Mrs. Assingham and the Colonel, quitting Fawns before the end of
September, had come back later on; and now, a couple of weeks after,
they were again interrupting their stay, but this time with the question
of their return left to depend, on matters that were rather hinted at
than importunately named. The Lutches and Mrs. Rance had also, by the
action of Charlotte Stant’s arrival, ceased to linger, though with hopes
and theories, as to some promptitude of renewal, of which the lively
expression, awakening the echoes of the great stone-paved, oak-panelled,
galleried hall that was not the least interesting feature of the place,
seemed still a property of the air. It was on this admirable spot that,
before her October afternoon had waned, Fanny Assingham spent with her
easy host a few moments which led to her announcing her own and her
husband’s final secession, at the same time as they tempted her to point
the moral of all vain reverberations. The double door of the house
stood open to an effect of hazy autumn sunshine, a wonderful, windless,
waiting, golden hour, under the influence of which Adam Verver met his
genial friend as she came to drop into the post-box with her own hand
a thick sheaf of letters. They presently thereafter left the house
together and drew out half-an-hour on the terrace in a manner they were
to revert to in thought, later on, as that of persons who really had
been taking leave of each other at a parting of the ways. He traced his
impression, on coming to consider, back to a mere three words she
had begun by using about Charlotte Stant. She simply “cleared them
out”—those had been the three words, thrown off in reference to the
general golden peace that the Kentish October had gradually ushered in,
the “halcyon” days the full beauty of which had appeared to shine out
for them after Charlotte’s arrival. For it was during these days that
Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches had been observed to be gathering
themselves for departure, and it was with that difference made that the
sense of the whole situation showed most fair—the sense of how right
they had been to engage for so ample a residence, and of all the
pleasure so fruity an autumn there could hold in its lap. This was
what had occurred, that their lesson had been learned; and what Mrs.
Assingham had dwelt upon was that without Charlotte it would have been
learned but half. It would certainly not have been taught by Mrs. Rance
and the Miss Lutches if these ladies had remained with them as long as
at one time seemed probable. Charlotte’s light intervention had thus
become a cause, operating covertly but none the less actively, and Fanny
Assingham’s speech, which she had followed up a little, echoed within
him, fairly to startle him, as the indication of something irresistible.
He could see now how this superior force had worked, and he fairly liked
to recover the sight—little harm as he dreamed of doing, little ill
as he dreamed of wishing, the three ladies, whom he had after all
entertained for a stiffish series of days. She had been so vague and
quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn’t known what was
happening—happening, that is, as a result of her influence. “Their
fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke,” Mrs. Assingham remarked;
which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled. He had
retained, since his long talk with Maggie—the talk that had settled the
matter of his own direct invitation to her friend—an odd little taste,
as he would have described it, for hearing things said about this young
woman, hearing, so to speak, what COULD be said about her: almost as if
her portrait, by some eminent hand, were going on, so that he watched it
grow under the multiplication of touches. Mrs. Assingham, it struck him,
applied two or three of the finest in their discussion of their young
friend—so different a figure now from that early playmate of Maggie’s
as to whom he could almost recall from of old the definite occasions
of his having paternally lumped the two children together in the
recommendation that they shouldn’t make too much noise nor eat too much
jam. His companion professed that in the light of Charlotte’s prompt
influence she had not been a stranger to a pang of pity for their recent
visitors. “I felt in fact, privately, so sorry for them, that I kept my
impression to myself while they were here—wishing not to put the rest
of you on the scent; neither Maggie, nor the Prince, nor yourself,
nor even Charlotte HERself, if you didn’t happen to notice. Since you
didn’t, apparently, I perhaps now strike you as extravagant. But I’m
not—I followed it all. One SAW the consciousness I speak of come over
the poor things, very much as I suppose people at the court of the
Borgias may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had
the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family. My comparison’s
only a little awkward, for I don’t in the least mean that Charlotte was
consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their
poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them—but she didn’t
know it.”
“Ah, she didn’t know it?” Mr. Verver had asked with interest.
“Well, I THINK she didn’t”—Mrs. Assingham had to admit that she
hadn’t pressingly sounded her. “I don’t pretend to be sure, in every
connection, of what Charlotte knows. She doesn’t, certainly, like to
make people suffer—not, in general, as is the case with so many of us,
even other women: she likes much rather to put them at their ease with
her. She likes, that is—as all pleasant people do—to be liked.”
“Ah, she likes to be liked?” her companion had gone on.
“She did, at the same time, no doubt, want to help us—to put us at our
ease. That is she wanted to put you—and to put Maggie about you. So far
as that went she had a plan. But it was only AFTER—it was not before, I
really believe—that she saw how effectively she could work.”
Again, as Mr. Verver felt, he must have taken it up. “Ah, she wanted to
help us?—wanted to help ME?”
“Why,” Mrs. Assingham asked after an instant, “should it surprise you?”
He just thought. “Oh, it doesn’t!”
“She saw, of course, as soon as she came, with her quickness, where we
all were. She didn’t need each of us to go, by appointment, to her room
at night, or take her out into the fields, for our palpitating tale. No
doubt even she was rather impatient.”
“OF the poor things?” Mr. Verver had here inquired while he waited.
“Well, of your not yourselves being so—and of YOUR not in particular.
I haven’t the least doubt in the world, par exemple, that she thinks you
too meek.”
“Oh, she thinks me too meek?”
“And she had been sent for, on the very face of it, to work right in.
All she had to do, after all, was to be nice to you.”
“To—a—ME?” said Adam Verver.
He could remember now that his friend had positively had a laugh for his
tone. “To you and to every one. She had only to be what she is—and to
be it all round. If she’s charming, how can she help it? So it was, and
so only, that she ‘acted’-as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it
come over them—the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a
woman other, and SO other, than themselves, COULD be charming. One saw
them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and
decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it’s she who’s
the real thing.”
“Ah, it’s she who’s the real thing?” As HE had not hitherto taken it
home as completely as the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance, so, doubtless, he
had now, a little, appeared to offer submission in his appeal. “I see,
I see”—he could at least simply take it home now; yet as not without
wanting, at the same time, to be sure of what the real thing was. “And
what would it be—a—definitely that you understand by that?”
She had only for an instant not found it easy to say. “Why, exactly what
those women themselves want to be, and what her effect on them is to
make them recognise that they never will.”
“Oh—of course never?”
It not only remained and abode with them, it positively developed and
deepened, after this talk, that the luxurious side of his personal
existence was now again furnished, socially speaking, with the thing
classed and stamped as “real”—just as he had been able to think of it
as not otherwise enriched in consequence of his daughter’s marriage. The
note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him
the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been
reached in his great “finds”—continued, beyond any other, to keep him
attentive and gratified. Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had
we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of
value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say,
and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man
was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster
of life, economically constructed. He put into his one little glass
everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried
in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass
cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept
in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a
deposed dynasty. As it had served him to satisfy himself, so to speak,
both about Amerigo and about the Bernadino Luini he had happened to come
to knowledge of at the time he was consenting to the announcement of
his daughter’s betrothal, so it served him at present to satisfy himself
about Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of
which he had lately got wind, to which a provoking legend was attached,
and as to which he had made out, contentedly, that further news was to
be obtained from a certain Mr. Gutermann-Seuss of Brighton. It was all,
at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn
with a cold, still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material
directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic
beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, in
spite of the general tendency of the “devouring element” to spread,
the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scattered, and tended with
unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds
from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires. Adam Verver had in
other words learnt the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own
little book, without having, for a day, raised the smallest scandal
in his economy at large; being in this particular not unlike those
fortunate bachelors, or other gentlemen of pleasure, who so manage
their entertainment of compromising company that even the austerest
housekeeper, occupied and competent below-stairs, never feels obliged
to give warning.
That figure has, however, a freedom that the occasion doubtless scarce
demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value. It was to
come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within,
that before the first ten days of November had elapsed he found himself
practically alone at Fawns with his young friend; Amerigo and Maggie
having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent to their going
abroad for a month, since his amusement was now scarce less happily
assured than his security. An impulse eminently natural had stirred
within the Prince; his life, as for some time established, was
deliciously dull, and thereby, on the whole, what he best liked; but a
small gust of yearning had swept over him, and Maggie repeated to her
father, with infinite admiration, the pretty terms in which, after it
had lasted a little, he had described to her this experience. He called
it a “serenade,” a low music that, outside one of the windows of the
sleeping house, disturbed his rest at night. Timid as it was, and
plaintive, he yet couldn’t close his eyes for it, and when finally,
rising on tiptoe, he had looked out, he had recognised in the figure
below with a mandolin, all duskily draped in her grace, the raised
appealing eyes and the one irresistible voice of the ever-to-be-loved
Italy. Sooner or later, that way, one had to listen; it was a hovering,
haunting ghost, as of a creature to whom one had done a wrong, a dim,
pathetic shade crying out to be comforted. For this there was obviously
but one way—as there were doubtless also many words for the simple
fact that so prime a Roman had a fancy for again seeing Rome. They would
accordingly—hadn’t they better?—go for a little; Maggie meanwhile
making the too-absurdly artful point with her father, so that he
repeated it, in his amusement, to Charlotte Stant, to whom he was by
this time conscious of addressing many remarks, that it was absolutely,
when she came to think, the first thing Amerigo had ever asked of her.
“She doesn’t count of course his having asked of her to marry him”—
this was Mr. Verver’s indulgent criticism; but he found Charlotte,
equally touched by the ingenuous Maggie, in easy agreement with him over
the question. If the Prince had asked something of his wife every day
in the year, this would be still no reason why the poor dear man should
not, in a beautiful fit of homesickness, revisit, without reproach, his
native country.
What his father-in-law frankly counselled was that the reasonable, the
really too reasonable, pair should, while they were about it, take three
or four weeks of Paris as well—Paris being always, for Mr. Verver, in
any stress of sympathy, a suggestion that rose of itself to the lips.
If they would only do that, on their way back, or however they preferred
it, Charlotte and he would go over to join them there for a small
look—though even then, assuredly, as he had it at heart to add, not in
the least because they should have found themselves bored at being left
together. The fate of this last proposal indeed was that it reeled,
for the moment, under an assault of destructive analysis from Maggie,
who—having, as she granted, to choose between being an unnatural
daughter or an unnatural mother, and “electing” for the former—wanted
to know what would become of the Principino if the house were cleared of
everyone but the servants. Her question had fairly resounded, but it had
afterwards, like many of her questions, dropped still more effectively
than it had risen: the highest moral of the matter being, before the
couple took their departure, that Mrs. Noble and Dr. Brady must mount
unchallenged guard over the august little crib. If she hadn’t supremely
believed in the majestic value of the nurse, whose experience was in
itself the amplest of pillows, just as her attention was a spreading
canopy from which precedent and reminiscence dropped as thickly as
parted curtains—if she hadn’t been able to rest in this confidence she
would fairly have sent her husband on his journey without her. In the
same manner, if the sweetest—for it was so she qualified him—of
little country doctors hadn’t proved to her his wisdom by rendering
irresistible, especially on rainy days and in direct proportion to
the frequency of his calls, adapted to all weathers, that she should
converse with him for hours over causes and consequences, over what he
had found to answer with his little five at home, she would have
drawn scant support from the presence of a mere grandfather and a mere
brilliant friend. These persons, accordingly, her own predominance
having thus, for the time, given way, could carry with a certain ease,
and above all with mutual aid, their consciousness of a charge. So far
as their office weighed they could help each other with it—which was
in fact to become, as Mrs. Noble herself loomed larger for them, not a
little of a relief and a diversion.
Mr. Verver met his young friend, at certain hours, in the day-nursery,
very much as he had regularly met the child’s fond mother—Charlotte
having, as she clearly considered, given Maggie equal pledges and
desiring never to fail of the last word for the daily letter she had
promised to write. She wrote with high fidelity, she let her companion
know, and the effect of it was, remarkably enough, that he himself
didn’t write. The reason of this was partly that Charlotte “told all
about him”—which she also let him know she did—and partly that
he enjoyed feeling, as a consequence, that he was generally, quite
systematically, eased and, as they said, “done” for. Committed, as it
were, to this charming and clever young woman, who, by becoming for him
a domestic resource, had become for him practically a new person—and
committed, especially, in his own house, which somehow made his sense of
it a deeper thing—he took an interest in seeing how far the connection
could carry him, could perhaps even lead him, and in thus putting to the
test, for pleasant verification, what Fanny Assingham had said, at the
last, about the difference such a girl could make. She was really making
one now, in their simplified existence, and a very considerable one,
though there was no one to compare her with, as there had been, so
usefully, for Fanny—no Mrs. Rance, no Kitty, no Dotty Lutch, to help
her to be felt, according to Fanny’s diagnosis, as real. She was real,
decidedly, from other causes, and Mr. Verver grew in time even a little
amused at the amount of machinery Mrs. Assingham had seemed to see
needed for pointing it. She was directly and immediately real, real on
a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than
during those—at which we have just glanced—when Mrs. Noble made
them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the
queen-mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the heir. Treated
on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal
court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the
petites entrees but quite external to the State, which began and ended
with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability,
to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded
insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such
snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among
china lap-dogs.
Every evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him; seated
at the piano and requiring no music, she went through his “favourite
things”—and he had many favourites—with a facility that never failed,
or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his
fitful voice. She could play anything, she could play everything—always
shockingly, she of course insisted, but always, by his own vague
measure, very much as if she might, slim, sinuous and strong, and
with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and
rhythmically waltzing. His love of music, unlike his other loves,
owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and
smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as
everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations—while,
I say, he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was ever
absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the
vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface
delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest. It was a manner of
passing the time that rather replaced conversation, but the air, at the
end, none the less, before they separated, had a way of seeming full
of the echoes of talk. They separated, in the hushed house, not quite
easily, yet not quite awkwardly either, with tapers that twinkled in the
large dark spaces, and for the most part so late that the last solemn
servant had been dismissed for the night.
Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October, there
had been a full word or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other
voices—a word or two that affected our friend even at the moment, and
rather oddly, as louder and rounder than any previous sound; and then he
had lingered, under pretext of an opened window to be made secure, after
taking leave of his companion in the hall and watching her glimmer away
up the staircase. He had for himself another impulse than to go to bed;
picking up a hat in the hall, slipping his arms into a sleeveless cape
and lighting still another cigar, he turned out upon the terrace through
one of the long drawing-room windows and moved to and fro there for an
hour beneath the sharp autumn stars. It was where he had walked in the
afternoon sun with Fanny Assingham, and the sense of that other hour,
the sense of the suggestive woman herself, was before him again as, in
spite of all the previous degustation we have hinted at, it had not yet
been. He thought, in a loose, an almost agitated order, of many things;
the power that was in them to agitate having been part of his conviction
that he should not soon sleep. He truly felt for a while that he should
never sleep again till something had come to him; some light, some idea,
some mere happy word perhaps, that he had begun to want, but had been
till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly groping for. “Can
you really then come if we start early?”—that was practically all he
had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And “Why in
the world not, when I’ve nothing else to do, and should, besides, so
immensely like it?”—this had as definitely been, on her side, the limit
of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene,
even of the littlest, at all—though he perhaps didn’t quite know why
something like the menace of one hadn’t proceeded from her stopping
half-way upstairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she
promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and
a sponge. There hovered about him, at all events, while he walked,
appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and
not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of
being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have
noted, one of the minor yet so far as there were any such, quite one of
the compensatory, incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him,
up to now, that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo, as
through some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret; so
that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had
unmistakably acquired it, through the young man’s having amiably passed
it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this
might be, of quite the same shades of attention and recognition, was
mistress in an equal degree of the regulated, the developed art of
placing him high in the scale of importance. That was even for his own
thought a clumsy way of expressing the element of similarity in the
agreeable effect they each produced on him, and it held him for a little
only because this coincidence in their felicity caused him vaguely to
connect or associate them in the matter of tradition, training, tact,
or whatever else one might call it. It might almost have been—if such
a link between them was to be imagined—that Amerigo had, a little,
“coached” or incited their young friend, or perhaps rather that she had
simply, as one of the signs of the general perfection Fanny Assingham
commended in her, profited by observing, during her short opportunity
before the start of the travellers, the pleasant application by the
Prince of his personal system. He might wonder what exactly it was that
they so resembled each other in treating him like—from what noble and
propagated convention, in cases in which the exquisite “importance” was
to be neither too grossly attributed nor too grossly denied, they had
taken their specific lesson; but the difficulty was here of course that
one could really never know—couldn’t know without having been one’s
self a personage; whether a Pope, a King, a President, a Peer, a
General, or just a beautiful Author.
Before such a question, as before several others when they recurred, he
would come to a pause, leaning his arms on the old parapet and losing
himself in a far excursion. He had as to so many of the matters in hand
a divided view, and this was exactly what made him reach out, in his
unrest, for some idea, lurking in the vast freshness of the night,
at the breath of which disparities would submit to fusion, and so,
spreading beneath him, make him feel that he floated. What he kept
finding himself return to, disturbingly enough, was the reflection,
deeper than anything else, that in forming a new and intimate tie
he should in a manner abandon, or at the best signally relegate, his
daughter. He should reduce to definite form the idea that he had lost
her—as was indeed inevitable—by her own marriage; he should reduce to
definite form the idea of his having incurred an injury, or at the
best an inconvenience, that required some makeweight and deserved some
amends. And he should do this the more, which was the great point, that
he should appear to adopt, in doing it, the sentiment, in fact the very
conviction, entertained, and quite sufficiently expressed, by
Maggie herself, in her beautiful generosity, as to what he had
suffered—putting it with extravagance—at her hands. If she put it with
extravagance the extravagance was yet sincere, for it came—which she
put with extravagance too—from her persistence, always, in thinking,
feeling, talking about him, as young. He had had glimpses of moments
when to hear her thus, in her absolutely unforced compunction, one would
have supposed the special edge of the wrong she had done him to consist
in his having still before him years and years to groan under it. She
had sacrificed a parent, the pearl of parents, no older than herself:
it wouldn’t so much have mattered if he had been of common parental
age. That he wasn’t, that he was just her extraordinary equal and
contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its
effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence
of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual
garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened
out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was
afterwards to recall how, just then, the autumn night seemed to clear to
a view in which the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace
where he stood, the others, with their steps, below, the gardens, the
park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some strange
midnight sun. It all met him during these instants as a vast expanse of
discovery, a world that looked, so lighted, extraordinarily new, and in
which familiar objects had taken on a distinctness that, as if it had
been a loud, a spoken pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to
he scarce knew what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character and,
verily, an inordinate size. This hallucination, or whatever he might
have called it, was brief, but it lasted long enough to leave him
gasping. The gasp of admiration had by this time, however, lost itself
in an intensity that quickly followed—the way the wonder of it, since
wonder was in question, truly had been the strange DELAY of his vision.
He had these several days groped and groped for an object that lay at
his feet and as to which his blindness came from his stupidly looking
beyond. It had sat all the while at his hearth-stone, whence it now
gazed up in his face.
Once he had recognised it there everything became coherent. The sharp
point to which all his light converged was that the whole call of his
future to him, as a father, would be in his so managing that Maggie
would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him. And it not
only wouldn’t be decently humane, decently possible, not to make
this relief easy to her—the idea shone upon him, more than that, as
exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with what
might be otherwise possible; it stood there absolutely confronted with
the material way in which it might be met. The way in which it might
be met was by his putting his child at peace, and the way to put her at
peace was to provide for his future—that is for hers—by marriage, by
a marriage as good, speaking proportionately, as hers had been. As he
fairly inhaled this measure of refreshment he tasted the meaning of
recent agitations. He had seen that Charlotte could contribute—what he
hadn’t seen was what she could contribute TO. When it had all supremely
cleared up and he had simply settled this service to his daughter well
before him as the proper direction of his young friend’s leisure, the
cool darkness had again closed round him, but his moral lucidity was
constituted. It wasn’t only moreover that the word, with a click, so
fitted the riddle, but that the riddle, in such perfection, fitted
the word. He might have been equally in want and yet not have had his
remedy. Oh, if Charlotte didn’t accept him, of course the remedy would
fail; but, as everything had fallen together, it was at least there to
be tried. And success would be great—that was his last throb—if the
measure of relief effected for Maggie should at all prove to have been
given by his own actual sense of felicity. He really didn’t know when in
his life he had thought of anything happier. To think of it merely for
himself would have been, even as he had just lately felt, even doing
all justice to that condition—yes, impossible. But there was a grand
difference in thinking of it for his child.