The Golden Bowl — Complete. Генри Джеймс

Prince? Why, nothing—except their having to recognise that nothing COULD. That was their little romance—it was even their little tragedy.”

      “But what the deuce did they DO?”

      “Do? They fell in love with each other—but, seeing it wasn’t possible, gave each other up.”

      “Then where was the romance?”

      “Why, in their frustration, in their having the courage to look the facts in the face.”

      “What facts?” the Colonel went on.

      “Well, to begin with, that of their neither of them having the means to marry. If she had had even a little—a little, I mean, for two—I believe he would bravely have done it.” After which, as her husband but emitted an odd vague sound, she corrected herself. “I mean if he himself had had only a little—or a little more than a little, a little for a prince. They would have done what they could”—she did them justice”—if there had been a way. But there wasn’t a way, and Charlotte, quite to her honour, I consider, understood it. He HAD to have money—it was a question of life and death. It wouldn’t have been a bit amusing, either, to marry him as a pauper—I mean leaving him one. That was what she had—as HE had—the reason to see.”

      “And their reason is what you call their romance?”

      She looked at him a moment. “What do you want more?”

      “Didn’t HE,” the Colonel inquired, “want anything more? Or didn’t, for that matter, poor Charlotte herself?”

      She kept her eyes on him; there was a manner in it that half answered. “They were thoroughly in love. She might have been his—” She checked herself; she even for a minute lost herself. “She might have been anything she liked—except his wife.”

      “But she wasn’t,” said the Colonel very smokingly.

      “She wasn’t,” Mrs. Assingham echoed.

      The echo, not loud but deep, filled for a little the room. He seemed to listen to it die away; then he began again. “How are you sure?”

      She waited before saying, but when she spoke it was definite. “There wasn’t time.”

      He had a small laugh for her reason; he might have expected some other. “Does it take so much time?”

      She herself, however, remained serious. “It takes more than they had.”

      He was detached, but he wondered. “What was the matter with their time?” After which, as, remembering it all, living it over and piecing it together, she only considered, “You mean that you came in with your idea?” he demanded.

      It brought her quickly to the point, and as if also in a measure to answer herself. “Not a bit of it—THEN. But you surely recall,” she went on, “the way, a year ago, everything took place. They had parted before he had ever heard of Maggie.”

      “Why hadn’t he heard of her from Charlotte herself?”

      “Because she had never spoken of her.”

      “Is that also,” the Colonel inquired, “what she has told you?”

      “I’m not speaking,” his wife returned, “of what she has told me. That’s one thing. I’m speaking of what I know by myself. That’s another.”

      “You feel, in other words, that she lies to you?” Bob Assingham more sociably asked.

      She neglected the question, treating it as gross. “She never so much, at the time, as named Maggie.”

      It was so positive that it appeared to strike him. “It’s he then who has told you?”

      She after a moment admitted it. “It’s he.”

      “And he doesn’t lie?”

      “No—to do him justice. I believe he absolutely doesn’t. If I hadn’t believed it,” Mrs. Assingham declared, for her general justification, “I would have had nothing to do with him—that is in this connection. He’s a gentleman—I mean ALL as much of one as he ought to be. And he had nothing to gain. That helps,” she added, “even a gentleman. It was I who named Maggie to him—a year from last May. He had never heard of her before.”

      “Then it’s grave,” said the Colonel.

      She hesitated. “Do you mean grave for me?”

      “Oh, that everything’s grave for ‘you’ is what we take for granted and are fundamentally talking about. It’s grave—it WAS—for Charlotte. And it’s grave for Maggie. That is it WAS—when he did see her. Or when she did see HIM.”

      “You don’t torment me as much as you would like,” she presently went on, “because you think of nothing that I haven’t a thousand times thought of, and because I think of everything that you never will. It would all,” she recognised, “have been grave if it hadn’t all been right. You can’t make out,” she contended, “that we got to Rome before the end of February.”

      He more than agreed. “There’s nothing in life, my dear, that I CAN make out.”

      Well, there was nothing in life, apparently, that she, at real need, couldn’t. “Charlotte, who had been there, that year, from early, quite from November, left suddenly, you’ll quite remember, about the 10th of April. She was to have stayed on—she was to have stayed, naturally, more or less, for us; and she was to have stayed all the more that the Ververs, due all winter, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at last really coming. They were coming—that is Maggie was—largely to see her, and above all to be with her THERE. It was all altered—by Charlotte’s going to Florence. She went from one day to the other—you forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd, at the time; I had a sense that something must have happened. The difficulty was that, though I knew a little, I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know her relation with him had been, as you say, a ‘near’ thing—that is I didn’t know HOW near. The poor girl’s departure was a flight—she went to save herself.”

      He had listened more than he showed—as came out in his tone. “To save herself?”

      “Well, also, really, I think, to save HIM too. I saw it afterwards—I see it all now. He would have been sorry—he didn’t want to hurt her.”

      “Oh, I daresay,” the Colonel laughed. “They generally don’t!”

      “At all events,” his wife pursued, “she escaped—they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn’t be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines between them the better. It had taken them, it is true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known—though it was a good deal known. More, certainly,” she said, “than I then imagined—though I don’t know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it. And there are things he might have done—things that many men easily would. Therefore I believe in him, and I was right, at first, in knowing I was going to. So I haven’t”—and she stated it as she might have quoted from a slate, after adding up the items, the sum of a column of figures—“so I haven’t, I say to myself, been a fool.”

      “Well, are you trying to make out that I’ve said you have? All their case wants, at any rate,” Bob Assingham declared, “is that you should leave it well alone. It’s theirs now; they’ve bought it, over the counter, and paid for it. It has ceased to be yours.”

      “Of which case,” she asked, “are you speaking?”

      He smoked a minute: then with