第208章 Chapter 4(3)

Therefore though there was in these days for her with Amerigo little enough even of the imitation, from day to day, of unembarrassed reference--as she had foreseen for that matter from the first that there would be--her active conception of his accessibility to their companion's own private and unextinguished right to break ground was not much less active than before. So it was that her inner sense, in spite of (281) everything, represented him as still pulling wires and controlling currents, or rather indeed as muffling the whole possibility, keeping it down and down, leading his accomplice continually on to some new turn of the road. As regards herself Maggie had become more conscious from week to week of his ingenuities of intention to make up to her for their forfeiture, in so dire a degree, of any reality of frankness--a privation that had left on his lips perhaps a little of the same thirst with which she fairly felt her own distorted, the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens in desert sands for the possible, the impossible plash of water. It was just this hampered state in him none the less that she kept before her when she wished most to find grounds of dignity for the hard little passion which nothing he had done could smother. There were hours enough, lonely hours, in which she let dignity go; then there were others when, clinging with her winged concentration to some deep cell of her heart, she stored away her hived tenderness as if she had gathered it all from flowers. He was walking ostensibly beside her, but in fact given over without a break to the grey medium in which he helplessly groped; a perception on her part which was a perpetual pang and which might last what it would--for ever if need be--but which if relieved at all must be relieved by his act alone. She herself could do nothing more for it; she had done the utmost possible. It was meantime not the easier to bear for this aspect under which Charlotte was presented as depending on him for guidance, taking it from him even in doses of bitterness and yet lost with him in devious depths. Nothing was thus (282) more sharply to be inferred than that he had promptly enough warned her, on hearing from her of the precious assurance received from his wife, that she must take care her satisfaction did n't betray something of her danger. Maggie had a day of still waiting after allowing him time to learn how unreservedly she had lied for him--of waiting as for the light of she scarce knew what slow-shining reflexion of this knowledge in his personal attitude. What retarded evolution, she asked herself in these hours, might n't poor Charlotte all unwittingly have precipitated She was thus poor Charlotte again for Maggie even while Maggie's own head was bowed, and the reason for this kept coming back to our young woman in the conception of what would secretly have passed. She saw her, face to face with the Prince, take from him the chill of his stiffest admonition, with the possibilities of deeper difficulty that it represented for each. She heard her ask, irritated and sombre, what tone, in God's name--since her bravery did n't suit him--she WAS then to adopt; and by way of a fantastic flight of divination she heard Amerigo reply, in a voice of which every fine note, familiar and admirable, came home to her, that one must really manage such prudences a little for one's self. It was positive in the Princess that for this she breathed Charlotte's cold air--turned away from him in it with her, turned with her, in growing compassion, this way and that, hovered behind her while she felt her ask herself where then she should rest. Marvellous the manner in which, under such imaginations, Maggie thus circled and lingered--quite as if she were, materially, following her unseen, (283) counting every step she helplessly wasted, noting every hindrance that brought her to a pause.