It may be recorded none the less that the Prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded. Alone with him now Mrs. Assingham was incorruptible. “They send for Charlotte through YOU?”
“No, my dear; as you see, through the Ambassador.”
“Ah, but the Ambassador and you, for the last quarter-of-an-hour, have been for them as one. He’s YOUR ambassador.” It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it the more she saw in it. “They’ve connected her with you — she’s treated as your appendage1.”
“Oh, my ‘appendage,’” the Prince amusedly exclaimed —“cara mia, what a name! She’s treated, rather, say, as my ornament2 and my glory. And it’s so remarkable3 a case for a mother-inlaw that you surely can’t find fault with it.”
“You’ve ornaments4 enough, it seems to me — as you’ve certainly glories enough — without her. And she’s not the least little bit,” Mrs. Assingham observed, “your mother-inlaw. In such a matter a shade of difference is enormous. She’s no relation to you whatever, and if she’s known in high quarters but as going about with you, then — then —!” She failed, however, as from positive intensity5 of vision. “Then, then what?” he asked with perfect good-nature.
“She had better in such a case not be known at all.”
“But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them,” said the young man, still amused, “if they didn’t want to see her? You surely don’t need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself — that she does so above all on such an occasion as this and looking as she does to-night. How, so looking, can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have ‘success’? Besides,” he added as she but watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if she wanted to see how he would say it, “besides, there IS always the fact that we’re of the same connection, of — what is your word?— the same ‘concern.’ We’re certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal acquaintances. We’re in the same boat”— and the Prince smiled with a candour that added an accent to his emphasis.
Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner: it caused her to turn for a moment’s refuge to a corner of her general consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad SHE wasn’t in love with such a man. As with Charlotte just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. “It only appears to me of great importance that — now that you all seem more settled here — Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as, in particular, her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don’t know what you mean by the ‘same’ boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver’s boat.”
“And, pray, am I not in Mr. Verver’s boat too? Why, but for Mr. Verver’s boat, I should have been by this time”— and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive6 direction and motion of his forefinger7, pointed8 to deepest depths —“away down, down, down.” She knew of course what he meant — how it had taken his father-inlaw’s great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily9 float; and with this reminder10 other things came to her — how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately11 valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn’t mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure SHE could take in this specimen12 of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, COULDN’T suffer, to whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered. He was a huge expense assuredly — but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent. And that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father — this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous14 intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.
“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor15 in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. “I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-inlaw too. It’s as if he had saved us both — which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don’t you remember”— he kept it up —“how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly16 and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage?” And then as his friend’s face, in her extremity17, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation18: “Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right — and so was she. That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn’t it? Only — what she has got — something thoroughly19 good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better — once you allow her the way it’s to be taken. Of course if you don’t allow her that the case is different. Her offset20 is a certain decent freedom — which, I judge, she’ll be quite contented21 with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly22 humble23 about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The ‘boat,’ you see”— the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly24 —“is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you’ll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can’t help occasionally doing the same. It isn’t even a question, sometimes, of one’s getting to the dock — one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion’s track — for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination — call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges25 off the deck, inevitable26 for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable — and, above all, as not endangering life or limb? We shan’t drown, we shan’t sink — at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver too, moreover — do her the justice — visibly knows how to swim.”
He could easily go on, for she didn’t interrupt him; Fanny felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence27 precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn’t, in a manner, catch, as it came, for immediate28 bottling, for future preservation29. The crystal flask30 of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug31 laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments, positively32, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnamable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance33 with his words, something that GAVE THEM AWAY, glimmered34 deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Wasn’t it, however gross, such a rendering35 of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink36, a hint of the possibility of their REALLY treating their subject — of course on some better occasion — and thereby37, as well, finding it much more interesting? If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere13 subjective38 phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting39 her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. This was when he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought — on the manner of which he couldn’t have improved — to complete his successful simile40 by another, in fact by just the supreme41 touch, the touch for which it had till now been waiting. “For Mrs. Verver to be known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband’s wife, something is wanted that, you know, they haven’t exactly got. He should manage to be known — or at least to be seen — a little more as his wife’s husband. You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has his own habits and his own ways, and that he makes, more and more — as of course he has a perfect right to do — his own discriminations. He’s so perfect, so ideal a father, and, doubtless largely by that very fact, a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-inlaw, that I should really feel it base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to criticise42 him. To YOU, nevertheless, I may make just one remark; for you’re not stupid — you always understand so blessedly what one means.”
He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for him should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it. Nothing would have induced her, however, to encourage him; she was now conscious of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly, as it were, so tight; she felt like the horse of the adage43, brought — and brought by her own fault — to the water, but strong, for the occasion, in the one fact that she couldn’t be forced to drink. Invited, in other words, to understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to. It was sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain, in advance, of his remark; that she heard it before it had sounded, that she already tasted, in fine, the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility. But her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred44 by her silence. “What I really don’t see is why, from his own point of view — given, that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood — he should have wished to marry at all.” There it was then — exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that seemed now to thump45 at her heart, as distressing47 to her. Yet she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs48, then and there; not to suffer, odiously49, helplessly, in public — which could be prevented but by her breaking off, with whatever inconsequence; by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly wanted to go home much as she had wanted, an hour or two before, to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had, abruptly50, taken such vivid form — but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight. Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger — such light, as from open crevices51, it let in; and the overt52 recognition of danger was worse than anything else. The worst in fact came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly53 recognise. Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. “I’m afraid, however,” the Prince said, “that I, for some reason, distress46 you — for which I beg your pardon. We’ve always talked so well together — it has been, from the beginning, the greatest pull for me.” Nothing so much as such a tone could have quickened her collapse54; she felt he had her now at his mercy, and he showed, as he went on, that he knew it. “We shall talk again, all the same, better than ever — I depend on it too much. Don’t you remember what I told you, so definitely, one day before my marriage?— that, moving as I did in so many ways among new things, mysteries, conditions, expectations, assumptions different from any I had known, I looked to you, as my original sponsor, my fairy godmother, to see me through. I beg you to believe,” he added, “that I look to you yet.”
His very insistence55 had, fortunately, the next moment, affected56 her as bringing her help; with which, at least, she could hold up her head to speak. “Ah, you ARE through — you were through long ago. Or if you aren’t you ought to be.”
“Well then, if I ought to be it’s all the more reason why you should continue to help me. Because, very distinctly, I assure you, I’m not. The new things or ever so many of them — are still for me new things; the mysteries and expectations and assumptions still contain an immense element that I’ve failed to puzzle out. As we’ve happened, so luckily, to find ourselves again really taking hold together, you must let me, as soon as possible, come to see you; you must give me a good, kind hour. If you refuse it me”— and he addressed himself to her continued reserve —“I shall feel that you deny, with a stony57 stare, your responsibility.”
At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate58 vessel59. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. “Oh, I deny responsibility — to YOU. So far as I ever had it I’ve done with it.”
He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she made his look, now, penetrate60 her again more. “As to whom then do you confess it?”
“Ah, mio caro, that’s — if to anyone — my own business!”
He continued to look at her hard. “You give me up then?”
It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and its coming from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the point of replying “Do you and she agree together for what you’ll say to me?”— but she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. “I think I don’t know what to make of you.”
“You must receive me at least,” he said.
“Oh, please, not till I’m ready for you!”— and, though she found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for her as if she were altogether afraid of him.
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appendage
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| n.附加物 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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ornaments
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| n.装饰( ornament的名词复数 )；点缀；装饰品；首饰v.装饰，点缀，美化( ornament的第三人称单数 ) | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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expressive
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| adj.表现的，表达…的，富于表情的 | |
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forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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pecuniarily
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| adv.在金钱上，在金钱方面 | |
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reminder
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| n.提醒物，纪念品；暗示，提示 | |
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inordinately
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| adv.无度地，非常地 | |
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specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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mere
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ominous
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| adj.不祥的，不吉的，预兆的，预示的 | |
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benefactor
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| n. 恩人，行善的人，捐助人 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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extremity
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| n.末端，尽头；尽力；终极；极度 | |
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repudiation
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| n.拒绝；否认；断绝关系；抛弃 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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offset
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| n.分支，补偿；v.抵消，补偿 | |
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contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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lucidly
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| adv.清透地，透明地 | |
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plunges
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| n.跳进，投入vt.使投入，使插入，使陷入vi.投入，跳进，陷入v.颠簸( plunge的第三人称单数 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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inevitable
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eloquence
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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preservation
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| n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持 | |
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flask
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| n.瓶，火药筒，砂箱 | |
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snug
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| adj.温暖舒适的，合身的，安全的；v.使整洁干净，舒适地依靠，紧贴；n.（英）酒吧里的私房 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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variance
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| n.矛盾，不同 | |
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glimmered
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| v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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rendering
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| n.表现，描写 | |
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wink
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| n.眨眼，使眼色，瞬间；v.眨眼，使眼色，闪烁 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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subjective
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| a.主观(上)的，个人的 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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simile
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| n.直喻，明喻 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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criticise
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| v.批评，评论；非难 | |
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adage
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| n.格言，古训 | |
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deterred
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| v.阻止，制止( deter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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thump
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| v.重击，砰然地响；n.重击，重击声 | |
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distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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distressing
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| a.使人痛苦的 | |
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martyrs
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| n.martyr的复数形式；烈士( martyr的名词复数 )；殉道者；殉教者；乞怜者（向人诉苦以博取同情） | |
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odiously
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| Odiously | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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crevices
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| n.（尤指岩石的）裂缝，缺口( crevice的名词复数 ) | |
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overt
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| adj.公开的，明显的，公然的 | |
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overtly
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| ad.公开地 | |
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collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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penetrate
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| v.透(渗)入；刺入，刺穿；洞察，了解 | |
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