第96章 Chapter 4(4)

Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence. The effect of her coming to see him, him only, had, as he stood waiting, a singular intensity--though after some minutes had passed the certainty of this began to drop. Perhaps she had NOT come, or had come only for Maggie; perhaps, on learning below that the Princess had n't returned, she was merely leaving a message, writing a word on a card. He should see at any rate, and just yet, controlling himself, would do (296) nothing. This thought of not interfering took on a sudden force for him; she would doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit to him be all of her own choosing. And his view of a reason for leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking no step, he yet intensely hoped. The harmony of her breaking into sight while the superficial conditions were so against her was a harmony with conditions that were far from superficial and that gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value to her presence. The value deepened strangely moreover with the rigour of his own attitude--with the fact too that, listening hard, he neither heard the house-door close again nor saw her go back to her cab; and it had risen to a climax by the time he had become aware, with his quickened sense, that she had followed the butler up to the landing from which his room opened. If anything could further then have added to it the renewed pause outside, as if she had said to the man "Wait a moment!" would have constituted this touch. Yet when the man had shown her in, had advanced to the tea-table to light the lamp under the kettle and had then busied himself all deliberately with the fire, she made it easy for her host to drop straight from any height of tension and to meet her provisionally on the question of Maggie. While the butler remained it was Maggie that she had come to see and Maggie that--in spite of this attendant's high blankness on the subject of all possibilities on that lady's part--she would cheerfully, by the fire, wait for. Directly they were alone together, however, she mounted, with the whizz and the red light of a rocket. from the form to the fact, (297) saying straight out as she stood and looked at him: "What else, my dear, what in the world else can we do?"

It was as if he then knew on the spot why he had been feeling for hours in such fashion--as if he in fact knew within the minute things he had n't known even while she was panting, from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the less, that SHE knew still more than he--in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision of alternatives (he could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions) opened out altogether with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry. He could n't have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered no occasion in Rome from which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence--the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter--of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hat's and the frock's own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The sense (298) of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had n't yet done: it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently THERE, to be wounded or shocked.

What had happened in short was that Charlotte and he had by a single turn of the wrist of fate--"led up" to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed--been placed face to face in a freedom that extraordinarily partook of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was--into which he had lived quite intimately by the end of a quarter of an hour--that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown. On that morning in the Park there had been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised confidence.

The emphasis, for their general comfort, was what Charlotte had come to apply; inasmuch as, though it was not what she (299) definitely began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were alone--even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then directly replied; it was the meaning of everything else, down to the conscious quaintness of her rickety "growler" and the conscious humility of her toneless dress. It had helped him a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass with out an answer. He could ask her instead what had become of her carriage and why above all she was n't using it in such weather.

"It's just because of the weather," she explained. "It's my little idea.

It makes me feel as I used to--when I could do as I liked."