XIV
Charlotte, half way up the “monumental” staircase, had begun by waiting alone—waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would know where to find her. She was meanwhile, though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised; but she would not have cared if she had been—so little was it, by this time, her first occasion of facing society with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly, enriched. For a couple of years now she had known as never before what it was to look “well”—to look, that is, as well as she had always felt, from far back, that, in certain conditions, she might. On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all profusely present; so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith as at the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood and meeting in consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the whole high pitch—much, in fact, as if she had pressed a finger on a chord or a key and created, for the number of seconds, an arrest of vibration, a more muffled thump. The sight of him suggested indeed that Fanny would be there, though so far as opportunity went she had not seen her. This was about the limit of what it could suggest.
The air, however, had suggestions enough—it abounded in them, many of them precisely helping to constitute those conditions with which, for our young woman, the hour was brilliantly crowned. She was herself in truth crowned, and it all hung together, melted together, in light and colour and sound: the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the PROVED private theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use—to which might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. For a crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was, doubtless, that helped her, while she waited, to the right assurance, to the right indifference, to the right expression, and above all, as she felt, to the right view of her opportunity for happiness—unless indeed the opportunity itself, rather, were, in its mere strange amplitude, the producing, the precipitating cause. The ordered revellers, rustling and shining, with sweep of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and yet, for all this, but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely vocal—the double stream of the coming and the going, flowing together where she stood, passed her, brushed her, treated her to much crude contemplation and now and then to a spasm of speech, an offered hand, even in some cases to an unencouraged pause; but she missed no countenance and invited no protection: she fairly liked to be, so long as she might, just as she was—exposed a little to the public, no doubt, in her unaccompanied state, but, even if it were a bit brazen, careless of queer reflections on the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since it was a question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions of her own. She hoped no one would stop—she was positively keeping herself; it was her idea to mark in a particular manner the importance of something that had just happened. She knew how she should mark it, and what she was doing there made already a beginning.
When presently, therefore, from her standpoint, she saw the Prince come back she had an impression of all the place as higher and wider and more appointed for great moments; with its dome of lustres lifted, its ascents and descents more majestic, its marble tiers more vividly overhung, its numerosity of royalties, foreign and domestic, more unprecedented, its symbolism of “State” hospitality both emphasised and refined. This was doubtless a large consequence of a fairly familiar cause, a considerable inward stir to spring from the mere vision, striking as that might be, of Amerigo in a crowd; but she had her reasons, she held them there, she carried them in fact, responsibly and overtly, as she carried her head, her high tiara, her folded fan, her indifferent, unattended eminence; and it was when he reached her and she could, taking his arm, show herself as placed in her relation, that she felt supremely justified. It was her notion of course that she gave a glimpse of but few of her grounds for this discrimination—indeed of the most evident alone; yet she would have been half willing it should be guessed how she drew inspiration, drew support, in quantity sufficient for almost anything, from the individual value that, through all the picture, her husband’s son-in-law kept for the eye, deriving it from his fine unconscious way, in the swarming social sum, of outshining, overlooking and overtopping. It was as if in separation, even the shortest, she half forgot or disbelieved how he affected her sight, so that reappearance had, in him, each time, a virtue of its own—a kind of disproportionate intensity suggesting his connection with occult sources of renewal. What did he do when he was away from her that made him always come back only looking, as she would have called it, “more so?” Superior to any shade of cabotinage, he yet almost resembled an actor who, between his moments on the stage, revisits his dressing-room and, before the glass, pressed by his need of effect, retouches his make-up. The Prince was at present, for instance, though he had quitted her but ten minutes before, still more than then the person it pleased her to be left with—a truth that had all its force for her while he made her his care for their conspicuous return together to the upper rooms. Conspicuous beyond any wish they could entertain was what, poor wonderful man, he couldn’t help making it; and when she raised her eyes again, on the ascent, to Bob Assingham, still aloft in his gallery and still looking down at her, she was aware that, in spite of hovering and warning inward voices, she even enjoyed the testimony rendered by his lonely vigil to the lustre she reflected.
He was always lonely at great parties, the dear Colonel—it wasn’t in such places that the seed he sowed at home was ever reaped by him; but nobody could have seemed to mind it less, to brave it with more bronzed indifference; so markedly that he moved about less like one of the guests than like some quite presentable person in charge of the police arrangements or the electric light. To Mrs. Verver, as will be seen, he represented, with the perfect good faith of his apparent blankness, something definite enough; though her bravery was not thereby too blighted for her to feel herself calling him to witness that the only witchcraft her companion had used, within the few minutes, was that of attending Maggie, who had withdrawn from the scene, to her carriage. Notified, at all events, of Fanny’s probable presence, Charlotte was, for a while after this, divided between the sense of it as a fact somehow to reckon with and deal with, which was a perception that made, in its degree, for the prudence, the pusillanimity of postponement, of avoidance—and a quite other feeling, an impatience that presently ended by prevailing, an eagerness, really, to BE suspected, sounded, veritably arraigned, if only that she might have the bad moment over, if only that she might prove to herself, let alone to Mrs. Assingham also, that she could convert it to good; if only, in short, to be “square,” as they said, with her question. For herself indeed, particularly, it wasn’t a question; but something in her bones told her that Fanny would treat it as one, and there was truly nothing that, from this friend, she was not bound in decency to take. She might hand things back with every tender precaution, with acknowledgments and assurances, but she owed it to them, in any case, and it to all Mrs. Assingham had done for her, not to get rid of them without having well unwrapped and turned them over.
To-night, as happened—and she recognised it more and more, with the ebbing minutes, as an influence of everything about her—to-night exactly, she would, no doubt, since she knew why, be as firm as she might at any near moment again hope to be for going through that process with the right temper and tone. She said, after a little, to the Prince, “Stay with me; let no one take you; for I want her, yes, I do want her to see us together, and the sooner the better”—said it to keep her hand on him through constant diversions, and made him, in fact, by saying it, profess a momentary vagueness. She had to explain to him that it was Fanny Assingham, she wanted to see—who clearly would be there, since the Colonel never either stirred without her or, once arrived, concerned himself for her fate; and she had, further, after Amerigo had met her with “See us together? why in the world? hasn’t she often seen us together?” to inform him that what had elsewhere and otherwise happened didn’t now matter and that she at any rate well knew, for the occasion, what she was about. “You’re strange, cara mia,” he consentingly enough dropped; but, for whatever strangeness, he kept her, as they circulated, from being waylaid, even remarking to her afresh as he had often done before, on the help rendered, in such situations, by the intrinsic oddity of the London “squash,” a thing of vague, slow, senseless eddies, revolving as in fear of some menace of conversation suspended over it, the drop of which, with some consequent refreshing splash or spatter, yet never took place. Of course she was strange; this, as they went, Charlotte knew for herself: how could she be anything else when the situation holding her, and holding him, for that matter, just as much, had so the stamp of it? She had already accepted her consciousness, as we have already noted, that a crisis, for them all, was in the air; and when such hours were not depressing, which was the form indeed in which she had mainly known them, they were apparently in a high degree exhilarating.
Later on, in a corner to which, at sight of an empty sofa, Mrs. Assingham had, after a single attentive arrest, led her with a certain earnestness, this vision of the critical was much more sharpened than blurred. Fanny had taken it from her: yes, she was there with Amerigo alone, Maggie having come with them and then, within ten minutes, changed her mind, repented and departed. “So you’re staying on together without her?” the elder woman had asked; and it was Charlotte’s answer to this that had determined for them, quite indeed according to the latter’s expectation, the need of some seclusion and her companion’s pounce at the sofa. They were staying on together alone, and—oh distinctly!—it was alone that Maggie had driven away, her father, as usual, not having managed to come. “‘As usual’—?” Mrs. Assingham had seemed to wonder; Mr. Verver’s reluctances not having, she in fact quite intimated, hitherto struck her. Charlotte responded, at any rate, that his indisposition to go out had lately much increased—even though to-night, as she admitted, he had pleaded his not feeling well. Maggie had wished to stay with him—for the Prince and she, dining out, had afterwards called in Portland Place, whence, in the event, they had brought her, Charlotte, on. Maggie had come but to oblige her father—she had urged the two others to go without her; then she had yielded, for the time, to Mr. Verver’s persuasion. But here, when they had, after the long wait in the carriage, fairly got in; here, once up the stairs, with the rooms before them, remorse had ended by seizing her: she had listened to no other remonstrance, and at present therefore, as Charlotte put it, the two were doubtless making together a little party at home. But it was all right—so Charlotte also put it: there was nothing in the world they liked better than these snatched felicities, little parties, long talks, with “I’ll come to you to-morrow,” and “No, I’ll come to you,” make-believe renewals of their old life. They were fairly, at times, the dear things, like children playing at paying visits, playing at “Mr. Thompson” and “Mrs. Fane,” each hoping that the other would really stay to tea. Charlotte was sure she should find Maggie there on getting home—a remark in which Mrs. Verver’s immediate response to her friend’s inquiry had culminated. She had thus, on the spot, the sense of having given her plenty to think about, and that moreover of liking to see it even better than she had expected. She had plenty to think about herself, and there was already something in Fanny that made it seem still more.
“You say your husband’s ill? He felt too ill to come?”
“No, my dear—I think not. If he had been too ill I wouldn’t have left him.”
“And yet Maggie was worried?” Mrs. Assingham asked.
“She worries, you know, easily. She’s afraid of influenza—of which he has had, at different times, though never with the least gravity, several attacks.”
“But you’re not afraid of it?”
Charlotte had for a moment a pause; it had continued to come to her that really to have her case “out,” as they said, with the person in the world to whom her most intimate difficulties had oftenest referred themselves, would help her, on the whole, more than hinder; and under that feeling all her opportunity, with nothing kept back; with a thing or two perhaps even thrust forward, seemed temptingly to open. Besides, didn’t Fanny at bottom half expect, absolutely at the bottom half WANT, things?—so that she would be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn’t get something to put between the teeth of her so restless rumination, that cultivation of the fear, of which our young woman had already had glimpses, that she might have “gone too far” in her irrepressible interest in other lives. What had just happened—it pieced itself together for Charlotte—was that the Assingham pair, drifting like everyone else, had had somewhere in the gallery, in the rooms, an accidental concussion; had it after the Colonel, over his balustrade, had observed, in the favouring high light, her public junction with the Prince. His very dryness, in this encounter, had, as always, struck a spark from his wife’s curiosity, and, familiar, on his side, with all that she saw in things, he had thrown her, as a fine little bone to pick, some report of the way one of her young friends was “going on” with another. He knew perfectly—such at least was Charlotte’s liberal assumption—that she wasn’t going on with anyone, but she also knew that, given the circumstances, she was inevitably to be sacrificed, in some form or another, to the humorous intercourse of the inimitable couple. The Prince meanwhile had also, under coercion, sacrificed her; the Ambassador had come up to him with a message from Royalty, to whom he was led away; after which she had talked for five minutes with Sir John Brinder, who had been of the Ambassador’s company and who had rather artlessly remained with her. Fanny had then arrived in sight of them at the same moment as someone else she didn’t know, someone who knew Mrs. Assingham and also knew Sir John. Charlotte had left it to her friend’s competence to throw the two others immediately together and to find a way for entertaining her in closer quarters. This was the little history of the vision, in her, that was now rapidly helping her to recognise a precious chance, the chance that mightn’t again soon be so good for the vivid making of a point. Her point was before her; it was sharp, bright, true; above all it was her own. She had reached it quite by herself; no one, not even Amerigo—Amerigo least of all, who would have nothing to do with it—had given her aid. To make it now with force for Fanny Assingham’s benefit would see her further, in the direction in which the light had dawned, than any other spring she should, yet awhile, doubtless, be able to press. The direction was that of her greater freedom—which was all in the world she had in mind. Her opportunity had accordingly, after a few minutes of Mrs. Assingham’s almost imprudently interested expression of face, positively acquired such a price for her that she may, for ourselves, while the intensity lasted, rather resemble a person holding out a small mirror at arm’s length and consulting it with a special turn of the head. It was, in a word, with this value of her chance that she was intelligently playing when she said in answer to Fanny’s last question: “Don’t you remember what you told me, on the occasion of something or other, the other day? That you believe there’s nothing I’m afraid of? So, my dear, don’t ask me!”
“Mayn’t I ask you,” Mrs. Assingham returned, “how the case stands with your poor husband?”
“Certainly, dear. Only, when you ask me as if I mightn’t perhaps know what to think, it seems to me best to let you see that I know perfectly what to think.”
Mrs. Assingham hesitated; then, blinking a little, she took her risk. “You didn’t think that if it was a question of anyone’s returning to him, in his trouble, it would be better you yourself should have gone?”
Well, Charlotte’s answer to this inquiry visibly shaped itself in the interest of the highest considerations. The highest considerations were good humour, candour, clearness and, obviously, the REAL truth. “If we couldn’t be perfectly frank and dear with each other, it would be ever so much better, wouldn’t it? that we shouldn’t talk about anything at all; which, however, would be dreadful—and we certainly, at any rate, haven’t yet come to it. You can ask me anything under the sun you like, because, don’t you see? you can’t upset me.”
“I’m sure, my dear Charlotte,” Fanny Assingham laughed, “I don’t want to upset you.”
“Indeed, love, you simply COULDN’T even if you thought it necessary—that’s all I mean. Nobody could, for it belongs to my situation that I’m, by no merit of my own, just fixed—fixed as fast as a pin stuck, up to its head, in a cushion. I’m placed—I can’t imagine anyone MORE placed. There I AM!”
Fanny had indeed never listened to emphasis more firmly applied, and it brought into her own eyes, though she had reasons for striving to keep them from betrayals, a sort of anxiety of intelligence. “I dare say—but your statement of your position, however you see it, isn’t an answer to my inquiry. It seems to me, at the same time, I confess,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to give but the more reason for it. You speak of our being ‘frank.’ How can we possibly be anything else? If Maggie has gone off through finding herself too distressed to stay, and if she’s willing to leave you and her husband to show here without her, aren’t the grounds of her preoccupation more or less discussable?”
“If they’re not,” Charlotte replied, “it’s only from their being, in a way, too evident. They’re not grounds for me—they weren’t when I accepted Adam’s preference that I should come to-night without him: just as I accept, absolutely, as a fixed rule, ALL his preferences. But that doesn’t alter the fact, of course, that my husband’s daughter, rather than his wife, should have felt SHE could, after all, be the one to stay with him, the one to make the sacrifice of this hour—seeing, especially, that the daughter has a husband of her own in the field.” With which she produced, as it were, her explanation. “I’ve simply to see the truth of the matter—see that Maggie thinks more, on the whole, of fathers than of husbands. And my situation is such,” she went on, “that this becomes immediately, don’t you understand? a thing I have to count with.”
Mrs. Assingham, vaguely heaving, panting a little but trying not to show it, turned about, from some inward spring, in her seat. “If you mean such a thing as that she doesn’t adore the Prince—!”
“I don’t say she doesn’t adore him. What I say is that she doesn’t think of him. One of those conditions doesn’t always, at all stages, involve the other. This is just HOW she adores him,” Charlotte said. “And what reason is there, in the world, after all, why he and I shouldn’t, as you say, show together? We’ve shown together, my dear,” she smiled, “before.”
Her friend, for a little, only looked at her—speaking then with abruptness. “You ought to be absolutely happy. You live with such GOOD people.”
The effect of it, as well, was an arrest for Charlotte; whose face, however, all of whose fine and slightly hard radiance, it had caused, the next instant, further to brighten. “Does one ever put into words anything so fatuously rash? It’s a thing that must be said, in prudence, FOR one—by somebody who’s so good as to take the responsibility: the more that it gives one always a chance to show one’s best manners by not contradicting it. Certainly, you’ll never have the distress, or whatever, of hearing me complain.”
“Truly, my dear, I hope in all conscience not!” and the elder woman’s spirit found relief in a laugh more resonant than was quite advised by their pursuit of privacy.
To this demonstration her friend gave no heed. “With all our absence after marriage, and with the separation from her produced in particular by our so many months in America, Maggie has still arrears, still losses to make up—still the need of showing how, for so long, she simply kept missing him. She missed his company—a large allowance of which is, in spite of everything else, of the first necessity to her. So she puts it in when she can—a little here, a little there, and it ends by making up a considerable amount. The fact of our distinct establishments—which has, all the same, everything in its favour,” Charlotte hastened to declare, “makes her really see more of him than when they had the same house. To make sure she doesn’t fail of it she’s always arranging for it—which she didn’t have to do while they lived together. But she likes to arrange,” Charlotte steadily proceeded; “it peculiarly suits her; and the result of our separate households is really, for them, more contact and more intimacy. To-night, for instance, has been practically an arrangement. She likes him best alone. And it’s the way,” said our young woman, “in which he best likes HER. It’s what I mean therefore by being ‘placed.’ And the great thing is, as they say, to ‘know’ one’s place. Doesn’t it all strike you,” she wound up, “as rather placing the Prince too?”
Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. So she picked out, after consideration, a solitary plum. “So placed that YOU have to arrange?”
“Certainly I have to arrange.”
“And the Prince also—if the effect for him is the same?”
“Really, I think, not less.”
“And does he arrange,” Mrs. Assingham asked, “to make up HIS arrears?” The question had risen to her lips—it was as if another morsel, on the dish, had tempted her. The sound of it struck her own ear, immediately, as giving out more of her thought than she had as yet intended; but she quickly saw that she must follow it up, at any risk, with simplicity, and that what was simplest was the ease of boldness. “Make them up, I mean, by coming to see YOU?”
Charlotte replied, however, without, as her friend would have phrased it, turning a hair. She shook her head, but it was beautifully gentle. “He never comes.”
“Oh!” said Fanny Assingham: with which she felt a little stupid. “There it is. He might so well, you know, otherwise.”
“‘Otherwise’?”—and Fanny was still vague.
It passed, this time, over her companion, whose eyes, wandering, to a distance, found themselves held. The Prince was at hand again; the Ambassador was still at his side; they were stopped a moment by a uniformed personage, a little old man, of apparently the highest military character, bristling with medals and orders. This gave Charlotte time to go on. “He has not been for three months.” And then as with her friend’s last word in her ear: “‘Otherwise’—yes. He arranges otherwise. And in my position,” she added, “I might too. It’s too absurd we shouldn’t meet.”
“You’ve met, I gather,” said Fanny Assingham, “to-night.”
“Yes—as far as that goes. But what I mean is that I might—placed for it as we both are—go to see HIM.”
“And do you?” Fanny asked with almost mistaken solemnity.
The perception of this excess made Charlotte, whether for gravity or for irony, hang fire a minute. “I HAVE been. But that’s nothing,” she said, “in itself, and I tell you of it only to show you how our situation works. It essentially becomes one, a situation, for both of us. The Prince’s, however, is his own affair—I meant but to speak of mine.”
“Your situation’s perfect,” Mrs. Assingham presently declared.
“I don’t say it isn’t. Taken, in fact, all round, I think it is. And I don’t, as I tell you, complain of it. The only thing is that I have to act as it demands of me.”
“To ‘act’?” said Mrs. Assingham with an irrepressible quaver.
“Isn’t it acting, my dear, to accept it? I do accept it. What do you want me to do less?”
“I want you to believe that you’re a very fortunate person.”
“Do you call that LESS?” Charlotte asked with a smile. “From the point of view of my freedom I call it more. Let it take, my position, any name you like.”
“Don’t let it, at any rate”—and Mrs. Assingham’s impatience prevailed at last over her presence of mind—“don’t let it make you think too much of your freedom.”
“I don’t know what you call too much—for how can I not see it as it is? You’d see your own quickly enough if the Colonel gave you the same liberty—and I haven’t to tell you, with your so much greater knowledge of everything, what it is that gives such liberty most. For yourself personally of course,” Charlotte went on, “you only know the state of neither needing it nor missing it. Your husband doesn’t treat you as of less importance to him than some other woman.”
“Ah, don’t talk to me of other women!” Fanny now overtly panted. “Do you call Mr. Verver’s perfectly natural interest in his daughter—?”
“The greatest affection of which he is capable?” Charlotte took it up in all readiness. “I do distinctly—and in spite of my having done all I could think of—to make him capable of a greater. I’ve done, earnestly, everything I could—I’ve made it, month after month, my study. But I haven’t succeeded—it has been vividly brought home to me to-night. However,” she pursued, “I’ve hoped against hope, for I recognise that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned.” And then as she met in her friend’s face the absence of any such remembrance: “He did tell me that he wanted me just BECAUSE I could be useful about her.” With which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. “So you see I AM!”
It was on Fanny Assingham’s lips for the moment to reply that this was, on the contrary, exactly what she didn’t see; she came in fact within an ace of saying: “You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work—since, by your account, Maggie has him not less, but so much more, on her mind. How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated?” But she saved herself in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was “more in it” than any admission she had made represented—and she had held herself familiar with admissions: so that, not to seem to understand where she couldn’t accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn’t approve, and could still less, with precipitation, advise, she invoked the mere appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young friend’s consistency. The only thing was that, as she was quickly enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess. It brought her, her invocation, too abruptly to her feet. She brushed away everything. “I can’t conceive, my dear, what you’re talking about!”
Charlotte promptly rose then, as might be, to meet it, and her colour, for the first time, perceptibly heightened. She looked, for the minute, as her companion had looked—as if twenty protests, blocking each other’s way, had surged up within her. But when Charlotte had to make a selection, her selection was always the most effective possible. It was happy now, above all, for being made not in anger but in sorrow. “You give me up then?”
“Give you up—?”
“You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend’s loyalty? If you do you’re not just, Fanny; you’re even, I think,” she went on, “rather cruel; and it’s least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion.” She spoke, at the same time, with the noblest moderation of tone, and the image of high, pale, lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendour, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet enjoy the last word, as it is called in such cases, with a perfection void of any vulgarity of triumph. She merely completed, for truth’s sake, her demonstration. “What is a quarrel with me but a quarrel with my right to recognise the conditions of my bargain? But I can carry them out alone,” she said as she turned away. She turned to meet the Ambassador and the Prince, who, their colloquy with their Field-Marshal ended, were now at hand and had already, between them, she was aware, addressed her a remark that failed to penetrate the golden glow in which her intelligence was temporarily bathed. She had made her point, the point she had foreseen she must make; she had made it thoroughly and once for all, so that no more making was required; and her success was reflected in the faces of the two men of distinction before her, unmistakably moved to admiration by her exceptional radiance. She at first but watched this reflection, taking no note of any less adequate form of it possibly presented by poor Fanny—poor Fanny left to stare at her incurred “score,” chalked up in so few strokes on the wall; then she took in what the Ambassador was saying, in French, what he was apparently repeating to her.
“A desire for your presence, Madame, has been expressed en tres-haut lieu, and I’ve let myself in for the responsibility, to say nothing of the honour, of seeing, as the most respectful of your friends, that so august an impatience is not kept waiting.” The greatest possible Personage had, in short, according to the odd formula of societies subject to the greatest personages possible, “sent for” her, and she asked, in her surprise, “What in the world does he want to do to me?” only to know, without looking, that Fanny’s bewilderment was called to a still larger application, and to hear the Prince say with authority, indeed with a certain prompt dryness: “You must go immediately—it’s a summons.” The Ambassador, using authority as well, had already somehow possessed himself of her hand, which he drew into his arm, and she was further conscious as she went off with him that, though still speaking for her benefit, Amerigo had turned to Fanny Assingham. He would explain afterwards—besides which she would understand for herself. To Fanny, however, he had laughed—as a mark, apparently, that for this infallible friend no explanation at all would be necessary.
XV
It may be recorded none the less that the Prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded. Alone with him now Mrs. Assingham was incorruptible. “They send for Charlotte through YOU?”
“No, my dear; as you see, through the Ambassador.”
“Ah, but the Ambassador and you, for the last quarter-of-an-hour, have been for them as one. He’s YOUR ambassador.” It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it the more she saw in it. “They’ve connected her with you—she’s treated as your appendage.”
“Oh, my ‘appendage,’” the Prince amusedly exclaimed—“cara mia, what a name! She’s treated, rather, say, as my ornament and my glory. And it’s so remarkable a case for a mother-in-law that you surely can’t find fault with it.”
“You’ve ornaments enough, it seems to me—as you’ve certainly glories enough—without her. And she’s not the least little bit,” Mrs. Assingham observed, “your mother-in-law. In such a matter a shade of difference is enormous. She’s no relation to you whatever, and if she’s known in high quarters but as going about with you, then—then—!” She failed, however, as from positive intensity of vision. “Then, then what?” he asked with perfect good-nature.
“She had better in such a case not be known at all.”
“But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them,” said the young man, still amused, “if they didn’t want to see her? You surely don’t need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself—that she does so above all on such an occasion as this and looking as she does to-night. How, so looking, can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have ‘success’? Besides,” he added as she but watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if she wanted to see how he would say it, “besides, there IS always the fact that we’re of the same connection, of—what is your word?—the same ‘concern.’ We’re certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal acquaintances. We’re in the same boat”—and the Prince smiled with a candour that added an accent to his emphasis.
Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner: it caused her to turn for a moment’s refuge to a corner of her general consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad SHE wasn’t in love with such a man. As with Charlotte just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. “It only appears to me of great importance that—now that you all seem more settled here—Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as, in particular, her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don’t know what you mean by the ‘same’ boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver’s boat.”
“And, pray, am I not in Mr. Verver’s boat too? Why, but for Mr. Verver’s boat, I should have been by this time”—and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths—“away down, down, down.” She knew of course what he meant—how it had taken his father-in-law’s great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float; and with this reminder other things came to her—how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn’t mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure SHE could take in this specimen of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, COULDN’T suffer, to whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered. He was a huge expense assuredly—but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent. And that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father— this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.
“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. “I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-in-law too. It’s as if he had saved us both—which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don’t you remember”—he kept it up—“how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage?” And then as his friend’s face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: “Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right—and so was she. That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn’t it? Only—what she has got—something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better—once you allow her the way it’s to be taken. Of course if you don’t allow her that the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom— which, I judge, she’ll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The ‘boat,’ you see”—the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly—“is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you’ll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can’t help occasionally doing the same. It isn’t even a question, sometimes, of one’s getting to the dock—one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion’s track—for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination—call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable—and, above all, as not endangering life or limb? We shan’t drown, we shan’t sink—at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver too, moreover—do her the justice—visibly knows how to swim.”
He could easily go on, for she didn’t interrupt him; Fanny felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn’t, in a manner, catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments, positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnamable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that GAVE THEM AWAY, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Wasn’t it, however gross, such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their REALLY treating their subject—of course on some better occasion—and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. This was when he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought—on the manner of which he couldn’t have improved—to complete his successful simile by another, in fact by just the supreme touch, the touch for which it had till now been waiting. “For Mrs. Verver to be known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband’s wife, something is wanted that, you know, they haven’t exactly got. He should manage to be known—or at least to be seen—a little more as his wife’s husband. You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has his own habits and his own ways, and that he makes, more and more—as of course he has a perfect right to do—his own discriminations. He’s so perfect, so ideal a father, and, doubtless largely by that very fact, a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-in-law, that I should really feel it base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to criticise him. To YOU, nevertheless, I may make just one remark; for you’re not stupid—you always understand so blessedly what one means.”
He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for him should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it. Nothing would have induced her, however, to encourage him; she was now conscious of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly, as it were, so tight; she felt like the horse of the adage, brought—and brought by her own fault—to the water, but strong, for the occasion, in the one fact that she couldn’t be forced to drink. Invited, in other words, to understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to. It was sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain, in advance, of his remark; that she heard it before it had sounded, that she already tasted, in fine, the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility. But her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred by her silence. “What I really don’t see is why, from his own point of view—given, that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood—he should have wished to marry at all.” There it was then—exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her. Yet she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs, then and there; not to suffer, odiously, helplessly, in public—which could be prevented but by her breaking off, with whatever inconsequence; by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly wanted to go home much as she had wanted, an hour or two before, to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had, abruptly, taken such vivid form—but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight. Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger—such light, as from open crevices, it let in; and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything else. The worst in fact came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly recognise. Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. “I’m afraid, however,” the Prince said, “that I, for some reason, distress you—for which I beg your pardon. We’ve always talked so well together—it has been, from the beginning, the greatest pull for me.” Nothing so much as such a tone could have quickened her collapse; she felt he had her now at his mercy, and he showed, as he went on, that he knew it. “We shall talk again, all the same, better than ever—I depend on it too much. Don’t you remember what I told you, so definitely, one day before my marriage?—that, moving as I did in so many ways among new things, mysteries, conditions, expectations, assumptions different from any I had known, I looked to you, as my original sponsor, my fairy godmother, to see me through. I beg you to believe,” he added, “that I look to you yet.”
His very insistence had, fortunately, the next moment, affected her as bringing her help; with which, at least, she could hold up her head to speak. “Ah, you ARE through—you were through long ago. Or if you aren’t you ought to be.”
“Well then, if I ought to be it’s all the more reason why you should continue to help me. Because, very distinctly, I assure you, I’m not. The new things or ever so many of them—are still for me new things; the mysteries and expectations and assumptions still contain an immense element that I’ve failed to puzzle out. As we’ve happened, so luckily, to find ourselves again really taking hold together, you must let me, as soon as possible, come to see you; you must give me a good, kind hour. If you refuse it me”—and he addressed himself to her continued reserve—“I shall feel that you deny, with a stony stare, your responsibility.”
At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate vessel. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. “Oh, I deny responsibility—to YOU. So far as I ever had it I’ve done with it.”
He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she made his look, now, penetrate her again more. “As to whom then do you confess it?”
“Ah, mio caro, that’s—if to anyone—my own business!”
He continued to look at her hard. “You give me up then?”
It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and its coming from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the point of replying “Do you and she agree together for what you’ll say to me?”—but she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. “I think I don’t know what to make of you.”
“You must receive me at least,” he said.
“Oh, please, not till I’m ready for you!”—and, though she found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for her as if she were altogether afraid of him.
XVI
Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath. She had stood for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake. For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had, in the past, been active, for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded, at first, in her corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the window of the brougham, a world mercifully unconscious and unreproachful. It wouldn’t, like the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it, at least, only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house-front, she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest, not less quickly, against mere blind terror. It had become, for the occasion, preposterously, terror—of which she must shake herself free before she could properly measure her ground. The perception of this necessity had in truth soon aided her; since she found, on trying, that, lurid as her prospect might hover there, she could none the less give it no name. The sense of seeing was strong in her, but she clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw. Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were embrued; since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause she should surely be less vague about what she had produced. This, further, in its way, was a step toward reflecting that when one’s connection with any matter was too indirect to be traced it might be described also as too slight to be deplored. By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place she had in fact recognised that she couldn’t be as curious as she desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as innocent. But there had been a moment, in the dim desert of Eaton Square, when she broke into speech.
“It’s only their defending themselves so much more than they need—it’s only THAT that makes me wonder. It’s their having so remarkably much to say for themselves.”
Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. “You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?” To which, as she made no answer, the Colonel added: “What in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen? The man’s in a position in which he has nothing in life to do.”
Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband’s company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him. “He has behaved beautifully—he did from the first. I’ve thought it, all along, wonderful of him; and I’ve more than once, when I’ve had a chance, told him so. Therefore, therefore—!” But it died away as she mused.
“Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?”
“It isn’t a question, of course, however,” she undivertedly went on, “of their behaving beautifully apart. It’s a question of their doing as they should when together—which is another matter.”
“And how do you think then,” the Colonel asked with interest, “that, when together, they SHOULD do? The less they do, one would say, the better—if you see so much in it.”
His wife, at this, appeared to hear him. “I don’t see in it what YOU’D see. And don’t, my dear,” she further answered, “think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. They’re the last people, really, to make anything of that sort come in right.”
“I’m surely never horrid or low,” he returned, “about anyone but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our friends—as I see them myself: what I can’t do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up—!” But he exhaled it again in smoke.
“My additions don’t matter when you’ve not to pay the bill.” With which her meditation again bore her through the air. “The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn’t afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was—if I hadn’t seen he wasn’t—so,” said Mrs. Assingham, “could I. So,” she declared, “WOULD I. It’s perfectly true,” she went on—“it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted. And I LIKED his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn’t have faced it. Then, if SHE had not had confidence, we might have talked. But she had it to any amount.”
“Did you ask her how much?” Bob Assingham patiently inquired.
He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed, this time, the sharpest spring of response. “Never, never—it wasn’t a time to ‘ask.’ Asking is suggesting—and it wasn’t a time to suggest. One had to make up one’s mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as—for so proud a creature—almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due.”
“That is to Mrs. Assingham?”
She said nothing for a little—there were, after all, alternatives. “Maggie herself of course—astonishing little Maggie.”
“Is Maggie then astonishing too?”—and he gloomed out of his window.
His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look. “I’m not sure that I don’t begin to see more in her than—dear little person as I’ve always thought—I ever supposed there was. I’m not sure that, putting a good many things together, I’m not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary.”
“You certainly will if you can,” the Colonel resignedly remarked.
Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke out. “In fact—I do begin to feel it—Maggie’s the great comfort. I’m getting hold of it. It will be SHE who’ll see us through. In fact she’ll have to. And she’ll be able.”
Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but with a cumulative effect for her husband’s general sense of her method that caused him to overflow, whimsically enough, in his corner, into an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr. Verver. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy!”
“If she is, however,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “she’ll be extraordinary enough—and that’s what I’m thinking of. But I’m not indeed so very sure,” she added, “of the person to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful. I mean I’m not sure if that person is even almost the incredible little idealist who has made her his wife.”
“I shouldn’t think you would be, love,” the Colonel with some promptness responded. “Charlotte as the wife of an incredible little idealist—!” His cigar, in short, once more, could alone express it.
“Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was really going to be?”—this memory, for the full view, Fanny found herself also invoking.
It made her companion, in truth, slightly gape. “An incredible little idealist—Charlotte herself?”
“And she was sincere,” his wife simply proceeded “she was unmistakably sincere. The question is only how much is left of it.”
“And that—I see—happens to be another of the questions you can’t ask her. You have to do it all,” said Bob Assingham, “as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up—though who’s to come down on you if you break them I don’t quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses—like forfeits on Christmas eve?” To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from her, he further added: “How much of anything will have to be left for you to be able to go on with it?”
“I shall go on,” Fanny Assingham a trifle grimly declared, “while there’s a scrap as big as your nail. But we’re not yet, luckily, reduced only to that.” She had another pause, holding the while the thread of that larger perception into which her view of Mrs. Verver’s obligation to Maggie had suddenly expanded. “Even if her debt was not to the others—even then it ought to be quite sufficiently to the Prince himself to keep her straight. For what, really, did the Prince do,” she asked herself, “but generously trust her? What did he do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was because she felt herself strong? That creates for her, upon my word,” Mrs. Assingham pursued, “a duty of considering him, of honourably repaying his trust, which—well, which she’ll be really a fiend if she doesn’t make the law of her conduct. I mean of course his trust that she wouldn’t interfere with him—expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical time.”
The brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel’s next meditation to flower in a fashion almost surprising to his wife. They were united, for the most part, but by his exhausted patience; so that indulgent despair was generally, at the best, his note. He at present, however, actually compromised with his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had followed her steps. He literally asked, in short, an intelligent, well nigh a sympathising, question. “Gratitude to the Prince for not having put a spoke in her wheel—that, you mean, should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of her boat?”
“Taking it in the right way.” Fanny, catching at this gleam, emphasised the proviso.
“But doesn’t it rather depend on what she may most feel to BE the right way?”
“No—it depends on nothing. Because there’s only one way—for duty or delicacy.”
“Oh—delicacy!” Bob Assingham rather crudely murmured.
“I mean the highest kind—moral. Charlotte’s perfectly capable of appreciating that. By every dictate of moral delicacy she must let him alone.”
“Then you’ve made up your mind it’s all poor Charlotte?” he asked with an effect of abruptness.
The effect, whether intended or not, reached her—brought her face short round. It was a touch at which she again lost her balance, at which, somehow, the bottom dropped out of her recovered comfort. “Then you’ve made up yours differently? It really struck you that there IS something?”
The movement itself, apparently, made him once more stand off. He had felt on his nearer approach the high temperature of the question. “Perhaps that’s just what she’s doing: showing him how much she’s letting him alone—pointing it out to him from day to day.”
“Did she point it out by waiting for him to-night on the stair-case in the manner you described to me?”
“I really, my dear, described to you a manner?” the Colonel, clearly, from want of habit, scarce recognised himself in the imputation.
“Yes—for once in a way; in those few words we had after you had watched them come up you told me something of what you had seen. You didn’t tell me very much—THAT you couldn’t for your life; but I saw for myself that, strange to say, you had received your impression, and I felt therefore that there must indeed have been something out of the way for you so to betray it.” She was fully upon him now, and she confronted him with his proved sensibility to the occasion—confronted him because of her own uneasy need to profit by it. It came over her still more than at the time, it came over her that he had been struck with something, even HE, poor dear man; and that for this to have occurred there must have been much to be struck with. She tried in fact to corner him, to pack him insistently down, in the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value; for so recorded, she felt, none of it would escape—she should have it at hand for reference. “Come, my dear—you thought what you thought: in the presence of what you saw you couldn’t resist thinking. I don’t ask more of it than that. And your idea is worth, this time, quite as much as any of mine—so that you can’t pretend, as usual, that mine has run away with me. I haven’t caught up with you. I stay where I am. But I see,” she concluded, “where you are, and I’m much obliged to you for letting me. You give me a point de repere outside myself—which is where I like it. Now I can work round you.”
Their conveyance, as she spoke, stopped at their door, and it was, on the spot, another fact of value for her that her husband, though seated on the side by which they must alight, made no movement. They were in a high degree votaries of the latch-key, so that their household had gone to bed; and as they were unaccompanied by a footman the coachman waited in peace. It was so indeed that for a minute Bob Assingham waited—conscious of a reason for replying to this address otherwise than by the so obvious method of turning his back. He didn’t turn his face, but he stared straight before him, and his wife had already perceived in the fact of his not moving all the proof she could desire— proof, that is, of her own contention. She knew he never cared what she said, and his neglect of his chance to show it was thereby the more eloquent. “Leave it,” he at last remarked, “to THEM.”
“‘Leave’ it—?” She wondered.
“Let them alone. They’ll manage.”
“They’ll manage, you mean, to do everything they want? Ah, there then you are!”
“They’ll manage in their own way,” the Colonel almost cryptically repeated.
It had its effect for her: quite apart from its light on the familiar phenomenon of her husband’s indurated conscience, it gave her, full in her face, the particular evocation of which she had made him guilty. It was wonderful truly, then, the evocation. “So cleverly—THAT’S your idea?—that no one will be the wiser? It’s your idea that we shall have done all that’s required of us if we simply protect them?”
The Colonel, still in his place, declined, however, to be drawn into a statement of his idea. Statements were too much like theories, in which one lost one’s way; he only knew what he said, and what he said represented the limited vibration of which his confirmed old toughness had been capable. Still, none the less, he had his point to make—for which he took another instant. But he made it, for the third time, in the same fashion. “They’ll manage in their own way.” With which he got out.
Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared, without following him, at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking back at her, his tall lean figure outlined in darkness and with his crush-hat, according to his wont, worn cavalierly, rather diabolically, askew, he seemed to prolong the sinister emphasis of his meaning. In general, on these returns, he came back for her when he had prepared their entrance; so that it was now as if he were ashamed to face her in closer quarters. He looked at her across the interval, and, still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view of everything flare up. Wasn’t it simply what had been written in the Prince’s own face BENEATH what he was saying?—didn’t it correspond with the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of? Wasn’t, in fine, the pledge that they would “manage in their own way” the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from him? Her husband’s tone somehow fitted Amerigo’s look—the one that had, for her, so strangely, peeped, from behind, over the shoulder of the one in front. She had not then read it—but wasn’t she reading it when she now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She wasn’t to be squared, and while she heard her companion call across to her “Well, what’s the matter?” she also took time to remind herself that she had decided she couldn’t be frightened. The “matter”?—why, it was sufficiently the matter, with all this, that she felt a little sick. For it was not the Prince that she had been prepared to regard as primarily the shaky one. Shakiness in Charlotte she had, at the most, perhaps postulated—it would be, she somehow felt, more easy to deal with. Therefore if HE had come so far it was a different pair of sleeves. There was nothing to choose between them. It made her so helpless that, as the time passed without her alighting, the Colonel came back and fairly drew her forth; after which, on the pavement, under the street-lamp, their very silence might have been the mark of something grave—their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and unitedly together, like some old Darby and Joan who have had a disappointment. It almost resembled a return from a funeral—unless indeed it resembled more the hushed approach to a house of mourning. What indeed had she come home for but to bury, as decently as possible, her mistake?
XVII
It appeared thus that they might enjoy together extraordinary freedom, the two friends, from the moment they should understand their position aright. With the Prince himself, from an early stage, not unnaturally, Charlotte had made a great point of their so understanding it; she had found frequent occasion to describe to him this necessity, and, her resignation tempered, or her intelligence at least quickened, by irrepressible irony, she applied at different times different names to the propriety of their case. The wonderful thing was that her sense of propriety had been, from the first, especially alive about it. There were hours when she spoke of their taking refuge in what she called the commonest tact—as if this principle alone would suffice to light their way; there were others when it might have seemed, to listen to her, that their course would demand of them the most anxious study and the most independent, not to say original, interpretation of signs. She talked now as if it were indicated, at every turn, by finger-posts of almost ridiculous prominence; she talked again as if it lurked in devious ways and were to be tracked through bush and briar; and she even, on occasion, delivered herself in the sense that, as their situation was unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars. “‘Do’?” she once had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though briefly, occurring between them on her return from the visit to America that had immediately succeeded her marriage, determined for her by this event as promptly as an excursion of the like strange order had been prescribed in his own case. “Isn’t the immense, the really quite matchless beauty of our position that we have to ‘do’ nothing in life at all?—nothing except the usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one’s not being more of a fool than one can help. That’s all—but that’s as true for one time as for another. There has been plenty of ‘doing,’ and there will doubtless be plenty still; but it’s all theirs, every inch of it; it’s all a matter of what they’ve done TO us.” And she showed how the question had therefore been only of their taking everything as everything came, and all as quietly as might be. Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair: no more extraordinary decree had ever been launched against such victims than this of forcing them against their will into a relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid.
She was to remember not a little, meanwhile, the particular prolonged silent look with which the Prince had met her allusion to these primary efforts at escape. She was inwardly to dwell on the element of the unuttered that her tone had caused to play up into his irresistible eyes; and this because she considered with pride and joy that she had, on the spot, disposed of the doubt, the question, the challenge, or whatever else might have been, that such a look could convey. He had been sufficiently off his guard to show some little wonder as to their having plotted so very hard against their destiny, and she knew well enough, of course, what, in this connection, was at the bottom of his thought, and what would have sounded out more or less if he had not happily saved himself from words. All men were brutes enough to catch when they might at such chances for dissent—for all the good it really did them; but the Prince’s distinction was in being one of the few who could check himself before acting on the impulse. This, obviously, was what counted in a man as delicacy. If her friend had blurted or bungled he would have said, in his simplicity, “Did we do ‘everything to avoid’ it when we faced your remarkable marriage?”—quite handsomely of course using the plural, taking his share of the case, by way of a tribute of memory to the telegram she had received from him in Paris after Mr. Verver had despatched to Rome the news of their engagement. That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them—an acceptance quite other than perfunctory—she had never destroyed; though reserved for no eyes but her own it was still carefully reserved. She kept it in a safe place—from which, very privately, she sometimes took it out to read it over. “A la guerre comme a la guerre then”—it had been couched in the French tongue. “We must lead our lives as we see them; but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own.” The message had remained ambiguous; she had read it in more lights than one; it might mean that even without her his career was up-hill work for him, a daily fighting-matter on behalf of a good appearance, and that thus, if they were to become neighbours again, the event would compel him to live still more under arms. It might mean on the other hand that he found he was happy enough, and that accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned and secure. On his arrival in Paris with his wife, none the less, she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself had not asked if the document were still in her possession. Such an inquiry, everything implied, was beneath him—just as it was beneath herself to mention to him, uninvited, that she had instantly offered, and in perfect honesty, to show the telegram to Mr. Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word she would immediately have put it before him. She had thereby forborne to call his attention to her consciousness that such an exposure would, in all probability, straightway have dished her marriage; that all her future had in fact, for the moment, hung by the single hair of Mr. Verver’s delicacy (as she supposed they must call it); and that her position, in the matter of responsibility, was therefore inattackably straight.
For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time, in its measured allowance, had originally much helped him—helped him in the sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up; in spite of which it was just this accessory element that seemed, at present, with wonders of patience, to lie in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than anything else, separations, delays and intervals; but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the question of what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of being married than he had, on the whole, expected; less, strangely, for the state of being married even as he was married. And there was a logic in the matter, he knew; a logic that but gave this truth a sort of solidity of evidence. Mr. Verver, decidedly, helped him with it—with his wedded condition; helped him really so much that it made all the difference. In the degree in which he rendered it the service on Mr. Verver’s part was remarkable—as indeed what service, from the first of their meeting, had not been? He was living, he had been living these four or five years, on Mr. Verver’s services: a truth scarcely less plain if he dealt with them, for appreciation, one by one, than if he poured them all together into the general pot of his gratitude and let the thing simmer to a nourishing broth. To the latter way with them he was undoubtedly most disposed; yet he would even thus, on occasion, pick out a piece to taste on its own merits. Wondrous at such hours could seem the savour of the particular “treat,” at his father-in-law’s expense, that he more and more struck himself as enjoying. He had needed months and months to arrive at a full appreciation—he couldn’t originally have given offhand a name to his deepest obligation; but by the time the name had flowered in his mind he was practically living at the ease guaranteed him. Mr. Verver then, in a word, took care of his relation to Maggie, as he took care, and apparently always would, of everything else. He relieved him of all anxiety about his married life in the same manner in which he relieved him on the score of his bank-account. And as he performed the latter office by communicating with the bankers, so the former sprang as directly from his good understanding with his daughter. This understanding had, wonderfully—THAT was in high evidence—the same deep intimacy as the commercial, the financial association founded, far down, on a community of interest. And the correspondence, for the Prince, carried itself out in identities of character the vision of which, fortunately, rather tended to amuse than to—as might have happened—irritate him. Those people—and his free synthesis lumped together capitalists and bankers, retired men of business, illustrious collectors, American fathers-in-law, American fathers, little American daughters, little American wives—those people were of the same large lucky group, as one might say; they were all, at least, of the same general species and had the same general instincts; they hung together, they passed each other the word, they spoke each other’s language, they did each other “turns.” In this last connection it of course came up for our young man at a given moment that Maggie’s relation with HIM was also, on the perceived basis, taken care of. Which was in fact the real upshot of the matter. It was a “funny” situation—that is it was funny just as it stood. Their married life was in question, but the solution was, not less strikingly, before them. It was all right for himself, because Mr. Verver worked it so for Maggie’s comfort; and it was all right for Maggie, because he worked it so for her husband’s.
The fact that time, however, was not, as we have said, wholly on the Prince’s side might have shown for particularly true one dark day on which, by an odd but not unprecedented chance, the reflections just noted offered themselves as his main recreation. They alone, it appeared, had been appointed to fill the hours for him, and even to fill the great square house in Portland Place, where the scale of one of the smaller saloons fitted them but loosely. He had looked into this room on the chance that he might find the Princess at tea; but though the fireside service of the repast was shiningly present the mistress of the table was not, and he had waited for her, if waiting it could be called, while he measured again and again the stretch of polished floor. He could have named to himself no pressing reason for seeing her at this moment, and her not coming in, as the half-hour elapsed, became in fact quite positively, however perversely, the circumstance that kept him on the spot. Just there, he might have been feeling, just there he could best take his note. This observation was certainly by itself meagre amusement for a dreary little crisis; but his walk to and fro, and in particular his repeated pause at one of the high front windows, gave each of the ebbing minutes, none the less, after a time, a little more of the quality of a quickened throb of the spirit. These throbs scarce expressed, however, the impatience of desire, any more than they stood for sharp disappointment: the series together resembled perhaps more than anything else those fine waves of clearness through which, for a watcher of the east, dawn at last trembles into rosy day. The illumination indeed was all for the mind, the prospect revealed by it a mere immensity of the world of thought; the material outlook was all the while a different matter. The March afternoon, judged at the window, had blundered back into autumn; it had been raining for hours, and the colour of the rain, the colour of the air, of the mud, of the opposite houses, of life altogether, in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an unutterable dirty brown. There was at first even, for the young man, no faint flush in the fact of the direction taken, while he happened to look out, by a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab which, awkwardly deflecting from the middle course, at the apparent instance of a person within, began to make for the left-hand pavement and so at last, under further instructions, floundered to a full stop before the Prince’s windows. The person within, alighting with an easier motion, proved to be a lady who left the vehicle to wait and, putting up no umbrella, quickly crossed the wet interval that separated her from the house. She but flitted and disappeared; yet the Prince, from his standpoint, had had time to recognise her, and the recognition kept him for some minutes motionless.
Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence. The effect of her coming to see him, him only, had, while he stood waiting, a singular intensity—though after some minutes had passed the certainty of this began to drop. Perhaps she had NOT come, or had come only for Maggie; perhaps, on learning below that the Princess had not returned, she was merely leaving a message, writing a word on a card. He should see, at any rate; and meanwhile, controlling himself, would do nothing. This thought of not interfering took on a sudden force for him; she would doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit to him be all of her own choosing. And his view of a reason for leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking no step, he yet intensely hoped. The harmony of her breaking into sight while the superficial conditions were so against her was a harmony with conditions that were far from superficial and that gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value to her presence. The value deepened strangely, moreover, with the rigour of his own attitude—with the fact too that, listening hard, he neither heard the house-door close again nor saw her go back to her cab; and it had risen to a climax by the time he had become aware, with his quickened sense, that she had followed the butler up to the landing from which his room opened. If anything could further then have added to it, the renewed pause outside, as if she had said to the man “Wait a moment!” would have constituted this touch. Yet when the man had shown her in, had advanced to the tea-table to light the lamp under the kettle and had then busied himself, all deliberately, with the fire, she made it easy for her host to drop straight from any height of tension and to meet her, provisionally, on the question of Maggie. While the butler remained it was Maggie that she had come to see and Maggie that—in spite of this attendant’s high blankness on the subject of all possibilities on that lady’s part—she would cheerfully, by the fire, wait for. As soon as they were alone together, however, she mounted, as with the whizz and the red light of a rocket, from the form to the fact, saying straight out, as she stood and looked at him: “What else, my dear, what in the world else can we do?”
It was as if he then knew, on the spot, why he had been feeling, for hours, as he had felt—as if he in fact knew, within the minute, things he had not known even while she was panting, as from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the less, that she knew still more than he—in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision of alternative—she could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions—opened out, altogether, with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry. He couldn’t have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered no occasion, in Rome, from which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited, and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence—the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter—of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hat’s and the frock’s own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had not yet done: it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce retained substance enough, scarce remained sufficiently THERE, to be wounded or shocked.
What had happened, in short, was that Charlotte and he had, by a single turn of the wrist of fate—“led up” to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed—been placed face to face in a freedom that partook, extraordinarily, of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was—into which he had lived, quite intimately, by the end of a quarter-of-an-hour—that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown. On that morning; in the Park there had been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised confidence. The emphasis, for their general comfort, was what Charlotte had come to apply; inasmuch as, though it was not what she definitely began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were alone—even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then directly replied; it was the meaning of everything else, down to the conscious quaintness of her ricketty “growler” and the conscious humility of her dress. It had helped him a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass without an answer. He could ask her instead what had become of her carriage and why, above all, she was not using it in such weather.
“It’s just because of the weather,” she explained. “It’s my little idea. It makes me feel as I used to—when I could do as I liked.”
XVIII
This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. “But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?”
“It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It’s the charm, at any rate,” she said from her place at the fire, “of trying again the old feelings. They come back—they come back. Everything,” she went on, “comes back. Besides,” she wound up, “you know for yourself.”
He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. “Ah, I haven’t your courage. Moreover,” he laughed, “it seems to me that, so far as that goes, I do live in hansoms. But you must awfully want your tea,” he quickly added; “so let me give you a good stiff cup.”
He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that, while she talked, he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none the less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate—in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question, as yet, of their seeing their way together: to which indeed, exactly, the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. “It’s not that you haven’t my courage,” Charlotte said, “but that you haven’t, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all,” she added, “that you haven’t even my intelligence. However, I shall not be afraid of that till you’ve given me more proof.” And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. “You knew, besides, you knew to-day, I would come. And if you knew that you know everything.” So she pursued, and if he didn’t meanwhile, if he didn’t even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with her like a precious medal—not exactly blessed by the Pope suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. “Above all,” she said, “there has been the personal romance of it.”
“Of tea with me over the fire? Ah, so far as that goes I don’t think even my intelligence fails me.”
“Oh, it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I AM braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don’t. I don’t, I don’t,” she repeated.
“It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,” he protested, “that takes courage.”
“Passive then—not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I’ve been all day on the town. Literally on the town—isn’t that what they call it? I know how it feels.” After which, as if breaking off, “And you, have you never been out?” she asked.
He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. “What should I have gone out for?”
“Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But you’re wonderful, all of YOU—you know how to live. We’re clumsy brutes, we other’s, beside you—we must always be ‘doing’ something. However,” Charlotte pursued, “if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me—which I’m sure, though you won’t confess it, was what you didn’t want; and might have missed, above all, the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I’ve come to congratulate you on. That’s really what I can at last do. You can’t not know at least, on such a day as this—you can’t not know,” she said, “where you are.” She waited as for him either to grant that he knew or to pretend that he didn’t; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there. So, for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said. “There it all is—extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven’t we therefore to take things as we find them?” She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one, as well, he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea, he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what more she would have; and then, on her “Nothing, thanks,” returned to the fire and restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too effectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was on her feet that she repeated the words she had first frankly spoken. “What else can we do, what in all the world else?”
He took them up, however, no more than at first. “Where then have you been?” he asked as from mere interest in her adventure.
“Everywhere I could think of—except to see people. I didn’t want people—I wanted too much to think. But I’ve been back at intervals—three times; and then come away again. My cabman must think me crazy—it’s very amusing; I shall owe him, when we come to settle, more money than he has ever seen. I’ve been, my dear,” she went on, “to the British Museum—which, you know, I always adore. And I’ve been to the National Gallery, and to a dozen old booksellers’, coming across treasures, and I’ve lunched, on some strange nastiness, at a cookshop in Holborn. I wanted to go to the Tower, but it was too far—my old man urged that; and I would have gone to the Zoo if it hadn’t been too wet—which he also begged me to observe. But you wouldn’t believe—I did put in St. Paul’s. Such days,” she wound up, “are expensive; for, besides the cab, I’ve bought quantities of books.” She immediately passed, at any rate, to another point: “I can’t help wondering when you must last have laid eyes on them.” And then as it had apparently for her companion an effect of abruptness: “Maggie, I mean, and the child. For I suppose you know he’s with her.”
“Oh yes, I know he’s with her. I saw them this morning.”
“And did they then announce their programme?”
“She told me she was taking him, as usual, da nonno.”
“And for the whole day?”
He hesitated, but it was as if his attitude had slowly shifted.
“She didn’t say. And I didn’t ask.”
“Well,” she went on, “it can’t have been later than half-past ten—I mean when you saw them. They had got to Eaton Square before eleven. You know we don’t formally breakfast, Adam and I; we have tea in our rooms—at least I have; but luncheon is early, and I saw my husband, this morning, by twelve; he was showing the child a picture-book. Maggie had been there with them, had left them settled together. Then she had gone out—taking the carriage for something he had been intending but that she offered to do instead.”
The Prince appeared to confess, at this, to his interest.
“Taking, you mean, YOUR carriage?”
“I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not a question,” she smiled, “of a carriage the more or the less. It’s not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab. It’s so beautiful,” she said, “that it’s not a question of anything vulgar or horrid.” Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was, rather remarkably, as if he fell in. “I went out—I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed to me important. It has BEEN—it IS important. I know as I haven’t known before the way they feel. I couldn’t in any other way have made so sure of it.”
“They feel a confidence,” the Prince observed.
He had indeed said it for her. “They feel a confidence.” And she proceeded, with lucidity, to the fuller illustration of it; speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return—for curiosity, and even really a little from anxiety—to Eaton Square. She was possessed of a latch-key, rarely used: it had always irritated Adam—one of the few things that did—to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home, in the small hours, after parties. “So I had but to slip in, each time, with my cab at the door, and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there. I came, I went—without their so much as dreaming. What do they really suppose,” she asked, “becomes of one?—not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn’t matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as a maitresse de maison not quite without a conscience. They must even in their odd way,” she declared, “have SOME idea.”
“Oh, they’ve a great deal of idea,” said the Prince. And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. “They think so much of us. They think in particular so much of you.”
“Ah, don’t put it all on ‘me’!” she smiled.
But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place. “It’s a matter of your known character.”
“Ah, thank you for ‘known’!” she still smiled.
“It’s a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It’s a matter of what those things have done for you in the world—I mean in THIS world and this place. You’re a Personage for them—and Personages do go and come.”
“Oh no, my dear; there you’re quite wrong.” And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused. “That’s exactly what Personages don’t do: they live in state and under constant consideration; they haven’t latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in growlers it makes a greater noise still. It’s you, caro mio,” she said, “who, so far as that goes, are the Personage.”
“Ah,” he in turn protested, “don’t put it all on me! What, at any rate, when you get home,” he added, “shall you say that you’ve been doing?”
“I shall say, beautifully, that I’ve been here.”
“All day?”
“Yes—all day. Keeping you company in your solitude. How can we understand anything,” she went on, “without really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do for you?—just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are.”
He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out: “How can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy?” And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect: “They would have done the same for one of yours.”
“Ah, if I could have had one—! I hoped and I believed,” said Charlotte, “that that would happen. It would have been better. It would have made perhaps some difference. He thought so too, poor duck—that it might have been. I’m sure he hoped and intended so. It’s not, at any rate,” she went on, “my fault. There it is.” She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, but, as if once for all, she made her clearness complete. “And now I’m too sure. It will never be.”
He waited for a moment. “Never?”
“Never.” They treated the matter not exactly with solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency, of distinctness. “It would probably have been better,” Charlotte added. “But things turn out—! And it leaves us”—she made the point—“more alone.”
He seemed to wonder. “It leaves you more alone.”
“Oh,” she again returned, “don’t put it all on me! Maggie would have given herself to his child, I’m sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than any child of mine,” she explained—“it would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them—to keep our sposi apart.” She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but, as he seemed to take it, in spite of this, for important, she then spoke gravely enough. “It’s as strange as you like, but we’re immensely alone.” He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when, again, with an awkward ease and his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her. He stood there at these last words, which had the effect of making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling. “What will you say,” she meanwhile asked, “that you’ve been doing?” This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question. “I mean when she comes in—for I suppose she WILL, some time, come in. It seems to me we must say the same thing.”
Well, he thought again. “Yet I can scarce pretend to have had what I haven’t.”
“Ah, WHAT haven’t you had?—what aren’t you having?”
Her question rang out as they lingered face to face, and he still took it, before he answered, from her eyes. “We must at least then, not to be absurd together, do the same thing. We must act, it would really seem, in concert.”
“It would really seem!” Her eyebrows, her shoulders went up, quite in gaiety, as for the relief this brought her. “It’s all in the world I pretend. We must act in concert. Heaven knows,” she said, “THEY do!”
So it was that he evidently saw and that, by his admission, the case, could fairly be put. But what he evidently saw appeared to come over him, at the same time, as too much for him, so that he fell back suddenly to ground where she was not awaiting him. “The difficulty is, and will always be, that I don’t understand them. I didn’t at first, but I thought I should learn to. That was what I hoped, and it appeared then that Fanny Assingham might help me.”
“Oh, Fanny Assingham!” said Charlotte Verver.
He stared a moment at her tone. “She would do anything for us.”
To which Charlotte at first said nothing—as if from the sense of too much. Then, indulgently enough, she shook her head. “We’re beyond her.”
He thought a moment—as of where this placed them. “She’d do anything then for THEM.”
“Well, so would we—so that doesn’t help us. She has broken down. She doesn’t understand us. And really, my dear,” Charlotte added, “Fanny Assingham doesn’t matter.”
He wondered again. “Unless as taking care of THEM.”
“Ah,” Charlotte instantly said, “isn’t it for us, only, to do that?” She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. “I think we want no one’s aid.”
She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he was not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception that he could name, and could act on, was something that now, at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but, as her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, in the glory of which—as it almost might be called—what he gave her back had the value of what she had, given him. “They’re extraordinarily happy.”
Oh, Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. “Beatifically.”
“That’s the great thing,” he went on; “so that it doesn’t matter, really, that one doesn’t understand. Besides, you do—enough.”
“I understand my husband perhaps,” she after an instant conceded. “I don’t understand your wife.”
“You’re of the same race, at any rate—more or less; of the same general tradition and education, of the same moral paste. There are things you have in common with them. But I, on my side, as I’ve gone on trying to see if I haven’t some of these things too—I, on my side, have more and more failed. There seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can’t help seeing it—I’m decidedly too different.”
“Yet you’re not”—Charlotte made the important point—“too different from ME.”
“I don’t know—as we’re not married. That brings things out. Perhaps if we were,” he said, “you WOULD find some abyss of divergence.”
“Since it depends on that then,” she smiled, “I’m safe—as you are anyhow. Moreover, as one has so often had occasion to feel, and even to remark, they’re very, very simple. That makes,” she added, “a difficulty for belief; but when once one has taken it in it makes less difficulty for action. I HAVE at last, for myself, I think, taken it in. I’m not afraid.”
He wondered a moment. “Not afraid of what?”
“Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of any mistake founded on one’s idea of their difference. For that idea,” Charlotte developed, “positively makes one so tender.”
“Ah, but rather!”
“Well then, there it is. I can’t put myself into Maggie’s skin—I can’t, as I say. It’s not my fit—I shouldn’t be able, as I see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I’d do anything—to shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her too,” she went on, “I think I’m still more so for my husband. HE’S in truth of a sweet simplicity—!”
The Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of Mr. Verver. “Well, I don’t know that I can choose. At night all cats are grey. I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them—and how, to do ourselves justice, we do. It represents for us a conscious care—”
“Of every hour, literally,” said Charlotte. She could rise to the highest measure of the facts. “And for which we must trust each other—!”
“Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,” the Prince hastened to add, “we can.” With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge it involved, their hands instinctively found their hands. “It’s all too wonderful.”
Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. “It’s too beautiful.”
And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past even had seen them. They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. “It’s sacred,” he said at last.
“It’s sacred,” she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge.
XIX
He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny Assingham didn’t now matter—the “now” he had even himself supplied, as no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour, so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the Foreign Office. With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward, since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her, have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed than open to interpretation. It had never indeed, before that evening, come up as during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a certain failure, on the dear woman’s part, of something he was aware of having always rather freely taken for granted in her. Of what exactly the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh to try to say; and if she had in fact, as by Charlotte’s observation, “broken down,” the details of the collapse would be comparatively unimportant. They came to the same thing, all such collapses—the failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just simply of tact; for didn’t any one of them by itself amount really to the failure of wit?—which was the last thing he had expected of her and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity. It had been Charlotte’s remark that they were at last “beyond” her; whereas he had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would keep up with him to the end. He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs. Assingham’s want of faith; but when he thought, at his ease, of the way persons who were capable really entertained—or at least with any refinement—the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous. So would his personal loyalty, if need be, have accepted the adventure for the good creature herself; to that definite degree that he had positively almost missed the luxury of some such call from her. That was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he was married—that one found one used one’s imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy—to call worthy—of the personal relation; never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humourously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare, insidiously, the cup. These were the services that, by all romantic tradition, were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate. But he could amuse himself with saying—so far as the amusement went—that they were what he had once for all turned his back on.
Fanny was meanwhile frequent, it appeared, in Eaton Square; so much he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at tea-time, during the same period, in Portland Place; though they had little need to talk of her after practically agreeing that they had outlived her. To the scene of these conversations and suppressions Mrs. Assingham herself made, actually, no approach; her latest view of her utility seeming to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent field. It was finding there in fact everything and everyone but the Prince, who mostly, just now, kept away, or who, at all events, on the interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the only person from whom he was a little estranged. It would have been all prodigious if he had not already, with Charlotte’s aid, so very considerably lived into it—it would have been all indescribably remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on the surface, nobody else, as yet, in the combination, seemed estranged from anybody. If Mrs. Assingham delighted in Maggie she knew by this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about Charlotte she knew, by the same reasoning, how most probably to miss that vision of her on which affliction would feed. It might feed of course on finding her so absent from her home—just as this particular phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind, best studied there. Fanny was, however, for her reasons, “shy” of Portland Place itself—this was appreciable; so that she might well, after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte’s appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the account they might be keeping of the usual solitude (since it came to this) of the head of that house. There was always, to cover all ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of Mrs. Verver’s day, the circumstance that, at the point they had all reached together, Mrs. Verver was definitely and by general acclamation in charge of the “social relations” of the family, literally of those of the two households; as to her genius for representing which in the great world and in the grand style vivid evidence had more and more accumulated. It had been established in the two households at an early stage, and with the highest good-humour, that Charlotte was a, was THE, “social success,” whereas the Princess, though kind, though punctilious, though charming, though in fact the dearest little creature in the world and the Princess into the bargain, was distinctly not, would distinctly never be, and might as well, practically, give it up: whether through being above it or below it, too much outside of it or too much lost in it, too unequipped or too indisposed, didn’t especially matter. What sufficed was that the whole thing, call it appetite or call it patience, the act of representation at large and the daily business of intercourse, fell in with Charlotte’s tested facility and, not much less visibly, with her accommodating, her generous, view of her domestic use. She had come, frankly, into the connection, to do and to be what she could, “no questions asked,” and she had taken over, accordingly, as it stood, and in the finest practical spirit, the burden of a visiting-list that Maggie, originally, left to herself, and left even more to the Principino, had suffered to get inordinately out of hand.
She had in a word not only mounted, cheerfully, the London treadmill—she had handsomely professed herself, for the further comfort of the three others, sustained in the effort by a “frivolous side,” if that were not too harsh a name for a pleasant constitutional curiosity. There were possibilities of dulness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad quarters-of-an-hour that turned up like false pieces in a debased currency, of which she made, on principle, very nearly as light as if she had not been clever enough to distinguish. The Prince had, on this score, paid her his compliment soon after her return from her wedding-tour in America, where, by all accounts, she had wondrously borne the brunt; facing brightly, at her husband’s side, everything that came up—and what had come, often, was beyond words: just as, precisely, with her own interest only at stake, she had thrown up the game during the visit paid before her marriage. The discussion of the American world, the comparison of notes, impressions and adventures, had been all at hand, as a ground of meeting for Mrs. Verver and her husband’s son-in-law, from the hour of the reunion of the two couples. Thus it had been, in short, that Charlotte could, for her friend’s appreciation, so promptly make her point; even using expressions from which he let her see, at the hour, that he drew amusement of his own. “What could be more simple than one’s going through with everything,” she had asked, “when it’s so plain a part of one’s contract? I’ve got so much, by my marriage”—for she had never for a moment concealed from him how “much” she had felt it and was finding it “that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, are just one’s decency and one’s honour and one’s virtue. These things, henceforth, if you’re interested to know, are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall. Oh yes, since I’m not a brute,” she had wound up, “you shall see me as I AM!” Which was therefore as he had seen her—dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office. Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless, all the while, contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which her husband and her husband’s daughter were lapped. It had in fact probably done something more than this—it had given them a finer and sweeter view of the possible scope of that ease. They had brought her in—on the crudest expression of it—to do the “worldly” for them, and she had done it with such genius that they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it, moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings; which minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore upon Maggie, in whose chords and whose province they more naturally lay. Not less naturally, by the same token, they included the repair, at the hands of the latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square. This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie’s. Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn’t, no doubt, quite equally provide for—that would be, to balance, just in a manner Charlotte’s very most charming function, from the moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognise it.
Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not ineffectually recognising it, was a reflection that, during the days with which we are actually engaged, completed in the Prince’s breast these others, these images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings and fittings of his conscience and his experience, that we have attempted to set in order there. They bore him company, not insufficiently—considering, in especial, his fuller resources in that line—while he worked out—to the last lucidity the principle on which he forbore either to seek Fanny out in Cadogan Place or to perpetrate the error of too marked an assiduity in Eaton Square. This error would be his not availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte’s, that might prevail there. That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite and ultimate; and it consorted with common prudence, with the simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any odd gleaning. To haunt Eaton Square, in fine, would be to show that he had not, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case, moreover, was that the “world,” by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. The latter residence, at the same time, it must promptly be added, did, on occasion, wake up to opportunity and, as giving itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations—one of which fitful flights, precisely, had, before Easter, the effect of disturbing a little our young man’s measure of his margin. Maggie, with a proper spirit, held that her father ought from time to time to give a really considered dinner, and Mr. Verver, who had as little idea as ever of not meeting expectation, was of the harmonious opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte’s own judgment was, always, that they were ideally free—the proof of which would always be, she maintained, that everyone they feared they might most have alienated by neglect would arrive, wreathed with smiles, on the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed in smiles, all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets struck Amerigo as being; they were, frankly, touching occasions to him, marked, in the great London bousculade, with a small, still grace of their own, an investing amenity and humanity. Everybody came, everybody rushed; but all succumbed to the soft influence, and the brutality of mere multitude, of curiosity without tenderness, was put off, at the foot of the fine staircase, with the overcoats and shawls. The entertainment offered a few evenings before Easter, and at which Maggie and he were inevitably present as guests, was a discharge of obligations not insistently incurred, and had thereby, possibly, all the more, the note of this almost Arcadian optimism: a large, bright, dull, murmurous, mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later contingent, by a brief instrumental concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince knew, Maggie’s anxiety had conferred with Charlotte’s ingenuity and both had supremely revelled, as it were, in Mr. Verver’s solvency.
The Assinghams were there, by prescription, though quite at the foot of the social ladder, and with the Colonel’s wife, in spite of her humility of position, the Prince was more inwardly occupied than with any other person except Charlotte. He was occupied with Charlotte because, in the first place, she looked so inordinately handsome and held so high, where so much else was mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth and the standard of passive grace; and because of the fact that, in the second, the occasion, so far as it referred itself with any confidence of emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially, well-meaningly and perversely, to Maggie. It was not indistinguishable to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife too had in perfection her own little character; but he wondered how it managed so visibly to simplify itself—and this, he knew, in spite of any desire she entertained—to the essential air of having overmuch on her mind the felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew, as well, the other things of which her appearance was at any time—and in Eaton Square especially—made up: her resemblance to her father, at times so vivid, and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions, like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance, as he had hit it off for her once in Rome, in the first flushed days, after their engagement, to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench; her approximation, finally—for it was analogy, somehow, more than identity—to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia in miniature. A light, however, broke for him in season, and when once it had done so it made him more than ever aware of Mrs. Verver’s vaguely, yet quite exquisitely, contingent participation—a mere hinted or tendered discretion; in short of Mrs. Verver’s indescribable, unfathomable relation to the scene. Her placed condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her intenser presence, her quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were inevitably all as nothing compared with the preoccupation that burned in Maggie like a small flame and that had in fact kindled in each of her cheeks a little attesting, but fortunately by no means unbecoming, spot. The party was her father’s party, and its greater or smaller success was a question having for her all the importance of his importance; so that sympathy created for her a sort of visible suspense, under pressure of which she bristled with filial reference, with little filial recalls of expression, movement, tone. It was all unmistakable, and as pretty as possible, if one would, and even as funny; but it put the pair so together, as undivided by the marriage of each, that the Princess il n’y avait pas a dire—might sit where she liked: she would still, always, in that house, be irremediably Maggie Verver. The Prince found himself on this occasion so beset with that perception that its natural complement for him would really have been to wonder if Mr. Verver had produced on people something of the same impression in the recorded cases of his having dined with his daughter.
This backward speculation, had it begun to play, however, would have been easily arrested; for it was at present to come over Amerigo as never before that his remarkable father-in-law was the man in the world least equipped with different appearances for different hours. He was simple, he was a revelation of simplicity, and that was the end of him so far as he consisted of an appearance at all—a question that might verily, for a weakness in it, have been argued. It amused our young man, who was taking his pleasure to-night, it will be seen, in sundry occult ways, it amused him to feel how everything else the master of the house consisted of, resources, possessions, facilities and amiabilities amplified by the social legend, depended, for conveying the effect of quantity, on no personal “equation,” no mere measurable medium. Quantity was in the air for these good people, and Mr. Verver’s estimable quality was almost wholly in that pervasion. He was meagre and modest and clearbrowed, and his eyes, if they wandered without fear, yet stayed without defiance; his shoulders were not broad, his chest was not high, his complexion was not fresh, and the crown of his head was not covered; in spite of all of which he looked, at the top of his table, so nearly like a little boy shyly entertaining in virtue of some imposed rank, that he COULD only be one of the powers, the representative of a force—quite as an infant king is the representative of a dynasty. In this generalised view of his father-in-law, intensified to-night but always operative, Amerigo had now for some time taken refuge. The refuge, after the reunion of the two households in England, had more and more offered itself as the substitute for communities, from man to man, that, by his original calculation, might have become possible, but that had not really ripened and flowered. He met the decent family eyes across the table, met them afterwards in the music-room, but only to read in them still what he had learned to read during his first months, the time of over-anxious initiation, a kind of apprehension in which the terms and conditions were finally fixed and absolute. This directed regard rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor penetrated, and was, to the Prince’s fancy, much of the same order as any glance directed, for due attention, from the same quarter, to the figure of a cheque received in the course of business and about to be enclosed to a banker. It made sure of the amount—and just so, from time to time, the amount of the Prince was made sure. He was being thus, in renewed instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He himself, after all, had not fixed it—the “figure” was a conception all of Mr. Verver’s own. Certainly, however, everything must be kept up to it; never so much as to-night had the Prince felt this. He would have been uncomfortable, as these quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for him by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte. It was impossible that he should not now and again meet Charlotte’s eyes, as it was also visible that she too now and again met her husband’s. For her as well, in all his pulses, he felt the conveyed impression. It put them, it kept them together, through the vain show of their separation, made the two other faces, made the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden bridge between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost vertiginous, for that intimacy of which the sovereign law would be the vigilance of “care,” would be never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound.
XX
The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval, a certain persistent aftertaste. This was the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny Assingham’s hand after dinner, while the clustered quartette kept their ranged companions, in the music-room, moved if one would, but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Assingham contrived, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she was moved—by the genius of Brahms—beyond what she could bear; so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated away, at the young man’s side, to such a distance as permitted them to converse without the effect of disdain. It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms—it was their achieved and, as he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring—in a light undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness—these independent words with him: she had sounded, covertly but distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain—which had introduced, in turn, a slight awkwardness. “Do you know that they’re not, after all, going to Matcham; so that, if they don’t—if, at least, Maggie doesn’t—you won’t, I suppose, go by yourself?” It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined. He had paid, first and last, many an English country visit; he had learned, even from of old, to do the English things, and to do them, all sufficiently, in the English way; if he didn’t always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much, to an appearance, as the good people who had, in the night of time, unanimously invented them, and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised them; yet, with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns the trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical, life; the determined need, which apparently all participant, of returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front—in shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals of meadow-paths or round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it sufficiently, on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing, of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly climax over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling tray; it met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture, on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression. Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left out; it was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own people—or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else—that he moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congruous whole.
“English society,” as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort, something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally, without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his pocket. The Prince’s shining star may, no doubt, having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety; but whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of sight—amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory and a fine embroidery of thought. Something had rather momentously occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes with his old friend: his present perspective made definitely clear to him that she had plumped out for him her first little lie. That took on—and he could scarce have said why—a sharpness of importance: she had never lied to him before—if only because it had never come up for her, properly, intelligibly, morally, that she must. As soon as she had put to him the question of what he would do—by which she meant of what Charlotte would also do—in that event of Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s not embracing the proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to entertain; as soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the line the other pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of at all too directly prying had become marked in her. Betrayed by the solicitude of which she had, already, three weeks before, given him a view, she had been obliged, on a second thought, to name, intelligibly, a reason for her appeal; while the Prince, on his side, had had, not without mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one and yet remaining unprovided. Not without mercy because, absolutely, he had on the spot, in his friendliness, invented one for her use, presenting it to her with a look no more significant than if he had picked up, to hand back to her, a dropped flower. “You ask if I’m likely also to back out then, because it may make a difference in what you and the Colonel decide?”—he had gone as far as that for her, fairly inviting her to assent, though not having had his impression, from any indication offered him by Charlotte, that the Assinghams were really in question for the large Matcham party. The wonderful thing, after this, was that the active couple had, in the interval, managed to inscribe themselves on the golden roll; an exertion of a sort that, to do her justice, he had never before observed Fanny to make. This last passage of the chapter but proved, after all, with what success she could work when she would.
Once launched, himself, at any rate, as he had been directed by all the terms of the intercourse between Portland Place and Eaton Square, once steeped, at Matcham, in the enjoyment of a splendid hospitality, he found everything, for his interpretation, for his convenience, fall easily enough into place; and all the more that Mrs. Verver was at hand to exchange ideas and impressions with. The great house was full of people, of possible new combinations, of the quickened play of possible propinquity, and no appearance, of course, was less to be cultivated than that of his having sought an opportunity to foregather with his friend at a safe distance from their respective sposi. There was a happy boldness, at the best, in their mingling thus, each unaccompanied, in the same sustained sociability—just exactly a touch of that eccentricity of associated freedom which sat so lightly on the imagination of the relatives left behind. They were exposed as much as one would to its being pronounced funny that they should, at such a rate, go about together—though, on the other hand, this consideration drew relief from the fact that, in their high conditions and with the easy tradition, the almost inspiring allowances, of the house in question, no individual line, however freely marked, was pronounced anything more than funny. Both our friends felt afresh, as they had felt before, the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to consider—looking as it did well over the heads of all lower growths; and that moreover treated its own sensibility quite as the easiest, friendliest, most informal and domesticated party to the general alliance. What anyone “thought” of anyone else—above all of anyone else with anyone else—was a matter incurring in these lulls so little awkward formulation that hovering judgment, the spirit with the scales, might perfectly have been imaged there as some rather snubbed and subdued, but quite trained and tactful poor relation, of equal, of the properest, lineage, only of aspect a little dingy, doubtless from too limited a change of dress, for whose tacit and abstemious presence, never betrayed by a rattle of her rusty machine, a room in the attic and a plate at the side-table were decently usual. It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable, again, to leave home; and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn’t bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. That was all right, the noted working harmony of the clever son-in-law and the charming stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and excess.
What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn’t be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand—to that the thing came back—was above all for courage and good-humour; and the value of this as a general assurance—that is for seeing one through at the worst—had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns—which was much to the point—in its hand. Courage and good-humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and course—a state of mind that was positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself. It wasn’t that, at Matcham, anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they said, to “happen”; there were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all the hilarity of “What indeed would THEY have made of it?” “They” were of course Maggie and her father, moping—so far as they ever consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of—whether beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it. They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the trio.
The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father’s wife, should prove to have been made, for the long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham; whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular terms—terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square—under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation—deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous, but that one couldn’t yet help, as for instance when one’s wife chose, in the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely here, however, was the difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual—yet to which, none the less, it would be too absurd that he should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically, with another woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as idiotic or incapable—this WAS a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one’s own handling. What was supremely grotesque, in fact, was the essential opposition of theories—as if a galantuomo, as HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything BUT blush to “go about” at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it—also as a man of the world—all merciful justice; but, assuredly, none the less, there was but one way REALLY to mark, and for his companion as much as for himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable. Wasn’t this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious? It was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were given by the growth between them, during their auspicious visit, of an exquisite sense of complicity.
XXI
He found himself therefore saying, with gaiety, even to Fanny Assingham, for their common, concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place: “What WOULD our cari sposi have made of it here? what would they, you know, really?”—which overflow would have been reckless if, already, and surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he had not got used to thinking of this friend as a person in whom the element of protest had of late been unmistakably allayed. He exposed himself of course to her replying: “Ah, if it would have been so bad for them, how can it be so good for you?”—but, quite apart from the small sense the question would have had at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and cheer. He had his view, as well—or at least a partial one—of the inner spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent with the retraction he had practically seen her make after Mr. Verver’s last dinner. Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no use in her if it were not sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her just discernible depression. By just so much as he guessed that she felt herself, as the slang was, out of it, out of the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her, from hour to hour, for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for being—as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first half-hour, at tea, to proclaim herself—the sole and single frump of the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham’s—these matters and others would be all, now, as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always, at the worst, be picturesque—for she habitually spoke of herself as “local” to Sloane Street whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement, in her, of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn’t really watching him—ground for which would have been too terribly grave—she had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: SO she might, precisely, mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take—the Prince could see it all: it wasn’t a shade of interference that a good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn’t even say, when she told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed eyes and lips, that she now knew her—he didn’t then say “Ah, see what you’ve done: isn’t it rather your own fault?” He behaved differently altogether: eminently distinguished himself—for she told him she had never seen him so universally distinguished—he yet distinguished her in her obscurity, or in what was worse, her objective absurdity, and frankly invested her with her absolute value, surrounded her with all the importance of her wit. That wit, as discriminated from stature and complexion, a sense for “bridge” and a credit for pearls, could have importance was meanwhile but dimly perceived at Matcham; so that his “niceness” to her—she called it only niceness, but it brought tears into her eyes—had the greatness of a general as well as of a special demonstration.
“She understands,” he said, as a comment on all this, to Mrs. Verver—“she understands all she needs to understand. She has taken her time, but she has at last made it out for herself: she sees how all we can desire is to give them the life they prefer, to surround them with the peace and quiet, and above all with the sense of security, most favourable to it. She can’t of course very well put it to us that we have, so far as she is concerned, but to make the best of our circumstances; she can’t say in so many words ‘Don’t think of me, for I too must make the best of mine: arrange as you can, only, and live as you must.’ I don’t get quite THAT from her, any more than I ask for it. But her tone and her whole manner mean nothing at all unless they mean that she trusts us to take as watchful, to take as artful, to take as tender care, in our way, as she so anxiously takes in hers. So that she’s—well,” the Prince wound up, “what you may call practically all right.” Charlotte in fact, however, to help out his confidence, didn’t call it anything; return as he might to the lucidity, the importance, or whatever it was, of this lesson, she gave him no aid toward reading it aloud. She let him, two or three times over, spell it out for himself; only on the eve of their visit’s end was she, for once, clear or direct in response. They had found a minute together in the great hall of the house during the half-hour before dinner; this easiest of chances they had already, a couple of times, arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress, and by being prepared themselves to dress so expeditiously that they might, a little later on, be among the first to appear in festal array. The hall then was empty, before the army of rearranging, cushion-patting housemaids were marshalled in, and there was a place by the forsaken fire, at one end, where they might imitate, with art, the unpremeditated. Above all, here, for the snatched instants, they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it, and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact. They had prolongations of instants that counted as visions of bliss; they had slow approximations that counted as long caresses. The quality of these passages, in truth, made the spoken word, and especially the spoken word about other people, fall below them; so that our young woman’s tone had even now a certain dryness. “It’s very good of her, my dear, to trust us. But what else can she do?”
“Why, whatever people do when they don’t trust. Let one see they don’t.”
“But let whom see?”
“Well, let ME, say, to begin with.”
“And should you mind that?”
He had a slight show of surprise. “Shouldn’t you?”
“Her letting you see? No,” said Charlotte; “the only thing I can imagine myself minding is what you yourself, if you don’t look out, may let HER see.” To which she added: “You may let her see, you know, that you’re afraid.”
“I’m only afraid of you, a little, at moments,” he presently returned. “But I shan’t let Fanny see that.”
It was clear, however, that neither the limits nor the extent of Mrs. Assingham’s vision were now a real concern to her, and she gave expression to this as she had not even yet done. “What in the world can she do against us? There’s not a word that she can breathe. She’s helpless; she can’t speak; she would be herself the first to be dished by it.” And then as he seemed slow to follow: “It all comes back to her. It all began with her. Everything, from the first. She introduced you to Maggie. She made your marriage.”
The Prince might have had his moment of demur, but at this, after a little, as with a smile dim but deep, he came on. “Mayn’t she also be said, a good deal, to have made yours? That was intended, I think, wasn’t it? for a kind of rectification.”
Charlotte, on her side, for an instant, hesitated; then she was prompter still. “I don’t mean there was anything to rectify; everything was as it had to be, and I’m not speaking of how she may have been concerned for you and me. I’m speaking of how she took, in her way, each time, THEIR lives in hand, and how, therefore, that ties her up to-day. She can’t go to them and say ‘It’s very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken.’”
He took it in still, with his long look at her. “All the more that she wasn’t. She was right. Everything’s right,” he went on, “and everything will stay so.”
“Then that’s all I say.”
But he worked it out, for the deeper satisfaction, even to superfluous lucidity. “We’re happy, and they’re happy. What more does the position admit of? What more need Fanny Assingham want?”
“Ah, my dear,” said Charlotte, “it’s not I who say that she need want anything. I only say that she’s FIXED, that she must stand exactly where everything has, by her own act, placed her. It’s you who have seemed haunted with the possibility, for her, of some injurious alternative, something or other we must be prepared for.” And she had, with her high reasoning, a strange cold smile. “We ARE prepared—for anything, for everything; and AS we are, practically, so she must take us. She’s condemned to consistency; she’s doomed, poor thing, to a genial optimism. That, luckily for her, however, is very much the law of her nature. She was born to soothe and to smooth. Now then, therefore,” Mrs. Verver gently laughed, “she has the chance of her life!”
“So that her present professions may, even at the best, not be sincere?—may be but a mask for doubts and fears, and for gaining time?”
The Prince had looked, with the question, as if this, again, could trouble him, and it determined in his companion a slight impatience. “You keep talking about such things as if they were our affair at all. I feel, at any rate, that I’ve nothing to do with her doubts and fears, or with anything she may feel. She must arrange all that for herself. It’s enough for me that she’ll always be, of necessity, much more afraid for herself, REALLY, either to see or to speak, than we should be to have her do it even if we were the idiots and cowards we aren’t.” And Charlotte’s face, with these words—to the mitigation of the slightly hard ring there might otherwise have been in them—fairly lightened, softened, shone out. It reflected as really never yet the rare felicity of their luck. It made her look for the moment as if she had actually pronounced that word of unpermitted presumption—so apt is the countenance, as with a finer consciousness than the tongue, to betray a sense of this particular lapse. She might indeed, the next instant, have seen her friend wince, in advance, at her use of a word that was already on her lips; for it was still unmistakable with him that there were things he could prize, forms of fortune he could cherish, without at all proportionately liking their names. Had all this, however, been even completely present to his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn’t heretofore by a hair’s breadth deviated. “If it didn’t sound so vulgar I should say that we’re—fatally, as it were—SAFE. Pardon the low expression—since it’s what we happen to be. We’re so because they are. And they’re so because they can’t be anything else, from the moment that, having originally intervened for them, she wouldn’t now be able to bear herself if she didn’t keep them so. That’s the way she’s inevitably WITH us,” said Charlotte over her smile. “We hang, essentially, together.”
Well, the Prince candidly allowed she did bring it home to him. Every way it worked out. “Yes, I see. We hang, essentially, together.”
His friend had a shrug—a shrug that had a grace. “Cosa volete?” The effect, beautifully, nobly, was more than Roman. “Ah, beyond doubt, it’s a case.”
He stood looking at her. “It’s a case. There can’t,” he said, “have been many.”
“Perhaps never, never, never any other. That,” she smiled, “I confess I should like to think. Only ours.”
“Only ours—most probably. Speriamo.” To which, as after hushed connections, he presently added: “Poor Fanny!” But Charlotte had already, with a start and a warning hand, turned from a glance at the clock. She sailed away to dress, while he watched her reach the staircase. His eyes followed her till, with a simple swift look round at him, she vanished. Something in the sight, however, appeared to have renewed the spring of his last exclamation, which he breathed again upon the air. “Poor, poor Fanny!”
It was to prove, however, on the morrow, quite consistent with the spirit of these words that, the party at Matcham breaking up and multitudinously dispersing, he should be able to meet the question of the social side of the process of repatriation with due presence of mind. It was impossible, for reasons, that he should travel to town with the Assinghams; it was impossible, for the same reasons, that he should travel to town save in the conditions that he had for the last twenty-four hours been privately, and it might have been said profoundly, thinking out. The result of his thought was already precious to him, and this put at his service, he sufficiently believed, the right tone for disposing of his elder friend’s suggestion, an assumption in fact equally full and mild, that he and Charlotte would conveniently take the same train and occupy the same compartment as the Colonel and herself. The extension of the idea to Mrs. Verver had been, precisely, a part of Mrs. Assingham’s mildness, and nothing could better have characterised her sense for social shades than her easy perception that the gentleman from Portland Place and the lady from Eaton Square might now confess, quite without indiscretion, to simultaneity of movement. She had made, for the four days, no direct appeal to the latter personage, but the Prince was accidental witness of her taking a fresh start at the moment the company were about to scatter for the last night of their stay. There had been, at this climax, the usual preparatory talk about hours and combinations, in the midst of which poor Fanny gently approached Mrs. Verver. She said “You and the Prince, love,”—quite, apparently, without blinking; she took for granted their public withdrawal together; she remarked that she and Bob were alike ready, in the interest of sociability, to take any train that would make them all one party. “I feel really as if, all this time, I had seen nothing of you”—that gave an added grace to the candour of the dear thing’s approach. But just then it was, on the other hand, that the young man found himself borrow most effectively the secret of the right tone for doing as he preferred. His preference had, during the evening, not failed of occasion to press him with mute insistences; practically without words, without any sort of straight telegraphy, it had arrived at a felt identity with Charlotte’s own. She spoke all for their friend while she answered their friend’s question, but she none the less signalled to him as definitely as if she had fluttered a white handkerchief from a window. “It’s awfully sweet of you, darling—our going together would be charming. But you mustn’t mind us—you must suit yourselves we’ve settled, Amerigo and I, to stay over till after luncheon.”
Amerigo, with the chink of this gold in his ear, turned straight away, so as not to be instantly appealed to; and for the very emotion of the wonder, furthermore, of what divination may achieve when winged by a community of passion. Charlotte had uttered the exact plea that he had been keeping ready for the same foreseen necessity, and had uttered it simply as a consequence of their deepening unexpressed need of each other and without the passing between them of a word. He hadn’t, God knew, to take it from her—he was too conscious of what he wanted; but the lesson for him was in the straight clear tone that Charlotte could thus distil, in the perfect felicity of her adding no explanation, no touch for plausibility, that she wasn’t strictly obliged to add, and in the truly superior way in which women, so situated, express and distinguish themselves. She had answered Mrs. Assingham quite adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap larger than the smallest that would serve, and she had, above all, thrown off, for his stretched but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror played at the face of the sun. The measure of EVERYTHING, to all his sense, at these moments, was in it—the measure especially of the thought that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order, at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming herself—the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn’t possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still other and still greater beauty. It had already told them, with an hourly voice, that it had a meaning—a meaning that their associated sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plough through the sands and the sight, afar, of the palm-cluster, might drink in at last the promised well in the desert. There had been beauty, day after day, and there had been, for the spiritual lips, something of the pervasive taste of it; yet it was all, none the less, as if their response had remained below their fortune. How to bring it, by some brave, free lift, up to the same height was the idea with which, behind and beneath everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in the exploration of which, as in that of the sun-chequered greenwood of romance, his spirit thus, at the opening of a vista, met hers. They were already, from that moment, so hand-in-hand in the place that he found himself making use, five minutes later, of exactly the same tone as Charlotte’s for telling Mrs. Assingham that he was likewise, in the matter of the return to London, sorry for what mightn’t be.
This had become, of a sudden, the simplest thing in the world—the sense of which moreover seemed really to amount to a portent that he should feel, forevermore, on the general head, conveniently at his ease with her. He went in fact a step further than Charlotte—put the latter forward as creating his necessity. She was staying over luncheon to oblige their hostess—as a consequence of which he must also stay to see her decently home. He must deliver her safe and sound, he felt, in Eaton Square. Regret as he might, too, the difference made by this obligation, he frankly didn’t mind, inasmuch as, over and above the pleasure itself, his scruple would certainly gratify both Mr. Verver and Maggie. They never yet had absolutely and entirely learned, he even found deliberation to intimate, how little he really neglected the first—as it seemed nowadays quite to have become—of his domestic duties: therefore he still constantly felt how little he must remit his effort to make them remark it. To which he added with equal lucidity that they would return in time for dinner, and if he didn’t, as a last word, subjoin that it would be “lovely” of Fanny to find, on her own return, a moment to go to Eaton Square and report them as struggling bravely on, this was not because the impulse, down to the very name for the amiable act, altogether failed to rise. His inward assurance, his general plan, had at moments, where she was concerned, its drops of continuity, and nothing would less have pleased him than that she should suspect in him, however tempted, any element of conscious “cheek.” But he was always—that was really the upshot—cultivating thanklessly the considerate and the delicate: it was a long lesson, this unlearning, with people of English race, all the little superstitions that accompany friendship. Mrs. Assingham herself was the first to say that she would unfailingly “report”; she brought it out in fact, he thought, quite wonderfully—having attained the summit of the wonderful during the brief interval that had separated her appeal to Charlotte from this passage with himself. She had taken the five minutes, obviously, amid the rest of the talk and the movement, to retire into her tent for meditation—which showed, among several things, the impression Charlotte had made on her. It was from the tent she emerged, as with arms refurbished; though who indeed could say if the manner in which she now met him spoke most, really, of the glitter of battle or of the white waver of the flag of truce? The parley was short either way; the gallantry of her offer was all sufficient.
“I’ll go to our friends then—I’ll ask for luncheon. I’ll tell them when to expect you.”
“That will be charming. Say we’re all right.”
“All right—precisely. I can’t say more,” Mrs. Assingham smiled.
“No doubt.” But he considered, as for the possible importance of it. “Neither can you, by what I seem to feel, say less.”
“Oh, I WON’T say less!” Fanny laughed; with which, the next moment, she had turned away. But they had it again, not less bravely, on the morrow, after breakfast, in the thick of the advancing carriages and the exchange of farewells. “I think I’ll send home my maid from Euston,” she was then prepared to amend, “and go to Eaton Square straight. So you can be easy.”
“Oh, I think we’re easy,” the Prince returned. “Be sure to say, at any rate, that we’re bearing up.”
“You’re bearing up—good. And Charlotte returns to dinner?”
“To dinner. We’re not likely, I think, to make another night away.”
“Well then, I wish you at least a pleasant day,”
“Oh,” he laughed as they separated, “we shall do our best for it!”—after which, in due course, with the announcement of their conveyance, the Assinghams rolled off.
XXII
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 connection with such commerce, even by men of the loosest business habits, a balance in his favour that he could pretty well, as a rule, take for granted. What were they doing at this very moment, wonderful creatures, but combine and conspire for his advantage?—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 reasons of her own, 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 not 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 license it would positively help them to have done so together. Each of them would, in this way, at home, have the other comfortably to blame. 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 not, 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—didn’t he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean 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 couldn’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 not 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 himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the type, rather a large item. If he, on the other hand, had an affair, it was not of that order; it was of the order, verily, that he had been reduced to as a not quite glorious substitute.
It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him 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 couldn’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. Yet it was past finding out, either, how such a woman as Lady Castledean could take him—since this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, “well”; he had lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various other things with them; but the number of questions about them he couldn’t have answered had much rather grown than shrunken, so that experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one residual impression. They didn’t like les situations nettes—that was all he was very sure of. They wouldn’t have them at any price; it had been their national genius and their national success to avoid them at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their wonderful spirit of compromise—the very influence of which actually so hung about him here, from moment to moment, that the earth and the air, the light and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, the blue-green counties and the cold cathedrals, owed to it every accent of their tone. Verily, as one had to feel in presence of such a picture, it had succeeded; it had made, up to now, for that seated solidity, in the rich sea-mist, on which the garish, the supposedly envious, peoples have ever cooled their eyes. But it was at the same time precisely why even much initiation left one, at given moments, so puzzled as to the element of staleness in all the freshness and of freshness in all the staleness, of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were other marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would have known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least the small intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between a given appearance and a taken meaning. The inquiring mind, in these present conditions, might, it was true, be more sharply challenged; but the result of its attention and its ingenuity, it had unluckily learned to know, was too often to be confronted with a mere dead wall, a lapse of logic, a confirmed bewilderment. And moreover, above all, nothing mattered, in the relation of the enclosing scene to his own consciousness, but its very most direct bearings.
Lady Castledean’s dream of Mr. Blint for the morning was doubtless already, with all the spacious harmonies re-established, taking the form of “going over” something with him, at the piano, in one of the numerous smaller rooms that were consecrated to the less gregarious uses; what she had wished had been effected—her convenience had been assured. This made him, however, wonder the more where Charlotte was—since he didn’t at all suppose her to be making a tactless third, which would be to have accepted mere spectatorship, in the duet of their companions. The upshot of everything for him, alike of the less and of the more, was that the exquisite day bloomed there like a large fragrant flower that he had only to gather. But it was to Charlotte he wished to make the offering, and as he moved along the terrace, which rendered visible parts of two sides of the house, he looked up at all the windows that were open to the April morning, and wondered which of them would represent his friend’s room. It befell thus that his question, after no long time, was answered; he saw Charlotte appear above as if she had been called by the pausing of his feet on the flags. She had come to the sill, on which she leaned to look down, and she remained there a minute smiling at him. He had been immediately struck with her wearing a hat and a jacket—which conduced to her appearance of readiness not so much to join him, with a beautiful uncovered head and a parasol, where he stood, as to take with him some larger step altogether. The larger step had been, since the evening before, intensely in his own mind, though he had not fully thought out, even yet, the slightly difficult detail of it; but he had had no chance, such as he needed, to speak the definite word to her, and the face she now showed affected him, accordingly, as a notice that she had wonderfully guessed it for herself. They had these identities of impulse—they had had them repeatedly before; and if such unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness. What in fact most often happened was that her rightness went, as who should say, even further than his own; they were conscious of the same necessity at the same moment, only it was she, as a general thing, who most clearly saw her way to it. Something in her long look at him now out of the old grey window, something in the very poise of her hat, the colour of her necktie, the prolonged stillness of her smile, touched into sudden light for him all the wealth of the fact that he could count on her. He had his hand there, to pluck it, on the open bloom of the day; but what did the bright minute mean but that her answering hand was already intelligently out? So, therefore, while the minute lasted, it passed between them that their cup was full; which cup their very eyes, holding it fast, carried and steadied and began, as they tasted it, to praise. He broke, however, after a moment, the silence.
“It only wants a moon, a mandolin, and a little danger, to be a serenade.”
“Ah, then,” she lightly called down, “let it at least have THIS!” With which she detached a rich white rosebud from its company with another in the front of her dress and flung it down to him. He caught it in its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his buttonhole. “Come down quickly!” he said in an Italian not loud but deep.
“Vengo, vengo!” she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she had left him the next minute to wait for 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—?”
“The very one. Paddington—the 6.50 ‘in.’ That gives us oceans; we can dine, at the usual hour, at home; and as Maggie will of course be in Eaton Square I hereby invite you.”
For a while he still but looked at her; it was a minute before he spoke. “Thank you very much. With pleasure.” To which he in a moment added: “But the train for Gloucester?”
“A local one—11.22; with several stops, but doing it a good deal, I forget how much, within the hour. So that we’ve time. Only,” she said, “we must employ our time.”
He roused himself as from the mere momentary spell of her; he looked again at his watch while they moved back to the door through which she had advanced. But he had also again questions and stops—all as for the mystery and the charm. “You looked it up—without my having asked you?”
“Ah, my dear,” she laughed, “I’ve seen you with Bradshaw! It takes Anglo-Saxon blood.”
“‘Blood’?” he echoed. “You’ve that of every race!” It kept her before him. “You’re terrible.”
Well, he could put it as he liked. “I know the name of the inn.”
“What is it then?”
“There are two—you’ll see. But I’ve chosen the right one. And I think I remember the tomb,” she smiled.
“Oh, the tomb—!” Any tomb would do for him. “But I mean I had been keeping my idea so cleverly for you, while there you already were with it.”
“You had been keeping it ‘for’ me as much as you like. But how do you make out,” she asked, “that you were keeping it FROM me?”
“I don’t—now. How shall I ever keep anything—some day when I shall wish to?”
“Ah, for things I mayn’t want to know, I promise you shall find me stupid.” They had reached their door, where she herself paused to explain. “These days, yesterday, last night, this morning, I’ve wanted everything.”
Well, it was all right. “You shall have everything.”
XXIII
Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second idea, despatching the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her maid into a cab, for Cadogan Place, with the variety of their effects. The result of this for each of the pair was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day practically passed without fresh contact between them. They dined out together, but it was both in going to their dinner and in coming back that they appeared, on either side, to have least to communicate. Fanny was wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the lemon-coloured mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less disposed than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have said, his end of it. They had, in general, in these days, longer pauses and more abrupt transitions; in one of which latter they found themselves, for a climax, launched at midnight. Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink, overburdened, on the landing outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian chair—of which at first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at last to become articulate. The Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went, by way of reconnoissance, into the drawing-room. He visited, according to his wont, the windows and their fastenings; he cast round the place the eye, all at once, of the master and the manager, the commandant and the rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a moment, he stood waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued to wait, only looking up at him inscrutably. There was in these minor manoeuvres and conscious patiences something of a suspension of their old custom of divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was also sensibly, and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble was at present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.
There might, for that matter, even have been in Mr. Assingham’s face a mild perception of some finer sense—a sense for his wife’s situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate—that she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he needed no telling that she had given herself, all the afternoon, to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakably went on, with abstentions and discretions that might almost have counted as solemnities. The solemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing—to nothing beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters. She had been out on these waters, for him, visibly; and his tribute to the fact had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He had not quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the mystic lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had parted—THEN some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty. His present position, clearly, was that of seeing her in the centre of her sheet of dark water, and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him didn’t perhaps mean that her planks WERE now parting. He held himself so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however—that is before he had uttered a question—he perceived, not without relief, that she was making for land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at last he felt her boat bump. The bump was distinct, and in fact she stepped ashore. “We were all wrong. There’s nothing.”
“Nothing—?” It was like giving her his hand up the bank.
“Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was uneasy—but I’m satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There’s nothing.”
“But I thought,” said Bob Assingham, “that that was just what you did persistently asseverate. You’ve guaranteed their straightness from the first.”
“No—I’ve never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to worry. I’ve never till now,” Fanny went on gravely from her chair, “had such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place—if I had, in my infatuation and my folly,” she added with expression, “nothing else. So I did see—I HAVE seen. And now I know.” Her emphasis, as she repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise higher. “I know.”
The Colonel took it—but took it at first in silence. “Do you mean they’ve TOLD you—?”
“No—I mean nothing so absurd. For in the first place I haven’t asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn’t count.”
“Oh,” said the Colonel with all his oddity, “they’d tell US.”
It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his short cuts, always across her finest flower-beds; but she felt, none the less, that she kept her irony down. “Then when they’ve told you, you’ll be perhaps so good as to let me know.”
He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. “Ah, I don’t say that they’d necessarily tell me that they ARE over the traces.”
“They’ll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and I’m talking of them now as I take them for myself only. THAT’S enough for me—it’s all I have to regard.” With which, after an instant, “They’re wonderful,” said Fanny Assingham.
“Indeed,” her husband concurred, “I really think they are.”
“You’d think it still more if you knew. But you don’t know—because you don’t see. Their situation”—this was what he didn’t see—“is too extraordinary.”
“‘Too’?” He was willing to try.
“Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn’t see. But just that, in a way, is what saves them. They take it seriously.”
He followed at his own pace. “Their situation?”
“The incredible side of it. They make it credible.”
“Credible then—you do say—to YOU?”
She looked at him again for an interval. “They believe in it themselves. They take it for what it is. And that,” she said, “saves them.”
“But if what it ‘is’ is just their chance—?”
“It’s their chance for what I told you when Charlotte first turned up. It’s their chance for the idea that I was then sure she had.”
The Colonel showed his effort to recall. “Oh, your idea, at different moments, of any one of THEIR ideas!” This dim procession, visibly, mustered before him, and, with the best will in the world, he could but watch its immensity. “Are you speaking now of something to which you can comfortably settle down?”
Again, for a little, she only glowered at him. “I’ve come back to my belief, and that I have done so—”
“Well?” he asked as she paused.
“Well, shows that I’m right—for I assure you I had wandered far. Now I’m at home again, and I mean,” said Fanny Assingham, “to stay here. They’re beautiful,” she declared.
“The Prince and Charlotte?”
“The Prince and Charlotte. THAT’S how they’re so remarkable. And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others.”
“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following. “Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of themselves.”
The Colonel wondered. “Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr. Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”
Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes—of SUCH blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”
He turned it over. “That danger BEING the blindness—?”
“That danger being their position. What their position contains—of all the elements—I needn’t at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily—for that’s the mercy—everything BUT blindness: I mean on their part. The blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”
He stood for a moment; he WOULD have it straight. “Whose husband’s?”
“Mr. Verver’s,” she went on. “The blindness is most of all his. That they feel—that they see. But it’s also his wife’s.”
“Whose wife’s?” he asked as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her contention. And then as she only gloomed: “The Prince’s?”
“Maggie’s own—Maggie’s very own,” she pursued as for herself.
He had a pause. “Do you think Maggie so blind?”
“The question isn’t of what I think. The question’s of the conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte—who have better opportunities than I for judging.”
The Colonel again wondered. “Are you so very sure their opportunities are better?”
“Well,” his wife asked, “what is their whole so extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation, but an opportunity?”
“Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity—of their extraordinary situation and relation—as much as they.”
“With the difference, darling,” she returned with some spirit, “that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the boat they’re in, but I’m not, thank God, in it myself. To-day, however,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to-day in Eaton Square I did see.”
“Well then, what?”
But she mused over it still. “Oh, many things. More, somehow, than ever before. It was as if, God help me, I was seeing FOR them—I mean for the others. It was as if something had happened—I don’t know what, except some effect of these days with them at that place—that had either made things come out or had cleared my own eyes.” These eyes indeed of the poor lady’s rested on her companion’s, meanwhile, with the lustre not so much of intenser insight as of a particular portent that he had at various other times had occasion to recognise. She desired, obviously, to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid, gathering, glittering tears to emphasise the fact. They had immediately, for him, their usual direct action: she must reassure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable for instance as she developed her indication of what had come out in the afternoon. “It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them—”
“What makes them?”—he pressed her as she fitfully dropped.
“Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might well have been difficult to know HOW to take it; and they may even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say, to-day,” she went on, “it was as if I were suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their eyes.” On which, as to shake off her perversity, Fanny Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under the dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high, dry, spare look of “type,” to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat gave a rigour of accent, waited, watching her, they might, at the late hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and compunction. “I can imagine the way it works,” she said; “it’s so easy to understand. Yet I don’t want to be wrong,” she the next moment broke out “I don’t, I don’t want to be wrong!”
“To make a mistake, you mean?”
Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant. “I don’t make mistakes. But I perpetrate—in thought—crimes.” And she spoke with all intensity. “I’m a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I’d do it again—feel that I’d do things myself.”
“Ah, my dear!” the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate.
“Yes, if you had driven me back on my ‘nature.’ Luckily for you you never have. You’ve done every thing else, but you’ve never done that. But what I really don’t a bit want,” she declared, “is to abet them or to protect them.”
Her companion turned this over. “What is there to protect them from?—if, by your now so settled faith, they’ve done nothing that justly exposes them.”
And it in fact half pulled her up. “Well, from a sudden scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think.”
“Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing—?”
She waited again. “It isn’t my ‘whole’ idea. Nothing is my ‘whole’ idea—for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there’s so much in the air.”
“Oh, in the air—!” the Colonel dryly breathed.
“Well, what’s in the air always HAS—hasn’t it?—to come down to the earth. And Maggie,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “is a very curious little person. Since I was ‘in,’ this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done—well, I felt THAT too, for some reason, as I hadn’t yet felt it.”
“For ‘some’ reason? For what reason?” And then, as his wife at first said nothing: “Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different?”
“She’s always so different from anyone else in the world that it’s hard to say when she’s different from herself. But she has made me,” said Fanny after an instant, “think of her differently. She drove me home.”
“Home here?”
“First to Portland Place—on her leaving her father: since she does, once in a while, leave him. That was to keep me with her a little longer. But she kept the carriage and, after tea there, came with me herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived—if they have arrived—expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know—she has clothes.”
The Colonel didn’t in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. “Oh, you mean a change?”
“Twenty changes, if you like—all sorts of things. She dresses, really, Maggie does, as much for her father—and she always did—as for her husband or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she had it before she was married—and just as the boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when she comes with him, makes herself, I assure you, at home. Si bien that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able to put them up.”
It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob Assingham could more or less enter. “Maggie and the child spread so?”
“Maggie and the child spread so.”
Well, he considered. “It IS rather rum,”
“That’s all I claim”—she seemed thankful for the word. “I don’t say it’s anything more—but it IS, distinctly, rum.”
Which, after an instant, the Colonel took up. “‘More’? What more COULD it be?”
“It could be that she’s unhappy, and that she takes her funny little way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy”—Mrs. Assingham had figured it out—“that’s just the way, I’m convinced, she would take. But how can she be unhappy, since—as I’m also convinced—she, in the midst of everything, adores her husband as much as ever?”
The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. “Then if she’s so happy, please what’s the matter?”
It made his wife almost spring at him. “You think then she’s secretly wretched?”
But he threw up his arms in deprecation. “Ah, my dear, I give them up to YOU. I’ve nothing more to suggest.”
“Then it’s not sweet of you.” She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. “You admit that it is ‘rum.’”
And this indeed fixed again, for a moment, his intention. “Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends?”
“Never, that I know of, a word. It isn’t the sort of thing she does. And whom has she, after all,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to complain to?”
“Hasn’t she always you?”
“Oh, ‘me’! Charlotte and I, nowadays—!” She spoke as of a chapter closed. “Yet see the justice I still do her. She strikes me, more and more, as extraordinary.”
A deeper shade, at the renewal of the word, had come into the Colonel’s face. “If they’re each and all so extraordinary then, isn’t that why one must just resign one’s self to wash one’s hands of them—to be lost?” Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for—her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back, alertly enough, to firmer ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man’s vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. “Hasn’t she then, Charlotte, always her husband—?”
“To complain to? She’d rather die.”
“Oh!”—and Bob Assingham’s face, at the vision of such extremities, lengthened for very docility. “Hasn’t she the Prince then?”
“For such matters? Oh, he doesn’t count.”
“I thought that was just what—as the basis of our agitation—he does do!”
Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. “Not a bit as a person to bore with complaints. The ground of MY agitation is, exactly, that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte!” And in the imagination of Mrs. Verver’s superiority to any such mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of her head—as marked a tribute to that lady’s general grace, in all the conditions, as the personage referred to doubtless had ever received.
“Ah, only Maggie!” With which the Colonel gave a short low gurgle. But it found his wife again prepared.
“No—not only Maggie. A great many people in London—and small wonder!—bore him.”
“Maggie only worst then?” But it was a question that he had promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly before sown the seed. “You said just now that he would by this time be back with Charlotte ‘if they HAVE arrived.’ You think it then possible that they really won’t have returned?”
His companion exhibited to view, for the idea, a sense of her responsibility; but this was insufficient, clearly, to keep her from entertaining it. “I think there’s nothing they’re not now capable of—in their so intense good faith.”
“Good faith?”—he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.
“Their false position. It comes to the same thing.” And she bore down, with her decision, the superficial lack of sequence. “They may very possibly, for a demonstration—as I see them—not have come back.”
He wondered, visibly, at this, how she did see them. “May have bolted somewhere together?”
“May have stayed over at Matcham itself till tomorrow. May have wired home, each of them, since Maggie left me. May have done,” Fanny Assingham continued, “God knows what!” She went on, suddenly, with more emotion—which, at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision, broke out in a wail of distress, imperfectly smothered. “Whatever they’ve done I shall never know. Never, never—because I don’t want to, and because nothing will induce me. So they may do as they like. But I’ve worked for them ALL” She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him. She passed into the dusky drawing-room, where, during his own prowl, shortly previous, he had drawn up a blind, so that the light of the street-lamps came in a little at the window. She made for this window, against which she leaned her head, while the Colonel, with his lengthened face, looked after her for a minute and hesitated. He might have been wondering what she had really done, to what extent, beyond his knowledge or his conception, in the affairs of these people, she COULD have committed herself. But to hear her cry, and yet try not to, was, quickly enough, too much for him; he had known her at other times quite not try not to, and that had not been so bad. He went to her and put his arm round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped, she let it stay a little—all with a patience that presently stilled her. Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close their colloquy, with the natural result of sending them to bed: what was between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and crystal and colour, the florid features, looming dimly, of Fanny’s drawing-room. And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand, for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone—the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself. What was the basis, which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte and the Prince must be saved—so far as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them? It did save them, somehow, for Fanny’s troubled mind—for that was the nature of the mind of women. He conveyed to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted. This remained quite clear even when he presently reverted to what she had told him of her recent passage with Maggie. “I don’t altogether see, you know, what you infer from it, or why you infer anything.” When he so expressed himself it was quite as if in possession of what they had brought up from the depths.
XXIV
“I can’t say more,” this made his companion reply, “than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before; and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best—and her very best, poor duck, is very good—to be quiet and natural. It’s when one sees people who always ARE natural making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it—then it is that one knows something’s the matter. I can’t describe my impression—you would have had it for yourself. And the only thing that ever CAN be the matter with Maggie is that. By ‘that’ I mean her beginning to doubt. To doubt, for the first time,” Mrs. Assingham wound up, “of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world.”
It was impressive, Fanny’s vision, and the Colonel, as if himself agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. “To doubt of fidelity—to doubt of friendship! Poor duck indeed! It will go hard with her. But she’ll put it all,” he concluded, “on Charlotte.”
Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a headshake. “She won’t ‘put’ it anywhere. She won’t do with it anything anyone else would. She’ll take it all herself.”
“You mean she’ll make it out her own fault?”
“Yes—she’ll find means, somehow, to arrive at that.”
“Ah then,” the Colonel dutifully declared, “she’s indeed a little brick!”
“Oh,” his wife returned, “you’ll see, in one way or another, to what tune!” And she spoke, of a sudden, with an approach to elation—so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. “She’ll see me somehow through!”
“See YOU—?”
“Yes, me. I’m the worst. For,” said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exaltation, “I did it all. I recognise that—I accept it. She won’t cast it up at me—she won’t cast up anything. So I throw myself upon her—she’ll bear me up.” She spoke almost volubly—she held him with her sudden sharpness. “She’ll carry the whole weight of us.”
There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it. “You mean she won’t mind? I SAY, love—!” And he not unkindly stared. “Then where’s the difficulty?”
“There isn’t any!” Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis. It kept him indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. “Ah, you mean there isn’t any for US!”
She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern, at any cost, for their own surface. Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what they had most to consider. “Not,” she said with dignity, “if we properly keep our heads.” She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now. This was what it was to have at last a constituted basis. “Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first REAL anxiety—after the Foreign Office party?”
“In the carriage—as we came home?” Yes—he could recall it. “Leave them to pull through?”
“Precisely. ‘Trust their own wit,’ you practically said, ‘to save all appearances.’ Well, I’ve trusted it. I HAVE left them to pull through.”
He hesitated. “And your point is that they’re not doing so?”
“I’ve left them,” she went on, “but now I see how and where. I’ve been leaving them all the while, without knowing it, to HER.”
“To the Princess?”
“And that’s what I mean,” Mrs. Assingham pensively pursued. “That’s what happened to me with her to-day,” she continued to explain. “It came home to me that that’s what I’ve really been doing.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I needn’t torment myself. She has taken them over.”
The Colonel declared that he “saw”; yet it was as if, at this, he a little sightlessly stared. “But what then has happened, from one day to the other, to HER? What has opened her eyes?”
“They were never really shut. She misses him.”
“Then why hasn’t she missed him before?”
Well, facing him there, among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny worked it out. “She did—but she wouldn’t let herself know it. She had her reason—she wore her blind. Now, at last, her situation has come to a head. To-day she does know it. And that’s illuminating. It has been,” Mrs. Assingham wound up, “illuminating to ME.”
Her husband attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. “Poor dear little girl!”
“Ah no—don’t pity her!”
This did, however, pull him up. “We mayn’t even be sorry for her?”
“Not now—or at least not yet. It’s too soon—that is if it isn’t very much too late. This will depend,” Mrs. Assingham went on; “at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before—for all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me—” But again she projected her vision.
“The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she’ll like it!”
“The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”
She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”
“No—we mustn’t touch her. We mayn’t touch any of them. We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Assingham, “we must bear it as we can. That’s where we are—and serves us right. We’re in presence.”
And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. “In presence of what?”
“Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off.”
She had paused there before him while he wondered. “You mean she’ll get the Prince back?”
She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been almost abject. “It isn’t a question of recovery. It won’t be a question of any vulgar struggle. To ‘get him back’ she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him.” With which Fanny shook her head. “What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while, she really HASN’T had him. Never.”
“Ah, my dear—!” the poor Colonel panted.
“Never!” his wife repeated. And she went on without pity. “Do you remember what I said to you long ago—that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?”
The smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was to be feared, robust. “What haven’t you, love, said in your time?”
“So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I put it to you, that evening, that Maggie was the person in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed, That therefore,” Fanny continued, “is what will now HAVE to happen. Her sense will have to open.”
“I see.” He nodded. “To the wrong.” He nodded again, almost cheerfully—as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a lunatic. “To the very, very wrong.”
But his wife’s spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain higher. “To what’s called Evil—with a very big E: for the first time in her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it.” And she gave, for the possibility, the largest measure. “To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it. Unless indeed”—and here Mrs. Assingham noted a limit “unless indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that mere dose of alarm will prove enough.”
He considered. “But enough for what then, dear—if not enough to break her heart?”
“Enough to give her a shaking!” Mrs. Assingham rather oddly replied. “To give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won’t break her heart. It will make her,” she explained—“well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the world.”
“But isn’t it a pity,” the Colonel asked, “that they should happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?”
“Oh, ‘disagreeable’—? They’ll have had to be disagreeable—to show her a little where she is. They’ll have HAD to be disagreeable to make her sit up. They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live.”
Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to “time” her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes, for a minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife’s words ideally implied.
“Decide to live—ah yes!—for her child.”
“Oh, bother her child!”—and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. “To live, you poor dear, for her father—which is another pair of sleeves!”
And Mrs. Assingham’s whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. “Any idiot can do things for her child. She’ll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She’ll have to save HIM.”
“To ‘save’ him—?”
“To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT”—and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes—“will be work cut out!” With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. “Good night!”
There was something in her manner, however—or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. “Ah, but, you know, that’s rather jolly!”
“Jolly’—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.
“I mean it’s rather charming.”
“‘Charming’—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.
“I mean it’s rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be. Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim—“only I don’t quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on.”
“Ah, there you are! It’s the question that I’ve all along been asking myself.” She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued—she let him have it straight. “And it’s the question of an idiot.”
“An idiot—?”
“Well, the idiot that I’VE been, in all sorts of ways—so often, of late, have I asked it. You’re excusable, since you ask it but now. The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face.”
“Then what in the world is it?”
“Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him—the very passion of her brave little piety. That’s the way it has worked,” Mrs. Assingham explained “and I admit it to have been as ‘rum’ a way as possible. But it has been working from a rum start. From the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced—!” With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.
“I see,” the Colonel sympathetically mused. “That WAS a rum start.”
But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense, for a moment, intolerable. “Yes—there I am! I was really at the bottom of it,” she declared; “I don’t know what possessed me—but I planned for him, I goaded him on.” With which, however, the next moment, she took herself up. “Or, rather, I DO know what possessed me—for wasn’t he beset with ravening women, right and left, and didn’t he, quite pathetically, appeal for protection, didn’t he, quite charmingly, show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie,” she thus lucidly continued, “couldn’t, with a new life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past—to fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping THEM off. One perceived this,” she went on—“out of the abundance of one’s affection and one’s sympathy.” It all blessedly came back to her—when it wasn’t all, for the fiftieth time, obscured, in face of the present facts, by anxiety and compunction. “One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always IS, to think one sees people’s lives for them better than they see them for themselves. But one’s excuse here,” she insisted, “was that these people clearly DIDN’T see them for themselves—didn’t see them at all. It struck one for very pity—that they were making a mess of such charming material; that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They didn’t know HOW to live—and somehow one couldn’t, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it. That’s what I pay for”—and the poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion’s intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. “I always pay for it, sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing of course would suit me but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a person who COULD keep off ravening women—without being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something, of course, that might have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean—it looks at me,” she veritably moaned, “out of your face! But all I can say is that it didn’t; the reason largely being—once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn’t quite make out either what other woman, or what other KIND of woman, one could think of her accepting.”
“I see—I see.” She had paused, meeting all the while his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. “One quite understands, my dear.”
It only, however, kept her there sombre. “I naturally see, love, what you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest”—and the grimness of her dreariness suddenly once more possessed her: “you’ve only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see,” she said with an ineffable headshake, “that I don’t stand up! I’m down, down, down,” she declared; “yet” she as quickly added—“there’s just one little thing that helps to save my life.” And she kept him waiting but an instant. “They might easily—they would perhaps even certainly—have done something worse.”
He thought. “Worse than that Charlotte—?”
“Ah, don’t tell me,” she cried, “that there COULD have been nothing worse. There might, as they were, have been many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary.”
He was almost simultaneous. “Extraordinary!”
“She observes the forms,” said Fanny Assingham.
He hesitated. “With the Prince—?”
“FOR the Prince. And with the others,” she went on. “With Mr. Verver—wonderfully. But above all with Maggie. And the forms”—she had to do even THEM justice—“are two-thirds of conduct. Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them.”
But he jerked back. “Ah, my dear, I wouldn’t say it for the world!”
“Say,” she none the less pursued, “he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for.”
“You mean then he doesn’t care for Charlotte—?” This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said: “No!”
“Then what on earth are they up to?” Still, however, she only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time, further, to risk, soothingly, another question. “Are the ‘forms’ you speak of—that are two-thirds of conduct—what will be keeping her now, by your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?”
“Yes—absolutely. THEIR forms.”
“‘Theirs’—?”
“Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s—those they IMPOSE on Charlotte and the Prince. Those,” she developed, “that, so perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones.”
He considered—but only now, at last, really to relapse into woe. “Your ‘perversity,’ my dear, is exactly what I don’t understand. The state of things existing hasn’t grown, like a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round, may be in for now is at least the consequence of what they’ve DONE. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?”
Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it, “Yes—they are. To be so abjectly innocent—that IS to be victims of fate.”
“And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent—?”
It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. “Yes. That is they WERE—as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s were beautiful—of THAT I had my faith. They WERE—I’d go to the stake. Otherwise,” she added, “I should have been a wretch. And I’ve not been a wretch. I’ve only been a double-dyed donkey.”
“Ah then,” he asked, “what does our muddle make THEM to have been?”
“Well, too much taken up with considering each other. You may call such a mistake as that by what ever name you please; it at any rate means, all round, their case. It illustrates the misfortune,” said Mrs. Assingham gravely, “of being too, too charming.”
This was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel again did his best. “Yes, but to whom?—doesn’t it rather depend on that? To whom have the Prince and Charlotte then been too charming?”
“To each other, in the first place—obviously. And then both of them together to Maggie.”
“To Maggie?” he wonderingly echoed.
“To Maggie.” She was now crystalline. “By having accepted, from the first, so guilelessly—yes, so guilelessly, themselves—her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast, in her life.”
“Then isn’t one supposed, in common humanity, and if one hasn’t quarrelled with him, and one has the means, and he, on his side, doesn’t drink or kick up rows—isn’t one supposed to keep one’s aged parent in one’s life?”
“Certainly—when there aren’t particular reasons against it. That there may be others than his getting drunk is exactly the moral of what is before us. In the first place Mr. Verver isn’t aged.”
The Colonel just hung fire—but it came. “Then why the deuce does he—oh, poor dear man!—behave as if he were?”
She took a moment to meet it. “How do you know how he behaves?”
“Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!” Again, at this, she faltered; but again she rose. “Ah, isn’t my whole point that he’s charming to her?”
“Doesn’t it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?”
She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a headshake of dignity she brushed it away. “It’s Mr. Verver who’s really young—it’s Charlotte who’s really old. And what I was saying,” she added, “isn’t affected!”
“You were saying”—he did her the justice—“that they’re all guileless.”
“That they were. Guileless, all, at first—quite extraordinarily. It’s what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted they could work together the more they were really working apart. For I repeat,” Fanny went on, “that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem for Mr. Verver—which was serious, as well it might be!—would save them.”
“I see.” The Colonel inclined himself. “And save HIM.”
“It comes to the same thing!”
“Then save Maggie.”
“That comes,” said Mrs. Assingham, “to something a little different. For Maggie has done the most.”
He wondered. “What do you call the most?”
“Well, she did it originally—she began the vicious circle. For that—though you make round eyes at my associating her with ‘vice’—is simply what it has been. It’s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably GOOD.”
“In their way—yes!” the Colonel grinned.
“Which was, above all, Maggie’s way.” No flicker of his ribaldry was anything to her now. “Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become—poor little dear, as she believed—so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path—by instalments, as it were—in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same time, however,” Mrs. Assingham further explained, “by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting HIM. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire—this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been—involved in some degree, and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold,” Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, “that a person can mostly feel but one passion—one TENDER passion, that is—at a time. Only, that doesn’t hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the ‘voice of blood,’ such as one’s feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities—as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you didn’t adore, for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie”—she kept it up—“is in the same situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was, thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have had. Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind—her feverish little sense of justice, as I say—had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn’t have done. And now she knows something or other has happened—yet hasn’t heretofore known what. She has only piled up her remedy, poor child—something that she has earnestly but confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy, on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself, and that would really have needed, since then, so much modification. Her only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her father’s wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so certainly for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that, peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there’s anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it, each day, each month, look natural and normal to him; so that—God forgive me the comparison!—she’s like an old woman who has taken to ‘painting’ and who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity, with a greater impudence even, the older she grows.” And Fanny stood a moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. “I like the idea of Maggie audacious and impudent—learning to be so to gloss things over. She could—she even will, yet, I believe—learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man should see it’s all rouge—!” She paused, staring at the vision.
It imparted itself even to Bob. “Then the fun would begin?” As it but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry. “You mean that in that case she WILL, charming creature, be lost?”
She was silent a moment more. “As I’ve told you before, she won’t be lost if her father’s saved. She’ll see that as salvation enough.”
The Colonel took it in. “Then she’s a little heroine.”
“Rather—she’s a little heroine. But it’s his innocence, above all,” Mrs. Assingham added, “that will pull them through.”
Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver’s innocence. “It’s awfully quaint.”
“Of course it’s awfully quaint! That it’s awfully quaint, that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness—by which I don’t mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from whom I’ve so deplorably degenerated—that,” Mrs. Assingham declared, “was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still,” she rather ruefully subjoined, “before they’ve done with me!”
This might be, but it wasn’t what most stood in the Colonel’s way. “You believe so in Mr. Verver’s innocence after two years of Charlotte?”
She stared. “But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn’t really—or what you may call undividedly—had.”
“Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has ‘really or undividedly,’ had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn’t had,” the Colonel conceded, “to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us in admiration.”
So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. “It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all events, is that—strange though this be—her effort for her father has, up to now, sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged—the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding—he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn’t worked them out in detail—any more than I had, heaven pity me!—and the queerness has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have married Charlotte. And they both,” she neatly wound up, “‘help.’”
“‘Both’—?”
“I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part is very large. Charlotte,” Fanny declared, “works like a horse.”
So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it. “And what does the Prince work like?”
She fixed him in return. “Like a Prince!” Whereupon, breaking short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly—decorated back—in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.
He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life—as life had shrunk for him now—the most luminous of wives. He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief—how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer—there was another plum in the pie. “What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?”
“The Prince’s? By his not ‘really’ caring?” She recalled, after a little, benevolently enough. “I mean that men don’t, when it has all been too easy. That’s how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he works,” she added; “but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays.”
Well, he made it up. “Like a Prince?”
“Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that,” she said with expression, “he’s—beautifully—a case. They’re far rarer, even in the ‘highest circles,’ than they pretend to be—and that’s what makes so much of his value. He’s perhaps one of the very last—the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round.”
The Colonel considered. “And how must Charlotte—if anything happens—take him?”
The question held her a minute, and while she waited, with her eyes on him, she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had ever received from her. “Nothing—in spite of everything—WILL happen. Nothing HAS happened. Nothing IS happening.”
He looked a trifle disappointed. “I see. For US.”
“For us. For whom else?” And he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it. “We know nothing on earth—!” It was an undertaking he must sign.
So he wrote, as it were, his name. “We know nothing on earth.” It was like the soldiers’ watchword at night.
“We’re as innocent,” she went on in the same way, “as babes.”
“Why not rather say,” he asked, “as innocent as they themselves are?”
“Oh, for the best of reasons! Because we’re much more so.”
He wondered. “But how can we be more—?”
“For them? Oh, easily! We can be anything.”
“Absolute idiots then?”
“Absolute idiots. And oh,” Fanny breathed, “the way it will rest us!”
Well, he looked as if there were something in that. “But won’t they know we’re not?”
She barely hesitated. “Charlotte and the Prince think we are—which is so much gained. Mr. Verver believes in our intelligence—but he doesn’t matter.”
“And Maggie? Doesn’t SHE know—?”
“That we see before our noses?” Yes, this indeed took longer. “Oh, so far as she may guess it she’ll give no sign. So it comes to the same thing.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Comes to our not being able to help her?”
“That’s the way we SHALL help her.”
“By looking like fools?”
She threw up her hands. “She only wants, herself, to look like a bigger! So there we are!” With which she brushed it away—his conformity was promised. Something, however, still held her; it broke, to her own vision, as a last wave of clearness. “Moreover NOW,” she said, “I see! I mean,” she added,—“what you were asking me: how I knew to-day, in Eaton Square, that Maggie’s awake.” And she had indeed visibly got it. “It was by seeing them together.”
“Seeing her with her father?” He fell behind again. “But you’ve seen her often enough before.”
“Never with my present eyes. For nothing like such a test—that of this length of the others’ absence together—has hitherto occurred.”
“Possibly! But if she and Mr. Verver insisted upon it—?”
“Why is it such a test? Because it has become one without their intending it. It has spoiled, so to speak, on their hands.”
“It has soured, eh?” the Colonel said.
“The word’s horrible—say rather it has ‘changed.’ Perhaps,” Fanny went on, “she did wish to see how much she can bear. In that case she HAS seen. Only it was she alone who—about the visit—insisted. Her father insists on nothing. And she watches him do it.”
Her husband looked impressed. “Watches him?”
“For the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing. It doesn’t, as I tell you, come. But she’s there for it to see. And I felt,” she continued, “HOW she’s there; I caught her, as it were, in the fact. She couldn’t keep it from me—though she left her post on purpose—came home with me to throw dust in my eyes. I took it all—her dust; but it was what showed me.” With which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her room. “Luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded. Nothing—from him—HAS come.”
“You’re so awfully sure?”
“Sure. Nothing WILL. Good-night,” she said. “She’ll die first.”
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