It had been said as a joke, but as, after this, they awaited their
friend in silence, the effect of the silence was to turn the time to
gravity—a gravity not dissipated even when the Prince next spoke. He
had been thinking the case over and making up his mind. A handsome,
clever, odd girl staying with one was a complication. Mrs. Assingham,
so far, was right. But there were the facts—the good relations, from
schooldays, of the two young women, and the clear confidence with which
one of them had arrived. “She can come, you know, at any time, to US.”
Mrs. Assingham took it up with an irony beyond laughter. “You’d like her
for your honeymoon?”
“Oh no, you must keep her for that. But why not after?”
She had looked at him a minute; then, at the sound of a voice in the
corridor, they had got up. “Why not? You’re splendid!” Charlotte Stant,
the next minute, was with them, ushered in as she had alighted from her
cab, and prepared for not finding Mrs. Assingham alone—this would have
been to be noticed—by the butler’s answer, on the stairs, to a question
put to him. She could have looked at her hostess with such straightness
and brightness only from knowing that the Prince was also there—the
discrimination of but a moment, yet which let him take her in still
better than if she had instantly faced him. He availed himself of the
chance thus given him, for he was conscious of all these things. What he
accordingly saw, for some seconds, with intensity, was a tall, strong,
charming girl who wore for him, at first, exactly the look of her
adventurous situation, a suggestion, in all her person, in motion and
gesture, in free, vivid, yet altogether happy indications of dress, from
the becoming compactness of her hat to the shade of tan in her shoes, of
winds and waves and custom-houses, of far countries and long journeys,
the knowledge of how and where and the habit, founded on experience,
of not being afraid. He was aware, at the same time, that of this
combination the “strongminded” note was not, as might have been
apprehended, the basis; he was now sufficiently familiar with
English-speaking types, he had sounded attentively enough such
possibilities, for a quick vision of differences. He had, besides, his
own view of this young lady’s strength of mind. It was great, he had
ground to believe, but it would never interfere with the play of her
extremely personal, her always amusing taste. This last was the thing
in her—for she threw it out positively, on the spot, like a light—that
she might have reappeared, during these moments, just to cool his
worried eyes with. He saw her in her light that immediate, exclusive
address to their friend was like a lamp she was holding aloft for his
benefit and for his pleasure. It showed him everything—above all her
presence in the world, so closely, so irretrievably contemporaneous with
his own: a sharp, sharp fact, sharper during these instants than any
other at all, even than that of his marriage, but accompanied, in a
subordinate and controlled way, with those others, facial, physiognomic,
that Mrs. Assingham had been speaking of as subject to appreciation.
So they were, these others, as he met them again, and that was the
connection they instantly established with him. If they had to be
interpreted, this made at least for intimacy. There was but one way
certainly for HIM—to interpret them in the sense of the already known.
Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too narrow and
too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth, on the other hand, by
no means small, with substance in its lips and a slight, the very
slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid teeth, otherwise indeed
well arrayed and flashingly white. But it was, strangely, as a cluster
of possessions of his own that these things, in Charlotte Stant, now
affected him; items in a full list, items recognised, each of them, as
if, for the long interval, they had been “stored” wrapped up, numbered,
put away in a cabinet. While she faced Mrs. Assingham the door of the
cabinet had opened of itself; he took the relics out, one by one, and it
was more and more, each instant, as if she were giving him time. He saw
again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there
was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for “appreciation”—a colour
indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that
gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves
of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms
within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that
Florentine sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the
apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old bronze. He
knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape and colour
of her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty of movement and line
when she turned her back, and the perfect working of all her main
attachments, that of some wonderful finished instrument, something
intently made for exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the
extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded
flower, which gave her a likeness also to some long, loose silk purse,
well filled with gold pieces, but having been passed, empty, through a
finger-ring that held it together. It was as if, before she turned to
him, he had weighed the whole thing in his open palm and even heard
a little the chink of the metal. When she did turn to him it was to
recognise with her eyes what he might have been doing. She made no
circumstance of thus coming upon him, save so far as the intelligence in
her face could at any moment make a circumstance of almost anything. If
when she moved off she looked like a huntress, she looked when she came
nearer like his notion, perhaps not wholly correct, of a muse. But what
she said was simply: “You see you’re not rid of me. How is dear Maggie?”
It was to come soon enough by the quite unforced operation of chance,
the young man’s opportunity to ask her the question suggested by Mrs.
Assingham shortly before her entrance. The license, had he chosen to
embrace it, was within a few minutes all there—the license given him
literally to inquire of this young lady how long she was likely to
be with them. For a matter of the mere domestic order had quickly
determined, on Mrs. Assingham’s part, a withdrawal, of a few moments,
which had the effect of leaving her visitors free. “Mrs. Betterman’s
there?” she had said to Charlotte in allusion to some member of the
household who was to have received her and seen her belongings settled;
to which Charlotte had replied that she had encountered only the butler,
who had been quite charming. She had deprecated any action taken on
behalf of her effects; but her hostess, rebounding from accumulated
cushions, evidently saw more in Mrs. Betterman’s non-appearance
than could meet the casual eye. What she saw, in short, demanded her
intervention, in spite of an earnest “Let ME go!” from the girl, and a
prolonged smiling wail over the trouble she was giving. The Prince was
quite aware, at this moment, that departure, for himself, was indicated;
the question of Miss Stant’s installation didn’t demand his presence;
it was a case for one to go away—if one hadn’t a reason for staying. He
had a reason, however—of that he was equally aware; and he had not
for a good while done anything more conscious and intentional than
not, quickly, to take leave. His visible insistence—for it came to
that—even demanded of him a certain disagreeable effort, the sort of
effort he had mostly associated with acting for an idea. His idea was
there, his idea was to find out something, something he wanted much to
know, and to find it out not tomorrow, not at some future time, not in
short with waiting and wondering, but if possible before quitting the
place. This particular curiosity, moreover, confounded itself a little
with the occasion offered him to satisfy Mrs. Assingham’s own; he
wouldn’t have admitted that he was staying to ask a rude question—there
was distinctly nothing rude in his having his reasons. It would be rude,
for that matter, to turn one’s back, without a word or two, on an old
friend.
Well, as it came to pass, he got the word or two, for Mrs. Assingham’s
preoccupation was practically simplifying. The little crisis was of
shorter duration than our account of it; duration, naturally, would have
forced him to take up his hat. He was somehow glad, on finding himself
alone with Charlotte, that he had not been guilty of that inconsequence.
Not to be flurried was the kind of consistency he wanted, just as
consistency was the kind of dignity. And why couldn’t he have dignity
when he had so much of the good conscience, as it were, on which such
advantages rested? He had done nothing he oughtn’t—he had in fact
done nothing at all. Once more, as a man conscious of having known many
women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the recurrent,
the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as certain as sunrise or
the coming round of Saints’ days, the doing by the woman of the thing
that gave her away. She did it, ever, inevitably, infallibly—she
couldn’t possibly not do it. It was her nature, it was her life, and the
man could always expect it without lifting a finger. This was HIS, the
man’s, any man’s, position and strength—that he had necessarily the
advantage, that he only had to wait, with a decent patience, to be
placed, in spite of himself, it might really be said, in the right. Just
so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other creature
was her weakness and her deep misfortune—not less, no doubt, than her
beauty. It produced for the man that extraordinary mixture of pity and
profit in which his relation with her, when he was not a mere brute,
mainly consisted; and gave him in fact his most pertinent ground of
being always nice to her, nice about her, nice FOR her. She always
dressed her act up, of course, she muffled and disguised and arranged
it, showing in fact in these dissimulations a cleverness equal to but
one thing in the world, equal to her abjection: she would let it be
known for anything, for everything, but the truth of which it was made.
That was what, precisely, Charlotte Stant would be doing now; that was
the present motive and support, to a certainty, of each of her looks and
motions. She was the twentieth woman, she was possessed by her doom, but
her doom was also to arrange appearances, and what now concerned him was
to learn how she proposed. He would help her, would arrange WITH her to
any point in reason; the only thing was to know what appearance could
best be produced and best be preserved. Produced and preserved on her
part of course; since on his own there had been luckily no folly to
cover up, nothing but a perfect accord between conduct and obligation.
They stood there together, at all events, when the door had closed
behind their friend, with a conscious, strained smile and very much as
if each waited for the other to strike the note or give the pitch. The
young man held himself, in his silent suspense—only not more afraid
because he felt her own fear. She was afraid of herself, however;
whereas, to his gain of lucidity, he was afraid only of her. Would she
throw herself into his arms, or would she be otherwise wonderful? She
would see what he would do—so their queer minute without words told
him; and she would act accordingly. But what could he do but just let
her see that he would make anything, everything, for her, as honourably
easy as possible? Even if she should throw herself into his arms he
would make that easy—easy, that is, to overlook, to ignore, not to
remember, and not, by the same token, either, to regret. This was not
what in fact happened, though it was also not at a single touch, but by
the finest gradations, that his tension subsided. “It’s too delightful
to be back!” she said at last; and it was all she definitely gave
him—being moreover nothing but what anyone else might have said. Yet
with two or three other things that, on his response, followed it, it
quite pointed the path, while the tone of it, and her whole attitude,
were as far removed as need have been from the truth of her situation.
The abjection that was present to him as of the essence quite failed to
peep out, and he soon enough saw that if she was arranging she could be
trusted to arrange. Good—it was all he asked; and all the more that he
could admire and like her for it.
The particular appearance she would, as they said, go in for was that
of having no account whatever to give him—it would be in fact that of
having none to give anybody—of reasons or of motives, of comings or of
goings. She was a charming young woman who had met him before, but she
was also a charming young woman with a life of her own. She would take
it high—up, up, up, ever so high. Well then, he would do the same; no
height would be too great for them, not even the dizziest conceivable
to a young person so subtle. The dizziest seemed indeed attained when,
after another moment, she came as near as she was to come to an apology
for her abruptness.
“I’ve been thinking of Maggie, and at last I yearned for her. I wanted
to see her happy—and it doesn’t strike me I find you too shy to tell me
I SHALL.”
“Of course she’s happy, thank God! Only it’s almost terrible, you know,
the happiness of young, good, generous creatures. It rather frightens
one. But the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints,” said the Prince, “have
her in their keeping.”
“Certainly they have. She’s the dearest of the dear. But I needn’t tell
you,” the girl added.
“Ah,” he returned with gravity, “I feel that I’ve still much to learn
about her.” To which he subjoined “She’ll rejoice awfully in your being
with us.”
“Oh, you don’t need me!” Charlotte smiled. “It’s her hour. It’s a great
hour. One has seen often enough, with girls, what it is. But that,” she
said, “is exactly why. Why I’ve wanted, I mean, not to miss it.”
He bent on her a kind, comprehending face. “You mustn’t miss anything.”
He had got it, the pitch, and he could keep it now, for all he had
needed was to have it given him. The pitch was the happiness of his wife
that was to be—the sight of that happiness as a joy for an old friend.
It was, yes, magnificent, and not the less so for its coming to him,
suddenly, as sincere, as nobly exalted. Something in Charlotte’s eyes
seemed to tell him this, seemed to plead with him in advance as to
what he was to find in it. He was eager—and he tried to show her that
too—to find what she liked; mindful as he easily could be of what the
friendship had been for Maggie. It had been armed with the wings of
young imagination, young generosity; it had been, he believed—always
counting out her intense devotion to her father—the liveliest emotion
she had known before the dawn of the sentiment inspired by himself. She
had not, to his knowledge, invited the object of it to their wedding,
had not thought of proposing to her, for a matter of a couple of hours,
an arduous and expensive journey. But she had kept her connected and
informed, from week to week, in spite of preparations and absorptions.
“Oh, I’ve been writing to Charlotte—I wish you knew her better:” he
could still hear, from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he
could still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous
element in Maggie’s wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate to her.
Older and perhaps more intelligent, at any rate, why shouldn’t Charlotte
respond—and be quite FREE to respond—to such fidelities with something
more than mere formal good manners? The relations of women with each
other were of the strangest, it was true, and he probably wouldn’t
have trusted here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding
throughout on the ground of the immense difference—difficult indeed as
it might have been to disembroil in this young person HER race-quality.
Nothing in her definitely placed her; she was a rare, a special product.
Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means, that is her want of
ramifications and other advantages, contributed to enrich her somehow
with an odd, precious neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached
yet so aware, a sort of small social capital. It was the only one she
had—it was the only one a lonely, gregarious girl COULD have, since
few, surely, had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and
since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of some gift
of nature to which you could scarce give a definite name.
It wasn’t a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which she
juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops or lighted
brands—it wasn’t at least entirely that, for he had known people
almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had quite failed to make
interesting. He was polyglot himself, for that matter—as was the case
too with so many of his friends and relations; for none of whom, more
than for himself, was it anything but a common convenience. The point
was that in this young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a
mystery: so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her
lips, that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect
felicity in the use of Italian. He had known strangers—a few, and
mostly men—who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had known
neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte’s almost mystifying
instinct. He remembered how, from the first of their acquaintance,
she had made no display of it, quite as if English, between them, his
English so matching with hers, were their inevitable medium. He had
perceived all by accident—by hearing her talk before him to somebody
else that they had an alternative as good; an alternative in fact as
much better as the amusement for him was greater in watching her for the
slips that never came. Her account of the mystery didn’t suffice: her
recall of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents,
from the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt generation,
demoralised, falsified, polyglot well before her, with the Tuscan balia
who was her first remembrance; the servants of the villa, the dear
contadini of the poder, the little girls and the other peasants of
the next podere, all the rather shabby but still ever so pretty human
furniture of her early time, including the good sisters of the poor
convent of the Tuscan hills, the convent shabbier than almost anything
else, but prettier too, in which she had been kept at school till the
subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in Paris at
which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as a smaller
girl, three years before her own ending of her period of five. Such
reminiscences, naturally, gave a ground, but they had not prevented him
from insisting that some strictly civil ancestor—generations back, and
from the Tuscan hills if she would—made himself felt, ineffaceably, in
her blood and in her tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she
had taken his theory from him, gracefully enough, as one of the little
presents that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, all
melted together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned,
not unnaturally, in the next thing, of the nature of a surmise, that
his discretion let him articulate. “You haven’t, I rather gather,
particularly liked your country?” They would stick, for the time, to
their English.
“It doesn’t, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn’t in the least
matter, over there, whether one likes it or not—that is to anyone but
one’s self. But I didn’t like it,” said Charlotte Stant.
“That’s not encouraging then to me, is it?” the Prince went on.
“Do you mean because you’re going?”
“Oh yes, of course we’re going. I’ve wanted immensely to go.” She
hesitated. “But now?—immediately?”
“In a month or two—it seems to be the new idea.” On which there was
something in her face—as he imagined—that made him say: “Didn’t Maggie
write to you?”
“Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of course you
must stay”—Charlotte was easily clear—“as long as possible.”
“Is that what you did?” he laughed. “You stayed as long as possible?”
“Well, it seemed to me so—but I hadn’t ‘interests.’ You’ll have
them—on a great scale. It’s the country for interests,” said Charlotte.
“If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn’t have left it.”
He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. “Yours then are
rather here?”
“Oh, mine!”—the girl smiled. “They take up little room, wherever they
are.”
It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it somehow
did for her—it determined in him a speech that would have seemed a few
minutes before precarious and in questionable taste. The lead she
had given him made the difference, and he felt it as really a lift on
finding an honest and natural word rise, by its license, to his lips.
Nothing surely could be, for both of them, more in the note of a high
bravery. “I’ve been thinking it all the while so probable, you know,
that you would have seen your way to marrying.”
She looked at him an instant, and, just for these seconds, he feared for
what he might have spoiled. “To marrying whom?”
“Why, some good, kind, clever, rich American.”
Again his security hung in the balance—then she was, as he felt,
admirable.
“I tried everyone I came across. I did my best. I showed I had come,
quite publicly, FOR that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At any rate
it was no use. I had to recognise it. No one would have me.” Then
she seemed to show as sorry for his having to hear of her anything so
disconcerting. She pitied his feeling about it; if he was disappointed
she would cheer him up. “Existence, you know, all the same, doesn’t
depend on that. I mean,” she smiled, “on having caught a husband.”
“Oh—existence!” the Prince vaguely commented. “You think I ought to
argue for more than mere existence?” she asked. “I don’t see why MY
existence—even reduced as much as you like to being merely mine—should
be so impossible. There are things, of sorts, I should be able to
have—things I should be able to be. The position of a single woman
to-day is very favourable, you know.”
“Favourable to what?”
“Why, just TO existence—which may contain, after all, in one way
and another, so much. It may contain, at the worst, even affections;
affections in fact quite particularly; fixed, that is, on one’s friends.
I’m extremely fond of Maggie, for instance—I quite adore her. How
could I adore her more if I were married to one of the people you speak
of?”
The Prince gave a laugh. “You might adore HIM more—!”
“Ah, but it isn’t, is it?” she asked, “a question of that.”
“My dear friend,” he returned, “it’s always a question of doing the best
for one’s self one can—without injury to others.” He felt by this time
that they were indeed on an excellent basis; so he went on again, as
if to show frankly his sense of its firmness. “I venture therefore to
repeat my hope that you’ll marry some capital fellow; and also to repeat
my belief that such a marriage will be more favourable to you, as you
call it, than even the spirit of the age.”
She looked at him at first only for answer, and would have appeared to
take it with meekness had she not perhaps appeared a little more to
take it with gaiety. “Thank you very much,” she simply said; but at that
moment their friend was with them again. It was undeniable that, as she
came in, Mrs. Assingham looked, with a certain smiling sharpness, from
one of them to the other; the perception of which was perhaps what led
Charlotte, for reassurance, to pass the question on. “The Prince hopes
so much I shall still marry some good person.”
Whether it worked for Mrs. Assingham or not, the Prince was himself, at
this, more than ever reassured. He was SAFE, in a word—that was what it
all meant; and he had required to be safe. He was really safe enough for
almost any joke. “It’s only,” he explained to their hostess, “because
of what Miss Stant has been telling me. Don’t we want to keep up her
courage?” If the joke was broad he had at least not begun it—not, that
is, AS a joke; which was what his companion’s address to their friend
made of it. “She has been trying in America, she says, but hasn’t
brought it off.”
The tone was somehow not what Mrs. Assingham had expected, but she made
the best of it. “Well then,” she replied to the young man, “if you take
such an interest you must bring it off.”
“And you must help, dear,” Charlotte said unperturbed—“as you’ve
helped, so beautifully, in such things before.” With which, before Mrs.
Assingham could meet the appeal, she had addressed herself to the Prince
on a matter much nearer to him. “YOUR marriage is on Friday?—on
Saturday?”
“Oh, on Friday, no! For what do you take us? There’s not a vulgar
omen we’re neglecting. On Saturday, please, at the Oratory, at three
o’clock—before twelve assistants exactly.”
“Twelve including ME?”
It struck him—he laughed. “You’ll make the thirteenth. It won’t do!”
“Not,” said Charlotte, “if you’re going in for ‘omens.’ Should you like
me to stay away?”
“Dear no—we’ll manage. We’ll make the round number—we’ll have in some
old woman. They must keep them there for that, don’t they?”
Mrs. Assingham’s return had at last indicated for him his departure; he
had possessed himself again of his hat and approached her to take leave.
But he had another word for Charlotte. “I dine to-night with Mr. Verver.
Have you any message?”
The girl seemed to wonder a little. “For Mr. Verver?”
“For Maggie—about her seeing you early. That, I know, is what she’ll
like.”
“Then I’ll come early—thanks.”
“I daresay,” he went on, “she’ll send for you. I mean send a carriage.”
“Oh, I don’t require that, thanks. I can go, for a penny, can’t I?” she
asked of Mrs. Assingham, “in an omnibus.”
“Oh, I say!” said the Prince while Mrs. Assingham looked at her blandly.
“Yes, love—and I’ll give you the penny. She shall get there,” the good
lady added to their friend.
But Charlotte, as the latter took leave of her, thought of something
else. “There’s a great favour, Prince, that I want to ask of you. I
want, between this and Saturday, to make Maggie a marriage-present.”
“Oh, I say!” the young man again soothingly exclaimed.
“Ah, but I MUST,” she went on. “It’s really almost for that I came back.
It was impossible to get in America what I wanted.”
Mrs. Assingham showed anxiety. “What is it then, dear, you want?”
But the girl looked only at their companion. “That’s what the Prince, if
he’ll be so good, must help me to decide.”
“Can’t _I_,” Mrs. Assingham asked, “help you to decide?”
“Certainly, darling, we must talk it well over.” And she kept her eyes
on the Prince. “But I want him, if he kindly will, to go with me to
look. I want him to judge with me and choose. That, if you can spare the
hour,” she said, “is the great favour I mean.”
He raised his eyebrows at her—he wonderfully smiled. “What you came
back from America to ask? Ah, certainly then, I must find the hour!” He
wonderfully smiled, but it was rather more, after all, than he had been
reckoning with. It went somehow so little with the rest that, directly,
for him, it wasn’t the note of safety; it preserved this character, at
the best, but by being the note of publicity. Quickly, quickly, however,
the note of publicity struck him as better than any other. In another
moment even it seemed positively what he wanted; for what so much as
publicity put their relation on the right footing? By this appeal to
Mrs. Assingham it was established as right, and she immediately showed
that such was her own understanding.
“Certainly, Prince,” she laughed, “you must find the hour!” And it was
really so express a license from her, as representing friendly judgment,
public opinion, the moral law, the margin allowed a husband about to be,
or whatever, that, after observing to Charlotte that, should she come to
Portland Place in the morning, he would make a point of being there
to see her and so, easily, arrange with her about a time, he took his
departure with the absolutely confirmed impression of knowing, as he put
it to himself, where he was. Which was what he had prolonged his visit
for. He was where he could stay.