The Golden Bowl - Henry James [155]
‘You were saying’ – he did her the justice – ‘that they’re all guileless.’
‘That they were. Guileless all at first – quite extraordinarily. It’s what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted they could work together the more they were really working apart. For I repeat,’ Fanny went on, ‘that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem for Mr Verver – which was serious, as well it might be! – would save them.’
‘I see.’ The Colonel inclined himself. ‘And save him.’
‘It comes to the same thing!’
‘Then save Maggie.’
‘That comes,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘to something a little different. For Maggie has done the most.’
He wondered. ‘What do you call the most?’
‘Well, she did it originally – she began the vicious circle. For that – though you make round eyes at my associating her with “vice” – is simply what it has been. It’s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably good.’
‘In their way – yes!’ the Colonel grinned.
‘Which was above all Maggie’s way.’ No flicker of his ribaldry was anything to her now. ‘Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become – poor little dear, as she believed – so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr Verver perfect. And her way to do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path – by instalments, as it were – in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same time, however,’ Mrs Assingham further explained, ‘by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you’ll easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate even if quite heroic little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting him. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire – this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been – involved in some degree and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold,’ Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, ‘that a person can mostly feel but one passion – one tender passion, that is – at a time. Only that doesn’t hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the “voice of blood”, such as one’s feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities – as you’ll recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout bêtement,1 to adore my mother, whom you didn’t adore, for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie’ – she kept it up – ‘is in the same situation as I was, plus complications from which I was, thank heaven; exempt: plus the complication above all of not having in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have had. Before she knew it at any rate her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind – her feverish little sense of justice, as I say – had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn’t have done. And now she knows something or other has happened – yet hasn’t heretofore known what. She has only piled up her remedy, poor child – something that she has earnestly but confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy, on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself and that would really have needed since then so much modification. Her only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her father