It was quite for the Prince after this as if the view had further cleared; so that the half-hour during which he strolled on the terrace and smoked--the day being lovely--overflowed with the plenitude of its particular quality.
Its general brightness was composed doubtless of many elements, but what shone out of it as if the whole place and time had been a great picture, from the hand of genius, presented to him as a prime ornament for his collection and all varnished and framed to hang up--what marked it especially for the highest appreciation was his extraordinarily unchallenged, his absolutely appointed and enhanced possession of it. Poor Fanny Assingham's challenge amounted to nothing: one of the things he thought of while he leaned on the old marble balustrade--so like others that he knew in still more nobly-terraced Italy--was that she was squared, all conveniently even to herself, and that, rumbling toward London with this contentment, she had become an image irrelevant to the scene. It further passed across him--as his imagination was, for reasons, during the time, unprecedentedly active--that he had after all gained more from women than he had ever lost by them; there appeared so, more and more, on those mystic books that are kept, in connexion with such commerce, even by men of the loosest business habits, a balance in his favour that he could (351) pretty well as a rule take for granted.
What were they doing at this very moment, wonderful creatures, but trying to outdo each other in his interest?--from Maggie herself, most wonderful in her way of all, to his hostess of the present hour, into whose head it had so inevitably come to keep Charlotte on, for particular reasons, and who had asked in this benevolent spirit why in the world, if not obliged, without plausibility, to hurry, her husband's son-in-law should n't wait over in her company. He would at least see, Lady Castledean had said, that nothing dreadful should happen to her either while still there or during the exposure of the run to town; and, for that matter, if they exceeded a little their licence it would positively help them to have done so together.
Each of them would in this way have the other comfortably to complain of at home. All of which, besides, in Lady Castledean as in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in Charlotte herself, was working for him without provocation or pressure, by the mere play of some vague sense on their part--definite and conscious at the most only in Charlotte--that he was n't, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman, in fine, below his remarkable fortune.
But there were more things before him than even these; things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty. If the outlook was in every way spacious--and the towers of three cathedrals, in different counties, as had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver, in the rich sameness of tone--did n't he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean (352) had kept over a man of her own, and that this offered a certain sweet intelligibility as the note of the day? It made everything fit; above all it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he lingered and waited, his meditative smile.
She had detained Charlotte because she wished to detain Mr. Blint, and she could n't detain Mr. Blint, disposed though he clearly was to oblige her, without spreading over the act some ampler drapery. Castledean had gone up to London; the place was all her own; she had had a fancy for a quiet morning with Mr. Blint, a sleek civil accomplished young man--distinctly younger than her ladyship--who played and sang delightfully (played even "bridge" and sang the English-comic as well as the French-tragic), and the presence--which really meant the absence--of a couple of other friends, if they were happily chosen, would make everything all right. The Prince had the sense, all good-humouredly, of being happily chosen, and it was n't spoiled for him even by another sense that followed in its train and with which during his life in England he had more than once had reflectively to deal the state of being reminded how after all, as an outsider, a foreigner, and even as a mere representative husband and son-in-law, he was so irrelevant to the working of affairs that he could be bent on occasion to uses comparatively trivial. No other of her guests would have been thus convenient for their hostess; affairs, of whatever sorts, had claimed, by early trains, every active easy smoothly-working man, each in his way a lubricated item of the great social political administrative engrenage--claimed most of all Castledean (353) himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the type, rather a large item. If he, the great and the clever Roman, on the other hand, had an affair, it was n't of that order; it was of the order verily that he had been reduced to as to a not quite glorious substitute.
It marked however the feeling of the hour with the Prince that this vision of being "reduced" interfered not at all with the measure of his actual ease. It kept before him again at moments the so familiar fact of his sacrifices--down to the idea of the very relinquishment, for his wife's convenience, of his real situation in the world; with the consequence thus that he was, in the last analysis, among all these so often inferior people, practically held cheap and made light of. But though all this was sensible enough there was a spirit in him that could rise above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and harmonious, something wholly his own.
He could n't somehow take Mr. Blint seriously--he was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than a Roman prince who consented to be in abeyance.
