The Golden Bowl - Henry James [101]
She broke the envelope then in silence, and for a minute, as with the message he himself had put before her, studied its contents without a sign. He watched her without a question and at last she looked up. ‘I’ll give you,’ she simply said, ‘what you ask.’
The expression of her face was strange – but since when had a woman’s at moments of supreme surrender not a right to be? He took it in with his own long look and his grateful silence – so that nothing more for some instants passed between them. Their understanding sealed itself – he already felt she had made him right. But he was in presence too of the fact that Maggie had made her so; and always therefore without Maggie where in fine would he be? She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring, so that on the spot, with the vision of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude. Quite through it withal he smiled. ‘What my child does for me – !’
Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw Charlotte, rather than heard her, reply. She held her paper wide open, but her eyes were wholly for his. ‘It isn’t Maggie. It’s the Prince.’
‘I say!’ – he gaily rang out. ‘Then it’s best of all.’
‘It’s enough.’
‘Thank you for thinking so!’ To which he added: ‘It’s enough for our question, but it isn’t – is it? – quite enough for our breakfast? Déjeunons.’5
She stood there however in spite of this appeal, her document always before them. ‘Don’t you want to read it?’
He thought. ‘Not if it satisfies you. I don’t require it.’
But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. ‘You can if you like.’
He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity. ‘Is it funny.’
Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. ‘No – I call it grave.’
‘Ah then I don’t want it.’
‘Very grave,’ said Charlotte Stant.
‘Well, what did I tell you of him?’ he asked, rejoicing, as they started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper crumpled into the pocket of her coat.
BOOK THIRD
1
Charlotte, halfway up the ‘monumental’ staircase, had begun by waiting alone – waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would know where to find her. She was meanwhile, though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised; but she wouldn’t have cared if she had been – so little was it by this time her first occasion of facing society with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly, enriched. For a couple of years now she had known as never before what it was to look ‘well’ – to look, that is, as well as she had always felt, from far back, that in certain conditions she might. On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all profusely present; so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith as at the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood and meeting in consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the whole high pitch