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

He threw back his head a little, settling with one hand his eyeglass. “What do you call, my dear, the consequences?”

“Your life as your marriage has made it.”

“Well, hasn’t it made it exactly what we wanted?” She just hesitated, then felt herself steady⁠—oh, beyond what she had dreamed. “Exactly what I wanted⁠—yes.”

His eyes, through his straightened glasses, were still on hers, and he might, with his intenser fixed smile, have been knowing she was, for herself, rightly inspired. “What do you make then of what I wanted?”

“I don’t make anything, any more than of what you’ve got. That’s exactly the point. I don’t put myself out to do so⁠—I never have; I take from you all I can get, all you’ve provided for me, and I leave you to make of your own side of the matter what you can. There you are⁠—the rest is your own affair. I don’t even pretend to concern myself⁠—!”

“To concern yourself⁠—?” He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face.

“With what may have really become of you. It’s as if we had agreed from the first not to go into that⁠—such an arrangement being of course charming for me. You can’t say, you know, that I haven’t stuck to it.”

He didn’t say so then⁠—even with the opportunity given him of her stopping once more to catch her breath. He said instead: “Oh, my dear⁠—oh, oh!”

But it made no difference, know as she might what a past⁠—still so recent and yet so distant⁠—it alluded to; she repeated her denial, warning him off, on her side, from spoiling the truth of her contention. “I never went into anything, and you see I don’t; I’ve continued to adore you⁠—but what’s that, from a decent daughter to such a father? what but a question of convenient arrangement, our having two houses, three houses, instead of one (you would have arranged for fifty if I had wished!) and my making it easy for you to see the child? You don’t claim, I suppose, that my natural course, once you had set up for yourself, would have been to ship you back to American City?”

These were direct inquiries, they quite rang out, in the soft, wooded air; so that Adam Verver, for a minute, appeared to meet them with reflection. She saw reflection, however, quickly enough show him what to do with them. “Do you know, Mag, what you make me wish when you talk that way?” And he waited again, while she further got from him the sense of something that had been behind, deeply in the shade, coming cautiously to the front and just feeling its way before presenting itself. “You regularly make me wish that I had shipped back to American City. When you go on as you do⁠—” But he really had to hold himself to say it.

“Well, when I go on⁠—?”

“Why, you make me quite want to ship back myself. You make me quite feel as if American City would be the best place for us.”

It made her all too finely vibrate. “For ‘us’⁠—?”

“For me and Charlotte. Do you know that if we should ship, it would serve you quite right?” With which he smiled⁠—oh he smiled! “And if you say much more we will ship.”

Ah, then it was that the cup of her conviction, full to the brim, overflowed at a touch! There was his idea, the clearness of which for an instant almost dazzled her. It was a blur of light, in the midst of which she saw Charlotte like some object marked, by contrast, in blackness, saw her waver in the field of vision, saw her removed, transported, doomed. And he had named Charlotte, named her again, and she had made him⁠—which was all she had needed more: it was as if she had held a blank letter to the fire and the writing had come out still larger than she hoped. The recognition of it took her some seconds, but she might when she spoke have been folding up these precious lines and restoring them to her pocket. “Well, I shall be as much as ever then the cause of what you do. I haven’t the least doubt of your being up to that if you should think I might get anything out of it; even the little pleasure,” she laughed, “of having said, as you call it, ‘more.’ Let my enjoyment of this therefore, at any price, continue to represent for you what I call sacrificing you.”

She had drawn a long breath; she had made him do it all for her, and had lighted the way to it without his naming her husband. That silence had been as distinct as the sharp, the inevitable sound, and something now, in him, followed it up, a sudden air as of confessing at last fully to where she was and of begging the particular question. “Don’t you think then I can take care of myself?”

“Ah, it’s exactly what I’ve gone upon. If it wasn’t for that⁠—!”

But she broke off, and they remained only another moment face to face. “I’ll let you know, my dear, the day I feel you’ve begun to sacrifice me.”

“ ‘Begun’?” she extravagantly echoed.

“Well, it will be, for me, the day you’ve ceased to believe in me.”

With which, his glasses still fixed on her, his hands in his pockets, his hat pushed back, his legs a little apart, he seemed to plant or to square himself for a kind of assurance it had occurred to him he might as well treat her to, in default of other things, before they changed their subject. It had the effect, for her, of a reminder⁠—a reminder of all he was, of all he had done, of all, above and beyond his being her perfect little father, she might take him as representing, take him as having, quite eminently, in the eyes of two hemispheres, been capable of, and as therefore