The Golden Bowl - Henry James [280]
If they were ever to go in short it was high time, with her father’s age, Charlotte’s need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to ‘live into’ their queer future, it was high time they should take up their courage. This was eminent sense, but it didn’t arrest the Princess, who the next moment had found a form for her challenge. ‘But shan’t you then so much as miss her a little? She’s wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically,’ Maggie went on – ‘she’s naturally so far, splendid as she is, from having done with life. But dying for us – for you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left.’
The Prince smoked hard a minute. ‘As you say, she’s splendid, but there is – there always will be – much of her left. Only, as you also say, for others.’
‘And yet I think,’ the Princess returned, ‘that it isn’t as if we had wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? It’s as if her unhappiness had been necessary to us – as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us.’
He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid enquiry. ‘Why do you speak of the unhappiness of your father’s wife?’
They exchanged a long look – the time that it took her to find her reply. ‘Because not to –!’
‘Well, not to –?’
‘Would make me have to speak of him. And I can’t,’ said Maggie, ‘speak of him.’
‘You “can’t” –?’
‘I can’t.’ She said it as for definite notice, not to be repeated. ‘There are too many things,’ she nevertheless added. ‘He’s too great.’
The Prince looked at his cigar-tip, and then as he put back the weed: ‘Too great for whom?’ Upon which as she hesitated, ‘Not, my dear, too great for you,’ he declared. ‘For me – oh as much as you like.’
‘Too great for me is what I mean. I know why I think it,’ Maggie said. ‘That’s enough.’
He looked at her yet again as if she but fanned his wonder; he was on the very point, she judged, of asking her why she thought it. But her own eyes maintained their warning, and at the end of a minute he had uttered other words. ‘What’s of importance is that you’re his daughter. That at least we’ve got. And I suppose that if I may say nothing else I may say at least that I value it.’
‘Oh yes, you may say that you value it. I myself make the most of it.’
This again he took in, letting it presently put forth for him a striking connexion. ‘She ought to have known you. That’s what’s present to me. She ought to have understood you better.’
‘Better than you did?’
‘Yes,’ he gravely maintained, ‘better than I did. And she didn’t really know you at all. She doesn’t know you now.’
‘Ah yes she does!’ said Maggie.
But he shook his head – he knew what he meant. ‘She not only doesn’t understand you more than I, she understands you ever so much less. Though even I –!’
‘Well, even you?’ Maggie pressed as he paused.
‘Even I, even I even yet –!’ Again he paused and the silence held them.
But Maggie at last broke it. ‘If Charlotte doesn’t understand me it’s because I’ve prevented her. I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her.’
The Prince kept his eyes on her. ‘I know what you’ve chosen to do. But I’ve chosen to do the same.’
‘Yes,’ said Maggie after an instant – ‘my choice was made when I had guessed yours. But you mean,’ she asked, ‘that she understands you?’
‘It presents small difficulty!’
‘Are you so sure?’ Maggie went on.
‘Sure enough. But it doesn’