The Golden Bowl - Henry James [188]
5
There was nothing to show that her effort in any degree fell short till they got well into the Park and he struck her as giving, unexpectedly, the go-by to any serious search for the Principino. The way they sat down a while in the sun was a sign of that; his dropping with her into the first pair of sequestered chairs they came across and waiting a little, after they were placed, as if now at last she might bring out, as between them, something more specific. It made her but feel the more sharply how the specific, in almost any direction, was utterly forbidden her – how the use of it would be, for all the world, like undoing the leash of a dog eager to follow up a scent. It would come out, the specific, where the dog would come out; would run to earth somehow the truth – for she was believing herself in relation to the truth! – at which she mustn’t so much as indirectly point. Such at any rate was the fashion in which her passionate prudence played over possibilities of danger, reading symptoms and betrayals into everything she looked at and yet having to make it evident even while she recognised them that she didn’t wince. There were moments between them, in their chairs, when he might have been watching her guard herself and trying to think of something new that would trip her up. There were pauses during which, with her affection as sweet and still as the sunshine, she might yet, as at some hard game over a table for money, have been defying him to fasten on her the least little complication of consciousness. She was afterwards positively proud of the great style in which she had kept this up; later on, at the hour’s end, when they had retraced their steps to find Amerigo and Charlotte awaiting them at the house, she was able to say to herself that truly she had put her plan through; even though once more setting herself the difficult task of making their relation, every minute of the time, not fall below the standard of that other hour in the treasured past which hung there behind them like a framed picture in a museum, a high-water-mark for the history of their old fortune; the summer evening in the park of Fawns, when, side by side under the trees just as now, they had let their happy confidence lull them with its most golden tone. There had been the possibility of a trap for her at present in the very question of their taking up anew that residence; wherefore she hadn’t been the first to sound it, in spite of the impression from him of his holding off to see what she would do. She was saying to herself in secret: ‘Can we again, in this form, migrate there? Can I, for myself, undertake it? face all the intenser keeping-up and stretching-out, indefinitely, impossibly, that our conditions in the country, as we’ve established and accepted them, would stand for?’ She had positively lost herself in this inward doubt – so much she was subsequently to remember; but remembering then too that her companion, though perceptibly perhaps as if not to be eager, had broken the ice very much as he had broken it in Eaton Square after the banquet to the Castledeans.
Her mind had taken a long excursion, wandered far into the vision of what a summer at Fawns, with Amerigo and Charlotte still more eminently in presence against that higher sky, would bring forth. Wasn’t her father meanwhile only pretending to talk of it? just as she was in a manner pretending to listen? He got off it finally, at all events, for the transition it couldn’t well help thrusting out at him; it had amounted exactly to an arrest of her private excursion by the sense that he had begun to imitate – oh as never yet! – the ancient tone of gold. It had verily come from him at last, the question of whether she thought it would be very good – but very good indeed – that he should leave England for a series of weeks on some pretext with the Prince. Then it had been that she was to know her husband’s ‘menace’ hadn’t really dropped, since she was face to face with the effect of it. Ah the effect of it had occupied all the rest of their walk, had stayed out with them and come home with them, besides making it impossible that they shouldn