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Chapter 18

This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. 'But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?'

'It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It's the charm, at any rate,' she said from her place at the fire, 'of trying again the old feelings. They come back - they come back. Everything,' she went on, 'comes back. Besides,' she wound up, 'you know for yourself.'

He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. 'Ah, I haven't your courage. Moreover,' he laughed, 'it seems to me that, so far as that goes, I do live in hansoms. But you must awfully want your tea,' he quickly added; 'so let me give you a good stiff cup.'

He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that, while she talked, he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none die less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate - in die cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question, as yet, of their seeing their way together: to which indeed, exactly, the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. 'It's not that you haven't my courage,' Charlotte said, 'but that you haven't, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all,' she added, 'that you haven't even my intelligence. However, I shall not be afraid of that till you've given me more proof.' And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. 'You knew, besides, you knew today, I would come. And if you knew that you know everything.' So she pursued, and if he didn't meanwhile, if he didn't even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes ощ at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with

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her like a precious medal - not exactly blessed by the Pope -suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. 'Above all,' she said, 'there has been the personal romance of it.'

'Of tea with me over the fire? Ah, so far as that goes I don't think even my intelligence fails me.'

'Oh, it's further than that goes; and if I've had a better day than you it's perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I am braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don't. I don't, I don't,' she repeated.

'It's precisely boring one's self without relief,' he protested, 'that takes courage.'

'Passive then - not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I've been all day on the town. Literally on the town - isn't that what they call it? I know how it feels.' After which, as if breaking off, 'And you, have you never been out?' she asked.

He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. 'What should I have gone out for?'

'Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But you're wonderful, all of you - you know how to live. We're clumsy brutes, we others, beside you - we must always be "doing" something. However,' Charlotte pursued, 'if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me - which I'm sure, though you won't confess it, was what you didn't want; and might have missed, above all, the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I've come to congratulate you on. That's really what I can at last do. You can't not know at least, on such a day as this - you can't not know,' she said, 'where you are.' She waited as for him either to grant that he knew or to pretend that he didn't; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there. So, for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said. 'There it all is - extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven't we therefore to take things as we find them?' She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one, as well, he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea, he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what

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more she would have; and then, on her 'Nothing, thanks,' returned to the fire and restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too effectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was on her feet that she repeated the words she had first frankly spoken. 'What else can we do, what in all the world else?'

He took them up, however, no more than at first. 'Where then have you been?' he asked as from mere interest in her adventure.

'Everywhere I could think of- except to see people. I didn't want people -1 wanted too much to think. But I've been back at intervals

- three times; and then come away again. My cabman must think me crazy - it's very amusing; I shall owe him, when we come to settle, more money than he has ever seen. I've been, my dear,' she went on, 'to the British Museum - which, you know, I always adore. And I've been to the National Gallery, and to a dozen old booksellers, coming across treasures, and I've lunched, on some strange nastiness, at a cookshop in Holborn. I wanted to go to the Tower, but it was too far

- my old man urged that; and I would have gone to the Zoo if it hadn't been too wet - which he also begged me to observe. But you wouldn't believe -1 did put in St Paul's. Such days,' she wound up, 'are expensive; for, besides the cab, I've bought quantities of books.' She immediately passed, at any rate, to another point. 'I can't help wondering when you must last have laid eyes on them.' And then as it had apparently for her companion an effect of abruptness: 'Maggie, I mean, and the child. For I suppose you know he's with her.'

'Oh yes, I know he's with her. I saw them this morning.'

'And did they then announce their programme?'

'She told me she was taking him, as usual, da nonno.'

'And for the whole day?'

He hesitated, but it was as if his attitude had slowly shifted. 'She didn't say. And I didn't ask.'

'Well,' she went on, 'it can't have been later than half-past ten -1 mean when you saw them. They had got to Eaton Square before eleven. You know we don't formally breakfast, Adam and I; we have tea in our rooms - at least I have; but luncheon is early, and I saw my husband, this morning, by twelve; he was showing the child a picture-book. Maggie had been there with them, had left them settled together. Then she had gone out - taking the carriage for something he had been intending but that she offered to do instead.'

The Prince appeared to confess, at this, to his interest. 'Taking, you mean, your carriage?'

'I don't know which, and it doesn't matter. It's not a question,' she smiled, 'of a carriage the more or the less. It's not a question even, if

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you come to that, of a cab. It's so beautiful,' she said, 'that it's not a question of anything vulgar or horrid.' Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was, rather remarkably, as if he fell in. 'I went out - I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed to me important. It has been - it is important. I know as I haven't known before the way they feel. I couldn't in any other way have made so sure of it.'

'They feel a confidence,' the Prince observed.

He had indeed said it for her. 'They feel a confidence.' And she proceeded, with lucidity, to the fuller illustration of it; speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return - for curiosity, and even really a little from anxiety - to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key, rarely used: it had always irritated Adam - one of the few things that did - to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home, in the small hours, after parties. 'So I had but to slip in, each time, with my cab at the door, and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went - without their so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose,' she asked, 'becomes of one? - not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn't matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as a maitresse de maison¹² not quite without a conscience. They must even in their odd way,' she declared, 'have some idea.'

'Oh, they've a great deal of idea,' said the Prince. And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. 'They think so much of us. They think in particular so much of you.'

'Ah, don't put it all on "me"!' she smiled.

But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place. 'It's a matter of your known character.'

'Ah, thank you for "known"!' she still smiled.

'It's a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It's a matter of what those things have done for you in the world -1 mean in this world and this place. You're a Personage for them - and Personages do go and come.'

'Oh no, my dear; there you're quite wrong.' And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused. 'That's exactly what Person­ages don't do: they live in state and under constant consideration; they haven't latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in "growlers" it makes a greater noise still. It's you, caro mio,' she said, 'who, so far as that goes, are the Personage.'

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 638