第203章 Chapter 3(5)

At this it hung before her that she should have had as never yet her opportunity to say, and it held her for a minute as in a vise, her impression of his now, with his strained smile, which touched her to deepest depths, sounding her in his secret unrest. This was the moment in the whole process of their mutual vigilance in which it decidedly MOST hung by a hair that their thin wall might be pierced by the lightest wrong touch. It shook between them, this transparency, with their very breath; it was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame, and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too hard. She held her breath, for she knew by his (268) eyes, the light at the heart of which he could n't blind, that he was, by his intention, making sure--sure whether or no her certainty was like his. The intensity of his dependence on it at that moment--this itself was what absolutely convinced her so that, as if perched up before him on her vertiginous point and in the very glare of his observation, she balanced for thirty seconds, she almost rocked: she might have been for the time, in all her conscious person, the very form of the equilibrium they were, in their different ways, equally trying to save. And they were saving it--yes, they were, or at least she was: that was still the workable issue, she could say, as she felt her dizziness drop. She held herself hard; the thing was to be done, once for all, by her acting now where she stood. So much was crowded into so short a space that she knew already she was keeping her head. She had kept it by the warning of his eyes; she should n't lose it again; she knew how and why, and if she had turned cold this was precisely what helped her. He had said to himself "She'll break down and name Amerigo; she'll say it's to him she's sacrificing me; and it's by what that will give me--with so many other things too--that my suspicion will be clinched." He was watching her lips, spying for the symptoms of the sound; whereby these symptoms had only to fail and he would have got nothing that she did n't measure out to him as she gave it. She had presently in fact so recovered herself that she seemed to know she could more easily have made him name his wife than he have made her name her husband. It was there before her that if she should so much as (269) force him just NOT consciously to avoid saying "Charlotte, Charlotte" he would have given himself away. But to be sure of this was enough for her, and she saw more clearly with each lapsing instant what they were both doing.

He was doing what he had steadily been coming to; he was practically OFFERING himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice--he had read his way so into her best possibility; and where had she already for weeks and days past planted her feet if not on her acceptance of the offer? Cold indeed, colder and colder she turned as she felt herself suffer this close personal vision of his attitude still not to make her weaken. That was her very certitude, the intensity of his pressure; for if something dreadful had n't happened there would n't for either of them be these dreadful things to do. She had meanwhile as well the immense advantage that SHE could have named Charlotte without exposing herself--as for that matter she was the next minute showing him.

"Why I sacrifice you simply to everything and to every one. I take the consequences of your marriage as perfectly natural."

He threw back his head a little, settling with one hand his nippers.

"What do you call, my dear, the consequences?"

"Your life as your marriage has made it."

"Well, has n't it made it exactly what we wanted?"

She just hesitated, then felt herself steady--oh beyond what she had dreamed. "Exactly what I wanted--yes."

His eyes, through his straightened glasses, were still on hers, and he might, with his intenser fixed (270) smile, have been knowing she was for herself rightly inspired. "What do you make then of what I wanted?"

"I don't make anything, any more than of what you've got. That's exactly the point. I don't put myself out to do so--I never have; I take from you all I can get, all you've provided for me, and I leave you to make of your own side of the matter what you can. There you are--the rest is your own affair. I don't even pretend to concern myself--!"

"To concern yourself--?" He watched her as she faintly faltered, looking about her now so as not to keep always meeting his face.

"With what may have REALLY become of you. It's as if we had agreed from the first not to go into that--such an arrangement being of course charming for ME. You can't say, you know, that I have n't stuck to it."

He did n't say so then--even with the opportunity given him of her stopping once more to catch her breath. He said instead: "Oh my dear--oh, oh!"

But it made no difference, know as she might what a past--still so recent and yet so distant--it alluded to; she repeated her denial, warning him off, on her side, from spoiling the truth of her contention. "I never went into anything, and you see I don't; I've continued to adore you--but what's that from a decent daughter to such a father? what but a question of convenient arrangement, our having two houses, three houses, instead of one (you would have arranged for fifty if I had wished!) and my making it easy for you to see the child? You don't claim, (271) I suppose, that my natural course, once you had set up for yourself, would have been to ship you back to American City?"

These were direct enquiries, they quite rang out in the soft wooded air; so that Adam Verver for a minute appeared to meet them with reflexion.

She saw reflexion however quickly enough show him what to do with them.

"Do you know, Mag, what you make me wish when you talk that way?" And he waited again while she further got from him the sense of something that had been behind, deeply in the shade, coming cautiously to the front and just feeling its way before presenting itself. "You regularly make me wish I HAD shipped back to American City. When you go on as you do--" But he really had to hold himself to say it.