The Golden Bowl - Henry James [220]
But the Princess had already caught at the words. ‘Yes – I’ve thought only too much!’ Yet she appeared to continue for the minute full of that fault. She had it in fact, by this prompted thought, all before her. ‘Of him, dear man, of him –!’
Her friend, able to take in thus directly her vision of her father, watched her with a new suspense. That way might safety lie – it was like a wider chink of light. ‘He believed – with a beauty! – in Charlotte.’
‘Yes, and it was I who had made him believe. I didn’t mean to at the time so much, for I had no idea then of what was coming. But I did it, I did it!’ the Princess declared.
‘With a beauty – ah with a beauty you too!’ Mrs Assingham insisted.
Maggie at all events was seeing for herself – it was another matter. ‘The thing was that he made her think it would be so possible.’
Fanny again hesitated. ‘The Prince made her think –?’
Maggie stared – she had meant her father. But her vision seemed to spread. ‘They both made her think. She wouldn’t have thought without them.’
‘Yet Amerigo’s good faith,’ Mrs Assingham insisted, ‘was perfect. And there was nothing, all the more,’ she added, ‘against your father’s.’
The remark kept Maggie for a moment still. ‘Nothing perhaps but his knowing that she knew.’
‘ “Knew” –?’
‘That he was doing it so much for me. To what extent,’ she suddenly asked of her friend, ‘do you think he was aware she knew?’
‘Ah who can say what passes between people in such a relation? The only thing one can be sure of is that he was generous.’ And Mrs Assingham conclusively smiled. ‘He doubtless knew as much as was right for himself.’
‘As much, that is, as was right for her.’
‘Yes then – as was right for her. The point is,’ Fanny declared, ‘that whatever his knowledge it made all the way it went for his good faith.’
Maggie continued to gaze, and her friend now fairly waited on her successive movements. ‘Isn’t the point, very considerably, that his good faith must have been his faith in her taking almost as much interest in me as he himself took?’
Fanny Assingham thought. ‘He recognised, he adopted, your long friendship. But he founded on it no selfishness.’
‘No,’ said Maggie with still deeper consideration: ‘he counted her selfishness out almost as he counted his own.’
‘So you may say.’
‘Very well,’ Maggie went on; ‘if he had none of his own, he invited her, may have expected her, on her side, to have as little. And she may only since have found that out.’
Mrs Assingham looked blank. ‘Since –?’
‘And he may have become aware,’ Maggie pursued, ‘that she has found it out. That she has taken the measure, since their marriage,’ she explained, ‘of how much he had asked of her – more say than she had understood at the time. He may have made out at last how such a demand was in the long run to affect her.’
‘He may have done many things,’ Mrs Assingham responded; ‘but there’s one thing he certainly won’t have done. He’ll never have shown that he expected of her a quarter as much as she must have understood he was to give.’
‘I’ve often wondered,’ Maggie mused, ‘what Charlotte really understood. But it’s one of the things she has never told me.’
‘Then as it’s one of the things she has never told me either we shall probably never know it, and we may regard it as none of our business. There are many things,’ said Mrs Assingham, ‘that we shall never know.’
Maggie took it in with a long reflexion. ‘Never.’
‘But there are others,’ her friend went on, ‘that stare us in the face and that – under whatever difficulty you may feel you labour – may now be enough for us. Your father has been extraordinary.’
It had been as if Maggie were feeling her way, but she rallied to this with a rush. ‘Extraordinary.’
‘Magnificent,’ said Fanny Assingham.
Her companion held tight to it. ‘Magnificent.’
‘Then he’ll do for himself whatever there may be to do. What he undertook for you he’ll do to the end. He didn’t undertake it to break down; in what – quiet patient exquisite as he is – did he ever break down? He had never in his life proposed to himself to have failed, and he won