The Golden Bowl - Henry James [43]
He had listened more than he showed – as came out in his tone. ‘To save herself?’
‘Well, also really I think to save him too. I saw it afterwards – I see it all now. He’d have been sorry – he didn’t want to hurt her.’
‘Oh I dare say,’ the Colonel laughed. ‘They generally don’t!’
‘At all events,’ his wife pursued, ‘she escaped – they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn’t be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines3 between them the better. It had taken them, it’s true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known – though it was a good deal known. More, certainly,’ she said, ‘than I then imagined – though I don’t know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he might have done – things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I haven’t’ – and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures – ‘so I haven’t, I say to myself, been a fool.’
‘Well, are you trying to make out that I’ve said you have? All their case wants, at any rate,’ Bob Assingham declared, ‘is that you should leave it well alone. It’s theirs now; they’ve bought it, over the counter, and paid for it. It has ceased to be yours.’
‘Of which case,’ she asked, ‘are you speaking?’
He smoked a minute: then with a groan: ‘Lord, are there so many?’
‘There’s Maggie’s and the Prince’s, and there’s the Prince’s and Charlotte’s.’
‘Oh yes; and then,’ the Colonel scoffed, ‘there’s Charlotte’s and the Prince’s.’
‘There’s Maggie’s and Charlotte’s,’ she went on – ‘and there’s also Maggie’s and mine. I think too that there’s Charlotte’s and mine. Yes,’ she mused, ‘Charlotte’s and mine is certainly a case. In short, you see, there are plenty. But I mean,’ she said, ‘to keep my head.’
‘Are we to settle them all,’ he enquired, ‘to-night?’
‘I should lose it if things had happened otherwise – if I had acted with any folly.’ She had gone on in her earnestness, unheeding of his question. ‘I shouldn’t be able to bear that now. But my good conscience is my strength; no one can accuse me. The Ververs came on to Rome alone – Charlotte, after their days with her in Florence, had decided about America. Maggie, I dare say, had helped her; she must have made her a present, and a handsome one, so that many things were easy. Charlotte left them, came to England, “joined” somebody or other, sailed for New York. I have still her letter from Milan, telling me; I didn’t know at the moment all that was behind it, but I felt in it nevertheless the undertaking of a new life. Certainly, in any case, it cleared that air – I mean the dear old Roman, in which we were steeped. It left the field free – it gave me a free hand. There was no question for me of anybody else when I brought the two others together. More than that, there was no question for them. So you see,’ she concluded, ‘where that puts me.’
She got up, on the words, very much as if they were the blue daylight towards which, through a darksome tunnel, she had been pushing her way, and the elation in her voice, combined with her recovered alertness, might have signified the sharp whistle of the train that shoots at last into the open. She turned about the room; she looked out a moment into the August night; she stopped here and there before the flowers in bowls and vases. Yes, it was distinctly as if she had proved what was needing proof, as if the issue of her operation had been almost unexpectedly a success. Old arithmetic had perhaps been fallacious, but the new settled the question. Her husband oddly, however, kept his place without apparently measuring these results. As he had been amused at her intensity, so he wasn