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

an intensity and an intimacy, that were a new and a strange quantity, that were like the irruption of a tide loosening them where they had stuck and making them feel they floated. What was it that, with the rush of this, just kept her from putting out her hands to him, from catching at him as, in the other time, with the superficial impetus he and Charlotte had privately conspired to impart, she had so often, her breath failing her, known the impulse to catch at her father? She did, however, just yet, nothing inconsequent⁠—though she couldn’t immediately have said what saved her; and by the time she had neatly folded her telegram she was doing something merely needful. “I wanted you simply to know⁠—so that you mayn’t by accident miss them. For it’s the last,” said Maggie.

“The last?”

“I take it as their goodbye.” And she smiled as she could always smile. “They come in state⁠—to take formal leave. They do everything that’s proper. Tomorrow,” she said, “they go to Southampton.”

“If they do everything that’s proper,” the Prince presently asked, “why don’t they at least come to dine?”

She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer. “That we must certainly ask them. It will be easy for you. But of course they’re immensely taken⁠—!”

He wondered. “So immensely taken that they can’t⁠—that your father can’t⁠—give you his last evening in England?”

This, for Maggie, was more difficult to meet; yet she was still not without her stopgap. “That may be what they’ll propose⁠—that we shall go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebration⁠—except that, to round it thoroughly off, we ought also to have Fanny and the Colonel. They don’t want them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them, beforehand. They want only us together; and if they cut us down to tea,” she continued, “as they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps it’s for the fancy, after all, of their keeping their last night in London for each other.”

She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them back, even though, as she heard herself, she might have been throwing everything to the winds. But wasn’t that the right way⁠—for sharing his last day of captivity with the man one adored? It was every moment more and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison⁠—waiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast, or a high discourse, of their last poor resources. If she had broken with everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply then take it so⁠—take it that what she had worked for was too near, at last, to let her keep her head. She might have been losing her head verily in her husband’s eyes⁠—since he didn’t know, all the while, that the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her disposition personally to seize him. He didn’t know, either, that this was her manner⁠—now she was with him⁠—of beguiling audaciously the supremacy of suspense. For the people of the French Revolution, assuredly, there wasn’t suspense; the scaffold, for those she was thinking of, was certain⁠—whereas what Charlotte’s telegram announced was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation. Just the point, however, was in its being clearer to herself than to him; her clearnesses, clearances⁠—those she had so all but abjectly laboured for⁠—threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron bars, that regale, on occasion, precisely, the fevered vision of those who are in chains. She was going to know, she felt, later on⁠—was going to know with compunction, doubtless, on the very morrow, how thumpingly her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together: she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted. She should judge at leisure even that avidity for an issue which was making so little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened. He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law and Mrs. Verver, by her glance at their possible preference for a concentrated evening. “But it isn’t⁠—is it?” he asked⁠—“as if they were leaving each other?”

“Oh no; it isn’t as if they were leaving each other. They’re only bringing to a close⁠—without knowing when it may open again⁠—a time that has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them.” Yes, she could talk so of their “time”⁠—she was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground. “They have their reasons⁠—many things to think of; how can one tell? But there’s always, also, the chance of his proposing to me that we shall have our last hours together; I mean that he and I shall. He may wish to take me off to dine with him somewhere alone⁠—and to do it in memory of old days. I mean,” the Princess went on, “the real old days; before my grand husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was: the wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done, his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains. The way we’ve sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, we’ve stayed on and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for, the things he had