This was for Maggie more difficult to meet; yet she was still not without her stop-gap. "That may be what they'll propose--that we shall go somewhere together, the four of us, for a celebration--except that to round it thoroughly off we ought also to have (341) Fanny and the Colonel. They don't WANT them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them beforehand. They want only US together; and if they cut us down to tea," she continued, "as they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps it's after all for the fancy of their keeping their last night in London for each other."
She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them back even though as she heard herself she might have been throwing everything to the winds. But was n't that the right way--for sharing his last day of captivity with the man one adored? It was every moment more and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison--waiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, in the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast or a high discourse of their last poor resources. If she had broken with everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply then take it so--take it that what she had worked for was too near at last to let her keep her head. She might have been losing her head verily in her husband's eyes--since he did n't know all the while that the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her disposition personally to seize him.
He knew as little that this was her manner--now she WAS with him--of beguiling audaciously the supremacy of suspense. For the people of the French Revolution assuredly there was n't suspense; the scaffold, for those she was thinking of, was certain--whereas what Charlotte's telegram (342) announced was, short of some incalculable error, clear liberation. Just the point however was in its being clearer to herself than to him; her clearnesses, clearances--those she had so all but abjectly laboured for--threatened to crowd upon her in the form of one of the clusters of angelic heads, the peopled shafts of light beating down through iron bars, that regale on occasion precisely the fevered vision of those who are in chains. She was going to know, she felt, later on--was going to know with compunction doubtless on the very morrow, how thumpingly her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together: she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted.
She should judge at leisure even that avidity for an issue which was making so little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened. He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law and Mrs. Verver, by her glance at their possible preference for a concentrated evening. "But it is n't--is it?" he asked--"as if they were leaving each other?"
"Oh no; it is n't as if they were leaving each other. They're only bringing to a close--without knowing when it may open again--a time that has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them." Yes, she could talk so of their "time"--she was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground. "They have their reasons--many things to think of; how (343) can one tell? But there's always also the chance of his proposing to me that WE shall have our last hours together;
I mean that he and I shall. He may wish to take me off to dine with him somewhere alone--and to do it in memory of old days. I mean," the Princess went on, "the REAL old days before my grand husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was: the wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done, his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains. The way we've sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, we've stayed on and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for, the things he had secured or refused or lost!
There were places he took me to--you would n't believe!--for often he could only have left me with servants. If he should carry me off with him to-night for old sake's sake to the Earl's Court Exhibition it will be a little--just a very, very little--like our young adventures." After which while Amerigo watched her, and in fact quite because of it, she had an inspiration to which she presently yielded. If he was wondering what she would say next she had found exactly the thing. "In that case he'll leave you Charlotte to take care of in our absence. You'll have to carry HER off somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with her here.
I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything, quite beautifully.
You'll be able to do as you like."