第107章 Chapter 7(3)

(332) What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny gusty lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience or even at moments kicking and crying like some infant Hercules who would n't be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one's head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand--to that the thing came back--was above all for courage and good humour; and the value of this as a general assurance--that is for seeing one through at the worst--had n't even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the (333) air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns--which was much to the point--in its hand. Courage and good humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that with Amerigo really the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and course--a state of mind that was positively like a vicarious good conscience cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself. It was n't that at Matcham anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be noticed, permitted itself, as they said, to "happen"; there were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all the hilarity of "What indeed would THEY have made of it?" "They" were of course Maggie and her father, moping--so far as they ever consented to mope--in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of--whether (334) beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge was n't one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it. They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children; so that verily the Principino himself, as less consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the trio.

The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father's wife, should prove to have been made, for the long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one WAS so made one had certainly no business on any terms at Matcham; whereas if one was n't one had no business there on the particular terms--terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square--under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that roused unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation--deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous but that one could n't yet help, as for instance when one's wife chose, in the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely here however was the difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual--yet to which none the less it would be too absurd that (335) he should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically, with another woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as idiotic or incapable--this was a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one's own handling. What was supremely grotesque in fact was the essential opposition of theories--as if a galantuomo, as HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything BUT blush to "go about" at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the Fall The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it--also as a man of the world--all merciful justice; but none the less assuredly there was but one way REALLY to mark, and for his companion as much as for himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable. Was n't this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious?

It was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were given by the growth between them, during their auspicious visit, of an exquisite sense of complicity.