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.