the mercy⁠—everything but blindness: I mean on their part. The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”

He stood for a moment; he would have it straight. “Whose husband’s?”

“Mr. Verver’s,” she went on. “The blindness is most of all his. That they feel⁠—that they see. But it’s also his wife’s.”

“Whose wife’s?” he asked as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her contention. And then as she only gloomed: “The Prince’s?”

“Maggie’s own⁠—Maggie’s very own,” she pursued as for herself.

He had a pause. “Do you think Maggie so blind?”

“The question isn’t of what I think. The question’s of the conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte⁠—who have better opportunities than I for judging.”

The Colonel again wondered. “Are you so very sure their opportunities are better?”

“Well,” his wife asked, “what is their whole so extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?”

“Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity⁠—of their extraordinary situation and relation⁠—as much as they.”

“With the difference, darling,” she returned with some spirit, “that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the boat they’re in, but I’m not, thank God, in it myself. Today, however,” Mrs. Assingham added, “today in Eaton Square I did see.”

“Well then, what?”

But she mused over it still. “Oh, many things. More, somehow, than ever before. It was as if, God help me, I was seeing for them⁠—I mean for the others. It was as if something had happened⁠—I don’t know what, except some effect of these days with them at that place⁠—that had either made things come out or had cleared my own eyes.” These eyes indeed of the poor lady’s rested on her companion’s, meanwhile, with the lustre not so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired, obviously, to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid, gathering, glittering tears to emphasise the fact. They had immediately, for him, their usual direct action: she must reassure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the afternoon. “It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them⁠—”

“What makes them?”⁠—he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.

“Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might well have been difficult to know how to take it; and they may even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say, today,” she went on, “it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their eyes.” On which, as to shake off her perversity, Fanny Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under the dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare look of “type,” to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirtfront and waistcoat gave a rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and compunction. “I can imagine the way it works,” she said; “it’s so easy to understand. Yet I don’t want to be wrong,” she the next moment broke out “I don’t, I don’t want to be wrong!”

“To make a mistake, you mean?”

Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant. “I don’t make mistakes. But I perpetrate⁠—in thought⁠—crimes.” And she spoke with all intensity. “I’m a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I’d do it again⁠—feel that I’d do things myself.”

“Ah, my dear!” the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.

“Yes, if you had driven me back on my ‘nature.’ Luckily for you you never have. You’ve done everything else, but you’ve never done that. But what I really don’t a bit want,” she declared, “is to abet them or to protect them.”

Her companion turned this over. “What is there to protect them from?⁠—if, by your now so settled faith, they’ve done nothing that justly exposes them.”

And it in fact half pulled her up. “Well, from a sudden scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie may think.”

“Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing⁠—?”

She waited again. “It isn’t my ‘whole’ idea. Nothing is my ‘whole’ idea⁠—for I felt today, as I tell you, that there’s so much in the air.”

“Oh, in the air⁠—!” the Colonel dryly breathed.

“Well, what’s in the air always has⁠—hasn’t it?⁠—to come down to the earth. And Maggie,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “is a very curious little person. Since I was ‘in,’