第213章 Chapter 5(1)

The resemblance had n't been present to her on first coming out into the hot still brightness of the Sunday afternoon--only the second Sunday, of all the summer, when the party of six, the party of seven including the Principino, had practically been without accessions or invasions; but within sight of Charlotte seated far away and very much where she had expected to find her the Princess fell to wondering if her friend would n't be affected quite as she herself had been that night on the terrace under Mrs. Verver's perceptive pursuit. The relation to-day had turned itself round; Charlotte was seeing her come through patches of lingering noon quite as she had watched Charlotte menace her through the starless dark; and there was a moment, that of her waiting a little as they thus met across the distance, when the interval was bridged by a recognition not less soundless and to all appearance not less charged with strange meanings than that of the other occasion. The point however was that they had changed places; Maggie had from her window seen her stepmother leave the house--at so unlikely an hour, three o'clock of a canicular August, for a ramble in garden or grove--and had thereupon felt her impulse determined with the same sharpness that had made the spring of her companion's three weeks before. It was the hottest day of the season, and the shaded siesta, for people all at (297) their ease, would certainly rather have been prescribed; but our young woman had perhaps not yet felt it so fully brought home that such refinements of repose among them constituted the empty chair at the feast.

This was the more distinct as the feast, literally, in the great bedimmed dining-room, the cool ceremonious semblance of luncheon, had just been taking place without Mrs. Verver. She had figured but as the absent victim of a bad headache, not reported to the rest of the company by her husband, but named directly to Mr. Verver himself, on their having assembled, by her maid, deputed for the effect and conscientiously producing it.

Maggie had sat down with the others to viands artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves of reference in many directions--poor Fanny Assingham herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had withdrawn. A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene--relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy hungry man, a trusted and overworked London friend and adviser, who had taken for a week or two the light neighbouring service, local rites flourishing under Maggie's munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the house. HE conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell--conversed mainly with the indefinite wandering smile of the entertainers, and the Princess's power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having, (298) from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his guidance.

She asked herself at times if he suspected how more than subtly, how perversely, she had dispensed with him, and she balanced between visions of all he must privately have guessed and certitudes that he had guessed nothing whatever. He might nevertheless have been so urbanely filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently served him--made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and of prolongations of tension, round about him, mostly foreign to the circles in which luxury was akin to virtue. Some day at some happier season she would confess to him that she had n't confessed, though taking so much on her conscience; but just now she was carrying in her weak stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a vow that no drop should overflow. She feared the very breath of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself; and, in addition, however that might be, she drew breath this afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression.

Something grave had happened somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her choice of suppositions: her heart stood still when she wondered above all if the cord might n't at last have snapped between her husband and her father. She shut her eyes for dismay at the possibility of such a passage--there moved before them the procession of ugly forms it might have taken. "Find out for yourself!" she had thrown to Amerigo for her last word on the question (299) of who else "knew," that night of the breaking of the Bowl; and she flattered herself that she had n't since then helped him, in her clear consistency, by an inch. It was what she had given him all these weeks to be busy with, and she had again and again lain awake for the obsession of her sense of his uncertainty ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity. She had handed him over to an ignorance that could n't even try to become indifferent and that yet would n't project itself either into the cleared air of conviction. In proportion as he was generous it had bitten into his spirit, and more than once she had said to herself that to break the spell she had cast upon him and that the polished old ivory of her father's inattackable surface made so absolute, he would suddenly commit some mistake or some violence, smash some window-pane for air, fail even of one of his blest inveteracies of taste. In that way, fatally, he would have put himself in the wrong--blighting by a single false step the perfection of his outward show.