第148章 Chapter 4(3)

But she had her hours thus of feeling supremely linked to him by the rigour of their law, and when it came over her that all the while the wish on his side to spare her might be what most worked with him, this very fact of their seeming to have nothing "inward" really to talk about wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him: "Yes, this is by every appearance (74) the best time we've had yet; but don't you see all the same how they must be working together for it and how my very success, my success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round to being THEIR success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability, their power to hold out, their complete possession in short of our life?" For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal more? without saying "They'll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing--prescribe a line for us that will make them separate." How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly murmuring that without putting into his mouth the very words that would have made her quail? "Separate, my dear? Do you want them to separate? Then you want US to--you and me? For how can the one separation take place without the other?" That was the question that in spirit she had heard him ask--with its dread train moreover of involved and connected enquiries. Their own separation, his and hers, was of course perfectly thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons.

Well, the sharpest, the very sharpest would be that they could no longer afford, as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, "run" them in such compact formation. And say they accepted this account of their situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a division, would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past on either side show across the widening strait pale unappeased faces, or raise in the very passage deprecating denouncing hands?

Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was (75) to have occasion to say to herself that a deeper treachery would perhaps lurk in recoveries and reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come--the alarm after all was yet to be confirmed. There came an hour inevitably when she knew with a chill what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make of Charlotte for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity.

The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He had been conscious at the moment of many things--conscious even not a little of desiring and thereby of needing to see what she would do in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, MENACED--horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in a question that seemed just then and there quite peculiarly their own business--why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should at the worst strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected for her temporarily from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her (76) that possibly had lost its way. That precisely was doubtless why she had learned to wait, as the weeks passed by, with a fair, or rather indeed with an excessive, imitation of resumed serenity. There had been no prompt sequel to the Prince's equivocal light, and that made for patience; yet she was none the less to have to admit after many days that the bread he had cast on the waters had come home and that she should thus be justified of her old apprehension. The consequence of this in turn was a renewed pang in presence of his remembered ingenuity.

To be ingenious with HER--what DID N'T, what might n't that mean when she had so absolutely never at any point of contact with him put him by as much as the value of a penny to the expense of sparing, doubting, fearing her, of having in any way whatever to reckon with her? The ingenuity had been in his simply speaking of their use of Charlotte as if it were common to them in an equal degree, and his triumph on the occasion had been just in the simplicity. She could n't--and he knew it--say what was true: "Oh you 'use' her, and I use her, if you will, yes; but we use her ever so differently and separately--not at all in the same way or degree. There's nobody we really use together but ourselves, don't you see?--by which I mean that where our interests are the same I can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve you for everything, and you can so beautifully, so exquisitely serve me. The only person either of us needs is the other of us; so why as a matter of course in such a case as this drag in Charlotte?"

She could n't so challenge him because it would have been--and there she was paralysed--the NOTE. (77) It would have translated itself on the spot for his ear into jealousy, and from reverberation to repercussion would have reached her father's exactly in the form of a cry piercing the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact of old--the time, so strangely, seemed already far away--an inevitability in her longer passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability round about them of everything.