第196章 Chapter 2(5)

Charlotte had said nothing in reply; her brow was dark as with a fixed expression, and her high elegance, her handsome head and long straight neck testified through the dusk to their inveterate completeness and noble erectness. It was as if what she had come out to do had already begun, and when, as a consequence, Maggie had said helplessly "Don't you want something? won't you have my shawl?" everything might have crumbled away in the comparative poverty of the tribute. Mrs. Verver's rejection of it had the brevity of a sign that they had n't closed in for idle words, just as her dim serious face, uninterruptedly presented until they moved again, might have figured the success with which she watched all her message penetrate.

They presently went back the way she had come, but she stopped Maggie again within range of the smoking-room window and made her stand where the party at cards would be before her. Side by side for three minutes they fixed this picture of quiet harmonies, the positive charm of it and, as might have been said, the full significance--which, as was now (244) brought home to Maggie, could be no more after all than a matter of interpretation, differing always for a different interpreter. As she herself had hovered in sight of it a quarter of an hour before, it would have been a thing for her to show Charlotte--to show in righteous irony, in reproach too stern for anything but silence. But now it was she who was being shown it, and shown it by Charlotte, and she saw quickly enough that as Charlotte showed it so she must at present submissively seem to take it.

The others were absorbed and unconscious, either silent over their game or dropping remarks unheard on the terrace; and it was to her father's quiet face, discernibly expressive of nothing that was in his daughter's mind, that our young woman's attention was most directly given. His wife and his daughter were both closely watching him, and to which of them, could he have been notified of this, would his raised eyes first, all impulsively, have responded? in which of them would he have felt it most important to destroy--for HIS clutch at the equilibrium--any germ of uneasiness? Not yet since his marriage had Maggie so sharply and so formidably known her old possession of him as a thing divided and contested. She was looking at him by Charlotte's leave and under Charlotte's direction; quite in fact as if the particular way she should look at him were prescribed to her; quite even as if she had been defied to look at him in any other. It came home to her too that the challenge was n't, as might be said, in his interest and for his protection, but pressingly, insistently in Charlotte's, for that of HER security at any price. She might verily (245) by this dumb demonstration have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie herself, a sum of money that she properly was to find She must remain safe and Maggie must pay--what she was to pay with being her own affair.

Straighter than ever thus the Princess again felt it all put upon her, and there was a minute, just a supreme instant, during which there burned in her a wild wish that her father would only look up. It throbbed for these seconds as a yearning appeal to him--she would chance it, that is, if he would but just raise his eyes and catch them, across the larger space, standing in the outer dark together. Then he might be affected by the sight, taking them as they were; he might make some sign--she scarce knew what--that would save HER; save her from being the one this way to pay all. He might somehow show a preference--distinguishing between them; might out of pity for her signal to her that this extremity of her effort for him was more than he asked. That represented Maggie's one little lapse from consistency--the sole small deflexion in the whole course of her scheme. It had come to nothing the next minute, for the dear man's eyes had never moved, and Charlotte's hand, promptly passed into her arm, had already, had very firmly drawn her on--quite for that matter as from some sudden, some equal perception on her part too of the more ways than one in which their impression could appeal. They retraced their steps along the rest of the terrace, turning the corner of the house, and presently came abreast of the other windows, those of the pompous drawing-room still lighted and (246) still empty.

Here Charlotte again paused, and it was again as if she were pointing out what Maggie had observed for herself, the very look the place had of being vivid in its stillness, of having, with all its great objects as ordered and balanced as for a formal reception, been appointed for some high transaction, some real affair of state. In presence of this opportunity she faced her companion once more; she traced in her the effect of everything she had already communicated; she signified with the same success that the terrace and the sullen night would bear too meagre witness to the completion of her idea. Soon enough then, within the room, under the old lustres of Venice and the eyes of the several great portraits, more or less contemporary with these, that awaited on the walls of Fawns their final far migration--soon enough Maggie found herself staring, and at first all too gaspingly, at the grand total to which each separate demand Mrs. Verver had hitherto made upon her, however she had made it, now amounted.