Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness--quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated in conversation and at tea fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs. Verver and the Prince fairly "placed" themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required aesthetically by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase. There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped? "Le compte y est. You've got some good things."
Maggie met it afresh--"Ah don't they look well?" Their companions, at the sound of this, gave them, in a spacious intermission of slow talk, an attention, all of gravity, that was like an ampler submission to the general duty of magnificence; sitting as still, to be thus appraised, as a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms (361) of Madame Tussaud. "I'm so glad--for your last look."
With which, after Maggie--quite in the air--had said it, the note was struck indeed; the note of that strange accepted finality of relation, as from couple to couple, which almost escaped an awkwardness only by not attempting a gloss. Yes, this was the wonder, that the occasion defied insistence precisely because of the vast quantities with which it dealt--so that separation was on a scale beyond any compass of parting. To do such an hour justice would have been in some degree to question its grounds--which was why they remained in fine, the four of them, in the upper air, united through the firmest abstention from pressure. There was visibly no point at which, face to face, either Amerigo or Charlotte had pressed; and how little she herself was in danger of doing so Maggie scarce needed to remember.
That her father would n't by the tip of a toe--of that she was equally conscious: the only thing was that since he did n't she could but hold her breath for what he would do instead. When at the end of three minutes more he had said, with an effect of suddenness, "Well, Mag--and the Principino?" it was quite as if THAT were by contrast the hard, the truer voice.
She glanced at the clock. "I 'ordered' him for half-past five--which has n't yet struck. Trust him, my dear, not to fail you!"
"Oh I don't want HIM to fail me!" was Mr. Verver's reply; yet uttered in so explicitly jocose a relation to the possibilities of failure that even when just afterwards he wandered in his impatience to one (362) of the long windows and passed out to the balcony she asked herself but for a few seconds whether reality, should she follow him, would overtake or meet her there. She followed him of necessity--it came absolutely so near to his inviting her, by stepping off into temporary detachment, to give the others something of the chance that she and her husband had so fantastically discussed. Beside him then, while they hung over the great dull place, clear and almost coloured now, coloured with the odd sad pictured "old-fashioned" look that empty London streets take on in waning afternoons of the summer's end, she felt once more how impossible such a passage would have been to them, how it would have torn them to pieces, if they had so much as suffered its suppressed relations to peep out of their eyes. This danger would doubtless indeed have been more to be reckoned with if the instinct of each--she could certainly at least answer for her own--had n't so successfully acted to trump up other apparent connexions for it, connexions as to which they could pretend to be frank.
"You mustn't stay on here, you know," Adam Verver said as a result of his unobstructed outlook. "Fawns is all there for you of course--to the end of my tenure. But Fawns so dismantled," he added with mild ruefulness, "Fawns with half its contents and half its best things removed, won't seem to you, I'm afraid, particularly lively."
"No," Maggie answered, "we should miss its best things. Its best things, my dear, have certainly been removed. To be back there," she went on, "to be (363) back there--!" And she paused for the force of her idea.
"Oh to be back there without anything good--!"