THE GOLDEN BOWL 177

'Ah,' he in turn protested, 'don't put it all on me! What, at any rate, when you get home,' he added, 'shall you say that you've been doing?'

'I shall say, beautifully, that I've been here.'

'All day?'

'Yes - all day. Keeping you company in your solitude. How can we understand anything,' she went on, 'without really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do for you? - just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are.'

He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out: 'Hpw can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy?' And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect: 'They would have done the same for one of yours.'

'Ah, if I could have had one - ! I hoped and I believed,' said Charlotte, 'that that would happen. It would have been better. It would have made perhaps some difference. He thought so too, poor duck - that it might have been. I'm sure he hoped and intended so. It's not, at any rate,' she went on, 'my fault. There it is.' She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, but, as if once for all, she made her clearness complete. 'And now I'm too sure. It will never be.'

He waited for a moment. 'Never?'

'Never.' They treated the matter not exactly with solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency, of distinctness. 'It would probably have been better,' Charlotte added. 'But things turn out - ! And it leaves us' - she made the point - 'more alone.'

He seemed to wonder. 'It leaves you more alone.'

'Oh,' she again returned, 'don't put it all on me! Maggie would have given herself to his child, I'm sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than any child of mine,' she explained - 'it would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them - to keep our sposi apart.' She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but, as he seemed to take it, in spite of this, for important, she then spoke gravely enough. 'It's as strange as you like, but we're immensely alone.' He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when, again, with an awkward ease and his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her. He stood there at these last

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words, which had the effect of making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling. 'What will you say,' she meanwhile asked, 'that you've been doing?' This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question. 'I mean when she comes in - for I suppose she will, some time, come in. It seems to me we must say the same thing.'

Well, he thought again. 'Yet I can scarce pretend to have had what I haven't.'

'Ah, what haven't you had? - what aren't you having?'

Her question rang out as they lingered face to face, and he still took it, before he answered, from her eyes. 'We must at least then, not to be absurd together, do the same thing. We must act, it would really seem, in concert.'

'It would really seem!' Her eyebrows, her shoulders went up, quite in gaiety, as for the relief this brought her. 'It's all in the world I pretend. We must act in concert. Heaven knows,' she said, 'they do!'

So it was that he evidently saw and that, by his admission, the case could fairly be put. But what he evidently saw appeared to come over him, at the same time, as too much for him, so that he fell back suddenly to ground where she was not awaiting him. 'The difficulty is, and will always be, that I don't understand them. I didn't at first, but I thought I should learn to. That was what I hoped, and it appeared then that Fanny Assingham might help me.'

'Oh, Fanny Assingham!' said Charlotte Verver.

He stared a moment at her tone. 'She would do anything for us.'

To which Charlotte at first said nothing - as if from the sense of too much. Then, indulgently enough, she shook her head. 'We're beyond her.'

He thought a moment - as of where this placed them. 'She'd do anything then for them.'

'Well, so would we - so that doesn't help us. She has broken down. She doesn't understand us. And really, my dear,' Charlotte added, 'Fanny Assingham doesn't matter.'

He wondered again. 'Unless as taking care of them."

'Ah,' Charlotte instantly said, 'isn't it for us, only, to do that?' She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. 'I think we want no one's aid.'

She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken

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by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he was not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception that he could name, and could act on, was something that now, at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but, as her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, in the glory of which - as it almost might be called - what he gave her back had the value of what she had .given him. 'They're extraordinarily happy.'

Oh, Charlotte's measure of it was only too full. 'Beatifically.'

'That's the great thing,' he went on; 'so that it doesn't matter, really, that one doesn't understand. Besides, you do - enough.'

'I understand my husband perhaps,' she after an instant conceded. 'I don't understand your wife.'

'You're of the same race, at any rate - more or less; of the same general tradition and education, of the same moral paste. There are things you have in common with them. But I, on my side, as I've gone on trying to see if I haven't some of these things too -1, on my side, have more and more failed. There seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can't help seeing it - I'm decidedly too different.'

'Yet you're not' - Charlotte made the important point - 'too different from me.'

'I don't know - as we're not married. That brings things out. Perhaps if we were,' he said, 'you would find some abyss of divergence.'

'Since it depends on that then,' she smiled, 'I'm safe - as you are anyhow. Moreover, as one has so often had occasion to feel, and even to remark, they're very, very simple. That makes,' she added, 'a difficulty for belief; but when once one has taken it in it makes less difficulty for action. / have at last, for myself, I think, taken it in. I'm not afraid.'

He wondered a moment. 'Not afraid of what?'

'Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of any mistake founded on one's idea of their difference. For that idea,' Charlotte developed, 'positively makes one so tender.'

'Ah, but rather!'

'Well then, there it is. I can't put myself into Maggie's skin - I

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 758