The Golden Bowl - Henry James [126]
‘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, each hand instinctively found the other. ‘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.
6
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 hadn’t 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 than open to interpretation. It had never indeed, before that evening, come up as during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a certain failure, on the dear woman’s part, of something he was aware of having always rather freely taken for granted in her. Of what exactly the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh to try to say; and if she had in fact, as by Charlotte’s observation, ‘broken down’, the details of the collapse would be comparatively unimportant. They came to the same thing, all such collapses – the failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just simply of tact; for didn’t any one of them by itself amount really to the failure of wit? – which was the last thing he had expected of her and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity. It had been Charlotte’s remark that they were at last ‘beyond’ her; whereas he had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would keep up with him to the end. He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs Assingham’s want of faith; but when he thought at his ease of the way persons who were capable really entertained – or at least with any refinement – the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous. So would his personal loyalty, if need be, have accepted the adventure for the good creature herself; to that definite degree that he had positively almost missed the luxury of some such call from her. That was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he had married – that one found one used one’s imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy – to call worthy – of the personal relation; never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humorously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare insidiously the cup. These were the services that by all romantic tradition were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate. But he could amuse himself with saying