The Golden Bowl - Henry James (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

was shown you both, but you didn’t take it; you left it for me, and I came upon it, extraordinarily, through happening to go into the same shop on Monday last; in walking home, in prowling about to pick up some small old thing for father’s birthday, after my visit to the Museum, my appointment there with Mr. Crichton, of which I told you. It was shown me, and I was struck with it and took it⁠—knowing nothing about it at the time. What I now know I’ve learned since⁠—I learned this afternoon, a couple of hours ago; receiving from it naturally a great impression. So there it is⁠—in its three pieces. You can handle them⁠—don’t be afraid⁠—if you want to make sure the thing is the thing you and Charlotte saw together. Its having come apart makes an unfortunate difference for its beauty, its artistic value, but none for anything else. Its other value is just the same⁠—I mean that of its having given me so much of the truth about you. I don’t therefore so much care what becomes of it now⁠—unless perhaps you may yourself, when you come to think, have some good use for it. In that case,” Maggie wound up, “we can easily take the pieces with us to Fawns.”

It was wonderful how she felt, by the time she had seen herself through this narrow pass, that she had really achieved something⁠—that she was emerging a little, in fine, with the prospect less contracted. She had done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not merely momentary on which he could meet her. When, by the turn of his head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity presided. It was not, however, that when he did commit himself the show was promptly portentous. “But what in the world has Fanny Assingham had to do with it?”

She could verily, out of all her smothered soreness, almost have smiled: his question so affected her as giving the whole thing up to her. But it left her only to go the straighter. “She has had to do with it that I immediately sent for her and that she immediately came. She was the first person I wanted to see⁠—because I knew she would know. Know more about what I had learned, I mean, than I could make out for myself. I made out as much as I could for myself⁠—that I also wanted to have done; but it didn’t, in spite of everything, take me very far, and she has really been a help. Not so much as she would like to be⁠—not so much as, poor dear, she just now tried to be; yet she has done her very best for you⁠—never forget that!⁠—and has kept me along immeasurably better than I should have been able to come without her. She has gained me time; and that, these three months, don’t you see? has been everything.”

She had said “Don’t you see?” on purpose, and was to feel the next moment that it had acted. “These three months’?” the Prince asked.

“Counting from the night you came home so late from Matcham. Counting from the hours you spent with Charlotte at Gloucester; your visit to the cathedral⁠—which you won’t have forgotten describing to me in so much detail. For that was the beginning of my being sure. Before it I had been sufficiently in doubt. Sure,” Maggie developed, “of your having, and of your having for a long time had, two relations with Charlotte.”

He stared, a little at sea, as he took it up. “Two⁠—?”

Something in the tone of it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost foolish⁠—leaving Maggie to feel, as in a flash, how such a consequence, a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrongdoing. “Oh, you may have had fifty⁠—had the same relation with her fifty times! It’s of the number of kinds of relation with her that I speak⁠—a number that doesn’t matter, really, so long as there wasn’t only one kind, as father and I supposed. One kind,” she went on, “was there before us; we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it. We never thought of there being another, kept out of our sight. But after the evening I speak of I knew there was something else. As I say, I had, before that, my idea⁠—which you never dreamed I had. From the moment I speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and she, vaguely, yet uneasily, conscious of the difference. But it’s within these last hours that I’ve most seen where we are; and as I’ve been in communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let her know my certainty⁠—with the determination of which, however, you must understand, she has had nothing to do. She defends you,” Maggie remarked.

He had given her all his attention, and with this impression for her, again, that he was, in essence, fairly reaching out to her for time⁠—time, only time⁠—she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of his losing almost everything else by it. It was still, for a minute, as if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that he too⁠—as was his right⁠—should know where he was. What stirred in him above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech, must