So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads of gaping neighbours; so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing, as less interested judges might have said, seemed to justify the (292) faith with which she was honoured. Maggie meanwhile at the window knew the strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying, or was at least on the point of it--the lighted square before her all blurred and dim. The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse--so that Maggie felt herself the next thing turn with a start to her father. "Can't she be stopped? Has n't she done it ENOUGH?"--some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half the gallery--for he had n't moved from where she had first seen him--he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion. "Poor thing, poor thing"--it reached straight--"IS N'T she, for one's credit, on the swagger?" After which, as held thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away. The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet lifted Maggie as on air--so much for deep guesses on her own side too it gave her to think of. There was honestly an awful mixture in things, and it was n't closed to her aftersense of such passages--we have already indeed in other cases seen it open--that the deepest depth of all, in a perceived penalty, was that you could n't be sure some of your compunctions and contortions would n't show for ridiculous. (293)
Amerigo that morning for instance had been as absent as he at this juncture appeared to desire he should mainly be noted as being; he had gone to London for the day and the night--a necessity that now frequently rose for him and that he had more than once suffered to operate during the presence of guests, successions of pretty women, the theory of his fond interest in whom had been publicly cultivated. It had never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at last a high dim August dawn when she could n't sleep and when, creeping restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded acres, she found the faint flush of the east march with the perception of that other almost equal prodigy.
It rosily coloured her vision that--even such as he was, yes--her husband could on occasion sin by excess of candour. He would n't otherwise have given as his reason for going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging books there. He had bought a great many of late and had had others, a large number, sent from Rome--wonders of old print in which her father had been interested. But when her imagination tracked him to the dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a caretaker and a kitchenmaid were alone in possession, it was n't to see him, in his shirtsleeves, unpacking battered boxes.
She saw him in truth less easily beguiled--saw him wander in the closed dusky rooms from place to place or else for long periods recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes. She made him out as liking better than anything in (294) the world just now to be alone with his thoughts. Being herself connected with his thoughts, she continued to believe, more than she had ever been, it was thereby a good deal as if he were alone with HER. She made him out as resting so from that constant strain of the perfunctory to which he was exposed at Fawns; and she was accessible to the impression of the almost beggared aspect of this alternative. It was like his doing penance in sordid ways--being sent to prison or being kept without money; it would n't have taken much to make her think of him as really kept without food. He might have broken away, might easily have started to travel; he had a right--thought wonderful Maggie now--to so many more freedoms than he took! His secret was of course that at Fawns he all the while winced, was all the while in presences in respect to which he had thrown himself back with a hard pressure on whatever mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the world, he could keep from snapping. Maggie, for some reason, had that morning, while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure of the ground on which he would have HAD to snatch at pretexts for absence. It all came to her there--he got off to escape from a sound. The sound was in her own ears still--that of Charlotte's high coerced quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the voice by which she herself had been pierced the day before as by that of a creature in anguish and by which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window, the tears had been forced into her eyes. Her comprehension soared so high that the wonder for her became really his not (295) feeling the need of wider intervals and thicker walls.
Before THAT admiration she also meditated; consider as she might now she kept reading not less into what he omitted than into what he performed a beauty of intention that touched her fairly the more by being obscure.
It was like hanging over a garden in the dark; nothing was to be made of the confusion of growing things, but one felt they were folded flowers and that their vague sweetness made the whole air their medium. He had to turn away, but he was n't at least a coward; he would wait on the spot for the issue of what he had done on the spot. She sank to her knees with her arm on the ledge of her window-seat, where she blinded her eyes from the full glare of seeing that his idea could only be to wait, whatever might come, at her side. It was to her buried face that she thus for a long time felt him draw nearest; though after a while, when the strange wail of the gallery began to repeat its inevitable echo, she was conscious of how that brought out his pale hard grimace.