第219章 Chapter 1(1)

"I'll do anything you like," she said to her husband on one of the last days of the month, "if our being here this way at this time seems to you too absurd or too uncomfortable or too impossible. We'll either take leave of them now, without waiting--or we'll come back in time, three days before they start. I'll go abroad with you if you but say the word; to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of your old high places you would like most to see again--those beautiful ones that used to do you good after Rome and that you so often told me about."

Where they were, in the conditions that prompted this offer, and where it might indeed appear ridiculous that, with the stale London September close at hand, they should content themselves with remaining, was where the desert of Portland Place looked blank as it had never looked, and where a drowsy cabman, scanning the horizon for a fare, could sink to oblivion of the risks of immobility. But Amerigo was of the odd opinion, day after day, that their situation could n't be bettered; and he even went at no moment through the form of replying that, should their ordeal strike her as exceeding their patience, any step they might take would be for her own relief. This was, no doubt, partly because he stood out so wonderfully, to the end, against admitting, by a weak word at least, that any element of their existence WAS or ever had been an (322) ordeal; no trap of circumstance, no lapse of "form," no accident of irritation, had landed him in that inconsequence.

His wife might verily have suggested that he was consequent--consequent with the admirable appearance he had from the first so undertaken and so continued to present--rather too rigidly at HER expense; only, as it happened, she was n't the little person to do anything of the sort, and the strange tacit compact actually in operation between them might have been founded on an intelligent comparison, a definite collation positively, of the kinds of patience proper to each. She was seeing him through--he had engaged to come out at the right end if she WOULD see him: this understanding, tacitly renewed from week to week, had fairly received, with the procession of the weeks, the consecration of time; but it scarce needed to be emphasised that she was seeing him on HIS terms, not at all on hers, or that, in a word, she must allow him his unexplained and uncharted, his one practicably workable way. If that way, by one of the intimate felicities the liability to which was so far from having even yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more bored than boring--with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but none to be persuadedly indebted to others for--what did such a false face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged? If she had questioned or challenged or interfered--if she had reserved herself that right--she would n't have been pledged; whereas there were still, and evidently would be yet a while, long tense stretches during which their case might have been hanging for (323) every eye on her possible, her impossible defection. She must keep it up to the last, must n't absent herself for three minutes from her post: only on those lines assuredly would she show herself as with him and not against him.

It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to make of being, of truly having been at anytime, "with" his wife: that reflexion she was not exempt from as they now, in their suspense, supremely waited--a reflexion under the brush of which she recognised her having had, in respect to him as well, to "do all," to go the whole way over, to move indefatigably while he stood as fixed in his place as some statue of one of his forefathers. The meaning of it would seem to be, she reasoned in sequestered hours, that he HAD a place, and that this was an attribute somehow indefeasible, unquenchable, which laid upon others--from the moment they definitely wanted anything of him--the necessity of taking more of the steps than he could, of circling round him, of remembering for his benefit the famous relation of the mountain to Mahomet. It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such a place as Amerigo's was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie's own had come to show simply as that improvised "post"--a post of the kind spoken of as advanced--with which she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous beadwork (324) to sell. Maggie's own, in short, would have been sought in vain in the most rudimentary map of the social relations as such. The only geography marking it would be doubtless that of the fundamental passions.