第224章 Chapter 2(1)

A telegram in Charlotte's name arrived early--"We shall come and ask you for tea at five if convenient to you. Am wiring for the Assinghams to lunch." This document, into which meanings were to be read, Maggie promptly placed before her husband, adding the remark that her father and his wife, who would have come up the previous night or that morning, had evidently gone to an hotel.

The Prince was in his "own" room, where he often sat now alone; half a dozen open newspapers, the _Figaro_ notably, as well as the _Times_, were scattered about him; but with a cigar in his teeth and a visible cloud on his brow he appeared actually to be engaged in walking to and fro. Never yet on thus approaching him--for she had done it of late, under one necessity or another, several times--had a particular impression so greeted her; supremely strong, for some reason, as he turned quickly round on her entrance.

The reason was partly the look in his face--a suffusion like the flush of fever, which brought back to her Fanny Assingham's charge, recently uttered under that roof, of her "thinking" too impenetrably. The word had remained with her and made her think still more; so that at first as she stood there she felt responsible for provoking on his part an irritation of suspense at which she had n't aimed. She had been going about him these three months, she perfectly (338) knew, with a maintained idea--of which she had never spoken to him; but what had at last happened was that his way of looking at her on occasion seemed a perception of the presence not of one idea but of fifty, variously prepared for uses with which he somehow must reckon. She knew herself suddenly, almost strangely glad to be coming to him at this hour with nothing more abstract than a telegram; but even after she had stepped into his prison under her pretext, while her eyes took in his face and then embraced the four walls that enclosed his restlessness, she recognised the virtual identity of his condition with that aspect of Charlotte's situation for which, early in the summer and in all the amplitude of a great residence, she had found with so little seeking the similitude of the locked cage. He struck her as caged, the man who could n't now without an instant effect on her sensibility give an instinctive push to the door she had n't completely closed behind her. He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food. There was a difference none the less between his captivity and Charlotte's--the difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in his starting at her entrance as if even this were in its degree an interference. That was what betrayed for her practically his fear of her fifty ideas, and what had begun after a minute to make her wish to repudiate or explain. It was more wonderful than she could have told; it was (339) for all the world as if she was succeeding with him beyond her intention. She had for these instants the sense that he exaggerated, that the imputation of purpose had fairly risen too high in him. She had begun, a year ago, by asking herself how she could make him think more of her; but what was it after all he was thinking now? He kept his eyes on her telegram; he read it more than once, easy as it was, in spite of its conveyed deprecation, to understand; during which she found herself almost awestruck with yearning, almost on the point of marking somehow what she had marked in the garden at Fawns with Charlotte--that she had truly come unarmed. She did n't bristle with intentions--she scarce knew, as he at this juncture affected her, what had happened to the only intention she had come with. She had nothing but her old idea, the old one he knew; she had n't the ghost of another. Presently in fact, when four or five minutes had elapsed, it was as if she positively had n't so much even as that one. He gave her back her paper, asking with it if there were anything in particular she wished him to do.

She stood there with her eyes on him, doubling the telegram together as if it had been a precious thing and yet all the while holding her breath.

Of a sudden somehow, and quite as by the action of their merely having between them these few written words, an extraordinary fact came up. He was with her as if he were hers, hers in a degree and on a scale, with an intensity and an intimacy, that were a new and a strange quantity, that were like the irruption of a tide loosening them where they had stuck and making (340) them feel they floated. What was it that, with the rush of this, just kept her from putting out her hands TO him, from catching at him as in the other time, with the superficial impetus he and Charlotte had privately conspired to impart, she had so often, her breath failing her, known the impulse to catch at her father? She did however just yet nothing inconsequent--though she could n't immediately have said what saved her; and by the time she had neatly folded her telegram she was doing something merely needful. "I wanted you simply to know--so that you may n't by accident miss them. For it's the last," said Maggie.

"The last?"

"I take it as their good-bye." And she smiled as she could always smile.

"They come in state--to take formal leave. They do everything that's proper.

To-morrow," she said, "they go to Southampton."

"If they do everything that's proper," the Prince presently asked, "why don't they at least come to dine?"

She hesitated, yet she lightly enough provided her answer. "That we must certainly ask them. It will be easy for you. But of course they're immensely taken--!"

He wondered. "So immensely taken that they can't--that your father can't--give you his last evening in England?"