The Golden Bowl - Complete

Therefore, on this occasion, she had found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared—well, so for them. 'He likes his things—he loves them,' she was to say; 'and it isn't only—it isn't perhaps even at all—that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers, at any rate, to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people—he knows them when he sees them; and that's why, as I say, you could make out, or at least I could, that he cared for us. Didn't you see'—she was to ask it with an insistence—'the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he'll remember us'—she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. 'But it was after all'—this was perhaps reassuring—'because, given his taste, since he HAS taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck—he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we're beautiful—aren't we?—and he knows. Then, also, he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he's all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it—that is a regular way.'

Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jewelled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter, where the shopman's slim, light fingers, with neat nails, touched them at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly, as those of a chess-player rest, a few seconds, over the board, on a figure he thinks he may move and then may not: small florid ancientries, ornaments, pendants, lockets, brooches, buckles, pretexts for dim brilliants, bloodless rubies, pearls either too large or too opaque for value; miniatures mounted with diamonds that had ceased to dazzle; snuffboxes presented to—or by—the too- questionable great; cups, trays, taper-stands, suggestive of pawn-tickets, archaic and brown, that would themselves, if preserved, have been prized curiosities. A few commemorative medals, of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic, temples, obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied, completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative reinforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios, amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, no great force of persuasion. They looked, the visitors, they touched, they vaguely pretended to consider, but with scepticism, so far as courtesy permitted, in the quality of their attention. It was impossible they shouldn't, after a little, tacitly agree as to the absurdity of carrying to Maggie a token from such a stock. It would be—that was the difficulty—pretentious without being 'good'; too usual, as a treasure, to have been an inspiration of the giver, and yet too primitive to be taken as tribute welcome on any terms. They had been out more than two hours and, evidently, had found nothing. It forced from Charlotte a kind of admission.

'It ought, really, if it should be a thing of this sort, to take its little value from having belonged to one's self.'

'Ecco!' said the Prince—just triumphantly enough. 'There you are.'

Behind the dealer were sundry small cupboards in the wall. Two or three of these Charlotte had seen him open, so that her eyes found themselves resting on those he had not visited. But she completed her admission. 'There's nothing here she could wear.'

It was only after a moment that her companion rejoined. 'Is there anything—do you think—that you could?'

It made her just start. She didn't, at all events, look at the objects; she but looked for an instant very directly at him. 'No.'

'Ah!' the Prince quietly exclaimed.

'Would it be,' Charlotte asked, 'your idea to offer me something?'

'Well, why not—as a small ricordo.'

'But a ricordo of what?'

'Why, of 'this'—as you yourself say. Of this little hunt.'

'Oh, I say it—but hasn't my whole point been that I don't ask you to. Therefore,' she demanded—but smiling at him now—'where's the logic?'

'Oh, the logic—!' he laughed.

'But logic's everything. That, at least, is how I feel it. A ricordo from you—from you to me—is a ricordo of nothing. It has no reference.'

'Ah, my dear!' he vaguely protested. Their entertainer, meanwhile, stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her friend than in anything else, again met his gaze. It was a comfort to her that their foreign tongue covered what they said—and they might have appeared of course, as the Prince now had one of the snuffboxes in his hand, to be discussing a purchase.

'You don't refer,' she went on to her companion. 'I refer.'

He had lifted the lid of his little box and he looked into it hard. 'Do you mean by that then that you would be free—?'

''Free'—?'

'To offer me something?'

This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. 'Would you allow me—?'

'No,' said the Prince into his little box.

'You wouldn't accept it from me?'

'No,' he repeated in the same way.

She exhaled a long breath that was like a guarded sigh. 'But you've touched an idea that HAS been mine. It's what I've wanted.' Then she added: 'It was what I hoped.'

He put down his box—this had drawn his eyes. He made nothing, clearly, of the little man's attention. 'It's what you brought me out for?'

'Well, that's, at any rate,' she returned, 'my own affair. But it won't do?'

'It won't do, cara mia.'

'It's impossible?'