The Golden Bowl - Henry James [59]
‘Per bacco!’
‘For your happiness?’
‘For my happiness.’
‘For your safety?’
‘For my safety.’
She just paused. ‘For your marriage?’
‘For my marriage. For everything.’
She thought again. ‘Thank goodness then that if there be a crack we know it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know –!’ And she smiled with the sadness of it. ‘We can never then give each other anything.’
He considered, but he met it. ‘Ah but one does know. I do at least – and by instinct. I don’t fail. That will always protect me.’
It was droll, the way he said such things; yet she liked him really the more for it. They fell in for her with a general, or rather with a special, vision. But she spoke with a mild despair. ‘What then will protect me?’
‘Where I’m concerned I will. From me at least you’ve nothing to fear,’ he now quite amiably responded. ‘Anything you consent to accept from me –’ But he paused.
‘Well?’
‘Well, shall be perfect.’
‘That’s very fine,’ she presently answered. ‘It’s vain, after all, for you to talk of my accepting things when you’ll accept nothing from me.’
Ah there better still he could meet her. ‘You attach an impossible condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to myself.’
Well, she looked, before him there, at the condition – then abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a headshake of disenchantment – so far as the idea had appealed to her. It all appeared too difficult. ‘Oh my “condition” – I don’t hold to it. You may cry it on the housetops – anything I ever do.’
‘Ah well, then –!’ This made, he laughed, all the difference.
But it was too late. ‘Oh I don’t care now! I should have liked the Bowl. But if that won’t do there’s nothing.’
He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again; but after a moment he qualified. ‘Yet I shall want some day to give you something.’
She wondered at him. ‘What day?’
‘The day you marry. For you will marry. You must – seriously – marry.’
She took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been pressed. ‘To make you feel better?’
‘Well,’ he replied frankly, wonderfully – ‘it will. But here,’ he added, ‘is your hansom.’
He had signalled – the cab was charging. She put out no hand for their separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she did so, however, she said what had been gathering while she waited. ‘Well, I would marry, I think, to have something from you in all freedom.’
BOOK SECOND
1
Adam Verver, at Fawns, that autumn Sunday, might have been observed to open the door of the billiard-room with a certain freedom – might have been observed, that is, had there been a spectator in the field. The justification of the push he had applied, however, and of the push equally sharp that, to shut himself in, he again applied – the ground of this energy was precisely that he might here, however briefly, find himself alone, alone with the handful of letters, newspapers and other unopened missives, to which, during and since breakfast, he had lacked opportunity to give an eye. The vast square clean apartment was empty, and its large clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly-condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered village and strong cloud-shadow, which were, together, a thing to create the sense, with every one else at church, of one’s having the world to one’s self. We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with Mr Verver; the very fact of his striking, as he would have said, for solitude, the fact of his quiet flight, almost on tiptoe, through tortuous corridors, investing him with an interest that makes our attention – tender indeed almost to compassion – qualify his achieved isolation. For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always figured other persons