The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “Oh, that isn’t so. It’s I that am old. You ARE young.” This was what she had at first answered—and quite in the tone too of having taken her minutes. It had not been wholly to the point, but it had been kind—which was what he most wanted. And she kept, for her next words, to kindness, kept to her clear, lowered voice and unshrinking face. “To me too it thoroughly seems that these days have been beautiful. I shouldn’t be grateful to them if I couldn’t more or less have imagined their bringing us to this.” She affected him somehow as if she had advanced a step to meet him and yet were at the same time standing still. It only meant, however, doubtless, that she was, gravely and reasonably, thinking—as he exactly desired to make her. If she would but think enough she would probably think to suit him. “It seems to me,” she went on, “that it’s for YOU to be sure.”

  “Ah, but I AM sure,” said Adam Verver. “On matters of importance I never speak when I’m not. So if you can yourself FACE such a union you needn’t in the least trouble.”

  She had another pause, and she might have been felt as facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the breath of the mild, slightly damp southwest, she met his eyes without evasion. Yet she had at the end of another minute debated only to the extent of saying: “I won’t pretend I don’t think it would be good for me to marry. Good for me, I mean,” she pursued, “because I’m so awfully unattached. I should like to be a little less adrift. I should like to have a home. I should like to have an existence. I should like to have a motive for one thing more than another—a motive outside of myself. In fact,” she said, so sincerely that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humour, “in fact, you know, I want to BE married. It’s—well, it’s the condition.”

  “The condition—?” He was just vague.

  “It’s the state, I mean. I don’t like my own. ‘Miss,’ among us all, is too dreadful—except for a shopgirl. I don’t want to be a horrible English old-maid.”

  “Oh, you want to be taken care of. Very well then, I’ll do it.”

  “I dare say it’s very much that. Only I don’t see why, for what I speak of,” she smiled—”for a mere escape from my state—I need do quite so MUCH.”

  “So much as marry me in particular?”

  Her smile was as for true directness. “I might get what I want for less.”

  “You think it so much for you to do?”

  “Yes,” she presently said, “I think it’s a great deal.”

  Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far—then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn’t quite know where they were. There rose for him, with this, the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, deny it as mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father. “Of course, yes—that’s my disadvantage: I’m not the natural, I’m so far from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty. I’ve the drawback that you’ve seen me always, so inevitably, in such another light.”

  But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction soft—made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete; and he had already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely deep. “You don’t understand me. It’s of all that it is for YOU to do—it’s of that I’m thinking.”

  Oh, with this, for him, the thing was clearer! “Then you needn’t think. I know enough what it is for me to do.”

  But she shook her head again. “I doubt if you know. I doubt if you CAN.”

  “And why not, please—when I’ve had you so before me? That I’m old has at least THAT fact about it to the good—that I’ve known you long and from far back.”

  “Do you think you’ve ‘known’ me?” asked Charlotte Stant. He hesitated—for the tone of it, and her look with it might have made him doubt. Just these things in themselves, however, with all the rest, with his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and crackling—this quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own could warn him. All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink glow. He wasn’t rabid, but he wasn’t either, as a man of a proper spirit, to be frightened. “What is that then—if I accept it—but as strong a reason as I can want for just LEARNING to know you?”

  She faced him always—kept it up as for honesty, and yet at the same time, in her odd way, as for mercy. “How can you tell whether if you did you would?”

  It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt. “I mean when it’s a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late.”

  “I think it’s a question,” he promptly enough made answer, “of liking you the more just for your saying these things. You should make something,” he added, “of my liking you.”

  “I make everything. But are you sure of having exhausted all other ways?”

  This, of a truth, enlarged his gaze. “But what other ways?”

  “Why, you’ve more ways of being kind than anyone I ever knew.”

  “Take it then,” he answered, “that I’m simply putting them all together for you.” She looked at him, on this, long again—still as if it shouldn’t be said she hadn’t given him time or had withdrawn from his view, so to speak, a single inch of her surface. This at least she was fully to have exposed. It represented her as oddly conscientious, and he scarce knew in what sense it affected him. On the whole, however, with admiration. “You’re very, very honourable.”

  “It’s just what I want to be. I don’t see,” she added, “why you’re not right, I don’t see why you’re not happy, as you are. I can not ask myself, I can not ask YOU,” she went on, “if you’re really as much at liberty as your universal generosity leads you to assume. Oughtn’t we,” she asked, “to think a little of others? Oughtn’t I, at least, in loyalty—at any rate in delicacy—to think of Maggie?” With which, intensely gentle, so as not to appear too much to teach him his duty, she explained. “She’s everything to you—she has always been. Are you so certain that there’s room in your life—?”

  “For another daughter?—is that what you mean?” She had not hung upon it long, but he had quickly taken her up.

  He had not, however, disconcerted her. “For another young woman— very much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it. For another companion,” said Charlotte Stant.

  “Can’t a man be, all his life then,” he almost fiercely asked, “anything but a father?” But he went on before she could answer. “You talk about differences, but they’ve been already made—as no one knows better than Maggie. She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage—made, I mean, for me. She constantly thinks of it—it allows her no rest. To put her at peace is therefore,” he explained, “what I’m trying, with you, to do. I can’t do it alone, but I can do it with your help. You can make her,” he said, “positively happy about me.”

  “About you?” she thoughtfully echoed. “But what can I make her about herself?”

  “Oh, if she’s at ease about me the rest will take care of itself. The case,” he declared, “is in your hands. You’ll effectually put out of her mind that I feel she has abandoned me.”

  Interest certainly now was what he had kindled in her face, but it was all the more honourable to her, as he had just called it that she should want to see each of the steps of his conviction. “If you’ve been driven to the ‘likes’ of me, mayn’t it show that you’ve felt truly forsaken?”

  “Well, I’m willing to suggest that, if I can show at the same time that I feel consoled.”

  “But HAVE you,” she demanded, “really felt so?” He hesitated.

  “Consoled?”

  “Forsaken.”

  “No—I haven’t. But if it’s her idea—!” If it was her idea, in short, that was enough. This enunciation of motive, the
next moment, however, sounded to him perhaps slightly thin, so that he gave it another touch. “That is if it’s my idea. I happen, you see, to like my idea.”

  “Well, it’s beautiful and wonderful. But isn’t it, possibly,” Charlotte asked, “not quite enough to marry me for?”

  “Why so, my dear child? Isn’t a man’s idea usually what he does marry for?”

  Charlotte, considering, looked as if this might perhaps be a large question, or at all events something of an extension of one they were immediately concerned with. “Doesn’t that a good deal depend on the sort of thing it may be?” She suggested that, about marriage, ideas, as he called them, might differ; with which, however, giving no more time to it, she sounded another question. “Don’t you appear rather to put it to me that I may accept your offer for Maggie’s sake? Somehow”—she turned it over—”I don’t so clearly SEE her quite so much finding reassurance, or even quite so much needing it.”

  “Do you then make nothing at all of her having been so ready to leave us?”

  Ah, Charlotte on the contrary made much! “She was ready to leave us because she had to be. From the moment the Prince wanted it she could only go with him.”

  “Perfectly—so that, if you see your way, she will be able to ‘go with him’ in future as much as she likes.”

  Charlotte appeared to examine for a minute, in Maggie’s interest, this privilege—the result of which was a limited concession. “You’ve certainly worked it out!”

  “Of course I’ve worked it out—that’s exactly what I HAVE done. She hadn’t for a long time been so happy about anything as at your being there with me.”

  “I was to be with you,” said Charlotte, “for her security.”

  “Well,” Adam Verver rang out, “this IS her security. You’ve only, if you can’t see it, to ask her.”

  “‘Ask’ her?”—the girl echoed it in wonder. “Certainly—in so many words. Telling her you don’t believe me.”

  Still she debated. “Do you mean write it to her?”

  “Quite so. Immediately. To-morrow.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I can write it,” said Charlotte Stant. “When I write to her”—and she looked amused for so different a shade— “it’s about the Principino’s appetite and Dr. Brady’s visits.”

  “Very good then—put it to her face to face. We’ll go straight to Paris to meet them.”

  Charlotte, at this, rose with a movement that was like a small cry; but her unspoken sense lost itself while she stood with her eyes on him—he keeping his seat as for the help it gave him, a little, to make his appeal go up. Presently, however, a new sense had come to her, and she covered him, kindly, with the expression of it. “I do think, you know, you must rather ‘like’ me.”

  “Thank you,” said Adam Verver. “You WILL put it to her yourself then?”

  She had another hesitation. “We go over, you say, to meet them?”

  “As soon as we can get back to Fawns. And wait there for them, if necessary, till they come.”

  “Wait—a—at Fawns?”

  “Wait in Paris. That will be charming in itself.”

  “You take me to pleasant places.” She turned it over. “You propose to me beautiful things.”

  “It rests but with you to make them beautiful and pleasant. You’ve made Brighton—!”

  “Ah!”—she almost tenderly protested. “With what I’m doing now?”

  “You’re promising me now what I want. Aren’t you promising me,” he pressed, getting up, “aren’t you promising me to abide by what Maggie says?”

  Oh, she wanted to be sure she was. “Do you mean she’ll ASK it of me?”

  It gave him indeed, as by communication, a sense of the propriety of being himself certain. Yet what was he but certain? “She’ll speak to you. She’ll speak to you FOR me.”

  This at last then seemed to satisfy her. “Very good. May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?” He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary. “Of course I give you time. Especially,” he smiled, “as it’s time that I shall be spending with you. Our keeping on together will help you perhaps to see. To see, I mean, how I need you.”

  “I already see,” said Charlotte, “how you’ve persuaded yourself you do.” But she had to repeat it. “That isn’t, unfortunately, all.”

  “Well then, how you’ll make Maggie right.”

  “‘Right’?” She echoed it as if the word went far. And “O—oh!” she still critically murmured as they moved together away.

  XIII

  He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris, a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie’s reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns—a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to inform—had proved, on his sitting down to it, and a little to his surprise, not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume: this doubtless, however, only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to “speak” to her so far even as to tell her of the communication despatched to Rome. Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them—it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn’t be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.

  It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris—which, suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch—made, between him and his companion, the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions. These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders— things, verily, he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality. He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater. Common conventions—that was what was odd—had to be on this basis more thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. The explanation would have been, he supposed— or would have figured it with less of unrest—that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all “far” there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further still. There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew it you might be unmistakably matching them. Since he wished therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself, on the receipt of Maggie’s missive, rejoicing with a certain inconsistency. The announcement made her from home had, in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him— his personal modesty, his imagination of her prepared state for so quick a jump, it didn’t much matter which—and yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay and for the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair. T
here was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being taken, as they said at the shops, on approval. Maggie, certainly, would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this, and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from holding him light as a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but from generous rigour of conscience.

  These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place. The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness. What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte’s simply saying to him that she didn’t like him enough. This he wouldn’t have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him enough—nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that—as a man, so to speak—he properly pleased her. He said nothing—the words sufficiently did it for him, doing it again better still as Charlotte, who had left her chair at his approach, murmured them out. “We start to-night to bring you all our love and joy and sympathy.” There they were, the words, and what did she want more? She didn’t, however, as she gave him back the little unfolded leaf, say they were enough —though he saw, the next moment, that her silence was probably not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale. Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he had always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this change of colour; and she had again, with it, her apparent way of subjecting herself, for explicit honesty and through her willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced in her. As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly she liked him enough—liked him enough to make him, old as he was ready to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The pleasure of it accordingly made him speak first. “Do you begin, a little, to be satisfied?”