The Golden Bowl — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 664 pages of information about The Golden Bowl — Complete.

The Golden Bowl — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 664 pages of information about The Golden Bowl — Complete.

He stood with his hands in his pockets; he had carried his eyes to the fragments on the chimney-piece, and she could already distinguish the element of relief, absolutely of succour, in his acceptance from her of the opportunity to consider the fruits of their friend’s violence—­every added inch of reflection and delay having the advantage, from this point on, of counting for him double.  It had operated within her now to the last intensity, her glimpse of the precious truth that by her helping him, helping him to help himself, as it were, she should help him to help her.  Hadn’t she fairly got into his labyrinth with him?—­wasn’t she indeed in the very act of placing herself there, for him, at its centre and core, whence, on that definite orientation and by an instinct all her own, she might securely guide him out of it?  She offered him thus, assuredly, a kind of support that was not to have been imagined in advance, and that moreover required—­ah most truly!—­some close looking at before it could be believed in and pronounced void of treachery.  “Yes, look, look,” she seemed to see him hear her say even while her sounded words were other—­ “look, look, both at the truth that still survives in that smashed evidence and at the even more remarkable appearance that I’m not such a fool as you supposed me.  Look at the possibility that, since I am different, there may still be something in it for you—­if you’re capable of working with me to get that out.  Consider of course, as you must, the question of what you may have to surrender, on your side, what price you may have to pay, whom you may have to pay with, to set this advantage free; but take in, at any rate, that there is something for you if you don’t too blindly spoil your chance for it.”  He went no nearer the damnatory pieces, but he eyed them, from where he stood, with a degree of recognition just visibly less to be dissimulated; all of which represented for her a certain traceable process.  And her uttered words, meanwhile, were different enough from those he might have inserted between the lines of her already-spoken.  “It’s the golden bowl, you know, that you saw at the little antiquario’s in Bloomsbury, so long ago—­when you went there with Charlotte, when you spent those hours with her, unknown to me, a day or two before our marriage.  It was shown you both, but you didn’t take it; you left it for me, and I came upon it, extraordinarily, through happening to go into the same shop on Monday last; in walking home, in prowling about to pick up some small old thing for father’s birthday, after my visit to the Museum, my appointment there with Mr. Crichton, of which I told you.  It was shown me, and I was struck with it and took it—­ knowing nothing about it at the time.  What I now know I’ve learned since—­I learned this afternoon, a couple of hours ago; receiving from it naturally a great impression.  So there it is—­ in its three pieces.  You can handle them—­don’t

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Project Gutenberg
The Golden Bowl — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.