The Golden Bowl - Henry James [213]
9
‘Something very strange has happened, and I think you ought to know it.’
Maggie spoke this indeed without extravagance, yet with the effect of making her guest measure anew the force of her appeal. It was their definite understanding: whatever Fanny knew Fanny’s faith would provide for. And she knew accordingly at the end of five minutes what the extraordinary in the late occurrence had consisted of, and how it had all come of Maggie’s achieved hour, under Mr Crichton’s protection, at the Museum. He had desired, Mr Crichton, with characteristic kindness, after the wonderful show, after offered luncheon at his contiguous lodge, a part of the place, to see her safely home; especially on his noting, in attending her to the great steps, that she had dismissed her carriage; which she had done really just for the harmless amusement of taking her way alone. She had known she should find herself, as the consequence of such an hour, in a sort of exalted state, under the influence of which a walk through the London streets would be exactly what would suit her best; an independent ramble, impressed excited contented, with nothing to mind and nobody to talk to and shop-windows in plenty to look at if she liked: a low taste, of the essence, it was to be supposed, of her nature, that she had of late for so many reasons been unable to gratify. She had taken her leave with her thanks – she knew her way quite enough; it being also sufficiently the case that she had even a shy hope of not going too straight. To wander a little wild was what would truly amuse her; so that, keeping clear of Oxford Street and cultivating an impression as of parts she didn’t know, she had ended with what she had more or less been plotting for, an encounter with three or four shops – an old bookseller’s, an old print-monger’s, a couple of places with dim antiquities in the window – that were not as so many of the other shops, those in Sloane Street say; a hollow parade which had long since ceased to beguile. There had remained with her moreover an allusion of Charlotte’s, of some months before – seed dropped into her imagination in the form of a casual speech about there being in Bloomsbury such ‘funny little fascinating’ places and even sometimes such unexpected finds. There could perhaps have been no stronger mark than this sense of well-nigh romantic opportunity – no livelier sign of the impression made on her, and always so long retained, so watchfully nursed, by any observation of Charlotte’s, however lightly thrown off. And then she had felt somehow more at her ease than for months and months before; she didn’t know why, but her time at the Museum, oddly, had done it; it was as if she hadn’t come into so many noble and beautiful associations, nor secured them also for her boy, secured them even for her father, only to see them turn to vanity and doubt, turn possibly to something still worse. ‘I believed in him again as much as ever, and I felt how I believed in him,’ she said with bright fixed eyes; ‘I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having for the moment to wonder and watch; having on the contrary almost nothing on my mind.’
It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen to thinking of her father’s birthday, had given herself this as a reason for trying what she could pick up for it. They would keep it at Fawns, where they had kept it before – since it would be the twenty-first of the month; and she mightn’t have another chance of making sure of something to offer him. There was always of course the impossibility of finding him anything, the least bit ‘good’, that he wouldn’t already long ago in his rummagings have seen himself