第167章 Chapter 8(2)

He might tell her only what he wanted, only what would work upon her by the beauty of his appeal; and the result of the direct appeal of ANY beauty in him would be her helpless submission to his terms. All her temporary safety, (141) her hand-to-mouth success, accordingly, was in his neither perceiving nor divining this, thanks to such means as she could take to prevent him; take, literally from hour to hour, during these days of more unbroken exposure. From hour to hour she fairly expected some sign of his having decided on a jump. "Ah yes, it HAS been as you think; I've strayed away, I've fancied myself free, given myself in other quantities, with larger generosities, because I thought you were different--different from what I now see. But it was only, only, because I did n't know--and you must admit that you gave me scarce reason enough. Reason enough, I mean, to keep clear of my mistake; to which I confess, for which I'll do exquisite penance, which you can help me now, I too beautifully feel, to get completely over."

That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence and yet another of their hours together, without his producing it, she felt herself occupied with him beyond even the intensity of surrender.

She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her greatest danger, or at least her greatest motive for care, was the obsession of the thought that if he actually did suspect, the fruit of his attention to her could n't help being a sense of the growth of her importance. Taking the measure with him, as she had taken it (142) with her father, of the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was NOT, all the same, important. A single touch from him--oh she should know it in case of its coming!--any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore to be free, to be free to act other than abjectly for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she could n't keep it up for ever; so that one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out in thought to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring. She was learning almost from minute to minute to be a mistress of shades--since always when there were possibilities enough of intimacy there were also by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too and on whom if she did n't look out she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle.

To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling himself, her adversary in things of this fineness--to see him at all in short brave a name that would represent him as in opposition--was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of alarm. Should he guess they were having in (143) their so occult manner a HIGH fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high--in the event of his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.

The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that observation in him there would inevitably find some of its directness diverted.

This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain of her father's placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some larger part of his attention. Besides which there would be always Charlotte herself to draw him off. Charlotte would help him again doubtless to study anything, right or left, that might be symptomatic; but Maggie could see that this very fact might perhaps contribute in its degree to protect the secret of her own fermentation. It is n't even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince's spirit, on his nerves, on his finer irritability, of some of the very airs and aspects, the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver's too perfect competence. What it would most come to after all, she said to herself, was a renewal for him of the privilege of watching that lady watch HER. Very well then: with the elements really so mixed in him how long would he go on enjoying mere spectatorship of that act? For she had by this time made up her mind that in Charlotte's company he deferred to Charlotte s easier art of mounting guard. Would n't he get tired--to put it only at that--of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant, with her (144) lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to and fro against a gold-coloured east or west? Maggie had truly gone far for a view of the question of this particular reaction, and she was n't incapable of pulling herself up with the rebuke that she counted her chickens before they were hatched. How sure she should have to be of so many things before she might thus find a weariness in Amerigo's expression and a logic in his weariness!