The Golden Bowl - Henry James [145]
There might, for that matter, even have been in Mrs Assingham’s face a mild perception of some finer sense – a sense for his wife’s situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate – that she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he needed no telling that she had given herself all the afternoon to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakeably went on, with abstentions and discretions that might almost have counted as solemnities. The solemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing – to nothing beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters. She had been out on these waters for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He hadn’t quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the mystic lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had parted – then some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty. His present position, clearly, was that of seeing her in the centre of her sheet of dark water, and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him didn’t perhaps mean that her planks were now parting. He held himself so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however – that is before he had uttered question – he saw, not without relief, that she was making for land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at last he felt her boat bump. The bump was distinct, and in fact she stepped ashore. ‘We were all wrong. There’s nothing.’
‘Nothing –?’ It was like giving her his hand up the bank.
‘Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was uneasy – but I’m satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There’s nothing.’
‘But I thought,’ said Bob Assingham, ‘that that was just what you did persistently asseverate. You’ve guaranteed their straightness from the first.’
‘No – I’ve never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to worry. I’ve never till now,’ Fanny went on gravely from her chair, ‘had such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place – if I had, in my infatuation and my folly,’ she added with expression, ‘nothing else. So I did see – I have seen. And now I know.’ Her emphasis, as she repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise higher. ‘I know.’
The Colonel took it – but took it at first in silence. ‘Do you mean they’ve told you –?’
‘No – I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I haven’t asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn