The Golden Bowl - Henry James [42]
‘And their reason is what you call their romance?’
She looked at him a moment. ‘What do you want more?’
‘Didn’t he,’ the Colonel enquired, ‘want anything more? Or didn’t, for that matter, poor Charlotte herself?’
She kept her eyes on him; there was a manner in it that half answered. ‘They were thoroughly in love. She might have been his –’ She checked herself; she even for a minute lost herself. ‘She might have been anything she liked – except his wife.’
‘But she wasn’t,’ said the Colonel very smokingly.
‘She wasn’t,’ Mrs Assingham echoed.
The echo, not loud but deep, filled for a little the room. He seemed to listen to it die away; then he began again. ‘How are you sure?’
She waited before saying, but when she spoke it was definite. ‘There wasn’t time.’
He had a small laugh for her reason; he might have expected some other. ‘Does it take so much time?’
She herself, however, remained serious. ‘It takes more than they had.’
He was detached, but he wondered. ‘What was the matter with their time?’ After which, as, remembering it all, living it over and piecing it together, she only considered, ‘You mean that you came in with your idea?’ he demanded.
It brought her quickly to the point, and as if also in a measure to answer herself. ‘Not a bit of it – then. But you surely recall,’ she went on, ‘the way, a year ago, everything took place. They had parted before he had ever heard of Maggie.’
‘Why hadn’t he heard of her from Charlotte herself?’
‘Because she had never spoken of her.’
‘Is that also,’ the Colonel enquired, ‘what she has told you?’
‘I’m not speaking,’ his wife returned, ‘of what she has told me. That’s one thing. I’m speaking of what I know by myself. That’s another.’
‘You feel in other words that she lies to you?’ Bob Assingham more sociably asked.
She neglected the question, treating it as gross. ‘She never so much, at the time, as named Maggie.’
It was so positive that it appeared to strike him. ‘It’s he then who has told you?’
She after a moment admitted it. ‘It’s he.’
‘And he doesn’t lie?’
‘No – to do him justice. I believe he absolutely doesn’t. If I hadn’t believed it,’ Mrs Assingham declared for her general justification, ‘I’d have had nothing to do with him – that is in this connexion. He’s a gentleman – I mean all as much of one as he ought to be. And he had nothing to gain. That helps,’ she added, ‘even a gentleman. It was I who named Maggie to him – a year from last May. He had never heard of her before.’
‘Then it’s grave,’ said the Colonel.
She briefly weighed it. ‘Do you mean grave for me?’
‘Oh that everything’s grave for “you” is what we take for granted and are fundamentally talking about. It’s grave – it was – for Charlotte. And it’s grave for Maggie. That is it was – when he did see her. Or when she did see him.’
‘You don’t torment me as much as you would like,’ she presently went on, ‘because you think of nothing that I haven’t a thousand times thought of, and because I think of everything that you never will. It would all,’ she recognised, ‘have been grave if it hadn’t all been right. You can’t make out,’ she contended, ‘that we got to Rome before the end of February.’
He more than agreed. ‘There’s nothing in life, my dear, that I can make out.’
Well, there was apparently nothing in life that she at real need couldn’t. ‘Charlotte, who had been there that year from early, early in November, left suddenly, you’ll quite remember, about the tenth of April. She was to have stayed on – she was to have stayed, naturally, more or less, for us; and she was to have stayed all the more that the Ververs, due all winter, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at last really coming. They were coming