The Golden Bowl - Henry James [125]
To which Charlotte at first said nothing – as if from the sense of too much. Then, indulgently enough, she shook her head. ‘We’re beyond her.’
He thought a moment – as of where this placed them. ‘She’d do anything then for them.’
‘Well, so would we – so that doesn’t help us. She has broken down. She doesn’t understand us. And really, my dear,’ Charlotte added, ‘Fanny Assingham doesn’t matter.’
He wondered again. ‘Unless as taking care of them.’
‘Ah,’ Charlotte instantly said, ‘isn’t it for us, only, to do that?’ She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. ‘I think we want no one’s aid.’
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 wasn’t, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception 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 since 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.