had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. “Because you think I must have so little? I’ve enough, at any rate—enough for us to take our hour. Enough,” she had smiled, “is as good as a feast! And then,” she had said, “it isn’t of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn’t a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn’t she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor—something, precisely, that—no rich person COULD ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have.” Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. “Only, as it can’t be fine, it ought to be funny—and that’s the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself.”
He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. “‘Funny’?” “Oh, I don’t mean a comic toy—I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely RIGHT, in its comparative cheapness. That’s what I call funny,” she had explained. “You used,” she had also added, “to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn’t say—the little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August.”
“Ah, but I don’t understand your English buying, and I confess I find it dull.” So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had objected. “I understood my poor dear Romans.”
“It was they who understood you—that was your pull,” she had laughed. “Our amusement here is just that they don’t understand us. We can make it amusing. You’ll see.”
If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted. “The amusement surely will be to find our present.”
“Certainly—as I say.”
“Well, if they don’t come down—?”
“Then we’ll come up. There’s always something to be done. Besides, Prince,” she had gone on, “I’m not, if you come to that, absolutely a pauper. I’m too poor for some things,” she had said—yet, strange as she was, lightly enough; “but I’m not too poor for others.” And she had paused again at the top. “I’ve been saving up.”
He had really challenged it. “In America?”
“Yes, even there—with my motive. And we oughtn’t, you know,” she had wound up, “to leave it beyond to-morrow.”
That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed—he feeling all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He might get on with things as they were, but he must do anything rather than magnify. Besides which it was pitiful to make her beg of him. He WAS making her—she had begged; and this, for a special sensibility in him, didn’t at all do. That was accordingly, in fine, how they had come to where they were: he was engaged, as hard as possible, in the policy of not magnifying. He had kept this up even on her making a point—and as if it were almost the whole point—that Maggie of course was not to have an idea. Half the interest of the thing at least would be that she shouldn’t suspect; therefore he was completely to keep it from her—as Charlotte on her side would—that they had been anywhere at all together or had so much as seen each other for five minutes alone. The absolute secrecy of their little excursion was in short of the essence; she appealed to his kindness to let her feel that he didn’t betray her. There had been something, frankly, a little disconcerting in such an appeal at such an hour, on the very eve of his nuptials: it was one thing to have met the girl casually at Mrs. Assingham’s and another to arrange with her thus for a morning practically as private as their old mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate. He had immediately told Maggie, the same evening, of the minutes that had passed between them in Cadogan Place—though not mentioning those of Mrs. Assingham’s absence any more than he mentioned the fact of what their friend had then, with such small delay, proposed. But what had briefly checked his assent to any present, to any positive making of mystery—what had made him, while they stood at the top of the stairs, demur just long enough for her to notice it—was the sense of the resemblance of the little plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. These items of his consciousness had clustered so quickly that by the time Charlotte read them in his face he was in presence of what they amounted to. She had challenged them as soon as read them, had met them with a “Do you want then to go and tell her?” that had somehow made them ridiculous. It had made him, promptly, fall back on minimizing it—that is on minimizing “fuss.” Apparent scruples were, obviously, fuss, and he had on the spot clutched, in the light of this truth, at the happy principle that would meet every case.
This principle was simply to be, with the girl, always simple—and with the very last simplicity. That would cover everything. It had covered, then and there, certainly, his immediate submission to the sight of what was clearest. This was, really, that what she asked was little compared to what she gave. What she gave touched him, as she faced him, for it was the full tune of her renouncing. She really renounced—renounced everything, and without even insisting now on what it had all been for her. Her only insistence was her insistence on the small matter of their keeping their appointment to themselves. That, in exchange for “everything,” everything she gave up, was verily but a trifle. He let himself accordingly be guided; he so soon assented, for enlightened indulgence, to any particular turn she might wish the occasion to take, that the stamp of her preference had been well applied to it even while they were still in the Park. The application in fact presently required that they should sit down a little, really to see where they were; in obedience to which propriety they had some ten minutes, of a quality quite distinct, in a couple of penny-chairs under one of the larger trees. They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped, rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position—her temporary position—still more clear, and it was for this purpose, obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down. He stood for a little before her, as if to mark the importance of not wasting time, the importance she herself had previously insisted on; but after she had said a few words it was impossible for him not to resort again to good-nature. He marked as he could, by this concession, that if he had finally met her first proposal for what would be “amusing” in it, so any idea she might have would contribute to that effect. He had consequently—in all consistency—to treat it as amusing that she reaffirmed, and reaffirmed again, the truth that was HER truth.
“I don’t care what you make of it, and I don’t ask anything whatever of you—anything but this. I want to have said it—that’s all; I want not to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour—or say for two—that’s what I have had for weeks in my head. I mean, of course, to get it BEFORE—before what you’re going to do. So, all the while, you see,” she went on with her eyes on him, “it was a question for me if I should be able to manage it in time. If I couldn’t have come now I probably shouldn’t have come at all—perhaps even ever. Now that I’m here I shall stay, but there were moments, over there, when I despaired. It wasn’t easy—there were reasons; but it was either this or nothing. So I didn’t struggle, you see, in vain. AFTER—oh, I didn’t want that! I don’t mean,” she smiled, “that it wouldn’t have been delightful to see you even then—to see you at any time; but I would never have come for it. This is different. This is what I wanted. This is what I’ve got. This is what I shall always
