The Golden Bowl - Henry James [45]
The Colonel had followed, but his comment was prosaic. ‘He knew, Amerigo, what he was about. And I don’t mean the old one.’
‘I know what you mean!’ his wife bravely threw off.
‘The old one’ – he pointed his effect – ‘isn’t the only discoverer in the family.’
‘Oh as much as you like! If he discovered America – or got himself honoured as if he had – his successors were in due time to discover the Americans. And it was one of them in particular, doubtless, who was to discover how patriotic we are.’
‘Wouldn’t this be the same one,’ the Colonel asked, ‘who really discovered what you call the connexion?’
She gave him a look. ‘The connexion’s a true thing – the connexion’s perfectly historic. Your insinuations recoil upon your cynical mind. Don’t you understand,’ she asked, ‘that the history of such people is known, root and branch, at every moment of its course?’
‘Oh it’s all right,’ said Bob Assingham.
‘Go to the British Museum,’ his companion continued with spirit.
‘And what am I to do there?’
‘There’s a whole immense room, or recess, or department, or whatever, filled with books written about his family alone. You can see for yourself?’
‘Have you seen for your self?’
She faltered but an instant. ‘Certainly – I went one day with Maggie. We looked him up, so to say. They were most civil.’ And she fell again into the current her husband had slightly ruffled. ‘The effect was produced, the charm began to work at all events, in Rome, from that hour of the Prince’s drive with us. My only course afterwards had to be to make the best of it. It was certainly good enough for that,’ Mrs Assingham hastened to add, ‘and I didn’t in the least see my duty in making the worst. In the same situation to-day I wouldn’t act differently. I entered into the case as it then appeared to me – and as for the matter of that it still does. I liked it, I thought all sorts of good of it, and nothing can even now,’ she said with some intensity, ‘make me think anything else.’
‘Nothing can ever make you think anything you don’t want to,’ the Colonel, still in his chair, remarked over his pipe. ‘You’ve got a precious power of thinking whatever you do want. You want also, from moment to moment, to think such desperately different things. What happened,’ he went on, ‘was that you fell violently in love with the Prince yourself, and that as you couldn’t get me out of the way you had to take some roundabout course. You couldn’t marry him, any more than Charlotte could – that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody else – it was always the Prince, it was always marriage. You could to your little friend, to whom there were no objections.’
‘Not only there were no objections, but there were reasons, positive ones – and all excellent, all charming.’ She spoke with an absence of all repudiation of his exposure of the spring of her conduct; and this abstention, clearly and effectively conscious, evidently cost her nothing. ‘It is always the Prince, and it is always, thank heaven, marriage. And these are the things, God grant, that it will always be. That I could help, a year ago, most assuredly made me happy, and it continues to make me happy.’
‘Then why aren’t you quiet?’
‘I am quiet,’ said Fanny Assingham.
He looked at her, with his colourless candour, still in his place; she moved about again a little, emphasising by her unrest her declaration of her tranquillity. He was as silent at first as if he had taken her answer, but he wasn’t to keep it long. ‘What do you make of it that, by your own show, Charlotte couldn’t tell her all? What do you make of it that the Prince didn’t tell her anything? Say one understands that there are things she can’t be told – since, as you put it, she is so easily scared and shocked.’ He produced these objections slowly, giving her time, by his pauses, to stop roaming and come back to him. But she was roaming still when he concluded his enquiry.