The Golden Bowl - Henry James [184]
But she had her hours thus of feeling supremely linked to him by the rigour of their law, and when it came over her that all the while the wish on his side to spare her might be what most worked with him, this very fact of their seeming to have nothing ‘inward’ really to talk about wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him: ‘Yes, this is by every appearance the best time we’ve had yet; but don’t you see all the same how they must be working together for it and how my very success, my success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round to being their success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability, their power to hold out, their complete possession in short of our life?’ For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal more? without saying ‘They’ll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing – prescribe a line for us that will make them separate.’ How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly murmuring that without putting into his mouth the very words that would have made her quail? ‘Separate, my dear? Do you want them to separate? Then you want us to – you and me? For how can the one separation take place without the other?’ That was the question that in spirit she had heard him ask – with its dread train moreover of involved and connected enquiries. Their own separation, his and hers, was of course perfectly thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons. Well, the sharpest, the very sharpest would be that they could no longer afford, as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, ‘run’ them in such compact formation. And say they accepted this account of their situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a division, would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past on either side show across the widening strait pale unappeased faces, or raise in the very passage deprecating denouncing hands?
Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was to have occasion to say to herself that a deeper treachery would perhaps lurk in recoveries and reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come – the alarm after all was yet to be confirmed. There came an hour inevitably when she knew with a chill what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make of Charlotte for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity. The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He had been conscious at the moment of many things