her.
He came along the terrace again, with pauses during which his eyes rested, as they had already often done, on the brave darker wash of far-away watercolour that represented the most distant of the cathedral towns. This place, with its great church and its high accessibility, its towers that distinguishably signalled, its English history, its appealing type, its acknowledged interest, this place had sounded its name to him half the night through, and its name had become but another name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of things which now throbbed within him. He had kept saying to himself 'Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,' quite as if the sharpest meaning of all the years just passed were intensely expressed in it. That meaning was really that his situation remained quite sublimely consistent with itself, and that they absolutely, he and Charlotte, stood there together in the very lustre of this truth. Every present circumstance helped to proclaim it; it was blown into their faces as by the lips of the morning. He knew why, from the first of his marriage, he had tried with such patience for such conformity; he knew why he had given up so much and bored himself so much; he knew why he, at any rate, had gone in, on the basis of all forms, on the basis of his having, in a manner, sold himself, for a situation nette. It had all been just in order that his—well, what on earth should he call it but his freedom?—should at present be as perfect and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious pearl. He hadn't struggled nor snatched; he was taking but what had been given him; the pearl dropped itself, with its exquisite quality and rarity, straight into his hand. Here, precisely, it was, incarnate; its size and its value grew as Mrs. Verver appeared, afar off, in one of the smaller doorways. She came toward him in silence, while he moved to meet her; the great scale of this particular front, at Matcham, multiplied thus, in the golden morning, the stages of their meeting and the successions of their consciousness. It wasn't till she had come quite close that he produced for her his 'Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester,' and his 'Look at it over there!'
She knew just where to look. 'Yes—isn't it one of the best? There are cloisters or towers or some thing.' And her eyes, which, though her lips smiled, were almost grave with their depths of acceptance; came back to him. 'Or the tomb of some old king.'
'We must see the old king; we must 'do' the cathedral,' he said; 'we must know all about it. If we could but take,' he exhaled, 'the full opportunity!' And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes: 'I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together.'
'I feel it, as you always make me feel everything, just as you do; so that I know ten miles off how you feel! But do you remember,' she asked, 'apropos of great gold cups, the beautiful one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago and that you wouldn't have? Just before your marriage'—she brought it back to him: 'the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop.'
'Oh yes!'—but it took, with a slight surprise on the 'Prince's part, some small recollecting. 'The treacherous cracked thing you wanted to palm off on me, and the little swindling Jew who understood Italian and who backed you up! But I feel this an occasion,' he immediately added, 'and I hope you don't mean,' he smiled, 'that AS an occasion it's also cracked.'
They spoke, naturally, more low than loud, overlooked as they were, though at a respectful distance, by tiers of windows; but it made each find in the other's voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed. 'Don't you think too much of 'cracks,' and aren't you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks,' said Charlotte, 'and I've often recalled the bowl and the little swindling Jew, wondering if they've parted company. He made,' she said, 'a great impression on me.'
'Well, you also, no doubt, made a great impression on him, and I dare say that if you were to go back to him you'd find he has been keeping that treasure for you. But as to cracks,' the Prince went on—'what did you tell me the other day you prettily call them in English?-'rifts within the lute'?—risk them as much as you like for yourself, but don't risk them for me.' He spoke it in all the gaiety of his just barely-tremulous serenity. 'I go, as you know, by my superstitions. And that's why,' he said, 'I know where we are. They're every one, to-day, on our side.'
Resting on the parapet; toward the great view, she was silent a little, and he saw the next moment that her eyes were closed. 'I go but by one thing.' Her hand was on the sun-warmed stone; so that, turned as they were away from the house, he put his own upon it and covered it. 'I go by YOU,' she said. 'I go by you.'
So they remained a moment, till he spoke again with a gesture that matched. 'What is really our great necessity, you know, is to go by my watch. It's already eleven'—he had looked at the time; 'so that if we stop here to luncheon what becomes of our afternoon?'
To this Charlotte's eyes opened straight. 'There's not the slightest need of our stopping here to luncheon. Don't you see,' she asked, 'how I'm ready?' He had taken it in, but there was always more and more of her. 'You mean you've arranged—?'
'It's easy to arrange. My maid goes up with my things. You've only to speak to your man about yours, and they can go together.'
'You mean we can leave at once?'
She let him have it all. 'One of the carriages, about which I spoke, will already have come back for us. If your superstitions are on our side,' she smiled, 'so my arrangements are, and I'll back my support against yours.'
'Then you had thought,' he wondered, 'about Gloucester?'
She hesitated—but it was only her way. 'I thought you would think. We have, thank goodness, these harmonies. They are food for superstition if you like. It's beautiful,' she went on, 'that it should be Gloucester; 'Glo'ster, Glo'ster,' as you say, making it sound like an old song. However, I'm sure Glo'ster, Glo'ster will be charming,' she still added; 'we shall be able easily to lunch there, and, with our luggage and our servants off our hands, we shall have at least three or four hours. We can wire,' she wound up, 'from there.'
Ever so quietly she had brought it, as she had thought it, all out, and it had to be as covertly that he let his appreciation expand. 'Then Lady Castledean—?'
'Doesn't dream of our staying.'
He took it, but thinking yet. 'Then what does she dream—?'
'Of Mr. Blint, poor dear; of Mr. Blint only.' Her smile for him—for the Prince himself—was free. 'Have I positively to tell you that she doesn't want us? She only wanted us for the others—to show she wasn't left alone with him. Now that that's done, and that they've all gone, she of course knows for herself—!'
''Knows'?' the Prince vaguely echoed.
'Why, that we like cathedrals; that we inevitably stop to see them, or go round to take them in, whenever we've a chance; that it's what our respective families quite expect of us and would be disappointed for us to fail of. This, as forestieri,' Mrs. Verver pursued, 'would be our pull—if our pull weren't indeed so great all round.'
He could only keep his eyes on her. 'And have you made out the very train—?'
