The Golden Bowl - Henry James [261]
There was a morning when, during the hour before luncheon and shortly after the arrival of a neighbourly contingent – neighbourly from ten miles off – whom Mrs Verver had taken in charge, Maggie paused on the threshold of the gallery through which she had been about to pass, faltering there for the very impression of his face as it met her from an opposite door. Charlotte, halfway down the vista; held together, as if by something almost austere in the grace of her authority, the semi-scared (now that they were there!) knot of her visitors, who, since they had announced themselves by telegram as yearning to enquire and admire, saw themselves restricted to this consistency. Her voice, high and clear and a little hard, reached her husband and her stepdaughter while she thus placed beyond doubt her cheerful submission to duty. Her words, addressed to the largest publicity, rang for some minutes through the place, every one as quiet to listen as if it had been a church ablaze with tapers and she were taking her part in some hymn of praise. Fanny Assingham looked rapt in devotion – Fanny Assingham who forsook this other friend as little as she forsook either her host or the Princess or the Prince or the Principino; she supported her, in slow revolutions, in murmurous attestations of presence, at all such times, and Maggie, advancing after a first hesitation, was not to fail of noting her solemn inscrutable attitude, her eyes attentively lifted, so that she might escape being provoked to betray an impression. She betrayed one however as Maggie approached, dropping her gaze to the latter’s level long enough to seem to adventure, marvellously, on a mute appeal. ‘You understand, don’t you, that if she didn’t do this there would be no knowing what she might do?’ This light Mrs Assingham richly launched while her younger friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain again, and then, not too much to show it – or rather positively to conceal it and to conceal something more as well – turned short round to one of the windows and awkwardly, pointlessly waited. ‘The largest of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands looped round it, which as you see are the finest possible vieux Saxe,4 aren’t of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect. They’ve been put on at a later time by a process known through very few examples, and through none so important as this, which is really quite unique – so that though the whole thing is a little baroque its value as a specimen is I believe almost inestimable.’
So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads of gaping neighbours; so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing, as less interested judges might have said, seemed to justify the faith with which she was honoured. Maggie meanwhile at the window knew the strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying, or was at least on the point of it – the lighted square before her all blurred and dim. The high voice went on, its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse – so that Maggie felt herself the next thing turn with a start to her father. ‘Can’t she be stopped? Hasn’t she done it enough?’ – some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half the gallery – for he hadn’t moved from where she had first seen him – he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion. ‘Poor thing, poor thing’ – it reached straight – ‘isn’t she, for one’s credit, on the swagger?’ After which, as held thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away. The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet lifted Maggie as on air – so much for deep guesses on her own side too it gave her to think of. There was honestly an awful mixture in things, and it wasn