The Golden Bowl - Henry James [55]
‘It ought, really, if it should be a thing of this sort, to take its little value from having belonged to one’s self.’
‘Ecco!’ said the Prince – just triumphantly enough. ‘There you are.’
Behind the dealer were sundry small cupboards in the wall. Two or three of these Charlotte had seen him open, so that her eyes found themselves resting on those he hadn’t visited. But she granted the whole mistake. ‘There’s nothing here she could wear.’
It was only after a moment that her companion rejoined: ‘Is there anything – do you think – that you could?’
It made her just start. She didn’t at all events look at the objects; she but looked for an instant very directly at him. ‘No.’
‘Ah!’ the Prince quietly exclaimed.
‘Would it be,’ Charlotte asked, ‘your idea to offer me something?’
‘Well, why not – as a small ricordo?’7
‘But a ricordo of what?’
‘Why of “this” – as you yourself say. Of this little hunt.’
‘Oh I say it – but hasn’t my whole point been that I don’t ask you to. Therefore,’ she demanded – but smiling at him now – ‘where’s the logic?’
‘Oh the logic –!’ he laughed.
‘But logic’s everything. That at least is how I feel it. A ricordo from you – from you to me – is a ricordo of nothing. It has no reference.’
‘Ah my dear!’ he vaguely protested. Their entertainer meanwhile stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her friend than in anything else, again met his gaze. It was a comfort to her that their foreign tongue8 covered what they said – and they might have appeared of course, as the Prince now had one of the snuff-boxes in his hand, to be discussing a purchase.
‘You don’t refer,’ she went on to her companion. ‘I refer.’
He had lifted the lid of his little box and he looked into it hard. ‘Do you mean by that then that you would be free –?’
“ ‘Free” –?’
‘To offer me something?’
This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. ‘Would you allow me –?’
‘No,’ said the Prince into his little box.
‘You wouldn’t accept it from me?’
‘No,’ he repeated in the same way.
She exhaled a long breath that was like a guarded sigh. ‘But you’ve touched an idea that has been mine. It’s what I’ve wanted.’ Then she added: ‘It was what I hoped.’
He put down his box – this had drawn his eyes. He made nothing, clearly, of the little man’s attention. ‘It’s what you brought me out for?’
‘Well, that’s at any rate,’ she returned, ‘my own affair. But it won’t do?’
‘It won’t do, cara mia.’9
‘It’s impossible?’
‘It’s impossible.’ And he took up one of the brooches.
She had another pause, while the shopman only waited. ‘If I were to accept from you one of these charming little ornaments as you suggest, what should I do with it?’
He was perhaps at last a little irritated; he even – as if he might understand – looked vaguely across at their host. ‘Wear it, per bacco!’10
‘Where then, please? Under my clothes?’
‘Wherever you like. But it isn’t then, if you will,’ he added, ‘worth talking about.’
‘It’s only worth talking about, mio caro,’ she smiled, ‘from your having begun it. My question is only reasonable – so that your idea may stand or fall by your answer to it. If I should pin one of these things on for you would it be, to your mind, that I might go home and show it to Maggie as your present?’
They had had between them often in talk the refrain, jocosely, descriptively applied, of ‘old-Roman’. It had been, as a pleasantry, in the other time, his explanation to her of everything; but nothing truly had even seemed so old-Roman as the shrug in which he now indulged. ‘Why in the world not?