He had n't in any way challenged her, it was true, and, after those instants during which she now believed him to have been harbouring the impression of (17) something unusually prepared and pointed in her attitude and array, he had advanced upon her smiling and smiling, and thus, without hesitation at the last, had taken her into his arms. The hesitation had been at the first, and she at present saw that he had surmounted it without her help. She had given him no help; for if on the one hand she could n't speak for hesitation, so on the other--and especially as he did n't ask her--she could n't explain why she was agitated. She had known it all the while down to her toes, known it in his presence with fresh intensity, and if he had uttered but a question it would have pressed in her the spring of recklessness. It had been strange that the most natural thing of all to say to him should have had that appearance; but she was more than ever conscious that ANY appearance she had would come round more or less straight to her father, whose life was now so quiet, on the basis accepted for it, that the least alteration of his consciousness, even in the possible sense of enlivenment, would make their precious equilibrium waver. THAT was at the bottom of her mind, that their equilibrium was everything, and that it was practically precarious, a matter of a hair's breadth for the loss of the balance. It was the equilibrium, or at all events her conscious fear about it, that had brought her heart into her mouth; and the same fear was on either side in the silent look she and Amerigo had exchanged.
The happy balance that demanded this amount of consideration was truly thus, as by its own confession, a delicate matter; but that her husband had also HIS habit of anxiety and his general caution only brought them (18) after all more closely together. It would have been most beautifully therefore in the name of the equilibrium, and in that of her joy at their feeling so exactly the same about it, that she might have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the subject of her behaviour to ring out--on the subject of that poor little behaviour which was for the moment so very limited a case of eccentricity.
"'Why, why' have I made this evening such a point of our not all dining together? Well, because I've all day been so wanting you alone that I finally could n't bear it and that there did n't seem any great reason why I should try to. THAT came to me--funny as it may at first sound, with all the things we've so wonderfully got into the way of bearing for each other. You've seemed these last days--I don't know what: more absent than ever before, too absent for us merely to go on so. It's all very well, and I perfectly see how beautiful it is, all round; but there comes a day when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to the very brim, begins to flow over.
That's what has happened to my need of you--the cup, all day, has been too full to carry. So here I am with it, spilling it over you--and just for the reason that's the reason of my life. After all I've scarcely to explain that I'm as much in love with you now as the first hour; except that there are some hours--which I know when they come, because they almost frighten me--that show me I'm even more so. They come of themselves--and ah they've been coming! After all, after all--!" Some such words as those were what DID N'T ring out, yet it was as if even the unuttered (19) sound had been quenched here in its own quaver. It was where utterance would have broken down by its very weight if he had let it get so far. Without that extremity, at the end of a moment, he had taken in what he needed to take--that his wife was TESTIFYING, that she adored and missed and desired him. "After all, after all," since she put it so, she was right. That was what he had to respond to; that was what, from the moment that, as has been said, he "saw," he had to treat as the most pertinent thing possible.
He held her close and long, in expression of their personal reunion--this obviously was one way of doing so. He rubbed his cheek tenderly and with a deep vague murmur against her face, that side of her face she was not pressing to his breast. That was not less obviously another way, and there were ways enough in short for his extemporised ease, for the good humour she was afterwards to find herself thinking of as his infinite tact. This last was partly no doubt because the question of tact might be felt as having come up at the end of a quarter of an hour during which he had liberally talked and she had genially questioned. He had told her of his day, the happy thought of his roundabout journey with Charlotte, all their cathedral-hunting adventure, and how it had turned out rather more of an affair than they expected. The moral of it was at any rate that he was tired verily, and must have a bath and dress--to which end she would kindly excuse him for the shortest time possible. She was to remember afterwards something that had passed between them on this--how he had looked, for her, during an instant, at the door, before (20) going out, how he had met her asking him, in hesitation first, then quickly in decision, whether she could n't help him by going up with him. He had perhaps also for a moment hesitated, but he had declined her offer, and she was to preserve, as I say, the memory of the smile with which he had opined that at that rate they would n't dine till ten o'clock and that he should go straighter and faster alone.
Such things, as I say, were to come back to her--they played through her full after-sense like lights on the whole impression; the subsequent parts of the experience were not to have blurred their distinctness. One of these subsequent parts, the first, had been the not inconsiderable length, to her later and more analytic consciousness, of this second wait for her husband's reappearance. She might certainly, with the best will in the world, had she gone up with him, have been more in his way than not, since people could really almost always hurry better without help than with it.
Still she could hardly have made him take more time than he struck her as actually taking, though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking little person's state of mind no mere crudity of impatience.
Something had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro.
Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie's spirit, was always at first positive emergence of the sweet, and it was long since anything had been so sweet to her as the particular quality suddenly given by her present emotion to the sense of possession.
