第76章 Chapter 7(1)

He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie's reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns--a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to inform--had proved on his sitting down to it and a little to his surprise not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume: this doubtless however only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their talk for the time had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to "speak" to her so far even as to tell her of the communication dispatched to Rome.

(228) Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them--it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she must n't be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.

It was just the delicacy, nevertheless, that in Paris--which, suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch--made between him and his associate the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions. These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders--things verily he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality. He was hanging back with Charlotte till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater.

Common conventions--that was what was odd--had to be on this basis more thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. The explanation would have been, he supposed--or would have figured it with less of unrest--that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all "far" there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further still. There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew (229) it you might be unmistakeably matching them. Since he wished therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself on the receipt of Maggie's missive rejoicing with a certain inconsistency. The announcement made her from home had, in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him--his personal modesty, his imagination of her prepared state for so quick a jump, it did n't much matter which--and yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay and for the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair. There was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being taken, as they said at the shops, on approval.

Maggie certainly would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this, and Charlotte on her side as far as Maggie from holding him light as a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but from generous rigour of conscience.