The Golden Bowl - Henry James [244]
‘I’ve come to join you – I thought you’d be here.’
‘Oh yes, I’m here,’ Maggie heard herself return a little flatly.
‘It’s too close indoors.’
‘Very – but close even here.’ Charlotte was still and grave – she had even uttered her remark about the temperature with an expressive weight that verged upon solemnity; so that Maggie, reduced to looking vaguely about at the sky, could only feel her not fail of her purpose. ‘The air’s heavy as if with thunder – I think there’ll be a storm.’ She made the suggestion to carry off an awkwardness – which was a part always of her companion’s gain; but the awkwardness didn’t diminish in the silence that followed. Charlotte had said nothing in reply; her brow was dark as with a fixed expression, and her high elegance, her handsome head and long straight neck testified through the dusk to their inveterate completeness and noble erectness. It was as if what she had come out to do had already begun, and when, as a consequence, Maggie had said helplessly ‘Don’t you want something? won’t you have my shawl?’ everything might have crumbled away in the comparative poverty of the tribute. Mrs Verver’s rejection of it had the brevity of a sign that they hadn’t closed in for idle words, just as her dim serious face, uninterruptedly presented until they moved again, might have figured the success with which she watched all her message penetrate. They presently went back the way she had come, but she stopped Maggie again within range of the smoking-room window and made her stand where the party at cards would be before her. Side by side for three minutes they fixed this picture of quiet harmonies, the positive charm of it and, as might have been said, the full significance – which, as was now brought home to Maggie, could be no more after all than a matter of interpretation, differing always for a different interpreter. As she herself had hovered in sight of it a quarter of an hour before, it would have been a thing for her to show Charlotte – to show in righteous irony, in reproach too stern for anything but silence. But now it was she who was being shown it, and shown it by Charlotte, and she saw quickly enough that as Charlotte showed it so she must at present submissively seem to take it.
The others were absorbed and unconscious, either silent over their game or dropping remarks unheard on the terrace; and it was to her father’s quiet face, discernibly expressive of nothing that was in his daughter’s mind, that our young woman’s attention was most directly given. His wife and his daughter were both closely watching him, and to which of them, could he have been notified of this, would his raised eyes first, all impulsively, have responded? in which of them would he have felt it most important to destroy – for his clutch at the equilibrium – any germ of uneasiness? Not yet since his marriage had Maggie so sharply and so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte’s leave and under Charlotte’s direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should look at him were prescribed to her; quite even as if she had been defied to look at him in any other. It came home to her too that the challenge wasn’t, as might be said, in his interest and for his protection, but pressingly, insistently in Charlotte’s, for that of her security at any price. She might verily by this dumb demonstration have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie herself, a sum of money that she properly was to find. She must remain safe and Maggie must pay