The Golden Bowl - Henry James [48]
5
‘Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest.’ So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park. ‘I don’t want to pretend, and I can’t pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don’t care. I knew I shouldn’t and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this,’ she repeated as under the influence of her tone the Prince had already come to a pause.
‘For “this”?’ He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were vague to him – or were, rather, a quantity that couldn’t at the most be much.
It would be as much however as she should be able to make it. ‘To have one hour alone with you.’
It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about her with expression from the first of their coming in, quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich low-browed weather-washed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be blessedly an American – as indeed you had to be blessedly an American for all sorts of things: so long as you hadn’t, blessedly or not, to remain in America. The Prince had by half-past ten – as also by definite appointment – called in Cadogan Place for Mrs Assingham’s visitor, and then after brief delay the two had walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge. The understanding to this end had taken its place, after a couple of days, as inevitably consequent on the appeal made by the girl during those first moments in Mrs Assingham’s drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days had done nothing to invalidate – everything much rather to place in a light, and as to which it obviously wouldn’t have fitted that any one should raise an objection. Who was there for that matter to raise one from the moment Mrs Assingham, informed and apparently not disapproving, didn’t intervene? This the young man had asked himself – with a very sufficient sense of what would have made him ridiculous. He wasn’t going to begin – that at least was certain – by showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp in him, moreover, it would already, not a little, have dropped; so happy, all round, so propitious, he quite might have called it, had been the effect of this rapid interval.
The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his own wedding-guests and by Maggie’s scarce less absorbed entertainment of her friend, whom she had kept for hours together in Portland Place; whom she hadn’t, as wouldn’t have been convenient, invited altogether as yet to migrate, but who had been present with other persons, his contingent, at luncheon, at tea, at dinner, at perpetual repasts – he had never in his life, it struck him, had to reckon with so much eating – whenever he had looked in. If he hadn’t again till this hour, save for a minute, seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he hadn’t seen even Maggie; and if therefore he hadn’t seen even Maggie nothing was more natural than that he shouldn’t have seen Charlotte. The exceptional minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of the others, on the huge Portland Place staircase,1 had sufficiently enabled the girl to remind him – so ready she assumed him to be