第171章 Chapter 9(1)

"Something very strange has happened, and I think you ought to know it."

Maggie spoke this indeed without extravagance, yet with the effect of making her guest measure anew the force of her appeal. It was their definite understanding: whatever Fanny knew Fanny's faith would provide for. And she knew accordingly at the end of five minutes what the extraordinary in the late occurrence had consisted of, and how it had all come of Maggie's achieved hour, under Mr. Crichton's protection, at the Museum. He had desired, Mr. Crichton, with characteristic kindness, after the wonderful show, after offered luncheon at his contiguous lodge, a part of the place, to see her safely home; especially on his noting, in attending her to the great steps, that she had dismissed her carriage; which she had done really just for the harmless amusement of taking her way alone. She had known she should find herself, as the consequence of such an hour, in a sort of exalted state, under the influence of which a walk through the London streets would be exactly what would suit her best; an independent ramble, impressed excited contented, with nothing to mind and nobody to talk to and shop-windows in plenty to look at if she liked: a low taste, of the essence, it was to be supposed, of her nature, that she had of late for so many reasons been unable to gratify. (155) She had taken her leave with her thanks--she knew her way quite enough; it being also sufficiently the case that she had even a shy hope of not going too straight. To wander a little wild was what would truly amuse her; so that, keeping clear of Oxford Street and cultivating an impression as of parts she did n't know, she had ended with what she had more or less been plotting for, an encounter with three or four shops--an old bookseller's, an old print-monger's, a couple of places with dim antiquities in the window--that were not as so many of the other shops, those in Sloane Street say; a hollow parade which had long since ceased to beguile. There had remained with her moreover an allusion of Charlotte's, of some months before--seed dropped into her imagination in the form of a casual speech about there being in Bloomsbury such "funny little fascinating" places and even sometimes such unexpected finds. There could perhaps have been no stronger mark than this sense of well-nigh romantic opportunity--no livelier sign of the impression made on her, and always so long retained, so watchfully nursed, by any observation of Charlotte's, however lightly thrown off. And then she had felt somehow more at her ease than for months and months before; she did n't know why, but her time at the Museum, oddly, had done it; it was as if she had n't come into so many noble and beautiful associations, nor secured them also for her boy, secured them even for her father, only to see them turn to vanity and doubt, turn possibly to something still worse. "I believed in him again as much as ever, and I FELT how I (156) believed in him," she said with bright fixed eyes; "I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having for the moment to wonder and watch; having on the contrary almost nothing on my mind."

It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen to thinking of her father's birthday, had given herself this as a reason for trying what she could pick up for it. They would keep it at Fawns, where they had kept it before--since it would be. the twenty-first of the month; and she might n't have another chance of making sure of something to offer him. There was always of course the impossibility of finding him anything, the least bit "good," that he would n't already long ago in his rummagings have seen himself--and only not to think a quarter good enough; this however was an old story, and one could n't have had any fun with him but for his sweet theory that the individual gift, the friendship's offering, was by a rigorous law of nature a foredoomed aberration, and that the more it WAS so the more it showed, and the more one cherished it for showing, how friendly it had been. The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest objects in fact as a general thing were the bravest, the tenderest mementoes, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home but not worthy of the temple--dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods. She herself, naturally, through the past years, had come to (157) be much represented in those receptacles; against the thick locked panes of which she still liked to flatten her nose, finding in its place each time everything she had on successive anniversaries tried to believe he might pretend at her suggestion to be put off with or at least to think curious. She was now ready to try it again: they had always, with his pleasure in her pretence and her pleasure in his, with the funny betrayal of the sacrifice to domestic manners on either side, played the game so happily. To this end, on her way home, she had loitered everywhere; quite too deludedly among the old books and the old prints, which had yielded nothing to her purpose, but with a strange inconsequence in one of the other shops, that of a small antiquarian, a queer little foreign man who had shown her a number of things, shown her finally something that, struck with it as rather a rarity and thinking it would, compared to some of her ventures, quite superlatively do, she had bought--bought really, when it came to that, for a price. "It appears now it won't do at all," said Maggie;

"something has happened since that puts it quite out of the question. I had only my day of satisfaction in it, but I feel at the same time, as I keep it here before me, that I would n't have missed it for the world."