第57章 Chapter 3(4)

He might rejoice in certain moods over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases and charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of use--all without counting the cloud of mortgages that had from far back buried them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the layer once resting on the towns at the foot of Vesuvius, and actually making of any present restorative effort a process much akin to slow excavation.

Just so he might with another turn of his humour almost wail for these brightest spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an idiot not to be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices--sacrifices resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr. Verver--involved in winning them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the (165) husband and the wife meanwhile--one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay about--was that she never admired him so much, or so found him heartbreakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all, to constitute HER substance.

There was really nothing they had talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of the licence and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established for each: she going so far as to put it that, even should he some day get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it, charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most deeply moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would therefore be more open to him than to keep her in love with him? He agreed, with all his heart, at these light moments, that his course would n't then be difficult, inasmuch as, so simply constituted as he was on all the precious question--and why should he be ashamed of it?--he knew but one way with the fair. They had to be fair--and he was fastidious and particular, his standard was high; but when once this was the case what relation with them was conceivable, what relation was decent, rudimentary, properly human, but that of a plain interest in the fairness? His interest, she always answered, happened not to be "plain," and plainness, all round, had little to do with the matter, which was marked on the contrary by the richest variety of colour; but the working basis at all (166) events had been settled--the Miss Maddocks of life been assured of their importance for him. How conveniently assured Maggie--to take him too into the joke--had more than once gone so far as to mention to her father; since it fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember she might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence. This was one of her rules--full as she was of little rules, considerations, provisions. There were things she of course could n't tell him, in so many words, about Amerigo and herself, and about their happiness and their union and their deepest depths--and there were other things she need n't; but there were also those that were both true and amusing, both communicable and real, and of these, with her so conscious, so delicately cultivated scheme of conduct as a daughter, she could make her profit at will.

A pleasant hush, for that matter, had fallen on most of the elements while she lingered apart with her companion; it involved, this serenity, innumerable complete assumptions: since so ordered and so splendid a rest, all the tokens, spreading about them, of confidence solidly supported, might have suggested for persons of poorer pitch the very insolence of facility. Still, they were n't insolent--THEY were n't, our pair could reflect; they were only blissful and grateful and personally modest, not ashamed of knowing, with competence, when great things were great, when good things were good and when safe things were safe, and not therefore placed below their fortune by timidity--which would have been as bad as being below it by impudence. Worthy of it as they were, and as each (167) appears, under our last possible analysis, to have wished to make the other feel that they were, what they most finally exhaled into the evening air as their eyes mildly met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity. Their rightness, the justification of everything--something they so felt the pulse of--sat there with them; but they might have been asking themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything so perfect. They had created and nursed and established it; they had housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort; but might n't the moment possibly count for them--or count at least for us while we watch them with their fate all before them--as the dawn of the discovery that it does n t always meet ALL contingencies to be right? Otherwise why should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt--the expression of the fine pang determined in her a few hours before--rise after a time to her lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion's intelligence of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all. "What is it after all that they want to do to you?" "They" were for the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs. Rance was the symbol, and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to appear not to know what she meant.

What she meant--when once she had spoken--could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying: "What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are (168) altered." He accepted equally for the time this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her even when she added that it would n't so much matter if he had n't been so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went on to declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited. Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have had to wait long--if she waited, that is, till he was old. But there was a way. "Since you ARE an irresistible youth we've got to face it. That's somehow what that woman has made me feel. There'll be others."