第54章 Chapter 3(1)

So much mute communication was doubtless all this time marvellous, and we may confess to having perhaps read into the scene prematurely a critical character that took longer to develop. Yet the quiet hour of reunion enjoyed that afternoon by the father and the daughter did really little else than deal with the elements definitely presented to each in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. Nothing allusive, nothing at all insistent, passed between them either before or immediately after luncheon--except indeed so far as their failure soon again to meet might be itself an accident charged with reference. The hour or two after luncheon--and on Sundays with especial rigour, for one of the domestic reasons of which it belonged to Maggie quite multitudinously to take account--were habitually spent by the Princess with her little boy, in whose apartment she either frequently found her father already established or was sooner or later joined by him.

His visit to his grandson, at some hour or other, held its place, in his day, against all interventions, and this without counting his grandson's visits to HIM, scarcely less ordered and timed, and the odd bits, as he called them, that they picked up together when they could--communions snatched, for the most part, on the terrace, in the gardens or the park, while the Principino, with much pomp and circumstance of perambulator, parasol, fine (156) lace over-veiling and incorruptible female attendance, took the air.

In the private apartments, which, occupying in the great house the larger part of a wing of their own, were not much more easily accessible than if the place had been a royal palace and the small child an heir-apparent--in the nursery of nurseries the talk, at these instituted times, was always so prevailingly with or about the master of the scene that other interests and other topics had fairly learned to avoid the slighting and inadequate notice there taken of them. They came in at the best but as involved in the little boy's future, his past, or his comprehensive present, never getting so much as a chance to plead their own merits or to complain of being neglected. Nothing perhaps in truth had done more than this united participation to confirm in the elder parties that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more deeply associated, more largely combined, of which, on Adam Verver's behalf, we have made some mention. It was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a grandpapa. The Principino, for a chance spectator of this process, might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless half-orphan, with the place of immediate male parent swept bare and open to the next nearest sympathy.

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of what the Prince might be or might do for his son--the sum of service, in his absence, so (157) completely filled itself out. It was not in the least moreover that there was doubt of him, for he was conspicuously addicted to the manipulation of the child, in the frank Italian way, at such moments as he judged discreet in respect to other claims: conspicuously indeed, that is, for Maggie, who had more occasion, on the whole, to speak to her husband of the extravagance of her father than to speak to her father of the extravagance of her husband. Adam Verver had, all round, in this connexion, his own serenity. He was sure of his son-in-law's auxiliary admiration--admiration, he meant, of his grandson; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but the instinct--or it might fairly have been the tradition--of the former's making the child so solidly beautiful as to HAVE to be admired?

What contributed most to harmony in this play of relations, however, was the way the young man seemed to leave it to be gathered that, tradition for tradition, the grandpapa's own was not, in any estimate, to go for nothing. A tradition, or whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively in the Princess herself--well, Amerigo's very discretions were his way of taking account of it. His discriminations in respect to his heir were in fine not more angular than any others to be observed in him; and Mr.

Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an impression of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he received from this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged nursery hours. It was as if the grandpapa's special show of the character were but another side for the observer to study, another item for him to note. It came back, this latter (158) personage knew, to his own previous perception--that of the Prince's inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to CONCLUDE. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated--on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last was after all the point; he really worked, poor young man, for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension.

And how, when you came to that, COULD you know that a horse would n't shy at a brass-band, in a country road, because it did n't shy at a traction-engine?

It might have been brought up to traction-engines without having been brought up to brass-bands. Little by little thus from month to month the Prince was learning what his wife's father had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off--he had been brought up to the romantic view of principini.

Who would have thought it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr. Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness.