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.