The Golden Bowl - Henry James [44]
She faced round as if he had touched a spring. ‘He wanted to, naturally – and it was much the best thing he could do.’ She was in possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. ‘He was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what Maggie then seemed to us.’
‘She’s very nice, but she always seems to me more than anything else the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that’s what she especially seemed to him you of course place the thing in your light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn’t, I grant you, have been so difficult.’
This pulled her up but for an instant. ‘I never said he didn’t from the first – I never said that he doesn’t more and more – like Maggie’s money.’
‘I never said I shouldn’t have liked it myself,’ Bob Assingham returned. He made no movement; he smoked another minute. ‘How much did Maggie know?’
‘How much?’ She seemed to consider – as if it were between quarts and gallons – how best to express the quantity. ‘She knew what Charlotte, in Florence, had told her.’
‘And what had Charlotte told her?’
‘Very little.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Why this – that she couldn’t tell her.’ And she explained a little what she meant. ‘There are things, my dear – haven’t you felt it yourself, coarse as you are? – that no one could tell Maggie. There are things that, upon my word, I shouldn’t care to attempt to tell her now.’
The Colonel smoked on it. ‘She’d be so scandalised?’
‘She’d be so frightened. She’d be, in her strange little way, so hurt. She wasn’t born to know evil. She must never know it.’
Bob Assingham had a queer grim laugh; the sound of which in fact fixed his wife before him. ‘We’re taking grand ways to prevent it.’
But she stood there to protest. ‘We’re not taking any ways. The ways are all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our carriage that day in Villa Borghese – the second or third of her days in Rome, when, as you remember, you went off somewhere with Mr Verver, and the Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea. They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation: the rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, I recollect, in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man’s greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a street-corner as we passed, that one of the Prince’s baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was Amerigo:4 which – as you probably don’t know, however, even after a lifetime of me – was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent; so that the thought of any connexion with him can even now thrill our artless breasts.’
The Colonel’s grim placidity could always quite adequately meet his wife’s not infrequent imputation of ignorances, on the score of the land of her birth, unperturbed and unashamed; and these dark depths were even at the present moment not directly lighted by an enquiry that managed to be curious without being apologetic. ‘But where does the connexion come in?’
She had it ready. ‘By the women – that is by some obliging woman, of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to refer to as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great – great enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator, crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My point is at any rate that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince was from the start helped with the dear Ververs by his wearing it. The connexion became romantic for Maggie the moment she took it in; she filled out, in a flash, every link that might be vague.