The Golden Bowl - Henry James [259]
Even to that indeed, she could reflect, Charlotte might have replied that it was easy to say; even to that no great meaning could attach so long as the little meditative man in the straw hat kept coming into view with his indescribable air of weaving his spell, weaving it off there by himself. In whatever quarter of the horizon the appearances were scanned he was to be noticed as absorbed in this occupation; and Maggie was to become aware of two or three extraordinary occasions of receiving from him the hint that he measured the impression he produced. It was not really till after their recent long talk in the park that she knew how deeply, how quite exhaustively, they had then communicated – so that they were to remain together, for the time, in consequence, quite in the form of a couple of sociable drinkers who sit back from the table over which they have been resting their elbows, over which they have emptied to the last drop their respective charged cups. The cups were still there on the table, but turned upside down; and nothing was left for the companions but to confirm by placid silences the fact that the wine had been good. They had parted positively as if on either side primed with it – primed for whatever was to be; and everything between them, as the month waned, added its touch of truth to this similitude. Nothing truly was at present between them save that they were looking at each other in infinite trust; it fairly wanted no more words, and when they met during the deep summer days, met even without witnesses, when they kissed at morning and evening or on any of the other occasions of contact that they had always so freely celebrated, a pair of birds of the upper air could scarce have appeared less to invite each other to sit down and worry afresh. So it was that in the house itself, where more of his waiting treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she sometimes only looked at him – from end to end of the great gallery, the pride of the house, for instance – as if, in one of the halls of a museum, she had been an earnest young woman with a Baedeker1 and he a vague gentleman to whom even Baedekers were unknown. He had ever of course had his way of walking about to review his possessions and verify their condition; but this was a pastime to which he now struck her as almost extravagantly addicted, and when she passed near him and he turned to give her a smile she caught – or so she fancied – the greater depth of his small perpetual hum of contemplation. It was as if he were singing to himself, sotto voce,2 as he went – and it was also on occasion quite ineffably as if Charlotte, hovering, watching, listening for her part too, kept sufficiently within earshot to make it out as song, and yet by some effect of the very manner of it stood off and didn’t dare.
One of the attentions she had from immediately after her marriage most freely paid him was that of her interest in his rarities, her appreciation of his taste, her native passion for beautiful objects and her grateful desire not to miss anything he could teach her about them. Maggie had in due course seen her begin to ‘work’ this fortunately natural source of sympathy for all it was worth. She took possession of the ground throughout its extent; she abounded, to odd excess, one might have remarked, in the assumption of its being for her, with her husband, all the ground, the finest clearest air and most breatheable medium common to them. It had been given to Maggie to wonder if she didn’t in these intensities of approbation too much shut him up to his province; but this was a complaint he had never made his daughter, and Charlotte must at least have had for her that, thanks to her admirable instinct, her range of perception marching with his own and never falling behind, she had probably not so much as once treated him to a rasping mistake or a revealing stupidity. Maggie, wonderfully, in the summer days, felt it forced upon her that that was one way, after all, of being a genial wife; and it was never so much forced upon her as at these odd moments of her encountering the sposi, as Amerigo called them, under the coved ceilings of Fawns while, so together yet at the same time so separate, they were making their daily round. Charlotte hung behind with emphasised attention; she stopped when her husband stopped, but at the distance of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of objects; and the likeness of their connexion wouldn