The Golden Bowl - Henry James [100]
‘Oh it isn’t that I hold that I’ve a right to it,’ Charlotte the next instant rather oddly qualified – and the observation itself gave him a further push.
‘Very well – I shall like it myself.’
At this then, as if moved by his habit of mostly – and more or less against his own contention – coming round to her, she showed how she could also ever, and not less gently, come halfway. ‘I speak of it only as the missing grace – the grace that’s in everything Maggie does. It isn’t my due’ – she kept it up – ‘but, taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have the touch. It will be beautiful.’
‘Then come out to breakfast.’2 Mr Verver had looked at his watch. ‘It will be here when we get back.’
‘If it isn’t’ – and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa3 that she had laid down on descending from her room – ‘if it isn’t it will have had but that slight fault.’
He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved to meet him, and, after he had fetched it, raising it to make its charming softness brush his face – for it was a wondrous product of Paris, purchased under his direct auspices the day before – he held it there a minute before giving it up. ‘Will you promise me then to be at peace?’
She looked, while she debated, at his admirable present. ‘I promise you.’
‘Quite for ever?’
‘Quite for ever.’
‘Remember,’ he went on, to justify his demand, ‘remember that in wiring you she’ll naturally speak even more for her husband than she has done in wiring me.’
It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demur. ‘ “Naturally” –?’
‘Why our marriage puts him for you, you see – or puts you for him – into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me unchanged. It therefore gives him more to say to you about it.’
‘About its making me his stepmother-in-law – or whatever I should become?’ Over which for a little she not undivertedly mused. ‘Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a young woman about that.’
‘Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as funny or as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you, in sending you a message, he’ll be it all.’ And then as the girl, with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly critical looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. ‘Don’t you think he’s charming?’
‘Oh charming,’ said Charlotte Stant. ‘If he weren’t I shouldn’t mind.’
‘No more should I!’ her friend harmoniously returned.
‘Ah but you don’t mind. You don’t have to. You don’t have to, I mean, as I have. It’s the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one’s absolutely forced. If I were you,’ she went on – ‘if I had in my life, for happiness and power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don’t know,’ she said, ‘what in the world – that didn’t touch my luck – I should trouble my head about.’
‘I quite understand you – yet doesn’t it just depend,’ Mr Verver asked, ‘on what you call one’s luck? It’s exactly my luck that I’m talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you’ve made me all right. It’s only when one is right that one really has the things you speak of. It isn’t they,’ he explained, ‘that make one so: it’s the something else I want that makes them right. If you’ll give me what I ask you’ll see.’
She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her eyes, while she still delayed, had turned from him, engaged by another interest, though the court was by this time, the hour of dispersal for luncheon, so forsaken that they would have had it, for free talk, should they have been moved to loudness, quite to themselves. She was ready for their adjournment, but she was also aware of a pedestrian youth in uniform, a visible emissary of the Postes et Télégraphes, who had approached, from the street, the small stronghold of the concierge and who presented there a missive taken from the little cartridge-box slung over his shoulder. The portress, meeting him on the threshold, met equally, across the court, Charlotte